Israel Gets Real on Iran

Posted on October 15, 2008 by Tony


Guest Post: Trita Parsi The distinction between the apocalyptic rhetoric Israeli leaders use publicly in relation to Iran, and the more pragmatic view they hold among themselves on how to deal with Tehran and its nuclear program, has long been clear to anyone paying very close attention. In short, it’s clear that many of Israel’s key leaders don’t believe Iran is a suicidal ideologically-crazed regime that would risk destroying itself in order to destroy Israel, and therefore that even a nuclear-armed Iran would not be an “existential threat” to Israel, although clearly it would present a major strategic challenge by fundamentally reordering the balance of military force in the region. And of late, some of them have begun a gingerly but very clear retreat from the idea that Israel will have to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities if no one else does — President Shimon Peres has said as much, publicly, and outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has echoed that position. I asked Rootless Cosmopolitan’s favorite Iran expert, Dr. Trita Parsi, to weigh in on the basis of his extensive research and interviews with many of the key decision-makers on the Israeli and Iranian sides. Trita’s book Treacherous Alliance — The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the U.S. is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the Israeli-Iranian relationship, and why there’s plenty of room for pragmatic coexistence.

Israel Gets Real on Iran

By Trita Parsi

On the eve of his departure from political life, outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Olmert delivered a stinging parting shot – putting under question not only the wisdom of holding on to Palestinian land, but also the feasibility of an Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“We have to make a decision, one that goes against all our instincts, against our collective memory,” he told the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth. Recognizing that no other Israeli leader ever had uttered these words publicly, Olmert went on to declare that “Israel must withdraw from almost all, if not all” of the West Bank to achieve peace.

On Iran, Olmert argued that Israel had lost its “sense of proportion” when stating that it would deal with Iran militarily. “What we can do with the Palestinians, the Syrians and the Lebanese, we cannot do with the Iranians,” Olmert said, in stark contradiction to his own earlier warnings on Iran as well as the rhetoric of many of his hawkish cabinet members. “Let’s be more modest, and act within the bounds of our realistic capabilities,” he cautioned.

Olmert’s interview dashed the hopes of neoconservatives in Washington hoping for an Israeli post-November surprise through the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities. With the U.S. facing a financial crisis and Israel’s lacking the “proportions” to take on Iran, the risk for military confrontation with Iran in the last months of the Bush Administration has decreased significantly, according to most analysts.

Olmert’s statement may signal a long-overdue shift towards Israel’s Plan B on Iran. Israel’s first preference had been to pressure the U.S. to exercise its own military option on Iran, and to prevent any diplomatic breakthrough that might cause Washington to accept some level of Iranian uranium-enrichment capability. In this regard, Israeli warnings of its readiness to attack Iran if the U.S. declined to do so served primarily to pressure Washington to launch a military strike. Talk about the Israeli military option was aimed at keeping the American military option on the table.

Since the mid-1990s, a key tenet of Israel’s foreign policy has been to sound alarm bells on Tehran. Originally, the aim was to prevent any thaw between the U.S. and Iran out of a fear that Israeli security interests would be sacrificed in a potential U.S.-Iran deal. Plan A was to nip this in the bud by undermining efforts to pursue diplomacy in the first place.

This policy did not lack critics, however. An internal Israeli Iran-committee in the early 1990s led by former commander of the Israeli air force, David Ivry, concluded that the aggressive Israeli rhetoric had prompted Iran to turn its focus towards Israel. Iran has enough problems in the region, the committee argued, there was no need to make Israel shine any brighter on Iran’s radar.

As Iran’s power grew in the region, Israeli concerns grew accordingly. The more Iran could present itself as an indispensible actor in the region, the greater the risk of a U.S.-Iran accommodation. Left with few good options, and an unwillingness to consider how a U.S.-Iran deal could change Iran’s behavior towards Israel, the inclination in Israel was to intensify the very policy its Iran-committee had warned against.

But while Israel’s Iran hawks argued against U.S.-Iran diplomacy, they had a hard time digesting the Bush Administration’s opposition to Israeli-Syrian diplomacy. The contradiction in the Israeli position was evident during AIPAC’s conference earlier this summer. Ephraim Sneh – a leading Iran hawk of Israel’s Labor Party – argued passionately against U.S.-Iran diplomacy while making an equally passionate case for diplomacy Syria. His justification was that in case of war, the Israeli public must know that every stone had been turned before their young men and women were sent to battle. On Iran, however, Sneh did not acknowledge the same justification.

Olmert’s valedictory interview may be the first small steps towards a Plan B on Iran – one that takes as its point of departure the new regional realities: A balance of power that has shifted away from Israel, and an Iran that is unlikely to unlearn the technology of enriching uranium. Israel now needs a way out of the prison of its own rhetoric. Repeating statements that a nuclear Iran is “unacceptable” and using a rhetoric that creates an air of inevitability of war has left the Jewish State with no real options. A more nuanced rhetoric on Iran may have the down-side of reducing pressure on the U.S. to act – “If we don’t talk about Iran, the world will forget about Iran,” as Israeli Iran expert David Menashri put it – but has the up-side of enabling new options to emerge for the Jewish state.

Warning about being “boxed into the corner,” a recent Haaretz editorial offered a clear break from Israel’s Plan A: “The best chance of calming the atmosphere and reducing the threat lies in starting negotiations between the United States and Iran… [I]t is the only route not yet tried and is likely to help moderate Iranian policy. Israel must encourage an American rapprochement with Iran, with the understanding that this will serve the Israeli interest as well.” And in a video by the Jewish Council for Education and Research, several high-ranking Israeli generals throw their weight behind U.S.-Iran diplomacy as a path towards advancing Israeli security.

Still, in spite of the many rising voices against Israel’s losing approach on Iran, the Jewish state is a long way from discarding its Plan A.

Unlike Olmert who recognized the unfeasibility of Plan A while leaving office, Israel’s new Prime Minister, Tzipi Livni, may enter office with Plan B in sight. She rejects the idea that Israel “will not be able to live” with a nuclear Iran and says Israel must deal with the challenges it faces. Though Livni won’t go as far as Barack Obama in promising direct diplomacy with Tehran, she may help Israel find a few more options on Iran.

Trita Parsi is the author of “Treacherous Alliance — The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the U.S.“, a Silver Medal Recipient of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Arthur Ross Book Award, the most significant award for a book on foreign affairs.

Posted in Guest Columns, Situation Report | Tagged , , | 59 Comments

What the Palestinians Can Learn from Mandela

Posted on October 13, 2008 by Tony

“The state of the city, the nation or the world can invest a sporting event with dramatic intensity such as is reached in few theatres,” the legendary Trinidadian historian, patriot and cricket writer CLR James once wrote. World Cup football matches have triggered wars (El Salvador-Honduras in 1968) or been postponed in order to avoid them (the Sudan-Chad match of last May). The 1956 Olympic water polo clash between Hungary and the Soviet Union, played one month after Soviet tanks crushed a popular uprising in Budapest, was so violent that the water was tinted red with players’ blood by the time officials called it off.

The June 24, 1995 Rugby World Cup final between South Africa and Australia was similarly epic, though not because of any enmity between the two countries. The game hosted an iconic moment heralding South Africa’s inclusive post-apartheid nationhood: President Nelson Mandela striding onto the field at Ellis Park in a Springbok rugby jersey, erstwhile symbol of the old regime, while the mostly Afrikaans crowd chanted “Nelson, Nelson, Nelson!” – lionising a man most of them would have gladly seen hang just a few years earlier.

John Carlin’s extraordinary new book, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Changed a Nation, provides a gripping, intimate account of the game, the events preceding it and their deep relevance to Mandela’s political project. Carlin served as the South Africa bureau chief for The Independent from 1989 to 1995, during which time he forged a foreign journalist’s intimacy with a wide range of key players across the political spectrum. Here he revisits that period, debriefing Mandela, his allies (including one of his bodyguards), key political and military figures in the apartheid establishment and even the rugby players themselves.

South Africa’s peaceful transformation is often hailed as a “miracle” attributable entirely to Mandela’s idealism and personal capacity for compromise and forgiveness. But Mandela never compromised on his core demand of democratic majority rule, and his genius lay not so much in forgiving his enemies as in disarming and outmanoeuvring them. His achievements, including the transformation consecrated by the famous rugby final, were the result of a clear-eyed political strategy. Today Mandela is often invoked as an exemplar of non-violent change – nowhere more frequently than in the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel, whose partisans love to bemoan the absence of a “Palestinian Mandela”, as if such a figure would be more willing than the current Palestinian leadership to accept Israel’s terms. But the South African Mandela has always insisted that in Palestine, just as in South Africa, justice is the key to peace and reconciliation.

To read more, click here

Posted in Situation Report, The Whole World's Africa | Tagged , , , | 17 Comments

All the Hysteria That’s Fit to Print, Take II

Posted on September 9, 2008 by Tony

Is there no screed of rabid hysteria too dumb for the New York Times Op Ed page? I have my doubts. Following on the learned scare stories of Benny Morris and Edward Luttwak, we’re now asked to take seriously the venerable Jeffrey Goldberg, who clearly has gone off his meds and is asking us to believe that the only — yes, the only — issue that should decide the American presidential election is the question of which candidate is better equipped to stop terrorists acquiring a nuclear weapon…

Where do they find these fevered people?

Goldberg writes:

The nuclear destruction of Lower Manhattan, or downtown Washington, would cause the deaths of thousands, or hundreds of thousands; a catastrophic depression; the reversal of globalization; a permanent climate of fear in the West; and the comprehensive repudiation of America’s culture of civil liberties.

Many proliferation experts I have spoken to judge the chance of such a detonation to be as high as 50 percent in the next 10 years. I am an optimist, so I put the chance at 10 percent to 20 percent. Only technical complications prevent Al Qaeda from executing a nuclear attack today. The hard part is acquiring fissile material; an easier part is the smuggling itself (as the saying goes, one way to bring nuclear weapon components into America would be to hide them inside shipments of cocaine).

Jeff, you optimist, you! You should leave the Dungeons and Dragons proliferation crowd sometime and step out into the sunshine. “Only technical complications prevent Al Qaeda from executing a nuclear attack today…” Is the New York Times edited by complete cretins?

Only technical complications prevent my neighbor who smokes those horrible cigars from trading in his pit bull for a nuclear weapon. Only technical complications prevent me from turning my bicycle into a Maserati. And, technical complications aside, if my grandmother had had wheels, she’d have been a bus.

