by Hooshang Amirahmadi

President Barack Obama’s move towards normalization of relations with Cuba has generated lots of hope and analyses that a similar development may take place with Iran. Jim Lobe, founder of the Lobe Log and Washington Bureau Chief of the Inter Press Service, is one such observer. His recent article offers an excellent elaboration of the arguments. I rarely comment on writings by others, but his article deserves a response.

Lobe writes, “In my opinion, Obama’s willingness to make a bold foreign policy move [on Cuba] should—contrary to the narratives put out by the neoconservatives and other hawks—actually strengthen the Rouhani-Zarif faction within the Iran leadership who are no doubt arguing that Obama is serious both about reaching an agreement and forging a new relationship with the Islamic Republic.”

As someone who has spent 25 years trying to mend relations between the US and Iran, I wish Mr. Lobe and his liberal allies were right, and that their “neoconservative” opponents were wrong in their assessments that after Cuba comes Iran; unfortunately they are not. The truth is that Obama cannot so easily unlock the 35-year US-Iran entanglement that involves complex forces, including an Islamic Revolution.

First, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and President Hassan Rouhani used to tell Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that Obama could be trusted, but after 14 months and many rounds of negotiations, they have now subscribed to Khamenei’s line that the US cannot be trusted. Iran’s nuclear program has already been reduced to a symbolic existence but the promised relief from key sanctions, Rouhani’s main incentive to negotiate, is nowhere on the horizon.

During the meeting in Oman between Kerry and Zarif just before the November 24, 2014 deadline for reaching a “comprehensive” deal, as disclosed by the parliamentarian Mohammad Nabavian in an interview, “[Secretary of State] Kerry crossed all Iranian red lines” and Zarif left for Tehran “thinking that the negotiations should stop.” One such red line concerns Iran’s missile program, which is now included in the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.

In a recent letter to his counterparts throughout the world regarding the talks and why a comprehensive deal was not struck last November, Zarif writes that “demands from the Western countries [i.e., the US] are humiliating and illegitimate” and that the “ball is now in their court.” Partly reflecting this disappointment, the Rouhani Government has increased Iran’s defense and intelligence budgets for 2015 by 33 percent and 48 percent respectively (the Iranian calendar begins on March 21).

Second, Zarif and Rouhani could not make the “beyond-the-NPT” concessions that they have made if the supreme leader had not authorized them. The argument that Khamenei and his “hardline” supporters are the obstacle misses the fact that while they have raised “concern” about Iran’s mostly unilateral concessions and the US’s “rapacious” demands, they (particularly the supreme leader) have consistently backed the negotiations and the Iranian negotiators.

Third, Lobe’s thinking suggests that the problem between the two governments is a discursive and personal one: if Khamenei is convinced that Obama is a honest man, then a nuclear agreement would be concluded and a new relationship would be forged between the two countries. What this genus of thinking misses is a radical “Islamic Revolution” and its “divine” Nizam (regime) that stands between Washington and Tehran.

The Islamic Revolution has been anti-American from its inception in 1979 (and not just in Iran), and will remain so as long as the first generation revolutionary leaders rule. The US has also been hostile to the theocratic regime and has often tried to change it. No wonder Khamenei and his people view the US as an “existential threat,” and to fend it off, they have built a “strategic depth” extending to Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and other countries.

Fourth, several times in the past the Iran watchers in the West have become excited about elections that have produced “moderate” governments, making them naively optimistic that a change in relations between the US and Iran would follow. What they miss is that the Islamic “regime” (nizam) and the Islamic “government” are two distinct entities, with the latter totally subordinated to the former.

Specifically, the Nizam (where the House of Leader and revolutionary institutions reside) is ideological and revolutionary, whereas the government has often been pragmatic. Indeed, in the last 35 years, the so-called hardliners have controlled the executive branch for less than 10 years. The division of labor should be easy to understand: the Nizam guards the divine Islamic Revolution against any deviation and intrusion while the government deals with earthly butter and bread matters.

Fifth, to avoid a losing military clash with the US and at the same time reduce Washington’s ability to change its regime or “liberalize” it, the Islamic Republic has charted a smart policy towards the US: “no-war, no-peace.” The US has also followed a similar policy towards Iran to calm both anti-war and anti-peace forces in the conflict. Thus, for over 35 years, US-Iran relations have frequently swung between heightened hostility and qualified moderation (in Khamenei’s words, “heroic flexibility”).

