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From: Jeffrey Epstein [jeeyacation@gmail.com]
Sent: 2/15/2013 4:52:58 PM
To: Larry Summers
take-it-or-leave-it deal by the U.S. on the
nuclear issue is the wrong strategy
Ray Takeyh
February 14, 2013 -- On Feb. 26, the United States and Iran will once
more resume their diplomatic ritual, in the so-called six-party talks, over
Iran's disputed nuclear program. As the two perennial adversaries eye one
another, there are competing paradigms about how to deal with Tehran.
An emerging school of thought suggests that the best means of "testing"
Iran is to offer it a final nuclear agreement that presumably promises
measurable relief from sanctions for significant Iranian concessions. Iran's
failure to grasp such an offer would then conclusively demonstrate to both
domestic and international audiences that the cause of the impasse is not
American belligerence but Iranian truculence.
But this approach fails to recognize that an arms-control process is
necessarily an incremental one, nor does it offer a practical substitute to
the existing step-by-step diplomacy.
Iran's nuclear program encompasses a vast complex of enrichment
facilities, centrifuge construction plants, uranium extraction companies
and thousands of scientists working in university and government
laboratories. Iran is enriching uranium at both 5% and 20% levels,
experimenting with high-velocity centrifuges and seemingly in the process
of constructing additional enrichment facilities.
Such a multilayered, multifaceted program can be dealt with only on a
piecemeal basis, as the technical details and rules for inspections are too
complex to be addressed in a single agreement.
Moreover, should the United States offer Iran a final deal, Tehran still has
a right to contest and negotiate its provisions and offer counterproposals.
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The international community is unlikely to concede to either more
sanctions or the use of force until Iran's objections are taken into full
consideration. As such, a grand deal that is supposed to provoke a moment
of clarity is likely to be enmeshed in the existing, protracted arms-control
process.
Another complication is the advent of public opinion and critical
constituencies in Iran devoted to the perpetuation of the program. The
growing public sentiment is that Iran has a right to acquire a nuclear
capability. As the program matures, it is becoming a source of pride for a
citizenry accustomed to the revolution's setbacks and failures.
Also emerging is a bureaucratic and scientific establishment with its own
parochial considerations for sustaining the nuclear investment. A clerical
leadership that is dealing with a restive population and empowered
security services cannot easily dispense with its nuclear trump card.
All this suggests that the best means of addressing Iran's nuclear challenge
is to mitigate its most dangerous dimensions. The focus should remain on
Iran's high-grade enrichment and its underground nuclear facility nestled
in mountains outside Qom. Tehran seems to have conceived an ingenious
path to nuclear advancement, one that involves increasing the size and
sophistication of its civilian atomic apparatus to the point where it can
quickly surge into a bomb. While staying within the rules of the
International Atomic Energy Agency's inspection process, Iran is
essentially expanding its capabilities while shielding them under the
veneer of legality. Given the fact that much of civilian nuclear technology
can easily be misappropriated for military purposes, Iran can construct an
elaborate nuclear infrastructure while remaining within IAEA guidelines.
The diplomatic challenge is to derail this path to a nuclear weapon by
imposing significant restraints on its program. And this can still be done
through a process that proceeds incrementally and sequentially.
U.S. officials would be wise to get out of the crisis mode and put some
time back on the clock. The Iran issue always seems urgent, and yet
somehow there is always time to deal with it. Washington should
acknowledge the obvious, namely, that given Iran's gradualist approach, it
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is still years from completing an efficient enrichment infrastructure,
constructing a nuclear arsenal and developing a reliable means of delivery.
By agreeing to a compressed timeline, the U.S. only narrows its options
and makes a solution even more elusive.
As the United States again contemplates its Iran conundrum, it should
eschew calls for a take-it-or-leave-it deal. The history of Iran's
confrontation with the international community suggests that keeping it a
crisis situation benefits the Islamic Republic. Ironically, it is the Western
powers that have generated alarmist conditions. And then to escape the
predicament of their own making, they offer Iran more concessions and
further incentives.
To avoid a repeat of that outcome, it would be prudent to have a sense of
proportionality and appreciate that, in the end, time works best for the
United States and not the economically beleaguered theocracy.
Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Article 2.
The Guardian
Whether it's North Korea or Iran, sanctions
won't work
Simon Jenkins
13 February 2013 -- Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinej ad. 'Threats
and sanctions have not weakened the regime's determination to proceed
[with nuclear weapons], but rather weakened opposition to it'. Photograph:
Sven Hoppe/EPA
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North Korea has  set off a third nuclear test explosion. It has done so in
defiance of the UN, America, Japan and even, reportedly, its sponsor,
China. It has said to hell with everyone, in a brutal comment on western
economic sanctions.
The UN security council met yesterday and Washington threatened
"significant consequences" — code nowadays for "tighter sanctions". Every
shred of evidence suggests that these will not achieve the declared goal.
They will merely add to the impoverishment of North Korea's people by
its own government. Sanctions are the most counter-productive tool
known to diplomacy. Yet we keep imposing them. Why?
Sanctions assume that all countries react to external pressure as might a
capitalist democracy. They assume a misguided regime will change its
mind and put financial advantage above its definition of national interest.
"Smart sanctions" (really dumb sanctions) further assume the rich can be
punished without punishing the poor, and that all dictators' wives want to
fly abroad and shop at Harrods. They assume that trade guides political
action and political action trumps dictatorship.
Economic sanctions are hugely popular to western politicians, not because
of their effect but because of their cause: the desire to stand on an
international stage and being seen to "do something". They are the least-
cost first resort of the laptop bombardiers of global intervention. They
sound punitive and aggressive without inflicting any hardship on the
imposer.