Even the Times’ often annoying Tom Friedman has tried to impress on his readers the fact that 9/11 was a long time ago, and if it becomes the organizing principle of American politics, America will be left behind in the 21st century. In one of his better columns after the Beijing Olympics, Friedman wrote:

As I sat in my seat at the Bird’s Nest, watching thousands of Chinese dancers, drummers, singers and acrobats on stilts perform their magic at the closing ceremony, I couldn’t help but reflect on how China and America have spent the last seven years: China has been preparing for the Olympics; we Americans have been preparing for Al Qaeda. They’ve been building better stadiums, subways, airports, roads and parks. And we’ve been building better metal detectors, armored Humvees and pilotless drones.

The difference is starting to show. Just compare arriving at La Guardia’s dumpy terminal in New York City and driving through the crumbling infrastructure into Manhattan with arriving at Shanghai’s sleek airport and taking the 220-mph magnetic levitation train, which uses electromagnetic propulsion instead of steel wheels and tracks, to get to town in a blink.

Then ask yourself: Who is living in the Third World country?

Yes, if you drive an hour out of Beijing, you meet the vast dirt-poor third world of China. But here’s what’s new: The rich parts of China, the modern parts of Beijing or Shanghai or Dalian, are now more state of the art than rich America. The buildings are architecturally more interesting, the wireless networks more sophisticated, the roads and trains more efficient and nicer. And, I repeat, they did not get all this by discovering oil. They got it by digging inside themselves.

I realize the differences: We were attacked on 9/11; they were not.

We have real enemies; theirs are small and mostly domestic. We had to respond to 9/11 at least by eliminating the Qaeda base in Afghanistan and investing in tighter homeland security. They could avoid foreign entanglements. Trying to build democracy in Iraq, though, which I supported, was a war of choice and is unlikely to ever produce anything equal to its huge price tag.

But the first rule of holes is that when you’re in one, stop digging. When you see how much modern infrastructure has been built in China since 2001, under the banner of the Olympics, and you see how much infrastructure has been postponed in America since 2001, under the banner of the war on terrorism, it’s clear that the next seven years need to be devoted to nation-building in America.

Duh! If America bases its foreign policy on terrorism, it will have allowed a handful of dangerous cranks to dramatically accelerate its decline as a superpower through self-inflicted wounds. So, when I read lines like this one from Goldberg —

The next president must do one thing, and one thing only, if he is to be judged a success: He must prevent Al Qaeda, or a Qaeda imitator, from gaining control of a nuclear device and detonating it in America. Everything else — Fannie Mae, health care reform, energy independence, the budget shortfall in Wasilla, Alaska — is commentary.

— I’m inclined to imagine that the New York Times has been taken over by the editors of the Onion. Sorry, but America is not engaged in an existential battle for survival, and to operate as if it is mortally threatened is the ultimate in lemming behavior. The Times ought to know better.

Posted in A Skeptical Read | Tagged , , | 22 Comments

Will the Last One Out of La Liga Please Turn Out the Lights…

Posted on September 8, 2008 by Tony


Torres and Fabregas lit up Spain’s Euro 2008 campaign

My friend John Carlin offers an interesting take on where the influx of foreign investment into the English Premiership leaves La Liga, the Spanish league long accustomed to being Europe’s finest. Not only are the cream of the world’s players increasingly likely to leave Spain (and Italy) for English clubs these days thanks to the billions pouring into the cofferes of Chelsea, Manchester City and a coterie of other clubs being snapped up as racehorses once would have been by the ultra-rich — Robinho’s move from Real Madrid to City may simply be the beginning; what with Kaka looking increasingly likely to join him there, or at Chelsea, and the likes of Jo and Elano already there, how long will it be before the bulk of the Brazilian national team are playing in England? Even more alarming, to some Spanish fans, will be the fact that the cream of the country’s coaches are increasingly being tempted to England, too: Rafa Benitez at Liverpool; Juande Ramos at Spurs; when West Ham and Newcastle sacked their coaches early in the new season, Spanish coaches were among the frontrunners for both positions. Only Valencia had more players in Spain’s victorious Euro 2008 squad than did Liverpool. Already, three of the most gifted members of that team — Fernando Torres, Cesc Fabregas and Xabi Alonso — are playing their club football in England; how long before David Villa, David Silvak, Andres Iniesta and Sergio Ramos join them?

As John puts it, the coming reality is one where “next to the Premier League, La Liga will dwindle to the level of, say, the Dutch League. Nice enough football, pretty to watch – and filled with clubs who have next to no chance of winning big European trophies, instead becoming feeder clubs for the English teams.”

Indeed, he points out, the swing of the pendulum of footie power to England may be best reflected by the fact that in Spain now, you can watch the English Premiership on TV, and you don’t even have to have cable; it’s on terrestrial TV!

I think John’s right, of course, but while the development may be traumatic for the fans of Real and Barca, I suspect for the rest — who often had to resign themselves to losing their best players to Real or Barca — making the switch to supporting a “Spanish” club in England won’t be that hard.

There is, after all, less and less that is particularly “English” about the football in the English Premier League. (Hell, even their national team is coached by a catenaccio artist from Italy). England is simply the address, and Spanish fans should take it as a compliment to their football that this huge influx of money that is creating what is essentially a league with a global audience is relying so heavily on Spanish talent and expertise.