Sixth, the Cuban and Iranian cases are fundamentally dissimilar. True, the Castros were also anti-American and are first-generation leaders, but Fidel is retired and on his deathbed while his brother Raul has hardly been as revolutionary as Fidel. Besides, with regard to US-Cuban normalization, Fidel and his brother can claim more victory than Obama; after all, the Castros did not cave in, Obama did. Furthermore, the Castros are their own bosses, head a dying socialist regime, and are the judges of their own “legacy.”

In sharp contrast, Khamenei subscribes to a rising Islam, heads a living though conflicted theocracy, and subsists in the shadow of the late Ayatollah Khomeini who called the US a “wolf” and Iran a “sheep,” decreeing that they cannot coexist. Indeed, in the Cuban case, the US held the tough line while in the case of Iran, the refusal to reconcile is mutual. Furthermore, the Cuban lobby is a passing force and no longer a match for the world-wide support that the Cuban government garners. Conversely, in the Iranian case, Obama has to deal with powerful Israeli and Arab lobbies, and the Islamic Republic does not have effective international support.

On the other hand, we also have certain similarities between the Cuban and Iranian cases. For example, both revolutions have been subject to harsh US sanctions and other forms of coercion that Obama called a “failed approach.” Obama is also in his second term, free from the yoke of domestic politics, and wishes to build a lasting legacy. Despite these similarities, the differences between the Iranian Islamic regime and the Cuban socialist system make the former a tougher challenge for Obama to solve.

Finally, while I do not think that the Cuban course will be followed for Iran any time soon, I do think that certain developments are generating the imperative for an US-Iran reconciliation in the near future. On Iran’s side, they include a crippled economy facing declining oil prices, a young Iranian population demanding transformative changes, and the gradual shrinking of the first-generation Islamic revolutionary leaders.

On the US side, the changes include an imperial power increasingly reluctant to use force, rising Islamic extremism, growing instability in the Persian Gulf and the larger Middle East, and the difficulty of sustaining the “no-war, no-peace” status quo in the absence of a “comprehensive” deal on Iran’s nuclear program. However, on this last issue, in Washington and Tehran, pessimism now far outweighs optimism, a rather sad development. Let us hope that sanity will prevail.

Photo: Iranian President Hassan Rouhani greets a rally in commemoration of the Islamic Republic’s 35 anniversary of its 1979 revolution in Tehran, Iran on Feb. 11, 2014. Credit: ISNA/Hamid Forootan

by Jim Lobe

Since Obama’s announcement last week that he will normalize relations with Cuba, a number of commentators have analyzed what impact this might have on US-Iranian ties, particularly with respect to the ongoing negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program.

Aside from neoconservatives, such as Elliott Abrams, and other hawks, like Lindsey Graham and John McCain—who predictably deplored the move and worried that Obama’s move portends US surrender at the negotiating table—the Wilson Center’s Aaron David Miller was one of the first to do a more thoughtful analysis of what it might mean for Iran policy. In his post, entitled “After Cuba Comes Iran,” Miller argued that, despite the key differences between the two countries, Obama’s decision to normalize ties with Havana “should be a clear sign of where he might like to go with Iran on the nuclear issue in coming months.”

Paul Pillar, a regular contributor to the National Interest, also alluded to the possibility that the Cuba initiative, coupled with Obama’s more assertive policy shifts on immigration and climate change, could indeed indicate where Obama wants to go with Iran and expressed the hope that these moves will encourage him to inject into the US negotiating position the flexibility that will be needed to conclude an agreement.

In another important contribution published by Voice of America Tuesday, the Atlantic Council’s Iran expert, Barbara Slavin argued what I’ve been thinking (but hadn’t put pen to paper) for the past week:

For those in the Iranian government who are pushing for a long-term nuclear deal with Washington, seeing Obama use his presidential authority to relieve the embargo against Cuba despite the vocal objection of some in Congress should increase confidence that he can waive key nuclear-related sanctions against Iran in a similar fashion.

In my opinion, Obama’s willingness to make a bold foreign policy move that is certain to provoke heated opposition from not insignificant domestic constituencies (that are also overrepresented in Congress) should—contrary to the narratives put out by the neoconservatives and other hawks—actually strengthen the Rouhani-Zarif faction within the Iran leadership who are no doubt arguing that Obama is serious both about reaching an agreement and forging a new relationship with the Islamic Republic.

I asked Farideh Farhi—whose analysis of internal Iranian politics and foreign policy is, as far as LobeLog (among many others) is concerned, the best available—about this Wednesday. She replied by email as follows:

I think Obama did himself a lot of good in changing the perception of him in Iran, as well as the rest of the world, as a weak and indecisive president. I think that perception just received a beating and will help those in Tehran who are making the case that Obama is serious and can deliver on substantial sanctions relief or that he is the best person to deal with (given the fact that he is relieved of election pressures). To be sure, all this will be focused on nuclear negotiations and not normalization of relations that developed in the Cuba situation, but if it happens, it will certainly be a breakthrough that may gradually open the path towards normalization.

