Category: Iran

The last couple of weeks have been extremely busy. Last week I did four events connected with my Re-engage! book. The one at USIP Tuesday really involved me doing some new cogitation, and I’ve been thinking a lot more about that “Have foreign wars become unwinnable yet?” question ever since. (I’m trending toward Yes, but need to do more work on the matter.)
The other three events were all great. Two of them were in private homes. One of those was organized by the Women’s Foreign Policy Group, and the other by an interesting new project, the “Chez Nous Salon”, based in the DC exurb of Reston, Virginia, that aims mainly at bringing residents from that area together with each other for friendship and discussion… Standing room only at both those events, where I met some really interesting people– most of them extremely supportive of the book project!
Friday, I got to talk about the book with a group of high-school teachers, in DC for a Summer Institute organized by the World Affairs Council of DC. Another great group. I truly think teachers are grossly under-valued in our society.
Learning about the recent “How to withdraw from Iraq” project, the degree to which they had ripped off some of my own longstanding work on precisely this topic, and the fact that, though they had consulted widely with alleged experts they never even deigned to contact me, all took a bit of time to deal with. But I hope we can all learn some good lessons from that about the need for better coordination and more serious, focused antiwar movement-building going forward. That’s what I want to do, anyway.
But right now, I’m starting to change gears for the next ten days or so. My son’s wedding is in Vermont next weekend. Bill and I will be driving up, and taking a few days to do so.
By the way, if you’re anywhere near Johnstown, PA, on Tuesday afternoon, come hear me talk about my book at 1:30 p.m. at the Gathering of Friends General Conference, being held in the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown. The book talk will be in the Gathering’s bookstore.
Lots is, as always, still happening in the world. North Korea is off the US government’s “terrorism list.” Robert Mugabe has been acting like a real thug (though I’m trying to figure out why the US government feels it has any particular reason to say anything about that… really, who cares what Washington thinks about it?) The Israel-Hamas ceasefire is still in place, albeit shakily, given the determination of Fateh and others to torpedo it… The Quarantine Wall the Bushists have been trying to maintain against Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, and Hamas has seen yet more breaches with the news that the Hizbullah-Israel prisoner swap is even closer to being a done deal, and the news of further steps in the Israel-Syria peace talks dance. There have been new developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan…
Meanwhile, I’ve been reading Sy Hersch’s latest piece in The New Yorker, which depicts in some detail the way the hawks in the Bush administration have been maintaining and escalating their provocative military and paramilitary activities against Iran… Their use of the term “preparing the battle space” for what they’ve been doing seems particularly ominous to me, as does the permission given to “defensive lethal” operations.
Well heck, aren’t all the US’s many wars around the world always sold to the citizenry here as being “defensive” at some remove??
Anyway, I have scores of things I wanted to post about here, but I don’t have time. Over the next ten days I’ll check in and post whenever I can. But no promises.

AFP reports from Athens that:

The Greek air force’s central command said Friday it had taken part in “joint training exercises” with Israel off the southern Mediterranean island of Crete.
The maneuvers, code-named ’Glorious Spartan 08,’ took place on May 28 and June 12, and consisted of aerial maneuvers and knowledge exchange.
According to Greece’s Athens News Agency, the operation involved simulated aerial combat, attacks on terrestrial targets, aerial refueling and search and rescue missions.

I still believe, as I wrote here yesterday, that given Greece’s role in NATO the US military must have known all about the exercise. It also quite possibly provided material help to it, as well as helping ensure the operational safety of the airspace used.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) today threatened to resign if Iran should be subjected to unwarranted military attack by any party.
Now, that’s leadership!
I am just sitting here and thinking how different the world would be today if former Secretary of State Colin Powell had shown comparable moral grit and expressed an exactly similar intention, either publicly, or privately to the president, in the lead-up to Bush’s launching of the war against Iraq… Powell reportedly had considerable reservations about the wisdom of the attack, but at a certain point he took a deep breath and went along with it, as “a loyal soldier.” Indeed, he even agreed to lend the considerable political legitimacy he had accrued both at home and overseas to the shameful and mendacious effort to “sell” the war to the national and global publics with his UN speech.
The worldwide impact of ElBaradei’s statement, which he made to the broadly pro-US Al-Arabiyya television station, is huge. Its impact here in the US is doubtless considerably less than a public Powell declaration of intent-to-resign would have been, but it is by no means trivial. For finally, after being immersed in neocon-generated delusions about America’s global supremacy etc for so many years, the American people and even many members of our political elite are waking up to the fact that the US is not a widely admired and unchallengeable Uberpower any more.
In this new, post-Uberpower world, that vital, if still somewhat hard-to-capture quality of “legitimacy” has become more and more important.
In the 19th century, the US Cavalry could go charging around the American west rounding up and expropriating the native peoples, and the European Big Powers could continue doing exactly the same thing in Asia or Africa– and essentially there was nothing to stop them. The oppressed peoples themselves had nothing like the firepower required to resist the “White” armies, and public opinion back in the metropoles only rarely intervened to stop the massacres. News of the military forces’ depradations took weeks, sometimes months, to reach “back home”, if it ever did. And if the publics in London, New York, or Paris should receive news of a massacre here or there in the non-“White” world– well, how much did most of them, actually, care?
We are no longer in the nineteenth century. Thank goodness.
We’re in a century in which:

1. The international information environment is fast approaching global transparency. Now, we citizens of big, powerful nations often have real-time information about the effects of our military’s actions on others around the world. We can never again say with conviction that “We didn’t know.”
2. The norm of the equality of all human persons has become much more solidly recognized (even if still only imperfectly respected) than ever before. It is impossible to stand up in any chancery or parliament today and say, “Oh, but it was only a bunch of fuzzy-wuzzies or towelheads who were harmed.” Humanity matters.

The above two developments have transformed world politics. In the era of transparency and human equality, the legitimacy of any government or other body that is contemplating taking a radical action has become central.
ElBaradei embodies global legitimacy on issues of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. George Bush does not. (To put it mildly.) With his statement of intention to resign, ElBaradei has thrown down a challenge to the warmongers in Washington and Israel that I believe they will be unable to overcome.
Thank you, Mr. ElBaradei!
(In terms of “legitimacy”, it is also notable that Sergei Lavrov, the Foreign Minister of a newly stabilized and new self-confident Russia– which still, of course, has a veto-bearing seat on the Security Council– has also recently issued a strong warning against the use of force against Iran.)

The NYT’s Michael Gordon and Eric Schmitt today published a report, sourced to Gordon’s favored sources, those ever-anonymous “Pentagon officials”, that states,

Israel carried out a major military exercise earlier this month that American officials say appeared to be a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Several American officials [who remain unidentified throughout] said the Israeli exercise appeared to be an effort to develop the military’s capacity to carry out long-range strikes and to demonstrate the seriousness with which Israel views Iran’s nuclear program.
More than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighters participated in the maneuvers, which were carried out over the eastern Mediterranean and over Greece during the first week of June, American officials said.

The military exercise in question, the Pentagon-leaked report about it, and the publication earlier this week of WINEP’s long-awaited “It’ll be a cake-walk, folks!”, oh sorry make that”The Last Resort” report (PDF), that spins the neocon view of how painless an attack on Iran will be: all these developments together look like a sophisticated, multi-pronged campaign to prepare the world political climate for just such an attack.
Any military attack by one country on the land of another is an act of war. Let’s not forget that. Warmongers have always sought to cloak the nature of their actions in euphemistic mendacity. The euphemism favored by Patrick Clawson and Michael Eisenstadt, the authors of the Cakewalk “Last resort” paper favor, is “preventive action.”
Oh my! It makes it sound as admirable and low-risk as a measles-inoculation campaign in a low-income neighborhood, doesn’t it? Don’t be fooled for a moment.
Some first important points to note about the reported Israeli exercise:

1. If indeed it was of the scale reported by Gordon and Schmitt, then it was one large, very noticeable, and very expensive exercise. Two questions: Why have we not heard about it from other sources in Greece and the eastern Med before now? And why, if it was kept quiet until now, did these Pentagon officials choose to tell us about it now?
2. Over the years, it was the US that gave Israel the vast majority, if not all, of the air platforms used. These would be the same kind of platforms (i.e. planes and choppers) that would be used in the attack on Iran that is apparently being considered by Israel. But the transfer of all such weapons from the US to any other country is always attached to strict conditionality regarding the uses to which they can be put. Do we have any reason to think that the US would, actually, allow Israel to use these planes to bomb Iran? And why should it allow Israel to train to do so? These are very important questions.
3. The airspace over Greece and the eastern Med is part of Greece’s and NATO’s clearly understood area of operations. What authorities within Greece or NATO gave permission for an exercise of this nature to be conducted? What operational support did the Israelis receive in its conduct from either Greece or NATO?
4. The exercise looks to have been extremely expensive to conduct. Was any portion of that cost paid by the US? If not, how did Israel fund it?

