Category Archives: Middle East

Are We Afraid Yet?

Posted on by

The Big Debate today is over how long it will take for Iran to have the bomb.

Years, say analysts quoted in the New York Times.

Western nuclear analysts said yesterday that Tehran lacked the skills, materials and equipment to make good on its immediate nuclear ambitions, even as a senior Iranian official said Iran would defy international pressure and rapidly expand its ability to enrich uranium for fuel.

The official, Muhammad Saeedi, the deputy head of Iran’s atomic energy organization, said Iran would push quickly to put 54,000 centrifuges on line — a vast increase from the 164 the Iranians said Tuesday that they had used to enrich uranium to levels that could fuel a nuclear reactor.

Still, nuclear analysts called the claims exaggerated. They said nothing had changed to alter current estimates of when Iran might be able to make a single nuclear weapon, assuming that is its ultimate goal. The United States government has put that at 5 to 10 years, and some analysts have said it could come as late as 2020.

Andy Grotto at Think Progress explains:

Iran enriched the uranium using a cascade of 164 centrifuges that spin uranium hexafluoride gas at supersonic speed. This process extracts U-235—usable in power reactors and nuclear weapons—from the gas. The enriched uranium that Iran produced cannot be used in a nuclear weapon because it contains just 3.5% U-235, whereas a nuclear weapon typically requires highly-enriched uranium (HEU) that contains more than 90% U-235. Assuming Iran has perfect luck with the centrifuge, it would need to operate this cascade continually for more than five years to produce enough HEU (15-20 kg, roughly the size of a basketball) for a crude nuclear bomb.

To acquire a credible nuclear weapons capability, Iran’s next step is to use this successful experiment as the basis for building a 3,000 centrifuge cascade at Natanz, as Iran has frequently claimed it would do. In theory, such a facility would be capable of producing enough HEU for 2-3 bombs a year. Building such a facility, however, is far more difficult and demanding than operating the 164 centrifuge cascade.

Even if everything goes right, such a facility would not be fully operational until 2009 at the earliest. This is still too soon for comfort, but it does leave significant time for some hard-nosed diplomacy.

Even some rightie bloggers admit that Iran isn’t likely to have the bomb next week. This guy, for example, quotes a professor at the Woodrow Wilson School who said 2009 was the earliest possible date for the mullahs to build an atomic weapon.

And talking about 3,000 or 54,000 centrifuges makes the pre-Iraq invasion hysteria over the aluminum tubes and rumors that Saddam Hussein was trying to build a centrifuge seem all the more rinky-dink, doesn’t it?

Still, there is much talk of cascades and centrifuges on the Blogosphere today. My understanding is that building a whole lot of centrifuges and getting them to work together properly to make weapons-grade material is devilishly difficult and expensive — easier said than done — and also requires vast amounts of uranium and energy. Although I guess an oil nation has that last part licked.

Bottom line — no matter what anybody says, we shouldn’t have to bomb Iran this year. There seems to be general consensus on that point.

At the Washington Post, David Ignatius writes,

The emerging confrontation between the United States and Iran is “the Cuban missile crisis in slow motion,” argues Graham Allison, the Harvard University professor who wrote the classic study of President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 showdown with the Soviet Union that narrowly averted nuclear war. If anything, that analogy understates the potential risks here.

That doesn’t sound good.

Allison argues that Bush’s dilemma is similar to the one that confronted Kennedy in 1962. His advisers are telling him that he may face a stark choice — either to acquiesce in the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a dangerous adversary, or risk war to stop that nuclear fait accompli. Hard-liners warned JFK that alternative courses of action would only delay the inevitable day of reckoning, and Bush is probably hearing similar advice now.

Kennedy’s genius was to reject the Cuba options proposed by his advisers, hawk and dove alike, and choose his own peculiar outside-the-box strategy. He issued a deadline but privately delayed it; he answered a first, flexible message from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev but not a second unyielding one; he said he would never take U.S. missiles out of Turkey, as the Soviets were demanding, and then secretly did precisely that. Disaster was avoided because Khrushchev believed Kennedy was willing to risk war — but wanted to avoid it.

But, um, Kennedy isn’t the guy plotting the course any more. And Bush and Cheney put together don’t have half the smarts that collected in JFK’s toe jam.

Ignatius continues,

What worries me is that the relevant historical analogy may not be the 1962 war that didn’t happen, but World War I, which did. The march toward war in 1914 resulted from the tight interlocking of alliances, obligations, perceived threats and strategic miscalculations. The British historian Niall Ferguson argued in his book “The Pity of War” that Britain’s decision to enter World War I was a gross error of judgment that cost that nation its empire.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, makes a similar argument about Iran. “I think of war with Iran as the ending of America’s present role in the world,” he told me this week. “Iraq may have been a preview of that, but it’s still redeemable if we get out fast. In a war with Iran, we’ll get dragged down for 20 or 30 years. The world will condemn us. We will lose our position in the world.”

