The week before the 10th anniversary of 9/11 saw several alarmist editorials about Iran in leading U.S. new outlets. Leon Panetta also did something he probably shouldn’t do: prophesize about Iranian domestic politics.
Forbes: The writing of Mark Dubowitz of the neoconservative
The week before the 10th anniversary of 9/11 saw several alarmist editorials about Iran in leading U.S. new outlets. Leon Panetta also did something he probably shouldn’t do: prophesize about Iranian domestic politics.
Forbes: The writing of Mark Dubowitz of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies reads like a broken record. On Wednesday he produced yet another “Iranian threat” article fraught with hyperbole. This is how it begins:
- Ten years after Sept. 11, the Islamic Republic of Iran constitutes the most serious threat to American national security, and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the world’s most deadly terrorist organization.
Dubowitz ends by admitting that the Obama administration’s sanctions policy has taken a toll on Iran’s economy, but says they are ineffective because “they have become an end in themselves, rather than means of making the regime vulnerable to other measures.” Dubowitz does not specify what “other measures” amounts to. He also criticizes the U.S. and E.U. for not providing “material support” to Iranians to overthrow their government in 2009.
The Washington Post: Another board editorial opinion piece argues that Iran is intent on building a nuclear weapon and has taken “two more steps toward” that goal without providing any supporting evidence.
Certainly Iran’s nuclear ambitions have advanced—even Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld admitted the Iranians would be “crazy” to not pursue nuclear weapons capability considering the threats they face—but many analysts argue that the Islamic Republic is moving towards “surge capability” or the ability to quickly produce a nuclear weapon should a situation require it. This capability would also serve as deterrence from foreign aggression. But the idea that Iran is trying to produce a nuclear weapon to have in hand suggests that it is pursuing an offensive rather than a defensive position, and considering its weak position both domestically and internationally, is that even plausible? Moreover, what could Iran possibly gain by attacking another country with a nuclear weapon? Surely nothing could exceed the losses such a move would result in if it was aimed at the U.S. and likely Israel as well.
Reuters: During an appearance on the Charlie Rose Show U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the Iranian reform movement is “learning” from the Arab Spring and “it’s a matter of time before that kind of change and reform and revolution occurs in Iran as well.”
Panetta also indirectly explained why pursuing an open regime change policy (advocated by Michael Ledeen and many of his neoconservative colleagues) is counterproductive for U.S. interests:
- “We should try to take every step to try to support their effort but at the same time, we’ve got to analyze each situation to make sure that we do nothing that creates a backlash or that undermines those efforts.”
While “change” and “reform” are possible in the near future, revolution is unlikely. Most U.S. policy analysts abandoned the hope of another Iranian revolution in 2010 after it became clear that the Green Movement’s leadership was going to work within the system rather than directly against it — so it’s not clear why Panetta has revived that language.
Iranian discontent with their government is long-running and justified. Iranians are not only dissatisfied with President Ahmadinejad who no longer has the backing of even his superiors, they are also tired of the entire political and social system they are forced to live in. But as Iran analyst Farideh Farhi told me several months ago, revolutions don’t happen so quickly one after the other, and Iran’s revolution is only a little over 30 years old.
My own sense from talking to Iranians in the country during my last visit this year is that there was a narrow window of time in 2009 when millions were once again contemplating sacrificing everything, but it passed without its potential being seized. Since then the Green Movement has been simmering, but the leadership has lost much momentum. Iranians face deadly repression on a daily basis, but as shown by the revolutionary movements in Arab countries, that can’t be the only reason why people didn’t stay in the streets. Many Iranians told me they weren’t willing to fight to the death unless they were guaranteed that something worse wouldn’t replace the current government. Others didn’t seem able or willing to go that length. They were preoccupied with their jobs, their bills and family issues; they were simply trying to live. But considering the Islamic government’s history with political dissent, fighting to the death is the minimum requirement for bringing down this government forcefully and quickly. At present there is little to suggest that the majority of Iranians are going to take this approach.
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Today in the New York Times, WINEP fellow Martin Kramer is quoted warning against the dangers of the reemergence of Tunisia’s Islamist party, Al-Nahda, widely regarded as one of the most progressive versions of Islamism on the planet:
Martin Kramer, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who had long criticized Mr. Ghannouchi of Al-Nahda, argued that the party’s professions of pluralism could not be trusted. “Islamists become the more moderate and tolerant of pluralism the further away from power they are,” he said.
For Kramer, this is little more than the latest campaign in a decades-long crusade against Islamism. After Sept. 11, 2001, he went so far as to say that all Islamism breeds terrorism, holding up Lebanon as an example where democratic inclusion has wrought stumbling blocks, but also citing problems with radical Islamism in U.S.-backed dictatorships like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Kramer has been denouncing the Tunisian Islamist movement since the early 1990s, when the main party’s now-exiled founder called for attacking U.S. interests in response to the first Gulf War. But those sorts of views have been moderated in the ensuing two decades. In the Times profile of Al-Nahda’s leader inside Tunisia, he says women should choose to wear veils (and called for political quotas “until they get their voices”), and doesn’t even have a problem with bikinis and sipping wine.
But Kramer doesn’t care for these subtleties, espousing that Islam can play no role in politics at all, ever. Naturally, Kramer is an unflinching supporter of an ethnocratic Israel, though, to be fair, Kramer is consistent — he has flirted openly, elsewhere in the Middle East, with anti-democratic “minority rule”:
In Iraq’s Sunni triangle, they like their tribes and they might want a tough-minded sheikh to keep order among them; in the Shi’ite south, they might wish to venerate a white-bearded recluse in a turban, and have him resolve all their disputes; and so on. What they crave is not democracy, but sub-national self-determination…
(Tell them what they want, Dr. Kramer…)
America cannot revive the Ottoman empire, but it might take a lesson from its legacy: that empire is most effective when it is invisible, that there are things worse than minority rule.
I don’t know what Kramer thinks of Iraq today, but I do know what Rubin thinks of it. It’s Bush’s gift that keeps on giving! Here’s her description of the Iraqi state, emphasized by me:
The left blogosphere seems to have wigged out over the suggestion that George W. Bush and the successful emergence of a secular, democratic Iraq has anything to do with all this.
(While Kramer opposes some Middle East autocrats, he doesn’t note that fervent Islamism, as in Iran’s 1979 revolution and establishment of an Islamic Republic, is often a reaction to U.S. support for these autocrats, as with the CIA toppling of a secular, democratic coup to re-install the Shah in 1953.)
Yet, in a world where Kramer and Rubin warn and warn and warn about Islamism — even in moderated forms — here are the first words of the constitution (PDF) of this “secular, democratic Iraq”:
The Preamble
In the name of God, the Most merciful, the Most compassionate
The document continues in Section One:
Article 2:
First: Islam is the official religion of the State and is a foundation source of legislation:
A. No law may be enacted that contradicts the established provisions of Islam.
B. No law may be enacted that contradicts the principles of democracy.
C. No law may be enacted that contradicts the rights and basic freedoms stipulated in this Constitution.
Second: This Constitution guarantees the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people and guarantees the full religious rights to freedom of religious belief and practice of all individuals such as Christians, Yazidis, and Mandean Sabeans.
Article 3:
Iraq is a country of multiple nationalities, religions, and sects. It is a founding and active member in the Arab League and is committed to its charter, and it is part of the Islamic world.
Iraq is not so secular, after all.
Will Kramer denounce the government of Islamic Iraq? Will Rubin admit that, since she holds up the example of Islamic democracy in Iraq (not secular, though with minority protections), perhaps her “real concern” for any “specific sign of an Islamist presence” may not be so sound?
