http://original.antiwar.com/lobe/2013/09/21/hard-times-for-iran-hawks/
Anyone who’s paid attention to the last 35 years of US-Iranian relations knows what happens next: the White House has announced that Iran’s promises are “clearly not sufficient,” and says that they have no plans to meet with Rohani.
http://www.debka.com/article/23287/Obama-softens-on-nuclear-Iran-Keep-components-just-promise-not-to-weaponise-them
Full details of the exchanges going back and both between Washington and Tehran will appear in the coming DEBKA Weekly 603 out Friday, Sept. 20.
They will confirm that the US president has come to terms with a nuclear-capable Iran and will be satisfied with Ayatollah Khamenei’s word that Tehran will not take the last step to actually assemble a bomb.
This pretense was played out at the G20, when the two presidents acted as though they were irreconcilably divided on the Syrian question, while secretly tying up the ends of the chemical accord.
Notwithstanding the briefing offered by Secretary of State John Kerry when he visited Jerusalem on Sunday, Sept. 15, it looks as though Obama is keeping the Israeli prime minister in the dark on his moves towards Iran.
and....
Fordow, the second Iranian enrichment site after Natanz, is considered more irksome to the international community because it is underground and difficult to bomb.
That’s nothing to do with the Iranian government’s policy, but is rather a function of the US government’s sanctions on Iran, as Karroubi’s site was shut down by JustHost.com on grounds that it violates Treasury Department sanctions against Iran.
Shurat HaDin has announced its intentions to sue Facebook for violation of US Department of the Treasury sanctions against Iran, on the grounds that 15 Iranian government ministers created free accounts there.
Hard Times for Iran Hawks
by Jim Lobe, September 22, 2013
Just three weeks ago, Washington’s hawks, particularly of the pro-Israel neo-conservative variety, were flying high, suddenly filled with hope.
President Barack Obama, having trapped himself with his own “red-line” rhetoric, appeared on the verge of ordering air strikes designed not only to deter Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad from re-using his chemical weapons, but also, at their urging, to degrade his military machine in a way that could shift the tide of battle toward the rebels in the two-year-old civil war that Obama had desperately tried to stay out of.
It was win-win all the way. In addition to landing a heavy body blow against Iran’s closest ally in the Arab world, they whispered to themselves that such an attack might also sabotage prospects for serious negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear programme with its moderate and dangerously appealing new president, Hassan Rouhani.
In any event, a strike would serve as a valuable precedent for similar – if even more ambitious – action against Iran’s nuclear facilities some time in the next year, as well restore U.S. military credibility in a region from which U.S. power was seen to be dangerously in retreat.
Today, with those promising attacks suspended indefinitely, the same hawks are down in the dumps, not to say downright desperate. Some are even comparing the chain of events over the past two weeks to the West’s “appeasement” policies that contributed to the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
“…[S]yria is merely Act One. Next week Act Two opens at the United Nations,” wrote Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, co-founder of The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) and the neo-conservative Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), Friday.
“There, we’ll see a charm offensive worthy of Richard III by the new Iranian president and veteran deceiver of the West, Hassan Rouhani. In response the Obama administration will move on from punting in Syria to appeasing Iran.
“Smaller retreats lead to larger ones. The West’s failure to resist Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 – and his troops’ use of poison gas – was merely a foretaste of the failure to resist Hitler when he took the Rhineland in March 1936,” he warned, evoking Winston’s Churchill’s denunciation in the British Parliament of London’s appeasement policies in the run-up to the World War Two.
Ironically, it was the British Parliament that appears to have set off the extraordinary chain of events that brought the hawks to their current depths of despond. Its vote against participating in any military action against Syria persuaded Obama to yield to a rising bipartisan tide in Congress demanding that he seek its formal authorisation before launching strikes.
The administration mounted an intense lobbying effort, enlisting key Republican hawks, notably Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham (who demanded stronger military action and enhanced military aid for the rebels as the price for their backing), as well as the powerful American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and other pro-Israel groups in the cause, but popular support for an attack was not forthcoming.
Worse, because of the August recess, most lawmakers were in their home districts among their constituents, rather than in the “Beltway Bubble” where elite opinion and the “talking heads” who dominate the airwaves tilted generally in favour of military action. And while the Congressional leadership of both parties supported the authorisation, they said members were free to vote their conscience.
As Congress reconvened, it became clear that the White House would be lucky to win in the Senate but had no chance of prevailing in the House. Despite the efforts of McCain and Graham, who had long been treated by the mainstream media as the party’s chief spokesmen on foreign policy issues, Republican support for the authorisation virtually collapsed. Both Obama and the hawks faced certain defeat.
