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As noted in  the September 2 Talking Points, the hard-line neoconservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) is pushing the old neocon meme that the ‘road to Middle East peace runs through’… well, anywhere but Jerusalem. This time, of course, it’s Tehran.

The latest JINSA Report, the organization’s policy e-newsletter, calls Iran the “elephant” in the room that went unmentioned in U.S. President Barack Obama’s Iraq address, as well as the “elephant” in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The JINSA Report says that prospects for long-term success in Iraq will be “short-lived” unless the U.S. figures out what the elephant is and “how to tame it or remove it.” JINSA’s description of Iranian involvement in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories makes clear this prescription applies to those strategic challenges as well.

This theme is of course familiar to anyone who has followed JINSA since the run-up to the Iraq War. Just after September 11, 2001 — on September 14, to be exact — the top U.S. policy priority listed in the JINSA Report was the provision of  ”all necessary support to the Iraq National Congress, including direct American military support, to affect [sic] a regime change in Iraq.” (The Iraqi National Congress and its leader, the neocon darling Ahmad Chalabi, have since been revealed to have had extensive ties to Iran, with Chalabi even accused of spying for the Islamic Republic, making JINSA’s outrage at Iranian influence in Iraq somewhat ironic, to say the least.)

On March 19, 2002, just one year prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, JINSA made the exact same point about Iraq it is now making about Iran: in order to bring regional actors at odds with the U.S. to heel, the U.S. must remove their patron (in Iraq’s case, Saddam Hussein) from power. This 2002 JINSA Report warns:

…the Oslo process in the 1990s had shifted attention from the greater dangers posed by Iraq. We believed, then and now, that only after the regional situation was stabilized in America’s favor would the Palestinians be prepared to acquiesce to legitimate American and Israeli demands about security and legitimacy. It wouldn’t work the other way around.

This analysis should be of no surprise coming from JINSA, an organization funded by Irving Moskowitz, the bingo and gambling magnate who has had a close relationship with both the Likud party of Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu and the most radical settler movements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Unsurprisingly, Moskowitz has also funded leading neoconservative institutions here, notably  (AEI, Center for Security Policy, Hudson), which connects him to figures instrumental in implementing the invasion of Iraq. Co-founded by Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, and Stephen Bryen, JINSA itself is advised by the likes of Anne Bayefsky (see Eli’s recent post), John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Douglas Feith, and Jim Woolsey.

Dyed-in-the-wool neoconservatives like the JINSA advisers have a known fondness for the policies of the Likud party. So it’s again no surprise to see that Netanyahu has long promoted the position that first solving the Iran problem will suddenly allow Israel some latitude in Arab-Israeli peacemaking. This notion, known as ‘reverse linkage’ rather than the militarily-accepted ‘linkage’ that says the opposite, was espoused by Netanyahu’s National Security Advisor, Uzi Arad, just they were coming into office. In March 2009, Arad told Reuters:

[T]he order of priority is: blunt Iran first, move vigorously on peace after, and based on that. Should you act in the wrong order…you will have a sterile, perhaps failed process with the Palestinians and at the same time you will end up with a nuclear Iran.

So now those same figures who brought us the Iraq war are using the same talking points — eerily echoing the Israeli right — to drum up support for escalating measures against Iran. We’ve seen this movie before.

News and views relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for September 3, 2010.

• The Wall Street Journal: Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), who made his first trip to the Middle East last month, applauds the talks between Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu but warns that “[t]here can never be peace in the Middle East with a nuclear-armed Iran.”  The first term Senator calls for additional “punishing” sanctions against Iran and reports that the possibility of a nuclear weapons possessing Iran is the biggest concern of both Israeli and Jordanian leadership.  Brown concludes that, “While we should encourage the Israelis and Palestinians as they return to the negotiating table, let’s not lose sight of the real threat to peace in the Middle East: Iran, the leading state sponsor of terror in the world, armed with a nuclear weapon.”

• Politico: Fredrik Stanton, author of “Great Negotiations: Agreements That Changed the Modern World,” argues that sanctions against Iran’s economy are failing to deter Tehran from its nuclear ambitions but that more aggressive steps—in line with Britain, Germany and Italy’s 2003 boarding of the BBC China, a ship carrying centrifuge parts for Libya’s nuclear weapons program—could deter Iran from its current path.  Stanton proposes that the U.S. should pursue policies of, “visible and tangible support for domestic opponents of the regime, greater focus on Iranian human rights violations, public seizures of nuclear proliferation material and an embargo of refined petroleum fuels.”

