October 25, 2010| News | Eli Clifton

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for October 25th, 2010:

Commentary: Max Boot blogs that, in light of Hamid Karzai’s acknowledgment that he receives $2 million a year from Iran, “the Iranians have attempted similar dollar diplomacy in Iraq, Lebanon, and lots of other countries. No surprise that they should try the same thing with another neighbor.” Boot says Iran’s policy is to give money to both the Afghan government and, allegedly, the Taliban, and its tendency to make contributions in cash is cynical and “seedy.” But the strategy is “not that far removed from conventional foreign aid programs run by the U.S., Britain and other powers.” Karzai’s decision to take Iranian money doesn’t make him a “dupe of Iran,” and he gets far more money from the U.S., says Boot. Instead, Boot takes the lesson that the revelations should be a warning that if the U.S. leaves, “Afghanistan will once again be the scene of a massive civil war, with neighboring states, and in particular Pakistan and Iran, doing their utmost to exert their influence to the detriment of our long-term interests.”

Pajamas Media: Michael Ledeen writes that the Wikileaks release shows that Iran is engaging in the “murder of Americans.” Ledeen says the documents show proof that he’s “been pretty much on-target all along” and that his critics owe him an apology. “But the really big apologies are due from our political leaders, who… have failed to respond, either politically (as I have proposed) or militarily,” he writes. He names many officials from the Clinton, Bush and Obama White Houses and says they are “all accomplices to the great evil that is the Islamic Republic of Iran,” and calls for overt support of Iranian opposition movements.

The Washington Post: Thomas J. Raleigh, a strategic planner at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad since August 2008, opines that while Iraq is building a stable and prosperous economy, “Iran will be feeling increasingly isolated.” Iranian visitors to Iraq will see the benefits of free trade and democracy and will come back to Iran wanting a similar standard of living. “As the Iraqi standard of living rises, Iranian leaders will eventually find themselves confronting an economic ‘comparative crisis’ much like that East German leaders confronted in the 1980s as their people looked enviously ‘over the wall’,” writes Raleigh.

The Washington Post: Deputy Editorial Page Editor Jackson Diehl writes that supporting free access to the internet should be better funded by the State Department and describes the success of such firewall breaching firms as UltraReach, a company which allows internet users to circumvent national firewalls. Diehl writes that the companies’ founders say that with $30 million in funding they could “effectively destroy the Internet controls of Iran and most other dictatorships.” Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner has said that defeating internet censorship would be a “game changer” in countries like Iran. Diehl writes that the holdup in funding such projects is rooted in a fear of offending the Chinese government. “State is polishing its policy and preparing yet more training programs, Iranians and people from dozens of other countries are trying to get free access to the Internet,” concludes Diehl.

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October 22, 2010| News | James Bovard

So the pre-leak spin by the Pentagon is that they have already disclosed everything important that will be revealed in the next WikiLeaks document super-dump.

Obama’s Pentagon apparently believes that Americans are as gullible – if not mutton-headed – as the Bush Pentagon believed.

No surprises expected in WikiLeaks Iraq war dump: Pentagon WASHINGTON | Fri Oct 22, 2010 11:21am EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Pentagon said on Friday it does not expect any big surprises from an imminent dump of as many as 500,000 Iraq war documents by the WikiLeaks website.

“In terms of the types of incidents that are captured in these reports, where innocent Iraqis have been killed, where there are allegations of detainee abuse, all of these things have been very well chronicled over time,” Pentagon spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said.</

blockquote>

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October 22, 2010| News | Ali Gharib

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for October 22nd, 2010:

Jerusalem Post: Israeli President Shimon Peres endorsed linkage — the concept accepted by many in the Obama administration and military leadership that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will help the U.S. pursue its longterm strategic objectives in the Middle East —at a conference of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute on Thursday. According to the Jerusalem Post, “Peres said that, “for our existence, we need the friendship of the United States of America,” and “…the president said Israel could be of help to the US by enabling an ‘anti-Iran coalition in the Middle East, and the contribution will not be by declaration, but if we stop the secondary conflict between us and the Palestinians,’ in order to allow the US to focus on the Iranian threat.”