It was at that moment that Russian President Vladimir Putin, Assad’s most influential foreign backer, threw Obama a lifeline.
By offering a deal whereby Damascus agreed to join the Chemical Weapons Convention and place its chemical arms under international control, he permitted Obama to suspend both Congressional and military action pending implementation of the plan, the operational details of which are now being worked out.
If the White House was relieved, the hawks were furious.
“What could be worse for America’s standing in the world than a Congress refusing to support a President’s proposal for military action against a rogue regime that used WMD [weapons of mass destruction]?” asked the Wall Street Journal’s neo-conservative editorial page. “Here’s one idea: A U.S. President letting that rogue be rescued from military punishment by the country that has protected the rogue all along.”
“The Iranians will take it as a signal that they can similarly trap Mr. Obama in a diplomatic morass that claims to have stopped their nuclear program,” it went on, a point ceaselessly echoed since by other hawks, including McCain and Graham.
But several polls have shown overwhelming public support for the deal – as high as 80 percent, even as majorities also voice scepticism that the agreement will be effective. The findings are widely seen as an expression of the country’s deep war-weariness and opposition to any new Middle East military adventures in the absence of any clear and imminent threat.
Indeed, the events of the past few weeks suggest that the public has lost confidence in the war hawks and their military solutions. The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, a prominent foreign-affairs commentator, noted this week that McCain is becoming “a kind of Republican version of Jesse Jackson” whose proposals “have no political support at home”.
While the Syria crisis unfolded, of course, a bigger threat to neo-conservatives has been developing in Tehran, where Rouhani appears to have consolidated his authority over foreign policy and carried out a highly sophisticated public-relations campaign.
This has ranged from the release of political prisoners to tweets wishing Jews a happy Rosh Hashanah, to an interview with a U.S. television network and an op-ed in Friday’s Post, all aimed at conveying the impression that he is someone the West “can do business” with (as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said of Mikhail Gorbachev after their first meeting in 1984) in the run-up to his appearance at the U.N. General Assembly in New York next week.
That both Tehran and Obama disclosed this week that they have exchanged letters and speculation that the two leaders may actually meet – even if it’s only momentarily in a U.N. corridor — Tuesday when each addresses the General Assembly have only increased the hawks’ anxiety that a 21st version of “Munich” (shorthand for the 1938 accord that permitted Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia) is at hand.
Taking their cue from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned Thursday that “the Iranians are spinning in the media so that the centrifuges can keep on spinning,” several pro-Israel groups here, including AIPAC and FPI, demanded Friday that Washington increase pressure against Tehran on all fronts and ignore growing calls to take a more conciliatory approach.
White House Lashes ‘Insufficient’ Iranian Peace Offers
Netanyahu Presses US to Escalate Threats Against Iran
by Jason Ditz, September 20, 2013
Iranian President Hassan Rohani ran his entire election campaign around the idea of negotiating a rapprochement with the United States, and has been pushing for direct talks during his upcoming visit to New York, assuring that Iran will never attempt to make a nuclear weapon and confirming that he had been broad powers to unilaterally negotiate a settlement.
Anyone who’s paid attention to the last 35 years of US-Iranian relations knows what happens next: the White House has announced that Iran’s promises are “clearly not sufficient,” and says that they have no plans to meet with Rohani.
That’s just how the US rolls with respect to Iran. In 1995 President Rafsanjani offered full normalization of relations and was spurned. In 2003 President Khatami’s inability to convince the Bush Administration to the negotiating table set the stage for one of the biggest hardliner election victories in years.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been intensely campaigning against peace talks on general principle, insisting anything offered by Iran must be a plot and that Rohani’s offers to make broad, permanent deals should be rejected in favor of more threats.
Rejecting Iranian peace offers is certainly in the US government’s wheelhouse, and even without Netanyahu egging them on, spurning peace in favor of hostility seems to be the administration’s first instinct, suggesting that Rohani’s efforts at rapprochement will face the same problems as everyone else’s.
Iran’s Rouhani Confounds Neocons
Official Washington’s still-influential neocons are still hoping they can sabotage progress toward a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement – and thus keep open the option of war – but the reasonable tone of Iran’s new president Hassan Rouhani is making the neocons’ job trickier, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.
By Paul R. Pillar
The op ed from Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani in the Washington Post should be read carefully on at least four levels.
The first is as one measure of the overall earnestness and seriousness with which the current leadership of Iran is approaching relations with the United States and with the rest of the outside world. Can you find an unreasonable phrase anywhere in the piece? I can’t.