• International Herald Tribune: Earlier this week in the global edition of the New York Times, Iranian-American Reza Aslan and Israeli Bernard Avishai conclude that were the West to be “confronted by an Iran crossing the nuclear threshold, that would be a lesser evil than what we will confront in the wake of an attack to prevent this.” They sum up some of the recent war-drum-chatter around Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic piece on an Israeli attack on Iran, noting that the “logic” of what Goldberg writes points towards a U.S. strike. “This drumbeat must be silenced, and only President Obama can silence,” they write. “An Israeli attack on Iran would almost certainly precipitate a devastating regional war with unforeseeable global consequences.”

Jeffery Goldberg’s Point of No Return article in September’s Atlantic Monthly continues to stir up debate.

Tom Ricks, Center for a New American Security (CNAS) senior fellow, adds his take to the list of disastrous scenarios which could follow an Israeli attack on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

On his Foreign Policy blog, The Best Defense, Ricks reflects on a note received from (ret.) Col. Peter Mansoor–Gen. David Petraeus’ executive officer from February 2007 to May 2008–in which Mansoor outlines the potential fallout from an Israeli strike and, rather ominously, describes such an attack as “a likely scenario”. Ricks had been coming to the conclusion that, “…the more Israeli officials chat with journalists about [bombing Iran], the less likely I think it is to happen,” but Mansoor’s note appears to be giving him second thoughts.

The note, reposted on Ricks’ blog, reads:

“Whether it is Israel or the United States that attacks Iranian nuclear facilities, the Iranians will respond by trying to close the Straits of Hormuz and unleashing terror attacks in the ME and around the world. In the event of an attack, the United States will have to destroy Iran’s capacity to close the straits, which means destroying their anti-ship missile batteries, submarines, aircraft, and the assortment of small boats and mine layers that can wreak havoc on  Gulf shipping. Israel will no doubt have to invade southern Lebanon again to suppress the inevitable barrage of missiles from Hezbollah. The West will have to go on high alert against terror attacks. The oil shock alone will no doubt spiral the West into a double dip recession/depression.

Not a pretty picture to contemplate, but a likely scenario. Despite the crowd of academics in the United States that says we can live with an Iranian bomb, Israel will not allow the Iranians to go nuclear — at least, not while a Holocaust denier who has made pointed threats against the Jewish state remains in power.”

Prompted by the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq (at least in letter, if not in actuality), many of the hawks who pushed hardest for the 2003 invasion are coming out of the woodwork to argue once again that the war was both successful and necessary. While most hawks have restricted their rhetoric to pious references to the surge that steer clear of the unpopular claim that the war itself was worth it, in recent days both David Frum and Daniel Henninger have relied on counterfactuals to argue that the consequences of not removing Saddam Hussein from power outweigh the war’s toll of hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced, and billions of dollars wasted. I didn’t find Frum’s argument terribly convincing — it relies primarily on assuming a series of worst-case scenarios about Saddam’s capabilities and intentions — but the fact that Henninger is also getting into the game may signal the start of a trend. For that reason, it’s worth examining the logic of Henninger’s piece. Continue Reading »

Author Hooman Majd, who’s much anticipated second book is due this month, writes today in Foreign Policy that the U.S. sanctions program on Iran isn’t exactly going to plan. This contradicts a central talking point of the Obama administration: that the recent political infighting in Tehran (which has not involved the reform or Green movements) is a sign that Iran is feeling the bite of recent sanctions. Majd says that “the latest squabbling is business as usual in the byzantine Iranian political system.”

That system, notes Majd, has “never quite been the absolute and monolithic totalitarian dictatorship we often imagine it to be (and it’s certainly not one with a dictator president).” Rather than the embattled President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (the focus of much Iranian discontent), the real power center of Iranian politics, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, remains very much in control. Though some infighting has persisted despite his orders to stop, Khamenei accepts a level of political dissent — especially if it comes from Ahmadinejad’s right and doesn’t challenge the Supreme Leader himself.

So why did Khamenei insist that the political wrangling be toned down, at least in public? And what does it mean for what Obama’s claims about his gains versus his actual prospects for progress on the nuclear issue? Majd writes:

Khamenei is no doubt aware that Iran’s enemies are keenly watching for signs of the regime’s weakness, the better to justify military attacks. By emphasizing unity — something former president Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, no fan of Ahmadinejad, has also done in recent weeks — Khamenei likely means to project an image of strength, internationally and domestically, at a crucial period in Iran’s history. The rallying together isn’t a flailing reaction to sanctions; it’s a concerted show of strength in the face of adversity.

The fact is, there is broad consensus on major foreign-policy issues across the political spectrum in Iran — particularly with respect to the nuclear issue. While U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration claims that the latest and toughest sanctions seem to be working, forcing the Iranians to consider negotiations on the nuclear issue, the Iranian leadership was already in agreement on actual compromises before the sanctions were imposed. [...]

The suggestion that tensions within the leadership have been aggravated by the sanctions, or that sanctions are responsible for Iran’s apparent willingness to talk, is a misreading of the political scene in Tehran.

News and views relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for September 2, 2010.

• The Washington Post: Scott Wilson writes that shared regional fears of a nuclear weapons possessing Iran might be a catalyst for a breakthrough in this week’s Arab-Israeli peace talks. “Iran’s ambitions, which have cast a long shadow over the greater Middle East, may serve as a common bond keeping a frail peace process intact despite threats that have arisen even before the negotiations open Thursday at the State Department,” he says. Wilson suggests that, if Israel is seriously considering a unilateral strike on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons facilities, Netanyahu will need to stick with peace talks and win goodwill with the White House.

• The Wall Street Journal: Daniel Henninger defends the U.S. invasion of Iraq as preemptively cutting off Iraq’s nuclear ambitions. Henninger theorizes that had the U.S. not invaded, Saddam Hussein would have been driven to pursue nuclear weapons in order to match Iran’s alleged pursuit of the bomb. “In such a world, Saddam would have aspired to play in the same league as Iran and NoKo. Would we have ‘contained’ him?” he asks. Henninger continues his exercise in hypothetical history by suggesting that Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Sudan would enter the “nuclear marketplace” if Iran and Iraq acquired nuclear weapons. He concludes: “The sacrifice made by the United States in Iraq took one of these nuclear-obsessed madmen off the table and gave the world more margin to deal with the threat that remains, if the world’s leadership is up to it. A big if.”

• Foreign Policy: Author Hooman Majd contests a recent U.S. talking point that sanctions are working. Citing political infighting between various conservative factions, the Obama administration argues that sanctions are having an effect. But Majd asserts that this is politics as usual — not a sign that there might be political space for a resurgent Green Movement. In fact, he says, no matter what happens, the real power center in Iran, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, remains firmly in the driver’s seat and the nuclear calculus is still a point of mutual agreement between the many political factions.

• JINSA Report: The ultra-hawkish advocacy organization, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), issued it’s latest e-mail blast calling Iran the “elephant” in the room in nearly every U.S. and Israeli strategic challenge in the region (this mirrors the ‘road to peace leads through Tehran’ meme discussed in yesterday’s TP’s). The U.S. needs “to tame it or remove” that elephant from Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and the “the Israel-Palestinian ‘peace’ talks,” JINSA argues.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the BBC yesterday that the West should be prepared to use force against Iran if the Islamic Republic does not give up its alleged nuclear weapons program.

The Guardian, a left-leaning daily in the U.K., says that Blair called a potential Iranian weapons program “wholly unacceptable” and said such a program leaves the West “no alternative” other than a military strike.

Blair is the Middle East envoy for the ‘Quartet’ (UN, EU, Russia and the U.S.), which is involved in multilateral negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

Promoting his new book, Blair told the BBC’s Andrew Marr:

I am saying that I think it is wholly unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapons capability and I think we have got to be prepared to confront them, if necessary militarily. I think there is no alternative to that if they continue to develop nuclear weapons. They need to get that message loud and clear.

This hawkish rhetoric against Iran is apparently a theme for Blair of late. The Guardian piece goes on to cite its own exclusive interview with Blair (also promoting his book), where the former PM said:

Now other people may say: ‘Come on, the consequences of taking them on are too great, you’ve got to be so very careful, you’ll simply upset everybody, you’ll destabilise it.’ I understand all of those arguments. But I wouldn’t take the risk of Iran with a nuclear weapon.

In the postscript of the book itself, Blair writes: “Iran with a nuclear bomb would mean others in the region acquiring the same capability; it would dramatically alter the balance of power in the region, but also within Islam.”

(h/t reader Anthony)

News and views relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for September 1, 2010.

• The Wall Street Journal: The WSJ editorial board uses two 30-year-old letters from the Imam of the Park 51 community center, Feisal Abdul Rauf, to show Rauf’s alleged anti-Israel and pro-Iranian revolution leanings. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s 1977 outreach to Israel led Rauf to write, “In a true peace, Israel will, in our lifetimes, become one more Arab country, with a Jewish minority.” In a letter written after the 1979 Iranian revolution, he observed the American and Iranian revolution shared “the very principles of individual rights and freedom”. In Rauf’s response to the WSJ’s publication of his letters, he wrote, “As I re-read those letters now, I see that they express the same concerns—a desire for peaceful solutions in Israel, and for a humane understanding of Iran.”

• National Review Online: At NRO’s The Corner blog, Benjamin Weinthal lays out a ‘reverse linkage’ — turning around the usual military/realist thinking that Israeli-Arab peace will help the U.S. deal with other regional issues. He writes, “To bring about peace with longevity between the Palestinians and Israel, the Obama administration has to confront Iran, which means promoting democracy in Iran and terminating its nuclear-weapons program.” Weinthal asserts, “if the sanctions prove impotent, Obama will then have to turn to serious saber-rattling and lay out a blueprint for military intervention.” The statement rehashes the catchphrase from the early 2000s that ‘the road to Mid East peace runs through Baghdad’ – only now it’s rerouted through Tehran.

• The New York Times: David Sanger writes about the linkages between Israeli-Palestinian peace, Iraq and Iran. He argues while other presidents have dealt with these linkages, Obama faces a new variation with U.S. forces pulling out of Iraq, tough sanctions on Iran and and the slow emergence of a working Palestinian government in the West Bank. With the withdrawal from Iraq, Obama can claim victory over that source of instability and, according to Sanger’s sources, progress on Iran. Sanger interviews WINEP cofounders Martin Indyk, the Vice President for Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution and former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Senior Mideast diplomat Dennis Ross, special adviser for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Ross currently works out of the National Security Council, where he focuses on Iran, and  has served in the past two administrations. Indyk and Ross agree sanctions have made progress in isolating and containing Iran.  “We finally have leverage,” said Ross, pointing to talk from Iranian officials about the possibility of negotiations with the West.

Brookings fellow Bruce Riedel has an important piece at the National Interest magazine about the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran. Riedel, who advised President Obama in the 2008 campaign and led the Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy review last year, evaluates the history of Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly, along with the current threats facing the U.S. and Israel. He concludes Washington “needs to send a clear red light to Israel.”

Then he emphatically says it again: “There is no option but to actively discourage an Israeli attack.”

Riedel’s piece, published last week, is a sober look at how to avoid the regional catastrophe that could be engendered by an Israeli strike on Iran — a position that falls in line with the National Interest, the Nixon Center’s flagship realist publication. The piece, however, is surprising coming from a senior fellow at Brookings’s Saban Center, which is known for hawkish (albeit liberal hawkish) positions in the Middle East. Riedel’s colleagues Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack, after all, were instrumental in giving liberal interventionist cover to the neoconservative drive for war with Iraq.

After running through the history of Israel’s nuclear development and its policies of opacity and regional monopoly, Riedel, a former CIA analyst, describes the many hints that Israel has developed plans for an attack. After running through logistical problems with a strike — Iran’s distance from Israel, the challenge of crossing unfriendly airspace and the dispersal of Iranian nuclear sites, to name a few — Riedel asses  potential blowback, focusing on the potential harm to the U.S.:

AN ISRAELI attack on Iran is a disaster in the making. And it will directly impact key strategic American interests. Iran will see an attack as American supported if not American orchestrated. The aircraft in any strike will be American-produced, -supplied and -funded F-15s and F-16s, and most of the ordnance will be from American stocks. Washington’s $3 billion in assistance annually makes possible the IDF’s conventional superiority in the region.

Iran will almost certainly retaliate against both U.S. and Israeli targets. [...]

America’s greatest vulnerability would be in Afghanistan. Iran could easily increase its assistance to the Taliban and make the already-difficult Afghan mission much more complicated.

In addition, Riedel notes that “even a successful Israeli raid would only delay Iran’s nuclear program, not eliminate it entirely.” The delay to the program could be as little as a year, according to even Israeli analysts. The U.S. would still need to deal with the Iranian nuclear program, but in a “much more complicated diplomatic context since Tehran would be able to argue it was the victim of aggression and probably would renounce its NPT commitments.” Continue Reading »

and Ali Gharib

John Hagee’s Christians United For Israel (CUFI) has just sent out a petition demanding that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be tried by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the crime of incitement to genocide.

“The next time that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears before an international tribunal, it must not be as an honored guest at the United Nations General Assembly. It must be as a defendant in the dock of the International Criminal Court,” Hagee and his lieutenant David Brog wrote in a letter promoting the petition, for which they claim to have already gathered 75,000 signatures.

The fact that CUFI is endorsing the authority of the ICC and international law is a striking policy shift away from the views held by most right-wing supporters of Israel. Usually, these supporters spurn international laws and the institutions that enforce them because Israel often ends up on the receiving end of international legal criticism.

For instance, settlements in the West Bank violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits military occupiers from transferring their own populations into occupied lands. 

It’s unclear how Hagee will bring together the contradictory positions taken by his endorsement of international law while, at the same time, funding illegal West Bank settlements.

Hagee, who is no stranger to controversy and believes that the founding of the state of Israel set a countdown clock for the apocalypse, has advocated for a territorially maximalist Israeli state and the destruction of Islamic shrines and mosques which are currently on the site of the Temple of Solomon.

CUFI’s brand of Christian Zionism has long focused on Iran, though perhaps for questionable reasons. Ali reported on the Iranian focus at the 2008 CUFI summit, where neocons like Patrick Clawson, Cliff May and Frank Gaffney pushed their own hawkish prescriptions for Iran on Hagee’s flock.

The full e-mail petition to charge Ahmadinejad in the ICC is pasted below the fold.

Continue Reading »