by Nick Turse
via Tom Dispatch
In those first minutes, they’ll be stunned. Eyes fixed in a thousand-yard stare, nerve endings numbed. They’ll just stand there. Soon, you’ll notice that they are holding their arms out at a 45-degree angle. Your eyes will be drawn to their hands and [...]]]>
by Nick Turse
via Tom Dispatch
In those first minutes, they’ll be stunned. Eyes fixed in a thousand-yard stare, nerve endings numbed. They’ll just stand there. Soon, you’ll notice that they are holding their arms out at a 45-degree angle. Your eyes will be drawn to their hands and you’ll think you mind is playing tricks. But it won’t be. Their fingers will start to resemble stalactites, seeming to melt toward the ground. And it won’t be long until the screaming begins. Shrieking. Moaning. Tens of thousands of victims at once. They’ll be standing amid a sea of shattered concrete and glass, a wasteland punctuated by the shells of buildings, orphaned walls, stairways leading nowhere.
This could be Tehran, or what’s left of it, just after an Israeli nuclear strike.
Iranian cities — owing to geography, climate, building construction, and population densities — are particularly vulnerable to nuclear attack, according to a new study, “Nuclear War Between Israel and Iran: Lethality Beyond the Pale,” published in the journal Conflict & Health by researchers from the University of Georgia and Harvard University. It is the first publicly released scientific assessment of what a nuclear attack in the Middle East might actually mean for people in the region.
Its scenarios are staggering. An Israeli attack on the Iranian capital of Tehran using five 500-kiloton weapons would, the study estimates, kill seven million people — 86% of the population — and leave close to 800,000 wounded. A strike with five 250-kiloton weapons would kill an estimated 5.6 million and injure 1.6 million, according to predictions made using an advanced software package designed to calculate mass casualties from a nuclear detonation.
Estimates of the civilian toll in other Iranian cities are even more horrendous. A nuclear assault on the city of Arak, the site of a heavy water plant central to Iran’s nuclear program, would potentially kill 93% of its 424,000 residents. Three 100-kiloton nuclear weapons hitting the Persian Gulf port of Bandar Abbas would slaughter an estimated 94% of its 468,000 citizens, leaving just 1% of the population uninjured. A multi-weapon strike on Kermanshah, a Kurdish city with a population of 752,000, would result in an almost unfathomable 99.9% casualty rate.
Cham Dallas, the director of the Institute for Health Management and Mass Destruction Defense at the University of Georgia and lead author of the study, says that the projections are the most catastrophic he’s seen in more than 30 years analyzing weapons of mass destruction and their potential effects. “The fatality rates are the highest of any nuke simulation I’ve ever done,” he told me by phone from the nuclear disaster zone in Fukushima, Japan, where he was doing research. “It’s the perfect storm for high fatality rates.”
Israel has never confirmed or denied possessing nuclear weapons, but is widelyknown to have up to several hundred nuclear warheads in its arsenal. Iran has no nuclear weapons and its leaders claim that its nuclear program is for peaceful civilian purposes only. Published reports suggest that American intelligence agencies and Israel’s intelligence service are in agreement: Iran suspended its nuclear weapons development program in 2003.
Dallas and his colleagues nonetheless ran simulations for potential Iranian nuclear strikes on the Israeli cities of Beer Sheva, Haifa, and Tel Aviv using much smaller 15-kiloton weapons, similar in strength to those dropped by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Their analyses suggest that, in Beer Shiva, half of the population of 209,000 would be killed and one-sixth injured. Haifa would see similar casualty ratios, including 40,000 trauma victims. A strike on Tel Aviv with two 15-kiloton weapons would potentially slaughter 17% of the population — nearly 230,000 people. Close to 150,000 residents would likely be injured.
These forecasts, like those for Iranian cities, are difficult even for experts to assess. “Obviously, accurate predictions of casualty and fatality estimates are next to impossible to obtain,” says Dr. Glen Reeves, a longtime consultant on the medical effects of radiation for the Defense Department’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, who was not involved in the research. “I think their estimates are probably high but not impossibly so.”
According to Paul Carroll of the Ploughshares Fund, a San Francisco-based foundation that advocates for nuclear disarmament, “the results would be catastrophic” if major Iranian cities were attacked with modern nuclear weapons. “I don’t see 75% [fatality rates as] being out of the question,” says Carroll, after factoring in the longer-term effects of radiation sickness, burns, and a devastated medical infrastructure.
According to Dallas and his colleagues, the marked disparity between estimated fatalities in Israel and Iran can be explained by a number of factors. As a start, Israel is presumed to have extremely powerful nuclear weapons and sophisticated delivery capabilities including long-range Jericho missiles, land-based cruise missiles, submarine-launched missiles, and advanced aircraft with precision targeting technology.
The nature of Iranian cities also makes them exceptionally vulnerable to nuclear attack, according to the Conflict & Health study. Tehran, for instance, is home to 50% of Iran’s industry, 30% of its public sector workers, and 50 colleges and universities. As a result, 12 million people live in or near the capital, most of them clustered in its core. Like most Iranian cities, Tehran has little urban sprawl, meaning residents tend to live and work in areas that would be subject to maximum devastation and would suffer high percentages of fatalities due to trauma as well asthermal burns caused by the flash of heat from an explosion.
Iran’s topography, specifically mountains around cities, would obstruct the dissipation of the blast and heat from a nuclear explosion, intensifying the effects. Climatic conditions, especially high concentrations of airborne dust, would likely exacerbate thermal and radiation casualties as well as wound infections.
