Mark Perry — who recently explained that the “chance for calm” has been assassinated by Israel in the past – on the current potential for a ceasefire (via CNN’s transcript):

MARK PERRY, MIDDLE EAST EXPERT: I would have said six hours ago if you had asked me that I [...]]]> via Lobe Log

Mark Perry — who recently explained that the “chance for calm” has been assassinated by Israel in the past – on the current potential for a ceasefire (via CNN’s transcript):

MARK PERRY, MIDDLE EAST EXPERT: I would have said six hours ago if you had asked me that I thought that a cease-fire was quite possible and that the principles were in place for a cease-fire. But as Arwa Damon said at the top of your broadcast that the two sides now seem to be drifting apart.

Listen, I think the principles for a cease-fire are in place. An end to the siege, that’s what Hamas wants. An end to the siege of the targeting of their leadership. What does Israel want? Israel wants Hamas to stop firing rockets, especially the Fajr-5 and the Fajr-3 long-range rockets, at their populations.

Certainly there’s a good exchange there. But what it’s going to take is Egyptians or somebody, Egyptians are going to be it, providing the security and the guarantees on such — on such an agreement. That’s very hard for the Egyptians to do. They don’t want to be responsible for Gaza. So we’re going to have to provide — somebody is going to have to provide inducement for them to do so. I think that’s the broad outlines of a cease-fire. A long-term cease-fire. And I think it’s very doable.

Goldberg is indignant that Aslan suggests, based on revelations about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in WikiLeaks cables, that the boisterous president may not be as evil as many commentators in the West — particularly pundits, [...]]]>

Jeffrey Goldberg, a prominent hawkish Israeli-American journalist, has written a post responding to a Reza Aslan piece on The Atlantic website.

Goldberg is indignant that Aslan suggests, based on revelations about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in WikiLeaks cables, that the boisterous president may not be as evil as many commentators in the West — particularly pundits, like Goldberg, close to the Israel lobby — make him out to be. Aslan contends that, according to this new evidence, Ahmadinejad may be more amiable to a nuclear deal and some increased freedoms for Iranians than previously thought.

Goldberg, of course, seizes on Alsan’s passage about Ahmadinejad’s oft-cited quote about ‘wiping Israel off the map.’ Aslan notes that, in the Farsi context, this phrase is not quite as incendiary as it is portrayed in the West — though Aslan admits that a more proper translation would bring little comfort to Westerners.

Ignoring Aslan’s important qualification, Goldberg lashes out. He exaggerates and gives evidence to support his view that Ahmadinejad is a “Holocaust-denying, eliminationist anti-Semitic Iranian president.” There should be ample citable examples to support such a view, but Goldberg doesn’t employ them. Instead, he gives a series of unsourced, unlinked quotes from Ahmadinejad. Some of the quotes seem to be of dubious origin.

First, Goldberg starts out with a hyperbolic interpretation of what Aslan is saying, and pillories it (Goldberg loves his straw-men). He hauls out a laundry list of Ahmadinejad’s statements that call for an end to the “Zionist regime.” But he has pulled out this exact same list twice before–with one new quote added this time around. That strikes me as a bit lazy (it’s the internet, dude, you can link back to your old posts) and a bit dishonest (you could at least acknowledge that you’ve essentially written the same column twice before).

I don’t want to defend these comments from Ahmadinejad, but there’s something here that needs to be unpacked: Calling for the end of the “Zionist regime” is calling for an end to a state that is driven by a particular ideology. This is called ‘regime change’ and people like Goldberg and his allies in the hawkish pro-Israel camp support this concept all the time.

Of course, Goldberg says this that list of pronouncements by Ahmadinejad are things that the president has “said about Israel and Jews in the last several years.” But that’s not exactly true: In the 20 examples, the word “Jew(s)” is never used; “Israel,” or some derivative, is used four times, with three of the four in either parenthesis or brackets (Goldberg, or whoever compiled this list for him some years ago, was not consistent). Instead, the quotes from Ahmadinejad that Goldberg uses refer mostly to the “Zionist regime.”

