Okay, it seems I spoke too soon. Hamas is now back in the “Iranian-supported” camp according to this editorial in the New York Times, which identifies Hamas as both “backed by Iran” and pathologically “consumed with hatred for Israel.”

President Shimon Peres has also refocused on Iran, as [...]]]> via Lobe Log

Okay, it seems I spoke too soon. Hamas is now back in the “Iranian-supported” camp according to this editorial in the New York Times, which identifies Hamas as both “backed by Iran” and pathologically “consumed with hatred for Israel.”

President Shimon Peres has also refocused on Iran, as shown by his response to a prompt by Piers Morgan of CNN. Morgan doesn’t beat around the bush and without displaying a modicum of impartiality asks: “If you believe Mr. President, that Iran is behind a lot of the Hamas terror activity, as you put it, then what action do you intend to take against Iran?”

Peres’ response?

Not that I guess so, I know that is the case. And we are not going to make a war with Iran but we are trying to prevent the shipping of long range missiles which Iran is sending to Hamas. And they are urge to Hamas to fire ….Iran is a problem, world problem. Not only from the point of view of building a nuclear danger, but also from the point of being a center of world terror. They finance, they train, they send arms, they urge, no responsibility, nor any moral consideration. It’s a world problem and you know it.

And what of the closure of the Hamas headquarters in Damascus, which according to many commentators supposedly created enormous strains with Iran and resulted in much less funding and material to Hamas than in the past? What of the recent visits by high profile non-Iranian regional leaders? Not much.

The Gaza problem, in the minds of the Netenyahu-Barak duo, is caused by Iran, according to Salam Masalha, writing in Haaretz: “[t]he current operation can be called “the little southern Iranian operation,” since it’s designed to paralyze Iran’s southern wing. The next operation will be “the little northern Iranian operation “: It will try to destroy Iran’s Lebanon wing.”

Israeli officials must be feeling like they’re losing their public relations war on Gaza. The meme of Hamas, the terrorist group, no longer seems sufficient. Hence “Hamas, the terrorist group supported by Iran” comes to the rescue.

Even the New York Times is noticing this problem and wants the “Arab leaders to speak the truth and stop ignoring the culpability of Hamas.” The unhappiness with the changed region and the difficulty it poses for the usual conceptualization of the disproportionate Israeli attacks on Gaza as self-defense and a fight against terrorism, is palpable. After all, it is not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who is calling Israel a “terrorist state” these days, but Prime Minister Recept Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

The reality is that even the re-attachment of Hamas to Iran will neither resolve Israel’s occupation problem nor its public relations predicament. Israel is deemed the aggressor and out of control in the region not because it is unable to tell and re-tell its anti-terrorism narrative loudly enough, but because it cannot convince most of the world that its reckless bombing of a civilian population is a fight against terrorism (and its presumed chief sponsor, Iran).

As Sherine Tadros points out in her discussion of why reporting on Gaza is hard: “Hamas is not Gaza.” The reason Israel, after a few days of bombing, invariably loses its ability to sell the Iranian-backed terrorism meme in the court of regional public opinion — although not to US policy-makers who are its chief concern —  is because most people know that no society and its livelihood can be reduced to its government, no matter how bad that government is.

To be sure, the current Israeli government can take the honest route and call for the punishing of the entire society in the way Gilad Sharon, son of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, did when he said that “We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza… The residents of Gaza are not innocent, they elected Hamas. The Gazans aren’t hostages; they chose this freely, and must live with the consequences.”

But this is not the route most Israeli leaders (excepting Interior Minister Eli Yishai who posited the goal of Pillar of Defense Operation as “sending Gaza back to the Middle Ages”) have taken. The route taken is to say that Israel had no choice but to respond disproportionately because of Hamas terrorism (now, again, supported by outside terrorists).

This is not a credible argument given the impact of Israeli actions — including the almost 6-year old embargo — on Gaza and not Hamas. And blaming or even militarily attacking Iran will not make Gaza go away.

- Farideh Farhi is an independent researcher and an affiliate graduate faculty member in political science and international relations at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.

The escalating sanctions regime that has been imposed on Iran by the United States and European Union has placed all parties involved in a rather strange position. On the US side, the palpable glee over the dropping value of the Iranian currency and the success sanctions have had in causing misery [...]]]> via Lobe Log

The escalating sanctions regime that has been imposed on Iran by the United States and European Union has placed all parties involved in a rather strange position. On the US side, the palpable glee over the dropping value of the Iranian currency and the success sanctions have had in causing misery has been hard to hide. It is also politically astute for domestic electoral purposes to take credit for the success of sanctions. That is why State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland simply couldn’t resist giving quite a bit of credit to the sanctions regime in the immediate aftermath of the currency devaluation in Iran:

Our understanding is that the Iranian currency has dropped to a historic low today against the dollar in informal currency trading, this despite some frantic efforts by the Iranian government last week to try to prop it up, rearrange the way it dealt with these issues…..From our perspective, this speaks to the unrelenting and increasingly successful international pressure that we are all bringing to bear on the Iranian economy. It is under incredible strain. Iran is increasingly cut off from the global financial system.