Posted in Glancing Headers | Tagged , , , , , | 14 Comments

Honoring Mahmoud Darwish

Posted on August 12, 2008 by Tony

Guest Post: Breyten Breytenbach

For South Africans of my generation, Breyten Breytenbach epitomizes the poet as revolutionary humanist, who invites all and sundry to imagine themselves outside of their received identities and celebrate their common humanity — an epically subversive enterprise. Breytenbach was a scion of the Afrikaans establishment in South Africa who not only turned his back on apartheid, but turned his pen against it, giving those of us forced to learn Afrikaans at school a wonderfully novel sense of how beautifully this great language could be deployed in the service of humanity, and as a lance to puncture the moral pretenses of a system that had had such great expectations of him — his brother, Wynand, was a legendary field commander in the special forces of the South African military during the dirty war in Angola. Breyten suffered prison and then the heartbreak of exile for his courage, and I was deeply honored when Breyten wrote me recently to commend me on my piece about the growth of Jewish dissidence — as an Afrikaner who was ostracized because he dared speak truth to apartheid power in South Africa, he could empathize very strongly with Jews who stood up to challenge Israeli apartheid policies. It was that same humanism that guided the politics and poetry of the great Palestinian poet and national treasure, Mahmoud Darwish. Hours after he died on Saturday, I received an email eulogy from Breyten which he graciously agreed to have republished here. Also, read the heartfelt appreciation by my good friend Saifedean Ammous (which includes a translation of Darwish’s epic poem composed aboard ship from Lebanon to Tunisia, driven out along with the PLO leadership, in 1982) and a great political obituary from my good friend Scott MacLeod.

The Death of Mahmoud

By Breyten Breytenbach

I just heard the terrible news that Mahmoud Darwish passed away. As for many of you, I’m sure, the anguish and pain brought about by this loss is nearly unbearable.

Some of us had the privilege, only a few weeks ago, of listening to him reading his poems in an arena in Arles. The sun was setting, there was a soundless wind in the trees and from the neighbouring streets we could hear the voices of children playing. And for hours we sat on the ancient stone seats, spellbound by the depth and the beauty of this poetry. Was it about Palestine? Was it about his people dying, the darkening sky, the intimate relationships with those on the other side of the wall, ‘soldier’ and ‘guest’, exile and love, the return to what is no longer there, the memory of orchards, the dreams of freedom…? Yes – like a deep stream all of these themes were there, of course they so constantly informed his verses; but it was also about olives and figs and a horse against the skyline and the feel of cloth and the mystery of the colour of a flower and the eyes of a beloved and the imagination of a child and the hands of a grandfather.

And of death.

Gently, repeatedly, terribly, by implication, mockingly, even longingly – death. Many of us were petrified. Maybe we sensed – remember Leila? – that this was like saying goodbye. Like this? On foreign soil? Time stopped there, and the lament was made nearly joyous in the ageless rhythm of the two brothers in black on their string instruments accompanying the words coming to us from the earth and from a light blowing over that distant land. We wanted to weep, and yet there was laughter and he made it easy for us and it became festive.

Afterwards, I remember, we did not want to leave the place. Light had fallen but we lingered, embracing and holding one another. Strangers looked each other in the eye, fumbled for a few words to exchange, some thoughts. How awkward it has become to be moved! I remember thinking how deeply he touched us, how generous he was. And how light. Maybe, had he known, he would have wanted to take leave in this way. No drama. No histrionics. No demagogic declarations. Maybe not even much certainty anymore. Despair, yes – and laughter. The dignity and the humbleness of the combatant. And somehow, without us knowing or understanding, his wanting to comfort us. He said he was stripping his verses of everything but the poetry. He was reaching out even more profoundly than he’d ever done before for the universally shared fate and sense of being human. Perhaps he was trying to convey that it was now time to “remember to die.”

The next day when we left, when we said goodbye in that Hotel Nord-Pinus with its huge posters of corridas and the photos of bullfighters fragile like angels in the intimacy of preparing for walking out into the blinding light, with the sweet smell of death lilies in the foyer, I wanted to kiss his hands and he refused.

Time will pass. There will be eulogies and homages. He will be ‘official’, a ‘voice of the people’… He knew all of that and he accepted it, and sometimes he gently mocked the hyperbole and the impossible expectations. Maybe the anger will be forgotten. Maybe even, the politicians will refrain from trying to steal the light of his complex legacy, his questioning and his doubts, and perhaps some cynics – abroad as well – will, this time, not disgust us with the spectacle of their crocodile tears.

Mahmoud is gone. The exile is over. He will not have lived to see the end of the suffering of his people – the mothers and the sons and the children who cannot know why they should be born into the horror of this life, the arbitrary cruelty of their dying. He will not fade away. Not the silhouette in its dapper outdated clothes and polished loafers, not the intelligent eyes behind the thick lenses, not the teasing, not the curiosity about the world and the intimacy of his reaching out to those close to him, not the sharp analyses of the foibles and the folly of politics, not the humanism, not the good drinking and the many cigarettes, not the hospitality of never imposing his pain on you, not the voice that spoke from the ageless spaces of poetry, not the verses, not the verses, not the timeless love-making of his words.

I just wanted to reach out to you. Some of you, I know, must be crying as I am now, and some never met him; but, surely, for all of us he was a reference. Maybe we will stop somewhere because we hear a flutter of birds overhead, and we will hold a protecting hand to our blinded eyes as we search the sky.