Howard Fineman at Newsweek:

For as long as I’ve known him, Bush has liked to muse aloud about his theory of “political capital.” His dad’s mistake, he told me more than once, was to have not spent the vast political capital he accumulated in 1991 as the “liberator of Kuwait”—a failure that led, in his son’s mind, to Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992.

After the attacks on 9/11, after the successful (and globally popular) obliteration of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and after the midterm congressional elections of 2002, President Bush was sitting in the White House with a colossal pile of military, diplomatic and political capital in front of him. And then he pushed the entire pile to the middle of the poker table and bet it all on his predetermined decision to invade Iraq. I said at the time and still believe that it was one of the most momentous decisions any president had ever made.

Now, and largely as a consequence, Bush finds himself bereft of political capital at precisely the moment when he (and the rest of the world) needs it most. To use his father’s terms (from his 1989 inaugural address), we have neither the will nor the wallet to take care of business in and with the bullies in Iran.

Somebody — it may have been Fineman — said on Countdown last night that we spent our military capital on the wrong I-country.

Fineman goes on to say that the President is boxed in politically because he’s lost credibility with too many voters. He’s boxed in militarily because Iran is, well, not Iraq —

Saddam Hussein was a bellicose character, but Iran has four times the population and several thousand more years of unified national identity. Iran also has big-league ballistic missiles capable of reaching, and ruining, lots of places in the Middle East region, including Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Iran also has millions of Shia allies in Iraq who would regard (and be asked to regard) an attack on Iran as an attack on Shia Islam. One retired general I checked in with (who asked to remain unidentified because he sometimes is called on for counsel by the administration) says that American troops in Iraq—who’ve been working in many ways with the Shiite majority there—would risk coming under attack by them, especially if there was any effort to redeploy them.

Bush is boxed in diplomatically because, frankly, he needs to be able to work with the UN and the IAEA, not shove them around, and Bush and the UN/IAEA have, um, some history. And he’s boxed in economically because starting another war in the Middle East would send oil prices even higher.

I want to go back to what Fineman said about Bush and political capital: His dad’s mistake, he told me more than once, was to have not spent the vast political capital he accumulated in 1991 as the “liberator of Kuwait”—a failure that led, in his son’s mind, to Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992. What Bush never understood is that “political capital” has a limited shelf life whether you spend it or not. Eventually, people start to ask what have you done for me lately? The Bushies seemed to think the free ride they got from 9/11 would last forever; that they could do whatever they wanted for the next seven years. I think only now it’s starting to sink in that the 9/11 boost is over.

I’m also reminded of what Ezra Klein said — “This White House was predicated on the belief that policies didn’t matter, only politics did. That’s been disproven, they’ve found themselves unable to fight failure with photo-ops.” For Bushies, policy is just a continuation of politics by other means. Bush blew his “political capital” on political games instead of substance. And now he’s broke and we’re bleeped.

Judging by past performance, whatever the Bushies choose to do about Iran will be the wrong thing. It may be that the best we can hope for is that nobody starts a war before we can pry the Bushies out of the White House. At least Tehran shouldn’t be able to make a bomb before then.

Yes, He Would

Posted on by

Via True Blue Liberal you can read today’s Paul Krugman column without breaking through the NY Times firewall. Here are two terrible truths Bush supporters cannot face, never mind refute:

First, it’s clearer than ever that Mr. Bush, who still claims that war with Iraq was a last resort, was actually spoiling for a fight. The New York Times has confirmed the authenticity of a British government memo reporting on a prewar discussion between Mr. Bush and Tony Blair. In that conversation, Mr. Bush told Mr. Blair that he was determined to invade Iraq even if U.N. inspectors came up empty-handed.

Second, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Mr. Bush knew that the case he was presenting for war — a case that depended crucially on visions of mushroom clouds — rested on suspect evidence. For example, in the 2003 State of the Union address Mr. Bush cited Iraq’s purchase of aluminum tubes as clear evidence that Saddam was trying to acquire a nuclear arsenal. Yet Murray Waas of the National Journal reports that Mr. Bush had been warned that many intelligence analysts disagreed with that assessment.

These two truths have been verified way beyond a shadow of a doubt, yet righties cannot address them honestly. Instead, when challenged, they concoct a straw man and argue with that. For example, Gateway Pundit’s defense of the newest leak revelation is titled “Media Appalled that George Bush Dare Defend Himself.” And, of course, no one is appalled that Bush would defend himself. We’re appalled that he keeps lying his ass off to do it.

