William O. Beeman Commentary on Thomas Friedman "Sheldon: Iran's Best Friend" NY Times April 5, 2014: Crude and Inaccurate on Iran

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/opinion/sunday/friedman-sheldon-irans-best-friend.html?comments#permid=11511683

Sheldon: Iran’s Best Friend

APRIL 5, 2014

Thomas L. Friedman

Commentary on this article by William O. Beeman

Tom Friedman's characterization of Iran's current attitude toward Israel is both crude and inaccurate. Iran has never threatened to "destroy Israel." This is a piece of cant that has been repeated so often that it constitutes "truth by repetition." Mr. Friedman's piece uses a cheap rhetorical ploy to make his point. It is indeed "cute" to juxtapose Adelson and Iran and thus play to mistaken cultural stereotypes.

Iran has championed the Palestinians and their mistreatment by Israel. It has also defended the Shi'a population in Southern Lebanon that has been attacked in over-the-border raids by Israel in violation of international law. If Israel would resolve the Palestinian issue, Iran would gladly resume diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv, since Iran has no quarrel with the Israeli people, or indeed with Jews. It may be that Sheldon Adelson may destroy Israel by promoting crude right-wing politics directed at the Palestinians, but Iran would applaud the granting of equal rights and independence for Palestinians, and this would effectively end Iran's objections to Israel.

A final point: Iran conducts considerable sub rosa trade with Israel through third parties, and Iranian Jews (and indeed others) can travel to Israel via third countries. The large Iranian Jewish population in Israel are still Iranian identifying with Iranian culture and civilization. There is far more that unites Iranian and Israeli society, but the Palestinian issue is a continual obstacle.

___________________________________________

IT occurred to me the other day that the zealously pro-Israel billionaire Sheldon Adelson and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, actually have one big thing in common. They are both trying to destroy Israel. Adelson is doing it by loving Israel to death and Khamenei by hating Israel to death. And now even Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey inadvertently got drawn into this craziness.

What’s the logic? Very simple. Iran’s leaders want Israel destroyed but have no desire, in my view, to use a nuclear bomb to do it. That would expose them to retaliation and sure death. Their real strategy is more subtle: Do everything possible to ensure that Israel remains in the “occupied territory,” as the U.S. State Department refers to the West Bank, won by Israel in the 1967 war. By supporting Palestinian militants dedicated to destroying any peace process, Tehran hopes to keep Israel permanently mired in the West Bank and occupying 2.7 million Palestinians, denying them any statehood and preventing the emergence of a Palestinian state that might recognize Israel and live in peace alongside it. The more Israel is stuck there, the more Palestinians and the world will demand a “one-state solution,” with Palestinians given the right to vote. 

The more Israel resists that, the more isolated it becomes.

Iran and its ally Hamas have plenty of evidence that this strategy is working: Israel’s 47-year-old occupation of the West Bank has led it to build more settlements there and in doing so make itself look like the most active colonial power on the planet today. The 350,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank reinforce that view by claiming their presence in the West Bank is not about security but a divinely inspired project to reunite the Jewish people with their biblical homeland.

The result is a growing movement on college campuses and in international organizations to isolate and delegitimize the Jewish state because of this occupation. This “B.D.S. movement” — to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel — is gaining adherents not only among non-Jews on American campuses but even within some Hillels, campus Jewish centers.

Iran could not be happier. The more Israel sinks into the West Bank, the more it is delegitimized and isolated, the more the world focuses on Israel’s colonialism rather than Iran’s nuclear enrichment, the more people call for a single democratic state in all of historic Palestine.

And now Iran has an ally: Sheldon Adelson — the foolhardy Las Vegas casino magnate and crude right-wing, pro-Israel extremist. Adelson gave away some $100 million in the last presidential campaign to fund Republican candidates, with several priorities in mind: that they delegitimize the Palestinians and that they avoid any reference to the West Bank as “occupied territories” and any notion that the U.S. should pressure Israel to trade land for peace there. Both Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney took the money and played by Sheldon’s rules.

In case you missed it, the R.J.C., the Republican Jewish Coalition, held a retreat last weekend at an Adelson casino in Las Vegas. It was dubbed “the Sheldon Primary.” Republicans lined up to compete for Adelson’s blessing and money, or as Politico put it: “Adelson summoned [Jeb] Bush and Govs. Chris Christie of New Jersey, John Kasich of Ohio and Scott Walker of Wisconsin to Las Vegas. ... The new big-money political landscape — in which a handful of donors can dramatically alter a campaign with just a check or two — explains both the eagerness of busy governors to make pilgrimages to Las Vegas, and the obsession with divining Adelson’s 2016 leanings.”

