Month: January 2013

In his Senate confirmation hearings to be the next Secretary of State, Senator John Kerry declared US foreign policy “is not defined by drones and deployments alone,” as he tried to emphasize humanitarian assistance and development projects instead of American militarism.

“President Obama and everyone here knows that American foreign policy is not defined by drones and deployments alone,” Kerry said.

“American foreign policy is also defined by food security and energy security, humanitarian assistance, the fight against disease and the push for development, as much as it is by any single counter terrorism initiative,” he added.

While its true that drones and military deployments are not the only policies that define US foreign policy, they are the central tools of how the US implements its national security strategies abroad.

“Since November 2002, there have been 400 more documented US targeted killings in the non-battlefield settings of Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines,” writes Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Targeted killings have exacted a considerable toll, far beyond what anyone imagined in the immediate post-9/11 era,” Zenko adds. “Although the publicly available numbers vary among research organizations, an estimated 3,400 people have been killed” in a new kind of war that “shows no signs of ending.”

President Obama has been exploiting a loophole afforded to him by this new military technology. On the one hand, he gets to present himself as less interventionist, less militarist than his predecessor George W. Bush, who never shied away from conventional ground invasions and troop buildups. But Obama has been just as interventionist and similarly indifferent to legal restrictions on the use of force, especially with drones.

As far as troop deployments, Kerry certainly knows how fundamental they are to US foreign policy.

This past June, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of which Kerry was chair at the time, released a report describing how Washington needs to maintain key military bases and troop presence throughout the Middle East, which is vital because the region is “home to more than half of the world’s oil reserves and over a third of its natural gas.”

“The United States should preserve the model of ‘lily pad’ bases throughout the Gulf,” read the study, “which permits the rapid escalation of military force,” enabling “the United States to quickly deploy its superior conventional force should conflict arise.”

President Obama himself has overseen a considerably troops surge in Afghanistan and the broader Middle East region, and has also escalated the US military presence throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

With the drone war rapidly increasing under Obama and US troops stationed in more than 130 countries around the world, Kerry was being merely rhetorical in his rather symbolic confirmation hearing.

The unprecedentedly harsh economic sanctions regime Washington has imposed on Iran “really has reached its end,” according to Vali Nasr, Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Nasr, born in Tehran, is well within the mainstream in Washington’s foreign policy elite, having worked in and out of government with people like Richard Holbrooke, John Kerry, and Richard Haas. However, he has been somewhat critical of Obama’s drone policy, the lack of diplomacy on Iran, and the continuation of some of George W. Bush’s worst foreign policy strategies.

Nasr explained that the sanctions have passed their point of effectiveness and that needlessly keeping them in place will generate “a scenario where Iran is going to rush very quickly towards nuclear power, because they also think, like North Korea, that you have much more leverage to get rid of these sanctions.”

This point is arguable. While it’s true that US policy towards Iran has long incentivized the Islamic Republic to obtain nuclear weapons as a tool of international prestige and strategic deterrence, their religious fatwas against weapons of mass destruction have proven ironclad in the past. And it is probably still the case that the majority of Iranian strategists consider the international isolation and hostility they would attract by developing weapons to be greater than any potential benefits. Still, increased aggression will continue to pressure Iran away from its commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Either way, the sanctions, as renowned international relations theorist Kenneth Waltz has argued, should be dropped since they “primarily harm ordinary Iranians, with little purpose.” And indeed, ordinary Iranian are being harmed as unemployment continues to rise, inflation is increasingly out of control, and the import of vital medicines for severely sick Iranians are being blocked, putting millions of lives at risk. Economies are simply collections of individual interactions between people, and the US is waging war on those interactions – and thus, waging war on the Iranian people.

Sanctions regimes have a terrible record of actually being effective altering policies in one direction or another, which is why I’ve argued – and reiterated again yesterday – that the Obama administration is either extremely stupid, or they’re perfectly rational and a change in policy is not the goal. Rather, the goal is regime change.

The case of Iraq is instructive. Washington had set out in the early 1990s claiming the purpose of the extreme sanctions on Iraq was to undermine the nuclear weapons program. And “by the first few months of 1997, Iraq had completed the disarmament phase of the cease-fire agreement and the United Nations had developed a monitoring system designed to detect Iraqi violations of the nonproliferation requirement,” report two high level diplomats in Foreign Affairs.

But the US refused to lift the sanctions, and threatened to veto proposals to do so at the UN. “In the spring of 1997, former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave a speech at Georgetown University in which she stated that even if the weapons provisions under the cease-fire resolution were completed, the United States would not agree to lifting sanctions unless Saddam had been removed from power.”

