June 15, 2008
When Will We Learn?
Over at The Corner, Michael Rubin has found something at Barack Obama and all liberals who think we should negotiate with Iran should read.
The former spokesman of the President Mohammed Khatami's government (1997-2005) has admitted that the only reason they negotiated with the West was to stall for time so that they could continue their nuclear weapons program. From a report in the Fars News Agency (you have to trust Rubin's translator, the Royal Danish Defence College analyst Ali Alfoneh):
Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, Khatami-era government spokesman, on a panel with Mehdi Faza'eli, general secretary of the Muslim Journalist Association: "We did our outmost to prevent the case of Iran being sent to the Security Council, whose judge is the United States.... During the confidence building-era, we entered the nuclear club, and despite the suspension [of uranium enrichment] we imported all the materials needed for our nuclear activities of the country...We were not subjected to sanctions regime during the reform era, but today, even our ophthalmologists are not allowed to import laser products [needed for operations]... If we pursue the right to nuclear energy for bombs, it is clear that the world does not want this, and if we want it for electricity, they say 'you don't have nuclear power plants, what do you want nuclear fuel for?' Just take a look at what the Russians have done to us in the Bushehr nuclear power plant.With the current speed of enrichment, it will take us 25 years before we reach enrichment self-sufficiency. And who knows where we want to find nuclear fuel? And our reserves are unknown... The solution is to prove to the entire world that we want the power plants for electricity. Afterwards, we can proceed with other activities... The peak of our goal is an honorable life for the people. Do we want to become another North Korea...
And this isn't even the good part. Read on
There are only two ways of coming through the current crisis. One is what Khatami did by winning the election of 1997, and the other what [he did] after September 11th, which both guarded the country against war. Today, the solution is to marginalize the Ahmadinejad government from political decision-making in the nuclear energy field, with decisions be taken elsewhere.As long as we were not subjected to sanctions, and during our negotiations we could import technology. We should have negotiated for so long, and benefited from the atmosphere of negotiations to the extent that we could import all the technology needed. The adversary wanted the negotiations to come to a dead end and initiate a new phase. But we wanted to continue negotiations until the U.S. would be gone from the circle of negotiations. We had one overt policy, which was one of negotiation and confidence building, and a covert policy, which was continuation of the activities...
We consider access to all sciences and technologies of the humankind a necessity, but we also prioritize confidence building. Today, in the field of confidence building, Japan is the most advanced country in the world, but Japan can produce a nuclear bomb in less than a week...We achieved to divide the Europeans from the Americans, but today it has come to a point that the Europeans and the Americans have harmonized their policies.
Yes I know, this does not necessarily mean that they're working on nuclear weapons now. And Ramezanzadeh doesn't come out and directly say they were working on nuclear weapons. But I think it's pretty clear what he's talking about.
And in case you think this was the first such admission, think again. In March of 2006 The Telegraph reported that
The man who for two years led Iran's nuclear negotiations has laid out in unprecedented detail how the regime took advantage of talks with Britain, France and Germany to forge ahead with its secret atomic programme.In a speech to a closed meeting of leading Islamic clerics and academics, Hassan Rowhani, who headed talks with the so-called EU3 until last year, revealed how Teheran played for time and tried to dupe the West after its secret nuclear programme was uncovered by the Iranian opposition in 2002.
Iran has completed uranium enrichment equipment at Isfahan
He boasted that while talks were taking place in Teheran, Iran was able to complete the installation of equipment for conversion of yellowcake - a key stage in the nuclear fuel process - at its Isfahan plant but at the same time convince European diplomats that nothing was afoot."From the outset, the Americans kept telling the Europeans, 'The Iranians are lying and deceiving you and they have not told you everything.' The Europeans used to respond, 'We trust them'," he said.
Remember last December's National Intelligence Estimate? The one that was used by the left to "prove" that Iran wasn't seeking nuclear weapons? The one in which the authors confidently said that
A. We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program...
Oops.
Unless this Ramezanzadeh fellow is blowing smoke, we've been had. And by "we" I mean the Bush Administration as well as his predecessors. We've been talking to Iran for 38 years and it hasn't worked. When will we learn?
Posted by Tom at 8:20 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 22, 2008
Book Review - The Iranian Time Bomb
It is perhaps fitting that I finished Michael Ledeen's The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealot's Quest for Destruction, just days after the good Senator Obama and his fellow Democrats lost it over President Bush's remarks in Israel. Obama and his friends imagine that if only they were in charge, their magical words would convince the Mullah's to quit their pursuit of the bomb and stop their support of terrorism. All this, mind you, while running out of Iraq and cutting military spending.
In his book Ledeen demonstrates that diplomacy, "aggressive" or otherwise, is an utter waste of time. The only policy that has a chance of succeeding is regime change, something we should pursue both openly and clandestinely. A direct military attack, at this time, however, would be counterproductive. It may come to military action if that is our only option to stopping them from getting the bomb, but as of now we have many options if only we would pursue them.
The bottom line is that Iran has been at war with us since the Islamic revolution in 1979. They have attacked us numerous times, and are doing so to this day by sending weapons and personnel into Iraq. Yet astoundingly, many Americans do not grasp this fact. They are at war with us, yet we are not allowed to be at war with them. This would somehow be "fearmongering", and "racheting up tensions."
Every president from Reagan to Bush has negotiated with the Iranians, though not at the presidential level. Every single our attempt to find common ground has resulted in failure. Ledeen documents the whole sad story.
The negotiations were almost always based on a search, always futile, for an Iranian "reformer". President Reagan thought he had found Iranian leaders with whom we might be able to negotiate, and famously sent Oliver North and National Security Adviser Robert C. "Bud" McFarlane with bible and chocolate cake allegedly in the shape of a key. Nothing came of it. President Clinton was encouraged by the election of Mohammed Khatami as president in 1997, only to see those hopes dashed as well. The vote for Khatami was more a vote against the regime than a vote for him.
What makes all this so frustrating is that the human rights situation in Iran is much worse than is generally recognized, and no administration of either party has done anything about it. Ledeen spends a chapter detailing the abuses of women, minorities, non-Shiite Muslims, and anyone who disagrees with the regime.
The leaders of the Iranian revolution made clear from the beginning that there's was not a nationalist movement. The Ayatollah Khomeini said it best "We do not worship Iran. We worship Allah, for patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land burn. I saw let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world." Their motivation is important to understand, because all too many Western leaders think that we can placate the Iranians leaders and they will be happy secure within their own country. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that they have quasi-religious/historical motivations which drive them to want to dominate the region, chasing out Western powers in the process.
For example, Muhammed started the practice of writing to infidel leaders, "inviting" them to accept Islam - or else. In 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini wrote a similar letter to Gorbachev, then still leader of the then still USSR. In 2006, Ahmadinejad wrote such a letter to President George W. Bush. As with the others, Ahmadinejad's letter asked Bush to convert to Islam. Muhammed's letters presaged war. We ignore the letters they send us to day at our own peril. They mean what they say.
The main forces used by the Iranians to carry out their policies of terror are the Quds force (the overseas arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, or IRGC), and Hezbollah. They are not going to attack us with conventional military forces if they can help it. They are practitioners of asymmetrical warfare. They aim to wear us down, and to hit us in ways we can least defend against.
In another example of using proxies to further their cause, in the 1990s Iran supported the government of the Sudan, the latter a Muslim Brotherhood movement born out of Sunni Islam. In 1991 they "established a strategic alliance to wage war against their common enemies in the West". The alliance between Iran and Sudan extended to the former sending several thousand IRGC trainers to the Sudan in the 1990's. al Qaeda was in the mix too, as the 1998 U.S. Federal indictment of Osama bin Laden stated that
"Al Qaeda... forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezbollah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States."
The evidence is that Iran was behind the 1988 Khobar Towers attack. The al Qaeda terrorist who carried out the attack were in fact trained by Hezbollah, and the explosives came from Iran. "The entire operation was conceived, organized, and controlled by the Islamic Republic from beginning to end."
It took some doing, but finally in the spring of 1999 FBI interrogators got access to the terrorists the Saudis had captured, and what they heard confirmed Iranian involvement. Director Louis Freeh advised National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and President and Clinton that Iran was behind the Khobar Towers attack. There is some dispute as to what exactly happened within the Clinton Administration, but in the end there was no U.S. retaliation for the attack.
Unfortunately the Bush Administration has done any better than any previous one in dealing with Iran. Despite tough talk, the Bush Administration has no policy to permanently solve the problem. Regime change by whatever means seems off the table. Ledeen places most of the blame on Condolezza Rice, especially when she was National Security Adviser. In this role she was responsible for the formulation of policy, which in the case of Iran she absolutely failed to do.
Another factor contributing to the confusion is the intelligence community, which has been working against doing anything "muscular" with regards to Iran. They are quite happy to let the current negotiations regime take its course, believing that Iran will naturally flower into a democracy sometime in the next decade. Adding to that is that the CIA has very few true Iranian specialists and fewer Persian speakers. Most of the people assigned to the Iran desk are Arabists by trade.
Ledeen, like Richard Miniter, believes that bin Laden is most likely in Iran. This is hardly as unlikely as it may seem, once you get over the false notion that the Sunni-Shiite split precludes all cooperation. Ledeen takes this one more step; "...al Qaeda no longer exists as a separate entity, and that it has been integrated into the terrorist galaxy that revolves around Iran." This may be be going too far, but I don't have the information to make that judgement. I do know that al Qaeda is loosely organized, so that AQI can exist somewhat separately from the rest of the organization.