One inescapable conclusion: There is no way this exercise was carried without direct coordination with US and and probably also NATO commanders at, presumably, the highest level. In that sense, therefore, it was not solely an “Israeli” exercise. It was a US-condoned or perhaps even US-supported or US-funded exercise, carried out by Israeli pilots in planes given to Israel by the US.
An important corollary: If Israel should build on what it learned in the exercise and actually undertake an act of war against Iran, then the US would be just as closely implicated in (and responsible for) that act of war as it was for the conduct of the training exercise. There is no way an Israeli air force strike group could reach Iran to bomb it without passing through airspace that– in Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, other Gulf countries, and Turkey– is all under tight control of either the US unilaterally, or of NATO.
My first thought on reading the Gordon-Schmitt piece was, “Oh my gosh, maybe the Israelis will actually go ahead and launch a war against Iran in which the US would, like it or not, necessarily immediately become entangled.”
My second thought, on reading the two men’s almost exclusively “Pentagon official” sourcing of the story was that it looks as though there are high-ups in the Pentagon actually conniving in something there.
But what? Hard to believe that even the most hardened neocons left in the administration (and there aren’t a lot there any more) would collude with Israel in undertaking an act of war that would place in immediate jeopardy the lives of our 160,000 American sitting ducks in Iraq– and the supply lines that support them… and the entire global oil market?
Don’t be swayed, by the way, by all the attempts at emollient argument– “it won’t be so bad!” “we’ll have lots of allies in the region, and even in Iran!”– that Clawson and Eisenstadt brought forth in their Cakewalk paper. The effects of any outside country, whether US or Israel (with US collusion), launching a war against Iran would be of the utmost gravity.
So if these “Pentagon officials”– and perhaps also some officials in Dick Cheney’s office– are conniving in something, maybe it isn’t actually the planning for an Israeli attack on Iran? Maybe they’ve been conniving in generating an appearance of an imminent Israeli attack against Iran, with the aim of– what? Trying to up the coercion-factor ante against Iran in the continuing negotiations, or non-negotiations, over its nuclear program? Perhaps.
(Note to Gordon and Schmitt in this context: No-one has yet produced any conclusive evidence that Iran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program. You make mention of such a program twice in your article, both times in the context of reporting on allegations made about its existence by Israeli officials. But since you do mention it both times without comment or qualification, you surely owe it to your American readers to also note that Iran claims its program is for purely civilian purposes, and there is no conclusive evidence that it has a military dimension.)
But it is also possible that what the Israelis, and their friends deep in the Bush administration including the office of the Vice President, are doing is something altogether more nefarious. Perhaps they are seeking to “use” the threat that Israel might launch an attack against Iran at a time and in a way of its own choosing as a way of essentially blackmailing the rest of the US government into agreeing to either coordinate more closely and cooperatively with Israel in planning a joint attack against Iran; or to do something else the Olmert government really wants them to do (more money, more weapons, less pressure on the “peace process”, etc.)
In any event, it is all an extremely risky business indeed… The oil market has already been showing jitters this morning, in response to the NYT article and to the latest declarations from Hugo Chavez.
Whether Israel and its allies within the US (inside portions of the administration, and in highly ideological think-tanks) are supporting the flexing of Israel’s military muscle in order to prepare for an actual act of war against Iran, or “merely” to blackmail the rest of the US government, then either way it’s an outrage and should end forthwith.
As for the still-continuing dispute between the US government and Iran over the latter’s nuclear enrichment program, there are 1,000 ways other than war and violence to deal with that. Indeed, the non-US powers on the UN Security Council should right now be working overtime to try to convene an authoritative, high-level US-Iranian negotiation in which those concerns and all the other issues of concern between the two governments can be addressed.
The creation of the UN in 1945, as a body that provides numerous different avenues for the nonviolent resolution of tough international conflicts, is a signal achievement of US diplomacy and wisdom in decades past. Our country’s citizens– and the whole world!– would be extremely well served if our president decided to use the world body to help de-escalate the current, extremely high-risk tensions. And we would be correspondingly ill-served if he allowed the warmongers to jerk him into supporting any form of a military attack against Iran.
Right now, as whenever there is an increased risk of an act of war being launched against Iran by the US or Israel, there is a heightened risk that matters might spin out of control. The stability of the global system as well as the lives of 160,000 US servicemembers in Iraq are put in direct risk.
Stop the madness. Stop the war. Start the diplomacy of real engagement and real problem-solving– now.

