Foreign Policy In Focus

As always, emphasis added.

Credibility: The Only Thing People Value More Highly Than Their Credit Rating

So why do so many smart people keep embracing an approach to Iran that is internally contradictory and has consistently failed for more than a decade? I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect it has a lot to do with maintaining credibility inside Washington. Because Iran has been demonized for so long, and absurdly cast as the Greatest National Security Threat we face, it has become largely impossible for anyone to speak openly of a different approach without becoming marginalized. Instead, you have to sound tough and hawkish even if you are in favor of negotiations, because that's the only way to be taken seriously in the funhouse world of official Washington (see under: the Armed Services Committee hearings on Chuck Hagel).

On Iran, try backscratching, not blackmail, Stephen Walt, Foreign Policy

Netanyahu's Alarmist Tachometer

So if we are looking for real “red lines,” the obvious trip-wires should be either the expulsion of IAEA inspectors or the detection of diversion of nuclear material to non-peaceful uses – not some artificial red line drawn by a non-NPT member state.

How close is Iran to nuclear weapons?, Yousaf Butt, Reuters

Nuclear Disarmament on the Sly

… the administration continues to keep secret the current size of the stockpile, which, among other effects, forces officials such as Dr. Cook to be unnecessarily vague about the extent to which the United States continues to make progress on reducing nuclear weapons in compliance with its obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. [Because] the unilateral retirement of roughly 500 warheads from the stockpile since 2009 – an inventory comparable to the total stockpiles of China and Britain combined – is political dynamite (no pun intended) because conservative Cold Warriors in Congress (and elsewhere) vehemently oppose unilateral reductions of U.S. nuclear weapons.

(Still) Secret US Nuclear Weapons Stockpile Reduced, Hans Kristensen, FAS Strategic Security Blog

What Would the Supreme Leader Do Without the U.S.?

Reaching a lasting deal with Khamenei has never been about Iran's nuclear program but rather the political legitimacy — and thereby survival — of the Islamic regime. … Mindful of threats to his power by rival conservative and reformist factions, Khamenei has nearly always undermined efforts by any one of these groups to resolve Iran's long-standing disputes with Western powers. … Simply put, normalization of relations between Iran and the United States would deprive Khamenei and the deeply invested cohort of radical ideologues around him of a powerful justification for their arbitrary rule.

Why Iran says no, Hussein Banai, The Los Angeles Times

"A war against a name is a war in name only"

Last September, Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, testified to Congress that “core Al Qaeda”—the original, Arab-led group, whose surviving members, hiding mainly in Pakistan, are thought to number in the dozens or low hundreds—is at “its weakest point in the last ten years.” Yet, to explain the White House’s policy, he and many other counterterrorism analysts warn of a resilient threat posed by Al Qaeda “franchises” … Each group has a distinctive local history and a mostly local membership. None have strong ties to “core Al Qaeda,” …  A franchise is a business that typically operates under strict rules laid down by a parent corporation; to apply that label to Al Qaeda’s derivative groups today is false. … If Al Qaeda is not coherent enough to justify a formal state of war, the war should end."

Name Calling, Steve Coll, The New Yorker

The United States military is its own worst enemy, "witch" burning, healthcare overseas, and other assorted errata.

Emphasis, as always, added.

A "fundamental problem with COIN."

Where foreign forces go, violence follows.

. . . a wave of “insider-attacks,” perpetrated by members of the Afghan security forces, has killed 60 coalition troops this year (compared with 35 last year). Leon Panetta has described these killings as “kind of a last-gasp effort” of the Taliban to resist their inevitable demise. He also remarked, “It’s near the end of their effort to really fully fight back.” It’s hard to say which is worse: our president and defense secretary deliberately misrepresenting the situation in Afghanistan to such a degree, or our president and defense secretary genuinely misunderstanding it to such a degree.

