Tag: Iran

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Eli Lake is the senior national security correspondent for Newsweek/Daily Beast. For more on the Israel-Iran standoff, read Eli’s story on the informal “security cabinet”, or octet, that may decide Israel’s actions:

Israeli law requires that major national-security decisions, like signing peace accords or ordering airstrikes, must receive a majority vote in either the full cabinet or a smaller ministerial committee on national security—a panel comprising half the ministers of the full cabinet. … [I]n practice, the decision of the octet is most vital.

Previous videos of Eli here, here and here. “Ask Anything” archive here.

Bob Wright worries that the P5+1 talks may falter because of excessive Western caution on lifting some sanctions as part of an incremental dismantling of Iran's nuclear weapon capabilities. His suggestion?

One EU sanction–the embargo on Iranian oil that's scheduled to take effect in July–is tailor made for this occasion. The sanctions "relief" could just assume the form of delaying the onset of the embargo by a few months. Then if Iran didn't deliver on its commitments, the embargo would kick in automatically; enduring relief from the embargo would require additional EU action, contingent on demonstrated Iranian compliance. (This would in that sense be sanctions "relief" in which the default is set to "distrust".)

It is not surrender or appeasement to find ways to nudge a regime away from its worst temptations, when you have already forced it into a corner of sanctioned misery. A little relief in return for ending uranium enrichment at 20 percent levels and sending the rest abroad seems sensible to me.

It's far too soon to tell. But the omens are good:

The head of the UN nuclear agency, Yukiya Amano, has said an agreement would be signed "quite soon" with Iran to allow an investigation into claims it had tried to develop nuclear weapons.

And, whatever they bluster in public, the Israelis are getting saner:

Though Israel has been expressing zero flexibility regarding a possible deal with Iran, Defense Minister Ehud Barak a few weeks ago issued a written statement that Israel would consent to Iran's continuing enrichment of uranium to a low level of 3.5 percent, as well as to allowing a few hundred kilograms of 3.5-percent enriched uranium to remain in that country.

Know hope.

A fascinating report:

The Arab world's median age is 22, Iran's is 27; Western Europe's, by contrast, is near 40. High levels of Internet and satellite television penetration, with their pervasive pornography, coupled with the region's youthful demographics, have accentuated the Muslim Middle East's fraught relationship with sexuality. Google Trends, which monitors searches from around the world, shows that of the seven countries that most frequently search the word "sex" on Google, five are Muslim and one (India) has a large Muslim minority. Google Insights, another trend spotter, shows that the most rapidly rising search term for Iranians so far in 2012 has been "Golshifteh Farahani," a popular exiled actress who in January posed topless for the French magazine Madame Figaro.

Giandomenico Picco, who successfully negotiated to secure the release of several Western hostages held by Hezbollah some time ago, enlightens us about some hidden history:

In these days of unending articles about inevitable war against Iran and bellicose declarations by various leaders who seem unable to lead without an enemy, it is important to note that over the past three decades, Iran and the West have negotiated at least 12 times—including my own experiences and those directly related to me by others. In almost all these cases, there were positive results.

One can hope. Jacques Hymans fits Iran into a broader pattern of nuclear programs failing from managerial incompetence:

The historical record strongly indicates that the more a state has conformed to the professional management culture generally found in developed states, the less time it has needed to get its first bomb and the lower its chances of failure. Conversely, the more a state has conformed to the authoritarian management culture typically found in developing states, the more time it has needed to get its first bomb and the higher its chances of failure…

In a study of Iranian human-resource practices, the management analysts Pari Namazie and Monir Tayeb concluded that the Iranian regime has historically shown a marked preference for political loyalty over professional qualifications. “The belief,” they wrote, “is that a loyal person can learn new skills, but it is much more difficult to teach loyalty to a skilled person.” This is the classic attitude of authoritarian managers. And according to the Iranian political scientist Hossein Bashiriyeh, in recent years, Iran’s “irregular and erratic economic policies and practices, political nepotism and general mismanagement” have greatly accelerated. It is hard to imagine that the politically charged Iranian nuclear program is sheltered from these tendencies.

A reader writes:

The latest "Ask Jennifer Rubin Anything" is a real doozy. She uses most of the two minutes making the sensible point that no, we can't know for sure that Iran has nuclear weapons. I expected her to explain why we should bomb anyway, but her last sentence was a real masterpiece. Here it is, transcribed:

I think the notion that we know all things at all times that are going on within a very closed, very secretive society is frankly wishful thinking on the part of some people who are simply looking for yet another excuse to not take decisive action against what I think and what many people think is the primary national security threat that our country is facing.

Wow. Somehow, and I can't understand how, she takes the reasonable skepticism about whether Iran is building nuclear weapons (not to mention what they'd do if they got them) and turns it into a point against those who don't want to bomb Iran! Critics of preemptive war are "looking for yet another excuse not to take decisive action." (I get the sense that she knows something's amiss from her facial expression at the end of the interview.) Can anyone explain this, or is it just intellectual thuggery?

Another is also incredulous:

Am I the only one who thinks that this is totally crazy? In what other areas of our life are we taught not to learn from past mistakes, and instead are actively encouraged to repeat them because to not do so would be a sign of excuse-making, or weakness, or … what, exactly? Honestly this way of thinking is so foreign to me that I can't begin to understand how a smart woman like Rubin could come to believe it. Is she so blinded by her hatred of Iran that she is willing to throw reason out with the trash? Or is this how she views decision making in her other parts of her life? Would she seriously encourage her child, if he or she had touched a hot plate and been hurt, to touch the hot plate again because to do otherwise is just "looking for yet another excuse" to not carry the plate?

Not having much familiarity with Rubin's other political positions, I have to believe it's the former and that Iran is a special case. But if she bases her political philosophy on such faulty reasoning, how can she ever be trusted?

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Read Rubin’s blog, Right Turn, here. Recent Dish links featuring Rubin here, here and here. Video archive here.

by Zack Beauchamp

Laura Rozen plays down expectations:

Few analysts I spoke to expected the day-long Istanbul talks to be sufficient time to hammer out any sort of agreement. They suggested that Western negotiators may be looking to Istanbul as an opportunity to observe Iranian negotiators’ body language and see if there is receptivity for further meetings in the coming weeks.

Gary Sick expects the sanctions to determine the outcome:

In a way, it will be a race to see who is hurt the most by sanctions. They are aimed at Iran, of course, but they will also have a direct impact on the price of oil – which means the price of gasoline and its ripple effects on economies that are already vulnerable as they struggle to recover from the recent recession. President Obama is gambling that Iran will be hurt most, and soonest, leading to concessions. But the damage of higher oil prices to Western economies could have equal or even greater negative impact on our own economies at a very delicate moment. 

Reza Marashi and Ali Reza Eshraghi compile historical evidence about when and why Khamenei has been willing to compromise with the West.

by Patrick Appel

Nope:

The vast majority of the Arab public does not believe that Iran poses a threat to the "security of the Arab homeland." Only 5 percent of respondents named Iran as a source of threat, versus 22 percent who named the U.S. The first place was reserved for Israel, which 51 percent of respondents named as a threat to Arab national security.

Arab societies differed modestly in their answers: The largest percentage viewing Iran as a threat was reported in Lebanon and Jordan (10 percent) and the lowest (1 percent or less) was reported in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Mauritania, and the Sudan. Even when respondents were asked about the state that poses the greatest threat to their particular country, the pattern held: Iran (7 percent), U.S. (14 percent), and Israel (35 percent). Interestingly, while Saudi Arabia is often cited as the primary Arab state in support of belligerence against Iran, the data indicate that this view doesn't seem to extend to its public. In the Saudi Arabian sample, only 8 percent believed that Iran presents a threat — a lower percentage even than that which viewed the U.S. as a source of threat (13 percent).