Category: Iran

Well, foaming-at-the-mouth neocon Joshua Muravchik wants the US to do it, as he argued in this overwrought op-ed in today’s LA times. Muravchik’s main argument was that Iran seemed poised to become as great a threat to world peace as the Soviet Union, and its progress towards possession of a nuclear arsenal would only accelerate this trend…
He also, amazingly, blamed the rise of fascism and Nazism on the Soviet Union:

Communism itself was to claim perhaps 100 million lives, and it also gave rise to fascism and Nazism, leading to World War II. Ahmadinejad wants to be the new Lenin. Force is the only thing that can stop him.

Well, as I said, the piece was more than a little overwrought in its argumentation.
No word from Muravchik, either, on what the US should do on the day after it has bombed Iran… Um, hasn’t the US citizenry been led down this path of launching an ill-thought-through war before??
For his part, Sy Hersh has another good piece out today in The New Yorker. He writes that one of the problems the Bushites have encountered in the push that some of them– most notably, Unca Dick Cheney– have pursued, toward launching a military attack on Iran, has been the CIA’s production of,

a highly classified draft assessment by the C.I.A. challenging the White House’s assumptions about how close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb. The C.I.A. found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency...
The C.I.A.’s analysis, which has been circulated to other agencies for comment, was based on technical intelligence collected by overhead satellites, and on other empirical evidence, such as measurements of the radioactivity of water samples and smoke plumes from factories and power plants. Additional data have been gathered, intelligence sources told me, by high-tech (and highly classified) radioactivity-detection devices that clandestine American and Israeli agents placed near suspected nuclear-weapons facilities inside Iran in the past year or so. No significant amounts of radioactivity were found.
A current senior intelligence official confirmed the existence of the C.I.A. analysis, and told me that the White House had been hostile to it…

So, the professionals at the CIA can’t find the “evidence” needed to justify a US attack on Iran. But wait! Somebody else apparently has.
Hersh:

As the C.I.A.’s assessment was making its way through the government, late this summer, current and former military officers and consultants told me, a new element suddenly emerged: intelligence from Israeli spies operating inside Iran claimed that Iran has developed and tested a trigger device for a nuclear bomb. The provenance and significance of the human intelligence, or HUMINT, are controversial. “The problem is that no one can verify it,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “We don’t know who the Israeli source is. The briefing says the Iranians are testing trigger mechanisms”—simulating a zero-yield nuclear explosion without any weapons-grade materials—“but there are no diagrams, no significant facts. Where is the test site? How often have they done it? How big is the warhead—a breadbox or a refrigerator? They don’t have that.” And yet, he said, the report was being used by White House hawks within the Administration to “prove the White House’s theory that the Iranians are on track. And tests leave no radioactive track, which is why we can’t find it.”

Over at HaAretz, meanwhile, Aluf Benn notes that during his most recent visit to the US, Israeli PM Olmert has been “beating the drums of war”– particularly in a speech he gave to the General Assembly of the Jewish Communities of North America in Los Angeles.
Olmert told that audience, “”We have reached the pivotal moment of truth regarding Iran… Our integrity will remain intact only if we prevent Iran’s devious goals, not if we try our best but fail.”
This was understood, not surprisingly, as a declaration that Israel itself would go ahead and bomb Iran if it considered that to be necessary, without waiting for the US to do the job.
Benn writes this about the political context of Olmert’s declaration:

Olmert stepped up his attacks on Iran’s nuclear program without consulting any professionals. His declarations last month have broken his “low profile” policy on Iran that Israel adopted in its effort to present Tehran’s bomb as an international problem. As late as last month, Olmert held talks in Israel on the Iranian nuclear program, and decided to stick with the low-profile approach.
So what happened to change his position?
“A weak prime minister who is dropping in the opinion polls suddenly found himself faced with Benjamin Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman and Effi Eitam, who are politicizing the issue, and with a public that does not have faith in the prime minister due to his lack of security experience,” senior officials in Jerusalem explained.
“Olmert is under attack for not being able to deal with the Qassam rockets, so he is under pressure and is moving away from the low-profile approach,” they added.
These officials also said that the Iranian issue had been taken out of their hands and had been placed on podiums and television shows.
Therein lies Olmert’s problem: After he made his bold statements, Netanyahu’s warnings that Israel is faced with a situation similar to that faced by European Jewry when threatened by Hitler in 1938, and Shimon Peres’ description of Ahmadinejad as “a Farsi-speaking Hitler,” the moment of truth for Israel’s political leadership is nearing.
The public will justifiably want to know what has been done to prevent the threat to its existence posed by Iran, and to stop the possible mass exodus of Jews from Israel, as described by Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh. Domestic pressure calling for military action will intensify…

Benn, who is an experienced diplomatic reporter, noted that if Olmert does go ahead and order military strikes on Iran, this would require:

Diplomatic coordination with the Americans. The U.S. forces in the region could become targets of Iranian retaliation, just like Israel, and therefore there is no way that an independent Israeli action can take place without authorization from Bush. Did Olmert get such a go-ahead and is this why he was pleased with his visit to the White House?

You bet there had better be diplomatic “coordination” with Washington over any attack– that is, a clear and unequivocal US order restraining Israel from launching it. Because even if Israel does launch such an attack without consulting Washington, no-one in the Middle East, or elsewhere, would ever believe this was done without a US “green light”, and the retaliation against the US forces’ extremely vulnerable troop concentrations and supply lines in the Gulf area would be speedy indeed.
Benn has this slightly sad little description of the policy Israel (and the Bushites) had been pursuing toward Iran until recently:

International pressure and sanctions were supposed to delay the Iranians, at least until the regime there fell, or some miracle happened. [And they call this a “policy”???] However, it is not working out.

In another article in Monday’s HaAretz, Yossi Verter writes that “several weeks ago”, Bush told French President Chirac that an Israeli attack against against Iran was quite possible. Verter adds,

Bush also said that if such an attack were to take place, he would understand it. According to European diplomats who later met with Rice, the secretary of state did not express the same willingness to show understanding for a possible Israeli strike against Iran.

Phew! It’s good to have at least one sentient being working in the administration…

While Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in New York for the U.N. General Assembly last week, one of the groups he met with was a group of around 45 “religious leaders from Christian and Muslim faith backgrounds”. This group was convened by the Mennonite Central Committee, whose account of the meeting can be found here.
The Mennonite Chirch is one of the historic “peace churches” here in the US– that is, one of the churches that hews to the strong peace testimony within the New Testament rather than to the “Just War” theory, which was a much later accretion to the body of Christian belief and practice. The MCC has maintained an inter-faith dialogue with religious scholars in Teheran for several years now.
According to that report on the MCC website, the meeting in New York lasted about 70 minutes. After opening remarks from both Pres. Ahmadinejad and MCC Executive Director Robb Davis, Davis asked

a question about the language being used by the U.S. and Iran, such as President Bush referring to Iran as one of the “Axis of Evil” countries, while Iranian protesters march through the streets shouting “Death to America.”
Ahmadinejad responded by saying that “Death to America” does not mean death to the American people, but in fact Iranians love the American people. What it pointed to, he said, were problems with how U.S. government policy has negatively impacted the recent history of Iran from the Shah to the present crisis.
“There was no cause for anger as they are not addressed to the American nation but to the aggressive, unjust, warmongering and bullying U.S. policies,” he said. He later added that there are times when people need strong language to express themselves.

That last part strikes me as an unhelpful cop-out.
Asked about his views on the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad

made a direct connection between the current conflict between Israel and Palestine and the Holocaust in which he said the Palestinian people are being asked to pay the price of the Holocaust. In this context “the Holocaust is a European problem not a Palestinian one,” he said.
Acknowledging the millions of people who died in World War II, Ahmadinejad asked why so much attention was being paid to those who died in the Holocaust and very little to the millions of other civilians who also died.
Davis told Ahmadinejad that more dialogue was necessary on this issue.

