He writes:
The New York Times article is deliberately misleading, excluding publicly-available evidence that casts doubts on the facts presented within it. Chiefly it [...]]]>
He writes:
The New York Times article is deliberately misleading, excluding publicly-available evidence that casts doubts on the facts presented within it. Chiefly it has excluded the likelihood that the Stuxnet operation was a failed or only minimally-successful experiment that did next to nothing in terms of setting back Iran’s nuclear program, as demonstrated by Stuxnet’s inconsequential effect on the production of low-enriched uranium– an effect documented in the graph below from the very report that The New York Times cites as the authoritative record for the timeline it puts forward, but a graph it failed to report to readers.
This graph, showing steady increases in Low Enriched Uranium production at Natanz, Iran, plant, was published in a document that the New York Times relied on for its story. But the Times did not provide this information to its readers.
Furthermore, technical analysis of the actual virus code shows a series of software revisions in 2010, long after the 2009 period of damage the authors assert was effected by Stuxnet– implying much less confidence in the success of the virus on the part of its developers, a conclusion again supported by quantitative data illustrating rising Iranian output of low enriched uranium over the past four years. And this conclusion is borne out by recent analyses of the software that once again the Times failed to mention.
The full post can be read here.
]]>Spokesperson P.J. Crowley replied, “Well, actually, in the other countries there is greater respect for the rights of the citizens.”
Phil Weiss, parodying a favorite neoconservative meme about Israel, called it “singling out Iran.”
But State is being responsive to the tough questions, and has come out with a statement on U.S. ally Bahrain. Here’s Crowley, in full:
]]>The United States is very concerned by recent violence surrounding protests in Bahrain. We have received confirmation that two protesters in Bahrain were recently killed, and offer our condolences to the families and friends of the two individuals who lost their lives.
The United States welcomes the Government of Bahrain’s statements that it will investigate these deaths, and that it will take legal action against any unjustified use of force by Bahraini security forces. We urge that it follow through on these statements as quickly as possible. We also call on all parties to exercise restraint and refrain from violence.
Right now, of course, it is Egypt’s moment. Many people’s elation over the [...]]]>
Right now, of course, it is Egypt’s moment. Many people’s elation over the past ten days has given way to guarded optimism that a relatively peaceful transition to a new government can be made. This will likely be a volatile, months-long process — at least — and the implications will be wide-ranging. We’ll, of course, be covering all of it, or as much of it as we can.
For good things to check out elsewhere, there are far too many places to list comprehensively. For starters, I’d point to Inter Press Service, the wire that hosts this blog. On the homepage, you’ll find articles by a host of correspondents on the ground in Egypt and all over the world, including LobeLog contributors like Emad Mekay, the IPS correspondent in Cairo who has been filing dispatches for us here (some by phone).
Listing other sources of news and analysis would take too much time, so I’ll just say you can follow us on Twitter (@LobeLog), where you can keep track of what I’m reading and, sometimes, thinking. Of course, I am still glued to Al Jazeera English. Other than that, I’ve been dashing off thoughts on Egypt and its ripples on my personal blog and occasionally on Mondoweiss.
The latter has been a damned good source of info on all things related to Egypt’s aftershocks in both the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, perhaps more importantly to those of us who live here, the discourse in the U.S. If the U.S.’s strategic m.o. in the region is not under serious review, then, Houston, we have a problem.
Some rumblings of change have become perfectly clear from closely watching U.S. neoconservatives. The movement is split among itself, and cracks are forming between them and their usual allies in Israel’s Likud party. All about Earthquake Egypt.
But the movement remains strong and, most curiously, focused on Iran. This they still share with Israel’s Likud prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu. The general just appointed as IDF chief-of-staff has asserted Israel’s “moral right to act [against Iran]” and focused on the Iranian threat. Blogger Noam Sheizaf doesn’t know if the general falls in the attack camp or the “skeptics” camp; it’s “unclear.”
On the other hand, where neocons in the U.S. come down on Iran seems very clear. As Egypt unfolds all around them, they are out hawking “Iranium.”
Much more to come, I’m sure. And, of course, my vacation doesn’t mean that you won’t be getting Eli’s usual great reporting and analysis, as well as that of our long list of guest contributors.