The second is as a contrast with what we had become accustomed to hearing under the eight-year tenure of Rouhani’s predecessor. The contrast is so sharp one would never guess, if we did not already know it was so, that such pronouncements were coming from successive presidents of the same country, separated not by a coup or revolution but instead by a peaceful election.
Rouhani’s piece in the Post adds to the numerous other indications over the past several weeks that his election marks a profound change in attitude and approach in Tehran.
Third, Rouhani’s statements about what Iran wishes to do on issues of high concern to both it and the United States is consistent with what any dispassionate and well-reasoned analysis would arrive at as necessary to facilitate resolution of these issues. On the nuclear question, any resolution will have to recognize — and provide assurances to the West of being limited to — a “peaceful nuclear energy program.”
On the more pressing issue of the Syrian war, Rouhani’s statement of his government’s “readiness to help facilitate dialogue between the Syrian government and the opposition” should be acted upon, both because Iran already is a player, for better or for worse, in the Syrian situation and because working together in addressing the Syrian situation can have beneficial spillover effects in dealing with the nuclear question and other issues.
Fourth, the article contains sage advice about other aspects of the American approach to foreign policy, including on matters that do not directly involve Iran. As with Vladimir Putin’s recent missive, Americans ought not to need foreign presidents to point out truths about their own policies and approach toward the world, but they are truths nonetheless.
Among Rouhani’s observations that are too often forgotten, or never appreciated in the first place, in American discourse is that the world is for the most part not a zero-sum place and that dealing with other nations involves simultaneous competition and cooperation. He correctly observes that a unilateral approach that “glorifies brute force and breeds violence” does not solve shared problems such as terrorism and extremism.
He notes that too often “security is pursued at the expense of the insecurity of others, with disastrous consequences.” A glaring example of this in the Middle East that does not directly involve Iran but is condoned by the United States comes readily to mind. Perhaps the most trenchant of Rouhani’s observations is:
“We and our international counterparts have spent a lot of time — perhaps too much time — discussing what we don’t want rather than what we do want. This is not unique to Iran’s international relations. In a climate where much of foreign policy is a direct function of domestic politics, focusing on what one doesn’t want is an easy way out of difficult conundrums for many world leaders. Expressing what one does want requires more courage.”
This aptly describes how some foreign policy issues — certainly including the Iranian nuclear issue — get addressed in the United States. One of the biggest deficiencies in American discourse about that issue is that it goes little beyond declarations of how badly we don’t want an Iranian bomb, with almost no sense of what we do want other than to hurt Iran and no vision for the future other than, by implication, perpetual hostility.
The new Iranian administration has opened a door to a better relationship, and one better for the United States, about as widely as such doors ever are opened. The United States would be foolish not to walk through it.
By Paul R. Pillar
The op ed from Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani in the Washington Post should be read carefully on at least four levels.
The first is as one measure of the overall earnestness and seriousness with which the current leadership of Iran is approaching relations with the United States and with the rest of the outside world. Can you find an unreasonable phrase anywhere in the piece? I can’t.
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, shown during the presidential campaign earlier this year.
Rouhani’s piece in the Post adds to the numerous other indications over the past several weeks that his election marks a profound change in attitude and approach in Tehran.
Third, Rouhani’s statements about what Iran wishes to do on issues of high concern to both it and the United States is consistent with what any dispassionate and well-reasoned analysis would arrive at as necessary to facilitate resolution of these issues. On the nuclear question, any resolution will have to recognize — and provide assurances to the West of being limited to — a “peaceful nuclear energy program.”
On the more pressing issue of the Syrian war, Rouhani’s statement of his government’s “readiness to help facilitate dialogue between the Syrian government and the opposition” should be acted upon, both because Iran already is a player, for better or for worse, in the Syrian situation and because working together in addressing the Syrian situation can have beneficial spillover effects in dealing with the nuclear question and other issues.
Fourth, the article contains sage advice about other aspects of the American approach to foreign policy, including on matters that do not directly involve Iran. As with Vladimir Putin’s recent missive, Americans ought not to need foreign presidents to point out truths about their own policies and approach toward the world, but they are truths nonetheless.
Among Rouhani’s observations that are too often forgotten, or never appreciated in the first place, in American discourse is that the world is for the most part not a zero-sum place and that dealing with other nations involves simultaneous competition and cooperation. He correctly observes that a unilateral approach that “glorifies brute force and breeds violence” does not solve shared problems such as terrorism and extremism.