Here comes another propaganda campaign designed to lull western publics into thinking that a military attack on a Middle East nation will likely be a whole lot more successful than most experts currently think.
“Cakewalk”, anyone?
The cakewalk is now being promised us is in Iran… and by that highly ideological, anti-Islamic Republic figure Patrick Clawson, deputy director of AIPAC’s longtime research offshoot, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
In the article linked to there, Clawson discusses with Israeli commentator Yossi Melman the reasons he and fellow WINEP-er Michael Eisenstadt give in a forthcoming publication for why a military attack on Iran could be much more successful than most people currently fear.
Clawson seems to realize that he is trying to make a very tough argument, since he starts off with the old canard of obfuscation that “matters are a whole lot more complex than you think,” since there are “many variables” involved.
Melman asks: “Do you share the sweeping assessment of most experts that Iran’s reaction if attacked will be harsh and painful?” Clawson: “No. Iran’s record when it comes to its reactions in the past to attacks against it, or its important interests, is mixed… ” And he gives some examples from the 1980s and the early 1990s.
He makes no mention at all of the fact that the strategic picture in the Gulf region has changed considerably since then– including, crucially, that the US military now has 160,000 sitting ducks sitting in Iraq, just a stone’s throw away from Iran, with most of them in areas where the population is much, much more sympathetic to Iran’s interests than they are to the US’s.
This is, indeed, a key aspect of the currently re-emerging talk about “an attack” on Iran before Pres. Bush leaves office. Many participants in this talk gloss over the issue of whether it would be Israel or the US that launches the attack. In Melman’s questioning of Clawson, the assumption on both sides seems to be– as spelled out in one of Melman’s questions– that it would be Israel launching the attack.
So we here in the U.S. should be clear that Clawson, like a number of other strongly pro-Israeli figures, is openly arguing for an Israeli attack on Iran that will put thousands of US troops– and the very lengthy and vulnerable supply lines on which they depend– directly at risk of Iran’s retaliation.
Given the extremely close degree of military and political cooperation between the Israeli government and the Bush administration, if Israel launches a military attack against Iran then no-one inside Iran (or anywhere else) would find credible any protestation from the US government that it “was not involved at all” in the attack. Indeed, it is impossible to see how the Israelis could deliver warheads against targets inside Iran without the passage of those warheads (on missiles or planes) through US-controlled security environments– in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, or the Gulf– having been cleared in advance by the US at the highest levels.
If any US government official colludes in any way with a plan whereby either Israeli or American weapons and plans are used to launch an attack against Iran that is not directly allowed by the UN Security Council, then that official is surely guilty of the highest levels of treason against our citizenry’s deepest interests. Like the majority of other US citizens, I have had quite enough of Israeli and pro-Israeli figures using cockamamie arguments to try to cajole my government into launching (or colluding in Israel’s launching of) a quite unjustified military attack against a Middle Eastern nation, thereby putting the lives of my fellow-citizens who are in the US military, and bound to follow the orders of their superiors, directly at risk.
All this re-emerging talk of an attack against Iran in the coming months– whether the attack has an Israeli “face” or a directly US one– needs to be decisively quashed. (Coincidentally, doing this could also help calm many of the current jitters in the global oil market.)
The best way to quash it, from the highest levels of US decisionmaking, would be for President Bush to declare publicly that

(1) The US government does not seek and will not pursue any form of externally-pushed “regime change” in Iran,
(2) The US seeks to re-open full diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic or Iran, and
(3) The US wants to start broad negotiations with Iran (and the involvement of other relevant parties, as needed) on the whole range of issues that currently divide the two governments, and seeks the help of the UN Secretary-General in convening these talks.

This is not “giving away the store.” This is not the “appeasement” that Pres. Bush is so terrified of. This is a way of resolving international disagreements that has been tried and tested throughout the centuries. It’s called “diplomacy.”

Philip Giraldi of American (Paleo-)Conservative wrote yesterday:

There is considerable speculation and buzz in Washington today suggesting that the National Security Council has agreed in principle to proceed with plans to attack an Iranian al-Qods-run camp that is believed to be training Iraqi militants. The camp that will be targeted is one of several located near Tehran. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was the only senior official urging delay in taking any offensive action. The decision to go ahead with plans to attack Iran is the direct result of concerns being expressed over the deteriorating situation in Lebanon, where Iranian ally Hezbollah appears to have gained the upper hand against government forces and might be able to dominate the fractious political situation. The White House contacted the Iranian government directly yesterday through a channel provided by the leadership of the Kurdish region in Iraq, which has traditionally had close ties to Tehran. The US demanded that Iran admit that it has been interfering in Iraq and also commit itself to taking steps to end the support of various militant groups. There was also a warning about interfering in Lebanon. The Iranian government reportedly responded quickly, restating its position that it would not discuss the matter until the US ceases its own meddling employing Iranian dissident groups. The perceived Iranian intransigence coupled with the Lebanese situation convinced the White House that some sort of unambiguous signal has to be sent to the Iranian leadership, presumably in the form of cruise missiles. It is to be presumed that the attack will be as “pinpoint” and limited as possible, intended to target only al-Qods and avoid civilian casualties. The decision to proceed with plans for an attack is not final. The President will still have to give the order to launch after all preparations are made.

