NO RED lipstick Turkish Airlines

http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2013/05/turkish-airlines

Turkish Airlines

Red no's day

May 4th 2013, 19:49 by A.Z. | ISTANBUL

NO RED lipstick, no red nail polish. These are the new rules for flight attendants on Turkey’s national carrier, Turkish Airlines (THY). The ban has provoked a furore among secular Turks, who fret that under the ruling, Islam-rooted Justice and Development (AK) party, Ataturk’s cherished Republic is hurtling towards religious rule. “This is perversion,” fumed Gursel Tekin, a member of parliament for the main opposition, pro-secular Republican People’s Party. Pouting and crimson-lipped ladies posted pictures of themselves on Twitter in protest.

In a brief statement on May 2nd, Europe’s fourth-biggest carrier said the ban was designed to keep crews "unpretentious" and "well-groomed". Pastel colours were preferred, the airline added, because they were in better keeping with the attendants’ uniforms, which were neither red nor deep pink. Turkey’s transport minister, Binali Yildirim, refused to be drawn. When asked about the ban, he declared, “red is a lovely colour. It is the colour of our flag.”

Turkish Airlines stirred similar controversy in February when it proposed new “chaste” uniforms for attendants. These included ankle-length caftans for women and silver-brocade coats for men. Secular Turks howled in indignation and, in the event, the designs were scrapped. Claims of creeping Islam did not, though, alter the carrier's decision to ban alcohol on most domestic flights and on flights to eight destinations in Africa and the Middle East. And last year management eased bans on the Islamic-style headscarf for ground service personnel (though not for cabin crew.)

There is a whiff of hypocrisy about the secularists’ laments. Bottle blondes with short skirts and crimson talons hardly represent Turkish women. Polls consistently suggest that more than half cover their heads in keeping with Islam. Yet until AK came to power a decade ago, the generals, who used to run the country, battled to keep the pious well out of sight. Veiled women were denied entry into schools and universities. They are still barred from practising law in court or running for parliament.

Turkish Airlines, whose service was once so shoddy and safety record so poor that its initials came to stand for “They Hate You”, has dramatically improved under AK rule. The carrier now flies to 219 destinations and was last year voted “Best Airline in Europe” by Skytrax, an airline quality-ranking programme, for a second time. The carrier carried 39m passengers last year, a figure that is expected to grow to 90m by the end of 2020. In April the company announced plans to buy 95 more planes from Boeing and 117 others from Airbus to accommodate this growth.

The more immediate challenge is a strike called by the Hava-Is union, which speaks for around 90% of Turkish airline employees. This followed a management rebuttal of its demands for salary hikes, a reduction in hours and the re-instatement of some 305 workers sacked last year. The union’s president, Atilla Aycin, said the strike would begin on May 15th. The ban on red lipstick, it would seem, is the least of the overworked and underpaid flight attendants’ concerns.

Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html

Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran
By DAVID E. SANGER

Published: June 1, 2012

WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.

“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.

Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium.

This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program is based on interviews over the past 18 months with current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program, as well as a range of outside experts. None would allow their names to be used because the effort remains highly classified, and parts of it continue to this day.

These officials gave differing assessments of how successful the sabotage program was in slowing Iran’s progress toward developing the ability to build nuclear weapons. Internal Obama administration estimates say the effort was set back by 18 months to two years, but some experts inside and outside the government are more skeptical, noting that Iran’s enrichment levels have steadily recovered, giving the country enough fuel today for five or more weapons, with additional enrichment.

Whether Iran is still trying to design and build a weapon is in dispute. The most recent United States intelligence estimate concludes that Iran suspended major parts of its weaponization effort after 2003, though there is evidence that some remnants of it continue.

Iran initially denied that its enrichment facilities had been hit by Stuxnet, then said it had found the worm and contained it. Last year, the nation announced that it had begun its own military cyberunit, and Brig. Gen. Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s Passive Defense Organization, said that the Iranian military was prepared “to fight our enemies” in “cyberspace and Internet warfare.” But there has been scant evidence that it has begun to strike back.

The United States government only recently acknowledged developing cyberweapons, and it has never admitted using them. There have been reports of one-time attacks against personal computers used by members of Al Qaeda, and of contemplated attacks against the computers that run air defense systems, including during the NATO-led air attack on Libya last year. But Olympic Games was of an entirely different type and sophistication.

It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives. The code itself is 50 times as big as the typical computer worm, Carey Nachenberg, a vice president of Symantec, one of the many groups that have dissected the code, said at a symposium at Stanford University in April. Those forensic investigations into the inner workings of the code, while picking apart how it worked, came to no conclusions about who was responsible.

A similar process is now under way to figure out the origins of another cyberweapon called Flame that was recently discovered to have attacked the computers of Iranian officials, sweeping up information from those machines. But the computer code appears to be at least five years old, and American officials say that it was not part of Olympic Games. They have declined to say whether the United States was responsible for the Flame attack.

Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons — even under the most careful and limited circumstances — could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks.

 “We discussed the irony, more than once,” one of his aides said. Another said that the administration was resistant to developing a “grand theory for a weapon whose possibilities they were still discovering.” Yet Mr. Obama concluded that when it came to stopping Iran, the United States had no other choice.

If Olympic Games failed, he told aides, there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region.

A Bush Initiative

The impetus for Olympic Games dates from 2006, when President George W. Bush saw few good options in dealing with Iran. At the time, America’s European allies were divided about the cost that imposing sanctions on Iran would have on their own economies. Having falsely accused Saddam Hussein of reconstituting his nuclear program in Iraq, Mr. Bush had little credibility in publicly discussing another nation’s nuclear ambitions. The Iranians seemed to sense his vulnerability, and, frustrated by negotiations, they resumed enriching uranium at an underground site at Natanz, one whose existence had been exposed just three years before.

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took reporters on a tour of the plant and described grand ambitions to install upward of 50,000 centrifuges. For a country with only one nuclear power reactor — whose fuel comes from Russia — to say that it needed fuel for its civilian nuclear program seemed dubious to Bush administration officials. They feared that the fuel could be used in another way besides providing power: to create a stockpile that could later be enriched to bomb-grade material if the Iranians made a political decision to do so.

Hawks in the Bush administration like Vice President Dick Cheney urged Mr. Bush to consider a military strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities before they could produce fuel suitable for a weapon. Several times, the administration reviewed military options and concluded that they would only further inflame a region already at war, and would have uncertain results.

For years the C.I.A. had introduced faulty parts and designs into Iran’s systems — even tinkering with imported power supplies so that they would blow up — but the sabotage had had relatively little effect. General James E. Cartwright, who had established a small cyberoperation inside the United States Strategic Command, which is responsible for many of America’s nuclear forces, joined intelligence officials in presenting a radical new idea to Mr. Bush and his national security team. It involved a far more sophisticated cyberweapon than the United States had designed before.

The goal was to gain access to the Natanz plant’s industrial computer controls. That required leaping the electronic moat that cut the Natanz plant off from the Internet — called the air gap, because it physically separates the facility from the outside world. The computer code would invade the specialized computers that command the centrifuges.

The first stage in the effort was to develop a bit of computer code called a beacon that could be inserted into the computers, which were made by the German company Siemens and an Iranian manufacturer, to map their operations. The idea was to draw the equivalent of an electrical blueprint of the Natanz plant, to understand how the computers control the giant silvery centrifuges that spin at tremendous speeds. The connections were complex, and unless every circuit was understood, efforts to seize control of the centrifuges could fail.

Eventually the beacon would have to “phone home” — literally send a message back to the headquarters of the National Security Agency that would describe the structure and daily rhythms of the enrichment plant. Expectations for the plan were low; one participant said the goal was simply to “throw a little sand in the gears” and buy some time. Mr. Bush was skeptical, but lacking other options, he authorized the effort.

Breakthrough, Aided by Israel

 It took months for the beacons to do their work and report home, complete with maps of the electronic directories of the controllers and what amounted to blueprints of how they were connected to the centrifuges deep underground.

Then the N.S.A. and a secret Israeli unit respected by American intelligence officials for its cyberskills set to work developing the enormously complex computer worm that would become the attacker from within.

The unusually tight collaboration with Israel was driven by two imperatives. Israel’s Unit 8200, a part of its military, had technical expertise that rivaled the N.S.A.’s, and the Israelis had deep intelligence about operations at Natanz that would be vital to making the cyberattack a success. But American officials had another interest, to dissuade the Israelis from carrying out their own pre-emptive strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities. To do that, the Israelis would have to be convinced that the new line of attack was working. The only way to convince them, several officials said in interviews, was to have them deeply involved in every aspect of the program.

Soon the two countries had developed a complex worm that the Americans called “the bug.” But the bug needed to be tested. So, under enormous secrecy, the United States began building replicas of Iran’s P-1 centrifuges, an aging, unreliable design that Iran purchased from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear chief who had begun selling fuel-making technology on the black market. Fortunately for the United States, it already owned some P-1s, thanks to the Libyan dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

When Colonel Qaddafi gave up his nuclear weapons program in 2003, he turned over the centrifuges he had bought from the Pakistani nuclear ring, and they were placed in storage at a weapons laboratory in Tennessee. The military and intelligence officials overseeing Olympic Games borrowed some for what they termed “destructive testing,” essentially building a virtual replica of Natanz, but spreading the test over several of the Energy Department’s national laboratories to keep even the most trusted nuclear workers from figuring out what was afoot.

Those first small-scale tests were surprisingly successful: the bug invaded the computers, lurking for days or weeks, before sending instructions to speed them up or slow them down so suddenly that their delicate parts, spinning at supersonic speeds, self-destructed. After several false starts, it worked. One day, toward the end of Mr. Bush’s term, the rubble of a centrifuge was spread out on the conference table in the Situation Room, proof of the potential power of a cyberweapon. The worm was declared ready to test against the real target: Iran’s underground enrichment plant.

“Previous cyberattacks had effects limited to other computers,” Michael V. Hayden, the former chief of the C.I.A., said, declining to describe what he knew of these attacks when he was in office. “This is the first attack of a major nature in which a cyberattack was used to effect physical destruction,” rather than just slow another computer, or hack into it to steal data.

“Somebody crossed the Rubicon,” he said.

Getting the worm into Natanz, however, was no easy trick. The United States and Israel would have to rely on engineers, maintenance workers and others — both spies and unwitting accomplices — with physical access to the plant. “That was our holy grail,” one of the architects of the plan said. “It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesn’t think much about the thumb drive in their hand.”

In fact, thumb drives turned out to be critical in spreading the first variants of the computer worm; later, more sophisticated methods were developed to deliver the malicious code.

The first attacks were small, and when the centrifuges began spinning out of control in 2008, the Iranians were mystified about the cause, according to intercepts that the United States later picked up. “The thinking was that the Iranians would blame bad parts, or bad engineering, or just incompetence,” one of the architects of the early attack said.

 The Iranians were confused partly because no two attacks were exactly alike. Moreover, the code would lurk inside the plant for weeks, recording normal operations; when it attacked, it sent signals to the Natanz control room indicating that everything downstairs was operating normally. “This may have been the most brilliant part of the code,” one American official said.

Later, word circulated through the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based nuclear watchdog, that the Iranians had grown so distrustful of their own instruments that they had assigned people to sit in the plant and radio back what they saw.

“The intent was that the failures should make them feel they were stupid, which is what happened,” the participant in the attacks said. When a few centrifuges failed, the Iranians would close down whole “stands” that linked 164 machines, looking for signs of sabotage in all of them. “They overreacted,” one official said. “We soon discovered they fired people.”

Imagery recovered by nuclear inspectors from cameras at Natanz — which the nuclear agency uses to keep track of what happens between visits — showed the results. There was some evidence of wreckage, but it was clear that the Iranians had also carted away centrifuges that had previously appeared to be working well.

But by the time Mr. Bush left office, no wholesale destruction had been accomplished. Meeting with Mr. Obama in the White House days before his inauguration, Mr. Bush urged him to preserve two classified programs, Olympic Games and the drone program in Pakistan. Mr. Obama took Mr. Bush’s advice.

The Stuxnet Surprise

Mr. Obama came to office with an interest in cyberissues, but he had discussed them during the campaign mostly in terms of threats to personal privacy and the risks to infrastructure like the electrical grid and the air traffic control system. He commissioned a major study on how to improve America’s defenses and announced it with great fanfare in the East Room.

What he did not say then was that he was also learning the arts of cyberwar. The architects of Olympic Games would meet him in the Situation Room, often with what they called the “horse blanket,” a giant foldout schematic diagram of Iran’s nuclear production facilities. Mr. Obama authorized the attacks to continue, and every few weeks — certainly after a major attack — he would get updates and authorize the next step. Sometimes it was a strike riskier and bolder than what had been tried previously.

“From his first days in office, he was deep into every step in slowing the Iranian program — the diplomacy, the sanctions, every major decision,” a senior administration official said. “And it’s safe to say that whatever other activity might have been under way was no exception to that rule.”

