Many participants in debate on U.S. policy in the Middle East have a lot invested in maintaining the idea of the Islamic Republic of Iran as a bogeyman forever to be feared, despised, sanctioned, and shunned, and never to be cooperated with on anything. The lodestar for this school of advocacy is [...]]]>
Many participants in debate on U.S. policy in the Middle East have a lot invested in maintaining the idea of the Islamic Republic of Iran as a bogeyman forever to be feared, despised, sanctioned, and shunned, and never to be cooperated with on anything. The lodestar for this school of advocacy is the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, who proclaims to us nearly every day that Iran is the “real problem” underlying just about everything wrong in the region, and who adamantly opposes anyone reaching any agreement with Tehran on anything. Netanyahu does not want a significant regional competitor that would no longer be an ostracized pariah and that will freely speak its mind in a way that, say, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, with the other equities they have in Washington, cannot. He does not want the United States to come to realize that it need not be stuck rigidly to the side of — and always defer to the preferences of — “traditional allies” such as Israel and that it can sometimes advance U.S. interests by doing business with those who have worn the label of adversary. And of course the more that people focus on the “real problem” of Iran, the less attention will be devoted to topics Netanyahu would rather not talk about, such as the occupation of Palestinian territory.
For those in Washington who wave the anti-Iranian banner most fervently, the waving is not only a following of Netanyahu’s lead but also a filling of the neoconservative need for bogeymen as justification and focus for militant, interventionist policies in the region. The neocons do not have Saddam Hussein to kick around any more, and they unsurprisingly would prefer not to dwell upon what transpired when they kicked him out. So it’s natural to target the next nearest member of the Axis of Evil — and even when the neocons were still kicking Saddam, they were already telling Iran to “take a number.” The anti-Iranian banner-waving of neocons, despite the abysmal policy failure of the Iraq War that should have closed ears to what they are saying today — finds resonance among a general American public that historically has had a need for foreign monsters to destroy as one way to define America’s mission and purpose.
The prospective reaching of a negotiated agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program has been a major concern and preoccupation of those who want to keep Iran a hated and feared pariah forever. An agreement would represent a major departure in U.S. relations with Iran. So the anti-Iran banner-wavers have been making a concerted effort for several months to undermine the negotiations and torpedo any agreement that is reached. Not reaching an agreement has become such a major goal that the banner-wavers have no compunction about taking the fundamentally illogical stance of exclaiming about the dangers of an Iranian nuclear weapon while opposing an agreement that would place substantially more restrictions on the Iranian program, and make an Iranian weapon less likely, than without an agreement.
At least the anti-agreement forces have had a game plan, involving such things as hyping “breakout” fears and pushing Congressional action that is disguised as support for the negotiations when it actually would undermine them. Now suddenly along comes a security crisis in Iraq, in which parallel U.S. and Iranian interests and the opportunity for some beneficial U.S.-Iranian dialogue are clear. Oh, no, think the banner-wavers, we didn’t plan on this. One detects a tone of panic in their jumping into print with emergency sermons reminding us that Iranians are evil and we must never, ever be tempted into cooperating with them.
One of the more strident of these sermons comes from Michael Doran and Max Boot. The panicky nature of their piece is reflected in the fact that the first thing they do is to reach for the old, familiar Hitler analogy. The idea that the United States and Iran share any common interests is, they tell us, just like Neville Chamberlain working with Adolf Hitler.
The next thing they do is to match the most imaginative conspiracy theorists in the Middle East by suggesting that the government of Iran really is supporting and promoting the Sunni radicals of ISIS — yes, the same ISIS whose main calling card has been the beheading and massacre of the Iranians’ fellow Shiites. The logic behind this conspiracy theory, explain Doran and Boot, is that a threat from ISIS makes Prime Minister Maliki and Iraqi Shiites “ever more dependent on Iranian protection.”
Then Doran and Boot go way into straw-man territory, saying the United States would be making a “historic error” if it assisted “an Iranian-orchestrated ethnic-cleansing campaign” carried out by ruthless Revolutionary Guards. Of course, the Obama administration isn’t talking about doing anything of the sort. We weren’t flies on the wall when Deputy Secretary of State William Burns talked earlier this week with the Iranian foreign minister about Iraq, but it is a safe bet that a theme of U.S. remarks was the need for greater cross-community inclusiveness in Iraq and the need not to stoke the fire of the sectarian civil war.
Besides dealing with straw men, Doran and Boot here exhibit another habit of the banner-wavers — which comes up a lot in discussion of the nuclear issue — which is to assume that Iran will do the worst, most destructive thing it is capable of doing regardless of whether doing so would be in Iran’s own interests. What advantage could Tehran possibly see in propping up an increasingly beleaguered and unpopular Nouri al-Maliki with rampaging Revolutionary Guards? What Iranian interest would that serve?
This gets to one of the things that Doran and Boot do not address, which is what fundamental Iranian interests are in Iraq, including everything those interests involve in terms of stability and material costs to Iran. Even if Iran had so much influence with Maliki that he could be said to be in Tehran’s pocket, what would Iran do with such influence? Here is displayed another habit of the banner-wavers, which is just to assume that any Iranian influence is bad, without stopping to examine the Iranian interests being served and whether they are consistent with, in conflict with, or irrelevant to U.S. interests.
The other major thing that Doran and Boot do not do is to mention what militant U.S. policies have had to do with Iranian behavior they don’t like. In the course of loosely slinging as much mud on the Iranians as they can, they state that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps “has been responsible for attacks against U.S. targets stretching back more than 30 years.” They do not offer any specifics. The only ones that come to mind involve a U.S. military intervention in Lebanon, U.S. support for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War, a U.S. troop presence in eastern Saudi Arabia, and the eight-year-long U.S. military occupation in Iraq.
Doran and Boot write that instead of having anything to do with the Iranians, we should develop a coalition of those “traditional allies” to prosecute a conflict on the “vast battlefield” that embraces Iraq and Syria. This sounds just like the talk of a coalition of “moderates” we heard during the George W. Bush administration. As then, the talk is apparently oblivious to ethnic, sectarian, and geographic realities. Doran and Boot suggest that clever covert work against “Iranian networks” would be enough to “pull the Iraqi government out of Iran’s orbit.”
This sort of thinking represents not only a missed opportunity to make U.S. diplomacy more effective but also a recipe for further inflaming that vast battlefield.
*This article was first published by the National Interest and was reprinted here with permission.
Photo Credit: ISNA/Roohollah Vahdati
]]>Lobe Log publishes Hawks on Iran every Friday. Our posts highlight militaristic commentary and confrontational policy recommendations about Iran from a variety of sources including news articles, think tanks and pundits.
Michael Rubin, Fox News: Missing from last week’s roundup was an op-ed by the hawkish
Lobe Log publishes Hawks on Iran every Friday. Our posts highlight militaristic commentary and confrontational policy recommendations about Iran from a variety of sources including news articles, think tanks and pundits.
Michael Rubin, Fox News: Missing from last week’s roundup was an op-ed by the hawkish American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Michael Rubin, George W. Bush’s Pentagon adviser on Iran and Iraq, where he explains how to make Iran “blink” with devastating sanctions. Rubin indirectly reiterates calls for “economic warfare” against Iran made by Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) when he says that the “only way to undercut Iran’s strategy is to sanction whole industries”. He also argues that if we want to avoid war with Iran, we need to really threaten it (to death?):
It is time to face down the Iranian leadership to convey that they cannot imagine the pain the United States and its allies are capable of inflicting. The Iranian leadership may respond with bluster but, if policymakers are serious both about avoiding a prolonged military conflict with Iran and denying the Islamic Republic a nuclear weapons capability, then the United States will have no choice but to call Iran’s bluff.
Max Boot, Commentary: The Council on Foreign Relations’ Max Boot allied with neoconservatives as an early supporter of the US’s war on Iraq and has agitated for war with Iran even while acknowledging that strikes would not set back its alleged nuclear ambitions by much. This week he writes that the West should not be deterred by Iranian threats to close the vital oil supply route, the Strait of Hormuz, and should proceed with the crippling sanctions game plan because that’s the only option left next to war:
This is yet another reason why the West should not be intimidated by Tehran’s bluster, and why we should proceed with even more punishing sanctions in a last-ditch chance to bring a peaceful halt to the Iranian nuclear program, which, as the chief of Britain’s MI6 warned recently, could result in the production of actual nuclear weapons by 2014.
John Bolton, Weekly Standard: Negotiations with Iran are futile according to John Bolton, George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations and AEI fellow, who once again refuted high level US and Israeli intelligence assessments when he declared this week in William Kristol’s magazine that Iran is involved in a “decades-long effort to build deliverable nuclear weapons” while failing to provide a shred of supporting evidence. And here’s his pitch for military force:
]]>In the race between the West’s sanctions/negotiations track and Tehran’s nuclear weapons track, the nuclear effort is much closer to the finish line. Since all other options have failed repeatedly, we must at some very near point face a basic question: Are we prepared to use force at a time of our choosing and through means optimal for us rather than for Iran’s air defenses, or will we simply allow Iran to have nuclear weapons under the delusion it can be contained and deterred? The clock is ticking, and the centrifuges are spinning.
Weekly Reads/Watch:
- News: Israeli elections likely to postpone any deliberations on Iran strikeWeekly Reads/Watch:
Jamie M. Fly/Robert Zarate, Weekly Standard: A common argument touted by hawks these days is that President Obama should seek regime change in Syria because Iran would be weakened from the loss of a major ally. The neoconservative-dominated Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) have led that call and this week FPI Executive Director Jamie M. Fly (an Iraq war hawk who has never been shy about his hopes for Iran) and Policy Director Robert Zarate, claimed that if Obama doesn’t forcefully intervene in Syria, scary Iran will be emboldened by the U.S.’s refusal to force change in other countries:
If the United States still can’t bring itself to stop the mortally wounded Assad regime (which lacksnuclear weapons) from murdering its own people and destabilizing its neighbors, then how likely is it to deal with much harder cases in the Middle East—like a nuclear-armed Iran that starts inflicting Syria-like mass atrocities on its own people or menacing its own neighbors? Indeed, not only Damascus and Tehran, but also America’s allies and partners throughout the world, are waiting and watching to see whether the Obama administration and Congress will truly side with the Syrian people and show resolve against Assad.
Unabashed hawk Jennifer Rubin, who regularly argues that the U.S. should wage war on Iran for Israel and often regurgitates commentary from FPI and FDD staffers, was quick to feature Fly and Zarate’s article at her Washington Post perch.
Max Boot, Commentary: The Council on Foreign Relations’ Max Boot allied with neoconservatives as an early supporter of the U.S.’s war on Iraq and has been a persistent agitator for war with Iran, even while acknowledging that strikes would not set back its alleged nuclear ambitions by much. Last week he accordingly disapproved of a New York Times article about Obama’s foreign policy for giving too much credit to the President despite what Boot considers to be serious failures. Obama was not only insufficiently militaristic with Iran writes Boot, he should also be criticized for trying to avoid an Israeli war on Iran:
There is also little or no mention in Bergen’s article…of Iran, where Obama opposed strong sanctions on the Central Bank that were ultimately passed by Congress, and where he has tried to pressure Israel not to strike while all but ruling out the use of American force against this dangerous nuclear program;
Michael Rubin, Commentary: Like Fly and Boot, the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin (who was Pentagon adviser on Iran and Iraq during the first George W. Bush administration) advocates confrontational U.S. foreign policy particularly in the Middle East. While he has admitted during public forums that a military campaign on Iran should be avoided, he has no qualms about advocating Iranian “regime collapse” byway of U.S. “private decision-making” (whatever than means) and other methods:
]]>Just as terrorism is a tactic, and it’s the ideology underlying its practitioners which should be the target of U.S. policy, the nuclear weapons are less of a problem than the regime which would wield them. The key to U.S. national security is simply regime collapse in Iran. How to hasten that collapse should be the guiding principle of U.S. policy.
Frequent IPS News contributor Barbara Slavin begins this C-Span discussion on Iran’s nuclear program by noting that she’s concerned about the trajectory the U.S. is on with Iran:
…it’s very easy to impose sanctions, and more sanctions and more sanctions, more pressure on the country, but to what end? [...]]]>
Frequent IPS News contributor Barbara Slavin begins this C-Span discussion on Iran’s nuclear program by noting that she’s concerned about the trajectory the U.S. is on with Iran:
…it’s very easy to impose sanctions, and more sanctions and more sanctions, more pressure on the country, but to what end? If there isn’t a really sound diplomatic engagement strategy coupled with it, then you may be put in a position where Iran behaves more like a pariah state because it really doesn’t see any more options for itself. I think we had some indications of that with that strange business at the British embassy.
U.S. hawks agree that their country is going in the wrong direction with Iran, but for different reasons. Last week Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations declared that the “only credible option” for significantly delaying the Iranian nuclear program considering the U.S.’s “lack of success” with its sanctions policy would be a “bombing campaign”.
These words are coming from a man who famously made his “Case for American Empire” shortly after 9/11 by claiming that the U.S. needed to go to war with Afghanistan first, so it could take on Iraq. And what were his views on the false allegations that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11? The truth doesn’t matter plus another unsubstantiated claim:
The debate about whether Saddam Hussein was implicated in the September 11 attacks misses the point. Who cares if Saddam was involved in this particular barbarity? He has been involved in so many barbarities over the years–from gassing the Kurds to raping the Kuwaitis–that he has already earned himself a death sentence a thousand times over. But it is not just a matter of justice to depose Saddam. It is a matter of self defense: He is currently working to acquire weapons of mass destruction that he or his confederates will unleash against America and our allies if given the chance.
Now Boot is claiming that the U.S. is suffering from a “failure of imagination” by failing to “face up” to the “growing threat from the Islamic Republic”. Given the history of Boot’s predictions, and the low premium he places on facts, we can only hope that policy makers will regard his apocalyptic predictions with the degree of skepticism that they failed to show in the case of Iraq.
]]>The Council on Foreign Relations’ Max Boot is no stranger to calling for increasingly confrontational measures to address Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. But in a column in today’s L.A. Times, Boot doubles down on his calls for war while in the same breath admitting [...]]]>
The Council on Foreign Relations’ Max Boot is no stranger to calling for increasingly confrontational measures to address Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. But in a column in today’s L.A. Times, Boot doubles down on his calls for war while in the same breath admitting that a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would only delay Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon. He writes:
[A]t this late date, even such tough actions might not stop Iran from going nuclear.
The only credible option for significantly delaying the Iranian nuclear program would be a bombing campaign.
While Boot completely skips an examination of the consequences associated with bombing Iran — including damaging any possibility of deterrence should Iran acquire nuclear weapons and giving pretext for brutal crackdowns on the Green Movement — he’s apparently willing to accept those consequences in exchange for just “delaying” the Iranian nuclear program.
Boot’s column is equally troubling in that it dramatically misrepresents the facts on the ground.
Boot suggests that Iran and al Qaeda are in league, even while admitting that the 9/11 report cleared Iran of any role in the 9/11 attacks. He also claims that while Iran was arming insurgents in Iraq, it “was covertly developing nuclear weapons.” The Nov. 8, report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) draws no such conclusion, leading a senior Obama administration official to observe:
The IAEA does not assert that Iran has resumed a full scale nuclear weapons program nor does it have a program [sic] about how advanced the programs really are.
Neoconservative talking points pushing for war hinge on the well worn argument that backing down from the use of force — as Neville Chamberlain’s attempts to negotiate with Adolf Hitler allegedly proved — will always result in failure. Boot writes:
In retrospect, weakness in the face of aggression is almost impossible to understand — or forgive. Why did the West do so little while the Nazis gathered strength in the 1930s?
In February 2003, Boot used a similar argument, urging President George W. Bush not to be swayed by antiwar protests opposing the imminent war in Iraq. He wrote:
When the demands of protesters have been met, more bloodshed has resulted; when strong leaders have resisted the lure of appeasement, peace has usually broken out.
Boot’s track record would suggest he’s far more interested in war than peace. Aside from his misstatement about intelligence estimates on Iran’s nuclear program, hyping of an Iran-Al Qaeda link and recycling of pre-Iraq War “appeasement” arguments, Boot is right about one thing: Attacking Iran would only delay its nuclear program. And for CFR’s Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies, it seems that’s a good enough reason to live with the consequences that will result.
]]>I think this basic point is one that’s worth exploring. Neoconservative claims to be ardent democracy promoters have always been met with well-deserved skepticism. Despite a great deal of high-flown rhetoric to the contrary, the movement has largely continued to abide by the framework set forth in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorships and Double Standards”: hostile dictators bad, friendly dictators good, and democratization worthwhile only so far as it replaces rivals with allies. Egypt itself has served as a good example of this tendency, as the Bush administration quickly abandoned its “freedom agenda” in 2005-6 once it became clear that free and fair elections might very well bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power. (Palestine was an even more striking example, as that pious democracy promoter Elliott Abrams helped launch a failed coup against Hamas after they won elections in 2006.) Still, it may be unfair to see the neocons’ support for democracy promotion as purely a cynical cover for other geopolitical goals. It is far from inconceivable that after reciting the pro-democracy script for so long, some neocons have genuinely come to believe it.
But I don’t think Boot has enough evidence at this point to show that the neoconservative calls for Mubarak to depart are rooted in democratic idealism rather than a concern for Israeli and US strategic interests. After all, a strong case can be made for abandoning Mubarak even on grounds of pure realpolitik; as Steve Walt notes, any smart realist prefers stable allies to unstable ones. Thus if Mubarak really is a dead man walking, as appears increasingly likely, it would serve neither US nor Israeli interests to continue propping him up.
The real question is not whether one supports Mubarak, but whether one is willing to support truly free and contested elections to determine his successor. After all, one can easily imagine a situation in which Mubarak departs but his successor (Omar Suleiman, say) continues to run a repressive US-backed regime in much the same vein. But will all those American commentators currently touting their love of Egyptian democracy continue to be so supportive if the democratic process threatens to bring the Muslim Brotherhood into power?
That is far less clear. In fact, many of the neocons appear unable even to deal with the possibility of a government led by Mohamed ElBaradei, who is about as much of a liberal secularist as the US could realistically hope for. Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer is suggesting that the US’s “ultimate objective” should be keeping the Muslim Brotherhood out of power, and that “arranging for a transition to a secular moderate regime” — note the absence of the qualifier “democratic” — “is our number one priority.” One can easily anticipate a scenario in which US support for Egyptian democracy proves to be largely empty rhetoric, as it did during Bush’s second term.
So I hope that Boot is right, and that the neoconservatives will prove willing to support democracy in Egypt even if it brings into power a government less friendly to Israel than Mubarak’s. At the moment, however, the atmosphere of moral self-congratulation among American commentators seems a bit premature and unwarranted.
]]>Of course the similarities between the two countries, comprising two-thirds of George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” are limited. North Korea is a self-imposed “hermit kingdom.” Iran, much to the dismay of those calling for ever tighter sanctions, is eager to establish both trade and political links with both its neighbors and allies around the world.
The week started with what appears to be widely held assumptions that Iran and North Korea may have collaborated on Pyongyang’s HEU facilitity, or North Korea might transfer the technology to Iran, or Tehran might have transferred technology to Pyongyang. This leaves a lot of room for questions. However, the conventional thinking is that there is a link — with no agreement on how, or if, a technology transfer has occurred.
The WSJ‘s Jay Solomon interviewed the Washington Institute for Near East Policy‘s (WINEP) Simon Henderson, who told him:
One has to assume that Iran either has the P-2 centrifuge from North Korea, or could get it very easily.
And former UN ambassador, outspoken hawk, and American Enterprise Institute (AEI) fellow John Bolton wrote in the LA Times:
There is substantial reason for concern that Tehran’s capabilities and its penchant for cooperating with the North exceed U.S. intelligence estimates.
Indeed hawks from WINEP and AEI are not the only ones making assumptions about how Pyongyang’s announcement might impact Iran’s nuclear program.
The extremely well informed Nelson Report, an insider newsletter which focuses on U.S.-Asia policy, suggested that a technology transfer may have occurred from Iran to North Korea. An anonymous expert who told them:
From what we’re seeing, you have to think the components of this plant were moved-in from elsewhere and set up, which is a stunning defeat for our intelligence, since it could equally imply there are many HEU-related facilities elsewhere in N. Korea, in addition to whatever was imported from Pakistan and/or Iran.
The Report also wrote:
Every expert we touched base with today felt that despite its years of known effort to achieve HEU capability, the equally known assistance and information sharing with Pakistan, and the presumed but not proven cooperation with Iran, leads the experts to assume that the DPRK had help with the current HEU facility.