Yes, indeed.
The group also discussed nuclear-weapons issues. The best account of this part of the discussion is this one from David Culp– also here. Culp heads the Nuclear Disarmament Program at our Quaker lobbying group, the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
Culp picked out this statement from Ahmadinejad as central: “We believe the production or use of nuclear weapons is immoral.”
Culp wrote:

I suspect that all of the people in this meeting had many areas where we probably disagree with the policies of the Iranian government. For instance, FCNL is concerned about political prisoners in Iran, religious tolerance, and Iran’s position on Israel. We also were aware that the Iranian president met with us as part of his effort to defuse the looming crisis between the Iranian government and the international community over Iran’s nuclear energy program.
But I’ve been a lobbyist working for the abolition of nuclear weapons for more than a decade, and I’ve talked about these issues with a lot of people. Ahmadinejad impressed me as someone who had thought about these issues a lot. He’s a former engineer, who is thinking through the arguments from a number of different perspectives.
For instance, although he starts any discussion by saying that nuclear weapons are immoral, Ahmadinejad also reminded us that the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear weapons, which didn’t prevent their government from collapsing. He added that, during Iran’s war with Iraq in the 1980s, Iraq’s alliance with a country with nuclear weapons (presumably he was referring to the United States) didn’t have any impact on the war. He convinced me that Iran is not interested in developing nuclear weapons.
Iran is interested in developing nuclear energy. As a former engineer, he believes that nuclear fuel is the cleanest fuel there is and he explained that this energy source is critical for the future development of his country. And Ahmadinejad bristles at suggestions that the United States or anyone else would try to dictate how his country pursued its energy needs.

He reported that Ahmadinejad suggested that the 27-year-old Conference on Disarmament in Geneva might be a good place to discuss these issues, and added:

He then offered a proposal: Iran will open all of its nuclear facilities to inspections, if the United States will also open its facilities to inspections. Neither Iran nor the U.S. have implemented the Additional Protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that includes additional inspections, although we at FCNL believe both countries should do so. He added that the United States should refrain from building so-called second or third generation nuclear weapons.
Now, I’m not endorsing Iran’s proposals or even arguing this is the only path to peace. And, in our meeting in New York on Wednesday, the Iranian president made other comments that I found deeply troubling. In particular, I was struck by his comments about the Holocaust…
But when he spoke about issues that I cover, the nuclear weapons issues, what struck me is that the Iranian president was offering a reasonable basis for real negotiations. Since Ahmadinejad took office, Iran has been backing away from permitting full inspections of its nuclear program. But I think this is a bargaining stance to start negotiations. Iran wants to have full rights for civilian nuclear energy, including nuclear enrichment. Iranian leaders also want some kind of assurance that the United States will not bomb their country.

He added this little bit of further context:

The day I left Washington to go to New York for this meeting, I attended a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The contrast was striking. Nicholas Burns, the number three official at the State Department, spent most of that hearing lob[b]ing what I can only describe as rhetorical hand grenades at Iran. In his first State of the Union address, President Bush described Iran as part of the “axis of evil.” That’s still the approach of some in the U.S. government.
But what is even more striking is the pride U.S. officials take in insisting they will not even talk to Iran. Nicholas Burns, in his testimony this week to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made a point of saying he has never met with an Iranian government official. Now here is a man who has been part of the U.S. foreign service for decades, and he made a point of pride that he had never met with any Iranian official. If the U.S. continues to insist that no dialogue is possible with Iran, then war is the likely alternative.

These are great observations. Even more of a reason for folks to become big supporters (financial and otherwise) of FCNL’s truly constructive work there in Washington DC!