The Last Men, Luke Mogelson, The New Republic

"Milicrats"

The promotion system reinforces professional ignorance. Above the company grades, military ability does not count in determining who gets promoted. At the rank of major, officers are supposed to accept that the “real world” is the internal world of budget and promotion politics, not war. Those who “don’t get it” have ever smaller chances of making general. … Its result is generals and admirals who are in effect Soviet industrial managers in ever worse-looking suits. They know little and care less about their intended product, military victory. Their expertise is in acquiring resources and playing the military courtier.

Rank Incompetence, William S. Lind, The American Conservative

The UK's National Health Service: "a benevolent deity"

By now I am convinced that the NHS – and I hyperbolise, but only slightly – is the greatest achievement of humankind, the nearest we get to a benevolent deity, a goddamn superhero. It is an imperfect manifestation of a beautiful ideal – free care based on need, free care for all, without judgement, without reservation.

However long this [the author's father dying] goes on for, they'll continue throwing resources at this individual and never show a single sheet of figures to any of his relatives.

This Is How You Healthcare: American Death in London, Sarah C. R. Bee, NSFWCorp

To Netanyahu, Syria Just Another "reason to blow Iran to smithereens"

Netanyahu can't unring the bell in Syria either, but there's little doubt that he'd like to. The Israeli prime minister remained suspiciously silent during the Syrian uprising's first 90 days but then, as if testing the wind, began to cautiously support the rebels. By July of last year he was all in, but only after his silence bordered on the embarrassing. Even then, he characterised the May 2011 Houla Massacre (in which a reported 108 Syrians were slaughtered by Assad's henchmen), as being carried out primarily with the help of Iran and Hezbollah. It was almost as if the Syrian military was a bystander. 

This was all part of the same sad drumbeat, as if Netanyahu feared that (in the midst of the Arab Spring), we'd lose sight of the real agenda -- which was finding a reason to blow Iran to smithereens. It wasn't so important that the Houla Massacre was evidence of the Syrian government's hate of its own people, (you see), it was important that it was carried out by people who hate Israel.

Israel's democracy myth, Mark Perry, Al Jazeera

Protecting Papua New Guinea's "Witches"

Even assuming the political will emerges to invest in stronger policing and community protection, it will be years before the terrorism fades in communities like Simbu, an epicentre for violence.…

Bishop Anton Bal, the Catholic bishop of Kundiawa, the capital of Simbu … argues that the catch-22 with sorcery is that the more it’s talked about, the greater its power and allure. So his programs include training up networks of local parish volunteers as a kind of resistance movement. Operatives deflect and douse conversations about blame as soon as a death in the community occurs. They go to the funeral and when someone brings up the question of sanguma they shift the topic — talk about the weather, shut it down. Or raise the alarm.

It’s 2013, And They’re Burning 'Witches', Jo Chandler, The Global Mail

The Sunday Times of London's controversial Netanyahu cartoon highlighted the difficulty many experience differentiating between a political comment and a religious insult.

Britain’s The Sunday Times featured a controversial cartoon this past Sunday depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu building a bloody brick wall on the bodies of trapped, screaming Palestinians with the caption: “Israel elections. Will cementing the peace continue?”

The cartoon—drawn by veteran cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, who often utilizes blood in his work—has garnered the attention of Israeli officials and international Jewish groups who have declared the cartoon “sickening,” “anti-Semitic,” and “grotesque.”  

Israel’s ambassador to Britain, Daniel Taub, demanded an apology from the newspaper, stating that “We’re not going to let this stand as it is…We genuinely think that a red line has been crossed and the obligation on the newspaper is to correct that.” Other Israeli officials have also spoken out against the cartoon, such as Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, who wrote, “For me and for other Israelis, this cartoon was reminiscent of the vicious journalism during one of the darkest periods in human history,” and that he was “shocked that such cartoons can be published in such a respectable newspaper in the Great Britain of today.”

