Iraqi President Fouad Massoum said this past week that the government was looking for an independent Sunni Muslim to fill the post of defense minister in an effort to improve chances of reunifying the country and defeating the group that calls itself the Islamic State (IS).

Massoum, in his first extended comments to a U.S. audience since his recent selection as president of Iraq, also said Sept. 26 that Iraqi Kurds – while they might still hold a referendum on independence – would not secede from Iraq at a  time of such major peril.

“Today there is no possibility to announce such a state,” Massoum, a Kurd and former prime minister of the Kurdish region, told a packed room at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

“Forming a Kurdish state is a project, and a project like that has to take into account” the views of regional and other countries and the extraordinary circumstances of the current terrorist menace to Iraq.

Kurdish threats to hold a referendum and declare independence were widely seen as leverage to force the resignation of former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Maliki,also under pressure from President Barack Obama’s administration, Iraqi Sunnis and Iran, stepped down to allow a less  polarizing member of his Shi’ite Dawa party – Haider al-Abadi – to take the top job.

Abadi, however, has been unable so far to get parliament to approve his choices for the sensitive posts of defense and interior ministers. Queried about this, Massoum said, “There seems to be some understanding that the minister of defense should be Sunni and there is a search for an independent Sunni.”

As for interior minister, Massoum said, they were looking for an “independent Shiite” to take the post.

For the time being, Abadi is holding the portfolios, but unlike his predecessor, who retained them, has clearly stated that he does not want to assume those responsibilities for long. Massoum said a decision was likely after the coming Muslim holiday, the Eid al-Adha.

The Iraqi president also said there was progress on a new arrangement for sharing Iraq’s oil revenues, a major source of internal grievances under Maliki. A decision has been made that each of the regions will have representation on a higher oil and gas council, Massoum said. He also expressed confidence in Iraq’s new oil minister, Adel Abdel-Mahdi.

Asked whether Iraq would split into three countries – as Vice President Joe Biden once recommended – Massoum said there might be an eventual move toward a more confederal system but “partitioning Iraq … into three independent states is a bit far-fetched, especially in the current situation.”

Massoum began his remarks with a fascinating explanation of how IS – which he called ISIS, for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams – came into being. He said the group began “as a marriage” between nationalist military officers and religious extremists that took place when they were in prison together while the U.S. still occupied Iraq.

The notion of combining Iraq with the Levant – made up of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan – is actually an old Arab nationalist concept, Massoum said.

As for the religious aspects of the movement, Massoum traced that to the so-called Hashishin – users of hashish. This Shiite group, formed in the late 11th century, challenged the then-Sunni rulers of the day, used suicide attacks and were said to be under the influence of drugs. The English word “assassin” derives from the term.

“Many times these terrorist practices [were used] in the name of a religion or a sect,” Massoum said.

He praised the United States for coming to the aid of Iraqis and Kurds against IS and also expressed support for the recent bombing of IS and Jabhat al-Nusra positions in Syria. But Massoum sidestepped repeated questions about whether such strikes would inadvertently bolster the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“Hitting ISIS in Syria should not mean this is to support the regime or as a beginning to overthrowing Bashar al-Assad,” Massoum said. “That’s why the attacks are limited.”

Asked about Iraqi relations with Iran and whether the Iraqis and Kurds were serving as go-betweens for the United States and Iran in mutual efforts to degrade IS, Massoum noted Iraq’s historic relations with its neighbour and that Iraq also had common interests with the United States.

“We don’t look at America with Iranian eyes and we don’t look at Iran with American eyes,” Massoum said. He evaded questions about Iran’s military role in Iraq, saying that while he had heard reports that Quds Force Chief Qasem Soleimani had visited the Kurdish region, requests for a meeting were not fulfilled.

As for Iranian military advisers who were said to have helped liberate the town of Amerli and relieve the siege of Mt. Sinjar, Massoum said, there were “many  experts” who had come to help the Kurdish peshmerga forces.

Massoum attributed the collapse of the Iraqi army at Mosul to poor leadership, corruption and decades of setbacks starting with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980. This was followed a decade later by his invasion of Kuwait and subsequent refusal to cooperate with the international community.

“These blows all had an impact on the psychology of the commanders and soldiers,” Massoum said. Iraqi armed forces have gone “from failure to failure.”

The president confirmed that under the new Iraqi government, each governorate will have its own national guard made up of local people. This concept – which may be partly funded by the Saudis and other rich Gulf Arabs – is an attempt to replicate the success of the so-called sons of Iraq by motivating Sunni tribesmen to confront IS as they previously did al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Asked what would happen to Shi’ite militias – which have committed abuses against Sunnis and helped alienate that population from Baghdad – Massum said the militias would eventually have to be shut down but only after the IS threat had been eliminated. He did not indicate how long that might take.

Massum was also asked about reported IS plots against U.S. and French subway systems. Abadi earlier this week made reference to such plots, but U.S. officials said they had no such intelligence.

Iraqi officials accompanying Massoum, who spoke on condition that they not be identified, said Abadi had been misinterpreted and was referring only to the types of attacks IS might mount in the West. Massoum warned, however, that “sleeper cells” in the West as well as in Iraq might be planning terrorist attacks.

Asked about Turkey – which has been reticent about aiding Iraq against IS – Massoum, who met at the U.N. this week with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said he expected more help now that 49 Turkish hostages in Mosul have been freed.

Massoum also urged Turkey to do a better job vetting young men who arrive there from Europe and America, and prevent them from reaching border areas and slipping into IS-controlled areas in Syria.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

With U.S.-mediated Israel-Palestinian peace talks once again dangling over the abyss, a new book has kicked up controversy over the roots of U.S. policy toward Israelis and Palestinians.

In Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict, John Judis, a senior editor at The New Republic, argues that President Harry Truman was more ambivalent about the creation of the state of Israel than is commonly known.

While Truman famously told audiences after he left the presidency that he considered himself a modern-day Cyrus – after the Persian king who freed Jews from Babylonian captivity in the sixth century B.C. – Truman actually preferred a federation of Arabs and Jews to a Jewish-run state and worried about the impact of favouring Zionist claims over Arab ones, according to Judis.

“His preference was for a plan negotiated by American Henry Grady and British official Herbert Morrison that recommended a federated Palestine jointly administered by Arabs and Jews,” Judis writes. “‘Zionist pressure killed the plan,’ ” Judis quotes Truman as saying.

While the plan – as Judis acknowledges – was not very realistic given strong Zionist desire for a Jewish state, the impact of the Holocaust on US and global politics and Britain’s eagerness to shed expensive overseas commitments after World War II, Judis’s depiction of Truman’s concerns have upset some American Jews and others who prefer a less nuanced narrative about the U.S. role in Israel’s origins.

Among those criticising Judis is Leon Wieseltier, a colleague at The New Republic, who in an email to historian Ron Radish that was published by the hawkish Washington Free Beacon accused Judis of being “a tourist in this subject” with a “shallow, derivative, tendentious, imprecise and sometimes risibly inaccurate” understanding of Zionist and Jewish history.

Wieseltier also accuses Judis of insulting Jews, showing “shocking indifference” to their fate after the Holocaust and even being a disciple of communist radical Rosa Luxemburg.

Peter Beinart, a former colleague of Judis’s at The New Republic whose own recent book – “The Crisis of Zionism” – also created quite a stir, wrote in an email that much of the criticism of Judis as “anti-Israel” and anti-Jewish was patently unfair.

“I honestly don’t know what people mean when they say John is ‘anti-Israel,’ ” Beinart wrote. “It’s such an overused and ill-defined phrase. I think what he wants for Israel today is the same thing that most Israelis who care about democracy want: a two state solution, a democratic Jewish state and an end to Israeli control over millions of stateless Palestinians.”

Judis discussed the controversy at an appearance in Washington earlier this week before an audience at the Centre for the National Interest. He said that he had been interested in the subject of how Israel came to be since he edited an essay by Noam Chomsky in 1971 that advocated a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians before that was fashionable again.

The Arab side of the debate, Judis said, has been obscured by the events of World War II and the Holocaust and by the fact that the Jews of Eastern and Central Europe had nowhere to go but British Mandate Palestine after the U.S. and other Western countries shut off immigration following World War I.

“If immigration had not been closed off, Israel would have been located somewhere between Silver Spring [Maryland] and Great Neck [New York],” Judis quipped, referring to two suburbs with large numbers of descendents of Jewish immigrants.

Truman, Judis said, had tremendous sympathy for the 50,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who were stuck in displaced persons camps in Europe after World War II. But he was “not a Christian Zionist” like former British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour of the 1917 Balfour Declaration fame or the prime minister at the time, David Lloyd George, or even President Woodrow Wilson.

“He did not have a special attachment to the Jewish people,” Judis said of Truman.

In his book, Judis writes that “Truman’s foreign policy views were grounded in personal morality. He saw the world divided between good guys and bad guys and between underdogs and bullies. He worried about fairness.”

Judis sees the world in shades of grey. Among his more incendiary comments in the book – from the point of view of traditional Zionists — is that “in historical terms, the Zionist claim to Palestine had no more validity than the claim by some radical Islamists to a new caliphate.”

Asked what was new in his account, given other revisionist histories of Israel’s creation primarily by Israeli authors such as Ari Shavit and Benny Morris, Judis said the book would not have caused such a stir if it had been published in Europe or Israel. “What’s new is it is being published in the U.S.…The idea of the two sides of Truman – that’s a different way of doing it.”

While some books attribute Truman’s decision to recognise Israel to his being a Christian Zionist and others say Truman was merely bowing to domestic politics and the power of a Jewish lobby, Truman had “a principled view but at some point got frustrated and gave up,” Judis said.

As for the book’s relevance to the current Mideast impasse, Judis said he hopes to convince more Americans of the legitimacy of the Palestinian case to help U.S. leaders mediate a fair and durable solution to the crisis. “We have to recognise the Arab side better and recognise that they have a real beef,” he said.

“I can’t solve the situation but the book might have a slight effect on changing how people feel about this issue,” Judis said.

Jewish Democrats are increasingly less supportive of the policies of right-wing Israeli governments, Judis said, but “the Republicans are going in the opposite direction.”

He cited the recent furor over comments by New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a possible candidate for president in 2016, referring to the West Bank as “occupied” territory during a speech in Las Vegas in front of wealthy Republican Jews. Christie has since apologised for not using the adjective “disputed.”

U.S. domestic politics have always played a role in Washington’s Middle East policy although some presidents – among them Dwight Eisenhower – were more willing to confront the Jewish state. Judis quotes a famous line by Truman that “I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism; I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”

Even after the U.S. recognised Israel in May 1948, Judis says that Truman pressed for Israel to allow Palestinian refugees to return and to adjust the borders of Israel in a manner more favourable to Arabs.

However, Arab divisions — and the willingness of many Arab states to use the Palestinian cause for their own purposes – have also jeopardised subsequent efforts at peace talks, Judis acknowledges.

“Almost every American president since Truman has tried to find a way to improve the lot of Palestinian Arabs,” Judis writes. “Yet Truman’s successors have, as a rule, suffered the same fate as he did.”

A new poll following the election of President Hassan Rouhani says that a majority of Iranians oppose Iran’s intervention in Syria and Iraq and believe that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons despite their government’s claims to the contrary.

President Hassan Rouhani in Bishkek, Sep. 13, 2013. Credit: kremlin.ru/cc by 3.0

The poll, released Friday and conducted Aug. 26-Sep. 22, of 1,205 Iranians in face-to-face interviews by a subcontractor for Zogby Research Services, also indicated that Rouhani had relatively lukewarm support at the time and that many Iranians would like to see a more democratic political system in their country.

The results jibe with the June presidential elections in which Rouhani won a bare majority of votes, albeit against half a dozen other candidates. Half of those polled after the election either opposed Rouhani or said that his victory would make no difference in their lives.

This reporter gained a similar impression of Iranian scepticism about their new president during a visit to Tehran in early August.

Not surprisingly, given the impact of draconian sanctions and mismanagement by the previous Mahmoud Ahmadinejad government on the Iranian economy, the poll found that only 36 percent of Iranians said they were better off now than five years ago, compared to 43 percent who said they were worse off. However, the same percentage – 43 percent – said they expected their lives to improve under the Rouhani administration.

Among the most interesting findings were those related to foreign policy. The poll found that 54 percent believe Iran’s intervention in Syria has had negative consequences – perhaps a reflection of the financial drain on Iran of the war in Syria and of the unpopularity of the Bashar al-Assad regime.

Nearly the same proportion of the Iranian population – 52 percent – also opposed Iranian involvement in Iraq, which is ruled by a Shi’ite Muslim government friendly to Tehran. Iranian activities in support of fellow Shi’ites in Lebanon and Bahrain were only slightly more popular, while only in Yemen and Afghanistan did a majority of Iranians say their country’s actions have had a positive impact.

Jim Zogby, director of Zogby Research Services, told IPS that Iranians know “Syria has become a huge problem in the world and they don’t want to have more problems with the world.”

The low marks for ties to Iraq may reflect “lingering anti-Iraq sentiment” stemming from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, Zogby said.

Iranian attitudes toward democracy and the nuclear issue were also interesting. While a plurality of Iranians (29 percent) listed unemployment as their top priority, a quarter of the population rated advancing democracy first.

Other major priorities included protecting personal and civil rights (23 percent); increasing rights for women (19 percent); ending corruption (18 percent); and political or governmental reform (18 percent).

According to the poll, only a tiny fraction – six percent – listed continuing Iran’s uranium enrichment as a top priority. Yet 55 percent agreed with the statement that “my country has ambitions to produce nuclear weapons” compared to 37 percent who believe the government’s assertions that the programme is purely peaceful.

The Iranian government insists that it is not aiming to produce weapons and signed an agreement in Geneva Nov. 24 to constrain its nuclear programme in return for modest sanctions relief.

In a strong show of nationalism, 96 percent said continuing the nuclear programme was worth the pain of sanctions. Only seven percent listed resolving the stand-off with the world over the Iranian nuclear programme so sanctions could be lifted as their top priority and only five percent put improving relations with the United States and the West at the head of their list.

Zogby said it was not surprising that Iranians would give a low priority to the nuclear programme yet “when you push that button [and question Iran’s rights], the nationalism takes off.”

He noted those who identified themselves as Rouhani supporters were more inclined to affirm Iran’s right to nuclear weapons than Rouhani opponents – 76 percent compared to 61 percent.

The poll results, Zogby said, suggest that Iranians do not consider Rouhani an exemplar of the reformist Green Movement that convulsed the country during and following 2009 presidential elections, but rather as an establishment figure.

“His supporters are more in the hardline camp,” Zogby said.

During the decades when Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood was a barely tolerated opposition party, it campaigned against the reigning secular autocrats under the banner “Islam is the solution.”

With the military’s removal on Jul. 3 of the Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, the region’s oldest exemplar of political Islam has lost its best and perhaps only chance to validate that slogan. Indeed, the rise and abrupt fall of the Morsi presidency are a timely comeuppance for a world view that, starting with Iran’s 1979 revolution, seemed to be gaining adherents throughout the Muslim world.

Political Islam has had a long arc, reviving in the modern era with the founding of the Brotherhood by Hassan al Banna in 1928 in opposition to a monarchy largely controlled by Western interests. Over the decades, monarchs and military-run governments of assorted Arab nationalist, socialist and capitalist hues have suppressed the Brotherhood and its various offshoots. Then came spring 2011.

While Islamic movements did not lead the rebellions against aging autocrats, they were well placed to benefit because of superior organisation, a history of providing social services to the poor and a record of repression by the state.

Once in power, however, these movements frequently overreached. Nowhere was this more evident than in Egypt, where the Brotherhood reneged on initial promises not to seek a parliamentary majority or the presidency – promises made to avoid provoking a backlash from secular forces.

Then, Morsi – a substitute for a more powerful Brotherhood official, Khairat el-Shater, who was disqualified from running – misinterpreted his narrow victory in a runoff a year ago as a mandate to  consolidate  power and essentially gut the Arab world’s most important democratic transition.

Given the magnitude of the problems Egypt faced after the removal of Hosni Mubarak, only a government that truly reached out beyond its political base stood a chance of succeeding.  Without that broad popular support, the Brotherhood was loathe to implement crucial economic reforms and incapable of concluding a bailout agreement with the International Monetary Fund.

The constitution rammed through by the Brotherhood last spring disappointed those looking for major improvements from the Mubarak era.  Morsi was also tone-deaf  in many of his appointments, going so far as to name a member of the once-violent Gamaa al-Islamiya that had massacred foreigners in Luxor to govern one of Egypt’s most important tourism hubs.

The Brotherhood mistook the piety and religiosity of ordinary Egyptians for allegiance to a largely one-party religious government. This is a common mistake among Islamists. Many people in the Middle East might like to have a pious Muslim as a president but even more, they want competent leaders who will listen to others and forge constructive relations with the outside world.

Morsi’s removal is a warning that Islamic parties cannot count on religious identity alone to govern successfully and need to work constructively with others. This lesson seems to have been internalised by the Al-Nour party, a nominally more hard-line group that supported Morsi’s ouster and pushed for a consensus choice for prime minister instead of Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel laureate and champion of secular forces.

The fate of the Brotherhood experiment in Egypt has important ramifications throughout the region – for Tunisia, still struggling to write a constitution, and for Syria, whose opposition includes numerous Islamic groups and whose regime is banking on the support of religious minorities terrified by the notion of Islamic rule.

Morsi’s fall is also a sobering lesson for Iran, the world’s only theocracy, and Turkey, whose ruling AK Party has strong Islamist roots. Both initially welcomed the Brotherhood victory but instead of validating an Islamic world view, the events in Egypt have underlined its limitations.

In Turkey, Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan is still reeling from protests in Istanbul and other major cities against his government’s authoritarianism and creeping efforts to legislate Islamic morality. Erdogan’s behaviour in recent years has contrasted with the AKP’s tolerance of opposing views when it first came to power a decade ago. Increasingly, Erdogan has come to resemble previous Turkish autocrats with an Islamic veneer.

In Iran, meanwhile, the 1979 Islamic Revolution died years ago. Iran is now one of the least religious countries in the Middle East, a place where Muslim holidays such as Ramadan are barely observed compared to ancient Persian celebrations such as Nowruz.

In urging Iranians to vote in last month’s presidential elections, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had to resort to appealing to the electorate’s patriotism as Iranians, not their religious identity as Shiite Muslims – a telling sign that he recognises how unpopular the system has become. Iranians promptly chose the least hard-line candidate allowed to run, Hassan Rouhani. One of the reasons his victory was surprising is because he is a cleric and clerics are notoriously unpopular among the citizens of the Islamic Republic.

In a speech shortly after his election, Rouhani indicated that he understands that religious ideology is no substitute for competence and accountability. He promised to listen to the “majority of Iranians” who voted for him and added:

“In our region, there were some countries who miscalculated their positions, and you have witnessed what happened to them…The world is in a transitional mood, and a new order has yet to be established. If we miscalculate our national situation, it will be detrimental for us.”

Demonstrators in Cairo hold up used tear gas shells. Credit: Cam McGrath/IPS

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Apr 24 2013 (IPS)

It’s no wonder that Egypt has floundered in its efforts to create a more democratic system from the ruins of the Mubarak regime.

A sweeping new history of Middle Eastern political activists shows that the search for justice has deep roots in the region but has often been thwarted by the intervention of foreign powers.

The Arab Spring revolts of 2011 were “both improbable and long in the making,” writes Elizabeth Thompson in her book, “Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East.”

The young people who massed in Tahrir Square and overturned the U.S.-backed Mubarak dictatorship were the heirs of Col. Ahmad Urabi, whose peasant army was crushed in 1882 by British troops. The beneficiaries of 2011 so far, however, are the heirs of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose concept of “justice” appears to restrict the rights of women, religious minorities and secular groups.

On Tuesday, President Mohamed Morsi’s own legal adviser resigned to protest a law that would force the retirement of more than 3,000 judges – Mubarak appointees that have sought to blunt the rising influence of Islamist politicians such as Morsi. The United States, while criticising human rights abuses under the new regime, appears to be placing a higher priority on Egypt maintaining its peace treaty with Israel.

If, as President Barack Obama likes to say – quoting Martin Luther King – “the arc of history bends toward justice” – in the Middle East, that arc has been exceedingly long.

The breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I interrupted movements for constitutional government and tainted liberalism by association with Western colonialism. Military autocrats, nationalists and Islamic groups took their place.

Thompson, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Virginia, structures her book by compiling mini-biographies of strivers for justice beginning with an early Ottoman bureaucrat, Mustafa Ali, who wrote a critique of corruption in Egypt, and ending with Wael Ghonim.

Ghonim, a Google executive, created a Facebook page devoted to a young Egyptian beaten to death in 2010 by police that attracted 300,000 followers – many of whom later gathered in Tahrir Square.

Others profiled in the book include Halide Edib, known as Turkey’s “Joan of Arc,” who first supported, then opposed Kemal Ataturk’s dictatorship; Yusuf Salman Yusuf or “Comrade Fahd,” whose Iraqi Communist Party was the largest and most inclusive political movement in modern Iraqi history; and Ali Shariati, the Iranian Islamic Socialist whose ideals were hijacked by the clerical regime after the 1979 revolution.

At a book launch Tuesday at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Thompson was asked by IPS if her book was largely a “history of losers” and whether there was any way to break the dismal cycle of one step forward, two steps back toward effective, representative government in the Middle East.

She compared recent revolts in the region to the 1848 revolutions in Europe that failed at the time but were key precursors of democratic movements to follow.

“You have to think long term,” she said. The optimistic interpretation of the Arab Spring is that it has led to “a fundamental shift in the political culture that will bear fruit decades later.”

She conceded that the current picture in Egypt is not a happy one.

Women, who in 2011 figured prominently in the overthrow of Mubarak, are now afraid to go to Tahrir Square for fear of being molested by thugs. Morsi, the president who hails from the Muslim Brotherhood, “is in a defensive posture,” Thompson said, “playing to the Salafist right.” Meanwhile, “the poor and the Copts are losing out.”

However, the Egyptian press has never been so free and Middle Easterners in general are more exposed to information than at any time in their history, she said. “People are not sealed off like they were in Syria in 1989” when state-run media omitted news that the Berlin Wall had fallen, she said.

Still, time and again in the last 150 years, the desire for security and independence from foreign powers has trumped liberal conceptions of human rights.

Thompson’s book contains many tantalising “What ifs” often linked to foreign machinations.

What if France had permitted Syria to retain an independent constitutional monarchy under King Feisal after World War I? French troops instead occupied the country under an internationally blessed mandate that lasted until after World War II.

What if Akram al-Hourani, leader of the Arab Socialist Party in Syria after independence, had not agreed to union with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt in 1958? Nasser proceeded to outlaw Syrian political parties and in 1963, the Baath party staged a coup and installed a regime that is fighting for its existence today.

The book also sheds light on important figures such as the Palestinian Salah Khalaf, Yasser Arafat’s number two who was known as Abu Iyad. Assassinated in 1991 by the rejectionist Abu Nidal faction, Iyad had made the transition from terrorist mastermind to supporter of the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. Arafat, who used to rely on Khalaf’s advice, might have steered his movement more wisely in his later years if he had not lost Abu Iyad as well as PLO military commander, Abu Jihad, who was killed by Israelis in 1988.

If, as Thompson concludes, the Arab Spring “has reprised the struggle interrupted by the World Wars and the Cold War,” it is a struggle that is still far from being won.

A member of the Free Syrian Army at the entrance to Sarmeen. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Feb 20 2013 (IPS)

A lack of Israeli pressure for the U.S. to intervene and Israel’s ability to go after sensitive targets in Syria on its own are factors in the Barack Obama administration’s reluctance to get more deeply involved in the Syrian civil war.

Despite reports that the U.S. may be reconsidering its rejection of calls to arm selected rebels, the Obama administration has shown little willingness to enter the Syrian fray.

Since the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad began nearly two years ago, the U.S. has confined itself to providing humanitarian relief to internally displaced Syrians and Syrian refugees while prodding the Syrian opposition to organise and seeking Russian buy-in for a political transition that removes Assad. Nearly 100,000 people have been killed in the fighting, with no end in sight.

“If there was a powerful push from Israel and its amen chorus in the U.S. to get in on the ground, that would change the policy overnight,” Bruce Riedel, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, told IPS.

While Israel does not want to see a jihadist regime replace Assad, Riedel said the dominant view in the Israeli military is that “while this [the Syrian civil war] is messy, it is fundamentally good for Israel” as it removes “the only conventional military threat Israel faced”.

Shai Feldman, an Israel expert at Brandeis University, said that he doubted the U.S. would intervene even if Israel pressured Washington, given war fatigue after a decade of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Feldman added that while Riedel’s analysis was an accurate “snapshot” of current Israeli views about Syria, those views have evolved.

Feldman described three phases of Israeli thinking on Syria: initially, a desire to keep “the devil we know;” later, the view that getting rid of Assad would strike a major blow against Iran and its ability to supply Hezbollah in Lebanon and; now, “real worries about what happens next”.

Israel can handle “extremists like Hamas in Gaza and [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah in Lebanon,” Feldman said, but fears chaos. It worries about who will control Syria’s arsenal of weapons and who, if anyone, will check the influence of Al-Qaeda affiliates.

Israel has clearly decided to take action on its own to deal with perceived threats from Syria and to prevent sensitive weapons systems from reaching Hezbollah. Taking advantage of weakened Syrian government defences, Israel last month (Jan. 30) struck several targets, including SA-17 surface-to-air missiles stored outside a military research centre near Damascus.

Fred Hof, a former U.S. State Department official dealing with Syria, told IPS that the Israelis “hit a big parking lot where these unassembled, not yet operational air defence weapons were lined up. Because of the blast radius, some damage was also done to the [nearby] building.”

According to Time magazine, the strike also destroyed “warehouses stocked with equipment necessary for the deployment of chemical and biological weapons”. Time said the U.S. gave Israel the “green light” for the attacks.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Feb. 15 that the Israeli strike also killed a senior Iranian officer in the Quds force of the Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Hassan Shateri – also known as Husam Khoshnevis – responsible for Iranian reconstruction in Lebanon and a key liaison with Hezbollah.

Feldman said it was possible that Shateri – not the surface-to-air missiles – was the main target of the Israeli strike.

Other sources say the general and another senior Iranian officer were killed by Syrian rebels as the Iranians were driving to Damascus airport. Iranian media have blamed Shateri’s death on “Zionists” and their “allies” in Syria, which is how Iran refers to the Syrian opposition.

Israel has shown an ability to strike sensitive targets in Syria before the outbreak of civil war there. In 2008, Imad Mughniyeh – Hezbollah’s chief of operations and liaison with Iranian intelligence – died in a car bombing in Damascus widely attributed to Israel. A year earlier, Israel destroyed a nuclear reactor under construction in Syria.

The current situation affords new risks as well as opportunities for Israeli intervention. Speaking in Germany on Feb. 3, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, while not confirming Israeli responsibility for the recent strikes in Syria, said “that’s proof when we said something we mean it… we say that we don’t think it [Hezbollah] should be allowed to bring advanced weapons systems into Lebanon.”

U.S. officials have said that their red line for direct U.S. intervention in Syria would be if the Assad regime uses chemical weapons against its own people. The White House is wary of sending sophisticated weapons to Syrian rebels for fear that they might fall into the hands of jihadists such as the Al-Nusrah front, which has been put on a State Department list of terrorist organizations.

However, the issue has been the source of dissension within the Obama administration. Reacting to news that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – joined by outgoing Defence Secretary Leon Panetta and by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey – favoured arming Syrian rebels, White House spokesman Jay Carney mentioned Israel as one reason why the administration had not done so.

“I can tell you that, as the president and his national security team have looked at these issues, we have had to be very careful,” Carney told reporters at a Feb. 8 briefing. “We don’t want any weapons to fall into the wrong hands and potentially further endanger the Syrian people, our ally, Israel, or the United States.”

Hof, who left the Obama administration in September and is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, has advocated providing weapons to selected Syrian rebels as a way to shore up a U.S. relationship with whoever emerges victorious in Damascus. He said Tuesday that the U.S. could provide training and share intelligence if it is still queasy about arms transfers.

“It’s about establishing working relationships with carefully vetted elements,” he said. “If we’ve already decided men with arms will determine the outcome, not to have a relationship with these people will roll the dice.”

European countries are imposing unprecedented sanctions against Iran in part in hopes of preventing an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear installations that could further destabilise the Middle East and wreak havoc on the global economy.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said the sanctions are designed to "increase(e) the pressure for a peaceful settlement of these disputes." Credit: opendemocracy/CC BY 2.0

The decision Monday by the European Union to phase out purchases of Iranian oil by Jul. 1 is timed to U.S. legislation that has the same deadline for sanctions against foreign banks that continue to do business with the Iranian central bank. However, European and U.S. experts on Iran cite the fear of a new war as a key reason for the EU decision.

“The French administration is worried about Israel attacking Iran this year,” a French researcher, speaking on condition of anonymity because he advises the French government, told IPS Wednesday.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague, answering questions Tuesday in the House of Commons, said the new sanctions are designed to “to lead us away from any conflict by increasing the pressure for a peaceful settlement of these disputes.”

The EU decision reflects Israeli success in pressuring both the United States and Europe. Israeli officials have repeatedly called for “crippling” sanctions against Iran, suggesting that might forestall their use of military force against Iran’s nuclear facilities – and collateral damage in terms of sharply higher oil prices and increased regional instability.

There is particular concern that Israel might act in 2012 out of concern that Iran is nearing nuclear weapons capability and in the belief that the Barack Obama administration would be obliged to support Israel in a U.S. presidential election year.

Stuart Eizenstat, who negotiated with Europeans a decade ago after the U.S. Congress first enacted sanctions that sought to penalise foreign oil companies doing business with Iran, told IPS Wednesday that the EU turnaround was “remarkable and stunning…given where they were on sanctions in general and Iran in particular.”

Eizenstat credited the Obama administration’s success in “multilateralising” the dispute, building on the basis of U.N. Security Council resolutions initiated by the George W. Bush administration.

Eizenstat, who co-chairs an Iran task force of the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank, added that the current U.S. government has benefited from a dual track policy of extending “the hand of friendship along with the club of sanctions”.

Europe’s willingness to deprive itself of Iranian oil at a time when it is facing a possible new recession is also the result of Iran’s actions, particularly since the disputed 2009 presidential elections.

Iran’s government, once practiced at driving a wedge between the United States and Europe over policy toward Iran, has instead united them by accelerating its nuclear programme, abusing human rights and targeting European nationals and the staff of European embassies.

Accusing Europeans of fomenting anti-government protests, the Iranian government in 2009 detained several Iranian staff of the British embassy, a British-Greek journalist and a French academic.

Last January, Iran executed a Dutch-Iranian woman, Zahra Bahrami, a rare use of capital punishment against a dual national. Bahrami was arrested during the post-election disturbances and subsequently convicted of being a drug smuggler.

Finally, last November, Iranian paramilitaries invaded and trashed the British embassy in Tehran, leading Britain to close the embassy, withdraw foreign staff and expel Iranian diplomats from London.

At the same time, Iran has continued to enrich uranium to higher levels and earlier this month began enrichment at a facility near Qom that is burrowed into a mountain and less vulnerable to attack.

“There has been a hardening of the European position, that’s for sure,” Anne Penketh, programme director of the British American Security Information Council, a think tank that seeks a nuclear weapons-free world, told IPS.

Penketh pointed to the leading role of France under President Nicolas Sarkozy in pushing for more concerted European action against Iran. At times, Sarkozy – who is also running for re-election this year – has been even more hawkish than President Obama.

The French expert on Iran attributed the tough stance to Sarkozy’s personal political views and to Iranian actions, including the detention of French academic Clothide Reiss. Reiss spent six weeks in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison in 2009 and was forced to remain in Iran for nine more months after being convicted of spying.

Eizenstat said that the combination of Sarkozy and the leaders of Germany and Great Britain has been crucial in building a consensus against the Iranian nuclear programme. Europe, Eizenstat said, fears that an Iran with nuclear weapons would “unravel the entire nonproliferation regime”.

He added that “there was and is genuine concern that if they didn’t go this way on sanctions, there was a real threat of an Israeli military strike.” The consequences of a European oil embargo on Iran pale in comparison to those of a new war, which would be “catastrophic”, Eizenstat said.

Writing in an upcoming article for The New York Times Magazine, Ronen Bergman, an Israeli journalist and expert on Iran, added to the media drumbeat by predicting an Israeli strike on Iran in 2012.

Asked if Israeli threats of military action were designed to produce an oil embargo, Eizenstat said the Israelis “are legitimately planning it (military action) but are aware of the grave risks. They have played their hand with considerable skill.”

In his State of the Union address to the U.S. Congress Tuesday night, President Obama took credit for Iran’s growing isolation.

“Through the power of our diplomacy, a world that was once divided about how to deal with Iran’s nuclear programme now stands as one,” he said.

While repeating that the U.S. would “take no options off the table” to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, the president asserted that “a peaceful resolution of this issue is still possible, and far better, and if Iran changes course and meets its obligations, it can rejoin the community of nations.”

There have been no negotiations with Iran for over a year and optimism about a renewal of talks is limited. Despite statements by Iranian officials that they are ready to return to negotiations, the Iranian government has not responded in writing to a letter last October from the chief European official in charge of foreign policy, Catherine Ashton.

The United States and its partners in the so-called P5+1 – the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany – are discussing what they might propose to Iran should new negotiations take place. The most urgent demand is for Iran to stop enriching uranium to a level of 20 percent U-235, the isotope necessary for nuclear explosions.

However, the U.S. and its partners have not decided what to offer Iran beyond fuel for a reactor that produces medical isotopes.

A hard-line Iranian newspaper, Keyhan, defiantly suggested Wednesday that Iran immediately cut off oil sales to Europe, which in the past has purchased about 18 percent of Iran’s oil exports. Keyhan also repeated Iranian threats to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of world oil supplies pass.

Other Iranian media were more sober, reflecting a deepening economic crisis that has seen the Iranian currency, the rial, lose more than half its value in recent months. The newspaper Javan, according to a translation by Mideast Mirror, called the new sanctions “a planned conspiracy, which we need to deal with wisely and cautiously and not provide opportunity to our enemies.”

President Barack Obama talks on the phone with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office, Jan. 12, 2012. Credit: White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Jan 18 2012 (IPS)

A former senior adviser on the Middle East to the last four U.S. presidents says that “the negatives far outweigh the positives” of war with Iran and the United States should augment Israel’s nuclear weapons delivery systems to dissuade it from attacking the Islamic Republic.

Bruce Riedel, who served on the White House National Security Council and dealt extensively with both Israel and Iran, told an audience Tuesday at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank, that while an Iran with nuclear weapons would be a significant strategic setback for the United States and Israel, deterrence and containment were preferable to military force.

He criticised those, including all but one Republican presidential candidate, who discuss an attack on Iran’s nuclear installations as though it would be “over in an afternoon or a couple of weeks”.

“I don’t use the term ‘military strike,’ ” Riedel said. “We will be at war with Iran. Once we begin it, the determination of when it ends will not be a unilateral one… This could become another ground war in Asia.”

The global economy would suffer a huge blow from spiking oil prices, and U.S. personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan would be likely targets of Iranian retaliation, Riedel said.

The consequences would be especially dire for Afghanistan because Iran could become a second sanctuary, after Pakistan, for Taliban militants. In that event, “the chances of success in Afghanistan on the timeline the (Barack Obama) administration has laid out is virtually nil,” he said.

While the U.S. military and intelligence establishment appears solidly against a war with Iran, Israel’s attitude has been ambivalent. A major concern for U.S. policymakers is that Israel might attack Iran without giving the United States warning – and thus the opportunity to try to veto the action.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in December that this was a possibility. Dempsey was due in Israel Thursday for discussions about Iran.

The U.S. and Israel were to have staged this spring a massive new joint manoeuvre to practice intercepting incoming missiles, Austere Challenge 12, but have put off the exercise. Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak Wednesday said he had asked for the delay, but it is also possible that the Obama administration made the decision to convey U.S. displeasure over Israel’s more aggressive posture toward Iran.

Michael Eisenstadt, a specialist on Iran and nuclear proliferation at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the Atlantic Council session Tuesday that while a war is risky, so is a policy of containment and deterrence when it comes to Iran.

Both men predicted that 2012 would be “the year of decision for Israel” on Iran, as Iran steadily amasses enriched uranium and moves enrichment into a hardened site at Fordow near Qom.

At the same time, Eisenstadt suggested Iran might be dissuaded from building nuclear weapons by continuing a covert campaign that includes assassinations of Iranian scientists and sabotage of centrifuge parts and computers.

These actions, he said, have shown Iran that its programme has been penetrated by foreign intelligence and that Iran would have a hard time building a nuclear weapon without being caught.

Eisenstadt said the U.S. would have to strike a “delicate balance”, keeping pressure on Iran but not pushing Tehran so hard that it decides to break out and rush to build nuclear weapons. He conceded that Israel might take unilateral action against Iran despite U.S. opposition, noting that “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.”

Riedel said that a nuclear-armed Iran would not be an existential threat to Israel as some Israelis have claimed and that the balance of power would “remain overwhelmingly in Israel’s favour” even if Iran acquired nuclear weapons.

Israel, he noted, not only has “the finest conventional military in the Middle East” but has had nuclear weapons since at least the late 1960s and is believed to possess more than 100 bombs. It also has delivery systems from three countries – the Jericho from France, U.S. F-15’s and Dolphin submarines from Germany.

Israel neither confirms nor denies that it has nuclear weapons – a policy of opacity that may have outlived its usefulness.

To reassure Israel that it could deter a nuclear Iran, the United States should enhance Israel’s naval and submarine capabilities, Riedel said. This would “ensure that the balance of terror is overwhelmingly in Israel’s favour.”

The comments by the two men added to the growing debate here over what to do about Iran’s nuclear programme, which Western and Israeli officials contend is designed to build a nuclear weapon.

If the current strategy of ever-tougher economic sanctions and sabotage fails to halt the programme in the near future, all but one of the Republican presidential candidates, among others, have called on the administration to prepare military strikes against Tehran’s nuclear facilities or, in any case, stand with Israel if it decided to carry out an attack.

Last week, Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham and Independent Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman announced they will introduce a resolution to put the Senate on record as ruling out a strategy of containment against a nuclear-armed Iran which they said would be “catastrophic mistake” on Washington’s part.

While the Obama administration has repeatedly called Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon “unacceptable”, senior officials, including Dempsey and his boss, Leon Panetta, have also stressed the potential downsides of a U.S. or Israeli military attack on Iran.

In his remarks Tuesday, Riedel called the Graham-Lieberman approach “stupid”.

*Barbara Slavin is a senior fellow at The Atlantic Council and moderated Tuesday’s discussion.

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Jan 11 2012 (IPS)

The Barack Obama administration is increasingly giving the impression that it supports a policy of regime change against Iran – a policy that could backfire and convince Iran to build nuclear weapons.

Senior U.S. officials have suggested recently that mounting economic sanctions are meant to “tighten the noose” around the Iranian government.

The Washington Post on Tuesday quoted an unnamed senior U.S. intelligence official as saying that the goal of sanctions was regime collapse.

The Post later amended the story to say that the official had been misquoted and that the Obama administration hopes sanctions will increase “public discontent that will help compel the government to abandon an alleged nuclear weapons program.”

On Wednesday, meanwhile, unknown assailants assassinated the fourth Iranian nuclear scientist in two years – Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, deputy director of Iran’s main uranium enrichment plant at Natanz.

The Iranian government blamed Israel and the United States for the killing, which, following the pattern of previous cases, took place when motorcyclists put sticky plastic explosives on a car carrying Roshan through Tehran traffic.

The harsh new rhetoric and the assassination come in the context of an escalating crisis that includes a massive attack on an Iranian missile facility that killed a top missile scientist and new sanctions directed against Iran’s central bank and oil exports.

Iran, in turn, has threatened to blockade the Strait of Hormuz and attack U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf; this week, a Tehran court sentenced an Iranian American former U.S. Marine to death on charges he spied for the CIA, and Iran began enriching uranium in a facility tunneled into a mountain near Qom.

Iran experts say the latest assassination is likely to scuttle the already slim chances for a negotiated solution and convince the Islamic Republic that the United States and its partners are determined to overthrow the Iranian government.

“The Iranians are convinced that that is our goal,” Paul Pillar, a CIA veteran and former Middle East chief on the National Intelligence Council, which advises the U.S. president, told IPS.

Pillar referred to inflammatory rhetoric by U.S. Republican presidential candidates – one of whom, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, has explicitly called for regime change – while others apart from Texas Congressman Ron Paul have called for attacking Iran to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons.

Pillar suggested that U.S. government talking points were being influenced by domestic politics and that the Obama administration wanted to be seen as being “tough on Iran” during a year in which the president is running for re-election.

Officially, U.S. policy remains a diplomatic resolution of the crisis.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, reacting Tuesday to news that Iran had begun enriching uranium at the Fordow facility near Qom, called on Iran “to return to negotiations with the P5+1”, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany.

“We reaffirm that our overall goal remains a comprehensive, negotiated solution that restores confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear programme while respecting Iran’s right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy consistent with its obligations under the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT),” Clinton said.

However, other State Department language has muddied the policy waters.

At least twice last week, senior State Department officials said that the goal of U.S. and other sanctions was to “tighten the noose” around the Iranian government.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland used the phrase during a regular press briefing on Jan. 5. Under-Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights Maria Otero used the language in answering a question Jan. 6 at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

Greg Thielmann, a nuclear expert at the Arms Control Association and former State Department intelligence analyst, told IPS the phrase was “cleared language” that was not “carefully considered”.

“I’m not convinced that the U.S. attitude has changed but this is an example of how sloppy and thoughtless we are,” he said.

John Limbert, former deputy secretary of state for Iran, said that such rhetoric suggested “a confusion of aims. It’s very clear that the way these sanctions have been put into effect, the aim is to undermine the regime. We’re going to cut off their financial system and their technology but we still want to negotiate. After a while, it strains credulity.”

While regime change may not be an explicit goal, clearly many would like to see an Iranian government willing to curb its nuclear programme, to treat its own people better and to stop supporting militant groups in the region.

“We hope sanctions will increase the cost for Iran, make the regime more vulnerable and give time for something better to emerge,” Ali Reza Nader, an Iran expert at the Rand Corporation, told IPS. “In the long term, there is a potential for that but I’m not sure the United States can do much to bring that about…We can weaken the regime but we don’t have the power to change it.”