But the good luck did not last. In the summer of 2010, shortly after a new variant of the worm had been sent into Natanz, it became clear that the worm, which was never supposed to leave the Natanz machines, had broken free, like a zoo animal that found the keys to the cage. It fell to Mr. Panetta and two other crucial players in Olympic Games — General Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Michael J. Morell, the deputy director of the C.I.A. — to break the news to Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden.

An error in the code, they said, had led it to spread to an engineer’s computer when it was hooked up to the centrifuges. When the engineer left Natanz and connected the computer to the Internet, the American- and Israeli-made bug failed to recognize that its environment had changed. It began replicating itself all around the world. Suddenly, the code was exposed, though its intent would not be clear, at least to ordinary computer users.

“We think there was a modification done by the Israelis,” one of the briefers told the president, “and we don’t know if we were part of that activity.”

 Mr. Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of questions, fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant. The answers came back in hedged terms. Mr. Biden fumed. “It’s got to be the Israelis,” he said. “They went too far.”

In fact, both the Israelis and the Americans had been aiming for a particular part of the centrifuge plant, a critical area whose loss, they had concluded, would set the Iranians back considerably. It is unclear who introduced the programming error.

The question facing Mr. Obama was whether the rest of Olympic Games was in jeopardy, now that a variant of the bug was replicating itself “in the wild,” where computer security experts can dissect it and figure out its purpose.

“I don’t think we have enough information,” Mr. Obama told the group that day, according to the officials. But in the meantime, he ordered that the cyberattacks continue. They were his best hope of disrupting the Iranian nuclear program unless economic sanctions began to bite harder and reduced Iran’s oil revenues.

Within a week, another version of the bug brought down just under 1,000 centrifuges. Olympic Games was still on.

A Weapon’s Uncertain Future

American cyberattacks are not limited to Iran, but the focus of attention, as one administration official put it, “has been overwhelmingly on one country.” There is no reason to believe that will remain the case for long. Some officials question why the same techniques have not been used more aggressively against North Korea. Others see chances to disrupt Chinese military plans, forces in Syria on the way to suppress the uprising there, and Qaeda operations around the world. “We’ve considered a lot more attacks than we have gone ahead with,” one former intelligence official said.

Mr. Obama has repeatedly told his aides that there are risks to using — and particularly to overusing — the weapon. In fact, no country’s infrastructure is more dependent on computer systems, and thus more vulnerable to attack, than that of the United States. It is only a matter of time, most experts believe, before it becomes the target of the same kind of weapon that the Americans have used, secretly, against Iran.

 

Bolster Diplomacy, Israeli Security, and the Iranian Citizenry

http://www.rand.org/publications/randreview/issues/2012/spring/iran.html

How to Defuse Iran's Nuclear Threat
Bolster Diplomacy, Israeli Security, and the Iranian Citizenry

By James Dobbins, Dalia Dassa Kaye, Alireza Nader, and Frederic Wehrey

Ambassador James Dobbins directs the RAND International Security and Defense Policy Center. Dalia Dassa Kaye is a RAND senior political scientist and a faculty member at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Alireza Nader is a RAND senior international policy analyst focusing on Iranian political dynamics and foreign policy. Frederic Wehrey is a RAND senior policy analyst focusing on Persian Gulf security.

The prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran has stoked tensions around the world. We argue that diplomacy and economic sanctions are better suited than military action to prevent the emergence of a nuclear-armed Iran, that Israeli security will be best served by military restraint combined with greater U.S.-Israeli cooperation, and that the Iranian people offer the surest hope for a future Iran that is more amenable to U.S. interests.

An Israeli or American attack on Iranian nuclear facilities would make it more, not less, likely that the Iranian regime would decide to produce and deploy nuclear weapons. Such an attack would also make it more, not less, difficult to contain Iranian influence.

It is, after all, not Iranian aggression that its neighbors principally fear, but Iranian subversion. It is Iran’s ability to appeal to potentially dissident elements within neighboring societies — to the Shia populations of Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Persian Gulf states, and to the more radical elements within Palestinian society — that is of most concern to these states. It is Iran’s appeal throughout the Islamic Middle East as a bastion of anti-American and anti-Zionist activity that most disturbs other regional regimes. This is true even of Israel, whose principal vulnerability is not to Iranian military pressure but to attacks by Iranian-supported Hamas and Hezbollah.

Containing this sort of influence would almost certainly become more difficult in the aftermath of an unprovoked American or Israeli military attack. Reaction among neighboring populations would be almost uniformly hostile. The sympathy thereby aroused for Iran would make containment of Iranian influence much more difficult for Israel, for the United States, and for the Arab regimes currently allied with Washington. This would be particularly true in newly democratizing societies, such as Egypt, where public opinion has become less fettered and more influential. International sanctions would erode, and Iran would likely redouble its efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

At this late date, the proximate objective of Western policy must be to dissuade Iran from testing and deploying nuclear weapons. Doing so will require that Western officials go beyond declaring such a step unacceptable and rather begin to illustrate how crossing this threshold will only increase Iran’s isolation, reduce its influence, and increase the regime’s vulnerability to internally driven change. Making such warnings credible will require broad international solidarity in support of ever-tighter sanctions. Threats of military action, and even more its actual conduct, would have only the opposite effect: reducing Iran’s isolation, increasing its influence, promoting domestic solidarity, and reinforcing the case for building and deploying nuclear weapons as soon as possible.

To prevent the rivalry between Israel and Iran from escalating into armed conflict, the United States should continue to discourage an Israeli military strike while strengthening Israeli capabilities in preparation for a future in which Iran may have managed to acquire nuclear weapons. U.S. leaders should bolster security cooperation and intelligence sharing with Israel while maintaining pressure on Iran, thus weakening its capacity to project power and fueling the debate within Iran over nuclear weapons.

A future Iranian regime may view Israel differently. Fundamentalists appear to have consolidated power since the 2009 Iranian presidential election, but the regime exhibits severe fractures and faces critical vulnerabilities. The potential emergence of a more democratic Iran or of more moderate leadership may diminish Iran’s hostility toward Israel as well as Israel’s heightened threat perceptions of Iran. The United States should pay close attention not only to Iran’s nuclear program but also to such issues as human rights abuses, signaling to the Iranian people that the United States cares about Iran as a nation, not merely as a problem to be solved.
Diplomacy and Sanctions

Iran and the United States have substantial grounds for their mutual antipathy. Iranian grievances go back to the U.S. role in overthrowing Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953, followed by Washington’s backing of the shah for 26 years and then U.S. support for Saddam Hussein’s war of aggression against Iran, during which the U.S. Navy accidentally shot down an Iranian civilian airliner over international waters in the Persian Gulf in 1988. U.S. grievances date to the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the holding hostage of its staff for 444 days, followed by Iranian links to terrorist attacks on U.S. forces in Beirut in 1983 and in Saudi Arabia in 1996 and Iranian support for extremist movements in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In the past decade, Iran’s nuclear program has emerged as the dominant concern.

U.S. diplomatic leverage is constrained by the bitter history of U.S.-Iranian relations and the degree of domestic legitimacy that the Islamic Republic derives from defying the United States. The 2009 Iranian presidential election and the resulting divisions among Iranian political elites and within Iranian society have made the Islamic Republic even less susceptible to direct U.S. diplomatic influence, but also more vulnerable to U.S. economic leverage and “soft power.”

Even though the regime’s conservative and “principlist” (fundamentalist) decisionmakers, ascendant in the postelection period, are unlikely to be swayed by U.S. efforts at engagement, their repression of the Iranian people and their assertive foreign policy make it easier for the United States to rally international pressure against them. Iran’s recent support for Syrian President Bashar Assad’s brutal repression of the Syrian people and opposition forces has further weakened Iran’s regional stature following the Arab uprisings.

Current U.S. policy has been to ease sanctions only if Iran rolls back its nuclear program entirely by abandoning uranium enrichment (even if the Obama administration might allow Iran to enrich uranium up to 5-percent purity, the upper end of the range for most civilian uses). But there is no support anywhere on the Iranian political spectrum for abandoning all enrichment activity and, therefore, little prospect that this larger objective could be attained. Worst of all would be a situation in which Iran openly breached the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (also known as the Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT) by actually building, testing, and deploying nuclear weapons. This latter situation could well prompt other regional states to go down this same path.

We therefore recommend that the United States pursue a set of graduated diplomatic objectives, seeking first to halt the Iranian nuclear program short of weaponization while retaining the leverage to secure Iran’s eventual compliance with all its NPT obligations. Iran is seeking nuclear weapons for some combination of security, influence, and prestige; thus, persuading Iran that violating the NPT will only confirm its pariah status is the best way to dissuade it from crossing that threshold. No effort at persuasion can begin, though, until the United States acknowledges that the Iranian nuclear program might not be reversed and thus commences preparations to deal with the consequences.

Diplomacy is unlikely to yield substantial breakthroughs as long as the current Iranian leadership remains in power. The United States nevertheless needs reliable channels of communication with the Iranian regime to garner information, signal warnings, avoid unintended conflict, and be positioned to move toward accord if and when an opening arises. Should Iran actually build and deploy nuclear weapons, such diplomatic channels will become all the more important.

Explicit U.S. efforts to bring about regime change, whether overt or covert, will probably have the reverse effect, helping to perpetuate the regime and strengthen its current leaders. For the immediate future, the best thing the United States can do to promote reform in Iran is to support the growth of democracy in those other Middle Eastern countries where the United States has greater access and influence. Adopting a regionwide and, indeed, globally consistent approach to democratization is important to establishing the credibility of U.S. support for reform in Iran.

Employing this type of soft power could be decisive in the long run. Harvard University Professor Joseph Nye defines soft power as what a country can obtain “through attraction rather than coercion.” It arises from a country’s “culture, political ideals, and policies.” It is more of a magnet than a mallet. The best way to employ soft power is simply to remove the barriers to exposure. For example, the United States should make Internet censorship by the Iranian regime difficult and help expose the Iranian people to the outside world by encouraging travel and study abroad programs.

Sanctions erect barriers to such exposure — an unavoidable trade-off that needs to be carefully weighed each time new sanctions are levied or old ones renewed. Even as the United States seeks to isolate and penalize the Iranian government, it should seek to expand the exposure of the Iranian people to the United States, the West, and the newly dynamic Middle East.
Israeli Security

Proponents of an Israeli military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities might believe that Israel could endure the short-term military and diplomatic fallout of such action, but the long-term consequences would likely be disastrous for Israel’s security. Those believed to favor a military option, such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, argue that the Middle East with a nuclear-armed Iran would be far more dangerous than a military attack to prevent it. But their position rests on a faulty assumption that a future, post-attack Middle East would indeed be free of a nuclear-armed Iran. In fact, a post-attack Middle East may result in the worst of both worlds: a nuclear-armed Iran more determined than ever to challenge the Jewish state, and with far fewer regional and international impediments to doing so.

Thus, what the region’s future may hold is not an Iran that has or has not acquired nuclear weapons, but rather a nuclear-armed Iran that has or has not been attacked by Israel. And while a nuclear-armed Iran that has not been attacked is dangerous, one that has been attacked may be much more likely to brandish its capabilities, to make sure that it is not attacked again.

Israel and Iran have not always been rivals, nor are they natural competitors. They do not have territorial disputes. They do not compete economically. They have traditionally maintained distinct regional zones of interest (the Eastern Mediterranean for Israel and the Persian Gulf for Iran). Their shared geopolitical interests led to years of cooperation before and even after Iran’s 1979 revolution. Arab governments have regarded both countries with great suspicion, while both viewed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as the greatest obstacle to their national security interests.

Only in the past decade have Israel and Iran come to view each other as rivals. Israeli perceptions of the Iranian threat stem, in part, from Iran’s expanding missile capabilities and nuclear advances. But just as critical is Israel’s view that Iranian regional influence is on the rise, infringing on Israeli interests and threatening stability in areas bordering Israel. Israeli leaders worry that if Iran acquired a nuclear weapon capability, its influence would only grow, severely limiting both Israeli and U.S. military and political maneuverability in the region.

The rise of Iranian principlists has increased Iranian hostility toward Israel and deepened Israeli concerns over Iran’s regional ambitions. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has spoken of “wiping” Israel off the map. But the Iranian regime today is undergoing an intense internal battle, and Ahmadinejad’s harsh rhetoric, though motivated by ideology, also serves his domestic needs to satisfy other principlists on foreign policy issues. That said, there are many in Israel who take this anti-Israel ideology seriously.

The Middle East’s geopolitical transformation over the past decade has further intensified the rivalry. When the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 eliminated a common adversary of Israel and Iran, the latter began to see itself as the Middle East’s ascendant power, a view shared by many of the former’s political and military elite. The 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel — in which Iranian tactics and arms were seen as effective against Israel — reinforced the perception of Iran as the region’s great power. The Arab uprisings since 2011 have added to Israeli concerns, although this turmoil has created even greater vulnerabilities and limitations for Iran.

The United States can help manage the Israeli-Iranian rivalry by averting a military conflict through prevention and preparation. For Israel, this means discouraging an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities while bolstering Israeli military capabilities. For Iran, this means continuing to dissuade the regime from weaponizing its nuclear program while preparing to deter a nuclear-armed Iran if such efforts fail. In addition, the United States should:

Avoid putting public pressure on Israel. U.S. public pressure on Israel will likely backfire given Israel’s sense of isolation, turning Israeli popular opinion, which is divided on the question of a military strike option, against the United States and allowing for more defiant positions among Israeli leaders.

