Foreign Policy In Focus

Excerpted from IPS Special Project Right Web.

The threat of a military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities this year appears to have substantially subsided over the past several weeks as a result of several developments, including the biting criticisms of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak voiced recently by former top national security officials.

The possibility of war seems significantly more remote than it did during the winter months, when tensions reached an all-time high. The New York Times even recently ran a front-page feature entitled “Experts Believe Iran Conflict is Less Likely.”

Judging by actual bets placed on the online trading exchange Intrade, experts believe the chances that the United States or Israel will actually launch air strikes against Iran before the end of the year have fallen by more than half since the high reached in mid-February—from just over 60 percent to about 28 percent as of early May.

That's still a substantial percentage—about twice what it was before the latest round of Israeli saber-rattling began in November.

It's difficult to find any close observer who believes that war clouds could not suddenly reappear, particularly if the next meeting of the so-called P5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) with Iran scheduled for May 23 in Baghdad should break down or be delayed.

For its part, the Barack Obama administration has shown little inclination to reduce pressure—and the threat of military action—on Tehran.

Not only has it moved more minesweepers and F-15 fighter jets into the Gulf region, but the air force also announced recently that it has deployed an undisclosed number of advanced F-22 stealth fighter-bombers to the area, specifically to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), according to the industry publication Aviation Week.

To read in its entirety, visit Right Web.

Jim Lobe is the Washington bureau chief of the Inter Press Service and a contributor to Right Web. He blogs at LobeLog.

If you watch crime shows on television or read crime fiction, you're no doubt familiar with the term "tune him up." It's defined at Urban Dictionary as: "A beat down especially when administered by the cops." Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but what seems implied is that the victimizer-turned-victim is being "tenderized" to make him more amenable to questioning and admitting to his guilt (lack thereof notwithstanding).

At IPS News, Gareth Porter writes (emphasis added):

In a blog post in The National Interest, Paul Pillar, former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, wrote that the "Western message to Tehran" seems to be, "(W)e might be willing to tolerate some sort of Iranian nuclear program, but only one consisting of facilities that would suffer significant damage if we or the Israelis later decide to bomb it." 

Greg Thielmann, senior fellow at the Arms Control Association, said in an interview with IPS, "There are Americans who believe it is important to keep all Iranian facilities at risk in case Tehran decided to build a nuclear weapon [but that] is more an interest of the Israelis than of the United States". 

The Iranian facility that Israeli is most interested in keeping at risk is Fordow, the underground uranium facility near the city of Qom. Porter again.

Reza Marashi, the former State Department specialist on Iran and now research director at the National Iranian-American Council, said … the Israelis who have "turned their inability to destroy Fordow into a major issue". 

But (emphasis added again) …

While the demand on Fordow clearly responds to a U.S. need to accommodate Israel, it is also in line with Obama administration efforts to intimidate Iran by emphasising that it has only a limited time "window" in which to solve the issue diplomatically [before Israel decides to] strike Iran's nuclear facilities in the absence of progress toward an agreement guaranteeing Iran would not go nuclear. 

In other words, the United States is letting Israel "tune up" Iran with threats in hopes that Iran will agree to the United States and the P5 +1's points in negotiations. (In Istanbul on April 14, relations were cordial, lending cautious optimism to the next meeting in Baghadad on May 23.) Besides, Tehran, it's for your own good because otherwise we'll be unable to prevent our henchman, Israel, from unleashing the full force of its fury on you.

Allow us, now, to return to the assertions that we "might be willing to tolerate some sort of Iranian nuclear program, but only one consisting of facilities that would suffer significant damage if we or the Israelis later decide to bomb it" and "it is important to keep all Iranian facilities at risk in case Tehran decided to build a nuclear weapon."

How, you may be asking yourself, can one expect a state to agree to purposely leave itself vulnerable? Odd as it sounds, it's not unprecedented. Missile defense is infused with the same line of, if not magical, wishful thinking. It works like this: conventional thinking on nuclear strategy holds that missile defense upsets -- "destabilizes" -- the whole nuclear-deterrence apple cart. Russia, for example, is considered vulnerable to an initial nuclear strike by the United States, during which many of its nuclear weapons in land-based silos would be wiped out. Also, many of those launched at the United States would be destroyed while in the air by U.S. missile defense (in our dreams: our missile defense systems are years -- decades even -- from that kind of capability).

Anyway, the crux of this theory is that since Russia knows that under this arrangement it's going to lose missiles both on the ground and in the air, it's motivated to build more to compensate. In other words, the United States would be safer if it refrained from implementing missile defense and maintained a calculated vulnerability. (I've elaborated on this elsewhere.)

