Category: Iran

So it looks as if the Democratic Party leaders in Congress finally get it about the interdependence of the United States with the other six billion people of the world, and about the counter-productive nature of a policy of escalation, confrontation, and possible war?
That’s how it seems from this report by Nicholas Kralev in today’s Washington Times, who writes that

The House Democratic leadership has effectively shelved a resolution calling for what critics say would amount to a naval blockade of Iran because of concerns that it could provoke another war…

(HT to Think Progress for that.)
The resolution in question, House Concurrent Resolution 362, has been very heavily pushed by AIPAC, the mammoth-sized pro-Israel lobby in Washington DC. They no doubt hoped they could ram it through Congress in the period when members are maximally concerned about fund-raising and accusations of “being soft on Iran” in the run-up to the election.
Kralev notes,

Even though the document would not be a law but a “statement of policy” aimed at preventing Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, the Democratic leadership is worried that it could be viewed by the Bush administration as a green light to use military force against Iran, officials said.
Howard L. Berman, California Democrat and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he has concerns about the current text and will not bring it before the committee until those issues are addressed. That, in effect, blocks the document from reaching the floor.

Phew! People in the peace movement have organized and lobbied hard against the resolution ever since it was introduced. It had more than 200 “co-sponsors” who eagerly lined up to get their names attached to what looked like an attractive, vote- and money-winning resolution.
But then, we all made the point that with this administration, if congress gives them an inch in terms of escalating tensions with another country, quite likely Bush will end up taking a couple hundred miles… And with the military as overstretched as it now is, and in the current global economic climate, do we really want to start yet another war, this time against Iran?
Over the summer, persistent lobbying by the peace movement managed to peel five of the bill’s original co-sponsor’s off that roster. Now Berman and his colleagues have definitively closed down the possibility of AIPAC getting the bill considered and voted on before the election. (After which, it will almost certainly die because of its own considerable demerits.)
I am so glad the congressional leaders finally connected these dots… between their responsibilities as lawmakers and the belligerent and near-criminal irresponsibility of the administration… between a rise in tensions in the Middle East and the probability of further huge blows to the world’s economic system (not to mention the US military)… between the global image of the US as a unilateralist, ill-governed bully on the world stage and the fact that right now, like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, our country is dependent on the goodwill of others.
There are signs of intelligent life in Washington! Praise the Lord!
(And maybe we should all send thank-you notes to Howard Berman.)

