The United States is debating whether to intervene militarily in Syria. Above, Syrian rebel forces. Credit: FreedomHouse/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Aug 27 2013 (IPS)

While some kind of U.S. military action against Syria in the coming days appears increasingly inevitable, the debate over the why and how of such an attack has grown white hot here.

On one side, hawks, who span the political spectrum, argue that President Barack Obama’s credibility is at stake, especially now that Secretary of State John Kerry has publicly endorsed the case that the government of President Bashar Al-Assad must have been responsible for the alleged chemical attack on a Damascus suburb that was reported to have killed hundreds of people.

Just one year ago, Obama warned that the regime’s use of such weapons would cross a “red line” and constitute a “game-changer” that would force Washington to reassess its policy of not providing direct military aid to rebels and of avoiding military action of its own.

After U.S. intelligence confirmed earlier this year that government forces had on several occasions used limited quantities of chemical weapons against insurgents, the administration said it would begin providing arms to opposition forces, although rebels complain that nothing has yet materialised.

The hawks have further argued that U.S. military action is also necessary to demonstrate that the most deadly use of chemical weapons since the 1988 Halabja massacre by Iraqi forces against the Kurdish population there – a use of which the US. was fully aware but did not denounce at the time – will not go unpunished.

Military action should be “sufficiently large that it would underscore the message that chemical weapons as a weapon of mass destruction simply cannot be used with impunity,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), told reporters in a teleconference Monday. “The audience here is not just the Syrian government.”

While the hawks, whose position is strongly backed by the governments of Britain, France, Gulf Arab kingdoms and Israel, clearly have the wind at their backs, the doves have not given up.

Remembering Iraq

Recalling the mistakes and distortions of U.S. intelligence in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, some argue that the administration is being too hasty in blaming the Syrian government. "The other side, not we, gets to decide when it ends."
-- Eliot Cohen

If it waits until United Nations inspectors, who visited the site of the alleged attack Monday, complete their work, the United States could at least persuade other governments that Washington is not short-circuiting a multilateral process as it did in Iraq.

Many also note that military action could launch an escalation that Washington will not necessarily be able to control, as noted by a prominent neo-conservative hawk, Eliot Cohen, in Monday’s Washington Post.

“Chess players who think one move ahead usually lose; so do presidents who think they can launch a day or two of strikes and then walk away with a win,” wrote Cohen, who served as counsellor to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “The other side, not we, gets to decide when it ends.”

“What if [Obama] hurls cruise missiles at a few key targets, and Assad does nothing and says, ‘I’m still winning.’ What do you then?” asked Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.), who served for 16 years as chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. “Do you automatically escalate and go up to a no-fly zone and the challenges that entails, and what then if that doesn’t get [Assad’s] attention?

“This is fraught with tar-babiness,” he told IPS in a reference to an African-American folk fable about how Br’er Rabbit becomes stuck to a doll made of tar. “You stick in your hand, and you can’t get it out, so you then you stick in your other hand, and pretty soon you’re all tangled up all this mess – and for what?”

“Certainly there are more vital interests in Iran than in Syria,” he added. “You can’t negotiate with Iran if you start bombing Syria,” he said, a point echoed by the head of the National Iranian American Council, Trita Parsi.

“There is a real opportunity for successful diplomacy on the Iranian nuclear issue, but that opportunity will either be completely spoiled or undermined if the U.S. intervention in Syria puts the U.S. and Iran in direct combat with each other,” he told IPS. Humanitarian concerns and U.S. credibility should also be taken into account when considering intervention, he said.

Remembering Kosovo

Still, the likelihood of military action – almost certainly through the use of airpower since even the most aggressive hawks, such as Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham, have ruled out the commitment of ground troops – is being increasingly taken for granted here.

Lingering questions include whether Washington will first ask the United Nations Security Council to approve military action, despite the strong belief here that Russia, Assad’s most important international supporter and arms supplier, and China would veto such a resolution.

“Every time we bypass the council for fear of a Russian or Chinese veto, we drive a stake into the heart of collective security,” noted Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “Long-term, that’s not in our interest.”

But the hawks, both inside the administration and out, are urging Obama to follow the precedent of NATO’s air campaign in 1999 against Serbia during the Kosovo War. In that case, President Bill Clinton ignored the U.N. and persuaded his NATO allies to endorse military intervention on humanitarian grounds.

The 78-day air war ultimately persuaded Yugoslav President Milosovic to withdraw his troops from most of Kosovo province, but not before NATO forces threatened to deploy ground troops, a threat that the Obama administration would very much like to avoid in the case of Syria.

While the administration is considered most likely to carry out “stand-off” strikes by cruise missiles launched from outside Syria’s territory to avoid its more formidable air-defence system and thus minimise the risk to U.S. pilots, there remains considerable debate as to what should be included in the target list.

Some hawks, including McCain and Graham, have called not only for Washington to bomb Syrian airfields and destroy its fleet of warplanes and helicopter and ballistic capabilities, but also to establish no-fly zones and safe areas for civilians and rebel forces to tilt the balance of power decisively against the Assad government. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, have urged the same.

