Good news on US Iran policy

According to David Ignatius yesterday,

    The administration official who oversees the Iran file is William Burns, the undersecretary of state for political affairs. Although Dennis Ross will take a broad strategic look at the region in his new post of State Department adviser, senior officials stress that Burns is the address for Iran policy.

So it looks as if the strongly pro-Israeli, anti-Iranian, and professionally unsuccessful Ross has not been given the extremely powerful mandate he had evidently hoped for.
Ignatius’s piece is mainly a description of a discussion he had about Iran policy with Lee Hamilton, an extremely wise elder statesman who’s had two private meetings with Obama since the inauguration.
He wrote:

    Administration officials echo [the need Hamilton described] for a careful, low-key approach to Iran. The administration has begun an interagency strategic review of Iran policy (they love “reviews,” this Obama team). Until this is done, says a White House official, “it’s premature to talk about talks, or pre-talks, or emissaries.” (Point taken. I wrote recently that former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski would be good emissaries if talks ripened. Add Hamilton to that list.) The starting points for U.S.-Iran discussions, Hamilton said, would be to “state our respect for the Iranian people, renounce regime change as an instrument of U.S. policy, seek opportunities for a range of dialogue across a range of issues, and acknowledge Iran’s security concerns and its right to civilian nuclear power.” He said Obama has already signaled that he wants such a conversation, without preconditions.

This point about taking externally driven campaigns for “regime change” off the table is extremely important, and is evidently an essential precondition for any serious diplomacy at all.
I think it’s important to keep the discussion of possible future emissaries, as Ignatius does, at the level of extremely weighty former statesmen like Scowcroft, Brzezinski, or Hamilton. The idea that a highly ideological and professionally unsuccessful lightweight like Dennis Ross could do the serious job of de-escalation of tensions that’s required in the case of US-Iran relations appears more and more risible. (Or, actually, dangerous.)
A final note here, too, as to why de-escalation of tensions with Iran is absolutely necessary for this US president.
In case anyone hadn’t noticed, the US is now entering an extremely serious economic crisis, and the president has pledged to reduce the federal government’s budget deficit considerably even during his first term in office.
Yesterday, Obama submitted to Congress an outline (“topline”) of his defense spending request for FY2010.spending request. Here’s a portion of the bottom line there:

    The topline request provides $534 billion in FY 2010 funding for the Department of Defense’s “base” budget, which excludes funding for Iraq, Afghanistan, and nuclear weapons activities…
    President Obama’s topline thus requests $664 billion in total DOD and war funding for FY 2010. This figure does not include funding for nuclear weapons or miscellaneous non-DOD defense costs, which were approximately $23 billion in FY 2009… After adjusting for inflation, the $534 billion topline request is $9 billion, or 1.7 percent, greater than the $525 billion (FY 2010 dollars) appropriated by Congress in FY 2009 for DOD’s base budget.

The major engine of growth in this defense budget request is doubtless the president’s Quixotic (and tragically doomed) attempt to try to “win” in Afghanistan by very expensively deploying more US troops to that landlocked distant land. But if he is going to have any chance of meeting his goal of deficit reduction, the budget for all these military adventures the US has been sustaining around the world will have to be part of the reduction.
Launching yet another war, against Iran, would be sheer lunacy– from every point of view. Especially since there are so very many alternatives to war, as a way of resolving the US’s tensions with Iran, that haven’t even been tried yet.

4 thoughts on “Good news on US Iran policy”

  1. Did the US Learn Anything in Iraq?
    It is difficult to believe that the Obama administration is going to make as many crass errors as its predecessor. So amazed were the Iranians to see President Bush destroy their two most detested enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003 that some theologians held that such stupidity must be divinely inspired and heralded the return of the Twelfth Imam and the Shia millennium.
    Obama is the Twelfth Imam? Who knew!?

  2. So it looks as if the strongly pro-Israeli, anti-Iranian, and professionally unsuccessful Ross
    Not to mention his bad breath and body odor. Plus I hear he cheats at golf. What an ogre!

  3. Of course the previous professional record in diplomacy of someone with ambitions to continue as a high-level diplomatist are relevant and should be mentioned. Vadim, your comments are sometimes ridiculously off the mark.

  4. Dennis Ross and Iran
    …US foreign policy toward the Middle East has become institutionalized and it makes very little difference who is the president… Clinton’s Middle East men, such as Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk and Richard Holbrooke, are hardly distinguishable from Bush’s men, such as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. But since the latter group is temporarily out of office, the former is filling in. Ross has become the designated senior Israeli lobby man in Obama’s Administration.
    Over the years… Ross has developed a strategy to contain Iran. The strategy consists of arguing that:
    1) Iran is developing nuclear weapons;
    2) Iran is a threat to the US and an existential threat to Israel, and Israel will not tolerate “mullahs with nukes” (Sydney Morning Herald, October 16, 2004);
    3) “nuclear deterrent rules that governed relations between the United States and the Soviet Union” do not hold when it comes to Iran, since Iranians, especially their president, are irrational and believe in the “coming of the 12th Imam” (The Washington Post, May 1, 2006);
    4) Iran’s nuclear ambitions will start a nuclear arms race in the Middle East;
    5) the Bush Administration’s policy of dealing with Iran did not work, because it did not have enough sticks or carrots;
    6) the US should push for a direct, but “tough” or aggressive diplomacy to stop Iran from enriching uranium and supporting “terrorism” (Newsweek, December 8, 2008);
    7) the aggressive diplomacy should include pressuring the Europeans, as well as the Chinese and Russians, to stop trading with Iran;
    8) the prohibition of trade should include preventing Iran from importing refined oil products and, ultimately, blockading Iran; and
    9) once this tough and aggressive diplomacy fails and Iran does not change its “behavior,” then the US could legitimately launch military attacks against Iran, arguing that the it did everything in its power to resolve the situation peacefully.

    Whatever the reason for the postponement of Ross’s appointment and change of title, one thing is clear: the sly fox is now guarding the chicken coop… With the help of Richard Holbrooke, Stuart Levey — Bush’s Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, who is now in Obama’s Administration — and all the other “president’s Middle East men,” Dennis Ross might be able to finish the unfinished business of the neoconservatives, the containment of Iraq and Iran.
    Let’s hope US finances collapse before rather than after Dennis Ross’ new “excellent Middle East adventure”.
    Hell of a thing to hope for, yet the distance to which we have been removed from the seat of control of our own government leaves us, short term, with no choice but between the Scylla of warfare and the Charibdis of financial collapse.

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