Farideh pointed in particular to the official reaction by Iran’s Foreign Ministry to Obama’s Cuba announcement as offering some indication about how it was being interpreted in Tehran. That statement emphasized the president’s acknowledgment that more than 50 years of isolation and sanctions against Cuba had not worked and “I do not believe we can continue doing the same thing for over five decades and expect a different result.” Obama’s remarks about having learned “from hard-earned experience that countries are more likely to enjoy lasting transformation if their people are not subjected to chaos,” according to Farideh, were also likely to be seen favorably in Tehran as Obama’s repudiation of “regime change.” (Related points were made in another analysis, “If It’s True on Cuba, It’s True on Iran,” published in the Huffington Post by Trita Parsi and Ryan Costello shortly after Obama’s announcement.)

I would add that the fact that the Castro brothers, who have “resisted” Yanqui imperialism and “global arrogance” for even longer than Tehran, are now willing to establish a new relationship with their own “Great Satan” may also count for something in the internal debate that swirls around Ayatollah Khamenei’s office. If, after all, revolutionary Cuba is willing to turn the page with their historic nemesis—defiance of which has largely defined Cuba’s out-sized standing and status in the world—shouldn’t hardcore revolutionaries around Khamenei at least consider the idea, if not of normalisation (which appears out of the question for the moment), then at least moving with greater confidence toward some rapprochement?

That view is shared by Kenneth Katzman, the senior analyst of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Persian Gulf Affairs at the Congressional Research Service. “I think we should also not minimize how the Cuba rapprochement might play in the inner counsels in Tehran,” he said in an email. “Surely, Rouhani and Zarif can now go to the Supreme Leader and say ‘The Castro brothers are at least as distrustful of the United States as you are, and they were able to reach a deal with the United States. Why wouldn’t you do the same??”

Of course, opponents of Obama’s normalization of ties with Cuba will try to rally a Republican-led Congress behind their efforts to restrain Obama’s efforts by, among other measures, denying funding for an embassy, refusing to confirm a nominee as ambassador, and introducing legislation designed to constrain the president’s authority to waive or lift certain sanctions or further ease the trade embargo. And, if they succeed, particularly with respect to the sanctions issue, there’s no doubt that such action will be used by hard-liners in Tehran to argue that Obama lacks the power to follow through on any promises he makes about lifting sanctions and related concessions, in a nuclear deal.

But it’s pretty clear that Obama is determined to fight such actions, and it’s most unlikely that anti-Castro diehards like Marco Rubio and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen will be able to gather enough Democratic supporters to overcome a presidential veto. Indeed, given the strong support for Obama’s action from such quarters as the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Foreign Trade Council, and various agricultural lobby groups whose members are eager to significantly increase their exports to Cuba, normalization’s foes may find it more difficult than they anticipate to rally a large majority of Republicans behind them despite the party leadership’s determination to deny Obama any kind of foreign policy success.

At the same time, any serious effort by the anti-Castro forces on Capitol Hill will pose some difficult questions for key players on Iran, especially the Israel lobby and the various groups associated with it. The Cuba and Israel lobbies have worked closely together for decades—their common interests have converged perfectly in the persons of the outgoing chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and former House Foreign Committee chair Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. And now is the moment when the Cuba lobby needs all the help it can get. Moreover, if the leadership of the Israel lobby believes that normalization with Cuba will make a nuclear deal and rapprochement with Iran substantially more likely, will it decide that this is a fight worth fighting? Of course, the leadership is not monolithic, especially on a question that, at least on the face of it, is so far removed from Israel itself, and it will be very difficult to mobilize all but the lobby’s most right-wing constituents behind preventing normalization with Cuba. But it will be fascinating to watch.

Photo: US President Barack Obama talks with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani of during a phone call in the Oval Office, Sept. 27, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

In perhaps his boldest foreign policy move during his presidency, Barack Obama Wednesday announced that he intends to establish full diplomatic relations with Cuba.

While the president noted that he lacked the authority to lift the 54-year-old trade embargo against Havana, he issued directives that will permit more American citizens to travel there and third-country subsidiaries of US companies to engage in commerce. Other measures include the launching a review of whether Havana should remain on the US list of “state sponsors of terrorism.” The president also said he looked forward to engaging Congress in “an honest and serious debate about lifting the embargo.”

“In the most significant changes in our policy in more than fifty years, we will end an outdated approach that, for decades, has failed to advance our interests, and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries,” said Obama in a nationally televised announcement.