Nuclear Horror: Then and Now
The first nuclear attack on a civilian population center, the U.S. strike onHiroshima, left that city “uniformly and extensively devastated,” according to astudy carried out in the wake of the attacks by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. “Practically the entire densely or moderately built-up portion of the city was leveled by blast and swept by fire… The surprise, the collapse of many buildings, and the conflagration contributed to an unprecedented casualty rate.” At the time, local health authorities reported that 60% of immediate deaths were due to flash or flame burns and medical investigators estimated that 15%-20% of the deaths were caused by radiation.
Witnesses “stated that people who were in the open directly under the explosion of the bomb were so severely burned that the skin was charred dark brown or black and that they died within a few minutes or hours,” according to the 1946 report. “Among the survivors, the burned areas of the skin showed evidence of burns almost immediately after the explosion. At first there was marked redness, and other evidence of thermal burns appeared within the next few minutes or hours.”
Many victims kept their arms outstretched because it was too painful to allow them to hang at their sides and rub against their bodies. One survivor recalledseeing victims “with both arms so severely burned that all the skin was hanging from their arms down to their nails, and others having faces swollen like bread, losing their eyesight. It was like ghosts walking in procession… Some jumped into a river because of their serious burns. The river was filled with the wounded and blood.”
The number of fatalities at Hiroshima has been estimated at 140,000. A nuclear attack on Nagasaki three days later is thought to have killed 70,000. Today, according to Dallas, 15-kiloton nuclear weapons of the type used on Japan are referred to by experts as “firecracker nukes” due to their relative weakness.
In addition to killing more than 5.5 million people, a strike on Tehran involving five 250-kiloton weapons — each of them 16 times more powerful than thebomb dropped on Hiroshima — would result in an estimated 803,000 third-degree burn victims, with close to 300,000 others suffering second degree burns, and 750,000 to 880,000 people severely exposed to radiation. “Those people with thermal burns over most of their bodies we can’t help,” says Dallas. “Most of these people are not going to survive… there is no saving them. They’ll be in intense agony.” As you move out further from the site of the blast, he says, “it actually gets worse. As the damage decreases, the pain increases, because you’re not numb.”
In a best case scenario, there would be 1,000 critically injured victims for every surviving doctor but “it will probably be worse,” according to Dallas. Whatever remains of Tehran’s healthcare system will be inundated with an estimated 1.5 million trauma sufferers. In a feat of understatement, the researchers report that survivors “presenting with combined injuries including either thermal burns or radiation poisoning are unlikely to have favorable outcomes.”
Iranian government officials did not respond to a request for information about how Tehran would cope in the event of a nuclear attack. When asked if the U.S. military could provide humanitarian aid to Iran after such a strike, a spokesman for Central Command, whose area of responsibility includes the Middle East, was circumspect. “U.S. Central Command plans for a wide range of contingencies to be prepared to provide options to the Secretary of Defense and the President,” he told this reporter. But Frederick Burkle, a senior fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Harvard University’s School of Public Health, as well as a coauthor of the just-published article, is emphatic that the U.S. military could not cope with the scale of the problem. “I must also say that no country or international body is prepared to offer the assistance that would be needed,” he told me.
Dallas and his team spent five years working on their study. Their predictions were generated using a declassified version of a software package developed for the Defense Department’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, as well as other complementary software applications. According to Glen Reeves, the software used fails to account for many of the vagaries and irregularities of an urban environment. These, he says, would mitigate some of the harmful effects. Examples would be buildings or cars providing protection from flash burns. He notes, however, that built-up areas can also exacerbate the number of deaths and injuries. Blast effects far weaker than what would be necessary to injure the lungs can, for instance, topple a house. “Your office building can collapse… before your eardrums pop!” notes Reeves.
The new study provides the only available scientific predictions to date about what a nuclear attack in the Middle East might actually mean. Dallas, who was previously the director of the Center for Mass Destruction Defense at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is quick to point out that the study received no U.S. government funding or oversight. “No one wanted this research to happen,” he adds.
Rattling Sabers and Nuclear Denial
Frederick Burkle points out that, today, discussions about nuclear weapons in the Middle East almost exclusively center on whether or not Iran will produce an atomic bomb instead of “focusing on ensuring that there are options for them to embrace an alternate sense of security.” He warns that the repercussions may be grave. “The longer this goes on the more we empower that singular thinking both within Iran and Israel.”
Even if Iran were someday to build several small nuclear weapons, their utility would be limited. After all, analysts note that Israel would be capable of launching a post-attack response which would simply devastate Iran. Right now, Israel is the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East. Yet a preemptive Israeli nuclear strike against Iran also seems an unlikely prospect to most experts.
“Currently, there is little chance of a true nuclear war between the two nations,” according to Paul Carroll of the Ploughshares Fund. Israel, he points out, would be unlikely to use nuclear weapons unless its very survival were at stake. “However, Israel’s rhetoric about red lines and the threat of a nuclear Iran are something we need to worry about,” he told me recently by email. “A military strike to defeat Iran’s nuclear capacity would A) not work B) ensure that Iran WOULD then pursue a bomb (something they have not clearly decided to do yet) and C) risk a regional war.”
Cham Dallas sees the threat in even starker terms. “The Iranians and the Israelis are both committed to conflict,” he told me. He isn’t alone in voicing concern. “What will we do if Israel threatens Tehran with nuclear obliteration?… A nuclear battle in the Middle East, one-sided or not, would be the most destabilizing military event since Pearl Harbor,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter Tim Weiner in a recent op-ed for Bloomberg News. “Our military commanders know a thousand ways in which a war could start between Israel and Iran… No one has ever fought a nuclear war, however. No one knows how to end one.”
