Author: Eli Clifton

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for January 15th, 2011:

National Review Online: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Benjamin Weinthal blogs on the collapse of Lebanon’s government on Wednesday, warning that “the Iranian proxy Hezbollah” has shown “that the political Islamists rule the roost in Lebanese society.” Weinthal writes, “The Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah’s chief sponsor, has been forced to reduce its supply of military and financial aid to the Islamic fanatics by 40 percent. Over the years, the Iranian regime has pumped roughly $1 billion in military aid into Hezbollah’s arsenal.” Weinthal concludes that the approval of $100 million in military aid for Lebanon could have been a mistake if Hezbollah somehow becomes the beneficiary of the military goods: “Plainly said, it is time that the U.S. discontinues military funds for Lebanon and redirect monies to pro–Lebanese democracy organizations.”

The Atlantic: Jeffrey Goldberg responds to a post by Reza Aslan in which Aslan suggests that Ahmadinejad’s comments that Israel should be “wiped from the map” has been mistranslated and does not imply that Israel, and its people, should be physically destroyed but that “existing political borders should be wiped from a literal map.” Goldberg responds, “Hmmm. So Israel should be replaced by Palestine, which is different than removing Israel from the map. Got it. What Ahmadinejad has been trying to say all along, then, is ‘Shabbat Shalom, Jews!.’” He then sarcastically offers to “clarify the record of the Holocaust-denying, eliminationist anti-Semitic Iranian president” before reprinting a list of Ahmadinejad’s comments about Israel and Jews.

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for January 13th, 2011:

The Washington Post: The Post’s editorial board writes that the apparent delay of Iran’s nuclear program is “confirmation that the international campaign” has been effective. The editorial board credits the Stuxnet virus, sanctions, and assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists as responsible for pushing back the clock on the Iranian program. “The challenge for the Obama administration, Israel and other allies will be to make use of that window to force a definitive end to the Iranian bomb program,” says The Post. “The administration still hopes negotiations, set to resume Jan. 20, will achieve that end, but most likely it will require a fundamental change in Iran’s hard-line regime,” the article concludes. “From that point of view, five years is certainly not much time.”

Foreign Affairs [PDF]: Former Undersecretary of Defense and current Foreign Policy Initiative board member Eric Edelman, along with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment’s Andrew Krepinevich and Evan Braden Montgomery, collaborate on an article entitled “The Dangers of a Nuclear Iran: The Limits of Containment.” The authors reach the conclusion that the U.S. should pursue a three-track approach “that brings diplomacy and sanctions, clandestine action, and the threat of military force into alignment.” The authors call for a significant buildup of U.S. military forces in the Gulf region and acknowledge, “Although finding a peaceful way to preclude Iran from getting nuclear weapons is obviously desirable, Washington will likely have to decide between two unattractive options: pursuing a military strike to prevent Iran from going nuclear or implementing a containment strategy to live with a nuclear Iran.”

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for January 12th, 2011:

Tablet Magazine: Hudson Institute Visiting Fellow Lee Smith writes, “Arabs are not winning an information war against Israel, nor anything else for that matter. Rather, the stories and lies they tell to delegitimize the Jewish state are part and parcel of the war that they have been waging against themselves, and with stunning success.” In his attack on Arab culture, he groups Iran with the “Arabic speaking Middle East” and observes, “Culture is more powerful than technology, and how a society uses any given technology is determined by its culture. This is why no one wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to have a nuclear bomb, but no one has a problem with France’s weapons program.”

The Wall Street Journal: Ilan Berman, vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council, writes that, for Iran’s hard-liners, Iran’s Green Movement is still a force to be reckoned with. Berman cites the crackdown on Green Movement leaders and observers, “If the Green Movement were truly a spent force, Iranian officials would be far less preoccupied with containing and discrediting its remnants.” He concludes, “That Iran’s leaders appear to believe otherwise suggests that they understand well what many in the West do not: the Green Movement itself may be on the ropes, but the larger urge for democracy that it represents isn’t dead. It is simply hibernating.”

Commentary: Jonathan Tobin writes on Commentary’s Contentions blog that Roger Cohen’s column, on the Jewish community in Iran that was published two years ago, was brought about because “The Times columnist’s motive for trying to soften the image of that openly anti-Semitic government was to undermine support for sanctions or the use of force to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.” Tobin cites reports that the Tomb of Mordechai and Esther—the central characters in the Jewish story of Purim— in the city of Hamdan has lost its official status as a religious pilgrimage site. “While we cannot know whether the Iranians will follow through on this threat and actually tear down the tomb or transform it into a center of anti-Jewish hate, it does provide yet another insight into the virulent nature of the attitudes of those in power there,” he writes. Tobin concludes, “Anyone who thinks that we can live with a nuclear Iran needs to consider the madness of allowing a government that thinks the Purim story should be reversed the power to do just that.”

