Jim Lobe and I wrote a report yesterday for IPS News about the expected US decision to delist the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (aka MEK, PMOI and NCRI) from its foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) list. Most analysts we interviewed predicted that the removal would only worsen already abysmal relations with Iran and possibly make [...]]]>
Jim Lobe and I wrote a report yesterday for IPS News about the expected US decision to delist the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (aka MEK, PMOI and NCRI) from its foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) list. Most analysts we interviewed predicted that the removal would only worsen already abysmal relations with Iran and possibly make any effort to defuse the gathering crisis over its nuclear programme yet more difficult. Here’s a round-up of what they had to say beginning with statements that came in following the article’s publication:
John Limbert, a retired career foreign service officer and former embassy hostage in Tehran who served as the first-ever Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iran from 2009 to 2010 when he returned to teach at the US Naval Academy:
There may be reasons, but it’s a strange and disappointing decision.
I know the group claims it has abandon its violent and anti-American past. I wish I could believe them. They have a very dubious history and a similarly dubious present.
Farideh Farhi, Iran expert at the University of Hawaii:
As to the MEK delisting, especially after high-level leaks by members of the US intelligence community that the MEK was involved in terror operations inside Iran, the decision will no doubt make the Iranian leadership even more distrustful of US intentions regarding the future of Iran, particularly given the congressional support for the MEK to spearhead regime change. Less trust will make compromise less likely, presumably a preferred outcome for the high profile supporters of the MEK in Congress and elsewhere.
Note that the Obama Administration’s humanitarian argument for delisting says very little about the future operation of this group in the US and how their well-funded operation and agitation for regime change will be promoted or managed in the US. This ambiguity by itself will be a source of tension and will be used by hardliners inside Iran to further delegitimize all efforts to agitate for political reform from inside and outside of the country.
The issue is not about whether something needed to be done to help the poor souls caught in Iraq, abused by everyone including their own cult-like organization. The issue has to do with the wisdom of linking the highly political and politicized process of de-listing to a humanitarian effort.
Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005:
“Delisting will be seen not only by the Iranian regime, but also by most Iranian citizens, as a hostile act by the United States.”
“The MEK has almost no popular support within Iran, where it is despised as a group of traitors, especially given its history of joining forces with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War,” Pillar, who now teaches at George Washington University, added.
“Any effect of the delisting on nuclear negotiations will be negative; Tehran will read it as one more indication that the United States is interested only in hostility and pressure toward the Islamic Republic, rather than coming to terms with it.”
Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former senior Iranian diplomat and nuclear negotiator currently at Princeton University:
“The Iranian security establishment’s assessment has long believed that foreign intelligence agencies, specifically the CIA, Israeli Mossad, and the UK’s MI6 utilise the MEK for terror attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists, nuclear sabotage and intelligence gathering,”…
“Therefore, the delisting of MEK will be seen in Tehran as a reward for the group’s terrorist actions in the country,” he wrote in an email exchange with IPS. “Furthermore, Iran has firmly concluded that the Western demands for broader inspections (of Iran’s nuclear programme), including its military sites, are a smokescreen for mounting increased cyber attacks, sabotage and terror of nuclear scientists.
“Delisting MEK would be considered in Tehran as a U.S.-led effort to increase sabotage and covert actions through MEK leading inevitably to less cooperation by Iran with the IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency).”
He added that government in Tehran will use this as a way of “demonstrating to the public that the U.S. is seeking …to bring a MEK-style group to power” which, in turn, “would strengthen the Iranian nation’s support for the current system as the perceived alternative advanced by Washington would be catastrophic.”
Karim Sadjadpour, analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:
…said the move was unlikely to be “game-changer” in that “the MEK will continue to be perceived inside Iran as an antiquated cult which sided with Saddam Hussein during the (Iran-Iraq) war, and U.S. Iran relations will remain hostile.”
“It doesn’t help (Washington’s) image within Iran, certainly, and some Iranian democracy activists may misperceive this as a U.S. show of support for the MEK, which could have negative ramifications,” he noted.
Mila Johns, a researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland:
“The entire atmosphere around the MEK’s campaign to be removed from the FTO list – the fact that (former) American government officials were allowed to actively and openly receive financial incentives to speak in support of an organisation that was legally designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, without consequence – created the impression that the list is essentially a meaningless political tool,” she told IPS.
“It is hard to imagine that the FTO designation holds much legitimacy within the international community when it is barely respected by our own government,” she said.