Yesterday evening I was one of about 250 participants in an interfaith iftar (fast-breaking dinner) and conversation hosted here in New York by the Iranian mission to the UN. The guest (and speaker) of honor was Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Other speakers included a number of US religious leaders from different faiths, the President of the UN General Assembly, Nicaragua’s Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, and Norway’s former prime minister Kjell-Magne Bondevik. Both these latter spoke about the very deeply felt religious motivations for their engagement in public life.
I found Ahmadinejad much more impressive as an orator than I had expected. In t.v. clips he often looks a little ranty. But in life, it turned out he has a commanding rhetorical style. He has a much deeper voice than I’d expected, and used it with evident expertise regarding timing, modulation, and other aspects of oration. He spoke in Farsi, only occasionally looking down at notes. I suspect it was a speech he had delivered a number of times before in different settings?
Unfortunately the simultaneous interpretation was not great; but I imagine we non-Farsi speakers received a fair idea of the main points of what he said.
The format of the event was strange, and shifted a number of times as the evening progressed. The “main event” was set up as a panel discussion with five participants. The moderator said at the beginning that he would have a little bell he’d ring to keep each main speaker to seven minutes. And he promised there’d be time for questions from the floor afterwards.
So the first four speakers (and D’Escoto) all spoke their seven-minutes’ worth first. They made some very good points. Then Ahmadinejad spoke– for around 40 minutes.
But what, really, could one have expected? That he’d be “just another panelist”, speaking alongside the others? He is, after all, the President of a country…
And there was no time for questions.
Among the points raised by the four preceding panelists were their concerns about Iran’s human rights situation; about the non-transparency of Iran’s nuclear technology program; and about Ahmadinejad’s fierce opposition to Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state and his denials of the broadly accepted facts about Hitler’s Holocaust. These panelists all, also, issued impassioned pleas for the United States’ differences with Iran to be resolved through peaceful means.
In his speech, Ahmadinejad pushed back forcefully on all the points of criticism the earlier speakers had raised. He said that citizens from the country that had invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, had supported Israel’s attacks against Lebanon and the Palestinians, and had been responsible for so many rights abuses in Iraq, Aghanistan and Guantanamo were in a poor situation to speak about Iranian rights abuses. (But besides, there weren’t any.) He said that citizens of a country that has a huge nuclear arsenal, some of which is close to Iran and pointed at it, are in a poor situation to say anything about Iran’s nuclear program, which “as we all know” is for solely scientific and peaceful purposes. He did not mention the Holocaust directly. But he did say that during World War 2 some 60 million people lost their lives (or he might have said 20 million? Unclear.) … And that the perpetrators responsible for all that killing had been Europeans– yet it had been the Palestinians who were forced to pay the price.
On Palestine, he talked at some length about the “Zionist occupation” of Palestine as having lasted for more than 60 years, and inflicting terrible harm on the Palestinians. He argued that at and after the creation of Israel five million Palestinians were displaced (a huge exaggeration of their numbers then, but less than the number of Palestinian refugees today)– along with one million Jews, presumably those from the Arab countries.
While expressing strong support for Judaism as a faith, he said that Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism and transgresses against it.
He spoke in a consistently religiously-based vein, lacing his speech with comments about “What would the Prophets have done if… ?” and expressing a lot of support for the world’s poor, hungry, and displaced. He also took the opportunity to accuse the US of being motivated by greed and indifference to the sufferings of others in Africa, the Middle East, or elsewhere. His religious views seemed to include considerable millennialism, but cast in a sort of interfaith vein: he seemed to be referring not only to the possibly imminent return of a Mahdi-like figure but also to that of a Christ-like figure. (I wish the interpretation had been clearer.)
At the end, there was no time for questions. Mary-Ellen McNish, the Executive Secretary of the American Friends Service Committee, presented Ahmadinejad with a reproduction of a famous painting by a 19th century artist, Edward Hicks, representing “the lion lying down with the lamb” and a bunch of other peaceable animals lying around, too. Then he left to catch his plane back home.
While he’s been in New York for the General Assembly this year, he has met with large numbers of different groups of people, including an MSM journalists’ group, yesterday morning.
McNish and some other Quakers, including Joe Volk, the head of the Friends Committee for National Legislation, have been among the faith group leaders in this country who have been participating in interfaith dialogue with Ahmadinejad and other Iranian regime figures for two or three years now. I haven’t talked with any of them since last night’s event, but I imagine some of them may be feeling that it’s a pretty long, slow process to get beyond the “opening statements.” But still, having these dialogues, and hanging in with them, is so much better than not having them– especially given how loudly the drums of an anti-Iranian war continue to beat in this country. Also, many of the points Ahmadinejad made about US policies have considerable validity. No-one should judge a situation of gross double standards on issues like human rights or WMDs to be fair or acceptable.
I was interested, too, to see both the fact and the nature of the engagement in the event by D’Escoto and Bondevik. D’Escoto spoke with huge passion about the need for human equality and caring for all of God’s children in all countries, of all faiths. I think it’s great to have a person with such views and such commitment steering the work of the General Assembly. (Ah, but how about the much more elitist and powerful Security Council? That would be even better!)

This is a story everyone in the US– but especially all those members of Congress who line up behind AIPAC’s warmongering– needs to read. Israeli president Shimon Peres tells the London Sunday Times that, regarding Iran, “The military way will not solve the problem… Such an attack can trigger a bigger war.”
How’s that again?? In all the anti-Iran propaganda with which AIPAC lards its public communications, it forcefully makes the argument that the US and Israel should be prepared to use military attacks against Iran to prevent it ever getting a nuclear weapon… because such a capability could be fatal for Israel.
And now Peres, who was the father of Israel’s own nuclear weapons program back in the 1950s and 1960s, tells us that an attack might actually be harmful, not helpful?
We might remember, too, that during the few months in 1995-96 when Peres was Israel’s prime minister, he launched his own fateful war of choice against Lebanon. That was April 1996, and it did not turn out well for Israel, at all. Peres had launched it partly as an election ploy. It didn’t work out well for him, either. He lost that election– due in good part to the fact that his war in Lebanon persuaded large numbers of Palestinian-Israelis not to vote for him…
And now, the Sunday Times’s Uzi Mahnaimi is writing this:

Peres also criticised American foreign policy in highly unusual terms for an Israeli leader, saying it relied too much on military force in attempts to impose democracy on the Middle East.
…“In my opinion, the Americans are making a mistake in their foreign policy.
“When they intervene abroad, they’d do better using the economy, which doesn’t provoke such antagonism.”