I doubt it. Neocons like Rubin will simply go on ignoring the Islamic character of Iraq when it is convenient to use the country as example of what can be accomplished by going to war.
Take, for example, Iran’s Green Movement, which Rubin and her ideological comrades like Reuel Marc Gerecht claim to support (all the while calling for an attack on Iran that will likely blunt the movement’s chances of success).
Undoubtedly, the Green Movement has an element that pushes for the end of the Islamic Republic, but this is not a monolithic view among the movement’s supporters. Many of its adherents want a reformed Islamic Republic, as with the opposition leadership inside Iran. If one prefers to think of the Green Movement as leaderless, he still cannot deny that figures like Mir Hossein Moussavi and his wife, Mohammad Khatami, and Mehdi Karroubi, do not constitute an important place within the movement.
Neocons, nonetheless, unabashedly call for regime change by any means in Iran, ignoring the fact that the only viable opposition movement there is divided on the issue of maintaining the Islamic Republic.
The notion that moderate, democratic strains of Islamism exist — as with most ideologies — and should be allowed to enter political discourse is blasphemy to these rigid ideologues. (Neoconservatism, for its part, seems not to have a moderate strain.) Kramer insists that his call for blanket exclusion of Islamism “has nothing to do with Islam per se”– but one has to wonder.
]]>Others have [...]]]>
Others have also described Ross as more skeptical [than Mitchell] about the chances of peace, based on his decades-long experience with trying to bring together the parties.
I don’t want to get all new-agey, but if you think something is difficult or impossible to do, the chances of being able to do it are greatly diminished from the get-go.
So why does this Ross guy keep getting jobs that he doesn’t think are possible? I picked up Ross’ book off of my shelf here in D.C., and it amazed me how many times he says you cannot make any kind of deal with the Iranians. Then, Obama put him in charge of making a deal with the Iranians. Ross, we now learn, doubts that a peace deal can be reached in Israel-Palestine, and Obama gives him a job making peace in Israel-Palestine.
On the Middle Eastern conflict, Ross’s credentials for the job are impeccable. After all, he’s been involved in decades — decades! — of failed peace processes. Ross has worked at the Washington Institute (WINEP), an AIPAC-formed think tank, and also chaired the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), an Israeli organization dedicated to “ensur(ing) the thriving of the Jewish People and the Jewish civilization.” (The organization seems to oppose intermarriage with racist-sounding statements like “cultural collectivity cannot survive in the long term without primary biological foundations of family and children.”)
Ross was thought responsible for crafting Obama’s presidential campaign AIPAC speech — yes, the one with the line about an “undivided” Jerusalem that would spike a peace deal if implemented. Ross later reiterated the notion of an undivided Jerusalem as a “fact” in an interview with the Jerusalem Post.
Ross was recently in the news following a secret but not-so-secret visit to the Middle East, which was fleshed out on Politico by Laura Rozen. Rozen was the reporter who carried a rather shocking anonymous allegation about Ross:
“[Ross] seems to be far more sensitive to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests,” one U.S. official told POLITICO Saturday. “And he doesn’t seem to understand that this has become bigger than Jerusalem but is rather about the credibility of this administration.”
In an update, Rozen carried NSC CoS Denis McDonough’s defense of Ross:
“The assertion is as false as it is offensive,” McDonough said Sunday by e-mail. ”Whoever said it has no idea what they are talking about. Dennis Ross’s many decades of service speak volumes about his commitment to this country and to our vital interests, and he is a critical part of the president’s team.”
But the new Forward article, as MJ Rosenberg points out, backs up the notion that Ross was extremely concerned with “advocat[ing]” for Israel. The source is none other than Israel-advocate extraordinaire Abe Foxman (who doesn’t negotiate on behalf of the U.S. government):
“Dennis is the closest thing you’ll find to a melitz yosher, as far as Israel is concerned,” said the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, Abraham Foxman, who used the ancient Hebrew term for ‘advocate.’”
