Month: January 2012

There was a long list of sanctions already imposed on Iran before this latest round from the U.S., and now that Obama’s diplomats have been successful in pressuring the European Union to ban the import of Iranian crude oil and block trade in other markets like precious metals, the Iranian people are suffering.

In this piece at CNN, entitled “Sanctions take toll on ordinary Iranians,” its clear that these measures are impoverishing the people instead of having any effect on the Iranian government. Jobs are being lost because the oil sector is weakened, rampant inflation (caused by sanctions targeted on the central bank) have pushed the price of meat and milk up 50 percent. In response, Iran has “increased bank interest rates” and plans to “restrict sales of foreign currency, hoping to halt a spiraling currency crisis after new Western sanctions accelerated a dash for dollars by Iranians worried about their economic future.”

“People are buying less because the prices have gone up,” Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiari said. “That affects the shopkeepers. It’s a vicious cycle.” An Iranian interviewed for the piece says, “People are hungry and this is why crime has gone up.” Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian-American Council and author of A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran, told CNN, “The government always has the ability to circumvent sanctions and shift the burden onto the population.”

What’s notable is that the Obama administration definitely knows that sanctions are hurting the population and are unlikely to effect the policies of Tehran (which, to recap, are to develop nuclear power, as is their right, and to signal to their antagonistic adversaries that they’re technologically capable of getting nuclear weapons without actually developing them). So why impose them?

Listening to congressional supporters of sanctions, you’d think the sole reason is a sadistic urge to harm innocent Iranians. As one of the top supporters of sanctions, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), said, “Critics [of the sanctions] argued that these measures will hurt the Iranian people.  Quite frankly, we need to do just that.” Or take Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY): “The goal … is to inflict crippling, unendurable economic pain over there. Iran’s banking sector — especially its central bank — needs to become the financial equivalent of Chernobyl: radioactive, dangerous and most of all, empty.”

The administration’s view, at least as reported, is more nuanced. An initial version of a Washington Post article this month reported an anonymous U.S. official claiming that the purpose of the sanctions is regime change. The Post later revised the report, supposedly clarifying that the official said the purpose was to “create hate and discontent at the street level so that the Iranian leaders realize that they need to change their ways.” But as I said, they know that’s very unlikely to happen. They’re doing it anyways, I suspect, to satisfy pressures from Israel, AIPAC, and Congress and avoid Obama being painted as a wussy. This is an election year, after all.

Making ordinary people suffer and struggle for jobs and for food so that one can protect one’s political capital isn’t the most evil thing in the world, but it’s pretty high up on the list.

From a new Congressional Research Service report, American casualties soar in Afghanistan since Obama took over:

Afghan civilian casualties, although the numbers are less solid than DoD’s tracking of Americans killed, have also skyrocketed under Obama’s surge. See here for the estimates. Hard to match this up with Obama’s claim that “the tide of war is receding.”

Robert Wright talks with Mikhael Manekin of Breaking the Silence:

U.S. policy in the last couple of presidential eras has demonstrated complete acceptance of North Korea’s megalomaniacal leadership attaining nuclear weapons. In 2003 though, make-believe weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq were enough of a threat to start an illegal war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, cost unfathomable amounts of money, and is still wreaking havoc on Americans, Iraqis, and the region. And now again, a nuclear program in Iran that everybody agrees has no military component is worth the world’s most crippling sanctions, provocative militarism, and outright calls for preemptive war.

Without endorsing the whole thing, Micah Zenko at CFR:

As it turned out, the existence of several North Korean nuclear weapons were both tolerable and acceptable to the Bush administration. The collective weight of the Six Party Talks, economic sanctions, and positive incentives in the form of fuel oil or security guarantees failed to convince the North Korean regime to abandon their nuclear program and accept intrusive verification. As Arthur Brown, CIA East Asian division chief during the first term of the Bush administration, asked pointedly: “If you were Kim [Jong-il], would you give up the only thing that has protected your regime from collapse?”

Although former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld placed two dozen B-52 bombers and B-1 bombers on high alert to deter “opportunism,” the Bush administration never seriously considered a preemptive attack on North Korean nuclear facilities for a number of reasons: the military was busy with regime change in Iraq; South Korean citizens would have borne the brunt of retaliatory artillery and rocket attacks; and there were no guarantees that airstrikes would effectively destroy the plutonium or any assembled nuclear warheads. As a Bush administration official readily acknowledged in December 2002: “I’m not saying we don’t have military options. I’m just saying we don’t have good ones.”

There are of course two things that make Washington ambivalent towards the nukes of the psychotic authoritarian North Korean government and at the same time preemptively outraged and bombastic towards the civilian nuclear programs of Iraq and Iran: Israel and oil.

As prominent voices in the U.S. pontificate about a looming nuclear bomb in Iran, as fleets of U.S. navy warships demonstrate provocative militarism in the Persian Gulf, and as Israel uses its committed constituency in America to push for a preemptive military strike, war with Iran seems ever closer. But even someone as deeply concerned as I am about attacking Iran (on false pretenses no less), can recognize that there is significant aversion within official circles to doing such a thing. The problem is, these “antiwar-with-Iran” voices are still squarely in the threaten, provoke, sanction, and covertly attack Iran camp. The debate is limited to those who want to recklessly bomb Iran to smithereens and those who would rather stick to secret, small-scale war.

The calls for war are ubiquitous. Even if its an attempt to throw red meat to the Republican base, you have top GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney consistently pledging he would “prepare for war” with Iran, that he would “put together a plan to show Iran that we have the capacity to remove them militarily from their plans to have nuclear weaponry.” Gingrich has approximately the same position. Rick Santorum is worse, saying he wouldn’t stop at just “degrading [Iran’s nuclear] facilities through airstrikes,” but that he would also “say to any foreign scientist that’s going into Iran to help on their [nuclear] program, you will be treated like an enemy combatant, like an al-Qaida member.”

Mark Helprin in the Wall Street Journal recently wrote that any President “fit for the office” should “order the armed forces of the United States to attack and destroy the Iranian nuclear weapons complex” (via lobelog). Former CIA director James Woolsey and Reagan administration National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane recently hinted war was necessary in the National Review that “Although much damage to that infrastructure is possible with air strikes, it is also true that if the regime is left intact it will exploit any attack limited to nuclear installations to rally the nation behind the regime.” Former Bush administration ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton said on Fox News that “half-measures like assassinations or sanctions are only going to produce the crisis more quickly. The better way to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons is to attack its nuclear weapons program directly.” Matthew Kroenig, Georgetown professor and fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs, the title of which said it all: “Time to Attack Iran.”

But this heedless chorus for war is not unified. There are many prominent figures in both the U.S. and Israeli military and intelligence communities that are pushing back, saying loudly that we should not attack Iran because it would be both premature and a bloody, expensive catastrophe. This fact may prevent or delay a military strike on Iran, despite all of the war hype going on for the past few weeks. The problem is that while these people are arguing against war, none of them are arguing for peace.

In response to Kroenig’s piece in Foreign Affairs, Colin Kahl, who was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense of the Middle East until December, wrote his own entitled “Not Time to Attack Iran.” But he also thinks that the “forty thousand U.S. troops” that are “stationed in the Gulf, accompanied by strike aircraft, two aircraft carrier strike groups, two Aegis ballistic missile defense ships, and multiple Patriot antimissile systems” should perhaps be “supplemented by a limited forward deployment of nuclear weapons and additional ballistic missile defenses.” Nice. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, too, has warned against attacking Iran on the grounds that it would have disastrous unintended consequences for the region. But he also has said that U.S. military presence surrounding Iran and particularly in the Gulf will not change. Former Israeli Mossad chief Mier Dagan has argued that going to war with Iran preemptively would be disastrous to life, treasure, and security, and Ehud Barak has said an attack on Iran is “far off” but neither has spoken out about the current militaristic postures. Former CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) chief Gen. Michael Hayden on Thursday  argued against attacking Iran, saying it “would guarantee that which we are trying to prevent — an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon and that would build it in secret.” He followed up by explicitly endorsing the violent covert actions against Iran, including supporting proxies inside Iran to destabilize the regime.

These are the parameters within which it is acceptable to talk about U.S. foreign policy towards Iran, and in general. The prospect of war with Iran is so glaringly obvious that even the sociopathic jingoes in the American foreign policy and military establishment recognize it would be a calamity. But that can only go so far: there is an unabashed consensus supporting the actions that are currently paving the road to war. Everybody in officialdom believes we ought to be garrisoning Iran’s surroundings with troops and weaponry, undermining Iran’s civilian nuclear program through aggressive covert action, crippling the economy with sanctions, and supporting rebels inside Iran that aim at regime change. These policies have led us to our current precarious position on the cusp of war. The limits of debate are so narrow so as to only allow room for (1) advocates of war and (2) advocates of policies that will probably lead to war. What is the likely outcome?

Daily Beast: