Richard Grenell takes to the e-pages of HuffingtonPost to say the following:

One year later Obama has single-handedly allowed the Iranians more than a year of unfettered progress toward a nuclear weapon with less pressure and inquiry from the international community. Even the slow-moving, state-the-obvious International Atomic Energy Agency announced this week that it fears Iran is working toward a nuclear warhead to go along with its undisclosed uranium enrichment activities. While Obama experimented with his classroom thesis of talking dictators out of their nuclear pursuits, many in the international community celebrated the fact that they weren’t being confronted by the United States with the lingering Iran problem. From Cairo to Berlin, the world celebrated Obama’s perceived world peace and even gave him the Nobel Prize. The Iranians, meanwhile, continued to build a nuclear weapon. While Obama did his world-wide victory lap, the Iranian Government celebrated their freedom. And although the United States has been negotiating with Iran for more than 30 years, Obama has been acting like this nation has never tried diplomacy. It is dangerous for a President to believe that his personality is so different from previous leaders’ that people will change their course of action just because of who is asking.

Since this sounds awfully John McCain-esque…

My friends, the Iranians are going to get a nuclear weapon.  Either that or they will reach a state like Canada and Japan where they have acquired de facto nuclear deterrence without actually building the bomb.  They just have to turn on the ol’ uranium coffee pot one morning and hit brew.

It doesn’t matter if Hillary Clinton or John McCain had won and pushed for tougher sanctions or whether “Professor” Obama talks with them.  The world is not a genie which submits to every wish the US makes.  I would call this reminder the foreign policy equivalent of The Secret.

My guess is that the Iranian regime has already reached a de facto state of ’soft’ deterrence in the region.  If the Israelis or US do indeed strike, it may well knock back their progress (which still appears to be quite far off from a bomb, but who knows?) towards a nuclear weapon, but it won’t stop it.  And if we do strike, the Iranians have multiple and very deadly ways of retaliating: e.g. cutting off the Straits of Hormuz;  oil price spikes; asymmetric attacks on US forces in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan; proxy attacks on Israel via Hezbollah and/or Hamas; potentially even terror attacks on Saudi Arabia via proxies in Yemen or through disaffected Shia elements in Saudi Arabia itself. Not to mention the Chinese and Russian reactions in the event of a US/Israeli strike.  Both countries could respond by making life very difficult for the US/NATO in Afghanistan.

The only chance (and I mean chance, not guarantee) the US ever had of derailing Iranian proliferation came early in the Bush administration. At the tail-end of President Khatami’s regime, the Reformer camp was apparently given the green light from Khamenei to make an offer for full negotiations: collaboration on terrorism, mutual recognition, nuclear disarmament, support for the invasion and aftermath of Iraq, etc.  The Bush administration completely ignored these overtures. Opinions will vary as to whether this was a good faith offer or not and whether the US was right to ignore it, but either way the course of events after the Iranian offer was rejected seems basically inevitable:  at that point, the Iranian regime had to acquire nuclear deterrence for the sake of self-preservation.

After which point, the Reformers were sidelined by Khamenei, forcing him (after some initial colddness) into the camp of Ahmadinejad and his allies.

If you want a much more knowledgeable and articulate piece on this topic, read this one from Robert Baer.

On Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton finally got around to acknowledging what a lot of people have known since Iran’s contested election last June — there’s been a military takeover in that country, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) grabbing every important lever of power. As Clinton put it during a televised town-hall meeting, “The Supreme Leader, the President [and] the parliament is being supplanted, and Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship.”

So instead of focusing, as too much US foreign policy coverage does (like Grenell’s schlock above), on what the president’s rhetoric is, we should examine the actual state of play in the other country.  In this case I agree substantially with Baer that what occurred since the botched (illegitimate) re-election of Ahmadinejad is that Khamenei and other clerics in the old guard have basically been forced to acquiesce to a soft military coup.  The Praetorian Revolutionary Guards are now the real power in Iran.   [Read more →]

Scott: So back in June, I wrote a post telling people to hold off judging what was going on in Iran when things first started to erupt after the elections and the installation of the current regime, it seemed to me that many bloggers were premature in assessing a situation they were so far away from and getting so much information about second hand. And yet, it is increasingly apparent that that revolution in Iran is not just sincere and groundbreaking, but that it is a major geo-political event that isn’t going anywhere.

