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Keep your enemies close; push your friends away

In a remarkable op-ed last week, Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post excoriated Obama’s Myopic Worldview. After noting that the President claimed in his U.N. speech, “The world is more stable than it was five years ago,” Diehl responded:

So: Why, according to Obama, is the world better off than in 2008? Well, the global economic crisis has abated. But that’s not all: “We’ve also worked to end a decade of war,” the president said, by withdrawing U.S. and NATO troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and “shifting away from a perpetual war footing.” Here’s where you could almost hear the head-scratching in the Iraqi and Afghan delegations: Violence in both of those countries is considerably worse than it was five years ago, in part because of the U.S. withdrawals.

Also, as Obama half-acknowledged, al-Qaeda is more of a threat in more places — Kenya, Nigeria, Mali, Libya, Syria — than it was in 2008. And then there is the region stretching from Morocco to Iran, which is experiencing not stability but an epochal upheaval, one that has brought civil war or anarchy to a half-dozen countries and spawned the greatest crimes against humanity since the turn of the 21st century.

It’s easy to dismiss Obama’s claim on factual grounds. More interesting is to see what prompted it: a soda-straw view of the world in which only the president’s inauguration-day priorities are visible. His aim then was to bring home U.S. troops, end the “endless war” of George W. Bush, defend the homeland from al-Qaeda and step back from the quagmire of the Arab Middle East. He did all that; ergo, the world is more stable — and from the attenuated perspective of an American who mainly wishes the world would go away, perhaps it is.

Unlike Diehl, I didn’t find President Obama’s speech to be that surprising. There wasn’t much new in it. President Obama doesn’t believe in letting troops fight to win a war but to bring them home and end it. He’s said that in slightly different words throughout his presidency.

My column is about Obama's claim that the world has become "more stable" and what that says about his worldview http://t.co/OylnSbDtDs

— Jackson Diehl (@JacksonDiehl) September 27, 2013

What’s remarkable about Diehl’s column is that Diehl and the Washington Post’s editorial board twice endorsed Barack Obama for President despite his myopic worldview. This is as thorough a verbal repudiation of the president as any I’ve seen.

But it isn’t just pundits who reject President Obama’s foreign policies; it’s allies too. A few weeks ago Walter Russell Mead wrote in The Failed Grand Strategy in the Middle East:

The next problem is that the Obama administration misread the impact that its chosen strategies would have on relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia—and underestimated just how miserable those two countries can make America’s life in the Middle East if they are sufficiently annoyed.

The situations with Israel and Saudi Arabia have gotten worse since then. The most recent reason is President Obama’s outreach to Iran. The Wall Street Journal reported U.S. Moves on Syria, Iran Anger Saudi Arabia:

Saudi Arabia, for example, long held off on supplying Stinger-style missiles to Syrian rebels because of U.S. worries the missiles could be used against Western targets, security analysts briefed by Saudi officials say. Saudi Arabia increased pressure on the U.S. to allow arming the rebels with antiaircraft weapons this summer, as larger numbers of Hezbollah fighters entered the conflict on the side of Mr. Assad’s regime.

Saudis now feel that the Obama administration is disregarding Saudi concerns over Iran and Syria, and will respond accordingly in ignoring “U.S. interests, U.S. wishes, U.S. issues” in Syria, said Mustafa Alani, a veteran Saudi security analyst with the Geneva-based Gulf Research Center.

“They are going to be upset—we can live with that,” Mr. Alani said Sunday of the Obama administration. “We are learning from our enemies now how to treat the United States.”

https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/384699825645563905

The New York Times added Israel to the allies who are concerned with President Obama’s outreach. Jodi Rudoren reported in Israel and Others in Mideast View Overtures of U.S. and Iran With Suspicion (There was no reason to single Israel out in the headline.):

Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni-dominated gulf countries share a concern about a shift in the balance of power toward Iran’s Shiite-led government and its allies. For Israel, Iran remains the sponsor of global terrorism and of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, both avowed enemies of Israel’s existence.

This paragraph is largely accurate though it’s written in Timespeak so as to make it seem that only the Gulf States would be concerned with the first problem and only Israel need be concerned with the second. But like the Wall Street Journal, this one too has a memorable quote:

“Obama is interested in showing foreign policy success because he hasn’t had too many of them,” said Emily Landau, an Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “I’m afraid that for the sake of that he might be willing to compromise on the nuclear issue in a manner that I think is detrimental to U.S. national security interests, leave aside Israel.”

Landau is correct. Iran’s aggressiveness isn’t just a threat to Israel. She’s also correct that for President Obama making an agreement is a success in its own right regardless of the consequences. (Although, Obama would dispute Landau’s assertion that he has had few foreign policy successes. Bringing the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, are successes in his book.)