Words of wisdom, spoken very late in the guy’s life, indeed. (When I interviewed him in Tel Aviv back in 1998, he still forcefully defended his decision to launch the 1996 war.)
So, late in the day, yes. But still, words that people in the US policy elite definitely need to hear.

I see CSIS has now published the entire transcript of Tuesday’s panel discussion with Brzezinski, Scowcroft, and Ignatius. You can access that– or the audio or even video records of the event– here.
It makes my work of taking notes and then uploading them here yesterday a little redundant. Oh well, I should ask next time if the organizers of any event are planning to post a transcript, and I should have guessed that rich old CSIS would have the resources to do so.
I think the most politically relevant aspect of the event was the intensity with which both those former National Security Advisers, Brzezinski and Scowcroft, warned against the consequences of any attack (= act of war) against Iran– and also, against the over-militarization of the approach being followed by the Bushists.
The considerations that David Ignatius raised about the timing of Washington undertaking a serious commitment to resolving the issue through diplomacy were interesting– though I agree strongly with what Scowcroft said about the administration’s continuation of its still-hard line being more likely to strengthen Ahmadinejad in Iran’s elections next March than would a more determined turn– by Bush— to real exploration of the diplomatic options.
The warnings Scowcroft issued about the political effects of the administration’s still-harsh rhetoric against Iran– in terms of continuing to legitimize and “normalize” the idea of attacking Iran as a possibly viable option– were also important.
I found Brzezinski’s quick analysis of the political dynamics within the 5+1 group very thought-provoking– as too, his judgment that sometime earlier this year China had become much more seriously engaged in the Iran-related diplomacy than hitherto.
This is significant because it signals China’s entry in a new way into the power dynamics of the Middle East region– a development that could well have ramifications elsewhere in the region.
As I noted here yesterday, I still do not see the signs I need to see, that the administration has definitively backed off from its longstanding pursuit of regime change in Tehran. To me, that is an essential first step in any real turn toward use of diplomacy with Iran.

Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski warned yesterday
that,

Brzezinski, who served in the Carter administration, was speaking at
Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, just three
days after Under-Secretary of State Bill Burns took part in a meeting
the “P5+1” group had in Geneva with Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator,
Saeed Jalili.  Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice downplayed
the importance of the Geneva meeting, though it was one of a number of
tentative moves the administration has made in recent months that may
(or may not) signal an attempt to de-escalate the administration’s
long-running confrontation with Iran.

(By the way, if you want to see what I said about  the US-Iran
situation at the meeting in Charlottesville Monday night, you can see a
YouTube version of my 24-minute speech, here.
Great audio but, um, idiosyncratic camera work.)

At yesterday’s forum at CSIS, Brzezinski was speaking alongside Brent
Scowcroft, who had been Pres. George H.W. Bush’s National security
Advisor, and David Ignatius, Associate Editor and columnist at The Washington Post.

Brzezinski and Scowcroft both expressed forceful criticisms of the
hard-line policy the Bush administration has maintained against Iran
until now. Ignatius expressed a notably less critical view.

