The National Review Online has run an advance copy of the foreign policy speech GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney will give today in Virginia. In it, the former governor is expected to lay out his “red lines” for Iran that will be closer to Congress and the Israeli government’s position [...]]]>
The National Review Online has run an advance copy of the foreign policy speech GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney will give today in Virginia. In it, the former governor is expected to lay out his “red lines” for Iran that will be closer to Congress and the Israeli government’s position than the Obama Administration’s. Romney has expressed differing red lines on Iran in the past. Romney is also expected to express support for US arming of Syrian rebels:
It is time to change course in the Middle East. . . .
I will put the leaders of Iran on notice that the United States and our friends and allies will prevent them from acquiring nuclear-weapons capability. I will not hesitate to impose new sanctions on Iran, and will tighten the sanctions we currently have. I will restore the permanent presence of aircraft-carrier task forces in both the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf region—and work with Israel to increase our military assistance and coordination. For the sake of peace, we must make clear to Iran through actions—not just words—that their nuclear pursuit will not be tolerated.
…. In Syria, I will work with our partners to identify and organize those members of the opposition who share our values and ensure they obtain the arms they need to defeat Assad’s tanks, helicopters, and fighter jets. Iran is sending arms to Assad because they know his downfall would be a strategic defeat for them. We should be working no less vigorously with our international partners to support the many Syrians who would deliver that defeat to Iran—rather than sitting on the sidelines. It is essential that we develop influence with those forces in Syria that will one day lead a country that sits at the heart of the Middle East.
]]>
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.
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal: For months the Journal’s editorial board published hawkish articles about Iran on [...]]]>
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.
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal: For months the Journal’s editorial board published hawkish articles about Iran on a weekly basis. We highlighted some of them here, here and here. Then they stopped, perhaps due to the heating up of the presidential campaign and the crisis in Syria. But this week the editors returned to reminding readers about their hardline position on Iran by arguing that current sanctions are not strong enough and filled with “loopholes”. Interestingly, they criticize the measures for being inadequately painful and advocate more “pain” while simultaneously claiming that they are unlikely to be effective:
But enough pain to stop the 30-year nuclear drive of a revolutionary regime built around a messianic cult of martyrdom? A regime with foreign currency reserves between $60 billion and $100 billion, and which would net more than $40 billion in oil revenue even with a 40% drop in sales?
We’ve never considered sanctions likely to persuade Iran to drop its nuclear program, but it’s dangerous to pursue them half-heartedly while claiming progress and keeping the international temperature down as Iran’s centrifuges spin. That’s been the Obama Administration’s consistent approach, and it’ll probably continue at least through Election Day in November. It’s a good way to comfort adversaries in Tehran and Beijing while undermining friends in Jerusalem and beyond.
Benjamin Weinthal, Jerusalem Post: A fellow from the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and frequent JPost contributor praises his superior’s call for “economic warfare” on Iran. (Find a response to “Battle Rial” here.):
Writing in late June on the website of Foreign Policymagazine, Mark Dubowitz, a leading US sanctions expert, urged greater “economic warfare” targeting Iran’s entire energy apparatus and branches of its non-gas-and-oil sectors.
Dubowitz,the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, advocates a creative piece of US legislation from Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Florida), Rep. Robert Dold (R-Illinois) and Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Illinois) that designates Iran’s entire energy sector as a “zone of primary proliferation concern.”
Benjamin Weinthal, National Review Online: In a piece titled “Economic Suffocation for Iran’s Rulers” Weinthal says the Obama administration should begin rounding up a coalition of the willing for an attack on Iran:
The Obama administration could begin preparing a blueprint for a coalition of governments that would support a military option within a defined timetable. In addition to Israel, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands have also maintained that a military option should remain on the table.
Mark Dubowitz, NPR: The executive director of the FDD is arguably the most enthusiastic advocate of crippling sanctions against Iran from the world of Washington think tanks, and yet, he regularly admits that sanctions won’t impede Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions:
So, are sanctions working to make Iran less of a nuclear threat?
Some experts are skeptical.
“The regime has been bracing for this,” says Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “It has large foreign exchange reserves, and it is still earning $40 [billion] or $45 billion a year from oil sales.
“The supreme leader’s economic expiration date — when his cash hoard falls low enough to set off a massive economic panic — may still be far off,” Dubowitz argues. “If the [Obama] administration wants to bring that date closer, it needs to make clear that the United States and our allies will do everything in their power to destroy Iran’s energy wealth unless the regime compromises.”
