EA WorldView: Scott Lucas points out that the only named source that we have to back up David Ignatius’s advancing of the claim that Gholam Shakuri “helped organize militant Shiite protesters in Bahrain” is Bahrain’s Foreign [...]]]> News and views relevant to U.S.-Iran relations from Oct. 15 – Oct. 21

EA WorldView: Scott Lucas points out that the only named source that we have to back up David Ignatius’s advancing of the claim that Gholam Shakuri “helped organize militant Shiite protesters in Bahrain” is Bahrain’s Foreign Minister, Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed Al-Khalifa. The following is a press release from Bahraini state news:

Bahrain national intelligence agency has been totally aware of the activities of Gholam Shakuri, an Iranian Al-Quds Force operative who was accused by the US authorities of plotting to assassinate Saudi Ambassador to Washington Adel Al-Jubeir.

“This man is not new to us. Months before the indictment was issued, Bahraini and Saudi intelligence had identified him as an important “Iranian interlocutor” with several members masterminding the coup attempt in Bahrain”, Foreign Minister Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed Al-Khalifa told Washington Post Columnist David Ignatius.

He wondered about the action which would be taken by the US against Iran to show its seriousness after President Obama denounced the plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington and warned that Iran “will pay a price”. “We’re asking the U.S. to stand up for its interests and draw the red lines,” Sheikh Khalid said, referring to Iran-sponsored attacks on American forces in Lebanon and Iraq and asked: “How many times have you lost lives, been subject to terrorist activities and yet we haven’t seen any proper response. This is really serious. It’s coming to your shores now.”

Washington Post: Experts are arguing that sanctions and other measures are “exerting a mounting toll” on Iran’s nuclear program:

“Without question, they have been set back,” said David Albright, president of the institute and a former inspector for the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. Although the problems are not fatal for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, they have “hurt Iran’s ability to break out quickly” into the ranks of the world’s nuclear powers, Albright said.

U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that Iran’s clerical leaders are seeking to rapidly acquire the technical capability to make nuclear weapons, though there are indications that top officials have not yet firmly committed to building the bomb. Iran maintains that its nuclear intentions are peaceful.

The Weekly Standard: Lee Smith, the senior editor of the Weekly Standard who also works with the Hudson Institute and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and frequently accuses critics of the U.S.’s “special relationship” with Israel of being anti-Semites uses the killings of Muammar Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein as a pretext for the U.S. implementing regime change in Iran right now:

One day soon, however, the Iranians will cross the line, and the American president will have no choice but to retaliate​—​even if the Iranians have the bomb. There won’t be time then for the “collective action” prized by Obama and his deputies. The time for “collective action” is now.

Collective action does not mean bringing the unmovable Russians and Chinese on board. It means going after Revolutionary Guard camps. It means destabilizing Iran’s ally Syria by creating a no-fly zone there that protects the Syrian opposition and helps bring down Bashar al-Assad. Collective action means using every possible method and tactic to destabilize the Iranian regime by working with allies inside and outside of Iran. It means doing everything possible to ensure that Ayatollah Ali Khameini, stripped of his clerical robes, is the next Middle East dictator dragged from a hole in the ground.

National Review Online: In “Breaking Tehran” anti-Islam extremist Andrew C. McCarthy of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who considers President Obama a “radical leftist” declares that regime change by way of military force should be the driving motivation behind U.S. foreign policy toward Iran after incorrectly stating that all other options have been exhausted. McCarthy also says that Iran’s alleged nuclear weapon ambitions aren’t the real problem:

The point is that the problem isn’t the nukes, it’s the regime — and while there may be many sites, there is only one regime. Take the regime out, eliminate the world’s most destabilizing and incorrigibly evil force, and the challenge of Iran’s weapons program would get a lot easier. So would such challenges as the future of Iraq; the ground beneath Syria’s execrable Assad regime; and the supply lines of al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, and the mullahs’ other clients.

Most significant, gone would be today’s worst threat to American national security — a threat that will become only more dire if these rabid, desperate men are permitted to become a nuclear power. That is an eventuality that will come about in short order if we fail to act. It is an eventuality that we should find unacceptable, as this week once again demonstrated. And it can be stopped only by military force; other options have been exhausted, and they only vex the mullahs — they don’t stop them.

The first argument states that Israel is a central character in Arab nationalism and that irrational hatred of Israel and Jews has a prominent place in any [...]]]> Iran hawks and neoconservatives have had a tendency to pick one of two arguments on the issue of whether Israel plays a central role in Middle East politics.

The first argument states that Israel is a central character in Arab nationalism and that irrational hatred of Israel and Jews has a prominent place in any Arab government.

On January 31 2010, Andrew Mccarthy offered an example of this talking point in his National Review blog post, “Fear the Muslim Brotherhood,” writing:

The Brotherhood did not suddenly become violent (or “more violent”) during World War II. It was violent from its origins two decades earlier. This fact — along with Egyptian Islamic society’s deep antipathy toward the West and its attraction to the Nazis’ virulent anti-Semitism — is what gradually beat European powers, especially Britain, into withdrawal.

But with the Middle East in a state of upheaval after Hosni Mubarak’s resignation and what appears to be the approaching end of Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year reign, a more popular talking point has taken over the opinion pages: Hawks seek to deny the destabilizing role that the U.S. has played in supporting authoritarian Arab leaders who have kept peace with Israel.

Two promoters of this theory recently popped up in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Today’s issue of the WSJ offered up an excerpt, in the paper’s “Notable & Quotable” section, of journalist Brendan O’Neill’s writing. O’Neill had written in The Australian, on February 16:

[O]ne of the most striking things about the uprising in Egypt was the lack of pro-Palestine placards. As Egypt-watcher Amr Hamzawy put it, in Tahrir Square and elsewhere there were no signs saying “death to Israel, America and global imperialism” or “together to free Palestine.” Instead, this revolt was about Egyptian people’s own freedom and living conditions.

O’Neill observes that at “the pro-Egypt demonstration in London on Saturday, there was a sea of Palestine placards. ‘Free Palestine,’ they said, and ‘End the Israeli occupation.’” The WSJ’s excerpt ends:

This reveals something important about the Palestine issue. . . . [It] has become less important for Arabs and of the utmost symbolic importance for Western radicals at exactly the same time.

While O’Neill’s point may have been more broad, the WSJ editorial board’s decision to narrowly quote him and promote the few sentences he wrote about the “lack of pro-Palestine placards” is telling.

Of course, this analysis overlooks the U.S.’s support for Mubarak as well as the Egyptian government’s maintenance of the Israeli-Egypt peace agreement and assistance in enforcing the siege on Gaza. (See Alex Kane’s excellent dismantling of the “Israel has nothing to do with this” argument.)

Yesterday, the Journal’s European edition published an op-ed on the non-existent role Israel played in the unrest shaking the Middle East.

The Foundation for Defense for Defense of Democracies’ Emanuele Ottolenghi wrote:

Arab freedom has taken precedence over Israel and Palestine—or so says the much-maligned Arab Street, as it topples one tyrant and challenges the next. The conventional wisdom that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the mother of all problems in the region has now been exposed as nothing but a myth. Will Western leaders finally learn?

Ottolenghi uses this argument to belittle the Obama administration for its public endorsements of linkage—the idea, accepted by the upper echelons of the U.S. military, that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will help promote U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East.

While it is convenient for Ottolenghi to take up this argument as the Middle East is falling into turmoil, he hasn’t been immune from reverting to the argument that a deep-rooted anti-Semitism is prevalent in the Middle East.

In March, 2010, Ottolenghi wrote on Commentary’s Contentions blog:

A bi-national state is actually more promising than a nation-state […] because it would keep their nationalist dream alive — a dream whereby, as Professor Fouad Ajami once so artfully put it, “there still lurks in the Palestinian and Arab imagination a view, depicted by the Moroccan historian Abdallah Laroui, that “on a certain day, everything would be obliterated and instantaneously reconstructed and the new inhabitants would leave, as if by magic, the land they had despoiled.” Arafat knew the power of this redemptive idea. He must have reasoned that it is safer to ride that idea, and that there will always be another day and another offer.”

And in February 2009, he wrote in Haaretz:

[H]istory shows us that Palestinian demands are rooted in a grievance culture of victimhood, not in facts.

Western-allied Middle Eastern countries are under increasing pressure to yield to protesters’ demands for more representative governments and improvements in human rights. It’s convenient for pro-Israel hawks to hide behind the argument that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had nothing to do with this quickly unraveling situation. But, as Ottolenghi’s contradicting op-eds illustrate, any expression of Palestinian solidarity from a newly democratic Arab government will most likely be met with accusations that an irrational hatred of Israel is central to the Arab psyche.