]]>House Foreign Affairs chief Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) was wondering about the “nefarious ends” of some “elements” there, and Jeffrey Goldberg, who, with shifting views, expressed apprehension about the Muslim Brotherhood (giving space to FDD’s Reuel Marc Gerecht, who [...]]]>
House Foreign Affairs chief Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) was wondering about the “nefarious ends” of some “elements” there, and Jeffrey Goldberg, who, with shifting views, expressed apprehension about the Muslim Brotherhood (giving space to FDD’s Reuel Marc Gerecht, who seems open to Islamism, apparently, and Eli Lake, who doesn’t think Egypt’s peace deal with Israel will collapse).
Goldberg, to his credit, is asking big questions. And one of the biggest right now is about Islamism, and it’s role in the future of the Middle East. It’s playing out most acutely today in Tunisia and Egypt, but has been simmering all over the region, from Gaza to Qom.
Opinion makers in the U.S. seem to be divided along the lines that define what M.J. Rosenberg has called the “status quo lobby” (SQL), those whose actions — or key inactions — have thwarted a robust role for the U.S. in Middle East peacemaking. Goldberg and Ros-Lehtinen fit the paradigm: Both unflinching SQLers, they wear their hesitance for the long-awaited Arab democratic uprising on their sleeves.
The tepid support for Egyptians is about fear of Islamists, and no totalitarian strain, but one that has transitioned to seeking democratic legitimacy and inclusion. Yet events unfold in Egypt that drown out that narrative of what Phil Weiss, in an eloquent, must-read essay, called the “false choice of secular dictator-or-crazy Islamists.”
A bearded, angry young Arab shouted into a camera that “whether you’re Muslim, whether you’re a Christian, whether you’re an atheist, you will demand your goddamn rights.” Police held their fire, and protesters their stones, to break for prayers. On Twitter, Marc Lynch, a professor at George Washington University, wrote that a key day of demonstrations went forward even without the internet because people already knew where to meet up: “[O]n Friday everybody knew mosques would be focal points, didn’t need to coordinate.”
But the “false choice” clings to life among adherents of the SQL, where it is considered infallible wisdom.
The New York Times gave us a pretty even handed account a few weeks back about Tunisia’s relatively moderate Islamist party, then hauled out WINEP‘s Martin Kramer to unthinkingly denounce Islamism. (The Times also carried a pro-inclusion analyst.) Kramer, you see, hasn’t honestly answered or asked this question for decades.
Even Ben Birnbaum, a young reporter with the right-wing Washington Times, where he works with Lake, was asking himself some serious questions, too, on Twitter:
Do my mixed feelings about democracy in #Egypt make me a bad person? #Jan25
You get the feeling that Steve Coll had just the SQL in mind when he wrote, in the New Yorker, that the Tunisian Islamist party — the one that’s cool with “tourists sipping French wine in their bikinis” – is “raising anxieties in some quarters.”
In other quarters, however, questions are being asked. Take Coll himself:
[T]he corrosive effects of political and economic exclusion in the region cannot be sustained—among them the legions of pent-up, angry young men, Islamist and otherwise.
Yes, he calls for Obama to “thwart” Islamists in Tunisia. But the New Yorker‘s Comment is a column that important people read, and they’re reading about important questions.
]]>I won’t bother going over her recommendations and rebutting them, because so many have already done it for me:
Matt Duss at the Wonk Room, whose entire post is a definite must-read:
What’s Farsi for ‘Cakewalk’?
…Maybe there are Iranian democrats who support the U.S. bombing their country, I’d love to hear from them. But I think we’ve gotten far too casual about proposing these sorts of attacks. If we’re going to talk about it, let’s at least talk about it seriously, recognizing that very many people will very likely die. They deserve a lot better than than you know, if everything goes just right, it just might work!
Rubin wants the United States to make human rights a central theme in its Iran policy — and to indiscriminately assassinate civilian scientists.
…The “car accident” line in her post is a clear reference to the bombing of two scientists’ cars last month in Tehran. Here is a BBC account of those attacks, carried out by unknown men on motorbikes. One of the scientists was killed and one was wounded. Both of their wives were also reportedly wounded. Another nuclear scientist was killed in a similar bombing earlier this year.
