Month: October 2010

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for October 25th, 2010:

Commentary: Max Boot blogs that, in light of Hamid Karzai’s acknowledgment that he receives $2 million a year from Iran, “the Iranians have attempted similar dollar diplomacy in Iraq, Lebanon, and lots of other countries. No surprise that they should try the same thing with another neighbor.” Boot says Iran’s policy is to give money to both the Afghan government and, allegedly, the Taliban, and its tendency to make contributions in cash is cynical and “seedy.” But the strategy is “not that far removed from conventional foreign aid programs run by the U.S., Britain and other powers.” Karzai’s decision to take Iranian money doesn’t make him a “dupe of Iran,” and he gets far more money from the U.S., says Boot. Instead, Boot takes the lesson that the revelations should be a warning that if the U.S. leaves, “Afghanistan will once again be the scene of a massive civil war, with neighboring states, and in particular Pakistan and Iran, doing their utmost to exert their influence to the detriment of our long-term interests.”

Pajamas Media: Michael Ledeen writes that the Wikileaks release shows that Iran is engaging in the “murder of Americans.” Ledeen says the documents show proof that he’s “been pretty much on-target all along” and that his critics owe him an apology. “But the really big apologies are due from our political leaders, who… have failed to respond, either politically (as I have proposed) or militarily,” he writes. He names many officials from the Clinton, Bush and Obama White Houses and says they are “all accomplices to the great evil that is the Islamic Republic of Iran,” and calls for overt support of Iranian opposition movements.

The Washington Post: Thomas J. Raleigh, a strategic planner at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad since August 2008, opines that while Iraq is building a stable and prosperous economy, “Iran will be feeling increasingly isolated.” Iranian visitors to Iraq will see the benefits of free trade and democracy and will come back to Iran wanting a similar standard of living. “As the Iraqi standard of living rises, Iranian leaders will eventually find themselves confronting an economic ‘comparative crisis’ much like that East German leaders confronted in the 1980s as their people looked enviously ‘over the wall’,” writes Raleigh.

The Washington Post: Deputy Editorial Page Editor Jackson Diehl writes that supporting free access to the internet should be better funded by the State Department and describes the success of such firewall breaching firms as UltraReach, a company which allows internet users to circumvent national firewalls. Diehl writes that the companies’ founders say that with $30 million in funding they could “effectively destroy the Internet controls of Iran and most other dictatorships.” Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner has said that defeating internet censorship would be a “game changer” in countries like Iran. Diehl writes that the holdup in funding such projects is rooted in a fear of offending the Chinese government. “State is polishing its policy and preparing yet more training programs, Iranians and people from dozens of other countries are trying to get free access to the Internet,” concludes Diehl.

So the pre-leak spin by the Pentagon is that they have already disclosed everything important that will be revealed in the next WikiLeaks document super-dump.

Obama’s Pentagon apparently believes that Americans are as gullible – if not mutton-headed – as the Bush Pentagon believed.

No surprises expected in WikiLeaks Iraq war dump: Pentagon WASHINGTON | Fri Oct 22, 2010 11:21am EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Pentagon said on Friday it does not expect any big surprises from an imminent dump of as many as 500,000 Iraq war documents by the WikiLeaks website.

“In terms of the types of incidents that are captured in these reports, where innocent Iraqis have been killed, where there are allegations of detainee abuse, all of these things have been very well chronicled over time,” Pentagon spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said.</

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from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for October 22nd, 2010:

Jerusalem Post: Israeli President Shimon Peres endorsed linkage — the concept accepted by many in the Obama administration and military leadership that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will help the U.S. pursue its longterm strategic objectives in the Middle East —at a conference of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute on Thursday. According to the Jerusalem Post, “Peres said that, “for our existence, we need the friendship of the United States of America,” and “…the president said Israel could be of help to the US by enabling an ‘anti-Iran coalition in the Middle East, and the contribution will not be by declaration, but if we stop the secondary conflict between us and the Palestinians,’ in order to allow the US to focus on the Iranian threat.”