As with all totalitarians, the Iranians believe us to be weak, and unwilling to take casualties. Whether this is true or not is beside the point; what is important is that they believe it is so and act based on their beliefs.
Further, they believe themselves to be strong. Part of this is the cult of the return of the Mahdi, personified now in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a member (or reputed to be) of the Hojetiah sect. The Hojetiah believe that they can prompte the return of the Mahdi by creating bloodshed and chaos on earth, something which even the Ayatollah Khomeini thought so extreme that he banned them in 1983.
To be fair, they have not succeeded in their objectives in Iraq. They were not able to prompt the civil war they hoped for, and the "surge" is working.
It would be bad enough if the Iranian leaders simply thought themselves strong and us weak. This might lead to dangerously overstep, and then get plastered by a determined U.S. president in response. Here's Ledeen:
Some of the most thoughtful analysis of contemporary Iran believe that the Islamic Republic is currently in the throes of a second Islamic revolution, driven by Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guards Corps from which he comes. As the label suggests, Iranian leaders seek a revitalization of Khomeini's original vision - above all, the export of the revolution - and fully embrace "such events as 'destruction, pestilence, and wars' which they see as the inevitable accompaniments of the Mahdi's return. Amir Taheri terms this "a deliberate clash of civilizations with the West."
They believe they can achieve their Jihadist goal of chasing the U.S. and other Western powers from the gulf region and creating a regional Imamate.
Ledeen doesn't just complain about our past and current failings, however, for he does offer concrete proposals about what to do about Iran, ones that are in line with what I have been saying here.
One thing that he does not believe is useful is engaging in a "War of Ideas" with the Mullahs. Although he does not mention Walid Phares by name, it is apparent that Ledeen has him and similar thinkers in mind. Ledeen has other ideas for dealing with Iran.
Ledeen's starting point is that only regime change will solve the problem. The current government is inherently anti-Western and expansionist and cannot be reformed.
His basic strategy for regime change is pretty straightforward:
...the same way we brought down the Soviet empire, by exporting the American democratic revolution, by adopting the methods that have successfully been used against dictators from Moscow and Belgrade to Beirut and the Philippines. the best strategy is to support the Iranian people against the mullahs they so hate.
A direct military attack would not achieve this purpose because we do not have the capability to take down Iran as we did Iraq. Bombing nuclear installations would set back their program but not get rid of the root problem, which is the government.
Rather, we should use our vast "soft power" to do things like support Iranian dissidents and democracy movements and start a human rights campaign. We can provide these dissidents with material and moral support. Broadcast messages ("propaganda" if you prefer) should be stepped up (our current efforts are abysmal). An information campaign to educate people on the mullahs and their regime should be launched taking advantage of all media including the Internet. Simply providing moral support to regime opponents would go a long way.
Of course this may not work. And there will be many who object to such a campaign, including, sadly, the American left who is stuck in a paradigm of endless negotiations.
Unlike many others, Ledeen sees Iran as the key to winning the War on Terror, or War on Jihadism (or whatever you want to call it).
My take is that Ledeen is mostly correct in this book, but that he takes it all a step too far. Yes Iran is a huge threat, larger than is commonly realized. Yes we should revise our strategy to one of regime change, and, and no, negotiations will not work. Administrations of both parties have kicked the can down the road, and it is time to deal with it before they get nuclear weapons.
The "War of Ideas" that thinkers like Phares advocate will work well against the Wahabbists and Muslim Brotherhood, but alone cannot work against Iran. That said, I think Ledeen criticizes it too much, since I find nothing in Phares' work to indicate such single-mindedness. A War of Ideas can certainly be part of the information or propaganda war that Ledeen advocates.
I also don't see al Qaeda being submerged into Iran as Ledeen thinks. I'm not the expert, but I don't see that theory being promoted elsewhere. Bin Laden may well be in Iran, but that doesn't mean his movement has been totally captured by them. al Qaeda is a pretty dispersed and loosely organized movement, and I never did buy the idea that it's controlled from the top like the Mafia (so "getting bin Laden" would, I think, have minimal effect).
Next Up
Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Don't miss it!
Posted by Tom at 9:00 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
January 7, 2008
Why did the Iranians Threaten U.S. Navy Ships?
Earlier this morning this was reported by Reuters
Five Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats harassed and provoked three U.S. Navy ships in the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday, CNN reported.The CNN report on Monday, citing unidentified U.S. officials, said the Iranian vessels came within 200 yards (metres) of the U.S. ships and that after a threatening radio communication, U.S. sailors manned their ships' guns and were very close to opening fire.
Agence France Presse has details
Armed Iranian speedboats swarmed three US warships in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, radioing a threat to blow them up and sending tensions flaring ahead of President George W. Bush's trip to the Mideast, US officials said Monday."I'm coming at you and you will blow up in a couple of minutes," a Defense Department official quoted the radio transmission as saying.
Crew aboard two of the five speedboats also dumped floating boxes into the path of one of the vessels during the incident Sunday morning, but it passed them without incident, officials said.
At 6:23 PM ET the AP had still more, with a bit of analysis
No shots were fired an an Iranian official in Tehran said the incident amounted to "something normal."Bush administration officials complained that the Iranian actions amounted to a dangerous provocation, but one private analyst said the Iranians may have believed they were acting defensively in a narrow waterway that is heavily trafficked by commercial ships, including oil vessels.
...The three U.S. warships -- cruiser USS Port Royal, destroyer USS Hopper and frigate USS Ingraham -- were headed into the Persian Gulf through the Straits of Hormuz on what the U.S. Navy called a routine passage inside international waters when they were approached by five small high-speed vessels believed to be from Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy.
The Iranians "maneuvered aggressively" in the direction of the U.S. ships, said Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, the commander of U.S. 5th Fleet, which patrols the Gulf and is based at nearby Bahrain. The U.S. ship commanders took a series of steps toward firing on the boats, which approached to within 500 yards, but the Iranians suddenly fled back toward their shore, Cosgriff said.
Cosgriff was not precise about the U.S. ships' location but indicated they were about three miles outside Iran's territorial waters, which extend 12 miles from its shores, headed in a westerly direction after having passed the narrowest point in the straits.
At one point the U.S. ships received a threatening radio call from the Iranians, "to the effect that they were closing (on) our ships and that the ships would explode -- the U.S. ships would explode," Cosgriff said.
"Subsequently, two of these boats were observed dropping objects in the water, generally in the path of the final ship in the formation, the USS Ingraham," he added. "These objects were white, box-like objects that floated. And, obviously, the ship passed by them safely."
The boxes were not retrieved, so U.S. officials do not know whether they posed an actual threat. Cosgriff the U.S. ship commanders were moving through a standard series of actions -- including radio calls to the Iranians that went unheeded -- but did not reach the point of firing warning shots.
What was the Iranian motivation?
First, we need to be careful because initial reports can be wrong. It is possible that our warships surprised the Iranians and they acted the way they did out of fear. Unlikely, but possible.
Did last November's National Intelligence Estimate (NIE 20071203) embolden the Iranians?
It might be that they are simply emboldened, and think that President Bush has been so weakened that they can get away with provoking us. Like with petty tyrants and schoolyard bullies alike, this sort of thing makes them feel big and tough. They think they can show the region that they're not intimidated by the American colossus. Last March, it will be recalled, they seized 15 British sailors and Royal Marines in an act that provoked a lot of analysis but no real certainty as to their intent.
But if one engages in "mirror image" thinking, surely the Iranians would lie low. The NIE gave them the cover they needed to restart their nuclear weapons program, and the last thing they need is to start something that might disrupt it. After all, once they get nuclear weapons then they'll be the dominate power in the gulf, and with that they can pursue their goal of creating a regional Imamate.
Further, the last time they tangled with our navy was in 1988, and they got their heads handed to them.
What to make of it, then? Steve Schippert, writing at The Tank, thinks that much of it could be about oil:
First, in a quote attributed to an unnamed official in the latest New York Times article on the incident, is the possibility of an Iranian probe, testing reactions and observable procedures for future reference. "Whether they're just testing us to learn about our procedures, or actually trying to initiate an incident, we don't know," the Times quoted him as saying.Second, and more importantly from a strategic view rather than tactical, is the Iranian leveraging of crisis and instability in the manipulation of sky-high crude oil prices, the only boost that exists in the Iranian economy.
Oil is flirting with $100 per barrel. Its average price in December dropped to just over $88 per barrel from over $92 average for the month of November. Incidents like this weekend's serve to remind the global oil market of how fragile the supply route is, thus maintaining premium price for Iran's only significant export and only significant source of revenue
Continuing in this vein at Threatswatch, he makes the Clausewitzian point that
The Iranian Oil Weapon is not the act of blocking the Strait of Hormuz nor the removal of Iranian oil from world markets, which is economic suicide for an immensely struggling Iranian economy. The Iranian Oil Weapon is the threat of this, manifest in actions such as the naval harassment this weekend, and the clear economic advantage the resulting tensions provide via increased market price for exported crude oil and natural gas.
On the other hand, it might simply be that the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing. This might not have been an operation sanctioned by Tehran; or at least by everyone in Tehran. StrategyPage, in an article that happened to come out today but is not directly about the situation at hand, explains
Who runs Iran? No one in particular, it turns out. Over the past two years, the senior cleric, Ali Khamenei, has tried to solve the corruption problem by ordering most state owned companies to be privatized (sold off to investors). Khamenei, who has enormous civil and religious power, was ignored. ...The various cleric controlled bureaucracies keep themselves out of trouble with each other by following a "live-and-let-live" policy. So one faction can support terrorist attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, while another insists that the government is doing no such thing.