Much of the outrage has been in response to the fact that Scarfe’s cartoon was printed on Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day, which coincides with the International Holocaust Remembrance Day marking the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945. Scarfe himself has stated he was unaware of the timing and publicly apologized in a statement on his website:

First of all I am not, and never have been, anti-Semitic. The Sunday Times has given me the freedom of speech over the last 46 years to criticise world leaders for what I see as their wrong-doings. This drawing was a criticism of Netanyahu, and not of the Jewish people: there was no slight whatsoever intended against them. I was, however, stupidly completely unaware that it would be printed on Holocaust Day, and I apologise for the very unfortunate timing.

Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media mogul whose company owns the Sunday Times, also publicly tweeted an apology, labeling the cartoon “grotesque” and “offensive,” adding that it “has never reflected the opinions of the Sunday Times.”

Some members of the Jewish community have come to Scarfe’s defense, however, such as Anshel Pfeffer from Haaretz, who listed four reasons why the cartoon “isn’t anti-Semitic in any way: ”first, that it is not directed at Jews; second, that it does not use Holocaust imagery; third, there was no discrimination; and lastly, that “this is not what a blood libel looks like.”

Simon Kelner of The Independent also came to Scarfe’s defense, replying to Murdoch’s tweet:

Of course it's grotesque. Has he never seen a Scarfe cartoon before? But offensive? I can't find any impulse, emotionally or intellectually, that causes me to be offended. Does this make me a bad Jew? Maybe it does, but I do think the world would be a better place if people were able to tell the difference between a political comment and a religious insult.

Yet for all the controversy one cannot help but wonder whose decision it actually was to print Scarfe’s cartoon on such a date, especially since it would seem that such a cartoon would have been much more timely—and a lot less offensive—had it been featured the Sunday before Israel’s elections. 

Leslie Garvey is an intern at Foreign Policy in Focus.

Mitt Romney is playing the same cynical game as Benjamin Netanyahu.

Cross-posted from OtherWords, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies.

The war of words over Iran's nuclear program keeps expanding.

It's now a multi-sided melee pitting Iran against the West and Israel, Israel against the Obama administration, Mitt Romney against Barack Obama, and neo-conservatives like William Kristol against the rest of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

The rhetoric is more heated, too. President Obama swears that his administration "will do what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon." It's his clearest indication to date that he would, if he deemed it necessary, order military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Robert Gates, Obama's former defense secretary and a Republican, thinks such an attack would be "catastrophic, haunting us for generations in that part of the world." Yet Romney and his hawkish advisers are accusing Obama of coddling the Islamic Republic, which the GOP challenger claims "has never posed a greater danger to our friends, our allies, and to us." But neither he nor Obama will draw the "red line" for war that Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu demands.

A great deal of this bellicosity is mere campaign theatrics. Netanyahu is shamelessly interfering in U.S. politics, trying to paint Obama as a betrayer of Israel in the eyes of swing-state Jewish and evangelical Christian voters. We know he's bluffing when he suggests Israel might attack Iran by itself because Meir Dagan, the former Israeli intelligence chief and no dove, called this threat "the stupidest thing I have ever heard."

Romney is playing the same cynical game as Netanyahu. In his October 8 foreign policy speech, he didn't offer a single idea about Iran that differs from what Obama is already doing.

And here's the deadly serious part: Amid the hullabaloo, Washington has indeed been "tightening the noose" (the White House's phrase) on the Iranian economy with ever more stringent sanctions. The rial, the Iranian currency, went into freefall over two days in early October — losing 40 percent or more of its value. Even Iran's smugly self-confident president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has been forced to acknowledge that the sanctions are stinging.

Sanctions punish entire nations for the misdeeds of their leaders. In theory, if the general population suffers enough, it will get rid of those leaders and replace them with a more congenial elite.