After North Korea the other target in the sanctions frame is Iran.
Everything at present suggests that ever-tighter sanctions have done
nothing to curb Iran's nuclear programme. Indeed, by inducing paranoia,
probably the reverse. Sanctions have certainly "bitten", to the glee of their
advocates. They have brought inflation and a collapse in the currency, the
rial. They have harmed ordinary people and solidified sentiment against
the west and the "great Satan" of the US. Assassination and cyber-
weapons have wiped out a few scientists and scrambled a few computers.
What sanctions have not done is weakened the power of the ayatollahs or
their private army, the Revolutionary Guards. Both seem as secure as ever,
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while (relatively) moderate civilian politicians are reduced to feuding and
arresting each others' children. Iran's nuclear programme appears to
proceed independent even of the organs of its own state.
A spoof article in the Economist last year portrayed Iran's supreme leader,
Ayatollah Khamenei, ruminating on western nations' obsessive posturing
towards his country. He mused that these were unstable, unreliable places,
dangerous though probably not all mad. But since it was hard to be sure, "I
would feel a lot safer if we already had that bomb". Similar insecurity
drove sanctioned Cuba to accept Russian missiles in the 1960s, and
sanctioned Iraq and Libya to pretend to build weapons of mass destruction
in the 1990s.
Sanctions never stop bad things happening. Rather they entrench dictators,
build up siege economies and debilitate the urban middle class from which
opposition to dictatorship grows. As Khamenei said in a speech a year
ago, sanctions were "painful ... but make us more self-reliant". Indeed, for
a regime to be sanctioned is to receive an elixir: witness Castro, Gaddafi,
the ayatollahs and the ruling cliques of Burma, Afghanistan and North
Korea. That sanctioned regimes sometimes come to an end is not proof
that sanctions work, rather that they take a long time and usually require
war to "work".
This is a rarely researched topic because sanctions are diplomatic ideology
rather than science. A debate in 1998 in International Security magazine
saw the Chicago academic, Robert Pape, barely challenged in his view
that only around five of the 115 cases of sanctions imposed since the war
could claim any plausible efficacy. Most merely inflicted "significant
human costs on the populations of target states, including on innocent
civilians who have little influence on their government's behaviour". They
are a ready invitation to war.
When I was reporting on South Africa in the 1980s I became convinced
that sanctions were aiding import substitution and benefiting the Afrikaner
economy, probably giving apartheid an extra decade of life. They likewise
prolonged Ian Smith's regime in Rhodesia. Sanctions made Libya's
Gaddafi so rich he could spoon money into the London School of
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Economics. They made Saddam Hussein one of the 10 wealthiest people
in the world. Besides, sanctions create sanctions-busting which, like drugs,
is a global criminal industry born entirely of the idiocy of western
diplomacy.
A year ago the  Foreign Office defended yet another round of sanctions
against Tehran on the grounds they would "hasten Iran's economic
collapse and deepen rifts within the regime, in the hope that saner voices
will deem the price of pursuing nuclear weapons too high". Economies
don't collapse, any more than poverty changes governments. Even Greece,
now the most "sanctioned" nation in Europe, has not collapsed. Places just
get poorer. As for "saner voices", they go into exile, hiding or prison.
That's where sanctions send them.
Iran is a proud nation of 80 million mostly Muslim people, one of many
Asian and African states struggling between theocracy and democracy,
tradition and modernity. These are agonising struggles among and within
peoples, to which the west has contributed nothing but hostility and
belligerence. Under the cloak of "counter-terror", it has been as crass as it
was during the Crusades. Of course no one wants to see nuclear weapons
spread. Russia tried to stop China getting them. China tried to stop North
Korea. The west tried to stop India and Pakistan, while hypocritically
tolerating Israel and the replenished arsenals of France and Britain. No
pressure made the slightest difference to anyone.
If Iran really wants a nuclear weapon, it will get one — the more so when it
is threatened with dire retribution if it does. That is how such states react
to pressure. Ever since the dodgy election of 2009, threats and sanctions
have not weakened the regime's determination to proceed, but rather
weakened opposition to it. If ever there was a country unlikely to respond
to diplomatic bullying, it is Iran. If ever there was a country that might
respond to constructive engagement, to commercial, governmental and
cultural intercourse, it is also Iran. Why the west should want to make it
another North Korea passes comprehension.
Article 3.
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The Washington Institute
Year of Decision: U.S. Policy toward Iran in
2013
James F. Jeffrey and Thomas Pickering
February 12, 2013 -- On February 7, 2013, James F. Jeffrey and Thomas
Pickering addressed a Policy Forum at The Washington Institute.
Ambassador Jeffrey, a former assistant to the president and deputy
national security advisor, is author of the new Institute study Moving to
Decision: U.S. Policy toward Iran. Ambassador Pickering served in
numerous key posts at home and abroad over a five-decade career,
including undersecretary of state for political affairs. The following is a
rapporteur's summary of their remarks.
JAMES F. JEFFREY
The move to decision on Iran is the most pressing and dangerous issue on
the U.S. and international agenda in 2013. The year ahead will largely
define the longstanding struggle between Washington and Tehran, and the
considerable stakes involved make it absolutely crucial that a swift and
decisive resolution be achieved. Regardless of the outcome of the nuclear
issue, however, Iran will continue to present a long-term challenge to the
United States because of clashing ideologies, conflicting foreign policy
goals, and Iran's claim to regional hegemony.
