by James A. Russell

Russia’s storming of the Ukrainian naval base in Crimea just as Iran and world powers wrapped up another round of negotiations in Vienna earlier this week represent seemingly contradictory bookends to a world that some believe is spinning out of control.

It’s hard not to argue that the [...]]]> via LobeLog

by James A. Russell

Russia’s storming of the Ukrainian naval base in Crimea just as Iran and world powers wrapped up another round of negotiations in Vienna earlier this week represent seemingly contradictory bookends to a world that some believe is spinning out of control.

It’s hard not to argue that the world seems a bit trigger-happy these days. Vladimir Putin’s Russian mafia thugs armed with weapons bought with oil money calmly annex the Crimea. Chinese warships ominously circle obscure shoals in the Western Pacific as Japan and other countries look on nervously. Israel and Hezbollah appear eager to settle scores and start another war in Lebanon. Syria and Libya continue their descent into a medieval-like state of nature as the world looks on not quite knowing what to do.

The icing on the cake is outgoing Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s telling the United States to get stuffed and leave his country — after we’ve spent billions dollars of borrowed money and suffered thousands of casualties over 13 years propping up his corrupt kleptocracy. Karzai and his cronies are laughing all the way to their secret Swiss banks with their pockets stuffed full of US taxpayer dollars. Why the United States thinks it needs to maintain a military presence in Afghanistan remains a mystery — but that’s another story altogether.

In the United States, noted foreign policy experts like Senator John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Condoleeza Rice have greeted these developments with howls of protest and with a call to arms to reassert America’s global leadership to tame a world that looks like it’s spinning out of control. They appear to believe that we should somehow use force or the threat of force as an instrument to restore order. Never mind that these commentators have exercised uniformly bad judgment on nearly all the major foreign policy issues of the last decade.

The protests of these commentators notwithstanding, however, it is worth engaging in a debate about what all these events really mean; whether they are somehow linked and perhaps emblematic of a more important structural shift in international politics towards a more warlike environment. For the United States, these developments come as the Obama administration sensibly tries to take the country’s military off a permanent war-footing and slow the growth in the defense budget — a budget that will still see the United States spend more on its military than most of the rest of the world combined.

The first issue is whether the events in Crimea are emblematic of a global system in which developed states may reconsider the basic calculus that has governed decision-making since World War II — that going to war doesn’t pay. Putin may have correctly calculated that the West doesn’t care enough about Crimea to militarily stop Russia, but would the same calculus apply to Moldova, Poland, or some part of Eastern Europe? Similarly, would the Central Committee in Beijing risk a wider war in the Pacific over the bits of rocks in the South China Sea that are claimed by various countries?

While we can’t know the answer to these questions, the political leadership of both Russia and China clearly would face significant political, economic, and military costs in choosing to exercise force in a dispute in which the world’s developed states could not or would not back down. These considerations remain a powerful deterrent to a resumption of war between the developed states, events in Crimea notwithstanding– although miscalculations by foolhardy leaders are always a possibility. Putin could have chosen some other piece of real estate that might have led to a different reaction by the West, but it seems unlikely.

The second kind of inter-state dispute troubling the system are those between countries/actors that have a healthy dislike for one another. Clearly, the most dangerous of these situations is the relationship between India and Pakistan — two nuclear-armed states that have been exchanging fire directly and indirectly for much of the last half century. By the same token, however, there is really nothing new in this dispute that has remained a constant since both states were created after Britain’s departure from the subcontinent.

Similarly, the situation in the Middle East stemming from Israel’s still unfinished wars of independence remains a constant source of regional instability. Maybe one day, Israel and its neighbors will finally decide on a set of agreeable borders, but until they do we can all expect them to resort to occasional violence until the issue is settled. Regrettably, neither Israel nor its neighbors shows any real interest in peaceful accommodation.

The third kind of war is the intra-national conflicts like those in Syria, the Congo, and Libya that some believe is emblematic of a more general slide into a global state-of-nature Hobbesian world in which the weak perish and the strong survive. If this is the case, what if anything can be done about it?

Here again, however, we have to wonder what if anything is new with these wars. As much as we might not like it, internal political evolution in developing states can and often does turn violent until winners emerge. The West’s own evolution in Europe took hundreds of years of bloodshed until winners emerged and eventually established political systems capable of resolving disputes peacefully through politics and national institutions. The chaos in places like Syria, the Congo, Libya, and Afghanistan has actually been the norm of international politics over much of the last century — not the exception.

This returns us to the other bookend cited at the outset of this piece — the reconvened negotiations in Vienna that are attempting to resolve the standoff between Iran and the international community. These meetings point to perhaps the most significant change in the international system over the last century that has seen global institutions emerge as mechanisms to control state behavior through an incentive structure that discourages war and encourages compliance with generally accepted behavioral norms.

These institutions, such as the United Nations, and their supporting regulatory structures like the International Atomic Energy Agency have helped establish new behavioral norms and impose costs on states that do not comply with the norms. While we cannot be certain of what caused Iran to seek a negotiated solution to its standoff with the international community over its nuclear program, it is clear that the international community has imposed significant economic costs on Iran over the last eight years of ever-tightening sanctions.

