Change you can’t beleive in

12Jan09

The auguries are poor that President Obama will engage in a significant shift of policy toward Iran in the first months of his new Administration.  As noted by Glenn Greenwald in Salon, his recent public statements reflect that he has fully signed on the mainstream rejection of the 2007 NIE’s statement that Iran was not currently engaging in a nuclear weapons program.  Instead, together with the overwhelming sentiment in Congress, Obama takes as a given that Iran is moving as quickly toward the development of atomic weapons as is feasibly possible despite years of IAEA inspections on the ground.  All this happens even though there has been no hard evidence to back up this claim.

 

Greenwald reports:                

President-elect Barack Obama in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:

Iran is going to be one of our biggest challenges and as I said during the campaign we have a situation in which not only is Iran exporting terrorism through Hamas, through Hezbollah but they are pursuing a nuclear weapon that could potentially trigger a nuclear arms race.

The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, the consensus opinion of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies:

We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.

Naturally, Stephanopolous asked Obama — as any competent, professional journalist would — to explain why he disagreed with the findings of the intelligence community and of the international inspectors on the ground:

STEPHANOPOULOS: And you have to do something about it in your first year.

 

So it goes.  There’s usually no shortage of people willing to defend Obama’s statements and explain what he really means.

 

This attitude dangerously parallels President Kennedy’s view of Cuba when he took office in January 1961 as a Soviet satellite.  This unthinking, uncritical view caused Kennedy to sign off on the disastrous Bay of Pigs adventure later in 1961, which in turn precipitated the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

 

Kaveh Afrasiabi identifies the problem as on of “centrality”, namely a dominant hegemonistic view toward Middle Eastern issues and events in a some hypothetical “even handed” but ultimately favoring the status quo , free markets and resource domination, and established order.  Afrasiabi reviews the December 2008 Brookings Institute publication Restoring the Balance which was critiqued in this blog a number of weeks ago, and reaches the same conclusions.  Apart from acknowledging that some incremental, non-punitive diplomacy with Iran is now in order, there is nothing in this latest mainstream ‘moderate’ study that challenges the fundamental American mid-set that the Islamic Republic is developing a nuclear weapon and exporting terrorism. 

 

However, the trouble is that beyond the semantics of “reorientation” and “major adjustments”, there is little to suggest that the proposed strategies contain the necessary ingredients in terms of their content to match their seductive appearance; the book’s title is a misnomer and the centrality attached to Iran’s nuclear and other threats reflects an unreconstructed diplomatic mindset that, if implemented by the next president, will inevitably culminate in the extension of the present status quo of stalemated relations between US and Iran for the foreseeable future. 

 

The authors’ self-checkmating of their noble effort to instigate a sea change in Middle East policy is mainly due to the common theme that binds the chapters, the primacy of Iran’s threat, as a result of which the entire edifice of “new diplomacy” or “game-changing diplomacy” falls by the wayside and gets devoured by the corrosive influence of diplomatic atrophy; this even applies to the contribution by Ray Takeyh, who espouses the lofty notion of a US-Iran rapprochement. Takeyh’s recycling of the other authors’ Iranophobic false assumption that Tehran is on the march toward nuclear weapons, and thus represents a clear and present danger of nuclear proliferation, ultimately undermines his arguments in favor of rapprochement.

But the blame for the rather egregious shortcoming of this book, giving it a distinct alarmist flavor, belongs to the lead authors, Richard Haass and Martin Indyk, whose adamant calls for “renewed emphasis on diplomacy as a tool of American foreign policy” is ill-matched with their blatant Iranophobia: “By the time the next president enters the Oval Office the hands of Iran’s nuclear clock will be approaching midnight.” This leads the authors to advise the next US president to pursue the “military option” that “should be explored closely for what it could accomplish”. Sound familiar?

Haass and Indyk naturally do not limit themselves to Iran’s nuclear threat and, instead, perceive this as part of a broader Iranian “challenge to the existing order”. They blame the Bush administration’s “mishandling of Iraq and Afghanistan” that has ostensibly “opened the door to an Iranian bid for regional primacy”, accuse Iran of following a hegemonic “my way works” policy and promise that if the next president listens to their advice then “considerable American influence can be recouped” and the US president will be “able to say that ‘America’s way works”.

Clearly, the book’s intention is to restore American hegemony in the Middle East and design a better strategy for dealing with the native anti-hegemonic forces in the region.

This is rather unfortunate and quite simply will not help US national interests that are currently bedeviled by the pursuit of hegemonic policies in the Middle East and beyond. Washington requires a post-hegemonic worldview at the White House, not the neo-hegemonic attitude put forward by the likes of Haass and Indyk, prescriptions that in the final analysis are a recipe for disaster. For instance, the necessity of furthering the Middle East peace process and addressing the Palestinian “issue” has been relegated behind the top priority status assigned to the Iran threat.  And what exactly does the nature of this threat consist of? Answer: Iran’s “breakout capability”, the fact that Tehran is on the verge of being “capable of producing large amounts of weapons grade fuel”. In turn, this raises a pertinent question: does Iran’s latent potential represent a grave threat when there are objective mechanisms in place that tie its hands and restrict its ability to turn manifest or reach its latent potential?

Unfortunately, neither Haass nor Indyk nor Gary Samore, another contributor who is a vocal voice of the anti-Iran lobby group United Against Nuclear Iran, bother with such questions. The failure to do so undermines their false assumptions about Iran’s breakout capability. Nor do they bother to delve into the specifics of Iran-International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) cooperation, or the fact that, per the admission of an IAEA official quoted in a recent report by Anthony Cordesman and Khalid Al-Rodham, “the biggest smoking gun that anyone was waving is now eliminated” as per the conclusions of the recent Work Plan that addressed Iran’s six “outstanding issues”.

Add to this the fact that Thomas Fingar, the number two US intelligence official and deputy assistant secretary of state for intelligence, has recently admitted, in his interview with the Washington Times, that “I stand by that estimate”, which appeared in the November 2007 US Intelligence Estimate on Iran (NIE). The NIE report stated that Iran’s nuclear program has been peaceful since 2003 and that “Iran has not diverted its nuclear activities to a nuclear program.”

Fingar should receive a medal of honor for his bravery, standing up to all the heat applied on the US intelligence community to either recant or revise its conclusion. Thus another question: why didn’t the NIE report cite Iran’s uranium enrichment activities as evidence of weapons proliferation, just as a number of US pundits such as Henry Kissinger, who has criticized the NIE report precisely on this point, have done?

The answer is straightforward. In the absence of any smoking gun or evidence of military diversion, no US intelligence official in his or her right mind could appease Kissinger and others in light of the legality of Iran’s nuclear program under the articles of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). But, perhaps, with Fingar stepping down, we must await a worse replacement, someone willing to stoop below the NPT standards and flat out accuse Iran of engaging in nuclear proliferation due to its mere involvement in enrichment activities. If so, then this would be nothing short of another giant step backward for US diplomacy, much as it may satisfy the likes of Haass and Indyk.

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