The Race For Iran: Peter Jenkins endorses Gareth Evans post which lays out why Iran’s leaders will not pursue nuclear weapons, but adds that while pressure and persuasion may help deter Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, it may also have the opposite effect. Jenkins suggests that Western powers start focusing on addressing broader regional concerns about a nuclear weapons possession and the impact on the regional balance of power. “Now that most of the evidence points to Iran having opted for self-denial, a new policy is needed, a policy that gives priority to allaying Israeli and Arab fears that a threshold capability will enhance Iran’s regional status and self-confidence,” he concludes.

Commentary: Evelyn Gordon writes on the Contentions blog that the incoming Congress must do everything it can to support the Iranian opposition. She says “Swiss cheese sanctions” won’t work. “That leaves two choices: a military strike, which everyone professes to oppose, or regime change — which probably wouldn’t end the nuclear program but would mitigate the threat it poses,” she writes. She says this entails “vocal and unequivocal moral support,” and “technological support.” She concludes: “What Congress must do is find out from movement organizers themselves what they need — and then give it to them.”

The Guardian: Foreign affairs columnist Simon Tisdall writes that “neither sanctions nor diplomacy can wholly obviate the dread possibility of military confrontation unless something fundamental changes soon at the heart of Iran’s fundamentalist regime.” Tisdall points to some of the effects of sanctions, but says their overall impact inside is difficult to know, noting comments from Iran’s finance minister that the country’s cash reserves are enough to withstand the pressure. He also mentions resistance to the program from China, Turkey and Iraq. He says that while Iran is due to come to the negotiating table next month, it will likely limit the talks. “[T]here is little or no evidence so far that Iran’s top leadership is willing, or can be forced, to fundamentally change its ways,” he writes. “And so the dread juggernaut of direct, physical confrontation rolls ever closer.”

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for October 21st, 2010:

The Washington Post: Glenn Kessler reports that Iran is increasingly unable to conduct “normal banking” activities due to the sanctions, and is attempting to set up banking operations in such Muslim countries as Iraq and Malaysia “using dummy names and opaque ownership structures.” For their alleged support of Iran’s nuclear program, the U.S. Treasury has blacklisted 16 Iranian banks. Matthew Levitt, director of the counterterrorism and intelligence program at the hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) told Kessler that “the banking operations, even if successfully created in other countries, are likely to be small-scale and insufficient to make up for the volume of banking activity Iran has lost.”

The National Interest: Ken Pollack, the director of Brookings’s Mid East Center, reviews the Obama administration’s Iran policy and concludes that “it is working, but it probably isn’t going to work.” He says an airstrike on Iran’s nuclear program — “and launching air strikes will be war” — will rally people to the government, justify an Iranian nuclear deterrent to further attack, cause Iran to withdraw from the NPT (meaning the world will be in the dark), and bring condemnations of the U.S. from the world. Following a lengthy analysis of U.S. policy options, he ends with thoughts on containment. He writes that given Iran belief that it can outlast sanctions, the United States and the international community needs to build “an aggressive new containment regime that Iran cannot possibly outlast. Like North Korea, Iran would not be allowed to enjoy any benefit from its acquisition of a nuclear capability or even a nuclear arsenal.”

The National Interest: Georgetown professor and former CIA officer Paul Pillar responds to Pollack’s article and disagrees that “pressure and more pressure” is the best way of dealing with Iran’s nuclear program. Pillar raises the question of why the Iranian nuclear program is such a preoccupation for the United States and whether assumptions about Iranian irrationality have any grounding in reality or are reflected in Iran’s record of behavior. Pillar also disputes the argument that a strategy of deterrence has “no guarantees of success” and “failure is invariably catastrophic” is reason enough to pressure Iran. “…[T]o make that observation as an argument for not tolerating someone else’s nuclear force would mean not only dismissing a lot of Cold War history but also throwing up our arms in despair over nuclear deterrence relationships that we continue to have to this day with the likes of Russia and China,” he contends.