Do you get the feeling that Ross advocated for Iran? Or, as the Forward article put it (with my strikethrough), has “strong ties to Israel” Iran? Guttman writes that Ross is considered to have a “reputation of being pro-Israeli.” As for Iran? Not quite: Ross’s Iran experience seems to boil down to heading United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), a group that pushes for harsher, broad-based sanctions against Iran (despite a stated goal to not hurt ordinary Iranians) and that has criticized Obama’s policy of engagement. Ross left the gig, as with JPPI, when he took the job with the administration.
The group also launched an error-filled fear-mongering video (while Ross was still there; he appears in the video) and a campaign to get New York hotels to refuse to host Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he comes to town each year for the U.N. General Assembly, which hardly lays the groundwork for good diplomacy.
Oh, and about the Iran engagement designed by Ross: The administration’s approach has been questioned by several leading Iran experts. “It is unlikely that the resources and dedication needed for success was given to a policy that the administration expected to fail,” National Iranian American Council (NIAC) president Trita Parsi observed. In December, Ross publicly defended the administration against charges that engagement was less than sincere from the U.S. side. But it is Ross himself who has apparently long held a pessimistic outlook on engagement.
Ross’s 2007 book, “Statecraft: And How to Restore America’s Standing in the World“, is fascinating in light of where Ross has come from, and where he’s taken Iran policy. I was struck at a five-page section of the first chapter called “Neoconservatism vs. Neoliberalism,” in which Ross writes, “[Neoconservatism's] current standard-bearers — such as Richard Perle, David Frum, William Kristol, and Robert Kagan — are serious thinkers with a clear worldview,” (with my links).
Later, in several long sections about the run-up to George W. Bush’s Iraq war, Ross notes that Paul Wolfowitz was highly focused on Iraq before and after 9/11. He also mentions “political difficulties” in the push for war: “Once [Bush] realized there might be a domestic problem in acting against Iraq, his administration focused a great deal of energy and effort on mobilizing domestic support for military action.”
But Ross never acknowledges that some of his neoconservative “serious thinkers” — such as Kristol and his Weekly Standard magazine — were involved in the concerted campaign to mislead Americans in an effort to push the war… just as the same figures are pushing for an attack on Iran. Frum, who does seem capable of serious thinking, was the author of the “axis of evil” phrasing of Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address. The moniker included both Iraq and Iran, despite the fact that the latter was, until the speech, considered a potential ally in the fight against Al Qaeda. (Marsha Cohen chronicled an Israeli effort to squash the alliance, culminating in Frum’s contribution to the Bush speech.)
Ross never mentions that neocon Douglas Feith, a political appointee in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), was responsible for cherry-picking intelligence about Iraq within the administration, and whose office was feeding cooked information to the public via Scooter Libby in Vice President Dick Cheney‘s office. Through Libby, the distorted information made its way into the hands of the Standard and sympathetic journalists like ideologue Judith Miller at the New York Times. In August of 2003, Jim Lobe wrote (with my links):
[K]ey personnel who worked in both NESA [the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia bureau] and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003. …
Other appointees who worked with… both offices included Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist previously with the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI); David Schenker, previously with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Michael Makovsky; an expert on neo-con icon Winston Churchill and the younger brother of David Makovsky, a senior WINEP fellow and former executive editor of pro-Likud ‘Jerusalem Post’; and Chris Lehman, the brother of the John Lehman, a prominent neo-conservative who served as secretary of the navy under Ronald Reagan, according to Kwiatkowski.
Ross has personal experience with many OSP veterans, working with them at WINEP and signing hawkish reports on Iran authored by them.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Ross was a member of a task force that delivered a hawkish report apparently co-authored by two veterans of OSP, Rubin and Michael Makovsky. (Ross reportedly recused himself as the presidential campaign came into full swing.) Lobe, noting Ross’s curious involvement, called the report a “roadmap to war with Iran,” and added, a year later, that the group that put out the report was accelerating the plan, calling for a military build-up and a naval blockade against Iran.