He notes that too often “security is pursued at the expense of the insecurity of others, with disastrous consequences.” A glaring example of this in the Middle East that does not directly involve Iran but is condoned by the United States comes readily to mind. Perhaps the most trenchant of Rouhani’s observations is:
“We and our international counterparts have spent a lot of time — perhaps too much time — discussing what we don’t want rather than what we do want. This is not unique to Iran’s international relations. In a climate where much of foreign policy is a direct function of domestic politics, focusing on what one doesn’t want is an easy way out of difficult conundrums for many world leaders. Expressing what one does want requires more courage.”
This aptly describes how some foreign policy issues — certainly including the Iranian nuclear issue — get addressed in the United States. One of the biggest deficiencies in American discourse about that issue is that it goes little beyond declarations of how badly we don’t want an Iranian bomb, with almost no sense of what we do want other than to hurt Iran and no vision for the future other than, by implication, perpetual hostility.
The new Iranian administration has opened a door to a better relationship, and one better for the United States, about as widely as such doors ever are opened. The United States would be foolish not to walk through it.
| Sen. Lindsey Graham to Seek Authorization for Attack on Iran |
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Iran’s Rouhani: Not Seeking the Bomb, Willing to show Flexibility
Posted on 09/19/2013 by Juan Cole
Ann Curry of NBC News gets a scoop, with an interview with Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, in which he restates Iran’s position that it is not seeking, and will never seek, a nuclear weapon. He said that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, had recently stressed ‘heroic flexibility.’ US economic sanctions are severely affecting the Iranian economy, and Rouhani was elected by the public in part to negotiate with the US and alleviate this duress.
The USG Open Source Center translates from the conservative Iranian newspaper, Tasnim, on the significance of ‘heroic flexibility:’
“Heroic Flexibility Different from Retreat, Says Analyst
Tasnim
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Document Type: OSC Transcribed TextTEHRAN (Tasnim) An analyst says Iran’s new administration has adopted a new approach in its foreign policy and is after improvement of ties with the West, but that this changed tack should not be confused with a retreat from the principles of the Islamic Revolution.The heroic flexibility approach in diplomacy does not mean retreating from the known paradigms of the Islamic Revolution, but means artistic diplomacy in dealing with the existing situations, Hassan Hanizadeh said of the latest remarks by Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei.Hanizadeh also added that the Leader has valuable experiences in various fields, and that the new administration can take advantage of such experiences in dealing with other countries.
Ayatollah Khamenei stated on Tuesday that he approved of the policy of “heroic flexibility” in dealing with other countries.
Addressing a gathering of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) commanders and veterans here in Tehran on Tuesday, the Leader said that he endorses wise and correct measures in domestic and foreign policies, adding, “I agree with what I called a few years ago ‘heroic flexibility’ because this move is very good on some occasions and is necessary, but only with commitment to a main condition.”
The main condition is to thoroughly understand the nature of the other side and its objectives, the Leader added.
Hanizadeh said given the current situations, the administration of President Rouhani wants to improve ties with the West — which is quite different from the approach of the previous government — and settle the problems through dialogue and interaction.
The heroic flexibility approach can have positive economic results for the country and help ease western sanctions against Iran, Hanizadeh concluded.
http://www.debka.com/article/23287/Obama-softens-on-nuclear-Iran-Keep-components-just-promise-not-to-weaponise-them
The moderate mien of Iran’s new president Hassan Rouhani has had its intended effect – even before nuclear dialogue began. President Barack Obama had only one demand of Tehran: “Iran would have to demonstrate its own seriousness by agreement not to weaponise nuclear power,” he said Wednesday, Sept. 18. He thus took at his word Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who declared the day before: “We are against nuclear weapons. And when we say no one should have nuclear weapons, we definitely do not pursue it ourselves either.”
The symmetry between the words from Washington and Tehran was perfect in content and timing – and not by chance.
DEBKAfile’s Washington and Iranian sources disclose that it was choreographed in advance.
Obama and Khamenei have been exchanging secret messages through Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said of Oman, who visited Tehran in the last week of August and conferred with both Khameini and Rouhani.
In the last message, carried to Tehran by Oman’s Defense Minister Sayyid Badr bin Saud Al Busaidiat, the US president said that Rouhani’s conciliatory gestures towards Washington needed to be backed up by an explicit pledge not to weaponise Iran’s nuclear program.
That pledge must come from the supreme leader in person and delivered publicly to Iran’s most hawkish audience, Revolutionary Guards chiefs.
And indeed, Khamenei acted out his part Tuesday under TV cameras.
Full details of the exchanges going back and both between Washington and Tehran will appear in the coming DEBKA Weekly 603 out Friday, Sept. 20.
They will confirm that the US president has come to terms with a nuclear-capable Iran and will be satisfied with Ayatollah Khamenei’s word that Tehran will not take the last step to actually assemble a bomb.
