Month: January 2011

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for January 10th, 2011:

Commentary: Evelyn Gordon, writing on Commentary’s Contentions blog, pushes back against the claim by outgoing Mossad chief Meir Dagan that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon before 2015. Gordon writes, “Precisely because Dagan is known to have vehemently opposed military action against Iran, his confident assertion that Iran won’t have the bomb before 2015 should be taken with a large grain of salt.” She concludes, “Dagan is both a dedicated patriot and a consummate professional, but even patriotic professionals are still human. And it is only human nature to read the tea leaves in a way that supports what you would most like to believe.”

The Atlantic: Jeffrey Goldberg takes a more positive approach to Dagan’s announcement: “[I]t is fair to say that the combination of sanctions and subterfuge has definitively set back Iran’s nuclear program by at least one and perhaps as many as four years.” Goldberg hails “the unknown inventor of Stuxnet, the miracle computer virus, which has bollixed-up Iran’s centrifuges” and the Obama administration’s efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. He concludes with a warning, writing, “It is important to remember that Iranian intentions are unchanged, until proven otherwise, and it is also important to remember that technical difficulties are surmountable, but it is definitely fair to say that the zero hour is not yet here.”

National Review Online: Michael Mukasey, Tom Ridge, Rudolph Giuliani, and Frances Townsend defend their participation in a Mujahadin e Khalq (MEK) event in Paris. The MEK is a foreign terrorist organization, according to the State Department; speaking at a MEK event could be seen as providing support for a terrorist organization. But Mukasey, Ridge, Giuliani, and Townsend write, in response to a challenge by Professor David Cole, that the Material Support statute does not need revision, but “[w]hat it does need — and does not often enough get for fear of offending some Muslim organizations — is rigorous enforcement against accurately designated organizations, of which MEK is not one.”

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for January 7th, 2011:

The Washington Post: Jennifer Rubin, writing on her Right Turn blog, asks whether India is doing enough to enforce sanctions against Iran. Rubin, picking up on The Wall Street Journal’s reporting, writes, “The revelation that the government of India ‘advised oil companies to open individual accounts with government-owned State Bank of India–India’s largest lender–which has a branch in Frankfurt,’ rather than directly with the blacklisted Iranian Trade Bank points to the shortcomings of sanctions.” She concludes, “The real lesson of this episode is that we should be circumspect about India’s — or any country’s — ability and willingness to turn off the flow of cash to the revolutionary Islamic regime.”

Commentary: Alana Goodman blogs on Commentary’s Contentions blog that “HSBC may be doing a bit of damage control in Foggy Bottom after its pro-Iran ad campaign sparked criticism from the media and foreign-policy experts.” Goodman claims that the ad came up in a “private meeting between HSBC CEO Niall Booker and Jose Fernandez, assistant secretary for economic energy and business affairs, at the State Department on Monday,” according to an anonymous source. HSBC declined to respond to the claim. Goodman repeats Jennifer Rubin’s suggestion the possibility that HSBC “was conducting transactions on behalf of sanctioned entities.” HSBC has been mentioned by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago as needing to improve its anti-money laundering and terrorist-financing mechanisms but no mention was made of HSBC conducting business with sanctioned entities.

The Weekly Standard: Stephen Schwartz blogs that Iran is exhibiting the qualities of “other tyrannies before it” by oppressing the country’s Sufis. “Iranian fear of Sufis puts the country’s clerical oligarchs in the same camp with other Islamist radicals from the Balkans to Pakistan, where attacks against the mystics have proliferated along with anti-Western jihadism,” writes Schwartz.

Commentary: Jonathan Tobin blogs on Contentions that “Iran is still on track to have a bomb in four years.” Tobin says that Western or Israeli “sabotage” operations have delayed the nuclear program and given the West “more time to prepare less-diplomatic methods of ensuring that the tyrannical Islamist regime in Tehran does not obtain the ultimate weapon.” But, warns Tobin, “it is only a matter of time (and perhaps less time than we think) before they succeed.” He concludes, “Stuxnet is not a solution to the existential threat that an Iranian bomb poses to Israel in particular and to stability in the Middle East in general. It is just a delaying tactic.”

By now, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attempts to spin the story of Jawaher Abu Rahmah — the Palestinian woman who died last week following a protest in the West Bank village of Bil’in, by all indications due to exposure to tear gas fired by the IDF at the protesters — have fallen to pieces. (See +972 magazine for the most thorough coverage of the Abu Rahmah story.) Soon after Abu Rahmah’s death, a senior IDF officer — since revealed to be Major General (Aluf) Avi Mizrahi — gave a briefing to what one participant described as an “exclusive group of bloggers” raising questions about the circumstances of her death.

The secretive nature of the briefing reflected the fact that the allegations being made were simply innuendo that the IDF did not wish to attach itself to in public. (The Israeli Government’s press office did, however, subsequently disseminate the central allegation; they have since removed the offending tweet without a trace.) The main claim was that Abu Rahmah had died of leukemia, and that her death had nothing to do with tear gas. This claim was quickly discredited, but not before it had raced through the right-wing blogosphere. (Here’s one example.) In my mind, an even more galling innuendo was this one, courtesy of the same participant in the briefing:

IDF has heard about the honor killing theory, that Abu Rahma was stabbed to death for being pregnant as a family “honor killing”, however they cannot confirm this and the direction they currently are progressing is more in towards death from a chronic illness.