Adelson personifies everything that is poisoning our democracy and Israel’s today — swaggering oligarchs, using huge sums of money to try to bend each system to their will.

Christie, in his speech, referred to the West Bank as “occupied territories” — as any knowledgeable American leader would. This, Politico said, “set off murmurs in the crowd.” Some Republican Jews explained to Christie after he finished that he had made a terrible faux pas. (He called something by its true name and in the way the U.S. government always has!) The West Bank should be called “disputed territories” or “Judea and Samaria,” the way hard-line Jews prefer. So, Politico reported, Christie hastily arranged a meeting with Adelson to explain that he misspoke and that he was a true friend of Israel. “The New Jersey governor apologized in a private meeting in the casino mogul’s Venetian office shortly afterward,” Politico reported. It said Adelson “accepted” Christie’s “explanation” and “quick apology.”

Read that sentence over and contemplate it.

I don’t know if Israel has a Palestinian partner for a secure withdrawal from the West Bank, or ever will. But I know this: If Israel wants to remain a Jewish, democratic state, it should be doing everything it can to nurture such a partner or acting unilaterally to get out. Because, I’m certain that when reports about the “Adelson primary” reached the desk of Supreme Leader Khamenei in Tehran, a big smile crossed his face and he said to his aides: “May Allah grant Sheldon a long life. Everything is going according to plan.”

The War Bill--Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013--Gusterson (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)

Commentary from William O. Beeman: 

This excellent article points up the danger of letting ignorant legislators try to micromanage diplomacy. I use the word ignorant in three senses. First, for the most part they know nothing about the actual issues at hand in the Iranian nuclear program--neither the history nor the actual technical details on the ground.

Second, I am convinced that many of the supporters of the bill haven't read it, or considered its implications. The bill goes far, far beyond dealing with Iran's nuclear program, including trying to put restrictions on conventional weapons. Iran's "rocket" program would conceivably be covered by this agreement--rockets that are currently used to launch communications satellites.

Third, the supporters are ignorant of the implications this bill has for all American diplomatic efforts going forward. Pre-configuring the outcomes of diplomatic negotiations effectively renders them moot. Why even  have diplomats if their hands are tied in this way?

The bill is a fantasy desire on the part of Israel and its supporters, such as Senator Kirk, whose ideological biases are quite evident, to cripple Iran's general technology. It is overreach, and if it passes, will backfire in really terrible ways. This is a bad bill in every sense of the word.

William O. Beeman
University of Minnesota

http://thebulletin.org/war-bill

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

15 January 2014

The war bill

Hugh Gusterson

Just when it seemed we might escape the political tides pushing the United States toward war with Iran, a group of senators has introduced a bill that would put us back on the path to war. We might as well call it the “give war a chance” bill.

Until recently there had been a general consensus in Washington in favor of sanctions against Iran. Although Washington’s two foreign policy factions—arms controllers and regime changers—diverged in their ultimate goals, as long as Tehran kept methodically expanding its uranium enrichment capability (from a few hundred centrifuges in 2005 to 19,000 today and from 5 percent enrichment to 20 percent), the two sides could often agree on a policy of economic strangulation  against Iran, backed up with the threat of military attack.

That coalition between Washington’s arms controllers and regime changers was shattered, though, following the 2013 election victory in Tehran of a moderate, President Hassan Rouhani, who is aggressively pursuing an entente with the West. While the arms controllers, led by President Barack Obama, are trying to avert a war by reaching an accord with Iran, the regime changers are doing everything they can to sabotage such an accord through a Senate bill, the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013, co-authored by Sen. Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, and Sen. Mark Kirk, Republican of Illinois. Of course, being against arms control and for an increased likelihood of war is like being against motherhood and apple pie, so the regime changers are pretending to help the arms control negotiations they seek to undermine.

The geopolitical landscape first shifted in November 2013 after an extraordinary icebreaking phone call in September between Presidents Rouhani and Obama. Iranian and Western negotiators went on to achieve a modest but—given decades of animosity—historic agreement in Geneva. In exchange for an easing of sanctions worth about $7 billion, the Iranians agreed to cease work on their reactor at Arak, freeze the building of new centrifuges, cap uranium enrichment well below bomb-grade at 5 percent, and allow international inspectors greater access. This agreement was the appetizer for the more substantial deal Western and Iranian diplomats are now trying to negotiate—one with the potential to freeze Tehran’s seemingly inexorable progress toward a nuclear weapon indefinitely, while reintegrating the country into the international system and permanently realigning the relationship between Iran, its neighbors, and the United States.