MT @Grant_Rumley: “Obama is interested in showing FP successes because he hasn’t had too many of them" http://t.co/2D9iPKXNDN v @rudoren

— Nervana Mahmoud (@Nervana_1) September 30, 2013

Once allies no longer trust you, then someone else will step in. The Washington Post reports Russia seeks to fill vacuum in the Middle East:

Russian intentions in the region are rooted in many concerns, but foremost among them is Moscow’s determination “to emphasize Russia’s role in the world as an indispensable nation, especially vis-a-vis American helplessness to settle problems,” he said.

The intent is being felt. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who became premier three years after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, has made two trips to Moscow in the past year and none to Washington. His talks were focused on a $4 billion defense deal under which Russia will supply Iraq with a range of armaments, including fighter jets, which are expected to be delivered soon. …

Meanwhile, strains between Egypt’s new military-backed rulers and Washington have led Egyptian leaders to encourage Russian advances. A Russian tourism delegation came to the country to explore ways of expanding visits by Russians at a time when most Westerners have been staying away, and interim Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy, a former ambassador to Washington, chose Moscow for his first visit beyond the region in his new job.

This isn’t just a negative effect of Obama’s outreach to Iran, but of his myopic worldview, in which he sees no need to cultivate alliances.

Ironically the failures of President Obama’s foreign policy won’t get a lot of attention right now because of the government shutdown. Obama would reach out to an acknowledged and active enemy of the United States (and the West generally) but steadfastly refused to negotiate with political opponents. The contrast between how President Obama treated Hassan Rouhani and how he treats John Boehner speaks volumes about the his priorities.

Don’t Fear Iranian Nukes

In his column yesterday, Hassan does Manhattan, Thomas Friedman wrote about Iran’s new President Hassan Rouhani:

1) He’s not here by accident. That is, this Iranian charm offensive is not because Rouhani, unlike his predecessor, went to charm school. Powerful domestic pressures have driven him here. 2) We are finally going to see a serious, face-to-face negotiation between top Iranian and American diplomats over Iran’s nuclear program. 3) I have no clue and would not dare predict whether these negotiations will lead to a peaceful resolution of the Iranian nuclear crisis. 4) The fact that we’re now going to see serious negotiations raises the stakes considerably. It means that if talks fail, President Obama will face a real choice between military action and permanent sanctions that could help turn Iran into a giant failed state. 5) Pray that option 2 succeeds.

While there are no doubt domestic considerations that drove Rouhani to appear conciliatory, there’s one reason that Friedman left out. A recent skeptical Washington Post editorial put it well:

Mr. Rouhani was in New York on Tuesday not because democracy triumphed in Iran but because Iran’s real leader decided to give the soft-sell strategy a try.

"it is perhaps a peccadillo to point out that Rouhani has consistently lied about the nuclear program." http://t.co/PUCJkff4Pn

— Mark Dubowitz (@mdubowitz) September 28, 2013

In the end of Friedman’s column, he writes:

The fact that Rouhani could not shake President Obama’s hand (they did speak by phone, in the end) because he feared a photo-op would be used against him by hard-line Revolutionary Guards back home — before he had gains to show for it — tells us how hard it will be to reach the only kind of nuclear deal Obama can sign on to. That is one that affirms Iran’s right to produce fuel for civilian nuclear power, but with a nuclear enrichment infrastructure small enough, and international oversight and safeguards stringent enough, that a quick breakout to a bomb would be impossible.

Geopolitics is all about leverage: who’s got it and who doesn’t. Today, the negotiating table is tilted our way. That is to Obama’s credit. We should offer Iranians a deal that accedes to their desire for civilian nuclear power and thus affirms their scientific prowess — remember that Iran’s 1979 revolution was as much a nationalist rebellion against a regime installed by the West as a religious revolution, so having a nuclear program has broad nationalist appeal there — while insisting on a foolproof inspection regime. We can accept that deal, but can they? I don’t know. But if we put it on the table and make it public, so the Iranian people also get a vote — not just the pragmatists and hard-liners in the regime — you’ll see some real politics break out there, and it won’t merely be about the quality of Iran’s nuclear program but about the quality of life in Iran.

Iran doesn’t believe that current conditions favor the West. It believes that the West can offer it something it seeks – relief from sanctions – for a price it considers acceptable. While Friedman writes that any deal needs to prevent a “quick breakout to a bomb,” he did not specifically list the one element that is necessary to prevent that.

Two weeks ago Prime Minister Netanyahu outlined four steps that need to be part of any deal with Iran:

The way to stop Iran’s nuclear program requires four steps:

1. Halting all uranium enrichment;
2. Removing all enriched uranium;
3. Closing Qom; and
4. Stopping the plutonium track.

