The next step in our Iran policy
Talk of attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities is springing up again, on the heels of two major developments: one is an an IAEA report on the progress of the nuclear program, and the other is a column by Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea outlining the debate in Israel’s security establishment over whether to attack.
This has forced the question in Washington: What is the next step once our current prevention strategy runs its course? I am still skeptical that the military option will be exercised anytime soon, despite all the recent chatter. One thing we learned as a result of the debate in Israel is that a number of crucial political and military figures are opposed to an attack at this stage. These include IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, the heads of the Mossad and Shabak (Israel’s internal security service), influential members of Knesset Moshe Ya’alon and Shaul Mofaz (who have both served as defense minister and IDF Chief of Staff), Intelligence Minister Dan Meridor, and even Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. Also importantly, President Barack Obama is opposed.
One answer which I have previously rejected may be a better option due to changed circumstances. That option is the “naming and shaming” route, to aggressively wage a “PR war” against Iran’s systemic human rights abuses and illegal clandestine operations.
These circumstances have changed somewhat. With the quantum of credibility that the Obama Administration has received on human rights as a result of the Arab Spring, Iranian allegations of American hypocrisy sound less credible. (Note to realists and conservatives: This is what is known as soft power.)
Russia and China will still refuse to endorse the language of Europe and the U.S., but they must now be more cautious not to tread on Arab popular sentiment. For the first time, their insistence on “non-interference” could draw political costs. Arab rulers have discovered that they cannot make policy completely independent of Arab public opinion. Soon, other countries will, too.
This is why it would have been strategic folly to have backed Mubarak to a bitter end. And it is why Saudi Arabia’s backing of the repression in Bahrain was foolish. Building resonance with an angry Arab public is undermined by such short-sighted duplicity. (It has also had the effect of pushing some Bahraini Shia to align closer with Iran than they did before.)
Going the quasi-humanitarian route on Iran is not guaranteed to work, but it is an option that U.S. could not have exercised as easily a year ago. It also helps maximize our gains in the war of narratives with Iran, putting us in better position to influence affairs throughout the region. As long as we do not initiate military action (in the foreseeable future), those gains could mean a whole lot for American foreign policy.
A convenient guide to Paul Pillar’s commentary on Iran
It is with increasing frustration that I see Paul Pillar continually rant against those who consider Iran a dangerous country. I am stunned how frequently he writes about the topic, all without addressing the most important development in Iranian politics — the consolidation of political power behind Supreme Leader Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards. His posts resemble each other so much that I have decided to keep a checklist. Here’s how he scores in his latest post:
- Warning that this “just like Iraq” ✔
- Blaming domestic pro-Israel voices ✔
- Assumption that war is inevitable without his preferred solutions ✔
- Hysterical accusations and word choice ✔
- Blaming Iran’s behavior on U.S. policy (a usual feature)
- Analysis of Iranian institutions, policy, culture, leadership, etc., as is relevant to the discussion
I eagerly wait being able to check off that last one!
A moral narrative to progressivism to counter the immorality of Ayn Rand
In 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of the UK. Her election was a triumph for British Tories, the modern heirs to the classical conservatism of Edmund Burke. Though Thatcher is compared to Ronald Reagan, and modern American conservatives try at all costs to invoke Reagan’s legacy, the truth is that Thatcher and the Tea Party are worlds apart. Ironically, it is liberalism (or progressivism, depending on your preferred nomenclature) that can more easily emulate a Tory way of solving America’s myriad challenges.
The chief difference between Thatcher and the Tea Party is their rationale for small-government capitalism. Tea Partiers perceive their political opposition in sinister terms, for instance thinking President Obama is actually a Manchurian candidate from Kenya. In one poll, 41% of self-identified Tea Partiers thought the President was not a U.S. citizen. In another, 92% of them thought he was leading the country towards socialism. Slogans like “don’t tread on me” betray a fiercely individualistic — crossing into mean-spirited — worldview.
By contrast, Toryism seeks to maintain personal freedom within a larger moral culture. Thatcher remarked in a 1977 speech:
[C]apital and labour together can realise that their interests are the same. We need a free economy not only for the renewed material prosperity it will bring, but because it is indispensable to individual freedom, human dignity and to a more just, more honest society.
We want a society where people are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate. This is what we mean by a moral society; not a society where the State is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the State.