The Middle East is hardly the only site of potential nuclear catastrophe. Today,according to the Ploughshares Fund, there are an estimated 17,300 nuclear weapons in the world. Russia reportedly has the most with 8,500; North Korea, the fewest with less than 10. Donald Cook, the administrator for defense programs at the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, recently confirmed that the United States possesses around 4,700 nuclear warheads. Other nuclear powers include rivals India and Pakistan, which stood on the brink of nuclear war in 2002. (Just this year, Indian government officials warned residents of Kashmir, the divided territory claimed by both nations, to prepare for a possible nuclear war.) Recently, India and nuclear-armed neighbor China, which went to war with each other in the 1960s, again found themselves on the verge of a crisis due to a border dispute in a remote area of the Himalayas.
In a world awash in nuclear weapons, saber-rattling, brinkmanship, erratic behavior, miscalculations, technological errors, or errors in judgment could lead to a nuclear detonation and suffering on an almost unimaginable scale, perhaps nowhere more so than in Iran. “Not only would the immediate impacts be devastating, but the lingering effects and our ability to deal with them would be far more difficult than a 9/11 or earthquake/tsunami event,” notes Paul Carroll. Radiation could turn areas of a country into no-go zones; healthcare infrastructure would be crippled or totally destroyed; and depending on climatic conditions and the prevailing winds, whole regions might have their agriculture poisoned. “One large bomb could do this, let alone a handful, say, in a South Asian conflict,” he told me.
“I do believe that the longer we have these weapons and the more there are, the greater the chances that we will experience either an intentional attack (state-based or terrorist) or an accident,” Carroll wrote in his email. “In many ways, we’ve been lucky since 1945. There have been some very close calls. But our luck won’t hold forever.”
Cham Dallas says there is an urgent need to grapple with the prospect of nuclear attacks, not later, but now. “There are going to be other big public health issues in the twenty-first century, but in the first third, this is it. It’s a freight train coming down the tracks,” he told me. “People don’t want to face this. They’re in denial.”
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in theLos Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. He is the author most recently of the New York Times bestseller Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books). You can catch his conversation with Bill Moyers about that book by clicking here. His website is NickTurse.com. You can follow him on Tumblr and on Facebook.
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]]>by Jasmin Ramsey
Two conversations are presently occurring in Washington about Iran. Hawks and hardliners are searching for new ways to force the Obama administration to tighten or impose further sanctions, and/or discussing when the US should strike the country. Meanwhile, doves and pragmatists have been pointing out the ineffectiveness of sanctions in [...]]]>
by Jasmin Ramsey
Two conversations are presently occurring in Washington about Iran. Hawks and hardliners are searching for new ways to force the Obama administration to tighten or impose further sanctions, and/or discussing when the US should strike the country. Meanwhile, doves and pragmatists have been pointing out the ineffectiveness of sanctions in changing Iran’s nuclear calculus (even though the majority of them initially pushed for these sanctions) as well as the many cons of military action. Although the hawks and hardliners tend to be Republican, the group is by no means partisan. And these conversations do converge and share points at times, for example, the hawks and hardliners also complain about the ineffectiveness of sanctions, but in the context of pushing for more pressure and punishment.
That said, both sides appear stuck — the hawks, while successful in getting US policy on Iran to become sanctions-centric, can’t get the administration or military leaders to buy their interventionist arguments, and the doves, having previously cheered sanctions as an alternative to military action, appear lost now that their chosen pressure tactic has proven ineffective.
Hawks and Doves Debate Iran Strike Option
On Wednesday, the McCain Institute hosted a live debate that showcased Washington positions on Iran, with the pro-military argument represented by neoconservative analyst Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute and Democrat Robert Wexler, a member of the US House of Representatives from 1997-2010, and two prominent US diplomats on the other side — Ambassadors Thomas R. Pickering, who David Sanger writes “is such a towering figure in the State Department that a major program to train young diplomats is named for him”, and James R. Dobbins, whose distinguished career includes service as envoy to Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti and Somalia.
Only the beginning of this recording (I can’t find any others) is hard to hear, and you won’t regret watching the entire lively discussion, particularly because of Amb. Pickering’s poignant responses to Pletka’s flimsy points — she inaccurately states IAEA findings on Iran’s nuclear program and claims that, even though she’s no military expert, a successful military operation against Iran wouldn’t necessarily include boots on the ground. In fact, experts assess that effective military action against Iran aimed at long-term positive results (cessation of its nuclear program and regime change) would be a long and arduous process, entailing more resources than Afghanistan and Iraq have taken combined, and almost certainly involving ground forces and occupation.
Consider some the characteristics of the pro-military side: Wexler repeatedly admits he made a mistake in supporting the war on Iraq, but says the decision to attack Iran should “presuppose” that event. Later on he says that considering what happened with Iraq, he “hopes” the same mistake about non-existent WMDs won’t happen again. Pletka, who endorsed fighting in Iraq until “victory” had been achieved (a garbled version of an AEI transcript can be found here), states in her opening remarks that the US needs to focus on ”what happens, when, if, negotiations fail” and leads from that premise, which she does not qualify with anything other than they’re taking too much time, with arguments about the threat Iran poses, even though she calls the Iranians “very rational actors”.
While Wexler’s support for a war launched on false premises seriously harms his side’s credibility, it was both his and Pletka’s inability to advance even one indisputable interventionist argument, coupled with their constant reminders that they don’t actually want military action, that left them looking uninformed and weak.
