How the Obama Administration Is Stalling Its Way to War with Iran
Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com.
Since talks with Iran over its nuclear development started up again in April, U.S. officials have repeatedly warned that Tehran will not be allowed to “play for time” in the negotiations. In fact, it is the Obama administration that is playing for time.
Some suggest that President Obama is trying to use diplomacy to manage the nuclear issue and forestall an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear targets through the U.S. presidential election. In reality, his administration is “buying time” for a more pernicious agenda: time for covert action to sabotage Tehran’s nuclear program; time for sanctions to set the stage for regime change in Iran; and time for the United States, its European and Sunni Arab partners, and Turkey to weaken the Islamic Republic by overthrowing the Assad government in Syria.
Vice President Biden’s national security adviser, Antony J. Blinken, hinted at this in February, explaining that the administration’s Iran policy is aimed at “buying time and continuing to move this problem into the future, and if you can do that -- strange things can happen in the interim.” Former Pentagon official Michèle Flournoy -- now out of government and advising Obama’s reelection campaign -- told an Israeli audience this month that, in the administration’s view, it is also important to go through the diplomatic motions before attacking Iran so as not to “undermine the legitimacy of the action.”
New York Times’ journalist David Sanger recently reported that, “from his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons” -- even though he knew this “could enable other countries, terrorists, or hackers to justify” cyberattacks against the United States. Israel -- which U.S. intelligence officials say is sponsoring assassinations of Iranian scientists and other terrorist attacks in Iran -- has been intimately involved in the program.
Classified State Department cables published by WikiLeaks show that, from the beginning of the Obama presidency, he and his team saw diplomacy primarily as a tool to build international support for tougher sanctions, including severe restrictions on Iranian oil exports. And what is the aim of such sanctions? Earlier this year, administration officials told the Washington Post that their purpose was to turn the Iranian people against their government. If this persuades Tehran to accept U.S. demands to curtail its nuclear activities, fine; if the anger were to result in the Islamic Republic’s overthrow, many in the administration would welcome that.
Since shortly after unrest broke out in Syria, the Obama team has been calling for President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster, expressing outrage over what they routinely describe as the deaths of thousands of innocent people at the hands of Syrian security forces. But, for more than a year, they have been focused on another aspect of the Syrian situation, calculating that Assad’s fall or removal would be a sharp blow to Tehran’s regional position -- and might even spark the Islamic Republic’s demise. That’s the real impetus behind Washington’s decision to provide “non-lethal” support to Syrian rebels attacking government forces, while refusing to back proposals for mediating the country’s internal conflicts which might save lives, but do not stipulate Assad’s departure upfront.
Meeting with Iranian oppositionists last month, State Department officials aptly summarized Obama’s Iran policy priorities this way: the “nuclear program, its impact on the security of Israel, and avenues for regime change.” With such goals, how could his team do anything but play for time in the nuclear talks? Two former State Department officials who worked on Iran in the early months of Obama’s presidency are on record confirming that the administration “never believed that diplomacy could succeed” -- and was “never serious” about it either.
How Not to Talk to Iran
Simply demanding that Iran halt its nuclear activities and ratcheting up pressure when it does not comply will not, however, achieve anything for America’s position in the Middle East. Western powers have been trying to talk Iran out of its civil nuclear program for nearly 10 years. At no point has Tehran been willing to surrender its sovereign right to indigenous fuel cycle capabilities, including uranium enrichment.
Sanctions and military threats have only reinforced its determination. Despite all the pressure exerted by Washington and Tel Aviv, the number of centrifuges operating in Iran has risen over the past five years from less than 1,000 to more than 9,000. Yet Tehran has repeatedly offered, in return for recognition of its right to enrich, to accept more intrusive monitoring of -- and, perhaps, negotiated limits on -- its nuclear activities.
Greater transparency for recognition of rights: this is the only possible basis for a deal between Washington and Tehran. It is precisely the approach that Iran has advanced in the current series of talks. Rejecting it only guarantees diplomatic failure -- and the further erosion of America’s standing, regionally and globally.
George W. Bush’s administration refused to accept safeguarded enrichment in Iran. Indeed, it refused to talk at all until Tehran stopped its enrichment program altogether. This only encouraged Iran’s nuclear development, while polls show that, by defying American diktats, Tehran has actually won support among regional publics for its nuclear stance.
Some highly partisan analysts claim that, in contrast to Bush, Obama was indeed ready from early in his presidency to accept the principle and reality of safeguarded enrichment in Iran. And when his administration failed at every turn to act in a manner consistent with a willingness to accept safeguarded enrichment, the same analysts attributed this to congressional and Israeli pressure.
In truth, Obama and his team have never seriously considered enrichment acceptable. Instead, the president himself decided, early in his tenure, to launch unprecedented cyberattacks against Iran’s main, internationally monitored enrichment facility. His team has resisted a more realistic approach not because a deal incorporating safeguarded enrichment would be bad for American security (it wouldn’t), but because accepting it would compel a more thoroughgoing reappraisal of the U.S. posture toward the Islamic Republic and, more broadly, of America’s faltering strategy of dominating the Middle East.