Bottom line, no one is in charge of the national government, and the senior government officials have the maintenance of their personal wealth and power as their primary goals. All in the name of Allah, of course.
All these motives and more are possible. It's also possible that we'll just never find out.
Update: Tuesday Jan 8
Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, gave a press briefing yesterday on the incident. Adm Cosgriff reports to Adm Fallon, who is commander of Central Command.
This video can also be viewed at DODvCLIPS
Here are the important parts
With respect to the encounter yesterday morning local time in the Strait of Hormuz, I think the facts are known to many of you. USS Port Royal, USS Hopper, USS Ingraham were in bound the Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz routine transit.In the early hours of the morning, daylight hours of the morning, they were encountered by five total small high-speed craft that we assessed to belong the Iranian Revolutionary Guard navy. The five boats approached the formation on the formation's starboard bow in international waters slightly inside the gulf from the apex of the strait, broke into two groups, one to one side of the formation, one to the other. The groups maneuvered aggressively in the direction of the U.S. ships. They were called on radio; they were -- ships' whistles were sounded, those sorts of things, to draw attention to the fact that their maneuvers were a cause of concern to the commanding officers.
At one point during this encounter, we received a radio -- the ships received a radio call that was threatening in nature, to the effect that they were closing our ships and that the ships might -- the ships would explode, the U.S. ships would explode. Subsequently, two of these boats were observed dropping objects in the water, generally in the path of the final ship in the formation, the USS Ingraham. These objects were white box-like objects that floated, and obviously the ship passed by them safely.
The encounter continued, with the boats maneuvering close to stern and after -- under 30 minutes total, they returned in the direction from whence they came, to the north, back towards Iranian territorial waters.
So I would reiterate it was a transit passage in international waters incidental to a routine inbound transit of the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. ships were clearly marked, at daylight, decent visibility. The behavior of the Iranian ships was, in my estimation, unnecessary, without due regard for safety of navigation and unduly provocative in the sense of the aggregate of their maneuvers, the radio call and the dropping of objects in the water.
I'd like to report that the training of our ships as they came in was more than satisfactory. They stepped through the procedures carefully, with good discipline, with due regard for all the factors, while at the same time taking the reasonable precautions to place their ships in conditions of readiness consistent with the environment in which they were entering. So I was very proud of their performance and the training they received.
...Q Admiral, this is Bob Burns from AP. Could you tell us how frequently in the recent past have Iranian National Guard -- or Republican Guard vessels intercepted U.S. ships in that area, and exactly how close were the U.S. ships to the Iranian territorial waters?
ADM. COSGRIFF: I'll answer the last first. We were at least 15 miles from Iranian-recognized land, so outside the 12-mile territorial waters, in international waters.We routinely encounter Iranian navy and Iranian Revolutionary Guard ships on our operation in the gulf, including in and around the Strait of Hormuz. In fact, this group had passed an Iranian navy ship earlier in its transit and exchanged quite correct radio communication with that Iranian ship, and indeed had communicated again correctly with some Iranian shore stations and, for that matter, Omani shore stations, again following the procedures that we teach them to follow. So encounters with warships, of either the Revolutionary Guard navy or the regular navy, are not unusual.
...Q Admiral, it's Andrew Gray from Reuters. Can you characterize how serious this incident was from your point of view?
Following off of Bob's question, have you known an incident as serious as this since you took command here?
ADM. COSGRIFF: Well, this particular body of water, no; this is more serious because of the aggregate of the actions, the coordinated movement of the ships, the boats, the aggressive maneuvering, the more or less simultaneous radio communication, the dropping of objects. So these are -- in my unnecessarily provocative -- in international waters incidental to a routine transit of a(n) internationally recognized strait. So yes, it's more serious than we have seen, but to put it in context, we do interact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and their navy regularly. For the most part, those interactions are correct. We are familiar with their presence, they're familiar with ours. So I think in the time I've been here I've seen things that are a concern, and then there's periods of time -- long periods of time where there's not as much going on.
Update: Jan 12
Reading this post, I realize that I forgot to state the obvious; that the Iranians were probably just testing our reaction in case they do decide to attack our ships. Given their lack of large warships or modern attack aircraft, they've decided that "swarm" attacks by small boats might work. As such, they need to gather intelligence to determine our rules of engagement so that they can search for weaknesses.
Update II Jan 12:
Malcolm Nance, writing at Small Wars Journal, sort of agrees with what I just wrote, but adds a new twist
Given all the factors and the evidence by both the US Navy and Iranian video, this was a simple harassment and surveillance mission carried out by the IRGC on US Navy vessels as the opportunity arose. The boxes thrown into the water were most likely ammunition packaging as they prepared to be engaged and engage the US ships. For reasons I am sworn to secrecy over I can assure you that Iranian high speed boats do not warn on bridge-to-bridge radio that they are making a suicide attack. No terrorist would. ...The risk here is that the White House and Pentagon staffers may have a political scenario in their head that will always explains routine incidents such as these in a hostile, dangerous light. As tensions and rhetoric escalates they may fall victim to "scenario fulfillment" (the same group think that the crew of the USS Vincennes experienced in their tragic gunbattle) where the desire to attack the Iranians, who are acting out their role as "evil", is aided by the ease of which Iranian activities, however mundane can be seen as belligerent. To the hawks in the administration, the Iranians want to start a war because they are "Islamofacists" who seek nuclear weapons and the destruction of Israel - so of course they are trying to provoke us.
Well...maybe. True enough that we should be aware of self-fulfilling prophesies. But just because you're paranoid of the Islamo-fascists doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
Posted by Tom at 10:00 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 5, 2007
More on the NIE
I've got a bit more time tonight and so want to quickly revisit the issue of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE 20071203) on Iran (hat has caused so much comment. First off, let's take a look at what it actually says. Under "Key Judgements", we have, among other findings
A. We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we access with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons....• We assess with high confidence that until fall 2003, Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons.
• We judge with high confidence that the halt lasted at least several years. (Because of intelligence gaps discussed elsewhere in this Estimate, however, DOE and NIC access with only moderate confidence taht the halt to those programs represents a halt to Iran's entire nuclear weapons program.)
• We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.
• Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005. Our assessment that the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously.
What's all this about "high or moderate confidence"? Here's where the Estimate gets interesting. Here's how it defines these two levels:
High confidence generally indicates that our judgements are based on high-quality information, and/or that the nature of the issue makes it possible to render a solid judgement. A "high confidence" judgement is not a fact or certainty, however, and such judgements carry a risk of being wrong.Moderate confidence generally means that the information is credibly sourced and plausible but not of sufficient quality or corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of confidence.
What the report does therefore not say is that "Iran has shut down it's program". It speaks in terms of probabilities and admits that it could all be wrong. Not that it is, but that it could be. Further, remember it was only with moderate confidence that it declared that as of mid-2007 "Tehran had not restated its nuclear weapons program."
Two more key findings bear quoting:
E. We do not have sufficient intelligence to judge confidently whether Tehran is willing to maintain the halt of its nuclear programs program indefinitely while it weights its options, or whether it will or already has set specific deadlines or criteria that will promot it to restart the program.
So they might be waiting to see if the political climate changes. What could they be waiting for? One possibility is to see if a Democrat wins the White House in 2008, especially one like Barak Obama or John Edwards. While this comment might seem overly partisan, I think it to be a fair one. Neither has shown any willingness to use military force against Iran, or to use it as a credible threat during diplomacy. Second is that they could be waiting to see if they can chase the U.S. out of Iraq. If they succeed there, their prestige will be enhanced and ours will fall. We will be less willing than ever to use force, and they will know it. Again, they could seize the opportunity to restart work.
And under "E"
• Our assessment that iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran's desisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs. This, in turn, suggests that some combination of threats of international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportuities in Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways, might - if perceived by Iran's leaders as credible - prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program. It is difficult to specify what such a combination might be.Certainly the bit about Iran being "guided by a cost-benefit approach" contradicts much of what I've written about the Iranian leadership. This in turn leads to a few observations
One, of the NIE is accurate, then why has the Iranian leadership, and especially President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, been so bellicose? With Saddam we learned that he was playing a double game; trying to convince his own people, party, and regional threats that he had WMD, while trying to convince us that he didn't. It doesn't seem likely that the Iranians are up to the same thing, but it's possible.
Two, as with Saddam, the Iranian leadership bears ultimate responsibility for our uncertainty. Saddam could have resolved the whole issue of whether he had WMD or not by simply opening up his country for honest inspections. Instead, the history of the mid-to-late 90s with him is one of deception after deception. Ditto with Iran. If they really aren't pursuing weapons then it's their responsibility to open up fully to inspections.
Three, as with others I have to question the accuracy of the NIE, because the Iranian leadership (and yes I know that their president does not hold total power) seems so driven by religious/historical objectives.
Also, under "E" is this
• We assess with moderate confidence that convincing the Iranian leadership to forgo the eventual development of nuclear weapons will be difficult given the linkage many within the leadership probably see between nuclear weapons development and Iran's key national security and foreign policy objectives, and given Iran's considerable effort from at least the late 1980s to 2003 to develop such weapons. In our judgement, only an Iranian political decision to abandon a nuclear weapons objective would plausibly keep Iran from eventually producing nuclear weapons - and such a decisiion is inherently reversible.
In other words, they're probably going to restart their weapons program and talking them out of it will be difficult. Why this one is only of "moderate confidence" is hard to know.
More Observations
If indeed they stopped in 2003, what was the "international pressure" that made them stop? One has to be Operation Iraqi Freedom, in which (yes) many countries besides the U.S. participated. Seems like a vindication of the Iraq war to me.
