by James A. Russell
Russia’s storming of the Ukrainian naval base in Crimea just as Iran and world powers wrapped up another round of negotiations in Vienna earlier this week represent seemingly contradictory bookends to a world that some believe is spinning out of control.
It’s hard not to argue that the [...]]]>
by James A. Russell
Russia’s storming of the Ukrainian naval base in Crimea just as Iran and world powers wrapped up another round of negotiations in Vienna earlier this week represent seemingly contradictory bookends to a world that some believe is spinning out of control.
It’s hard not to argue that the world seems a bit trigger-happy these days. Vladimir Putin’s Russian mafia thugs armed with weapons bought with oil money calmly annex the Crimea. Chinese warships ominously circle obscure shoals in the Western Pacific as Japan and other countries look on nervously. Israel and Hezbollah appear eager to settle scores and start another war in Lebanon. Syria and Libya continue their descent into a medieval-like state of nature as the world looks on not quite knowing what to do.
The icing on the cake is outgoing Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s telling the United States to get stuffed and leave his country — after we’ve spent billions dollars of borrowed money and suffered thousands of casualties over 13 years propping up his corrupt kleptocracy. Karzai and his cronies are laughing all the way to their secret Swiss banks with their pockets stuffed full of US taxpayer dollars. Why the United States thinks it needs to maintain a military presence in Afghanistan remains a mystery — but that’s another story altogether.
In the United States, noted foreign policy experts like Senator John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Condoleeza Rice have greeted these developments with howls of protest and with a call to arms to reassert America’s global leadership to tame a world that looks like it’s spinning out of control. They appear to believe that we should somehow use force or the threat of force as an instrument to restore order. Never mind that these commentators have exercised uniformly bad judgment on nearly all the major foreign policy issues of the last decade.
The protests of these commentators notwithstanding, however, it is worth engaging in a debate about what all these events really mean; whether they are somehow linked and perhaps emblematic of a more important structural shift in international politics towards a more warlike environment. For the United States, these developments come as the Obama administration sensibly tries to take the country’s military off a permanent war-footing and slow the growth in the defense budget — a budget that will still see the United States spend more on its military than most of the rest of the world combined.
The first issue is whether the events in Crimea are emblematic of a global system in which developed states may reconsider the basic calculus that has governed decision-making since World War II — that going to war doesn’t pay. Putin may have correctly calculated that the West doesn’t care enough about Crimea to militarily stop Russia, but would the same calculus apply to Moldova, Poland, or some part of Eastern Europe? Similarly, would the Central Committee in Beijing risk a wider war in the Pacific over the bits of rocks in the South China Sea that are claimed by various countries?
While we can’t know the answer to these questions, the political leadership of both Russia and China clearly would face significant political, economic, and military costs in choosing to exercise force in a dispute in which the world’s developed states could not or would not back down. These considerations remain a powerful deterrent to a resumption of war between the developed states, events in Crimea notwithstanding– although miscalculations by foolhardy leaders are always a possibility. Putin could have chosen some other piece of real estate that might have led to a different reaction by the West, but it seems unlikely.
The second kind of inter-state dispute troubling the system are those between countries/actors that have a healthy dislike for one another. Clearly, the most dangerous of these situations is the relationship between India and Pakistan — two nuclear-armed states that have been exchanging fire directly and indirectly for much of the last half century. By the same token, however, there is really nothing new in this dispute that has remained a constant since both states were created after Britain’s departure from the subcontinent.
Similarly, the situation in the Middle East stemming from Israel’s still unfinished wars of independence remains a constant source of regional instability. Maybe one day, Israel and its neighbors will finally decide on a set of agreeable borders, but until they do we can all expect them to resort to occasional violence until the issue is settled. Regrettably, neither Israel nor its neighbors shows any real interest in peaceful accommodation.
The third kind of war is the intra-national conflicts like those in Syria, the Congo, and Libya that some believe is emblematic of a more general slide into a global state-of-nature Hobbesian world in which the weak perish and the strong survive. If this is the case, what if anything can be done about it?
Here again, however, we have to wonder what if anything is new with these wars. As much as we might not like it, internal political evolution in developing states can and often does turn violent until winners emerge. The West’s own evolution in Europe took hundreds of years of bloodshed until winners emerged and eventually established political systems capable of resolving disputes peacefully through politics and national institutions. The chaos in places like Syria, the Congo, Libya, and Afghanistan has actually been the norm of international politics over much of the last century — not the exception.
This returns us to the other bookend cited at the outset of this piece — the reconvened negotiations in Vienna that are attempting to resolve the standoff between Iran and the international community. These meetings point to perhaps the most significant change in the international system over the last century that has seen global institutions emerge as mechanisms to control state behavior through an incentive structure that discourages war and encourages compliance with generally accepted behavioral norms.
These institutions, such as the United Nations, and their supporting regulatory structures like the International Atomic Energy Agency have helped establish new behavioral norms and impose costs on states that do not comply with the norms. While we cannot be certain of what caused Iran to seek a negotiated solution to its standoff with the international community over its nuclear program, it is clear that the international community has imposed significant economic costs on Iran over the last eight years of ever-tightening sanctions.
Similarly, that same set of global institutions and regulatory regimes supported by the United States will almost certainly impose sanctions that will increase the costs of Putin’s violation of international norms in Russia’s seizure of Crimea. Those costs will build up over time, just as they have for Iran and other states like North Korea that find themselves outside of the general global political and economic system. As Iran has discovered, and as Russia will also discover — it’s an expensive and arguably unsustainable proposition to be the object of international obloquy.
For those hawks arguing for a more militarized US response to these disparate events, it’s worth returning to George F. Kennan’s basic argument for a patient, defensive global posture. Kennan argued that inherent US and Western strength would see it through the Cold War and triumph over its weaker foes in the Kremlin. As Kennan correctly noted: we were strong, they were weaker. Time was on our side, not theirs. The world’s networked political and economic institutions only reinforce the strength of the West and those other members of the international community that choose to play by the accepted rules for peaceful global interaction.
The same holds true today. Putin’s Russia is a paper tiger that is awash in oil money but with huge structural problems. Russia’s corrupt, mafia-like dictatorship will weaken over time as it is excluded from the system of global political and economic interactions that rewards those that play by the rules and penalizes those that don’t.
As for other wars around the world in places like Syria, we need to recognize they are part of the durable disorder of global politics that cannot necessarily be managed despite the awful plight of the poor innocent civilians and children — who always bear the costs of these tragic conflicts.
We need to calm down and recognize that the international system is not becoming unglued; it is simply exhibiting immutable characteristics that have been with us for much of recorded history. We should, however, be more confident of the ability of the system (with US leadership) to police itself and avoid rash decisions that will only make these situations worse.
Photo: A Russian armoured personnel carrier in Simferopol, the provincial capital of Crimea. Credit: Zack Baddorf/IPS.
]]>via IPS News
While some kind of U.S. military action against Syria in the coming days appears increasingly inevitable, the debate over the why and how of such an attack has grown white hot here.
On one side, hawks, who span the political spectrum, argue that President Barack Obama’s credibility [...]]]>
via IPS News
While some kind of U.S. military action against Syria in the coming days appears increasingly inevitable, the debate over the why and how of such an attack has grown white hot here.
On one side, hawks, who span the political spectrum, argue that President Barack Obama’s credibility is at stake, especially now that Secretary of State John Kerry has publicly endorsed the case that the government of President Bashar Al-Assad must have been responsible for the alleged chemical attack on a Damascus suburb that was reported to have killed hundreds of people.
Just one year ago, Obama warned that the regime’s use of such weapons would cross a “red line” and constitute a “game-changer” that would force Washington to reassess its policy of not providing direct military aid to rebels and of avoiding military action of its own.