After taking his position within the Obama administration, Ross released a book, co-authored with David Makovsky, that was skeptical of the notion that engagement could work. Nathan Guttman, in a review of the book for the Forward, wrote:
The success of diplomatic engagement, according to Ross, is not guaranteed and could be unlikely. Still, he and Makovsky believe that negotiations will serve a purpose even if results are not satisfying. “By not trying, the U.S. and its refusal to talk become the issue,” said Makovsky in a June 1 interview with the Forward. “What we are saying is that if the U.S. chooses engagement, even if it fails, every other option will be more legitimate.”
The attitude of Ross and Makovsky seems closer to that of the Israeli government then to that of the Obama administration.
OSP, Feith, the Makovsky brothers, and Rubin are not listed in the index of “Statecraft,” nor have they appeared in the many sections that I’ve read in full.
In his book, Ross does have many revealing passages about concepts that have been worked into the Obama administration’s Iran policy. One such ploy, which has not been acknowledged or revealed publicly, is using Israel as the crazy ‘bad cop’ — a potentially dangerous game. Ross also writes that international pressure (through sanctions) must be made in order to cause Iran “pain.” Only then, thinks Ross, can concessions such as “economic, technological and security benefits” from the U.S. be offered:
Orchestrating this combination of sticks and carrots requires at this point some obviously adverse consequences for the Iranians first.
This view does not comport with the Obama plan for a simultaneous dual-track policy toward Iran — which holds that engagement and pressure should occur simultaneously — and serves to bolster critics who say that engagement has not been serious because meaningful concessions have not been offered. But it does hint at another tactic that Ross references at least twice in the book: the difference between “style” and “substance.” With regard to Iran, he presents this dichotomy in relation to public professions about the “military option” — a euphemism for launching a war. But publicly suppressing rhetoric is only used as a way to build international support for pressure — not also, as one might expect, a way to assuage the security fears of Iran.
But those aren’t the only ideas from the 2007 book that seem to have made their way into U.S. policy toward Iran. In “Statecraft,” Ross endorses the use of “more overt and inherently deniable alternatives to the use of force” for slowing Iran’s nuclear progress. In particular, he mentions the “fragility of centrifuges,” which is exactly what is being targeted by the Stuxnet virus, a powerful computer worm thought to be created by a state, likely Israel, and perhaps with help from the U.S., according to the latest revelations.
Some critics of this website complain that the level of attention given to neoconservatives is too great, but they should consider this: Look at Dennis Ross. He works extensively with this clique, and no doubt has the occasional drink or meeting with them. And, most importantly, he writes approvingly about neoconservatives, noting that their viewpoint affects political considerations of “any political leader.” Because of these neocon “considerations,” he writes, this is how we should view the Islamic Republic: “With Iran, there is a profound mistrust of the mullahs, and of their perceived deceit, their support for terror, and their enduring hostility to America and its friends in the Middle East. … No one will be keen to be portrayed as soft on the Iranian mullahs.”
This from the man that formulated a policy that has offered “adverse consequences” but so far no “carrots.” Ross’s predictions are a self-fulfilling prophecy — and since he gets the big appointments, he gets to fulfill them. Taking reviews of his book with Makovsky, the Bipartisan Policy Committee report, and “Statecraft” as a whole, I’m not at all surprised that little progress has been made with Iran.
But, at least, that was his first try. He’s a three-time-loser on Israeli-Palestinian peace-making. With Iran, I had to put the pieces together, whereas with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, his record is right there for all to see. Putting Ross in charge of peace-making between the two seems to perfectly fit Einstein’s definition of insanity.
]]>Goldberg is indignant that Aslan suggests, based on revelations about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in WikiLeaks cables, that the boisterous president may not be as evil as many commentators in the West — particularly pundits, [...]]]>
Jeffrey Goldberg, a prominent hawkish Israeli-American journalist, has written a post responding to a Reza Aslan piece on The Atlantic website.
