by Jim Lobe

Last weekend, I noted the increasingly vulnerable position in which AIPAC finds itself in after its defeat on the Kirk-Menendez bill (S. 1881), and less than three weeks before its annual conference, which this year is expected to attract a record 14,000 attendees, as well as keynoter Israeli [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Jim Lobe

Last weekend, I noted the increasingly vulnerable position in which AIPAC finds itself in after its defeat on the Kirk-Menendez bill (S. 1881), and less than three weeks before its annual conference, which this year is expected to attract a record 14,000 attendees, as well as keynoter Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Reporters who pay closer attention and have better contacts inside AIPAC than I do appear to share this view.

Particularly remarkable is an article entitled, “As Confab Nears, AIPAC Still Trying to Figure Out its Legislative Agenda,” by JTA’s Ron Kampeas. It describes how unprepared the group’s leadership appears to be:

“[J]ust three weeks before the [annual] conference, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is facing a dilemma: how to craft a legislative agenda after losing a bruising battle with the Obama administration over Iran sanctions and amid uncertainty stemming from regional turmoil and ongoing Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.

An AIPAC official confirmed that the lobbying group has yet to choose a legislative initiative for the estimated 14,000 activists to support at the March 2-4 conference.

While AIPAC does not unveil the specifics of its favored legislative action until the eve of its conference, what’s unusual is that those close to the group and its Capitol Hill interlocutors say it’s not yet clear even behind closed doors what shape AIPAC’s lobbying will assume.”

A second widely noted article, “How AIPAC Botched Its Biggest Fight in Years,” appeared in the Daily Beast Tuesday morning. It recounts details surrounding last week’s debacle and offers a broader context in which it took place, particularly the apparent splits between AIPAC’s neoconservative/Republican wing and those within the group who hope to maintain its appeal to Democrats as well as, more interestingly, between the latter and the Netanyahu government as represented by its new ambassador here, Ron Dermer, who reportedly lobbied very aggressively for the passage of the bill even when it became clear that there was no way its proponents could get a veto-proof majority or Majority Leader Harry Reid to send it to the floor for an up-or-down vote. (Unlike his predecessor, Michael Oren, Dermer, who grew up in Florida, is said by knowledgeable sources to consider himself a Republican with little interest in or patience for Democrats.) According to Lake’s account, Dermer told Republican Sen. Bob Corker outright that AIPAC and the Israeli government were not on the same page. Lake recounts where the group ended up:

Somehow, on the issue arguably of most importance to both the Israeli government and America’s pro-Israel community—Iran and its nuclear ambitions—AIPAC didn’t merely fail to deliver. It alienated its most ardent supporters, and helped turn what was a bipartisan effort to keep Iran in check into just another political squabble. The lobby that everybody in Washington publicly backs somehow managed to piss off just about everyone.

Now, I wouldn’t call AIPAC’s management or mismanagement of the bill a “botch” as the Daily Beast’s headline writer did. I think there is something much more fundamental — and possibly existential — about what is happening to the group. Its neoconservative/ECI/Republican wing, which no doubt includes important donors, is pressing it to abandon its bipartisanship, which is a very, very risky strategy when one considers that a strong majority of the Jewish community remains firmly in the Democratic camp. And, as many polls have shown, Democrats are becoming ever more disenchanted with the policies — not just with respect to Iran — being pursued by Netanyahu’s right-wing politics. This puts AIPAC in an extremely delicate position, and one that it has never before confronted. In that respect, Netanyahu’s keynote speech could be a very important moment in the group’s history.

Jennifer Rubin, a hard-line neocon whose sympathies definitely lie with Republicans, appears to agree with Lake. In an echo of ECI’s attack on AIPAC last Friday, she also wrote Tuesday:

All this plays out while the most prominent pro-Israel group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is going through its rockiest period in decades. The administration’s attacks on sanctions advocates as “war mongers” and ability to rebuff sanctions showed AIPAC’s declining influence on the left, a trend accelerated under an administration with the worst relationship with Israel since George H.W. Bush. In awkwardly abandoning the current sanctions battle, AIPAC was accused by the right of bending over backward to accommodate Democrats who aren’t supportive of sanctions. When AIPAC attempted damage control last Friday by issuing a letter from its president saying AIPAC was in fact still in favor of sanctions, the reaction on Capitol Hill ranged from confusion to contempt. At the time its role is most critical, AIPAC is least effective.

This naturally must intensify the heartburn at AIPAC headquarters.

Meanwhile, opponents of more sanctions appear to have gone somewhat on the offensive in the House, especially in light of persistent reports that Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer were cooking up an AIPAC-backed non-binding resolution designed to define what would or would not be acceptable in a final deal worked out between Iran and the 6 world powers known as the P5+1. A total so far of 104 House members have signed a letter demanding that Congress “give diplomacy a chance.” The letter, which was organised by Reps. David Price (D-NC) and Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) and gained the signatures of four Republicans, adds that any “bill or resolution that risks fracturing our international coalition or, worse yet, undermining our credibility in future negotiations and jeopardizing hard-won progress toward a verifiable final agreement, must be avoided.”

I understand that in a meeting with top AIPAC board members Tuesday, House Democrats made clear that there was no support in their caucus for any Iran resolution — binding or non-binding and that Wednesday’s release of the Price-Doggett letter was designed to underline the lack of appetite for any more legislative battles on Iran until diplomacy plays out. And while the White House announced Wednesday that Obama and Netanyahu will meet Mar. 3 at the White House, there still has been no word as to whom the administration intends to send to address the AIPAC conference that will be going on at the time.

News and views relevant to US mideast foreign policy for Sept. 20

“Iranian policymakers should understand that failing to limit the enrichment program will eventually trigger war”: The Security Times carries a commentary by Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential British think tank. Outlining the continuing [...]]]> via Lobe Log

News and views relevant to US mideast foreign policy for Sept. 20

“Iranian policymakers should understand that failing to limit the enrichment program will eventually trigger war”: The Security Times carries a commentary by Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential British think tank. Outlining the continuing difficulties in negotiating an agreement on Iran’s enrichment activities, Fitzpatrick notes that the lack of an agreement means that pressure will grow to take military action in the coming years:

…. Iran already is nuclear capable – now possessing all the materials and technology, requiring only a political decision – and, while unpalatable, this status has not triggered military action.

The problem is that the red line separating nuclear-capable from nuclear-armed will become less clear as Iran’s enrichment program makes further advances. At present, Iran is still months away from being able to make a successful dash to produce weapons-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU). Because IAEA inspections take place on average twice a month, any such ‘breakout’ at declared facilities would be detected in time.

If, however, the Iranians sought to produce HEU at clandestine plants, they could not be confident the work would remain hidden. Twice already, secret enrichment plants have been exposed. Iran might judge that it could get away with such exposure, claiming, as it does today, that it does not need to follow IAEA rules about early notification of new nuclear facilities.

If this is Iran’s calculation, it could well backfire. Iran does not know how close it could come to crossing the line to weapons production before its adversaries determined it was too close. If Iran’s enrichment program continues unabated, at some point Western intelligence agencies will judge that because the uranium stockpile is too large, the technology too advanced and the hiding places too many, a dash for the bomb cannot be detected in time. The red line of weapons production will have become too blurred to serve as an effective tripwire.

“Iran’s Nuclear Program: Tehran’s Compliance with International Obligations”: The Congressional Research Service asks “Has Iran Violated the NPT?” in a new report and concludes that the matter is “unclear” though the IAEA believes Iran “has violated its safeguards agreement” and was, until at least 2003, pursuing military research as part of the program. It notes that investigations are still ongoing over claims that Iran violated the NPT’s Article II, “which state[s] that non-nuclear-weapon states-parties shall not ‘manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear  explosive devices’ or “’seek or receive any assistance in the manufacture of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.’”

The 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate assessed in 2007 that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

In response to an IAEA Board of Governors ruling that Iran had not met its disclosure (and safeguards) obligations, the Iranian press reported that “Iranian Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani said that the most recent resolution issued against Iran by the International Atomic Energy Agency raises doubt about the benefit of being a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).”

“Who’s Sabotaging Iran’s Nuclear Program?”: Building off an earlier New York Times report on allegations of sabotage against Iran’s nuclear facilities, the Daily Beast’s Eli Lake questions if this is an act of escalation by the perpetrators:

Fereydoun Abbasi, Iran’s vice president and the chief of its nuclear-energy agency, disclosed that power lines between the holy city of Qom and the underground Fordow nuclear centrifuge facility were blown up with explosives on Aug. 17. He also said the power lines leading to Iran’s Natanz facilities were blown up as well. On the day after the power was cut off at Fordow, an inspector from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) asked to visit the facility.

