The Wonk Room

Kagan: What I Previously Defined As Failure Now Equals Success»

Speaking to Hugh Hewitt on Monday, surge architect Fred Kagan — who just last year wrote that “setting hard-and-fast timelines for the withdrawal of U.S. forces… is equivalent to accepting failure in Iraq” — explained how the new security agreement setting a hard-and-fast timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. forces is equivalent to a huge U.S. victory over Iran.

Kagan said “the Iranian leadership has been pulling out all the stops to get the Iraqis not to” sign the status of forces agreement.

The Iranians are desperate for Iraq not to align itself strategically with the United States, and they have been literally trying to bribe everybody they can bribe in Iraq, and running a fantastic information operations campaign in Iraq to make this an unpopular and hard thing to do. And the Iraqi government has done it anyway. And that is actually a great accomplishment for us, and it tells us a lot about where this Shia Iraqi government actually stands on whether it wants to be aligned with the United States, or whether it wants to be aligned with Iran.

As we’ve written before, the new Iraqi government is dominated by Shia parties which either have a longstanding supportive relationship with Iran (the Da’wa), or were drawn into an alliance of convenience with Iran (Muqtada al-Sadr), or were themselves founded in Iran, under Iranian auspices (ISCI, whose leader, Abdul Aziz la-Hakim, actually okayed the security agreement from Tehran). It’s patently ridiculous to claim, as Kagan does, that an agreement concluded with such a government represents a “defeat” for Iran, especially when that agreement happens to contain provisions that Kagan himself previously warned would represent American failure.

Testing Iran»

Yesterday the Iranian press reported that the Islamic Republic “successfully test-fired a new generation of long range surface-to-surface missiles with a range of 1,200 miles.”

Some weapons experts have disputed whether this was, in fact, a new missile. Andrew Brookes of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies told The London Times, “I think the Iranians just keeping on rejigging the same missile and putting a new logo on it. It’s basically the Shahab 3 with a different name, and the purpose of the test firing is to tell the world, ‘don’t forget us’, we have missiles that can reach 2,000 kilometers.”

The White House responded with the requisite denunciation, with spokesman Gordon Johndroe saying “Iran’s development of ballistic missiles is contrary to United Nations Security Council resolutions and completely inconsistent with Iran’s obligations to the world.”

Iran’s missile test should be considered in light of the fact that Iran’s economy, which had been kept afloat on high oil revenues, is collapsing. The high price of oil — which was partly a consequence of the Iraq war — had enabled Iran to sidestep economic sanctions, but with the recent drop in oil prices Iran is in serious trouble. They’ve got double-digit unemployment, double-digit inflation, there’s a whole generation of young Iranians whose future prospects are very dim. And they are very, very unhappy with their government right now.

The missile test should be therefore viewed less as an attempt to “test” the new president-elect, more as an attempt by hardliners to rally Iranians round the flag, as they have done consistently over the past few years, by provoking a crisis to draw attention away from their failure to manage the economy. More »

Surprisingly, Iran Has An Opinion About U.S. Forces Being Stationed Next Door»

General Ray Odierno — commander of U.S.-led forces in Iraq — told the Washington Post that Iran “is working publicly and covertly to undermine the status-of-forces agreement as officials from Iraq and the United States report nearing a deal that must be ratified by Iraq’s parliament.”

“Clearly, this is one they’re having a full court press on to try to ensure there’s never any bilateral agreement between the United States and Iraq,” Odierno said. “We know that there are many relationships with people here for many years going back to when Saddam was in charge, and I think they’re utilizing those contacts to attempt to influence the outcome of the potential vote in the council of representatives.”

Odierno said he had no definitive proof of the bribes, but added that “there are many intelligence reports” that suggest Iranians are “coming in to pay off people to vote against it.” The reports have not been made public.

No one should find it surprising that Iran would seek to influence an agreement that could potentially involve a significant U.S. force presence on its border for years to come. As to the question of “payoffs,” it’s probably unwise to comment until we have some evidence, and know what form these “payoffs” take. As Gen. Odierno indicates, however, Iran enjoys ties at all levels of leading Iraqi Shia parties, something which derives both from similar traditions of scholarly activism and, perhaps more immediately, from the fact these parties were headquartered in Tehran during the reign of Saddam Hussein.

In May, Center for American Progress analyst Brian Katulis wrote that Iran’s “important role in Iraq economically and politically is generally acknowledged, though it rarely gets the attention it deserves.” Katulis argued that “the United States, by staying in Iraq unconditionally, is facilitating the expansion of the Iranian government’s influence.”

The efforts to shape Iranian behavior through a coalition of the willing on economic sanctions are not likely to have an impact as long as it is U.S. policy to boost some of Iran’s best allies in the Middle East: the Iraqi government.

Reviewing the Pentagon’s recent “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq” report, analyst Reidar Visser criticized “the Pentagon’s take on Iranian influences in Iraq”:

The Department of Defense simply refuses to deal open-mindedly with the possibility of pro-Iranian influences inside the current Iraqi government. Instead the report brusquely asserts, “despite long-standing ties between Iraq and some members of the GoI, Tehran’s influence campaign is beginning to strain that relationship due to the rising perception that Iran poses a significant threat to Iraqi sovereignty.” Maybe it is the overuse of acronyms that prevents Pentagon analysts from detecting the problem here? Surely, when ISOF are conducting COIN with IP support to defeat the JAM and SGs and other undesirables, it all sounds so well organised that it almost comes across as unthinkable that Iranian interests could conceivably be served by these actions.