Goldberg is indignant that Aslan suggests, based on revelations about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in WikiLeaks cables, that the boisterous president may not be as evil as many commentators in the West — particularly pundits, like Goldberg, close to the Israel lobby — make him out to be. Aslan contends that, according to this new evidence, Ahmadinejad may be more amiable to a nuclear deal and some increased freedoms for Iranians than previously thought.
Goldberg, of course, seizes on Alsan’s passage about Ahmadinejad’s oft-cited quote about ‘wiping Israel off the map.’ Aslan notes that, in the Farsi context, this phrase is not quite as incendiary as it is portrayed in the West — though Aslan admits that a more proper translation would bring little comfort to Westerners.
Ignoring Aslan’s important qualification, Goldberg lashes out. He exaggerates and gives evidence to support his view that Ahmadinejad is a “Holocaust-denying, eliminationist anti-Semitic Iranian president.” There should be ample citable examples to support such a view, but Goldberg doesn’t employ them. Instead, he gives a series of unsourced, unlinked quotes from Ahmadinejad. Some of the quotes seem to be of dubious origin.
First, Goldberg starts out with a hyperbolic interpretation of what Aslan is saying, and pillories it (Goldberg loves his straw-men). He hauls out a laundry list of Ahmadinejad’s statements that call for an end to the “Zionist regime.” But he has pulled out this exact same list twice before–with one new quote added this time around. That strikes me as a bit lazy (it’s the internet, dude, you can link back to your old posts) and a bit dishonest (you could at least acknowledge that you’ve essentially written the same column twice before).
I don’t want to defend these comments from Ahmadinejad, but there’s something here that needs to be unpacked: Calling for the end of the “Zionist regime” is calling for an end to a state that is driven by a particular ideology. This is called ‘regime change’ and people like Goldberg and his allies in the hawkish pro-Israel camp support this concept all the time.
Of course, Goldberg says this that list of pronouncements by Ahmadinejad are things that the president has “said about Israel and Jews in the last several years.” But that’s not exactly true: In the 20 examples, the word “Jew(s)” is never used; “Israel,” or some derivative, is used four times, with three of the four in either parenthesis or brackets (Goldberg, or whoever compiled this list for him some years ago, was not consistent). Instead, the quotes from Ahmadinejad that Goldberg uses refer mostly to the “Zionist regime.”
Goldberg is widely considered a liberal Zionst (as well as “one of the most influential Jewish journalists working in mainstream media”), and Zionism is, of course, an ideology. Goldberg’s fervent Zionism seems to intellectually confine him. It’s not actually so unusual for one state to call for an end to the ideological underpinnings of a hostile state– this is exactly what Goldberg and others of his ilk do from their own perspective. Those pundits, of course, want an end to the Islamic Republic. A reformed Islamic Republic, even one that might be less likely to pursue nuclear weapons or hostility towards Israel, is not good enough — they demand a secular state bereft of an official Islamic religion. That is what ‘regime change’ in the case of Iran is all about.
Back to Goldberg’s list: I am also afraid that I have to question the veracity of his quotes. In none of the three blog posts does Goldberg provide any sources. Each quote is accompanied by just a month and year. So I punched a bunch of the quotes into Google using Goldberg’s wordings. Take this item from Goldberg’s list:
July 2006: “Nations in the region will be more furious every day. It won’t take long before the wrath of the people turns into a terrible explosion that will wipe the Zionist entity off the map… The basic problem in the Islamic world is the existence of the Zionist regime, and the Islamic world and the region must mobilize to remove this problem. It is a usurper that our enemies made and imposed on the Muslim world, a regime that prevented the progress of the region’s nations, a regime that all Muslims must join hands in isolating worldwide.”