Andrew Sullivan, who it should be noted has done an amazing job along with Patrick Appel and Chris Bodenner of providing among the best coverage on the unfolding of events in Iran, has called the response to the current regime’s crack down and the development of things on the ground, “a historic moment, the culmination of the biggest story of the year”. Increasingly I can’t but agree with him, though I offered my own missive about Sullivan’s enthusiasm around Iranian events. But Andrew does seem to have been correct and it strikes me that anyone who watches geo-political and military events with a keen eye should see the outcome in Iran as the most important happening since the US invasion of Iraq.

It is notable that even Obama now feels compelled to speak out against the crack down in much stronger language than anything close to what we’ve seen thus far. There does seem to be a perfect storm of momentum gathering around the future of Iran, thanks entirely to the bravery and blood of many, many Iranians, that, from a certain vantage, could have some pretty serious ramifications for the entire region, as I’ve been harping of late.

Chris: Some good points.

When the post-elections rioting took place in June I said that we had entered a situation in which The Reformers had “won” (i.e. totally de-legitimized the regime) and therefore were now about to face the real brutality. They had pushed the regime into a situation in which either the regime would have to back down and open the system OR they would have to become a completely brutal totalitarian regime and enter complete crackdown mode. Either way I thought the regime’s (halal?) goose was cooked. It was only a matter of time. Either way The Islamic Republic of Iran that had been the governing paradigm since 1979 was over.

I think the events taking place since the election and now have basically shown I was right (or at least not a complete idiot :). I still think history (and the future) is on the side of The Reformers, but there is no predicting when or where or what will be the final straw that breaks the camel’s back, nor exactly what will come out the other side of this political turmoil.

You mentioned Andrew and he linked to this piece suggesting a historic parallel to the Palestinian Intifada of 1987. I think that analogy has some merit to it, but I’ve always thought the best analogy is to Iran’s own 1979 Revolution. That Revolution took quite awhile. It went in cycles of flaring up and then (seemingly) dying down. This is why after the initial post-election protests in June and the bloody crackdown, I didn’t agree with (usually right-wing) US commentators saying “The Regime Won.”

So in that sense, I also wouldn’t automatically jump to over-estimating what the current round of protesting means. Of course, something could happen, something totally unexpected and miraculous that brings down the regime by January. That’s more or less how it happened with The Berlin Wall. But I think we are in for a much longer haul of constant protesting, civil disobedience, rioting, crackdowns and the like. I imagine it will ebb and flow but not end. I think The Reformers have reached a point where they will never give up. They may tactically lay low at different points, but there has been too much blood spilled at this point. [Read more →]

Here is Part 2 of last Sunday’s conversation between Chris and I. I’ve included about a minute of audio you’ve already heard to set the stage for where Chris goes. The audio is below the fold. [Read more →]

Reading through this story coming out of Iran, I find myself increasingly agreeing with Maziar Bahari about pressing engagement with Iran in terms of pointing out how the actions of the current government have “consequences”. As more and more stories like the aforementioned, along with Bahari’s Jon Stewart story come to light via the various people both inside and outside Iran pierce what remains of the veil of secrecy around Iranian culture/internal ongoings, I think we are exposed to a picture of a regime of rapidly vanishing legitimacy that is flailing in all directions to avoid/delay the inevitable.

To my mind, letting that process play out (ie. allowing the current regime to collapse under the weight of its own internal inconsistencies) while diplomatically gesturing towards the obviousness of the situation is the only sane best of all possible, if not far more challenging than it is often given credit, courses of action.