In the meantime, the escalation could convince Iran that it needs nuclear weapons for regime survival and increases the chances for a military confrontation and tit-for-tat terrorism.

Pillar warned that Iran would feel pressured to respond to the latest assassination.

“I would be surprised if we didn’t have an in-kind retaliatory act in the near future – perhaps some poor bloke at Los Alamos,” the U.S. nuclear lab in New Mexico, Pillar said.

Jeffrey Goldberg, a Middle East analyst, writing on the Atlantic.com on Wednesday, observed that if he were a member of the Iranian government, “I would take this assassination program to mean that the West is entirely uninterested in any form of negotiation [not that I, the regime official, has ever been much interested in dialogue with the West] and that I should double-down and cross the nuclear threshold as fast as humanly possible. Once I do that, I’m North Korea, or Pakistan: An untouchable country.”

William Luers, a former U.S. ambassador and senior State Department official who has participated in discussions with Iranians, added: “As long as the regime is convinced U.S. policy is at its core ‘regime change’ it will not be receptive to dealing and will be driven in the opposite direction. Whether or not the U.S. is behind the assassinations and explosions, the Supreme Leader is convinced it is the U.S.

“You can’t kill and talk at the same time,” he noted.

Excerpt:

The recent escalation in Iranian threats to blockade oil shipments and attack U.S. Navy vessels are meant to push up the price of oil and divert domestic opinion from an economic crisis but are not likely to lead to a war in the Persian Gulf, in the view of Iran experts.

The amphibious assault ship USS Bataan transits the Strait of Hormuz in October 2011. Credit: U.S. Navy photo

Should Iran retaliate for impending new sanctions against its oil exports, it is more apt to target oil production in its neighbour, Iraq, than foreign tankers in the Gulf.

“We’ve seen this movie before,” Cliff Kupchan, an Iran analyst at the Eurasia Group, told IPS on Wednesday, referring to Iran’s defiant rhetoric and firm U.S. response. “Neither side wants a war. A lot of this rhetoric is overstated.”

While there is always a chance for miscalculation in the crowded waters of the Gulf, a clash of words is more useful to Tehran than actual hostilities.

On Tuesday, after Iranian armed forces commander Gen. Ataollah Salehi warned that a U.S. aircraft carrier that left the Gulf last week should not return, the price of oil jumped four percent.

The United States has also benefited from the tensions, recently concluding deals to sell Saudi Arabia 30 billion dollars in advanced weaponry and 3.5 billion dollars in arms to the United Arab Emirates.

Despite threats last week to close the Strait of Hormuz, the choke point between Iran and Oman for much of the world’s tanker-borne oil, Iran is not in a position to keep the waterway closed.

During the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, Iran used mines and small boats to attack 190 ships from 31 nations, killing at least 63 sailors, according to David Crist, who wrote a history of naval encounters in the Gulf for The Washington Institute for Near East Policy in 2009. However, the U.S. and allied navies kept the Gulf open for tanker traffic and Iran suffered significant losses, including three warships, two oil platforms and a number of boats.

The U.S. is now much better equipped to deal with the threat from Iranian mines, Crist wrote, with four counter-mine ships based in Bahrain and superior surveillance.

While Iran now has more advanced anti-ship missiles and three Russian submarines, Kupchan dismissed Iranian naval power in the Gulf as “puny”.

Should Iran provoke a clash, Iran hawks in the U.S. have suggested that the U.S. military take the opportunity not just to hit Iranian naval assets, but to go after its nuclear installations as well. While the Barack Obama administration has given no indication that it would do so, Kupchan said Iran would be unlikely to jeopardise its “crown jewels”.

Iran would presumably seek to continue its own oil exports through the Gulf and target the ships of Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. However, that would undermine Iran’s relations with China, a major importer of oil from Saudi Arabia as well as Iran. China is also Iran’s number one trading partner and has provided Iran with key political support, threatening to use its veto power to prevent new sanctions against Iran by the U.N. Security Council.

While the United States has repeatedly affirmed that it will keep the Gulf open to shipping, the Obama administration is not eager for a new conflict in the Middle East at a time when it is trying to cut the defence budget and the president is running for re-election.

However, the administration has not sought to take advantage of the growing squeeze on Iran to advance a diplomatic solution of the dispute over Iran’s nuclear programme.

Iranian press reports say that Tehran is seeking a new round of nuclear negotiations with the U.S. and the other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany this month. However, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Tuesday that Iran had yet to put the request in writing.

U.S. officials have barely mentioned diplomacy as an option with Iran in recent months following a brief attempt at engagement in Obama’s first year. Instead the focus is almost entirely on sanctions.

Nuland told reporters Tuesday that the Obama administration sees new “threats from Tehran as just increasing evidence that the international pressure is beginning to bite there, and that they are feeling increasingly isolated and they are trying to divert the attention of their own public from the difficulties inside Iran, including the economic difficulties as a result of the sanctions.”

The Iranian warnings have coincided with a precipitous drop in the Iranian currency, the rial. Worth 10,000 to the dollar a year ago, the rial is now hovering between 16,000 and 18,000.

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, an expert on the Iranian economy at Virginia Tech, told IPS that the biggest victim of the drop was the Iranian middle class. He said that at one point on Monday, “there were no dollars to be bought” from currency traders in Tehran.

While the Iranian government still has substantial reserves in gold and hard currency, Salehi said there is a severe shortage of paper dollars in the country exacerbated by the growing difficulty of carrying out foreign banking transactions. Small factory owners desperate to keep their enterprises running and dependent on imports of intermediate goods are bidding up the price of the dollar in a panicky fashion, he said.

Others impacted by the currency drop include the parents of students studying abroad.

“There are half a million kids abroad,” he said. “They need dollars to pay tuition and rent.”

The crisis comes at a politically sensitive time for the Iranian regime. Parliamentary elections are scheduled for Mar. 2 and the government fears that a low turnout will further undermine its legitimacy, already blackened in the wake of disputed 2009 presidential elections and a harsh crackdown on dissent.

The rial plunge appeared to be in part a reaction to an anticipated European embargo on Iranian oil. European Union members decided in principle Wednesday to halt imports that have averaged about 450,000 barrels a day.

The Europeans, who are expected to finalise the decision by the end of this month, are responding to a new U.S. law, signed by President Barack Obama on New Year’s Eve, that forbids foreign banks that deal with Iran’s Central Bank from transactions with U.S. banks. The law, which was attached to a defense authorisation bill, provides several months for the sanctions to go into effect and allows Obama to waive the penalties if they will result in major disruptions in the world oil market.

Kupchan suggested that Iran might retaliate by sabotaging Iraqi oil production, taking advantage of chaos in that country since a U.S. military withdrawal and seeking to trigger the market disruption outlined in the new U.S. sanctions bill.

“If you want to undermine the legislation, the easiest oil to take off line is Iraq,” he said.

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Dec 28 2011 (IPS)

Veteran observers of U.S.-Iran relations know better than to be optimistic about the chances for reconciliation between the two countries. It has long been the pattern – indeed the curse – that when one side was ready to engage, the other was not.

Negotiations might have continued if not for other pressures on Obama, Parsi writes. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

But even the most jaundiced of Iran experts succumbed to a smidgeon of hope in 2008 that the election of Barack Hussein Obama would shatter a three-decade-old stalemate.

As of this writing, however, the curse holds. The United States and Iran remain on a collision course. Relations are, if anything, worse than they were under the George W. Bush administration; the world appears to be faced with a lose-lose situation: an Iran with nuclear weapons, or a new Middle East war with devastating consequences for the region and the world economy.

According to Trita Parsi, author of a new book on U.S. diplomacy toward Iran, Obama – the man with the Muslim middle name and a last name that means “He is with us” in Farsi – tried hard but not hard or long enough. Iran, meanwhile, bungled a genuine offer of engagement.

Parsi has done a great service by writing the first book on how the Obama administration and Iran missed yet another opportunity for reconciliation. In “A Single Role of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran”, Parsi explains what went wrong on both sides as well the events and third parties that helped insure that diplomacy would be given only a minimal chance to succeed.

Parsi is well qualified to analyse the sad course of U.S.-Iran relations. He is already the author of an acclaimed 2007 book – “Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States” – that examined Israel’s changing view of the Islamic Republic and influence over U.S. policy.

His new book will appeal to specialists and the general public. While his main arguments are familiar to those who follow the issues closely, there is new detail about the formation of Obama’s policy, Israeli intervention in U.S. decision-making, as well as abortive efforts by Turkey and Brazil to resurrect a confidence-building measure that turned out to be Obama’s sole diplomatic gambit.

The fraud-tainted Iranian presidential elections of 2009 were a major factor in reducing maneuvering room in both Tehran and Washington. Parsi describes how “Iran’s decision-making process, which was already taxing and slow, reached a state of near-paralysis” after the June vote.

Domestic opposition to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from both his left and his right led Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to rescind support in the fall of 2009 for a U.S.-proposed confidence-building measure that would have sent out large quantities of Iran’s partially enriched uranium in return for fuel for a Tehran reactor that makes medical isotopes.

Still, negotiations should have continued, Parsi argues, and perhaps would have continued, if not for other pressures on Obama.

Parsi, citing a leaked State Department cable, reveals that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who took office shortly after Obama, told a U.S. Congressional delegation led by Sen. Jon Kyl in April 2009 that engagement with Iran should be tried for only four to 12 weeks “with the explicit objective of putting an end to the Iranian nuclear program – a near impossible task.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress – actively lobbied by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – began pushing for new sanctions before Obama had had a chance to make a serious overture to Tehran.

Netanyahu also sought to leverage Obama’s main priority in the Middle East – resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute – to cut short U.S. engagement with Iran. As Parsi writes, “the Netanyahu government declared that it would not move on peace talks with the Palestinians until it first saw progress in America’s efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear program and limited Tehran’s rising influence in the region.”

As of this writing, there has been no progress on the Arab-Israeli front and Iran’s nuclear programme continues.

Iran’s harsh crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators after the 2009 presidential elections led many who had previously supported engagement to embrace sanctions. France, under President Nicolas Sarkozy, was particularly hawkish.

In September 2009, after the U.S., France and Britain revealed that Iran had been secretly building a uranium enrichment site in a mountain near Qom, Sarkozy declared that if there was not an “in- depth change by the Iranian leaders” by December, tough new sanctions should be imposed, Parsi writes.

Obama had already promised Netanyahu that the end of December would be the deadline for progress; once Iran began to retreat and haggle over the fuel swap proposal, Obama endorsed a series of ever more punitive sanctions. In response, Iran has hardened its position.

Among the major contributions of Parsi’s book is an entire chapter devoted to the efforts by Turkey and Brazil to resurrect the fuel swap, which culminated in the so-called Tehran Declaration of May 17, 2010.

Parsi quotes at length from an Apr. 20, 2010 letter from Obama to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva that guided Lula’s efforts along with those of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The letter repeated U.S. demands for Iran to send out 1,200 kilogrammes of low-enriched uranium (LEU) and said that the United States would accept Turkey holding the material in “escrow” until fuel for the Tehran reactor could be delivered to Iran a year later.

But when Iran agreed to the deal a month later, the Obama administration was both surprised and annoyed. Within the administration, Parsi discloses, then deputy assistant secretary of State John Limbert, a former hostage in Iran, led a minority that advocated exploring the agreement.

“The argument for patience did not have any takers at the top,” Parsi writes.

Iran had by then accumulated a larger stockpile of LEU and the United States had just succeeded in getting Chinese and Russian buy-in for a tough new sanctions resolution. According to Parsi, Obama was afraid that if he did not go forward, he would be seen as indecisive and weak. The vote at the U.N. Security Council proceeded but Turkey and Brazil voted “no”. The U.S. followed up with more sanctions of its own.

Two subsequent meetings of Iran and the so-called P 5 + 1 – the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany – failed to narrow differences; they were characterised by empty posturing by the Iranians, who also refused to talk bilaterally with the United States.

As Obama’s first term comes to an end, Iran is feeling the pain of sanctions but continuing to enrich uranium to ever higher percentages of the isotope needed for nuclear weapons. U.S. influence in the region as a whole is on the wane as a result of political upheaval in the Arab world. Iran is also losing clout as Arabs search for new models of governance and Iran is tainted by its support of Syria’s brutal dictatorship.

Hawks in Washington and Jerusalem are calling for a U.S. attack on Iran this year, minimising the consequences and the misery wrought by U.S. regime change in Iraq and the ambivalent results of the war in Afghanistan.

Tehran, meanwhile, is consumed by bitter political rivalry within the conservative elite who are competing for the diminishing spoils of the state and blaming each other for their country’s predicament. Faced with a possible European oil embargo, Iran is threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz, choking off world oil supplies and possibly triggering a conflict with the United States.

Parsi criticises the Obama administration for essentially giving up on diplomacy after its initial proposal failed, conflating a confidence-building measure with “the endgame” of preventing Iran from building nuclear weapons.

The United States, he asserts, should also have sought to engage Iran on a broader agenda, including issues like Afghanistan where the two sides might more easily find common ground. But he acknowledges that Iran failed, too, and says that its leaders are likely to realise in hindsight that they blew a major opportunity to escape from growing international isolation.

Parsi predicts that the stalemate will persist “for some time” no matter who wins U.S. presidential elections in 2012. One can only hope that war can be avoided, giving time for more creative and flexible policies to emerge in Washington, Jerusalem and Tehran.

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin and - -
WASHINGTON, Dec 19 2011 (IPS)

The Barack Obama administration and the United Nations are struggling to convince the leadership of the Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian opposition group with cult-like characteristics, to vacate a camp in Iraq and allow residents to move to another location in the country or risk the lives of as many as 3,200 people.

U.S. officials fear that unless MEK leader Maryam Rajavi gives her approval, there will be a bloodbath at Camp Ashraf, an MEK base 56 kilometres north of Baghdad that Iraqi leaders insist must close by Dec. 31. There are particular concerns that MEK members will clash with Iraqi security forces or commit mass suicide.

An Obama administration official who spoke to IPS on condition that he not be named said, “The Iraqi government and U.N. ambassador (to Iraq) Martin Kobler have made significant progress recently” but that MEK leaders have still not signed off on the plan, which would transfer residents in stages to Camp Liberty, a former U.S. military base near Baghdad airport.

There, officials from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) would be able to interview MEK members individually to determine their preferences for resettlement.

“After much regrettable stalling, the MEK finally seems ready to engage seriously,” the official said Monday. “This is good, but the MEK must be realistic, and time is short.”

The official added that while MEK leaders have backed off from “maximalist positions” in the last 48 hours, “We’re still hearing talk about martyrdom and dying.”

The Obama administration has been working with the United Nations and Iraq to facilitate the transfer of the estimated 3,200 Ashraf residents. Vincent Cochetel, Washington representative for UNHCR, told IPS in September that the MEK had agreed to the plan through the organisation’s legal counsel in London.

But Rajavi, who lives outside Paris and met with Kobler last weekend, is insisting that U.S. or U.N. troops accompany the Ashraf residents, according to a source with knowledge of the meeting who spoke on condition of anonymity. Iraq has agreed to U.N. monitoring of the transfer but not the presence of foreign troops.

The United States last weekend withdrew the last of its forces from Iraq under the terms of a status of forces agreement and is not about to send them back for this purpose.

Human rights organisations have urged the Obama administration to call on the Iraqi government to extend the deadline.

Sanjeev Bery, advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, told IPS in an email that the organisation “is concerned that Camp Ashraf residents are at serious risk of severe human rights violations if the Iraqi government goes ahead with its plans to force the closure of the camp by the end of this month.”

The email noted that there had been several attacks on the camp by Iraqi security forces, most recently in April, which “resulted in the deaths of dozens of residents and injuries to others”.

The senior administration official said Amnesty, instead, should urge the MEK to sign onto the plan “at hand and not encourage people to die”.

Experts on the MEK accuse its leaders of holding its own members hostage to efforts to get the organisation removed from the U.S. State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organisations. The State Department has been reviewing the MEK’s status for months but has tried to decouple the process from efforts to resolve the impasse over Ashraf.

MEK supporters say the group has renounced terrorism. They have mounted an elaborate campaign to be removed from the terrorist list that has included expensive full-page ads in major U.S. newspapers and paid speeches by prominent former U.S. officials.

However, Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, told IPS, “If an organisation is ordering innocent residents of a camp to commit suicide or have themselves killed if their leaders don’t get the outcome they are seeking, isn’t that the definition of a terrorist group?”

U.S. officials do not know for sure how many people are at Ashraf but believe they include minors and others who were tricked into going to the camp. There they were subjected to military training and mind control exercises that include cult-like devotion to Mrs. Rajavi and her husband Massoud, whose whereabouts are unknown.

The prolonged presence of the MEK at Camp Ashraf has been a major irritant for Iraqi officials since the end of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003.

A Marxist-Islamist group that helped remove the Shah of Iran but lost out in a post-revolution power struggle, the MEK found refuge in Iraq and fought on the side of Saddam’s forces against Iran in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. It also helped Saddam suppress uprisings by Iraqi Shiites and Kurds following the 1991 Gulf War and carried out a series of high-profile attacks on Iranian officials during the 1990s.

The U.S. State Department put the MEK on its list of foreign terrorist organisations in 1997.

Iraqi officials have promised to give the U.N. sufficient time to process the camp members – provided they leave Ashraf.

Even if they do accept transfer, it will be difficult to resettle the residents. Several hundred camp residents have returned to Iran since 2003 through the auspices of the International Red Cross.

However, the atmosphere in Iran has darkened since disputed 2009 presidential elections and those affiliated with the MEK face imprisonment or even execution. European countries are also not eager to accept MEK members, many of whom have been subjected to brainwashing.

Taking the group off the U.S. terrorist list would not mean that members could automatically come to the United States. U.S. law forbids immigration to “those who provided material support to, or received military-type training” from any organisation that has been on the terrorist list, according to another State Department official who spoke to IPS recently on condition of anonymity.

The Obama administration has tasked Daniel Fried, a former assistant secretary of State for European affairs, with resolving the crisis. Fried’s office is also responsible for resettling Guantanamo detainees.

Excerpt:

A poster in Damascus, Syria, features Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Credit: Elizabeth Whitman/IPS

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Dec 15 2011 (IPS)

Iran is courting the opposition to Syrian President Bashar al- Assad, seeking to maintain a crucial alliance in the event that Assad falls.

So far, Iranian officials have met at least twice with members of the National Coordinating Committee (NCC). The Damascus-based group opposes foreign intervention in Syria and advocates reform to resolve the nine-month-old crisis.

According to Randa Slim, an expert on Syria and Arab democracy movements who is affiliated with the New America Foundation and the Middle East Institute, Iran has also reached out to members of the Syrian National Council (SNC), the main opposition group based outside Syria, through Tunisian Islamic leader Rachid al Ghannouchi.

“To date, the SNC has rebuffed Iran’s attempts,” Slim told IPS.

The uprising against the Assad regime is a serious crisis for Iran, as Syria has been the only Arab country allied with Iran since the latter’s Islamic revolution of 1979.

Syria is also the conduit through which Iran supplies its main Arab partner, the Lebanese Shiite group, Hezbollah, and a key member of a so-called “axis of resistance” that opposes Arab-Israeli peace negotiations and condones the use of force against Israel.

Mona Yacoubian, an expert on Lebanon and Syria at the Stimson Centre in Washington, told a panel discussion Wednesday at the Atlantic Council that Syria plays “an important bridging role not just geographically but ideologically” as the only Arab country in the axis.

Meanwhile Hamas, a Palestinian Sunni Islamic movement headquartered in Damascus, has chosen to distance itself from the Assad government rather than be seen as supporting a regime that is brutally cracking down on fellow Islamic activists.

Without Hamas and Assad, the “resistance front” could shrink to two Shiite Muslim entities: Iran and Hezbollah. Both would lose their pan-Islamic cover as champions of Arab rights.

Iran’s gamble

In trying to salvage its relationship with Syria, Iran has been playing a multifaceted game – reaching out to the opposition and on occasion, criticising Assad, while simultaneously providing the regime with money, weapons and expertise in monitoring computers and cell phones.

An Iranian official, who spoke to IPS on condition of anonymity, said Iran was also encouraging Shiite religious pilgrims from Iran and Iraq to visit Damascus, site of a major Shiite shrine, to make up for the precipitous drop in European tourism to Syria.

Still, doubts are rising about whether Assad can survive a conflict that has grown increasingly bloody and sectarian.

Already the death roll stands at more than 5,000, according to the United Nations, and incidents of massacres of Sunnis by the ruling Alawites, an offshoot of Shiism, and vice versa are mounting.

Although there have been no major defections by Syrian army officers, most of whom are members of the Alawite minority, rank and file soldiers are deserting and joining the so-called Free Syria Army, based across the border in Turkey.

On Thursday, Human Rights Watch reported that former Syrian soldiers have identified 74 commanders and officials who gave orders to shoot to kill unarmed demonstrators or ordered, authorised or condoned torture and unlawful arrests.

Human Rights Watch has urged the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on those implicated and to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court.

There has been talk of trying to preserve the regime while convincing Assad and his family to seek exile abroad. Still, it is likely that a post-Assad regime will put some distance between Damascus and Tehran.