He will be alive for me in that rhythm of birds. I told him in Arles I want to propose to my fellow poets that we should, each one of us, declare ourselves ‘honourary Palestinians.’ He tried to laugh it away with the habitual embarrassment of a brother. And indeed, how puny our attempts to understand and approach the inconsolable must be! We cannot die or write in the place of his people, in the place of Mahmoud Darwish. Still, somehow, however futile the gesture, I need to try and say what an honour it was to have known this man a little and what a privilege and a gift his poetry is. And that I wish to celebrate the dignity and the beauty of his life by sharing this fleeting moment with you.

Posted in Situation Report | Tagged , , , | 17 Comments

All the Hysteria That’s Fit to Print?

Posted on July 21, 2008 by Tony

You’d think the once-gray lady would have learned from the Edward Luttwak debacle earlier this year, when its public editor was forced to apologize for the paper publishing an op-ed premised on utter nonsense. But no. Instead, the paper asks us to take seriously a manic rant from Israeli historian-turned-hysterian Benny Morris, warning that “Israel will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months — and the leaders in Washington and even Tehran should hope that the attack will be successful enough to cause at least a significant delay in the Iranian production schedule, if not complete destruction, of that country’s nuclear program. Because if the attack fails, the Middle East will almost certainly face a nuclear war — either through a subsequent pre-emptive Israeli nuclear strike or a nuclear exchange shortly after Iran gets the bomb.”

For a man who once applied the historian’s method of carefully weighing evidence from a wide variety of sources to establish the complex motives at work in historical conflict, the reasoning in Morris’s rant was shockingly adolescent, and bereft of precisely the craft through which he made his name.

It’s mostly a transparent kvetch about the fact that the U.S. is unlikely to start another war in the Middle East, suggesting that Israel will “almost certainly” do something really crazy if the U.S. doesn’t. “Israel, believing that its very existence is at stake — and this is a feeling shared by most Israelis across the political spectrum — will certainly make the effort.”

Well, no, Benny, actually, anyone with a historian’s take would recognize that despite the rhetoric of Israel’s leaders, few of those in the security and strategic echelon actually believe Israel’s existence is threatened by Iran’s nuclear program. That’s the packaged message for the American and international audience; the Israelis know firstly that their own 200 warheads are more than a match for Iran, and that Iran’s leadership — the clowning demagoguery of Ahmadinejad notwithstanding (although even he has taken to making clear Iran has no intention of attacking Israel) are national-interests-driven pragmatists.

I guess Benny didn’t get that email. He writes: “Given the fundamentalist, self-sacrificial mindset of the mullahs who run Iran, Israel knows that deterrence may not work as well as it did with the comparatively rational men who ran the Kremlin and White House during the cold war. They are likely to use any bomb they build, both because of ideology and because of fear of Israeli nuclear pre-emption.”

Benny the hysterian would have us believe that the last 30 years — for some period of which, by the way, Israel actually armed these “self-sacrificial” fundamentalist mullahs, and for much of which they cooperated pragmatically — have all simply been a preparation for the goal of launching a suicide attack on Israel. They’re likely to use any bomb they build out of ideology? Blimey! In the fevered mind of Benny Morris, the very raison d’etre of the regime in Tehran is to destroy Israel, knowing they’ll be destroyed in the process. The evidence for this uniquely self-centered apocalyptic view has yet to be produced, but that doesn’t seem to bother Morris — or, for that matter, the editorial page editors of the New York Times, who seem to be willing to believe just about anything they’re told about Mad Mullahs. Like the New York Post.

Posted in A Skeptical Read | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

Why John Bolton is Right on Iran

Posted on July 16, 2008 by Tony


Armageddon Man is unhappy with his President

Guest Column: Dr. Gary Sick of Columbia, a preeminent U.S. scholar on Iran, is a must-read analyst given his wide experience engaging with the leadership in Tehran and in U.S. government service (he honed his expertise on the National Security Council). Having spent quite some time on these pages offering analysis on why, despite the rhetoric, the Bush Administration is unlikely to attack Iran, I was delighted to receive in email form the attached analysis, reproduced with Gary’s approval. It’s a great read:

As usual, John Bolton is absolutely right. His policy prescriptions may be reckless to the point of foolishness (“When in doubt, bomb!”), but his understanding of what is happening in Washington policy (as outlined in his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday) is unerringly accurate.

While much of the world was hyper-ventilating over the possibility that the United States (and maybe Israel) were getting ready to launch a new war against Iran, Bolton was looking at the realities and concluding that far from bombing the US was preparing to do a deal with Iran. He had noticed that over the past two years the US had completely reversed its position that originally opposed European talks with Iran.

First, the US indicated that it would participate if the negotiations showed progress. Then, when they didn’t, we went further and actively participated in negotiating a new and more attractive offer of incentives to Iran. Bolton noticed that when that package was delivered to Tehran by Xavier Solana, the signature of one Condoleeza Rice was there, along with representatives of the other five members of the UN Security Council plus Germany.

He had probably also noticed Secretary Rice’s suggestion of possibly opening a US interests section in Tehran — the first step toward reestablishing diplomatic relations. And he didn’t overlook the softening of rhetoric in Under Secretary Wm Burn’s recent testimony to the Congress about Iran.

