Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, in Geneva with Mohammed Javad Zarif, Iranian Minister for Foreign Affairs. Credit: Courtesy of the European Commission

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 23 2013 (IPS)

As Secretary of State John Kerry and foreign ministers of at least four other major powers prepared to join talks with Iran in Geneva Saturday, the stakes over the eventual success or failure of the negotiations seem very much on the rise here.

While nervous Democrats in the Senate held off a last-minute push by Republicans to approve legislation preventing President Barack Obama from easing sanctions against Iran as part of a possible interim deal to curb its nuclear programme, they also warned that, absent an accord in Geneva, new punitive measures are likely to be enacted shortly after Congress returns from its Thanksgiving recess Dec. 9.

Most analysts, including administration officials involved in the negotiation, believe that any new sanctions – or curbs on Obama’s authority to waive existing ones – are likely to drive Iran from the table by bolstering hard-liners in Tehran who have long argued that Obama is either unwilling or unable to deliver what they regard as a minimally acceptable deal.

Such a breakdown in the talks would return the two countries to a path of confrontation, significantly enhancing the chances of war, according to both the White House and most independent analysts.

While diplomats from the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, Russia, and China plus Germany) and Iran have been remarkably tight-lipped about the past three days of talks, foes of a likely accord – almost all of whom are associated with the Israel lobby here – have escalated their attacks here.

Even if an interim accord is reached within the coming days, the lobby’s leaders and their backers in Congress have made clear they will not give up on their efforts to derail its implementation. Republican lawmakers, in particular, warned this week that, in addition to seeking new sanctions, they will introduce legislation aimed at reducing Obama’s room for manoeuvre.

A number of prominent neo-conservatives, who have tried to lie relatively low on the Iran issue due to their high-profile championship 10 years ago of the now-highly unpopular Iraq war, have come to the fore in recent days, apparently unable to restrain themselves at such a critical moment.

One leading Iraq hawk and co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and the Emergency Committee for Israel, Bill Kristol, who has been immersed in “Obamacare” and intra-Republican politics for weeks, titled the lead editorial in his Weekly Standard magazine “No Deal”.

“[S]erious people, in Congress and outside, will do their utmost to expose and scuttle Obama’s bad Iran deal. They can expect to be smeared by the Obama administration as reckless warmongers and slandered by Obama’s media epigones as tools of the Israel lobby,” he wrote, calling on lawmakers to resist such intimidation.

Similarly, the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer, a leading neo-conservative who has largely neglected Iran in recent months, published a column Friday entitled “A ‘Sucker’s Deal'” – the phrase used by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who reportedly blew up the last round of Geneva talks at the 11^th hour earlier this month – in which he echoed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s argument that any easing of sanctions against Iran as part of an interim accord would be irreversible.

Netanyahu and his supporters here have demanded that Iran be denied any sanctions relief pending verifiable steps leading to the virtually complete dismantlement of its nuclear programme, including any enrichment of uranium which Iran has long claimed is its “right” under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

According to multiple reports, the current offer by the P5+1 governments for an interim accord – which would eventually be superceded by a comprehensive agreement to be finalised within six months to a year – would permit Tehran to continue enrichment to 3.5 percent, although it would not explicitly recognise a “right to enrich”.

Such an agreement would also require Iran to freeze its 20-percent enrichment programme, as well as the number of centrifuges it is operating; place its current stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium – which is closer to bomb grade – under international supervision pending its transformation into oxide or less-dangerous forms; and an effective suspension of work on its Arak heavy-water facility, which, when operational, would produce plutonium fuel for its nuclear reactors.

In addition the offer calls for an enhanced inspection regime overseen by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to monitor compliance.

In return, the P5+1 would permit Iran access to as much as 10 billion dollars of its foreign exchange reserves that are currently frozen in Western banks and ease sanctions on its trade in gold, other precious metals, petrochemicals, and airplane spare parts, according to the latest reports.

Obama has insisted that such concessions keep core financial and oil sanctions intact.

Netanyahu and his backers, however, disagree, arguing any easing of sanctions will trigger the collapse of the entire international sanctions regime, and thus make it possible for Iran to retain its basic nuclear infrastructure and, with it, the capability to build a bomb.

They thus oppose any interim agreement that does not require Iran to dismantle – rather than simply freeze — Arak and most of the rest of its nuclear facilities and capabilities.

But administration officials consider Israel’s demands as a deal-breaker. Indeed, a senior White House official told a confidential briefing Wednesday of think tank analysts and advocacy groups that favour an accord that Israel’s terms would “close the door on diplomacy” and “essentially lead to war,” according to an account published in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA).

That kind of warning has infuriated neo-conservatives and Israel lobby leaders, as did an op-ed published this week by the influential New York Times columnist Tom Friedman that blasted both the lobby and lawmakers who oppose an interim accord.

“If Israel kills this U.S.-led deal, then the only option is military,” he wrote. “How many Americans or NATO allies will go for bombing Iran after Netanyahu has blocked the best effort to explore a credible diplomatic alternative?”

“Not many,” he noted.

Indeed, that conclusion was echoed in two polls published this week. Nearly two-thirds of respondents in a Washington Post/ABC poll said they would support an agreement in which “the U.S. and other countries would lift some sanctions against Iran, in exchange for Iran restricting its nuclear programme in a way that makes it harder for it to produce nuclear weapons.”

Fifty-six percent of respondents in a subsequent CNN poll also approved a similarly phrased deal. The latter survey, however, stressed that such a deal would “not end [Iran’s nuclear programme] completely.”

The administration’s strategy gained other influential backers besides Friedman this week. Former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft, who served under President Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served under Jimmy Carter, sent a letter to the Congressional leadership endorsing an interim deal. They were joined by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who served under Bill Clinton.

Brzezinski and Scowcroft were key dissenters in the Iraq war, while Albright initially supported it.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul speaking to supporters in New Hampshire. Credit: Gage Skidmore/CC-BY-SA-2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 18 2013 (IPS)

Ten years after reaching the height of their influence with the invasion of Iraq, the neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks are fighting hard to retain their control of the Republican Party.

That fight was on vivid display last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) here where, as the New York Times observed in a front-page article, the party appeared increasingly split between the aggressively interventionist wing that led the march to war a decade ago and a libertarian-realist coalition that is highly sceptical of, if not strongly opposed to, any more military adventures abroad.

The libertarian component, which appears ascendant at the moment, is identified most closely with the so-called Tea Party, particularly Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, whose extraordinary 13-hour “filibuster” against the hypothetical use of drone strikes against U.S. citizens on U.S. territory on the Senate floor last week made him an overnight rock star on the left as well as the right.

Republican unity was not helped by the hostile reaction to Paul’s performance by Sen. John McCain, and his long-time ally, Sen. Lindsay Graham, whose national security views tilt strongly neo-conservative and who are treated by most mainstream media as the party’s two most important foreign policy spokesmen.

McCain dismissed Paul and his admirers as “wacko birds on the right and left that get the media megaphone” and charged that Republican senators who joined Paul – among them, the Senate Republican Leader, Mitch McConnell – during his oratorical marathon should “know better”.

But, beyond drones, the party is deeply divided between deficit hawks, including many in the Tea Party who do not believe the Pentagon should be exempt from budget cuts and are leery of new overseas commitments, and defence hawks, led by McCain and Graham.

The split between the party’s two wings, which have clashed several times during Barack Obama’s presidency over issues such as Washington’s intervention in Libya and how much, if any, support to provide rebels in Syria, appears certain to grow wider, if for no other reason than deficit-cutting will remain the Republicans’ main obsession for the foreseeable future.

