By Richard Sale
I believe that delisting the Mujahadeen-e Khalq (MEK) from the US foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) list is in every way reprehensible. I realize that all US public officials, especially the president, are involved in systems of necessity and that without satisfying those necessities, their hold on power wouldn’t [...]]]>
By Richard Sale
I believe that delisting the Mujahadeen-e Khalq (MEK) from the US foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) list is in every way reprehensible. I realize that all US public officials, especially the president, are involved in systems of necessity and that without satisfying those necessities, their hold on power wouldn’t last very long. Everyone agrees that the president is a pawn of political speculations and maneuvers, and that he is at once the citizen, the voter, the candidate, the taxpayer, as well as the ordinary, common man. But this results in a curious split of judgment, and the result is that we look on the same individual as responsible and irresponsible, depending which of these fictions we adopt, and whether we are in a juridical or an objective frame of mind.
But one has to remember certain historical facts, the first being that at the beginning of his administration, President Obama wanted to relax tensions with Iran and engage with it diplomatically while Israel continued to carry out killings of Iranian nuclear scientists using its proxies, including an armed group of Iranian dissidents, the MEK, a group that has high-level political backers in the US despite being a terrorist organization.
I have said publicly, quoting former US officials, that a number of Israeli terrorists were members of the MEK, who are paid by Israel to do targeted killings of Iranian nationals. “The MEK is being used as the assassination arm of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service,” said Vince Cannistraro, former CIA chief of counterterrorism. He also said that the MEK is in charge of executing “the motor attacks on Iranian targets chosen by Israel. They go to Israel for training, and Israel pays them.”
According to one former senior CIA official, the MEK is particularly violent. Back in the 1970s, in France, they did killings of Americans in Paris, including six or seven US Army sergeants. He added that the French “were terrified of them.”
As part of Israel’s continuing battle to hold off the Iranian nuclear program, the MEK, paid by Israel, have not only assassinated Iran’s nuclear scientists, but US officials have said they believe that a saboteur at the Natanz nuclear facility, probably an MEK member, used a memory stick to infect the machines there.
These officials said using a person on the ground would greatly increase the probability of computer infection, as opposed to passively waiting for the software to spread through the system. “Iranian double agents” would have helped to target the most vulnerable spots in the system,” said a high ranking source. In October 2010, Iran’s intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi, said an unspecified number of “nuclear spies” were arrested in connection with the Stuxnet.33 virus.
It is a dismal history, but, alas, as I said, we are all slaves of necessity.
- Richard Sale was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and his entry was given a National Press Club Award for “excellence in diplomatic reporting” in 1989. He has been reporting on intelligence since 1977, most recently as UPI’s Intelligence Correspondent. Sale’s book, “Clinton’s Secret Wars,” was selected by the History and Military Book Clubs and Book of the Month 2.
]]>Commentary: While most of the U.S. celebrated the release of the remaining two U.S. hikers imprisoned in Iran after they illegally entered the country, American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin was perturbed. After quoting a book by Matthew [...]]]>
Commentary: While most of the U.S. celebrated the release of the remaining two U.S. hikers imprisoned in Iran after they illegally entered the country, American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin was perturbed. After quoting a book by Matthew Levitt about Hamas in 2006, Rubin suggests the 1 million that secured Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal’s freedom will be used to fund terrorism. While offering no evidence about how the Iranian judiciary will make use of the bail money, Rubin claims the hikers’ release will lead to the death of innocents:
- It may be good to have our hostages home, but to celebrate their release is unfortunate without acknowledging the death sentences those who paid the bail just signed on innocent civilians elsewhere.
Rubin also suggests it’s unlikely that the hikers entered Iran accidentally as they claimed they did.
Pajama’s Media: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies Michael Ledeen vehemently criticizes the Obama administration for refusing to address “reality” as he sees it.
Ledeen calls Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan a “totally unsuitable partner” after quoting Barry Rubin’s gross mischaracterization of the Israeli attack against the Turkish Gaza-bound aid flotilla which resulted in the death of 9 passengers (1 of whom was a U.S. citizen) and Erdogan’s attempts to build diplomatic channels with regional Mideast players. He criticizes Obama’s refusal to force the Syrian president from power and uses NATO’s intervention in Libya as justification for something that he has been arguing for years: U.S. covert or open support for Iranian groups which want regime change. (As a side note, Ledeen and some other neoconservatives have argued against supporting the Mujahideen-e-khalq (MEK) which speaks volumes about the nature of that organization and those who support it.)