Only a combination of these four steps will constitute an actual stopping of the nuclear program, and until all four of these measures are achieved, the pressure on Iran must be increased and not relaxed, and certainly not eased.

Charles Krauthammer explained in The Real Rouhani:

It takes about 250?kilograms of 20?percent enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported in August that Iran already has 186?kilograms. That leaves the Iranians on the threshold of going nuclear. They are adding 3,000 new high-speed centrifuges. They need just a bit more talking, stalling, smiling and stringing along of a gullible West.

Friedman simply limited the Western goal to “a nuclear enrichment infrastructure small enough” not the removal of all enriched uranium.

Iran Pres Hassan Rouhani speech lacked practical proposal to stop military nuclear program http://t.co/9dL8FDjUNu #AIPAC #ISRAEL @StateDept

— NEWS FRM BOCA RATON (@BOCATWEETER) September 30, 2013

A deal that is good enough for Friedman and much of the West, including, unfortunately, President Obama. What’s most likely to happen is what Barry Rubin described:

The Obama administration considers the election of a new president in Iran a tremendous opportunity, but it isn’t. The administration has always wanted to make a deal with Iran, both to avoid confrontation and for domestic popularity. Obama could claim a peaceful resolution as a great diplomatic achievement. This fits their ideological pattern of negotiations and concessions to enemies, especially to “moderate Islamists.”

But how can this collective deal on the nuclear program and on regional stability be achieved? One way is for Iran’s actual intransigence to go ignored, and for American leaders to pretend to believe a deal can be reached until the time when Tehran gets nuclear arms.

Friedman wants a deal. President Obama wants a deal. This is the prevailing mindset in American foreign policy circles. The elements of a deal are not as important as there being a deal.

Friedman doesn’t fear Iranian nukes.

#Iran imprisons US citizens, pursues nukes + is State Sponsor of Terrorism. Speaking w #Rouhani only emboldens regime http://t.co/Uurv8NSTWM

— Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (@RosLehtinen) September 27, 2013

But that’s only half the story. The Western conflict with Iran is much broader than Iran’s interest in becoming a nuclear power. Dexter Filkins wrote a profile of Qassem Suleimani, the Shadow Commander. Suleimani is the commander of Iran’s Qods force and, effectively, the military commander of Hezbollah.

In 2010, according to Western officials, the Quds Force and Hezbollah launched a new campaign against American and Israeli targets—in apparent retaliation for the covert effort to slow down the Iranian nuclear program, which has included cyber attacks and assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists.

Since then, Suleimani has orchestrated attacks in places as far flung as Thailand, New Delhi, Lagos, and Nairobi—at least thirty attempts in the past two years alone. The most notorious was a scheme, in 2011, to hire a Mexican drug cartel to blow up the Saudi Ambassador to the United States as he sat down to eat at a restaurant a few miles from the White House. The cartel member approached by Suleimani’s agent turned out to be an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. (The Quds Force appears to be more effective close to home, and a number of the remote plans have gone awry.) Still, after the plot collapsed, two former American officials told a congressional committee that Suleimani should be assassinated. “Suleimani travels a lot,” one said. “He is all over the place. Go get him. Either try to capture him or kill him.” In Iran, more than two hundred dignitaries signed an outraged letter in his defense; a social-media campaign proclaimed, “We are all Qassem Suleimani.”

Several Middle Eastern officials, some of whom I have known for a decade, stopped talking the moment I brought up Suleimani. “We don’t want to have any part of this,” a Kurdish official in Iraq said. Among spies in the West, he appears to exist in a special category, an enemy both hated and admired: a Middle Eastern equivalent of Karla, the elusive Soviet master spy in John le Carré’s novels.

The increased anti-Western activity is probably what forced the EU to declare Hezbollah’s military wing a terrorist organization. Hezbollah has been active in Bulgaria and Nigeria. Iran provides the main support to Bashar Assad’s bloody regime. But the West seems oblivious that whatever is Hezbollah is doing is being done at Iran’s behest. Israel has just arrested an Iranian for spying on American interests. (via memeorandum)

Even if – like Thomas Friedman – you don’t fear Iranian nukes, you should at least fear Iranian anti-Western terror. (I’m not even asking how you can trust someone who is waging a war against you.) Even that Friedman seems unconcerned with.

Iran can’t be trusted with regard to chemical weapons; Should they be trusted with Nukes?

In addition to last week’s Wall Street Journal article about Iran’s role in training Shi’ites to fight in Syria, there was another important article. The New York Times reported U.N. Data on Gas Attack Point to Assad’s Top Forces.

The inspectors, instructed to investigate the attack but not to assign blame, nonetheless listed the precise compass directions of flight for two rocket strikes that appeared to lead back toward the government’s elite redoubt in Damascus, Mount Qasioun, which overlooks and protects neighborhoods and Mr. Assad’s presidential palace and where his Republican Guard and the army’s powerful Fourth Division are entrenched.

“It is the center of gravity of the regime,” said Elias Hanna, a retired general in the Lebanese Army and a lecturer on strategy and geopolitics at the American University of Beirut. “It is the core of the regime.”

In presenting the data concerning two rocket strikes — the significance of which was not commented upon by the United Nations itself — the report provides a stronger indication than the public statements of intelligence services of the United States, France or Britain that the Syrian military not only carried out the attack, but apparently did so brazenly, firing from the same neighborhoods or ridges from which it has been firing high-explosive conventional munitions for much of the war.

The U.N. report on Syria actually DID implicitly finger the Assad regime, @cjchivers says http://t.co/GCEI317M7R

— Blake Hounshell (@blakehounshell) September 18, 2013

In addition to using the data from the two rocket strikes, the New York Times reporters added:

A senior American intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the United States, via satellite, had confirmed rocket launches that corroborated the United Nations data and the Human Rights Watch analysis for one of the strikes.

In the wake of the attack it was reported:

According to reports from the scene, four large rockets landed in the Damascus suburb of East Ghouta at just after 2 A.M.

I figured that with all the surveillance the United States has, if this was true, the firing of those rockets would have been detected. Presumably the confirmation reported by the New York Times, is the detection I was thinking of.

This last detail is further confirmation of the Syrian government’s guilt. Inspectors gathered evidence of sarin in the August 21 attacks in Ghouta. Rocket trajectories placed the point of origin of the deadly weapons at a base of the Syrian army. Israeli intelligence reportedly picked up “chatter” of the government’s usage of chemical agents. And American intelligence picked up the signatures of the rockets being fired.

MT @micahzenko: Iran crossed 7 redlines on its nukes. http://t.co/UftMx62AUh Why would Syria CW redline inform their decisionmaking at all?

— Council on Foreign Relations (@CFR_org) September 19, 2013

Together with yesterday’s post about Iran’s involvement in the Syrian civil war tie the Iranian regime – the power behind Iran’s Revolutionary Guards – to the Assad regime. Iran’s involvement in that war belies the moderate image cultivated by Iran’s new president but also ties Iran to a regime that uses weapons proscribed by international convention. What does that say about Iran’s likelihood of adhering to international standards and agreements when it comes to its own quest to develop nuclear weapons?

Rouhani's speech & video of Iranians training for Syria point to Iran's dueling interests. #ActionsLouderThanWords http://t.co/LtDKNs3ar0

— UANI (@UANI) September 17, 2013

Iran Continues to Support Assad’s Savagery under “Moderate” Rouhani

In recent weeks, the New York Times has been playing up the moderation of Iran’s new government, especially that of its new president Hassan Rouhani.

Yesterday’s editorial, President Rouhani Comes to Town ahead of Rouhani’s speech before the U.N. later this week, is one more element of that campaign.

All eyes at this week’s United Nations General Assembly will be on Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani. Since taking office in August, he has sent encouraging signals about his willingness to engage more constructively with the West than his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who insisted on proceeding with Iran’s nuclear program, denied the Holocaust and seemed unconcerned as his country slipped into deeper economic distress. Mr. Rouhani’s assembly address on Tuesday gives him a chance to provide concrete evidence that his talk of change is real.

https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/381099542533271553

Perhaps the most important article to appear last week in the media was Iranians Dial Up Presence in Syria in the Wall Street Journal (Google search terms)

The busloads of Shiite militiamen from Iraq, Syria and other Arab states have been arriving at the Iranian base in recent weeks, under cover of darkness, for instruction in urban warfare and the teachings of Iran’s clerics, according to Iranian military figures and residents in the area. The fighters’ mission: Fortify the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad against Sunni rebels, the U.S. and Israel. …

The fighters “are told that the war in Syria is akin to [an] epic battle for Shiite Islam, and if they die they will be martyrs of the highest rank,” says an Iranian military officer briefed on the training camp, which is 15 miles outside Tehran and called Amir Al-Momenin, or Commander of the Faithful.

The training of thousands of fighters is an outgrowth of Iran’s decision last year to immerse itself in the Syrian civil war on behalf of its struggling ally, the Assad regime, in an effort to shift the balance of power in the Middle East. Syria’s bloodshed is shaping into more than a civil war: It is now a proxy war among regional powers jockeying for influence in the wake of the Arab Spring revolutions.

Rouhani's speech & video of Iranians training for Syria point to Iran's dueling interests. #ActionsLouderThanWords http://t.co/LtDKNs3ar0

— UANI (@UANI) September 17, 2013

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