Indeed, uncertainty continues to run rampant over the extent of the DPRK-Iran relationship and how a technology transfer may have played a role in Pyongyang’s HEU announcement. The lack of details hasn’t slowed hawkish pundits from translating this week’s artillery attack and the earlier Cheonan sinking into the conclusion that containment is a failed policy. Thus, the U.S. should take any and all actions to prevent Iran from reaching North Korea’s level of nuclearization.
Council on Foreign Relations fellow Max Boot writes in Commentary (my emphasis):
]]>For those who advocate containment as the solution to the Iranian nuclear threat, it is worth noting how destabilizing a nuclear-armed rogue state can be and how hard it is to contain. Even now, North Korea could be planning to export nuclear know-how or uranium to Iran. If so, what are we going to do about it? My guess: not much. That is an argument for stopping Iran by any means necessary before it crosses the nuclear threshold and becomes as dangerous as North Korea.
The allegations were first brought to light by New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins. Filkins later confirmed the exchanges of cash with Karzai himself, who [...]]]>
The allegations were first brought to light by New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins. Filkins later confirmed the exchanges of cash with Karzai himself, who called the allegation defamation even as he admitted it was true.
But what exactly does the exchange of cash mean?
Iran has long been involved in post-Taliban Afghanistan. As Amb. James Dobbins recounts in his section of the U.S. Institute of Peace’s Iran Primer, which was also published at Tehran Bureau, Iran’s relationship with the Northern Alliance allowed the December 2001 Bonn Conference to end successfully with the creation of an Afghani government. It was also Iran, says Dobbins, who represented the U.S. at the conference, and suggested adding language about elections to the interim Afghan constitution created in Bonn.
Most analysts seem to agree that the “bags of cash” pseudo-scandal only reinforces the notion that Iran and the U.S. share an interest in a stable Afghanistan, or at worst, that the cash handed over pales in comparison to what the U.S. throws around with Karzai unlikely to be beholden to Iranian demands.
“Worries about geopolitical bogeymen can overwhelm good sense,” writes Foreign Policy‘s Steve LeVine on his blog about oil geopolitics. “Just who is Tehran endangering by keeping Karzai lubricated with pocket change? For one, the fellows U.S. troops are fighting: the Taliban.”
“Today’s alarmism is partly over Karzai’s use of some of the Iran money to buy off Taliban leaders. To which one can rightly reply, So what? The strategic payoff is how power operates in Afghanistan,” he adds.
Michigan professor Juan Cole blogs that the revelation underscores several realities, among them “that the US and Iran are de facto allies in Afghanistan (in fact both of them are deeply opposed to the Taliban and their backers among hard line cells of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence).”
“US military spokesmen have sometimes attempted to make a case that Iran is helping the hyper-Sunni, Shiite-killing, anti-Karzai Taliban, which is not very likely to be true or at least not on a significant scale,” he continues. “The revelations of Tehran’s support for Karzai give credence to Iranian officials’ claims of having been helpful to NATO, since they both want Karzai to succeed.”
Even Ann Marlowe, a visiting fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute, doesn’t think the revelation is a big deal, despite underscoring the Karzai’s “venality”: “On the bright side, the Iranian money probably doesn’t influence Mr. Karzai’s policy or Afghan actions any more than, say, our money does,” she writes on a New York Times online symposium on the subject. “The Afghan president has always had a ‘strategy of tactics,’ playing one powerbroker off against another to make sure he stays afloat.”
Thought she concludes that the money might be intended to hasten a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Marlowe acknowledges the ‘bags of money’ don’t pose a great threat to the United States: “The bogyman of Iranian influence in Afghanistan is overhyped. The Iranians have every interest in a relatively stable neighbor.”
This is just about the same view as neoconservative Council on Foreign Relations scholar Max Boot, who writes in Commentary: “These cash payments hardly mean that Karzai is a dupe of Iran. He gets much more money and support from the U.S. than from the Iranians, and he knows that.”
“In a way, what the Iranians are doing, while undoubtedly cynical, is not that far removed from conventional foreign-aid programs run by the U.S., Britain, and other powers that also seek to curry influence with their donations,” Boot notes. He does, however, have concerns that the Iran-Karzai relationship is an indication of what is to come for Afghanistan should the U.S. “leave prematurely.”
So there you have it. Not much on the left, not much on the right. The “bags of cash” scandal has ended up being little more than the rare confirmation of business as usual.
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