The left will claim a "victory for diplomacy", yet talk without the credible threat of force to back it up is meaningless. If indeed diplomacy worked, then it did so only because the Iranians knew that if they pushed too far we'd hit them.
The Bush Administration's policy on Iran has been to follow the European's lead, which has been negotiations, sanctions, and the use of international agencies such as the IAEA. Isn't that what the left wants? Or is the mere hint of military action so upsetting to them that it must be completely "off the table"? My own idiot Senator, James Webb, apparently thinks so.
As I said on Monday, if it's accurate, then the new NIE is certainly good news. The 2005 Estimate was to "assess with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure...."
Other Opinion
Mossad and Aman aren't convinced that the NIE has it right. From the New York Times
Israel today took a darker view of Iran’s nuclear ambitions than the assessment released by United States intelligence agencies yesterday, saying it was convinced that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons.It said Iran had probably resumed the nuclear weapons program the American report said was stopped in the fall of 2003. “It is apparently true that in 2003 Iran stopped pursuing its military nuclear program for a certain period of time,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israeli Army Radio. “But in our estimation, since then it is apparently continuing with its program to produce a nuclear weapon.”
The Israelis are hardly infallible, but they are to be taken seriously.
The editors of National Review aren't impressed either
First, the NIE says that Iran was indeed operating a covert nuclear-weapons program up to the fall of 2003. Until now, no NIE had held that such a program existed. The acknowledgement that one did is a big piece of news — even if not many people want to talk about it. Yes, the NIE also claims that Iran suspended weapons-related activities in 2003. But the question for policymakers is whether a regime that has, in the past four years, tried to build atomic bombs, should be trusted with civilian technologies that greatly increase its ability to make a bomb whenever it wishes to do so.And that’s the second thing to remember about this NIE: It relies on an unrealistic distinction between civilian and military nuclear technologies. When it says Iran suspended its weapons program in 2003, what it means is that Iran isn’t currently designing or building warheads, or other components of nuclear weapons. But it concedes that Iran “made significant progress in 2007 installing centrifuges at Natanz.” And while the NIE judges “with moderate confidence” that Iran “still faces significant technical problems” operating the centrifuges, it does not question that the enrichment of uranium continues.
...Of course, all this assumes that the NIE is accurate and impartial — and there is reason to doubt that. It’s no secret that careerists at the CIA and State have been less interested in implementing the president’s policies on Iran, Iraq, and North Korea than in sabotaging them at every opportunity. Sources close to the intelligence community question the objectivity of the NIE’s Iran conclusions, and tell us that three principal authors of the report are longtime critics of the administration’s policy who have axes to grind.
We can’t know for sure whether the claims in the NIE are correct. What we do know is this: The Islamic Republic is killing Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has exported terror around the globe. It has powerful strategic reasons to want an atomic bomb: to counterbalance American influence, and to become a hegemon in the Middle East. And it continues to enrich uranium while refusing to allow the kind of intrusive and thorough inspections that would allow us to test its claim that it seeks nothing but electricity. Until that big picture changes, it would be irresponsible for any American policymaker to conclude that the Iranian threat had diminished.
Robert Rubin in the New York Daily News reminds us that
Just last month, IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei revealed Iran had a blueprint for a nuclear warhead provided by disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan during a visit to Tehran in the 1990s.
Writing on the Media Blog at NRO Tom Gross has a host of good links and quotes, all from major publications. Here are a few
William J. Broad in The New York Times:
When is a nuclear program a nuclear weapons program? The open secret of the nuclear age is that the line between civilian and military programs is extraordinarily thin...
The Washington Post
While U.S. intelligence agencies have “high confidence” that covert work on a bomb was suspended “for at least several years” after 2003, there is only “moderate confidence” that Tehran has not restarted the military program. Iran’s massive overt investment in uranium enrichment meanwhile proceeds in defiance of binding U.N. resolutions, even though Tehran has no legitimate use for enriched uranium. The U.S. estimate of when Iran might produce enough enriched uranium for a bomb – sometime between late 2009 and the middle of the next decade — hasn’t changed.
Robert Baer (who is a former CIA field officer) in TIME magazine:
… Then there are the Gulf Arabs. For the last year and a half, ever since the Bush Administration started to hint that it might hit Iran, they have been sending emissaries to Tehran to assure the Iranians they’re not going to help the U.S. But in private, the Gulf Arabs have been reminding Washington that Iran is a rabid dog: Don’t even think about kicking it, the Arabs tell us. If you have to do something, shoot it dead. Which is something the U.S. can’t do. So how far is Iran from a nuke? The truth is that Iran is a black hole, and it’s entirely conceivable Iran could build a bomb and we wouldn’t know until they tested it...
The hard reality is that at this point President Bush doesn't have the political capital to "shoot it dead". That's the penalty for taking so long to get Iraq on the right track.
Update
Bret Stephens, writing in the OpinionJournal, pointed out the other day that another NIE failed to anticipate that Nikita Khrushchev might place missiles in Cuba. From the Estimate
"The USSR could derive considerable military advantage from the establishment of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, or from the establishment of a submarine base there. . . . Either development, however, would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it."--Special National Intelligence Estimate 85-3-62, Sept. 19, 1962
Twenty-five days later our U-2 photographed the Soviets building a base for SS-4 missiles in Cuba, and the rest is history.
Posted by Tom at 7:30 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
December 3, 2007
The National Intelligence Estimate on Iranian Nuclear Capabilities
You're going to see a lot of the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran in the next few weeks. Here's how it was reported in the New York Times earlier today
A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.The conclusions of the new assessment are likely to reshape the final year of the Bush administration, which has made halting Iran’s nuclear program a cornerstone of its foreign policy.
The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran is likely keeping its options open with respect to building a weapon, but that intelligence agencies “do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”
Iran is continuing to produce enriched uranium, a program that the Tehran government has said is designed for civilian purposes. The new estimate says that enrichment program could still provide Iran with enough raw material to produce a nuclear weapon sometime by the middle of next decade, a timetable essentially unchanged from previous estimates.
But the new estimate declares with “high confidence” that a military-run Iranian program intended to transform that raw material into a nuclear weapon has been shut down since 2003, and also says with high confidence that the halt “was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure.”
The next two paragraphs could have been written by the DNC. Look for them to be used quite a bit in the days to come.
Rather than painting Iran as a rogue, irrational nation determined to join the club of nations with the bomb, the estimate states Iran’s “decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs.” The administration called new attention to the threat posed by Iran earlier this year when President Bush had suggested in October that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to “World War III” and Vice President Dick Cheney promised “serious consequences” if the government in Tehran did not abandon its nuclear program.Yet at the same time officials were airing these dire warnings about the Iranian threat, analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency were secretly concluding that Iran’s nuclear weapons work halted years ago and that international pressure on the Islamic regime in Tehran was working.
So we can all relax and stop worrying about Iranian nukes, right? All that talk about an "Iranian threat" was just the evil neocons trying to scare us so they could drum up more business for Halliburton, wasn't it? Not so fast, and here's why:
First off, what makes the NIE the word of god? It will be described as holy writ by the left in the days to come, but just partisan politics talking.
Second, the NYT somewhat mischaracterized the NIE, as Tom Maguire points out on his blog (h/t Michelle Malkin), and says that the Washington Post was more accurate when it said that
Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to international pressure, and while it continues to develop an enriched uranium program, it apparently has not resumed moving toward a nuclear capability, according to a consensus judgment of the U.S. intelligence community released today by Director of National Intelligence John M. McConnell.The assessment states "with moderate confidence" that "Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program" as of mid-2007, but suggests that Tehran continues to keep that option open.
Third, the fact is that our intelligence agencies have not had a good record at figuring out the capabilities of other countries when it comes to weapons of mass destruction. Most of the time our enemies have developed weapons well before we thought they would.
The Soviet Union exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949, years before we thought they would. We based our estimate not knowing that we had been betrayed by spies. The first Chinese detonation was in 1964, again catching us by surprise. Ditto with the Indian bomb in 1974 and that of Pakistan in 1998.
We didn't think that Iraq was very far along in it's bomb program in the 1980s, which turned out to be wrong. After the Gulf War, the IAEA, with Hans Blix as it's director, went into Iraq and found out that their program was much more advanced than we had suspected. As Blix himself said "It's correct to say that the IAEA was fooled by the Iraqis".
On the other hand, we were obviously wrong in 2003. As it turned out, Saddam did not have the WMD that we thought he did. Whatever happened to it (unaccounted for to this day) it was not at the ready.
Further, the Manhattan Project itself was based on the Roosevelt's belief that Nazi Germany had an atomic bomb program. As it turned out, Germany had a small research program that never came anywhere close to developing weapons.
Let's not forget the "missile gap", which was used by then Senator John F Kennedy during the presidential race of 1960, in which he ran agains Vice President Richard M Nixon. The whole story is a bit complicated, but suffice it to say that several NIE reports in the late 1950s had it that the Soviet Union was or would over take us in Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). Further, the USAF thought that the Soviets had more ICBMs than we did, but that the CIA said otherwise. Sen Kennedy seized on the NIE and USAF estimates and used them to attack the Eisenhower Administration, of which Nixon was of course a part, as being "weak on defense". Adding fuel to the fire was Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who had a habit of saying that his country was turning out nuclear-armed missiles "like sausages". As it turned out, the "missile gap" was as illusory as the "bomber gap" of a few years earlier, something President Kennedy learned after taking office.
The point, if I have to spell it out, is that sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong. It's hard to know at the time, but it all seems so obvious in retrospect.