There are four likely outcomes to the nuclear issue: a unilateral Iranian
decision to halt or dramatically slow its progress toward a nuclear weapon;
a negotiated outcome, whether through the P5+1 (i.e., the five permanent
members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) or bilateral
negotiations; a military strike, as threatened by President Obama and
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and an explicit or implicit
shift to containment, indicating that Washington would be prepared to
coexist with a nuclear-armed Iran.
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The most effective resolution would be a negotiated outcome -- to achieve
it, Washington will need to take preliminary steps on several fronts. A
serious compromise needs to be put on the table, including an offer to
suspend crippling oil sanctions in return for specific, verifiable Iranian
steps to eliminate any nuclear breakout capabilities. Equally significant is
establishing a credible military threat, given that Tehran has been willing
to endure increasing economic pressure in order to continue its nuclear
program. The regime is unlikely to concede anything during negotiations
if it does not believe that Washington will actually follow through on such
threats. Although specific public redlines are often unpalatable, the Obama
administration must clarify internally when it would take military steps,
and these intentions must be made clear to the Iranians.
In the same vein, the military option requires a credible negotiating
complement, as seen in the early 1990s with Iraq. To legitimize military
action against Saddam Hussein's regime, Washington had to prove that all
other options had been exhausted. Similarly, the only way to set the
predicate for military action against Iran is to show the regime and the
international community that everything has been tried, and that
Washington has left Tehran with a way out. Failure to do so would
undermine the legitimacy of any strikes.
It is also important to understand that curtailing Iran's nuclear progress
will not by itself alter the regime's regional agenda -- nuclear ambitions
are but an extension of Tehran's wider aspirations toward hegemony in the
Middle East. Unfortunately, none of the longer-term proposals for
addressing that issue seem feasible at the moment (e.g., regime change by
internal or external means; a shift in Tehran's views on the Supreme
Leader and succession; a "grand deal" between Washington, Iran, and the
international community).
One lesson to be learned from past interactions with Tehran (or lack
thereof) is that when the United States proactively opposes Iranian
aggression in the Middle East, the regime relents, but when Washington
offers a more passive response, Iranian aggression increases. With respect
to Syria, for example, it cannot be assumed that Bashar al-Assad will fall
at all, let alone quickly, without active U.S. engagement. If the Assad
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regime does in fact survive, Iran would become increasingly emboldened,
with potentially disastrous consequences for the United States and its
allies and interests in the Middle East.
Denuding U.S. forces in the region to enable a pivot to Asia is also risky.
Nowhere else in the world is America more likely to deploy forces than in
the Persian Gulf in opposition to Iran, and nowhere else is it of utmost
importance that any potential confrontation be won decisively in the next
five to ten years than with the Islamic Republic.
Going forward, Washington must discriminate between Iranian behaviors
it considers unacceptable -- such as support for terrorism, hegemonic
ambitions, and progress toward nuclear weapons -- and those it can
tolerate. U.S. officials could open the door for negotiations by making
clear to Tehran that they do not seek regime change; the first step in that
regard would be to let Iran know that Washington respects it as a nation-
state and not a transnational revolutionary movement.
Finally, disorganization within the U.S. government and a "go it alone"
mentality have accounted for many of Washington's internal difficulties in
responding to the Iranian challenge. To alleviate this problem, all cabinet-
level officials must be in constant and complete coordination, devoid of
routine bureaucratic obstacles. In addition, the appointment of a senior
subcabinet official whose sole responsibility is Iran (or, alternatively, a
small group of officials in constant coordination) could allow the
administration to reorganize bureaucratically in preparation for this year of
decision.
THOMAS PICKERING
Discussions of containment policy typically imply accepting the Islamic
Republic as an inevitable nuclear power and using deterrence to deal with
a nuclear-armed Iran. Yet such an outcome would be disastrous for U.S.
nonproliferation policy, which is based on the notion that fewer nuclear
states means less chance of miscalculated use. If Iran attains a nuclear
weapon, other regional powers would likely follow suit -- clearly an
undesirable outcome for the international community.
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At the other end of the spectrum, using military means in the short term to
guarantee prevention would entail a vast use of force -- essentially an
unofficial, semipermanent occupation of Iran. This is not a viable path,
particularly since other diplomatic possibilities have not yet been
exhausted.
Similarly, sanctions, while effective, are not sufficient by themselves.
They must be intertwined with negotiations -- as Washington and its allies
increase the pressure, cohesive and meaningful talks with equivalent
concessions should follow suit. Some have argued that negotiations should
expand to a "big for big" format, but decades of mistrust between the
United States and Iran make smaller deals more practical. Such an
approach would have to focus on ending Iran's most problematic
enrichment activity: processing uranium to the 20 percent threshold, which
makes the leap to weapons-grade material much easier. Instead, the regime
could limit itself to 5 percent enrichment, and under strict supervision by
the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The intelligence community widely believes that although Iran has not yet
decided to make a nuclear weapon, it is still moving to acquire all the
necessary capabilities in case it chooses that path. Accordingly,
Washington will need to obtain a concrete Iranian commitment to convert
its stocks of readily upgradeable gaseous uranium into metallic fuel
elements, which pose significantly less of a threat. A serious inspection
system would need to be implemented in order to monitor these
requirements. In return, the Iranians would expect the lifting of nuclear-
related sanctions. They would also likely ask for acknowledgement that
they have the right to continue their civil enrichment program, whether for
supposed use in cancer treatment or to safeguard against a potential
Russian decision to cease fueling the Bushehr reactor.