Israel wants Fordow less fortified against attack -- to come complete, as it were, with a self-destruct button. Meanwhile, the United States is turning Fordow into a self-destruct bottom for the negotiations. At PBS Frontline Tehran Bureau, Muhammad Sahimi writes that in an interview, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said:

The way to confront this strategy of Iran's [stalling and exploiting divisions among its adversaries] is to demand explicit conditions calling for ceasing all uranium enrichment, removal of all enrich[ed] uranium from the country, and its exchange for material which cannot be [used to] develop nuclear weapons, and agreement to give up the underground facility in Qom [the Fordow site].

But assuming that [this] accurately reflects the Obama administration's goals and demands … they will be non-starters and will doom the negotiations before they even get under way.

Because …

Iran built the Fordow uranium enrichment site precisely to have a fallback facility if its other sites, such as those in Natanz, Isfahan, and Arak, are attacked and destroyed. The site is effectively indestructible at present.

In fact, though, it may be much adieu about nothing.

… even though the prowar factions in the United States and elsewhere still refer to it as a "secret site." … most Western media reports fail to inform the public … that the site is also monitored and safeguarded by the IAEA. I cannot imagine any scenario under which Iran, and in particular the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the state's most powerful organ, will agree to dismantle Fordow.

In other words, it's as if by including the Fordow proviso, the United States and the P5+1 are intentionally sabotaging the negotiations.

After months of conflating punitive sanctions with diplomatic engagement, President Barack Obama apparently believes he has nearly exhausted his diplomatic options for dealing with Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

“I believe there is a window of time to solve this diplomatically, but that window is closing," he told reporters in Seoul on the eve of a nuclear summit. And given Washington’s apparent distaste for letting any problem in the world go “unsolved,” the president’s words should be read as yet another military threat against the Iranian homeland.

Of course, exactly what problem remains to be “solved” is a little less clear on further examination.

In a lengthy interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, a sometimes-hawkish journalist with close ties to both the Obama administration and the Israeli defense establishment, Obama emphasized that preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon “is profoundly in the security interests of the United States, and that when I say we're not taking any option off the table, we mean it. We are going to continue to apply pressure until Iran takes a different course.”

One might get the impression that Obama is accusing Iran of building a nuclear weapon—and that the goal of sanctions, therefore, is to persuade the Iranian regime to stop. However, the president also conceded to Goldberg that “our assessment, which is shared by the Israelis, is that Iran does not yet have a nuclear weapon and is not yet in a position to obtain a nuclear weapon without us having a pretty long lead time in which we will know that they are making that attempt.”

By its own assessment, then, the United States is sanctioning Iran over a nuclear weapons program that neither the Mossad nor the CIA nor the president of the United States himself believes to exist. And they’ve repeatedly promised military action if the sanctions “fail” to make Iran give up a program that no one believes it has in the first place! In his 45-minute interview with the president, Goldberg never once seemed to catch onto this.

Nor is it an issue of inspections. Iran has already admitted inspectors into some of its more sensitive nuclear installations, and yet the U.S. Congress is still trying to push through ever newer rounds of sanctions against the regime.

Iran’s Supreme Leader even called possession of nuclear weapons "a sin” and “against Islamic rules.” The Supreme Leader may not be the most credible source on the matter, but that’s about as close to a Rushdie-style fatwa against nukes as one is likely to hear.

So why the sanctions?

The most sinister explanation is that the sanctions are little more than a prelude to regime change. If sanctions “fail” – and they can’t really succeed, since the problem they purport to address is a fantasy – then America’s Iran hawks will have checked off yet another box on the road to war.

But although Obama’s posturing toward Iran has been on balance quite hawkish, the president himself seems keen to avoid an overt military confrontation with the Islamic Republic—at least in an election year.

Maybe there’s another reason. Obama hinted as much when he told Goldberg that “as Israel's closest friend and ally,” it is incumbent on the United States to “point out to them that we have a sanctions architecture that is far more effective than anybody anticipated; that we have a world that is about as united as you get behind the sanctions.” According to the president, then, the primary purpose of U.S. sanctions on Iran is to persuade Israel that both the United States and the international community are committed to Israel’s security—and, therefore, that there’s no need for Israel to do something rash like unilaterally attacking Iran.

Put another way, Obama is sanctioning Iran to influence Israel’s behavior. One could almost forgive Iran for feeling a little burned up about it.

Of course, once upon a time, a nuclear-armed country making open threats to attack a regional rival—particularly one that has never admitted IAEA inspectors and has chalked up a recent history of invading neighbors, bombing civilian population centers, and working with a terrorist organization to assassinate civilian nuclear scientists—would have found itself a prime target of international sanctions.

