Author: Eli Clifton

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for December 8th, 2010:

The Washington Times: Ilan Berman, vice president of the hawkish American Foreign Policy Council, writes that the WikiLeaks cables “demolishes a number of sacred cows relating to American policy towards the Islamic republic” and brings the United States “one step closer to [a military] strike on Iran.” Berman claims that WikiLeaks has proven that: many Middle Eastern leaders are willing to support military action against Iran (this assertion has been widely questioned); Iran has acquired Russian designed missiles from North Korea which can reach Western Europe (significant doubt has been raised about this allegation); and “if Iran is allowed to cross the nuclear threshold, others in the Middle East invariably will follow suit.”

Voice of America: VOA includes comments made by Iranian chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili in its wraps up of the P5+1 Geneva talks. Jalili says Iran will never give up its nuclear rights. Simon Henderson at the hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told VOA “it does not make sense for Tehran to say it needs nuclear technology for power purposes…that is one of the reasons why there is such suspicion that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.”

Tablet Magazine: Lee Smith, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute and columnist at Tablet, writes that analysts who argue that hawkish comments made by Arab leaders in the WikiLeaks cables might not always tell the truth to U.S. diplomats, indirectly raise a point about the relationship between Arab leaders and the United States: “Perhaps it is helpful to think of the Wikileaks cables in lay terms as a transcript of a guy (in this case, the Saudis) trying to pick up a pretty girl (the Americans) at a bar. What the boy says to the girl may or may not be true. What is most significant is the effect he means to produce, which is to convince the girl to go home with him.” Smith concludes that much of what is said in the cables about Iran is just “noise” and “it should not matter one whit to U.S. policymakers whether Iran is a danger to the Arabs or, for that matter, to Israel: Tehran represents a major strategic threat to American interests.”

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for December 6th, 2010:

National Review Online: American Enterprise Institute Resident Fellow Ali Alfoneh opines that expectations should be “subzero” for the P5+1 talks, continuing today in Geneva, since “the Iranian negotiators in Geneva represent the Ahmadinejad government and possibly Khamenei, therefore they cannot deliver what they may promise.” Alfoneh says the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and not the civilian leadership represented in the Geneva talks, is responsible for most aspects of the nuclear program and “has a vested interest in a low-intensity diplomatic crisis between the Islamic Republic and the United States, as it would pave the way for expansion of the IRGC’s power within the Islamic Republic.”

The Weekly Standard: Senior Foundation for Defense of Democracies Fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht warns that negotiations with Iran “will never work.” “You cannot talk about Iran’s nuclear program without understanding it within a religious context,” writes Gerecht. “Secularism has transformed Western culture—or, as Ahmadinejad and Khamenei would say, has permanently debased it.” Gerecht predicts that when the P5+1 meet in Geneva, “If the Obama administration and the Europeans actually understood the opposing side, they would realize the sanctions now on the books are not nearly enough to make Khamenei blink.” In a subtle call for military action, Gerecht concludes “Islamic history is littered with defeated religious militants. But they were defeated. They didn’t arrive at a new understanding of their faith through diplomacy and negotiations.”

FrumForum / National Post: David Frum writes an anti-linkage piece describing how Arab capitals don’t care about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and are instead consumed with Iran. “Governments in the region do not in fact care very much about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute,” he writes. “They are transfixed by Iran. They are terrorized by the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon.” He suggests the United States should follow their lead and drop the Israeli-Palestinian conflict altogether until the Palestinians are ready to acquiesce to many of Israel’s demands. On Iran, Frum is alarmed by the WikiLeaks revelations: “WikiLeaks confirms and underscores the intransigence and belligerence of Iran.” Frum adds that Iran is “even more dangerous” than most analysts thought.

Weekly Standard: Stephen Hayes and Foundation for Defense of Democracies fellow Thomas Joscelyn (formerly of the Claremont Institute) write about the links between Al Qaeda and Iran in an article called “The Iran Connection” for the print edition of the Weekly Standard. The two combed through WikiLeaks revelations in order to showcase accusations by Arab leaders that Iran has been visited by relatives of Bin Laden and harbors Al Qaeda members and their families. The article also point to the alleged support of extremist groups and anti-U.S. fighters in Afghanistan and Iraq. It notes that while the P5+1 talks will focus on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, “the United States is concerned about the Iranian nuclear program not just because of nuclear weapons, but because of what the Iranian leadership plans to do with them.” The authors conclude by invoking the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States: “Nearly a decade after the 9/11 attacks, not only do we have abundant evidence that Iran, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terror, supports al Qaeda. We also have evidence that Iran actively assists terrorists and insurgents targeting our soldiers and diplomats in two war zones.”

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for December 3rd, 2010:

National Review Online: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies Benjamin Weinthal blogs on a WikiLeaks cable that had originated in the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. Apparently, a senior adviser to Angela Merkel, Christoph Heusgen, proposed a quid-pro-quo relationship between Netanyahu ending settlement construction and “favorable” treatment of the Goldstone Report in the UN Security Council. Weinthal refutes the possibility of linkage between ending settlement construction and achieving peace between Israel and its neighbors. Instead, he rolls out the neoconservative trope of “reverse linkage,” arguing, “[U.S. diplomats’] willingness, like that of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, to remain incurably fixated on the construction of housing complexes as the impediment to peace shows the dangerous merger of American and EU foreign policy. Iran’s drive to obtain nuclear weapons is relegated to an inferior status — at the expense of global security.”

The Washington Post: Jennifer Rubin interviews Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Post for the Right Turn blog, extracting tough talk from him on Iran. She writes, “McConnell agrees with those who think strong measures are needed to disrupt the Iranian regime’s nuclear program: ‘What I am saying is that we should be squeezing these guys like a lemon.’ He says he senses, as the WikiLeaks documents suggested, that Arab leaders are deeply worried and believe ‘only we have the swat’ to deal with the threat.”

Pajamas Media: Foundation for Defense of Democracies‘ “Freedom Scholar” Michael Ledeen transcribes a made-up conversation with a dead friend, former CIA counter-intelligence official James Jesus Angleton. They banter about a number of possible conspiracies within the ongoing news stories about Iran –addressing the Stuxnet virus, the WikiLeaks cable dump, and the bombing of two Iranian nuclear scientists in Tehran. Ledeen, feigning use of a Ouija board, has his ghost friend suggest that the Russians could be behind the Stuxnet virus, and that the murdered Iranian nuclear scientists could have been killed by Tehran for their (possible) collusion with the Russians, Israelis, or Americans.

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for December 2nd, 2010:

Commentary: Abe Greenwald writes on Commentary’s Contentions blog that the Obama administration’s “paralysis” in responding to North Korea’s recent artillery attack on South Korea “makes one thing clear: we cannot, for any reason, allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.” Greenwald warns that, “If guessing at Kim Jong-il’s motives makes fools of us all, just imagine trying to react to a nuclear theocratic thug-state perpetually sponsoring regional terror and frozen in a cold domestic revolution.” While Pyongyang might settle for talks or further aid, he argues Iran’s leaders seek only to destroy the United States and Israel.

The Weekly Standard: Thomas Joscelyn blogs that WikiLeaks cables have shown a link between Iran and al-Qaeda. Citing a cable which summarizes a conversation with Saudia Arabia’s Prince Nayif bi Abdulaziz, Joscelyn points to Iran’s alleged hosting Osama bin Laden’s youngest son, Ibrahim bin Laden. Joscelyn rather looks into this and finds “There is little publicly-available information on him. However, U.S. intelligence officials contacted by THE WEEKLY STANDARD say that he is quickly rising through al Qaeda’s ranks – just like his brothers.” He concludes, “The State Department’s September 2009 cable is just the latest U.S. government document released by WikiLeaks that connects Iran and al Qaeda.”

National Review Online: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies president, Clifford May, writes that when being frisked at the airport it’s important to remember that “jihadi terrorists are the enemy” and thus responsible for our privacy invasions — and not the TSA. May segues into the warning that “the Islamic Republic of Iran has long been the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism,” and takes a swipe at Turkey. “Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been moving closer to Iran’s rulers even as they have unleashed waves of repression against Iranian dissenters,” he writes. May concludes, “For the traveling public, that means directing our anger not at the TSA but at the Islamist terrorists…who see[s] the airport as a field of battle in the great war of the 21st century.”

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for December 1st, 2010:

The Washington Post: Jennifer Rubin, in her first day on the job blogging on her new Right Turn blog, interviews former UN ambassador and current American Enterprise Institute fellow John Bolton. Bolton tells her that “Arab states don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons any more than Israel does, and they fear that Obama is going to deliver them into the hands” of a nuclear-armed Iran.” He considers Obama is “in over his head on national security” and that “unlike every president since FDR, this president doesn’t think foreign policy is a top priority.”

The Wall Street Journal: Former deputy national security adviser and Project for the New American Century signatory Elliot Abrams writes that the double-speak of non-democratic Arab leaders, who “[t]ell the truth to foreigners but not to your own population[s],” is being put to a test by the WikiLeaks releases. “We find the king of Bahrain telling American officials privately that the Iranian nuclear program ‘must be stopped,’ while in public he carefully avoids any comment that might anger Iran’s aggressive leaders,” he writes. Abrams writes that it is easy to criticize the “gap” between the public and private discourse of the United States’ non-democratic Arab allies, but “when we consider the identities of some of the people they fear—the ayatollahs in Tehran, terrorists in Hamas and Hezbollah, al Qaeda itself—we see that the WikiLeaks disclosures are less likely to promote more open government than to give aid and comfort to the enemy.”

The New Republic: Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes that the WikiLeaks document dump should prove that those “…who have suggested—or asserted boldly—that Arab leaders don’t want the United States to stop militarily Iran’s nuclear program have been (i) fibbing, (ii) hopelessly ill-informed, or (iii) so ideologically purblind that they now appear intellectually dishonest.” Gerecht concludes by quipping, “They at least owe Mr. Assange a ‘thank you’ for helping them see, as the Quran says, ‘the straight path.’”

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for November 30th, 2010:

The Wall Street Journal: In his weekly column, Bret Stephens asks “Are Israeli Likudniks and their neocon friends (present company included) the dark matter pushing the U.S. toward war with Iran?” After analyzing the WikiLeaks documents, he concludes that, “Arab Likudniks turn out to be even more vocal on that score.” Stephens goes on to argue that the need for missile defense has not been overblown because, “we learned that North Korea had shipped missiles to Tehran that can carry nuclear warheads as far as Western Europe and Moscow.”

The Atlantic: Former New York Times investigative reporter Raymond Bonner blogs that the WikiLeaks documents have shown “…that Israel is, as Jeffrey Goldberg notes, [is] not alone in wanting decisive action to stop Iran’s nuclear program.” Bonner repeats the alleged comments from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and King Hamid of Bahrain, both of whom reportedly urged a U.S. military strike on Iran’s nuclear program, and observes that “this the same chilling language, which the American public is accustomed to hearing from hardline Israeli officials.” He finishes his post by speculating that the death of an Iranian nuclear scientist on Monday might be the work of Saudi Arabia, UAE or Kuwait because it is “easier for one of those countries to have infiltrated, or recruited, and less likely to be caught, because they could be confident Iran would blame Israel or the United States.”

FrumForum: Executive director of the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), Noah Pollak, writes that this WikiLeaks release is “obliterating the Gulf-side Middle East” worldview of leftists and realists that had promoted negotiations with Iran and Syria, a withdrawal from Iraq and a policy of pressuring Israel to stop settlement construction. Pollak, attacking the “linkage” argument, blogs that Washington’s Arab allies are not alienated by the close U.S.-Israel relationship. Instead, “we now know that what’s really alienating the Arabs is America’s reluctance to use its power to confront Iran and enforce a security architecture in which Israel is America’s most capable client.”

National Review Online: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies‘ Benjamin Weinthal observes that WikiLeaks has “forced [Arab world leaders] to come out of the diplomatic closet and declare Iran’s regime the number one enemy in the Middle East.” Now that the Arab world’s opposition to Iran’s nuclear program is known, says Weinthal, it’s time to ratchet up sanctions against the Islamic Republic’s energy and financial sectors. Weinthal stops short of calling for military action again Iran but concludes that the WikiLeaks information “vindicate[s] Israel’s longstanding position on the need for swift and powerful action against Iran’s out-of-control regime.”