Our sources note that in his direct secret dialogue with Tehran, Obama is pursuing the same tactics he used for the Syrian chemical issue with Russian President Vladmir Putin: Moving fast forward on the secret track while pretending that the process is still at an early stage and then a sudden leap to target – a particular form of diplomacy consisting of verbal calisthenics.
This pretense was played out at the G20, when the two presidents acted as though they were irreconcilably divided on the Syrian question, while secretly tying up the ends of the chemical accord.
Obama’s willingness to accept Khamenei’s oft-repeated assurance that his country’s nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes – while letting its military program advance to the brink – leaves Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu lagging far behind and his Iranian policy with nowhere to go.
At the Israeli cabinet meeting Tuesday, the prime minister said his White House talks with President Obama on Sept. 30 would focus on Iran and his four demands:
1) Complete halt of uranium enrichment; 2) Removal of enriched materials from Iran; 3) Closure of the Fordo enrichment plant; 4) Termination of plutonium production at Arak.
Notwithstanding the briefing offered by Secretary of State John Kerry when he visited Jerusalem on Sunday, Sept. 15, it looks as though Obama is keeping the Israeli prime minister in the dark on his moves towards Iran.
and....
Report: Iran Would Shut Enrichment Plant for End to Sanctions
Israel Expected to Oppose Deal as 'Ploy'
by Jason Ditz, September 16, 2013
According to German newspaper Der Spiegel, Iranian President Hassan Rohani is prepared to offer a deal wherein he would shutter the Fordow uranium enrichment facility in return for the international community ending sanctions against them.
Fordow, the second Iranian enrichment site after Natanz, is considered more irksome to the international community because it is underground and difficult to bomb.
Israeli officials are expected to vigorously oppose any such deal, primarily on the grounds that it would get in the way of their oft-threatened plans to attack Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dubbed past deals “ploys” aimed at preventing the planned war.
The closure of Fordow might be easy for Iran to pull off right now, as they are said to be winding down production of 20% enriched uranium, having created enough fuel rods to run their medical isotope reactor for the foreseeable future.
US Sanctions Force Closure of Iranian Opposition Leader’s Website
Mehdi Karroubi's Internet Presence 'Violates' Sanctions
by Jason Ditz, September 16, 2013
Long-time Iranian opposition figure Mehdi Karroubi just can’t catch a break.
The reformist candidate has been under house arrest in Iran since February of 2011, and with Iran’s new reform-minded government looking to pare back the harsh Internet restrictions of previous governments, he’s now lost his website.
That’s nothing to do with the Iranian government’s policy, but is rather a function of the US government’s sanctions on Iran, as Karroubi’s site was shut down by JustHost.com on grounds that it violates Treasury Department sanctions against Iran.
“What’s frustrating is that on one hand, our sites are filtered inside Iran and so Iranian companies are fearful of providing services to us, and on another hand we face the sanctions,” noted Karroubi aide Mohammad Ziya, who ran his website from inside the United States, adding “it’s like being caught in a pair of scissors.”
JustHost.com parent Endurance International defended the move, arguing that while US sanctions offer an exemption for personal websites, they forbid the hosting of websites for any other purposes. That apparently includes political dissent.
Israeli NGO Threatens Facebook, Demands They Ban Iranian Officials
Claims US Sanctions Ban Facebook Accounts for Iranians
by Jason Ditz, September 16, 2013
Israeli non-governmental organization Shurat HaDin, which made headlines in 2011 for suing former President Jimmy Carter and publisher Simon and Schuster over his book calling for a two-state solution, has turned its attentions to a company with much deeper pockets, Facebook.
Shurat HaDin has announced its intentions to sue Facebook for violation of US Department of the Treasury sanctions against Iran, on the grounds that 15 Iranian government ministers created free accounts there.
Iran’s new government has been seen carrying out significant reforms of past governments restrictions on Internet access, and has allowed Iranian civilians access to Facebook and Twitter.
That’s a positive sign from Iran, but it won’t happen if Shurat HaDin gets its way, arguing that Facebook is violating US law by allowing the Iranians to sign up for accounts, saying that even “seemingly innocuous material support” could lead to criminal liability for supporting Iran.
Facebook has yet to comment on the matter.
Good Morning Fred, Interesting how Iran is not given any credit for offering to shutdown their 20% enrichment because they already have what they need for their medical isotopes reactor. That's what Iran has said the enrichment was about all along while western media claimed they were lying.
ReplyDeleteMorning Kev - as Iran offers concrete actions , the US seizes the Piaget Building , a Manhattan Tower owned by Iran ! Doesn't seem as if we are willing to do anything other than increase punitive actions regarding Iran !
ReplyDelete