There's more to this dubious logic in Iran than there was in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where the people were powerless over the fearsome dictatorship. While hardly fully democratic, the Islamic Republic does hold regular elections that have meaning. There are real policy differences between Ahmadinejad, whose two terms in office are almost up, and the more mainstream conservatives who are working to anoint his successor as president next June. Iranian elections are unpredictable. If enough voters blame the hardliners for economic woes, a maverick candidate might emerge.

Ahmadinejad is already signaling a renewed interest in talks about the nuclear program. Obama might calculate that, after the twin presidential contests are over, Washington will be in a good position to get what it wants at the negotiating table. Romney may be thinking the same way.

The problem, as it always has been, is that the technology for generating peaceful nuclear power and building a bomb is the same. The United States and Israel have insisted that Iran can't have atomic energy capacity, because the same highly enriched uranium could be fashioned into a warhead.

Under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, however, Iran has the right to produce nuclear power — and the whole Iranian political spectrum believes in that right. To persuade Tehran to halt enrichment, Washington will have to offer a lot more than the prospect of more coercion.

In 2013, the U.S. president will need to accept this reality or inch down the path to another war in contravention of international law.

Chris Toensing is editor of Middle East Report, published by the Middle East Research and Information Project.

On Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's personal tachometer of war, the needle is always at the red line.

Widespread in Washington is an assumption as implicit as it is unexamined that the possession of nuclear weapons by Israel, even though it hasn't signed the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), is acceptable because:

1. It's an ally.
2. It's "rational."

Bear in mind that Iran is a signatory to the NPT and International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors prowl Iran 24/7 365 days a year.*

But Israel, or to be more exact, Prime Minister Netanyahu, seems to be doing everything within his power to disabuse us of the notion that Israel is either an ally or rational. Netanyahu, constantly monitoring his personal tachometer of war, keeps watching for the needle to approach the red line. His latest impolitic outburst occurred on NBC's Meet the Press, Sunday, July 16. Among other things he said:

Some have even said that Iran with nuclear weapons would stabilize the Middle East, stabilize the Middle East. I think the people who say this have set a new standard for human stupidity.

Of course, proliferation is never a good idea. But Netanyahu's language became more and more un-prime-minister-like as the show proceeded. Speaking of Iran's leadership, he said:

They put their zealotry above their survival. They have suicide bombers all over the place. I wouldn’t rely on their rationality, you know, you-- since the advent of nuclear weapons, you had countries that had access to nuclear weapons who always made a careful calculation of cost and benefit. But Iran is guided by a leadership with an unbelievable fanaticism. It’s the same fanaticism that you see storming your embassies today. You want these fanatics to have nuclear weapons? 

Netanyahu is propagating two myths:

1. Netanyahu is implying that any belief in the return of the Mahdi on the part of Iran's leadership means that, like Christian millennialists, it courts the Apocalypse.
2. That those attacking American embassies -- Sunni extremists at their worst, as in Benghazi -- have much in common with Shiite Iran.

Meanwhile, Washington, too, seems incapable of putting itself in Tehran's shoes. How, Tehran no doubt wonders, does a state like Israel get away with not only not refusing to sign the NPT, but enlisting the help of the entire West in upholding the pretense that it's not in possession of a nuclear-weapons program?

The jury may still be out on whether disarmament initiatives by states with nuclear-weapons spurs states that aspire to a nuclear-weapons program to give up that dream. But, in a just world, Israel needs to give the world the opportunity to learn what the impact of signing the NPT and allowing IAEA inspectors into its own country would have on Iran before considering an attack. Of course, the evidence that Iran is developing nuclear-weapons or the capability to manufacture is little more -- if that -- than circumstantial thus far. But nuclear transparency on the part of Israel would likely induce concessions on enrichment from Iran. Of perforce, the temperature of Netanyahu's war fever would be lowered and the dial on his war tachometer would recede safely into the black.

*Which, incidentally, place them in harm's way in the event of an attack by Israel. Alternately, if pulled out, Iran knows an attack is forthcoming and Israel loses the element of surprise.