“Through these changes, we intend to create more opportunities for the American and Cuban people, and begin a new chapter among the nations of the Americas.”

The announcement, which was preceded by a secret, 45-minute telephone conversation Tuesday morning between Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro, drew both praise from those who have long argued that Washington’s pursuit of Cuba’s isolation has been a total failure and bitter denunciations from right-wing Republicans. Some of them vowed, among other things, to oppose any effort to lift the embargo, open the US embassy in Havana, or confirm a US ambassador to serve there. (Washington has had an Interest Section in the Cuban capital since 1977.)

“Today’s announcement initiating a dramatic change in US policy is just the latest in a long line of failed attempts by President Obama to appease rogue regimes at all costs,” said Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, one of a number of fiercely anti-Castro Cuban-American lawmakers and a likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

“I intend to use my role as incoming Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Western Hemisphere subcommittee to make every effort to block this dangerous and desperate attempt by the President to burnish his legacy at the Cuba people’s expense,” he said in a statement. “Appeasing the Castro brothers will only cause other tyrants from Caracas to Tehran to Pyongyang to see that they can take advantage of President Obama’s naiveté during his final two years in office.”

The outgoing Democratic chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, also decried Obama’s announcement. “The United States has just thrown the Cuban regime an economic lifeline,” he said.

“With the collapse of the Venezuelan economy, Cuba is losing its main benefactor, but will now receive the support of the United States, the greatest democracy in the world,” said Menendez, who is also Cuban-American.

But other lawmakers hailed the announcement.

Today President Obama and President Raul Castro made history,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, a senior Democrat and one of three lawmakers, including Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, who escorted Alan Gross, a US Agency for International Development (USAID) contractor, from Havana Wednesday morning as part of a larger prisoner and spy swap that precipitated the announcement.

“Those who cling to a failed policy (and) …may oppose the President’s actions have nothing to offer but more of the same. That would serve neither the interests of the United States and its people, nor of the Cuban people,” Leahy said. “It is time for a change.”

Other analysts also lauded Obama’s Wednesday’s developments, comparing them to historic breakthroughs with major foreign policy consequences.

“Obama has chosen to change the entire framework of the relationship, as (former President Richard) Nixon did when he travelled to China,” said William LeoGrande, a veteran Cuba scholar at American University, in an email from Havana. “Many issues remain to be resolved, but the new direction of US policy is clear.”

Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based hemispheric think tank that has long urged Washington to normalize ties with Havana, told IPS the regional implications would likely be very positive.

“Obama’s decision will be cheered and applauded throughout Latin America,” he said.

“The Cuba issue has sharply divided Washington from the rest of the hemisphere for decades, and this move, long overdue, goes a long way towards removing a key major source of irritation in US-Latin American relations,” Shifter said.

Obama also announced Wednesday that he will attend the 2015 Summit of the Americas in Panama in April. Castro had also been officially invited, over the objections of both the US and Canada, at the last Summit in Cartagena in 2012, so there had been some speculation that Obama might boycott the proceedings.

Harvard international relations expert Stephen Walt said he hoped that Wednesday’s announcement portends additional bold moves by Obama on the world stage in his last two years as president despite the control of both houses of Congress by Republicans.

“One may hope that this decision will be followed by renewed efforts to restore full diplomatic relations with even more important countries, most notably Iran,” he told IPS in an email.

“Recognition does not imply endorsing a foreign government’s policies; it simply acknowledges that U.S. interests are almost always well served by regular contact with allies and adversaries alike,” he said.

Administration officials told reporters that Wednesday’s developments were made possible by 18 months of secret talks between senior official from both sides—not unlike those carried out in Oman between the US and Iran prior to their landmark November 2013 agreement with five other world powers on Tehran’s nuclear program.

Officials credited Pope Francis, an Argentine, with a key role in prodding both parties toward an accord.

“The Holy Father wishes to express his warm congratulations for the historic decision taken by the Governments of the United States of America and Cuba to establish diplomatic relations, with the aim of overcoming, in the interest of the citizens of both countries, the difficulties which have marked their recent history,” the Vatican said in a statement Wednesday.

The Vatican’s strong endorsement could mute some of the Republican and Cuban-American criticism of normalization and make it more difficult for Rubio and his colleagues to prevent the establishment of an embassy and appointment of an ambassador, according to some Capitol Hill staff.

Similarly, major US corporations, some of whom, particularly in the agribusiness and consumer goods sectors, have seen major market potential in Cuba, are likely to lobby their allies on the Republican side.