No other group, she noted, has been de-listed in this way, “though now that the precedent has been set, I would expect that other groups will explore this as an option.”
]]>
via IPS News
In a move certain to ratchet up already-high tensions with Iran, the administration of President Barack Obama will remove a militant anti-regime group from the State Department’s terrorism list, U.S. officials told reporters here Friday.
The decision, which is expected to be formally announced before Oct. [...]]]>
via IPS News
In a move certain to ratchet up already-high tensions with Iran, the administration of President Barack Obama will remove a militant anti-regime group from the State Department’s terrorism list, U.S. officials told reporters here Friday.
The decision, which is expected to be formally announced before Oct. 1, the deadline set earlier this year by a federal court to make a determination, was in the process of being transmitted in a classified report to Congress, according to the Department’s spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland.
The decision came several days after some 680 members of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), or People’s Mojahedin, were transferred from their long-time home at Camp Ashraf in eastern Iraq close to the Iranian to a former U.S. base in at Baghdad’s airport in compliance with Washington’s demands that the group move. The transfer leaves only 200 militants at Camp Ashraf out of the roughly 3,200 who were there before the transfers began.
Most analysts here predicted that the administration’s decision to remove the MEK from the terrorism list would only worsen already abysmal relations with Iran and possibly make any effort to defuse the gathering crisis over its nuclear programme yet more difficult.
“Delisting will be seen not only by the Iranian regime, but also by most Iranian citizens, as a hostile act by the United States,” Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, told IPS.
“The MEK has almost no popular support within Iran, where it is despised as a group of traitors, especially given its history of joining forces with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War,” Pillar, who now teaches at George Washington University, added.
“Any effect of the delisting on nuclear negotiations will be negative; Tehran will read it as one more indication that the United States is interested only in hostility and pressure toward the Islamic Republic, rather than coming to terms with it.”
The decision followed a high-profile multi-year campaign by the group and its sympathisers that featured almost-daily demonstrations at the State Department, full-page ads in major newspapers, and the participation of former high-level U.S. officials, some of whom were paid tens of thousands of dollars to make public appearances on behalf of the MEK.
Officials included Obama’s first national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, former FBI chief Louis Freeh, and a number of senior officials in the George W. Bush administration, including his White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, attorney general Michael Mukasey, and former U.N. ambassador John Bolton.
Created in the mid-1960s by Islamo-Marxist university students, the MEK played a key role in the 1979 ouster of the Shah only to lose a bloody power struggle with the more-conservative clerical factions close to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The group went into exile; many members fled to Iraq, which they used as a base from which they mounted military and terrorist attacks inside Iran during the eight-year war between the two countries. Its forces were also reportedly used to crush popular rebellions against President Saddam Hussein that followed the 1991 Gulf War.
During a brief period of détente between Washington and Tehran, the administration of President Bill Clinton designated the group as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO) in 1997 based in part on its murder of several U.S. military officials and contractors in the 1970s and its part in the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover, as well as its alliance with Saddam Hussein.
When U.S. forces invaded Iraq in 2001, the MEK declared its neutrality and eventually agreed to disarm in exchange for Washington’s agreement that its members could remain at Camp Ashraf as “protected persons” under the Geneva Convention, an arrangement that expired in 2009.
The government of President Nour Al-Maliki, however, has been hostile to the MEK’s continued presence in Iraq. Two violent clashes since 2009 between Iraqi security forces and camp residents resulted in the deaths of at least 45 MEK members.
Last December, the UN reached a U.S.-mediated accord with the MEK to re-locate the residents to “Camp Liberty” at Baghdad’s airport, which would serve as a “temporary transit station” for residents to resettle in third countries or in Iran, if they so chose, after interviews with the UN High Commission on Refugees.
Until quite recently, however, the group — which Human Rights Watch (HRW) and a significant number of defectors, among others, have described as a cult built around its long-unaccounted-for founder, Massoud Rajavi, and his Paris-based spouse, Maryam — has resisted its wholesale removal from Ashraf. Some observers believe Massoud may be based there.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s increasingly blunt suggestions that the MEK’s failure to co-operate would jeopardise its chances of being removed from the terrorism list, however, appear to have brought it around.
The MEK claims that it halted all military actions in 2001 and has lacked the intent or the capability of carrying out any armed activity since 2003, an assertion reportedly backed up by the State Department.
