The Wonk Room

Richard Grennell: ‘John Bolton Was Right’ On Iran

Richard Grennell, the Bush administration’s UN spokesperson, writes a love-struck op-ed claiming that his old boss John Bolton was right all along when he said negotiating with the Iranians was pointless:

Someone needs to say it now. John Bolton was right. When the Obama Administration proclaimed victory on October 1st by announcing that a break-through had been reached in Geneva and that Iran had committed to shipping 2,600 pounds of fuel to Russia, expert Iran watchers were appropriately cynical… Bolton, however, was the first to stand up and call the Iranian pronouncement a sham – and he did it within hours of the announcement.

This misses the point entirely and demonstrates a totally one-dimensional view of diplomacy that was endemic during the Bush administration. During the Bush years, figures like Bolton blustered endlessly about Iran, but despite all of this empty rhetoric, nothing came of it. Iran accelerated its nuclear program, leaving the Obama administration to deal with an Iran well on their nuclear way.

Furthermore, the Bush administration’s refusal to engage Iran prevented an international consensus from emerging. Our European allies, Russia and China weren’t willing to support stronger action against Iran as long as we refused to even try diplomacy. And the threats of war from figures like Bolton only served to make the United States look like a hyper-aggressive belligerent power, further undercutting any hopes of gaining a tough international consensus. In the end, Bush left office with a divided international community and with Iran closer to developing nuclear weapons.

The point of Obama’s decision to engage Iran was to put the onus on the Iranians and force them to decide whether they are with the international community or against it. Our willingness to engage in serious talks, and Iran’s willingness to reject them, has made Iran the bad guy and given us the credibility to establish a more robust international response.

Far from being wild-eyed optimists about talks, the Obama administration and progressive foreign policy experts thought it quite likely that Iran would reject talks. Sure, the best case scenario was that Iran would decide it was in their self interest to abandon the prospects of developing nuclear weapons in exchange for improved ties with the west, but this was always the best case scenario. So while Obama has been engaging Iran, he has also been working to significantly strengthen the international community’s stance on sanctions should the Iranians walk away. The US and Europe, which were frequently at odds during the Bush administration, are now largely in sync. This is crucial since any effective sanctions policy requires the Europeans, which have a lot more economic leverage over Iran than we do. Additionally, the improved relationship with Russia has increased the prospects that Russia will support tougher sanctions on Iran.

There is still a lot of uncertainty as to what will happen. But by engaging Iran diplomatically, the Obama administration has laid the groundwork for a much more robust international response to Iranian intransigence than would have ever been possible during the Bush years.

Consequences Of An Israeli Strike On Iran: Still Very Bad

A new memo from Steve Simon of the Council on Foreign Relations looks at the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. “In assessing the likelihood of an attack,” Simon writes, “it is useful to look back on the origins of the Six Day War in 1967 and the raid on the Osirak reactor in Iraq.”

In each case, Israel attacked only after a long period of procrastination. In 1967, Washington’s hands-off posture tipped the balance in the cabinet in favor of preemption. In the case of Osirak, the Carter and Reagan administrations’ unwillingness or incapacity to intervene left Israel feeling cornered and compelled to act unilaterally. One lesson to be learned from this is that Israel is more likely to use force if it perceives Washington to be disengaged.

I’m not sure what lesson this has for Obama. No one can say that he’s been “disengaged” in the Middle East. Clearly, Obama hasn’t been “engaged” in precisely the manner that Netanyahu would probably prefer — i.e. taking a harder line on Iran while ignoring Israel’s settlement building — but he has repeatedly stressed both the U.S. commitment to Israel’s security and that he recognizes Iran’s nuclear program as a threat to that security. So I suppose the question is whether, or at what point, Netanyahu will decide to interpret Obama’s pursuit of engagement with Iran as “disengagement” from Israel.

Simon concludes that, while Israel could carry out such a strike, the margin of error for a successful strike — that is, one that destroys or at least seriously incapacitates Iran’s known nuclear facilities — is razor thin.

And then there are the consequences of such a strike. Here’s a summary:

First, regardless of perceptions of U.S. complicity in the attack, the United States would probably become embroiled militarily in any Iranian retaliation against Israel or other countries in the region. [...]

Second, an Israeli strike would cause oil prices to spike and heighten concerns that energy supplies through the Persian Gulf may become disrupted. [...]

Third, since the United States would be viewed as having assisted Israel, U.S. efforts to foster better relations with the Muslim world would almost certainly suffer. [...]

Fourth, the United States has a strong interest in domestically generated regime change in Iran. Although some argue that the popular anger aroused in Iran by a strike would be turned against a discredited clerical regime that seemed to invite foreign attack after its bloody post-election repression of nonviolent opposition, it is more likely that Iranians of all stripes would rally around the flag. [...]

Fifth, an Israeli attack might guarantee an overtly nuclear weapons capable Iran in the medium term.

Sixth, although progress toward an Israeli-Palestinian final status accord remains elusive, an Israeli strike, especially one that overflew Jordan or Saudi Arabia, would delay fruitful renewed negotiation indefinitely. [...]

Finally, the United States has an abiding interest in the safety and security of Israel. Depending on the circumstances surrounding an Israeli attack, the political-military relationship between Jerusalem and Washington could fray, which could erode unity among Democrats and embolden Republicans, thereby complicating the administration’s political situation, and weaken Israel’s deterrent. Even if an Israeli move on Iran did not dislocate the bilateral relationship, it could instead produce diplomatic rifts between the United States and its European and regional allies, reminiscent of tensions over the Iraq war.

That’s a lot of downsides. One that I have yet to see discussed, however, is the potential effect on U.S. public support for Israel of attacks by Iran on American troops in retaliation for an Israeli strike. As retired General Anthony Zinni put it back in September, “Eventually, if you follow this [a strike on Iran] all the way down, eventually I’m putting boots on the ground somewhere. And like I tell my friends, if you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll love Iran.” A solid majority of Americans support the U.S. Israel relationship, but I’m not sure Netanyahu really wants to test the depth of that support once America starts taking casualties as a direct result of precipitous Israeli military action. And no one wants Israel to be put into a position where he has to do that.