There seem to be two plausible scenarios for the sanctions regime on Iran. The first is that the sanctions continue to cause mass suffering for millions of innocent Iranians. The second is that the sanctions back Tehran into a corner on the nuclear issue, prompting them to dash for weapons (which, according to US intelligence, they have not yet done). These are not mutually exclusive, but neither scenario includes a diplomatic settlement where Washington is reassured of Iran’s commitment to non-proliferation and Iran is relieved of sanctions and is no longer the victim of threats of illegal war by states that are orders of magnitude more powerful militarily.

Such a conclusion is perfectly within reach, if only Washington would choose diplomacy over imperial bullying and hegemony in the Middle East. But it doesn’t seem to be in the cards for Barack Obama.

In his questioning of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today, Sen. Rand Paul characerterized the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi as the “worst tragedy since 9/11.”

I’m glad that Rand made it warm for Hillary, but the invasion of Iraq was a much greater tragedy than Benghazi….  as were plenty of other post 9/11 policies.

(I discussed some of Rand Paul’s foreign policy views in a November review of his book, Government Bullies in the American Conservative.)

The Obama administration’s diplomacy with Iran over its nuclear program is in shambles. In the broadest terms, this is because the so-called diplomatic opening Obama initiated upon coming into office never actually happened; Washington has been more apt to continue to bully Iran diplomatically while using draconian economic warfare to squeeze the Islamic Republic, despite Washington’s inability to identify any substantive Iranian transgressions.

But there is another, more specific detail to this story that is obstructing any political deal between Iran and the US (the P5+1 are there only to repel the impression that the US is actually engaging with Iran). And that detail is the obsession that the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has with the Iranian military site Parchin.

Yousaf Butt, a nuclear physicist and professor at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, writes about this absurdity in Foreign Policy:

Following two days of talks last week, officials from Iran and the IAEA threw in the towel, failing again to clinch a deal on access to sites, people, and documents of interest to the agency. The IAEA’s immediate priority is to get into certain buildings at the Parchin military base near Tehran, where they suspect Iran may have conducted conventional explosives testing — possibly relevant to nuclear weaponry — perhaps a decade or so ago. There is no evidence of current nuclear work there (in fact, the agency has visited the site twice and found nothing of concern). But by inflating these old concerns about Parchin into a major issue, the agency risks derailing the more urgent negotiations that are due to take place between Iran and the P5+1 countries (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany).

The IAEA again wants access to the site because of secret evidence, provided by unidentified third-party intelligence agencies, implying that conventional explosives testing relevant to nuclear weaponization may have taken place a decade or so ago at Parchin. The agency has not showed Iranian officials this evidence, which has led Iran to insist that it must have been fabricated. (This could well be true, given that forged documents were also passed on to the IAEA before the 2003 Iraq war.) As Robert Kelley, an American weapons engineer and ex-IAEA inspector, has stated: “The IAEA’s authority is supposed to derive from its ability to independently analyze information….At Parchin, they appear to be merely echoing the intelligence and analysis of a few member states.”

Olli Heinonen, the head of the IAEA’s safeguards department until 2010, is also puzzled at the way the IAEA is behaving: “Let’s assume [inspectors] finally get there and they find nothing. People will say, ‘Oh, it’s because Iran has sanitized it….But in reality it may have not been sanitized….I don’t know why [the IAEA] approach it this way, which was not a standard practice.” And Hans Blix, former head of the IAEA, weighed in, stating, “Any country, I think, would be rather reluctant to let international inspectors to go anywhere in a military site. In a way, the Iranians have been more open than most other countries would be.”

This last point is corroborated by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett in their new book Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran, in which they report current “agency [IAEA] officials have told us they have better access to these [Iran’s nuclear] facilities than to analogous sites in some Western countries.” These inside accounts by experts in the field run in stark contrast to the media hype that Iran is somehow blocking IAEA access to facilities that could be hiding work on nuclear weapons.

But this isn’t the case. The IAEA doesn’t have jurisdiction over military sites like Parchin. They are being insistent on the Parchin issue despite having full access to all of Iran’s declared nuclear facilities and confirming time and again the non-diversion of Iran’s nuclear material.

And anyways, the allegations of weapons development at Parchin are that Iran was conducting work there a decade ago. Not only is that irrelevant to whether Iran is currently conducting weapons development, but even if it were true (which, again, is highly questionable) “Iran would not have violated its IAEA safeguards agreement,” Butt writes.