I am not saying that the new NIE is necessarily wrong. It might be right. But it's not holy scripture.
Other Opinion
It would certainly be good news if it turns out that the NIE is correct. I'd be happy if Iran was truely not pursuing nuclear weapons. If they are, then at some point we'll have to attack them. While an attack will stop or at least set back Iran, it will also lead to all sorts of negative consequences, not the least of which might be riots or demonstrations by Shiites in Iraq.
But how do we know that the NIE is right? Thomas Joscelyn, writing in The Weekly Standard, has five questions of the NIE that need to be answered before we can be assured of its accuracy.
Victor Davis Hanson points out that contrary to what at first glance seems to be a Democrat advantage, it actually puts them in something of a pickle
Are they now to suggest that Republicans have been warmongering over a nonexistent threat for partisan purposes? But to advance that belief is also to concede that, Iran, like Libya, likely came to a conjecture around (say early spring 2003?) that it was not wise for regimes to conceal WMD programs, given the unpredictable, but lethal American military reaction.
I hadn't thought of that when I first saw the NIE, but he's right; if in fact Iran stopped work on their bomb in 2003, it's really too much to believe that it's coincidence that OIF started at the same time.
In the same vein, Richard Fernandez of The Belmont Club also has a few questions, among them is "Why was Iran not provoked into further and more frantic efforts to develop nuclear weapons by the invasion of Iraq?" Maybe because the invasion had the effect the evil neocons said it would have? Maybe. Whatever caused them to shut off their program (again, if they did), "no new sanctions were imposed on Iran between 2000 and 2005" so it couldn't have been that.
And as to leftists who claim that the whole Iranian threat was "overblown" and that nothing needed to be done, " that is a perverted argument which reverses the order of things. The reason the Iranian bomb program was prevented or slowed was because it was taken seriously and the necessary counter-pressures were implemented." As always when it comes to Fernandez, read the whole thing.
Writing at The Corner, Cliff May thinks that it's all political: "The purpose of this NIE is to prevent Bush from using military force during the remainder of his term to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons program." Maybe. It's been known that the CIA in particular is full of people who don't like GWB.
Either way, there will be a lot more about this NIE in the days to come.
Posted by Tom at 10:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 2, 2007
Newt Nails It
Many of us on the right are increasingly dissatisfied with the Bush Administration's handling of the "war on terror". Most of us aren't even really happy with that term, and those of us who accept it tend to do so only because either they don't think it can be changed or because none of the other choices seem better.
The president started out strong after 9-11, and it seemed that there was a new sheriff in town. The rest of the world saw that after those attacks on our homeland we did not hesitate in quickly going to Afghanistan and routing the Taliban and al Qaeda there. A little over a year later we removed another cancer in the region by quickly smashing the Iraqi army and rolling into Baghdad.
The outlaw regimes of the world trembled and the rest of the world looked on in awe.
This is the type of respect that I want for our country. When Democrats, reporters, news anchors ask "how can the U.S. regain the respect of the rest of the world" they are looking for a politically correct answer along the lines of "pull out of Iraq, apologize for invading, and only do what the UN allows us to do". But that's appeasement, not respect (As a side note, why is it that no one thinks to ask "what can the rest of the world do to gain our respect?")
When Iraq turned out to be more difficult than anticiplated we stumbled, and in the years that followed slowly lost our way. I've detailed all this in numerous posts on this blog, but no one does it better than Newt Gingrich.
Gingrich is simply one of the most brilliant speakers there is. I heard him last year at CPAC
In an article posted the other day at Family Security Matters, he takes us through the genesis of our problem and how to fix it. Following are the most important excerpts, but I encourage you to read the whole thing
Our current problem is tragic. You have an administration whose policy is inadequate being opposed by a political Left whose policy is worse, and you have nobody prepared to talk about the policy we need. Because we are told if you are for a strong America, you should back the Bush policy even if it's inadequate, and so you end up making an argument in favor of something that can't work. So your choice is to defend something which isn't working or to oppose it by being for an even weaker policy. So this is a catastrophe for this country and a catastrophe for freedom around the world. Because we have refused to be honest about the scale of the problem. ...What's the primary source of money for al Qaeda? It's you, re-circulated through Saudi Arabia. Because we have no national energy strategy, when clearly if you really cared about liberating the United States from the Middle East and if you really cared about the survival of Israel, one of your highest goals would be to move to a hydrogen economy and to eliminate petroleum as a primary source of energy.
...So then you look at Saudi Arabia. The fact that we tolerate a country saying no Christian and no Jew can go to Mecca, and we start with the presumption that that's true while they attack Israel for being a religious state is a sign of our timidity, our confusion, our cowardice that is stunning.
...So we accept this totally one-sided definition of the world in which our enemies can cheerfully lie on television every day, and we don't even have the nerve to insist on the truth. We pretend their lies are reasonable. This is a very fundamental problem. And if you look at who some of the largest owners of some of our largest banks are today, they're Saudis.
...So we accept this totally one-sided definition of the world in which our enemies can cheerfully lie on television every day, and we don't even have the nerve to insist on the truth. We pretend their lies are reasonable. This is a very fundamental problem. And if you look at who some of the largest owners of some of our largest banks are today, they're Saudis.
...We have created our own nightmare because we refuse to tell the truth. We refuse to tell the truth to our politicians. Our State Department refuses to tell the truth to the country. If the president of the United States, and again, we're now so bitterly partisan, we're so committed to red vs. blue hostility, that George W. Bush doesn't have the capacity to give an address from the Oval Office that has any meaning for half the country. And the anti-war Left is so strong in the Democratic primary that I think it's almost impossible for any Democratic presidential candidate to tell the truth about the situation.
And so the Republicans are isolated and trying to defend incompetence. The Democrats are isolated and trying to find a way to say, "I'm really for strength as long as I can have peace, but I'd really like to have peace, except I don't want to recognize these people who aren't very peaceful.
...None of our enemies are confused. Our enemies don't get up each morning and go, "Oh, gosh, I think I'll have an existential crisis of identity in which I will try to think through whether or not we can be friends while you're killing me." Our enemies get up every morning and say, "We hate the West. We hate freedom." They would not allow a meeting with women in the room.
...Now what do we need?
We need first of all to recognize this is a real war. Our enemies are peaceful when they're weak, are ruthless when they're strong, demand mercy when they're losing, show no mercy when they're winning. They understand exactly what this is, and anybody who reads Sun Tzu will understand exactly what we're living through. This is a total war. One side is going to win. One side is going to lose. You'll be able to tell who won and who lost by who's still standing. Most of Islam is not in this war, but most of Islam isn't going to stop this war. They're just going to sit to one side and tell you how sorry they are that this happened. We had better design grand strategies that are radically bigger and radically tougher and radically more honest than anything currently going on, and that includes winning the argument in Europe, and it includes winning the argument in the rest of the world. And it includes being very clear, and I'll just give you one simple example because we're now muscle-bound by our own inability to talk honestly.
Iran produces 60% of its own gasoline. It produces lots of crude oil but only has one refinery. It imports 40% of its gasoline. The entire 60% is produced at one huge refinery.
...n the 28 years since the Iranians declared war on us, in the six years since 9/11, in the months since Gen. Petraeus publicly said they are killing young Americans, we have not been able to figure out how to take down one refinery. Covertly, quietly, without overt war. And we have not been able to figure out how to use the most powerful navy in the world to simply stop the tankers and say, "Look, you want to kill young Americans, you're going to walk to the battlefield, but you're not going to ride in the car because you're not going to have any gasoline."
...We had better take this seriously because we are not very many mistakes away from a second Holocaust. Three nuclear weapons is a second Holocaust. Our enemies would like to get those weapons as soon as they can, and they promise to use them as soon as they can.
I suggest we defeat our enemies and create a different situation long before they have that power.
I don't think we're quite at the point where we need to take out that single Iranian refinery, or blockade their shipping, but we're getting close.
Posted by Tom at 10:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 13, 2007
Yes They Want Nukes
If you thought that my warnings yesterday about why we should not let Iran get nuclear weapons were alarmist, today we have this AP story via the New York Times:
Iran has met a key demand of the U.N. nuclear agency, handing over long-sought blueprints showing how to mold uranium metal into the shape of warheads, diplomats said Tuesday.Iran's decision to release the documents, which were seen by U.N. inspectors two years ago, was seen as a concession designed to head off the threat of new U.N. sanctions.
But the diplomats said Tehran has failed to meet other requests made by the International Atomic Energy Agency in its attempts to end nearly two decades of nuclear secrecy on the part of Iran
...The agency has been seeking possession of the blueprints since 2005, when it stumbled upon them among a batch of other documents during its examination of suspect Iranian nuclear activities. While agency inspectors had been allowed to examine them in the country, Tehran had up to now refused to let the IAEA have a copy for closer perusal.
Well that was awfully nice of them to let us have the documents. But how did they get them in the first place? After all, aren't we supposed to believe that their nuclear program is peaceful? Here's the Iranian explanation:
Iran maintains it was given the papers without asking for them during its black market purchases of nuclear equipment decades ago that now serve as the backbone of its program to enrich uranium -- a process that can generate both power or create the fissile core of nuclear warheads. Iran's refusal to suspend enrichment has been the main trigger for both existing U.N. sanctions and the threat of new ones.
I guess the documents were just thrown in as a bonus. Kind of like when you buy a new cell phone they throw in a car charger.
Just to be sure we're all on the same page regarding the documents, the AP story goes on to explain that
Both the IAEA and other experts have categorized the instructions outlined in the blueprints as having no value outside of a nuclear weapons program.