If you stick this into Google, without the date intro, you’ll get about 200 hits (not that many, relatively speaking). You might expect the top one to be a well trafficked or reputable news site — well, you’d be sort of right. The first hit is a website for Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), and the Google cache points you to a version of the site with a reprinted Daily Caller column from August (which could easily be citing Goldberg). The second hit is Goldberg himself. Then comes the blogspots, hokey right-wing websites like EMPACT America (dedicated to the overhyped EMP threat), and the Christian Zionist pages like “The Bible Teaching Ministry of David Hocking“, “Bible Searchers”, and even some Christian Zionist blogspots!
I don’t have time to run through all the quotes, so I’ll just let that one stand, and challenge my esteemed colleague (much more esteemed than I) to give some sources for his oft-used list of quotes (even if they’re from MEMRI). If he’d like to draft a new list, I’d point him to the website for the right-leaning pro-Israel advocacy website The Israel Project. At least when they compile Ahmadinejad quotes, they’re not so lazy, and provide sources and links.
But maybe that’s why Goldberg keeps doing the same post over and over again: If you repeat something often enough, especially on the internet, people will start to think that it’s true.
]]>Takeyh starts with a little armchair psychology on the Islamic Republic’s enforcers — the mid-level officials as well as the foot [...]]]>
Takeyh starts with a little armchair psychology on the Islamic Republic’s enforcers — the mid-level officials as well as the foot soldiers of the regime — “all require an overweening ideological cover to justify their brutalities to themselves.”
Yet the crackdown against Iran’s nascent Green Movement after the June 2009 elections is calling these justifications into question:
The subtle and subversive victory of the Green movement is to hollow out the state and demonstrate to its loyalists that they are not defending a transcendent orthodoxy but craven and cruel men addicted to power at all cost. In the words of the reformist cleric, the late Ayatollah Hossein Montazeri, in the violent crackdown following the elections in June 2009, the Islamic Republic ceased to be either Islamic or a republic.
In his seminal study of revolutions, Crane Brinton observed that a ruling class becomes imperiled when “numerous and influential members of such a class begin to believe that they hold power unjustly, [and] that the beliefs they were brought up on are silly.”
Takeyh points to a string of high level defections of some former defenders of the regime to the opposition. He says the “accomplishments of the Green movement are impressive,” but stressed the future of Iran is still very much uncertain. In his estimation, it’s not a matter of if the regime collapses, but when.
Here’s the rub for U.S. policy:
The series of decisions that the United States and its allies make today will help condition the contours of power in tomorrow’s Iran.
This is not to suggest that the United States should cease negotiating with Iran. Ronald Reagan continued to sign arms control compacts with a Soviet Union whose demise he perceived as certain. The pursuit of important security objectives did not derail Reagan from embracing Solidarity in Poland or comparable opposition groups throughout Eastern Europe. The important point is that the Iran conundrum is not limited to compelling Tehran to spew out some of its accumulated uranium. Our choices speak as much to our values as they do to our interests. In the long run, America has never gone astray by standing with those who hope for a more decent future.
The “anti-appeasement” hawks may have a tough time with that last graf. Takeyh cites Ronald Reagan (!!! — might as well be pro-appeasement right-wing idol Winston Churchill!). He also implies a fuel-swap confidence building measure is in U.S. interests, although U.S. interests should “not be limited” to this goal.
]]>- The Washington Times: Ben Birnbaum reports that a leaked International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog, indicates that Iran’s nuclear program “experienced a one-day shutdown last week, indicating a slowing of Tehran’s nuclear progress.” Some analysts speculate the Stuxnet virus is behind this, which Iran denies. Patrick Clawson, director of the Iran Security Initiative at the hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), tells Birnbaum that the alleged delays in Iran’s nuclear program are partially due to economic pressure from sanctions: “The West is going to be able to say to them, ‘You haven’t gotten anywhere with your nuclear program in the last year, you’re paying a price for sanctions and — by the way — we’ll impose more sanctions if you don’t agree to this.’”