Burhan Ghalioun, a Paris-based professor who leads the SNC, told the Wall Street Journal recently that “there will be no special relationship with Iran” if his organisation takes power.

In an interview with CNN Dec. 6, Ghalioun said, “I hope that the Iranians realise the importance of not compromising the Syrian- Iranian relationship by defending a regime whose own people clearly reject it and has become a regime of torture to its own people.”

He added that Syrians, who haVE supported Hezbollah in the past, “are surprised that Hezbollah did not return the favour and support the Syrian people’s struggle for freedom”.

The possibility of regime change

Murhaf Jouejati, a Washington-based member of the SNC, told IPS that a successor government to Assad would “shift back to the Arab mainstream” that supports a negotiated solution of Israel’s disputes with the Palestinians, Lebanon and Syria and better relations with the U.S.

Jouejati accused Iran of trying “to give legitimacy to the NCC and to prop it up on behalf of the Syrian government”. He said this effort would fail because the NCC has not attracted support from protestors within Syria.

Iran’s manoeuvring comes when the country itself is increasingly isolated, facing mounting economic and other sanctions over its nuclear program.

U.S. President Barack Obama is poised to sign into law a bill that could forbid foreign financial institutions conducting business with Iran’s Central Bank from dealings with U.S. banks.

Experts on the region say that Assad’s time in office is limited and that the regime could collapse rather suddenly, as economic sanctions undermine support for the government within the business community and ordinary Syrians recoil from the regime’s brutality.

Frederic Hof, an expert on Syria who is currently advising the State Department, called the Syrian regime “the equivalent of [a] dead man walking” in testimony before Congress Wednesday. But he said he could not predict how long it would remain.

It is possible that the situation will get much worse, with Iran and other interested parties such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey supporting different armed factions and sectarian groups.

“At the end of the day, it’s about regional hegemony,” Aram Nerguizian, an expert on the militaries of the Levant, told the Atlantic Council Wednesday. Syria, he said, is likely to become “an arena for proxy competition”, feeding a conflict similar to the civil wars that have previously convulsed Iraq and Lebanon.

Excerpt:

The Tehran Research Reactor where uranium enriched to 20 percent is used to produce medical isotopes. Credit: Jim Lobe/IPS

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Dec 9 2011 (IPS)

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, said Friday that he believes that sanctions and diplomacy are the right strategy to deal with Iran’s nuclear programme and that the United States “is doing everything we can to accomplish the stated objective without resorting to military force”.

Dempsey, speaking at a forum organised by the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, was asked if he agreed with remarks last week by Defence Secretary Leon Panetta that a massive attack on Iran’s nuclear installations would retard the programme only briefly and that other measures were preferable to a new war in the Middle East.

“I do,” Dempsey said emphatically.

Panetta has been criticised by Iran hawks for emphasising the negative consequences of a war against Iran. The Washington Post editorialised Friday that Panetta should have kept his reservations private because “the more Iran worries about a military attack, the more likely it is to scale back its nuclear activity.”

However, Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said “there is far more evidence to suggest that overt threats of military strikes and regime change are counterproductive because they strengthen the position of Iranian hardliners who want to keep pursuing the capability to build nuclear weapons.”

While the Barack Obama administration appears reluctant to mount a large-scale attack on Iran, a string of recent incidents – such as explosions at Iranian military facilities and the loss of a U.S. drone over Iran – suggest that the United States and Israel, independently and at times together, are carrying out a variety of covert actions that include attacks on individual installations, cyber warfare, assassination of Iranian scientists, and extensive surveillance to uncover any clandestine nuclear facilities.

A sophisticated U.S. RQ-170 drone went missing near the Iran-Afghan border last week and is similar to the one used to spy on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. The loss of the drone appeared to be both an intelligence and a propaganda coup for Tehran.

Iranian ambassador to the United Nations Mohammad Khazaee, in a letter Thursday to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, described the drone’s operation as a “blatant and unprovoked air violation by the United States Government (that) is tantamount to an act of hostility against the Islamic Republic of Iran in clear contravention of international law, in particular, the basic tenets of the United Nations.”

Khazaee added that the drone had penetrated 250 kilometres into Iran to the northeastern city of Tabas, “where it faced prompt and forceful action by the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.

It remains unclear whether Iran brought down the drone or whether it came down on its own because of a technical failure. Iranian authorities showed the craft on state television Thursday and its hull was largely intact.

The Obama administration is combining such covert activities with ever-tightening economic sanctions that are making it more difficult for Iran to receive payment for its oil exports in hard currency. Sensitive to charges from Republican presidential contenders that he is somehow soft on Iran, Obama told reporters Thursday that “this administration has systematically imposed the toughest sanctions on … Iran ever.”

However, the Obama administration is resisting Congressional efforts to impose even more drastic measures that would threaten foreign banks that do business with Iran’s Central Bank with banishment from the U.S. – and thus the global – financial system.

Obama administration officials negotiated this week with Congress to try to water down an amendment to a defence bill by Senators Mark Kirk and Bob Menendez that passed the Senate unanimously last week.

According to Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy magazine, the administration is seeking a six-month delay in implementing the sanctions and a reduction in penalties on foreign banks that do not abide by the new measures. However, election year politics are intruding in unhelpful ways.

Rep. Howard Berman, who is battling another Democrat, Brad Sherman, to represent a newly merged California district, suggested an amendment that would reduce the time given for implementation of the Central Bank sanctions from six months to four months. A final bill is expected to emerge from a conference committee next week.

U.S. officials have described their strategy against Iran as having two tracks – one coercive, the other involving diplomatic engagement. However, there have been no U.S. talks with Iran since January.

Iran experts fear that that a pattern of tit-for-tat actions, such as the attack by regime thugs on the British Embassy in Tehran last month, will escalate into a broader confrontation that the region and the global economy can ill afford. There is particular concern about the possibility for clashes between U.S. and Iranian vessels in the crowded waters of the Persian Gulf.

Asked by IPS Thursday if the Obama administration was considering seeking talks with Iran’s military to craft an incidents at sea agreement or establish a hotline for use in the event of such a crisis, Dempsey said, “We have discussed this but have not come to a decision about opening up links or a hotline to seek an option to de- escalate any incident. It’s not our behaviour that’s the impediment to progress here.”

Some analysts believe the British embassy attack was meant to embarrass the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Credit: UN Photo/Marco Castro

By Barbara Slavin and - -
WASHINGTON, Nov 30 2011 (IPS)

Scenes from Tehran Tuesday of bearded Iranian youth swarming over the walls of the British embassy evoked memories of the 1979-81 hostage crisis that created the image of Iran as a pariah state.

Some analysts believe the British embassy attack was meant to embarrass the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Credit: UN Photo/Marco Castro

The latest events come in the context of an escalating intelligence and economic war between Iran and the West over its nuclear programme that could spiral out of control at a time that the world economy and an already unstable Middle East can ill afford.

The hostage crisis took place while Iran was still in the throes of revolution and solidifying its form of government. Then leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini embraced the action after it became clear that it was both popular and a means of disposing of moderate rivals within the new regime.

In contrast, Tuesday’s event – despite an expression of regret by Iran’s foreign ministry – appears to have been orchestrated by the regime’s security forces.

It followed two mysterious explosions, one of which destroyed an Iranian missile facility, and new U.S. and European economic sanctions, including a British cutoff of dealings with Iran’s Central Bank, a move that hawkish U.S. lawmakers are hoping to replicate by the end of this year. Even before Tuesday’s attack, the European Union was scheduled to consider additional sanctions at a meeting in Brussels Thursday.

Police reportedly stood by while members of the Basij – a volunteer force of thuggish young men considered more loyal to the office of the current leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, than to the government headed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – broke into the British compound in downtown Tehran, destroyed property and burned documents.

Other Basiji invaded a British diplomatic residence in north Tehran and briefly held six British staff members. On Wednesday, Britain announced that it was closing the embassy and withdrawing its diplomatic personnel from Iran.

The original hostage crisis led the U.S. to break off diplomatic relations with Iran and persuaded Washington and much of the rest of the world to side with Iraq when it invaded Iran in 1980, seeking to profit from the revolutionary chaos and Iran’s isolation.

The ensuing eight-year war devastated both countries but was actually welcomed in some quarters in the West. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger famously commented at the time that it was “a pity” that both Iran and Iraq could not lose.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is now more isolated than it has been since the 1980s, but it also has a greater capacity to respond in ways that could disrupt the world economy – affecting the price and supply of oil, for example.

Iran has more mature asymmetric capabilities to carry out acts of violence abroad through groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. And it has more missiles that could attack Saudi oil fields, as well as a steadily growing stockpile of partially enriched uranium that could be turned into nuclear weapons if Iran so chose.

Paul Pillar, a professor at Georgetown University and former National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, told IPS, “We ought to be worried about a spiral getting out of control on both sides.” In Iran and its adversaries, “there is so much resignation to perceived unmitigated hostility on the other side that it is hard to see a way out.”

Iranian leaders, Pillar said, “do not see in the West any real opportunity in the future for an improved relationship. All they see is pressure, pressure, pressure and sanctions, sanctions, sanctions.”

Meanwhile, Iranian acts such as the invasion of the British Embassy “feed similar perceptions in the United States” and its allies, Pillar said.

Pillar and other Iran experts worry about the prospects for an incident in the Gulf between Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Navy and U.S. forces that might escalate into a broader conflict.

There is also the possibility that the growing tension will spur Iran to accelerate its nuclear programme in hopes of deterring a U.S. or Israeli attack.

Since most of the world seems to believe that Iran is determined to get a nuclear capability and many countries are imposing sanctions against Tehran based on that premise, why not kick out U.N. inspectors and build a weapon?

Besides the recent explosions outside Tehran and Isfahan, foreign agents believed to be directed by Israel have in recent years assassinated several Iranian nuclear scientists – the name of one of whom, Majid Shariari, was chanted by the crowd that attacked the embassy Tuesday. The U.S. and Israel are also thought to be behind a computer worm called Stuxnet that set back Iran’s centrifuge operation a year ago.

The United States, for its part, has accused Iran of supplying weapons to groups in Iraq and Afghanistan that have targeted U.S. troops. The Barack Obama administration also asserts that the elite Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards was behind a bizarre foiled plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

The latter charges elicited much scepticism in the U.S., but it is possible that Iran would back terrorist attacks in the United States if there is no serious diplomatic effort to de-escalate the current crisis.

Pillar said he believes that Iran is holding the terrorist “capability in reserve until the situation escalates to a higher level than it is right now”.

John Limbert, a former U.S. diplomat who was among the 52 Americans held hostage in Iran for 444 days from 1979-81, said there were also internal political factors behind Tuesday’s actions. Just as the U.S. embassy was an appropriate target three decades ago for Washington’s support of the shah, so the British, long vilified by Iranians for meddling in their country, “are a useful means to get at your domestic enemies”, Limbert told IPS.

He thought the violation of the British embassy was meant to embarrass the government of Ahmadinejad, who has increasingly been at odds with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Whatever the reason, it is becoming harder to talk to Iran at a time when dialogue is more important than ever.

“The people behind this don’t care,” Limbert said. “It’s hard to talk about mutual respect when there’s officially sanctioned mob rule. You’d think after 32 years, people would have learned something.”

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin and - -
WASHINGTON, Nov 21 2011 (IPS)

Under intense pressure from the U.S. Congress and U.S. presidential election politics, the Barack Obama administration Monday declared the Islamic Republic of Iran a “primary money laundering concern” – a designation that stops short of blacklisting Iran’s Central Bank but is intended to persuade more foreign governments, banks and companies to curtail business with Iranian financial entities.

Administration officials portrayed the move – coupled with new restrictions on Iran’s petrochemical sector and a ban on financial dealings with Iran by Britain and Canada – as a response to an alarming recent report by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The report provides substantial evidence that Iran carried out extensive research into how to make a nuclear weapon prior to 2003 but is less conclusive about a continuing weapons effort.

However, one impetus for the new sanctions is domestic U.S. politics.

Republican candidates for president have singled out the administration’s Iran policy as weak even though the Islamic Republic has never faced such stringent and widespread economic sanctions.

Last week, Sen. Mark Kirk, a leading Iran hawk in the U.S. Congress, introduced an amendment to the 2012 defence authorisation bill that would effectively bar foreign financial institutions that carry out transactions with the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) from dealings with any U.S. bank. Dubbed the “nuclear option”, Kirk has said the measure is designed to “collapse the Iranian economy” by preventing Iran from selling its oil and natural gas for hard currency.

Similar measures are under consideration in the House.

The new U.S. sanctions stop short of blocking all transactions with the CBI, a step that U.S. officials feared would lead to a sharp increase in oil prices and fracture a multilateral consensus against Iran’s nuclear activities. Previous U.S. sanctions already blacklist 22 Iranian banks, bar Iran from almost all transactions in dollars, and forbid foreign companies that invest in Iran’s energy sector from business in the U.S.

“The administration is trying to buy off Congress, buy off pressure from Israel and make sure nothing will further erode the president’s chances for re-election,” Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, told IPS.

A statement from President Barack Obama called the new measures “another step to further isolate and penalize Iran for its refusal to live up to its international obligations regarding its nuclear program.”

Erich Ferrari, a Washington attorney who specialises in U.S. economic sanctions, said the new sanctions would make it even harder for Iranian Americans to send money to relatives but was not as drastic as sanctioning the CBI.

“We call sanctions like this under the Patriot Act ‘baby sanctions’,” Ferrari told IPS.

Sanctioning the CBI would have obligated U.S. banks to block any transaction that went through that bank, he said. Monday’s measure will mean “additional reporting requirements and increase the cost to U.S. financial institutions” of facilitating transactions for which U.S. citizens must already obtain a license from the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, Ferrari said.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced the new sanctions jointly. In addition to designating Iran as a “a jurisdiction of primary money laundering concern”, the administration bars the sale or lease of goods and technology to Iran’s petrochemical sector worth more than one million dollars for a single transaction or five million dollars for deals over a 12-month period.

Iran experts said the new U.S. measures would increase hardship for the Iranian government and people but would be unlikely to convince Iran to curb its nuclear programme.

Countries such as China, which has become Iran’s chief trading partner in recent years, will not go along with the new sanctions. Much of China’s 30-billion-dollar annual trade with Iran is conducted through barter deals that provide goods and services in return for Iranian crude.

India, Spain, Italy, Greece, Japan and South Korea are also major buyers of Iranian oil, while Turkey purchases much of its natural gas from Iran.

Both Clinton and Obama said Iran had a choice – to curtail its nuclear programme or face increasing isolation and economic pressure.

Maloney said, however, that the latest punitive measures would not be sufficient to change Iran’s posture, particularly at a time of fractious internal politics.

“If anything, this will reinforce paranoia in Tehran that this is all about regime change,” she said. She expressed concern that there is “no adult supervision” of Iran policy in the Obama administration and that “no one is thinking ahead” about the consequences of further weakening the Iranian economy.

The measures may also not be sufficient to placate Congress.

Kirk, while welcoming the administration’s decision “to put the world on notice” about the CBI, gave no indication that he would withdraw his amendment.

“Now we need to move forward with bipartisan legislation to collapse this terrorist bank and stop Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons before it’s too late,” a statement from the senator said.

A spokesman for Kirk’s office who asked not to be named told IPS that “our plan is to continue the amendment” when Congress returns from a Thanksgiving recess.

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin and - -
WASHINGTON, Nov 15 2011 (IPS)

Actions by the Arab League this week have given a regional seal of approval to Syrian opposition forces and could mark the beginning of the end of the Assad family dictatorship that has ruled Syria for more than 40 years.

Regional experts and members of the Syrian opposition expect the process to be long, complicated and bloody. But they say that the League’s suspension of Syria – once the symbol of Arab nationalism – will embolden the opposition and encourage key foreign countries such as Syrian neighbour Turkey to turn decisively against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

“This opens a lot of doors for the Syrian opposition,” Murhaf Jouejati, a professor at the National Defense University in Washington and member of the new Syrian National Council (SNC), told an audience Monday at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Turkey, he said, has agreed to allow the SNC – which was formed in October and is headed by a Paris-based academic, Burhan Ghalioun – to open an office in Istanbul. Turkey is also sending a representative to an Arab League meeting in Rabat, Morocco Wednesday that is expected to confirm Syria’s suspension from the League and call for deploying hundreds of monitors from Arab human rights organisations around the country.

The intent of such a deployment would be to deter Syrian armed forces from killing more people and provide independent accounts of clashes when they occur. It is highly unlikely, however, that the Assad regime would allow monitors into the country after killing more than 3,500 people since March — including 70 in the past 24 hours, according to human rights groups.

Condemnation by the Arab League is a prerequisite for more serious international steps against the Syrian government. However, foreign military intervention – such as the NATO action that eventually overturned the Muammar Qaddafi regime in Libya – is unlikely in the near future.

The Russian author Leo Tolstoy famously wrote that “happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Thus Syria, although it shares some characteristics with dictatorships that have fallen this year in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, differs in important respects.

While protests have occurred throughout the country, there have not been mass demonstrations yet in the capital, Damascus, or Syria’s second largest city, Aleppo, unlike the protests that took place in Cairo and Tunis. The opposition to the government has yet to unify as most Libyans did behind a Transitional National Council based in eastern Libya. The externally-based SNC is at odds with the Damascus- based National Coordination Committee (NCC) over a number of issues.

Jouejati said the only thing the SNC wants to negotiate with Assad is the manner and timing of his departure, while the NCC has backed what most observers see as meaningless discussions with the government on political reforms.

Both groups oppose violence and worry that militarising the opposition would make it easier for the regime to justify its brutal crackdown. However, about 15,000 members of the Syrian military have already defected, according to Jouejati, with many joining a self- styled Free Syrian Army based in Turkey.

The government crackdown, he said, is being carried out largely by the 4th division of the Syrian Army and the Republican Guard – both largely comprised of members of Syria’s ruling Alawite religious minority. The rank and file is predominantly Sunni Muslim, as are most Syrians.

Fear of Syria devolving into a multi-sided civil war among its religious and ethnic components was a major factor in the Arab League decision to suspend the Assad government. A League delegation had won Assad’s approval for a peace deal on Nov. 2, but the regime promptly violated its promise to withdraw tanks from the streets and to stop shooting peaceful protestors – as it has reneged on previous agreements.

Over the past few months, Assad – who lacks the strategic finesse of his legendary father, Hafez – has managed to alienate most of his once ardent regional backers, including Qatar’s influential emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

On Monday, Erdogan told members of his AK political party, that “Assad should see the tragic ends of the ones who declared war against their own people… I want to remind him that future cannot be built on the blood of the oppressed.”

The same day, King Abdullah of Jordan told the BBC, referring to Assad, “I believe, if I were in his shoes, I would step down.”

The Barack Obama administration has also called for Assad to leave and applauded the Arab League decision to suspend Syria.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a statement Nov. 12 that the U.S. “commends the principled stand taken by the Arab League…The United States reiterates its calls for an immediate end to the violence, for free unfettered access for human rights monitors and journalists to deter and document grave human rights abuses and for Assad to step aside so a peaceful transition can begin. As today’s Arab League decision demonstrates, the international pressure will continue to build until the brutal Assad regime heeds the calls of its own people and the world community.”

For now, that pressure consists of ever tightening economic sanctions primarily by the United States and the European Union. Ivo Daalder, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, told the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, on Nov. 7 that military intervention was not planned because three criteria have not been met.

“There needs to be a demonstrable need, regional support, and sound legal basis for action,” Daalder said. “None of them apply in Syria.”

After the events so far this week, it could be argued that Syria is close to satisfying the first two criteria. So far, however, the “sound legal basis for action” in the form of a U.N. Security Council resolution has not been forthcoming.

Jouejati said that he hoped the Arab League decision would influence Russia, a long-time ally of Syria that has blocked Security Council action by using its veto power. A delegation from the SNC met Tuesday in Moscow with Russian officials but there were no indications that Russia, which maintains a naval base at the Syrian port of Tartus, was ready to break with the Assad regime.

Both Jouejati and Robert Danin, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and former deputy assistant secretary of state, said the U.S. and NATO should keep a military option open to convince Assad to step down.

“You should leave the Syrians with some ambiguity” about military intervention, Danin said Monday.

The Assad family has been frequently compared to the Corleones of the “Godfather” books and movies. Bashar al-Assad has been likened to Fredo, the weakest and least intelligent son of Mafia boss Vito Corleone.

Danin said, however, that Bashar was more like Michael Corleone, the youngest son, who initially wanted nothing to do with his family’s illegal and bloody business. Trained as an ophthalmologist, Bashar became the heir to the presidency after his elder brother, Basil, was killed in a car accident in 1994. Their father died in 2000.

“Michael wanted to go legit but he got pulled in, and the more he got pulled in, the more brutal he became,” Danin said. Now, as in the Godfather saga, “the family relies on him (Bashar) for its survival.”

Excerpt:

The Tehran Research Reactor where uranium enriched to 20 percent is used to produce medical isotopes. Credit: Jim Lobe/IPS

By - - and Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Nov 8 2011 (IPS)

A new report on Iran’s nuclear programme provides substantial evidence that Iran carried out extensive research into how to make a nuclear weapon prior to 2003 but is shaky about how much work has continued.