It remains true that throughout the Middle East there are real instances of attitudes and actions towards human rights that constitute reasonable causes for concern. While we might be in a place where most aren’t interested in making the Middle East over in the West’s image (were such a thing even possible), that doesn’t mean that we also cease to be concerned about the rights afforded women in Saudi Arabia or homosexuals in Dubai or the like. And if those reasonable concerns are to really be addressed and the security risks posed by animosity between the so-called “clash of civilizations” averted, then a real partner is needed in the Middle East.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, it makes sense to me that Iran represents the greatest possibility for that partner. [Read more →]

Michael Crowley ruins an otherwise good post on the Obama administration’s engagement with Russia over the Iranian nuclear program with this aside: [Read more →]

A nice vignette from the Grizzlies-Kings game (via):

Grizzlies center Hamed Haddadi , the first NBA player from Iran, and Omri Casspi, the first Israeli player in the league, met at midcourt and shook hands before the game.

[Read more →]

While spending 118 days in an Iranian prison accused of being a “Western spy”, Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari, who at the time was in Iran working for Newsweek, tells of the most bizarre moment of his captivity and torture at the hands of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard,

One day my interrogator told me that, ‘We have video evidence of you working as a spy,’ and then when he put the DVD of The Daily Show in the laptop, I just thought, ‘Oh my God.’

The myriad of arguments against torture aside, do pro-torture advocates really want to place themselves in the same camp as folks who can’t tell that The Daily Show is satire? If there is a more relevant argument to demonstrate why the mindset of folks who support torture is not worthy of American ideals and values, I’ve not seen it.

In all seriousness, though, Bahari’s full interview with CBC’s Nancy Durham (sorry, not able to embed it) is well worth the thirty-eight plus minutes of your time.

The comment that most caught my attention was when Bahari said that it was important that the West engage Iran so Iran understands there are consequences to its decisions. Think about that for a moment: a man who was imprisoned and tortured for 118 days on clearly fictional charges of espionage, who was told regularly that he would be executed without ever having the chance to see his unborn child, whose mind and spirit became so strained that he seriously contemplated suicide thinks that engagement with Iran is the right course of action.

Perhaps the “Obama is an appeaser because he wants to engage countries like Iran” meme will ease up a bit in light of Bahari’s commentary. Or perhaps they think Bahari himself is a pro-appeasement Manchurian candidate set loose by the Iranian government. Maybe they saw it on the Colbert Report…

Andrew Lee Butters has a really excellent piece in Time that tries to discern Iran’s thinking on the enrichment question.  Do read the whole thing:

The response to the nuclear deal could be an important test of the regime’s direction, because while its ideology demands rejection, its pragmatic interests may be best served by reaching an agreement…So while the deal is little more than a confidence-building mechanism, its failure could mean that the cold war between the U.S. and Iran that traverses much of the Middle East won’t stay cold for much longer.

The Leveretts (Flynt and Hillary Mann) have a NyTimes op-ed out on the Iranian situation in light of the revelation of the new nuclear site.

Dan Drezner it’s fair to say, he no likey the op-ed.  His broadside against Team Leverett here.

I’ll start with Drezner’s critique.

You know how so many in the blogosphere bitch and moan about the ability of neoconservatives to get their policy proposals published even after screwing up on Iraq?

I’m kind of curious how these people feel about Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett’s op-ed in the New York Times today about Iran.  I mean, this is a scant few months after they served as apologists for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after the controversial June election.  I guess the Leveretts know Gwen Pollard well.

The apologia for Ahmadinejad was indeed odious (and more importantly wrong).  So no defense of the indefensible on that point.  The Leveretts don’t help their own case by referring to the recent events in Iran as “hardly a cataclysmic event.” And accuse, falsely, the Obama administration of trying to use the elections to topple the Iranian regime (to which Drezner correctly gives a WTF?).

The brunt of Drezner’s claim is that they have taken this Ahmadi-apologetic stance to new highs (or lows I suppose) in regards to the upcoming talks with Iran. But then he goes on to say the article makes “no f***ing sense whatsoever.”  Which while colorful is not true. In the process Drezner I think misses some really insightful thinking on this subject.

