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Oil prices soar as Iran cuts off supply
Oil prices jumped to $105 per barrel Monday after Iran halted exports to Britain and France. Oil prices are now at a nine-month high.By Pablo Gordoni, Associated Press / February 20, 2012
A customer fills up at an Irving Oil gas station, in Berlin, Vt. Iran cut off its crude oil supply to Britain and France Monday, Feb. 20, 2012, causing a spike in oil prices to $105 per barrel.
Toby Talbot/AP/File
Oil prices jumped to a nine-month high above $105 a barrel on Monday after Iran said it halted crude exports to Britain and France in an escalation of a dispute over the Middle Eastern country’s nuclear program.
By early afternoon in Europe, benchmark March crude was up $1.91 to $105.15 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Earlier in the day, it rose to $105.21, the highest since May. The contract rose 93 cents to settle at $103.24 per barrel in New York on Friday.
Markets in the United States are closed Monday for the Presidents Day holiday.
Iran’s oil ministry said Sunday it stopped crude shipments to British and French companies in an apparent pre-emptive blow against the European Union after the bloc imposed sanctions on Iran’s crucial fuel exports. They include a freeze of the country’s central bank assets and an oil embargo set to begin in July.
Iran’s Oil Minister Rostam Qassemi had warned earlier this month that Tehran could cut off oil exports to “hostile” European nations. The 27-nation EU accounts for about 18 percent of Iran’s oil exports.
The EU sanctions, along with other punitive measures imposed by the U.S., are part of Western efforts to derail Iran’s disputed nuclear program, which the West fears is aimed at developing atomic weapons. Iran denies the charges, and says its program is for peaceful purposes.
Analysts said Iran’s announcement would likely have minimal impact on supplies, because only about 3 percent of France’s oil consumption is from Iranian sources, while Britain had not imported oil from the Islamic republic in six months.
“The price rise is more a reflection of concerns about the further escalation in tensions between Iran and the West,” said commodity analyst Caroline Bain of the Economist Intelligence Unit. “Banning the tiny quantities of exports to the U.K. and France involves very little risk for Iran — indeed quite the opposite, it catches the headlines and leads to a higher global oil price, which is something Iran is very keen to encourage.”
Oil prices also rose on hopes that Greece‘s new bailout deal will be approved on Monday as well as by China‘s decision to boost money supply bid to spur lending and economic growth. China’s central bank said Saturday it will lower the ratio of funds that banks must hold as reserves, a move that frees tens of billions of dollars.
Oil has jumped from $96 earlier this month amid optimism the global economy may grow more this year than previously expected. J.P. Morgan raised its Brent crude price forecast to as high as $135 from $120 — on Monday, the April Brent crude contract was up 79 cents at $120.37 per barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.
“Building economic momentum has the potential to pull oil prices higher for the next 12 to 24 months,” J.P. Morgan said in a report.
In other energy trading in March contracts, heating oil gained 1.61 cents to $3.2050 per gallon and gasoline futures rose 3.2 cents to $3.22 per gallon. Natural gas lost 4.8 cents to $2.636 per 1,000 cubic feet.
Markets in the United States are closed Monday for the Presidents Day holiday.
Iran’s oil ministry said Sunday it stopped crude shipments to British and French companies in an apparent pre-emptive blow against the European Union after the bloc imposed sanctions on Iran’s crucial fuel exports. They include a freeze of the country’s central bank assets and an oil embargo set to begin in July.
Iran’s Oil Minister Rostam Qassemi had warned earlier this month that Tehran could cut off oil exports to “hostile” European nations. The 27-nation EU accounts for about 18 percent of Iran’s oil exports.
The EU sanctions, along with other punitive measures imposed by the U.S., are part of Western efforts to derail Iran’s disputed nuclear program, which the West fears is aimed at developing atomic weapons. Iran denies the charges, and says its program is for peaceful purposes.
Analysts said Iran’s announcement would likely have minimal impact on supplies, because only about 3 percent of France’s oil consumption is from Iranian sources, while Britain had not imported oil from the Islamic republic in six months.
“The price rise is more a reflection of concerns about the further escalation in tensions between Iran and the West,” said commodity analyst Caroline Bain of the Economist Intelligence Unit. “Banning the tiny quantities of exports to the U.K. and France involves very little risk for Iran — indeed quite the opposite, it catches the headlines and leads to a higher global oil price, which is something Iran is very keen to encourage.”
Oil prices also rose on hopes that Greece‘s new bailout deal will be approved on Monday as well as by China‘s decision to boost money supply bid to spur lending and economic growth. China’s central bank said Saturday it will lower the ratio of funds that banks must hold as reserves, a move that frees tens of billions of dollars.
Oil has jumped from $96 earlier this month amid optimism the global economy may grow more this year than previously expected. J.P. Morgan raised its Brent crude price forecast to as high as $135 from $120 — on Monday, the April Brent crude contract was up 79 cents at $120.37 per barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.
“Building economic momentum has the potential to pull oil prices higher for the next 12 to 24 months,” J.P. Morgan said in a report.
In other energy trading in March contracts, heating oil gained 1.61 cents to $3.2050 per gallon and gasoline futures rose 3.2 cents to $3.22 per gallon. Natural gas lost 4.8 cents to $2.636 per 1,000 cubic feet.
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Narrowing the Options on the Table
by Farideh Farhi | published December 8, 2011
Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran’s foreign minister and former representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is not usually a sarcastic man. But he became one in early November following several days of leaks about the negative content of a pending IAEA report on Iran. “Marg yek bar, shivan yek bar,” he said, using an age-old Persian expression. Literally, the phrase means “You die once, you are mourned once,” but here it might be translated, “Get it over with.”
The point for Salehi’s Iranian audience: Time and time again, and despite repeated denials from Tehran, the West has insisted that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear research program is aimed at acquiring an atomic bomb. Western chanceries pick through the IAEA’s reports for incriminating passages, howl about them for a while and then the matter is forgotten. The specific allegations, meanwhile, prove nothing of import, even if correct. In the latest instance, leakers said the IAEA would present evidence that Iran had looked into military applications of nuclear materials from the 1990s through 2003, but not since then. So publish the report, Salehi said. Iran has no problem being charged with an interest in building a nuclear weapon. “We just think that the supporting documents are without basis or foundation.” [1]
On November 10, two days after the UN nuclear watchdog released its report, the hardline newspaper Keyhan ran an editorial by Hossein Shariatmadari that displayed a similar attitude. The intractable columnist smugly hailed IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano with the Persian greeting, “May your shadow never lessen!” Thanks were due to Amano, he wrote, for letting the world see the “credibility gap” in the case for the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. As advertised, the report indeed indicated that the Islamic Republic had “carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.” “Prior to the end of 2003, these activities took place under a structured program,” it went on to say, and some “might still be ongoing.” But that, Shariatmadari noted with evident satisfaction, was it. There was no new basis for the West’s accusations; in fact, there was no new information at all.
It would have been harder for Tehran to shrug so contemptuously at the IAEA report had it not come out immediately after a month of extraordinary, even manic agitation against the Islamic Republic by the Obama administration. First, there was the Justice Department’s decision to call a press conference to accuse Iran of plotting to kill Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, at a Washington restaurant. The world was skeptical, and more so after the Saudis floated charges of similar connivance against its diplomats in Pakistan and South America. In Iran, these maneuvers permitted hardliners to frame the IAEA report as part of an all-out effort by Iran’s enemies to blacken the country’s image.
Then there was the recent history of the nuclear file. Over the summer, Salehi had tried and failed to convince the IAEA to accept an offer of intensified cooperation provided that the Agency agree not to mention a “possible military dimension” to Iran’s program in its report. Under Amano’s predecessor, Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA had preferred the phrase “alleged studies” to refer to charges of warhead design research and the like by Iran, because these charges are based on documents shared with the Agency by unidentified countries and the Agency was unsure of their ultimate provenance or credibility. ElBaradei was unwilling to ignore the allegations entirely, but he was hesitant to make them the cornerstone of an indictment of Iran’s nuclear program. In an interview toward the end of his term in November 2009, he maintained, “We have not seen any use of nuclear material; we have not received any information that Iran has manufactured any part of a nuclear weapon or component.” [2]
Russia had also proposed a compromise to lower tensions: a “step-by-step” process of limitations on uranium enrichment and enhanced inspections in exchange for loosening of international sanctions. Iran agreed to consider the proposal, but the Russians got the cold shoulder from the West. According to Mark Hibbs, a close observer of negotiations over the nuclear file, the private reactions of US officials to Moscow’s idea “range from lukewarm interest to outright dismissal,” because such a deal would leave the task of verification in IAEA hands and allow Iran to proceed with enrichment, in effect safeguarding Iran’s capacity to pursue the bomb. Meanwhile, the IAEA itself dislikes the Russian plan because it would effectively declare the “outstanding issues” about Iran’s nuclear program to be “closed.” [3]
But the kicker was the IAEA report itself. Hawks in the US seized upon the section on a “possible military dimension” as proof of Iranian perfidy, and on December 2 Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told a Brookings Institution audience the report showed that “the regime in Tehran remains a very grave threat to all of us.” There is nothing in the report that was previously unknown to Western powers, however, since they are the countries supplying the IAEA with documents regarding Iran’s past weapons-related studies.
So the noise must be about something else. As Mark Fitzpatrick, director of the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies points out, the core issue at stake remains not studies conducted in the past but Iran’s steady, though legal and IAEA-supervised, accumulation of low-enriched uranium, which, if further enriched, can be the fuel for a nuclear arsenal. [4] But on that front the IAEA can do nothing but report on Iran’s progress and the Agency’s monitoring thereof. It is this fact that makes it easy for someone like Shariatmadari to argue that it was not the IAEA’s “technical expertise” that led Amano to “put it all out there,” but his enlistment in a US and Western project to exert pressure on Iran, come what may.
And this view is gaining traction across the spectrum of the Islamic Republic’s factious political class. Even Mohammad Khatami, Iran’s president during the reformist era of 1997-2005, pointed to “ominous thinking” behind the words “possible military dimension.” “They want to further increase pressure on Iran,” Khatami was quoted as saying in the Iranian press. Nodding to the presence of “warmongers” on both sides, he proceeded to hint at the salience of one side. “Of course, our behavior, positions and words may also have an impact, but it is evident that there is another plan for pressure. What they speak is nonsense, but they speak it nonetheless.” [5]
The Iranian reception of the IAEA report is the backdrop to the November 29 storming of the British Embassy in Tehran by members of the hardline Basij — a move that was doubtless orchestrated from the top of the Islamic Republic even if a crowd mentality may have caused more destruction than planned as things got out of control. To be sure, the Basij likes to flex its muscles periodically to secure its ascendancy in domestic politics. But there is another interactive logic at work: Britain had levied new sanctions, barring transactions with the Iranian financial sector including the Central Bank, and Tehran is signaling that it will answer more forcible arm-twisting with escalation of its own. The Iranian leadership wants the West to understand that, like its US counterpart, it has not “taken any options off the table,” including war.
On November 22, National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon laid out the Obama administration’s justifications for its policy shift in a speech at the Brookings Institution. Ironically, but not surprisingly, he placed the blame upon Iran, which he claimed rebuffed the Obama administration’s “sincere effort” at engagement. [6] Donilon explained, however, that the purpose of the US overture in the autumn of 2009 had been twofold: “First, [we launched it] as a sincere offer of dialogue — with the prospect of tangible benefits for Iran…. Second, we knew that if our offer was rejected, Iran’s failure to meet its international obligations would be exposed to the entire world…. That, in turn, would increase our ability to mobilize international support for holding Tehran accountable for its reckless behavior. And over the past three years, that is exactly what has happened.”
One might question whether the US effort was in fact sincere, given its built-in mechanism for halting negotiations at the first encounter with resistance, but such was not the national security adviser’s remit in his speech. Donilon went on to celebrate the administration’s successes in arraying a solid international coalition against Iran and in delaying the progress of Iran’s nuclear program. Clearly, with an election year imminent, and Republican primary candidates sounding the usual sharply anti-Iranian notes, the Obama administration must not look soft on the Islamic Republic — particularly not its alleged atomic ambitions. It was a message underscored by Panetta two weeks later: “No greater threat exists to the security and prosperity of the Middle East than a nuclear-armed Iran.”
The “we tried” mantra voiced by Donilon is ironic because it is an argument used regularly by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, as well. Khamenei has rested his defense of both the suspension of uranium enrichment (2003) and the resumption of it (2005) on Iran’s good faith as a negotiator. In the interim, he contends, Iran worked hard to reach an agreement, but remained cognizant that failure had the advantage of revealing Western intransigence. Iran suspended enrichment, but the other side did not respond favorably, instead asking Iran to sacrifice more of its rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This line of argument has proven to be a powerful deterrent to compromise and a stinging critique of what the hardliners call the “passive foreign policy” of the reformists.
In any event, there is no backing away from the path taken by the White House, at least not until after the 2012 election. According to Donilon, the US will continue to be “vigilant” toward the Islamic Republic, working to impose further sanctions on Tehran and isolate it. The US will seek to build a regional security architecture that excludes Iran, weaken the Iranian economy, undermine the legitimacy of Iran’s government and further divide its fissiparous leadership. “The onus is on Iran” to alter the trajectory of relations by suspending all enrichment, reprocessing and heavy water-related activities, in effect, renouncing its right under the NPT to develop an independent nuclear capacity, even a peaceful one. And, in the meantime, Washington will continue to lay the blame at Iran’s doorstep: In the words of Panetta at Brookings, Iran has “to stop isolating itself” and “become part of the international community.”
No more beating around the bush, it seems. No more dilly-dallying before a middle path heading toward limits on enrichment combined with a more robust inspection regime. The “diplomatic opportunities” offered to Iran will henceforth essentially mean that Iran must accept terms it has disdained since negotiations over its nuclear program began in 2003. Iran explicitly rejected these terms in 2005, when Britain, France and Germany, prodded by the Bush administration, pushed for the ultimate demand of full suspension of uranium enrichment and initiated the process of sanctioning Iran at the Security Council.
In 2005, the threat of coordinated sanctions was deemed the only way to convince Iran to change its ways and to forestall the Israeli airstrikes on Iranian facilities that were constantly touted in the press (and, sometimes, by Israeli or US officials). European diplomats were wont to say that wielding the stick of sanctions over negotiations was a form of diplomacy rather than a surefire way to generate talk of war, given the Iraqi precedent on everyone’s minds at the time. Others, oblivious to the real chance that no Iranian government, elected or not, could accede to the maximalist demand of full suspension, made the case that Iran’s contentious political sphere could be molded by external pressure.
Six years later, coordinated sanctions are no mere threat. “Vigilance” on the part of the Obama administration has paid off in the form of draconian sanctions on financial dealings and investment in Iran. There is not much left to do in the way of sanctions, short of an outright embargo on Iranian crude oil, which is an act of war since it can be policed only by military means. The axiom that Iranians respond only to pressure has been modified to stipulate that there must be a lot of pressure, but the underlying logic remains the same: At minimum, the nuclear program will sputter; better, Iran will cave in; or, better still, the cracks in the edifice of the Islamic Republic will widen under the weight of international opprobrium. All of these possible outcomes are positive.
But the one-track policy of pressure is not free of obstacles. First and foremost, there are few remaining ways to tighten the vise. Western allies have effectively given carte blanche to the Obama administration, with Britain and France going further than the US in sanctioning Iran’s Central Bank and proposing an oil export embargo. But the US is constrained by its ties with China and Russia, which oppose anything like comprehensive sanctions, not to mention realities of the global economy like the reliance of allies Greece and Turkey on Iranian exports. The US may be able to make Iran bleed, but not enough to induce its surrender. This dynamic has made the Obama administration easily tempted by bombast, a way for it to project “vigilance” for audiences foreign and domestic while concealing the lack of a clear endgame.
The more vexing problem for US policy lies in Washington’s assumption that Tehran will simply be a passive taker of sanctions until the moment its competing elites decide to change course. The sanctions regime, in short, is offered as a relatively inexpensive instrument for the containment of Iran’s regional ambitions. Yet it is equally possible that a single-minded focus on coercion will egg on the Islamic Republic in escalation of its own, the latter being anxious to prove to Iranians that pressure is fruitless and to show its adversaries that coercion has costs. Iran is susceptible to this dynamic precisely because its elites are divided and eager, at what could be a historic juncture, to juxtapose their nationalist credentials to their rivals’ fecklessness.
According to conservative strategist Amir Mohebian, writing on Khamenei’s official website, the Leader’s statement (and, presumably, the attack on the British Embassy, as well) was intended to dispel the “groundless notion that concessions can be gained from Iran through pressure and harsh rhetoric.” The Leader also meant to send the messages that, whatever rifts may exist in the Islamic Republic, his office is the center of decision-making, and that, contra Donilon, Iran believes the onus of reducing tensions is on the United States.
Given the awesome military might of the US and the recurrent threats from Israel, the Leader’s might seem a foolhardy position to take. But Iran’s brinksmanship is based on the belief that this stance is no crazier than the idea of US or Israeli attack, particularly given the state of the world economy. On Khamenei’s website, Mohebian details three war scenarios, ranging from combined aerial assault and ground invasion, which he judges least likely, to airstrikes aimed at stirring up internal unrest to attacks on military targets, the most likely. At the end, however, and like most decision-makers in Iran, Mohebian finds all of these scenarios implausible in view of the cost. He posits that US-Israeli talk of military options is a bluff to test Iran’s will and psychological warfare intended to frighten Iranian civilians, fracture the leadership and debilitate the government.
The implications for Iranian domestic politics are clear. The leadership of the Islamic Republic will confront outside hostility with hostility, and, in the meantime, it is prone to label any insider who questions its strategic direction as a foreign stooge. Indeed, the hardliners have developed a vested interest in continuation of the war talk. In addition to marginalizing their opponents, it allows them to justify the post-2005 securitization of the public sphere that intensified after the disputed presidential election of 2009.
Meanwhile, reformers and centrists who are unhappy with their political exclusion and worried about what they consider an “adventurist” foreign policy have discovered their own reason to highlight the external peril. Their brief, laid out by Khatami and another former president, Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, insists that because a divided Iran is more easily attacked, the best guarantee of national security is inter-elite reconciliation underwritten by release of political prisoners and free elections.
Some elements of the Iranian opposition in the diaspora find the Khatami-Rafsanjani tack inadequate. They call for suspension of uranium enrichment and posit that, if Iran is eventually attacked, the Iranian government will be the responsible party. “The main mission of the opposition is stopping the nuclear adventurism of the state,” says Ali Afshari, a former student leader who is now in exile. [7] Such a position is not an option for most political actors inside Iran. Aside from the fact that no politician in any country can openly advocate giving in to foreign coercion, the reformist leadership in Iran has also been adamant about Iran’s nuclear rights. Iran’s nuclear program, in fact, saw its most significant expansion during Khatami’s presidency. In the face of aggressive sanctions and rumors of war, the most the reformists can do is cast aspersions on the hardline government’s diplomatic savvy. [8] They share its strident defense of the program itself.
The talk of war, in short, has indeed recalibrated the discourse of Iranian politics, but so far not in the direction of challenges to the international posture of the Islamic Republic. Speaking to reformist youth in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province, Khatami went so far as to say, “If foreigners one day decide to intervene, reformists and non-reformists will confront them.” The remarks were promptly posted on his official website and also by the hardline Fars News Agency.
The reformist predicament was highlighted by a bit of careless commentary from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in an interview with BBC’s Persian-language service. In defense of the Obama administration’s non-committal response to the mass dissent from the 2009 election result, Clinton pointed out that the Iranian protesters had not asked for US help, unlike the Libyan opposition to Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi in the spring of 2011. She continued, “I think if something were to happen again, it would be smart for the Green Movement or some other movement inside Iran to say, ‘We want the voices of the world. We want the support of the world behind us.’ …And I think that maybe in retrospect it was an unfortunate mutual decision on the part of the leaders of the Green Movement and the supporters inside Iran and those of us on the outside, who very much hoped that that would spark reform.” Clinton did not spell out what the US might offer “if something were to happen again,” but the mere evocation of Libya sparked shouting matches among Iranian exiles about the potential for an attack on Iran, facilitated by the opposition in the name of humanitarian intervention. [9]
Inside Iran, for obvious reasons, there is no such acrimonious debate. Mohammad Nourizad, a former hardliner turned political dissident after the 2009 election, has written a twelfth open letter to Khamenei, asking him to “drink from the poisoned chalice,” a reference to the famous statement by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini when he finally agreed to accept UN Security Council Resolution 528 ending the Iran-Iraq war. [10] “If they attack and destroy us, our half-baked knowledge of nuclear energy will not come to our aid,” Nourizad says. But his entreaty does not stand alone; he amends it with the condition that Khamenei find a “respectable” exit from the nuclear drama.
After eight years of confrontation over Iran’s nuclear file, the injunction to save face rings hollow. The two sides in the showdown are unequal in power but equally painted into a corner by policies of “vigilance,” on the one hand, and “answering threats with threats,” on the other. It is far from certain that cooler heads will prevail in de-escalating this increasingly worrisome crisis.
[2] Siddharth Varadarajan, “Language of Force Is Not Helpful with Iran: Interview with Mohamed ElBaradei,” The Hindu, October 3, 2009.
[3] Mark Hibbs, “Who Wants Diplomacy on Iran?” Arms Control Wonk, December 1, 2011.
[4] See the full interview with Fitzpatrick at: http://www.iiss.org/whats-new/iiss-experts-commentary/qa-iaea-report-ind….
[5] Fars News, November 14, 2011.
[6] For background, see Farideh Farhi, “Anatomy of a Nuclear Breakthrough Gone Backwards,” Middle East Report Online, December 8, 2009.
[7] Ali Afshari, “War with Israel Paid For from the Pockets of the Iranian People,” Gooya.com, November 26, 2011. [Persian]
[8] Sadeq Kharrazi, “Creative Diplomacy, Today’s Necessity,” Sharq, November 6, 2011. [Persian]
[9] See, for instance, Hamid Dabashi, “Fifth Column of the Post-Modern Kind,” Al Jazeera English, November 21, 2011, to which Afshari’s article is a response.
[10] Mohammad Nourizad, “Come and Drink from the Poisoned Chalice I Have Prepared for You,” Iran Emrooz, November 25, 2011. [Persian]
The point for Salehi’s Iranian audience: Time and time again, and despite repeated denials from Tehran, the West has insisted that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear research program is aimed at acquiring an atomic bomb. Western chanceries pick through the IAEA’s reports for incriminating passages, howl about them for a while and then the matter is forgotten. The specific allegations, meanwhile, prove nothing of import, even if correct. In the latest instance, leakers said the IAEA would present evidence that Iran had looked into military applications of nuclear materials from the 1990s through 2003, but not since then. So publish the report, Salehi said. Iran has no problem being charged with an interest in building a nuclear weapon. “We just think that the supporting documents are without basis or foundation.” [1]
On November 10, two days after the UN nuclear watchdog released its report, the hardline newspaper Keyhan ran an editorial by Hossein Shariatmadari that displayed a similar attitude. The intractable columnist smugly hailed IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano with the Persian greeting, “May your shadow never lessen!” Thanks were due to Amano, he wrote, for letting the world see the “credibility gap” in the case for the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. As advertised, the report indeed indicated that the Islamic Republic had “carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.” “Prior to the end of 2003, these activities took place under a structured program,” it went on to say, and some “might still be ongoing.” But that, Shariatmadari noted with evident satisfaction, was it. There was no new basis for the West’s accusations; in fact, there was no new information at all.
Spin Doctors East and West
Among the hardliners in Iran, there is a palpable sense of not relief but redemption. For decades, the arch-conservatives have maintained that Western hostility to the Islamic Republic is implacable and that Iran’s only choice is to respond in kind. Today, when they control all branches of government in Tehran, they point to the IAEA report as vindication of their dire prophecies. The Agency has showed its hand, they say, and it is thoroughly politicized. Iran should not waste any more time engaging with the IAEA beyond routine fulfillment of its treaty obligations. And the nuclear file is only one front of a coordinated onslaught.It would have been harder for Tehran to shrug so contemptuously at the IAEA report had it not come out immediately after a month of extraordinary, even manic agitation against the Islamic Republic by the Obama administration. First, there was the Justice Department’s decision to call a press conference to accuse Iran of plotting to kill Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, at a Washington restaurant. The world was skeptical, and more so after the Saudis floated charges of similar connivance against its diplomats in Pakistan and South America. In Iran, these maneuvers permitted hardliners to frame the IAEA report as part of an all-out effort by Iran’s enemies to blacken the country’s image.
Then there was the recent history of the nuclear file. Over the summer, Salehi had tried and failed to convince the IAEA to accept an offer of intensified cooperation provided that the Agency agree not to mention a “possible military dimension” to Iran’s program in its report. Under Amano’s predecessor, Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA had preferred the phrase “alleged studies” to refer to charges of warhead design research and the like by Iran, because these charges are based on documents shared with the Agency by unidentified countries and the Agency was unsure of their ultimate provenance or credibility. ElBaradei was unwilling to ignore the allegations entirely, but he was hesitant to make them the cornerstone of an indictment of Iran’s nuclear program. In an interview toward the end of his term in November 2009, he maintained, “We have not seen any use of nuclear material; we have not received any information that Iran has manufactured any part of a nuclear weapon or component.” [2]
Russia had also proposed a compromise to lower tensions: a “step-by-step” process of limitations on uranium enrichment and enhanced inspections in exchange for loosening of international sanctions. Iran agreed to consider the proposal, but the Russians got the cold shoulder from the West. According to Mark Hibbs, a close observer of negotiations over the nuclear file, the private reactions of US officials to Moscow’s idea “range from lukewarm interest to outright dismissal,” because such a deal would leave the task of verification in IAEA hands and allow Iran to proceed with enrichment, in effect safeguarding Iran’s capacity to pursue the bomb. Meanwhile, the IAEA itself dislikes the Russian plan because it would effectively declare the “outstanding issues” about Iran’s nuclear program to be “closed.” [3]
But the kicker was the IAEA report itself. Hawks in the US seized upon the section on a “possible military dimension” as proof of Iranian perfidy, and on December 2 Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told a Brookings Institution audience the report showed that “the regime in Tehran remains a very grave threat to all of us.” There is nothing in the report that was previously unknown to Western powers, however, since they are the countries supplying the IAEA with documents regarding Iran’s past weapons-related studies.
So the noise must be about something else. As Mark Fitzpatrick, director of the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies points out, the core issue at stake remains not studies conducted in the past but Iran’s steady, though legal and IAEA-supervised, accumulation of low-enriched uranium, which, if further enriched, can be the fuel for a nuclear arsenal. [4] But on that front the IAEA can do nothing but report on Iran’s progress and the Agency’s monitoring thereof. It is this fact that makes it easy for someone like Shariatmadari to argue that it was not the IAEA’s “technical expertise” that led Amano to “put it all out there,” but his enlistment in a US and Western project to exert pressure on Iran, come what may.
And this view is gaining traction across the spectrum of the Islamic Republic’s factious political class. Even Mohammad Khatami, Iran’s president during the reformist era of 1997-2005, pointed to “ominous thinking” behind the words “possible military dimension.” “They want to further increase pressure on Iran,” Khatami was quoted as saying in the Iranian press. Nodding to the presence of “warmongers” on both sides, he proceeded to hint at the salience of one side. “Of course, our behavior, positions and words may also have an impact, but it is evident that there is another plan for pressure. What they speak is nonsense, but they speak it nonetheless.” [5]
The Iranian reception of the IAEA report is the backdrop to the November 29 storming of the British Embassy in Tehran by members of the hardline Basij — a move that was doubtless orchestrated from the top of the Islamic Republic even if a crowd mentality may have caused more destruction than planned as things got out of control. To be sure, the Basij likes to flex its muscles periodically to secure its ascendancy in domestic politics. But there is another interactive logic at work: Britain had levied new sanctions, barring transactions with the Iranian financial sector including the Central Bank, and Tehran is signaling that it will answer more forcible arm-twisting with escalation of its own. The Iranian leadership wants the West to understand that, like its US counterpart, it has not “taken any options off the table,” including war.
The Obama Squeeze
As always since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Tehran watches no foreign power more carefully than the United States, whose policy it views as determinant of the broader Western posture. Since a tentative opening in mid-2009, when the Obama administration hinted it would approach Iran with a mixture of the proverbial carrots and sticks, US policy has shifted seamlessly to one of pure coercion. The conversation within the Islamic Republic has naturally moved to how to counteract Washington’s apparent new fervor for putting the squeeze on Iran.On November 22, National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon laid out the Obama administration’s justifications for its policy shift in a speech at the Brookings Institution. Ironically, but not surprisingly, he placed the blame upon Iran, which he claimed rebuffed the Obama administration’s “sincere effort” at engagement. [6] Donilon explained, however, that the purpose of the US overture in the autumn of 2009 had been twofold: “First, [we launched it] as a sincere offer of dialogue — with the prospect of tangible benefits for Iran…. Second, we knew that if our offer was rejected, Iran’s failure to meet its international obligations would be exposed to the entire world…. That, in turn, would increase our ability to mobilize international support for holding Tehran accountable for its reckless behavior. And over the past three years, that is exactly what has happened.”
One might question whether the US effort was in fact sincere, given its built-in mechanism for halting negotiations at the first encounter with resistance, but such was not the national security adviser’s remit in his speech. Donilon went on to celebrate the administration’s successes in arraying a solid international coalition against Iran and in delaying the progress of Iran’s nuclear program. Clearly, with an election year imminent, and Republican primary candidates sounding the usual sharply anti-Iranian notes, the Obama administration must not look soft on the Islamic Republic — particularly not its alleged atomic ambitions. It was a message underscored by Panetta two weeks later: “No greater threat exists to the security and prosperity of the Middle East than a nuclear-armed Iran.”
The “we tried” mantra voiced by Donilon is ironic because it is an argument used regularly by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, as well. Khamenei has rested his defense of both the suspension of uranium enrichment (2003) and the resumption of it (2005) on Iran’s good faith as a negotiator. In the interim, he contends, Iran worked hard to reach an agreement, but remained cognizant that failure had the advantage of revealing Western intransigence. Iran suspended enrichment, but the other side did not respond favorably, instead asking Iran to sacrifice more of its rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This line of argument has proven to be a powerful deterrent to compromise and a stinging critique of what the hardliners call the “passive foreign policy” of the reformists.
In any event, there is no backing away from the path taken by the White House, at least not until after the 2012 election. According to Donilon, the US will continue to be “vigilant” toward the Islamic Republic, working to impose further sanctions on Tehran and isolate it. The US will seek to build a regional security architecture that excludes Iran, weaken the Iranian economy, undermine the legitimacy of Iran’s government and further divide its fissiparous leadership. “The onus is on Iran” to alter the trajectory of relations by suspending all enrichment, reprocessing and heavy water-related activities, in effect, renouncing its right under the NPT to develop an independent nuclear capacity, even a peaceful one. And, in the meantime, Washington will continue to lay the blame at Iran’s doorstep: In the words of Panetta at Brookings, Iran has “to stop isolating itself” and “become part of the international community.”
No more beating around the bush, it seems. No more dilly-dallying before a middle path heading toward limits on enrichment combined with a more robust inspection regime. The “diplomatic opportunities” offered to Iran will henceforth essentially mean that Iran must accept terms it has disdained since negotiations over its nuclear program began in 2003. Iran explicitly rejected these terms in 2005, when Britain, France and Germany, prodded by the Bush administration, pushed for the ultimate demand of full suspension of uranium enrichment and initiated the process of sanctioning Iran at the Security Council.
In 2005, the threat of coordinated sanctions was deemed the only way to convince Iran to change its ways and to forestall the Israeli airstrikes on Iranian facilities that were constantly touted in the press (and, sometimes, by Israeli or US officials). European diplomats were wont to say that wielding the stick of sanctions over negotiations was a form of diplomacy rather than a surefire way to generate talk of war, given the Iraqi precedent on everyone’s minds at the time. Others, oblivious to the real chance that no Iranian government, elected or not, could accede to the maximalist demand of full suspension, made the case that Iran’s contentious political sphere could be molded by external pressure.
Six years later, coordinated sanctions are no mere threat. “Vigilance” on the part of the Obama administration has paid off in the form of draconian sanctions on financial dealings and investment in Iran. There is not much left to do in the way of sanctions, short of an outright embargo on Iranian crude oil, which is an act of war since it can be policed only by military means. The axiom that Iranians respond only to pressure has been modified to stipulate that there must be a lot of pressure, but the underlying logic remains the same: At minimum, the nuclear program will sputter; better, Iran will cave in; or, better still, the cracks in the edifice of the Islamic Republic will widen under the weight of international opprobrium. All of these possible outcomes are positive.
But the one-track policy of pressure is not free of obstacles. First and foremost, there are few remaining ways to tighten the vise. Western allies have effectively given carte blanche to the Obama administration, with Britain and France going further than the US in sanctioning Iran’s Central Bank and proposing an oil export embargo. But the US is constrained by its ties with China and Russia, which oppose anything like comprehensive sanctions, not to mention realities of the global economy like the reliance of allies Greece and Turkey on Iranian exports. The US may be able to make Iran bleed, but not enough to induce its surrender. This dynamic has made the Obama administration easily tempted by bombast, a way for it to project “vigilance” for audiences foreign and domestic while concealing the lack of a clear endgame.
The more vexing problem for US policy lies in Washington’s assumption that Tehran will simply be a passive taker of sanctions until the moment its competing elites decide to change course. The sanctions regime, in short, is offered as a relatively inexpensive instrument for the containment of Iran’s regional ambitions. Yet it is equally possible that a single-minded focus on coercion will egg on the Islamic Republic in escalation of its own, the latter being anxious to prove to Iranians that pressure is fruitless and to show its adversaries that coercion has costs. Iran is susceptible to this dynamic precisely because its elites are divided and eager, at what could be a historic juncture, to juxtapose their nationalist credentials to their rivals’ fecklessness.
Of Postures and Predicaments
On October 11, Ayatollah Khamenei succinctly articulated the Islamic Republic’s posture toward escalating sanctions in a speech at the Imam Ali Military Academy. “We are not a nation that stands by and watches fragile powers made of straw…threaten the steadfast and steel-like Iranian nation,” the Leader said. “We will answer threats with threats.” As they rushed the British Embassy on November 29, students held aloft posters of Khamenei emblazoned with the second declaration.According to conservative strategist Amir Mohebian, writing on Khamenei’s official website, the Leader’s statement (and, presumably, the attack on the British Embassy, as well) was intended to dispel the “groundless notion that concessions can be gained from Iran through pressure and harsh rhetoric.” The Leader also meant to send the messages that, whatever rifts may exist in the Islamic Republic, his office is the center of decision-making, and that, contra Donilon, Iran believes the onus of reducing tensions is on the United States.
Given the awesome military might of the US and the recurrent threats from Israel, the Leader’s might seem a foolhardy position to take. But Iran’s brinksmanship is based on the belief that this stance is no crazier than the idea of US or Israeli attack, particularly given the state of the world economy. On Khamenei’s website, Mohebian details three war scenarios, ranging from combined aerial assault and ground invasion, which he judges least likely, to airstrikes aimed at stirring up internal unrest to attacks on military targets, the most likely. At the end, however, and like most decision-makers in Iran, Mohebian finds all of these scenarios implausible in view of the cost. He posits that US-Israeli talk of military options is a bluff to test Iran’s will and psychological warfare intended to frighten Iranian civilians, fracture the leadership and debilitate the government.
The implications for Iranian domestic politics are clear. The leadership of the Islamic Republic will confront outside hostility with hostility, and, in the meantime, it is prone to label any insider who questions its strategic direction as a foreign stooge. Indeed, the hardliners have developed a vested interest in continuation of the war talk. In addition to marginalizing their opponents, it allows them to justify the post-2005 securitization of the public sphere that intensified after the disputed presidential election of 2009.
Meanwhile, reformers and centrists who are unhappy with their political exclusion and worried about what they consider an “adventurist” foreign policy have discovered their own reason to highlight the external peril. Their brief, laid out by Khatami and another former president, Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, insists that because a divided Iran is more easily attacked, the best guarantee of national security is inter-elite reconciliation underwritten by release of political prisoners and free elections.
Some elements of the Iranian opposition in the diaspora find the Khatami-Rafsanjani tack inadequate. They call for suspension of uranium enrichment and posit that, if Iran is eventually attacked, the Iranian government will be the responsible party. “The main mission of the opposition is stopping the nuclear adventurism of the state,” says Ali Afshari, a former student leader who is now in exile. [7] Such a position is not an option for most political actors inside Iran. Aside from the fact that no politician in any country can openly advocate giving in to foreign coercion, the reformist leadership in Iran has also been adamant about Iran’s nuclear rights. Iran’s nuclear program, in fact, saw its most significant expansion during Khatami’s presidency. In the face of aggressive sanctions and rumors of war, the most the reformists can do is cast aspersions on the hardline government’s diplomatic savvy. [8] They share its strident defense of the program itself.
The talk of war, in short, has indeed recalibrated the discourse of Iranian politics, but so far not in the direction of challenges to the international posture of the Islamic Republic. Speaking to reformist youth in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province, Khatami went so far as to say, “If foreigners one day decide to intervene, reformists and non-reformists will confront them.” The remarks were promptly posted on his official website and also by the hardline Fars News Agency.
The reformist predicament was highlighted by a bit of careless commentary from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in an interview with BBC’s Persian-language service. In defense of the Obama administration’s non-committal response to the mass dissent from the 2009 election result, Clinton pointed out that the Iranian protesters had not asked for US help, unlike the Libyan opposition to Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi in the spring of 2011. She continued, “I think if something were to happen again, it would be smart for the Green Movement or some other movement inside Iran to say, ‘We want the voices of the world. We want the support of the world behind us.’ …And I think that maybe in retrospect it was an unfortunate mutual decision on the part of the leaders of the Green Movement and the supporters inside Iran and those of us on the outside, who very much hoped that that would spark reform.” Clinton did not spell out what the US might offer “if something were to happen again,” but the mere evocation of Libya sparked shouting matches among Iranian exiles about the potential for an attack on Iran, facilitated by the opposition in the name of humanitarian intervention. [9]
Inside Iran, for obvious reasons, there is no such acrimonious debate. Mohammad Nourizad, a former hardliner turned political dissident after the 2009 election, has written a twelfth open letter to Khamenei, asking him to “drink from the poisoned chalice,” a reference to the famous statement by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini when he finally agreed to accept UN Security Council Resolution 528 ending the Iran-Iraq war. [10] “If they attack and destroy us, our half-baked knowledge of nuclear energy will not come to our aid,” Nourizad says. But his entreaty does not stand alone; he amends it with the condition that Khamenei find a “respectable” exit from the nuclear drama.
After eight years of confrontation over Iran’s nuclear file, the injunction to save face rings hollow. The two sides in the showdown are unequal in power but equally painted into a corner by policies of “vigilance,” on the one hand, and “answering threats with threats,” on the other. It is far from certain that cooler heads will prevail in de-escalating this increasingly worrisome crisis.
Endnotes
[1] Mehr News, November 5, 2011.[2] Siddharth Varadarajan, “Language of Force Is Not Helpful with Iran: Interview with Mohamed ElBaradei,” The Hindu, October 3, 2009.
[3] Mark Hibbs, “Who Wants Diplomacy on Iran?” Arms Control Wonk, December 1, 2011.
[4] See the full interview with Fitzpatrick at: http://www.iiss.org/whats-new/iiss-experts-commentary/qa-iaea-report-ind….
[5] Fars News, November 14, 2011.
[6] For background, see Farideh Farhi, “Anatomy of a Nuclear Breakthrough Gone Backwards,” Middle East Report Online, December 8, 2009.
[7] Ali Afshari, “War with Israel Paid For from the Pockets of the Iranian People,” Gooya.com, November 26, 2011. [Persian]
[8] Sadeq Kharrazi, “Creative Diplomacy, Today’s Necessity,” Sharq, November 6, 2011. [Persian]
[9] See, for instance, Hamid Dabashi, “Fifth Column of the Post-Modern Kind,” Al Jazeera English, November 21, 2011, to which Afshari’s article is a response.
[10] Mohammad Nourizad, “Come and Drink from the Poisoned Chalice I Have Prepared for You,” Iran Emrooz, November 25, 2011. [Persian]
Debunking the Iran “Terror Plot”
by Gareth Porter | published November 3, 2011
At a press conference on October 11, the Obama administration unveiled a spectacular charge against the government of Iran: The Qods Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had plotted to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, right in Washington, DC, in a place where large numbers of innocent bystanders could have been killed. High-level officials of the Qods Force were said to be involved, the only question being how far up in the Iranian government the complicity went.
The US tale of the Iranian plot was greeted with unusual skepticism on the part of Iran specialists and independent policy analysts, and even elements of the mainstream media. The critics observed that the alleged assassination scheme was not in Iran’s interest, and that it bore scant resemblance to past operations attributed to the foreign special operations branch of Iranian intelligence. The Qods Force, it was widely believed, would not send a person like Iranian-American used car dealer Manssor Arbabsiar, known to friends in Corpus Christi, Texas as forgetful and disorganized, to hire the hit squad for such a sensitive covert action.
But administration officials claimed they had hard evidence to back up the charge. They cited a 21-page deposition by a supervising FBI agent in the “amended criminal complaint” filed against Arbabsiar and an accomplice who remains at large, Gholam Shakuri. [1] It was all there, the officials insisted: several meetings between Arbabsiar and a man he thought was a member of a leading Mexican drug cartel, Los Zetas, with a reputation for cold-blooded killing; incriminating statements, all secretly recorded, by Arbabsiar and Shakuri, his alleged handler in Tehran; and finally, Arbabsiar’s confession after his arrest, which clearly implicates Qods Force agents in a plan to murder a foreign diplomat on US soil.
A close analysis of the FBI deposition reveals, however, that independent evidence for the charge that Arbabsiar was sent by the Qods Force on a mission to arrange for the assassination of Jubeir is lacking. The FBI account is full of holes and contradictions, moreover. The document gives good reason to doubt that Arbabsiar and his confederates in Iran had the intention of assassinating Jubeir, and to believe instead that the FBI hatched the plot as part of a sting operation.
But the allegations that the Iranian-American used car salesman wanted to “attack” the Saudi embassy and other targets rest entirely upon the testimony of the DEA informant with whom he was meeting. The informant is a drug dealer who had been indicted for a narcotics violation in a US state but had the charges dropped “in exchange for cooperation in various drug investigations,” according to the FBI account. The informant is not an independent source of information, but someone paid to help pursue FBI objectives.
The most suspicious aspect of the administration’s case, in fact, is the complete absence of any direct quote from Arbabsiar suggesting interest in, much less advocacy of, assassinating the Saudi ambassador or carrying out other attacks in a series of meetings with the DEA informant between June 23 and July 14. The deposition does not even indicate how many times the two actually met during those three weeks, suggesting that the number was substantial, and that the lack of primary evidence from those meetings is a sensitive issue. And although the FBI account specifies that the July 14 and 17 meetings were recorded “at the direction of law enforcement agents,” it is carefully ambiguous about whether or not the earlier meetings were recorded.
The lack of quotations is a crucial problem for the official case for a simple reason: If Arbabsiar had said anything even hinting in the May 24 meeting or in a subsequent meeting at the desire to mount a terrorist attack, it would have triggered the immediate involvement of the FBI’s National Security Branch and its counter-terrorism division. The FBI would then have instructed the DEA informant to record all of the meetings with Arbabsiar, as is standard practice in such cases, according to a former FBI official interviewed for this article. And that would mean that those meetings were indeed recorded.
The fact that the FBI account does not include a single quotation from Arbabsiar in the June 23-July 14 meetings means either that Arbabsiar did not say anything that raised such alarms at the FBI or that he was saying something sufficiently different from what is now claimed that the administration chooses not to quote from it. In either case, the lack of such quotes further suggests that it was not Arbabsiar, but the DEA informant, acting as part of an FBI sting operation, who pushed the idea of assassinating Jubeir. The most likely explanation is that Arbabsiar was suggesting surveillance of targets that could be hit if Iran were to be attacked by Israel with Saudi connivance.
The quotations attributed to the DEA informant suggest that he was under orders to get a response from Arbabsiar that could be interpreted as assent to an assassination plot. For example, the informant tells Arbabsiar, “You just want the, the main guy.” There is no quoted response from the car dealer. Instead, the FBI narrative simply asserts that Arbabsiar “confirmed that he just wanted the ‘ambassador.’” At the end of the meeting, the informant declares, “We’re gonna start doing the guy.” But again, no response from Arbabsiar is quoted.
Two statements by the informant appear on their face to relate to a broader set of Saudi targets than Adel al-Jubeir. The informant tells Arbabsiar that he would need “at least four guys” and would “take the one point five for the Saudi Arabia.” The FBI agent who signed the deposition explains, “I understand this to mean that he would need to use four men to assassinate the Ambassador and that the cost to Arbabsiar of the assassination would be $1.5 million.” But, apart from the agent’s surmise, there is no hint that either cited phrase referred to a proposal to assassinate the ambassador. Given that there had already been discussion of multiple Saudi targets, as well as those of an unnamed third country (probably Israel), it seems more reasonable to interpret the words “the Saudi Arabia” to refer to a set of missions relating to Saudi Arabia in order to distinguish them from the other target list.
Then the informant repeats the same wording, telling Arbabsiar he would “go ahead and work on the Saudi Arabia, get all the information that we can.” This language does not show that Arbabsiar proposed the killing of Jubeir, much less approved it. And the FBI narrative states that the Iranian-American “agreed that the assassination of the Ambassador should be handled first.” Again, that curious wording does not assert that Arbabsiar said an assassination should be carried out first, but suggests he was agreeing that the subject should be discussed first.
The absence of any quote from Arbabsiar about an assassination plot, combined with the multiple ambiguities surrounding the statements attributed to the DEA informant, suggest that the main subject of the July 14 meeting was something broader than an assassination plot, and that it was the government’s own agent who had brought up the subject of assassinating the ambassador in the meeting, rather than Arbabsiar.
The government reconstruction of the July 14 meeting also introduces the keystone of the Obama administration’s public case: $100,000 that was to be transferred to a bank account that the DEA informant said he would make known to Arbabsiar. The FBI deposition asserts repeatedly that whenever Arbabsiar or the DEA informant mention the $100,000, they are talking about a “down payment” on the assassination. But the document contains no statement from either of them linking that $100,000 to any assassination plan. In fact, it provides details suggesting that the $100,000 could not have been linked to such a plan.
The FBI deposition states that the informant and Arbabsiar “discussed how Arbabsiar would pay [the informant],” but offers no statement from either individual even mentioning a “payment,” or any reason for transferring the money to a bank account. Furthermore, it does not actually claim that Arbabsiar made any commitment to any action against Jubeir at either the July 14 or 17 meetings. And when the informant is quoted in the July 17 meeting as saying, “I don’t know exactly what your cousin wants me to do,” it appears to be an acknowledgement that he had gotten no indication prior to July 17 that Arbabsiar’s Tehran interlocutors wanted the Saudi ambassador dead. The deposition does not even claim that Arbabsiar’s supposed handlers had approved a plan to kill Jubeir until after the Iranian-American returned to his native country on July 20.
Nevertheless, Arbabsiar is quoted telling the informant on July 14 that the full $100,000 had already been collected in cash at the home of “a certain individual.” Preparations for the transfer of the $100,000 had thus commenced well before the assassination plot allegedly got the green light.
The amount of $100,000 does not even appear credible as a “down payment” on a job that the FBI account says was to have cost a total of $1.5 million. It would represent a mere 6 percent of the full price. Bearing in mind that the DEA informant was supposed to be representing the demand of a ruthlessly profit-motivated Los Zetas drug cartel for a high-stakes political assassination well outside its purview, 6 percent of the total would represent far too little for a “down payment.”
The $100,000 wire transfer must have been related to an understanding that had been reached on something other than the assassination plan. Yet it has been cited by the administration and reported by news media as proof of the plot — and key evidence of Iran’s complicity therein. [2]
After the FBI evidently sought again to get the straightforward answer it was seeking, however, Arbabsiar is quoted as saying: “He wants you to kill this guy.” The informant then presents a fanciful plan to bomb an imaginary restaurant in Washington where Arbabsiar was told the Saudi ambassador liked to dine twice a week and where many “like, American people” would be present. “You want me to do it outside or in the restaurant?” asks the informant, to which question the Iranian-American replies, “Doesn’t matter how you do it.” At another point in the conversation, Arbabsiar goes further, saying, “They want that guy done. If the hundred go with him, fuck ‘em.”
These statements appear at first blush to be conclusive evidence that Arbabsiar and his Iranian overseers were contracting for the assassination of Jubeir, regardless of lives lost. But there are two crucial questions that the FBI account leaves unanswered: Was Arbabsiar speaking on behalf of the Qods Force or some element of it? And if he was, was he talking about a plan that was to go into effect as soon as possible or was it understood that they were talking about a contingency plan that would only be carried out under specific circumstances?
The deposition includes several instances of Arbabsiar’s bragging about a cousin who is a general, out of uniform and involved in covert external operations, including in Iraq — clearly implying that he belongs to the Qods Force. Arbabsiar is said to have claimed that the cousin and another Iranian official gave him funds for his contacts with the drug cartel. “I got the money coming,” he says. Subsequently, in one of the most extensive quotations from the recorded conversations, Arbabsiar says, “This is politics, so these people they pay this government…he’s got the, got the government behind him…he’s not paying from his pocket.” The FBI narrative identifies the person referred to here as Arbabsiar’s cousin, a Qods Force officer later named as Abdul Reza Shahlai, but again, there is not a single direct quotation backing the claim. And the reference to “these people” who “pay this government” suggests that “he” is connected to a group with illicit financial ties to government officials.
This excerpt could be particularly significant in light of press reports quoting a US law enforcement official saying that Arbabsiar had offered “tons of opium” to the drug cartel and that he and the informant had discussed what the New York Times called a “side deal” on the Iranian-held narcotics. [3] If these reports are accurate, it seems possible that Arbabsiar approached Los Zetas on behalf of Iranians who control a portion of the opium being smuggled through Iran from Afghanistan, while seeking to impress the drug cartel operative with his claim to have close ties to the Qods Force through Shahlai. But if the DEA informant then pressed him to authenticate his Qods Force connection, he may have begun discussing covert operations against Iran’s enemies in North America.
The only alleged evidence that Arbabsiar was speaking for Shahlai and the Qods Force is Arbabsiar’s own confession, summarized in the criminal complaint. But, at minimum, that testimony was provided after he had been arrested and had a strong interest in telling the FBI what it wanted to hear.
The deposition makes much of a series of three phone conversations on October 4, 5 and 7 between Arbabsiar and someone who Arbabsiar tells his FBI handlers is Gholam Shakuri, presenting them as confirmation of the involvement of Qods Force officers in the assassination scheme. But the FBI apparently had no way of ascertaining whether the person to whom Arababsiar was talking was actually Shakuri. After the October 4 call, for example, the FBI account merely records that Arbabsiar “indicated that the person he was speaking with was Shakuri.”
On their face, moreover, these conversations prove nothing. In the first of the three calls, the person at the other end of the line, whom Arbabsiar identifies to his FBI contact as Shakuri but whose identity is not otherwise established, asks, “What news…what did you do about the building?” The FBI agent again suggests, “based on my training, experience and participation in this investigation,” that these queries were a “reference to the plot to murder the Ambassador and a question about its status.”
But Arbabsiar is said to have claimed in his confession that he was instructed by Shakuri to use the code word “Chevrolet” to refer to the plot to kill the ambassador. In a second recorded conversation, Arbabsiar immediately says, “I wanted to tell you the Chevrolet is ready, it’s ready, uh, to be done. I should continue, right?” After further exchange, the man purported to be “Shakuri” says, “So buy it, buy it.” Despite the obvious invocation of a code word, it remains unclear what Arbabsiar was to “buy.” “Chevrolet” could actually have been a reference to either a drug-related deal or a generic plan having to do with Saudi and other targets.
In a third recorded conversation on October 7, both Arbabsiar and “Shakuri” refer to a demand by a purported cartel figure for another $50,000 on top of the original $100,000 transferred by wire earlier. But there is no other evidence of such a demand. It appears to be a mere device of the FBI to get “Shakuri” on record as talking about the $100,000. And here it should be recalled that the account in the deposition shows that the transfer of the $100,000 had been agreed on before any indication of agreement on a plan to kill the ambassador.
The invocation of a fictional demand for $50,000, along with the dramatic difference between the first conversation and the second and third conversations, suggests yet another possibility: The second and third conversations were set up in advance by Arbabsiar to provide a transcript to bolster the administration’s case.
Iran lacks the conventional means to deter attack by a powerful adversary. In its decades-long standoffs with the United States and Israel, amidst recurrent talk of “preemptive” strikes by those powers, Iran has relied on threats of proxy retaliation against US and allied state targets in the Middle East. [4] The Iranian military support for Lebanon’s Hizballah, in particular, is widely recognized as prompted primarily by Iran’s need to deter US and Israeli attack. [5]
In one case in 1994-1995, Saudi Arabian Shi‘i militants carried out surveillance of potential US military and diplomatic targets in Saudi Arabia, in a way that was quickly noticed by US and Saudi intelligence. [6] Although the consensus among US intelligence analysts was that Iran was preparing for a terrorist attack, Ronald Neumann, then the State Department’s intelligence officer for Iran and Iraq, noted that Iran had done the same thing whenever US-Iranian tensions had risen. He suggested that Iran could be using the surveillance for deterrence, to let Washington know that its interests in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere would be in danger if Iran were attacked. [7]
Unfortunately for Iran’s deterrent strategy, however, Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda was also carrying out surveillance of US bases in Saudi Arabia, and in November 1995 and again in June 1996, that group bombed two facilities housing US servicemen. The bombing of Khobar Towers in June 1996, which killed 19 US soldiers and one Saudi Arabian, was blamed by the Clinton administration’s FBI and CIA leadership on Iranian-sponsored Shi‘a from Saudi Arabia, with prodding from Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, despite the fact that bin Laden claimed responsibility not once but twice, in interviews with the London-based newspaper, al-Quds al-‘Arabi. [8]
Hani al-Sayigh, one of the Saudi Arabian Shi‘a accused by the Saudi and US governments of conspiring to attack the Khobar Towers, admitted to Assistant Attorney General Eric Dubelier, who interviewed him at a Canadian detention facility in May 1997, that he had participated in the surveillance of US military targets in Saudi Arabia on behalf of Iranian intelligence. But, according to the FBI report on the interview, al-Sayigh insisted that Iran had never intended to attack any of those sites unless it was first attacked by the United States. And when Dubelier asked a question later in the interview that was based on the premise that the surveillance effort was preparation for a terrorist attack, al-Sayigh corrected him. [9]
With threats of an Israeli or US bombing attack on Iran, with Saudi complicity, mounting since the mid-2000s, a similar campaign of surveillance of Saudi and Israeli targets in North America would fit the framework of what the Pentagon has called Iran’s “asymmetric warfare doctrine.” If Arbabsiar spoke of such a campaign in his initial meeting with the DEA informant, he certainly would have piqued the interest of FBI counter-terrorism personnel. And this scenario would also explain why the series of meetings in late June and the first half of July did not produce a single statement by Arbabsiar that the administration could quote to advance its case that the Iranian-American was interested in assassinating Adel al-Jubeir or carrying out other acts of terrorism.
A plan to conduct surveillance and be ready to act on contingency plans would also explain why someone as lacking in relevant experience and skills as Arbabsiar might have been acceptable to the Qods Force. Not only would the mission not have required absolute secrecy; it would have been based on the assumption that the surveillance would become known to US intelligence relatively quickly, as did the monitoring of US targets in Saudi Arabia in 1994-1995.
The Qods Force officials were certainly well aware that the Drug Enforcement Agency had penetrated various Mexican drug cartels, in some cases even at the very top level. US court proceedings involving Mexican drug traffickers who were highly placed in the Sinaloa drug cartel between 2009 and early 2011 reveal that the US made deals with leaders of the cartel to report what they knew about rival cartel operations in return for a hands-off approach to their drug trafficking. [10] Further underlining the degree to which the cartels were honeycombed with people on the US payroll, the DEA informant in this case was not merely posing as a drug trafficker but is reportedly an actual associate of Los Zetas with access to its upper echelons, who has been given immunity from prosecution to cooperate with the DEA. [11]
For someone facing such serious charges to provide the details with which to make the case against him, while renouncing benefit of counsel, is odd, to say the least. The official story raises questions not only about what agreement was reached between Arbabsiar and the FBI to ensure his cooperation but about when that agreement was reached.
One clue that Arbabsiar was brought into the sting operation well before his arrest is the DEA informant’s demand in a September 20 phone conversation with Arbabsiar in Tehran that he either come up with half the $1.5 million total fee or come to Mexico to be the guarantee that the full amount would be paid.
Yet the FBI account of that conversation shows Arbabsiar telling the informant, without even consulting with his contacts in Tehran, “I’m gonna go over there [in] two [or] three days.” Later in the same evening, he calls back to ask how long he would need to remain in Mexico. Even if Arbabsiar were as feckless as some reports have suggested, he would certainly not have agreed so readily to put his fate in the hands of the murderous Los Zetas cartel — unless he knew that he was not really in danger, because the US government would intercept him and bring him to the United States. Making the episode even stranger, Arbabsiar’s confession claims that when he told Shakuri about the purported Los Zetas demand, Shakuri refused to provide any more money to the cartel, advised him against going to Mexico and warned him that if he did so, he would be on his own.
Further supporting the conclusion that Arbabsiar had become part of the sting operation before his arrest is the fact there was no reason for the FBI to pose the demand — through the DEA informant — for more money or Arbabsiar’s presence in Mexico except to provide an excuse to get him out of Iran, so he could provide a full confession implicating the Qods Force and be the centerpiece of the case against Iran.
The larger aim of the FBI sting operation, which ABC News has reported was dubbed Operation Red Coalition, was clearly to link the alleged assassination plot to Qods Force officers. The logical moment for the FBI to have recruited the Iranian-American would have been right after the FBI recorded him talking about wiring money to the bank account and casually approving the idea of bombing a restaurant and before his planned departure from Mexico for Iran. The only way to ensure that Arbabsiar would come back, of course, would be to offer him a substantial amount of money to serve as an informant for the FBI during his stay in Iran, which he would receive only upon returning. If Arbabsiar had already been enlisted, of course, it would also mean the keystone of the case — the wiring of $100,000 to a secret FBI bank account — was a part of the FBI sting.
Perhaps the most notorious of all these domestic terrorism sting operations is the case in which Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain, leaders of their Albany, New York mosque, were sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for allegedly laundering profits from the sale of a shoulder-launched missile for a Pakistani militant group that was planning to assassinate a Pakistani diplomat in New York City.
In fact, there was no such terrorist plot, and the alleged crime was the result of an elaborate FBI scam directed against two innocent men. [13] It began when an FBI informant pretending to be a Pakistani businessman insinuated himself into Hossain’s life and extended him a $50,000 loan for his pizza parlor. Only months after the informant had begun loaning the money did he show Hossain a shoulder-launched missile, and suggest that he was also selling arms to his “Muslim brothers.” It was a devious form of entrapment; the prosecutors later argued that Hossain should have known the loan could have come from money made in the sale of weapons to terrorists and was therefore guilty of money laundering.
The FBI approach to entrapping Hossain’s friend Aref was even more underhanded. Aref was never even made aware of the missile or the phony story of the illegal arms sale. But on one occasion, when he was present to witness the transfer of loan money, what was later said to have been the missile’s trigger system was left on a table in the room. Prosecutors then argued the theory that Aref had seen the trigger, which looks much like a staple gun, and thus had become part of a conspiracy to “assist in money laundering.”
Many other domestic terrorism cases have involved deceptive tactics and economic inducements deployed by the FBI to involve American Muslims in fictional terrorist plots. The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University’s Law School found more than 20 terrorism cases that involved some combination of “paid informants, selection of investigation based on perceived religious identity, [and] a plot that was created by the government.” [14] This history makes it clear that the Justice Department and FBI are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to fabricate terrorism cases against targeted individuals, and that misrepresenting these individuals’ intentions and actual behavior has long been standard practice. The trickery and deceit in past “counter-terrorism” sting operations provides further reason to question the veracity of the Obama administration’s allegations in the bizarre case of Manssor Arbabsiar.
[2] See New York Times, October 12, 2011 and Reuters, October 12, 2011.
[3] See New York Times, October 12, 2011 and Bloomberg, October 12, 2011.
[4] For an official US recognition of Iran’s “assymetric warfare doctrine” as a tool of deterrence of “any would-be invader,” see Department of Defense, Unclassified Report on Military Power of Iran, April 2010, p. 1.
[5] See, for example, Michael Young, “Another Israel-Hezbollah War?” Middle East Security at Harvard, National Security Study Program, February 28, 2008: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/2008/02/another_israel_hezbollah_war/
[6] See Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1997 and Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 276.
[7] Gareth Porter, “US Officials Leaked a False Story Blaming Iran,” Inter Press Service, June 24, 2009.
[8] Gareth Porter, “FBI Ignored Compelling Evidence of Bin Laden Role,” Inter Press Service, June 25, 2009.
[9] Gareth Porter, “US May Have Concealed Deterrent Aim of Iranian Plan,” Inter Press Service, October 21, 2011.
[10] New York Times, October 24, 2011.
[11] So said ProPublica reporter Sebastian Rotella in his podcast of October 18, 2011, online at: http://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/podcast-sebastian-rotella-on-the-…
[12] Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Targeted and Entrapped: Manufacturing the “Homegrown Threat” in the United States (New York, 2011), p. 14.
[13] This account of the case is drawn from Petra Bartosiewicz, “To Catch a Terrorist,” Harper’s (August 2011).
[14] Targeted and Entrapped, pp. 50-52, fn 17.
The US tale of the Iranian plot was greeted with unusual skepticism on the part of Iran specialists and independent policy analysts, and even elements of the mainstream media. The critics observed that the alleged assassination scheme was not in Iran’s interest, and that it bore scant resemblance to past operations attributed to the foreign special operations branch of Iranian intelligence. The Qods Force, it was widely believed, would not send a person like Iranian-American used car dealer Manssor Arbabsiar, known to friends in Corpus Christi, Texas as forgetful and disorganized, to hire the hit squad for such a sensitive covert action.
But administration officials claimed they had hard evidence to back up the charge. They cited a 21-page deposition by a supervising FBI agent in the “amended criminal complaint” filed against Arbabsiar and an accomplice who remains at large, Gholam Shakuri. [1] It was all there, the officials insisted: several meetings between Arbabsiar and a man he thought was a member of a leading Mexican drug cartel, Los Zetas, with a reputation for cold-blooded killing; incriminating statements, all secretly recorded, by Arbabsiar and Shakuri, his alleged handler in Tehran; and finally, Arbabsiar’s confession after his arrest, which clearly implicates Qods Force agents in a plan to murder a foreign diplomat on US soil.
A close analysis of the FBI deposition reveals, however, that independent evidence for the charge that Arbabsiar was sent by the Qods Force on a mission to arrange for the assassination of Jubeir is lacking. The FBI account is full of holes and contradictions, moreover. The document gives good reason to doubt that Arbabsiar and his confederates in Iran had the intention of assassinating Jubeir, and to believe instead that the FBI hatched the plot as part of a sting operation.
The Case of the Missing Quotes
The FBI account suggests that, from the inaugural meetings between Arbabsiar and his supposed Los Zetas contact, a Drug Enforcement Agency informant, Arbabsiar was advocating a terrorist strike against the Saudi embassy. The government narrative states that, in the very first meeting on May 24, Arbabsiar asked the informant about his “knowledge, if any, with respect to explosives” and said he was interested in “among other things, attacking an embassy of Saudi Arabia.” It also notes that in the meetings prior to July 14, the DEA informant “had reported that he and Arbabsiar had discussed the possibility of attacks on a number of other targets,” including “foreign government facilities associated with Saudi Arabia and with another country,” located “within and outside the United States.”But the allegations that the Iranian-American used car salesman wanted to “attack” the Saudi embassy and other targets rest entirely upon the testimony of the DEA informant with whom he was meeting. The informant is a drug dealer who had been indicted for a narcotics violation in a US state but had the charges dropped “in exchange for cooperation in various drug investigations,” according to the FBI account. The informant is not an independent source of information, but someone paid to help pursue FBI objectives.
The most suspicious aspect of the administration’s case, in fact, is the complete absence of any direct quote from Arbabsiar suggesting interest in, much less advocacy of, assassinating the Saudi ambassador or carrying out other attacks in a series of meetings with the DEA informant between June 23 and July 14. The deposition does not even indicate how many times the two actually met during those three weeks, suggesting that the number was substantial, and that the lack of primary evidence from those meetings is a sensitive issue. And although the FBI account specifies that the July 14 and 17 meetings were recorded “at the direction of law enforcement agents,” it is carefully ambiguous about whether or not the earlier meetings were recorded.
The lack of quotations is a crucial problem for the official case for a simple reason: If Arbabsiar had said anything even hinting in the May 24 meeting or in a subsequent meeting at the desire to mount a terrorist attack, it would have triggered the immediate involvement of the FBI’s National Security Branch and its counter-terrorism division. The FBI would then have instructed the DEA informant to record all of the meetings with Arbabsiar, as is standard practice in such cases, according to a former FBI official interviewed for this article. And that would mean that those meetings were indeed recorded.
The fact that the FBI account does not include a single quotation from Arbabsiar in the June 23-July 14 meetings means either that Arbabsiar did not say anything that raised such alarms at the FBI or that he was saying something sufficiently different from what is now claimed that the administration chooses not to quote from it. In either case, the lack of such quotes further suggests that it was not Arbabsiar, but the DEA informant, acting as part of an FBI sting operation, who pushed the idea of assassinating Jubeir. The most likely explanation is that Arbabsiar was suggesting surveillance of targets that could be hit if Iran were to be attacked by Israel with Saudi connivance.
“The Saudi Arabia” and the $100,000
The July 14 meeting between Arbabsiar and the DEA informant is the first from which the criminal complaint offers actual quotations from the secretly recorded conversation. The FBI’s retelling supplies selected bits of conversation — mostly from the informant — aimed at portraying the meeting as revolving around the assassination plot. But when carefully studied, the account reveals a different story.The quotations attributed to the DEA informant suggest that he was under orders to get a response from Arbabsiar that could be interpreted as assent to an assassination plot. For example, the informant tells Arbabsiar, “You just want the, the main guy.” There is no quoted response from the car dealer. Instead, the FBI narrative simply asserts that Arbabsiar “confirmed that he just wanted the ‘ambassador.’” At the end of the meeting, the informant declares, “We’re gonna start doing the guy.” But again, no response from Arbabsiar is quoted.
Two statements by the informant appear on their face to relate to a broader set of Saudi targets than Adel al-Jubeir. The informant tells Arbabsiar that he would need “at least four guys” and would “take the one point five for the Saudi Arabia.” The FBI agent who signed the deposition explains, “I understand this to mean that he would need to use four men to assassinate the Ambassador and that the cost to Arbabsiar of the assassination would be $1.5 million.” But, apart from the agent’s surmise, there is no hint that either cited phrase referred to a proposal to assassinate the ambassador. Given that there had already been discussion of multiple Saudi targets, as well as those of an unnamed third country (probably Israel), it seems more reasonable to interpret the words “the Saudi Arabia” to refer to a set of missions relating to Saudi Arabia in order to distinguish them from the other target list.
Then the informant repeats the same wording, telling Arbabsiar he would “go ahead and work on the Saudi Arabia, get all the information that we can.” This language does not show that Arbabsiar proposed the killing of Jubeir, much less approved it. And the FBI narrative states that the Iranian-American “agreed that the assassination of the Ambassador should be handled first.” Again, that curious wording does not assert that Arbabsiar said an assassination should be carried out first, but suggests he was agreeing that the subject should be discussed first.
The absence of any quote from Arbabsiar about an assassination plot, combined with the multiple ambiguities surrounding the statements attributed to the DEA informant, suggest that the main subject of the July 14 meeting was something broader than an assassination plot, and that it was the government’s own agent who had brought up the subject of assassinating the ambassador in the meeting, rather than Arbabsiar.
The government reconstruction of the July 14 meeting also introduces the keystone of the Obama administration’s public case: $100,000 that was to be transferred to a bank account that the DEA informant said he would make known to Arbabsiar. The FBI deposition asserts repeatedly that whenever Arbabsiar or the DEA informant mention the $100,000, they are talking about a “down payment” on the assassination. But the document contains no statement from either of them linking that $100,000 to any assassination plan. In fact, it provides details suggesting that the $100,000 could not have been linked to such a plan.
The FBI deposition states that the informant and Arbabsiar “discussed how Arbabsiar would pay [the informant],” but offers no statement from either individual even mentioning a “payment,” or any reason for transferring the money to a bank account. Furthermore, it does not actually claim that Arbabsiar made any commitment to any action against Jubeir at either the July 14 or 17 meetings. And when the informant is quoted in the July 17 meeting as saying, “I don’t know exactly what your cousin wants me to do,” it appears to be an acknowledgement that he had gotten no indication prior to July 17 that Arbabsiar’s Tehran interlocutors wanted the Saudi ambassador dead. The deposition does not even claim that Arbabsiar’s supposed handlers had approved a plan to kill Jubeir until after the Iranian-American returned to his native country on July 20.
Nevertheless, Arbabsiar is quoted telling the informant on July 14 that the full $100,000 had already been collected in cash at the home of “a certain individual.” Preparations for the transfer of the $100,000 had thus commenced well before the assassination plot allegedly got the green light.
The amount of $100,000 does not even appear credible as a “down payment” on a job that the FBI account says was to have cost a total of $1.5 million. It would represent a mere 6 percent of the full price. Bearing in mind that the DEA informant was supposed to be representing the demand of a ruthlessly profit-motivated Los Zetas drug cartel for a high-stakes political assassination well outside its purview, 6 percent of the total would represent far too little for a “down payment.”
The $100,000 wire transfer must have been related to an understanding that had been reached on something other than the assassination plan. Yet it has been cited by the administration and reported by news media as proof of the plot — and key evidence of Iran’s complicity therein. [2]
The Qods Force Connection
The FBI account of the July 17 meeting shows the DEA informant leading Arbabsiar into a statement of support for an assassination. The informant, obviously following an FBI script, says, “I don’t know what exactly your cousin wants me to do.” But the deposition notes “further conversation” following that invitation for a clear position on a proposal coming from the informant, indicating that what Arbabsiar was saying did not support the administration’s allegation that assassination plot was coming from Tehran.After the FBI evidently sought again to get the straightforward answer it was seeking, however, Arbabsiar is quoted as saying: “He wants you to kill this guy.” The informant then presents a fanciful plan to bomb an imaginary restaurant in Washington where Arbabsiar was told the Saudi ambassador liked to dine twice a week and where many “like, American people” would be present. “You want me to do it outside or in the restaurant?” asks the informant, to which question the Iranian-American replies, “Doesn’t matter how you do it.” At another point in the conversation, Arbabsiar goes further, saying, “They want that guy done. If the hundred go with him, fuck ‘em.”
These statements appear at first blush to be conclusive evidence that Arbabsiar and his Iranian overseers were contracting for the assassination of Jubeir, regardless of lives lost. But there are two crucial questions that the FBI account leaves unanswered: Was Arbabsiar speaking on behalf of the Qods Force or some element of it? And if he was, was he talking about a plan that was to go into effect as soon as possible or was it understood that they were talking about a contingency plan that would only be carried out under specific circumstances?
The deposition includes several instances of Arbabsiar’s bragging about a cousin who is a general, out of uniform and involved in covert external operations, including in Iraq — clearly implying that he belongs to the Qods Force. Arbabsiar is said to have claimed that the cousin and another Iranian official gave him funds for his contacts with the drug cartel. “I got the money coming,” he says. Subsequently, in one of the most extensive quotations from the recorded conversations, Arbabsiar says, “This is politics, so these people they pay this government…he’s got the, got the government behind him…he’s not paying from his pocket.” The FBI narrative identifies the person referred to here as Arbabsiar’s cousin, a Qods Force officer later named as Abdul Reza Shahlai, but again, there is not a single direct quotation backing the claim. And the reference to “these people” who “pay this government” suggests that “he” is connected to a group with illicit financial ties to government officials.
This excerpt could be particularly significant in light of press reports quoting a US law enforcement official saying that Arbabsiar had offered “tons of opium” to the drug cartel and that he and the informant had discussed what the New York Times called a “side deal” on the Iranian-held narcotics. [3] If these reports are accurate, it seems possible that Arbabsiar approached Los Zetas on behalf of Iranians who control a portion of the opium being smuggled through Iran from Afghanistan, while seeking to impress the drug cartel operative with his claim to have close ties to the Qods Force through Shahlai. But if the DEA informant then pressed him to authenticate his Qods Force connection, he may have begun discussing covert operations against Iran’s enemies in North America.
The only alleged evidence that Arbabsiar was speaking for Shahlai and the Qods Force is Arbabsiar’s own confession, summarized in the criminal complaint. But, at minimum, that testimony was provided after he had been arrested and had a strong interest in telling the FBI what it wanted to hear.
The deposition makes much of a series of three phone conversations on October 4, 5 and 7 between Arbabsiar and someone who Arbabsiar tells his FBI handlers is Gholam Shakuri, presenting them as confirmation of the involvement of Qods Force officers in the assassination scheme. But the FBI apparently had no way of ascertaining whether the person to whom Arababsiar was talking was actually Shakuri. After the October 4 call, for example, the FBI account merely records that Arbabsiar “indicated that the person he was speaking with was Shakuri.”
On their face, moreover, these conversations prove nothing. In the first of the three calls, the person at the other end of the line, whom Arbabsiar identifies to his FBI contact as Shakuri but whose identity is not otherwise established, asks, “What news…what did you do about the building?” The FBI agent again suggests, “based on my training, experience and participation in this investigation,” that these queries were a “reference to the plot to murder the Ambassador and a question about its status.”
But Arbabsiar is said to have claimed in his confession that he was instructed by Shakuri to use the code word “Chevrolet” to refer to the plot to kill the ambassador. In a second recorded conversation, Arbabsiar immediately says, “I wanted to tell you the Chevrolet is ready, it’s ready, uh, to be done. I should continue, right?” After further exchange, the man purported to be “Shakuri” says, “So buy it, buy it.” Despite the obvious invocation of a code word, it remains unclear what Arbabsiar was to “buy.” “Chevrolet” could actually have been a reference to either a drug-related deal or a generic plan having to do with Saudi and other targets.
In a third recorded conversation on October 7, both Arbabsiar and “Shakuri” refer to a demand by a purported cartel figure for another $50,000 on top of the original $100,000 transferred by wire earlier. But there is no other evidence of such a demand. It appears to be a mere device of the FBI to get “Shakuri” on record as talking about the $100,000. And here it should be recalled that the account in the deposition shows that the transfer of the $100,000 had been agreed on before any indication of agreement on a plan to kill the ambassador.
The invocation of a fictional demand for $50,000, along with the dramatic difference between the first conversation and the second and third conversations, suggests yet another possibility: The second and third conversations were set up in advance by Arbabsiar to provide a transcript to bolster the administration’s case.
Terrorist Plot or Deterrence Strategy?