Citing “a wide variety of independent sources”, including material from 10 member states and from a foreign scientist who worked on the programme, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Tuesday that Iranians had conducted multiple activities “relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device” from the late 1990s until 2003.

The material, listed in great detail in a 14-page annex to a regular IAEA report on Iran, should provide ample new ammunition for the agency and the international community to press Iran for answers and for improved access to its nuclear facilities. There is no indication, however, that Iran has actually built a nuclear weapon.

There is new information that Iran experimented with producing uranium metal for a bomb, with high explosives needed to trigger a nuclear device, and studied how to produce a warhead small enough to fit on a ballistic missile. Satellite information shows Iran built a “large explosives containment vessel” at a site near Tehran in which to conduct experiments, the report said.

“It remains for Iran to explain the rationale behind these activities,” which violate Iran’s commitments to peaceful nuclear activities under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the agency said.

The report is much less authoritative about what went on after 2003, when Iran at least temporarily halted the programme following the revelation that it was building a uranium enrichment plant at Natanz and a heavy water plant and reactor at Arak.

“The Agency’s ability to construct an equally good understanding of activities in Iran after the end of 2003 is reduced due to the more limited information available to the Agency,” the report acknowledged.

Thus the findings appear to be consistent with a much maligned 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate which expressed “medium confidence” that Iran had not restarted a weaponisation programme at that time.

Conservative groups immediately pounced on the findings to demand harsh new measures against Iran, including sanctioning Iran’s Central Bank and retaining “all options” – meaning a military attack.

“There can no longer be any doubt about the intent or direction of the Iran nuclear weapons effort, which is progressing rapidly,” said a statement by Richard Stone and Malcolm Hoenlein, the chairman and executive vice chairman, respectively, of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. “The report leaves no room for ambiguity and demands a quick, comprehensive plan in which all options are included.”

However, the main aspects of the programme have been known for several years and discussed in previous IAEA publications.

David Albright, a former nuclear inspector and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, told IPS that he was comforted by the new evidence that “pressure worked” and that Iran stopped what the IAEA called a “structured” programme in 2003.

“It’s important to know that they didn’t succeed in building a reliable warhead that could fit on one of their missiles,” he said. “We’re much better off that it was stopped when it was.”

He added, however, that the Iranians “know how to build a nuclear weapon and know the problems they have to solve to make them reliable.”

Sourcing for allegations of Iranian work after 2003 is thin. For example, only one unnamed IAEA member provided information that Iran had tried after 2004 to manufacture elements of what is known as a neutron initiator, necessary to trigger a chain reaction leading to a nuclear explosion.

Two unnamed member states were the source of allegations that in 2008 and 2009, Iran carried out computer modeling of a nuclear device “subjected to shock compression”, another step in building a reliable bomb.

“There are new details but the overall picture that the report paints we have heard before,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “There is no new information about a new location or a new area of experimentation.”

The Iranian government had no immediate reaction to the report, which was given to members of the IAEA board and swiftly leaked to the press. In the past, Tehran has accused the IAEA of confronting it with forgeries, while admitting that some research has taken place.

The Barack Obama administration was also subdued and suggested it would use the information to press harder for a diplomatic solution, including tougher enforcement of existing sanctions against Iran.

In some respects, the most worrisome aspects of the report were in its initial pages devoted to Iran’s safeguarded facilities. The report said Iran has continued its slow but steady accumulation of enriched uranium and now has nearly 5,000 kilogrammes of uranium enriched to five percent and nearly 74 kilogrammes of uranium enriched to 20 percent U-235. If converted to weapons grade uranium – which is 90 percent U-235 – that stockpile is enough for several bombs.

The findings were revealed in advance of an IAEA board meeting next week that is likely to be stormy.

“The most important thing is for Iran to come clean on weaponisation,” Albright said. “If they deal with this, the enrichment programme will be much less of a problem.”

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin and - -
WASHINGTON, Nov 1 2011 (IPS)

Washington’s failure to gain Iraqi approval for a significant U.S. military presence in that country beyond December could make it harder for Afghanistan to agree to a similar deployment beyond 2014.

A U.S. Army Special Forces Soldier in Shah Wali Kot District, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. Credit: Staff Sgt. Jeremy D. Crisp/U.S. Army/CC by 2.0

Frank Ruggiero, the deputy special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told IPS, “I’m not aware of a spillover” from the Iraq negotiations, which foundered over Iraqi refusal to grant U.S. forces immunity from local prosecution.

But he acknowledged that negotiations on a so-called strategic framework between the U.S. and the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai are not proceeding quickly. He said that the Afghans are focusing on issues such as U.S. night raids and detention practices rather than the question of how many U.S. forces remain in the country long-term.

Nasr and Ruggiero spoke on the sidelines of a symposium at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars that posed the question of whether there is “a regional endgame” for the decade-old U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. Participants, who included the former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, were subdued in their assessments, noting that Afghanistan’s neighbours have different priorities and have already begun to hedge their behaviour in anticipation of a U.S. withdrawal.

The Barack Obama administration is hoping that regional representatives, meeting Wednesday in Istanbul, will sign onto a series of principles declaring “full respect for Afghan sovereignty and territory”, according to a State Department official who briefed reporters Monday and asked not to be named.

The official said that diplomats are also being asked to endorse a gradual transition from U.S. security leadership to Afghan control, a political solution to the war and a so-called “New Silk Road” vision for regional economic prosperity.

Such declarations cannot paper over the real challenges Afghanistan faces in trying to build a stable future in an unsettled neighbourhood.

Kissinger, speaking in his distinctive German-accented rumbling baritone, said that U.S. administrations historically have gotten into wars with “objectives beyond the capacity of the U.S. domestic consensus required to support and implement” them. In Afghanistan’s case, he said, this included implanting a government “whose writ ran all over the country” and that would “represent some fundamental democratic principles such as women’s rights and education”.

Afghanistan, he said, “is a particularly difficult country to attempt this because it isn’t really a state (but) a nation that comes together primarily to expel foreigners.”

U.S. hopes to “win” the war are unrealistic, Kissinger suggested, given Pakistan’s harbouring of Taliban fighters. “I know of no guerrilla war that was won when there were sanctuaries within reach,” he said.

He said the Obama administration should postpone major troop withdrawals as long as possible to maintain maximum leverage and should warn the neighbours that if they do not cooperate as the U.S. withdraws, “You’ll have to take the consequences on your own.” However, Afghanistan’s two key neighbours – Pakistan and Iran – appear to prefer those consequences to a continued U.S. military presence on their borders.

Iran has sent arms to the Taliban and cultivated an economic relationship with India that will allow both to trade with Afghanistan and Central Asia by circumventing Pakistan.

Pakistan, meanwhile, is harbouring the Afghan militants with the most U.S. blood on their hands – the Haqqani network said to be responsible for a series of spectacular attacks in Kabul including attacks on the Intercontinental Hotel and U.S. embassy and a weekend suicide bombing that killed a dozen U.S. soldiers.

A story in the New York Times on Tuesday quoted unnamed Western analysts as saying that senior members of the Haqqani family – including brothers and children of patriarch Jalaluddin Haqqani – had been spotted recently in Islamabad. Given that Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was found and killed by U.S. forces in May in a nearby resort for retired military, Abbotabad, a senior Haqqani presence in the Pakistani capital would suggest that the Pakistani government is actively aiding the enemies of the United States while accepting billions in U.S. military and economic aid.

Charges that Pakistan’s intelligence services, the ISI, were working with the Haqqani network first surfaced publicly in September when outgoing chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullin, told Congress that the Taliban leadership known as the Quetta Shura and the Haqqanis “operate from Pakistan with impunity… attacking Afghan troops and civilians as well as U.S. soldiers”. Mullin went on to call the Haqqani network “a strategic arm” of the ISI.

The Obama administration subsequently tried a softer approach. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton led a high-profile inter- agency delegation to Pakistan last month which urged Pakistani officials to cooperate with the U.S. in reining in the Haqqanis and bringing them to the negotiating table. That visit preceded last weekend’s suicide bombing.

Nasr, who left the State Department earlier this year, said that U.S. relations with “the two countries that are really important – Iran and Pakistan” – had steadily worsened while the U.S. had the best relations with the countries “that matter the least” in terms of Afghanistan’s long-term future.

Iran and the United States are at odds over multiple issues, including Iran’s nuclear programme and support for terrorism.

Anti-U.S. sentiment in Pakistan is at historic highs since the killing of bin Laden. Politician and former cricket star Imran Khan attracted over 100,000 people to a recent rally in Lahore at which he said that Pakistan would not allow itself to be “enslaved” by the United States and attack Pakistani militants at U.S. bidding.

Pakistan and Iran “are very happy to help us leave but they are not necessarily going to support our vision for Afghanistan which includes (a continued U.S. military) footprint,” Nasr told the Wilson Center audience.

U.S. officials have spoken of leaving 20,000-25,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014 to shore up the Afghan government and continue counter-terrorism operations against Al-Qaeda and its Pakistani allies. However, the appetite for the war has waned as U.S. casualties rise beyond 1,800 killed and 15,000 wounded.

Kissinger, who served during Republican administrations that first widened the Vietnam War and then ended it through a peace deal that swiftly crumbled in a communist victory, warned against treating the Afghan conflict as a partisan issue.

“What this country really needs is a reconciliation at home,” he said, speaking of the United States. “The national interest of the U.S. doesn’t change” with every election.

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin and - -
WASHINGTON, Oct 25 2011 (IPS)

The United States and North Korea are resuming the joint search for U.S. soldiers still missing from the Korean War, one of the few positive areas of interaction between two countries estranged for more than 60 years.

The announcement last week by the Pentagon came before two days of U.S.-North Korea talks in Geneva over a much more intractable issue – North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons – and could be part of a tentative thaw following years of heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula.

U.S. special envoy to North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, said at the conclusion of the Geneva talks Tuesday that the tone was “positive and generally constructive…We narrowed differences in terms of what has to be done before we can both agree to a resumption of the formal negotiations.”

There are still major questions over whether North Korea, which carried out nuclear tests in 2006 and 2008, will relinquish a remaining stockpile of plutonium as well as a uranium enrichment programme that provides another pathway to bombs.

The decision to resume the search for MIAs appears to have been much less complicated. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for POW/Missing Personnel Affairs Robert J. Newberry led a team that reached a deal with North Korea after three days of talks last week in Bangkok.

Maj. Carie Parker, a spokeswoman for Newberry’s office, told IPS that operations will resume next spring and that four missions are planned.

They will take place in Unsan County and near the Chosin Reservoir, the scene of a ferocious battle in late 1950 in which more than 2,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines died, along with thousands of U.S. allied troops, North Koreans and Chinese. China intervened in Korea after U.S.-led forces, commanded by Gen. Douglas McArthur, crossed the 38th parallel in a disastrously ill-conceived attempt to stamp out communism on the peninsula.

The 1950-53 conflict began when North Korean soldiers invaded the south and overran South Korean and American troops. U.S.-led forces staged a daring landing at Inchon and forced the North Koreans back, but the war ended in a stalemate with no formal peace treaty, just an armistice. The U.S. and North Korea still have no formal diplomatic ties.

Relations improved during the Bill Clinton administration, which signed a 1994 agreement with North Korea promising civilian nuclear reactors, other energy assistance and eventual diplomatic relations in return for North Korea ending a nuclear weapons programme based on plutonium. The George W. Bush administration scrapped the accord in 2003 after North Korea admitted that it had started a separate effort to enrich uranium.

The MIA recovery efforts continued for another two years before then Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shut them down. U.S. officials said at the time that they were scrapping the missions because they feared for the safety of U.S. personnel. However, a Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence DiRita, told this reporter in 2005 that North Korea’s refusal to return to six-nation talks on its nuclear programme was a factor.

Frank Metersky, a former Marine and veteran of the Korean War who has worked on MIA issues with North Korea for more than two decades, told IPS that the previous missions had all gone smoothly and that the Bush administration cancelled the programme in 2005 under “false pretenses”.

Maj. Parker said the U.S. regarded the MIA recovery efforts as a “humanitarian issue” separate from other U.S. concerns about North Korea.

North Korea is likely to have a different interpretation, especially since the operations include undisclosed hard currency payments to Pyongyang and follow a U.S. decision to resume limited food aid to North Korea’s perennially starving people.

It remains unclear whether the gestures are a harbinger of a broader reduction in tensions.

Scott Snyder, a Korea expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, told IPS that “things seem to be settling down” in North Korea after a bumpy few years that began when North Korean leader Kim Jong Il suffered a massive stroke in 2008. While in the process of installing Kim’s third son, Kim Jong-un, as his designated successor, the North Korean regime carried out a series of provocations, including a second nuclear test, missile launches, sinking a South Korean ship and attacking a South Korean island.

Now, the emphasis appears to be on shoring up the system in advance of celebrations planned next year around the 100th year of the birth of Kim Jong Il’s father, Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea’s communist system and dynasty.

“At the moment, the succession process is stable and Kim Jong Il seems in better health,” Snyder said, noting recent visits by the North Korean leader to China and Russia.

Both these countries appear to be pushing North Korea to resume nuclear talks. Russia wants to build a pipeline through North Korea to ship natural gas to a booming South Korea, while China, in the throes of its own political succession, would like a trouble-free Korean peninsula for a change.

Meanwhile, the Barack Obama administration, which in the past put little priority on resuming ties with North Korea, is replacing its part-time special envoy, Bosworth, with a full-time career diplomat, Glyn Davies.

Metersky, 79, who met a North Korean diplomat for the first time in 1985, long before any U.S. government official, said persistence is the key to success with difficult countries like North Korea.

“Unless you sit across from North Koreans, you never find out what they are really about,” he said. “You just can’t sit down for a talk and then go away.”

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Oct 20 2011 (IPS)

U.S. presidents seeking a second term are not known for taking risks in foreign policy in election years.

Ronald Reagan quickly withdrew U.S. troops from Lebanon in 1983, a year before he sought re-election, after the U.S. forces there became the target of bombings by Shiite militants.

George W. Bush launched the war in Iraq in 2003 in part because he didn’t want to start a new conflict a year later. And Bill Clinton waited until almost the end of his second term to make a concerted push for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

With the majority of U.S. citizens preoccupied by domestic concerns, President Barack Obama is also likely to tread water in foreign affairs, seeking incremental progress where possible but not bold breakthroughs.

This is particularly true when it comes to the Arab-Israeli dispute. Obama, unlike most of his predecessors, devoted considerable time and energy to trying to achieve an agreement in his first term. Two days after his inauguration, he appointed a prestigious envoy, George Mitchell, and pressured Israel to slow its expansion of settlements in the West Bank.

The results have been disappointing, to say the least, and Obama and his advisers have retreated in part for domestic political reasons – to avoid alienating some Jewish voters – and in part because they simply don’t know what to try next.

Mitchell departed in May and was replaced by a career State Department officer, David Hale, who has made no discernible headway getting Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table.

Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP), said only a crisis or an unexpected opportunity in the region could prompt a more proactive U.S. role until after next year’s elections.

“The situation is untenable but stable for now,” Ibish told IPS. “When you look at the array of players, Prime Minister (Salam) Fayyad was right.”

Ibish was referring to remarks by the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Fayyad told a large audience at an ATFP dinner in Washington Wednesday that “conditions are not ripe at this juncture for a meaningful resumption of talks” with Israel. Palestinian negotiators need “much greater specificity” about what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is willing to concede to make new negotiations worthwhile, Fayyad said.

The Palestinians’ other gambit – seeking enhanced status at the United Nations – also seems to be going nowhere, in large part because of U.S. opposition. That leaves the status quo as the best option in the near term.

Fayyad urged U.S. supporters of the Palestinians to press the U.S. Congress not to cut off aid, which has been instrumental in enabling the PA to build the infrastructure of a state and to pay 150,000 employees on whom one million Palestinians in the West Bank depend.

The Palestinian leader also urged the Israeli government to curb violence against Palestinians by Jewish settlers, validate Palestinian security forces by letting them patrol more areas in the West Bank, and treat peaceful Palestinian demonstrators with the same care they do Jewish protestors in Tel Aviv.

Ibish said Israeli restraint on expanding settlements would also be welcome, but real progress would have to wait.

“The Obama administration tried very hard for three years and spent political capital and got nowhere,” he said. The White House is “flummoxed by the impasse and not sure how to proceed”.

Similar caution is likely when it comes to Syria and Iran.

Regarding Syria, the administration has made it clear that it is not going to intervene militarily to oust embattled President Bashar al- Assad.

While limited U.S. involvement through NATO helped remove the regime in Libya of Moammar Gaddafi – who was killed by opposition forces in his hometown of Sirte on Thursday – Syria is far more complicated.

Syrian opposition forces are not unified and lack a territorial base. U.S. officials for now are urging them to remain peaceful, fearing a sectarian bloodbath if rebels take up arms en masse and the country fractures along ethnic and religious lines.

Appearing Oct. 14 via Skype at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Robert Ford, the U.S. ambassador to Syria, said that while Syrians assured him they would not turn on each other for sectarian reasons, he had heard the same claims in Iraq in 2004, just before that country dissolved in civil strife.

“I worry that a sectarian civil war can happen,” in Syria, he said.

Such a development would inevitably draw in neighbours and could become a proxy conflict among Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey that would kill many thousands and create thousands more refugees. Fighting could also spread into Lebanon, a country with a history of civil war where sectarian divisions still simmer and key players are allied with foreign powers.

The Libya intervention was unique in that it involved a small homogenous nation of little strategic import led by a dictator with almost no international support. Both the U.N. Security Council and the Arab League gave NATO intervention their blessing – something that is unlikely in Syria’s case.

Ford also noted that “there is not an armed opposition cable of overthrowing the Syrian government” at this point.

More sanctions to pressure the Assad regime to step down if it continues to refuse to reform are thus the most likely scenario, he said.

Sanctions are also the default mode for Iran. Despite calls by some Washington hawks to use allegations of a foiled Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to attack Iran, the Obama administration is using the case instead to press foreign governments to do a better job of implementing tough financial penalties on Iran.

In general, it appears that Obama has little to fear from the Republicans on foreign affairs as opposed to his track record on the U.S. economy.

With the deaths of Osama bin Laden, Anwar el-Awlaki and even “mad dog” Gaddafi on his watch and the toughest sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran in its history, it will be difficult for Republicans to portray the president as weak on U.S. national security. Even if he was inclined to be bold, Obama’s campaign advisers will likely tell him to postpone any ambitious foreign policy gambits for a second term.

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin and - -
WASHINGTON, Oct 12 2011 (IPS)

U.S. Justice Department charges that elements of Iran’s government were behind a foiled plot on the life of Saudi Arabia’s U.S. ambassador have boggled the minds of many Americans knowledgeable about both Iran and terrorism.

The alleged target and modus operandi – employing a Mexican drug cartel to blow up Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir at a Washington restaurant – are unusual, to say the least, for a government that has focused on political dissidents and theatres of war closer to home.

“Fishy, fishy, fishy,” Bruce Riedel, a CIA veteran who was formerly in charge of the Near East and South Asia on the White House National Security Council, told IPS. “That Iran engages in assassinations is old news. That it would use a Mexican drug cartel would be new.”

Iran has not been behind a political assassination in the United States since a year after the 1979 revolution, when an African-American convert to Islam, Daoud Salahuddin, killed the former press attaché at the Iranian Embassy, Ali Akbar Tabatabai, in a Washington suburb.

Iran was also responsible for assassinations of Iranian dissidents in Europe in the 1980s and early 1990s but used its own agents or members of Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shiite organization that Iran helped create following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Hezbollah is believed responsible for the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and a spate of other bombings and abductions in Lebanon.

More recently, Iran has allegedly backed local proxies responsible for the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

U.S. experts on Iranian spy agencies and tradecraft say the hare-brained scheme described in the Justice Department complaint does not resemble the operations of the Quds Force, the external arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC). Al-Quds means Jerusalem in Arabic.

“Nothing about this adds up,” said Kenneth Katzman, author of a book on the IRGC and expert on Iran at the Congressional Research Service.

“Iran does not use non-Muslim groups or people who are not trusted members or associates of the Quds force,” Katzman said. “Iran does not blow up buildings in Washington that invites retaliation against the Iranian homeland.”

Indeed, the timing would be extremely awkward for Iran, which is already facing growing isolation because of its nuclear program and domestic abuses of human rights.

This weekend, Ahmed Shaheed, the new U.N. special rapporteur on human rights to Iran, will release his first report, which is expected to excoriate the Iranian government for its treatment of its own citizens, especially in the aftermath of disputed 2009 presidential elections.

Early next month, the International Atomic Energy Agency is scheduled to share with its board members new information about alleged Iranian research into making a nuclear warhead. A new finding against Iran by the board of the nuclear watchdog group would increase pressure on Russia, China and members of the Nonaligned Movement to approve more sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

Iran has vehemently denied the U.S. allegations that Quds Force officers recruited an Iranian-American from Texas, Manssor Arbabsiar, as part of a plot to kill al-Jubeir by employing members of a Mexican drug cartel.

Katzman speculated that Arbabsiar, a former used car salesman who was apparently in financial difficulties, may have come up with the idea on his own. According to the official complaint, he contacted a member of the Los Zetas cartel who turned out to be an informant of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), as well as a cousin in Iran who has connections to the Quds Force.