Earlier this year, however, NBC News quoted one U.S. official as confirming Iran’s charges that Israel has used MEK militants in recent years to carry out sabotage operations, including the assassination of Iranian scientists associated with Tehran’s nuclear programme.
“The Iranian security establishment’s assessment has long believed that foreign intelligence agencies, specifically the CIA, Israeli Mossad, and the UK’s MI6 utilise the MEK for terror attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists, nuclear sabotage and intelligence gathering,” noted Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former senior Iranian diplomat and nuclear negotiator currently at Princeton University.
“Therefore, the delisting of MEK will be seen in Tehran as a reward for the group’s terrorist actions in the country,” he wrote in an email exchange with IPS. “Furthermore, Iran has firmly concluded that the Western demands for broader inspections (of Iran’s nuclear programme), including its military sites, are a smokescreen for mounting increased cyber attacks, sabotage and terror of nuclear scientists.
“Delisting MEK would be considered in Tehran as a U.S.-led effort to increase sabotage and covert actions through MEK leading inevitably to less cooperation by Iran with the IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency).”
He added that government in Tehran will use this as a way of “demonstrating to the public that the U.S. is seeking …to bring a MEK-style group to power” which, in turn, “would strengthen the Iranian nation’s support for the current system as the perceived alternative advanced by Washington would be catastrophic.”
That view was echoed by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which noted that the decision opens the doors to Congressional funding of the MEK and that leaders of the Iran’s Green Movement have long repudiated the group.
“The biggest winner today is the Iranian regime, which has claimed for a long time that the U.S. is out to destroy Iran and is the enemy of the Iranian people,” said NIAC’s policy director, Jamal Abdi.
“It will certainly not improve U.S.-Iranian relations,” according to Alireza Nader, an Iran specialist at the Rand Corporation, who agreed that the “delisting reinforces Tehran’s longstanding narrative regarding U.S. hostility toward the regime.
“Nevertheless,” he added, “I don’t think it is detrimental to U.S. interests as Tehran suspects U.S. collusion with the MEDK anyhow, whether this perception is correct or not.”
Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the move was unlikely to be “game-changer” in that “the MEK will continue to be perceived inside Iran as an antiquated cult which sided with Saddam Hussein during the (Iran-Iraq) war, and U.S. Iran relations will remain hostile.”
“It doesn’t help (Washington’s) image within Iran, certainly, and some Iranian democracy activists may misperceive this as a U.S. show of support for the MEK, which could have negative ramifications,” he noted.
Another casualty of the decision may be the credibility of the FTO list itself, according to Mila Johns, a researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.
“The entire atmosphere around the MEK’s campaign to be removed from the FTO list – the fact that (former) American government officials were allowed to actively and openly receive financial incentives to speak in support of an organisation that was legally designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, without consequence – created the impression that the list is essentially a meaningless political tool,” she told IPS.
“It is hard to imagine that the FTO designation holds much legitimacy within the international community when it is barely respected by our own government,” she said.
No other group, she noted, has been de-listed in this way, “though now that the precedent has been set, I would expect that other groups will explore this as an option.”
]]>*This week’s must-reads/watch:
- News/Interview: Iran Official Offers ‘Permanent Human Monitoring’ of Nuclear Sites*This week’s must-reads/watch:
- - News/Interview: Iran Official Offers ‘Permanent Human Monitoring’ of Nuclear Sites
- Research Publication: Holding Iran To Peaceful Uses Of Nuclear Technology
- Research Publication: Engaging Iran On Afghanistan
- Opinion: Deterring Iran is the best option
- Opinion: Obama Needs to Go Whole Mile on Iran Diplomacy: Vali Nasr
- News: Former Bush official warns against Iran attack
- News: Subtle Signs Obama Diplomacy May Work on Iran
- News: Israeli Attack On Iran Would ‘Ignite Regional War,’ Only Delay Nuke Program
Howard “Buck” McKeon at the the Reagan Presidential Library: The House Armed Services chairman (R., Calif.) made alarmist claims on Wednesday about Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions while advocating for more spending on weapons (h/t John M. Donnelly). His statement that “Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons is perhaps the gravest threat to the global order…since the collapse of communism” directly contradicted the findings of a report released yesterday by the prominent national security think tank, the Stimson Center. According to experts Barry Blechman and R. Taj Moore (Blechman has nearly 50 years of national security experience), the so-called “threat” from Iran is not even close to that which the U.S. faced during the Cold war. McKeon nevertheless recommends that the U.S. “allocate resources for contingencies like Iran” and “place emphasis on vital weapons, should the Iranians determine that a peaceful, nuclear-free existence is not in their best interest.”