Anyone still want to maintain that Iran isn't seeking nukes?
Paul Mirengoff of Powerline attended a breakfast hosted by The American Spectator two days ago. Former Ambassador to the UN John Bolton was the featured speaker. Here's what he had to say about Iran
Our policy has been, let the Europeans handle it. Europe's policy has been "speak softly and carry a big carrrot." This dynamic has caused us to waste four years. Finally, we have Sarkozy and perhaps Merkel on board, and we've been able to implement some decent sanctions. But they are too little too late. The only question now is when (not whether) Iran will get nukes. And given the price of oil, the answer is probably sooner rather than later. Our options, then, are regime change and the use of military force. There's some chance of regime change because the regime is fragile. Failing that, as a last resort the U.S. or Israel should strike Iran's nuclear facilities. However, this is a risky strategy because Iran may have facilites we don't know about. In that case, you get the adverse consequences of the stirke without the benefit. Bolton doubts that Iran would withhold oil because the revenue is too important to the regime. Iran would likely retaliate by supporting terrorism, but Iran's support of terrorism is already substantial.
I'd say he has it just about right.
Unfortunately, the Bush Administration seems determined to forge ahead with our current strategy of endless negotiations and sanctions that will not deter the mullahs. We should be pursuing regime change but are not. What we're going to end up with is a situation where the choice will be between letting Iran have the bomb and hoping for the best and a military strike, which as Bolton says is risky.
Part of me thinks that the President will assess the 2008 race late next year and if it looks like the Democrat will win, will order strikes because he (rightly) won't trust his successor to do it. On the other hand, this ridiculous business of seeking an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord makes he think he's looking at his legacy and wants to go out a peacemaker.
If Israel had a strong leader I'd say they would present Bush with an ultimatum; you strike or we will. Bush would have to hit Iran because 1) Israel couldn't get the job done (they don't have big bombers that can carry the deep penetrator bombs) and 2) an Israeli strike would inflame the region even more than a U.S. one would. But unless Israel gets new leadership (Bibi where are you?) I'm not sure I even see this happening.
Either way, Bolton is right in that the situation will come to a head sometime in the next few years. It might not be September 1939 yet, but it's just about 1938.
Posted by Tom at 8:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 12, 2007
More Reasons not to let Iran get the Bomb
David Frum linked to an article by Barry Rubin at The Gloria Center that is worth quoting in its entirety
The Iranian nuclear issue is too important and dangerous to be miscomprehended. So here are some life-and-death factors to keep in mind about it:First, Iran is not about to obtain nuclear weapons, certainly not ones that it could use. That dreadful outcome is still several years away. Despite all the bragging going on by Iranian leaders in Persian-language statements about how they are getting closer to atomic bombs—coupled with denials of any such intention in English-language ones—it just isn’t that easy to do.
Second, neither Israel nor the United States is about to attack Iran. There are lots of reasons why this is so but they can be boiled down to the following: it is hard militarily to carry out such an attack, it is politically dangerous, and can lead to very serious consequences. An attack is something better to avoid, if possible. And it is certainly too early for such a high-risk, potentially high-cost venture.
Third, why then are Israel, the United States and others making such a big fuss about Iran right now, since it is neither the last moment nor a prelude to an attack soon? The answer is that it is the last moment for three other things:
* If international terms, if diplomatic and economic pressure is going to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons it has to be intensified right now or it will be too late to generate the needed non-military threat to Tehran.* In technological terms, Iran is right on the verge of being able to build nuclear weapons all by itself without any more foreign help or equipment.
* In political terms, if Iranian leaders and people aren’t worried about the country’s isolation and the nuclear program’s high costs, they will more likely keep in power the regime’s most extreme faction—and the ones most likely to use nuclear weapons in the future.
So in several real ways it is truly a moment of now or never, not because of an imminent attack but due to the fact that this era gives the last chance to avoid one.But there is a fourth set of factors extremely important yet hardly ever mentioned. True, the most horrifying outcome would be if Iran used these weapons against Israel, possibly triggering a region-wide nuclear and conventional war which will make previous conflicts look like a picnic.
Yet while this risk alone justifies decisive action to stop Iran’s nuclear success, this may not happen, you could argue. Or perhaps you don’t mind seeing Israel incinerated or think it can take care of itself. Why, then, should Iran having nuclear weapons bother you?
The reason is that even more likely to take place than an Iranian attack on Israel are a number of other dire circumstances that would be devastating for everyone in the region and the world in general. Briefly, these include the following disasters:
* Appeasement: Frightened by Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons and uncertain of Western protection, Arabic-speaking states will rush to meet Iran’s demands.* This means they will be afraid to cooperate with U.S. policy or provide facilities for Western efforts to contain Iran. And that development will make them even less able to protect themselves against Tehran, further reinforcing the effect.
* Given Iran’s rejectionist stance, no Arab state or the Palestinian Authority would dare move toward peace with Israel. Even if you believe such a thing is possible now, forget about it for 20 or 30 years.
* Since Iran always favors higher oil prices (with Saudi Arabia, which already has lots of money, holding them down), the combination of Iranian pressure and heightened regional insecurity will send the cost of petroleum sky-high, far above anything hitherto dreamed.
* Intoxicated with a belief that Islamism is on the march to victory, tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands will join radical Islamist groups, either clients of Iran or independent ones.
* It is quite conceivable that even if the Iranian government makes no decision to give nuclear weapons to terrorists super-extremist elements in the regime will do it on their own.
* With the regime having nuclear weapons, any opposition will be too intimidated to try to change it, no matter how much support dissidents have.
* Nobody in the region will be willing to oppose greater Iranian influence in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere. And even if you believe this is possible now—though I don’t—it is certainly obvious that Syria, nestled under Iran’s nuclear protection, will never move away from its alliance with Tehran
* In fact, new members may join the current radical HISH alliance (Hamas-Iran-Syria-Hizballah), thus further building the extremist forces. The result could be a turning point with Islamists toppling one Arab nationalist regime after another.
* Of course, all of the above would escalate regional instability.
Does the above sound exaggerated? I don’t think so but even if you want to reduce such dire predictions to a lower level the prospects are still quite harrowing. Remember that even if Iran never uses nuclear weapons to make mushroom clouds it will quite effectively use them for strategic and economic leverage.
Oh and for the millionth time Ahmadinejad is proclaiming that the return of the Mahdi is near.
Posted by Tom at 8:22 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 27, 2007
Ahmadinejad's Other Message
It's taken me longer than I wanted to get this posted
There's been a lot of talk about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech(or here) earlier this week at Columbia University. What you may have missed is what he said at the beginning of his talk
AHMADINEJAD: In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful...TRANSLATOR: The president is reciting verses from the holy Koran in Arabic.
AHMADINEJAD: Oh, God, hasten the arrival of Imam al-Mahdi and grant him good health and victory and make us his followers and those to attest to his rightfulness.
My guess is that most people skipped right through this part. I however, think it very important to understanding who he is and what we are up against.
And the bottom line is that we are dealing with a madman. One who if present trends continue will have nuclear weapons at his disposal.
The Doctrine of Mahdism is as follows
According to Shi’ite tradition, the Twelve Imams, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali Ibn Abi Talib, were endowed with divine qualities that enabled them to lead the Shi’ite believers and to function as Allah’s emissaries on earth. However, when the Twelfth Imam Muhammad Al-Mahdi disappeared in 941 CE, his connection with the Shi’ite believers was severed, and since then, the Shi’ites are commanded to await his return at any time.In the meantime, Shi’ite senior clerics are considered to be the representatives of the Imams, and thus have the authority to handle the affairs of the Shi’ite community, mainly in the religious and judicial spheres, until the Hidden Imam returns to lead the Shi’ite community and deliver it from its suffering.
According to Shi’ite belief, during the period of the Mahdi’s absence (termed ghaibat or “occultation”), no one but God knows the hour of the Mahdi’s return, and no man can presume to foresee when this hour will come. Upon the Mahdi’s reappearance, all wrongs will be righted, divine justice will be instated, and the truth of Shi’ite Islam will be acknowledged by the entire world. (Mahdism).
So far so good. I have no problem with any of this and want to make clear that in no shape way or form am I "making fun" of Shi'ite end times theology. As a Christian I believe that the book of Revelation is accurate and will one day occur. We Christians are also fond of saying "Jesus is coming soon", so neither am I criticizing Ahmadinejad when he said that he wished to "hasten the arrival of Imam al-Mahdi".
So if that's all there was to it, then no issue. But that's not all there is too it. With Ahmadinejad, there's a lot more.
Continuing from the same MEMRI report linked to above
Immediately upon assuming the presidency, Ahmadinejad began to assert his belief in the imminent return of the Mahdi as the basis for his political activities. Despite the traditional belief that no one can foresee the hour of the Mahdi’s return, Ahmadinejad frequently stated that his coming was nigh, and even gave a more specific prediction. During a meeting with the foreign minister of an Islamic country, he said that the crisis in Iran “presaged the coming of the Hidden Imam, who would appear within the next two years.” In a December 2006 speech in Kermanshah, Ahmadinejad wished the Christians a merry Christmas and said: “I hereby announce that, with God’s help, the day is not far off when Jesus will return at the side of the Hidden Imam.”Not only has Ahmadinejad wished to proclaim the imminent coming of the Mahdi, and thereby to legitimize his policy and actions by associating them with Hidden Imam - but he has also presented himself as being directly connected to God.