Brzezinski said,

The panelists were asked, “What do the Iranians want?” Scowcroft’s
answer was:

Continue reading “Iran: Brzezinski, Scowcroft, and Ignatius speak”

Today, Iran’s most powerful figure,Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Tehran “is ready for negotiations over the nuclear crisis” but warned it would not step over any “red lines” in the search for a deal.
Khamenei’s remarks come a day before a key meeting at which Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, EU negotiator Javier Solana, and top US diplomat Bill Burns will all gather face-to-face to discuss (I hope) measures to defuse/de-escalate the tensions aroused by Iran’s nuclear program.
That report from AFP notes that Khamenei’s statement is his first direct intervention in the continuing standoff over the nuclear issue. This is, obviously, very significant, and could signal that the crisis is on its way to being ramped back down. (Related evidence: the recent agreement between Tehran and Washington that the US can re-open an “interests section”, even if not yet a full embassy, in Tehran.)
Here’s what, according to AFP, Khamenei actually said:

“Iran has decided to take part in negotiations but it will not accept any threat,” state television quoted Khamenei as saying.
He said Tehran would not step over any “red lines”, repeating Iran’s insistence that it will not suspend uranium enrichment activities, which world powers fear could be used to make a nuclear weapon.
But Khamenei also appeared to give his wholehearted backing to the idea of talks.
“Our red lines are clear and if the other parties respect the Iranian people, the dignity of the Islamic republic and these red lines, our officials will negotiate as long as no one makes any threats against Iran.”

In the west, the Iranian leader who garners most attention is usually the often bellicose President, Mahmoud Ahmahinejad. But Khamenei has always– as I’ve noted here often– been the chief center of power in the regime.
Karim Sadjadpour recently published this informative little study of Khamenei’s thinking and leadership style.
He argued that,

“Iran’s Islamic government is more powerful than it has ever been vis-à-vis the United States, Khamenei is more powerful than he’s ever been within Iran, and in order to devise a more effective U.S. policy toward Iran a better understanding of Khamenei is essential.” Though Khamenei is sometimes dismissed as weak and indecisive, Sadjadpour writes, “his rhetoric depicts a resolute leader with a remarkably consistent and coherent—though highly cynical and conspiratorial—world view.”
Given that the real political power of the Iranian Supreme Leader dwarfs that of the president, Sadjadpour argues, “It’s time for the world to focus less on Ahmadinejad and more on Khamenei. His speeches present arguably the most accurate reflection of Iranian domestic and foreign policy aims and actions over the last two decades.” …
“Given Iran’s centrality to urgent U.S. and European foreign policy challenges—namely Iraq, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, energy security, Arab–Israeli peace, and Afghanistan,” Sadjadpour writes, “the United States does not have the luxury of shunning dialogue with Tehran until Khamenei’s death or the arrival of a more accessible Iranian leader. This could be a long time in coming.”
Sadjadpour argues that any successful approach toward Iran must take into account Khamenei’s pivotal role in Iran’s decision-making process and his deeply held suspicions of the United States. “Trying to engage an Iran with Khamenei at the helm will no doubt be trying, require a great deal of nuance and patience, and offer no guaranteed chance of success. But an approach toward Iran that aims to ignore, bypass, or undermine Khamenei is guaranteed to fail.”

I just checked out the English-language portion of Khamenei’s official website, seeking their exact translation of whatever it was he said. However, nothing has been put up there in English since June 25.
But some of the other materials posted there, from earlier in June, are pretty interesting and revelatory. Like this, on Iraq, and this, on his view of the need to confront US power.
Anyway, good news from Tehran today. May the trend continue.

I have long argued– most recently here— that if an act of war is launched against Iran by the US or by Israel, then one of the most obvious ways for Iran to engage in the war that ensues would be to attack, or surround and cut off, the US troops distributed broadly throughout Iraq, very close to Iran’s borders and at the end of agonizingly long and vulnerable supply lines.
My argument has always been that if Iran suffers any aerial (or naval) attack– even if only Israeli forces participate in it directly– then it could easily demonstrate that that attack could not have been launched without the active and premeditated collusion of the US, whose military dominates all the airspace around Iran, especially from the east, as well as the waters of the Gulf.
That would make the US’s forces in the region legitimate targets for an Iranian counter-attack.
And now, Israel’s Y-net website tells us, quoting unnamed “sources in the Iraqi Defense Ministry”, that,

Israeli fighter jets have been flying over Iraqi territory for over a month in preparation for potential strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, sources in the Iraqi Defense Ministry told a local news network Friday, adding that the aircraft have been landing in American bases following the overflights.