Now, just one day after Bolton’s cry of alarm that the US is going soft on Iran, we learn that the same Bill Burns will participate directly in the talks that are going to be held on Saturday in Geneva with the chief Iranian negotiator on the nuclear file. Bolton’s worst suspicions seem to be confirmed.

Unlike many observers and commentators, Bolton has been looking, not at what the US administration says, but what it does. Ever since the congressional elections of 2006, the US has been in the process of a fundamental change in its policy on a number of key issues: the Arab-Israel dispute, the North Korean nuclear issue, and Iran. Since the administration proclaims loudly that its policies have not changed, and since the tough rhetoric of the past dominates the discussion, it is easy to overlook what is actually going on.

Bolton no doubt noticed that Rumsfeld is gone and replaced with Robert Gates, a very different sort of secretary of Defense. He will have observed that the worst of the neocons (including himself) are now writing books and spending more time with families and friends, cheer-leading for more war by writing op-eds from the outside rather than pursuing their strategies in policy meetings in the White House.

He will have seen the gradual shift of the policy center of gravity from Dick Cheney to Rice and Gates. He will have been listening when the Chairman of the JCS and others have said as clearly as they realistically can that the military option, though never renounced as a theoretical possibility, is the least attractive option available to us and in fact is close to impossible given our over-stretch in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In other words, Bolton, as someone whose policies (in my view) are certifiably insane, recognizes real pragmatism and moderation in Washington when he sees it. And he does not like what he sees in this lame duck administration.

Over the past two or three years, we have been treated to one sensational threat after another about the likelihood of imminent war with Iran. All of these alarms and predictions have one thing in common: they never happened. Perhaps it is time for us to join Bolton in looking at the real indicators. When Bolton quits writing his jeremiads or when he begins to express satisfaction with the direction of US policy, that is when we should start to get worried.

Posted in Guest Columns, Situation Report | Tagged , , , , , | 31 Comments

Behind the ‘Phony War’ on Iran

Posted on July 12, 2008 by Tony

This from my new op ed in the National:

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s rocketeers – helped by its Photoshop mujahideen – managed last week to set off a wave of hysteria by test-firing four medium-range missiles to underscore its capacity to retaliate against any US-Israeli air strikes. (Well, three actually, the photo retouching was needed to disguise the failure to launch of the fourth.) But the hysteria seemed more like going through the motions of pre-existing agendas than a sign of impending combat.

The piece touches on what I believe is the significant debate in Washington, which is not that usually reported pitting those who actually want to attack Iran against those who want to pursue diplomacy; instead, it is being fought between those who believe diplomacy will only succeed if the Iranians believe they’re facing a real military threat, and those who believe that creating that such a belief would retard rather than enhance diplomacy and risk unintended escalation.

In other words, all Bush’s talk about the military option remaining “on the table” is an increasingly transparent bluff. But the real diplomacy will begin only after a new U.S. president is seated.

To read the whole thing, click here.

Posted in Situation Report | Tagged , , , , | 13 Comments

The Wrong Questions on Iran – Again

Posted on July 9, 2008 by Tony

I know it’s a summer news doldrum, despite the morbid antics of the presidential candidates, but all this “war on Iran” speculation seems to be missing some key points. Despite Sy Hersch’s recent revelations of stepped up proxy warfare by the Bush Administration against Iran — which mostly reprised previous reporting he’s done, with the only addition I could see being that congressional Democrats have signed off on this fool-headed business — I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that suggests an attack on Iran is imminent — or even likely.

That the Democrats signed off shouldn’t come as any surprise — even the Obama campaign seems ready to embrace the idea that Iranian progress towards the capacity to build a nuclear weapon is “the most dangerous crisis” facing the U.S. in the next decade. And candidate Obama appears to have signed up to the same broad outlook as Bush and McCain, demanding tougher sanctions on Iran in response to its latest missile test. There’s no reason to believe that Obama sanctions would be any more effective than Bush or McCain sanctions in resolving this problem, and it shouldn’t be difficult to understand the Iranian missile test as a response to Israel’s training for air strikes and the stepped up war talk. After all, the Iranians are explicitly saying that they have no intention of attacking any other state, including Israel, but that if they are attacked, they will hit back in a very nasty way. The idea that the appropriate response is to escalate the confrontation seems, to me, to be very much in keeping with the longstanding self-defeating approach to the Iran question we’ve seen up till now.

But before we get onto the right questions that need to be asked in order to resolve the conflict between Iran and the Western powers, I think David Ignatius nailed it last week when he noted that the covert proxy warfare against Iran is not a product of a plan to attack Iran — or of any coherent plan at all — it’s the sort of incoherent bumbling that reflects an Administration that can’t decide what it wants to do about Iran. The argument against direct military action will almost certainly prevail: The U.S. military is firmly opposed to a confrontation with Iran, understanding that it will bear the consequences in the Gulf — and a shooting war will certainly open a third front, the stress of which, as Joint-Chiefs chair Admiral Mike Mullen recently noted, will seriously damage the U.S. military. Most analysts agree that Israel can’t bomb Iran without U.S. support, and the U.S. is unlikely to provide that support. As Anthony Cordesman told an Israeli audience last week, the consensus in the U.S. intelligence community is that Iran represents no immediate nuclear threat.

And Jim Lobe reminds us that the U.S. economy is in no position to absorb the shock of the oil prices shooting up way past the $200 a barrel mark — a predictable consequence of an attack on Iran.