Similarly, that same set of global institutions and regulatory regimes supported by the United States will almost certainly impose sanctions that will increase the costs of Putin’s violation of international norms in Russia’s seizure of Crimea. Those costs will build up over time, just as they have for Iran and other states like North Korea that find themselves outside of the general global political and economic system. As Iran has discovered, and as Russia will also discover — it’s an expensive and arguably unsustainable proposition to be the object of international obloquy.

For those hawks arguing for a more militarized US response to these disparate events, it’s worth returning to George F. Kennan’s basic argument for a patient, defensive global posture. Kennan argued that inherent US and Western strength would see it through the Cold War and triumph over its weaker foes in the Kremlin. As Kennan correctly noted: we were strong, they were weaker. Time was on our side, not theirs. The world’s networked political and economic institutions only reinforce the strength of the West and those other members of the international community that choose to play by the accepted rules for peaceful global interaction.

The same holds true today. Putin’s Russia is a paper tiger that is awash in oil money but with huge structural problems. Russia’s corrupt, mafia-like dictatorship will weaken over time as it is excluded from the system of global political and economic interactions that rewards those that play by the rules and penalizes those that don’t.

As for other wars around the world in places like Syria, we need to recognize they are part of the durable disorder of global politics that cannot necessarily be managed despite the awful plight of the poor innocent civilians and children — who always bear the costs of these tragic conflicts.

We need to calm down and recognize that the international system is not becoming unglued; it is simply exhibiting immutable characteristics that have been with us for much of recorded history. We should, however, be more confident of the ability of the system (with US leadership) to police itself and avoid rash decisions that will only make these situations worse.

Photo: A Russian armoured personnel carrier in Simferopol, the provincial capital of Crimea. Credit: Zack Baddorf/IPS.

By David Isenberg

Apart from death and taxes, one other thing has also appeared inevitable, at least for the past two decades: Iran will acquire a nuclear weapons capability.

Yet, despite all the near frantic demands for sanctions, clandestine action, sabotage, and outright military strikes to prevent Iran’s presumed inexorable march [...]]]> via Lobe Log

By David Isenberg

Apart from death and taxes, one other thing has also appeared inevitable, at least for the past two decades: Iran will acquire a nuclear weapons capability.

Yet, despite all the near frantic demands for sanctions, clandestine action, sabotage, and outright military strikes to prevent Iran’s presumed inexorable march towards that capability, one thing keeps getting overlooked: Iran has not managed to develop a nuclear weapon.

How is that possible? As states go, Iran has a reasonably well-developed scientific and industrial infrastructure, an educated workforce capable of working with advanced technologies, and lots of money. If Pakistan, starting from a much lower level, could develop nuclear weapons, why hasn’t Iran?

That overlooked question was the subject of an important but largely ignored past article, “Botching the Bomb: Why Nuclear Weapons Programs Often Fail on Their Own — and Why Iran’s Might, Too” in Foreign Affairs journal.

In the May/June 2012 issue, Jacques E. C. Hymans, an International Relations Associate Professor at the University of Southern California and author of the book Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists, Politicians, and Proliferation (from which his article was adapted) wrote:

The Iranians had to work for 25 years just to start accumulating uranium enriched to 20 percent, which is not even weapons grade. The slow pace of Iranian nuclear progress to date strongly suggests that Iran could still need a very long time to actually build a bomb — or could even ultimately fail to do so. Indeed, global trends in proliferation suggest that either of those outcomes might be more likely than Iranian success in the near future. Despite regular warnings that proliferation is spinning out of control, the fact is that since the 1970s, there has been a persistent slowdown in the pace of technical progress on nuclear weapons projects and an equally dramatic decline in their ultimate success rate.

To paraphrase Sherlock Homes, Iran is an example of a nuclear dog that has not barked. In Hyman’s view, Iran’s lack of progress can only partly be attributed to US and international nonproliferation efforts.

But the primary reason is:

…mostly the result of the dysfunctional management tendencies of the states that have sought the bomb in recent decades. Weak institutions in those states have permitted political leaders to unintentionally undermine the performance of their nuclear scientists, engineers, and technicians. The harder politicians have pushed to achieve their nuclear ambitions, the less productive their nuclear programs have become.

Conversely, US and Israeli efforts may actually be helping Iran to someday achieve a nuclear weapons capability.

Meanwhile, military attacks by foreign powers have tended to unite politicians and scientists in a common cause to build the bomb. Therefore, taking radical steps to rein in Iran would be not only risky but also potentially counterproductive, and much less likely to succeed than the simplest policy of all: getting out of the way and allowing the Iranian nuclear program’s worst enemies — Iran’s political leaders — to hinder the country’s nuclear progress all by themselves.

Generally examining the progress of contemporary aspiring nuclear weapons states, Hymans notes that seven countries launched dedicated nuclear weapons projects before 1970, and all of them succeeded in relatively short order. By contrast, of the ten countries that have launched dedicated nuclear weapons projects since 1970, only three have achieved a bomb. And only one of the six states that failed — Iraq — had made much progress toward its ultimate goal by the time it gave up trying. (The jury is still out on Iran’s program.) What’s more, even the successful projects of recent decades have required a long time to achieve their goals. The average timeline to the bomb for successful projects launched before 1970 was about seven years; the average timeline to the bomb for successful projects launched after 1970 has been about 17 years.