Veteran Washington (now WaPo) columnist David Ignatius is, as I’ve written here numerous times before, a savvy and very well-connected journo. Within the past three weeks he has: (1) made a ten-day tour to Iran, (2) participated in a significant, if quirky, little conference on the problems of empire convened in Venice by some very well-connected Washington “paleo-conservatives”, (3) conducted a one-on-one interview with Pres. Bush, and (4) participated in a two-on-one interview in New York with Iranian Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
In this latter interview, David was accompanied by diva-ish WaPo “First Sister” Lally Weymouth, whose transcript of the interview is here. (See Scott’s commentary on that interview, here.) Equally as interesting as the straight content of that interview is David’s very well-informed judgment of the historical moment it represents:

The most telling moment in a conversation here last week with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came when he was asked if America would attack Iran. He quickly answered “no,” with a slight cock of his head as if he regarded the very idea of war between the two countries as preposterous.
Ahmadinejad’s confidence was the overriding theme of his visit. He was like a picador, deftly sticking darts into a wounded bull…
Over the course of a week’s time, I had an unusual chance to sit with both President Bush and President Ahmadinejad and hear their thoughts about Iran. The contrasts were striking: Bush is groping for answers to the Iran problem; you sense him struggling for a viable strategy. When I asked what message he wanted to send the Iranian people, Bush seemed eager for more contact: He spoke of Iran’s importance, of its great history and culture, of its legitimate rights. He made similar comments in his speech Tuesday to the U.N. General Assembly.
Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, is sitting back and enjoying the attention. He’s not groping for anything; he’s waiting for the world to come to him. When you boil down his comments, the message is similar to Bush’s: Iran wants a diplomatic solution to the nuclear impasse; Iran wants dialogue; Iran wants more cultural exchanges. At one point, Ahmadinejad even said that “under fair conditions,” he would favor a resumption of diplomatic relations with the United States.
But if the words of accommodation are there, the music is not. Instead of sending a message to the administration that he is serious about negotiations, Ahmadinejad spent the week playing to the gallery of Third World activists and Muslim revolutionaries with his comments about Israel and the Holocaust. This audience hears the defiant message between the lines: America cannot do a damn thing.
Ahmadinejad is the calmest revolutionary I’ve ever seen. Sitting in a plush easy chair in his suite at the InterContinental hotel, he barely moves a muscle as he makes the most radical statements. His feet don’t jiggle, his hands don’t make gestures, his facial expression barely changes. His eyes are the most expressive part of his body — sparkling one moment, glowering the next, focusing down to dark points when he is angry.
An interview with Ahmadinejad is an intellectual ping-pong match. He bounces back each question with one of his own: Ask about Hezbollah’s attacks, and he asks about Israel’s attacks. Question his defiance of the United Nations, and he shifts to America’s defiance of the world body. In more than an hour of conversation with me and Lally Weymouth of Newsweek, he didn’t deviate from his script. Indeed, some of his comments in the interview were repeated almost word for word when he addressed the General Assembly a few hours later. This is a man adept at message control.
The common strand I take away from this week of Iranian-American conversation is that the two countries agree on one central fact: Iran is a powerful nation that should play an important role in the international system..
That’s the challenge: Can America and Iran find a formula that will meet each side’s security interests, and thereby allow Iran to return fully to the community of nations after 27 years? Iran can’t achieve its ambitions as a rising power without an accommodation with America. America can’t achieve its interest in stabilizing the Middle East without help from Iran. The potential for war is there, but so is the bedrock of mutual self-interest. The simple fact is that these two countries need each other.