Rami Khouri also highlights a very important technical issue that militates against military action: It would be a high-risk operation, with potentially disastrous consequences, whose success would amount to no more than locking the stable door after the horse had bolted. He writes: “Iran has already achieved that which it says it seeks: full mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment. Since this is the season for predicting in the Middle East, and given the paucity of hard facts or credible knowledge about the main players’ intentions, I expect the US and Israel to finally accept the reality that a military strike, no matter how punitive, would only temporarily set back Iran’s nuclear capability, because the technological knowledge is already in Iran’s hands and cannot be destroyed with bombs.”

Rami’s point is very important: Bush has always emphasized that his goal is not simply to prevent Iran building a bomb, but to prevent it attaining the “know-how” to build such a weapon — that was the motivation for trying to stop the uranium-enrichment currently underway in Iran, which is being done under international supervision and to a level of enrichment 20 times too low for bomb-grade materiel. The point was that once Iran knew how to enrich uranium, it could cut loose at some point in the future and start building bombs.

But the bad news, as Rami notes, is that the “know-how” has already been attained — a fact that can’t be reversed by military action. As a result, he argues, “the destabilizing consequences for the Middle East, and for global energy and economics, are so massive that it is difficult to imagine [the military] scenario unfolding. The alternative is diplomatic negotiations that would meet the legitimate and reasonable needs of the key parties, namely Iran, the US, Israel, Europe and the Arab neighbors. Iran could continue to develop its nuclear industry, but with stringent international inspections and safeguards under the rules of existing treaties and conventions that prevent the development of nuclear weapons.”

Even as they counter military threat with military threat, the Iranians are also stepping up their diplomatic offensive. Trita Parsi provides a useful explanation of the strategic thinking behind a new conciliatory tone being adopted by key leaders in Tehran. Ali Akbar Velayati, a key adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, last week rebuked President Ahmadinejad for his provocative rhetoric, and urged that the Iranian accept the latest formula for negotiations with the West being proferred by the EU’s top diplomat, Javier Solana. There was something classically Leninist in his reasoning: The most bellicose elements in Washington and Israel wanted Iran to isolate itself by rejecting the offer; therefore, Iran should accept the offer in order to isolate the hawks from the Europeans and others in the middle.

Similar thinking has been expressed by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, and even President Ahmadinejad popped up in Malaysia last week to make clear that Iran has no intention of attacking any other state, including Israel — which, by the way, has long been Iran’s official position, Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric on Israel notwithstanding.

The Iranians are unlikely to simply accept the demand for an end to uranium enrichment, but they may take advantage of the face-saving potential in the “freeze-for-freeze” formula that accompanies the latest package. The Iranian objective has been to achieve a diplomatic solution that allows it maintain a modest enrichment capability under international supervision, a goal which, as Rami Khouri pointed out, they might be closer to achieving. But Tehran is also intimately aware of the possibilities raised by the U.S. election in November.

Trita writes:

The debate in Tehran over this issue seems to have centered on whether to continue defying the Security Council or to consolidate Iranian gains. Those favoring the latter have likely realized the Bush administration itself has helped make Iranian defiance successful. Critics argue that the Bush team’s lack of credibility and incompetence has made it more difficult to assemble a strong international coalition against Iran. Washington’s soft power with the EU under Bush has been negligible, forcing the president to strong-arm his European allies to go along with more stringent economic measures against Iran.

But with Bush out of the picture by January 2009, the utility and risk of the Ahmadinejad line can change dramatically. Whether it is Democratic Senator Barack Obama or McCain, the next commander in chief will begin his presidency with a significantly higher cachet with the Europeans. The hunger for strengthening trans-Atlantic ties and putting the past eight years of bickering behind them is palpable in Europe… In addition, Washington could enjoy much greater pull with non-aligned countries, including Asian nations whose unwillingness to go along with sanctions have provided Tehran with an economic escape route.

Consequently, greater interest in the freeze-for-freeze formula may have less to do with recent Israeli bluster and more to do with the greater political pull [that will be ] enjoyed by the next US administration.

Furthermore, proponents of [accepting] the Solana proposal in Tehran believe that a US-Iran rapprochement can be achieved under the next US administration if diplomacy is pursued. To facilitate the next US president’s decision to negotiate, however, Tehran must help improve the political atmosphere and provide the next US commander-in-chief with a better starting point for diplomacy.

Initiating discussions at this stage could tie both an Obama and a McCain presidency to the diplomatic track. Whoever wins the elections will inherit a less problematic dispute and enjoy greater political maneuverability as a result. This is particularly true for Obama, since the Illinois senator’s willingness to pursue diplomacy may not match his political ability to do so if the nuclear deadlock persists.

Iran will negotiate, it seems, but not on the terms demanded by the U.S. and its allies. But as I argued a year ago

States do not pursue weapons systems as ends in themselves; and states are hardwired to ensure their own survival. It is to that end that they acquire weapons systems, to protect, enhance or advance their own strategic position and even up the odds against more powerful rivals. As everything from the Cold War to the current deal with North Korea demonstrate, the only way to avoid nuclear conflict is to address the concerns and fears on both sides that might spark such a conflict. Weapons systems are dangerous, but not as dangerous as the conflicts that might result in them being used. And we should also get used to the idea that the globalization of technology on the current strategic landscape makes nuclear weapons likely to become the norm among states — after all, the existing eight nuclear weapons states have no intention of relinquishing theirs, so why would any states that anticipate being in conflict with any of them refrain from pursuing those weapons when the opportunity presents itself?