This talk of a “moral society” is absent from the Tea Party language. Theirs is more evocative of Ayn Rand, who has been a major intellectual force behind Tea Party elites. Rand, for instance, speaks more frequently in the apocalyptic terms we come to expect from the teabaggers:
Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.
Charming.
What it leads to is a political discourse insistent on maintaining principle instead of bargaining for results. Again, the influence of Rand is apparent:
Observe, in politics, that the term extremism has become a synonym of “evil,” regardless of the content of the issue (the evil is not what you are extreme about, but that you are “extreme”—i.e., consistent).
Rand’s Objectivist philosophy emphasizes the idea of objective truth — which conveniently is known only to her and her followers. Believing they know the objective truth, why should they settle for anything less? (Rand would never admit this, but this makes Objectivism frighteningly similar to Marxism.)
By contrast, Thatcher understood that the health of a democracy means respecting the decisions and beliefs of an opponent. (In fact, this is one of the crucial components of classical conservatism that Tea Partiers overlook.) When Maggie came into office as the education minister in 1970, she maintained some of Labor’s previous policies out of respect for the democratic process.
This is where the American left comes in. Since the right has punted the question of what makes a moral society — preferring instead to compose policy based loosely on the idea of “Get off my lawn!” — there is a vacuum in the moral culture of the nation. Progressives have rightly focused politics back onto economic inequality with the idea of 99% vs. 1%, but it is framed in a way that sounds more vengeful than visionary.
To reclaim the moral high ground, progressives should transform their legitimate grievances into a vision: a system that works for all, and one that is guided not just by short-term profit gains. It can only be realized by addressing the issues that Occupy Wall Street protestors have raised, but not in such stark terms. Ayn Rand’s acolytes believe the value of a human is directly tied to their net worth. Progressives now need to replace that with a value system that evaluates people’s worth based on their contribution to society’s benefit. It shouldn’t shame the principle of self-interest, but it should ask what social gains can be realized by thinking systemically.
Iran’s nuke program see-sawing back in our favor?
Extrapolating the course of Iran’s progress in constructing an atomic weapon is pretty hard to do. A year ago, everyone in the counter-proliferation world was buzzing about the potentially game-changing effects of the Stuxnet virus, with speculation that Iran’s nuclear program was all but kaput. Then, just months later, came reports that Stuxnet merely caused a mild hassle, and that Iran was chugging along. Now the news is swinging slightly back to the positive:
At Iran’s largest nuclear complex, near the city of Natanz, fast-spinning machines called centrifuges churn out enriched uranium. But the average output is steadily declining as the equipment breaks down, according to an analysis of data collected by U.N. nuclear officials.
Iran has vowed to replace the older machines with models that are faster and more efficient. Yet new centrifuges recently introduced at Natanz contain parts made from an inferior type of metal that is weaker and more prone to failure, according to a report by the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington nonprofit group widely regarded for its analysis of nuclear programs.
“Without question, they have been set back,” said David Albright, president of the institute and a former inspector for the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. Although the problems are not fatal for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, they have “hurt Iran’s ability to break out quickly” into the ranks of the world’s nuclear powers, Albright said.
Albright’s actual report at ISIS takes a less optimistic tone, but any good news is still good news.
A new direction for Israel’s public diplomacy
A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to speak with a respected expert at a Washington-area Middle East think tank about regional events. (He did not know that his comments might end up on the Internet, so I will not mention his name.) I asked him about the Netanyahu government’s lack of strategic direction in the recent months, an issue which has the unfortunate effect of both making President Obama’s job harder and endangering his country.
This expert, though understanding Israeli passivity in the wake of rapidly changing events, agreed that Netanyahu has been too cautious. I had primarily meant that Bibi wasn’t giving any progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front, but my interlocutor made a different case: that Israel needed to take a strategic offensive with regard to the Arab Spring.
Too often, Israeli leaders have been quoted in the press as denigrating the Arab Spring revolutions. They worry that peace agreements will crumble, or that terrorist groups could acquire assets to use against Israel. These are valid concerns, but they are not the way to address the Arab publics.
Egyptians don’t want to hear how much the Israeli defense establishment misses Hosni Mubarak. Israel’s leaders would be much better served by empathizing with the Arab publics’ desires to form better futures. That doesn’t mean meddling in internal politics, but it includes respecting the right for Arabs to elect their own leaders — even if they are non-violent but conservative Muslims.
