Weekly Reads/Watch:
- News: Challenges From Iran to North Korea Spotlight Old ThreatsWeekly Reads/Watch:
Foreign Policy Initiative Iran Fact Sheet: The Washington-based advocacy group was founded in 2009 by several neoconservatives known for their hawkish views and support for the Iraq War. The FPI has since been attempting to make its mark on US foreign policy with Iran. In the same week that the P5+1 is meeting with Tehran in Istanbul for renewed talks, the FPI released a Fact Sheet titled “The False Promise of Negotiations over Iran’s Nuclear Program”. While being extremely critical of the Obama administration, the essential argument is that Iran should not be trusted and that the U.S. should project an aggressive and dominant position while imposing further punitive measures on the Islamic Republic:
As Iran’s controversial nuclear program approaches the “zone of immunity,” the United States should work, individually and with like-minded nations, to dramatically increase the pressure on Iran by implementing all possible sanctions. Attempts by either President Obama or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to water down sanctions will not adequately increase pressure against the Iranian regime. An effective strategy towards Tehran will also require the United States to make clear that a nuclear Iran is truly unacceptable and that if necessary, military action will be used to prevent that nightmare scenario.
Certainly, when one recognizes that the United States and international community have repeatedly offered Iran substantive and beneficial economic assistance over the past decade, only to be rebuffed, then one can only conclude that the Iranian leadership is simply uninterested in negotiating away their ability to produce a nuclear weapon.
Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post: The Post’s unabashedly hawkish blogger says the Obama administration is trying to con Americans into believing that its intelligence on Iran is authoritative and trustworthy. The argument that the U.S. is being overly careful with Iran because of its catastrophic mistakes with Iraq is regularly touted by hawks and neoconservatives, many of whom Rubin quotes regularly. This week the American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka and Elliott Abrams of the Council on Foreign Relations did just that. Rubin accordingly combined their arguments into a blog post about how the President is trying to pull the wool over American eyes because it wants to prevent an Israeli strike on Iran–something which she has never expressed opposition to (in fact she criticizes those who argue against it). She also states that the Obama administration’s spinning of its Iran intelligence is more evidence of its failure to seriously pursue the war option:
In any event he finds the disclosures, if not cleared for release, would be the sort of “revelations of ‘sources and methods’ of intelligence that might, if unauthorized, be criminal.” So assuming then that this was fully authorized, is there anything more to this than a ham-handed effort to discourage Israel from launching a military strike? Abrams suggest that is precisely what is going on: “The Obama administration appears to regard intelligence leaks and briefings more or less like briefings by the Democratic National Committee or White House flack Jay Carney. You use any information at hand, classified or not, and you spin it any way you like, fairly or not. Information that is unhelpful to your case is denied, dismissed, or denigrated.”
Considering that two informed conservatives without current security clearances can figure this out, won’t the Israelis recognize this is in large part spin? You’d think so. That suggests the leaks are really designed to justify to the American people, who may buy this stuff, why the Obama administration is refusing to consider seriously a military option at this time. More and more foreign policy — like tax or budget policy — is simply an adjunct to the political campaign.
John Podhoretz, Commentary: The son of Norman Podhoretz, one of the Godfathers of the neoconservative movement, has no qualms about being hawkish on Iran. In this month’s April issue of the right-wing Commentary Magazine, Podhoretz advocates militarily striking Iran:
]]>But how could it be prevented? Trying to answer that question was what led to the initial discussions of the need to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities in their adolescence. Doing so would have required using the tools and weapons of war, of course, but no one—no one—was actually proposing an Iraq-style war. As Norman Podhoretz put it in his 2007 article, “Since a ground invasion of Iran must be ruled out for many different reasons, the job would have to be done, if it is to be done at all, by a campaign of air strikes.”
No one takes this lightly. Nearly every scenario you can imagine that involves a direct engagement with the Iranian threat is a bad one. But it remains as true today as it was when John McCain said it, without music, in 2007: “There’s only one thing worse than the United States exercising a military option. That is a nuclear-armed Iran.”
The anti-Mubarak revolution won’t only topple an authoritarian regime. It will also topple 40-plus years of wrong-headed thinking about the causes of Middle East instability among the world’s foreign-policy cognoscenti.
In that view, the horrible relationship between Israel and the Arabs is the dominant issue for the Near East’s 20-plus nations and its 250-million-plus people — and the root cause of the region’s tempestuousness.
And poses the question:
If there were a Palestinian embassy in Washington today, would Hosni Mubarak have been any more mindful of the eventual consequences of his iron-fisted fecklessness in refusing a transition to a more representative Egypt because there was an ambassador from Palestine in Washington?
While Podhoretz considers this to be a rhetorical question, a slightly nuanced reading of the situation would respond affirmatively to that question.
Perhaps Podhoretz should answer this question: Could Hosni Mubarak’s authoritarian rule in Egypt have lasted for thirty years had Egypt not enjoyed the benefits—largely in the form of U.S. aid and military assistance—of a peace deal with Israel?
Podhoretz writes:
Cure the Israeli-Palestinian problem, they tell us, and you cure regional instability. But the problem for the overwhelming majority of countries in the Middle East hasn’t been instability. The problem has, rather, been an excess of stability — the result of sclerotic regimes of preposterously long duration.
Mubarak has been in power since 1981, as part of a movement in charge of Egypt for nearly 60 years. The al-Saud family has run Saudi Arabia since 1903; the al-Sabahs have been Kuwait’s poohbahs since 1913. The Jordanian royal family has held sway for eight decades; the Assads, father and son, have bossed Syria since 1970.
Is it any coincidence that these governments all benefit from close relationships with the U.S.? Are we to believe that Washington’s support of these governments is totally independent from its concern over Israel’s security?
A June 15, 2010 Congressional Research Service report (PDF) spelled out the U.S.’s aid strategy in the Middle East (my emphasis):
The degree to which foreign assistance has contributed to the achievement of U.S. objectives in the Middle East is difficult to measure, but the consensus among most analysts seems to be that
U.S. economic and security aid has contributed significantly to Israel’s security, Egypt’s stability, and Jordan’s friendship with the United States. The promise of U.S. assistance to Israel and Egypt during peace negotiations in the late 1970s helped to enable both countries to take the risks needed for peace, and may have helped convince both countries that the United States was committed to supporting their peace efforts. Excluding Iraq, Israel and Egypt are the largest two recipients of U.S. aid respectively.
While Podhoretz would like to have his readers believe that Israel is a totally independent variable in the region’s stability, the reality is that U.S. aid and support for authoritarian regimes who maintain peace with Israel is a real side effect of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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