No one has argued that any of these men could be considered combatants. It’s also still unclear who was behind the attacks, though Iran has accused the United States and Israel of having a role. But even the U.S. State Department referred to these attacks as acts of terrorism, which would make them antithetical to any serious concept of human rights.
At Mondoweiss, Philip Weiss picks up on this same inconsistency, but has a broader point about the Post:
The Washington Post has replaced the American Enterprise Institute as the primary hub of neoconservative arguments for U.S. aggression in the Middle East. AEI served a Republican administration, and cannot perform that role for Democrats. So the Post is now doing the job, percolating militarist ideas for the Obama administration. Old wine in a new bottle. Jennifer Rubin is the latest hire, fresh from Commentary magazine, arguing for an attack on Iran…
Later on Weiss comes back to the issue, and points us to a Huffington Post piece by David Bromwich, who calls it “barbarous dialect”:
There was nothing like this in our popular commentary before 2003; but the callousness has grown more marked in the past year, and especially in the past six months. Why?
Bromwich focuses on President Barack Obama’s decision to assassinate a U.S. citizen who preaches violent extremism against the U.S., and the fact that even the president can joke about “drone strikes” — that is, shooting missiles down on villages from on high. Bromwich:
]]>A joke (it has been said) is an epigram on the death of a feeling. By turning the killings he orders into an occasion for stand-up comedy, the new president marked the death of a feeling that had seemed to differentiate him from George W. Bush. A change in the mood of a people may occur like a slip of the tongue. A word becomes a phrase, the phrase a sentence, and when enough speakers fall into the barbarous dialect, we forget that we ever talked differently.
He [...]]]>
He writes (my emphasis):
Sanctions invariably fail to achieve their goal if the majority of citizens in the sanctioned country support the objectionable policy, in this case, Iran’s nuclear-enrichment program. I believe that the majority of Iranians support this policy because of Iran’s isolation during the Iran-Iraq War and the shameful use of Western-supplied chemical weapons on Iranians. Thus, the focus on Iran’s nuclear policy has been doomed from the start. But if the United States shifts its focus to the regime’s human-rights abuses, corruption and failure to deliver economic prosperity, then success becomes more likely. This shift in U.S. policy should be carefully considered because an agreement with an Iranian leadership that had the interests of its people at heart would be much more likely to be honored.
His proposal to gain Iranian popular support of a U.S.-instigated overthrow of the regime is difficult to follow (my emphasis again):
Success can be further enhanced by two additional measures. First, as the central bank of Iran has filled, in part, the void left by the exclusion of its commercial banks from international transactions, sanctioning the central bank would close an important loophole. Second, in view of the recent depreciation of the rial, the United States could adopt one or two simple measures to initiate a run on the currency that could bring Iranians from all walks of life onto the streets to oppose the regime as never before.
It’s possible that collapsing the rial and destroying ordinary Iranian’s savings could bring people to the streets. But it seems extremely short-sighted to assume the Iranian public will jump to bring down their government, given the decades of animus between the United States and Iran that dates to the 1953 overthrow of the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadeq.
In his review of two recent books on the coup, James North wrote on Mondoweiss about how economic warfare, starting in 1951, was used to undermine Mossadeq’s government.
North wrote:
Mossadeq’s government fell mainly because the British had imposed a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil starting back in 1951, and British warships blocked exports. Most of the third world was still under formal colonial rule then, so Iran had to stand alone. Economic warfare, not the cunning Kermit Roosevelt outfoxing flustered and foolish Iranians, was decisive.
So while it’s possible that a strategy of economic warfare that would wipe out the country’s banks and destroys the currency could bring the Iranian public around to the United State’s side. More likely, they have a greater sense of history than Askari gives credit, and would consider such a plan a disaster.
]]>Yossi Melman, who covers [...]]]>
Yossi Melman, who covers intelligence for the newspaper Haaretz and is at work on a book about Israeli intelligence over the past decade, said in a telephone interview that he suspected that Israel was involved [in the Stuxnet virus].
He noted that Meir Dagan, head of Mossad, had his term extended last year partly because he was said to be involved in important projects. He added that in the past year Israeli estimates of when Iran will have a nuclear weapon had been extended to 2014.
“They seem to know something, that they have more time than originally thought,” he said.