After U.S. intelligence confirmed earlier this year that government forces had on several occasions used limited quantities of chemical weapons against insurgents, the administration said it would begin providing arms to opposition forces, although rebels complain that nothing has yet materialised.
The hawks have further argued that U.S. military action is also necessary to demonstrate that the most deadly use of chemical weapons since the 1988 Halabja massacre by Iraqi forces against the Kurdish population there – a use of which the US. was fully aware but did not denounce at the time – will not go unpunished.
Military action should be “sufficiently large that it would underscore the message that chemical weapons as a weapon of mass destruction simply cannot be used with impunity,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), told reporters in a teleconference Monday. “The audience here is not just the Syrian government.”
While the hawks, whose position is strongly backed by the governments of Britain, France, Gulf Arab kingdoms and Israel, clearly have the wind at their backs, the doves have not given up.
Remembering Iraq
Recalling the mistakes and distortions of U.S. intelligence in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, some argue that the administration is being too hasty in blaming the Syrian government.
If it waits until United Nations inspectors, who visited the site of the alleged attack Monday, complete their work, the United States could at least persuade other governments that Washington is not short-circuiting a multilateral process as it did in Iraq.
Many also note that military action could launch an escalation that Washington will not necessarily be able to control, as noted by a prominent neo-conservative hawk, Eliot Cohen, in Monday’s Washington Post.
“Chess players who think one move ahead usually lose; so do presidents who think they can launch a day or two of strikes and then walk away with a win,” wrote Cohen, who served as counsellor to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “The other side, not we, gets to decide when it ends.”
“What if [Obama] hurls cruise missiles at a few key targets, and Assad does nothing and says, ‘I’m still winning.’ What do you then?” asked Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.), who served for 16 years as chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. “Do you automatically escalate and go up to a no-fly zone and the challenges that entails, and what then if that doesn’t get [Assad's] attention?
“This is fraught with tar-babiness,” he told IPS in a reference to an African-American folk fable about how Br’er Rabbit becomes stuck to a doll made of tar. “You stick in your hand, and you can’t get it out, so you then you stick in your other hand, and pretty soon you’re all tangled up all this mess – and for what?”
“Certainly there are more vital interests in Iran than in Syria,” he added. “You can’t negotiate with Iran if you start bombing Syria,” he said, a point echoed by the head of the National Iranian American Council, Trita Parsi.
“There is a real opportunity for successful diplomacy on the Iranian nuclear issue, but that opportunity will either be completely spoiled or undermined if the U.S. intervention in Syria puts the U.S. and Iran in direct combat with each other,” he told IPS. Humanitarian concerns and U.S. credibility should also be taken into account when considering intervention, he said.
Remembering Kosovo
Still, the likelihood of military action – almost certainly through the use of airpower since even the most aggressive hawks, such as Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham, have ruled out the commitment of ground troops – is being increasingly taken for granted here.
Lingering questions include whether Washington will first ask the United Nations Security Council to approve military action, despite the strong belief here that Russia, Assad’s most important international supporter and arms supplier, and China would veto such a resolution.
“Every time we bypass the council for fear of a Russian or Chinese veto, we drive a stake into the heart of collective security,” noted Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “Long-term, that’s not in our interest.”
But the hawks, both inside the administration and out, are urging Obama to follow the precedent of NATO’s air campaign in 1999 against Serbia during the Kosovo War. In that case, President Bill Clinton ignored the U.N. and persuaded his NATO allies to endorse military intervention on humanitarian grounds.
The 78-day air war ultimately persuaded Yugoslav President Milosovic to withdraw his troops from most of Kosovo province, but not before NATO forces threatened to deploy ground troops, a threat that the Obama administration would very much like to avoid in the case of Syria.
While the administration is considered most likely to carry out “stand-off” strikes by cruise missiles launched from outside Syria’s territory to avoid its more formidable air-defence system and thus minimise the risk to U.S. pilots, there remains considerable debate as to what should be included in the target list.
Some hawks, including McCain and Graham, have called not only for Washington to bomb Syrian airfields and destroy its fleet of warplanes and helicopter and ballistic capabilities, but also to establish no-fly zones and safe areas for civilians and rebel forces to tilt the balance of power decisively against the Assad government. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, have urged the same.
But others oppose such far-reaching measures, noting that the armed opposition appears increasingly dominated by radical Islamists, some of them affiliated with Al Qaeda, and that the aim of any military intervention should be not only to deter the future use of chemical weapons but also to prod Assad and the more moderate opposition forces into negotiations, as jointly proposed this spring by Moscow and Washington. In their view, any intervention should be more limited so as not to provoke Assad into escalating the conflict.
Photo: Secretary of State John Kerry delivers remarks on Syria at the Department of State in Washington, DC, on August 26, 2013. Credit: State Department
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
When is a coup not a coup? When calling it that carries repercussions that make a bad situation worse.
US President Barack Obama is struggling with recent events in Egypt. Once again he’s presented with a situation in the Middle East where he has few good options but is [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
When is a coup not a coup? When calling it that carries repercussions that make a bad situation worse.
US President Barack Obama is struggling with recent events in Egypt. Once again he’s presented with a situation in the Middle East where he has few good options but is still facing expectations based on a long history of US influence over events — an influence that is no longer situated in reality.
In contrast to the revolution that deposed Hosni Mubarak two years ago, the ouster of Mohammed Morsi raises some profound questions, not only for foreign powers, but for Egyptians themselves. There is no doubt that Morsi brought a lot of this on himself. He neglected the major issue for almost all Egyptians, the economy; he shamelessly tried to grab dictatorial powers; he did not follow through on his campaign promises to include the widest spectrum of Egyptians in his government; and, when confronted with all of this, he remained obstinate.
All of that led to the June 30 demonstrations, organized by young Egyptians of the grassroots Tamarod (Rebel) movement, which included both the liberal and Salafist camps. That is a wide spectrum of Egyptians demanding Morsi to resign. The military — the power that controlled Egypt until Mubarak’s fall — stepped in very quickly and gave Morsi two days to respond before removing him from the presidency. It is not unreasonable to say that the military action was hasty. It certainly was likely, from the onset, to split Egypt between Mulsim Brotherhood supporters (even if they agreed that Morsi had bungled the job and needed to go, an opinion that was far from rare among those who opposed the military action) and those supporting the military’s action.
The military removed a sitting and democratically elected president; that’s a coup, and everyone knows it. Whether or not it should be officially dubbed as such, with all the accompanying policy ramifications, is a different matter. For the radical neoconservative, Elliott Abrams, US aid to Egypt should be cut off, as US law demands when a coup occurs. In this, Abrams stands against the desires of the Israeli government as well as the Obama administration. But he does not stand alone.
Democratic Senator Carl Levin and Republican Senator John McCain are also calling for the suspension of aid to Egypt. The concern, which they share with Abrams, is that the Egyptian military needs a stern warning in order to move with all deliberate speed toward restoring a civilian government. Elections are the key.
By contrast, many other members of Congress from both parties are supporting Obama in his determination not to cut funds for Egypt. The reasoning here is that the Egyptian economy is already reeling badly and cutting off US aid would not only exacerbate that situation, it also removes what leverage we might have in pushing the SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) toward relinquishing power.
Both bits of thinking are misguided. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have already moved to bolster their position in Egypt by pledging $8 billion to help Egypt weather its economic crisis. The gift is being given for reasons beyond promoting Egyptian stability. The Saudi/UAE rivalry with Qatar took a strong pro-Saudi turn with the deposition of Morsi. Qatar had backed him, as they had backed the Muslim Brotherhood and the rise of that brand of Islamism throughout the region. But even before this, the succession of power in Qatar was already leading to Qatari adventurism’s end in the region. The Saudi/UAE support is meant to push that process along and cement Egypt against a Brotherhood revival.