Goldberg is widely considered a liberal Zionst (as well as “one of the most influential Jewish journalists working in mainstream media”), and Zionism is, of course, an ideology. Goldberg’s fervent Zionism seems to intellectually confine him. It’s not actually so unusual for one state to call for an end to the ideological underpinnings of a hostile state– this is exactly what Goldberg and others of his ilk do from their own perspective. Those pundits, of course, want an end to the Islamic Republic. A reformed Islamic Republic, even one that might be less likely to pursue nuclear weapons or hostility towards Israel, is not good enough — they demand a secular state bereft of an official Islamic religion. That is what ‘regime change’ in the case of Iran is all about.

Back to Goldberg’s list: I am also afraid that I have to question the veracity of his quotes. In none of the three blog posts does Goldberg provide any sources. Each quote is accompanied by just a month and year. So I punched a bunch of the quotes into Google using Goldberg’s wordings. Take this item from Goldberg’s list:

July 2006: “Nations in the region will be more furious every day. It won’t take long before the wrath of the people turns into a terrible explosion that will wipe the Zionist entity off the map… The basic problem in the Islamic world is the existence of the Zionist regime, and the Islamic world and the region must mobilize to remove this problem. It is a usurper that our enemies made and imposed on the Muslim world, a regime that prevented the progress of the region’s nations, a regime that all Muslims must join hands in isolating worldwide.”

If you stick this into Google, without the date intro, you’ll get about 200 hits (not that many, relatively speaking). You might expect the top one to be a well trafficked or reputable news site — well, you’d be sort of right. The first hit is a website for Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), and the Google cache points you to a version of the site with a reprinted  Daily Caller column from August (which could easily be citing Goldberg). The second hit is Goldberg himself. Then comes the blogspots, hokey right-wing websites like EMPACT America (dedicated to the overhyped EMP threat), and the Christian Zionist pages like “The Bible Teaching Ministry of David Hocking“, “Bible Searchers”, and even some Christian Zionist blogspots!

I don’t have time to run through all the quotes, so I’ll just let that one stand, and challenge my esteemed colleague (much more esteemed than I) to give some sources for his oft-used list of quotes (even if they’re from MEMRI). If he’d like to draft a new list, I’d point him to the website for the right-leaning pro-Israel advocacy website The Israel Project. At least when they compile Ahmadinejad quotes, they’re not so lazy, and provide sources and links.

But maybe that’s why Goldberg keeps doing the same post over and over again: If you repeat something often enough, especially on the internet, people will start to think that it’s true.

Incredibly well connected in Iran, Majd is one of the country’s most astute analysts and a great story [...]]]> Author Hooman Majd did a web chat with scholar Reza Aslan on the latter’s website. They’re discussing Majd’s lastest book, The Ayatollah’s Democracy: An Iranian Challenge. I’m reading it right now. You should be, too.

Incredibly well connected in Iran, Majd is one of the country’s most astute analysts and a great story teller.

For the last question of their chat, Aslan asks Majd what he thinks Iran will be like in five years. Majd delivers a nuanced answer, as both the current situation and Aslan’s question demand. His answer contains many lessons for U.S. policy-makers, shedding light on why Majd is an important voice on this issue outside the Washington bubble. Here’s the full video, with the transcript of Majd’s last answer (my emphasis):

I think it can go either way. It depends on what happens outside Iran, almost as much as what happens inside Iran. When I was last in Iran about five months ago, there was a lot of despondency among the youth, and people trying to emigrate and trying to leave. Not because of an imminent threat to them, but just because they feel like they lost. That’s why people say the Green movement is over, because they feel like they’ve lost this battle.

I don’t think the regime in Iran is particularly unhappy about those kinds of people leaving. I think they feel that they have enough support by their case that they can manage the system.

I think if the United States in particular puts the kind of pressure they are putting on Iran right now — including sanctions for human rights and things like that — they kind of tend to unite the country more than divide it. Even people in the Green movement in Iran — the leadership anyway — have been against sanctions like this because it gives the hard-liners every excuse to crackdown on them.

Five years from now, if you saw what’s happening today with relations between the U.S. and Iran — the threat of war, what’s happening with Israel — I don’t think you’ll see much of a change. We’d see the democratic process stalled; I don’t think we’ll see much progress.

[...] It’s all speculation. And I do think we play a big role in this. I think we play a bigger role than we thing in terms of being able to foster this democratic movement.