Mr. Arbabsiar was said to have wired nearly 100,000 dollars to the informant’s bank account from Iran in September and to have promised 1.5 million dollars to do the deed. He was arrested earlier this month when he was refused entry to Mexico and put on a plane to New York.

It is possible that the Iranian cousin “agreed to support him in some way but was doubtful he could pull it off”, Katzman said. “This was not a thoroughly vetted and approved terrorist plot.”

Several U.S. intelligence experts expressed scepticism about the expertise of the DEA in evaluating such a sensitive case.

Riedel noted that the complaint refers to “elements” of the Iranian government, “which suggests that the administration doesn’t think that all elements of the Iranian government were involved”.

An Iranian source, speaking with IPS on condition he not be named, said that the Quds force would investigate the Iranian alleged to have participated in the plot “to find out if there is any personal interest” involved, suggesting an element of freelancing.

“It seems the Americans and Saudis need this propaganda to promote their policy against Iran at this time, given that they have occupied three Muslim countries in the world – Iraq, Afghanistan and Bahrain,” the source added.

While Iranian-Saudi tensions are clearly on the rise, Riedel questioned why Iran would want to target the Saudi ambassador. Al-Jubeir, while close to Saudi King Abdullah, is not a member of the royal family and has functioned mostly as the King’s translator and “favoured messenger boy”, Riedel said.

Both Katzman and Riedel said they were troubled by the way in which the Obama administration has jumped on the case, with a news conference by the attorney general and high-profile statements by the president and secretary of state.

Given the current tensions in the region, “I hope they know where they want to take it,” Riedel said.

Vali Nasr, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, told CNN that the United States should “make public all the details of this plot” to avoid feeding Middle Eastern conspiracy theories.

“It is only with clarity of facts that the United States can make a convincing case for why Iran’s anti- American posture and violent tactics is not heroic bravado deserving of accolade, but a cynical gamble that endangers the whole region,” Nasr wrote.

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin and - -
WASHINGTON, Oct 5 2011 (IPS)

As Iran continues a slow march toward potential nuclear weapons capability, diplomatic action to contain the programme is likely to shift to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), whose director general, Yukiya Amano, has taken a harder line than his predecessor about alleged military research by Iran’s nuclear scientists.

Experts on the Iranian nuclear programme are looking toward the IAEA’s Nov. 17-18 board meeting in Vienna for new criticism of Tehran, including a possible finding that Iran has not complied with its obligations to be honest about alleged nuclear studies with a military dimension.

Since he took office in late 2009, Amano, a non-proliferation specialist and Japan’s former representative to the nuclear watchdog organisation, has spoken much more explicitly and insistently than his Egyptian predecessor, Mohamed ElBaradei, about alleged Iranian studies of warhead designs and ways to initiate nuclear explosions.

Amano told the IAEA board Sep. 12 that, “the Agency is increasingly concerned about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed nuclear related activities involving military related organizations, including activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile, about which the Agency continues to receive new information.”

Amano added, “In the near future, I hope to set out in greater detail the basis for the Agency’s concerns so that all Member States are fully informed.”

A Western diplomat in Vienna told IPS that that comment by Amano triggered speculation that he will provide significant new information about Iran in the next report to the board, due out around Nov. 9. The diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that member states, led by Western countries, might use the material as a basis to find Iran in non-compliance with its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Such a finding was first reached in 2006 and resulted in the issue being taken up by the U.N. Security Council, which has passed six resolutions against Iran, including four that specify sanctions. Another resolution seems unlikely now, given Russian and Chinese resistance.

However, the diplomat said that a new finding would increase pressure on governments to tighten implementation of punitive measures already in place. These include an embargo on arms sales to and from Iran and tight export controls over materials that Iran could use for its nuclear programme.

“This issue has been marked by incremental escalation on all sides,” the diplomat said, referring both to sanctions and Iran’s slow but steady expansion of uranium enrichment and other technologies with potential weapons applications.

The U.S. intelligence community, in a 2007 estimate, said it had “high confidence” that Iran had halted weapons-related nuclear work in 2003 and “medium confidence” that the programme had not resumed through mid-2007. A 2011 intelligence estimate appears to have been less categorical but has not been made public.

Michael Adler, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said that the IAEA was receiving a considerable amount of new information to augment documents and other materials smuggled out of Iran several years ago by the wife of an Iranian spying for Germany and later gathered by foreign intelligence agencies on a computer nicknamed “the laptop of death”.

Iran has called the material forgeries while admitting that some of the information about alleged studies is correct. Olli Heinonen, former deputy director of the IAEA, says that there have been no detailed discussions about the allegations since the summer of 2008.

Adler, who covered the IAEA as a reporter for Agence France Presse and who is writing a book on the Iranian nuclear programme, told a conference at the Woodrow Wilson Center Sep. 30 that Iran appears to have dismantled some of the units doing weapons research in 2003 and reassembled elements of the programme “below the radar screen”, focusing on work that also can have civilian purposes.

He added that “Amano and other officials say there is increasing evidence Iran resumed weaponisation work after 2003 and especially after 2006.”

Jim Walsh, a non-proliferation expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says there is a danger that the IAEA could lose credibility if it takes too tough a line against Iran without publicising hard evidence to back up its claims.

“They could lose access and make a diplomatic solution more difficult if they are seen as a handmaiden of the U.S.,” Walsh told IPS. “They need to say what they’ve got.”

The new focus on the IAEA comes at a time when other diplomatic efforts have waned.

Several Iranian officials, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have said recently that Iran would stop producing uranium enriched to 20 percent of a key isotope, U-235, if foreign countries would provide Iran with the fuel for a reactor that makes medical isotopes. Iran has amassed more than 70 kilogrammes of this moderately enriched uranium, which is perilously close to weapons grade fuel.

Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), and Charles Ferguson, president of FAS, wrote recently in the International Herald Tribune that the U.S. and its allies should “take Ahmadinejad at his word” and “provide Iran with 50 kilograms of fuel, without any conditions.”

The two said that the move would be “a humanitarian gesture (that) would buy Washington good will with the Iranian people (while) curtailing Iran’s enrichment activities and potentially cutting the Gordian knot that has stalled the West’s nuclear negotiations with Iran.”

However, the Barack Obama administration appears to have rejected the new proposal out of hand.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters last week that “Ahmadinejad makes a lot of empty promises.” She described the latest offer as “a diversion from the real issues”.

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Sep 28 2011 (IPS)

In a development that could help resolve an eight-year-old diplomatic and humanitarian standoff, the Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian opposition group that has several thousand adherents at a military camp in Iraq, has agreed to allow residents to apply for refugee status and be interviewed individually by U.N. officials.

Vincent Cochetel, Washington representative for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told IPS Wednesday that an agreement was reached about 10 days ago through the MEK’s legal counsel in London.

“They have agreed to individual screening,” he said. “We have offered an alternative location near Ashraf,” the camp north of Baghdad where the MEK members reside.

The decision by the MEK could help resolve a crisis that has weighed heavily on the United States as it prepares to withdraw most of its remaining troops from Iraq. Iraqi officials are considering allowing a few thousand U.S. troops to stay in the country but only to provide training and other military assistance.

Mark Toner, deputy State Department spokesman, told IPS, “We fully support the international community’s efforts to resolve the situation at Ashraf.”

There are about 3,300 Iranians left in the camp.

In the past, the MEK leadership has refused to allow most residents of Camp Ashraf to apply for refugee status or to speak with UNHCR representatives without MEK officials present.

Former members of the group, who contend that the MEK is a cult that fosters blind obedience to its leaders, say that many Ashraf inhabitants have been held against their will and would eagerly leave the camp if they could. There have been fears that the leaders would order members to commit suicide en masse rather than let them go.

The agreement with UNHCR is a necessary first step to close the camp – something the Iraqi government has long sought – but does not resolve the problem of where the residents find refuge.

“The challenge for us is to find countries to receive them,” Cochetel said. “The likelihood that they can remain in Iraq is very limited.”

The current Iraqi government, dominated by Shiites and Kurds, has tolerated the MEK camp only under U.S. and international pressure. The Iraqi leadership blames the MEK for allying with Saddam Hussein and participating in brutal crackdowns against Iraqi Kurds and Shiites following the 1991 Gulf War.

The George W. Bush administration initially promised to declare residents of Ashraf enemy combatants following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam’s regime. Instead, however, U.S. forces put the camp under their protection. Since 2008, when Iraq regained sovereignty over the camp, Iraqi troops have entered Ashraf several times in a futile effort to convince residents to leave. A few dozen people have been killed in skirmishes between the Iraqis and the Iranians.

Trita Parsi, head of the National Iranian American Council, told IPS the agreement with UNHCR “could potentially be a breakthrough”, but that it remained unclear whether the MEK leadership would allow everyone in the camp to be interviewed.

“Hopefully, if given enough protection, camp residents will be able to be truthful about conditions in Ashraf and where they want to go,” Parsi said.

Several hundred camp residents have managed to return to Iran since 2003 through the auspices of the International Red Cross. Many of those who remain would fear to go to Iran now in light of the widespread crackdown on Iranian opposition groups that followed disputed 2009 presidential elections.

Originally a Marxist-Islamist group that helped overthrow the Shah of Iran, the MEK lost a power struggle with more Islamic-oriented factions following the 1979 revolution. The group has very little support within Iran because of its siding with Iraq in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. During the following decade, while Saddam remained in power, the MEK carried out assassinations of prominent officials and other attacks within Iran.

The U.S. State Department put the MEK on its list of foreign terrorist organisations in 1997 because of the group’s bloody record, which includes the assassination of six U.S. citizens in Iran during the 1970s.

MEK leaders insist that they have renounced terrorism and now advocate a democratic government for Iran. But their literature continues to treat their leader, Mariam Rajavi, who lives outside Paris, as the object of a personality cult. The whereabouts of Mrs. Rajavi’s husband, Massoud, who led the group into exile, are unknown.

In recent months, wealthy supporters of the MEK have waged an aggressive lobbying campaign to be removed from the U.S. terrorist list, paying tens of thousands of dollars apiece to prominent former U.S. officials to speak on the group’s behalf.

One argument advanced by MEK adherents has been that removal from the list would allow Ashraf residents to come to the United States. However, a State Department official told IPS last month that U.S. law forbids immigration to anyone with ties to a foreign terrorist organisation. He said this includes “those who provided material support to, or received military-type training from the group, as many MEK members have”.

Asked if UNHCR was looking to Europe – where many Ashraf residents have relatives – to give refuge to camp residents, Cochetel said, “I can’t say at this point that their response has been overwhelming.”

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin and - -
NEW YORK, Sep 22 2011 (IPS)

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Thursday that Iran would be willing to halt production of enriched uranium that is close to weapons grade if the United States sells Iran fuel for a reactor that produces medical isotopes.

But Ahmadinejad said Iran would not stop making low enriched uranium and would not give up its nuclear stockpiles, making it unlikely that Washington will embrace his proposal.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran has more than 4,500 kilogrammes of uranium enriched to 3.5 percent U-235 – which is suitable to power nuclear reactors for electricity – and more 70 kilogrammes of uranium enriched to 20 percent of the rare isotope. Weapons grade uranium is enriched to 90 percent U-235, but getting there from 20 percent is much easier than starting from scratch.

The Iranian president has suggested in several recent interviews that Iran would stop making 20 percent uranium if the United States sold Iran fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor, an aging facility provided by the United States when the shah ruled Iran. Argentina provided the last batch of fuel for the plant in the 1990s but that is now running out. It is not clear that Iran has the expertise to make the necessary fuel rods and assemblies.

Speaking to about a dozen senior U.S. editors and reporters Thursday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, Ahmadinejad said Iran had only begun to enrich to 20 percent because “some of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) members set up preconditions” for providing fuel. He was referring to a U.S.-backed offer in 2009 for Iran to send out most of its stockpile of 3.5 percent uranium for further processing by Russia and France. At the time, Iran had no uranium enriched to 20 percent.

Iran agreed to the swap, then reneged after the proposal was harshly criticised by Ahmadinejad’s political rivals. It later re-embraced the idea after mediation by Brazil and Turkey, but by then, Iran had amassed a larger quantity of enriched uranium and begun enriching to 20 percent and the U.S. and its allies were no longer interested in the original deal.

David Albright, president and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington research organisation, told IPS that the new offer was worth pursuing to limit Iran’s production of more highly enriched uranium.

“Take it as a small proposal, sell two years of fuel and cap enrichment at five percent,” Albright said. “If you can curtail that, you are better off.”

Sanctions would remain in place against Iran so long as it does not abide by repeated U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding that it suspend uranium enrichment, he said. But the sense of urgency about Iran’s nuclear programme would dissipate and allow more time for diplomacy.

Ahmadinejad, Albright noted, is under pressure to meet the needs of Iranian cancer patients who require the radioactive isotopes for treatment.

Ahmadinejad said Thursday that “over 800,000 people in Iran are dependent on this medicine”.

He said the international community should not worry about Iran’s remaining stockpiles because it is “under the monitoring and control of the IAEA”.

However, Iran has aroused concerns because it has hidden aspects of its programme and refuses to give the IAEA access to scientists suspected of studying how to make a nuclear warhead.

There is also the question of whether Ahmadinejad can deliver on any promises – particularly on so sensitive a topic — given his weakened political position back home.

Tensions with the country’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have flared in recent months and there have been increasingly harsh attacks on Ahmadinejad and his chief aide, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, in the state-controlled Iranian press.

The president’s entourage has been accused of crimes ranging from sorcery to corruption. The most serious charges came last week when a businessman close to Mashaei was arrested on charges of obtaining fraudulent letters of credit worth 2.8 billion dollars to buy shares in a state-owned steel factory that is being privatised.

Asked about domestic tensions Thursday, Ahmadinejad, as is his wont, replied with a question of his own about the United States.

“Is there a power struggle in America?” he asked, referring to the conflict between the Congress and the White House over taxes and spending.

Ahmadinejad also deflected questions on human rights, claiming he had no control over the actions of the judiciary.

He suggested that the hundreds of Iranian political prisoners still in jail following his disputed 2009 re-election were there for attacking public property, not for expressing their views. He also claimed that only 38 people died during those disturbances and that many of them were security forces; human rights groups believe more than 100 were killed and that most of them were unarmed demonstrators.

Among his most controversial comments, Ahmadinejad condemned homosexualty as “an ugly deed… shameful… one of the ugliest behaviours in our society (that is) against the divine teachings of every faith.”

He made the remark in reply to a question about whether he still believed – as he told an audience at Columbia University in 2007 — that there were no homosexuals in his country.

The Iranian president also insisted, despite evidence to the contrary, that the Iranian economy is prospering. “The purchasing power of the Iranian population is steadily increasing,” he said.

Earlier this year, his government phased out subsidies on consumer staples in favour of cash payments to Iranians. But many report sticker shock when they see electricity bills and factories are laying off workers because they cannot afford the new prices. Iran’s chief auditor said recently that the programme was unsustainable because the government is paying out more in cash payments than it is getting from selling unsubsidised energy and other goods.

In other comments sure to irritate the U.S. and Europeans, Ahmadinejad asserted that the political awakenings of the Middle East would soon reach Europe and the United States.

“The time of the oppressor is over,” he said with no obvious sense of irony about Iran’s own actions. “We are in serious need of behaviour modification.”

Earlier Thursday, U.S. and European diplomats at the U.N. General Assembly walked out during his speech in which he accused the United States of killing Osama bin Laden so that he could not testify about the true culprits behind the Sep. 11, 2011 terrorist attacks. Ahmadinejad provoked a similar walkout last year when he accused the United States of being behind the attacks to have a pretext to invade Muslim countries.

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Sep 13 2011 (IPS)

The Palestinian drive for statehood status at the United Nations injects new uncertainty into an already volatile Middle East, threatening to further isolate Israel and diminish already dwindling U.S. influence in the region.

Barring some last-minute breakthrough that would revive negotiations or otherwise advance their national aspirations, Palestinian officials appear bent on seeking, at a minimum, recognition as a nonmember state from the U.N. General Assembly.

That would allow “Palestine” to join a variety of international bodies and conventions and use them to oppose policies connected with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem – a tactic that David Makovsky, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, calls “lawfare”.

Israel, already reeling from the expulsion of its ambassador from Turkey and the withdrawal of nearly all its diplomats from Cairo after anti-Israel riots last weekend, is bracing for more turmoil.

Although Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has promised not to allow violent protests, demonstrations could get out of hand – especially if the Palestinian bid for statehood is introduced at the U.N. Security Council where it faces a certain U.S. veto.

Retired Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, former head of intelligence for the Israel Defence Forces, warned Monday that unrest “will not be limited to the West Bank”. Speaking at The Washington Institute, where he is currently a senior fellow, Yadlin said, “The whole Middle East can go on fire. The law of unintended consequences is going to work hard in coming months.”

Throughout the region, governments have been toppled or are on the defensive against popular unrest. While the Palestinian issue did not figure in any of the uprisings that have marked the Arab Spring so far, it is a deeply felt issue of Arab and Muslim identity. The inability of countries such as Egypt to broker Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and creation of a Palestinian state has long been a source of grievance and humiliation.

Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute, has gone so far as to warn that the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty – the foundation for Israeli security – is “hanging by a thread” in a situation in which the Muslim Brotherhood is likely to do well in upcoming parliamentary elections and “no major political figure left on Egypt’s national scene [is] willing to defend peace with Israel.”

Israel’s growing isolation is also the result of its own policies.

While it has blamed its troubles with Turkey on Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s outsized regional ambitions, Israeli- Turkish relations began their downward trajectory following a massive Israeli assault on Gaza in late 2008. Ties have worsened since Israel killed eight Turks and a Turkish American aboard a ship trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza in 2010.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has refused to apologise for those deaths, leading Turkey to downgrade diplomatic relations.

On the Palestinian front, Israel implemented a partial moratorium on settlement construction for 10 months but refused to extend the restrictions last year, leading Abbas to withdraw from talks after only two weeks. Israel has not tabled any parametres for a settlement and has rejected using its 1967 borders, with agreed land swaps, as the basis for a two-state solution. U.S. President Barack Obama proposed this in a speech in May that was harshly criticised by Netanyahu and U.S. supporters of Netanyahu’s hardline stance.

The Palestinian decision to go to the U.N. was sparked by a belief that nothing would come from negotiations with Netanyahu’s right-wing government and that Obama – battling for re-election – would not be in a position to do more to pressure Israel for at least the next year. Abbas also seeks to placate his own restive constituents, who are weary of living in sovereign limbo. However, his decision could spark a cutoff in U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority, which governs portions of the West Bank.

Hind Khoury, a former Palestinian ambassador to France and minister for Jerusalem affairs, said the move would improve Palestinian leverage for future negotiations.

“I am tired of being a hostage of internal U.S. politics and Israeli politics,” she told the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, last week. “One of the major problems has been the lack of any deterrence to force Israel to act within international law.”

Chas Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, another Washington think tank, Monday that there will be “a war of attrition by the international community… against the U.S. effort to protect Israel from the consequences of its own actions in the occupied territories.”

Among Arab and Muslim states, U.S. opposition to the Palestinian gambit reinforces the view that Washington and Tel Aviv are joined at the hip and that the United States will not stand up even for its own policies – such as opposing Israel’s continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Former Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Turki al-Faisal, warned Monday in an op-ed in The New York Times that as a result of U.S. rejection of the Palestinian U.N. move, “American influence will decline further, Israeli security will be undermined and Iran will be empowered, increasing the chances of another war in the region. Moreover, Saudi Arabia would no longer be able to cooperate with America in the same way it historically has.”

Saudi experts say that the kingdom is unlikely to retaliate against the United States in any specific way, but that Washington’s actions will further diminish what was once a solid partnership.

Freeman said the relationship had become “transactional”, with each issue dealt with on a case-by-case basis. While Saudi Arabia continues to rely on the United States for its security and cooperates closely on counterterrorism, it looks to Asia for most of its trade and has profound disagreements with Washington over the introduction of democracy in countries such as Bahrain and Syria, he said.

Quoting an old Chinese proverb, Freeman added, “We are sleeping in the same bed but dreaming different dreams.”

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Sep 7 2011 (IPS)

Of all the mistakes and missed opportunities that have characterised U.S. foreign policy since Sep. 11, 2001, few may have been as consequential as the failure to improve relations with Iran.

Had the George W. Bush administration responded to repeated overtures from Tehran, it might have cemented a powerful ally against Al-Qaeda, had an easier time pacifying Iraq and reduced Iranian motivation to acquire nuclear weapons and oppose Arab-Israeli peace.

Unlike the reaction in many Arab states, where people saw 9-11 as punishment of the United States for its pro-Israeli policies, in Iran both government officials and ordinary citizens expressed genuine sympathy for the victims.

The government of then President Mohammad Khatami – with the backing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – strongly supported U.S. efforts to topple the Taliban government and create a new administration for Afghanistan. Its reward: being labeled a member of an “axis of evil” along with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and North Korea.

Iranian efforts to reconcile with the United States persisted despite this diplomatic slap. There were monthly one-on-one talks in Europe between fairly senior Iranian and U.S. diplomats from the fall of 2001 until May 2003 that dealt with Afghanistan and the looming U.S. invasion of Iraq.

James Dobbins, a special U.S. envoy for Afghanistan after 9-11, recalls a remarkable overture in March 2002 – two months after the “axis of evil” comment by President Bush – when an Iranian general offered his country’s assistance in training 20,000 members of a new Afghan army.