Indeed, it is unthinkable that removing Iran’s greatest enemy and facilitating the installation of a government dominated by Shia religious parties with close ties to Iran in its place could have possibly increased Iranian influenced in Iraq.

The Post story ends by reporting that Gen. Odierno “said al-Qaeda in Iraq, which does not enjoy Iranian backing, has been particularly resilient in Mosul.” I should point out that a number of John McCain’s advisers and spokespersons (including Mike Goldfarb, back when he was, as Jason Zengerle noted, merely a de facto McCain spokesman, rather than an official one) have disagreed with Odierno and Petraeus on this point, and continue to insist that Iran backs Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Rubin: It’s Biden’s Fault That The Bush Administration Has No Coherent Iran Policy»

There are a number of questions one could ask about Michael Rubin’s Washington Post op-ed this morning attacking Senator Joe Biden’s past judgment on Iran. Such as: Given that Biden has, for five of the last seven years, been a member of the minority in the Senate, how dumb is it to blame him for the fact that President Bush has no coherent Iran policy? Monumentally dumb? Or just profoundly dumb? And given that Rubin, who formerly worked in the Office of Special Plans and now works out of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, is up to his ears in the Iraq debacle, and thus is himself an accessory to the spread of Iran’s influence throughout the region, should one really ever assume that Rubin argues in good faith?

While mulling those questions, consider what Rubin writes here:

Between 2000 and 2005, in an effort to engage Iran, European Union trade with that country nearly tripled. Yet far from assuming a moderate posture, “the elected representatives in Iran” allocated nearly 70 percent of the hard currency windfall into military and nuclear programs.

What could have happened between 2000 and 2005 that might have undermined Iranian moderates, strengthened Iran’s own neoconservatives, and convinced the regime that a greater investment in its military and nuclear program was prudent? Well, there was President Bush’s casting of Iran as a member of the “axis of evil,” which came three months after Iran had aided the U.S. against their mutual enemy the Taliban in Afghanistan. According to Ismail Gerami-Moghaddam, a member of Iran’s moderate Reformist Party, “Including Iran in the ‘axis of evil’ led the Iranian people to grow increasingly skeptical of American slogans”:

Our political rivals … attacked us. They said sympathizing with a country that puts us in the “axis of evil” will take you down a dead-end road, and they were actually correct.

And then later, of course, there was that thing where the U.S. invaded and occupied Iran’s neighbor Iraq.

But getting back to counter-productive rhetoric, Rubin writes:

In the Dec. 7, 2007, official sermon, Ayatollah Mohammad Kashani speaking on behalf of Iran’s supreme leader, declared, “This Senator [Biden] correctly says Israel could not suppress Hizbullah in Lebanon, so how can the U.S. stand face-to-face with a nation of 70 million? This is the blessing of the Guardianship of the Jurists [the theocracy] . . . which plants such thoughts in the hearts of U.S. senators and forces them to make such confessions.” The crowd met his statement with refrains of “Death to America.”

As Ilan Goldenberg notes, Rubin is basically suggesting that American politicians should avoid criticizing policies they disagree with, because of the possibility that that criticism may be used as enemy propaganda. (What do you think the odds are on Rubin following his own advice under a Democratic administration?)

Here’s what Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, speaking for himself, said this past June:

Look at behavior of the US president and members of his team, their words are like those of the mentally ill… Sometimes they threaten, sometimes they order assassinations … and sometimes they ask for help - it’s like mad people staggering to and fro.

Devastatingly for Rubin’s thesis, Khamenei criticized the Bush administration without any signaling whatsoever from Joe Biden.

Finishing off the article with a touch of class, Rubin labels Biden “Tehran’s favorite senator.” Given that AEI’s various goofy schemes for reordering the Middle East have thus far succeeded only in extending Iran’s influence in the region, it’s not hard to guess which is Tehran’s favorite think tank.

John McCain’s Russia Policy Is Bad For U.S.’s Middle East Allies»

Back in March, in his first major foreign policy address since securing the Republican presidential nomination, McCain declared his view that Russia should be kicked out of the G8. Writer Fareed Zakaria called this “the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years.”

It should be understood that McCain’s confrontational stance toward Russia was not just a line in a speech, but is representative of McCain’s deeply-held views, as well as those of top McCain advisers like Randy Scheunemann.

As Zakaria and other analysts like Zbigniew Brzezinski make clear, Russia’s cooperation is essential for dealing productively with Iran. In addition to aiding Iran’s nuclear program, Russia has become one of Iran’s most important business partners:

- On July 13, Iran announced a deal with Russian energy giant Gazprom to help Tehran develop its oil and gas fields.

- On June 21, Tehran announced that it had “signed an agreement with Moscow for a joint venture to build passenger airliners” at a production plant to be sited in Iran.

- In February, Russia announced that it would double its staff at the Bushehr nuclear reactor in southwest Iran.

McCain’s anti-Russia stance does not bode well for efforts to partner with Russia in containing Iran. This has serious negative implications for U.S. interests in the Middle East, especially for regional allies like Israel.

Yossi Klein Halevi recently wrote in The New Republic “Above all else, [Israelis] dread a nuclear Iran. With few exceptions, the consensus within the political and security establishment is that Israel cannot live with an Iranian bomb.” Israelis not only fear a possible first strike by Iran, they’re also concerned about the Iranian “nuclear umbrella,” the greater freedom of action that Iran would enjoy upon obtaining a nuclear deterrent.

Military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities, either by Israel or the U.S., also would trigger numerous unpredictable consequences, which is why it’s imperative that the U.S. work with its partners and use every diplomatic tool possible to ensure that we are not left with war as the only option.

