The New Iranian Charm Offensive --Beware
The fifteen-minute conversation between Iranian President Hasan Rouhani and U.S. President Obama last Friday has once again sent Western hearts aflutter with hopes of peace about to break out.
The Iranians have read the message of Obama's eager grab at the lifeline held out by Russian President Vladimir Putin to climb down from his threat of military action against Syrian despot Bashir Assad: The United States, under Obama's leadership, will avoid military action at all costs. And Iranian master strategists are ever ready to show the Americans just enough ankle to provide the excuse for postponing action.
Once again, Obama is hopelessly overmatched, and too vain to realize it. In Syria, Assad crossed Obama's red line by using chemical weapons, and emerged not only unscathed in the process but with the increased stature of a statesman-like partner. At the same time, Mark Steyn points out, Obama managed to anoint Putin "as the international community's official peacemaker, even as he assists Iran in going nuclear and keeping his blood-soaked Syrian client in his presidential palace." The Iranians may well be banking on Putin's ability to achieve similar results on behalf of their nuclear program.
After the President's Syrian speech, the Wall Street Journal's Pulitzer prize-winning foreign affairs columnist Bret Stephens, wrote me, "I hope the Israelis have realized this president is not coming to their rescue." As a former senior U.S. diplomat told Peggy Noonan last week, "[Obama] doesn't know what to do so he stays out of it [and] hopes for the best.
Yes, Israelis have his number. But there is not much to do about it, except pray – pray very hard.
THAT ANYONE COULD TAKE SERIOUSLY the latest Iranian charm offensive almost defies belief. In his speech at the U.N., Obama breathlessly cited a mythical (and long debunked) fatwa by Iran's Supreme Leader Khameini's against the use of nuclear weapons and Rouhani's assurances that Iran does not seek to develop nuclear weapons. But Iran has always denied that it seeks nuclear weapons.
Even without Iran's numerous instances of lying about its nuclear program, its efforts (often successful) to hide key elements of its nuclear program, the 2008 discovery by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of Iranian plans for a nuclear warhead, and enrichment past the levels needed for any conceivable civilian use, the Iranian claim not to seek nuclear weapons is untenable on its face. Iran has sufficient oil and gas reserves for 200 years, and has no need of nuclear energy. Moreover, even if it were seeking a nuclear energy alternative, it could simply import enriched uranium rather than set up the hugely expensive infrastructure needed for its own enrichment.
Equally implausible is the hope that Iran can be persuaded to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Nuclear weapons have been central to the strategic vision of the Islamic Revolution from the beginning. Possession of such weapons would allow Iran to provide cover to terrorist allies around the world, and therefore facilitate the spread of the Islamic Revolution. They would also increase exponentially Iran's ability to control the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf, and thus over world oil prices.
When a country has endured international isolation and prolonged and severe economic hardship to maintain its nuclear program, as Iran has done, two things are blatantly clear. One, that program is not just for the purpose of developing already plentiful energy resources. Two, it will not be abandoned, except by force.
Iran's interest in negotiations is precisely what it has always been: To string along the West until Iran has achieved nuclear weapon capacity. For good measure, Iran will use those negotiations to secure relief from economic sanctions and to shore up the position its most important regional ally – Assad. (According to the New York Times, the Obama administration has seriously entertained the lunatic notion that its refusal to try to bring down Assad will make Iran more malleable on the nuclear issues, and even dispatched Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman to Tehran to discuss possible linkage of the two issues.)
Amazingly, Rouhani has even boasted of his past successes, as Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, of soothing the West to gain valuable time for nuclear development. In a speech to the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council in 2005, he noted cheerily, "While we were talking to the Europeans in Teheran, we were installing equipment in parts of the [uranium conversion] facility in Isfahan. . . . In fact, by creating a calm environment, we were able to complete the work in Isfahan."
A September 3 editorial in the Iranian newspaper Baher, which has close ties to the regime, made clear that the same tactics are being employed today. The editorial criticized Rouhani's predecessor Ahmadinejad for adopting an aggressive stance guaranteed to engender Western resistance. The thrust of the editorial, according to Ray Takeyh, an Iran specialist with the Council on Foreign Relations, was that Iran's nuclear aspirations are best served not by concessions on the scope of its program but by improving its image as a trustworthy and accountable state. Thus Rouhani's current charm offensive.
FEW EPIGRAMS ARE AS HACKNEYED AS SANTAYANA'S "those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it." Sadly, it is fully apposite as we watch a complete reprise of many other chapters in Iran-American relations over the past three plus decades. The sighting of a supposedly "moderate" Iranian president is already an oft-told tale signifying nothing. Even on the implausible proposition that Hasan Rouhani represents something new, and not just the diplomatic face the mullahs have chosen to put forward – remember we are talking about a man who has faithfully served the Iranian theocracy in senior positions for 34 years and was one of only six out of 686 candidates vetted by the Guardian Council allowed to run for president – he has absolutely no independent authority over Iran's nuclear program. That rests exclusively with Supreme Leader Khameini.