Rolling back Iran’s nuclear program has thus far been the publicly stated rationale for sanctions. But a faction of the US foreign policy community, dominated by the neoconservatives who brought about the disastrous invasion of Iraq, has always had the more ambitious, if less candidly avowed, objective of ousting the regime that came to power in Tehran in 1979. In the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq, neoconservatives liked to quip that “anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran.” Neocons like William Kristol, Doug Feith, Eliot Cohen, Paul Bremer, and Danielle Pletka (all of whom have signed a letter to the Senate endorsing the Menendez-Kirk approach) have never forgiven the Iranian regime for its humiliating seizure of American hostages at the US embassy in Tehran in 1979. And they believe that the removal of Iran’s clerical regime would ameliorate the situation in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq; cripple Hezbollah; dispose of the main threat to Israel in the neighborhood; and re-establish American dominance in the region. Of course, they had similarly utopian dreams for the invasion of Iraq, and look how that turned out.

In a recent opinion piece for The Washington Post, Senator Menendez (or is that Senator Mendacious?) presented his legislation as intended to help negotiations with Iran succeed. “The proposed legislation is a clarifying action. It allows all sides to negotiate in certainties and provides one year of space for the parties to continue talking. It spells out precisely the consequences should the agreement fail. This should motivate Iranians to negotiate honestly and seriously. At the same time, these prospective sanctions play a positive and reinforcing role in negotiations.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Even by the currently degraded standards of Washington discourse, this is a pretzel-shaped representation of reality. It is for good reason that President Obama has promised to veto the Menendez-Kirk legislation if it passes, and 10 Senate committee chairs have co-signed a letter to Senate majority leader Harry Reid condemning it.

Edward Levine, a former Senate staffer, has posted an excellent analysis of the Senate bill’s dangers on the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation’s website. He foregrounds four poison pills that it contains.

First, for sanctions against Iran to be suspended, the bill requires the President to certify that “Iran has not conducted any tests for ballistic missiles with a range exceeding 500 kilometers.” As Levine points out, this moves the goalposts on Iran since missile tests have not been a part of the negotiations thus far. Furthermore, since the bill specifies no time period during which such missile tests are disallowed, and Iran has conducted such tests in the past, by some interpretations the bill will preemptively exclude lifting sanctions.

Second, the bill would allow sanctions to be lifted only if the US president certified that “Iran has not directly, or through a proxy, supported, financed, planned, or otherwise carried out an act of terrorism against the United States or United States persons or property anywhere in the world.” Again, no time period is specified. As Levine observes, this means that “if, say, Hezbollah were to explode a bomb outside a US firm’s office in Beirut, the sanctions would go into effect (because Iran gives financial and other support to Hezbollah) even if Iran’s nuclear activities and negotiations were completely in good faith.”

Third, the bill would preauthorize sanctions, but waive them every year if the US Congress agreed that Iran was meeting its commitments. From the Iranian point of view, this would weaken any agreement by introducing the possibility that Congress could allow it to lapse. Iran could end up dismantling nuclear infrastructure only to find itself dealing with a new Congress that decided it had not done enough, or one so paralyzed it could not prevent the trap it had devised from snapping shut.

Finally, Levine points out that the bill requires the dismantling of Iran’s “enrichment and reprocessing capabilities and facilities, the heavy water reactor and production plant at Arak, and any nuclear weapon components and technology.” While it might be conceivable that this could happen many years in the future at the end of a multi-stage process, it is unreasonable in the near term to expect Iran to give up the nuclear infrastructure, permitted by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, for which it has paid so dearly, and in which it sees a hedge against possible security threats.

As former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Colin Kahl puts it in The National Interest, “given the significant financial investment—estimated to be at least $100 billion—and political capital the regime has expended to master uranium enrichment, the supreme leader will not agree to completely dismantle Iran’s program as many in Congress demand. Indeed, Khamenei probably fears such a humiliation more than he fears economic collapse or targeted military strikes against his nuclear facilities.” In other words, this provision in the Kirk-Menendez bill, tantamount to a demand for Iranian surrender, is an offer Tehran cannot accept—but can be blamed for refusing.

There is one more troubling clause in the Senate bill. It states that "if the government of Israel is compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran's nuclear weapon program, the United States government should stand with Israel,” calling for “diplomatic, military and economic” support in such circumstances. In other words, it effectively outsources to Israel the decision over whether the United States should go to war with Iran. No wonder the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has been pushing so hard for the bill on Capitol Hill. (Incidentally the Jewish lobby groups J Street and Americans for Peace Now oppose the bill.)