“We deeply believe that an open dialogue and commercial exchange between the US and Cuban private sectors will bring shared benefits, and the steps announced today will go a long way in allowing opportunities for free enterprise to flourish,” said Thomas Donohue, the president of the US Chamber of Commerce in a statement. Donohue headed what he called an unprecedented “exploratory” trip to Cuba earlier this year.

“Congress now has a decision to make,” said Jake Colvin, the vice president for global trade issues at the National Foreign Trade Council, an association of many of the world’s biggest multi-national corporations. “It can either show that politics stops at the water’s edge, or insist that the walls of the Cold War still exist.”

Wednesday’s announcement came in the wake of an extraordinary series of editorials by the New York Times through this autumn in favour of normalization and the lifting of the trade embargo.

In another sign of a fundamental shift here, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose husband Bill took some steps to ease the embargo during his tenure as president, disclosed in her book published last summer that she had urged Obama to “take another look at our embargo. It wasn’t achieving its goals, and it was holding back our broader agenda across Latin America.”

That stance, of course, could alienate some Cuban-American opinion, especially in the critical “swing state” of Florida if Clinton runs in the 2016 election. But recent polls of Cuban-Americans have suggested an important generational change in attitudes toward Cuba and normalization within the Cuban-American community, with the younger generation favoring broader ties with their homeland.

Photo: Alan Gross talks with President Obama onboard a government plane headed back to the US, Dec. 17, 2014. Credit: Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson

 Undoubtedly, there are many aspects of the just-released summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program that can and should be pondered.

But, having written on the national U.S. defense and national security sector’s use of private contractors for over twenty years, I naturally focus my attention on the CIA’s reliance on private contractors for the devising and implementation of an “enhanced interrogation” — i.e., torture – program.

It is worth emphasizing that the use of contractors described in the committee summary — including the roles played by what the Washington Post Friday called the “two questionably credentialed advisers, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen,” who were paid more than $80 million before the CIA cut its ties with them — focused only on the use of contractors in the interrogation program. It did not look at other contractor uses, such as their involvement in the rendition of suspected terrorists

The United States has used torture, both psychological and physical, going back decades, as historian Alfred McCoy richly detailed in his 2012 book Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogations. And it is not as if the military did not know how to do harsh interrogations as the Army’s 519^th Military Intelligence Battalion demonstrated at Abu Ghraib. The government recognized long ago that some activities are so sensitive and consequential that they should be done only by the government, not the private sector.

In his 2008 book Spies For Hire, Tim Shorrock quotes Eugene Fidell, then president of the National Institute for Military Justice, who was troubled by the CIA’s and Pentagon’s use of private contractors to interrogate enemy prisoners. “That’s’ really playing with fire,” he said. “That kind of activity, which so closely entails the national interest and exposes the country to terrible opprobrium, is something that ought to be done only by people who are government employees.”

So, why would the government turn to the private sector for this, and what does that say about governmental control of and accountability, or lack thereof, for the use of private security and military contractors?

I don’t ask this rhetorically. There has been lots of debate over what constitute inherently governmental activities – things only the government should do. But almost nobody, outside of companies that are paid to do it, believes that the private sector should be involved in interrogation.

In 2010, for example, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy issued a proposed policy memo to agencies instructing them to use the definition of “inherently governmental” in the 1998 Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act (FAIR). The FAIR Act classifies an activity as “inherently governmental” when it is so intimately related to the public interest that it must be performed by federal employees.

When my book, Shadow Force, on the use of private security contractors in Iraq was published in 2009, I noted that “An Army policy directive published in 2000,” and still in effect today, classifies any job that involves “the gathering and analysis” of tactical intelligence as “an inherently governmental function barred from private sector performance.”

Yet, that is a restriction that seems more honored in the breach. A Georgetown University law review article last year noted:

 Private companies are hired to train troops, collect and analyze intelligence, and carry out special operations. For instance, one company allegedly participated in an extraordinary rendition through a contract for air transport. Two Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contractors helped design and oversee the interrogation of Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida. Employees of CIA contractors CACI and Titan have allegedly been involved in the oversight and torture of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib facility. One source estimates that “more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service (NCS)–the heart, brains and soul of the CIA–has been outsourced to private firms.

In fact, the outsourcing to the private sector that the government used to reserve for itself has been gathering momentum for decades. With regard to national security functions, it started, at least conceptually, in the Reagan era, gathered steam in the Clinton Administration, and rocketed up into the stratosphere in the years after 9/11. Currently, contractors are so entwined with the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, the Department of Homeland Security and numerous other agencies that they are similar to the creature in the Alien movies; trying to remove them would kill the patient.