The disclosure is significant. To start, it is the first piece of evidence to suggest opponents of the Iranian program are targeting the country’s electrical grid and doing so on the ground.

The US has publicly denied it is carrying out attacks on any facilities and military or civilian targets in Iran. An NBC investigative report from the summer reported that Israel, not the US, is actually orchestrating the bombings and assassinations. Rather than risk discovery of its own network in the Islamic Republic, the NBC said that the Mossad relies on members of the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran (PMO) to carry out these operations.

“Poll: Majority of Palestinians, Israelis say attack on Iran would result in major war”: Haaretz reports on a new poll in Israel expressing growing concern among Israeli citizens and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories that a war with Iran would “would ignite a major regional war,” though the poll also noted that a significant number of respondents do not believe a war is likely this year anyway:

According to the study’s finding, 77 percent of Israeli respondents and 82 percent of Palestinian respondents said that an Israeli attack on Iran would result in a major regional confrontation.

Regarding the possibility of an Israeli strike without U.S. backing, 65 percent of Israelis were against such a course of action, an increase from 52 percent in June.

Also, the study found that 70 percent of Israelis did not believe Israel would strike Iran in the coming months, with only 20 percent of respondents saying they believe the Iranians’ goal is to destroy Israel.

The Israeli press also reported that US diplomats have warned their Israeli counterparts that should Israel attack Iran this year, it would jeopardize Israel’s peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt.

It’s the holidays and unfortunately not all the hawks took a break from agitating [...]]]> In response to a worrying trend in U.S. politics Lobe Log has launched Iran Hawk Watch. Each Friday we will post on notable militaristic commentary about Iran from a variety of sources including news articles, think tanks and pundits.

It’s the holidays and unfortunately not all the hawks took a break from agitating for confrontation with Iran. Here’s to giving all we’ve got in the New Year to working for peaceful means of conflict resolution.

*This week’s essential reading is “Hawks who learned Nothing” in Salon. Matthew Duss of the Center for American Progress reminds us that many of the same people who pushed for war with Iraq are calling for escalation with Iran.

Mainstream Media and Pundits:

Wall Street Journal: The hawkish editorial board says yet again that war is the answer (emphasis is mine):

The Hormuz threat is another opportunity to set boundaries on Iran’s rogue behavior. Washington, along with London, Paris and Riyadh, should say plainly that any attempt to close or disrupt traffic through the strait would be considered an act of war that would be met with a military response…

The article ends by echoing Bush-era preemptive war rhetoric:

Would the U.S. dare resist Iranian aggression if it meant putting American forces at risk of a nuclear reprisal? Better to act now to stop Iran before we have to answer that terrible question.

The WSJ’s logic with respect to Iran’s behavior is curious. Iran is accused of being irrational and having a “tantrum” but it’s unlikely that it would close the Strait or threaten to do so without feeling seriously threatened itself. It’s worth keeping in mind that Iran has had more than 30 years to block this vital supply route and has never done so.

Washington Post: Jennifer Rubin (who almost always quotes the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies when writing about Iran) does three things in this blog post. First she criticizes Leon Panetta for making “a mess of things” by expressing U.S. reservations about going to war with Iran. Then she asserts that there is only two options with Iran: punitive sanctions or war. Finally she repeats an argument regularly touted by pro-Israel hawks: the U.S. needs to save Israel from itself by preemptively going to war with Iran:

Ironic, isn’t it, that Obama should find himself in the same predicament as his predecessor: Preemptively strike a rogue regime or run the risk of regional and global catastrophe? There is one big difference, however. In Obama’s case, the Israelis will act if we don’t. And the margin for error, the degree of risk Israel is willing to incur, is much smaller than for us. Its existence and the entire Zioinist concept of a safe refuge for Jews is at stake.

Rubin also says “it’s impossible to know with certainty what the Iranians are up to” and yet she continues to make the case for confrontation. Like Iran’s authoritarian adjudicators, Rubin seems to be using guilty until proven innocent logic.