...Ahmadinejad has also presented himself as being privy to God’s intentions and actions, as reflected in his statement that “God has appointed the Hidden Imam to be our supporter.” His claim of having a direct relationship with God was also evident in the speech he made upon his return to Iran after addressing the U.N. General Assembly in 2005. Ahmadinejad claimed that, as he was delivering his U.N. address, he felt himself “surrounded by a halo of light” symbolizing the messianic nature of his message to the nations of the world.
Again, though, I'm just setting the stage. Stay with me. Here's more from MEMRI
In his just-published memoirs, French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy relates the story of a meeting between three European foreign ministers together with Javier Solana of the European Union and President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The meeting, which took place at the United Nations on September 15, 2005, dealt with what Douste-Blazy characterized as "the generous European offer" to Iran regarding its nuclear program. Ahmadinejad was characterized by Douste-Blazy, a surgeon and a professor of medicine by profession, as stubborn, and the meeting was described as leading nowhere. Suddenly, Ahmadinejad changed the course of the conversation with the following aside: "Do you know why we should wish to have chaos at any price?" he asked rhetorically. "Because, after the chaos, we can see the greatness of Allah."(emphasis added)
Do you see where I'm going with this? Let me spell it out: Ahhadinejad is a sympathizer of the Hojjatieh. Who are they? Well, the Hojjatieh are a sect of Shii Islam that is so radical that it was banned by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1983, if that gets your attention.
Here's where I'll wrap it all up. Read this carefully
But rooted in the Shiite ideology of martyrdom and violence, the Hojjatieh sect adds messianic and apocalyptic elements to an already volatile theology. They believe that chaos and bloodshed must precede the return of the 12th Imam, called the Mahdi. But unlike the biblical apocalypse, where the return of Jesus is preceded by waves of divinely decreed natural disasters, the summoning of the Mahdi through chaos and violence is wholly in the realm of human action. The Hojjatieh faith puts inordinate stress on the human ability to direct divinely appointed events. By creating the apocalyptic chaos, the Hojjatiehs believe it is entirely in the power of believers to affect the Mahdi’s reappearance, the institution of Islamic government worldwide, and the destruction of all competing faiths.Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has clearly indicated that he is a true believer in this faith.
It has been reported that he has told confidants that he anticipates the immanent return of the Mahdi. When he previously served as Mayor of Tehran, he advocated for widening the roads to accommodate the Mahdi’s triumphal entry into the city. One of his first acts of office as President was to dedicate approximately $20 million to the restoration and improvement of the mosque at Jamkaran, where the Mahdi is claimed to dwell.
The short version of all this is that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad belives that he can prompt the return of the Mahdi by creating bloodshed and choas on earth.
See now why I said he was a madman?
Don't think that Ahmadinejad is the only one in Iran to hold such beliefs. At least one other senior Ayatollah, Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi (aka "Professor Crocodile"), who is "the Iranian President’s ideological mentor", also buys into this stuff.
Do you understand now why under no circumstances can we allow these people to obtain nuclear weapons?
Posted by Tom at 9:29 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
September 24, 2007
Ahmadinejad at Columbia
I was able to tune into Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about halfway through his address at Columbia University earlier today. What struck me was what a poor speech it was. He rambled and seemed not to be able to stay on any one topic for long. I was unimpressed.
Much more interesting was the question and answer period which followed. He is the master of evasion, able to take just about any question and turn it into a soliquoly on "justice" for the Palestinians. When asked whether Iran was building nuclear weapons he engaged in moral equivalence; "you have them and you tell others they can't have them?" Sadly though unsurprisingly, many in the audience applauded him.
Playing to Western leftists, he tried to portray Iran as the a victim; of terrorism, Western imperialism, of economic sanctions for no reason, and of Iraqi chemical weapons.
The last is at least true, although no doubt many leftists will simply use this as an excuse to attack the United States. All we want is justice and freedom, he insisted.
Many students were having none of it, there being many reports of anti Ahmadinejad demonstrations outside of the lecture hall. And many in the United States who haven't paid much attention to him will rightly be offended by his insistence that more "research" is needed to determine whether the holocaust occured or not.
Also President Bollinger (whom I heard later on the Sean Hannity show) did attack Ahmadinejad pretty good during his introduction, and to their credit many students applauded him. On the flip side, they should have just boycotted the whole thing.
Here's how I think it will play out from a public perception standpoint
This is win for Ahmadinejad in Iran and in Muslim countries, as they will only show him at his best. They won't show Bollinger's introduction. They'll also show the students applauding Ahmadinejad. The mere fact that he spoke at a major American university give him legitimacy and standing.
Further, this invite and his speaking at Columbia feeds into the fantasies of the jihadists. The Khumeinists believe that they can declare jihad and create a regional Imamate. They believe that they can pull the wool over our eyes as to their true intentions. This event today encourages that belief.
On the other side, some in Muslim countries will hear Bollinger's introduction (from one source or another), and this will be damaging. Also, more people in the United States will now realize what a dangerous man this guy is.
The real shame here is on Columbia University for inviting him in the first place. I don't buy their excuse that everyone should be given a forum. Dean Coatsworth even said that they would have invited Hitler if he had been willing to debate. This is absurd. There are some people so extreme we need not listen to them. Grand Wizards of the KKK are an example. Anyone who denies the holocaust and has repeatedly said that Israel should be wiped off the map is another.
Unfortunately, this is the same university that allowed Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minutemen, was literally chased off stage by leftist idiots in October 2006. According to his website, he was supposed to return this year but the deal was nixed. It's unclear why, but Gilchrist said that the Columbia Political Union succumbed "to pressure from anti-freedom-of-speech gangsters." It wouldn't surprise me.
While I'm sure Ahmadinejad had great security, I'm sure he had nothing to fear from any students at Columbia. Conservatives don't storm stages or disrupt speakers, and leftists will tolerate anyone who hates the U.S.
And anyone who wonders where the faculty of Columbia's sympathies lie need only consider that this is a university that has banned ROTC and military recruiters, yet has no problem inviting a man like Ahmadinejad.
Rather, I think the Editors of National Review have figured out why Columbia invited Ahmadinejad
Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Rather, it is one more capitulation in series of victories for anti-Israel sentiment at the university. Columbia has long had problems with professors’ intimidating students who disagree with them about Israel’s right to exist, and its Middle East–studies department is a hotbed of anti-Israel hysteria. The sad reality is that there isn’t much daylight between Ahmadinejad’s positions on the legitimacy of the founding of Israel and those of Columbia professors Joseph Massad and Gil Anidjar.
I think they have it about right. Bollinger and other academics prattle about "free speech", but the experience of conservative speakers at universities over the past 30 years has put the lie to this. Recall also that these academics are the same ones who pushed onerous speech codes (most of which have fortunately been overturned by the courts).
In the end, sometime in the next year or so we'll have to face the Iranian quest for nuclear weapons and their sponsorship of terrorism. Hitler had no shortage of apologists in France and Britain in the mid-30s. After he took Czechoslovakia (and certainly after Poland) most people came around, though it was nearly too late. Let's hope it's not so close this time.
Posted by Tom at 9:24 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 5, 2007
Hold the B-2s... for Now
Oh criminy here we go again, another book to add to my ever-growing list.
Michael Ledeen's just published The Iranian Time Bomb looks like another must-read. Given than I've got several to go before I can get to it, it may be awhile. It also gives me an excuse to do another post updating myself on where we are with regard to the situation with Iran and their nuclear weapons program.
I heard it mentioned on somebody's radio talk-show the other day, and then came across it today on NRO, where Kathryn Jean Lopez interviewed him about the book. You'll want to hop on over there and read the whole thing, but essentially his thesis is that Iran has been at war with us ever since their 1979 revolution, we haven't done much of anything about it, and that we ought to explicity make it our national objective to overthrow the mullahs. We should do this mainly through "soft power" (although Ledeen himself does not use the term). The reason why the entire regime must go, he says, is that it's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is just "the mask currently worn by the regime.
To be clear, Ledeen is not advocating some namby-pamby "lets go though the UN" approach, where the we offer various carrots to the mullahs and threaten toothless sanctions. That, um, would be our current policy.
Read K-Lo's interview with him to find out what he thinks. The good news is that the Iranian people hate the mullahs, and stage fairly large demonstrations against it on a regular basis. We ought to be able to take advantage of that.
Some people quibble over how many centrifuges Iran has, and how fast they can produce fissile material. Ahmadinejad says he has 2,000, some inspectors say says no he doesn't, but other inspectors say he has enough to do the trick.
I say that what this tells us is that it's darn hard to know what's really going on, so if we're going to stop them we better get to work on it.
Hold the B-2s
Whereever Iran is on their enrichment program, we do have some time. How much is hard to say, but it's enough so that we can safely put off military action for awhile, perhaps even a few years. Victor Davis Hanson said as much last week when he concluded that our current policy towards Iran might just work,
...there are subtle indications that U.S. policy is slowly working, and that a strike now on Iran would be a grave mistake, in every strategic and political sense — not to mention the humanitarian one of harming a populace that may well soon prove to be the most pro-Western in the region.
His remarks were in the context of praising the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who almost along among continental European leaders takes the Iranian threat seriously. Sarkozy has even gone so far as to say that
An Iran with nuclear arms is, to me, unacceptable, and I am weighing my words…And I underline France's full determination to support the alliance's current policy of increasing sanctions, but also to remain open if Iran makes the choice to fulfill its obligations. This policy is the only one that will allow us to escape an alternative, which I consider to be catastrophic. Which alternative? An Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran.
As a practical matter any attack on Iran would be mostly a U.S. affair, but it would be invaluable to have French support if for no other reason than to watch the American left collectively grab it's chest and fall to he floor.