Last month, the Bush administration achieved success dealing with North Korea’s nuclear program by reversing course away from policies that John McCain continues to advocate. Just as China was a partner in dealing with North Korea — by the way, John McCain advocates harsher policies toward China, too — so Russia must be a partner in dealing with Iran. The aggressive policies that John McCain promises to pursue toward Russia make an Iranian bomb more likely.

McCain: ‘I Don’t Know The Progress Or The Nature Or The Significance Of The Iran Threat’»

Referring to Iran’s recent provocative missile tests, Charlie Gibson asked John McCain whether he thought an Israeli strike against Iran would be justified. McCain responded:

I can’t know whether a strike would be justified because I don’t know the progress or the nature or the significance of the threat. I know that a- the threat is growing because the Iranian continued development of nuclear weapons.

Earlier in the interview, McCain responded this way to a question about efforts by America’s European partners to the deal with a threat of which he is unsure:

I was glad that President Sarkoszy in particular but also Prime Minister Brown, Chancellor Merkel and others, have shown this same concern and now I hope that this will be a catalyst to actually come together and impose these sanctions on the Iranians at the end of the day also we cannot afford to have a second Holocaust.

So, while McCain’s unsure of the progress, nature, and significance of the threat, that doesn’t stop him from stating as fact that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons (even though America’s intelligence agencies concluded last year that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003), or from throwing in a gratuitous, fear-mongering reference to the Holocaust at the end there, as an afterthought.

This is pretty significant. Everyone agrees that Iran represents one of the U.S.’s most significant foreign policy challenges, and yet the candidate who has made foreign policy his number one issue — to the virtual exclusion of all other issues — essentially admits that he doesn’t really know the nature or the significance of that challenge.

This sort of vague, generalist approach to Middle East policy is typical for McCain. Whether he’s mixing up Sunni Al Qaeda and Shia Iran, or wrongly insisting that Japan, Germany, and Korea provide workable models for a U.S. presence in Iraq, or just making up stuff about the structure of the Iranian government, McCain has repeatedly demonstrated that, regardless of whatever experience or judgment he may possess, he simply hasn’t done his homework on the region of the world most likely to command the next administration’s attention. And the media have repeatedly demonstrated a disinclination toward calling him on it.

The Iran ‘Appeaser’ On McCain’s National Security Team»

Our guest blogger is Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Just a few weeks ago, Senator John McCain endorsed President George W. Bush’s criticism that diplomatic engagement with Iran would be appeasement.

Now it seems McCain has open the door to his war cabinet to someone who has called for U.S. negotiations “without preconditions” with Iran.

Kori Schake, a research fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, former National Security Council and State Department official in the Bush administration, and former advisor to Rudy Giuliani, wrote an article last spring in the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review, that in the case of Iran and its nuclear program, “We could assist our own case significantly by agreeing to negotiations without preconditions.”

Her article outlines a persuasive case against John McCain’s stated Iran position:

Opponents of negotiations argue that opening them would give away valuable leverage, reward Iranian misbehavior, and send a signal of weakness. They are mistaken on at least two of those points. If negotiations with the U.S. were such valuable leverage, the Iranians would likely have taken last summer’s deal. Moreover, the leverage argument assumes that negotiating with the Iranians is of more value to them than to us, which is at least questionable. If the Iranians are bent on nuclear weapons development, they will be unaffected by negotiations, whereas we will solidify domestic and international backing and have a direct channel of communication that could reduce miscalculation and expand our opportunities to separate the Iranian government from its people. Even if negotiations do not constrain the Iranian nuclear program, they will strengthen our standing and could help open up Iranian society.

Engaging with the Iranian government is an idea more anathema to American policymakers than it is to Iranian dissidents; they have confidence we can conduct diplomacy, as we did with the Soviet Union, without legitimizing the regime. In refusing to negotiate we help a dictatorial government control information; through negotiations, we further our aims and reduce their ability to mischaracterize our actions. If the Iranians are not bent on nuclear-weapons development, negotiations will give us a better understanding of tradeoffs that would constrain them.

In the same piece, Schake also argued that the United States should increase its threshold for military action against Iran to the actual testing of a nuclear weapon rather than uranium enrichment.

Schake joined the McCain team sometime this year and took part in this national security conference call with reporters earlier this month. Schake was even sent out to defend McCain’s position on Iran from Congressional critics of McCain’s 2005 vote against sanctions on Iran.

Why Is Richard Perle Still Published?»

Proving once again that being demonstrably and disastrously wrong on the most important national security questions of the day is no barrier to influence in American politics — provided, of course, that one is always careful to err on the side of war — the Washington Post gives Richard Perle yet another opportunity to be wrong again, this time on Iran.

Echoing the manner in which he calmly assured us of the threat represented by Saddam Hussein’s non-existent WMDs, Perle asserts that “the Iranians… are relentlessly building a nuclear weapons program.” Perle attacks Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for placing too high a value on “coalition building” in dealing with Iran’s nuclear program:

Coalitions, even successful multilateral ones, are instruments, tools, means to an end. They are important and useful, sometimes essential, but they are not, and must not be seen as, ends in themselves. Confusion on this point can lead to claims of success when failure is staring you in the face.

While the above statement is particularly funny coming from the guy who claimed that “we have already won in Iraq” because “Saddam will not be sharing WMD with anyone,” it’s interesting that Perle’s jeremiad against multilateralism is delivered on the day that President Bush essentially acknowledged he had the wrong approach on North Korea for years. Perle now makes the same argument for Iran that people like John Bolton made for North Korea.

After years of ineffective bluster that only allowed North Korea to develop and test a nuclear weapon, today’s step forward on addressing North Korea’s nuclear program proves that tough diplomacy and engagement with adversaries can make America safer.