The China Option
Acknowledging Iran’s right to enrich would require acknowledging the Islamic Republic as a legitimate entity with legitimate national interests, a rising regional power not likely to subordinate its foreign policy to Washington (as, for example, U.S. administrations regularly expected of Egypt under Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak). It would mean coming to terms with the Islamic Republic in much the same way that the United States came to terms with the People’s Republic of China -- another rising, independent power -- in the early 1970s.
America’s Iran policy remains stuck in a delusion similar to the one that warped its China policy for two decades after China’s revolutionaries took power in 1949 -- that Washington could somehow isolate, strangle, and ultimately bring down a political order created through mass mobilization and dedicated to restoring national independence after a long period of Western domination. It didn’t work in the Chinese case and it’s not likely to in Iran either.
In one of the most consequential initiatives in American diplomatic history, President Nixon and Henry Kissinger finally accepted this reality and aligned Washington’s China policy with reality. Unfortunately, Washington’s Iran policy has not had its Nixonian moment yet, and so successive U.S. administrations -- including Obama’s -- persist in folly.
The fact is: Obama could have had a nuclear deal in May 2010, when Brazil and Turkey brokered an agreement for Iran to send most of its low-enriched uranium abroad in return for new fuel for a research reactor in Tehran. The accord met all the conditions spelled out in letters from Obama to then-Brazilian President Lula and Turkish Prime Minister ErdoÄŸan -- but Obama rejected it, because it recognized Iran’s right to enrich. (That this was the main reason was affirmed by Dennis Ross, the architect of Obama’s Iran policy, earlier this year.) The Obama team has declined to reconsider its position since 2010 and, as a result, it is on its way to another diplomatic failure.
As Middle Eastern governments become somewhat more representative of their peoples’ concerns and preferences, they are also -- as in Egypt and Iraq -- becoming less inclined toward strategic deference to the United States. This challenges Washington to do something at which it is badly out of practice: pursue genuine diplomacy with important regional states, based on real give and take and mutual accommodation of core interests. Above all, reversing America’s decline requires rapprochement with the Islamic Republic (just as reviving its position in the early 1970s required rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China).
Instead, three and a half years after George W. Bush left office, his successor continues to insist that Iran surrender to Washington’s diktats or face attack. By doing so, Obama is locking America into a path that is increasingly likely to result in yet another U.S.-initiated war in the Middle East during the first years of the next presidential term. And the damage that war against Iran will inflict on America’s strategic position could make the Iraq debacle look trivial by comparison.
Flynt Leverett is professor of international affairs at Penn State. Hillary Mann Leverett is senior professorial lecturer at American University. Together, they write the Race for Iran blog. Their new book, Going to Tehran: Why the United States Needs to Come to Terms With the Islamic Republic of Iran (Metropolitan Books), will be published in January 2013.
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So Russia says: that anti-missile system threatens us!
And Obama says: then end support for Iran, or it's missiles on your doorstep. Russia folds.
Which Russia and China are doing. Iran has no support, they are desperate hence this article. But it will do no good. Iran's theocracy is history, the only question is how many Iranians will die because of it. Likely it will be like the Gulf War: 100,000 Iraqi soldiers die, 300 US. Like the Gulf War, the Iran War will be won in a month.
Iran is Assad's best hope. Iran sponsors anti-US terrorism. Iran wants to control Gulf oil. It doesn't care a bit about Israel, they just Israel to appeal to the radical Left, including here. Israel has megaton range H-bombs, Iran's A-bombs will be toys. Iran can't threaten Israel, it wants to threaten the Saudis.
Iran's military is a little more powerful than Iraq's. Which we destroyed in the Gulf War, ended Iraq's WMD program, took total control of Iraq's skies, flew planes at will - and lost 300 US soldiers. It will take about a month to destroy Iraq's puny navy, coastal and air defenses, oil shipping and nuke facilities. US planes will then own Iran's skies indefinitely. Iran will be unable to ship oil.
The regime will likely fall, but in any case like Iraq it will be incapable of ever developing WMDs. This will be cheaper for the US, than the cost of deterrence. Same with North Korea: if China did not protect them, would have saved billions by destroying their military 50 years ago. But China and Russia aren't protecting Iran, so we'll do what we did to Iraq in the Gulf War. Not the Iraq War, no need to invade Iran.
The US does not negotiate with terrorists. Religious fundamentalists are irrational, you can't talk reason with them. Yes that includes Benjy, but Israel had nothing to do with Iran invading our embassy, they are irrelevant to this issue. Iran will be bombed after the election, regardless who wins. We'll do it because the Saudis want us to. We don't care about Israel, they have no oil.
Iran experienced and act of war from America well before the embassy incident. You can ignore it, but it doesn't go away.
Isn't that what was just blown up by leaks from the administration?
Iran is hoping it can keep bluffing along until its too late to stop them.