In the case of Iran, Hymans notes:

Iran’s nuclear scientists and engineers may well find a way to inoculate themselves against Israeli bombs and computer hackers. But they face a potentially far greater obstacle in the form of Iran’s long-standing authoritarian management culture. In a study of Iranian human-resource practices, the management analysts Pari Namazie and Monir Tayeb concluded that the Iranian regime has historically shown a marked preference for political loyalty over professional qualifications. “The belief,” they wrote, “is that a loyal person can learn new skills, but it is much more difficult to teach loyalty to a skilled person.” This is the classic attitude of authoritarian managers. And according to the Iranian political scientist Hossein Bashiriyeh, in recent years, Iran’s “irregular and erratic economic policies and practices, political nepotism and general mismanagement” have greatly accelerated. It is hard to imagine that the politically charged Iranian nuclear program is sheltered from these tendencies.

Hymans accordingly derived four lessons.

• The first is to be wary of narrow, technocentric analyses of a state’s nuclear weapons potential. Recent alarming estimates of Iran’s timeline to the bomb have been based on the same assumptions that have led Israel and the United States to consistently overestimate Iran’s rate of nuclear progress for the last 20 years. The majority of official US and Israeli estimates during the 1990s predicted that Iran would acquire nuclear weapons by 2000. After that date passed with no Iranian bomb in sight, the estimate was simply bumped back to 2005, then to 2010, and most recently to 2015. The point is not that the most recent estimates are necessarily wrong, but that they lack credibility. In particular, policymakers should heavily discount any intelligence assessments that do not explicitly account for the impact of management quality on Iran’s proliferation timeline.

• The second is that policymakers should reject analyses based on assumptions about a state’s capacity to build nuclear programs in secret. Ever since the mid-1990s, official proliferation assessments have freely extrapolated from minimal data, a practice that led US intelligence analysts to wrongly conclude that Iraq had reconstituted its weapons of mass destruction programs after the Gulf War. The US must guard against the possibility of an equivalent intelligence failure over Iran. This is not to deny that Tehran may be keeping some of its nuclear work secret. But it is simply unreasonable to assume, for example, that Iran has compensated for the problems it has faced with centrifuges at the Natanz uranium-enrichment facility by hiding better-working centrifuges at some unknown facility. Indeed, when Iran has tried to hide weapons-related activities in the past, it has often been precisely because the work was at the very early stages or was going badly.

• The third is that states that poorly manage their nuclear programs can bungle even the supposedly easy steps of the process. For instance, based on estimates of the size of North Korea’s plutonium stockpile and the presumed ease of weapons fabrication, US intelligence agencies thought that by the 1990s, North Korea had built one or two nuclear weapons. But in 2006, North Korea’s first nuclear test essentially fizzled, making it clear that the “hermit kingdom” did not have any working weapons at all. Even its second try, in 2009, did not work properly. Similarly, if Iran eventually does acquire a significant quantity of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium, this should not be equated with the possession of a nuclear weapon.

• The fourth lesson is to avoid acting in a way that might motivate scientific and technical workers to commit themselves more firmly to the nuclear weapons project. Nationalist fervor can partially compensate for poor organization. Accordingly, violent actions, such as aerial bombardments or assassinations of scientists, are a loser’s bet. As shown by the consequences of the Israeli attack on Osiraq, such strikes are liable to unite the state’s scientific and technical workers behind their otherwise illegitimate political leadership. Acts of sabotage, such as the Stuxnet computer worm, which damaged Iranian nuclear equipment in 2010, stand at the extreme boundary between sanctions and violent attacks, and should therefore only be undertaken after extremely thorough consideration.

 - David Isenberg runs the Isenberg Institute of Strategic Satire (Motto: Let’s stop war by making fun of it.). He is author of the book Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq and blogs at The PMSC Observer and the Huffington Post. He is a senior analyst at Wikistrat, an adjunct scholar at the CATO Institute, and a Navy veteran.

Photo: Iran’s first nuclear power plant in Bushehr, Iran, on August 21, 2010. UPI/Maryam Rahmanianon.  

Considering the misleading claims made about non-existent Iraqi and Iranian nuclear weapons, and the ramifications of another costly and catastrophic war, there should be more analyses like Scott Peterson’s highlighting of lessons from the lead-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

A declassified January 2006 report published in [...]]]> via Lobe Log

Considering the misleading claims made about non-existent Iraqi and Iranian nuclear weapons, and the ramifications of another costly and catastrophic war, there should be more analyses like Scott Peterson’s highlighting of lessons from the lead-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

A declassified January 2006 report published in September by the indispensable National Security Archive shows that CIA analysts allowed their search for non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to overshadow Saddam Hussein’s reasons for bluffing about them. Peterson accordingly suggests that Iranian attempts to eradicate traces of what appears to be previous weapons work (halted in 2003, according to the 2007 NIE), could be a face-saving measure rather than evidence of malicious intent. Increasing “scrutiny and distrust” directed at Iraq also led to counterproductive activities from both sides:

But that Iranian refusal – while at the same time engaging in “substantial” landscaping of the site, which the IAEA says undermines its ability to inspect it for traces of past nuclear work – echoes many Iraqi weapons inspections in the 1990s. In those standoffs, Iraqi officials often behaved as if they had something to hide, when in fact they did not.