While neoconservatives in the U.S. and their allies on the Israeli right speak often about how Iran is on the cusp of nuclear weapons capability, this seems not to be the case — even by the estimates of Israeli intelligence.
Just yesterday, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations, neoconservative Sen. Joe Lieberman said that Iran was mere months away from a weapons capability:
As my colleague in the House of Representatives, Foreign Affairs Chairman Howard Berman, warned last week, we are talking about months, not years.
Right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been talking for years about how an Iranian bomb was right aoround the corner. He started up this meme as early as 1995 — 15 years ago — with his book “Fighting Terrorism.” Phil Weiss has the key quote from Netanyahu, way back when (with my emphasis):
The best estimates at this time place Iran between three and fve years away from possessing the prerequisites required for the independent production of nuclear weapons. After this time, the Iranian Islamic republic will have the ability to construct atomic weapons without the importation of materials or technology from abroad.
If the Israeli intelligence estimate is to be believed, either these characters have a very distorted sense of time — 15 Earth years equals no time at all for Netanyahu — or they are promoting an alarmist time frame in the pursuit of an agenda.
(H/T Mid East Brief)
]]>The exact meaning of the warning seems to be in doubt because Oren addressed so many topics during his 15-minute speech to congregations that included Atlantic heavyweight Jeffrey Goldberg and Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan.
One recurring theme in the commentary, however, was Oren’s references to Iran. Oren hinted at issues with Iran before the halfway point of his speech, referring to “monumental–even existential–decisions” that Israeli leaders are forced to make. Returning to the theme of asking his audience to imagine they were Israel’s prime minister, Oren specifically talked about Iran later in his speech:
[T]he ultimate quandary of statecraft centers on Iran.
This is the radical, genocidal Iran whose leaders regularly call for Israel’s annihilation and provides terrorists with the means for accomplishing that goal. This is the Iran that undermines governments throughout the Middle East and even South America, and an Iran that shoots its own people protesting for freedom.
Iran does all this without nuclear weapons–imagine what it would do with the nuclear arms it is assiduously developing. And imagine what you, awakening once again as the Israeli Prime Minister, will decide. Do you remain passive while Iran provides nuclear weaponry to terrorist groups, targets Tel Aviv with nuclear-tipped missiles, and triggers a nuclear arms race throughout the region? Or do you act, as Israel has now, joining with the United States and other like-minded nations in imposing sanctions on Iran, hoping to dissuade its rulers from nuclearizing? And, if that fails, do you keep all options on the table, with the potentially far-reaching risks those options entail?
At the end of the speech, he asked that American Jews “stand with [Israel] as we resist Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.”
As covered in our Daily Talking Points today, Bill Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, interpreted Oren’s multifaceted warning as a shot at Obama: “It would seem that if President Obama does not act to stop Iran, Prime Minister Netanyahu will.”
Kristol’s ideological comrades at Commentary‘s Contentions blog saw things much the same way. Jennifer Rubin wrote that Oren was “crystal clear on Iran.” With her usual biting prose, Rubin attacks Obama as “feckless” and writes that Oren’s section on Iran and conclusion — a call for American Jews and Israelis to be “appreciative of the quandaries our leaders face” — was a
suggest[ion that] it is time to get real, to put aside the fantasy that Swiss cheese sanctions are going to break the mullahs’ will. Obama is, we are told, preparing to call for more “engagement” with Iran — a ludicrous and dangerous suggestion that indicates he’s not remotely serious about ending the threat of a nuclear Iran. So Oren is telling — perhaps pleading — with American Jews to stand by Israel if in fact Obama shirks his obligations as leader of the Free World. After all, should Israel be forced to act on its own, it will be defending our national security interests as much as its own.
Rubin, it would seem, doesn’t need to be warned about anything: She added that it’s a delusion to think “we have some other viable alternative to military force” to halt Iran’s alleged advancement toward a nuclear weapon.