The reasons for this are many, but some stand out. First, government, whether Republican- or Democratic-led, has bought into the neo-liberal orthodoxy of the “magic of the marketplace,” as Reagan put it, with the presumption that the private sector just does things better. Like the Bionic Man, it is supposedly cheaper, more agile and more efficient.

This is debatable when it comes to municipal services. It becomes even dodgier when applied to the national security sector. For some twenty years now, I have been asking advocates of the private military and security contracting industry to show me empirically based, methodologically sound studies that prove this point. I have not yet been shown any.

Peter Singer, a former scholar at the Brookings Institution, once wrote an article in Foreign Affairs journal in which he noted:

Unfortunately, the Pentagon’s current, supposedly business-minded leadership seems to have forgotten Economics 101. All too often, it outsources first and never bothers to ask questions later. That something is done privately does not necessarily make it better, quicker, or cheaper. Rather, it is through leveraging free-market mechanisms that one potentially gets better private results. Success is likely only if a contract is competed for on the open market, if the winning firm can specialize on the job and build in redundancies, if the client is able to provide oversight and management to guard its own interests, and if the contractor is properly motivated by the fear of being fired. Forget these simple rules, as the U.S. government often does, and the result is not the best of privatization but the worst of monopolization.

Common sense, if nothing else, should tell people that economic rationales for using contractors for interrogations are nonsense. Free markets require competitive environments and numerous customers, yet the government is often the only customer. And even private contractors have their limits on what they are willing to do. In September 2005, CACI announced that it would cease providing interrogation services when its contract expired at the end of that month.

Another, far more likely reason that the intelligence community would use contractors is that it is easier to keep things secret. A government agency carrying out torture could be subject to congressional oversight, weak and ineffective as it often is. But a private company generally doesn’t have to worry about that.

Despite a decade’s worth of strong reporting on the subject, the deep involvement of private contractors in our national-security apparatus is only dimly acknowledged — and even less appreciated — by the general public. One has only to ask how many casualties the U.S. has suffered in Afghanistan and Iraq. The body count almost never includes contractors — nearly 1500 in Afghanistan as of the end of 2013, according to the Department of Labor. In Iraq, the toll was higher. If people don’t care about contractors when they are actually dying on behalf of the government, the probability that anyone cares when they violate law on behalf of the government is practically zero.

Torture has been illegal in the United States since the Senate ratified the UN’s Convention Against Torture in 1994. So, the temptation for the CIA to employ contractors to further hide U.S. government use of torture must have been almost irresistible.

Furthermore, the use of private contractors may well have served as a way to satisfy U.S. government officials’ bloodlust — torture for torture’s sake — even though, according to the Senate committee’s report, it did not help to gain enough useful intelligence to justify its use. As New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote this week:

And why the private contractors? Maybe because the actual government interrogators didn’t believe torture worked either. Some complained that, after Mitchell and Jessen arrived, reasonably cooperative prisoners were suddenly brutalized under the theory that the original approach had been too “sissified.”

Nor is the use of contractors in intelligence for troubling purposes limited to torture. In fact, as I write this, the Associated Press is running a story that about how the U.S. Agency for International Development used contractors for more than two years to secretly infiltrate Cuba’s underground hip-hop movement, recruiting unwitting rappers to spark a youth movement against the Castro government.

The idea was to use Cuban musicians “to break the information blockade” and build a network of young people seeking “social change,” documents show. But the operation was amateurish and profoundly unsuccessful.

On at least six occasions, Cuban authorities detained or interrogated people involved in the program; they also confiscated computer hardware, and in some cases it contained information that jeopardized Cubans who likely had no idea they were caught up in a clandestine U.S. operation. Still, contractors working for the U.S. Agency for International Development kept putting themselves and their targets at risk, the AP investigation found.

The program is laid out in documents involving Creative Associates International, a Washington, D.C., contractor paid millions of dollars to undermine Cuba’s communist government.

The worst truth, however, is this: as the National Security Agency surveillance scandal confirms, private companies are so comfortably and deeply embedded with the national security state — and happily making billions in the process — that separation, let alone divorce, seems almost entirely out of the question.

Every day, private contractors are breaking scores, if not hundreds, of domestic and foreign laws. And why wouldn’t they, considering that the government is willing to grant them immunity or indemnify them against any charges that might be brought against them?

Of course, not all contractors are bad or doing bad things. Most, in fact, are doing their best to implement whatever contact they are working on. But as long as a government is allowed by its own public to do things in the name of ensuring public safety, we can expect similar atrocities in the future. To paraphrase what Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar:

The fault, dear American public, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

David Isenberg is an independent researcher and writer on U.S. military, foreign policy, and national and international security issues. He a Senior Analyst with the online geopolitical consultancy Wikistrat and is a U.S. Navy veteran., He is author of  Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq. His blog, The PMSC Observer, focuses on private military and security contracting, a subject he has testified on to Congress.

Image Credit: Mike Licht

The stated rationale for the United States casting on Tuesday one of the very lonely votes it sometimes casts at the United Nations General Assembly, on matters on which almost the entire world sees things differently, warrants some reflection. The resolution in question this time endorsed the creation of a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East and called on Israel to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to renounce any possession of nuclear weapons, and to put its nuclear facilities under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency. A nuclear weapons-free Middle East and universal adherence to the nonproliferation treaty are supposedly U.S. policy objectives, and have been for many years. So why did the United States oppose the resolution? According to the U.S. representative’s statement in earlier debate, the resolution “fails to meet the fundamental tests of fairness and balance. It confines itself to expressions of concern about the activities of a single country.”

You know something doesn’t wash when the contrary views are as overwhelmingly held as on this matter. The resolution passed on a vote of 161-5. Joining Israel and the United States as “no” votes were Canada (maybe the Harper government was thinking of the Keystone XL pipeline issue being in the balance?) and the Pacific powers of Micronesia and Palau. The latter two habitually cast their UN votes to stay in the good graces of the United States; they have been among the few abstainers on the even more lopsided votes in the General Assembly each year calling for an end to the U.S. embargo of Cuba.

An obvious problem with the United States complaining about a resolution on a topic such as this being an expression of concern about the activities of only a single country is that the United States has been in front in pushing for United Nations resolutions about the nuclear activities of a single country, only just not about the particular country involved this time. The inconsistency is glaring. Iran has been the single-country focus of several U.S.-backed resolutions on nuclear matters—resolutions in the Security Council that have been the basis for international sanctions against Iran.

One could look, but would look in vain, for sound rationales for the inconsistency. If anything, the differences one would find should point U.S. policy in the opposite direction from the direction it has taken. It is Iran that has placed itself under the obligations of the nonproliferation treaty and subjects its nuclear activities to international inspection. Since the preliminary agreement to restrict Iran’s nuclear program that was negotiated last year, those inspections are more frequent and intrusive than ever. Israel, by contrast, has kept its nuclear activities completely out of the reach of any international inspection or control regime. As for actual nuclear weapons, Iran does not have them, has declared its intention not to have them, and according to the U.S. intelligence community has not made any decision to make them. Neither Israel nor the United States says publicly that Israel has nuclear weapons, but just about everyone else in the world takes it as a given that it does, which would make it the only state in the Middle East that does.

One might look, but still in vain, for justifying discrepancies that go beyond the respective nuclear programs of the countries in question but still involve questions of regional security and stability. What about, for example, menacing threats? Iran and Israel have each had plenty of unfriendly words about each other. Iran’s words have included bloviation about wiping something from pages of history; Israel’s have included more pointed threats of military attack. What about actual attacks? Israel has initiated multiple wars with its neighbors, as well as launching smaller armed attacks; The Islamic Republic of Iran has not started a war in its 35-year history. Terrorism? Well, there were those assassinations of Iranian scientists, with some later attacks against Israelis being an obvious (and not very successful) attempt by Iran at a tit-for-tat response against those responsible for murdering the scientists. And so forth.

Singling out one country in a multilateral context can indeed cause problems. The resolution the General Assembly passed this week need not involve a problem, however, since it was not calling for differential treatment of anyone—only for Israel to get with the same program as any state in the Middle East that does not have nukes and adheres to the international nuclear control regime.

Iran, by contrast, is being treated much differently from anyone else. Tehran already has acquiesced to some of that differential treatment, but Iranians unsurprisingly wonder why Iran should be subjected to more such treatment, or indeed to any of it. They wonder, for example, why Iran should be subject to unique restrictions that several other non-nuclear-weapons states that also are parties to the nonproliferation treaty and enrich their own uranium are not. Such wonderment is almost certainly a factor in Iranian resistance to making the sorts of additional concessions that many in the United States are expecting or demanding that Iran make. The differential treatment should be kept in mind in any discussion in the United States about who has made bigger concessions than whom and about what would or would not constitute a fair and reasonable final agreement.

Then there is the irony—although Iranians might use a more bitter word than irony—of Israel leading the charge in constantly agitating about Iran’s nuclear program (and by trying to torpedo an international agreement to restrict that program, making the issue fester and thus making it more possible for Israel’s agitation to go on forever).

This article was first published by the National Interest and was reprinted here with permission.