Amotz Asa-El, Market Watch: The Israeli pundit and former Jerusalem Post executive editor praises crippling sanctions against Iran because he believes they will lead to political upheaval:
Watching their money evaporate between their fingers, a growing number of Iranians increasingly ask why they need a leadership whose adventurism’s main cheerleaders are Hugo Chavez and Bashar Assad. Moreover, the millions in Iran who believe the ayatollahs stole their votes three years ago have since seen people power drive other inept Middle East leaders from office.
Between the increasingly restless masses and the economically dilettante ayatollahs, change from within is on its way to Iran, either in the wake of next year’s election or before it, whether peacefully or not.
Emergency Committee for Israel: A news advertisement unleashed this week by the ultra-hawkish letterhead group the Emergency Committee for [...]]]>
Emergency Committee for Israel: A news advertisement unleashed this week by the ultra-hawkish letterhead group the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), which is headed by Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, speaks for itself. “Time to Act” seems like a parody from the Daily Show but the ECI actually wants Americans to see the world through the ultra-paranoid, fact-devoid lens that they’re manufacturing. Eli Clifton provides a backgrounder on what the ECI is really about:
ECI’s reflexive hawkishness stems from its hard-right neoconservative disposition. The organization was even born in the same Washington office as the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), a short-lived right-wing pressure group that pushed for an Iraq invasion. A major player in the Iraq war push, Kristol, for his part, already called for a war with Iran last October.
Robert Wright also discusses ECI’s fanaticism in the Atlantic.
Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post: Surprise, surprise. The ECI ad gets a plug from the militantly pro-Israel Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin who regularly agitates for a U.S. war on Iran. Congressional hawks pushing measures that will make those “meaningless talks” between the Iranians and Western countries even less likely to result in a negotiated settlement are also praised by Rubin:
Sitting mutely by on the sidelines while the centrifuges keep spinning in Iran is a dereliction of duty by Congress. Unlike President Obama, however, I think there are lawmakers willing to step up to the plate. History will judge them well.
For more on “Congressional obstructionism” on Iran see Trita Parsi’s recent Op-Ed in the New York Times.
Daniel Pipes, National Review Online: Arch hardliner Daniel Pipes–whose writings were cited 18 times in the “Manifesto” penned by Oslo killer Anders Brevik–criticizes Nicholas Kristof’s observations from his recent trip to Iran. Why? Because Kristof suggests that Iranians are unlikely to welcome a war with open arms:
After providing this information – which tallies with what other travelers to Iran have recounted – Kristof reaches an inexplicable and illogical conclusion: “My guess is that the demise of the system is a matter of time — unless there’s a war between Iran and the West, perhaps ignited by Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. That, I sense, would provoke a nationalist backlash and rescue the ayatollahs.”
Comment: Whence this “sense”? If the Iranian population blames the mullahs for its economic woes today, why not assume it will also blame war on them too?
Emanuele Ottolenghi, FDD/Commentary: According to former Dick Cheney national security adviser John Hannah, the ultra-hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies and particularly Hannah’s “colleague” and FDD executive director Mark Dubowitz was pivotal in framing the U.S.’s decision to sanction Iran’s central bank. Now that sounds all fine and dandy except for one contradiction that all this exposes. If the FDD’s goal with Iran is regime change as stated here by Dubowitz and Reuel Marc Gerecht and this week by FDD staffer Emanuele Ottolenghi (among other places), then why does the U.S. insist that sanctions are integral to reaching a nuclear deal with Iran? If the sanctions are designed by an organization that is striving for regime change, then what hope can there be in any success through diplomacy? Here’s Ottolenghi:
]]>Trouble is brewing then, and offering a facile compromise on nuclear matters to this regime at this juncture would be a terrible mistake. Sanctions are slowly working – but we should keep using them less to extract an impossible deal and more to undermine the regime in Tehran.
The Weekly Standard: Stephen Schwartz writes on “Iran’s Conspiracy Industry” and observes that “conspiracy theories have long flourished in the lands of Islam.” Schwartz offers a rundown of recent anti-Semitic television programming in Iran, warning, “all of this might seem like nothing more than typical, [...]]]>
The Weekly Standard: Stephen Schwartz writes on “Iran’s Conspiracy Industry” and observes that “conspiracy theories have long flourished in the lands of Islam.” Schwartz offers a rundown of recent anti-Semitic television programming in Iran, warning, “all of this might seem like nothing more than typical, daily insanity in Iran.”