That lesson should have been learned at the very outset of the Islamic Revolution. After the 1979 seizure of American hostages, the United States engaged in ongoing futile negotiations with President Obolhassan Bani Sadr, despite the fact that the only one who could make any decisions was then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. Though nothing came of those negotiations, Bani Sadr did extract crucial concessions from the U.S. that were viewed in much of the Muslim world as a humiliation of the United States,and thereby increased the prestige of the Islamic Revolution throughout the Muslim world. For his part, Bani Sadr was ultimately impeached on orders of Khomeini, and lives, until today, as a exile in France.
Other "moderate" presidents were to follow. The 1989 election of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani generated much excitement in the West, particularly in Germany, which opened up a new "critical dialogue" in 1992. Two months after the opening of that dialogue, three leaders of the Iranian Democratic Party of Kurdistan were gunned down in a Berlin restaurant. Five years later, a German court implicated Supreme Leader Khameini and President Rafsanjani as among the masterminds of the assassination. As a result every EU member nation withdrew its ambassador from Teheran.
In response, the mullahs had another "moderate," Mohammed Khatami elected president in 1997. He trumpeted a Dialogue of Civilizations. Yet in the first two years of his "moderate" rule, a dozen writers and political leaders were murdered, and in 1999, student uprisings were brutally suppressed. Overseeing the suppression of the student protests, incidentally, was Hasan Rouhani, the latest incarnation of an Iranian "moderate" president.
DESPITE THE FATUITY of the claim of new winds blowing from Teheran, much of the Western media was eager to go along with the charade and act as a chorus for the bright hopes for a "comprehensive solution" expressed by President Obama, after his chat with Rouhani.
CNN trumpeted an interview of Rouhani by Chistine Amanpour with a headline that Rouhani had repudiated Holocaust denial – a claim swiftly denied by the official Iranian news agency, which was backed up by independent translators. In fact, Rouhani never mentioned the Holocaust. He went no farther than to condemn the Nazis killing of a "group of Jews, among many, many people," and refused to be drawn into a discussion of how many Jews were killed on the grounds that it is a question best left to the historians. "A group of Jews" is strange way to characterize six million people. Minimizing the number of murdered Jews, is is itself a form of Holocaust denial, and precisely what Rouhani engaged in. Even David Irwing does not suggest no "group" of Jews were killed.
For its part, The New York Times accused Prime Minister Netanyahu of moving quickly "to block even tentative steps by Iran and the United States to ease tensions and move toward negotiations to end the nuclear crisis." The Times apparently could find no basis for skepticism about the likelihood of yet another round of negotiations ending the nuclear crisis, or why Israel – a nation repeatedly threatened with annihilation by Iran – should have any grounds for concern, apart from Netanyahu's perpetual bellicosity.
TEASING THE WEST with hope and stringing out negotiations on the basis of that hope can only serve the mullahs goal of a attaining full nuclear capacity. Rouhani's pointed avoidance of even the briefest photo-op with Obama at the UN, despite extensive American entreaties – he did have plenty of time for Louis Farrakhan -- suggests the course the Iranians will follow: alternately playing hard to get and willing, while counting on Western desperation to believe in a diplomatic solution to drag things out.
Even as they play hard to get, the Iranians will not eschew occasional hardball, just as the 1992 "critical dialogue" with Germany did not prevent them from assassinating political rivals in a Berlin restaurant. Just this week the U.S. Navy announced that government-supported Iranian hackers had recently gained entry to the Navy's intranet.
Khameini will not want Obama to forget the capacity of Iran's external operations unit, under the direction of Qassem Suleimani, to wreak havoc around the globe. As recently as 2011, the Iranians brazenly plotted to kill the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States in Washington D.C.
John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., as well as chief nuclear negotiator, writes in Sunday's Wall Street Journal that Iran will attempt to extend negotiations as long as possible and gain from the West reductions of sanctions as "good will" gestures to lessen the mutual "mistrust" Obama described as existing between Iran and the United States. Once removed sanctions will almost certainly never be reinstated, especially by European nations chafing at the bit to resume business with Iran.
While negotiations proceed, there is no chance of an Israeli air strike, which would be castigated world wide for destroying the chances of peace or of more robust congressional sanctions. Thus one of Prime Minister Netanyahu's primary goals in his discussions with President Obama must be to secure a firm time limit for talks, within which either an agreement that puts Iran significantly further from nuclear capability than today will be achieved or the path of negotiations will be revealed to have failed resoundingly.
Amos Yadlin, former head of Israel's Military Intelligence, outlines the elements of a "good" agreement from Israel's point of view: Removal of all previously enriched uranium and its return to Iran only in a form that cannot be weaponized; the cessation of work on the Arak heavy-water facility, which will provide Iran with an option for a plutonium bomb; the neutering of Fordow underground facility; and strict limits on the number of centrifuges and the degree of enrichment permitted – 3.5 per cent, the maximum needed for civilian use.
An agreement that leaves Iran with its existing stocks of 5% enriched uranium and the Arak and Fordow facilities capable of being fully activated any time that the Iran decides to abrogate the treaty, as North Korea did shortly after the 2005 Pyongyang Accords, is much worse than no agreement from the point of view of Israeli security.
A purely cosmetic agreement that focuses only on inspection and transparency and allows Iran to maintain its current stock of 5% enriched uranium and its Arak and Fordrow facilities – in short, just enough to allow the United States to claim that it has achieved something, without significantly distancing Iran from its ability to breakout to nuclear capability at a time of its choosing -- would be the worst of all possible worlds for Israel.
How much would you like to bet on President Obama being unwilling to accept such a cosmetic achievement, secure in the support of a fawning media?
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The Power of an Illusion
Few epigrams are as hackneyed as George Santayana's "those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it." Yet that warning remains fully apposite as one surveys the failures of American and Western policy towards Iran since Ayatollah Khomeini's 1979 Islamic Revolution. Again and again policymakers who pride themselves on their sophistication and knowledge have professed to detect moderate forces among the ruling mullahs and their chosen representatives with whom one can do business, as Neville Chamberlain once said of Adolph Hitler.
President Obama's expressed confidence, during his fifteen-minute chat last Friday with Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, in the possibility of working out a "comprehensive solution" to the impasse over the Iranian nuclear program is but the most recent example of a Western leader who believes himself the soul of urbane sophistication falling prey to the illusion of Iranian moderation.
Yet the conviction that Iran can be persuaded to shutter its nuclear weapons development by anything other than a credible and imminent threat of having its nuclear facilities laid waste by U.S. bombers ignores the crucial importance of nuclear weapons in the strategic vision of Iranian leaders from Khomeini to the present. President Obama to an even greater degree than his predecessors is unable to credit Khomeini's frequently expressed vision for the spread of his particular brand of Shiite Islam worldwide, even at the cost of the destruction of Iran.
Khomeini saw, according to long-time U.S. Defense Department analyst Harold Rhode, nuclear weapons as a means of reversing the humiliation of Muslim subservience to the West. Possession of nuclear weapons, in Khomeini's vision, would place Iran at the forefront of the world-wide war to spread Islam of which he constantly spoke. And crucially those weapons would represent a triumph of Shiite Muslims over their Sunni rivals. For while Sunni leaders have for decades whipped their populations into paroxysms of hatred for the West and Israel, largely to distract from their own failures, they have done nothing to reverse the theological humiliation of Muslim weakness vis-à-vis the West.
Nuclear weapons would allow Iran to provide more effective cover for its terrorist allies, such as Hamas, and exercise control over the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, and thus over the world economy.
Proof of Iran's steadfast commitment to the development of nuclear weapons does not depend solely on understanding of the theological logic of the Islamic Revolution. It is evident on its face. Iran possesses the world's second or third largest oil and gas reserves – enough to meet its energy needs for 200 years – and has no need of nuclear energy. And even if it did, it would be far cheaper to purchase from Russia all the enriched uranium needed to power civilian reactors rather than build its own vastly more expensive nuclear enrichment program. That Iran has nevertheless maintained its nuclear program in the face of international isolation and crippling economic sanctions proves two things: Iran's nuclear program is not about energy and that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khameini has no intention of surrendering that program.
Not least, a November 8 2011 report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) detailed Iranian work on nuclear triggers, mathematical modeling of missile trajectories for the deployment of nuclear weapons, and implosion experiments. It confirmed that Iran has sophisticated knowledge of nuclear weapon design and has tested some of the components of a nuclear weapon.
THE APPELATION OF "MODERATE" to Iranian presidents is on oft-told tale, which gets no better by virtue of repetition. Most important, the moderation or lack thereof of the Iranian president is irrelevant to the regime's decision-making about its nuclear program. Only one person has the power to halt Iran's development of nuclear power: Supreme Leader Khameini. The new president is no more than the public face that Khameini chooses.
That lesson should have been learned more than thirty years ago, during the Iran hostage crisis. The United States conducted lengthy negotiations with President Obolbassan Bani Sadr, though the only one with the authority to order the release of the American hostages was Supreme Leader Khomeini. Bani Sadr did, however, manage to extract crucial concessions from the Americans, which were viewed as a humiliation of the United States in the honor-obsessed Islam world and served to increase the prestige of the Islamic Revolution in Muslim eyes.