It is the conflicts that fuel the drive for nuclear weapons that are more dangerous than the weapons themselves, and the problem of those weapons can’t be addressed separately from those conflicts. An Iran bombed to destroy its nuclear power plants would likely be far more dangerous to the U.S. and its allies over the next couple of decades than an Iran that had nuclear weapons within reach might be. The only way to diminish the danger of an escalating confrontation with Iran — which is what bombing its nuclear facilities would certainly do — is to address the conflict between it and its rivals directly, and seek a modus vivendi that can manage their conflicting interests. Iran has shown itself to be ready to engage in such dialogue; it is the Bush administration that has demurred.

To this end, I highly recommend Thomas Powers’ excellent piece that makes clear the absurdity of initiating a new war of aggression in the Middle East in the hope of Iran attaining the means to pursue any weapons capabilities. The key question that should be addressed at the very heart of any diplomatic process, he argues, is why Iran might seek nuclear weapons capability. Powers writes:

What US officials say, when they say anything at all, is that Tehran wants a bomb in order to dominate the Persian Gulf region and to threaten its neighbors, especially Israel. This is a misreading of how other nuclear powers have made use of their weapons. As tools of coercive diplomacy nuclear weapons are almost entirely useless, but they are extremely effective in blocking large-scale or regime-threatening attack. There is no evidence that Iran has a different motive, and plenty of reason for Iran to fear that attack is a real possibility.

Indeed, the Bush administration, far from trying to quiet Iran’s fears, makes a point of confirming them every few months. These threats are not limited to words, but are supported with practical steps—the presence of large American armies just across Iran’s borders in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the dispatch of the world’s largest fleet of warships to cruise along Iran’s Persian Gulf coastline. The Bush administration further accuses Iran of “meddling” in the affairs of its neighbors, of supplying weapons and training to Iraqis who kill Americans, and of being the world’s principal state sponsor of terrorism. Fear that Saddam Hussein might provide nuclear weapons to terrorist groups was the leading American justification for the invasion of Iraq, and the same concern is often cited about Iran.

The seriousness of American threats is confirmed by the fact that no significant national leader in the United States has ever disowned or objected to them in clear, vigorous, principled language. It is as if the whole country listens to the administration’s threats with breath held, wondering if Bush and Cheney really mean to do as they say, and in effect leaving the decision entirely to them. Americans may count on the President to think twice, but why would leaders in Tehran, responsible for the lives of 70 million citizens, want to depend on President Bush’s restraint for their survival and safety? Bush has a history. On his own authority, without the sanction of any international body, he attacked Iraq five years ago and precipitated a bloody chain of events that shows no sign of ending. It would be natural, indeed inevitable, for any government in Tehran, seeing what has happened next door, to ask what could save Iran from a similar fate. An answer is not far to seek: nuclear weapons with a reliable delivery system could do that.

When Bush talks of a “diplomatic solution”, he simply means Iranian surrender under pressure of sanctions. The current administration is simply incapable of achieving a genuine diplomatic breakthrough — or much else — anywhere in the Middle East. But if the next Administration is to avoid the mistakes of the current one, it would do well to get beyond the narrow frame of the questions Barack Obama and John McCain are currently asking and answering. The definition of a serious diplomatic process, then, is one, as Rami Khouri suggests above, that addresses “the legitimate and reasonable needs of the key parties, namely Iran, the US, Israel, Europe and the Arab neighbors.”

Posted in Situation Report | Tagged , , | 25 Comments

Biggie Smalls Says Israel Won’t Bomb Iran

Posted on June 29, 2008 by Tony

About 13 years ago, while working on a British TV magazine program, I found myself spending a couple of days with Christopher Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls/the Notorious B.I.G. (I swear, I still have the tape, but it’s analog.) This extended interview took place at the time when Tupac Shakur was yelling from the rooftops that he was going to kill Brooklyn’s greatest rapper, and getting plenty of publicity and selling records by doing so. Biggie wasn’t particularly alarmed. He’d been a hustler in Bed-Stuy for too long to take seriously threats that are broadcast. In far more colorful language, he said words to the effect of “On the streets, when someone is telling anyone who’ll listen that they’re going to kill you, you don’t have to lose any sleep over it. You’re not going to hear about it beforehand when the real killer comes.”

Exactly. (Yes, I know, Biggie was eventually, tragically, murdered — but his point is proven by the fact that his killers had nothing to do with Tupac.)

And that’s why it’s hard to take seriously last week’s New York Times report about an Israeli military exercise in the Mediterranean being a “dry run” for an air attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Well, you can take it seriously as a PR stunt, aimed at sweating the Europeans into imposing more sanctions on Iran for fear that Israel will “do something crazy.” But when Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981, and when it struck what it claimed was a Syrian nuclear facility late last year, there was no coverage of the preparations for those missions in the New York Times.

There is no credible scenario in which Israel will attack Iran without U.S. support, and achieving U.S. support for such a reckless course of action remains a long-shot.

As I wrote in the National this week Continue reading →

Posted in Situation Report | Tagged , , , , | 29 Comments