But Krugman’s main point is that no one should doubt Bush could invade Iran.

“But he wouldn’t do that,” say people who think they’re being sensible. Given what we now know about the origins of the Iraq war, however, discounting the possibility that Mr. Bush will start another ill-conceived and unnecessary war isn’t sensible. It’s wishful thinking. …

… Why might Mr. Bush want another war? For one thing, Mr. Bush, whose presidency is increasingly defined by the quagmire in Iraq, may believe that he can redeem himself with a new Mission Accomplished moment.

And it’s not just Mr. Bush’s legacy that’s at risk. Current polls suggest that the Democrats could take one or both houses of Congress this November, acquiring the ability to launch investigations backed by subpoena power. This could blow the lid off multiple Bush administration scandals. Political analysts openly suggest that an attack on Iran offers Mr. Bush a way to head off this danger, that an appropriately timed military strike could change the domestic political dynamics.

See also John Steinberg of Raw Story —

In a rational world, Bush’s dismal track record (by our standards) would hasten the handing of the car keys to a designated driver. In the strange world that Bush and Karl Rove inhabit, it means that a bigger distraction must be created.

Now, I don’t think the public would back an invasion of Iran unless a new, major terrorist strike could be blamed on Iran, or if, as Steinberg suggests, a couple of American warships happened to sink in the Persian Gulf. That might do it.

William M. Arkin of the Washington Post writes in “Goldilocks and Iran” that there are three ways Iran and the U.S. could enter into a war:

  • We could go to war if a cornered Iran lashes out.
  • We could go to war if the intelligence community assesses that Iran has clandestinely acquired nuclear weapons and an administration decides that the U.S. must preempt.
  • We could go to war if intensified military activity on both sides leads to greater possibilities for contact leading to an accident or incident that escalates out of control.

    • None of those sound all that farfetched to me.

    Fred Kaplan at Slate talks about a “Global Game of Chicken“:

    They’ve been revving the engines and rattling the sabers loud and hard lately. In the past few weeks, President Bush has released a document on national-security strategy that declares Iran to be the single biggest threat on the planet. Vice President Dick Cheney has warned that Iran will face serious consequences if it continues to enrich uranium. Joseph Cirincione, a sober-minded nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment, writes in the new issue of Foreign Policy:

      For months, I have told interviewers that no senior political or military official was seriously considering a military attack on Iran. In the last few weeks, I have changed my view. In part, this shift was triggered by colleagues with close ties to the Pentagon and the executive branch who have convinced me that some senior officials have already made up their minds: They want to hit Iran.

    BTW, the Cirincione article quoted above is titled “Fool Me Twice” and is a good read.

    At a series of seminars at the Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday, analysts and ex-officials debated the pros and cons of attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities, but they agreed that keeping the conflict to a snappy “limited strike” was unlikely; it would almost certainly escalate to all-out war, with regional and possibly global repercussions.

    Yes, that’s certainly not comforting.

    In the new issue of Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows discusses a “war game” sponsored by the Atlantic in 2004.

    … under the guidance of Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel who had conducted many real-world war games for the Pentagon, including those that shaped U.S. strategy for the first Gulf War, we assembled a panel of experts to ask “What then?” about the ways in which the United States might threaten, pressure, or entice the Iranians not to build a bomb. Some had been for and some against the invasion of Iraq; all had served in the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, or other parts of the nation’s security apparatus, and many had dealt directly with Iran.

    The experts disagreed on some details but were nearly unanimous on one crucial point: what might seem America’s ace in the hole—the ability to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations in a pre-emptive air strike—was a fantasy.

    Fallows elaborates and explains the reasons why this is a fantasy, which I will not list here. Bottom line, the panel agreed that Iran’s getting nuclear weapons capability would be a very bad thing. But trying to solve this problem by dropping bombs on it would fail militarily (for reasons given in the article) and would also cause other more serious problems. Like Iraq, only worse.

    If you are doom and gloomed out now, Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian looks at the bright side. Unfortunately, it’s only the bright side for Brits.

    Britain is unlikely to participate in the nuclear bombing of Iranian atomic weapons research facilities. Instead, our role in any forthcoming nuclear blitz will be to fill the blogosphere with sarcastic posts and make tut-tutting noises. The latter may or may not be heard above B61-11s slamming nukes into Iran’s Natanz centrifuge plant, which is challengingly located 75ft below ground.