Thus far, President Obama has been frustrated at the lack of progress in
response to his openness toward the Iranian regime, and his new cabinet
has an obligation to help him solidify a negotiating position that improves
the situation. If the Iranians continue to reject U.S. positions that
seemingly respond to some of their demands, then the administration
should begin applying other pressures. These steps should be taken sooner
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rather than later so that the parties can move toward a mutually acceptable
conclusion.
Washington must also keep in mind that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei
has the last word on all matters in Iran, and that negotiations will go only
as far as he allows them to go. In years past, he issued a fatwa condemning
nuclear weapons -- Washington could take advantage of this fact by
drafting a UN Security Council resolution endorsing the fatwa. This could
be a small step toward boosting Khamenei's international profile while
simultaneously pressuring Iran to follow its own religious decree.
To be sure, regime change remains an attractive alternative on paper, and
some in Washington view it as an insurance policy. Historically, however,
regime change has not been a successful option for the United States, and
internal attempts at toppling Iran's leadership have thus far been crushed
by Stalinesque suppression, including the 2009 uprising. Despite such
failures and Washington's limited influence in Iranian domestic affairs,
U.S. policy should be to demonstratively support popular democratic
movements.
Article 4.
TIME
Spy Fail: Why Iran Is Losing Its Covert War
with Israel
Karl Vick
Feb. 13, 2013 -- Slumped in a Nairobi courtroom, suit coats rumpled and
reading glasses dangling from librarian chains, the defendants made a poor
showing for the notorious Quds Force of the elite Iranian Revolutionary
Guard Corps. Ahmad Abolafathi Mohammed and Sayed Mansour Mousa
had been caught red-handed and middle-aged. And if the latter did them a
certain credit — blandly forgettable always having been a good look for a
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secret agent — the prisoners still had to explain why they had hidden 15
kg of the military explosive RDX under bushes on a Mombasa golf
course.
Created to advance Iran's interests clandestinely overseas, the Quds Force
has lately provided mostly embarrassment, stumbling in Azerbaijan,
Georgia, India, Kenya and most spectacularly in Thailand, where before
accidentally blowing up their Bangkok safe house, Iran's secret agents
were photographed in the sex-tourism mecca of Pattaya, one arm around a
hookah, the other around a hooker. In its ongoing shadow war with Israel,
the Iranian side's lone "success" was the July 18 bombing of a Bulgarian
bus carrying Israeli tourists — though European investigators last week
officially attributed that attack to Iran's Lebanese proxy, Hizballah. That
leaves the Islamic Republic itself with a failure rate hovering near 100%
abroad and an operational tempo — nine overseas plots uncovered in nine
months — that carries a whiff of desperation. A Tehran government long
branded by U.S. officials as the globe's leading exporter of terrorism may
be cornering the market on haplessness.
Within Iran's own borders, however, the story is different. Twice in the
past two years Iranian intelligence has cracked espionage rings working
with Israel's Mossad, Western intelligence officials tell TIME. In both
cases, the arrests were the furthest thing from secret: announced at a news
conference, each was later followed up by televised confessions broadcast
on Iranian state television in prime time. Given Iran's history of trumped-
up confessions, skepticism is more than justified. But the arrests appear to
be solid. One intelligence official said the captured Iranians provided
"support and logistics" to the Mossad operatives who carried out the
assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists.
At least four scientists were killed on Tehran's streets from 2010 to 2012,
when, as TIME has reported, Israel ratcheted back on covert operations
inside Iran. Officially, Israel has remained silent on the killings, though
government officials will coyly say they welcome the deaths. The Jewish
state maintains the same ambiguous posture on other "setbacks" to Iran's
nuclear program widely — and correctly, Western intelligence officials
say — attributed to Mossad, from the Stuxnet computer virus, to
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mysterious explosions like the massive blast at a missile base, which
destroyed ballistic missiles that could reach Israel.
The covert onslaught dovetails with Israel's history of reaching "over the
horizon" to disarm perceived threats at a distance. To keep advanced arms
from reaching Hamas and Hizballah, Israel in the past year sent warplanes
to bomb convoys and arms depots in Sudan and Syria, respectively,
without apparent retribution. In the case of Iran, however, experts say the
audacity of Israel's covert campaign stirred Tehran to revive an espionage
effort that lay largely fallow since 9/11. The Spy vs. Spy contest that
ensued would prove woefully one-sided, even in the third-world countries
where Iran chose to strike, hoping to avoid heightened security awareness
in the developed world. In the end, its only success came inside Iran,
where the secret police operate without inhibition.
The shadow war may have started on Jan. 15, 2007, the day Ardeshir
Hosseinpour passed away. Hosseinpour was a specialist in
electromagnetics at the Nuclear Technology Center in the city of Isfahan,
Iran, but his death might have escaped notice had Iran's government not
kept it under wraps for almost a week, finally attributing it to fumes from
a faulty heater. An online report by the American private intelligence firm
Stratfor suggested another cause — radioactive poisoning — and hinted
that Mossad's Caesarea section was back in business. Caesarea, named for
an Israeli beach town that dates back to Roman times, is the operations
branch of Israel's secret service, most notoriously responsible for the
assassinations of some two dozen Palestinians (and an innocent waiter)
after the 1972 Munich Olympics. Assassinations are carried out by a very
small unit dubbed Kidon, the Hebrew word for "tip of the spear." Kidon
operates at a remove from the legions of Mossad employees working in
less lethal fields.