Blogger: Palestinains claim getting a 100,000% return on investment is a bum deal
The normally astute analysis at the Camel’s Nose Blog has instead left me baffled today with a post on the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange:
Outside of Israel, including here in Washington, there are those who have made the argument that the deal is indicative of a double-standard on Israel’s part. The argument is that Israel devalues Palestinian life as evidenced by the 1027:1 ratio of prisoners involved in the swap. For a single Israeli life, Israel is willing to trade 1027 Palestinian lives, a gaping disparity between its valuation of the two sides of the equation. This argument is controversial but also powerful. More importantly, it raises the question of morality in policymaking, an often-ignored but important facet of the field.Wait, wait, wait. First of all, who is making the claim that Israel is forcing the Palestinians to devalue themselves with these deals? I have never heard such a ridiculous idea in my life. The post’s rebuttal of this claim is equally off the mark:
In some ways, the argument is valid. States do consistently value the lives of their own citizens over the lives of non-citizens. Analysts may attribute racial or cultural differences to the disparity, and such attributions may be legitimate. Israel’s valuation of Israeli life above Palestinian life is evident in the conditions imposed on Palestinians through land blockades on the Gaza Strip, checkpoints and arbitrary detention in the West Bank, and disregard for historical land claims along the route of the Separation Barrier.
Firstly, those in the Palestinian leadership making the argument are themselves benefitting from the prisoner release. This point does not undermine the internal validity of the argument. However, it does undermine the credibility of some of its major advocates. It would be akin to someone attending a protest on oil dependence driving an SUV 6 hours to get there. The action alone doesn’t delegitimize the argument but it should call into question the credibility of the actor making it.These points are not untrue, but they are mostly irrelevant. The number 1,027 was arrived at not by Israel, but by the Palestinians. They knew the singular objective of the Israeli government — to return Shalit — and maximized the gain they could extract from the deal. If Israel could have traded away only one Palestinian to get Shalit, don’t you think they would have?
Secondly, the argument implies that the morally superior decision for Israel would have been not to negotiate at all. Since negotiating a 1027:1 prisoner swap devalues Palestinian life, the argument implies that given Israel’s choice between the asymmetric 1027:1 or the symmetric 0:0, the latter would be the optimal (more moral) choice. It bears mention that this has in fact been Israel’s choice for the past five years. Thus, while the final terms may be asymmetrical, they are hardly the result of spurious action by Israel. 1027 after over 5 years of political ramifications is not the same as 1027 a week after the kidnapping. Truly demonstrating the swap is immoral requires accounting for many other variables over the 5-plus year period. If the swap is immoral, it is not only on these grounds.
Processing the strange Iranian terrorist plot
Quite understandably, various commentators are trying to make sense of an absurd plan by Iran’s IRGC to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. Spencer Ackerman thinks it sounds like it “passed through a bull’s digestive tract.” And the Iranian government, innovators of the conspiracy theory, believe the story was concocted to distract people from the Occupy Wall Street movement. Right. (Khamenei believes the protest movement will be the downfall of the free market economy in the U.S. Shows you how much he understands American political culture.)
Given access to only the indictment papers everyone else, I can only guess based on the past history of Iran how credible the allegations are. There might be enough circumstantial evidence to say the charges are plausible, but in the absence of better information, it’s too hard to say for sure.
One thing Ackerman finds hard to believe is how harebrained the scheme is. (I am equally befuddled, as are many others.) However, Iran has done incredibly foolish things before with little regard for its well-being. For instance, Iran rejected an offer by Saddam Hussein in mid-1982 to suspend the Iran-Iraq war and return to the status quo ante, which was roughly where each side’s forces were at that time, anyway. Ayatollah Khomeini rejected the ceasefire offer, and — believing he was acting on God’s will — insisted that Iran invade Iraq with the aim of deposing Hussein and replacing him with a Shia Islamist. Six more years of war and Iran didn’t gain an inch of land.
Iran has also conducted audacious overseas bombings out of spite, such as when it directed Hizballah to blow up a Jewish community center in Argentina in retaliation for that government’s cancellation of a nuclear cooperation agreement.
The involvement of Mexican drug cartels as participants in the disrupted plot does not discredit the involvement of Iran’s Quds Force at all; Hizballah is well-known to have established fundraising and recruitment networks in Latin America, including Mexico.