Dobbins, in an article last year in the Washington Quarterly, wrote that Secretary of State Colin Powell called the proposal “very interesting” and told him to talk to then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Rice put the offer on the agenda at a meeting of National Security Council principals, including then defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

“When we came to that item on the agenda, I again recounted my conversation with the Iranians,” Dobbins wrote. “Rumsfeld did not look up from the papers he was perusing. When I finished, he made no comment and asked no questions. Neither did anyone else. After a long pause, seeing no one ready to take up the issue, Rice moved the meeting on to the next item on her agenda.”

Dobbins told IPS that the Iranian offer would likely have been scaled back and Afghanistan’s other neighbours and interested parties such as Pakistan and India would also have to have been included. Still, he regards the lack of a U.S. counter-proposal as a major missed opportunity. The Iranians, he said, “were making it clear that they had a broader agenda [of reconciliation with the U.S.] in mind.”

This pattern of non-response to Iranian overtures persisted. There was no U.S. reply to an Iranian agenda for comprehensive negotiations sent to the State Department in May 2003, no answer when Iran offered that year to trade senior Al-Qaeda detainees for members of an Iranian terrorist group in Iraq, and no response to an admittedly idiosyncratic letter to Bush by new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006.

By then, of course, the power dynamics in the region had shifted toward Iran and away from the United States, which was bogged down in sectarian warfare in Iraq and about to face a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.

Dobbins said that continued Iranian cooperation might not have been decisive in Afghanistan given the Taliban’s stronger links to Pakistan. “In terms of Iraq, however, it could have made all the difference since at least 50 percent of the violence since 2003 has come from Shi’ite militants” who are either backed by Iran or otherwise susceptible to Iranian pressure, he said.

Those in the Bush administration who opposed rapprochement with Iran feared that restoring U.S. relations would preserve an authoritarian regime that had been responsible for acts of terrorism against Americans in the past and that still supported groups opposed to Israel’s existence.

However, improved U.S.-Iran relations under Khatami would likely have strengthened Iranian reformists and might have even prevented the election of the neoconservative Ahmadinejad. U.S. refusal to negotiate with Iran about its nuclear programme – unless Iran first suspended that programme – certainly did not stop the programme; if anything, it resulted in Iran accelerating uranium enrichment.

The Barack Obama administration tried to correct course and sought to engage Iran without preconditions in 2009. However, disputed Iranian presidential elections and their bloody aftermath so divided the Iranian political elite that progress on the diplomatic front was impossible.

Since then, both sides have hardened their positions. Iran has continued support for anti-U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq to chase the U.S. from the region and retaliate for mounting U.S. and international sanctions over the nuclear programme.

John Limbert, a former U.S. hostage in Iran who was deputy assistant secretary of state for Iran in the early part of the Obama administration, blames inertia for Washington’s inability to take yes for an answer from Iran.

“We know how to do certain things but not act constructively” with Iran, he said. “We assume there is a trick whenever they come to us.”

Iranians also have difficulty trusting a country that is slowly squeezing the Iranian economy and anticipating the demise of the Islamic regime. Newly minted Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said Tuesday that another Iranian revolution is “a matter of time” given the pro-democracy ferment in the neighbourhood. That may well be the case, but talking about it openly is unlikely to help Iranians bring that about.

Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution, said she doubted that U.S. policies have impacted Iran’s complicated internal dynamics, noting that Ahmadinejad has gotten no bounce from his occasional efforts to engage Washington.

However, she told IPS that allowing the 2001-2003 talks to end was “a fantastic mistake… The dialogue that existed on Afghanistan was the single unparalleled opportunity to create a diplomatic process” with Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

“It’s wholly improbable that we’ll see anything like that in the foreseeable future,” she added, “because the political conditions in Iran are so inappropriate for any meaningful dialogue.”

She might have said the same about the United States in a presidential election year.

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Aug 31 2011 (IPS)

U.S.-led efforts to build Afghan security forces capable of preventing Taliban resurgence face a series of challenges, from the reluctance of southern Pashtuns to serve in a national army, to maintaining the billions of dollars in infrastructure and equipment provided by the U.S. and other foreign countries over the past decade.

Brig. Gen. Guy “Tom” Cosentino, deputy commanding general for regional support at the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan, Tuesday provided a largely candid assessment of Afghan security progress and U.S. goals.

“When we say that they [the Afghans] are going to provide security, I don’t mean that the war is going to end … on Dec. 31, 2014” when U.S.-led troops are to hand over responsibility for defending the country, Cosentino told an audience at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank. “The Afghan army and police will be securing their own people and there will be occasional dramatic attacks.”

U.S. popular enthusiasm for the war a decade after the 9-11 attacks has waned as the financial and human costs of the conflict rise. Even as the U.S. starts to withdraw 33,000 troops surged into the country since President Barack Obama’s inauguration, the death toll continues to mount. August was the deadliest month of the war for U.S. troops, with 66 killed — 300 so far this year. More than 1,750 U.S. troops have died since the U.S. starting fighting in Afghanistan in 2001.

U.S. hopes of reducing its military personnel to 10,000 or 20,000 – from a current level of 100,000 – rest in large part on developing capable Afghan forces. After a choppy start, a NATO-led training mission inaugurated nearly two years ago is shaping an Afghan security establishment that numbers more than 300,000 soldiers and police.

Cosentino said the quality of the forces was improving, but conceded that the mission still has to contend with a number of challenges. Among them:

Southern Pashtuns – the major source of recruits for the Taliban – now make up about a third of Afghan army and police but are under- represented in the officer corps. While Pashtuns make up nearly 40 percent of Afghan army officers, Cosentino said he did not have a figure for the percentage that are from the south. Tajiks, a northern ethnic group that represents only 25 percent of the Afghan population, make up 38 percent of army officers. Pashtuns account for about 44 percent of the population.

Only 14 percent of Afghans aged 18-40 – the prime military recruiting target group – are literate and “it’s worse in the south”, Cosentino said. As a result, basic training for both army and police now includes teaching recruits how to read.

Retention “is still a challenge,” Cosentino said. The attrition rate for the Afghan army was 32 percent in 2010 and remains high, at about 2.2 percent a month or 24-26 percent a year. The turnover, Cosentino said, in part reflects the fact that “there is no law that requires you to stay” in the Afghan military once signing up – unlike the situation in the U.S. and most other nations.

To compensate for the reluctance of southern Pashtuns to join the national army, NATO is promoting recruitment of local police in a kind of replay of the creation of “Sons of Iraq” militias among Sunnis who would not join an Iraqi army perceived as Shiite Muslim- dominated.

Matthew Hoh, a former Marine Corps company commander and director of the Afghanistan Study Group, a nonprofit group that opposed the U.S. troop surge, told IPS that this approach would not overcome local hostility to national forces.

“Are they truly subservient to the ministry of interior [in Kabul]?” Hoh asked about the local police. He added that the Taliban had conducted its own surge, reflected in the rising numbers of improvised explosive devices and other attacks on U.S. and Afghan forces and the Taliban’s apparent reluctance to engage in negotiations on a political solution.

In message marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who is believed to be in Pakistan, noted approvingly that “the enemy sustained more casualties in soul and equipment this year in comparison with last year.”

Omar alluded to the death of 30 U.S. troops – including elite Navy SEALs – in a helicopter crash Aug. 6 and the assassination of prominent Afghan officials, including Ahmad Wali Karzai, boss of Kandahar province and President Hamid Karzai’s half-brother, Jul. 12. Omar did not mention the U.S. killing of Al-Qaeda leader and Taliban ally Osama bin Laden in Pakistan May 1.

Cosentino maintained that the U.S. and NATO surge had shown results in southern Afghanistan, where he said “the enemy is back on their heels”. He said the military and diplomatic focus over the next six months would be on eastern Afghanistan along the border with Pakistan, which insurgents appear to cross at will. “We are still greatly challenged in the east,” he said.

Traveling around the country in recent months, Cosentino said he had seen a marked rise in economic activity in areas that had previously been controlled by the Taliban. “Helmand province is a boomtown,” he said. In addition to local investment, private Indian and Iranian entrepreneurs are also starting up businesses.

“People don’t make investments where their investments are at risk,” he said.

The NATO training mission, which now includes representatives of 34 nations, is shifting focus toward what Cosentino called “stewardship” – teaching Afghans how to maintain personnel, facilities and equipment.

NATO has also altered its construction practices, which he admitted had not been “very wise” in the past, toward building that is more sustainable in a poor country. For example, he said, Afghans are being given money to build adobe-style structures in the south that are cheap to maintain and cool. Solar panels are being installed on the roofs of police stations so that they don’t need expensive generators and fuel to provide electricity.

Cosentino said local police are also recruiting women – many of them war widows – to perform functions such as searching female suspects.

Many critics have focused on the high cost of the training mission – which Cosentino said would amount to 12.8 billion dollars for 2012 – and said that there was no way that Afghanistan will be able to pay for its large security forces on its own.

Cosentino said the sum reflected the fact that “we are in a building phase” and that the number “will drop like a rock next year” after facilities are finished, weapons are provided and Afghans take over more responsibility for defending their country. He conceded, however, that for the mission to succeed, the U.S. and its partners would have to maintain a long-term commitment to the country.

*Barbara Slavin, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, moderated the discussion with Gen. Cosentino.

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Aug 11 2011 (IPS)

A new Congressional push to sanction Iran’s Central Bank is aimed at reducing Iranian oil revenues, but could backfire and hurt the global economy.

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal disclosed a letter to the White House signed by 92 senators urging the Barack Obama administration to place new restrictions on dealings with the bank as part of a strategy to “cripple” Iran.

A copy of the letter, obtained Thursday by IPS, alleged that the Iranian Central Bank “lies at the center” of Tehran’s efforts to circumvent a long list of sanctions already imposed on the Islamic Republic by the United States and other countries.

Such a step – on top of prior sanctions that bar Iran from most transactions in dollars and make it hard for it to deal in euros – would make it even more difficult for Iran to obtain hard currency for its oil exports.

Experts on the Iranian economy told IPS that the intent was not to cut Iranian oil sales – which could cause a spike in global prices and ultimately help Iran’s oil-dependent economy – but to worsen the terms of trade with Tehran by giving more leverage to customers such as China, India and Turkey to strike hard bargains for Iranian crude.

“If this goes through, the big buyers of Iranian oil will be able to squeeze Iran,” said Kevan Harris, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins who studies the Iranian economy and recently returned from a trip to Iran.

“You want to move the market so that you have a smaller number of buyers” of Iranian oil, added Mark Dubowitz, director of the Iran Energy Project at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, a Washington think tank that provides research for Congressional staffers crafting sanctions strategy against Iran.

“You want to remove the ‘white-hatted’ [reputable Western] buyers and ruthlessly drive the price down” that Iran receives from remaining buyers, he said.

Dubowitz said that rather than a blanket ban on dealings with the Iranian Central Bank, he would prefer barring certain transactions that he claimed facilitate the Iranian nuclear programme and support for terrorism, allow Iran to sell energy bonds and circumvent existing sanctions on Iranian banks. He called the Senate push the beginning of a “negotiation” with the Obama administration on further sanctions against Iran.

The administration has said – as recently as June – that it does not seek new legislation against Iran and is content to implement already stringent measures in force. However, the White House could act through executive order.

Republican Senator Mark Kirk, one of the main sponsors of the letter, told the Wall Street Journal he would introduce a law to sanction the central bank if the White House didn’t act by the end of this year.

“The administration will face a choice of whether it wants to lead this effort or be forced to act,” Kirk told the paper.

The move comes in the context of growing hawkishness against Iran in Washington, with neoconservative pundits questioning the success of sanctions and suggesting that military action might be necessary to slow Iran’s nuclear progress. The Obama administration has refused to rule out a “military option” even as it stresses economic measures.

The Senate letter, whose other main sponsor was Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, got a big endorsement from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the influential Jewish lobby group that has made stopping Iran’s nuclear programme a major priority.

In a press release, the group said, “We urge the administration to heed the Senators’ call to sanction the CBI [Central Bank of Iran]. With other sanctions in place, the bank is Tehran’s remaining lifeline to the international financial system. Sanctioning it would deal a key blow to the regime by severely limiting its ability to conduct international trade and finance illegal activity.”

The group did not make anyone available Thursday to discuss with IPS the possible downsides of such a move.

Sanctioning the Central Bank would punish ordinary Iranians, something the Obama administration has said it wants to avoid, and could undermine what had been a growing international consensus against the Iranian nuclear programme. It could also jack up oil prices at a time when the global economy is teetering on the verge of a second recession.

“Some experts in international law view this as equivalent to a declaration of war,” said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, an advocacy group for Iranian Americans.

He added, however, “When push comes to shove, this administration is not likely to pick a fight with Congress over Iran in an election year.”

Harris agreed that sanctioning the bank would be “economic warfare” against Iran. He said the architects of the plan were “following the headlines” which have catalogued Iran’s difficulties getting paid in hard currency for oil already exported. China sometimes pays Iran in goods, not cash, he said.

After abortive efforts to pay Iran through an Asian financial facility and a bank in Germany, India is finally managing to clear five billion dollars in back payments to Iran through a Turkish bank.

In an interview last week with an Iranian newspaper, Etemaad, Hamid Reza Katuzian, chair of the Iranian parliament’s energy committee, faulted the head of the Central Bank for ordering the oil ministry to continue delivering oil to India despite the long delay in payment for prior shipments.

“There is disarray in the overall economic policies of the government,” Katuzian said. “There is confusion and chaos and it is not clear who is in charge… When we sell oil on credit, then we have to get the guarantees for it. You cannot just give them the oil and say God willing they will give us our money. Well, what if they don’t pay, especially countries that are problematic such as India with such records of getting the oil and paying with rupees instead of dollars.”

Harris told IPS Iran needs a steady infusion of dollars or euros to prop up its sagging currency, the rial, and to continue to give cash payments to Iranians to compensate them for ending subsidies on consumer staples. The current Iranian budget, he noted, is based on Iran getting at least 85 dollars a barrel for its oil.

“If they’re selling oil much lower than that, that will cause a crisis,” Harris said. He warned that new sanctions could backfire if a desperate Iran decides to punish the world by suddenly withdrawing its oil from the market.

“You have to be careful what you wish for,” Harris said. “You are really playing a dangerous game.”

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Aug 4 2011 (IPS)

Iran and the United States don’t agree on much these days, but there are a few views they hold in common.

Both regard the Kurdish Party of Free Life for Kurdistan (PJAK) and the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) or People’s Holy Warriors as terrorist organisations.

In the last few weeks, Iranian forces have been shelling PJAK camps and fighters near and across the Iranian border in Iraqi Kurdistan.

According to an Iranian source who has been reliable in the past and who spoke on condition of anonymity, U.S. forces observed the fighting from the air and did nothing to stop it. In fact, the source said, “There was good coordination [between Iran and the United States] to destroy this terrorist organisation.”

An Iraqi Kurdish official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, disputed the report of U.S. tacit cooperation against PJAK. The official said the U.S. military presence in Iraq is “insignificant” and far from the Iraq-Iran border. He added that the United States would be more inclined to back PJAK because “it’s anti-Iran”.

Asked if the U.S. had, at a minimum, condoned Iranian attacks on three PJAK camps, however, George Little, the chief Pentagon spokesman, had no comment. He also declined to comment on any possible links between the Iranian Kurdish operation and a recent decrease in attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq by Iran-backed Iraqi Shiite militants.

The world’s largest ethnic minority without its own state, Kurds are scattered across mountainous regions of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. They have the greatest freedom in Iraq, thanks to U.S. protection since the 1991 Gulf War and an autonomous status confirmed after the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003.

Patrick Clawson, a Middle East expert at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said U.S. tacit approval for the Iranian raids was “entirely plausible” given U.S. opposition to Kurdish militants.

“The U.S. was signaling the KRG [Kurdistan Regional Government] that you can’t just let this problem fester,” Clawson told IPS. He noted that the PKK or Kurdistan Workers Party, the parent organisation of PJAK, had recently intensified attacks in Turkey.

A State Department official told IPS in an email that “PJAK was created in 2004 as a splinter group of the PKK to appeal to Iranian Kurds.” The official, who asked not to be named, noted that the PKK was “a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization that has been involved in the targeting of the Turkish government for more than 20 years.”

The State Department also regards the MEK – an Iranian opposition group that has about 3,000 members in Iraq – as terrorist but that designation is currently under review and has provoked growing controversy in Washington.

Originally a Marxist-Islamist group that killed Americans in Iran before the 1979 revolution and Iranian officials both before and after the revolution, it has been designated since the terrorist list’s inception in 1997. MEK officials insist the group has renounced violence and deserves to come off.

In recent months, MEK supporters have engaged in an aggressive lobbying campaign in Washington that has included a number of events at which former senior U.S. officials have received hefty sums to speak. Among them: ex-FBI chief Louis Freeh, former attorney general Michael Mukasey and former Central Command head Anthony Zinni.

The MEK has scant support within Iran because it sided with Iraq during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Former members say the organisation is a cult fixated on leader Maryam Rajavi and her husband, Massoud, whose whereabouts are unknown. A State Department official told IPS that “attempts to paint the MEK as the poster child for the democracy movement in Iran are grossly ironic.”

Unlike PJAK, however, the group has not committed violent acts in recent years. It has been unable to attack Iran because its main base in Iraq – Camp Ashraf – has been under U.S. control since 2003 and in the Iraqi government’s hands since 2008.

One argument used by supporters of de-listing is that it will help resolve the humanitarian plight of MEK members who remain at Camp Ashraf. However, the State Department official said that taking the group off the list would not mean that they could come to the United States.

U.S. law “places a permanent, non-waivable bar to immigration in the way of anyone who has ties to a Foreign Terrorist Organization,” the official told IPS. He said this includes “those who provided material support to, or received military-type training from the group, as many MEK members have”.

U.S. diplomats have been trying to arrange new homes for the camp residents but have been hampered by the fact that their leaders refuse to accept refugee status.

Maziar Bahari, an Iranian-Canadian journalist imprisoned in Iran after disputed 2009 presidential elections, said the MEK needs to keep the camp to maintain control of its foot-soldiers. He said that U.S. officials feared a “Jonestown in Ashraf” if attempts were made to remove camp residents by force. He was referring to the mass suicide in Guyana in 1978 of hundreds of fanatical followers of a self-styled prophet, Jim Jones.

Bahari, speaking at a conference in Washington Thursday sponsored by the National Iranian American Council, a non-partisan group that advocates for Iranian Americans and opposes the MEK, expressed sympathy for MEK members but said it would be a mistake to take the group off the State Department list at this time.

Given the group’s violent past and violent potential, Bahari said, “It would send a very wrong signal [to Iranians] about America’s intentions in Iran.” He said the MEK was “the perfect opposition” for an Iranian regime seeking to paint peaceful protestors as violent extremists backed by foreigners.

*Barbara Slavin also spoke at the NIAC event but did not advocate keeping the MEK on the terrorist list or removing it. She did question the group’s democratic credentials.

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Jul 27 2011 (IPS)

Iranian leaders have tried to portray democracy movements in the Arab world as inspired by their 1979 Islamic revolution and predicted that Iran’s regional support would grow as pro- Western dictators fell.

However, a new poll by the Arab American Institute shows approval of Iran’s role in the region plummeting since 2006 and especially since Iran crushed its own democracy movement in 2009.

The results of the poll, taken during the first three weeks of June and released in Washington on Wednesday, are stunning.

In Egypt, where 89 percent had a positive view of Tehran in 2006, only 37 percent do now. In Morocco, Iran’s favourables have plunged from 82 percent to 14 percent; in the United Arab Emirates, from 68 percent to 22 percent; in Saudi Arabia from 85 percent to six percent; and in Jordan from 75 percent to 23 percent. Only in Lebanon, which has a substantial Shiite population, is Iran still popular, with 63 percent approval.

James Zogby, who heads the Institute, said the dramatic shift reflects the widespread Arab view that “Iran is not contributing to peace and stability in the Arab world.”

Five years ago, Tehran benefited from widespread hostility toward George W. Bush and from the perceived victory of Iran’s Lebanese partner, Hezbollah, against Israel in a month-long war.

“In 2006, Iran presented itself as the challenger to Israel and the United States,” Zogby told a news conference. “The region has changed. It has other fish to fry and in this context, Iran is a nuisance.”

In an email, Zogby told IPS that Iran has previously “been able to play off of U.S. bellicosity and blunders” including “widespread outrage at the U.S. for its invasion of Iraq, its standing by while Israel devastated Lebanon and Gaza in 2006 and Gaza, again in 2009, and the horrors of Abu Ghraib. Iran was able to turn that region-wide rage to its benefit, especially when the Bush administration and Israel then directed so much hostile rhetoric against the Islamic Republic.”

In contrast, he wrote, President Barack Obama has “somewhat reduced the decibel level of the threats” against Iran as he has become preoccupied with other regional issues including the upheavals in the Arab world and U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

“In the face of all this, Iran’s behaviour is seen by Arab public opinion not as a counter to America’s hostile domination, but as source of instability seeking to exploit troubled areas for its own gain,” Zogby wrote. “Add to this the Iranian regime’s brutal confrontation with the Green Revolution, and whatever positive characteristics frustrated and alienated Arabs once attributed to the regime in Tehran has all but evaporated.”