It would have been a unit called Hatzomet, or "The Junction," that
recruited Majid Fashi, a handsome young Iranian who dropped out of high
school to pursue a career in kickboxing. By the account he gave on Iranian
state television early in 2011, Fashi presented himself at the Israeli
consulate in Istanbul in 2007 and was vetted for a solid year before being
shown any trust. Two years later, on Jan. 12, 2010, he would place a bomb
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on a motorbike parked on the sidewalk outside the Tehran home of
Masoud Alimohammadi, the nuclear physicist was killed when it was
detonated by remote control.
In the broadcast, Fashi accurately described the Mossad campus north of
Tel Aviv. He said he had been given a laptop equipped with a second
operating system and used it to communicate through online drop boxes.
He was impressed by his handlers' thoroughness. At one point Fashi
described studying a scale model of Alimohammadi's street. "It was an
exact copy of the real one," Fashi said. "The tree next it, the street curb,
the bridge." In a later broadcast, he was seated across from
Alimohammadi's widow, who glared at him as he bowed his head and
wept. Mossad officials were "pissed off and shocked" seeing their agent
on television, the intelligence official said.
Fashi was executed in May 2012. About the same time, Iran's intelligence
minister announced the arrest of 14 more Iranians, eight men and six
women dubbed members of the "Terror Club" in the subsequent  prime-
time broadcast of that name. Filmed in shadow, and rich in atmospherics,
the Aug. 5 program recreated Alimohammadi's death and four subsequent
attacks: they started with the Nov. 29, 2010 nearly simultaneous attempts
on Majid Shariari and Fereydoun Abbasi, nuclear scientists driving to
work when magnetic "sticky bombs" were attached to the side of their cars
from passing motorcycles. Abbasi managed to escape before it detonated,
saving his wife as well. Shariari was killed — a significant setback for the
Iranian nuclear program where he was the top scientist, according to a
Western intelligence official.
The confessed agents offered absorbing detail — they were aboard a Bajaj
Pulsar, wearing helmets, when the magnet bomb stuck on the right front
panel of Shariari's car exploded. The riders scrambled into the "trail car"
assigned to follow the target and disappeared into the traffic of the Imam
Ali Autobahn. Already gone was the car assigned to cut off and slow the
car carrying the scientist. They claimed to have rehearsed on a practice
track inside Israel. None of the details could be confirmed, but an
intelligence official acknowledged: "Another network was taken."
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The third scientist, Dariush Rezaeinejad was shot on July 23, 2011 after
picking up his child at a day care; his wife described hearing shots whiz by
as she chased the assailants. The most recent assassination was the Jan. 11,
2012 death of Mustafa Ahmadi-Roshan, an expert on uranium enrichment,
also by a magnet bomb slapped on his car during his morning commute.
By then, Iran was trying to strike back. The task of avenging the scientists
fell to the sprawling Quds Force's own covert-operations division, known
as Unit 400. It took a shotgun approach, targeting Israeli diplomatic
missions in a variety of countries, mostly in the developing world where
the global antiterrorism mesh is not so fine. Exposed in Baku, Tbilisi,
Johannesburg, Mombasa and Bangkok, the failures mounted at a pace that
was itself one of the problems. In the world of espionage, a quality covert
operation can take years to pull together. Yet in the 15 months from May
2011 to July 2012, the Quds Force and Hizballah attempted 20 attacks, by
the count of Matthew Levitt, a former State Department counterterrorism
official. "Hizballah and the Quds Force traded speed for tradecraft and
reaped what they sowed," Levitt writes in a January report for the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Quds Force planners were
stretched thin by the rapid tempo of their new attack plan, and were forced
to throw together random teams of operatives who had not trained
together."
The decline in quality was so striking it initially inspired disbelief Recall
the preposterous-sounding plot weaving together a former used-car
salesman, Mexico's Zetas drug gang and a bank transfer from a
Revolutionary Guard account to assassinate Saudi Arabia's ambassador —
by bombing a Washington restaurant? A year on it looks like the new
normal. In Bangkok last month, an Iranian agent entered a courtroom in a
wheelchair, having accidentally blown his legs off while fleeing police. A
January alert issued by Turkish intelligence was light on specifics but
quite certain the Quds operatives would be staying in five-star hotels.
"There's a number of reasons that Iranian intelligence has suffered," says
Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-born analyst who lectures at the
Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. "No. 1," he says, "is the 2009
uprisings in Iran." The street protests over a fraudulent election
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undermined the perceived legitimacy of the state among people who once
would work for it, including in its secret services. "People less and less see
it as a nationalist endeavor and more as a Khamenei-related project to
strengthen himself," Javedanfar says, referring to Iran's Supreme Leader
Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, who by some published accounts personally
authorizes all overseas attacks.
Hard-liners further aggravated the situation by purging competent
reformists from both the secret services and from Iran's embassies —
crucial to a force expected to work undetected abroad. "Basically the Quds
Force doesn't cooperate with the Foreign Ministry, and the Foreign
Ministry isn't what it used to be either," says Javedanfar. Under President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, 42% of ministry employees have only high
school degrees. "The regime is a bigger threat to itself than Israel," he
says.
Karl Vick has been TIME's Jerusalem bureau chief since 2010, covering
Israel, the Palestine territories and nearby sovereignties. He worked 16
years at the Washington Post in Nairobi, Istanbul, Baghdad, Los Angeles
and Rockville, MD.
Article 5.
YaleGlobal
Is the US Ready To Be Number Two?
Kishore Mahbubani
11 February 2013 -- SINGAPORE: Long before anyone did, former US
president Bill Clinton saw that America would have to prepare for the time
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when it would no longer be the number one power in the world. In his
2003 Yale University address on "Global Challenges," he said:
If you believe that maintaining power and control and absolute freedom of
movement and sovereignty is important to your country's future, there's
nothing inconsistent in that [the US continuing to behaving unilaterally].