As the article points out, in the end US/Israel is either going to have to accept Iran as is or badly lose a terrible war that will permanently cripple the US and probably destroy Israel.
The US is stupidly letting Israel lead the US down into a free-fire killing zone of destruction.
and do you really think Pakistan could export nukes without the US knowing it? LOL
Of course, he could just stand up like a man, say "we're taking the military option off the table, and so are you, Israel, because it would be a terrible thing for all of us, and because I say so". But Barack Obama does not possess anywhere near the necessary stones to do any such thing.
So, he's just following Bush. The difference is, he knows better. So he's buying time.
The point on Iraq is not apt. Yes the Iraquis who were invaded by us, for no reason, are surely going to favor the US. That too was a critical mistake. Saddam played a role in geopolitics. He offset the Iranians. As far as us he was imasculated. For those reasons there was no need to overthrow him and it was impractical, who knew Bush could be impractical, to think that the regime we replaced him with would fall into line. That is why Bush senior and his team (Scowcroft, Powell and Baker) opted to leave him in place. For practical geopolitical reasons.
International relations is a game of power and position. However, I think that with Obama a war is not a likely conclusion. He tends to play the real politik game and has demonstrated an understanding of the costs of foolish moves. Romney well..............
Having studied IR and lot of these issues for years I am glad I read this. Just to note I am a progressive. Glad as I now know of two lecturers to avoid. First, Nixon and Kissenger engaged China for many reasons. One was as political distraction and coup. One that led to little real change in their period although later we did recognize China although we still maintain our military ties to Taiwan. The mistake was to extend our Chinese relationship by pushing for MFN status for China and later pushing for WTO membership. Given the Chinese are some of most blatant currency manipulators and free trade abusers. China is and will remain a critical opponent of the US and if we were smart we would change trade and tax laws to begin to reverese the trend that has made the US into a net importer.
On Iran if this is the case good for the administration. I have always been a realist and appreciate the views of Morgenthau. Which seems in part what is being described. Iran and its regime are inimical to the interests of the US. They are good at suppressing their people and if we can engineer a removal of that regime by the people that is fine with me.
But frankly, fear-mongering notion of U.S. attacking Iran is not credible. If Bush didn't attack Iran, certainly Obama won't (don't argue, he won't).
The idea of standing up to U.S. to protect some (fill in the blank) Third World despot aka revolutionary hero of progressive indigenous masses ( see Chomsky support for Pol Pot and Hussein and current batch support for Iranian despotism) is what modern liberal multicultural ideology has been reduced to, unfortunately.
If Peace is essential to this world, War would be the second choice. But, this second choice is becoming the first choice for all sort of unbelievable excuses or compelling reasons. For OIL commodity Middle East Region is ridden by wars People in Middle East are MEAT on a chopping board. Nobody has statistic of Dead and Injured caused by wars there. So, a war to Iran is just another war. But, the difference is Iran will fight back this time for sure even not equipped with nuclear weapon. It is very confusing why Israel wants to have a population of 4 billions as enemy. How is Israel going to win in long run ?
You are right - the world economy cannot afford a war in the ME where nearly 1/2 the worlds oil rests. and the US is too damn stupid to drill more of our own
If Israel does not learn to get along with its neighbors, eventually the neighbors will remove it. No amount of nuclear threats or US force will stop the neighbors.
This is the harsh reality Israelis can not seem to grasp - they can NOT maintain their hold on the land forever by shear force because every group that has tried to use force to maintain their rule for the last 50000 year has ALWAYS failed. Israel will fail also.
BTW - even if the US drilled every square yard of the US, it would still not have enough oil to survive and when the world demand for oil exceeds the global supply, even the oil pumped in the US will go to China because it has vastly more wealth than the US (a debtor nation)
No, it is about the balance of power in the middle east and our ability to restrict access to world oil reserves. Unfortunately (for Israel, although any comeuppance they have coming their way is entirely their own fault for their behavior over the last 65 years), we've shot our load trying to nail down Iraq and Afghanistan.
Iraq was a disaster, Afghanistan is an ongoing catastrophe, why are we listening to the same chickenhawks make exaggerated claims to get us into an unwinnable war?
Non everything is a secret capitalist conspiracy.
Iran is already at war with Israel via funding and arming Hezbollah and Hamas. It most certainly has NOT been clear that Iran does not intend to produce nuclear weapons.
Electricity and chemo med production do not explain Irans massive underground nuclear project in a dozen locations. The Revolutionary Guard are internally unpopular and are worried about regime change.
Yeah, the US got no oil, because the US is not an oil company. Big oil companies got a LOT of oil. And they RUN the US government and they, along with other corporations that also made a lot of money from it, pushed us into that war.
http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/20/more-cleanup-activity-alleged-at-suspected-iranian-nuclear-site/
any one who thinks they are just "making electricity" is naive at best.....
I think you all should be patting him on the back if this is truly Obama's strategy. That would make him the most deft politician since napolean.
Our sole consolation: the other guy would be worse.