It seems clear to me that right now in both capitals, Washington and Teheran, there is an intense internal struggle over this relationship– though quite possibly, the struggle is more intense inside Washington now, than it is inside Teheran.
Why do I say this? Because for all the rhetorical barbs he launched while in New York this week, Ahmadinejad was also very careful to express himself in a measured, calculated way when it came to the central core of the issue: the possibility of a real opening with Washington. For example, in the interview with Ignatius and Weymouth, he started off, in the first answer, saying that “the US administration” (does not create the right circumstances for negotiations) but immediately self-corrected that to say, “that is, a section of the U.S. administration — does not create the right circumstances. It destroys chances for constructive talks.” And later, he said, “Some politicians in the United States think that the nuclear issue is a way to put pressure on Iran.”
As David noted, this is a man who knows how to stay “on message”. And the message he is on now seems clearly to be one that seeks not to demonize the entire current US administration but to leave the way open to empowering any voices within it that might be ready to open a serious negotiation with Teheran.
That, and the relative calm and circumspection with which Ahmadinejad responded to, for example, Weymouth’s questions on Israel and the Holocaust indicate to me that the Superme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has now gotten Ahmadinejad sufficiently on board his more moderate diplomatic project that at least Ahmadinejad’s performance while in New York has not torpedoed (and may perhaps have helped?) Khamenei’s project.
While in New York Ahmadinejad also held a couple of other significant meetings with Americans. One was the very controversial meeting with the ultra-Establishment-oriented “Council on Foreign Relations”. Another was with a group of 50 non-governmental people convened by the Mennonite Central Committee. (More on this in a later post.)
Many of the attendees at the CFR meeting were later quoted as saying that his performance there had shown that Ahmadinejad was “impossible” to deal with– though at least one experienced diplomatist responded to those utterances by saying that they just showed how out of practice most Americans have become at the fine art of diplomacy over the years in which the US has been able to act as a largely unchallenged hegemonic power…
It looks, though, in general as if Ahmadinejad’s visit has kept the opening provided by former Pres. Khatami’s recent visit here at least wide enough open for some form of serious, de-escalatory communication to proceed. As I noted in this recent CSM column, that should at the very least include some kind of an inter-military hot-line system down there in the Gulf. But beyond that, there certainly need to be conflict-resolving talks on a wide range of issues including the modalities of a US withdrawal from Iraq, the American concerns about Iran’s nuclear program, and other outstanding regional issues.
Meanwhile, the US Navy is also proceeding on the parallel track of preparing an entire additional carrier battle group to leave Virginia to sail toward Iran. It is time to get the US-Iran diplomacy started.

My column urging easing of US-Iran tensions is in Thursday’s Christian Science Monitor.
It uses some of the material I gleaned from Pres. Khatami’s visit here.
The column is titled Back from the brink, Iran and the US must now build comity. Here’s how the text starts:

The Bush administration and Iran seem to be stepping back from the brink of their confrontation over accusations that Iran is pursuing a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. On Sunday, Iranian officials in Vienna said they would consider suspending their controversial uranium-enrichment program for two months if that would improve the climate for the talks. Washington’s chief negotiator there said he welcomed the move.
This is great news. The last thing the Middle East or central Asia needs is an outbreak of fighting between the US and Iran. In Afghanistan and Iraq, US and allied troops face a worrying escalation of hostilities. In both countries, these troops are deployed in vulnerable positions, at the end of equally vulnerable supply lines. Iran lies between those two countries – and abuts the US naval presence in the Persian Gulf.
So it is not nearly enough to take just one small step back from the brink. Washington and Tehran need urgently to start addressing the broader issues of power and security in the region. They also need to make sure that the military forces they both have deployed and primed for action there do not get mistakenly jerked into action. Does each side have a hot-line arrangement to dispel misunderstandings, I wonder? If not, they should.
How can the weightier challenge of stabilizing the long-stormy US-Iran relationship be tackled? This is a real conundrum…

By the way, Scott Harrop and I had an interesting little side-meeting with Col. Pat Lang after his appearance here in town Monday. (I was, sadly, unable to get to the main event. So I’m lucky Scott was able to go, and to post such a full description of it on JWN for us!) We talked about the virtues of a military-to-military hot-line system some. And I learned from Lang that in mil-speak this would be referred to as a “deconfliction mechanism.” Right. Let me remember that…
Anyway, here’s how the column ends:

It was not clear to me whether Khatami was proposing himself for any key diplomatic role. What did seem clear was his commitment, in a general but philosophically deep way, to the ideals of peaceful coexistence that motivated his US trip. If this visit – and Mr. Bush’s wisdom in letting it proceed – helps the world avoid a US-Iranian explosion and brings the two countries closer to improved relations, then that is already cause for huge relief.

So, comments courteous and to the point, as usual, please…