Month: October 2010

The Michigan Campaign for Liberty and the University of Michigan College Libertarians will host Antiwar.com Editorial Director Justin Raimondo in Ann Arbor on October 25, 2010 at 7pm. The free event, “War Without End: The Shame of the American Left,” will be held in the Michigan League Ballroom at 911 N. University at the Central Campus in Ann Arbor. You can also join the hosts and Raimondo at the sponsors dinner by purchasing tickets here. To book an event with Raimondo, please contact Wendy Honett wendy@antiwar.com.

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for October 20th, 2010:

The National: Mohamad Bazzi, former Middle East bureau chief for Newsday and current adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes while the Obama administration has portrayed Hezbollah as having questionable loyalties to Lebanon, the Shi’a political party plays a valuable role for Shiite community in Lebanon. “There is a long tradition of the Lebanese state leaving Shiites to fend for themselves and waiting for religious or charitable groups to fill the vacuum. […]Hizbollah’s “state within a state” was possible because successive governments left a void in the Shiite-dominated areas of southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley and the southern suburbs of Beirut.” He notes that while Hezbollah is reliant on Iran for financial, military and political support, it is mischaracterized as “purely an Iranian proxy” by western and Arab policy makers.

The Hill’s Congress Blog: Mark D. Wallace, President of United Against Nuclear Iran, opines that new U.S. sanctions, which took effect on September 29, “closes a significant loophole found in previous U.S. sanction provisions by covering not only U.S. companies and financial institutions but foreign firms and subsidiaries as well.” Wallace, a former ambassador to the UN and the Bush-Cheney ’04 Deputy Campaign Manager, argues against the criticism that the new sanctions law oversteps “extraterritoriality.” He concludes, “Iran’s flagrant defiance of international norms should be reason enough for corporations to cease their business dealings in Iran. Now the U.S. government is presenting companies with a reasonable choice should they refuse to do so: do business with Uncle Sam or with the mullahs in Tehran.”

The New York Times: Despite some distortions demonizing Iran, such as repeating the mistranslation Ahmadinejad’s statement that Israel should be “wiped off the map,” columnist Tom Friedman explicitly endorses linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other problems that hamper the U.S. in the Middle East. “At a time when the president has made it one of his top priorities to build a global coalition to stop Iran from making a nuclear weapon, he took the very logical view that if he could advance the peace process in the Middle East it would give him much greater leverage to get the Europeans and U.N. behind tougher sanctions on Iran,” writes Friedman. In light of this, he declares Israel is behaving like a “spoiled child,” pointing to that nation’s intransigence in the peace process.

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for October 19th, 2010:

Commentary: J.E. Dyer writes on the Contentions blog that Sunni Arabs are convinced Iran is taking over Iraq. He notes that Iraqi Sunnis in the Awakening movement are moving back into the insurgent camp because of this view, bolstered by fear of ending U.S. combat operations in Iraq. “In the absence of clear, assertive U.S. policy, we will find ourselves increasingly boxed in by the plans of opponents who want to make our policy for us. In many cases, the opponents will be terrorists,” he concludes.

National Review: Joel Rosenberg offers his theory behind Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Lebanon. Ahmadinejad’s aim, he writes, is “to rally the terrorist forces of Hezbollah for an apocalyptic war with the Jewish state that will set the stage for the coming of the Shia Islamic messiah known as the ‘Mahdi’ or the ‘Twelfth Imam.’” He says Iran and Hezbollah want to annihilate Israel and the United States. Rosenberg warns congressional Democrats and the president “don’t get it,” and that “Democrats have neither the wisdom nor the will to protect the American people or allies like Israel from the threat of Radical Islam,” and this may cost votes at the polls. He backs his views with findings from a poll commissioned by the neoconservative Emergency Committee for Israel and a historical overview.

Pajamas Media: Former AEI fellow and current Foundation for Defense of Democracies scholar Michael Ledeen writes about internal opposition to the Islamic Republic. “The regime would surely fall in short order if its opponents received a modicum of real support from the West, but no such support seems to be forthcoming from the feckless men and women who mistakenly fancy themselves to be real leaders,” he opines. His launching point to discuss discontent is the string of recent bombings against Iranian Revolutionary Guard facilities. He quotes an unnamed source that the most recently attacked facility is used to train terrorists: “According to a reliable Iranian source, the foreigners were being trained in the use of roadside bombs, the so-called IEDs that account for most American and other NATO casualties in Afghanistan.”

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for October 18th, 2010:

New York Post: Disgraced Iranian journalist Amir Taheri writes that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki “seems set to strike a Faustian bargain to cling to power: He is ready to dine with the devil.” Judging from the headline, “Iraq: Letting Iran Call the Shots,” the “devil” here is clearly Iran. Taheri, known to have fabricated stories in the past, makes errors in his Post article as well. He writes, “Tehran helped the deal by ordering its oldest Shiite clients, the so-called Supreme Islamic Assembly of Iraq [ISCI] (and its armed wing, the Badr Brigades), to back Maliki.” Historian Juan Cole noted that Badr “peeled away from it’s parent,” and that ISCI stayed out of Maliki’s coalition.

The Guardian: Michael Knights, a fellow at Washington Institute for Near East Policy, writes that “Tehran [has] become the most influential outside power in Iraq.” He says, however, that the issue is not closed: “Iran, like the United States, will have to continue to vie for influence in Iraq.” He assesses Iranian interests in Iraq and concludes, “Tehran seeks to prevent Iraq from recovering as a military threat or as a launchpad for an American attack.” He sees the Islamic Republic accomplishing this through trade, particularly energy, and influencing Iraq’s “ fragmented and unregulated” politics.

The Washington Post: A neoconservative editorial writer at the Post make a thinly-veiled call for regime change in Iran, writing that the Islamic Republic has “no interest in a ‘grand bargain’ with the United States or an accommodation with the Security Council… [A]s long as these rulers are in power, Iran will not give up its ambition to exercise hegemony over the Middle East.” Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Southern Lebanon is seen to demonstrate that “Tehran can use its client to trigger a new war in the Middle East at any time; it’s a lesser form of the intimidation that it hopes to exercise around the region with an arsenal of nuclear weapons.” This show of force is viewed as a deterrence against an Israeli or U.S. strike on Iran.

The Wall Street Journal: Senior Claremont Institute Fellow Mark Halperin writes that Israel’s unique experience as a country “repeatedly subjected to calls for its extinction” and “the steadily improving professionalism of the Arab air forces, their first rate American and European equipment, their surface-to-air-missile shield, and most importantly their mass,” pose a “mortal threat” to Israel’s existence. Halperin observes that “the military strategy of Israel’s enemies is now to alter the conventional balance while either equipping themselves with nuclear weapons or denying them to Israel, or both.” Saving a discussion of Israel’s own nuclear capabilities until the last sentence, Halperin concludes that the only source of security for a Jewish state under “a continual state of siege is the nuclear arsenal devoted solely to preserving its existence.”

Obama’s total capitulation to the military industrial complex and the War Party

there is not better evidence than his offer to fund with more billions of American dollars the useless missile shield to “protect” Europe against Iranian “attack” – idiotic presumptions that Iran mullahs are suicidal and crazy. America is Iran’s enemy, not Europe.

When we wonder why Obama has done nothing to cut even one of the 800 odd bases with American soldiers abroad, this is an example of even more crazy spending, never mind that he won his election because of Americans who oppose empire building and want peace.

see the Washington Post report

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for October 15th, 2010:

Foreign Policy: David Rothkopf charges that Roger Cohen’s recent New York Times op-ed totally disregards the threat posed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Instead, Rothkopf endorses Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren’s New York Times op-ed demanding Palestinian recognition of Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. “As unproductive as the Israeli stance on settlements has been, the Palestinian stance on the nature of the Israeli state, and its ability to continue operations as conceived and sanctioned by the United Nations nearly six and a half decades into its modern existence is just as unconstructive and indefensible,” writes Rothkopf. He concludes with a variation of the debunked reverse-linkage argument, arguing that “[Ahmadinejad’s] grandstanding and inflaming crowds on Israel’s borders with the language of obliteration is not just rhetoric. It is part of a systematic and thus far effective effort to exacerbate dangers and, not secondarily, to prolong the misery of the Palestinian people whose right to a free, independent state created in their own image is, of course, every bit as great as that of the Israelis.”

The Washington Times: Eli Lake writes that Ahmadinejad’s visit to Lebanon adds pressure to Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to withdraw his support of a UN investigation to determine who killed his father, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. “I think it’s clear that Ahmadinejad’s visit is intended to show support for Hezbollah at a time when it’s facing the prospect of indictments in the murder of Hariri and is engaged in a campaign to undermine and derail the tribunal,” said Ash Jain, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Lake’s article went to print before it was known whether Ahmadinejad would travel to the Israeli border—he did not—but he writes that such a visit “would signal Iran’s proxies were on Israel’s border.”

FrumForum: Brad Schaeffer, an energy derivatives broker writing for the blog of neoconservative pundit David Frum, lines up three scenarios (best, mid, and worst case) on what could happen to oil prices should Israel attack Iran’s nuclear installations. Best-case results in only a small, temporary spike in prices and the Iranian leadership uses the strike to turn the “military lemon into PR lemonade” by playing “victim” without retaliation. A mid-level escalation would result in small to medium spikes, for a more sustained period, and attacks against Western forces. Worst case would mean an all out war (and closing the Strait of Hormuz) and the doubling of oil prices from their current levels.

Time: Tony Karon describes Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s trip to Lebanon as emblematic of a U.S. policy failure in the region. The visit makes clear three difficult realities the U.S. is facing: “First, Iran is not nearly as isolated as Washington would like; secondly, the Bush Administration efforts to vanquish Tehran and its allies have failed; and, finally, the balance of forces in the region today prompts even U.S.-allied Arab regimes to engage pragmatically with a greatly expanded Iranian regional role.” Ahmadinejad met with Lebanon’s Christian president and Saudi-backed Sunni prime minister, notes Karon, and “he also appears to be placing a heavy stress on Lebanese unity and the need to avoid division” — rather than focus solely on Iran’s Hezbollah beneficiaries.