Lobe Log publishes Hawks on Iran every Friday. Our posts highlight militaristic commentary and confrontational policy recommendations about Iran from a variety of sources including news articles, think tanks and pundits.
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal: For months the Journal’s editorial board published hawkish articles about Iran on [...]]]>
Lobe Log publishes Hawks on Iran every Friday. Our posts highlight militaristic commentary and confrontational policy recommendations about Iran from a variety of sources including news articles, think tanks and pundits.
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal: For months the Journal’s editorial board published hawkish articles about Iran on a weekly basis. We highlighted some of them here, here and here. Then they stopped, perhaps due to the heating up of the presidential campaign and the crisis in Syria. But this week the editors returned to reminding readers about their hardline position on Iran by arguing that current sanctions are not strong enough and filled with “loopholes”. Interestingly, they criticize the measures for being inadequately painful and advocate more “pain” while simultaneously claiming that they are unlikely to be effective:
But enough pain to stop the 30-year nuclear drive of a revolutionary regime built around a messianic cult of martyrdom? A regime with foreign currency reserves between $60 billion and $100 billion, and which would net more than $40 billion in oil revenue even with a 40% drop in sales?
We’ve never considered sanctions likely to persuade Iran to drop its nuclear program, but it’s dangerous to pursue them half-heartedly while claiming progress and keeping the international temperature down as Iran’s centrifuges spin. That’s been the Obama Administration’s consistent approach, and it’ll probably continue at least through Election Day in November. It’s a good way to comfort adversaries in Tehran and Beijing while undermining friends in Jerusalem and beyond.
Benjamin Weinthal, Jerusalem Post: A fellow from the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and frequent JPost contributor praises his superior’s call for “economic warfare” on Iran. (Find a response to “Battle Rial” here.):
Writing in late June on the website of Foreign Policymagazine, Mark Dubowitz, a leading US sanctions expert, urged greater “economic warfare” targeting Iran’s entire energy apparatus and branches of its non-gas-and-oil sectors.
Dubowitz,the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, advocates a creative piece of US legislation from Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Florida), Rep. Robert Dold (R-Illinois) and Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Illinois) that designates Iran’s entire energy sector as a “zone of primary proliferation concern.”
Benjamin Weinthal, National Review Online: In a piece titled “Economic Suffocation for Iran’s Rulers” Weinthal says the Obama administration should begin rounding up a coalition of the willing for an attack on Iran:
The Obama administration could begin preparing a blueprint for a coalition of governments that would support a military option within a defined timetable. In addition to Israel, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands have also maintained that a military option should remain on the table.
Mark Dubowitz, NPR: The executive director of the FDD is arguably the most enthusiastic advocate of crippling sanctions against Iran from the world of Washington think tanks, and yet, he regularly admits that sanctions won’t impede Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions:
So, are sanctions working to make Iran less of a nuclear threat?
Some experts are skeptical.
“The regime has been bracing for this,” says Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “It has large foreign exchange reserves, and it is still earning $40 [billion] or $45 billion a year from oil sales.
“The supreme leader’s economic expiration date — when his cash hoard falls low enough to set off a massive economic panic — may still be far off,” Dubowitz argues. “If the [Obama] administration wants to bring that date closer, it needs to make clear that the United States and our allies will do everything in their power to destroy Iran’s energy wealth unless the regime compromises.”
Amotz Asa-El, Market Watch: The Israeli pundit and former Jerusalem Post executive editor praises crippling sanctions against Iran because he believes they will lead to political upheaval:
Watching their money evaporate between their fingers, a growing number of Iranians increasingly ask why they need a leadership whose adventurism’s main cheerleaders are Hugo Chavez and Bashar Assad. Moreover, the millions in Iran who believe the ayatollahs stole their votes three years ago have since seen people power drive other inept Middle East leaders from office.
Between the increasingly restless masses and the economically dilettante ayatollahs, change from within is on its way to Iran, either in the wake of next year’s election or before it, whether peacefully or not.
“On Point” host Tom Ashbrook asked tough questions of Goldberg, confronting him with critics like Glenn Greenwald. Goldberg fired back that Greenwald had retracted his criticisms, thereby dismissing his arguments. In fact, [...]]]>
“On Point” host Tom Ashbrook asked tough questions of Goldberg, confronting him with critics like Glenn Greenwald. Goldberg fired back that Greenwald had retracted his criticisms, thereby dismissing his arguments. In fact, no such retraction happened. Greenwald points out that this was not just some lapse in memory about an event that happened long ago, but that it was a “complete fabrication” about commentary written last week (in Greenwald’s updates, you’ll find much of the back and forth between the two).
The accumulation of the small mistakes is troubling, given the prominence of Goldberg in the U.S. debate. This is even the case if his newest “article hews to a strictly reportorial perspective,” as his colleague James Fallows said. Errors of fact, no matter how small, are “reportorial” errors. Muddled reportage was a major disaster in the lead up to the Iraq War.
Goldberg himself has maintained that he was right about ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda-linked groups, but he stands corrected in his accusation that Saddam was actively trying to weaponize aflatoxin (unless he cares to respond). As Ken Silverstein pointed out way back in ’06, Saddam’s regime had looked into the cancer-causing poison, but hadn’t pursued it. Goldberg nonetheless stated as fact that Saddam had a “weaponization” program twice in the run up to the war — once on Slate and once on CNN.
Silverstein even points to this amazing line: Critics of the Iraq war plan have “limited experience in the Middle East (Their lack of experience causes them to reach the naive conclusion that an invasion of Iraq will cause America to be loathed in the Middle East, rather than respected).”
Are readers really expected, after the disaster that was Iraq, to wipe Goldberg’s slate clean? And even if they do, how many more little mistakes will Goldberg make before everyone realizes he’s walked them into another big one?
UPDATE (8/21/10): In the original version of this piece, I erred in reading Goldberg’s assertion on “All Things Considered” as a new break. I thought when he was talking about U.S. officials going to China to warn of Israeli unpredictability, Goldberg was conflating two events — namely the separate April trips by U.S. and Israeli officials, where opposite messages were delivered inre: China’s energy stability.
I was wrong. Goldberg was likely talking about a late 2009 trip by Dennis Ross and Jeffrey Bader where they did just that. A reader pointed me to multiple stories that said as much. My apologies.
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