Hard to believe this is true. A quite illegal use of US armed force against targets inside Iran– forget this silly whitewash about “pinpoint”– and this would be just to “send a signal”?
In the present circumstances the signal would be not just to Iran but to the world. The signal would say: “World! You need to rein in this lunatic power seated in Washington, urgently, before it does anything more to cause mayhem, chaos, destruction, death, and ever higher oil prices.”
Oh, and GWB will be in Israel Wednesday, very publicly lauding the United States’ close and appreciative friendship with Israel. Just what the world needs to see this week, eh? (Irony alert.)

Iran’s Parliamentary elections take place today, amid widespread criticisms of the process, especially from within. Iran’s vetting Council of Guardians has been especially zealous in blocking thousands of prominent reformists from running for election to Iran’s 290 seat Parliament. (Majlis)
Such vetting provoked loud condemnation, with one reformer, Ali Akbar Motashamipur, publicly proclaiming that, “If anyone’s qualifications should be rejected, it is the 12 members of the Council of Guardians.” He boldly characterized the Council’s rejections as “falsifying, fraudulent, slanderous, and seditious” and called on “all the people to resist any government which applies such tactics.”
While nearly 900 candidate rejections were eventually reversed, Iranians appear split over whether the elections provide significant choices, whether they constitute a referendum on the policies of President Ahmadinejad, or whether choosing not to vote constitutes a “vote against the system” or a “vote for arrogance.” (that is, for American and external intervention)
Here’s a useful round-up of diverse western reporting on the elections thus far. I also suggest attention to Scott Peterson’s recent reporting. Last week, he touched on the unprecedented battles over who owns the revolution, the role of the military in politics, and the legacy of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Among the sensations afoot, Iran’s new Revolutionary Guards commander stirred a hornet’s nest when he declared that, “To follow the path of the Islamic revolution, support for the principlists is necessary, inevitable, and a divine duty of all revolutionary groups…”
That “brought stinging rebuke from across the political spectrum, even from fellow hard-liners such as the editor of the hard-line newspaper Kayhan, who called it a “faulty declaration” that is “against the clear guidelines.” Hassan Khomeini, the reformist grandson of Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, proclaimed that, “If a soldier wants to enter into politics, he needs to forget the military and the presence of a gun in politics means the end of all dialogue.” (What a concept…)
On Monday, Mehdi Karrubi, the former Majles speaker, invoked a sports analogy (sorry Helena) to lament the prospects for fellow reformists: “we are like a football team; many of our players have been given a red card.”
Hard-line outlets fiercely reject such criticisms. On Wednesday, the newspaper Resalat editorialized that many “extremist” reformists “deserved a red card,” and, in any case, the refomists should be thankful to the Guardian Council. If they hadn’t been disqualified, the lame logic goes, there would have been too many candidates, and the reformists would have negated each other’s strength, with up to seven competing for each vacancy.
Resalat conveniently doesn’t mention the many obstacles in the way of political party formation in Iran. Nor does it mention that reformists apparently are still blocked from running in over half of the contests. I’ve seen independent reports, including this one, suggesting reformist candidates are being allowed to compete for only 110 out of 290 seats.
Many Iranians will deem the present Iranian Majlis elections as too crabbed to be even worth getting their “fingers stamped,” as Peterson’s dispatch today suggests. The Guardian headline today opines, “Iran’s reformists” are facing a challenge to fight off irrelevance in an election they cannot win. Yet as the paper’s Julian Borger notes, “For all its limitations, political leaders of every hue still believe there is something worth fighting for in the Majlis election.”
Perhaps because I subscribe to a more nuanced view of Iran’s ever shifting factional struggles, I will be watching for content, even if it appears that the remaining reformist candidates do not fare well. Among the presumed “conservatives,” there are widely differing viewpoints and tendencies. For example, it remains quite unclear how many “moderate conservatives” critical of Ahmadinejad remained in the race. Hope may be in the details.