The diplomats, on the other hand, offered rhetorical questions and points that have come to characterize this debate more generally. Amb. Pickering: “Are we ready for another ground war in the Middle East?”, and, “we are not wonderful occupiers”. Then on the status of the diplomatic process: “we are closer to a solution in negotiations than we have been before”. Amb. Dobbins meanwhile listed some of the cons of a military operation — Hezbollah attacks against Israel and US allies, interruptions to the movement of oil through the vital Strait of Hormuz, a terror campaign orchestrated by the Iranians — and then surprised everyone by saying that these are “all things we can deal with”. A pause, then the real danger in Amb. Dobbins’ mind: that “Iran would respond cautiously”, play the aggrieved party, withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, kick out IAEA inspectors and accelerate its nuclear program at unknown sites. Then what, the audience was left to wonder. Neither Pletka nor Wexler offered an answer.
The Costs of War With Iran and the C-Word
While watching the McCain debate, I wondered if Pletka and Wexler would consider reading a recently published book by Geoffrey Kemp, an economist who served as a Gulf expert on Reagan’s National Security Council and John Allen Gay, entitled War With Iran: Political, Military, And Economic Consequences. This essay lays out the basis of the work, which mainly focuses on the high economic costs of war, so I won’t go into detail here, but yesterday during the book’s launch at the Center for National Interest (CNI), an interesting comment was made about the “C-Word”. Here’s what Kemp said during his opening remarks, to an audience that included everyone from prominent foreign policy experts and former government officials, to representatives from Chevron and AIPAC:
You certainly cannot, must not, underestimate the negative consequences if Iran does get the bomb…But I think on balance, unlike Senator McCain who said that the only thing worse than a war with Iran is an Iran with a nuclear weapon…the conclusion of this study is that war is worse than the options, and the options we have, are clearly based on something that we call deterrence and something that we are not allowed to call, but in fact, is something called containment. And to me this seems like the most difficult thing for the Obama administration, to walk back out of the box it’s gotten itself into over this issue of containment. But never fear. Successive American administrations have all walked back lines on Iran.
Interestingly, no one challenged him on this during the Q&A. And Kemp is not the only expert to utter the C-Word in Washington — he’s joined by Paul Pillar and more reluctant distinguished voices including Zbigniew Brzezinksi.
Diplomacy as the Best Effective Option
Of course, if more effort was concentrated on the diplomacy front, as opposed to mostly on sanctions and the military option, Iran could be persuaded against building a nuclear weapon. Consider, for example, US intelligence chief James Clapper’s statement on Thursday that Iran has not yet made the decision to develop a nuclear weapon but that if it chose to do so, it might be able to produce one in a matter of “months, not years.” Clapper told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “[Iran] has not yet made that decision, and that decision would be made singularly by the supreme leader.”
It follows from this that while the US would be hard pressed in permanently preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon (apart from adopting the costly and morally repulsive “mowing the lawn” option), it could certainly compel the Iranians to make the decision to rush for a bomb by finally making the military option credible — as Israel has pushed for — or following through on that threat.
So where to go from here? Enter the Iran Project, which has published a series of reports all signed and endorsed by high-level US foreign policy experts, and which just released it’s first report with policy advise: “Strategic Options for Iran: Balancing Pressure with Diplomacy”. There’s lots to be taken away from it, and Jim Lobe, as well as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have covered it, but it ultimately boils down to the notion that the US needs to rethink its policy with Iran and creatively use the leverage it has gotten from sanctions to bring about an agreement. Such an agreement will likely have to be preceded by bilateral talks and include some form of low-level uranium enrichment on Iranian soil and sanctions relief if Iran provides its own signifiant concessions. The report also argues for the US to engage with Iran on areas of mutual interest, including Iraq and Afghanistan.
During the Wilson Center report launch event, Amb. Pickering summed up the status of negotiations with Iran as follows: “Admittedly we should not expect miraculous moves to a rapid agreement, but we’re engaged enough now to have gone beyond the beginning of the beginning. We’re not at the end of the beginning yet, but we’re getting there.” Later, Jim Walsh, a member of the task force and nuclear expert at MIT pointed out that 20-percent Iranian uranium enrichment, which everyone is fixated on now, only became an issue after Iran stopped receiving fuel for its Tehran Research Reactor and began producing it itself. In other words, the longer the US takes to give Iran a deal it can stomach and sell at home, the more the Iranians can ask for as their nuclear program progresses. “The earlier we can get a deal, the better the deal is likely to be,” he said.
]]>The Asian Law Caucus (ALC), in collaboration with the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA) and several other Iranian-American organizations, has released a publication titled “Unintended Victims: The Impact of the Iran Sanctions on Iranian Americans.”
News reports continue to spell out something that the US government [...]]]>
The Asian Law Caucus (ALC), in collaboration with the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA) and several other Iranian-American organizations, has released a publication titled “Unintended Victims: The Impact of the Iran Sanctions on Iranian Americans.”
News reports continue to spell out something that the US government claims it’s trying to avoid: sanctions are harming average Iranians, many of whom are the most vulnerable. Now it’s also clear that Iranians inside Iran aren’t the only ones who are suffering from America’s apparently incoherent Iran policy.
The sanctions and the deeply complicated, burdensome and stressful process of obtaining exemptions from the mammoth sanctions-regulatory/enforcement body, OFAC, are impeding ordinary Iranian-Americans from a wide range of routine activities essential to their personal lives. According to the report, this isn’t by accident, and can be remedied:
Both proponents and opponents of the sanctions must agree that U.S. persons should not be unfairly targeted by a set of laws and regulations simply because of their nationality or country of origin. And yet, that is precisely the situation the Iranian American community finds itself in. As illustrated in this report, it is clear that the Iran Sanctions have had intended and collateral consequences for the Iranian American community. Lawmakers and those in the Executive Branch, including the President and the Office of Foreign Assets Control, should work closely with the Iranian American community and community and legal organizations to understand the community’s concerns, and should take the proactive steps outlines above to ensure that this disproportionate burden is lifted.
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By Mark Jansson
Although President Obama has another four years, he will surely continue to hear from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu and a chorus of critics at home, that he has far less time to convince Iran to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA). But the administration [...]]]>
By Mark Jansson
Although President Obama has another four years, he will surely continue to hear from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu and a chorus of critics at home, that he has far less time to convince Iran to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA). But the administration should not let the urgency of the matter drive it to a neurotic fixation on breakout timelines, which is likely to have a dumbing-down effect on policy and push a diplomatic solution farther into the future rather than hasten it.
Throughout the President’s first term, the issue of time dominated the narrative about Iran and continues to do so. Obama himself has said that the “window is closing” for Iran to address contentious issues properly, but that there’s “still time” to do so. The focus on time has gradually become an obsession – one that crescendos intoxicatingly in the post-IAEA report number-crunching frenzies that determine the time intervals comprising the worst-case scenario of Iranian nuclear breakout. More recently, some have extrapolated (erroneously) a “cripple date” for how soon the United States must take drastic steps to force capitulation by ruining Iran’s economy.
Yet, as the nuclear drama has played out during Obama’s first term — punctuated by inflammatory speeches, abortive diplomatic initiatives, spellbinding unveilings of “Bibian” art and long intermissions for US sanctions and Iranian centrifuges to do what they do — it has left in its wake a sort of desultory urgency. Clearly, the issue is serious, but the recent history of failed negotiations is less-than-heartening and there is no obvious or specific reason to believe that talks will go better in the future.
An important step for the Obama administration before it starts grasping for diplomatic straws is to refresh the framing of the issue and think longer term. One takeaway from Obama’s first term is that the framing of engagement with Iran as a race against the clock has outlived its usefulness. The same time-delimited urgency of the Iranian nuclear issue that has led to severe economic sanctions and brought Iran to the negotiating table has, arguably, had the unintended side effect of preventing negotiations from going anywhere once they begin.
While a sense of urgency can help focus the mind, too much will lead to mistakes by forcing the adoption of approaches that are fast and simple but less accurate. At present, the consuming fear that time is running out to solve the Iranian nuclear problem seems to have become a barrier that confines the search for a solution to shallow waters, wherein the prevailing theory is reducible to one radically simple notion: just add pressure.
Pressure tactics might have been good enough to get Iran to agree to talks, but prolonging this approach in the way that we have is a recipe for escalation. Overall, US engagement with Iran has been erratic during Obama’s first term — negotiations one week, sanctions and cyber attacks the next. From what is known about the talks that have transpired, it’s apparent that neither side has shown much courage in tabling offers that stood a chance of gaining traction. If anything, the US position hardened over time rather than the other way around, perhaps because it bought into the notion that the duress Iran was experiencing from choking sanctions would eventually force it to accept anything.
But the only recent accomplishment of the ‘add pressure and wait’ approach has been to fuel a dangerous pattern of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby perceptions of Iranian intransigence become more extreme with every moment that passes between added punishment and its capitulation. The perception of Iranian defiance has now reached near-mythical status and driven supposedly mainstream policy discussion into the realm of outright belligerence. Even moderates have argued unblushingly that only “existential angst” brought on by the specter of total economic collapse (or perhaps that ever-elusive “truly credible” threat to attack) will get Iran to give in on the nuclear issue.
But it should be clear by now that the United States and Iran are far better off taking steps to moderate their behavior rather than make it more extreme. A conflict with Iran could be exceedingly dangerous for the US, Israel, and the global economy. Isolating Iran, encircling it, sabotaging its nuclear facilities and pushing its economy to the brink of collapse has become not just inhumane but strategically counterproductive as well. It has left Iran’s leaders with less to lose for retaliating aggressively if attacked, making military action riskier for the US and any threat to carry it out less believable for Iran. It’s time to give up on the machismo.
Another reason to jettison the notion that the window of opportunity for a diplomatic solution to the Iranian issue is rapidly closing is because, frankly, it is not. Even if Iran decides to “come clean” on everything, fully cooperate with the IAEA and implement the Additional Protocol, it will retain the technical talent to produce nuclear weapons, if it so chooses, for some time to come. There is no silver bullet solution — be it a collapsed Iranian economy, a successful military strike or a brilliantly orchestrated deal– that can undo that. So, letting breakout timelines drive policy — as if Iran does not really have nuclear weapon potential until it has the potential to make them quickly — actually belies the larger reality that Iran is, and will be, capable of making nuclear weapons, regardless of whether or not it ever crosses Bibi’s red line.
Getting over the preoccupation with timelines and red lines would give the US and the six power P5+1 the space to enter future negotiations with multiple options, not just one proposition, and be flexible about mixing and matching their various elements as appropriate. It is obvious that any deal must include prompt sanctions relief for Iran, but figuring out what sanctions to lift and what can be received in exchange will probably take time. As former Israeli intelligence chief Efraim Halevy recently put it, “you have to understand what it is that makes Iran tick.” Coming up with multiple options is a good way to discover what the other side really values and for zeroing in on a mutually acceptable agreement.
At the end of the day, any diplomatic progress that may be made over the next several years will only be the beginning of a very long process of convincing Iran to turn its back on nuclear weapons and, just as importantly, to not relapse. For now, it will be hard enough to figure out what will work without having to do it under stultifying pressure created by a loudly ticking clock and timelines that unnecessarily drive policy towards extremes and the desperately oversimplified solutions found there.
- Mark Jansson is the Special Projects Director for the Federation of American Scientists, the country’s longest-serving organization committed to reducing the dangers posed by nuclear weapons.
]]>Faced with a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment and a well-funded campaign to promote Islamophobia, a coalition of faith and religious freedom groups Thursday said it will circulate a new pamphlet on frequently asked questions (FAQs) about Islam and U.S. Muslims to elected officials across the United States.
The initiative, which coincides [...]]]>
Faced with a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment and a well-funded campaign to promote Islamophobia, a coalition of faith and religious freedom groups Thursday said it will circulate a new pamphlet on frequently asked questions (FAQs) about Islam and U.S. Muslims to elected officials across the United States.
The initiative, which coincides with the appearance in subway stations in New York City and Washington of pro-Israel ads equating the Jewish state with “civilised man” and “Jihad” with “savages”, is designed to rebut the notion that Muslims pose a threat to U.S. values and way of life.
“Nothing gives weight to bigotry more than ignorance,” said Rev. Welton Gaddy, a Baptist minister who is president of the Interfaith Alliance, a grassroots organisation of leaders representing 75 faith traditions. “The FAQ enables people to be spared of an agenda-driven fear and to be done with a negative movement born of misinformation…”
Gaddy was joined by Charles Haynes, director of the Religious Freedom Project of the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center which co-sponsored the new 13-page pamphlet, entitled “What is the Truth About American Muslims?”
“In my view,” Haynes said in reference to the so-called “Stop Islamisation of America” (SIOA) movement that, among other things, has sponsored the subway ads, “this campaign to spread hate and fear is the most significant threat to religious freedom in America today.”
“Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the anti-Muslim narrative has migrated from the right-wing fringe into the mainstream political arena – and is now parroted by a growing number of political and religious leaders,” he said.
Indeed, public opinion polls have shown a gradual rise in Islamophobia here over the past 11 years, most recently in the wake of last month’s anti-U.S. demonstrations across the Islamic world that were triggered by a vulgar internet video mocking the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. The video, supposedly a trailer for a longer movie, was reportedly produced by a California-based, Egyptian-born Copt, although the source of its funding remains unclear.
While a majority (53 percent) of U.S. respondents say they believe that it is possible to find “common ground” between Muslims and the West, that majority has shrunk since 9/11, according to a poll released earlier this week by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA). Only one year ago, it stood at 59 percent, and in November 2001 – just two months after 9/11 – it was 68 percent.
Conversely, the minority that agreed with the notion that “Islamic religious and social traditions are intolerant and fundamentally incompatible with Western culture” rose from 26 percent in 2001, to 37 percent last year, and 42 percent when the latest PIPA poll was conducted two weeks ago.
In another poll conducted by the Pew Research Center last year which asked respondents “how much support for extremism is there among Muslim Americans”, 40 percent said there was either a “great deal” or a “fair amount”, while only a narrow plurality (45 percent) disagreed.
In addition to the violent images of conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Islamic world that have been beamed onto U.S. television screens and home computers since 9/11, popular beliefs that Muslims are inherently more hostile and dangerous have been propagated by a small network of funders, bloggers, pundits and groups documented in a 2011 report, entitled “Fear, Inc.,” by the Center for American Progress (CAP).
It identified seven foundations – most of them associated with the far-right in the U.S., as well as several Jewish family foundations that have supported right-wing and settler groups in Israel – that provided more than 42 million dollars between 2001 and 2009 to key individuals and organisations who have spread an Islamophobic message through, among other means, videos, newspaper op-eds, radio and television talk shows, paid ads, and local demonstrations against mosques.
Among the most prominent recipients have been the Center for Security Policy, the Middle East Forum, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, the Society of Americans for National Existence, as well as SIOA, the group, which, along with the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), is sponsoring the current subway ad campaign.
“Together, this core group of deeply intertwined individuals and organizations manufacture and exaggerate threats of ‘creeping Sharia’, Islamic domination of the West, and purported obligatory calls to violence against all non-Muslims by the Quran,” according to the CAP report.
It noted that their message was also echoed by leaders of the Christian Right and some Republican politicians, including several who ran for president this year, such as former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich.
Leaders of many mainstream Jewish and Christian denominations have denounced specific aspects of the network’s initiatives, such as its efforts to derail the construction of a Muslim community center near the so-called “Ground Zero” site where Manhattan’s Twin Towers were destroyed on 9/11; distribute Islamophobic videos, such as ‘Obsession’; and to lobby state legislatures to ban the application of “Sharia”, or Islamic law, in their jurisdictions.
The new pamphlet, however, marks the first effort by faith groups and religious freedom advocates to directly rebut common misconceptions and claims made against Muslims and their theology by, among other things, explaining the meaning of “jihad”, and the sources, practice, and aims of Sharia.
“In a time when misinformation about and misunderstandings of Islam and of the American Muslim community are widespread, our goal is to provide the public with accurate answers to understandable questions,” said Gaddy, who noted that the authors consulted closely with well-recognised Muslim scholars in drafting the document.
Twenty-one religious and secular organisations, including the Disciples of Christ, the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, the Presbyterian Church, the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, and Rabbis for Human Rights-North America endorsed the pamphlet, as did several major Muslim and Sikh organisations.
Six people were killed at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin last summer by an individual who had mistakenly believed he was attacking Muslims.
Haynes stressed that the response to the Islamophobia campaign was late. “We have left the field to the people who demonised Muslims, and they have won the day,” he said. “We’re playing catch-up on this nonsense.”
In bold black-and-white lettering, the subway ad that first appeared in New York last month and then in Washington this week states: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”
A coalition of 157 local religious groups have formally objected to the transit authority over the ad, and demanded that it issue disclaimers alongside the ads as the San Francisco transit authority did when the same groups took out ads on buses this summer.
A number of religious groups, including Sojourners, an evangelical group, Rabbis for Human Rights, and the United Methodist Church are running counter-ads in New York and Washington.