At his blog on the Atlantic website, former IDF corporal Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote in August about the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran, gave his own interpretation of Oren’s speech:
I took the sermon as a warning from the Netanyahu government: There may be tough times ahead, in the peace process, and with Iran, so it is time for American Jews to cowboy-up and deal with the difficulties our brethren in Israel are facing. Others in my congregation took the speech as a signal that Israel was prepping American Jewry for an inevitable attack on Iran, or, at the very least, for an Israeli unwillingness to freeze settlement growth, which could lead to the end of the current round of peace talks. In typical Goldblog fashion, I think the speech might have meant all of these thing [sic].
Phil Weiss, who blogs at Mondoweiss, took note of “the suggestion that the peace talks [with the Palestinians] will fail” — Oren had asked the crowd to “uphold us if we have to make painful sacrifices for peace or if we decide that the terms of the proposed treaty fail to justify those sacrifices.” But Weiss saw the warning as focused squarely on Iran. Writing from a trip to the Middle East, Weiss said that Oren used the opportunity to “remind American Jews to support Israel no matter what it does in the near future re Iran.”
Lastly, but not least, Debra Rubin, who attended one of the speeches and wrote it up for the Washington Jewish Week, phrased Oren’s warning about an attack on Iran as a question, citing the views of some attendees:
Was Israel’s ambassador warning the Jewish community on Kol Nidre that Israel has decided to take a preemptive strike in Iran?
Some congregants at Adas Israel Congregation in D.C. thought so [...].
Jeffrey Goldberg decided, at the end of his post, to let his readers decide the focus of the speech for themselves. I’ll follow his lead on this one. Here’s Oren’s remarks in full:
On Yom Kippur we read the Book of Jonah, one of the Bible’s most enigmatic texts. It is also one of the Bible’s shortest texts, weighing in at a page and a half, which is quite an accomplishment for this holiday. And it features one of our scripture’s least distinguished individuals. Jonah–a man whose name, in Hebrew, means dove–not dov, as in Hebrew for bear, but dove as, in English, pigeon.
Yet this same everyman, this Jonah, is tasked by God with a most daunting mission. He is charged with going to the great city of Nineveh and persuading its pernicious people to repent for their sins or else.
Not such an unusual task, you might think. Twenty-first century life is rife with people who warn of the catastrophes awaiting us if we fail to modify our behavior one way or the other. Today we call them pundits, commentators who, if proven correct, claim all the credit but who, if proven wrong, bear none of the responsibility.
Jonah, though, cannot escape the responsibility. Nor can he dodge his divinely ordained dilemma. If he succeeds in convincing the Ninevehians to atone and no harm befalls them, many will soon question whether that penitence was ever really necessary. Jonah will be labeled an alarmist. But, what if the people of Nineveh ignore the warning and the city meets the same fiery fate as Sodom and Gomorrah? Then Jonah, as a prophet, has failed.
Such is the paradox of prophecy for Jonah, a lose-lose situation. No wonder he runs away. He flees to the sea, only to be swallowed by a gigantic fish, and then to the desert, cowering under a gourd. But, in the end, the fish coughs him up and the gourd withers. The moral is: there is no avoiding Jonah’s paradox. Once elected by God, whatever the risks, he must act.
]]>As such, the Book of Jonah can be read as more than morality play, but also a cautionary tale about the hazards of decision-making. It is a type of political primer, if you will, what the medieval thinkers called a Mirror for Princes. The Talmud teaches us that, in the post-Biblical era, the gift of prophecy is reserved for children and fools. In modern times, we don’t have prophets–pundits, yes, but no prophets. Instead we have statesmen who, like Jonah, often have to make fateful decisions for which they will bear personal responsibility. If not a paradox of prophecy, these leaders face what we might call the quandary of statecraft.
Take, for example, the case of Winston Churchill. During the 1930s, he warned the world of the dangers of the rapidly rearming German Reich. The British people ignored Churchill- worse they scorned him, only to learn later that he was all along prescient and wise. But what if Churchill had become Britain’s Prime Minister five years earlier and had ordered a pre-emptive strike against Germany? Those same people might have concluded that the Nazis never posed a real threat and that their prime minister was merely a warmonger.
Or consider Harry Truman who, shortly after assuming the presidency in the spring of 1945, had to decide whether to drop America’s terrible secret weapon on Imperial Japan. Today, many people, including some Americans, regard the dropping of the atomic bomb on two Japanese cities as an act of unrivaled brutality, but what if Truman had decided otherwise? What if the United States had invaded the Japanese mainland and lost, as the US Army estimated at the time, more than a million GIs? Truman, the decision-maker, was either the butcher of Japanese civilians or butcher of young Americans. Either way he lost.