[The US is] the biggest, most powerful country in the world now. . . . But
if you believe that we should be trying to create a world with rules and
partnerships and habits of behavior that we would like to live in when
we're no longer the military political economic superpower in the world,
then you wouldn't do that. It just depends on what you believe.
Long before 2003, Clinton wanted to begin preparing Americans for this
new world. "Clinton believed [...] what we had in the wake of the cold
war was a multilateral moment — an opportunity to shape the world
through our active leadership of the institutions Clinton admired and
[Charles] Krauthammer disdained," writes Strobe Talbott, former deputy
secretary of state in his book The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient
Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation. "But Clinton
kept that belief largely to himself while he was in office.... political
instincts told him it would be inviting trouble to suggest that the sun
would someday set on American preeminence." Sadly, few Americans
have heeded Clinton's wisdom. Few dare to mention that America could
well be number two. I discovered this when I chaired a panel on "the
future of American power" at the 2012 World Economic Forum in Davos.
After citing projections that America would have the second largest
economy in just a few years, I asked the American panelists — two
senators, a congresswoman and a former deputy national security advisor
— whether Americans are ready to become number two. To my shock,
none could acknowledge publically this possibility.
America may well become number two faster than anyone has anticipated.
According to the most recent International Monetary Fund (IMF)
projections, China will have larger share of global GDP than the United
States by 2017. In 1980, in PPP terms, the US share of the global economy
was 25 percent, while China's was 2.2 percent. By 2017, the US share will
decline to 17.9 percent, and China's will rise to 18.3 percent. Even if
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America becomes number two, we will still have a better world. In many
ways, the world is "converging" to American values and standards, as I
explain in The Great Convergence. The global middle class is booming,
interstate war is waning, and never before have people traveled and
communicated across the world so easily. These changes are creating
common values and norms across the world. Education and scientific
reasoning, for example, are enabling people the world over to speak with a
common language. However, while humanity is well on its way to
combating absolute poverty and interstate warfare, other problems are
surfacing. Preventing and curtailing transnational issues like climate
change, human and drug trafficking, and financial crises require
cooperation among nation states, yet this is not happening. A simple
analogy illustrates this. Before the era of modern globalization,
humankind was like a flotilla of more than 100 separate boats in their
separate countries. The world needed a set of rules then to ensure that the
many boats did not collide and facilitate their cooperation on the high seas
if they chose to do so. The 1945 rules-based order strived to do this, and
despite some obvious failures, it succeeded in producing a relatively stable
global order for more than 50 years. Today, the 7 billion people who
inhabit planet earth no longer live in more than 100 separate boats.
Instead, they live in 193 separate cabins on the same boat. But this boat
has a problem. It has 193 captains and crews, each claiming exclusive
responsibility for one cabin. No captain or crew cares for the boat as a
whole. The world is now sailing into increasingly turbulent waters with no
captain or crew at the helm. The Great Convergence echoes the themes
of Clinton's 2003 Yale speech. It's in the interest of all — particularly great
powers — to strengthen institutions of global governance so that we're not
sailing blindly into choppy waters without a captain. The National
Intelligence Council recently projected that in 2030 Asia would overtake
the Western world economically, technologically and militarily. When
China becomes a world superpower in a matter of decades, the United
States and Europe will want to ensure that China plays by the rules.
But in order to make international organizations like the United Nations,
the IMF and the World Bank more credible and effective, they must
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undergo serious reform. It is manifestly absurd that the West makes up 12
percent of the world's population but takes up 60 percent of UN Security
Council permanent seats. It's nonsensical that the head of the IMF is
always a European and the head of the World Bank is always an American
as the West's share of global GDP diminishes every year. This
concentration of clout in the hands of a relative few has grave implications
for these institutions' effectiveness and independence, making them
instruments of the West. No other organization, not even huge global
NGOs like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or the Clinton
Foundation, has the scope and legitimacy that the UN currently enjoys.
For example, the United States for years has been trying to pressure China
to take a more proactive role in fighting climate change. Predictably,
China has resisted these pressures because they saw them as a clever yet
transparent American ruse to curtail Chinese economic growth. Only when
the United Nations Development Programme raised the issue with China
did the Chinese government take heed, as the UNDP is seen as a neutral
party in China. The UN and its many agencies may soon lose invaluable
credibility if the West insists on monopolizing its power over these
institutions.
Any reform of the UN should take into account three principles:
democracy, recognition of power balances and the rule of law. Institutions
of global governance can be made more democratic by ensuring that their
leadership accurately reflects the composition of world's population. At
the same time, we must also take into account geopolitical relationships
among emerging and middle powers. Finally, the rule of law is essential to
the mediation and resolution of thorny international issues and to
governing the conduct of states on the international stage so as to prevent
escalation of conflict.
In this rapidly changing world, it's a mistake to allow institutions of global
governance to stay as they are. The 1945 rules-based order is no longer
appropriate for 21st century circumstances. Global leaders must better
prepare us for the challenges to come and equip our international
organizations to deal with them. Leaders must find the courage to continue
advocating for stronger multilateral cooperation. It is time for our captains
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and crews to emerge from their cabins and start steering the boat.
Kishore Mahbubani is dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy,
NUS, and author of the forthcoming book The Great Convergence: Asia,
the West, and the Logic of One World.
Article 6.
