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.
IPS News: Further to Jim’s post yesterday is his article about the approval of two bills calling for “sweeping sanctions” against Iran by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives. Lobe quotes the two bills’ leading [...]]]>
IPS News: Further to Jim’s post yesterday is his article about the approval of two bills calling for “sweeping sanctions” against Iran by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives. Lobe quotes the two bills’ leading sponsor and committee chairperson Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen saying that she hopes the House and the Senate enact them quickly to “hand the Iranian regime a nice holiday present”. Lobe notes that regardless of if or when the bills are passed, the “draconian legislation” will further stoke tension in the region while giving leverage to Israel lobbyists who are pushing for more militant sanctions against Iran by the U.S.
According to some observers here, the war talk in Jerusalem may be intended primarily to encourage lawmakers here to support the strongest possible sanctions legislation, which Netanyahu has repeatedly called for over the last several years.
Haaretz: Lending support to the idea that Israel’s recent military chest-banging is actually posturing intended to pressure the U.S. to pass more militant sanctions against Iran are comments by Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff in an Israeli daily. The authors argue that Israel stands to benefit from the recent increase in war talk about Iran as long as the plan doesn’t backfire:
But this is a dangerous game. A few more weeks of tension and one party or another might make a fatal mistake that will drag the region into war. Barak, the brilliant planner, should know this. More than once in the past his complex plans have gone seriously awry.
Jerusalem Post: Despite considerable doubts raised about the U.S.’s controversial allegations about an “Iranian plot” to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, Benjamin Weinthal of the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies (also a Jerusalem Post correspondent) urges for “crippling” sanctions against the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) in response. Weinthal cites a 2007 New York Times article quoting an Iranian-German exile to support his linking of the CBI to Iran’s revolutionary guards. He adds that the U.S. will need to ”strongly twist Europe’s economic arm” to get the EU to support the U.S.-led initiative against Iran. Weinthal’s odd focus on Germany in the article was likely inspired by his recent attendance at an Israel lobby conference in Frankfurt which he wrote about here. His other quote about why the CBI needs to be sanctioned comes from an “expert” at the FDD’s Brussels’s branch.
Huffington Post: Former George W. Bush advisor Frances Townsend writes an article with the president of United Against Nuclear Iran (where she serves on the advisory board), Mark D. Wallace, urging the U.S. to “isolate Iran further” through its financial sector and support anti-regime forces inside the country. They end by arguing that Iran refused the “olive branch” that the Obama administration apparently offered it and that the U.S. should respond to alleged Iranian aggressions with “swift and effective financial and military action.”
]]>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.”
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