Support Iran’s Opposition Or Bomb Iran: You Can’t Do Both

Washington Times national security editor Barbara Slavin has an article on Iranian filmmaker and dissident Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who has become a spokesperson for Iran’s Green Movement in the wake of the June 12 elections. Makhmalbaf called upon President Obama to more explicitly support Iran’s opposition movement and more strongly condemn Iranian human rights abuses. He also had some interesting things to say about the prospect of further sanctions:

“Inevitably, you are going to put [new] sanctions on Iran,” Mr. Makhmalbaf told a small group of Iran specialists and journalists in Washington. He said the U.S. should “let the Iranian people know why you are going to sanction and what the targets are so they can support you.”

He rejected proposed U.S. legislation that would target gasoline imports to Iran, saying that would hurt average people. He said it was better to focus on the Revolutionary Guards, who have been at the forefront of repressing demonstrations and who have taken control of considerable elements of the Iranian economy.

You know who also opposes U.S. legislation targeting gasoline imports to Iran? The Iranian regime. For some, this shared interest is quite enough to tar Makhmalbaf as a regime apologist. Those who are genuinely interested in supporting Iran’s opposition — and not just in smoothing the road toward a U.S.-Iran war — understand that this is silly, of course. The Iranian opposition — and its supporters outside the country — include a number of different factions and trends with various end goals and methods of reaching them.

Speaking of smoothing the road toward a U.S.-Iran war, the very same Washington Times also runs an editorial today telling Americans to Get Ready To Bomb Iran:

Force need not be used to be effective, but the threat of force must be credible to have any chance of influencing Iranian behavior. Right now, there is no credible threat emanating from the United States. The Obama administration unambiguously opposes military action against Iran, particularly by Israel. But it would help to have a little ambiguity on this issue. So long as Tehran thinks the United States will work actively to prevent Israel from taking action, it has one less reason to worry. It would be most helpful if the United States began to send signals to Tehran that the United States will assist Israel in its preparations for military action and maybe even participate when the attack ultimately is launched.

If the regime in Tehran is not made to fear serious consequences for its continued intransigence, it has no reason to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

Leaving aside that anyone who talks seriously about bombing Iran has revealed themselves to be no friend of Iran’s opposition — Abbas Milani represents the overwhelming consensus when he writes that “the forces now controlling Iran would be immeasurably strengthened by an American or (especially) Israeli attack” — this shows a pretty serious misapprehension of the situation in Iran right now.

It’s not at all clear that Iran’s ruling hardliners, who are currently weathering the most serious crisis of legitimacy in the Islamic Republic’s history, wouldn’t actually welcome a military strike by either Israel or the U.S. Such a strike, in addition to extinguishing the Green Movement, would effectively end the ongoing debate within the regime over whether to obtain a nuclear weapon in favor of those who have been arguing “yes,” in very much the same way that the preventive U.S. invasion of Iraq convinced Iran’s hardliners that they needed to keep open the option of having a strategic deterrent.

It’s pretty broadly understood across the U.S. defense establishment that a strike on Iran — either by Israel or the U.S. — would very likely result in a number of disastrous consequences, consequences Iran knows that the U.S. would rather avoid. There’s really no credibility to be generated by pretending otherwise.

Dubious Article Leaves Paranoid Right Seeing IAEA–Iran Conspiracy

A report that came out yesterday from the conservative Times of London has gotten the American right into a tizzy. The Times reported that longtime bogeyman for the right, Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, was negotiating a “secret” plan with Iran:

United Nations and Iranian officials have been secretly negotiating a deal to persuade world powers to lift sanctions and allow Tehran to retain the bulk of its nuclear programme in return for co-operation with UN inspectors. …The plan would require the UN Security Council to revoke the three existing sanctions and five resolutions ordering Iran to halt its uranium enrichment — an unthinkable development at a time when the West is focused on how to impose more, not fewer, sanctions on Iran.

Fox News profiled the story, Rachel Abrams of the Weekly Standard concluded that ElBaradei was a “collaborator with tyrants,” and John Hull writing in the Examiner papers concluded that “Elbaradei conspired with Iraq, as he is now doing with the Islamic Republic of Iran, to hide nuclear weapons from the infidels.” This comes a day after the IAEA released a report accusing the Iranians of misleading the agency over the extent of its nuclear program. A report, Julian Borger of the Guardian said, was “marked by the impatient and sceptical language that has become an increasingly regular feature of the agency’s Iran reports.” This is hardly the tone or the conclusions one would expect from an agency headed by a guy who collaborates with tyrants. But reality rarely matters when developing a conspiracy theory.

Furthermore, the Times story that they have all seized on seems highly dubious for a number of reasons.

First, this apparent “plan,” according to the Times, was put together in September – not November. But this would likely make the Times’ “plan” totally irrelevant, since the talks with Iran in Vienna that resulted in the current deal on the table took place in October. The IAEA has also denied the plan’s existence but if there ever was such a plan it was probably just one of the many possible plans being floated prior to the October meeting.

Second, any “secret deal” negotiated by ElBaradei with the Iranians would ultimately have to be agreed to by the U.S. and other powers – and lifting sanctions definitely won’t be agreed to.

Finally, if this draft plan is current, than none of this really make any sense. If the Times story is right that – “It was thought that Mr ElBaradei was anxious to secure his legacy after infighting over his perceived weakness in dealing with Iran” – then why would he be advancing a plan to remove sanctions that he knows would be dead in the water with the West and which would only serve to exacerbate his “perceived weakness” vis-à-vis Iran.

ElBaradei has been a constant target of the right. He entered their cross hairs after correctly assessing Iraq’s WMD programs and questioning Bush administration claims that a Saddam sponsored mushroom cloud was imminent. So despite the dubious nature of the Times’ claims, the right has grabbed hold of its conclusions and gone crazy with it.

‘Potentially Quite Significant’ Progress On Iran

In his remarks yesterday morning at an Iran panel on Capitol Hill, Sen. Joe Lieberman — who claims to support the Obama administration’s Iran engagement policy, having derided it as “naive” while stumping for McCain during the 2008 campaign — set an unrealistically high bar for success in yesterday’s Geneva talks. Reminding the audience that “the Iranian leaders have not yet clearly agreed to put their illicit nuclear activities on the agenda,” Lieberman said:

If the P5+1 plus Iran cannot reach public agreement that Iran’s nuclear weapons program is the major topic of engagement among them today, then there is no point in continuing this process, and we and our allies should get up and leave — promising to return only when and if Iran is willing to begin serious discussions to end their illicit nuclear activities and normalize their relations with the rest of the world, including the United States.

Imagine Joementum’s surprise — and mine, honestly — when the news came that the talks had in fact cleared that bar. Iran not only agreed to make its nuclear program the major topic, the Tehran government “promised to send most of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) abroad.”

Gary Sick has a concise rundown of what yesterday’s meetings actually produced:

Iran agreed to permit inspections of its new site. The Western negotiators came up with a clever ploy to permit Iranian low-enriched uranium (LEU) to be sent to Russia for further enrichment, probably from about 5 percent to about 20 percent, and then transported to France to be fabricated into fuel rods to feed the Iranian research reactor (ironically given to Iran by the United States in an earlier day), which is used to produce isotopes used for medical purposes. This had many dimensions. First, it reduced the Iranian LEU stock below the level required to produce a nuclear device. Second, it established the principle that Iranian enrichment could be conducted outside the country. But third, it promised to provide Iran with uranium enriched well above the level required for nuclear power reactors (but not yet at the level required for bomb-building). And lastly, it tacitly acknowledged Iran’s right to produce enriched uranium. Nothing in the reports we have seen to date indicate that the Western interlocutors insisted on the previous red line that Iran should abandon its enrichment program.

It’s important to keep in mind, of course, that currently these agreements — which Brookings’ Ken Pollack called “potentially quite significant” on MSNBC just now — are in principle only. As President Obama made clear in his appropriately cautious statement yesterday, it remains to be seen whether Iran will follow through. But we should also recognize that, as Juan Cole notes, Barack Obama “got more concessions from Iran in 7 1/2 hours than the former administration got in 8 years of saber-rattling.”

It will be interesting to see what new and wonderful conditions for success Joe Lieberman and the rest of the War Party come up with in the future to try and demonstrate that talks have already failed.

Montazeri: Clerics Must Reject Iran’s ‘Military Regime’

Borzou Daragahi reports on Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri’s latest broadside against the Iranian regime, in which the country’s most prominent clerical dissident called on “senior Shiite Muslim clergy in the Iranian holy cities of Qom and Mashhad as well as the Iraqi shrine city of Najaf and beyond to speak out against the regime.”

In a statement issued today, [Montazeri] said that Iran had become a “military regime” not the Islamic government envisioned at time of the 1979 revolution.

He said it was his fellow clergymen’s “religious duty” to speak out against the the government’s abuses.

“We didn’t want a mere change in title and slogans while the same oppressions and violations of rights continue under the cover of Islamic government,” he said in the statement posted to his website.

The extent of clerical condemnation of the regime’s behavior in the wake of the June presidential elections, which have seriously undermined the government’s claims to uphold just Islamic principles, has been one of the most interesting and important aspects of the protests. Back in July, I spoke with Hamid Dabashi, professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, who stressed how significant it was, both in religious and constitutional terms, that “leading clerics have taken sides with the Green movement.” Because of Supreme Leader Khamenei’s relatively meager scholarly credentials, Dabashi said, he “is not even in position to prevent [other clerics] from passing judgment.” “Khamenei’s official position as Supreme Leader has no bearing on his junior position as a jurist,” said Dabashi. “He’s not in a position to disallow the clerical challenge to his authority.”

A key challenge for the Obama administration as it moves forward with its Iran engagement policy is how to create the political space for Iranians to continue to contest the regime while at the same time addressing the more immediate problems of Iran’s nuclear program and support for terrorism.

Did Obama’s Outreach ‘Embolden’ Iran’s Hardliners?

In an article exploring the Ahmadinejad-led “purge” of Iran’s intelligence service, David Ignatius relays this story:

One Iranian political figure has told a Western intermediary that the Obama administration may have unwittingly encouraged the regime’s power grab by sending two letters to Khamenei before the June election. The first, delivered through Iran’s mission to the United Nations, was a general invitation to dialogue. Khamenei is said to have taken a month to answer, and then only in vague terms. A second Obama administration letter reiterated U.S. interest in engagement. According to the Iranian political figure, this may have emboldened Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to think they had a free hand on June 12.

This suggests that Khamenei and Ahmadinejad felt that they did not have “a free hand” in Iran before President Obama sent letters and wished them a Happy Nowruz, which sounds pretty strange to me. The steady takeover of key Iranian state institutions by the hardline faction that supports Ahmadinejad, and is favored by Khamenei, had been occurring for over a decade. This faction was given a huge political boost by President Bush’s “war on terror” policies, which did a great job of confirming hardliners’ propaganda about belligerent U.S. intentions, weakening moderates and making talk of improved U.S.-Iran relations political poison.

An alternative interpretation, one that I’ve heard voiced by a number of analysts, both conservative and progressive, is that Obama’s outreach caused hardline elements in the regime to overplay their hand out of fear that victorious moderates would be able to deliver the U.S.-Iranian détente that a substantial portion of Iranians clearly desire.

According to Patrick Disney of the National Iranian American Council, Ignatius’ anecdote “has it completely backwards.”

Iran’s hardliners had a free hand when George Bush threatened them with military strikes at every turn. It was only when Obama came out with a sensible plan for engagement that Khamenei and Ahmadinejad actually felt threatened. The hardliners knew the majority of Iranians want détente with the US, and they recognized that Obama’s outreach would very likely reveal them — not the West — as the intractable actor.

Everyone knows that whoever delivers a rapprochement with the US will be seen as a hero by the Iranian people. But nothing scares Khamenei and Ahmadinejad more than the idea of a world without the US boogeyman to justify their every move. So they tried desperately to resist change — they cracked down on June 12 because they knew Obama could be a rallying point for moderates to get their foot in the door, and the hardliners just couldn’t accept that.

Examining their behavior over the past few years, it seems clear that Iran’s hardliners were far more “emboldened” by Bush’s supposed “toughness” than by anything President Obama has done in the nine months of his presidency. The hardliners rightly feared that they would be the losers in any warming of U.S.-Iran relations, which could explain the usually meticulous Khamenei’s uncharacteristic overreach, the comically obvious election-rigging, and the eventual security crackdown. Obama’s outreach only “emboldened” the hardliners in the sense that it elicited their over-reaction, resulting in the Islamic Republic’s most serious crisis of legitimacy since the revolution.

Cohen: The Iranian Regime’s Days are Numbered »

John F. Kennedy once said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” JFK was speaking about Latin America in the wake of the Cuban revolution in the early 1960s, but the broader point he made – that disallowing non-violent political and social change ultimately undermines those who seek to prevent it – still stands today. Roger Cohen’s indefatigable reporting from Tehran over the last several days makes it clear that no matter how the current unrest pans out, the regime’s days are numbered: “All the fudge that allowed a modern society to coexist with a society inspired by an imam occulted in the 9th century has been swept away, leaving two Irans at war.”

Up until now, the regime has been able to survive so long because of its relative flexibility. Khomeini continued the slaughter of the Iran-Iraq war for six years beyond the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Iran, but agreed to a UN cease-fire after becoming convinced the United States was about to intervene more directly after the accidental shoot-down of an Iranian airliner in 1988. He ruefully called his acceptance of the cease-fire resolution “more deadly than taking poison.” His successor, the current Supreme Leader Khamenei, allowed a reformist, Mohammad Khatami, to win the presidency twice, but undermined his efforts toward liberalizing Iranian society and politics whenever he and the conservative establishment could.

Apparently Khamenei couldn’t face the prospect of another reformer winning power, no matter how moderate and committed to the system, and decided to fix the election. But he didn’t count on hundreds of thousands of average Iranians wanting their votes to mean something and demonstrating in the streets of major cities to make sure they did. Even then, though, the regime could have showed flexibility and maintained the general contours of the system. After all, the main challenger, Mir Hussein Mousavi, has solid credentials as a member of that system, and the framed his objections to the rigged vote in the context of fidelity to the 1979 revolution’s ideals.

Mousavi’s framing and the recent bloody crackdown have probably done deep damage to the regime’s legitimacy. Khamenei prevented President Khatami from making any real changes to the Iranian system when he was in power from 1997 to 2005, and prevented Mousavi, a committed disciple of the revolution, from winning the presidency by the system’s own rules. And when Iranians then protested peacefully and framed their demands in accordance with the system, Khamenei denounced them and then sicced the state’s security forces on them. What the Supreme Leader and his allies have done is made peaceful change within the regime’s system impossible. More »« Less

Iran’s Second Islamic Revolution?

Last week, Ali Gharib made the important point that what’s happening in Iran is thus far not a rejection of the Islamic republic, but a struggle over its founding principles. Reviewing Moussavi’s formal statement Saturday, Gary Sick described it as diagnosis of “a revolution gone wrong,” writing that Moussavi has “issued a manifesto for a new vision of the Islamic republic.”

In an especially good post, Spencer Ackerman flagged a key passage from Moussavi’s statement:

If the large volume of cheating and vote rigging, which has set fire to the hays of people’s anger, is expressed as the evidence of fairness, the republican nature of the state will be killed and in practice, the ideology that Islam and Republicanism are incompatible will be proven.

This outcome will make two groups happy: One, those who since the beginning of revolution stood against Imam and called the Islamic state a dictatorship of the elite who want to take people to heaven by force; and the other, those who in defending the human rights, consider religion and Islam against republicanism.

As Spencer notes, that last bit is a pretty clear rebuke to those Western critics who, in criticizing the brutality of the Iranian regime, have tried to present Islam and democracy as irreconcilable.

Speaking of which, conservative scholar-activist Martin Kramer, in a comically mendacious (and, as usual, Rashid Khalidi-obsessed) dispatch, tries to argue that the “events in Iran have left Obama’s simplistic mental map of the Middle East, first learned from a few Palestinian activists and an old Hyde Park rabbi, in shreds.”

But, in fact, what is in shreds is the representation of Islamism — peddled for years by Kramer, Daniel Pipes, and ideologically affiliated think tanks and publications — as wholly and irretrievably hostile to modernity, to human rights, and to democracy. Having spent years vilifying the Islamist discourse of struggle and sacrifice as deployed by Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, these pundits have now been pantsed by the Iranian demonstrators deploying the very same discourse on behalf of freedom and reform. Moussavi has declared himself “ready for martyrdom” — will conservatives now condemn his “death cult“?

The point here is not to call out those whose skewed analysis of the Middle East strongly informed America’s disastrous and costly attempt to implant democracy there by force. Okay, that’s part of the point. But the larger part is to note how significant it is that the Iranian clerical-dictatorial regime is being challenged from within Islam, and that a very credible scholarly-religious critique that has long been suppressed by the regime now seems to have found a vehicle in Moussavi and the movement around him.

Even in the best outcome, I think it’s likely that the Iranian government will continue to be, in key respects, Islamist-controlled (matching the Islamist-controlled government in neighboring Iraq.) But it’s important to understand that this, much more so than any Western-imported concept of “secularism,” has the potential to really spur the already vigorous debate in the region over the arrangement of a fair and just society, by underscoring Islamism’s contribution to that debate. As with President Obama’s wise caution in regard to the demonstrations, the most productive thing the U.S. do, while continuing to voice support for human rights, is to get out of the way and make space for the debate to occur.

Montazeri: ‘In This Day And Age, One Cannot Hide The Truth From The People’

Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri is Iran’s most prominent clerical dissident. He was the designated successor of Ayatollah Khomeini, but Montazeri’s criticisms of the authoritarian nature of Khomeini’s government earned him rejection by Khomeini, followed by years of house arrest.

Montazeri issued a statement today strongly supporting political and religious pluralism, and cautioning both the regime and the demonstrators against violence:

The distinction of a powerful government — Islamic or non-Islamic — is its ability to heed both similar and opposing views and, with religious compassion, which is a prerequisite of government, allow all the strata of society, whatever their political beliefs, to participate in the running of the country, instead of totally alienating them and constantly increasing their [the dissidents] number. Since this government is known as a religious government, I fear that the conduct and actions of the officials may ultimately harm the religion and undermine the people’s beliefs. [...]

I urge all the people, in particular the youth, to pursue the realization of their rights with patience and grace, to maintain calm and security in the country by virtue of sagacity and intelligence, and to refrain from aggression or any action that may harm their image and legitimate demand, and which would give an excuse to those of unfit character, who infiltrate the crowds, to create turmoil and disorder, and set people’s homes and belongings on fire, in a bid to generate an atmosphere of fear and insecurity. [...]

I advise all the officials, as well as the military and security forces, to uphold their religion and not sell their souls; they must understand that the term “officials are excused [because they are only doing their duty]” would not be accepted by the Almighty God on the Day of Judgement. They must regard the protesting youth as their own children, and refrain from violent and cruel actions. They must learn from the mistakes of the predecessors and understand that, eventually, those who oppress the people will receive their just comeuppance. In this day and age, one cannot hide the truth from the people through censorship, closures and restrictions of communication means.

In conclusion, I beseech the Almighty God to grant success to all those who serve Islam and the Muslims, and honor and glory to the dear Iranian nation.

Unlike allegations of vote fraud from American congressmen and former presidential candidates, this is the sort of statement, a respected clerical authority making an appeal for justice, tolerance, and non-violence on the basis of Islam, that could has the potential to really change the outcome on the ground. Hopefully more clerics will join with him.

New Conservative Line: Iran’s President Doesn’t Matter!

As Dana Goldstein indicates, the newly minted conservative position on Iran is that, regardless of all the time and effort they’ve spent over the last four years setting up Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the new Hitler, it really doesn’t matter who the president of Iran is, because Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is in charge. In the event that Ahmadinejad is defeated at the polls, expect a landslide of conservatives making this argument. I suspect that even John McCain — who famously refused to hear anything about it last year — will suddenly magically discover that the Supreme Leader is actually the supreme leader.

For example, check Daniel Pipes’s new line. Back in 2006, Pipes ominously warned of “The Mystical Menace of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad“:

[T]he most dangerous leaders in modern history are those (such as Hitler) equipped with a totalitarian ideology and a mystical belief in their own mission. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fulfills both these criteria.

Last week, however, speaking at a Heritage Foundation event, Pipes stated that “the president of Iran, despite his title, is not the final arbiter in [national security] matters.”

The president tends to have power in the areas — in the soft areas — having to do with culture and religion and education. And it is the Rahbare, the Supreme Guide of Iran, Khomeini at first and now Khamenei who has control of the military, the law enforcement, the judiciary system, the intelligence agencies. So its not clear that the president matters that much.

As Daniel Luban reported, Pipes was at least forthright enough to admit that, were he a registered voter in Iran, he would “vote for Ahmadinejad…I would prefer to have an enemy who is forthright and blatant and obvious.” Interestingly, Pipes’ thinking neatly mirrors the thinking of extremists elsewhere, such as the contributor to an Al Qaeda-linked website who declared that “Al-Qaeda will have to support [Sen. John] McCain in the coming election,” as McCain would be more likely to continue the policies of George W. Bush, which produced a propaganda and recruiting bonanza for the terrorists.

Pipes also flatly insisted that “when it comes to building a nuclear weapon…there is a wide consensus in the Iranian leadership that building these weapons is something that is desirableand there is no known dissent from that viewpoint .”

This is untrue. There is in fact rather well known dissent from that viewpoint — in the form of a 2003 fatwa (religious-legal decree) issued by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei which declared that Islam forbids the development and use of all weapons of mass destruction. It’s true that later statements and actions have called this position into question, but it’s flatly false to suggest that there is “no dissent” among the Iranian clerical leadership regarding the production and use of nuclear weapons.

Interestingly, the event at which Pipes spoke was called “New Thinking for Old Problems.” The old problem, I take it, being “how to gin up a war with Iran,” and the new thinking being “insist that a reformist electoral victory will be meaningless.” Of course, if Ahmadinejad wins, he’ll still be the new Hitler and the presidency will once again matter a lot.

Surveying The Terrain Of Iran’s Elections

Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, Research Associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Tomorrow, Iranians will go to the polls to choose their next president. This election (and the possible run-off) will be far from free and fair – who can and cannot run for president is determined by the Guardian Council, the unelected theocratic body that approves all candidates for elected office. Despite this circumscribed choice, Iranians do have options in these elections.

Current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, well-known as a radical conservative to the outside world for his inflammatory rhetoric, faces the internal opposition of reformists and pragmatic conservatives in his quest for a second term. These groups believe Ahmadinejad’s outlandish behavior on the international stage and economic mismanagement are driving Iran to ruin. They include people like former president and 2005 Ahmadinejad opponent Hashemi Rafsanjani, who recently accused Ahmadinejad of lying about his [Rafsanjani’s] public service record in a letter to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Ahmadinejad faces three challengers, two relative reformists and one moderate conservative. Of these, the challenger perceived to have the greatest support is the moderate reformist Mir Hussein Mousavi. A former conservative and prime minister during the Iran-Iraq war, Mousavi has cultivated the support of students and women. In a recent televised debate, Mousavi accused Ahmadinejad’s foreign policy of “adventurism, illusionism, exhibitionism, extremism, and superficiality.” Other opponents include Mehdi Karroubi, another reformist who promises to appoint a female minister if elected, and Mohsen Rezai, a pragmatic conservative and former Revolutionary Guard head who warns Ahmadinejad is leading the country to a “precipice.”

The biggest issue facing Iranian voters, like those in much of the rest of the world, is the economy. Ahmadinejad’s economic policies have bought him the political goodwill of the rural poor at the cost of rampant inflation – 23.6 percent according to Iran’s own central bank. The IMF estimates that Iran’s economic growth has slowed from 8 percent in 2007 to 4.5 percent in 2008, and projects that it will further decrease to 3.2 percent this year. All three alternatives are promising to end the current president’s economic mismanagement and take a less confrontational approach to foreign affairs.

But will it really matter who wins? As Laura Secor observes in The New Republic, all four presidential candidates are playing on essentially the same rural, conservative political terrain. Urban Iranians with more liberal attitudes “are so disenchanted with the Islamic Republic that they are as a whole increasingly disinclined to vote.” And even if one of the alternatives to Ahmadinejad wins in the end, he will not be the most powerful person in Iran’s convoluted political system. That honor goes to the Supreme Leader, to whom all roads of political power ultimately run in the Islamic Republic.

To be sure, an Ahmadinejad defeat would be a good thing. Replacing an ideological blowhard with a more pragmatic or even reformist figure will certainly make it politically easier for the United States and Iran to engage one another after 30 some years of estrangement. But the United States can’t bank its Iran policy on who occupies an office with powers that ebb and flow on the whim of an unelected senior cleric. We must deal with the byzantine Iranian political structure as it is, not place unfounded hope in individual changes in positions with fluctuating status and power.

Chalabi: ‘Iran Benefited From Toppling Saddam’

Via Tom Ricks, a very interesting Dar al-Hayat interview with Ahmad Chalabi, in which Chalabi shares his views of President Bush and the strategic consequences of the Iraq invasion for Iran:

[Al-Hayat]: If you want to describe George Bush, then how would you describe him?

[Chalabi]: A man with very little skill and knowledge.

[Al-Hayat]: He did Iran a great service by toppling Saddam?

[Chalabi]: Iran benefited from toppling Saddam. Bush didn’t mean to do it a favor but it was clear that Iran would benefit from Saddam’s fall. I am convinced that Saddam would not have fallen except for an implicit agreement between America and Iran.

[Al-Hayat]: This happened?

[Chalabi]: Yes, of course it did.

[Al-Hayat]: Through whom?

[Chalabi]: We worked on this and so did the Supreme Council and Jalal Talbani.

The idea that Iran has been the main beneficiary of the Iraq war isn’t particularly controversial any more — except, of course, among the war’s neoconservative advocates, who continue to insist that removing Iran’s greatest enemy and empowering Iraqi factions with longstanding close ties to Iran was a huge defeat for Iran. Incidentally, many of these people — Sen. John McCain and his adviser Randy Scheunemann among them — were also Chalabi’s biggest boosters.

Like Ricks, I’d be very interested to hear more about the “implicit agreement” that Chalabi asserts between the U.S. and Iran. Given what’s known now about Chalabi’s cooperation with Iran’s intelligence services, though, it’s pretty chilling to consider how close some of Chalabi’s marks came to taking the White House last November. Unfortunately, as shown by the continuing prominence of McCain, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and other neocon fantasists, inadvertently aiding America’s enemies is no barrier to influence in American foreign policy, as long as one is always careful to err on the side of war, and meticulous about dressing one’s belligerent strategic stupidity in patriotic drag.

Obama’s ‘Game Changing’ Iran Diplomacy

There are a couple of key points to draw from the reports that the Obama administration is planning to drop a long-standing U.S. demand that Iran suspend uranium enrichment as a pre-condition for talks. The first is that, while the Obama administration has not dropped enrichment suspension as a goal, they seem to have grasped the basic idea that you’re more likely to get your adversary to give up something he values by talking to him and offering incentives than you are by insisting that he give it up in exchange for talking in the first place.

The second is that the Obama administration has understood the extent to which the Bush-Cheney approach to Iran — in which talking to one’s enemies was itself seen as a form of appeasement — essentially gave a free pass to the Iranian regime. As John Lee Anderson writes in the New Yorker, “it was easy for [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad to argue that President Bush was not interested in anything but a hostile relationship with Iran.”

Obama’s [Nowruz] message was “a game-changer,” Vali Nasr, an expert on Iran and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said. “Now the U.S. has come out with an extraordinarily different kind of message, one that is warm, and seems sincere about engaging with Iran. So the Iranians now will ask of their government, why aren’t you engaging?” Nasr added, “Obama has cleverly created a debate between the Iranian people and their leaders, and within the leadership itself — and also, because this comes just three months before the elections, made it a campaign issue.”

As CAP analyst Andrew Grotto wrote last May, moving toward greater engagement with the Iranian government “would clarify the choice being presented to the Iranian nation by the international community: the poverty and isolation that extremism brings, or the prosperity and global respect that Iran would enjoy if it adopted a more constructive foreign policy.” Iran’s conservatives would very much prefer that that choice not be clarified.

The Bush administration’s approach to Iran — typified by Dick Cheney’s ideologically hidebound insistence that “we don’t negotiate with evil, we defeat it” — was not only a propaganda gift to Iran’s conservative hardliners, it both confirmed and mirrored their own worldview. By steadily reorienting the U.S. approach to Iran and making it abundantly clear both to the Iranian people and the world that America is not the recalcitrant party, President Obama is putting the onus on Iran’s hardliners to justify their own intransigence. He’s also taking away one of President Ahmadinejad’s most treasured propaganda tools — fear of an aggressive, threatening America — months before Iranians go to the polls to choose a new president.

Obama’s Strategic Outreach

Laura Secor’s article on Obama’s new Iranian charm offensive makes a very good argument for the U.S. offering to take regime change off the table in anticipation of talks. While noting that Iran’s rulers have “no more urgent interest than the regime’s own survival,” Secor recognizes the way that the regime’s “anti-American and anti-Israeli stances bind the hardliners to their small but loyal and heavily armed constituency, and they furnish a pretext for domestic repression.”

To give up this trump card–the non-relationship with the United States, the easy evocation of an external bogeyman–would be costly for the Iranian leadership. It would be a Gorbachevian signal that the revolution is entering a dramatically new phase–one Iran’s leaders cannot be certain of surviving in power.

The Bush administration got this dynamic all wrong when it insisted that Iran meet preconditions before coming to the negotiating table. The working assumption was that the lure of talks with the United States would be powerful enough to impel the Iranians to make a major concession. But what if talking to the United States is itself a concession — perhaps one of the toughest for the Iranians to make? That puts us in the very different, far less advantageous position of needing to offer Iran something it truly wants–like a security guarantee–up front. That’s appeasement, critics might object: How can we give up our trump card right at the outset? It looks bad if you think of it as unilateral disarmament. It looks less bad if you consider that the very act of entering direct talks with us means something for the Iranian regime that it doesn’t mean for us.

This is an important re-framing of the “more ideological than pragmatic?” debate that Secor notes has tended to dominate the U.S. debate over Iran policy. Like Secor, I think the evidence weighs strongly against the idea that Iran is interested in committing suicide, but there’s still a question of whether the very act of formally negotiating with the United States — and thus abandoning a central pillar of state ideology, anti-Americanism — could itself represent an unacceptable form of “regime change” for Khamenei.

In the end, Obama’s Iran outreach may simply not work, but it could effectively demonstrate to the Iranian people and others that the Great Satan is not the recalcitrant party. As newly-minted administration ally Robert Kagan wrote the other day, what’s the harm in trying?

Veterans’ Charity Scammer Calls For Bombing Iran

I admit it, I was wrong. I didn’t think it was possible to find a conservative whose Iran analysis is dumber than Michael Ledeen’s. But the Washington Times has done it, offering its semi-valuable op-ed real estate this morning to one Roger Chapin, who argues that America’s “only rational course of action [is to] launch a massive series of preemptive strikes on Iran as soon as possible and send in special ops forces to ensure the mission was accomplished.”

I won’t go too much into Chapin’s reasoning here, except to say that he thinks Ahmadinejad runs Iran, he thinks Russia intends to foment nuclear apocalypse in the Middle East to drive up oil prices, and he fears a Iranian electro-magnetic pulse attack on America that Iran has shown no capacity to deliver. And:

For those that wonder why Iran would invite its own obliteration by attacking the United Sates, understand that the apocalyptic, messianically driven mentality of their leadership views martyrdom as a reward and not a deterrent.

This claim, a common trope of the conservative discourse on Iran, is the rhetorical equivalent of putting on a red clown nose and rainbow afro wig. There are no actual Iran scholars that I’m aware of who find the “suicidal Iran” thesis to be credible. The Iranian regime has had numerous opportunities to commit suicide over the past decades, but has repeatedly behaved according to a rational strategic calculation of its interests.

So Roger Chapin doesn’t know much about Iran. He does, however, apparently know a lot about founding veterans charities and then scamming those charities for lots of money. An investigation last year found that Chapin’s charities — which include the Coalition to Salute America’s Heroes and Help Hospitalized Veterans — “raised more than $168 million from 2004 to 2006, but spent only a pittance — about 25 percent — to help veterans.”

The rest, nearly $125 million, went to fund-raising, administrative expenses, fat salaries and perks. Mr. Chapin gave himself and his wife $1.5 million in salary, bonuses and pension contributions over those three years, including more than $560,000 in 2006. The charities also reimbursed the Chapins more than $340,000 for meals, hotels, entertainment and other expenses, and paid for a $440,000 condominium and a $17,000 golf-club membership.

Chapin’s bio in the Washington Times op-ed states that he is the “founder and president of Make America Safe, a new San Diego-based policy and educational organization focused on the threat posed by radical Islamics [sic] to U.S. national security.” We’ll wait and see how many new condos, steak dinners and golf-club memberships making America safe requires.

Obama Seeking A Channel To Khamenei?

In what I’m going to interpret as clear evidence that President Obama reads this blog, the Wall Street Journal reports that the administration is “looking at ways to develop a direct line of communication to [Iranian] Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.”

American and European officials say Mr. Khamenei is the only Iranian leader who can make the ultimate decision to suspend or freeze Iran’s nuclear program.

“The key issue is now to find a channel to Khamenei,” said a senior Western diplomat briefed on the Obama administration’s policy review in recent days. “If the supreme leader moves, he’s going to do it in a very prudent and incremental way.”

The discussions are part of a larger Iran-policy review that the Obama administration is aiming to complete this month, according to U.S. officials. [...]

The Obama administration’s first direct contact with Iranian officials is expected to come later this month at a U.N.-sanctioned conference on Afghanistan in the Netherlands. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other U.S. officials say Washington and Tehran could collaborate in countering the Afghan narcotics trade and weakening the Taliban.

Interestingly, the story notes a “growing consensus is that the U.S. should seek to begin a dialogue with Iran before June elections there, despite concerns that such recognition could strengthen the position of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.” Back in November, the Carnegie Endowment’s Karim Sadjadpour advised U.S. policymakers to “refrain from making any grand overtures to Tehran that could redeem Ahmadinejad’s leadership and increase his popularity ahead of the country’s June 2009 presidential elections.” I’m not sure that seeking a channel to the supreme leader necessarily qualifies as a “grand overture,” though, as much as a simple acknowledgment of who the decider is.

In any case, now would be a great time for everyone to go and read Sadjadpour’s excellent review of Khamenei’s writings and speeches, which Sadjadpour suggests “present arguably the most accurate reflection of Iranian domestic and foreign policy aims and actions over the last two decades.”

For More Tehran-ology

Responding to my Iran post from yesterday, Kevin Sullivan writes that I make “a couple of critical errors in this Iran/Soviet Union comparison.”

First, I should say — and I think it was obvious — that I wasn’t making a broad comparison between the Soviet Union and Iran, but rather making a specific comment about the difficulty of drawing conclusions about trends within two often frustratingly opaque regimes.

Sullivan suggests that “it’s false to argue that the [Iranian] presidency is without clout or efficacy,” noting that “Iranian presidents — like Rafsanjani in the late 1980s, and Khatami in the late 1990s — have challenged the Leader on matters of economic isolation, domestic security and the freedoms of Iranian citizens.”

That’s true, but the key thing here is this: They lost. I don’t argue that the presidency is “without clout or efficacy” (though, as Akhbar Ganji pointed out in the piece I quoted, Khatami himself protested that the presidency had been reduced to a factotum) but the presidency operates within a structure that is dominated by the supreme leader’s office.

Sullivan writes that to “focus narrowly on Khamenei and the Royal [sic] Guard, would put us in the same place we were in the 1970s: out of touch with the situation on the ground, and disconnected from the concerns of ordinary Iranians. These decisions, as President Carter learned in 1979, have an impact on foreign policy.”

This is a little odd. We were out of touch with the situation on the ground in Iran in the 1970s mainly because we were the deeply committed sponsor of an oppressive Iranian regime that represented the crux of U.S. regional security strategy. That regime was overthrown, then they kicked us out. It’s a rather different situation now. I certainly don’t think that Iranian popular discontent should be disregarded, but we’ve been hearing these sorts of arguments about the restive Iranian population for years, and while I have no reason to believe that they aren’t true, Khamenei and his allies have consistently proven expert at deflecting calls for reform and preserving their regime, the main levers of which remain firmly in Khamenei’s hands.

Against Tehran-ology

During the Cold War, “Kremlinology” was a term for the practice of attempting to determine the workings of the Soviet government, and which leaders or factions were on the rise or decline at a given moment. U.S. analysts often (and often wrongly) drew clues from such things as who was standing where during the May Day parade, who was lunching with whom, who got the best seats at the Bolshoi Theater.

A couple of stories out of Iran provide good opportunity to argue against a similar sort of approach — call it Tehran-ology — that tries to determine an approach toward Iran based upon perceived political trends among Iranian elites.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that one of former Iranian president — and current presidential candidate — Mohamed Khatami’s most prominent backers, Gholamhossein Karbaschi, switched to support one of Khatami’s rivals, Mehdi Kharroubi. Both candidates are considered reformers, and have been critical of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Today the Washington Post reports that another critic of Ahamedinejad, former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi has also announced his candidacy. But while it’s fair to see all of this as evidence of popular discontent with Ahmadinejad’s poor stewardship of the economy, as always it’s unclear what, if anything, any of this says about Iranian supreme leader Khamenei’s orientation toward rapprochement with the U.S., which is the key consideration.

On that point, Iranian dissident Akhbar Ganji had this article in the Nov/Dec issue of Foreign Affairs, it’s one of the best and most concise descriptions of the structure of the Iranian government that you’ll find. The bottom line: Regardless of which leaders and factions are up or down at any given moment, Ayatollah Khamenei is always up.

The Iranian constitution endows the supreme leader with tremendous authority over all major state institutions, and Khamenei, who has held the post since 1989, has found many other ways to further increase his influence. Formally or not, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government all operate under the absolute sovereignty of the supreme leader; Khamenei is the head of state, the commander in chief, and the top ideologue. He also reaches into economic, religious, and cultural affairs through various government councils and organs of repression, such as the Revolutionary Guards, whose commander he himself appoints.

Of all of Iran’s leaders since the country became the Islamic Republic in 1979, only Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolution’s leader; Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran’s president for much of the 1990s; and Khamenei have had defining influences. Despite all the attention he receives, Ahmadinejad does not even rank among Iran’s top 100 leaders over the past 30 years. Khamenei supports Ahmadinejad immeasurably more than he did any of Ahmadinejad’s predecessors, but Ahmadinejad is only as powerful as he is devoted to Khamenei and successful at advancing his aims. Khamenei’s power is so great, in fact, that in 2004 the reformist Muhammad Khatami declared that the post of president, which he held at the time, had been reduced to a factotum. Blaming the country’s main problems on Ahmadinejad not only overstates his influence; it inaccurately suggests that Iran’s problems will go away when he does. More likely, especially regarding matters such as Iran’s foreign policy, the situation will remain much the same as long as the structure of power that supports the supreme leader remains unchanged.

While inviting Iran to the upcoming conference on Afghanistan seems like a prudent move — engaging Iran first on a key area of mutual concern rather than going after the big issues outright — it’s important to remember that Khamenei is the main arbiter of Iran’s foreign policy. Regardless of who is favored at the moment or what trends are extant, as Karim Sadjadpour told Middle East Progress last month, any approach “that aims to ignore, bypass or undermine Khamenei is guaranteed to fail.”

Neocon Smear Machine: Rice, Ross, CNAS Part Of ‘Iran Lobby’

For anyone familiar with the work of neocon hysteric Frank Gaffney — who we last saw suggesting that Gov. Sarah Palin’s national security credentials had been achieved “by osmosis” — the fact that his organization’s new report on The Iran Lobby is a pathetic fog of alarmist innuendos and unsubstantiated assertions should come as no surprise.

But rather than spend valuable time demonstrating why the report’s research method makes “guilt by association” seem like a comparatively rigorous argumentative framework, I’ll just quote from the report’s conclusion (pg 25), which lists some of the people the report claims “have been associated in one way or another with the Iran Lobby”:

• Fletcher School professor and Middle East scholar, Dr. Vali Nasr, who will, as noted above, be Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s senior advisor – a position that will assuredly involve decisions about dealings with Afghanistan’s neighbor.

• Dr. Susan Rice, the Obama administration’s new Ambassador to the United Nations. Amb. Rice served on the board of directors for the Center for a New American Security. While CNAS is not formally connected directly with either NIAC or Trita Parsi, the foreign policy positions of its affiliates correspond strongly to the preferred policy positions of Tehran’s mullahs.

• Ambassador Dennis Ross, who will be a senior advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for Iran policy, was previously an “Expert” for CNAS.

• Council on Foreign Relations Committee president and another CNAS “Expert” Richard Haas, reportedly is under consideration for a top job in the Obama foreign policy team.

Do you oppose air strikes on Iran? So do Tehran’s mullahs! Congratulations, you are now part of the Iran Lobby. But really, if the neocons ever intend to be taken seriously again, they need to get some of these characters in check.