New York Times: John Vinocur’s alarmist article suggests war with Iran is just on the horizon. He quotes the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’s Mark Dubowitz who provides a quickly approaching deadline for sanctions (which he’s been aggressively pushing for) even though all success stories took years to bear results. Moreover, while analysts and Israeli officials doubt Israel’s strike capability and Israeli officials say an Iranian nuclear weapon does not pose an existential threat, Vinocur still suggests that Israel would go to war with Iran alone (by going over Iraq’s unsecured airspace!):

By some time next June, said Mr. Dubowitz, “If there’s no impact on Iranian oil revenue, then you’re at the end of the sanctions road.”

That’s 2012 ticking. The volume changes over the weekend.

With the end of 2011, the United States no longer holds responsibility for policing Iraqi airspace. Iraq has no replacement aircraft for now, and the shortest route for long-range Israeli F15Is to attack Iran’s nuclear sites will be wide open to them beginning Sunday.

Fox News: This panel discussing the Strait of Hormuz situation features Charles Krauthammer (who made last week’s posting) and Chuck Lane of the Washington Post. Their basic argument: impose a crippling embargo and more sanctions on Iran and go to war with it if it reacts by doing one of the only things it can do. Interestingly, Krauthammer admits that the Iranian government is reacting rather than acting unprovoked and is “weak”:

It’s doing it because the Obama administration is on the verge of imposing very serious sanctions on Iran which will essentially shut down at least gradually its oil exports and the Europeans are considering a boycott. That will really hurt the Iranian economy. The regime is already a weak one and worries about that, so it’s threatening.

Daily Beast/Commentary: Matthew Kroenig, the Georgetown Assistant Professor who wrote a poorly argued warmongering piece in Foreign Affairs (see responses here, here and here) finds fame with Eli Lake and Evelyn Gordon.

Past and Present U.S. Officials:

John Yoo: In case you missed it, the George W. Bush administration official who authored the infamous “torture memos” invokes Iraq war logic while pushing for war with Iran in the National Review. Writes Jim Lobe:

…his “case” for attacking Iran strikes me as extremely weak unless you believe, as his aggressive nationalist and neo-conservative colleagues do, that Washington can really do just about anything it likes and should, in any event, not be bound by silly concepts or institutions like international law or the UN Charter. Hence, his argument for ignoring the UN Security Council:

Just as national governments claim a monopoly on the use of force within their borders and in exchange offer police protection, the U.N. asks nations to give up their right to go to war and in exchange offers to police the world. But the U.N. has no armed forces of its own, has a crippled decision-making system, and lacks political legitimacy. It is contrary to both American national interests and global welfare because it subjects any intervention, no matter how justified or beneficial, to the approval of authoritarian nations.

John Bolton: George W. Bush’s UN ambassador is a favorite of Fox News and journalists soliciting a bellicose view from a former official. This week Bolton told Fox’s Jon Scott that the U.S. would crush Iran if it blocked the Strait of Hormuz while making some questionable claims:

Bolton: I’ve had many conversations with military officials here in this country over the years and it’s not bluster and it’s not boast, it’s a fact that if the Iranians tried to block the Straits of Hormuz [sic] it would be a matter of 2 or 3 days before the Straits [sic] were reopened. And the damage caused to Iran would not just be to its navy which would be on the bottom of the sea, but to a lot of land-based air and air defense mechanisms.

Scott: But if I’m in the Pentagon or if I’m advising the President and I’m presented with two scenarios, one, try to go after those hardened nuclear facilities that we know exist but that are very deep underground or potentially take out their navy in one swoop and maybe some anti-aircraft and military facilities along with it, I think I’d opt for option two.

Bolton: Well I’d opt for both options but I think it’s important to understand that those nuclear facilities that we know of at Natanz and Isfahan and Arak are not so deeply buried that they’re not very vulnerable, certainly to us, but even vulnerable to the Israelis as well and that really is what I think is most acute in Iran’s thoughts.

A check-in with Iran analyst Patrick Disney clarifies some misleading statements made by both Scott and Bolton. First, the Isfahan and Arak facilities are actually above ground. Second, Bolton seems to be exaggerating Israel’s strike capability. According to Disney:

Natanz is buried about 75 feet underground, but (as Matthew Kroenig said this week) could be destroyed with bunker buster bombs known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator which is capable of busting through 200 feet of concrete. So the US could destroy Natanz, but there’s a real doubt about Israel’s ability to destroy it alone, even with the bunker buster bombs that the Obama administration sent in 2009.

Disney also points out Kroenig’s problematic logic in his attack Iran piece:

Kroenig said multiple times this week that one of the red lines the US should have is any move by Iran to install advanced centrifuges (whether IR-2, IR-4 or some other variant) in the Fordow facility — something that strikes me as a very low standard for triggering military action. Iran already is operating advanced centrifuges at Natanz. Iran is already operating first-generation centrifuges at Fordow. It’s unclear why the introduction of advanced centrifuges into the Fordow facility would pose such a threat as to trigger military action. Not to mention…it’s kind of bizarre to say we should attack AFTER Iran puts next-generation centrifuges into Fordow, since one of the reasons we’d be concerned about them doing so is because the facility is invulnerable to attack.

It’s right there in the opinion section of the Washington Times, where even Frank Gaffney is zoomed in on the Muslim Brotherhood and has the decency not to mention Iran. (Gaffney’s piece is [...]]]> Everyone’s watching Egypt. Everyone. But Daniel Pipes sees right through it, to where Iran is lurking in the background.

It’s right there in the opinion section of the Washington Times, where even Frank Gaffney is zoomed in on the Muslim Brotherhood and has the decency not to mention Iran. (Gaffney’s piece is called “The Muslim Brotherhood is the Enemy“, and I didn’t read it, but searched it for ‘Iran’, ‘Tehran’, and ‘mullah’, and: nada.)

But not Pipes. The show must go on. (Just as Clarion Fund‘s “Iranium” premieres tomorrow.) Here’s Pipes’s lede:

As Egypt’s much-anticipated moment of crisis arrived and popular rebellions shook governments across the Middle East, Iran stands as never before at the center of the region. Its Islamist rulers are within sight of dominating the region. But revolutions are hard to pull off and I predict that Islamists will not achieve a Middle East-wide breakthrough and Tehran will not emerge as the key powerbroker.

Check out that deft change of subject in the first sentence!

Oh, and did you know that U.S. President Barack Obama is supporting the nasty Islamists in Egypt, the very Brotherhood that Gaffney is warning us about?

Sure, you say, democracy advocates from across the political spectrum are asking for Obama to do more to usher Egyptian dictator Honsi Mubarak out of power. But Pipes has a different story. He concludes:

Barack Obama initially reverted to the failed old policy of making nice with tyrants; now he is myopically siding with the Islamists against Mr. Mubarak.

The link for that Islamist allegation, from the version of the piece on Pipes’s hompage, goes to Obama’s catch-up speech on Thursday night after he spoke to Mubarak. Only Pipes saw the Islamist connection; he went to Harvard, you know, and runs a think tank.

But do tell, Pipes, what should Obama do?

He should emulate Bush but do a better job, understanding that democratization is a decades-long process that requires the inculcation of counter-intuitive ideas about elections, freedom of speech, and the rule of law.

If there’s any question about whether some neoconservatives are democratic opportunists for the purpose of scoring political points, that about settles it.

And the “inculcation of counter-intuitive ideas about elections, freedom of speech and the rule of law”? It seems to me that Egyptians, at this moment, are perfectly attuned to these notions. How racist.

And wasn’t the idea that all people have these aspirations at the very heart of Bush’s 2005 State of the Union? Jennifer Rubin, the neoconservative Washington Post blogger, cited that very passage in support of her hallucination “that it was the left that said that democracy was alien to the Middle East. Bush was right; they were wrong.” (Pipes may actually be on Rubin’s left.)

Elliott Abrams, too, hauled out a similar Bush passage — that everyone is ‘ready’ for democracy — when he presented his own bogus narrative that the Iraq War was being vindicated by current events. (Doesn’t Pipes read his comrades?)

Nonetheless, on Egypt: Eli Lake has a good piece on the New Republic about Bush’s failure to push for genuine reform in Egypt. We don’t really know exactly what’s going on in the White House right now, though we’re getting some hints (Mubarak will be out).

After reading Lake’s piece, what’s stands out as ironic is that Obama’s caution, at the moment, seems an awful lot like he’s already ‘emulating’ Bush. To do something about it, and call for or arrange Mubarak’s ouster, would indeed be doing a “better job” than Bush, as Pipes put it.