]]>This is becoming a recurring theme: sanctions are affecting the supply of humanitarian essentials for Iranians regardless of special waivers. Reuters has the report:
“The sanctions also appear to be affecting humanitarian operations in the country,” Ban wrote in the report, dated August 22, to the 193-member General Assembly on [...]]]>
This is becoming a recurring theme: sanctions are affecting the supply of humanitarian essentials for Iranians regardless of special waivers. Reuters has the report:
“The sanctions also appear to be affecting humanitarian operations in the country,” Ban wrote in the report, dated August 22, to the 193-member General Assembly on the “Situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
“Even companies that have obtained the requisite license to import food and medicine are facing difficulties in finding third-country banks to process the transactions,” he said.
In September, Najmeh Bozorgmehr reported on how US-imposed sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank are preventing critically-ill patients from getting crucial medical aid:
The government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says international sanctions have had little impact on the country and insists that its nuclear program should continue. It has launched a public relations campaign stressing that 97 percent of Iran’s medicine is produced domestically — a clear attempt to prevent panic that medical supplies could be at risk.
However, Ahmad Ghavidel, head of the Iranian Hemophilia Society, a nongovernmental organization that assists about 8,000 patients, says access to medicine has become increasingly limited and claims one young man recently died in southern Iran after an accident when the blood-clotting injection he needed was not available.
“This is a blatant hostage-taking of the most vulnerable people by countries which claim they care about human rights,” Ghavidel said. “Even a few days of delay can have serious consequences like hemorrhage and disability.”
Iran scholar Farideh Farhi also informed us in July about a report by the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN) that details the negative impact of sanctions on ordinary Iranians, particularly women. Farhi’s article provides useful context and analysis for these events. She writes:
]]>If ICAN’s analysis is accurate, it also foretells harsher economic realities for the most vulnerable elements of Iran’s population, a harsher political environment for those agitating for change, and a more hostile setting for those who have tried to maintain historical links between Western societies and Iranian society.
Sanctions impact calculations, but usually not in the intended fashion.
As always with rich reports like these, there is too much valuable info to squeeze into one article, so I’m making use of this space to draw [...]]]>
UN Photo/Stuart Price
Some may have seen my most recent article providing some highlights of a new UNICEF report on the global progress in reducing child mortality since 1990.
As always with rich reports like these, there is too much valuable info to squeeze into one article, so I’m making use of this space to draw attention to some more statistics that I think are worth mentioning.
For example:
:: Half of all under-five deaths occur in only five countries.
:: These countries are India, DRC, Nigeria, Pakistan and China.
:: 40 percent of all children dying under the age of five die within the first 28 days after birth.
:: UNICEF estimates that by 2050 one in three children will be born in sub-Saharan Africa.
Now, onto some positive news. Here are 12 former high-mortality countries that have made strides in reducing under-five mortality and are close to achieving Millennium Development Goal 4 by 2015.
Percentages are reduction:
Laos: 72 percent (MDG 4 achieved)
Timor Leste: 70 percent (MDG 4 achieved)
Liberia: 68 percent (MDG 4 achieved)
Bangladesh: 67 percent (MDG 4 achieved)
Rwanda: 65 percent
Nepal: 64 percent
Malawi: 64 percent
Cambodia: 64 percent
Madagascar: 62 percent
Bhutan: 61 percent
Ethiopia: 61 percent
Niger: 60 percent
]]>The [...]]]>
The newly released Iran Project report which I’ve summarized below and which has received widespread coverage in multiple prominent mainstream media publications including the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal and Haaertz, can be read in full here.
The accompanying letter and list of endorsing bipartisan, high-level national security advisers — all of whom one of the reports’ presenters, Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering noted today “had their say” about the report before publication — can be found in the first pages.
The signatories include Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard L. Armitage, Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Chuck Hagel, Gen .Anthony C. Zinni, Leslie H. Gelb, Lee H. Hamilton, Ellen Laipson, Adm. William Fallon, Amb. Thomas R. Pickering, Amb. William Luers, and others. According to the National Security Network, ”Other analysts have recently sounded the same alarm” about the lacking public discussion regarding the benefits and costs of militarily attacking Iran and “While the Iran Project report explicitly does not make policy recommendations, CSIS’s Anthony Cordesman concludes in his recent study, “The best way out is successful negotiations.”
]]>A number of these companies, like Dyncorp International, have been [...]]]>
A number of these companies, like Dyncorp International, have been linked to a plethora of alleged human rights violations, sparking various international efforts to regulate the industry, as I reported earlier this week.
The report, published by the New York- based Global Policy Forum (GPF), recently prompted a direct responses from Greg Starr, head of the U.N. Department of Safety and Security (DSS), who wrote a letter to GFP, which the organisation published on its website this week, along with its response to the letter.
Two of the PMSCs mentioned in the report, DynCorp and G4S, (the latter having been the security provider for this year’s London Olympics) also issued statements challenging the negative portrail of PMSCs by GPF.
GPF raised concerns about post-9/11 “bunkerisation” within the U.N. – an increasing use of private security, partially fueled by involving firms directly in assessing risks and needs — as well as a lack of guidelines within the U.N. to vet contracts.
In his response to the report, Starr stated:
The fact is that there are unfortunately places in the world today where relying on the principle of acceptance does not provide the security necessary to continue operations. “Hard” security measures, which the report goes to great lengths to prove counterproductive in all instances, are actually necessary and appropriate at times.
He added that:
The overwhelming majority of contracted services for guards by the United Nations are related to residential or facility protection.