Hold the B-2's...But Keep Them Ready
No way no how can we allow the mullahs to obtain nuclear weapons. If it even looks like Iran is getting close to building bombs, we attack. Of course, it's going to be hard to know. It's hard to see into Iran as it is. The lesson of Iraq is that it's hard to know what's going on. With Iraq we got it wrong in the direction of thinking they had something they didn't. It would even worse though, to get it wrong the other direction.
I've written various scenarios about what might happen if they get the bomb, and even my best-case wasn't very good.
So in the end we have to hit Iran if nothing else works. An article a few months ago in the London Telegraph quoted John Bolton
"It's been conclusively proven Iran is not going to be talked out of its nuclear programme. So to stop them from doing it, we have to massively increase the pressure."If we can't get enough other countries to come along with us to do that, then we've got to go with regime change by bolstering opposition groups and the like, because that's the circumstance most likely for an Iranian government to decide that it's safer not to pursue nuclear weapons than to continue to do so. And if all else fails, if the choice is between a nuclear-capable Iran and the use of force, then I think we need to look at the use of force."
Be sure to check out the article, especially for it's excellent links at top. You'll also get some laughs, or cries, out of reading the comments, because Bolton's comments seem to have driven a good many leftists into paroxysms of rage.
Although the Bush Administration has done a miserable job at employing the "soft power" that strategists like Frank Gaffney and Michael Ledeen advocate, they might at least be taking long-term steps toward setting the legal basis for military strikes. Ralph Peters explained why a few weeks ago
The media missed a big one yesterday.They ran with the story that the Bush administration will soon designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps - a major troublemaker in Iraq - as a terrorist organization. But they didn't look past the public-consumption explanation that the move lets our government go after the Revolutionary Guards' finances and the international companies that cut deals with Tehran's thugs.
The real reason for the move is to set up a legal basis for airstrikes or special operations raids on the Guard's bases in Iran.
Our policy is that we reserve the right to whack terrorists anywhere in the world. Now we have newly designated terrorists. And we know exactly where they are.
He may be right. Let's hope it doesn't come down to military strikes, because if it does it isn't going to be a 2 or 3 day affair, but one that lasts weeks, and will undoubtably involve naval action in the Persian Gulf as well. And let's not forget that Iran won't take it lying down. They'll unleash their terrorist proxy forces around the world, and we'll get hit with some nasty surprises. In the end, though, even this is better than an Iran armed with nuclear weapons.
Posted by Tom at 8:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 26, 2007
The Iranian Hostages
You may not know it, but the government of Iran is effectively holding 4 American hostages and 1 Canadian.
It was a Mark Steyn column from Monday that prompted me to write this piece. I'd heard of the situation before I read his piece, but haven't saved any articles. He doesn't list all of the hostages, so I've had to piece this together by finding them one by one.
Here they are:
Haleh Esfandiari is the director of the Middle East program at the Smithsonian’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Her friends have started a "free Haleh" website, I believe that she holds dual American and Iranian citizenships.
Kian Tajbakhsh (sometimes "Yahya Kian Tajbaksh") is an urban planning consultant with the New York-based George Soros Open Society Institute,. There is also, appropriately, a "free Kian" website. According to the website, he is "an internationally-respected scholar, social scientist and urban planner". He holds both American and Iranian citizenship. Exploring the website, under "Kian's Writing" we find a piece called "An Iranian in New York: America’s Split Personality". In it he takes a leftie view of Sept 11, for example describing Bill Moyers as "that rare American intellectual" before quoting him.
Ramin Jahanbagloo (or "Jahanbeglou") is an Iranian-Canadian who was, at least for a time, adjunct professor of political science at the University of Toronto. According to Wikipedia he was arrested in April of 2006 while traveling from India to Iran, held at least for a time at Evin prison, and released from on August 30. He is not allowed to leave Iran.
Ali Shakeri, advisor to a California-based group called Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, is currently being held in Evin prison. He left Iran in the early 1970s, but went back some months ago to visit his ill mother. On May 8 he was arrested and is still being held.
Parnaz Azima is another Iranian-American held in Iran. She left the country in 1979 after being branded a "counter-revolutionary". She returned two years ago after receiving an official invitiation from the government. For awhile they treated her "like a VIP", but when Ahmadinejad came to power she has been threatened by the authorities and subjected to interrogations. She 's not imprisoned, but the authorities won't let her leave.
I don't know much about the Woodrow Wilson Center, but I'm sure they're not a conservative group. None of the above people can be considered a real threat to the Iranian government...unless it's just democracy that they're afraid of.
Three of the above, Ramin Jahanbegloo, Kian Tajbaksh, Haleh Esfandiari, gave their "confessions" on Iranian TV, which were aired by Iranian Channel 1 on July 18 and 19, 2007.
The invaluable MEMRI has the transcript of their "confessions". What's interesting is that they don't "confess" to stealing military secrets or anything important at all.
Haleh Esfandiari says that her role was to provide information to the American government on Iranians who came to speak at the Woodrow Wilson Center. The speakers were from Iran, but are not further identified. As to her involvement with the Woodrow Wilson Center and other similar organizations,
"There is a connection between the government, the government officials, and the heads of these research centers. It is like a revolving door." ..."I have been in Iran for nearly five months now. I have had an opportunity to think about the issues I have discussed with you. I have come to the conclusion that these people - myself included - have become links in a chain created by foundations, research institutes, and universities, that have, in the name of democracy, in the name of the empowerment of women, and in the name of dialogue, created networks in Iran, which should eventually bring about fundamental changes in the Iranian regime. In fact, they should shake the system."
Kian Tajbaksh says that his job with the Soros Foundation was to act as a laison between his organization and Iran.
"The fact that the American government allowed the Soros Foundation to have this project on Iran indicates that despite the differences in policy that Mr. Soros and his foundation have with Mr. Bush's Republican Party, they are in agreement with regard to their plans concerning Iran." ..."The long-term goal of the Soros Foundation is to achieve an open society [in Iran]. The way to achieve this is to create a rift between the rulers and the people. Through this rift, those parts of civil society which were formed and strengthened according to the concept of open society will exert pressure on the rulers to change their conduct."
Ramin Jahanbaglou "admits" to having contacts with Haleh Esfandiari, who's Woodrow Wilson Center "receives most of its funding from the U.S. Congress, and therefore, it had connections there." He concludes that
"Now, when I look back on all my activities during the years I spent in America until I reached Iran, I realize that my activities served the interests of Iran's enemies, and not the interests of the Iranian people. I regret this very much, and I think I should make amends for this."
These are "confessions"? What a joke.
All they really did was say that they're working with the US government to promote democracy in Iran. Some crime.
As upset as televised "confessions" are to Westerners, Iranian leaders are said to be quite pleased with the spectacle:
Government spokesman Gholamhossein Elham told reporters on July 22 that the televised confessions did not constitute "legal" evidence but rather revealed "the nature of a cultural assault" on Iran by the United States. At the same time, he said the security-related "criminal" charges against Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh are separate issues to be dealt with by the judiciary and investigators. He suggested that "the issue of their being spies and charges against them concern judges and the judiciary," adding that "they have committed a criminal offense, an act against national security with the methods they used."The head of the parliamentary National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, Alaeddin Borujerdi, argued on July 21 that the program provided "outstanding" evidence of alleged U.S. "interference in Iran's internal affairs," the "Javan" daily reported. He said the detainees' statements showed how the United States is allocating what he described as "enormous sums" to "obstruct" Iran.
Borujerdi also claimed that the hostages "have made these confessions voluntarily and in a fully free atmosphere."
The government is so confident that it recently announced that it had arrested several associates of Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh.
What is Going On?
As I've said numerous times, I certainly hope that the CIA is aiding Iranian democracy groups. Our best hope for avoiding a Middle East holocaust is to get rid of the current government in Iran and replace it with one that is genuinely representative of the will of the people. Unlike with Iraq, however, regime change in Iran is not official U.S. government policy.
Looking at the biographies of the people being held, though, I find it very hard to believe that they're the sort who would work for the CIA, even on a non-violent project like supporting democracy movements.
More likely, the Iranian authorities know that the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies are hard at work trying to subert their government, and as such need to arrest someone, if for no other reason than to feel like they're doing something. Likely the counter-intelligence fellows are under intense pressure to come up with arrests, and since they can't find any genuine spies these will have to do.
The other probable motive is to send a warning to Western governments any anyone considering working for their intelligence agencies: spy on us and this is what will happen to you - if you're lucky.
Finally, it just seems to be in the nature of totalitarian regimes to put on show trials. I grew up reading about Andrei Vyshinsky and the Moscow Show Trials of the 1930s. Things never seem to change
.
What Are We Doing?
Not much, from what I can tell. "Quiet diplomacy" seems to be the order of the day. This exchange between Press Secretary Tony Snow and an unnamed reporter
Q Will there be talk about the four Iranian American scholars and activists that are being held?MR. SNOW: No. The conversations are restricted to security matters within Iraq proper. That is the channel that has been opened up. This is not a way of broadening diplomatic contacts between the nations.
Q And about the five Iranians being held inside Iraq?
MR. SNOW: Well, again, what we're talking about are those who have been trying to destabilize Iraq. That is going to be a topic of conversation.
Yes well we wouldn't want to upset the talks by bringing up uncomfortable topics like hostages. We all know the Iranians are so interested in a stable Iraq.
Sigh.
Posted by Tom at 9:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
July 15, 2007
Consequences of Failure
What would happen if we left Iraq as soon as possible, as many now want? What if we just immediately halted offensive operations, returned to our bases, and began packing?
Austin Bay has come up with seven scenarios. Summarized, they are
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