As the CIA’s 2006 assessment states, “Iraq’s intransigence and deceptive practices during the periods of UN inspections between 1991 and 2003 deepened suspicions … that Baghdad had ongoing WMD programs.”

The CIA further notes that Iraqi attempts “to find face-saving means to disclose previously hidden information” meant that Iraqi attempts later to “close the books” only “reinvigorated the hunt for concealed WMD, as analysts perceived that Iraq had both the intent and capability to continue WMD efforts.…”

This led Iraq to one conclusion, similar to the public declarations of Iranian leaders today: “When Iraq’s revelations were met by added UN scrutiny and distrust, frustrated Iraqi leaders deepened their belief that inspections were politically motivated and would not lead to the end of sanctions,” read the CIA report.

Some analysts have dared to suggest that Iranian attempts to remove traces of halted weapons work is ultimately a positive sign. Consider the assessment of MIT international security expert Jim Walsh, who focuses on Iran’s nuclear program, talking about Parchin last week at a conference in Washington last week:

So I think they had a weapons program; they shut it down.  I think part of what was happening was at Parchin, this gigantic military base that the IAEA visited, but because it’s so large, they went to this building and not that building and that sort of thing.  Then they get – IAEA gets some intel that says, well, we think the explosives work was being done in this building, and, you know, all this time, Iran’s being – Parchin’s being watched by satellites continuously, and there’s no activity there.  Nothing for five years, right?  And then – or – not five years, but some period of time – years.

So then, the IAEA says, well, we want to go to that building, and then suddenly, there’s a whole lot of activity.  You know, there’s cartons put up and shoveling and scalping of soil and all that sort of thing.  So I read this as – that was a facility involved in the bomb program, and they’re cleaning it up, and IAEA is not going to get on the ground until it’s cleaned up.  Now here’s the part where I’m practical and blunt – I don’t care.  Right?  This is part of a program from the past.  And I wish they didn’t have the program from the past, but I’m more worried about Iran’s nuclear status in the future than the past, and so, you know, if it’s dead, and all they’re doing is cleaning it up so there’s no evidence of what they did before, I – you know, it’s regretful and blah, blah, but I don’t care.  I would rather get a deal that prevents Iran from moving forward towards a nuclear weapon or moving forward so that we don’t have a military engagement that leads to a nuclear weapons decision by Iran.

Former Iran-desk State Department staffer Reza Marashi and journalist Sahar Namazikhah remind us that Iran’s influnetial Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) has publicly recognized the benefits of negotiating with the US to avert a military conflict through a report that’s available on their website. “To that end, the Intelligence Ministry [...]]]> via Lobe Log

Former Iran-desk State Department staffer Reza Marashi and journalist Sahar Namazikhah remind us that Iran’s influnetial Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) has publicly recognized the benefits of negotiating with the US to avert a military conflict through a report that’s available on their website. “To that end, the Intelligence Ministry can play a role in planting ideas within the minds of Iran’s top decision-makers,” write Marashi and Namazikhah, adding that the MOIS report directly “articulates why President Obama is different than Israel”:

The primary obstacle? According to the MOIS, it is Israel – but not for the reasons many might assume. Rather than ideology, Iran’s Intelligence Ministry sees geopolitics as the driving force: “[Israel is concerned that] the balance of power in the region will be against the Zionist regime” and it therefore “considers enrichment a threat to its national security and wants to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities”.

The way that Iran’s Intelligence Ministry distinguishes between Obama and Israel is important. As a key source of information in the Iranian system, the MOIS has said that Obama shows he is not willing to rush into war – and it has given him de facto credit for it. To that end, policymakers in Washington should carefully study this publication as a potential opening from Iran.

Gary Sick, an acute observer of US-Iranian relations for more than three decades who served on the National Security Council staff under president Ford, Carter and Reagan, meanwhile argues that the path to middle east peace goes through Tehran. But even if conditions are ripe for a serious attempt at reaching a deal — which President Obama seems interested in – both sides will need to make concessions:

The United States and its allies will have to accept a measure of Iranian domestic enrichment of uranium. Iran will have to accept limits on its entire nuclear infrastructure, subject to intrusive inspections and monitoring. Iran will need to document the history of its nuclear program, and the West will need to remove sanctions. All of this must happen in a step-by-step process with safeguards and verifications at each stage.

Writing in Al-Monitor, Banafsheh Keynoush argues that Iran’s hardliners are ready to engage, but won’t submit without serious incentives. Indeed, as Iran scholar Farideh Farhi points out, the key to moving the diplomatic process forward and avoiding a military conflict is flexibility on both sides:

Unless Khamenei and company are given a way out of the mess they have taken Iran into (with some help from the US and company), chances are that we are heading into a war in the same way we headed to war in Iraq. A recent Foreign Affairs article by Ralf Ekeus, the former executive chairman of the UN special Commission on Iraq, and Malfrid-Braut hegghammer, is a good primer on how this could happen.

The reality is that the current sanctions regime does not constitute a stable situation. First, the instability (and instability is different from regime change as we are sadly learning in Syria) it might beget is a constant force for policy re-evaluation on all sides (other members of the P5+1 included). Second, maintaining sanctions require vigilance while egging on the sanctioned regime to become more risk-taking in trying to get around them. This is a formula for war and it will happen if a real effort at compromise is not made. Inflexibility will beget inflexibility.