Matthew Kroenig at CSIS: The Georgetown Assistant Professor continues to advocate for “limited strikes” on Iran by the U.S. even though experts acknowledge that the best this would achieve is a few years of setback and could in fact result in an increased desire on the part of the Iranians to acquire nuclear weapons. Kroenig’s analysis (debunked here and here among other places) has inspired more hawkish recommendations by well-known militarists Jamie M. Fly and Gary Schmitt who argue that the U.S. should go much further if the military option is pursued.
Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post: The militarist pro-Israel blogger who regularly displays her contempt for President Obama claims again that the only choices he has with Iran are war or living with a nuclear-armed regime. Her proclamation comes during the same week that the Iranians offered “full transparency” with their nuclear activities in exchange for Western cooperation. Writes Rubin:
In any event, the president — having dismissed a robust policy of regime change, repeatedly talked down the prospect of military action, tolerated Iran’s killing of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, taken no action in response to Iran’s attempted assassination of a Saudi diplomat on U.S. soil and signaled by withdrawal from Iraq and a rush to the exits in Afghanistan our willingness to cede ground to our foes — now faces an Iranian regime that is emboldened and on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. He will soon be confronted with the choice: military action (by Israel or the United States) or acceptance of Iran as a nuclear power, something he said he would never do. It’s a Hobson’s choice, largely of his own making due to his unserious and delusional foreign policy.
Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal: After illustrating an imaginary scenario where Iran (widely regarded as a non-conventional military threat to the U.S.) endangers U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf, the former Jerusalem Post editor says the U.S. Navy should beef up its presence even after Vice Adm. Mark Fox stresses that its “absolutely prepared” for any contingency:
The Navy doesn’t like to advertise this, but it is trying to fulfill its traditional global role with a fleet of 285 ships—the smallest it has been since before the First World War, even if modern warships are more capable than ever before. That number is likely to decline further under President Obama’s proposed budgetary cuts. If you sleep better at night knowing that a powerful American Navy ensures the freedom of the seas in places like the Gulf, the time to start worrying about the Navy’s future is now.
David Ignatius, Washington Post: The widely read columnist suggests that sanctions and “covert actions” should be used to “sink” the Iranian regime. His words run counter to the stated strategy of the Obama administration–to use pressure and diplomacy as a means for getting the Iranians to submit to U.S. demands at the negotiating table. His article also comes at a time when the Iranians are claiming that they’re ready to make serious concessions on their nuclear program. Writes Ignatius:
[Karim] Sadjadpour likes to invoke an old saying about dictatorships: “While they rule, their collapse appears inconceivable. After they’ve fallen, their collapse appeared inevitable.” Iran, he argues, is “at the crossroads of that maxim.”
Now that the squeeze on Iran has begun, there’s a potential risk if it stops too quickly, leaving a damaged but still potent Iran seething for vengeance. That early termination could happen through a quick U.N. cease-fire after a unilateral Israeli strike or because the West calls off sanctions prematurely, leaving Iran’s nuclear toolkit still largely intact.
The West has an additional hidden capability in this crisis, between sanctions and open military conflict. It’s a way of increasing the cost of Iran’s actions, short of war. Officials don’t usually talk about this terrain of “covert action,” for obvious reasons, but it’s easy to imagine what might be possible: Defense-related research facilities could be disrupted; financial and other commercial records could be scrambled. These may sound like extreme options, but they’re just the non-lethal ones.
“You can cause a lot of mischief inside Iran,” says one foreign official. The pressure campaign under way may not force Iran’s current leadership to make a deal, this official notes, but it increases the chance that the regime will sink as a result of its own defiant behavior.
]]>
Slavin hits on the tenor of administration officials’ comments, as well as the effort to boost Voice of America‘s public diplomacy bona fides as a [...]]]>
Slavin hits on the tenor of administration officials’ comments, as well as the effort to boost Voice of America‘s public diplomacy bona fides as a way of talking to Iranians over the heads of their government.
Carnegie Iran analyst Karim Sadjadpour tells Slavin that the U.S. shift may reflect an administration belief that a deal to ratchet down tensions between the West and the Islamic Republic over the latter’s nuclear program may not be possible:
Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says that the administration was more inhibited when protests broke out following Iran’s disputed 2009 presidential elections because “Obama still held out hope of reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran. Today I think the White House has come to the conclusion that they can’t reach a modus vivendi with a regime that seemingly needs them as an adversary.”