But others oppose such far-reaching measures, noting that the armed opposition appears increasingly dominated by radical Islamists, some of them affiliated with Al Qaeda, and that the aim of any military intervention should be not only to deter the future use of chemical weapons but also to prod Assad and the more moderate opposition forces into negotiations, as jointly proposed this spring by Moscow and Washington. In their view, any intervention should be more limited so as not to provoke Assad into escalating the conflict.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Credit: sajed.ir/GNU license

By Jasmin Ramsey
WASHINGTON, Mar 26 2013 (IPS)

While the U.S.-led sanctions regime on Iran has produced substantial economic hardship, analysts here are increasingly pointing out that Tehran’s controversial nuclear activities have continued unabated.

According to a study released Tuesday by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), “there is a clear disconnect between the stated goals of the sanctions policy (a change in the Iranian calculus in regard to its nuclear program) and what sanctions have actually achieved.”Sanctions have not induced significant Iranian concessions because the Iranians have been given little or no reason to believe that such concessions will bring significant relief from sanctions.

Based on interviews with senior Iranian political officials, analysts and members of the business community, the report argues that key Iranian regime stakeholders have not begun “building narratives that enable such a course correction” nor started “lobbying the government for a shift in policy”.

“[Iran’s nuclear programme] appears at best entirely unaffected by the sanctions or at worst partly driven by them in the sense that escalating sanctions as a bargaining chip also gives Iran the incentive to advance its program for the same reason,” argue report authors Bijan Khajehpour, Reza Marashi and Trita Parsi.

“…It is highly unlikely that the regime will succumb to sanctions pressure at a time when its narrative remains unchallenged, key stakeholders are not visibly lobbying for policy shifts, no proportionate sanctions relief is put on the table by the P5+1, and capitulation is seen as a greater threat to the regime’s survival than even a military confrontation with the United States,” according to the report.

Indeed, despite four rounds of U.N.-ratified sanctions on Iran imposed between 2006 and 2010, and unilateral sanctions imposed by the U.S. and EU that led to Iran’s currency losing 40 percent of its value in 2012, Tehran has not made nuclear concessions favourable to the P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany) during negotiations.

“Sanctions have not induced significant Iranian concessions because the Iranians have been given little or no reason to believe that such concessions will bring significant relief from sanctions,” Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst, told IPS.

Calling Western sanctions against Iran “underwhelming”, Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based group which strongly advocates for sanctions on Iran, wrote in June 2012 that only “economic warfare” would compel Iran to halt its nuclear programme.

“And, if that’s insufficient to get Khamenei to strike a deal – and there is unfortunately no evidence so far that it will – the president needs to unite the country in moving beyond sanctions and preparing for U.S. military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” concluded Dubowitz in his foreignpolicy.com article.

But Pillar was critical of the notion of sanctions as an alternative to military action.

“A fallacy in the common view of sanctions and military attack as being two alternative ways of dealing with the same problem is the tendency to think of sanctions in isolation, without regard to the diplomacy that must accompany sanctions for them to be of any help,” said the former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005.

“Merely piling on more sanctions without providing necessary incentives would probably only increase the risk of impasse leading to military conflict – both because it would confirm the Iranian belief that the West is interested more in regime change than in making a deal, and because it would encourage those in the United States and Israel who would welcome a war to argue that sanctions had been ‘tried’ and military force was the only option left,” he said.

While Iranian Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be deeply distrustful of U.S. intentions with or without sanctions, Ahmad Sadri, an Iran expert at Lake Forest College, told IPS that a change in Iran’s nuclear policy is possible.

“The imperious attitude and the coercive politics of sanctions have left no doubt in [Khamenei’s] mind that America is not after a deal to limit Iran’s nuclear programme. In his mind, the aim of America is nothing less than regime change,” he said.

But while “the case is already prejudiced…we are talking about motivated negotiators,” Sadri told IPS.

“Although the Iranian economy is far from a collapse, the vulnerable classes are feeling the pinch of the skyrocketing prices…the effect sanctions could have are not direct. They are not smart. They do hurt the common people. But also, the government is interested in bringing them to an end,” he said.

According to Sadri, if the P5+1 wants Iran to agree to their demands, they must change their view and approach to Iran and the diplomatic process.

“They must want to end the impasse without humiliating a country with two and a half millennia of history and two centuries of resisting colonial encroachments. They must negotiate in good faith and offer Iran an honourable deal with a face-saving way out of the impasse,” he said.

Iranian officials expressed disappointment after more details of a revised package by the P5+1 that included only slight sanctions relief was revealed in Istanbul during “technical” talks on Mar. 19.

In a Mar. 20 speech marking the Iranian New Year, Ayatollah Khamenei again insisted that any deal on its nuclear programme must include acknowledgement of “Iran’s right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes”.

“Past experiences and the existing conditions show that the Americans are not after resolving this issue and they want the nuclear issue to remain unresolved so that they have a pretext to pressure and ‘cripple’ the Iranian nation. Of course, much to the dismay of the enemies, the Iranian nation will not be crippled,” he said.

Iran and the P5+1 group are due to meet again in Almaty, Kazakhstan on Apr. 5 and 6.

“The U.S. and the other P5+1 countries need to couple their demands on Iran with offers of sanctions relief more significant than they have offered so far, and they need to make clear that they accept Iran’s right to have a peaceful nuclear programme, to include enrichment of uranium,” said Pillar.

“More generally they need to make clear that they are willing to do business with the current Iranian regime and that they are not more interested in overthrowing it,” he said.