This is surely met with approval in virtually all corners of Washington and Jerusalem, and, it should be added, within significant segments of Egypt. The SCAF wants the Brotherhood marginalized, as does the United States. But with the SCAF bringing this about in such a direct and draconian manner – mass arrests, heavy-handed use of force and shutting down media outlets deemed pro-Brotherhood — there is a real risk of undermining fragile hopes for stability in Egypt.
Obama is right in resisting calls to label the coup a coup. Yes, it’s playing fast and loose with both the truth and with US law, but no good is going to come out of alienating the SCAF and cooling our relationship with it. The plan the SCAF has in place is actually a pretty good one, if it plays out as written. The Western myopia that defines democracy through the ballot box will not serve well in Egypt. Before new elections, a constitution must be at least provisionally in place, lest we witness a repeat of June 30. It was this lack of structure that allowed Morsi to abuse his power and gave the Egyptian people no recourse to address that abuse but to march for his ouster.
But for even a constitutional structure to bring stability to Egypt, it will need to be as inclusive a process as possible, and that means finding a way to include the Muslim Brotherhood. Right now, the SCAF seems intent on marginalizing and radicalizing them. No doubt, the Saudis and other Gulf states are not unhappy with that state of affairs. Israel, too, is probably content with seeing the SCAF undermine not only the Brotherhood in Egypt, but pushing back the regional aspirations of the other Brotherhood branches and similar Islamist parties (not least the one in Turkey, the ruling AKP, whose own increasing lean toward Islamism could be discouraged by these events).
Less value is being placed on finding a way to reset the Egyptian revolution while not radicalizing the Brotherhood. It’s a complicated issue. The Brotherhood’s own behavior, even before June 30, indicates the comfort level they have with their familiar position of a besieged and persecuted opposition, a role they are quickly assuming once again. Right now, they’re assuming that role in isolation, but if Egypt’s economy continues to flounder, if the SCAF continues its heavy-handed approach and, most especially, if whatever government finally takes hold is deemed as inadequate as Morsi’s, they could find themselves in a popular position once again, as in 2011.
The US, and the Europeans, are in a position to influence some method of including the Brotherhood in Egypt’s future government. Indeed, the US seems to have already begun trying, though the approach was ham-handed and the Brotherhood interpreted the effort, not surprisingly, as an attempt to get them to legitimize the coup.
It is not the time for the US to try to bully Egypt or to taint whatever good relationships it has, and it still has a good one with the SCAF. But the US must recognize that a lot of its friends are holdovers from the Mubarak regime and that too much interference is very likely to backfire. A gentle and understated hand is necessary to help convince the SCAF and the currently forming technocratic government to work hard to include the Brotherhood as partners while still bringing in a government that will be very different from the one that was just toppled. That needs to be the key feature of the constitutional process. It is possible that this is what the Obama administration intends and, if so, they must stand fast against foolhardy voices like those of Levin, McCain and especially Abrams.
Photo Credit: Hossam el-Hamalawy
]]>by Jim Lobe
Exactly three weeks ago, a confident Dennis Ross, President Barack Obama’s top Iran policy-maker for most of his first term, made the following assessments and predictions in an op-ed entitled, ironically, “Don’t Discount the Iranian Election:”
So now Ayatollah Khamenei has decided not to leave anything [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
Exactly three weeks ago, a confident Dennis Ross, President Barack Obama’s top Iran policy-maker for most of his first term, made the following assessments and predictions in an op-ed entitled, ironically, “Don’t Discount the Iranian Election:”
So now Ayatollah Khamenei has decided not to leave anything to chance. …If there had been any hope that Iran’s presidential election might offer a pathway to different policy approaches on dealing with the United States, he has now made it clear that will not be the case. His action should be seen for what it is: a desire to prevent greater liberalization internally and accommodation externally.”
…Clearly, the Supreme Leader wanted to avoid the kind of excitement that Rafsanjani would have stirred up had he continued making public statements, as he has over the last two years, about Iran’s need to fix the economy and reduce Iran’s isolation internationally (a theme he has emphasized in recent years). But the exclusion of Rafsanjani from the election is also an important signal to anyone concerned about Iran’s nuclear program. If the Supreme Leader had been interested in doing a deal with the West on the Iranian nuclear program, he would have wanted [former President Akbar Hashemi] Rafsanjani to be president.
I say that …because if the Supreme Leader were interested in an agreement, he would probably want to create an image of broad acceptability of it in advance. Rather than having only his fingerprints on it, he would want to widen the circle of decision-making to share the responsibility. And he would set the stage by having someone like Rafsanjani lead a group that would make the case for reaching an understanding. Rafsanjani’s pedigree as Khomeini associate and former president, with ties to the Revolutionary Guard and to the elite more generally, would all argue for him to play this role.
…(T)he fact that the Iranian media is lavishing attention on [Saeed] Jalili certainly suggests that he is Khamenei’s preference, even though he has the thinnest credentials of the lot.
If Jalili does end up becoming the Iranian president, it will be hard to avoid the conclusion that the Supreme Leader has little interest in reaching an understanding with the United States on the Iranian nuclear program.”
Three weeks later, we know not only that Jalili did not win the election, but that the candidate backed with enthusiasm by both Rafsanjani and former reformist president Mohammad Khatami — Hassan Rouhani — did. Moreover, during his campaign, Rouhani did exactly what, in Ross’s assessment, made Rafsanjani’s candidacy unacceptable to Ali Khamenei: he spoke “about Iran’s need to fix the economy and reduce Iran’s isolation internationally…” — themes which he repeated in his 90-minute post-election press conference. In addition, Rouhani — given his 15 years on the Supreme National Security Council — appears to be an excellent vehicle for creating “an image of broad acceptability of [an agreement on Iran's nuclear program] in advance” if Khamenei were interested in such an accord. And, although he isn’t a former president like Rafsanjani, Rouhani’s reputed ability to bridge differences between conservatives, pragmatists and reformists would help Khamenei “widen the circle of decision-making to share the responsibility” of a deal. He would also be well placed to “lead a group that would make the case for reaching an understanding.”
Thus, if we assume, as Ross did three weeks ago, that Khamenei leaves nothing to chance and has the power to do so — a very questionable assumption among actual Iran experts (see here and here for examples) — then we might also see Jalili’s defeat and Rouhani’s surprise victory on what was essentially Rafsanjani’s platform as clear signals that Khamenei is indeed “interested in doing a deal on the Iranian nuclear program.” The only missing element in this scenario was Rafsanjani who, as noted above, strongly backed Rouhani and helped rally the centrists and reformists behind him. In light of Ross’s previous assessments regarding how the supreme leader signals his intentions on nuclear negotiations, would it be unreasonable to expect that Ross would not only be somewhat humbler with respect to his understanding of Iranian politics, but also rather hopeful about prospects for a real deal?
On the question of humility, the answer is not really, at least judging by his latest analysis, entitled “Talk to Iran’s New President. Warily.” Ross doesn’t even mention Jalili, Khamenei’s previously presumed chosen one. And while Ross seems genuinely puzzled by why Khamenei “allowed Mr. Rowhani to win the election,” particularly in light of the fact that the president-elect had “run against current [Khamenei-approved] Iranian policies,” he still sees the supreme leader as all-powerful, implying that Rouhani would not have won had Khamenei not approved of his victory.