The quandary of statecraft: every national leader knows it and few better than Israeli leaders. They, too, have had to make monumental–even existential–decisions.
On May 14th, 1948, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion had to determine whether to realize the two-thousand year-long dream of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel. But, by doing so, he risked an onslaught by overwhelming Arab forces against a Jewish population half the size of Washington, DC today armed mainly with handguns.
Another example: my personal hero, Levi Eshkol. On June 5th, 1967, Eshkol had to decide whether to unleash Israel Defense Forces against the Arab armies surrounding the Jewish State and clamoring for its destruction or whether to alienate the international community and especially the United States and be branded an aggressor.
Ben-Gurion’s decision resulted in the creation of the State of Israel and Eshkol’s in the immortal image of Israeli paratroopers dancing before the Kotel. Nothing is inevitable in history and in both cases the outcome might have been tragically different. Like Churchill and Truman, Ben-Gurion and Eshkol confronted the quandary of statecraft.
They also have to answer to their citizens. Unlike the prophetic leaders of antiquity, presidents and prime ministers are not selected by God but rather elected by the majority of their peoples through a democratic process. In America, the system was modeled on the Roman Republic in which citizens empowered senators to represent them in the distant capital. In tiny Israel, with its multi-party consensual style of democracy, the model is not Rome but rather ancient Athens. The American president, it has been said, represents 300 million constituents; Israeli prime ministers represent 7 million prime ministers.
Israeli democracy is rambunctious and intensely personal, placing the premium on individual participation. In our family, I can attest, my wife and I have never voted for the same party. Our son also went his own way politically. Together with his friends, he started a political party in our living room that now holds two seats on the Jerusalem municipality.
At 62 years old, Israel’s democracy is older than more than half of the democratic governments in the world, which, in turn, account for less than half of the world’s existing nations. Israel is one of the handful of democracies that has never succumbed to periods of undemocratic rule. And Israel has achieved this extraordinary record in spite of the fact that it is the only democracy never to know a nanosecond of peace and which has endured pressures that would have crushed most other democracies long ago. In a region inhospitable–even fatal–to government by and of the people, Israel’s democracy thrives.
Democracy in Israel is not only personal and vibrant, but also grave, because the stakes are so enormously high. Recalling Jonah’s paradox, the leaders we elect are confronted with grueling decisions.
Consider the case of terror. Israel today is threatened with two major terror organizations: Hamas in Gaza and, in Lebanon, Hizbollah. Both are backed by Iran and both call openly for Israel’s destruction. And, over the past five years, both have acted on that call by firing nearly 15,000 rockets at Israeli towns and villages.
Next imagine that you’re the prime minister of Israel. You know that in order to keep those thousands of rockets out of Hamas’s hands you need to blockade Gaza from the sea. The policy is risky–people may get hurt, especially if they’re armed extremists–and liable to make you very unpopular in the world. But you have to choose between being popular and watching idly while a million Israelis come under rocket fire. You have to choose between popular and being alive.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah has nearly quadrupled the rockets in its arsenal. They’re bigger, more accurate rockets, with a range that can reach every Israeli city, even Eilat. Worse: Hizbollah has positioned those rockets under homes, hospitals, and schools, confident that if Israelis try to defend themselves from those missiles, they will be branded war criminals.
Imagine, again, that you’re Israel’s prime minister. Do you wait until Hizbollah finds a pretext to fire those rockets or do you act preemptively? Do you risk having the much of the country being reduced to rubble or having that same country reduced to international pariah status?
The terror threat is a very poignant example of the quandary of statecraft in Israel, but an even thornier case is posed by the peace process.
Yes, the peace process, with its vision of two peoples living in adjacent states in a relationship of permanent and legitimate peace. What could be so hazardous about that?
Well, let’s return to that Kafkaesque scenario in which you wake up one morning and find yourself transformed into Israel’s prime minister.