Despite U.S. refusal to speak directly to the Islamic Republic and rounds of sanctions which have strangled its economy, Ledeen claims the U.S. treats its most “dangerous enemies” (i.e. Iran) as “potential allies who have temporarily gone astray.” Ledeen continues to lament the fact that the U.S. has not called for “regime change” in Iran.
True to his neoconservative ideology which favors military force over diplomacy with enemies, Ledeen claims the U.S. shouldn’t resist war with Iran because it’s “already under way, and it’s no accident.” He argues against the proposed direct line to Iran to prevent accidental military conflict because it “offers them a golden opportunity to deceive us.”
Considering Ledeen’s constant alarmist claims about the Iranian government, nothing seems to scare him more than direct communication between the U.S. and Iran. That’s why it’s so important for those who don’t favor war.
Arms Control Association: At an Arm Control Association (ACA) press conference Mark Fitzpatrick, Admiral Joe Sestak and Greg Thielmann argued that there is still time for diplomacy with Iran because an Iranian nuclear power arsenal is “neither imminent nor inevitable.”
Mark Fitzpatrick, Director of the Nonproliferation and Disarmament Program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London says sanctions against Iran have an aim which is not being executed properly:
- The whole point of sanctions is to persuade Iran to come back to the negotiating table. But how would we know when they’re ready to come back to the negotiating table if we’re not talking with them, if we’re not having some kind of a private, very quiet discussions?
Fitzpatrick adds:
- I think engagement will be absolutely crucial to any peaceful solution. Sanctions alone are not going to dissuade Iran because of the sense of national will. You don’t want to bow to pressure but if you are engaged in something where there’s a positive outcome, it’s more possible.
ACA senior fellow Greg Thielmann argued for direct negotiation with Iran without preconditions because any other approach is “counterproductive:”
- We’re under an environment here where the formidable diplomatic resources of the United States are basically banned from having any contact with Iranian diplomats except on very limited special occasions. This is cutting us off from a source of information about diplomatic opportunities about what is going on in Iran.
The panelists continued discussion at the highest levels of the U.S. military emphasizing that military conflict with Iran is the least favorable outcome because of the massive blowback it would result in. According to former three star admiral Sestak:
- …a military strike whether it’s by land or air against Iran would make the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion look like a cakewalk with regard to the impact on the United States’ national security.
Christian Science Monitor: Ralph Langner who discovered the Stuxnet virus which made headlines after it affected several Iranian organizations says the creators have opened a Pandora’s box of cyber warfare:
- It raises, for one, the question of how to apply cyberwar as a political decision. Is the US really willing to take down the power grid of another nation when that might mainly affect civilians? Could or should military contractors, instead of soldiers, wage cyberwar? What happens when cyberweapons dealers start selling sophisticated cyberweapons to terrorists? There is also the manner in which Stuxnet was used – which could be considered a textbook example of a “just war” approach. It didn’t kill anyone. That’s a good thing. But I am afraid this is only a short term view. In the long run it has opened Pandora’s box.
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.
]]>Others have [...]]]>
Others have also described Ross as more skeptical [than Mitchell] about the chances of peace, based on his decades-long experience with trying to bring together the parties.
I don’t want to get all new-agey, but if you think something is difficult or impossible to do, the chances of being able to do it are greatly diminished from the get-go.
So why does this Ross guy keep getting jobs that he doesn’t think are possible? I picked up Ross’ book off of my shelf here in D.C., and it amazed me how many times he says you cannot make any kind of deal with the Iranians. Then, Obama put him in charge of making a deal with the Iranians. Ross, we now learn, doubts that a peace deal can be reached in Israel-Palestine, and Obama gives him a job making peace in Israel-Palestine.