Starr admitted that “Our existing policy guidance on armed security contractors is dated, and there was a desire to address any concerns within the United Nations as to whether security companies used had requisite levels of oversight and management.” DSS has been spearheading a draft policy, he said, that “proposes a decision making framework and high standards for management accountability” for the use of PMSCs and “goes a very long way to ensuring that specific criteria was established so that the United Nations is neither tainted, impacted nor otherwise compromised by the use of these companies,” according to Starr.
GFP responded by saying it was unaware of serious policy guidance, “dated or of more recent origin” that has shaped U.N. practice regarding PMSCs and that the proposed new guidelines have not been approved and put into practice after two years of discussion.
Starr further criticised GPF for using “incomplete” data in its report.
GPF responded by quoting from an email Starr had sent to the report’s author, Lou Pingeot, during her research phase, in which the DSS chief himself declared it was impossible to know how much the U.N. spends on private security contractors annually and that he would “not hazard an estimate on an overall number.”
This lack of available statistics brings into question the ability of DSS to oversee system-wide security issues, according to GFP who in its response to Starr this week urged the DSS chief to publish annual statistical surveys of PMSC contracts.
Last month’s report, titled “Dangerous Partnership: Private Military Companies and the UN” used available U.N. procurement data to show an upward trend in the U.N.’s use of PMSCs, with a rise of 250 percent in field missions from 2006 to 2011.
While Starr emphasises the importance of PMSCs in guaranteeing security of U.N. personnel annual reports by the Secretary General on the Safety and Security of UN Personnel have failed to mention the use of private contractors and to what extend they are hired.
GPF holds that DSS is “failing in its responsibility to inform member states and the public about the UN’s security policy” and urges the U.N. to undertake a broad-ranging inquiry.
We would urge DSS to adopt a more forthcoming approach, incorporating reference to PMSCS in all reports where appropriate. Indeed, we believe that the United Nations should ask a blue ribbon panel of experts to prepare a broad-ranging inquiry into the costs, governance implications, policy impact and reputational issues posed by PMSCS. This would offer member states and the public a much-needed appraisal of these topics and lay the basis for a thorough-going review by the General Assembly.
“The U.N. [contracting system] has always been a crapshoot and it’s something we’d like to see professionalised,” Doug Brooks, President of the Washington D.C.-based PMSC trade association International Security Operations Association (ISOA), told me earlier this month.
Brooks particularly pointed to the U.N.’s penchant for late payments, which tilts the playing field in favour of large companies that can support operations while waiting up to a year for payment. “Big companies who work for the U.N. call it leaning forward — If you are a small business, there is no way you can do that.”
In addition to calls for the U.N. to improve its policies on hiring PMSCs, there are a number of international efforts underway to regulate the industry more broadly and make protection of human rights an integral part of its operations.
“I think that a key challenge for the industry is that it’s behind other industries in learning about how to integrate human rights into its strategies and operations,” James Cockayne, and expert on International Criminal Justice who has been involved in PMSC legislation efforts, told me. “It’s time that this industry caught up.”
]]>The “impulse to walk away from the [talks with Iran] is understandable”, writes Mary Kaszynski, a nuclear policy analyst at the American Security Project, but “negotiating with Iran is the only way to achieve a lasting solution to the nuclear dilemma.” Kaszynski, who published an informative
The “impulse to walk away from the [talks with Iran] is understandable”, writes Mary Kaszynski, a nuclear policy analyst at the American Security Project, but “negotiating with Iran is the only way to achieve a lasting solution to the nuclear dilemma.” Kaszynski, who published an informative overview of U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations in July, also makes a poignant observation about rhetoric surrounding the “military option” with Iran in The Diplomat:
The lack of substantive progress has led some pundits and policymakers to call the negotiations a failure and urge the Obama administration to abandon them altogether. Instead, these critics advocate more aggressive actions to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapons capability, which range from enacting harsher sanctions to conducting military strikes against Tehran’s nuclear facilities.
The impulse to walk away from the talks is understandable. Diplomacy takes time and years of negotiations can sometimes produce only incremental progress. This process is painstakingly slow and inherently frustrating. The results of using armed force, on the other hand, are apparent much more quickly. As Council on Foreign Relations fellow Micah Zenko, puts it, “[Both politicians and ordinary people] want to ‘do something.’ And nothing ‘does something’ like military force.”
The Washington Post’s blogger Jennifer Rubin is an example of an impatient pundit who opines from a prominent platform. Earlier this week she repeated her hope for the U.S. to increase its military threat to Iran because, in her mind, that will provide Iranians with an “incentive” to acquiesce to Western demands:
That “room for diplomacy to work” is precisely what keeps the Iranians from capitulating. It is only when we stop negotiations and begin, very overtly, preparations for military action that we can test whether Iran’s leaders, out of a desire for self-preservation, will come running, finally willing to make a deal.
But according to Kaszynski, with “both sides bolstering their military capabilities in the region, the possibility of events escalating out of control rises considerably”:
Indeed, this has been demonstrated numerous times throughout the U.S.-Iranian rivalry. For example, with both sides on edge at the end of the Tanker War in 1988, the U.S. Navy shot down an Iranian civilian aircraft that it mistakenly identified as an F-14 fighter jet. All 290 passengers on board perished.
More recently, last month a U.S. Navy vessel in the Gulf fired on a small Indian fishing boat, killing one and wounding three others. It was only hours later that Washington learned that the fishermen were Indian. Had they been Iranian, the story may have played out very differently. With tensions at a fever pitch, an incident like this could easily be the catalyst that sets the U.S. and Iran on a path to the conflict neither side seeks.
Rubin is not shy with her opinions. Just consider her unabashed campaigning for Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney. Considering how she writes about the U.S.’s Iran policy on a regular basis, I welcome her thoughts about the possible dire consequences of halting negotiations while upping the military threat.
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