The answer to this question is simple: there is no such thing as one Tehran. Opinions vary and arguments to back up the case for either Barak Obama or Mitt Romney are sometimes unexpected. The way it looks now, the hardliners prefer Romney. Just listen to the argument made by [...]]]> via Lobe Log

The answer to this question is simple: there is no such thing as one Tehran. Opinions vary and arguments to back up the case for either Barak Obama or Mitt Romney are sometimes unexpected. The way it looks now, the hardliners prefer Romney. Just listen to the argument made by the former MP and deputy secretary of the hard-line Society for the Followers of the Path of the Islamic Revolution, Parviz Sarvari:

Some people who are influential in the country have reached the conclusion that Obama must win in this election and this view unfortunately exists that we have to do something for Obama to win the election…Under current conditions even Mitt Romney is to our interest and it has always been shown that when Republicans have come to power, they have had war-mongering behavior and have diverged from Europe, China, and Russia and in these conditions the Islamic Republic has always been able to have more interactions with  Europe, china, Russia, and other countries. Republicans have shown that they are paper tigers and make more noise but do not act. Effectively their threats have never been a threat to us. As it happens, the most attacks and pressures against Iran have been during Democratic periods.

On the other side of the spectrum stands former vice president and reformist, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, who writes:

In the current American election, given the painful unilateral sanction policies that have been pursued against the nation of Iran by the administration of Mr. Obama and the harsher and more violent policies of Mr. Romney, which is closer to the military option, there are two views. The American hardliners who follow Israel welcome Mr. Romney’s election more and I think there are hardliners in Iran who also welcome this choice so that conflict and confrontation with the main enemy become more evident. In the same way part of the [Iranian] opposition which [is after] overthrow is also of the belief that Romney can better and faster bring the Islamic Republic to its knee. But in the midst of this commotion, my thinking is that Mr Obama will be elected with quite a bit of distance from Mr. Romney and all in all this is better for the world and our country.

Considering that Abatahi was imprisoned after the 2009 election and has essentially become a persona non grata within the power circles of current Iran, his opinions probably do not carry much weight. However, his view that President Obama will be re-elected is also shared by foreign policy heavy weights such as Ali Akbar Velayati, the former foreign minister and current senior advisor to Leader Ali Khamenei. Categorically denying recent reports of his meetings with US officials, Velayati relies on US polling data and suggests that Obama will probably be the victor.

Will it make a difference who wins for Iran? “America is America,” Velayati shrugs. In the past 34 years since the revolution, the Islamic Republic has “tested a variety of US presidents, Democrats and Republicans” and “we do not need of their kindness.” The bottom line for Velayati is that no matter who gets elected, Iran will not give in to the US demand to suspend “peaceful nuclear work” because “even if we waive our right temporarily, they will bring forth another excuse.”

Velayati does not reject negotiations but admits that as far as he knows, no decision has been made to talk to the US directly. But, the whole tenor of the interview suggests that Tehran is getting ready for another round of negotiations with the US within the frame of P5+1 at the end of November with the assumption that Obama will win.

At the same time, the interview makes clear that, with or without Obama, the level of mistrust is extremely high, at least among the current decision-making circles. Those inside Iran who are calling for concessions in the nuclear talks in exchange for the end of sanctions, Velayati says, do not understand the international environment. “I do not know a country in the world that has retreated against the unjust demands of Western powers and they have [in turn] fulfilled their promised concessions.”

- Farideh Farhi is an independent researcher and an affiliate graduate faculty member in political science and international relations at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. 

The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) has released a brief report emphasizing that Iran continues to move toward nuclear weapons capability and the international community must halt further progress. ISIS’s latest concern centers around Iranian lawmaker Mansour Haqiqatpour’s October 2 comment that Iran could enrich uranium to 60 percent [...]]]> via Lobe Log

The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) has released a brief report emphasizing that Iran continues to move toward nuclear weapons capability and the international community must halt further progress. ISIS’s latest concern centers around Iranian lawmaker Mansour Haqiqatpour’s October 2 comment that Iran could enrich uranium to 60 percent if diplomatic talks fail. From Reuters:

“In case our talks with the (six powers) fail to pay off, Iranian youth will master (the technology for) enrichment up to 60 percent to fuel submarines and ocean-going ships,” Haqiqatpour said.

The powers should know that “if these talks continue into next year, Iran cannot guarantee it would keep its enrichment limited to 20 percent. This enrichment is likely to increase to 40 or 50 percent,” he said.

The US and international community should prepare for an official Iranian announcement of such high-grade enrichment, warns ISIS, adding that Iran has “no need to produce highly enriched uranium at all, even if it wanted nuclear fuel for a reactor powering nuclear submarines or other naval vessels, or for a research reactor”. The move would also “significantly shortens Iran’s dash time to reaching weapon grade uranium,” the report said.

ISIS’s conclusion:

Taken in this context, any official Iranian announcement to make highly enriched uranium should be seen as unacceptable. Many will view such a decision as equivalent to initiating a breakout to acquire nuclear  weapons, reducing any chance for negotiations to work and potentially increasing the chances for military  strikes and war. Before Iran announces official plans to make highly enriched uranium, the United States and  the other members of the P5+1 should quietly but clearly state to Iran what it risks by producing highly  enriched uranium under any pretext.

No details are provided as to what exactly needs to be done to make Iran understand that such a move would be “unacceptable”, but we are informed that Iranian enrichment of high-grade uranium would increase the chances for military conflict.

The fact that Iran is still years aways from being able to test a device, and according to US and international official assessments has still not made the decision to do so, is also absent from ISIS’s report. Indeed, according to the bipartisan Iran Project report on the benefits and costs of military action on Iran (emphasis mine):

After deciding to “dash” for a bomb, Iran would need from one to four months to produce enough weapons-grade  uranium for a single nuclear device. Additional time—up to two years, according  to conservative estimates—would be required for Iran to build a nuclear warhead  that would be reliably deliverable by a missile. Given extensive monitoring and  surveillance of Iranian activities, signs of an Iranian decision to build a nuclear  weapon would likely be detected, and the U.S. would have at least a month to  implement a course of action.

It was exactly 50 years ago when then-President John F. Kennedy took to the airwaves to inform the world that the Soviet Union was introducing nuclear-armed missiles into Cuba and that he had ordered a blockade of the island – and would consider stronger action – to force their removal.

By Wayne White

Washington Post columnist Walter Pincus continues to provides incisive analysis to the debate over Iran’s controversial nuclear program. Following are a few of his suggested questions for the presidential candidates’ foreign policy debate on Monday.

What are the candidates willing to do to ensure their “red lines” on [...]]]> via Lobe Log

Washington Post columnist Walter Pincus continues to provides incisive analysis to the debate over Iran’s controversial nuclear program. Following are a few of his suggested questions for the presidential candidates’ foreign policy debate on Monday.

What are the candidates willing to do to ensure their “red lines” on Iran’s nuclear program aren’t violated and how much will Israeli concerns affect the ultimate outcome?

The president has said he would prevent Iran from “having a nuclear weapon” and has offered assurances that U.S. intelligence would be able to determine when building one had begun.

In his June “Face the Nation” appearance, Romney said he would be willing to use military force, but he did not define what that meant. Recently, he has said he would prevent Iran from having “a nuclear weapons capability,” but what does that mean?

Though the current policy of the United States and its allies rests on a U.N. Security Council resolution that calls for Iran to suspend its activities related to reprocessing uranium, Iran has produced uranium enriched to 20 percent. Enrichment up to 90 percent is considered weapons grade. Most of the enrichment has been up to 6 percent, usable as fuel in electric power reactors.

What solution is required by each candidate for this situation? Do they believe any deal with Tehran requires Israeli approval?

Does Romney or Obama believe they could attack Iran’s nuclear program without congressional authorization — as was the case with Libya — and without agreement from the United Nations or support from NATO or a group of other allies, including some countries in the region?

On March 21, 2011, Obama sent Congress a two-page letter saying that as commander in chief he had constitutional authority to authorize the military operations to prevent a humanitarian disaster. He said it would be limited in duration and noted that the U.N. Security Council had authorized a no-fly zone over Libya, and that the undertaking was done with British, French and Persian Gulf allies. Nineteen days after the strikes began, NATO took over command of the air operations from the U.S. Africa Command.

Does Obama or Romney believe that any military action against Iran would be as limited as the one in Libya? Does either believe that U.S. ground forces could be drawn into battle should Iran or its allies respond with attacks against Israel or other countries?

By Dilip Hiro

via Tom Dispatch

The United States and Pakistan are by now a classic example of a dysfunctional nuclear family (with an emphasis on “nuclear”). While the two governments and their peoples become more suspicious and resentful of [...]]]> How the U.S. and Pakistan Became the Dysfunctional Nuclear Family of International Relations

By Dilip Hiro

via Tom Dispatch

The United States and Pakistan are by now a classic example of a dysfunctional nuclear family (with an emphasis on “nuclear”). While the two governments and their peoples become more suspicious and resentful of each other with every passing month, Washington and Islamabad are still locked in an awkward post-9/11 embrace that, at this juncture, neither can afford to let go of.

Washington is keeping Pakistan, with its collapsing economy and bloated military, afloat but also cripplingly dependent on its handouts and U.S.-sanctioned International Monetary Fund loans.  Meanwhile, CIA drones unilaterally strike its tribal borderlands.  Islamabad returns the favor. It holds Washington hostage over its Afghan War from which the Pentagon won’t be able to exit in an orderly fashion without its help. By blocking U.S. and NATO supply routes into Afghanistan (after a U.S. cross-border air strike had killed 24 Pakistani soldiers) from November 2011 until last July, Islamabad managed to ratchet up the cost of the war while underscoring its indispensability to the Obama administration.

At the heart of this acerbic relationship, however, is Pakistan’s arsenal of 110 nuclear bombs which, if the country were to disintegrate, could fall into the hands of Islamist militants, possibly from inside its own security establishment. As Barack Obama confided to his aides, this remains his worst foreign-policy nightmare, despite the decision of the U.S. Army to train a commando unit to retrieve Pakistan’s nukes, should extremists seize some of them or materials to produce a “dirty bomb” themselves.

Two Publics, Differing Opinions

Pakistan’s military high command fears the Pentagon’s contingency plans to seize its nukes. Following the clandestine strike by U.S. SEALs that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in May 2011, it loaded elements of its nuclear arsenal onto trucks, which rumbled around the country to frustrate any possible American attempt to grab its most prized possessions. When Senator John Kerry arrived in Islamabad to calm frayed nerves following Bin Laden’s assassination, high Pakistani officials insisted on a written U.S. promise not to raid their nuclear arsenal. He snubbed the demand.

Since then mutual distrust between the two nominal allies — a relationship encapsulated by some in the term “AmPak” — has only intensified. Last month, for instance, Pakistan became the sole Muslim country to officially call on the Obama administration to ban the anti-Islamic 14-minute video clip Innocence of Muslims, which depicts the Prophet Muhammad as a womanizer, religious fraud, and pedophile.

While offering a bounty of $100,000 for the killing of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, an Egyptian-American Christian producer of the movie, Pakistan’s Railways Minister Ghulam Ahmad Bilour called on al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban to be “partners in this noble deed.” Prime Minister Raja Ashraf distanced his government from Bilour’s incitement to murder, a criminal offense under Pakistani law, but did not dismiss him from the cabinet. The U.S. State Department strongly condemned Bilour’s move.

Pakistan also stood out as the only Muslim state whose government declared a public holiday, “Love the Prophet Muhammad Day,” to encourage its people to demonstrate against the offending movie. The U.S. Embassy’s strategy of disarming criticism with TV and newspaper ads showing President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemning “the content and the message” of the film failed to discourage protesters. In fact, the demonstrations in major Pakistani cities turned so violent that 23 protesters were killed, the highest figure worldwide.

Taking advantage of the government’s stance, proscribed jihadist organizations made a defiant show of their continued existence. In Lahore, the capital of Punjab, the country’s largest province, activists from the banned Lashkar-e Taiba (Army of the Pure), whose leader Hafiz Saeed is the target of a $10 million bounty by Washington, led protesters toward the American consulate where perimeter defenses had been breached earlier in the week. In Islamabad, activists from the Sipah-e-Sahaba  (Soldiers of the Prophet’s Companions), an outlawed Sunni faction, clashed with the police for hours in the course of a march to the heavily guarded diplomatic enclave.

These outlawed organizations continue to operate with impunity in an environment that has grown rabidly anti-American. A June 2012 survey by the Washington-based Pew Research Center (PRC) found that 74% of Pakistanis consider the United States an enemy. By contrast, only 12% believe that U.S. aid helps solve problems in their country in a situation in which 89% describe their nation’s economic situation as “bad.”

The American public’s view of Pakistan is equally bleak. February polls byGallup and Fox News indicated that 81% of Americans had an unfavorable view of that country; just 15% held a contrary view, the lowest figure of the post-9/11 period (with only the remaining “axis of evil” states of Iran and North Korea faring worse).

Clashing Views on the War on Terror

Most Americans consider Pakistan an especially unreliable ally in Washington’s war on terror. That it provided safe haven to bin Laden for 10 years before his violent death in 2011 reinforced this perception. Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman Zawahiri, is widely believed to be hiding in Pakistan. So, too, are Mullah Muhammad Omar and other leaders of the Afghan Taliban.

It beggars belief that this array of Washington’s enemies can continue to function inside the country without the knowledge of its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) which reputedly has nearly 100,000 employees and informers. Even if serving ISI officers are not in cahoots with the Afghan Taliban, many retired ISI officers clearly are.

The rationale for this, top Pakistani officials say privately, is that the Afghan Taliban and the allied Haqqani Network are not attacking targets in Pakistan and so pose no threat to the state. In practice, these political-military entities are being sustained by Islamabad as future surrogates in a post-American Afghanistan.  Their task is to ensure a pro-Islamabad government in Kabul, immune to offers of large-scale economic aid from India, the regional superpower. In short, it all boils down to Washington and Islamabad pursuing clashing aims in war-ravaged Afghanistan and in Pakistan as well.

The Pakistani government’s multifaceted stance toward Washington has wide public support. Popular hostility toward the U.S. stems from several interrelated factors.  Above all, most Pakistanis view the war on terror from a radically differently perspective than Americans. Since its primary targets have been the predominantly Muslim countries of Afghanistan and Iraq, they equate it with an American crusade against Islam.

While U.S. pundits and politicians invariably cite the $24 billion in assistance and military aid Washington has given Islamabad in the post-9/11 period, Pakistanis stress the heavy price they have paid for participating in the Washington-led war. “No country and no people have suffered more in the epic struggle against terrorism than Pakistan,” said President Asif Ali Zardari at the United Nations General Assembly last month.

His government argues that, as a result of joining the war on terror, Pakistan has suffered a loss of $68 billion over the past decade.  A widely disseminated statistic at home, it includes estimated losses due to a decline in foreign investments and adverse effects on trade, tourism, and businesses.  Islamabad attributes all this to the insecurity caused by the terrorist acts of local jihadists in response to its participation in Washington’s war. Then there are the roughly 4,000 Pakistani military fatalities suffered during post-9/11 operations against terror groups and other homegrown militants — significantly higher than all allied troops killed in Afghanistan. Some 35,000 civilians have also died or suffered injuries in the process.