As to the meaning of Khamenei’s permitting Rouhani to win, Ross floats four possible options, none of which, however, admits the possibility that Khamenei is prepared “to do a deal” acceptable to the West (a possibility for which Ross, just three weeks before, believed could have been signaled by the Guardian Council’s approval of Rafsanjani’s candidacy). He does entertain the possibility that Rouhani gained Khamenei’s approval for reasons related to the nuclear issue, but strictly for tactical purposes — not to reach a final accord that would preclude Iran’s attaining “breakout capability” (as would presumably have been possible if Rafsanjani had won the presidency):
He [Khamenei] believes that Mr. Rowhani, a president with a moderate face, might be able to seek an open-ended agreement on Iran’s nuclear program that would reduce tensions and ease sanctions now, while leaving Iran room for development of nuclear weapons at some point in the future.
He believes that Mr. Rowhani might be able to start talks that would simply serve as a cover while Iran continued its nuclear program.
Ross, who has been arguing for several months now that Washington needs to drop its approach of seeking incremental confidence-building accords with Iran in favor of making a final ultimatum-like offer (backed up by ever-tougher sanctions and ever-more credible threats of military action) that would permit Tehran to enrich uranium up to five percent (subject to the strictest possible international oversight in exchange for a gradual easing of sanctions), goes on to reject any let-up in pressure on Tehran.
Even if he were given the power to negotiate, Mr. Rowhani would have to produce a deal the supreme leader would accept. So it is far too early to consider backing off sanctions as a gesture to Mr. Rowhani.
We should, instead, keep in mind that the outside world’s pressure on Iran to change course on its nuclear program may well have produced his election. So it would be foolish to think that lifting the pressure now would improve the chances that he would be allowed to offer us what we need: an agreement, or credible Iranian steps toward one, under which Iran would comply with its international obligations on the nuclear issue.”[Emphasis added.]
Now, I, for one, find this reasoning difficult to understand. Ross may be right that external pressure was responsible for Rouhani’s election, but I suspect that it was a good deal more complicated than that, and, in any event, one of the last people I would seek out for an explanation as to why Rouhani won would be Ross, given his assessments of Iranian politics just three weeks ago. But to assert that easing pressure on Iran once Rouhani takes office (as a goodwill gesture) would somehow reduce the chances that Rouhani would be allowed to make concessions on the nuclear issue just doesn’t make much sense, if, for no other reason, virtually all Iran experts agree that Khamenei (and presumably hard-liners in and around his office) don’t believe Washington really wants an agreement because its ultimate goal is regime change. (Just today, Khamenei, while insisting that “resolving the nuclear issue would be simple” if hostile powers put aside their stubbornness, noted, “Of course, the enemies say in their words and letters that they do not want to change the regime, but their approaches are contrary to these words.”) If Khamenei is to be persuaded otherwise, Washington should work to bolster Rouhani and the forces that supported him in the election.
Indeed, most Iran specialists whose work I read argue that Rouhani’s election has really put the “ball in President Obama’s court”, as the International Crisis Group’s Ali Vaez wrote this week. They say that the response should not only be goodwill gestures, such as a congratulatory letter on his inauguration, but far more generous offers than what has been put on the table to date. Vali Nasr, for example, made the point last week when he argued that Rouhani “will likely wait for a signal of American willingness to make serious concessions before he risks compromise.”
For the past eight years, U.S. policy has relied on pressure — threats of war and international economic sanctions — rather than incentives to change Iran’s calculus. Continuing with that approach will be counterproductive. It will not provide Rowhani with the cover for a fresh approach to nuclear talks, and it could undermine the reformists generally by showing they cannot do better than conservatives on the nuclear issue.
…There is now both the opportunity and the expectation that Washington will adopt a new approach to strengthen reformists and give Rowhani the opening that he needs if he is to successfully argue the case for a deal with the P5+1.”
Paul Pillar made a similar point in the National Interest last week:
Rouhani’s election presents the United States and its partners with a test — of our intentions and seriousness about reaching an agreement. Failure of the test will confirm suspicions in Tehran that we do not want a deal and instead are stringing along negotiations while waiting for the sanctions to wreak more damage. …Passage of the test …means not making any proposal an ultimatum that is coupled with threats of military force, which only feed Iranian suspicions that for the West the negotiations are a box-checking prelude to war and regime change.”
“The Iranian electorate has in effect said to the United States and its Western partners, “We’ve done all we can. Among the options that the Guardian Council gave us, we have chosen the one that offers to get us closest to accommodation, agreement and understanding with the West. Your move, America.”
And, in contrast to Ross, who believes that time is fast running out and the “multilateral step-by-step approach …has outlived its usefulness,” the Brookings Institution’s Suzanne Maloney argued in Foreign Affairs that
To overcome the deep-seated (and not entirely unjustified) paranoia of its ultimate decision-maker, the United States will need to be patient. It will need to understand, for example, that Rouhani will need to demonstrate to Iranians that he can produce tangible rewards for diplomatic overtures. That means that Washington should be prepared to offer significant sanctions relief in exchange for any concessions on the nuclear issue. Washington will also have to understand that Rouhani may face real constraints in seeking to solve the nuclear dispute without exacerbating the mistrust of hard-liners.
In spite of this advice, things are moving in the opposite direction. On July 1, tough new sanctions to which Obama has already committed himself will take effect. Among other provisions, they will penalise companies that deal in rials or with Iran’s automotive sector. The Republican-led House is expected to pass legislation by the end of next month (that is, on the eve of Rouhani’s inauguration) that would sharply curb or eliminate the president’s authority to waive sanctions on countries and companies doing any business with Iran, thus imposing a virtual trade embargo on Iran. Other sanctions measures, including an anticipated effort by Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham to get an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) resolution passed by the Senate after the August recess, are lined up.
It would be good to learn what Ross, who is co-chairing the new Iran task force of the ultra-hawkish Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, thinks of these new and pending forms of pressure and whether they are likely to improve the chances that Rouhani will be able to deliver a deal.
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
Outside of Iran, there is no doubt that the biggest losers in Iran’s election this past weekend were the Likud government in Israel and its supporters, especially neoconservatives, in the United States.
The response of Israel’s Prime Minister to the election of centrist candidate Hassan Rouhani as [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
Outside of Iran, there is no doubt that the biggest losers in Iran’s election this past weekend were the Likud government in Israel and its supporters, especially neoconservatives, in the United States.
The response of Israel’s Prime Minister to the election of centrist candidate Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s next President was almost comical in its sharp reversal from the rhetoric of the past eight years. As was widely reported, Benjamin Netanyahu said that it was Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and not the president who set nuclear policy.
That is, of course, true, and it is precisely what opponents of an attack on Iran have been saying for the past eight years. Netanyahu and his neocon allies, on the other hand, were repeatedly pointing to outgoing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the fearsome specter, the man who wanted to “wipe Israel off the map” and must be prevented from acquiring the means to do so. With Ahmadinejad gone, and, much to the surprise of many observers, not replaced by someone from the arch-conservative (or, in Iranian political terms, principlist) camp, the hawks have lost their best tool for frightening people and getting them behind the idea of attacking Iran.
So, Netanyahu has stepped up his push for a hard line on Iran, saying, “The international community must not become caught up in wishful thinking and be tempted to relax the pressure on Iran to stop its nuclear program.” Netanyahu is admitting that all the rhetoric around Ahemdinejad was insincere, and that the Iranian president is only relevant insofar as his visage can be used to whip people into a frenzy behind his call for war.
He has plenty of support in the United States. As the Iranian election results were coming in on Saturday, the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Josh Block of The Israel Project and other, similar sources tweeted incessantly about how meaningless the elections were. Ahmadinejad was exactly what the hawks wanted, an Iranian leader who displayed fiery rhetoric, was confrontational with the West and expressed hostility toward Israel and even Jews more broadly (though his frequently cited statement about wiping Israel off the map was fabricated, he did host a conference of leading Holocaust deniers, for instance, among other incidents). Rouhani, a man determined to project an air of reasonableness, makes the drumbeat for war harder to sustain.