The Washington Post: Charles Krauthammer writes, “Of course, yesterday it was just George W. Bush, Tony Blair and a band of neocons with unusual hypnotic powers who dared challenge the received wisdom of Arab exceptionalism – the notion that Arabs, as opposed to East Asians, Latin Americans, Europeans and Africans, were uniquely allergic to democracy.” Krauthammer goes on to identify the new totalitarianism as “Islamism” and argues, “as in Soviet days, the threat is both internal and external. Iran, a mini-version of the old Soviet Union, has its own allies and satellites – Syria, Lebanon and Gaza – and its own Comintern, with agents operating throughout the region to extend Islamist influence and undermine pro-Western secular states.” He concludes, “We are, unwillingly again, parties to a long twilight struggle, this time with Islamism – most notably Iran, its proxies and its potential allies, Sunni and Shiite.”
The Washington Post: Michael Gerson asks, “Do Egypt’s protests mean American decline?” He warns, “The emergence of a Sunni version of Iran in Egypt would be a major blow,” and “There’s a reason shahs are sometimes followed by mullahs – because religious extremism is the opiate of a humiliated people.”
National Review Online: The Foundation For Defense of Democracies’s Benjamin Weinthal blogs, “The failure of the West to energetically confront Iran’s bellicose policies might very well be revealed in the post-Mubarak era.” He argues, “Iran’s understanding of a new Egyptian political system mirrors the fiercely anti-democratic goals of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.” Weinthal segues the jubilation over Hosni Mubarak’s resignation into a call for tighter sanctions on Iran, writing, “If the West, particularly the Obama administration, is serious about the business of democracy-promotion in Egypt and in the Muslim world, then an accelerated round of hard-hitting sanctions ought to be implemented against Iran’s energy sector… Crude-oil sanctions targeting Iran serve the twin goals of advancing democracy in Egypt and perhaps contributing to the demise of the Iranian regime.” He concludes, “In short, democratic change in Egypt is arguably contingent on blocking the spread of revolutionary Iranian Islam in the Middle East.”
]]>The New York Times: Yossi Klein Halevi, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and a contributing editor at The New Republic, writes, “Israelis fear that Egypt will go the way of Iran or Turkey, with Islamists gaining control through violence or gradual co-optation.” Hezbollah’s [...]]]>
The New York Times: Yossi Klein Halevi, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and a contributing editor at The New Republic, writes, “Israelis fear that Egypt will go the way of Iran or Turkey, with Islamists gaining control through violence or gradual co-optation.” Hezbollah’s increasingly strong role in Lebanon, Hamas’s control of the Gaza Strip, and the downturn in Israel-Turkey relations leads Halevi to comment, “[A]n Islamist Egypt could produce the ultimate Israeli nightmare: living in a country surrounded by Iran’s allies or proxies.” While the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood has forsworn violence, “it is small comfort to Israelis, who fear that the Brotherhood’s nonviolence has been a tactical maneuver and know that its worldview is rooted in crude anti-Semitism.”
National Review Online: The American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin opines on the developing situation in Egypt and suggests that the Muslim Brotherhood and “anti-Western forces will look to blame Egypt’s problems on the U.S.” “What worries me is this: Today marks the 32nd anniversary of Khomeini’s return to Iran. Most people making dark allusions to Iran forget that more than nine months passed between Khomeini’s return and the seizure of the U.S. Embassy,” says Rubin. “The question then becomes, what grievances can the Muslim Brotherhood or other anti-Western forces manufacture in those nine months to try to appeal beyond their natural constituency of perhaps 25 percent?” Rubin concludes that Obama should avoid making George W. Bush’s mistake of supporting elections in Gaza and “enabl[ing] political groups which maintain militias to claim the mantle of electoral legitimacy.”
Los Angeles Times: Jonah Goldberg, also based at The American Enterprise Institute, warns that the democracy movement in Egypt could turn into “a replay of the Iranian revolution, in which justified popular discontent with an authoritarian ruler was exploited by Islamists who ultimately imposed an even crueler brand of tyranny.” Goldberg goes on to compare political participation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to a “contagion.”
]]>