    (The lousy exchange rate makes Britain damn expensive, but maybe my Welsh relatives will take me in for a while. …)

    Cross-posted at The American Street.)

    Update: See also “Why Iraq Was a Mistake.”

    Bush Is Dissed

    Posted on by

    What Juan Cole says:

    Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has blown off the president of the United States. Bush sent Sistani a letter asking him to intervene to help end the gridlock in the formation of a new Iraqi government. Asked about his response, an aide said that Sistani had not opened the letter and had put it aside in his office.

    Sistani does not approve of the American presence in Iraq, and certainly disapproves of the Bush administration’s attempt to unseat Ibrahim Jaafari as the candidate of the United Iraqi Alliance. Middle Easterners have had Western Powers dictate their politics to them for a couple of centuries and are pretty tired of it.

    More jaw-dropping information in the Professor’s post; it’s worth reading all the way through.

    Mystery Solved

    Posted on by

    Ever wonder how it is that conservatives can go to Iraq and not see any violence? Well, now we know — they’ve been in the wrong country.

    Will Bunch posted a photograph that Republican congressional candidate Howard Kaloogian (running for Duke Cunningham’s seat) claimed he had taken in Baghdad.

    Turns out this photo is actually of a suburb of Istanbul.

    Does this explain how, for example, Ralph Peters could travel all over Baghdad without so much as seeing smudged shoes or a hair out of place? Have the Bushies set up a Potemkin Baghdad village somewhere in Turkey to show off to visitors? I mean, we’ve heard for years the moon landings were faked. If you can fake the moon, you can fake Baghdad.

    Of course, this might be just an honest mistake. So I created this handy-dandy guide to Middle East geography for Republicans:

    I’m just funnin’ with ya, righties. But those of you who think you’ve been to Iraq might want to check what’s stamped on your passport.

    Update:     Howard Kaloogian says he’s sorry about the photo. He’s sorry he didn’t “just” get back from Baghdad; he got back last year. And he didn’t “take” the “photo.” He doesn’t know who took it. He didn’t write the caption; some staffer wrote the caption. Maybe some staffer’s mother. Maybe elves. But he thinks people are being picky.

    Misguided

    Posted on by

    The case of the Christian convert under threat of execution in Afghanistan may be putting more cracks in the Bush base. For background, see Pamela Constable in today’s Washington Post:

    The case of an Afghan man who could be prosecuted and even put to death for converting to Christianity has unleashed a blizzard of condemnation from the West this week and exposed a conflict in values between Afghanistan, a conservative Muslim country, and the foreign countries that have helped defend and rebuild it in the four years since the fall of the Taliban.

    The case of Abdul Rahman, a longtime Christian convert who lived in Germany for years and was arrested last month in Kabul, has also highlighted the volatile debate within Afghanistan over the proper role of Islam in Afghan law and public policy as the country struggles to develop a democracy.

    My understanding is that Rahman is not in trouble for being Christian, but for converting from Islam. I dimly remember hearing (in a seminar I attended years ago) that under traditional Sharia law, converting from Islam is punishable by death. It may be that the Afghan constitution doesn’t mind if people who have never been Muslims practice a religion other than Islam.

    According to Constable, it appears at the moment that Rahman is unlikely to be tried or executed. However, at the New York Times Abdul Waheed Wafa writes that the judge in the case has vowed to resist international pressure when he makes his decision.

    There’s no question that the execution of Rahman would be an atrocity. It would also likely stir up more anti-Islamic feeling in Europe and cause the Christian Right to re-evaluate our military adventures in the Middle East, which would be a disaster for the Bush Administration. I take it from the Wafa article that Condoleezza Rice is pulling every string she can pull to set Rahman free.

    Word that the Afghani government — the one that the U.S. fought to establish — could execute someone for converting to Christianity hit the American religious Right like a ton of Bibles. Constable writes at WaPo:

    Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, complained in a letter to Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “How can we congratulate ourselves for liberating Afghanistan from the rule of jihadists only to be ruled by radical Islamists who kill Christians? . . . Americans will not give their blood and treasure to prop up new Islamic fundamentalist regimes.”

    Hasn’t someone explained to Mr. Perkins that that’s exactly what we’re doing in Iraq?

    Wafa writes at the Times, “In the United States this week, Christian talk shows and advocacy groups rallied their supporters, who flooded the White House and the Afghanistan Embassy with complaints.”

    Initial reaction from the Bush Administration was tepid, writes Constable:

    On Tuesday, a State Department spokesman urged the Afghan government to “conduct any legal proceedings in a transparent and fair manner.” R. Nicholas Burns, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, said that the Afghan constitution “affords freedom of religion to all Afghans” and that the U.S. government hoped for a “satisfactory result” of the case.

    However, Judd at Think Progress says the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom repeatedly tried to warn the Bushies that the Afghan constitution amounted to “Taliban Lite.” The Bushies ignored them, until now. (Nobody could have anticipated that Afghan judges would adhere to Sharia law, even though the Afghan constitution says they can.)

    Rightie bloggers are, of course, all a-twitter. “Where is the outrage from the Left?” says this one.

    Oh, I dunno … maybe in the same place as the outrage from the Right on the death of Dilawar the cab driver.

    But another had some pointed words for Republicans —

    Also, I’d like to make a quick suggestion to Republicans: get on top of this story now. Not just because you should be anyway–obviously, it’s the right thing to do–but also because this story has the makings of another Dubai Ports World scandal written all over it. Fool me once. That’s all I have to say.

    In other Christian news — you may remember Tom Fox, the Christian peace activist who was killed while being held hostage in Iraq. Today U.S. and British Thursday freed three more Christian peace activists.

    You’d think the righties would be pleased that three Christians have been saved. Guess again.

    The Christian peace activists are not “good” Christians because they don’t support the war (be sure to read the comments to the linked blog post, too. Verily I say unto thee, unless thou shalt support George W. Bush and the Iraq War, and vote Republican, thou shalt not be admitted into the Kingdom of Heaven.).

    Here’s my favorite blog post on the subject:

    One would think that the military that saved these people would recieve a huge thank you, but their press release doesn’t even mention the rescue. They do take the time for mentioning how much they love the enemy however.

      Today, in the face of this joyful news, our faith compels us to love our enemies even when they have committed acts which caused great hardship to our friends and sorrow to their families.

    That in itself can be viewed as an admiral conviction to their faith, even if misguided …

    Got that? Jesus’s teachings are misguided.

    Update: See also the Green Knight.

    Iran Update

    Posted on by

    Bronwen Maddox of the London Times provides an update on the Iran nuclear situation.

    EVERYTHING is set for the row over Iran’s nuclear work to land before the UN Security Council in New York. The council is preparing to take up the baton next week.

    Yet until this week’s acrimonious and muddled meeting at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna finally ends, there is a hovering uncertainty that this will happen.

    Yesterday the tone hardened. Russia denied that it was offering Iran a way to keep a vestige of the most controversial research. The US warned Iran of “consequences” if it persisted with uranium enrichment. Britain, France and Germany, who orchestrated the IAEA vote that referred the row to the council, said that what is known about Iran’s research could be just the tip of the iceberg: missile designs which have emerged this year could point to a secret military programme.

    And Iran, in its inimitable vocabulary, warned the US that it, too, could cause “harm and pain”, and threatened to disrupt oil markets. It attacked US “warmongers”, saying: “Surely we are not naive about the US’s intention to flex muscles. But we also see the bone fractures underneath.”

    Ms. Maddox writes that the Security Council will be reluctant to impose sanctions. Nobody expects anything to happen soon.

    For additional background see “Wolf! Wolf!” and “The Tar Baby.”

    The Tar Baby

    Posted on by

    The story thus far — a multinational diplomatic effort to resolve the Iran nuclear standoff, explained yesterday in this post, is still underway. Time is critical — the situation must be diffused before Tehran gets a bomb or Washington drops bombs.

    As it’s unlikely Tehran has sufficient weapons-grade uranium to do much nuclear mischief right now, the latter outcome is the more immediate threat.

    Simon Tisdall explains in today’s Guardian:

    George Bush’s explanation of his volte-face over a proposed Iran-India gas pipeline project appeared slightly disingenuous. “Our beef with Iran is not the pipeline,” the US president said on Saturday after withdrawing previous objections and giving the go-ahead to Washington’s new friends in Delhi. “Our beef with Iran is the fact that they want to develop a nuclear weapon.”

    But US fears about Iranian nukes, discussed in Vienna yesterday, are hardly the whole story. Washington is compiling a dossier of grievances against Tehran similar in scope and seriousness to the pre-war charge-sheet against Iraq. Other complaints include Iranian meddling in Iraq, support for Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon, and human rights abuses.

    Our meddling in Iraq and human rights abuses are an entirely different matter, of course.

    Mr Bush regularly urges Iranians to seize the “freedom they seek and deserve”. In Tehran’s ministries, that sounds like a call for regime change. He has ignored past Iranian offers of talks and tightened US economic sanctions.

    Official Washington’s quickening drumbeat of hostility is beginning to recall political offensives against Libya’s Muammar Gadafy, Panama’s Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein, which all ended in violence. Rightwing American media are urging action, deeming Iran “an intolerable threat” that is the “central crisis of the Bush presidency”. [emphasis added]

    Lord, how many central crises can one administration stand?

    Yesterday’s ABC News report that Iran is making roadside bombs known as IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices, which begs the question — how are they “improvised” if they are being manufactured?) and shipping them to Iraq for use against Americans has the righties worked up into a nice lather. The old war, with Iraq, just wasn’t much fun any more. But here is the promise of a bright, shiny new war to play with!

    It’s “a casus belli, if we want it,” says Captain Ed.

    “Gee, how convenient is that?” asks John Aravosis. “Suddenly after 3 years we conveniently find ‘evidence’ of Iran arming the Iraqi insurgents, only a mere weeks after Bush starts laying the groundwork for attacking Iran.”

    An odd part of this story is that for now it remains an ABC exclusive; I haven’t found independent corroboration. This suggests a plant. (Or, it also could suggest stupidity — see Newshog for evidence it’s an old story that ABC has confused for a new story.) On the other hand, ABC quotes Richard Clarke as finding the evidence credible. So let’s assume for a moment it’s true.

    The ABC report doesn’t make clear exactly which Iraqis the bombs are going to. Righties assume the bombs are going to “terrorists” which is a possibility. Or they might be going to insurgents. Or Shia militias. Or all of the above. What the righties never stop to consider is that Iran’s importing of bombs into Iraq is a consequence of our invasion of Iraq. In other words, we created the conditions that brought this about.

    The moral is, he who lets slip the dogs of war is likely to get bit.

    I see the Bushies and their hard-right base continuing to fight the Middle East tar baby until they get the desired outcome (can anyone explain what that is?) or until the keys to the war machine are wrestled from their hands. One can only imagine the unintended consequences of a U.S. bombing of Iran. Unfortunately, Bushies are famously imagination-challenged. Will we have to listen to Condi say, “No one could have anticipated we would start World War III”?

    Wolf! Wolf!

    Posted on by

    The monumental waste of human protoplasm known as “John Bolton” is threatening a military action against Iran, according to Julian Borger of The Guardian.

    The US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, has told British MPs that military action could bring Iran’s nuclear programme to a halt if all diplomatic efforts fail. The warning came ahead of a meeting today of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which will forward a report on Iran’s nuclear activities to the UN security council. …

    …According to Eric Illsley, a Labour committee member, the envoy told the MPs: “They must know everything is on the table and they must understand what that means. We can hit different points along the line. You only have to take out one part of their nuclear operation to take the whole thing down.”

    It is unusual for an administration official to go into detail about possible military action against Iran. To produce significant amounts of enriched uranium, Iran would have to set up a self-sustaining cycle of processes. Mr Bolton appeared to be suggesting that cycle could be hit at its most vulnerable point.

    Elaine Shannon of Time magazine says that the Bushies are preparing a security briefing on Iran for the UN Security Council.

    It will rely mainly on circumstantial evidence, much of it from documents found on a laptop purportedly purloined from an Iranian nuclear engineer and obtained by the CIA in 2004. U.S. officials insist the material is strong but concede they have no smoking gun.

    They do, however, have diagrams that they believe show components of a nuclear bomb. According to a Western diplomat familiar with the U.S. intel brief, a Farsi-language PowerPoint presentation on the laptop has “catchy graphics,” including diagrams of a hollow metallic sphere 2 ft. in diameter and weighing about 440 lbs. Other documents show a sphere-shaped array of tiny detonators. No file specifically refers to a nuclear bomb, but U.S. officials say the design of the sphere–an outer shell studded with small chemical-explosive charges meant to detonate inward, which would squeeze an inner core of material into a critical mass–is akin to that of classic devices like Fat Man, the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki during World War II. “Because of the size and weight and the power source going into it and height-of-burst requirements,” says the diplomat, Western experts have concluded that the design “is only intended to contain a nuclear weapon. There’s no other munition which would work.”

    Iran claims much of the laptop evidence is fabricated. Let it be noted I don’t trust Iran, either.

    Yesterday the London Times reported that NATO would help US airstrikes on Iran, which suggests to me that the plans for such airstrikes are complete and are just waiting for implementation. You might remember that over a year ago Seymour Hersh said plans for U.S. airstrikes in Iran were in the works.

    The Guardian article says that the CIA and the U.S. State Department do not appear to support airstrikes, but favor a diplomatic approach. The fact that the Bush Administration is not speaking with one voice brings us back to the question of who’s in charge? Condi takes her orders from Bush. Is Bolton getting orders from Cheney? Or is he a loose cannon?

    Today the IAEA is meeting to determine if Iran should be reported to the UN Security Council. Not that anything the IAEA or the UN Security Council decide really matters to the Bushies.

    Unlike Iraq, Iran really does have the capability to process uranium. It is engaged in small-scale processing right now. The question is, is the processing resulting in weapons-grade uranium? Iran says it needs nuclear reactors for energy. The U.S. says this is just a front for making bombs. Over the past several years most of the rest of the world has been trying to work with Iran to allow it to have energy-producing reactors but preventing Iran from engaging in the additional refinement of uranium required to produce weapons. A Russian-built power-generating reactor in Iran is scheduled to go online later this year.

    So now a race is on — not only to resolve the situation before Iran has bombs, but to resolve it before the Bush Administration charges ahead with airstrikes that would further destabilize the Middle East. Good luck, planet Earth.

    Both Tehran and Washington are playing this issue for political leverage at home. In the VRWC echo chamber the Bushies portray themselves as the only people on the planet with the wisdom and guts to stand up to Iran. The UN, the IAEA, Europe — all a pack of girly wusses who aren’t smart enough to see how dangerous Iran is. So the Lone Ranger and Tonto (probably Israel this time, not Britain) must go in alone to shoot it out with the bad guys while the tenderfeet hide out in the saloon.

    Meanwhile, as this New York Times editorial explains, Bush is Iran’s best friend.

    At the rate that President Bush is going, Iran will be a global superpower before too long. For all of the axis-of-evil rhetoric that has come out of the White House, the reality is that the Bush administration has done more to empower Iran than its most ambitious ayatollah could have dared to imagine. Tehran will be able to look back at the Bush years as a golden era full of boosts from America, its unlikely ally.

    Be sure to read the whole thing.

    Update: Former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami says that Islam is the enemy the West needs.

    Anticipate This

    Posted on by

    “I’m trying to think differently,” President Bush said in New Dehli. If that doesn’t give you the willies, nothin’ will.

    Yes, folks, the same crack (or on crack) foreign policy team that pushed North Korea back into the plutonium processing business, didn’t anticipate Hamas would win the Palestinian election even though their own poll said it would, and whose crowning achievement is the war in Iraq, has taken us another step closer to destroying civilization as we know it. David Sanger writes in the New York Times (emphasis added):

    Mr. Bush took a step in his efforts to rewrite the world’s longstanding rules that for more than 30 years have forbidden providing nuclear technology to countries that do not sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

    “I’m trying to think differently,” Mr. Bush said in New Delhi, referring to the administration’s argument that a new system is needed. But in treating India as a special case — a “strategic relationship” — he has so far declined to define general rules for everyone.

    In essence, Mr. Bush is making a huge gamble — critics say a dangerous one — that the United States can control proliferation by single-handedly rewarding nuclear states it considers “responsible,” and punishing those it declares irresponsible. For those keeping a scorecard, India is in the first camp, Iran is in the second, and no one in the administration wants to talk, at least on the record, about Israel or Pakistan — two allies that have embraced the bomb, but not the treaty.

    At WaPo, David Von Drehle writes,

    In case you missed the memo, the world is multipolar now.

    Gone are the days of go-it-alone foreign policy, of unilateral preemption and epoch-making events scheduled solely “at a time and place of our choosing.” That’s all so 2002, back at the climax of what columnist Charles Krauthammer calls “the unipolar moment” of unlimited American power. Unipolar means the big dog, Uncle Sam, bears the burdens and thus calls the shots.

    These days, America is into “regional partnerships,” as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice explained earlier this year, because “emerging nations like India and China and Brazil and Egypt and Indonesia and South Africa are increasingly shaping the course of history.”

    Condi Rice. The course of history. Be afraid.

    A few weeks ago Sebastian Mallaby pointed out that Condi Rice’s foreign policy theories are a work in progress.

    In January 2000, as the Bush campaign got underway, Rice published a manifesto in Foreign Affairs that laid out the classic “realist” position: American diplomacy should “focus on power relationships and great-power politics” rather than on other countries’ internal affairs. “Some worry that this view of the world ignores the role of values, particularly human rights and the promotion of democracy,” she acknowledged. But the priority for U.S. foreign policy was to deal with powerful governments, whose “fits of anger or acts of beneficence affect hundreds of millions of people.”

    The “great-power politics” perspective was, I assume, the basis of the Bush Administration’s decision to dismiss the importance of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in March 2001. Another Bush foreign policy triumph. Mallaby continues,

    Even six years ago, this was an outdated position. The Clinton administration was certainly preoccupied with powers such as Russia and China, but it was also tracking Islamic terrorists who had already attacked the World Trade Center. The importance of other non-state actors, from rebels to environmentalists to bond traders, had become a cliche of globalization commentary; AIDS had been recognized as a security threat. The era of great-power politics was widely thought to have ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Rice seemed like a Sovietologist who hadn’t quite caught up.

    Kissinger-style realpolitik is so 1970s, Mallaby writes. The realists were on the wrong side of history — American support for the Shah of Iran is just one example. “Time and again, the idea that diplomacy consisted mainly of relations with powerful governments proved wrong,” Mallaby writes. “As a rising cadre of neoconservative Republicans argued, diplomacy was often about judging the currents within countries — and backing democratic ones.”

    Mallaby explains that recently Rice seems to have caught up with the 1990s consensus that weak, destabilized states can prove to be dangerous, and in the long run the best hope for world peace is a world of stable democracies. And I can’t argue with that. The question is, how does that theory translate into policy?

    The Bush Administration seems to think that if the all-powerful U.S. can just find the right combination of carrots and sticks, plus the right message strategy, it can re-shape the world to its liking. Robert Fisk provided a glimpse into this thinking recently:

    Last week’s visit to Beirut by one of the blindest of George Bush’s bats – his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice – was indicative of the cruelty that now pervades Washington. She brazenly talked about the burgeoning “democracies” of the Middle East while utterly ignoring the bloodbaths in Iraq and the growing sectarian tensions of Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps the key to her indifference can be found in her evidence to the Senate Committee on International Affairs where she denounced Iran as “the greatest strategic challenge” facing the US in the region, because Iran uses policies that “contradict the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States”.

    As Bouthaina Shaaban, one of the brightest of Syria’s not always very bright team of government ministers, noted: “What is the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States? Should Middle East states adapt themselves to that nature, designed oceans away?”

    Fisk quotes Maureen Dowd: Bush “believes in self-determination only if he’s doing the determining.” Heh. David Von Drehle writes,

    But can a unipolar president find happiness in a multipolar world? We got a few hints last week, as President Bush visited one of Rice’s emerging shapers of history, India. Like a clumsy groom who has learned precisely one dance for his wedding day, Bush went carefully through the steps of multipolar diplomacy, yet there was no mistaking his natural tendencies. You got the feeling that if George W. Bush is going to embrace “partnership,” it’s going to be on his terms, pardner.

    Now the Bushies are playing Santa Claus and deciding who’s naughty or nice. And the Bush/Cheney/Rice team now decides on its own which nations deserve nuclear arms and which don’t. And they do so on the basis of their dumbly one-dimensional world view that attempts to sort all people into neat binary categories — good or bad, friend or foe — without taking in the complexity of nations and their multifaceted relationships with each other. How will the India deal affect the dicey relationship between India and Pakistan? Between Pakistan and the U.S.? Between Pakistan and the terrorists who live there? What about Israel? And what about China? The deal with India is supposed to help counter the power of China. But some critics of the deal point out that India’s economic relations with China are critical to New Dehli. If, someday, India found itself having to choose between China and the U.S. … well, Santa comes but once a year; China is on their border all the time.

    In other words, this deal could have all manner of bad outcomes that even smart people might not anticipate. Which means you can assume the anticipation-challenged Bushies haven’t considered them.

    See also: Ron Beasley and upyernoz.

    Update: Great cartoon.

    Worst Memory Ever

    Posted on by

    Or, Condi Strike Again … Jonathan S. Landay writes for Knight Ridder —

    A State Department-commissioned poll taken days before January’s Palestinian elections warned U.S. policymakers that the militant Islamic group Hamas was in a position to win.

    Nevertheless, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said after the election that they had no advance indication of a major Hamas triumph.

    What is with this woman?

    Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy, said that while the poll didn’t predict Hamas’ big win, it clearly showed a trend toward victory for the Islamic militants.

    “Either Secretary Rice was being disingenuous or else her department has a serious information-sharing problem, because INR could not have done a much better job of assessing the Palestinian election than they did,” said Aftergood. “No one else did a better job than INR. So to profess surprise of the outcome is incomprehensible.

    “This is secrecy squared,” he continued. “It’s one thing to keep secrets from the public. But when the bureaucracy is keeping secrets from itself, policy is compromised.”

    Maybe she was out buying shoes.

    Update: See Skippy, “we don’t think anybody anticipated that things might happen while he was in office and he’d actually have to lead the country.”

    Update update: I’ve been thinking the nation would be better served by a potted plant as POTUS. And Secretary of State, for that matter. But eventually we’d hear “I don’t think anyone could have anticipated that President Ficus would shrivel up and die if we didn’t keep him watered.”