On the Middle Eastern conflict, Ross’s credentials for the job are impeccable. After all, he’s been involved in decades — decades! — of failed peace processes. Ross has worked at the Washington Institute (WINEP), an AIPAC-formed think tank, and also chaired the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), an Israeli organization dedicated to “ensur(ing) the thriving of the Jewish People and the Jewish civilization.” (The organization seems to oppose intermarriage with racist-sounding statements like “cultural collectivity cannot survive in the long term without primary biological foundations of family and children.”)
Ross was thought responsible for crafting Obama’s presidential campaign AIPAC speech — yes, the one with the line about an “undivided” Jerusalem that would spike a peace deal if implemented. Ross later reiterated the notion of an undivided Jerusalem as a “fact” in an interview with the Jerusalem Post.
Ross was recently in the news following a secret but not-so-secret visit to the Middle East, which was fleshed out on Politico by Laura Rozen. Rozen was the reporter who carried a rather shocking anonymous allegation about Ross:
“[Ross] seems to be far more sensitive to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests,” one U.S. official told POLITICO Saturday. “And he doesn’t seem to understand that this has become bigger than Jerusalem but is rather about the credibility of this administration.”
In an update, Rozen carried NSC CoS Denis McDonough’s defense of Ross:
“The assertion is as false as it is offensive,” McDonough said Sunday by e-mail. ”Whoever said it has no idea what they are talking about. Dennis Ross’s many decades of service speak volumes about his commitment to this country and to our vital interests, and he is a critical part of the president’s team.”
But the new Forward article, as MJ Rosenberg points out, backs up the notion that Ross was extremely concerned with “advocat[ing]” for Israel. The source is none other than Israel-advocate extraordinaire Abe Foxman (who doesn’t negotiate on behalf of the U.S. government):
“Dennis is the closest thing you’ll find to a melitz yosher, as far as Israel is concerned,” said the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, Abraham Foxman, who used the ancient Hebrew term for ‘advocate.’”
Do you get the feeling that Ross advocated for Iran? Or, as the Forward article put it (with my strikethrough), has “strong ties to Israel” Iran? Guttman writes that Ross is considered to have a “reputation of being pro-Israeli.” As for Iran? Not quite: Ross’s Iran experience seems to boil down to heading United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), a group that pushes for harsher, broad-based sanctions against Iran (despite a stated goal to not hurt ordinary Iranians) and that has criticized Obama’s policy of engagement. Ross left the gig, as with JPPI, when he took the job with the administration.
The group also launched an error-filled fear-mongering video (while Ross was still there; he appears in the video) and a campaign to get New York hotels to refuse to host Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he comes to town each year for the U.N. General Assembly, which hardly lays the groundwork for good diplomacy.
Oh, and about the Iran engagement designed by Ross: The administration’s approach has been questioned by several leading Iran experts. “It is unlikely that the resources and dedication needed for success was given to a policy that the administration expected to fail,” National Iranian American Council (NIAC) president Trita Parsi observed. In December, Ross publicly defended the administration against charges that engagement was less than sincere from the U.S. side. But it is Ross himself who has apparently long held a pessimistic outlook on engagement.
Ross’s 2007 book, “Statecraft: And How to Restore America’s Standing in the World“, is fascinating in light of where Ross has come from, and where he’s taken Iran policy. I was struck at a five-page section of the first chapter called “Neoconservatism vs. Neoliberalism,” in which Ross writes, “[Neoconservatism's] current standard-bearers — such as Richard Perle, David Frum, William Kristol, and Robert Kagan — are serious thinkers with a clear worldview,” (with my links).
Later, in several long sections about the run-up to George W. Bush’s Iraq war, Ross notes that Paul Wolfowitz was highly focused on Iraq before and after 9/11. He also mentions “political difficulties” in the push for war: “Once [Bush] realized there might be a domestic problem in acting against Iraq, his administration focused a great deal of energy and effort on mobilizing domestic support for military action.”
But Ross never acknowledges that some of his neoconservative “serious thinkers” — such as Kristol and his Weekly Standard magazine — were involved in the concerted campaign to mislead Americans in an effort to push the war… just as the same figures are pushing for an attack on Iran. Frum, who does seem capable of serious thinking, was the author of the “axis of evil” phrasing of Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address. The moniker included both Iraq and Iran, despite the fact that the latter was, until the speech, considered a potential ally in the fight against Al Qaeda. (Marsha Cohen chronicled an Israeli effort to squash the alliance, culminating in Frum’s contribution to the Bush speech.)