For now, it appears that the deficit hawks have the upper hand, at least judging from the reactions so far to the Mar. 1 triggering of the much-dreaded “sequester” which, if not redressed, would require the Pentagon to reduce its planned 10-year budget by an additional 500 billion dollars beyond the nearly 500 billion dollars that Congress and Obama had already agreed to cut in late 2011.

“Indefensible,” wrote neo-conservative chieftain Bill Kristol in his Weekly Standard about Republican complacency in the face of such prospective cuts in the military budget.

“(T)he Republican party has, at first reluctantly, then enthusiastically, joined the president on the road to irresponsibility,” he despaired.

The great fear of the neo-conservatives is that, given the country’s war weariness and the party’s focus on the deficit, Republicans may be returning to “isolationism” – a reference to the party’s resistance to U.S. intervention in Europe in World War II until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Dec 1941.

Just as Adolf Hitler’s subsequent declaration of war silenced the isolationists, the rise of the Soviet Union after the war – and its depiction as a global threat – ensured that the party remained committed to a hawkish foreign policy over the next 45 years.

The end of the Cold War, however, created a new opening for those in the party – particularly budget-conscious, limited-government conservatives – who saw a big national security establishment with major overseas commitments as a threat to both individual liberties and the country’s fiscal health.

Thus, many Republican lawmakers went along with significant cuts in the defence budget that began during the George H.W. Bush administration. The party also split over a number of military actions in the 1990s, including Bush’s “humanitarian” intervention in Somalia, and Bill Clinton’s campaigns in Bosnia and later Kosovo.

Republican lawmakers also strongly opposed Clinton’s dispatch of troops to Haiti to restore ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1994.

Indeed, it was during this period that the neo-conservatives allied themselves with liberal interventionists in the Democratic Party to help prod an initially reluctant Clinton to intervene in the Balkans.

And in 1996, Kristol and Robert Kagan co-authored an article in Foreign Affairs entitled “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” that was directed precisely against what they described as a drift toward “neoisolationism” among Republicans.

The following year, they co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose charter was signed by, among others, eight top officials of the future George W. Bush administration, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.

The new group was not only to serve as an anchor for Republicans who supported its founders’ vision of a “benevolent (U.S.) hegemony” in world affairs based on overwhelming military power, but also as a lobby for ever higher defence budgets and “regime change” in Iraq, as well as a more confrontational relationship with China which it saw as the most likely next challenger to a U.S.-dominated global order.

Occupying key positions in the new Bush administration, these hawks took full advantage of 9/11 and reached their greatest influence when, exactly 10 years ago this week, the U.S. launched its invasion of Iraq to “shock and awe” the rest of the world into compliance with the new order.

And while a tiny minority of Republicans, including notably, Paul’s father, Rep. Ron Paul, and Sen. Chuck Hagel – who was just confirmed as Obama’s defence secretary despite an all-out neo-conservative campaign to defeat him – voiced strong reservations about the war at the time, the overwhelming majority of the party enthusiastically embraced it, sealing the hawks’ own domination of the party.

Ten years later, however, that domination is increasingly under siege, not only because of the growing national consensus that the Iraq invasion was a major strategic debacle, but also because of the increasing popular concern – noted in a number of major polls over the past six months – that Washington simply can no longer afford the kind of imperial vision the hawks have promoted.

And the fact that younger voters – so-called millennials, aged 18-29 – are, according to the same polls, especially repelled by that vision can only strengthen those in the party calling for a more restrained foreign policy.

Still, true to their nature, the hawks will not give up without a fight, and their hold on the party remains strong, as demonstrated most recently by the fact that only four Republican senators, including Paul, voted to confirm Hagel, a Republican realist, in his new post.

“It is way too early for budget hawks to declare victory,” noted Chris Preble of the libertarian Cato Institute on foreignpolicy.com last week. “The neocons won’t go down without a fight, and they will have other chances in the months ahead to ratchet the Pentagon budget back up to unnecessary levels.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.