I’ve always said, Reza, that if we can resolve this nuclear issue with Iran — no matter how much we hate Ahmadinejad, no matter we dislike this regime — if we can solve this, it gives these guys in Iran a little breathing room so that they’re no longer accused of being on the other side. And it would also force Ahmadinejad and his government to face up to the problems that they have in Iran. Every time something happens, (Ahmadinejad) can point to the nuclear issue and say, ‘Well, we have to be united against them. Sanctions against us; they’re threatening war.’ And it’s impossible for these Green guys to get a break, because every time they want to say something, it gets overshadowed by this pressure from Israel and pressure from the United States.

I’m hopeful that the nuclear issue can be solved in five years, and if it can, you’ll see a lot more change in Iran.

Mostly raised in the West, Majd brings a quasi-outsider’s eye to the Islamic Republic (read my review of his latest book here).

While his Western sensibilities allow Majd to explain Iranian complexities so well to a U.S. audience, one of his greatest assets may be that he’s an outsider here, too: the man has little or nothing to do with the narrow, agenda-driven dialogue in Washington. Coming to writing and journalism late in his career, Majd is a quintessential Washington outsider (though don’t expect him anytime soon on a Tea Party ticket). He thinks outside the Washington box, which allows him to spend most of his time in the real world.

As I wrote, check out his book.

First the hawks: At Commentary‘s Contentions blog, the prolific Jennifer Rubin [...]]]> There’s an interesting dichotomy in the current perspectives regarding Israel’s position on Iran. Both those who advocate for an Israeli (or U.S.) strike on Iran and those opposed to such action are using the tense status quo between the countries to bolster their viewpoints.

First the hawks: At Commentary‘s Contentions blog, the prolific Jennifer Rubin picks up on Senator Scott Brown’s Wall Street Journal op-ed espousing reverse-linkage — that the Iranian nuclear standoff must be resolved before any major breakthrough in Arab-Israeli peace can occur. But Rubin takes it a step farther than Brown, calling for regime change by military strike against Iran irrespective of a nuclear program:

But of course, an increasingly aggressive Iranian regime, even without nuclear weapons, is largely responsible for the ongoing terror directed against Israel. This is the real barrier to peace. [...] That will only come when terrorist groups (including Hezbollah on its northern boarder) are defanged. And that requires regime change and/or a decisive blow to their patrons in Tehran.

So Middle East peace depends not only on containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but removing its regime altogether. This is a striking admission — that there is no way to avoid conflict, even if Iranian leaders are diplomatically coerced to abandon an alleged nuclear weapons program. The thinking relies on Rubin’s claim that many of the negative effects of a potential Iranian nuclear weapon are already occurring. If this is true, Iran’s increased regional clout due to a bomb would only be a matter of degree, not one that would decisively shape regional dynamics.

Conversely, some doves use the same point that many of the hypothetically intolerable consequences of an Iranian bomb are already a strategic reality, and thus argue an attack would only exacerbate the current situation. Writing in the International Herald Tribune, Reza Aslan and Bernard Avishai point out much of the chatter from hawkish circles, which kicked into high gear with Jeffery Goldberg‘s recent Atlantic article, centers on the “existential threat” to Israel posed by “a ‘nuclear umbrella’ for Hezbollah missiles and Hamas terrorism.” Aslan and Avishai retort:

And exactly what is a “nuclear umbrella”? Did the absence of a nuclear Iran stop Hezbollah from attacking Israel in 2006? If war resumes, God forbid, would a nuclear Iran keep Israel from attacking Hezbollah missile sites in Lebanon any more than, say, the images of bombed out Beirut apartment buildings on CNN?

The answer is obviously no.

Aslan and Avishai argue the consequences of an attack would only make matters in the region much, much worse. They predict a “devastating regional war with unforeseeable global consequences” should Israel attack Iran and deduce Iran wants the bomb “as an ultimate hedge against invasion by superior conventional forces.” While they’re realistic this may “cause irreparable damage to the global anti-proliferation regime” and threaten Western regional interests, they soberly conclude a nuclear Iran “would be a lesser evil than what we will confront in the wake of an attack to prevent this.”

Containment, in other words, still has risks. But it is more likely to work than an attack. The latter scenario, everyone but those on far right seems to agree, will definitely not be “a pretty picture.”