Iran Affairs

Interview with Peter Jenkins on Iran's nuclear affairs

Farid Marjai asked me to contribute some questions for an interview (also in Farsi) of Mr. Peter Jenkins, former British ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency,ent who has recently published a piece on LobeLog entitled The latest offer to Iran of nuclear talks: don’t hold your breath. Regarding this:

IRD: In your article you express pessimism regarding the current p5+1 negotiations because, you ask “what would the West have to offer Iran?”

Could you explain why this question is a cause of pessimism with respect to the talks?

 

PJ: In any meaningful negotiation a degree of reciprocity is required to produce an agreed outcome. Supposing Iran were to tell the P5+1 that it was ready to apply the Additional Protocols and modified code 3.1, to resolve all outstanding IAEA questions, and to volunteer a number of "confidence-building measures" (CBMs) to show to neighbors that it intends to continue respecting the NPT – how could the West reciprocate? The White House cannot concede any diminution in the pressure of bilateral or UN sanctions in an electoral year, for fear of the President’s opponents accusing him of weakness, and the White House would be unhappy if the European Union were to rescind bilateral EU sanctions. Conclusion: it is hard to envisage any progress through talks/negotiations this year, even if the P5+1 were to drop its insistence on full implementation of all UN demands as a precondition.

Mousavian recounts ignored Iranian compromise offers

Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian cheif negotiator on the nuclear issue who is currently at Princeton U, has written an article entitled "How to engage Iran" in which he recounts a number of attempts by Iran to peacefully resolve the nuclear dispute with the US, which were all ignored by the Obama administration. These offers were in addition to the previous ones, all of which were also ignored. Nevertheless he proceeds to make suggestions on how the US and Iran could engage, despite the obvious fact (which I've pointed out) that the history of ignored peace offers makes it quite clear that the US is not interested in a peaceful resolution to the nuclear standoff but instead wants to keep the issue alive as long as possible since it serves as a convenient pretext for imposing regime change.

I also suggesting reading MJ Rosenbergs column on how AIPAC works in Washington. He had written before about how AIPAC is cornering US policmakers into a war.

Shimon Peres sends peace message to "spoiled" and "morally corrupt" Iran

So Shimon Peres has supposedly sent a "peace message" to Iran - the same Iran he characterized as "spoiled" and "morally corrupt" just a couple months ago. And at the same time, he threatens to bomb the very same people unless they give up their sovereign rights, and he has his agents in AIPAC pushing for sanctions that have to date prevented Iranians from getting cancer treatment or flying safely in their airliners, and he has also been recruiting terrorists to murder innocent people in Iran.

Sorry Shimon, I don't think the "elder statesman" schtick is working.

What chutzpa.

 

50th Anniversary of US embargo on Cuba

I thought it may be interesting for Iran observers to note that today is the 50th anniversary of the full-spectrum US embargo on Cuba which prohibits travel, money, medicine, everything else, from going to Cuba.

Yes, a 50-year shining example of promoting democracy in Cuba. As a result of these sanctions, the human rights of Cubans is better than anywhere else in the world, and it has become a beacon of democracy. Truly, this is a highly effective tactic. And if it works so well with a small, resource-poor island state, just imagine how effective similar embargoes can be when imposed on countries such as Iran. 

And for your information, Obama has continued and extended the embargo, even though he was opposed to the embargo while he was campaigning for office.

At least under Carter, the travel embargo was lifted. But Obama is no Carter.

Washington Post's David Ignatius lies about Panetta regarding Israeli strike on Iran

David Ignatius of the Washington Post has an...not an article but an opinion piece...in which he claims that US Def. Sec. Leon Panetta has expressed concerns about an imminent Israeli attack on Iran.

Problem is, he cites no sources and doesn’t even say how he learned of this. That, of course, didn’t stop the other media outlets around the world from running wild with the story, reporting it as uncontestable fact. This, despite the fact that Leon Panetta himself basically called Ignatius a liar:

"I'm not going to comment on that. David Ignatius can write what he will but with regards with what I think and what I view, I consider that to be an area that belongs to me and nobody else," he said....