Ackerman’s observation that the plot would have been a strategic catastrophe reinforces in his mind the idea that this makes the Quds Force look like, in his words, “blithering idiots” and “miscalculating buffoons.” This is too simplistic, just like it would be simplistic to label the SVR (the reincarnation of the KGB) a third-rate clown school after 10 of their spies did pretty terrible jobs spying on the U.S. Hell, even the CIA has had clueless operatives — like the ones who got busted in Italy carrying out an abduction. Regardless, Iran’s hardliners do struggle to calculate American foreign policies, and a few IRGC musclemen might have been under some loony impression that this bombing would be worthwhile.
The last point goes back to the outlandish and unusual nature of the suspected plot. If the U.S. government was going to invent charges of terrorism against Iran, why would it draw up a story so exceptionally bizarre, one which would draw such a skeptical reaction?
Is this man ready to be president?
According to Herman Cain, Uzbekistan is a small, insignificant country that is not vital to American security interests.
Now, it’s OK not to know immediately that the president of Uzbekistan is Islam Karimov. Still, it’s best not to dismiss a country’s importance simply because you haven’t read up on it. Uzbekistan, as it turns out, is an important supply route to troops in Afghanistan. It is also the original home of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which is currently part of the insurgency in Afghanistan. Getting intelligence from the Uzbekistani government on the IMU would be useful, although I’m not sure President Karimov would like to help a future President Cain as much. And that means more help to Russia and China.
The GOP’s anti-intellectualism used to be confined to domestic affairs, but it’s begun to seep into critical areas of foreign relations. This willful ignorance has consequences, but I’m sure Herman Cain is too busy to be thinking about those.
Negotiating with a divided Iran is no good
It’s impossible to really understand Iran’s diplomatic policy without first understanding its internal politics. But some observers are skipping that crucial step as they search for ways to end the deadlock over Iran’s nuclear program.
In one recent story at The Diplomat, Richard Dreyfuss takes a relatively nuanced look at the possibilities for discussion:
It’s not easy reading the tea leaves in Tehran, especially when it comes to Iran’s controversial nuclear programme. But over the past few weeks, Iran has sent out a steady stream of signals that it’s willing to talk, and they’ve put some fairly specific proposals on the table.
It’s possible to argue about every one of them, and as always dealing with Iran’s belligerency and fractured internal politics makes it daunting to even the most optimistic among the diplomacy-minded. Still, something important seems to be happening. And, so far at least, the United States hasn’t responded at all to Iran’s overtures, except with bombastic rhetoric of its own.
Paul Pillar can’t even be bothered to mention anything about Iran’s politics in a recent blog post, though. True to his old-school CIA background, he chooses to ignore the internal dynamics of Iran and focus only on American politics:
There has been no exploration jointly with the Iranians, and almost none unilaterally in U.S. policy discourse, of possible safeguards of an Iranian program that would include the enrichment of uranium. There are all manner of inspections, on-site monitoring, and other procedural arrangements that could be explored to determine if they might form the basis of an agreement that would meet the minimum needs of both sides. But the exploration has never occurred. All we have on the U.S. side are some mutterings by the secretary of state about how maybe, possibly, someday Iran could be entrusted with an enrichment program. The western stance of no enrichment, coupled with a political environment in the United States in which Iran is demonized and anything that could be interpreted as a favorable gesture toward the Islamic Republic is politically dangerous, has so far preempted any moves to fill the gap.
Well, the political environment in Iran demonizes the U.S. a whole lot more than the other way around. No talk of that interfering with a deal, huh?
An equally important omission is the seismic power dispute between Iran’s political organs. Ayatollah Khamenei, the hardline clerics, and the Revolutionary Guards decided after the 2009 presidential election that even what limited measures of democracy Iran had were a threat to the survival of the regime. These actors decided to consolidate power away from Iran’s “elected” leader, President Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad has had his wings clipped in a number of ways by Khamenei — he has had cabinet members and chief of staff arrested by the Supreme Leader, been accused of “witchcraft,” and threatened with impeachment.
In the latest sign that Ahmadinejad’s policy does not reflect the IRGC’s will, one need not look further than the idea — proposed by the U.S., Paul Pillar — of a “hotline” between Washington and Tehran, similar to the “red telephone” used during the Cold War. Ahmadinejad spoke favorably of such a system, only to be rebuffed by his own defense minister — a former IRGC commander, and thus a more likely person to speak for the Iranian security establishment.
