{"id":8366,"date":"2010-10-21T14:30:43","date_gmt":"2010-10-21T22:30:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=8366"},"modified":"2010-10-21T14:30:43","modified_gmt":"2010-10-21T22:30:43","slug":"thursday-iran-talking-points-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2010\/10\/21\/thursday-iran-talking-points-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Thursday Iran Talking Points"},"content":{"rendered":"

from LobeLog<\/a>: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for October 21st, 2010:<\/em><\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/a><\/em>: Glenn Kessler reports that Iran is increasingly unable to conduct \u00e2\u20ac\u0153normal banking\u00e2\u20ac\u009d activities due to the sanctions, and is attempting to set up banking operations in such Muslim countries as Iraq and Malaysia \u00e2\u20ac\u0153using dummy names and opaque ownership structures.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d For their alleged support of Iran\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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)<\/a> told Kessler that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the 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.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

The National Interest<\/a><\/em>: Ken Pollack, the director of Brookings\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Mid East Center, reviews the Obama administration\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Iran policy and concludes that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153it is working, but it probably isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t going to work.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He says an airstrike on Iran\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nuclear program \u00e2\u20ac\u201d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153and launching air strikes will be war\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201d 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153an 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.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

The National Interest<\/a><\/em>: Georgetown professor and former CIA officer Paul Pillar responds to Pollack\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s article and disagrees that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153pressure and more pressure\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is the best way of dealing with Iran\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s record of behavior. Pillar also disputes the argument that a strategy of deterrence has \u00e2\u20ac\u0153no guarantees of success\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153failure is invariably catastrophic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is reason enough to pressure Iran. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6[T]o make that observation as an argument for not tolerating someone else\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he contends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153normal banking\u00e2\u20ac\u009d activities due to the sanctions, and is attempting to set up banking operations in such Muslim countries as Iraq and Malaysia \u00e2\u20ac\u0153using dummy names and opaque ownership […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-8366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8366"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8367,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8366\/revisions\/8367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8366"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=8366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}