That said, the IAEA’s peculiar approach, under the self-described pro-US chief Yukiya Amano, is not the only roadblock. Most of Obama’s so-called diplomacy with Iran has been “predicated on intimidation, illegal threats of military action, unilateral ‘crippling’ sanctions, sabotage, and extrajudicial killings of Iran’s brightest minds,” writes Reza Nasri at PBS Frontline’s Tehran Bureau. This, despite a consensus in the military and intelligence community that Iran is not currently developing nuclear weapons and has not even made the political decision to do so.

Two experienced academics and diplomats, writing in Foreign Affairs back in October, also found the so-called diplomatic opening Obama brought was anything but: “for the past three years, the United States and Europe have stubbornly refused to seek a negotiated solution with Iran.”

Rolf Ekéus, Executive Chairman of the UN Special Commission on Iraq from 1991 to 1997, and Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer, Stanton Nuclear Security Junior Faculty Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, write that “calling for war while intensifying pressure on Iran, without also clearly defining steps Tehran could take to defuse the tension, removes any incentives for Iran to change its behavior.”

The last carrot the US offered Iran was spare parts for civilian airplanes, a pathetic offer they must have known Iran would (justifiably) balk at.

As Butt notes, former CIA analyst Paul Pillar has pointed out that the sanctions are “designed to fail.” Congress’s legislation links the sanctions to a long list of Iranian policies not at all related to their nuclear program. This makes lifting them really difficult in the context of nuclear negotiations.

After the failed talks in 2009 and 2010, wherein Obama ended up rejecting the very deal he demanded the Iranians accept, as Harvard professor Stephen Walt has written, the Iranian leadership “has good grounds for viewing Obama as inherently untrustworthy.” Paul Pillar has concurred, arguing that Iran has “ample reason” to believe, “ultimately the main Western interest is in regime change.”

In their Foreign Affairs article, Ekéus and Braut-Hegghammer say explicitly that they think the sanctions have “the long-term objective of regime change,” not a diplomatic settlement. Back in the 1990s, when the US-led sanctions regime in Iraq was killing millions of innocent people, Saddam’s regime actually met the Security Council requirements to get the sanctions lifted, but the US refused to provide any sanctions relief. When the sanctions were imposed, Washington insisted they were about blocking Iraq’s nuclear program. Then, “In the spring of 1997,” the authors write, “former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave a speech at Georgetown University in which she stated that even if the weapons provisions under the cease-fire resolution were completed, the United States would not agree to lifting sanctions unless Saddam had been removed from power.”

This is why a deal with Iran has not been forthcoming. Tehran knows and understands this. As Ayatollah Khamenei said in August 2010, “If they [the US] do not resort to bullying and step down from the ladder of imperialism…we will not have problems with negotiations. But negotiations are impossible as long as they behave like this.”

Washington claims its only direct involvement in France’s military intervention in Mali includes the US Air Force flying in French soldiers and 124 tons of equipment. Beyond that, the Pentagon will only admit vaguely to “intelligence support.” Whether the US is flying drones in Mali, whether Special Operations teams are secretly conducting operations inside Mali, and whether the CIA is covertly involved – the Pentagon has no comment.

Danger Room:

[George Little, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman] wouldn’t discuss any unarmed U.S. surveillance drones reportedly considered for use over Mali at French request. Nor would he discuss the use of any special-operations forces in the conflict. Since 9/11, unconventional forces and surveillance aircraft have often been a vanguard for a direct U.S. role in campaigns against terrorist organizations that relocate to areas where they perceive they won’t be pursued.

But the emerging line from the Pentagon is that, for now at least, the Mali war isn’t going to be like that. U.S. troops are “not contributing” to a training effort for African forces that France wants to conduct ground operations in Mali, Little said. The Pentagon is still considering a French request for midair refueling aircraft. And outside a handful of Air Force communications specialists who helped direct traffic at an air base near Bamako, U.S. personnel haven’t been on the ground in Mali.

“Our support of French operations in Mali does not involve what is traditionally referred to as boots on the ground,” Little told reporters during a Tuesday briefing. There’s a caveat: “We don’t have any plans to put on the ground at this time in support of French operations.” And Little wasn’t speaking to any possible CIA involvement in Mali; it’s worth noting that the CIA has placed operatives on the ground in places where the U.S. has publicly stated it wouldn’t send ground troops.

There has already been some evidence that in the months preceding the French intervention, the US had been flying drones over Mali and secretly conducting special operations inside the country. They didn’t tell us about that; I’m not sure why they’d tell us whether it was going on now.