But Pipes can’t be bothered with details or history. It’s all about Iran.

Oh, and the guy in the Obama administration responsible for designing U.S. policy toward Iran (and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process) sits on the board of editors at Daniel Pipes’s pseudo-academic journal. How comforting is that?

House Foreign Affairs chief Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) was wondering about the “nefarious ends” of some “elements” there, and Jeffrey Goldberg, who, with shifting views, expressed apprehension about the Muslim Brotherhood (giving space to FDD’s Reuel Marc Gerecht, who [...]]]> Egypt is on everyone’s minds today in Washington, not least among them neoconservatives and pro-Israel hawks.

House Foreign Affairs chief Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) was wondering about the “nefarious ends” of some “elements” there, and Jeffrey Goldberg, who, with shifting views, expressed apprehension about the Muslim Brotherhood (giving space to FDD’s Reuel Marc Gerecht, who seems open to Islamism, apparently, and Eli Lake, who doesn’t think Egypt’s peace deal with Israel will collapse).

Goldberg, to his credit, is asking big questions. And one of the biggest right now is about Islamism, and it’s role in the future of the Middle East. It’s playing out most acutely today in Tunisia and Egypt, but has been simmering all over the region, from Gaza to Qom.

Opinion makers in the U.S. seem to be divided along the lines that define what M.J. Rosenberg has called the “status quo lobby” (SQL), those whose actions — or key inactions — have thwarted a robust role for the U.S. in Middle East peacemaking. Goldberg and Ros-Lehtinen fit the paradigm: Both unflinching SQLers, they wear their hesitance for the long-awaited Arab democratic uprising on their sleeves.

The tepid support for Egyptians is about fear of Islamists, and no totalitarian strain, but one that has transitioned to seeking democratic legitimacy and inclusion. Yet events unfold in Egypt that drown out that narrative of what Phil Weiss, in an eloquent, must-read essay, called the “false choice of secular dictator-or-crazy Islamists.”

A bearded, angry young Arab shouted into a camera that “whether you’re Muslim, whether you’re a Christian, whether you’re an atheist, you will demand your goddamn rights.” Police held their fire, and protesters their stones, to break for prayers. On Twitter, Marc Lynch, a professor at George Washington University, wrote that a key day of demonstrations went forward even without the internet because people already knew where to meet up: “[O]n Friday everybody knew mosques would be focal points, didn’t need to coordinate.”

But the “false choice” clings to life among adherents of the SQL, where it is considered infallible wisdom.

The New York Times gave us a pretty even handed account a few weeks back about Tunisia’s relatively moderate Islamist party, then hauled out  WINEP‘s Martin Kramer to unthinkingly denounce Islamism. (The Times also carried a pro-inclusion analyst.) Kramer, you see, hasn’t honestly answered or asked this question for decades.

Even Ben Birnbaum, a young reporter with the right-wing Washington Times, where he works with Lake, was asking himself some serious questions, too, on Twitter:

Do my mixed feelings about democracy in #Egypt make me a bad person? #Jan25

You get the feeling that Steve Coll had just the SQL in mind when he wrote, in the New Yorker, that the Tunisian Islamist party — the one that’s cool with “tourists sipping French wine in their bikinis”  – is “raising anxieties in some quarters.”

In other quarters, however, questions are being asked. Take Coll himself:

[T]he corrosive effects of political and economic exclusion in the region cannot be sustained—among them the legions of pent-up, angry young men, Islamist and otherwise.

Yes, he calls for Obama to “thwart” Islamists in Tunisia. But the New Yorker‘s Comment is a column that important people read, and they’re reading about important questions.

The delays in the Iranian program are important because they add strategic warning time for the West to respond to any Iranian push for a bomb. U.S. officials [...]]]> Here’s David Ignatius, in The Washington Post, writing about the revised Israeli intelligence estimates about an Iranian bomb (2015, if you must know), with my emphasis:

The delays in the Iranian program are important because they add strategic warning time for the West to respond to any Iranian push for a bomb. U.S. officials estimate that if Iran were to try a “break out” by enriching uranium at Natanz to the 90 percent level needed for a bomb, that move (requiring reconfiguration of the centrifuges) would be detectable – and it would take Iran one to two more years to make a bomb.