Ross never mentions that neocon Douglas Feith, a political appointee in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), was responsible for cherry-picking intelligence about Iraq within the administration, and whose office was feeding cooked information to the public via Scooter Libby in Vice President Dick Cheney‘s office. Through Libby, the distorted information made its way into the hands of the Standard and sympathetic journalists like ideologue Judith Miller at the New York Times. In August of 2003, Jim Lobe wrote (with my links):
[K]ey personnel who worked in both NESA [the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia bureau] and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003. …
Other appointees who worked with… both offices included Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist previously with the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI); David Schenker, previously with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Michael Makovsky; an expert on neo-con icon Winston Churchill and the younger brother of David Makovsky, a senior WINEP fellow and former executive editor of pro-Likud ‘Jerusalem Post’; and Chris Lehman, the brother of the John Lehman, a prominent neo-conservative who served as secretary of the navy under Ronald Reagan, according to Kwiatkowski.
Ross has personal experience with many OSP veterans, working with them at WINEP and signing hawkish reports on Iran authored by them.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Ross was a member of a task force that delivered a hawkish report apparently co-authored by two veterans of OSP, Rubin and Michael Makovsky. (Ross reportedly recused himself as the presidential campaign came into full swing.) Lobe, noting Ross’s curious involvement, called the report a “roadmap to war with Iran,” and added, a year later, that the group that put out the report was accelerating the plan, calling for a military build-up and a naval blockade against Iran.
After taking his position within the Obama administration, Ross released a book, co-authored with David Makovsky, that was skeptical of the notion that engagement could work. Nathan Guttman, in a review of the book for the Forward, wrote:
The success of diplomatic engagement, according to Ross, is not guaranteed and could be unlikely. Still, he and Makovsky believe that negotiations will serve a purpose even if results are not satisfying. “By not trying, the U.S. and its refusal to talk become the issue,” said Makovsky in a June 1 interview with the Forward. “What we are saying is that if the U.S. chooses engagement, even if it fails, every other option will be more legitimate.”
The attitude of Ross and Makovsky seems closer to that of the Israeli government then to that of the Obama administration.
OSP, Feith, the Makovsky brothers, and Rubin are not listed in the index of “Statecraft,” nor have they appeared in the many sections that I’ve read in full.
In his book, Ross does have many revealing passages about concepts that have been worked into the Obama administration’s Iran policy. One such ploy, which has not been acknowledged or revealed publicly, is using Israel as the crazy ‘bad cop’ — a potentially dangerous game. Ross also writes that international pressure (through sanctions) must be made in order to cause Iran “pain.” Only then, thinks Ross, can concessions such as “economic, technological and security benefits” from the U.S. be offered:
Orchestrating this combination of sticks and carrots requires at this point some obviously adverse consequences for the Iranians first.
This view does not comport with the Obama plan for a simultaneous dual-track policy toward Iran — which holds that engagement and pressure should occur simultaneously — and serves to bolster critics who say that engagement has not been serious because meaningful concessions have not been offered. But it does hint at another tactic that Ross references at least twice in the book: the difference between “style” and “substance.” With regard to Iran, he presents this dichotomy in relation to public professions about the “military option” — a euphemism for launching a war. But publicly suppressing rhetoric is only used as a way to build international support for pressure — not also, as one might expect, a way to assuage the security fears of Iran.
But those aren’t the only ideas from the 2007 book that seem to have made their way into U.S. policy toward Iran. In “Statecraft,” Ross endorses the use of “more overt and inherently deniable alternatives to the use of force” for slowing Iran’s nuclear progress. In particular, he mentions the “fragility of centrifuges,” which is exactly what is being targeted by the Stuxnet virus, a powerful computer worm thought to be created by a state, likely Israel, and perhaps with help from the U.S., according to the latest revelations.