Quietly attempt to influence internal Israeli debates about the utility of a military strike. U.S. intelligence officials should support the assessments of former and current Israeli officials who have argued against a military option. U.S.-sponsored seminars outlining U.S. concerns and risk assessments for the Israeli intelligence and military community could also help shape the internal debate.

Continue to bolster security cooperation and intelligence sharing with Israel, and make such efforts more visible to the Israeli public. Making the extensive U.S.-Israeli security cooperation more known to the Israeli public could help assuage Israelis’ fears of isolation and make them less tolerant of Israeli leaders who defy U.S. leaders. Encouraging Israeli leaders and journalists to report more to the public about security cooperation efforts could be helpful.

Increase understanding about how deterrence between Israel and Iran could evolve. War games now taking place at nongovernmental institutions in the United States and Israel explore conflict scenarios involving Israel and Iran. Such games clarify how an Israeli-Iranian deterrence relationship might evolve and what military or political steps could heighten or diminish conflict.

Encourage direct communication between Israelis and Iranians through “track-two” diplomatic dialogues. Should Iran acquire a nuclear weapon capability, both Israel and Iran will have an interest in preventing nuclear conflict. Dialogue, though not possible at official levels in the immediate future, is possible through unofficial, track-two security discussions among Israeli and Iranian security experts, sponsored by U.S. or European nongovernmental institutions.

Continue engagement and sanction policies that may affect Iran’s internal debate. Iran is not necessarily intent on weaponizing its nuclear program. It may be developing the know-how and infrastructure, but it may decide to keep its nuclear program in the virtual realm. Its decisions are based on cost-benefit calculations affected by U.S. pressures and perhaps positive inducements.

Consider scenarios in which the Iranian regime is radically transformed. The Islamic Republic faces widespread popular dissatisfaction and deepening internal cleavages. Internal developments could alter the Israeli-Iranian rivalry and U.S. policy significantly. In particular, the United States should focus not only on the Iranian nuclear program but also on such issues as human rights abuses in Iran.

Iranian Citizenry

The Islamic Republic has become one of the worst human rights abusers in the Middle East. The 2009 Iranian presidential election, widely perceived in Iran as fraudulent, led to a dramatic increase in Iranian state repression. Iranians who oppose the clerical-led regime are routinely harassed and jailed, often tortured, sometimes raped, and even executed. The leaders of the opposition Green Movement, including former Prime Minister Mir Hussein Mousavi, have been placed under house arrest and isolated from their families and followers. The Iranian regime has stepped up its use of force as it faces the 2013 presidential election, which could become another occasion for public demonstrations.

Yet the Iranian regime remains vulnerable to the same domestic forces that have led to the toppling of dictatorships across the Arab world. The regime may have silenced the Green Movement’s leadership, but it has not been able to crush Iranian aspirations for a freer and more democratic form of government. Like many of their Arab neighbors, Iranians face the daily frustration and indignity bred by an increasingly repressive system. Iranian women are denied equal rights despite their educational, economic, and civic accomplishments. Iranian youth languish, bereft of the opportunities and freedoms afforded to their peers across the world. Ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities live in constant fear.

Recent revelations of massive corruption in Iran, including banking embezzlements by people closely tied to the regime, have shown that the Islamic Republic has deviated from its self-described mission of erasing the social inequality that had existed under the monarchy. Iran today is a nation of haves and have-nots. Those with close connections to the government live in luxury, while the rest of Iran’s people endure soaring inflation and rising unemployment. Disillusionment with the regime exists even throughout Iran’s political and military circles.

Conditions in Iran suggest that a “Persian Spring” is possible. But Iranians have not, so far, followed the footprints of the Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan, Yemeni, and Syrian revolutionaries. The Green Movement today is divided and leaderless, and it faces an even more fundamental weakness: It seeks to preserve the very same Islamic Republic that oppresses it, complete with a constitution that empowers unelected and unaccountable governing bodies that prevent free and fair elections. The Green Movement’s inherent weaknesses, however, have not given way to the total suppression of the democracy movement in Iran. Iranians have increasingly engaged in acts of civil disobedience independent of the Green Movement and its leadership.

But the regime maintains support among a sizable portion of the population, many of whom view the Islamic Republic as a force of “resistance” against U.S. “imperialism” in the Middle East. The regime exploits Iranian nationalism to buttress its own legitimacy and authority. It depicts the Green Movement and other civil rights actors as “pawns” of Western powers and portrays U.S. and international opposition to the Iranian nuclear program as part of an effort to deny Iran advanced technology and its place among the world’s great nations.

Thus, U.S. opposition to the Iranian nuclear program, while necessary, has also had the effect of strengthening the regime among its core supporters. The intense U.S. focus on the nuclear program may have also convinced many Iranians that the United States is concerned solely with its security interests in the Middle East, rather than with the plight of ordinary Iranians.

Recently, the United States has begun shifting toward a balanced approach, placing a greater emphasis on Iranian human rights abuses — a shift that can counter negative Iranian public perceptions of U.S. intentions. The U.S. government has supported the establishment of a special United Nations human rights monitor for Iran. The United States has also imposed financial and travel sanctions on high-ranking Iranian security officials for their involvement in human rights abuses.

Additional steps should now be taken. The international community, including the White House and the U.S. State Department, should be more vocal in excoriating Iran’s human rights abuses. Condemning these abuses should not be confused with interfering in internal Iranian affairs. As a signatory of numerous international conventions, Iran has a legal obligation to uphold its people’s human rights. When it fails to do so, the United States and the world community have a responsibility to speak up. The Iranian government is, perhaps surprisingly, very sensitive in this area, due to its ambition to be perceived as a regional leader.

In tandem, the United States should sanction additional members of the Iranian security services, especially top-ranking and mid-ranking members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and the Basij paramilitary forces responsible for the repression and human rights violations. Such sanctions would discourage foreign governments and companies from engaging with these individuals or conducting business with them and their affiliates, demonstrating to the regime that its domestic and foreign policies have substantial concrete consequences.

These steps would help the Green Movement in two ways. First, an international focus on Iran’s human rights record would make it tougher for Tehran to persist with its abuses. Second, this focus would disabuse the regime of its perception that the United States is willing to sacrifice the human rights and pro-democracy aspirations of the Iranian people for the sake of a nuclear deal.

The Iranian people, much like the Tunisians and Egyptians, are capable of challenging their government on their own. They do not need direct material or financial aid, of an overt or covert nature. The United States and other countries might not be able, through diplomacy and sanctions, to dissuade the Islamic Republic from continuing its nuclear program, but they can demonstrate that they are on the side of Iranian democrats who could well rule Iran one day.

3 reasons not to attack Iran

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2012/0305/3-reasons-not-to-attack-Iran/Economic-consequences-are-huge

The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com
3 reasons not to attack Iran

As tensions over a defiant Iran and its nuclear program escalate, the debate in Washington over preemptive military strikes heats up. Israel has warned US officials concerned about war with Iran: Stay to the side, and let us do it.

Meanwhile, the United States continues to seek harsh diplomatic and economic sanctions against Tehran, while insisting “all options” for thwarting a nuclear-armed Iran remain on the table.

Here, Edward Haley, professor of international strategic studies at Claremont McKenna College, gives three reasons not to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities:

1.Economic consequences are huge

President Obama pauses as he addresses thousands at the opening session of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's (AIPAC) annual policy conference March 4. The president said the US will not hesitate to attack Iran with military force to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon, but he cautioned that 'too much loose talk of war' has only helped Tehran and driven up the price of oil.
(Carolyn Kaster/AP)

The negative economic consequences – for the United States and the international community – are huge. Attacks on Iran and Iran’s reprisals would likely cause oil prices to spike and investors’ confidence to collapse. Such repercussions would doom worldwide hopes for ongoing economic recovery from the Great Recession. Unemployment in the US remains high, industrial production is struggling, the housing market continues to suffer.

If recovery is fragile in the US, it is in even more peril in Europe. The euro crisis remains unresolved, and not enough has been done to overcome the problems that followed the collapse of confidence in financial markets. Hundreds of billions in bad debts remain unpaid. Although the Greek government has accepted the latest draconian terms for remaining in the European Union, the near universal rejection of the austerity measures by the Greek people hardly assures that the agreements will stick.

2.An attack would galvanize the Iranian people around the regime

An attack would bury the Iranian opposition in a landslide of Iranian patriotic fervor. Not only would the attacks merely postpone the development of nuclear weapons in Iran, they would unite the Iranian people around a regime that is increasingly detested. Tehran has painted opposition to the regime as identical with abandoning Iran to foreign invaders.

The US, Israel, and their allies should seek to encourage exactly the opposite sentiment among the Iranian people, through measures that divide the people from the regime. That is the promise of diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions, which have finally begun to bite.

Iran’s economic relations with the outside world have been hit hard by US-led sanctions, including a number of key sectors, such as banking, trade, energy, insurance, and commodities. Joint US-European Union prohibitions have also crippled Iran’s financing of high volume exports and imports. Despite high prices for Iran’s oil exports, the value of Iran’s currency, the rial, has fallen sharply.

Prices are rising, and even the most basic goods are disappearing from stores, partly because of import problems and partly because Iranian citizens and businesses have resorted to hoarding as a way of escaping the effects of inflation and the rial’s depreciation, adding to economic uncertainty and turmoil.

Iranians in and out of government cannot avoid asking whether the isolation and punishment imposed on Iran as a result of the regime’s nuclear policies are worth the increasing costs that they have to bear.

3.Nuclear deterrence makes a preemptive attack unnecessary

Nuclear deterrence makes it unnecessary to attack in order to prevent Iran from starting a nuclear war. The evidence of this is abundant but seldom recognized as the crisis over Iran’s weapons escalates.

During the cold war the US was opposed by Russia and China, two nuclear-armed regimes that together possessed tens of thousands of nuclear missiles and were just as determined to crush democracy and economic freedom as the current regime in Tehran. What restrained them, as it would restrain a nuclear Iran now, was the overwhelming nuclear deterrent of the US.

Add to the thousands of US nuclear warheads the hundreds possessed by Iran’s neighbor Israel. Any nuclear attack on Israel or American forces anywhere in the world would doom Iran to catastrophic and irredeemable destruction. Of course, some would argue that what makes the Iranian regime more dangerous than a cold-war Russia or China is its religious extremism, which glorifies martyrdom.

This line of reasoning confuses the sacrifice of the faithful and credulous with the careful ways in which Iran’s rulers have avoided risks to their personal survival and the survival of the regime.

Annihilation is not in their interest, and avoiding annihilation is not a hard calculation to make. The obviousness and certainty of the destruction mean not that an Iranian nuclear capability is unimportant, but that it can’t be used.

The best argument from those who urge that Iran must be stopped from acquiring a nuclear weapon at all costs is not that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will launch nuclear war. It’s that after acquiring nuclear weapons, Iranian political and military leaders might make miscalculations about how far to push their adversaries with their newfound capabilities. But this is not so much an argument for a pre-emptive strike as evidence of the need for strategic dialogue and restraint among all the parties.

At this point it is far from clear that it will be possible to prevent an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. If it is possible, it will come about only if the leaders and peoples of the region and the US calmly and rationally assess not only the enormous economic, diplomatic, and human costs of such an attack but the strengths that flow from rejecting it.

The author is W.M. Keck Foundation professor of International Strategic Studies and director of the Center for Human Rights Leadership at Claremont McKenna College.

Will Netanyahu stay obsessed with Iran or use his new coalition to help Israel?

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2012/0510/Will-Netanyahu-stay-obsessed-with-Iran-or-use-his-new-coalition-to-help-Israel

The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com

Will Netanyahu stay obsessed with Iran or use his new coalition to help Israel?

Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy has been dangerously transfixed on Iran, neglecting the myriad other issues threatening Israel and Middle East stability. The new coalition government sets up a rare opportunity to reshape Israel’s domestic institutions and strengthen its regional standing.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a session of parliament in Jerusalem, where his new coalition partner Shaul Mofaz was sworn in as a cabinet minister May 9. Op-ed contributor Nir Eisikovits says 'The new centrist coalition frees Netanyahu from the chokehold of...extreme right parties' but he wonders whether 'Bibi' will seize the opportunity to make dramatic changes or 'simply use his broadened parliamentary support to secure the legitimacy of a future attack on Iran.'

By Nir Eisikovits
posted May 10, 2012 at 11:36 am EDT
Boston

Love him or hate him, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a stargazer, a strategic thinker.

The son of the late Benzion Netanyahu, one of the state’s most preeminent historians, Mr. Netanyahu seems focused on nothing less than the ability of Jews to survive as a people and on Israel’s role in their survival. His insistence on producing Holocaust-related documents during his speeches is not exclusively the result of bad taste or cheap fear-mongering. Rather, the crux of Netanyahu’s strategic vision appears to be the imperative to prevent a second Shoa.