But by now the false "Panetta warns of Israeli attack" meme has taken hold, and has misled millions of news readers. Thanks, David Ignatius and the Washington Post, you're truly a credit to your profession. 

As if you needed yet another example of why the corporate media must be assumed to be lying everytime they write anything about Iran.

Trita Parsi's reply to Leverett's critique of "A Single Roll of the Dice"

As an update to my previous post on this topic:

Trita Parsi has replied  to the critique published in the Boston Review by the Leveretts of his book, "A Single Roll of the Dice" (which I still have not had time to read myself though I definitely mean to.)

I must say I'm disappointed in Trita's response to the Leverett's critique. Sure, perhaps the Leveretts really were out of line in supposedly implying (as some think) that Trita was a crypto-Neocon who favoured a war with Iran  (the Leveretts have since stated to me that they implied no such thing and only characterized him as a "soft" regime change advocate like Ledeen. Point taken.) I certainly don't believe that myself either. But these sorts of things should not be used by Trita as an excuse to basically refuse to acknowledge and respond to the substantive charges raised by the Leveretts in their critique of his book.

Take for example the Leverett's objection to Trita's continued assertion that the 2009 elections in Iran were "fraudulent". Rather than responding to this, Trita simply demurs and instead characterizes the whole issue as "peripheral", even though he also writes that the the book was about Obama's reaction to the "election scandal" Iran:

Their assessment of the book seems to be based on their disagreements with my analysis on two points, one central and one peripheral to my thesis. First, the peripheral point: The Leveretts are stalwart proponents of the idea that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the 2009 elections fair and square...

The book does not try to resolve this debate. Rather, it focuses on how the Obama administration reacted to the developments in Iran and vice versa, as well as how the election scandal and the subsequent human rights abuses (which are undisputable) affected the Obama administration’s Iran policy, its calculations, and its political space and maneuverability.

Well, wait a minute now. If there was no election fraud, then what "scandal" are we talking about? Wouldn't any analysis of Obama's reaction depend a great deal on the nature of those very same elections? After all, if there was no fraud (and no one has provided any actual evidence for it) then that really puts a different spin on those post-election riotors, doesn't it? Rather than wronged pro-democracy voters as who simply wanted to have their votes counted (as portrayed in the Western media), they become a minority of agent provocateurs who sought to overturn the results of a valid election through force and intimidation such as burning buses and attacking banks, don't they? More broadly and fundamentally, the absence of fraud makes a big difference in the fundamental legitimacy of the Ahmadinejad presidency as well as the regime as a whole -- something which definitely CANNOT be viewed as merely "peripheral" to Obama's Iran policy.

It seems to me that Trita is trying to have it both ways, and unfortunately this is a debating tactic I've also seen employed by many of the other "Greens": they at once refuse to debate the question of whether there was fraud in the elections, while insisting that there was fraud,  and yet also insist that the post-election riots are proof of the unpopularity of the regime. Isn't this exactly the same "agenda-driven analysis" that Trita accuses the Leveretts of promoting?

So, I have to agree with the Leverett's rejoinder to Parsi on this point:

Confronting unsubstantiated claims about a “fraudulent” election gets to the foundations of the case for regime change—which, whether represented by hard militarists like John Bolton or soft regime change advocates like Trita Parsi and Scott Lucas, is ultimately what gets the United States into Middle Eastern wars.  This is the same dangerous convergence of the neoconservative right with liberal human rights advocates that enabled the Iraq war. 

And I have to also say that I'm a bit personally confused about Trita's response to the Leveretts on this point of the election fraud because on our FaceBook discussion, Trita told me that he "pointed to supporting evidence [of election fraud] in the book" -- a definite reason why I was keen to read it in the first place.

[My disappointment is doubled because I was similarly told that Ali Ansari's book on the elections, Crisis of Authority, would provide the proof of election fraud but when I bought and read it, that was obviously not the case. The closest Ansari came to providing any "proof" fraud was in claiming that some pro-Ahmadinejad cleric had encouraged people to vote for Ahmadinejad. And that's just not fraud, sorry, especially when some 40% of the voters apparently didn't feel particularly convinced or compelled to vote for Ahmadinejad.]

So in short, Trita's response that "there will be endless debate about this", is simply not an adequate answer to the Leverett's point.

And as for the second point -- the Leverett's view that Obama was never really interested in engaging Iran but merely engaged in a ploy intended to justify further sanctions and coercion -- the two sides are actually essentially in agreement though Trita is starts out being dismissive of the Leverett's point:

It is not clear whether the Leveretts’ position is a conclusion or an assumption. Either way, they do not present any evidence (no need for a smoking gun here, it seems) to support their contention beyond some of the writings of Dennis Ross prior to his entering the Obama administration, and the fact that the Obama White House did not emulate Richard Nixon’s tactics when he went to China.

Well, I'm not sure that the job of the Leveretts in writing the review is to present detailed "evidence" -- this is after all a review, not a separate book, and anyone who has read their work is quite familiar with their argument. And, in any case, the Leveretts are hardly the only ones who apparently think that Obama was disingenuous in his "outreach" to Iran. I certainly think so, for whatever that's worth, and for example apparently so does veteran Iran observer Gary Sick:

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that Obama was never sincere about his engagement strategy. It has yet to be tried.

Frankly I don't think anyone who is familiar with the history of the jostling surrounding Iran-US relations can conclude otherwise. If you doubt this, take a look at the many instances in which the US has condemned Iran for its "intransigence" to "negotiate meaningfully" of its nuclear program due to the imposition of "preconditions"  -- negotiations which the US itself saddled with poison pills and precondition of the indefinite suspension of uranium enrichment in Iran.

But to his credit, Trita himself seems to agree with the Leveretts on this point -- that the engagement was not genuine. His only real difference in opinion seems to be in that he attributes this to...

a much more complex picture in which the president’s vision was consistently compromised by opposition from within his own cabinet; by pressure from Israel, Saudi Arabia, lobbyists, and Congress; and by the actions of the Iranian government. All this combined with the administration’s unwillingness to fight for political space. It is this process that I describe in the book.

I can certainly see that (which is why I'm still buying the book though I don't expect the election fraud issue to be resolved)  and I think the Leveretts would agree with this too. After all, I don't think the Leveretts are of the opinion that the disingenuousness of the purported engagement was ONLY attributable to a PERSONAL distaste or dislike of engagement by Obama himself. Naturally, this is policy that has a variety of causes. Nevertheless, that was indeed the policy - to attempt to engage, but not really.(Incidentally, nor can the appointment of Dennis Ross be dismissed as irrelevant in creating this policy.)

The bottom line is that that Obama's outreach to Iran - for whatever reason - was cynical, and expected or even perhaps intended to fail. Thus, the argument now made by the hawks (that diplomacy and engagement was "tried" by was "rebuffed" by Iran) is simply not true. And in that, there is simply no question. After all, there is by now simply no doubt whatsoever that the the US and the Obama administration are not interested in any sort of peaceful resolution to the Iran nuclear standoff or compromise with Iran, but are instead out for regime change.

So in short, it seems to me that the Leveretts and Trita Parsi agree on more than they think. And what they agree on, is rather important.

Kenneth Pollack, Leslie Gelb feign restraint on Iran

IMPORTANT UPDATE:

Just a couple of hours after I wrote this, Salon.com published a puff piece on Kenneth Pollack which characterizes him as a "chastened liberal hawk" who worries about a war with Iran...not because the prospect of people dying bothers him much but because he's concerned that a war would be fought "half-assed," and nevermind that just a few months ago he was demanding that the Obama administration "double down" on the same policies of sanctions and coersion that have brought us to where we are. And yet he still manages to falsely accuse the Iranian side of refusing to negotiate on the nuclear program when in fact it has been the US side -- following policies he recommended -- which has been issuing ultimatums on Iran to give up her rights or face bombings. But what's really stomach-churning is how he tries to shift the blame onto Saddam for the mass suffering caused by US sanctions on Iraq -- sanctions that he helped put into place and which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, leading several UN officials to resign in protest. This guy is a sociopath who should be on trial as a goddamn war criminal guilty of genocide instead of getting free passes in puff pieces about how he's been "chastened", and Salon should be absolutely ashamed of itself.

 

I've often written how in the aftermath of the "WMDs in Iraq" fiasco, not a single one of the talking heads who so cravenly promoted the lie to justify the invasion of Iraq was ever held to account. I suppose that's why Leslie Gelb of the Council of Foreign Relations feels free to now admit that he supported the Iraq war due to personal career concerns:

My initial support for the war [in Iraq] was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility. We 'experts' have a lot to fix about ourselves, even as we 'perfect' the media. We must redouble our commitment to independent thought, and embrace, rather than cast aside, opinions and facts that blow the common—often wrong—wisdom apart. Our democracy requires nothing less.

And yet these same sorts of "experts" insist on portraying Iran policy as a false choice between bombing/sanctioning Iran or Iran "going nuclear" (ignoring the substantial and significant diffrence between "nuclear capability" and nuclear weapons) as well as the host of intermediate options that would not necessarily involve Iran getting the bomb or getting bombed -- for example by recognizing Iran's right to enrich uranium in peace and under IAEA safeguards as it is doing now.

The most recent example of this false choice which is being promoted to a "social fact" through constant repetition can be seen in an recent article in Foreign Affairs, entitled "The Dangers of a Nuclear Iran" by Edelman & Krepinevich (see image)

Once they box the US into thinking that the only options are bombing Iran, or Iran "gets the bomb" then it become oh so much easier to convince the US to bomb Iran, after all. This, despite the fact that even the Israelis themselves quitely conceed that Iran is not making nukes, and that Iranian nukes would not pose an "existential threat" to Israel anyway.

Even Leslie Gelb seems to be waivering on the overheated chest thumping towards Iran coming out of Washington, nevermind that he is/was part of the same pro-Israeli propaganda apparatus whose job is to scarmonger about Iran.

And ironically, Ken Pollack has written an article entitled "Are we sliding towards a war with Iran" in which he frets that the current policies could lead to an "inadvertent" war:

Thus, if we continue down this path, we had best be ready to walk it to its very end. And if we don’t have the stomach to countenance the possibility of such an escalation, we may want to reconsider our current course.

"Reconsider our current course"?? This is a rather ironic statement, coming from someone who was a strong proponent, if not contributing architect of the policies which have brought us the current mess with Iran. After all, it wasn't so long ago that Pollack argued that the the US should "double down" on a policy of sanctions and threats directed against Iran, even though he acknowledged that the policy had not succeeded, had no real prospects of success, and could only lead to...you guessed it!... a false choice between bombing Iran or Iran getting the bomb:

IN THE end, all this may fail. With its hard-liners firmly in charge, Tehran may choose further suffering, isolation and weakness rather than give up its nuclear program. If so, the United States will then face a choice between military operations and a containment strategy meant to limit or prevent a nuclear Iran from making mischief beyond its borders until the regime finally collapses from its own dysfunctions.

In short, the guy who is pushing quite ADVERTENTLY for war (is advertently a word?) pretends to care about an "inadvertent" slide towards the same end.

Seems like the rats know the ship is sinking and are trying to distance themselves. After all, wouldn't want to damage any "political and professional credibility."

My latest FAIR CounterSpin interview

I've been so busy I forgot to post this:

CounterSpin (1/13/12-1/19/12)

Listen: [mp3] [RealAudio not avalailable]

This week on CounterSpin: As a covert war against Iran seems to be intensifying, the U.S. media have looked like willing partners in an anti-Iran propaganda campaign, helping US officials project dishonest claims, rs. We'll speak with Cyrus Safdari of Iran Affairs about coverage.