Who had discussed the possibility of Abu Rahmah’s death being an “honor killing?” As far as I can tell, no one. Here Gen. Mizrahi appeared to be engaged in what is referred to in rhetoric as “paralipsis” — that is, bringing something up under the pretense of not bringing it up. (“I won’t even mention that my opponent beats his wife.”) By gratuitously bringing up the mention of honor killing, the IDF seemed to be trying to raise the specter of Muslim Barbarism in the public mind while appearing high-minded and generous by dismissing it in favor of the leukemia theory.

In any case, now that these allegations have been discredited, a more interesting question is: who was in the “exclusive group of bloggers” that the IDF chose to disseminate its innuendo? It would be helpful, for future reference, to know which public commentators have been chosen for the role of unofficial IDF spokespeople.

For example, one of the most persistent propagators of the since-discredited claims about Abu Rahmah has been Noah Pollak, head of the right-wing advocacy group Emergency Committee for Israel. He was one of those who disseminated the cancer story, as well as numerous other IDF innuendos (it wouldn’t even be fair to call them IDF talking points, since the IDF itself was unwilling to get behind them in public.) Now, if Pollak wanted to mention the rumors, while making clear that they were unverified claims by an anonymous IDF official with a vested interest in the story, that would be one thing. Instead, he simply repeated each claim as fact. After the cancer story was discredited, he refused to offer any correction, and instead appears to have stopped talking about Abu Rahmah at all.

According to David Frum, Pollak (who understands that “modern warfare is PR by other means”) was instrumental in convincing the IDF to step up its media efforts. Yet the exact nature of the Pollak’s relationship with the IDF is a bit unclear. Given that Pollak is the head of an American advocacy group that was formed to intervene in the 2010 U.S. congressional elections, it would be helpful to know exactly what his relationship to the Israeli military is. Answers to the following questions would be a useful start:

1) Has Pollak made aliyah?

2) Has he ever served in the IDF? If so, when?

3) Does he have a formalized professional relationship to the IDF? If so, what?

4) Has he ever been paid by the IDF for services rendered? If so, what were they?

5) Has he consulted with the IDF on an unofficial basis?

Lest I be accused of making claims about “dual loyalty,” let me make clear that there is nothing wrong whatsoever with U.S. citizens having sympathies for other states, including Israel. An active relationship with the military of a foreign state, however, is a somewhat different question — while it should by no means disqualify Pollak from working in American politics, it is certainly the sort of information that the public deserves to know, particularly it he aims to be a player on the U.S. domestic political scene.

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for January 5th, 2011:

The Wall Street Journal: David Feith adds his voice to the neoconservative criticism of HSBC’s recent advertisement that highlighted the high number of women in the Iranian film industry. Feith characterizes the bank as “Iran’s useful idiots” and says that the ad suggests that “a murderous theocracy is actually a progressive place.” The op-ed lists a number of human rights abuses against women in Iran and concludes that the ad is comparable to defending Nazi propaganda produced by females. “Imagine a 1939 ad pointing to Leni Riefenstahl—Hitler’s court filmmaker and a pioneering female artist—as evidence of the Third Reich’s unexpected “‘potential’,” he writes.

National Review Online: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies‘ Benjamin Weinthal blogs that Germany’s attempts at engagement with Iran, while Iran continues to detain two German journalists, “is yet another example of what a flop this cognitive-behavioral therapy for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and company has been.” Weinthal goes on to compare the arrest of three American hikers in 2009 to “replicating the 1979 model” of holding Americans hostage. Weinthal says that engagement with Iran has only produced more hostage crises and is a form of appeasement. “Germany’s flourishing trade relationship with Iran (German exports to Iran reached €3.4 billion this year) and a steady stream of German members of parliament travelling to Iran to meet Holocaust deniers, human-rights violators, and haters of women, reveal the bankruptcy of critical dialogue and change through trade,” he concludes.

The Wall Street Journal: Mark Dubowitz, Executive Director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, opines in the WSJ Asia edition that the Reserve Bank of India’s crackdown on domestic buyers of Iranian oil marks a major improvement in international sanctions against Iran’s energy sector, but that “further measures, and time for them to work, will still be needed to convince Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program.” Dubowitz argues that the U.S. could do more to ensure that oil supply will not tighten if sanctions are more strictly enforced. He writes, “Provided the United States and its allies can get more oil on the market—for example the Iran-loathing Saudis could increase production, or President Obama could lift the moratorium on offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico—then the world oil market would have considerably more elasticity.” He concludes, “The near-miraculous attack of the Stuxnet virus on Iran’s centrifuges and the untimely deaths of key Iranian nuclear scientists may have bought the administration that time, and further strengthened those who want to use economic sticks to beat back Iran’s nuclear aspirations.”

The Wall Street Journal: Emanuele Ottolenghi, a fellow the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, opines in the WSJ’s Europe edition that European countries could do more to expand sanctions against individuals associated with human rights abuses in Iran. In contrast to those who argue that the West’s approach to pressuring Iran must focus on either human rights or Tehran’s nuclear program, he writes, “If Western democracies were to target the Islamic Republic for its human-rights abuses, bolster the country’s internal opposition, and speak directly to the Iranian people over the heads of their oppressors, they would cause significant harm to Tehran.” Ottolenghi concludes with the suggestion that “every day, a member of the U.S. Congress or of the European Parliament spend just 30 seconds recounting the tale of one Iranian dissident, or one victim of Iran’s suppression, and plead for their freedom.”