This is why he appears to be especially proud to have recently changed the international conversation about the Middle East. In large part because of his prodding, posturing, and threatening, much of the world has fully turned its attention to the threat posed by Iran’s reported nuclear weapons program. As far as Netanyahu is concerned, this marks a shift from the tactical nuisance that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – troublesome but utterly manageable – to a fundamental question that threatens the very existence of the Jewish state.

Unfortunately, Netanyahu’s sense of strategy has been dangerously limited, remaining transfixed on Iran, without expending equal effort or public appeal on the myriad other issues threatening Israel and Middle East stability. It remains to be seen whether this week’s dramatic reshuffling of his coalition makes a difference. But the new partnership with the centrist Kadima party could provide Netanyahu with the political cover necessary to address a broader range of questions.

The Iranian threat is but one part of a complicated regional puzzle for Israelis. The conflict with the Palestinians and the direction taken by the new regimes in Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, and, one hopes, before long, Syria are other pieces. The great challenge facing Israeli leaders is to figure out how these pieces fit together.

Consider this: Islamist political parties are set to take over most of the newly freed countries in the Arab world. This is worrying, but the Muslim Brotherhood – now one of the most powerful regional political movements – is more pragmatic than some of its Salafist competitors. Israel (like much of the West) has a strong interest in keeping the Brotherhood as moderate and pragmatic as possible. How will an Israeli attack on the Iranian nuclear program impact the orientation of the newly emerging Arab regimes? How will it impact the prospects of maintaining the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan?

Israel also has a vital interest in strengthening moderate elements in the Palestinian territories. Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and his technocratic colleagues have kept the West Bank relatively quiet and prosperous in the last few years. How would attacking Iranian nuclear facilities influence the balance of power between moderates and extremists inside Palestinian Territories. What would it do to the credibility of Mr. Fayyad and his supporters? What, for that matter, would it do to the delicate balance between the most bellicose and more moderate elements inside Hamas (itself an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood)?

Israel’s most formidable challenge is to simultaneously manage the threat posed by a potential Iranian nuclear weapon and that created by a rising tide of Islamism in its immediate and intermediate vicinity. And these threats are intrinsically tied together.

A rash, premature attack on Iran will have a dramatic impact on the emerging governments in the Arab world and on the internal politics in the Palestinian territories. It would give a boost to the most extreme representatives of political Islam and divert the attention and resources of the new Arab polities away from much needed domestic reforms. It would also, most likely, lead to the cancellation of the already precarious peace treaties that Jordan and Egypt have signed with Israel.

Netanyahu’s seemingly singular focus on Iran has also obscured and pushed aside a host of domestic questions, all urgent and fundamental to the Jewish state’s future and integrity. The new centrist coalition agreements include promises to move forward on some of these fronts. Consider these examples.

Last summer, Israel’s cities erupted with social unrest. The state’s productive middle class was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with rigid free market economic policies. Over the last decade these policies resulted in growing levels of income inequality and a lack of access to affordable housing, education, and childcare.

Apart from a few stop-gap measures and pro-forma declarations, Netanyahu’s government has done little to meaningfully address these problems. Furthermore, the state’s dysfunctional electoral system warps its democracy by providing disproportionate power to small anti-democratic and anti-Zionist Jewish ultra orthodox parties.

Such distortions disenfranchise and alienate the majority of Israeli voters who are forced to watch their government subsidize an entire class of young men who refuse to serve in the military, or to become part of the regular economy. Again, Netanyahu’s government has, until now, done nothing to address this. And the focus on the Iranian question has provided the perfect excuse to take such troubling, uncomfortable questions off the table.

The new coalition frees Netanyahu from the chokehold of small ultra orthodox and extreme right parties. It enables him to make dramatic changes in the electoral system. It lets him pass long overdue social reforms that would distribute the state’s burdens of military and national service more fairly. And It provides him with the political backing to resuscitate talks with the Palestinians.

The question is whether the prime minister will fully seize these opportunities or simply use his broadened parliamentary support to secure the legitimacy of a future attack on Iran.

If he really is a stargazer, it is time for Netanyahu to take in the entire constellation. His excessive focus on Iran has not promoted Israel’s interests. The new coalition he stitched together with such exquisite political skill sets up a rare opportunity to reshape Israel’s domestic institutions and strengthen its regional standing. Whether or not Netanyahu takes advantage of this opportunity is the real strategic question facing the Jewish state.

Nir Eisikovits teaches legal and political philosophy at Suffolk University where he directs the graduate program in Ethics and Public Policy. His most recent book is "Sympathizing with the Enemy: Reconciliation, Transitional Justice, Negotiation."

U.S. Defines Its Demands for New Round of Talks With Iran

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/world/middleeast/us-defines-its-demands-for-new-round-of-talks-with-iran.html?_r=1

April 7, 2012
U.S. Defines Its Demands for New Round of Talks With Iran
By DAVID E. SANGER and STEVEN ERLANGER

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration and its European allies plan to open new negotiations with Iran by demanding the immediate closing and ultimate dismantling of a recently completed nuclear facility deep under a mountain, according to American and European diplomats.

They are also calling for a halt in the production of uranium fuel that is considered just a few steps from bomb grade, and the shipment of existing stockpiles of that fuel out of the country, the diplomats said.

That negotiating position will be the opening move in what President Obama has called Iran’s “last chance” to resolve its nuclear confrontation with the United Nations and the West diplomatically. The hard-line approach would require the country’s military leadership to give up the Fordo enrichment plant outside the holy city of Qum, and with it a huge investment in the one facility that is most hardened against airstrikes.

While it is unclear whether the allies would accept anything less than closing and disassembling Fordo, government and outside experts say the terms may be especially difficult for Iran’s leaders to accept when they need to appear strong in the face of political infighting.

Still, Mr. Obama and his allies are gambling that crushing sanctions and the threat of Israeli military action will bolster the arguments of those Iranians who say a negotiated settlement is far preferable to isolation and more financial hardship. Other experts fear the tough conditions being set could instead swing the debate in favor of Iran’s hard-liners.

“We have no idea how the Iranians will react,” one senior administration official said. “We probably won’t know after the first meeting.” But the next round of oil sanctions, he noted, kicks in early this summer.

The bitter tension among competing factions inside Iran’s leadership, only some of it related to the nuclear issue, may explain the country’s continued haggling about the venue of the talks, planned for Friday. In recent days, Iran has changed its position and balked at holding them in Istanbul, demanding a move to what Tehran calls more neutral territory, like Iraq or China.

The shift has underscored doubts among Obama administration officials and their European partners about Iran’s readiness to negotiate seriously and to finally answer questions from international nuclear inspectors about its program’s “possible military dimensions.” Those questions are based in part on evidence that Iran may have worked on warhead designs and nuclear triggers.

In what may be a sign of the competing, and sometimes confusing, views in Iran, a leading lawmaker, Gholamreza Mesbahi Moghadam, said on Friday that his country “has the scientific and technological capability” to produce a nuclear weapon “but will never choose this path.” The statement appeared to be an effort to put Iran in the company of nuclear-capable states that have committed not to produce a weapon, like Japan. But the statement, which appeared on the Parliament’s Web site, was taken down by late Saturday, possibly signaling discord.

There is disagreement among the Western allies about whether Iran’s leaders have made a political decision to pursue a nuclear weapon. American intelligence agencies have stuck to a 2007 intelligence assessment, which found that Iran suspended research on nuclear weapons technology in 2003 and has not decided to take the final steps needed to build a bomb. But Britain and Israel in particular, looking at essentially the same evidence, say that they believe a decision has been made to move to a nuclear-weapons capability, if not to a weapon itself.

Some American officials say they have considerable confidence that if Iran moves to build a weapon, they will detect the signs in time to take military action, though others — notably former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates — have been more skeptical. American and Israeli officials say they have been more successful in the past few years in intelligence gathering in Iran, both from human sources and drone aircraft, like the stealth RQ-170 Sentinel that was lost over Iran late last year.

While opening bids in international negotiations are often designed to set a high bar, as a political matter American and European officials say they cannot imagine agreeing to any outcome that leaves Iran with a stockpile of fuel, enriched to 20 percent purity, that could be converted to bomb grade in a matter of months.

The outcome of the talks — or their breakdown — could well determine whether Washington will be able to quiet Israeli threats that it could take military action this year. But talking with Iran’s leaders also carries considerable political risk for Mr. Obama, with Iran emerging as one of the few major foreign policy issues in the presidential campaign.

If Iran rejects American and European demands to immediately halt the most dangerous elements of its program, Mr. Obama could face a crisis in the Persian Gulf by early summer in the midst of his re-election bid.

“This may be the most complex negotiation I’ve ever seen the president enter,” one senior administration official said last week. “It’s got the Democrats and Republicans looking to score points, the Russians and the Chinese trying to water down the sanctions, the French pushing for harsher actions and the Israelis threatening to take the program out.”

European allies, especially the French and the British, say they are concerned that Mr. Obama will want to keep the negotiations going, however unproductive they might be, through the November presidential election to avoid the possibility of a military strike if the talks fail.

Israel and some European leaders fear that would play into what they perceive as Iran’s strategy to use the talks to buy time while its centrifuges keep spinning.

In interviews, administration officials said their “urgent priority” was to get Iran to give up — and ship out of the country — its stockpile of uranium enriched to 20 percent purity, and to get Tehran to close Fordo. Dismantlement, they said, would come in a second stage. So far Iran has produced only about 100 kilograms of 20 percent-enriched uranium — less than it would need to produce a single nuclear weapon — but it has announced plans to increase production sharply in coming months.

It is unclear whether that is possible: sanctions, embargos on crucial parts and Western sabotage have all delayed the program. But because that fuel could be so quickly converted to highly enriched uranium for a bomb, the American and European strategy is to eliminate that stockpile, leaving time to negotiate on the fate of lower-enriched uranium.

Uranium enriched to about 5 percent does not pose as imminent a risk, but the United Nations Security Council has required that Iran halt all enrichment.

“Our position is clear: Iran must live up to its international obligations, including full suspension of uranium enrichment as required by multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions,” Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council, said Friday.

Others, however, are more willing to allow Iran some enrichment capabilities.

“What we are looking for is a way to acknowledge Iran’s right to enrich, but only at levels that would give us plenty of warning if they moved toward a weapon,” one European diplomat familiar with the internal debates said.

Iran claims the right to enrich uranium as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which allows nations to pursue civilian nuclear power. The West says that Iran has breached its commitments by refusing to answer questions from the International Atomic Energy Agency and refusing to comply with Security Council mandates.

While the six nations in the talks — Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States and Germany — are prepared to allow Iran to have a nuclear power program, they say Iran must first restore its credibility and prove that it does not in fact have a military nuclear program. It can do so, they say, by allowing agency inspectors full access to all Iranian sites. Iran has refused to do so, and has barred the inspectors from talking to key nuclear scientists.

The Western negotiators all agree that in the first round of talks, Iran must prove its willingness to discuss its nuclear program without preconditions. In the last talks in January 2011, Tehran demanded that the six first lift all sanctions against Iran and recognize what Iran says is its “right to enrich.”

Last week, apparently in preparation for the meeting, Mr. Obama delivered a message to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, through an intermediary: Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Mr. Erdogan met Mr. Obama during a summit meeting in Seoul late last month and then went directly to northeastern Iran. The message, American officials said, was that “there is great urgency” that Iran seriously negotiate now. But it is unclear how specific Mr. Erdogan may have been about the consequences of continued nuclear development.


David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and Steven Erlanger from Paris.

2 Israeli Leaders Make the Iran Issue Their Own

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/world/middleeast/netanyahu-and-barak-bond-over-israels-iran-crisis.html

March 27, 2012
2 Israeli Leaders Make the Iran Issue Their Own
By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have turned into the odd couple of Israeli politics in whose hands sits the prospect of an attack on Iran. From opposite political traditions with distinct experiences and worldviews, the two have forged a tight bond, often excluding the rest of the Israeli leadership.

For Mr. Netanyahu, an Iranian nuclear weapon would be the 21st-century equivalent of the Nazi war machine and the Spanish Inquisition — the latest attempt to destroy the Jews. Preventing that is the mission of his life. For Mr. Barak, who spurns talk of a second Holocaust and fear for Israel’s existence, it is a challenge about strategy: “zones of immunity” and “red lines,” the operational details of an assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“All leaders have kitchen cabinets, but Netanyahu and Barak have established a kitchenette of two,” remarked Nahum Barnea, a columnist for the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, in an interview. “They haven’t discussed Iran with the rest of the government in weeks and have convinced themselves there is only one way to deal with Iran — their way.”

A top Israeli official who works closely with both leaders and spoke on the condition of anonymity confirmed that the cabinet had not talked lately about Iran, but noted that detailed and long-standing preparation had gone into the possibility of a military strike. Of the two men, he said: “One views himself as a savior, the other lives for a good operation. They’re a strange pair who have come to appreciate each other. Together they control this issue.”

Mr. Netanyahu is the leader of the right-wing Likud Party and grew up in the revisionist Zionist tradition of maximizing territory, standing up aggressively to Israel’s opponents and rejecting the quasi socialism of David Ben-Gurion, the founding prime minister. Mr. Barak grew up on a collective farm deep within the heart of Labor Zionism, and after a long and decorated military career became chairman of the Labor Party. He served briefly as prime minister before losing popular support and an election to Ariel Sharon in 2001.

“On the surface they appear very different,” commented Daniel Ben-Simon, a left-leaning Labor Party member of Parliament who worked with Mr. Barak. “Netanyahu cannot disconnect Israel from the Holocaust. He sees himself as the prime minister of the Jewish people. Barak is the ultimate Israeli, the prince of Zionism. Many thought Barak would rein in Netanyahu on Iran. Instead he joined with him into a two-man show.”

While many here fear a catastrophe if Israel strikes at Iran, Mr. Barak and Mr. Netanyahu increasingly argue that there may be no other option. Their view is that given a choice between an Iran with nuclear weapons — which they say could use them against Israel directly or through proxies, as well as spur a regional arms race — and the consequences of an attack on Iran before it can go nuclear, the latter is far preferable. There will be a counterattack, they say; people will lose their lives and property will be destroyed. But they say it is the lesser of two evils.

“Rockets will fall on this building, but things would be far worse if Iran got the bomb,” said a top former official who has worked for both men, as he sat in a seaside Tel Aviv hotel lobby.

He added that Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Barak were “meeting one on one with certain cabinet ministers in order to shape a majority in the 14,” referring to the 14-member security cabinet.

They have known each other a long time and have developed a strong mutual dependence. Mr. Barak’s political career, which once seemed so promising, now relies heavily on his relationship with Mr. Netanyahu. And given Mr. Netanyahu’s limited military experience, without the backing of Mr. Barak, who is seen as a military mastermind, he would have trouble winning support for his policy.

Mr. Barak, 70, was a commander of Mr. Netanyahu, 62, in the elite Sayeret Matkal unit in which they both served in the early 1970s. Both have also grown relatively wealthy in recent years from speeches and consulting when not in government, and both feel they understand American politics especially well.

If they did decide to attack, they would need the backing of a majority of the security cabinet. Most estimates are that they would get that support, although the vote might be as close as 8 to 6. But by keeping the issue off the cabinet’s agenda for now, they could be counting on seeking an 11th-hour vote, when it would be harder for ministers to oppose the attack.

Earlier cabinet meetings offer clues as to why they might be avoiding the issue. In its three years, the cabinet held a number of meetings devoted to Iran, according to top officials who add that defense officials and several ministers opposed military action, at least so far.

“They haven’t done it until now,” a top official who is unenthusiastic about an attack said. “Ask yourself why.”

Iran says its nuclear program is purely for civilian use, although Western powers believe its goal is to produce weapons. Israel points to repeated statements by Iranian leaders calling for its destruction and by Iran’s financing and arming of groups fighting Israel. Still, the United States says that diplomacy and sanctions against Iran’s financial and energy industries need time before military action should be considered.

Mr. Netanyahu’s recent trip to Washington is widely thought to have gained President Obama some of that time, with no attack expected in the next few months.

Both Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Barak say they will be delighted if pressure on Iran leads it to drop its nuclear program. Neither thinks it likely, however, because of the short time frame as Iran moves its centrifuges underground, beyond Israel’s military ability to destroy them.

Public opinion on the matter is unclear, although Mr. Netanyahu remains very popular and Mr. Barak is widely respected as defense minister. In polls about Iran, different questions produce different results. One poll asked Israelis if they favored an attack without American help and a sizable majority, 63 percent, said no. But another asked whether Israelis considered an attack on Iran riskier than “living in the shadow of an Iranian nuclear bomb” and 65 percent preferred the attack, in keeping with the Netanyahu-Barak argument. Some say it is the unusual combination of Mr. Netanyahu with Mr. Barak that could lead to an attack, and while some are grateful, others are terrified. Meir Dagan, a former head of the Mossad spy agency, has complained that the two leaders cannot be trusted to make the right decision.

Ben Caspit, a political columnist for the Maariv newspaper, a former Likud activist and a harsh critic of Mr. Netanyahu’s, wrote in the paper last weekend that he viewed them as dangerous.

Using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname, he said: “Bibi is a messianist. He believes with all his soul and every last molecule of his being that he — I don’t quite know how to express it — is King David. He’s not cynical in the least. The cynic here is Barak. The fortunate thing is that Bibi’s a coward. The dangerous thing is that he’s got Barak beside him.”

The False Debate About Attacking Iran

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/opinion/sunday/kristof-the-false-debate-about-attacking-iran.html?ref-politics

The False Debate About Attacking Iran

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 24, 2012

 I WONDER if we in the news media aren’t inadvertently leaving the impression that there is a genuine debate among experts about whether an Israeli military strike on Iran makes sense this year.

There really isn’t such a debate. Or rather, it’s the same kind of debate as the one about climate change — credible experts are overwhelmingly on one side.

Here’s what a few of them told me:

“I don’t know any security expert who is recommending a military strike on Iran at this point,” noted Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton University professor who was a senior State Department official earlier in the Obama administration.

“Unless you’re so far over on the neocon side that you’re blind to geopolitical realities, there’s an overwhelming consensus that this is a bad idea,” said W. Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle East affairs for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“Most security experts agree that it’s premature to go to a military option,” said Michèle Flournoy, who has just stepped down as the No. 3 official in the Defense Department. “We are in the middle of increasing sanctions on Iran. Iran is already under the most onerous sanctions it has ever experienced, and now we’re turning the screws further with sanctions that will touch their central bank, sanctions that will touch their oil products and so forth.

“So it has been bad for them and it’s about to get worse,” Flournoy added. “The overwhelming consensus is we should give some time to let that work.”

Granted, American officials are deeply alarmed about Iran’s nuclear program, although the fear is not so much that Iran would use nuclear weapons against Israel or anyone else. Iran apparently developed chemical weapons to respond to Iraq’s chemical attacks during the Iran-Iraq war, and it showed restraint with them. Rather, the biggest fear is that if Iran tests and deploys nuclear weapons, other countries will follow. These could include Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, setting off another round of nuclear proliferation.

Officials and security experts make several broad points about why a military strike on Iran anytime soon would be an abominable idea.

First, it would set back Iran’s program by only one to three years — and then it presumably would go ahead more covertly and with more domestic support than ever.

Second, this wouldn’t be a single strike but would require sorties over many days to attack many locations. And the aim would be in part to kill the scientists running the program, so there would be civilian casualties. Day by day, anger in the Muslim world and around the world would grow at Israel — and at America. The coalition pressuring Iran through sanctions might well dissolve.

Third, a regional war in the Middle East could result, sucking in the United States. Iran could sponsor attacks on American targets around the world, and it could use proxies to escalate attacks on American troops in Afghanistan.

Fourth, oil supplies through the Persian Gulf could be interrupted, sending oil and gas prices soaring, and damaging the global economy.

Fifth, sanctions and covert methods like the Stuxnet computer worm have already slowed Iran’s progress, and tougher sanctions and covert sabotage will continue to delay the program in a low-risk way.

Granted, everything I say here may be wrong. Israel’s 1981 attack on the Osirak reactor in Iraq and its 2007 attack on a Syrian nuclear project both went smoothly, without retaliation. The attacks set back those countries’ nuclear programs much more than skeptics had expected.

Yet there’s good reason to think that Iran is different, partly because its program is so dispersed and protected. More broadly, war is inherently unpredictable, and Israel has often been horrendously shortsighted in its interventions. Its invasion of Lebanon in 1982 turned into a quagmire that helped lead to the emergence of Hezbollah, while its de facto support for Hamas in Gaza in its early days harmed everyone (except Iran).

Let’s also remember that as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bangs the drums of war, that may empower Iranian hawks. “The continual threat of a military strike is as likely to convince them to move ahead as to deter them,” Slaughter notes.

Whether Israel will attack Iranian nuclear sites is one of this year’s crucial questions, and people in the know seem to think the odds are about 50-50. We don’t know that the economy would be harmed or that a war would unfold, but anyone who is confident about what would happen is a fool.

So as we hear talk about military action against Iran, let’s be clear about one thing. Outside Netanyahu’s aides and a fringe of raptors, just about every expert thinks that a military strike at this time would be a catastrophically bad idea. That’s not a debate, but a consensus.

Obama: no need to choose now on Iran strike

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-slams-republican-bluster-iran-185230069.html

Obama: no need to choose now on Iran strike

US President Barack Obama suggested Tuesday that Iran's nuclear program was not an immediate threat, but said new world power talks would "quickly" establish if Tehran wanted to end the crisis.

Obama stole some of the political limelight from Republican presidential hopefuls, holding his first White House news conference in five months as voters went to the polls in nationwide Super Tuesday nominating contests.

A day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he could not wait "much longer" for diplomacy on Iran to work, Obama also slammed Republicans for "big talk" and "bluster" and failing to consider the costs of war.

"This notion that somehow we have a choice to make in the next week or two weeks or month or two months is not borne out by the facts," Obama said, arguing a "window" for diplomacy could forestall an Iranian bomb.

Obama has also warned however that he will not tolerate Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, would not attempt a containment policy and is prepared to strike at the appropriate time.

He spoke after world powers responded to Iran's new willingness to discuss the nuclear issue with an offer of talks, which Obama said would "quickly" show whether the Islamic republic was serious about avoiding war.

Obama, seeking a second term in November, argued that Iran was now feeling the "bite" of tightening sanctions though cautioned he did not expect a breakthrough in a first set of negotiations.

He also slammed Republican candidates for their hawkish statements demanding military action on Iran, after leading Republican candidate Mitt Romney earlier said "thugs and tyrants" only understood American readiness to use power.

"This is not a game, and there's nothing casual about it," Obama said.

"When I see the casualness with which some of these folks talk about war, I'm reminded of the costs involved in war," he said, talking of visiting wounded soldiers and writing condolence letters to families of fallen warriors.

"Sometimes we bear that cost, but we think it through. We don't play politics with it," he said, noting he and not his Republican foes bore the heavy responsibilities of US commander-in-chief.

"When we haven't thought it through, and it gets wrapped up in politics, we make mistakes."

Obama described the crackdown in Syria which has killed thousands of civilians as "heartbreaking" and "outrageous" and predicted that President Bashar al-Assad would eventually fall, like other regional tyrants.

But he warned that unlike Libya, where the United States and allies prevented a massacre, there was no case for outside intervention.

"For us to take military action, unilaterally, as some have suggested, or to think that somehow there's some simple solution, I think is a mistake," Obama said, pointing out that the Libyan operation attracted a UN Security Council mandate and cooperation from regional governments.

"This is a much more complicated situation."

Obama noted that he was holding his press conference on Super Tuesday, and beamed when asked what he would like to say to Romney, replying, "Good luck tonight," keeping his powder dry for a likely future clash later.

Romney, the Republican favorite, hopes to use key contests in Ohio and Tennessee which were among 10 states voting on Tuesday to position himself as presumptive nominee for November's presidential election.

In Massachusetts, where he planned to await results, Romney said Obama had made "some extraordinary errors" with respect to Iran.

Obama did wade into controversy over conservative talk show icon Rush Limbaugh -- a hate figure for some -- who called a student a "slut" for arguing her health plan at a Catholic-affiliated college should provide birth control.

"I don't know what's in Rush Limbaugh's heart, so I'm not going to comment on the sincerity of his apology," Obama said.

"All decent folks can agree that the remarks that were made don't have any place in the public discourse."

Recent surveys have shown Obama's personal job approval rating at around 50 percent, a crucial historical threshold for presidents seeking reelection, after three White House years marred by economic gloom.

Obama: Iran's economy a 'shambles' after sanctions

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gBxDdCgwUv8X2qbVyAQNwWAlP6rg?docId=CNG.88737ace4800efd85d9752c4c64d58bb.f1

Obama: Iran's economy a 'shambles' after sanctions

(AFP) – 5 hours ago

NEW YORK — US President Barack Obama said US-led sanctions had reduced Iran's economy to a "shambles," in a robust defense of his policy towards Tehran following sharp Republican attacks.

Obama had previously been reticent in responding to Republican campaign attacks over his efforts to deter Iran's nuclear program, but addressed the issue at a fundraising event in New York, a center of the US Jewish community.

He said he had mobilized the world and built an "unprecedented" sanctions regime targeting Iran to state "unequivocally that we're not going to tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of this Iranian regime."



"We've been able to organize folks like China and Russia that previously would have never gone along with something like this," Obama said, referring to the support for sanctions of fellow UN Security Council permanent members.

"And it's been so effective that even the Iranians have had to acknowledge that their economy is in a shambles."

"When I came into office, Iran was united and the world was divided. And now what we have is a united international community that is saying to Iran, you've got to change your ways."

But Obama admitted that Iran had not yet decided to throw open its nuclear program to international scrutiny in a way that would help it move out of isolation.

Obama spoke hours after European Union nations agreed to sanction Iran's central bank, freezing assets used to finance its nuclear drive, in a move that further penalized and isolated the Islamic state.

The US leader signed into law a new set of US sanctions last month which target Iran's oil sector and seek to make foreign firms choose between doing business with Tehran or the United States.

Republicans seeking to turf Obama out of office in November's election have savaged his approach on Iran, saying that it shows weakness and have even said that the president has failed to prepare for the possibility of a military attack against Tehran's nuclear program.

"If we reelect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. If you elect Mitt Romney ... they will not have a nuclear weapon," the former Massachusetts governor and 2012 Republican frontrunner said in November.

Earlier this month, in South Carolina, Romney slammed Obama for being too slow to support the Iranian democracy protests in 2009.

"When there were over a million people in the streets of Tehran screaming for freedom, he was silent," Romney said.

Romney's rival Newt Gingrich has said the Iranian regime could be replaced within a year while Rick Santorum has compared Obama to "feckless" president Jimmy Carter, who saw hopes of a second term in 1980 dissolved in an Iranian hostage crisis.

Obama also told the mainly Jewish audience in New York that he had not seen the progress he had hoped for in his efforts to forge peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

And he also implicitly took aim at another area of Republican criticism that he had weakened US support for Israel.

"We've got the strongest military cooperation that we've ever had between our two nations. That's not my opinion, by the way -- that's the Israeli government's opinion," he said.

Obama's Iran policy shifted from outreach to pressure and sanctions

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-Wires/2012/0113/Obama-s-Iran-policy-shifted-from-outreach-to-pressure-and-sanctions

Obama's Iran policy shifted from outreach to pressure and sanctions

Obama intended to go the extra mile on engagement, his aides said, so if the gambit failed, allies and adversaries alike could not point the finger at the United States as the 'bad guy.' Instead, they would rally behind the effort to pressure Iran.

By Tabassum Zakaria and Caren Bohan, Reuters / January 13, 2012



WASHINGTON, D.C.

President Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009 carrying an olive branch for Iran, determined to show the world that Washington would not play the villain in a relationship marked by blood and bitterness over three decades.

Obama chose his words with excruciating care in reaching out to Iran publicly and privately, including through secret letters to Iran's Supreme Leader. The new president emphasized he wanted a "new beginning" with a country that called the United States "the Great Satan" and was branded by his predecessor as part of an "axis of evil."

Obama intended to go the extra mile on engagement, his aides said, so if the gambit failed, allies and adversaries alike could not point the finger at the United States as the "bad guy." Instead, they would rally behind the effort to pressure Iran.

IN PICTURES: Iran's military might

Three years later, tensions over Iran's nuclear program have escalated to their highest level in years. Tehran is threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz and the chances of a miscalculation that could lead to a military clash - and a global oil crisis - appear to be rising.

Diplomacy has given way to harsher tactics, with Obama and his European allies trying to isolate the Islamic republic with the toughest sanctions ever.



Interviews with U.S. officials reveal a strategy of watching and waiting and a belief that the West's leverage over Iran may grow as Tehran feels the heat from the sanctions and popular upheaval in the Middle East.

One official also predicted that the neighboring government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a key Iranian ally, would ultimately collapse, adding to the worries of Iran's leaders.

"It's our assessment that the Assad regime is not going to survive," White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told Reuters.

"The fall of the Assad regime would substantially impact Iran's strategic position in the world and the region. The combination of those sanctions and the demise of the Assad regime is a level of pressure that the Iranian government has never been under before," he said.

The White House insists that the United States is not pursuing a strategy of seeking "regime change."

"We are absolutely not," Rhodes said. "It's very much the policy of the United States to change Iran's behavior through our sanctions and through isolation, not to change the Iranian regime."

Obama remains open to talks with Iran, aides say. But after years of disappointment, with a U.S. election looming, and with Congress and allies like Israel lobbying him to stand tough, Washingtonsees the next move as Tehran's, officials and European diplomats say.

How Obama arrived at this point is a story of peace offers made and rebuffed, a crushed revolution on Tehran's streets, and dashed hopes for a civilian nuclear deal.

At the start of the 2012 U.S. election year, Iran and its suspected quest for a nuclear bomb is firmly at the top of Obama's foreign policy priorities.

REACHING OUT

Obama began with outreach - some of it unusually direct.

Early in his term, the president sent a personal letter to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khameini, who holds ultimate power, to show the seriousness of the outstretched hand. "A letter from the president was the clearest signal of our intentions that we could possibly make," a U.S. official said.

The United States and Iran do not have formal diplomatic ties.

Obama was closely involved in writing the letter that took account of their differences on nuclear and other issues, made clear there were two paths, and expressed a desire for a different kind of relationship, officials said. It was also a test to see if a serious dialogue could begin.

And in an unprecedented March 2009 Persian New Year message to the people and leaders ofIran, Obama repeatedly referred to the "Islamic Republic of Iran." It was a recognition of the formal name of the government and a signal that "regime change" was not the U.S. policy.

The intention was to show "a U.S. president who is not playing the villain in Iranian politics," Rhodes said.

"When you have a U.S. president who is not playing that role and saying look we've had a difficult history, let's look forward, the regime loses one of its most powerful propaganda tools," he said.

But Khamanei's response to Obama's 2009 letter contained nothing encouraging that the administration could act on. A second letter was sent to Khameini tied to that response.

TURNING AWAY

Late in 2009, Obama's policy began to shift.

In September, he took to the world stage at a Group of 20 summit in Pittsburgh, flanked by the leaders of Britain and France, and revealed that Iran was building a secret nuclear fuel plant underground near the holy city of Qom. The previous evening, Obama made sure his aides had briefed Russian and Chinese officials, who had not known about the facility.

In October, in direct talks in Geneva, the United States and its allies offered nuclear fuel for a civilian nuclear reactor in Tehran. In exchange, Iran would ship its enriched uranium outside the country, where it would be rendered unusable for a potential nuclear weapon.

Iran never picked up on the offer. The final straw when Iran declared in February 2010 that it would begin enriching uranium up to 20 percent.

By the end of 2009, "we were fully shifted to the notion of pursuing a U.N. Security Council resolution" with more sanctions, one official said.

Obama's critics and political opponents assert that his initial outreach was dangerous and naive. Current and former Obama aides disagree sharply.

IN PICTURES: Iran's military might

"There was never any illusion or naivete about who the regime was. There was never any assumption that we would pursue this regardless of their behavior," said Dennis Ross, a top White House adviser on Middle East policy until last month.

"If they weren't prepared to be responsive, then the assumption always was this will make it easier for us to mobilize real pressure against them," he said.

Obama was also criticized as missing a golden opportunity when the largest street protests in the Islamic republic's history broke out after Iran's disputed June 2009 election.

The protests, ultimately quashed with violence, did appear to catch the White House by surprise. But aides defended the muted U.S. response.

"We knew that too overt an embrace in some ways could hurt the Iranian opposition," said Jim Steinberg, former deputy secretary of state. "Especially when it looked like they had a chance of prevailing, we didn't want to undercut them and strengthen the hand of the hardliners."

A SOFT WAR?

U.S.-Iran tensions continued to ratchet up, and a string of events made it look to the outside world like an undeclared "soft war" was under way.

The United States accused Iran's shadowy Quds Force in a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

The Stuxnet computer virus attacked centrifuges at Iran's Natanz enrichment facility. Iran accusedIsrael and the United States.

Late last year, the United States lost a spy drone in Iran, unmasking an aggressive surveillance program.

There have been unexplained explosions at an Iranian missile depot and four nuclear scientists have been killed in Iran - the latest on Wednesday.

"We had absolutely nothing to do with the deaths of any of these scientists or the missile depot. Things exploding in Iran do not have anything to do with the United States," a U.S. official said.

Iran reacted to those events and the stepped-up economic sanctions as if under siege. It threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil shipping lane.

"They feel themselves under threat internally. They talk about the soft overthrow and the covert war that is being waged," said John Limbert, a professor of Middle East studies at the U.S. Naval Academy.

U.S. officials downplayed the possibility that Iran would follow through on its threats.

Iran has threatened to close the Strait before, usually when its leaders feel international pressure, another U.S. official said on condition of anonymity.

"It's doubtful Iranian leaders want an all-out war, but they'll continue to agitate and push the envelope in ways they believe advance their national interests," the official added.

WAITING FOR IRAN

Obama is still open to an Iranian overture for serious negotiations on its nuclear program, officials say. Indeed, that is the ultimate goal of the pressure strategy, they say.

"We have a number of ways to communicate our views to the Iranian government, and we have used those mechanisms regularly on a range of issues over the years," White House National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said.

"But any message that we have delivered to the Iranian government would be the same as what we've said publicly," Vietor said.

For now, Obama is focused on new sanctions that target Iran's central bank and oil sales.

"We are already seeing ... a really substantial impact on the Iranian economy, the Iranian currency," Rhodes said. "The next step for us is making sure that as we do that there is continued space for theIranian government to take a different path, rather than simply seeing our pressure as an end of itself."

But with Iran announcing it has begun enrichment at the protected underground site near Qom, andIsrael not ruling out a unilateral strike on Iran's nuclear sites, time may be short.

U.S. intelligence agencies say there is no evidence that Iran has decided to move forward with building a nuclear weapon. But experts point out it is taking steps to lay the groundwork so it can move quickly if that decision is made.

If Iran decided to move forward, it would be about a year away from having a crude nuclear explosive device, David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said. "They still don't know quite how to move forward without getting caught," he said.

An Oil Strategy in Case Iran’s Navy Shuts Down the Strait of Hormuz: View

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-12/an-oil-strategy-in-case-iran-s-navy-shuts-down-the-strait-of-hormuz-view.html

An Oil Strategy in Case Iran’s Navy Shuts Down the Strait of Hormuz: View

By the Editors Jan 12, 2012 3:44 AM GMT+0330

Let’s just say Iran makes good on its recent threats to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. And let’s say that with one-fifth of the world’s oil supply bottled up, the price of a barrel of oil then almost doubles, as some analysts predict, to more than $200.

What can the world do to bring prices down before a still- woozy global economy gets pushed back into recession?

Pipelines that circumvent the strait could carry to market at least 7 million of the 17 million barrels of tanker-borne oil that passes through the strait each day. The U.S. could, for the first time since the Gulf War in 1991, release oil from its 700 million-barrel Strategic Petroleum Reserve; other members of the International Energy Agency (set up after the 1973-74 oil crisis) could also tap the 90-day supply stocks that they are required to maintain.



The IEA has already prepared a plan to release as many as 14 million barrels a day in the event of a Gulf closure. Saudi Arabia, long the self-appointed swing man of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, has a spare production capacity -- on paper, at least -- of about 3 million barrels per day; everyone else is producing almost flat out.

The U.S. now gets only about 9 percent of the oil it consumes from the Persian Gulf. Countries such as China, India, Japan and South Korea, however, rely on Gulf exports, particularly from Iran, to power their economies. In the European Union, debt-ridden Greece gets 14 percent of its oil imports from Iran, Italy 13 percent and Spain almost 10 percent. And because oil is a global commodity, as far as oil prices are concerned, what happens in the Persian Gulf does not stay in the Persian Gulf.

For all Iran’s missile-rattling, however, there is little reason to think it will carry through on its bluster. To block the Gulf would verge on economic suicide: Petroleum products account for 20 percent of Iran’s gross domestic product, 80 percent of exports and 70 percent of its government revenue. Any attempt to close the Gulf could also provoke a war with the U.S. and vaporize what diplomatic support and leverage Iran gets from countries (and clients) such as China.

Iran may not intend ultimately to close the strait, but its threats to do so can still instigate tremendous economic uncertainty with very real consequences, especially in a hyper- connected world wired with complex speculative instruments. The challenge is similar to dealing with terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, which command our attention and resources through their potential no less than their actions. In either case, the goal is to balance the risks that such threats present with the costs of protecting against them.

More pipelines would be a good start. Unfortunately, the United Arab Emirates just announced that the opening of a 1.8 million barrel-per-day pipeline that circumvents the strait will be put off until May. The use of drag-reduction agents -- an estimated $600 million investment -- could increase the capacity of Saudi Arabia’s existing two pipelines that reach the Red Sea to as many as 11 million barrels per day. And if the Kingdom wants to bolster its reputation as a “stable, reliable” supplier of oil, it could invest the several billion dollars needed to build another pipeline -- a prospect that may be less painful if oil prices remain high. The current turmoil is another reason why Iraq needs to repair its pipeline to Turkey. At home, we support the building of the Keystone XL pipeline that will bring oil from Canada’s tar sands to market.

The IEA’s plan to release oil from emergency stocks will only work if China, India and other non-IEA countries agree not to hoard. That would require an unprecedented degree of policy coordination. One way to reduce future shocks, especially in Asia, may be more positioning of exports in regional storage depots and greater use of floating stocks. Governments may also want to dust off the IEA’s 2005 blueprint for cutting the amount of fuel consumed by cars, trucks and buses. If the crisis continues, the market’s response could also be an important first test of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s soon- to-be-imposed limits on trading by speculators.

Over the last few years, the U.S. has reduced its dependence on oil imports in general and from the Middle East in particular. Yet, almost four decades after the first oil shocks, the economy remains deeply vulnerable to the threat of a cutoff of oil from the Persian Gulf -- a state of affairs that calls into question the commitment of, by some estimates, trillions of dollars to keep the Gulf stable and the Strait of Hormuz open. Factor that “externality” into the price of a barrel of oil, and alternative fuels begin to look like a bargain by comparison -- at least until someone figures out how to take away the sun, wind, rivers and tides.

Read more opinion online from Bloomberg View.

To contact the Bloomberg View editorial board: [e-mail].

Heavy snow hits Austria

Heavy snow hits Austria

http://news.yahoo.com/photos/heavy-snow-hits-austria-1325959889-slideshow/village-andermatt-switzerland-covered-snow-saturday-jan-7-photo-175432379.html

Snow ploughs try to clear the streets in Fiss, eastern Austria, Friday, Jan. 6, 2012. Heavy snowfalls captured Austria and southern Germany and caused big traffic problems. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)

covered with snow Saturday Jan. 7, 2012. Heavy snow has blanketed parts of Switzerland and Austria over the last few days, leading to several road closures and an elevated risk of avalanches. A major east-west railway route in Austria has been shut down following heavy snow in Tyrol, a popular Alpine skiing region. (AP Photo/Keystone/Urs Flueeler)
cars queue on a snowy street near Fiss in Tyrol, eastern Austria, Friday, Jan. 6, 2012. Heavy snowfalls captured Austria and southern Germany and caused traffic problems. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)

A Jesus statue photographed under a snowy roof in Fiss, eastern Austria, Friday, Jan. 6, 2012. Heavy snowfalls captured Austria and southern Germany and caused big traffic problems. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)

The village of Andermatt , Switzerland covered with snow Saturday Jan. 7, 2012. Heavy snow has blanketed parts of Switzerland and Austria over the last few days, leading to several road closures and an elevated risk of avalanches. A major east-west railway route in Austria has been shut down following heavy snow in Tyrol, a popular Alpine skiing region. (AP Photo/Keystone/Urs Flueeler)

Gold, Silver Gain After Reports That Iran Made First Nuclear Rod

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-01-02/gold-silver-gain-after-reports-that-iran-made-first-nuclear-rod.html

Bloomberg
Gold, Silver Gain After Reports That Iran Made First Nuclear Rod

January 02, 2012, 1:01 PM EST

By Swansy Afonso

Jan. 2 (Bloomberg) - Gold and silver gained after reports that Iran produced its first nuclear fuel rod, spurring investors to buy the precious metal as a haven.

Gold for immediate delivery advanced 0.2 percent to $1,566.37 an ounce at 5:32 p.m. in London. Silver was 0.1 percent higher at $27.8625 an ounce. Gold rose 10 percent last year and silver dropped 9.9 percent.

A domestically made rod was inserted into the core of Tehran’s atomic research reactor after performance tests, the Iranian Students News Agency reported today, citing the country’s atomic energy agency. The Tehran reactor produces radioisotopes for cancer treatment, according to Mehr news agency. Nuclear fuel rods contain pellets of enriched uranium that provide fuel for nuclear power plants.

“Iran’s nuclear plans have raised fears that it is getting desperate and will take some drastic step,” Gnanasekar Thiagarajan, a director at Commtrendz Risk Management Services Pvt., said by phone from Mumbai. “More sanctions are expected from the U.S. and other nations. This will have a positive impact on gold prices as ideally people would try to buy gold.”

The U.S. and allies are increasing pressure on Iran to halt what they say may be a covert nuclear weapons program. Sanctions signed into law by President Barack Obama on Dec. 31 aim to deter dealings with the Iranian central bank, and the European Union is considering a ban on imports of oil from Iran, the world’s third-largest oil exporter. Iran denies seeking to develop atomic weapons.

Reserves Climb

Gold reserves increased in November at Belarus, Turkey, Tajikistan, Macedonia, Mauritius and Morocco, and declined in Mexico, according to data on the International Monetary Fund’s website. Turkey’s holdings increased to 5.758 million ounces from 4.429 million ounces and Mexico’s declined to 3.413 million ounces from 3.417 million ounces in October, the data showed. Morocco’s holdings were 710,000 ounces in November compared with 708,800 ounces in October, according to the data.

--With assistance from Ayesha Daya in Dubai and Madelene Pearson in Melbourne. Editors: Thomas Kutty Abraham, Cherian Thomas

To contact the reporter on this story: Swansy Afonso in Mumbai at [e-mail]

strong

Iran proposes new round of nuclear talks with 6 world powers as sanctions hit hard

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle-east/report-iran-to-propose-new-round-of-nuclear-talks-with-six-world-powers/2011/12/31/gIQANOIxRP_story.html

Iran proposes new round of nuclear talks with 6 world powers as sanctions hit hard

By Associated Press,

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran said Saturday it has proposed a new round of talks on its nuclear program with six world powers that have been trying for years to persuade Tehran to freeze aspects of its atomic work that could provide a possible pathway to weapons production.

The country’s top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, said he has formally called on the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany to return to negotiations.

The invitation comes after new sanctions recently imposed by the West over Tehran’s enrichment of uranium, a process that produces fuel for reactors but which can also be used in making nuclear weapons. Iran insists it only has peaceful intentions, while the U.S. and many of its European allies suspect Iran of aiming to use a civilian nuclear energy program as a cover for developing a weapons capability.

The last round of negotiations between Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany was held in January in Istanbul, Turkey, but it ended in failure.

“We formally declared to them (the intent) to return to the path of dialogue for cooperation,” Jalili told Iranian diplomats in Tehran, according to the official IRNA news agency. Jalili did not say when or through what channel he issued the invitation.

Iran’s ambassador to Germany, Ali Reza Sheikh Attar, said earlier Saturday that Jalili was to send a letter soon to EU’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton to arrange a new round of talks.

A spokesman for Ashton said she had not yet received any new communication from Iran.

“As she has made clear in her statements on behalf of the (six nations), we continue to pursue our twin-track approach and are open for meaningful discussions on confidence-building measures, without preconditions from the Iranian side,” said the spokesman, Michael Mann.

The Iranian announcement was the latest signal from Tehran that the country is feeling the impact of international sanctions.

The U.N. has imposed four rounds of sanctions. Separately, the U.S. and the European Union have imposed their own tough economic and financial penalties.

Washington’s measures target exports of gasoline and other refined petroleum products to Iran and have banned U.S. banks from doing business with foreign banks that provide services to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Last month, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad acknowledged that the current penalties were impeding Iran’s financial institutions, saying, “our banks cannot make international transactions anymore.”

And earlier in December, Iran reinstated an offer for U.N. nuclear agency officials to visit Tehran, though it did not say whether the International Atomic Energy Agency would be able to focus on suspicions that Iran is secretly working on nuclear arms — a key condition set by the agency.

The U.S. and Israel have not ruled out a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities if Tehran doesn’t stop its nuclear program.

But Jalili warned Tehran would make any aggressor regret a decision to attack Iran.

“We will give a response that will make the aggressor regret any threat against the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Jalili said.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

U.S. in $3.5 billion arms sale to UAE amid Iran tensions

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/31/us-usa-uae-iran-idUSTRE7BU0BF20111231

U.S. in $3.5 billion arms sale to UAE amid Iran tensions

By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON | Sat Dec 31, 2011 10:42am EST

(Reuters) - The United States has signed a $3.5 billion sale of an advanced antimissile interception system to the United Arab Emirates, part of an accelerating military buildup of its friends and allies near Iran.

The deal, signed on December 25 and announced on Friday night by the U.S. Defense Department, "is an important step in improving the region's security through a regional missile defense architecture," Pentagon press secretary George Little said in a statement.

The U.S. Congress had been notified of the proposed sale in September 2008 by former President George W. Bush's administration. At that time, the system built by Lockheed Martin Corp had been projected to involve more missiles, more "fire control" units, more radar sets, all at a cost roughly twice as much to UAE.

It marks the first foreign sale of the so-called Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), the only system designed to destroy short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles both inside and outside the Earth's atmosphere.

The United States, under the government-to-government deal, will deliver two THAAD batteries, 96 missiles, two Raytheon Co AN/TPY-2 radars plus 30 years of spare parts, support and training with contractor logistics support to the UAE, Little said.

"Acquisition of this critical defense system will bolster the UAE's air and missile defense capability and enhance the already robust ballistic missile defense cooperation between the United States and the UAE," he said.

Lockheed Martin did not immediately respond to a request for its delivery timetable for THAAD, part of a layered bulwark being built by the Obama administration in Europe and the Middle East against Iran's growing missile capabilities.

IRAN TENSIONS

UAE lies across the Gulf from Iran. The announcement of its purchase underlined rising tensions since a November 8 report from the U.N. nuclear watchdog that Iran appears to have worked on designing a nuclear bomb and may still be pursuing research to that end.

Iran delayed promised long-range missile tests in the Gulf on Saturday and signaled it was ready for fresh talks on its disputed nuclear program.

Tehran on Tuesday threatened to stop the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz if it became the target of an oil embargo over its nuclear ambitions.

The THAAD follows a $1.7 billion direct commercial contract this year to upgrade Saudi Arabia's Patriot antimissile missiles, and a sale this year of 209 advanced Patriot missiles to Kuwait, valued at roughly $900 million, the Defense Department said.

On Thursday, the Obama administration announced it had sealed a deal on December 24 to sell $29.4 billion in advanced Boeing Co F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, the priciest single U.S. arms sale yet.

The Saudi sale involves 84 new F-15SA models to be delivered starting in 2015 plus upgrades to 70 F-15s already in the Saudi fleet and new munitions. Congress had been notified of that deal in October 2010.

The ongoing U.S. buildup of Saudi Arabia as a counterweight to Iran is projected to total as much as $60 billion over 10 to 15 years, including the F-15s, three types of helicopters and advanced missiles, bombs and other hardware and services.

Saudi Arabia was the biggest buyer of U.S. arms from January 1, 2007 through the end of 2010, with signed agreements totaling $13.8 billion, followed by the United Arab Emirates, with $10.4 billion, according to a December 15 report by Congressional Research Service analyst Richard Grimmett.

In another pending arms sale to the region, the Obama administration formally proposed in November to sell 600 "bunker buster" bombs and other munitions to UAE in an estimated $304 million package to counter what the Pentagon called current and future regional threats.

Israel, the closest U.S. regional partner, is also being built up. It is to get Lockheed Martin's new radar-evading F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet, the first country in the region that will fly it. Israel views Iran's nuclear program as a threat to its existence.

Dennis Cavin, a Lockheed vice president for missile defense programs, told Reuters in August that, in scaling back their planned THAAD purchase, UAE officials had identified some elements "that they think they can do without right now."

Lockheed, the Pentagon's No. 1 supplier by sales, is being awarded an initial U.S. government contract worth up to $1.96 billion for the two THAAD batteries under the government-to-government sale to UAE, the Defense Department said in its contract digest on Friday. It said the work was to be carried out through June 30, 2016.

Raytheon's related deal is valued at up to $582.5 million for radars and services, with details expected to be finalized in June 2012, the digest said. It said Raytheon also was getting a Pentagon deal worth up to $363.9 million to start building two more AN/TPY-2 radar sets.

Lockheed Martin is pleased that the U.S. government and the United Arab Emirates have reached an agreement on the first foreign sale of the THAAD weapon system, Tom McGrath, a company vice president and program manager, said in a release.

"We look forward to working with our customers to deliver this important capability," he said.

(Reporting By Jim Wolf; Editing by Will Dunham)

Ron Paul: Sanctions against Iran are 'acts of war'

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-ron-paul-sanctions-act-of-war20111229,0,4395532.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+latimes%2Fmostviewed+%28L.A.+Times+-+Most+Viewed+Stories%29

Ron Paul: Sanctions against Iran are 'acts of war'

By Paul West

December 29, 2011, 11:20 a.m.
Reporting from Perry, Iowa— Defending himself against charges of isolationism, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul told voters in Iowa on Thursday that western sanctions against Iran are "acts of war" that are likely to lead to an actual war in the Middle East.

Paul, one of the leading contenders to win next week's Iowa caucuses, said Iran would be justified in responding to the sanctions by blocking the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. He compared the western sanctions to a hypothetical move by China to block the Gulf of Mexico, which Americans would consider an act of war.

He also said he would not respond militarily to keep the strait open—because he would not consider it an act of war against the U.S. But if he were president, he would report to Congress on the issue, leaving it up to lawmakers to declare war if they wanted.

"I think we're looking for trouble because we put these horrendous sanctions on Iran," Paul told a midday audience at the Hotel Pattee in Perry, Iowa. He said the Iranians are "planning to be bombed" and understandably would like to have a nuclear weapon, even though there is "no evidence whatsoever" that they have "enriched" uranium.

Apparently alluding to Israel and its nuclear-weapons arsenal, Paul said that "if I were an Iranian, I'd like to have a nuclear weapon, too, because you gain respect from them."

To approving applause from a crowd of about 125, the Texas congressman said that "we always seem to have to have a country to bash," linking the current saber-rattling against Iran to previous hawkish rhetoric that led to conflicts in Iraq, Libya and elsewhere.

"If you want to quiet things down," he said, referring to Iran, "don't put sanctions on them" because it's "just going to cause more trouble."

He said an Iranian blockade would be the most likely response to tighter sanctions because Iran has "no weapons of mass destruction" and shutting down the strait is "the most" it could do.

"I think the solution" to current tensions with Iran "is to do a lot less a lot sooner and mind our own business and then we would not have this threat of another war," he said to applause.

Reporting from Perry, Iowa— Defending himself against charges of isolationism, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul told voters in Iowa on Thursday that western sanctions against Iran are "acts of war" that are likely to lead to an actual war in the Middle East.

Paul, one of the leading contenders to win next week's Iowa caucuses, said Iran would be justified in responding to the sanctions by blocking the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. He compared the western sanctions to a hypothetical move by China to block the Gulf of Mexico, which Americans would consider an act of war.

He also said he would not respond militarily to keep the strait open—because he would not consider it an act of war against the U.S. But if he were president, he would report to Congress on the issue, leaving it up to lawmakers to declare war if they wanted.

"I think we're looking for trouble because we put these horrendous sanctions on Iran," Paul told a midday audience at the Hotel Pattee in Perry, Iowa. He said the Iranians are "planning to be bombed" and understandably would like to have a nuclear weapon, even though there is "no evidence whatsoever" that they have "enriched" uranium.

Apparently alluding to Israel and its nuclear-weapons arsenal, Paul said that "if I were an Iranian, I'd like to have a nuclear weapon, too, because you gain respect from them."

To approving applause from a crowd of about 125, the Texas congressman said that "we always seem to have to have a country to bash," linking the current saber-rattling against Iran to previous hawkish rhetoric that led to conflicts in Iraq, Libya and elsewhere.

"If you want to quiet things down," he said, referring to Iran, "don't put sanctions on them" because it's "just going to cause more trouble."

He said an Iranian blockade would be the most likely response to tighter sanctions because Iran has "no weapons of mass destruction" and shutting down the strait is "the most" it could do.

"I think the solution" to current tensions with Iran "is to do a lot less a lot sooner and mind our own business and then we would not have this threat of another war," he said to applause.


Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

U.S. touts Saudi Arabia fighter jet deal as a foreign policy, security and economic boon

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/massive-us-saudi-arms-deal-seen-as-a-foreign-policy-security-and-economic-boon/2011/12/29/gIQATNWQPP_story.html

U.S. touts Saudi Arabia fighter jet deal as a foreign policy, security and economic boon

By Joby Warrick and Jason Ukman,

The Obama administration on Thursday hailed a new $30 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia as both a hedge against Iranian aggression in the Persian Gulf and an economic windfall that could create thousands of U.S. jobs over the next decade.

The agreement to sell 84 top-of-the line F-15SA fighter jets to the Saudi air force also provided a needed boost to U.S. relations with the oil-rich kingdom after months of strain over the White House’s response to the Arab Spring uprisings, U.S. officials and Middle East analysts said.

The deal, which was finalized after more than a year of negotiations, was announced during a week of increased tensions with Iran, which has renewed its threat to block ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz in response to international economic sanctions. The administration has pursued a policy of supplying advanced weapons systems to friendly Arab states to keep Iran’s regional ambitions in check.

“This sale will send a strong message to countries in the region that the United States is committed to stability in the gulf and broader Middle East,” Andrew Shapiro, assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, told reporters.

The deal — outlines of which were disclosed to Congress last year — also calls for refurbishing 70 F-15s currently in Saudi Arabia’s fighter fleet, as well as providing munitions, spare parts and training for Saudi pilots and air crews.

The deal comes at a time when the Pentagon is considering supplying “bunker-buster” bombs and other munitions to another key gulf ally, the United Arab Emirates.

U.S. officials said the timing of the announcement was unrelated to Iran’s recent provocations.

“Clearly, one of the threats that [the Saudis] — that they face, as well as other countries in the region — is Iran,” Shapiro said. “But . . . this is not solely directed toward Iran. This is directed toward meeting our partner Saudi Arabia’s defense needs.”

While not the newest U.S. fighter jet, the model of the F-15 being acquired by Saudi Arabia will be equipped with the latest computers, radars and electronic warfare systems and will be “one of the most capable aircraft in the world,” said James Miller, the Defense Department’s principal deputy undersecretary for policy.

U.S. officials also touted the deal’s impact at home, saying the production of the Boeing-built F-15s would support 50,000 American jobs.

“It will engage 600 suppliers in 44 states and provide $3.5 billion in annual economic impact to the U.S. economy,” Shapiro said. “This will support jobs not only in the aerospace sector but also in our manufacturing base and support chain, which are all crucial for sustaining our national defense.”

Saudi Arabia, which has a predominantly Sunni Muslim population, is the key regional rival to Shiite-dominated Iran, as well as a vital U.S. ally.

The Obama administration has sought to smooth relations with Riyadh after months of strain over U.S. support for democratic uprisings in the Middle East. Saudi leaders were particularly angered when the White House criticized the crackdown on a Shiite-led movement in the neighboring kingdom of Bahrain.

The initial notification of the arms sale to Saudi Arabia, in 2010, prompted concern about security implications for Israel. U.S. officials have sought to allay those concerns and said Thursday that the sale would not degrade Israel’s military advantage.

A libertarian-minded Republican: Not Jump the Gun Soon

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-ron-paul-iran-iraq-20111215,0,3158409.story?track=rss

Ron Paul:
Strike against Iran would risk a repeat of 'useless' Iraq war

By Michael A. Memoli

December 15, 2011, 7:40 p.m.
Ron Paul did it again. The libertarian-minded Republican separated himself from the pack of candidates at tonight's debate by urging restraint in response to a possible Iranian nuclear threat, saying the U.S. can ill afford a repeat of its now-concluded war in Iraq.

Rep. Ron Paul of Texas speaks during Thursday's Republican presidential debate in Sioux City, Iowa. (Eric Gay / Associated Press / December 15, 2011)

Paul said there was "no U.N. evidence" that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons program, calling claims to the contrary "war propaganda."


"To me the greatest danger is that we will have a president that will overreact, and we will soon bomb Iran," he said. "We ought to really sit back and think, not jump the gun and believe that we are going to be attacked. That's how we got into that useless war in Iraq and lost so much."

Paul said it "makes more sense" to directly engage with Iran diplomatically. And he even praised President Obama for "wisely backing off on sanctions" against Iran, which he called overreaching.

"We have 12,000 diplomats in our services. We ought to use a little bit of diplomacy once in a while."

Rick Santorum and then Michele Bachmann rebutted Paul. Santorum equated the leadership of Iran to Al Qaeda and said that the U.S. should be ready to strike against Iran's nuclear facilities.

"We know without a shadow of a doubt that Iran will take a nuclear weapon, they will use it to wipe our ally, Israel, off the face fo the map," Bachmann said. "And they've stated they will use it against the United States of America. We would be fools and knaves to ignore their purpose and their plan."

On a question about a U.S. drone now in the hands of the Iranians, Mitt Romney had a chance to again focus on a potential general election fight. He said Obama was showing timidity by simply asking Iran to return the drone.

"A foreign policy based on 'pretty please'? You've got to be kidding me," he said.
Ron Paul did it again. The libertarian-minded Republican separated himself from the pack of candidates at tonight's debate by urging restraint in response to a possible Iranian nuclear threat, saying the U.S. can ill afford a repeat of its now-concluded war in Iraq.

Paul said there was "no U.N. evidence" that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons program, calling claims to the contrary "war propaganda."

"To me the greatest danger is that we will have a president that will overreact, and we will soon bomb Iran," he said. "We ought to really sit back and think, not jump the gun and believe that we are going to be attacked. That's how we got into that useless war in Iraq and lost so much."

Paul said it "makes more sense" to directly engage with Iran diplomatically. And he even praised President Obama for "wisely backing off on sanctions" against Iran, which he called overreaching.

"We have 12,000 diplomats in our services. We ought to use a little bit of diplomacy once in a while."

Rick Santorum and then Michele Bachmann rebutted Paul. Santorum equated the leadership of Iran to Al Qaeda and said that the U.S. should be ready to strike against Iran's nuclear facilities.

"We know without a shadow of a doubt that Iran will take a nuclear weapon, they will use it to wipe our ally, Israel, off the face fo the map," Bachmann said. "And they've stated they will use it against the United States of America. We would be fools and knaves to ignore their purpose and their plan."

On a question about a U.S. drone now in the hands of the Iranians, Mitt Romney had a chance to again focus on a potential general election fight. He said Obama was showing timidity by simply asking Iran to return the drone.

"A foreign policy based on 'pretty please'? You've got to be kidding me," he said.

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

پایان حضور نیروهای آمریکایی در عراق

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-obama-fort-bragg-iraq-speech-20111214,0,4258660.story

At Ft. Bragg, Obama welcomes troops home from Iraq

By Peter Nicholas

December 14, 2011, 11:10 a.m.

Reporting from Fort Bragg, N.C.— President Obama celebrated the soldiers who fought the Iraq war on Wednesday, marking the fulfillment of a campaign promise to bring home all U.S. forces following a nearly nine-year conflict that killed more than 4,400 U.S. soldiers.

"So as your commander in chief, on behalf of a grateful nation, I'm proud to finally say these two words – and I know your families agree," the president said. "Welcome home. Welcome home. Welcome home. Welcome home."

Obama, standing before a sea of paratroopers wearing maroon berets, thanked the troops returning from Iraq and hailed the country's steps toward creating an independent, democratic state.

"Now Iraq is not a perfect place," said Obama, standing at a lectern set up in an airplane hangar. "It has many challenges ahead. But we are leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people."

He was introduced by the first lady, a rare joint appearance borne of Michelle Obama's work finding jobs for military veterans.

In his remarks, President Obama largely ignored the furor over the war's origins under the Bush administration.

He made only the briefest mention of the "great controversy here at home …"

Instead, he kept a tight rhetorical focus on the sacrifices and victories of those who fought. He made no mention of the Iraqi dead, estimated to be more than 100,000.

Obama's political identity was shaped by the Iraq war. One way he distinguished himself from Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 Democratic nomination contest was by underscoring his early opposition to the U.S. invasion. Clinton had voted to authorize the war while serving in the U.S. Senate. Obama, as an Illinois state senator, delivered a speech in 2002 calling the imminent invasion "dumb."

Now commander in chief, he reminisced about key milestones in the war and said there is "something profound about the end of a war that has lasted so long."

"We remember the early days," he continued, "the American units that streaked across the sands and skies of Iraq," he said. "In battles from Karbala to Baghdad, American troops breaking the back of a brutal dictator in less than a month."

That was a reference to Saddam Hussein, who was captured and later hanged by the Iraqi government. Obama described Hussein in similar terms his 2002 address. But in that speech, he said Hussein posed no threat to the U.S. or Iraq's neighbors and could be successfully "contained" through international pressure.

He didn't relive that history on Wednesday. The war, he said, achieved America's strategic aims.

Interrupted by frequent chants of "Hooah!" Obama said that "everything that American troops have done in Iraq – all the fighting and all the dying, bleeding and building, training and partnering – all of it has led us to this moment of success."

As a backdrop for the speech, the White House chose a heavily populated base that is rich in political and military symbolism. A total of 202 Ft. Bragg service members were killed in Iraq. The base is also home to Green Berets who were among the first troops to enter Iraq at the start of the war in 2003.

Beyond that, Ft. Bragg sits in North Carolina, one of the major battlegrounds of the 2012 presidential campaign. Obama barely won the state in 2008 and has visited repeatedly since taking office – most recently in a bus tour in October.

In advance of Obama's arrival, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney wrote an op-ed published in the Fayetteville Observer criticizing the president's economic record.

"Every one of the men and women who have just come back from overseas has a future to look forward to," Romney wrote. " Right now, unfortunately, that future is bleak. Those who will be leaving the service will need to find jobs. Yet jobs are extraordinarily hard to find."

One expert estimated Obama's chances of winning North Carolina next year as "certainly less than 50-50."

David Rohde, a political science professor at Duke University, said that Obama's ratings have suffered because of the sour economy, though he added the state remains "competitive."

"By competing here and trying to win, he [Obama] at least compels the Republicans to allocate time and resources here, as well," Rohde said.

Campaign advisors believe that ending the war is a major point in Obama's favor. Polls showed Americans were tired of the conflict and wanted it over.

A new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll rated the end of the Iraq war as Obama's second-biggest accomplishment, next to killing Osama bin Laden.

Anticipating Romney's argument, Obama said he is striving to improve conditions for returning troops.

"We've worked with Congress to pass a tax credit so that companies have an incentive to hire vets," he said. "And Michelle has worked with the private sector to get commitments to create 100,000 jobs for those who've served."

"Hooah!" the paratroopers shouted.
Reporting from Fort Bragg, N.C.— President Obama celebrated the soldiers who fought the Iraq war on Wednesday, marking the fulfillment of a campaign promise to bring home all U.S. forces following a nearly nine-year conflict that killed more than 4,400 U.S. soldiers.