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for January 11th, 2011:

Council on Foreign Relations: George W. Bush administration Deputy National Security Advisor Elliot Abrams blogs that the pronouncement by retiring Mossad head, Meir Dagan, that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon until 2015 should give new momentum to sanctions. Abrams, who is a curently a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes that “increasing sanctions may damage the Iranian economy in ways that create additional political tension.” He says that Republican leadership in the House “should be asking right now what more the United States and our allies can be doing to stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program, make our sanctions more effective, and support democratic dissidents in Iran.”

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for January 10th, 2011:

Commentary: Evelyn Gordon, writing on Commentary’s Contentions blog, pushes back against the claim by outgoing Mossad chief Meir Dagan that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon before 2015. Gordon writes, “Precisely because Dagan is known to have vehemently opposed military action against Iran, his confident assertion that Iran won’t have the bomb before 2015 should be taken with a large grain of salt.” She concludes, “Dagan is both a dedicated patriot and a consummate professional, but even patriotic professionals are still human. And it is only human nature to read the tea leaves in a way that supports what you would most like to believe.”

The Atlantic: Jeffrey Goldberg takes a more positive approach to Dagan’s announcement: “[I]t is fair to say that the combination of sanctions and subterfuge has definitively set back Iran’s nuclear program by at least one and perhaps as many as four years.” Goldberg hails “the unknown inventor of Stuxnet, the miracle computer virus, which has bollixed-up Iran’s centrifuges” and the Obama administration’s efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. He concludes with a warning, writing, “It is important to remember that Iranian intentions are unchanged, until proven otherwise, and it is also important to remember that technical difficulties are surmountable, but it is definitely fair to say that the zero hour is not yet here.”

National Review Online: Michael Mukasey, Tom Ridge, Rudolph Giuliani, and Frances Townsend defend their participation in a Mujahadin e Khalq (MEK) event in Paris. The MEK is a foreign terrorist organization, according to the State Department; speaking at a MEK event could be seen as providing support for a terrorist organization. But Mukasey, Ridge, Giuliani, and Townsend write, in response to a challenge by Professor David Cole, that the Material Support statute does not need revision, but “[w]hat it does need — and does not often enough get for fear of offending some Muslim organizations — is rigorous enforcement against accurately designated organizations, of which MEK is not one.”

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for January 7th, 2011:

The Washington Post: Jennifer Rubin, writing on her Right Turn blog, asks whether India is doing enough to enforce sanctions against Iran. Rubin, picking up on The Wall Street Journal’s reporting, writes, “The revelation that the government of India ‘advised oil companies to open individual accounts with government-owned State Bank of India–India’s largest lender–which has a branch in Frankfurt,’ rather than directly with the blacklisted Iranian Trade Bank points to the shortcomings of sanctions.” She concludes, “The real lesson of this episode is that we should be circumspect about India’s — or any country’s — ability and willingness to turn off the flow of cash to the revolutionary Islamic regime.”

Commentary: Alana Goodman blogs on Commentary’s Contentions blog that “HSBC may be doing a bit of damage control in Foggy Bottom after its pro-Iran ad campaign sparked criticism from the media and foreign-policy experts.” Goodman claims that the ad came up in a “private meeting between HSBC CEO Niall Booker and Jose Fernandez, assistant secretary for economic energy and business affairs, at the State Department on Monday,” according to an anonymous source. HSBC declined to respond to the claim. Goodman repeats Jennifer Rubin’s suggestion the possibility that HSBC “was conducting transactions on behalf of sanctioned entities.” HSBC has been mentioned by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago as needing to improve its anti-money laundering and terrorist-financing mechanisms but no mention was made of HSBC conducting business with sanctioned entities.

The Weekly Standard: Stephen Schwartz blogs that Iran is exhibiting the qualities of “other tyrannies before it” by oppressing the country’s Sufis. “Iranian fear of Sufis puts the country’s clerical oligarchs in the same camp with other Islamist radicals from the Balkans to Pakistan, where attacks against the mystics have proliferated along with anti-Western jihadism,” writes Schwartz.

Commentary: Jonathan Tobin blogs on Contentions that “Iran is still on track to have a bomb in four years.” Tobin says that Western or Israeli “sabotage” operations have delayed the nuclear program and given the West “more time to prepare less-diplomatic methods of ensuring that the tyrannical Islamist regime in Tehran does not obtain the ultimate weapon.” But, warns Tobin, “it is only a matter of time (and perhaps less time than we think) before they succeed.” He concludes, “Stuxnet is not a solution to the existential threat that an Iranian bomb poses to Israel in particular and to stability in the Middle East in general. It is just a delaying tactic.”