On the public diplomacy front, Slavin notes an interesting turn at VOA‘s Persian News Network, which is illegally beamed into Iran by satellite. Slavin writes that neoconservatives have already attacked a new VOA official, a State Department Foreign Service officer heading up PNN, for comments related to the National Iranian American Council. (NIAC is run by Trita Parsi, a former IPS colleague and frequent neoconservative target who wrote for IPS before Slavin began writing for the wire .)
Slavin (with my emphasis and links):
]]>The Obama administration has struggled to find ways to communicate support for Iranian protesters without giving the Iranian government ammunition to blame unrest on outside interference. Broadcasts by the Persian News Network (PNN) – the Farsi service of the Voice of America – are a component of the strategy even though VOA’s mandate is to present news without political bias.
On Monday, Ramin Asgard, an Iranian-American Foreign Service officer whose last posting was as a political adviser to Central Command – took the helm of the PNN. VOA executives said it was the first time since the waning days of the Cold War that a non-journalist has assumed such an important position in U.S. government-funded broadcasting.
VOA management has had difficulty finding the right person to run the sprawling service, which has one hit show – a “Daily Show” clone called “Static” or “Parazit” in Farsi – but has been riven by disputes among its staff over what vision of Iran’s political future to promote. Some members of Congress as well as some Iranian expatriates have complained that PNN is too critical of U.S. policy and too accommodating to Tehran.
Asgard, who also served as head of an Iran watch office in Dubai, did not seek the position but was offered it after several others turned VOA down or were deemed unsuitable, according to a source with knowledge of the process.
On the job only three days, he has already been the target of an attack on a blog run by the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. Trey Hicks, a researcher at the Hudson Institute, accused Asgard of undermining U.S. policy toward Iran by suggesting U.S. taxpayer support for the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a group that has in the past advocated engagement with Iran but has also taken a tough stance on human rights abuses. Hicks also questioned Asgard’s command of Farsi.
Asgard did not respond to requests to reply to the allegations.
Trita Parsi, head of NIAC, said Asgard had once suggested that the grassroots group help him recruit interns for the Dubai office but Parsi said he was not in a position to help and no funds were offered. While in Dubai, Asgard did promote scientific and cultural exchanges with Iran, which was – and remains – the policy of the U.S. government.
Sadjadpour said Asgard was chosen in part to insulate VOA from Congressional complaints that the service was not sufficiently taking account of U.S. government views.
“The heads of VOA think they need to protect themselves against Congress and he [Asgard] checked some of the right boxes,” Sadjadpour said.
Memarian’s piece draws on Iranian sources to describe the political context of, and gauge reactions to, Mottaki’s firing and his interim replacement by Ali Akbar Salehi, until now [...]]]>
Memarian’s piece draws on Iranian sources to describe the political context of, and gauge reactions to, Mottaki’s firing and his interim replacement by Ali Akbar Salehi, until now the head of Iran’s nuclear agency.
Down at the end, Memarian speaks to the Carnegie Endowment’s Karim Sadjadpour, who says the move is unlikely to affect Iran’s ongoing diplomacy with the West:
Analysts believe Ahmadinejad’s surprise move is very unlikely to affect the negotiations, as Mottaki had little say in the country’s major foreign policy positions over the past five years.
“Mottaki’s firing will have little substantive impact on Iranian foreign policy,” Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, told IPS. “The Iranian foreign minister doesn’t formulate policy. It’s the equivalent of the State Department spokesperson being replaced.”
“Salehi is much smarter and smoother than Mottaki and may prove more effective at creating divisions in the international community,” Sadjadpour added. “The Iranian foreign minister’s job these days is akin to putting lipstick on a pig. It’s ugly no matter how you try and sell it.”
I covered some other reactions yesterday — mostly speculative at this point, and unlikely to become any more certain before the upcoming round of negotiations in Istanbul next month.
]]>Duss also takes note of another great point from Sadjadpour: [...]]]>
Duss also takes note of another great point from Sadjadpour: Just as neoconservative Iran hawks can’t have it both ways — boosting the Green movement and calling for bombing Iran — those Arab leaders who call for a U.S. attack on Iran probably don’t care a whit about democracy in Iran either. (And why should they? Their countries aren’t exactly democracies nor do they care what their own citizens/subjects think).
In fact, a democratic Iran would probably be bad news for these Gulf dictatorships.
Sadjadpour (emphasis by Duss):
The WikiLeaks revelations make clear that Arab officials believe Iran to be inherently dishonest and dangerous. The feeling is probably mutual. But they hide perhaps a more interesting issue, namely what type of Iranian government would actually best serve Gulf Arab interests.
President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad and the Islamic Republic may be loathed, but equally the advent of a more progressive, democratic Iran would enable Tehran to emerge from its largely self-inflicted isolation and begin to realise its enormous potential. In the zero-sum game of Middle Eastern politics, a democratic Iran would pose huge challenges to Persian Gulf sheikhdoms.
The irony that someone like Benjamin Wienthal, who’s at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, doesn’t recognize this in his National Review post says something about how the hawkish agenda drives neoconservatives — and not utopian notions of freedom and democracy.
Weinthal writes:
While Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, and Oman have long privately conveyed such warnings to diplomats, they never had the courage to flex their muscles in public.
Right! And that’s because these are dictatorships, and these Arab leaders are wildly out of step with their publics.
Neoconservatives, being neoconservatives, will gather allies in their campaign for war with Iran wherever they can find them.
]]>- Jerusalem Post: The right-wing English language Israeli daily has a piece by columnist Michael Freund, who revives the push that U.S. President Barack Obama can save his presidency by attacking Iran. “There is one dramatic step that Obama can take that would have a transformative effect, not only on his standing in public opinion but on the world itself: Take aggressive action to stop Iran’s nuclear program,” he writes, thus resurrecting a meme started by Daniel Pipes and adopted by Elliott Abrams, among others. “The thought of the would-be Hitler of Persia getting his hands on a nuclear weapon is one that should send shivers down the spine of every Israeli and every Westerner,” writes Freund. “Imposing punishing sanctions and using military force if necessary to stop the Iranian nuclear program would rally the American public behind his administration and underscore the fact that US deterrence is alive and well.”
- Foreign Policy: On FP‘s Shadow Government blog, Washington Institute for Near East Policy visiting fellow Michael Singh compares Iran’s diplomatic outreach to Africa with its alleged “shadowy network of arms smuggling, support for terrorism, and subversive activities.” Singh, a former George W. Bush National Security Council official, produces a long list of transgressions, some of them mere allegations. “These activities, taken together with Tehran’s refusal to cooperate with the IAEA on its nuclear activities and callous violations of its own people’s human rights, paint a picture of a regime which pursues its own security by flouting international rules and norms of acceptable behavior,” he writes. He calls for sanctions to be “vigorously enforced” and says Iran’s activities should be a lesson that “even a resolution of the nuclear issue would only begin to address the far broader concerns about the regime and its activities.”
- Wall Street Journal: In his Capital Journal column, Gerald Seib writes, “The goal of the U.S. and its allies right now is to make sure Iran has to make hard choices.” With Iran denying they are seeking nuclear weapons while pointing to Israel’s arsenal, ” Seib notes this gives a sense of the “gulf” between Iran and the United States. He says “the best the U.S. and its allies can hope for right now is to slow down the Iranian program on the one hand, while increasing the cost of continuing it on the other.” Carnegie Endowment Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour told Seib: “Negotiations likely won’t resolve our dispute with Iran. But they can help contain our dispute with Iran and prevent it from escalating.”
Duss agrees with Sadjadpour’s conclusion that the Soviet Union is the best historical model to apply to Iran, but adds something: If [...]]]>
Duss agrees with Sadjadpour’s conclusion that the Soviet Union is the best historical model to apply to Iran, but adds something: If this is the comparison, one must acknowledge the relative minuteness of the Iranian “threat” as compared to the USSR.
Duss concludes (with my emphasis):
I think this makes a lot of sense, but, having established a rough model for predicting Iran’s behavior, it’s necessary to go the next step and recognize that Iran is far, far weaker than the Soviet Union was, and doesn’t pose anything like the global threat to U.S. interests that the Soviet Union once did.
While Iran’s power in the region has clearly increased and the U.S.’s diminished as a result of the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. is still dealing from a position of considerable strength against a far weaker power in Iran, in a geopolitical environment that’s less conducive to the sort of power projection to which Iran seems to aspire. Clearly, Iran represents a challenge to a number of U.S. interests, but there are also areas of mutual interest to explore, such as its recent offer to help stabilize Afghanistan. So it’s important that we not allow ourselves to be talked into believing that the apocalypse is upon us.