The Kirk-Menendez bill has 59 co-sponsors—just eight shy of the number needed to override a presidential veto. It is astonishing that such a disastrous piece of legislation could have so much support in what we used to be able to call, with a more or less straight face, the world’s greatest deliberative body. Kahl, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense, believes the bill would violate the agreement already reached with Iran in November. The Iran expert Trita Parsi warns that “if the Geneva deal falls apart as a result of Congressional foul play, the world will view the United States and not Iran as the main obstacle to a nuclear agreement,” and that the international sanctions regime may fall apart as a result. Representative Raúl Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, and Kate Gould of the Friends Committee on National Legislation laid out what's at stake, pointing out that "if Congress isn't careful, it will sabotage our country's best opportunity to prevent war and a nuclear-armed Iran.” Meanwhile many commentators have cautioned that the bill will actually strengthen the hardliners in Tehran and, by sabotaging the chance to reach an agreement, make it more likely that the United States will face a stark choice between accepting a nuclear-armed Iran and going to war.

But the bill is above all dangerous because of the reckless way in which it creates two dead man’s switches—protocols that automate escalation and weaken the grip of American decision-makers on decisions about war and peace. One dead man’s switch is the pre-emplacement of sanctions and the insistence that action must be taken every year to prevent them from being implemented. One would have thought that Congress had learned from its experience with the automatic budget cuts of the 2013 sequester not to play this kind of game with itself.

The second, and even more disturbing, dead man’s switch is the clause pressing the United States to follow Israel to war. Reminiscent of the catastrophic alliance obligations that historians now blame for ensnaring Europe in the First World War, this stipulation incites Israeli hardliners by making them think they have a blank check from the United States. It also willfully and deliberately moves the center of gravity of the decision making outside the United States.

Neoconservatives like to use the rhetoric of patriotism to discredit their opponents. But true patriots do not outsource national-security decisions to other countries.

An anthropologist, Gusterson is a professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason University. His expertise is in nuclear culture, international security, and the anthropology of science....

Ex-Envoy’s Account Clarifies Iran’s 2003 Nuclear Decision--Porter (IPS)

http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/07/ex-envoys-account-clarifies-irans-2003-nuclear-decision/

Ex-Envoy’s Account Clarifies Iran’s 2003 Nuclear Decision

By Gareth PorterReprint |       |  Print | Send by email

WASHINGTON, Jul 30 2013 (IPS) - Newly published recollections by the former French ambassador to Iran suggest that Iran was not running a covert nuclear weapons programme that it then decided to halt in late 2003, as concluded by U.S. intelligence in 2007.

Ambassador Francois Nicoullaud recounted conversations with high-ranking Iranian officials indicating that Tehran’s then nuclear policy chief – and now president-elect – Hassan Rouhani did not know what research projects relating to nuclear weapons had been carried out over the years.

“I guess that most people, [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei included, were surprised by the extent of the activities." -- former French ambassador to Iran Francois Nicoullaud

The conversations described by Nicoullaud in a Jul. 26 New York Times op-ed also portray Rouhani as having difficulty getting individual researchers to comply with an order to halt all research related to nuclear weapons.

The picture of Iranian nuclear policy in 2003 drawn by Nicoullaud is different from the one in the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran had halted “its nuclear weapons program”. That conclusion implied that Iranian government leadership had organised a programme of research and development aimed at producing a nuclear weapon.

Nicoullaud recalled that a high-ranking Iranian official confided to him in late October 2003 that Rouhani had just “issued a general circular asking all Iranian departments and agencies, civilian and military, to report in detail about their past and ongoing nuclear activities.”

The conversation came immediately after Rouhani had concluded an agreement with the foreign ministers of the UK, France and Germany on Oct. 21, 2003, Nicoullaud recalled.

The same official explained that “the main difficulty Rouhani and his team were encountering was learning exactly what was happening in a system as secretive as Iran’s,” wrote Nicoullaud.

A few weeks after, the French ambassador learned from a second official, whom he described as “a close friend of Rouhani”, that Rouhani’s nuclear policy team had issued instructions to halt projects relating to nuclear weapons.

The Iranian official said the team was “having a hard time”, because, “[p]eople resist their instructions,” according to Nicoullaud. The official remarked that it was difficult to “convince researchers to abruptly terminate projects they had been conducting for years”.

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In an e-mail to IPS, Nicoullaud said he did not believe the Iranian government had ever approved a nuclear weapons programme. “The first challenge for Rouhani when he took hold of the nuclear,” said Nicoullaud, “must have been to get a clear picture of what was going on in Iran in the nuclear field.”