Recognizing this, Netanyahu, his friends at Commentary Magazine, and similar extremists have warned against getting “caught up in wishful thinking” regarding Rouhani. Already, there have been declarations that Israel’s hoped-for attack on Iran has been set back by at least another year. And even the tentative, merely polite response from US President Barack Obama has been met with apoplexy from the radical hawks.
So, what does Rouhani mean for US and Israeli policy? Of course, it is very true, as opponents of war on Iran have been saying for years, that the Supreme Leader, not the President, makes the major decisions in Iran. But, just as the Likud/Neocon campaign to use Ahmadinejad as the face of Iran was disingenuous, so too is their current attempt to contend that the Iranian president, and this election is meaningless.
The Iranian President is not like the Israeli one or the British monarchy; that is, it is not a merely ceremonial role. As we have seen repeatedly, the President of Iran handles quite a bit of the public diplomacy of the Islamic Republic, and he has considerable influence over domestic issues, appointments and other facets of government. When the Iranian people made their choice, it was far from a meaningless one.
One event, prior to the election, was particularly telling. A few days before, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called on all Iranians to vote. This was not just a “get out the vote” pitch, as we see so often in the United States. After the events of 2009, there was, quite understandably, widespread cynicism among moderates and reformists in Iran. Khamenei drove the point home by encouraging even those who “do not support the Islamic system” to cast their ballots. The result was a fantastically high voter turnout: 72.7% according to the Iranian Interior Ministry, a figure that was supported by virtually all reports from the ground. Combined with the eleventh hour joining of forces behind Rouhani, this turned into a mandate for centrism over the hardline conservative views that Khamenei himself holds and that have dominated Iranian politics for most of the past decade.
While it’s a little much to assume that Khamenei’s call to vote would bring victory to a man who, while hardly a radical reformist, clearly sees things differently than Iran’s Supreme Leader, he surely knew it was a possibility. Why would he do that?
The events of 2009 are quite likely the answer. The contested presidential election of that year, and the protests, violence and national schism it produced did a lot of harm to Khamenei and Iran. The interior breech has not yet healed; more than that, the Green Movement and the Islamic Republic’s response damaged Iran in the international arena. It made it much easier to ratchet up the calls for war in the US (even if they have not reached the tipping point Netanyahu and his neocon friends hoped) and, with the subsequent events of the Arab Awakening, it undermined Iran’s efforts to usurp Saudi Arabia’s position in the region. Instead of the image Iran wants to portray — that of an Islamic Republic whose 1979 revolution threw off Western domination — it appeared more like the Arab regimes whose time seems to have finally run out.
There can be little doubt that Khamenei’s willingness to risk a new president who holds different views about Iran’s domestic politics and international strategy was meant to address those wounds from 2009. And therein lies the real opportunity.
Rouhani was elected by promising to fix the economy, improve Iran’s international standing, including with the West, and relaxing some social laws. Both of the first two are inseparable from the standoff with the US and Israel. How far is Khamenei willing to go to break that impasse?
On Tuesday, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Iran was willing to stop its enrichment of uranium to 20% levels, if “substantial reciprocal steps” were forthcoming. No doubt, the hawks consider this more deception, but Rouhani has also called for greater transparency for the Iranian nuclear program as well.
This is a real opportunity, and one that the United States and Europe must explore to the fullest. If the hawks are right, then this is the easiest way to prove that. Which, conversely, makes it all the more encouraging that Iran seems to be making the first move toward accommodation.
This is not speculation that Khamenei has suddenly had a radical shift in outlook. After all, his call to vote came after the usual politicking, and political shenanigans, that trims the list of candidates to one that the Guardian Council, and by extension, Khamenei approves of. Still, that list included not only Rouhani, but also Mohammadreza Aref, a reform-minded candidate than Rouhani who withdrew voluntarily to increase Rouhani’s chances of winning.
And it is not at all difficult to believe that, after eight years of increasing tension, declining Iranian prestige in the Middle East and an economy reeling under the weight of Western sanctions, Khamenei may wish to pursue a new strategy, one which holds the possibility of reversing those trends and perhaps resolving, or at least significantly ameliorating, some of the vexing problems that Iran faces and which, eventually, could destabilize his regime.
It is perfectly sensible, politically. Now is the time for Barack Obama to close his ears to a Congress that frames the issue as an Iranian choice between war and total capitulation and ignores even the experts it calls to its hearings, in favor of Netanyahu’s paranoia, and his lunatic demands. Obama has an opportunity to test Iranian intentions right away, and very possibly, to march the region back from yet another bloody misadventure.
]]>Sometimes a child is able to drag a parent into doing something the parent might not really want to do—say, taking the kid to an amusement park—through a two-step process. The first step is to nag, repeatedly and insistently, about going to the park. The parent, [...]]]>
Sometimes a child is able to drag a parent into doing something the parent might not really want to do—say, taking the kid to an amusement park—through a two-step process. The first step is to nag, repeatedly and insistently, about going to the park. The parent, not wanting to be bothered about such a chore, tries to buy time and assuage the child by saying that they aren’t going to the park now but they will when a suitable day arises. After some time goes by and the trip to the amusement park still has not been taken, the child’s theme becomes, “But you promised.” The issue is framed no longer just in terms of the pros and cons of going to the amusement park but also in terms of the parent’s credibility. The parent, worried about maintaining credibility of both promises and threats on other possible matters, gives in.
A similar process is occurring with some of those who, for whatever ill-conceived reason, would welcome a war with Iran. With some of the same people, it is occurring also with the nearer-term issue of intervening in the civil war in Syria. In each case step one is agitation in favor of threatening the use of military force. Step two is to argue that unless the threat is carried out, U.S. credibility will be damaged. Similar to the child who wants to go to the amusement park, the same persons whose urgings led us to get into an option-reducing box then yammer about the damage that results from being in that box, unless we get out of it in the particular way they want.
On Iran, it is hard to know exactly how President Obama, in his innermost thoughts, views the nuclear activities of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is a fair guess that he does not subscribe to the repeatedly expressed notion that those activities constitute the Greatest Threat to Mankind in Our Time. He clearly does not want a war with Iran. But he is faced with repeated, insistent nagging about this from the government of Israel, and thus from those in the United States who support that government, and thus with all of the U.S. political implications that implies. Not wanting to have his presidency completely sidelined by such things, he tries to buy time and assuage the naggers by saying that an Iranian nuclear weapon would be unacceptable and that all options are on the table to prevent that eventuality. His statements are already fodder for lots of warnings about how badly U.S. credibility supposedly would be harmed if he does not make good on the promise he seems to have made. Some of the loudest voices in making those warnings are those whose pestering pressured him into making the promise in the first place.
On Syria, Mr. Obama seems to have allowed himself to be pushed into a similar box, with earlier statements about how President Assad must go and more recent ones about the use of chemical weapons as a “red line.” Some of the pressures to which he has been responding involve the same sort of two-step tactic as is being used on Iran. A glaring example is provided this week by Michael Singh of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. In an opinion piece titled “How to Make Diplomacy on Syria Succeed,” Singh argues that the United States “must credibly put on the table the option of military intervention,” including direct operations by U.S. forces and not just the arming of Syrian rebels. In a separate piece published on the same day and titled “U.S. Credibility on Iran at Stake in Syria,” Singh talks in the same breath as mentioning the “military option” that “Washington’s failure to push back on Iranian aggression in Syria” is undercutting “the credibility of Western warnings.” He goes on with more ominous language about a “vicious cycle” of lost influence in which “not just for Tehran” but elsewhere in the region “American influence is everywhere diminished.” What a deliciously constructed chain of entrapment: starting with the innocent goal of supporting diplomacy on Syria, we are led to threats of military force, and then to actual use of force, and then to the big prize of confrontation with Iran.