Foreign affairs
Pyongyang's Nuclear Logic
Jennifer Lind, Keir A. Lieber, and Daryl G. Press
February 14, 2013 -- In his State of the Union address, U.S. President
Barack Obama described North Korea's recent nuclear test as a
provocation that required a firm response. The intended audience for that
provocation, though, is up for debate. Some commentators have posited
that the test was a signal aimed at China, designed to demonstrate North
Korea's independence from its great-power patron. Others think that Kim
Jong-un was sending a message to the newly elected president of South
Korea, Park Geun-hye. Still other North Korea experts have suggested that
the test was actually meant for domestic consumption, to lift the sagging
morale of a deprived public or for the regime to curry favor with the
military. The intended North Korean signal is being analyzed and debated
by U.S. government officials, who hold views across the spectrum.
A much simpler explanation exists. Pyongyang tested a nuclear device for
the same reason it has been testing long-range missile designs: to see what
works. In truth, the effort was less a signal than an attempt to master the
technical capabilities that are vital to its nuclear deterrent.
This rationale should come as no surprise to those steeped in Cold War
history. Between 1945 and 1992, the United States conducted 1,054
nuclear tests and fired an untold number of missiles. If the goal had merely
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been to show the Soviets that the United States meant business, testing
nearly twice a month throughout the entire Cold War would have been
overkill. In fact, Operation Sandstone -- a series of three tests at Enewetak
Atoll in 1948 -- was not intended to warn off the Soviets as tensions rose
over Berlin. Nor was the series of 48 underground tests launched in the
summer of 1964 designed to impress the newly installed premier, Leonid
Brezhnev. And the United States would not have conducted a dozen
atomic blasts at its Nevada test site in the first half of 1977 -- including the
Cove, Dofino, Marsilly, Bulkhead, Crewline, Forefoot, Carnelian, Strake,
Flotost, Gruyere, Scantling, and Scupper detonations -- just because new
President Jimmy Carter was vulnerable to right-wing criticism.
The United States did what it did because it needed its ultimate deterrent
to actually work, and because the technical requirements of the nuclear
mission continually changed. The ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
evidence enough that the United States could destroy cities, but deterring
the Soviet Union was a far greater challenge. If the Soviets had invaded
Western Europe, for example, U.S. bombers would have had to penetrate
alerted Soviet air defenses, identify Soviet ground forces and industrial
centers, and attack them. Accordingly, U.S. bombers had to be highly
maneuverable and able to carry multiple weapons, so the bombs
themselves had to be lighter and smaller than the ones the United States
used against Japan. The Soviets put another wrinkle in Washington's plans
when they began to deploy large numbers of their own nuclear weapons.
The United States needed to find a way to potentially destroy the Soviet
arsenal on the ground. Eliminating those targets -- numerous and often
hardened -- required even greater numbers of bombs, even lighter designs,
and more accurate delivery systems. So the United States updated its
designs and tested. And tested. And tested again.
Like the United States during the Cold War, North Korea has apparently
decided that nuclear weapons are central to its national security strategy.
With few friends, its conventional military forces outgunned, an economy
in tatters, and facing off against a superpower prone to deposing
dictatorships across the globe, the Kim regime set about building an
operational nuclear arsenal. And just as NATO planned to thwart a Soviet
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invasion by striking targets in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, North
Korea presumably plans to defend itself, should war erupt on the
peninsula, by threatening U.S. regional allies and targets in the United
States.
North Korea's mission requires small, lightweight warheads, and missiles
that work -- and the only way to know that they work is to test them. So
far, the weapons have proved unspectacular. The country's first nuclear
test, conducted in 2006, was an embarrassment. Pyongyang had told the
Chinese that the device would generate four kilotons of explosive power,
but it ended up producing less than one. The second test in 2009 fared
slightly better, producing between one and eight kilotons, although it is
not known what size of a blast the North Koreans had sought. Moreover,
Pyongyang has much more work to do before it can boast weapons that
will actually fit on its missiles (which have been, themselves, a series of
humiliating failures).
Observers in the West who presume that North Korea's behavior must be
about signaling should remember NATO and the United States' own
experience during the Cold War. The United States understood then that
the ability to conduct nuclear operations was the very foundation of a
credible deterrence strategy. Today, a sound strategy for dealing with
North Korea should not ascribe ulterior motives to acts that the United
States once considered rational and routine.
The view that nuclear weapons are merely political instruments -- suitable
for sending signals, but not waging wars -- is now so common in
Washington, London, and Berlin that it is hard to find anyone who
disagrees. Yet those comforting assumptions are not shared by leaders
everywhere. Beyond North Korea, Russia is cutting down its arsenal,
modernizing the nuclear forces it plans to keep, and increasing its reliance
on nuclear weapons in national defense strategy. China is slowly
expanding its own arsenal, while substantially improving its weapons.
And Iran seems so committed to going nuclear that it has been ready to
endure crippling sanctions and risk foreign attack.
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It is unfortunate that U.S. policymakers are so convinced of nuclear
obsolescence that they have difficulty understanding the motivations of
potential adversaries. It would be tragic, however, if their questionable
assumptions prevent them from recognizing the deterrence problems that
lie ahead and the grave difficulties that will be posed by adversaries, such
as North Korea, that still cling to nuclear weapons.
JENNIFER LIND is an Associate Professor of government at Dartmouth
College and the author of Sorry States: Apologies in International
Politics. KEIR A. LIEBER is an Associate Professor in the Edmund A.
Walsh School of Foreign Service and Department of Government at
Georgetown University. DARYL G. PRESS is an Associate Professor in
the Government Department at Dartmouth College and Coordinator of
War and Peace Studies at Dartmouth's John Sloan Dickey Center for
International Understanding.