You know that to create that neighboring state that you’re going to have to give up some land, but not just any land, but land regarded as sacred by the majority of the Jewish people for more than three thousand years. You know that a great many of your countrymen have made their homes in these areas and that numerous Israelis have given their lives in their defense. You know that Israel has in the past withdrawn from territories in an effort to generate peace but that it received no peace but rather war. And, lastly, you know that many Arabs view the two-state solution as a two stage solution in which the ultimate stage is Israel’s dissolution.
What, then, Mr. or Ms. Prime Minister, do you do?
You could opt for maintaining the status quo, with the risk of deepening Israel’s international isolation or you could specify a vision of peace that significantly reduces its perils. You could, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has done, insist that the future Palestinian State be effectively demilitarized, without an army that could bombard Israeli cities or an air force that could shoot down planes landing at Ben-Gurion Airport. You could insist that the Palestinian State reciprocally recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and so put an end to all future claims and conflicts.
Even then, of course, Israel will be running incalculable risks, for what if the Palestinian state implodes and becomes another Gaza or Lebanon? What do you do if, a week after the peace treaty is signed, a rocket falls on Tel Aviv?
More than Gaza, more than peace, the ultimate quandary of statecraft centers on Iran.
This is the radical, genocidal Iran whose leaders regularly call for Israel’s annihilation and provides terrorists with the means for accomplishing that goal. This is the Iran that undermines governments throughout the Middle East and even South America, and an Iran that shoots its own people protesting for freedom.
Iran does all this without nuclear weapons–imagine what it would do with the nuclear arms it is assiduously developing. And imagine what you, awakening once again as the Israeli Prime Minister, will decide. Do you remain passive while Iran provides nuclear weaponry to terrorist groups, targets Tel Aviv with nuclear-tipped missiles, and triggers a nuclear arms race throughout the region? Or do you act, as Israel has now, joining with the United States and other like-minded nations in imposing sanctions on Iran, hoping to dissuade its rulers from nuclearizing? And, if that fails, do you keep all options on the table, with the potentially far-reaching risks those options entail?
The issues of terror, the peace process, and Iran evoke strong emotions in this country and around the world, and often spark criticism of Israeli policies. Yet it’s crucial to recall that those policies are determined by the leaders elected through one of the world’s most robust and resilient democracies. Recall that the people of Israel–not of Europe, not of the United States–bear the fullest consequences for their leaders’ decisions.
There is no escaping the responsibility–as Jonah learned thousands of years ago–and that responsibility is borne by our leaders and by the majority of the people they represent. Israel today faces decisions every bit as daunting as those confronting Jonah, but we will not run away. There is no gourd to hide under or fish to swallow us whole. Terror, the peace process, Iran–our Ninevehs–await.
Support us as we grapple with these towering challenges. Back us in our efforts to defend ourselves from terrorist rockets. Uphold us if we have to make painful sacrifices for peace or if we decide that the terms of the proposed treaty fail to justify those sacrifices. Stand with us as we resist Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Respect the decisions we take through our democratic system and respect the risks that we, more than any other nation, take.
The message of the Book of Jonah is one of personal and collective atonement, but it is also a message of unity and faith. “In my trouble I called to the Lord,” proclaims Jonah, “VaYa’aneini” – “and He answered me.”
Let us–Israelis and the American Jews–united by our faith, our peoplehood, and our common love for democracy. Let us assume responsibility for our decisions, crushingly difficult though they may often be, and appreciative of the quandaries our leaders face. When we call out, let us answer one another with the assurance that no challenge–no paradoxes, no Ninevehs–can defeat us.
At the core of Bayefsky’s reasoning is her claim that the project’s chairman, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf was photographed with a representative of the Iranian government in 2008 at a Cordoba Initiative event in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
From this single photograph Bayefsky draws the following conclusions:
The Iranian connection to the launch of Cordoba House may go beyond a relationship between Rauf and Larijani. The Cordoba Initiative lists one of its three major partners as the UN’s Alliance of Civilizations. The Alliance has its roots in the Iranian-driven “Dialogue Among Civilizations,” the brainchild of former Iranian President Hojjatoleslam Seyyed Mohammad Khatami. Khatami is now a member of the High-level Group which “guides the work of the Alliance.” His personal presidential qualifications include the pursuit of nuclear weapons, a major crackdown on Iranian media, and rounding up and imprisoning Jews on trumped-up charges of spying. Alliance reports claim Israel lies at the heart of problems associated with “cross-cultural relations,” since the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” and “Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestinian and other Arab territories … are primary causes of resentment and anger in the Muslim world toward Western nations.”
Never mind that recent polling confirms the fact that the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a primary cause of resentment and anger in the Muslim world toward the U.S.. Bayefsky is clearly suggesting that a moderate, mainstream group of Muslims can’t possibly build a community center without subversive Iranian connections.
She writes:
In addition, a Weekly Standard article in July suggested that the idea of building an Islamic memorial in lower Manhattan may have originated back in 2003 with two Iranian brothers: M. Jafar “Amir” Mahallati, who served as ambassador of the Iranian Islamic Republic to the United Nations from 1987 to 1989, and M. Hossein Mahallati.
The anti-Muslim campaign that is coming to a head in Manhattan is the product of years of grassroots efforts (see Justin Elliot and Alex Kane‘s excellent pieces on the origins of the campaign) to delegitimize and undermine Muslim Americans. But this attempt by Bayefsky to link the Cordoba Initiative with Iranian influences is particularly disturbing.
Implied in her article — in which she concludes ominously, “The unanswered questions keep mounting,” — is that the Cordoba Initiative, acting as an Iranian agent, is seeking to bring U.S. enemies — as Bayefsky would no doubt label Iranians — on to the “hallowed ground” of the World Trade Center site.
From this the reader can conclude that:
1.) Iran is an existential threat whose operatives seek to spread Iranian influence through community centers in Manhattan, and;
2.) Mainstream, moderate organizations of Muslims simply don’t exist. They can’t help but form links with subversive elements seeking to destroy the United States and Israel.
The intolerance directed toward the Park 51 Community Center, in combination with the United States and Israel’s increasingly troubling trajectory of policies towards Iran, has the potential to leave a lasting impact upon U.S. attitudes towards Muslims both domestically and around the world.
]]>Abedin writes:
]]>A top priority for the IRGC high command is to respond so harshly and decisively so as to deter the Americans from a second set of strikes at a future point. The idea here is to avoid what happened to Iraq in the period , when the former Baathist regime was so weakened by sanctions and repeated small-scale military attacks that it quickly collapsed in the face of American and British invading armies.
The range of predictable responses available to the IRGC high command include dramatic hit ad run attacks against military and commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf, the use of mid-range ballistic missiles against American bases in the region and Israel and a direct assault on American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. All these options are likely to be used within 48 hours of the start of hostilities.
What is less predictable is the response of the IRGC Qods Force, which is likely to be at the forefront of the Pasdaran’s counter-attack. One possible response by the Qods force is spectacular terrorist-style attacks against American intelligence bases and assets throughout the region. The IRGC Qods Force is believed to have identified every key component of the American intelligence apparatus in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan. They are likely to put this information to good use, especially since the Qods Force suspects that the CIA had a hand in last October’s Jundullah-organised suicide bombing targeting IRGC commanders in Iran’s volatile Sistan va Baluchistan province.
The IRGC navy will also play a key asymmetrical role in the conflict by organising maritime suicide bombings on an industrial scale. By manning its fleet of speedboats with suicide bombers and ramming them into American warships and even neutral commercial shipping, the Pasdaran will hope to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which nearly 40 percent of world crude oil supplies pass.
The combination of these asymmetrical forms of warfare with more conventional style missile and even ground force attacks on American bases in the region will likely result in thousands of American military casualties in the space of a few weeks. The IRGC has both the will and wherewithal to inflict a level of casualties on American armed forces not seen since the Second World War.
Even if the United States manages to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and much of the country’s military assets, the IRGC can still claim victory by claiming to have given the Americans a bloody nose and producing an outcome not dissimilar from the Israeli-Hezbollah military engagement in the summer of 2006.
The political effect of this will likely be even more explosive than the actual fighting. Not only will it awaken the sleeping giant of Iranian nationalism, thus aligning the broad mass of the people with the regime, it will also shore up Iran’s image in the region and prove once and for all that the Islamic Republic is prepared to fight to the death to uphold its principles. Suddenly Iran’s allies in the region – particularly non-state actors like Hezbollah and Hamas – would stand ten feet tall.