Yet it is not particularly seemly or civilized to take too much credit for causing misery in front of a global audience. That’s why Obama Administration officials twist and turn to explain that while sanctions are the mark of the administration’s great success, it is the Iranian government that is responsible for the deteriorating state of Iran’s economy. In the words of White House spokesman Jay Carney:

Iran’s leaders have made conscious choices about how they manage their economy, how they prioritize their budget and how they respond to the concerns of their people.  The regime has chosen to spend money to pursue nuclear activities in violation of its international obligations, to support Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime, to enable terrorist acts around the world, and to undertake destabilizing activities around the region.

The chosen examples of mismanagement is telling. Somehow we are expected to believe that the Iranian economy is in significantly worse shape than it was, let’s say, two years ago because of military and nuclear-related spending which I doubt constitutes even 1 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. (The latest figure that the Stockholm Institute for Peace Research has for Iran’s total military spending as a percentage of Gross National Product is 2 percent for 2008 while the CIA fact book puts the 2006 percentage at 2.5 percent. That’s a significantly lower percentage than neighboring countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and of course the United States, which, given its vast military presence in the region, is effectively Iran’s neighbor).

But US government officials are not the only ones caught in a delicate situation regarding the impact of sanctions, trying as they are to balance their jovial sense of success for the imposed policy of collective punishment and their avowed care for the “freedom loving people” of Iran. The EU foreign ministers’ statement on the latest sanctions slaps more broad punishment against the whole country while attempting to protect its writers from a guilty conscious. They want the world to remember that the innocuously worded “restrictive measures” are not aimed at the Iranian people but only “at affecting Iran’s nuclear program and revenues of the Iranian regime used to fund the program.”

The conversation regarding the impact of sanctions is as surreal and even more politicized inside Iran. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after years of describing sanctions as worthless pieces of torn paper but also a source of native talents’ great advancement, has suddenly found vested interest in identifying sanctions as the source of all the country’s economic woes.

It is not his fault and if you don’t believe him he is now more than willing to hand in his resignation letter, he tells a somewhat stunned audience of Iranian politicos, in a press conference last week. Just like that, with a shrug and annoying smirk, presumably assured that none of his political opponents has the energy to get too riled up about the wreckage he has made of the Iranian political and economic landscape.

Still, his conservative opponents do try to score a point by arguing otherwise. Iran’s presidential election is coming up in June 2013 and no one can afford to be associated with the policies of the past few years. These conservative opponents do not deny the impact of sanctions but see the source of the problem in Ahmadinejad’s populist and expansionary economic policies in the face of a tightening sanctions regime that he refused to take seriously and is now unable to address adequately because of the incompetence of his economic team. Their own complicity in the creation of this wreckage is of course a topic to be ignored.

Standing on top of this cantankerous conversation is Leader Ali Khamenei whose attempt to walk a tightrope in a series of speeches to various audiences in the North Khorasan Province last week was truly a spectacle. On one hand, he has been careful not to blame the sanctions too much. He is, after all, Iran’s “decider” and the person in charge of the “general direction of the country.” All along his talking point has been that Iran’s defying stance against external bullying is actually good for the country’s blossoming talent. Iran’s “resistant economy” is his brainchild.

In North Khorasan, Khamenei again reiterated his view that the sanctions regime is not about Iran’s nuclear program and is about Iran giving in to the dictates of US hegemony. The US “does not want Iran to come back to the negotiating table; it wants Iran to surrender to Western bullying during negotiation,” he said. Rightly or wrongly, it is this rather dark view of US intentions that prevents Khamenei from blaming sanctions. Iran’s defiant posture relies on the denial of the severe impact of the sanctions regime.

But Khamenei cannot go too far in blaming government policies and general incompetence for Iran’s current economic woes either. His continued support for the Ahmadinejad government is the only thing left between the latter and a testy and worried conservative political class ready to impeach the president for incompetence along with, as I mentioned above, the hope of ridding itself of the charge of complicity in bringing about Iran’s current economic problems.

In the mind of the influential conservative MP, Ahmad Tavakoli, “Ahamdinejad’s period is over and the continuation of his presidency is not positive” but a “consensus” regarding this issue has not yet developed. When asked whether this is due to the fact that some people — read Khamenei –  would like to keep the country calm in the 9 months that are left in Ahmadinejad’s presidency, Tavakoli answers in the affirmative and emphatically rejects rumors that Khamenei’s circumspection is because “Ahmadinejad and his team has threatened the Leadership.” He says that it can be accepted that at this time “tranquility is a value and losing it is considered a loss of value but the conclusion will not always be this.” In fact, Tavakoli goes on to make clear that he disagrees with Khamenei’s decision to tolerate Ahmadinejad until the end of his term for the sake of political tranquility.

There are others who seem to agree. Last week, over 100 MPs once again signed on to a question from the president regarding the currency situation. If Khamenei doesn’t put a stop to this process – and he probably will – Ahmadinejad will be hauled to the Parliament for a second time this year. Given the rule changes put in place after his last showing, if the Parliament is not satisfied with his answer, a vote will have to be taken regarding whether to lodge a complaint against him in the Judiciary.

The likelihood of this happening is low but I guess it is important to note that even if the Iranian economy is imploding and on the verge of collapse as some western officials claim, the politics of bickering continues to rule supreme even in Iran and is bound to get worse with the nearing of the election season despite Khamanei’s repeated calls for calm and not treating competitors as enemies.