Article 7.
Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF)
The Depths of Malaise in Palestine
Daniel DePetris
February 12, 2013 -- When talking about peace in Israel-Palestine, it is
easy to narrow the conversation to the leaders who are responsible for
making it. Over the past few years, there have been numerous profiles in
newspapers and profiles in magazines attempting to document the two
men who are supposed to make the effort—Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas.
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Delving into the lives and minds of world leaders is an undoubtedly
helpful, exciting, and informative way to find answers, but a conflict as
multifaceted and complicated as the Israeli-Palestinian dispute cannot be
fully explained without taking into account the opinions of the ordinary
people who live the reality every single day. Millions of Israelis and
Palestinians on both sides of the green line have had their voices drowned
out by the very politicians, lawmakers, and personalities who purport to
represent them.
The result is a host of unanswered questions. What does the average
Israeli or Palestinian think about the chances for a lasting and
comprehensive peace agreement? What types of concessions need to be
given for a deal to be struck? Do Israelis have the political courage to
sacrifice on settlements and Jerusalem so the conflict can finally be
resolved? Can the Palestinians negotiate in good faith?
Luckily, polling organizations in Israel and Palestine have spent years
trying to answer these very questions, often working together and sharing
their resources during the hunt.
Two of the latest polls, one from the Jerusalem Media and
Communications Center (JMCC) and the other from the Palestinian Center
for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR), are particularly telling. Unlike
other surveys that confirm what most in the international community
already think, the results of these polls are unprecedented, revealing a
stark and disturbing malaise in the Palestinian territories.
The message is clear: frustration with the conflict is at a high point, the
two-state solution is steadily losing credibility in the eyes of the people,
and ordinary citizens in the Holy Land are starting to wonder whether a
settlement can be achieved without another round of bloodshed.
Oslo Fatigue
When asked by the PSPSR whether Mahmoud Abbas's policy of peace
talks or armed resistance by Hamas is the best way to achieve a
Palestinian state, an alarming 60 percent of Palestinians surveyed threw in
their lot with armed resistance (compared to 28 percent who favored
negotiations). With the eight-day Israel-Hamas war having ended with a
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ceasefire that many view as a victory for the Islamist group, Hamas Prime
Minister Ismail Haniyeh finds his popularity having soared. Forty-eight
percent of Palestinians say that they would rather pick Haniyeh as
Palestine's next president instead of Abbas, who has struggled to secure
the freedom of movement and self-determination that so many
Palestinians once expected from his government.
The JMCC issued similar findings. By far the most disturbing figure in the
poll is the exponential rise in support among the Palestinian public for
armed operations against Israel-50.9 percent now view attacking Israeli
positions in the current climate as a credible way to express their
grievances and pressure the Israeli government to compromise. This is a
20-percent increase from the previous year.
The numbers can perhaps best be summarized by Ali Najjar, an 18-year-
old Palestinian who lives in a refugee camp. "In my view," he said, "what
was taken by force will only be returned by force. Twenty years after
Oslo, we haven't gained one inch of Palestine."
Many young Palestinians agree. Indeed, the words summarize the how
dire the situation has become for an entire generation of Palestinians, most
of whom are too young to remember the signing of the Oslo Accords in
1993. Most have not seen any benefit from peace agreements or
negotiations, and all of them have grown tired of the settlement
construction in the West Bank, the killing of Palestinian civilians, and the
internal fighting among Palestinian politicians that never seems to
dissipate.
The Corrosive Status Quo
One cannot blame Palestinian civilians for feeling this way. The previous
year was a terrible one for Abbas and his government. Settlement tenders
and approvals in the West Bank rose to such an extent that the anti-
settlement organization Peace Now named 2012 "the year of the
settlement," with the Ministry of Defense authorizing an additional 6,000
housing units and Netanyahu pushing for the construction of 11,000
homes in the month of December alone.
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The lack of economic support from donor nations and the restrictions that
impede the Palestinian economy from functioning at anywhere near its full
potential have also made for a deadly cocktail for Abbas' Palestinian
Authority. Combined with the occasional holding of Palestinian tax
revenue by the Israelis, the PA is finding it incredibly difficult to pay the
tens of thousands of employees on its payroll.
The recent Israeli parliamentary elections perhaps best illustrate where the
Palestinian issue is today: at the bottom of the barrel. Israeli politicians
chose to focus their campaigning on social and economic issues, from the
price of housing and cost of living to whether religious students should be
drafted into the Israeli military like everyone else. The only Israeli
candidate who spoke about the need to reengage the Palestinians in peace
talks was the former foreign minister Tzipi Livni, whose party failed to
reach double-digits in the incoming parliament.
The overall message is depressingly familiar to Palestinians: creating a
Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem is
simply not on the list of priorities for Israel at the current time. And the
Palestinian Authority is proving itself to be an increasingly fragile
governing body without the constant generosity of foreign countries; it's
an institution that cannot adequately care for its people, let alone its
employees who go months without pay. The average Palestinian is losing
hope that peace is possible in his or her lifetime. Palestinian leaders may
speak of ending the occupation, but for those who live under it, the
occupation is so ingrained that escaping it has become a violation of the
normal.
Some may take the more militant attitudes of Palestinians as confirmation
that Israel does not have a partner for peace. Yet those attitudes can also
be viewed differently: without a renewed effort at peacemaking, however
frustrating and difficult it will be, the conflict will reach a nadir where
searching for a peace partner will be irrelevant.
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