Moderate, in any event, is a relative term that has proven useless as an analytical tool when applied to successive Iranian presidents. The 1989 election of "moderate" Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani generated much excitement in the West, particularly in Germany, which opened up a new "critical dialogue" in 1992. Two months after the opening of that dialogue, three leaders of the Iranian Democratic Party of Kurdistan were gunned down in a Berlin restaurant. Five years later, a German court implicated Supreme Leader Khameini and President Rafsanjani as among the masterminds of the assassination. As a result every EU member nation withdrew its ambassador from Teheran.
In response, the mullahs had another "moderate," Mohammed Khatami elected president in 1997. He trumpeted a Dialogue of Civilizations. Yet in the first two years of his "moderate" rule, a dozen writers and political leaders were murdered, and in 1999, student uprisings were brutally put down. Overseeing the suppression of the student protests, incidentally, was Hasan Rouhani, the latest incarnation of an Iranian "moderate" president.
Nor did the moderation of the "moderates" extend to Israel or abhorrence of nuclear weapons. Rafsanjani referred to Israel as a "one-bomb country" and mused in a public sermon at Teheran University that "one atomic bomb would wipe out Israel." Khatami spoke of Israel as an "old wound in the body of Islam that cannot be healed. Under "moderates" and "fanatics" alike, long-range missiles were paraded in Teheran bedecked with banner proclaiming, "Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth."
The idea that Rouhani's alleged moderation will prove any more relevant is far-fetched. He has been a loyal senior servant of the Islamic Revolution for three decades. And he has openly boasted of the usefulness of a "moderate" façade in fooling the West. In a speech to the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council in 2005, he noted cheerily, "While we were talking to the Europeans in Teheran, we were installing equipment in parts of the [uranium conversion] facility in Isfahan. . . . In fact, by creating a calm environment, we were able to complete the work in Isfahan."
A September 3 editorial in the Iranian newspaper Baher, which has close ties to the regime, made clear that the same tactics are being employed today. The editorial criticized Rouhani's predecessor Ahmadinejad for adopting an aggressive stance guaranteed to engender Western resistance. The thrust of the editorial, according to Ray Takeyh, an Iran specialist with the Council on Foreign Relations, was that Iran's nuclear aspirations are best served not by concessions on the scope of its program but by improving its image as a trustworthy and accountable state. Thus Rouhani's current charm offensive.
EVEN THE SAME TIRED EVIDENCE OF IRAN'S potential flexibility keeps getting recycled. In his speech at the U.N. last week President Obama, following in the path of former Secretary of State Clinton, hopefully cited Supreme Leader Khameini's mythical fatwa against the use of nuclear weapons. A MEMRI search of the various official websites of Khameini, however, failed to discover any such fatwa. And in response to a question submitted to him as to whether it would not be permissible under Islamic law to use nuclear weapons to deter aggressors against Islam, Khameini pointedly made no reference to any such fatwa.
In addition, the Washington Post's Jody Warrick revealed the existence of an internal U.N. document showing that Khameini embraced the concept of an Iranian bomb during a meeting of the country's top leadership more than two decades ago on the grounds that a nuclear arsenal would "serve Iran as a deterrent in the hands of G-d's soldiers." Moreover, Ali Reza Forqani, a close ally of the Supreme Leader, has written of the duty to annihilate Israel and outlined how Iranian missiles could do so in nine minutes.
What next a citation to the 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate – described by John Bolton as a "soft coup" by the U.S. intelligence community against the possibility of military action -- which opened with a bombshell announcement of "high confidence" that Iran has suspended work on a nuclear weapons program? A footnote explained that by "weapons program" the NIE only referred to weapon design and "secret" efforts, not to the 3,000 centrifuges then spinning in broad daylight, and even with respect to those the IAEA subsequently found both conclusions to be wrong.
AT ROOT OF THE NEVER-ENDING HOPE for a diplomatic solution is the fallacy that diplomacy is always preferable to military action or the credible threat thereof. David Wurmser, a former advisor to both Vice-President Cheney and chief arms negotiation John Bolton, recalls a conversation with one of his successors in the incoming Obama administration, who outlined an approach to Iran "eerily identical" to the failed policy pursued by President Bush. Wurmser asked what was the backup plan in the event that diplomacy and sanctions proved ineffective. His opposite number confessed there was none. At some point "pressure must work," he insisted. That point has still not been reached and never will be.
Churchill never stopped lamenting how tens of millions of lives could have been spared had England and France shown some backbone at Munich. The German High Command would likely have overthrown Hitler. The lesson of Munich is that sometimes the application of force in time can spare far greater devastation later.
What was that Santayana said, again?