There are many things wrong with this, too numerous to mention them all. What Singh says, for example, about the impact of threats of U.S. military intervention on Syria diplomacy is inconsistent when considering the impact on both the thinking of the Syrian regime and its backers, on one hand, and the rebels and their backers, on the other. The commonly heard assertions about how threats of military force ought to aid the nuclear negotiations with Iran naively overlook how such threats are more likely to have counterproductive effects on Iranian perceptions and incentives, by lending credibility to the belief that Washington only wants regime change and to any arguments within the Iranian regime that it needs a nuclear deterrent. The talk about how actions in one theater are supposed to shape perceptions of U.S. credibility somewhere else also is inconsistent with the actual record of how governments assess the credibility of other governments.
Perhaps the most offensive thing about this approach is the manipulation involved in first pushing us—and our leaders—into a difficult position and then pushing us to do even more harmful things to get out of that same position. In a general way this is related not only to a kid who pesters his parent to go to the amusement park but also to the kid who killed his parents and then called for mercy because he was an orphan.
]]>by Ryan Costello
Fifty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy delivered a visionary commencement speech at American University where he called on Americans to reexamine their assumptions about peace, including with our then-archrival, the Soviet Union. In so doing, Kennedy challenged a mindset that has shaped modern American foreign policy: [...]]]>
by Ryan Costello
Fifty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy delivered a visionary commencement speech at American University where he called on Americans to reexamine their assumptions about peace, including with our then-archrival, the Soviet Union. In so doing, Kennedy challenged a mindset that has shaped modern American foreign policy: that diplomacy is appeasement and the only rational way to deal with rivals is through unyielding pressure and military force. Today, with President Barack Obama struggling to obtain a deal that ensures peace and prevents Iran’s increasingly authoritarian leaders from pursuing a nuclear weapon, Kennedy’s words resonate and offer guidance for a reinvigorated diplomatic approach to Iran.
As tensions with Iran rise, President Obama would be wise to heed Kennedy’s words “not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”
In 2008, when candidate Obama was drawing comparisons to President Kennedy for his idealism and soaring rhetoric, he openly challenged the anti-diplomacy mindset gripping U.S. policy. The young Senator’s willingness to engage face-to-face with the leaders of Iran and North Korea without preconditions was ridiculed by his opponents as a sign of his inexperience. But Obama stood firm and, upon entering the White House, his administration briefly attempted to reach out to Iran before altering course a year later in favor of escalating economic sanctions. While this reflected the Washington consensus that Iran will only respond to pressure, it has hardened Iran’s opposition to American interests.
Kennedy knew that a sole reliance on pressure and confrontation would be met in kind by the Soviet Union, increasing the likelihood of war. The same holds true for Iran today. As proponents of diplomacy warned, escalating pressure has strengthened Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s power, devastating reformists and limiting avenues for internal change. Iran is responding by continuing to advance its nuclear program and, as the State Department warned last month, surging its support for terror groups to levels not seen in two decades.
Now, with hawks from both parties calling for a cessation of the intermittent diplomatic talks and enhanced military pressure, the President is dangerously close to falling victim to a policy of brinksmanship that puts us on the path to war.
Months before his speech, Kennedy faced the very real possibility of nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy stymied the hawks within his administration who pushed for strikes on missile sites and an invasion of Cuba, which would have almost certainly triggered nuclear war. Through deft diplomacy, Kennedy offered Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviets an exit from the escalating tensions, allowing both sides to save face. Narrowly avoiding nuclear war had a profound impact on Kennedy, a “cold warrior”, and helped shape his stirring words delivered that summer at American University.
In an era where superpowers with rival ideologies clashed on the global stage, Kennedy challenged the “dangerous, defeatist,” the belief that peace is not possible, and that “war is inevitable.” Since the challenges of international politics are man-made, he argued, they will never be out of mankind’s capacity to solve. Kennedy explained that peace need not be the result of a “sudden revolution in human nature” called for by the naïve, and could be achievable through “a gradual evolution in human institutions — on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned.”
Despite the hostile rhetoric of Soviet propaganda, which described the United States as bloodthirsty imperialists eager to launch preventive war, Kennedy warned that “no government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.” Further, we must “persevere in the search for peace in the hope that constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond us.”
We are fortunate that the Cold War did not end in conflict. But the final chapters of our cold war with Iran have not yet been written.
Today, many policymakers believe that the pursuit of peace with Iran is foolhardy and that preventive war must remain “on the table.” Iran’s leaders meanwhile echo the propaganda of the Soviet leadership. Our decades of mutual mistrust have seemingly created a wall in which only animosity and barbs can penetrate. If Kennedy were alive today, he might warn President Obama about these “dangerous, defeatist” beliefs. Continuing to allow those beliefs to bind us to a policy of isolation, military pressure and continually escalating sanctions will only further undermine the reformist movement, strengthen Khamenei’s power and increase the likelihood of a spark igniting the flames of war.
But Iran cannot forever remain a pariah, cut off from the international community, stifling the hopes and aspirations of its people. And the United States cannot afford another bloody, open-ended conflict in the Middle East. To achieve the deal, we will need to challenge our assumptions, break away from the cycle of mutual escalation and put our full weight behind diplomacy.
As Kennedy warned, “I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war — and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.” Let’s hope his warning still resonates today.
– Ryan Costello is a policy fellow with the National Iranian American Council and a graduate of American University’s School of International Service.
]]>via IPS News
Ten years after right-wing and liberal hawks came together to push the U.S. into invading Iraq, key members of the two groups appear to be reuniting behind stronger U.S. military intervention in Syria.
While the liberals appear motivated by a desire to stop the [...]]]>
via IPS News
Ten years after right-wing and liberal hawks came together to push the U.S. into invading Iraq, key members of the two groups appear to be reuniting behind stronger U.S. military intervention in Syria.
While the liberals appear motivated by a desire to stop the violence and prevent its spread across borders, their right-wing colleagues, particularly neo-conservatives, see U.S. intervention as key to dealing Iran a strategic defeat in the region.
“…[T]he most important strategic goal continues to be to defeat Iran, our main adversary in the region,” according to Tuesday’s lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal.
“The risks of a jihadist victory in Damascus are real, at least in the short-term, but they are containable by Turkey and Israel,” the editorial asserted. “The far greater risk to Middle East stability and U.S. interests is a victorious arc of Iranian terror from the Gulf to the Mediterranean backed by nuclear weapons.”
The immediate impetus for the reunion between the country’s two interventionist forces seems related primarily to charges that Syrian security forces have used chemical weapons in several attacks on insurgents and growing fears that the two-year-old civil war is spilling over into and destabilising neighbouring countries.
Those fears gained greater urgency this week when Israeli warplanes twice attacked targets close to Damascus and reports surfaced that Lebanon’s Hezbollah has sharply escalated its role in actively defending the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
Both developments appear to have emboldened hawks here, particularly neo-conservatives who have sought for more than two decades to make the overthrow of the Assad dynasty in Damascus a major priority for U.S. Mideast policy and now see the conflict in Syria as a proxy war between Iran and Israel.
War-weariness and public disillusionment with U.S. interventions they championed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as President Barack Obama’s oft-expressed reservations about the wisdom of engaging in yet another war in a predominantly Muslim country, had kept the neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks at bay.