The Leverett article makes a great deal of sense IF one has a different frame of mind about who runs the shows in Iran than Drezner does.

Here’s a ‘graf from the Leverett piece that Dan quotes:

American officials tend to play down Iranian concerns about American intentions, citing public messages from President Obama to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, as proof of the administration’s diplomatic seriousness. But Tehran saw these messages as attempts to circumvent Iran’s president — another iteration, in a pattern dating from Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal, of American administrations trying to create channels to Iranian “moderates” rather than dealing with the Islamic Republic as a system.

Drezner’s response:

Wow again.  See, I would view these exchanges with Khamenei as attempts to talk to the person with actual control over Iran’s nuclear program, as opposed to the guy who rants on and on about how the Holocaust was just a big myth.  Indeed, the Obama administration is “dealing with the Islamic Republic as a system” — and they are trying to talk to the people with genuine foreign policy power.  The Leveretts, on the other hand, seem to be convinced that the only way to talk with Iran is through Ahmadinejad.

Now this notion that Khamenei is the man in charge was correct for a long time, but it is unclear that it is any longer the case.  Since the (fraudulent) election, Khamenei may no longer be in power.  The real power very likely now lies with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) whom Ahmadinejad is the mouthpiece for.  At the very least if Supreme Leader (perhaps now ironically written) Khamenei is not a puppet then he has certainly hitched his political wagon completely to Ahmadinejad.  He gave up any shred of neutrality/legitimacy he had remaining by so quickly pronouncing Mahmoud the winner of the Presidential election.

So the Leveretts’ contacts with Ahmadinejad–apologetic mouthpieces or not–are very likely giving us access to the actual thinking of the regime.  Again can’t know that for sure, but it’s very probable (and certainly makes some f’in sense at the very least).  If Ahmadinejad is the mouthpiece for the IRGC and the Leveretts are the mouthpiece for Ahmadinejad then you get the drift….(Socrates is mortal and it may actually help to listen to this point of view when deciding on a course of action).

What the Leveretts are ultimately arguing is that sanctions against Iran will not work.  If you read Dan’s piece he’s more open to the idea that they will.  I’m probably more in the Leverett camp on this one.  The Leveretts are also correct that this upcoming meeting with Iran will not involve an actual diplomatic offer but rather an ultimatum.  The ‘offer’ such as it is, is entirely based on the principle of “we’re in charge, if you follow our rules and play nice, then you’ll get some goodies.”  We’ll see, but I have a hard time imagining that will work, new nuclear site revealed or no.

Meaning I think at this point continuing down the sanctions route (which I believe has little to no chance to succeed) will inevitably lead to one of two outcomes:  war or a nuclear armed Iran.  For a long time, I’ve thought the second option the likely one, but my fear is that by ratcheting up on the sanction and Axis of Evil path oh this last decade, and all the declarations about never being able to live with a nuclear-armed Iran is tipping the balance towards the first option. [Read more →]

Does this finally and adequately demonstrate that John McCain’s and the still prevailing neocon Cold War mentality is hopelessly out of date? Please?! How long will it be before we regularly hear comments to the effect of, “No Grandpa, the Russians are our friends now…” (h/t: Sullivan)

This is Sec. Clinton on Meet the Press last week. The first 30 minutes or so is worth the watch as it is focused on foreign policy and her role as Sec. of State.  The last bit is fluffero related to her thoughts on Obama’s opinon on Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s arrest, whether she will run for President again, and whether she likes Obama or not.

And the trademark Hillary laugh-cle (laugh/cackle for those keeping score at home) makes an appearance as does Hillary telling countries of the world they are very naughty children and Mama Hillary will put them in their right place (in this case about North Korea).

So be it.  She’s clear, she is well versed in the subjects she is attending to, and clearly has a more substantial seat the Executive Table than any Secretary of State probably has since Albright or very possibly James Baker, the last Secretary of State who actually knew what he was doing.

But in the end this is (unsurprising given the individual) more evidence that Obama’s foreign policy is basically Clinton Foreign Policy redux.  It’s America as Indispensable Nation.  She in fact all but says the phrase in minute 29:  “America cannot solve all the world’s problems alone, but the world cannot solve it’s problems without the United States.”

Actually Madam Secretary, depending on thet problem, it very well might be able to solve (some) of it’s problems minus the US.

Now it’s certainly better that the US takes seriously the role of other nations and isn’t replicating the first term of Bush II with its arrogance and wanton disregard for much of world opinion.  And certainly to be fair to Obama & Clinton, they are still dealing with the aftermath of the awful failures of Bush’s administration.  A process that itself began under George W. Bush circa 2006 with the firing of Rumsfeld, the hiring of Sec. Bob Gates, the more nuanced response (than a John McCain) to the Russian-Georgian war, and the signing of the Security Agreement with Iraq calling for the timetable for withdrawal (i.e. Obama’s campaign policy).  I know it’s sorta chic to say Obama is Bush’s third term, but that cuts both ways.  It would just as accurate, I think even more so, to say that really the second half of Bush’s second term was the beginning of Obama’s first term foreign policy-wise.

In terms of Af-Pak as now “Obama’s War”, you can’t say he didn’t make perfectly clear during his campaign that he was going to ramp in those areas.

In the end, though the Obama Team still sees the US as the lone superpower and all the rest of the countries in the world as responsible to what we declare.  Now they are clearly bigger fans than the prior administration of creating diplomatic “coalitions of the willing” to put pressure on said countries, but fundamentally the view is the US is in the right, is the moral leader and lodestar geopolitically and everyone else must conform to that standard (and receive goodies) or face pressure (mostly in the form of sanctions with this administration).

We have gone from a (lone) hyperpower world, to a hyper-polar one.  

Given that the kind of foreign policy from the US I would like to see is a ways off, if ever, this is about the best I can hope for (which isn’t saying all that much sadly) in the interim.

Given the recent uproar over this article defending the Iranian election results,* I think it’s important to distinguish between those of us who see a realistic, restrained foreign policy as the best way to promote both human dignity and American interests abroad and people who view the United States’ posture through a strictly amoral lens, with no thought to the interests and aspirations of foreign peoples.

So yes, I deplore the assertion that “[T]he Iranian government responded to the post-June 12 protests in a manner consistent with its own constitutional procedures.” Any measures responsible for killing nearly 250 people over the past 10 days cannot be justified by vague allusions to constitutional protocol. Like Freddie, I think we can acknowledge the profound gulf between our perspectives and the views of the Iranian protesters while sympathizing with their efforts and admiring their courage.

When I think of “realism,” I think of an analytical tool that encourages restraint, acknowledges other states’ legitimate interests, and generally recognizes the value of engagement while rejecting false moral equivalence. Its current usage, however, implies an amoral perspective that is only concerned with maximizing American interests. Non-interventionists and other skeptics of an expansive American role abroad have, in my view, been unfairly tarred with this brush. In fact, I think it’s more appropriate to attach the term (and all that it implies) to interventionists like National Review’s Andy McCarthy – someone who forthrightly acknowledges his lack of concern for the aspirations of Iranian demonstrators – or John Derbyshire, who coined the phrase “to hell with them hawks” to describe his fondness for no-strings-attached punitive military expeditions.

These commentators are “realists” in the sense that they believe in maximizing American interests and are generally unconcerned the interests and aspirations of foreign countries. They share a certain skepticism of expansive overseas commitments with non-interventionists, but this skepticism does not extend to any broader disenchantment with American military power. They also seem to reject international engagement or diplomacy of any kind, something that is entirely foreign to non-interventionists who favor peaceful economic and diplomatic cooperation with countries like Iran.

I’m not sure which side deserves the term “realist,” but those of us who favor peaceful engagement with oppressive regimes in the hopes of reducing regional tensions, fostering greater cooperation, and eventually inducing political change don’t deserve to be put in the same camp as narrow-minded advocates of American military power.

*As to the substance of the article, the authors may well be right about the election results. That certainly doesn’t justify the regime’s brutal response to peaceful protests, however.