And the last five years of the Iraq debacle prove that Richard Perle is to be ignored at all costs.

What’s Arabic For ‘Always At War’?»

Hard at the task of rehabilitating the Iraq war on the grounds that such a war was “inevitable”, historian Arthur Herman claims “by the time George Bush entered the White House in January 2001, the United States was already at war with Iraq, and in fact had been at war for a decade, ever since the first Gulf war in the early 1990’s.”

There is obviously a huge difference between an economic sanctions regime backed by occasional airstrikes, and a hundred thousand-strong invasion force piling into Iraq. The latter is generally understood as war, the former as… an economic sanctions regime backed by occasional airstrikes. One can argue that the situation as it existed in the 1990s vis a vis Iraq was unsustainable — I agree that it was — but Herman’s retroactively redefining that situation as “war” is a pretty transparent attempt to downplay the radical nature of President Bush’s doctrine of preventive war, to ignore the massive and unprecedented propaganda campaign that was used to sell this doctrine to the American people, and to shift blame for the massive costs incurred by what is now correctly understood as an unnecessary war of choice.

But not only does Herman want to convince us that the U.S. was already at war with Iraq then, he also would have us to believe that the U.S. is “already at war with Iran” now. Making this argument back in October, Herman wrote that “a realistic war scenario with Iran would involve an extensive air and naval campaign without a single American soldier having to set foot on Iranian soil” :

From start to finish, such an operation would probably require no more than one more carrier group than is already in the area, as well as one Airborne Brigade Combat Team and one Marine Expeditionary Brigade, combined with Special Ops units-fewer troops than reinforced General Petraeus’s current surge in Iraq. In a matter of days or weeks, the key components of the Iranian oil industry would be in American hands even as Iran itself ground to a halt.

As if the spectacle of warmongers promising cakewalks in neoconservative magazines weren’t enough to set off alarm bells, note that Herman’s October item received admiring comment from none other than Michael Ledeen, who theorized (just to pick one of countless examples of Ledeenian silliness) back in 2003 that France and Germany had “struck a deal with radical Islam and with radical Arabs: You go after the United States, and we’ll do everything we can to protect you, and we will do everything we can to weaken the Americans.”

Smarter, please.

I Can Think Of A Reason, Max Boot»

Responding to David Ignatius’s suggestion that the commander of Iran’s Quds Force hopes that “the next administration will be more favorable to Iran’s interests,” Max Boot auto-writes:

There is, of course, no earthly reason why the Quds Force commander could expect that a John McCain (whose campaign — full disclosure — I advise on foreign policy) would be more favorable to his interests. So the implication is that Iran’s top terrorist is hoping that Americans will elect Barack Obama this fall.

No earthly reason? Oh, I don’t know about that. Given that two Bush terms have resulted in the destruction of Iran’s greatest rival, the installation of an Iran-friendly regime in its place, and the extension of Iran’s power and influence throughout the region, I think it’s quite possible that a Quds Force commander would be rubbing his hands with glee over the potential Iranian gains to be realized from McCain mucking about in the Middle East — especially since so many of the super-geniuses who helped Iran out by getting up the Iraq war are now advising McCain.

Iran: A Threat, Yes, But An Existential One?»

Our guest blogger is Andrew Grotto, a Senior National Security Analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

President Bush reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert yesterday that Iran posed an “existential threat to peace.” That would put Iran up there with the Soviet Union, which pointed thousands of thermonuclear weapons at the United States for decades, had dozens of alliances, wielded formidable conventional military forces, and had an industrialized economy.

Some perspective is in order here:

– Iran has no nuclear weapons that we know of, and according to U.S. intelligence is unlikely to be able to produce a single weapon for at least another few years, let alone field a credible arsenal of them.

– Iran has no real allies to speak of, its conventional military forces are paltry, and its economy is in shambles with unemployment and inflation in double digits.

– Iran is no Soviet Union. Not even close.

What Iran does have is a bellicose president who talks a tough game (all the while driving his domestic economy into the ground), natural resources in the form of oil and natural gas, and, of course, a formidable ability to make trouble in the region through proxies such as Hezbollah. Iran’s support for these groups and its meddling in Iraq and elsewhere is a primary source of violence and instability in the region, and the United States must contain these efforts at every turn. But they do not pose an existential threat to the United States or Israel.

Iran’s nuclear program is far more worrisome. At some point in 2009, Iran will likely acquire the technical option to produce enough highly-enriched material for a bomb within one year of a political decision. That means that Iran could have enough material for a bomb sometime in 2010. Iran is operating well over 3,000 of its first-generation “IR-1” centrifuges and has begun to install an additional 3,000. It is not operating these machines at full productive capacity, however, most likely because of lingering technical difficulties. It is unclear when Tehran will overcome these difficulties, but most experts believe it is only a matter of time — probably within the next twelve to eighteen months. When that time comes, 3,000 IR-1 centrifuges operating at full capacity for a year could produce more than enough highly-enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb. More »

McCain’s Foreign Policy Chief Confused About Iran»

In a conference call today, John McCain’s foreign policy spokesman Randy Scheunemann accused Barack Obama of “walking back” an earlier offer to meet with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Stating that Obama now says ” he would only meet with appropriate [Iranian] leaders,” Scheunemann snickered that “Generally, the president is considered the head of a country.”

That may be generally true, but it is not true of Iran. In several previous posts, we noted that McCain seems confused about who is really in charge in Iran. As reporter Joe Klein tried to point out to McCain several weeks ago, it is Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, not President Ahmadinejad, who is the head of the country. This seems like something Americans might want their president to have more than just “general” knowledge of.

McCain: No Bold New Ideas»

Judging from John McCain’s speech today to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, McCain thinks that the security of the United States and Israel is best served by the continuation of policies that have resulted in the advancement of Iran’s nuclear program, the consolidation of Iranian government power by an extreme hard-line faction, and the extension of Iranian influence throughout the region.

Dismissing calls for talks with Iran, McCain monotoned:

Even so, we hear talk of a meeting with the Iranian leadership offered up as if it were some sudden inspiration, a bold new idea that somehow nobody has ever thought of before. Yet it’s hard to see what such a summit with President Ahmadinejad would actually gain, except an earful of anti-Semitic rants, and a worldwide audience for a man who denies one Holocaust and talks before frenzied crowds about starting another. Such a spectacle would harm Iranian moderates and dissidents, as the radicals and hardliners strengthen their position and suddenly acquire the appearance of respectability.

I don’t know how to break this to John McCain, but Ahmadinejad already has a worldwide audience, as the Iranians long ago mastered the technology of recording images and broadcasting them through the air.

McCain’s claim that talking with Iran would strengthen the positions of radicals and hardliners gets it exactly wrong. Entering into responsible negotiations with the Iranian regime would likely undercut, rather than strengthen, hard-line factions by demonstrating that the United States is not an implacable foe bent on Iran’s destruction, as the hard-liners claim.

Conversely, radicals like Ahmadinejad continue to draw considerable strength and legitimacy from the self-gratifying war talk of President Bush, Senator McCain, and assorted neocon crazies, all of whom continue to mistake irresponsible threats for actual leadership. Any time any Iranian moderate suggests that perhaps the Americans are reasonable, all Ahmadinejad or any other radical has to do is play the YouTube (another technology the Iranians have mastered) of McCain singing about bombing Iran.

The Consequences Of McCain’s Bad Judgment»

Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview of John McCain is very worth reading, as it gives a pretty good view into the coloring book version of the Middle East that McCain offers to the American people. For all of the Middle East leaders that McCain has met with — and he really, really wants you to know how many he has met with — McCain’s knowledge of the region persists at the level of a twenty minute briefing. It’s nice that he can name-check Barak, Olmert, and Abbas; It would be really nice if he demonstrated any knowledge of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, or offered any good idea on how to move the peace process forward, which he does not.

What’s really troubling is McCain’s cluelessness about the disastrous effects of the Iraq war on American security. Asked by Goldberg whether he thinks Iran’s intention “is the actual destruction of America,” McCain answers that…the United States should stay in Iraq:

It’s hard for me to say what their intentions are, but the effect -– If they were able to drive us out of Iraq, and al Qaeda established a base there, and the Shiite militias erupted and the Iranian influence was expanded, which to my mind is what would happen, then the consequences for American national security would be profound. I don’t know if their intention is to destroy America and what we stand for, but I think the consequences of them succeeding in the destruction of the state of Israel and their continued support for terrorist organizations – all of these would have profound national security consequences.

You know what’s also had profound negative consequences for American national security? Invading and occupying Iraq. McCain has offered this justification before, and continues to completely miss the point.

Iran has been the single biggest beneficiary of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Former diplomat Peter Galbraith wrote last September that Iraq was a “mission accomplished–for Iran“:

Of all the unintended consequences of the Iraq war, Iran’s strategic victory is the most far-reaching…For eight years of brutal warfare in the 1980s, Iran tried to breach that line but could not. (At the time, the Reagan administration supported Saddam Hussein precisely because it feared the strategic consequences of an Iraq dominated by Iran’s allies.) The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq accomplished what Khomeini’s army could not.

Journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote in March that “the United States has spent most of the past five years in a de facto alliance with Iran in support of the Shiite-led (and US-installed) regime in Baghdad….Washington’s decision to topple Saddam’s government has put in place a ruling elite that is far closer to Iran than it is to the United States.”

Rather than weakening Iranian hard-liners, as the Iraq war’s advocates insisted it would, the American invasion only strengthened them.

The consequences of Iraq for Israel’s security have also been negative. Brian Katulis writes that “in the summer of 2006, when Israel was fighting a live war with the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, it was clear whose side most Iraqi leaders were on — and it was not Israel.”

Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki condemned Israel’s “aggression,” and that same summer, the Iraqi speaker of parliament Mahmoud Al-Mashhadani accused “Jews” of being behind the violence and murders in Iraq. Are these the type of allies that the United States wants? Is the current policy in Iraq undermining U.S. and Israeli security interests by giving Iran some breathing room to expand its influence further around the region? These are tough questions to answer, but U.S. leaders need to address this fundamental contradiction at the heart of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Rather than consider these questions, however, McCain prefers to engage in empty sloganeering and fear-mongering as he plans the next war.

Ignoring McCain’s Record in Favor of ‘Reborn Multilateralist’ Narrative»

John McCain delivered a foreign policy address today on nuclear proliferation, in which he stressed the need to work with Russia in securing loose nuclear materials and preventing them from falling into the wrong hands:

While we have serious differences, with the end of the Cold War, Russia and the United States are no longer mortal enemies. As our two countries possess the overwhelming majority of the world’s nuclear weapons, we have a special responsibility to reduce their number. […]

I would also redouble our common efforts to reduce the risk that nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons may fall into the hands of terrorists or unfriendly governments.

McCain did not say whether his surge in Russia diplomacy would occur before or after he gets Russia kicked out of the G8, as he has suggested he would try to do.

Given that a New York Times story on McCain’s speech quotes an expert praising McCain’s “references…to multilateralism,” we may be about to witness the same phenomenon as occurred after McCain’s earlier foreign policy speech in late March. After that speech, some analysts seriously surmised that McCain had forsworn American unilateralism, despite a clear past record of advocacy for American unilateralism, and despite having some of the foremost advocates of American unilateralism among his foreign policy advisers.

McCain’s foreign policy spokesman, Randy Scheunemann, has suggested in regard to Russian objections to U.S. missile defense in Eastern Europe, that “there will be no trade-offs,” which are “a relic of a bygone era of power politics.” This is the essence of McCain’s approach to foreign affairs. Like Bush, McCain defines “negotiation” as presenting our enemies with ultimata, and “diplomacy” as laying out for them the terms of their capitulation.

Max Bergmann at Democracy Arsenal isn’t fooled:

Since McCain is not willing to negotiate with Iran or North Korea - what non-military strategies does McCain have to ensure that North Korea and Iran end their nuclear programs? The fact is he has no non-military strategy. His sole approach is to say to them: we demand you to stop doing what you are doing or else we will attack you and destroy you.

The latter approach is what McCain advocated in a 1999 speech on the North Korean nuclear threat, in which he suggested that the U.S. should have taken a harder line much sooner. McCain asserted that “a firmer response to North Korea might have triggered a war, a war we would win, but not without paying a terrible price…North Korea is still inexorably nearing total collapse, and its leaders remain quite capable of launching in their country’s death throes one final, glorious war. But now, they are much, much better armed.”

I think we can safely predict that McCain would follow this advice in regard to Iran, with predictably disastrous results.

Randy Scheunemann — A Chalabyist»

USA Today reports on the lobbying career of John McCain’s top foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann, noting that Schuenemann “lobbied the Arizona senator’s staff on behalf of the republic of Georgia while he was working for the campaign”:

Randy Scheunemann, founder of Orion Strategies, represented the governments of Macedonia, Georgia and Taiwan between 2003 and March 1, according to the firm’s filings with the Justice Department. In its latest semiannual report, the firm disclosed that Scheunemann had a phone conversation in November about Georgia with Richard Fontaine, an aide in McCain’s Senate office.

As the article notes, in his capacity as McCain’s spokesman, Scheunemann often comments on issues directly relating to his firms’ clients. This was the case in an interview Scheunemann gave to Radio Liberty last month, in which Scheunemann attacked Russia’s policy toward Georgia while neglecting to disclose that he had been a paid lobbyist for Georgia until as late as December 2007.

The article notably does not mention one of the Chalabyist’s most significant and successful lobbying operations: the invasion of Iraq. Scheunemann served as president of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a neoconservative front group created in 2002. CLI coordinated with the Bush White House to gin up public support for the Iraq war by buttressing and echoing the administration’s various dubious claims about the threat posed by Saddam, and the quickness and ease of a war to remove him.

Part of Scheunemann’s work for the CLI was promoting convicted embezzler and WMD fantasist Ahmad Chalabi as the “new Iraqi Ataturk,” and Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress as a “government in exile.” In a 2003 NewsHour interview, Scheunemann defended Chalabi’s “vision” for Iraq, claiming that Chalabi was opposed for “ideological reasons” by the State Department and the CIA, who, it turns out, were precisely correct about Chalabi’s untrustworthiness.

Scheunemann also managed to convince John McCain that Chalabi was “a patriot with the interest of Iraq at heart.” Note that this “Iraqi patriot” has now been disavowed by the Bush administration, judged to be an “agent of influence” of Iran. Chalabi is suspected to have tipped off Iran that the U.S. had broken secret Iranian codes, as well as passing Iraqi government documents to Iranian agents. Back in 2004, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that “Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi.” Needless to say, none of this speaks very well of Scheunemann’s judgement, or John McCain’s.

UPDATE: Think Progress has more on Charlie Black, another former Chalabyist who works for McCain.

‘The Fact Is’ John McCain Is Confused About Iran»

My previous post referred to John McCain’s confusion over who really sets Iran’s foreign policy, as demonstrated under questioning by reporter Joe Klein.

KLEIN: According to most diplomatic experts, the supreme leader Ali Khamenei is the guy who’s in charge of Iranian foreign policy, and also in charge of the nuclear program. But you never mention him. Why do you always keep on talking about Ahmadinejad since he doesn’t have power in that realm?

MCCAIN: Again, I respectfully disagree, when he’s the person that comes to the United Nations and declares his country’s policy is the extermination of the state of Israel, quote, in his words, “wipe them off of the map” then I know that he is speaking for the Iranian government, and articulating their policy, and was elected, and is running for reelection, as the leader of that country…The fact is that he’s the acknowledged leader of that country. You may disagree, that’s your right to do so, but I think if you asked any Average American who the leader of Iran is, I think they’d know.

The fact is that John McCain is confused as to who is really the leader of Iran. (Big hint: He has the words “Supreme Leader” in his title.) There is no real dispute here: Iranian foreign policy is formulated and set by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Iran’s National Security Council. Ahmadinejad may make a lot of ridiculous statements, but the fact is that he has very little influence in this regard.

As for McCain’s attempt to derive Iranian policy from Ahmadinejad’s comments, while Iran is certainly hostile to Israel, two days after Ahmadinejad made his notorious threat to “wipe Israel off the map,” the president “was reined in by the Supreme Leader, who publicly reiterated Iran’s policy of nonaggression to all UN members.” This was widely interpreted as a public rebuke of Ahmadinejad. According to Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour, “[Khamenei] made it very clear: enough of this talk.”

This isn’t to suggest that Iran’s posture toward Israel is appropriate or defensible — it certainly is not. Just that the policies of the Iranian regime, and the way in which it perceives its own interests, are quite a bit more complex than John McCain and other anti-Iran hawks seem to understand.

Here’s the video of the exchange, which shows McCain sticking to his guns and simply refusing to accept that he is, in fact, wrong on the point.

Watch it:

Read the full transcript: More »

McCain Plays To The Misconceptions Of ‘Average Americans’»

Yesterday I pointed out that John McCain was incorrect in treating Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as if Ahmadinejad had a significant role in formulating Iranian foreign policy. In reality, Iranian foreign policy is set by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Iran’s National Security Council.

At a press conference yesterday, Time’s Joe Klein pressed McCain on this point. According to Klein, McCain said that Ahmadinejad “represents Iran in international forums like the United Nations,” but then Klein pointed out that “The Supreme Leader is, uh, the Supreme Leader”:

McCain responded that the “average American” thinks Ahmadinejad is the boss. Didn’t get a chance to follow up to that, but I would have asked, “But isn’t it your job to correct those sorts of mistaken impressions on the part of the American public?” Oh well.

Democracy Arsenal’s Ilan Goldenberg follows up:

[A]s Klein points out, the President’s job is to educate the public on questions of policy. So if the “average American” thinks that Ahmadinejad is the ultimate leader of Iran, it’s up to the President to dissuade them of this notion - not reinforce it. Back in 2002 more then half of Americans thought Saddam was responsible for 9/11 and President Bush did nothing to disprove this assumption (In fact, while never directly claiming that Saddam was responsible for 9/11 the Administration did everything it could to reinforce the notion). That doesn’t mean our policy should be based on those false assumptions.

Focusing on the rants of Iran’s mercurial president enables McCain and other war hawks to create the impression that Iran is an implacable enemy, with whom negotiation would be pointless.

McCain’s Hard-Line Rhetoric ‘Increases Prestige’ Of Other Hard-Liners»

Warning against the legitimizing effect of talks between the American and Iranian presidents, John McCain said today in a speech before the National Restaurant Association in Chicago that such high-level meetings “would increase the prestige of an implacable foe of the United States“:

[Meetings would] reinforce his [Ahamdinejad’s] confidence that Iran’s dedication to acquiring nuclear weapons, supporting terrorists and destroying the State of Israel had succeeded in winning concessions from the most powerful nation on earth. And he is unlikely to abandon the dangerous ambitions that will have given him a prominent role on the world stage.[…]

An unconditional summit meeting with the next American president would confer both international legitimacy on the Iranian president and could strengthen him domestically when he is unpopular among the Iranian people.

Here’s another area where McCain reveals his ignorance of the Iranian system, and of the effects of his own self-gratifying rhetoric. While Ahmadinejad enjoys influence by virtue of his being a public figure, it is not he but Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, and Iran’s National Security Council, who set Iranian foreign policy.

As for “increasing the prestige” of Ahmadinejad, as Iran analysts Vali Nasr and Ray Takeyh pointed out last December, Ahmadinejad’s prestige has benefited from the bellicose rhetoric coming from American conservatives, allowing him “to suppress dissent and divert attention from domestic woes to international crises he is only too happy to fuel.”

Clearly, Ahmadinejad would like nothing better than for John McCain to continue Bush’s policy of confrontation and escalation. And McCain seems all too willing to oblige, as he hysterically calls “radical Islamic terrorism” the “transcendental challenge of the century,” carelessly casting together groups and movements with conflicting goals and ideologies and treating them as a single monolithic enemy. McCain still doesn’t seem to understand that Iran and Al Qaeda are two very different groups, representing two different threats. And McCain and Bush seem to be the last people in the world to figure out that their Iraq policies have empowered Iran’s hard-liners and weakened moderates and other U.S. allies throughout the Middle East. Yet McCain continues to persist as if these policies have worked.

Bush Tries To Distract From The Conservative Record On Terrorism»

Our guest blogger is Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Ambassador Ryan Crocker meets with Iranian Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qumi in Baghdad, May 2007.

Reaching into the same old bag of tricks of politicizing national security, President Bush used a speech on the floor of the Israeli Knesset to divert attention from his administration’s record on terrorism and attack his political opponents in the United States.

It’s a little jarring to see an American president use a speech while visiting a major ally to engage in politics at home, but there’s nothing new in this approach -– President Bush has used national security as a domestic wedge issue unlike any president in the history of the United States. It was a winning formula politically for conservatives for a while in 2002 and 2004, but by 2005 the approach ran out of steam, collapsing under the weight of the Bush administration’s steady stream of failures around the globe, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this speech is that President Bush seems not only disconnected from the harsh realities of today’s Middle East -– he also seems disconnected from his own policies and their impacts on three counts:

1. Bush forgets that his own administration and other countries have engaged Iran. A focus of Bush’s speech was Iran and the very real threat it poses to stability in the Middle East. Ironically, the Bush administration itself has sent key officials on numerous occasions to meet with Iranian officials –- whether it was most recently sending U.S. diplomats to meetings on numerous occasions with Iranian officials to discuss Iraq, or coordinating closely with Iran in the early years of the Afghanistan war. Moreover, key U.S. allies like Britain, Germany, and France all engage Iran on a regular basis and in fact have embassies in Tehran. Did President Bush really mean to call these allies appeasers too? For example, should the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who met recently with Iranian officials, ask for an apology from Bush? What about most of the leaders of the Iraqi government, which is closely aligned with Iran? Should they be offended too?

2. Bush tries to avoid the fact that his policies have strengthened the hands of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas and undermined Middle East security. A second irony in Bush’s speech is linked directly with today’s headlines –- that the Lebanese government was forced to reverse itself in the face of a violent takeover last week by the terrorist group Hezbollah. This comes less than a year after Hamas took over the Gaza Strip violently. These events are directly related to numerous policy failures by the Bush administration – including the failure to deliver support to pragmatic allies in the Palestinian Authority and Lebanon. As a result, the Lebanese and Palestinian people have suffered from violence, instability, and economic stagnation. And as a result, Israel’s security has been weakened -– another irony given that Bush was speaking on the floor of the Israeli parliament.

3. Bush ignores the 2002-2008 conservative record on terrorism. A broader blind spot that comes crystal clear from Bush’s speech today –- he is incapable of acknowledging that his administration’s policies have been ineffective in responding to the threats posed by global terrorist groups. This blind spot is perhaps understandable, because Bush has invested so much of his legacy in a strategy that has led to a more than four-fold increase in global terrorist attacks by 2005, a trend that has only increased in the three years since.

It might have been easier for President Bush to point the finger at his domestic critics in the early years of his administration and get away with it. But in the last nine months of a lame duck administration, it is time that President Bush stopped running away from his own record and face the reality of his own dismal record on terrorism. Al Qaeda remains a threat, its top leadership like Ayman Zawahiri regularly taunts the United States, and Iran has seen historic expansion of its influence throughout the Middle East –- all national embarrassments that no number of speeches by President Bush can cover up.

In The War Of Ideas, Bush and McCain Wield A Wet Noodle»

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Commentary’s Gabriel Schoenfeld warned of a “growing pro-Obama/anti-McCain axis,”* an Ecumenical Legion of Doom that, in Schoenfeld’s telling, includes Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the leaders of Hamas, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmedinajad, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il:

The obvious possibility…is that one or more of these players might do everything in its power to hurt Mr. McCain and help Mr. Obama. Dramatic action keyed to our internal politics is, after all, already a page in some of our adversaries’ playbooks.

Today, Alex Koppelman notes that Schoenfeld’s argument manages to ignore everything that we have learned about the way that groups like Al Qaeda use media:

Schoenfeld…reached back to the 2004 presidential election, writing, “In 2004, Osama bin Laden’s television appearance only a weekend before the presidential election may have been a naked attempt to influence the outcome by reminding voters that he was still at large and President Bush’s policy had failed.”

Conspicuously absent from Schoenfeld’s argument that these various groups would want Obama as president and would take some action to help him, and from his discussion of the 2004 bin Laden videotape, is one very important point: The CIA believed that bin Laden wanted the tape to help President Bush, not his Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry.

Indeed, it’s important to recognize what a propaganda bonanza the neoconservative “war on terror” has been for Osama bin Laden, as well as for extremists, Islamic and otherwise, throughout the world. (The only thing that Kim Jong-Il, Ahmadinejad, Putin, and Hugo Chavez really have in common is the extent to which Bush’s arrogant unilateralism has helped justify the further consolidation of their political power.) The attacks of 9/11 made bin Laden a major figure in Arab media and culture; the decision by Bush and the neocons to cast him as the sinister leader of a global Islamofascist movement made him a legend. Simply put, Bush’s policy response to 9/11 has done more to promote bin Laden’s ideology than a hundred 9/11s. John McCain’s insistence on treating “Islamic extremism” as the “the transcendental challenge” indicates that he simply doesn’t grasp this.

*Why do neocons love that word, “axis” so much? Partly because the World War II allusion allows them to indulge their Churchill fetish. But mostly because it enables them to create the impression of an enemy “alliance” where there is no real evidence of any such thing, in order to conflate various extremist groups with differing, and often conflicting, goals and ideologies into a single Islamofascist Frankenstein’s monster, which they can then use to scare the simple villagers who read their magazines into voting for their preferred candidates.

There’s no denying that there are real threats out there in the world. The problem is that conservatives by and large have demonstrated over the past seven years that they are incapable of actually tackling the 21st century threats. They are stuck in a World War II mindset that is irrelevant to today’s challenges – after spending nearly a trillion dollars and grinding down our military, terrorist attacks have increased, the Al Qaeda threat remains real and present, and the positions of autocrats from Pyongyang to Moscow to Riyadh has gotten stronger.

O’Hanlon Delivers A Message Tehran Would Love»

Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, a national security consultant at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Michael O’Hanlon has yet another op-ed in the Washington Times today arguing that Iran is “seeking to establish itself as the region’s hegemon,” primarily by “stoking violence in Iraq.” Iranian involvement in Iraq has thus become another rationale for O’Hanlon’s open-ended policy of “strategic patience” in Iraq. To prevent Iran from becoming a regional hegemon, the argument goes, “all [the United States] can do is be patient, keep fighting in Iraq… and keep trying to prove we are the reasonable ones.”

O’Hanlon chides proponents of engagement with Iran as failing to “understand the real nature of the situation we face.” As usual, though, it’s O’Hanlon who doesn’t understand the real nature of the situation the United States faces in Iraq and the region more broadly.

As the New York Times reported today, the United States and Iran increasingly find themselves on common ground in Iraq as a result of the open-ended commitment of U.S. forces favored by O’Hanlon and the Bush administration. Iran’s ambassador to Iraq, Hassan Kazemi Qumi, gave strong support to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s offensive against Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Basra: “The idea of the government in Basra was to fight outlaws. This was the right of the government and the responsibility of the government. And in my opinion the government was able to achieve a positive result in Basra.”

The Iranian ambassador’s words could have come out of the mouth of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In an unannounced visit to Baghdad yesterday, she praised Maliki’s “very good decision by the Iraqis to not let Basra continue to be under the control of criminals and militias.” More »