The Race For Iran: Peter Jenkins endorses Gareth Evans post which lays out why Iran’s leaders will not pursue nuclear weapons, but adds that while pressure and persuasion may help deter Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, it may also have the opposite effect. Jenkins suggests that Western powers start focusing on addressing broader regional concerns about a nuclear weapons possession and the impact on the regional balance of power. “Now that most of the evidence points to Iran having opted for self-denial, a new policy is needed, a policy that gives priority to allaying Israeli and Arab fears that a threshold capability will enhance Iran’s regional status and self-confidence,” he concludes.

Commentary: Evelyn Gordon writes on the Contentions blog that the incoming Congress must do everything it can to support the Iranian opposition. She says “Swiss cheese sanctions” won’t work. “That leaves two choices: a military strike, which everyone professes to oppose, or regime change — which probably wouldn’t end the nuclear program but would mitigate the threat it poses,” she writes. She says this entails “vocal and unequivocal moral support,” and “technological support.” She concludes: “What Congress must do is find out from movement organizers themselves what they need — and then give it to them.”

The Guardian: Foreign affairs columnist Simon Tisdall writes that “neither sanctions nor diplomacy can wholly obviate the dread possibility of military confrontation unless something fundamental changes soon at the heart of Iran’s fundamentalist regime.” Tisdall points to some of the effects of sanctions, but says their overall impact inside is difficult to know, noting comments from Iran’s finance minister that the country’s cash reserves are enough to withstand the pressure. He also mentions resistance to the program from China, Turkey and Iraq. He says that while Iran is due to come to the negotiating table next month, it will likely limit the talks. “[T]here is little or no evidence so far that Iran’s top leadership is willing, or can be forced, to fundamentally change its ways,” he writes. “And so the dread juggernaut of direct, physical confrontation rolls ever closer.”

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October 22, 2010| Afghanistan, Antiwar movement, Culture, Economics, Empire, Iraq, Military spending, Military-industrial complex, News, Propaganda, non-violence | L. Reichard White

Can YOUR card do this?

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you how war fits into this. I mean, you co-wrote the book with Linda Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War. How does war fit into our problems with the economy?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Well, war fits in because you’re creating a liability, you’re spending money. And when we went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, we already had a deficit. And so, these wars were the first wars in America’s history financed totally on the credit card. So, you’re creating a liability, but you’re not creating an asset. So that’s the kind of spending that does weaken the economy, because it’s one-sided. … The numbers now are much more like four to six trillion.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, across this country, as the debates for various congressional and Senate seats[go], war is almost never raised [as an issue]. –Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz: Foreclosure Moratorium, Government Stimulus Needed to Revive US Economy

Blackout??

PRECEDENT? According to a "Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting" two week study, during the lead-up to the Iraq war, a period of particularly intense debate (Jan. 30 to Feb 12, 2003), U.S. mainstream media, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS Evening News, conducted 393 interviews about the pending war. Only three of those interviews were with peace leaders.

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October 21, 2010| News | Eli Clifton

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for October 21st, 2010:

The Washington Post: Glenn Kessler reports that Iran is increasingly unable to conduct “normal banking” activities due to the sanctions, and is attempting to set up banking operations in such Muslim countries as Iraq and Malaysia “using dummy names and opaque ownership structures.” For their alleged support of Iran’s nuclear program, the U.S. Treasury has blacklisted 16 Iranian banks. Matthew Levitt, director of the counterterrorism and intelligence program at the hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) told Kessler that “the banking operations, even if successfully created in other countries, are likely to be small-scale and insufficient to make up for the volume of banking activity Iran has lost.”

The National Interest: Ken Pollack, the director of Brookings’s Mid East Center, reviews the Obama administration’s Iran policy and concludes that “it is working, but it probably isn’t going to work.” He says an airstrike on Iran’s nuclear program — “and launching air strikes will be war” — will rally people to the government, justify an Iranian nuclear deterrent to further attack, cause Iran to withdraw from the NPT (meaning the world will be in the dark), and bring condemnations of the U.S. from the world. Following a lengthy analysis of U.S. policy options, he ends with thoughts on containment. He writes that given Iran belief that it can outlast sanctions, the United States and the international community needs to build “an aggressive new containment regime that Iran cannot possibly outlast. Like North Korea, Iran would not be allowed to enjoy any benefit from its acquisition of a nuclear capability or even a nuclear arsenal.”

The National Interest: Georgetown professor and former CIA officer Paul Pillar responds to Pollack’s article and disagrees that “pressure and more pressure” is the best way of dealing with Iran’s nuclear program. Pillar raises the question of why the Iranian nuclear program is such a preoccupation for the United States and whether assumptions about Iranian irrationality have any grounding in reality or are reflected in Iran’s record of behavior. Pillar also disputes the argument that a strategy of deterrence has “no guarantees of success” and “failure is invariably catastrophic” is reason enough to pressure Iran. “…[T]o make that observation as an argument for not tolerating someone else’s nuclear force would mean not only dismissing a lot of Cold War history but also throwing up our arms in despair over nuclear deterrence relationships that we continue to have to this day with the likes of Russia and China,” he contends.

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October 20, 2010| News | Wendy Honett

The Michigan Campaign for Liberty and the University of Michigan College Libertarians will host Antiwar.com Editorial Director Justin Raimondo in Ann Arbor on October 25, 2010 at 7pm. The free event, “War Without End: The Shame of the American Left,” will be held in the Michigan League Ballroom at 911 N. University at the Central Campus in Ann Arbor. You can also join the hosts and Raimondo at the sponsors dinner by purchasing tickets here. To book an event with Raimondo, please contact Wendy Honett wendy@antiwar.com.

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October 20, 2010| News | Eli Clifton

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for October 20th, 2010:

The National: Mohamad Bazzi, former Middle East bureau chief for Newsday and current adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes while the Obama administration has portrayed Hezbollah as having questionable loyalties to Lebanon, the Shi’a political party plays a valuable role for Shiite community in Lebanon. “There is a long tradition of the Lebanese state leaving Shiites to fend for themselves and waiting for religious or charitable groups to fill the vacuum. […]Hizbollah’s “state within a state” was possible because successive governments left a void in the Shiite-dominated areas of southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley and the southern suburbs of Beirut.” He notes that while Hezbollah is reliant on Iran for financial, military and political support, it is mischaracterized as “purely an Iranian proxy” by western and Arab policy makers.

The Hill’s Congress Blog: Mark D. Wallace, President of United Against Nuclear Iran, opines that new U.S. sanctions, which took effect on September 29, “closes a significant loophole found in previous U.S. sanction provisions by covering not only U.S. companies and financial institutions but foreign firms and subsidiaries as well.” Wallace, a former ambassador to the UN and the Bush-Cheney ’04 Deputy Campaign Manager, argues against the criticism that the new sanctions law oversteps “extraterritoriality.” He concludes, “Iran’s flagrant defiance of international norms should be reason enough for corporations to cease their business dealings in Iran. Now the U.S. government is presenting companies with a reasonable choice should they refuse to do so: do business with Uncle Sam or with the mullahs in Tehran.”

The New York Times: Despite some distortions demonizing Iran, such as repeating the mistranslation Ahmadinejad’s statement that Israel should be “wiped off the map,” columnist Tom Friedman explicitly endorses linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other problems that hamper the U.S. in the Middle East. “At a time when the president has made it one of his top priorities to build a global coalition to stop Iran from making a nuclear weapon, he took the very logical view that if he could advance the peace process in the Middle East it would give him much greater leverage to get the Europeans and U.N. behind tougher sanctions on Iran,” writes Friedman. In light of this, he declares Israel is behaving like a “spoiled child,” pointing to that nation’s intransigence in the peace process.

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October 19, 2010| News | Ali Gharib

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for October 19th, 2010:

Commentary: J.E. Dyer writes on the Contentions blog that Sunni Arabs are convinced Iran is taking over Iraq. He notes that Iraqi Sunnis in the Awakening movement are moving back into the insurgent camp because of this view, bolstered by fear of ending U.S. combat operations in Iraq. “In the absence of clear, assertive U.S. policy, we will find ourselves increasingly boxed in by the plans of opponents who want to make our policy for us. In many cases, the opponents will be terrorists,” he concludes.

National Review: Joel Rosenberg offers his theory behind Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Lebanon. Ahmadinejad’s aim, he writes, is “to rally the terrorist forces of Hezbollah for an apocalyptic war with the Jewish state that will set the stage for the coming of the Shia Islamic messiah known as the ‘Mahdi’ or the ‘Twelfth Imam.’” He says Iran and Hezbollah want to annihilate Israel and the United States. Rosenberg warns congressional Democrats and the president “don’t get it,” and that “Democrats have neither the wisdom nor the will to protect the American people or allies like Israel from the threat of Radical Islam,” and this may cost votes at the polls. He backs his views with findings from a poll commissioned by the neoconservative Emergency Committee for Israel and a historical overview.

Pajamas Media: Former AEI fellow and current Foundation for Defense of Democracies scholar Michael Ledeen writes about internal opposition to the Islamic Republic. “The regime would surely fall in short order if its opponents received a modicum of real support from the West, but no such support seems to be forthcoming from the feckless men and women who mistakenly fancy themselves to be real leaders,” he opines. His launching point to discuss discontent is the string of recent bombings against Iranian Revolutionary Guard facilities. He quotes an unnamed source that the most recently attacked facility is used to train terrorists: “According to a reliable Iranian source, the foreigners were being trained in the use of roadside bombs, the so-called IEDs that account for most American and other NATO casualties in Afghanistan.”

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October 18, 2010| News | Eli Clifton

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for October 18th, 2010:

New York Post: Disgraced Iranian journalist Amir Taheri writes that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki “seems set to strike a Faustian bargain to cling to power: He is ready to dine with the devil.” Judging from the headline, “Iraq: Letting Iran Call the Shots,” the “devil” here is clearly Iran. Taheri, known to have fabricated stories in the past, makes errors in his Post article as well. He writes, “Tehran helped the deal by ordering its oldest Shiite clients, the so-called Supreme Islamic Assembly of Iraq [ISCI] (and its armed wing, the Badr Brigades), to back Maliki.” Historian Juan Cole noted that Badr “peeled away from it’s parent,” and that ISCI stayed out of Maliki’s coalition.

The Guardian: Michael Knights, a fellow at Washington Institute for Near East Policy, writes that “Tehran [has] become the most influential outside power in Iraq.” He says, however, that the issue is not closed: “Iran, like the United States, will have to continue to vie for influence in Iraq.” He assesses Iranian interests in Iraq and concludes, “Tehran seeks to prevent Iraq from recovering as a military threat or as a launchpad for an American attack.” He sees the Islamic Republic accomplishing this through trade, particularly energy, and influencing Iraq’s “ fragmented and unregulated” politics.

The Washington Post: A neoconservative editorial writer at the Post make a thinly-veiled call for regime change in Iran, writing that the Islamic Republic has “no interest in a ‘grand bargain’ with the United States or an accommodation with the Security Council… [A]s long as these rulers are in power, Iran will not give up its ambition to exercise hegemony over the Middle East.” Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Southern Lebanon is seen to demonstrate that “Tehran can use its client to trigger a new war in the Middle East at any time; it’s a lesser form of the intimidation that it hopes to exercise around the region with an arsenal of nuclear weapons.” This show of force is viewed as a deterrence against an Israeli or U.S. strike on Iran.

The Wall Street Journal: Senior Claremont Institute Fellow Mark Halperin writes that Israel’s unique experience as a country “repeatedly subjected to calls for its extinction” and “the steadily improving professionalism of the Arab air forces, their first rate American and European equipment, their surface-to-air-missile shield, and most importantly their mass,” pose a “mortal threat” to Israel’s existence. Halperin observes that “the military strategy of Israel’s enemies is now to alter the conventional balance while either equipping themselves with nuclear weapons or denying them to Israel, or both.” Saving a discussion of Israel’s own nuclear capabilities until the last sentence, Halperin concludes that the only source of security for a Jewish state under “a continual state of siege is the nuclear arsenal devoted solely to preserving its existence.”

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October 16, 2010| News | Jon Basil Utley

Obama’s total capitulation to the military industrial complex and the War Party

there is not better evidence than his offer to fund with more billions of American dollars the useless missile shield to “protect” Europe against Iranian “attack” – idiotic presumptions that Iran mullahs are suicidal and crazy. America is Iran’s enemy, not Europe.

When we wonder why Obama has done nothing to cut even one of the 800 odd bases with American soldiers abroad, this is an example of even more crazy spending, never mind that he won his election because of Americans who oppose empire building and want peace.

see the Washington Post report

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October 15, 2010| News | Ali Gharib

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for October 15th, 2010:

Foreign Policy: David Rothkopf charges that Roger Cohen’s recent New York Times op-ed totally disregards the threat posed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Instead, Rothkopf endorses Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren’s New York Times op-ed demanding Palestinian recognition of Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. “As unproductive as the Israeli stance on settlements has been, the Palestinian stance on the nature of the Israeli state, and its ability to continue operations as conceived and sanctioned by the United Nations nearly six and a half decades into its modern existence is just as unconstructive and indefensible,” writes Rothkopf. He concludes with a variation of the debunked reverse-linkage argument, arguing that “[Ahmadinejad’s] grandstanding and inflaming crowds on Israel’s borders with the language of obliteration is not just rhetoric. It is part of a systematic and thus far effective effort to exacerbate dangers and, not secondarily, to prolong the misery of the Palestinian people whose right to a free, independent state created in their own image is, of course, every bit as great as that of the Israelis.”

The Washington Times: Eli Lake writes that Ahmadinejad’s visit to Lebanon adds pressure to Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to withdraw his support of a UN investigation to determine who killed his father, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. “I think it’s clear that Ahmadinejad’s visit is intended to show support for Hezbollah at a time when it’s facing the prospect of indictments in the murder of Hariri and is engaged in a campaign to undermine and derail the tribunal,” said Ash Jain, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Lake’s article went to print before it was known whether Ahmadinejad would travel to the Israeli border—he did not—but he writes that such a visit “would signal Iran’s proxies were on Israel’s border.”

FrumForum: Brad Schaeffer, an energy derivatives broker writing for the blog of neoconservative pundit David Frum, lines up three scenarios (best, mid, and worst case) on what could happen to oil prices should Israel attack Iran’s nuclear installations. Best-case results in only a small, temporary spike in prices and the Iranian leadership uses the strike to turn the “military lemon into PR lemonade” by playing “victim” without retaliation. A mid-level escalation would result in small to medium spikes, for a more sustained period, and attacks against Western forces. Worst case would mean an all out war (and closing the Strait of Hormuz) and the doubling of oil prices from their current levels.

Time: Tony Karon describes Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s trip to Lebanon as emblematic of a U.S. policy failure in the region. The visit makes clear three difficult realities the U.S. is facing: “First, Iran is not nearly as isolated as Washington would like; secondly, the Bush Administration efforts to vanquish Tehran and its allies have failed; and, finally, the balance of forces in the region today prompts even U.S.-allied Arab regimes to engage pragmatically with a greatly expanded Iranian regional role.” Ahmadinejad met with Lebanon’s Christian president and Saudi-backed Sunni prime minister, notes Karon, and “he also appears to be placing a heavy stress on Lebanese unity and the need to avoid division” — rather than focus solely on Iran’s Hezbollah beneficiaries.

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October 14, 2010| News | Jason Ditz

No Info About Who or Where, or What He’s Doing

Adding to the rapidly growing list of official “warnings” that bear all the trappings of wild guesses, senior US officials informed Fox News that there are indications that a member of the Pakistani Taliban is inside the United States.

Somewhere in the nearly 4 million square miles of the territorial United States, one of the 300+ million people in the nation is affiliated with the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP). “We know the guy’s here, but don’t know anything about him,” one official noted.

And when they say “don’t know anything about him,” they mean it. Officials say they have absolutely no idea who this person is, where he is, or what sort of plot he might be involved in. Officials added that it did not appear to be an “imminent” threat, though it seems difficult they could know that for sure, given the paucity of information.

Faisal Shahzad, who failed in an attempt to bomb Times Square, was link to the TTP. The group has vowed to launch attacks against US soil in retaliation for years of US drone strikes against their territory.

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