The Iranians could try what U.S. officials call a “sneak out” at a secret enrichment facility like the one they constructed near Qom. They would have to use their poorly performing (and perhaps still Stuxnet-infected) old centrifuges or an unproven new model. Alternative enrichment technologies, such as lasers or a heavy-water reactor, don’t appear feasible for Iran now, officials say. Foreign technology from Russia and other suppliers has been halted, and the Iranians can’t build the complex hardware (such as a “pressure vessel” needed for the heavy-water reactor) on their own.

And here’s Eli Lake in the Washington Times, with a good article on the same subject in which he talks with neoconservative pundit Patrick Clawson of WINEP, again with my emphasis:

Patrick Clawson, a specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said: “Certainly, the IAEA reports and what we hear from people knowledgeable about the nuclear program is that Iran is encountering significant technical problems.”

“The great worry is that Iran has clandestine facilities that will allow it to overcome these technical problems,” he said.

Now here’s Columbia professor Richard Bulliet, speaking at a forum called  “War With Iran?”, where the event poster featured a gas mask emblazoned with the Israeli, Iranian, and U.S. flags (video here; start at minute 41):

Recently I was reading about the buildup to the war on Iraq, and one of the things that became apparent as you look back… is that after 1991, the U.S. put sanctions on Iraq that were essentially sanctions that could not be positively satisfied. Iraq could say ‘okay, we have completely given up WMD.’ And we could say, ‘we don’t believe you, and the only way we can be sure is to get rid of your regime.’

My worry is that we’re moving a little bit in this direction with Iran, that we’re creating a focus on a sanctions regime that it may not be possible for Iran to ever satisfy the fear of the people that are putting on the sanctions.

…If you had a statement from Iran that ‘we have stopped purifying uranium,’ you would have some people who would say: ‘Well, underground someplace they’re still doing it; there are hidden facilities. There are centerfuges going day and night, and we just don’t know where they are doing it. They’re in Saddam’s palaces which have now been shipped to Iran.’

And under that circumstance, you get to a logic that’s saying, if you sanction a regime to get it to change its behavior, but you do not believe there are any circumstances under which a claim to behavior change would actually be credible, then regime change is your only option.

How many of the people that campaign most tirelessly for sanctions think that they will work? How many thought they were a good idea in Iraq for a decade, then went ahead and pushed for a war there anyway?

This last point is at the crux of critically examining sanctions–which hurt ordinary Iranians. In Iraq, infant mortality rose from 1 in 30, in 1990, to 1 in 8, in 1997. That’s more than a threefold increase, in just seven years, of babies who did not live to see their first birthdays.

There was no evidence in Iraq of a weapons of mass destructions program. Was it a result of those same sanctions? I couldn’t say. But I do know that neoconservatives and their allies in power remained determined, even with the draconian sanctions, to make war on Iraq.

Saying Iran remained his government’s biggest worry, Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon did not mention possible unilateral military strikes [...]]]>

(Reuters) – The United States and its allies have up to three years to curb Iran’s nuclear programme, which has been set back by technical difficulties and sanctions, a senior Israeli official said on Wednesday.

Saying Iran remained his government’s biggest worry, Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon did not mention possible unilateral military strikes by Israel, saying he hoped U.S.-led action against Tehran would be successful.

For as long as anyone can remember, Israel has been telling anyone who will listen (still a surprisingly large number, considering how wrong they’ve been) that Iran is around the corner from a nuclear weapons capability.

Justin Elliott was all over this ridiculousness in his excellent Salon article. And it came up at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies conference that I covered for LobeLog and Foreign Policy’s Middle East Channel.

At that conference, neoconservative Washington Times journalist Eli Lake had the best question of the whole two and a half days, on this very subject:

QUESTION: Thank you. This is a question for General Amidror.

Could you comment on why it seems Israeli estimates of the Iranian program have been one to two years away for about 10 years now?

Does this reflect the failure of your analysts or the success of your saboteurs?

Amirdror, ever the diplomatic general, answered “both.”

Back to Yaalon’s latest prediction. Reuters puts Israel’s Deputy PM’s views in context:

Yaalon had previously been hawkish on Iran, saying Israel, believed to have region’s only nuclear arsenal, should attack Iran rather than see it get the bomb.

All the prognosticating makes me want to take odds. But I’m afraid Yaalon might get the wrong idea if I asked, “Who wants to take this action?”