It was exactly 50 years ago when then-President John F. Kennedy took to the airwaves to inform the world that the Soviet Union was introducing nuclear-armed missiles into Cuba and that he had ordered a blockade of the island – and would consider stronger action – to force their removal.

“It was the most chilling speech in the history of the U.S. presidency,” according to Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive, who has spent several decades working to declassify key documents and other material that would shed light on the 13-day crisis that most historians believe brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any other moment.

Indeed, Kennedy’s military advisers were urging a pre-emptive strike against the missile installations on the island, unaware that some of them were already armed.

Several days later, the crisis was resolved when Soviet President Nikita Krushchev appeared to capitulate by agreeing to withdraw the missiles in exchange for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba.

“We’ve been eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked,” exulted Secretary of State Dean Rusk in what became the accepted interpretation of the crisis’ resolution.

“Kennedy’s victory in the messy and inconclusive Cold War naturally came to dominate the politics of U.S. foreign policy,” write Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations in a recent foreignpolicy.com article entitled “The Myth That Screwed Up 50 Years of U.S. Foreign Policy.”

“It deified military power and willpower and denigrated the give-and-take of diplomacy,” he wrote. “It set a standard for toughness and risky dueling with bad guys that could not be matched – because it never happened in the first place.”

What the U.S. public didn’t know was that Krushchev’s concession was matched by another on Washington’s part as a result of secret diplomacy, conducted mainly by Kennedy’s brother, Robert, and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.

Indeed, in exchange for removing the missiles from Cuba, Moscow obtained an additional concession by Washington: to remove its own force of nuclear-tipped Jupiter missiles from Turkey within six months – a concession that Washington insisted should remain secret.

“The myth (of the Cuban missile crisis), not the reality, became the measure for how to bargain with adversaries,” according to Gelb, who interviewed many of the principals.

Writing in a New York Times op-ed last week, Michael Dobbs, a former Washington Post reporter and Cold War historian, noted that the “eyeball to eyeball” image “has contributed to some of our most disastrous foreign policy decisions, from the escalation of the Vietnam War under (Lyndon) Johnson to the invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush.”

Dobbs also says Bush made a “fateful error, in a 2002 speech in Cincinnati when he depicted Kennedy as the father of his pre-emptive war doctrine. In fact, Kennedy went out of his way to avoid such a war.”

To Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, whose research into those fateful “13 days in October” has brought much of the back-and-forth to light, “the lessons of the crisis for current policy have never been greater.”

In a Foreign Affairs article published last summer, he described the current confrontation between the U.S. and Iran as “a Cuban missile crisis in slow motion”.

Kennedy, he wrote, was given two options by his advisers: “attack or accept Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba.” But the president rejected both and instead was determined to forge a mutually acceptable compromise backed up by a threat to attack Cuba within 24 hours unless Krushchev accepted the deal.

Today, President Barack Obama is being faced with a similar binary choice, according to Allison: to acquiesce in Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear bomb or carry out a preventive air strike that, at best, could delay Iran’s nuclear programme by some years.

A “Kennedyesque third option,” he wrote, would be an agreement that verifiably constrains Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for a pledge not to attack Iran so long as it complied with those constraints.

“I would hope that immediately after the election, the U.S. government will also turn intensely to the search for something that’s not very good – because it won’t be very good – but that is significantly better than attacking on the one hand or acquiescing on the other,” Allison told the Voice of America last week.

This very much appears to be what the Obama administration prefers, particularly in light of as-yet unconfirmed reports over the weekend that both Washington and Tehran have agreed in principle to direct bilateral talks, possibly within the framework of the P5+1 negotiations that also involve Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany, after the Nov. 6 election.

Allison also noted a parallel between the Cuban crisis and today’s stand-off between the U.S. and Iran – the existence of possible third-party spoilers.

Fifty years ago, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro had favoured facing down the U.S. threat and even launching the missiles in the event of a U.S. attack.

But because the Cubans lacked direct control over the missiles, which were under Soviet command, they could be ignored. Moreover, Kennedy warned the Kremlin that it “would be held accountable for any attack against the United States emanating from Cuba, however it started,” according to Allison.

The fact that Israel, which has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran’s nuclear sites unilaterally, actually has the assets to act on those threats makes the situation today more complicated than that faced by Kennedy.

“Due to the secrecy surrounding the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, the lesson that became ingrained in U.S. foreign policy-making was the importance of a show of force to make your opponent back down,” Kornbluh told IPS.

“But the real lesson is one of commitment to diplomacy, negotiation and compromise, and that was made possible by Kennedy’s determination to avoid a pre-emptive strike, which he knew would open a Pandora’s box in a nuclear age.”