]]>To act on these observations will require a far more nuanced Iran policy — one with a horizon of decades instead of months or years. [...] A more visionary policy would look back at the U.S.’s experience in the Cold War and examine the lessons learned from decades of détente with an enemy whose collapse was ultimately self-imposed.
Sadjadpour, an associate the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, starts by laying out the three accepted analogies most often employed by American analysts. Namely: Iran is like China and can be coaxed into modernity through rapprochement; Iran is like Nazi Germany and should “pre-emptively” attacked to prevent its acquisition of nuclear weapons; and Iran is like the Soviet Union and will change or collapse under the weight of its own insular policies and expansive domestic security apparatuses.
The most clear parallels, he says, can be drawn between Iran and the Soviet Union. Iran shares neither the military capabilities nor the expansionist ideology of the Nazis, and Ahmadinejad and Obama don’t face a common enemy as Mao and Nixon did with the threat of the Soviet Union.
Instead, Sadjadpour says that Iran most clearly resembles the Soviet Union and, in reading George F. Kennan’s 1947 essay on the Soviet Union, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” comes up with “10 striking examples of Kennan’s text anticipating today’s Iran.”
1. Iran’s sense of siege is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“[I]deology, as we have seen, taught them that the outside world was hostile and that it was their duty eventually to overthrow the political forces beyond their borders. Then powerful hands of Russian Iranian history and tradition reached up to sustain them in this feeling. Finally, their own aggressive intransigence with respect to the outside world began to find its own reaction.… It is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy; for if he reiterates it frequently enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right.”
2. The security apparatus designed to protect the state has begun to subsume it.
“The security of Soviet the Islamic Republic‘s power came to rest on the iron discipline of the Party Supreme Leader, on the severity and ubiquity of the secret police Basij and Revolutionary Guards, and on the uncompromising economic monopolism of the state. The ‘organs of suppression,’ in which the Soviet Iranian leaders had sought security from rival forces, became in large measures the masters of those whom they were designed to serve.”
3. The looming foreign enemy is needed to justify domestic suppression.
“[T]here is ample evidence that the stress laid in Moscow Tehran on the menace confronting Soviet Iranian society from the world outside its borders is founded not in the realities of foreign antagonism but in the necessity of explaining away the maintenance of dictatorial authority at home.”
4. Revolutionary ideology has not evolved.
“Of the original ideology, nothing has been officially junked. Belief is maintained in the basic badness of capitalism liberalism, in the inevitability of its destruction, in the obligation of the proletariat downtrodden believers to assist in that destruction and to take power into its their own hands.”
5. The Islamic Republic may make tactical offers of compromise, but its enmity toward the West is strategic.
“It must inevitably be assumed in Moscow Tehran that the aims of the capitalist Western world are antagonistic to the Soviet regime Islamic Republic, and therefore to the interests of the peoples it controls. If the Soviet Iranian government occasionally sets its signature to documents which would indicate the contrary, this is to [be] regarded as a tactical maneuver permissible in dealing with the enemy (who is without honor) and should be taken in the spirit of caveat emptor. Basically, the antagonism remains.”
6. The United States must focus on a long-term strategy, rather than short-term tactics.
“Soviet Iranian diplomacy [is] at once easier and more difficult to deal with than the diplomacy of individual aggressive leaders like Napoleon and Hitler. On the one hand it is more sensitive to contrary force, more ready to yield on individual sectors of the diplomatic front when that force is felt to be too strong, and thus more rational in the logic and rhetoric of power. On the other hand it cannot be easily defeated or discouraged by a single victory on the part of its opponents. And the patient persistence by which it is animated means that it can be effectively countered not by sporadic acts which represent the momentary whims of democratic opinion but only [by] intelligent long-range policies on the part of Russia’s Iran’s adversaries — policies no less steady in their purpose, and no less variegated and resourceful in their application, than those of the Soviet Union Islamic Republic itself.”
7. Ideological fatigue has set in.
“The mass of the people are disillusioned, skeptical and no longer as accessible as they once were to the magical attraction which Soviet Iranian power still radiates to its followers abroad.”
8. The succession of power in the Islamic Republic is uncertain.
“[A] great uncertainty hangs over the political life of the Soviet Union Islamic Republic. That is the uncertainty involved in the transfer of power from one individual or group of individuals to others.