- BBC: The BBC reports on The Gambia’s announcement that it is cutting diplomatic ties with Iran and ejecting all Iranian diplomats. Last month, Nigeria reported that it intercepted a shipment of arms (the container was labeled “building materials”) heading from Iran to The Gambia. Iran believes the severing of relations may be due to U.S. pressure, since The Gambia has supported Iran’s ability to have nuclear power. “Iran has sought partners around the world especially as sanctions have come on the table in the last few years,” the American Enterprise Institute‘s Charlie Zrom told the BBC. Expanding diplomatic and economic ties with West Africa is “a tool by which Iran tries to prevent measures harmful to it, or it believes harmful to it, being passed at the United Nations,” added Zrom.
- Commentary: As noted in a LobeLog post yesterday, Max Boot blogged at Commentary‘s Contentions that “For those who advocate containment as the solution to the Iranian nuclear threat, it is worth noting how destabilizing a nuclear-armed rogue state can be and how hard it is to contain.” He writes: “Even now, North Korea could be planning to export nuclear know-how or uranium to Iran. If so, what are we going to do about it? My guess: not much.” Then he veers into a thinly veiled call for war with Iran: “That is an argument for stopping Iran by any means necessary before it crosses the nuclear threshold and becomes as dangerous as North Korea.”
- The Enterprise Blog: At AEI‘s blog (and cross-posted at the think tank’s Center for Defense Studies), Thomas Donnelly writes in opposition to the New START treaty because “it does not prepare the United States for the new, and extremely volatile, nuclear realities just around the corner.” He writes that START will not prepare the U.S. for a “‘multi-polar’ nuclear world” that “will be marked by a rising number of otherwise weak states with modestly sized nuclear forces: think North Korea and Iran.” According to his analysis, these “regional rogues” have taken a lesson from the U.S. application of “relatively small but devastatingly effective applications of conventional military power” on Saddam Hussein: “to deter America, get a nuke.” He chalks up United States action in Iraq to dealing with Hussein’s “ambitions.” New Start or no New Start, Iran may well take away the Iraq War lesson that the U.S. is determined to attack — no matter what ambitions the Islamic Republic holds, and whether or not they take any steps towards realizing those ambitions.
- The Jewish Week: James D. Besser analyzes the impact of the midterm election on the Obama administration’s Iran strategy and concludes it “may indirectly lead to greater U.S. flexibility on the issue of Israeli military action to stop [Iran’s] nuclear program.” Shoshana Bryen, director of strategic policy for the hardline neoconservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) told Besser, “If you’re talking about the military option, you’re not talking about a single strike. If you want to go to war against Iran, that’s a choice, but I don’t think there will be a lot of support for that in the U.S. military, which is already involved in two wars.” Besser considers it unlikely that the GOP leadership would push for a strike as long as the Pentagon remains opposed to the action. Even David Harris of the American Jewish Committee says “outsourcing responsibility for Iran” to Israel would be “an abdication of U.S. responsibility.”
- National Public Radio: Alan Greenblatt examines how 100 new Republican members of Congress will impact on U.S. foreign policy. In examining the Obama administration’s Iran policy, Greenblatt interviews Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the hawkish American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and reports, “Pletka predicts that Republicans in Congress will push back if Obama continues his policy of seeking diplomatic engagement with Iran, as that nation continues to pursue its nuclear ambitions.”
- WINEP Policy Watch: In a briefing from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), Ehud Yarri discusses the conjoining of Iranian Shia Islamism with that of Sunni Hamas in the Occupied Palestinian Territories through a booklet being circulated in Gaza. Writes Yarri, “Titled The Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Revolution in Iran, this new publication represents the most important attempt to date to connect the growing cooperation between Hamas and its Iranian mentors to religious affinities, rather than political expediency.” He cites the booklet as a PR effort aimed at showing the two groups as “natural partner(s)” despite the usually deep-cutting sectarian divide between Shia and Sunni Muslims.