Drones Fuel Popular Rage

During a September address to the Asia Society in New York, Foreign Minister Hinna Rabbani Khar was asked for an explanation of the rampant anti-American sentiment in her country.  She replied with a single word: “drones.” At any given time, CIA drones, buzzing like wasps and armed with Hellfire missiles, circle round the clock over an area in Pakistan’s tribal zone, their high-resolution cameras recording movements below. This fills people on the ground with unending terror, being unable to guess when and where the missiles will be fired.

A June Pew Research Center survey shows that 97% of Pakistanis familiar with the drone attacks held a negative view of them.  “Those who are familiar with the drone campaign also overwhelmingly (94%) believe the attacks kill too many innocent people,” states its report. “Nearly three-quarters (74%) say they are not necessary to defend Pakistan from extremist organizations.” (In stark contrast, a February Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 83% of Americans — and 73% of liberal Democrats — support Obama’s drone onslaught.)

A recent anti-drone “march” by a nine-mile long motorcade from Islamabad to the border of the South Waziristan tribal agency was led by Imran Khan, head of the Movement for Justice political party.  Joined by protesters from the U.S.and Britain, it was a dramatic reminder of the depth of popular feeling against the drones. By refraining from forcibly entering South Waziristan in defiance of an official ban, Khan stayed within the law. And by so doing, he enhanced his already impressive 70% approval rating and improved the chances of his party — committed to ending Islamabad’s participation in Washington’s war on terror — to achieve a breakthrough in the upcoming parliamentary election.

Unlike in Yemen, where the government has authorized the Obama administration to stage drone attacks, Pakistani leaders, who implicitly accepted such strikes before the Pentagon’s gross violation of their country’s sovereignty in the bin Laden killing, no longer do so.  “The use of unilateral strikes on Pakistan territory is illegal,” said Foreign Minister Khar. Her government, she explained, needed to rally popular backing for its campaign to quash armed militant groups, and the drones make that impossible. “As the drones fly over the territory of Pakistan, it becomes an American war and the whole logic of this being our fight, in our own interest, is immediately put aside and again it is a war imposed on us.”

Underlying the deployment of a drone, helicopter, or jet fighter to hit a target in a foreign country is an updated version of the Vietnam-era doctrine of “hot pursuit,” which ignores the basic concept of national sovereignty. Pakistani leaders fear that if they do not protest Washington’s continued use of drones for “targeted killings” of Pakistan-based individuals selected in the White House, their arch-rival India will follow suit. It will hit the camps in Pakistan allegedly training terrorists to destabilize Indian Kashmir. That is one of the ongoing nightmares of Pakistan’s senior generals.

The Nuclear Conundrum

Since India would be the prime target of any nuclear-armed extremists, the Indian government dreads the prospect of Pakistan’s nukes falling into such hands far more than President Obama. The alarm of both Delhi and Washington is well justified, particularly because Pakistan’s arsenal is growingfaster than any on Earth — and the latest versions of nukes it’s producing are smaller and so easier to hijack.

Over the past five years, Pakistani extremists have staged a series of attacks on sensitive military installations, including nuclear facilities. In November 2007, for example, they attacked Sargodha airbase where nuclear-capable F-16 jet aircraft are stationed. The following month a suicide bomber targeted a Pakistani Air Force base believed to hold nuclear weapons at Kamra, 37 miles northwest of Islamabad. In August 2008, a group of suicide bombers blew up the gates to a weapons complex at the Wah cantonment containing a nuclear warhead assembly plant, leaving 63 people dead. A further assault on Kamra took place in October 2009 and yet another last August, this time by eight suicide bombers belonging to the Pakistani Taliban.

Given Pakistan’s dependence on a continuing supply of U.S.-made advanced weaponry — essential to withstand any onslaught by India in a conventional war — its government has had to continually reassure Washington that the security of its nuclear arsenal is foolproof. Its leaders have repeatedly assured their American counterparts that the hemispheres containing nuclear fuel and the triggers for activating the weapons are stored separately under tight guard. This has failed to allay the anxieties of successive American presidents. What disconcerts the U.S. is that, despite contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to underwrite programs to help Pakistan secure its nuclear arms, it does not know where many of these parts are stored.

This is not going to change. The military planners in Islamabad correctly surmise that Delhi and Washington would like to turn Pakistan into a non-nuclear power. At present, they see their nuclear arsenal as the only effective deterrent they have against an Indian aggression which, in their view, theyexperienced in 1965. “We developed all these nukes to use against India,” said an unnamed senior Pakistani military officer recently quoted in the London-based Sunday Times Magazine. “Now they turn out to be very useful in dealing with the U.S.”

In short, Pakistan’s military high command has come to view its nuclear arsenal as an effective deterrent not only against its traditional adversary, India, but also its nominal ally in Washington. If such thinking solidifies as the country’s military doctrine in the years following the Pentagon’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, then Pakistan may finally find itself removed from Washington’s list of non-NATO allies, ending the dysfunctional nuclear family of international politics.  What that would mean in global terms is anyone’s guess.

Dilip Hiro, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of 33 books, the most recent being Apocalyptic Realm: Jihadists in South Asia (Yale University Press, New Haven and London).  To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Hiro discusses the embattled Pakistan-U.S. relationship, click here or download it to your iPod here.

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Copyright 2012 Dilip Hiro