“This is, of course, outstandingly the problem of the personal position of Stalin Khamenei. We must remember that his succession to Lenin’s Khomeini’s pinnacle of pre-eminence … was the only such transfer of individual authority which the Soviet Union Islamic Republic has experienced.… Thus the future of Soviet Iranian power may not be by any means as secure as Russian Iranian capacity for self-delusion would make it appear to the men of the Kremlin Islamic Republic.”
9. You can’t reach an accommodation with a regime that needs you as an adversary.
“It is clear that the United States cannot expect in the foreseeable future to enjoy political intimacy with the Soviet Iranian regime. It must continue to regard the Soviet Union Iran as a rival, not a partner, in the political arena. It must continue to expect that Soviet Iranian policies will reflect no abstract love of peace and stability, no real faith in the possibility of a permanent happy coexistence of the Socialist Islamist and capitalist liberal worlds, but rather a cautious, persistent pressure toward the disruption and weakening of all rival influence and rival power.”
10. U.S. policies can expedite, but not engineer, political change in Iran.
“It would be an exaggeration to say that American behavior unassisted and alone could exercise a power of life and death over the Communist Islamist movement and bring about the early fall of Soviet power the Islamic Republic in Russia Iran. But the United States has it in its power to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet Iranian policy must operate, to force upon the Kremlin Islamic Republic a far greater degree of moderation and circumspection than it has had to observe in recent years, and in this way to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet Iranian power.”
To act on these observations will require a far more nuanced Iran policy — one with a horizon of decades instead of months or years. In the near term according to Sadjadpour’s analysis, neither sanctions, a military strike or rapprochement will bring meaningful change to a country which defines itself as in resistance to Western demands. Hooman Majd has discussed the same. A more visionary policy would look back at the U.S.’s experience in the Cold War and examine the lessons learned from decades of détente with an enemy whose collapse was ultimately self-imposed.
]]>- Jewish Telegraphic Agency: An American Jewish Committee poll found that “Jewish approval of President Obama is dropping,” according to JTA. On Iran, the poll found “American Jewish confidence in Obama’s approach to Iran also has fallen” to 43 percent approval. Nearly 60 percent of those American Jews polled approved of military action to prevent an Iranian bomb, and a third disapproved. Seventy percent approved of Israeli military action, which just over a quarter of respondents opposed.
- Commentary: Since Obama seems unlikely to strike Iran, Jennifer Rubin, writing at the Contentions blog, cited the responses to questions about Iran in the AJC poll reported by JTA as the central reason for the overall dip in approval. “In answer to the question of whether anything can wean Jews of their ‘sick addiction‘ to the Democratic Party” — referencing Rachel Abrams — “the answer seems to be ‘Obama,’” she writes.
- Reuters: Lesley Wroughton reports that on Friday Iran’s Economy Minister Shamseddin Hosseini accused the World Bank of “discriminatory behavior” in its decision not to authorize new development assistance in Iran. Hosseini said that development and humanitarian assistance were not part of UN sanctions and that the Bank’s refusal to consider a new lending strategy to Iran went against the Bank’s articles of agreement. “The shocking point is that, based on inquiry made from the legal department of the World Bank, the developmental and humanitarian projects are excluded from the imposed sanctions on Iran,” Hosseini said, “in no section of the legal opinion reasons can be found to reduce relations and not financing such new projects.” U.S. lawmakers have pressured the Bank to cut its lending to Iran.
- Foreign Policy: Iranian analysts tend to use Red China, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to contextualize and predict Iran’s behavior. Carnegie Endowment Associate Karim Sadjadpour looks at those examples, rejects two and chooses one. Using former U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan’s 1947 essay on the Soviet Union, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” as a template, Sadjadpour substitutes references to the former USSR with words related to the Islamic Republic and offers a guide to how the U.S. should manage its Iran policy. Sadjadpour rejects the China comparison, and the ensuing strategy of rapprochement. He concludes anti-Americanism is too deeply ingrained in the identity of the Islamic Republic. Instead, the U.S. should put aside fears that Iran is expansionist or genocidal—there is little evidence to support these fears—and accept that U.S. policies might not bring immediate change in Iran. Instead, the parallels to the Soviet Union’s “siege mentality” should help form a new U.S. policy based on Iran’s longterm strategic weaknesses and, ultimately, unsustainable security policies and revolutionary ideology.