At the same time that Iran’s approval ratings are in free-fall, the United States and Israel do worse.

Results from the same poll released two weeks ago show that U.S. “interference” in the Arab world and Israel’s continuing occupation of formerly Arab territory are cited as the biggest obstacles to regional peace and stability by substantial margins.

In Morocco, for example, 36 percent cite Israel and 31 percent the U.S. compared to only two percent that say Iranian interference is the biggest threat. The figures for Egypt are 37 percent, 31 percent and seven percent, respectively.

That does not mean that Arabs want Iran to become more powerful. In the new poll, most disapprove of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and said they would prefer Egypt or Turkey to have them if the region were to gain another nuclear weapons state besides Israel.

This contrasts dramatically with a poll just a year ago conducted by Shibley Telhami of the Brookings Institution and the Zogby International polling firm in which 77 percent of respondents said Iran had a right to pursue nuclear weapons and 57 percent said that would be a “positive” development for the Middle East.

There were largely negative views of Iran’s role in Iraq, Lebanon and Bahrain even though there is little evidence that Iran was behind recent unrest in Bahrain. On the other hand, Saudi military intervention to crush the Bahraini uprising got favourable reviews from all those polled except Lebanon, Jordan and the UAE.

Zogby, at the press conference, said he did not see the results as reflecting Sunni-Shiite enmity so much as resentment of a non-Arab country perceived as seeking regional hegemony – feelings that go back to the time of the Shah and that have waxed and waned since the 1979 revolution.

Anti-Iranian feelings declined during the administration of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami – who sought to build bridges to Saudi Arabia and other Arab states – and rose with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s more belligerent policies and with the consolidation of a Shiite government in formerly Sunni-ruled Iraq.

Iran is seen by most Arabs as “a regime attempting to insert itself in Iraq and other countries and to play off regional alienation,” Zogby said. “That act seems to have worn thin.”

*Jim Lobe contributed to this report.

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By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Jul 27 2011 (IPS)

U.S. hopes to withdraw forces and leave behind a stable Afghanistan may rest on whether Pakistan and India can lower bilateral tensions and refrain from using Afghan territory for a new proxy war.

Talks Wednesday in New Delhi between the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan ended with an upbeat assessment that these historic rivals can improve relations. S.M. Krishna of India and Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar pledged to strengthen joint efforts against terrorism and reduce restrictions on trade and travel in the disputed territory of Kashmir.

Regional experts say improving economic and people-to-people ties are key to reducing the chances for conflict between two nuclear-armed countries that have fought three wars since partition in 1947 and come close to war several times in the past 12 years.

“Economics can be a bridge to peace-building,” said Moeed Yusuf, an advisor at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Speaking Tuesday at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, Yusuf called the low level of trade between the neighbours “absurd given the complimentarities” of the two economies. Pakistan, he said, should give India most favoured nation status for imports and India should reduce non-tariff barriers to trade.

Aparna Pande, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, predicted that India would soon announce changes in its visa policies to make it easier for Pakistani businessmen, legislators and the elderly to cross the border.

“The more you let people in, the more you know they are the same people,” Pande told IPS.

She said “the most important thing” is that India and Pakistan – which resumed dialogue in February for the first time since the 2008 Mumbai attacks by Pakistani terrorists – are still talking in the aftermath of new bombings in Mumbai last month. Responsibility for the latest attacks has not been established.

Working groups of the Indian and Pakistani governments are addressing Afghanistan, she said. Pakistan is extremely nervous about India’s growing political and economic presence there and fears that a pro- India Kabul government is part of an Indian strategy of encirclement.

India, which has an embassy and four consulates in Afghanistan and has given the country about two billion dollars in aid, worries in turn that Pakistan will promote the return to power of the Taliban and allied fundamentalist groups such as the Haqqani network. That could trigger a new civil war between Pashtun fundamentalists and elements of the old Northern Alliance of ethnic Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks who in the past were supported by India, Russia and Iran.

Amer Latif, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said India-Pakistan competition in Afghanistan is a “Gordian knot” that must be cut for Afghanistan to succeed.

He called for joint economic projects and promotion of trade corridors benefiting all three countries, as well as other forms of dialogue and cooperation to reduce distrust. Among Latif’s suggestions: maritime cooperation against piracy, and joint exercises in search and rescue missions and on disaster response.

Shuja Nawaz, head of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, told a Congressional committee Tuesday that reopening old trade corridors between Central and South Asia through Afghanistan and Pakistan to India could bring big dividends, with commerce rising from a current level of “two billion dollars a year to 100 billion dollars a year – much more than any potential U.S. aid” to Pakistan.

Experts also advocate greater transparency about nuclear programmes to ease distrust and reduce the chances for a war that would devastate both countries.

Pakistan has increased its nuclear arsenal to deter India, a strategy based on the view that India is an existential threat – even though India has repeatedly stressed that a stable and successful Pakistan is in New Delhi’s interest. Pakistan’s reluctance to crack down on jihadi groups such as Lashkar-e Taiba that have targeted India reflects an unwillingness to give up tools against Indian control of Kashmir.

Latif expressed hope that a rising generation of Pakistani officers – having spent much of the last few years focused on combating a growing terrorist threat within Pakistan – would experience a “paradigm shift” and no longer see India as the major security threat. He said the United States can play a role by encouraging the two sides to talk and organising trilateral military exercises.

Washington has been hampered by India’s refusal to accept outside mediation of the dispute over Kashmir and by bureaucratic divisions that created a Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan and left India in a separate office of the State Department. The U.S. military is even more divided, with Pacific Command responsible for India and Central Command, whose primary area of operation is in the Middle East, for Pakistan.

Ultimately, of course, the responsibility for improving relations rests with India and Pakistan.

Pande said that Pakistan has to stop seeking parity with a country that is seven times larger and growing five times as fast. India, she noted, gave Pakistan most favoured nation trade status in 1995 but Pakistan has yet to reciprocate even though it stands to gain more from trade and investment.

With Indian labour costs rising, Indian firms – particularly in the service sector – might begin to outsource jobs to Pakistan, she said. Pakistan needs cement while India needs cotton, she added.

To help stabilise Afghanistan, meanwhile, Pakistan needs to define what it regards as an acceptable political outcome as the U.S. withdraws – one that can also be accepted by other neighbours.

“Ultimately Afghanistan has to be solved by the neighbourhood,” said Geoffrey Kemp, director of research at the Center for the National Interest in Washington. “Just as they agreed to us coming in, we need their agreement in coming out.”

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By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Jul 20 2011 (IPS)

When Bahraini ambassador Houda Ezra Nonoo arrived in Washington three years ago, she was greeted as the representative of a close U.S. ally with a reputation for more openness and tolerance than most Gulf nations.

Nonoo was also a novelty as a woman representing an Arab country, and even more unusually, a Jew – one of only 37 in Bahrain.

These days, however, her job is considerably more complicated. Demonstrations followed by a bloody crackdown have tarnished Bahrain’s image and shaken its social cohesion. Al-Wefaq, the largest opposition party, pulled out Sunday from a national dialogue convened by the government only two weeks ago to try to bridge a sectarian divide between the ruling Sunni minority and the Shiite majority that has widened into a chasm since the spring.

Welcoming an audience comprised largely of business people and Congressional staffers to the embassy Tuesday night, Nonoo appealed for patience. “My request to you as Americans is …try to understand what it means to be such a small country with powerful neighbours and wounds to heal,” she said.

The ambassador spoke after guests watched a glitzy video about Bahrain that even she conceded was jarringly out of date.

The video touted Bahrain’s “political stability” and called the island nation “the only real democracy in the Gulf region”. It showed scenes from Formula One racing, which cancelled its scheduled Grand Prix event in Bahrain this spring because of the political unrest. Bahrain is “a country undergoing dynamic changes”, the video said, a land of business opportunities, five star hotels and luxury homes built on land reclaimed from the sea.

The video, Nonoo noted, had been made in 2006, long before the current turmoil. However, she underlined its pitch for foreign investment and tourism, insisting that “Bahrain is open for business” and that its lifestyle is more relaxed and comfortable for foreigners than that of straight-laced Saudi Arabia across a 16-mile causeway to the west. What’s more, she added, Bahrain has no taxes of any kind.

The economy has begun to recover but it’s hard to see Bahrain resuming its former allure while its population of half a million citizens (plus 200,000 expats) remains so bitterly divided.

At least 24 Bahrainis died in this year’s disturbances and more than 1,200 people, most of them Shiites, were fired from their jobs, according to a report on Bahrain last month by the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

Human rights groups have described gross abuses including security personnel dragging out seriously wounded demonstrators from a Bahraini hospital. At least 50 doctors and nurses are among about 600 people detained during the protests, which began on Feb. 14 and largely ended on Mar. 14. On that day, Saudi Arabia and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council sent troops at Bahrain’s invitation to guard infrastructure and free local forces to restore order.

Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy – led by King Hamad bin Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa – blames the demonstrations on Iran, which ruled Bahrain before the al Khalifas arrived in 1783. Iranian officials have sometimes spoken of Bahrain as Iran’s 14th province, Nonoo said, and have stirred up local Shiites since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Only after 1979, she said, did Bahrainis start asking “are you Sunni or are you Shia?… It’s not a figment of our imagination that Iran is there.”

Another Bahraini official, parliament spokesman Fahad Ebrahim Shehabi, told the Los Angeles Times that Iran was to blame for the withdrawal of al-Wefaq from the national dialogue. He said the decision was “in the hands of the Wilayet Faqih”, a reference to Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Neither Shehabi nor Nonoo presented any evidence for their allegations. Iran has certainly provided rhetorical support for the demonstrators but the only military intervention thus far has come from the “Peninsula Shield” force of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East expert who wrote the CRS report on Bahrain, told IPS that there was no evidence that Iran had instigated the protests but that there are concerns that a growing role in government for al-Wefaq would lead Bahrain to be “less friendly to the U.S. and more friendly to Iran”.

Such a government, he said, might be less willing to allow the U.S. to expand its 100-acre base for the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet – a crucial installation protecting traffic in the Persian Gulf, deterring Iran and supporting U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Given such concerns, the Barack Obama administration – while calling for nonviolence and reform – has not reacted to the deaths and arrests in Bahrain with the same outrage that has shown toward crackdowns in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria.

Bahraini Shiites “do not have the same relationship with the U.S. that there is between the U.S. and the al Khalifas,” Katzman said.

Al-Wefaq says it withdrew from the national dialogue because opposition groups were granted only 35 of 300 seats and it had little confidence that the forum would result in meaningful change. Before this year’s unrest, there were only four Shiites among 23 cabinet ministers plus one of four deputy prime ministers. According to the CRS report, Shiites are “also highly underrepresented in the security forces, serving mainly in administrative tasks”.

Under a 2002 constitution, an elected lower house of parliament has the same number of seats as an appointed upper house and little power to impact policy. In addition, gerrymandering has kept Shiites -who comprise 60 to 70 percent of Bahraini citizens, according to CRS – from winning a majority even in the lower house.

Katzman predicted “a very long stalemate” punctuated by more protests, although not on the same scale as in February and March, when demonstrators paralysed the financial district of Manama, Bahrain’s capital. In the end, he said, some compromises are possible, including increasing the size and powers of the lower house of parliament and replacing as prime minister the king’s hard-line uncle, who has been in office since Bahrain became independent from Britain in 1971.

The Bahraini ambassador also pointed to an independent commission of inquiry into the demonstrations that is to issue a report in October as another potential contributor to reconciliation. She conceded, however, that “my role as ambassador has changed dramatically since February… It’s clear that the question of who is Shia and who is Sunni will remain with us for a long time.”

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Jul 12 2011 (IPS)

Reviving U.S.-Iran friction over Iraq may have more to do with deteriorating relations over Iran’s nuclear programme than with uncertainty over U.S. troop levels in Iraq beyond the end of this year.

In recent weeks, a chorus of U.S. officials has accused Iran of providing lethal weapons to Iraqi Shiite militias that have targeted U.S. soldiers and caused a spike in U.S. death tolls. Similar charges have been made against Iran in the past.

Last month, Robert Gates, then U.S. defence secretary, said Iran- backed Shiite militias were responsible for the deaths of five U.S. soldiers on Jun. 6, the single largest toll for the U.S. in two years. Overall, 15 U.S. servicemen were killed in Iraq in June, also a two- year record.

Gates’s successor, Leon Panetta, repeated the charges this week during his first trip to Iraq as defence secretary.

“We’re seeing more of those weapons going in from Iran, and they’ve really hurt us,” Panetta told reporters in Baghdad on Monday. He threatened Iran with unspecified retaliation if the attacks did not cease.

Panetta did not reveal any concrete evidence for the charges. U.S. officials and military experts say he was referring to rocket-assisted mortars.

“The main mass casualty producer for U.S. troops has been the IRAMS (improvised rocket-assisted munitions) which have been around for several years, and which I believe are used exclusively by Iranian- supported groups,” said Michael Eisenstadt, an Iraq expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank closely tied to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

“There are indications that they may have gotten more lethal lately, though I don’t know if this is a function of modifications to the weapons or to improved training,” he said.

U.S. accusations are hard if not impossible to prove given the fact that Iraq is awash with weapons and smuggling across the border with Iran is rampant. Iran denies the allegations.

“I believe the Americans are trying to make excuses, create Iranophobia, and cause doubt and anxiety among Iraqi officials and society,” Iranian ambassador to Iraq Hassan Danaeifar told Press TV, an Iranian state-owned channel. “The Americans are trying to suggest that if they leave Iraq, Iraq will be threatened by Iran.”

Analysts say the clashes – both rhetorical and real – may have more to do with Iranian anger at mounting U.S. economic sanctions than they do with Iraqi security. Iraq – and Afghanistan – are convenient venues for Iran to target U.S. forces.

“It’s not about Iraq at all, it’s about U.S.-Iran relations,” Vali Nasr, professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a former State Department adviser, told IPS.

“There is no doubt that the Iranians are escalating” to retaliate for U.S. sanctions over Iran’s nuclear programme, Nasr said.

The Barack Obama administration has been increasing economic penalties against Iran for the past year and pressuring foreign entities to boycott Iranian banks, shipping and airlines. The latest blow came Jun. 30 when Maersk, a major Danish shipping line, ended operations at Iran’s three largest ports. A week earlier, the U.S. had stated that the company operating the ports was controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Iran has refused to suspend uranium enrichment although it is required to do so by six U.N. Security Council resolutions. Attempts to negotiate a resolution with the U.S. and the other permanent members of the Council plus Germany have failed due to internal Iranian political divisions and a lack of creativity and political will on both sides.

The fallout of the nuclear dispute is landing in Iraq, compounding political problems for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki who has struggled to form a stable coalition government more than a year after parliamentary elections.

U.S. officials, concerned about the logistics of withdrawing troops on short notice, have been pressuring Maliki to make up his mind about keeping a residual U.S. force. Under a 2008 Status of Forces agreement, all remaining U.S. troops – which currently number 46,000 – are to be out by Dec. 31.

“Do they want us to stay? Don’t they want us to stay?” Panetta complained Monday before a U.S. military audience in Baghdad. Panetta also urged Maliki, who has been serving for months as interim defence and interior minister, to name full-time officials to head those key ministries.

“Damn it, make a decision,” Panetta said.

U.S. officials have expressed concern over whether Iraq will be able to defend itself against terrorists and foreign intruders eight years after U.S. invaders toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime. No matter what Maliki decides, a few hundred U.S. troops are likely to remain as military trainers for U.S. weapons. Some Special Forces are also likely to stay as well as forces based in semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, where the U.S. presence is popular.

A smaller U.S. military footprint would be in line with phasing out counterinsurgency doctrine, once in vogue in the Pentagon, in favour of counterterrorism.

“There’s been a shift in thinking in Washington,” Nasr said. “You don’t need as many troops. You need trainers and access to bases where you can use drones and Special Forces.”

Testifying before Congress last month, Eisenstadt suggested keeping 1,500 troops in Kurdistan to prevent clashes between the Iraqi military and the Kurdish Pesh Merga.

He told IPS that in addition, “a small Joint Special Operations Command task force would be essential for hunting down members of al Qaeda… and Iranian-supported special groups… You might also need troops to serve as quick reaction forces to help Iraqi security forces deal with insurgent groups, and civilian contractors providing protection for U.S. diplomats. Some military might serve as military movement teams for U.S. diplomats and civilians as well.”

However, a smaller U.S. force will remain vulnerable to attack by Shiite militias. That in turn could cause clashes between the United States and Iran.

“The U.S. is suggesting that the gloves will come off” if attacks on U.S. forces continue, Nasr said. “The question is, ‘Who will blink?’ This is very dangerous.”

Excerpt:

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Jun 27 2011 (IPS)

Turkey and Israel are close to resolving their dispute over last year’s flotilla fiasco, but the partnership that existed between them for more than a decade will almost certainly stay submerged.

As a new flotilla of ships prepared to set sail for Gaza Tuesday, Turkish and Israeli officials and analysts said that only a major breakthrough on Israeli-Palestinian peace could begin to revive a relationship that once featured joint military exercises and hordes of Israeli tourists visiting Istanbul. Even then, the officials said, they doubted that the warmth of the 1990s and the mid-2000s would resurface.

Suat Kiniklioglu, deputy chairman for external affairs of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), told a conference in Washington sponsored by the Middle East Institute Jun. 23 that “If there is not dramatic change in the Arab-Israeli conflict, I don’t see a Turkish Embassy in Tel Aviv in five years.”

Alon Liel, a former director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry who served in Turkey in the early 1980s, agreed that the relationship is in peril.

“As long as there is no progress between Israel and the Palestinians – I mean Fatah and Hamas together – I don’t think we will ever have a breakthrough with Turkey,” he said.

Turkish-Israeli relations have gone through dramatic swings since Turkey became the first Muslim nation to recognise Israel 62 years ago, with ties plummeting during Arab-Israeli wars and after Israel’s 1980 annexation of Jerusalem. The AKP, in power since 2002, has emphasised outreach to Muslim countries and taken a strong stand in support of the Palestinians.

The latest rupture dates from Israel’s month-long assault on Gaza in late 2008-early 2009.

Israel said it had no choice but to act to stop a steady stream of rockets on Israeli cities and towns. However, “Operation Cast Lead”, as Israel dubbed the Gaza campaign, killed more than 1,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, did enormous damage to Palestinian infrastructure and was a public relations nightmare for the Jewish state.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was particularly incensed because Turkey had been mediating at the time between Israel and Syria and had made considerable progress. Erdogan halted the indirect talks.

Relations deteriorated further after Israeli elections and the replacement of centrist Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government by a rightist coalition led by Benjamin Netanyahu. Ties hit bottom on May 31, 2010 when Israeli commandos seeking to turn back a flotilla of ships trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza killed nine Turks aboard the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish vessel leased by an Islamic group, IHH, with ties to the Turkish government.

Israel now appears on the verge of agreeing to pay compensation to the families of those killed and to express regret for their deaths. Turkey, seeking not to reignite the dispute, has kept the Mavi Marmara from sailing again to the Gaza coast with a convoy of ships due to embark from Greece on Tuesday. Other ships are already on route from Spain and France.

According to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon has been meeting with Turkish Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioğlu. Other talks are taking place between Israeli and Turkish delegates to a U.N. committee of inquiry into the flotilla incident that is expected to issue a report within the next two weeks.

Ha’aretz reported Sunday that Turkey is seeking to tone down criticism of Turkish government ties to IHH in the report, which also calls Israel’s actions legal but disproportionate.

However, the damage done to Israel in Turkish popular opinion – and the perception in Israel that Erdogan and the AKP no longer care about relations with the Jewish state – seem too deep to repair.

Both countries have altered their strategic orientations in ways that have undermined what has always been “an alliance of convenience”, in the words of Henri Barkey, a Turkey expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Good relations with Turkey were part of an Israeli strategy of compensating for its lack of rapport with its neighbours by building ties with non-Arab nations on the periphery of the Middle East. Turkey, for its part, valued Israeli support in Ankara’s war against Kurdish nationalists and cultivated U.S. Jews to lobby against anti- Turkish measures in the U.S. Congress sponsored by U.S. Greeks and Armenians.

However, with the world’s 16th largest economy and growing ties to former Ottoman lands in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, “Turkey is coming into its own and no longer needs Israel or the American Jewish community,” Barkey said. He also faulted Israel for taking Turkey “for granted”.

The Arab spring has posed new challenges for Turkey’s strategy of outreach to fellow Muslims and “no problems” with neighbours. Both Israel and Turkey are particularly concerned about events in Syria and the potential for conflict spreading across borders. However, Turkey’s response to the Arab spring has been proactive, while Israel has hunkered down amid worries about trading risk-averse authoritarian regimes for pro-Palestinian populist ones.

The United States – its own power diminishing in the region – has encouraged both Turkey and Israel to resolve the Mavi Marmara dispute. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland noted last week that “we have seen some warming in relations between Turkey and Israel… We want to see that effort continue.”

Now that his party has won its third election in a row, Erdogan can afford to be conciliatory toward Israel, at least superficially. However, Israel no longer figures prominently in Turkey’s foreign policy vista. In his election victory speech, the Turkish leader saluted “all friendly and brotherly nations from Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, Cairo, Sarajevo, Baku and Nicosia.”

Tel Aviv was notable for its absence.

*Jim Lobe contributed to this report.

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