Rouhani had been the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) since 1989 and would not only have known about but would have been involved in any government decision to establish a nuclear weapons programme.

“I guess that most people, [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei included, were surprised by the extent of the activities,” Nicoullaud told IPS.

Nicoullaud’s recollections are consistent with published evidence that nuclear weapons-related research projects had begun without any government authorisation.

Despite an Iranian policy that ruled out nuclear weapons, many Iranian officials believed that a nuclear weapons “capability” would confer benefits on Iran without actually having nuclear weapons.

But the meaning of such a capability was the subject of ongoing debate. Nasser Hadian, a well-connected Tehran University political scientist, wrote in late 2003 about two schools of thought on the option of having a “nuclear weapons capability” but not the weapons themselves. One definition of that option was that Iran should have only the capability to produce fuel for nuclear reactors, Hadian explained, while the other called for Iran to have “all the necessary elements and capabilities for producing weapons”.

That debate had evidently not been officially resolved by a government decision before Rouhani’s appointment. And in the absence of a clear statement of policy, figures associated with research centres with military and defence ministry ties began in the latter of the 1990s to create their own nuclear weapons-related research projects without the knowledge of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC).

Such projects were apparently begun during a period when the Supreme National Security Council was not exercising tight control over the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI), the Ministry of Defence or the military industrial complex controlled by Defence Industries Organisation related to nuclear weapons.

By the mid-1990s, AEOI was already taking advantage of the lax supervision of its operations to take actions that had significant policy implications without authorisation from the SNSC.

Seyed Hossein Mousavian, then the spokesman for Iran’s nuclear negotiating team, recalls in his memoirs that in January 2004, Rouhani revealed to him that AEOI had not informed the SNSC about a policy-relevant matter as important as the purchase of the P2 centrifuge designs from the A. Q. Khan network in 1995. AEOI officials had misled him, Rohani said, by claiming that “they had found some information about P2 centrifuges on the Internet and are studying it!”

When Rouhani was named to take over as nuclear policy coordinator in early October 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was demanding a full accounting by Iran of all of its nuclear activities. Rouhani’s circular to all civilian and military offices about nuclear work came soon after he had promised the IAEA that Iran would change its policy to one of full cooperation with the IAEA.

At the same time, Rouhani moved to tighten up the policy loophole that had allowed various entities to start weapons-related nuclear research.

Rouhani anticipated resistance from the bureaucratic entities that had nuclear weapons-related research projects from the beginning. He recalled in a later interview that he had told President Mohammad Khatami that he expected that there would be problems in carrying out the new nuclear policy, including “sabotage”.

The sequence of events surrounding Rouhani’s new nuclear policy indicates that he used Khamenei’s public posture that nuclear weapons were forbidden according to Islamic law to ensure compliance with the ban on such research projects.

Around the same time that Rouhani ordered the bureaucracy to report on its nuclear-related activities and to stop any research on military applications of nuclear power in late October, Khamenei gave a speech in which he said, “In contrast to the propaganda of our enemies, fundamentally we are against any production of weapons of mass destruction in any form.”

Three days later, Rouhani told students at Shahrud Industrial University that Khamenei considered nuclear weapons as religiously illegal.

That same week, in an interview with San Francisco Chronicle correspondent Robert Collier, Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor of the conservative newspaper Kayhan and an adviser to Khamenei, alluded to tensions between the Rouhani team and those researchers who were not responding to or resisting the Rouhani circular.

Khamenei was forcing those working on such projects to “admit that it is forbidden under Islam”, Shariatmadari said. He also suggested that the researchers resisting the ban had been working “clandestinely”.

After the U.S. intelligence community concluded in November 2007 estimate that Iran had halted a “nuclear weapons program”, a U.S. intelligence official said key pieces of evidence were intercepted communications from at least one senior military officer and others expressing dismay in 2007 that nuclear weapons-related work had been shut down in 2003.

But U.S. intelligence officials said nothing about what kind of work was being shut down, and revealed no further evidence that it was a “nuclear weapons program” under the control of the government.

Nicoullaud’s recollections suggest that the 2007 estimate glossed over a crucial distinction between an Iranian “nuclear weapons program” and research projects that had not been authorised or coordinated by the Iranian regime.

Nicoullaud told IPS he believes the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which controls Iran’s ballistic missile programme, was also carrying out a clandestine nuclear weapons programme. The IRGC’s own ministry had been merged, however, with the old Ministry of Defence to form a new ministry in 1989, which implies that any such clandestine programme would have necessarily involved a wider military conspiracy.

*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan