Month: March 2012

This week’s meeting between Obama and Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu was said to have ended more cordially than their last face-to-face. And Netanyahu does seem to have cooled his calls for war and threats to attack Iran even without notifying the U.S. After all, Iran doesn’t even have a nuclear weapons program.

According to Marc Ambinder, this is because Obama shared with Bibi “the U.S.’s significantly ramped-up American covert sabotage and non-proliferation campaign” inside Iran, calming his fears of an impending nuclear weapon. Ambinder says “the CIA’s ops arm, the National Clandestine Service, along with the U.S. military” are “scrutinizing and seizing cargo shipments bound for Iran, tapping the black market for nuclear supplies and buying up spare parts, and maximizing the collection of Iranian signal traffic.” One primary type of intelligence the U.S. has on Iran’s nuclear program is what is called “measurement and signature intelligence,” or MASINT. These are “sensors on satellites, drones, and on the ground” measuring “everything from the electromagnetic signatures created by testing conventional missile systems to disturbances in the soil and geography around a hidden nuclear facility to streams of radioactive particles that are byproducts of the uranium enrichment process.” The U.S. “knows what Iran has and doesn’t have,” says Ambinder.

Ambinder’s account of covert intelligence gathering conforms to a report from the New Yorker‘s Seymour Hersh in May of last year. Hersh reported that for years “soldiers from the Joint Special Operations Force, working with Iranian intelligence assets” went directly into Iran to set these systems up.

Street signs were surreptitiously removed in heavily populated areas of Tehran – say, near a university suspected of conducting nuclear enrichment – and replaced with similar-looking sings implanted with radiation sensors. American operatives, working undercover, also removed bricks from a building or two in central Tehran that they thought housed nuclear enrichment activities and replaced them with bricks embedded with radiation-monitoring devices.

High-powered sensors disguised as stones were spread randomly along roadways in a mountainous area where a suspected underground weapon site was under construction. The stones were capable of transmitting electronic data on the weight of the vehicles going in and out of the site; a truck going in light and coming out heavy could be hauling dirt – crucial evidence of evacuation work. There is also constant satellite coverage of major suspect areas in Iran and some American analysts were assigned the difficult task of examining footage in the hope of finding air vents – signs, perhaps, of an underground facility in lightly populated areas.

Ambinder’s piece doesn’t get deep into the sabotage elements of the covert war on Iran, but we of course know that the Stuxnet computer virus that infected Iran’s nuclear facilities and broke a bunch of their equipment was a U.S. project and that the U.S. has sold broken equipment to Iran through third parties in international markets. Incidentally, Ambinder notes, while the U.S. is sharing all this top secret information with Israel, Israel isn’t sharing anything with us. “Often,” he writes, “the U.S. government finds out about explosions that kill Iranian scientists at the same time as the world press does.” Apparently Bibi doesn’t feel comfortable divulging Israeli proxy terrorism with Obama.

Aside from being a war-monger, Senator Lindsey Graham has poor eyesight. No matter how much he squints, he has never seen fault in U.S. foreign policy (unless, of course, it hasn’t been sufficiently interventionist for him). But somehow circumstances have developed so that Graham can see the futility of the war in Afghanistan while managing to blame others, instead of the U.S.

Josh Rogin reports:

“If the president of the country can’t understand how irrational it is to expect us to turn over prisoners and if he doesn’t understand that the night raids have been the biggest blow to the Taliban … then there is no hope of winning. None,” Graham said in the hallways of the Capitol Building just before entering the GOP caucus lunch.

“So if he insists that all the prisoners have to be turned over by March 9 and that we have to stop night raids, that means we will fail in Afghanistan and that means Lindsey Graham pulls the plug. It means that I no longer believe we can win and we might as well get out of there sooner rather than later.”

Whenever someone loses hope for war in Afghanistan, an angel gets his wings. Still, Graham’s words are probably just talk.

The background for his comments are the negotiations taking place between the U.S. and Afghan President Hamid Karzai right now. The Obama administration has been working on an agreement for what the U.S. role in Afghanistan will be once the U.S. withdraws the bulk of its occupation forces sometime in the next two years (ahem, it will be substantial). Karzai has demanded Afghan control of jails and an end to night raids on Afghan homes. The U.S. has consistently demanded they retain control of Afghanistan’s prisons and that they continue to perform night raids with Special Operations forces, who are supposed to take a leading role in terrorizing Afghanistan after the drawdown.

I’m in no position to guess the result of the impasse, but America’s untamed, occupied underlings have stood up against the imperialist agenda before. Note the precedent of Iraq. Back in 2007 Bush administration had drafted the first Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) which detailed a prolonged and continued U.S. troop presence in Iraq with no specified limits and called for “facilitating and encouraging the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments” and for US forces to work indefinitely to “deter foreign aggression against Iraq.” There were reports at the time about the impasse that had been reached due to the Iraqi government’s objections to the SOFA. They started demanding a firm withdrawal date of all U.S. forces and rejecting “long-term US military bases on its soil.” The Obama administration picked up the torch from the Bush administration and began again to push for a new agreement that would allow the continuation of the occupation beyond 2011. They eventually failed. And while U.S. dominion over Iraq is not gone, it is considerably reduced from what it might have been had the Iraqis simply accepted U.S. commands.

That is possible, even if unlikely, with Afghanistan as well. But I’m sure Lindsey Graham will have found fault with the American retreat by then.

The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies has just completed another survey of Arab public opinion. Some relevant findings:

• 73 percent of respondents believe that Israel and the US are the two countries presenting the largest threat to the security of the Arab world, with 51 percent believing that Israel is the most threatening, 22 percent believe the US is the most threatening, and 5 percent reporting a belief that Iran is the single country most threatening to the security of their countries. The results on this question vary from one Arab country to another.
• 55 percent support having the Middle East declared a nuclear-weapons-free zone, compared to 29 percent who would oppose such a move. The majority of the 55 percent believe that Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons justifies possession of such weapons by other countries in the region.
• More than two-thirds of Arabs support a democratic form of government, believing in the importance of a transfer of power.

This, after all we’ve done to promote democracy in the region…

While widely recognized in antiwar circles and on the left, the issue of a nuclear weapons double standard in the Middle East is one of the least appreciated when it comes to the Iran nuclear debate. As President Obama curries favor with Israel and AIPAC, he is heaping punitive sanctions on the Iranian people and continuously issuing public threats of preventive war.

Iran’s crime? Well, it hasn’t committed one, even according to the leadership in both the U.S. and Israel. But they allege Iran is being intentionally opaque regarding the true intentions of its currently civilian nuclear program. This is what people see as a double standard: While Iran is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has publicly pledged its opposition to nuclear weapons development, has subjected itself to thorough international inspections, and in fact has exactly zero nuclear weapons, Israel has done none of the above and has approximately 200 nuclear warheads. Iran is being severely punished and threatened with attack, Israel is supported with unparalleled economic, military, and diplomatic support.

It’s a classic double standard. Fear-mongers who warn against an Iranian nuclear weapon point to the fact that its an oppressive and aggressive regime and would not only use its possession of nuclear weapons to be a regional bully, but would spark a nuclear arms race throughout the Middle East. But Israel, who militarily occupies and oppresses the Palestinian people and who has started several wars of late, can have nuclear weapons, need not sign any international agreements or subject itself to international regulation or inspections, etc.

Now, there is currently a consensus in the U.S. military and intelligence community on the status of the Iranian nuclear program. They assess and have held that Iran’s nuclear program is civilian in nature, that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons and has yet to demonstrate any intention of doing so. However, they also assess that Iran is continuing to develop its program to a point that would put them in the range of developing one rather quickly, should they choose to do so. Adm. Dennis Blair, Obama’s former director of national intelligence, told Congress in March 2009, “We judge in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons design and weaponization activities” but that Tehran “is keeping open the option to develop them.”  While Iran is aiming to be “nuclear capable,” Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said in February, “the intelligence does not show that they’ve made the decision to proceed with developing a nuclear weapon.” James Clapper, current director of national intelligence, and others have reiterated this conclusion. This is essentially a defensive posture on the part of Iran, an attempt to have a deterrent without actually having the deterrent. They don’t break their international obligations, but they signal to their adversaries (who consistently make public threats of overt military attack) that they can quickly develop nukes in the case that they are attacked.

But, as Micah Zenko pointed out yesterday, the double standard is even more glaring than this popular narrative suggests. The history of Israel’s development of nuclear weapons is strikingly parallel to Iran in 2012.

It took years, however, for the United States to verify that Israel had developed a nuclear weapon. This uncertainty persisted despite numerous U.S. inspections of the Dimona reactor—carefully stage-managed by the Israeli government to deceive the Kennedy and Johnson administrations—and assurances that Israel would not “introduce” nuclear weapons into the region. On May 1, 1967, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach wrote to President Johnson under the heading, “The Arab-Israeli Arms Race and Status of U.S. Arms Control Efforts:”

“Nuclear Weapons. Concerned that over the long run the Arabs will achieve superiority in conventional forces, Israel is carefully preserving its option to acquire sophisticated weapons, including, we believe, nuclear weapons. We have no evidence that Israel is actually making a bomb, but we believe Israel intends to keep itself in a position to do so at reasonably short notice should the need arise. The Israeli reactor at Dimona is capable of producing enough plutonium to make one or two bombs a year, but thus far our periodic inspections of this facility (most recently on April 22, 1967) have uncovered no evidence of weapons activity.”

If you replaced the words “Israel” with “Iran,” it would largely echo the recent findings of the U.S. intelligence community on the suspected Iranian nuclear weapons program. In a twist of historical irony, Iran’s contemporary playbook mirrors the one used by Israel to acquire a nuclear weapon in the 1950s and 1960s.

Even the intelligence assessments are the same. And as Zenko points out, President Obama warned last week that if Iran had a bomb, “It is almost certain that others in the region would feel compelled to get their own nuclear weapon, triggering an arms race in one of the world’s most volatile regions.” Zenko: “Concerns regarding a cascade of proliferation instigated by an Iranian nuclear weapon are as likely today as when Israel built the bomb forty-five years ago.”

Since the sole claim of Iran’s transgression is based on being slightly opaque (arguably) regarding their true intentions for their nuclear program, perhaps we should consider the reason for that opaqueness. Iran is operating out of a perception of threat, just as Israel was when it hid its weapons program from the U.S. in the 50s and 60s. If the U.S. and Israel stopped making public threats of attack, stopped their covert war on Iran, stopped employing economic warfare, might Iran’s defensive opaqueness begin to disappear? And if Israel, Iran’s main adversary, agreed to dismantling its vast stockpiles of nuclear weapons and to a deal enforcing a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East – a deal Iran has repeatedly proposed – might Iran’s defense posture expire?

This is the simplest, most complete diplomatic strategy for peace in this conflict, which could threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of people if it actually breaks out one day in the near future. But this peace will not be achieved because there is no political will to dissolve Israel’s nuclear double standard.