But a combination of an ever-climbing death toll, Hezbollah’s increased involvement, the rise of radical Islamist groups within the insurgency, and the initial –albeit yet to be confirmed — estimates by U.S., Israeli, and Western European intelligence agencies that Assad’s forces have used chemical weapons, as well as Obama’s apparently offhand public warnings during last year’s election campaign that such use would cross a “red line”, have propelled some prominent liberals – most recently, New York Times columnist Bill Keller and former senior Obama policy official Anne Marie Slaughter — into their camp.
Led by the Wall Street Journal and William Kristol’s Weekly Standard, the neo-conservatives remain the most aggressive among the hawks in their advice, just as they were in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Thus, providing weapons to selected rebel groups – an option which the administration is considered most likely to exercise if the evidence of chemical weapons use by government forces is confirmed – is no longer considered sufficient.
“At this stage, (a better outcome of the conflict), this would require more than arming some rebels,” according to the Journal editorial. “It probably means imposing a no-fly zone and air strikes against Assad’s forces.
“We would not rule out the use of American and other ground troops to secure the chemical weapons,” the editorial writer added in a notable deviation from assurances offered by the hawks’ two most prominent Congressional champions – Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham – who, in deference to public opinion, have said repeatedly that putting U.S. “boots on the ground” should be off the table.
This echoed Kristol’s own editorial in the Standard published on the weekend. Arming the rebels, he wrote, “could well be too little, too late. …It’s hard to see what a serious response would be short of direct American engagement – perhaps a combination of enforcement of a no-fly zone and aerial attacks. And no serious president would rule out a few boots on the ground…”
The Journal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign-policy columnist, Bret Stephens, weighed in with even more specific advice Tuesday.
He called for Obama to “disable the runways of Syrian air bases, including the international airport in Damascus; …[u]se naval assets to impose a no-fly zone over western Syria; …[s]upply the Free Syrian Army with heavy military equipment, including armored personnel carriers and light tanks; [and b]e prepared to seize and remove Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, even if it means putting boots (temporarily) on the ground.”
Liberal hawks have been less precise about what needs to be done, but their sense of urgency in favour of escalating U.S. military intervention – beginning with supplying the rebels with weapons – appears no less intense.
Slaughter, who served for two years as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s policy planning chief and, as an influential Princeton University international-relations professor, urged U.S. intervention in both Iraq and Libya, publishedan op-ed in the Washington Post that warned that Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria brought forth the spectre of the Rwandan genocide.
“For all the temptation to hide behind the decision to invade Iraq based on faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, Obama must realize the tremendous damage he will do to the United States and to his legacy if he fails to act,” she wrote, without prescribing precisely what he should do.
Keller, who described himself as a “reluctant hawk” in an influential 1,500-word op-ed on the eve of the 2003 Iraq invasion, provided somewhat more detailed advice in 1,300-word, very prominently placed op-ed entitled “Syria is Not Iraq” Wednesday in which he quoted Slaughter, among other liberal hawks.
“The United States moves to assert control of the arming and training of rebels – funnelling weapons through the rebel Supreme Military Council, cultivating insurgents who commit to negotiation an orderly transition to a non-sectarian Syria,” he wrote.
“We make clear to President Assad that if he does not cease his campaign of terror and enter negotiations on a new order, he will pay a heavy price. When he refuses, we send missiles against his military installations until he, or more likely those around him, calculate that they should sue for peace.”
Keller, who several years after the Iraq invasion offered a somewhat muted apology for supporting that war, stressed that he did not “mean to make this sound easy,” but stressed that a disastrous outcome “is virtually inevitable if we stay out [of the conflict]. …Why wait for the next atrocity?” he asked.
“Iraq should not keep us from doing the right thing in Syria…,’’ according to the op-ed’s subhead.
]]>by Jasmin Ramsey
Two conversations are presently occurring in Washington about Iran. Hawks and hardliners are searching for new ways to force the Obama administration to tighten or impose further sanctions, and/or discussing when the US should strike the country. Meanwhile, doves and pragmatists have been pointing out the ineffectiveness of sanctions in [...]]]>
by Jasmin Ramsey
Two conversations are presently occurring in Washington about Iran. Hawks and hardliners are searching for new ways to force the Obama administration to tighten or impose further sanctions, and/or discussing when the US should strike the country. Meanwhile, doves and pragmatists have been pointing out the ineffectiveness of sanctions in changing Iran’s nuclear calculus (even though the majority of them initially pushed for these sanctions) as well as the many cons of military action. Although the hawks and hardliners tend to be Republican, the group is by no means partisan. And these conversations do converge and share points at times, for example, the hawks and hardliners also complain about the ineffectiveness of sanctions, but in the context of pushing for more pressure and punishment.
That said, both sides appear stuck — the hawks, while successful in getting US policy on Iran to become sanctions-centric, can’t get the administration or military leaders to buy their interventionist arguments, and the doves, having previously cheered sanctions as an alternative to military action, appear lost now that their chosen pressure tactic has proven ineffective.
Hawks and Doves Debate Iran Strike Option
On Wednesday, the McCain Institute hosted a live debate that showcased Washington positions on Iran, with the pro-military argument represented by neoconservative analyst Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute and Democrat Robert Wexler, a member of the US House of Representatives from 1997-2010, and two prominent US diplomats on the other side — Ambassadors Thomas R. Pickering, who David Sanger writes “is such a towering figure in the State Department that a major program to train young diplomats is named for him”, and James R. Dobbins, whose distinguished career includes service as envoy to Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti and Somalia.
Only the beginning of this recording (I can’t find any others) is hard to hear, and you won’t regret watching the entire lively discussion, particularly because of Amb. Pickering’s poignant responses to Pletka’s flimsy points — she inaccurately states IAEA findings on Iran’s nuclear program and claims that, even though she’s no military expert, a successful military operation against Iran wouldn’t necessarily include boots on the ground. In fact, experts assess that effective military action against Iran aimed at long-term positive results (cessation of its nuclear program and regime change) would be a long and arduous process, entailing more resources than Afghanistan and Iraq have taken combined, and almost certainly involving ground forces and occupation.
Consider some the characteristics of the pro-military side: Wexler repeatedly admits he made a mistake in supporting the war on Iraq, but says the decision to attack Iran should “presuppose” that event. Later on he says that considering what happened with Iraq, he “hopes” the same mistake about non-existent WMDs won’t happen again. Pletka, who endorsed fighting in Iraq until “victory” had been achieved (a garbled version of an AEI transcript can be found here), states in her opening remarks that the US needs to focus on ”what happens, when, if, negotiations fail” and leads from that premise, which she does not qualify with anything other than they’re taking too much time, with arguments about the threat Iran poses, even though she calls the Iranians “very rational actors”.
While Wexler’s support for a war launched on false premises seriously harms his side’s credibility, it was both his and Pletka’s inability to advance even one indisputable interventionist argument, coupled with their constant reminders that they don’t actually want military action, that left them looking uninformed and weak.
The diplomats, on the other hand, offered rhetorical questions and points that have come to characterize this debate more generally. Amb. Pickering: “Are we ready for another ground war in the Middle East?”, and, “we are not wonderful occupiers”. Then on the status of the diplomatic process: “we are closer to a solution in negotiations than we have been before”. Amb. Dobbins meanwhile listed some of the cons of a military operation — Hezbollah attacks against Israel and US allies, interruptions to the movement of oil through the vital Strait of Hormuz, a terror campaign orchestrated by the Iranians — and then surprised everyone by saying that these are “all things we can deal with”. A pause, then the real danger in Amb. Dobbins’ mind: that “Iran would respond cautiously”, play the aggrieved party, withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, kick out IAEA inspectors and accelerate its nuclear program at unknown sites. Then what, the audience was left to wonder. Neither Pletka nor Wexler offered an answer.
The Costs of War With Iran and the C-Word
While watching the McCain debate, I wondered if Pletka and Wexler would consider reading a recently published book by Geoffrey Kemp, an economist who served as a Gulf expert on Reagan’s National Security Council and John Allen Gay, entitled War With Iran: Political, Military, And Economic Consequences. This essay lays out the basis of the work, which mainly focuses on the high economic costs of war, so I won’t go into detail here, but yesterday during the book’s launch at the Center for National Interest (CNI), an interesting comment was made about the “C-Word”. Here’s what Kemp said during his opening remarks, to an audience that included everyone from prominent foreign policy experts and former government officials, to representatives from Chevron and AIPAC:
You certainly cannot, must not, underestimate the negative consequences if Iran does get the bomb…But I think on balance, unlike Senator McCain who said that the only thing worse than a war with Iran is an Iran with a nuclear weapon…the conclusion of this study is that war is worse than the options, and the options we have, are clearly based on something that we call deterrence and something that we are not allowed to call, but in fact, is something called containment. And to me this seems like the most difficult thing for the Obama administration, to walk back out of the box it’s gotten itself into over this issue of containment. But never fear. Successive American administrations have all walked back lines on Iran.
Interestingly, no one challenged him on this during the Q&A. And Kemp is not the only expert to utter the C-Word in Washington — he’s joined by Paul Pillar and more reluctant distinguished voices including Zbigniew Brzezinksi.
Diplomacy as the Best Effective Option
Of course, if more effort was concentrated on the diplomacy front, as opposed to mostly on sanctions and the military option, Iran could be persuaded against building a nuclear weapon. Consider, for example, US intelligence chief James Clapper’s statement on Thursday that Iran has not yet made the decision to develop a nuclear weapon but that if it chose to do so, it might be able to produce one in a matter of “months, not years.” Clapper told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “[Iran] has not yet made that decision, and that decision would be made singularly by the supreme leader.”
It follows from this that while the US would be hard pressed in permanently preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon (apart from adopting the costly and morally repulsive “mowing the lawn” option), it could certainly compel the Iranians to make the decision to rush for a bomb by finally making the military option credible — as Israel has pushed for — or following through on that threat.
So where to go from here? Enter the Iran Project, which has published a series of reports all signed and endorsed by high-level US foreign policy experts, and which just released it’s first report with policy advise: “Strategic Options for Iran: Balancing Pressure with Diplomacy”. There’s lots to be taken away from it, and Jim Lobe, as well as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have covered it, but it ultimately boils down to the notion that the US needs to rethink its policy with Iran and creatively use the leverage it has gotten from sanctions to bring about an agreement. Such an agreement will likely have to be preceded by bilateral talks and include some form of low-level uranium enrichment on Iranian soil and sanctions relief if Iran provides its own signifiant concessions. The report also argues for the US to engage with Iran on areas of mutual interest, including Iraq and Afghanistan.
During the Wilson Center report launch event, Amb. Pickering summed up the status of negotiations with Iran as follows: “Admittedly we should not expect miraculous moves to a rapid agreement, but we’re engaged enough now to have gone beyond the beginning of the beginning. We’re not at the end of the beginning yet, but we’re getting there.” Later, Jim Walsh, a member of the task force and nuclear expert at MIT pointed out that 20-percent Iranian uranium enrichment, which everyone is fixated on now, only became an issue after Iran stopped receiving fuel for its Tehran Research Reactor and began producing it itself. In other words, the longer the US takes to give Iran a deal it can stomach and sell at home, the more the Iranians can ask for as their nuclear program progresses. “The earlier we can get a deal, the better the deal is likely to be,” he said.
]]>by James A. Russell
As the country makes a half-hearted attempt to sort through the wreckage of its experience in Iraq 10 years later, the country would do well to remind itself of a few central and searing uncomfortable truths.
While it is true that we got led down [...]]]>
by James A. Russell
As the country makes a half-hearted attempt to sort through the wreckage of its experience in Iraq 10 years later, the country would do well to remind itself of a few central and searing uncomfortable truths.
While it is true that we got led down the path to war by officials that consciously lied about intelligence to justify it, concealed their real motivations and willfully ignored voices that questioned predictions of a quick and easy victory — the undeniable truth is that this country allowed itself to be led like lambs to the slaughter.
And it was a slaughter. The river of human blood — Iraqi and American, to say nothing of lasting injuries on the battlefield that have wrecked lives around the world — flows wide and deep as documented by the Army’s Office of the Surgeon General.
So who is really responsible for the catastrophe and what should we do about it? Thus far, this country has avoided looking too hard into the mirror and instead blames the small caste of ideologically motivated neoconservative advisers clustered in the Pentagon and White House who had their own reasons for wanting to get rid of Saddam Hussein and could have cared less about the potential costs.
There has been no truth commission, no calling to account for these officials, who all returned to their law offices, lobbying jobs, became scions at the Council on Foreign Relations or were rewarded the chance to pollute the minds of students at Harvard and elsewhere.
These advisers took a free pass while our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines picked their way through the wreckage of their comrades’ body parts and dead Iraqis that littered the landscapes of Ramadi, Fallujah, Mosul and a host of other places that most Americans had never heard of.
However, it wasn’t just the Bush administration that took a free pass. An uncomfortable truth is that Americans, like those advisers, have also chosen to avoid taking a long, hard look in the mirror.
As much as this country wants to avoid it, the fact is that the war and the way it was launched says more about this country than those who sold the war with their public relations blitz.
If there is an abiding truth for this country and its citizenry, it’s that this kind of mistake should never happen again. Alas, we were also confronted with this truth after the Vietnam War — some lessons need to be learned over and over.
Looking in the rearview mirror is important because it can prepare us for how to proceed. The main lesson of the Iraq war should compel this country to sit up, pay attention and stop believing that the rest of the world is like a reality TV show or video game. We must exercise our obligations as citizens in the world’s greatest democracy when our politicians tell us it’s time for another war.
If the country were paying attention, it would know that many of the same ideologues that brought on the Iraq war are cheerleading and chanting for another one — this time with Iran.
Like the last time, many of these commentators are – albeit more subtly this time around — trying to sell us another public relations package to justify a war. As was the case with the unstated neoconservative justifications for the Iraq war, a main reason these people want us to attack Iran is to protect Israel.
Luckily for us, this time we have some actual adults in charge at the White House and a president that, whatever his faults, won’t be as easily convinced to start another catastrophe. That wouldn’t have been the case if Mitt Romney had won the election, with the inmates once again in control of the asylum. The politics of this potential new war, however, are complicated and difficult for our president — however reluctant a warrior he may be.
Consider, for example, that some senators want us to outsource the decision to start the war to the trigger-happy Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been restrained so far not by his main benefactor and ally, the United States, but by reasonable and sensible Israelis who are refreshingly unafraid to express their reservations in print and on the airwaves.
The image in the rearview mirror should be telling us to start seeing like those retired Israeli security and intelligence members who have told Bibi to cool it. One glance back should help us understand that instead of letting the neoconservative cheerleaders and members of the Congress who are beholden to the Israel lobby chart a path to another war, we should exercise our obligations as citizens and probe them with questions and protest.
Another go-to-war drama is quietly playing itself out again in this country, whether we notice it or not. Ten years from now, will we once again be averting our gaze from the mirror and blaming the war on a select few while avoiding our own responsibility?
How we choose to understand the images in today’s rearview mirror, and whether we decide on another war tomorrow, will say more about our country than the neoconservatives and hawks with their pompoms and war chants.
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