Some critics of this website complain that the level of attention given to neoconservatives is too great, but they should consider this: Look at Dennis Ross. He works extensively with this clique, and no doubt has the occasional drink or meeting with them. And, most importantly, he writes approvingly about neoconservatives, noting that their viewpoint affects political considerations of “any political leader.” Because of these neocon “considerations,” he writes, this is how we should view the Islamic Republic: “With Iran, there is a profound mistrust of the mullahs, and of their perceived deceit, their support for terror, and their enduring hostility to America and its friends in the Middle East. … No one will be keen to be portrayed as soft on the Iranian mullahs.”
This from the man that formulated a policy that has offered “adverse consequences” but so far no “carrots.” Ross’s predictions are a self-fulfilling prophecy — and since he gets the big appointments, he gets to fulfill them. Taking reviews of his book with Makovsky, the Bipartisan Policy Committee report, and “Statecraft” as a whole, I’m not at all surprised that little progress has been made with Iran.
But, at least, that was his first try. He’s a three-time-loser on Israeli-Palestinian peace-making. With Iran, I had to put the pieces together, whereas with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, his record is right there for all to see. Putting Ross in charge of peace-making between the two seems to perfectly fit Einstein’s definition of insanity.
]]>- The Wall Street Journal: In his weekly column, neoconservative Bret Stephens acknowledges that the Stuxnet virus appears to have done serious damage to Iran’s nuclear program but, “As of last November, U.N. inspectors reported that Iran continued to enrich uranium in as many as 4,816 centrifuges, and that it had produced more than three tons of reactor-grade uranium.” Stephens says, “That stockpile already suffices, with further enrichment, for two or possibly three bombs worth of fissile material.” He goes on to suggest that North Korea might export enriched uranium to Iran: “Merely stamp the words “Handle With Care” on the crate, and the flight from Pyongyang to Tehran takes maybe 10 hours.” Stephens ominously concludes, “The next time Israel or the U.S. tries to stop Iran’s nuclear advances, the means aren’t likely to be as targeted, or as bloodless,” and, “Wars are never won by covert means alone.”
- Commentary: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Benjamin Weinthal writes on Commentary’s Contentions blog that “Iran’s pariah regime said today that it plans to drop the death-by-stoning penalty against Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani.” (The New York Times reported that the head of the Human Rights Committee in Iran’s parliament said the stoning sentence had never been confirmed.) Weinthal theorizes that, “Given Iran’s deceptive behavior with respect to its illicit nuclear weapons program, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might be flirting with a cooling-off period in order to reimpose the stoning penalty at a later stage,” and partially blames the EU for failing to adequately sanction Iranian human rights abusers. “While the European Union claims to have cornered the market on advancing human rights, there is an eerie silence and passivity emanating from the E.U. about sanctioning Iran for human rights violations,” he writes. Weinthal concludes, “The tragic case of Ms. Ashtiani shows that if the Western democracies decide to fill its human rights rhetoric with meaning and content, they can influence a change in Iran’s incorrigibly reactionary domestic policies.”
- The Wall Street Journal Europe: Author Giulio Meotti and FDD’s Benjamin Weinthal opine that Germany and Italy have “put themselves on the wrong side of history” by increasing trade with Iran. “As Tehran continues its illicit nuclear program, Berlin and Rome are extending a commercial life line to the regime,” they write. “If Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is serious about his pledge to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, he ought to find ways to help Italians buy oil from other sources… Without the help of the two European economic powerhouses, Iran would have considerably less money with which to build nuclear weapons, and to finance terror groups like Hezbollah and Hamas,” they conclude. “Unfortunately, it appears Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Berlusconi still consider their countries’ combined €10 billion trade relationship with Iran to be more important than stopping a nuclear Iran.”
The article is a look into the possible reasons that Israel has pushed back the nuclear timeline for Iran. I quote Tony Karon at length (which appears at TB) and list my own thoughts (some via Jim):
That notion — [...]]]>
The article is a look into the possible reasons that Israel has pushed back the nuclear timeline for Iran. I quote Tony Karon at length (which appears at TB) and list my own thoughts (some via Jim):
That notion — that you can’t whip up your own population into a fearful frenzy, then not do anything — tracks with comments made in the past by top Israeli officials casting aside the “existential threat” meme. Along with Barak, former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy sounded a confident note in late 2009: “It is not within the power of Iran to destroy the state of Israel — at best it can cause Israel grievous damage. Israel is indestructible.”
