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06/16/2009

Speak softly and carry no stick

Filed under: Iran, Politics — Tags: , — Soccerdad @ 10:00 am

In Obama’s message to Iran, David Ignatius writes:

The stormy Iranian elections are one more sign of how the world has been shaken up in the age of Barack Obama. The ruling mullahs are nervous about a threat to the regime; the opposition is in the streets protesting what they assert is a rigged election. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is claiming a new mandate, but what the world sees is the regime’s vulnerability.

And what should Obama say about this ferment in Iran, a process that he has subtly encouraged? I’d argue that he should continue with the line he took in his Cairo speech two weeks ago — speaking directly to Muslim publics even as he proposes dialogue with the repressive regimes that govern Iran and many other nations.

Obama would make a mistake if he seemed to meddle in Iranian politics. That would give the mullahs the foreign enemy they need to discredit the reformers. Obama struck the right tone when he said late Monday: “The world is watching and inspired by their participation, regardless of what the ultimate outcome of the election was.” The basic message is: We support the Iranian people and their democracy. Any change in how Iran is governed is their decision, not America’s.

Is that what happened? I’d read the situation differently. It looks to me that after President Obama addressed the leadership of Iran both specifically in his New Year message and generally in his Cairo speech, the Iranian leadership saw it had little to fear from President Obama. When its preferred candidate seemed in danger of losing the carefully controlled election, the country’s leadership acted to save his political career.

In a nutshell, Ignatius claims (using anonymous “intelligence officials” to buttress his argument:) claims that by taking a non-confrontational approach to the Arab and Muslim worlds, President Obama has encouraged the reform movement in Iran.

Not everyone views the President’s reticence in facing up to tyranny as a good thing. Michael Totten who eschews self-interested “intelligence officials” in favor of his own observations, writes:

The “March 14” activists were, in fact, denounced as stooges of the Americans by Hezbollah and other pro-Syrian parties in Lebanon, but it didn’t matter. I met anti-Americans among the demonstrators, but none were mad that the Bush Administration supported them. His support actually eased their anti-American sentiment somewhat. “You are new friends of ours here in Lebanon,” one conservative Sunni Lebanese told me.

Nor did the president’s support make the Syrian military any more likely to beat civilians into submission. Nobody was killed, and the “March 14” movement won. “I am not Saddam Hussein,” Syria’s tyrant Bashar Assad said. “I want to cooperate.” The Syrian military left Lebanon shortly thereafter.

Whether or not President Bush’s support for the “March 14” revolution helped very much, it certainly didn’t hurt.

Bret Stephens,after criticizing the President for taking a harder line against an ally – PM Netanyahu – than against America’s enemies, argues (and notes some presidential hypocrisy):

This is a strange turn of events. In Cairo two weeks ago, Mr. Obama trumpeted “my commitment . . . to governments that reflect the will of the people.” He also lamented that “the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.” Yet here is his administration disavowing the first of these commitments while acquiescing in the overthrow — before it can even be installed — of another democratically elected Iranian government.

Now a presidency that’s supposed to be all about hope is suddenly in cynical realpolitik mode — the only “hope” it means to keep alive being a “grand bargain” over Iran’s nuclear program. This never had much chance of success, but at least until Friday’s sham poll it wasn’t flatly at odds with the interests of ordinary Iranians. Not anymore.

Here’s a recent comment from one Iranian demonstrator posted on the Web site of the National Iranian American Council. “WE NEED HELP, WE NEED SUPPORT,” this demonstrator wrote. “Time is not on our side. . . . The most essential need of young Iranians is to be recognized by US government. They need them not to accept the results and do not talk to government as an official, approved one.”

Barry Rubin writes in 48 hours of reality overthrows Obama’s Middle East policy:

President Barack Obama based his policy of engaging with Iran on the idea that while President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a wild man, Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei was a closet moderate, or at least a pragmatist.
Now all can see that Ahmadinejad and Khamenei are wedded, together at last. Khamenei is so set on Ahmadinejad’s character and policy that he risked the regime’s internal and external credibility and stability in order to reassure his reelection.