Apparently these are not ordinary times. But if Obama is concerned that his efforts at “diplomacy” are going nowhere, maybe it’s because he’s sanctioning the wrong country.

Peter Certo is an editorial assistant at the Institute of Policy Studies as well as IPS Special Project Right Web.

"ON THE DECAY OF THE ART OF LYING," tweets the Russian spam aggregator horse_ebooks, which publishes snippets of junk mail advertising such Pythonesque (but apparently real) offers for topics as varied as addressing the problem of "catfish gunk" and vampire murders to how to make your own greeting cards or a set of drums. This is the new poetry, people.

The aforementioned tweet of theirs -- presumably from an email promising to enlarge your lying skills in ten easy installments for all your passwords down -- could just as easily have been the title for Foreign Policy's "top ten media failures in the Iran war debate" list. Stephen Walt, a trenchant critic of the media circus filled with "expert" commentators and politicians' uncontested soundbytes that helped lead us into Iraq had some particularly harsh words for the media, certain Republican presidential candidates and Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren:

Journalists have to let officials and experts express their views, but they shouldn't let them spout falsehoods without pushing back. Unfortunately, there have been some egregious cases where prominent journalists allowed politicians or government officials to utter howlers without being called on it. When Rick Santorum announced on Meet the Press that "there were no inspectors" in Iran, for example, host David Gregory didn't challenge this obvious error. (In fact, Iran may be the most heavily inspected country in the history of the IAEA).

Even worse, when Israeli ambassador Michael Oren appeared on MSNBC last week, he offered the following set of dubious claims, without challenge.

[Iran] has built an underground nuclear facility trying to hide its activities from the world. It has been enriching uranium to a high rate [sic.] that has no explanation other than a military nuclear program -- that has been confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency now several times. It is advancing very quickly on an intercontinental ballistic missile system that's capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

Unfortunately, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell apparently didn't know that Oren's claims were either false or misleading. 1) Iran's underground facility was built to make it hard to destroy, not to "hide its activities," and IAEA inspectors have already been inside it. 2) Iran is not enriching at a "high rate" (i.e., to weapons-grade); it is currently enriching to only 20% (which is not high enough to build a bomb). 3) Lastly, Western intelligence experts do not think Iran is anywhere near to having an ICBM capability.

In another interview on NPR, Oren falsely accused Iran of "killing hundreds, if not thousands of American troops," a claim that NPR host Robert Siegel did not challenge. Then we got the following exchange:

Oren: Imagine Iran which today has a bunch of speedboats trying to close the Strait of Hormuz. Imagine if Iran has a nuclear weapon. Imagine if they could hold the entire world oil market blackmailed. Imagine if Iran is conducting terrorist organizations through its terrorist proxies -- Hamas, Hezbollah. Now we know there's a connection with al-Qaida. You can't respond to them because they have an atomic weapon.

Siegel: Yes. You're saying the consequences of Iran going nuclear are potentially global, and the consequences of a U.S. strike on Iran might also be further such attacks against the United States..."

Never mind the fact that we have been living in the nuclear age for some 60 years now, and no nuclear state has even been able to conduct the sort of aggressive blackmail that Oren suggests Iran would be able to do. Nuclear weapons are good for deterrence, and not much else, but the news media keep repeating alarmist fantasies without asking if they make sense or not.

Politicians and government officials are bound to use media moments to sell whatever story they are trying to spin; that's their job. But It is up to journalists to make this hard, and both Mitchell and Siegel didn't. (For another example of sloppy fact-checking, go here).

Walt's list is worth reading in its entirety, and should be read alongside this interview by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson about Iran's guessed-at nuclear capabilities and intentions. While serving as Secretary of State Colin Powell's aide he learned firsthand at the UN how easy it is to peddle assumptions presented as "intelligence." Wilkerson, while not trusting Iran's professed disinterest in nuclear weapons (I am skeptical of it myself), accepts the consensus that it is not currently developing nuclear weapons. Wilkerson, and former CIA planner and Iraq War critic Paul R. Pillar (as well as a number of other retired national security establishment people in both the U.S. and Israel) do not consider to be an "existential threat."

But Netanyahu has stated his determination to keep Iran from getting to any "capabilities," and by ruling out containment in his recent interview with The Atlantic and his 2012 AIPAC speech, Obama has actually inched closer to the Prime Minister's (and Congress's) stance because now the U.S. is explicitly committed to taking action when it determines Iran has reached a decision to build a nuclear weapon and it's not clear if there would be a distinction between Iran actually communicating this in public or the White House receiving a secret briefing that says the Iranians are taking that step.