But there are other possibilities to consider, most of them speculative. Perhaps Israel was merely gloating about its covert actions against Iran. Many mainstream commentators suggest Israel is behind the Stuxnet computer worm that damaged Iranian centrifuges as well as a campaign of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. Maybe, as Jim Lobe suggested to me in a conversation, there was some kind of quid pro quo between the U.S. and Israel over the public extension of Israel’s nuclear clock.
There are certainly many pawns on the board to trade between Israel and the U.S. at the moment: an Israeli settlement freeze (whether including East Jerusalem or not), the fate of imprisoned Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. offer of an Israeli wish list of military hardware (as discussed in earlier failed talks on a freeze), or maybe even some sort of agreement for Israel to drop mounting preconditions for yet another round of direct talks. All are possibilities, though some quite unlikely.
It’s worth noting, that as a source close to high-ranking Israelis put it to LobeLog, Israel has shifted its focus from the threat of Iran to the threat of “delegitimizers.” The latter is an amorphous and misleading catchall phrase that the Israeli right and their Stateside defenders use to indict the motives of anyone who even comes near the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
I also add that Paul Pillar, writing on the website of the National Interest, has an interesting post listing some possibilities:
One is that they are more or less straightforward reflections of careful, straightforward analysis by Israeli experts of the actual state of the Iranian program. Not every statement by a public official needs to be a disingenuous manipulation of the facts in pursuit of a policy objective. Sometimes we need to resist the tendency to overanalyze someone else’s motives.
Given Israel’s track record, I’m skeptical of this lack of skepticism. But some of Pillar’s other possibilities track with the ones I enumerated, and all are well worth reading.
Matt Duss at The Wonk Room, meanwhile, picks up on an interesting Der Spiegel interview with new IAEA chief Yukiya Amano. Duss notes that Amano told the German daily, “Despite all unanswered questions, we cannot say that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program.”
You’ll recall, of course, that Amano told U.S. officials that “he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision” — including Iran — according to U.S. diplomatic cables. As Duss points out, this aligns perfectly with the view Amano espoused in his Der Spiegel interview — because the “U.S. court” on this particular “key strategic issue” corresponds with a public acknowledgment by the CIA (PDF) that the U.S. does “not know whether Tehran will eventually decide to produce nuclear weapons.”
On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal‘s neoconservative editorial board recently declared (falsely) that Iran had already “announced its intention to build a nuclear bomb.”
As I wrote on Tehran Bureau, none of the recent developments seem to have had much impact on U.S.-based Iran hawks, who are perfectly content to keep beating the war drums. No matter what Iran does or how its nuclear program advances (if at all), the hawks want to attack it. No matter how effective sanctions are, they will never be enough.
]]>- Weekly Standard: Michael Weiss attacks the concept of ‘linkage‘ in a long, convoluted piece on the Standard‘s blog. Leading off with an overstatement explanation of linkage (“by resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict most other problems will be resolved”), Weiss goes on to list statements by some Arab leaders about both Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. ”Where linkage plainly fails as an interpretive mechanism is in its weighing of Arab motives for making Palestine the Key to All Mythologies for regional harmony,” he writes. Weiss analyzes linkage through the lens of previous Arab support for perpetuating the conflict, rather than the current push to end it. Returning to the straw man version of linkage (“attribut[ing] immolated churches in Iraq to ongoing Palestinian statelessness”), he concludes by writing: “In the end, if Palestinian statehood is achieved it will be largely in spite of, not because of, the self-serving efforts of unelected Arab leaders.” The connection to linkage remains unclear.
- Commentary: Writing on the Contentions blog, Jonathan Tobin says that Australian Foreign Minister Paul Rudd “blindsides” Israel when, on a tour of the region, the diplomat said that Israel should be subject to IAEA inspections. “The problem with Rudd’s shot fired across Israel’s bow is not so much the request itself but the fact that it represents a tacit acceptance of the main talking point of apologists for Iran’s nuclear ambitions: the positing of a moral equivalence between Israel’s nuclear deterrent and Iran’s desire for the ultimate weapon,” writes Tobin. He says it’s a sign of Israel’s isolation: “With allies like Australia and Kevin Rudd undermining Israel’s case, we must hope that the stories about Stuxnet’s devastating impact really are true.”
Yet it’s worth considering that even cyber-warfare — like all kinds of warfare — can produce “collateral damage.” The term is a military euphemism, now widely accepted in the lay lexicon, [...]]]>
Yet it’s worth considering that even cyber-warfare — like all kinds of warfare — can produce “collateral damage.” The term is a military euphemism, now widely accepted in the lay lexicon, for the unintended harm done by waging war.
Fox News reporter Ed Barnes writes:
The American and European experts say their security websites, which deal with the computer worm known as Stuxnet, continue to be swamped with traffic from Tehran and other places in the Islamic Republic, an indication that the worm continues to infect the computers at Iran’s two nuclear sites.
Yes, but not only nuclear sites are being attacked.
A contact in Iran recently e-mailed to let me know that the Stuxnet virus shut down the operations of a 350-ton capacity multi-purpose milling factory (think wheat flour) near Iran’s Mount Damavand. As the Fox News report seems to indicate, discs with computer security patches had to be mailed in from abroad to get the mills back up.
People aren’t starving — yet. But give sanctions some time, some say. My contact says Iran has more than 350 large-scale mills. Nonetheless, the (likely) government-created virus apparently can’t tell the difference between factories for baking bread and centrifuges for creating nuclear fuel.
Just some food for thought, or thought for food, as it were.
]]>- National Review Online: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies Benjamin Weinthal blogs on a WikiLeaks cable that had originated in the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. Apparently, a senior adviser to Angela Merkel, Christoph Heusgen, proposed a quid-pro-quo relationship between Netanyahu ending settlement construction and “favorable” treatment of the Goldstone Report in the UN Security Council. Weinthal refutes the possibility of linkage between ending settlement construction and achieving peace between Israel and its neighbors. Instead, he rolls out the neoconservative trope of “reverse linkage,” arguing, “[U.S. diplomats’] willingness, like that of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, to remain incurably fixated on the construction of housing complexes as the impediment to peace shows the dangerous merger of American and EU foreign policy. Iran’s drive to obtain nuclear weapons is relegated to an inferior status — at the expense of global security.”
- The Washington Post: Jennifer Rubin interviews Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Post for the Right Turn blog, extracting tough talk from him on Iran. She writes, “McConnell agrees with those who think strong measures are needed to disrupt the Iranian regime’s nuclear program: ‘What I am saying is that we should be squeezing these guys like a lemon.’ He says he senses, as the WikiLeaks documents suggested, that Arab leaders are deeply worried and believe ‘only we have the swat’ to deal with the threat.”
- Pajamas Media: Foundation for Defense of Democracies‘ “Freedom Scholar” Michael Ledeen transcribes a made-up conversation with a dead friend, former CIA counter-intelligence official James Jesus Angleton. They banter about a number of possible conspiracies within the ongoing news stories about Iran –addressing the Stuxnet virus, the WikiLeaks cable dump, and the bombing of two Iranian nuclear scientists in Tehran. Ledeen, feigning use of a Ouija board, has his ghost friend suggest that the Russians could be behind the Stuxnet virus, and that the murdered Iranian nuclear scientists could have been killed by Tehran for their (possible) collusion with the Russians, Israelis, or Americans.
The New York Times looks back at Stuxnet, the worm that targeted computers in Iran, specifically, those linked to Iran’s centrifuge work [...]]]>
The New York Times looks back at Stuxnet, the worm that targeted computers in Iran, specifically, those linked to Iran’s centrifuge work on uranium enrichment. The lede of the Times piece, by William Broad and David Sanger, says the virus “was precisely calibrated in a way that could send nuclear centrifuges wildly out of control.”
Then they have this:
The paternity of the worm is still in dispute, but in recent weeks officials from Israel have broken into wide smiles when asked whether Israel was behind the attack, or knew who was. American officials have suggested it originated abroad.
Later, Broad and Sanger go into some of the other hints that Israel may be behind the attack, which we covered (briefly in our Daily Talking Points) way back when (Oct. 1) via a piece by Laura Rozen.
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