Prof Rubin ties this together with another area where President Obama’s outreach has failed to achieve the desired results:

Now if Obama was right, the Palestinians should be eager for a state. So if Netanyahu calls on them to recognize Israel as a Jewish state—what do they care if they are accepting to live alongside it permanently?—and have their own state. Yes, that state would be “demilitarized,” I prefer the word “unmilitarized,” but all that means is that they would have the same security forces that they do now. And in proportional terms, the Palestinian Authority (PA) already has more men in uniform compared to the overall population, than any state on the planet.

So here’s Obama’s solution: an independent Palestinian state, Muslim and Arab, according to the PA’s constitution for that country, next to a Jewish state.

But how does the PA’s leader—who is always referred to as “moderate” in the Western media and is more moderate than any other Palestinian leader (it’s all relative)—react?

Nabil Abu Rdainah, spokesman for PA leader Abbas, said Netanyahu’s speech “torpedoes all peace initiatives in the region.” Another top PA leader, Yasser Abed Rabbo, said that recognizing Israel’s Jewish character would force Palestinians “to become part of the global Zionist movement”.

David Ignatius, neatly tailors his column to prove that President Obama’s “speak softly and carry no stick” approach to extremists works. Recent events suggest that he’s wrong. The President has been encouraging the extremists at the expense of the moderates.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

02/13/2009

A high degree of confidence

Filed under: Iran — Tags: — Soccerdad @ 1:00 pm

In late 2007 the United States intelligence agencies issue a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that Iran had stopped seeking to build a nuclear weapon. In a column The myth of the Mad Mullahs, David Ignatius wrote that the most important finding of the NIE was not the stoppage of Iranian work on a nuclear weapon.

For the past several years, U.S. intelligence analysts have doubted hawkish U.S. and Israeli rhetoric that Iran is dominated by “mad mullahs” — clerics whose fanatical religious views might lead to irrational decisions. In the new NIE, the analysts forcefully posit an alternative view of an Iran that is rational, susceptible to diplomatic pressure and, in that sense, can be “deterred.”

“Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs,” states the NIE. Asked if this meant the Iranian regime would be “deterrable” if it did obtain a weapon, a senior official responded, “That is the implication.” He added: “Diplomacy works. That’s the message.”

While the intelligence community regards Iran as a rational actor, the workings of the regime remain opaque — a “black box,” in the words of one senior official. “You see the outcome [in the fall 2003 decision to halt the covert program] but not the decision-making process.” This official said it was “logical, but we don’t have the evidence” that Iran felt less need for nuclear weapons after the United States toppled its mortal enemy, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, in April 2003.

Of course given the opacity of the decision making process, it could also be that they stopped pursuing nuclear weapons in 2003 because they feared the United States, and that as fear of the Americans dissipated they started their program up again.

Now it’s being reported that, whoops, the Iranians are indeed pursuing nuclear weapons (via memeorandum)

Obama’s nominee to serve as CIA director, Leon E. Panetta, left little doubt about his view last week when he testified on Capitol Hill. “From all the information I’ve seen,” Panetta said, “I think there is no question that they are seeking that capability.”

The language reflects the extent to which senior U.S. officials now discount a National Intelligence Estimate issued in November 2007 that was instrumental in derailing U.S. and European efforts to pressure Iran to shut down its nuclear program.

So if the NIE was wrong doesn’t that mean that mullahs are mad after all?

As the administration moves toward talks with Iran, Obama appears to be sending a signal that the United States will not be drawn into a debate over Iran’s intent.

“When you’re talking about negotiations in Iran, it is dangerous to appear weak or naive,” said Joseph Cirincione, a nuclear weapons expert and president of the Ploughshares Fund, an anti-proliferation organization based in Washington.

Cirincione said the unequivocal language also worked to Obama’s political advantage. “It guards against criticism from the right that the administration is underestimating Iran,” he said.

So this new information doesn’t change the Obama administration’s initiative at all? It just protects it form the “right?”

More from Hot Air, Israel Matzav, Mere Rhetoric and Jules Crittenden who writes:

My big question is still how Obama avoids appearing weak or naive. On the second part, I’d be inclined to say that by seeking to give the mullahs equal standing with the Great Satan in direct talks, sure, there is an underestimation of their deviousness and unreliability, but there is also a gross overestimation of their goodwill.

Emanuele Ottolenghi at Contentions sums it up:

Future historians will have a field day with those hapless intelligence experts who drafted the NIE in such a way as to wipe out any residual credibility of a U.S. military strike against Iran in the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency, thereby also undermining sanctions efforts by the rest of the international community — especially if it turns out that the NIE helped push Iranian scientists to the finish line this year.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

12/24/2008

The truth about David Ignatius

Filed under: Syria — Tags: — Soccerdad @ 8:00 am

At the end of his post about a Washington Post editorial yesterday, Daled Amos writes:

Maybe they should just go back to having terrorists writing op-eds.

Maybe someone in the Post’s editorial department was listening because today, op-ed columnist David Ignatius acted as a PR flack published an interview with President Bashar Assad of Syria, A New Partner in Syria?.

Assad is apparently an apt observer of the American scene.

In all three “hopes,” Assad seemed to be looking for a new start with Obama after years of chilly relations with Bush. Assad said he knew little about Obama or his policies but has heard that he is more in contact with ordinary people than Bush has been, which, Assad contended, would give Obama a better understanding of America.

The three hopesare part of a list of demands Syria published right after the election in order for Assad to “receive Obama.” In other words, Ignatius is serving the purpose of the official Syrian media.

On the trick question of Syria and Iran how does Assad deal with it?

On the crucial question of Syria’s future relations with Iran, Assad was noncommittal. He said the relationship with Iran wasn’t about the “kind of statehood” Syria has or its cultural affinities but about protecting Syrian interests against hostile neighbors. “It’s about who plays a role in this region, who supports my rights,” he said. “It’s not that complicated.”

Supports his rights? Surely this ought to have inspired a followup question from Ignatius. But it didn’t.

Here’s what a more serious observer, Danielle Pletka, just wrote about Iran and Syria.

Yet Iran and Syria’s ties have only deepened. Indeed, Iran most likely had a role in financing Syria’s construction of the illicit North Korean nuclear reactor, remains one of the largest foreign investors in the country and conducts joint training with the Syrian military on advanced Russian-supplied weaponry.

It is not inconceivable that the regime in Damascus might throw its supporters in Tehran under the bus in exchange for prestige, cash and a free hand in Lebanon.

Ignatius didn’t ask anything about Syria’s nuclear program. And Pletka’s observation about what it would take to draw Syria away from Iran is chilling. Again all Ignatius is doing is flacking for Assad, not interviewing him.

Ignatius also asked Assad about Hezbollah:

Asked whether Syria was prepared to restrain Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite militia in Lebanon, Assad said this was a matter the Israelis should sort out in separate negotiations with the Lebanese. Indeed, he promoted the idea of the other negotiating tracks — which would draw in, at least indirectly, Hezbollah and Hamas.

“The longer the border, the bigger the peace,” Assad said. “Hezbollah is on the Lebanese border, not Syrian. Hamas is on the Palestinian border. . . . They should look at those other tracks. They should be comprehensive. If you want peace, you need three peace treaties, on three tracks.”

Again, no follow up. Just acting as a megaphone for Assad. Pletka, though, writes:

But it is unrealistic to expect President Assad to dispose of Hezbollah and Hamas in the same way. Mr. Assad — broadly disliked at home, a member of a mistrusted Alawite minority, comically inept at managing his country’s resources — can maintain his grip on power only as long as he is seen as a vital instrument of Israel’s defeat.

More generally:

Herein lies the fatal flaw of this transformational vision. It assumes that Syria’s leaders want Syria to become a normal state, when in fact, it is essential to the regime’s survival that it remain a pariah. Mr. Assad and his mafia have made an art of extorting subsistence assistance from the outside world, most recently by holding out prospects for better relations with the West and Israel. But a new Middle East would mean the end of Mr. Assad, which is why he will always turn back to Iran, and why the road to peace in the Middle East will never run through Damascus.

Pletka’s assessment is in line with that of Barry Rubin in his book “The Truth About Syria” In an interview with Michael Totten this is how Dr. Rubin describes people like David Ignatius.

To begin with, to understand Syria—like other regional forces—one must first examine the nature of the regime and its real interests. The way to do this is not to cite the latest interview or op-eds by Syrian leaders or propagandists in the Western media or what one of them told some naïve Western “useful idiot” who traveled to Damascus but rather to look at what the Syrian rulers say among themselves, what they do, how they structure the regime and perceive of their interests.

Syria is not a radical regime because it has been mistreated by the West or Israel but because the regime needs radicalism to survive. It is a minority dictatorship of a small non-Muslim minority and it offers neither freedoms nor material benefit. It needs demagoguery, the scapegoats of America and Israel, massive loot taken from Lebanon, an Iraq which is either destabilized or a satellite, and so on.

No matter how generous, gracious or accommodating Ignatius portrays Assad, Assad is interested in only one thing: perpetuating his own rule over Syria. Getting more direct control over Lebanon would also be to the dictator’s liking. Portraying him as some sort of Middle Eastern Mr. Rogers as Ignatius does shows how little he understand the subject of his interview. Ignatius assumes (or pretends) that Assad is like him holding the same hopes and same premises about what constitutes peace. But Assad is motivated by his own ambition, not by any hopes for a peaceful Middle East.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

12/12/2008

Brother David Ignatius explained it all for you

Filed under: Iran, Israel — Tags: , — Soccerdad @ 9:00 am

Two and a half years ago, nothing troubled David Ignatius more than a repeat of Iraq. In “Avoiding another ‘Slam Dunk’” he wrote:

Amid all the debate about intelligence, there has been surprisingly little focus on the question the average citizen (and average policymaker, too) would probably have at the top of the list: Will these guys get it wrong again? Will they tell the world that something is a “slam-dunk,” only to discover later that it didn’t exist?

Of course, in our post 9/11 world, it’s odd that the other side of the question didn’t occur to him. What happens if our intelligence services get surprised again after raising no alarms of a very real threat?

Ignatius, of course, was relieved that his favorite bureaucrat, Thomas Fingar, would be in charge of handling intelligence.

The issue here is analysis, the least sexy but arguably most important part of the spy world. In trying to fix what was so obviously broken, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte did a smart thing. He went to the agency that came closest to getting it right on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction — the State Department’s tiny Bureau of Intelligence and Research — and picked its chief, Thomas Fingar, as his deputy for analysis. INR, as it is known, had antagonized many in the Bush administration in 2002 and 2003 by refusing to endorse their case that Iraq was trying to reconstitute its nuclear program — dismissing the claim about Iraqi uranium purchases from Niger as “highly dubious.”

No word if the INR had predicted 9/11 and was ignored.

And then last year, when the NIE was released and claimed that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons research, Ignatius claimed vindication in “The myth of the mad mullahs.”

To break the lock-step culture that allowed the disastrous mistake on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Deputy Director of National Intelligence Thomas Fingar ordered that analysts be given more information about sources and, rather than trying to fit information into preexisting boxes to prove a case, they should simply explain what it meant.

All these strands converged in the bombshell National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that was released Monday. That document was as close to a U-turn as one sees in the intelligence world. The community dropped its 2005 judgment that Iran was “determined to develop nuclear weapons” and instead said, “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program” because of international pressure.

The secret intelligence that produced this reversal came from multiple channels — human sources as well as intercepted communications — that arrived in June and July. At that time, a quite different draft of the Iran NIE was nearly finished. But the “volume and character” of the new information was so striking, says a senior official, that “we decided we’ve got to go back.” It was this combination of data from different sources that gave the analysts “high confidence” the covert weapons program had been stopped in 2003. This led them to reject an alternative scenario (one of six) pitched by a “red team” of counterintelligence specialists that the new information was a deliberate Iranian deception.

But more importantly, according to Ignatius:

For the past several years, U.S. intelligence analysts have doubted hawkish U.S. and Israeli rhetoric that Iran is dominated by “mad mullahs” — clerics whose fanatical religious views might lead to irrational decisions. In the new NIE, the analysts forcefully posit an alternative view of an Iran that is rational, susceptible to diplomatic pressure and, in that sense, can be “deterred.”

“Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs,” states the NIE. Asked if this meant the Iranian regime would be “deterrable” if it did obtain a weapon, a senior official responded, “That is the implication.” He added: “Diplomacy works. That’s the message.”

Yes it has. A year of diplomacy and some mild arm twisting and Tehran continues to move forward with its nuclear program.

But, it’s worse than that. Edward Jay Epstein writes that this new and improved intelligence assessment was wrong.

(h/t Deja Vu, The Spine)

Three pieces of the puzzle uncovered by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency cast a surprising light on how Iran has advanced its capabilities independently of Project 11-1. First, there is the digital blueprint circulated by the network of A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb. IAEA investigators decoding and analyzing the massive computer files of this network found that it had clandestinely provided clients with a detailed design of a nuclear warhead of the version used by first China then Pakistan.

Since the IAEA knew that Iran had been dealing with the Khan network since at least 2003, and features of that digital blueprint matched those described in the Project 11-1 documents, it was suspected that Iran acquired the digital blueprint, along with other components, from the Khan network. If so, it shortened the task of Project 1-11.

Then, in late 2007, IAEA investigators uncovered a detailed Iranian narrative, written in Farsi, that described how a Russian scientist helped the Iranians conduct experiments to help Iranian scientists solve a complex design problem: Configuring high-tension electric bridge wire to detonate at different points less than a fraction of a nanosecond apart. In an implosion-type bomb, this is crucial for properly compressing the nuclear core. As Olli Heinonen, the IAEA’s chief inspector explained at a closed-door briefing in February 2008, these Russian-led experiments were “not consistent with any application other than the development of a nuclear weapon.”

Finally, there is the Polonium 210 experiments that Iran conducted prior to 2004. Since Polonium 210 is used to initiate the chain reaction in early-generation nuclear bombs (and used in the Pakistan design), IAEA inspectors attempted up until 2008 to get access to the facility, or “box,” in which the Polonium 210 was extracted from radioactive Bismuth.

In other words, the NIE was correct. One of the Iranian programs for developing a nuclear weapon was shuttered. The problem was that they had a parallel program running that the NIE didn’t report. It accounted for the possibility that a second program did exist though.

According to the IAEA, which monitors Natanz, by 2008 Iran had 3,800 centrifuges in operation and is adding another 3,000. It has also upgraded many of the older centrifuges, giving it about quadruple the capacity it had in 2003. To date, it has produced and stockpiled 1,380 pounds of low-enriched uranium, which is enough, if further enriched to weapons grade, to build a nuclear bomb.

The 2007 NIE deftly ducked this escalation with a footnote stating it was excluding from its assessment “Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment,” which meant Natanz. However, in light of all the developments in the past year, America’s new president will have to confront the reality that Iran now has the capability to change the balance of power in the Gulf, if it so elects to do so, by building a nuclear weapon.

So the NIE focused on a program that no longer operated but ignored the possibility that “civilian” nuclear research was being used to produce nuclear material for a weapon. Of course that means that the point of the NIE was not to get things correct as Ignatius claims but to serve the political purpose of undermining any effective measures to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Ignatius is even more blatantly political than he accuses the Bush administration of being.

It would appear that Mere Rhetoric analyzed things correctly last year – and he’s paid a fraction of what David Ignatius is for his opinions –

This is still woefully stupid analysis: the new conclusions are based on a grumpy Iranian military officer complaining that Iran’s nuclear program was suspended in 2003. Which is totally true – except for how after the suspension they went ahead and restarted it. Printing things that are technically true but crucially incomplete as part of an effort to mislead Americans into underestimating the threat of political Islam – it’s like the LA Times editorial board took over the US intelligence apparatus. Which they might as well because US intelligence about Iran sucks – ergo the spectacle of political machinations completely reversing the NIE in the span of four months.

and as JoshuaPundit wrote at the time: Israel’s assessment of Iran was correct.

My guess is that Thomas Fingar was a very good source for David Ignatius when the latter needed material to blast the Bush administration. But Fingar told Ignatius exactly what he wanted to hear. Happy that his pre-conceived notions were “confirmed,” Ignatius didn’t think too hard and once again seen only what he wanted to see.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

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