We've been hearing for some time that "Netanyahu's Real Goal is Not Bombing Iran; It's Defeating Obama" (by Steve Jonas -- echoing claims other commentators have advanced in the past year). And Uri Avnery, an Israeli refusenik and activist, on why the "peace camp" does not think Israel will go to war with Iran because polls in Israel suggest opposition to this course and that he is not so foolhardy as to put the incomplete Iron Dome system up to the challenge of Iranian missiles, or risk tumbling the world economy into an oil shock abyss. Plus, as many commentators have noted, Netanyahu did not get the public declaration he seems to have been hoping for (though he did manage to keep anyone from bringing up the settlements -- which may or may not be his real aspiration, according to some skeptics).

To misquote the Duke of Wellington's character in the 1971 film Waterloo, "the only thing sadder than an election lost, is an election won." While I agree with Jonas's assessment that Bibi sees Iran in 2012 as a way to humiliate Obama, keep the White House looking the other way in the West Bank (not that much effort is required to achieve that) and help preferred Republicans do better, I am still unconvinced that Bibi will want to have his cake (a tough-talking super-Christian Republican ousting Obama) and chose to NOT eat it too (attack Iran). He could cut his settlement-expanding bomb-Iran layer cake with a Republican president absolutely willing to commit the USAF and USN to joint or unilateral strikes, yet he still could cut that cake with Obama too, notes Haaretz (not least because for all the ink and interviews shed on Iran, domestic issues are likely to be the main issue in the 2012 elections). 

Netanyahu's apparent failure at AIPAC in early March to get the U.S. government on message with him, and the resumption of talks with Iran are encouraging signs for a diplomatic resolution, but it does not mean Iran, the U.S. and Israel are out the woods yet. The "decapitating" 1981 Israeli strike against Iraq is a poor comparison because that attack enhanced, not hindered, Iraqi determination to pursue nuclear weapons -- a determination only put to an end by a humiliating military defeat in Kuwait, a decade of sanctions and, in theory at least, the eventual occupation of the country by the U.S. military. That is almost certainly what it would take in Iran, but few want to accept this and instead focus on the postwar picture (without talking about the war itself).

If winter 2012 comes and goes and both Israel and the U.S. have held their elections, we might not have attacked, but we will have moved closer to eventually attacking if once again diplomacy fails to satisfy any of the three countries' demands. Iraq wasn't invaded in a day, and we've been engaged in sanctions and shadow wars with Iran for around thirty years now. That's a long time for abnormal relations, and a long time to go without a consensus finally taking the initiative to make a move either towards normalizing relations (as a handful of Cold Warriors urge) or launching a major military effort (as far more urge). And if the can is just kicked down the road again for another presidential term, then we're no further from confrontation than we are today. We just end up talking around it and then bam, we're looking at a "mission accomplished" banner on the carrier deck while everything goes to pot on land. 

The cat pictures are the newest permutations of a social media campaign started over the weekend by two Israeli graphics designers that is called "We Love Iranians," aimed at raising public awareness against the steady march to war the Likud government has been taking Israel on towards Iran.

The meme has "gone viral" in Israel, and while it's spawned a number of sensible parodies (such as noting that the same tone was on display for Iraqis to hear -- if they could hear over the ack-ack -- by George W. Bush in 2003) and is inevitably going to lead to a "slacktivism" discussion, at least it's demonstrating that public opinion against war with Iran in Israel is growing. Israel is ostensibly a democracy, so the best-case outcome is that all those national security specialists and "cultural icons" who have been keeping quiet realize there is a base of domestic support for them to tell Bibi to can the Holocaust references 

More comforting, though, has been news that 1) Mossad once again concludes with the U.S. intelligence services that Iran has neither the capability nor political will to pursue nuclear weaponization now, 2) some Iranian leaders are saying they're willing to make concessions at the new P5+1 roundtable, and 3) Netanyahu has failed to convince his kitchen cabinet that he knows what he is talking about on Iran, and considering some of the people in that "Octet," that is saying something -- not least because one of the skeptics is in fact the Intelligence and Atomic Energy Minister, a post Netanyahu's Likud party established in 2009 to have a kind of go-to-guy looking over Shin Bet and Mossad, a la Dick Cheney.

Still, no one is out of the woods yet, Mossad assessment and grinning Israeli couples' pinterest tags aside. Netanyahu has deliberately set the bar for Iranian concessions so high it's difficult to believe progress can be made in talks -- i.e., asking the Iranians to do things no other NPT signatory is expected to do when Israel itself isn't even an NPT signatory -- and the U.S. has made it pretty clear it will take military action if it feels "compelled" to do so in the region by either an Israeli or Iranian "action."

Cross-posted from the Arabist.