The original reports of Iraqi defense officials reporting seeing Israeli military aircraft using US bases in Iraq seem to have come from the Iraqi news agency Nahrainnet. (That was also what AFP reported.) They have also been carried by the website of Iran’s international Press TV station.
But it is interesting that Israel’s Y-net carried the report– even if attributed to those non-Israeli sources. The Israeli media is, like the old Soviet media, subject to heavy censorship on all military matters. But as in the old Soviet Union, when the Israeli military censors kind of want to “get the news out” about one of their own military developments, they allow a news medium to run the item– but with attribution to foreign sources.
Update 4:20 p.m., July 11: After I wrote the main post here, Y-net updated their article, on the same URL, to feature an IDF denial that they had been doing any “training” activities in Iraq. I note this is not a categoric denial that they’ve been doing anything else, such as reconnaissance or prepositioning of materiel.)
(The second update, at 4:25 p.m. on July 14, is reflected in the new language (underlined) in the next paragraph, with the deleted material struck through. ~ HC)
The fact that Y-net carried the report, even with– at first– no confirmation or denial from their military sources close to home, indicates strongly to me that it’s true. Also, that the Israeli defense authorities want us to know that it’s true. indicated to me at the time that it was true– or, that some portions of the Israeli defense authorities wanted us to believe that it was true. Otherwise, wouldn’t they simply have squashed or denied the whole report from the get-go?
So that’s even more interesting. It means they want the US to know that, at one level, they have us over a barrel. Our 157,000 troops spread widely throughout Iraq are not only hostages to any Israeli military adventurism, but those of them running the air-bases where the Israeli jets have been reported as landing have, in addition, been forced to support Israeli acts that greatly increase the risk to themselves and their G.I. buddies.
Where is the national leader in Washington who can put his foot down, who can tell our Israeli blackmailers that they can no longer play around in this extremely risky way with the security of our men and women in uniform in Iraq and throughout the Gulf; tell them that their military and special-force provocateurs are no longer welcome in the US-controlled battlespace of Iraq; and thereby restore the integrity of US national defense planning?
I will quickly add a few more thoughts.

1. All the war games that US military planners have done to game out the sequelae of a US (or Israeli) act of war against Iran have shown that they are truly devastating for the US.
2. Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki stated on July 2 that Iran does not, actually, fear an Israeli attack. That is consonant with the results of the war-gaming indicated above.
3. There is at least some possibility that this current piece of Israeli muscle-flexing– like Iran’s own recent, widely publicized, missile tests– is an intentional precursor to Iran and the P5+1 sitting down to start the serious, de-escalatory negotiations that imho sorely need to happen. (Glenn Kessler posited this explanation, regarding the Iranians, in today’s WaPo, I see.) But Israel’s muscle-flexing is of a notably different order than Iran’s– not least because Israel is not, actually, a potential participant in the Iran-P5+1 negotiations. For that reason, Israel remains in the role of a potentially very dangerous ‘rogue’ actor– and it might even have an incentive to prevent or spoil those negotiations. The fact that PM Olmert is in such deep political trouble at home, and that the country’s whole political system is in such a shaky situation, means that Olmert’s decisionmaking may indeed be reckless and risk-embracing.
4. We need to think much more about what “message” Olmert and his national-defense people are trying to convey to the Americans with this risk-taking behavior regarding Iran. This is true even if (or perhaps, all the more so if) Olmert has many enablers and supporters dug well in at high levels of the US national-security machine.

Finally, we should remember that it has all along been Pres. George W. Bush who has pushed to place scores of thousands of US servicemen and -women into the position of sitting ducks for Iranian retaliation, in Iraq. In December 2006 the bipartisan group headed by Baker and Hamilton recommended strongly that the US should withdraw a sizeable portion of its troops from Iraq and concentrate the remainder into a small number of more easily defended (and supplied) bases. But Bush’s response to that was to pump large numbers of additional sitting ducks into the potential duck-abbatoir, and to spread them out thinly into many distant parts of the country under the logic of his so-called “surge.”
It is time to end the madness, end the Israeli blackmail, end or substantially reduce the tensions with Iran (which could still flare out of control any day), and end the very vulnerable and counter-productive US troop deployment in Iraq.
We have a pretty good idea how to do all these things. But please God get on with it. This reminder from Y-net about the presence and muscle-flexing propensities of the Israeli wild card makes the whole task of de-escalation much more urgent.