Even if Qods Forces officials indeed directed Arbabsiar to contact the Los Zetas cartel, it cannot be assumed that they intended to carry out one or more terrorist attacks in the United States. The killing of a foreign ambassador in Washington (not to speak of additional attacks on Saudi and Israeli buildings), if linked to Iran, would invite swift and massive US military retaliation. If, on the other hand, the Qods Force men instructed Arbabsiar to conduct surveillance of those targets and prepare contingency plans for hitting them if Iran were attacked, the whole story begins to make more sense.Iran lacks the conventional means to deter attack by a powerful adversary. In its decades-long standoffs with the United States and Israel, amidst recurrent talk of “preemptive” strikes by those powers, Iran has relied on threats of proxy retaliation against US and allied state targets in the Middle East. [4] The Iranian military support for Lebanon’s Hizballah, in particular, is widely recognized as prompted primarily by Iran’s need to deter US and Israeli attack. [5]
In one case in 1994-1995, Saudi Arabian Shi‘i militants carried out surveillance of potential US military and diplomatic targets in Saudi Arabia, in a way that was quickly noticed by US and Saudi intelligence. [6] Although the consensus among US intelligence analysts was that Iran was preparing for a terrorist attack, Ronald Neumann, then the State Department’s intelligence officer for Iran and Iraq, noted that Iran had done the same thing whenever US-Iranian tensions had risen. He suggested that Iran could be using the surveillance for deterrence, to let Washington know that its interests in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere would be in danger if Iran were attacked. [7]
Unfortunately for Iran’s deterrent strategy, however, Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda was also carrying out surveillance of US bases in Saudi Arabia, and in November 1995 and again in June 1996, that group bombed two facilities housing US servicemen. The bombing of Khobar Towers in June 1996, which killed 19 US soldiers and one Saudi Arabian, was blamed by the Clinton administration’s FBI and CIA leadership on Iranian-sponsored Shi‘a from Saudi Arabia, with prodding from Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, despite the fact that bin Laden claimed responsibility not once but twice, in interviews with the London-based newspaper, al-Quds al-‘Arabi. [8]
Hani al-Sayigh, one of the Saudi Arabian Shi‘a accused by the Saudi and US governments of conspiring to attack the Khobar Towers, admitted to Assistant Attorney General Eric Dubelier, who interviewed him at a Canadian detention facility in May 1997, that he had participated in the surveillance of US military targets in Saudi Arabia on behalf of Iranian intelligence. But, according to the FBI report on the interview, al-Sayigh insisted that Iran had never intended to attack any of those sites unless it was first attacked by the United States. And when Dubelier asked a question later in the interview that was based on the premise that the surveillance effort was preparation for a terrorist attack, al-Sayigh corrected him. [9]
With threats of an Israeli or US bombing attack on Iran, with Saudi complicity, mounting since the mid-2000s, a similar campaign of surveillance of Saudi and Israeli targets in North America would fit the framework of what the Pentagon has called Iran’s “asymmetric warfare doctrine.” If Arbabsiar spoke of such a campaign in his initial meeting with the DEA informant, he certainly would have piqued the interest of FBI counter-terrorism personnel. And this scenario would also explain why the series of meetings in late June and the first half of July did not produce a single statement by Arbabsiar that the administration could quote to advance its case that the Iranian-American was interested in assassinating Adel al-Jubeir or carrying out other acts of terrorism.
A plan to conduct surveillance and be ready to act on contingency plans would also explain why someone as lacking in relevant experience and skills as Arbabsiar might have been acceptable to the Qods Force. Not only would the mission not have required absolute secrecy; it would have been based on the assumption that the surveillance would become known to US intelligence relatively quickly, as did the monitoring of US targets in Saudi Arabia in 1994-1995.
The Qods Force officials were certainly well aware that the Drug Enforcement Agency had penetrated various Mexican drug cartels, in some cases even at the very top level. US court proceedings involving Mexican drug traffickers who were highly placed in the Sinaloa drug cartel between 2009 and early 2011 reveal that the US made deals with leaders of the cartel to report what they knew about rival cartel operations in return for a hands-off approach to their drug trafficking. [10] Further underlining the degree to which the cartels were honeycombed with people on the US payroll, the DEA informant in this case was not merely posing as a drug trafficker but is reportedly an actual associate of Los Zetas with access to its upper echelons, who has been given immunity from prosecution to cooperate with the DEA. [11]
When Did Arbabsiar Become Part of the Sting?
The Obama administration’s account of the alleged Iranian plot has Arbabsiar suddenly changing from terrorist conspirator to active collaborator with the FBI upon his September 29 arrest at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. He is said to have provided a confession immediately upon being apprehended, after waiving his right to a lawyer, and then to have waived that right repeatedly again while being interviewed by the FBI. Then Arbabsiar cooperated in making the series of secretly recorded phone calls to someone he identified as Shakuri.For someone facing such serious charges to provide the details with which to make the case against him, while renouncing benefit of counsel, is odd, to say the least. The official story raises questions not only about what agreement was reached between Arbabsiar and the FBI to ensure his cooperation but about when that agreement was reached.
One clue that Arbabsiar was brought into the sting operation well before his arrest is the DEA informant’s demand in a September 20 phone conversation with Arbabsiar in Tehran that he either come up with half the $1.5 million total fee or come to Mexico to be the guarantee that the full amount would be paid.
Yet the FBI account of that conversation shows Arbabsiar telling the informant, without even consulting with his contacts in Tehran, “I’m gonna go over there [in] two [or] three days.” Later in the same evening, he calls back to ask how long he would need to remain in Mexico. Even if Arbabsiar were as feckless as some reports have suggested, he would certainly not have agreed so readily to put his fate in the hands of the murderous Los Zetas cartel — unless he knew that he was not really in danger, because the US government would intercept him and bring him to the United States. Making the episode even stranger, Arbabsiar’s confession claims that when he told Shakuri about the purported Los Zetas demand, Shakuri refused to provide any more money to the cartel, advised him against going to Mexico and warned him that if he did so, he would be on his own.
Further supporting the conclusion that Arbabsiar had become part of the sting operation before his arrest is the fact there was no reason for the FBI to pose the demand — through the DEA informant — for more money or Arbabsiar’s presence in Mexico except to provide an excuse to get him out of Iran, so he could provide a full confession implicating the Qods Force and be the centerpiece of the case against Iran.
The larger aim of the FBI sting operation, which ABC News has reported was dubbed Operation Red Coalition, was clearly to link the alleged assassination plot to Qods Force officers. The logical moment for the FBI to have recruited the Iranian-American would have been right after the FBI recorded him talking about wiring money to the bank account and casually approving the idea of bombing a restaurant and before his planned departure from Mexico for Iran. The only way to ensure that Arbabsiar would come back, of course, would be to offer him a substantial amount of money to serve as an informant for the FBI during his stay in Iran, which he would receive only upon returning. If Arbabsiar had already been enlisted, of course, it would also mean the keystone of the case — the wiring of $100,000 to a secret FBI bank account — was a part of the FBI sting.
FBI Trickery in Terrorism Cases
FBI deceit in constructing a case for an Iranian terror plot should come as no surprise, given its record of domestic terrorism prosecutions based on sting operations involving entrapment and skullduggery. Central to these stings has been the creation of fictional terrorist plots by the FBI itself. In 2006 the “Gonzales Guidelines” for the use of FBI informants removed previous prohibitions on actions to “initiate a plan or strategy to commit a federal, state or local offense.” [12]Perhaps the most notorious of all these domestic terrorism sting operations is the case in which Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain, leaders of their Albany, New York mosque, were sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for allegedly laundering profits from the sale of a shoulder-launched missile for a Pakistani militant group that was planning to assassinate a Pakistani diplomat in New York City.
In fact, there was no such terrorist plot, and the alleged crime was the result of an elaborate FBI scam directed against two innocent men. [13] It began when an FBI informant pretending to be a Pakistani businessman insinuated himself into Hossain’s life and extended him a $50,000 loan for his pizza parlor. Only months after the informant had begun loaning the money did he show Hossain a shoulder-launched missile, and suggest that he was also selling arms to his “Muslim brothers.” It was a devious form of entrapment; the prosecutors later argued that Hossain should have known the loan could have come from money made in the sale of weapons to terrorists and was therefore guilty of money laundering.
The FBI approach to entrapping Hossain’s friend Aref was even more underhanded. Aref was never even made aware of the missile or the phony story of the illegal arms sale. But on one occasion, when he was present to witness the transfer of loan money, what was later said to have been the missile’s trigger system was left on a table in the room. Prosecutors then argued the theory that Aref had seen the trigger, which looks much like a staple gun, and thus had become part of a conspiracy to “assist in money laundering.”
Many other domestic terrorism cases have involved deceptive tactics and economic inducements deployed by the FBI to involve American Muslims in fictional terrorist plots. The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University’s Law School found more than 20 terrorism cases that involved some combination of “paid informants, selection of investigation based on perceived religious identity, [and] a plot that was created by the government.” [14] This history makes it clear that the Justice Department and FBI are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to fabricate terrorism cases against targeted individuals, and that misrepresenting these individuals’ intentions and actual behavior has long been standard practice. The trickery and deceit in past “counter-terrorism” sting operations provides further reason to question the veracity of the Obama administration’s allegations in the bizarre case of Manssor Arbabsiar.
Endnotes
[1] The full text of the “amended criminal complaint” is online at: http://www.jdsupra.com/post/documentViewer.aspx?fid=a334ea94-9f4f-4364-8…[2] See New York Times, October 12, 2011 and Reuters, October 12, 2011.
[3] See New York Times, October 12, 2011 and Bloomberg, October 12, 2011.
[4] For an official US recognition of Iran’s “assymetric warfare doctrine” as a tool of deterrence of “any would-be invader,” see Department of Defense, Unclassified Report on Military Power of Iran, April 2010, p. 1.
[5] See, for example, Michael Young, “Another Israel-Hezbollah War?” Middle East Security at Harvard, National Security Study Program, February 28, 2008: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/2008/02/another_israel_hezbollah_war/
[6] See Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1997 and Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 276.
[7] Gareth Porter, “US Officials Leaked a False Story Blaming Iran,” Inter Press Service, June 24, 2009.
[8] Gareth Porter, “FBI Ignored Compelling Evidence of Bin Laden Role,” Inter Press Service, June 25, 2009.
[9] Gareth Porter, “US May Have Concealed Deterrent Aim of Iranian Plan,” Inter Press Service, October 21, 2011.
[10] New York Times, October 24, 2011.
[11] So said ProPublica reporter Sebastian Rotella in his podcast of October 18, 2011, online at: http://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/podcast-sebastian-rotella-on-the-…
[12] Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Targeted and Entrapped: Manufacturing the “Homegrown Threat” in the United States (New York, 2011), p. 14.
[13] This account of the case is drawn from Petra Bartosiewicz, “To Catch a Terrorist,” Harper’s (August 2011).
[14] Targeted and Entrapped, pp. 50-52, fn 17.
Filed under:
As If There Is No Occupation
The Limits of Palestinian Authority Strategy
by Nu’man Kanafani | published September 22, 2011
For many months, the streets of downtown Ramallah, seat of the Palestinian Authority (PA), have literally been heaps of earth. Workers have labored intensively to replace water and sewage pipes, repave roads, lay beautiful carved stones at roadsides and install thick chains along the edges of sidewalks in order to better separate pedestrian and automotive traffic. Shopkeepers have been told to reduce the size of their storefront signs; specially designed electricity poles jut skyward. Not every town resident is impressed. As they navigate the mounds of dirt, cynics joke: “The PA is covering the road to self-determination in asphalt.” “We have the sewers; all that’s left is the sovereignty.” “The streets of Ramallah are paved with white stones — who needs Jerusalem?”
Behind the ironic jests of urban intellectuals, and the despair of Palestinians who watch the daily expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, lies a real dilemma for the PA. Some improvement of infrastructure is necessary to facilitate economic growth and ease living conditions for West Bankers, but the undertaking of such projects can also be taken as tacit PA recognition of Israel’s “facts on the ground.”
Take, for example, the road between Ramallah and Bethlehem. The direct route between these two important West Bank cities goes through Jerusalem and is just over 18 miles long. But Jerusalem is a forbidden city for West Bank Palestinians, who must take an alternative path, a narrow road winding for 34 miles over a treacherous mountain pass. Palestinians call it Wadi al-Nar (Hell Valley). Improving the road would make it safer, bringing obvious economic benefits, but could also be taken to imply that the PA accepts Israel’s decree that Jerusalem is a no-go zone for West Bankers. Given that the Palestinian national movement envisions East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, the question is sensitive indeed. Should the PA widen the road or abstain? Should the PA renovate the heart of Ramallah, knowing that it lacks true sovereignty there and cannot prevent Israeli army jeeps (or tanks) from driving downtown and back out at will?
What is this “Fayyadism”? At one level it is personal. It refers to merits rarely attributed to a Palestinian (or any Arab) politician: integrity, honesty and competence. Salam Fayyad, a former International Monetary Fund economist, is lauded for his understated personal style, a quiet demeanor that Friedman hastens to compare favorably to that of Yasser Arafat. As political theory and practice, however, Fayyadism is a far more controversial. The political scientist Nathan Brown sums up many of the objections in the title of his essay on Palestinian politics: “Fayyad Is Not the Problem, but Fayyadism Is Not the Solution to Palestine’s Political Crisis.” [3]
Fayyad’s political vision, underwritten by ‘Abbas, is to reverse the time-honored sequence of priorities for the Palestinian national movement. Previously, the Palestinians have demanded that Israel and the international community recognize and protect their rights, whether the right of return for people made refugees in 1948 or the collective right to self-determination, before getting involved in the nitty-gritty of governance. In the eyes of ‘Abbas and Fayyad, this strategy has not only failed to secure the Palestinians’ basic national rights, but has also brought disaster to the Palestinian cause. As the weaker party by far, the Palestinians cannot beat Israel on either the physical or diplomatic battlefields, so they should stop trying. As Fayyad’s sympathizers are fond of saying, “If you want to defeat Mike Tyson, you don’t invite him to the boxing ring but to the chessboard.”
The new strategy has several elements, including the creation of state institutions before the attainment of sovereignty. The idea is that having properly functioning institutions is a precondition for, rather than a consequence of, political independence. National rights can be secured by a proven record of discipline in building and maintaining these institutions and by honoring signed agreements. Rather than waiting for peace to bring the long-awaited economic dividends, relative prosperity and the rule of law will bring peace.
The most controversial element of the new paradigm is that it assumes the abandonment of all forms of armed struggle as a means of pressuring Israel to accept Palestinian rights. President ‘Abbas tirelessly assures all who want to hear it, and even those who do not, that a “third armed intifada” is out of the question. His approach posits that, if the PA builds institutions, revives the economy and adheres to contractual agreements in letter and spirit (even while the other side does not), international and Arab pressure will force Israel to recognize Palestinian rights. These rights, as ‘Abbas understands them, are clearly stated in the Arab Peace Initiative adopted by the Arab League in 2002: The Palestinian side will end the struggle in return for an independent, economically viable and sovereign Palestinian state on the basis of the pre-1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a “just settlement” of the refugee problem. The PA has gone much further, making clear that it is ready to accept land swaps, so that West Bank settlement blocs can be annexed to Israel. Among still other concessions, ‘Abbas and his team have indicated they will also agree to a purely symbolic return of refugees to Israel proper and borders guarded by international forces.
And what about Hamas, the Islamist party that since mid-2007 has been ruling the besieged Gaza Strip? Hamas has not renounced “armed struggle” as a means of securing Palestinian rights and has not recognized Israel in the unambiguous language the US and its allies demand. But the devotees of Fayyadism are not worried: When their new strategy ushers in economic wellbeing and a resolution to the conflict, Gaza will fall by itself, like an apple from the tree, into their hands.
Most of these preconditions have been, more or less, achieved. The lawlessness in West Bank cities began to subside in 2005, largely because activists of the intifada were put on the PA’s payroll. To stop Israel’s military interventions, the PA maintained close security cooperation with the occupying power. This level of cooperation has subjected the PA to harsh criticism, particularly because it has not been totally successful in stopping the Israeli army’s incursions, the latest of which was a large-scale sally in the middle of the month of Ramadan.
Fayyad and ‘Abbas have attempted since 2007 to generate momentum in the West Bank for the establishment of the state of Palestine, speaking in terms of anticipation and preparation. Over and over, while cutting ribbons on projects large and small in almost every village in the West Bank, Fayyad has repeated the message: “We ought to be ready, and we will no longer accept open-ended negotiation, with respect to either time or ultimate goal.” He has tried to mobilize Palestinians behind his vision for the country and, at the same time, worked to build up his own constituency after the dismal finish of his Third Way party in the 2006 legislative elections.
The mobilization has taken an official textual form as well. In August 2009, Ramallah’s Interim Thirteenth Government announced its program under the telling title: “Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State.” The program specified the steps that each ministry and PA agency would take to ready itself for the establishment of the state of Palestine by 2011. In mid-April, the same government published the sixth National Development Plan (2011-2013) under the no less revealing title: “Establishing the State, Building Our Future.”
What is the outcome of all this activity? The PA can brag about a number of achievements. The gross domestic product has seen remarkable growth, particularly in the West Bank. Real GDP growth in the Palestinian territories was no less than 9.3 percent in 2010, at a time when the average rate in the Middle East and North Africa was less than 4 percent. In contrast to previous years, the PA was able to pay the salaries of its 146,000 employees in the West Bank almost on time (the good record of meeting payroll obligations came to an end in July). Last, but not least, the UN Development Program, the IMF, the World Bank and the European Union have all issued reports praising the PA for its commitment, financial transparency, delivery of public services and economic policies. The IMF has even labeled the PA’s finances a model for developing countries in terms of transparency.
This rosy picture hides several worrisome trends, however, particularly on the economic front. Worse, the PA has little, if anything, to brag about on the political front. The goal of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state does not appear any closer to fruition or even any more attainable.
The economy of the West Bank and Gaza suffers from huge resource gaps, with regard to investment and commodity imports: domestic savings fall 44 percent short of investment, and imports exceed exports by 50 percent (both ratios are relative to GDP in 2009). These two gaps imply that the Palestinian economy consumes far more than it produces. The trade balance deficit exceeded $3 billion in 2010. In the past, these gaps were filled by the remittances of Palestinians working in Israel and the Gulf countries. But they are filled now mainly by foreign aid.
External aid creates conditions akin to those in oil-producing countries. Like oil revenue, aid is windfall money — what economists call “rent” — that allows countries to consume without producing. Dependency on rent leaves behind negative economic, as well as social and political, effects. Governments become less accountable to citizens because they do not have to collect taxes; services become something granted from on high rather than a public good, based on tough tradeoffs and paid for with collected taxes. On the economic level, the huge inflow of aid, along with the proximity of the West Bank and Gaza to the developed economy of Israel and the resulting distortions in prices and wages, explain why growth in the Palestinian territories has been almost exclusively confined to the service sector and construction of residential buildings. Services and trade account now for over 70 percent of the GDP in the West Bank and Gaza. The share of exports to GDP is only 12 percent, one of the lowest ratios in the lower middle-income countries of the world.
At the same time, foreign aid amounted to 47 percent of the total revenues of the PA’s current budget. Another 37 percent comes from the customs clearance money that Israel collects on the Palestinians’ behalf, by the terms of the 1994 Paris Protocol that is part of the Oslo accords. By right and by treaty, this money belongs to the Palestinians. But since the mid-1990s, and picking up with the outbreak of the 2000 intifada, Israel has impounded the funds every now and then as a punitive measure. (Israel transfers no money to the Hamas government in Gaza.) These two figures are sufficient to demonstrate the vulnerability of the PA’s finances. A delay (politically motivated, some suggest) in the arrival of aid from Arab countries in July forced the PA to pay only 50 percent of the salaries of its 146,000 public employees. The payroll amounts to $1.56 billion annually, accounting for 35 percent of the PA’s recurrent expenditures. When the extra 23,000 people employed by the Hamas government are included, public-sector employment accounts for about one quarter of total employment in the West Bank and Gaza.
The second problem looming on the horizon is the uneven distribution of the benefits of growth. The growth in GDP has not been accompanied by a parallel increase in employment or a reduction of poverty rates. Poverty is a major social problem, with 26 percent of Palestinian large families (and 38 percent of Gazans) spending less than $640 per month on basic needs in 2010. And despite the GDP growth of 2010, the official unemployment rate barely declined — falling by 0.6 percent in the West Bank and by less than 1 percent in Gaza. In 2010, the unemployment rate was as high as 24 percent overall (17 percent in the West Bank and 38 percent in Gaza).
The Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute estimates that the private sector needs to create no fewer than 30,000 new jobs every year just to keep the staggering unemployment rates constant. The estimate assumes that the present labor participation rate of 41 percent also remains constant. The labor participation rate is the proportion of the working-age population who are employed or unemployed and looking for a job. Palestine’s rate is very low compared with most middle-income countries, in which the average proportion is 60 percent.
It goes without saying that the Palestinian economy must generate far more than 30,000 jobs per annum if unemployment is to be reduced. When one considers the needs to limit the public-sector payroll, to absorb the 78,000 Palestinians currently working in Israel and Israeli settlements, and to allow for a rise in the labor participation ratio, the size of the challenge becomes even more obvious. The high overall unemployment rate masks still more causes for concern. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics labor market survey for the first quarter of 2011 reveals three alarming facts: Unemployment is highly concentrated in the 15-24 year-old age group. Unemployment among these young people is as high as 40 percent. Second, unemployment is precipitously high among university graduates — logged at 33 percent for graduates of teachers’ colleges, 24 percent for graduates in computer studies and 31 percent of graduates in mathematics and statistics. Third, unlike what pertains for men, the higher a woman’s education level, the harder it is for her to find a job.
It is hard to believe that Fayyad, the skilled ex-IMF economist, was not aware from the start of the “ceiling” that Israel’s occupation imposes on the Palestinian territories’ economic recovery. It seems, therefore, that all the talk of building institutions and economic booms was aimed at buying time. Fayyad hoped that if the PA stabilized the economy, demonstrated good will toward Israel and enforced law and order, then international pressure, particularly from the Obama administration, would persuade Israel to deliver an end to the occupation. The Europeans and the Arabs went along because none of them has a better strategy and all are tired of being “payers but not players” in the Israeli-Palestinian theater.
Fayyad can proclaim his mission accomplished with regard to institutional readiness. The PA has passed the world’s test with honors, and the examining committee was none less than the UN Development Program, the IMF, the World Bank and the EU. An IMF report in April declared that the PA is “now able to conduct the sound economic policies expected of a future well-functioning Palestinian state, given its solid track record in reforms and institution-building in the public finance and financial areas.” The World Bank used a slightly different formulation: “If the Palestinian Authority maintains its performance in institution-building and delivery of public services, it is well positioned for the establishment of a state at any point in the near future.” Some independent observers suggest that the process of building institutions was “more authoritarian than democratic,” [4] but the more powerful judges were willing to overlook such deficiencies.
Since when, however, has the creation of states been conditioned upon institutional readiness? Who asked South Sudan if it had properly transparent institutions before recognizing it as an independent entity? Were Kosovo’s adequate? And did either of these fledgling states need to demonstrate “economic viability” before being recognized by other countries? History affirms, almost without exception, that state creation is a purely political decision that has owed nothing to these other factors. Shortages of economic or institutional viability may have played a role in dissolving states, but not in creating them or drawing their borders.
The PA’s decision to advance a statehood bid at the UN is a desperate reaction, rather than a strategic move. It comes from despair at the Obama administration’s unwillingness to enforce its own vision of a negotiated settlement of the conflict. After fulfilling its part of the deal and meeting all the conditions laid down by the US, both in President Barack Obama’s public speeches and behind closed doors, the PA has discovered that the US will not come through. The strategy of Fayyadism has arrived at a dead end. The failure on the political front will kill off its economic and institutional vision. Throughout the buildup to the UN bid, the US did little more than threaten the Palestinians with a veto at the Security Council. And Israel decided that the PA’s appeal to the most multilateral organization on earth is a “unilateral” move for which the Palestinians should be punished. Little will change on the ground after September. The Palestinians will seek, and will probably get, the majority vote they seek at the UN General Assembly, and the US and key allies will remain in Israel’s corner. The result, at the diplomatic level, will be deadlock. And the PA will face more of the dilemmas it faced in Wadi al-Nar and downtown Ramallah. But the Middle East is changing and people in many Arab countries are insisting on having more say in their governments’ policies toward Israel. The Arab street will from now on play just as important a role as the Israeli street in deciding the direction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The pressure is mounting on Israel, no matter how invulnerable it looks now. It is far from obvious that Israel will be able to sustain the unprecedented no-state (and no-vote) non-solution it has imposed so far in the West Bank and Gaza.
Author’s Note: I would like to thank David Cobham for helpful comments and insights.
[2] Thomas Friedman, “Green Shoots in Palestine,” New York Times, August 4, 2009.
[3] Nathan Brown, “Fayyad Is Not the Problem, but Fayyadism Is Not the Solution to Palestine’s Political Crisis,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Commentary, September 17, 2010.
[4] Ibid.
Behind the ironic jests of urban intellectuals, and the despair of Palestinians who watch the daily expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, lies a real dilemma for the PA. Some improvement of infrastructure is necessary to facilitate economic growth and ease living conditions for West Bankers, but the undertaking of such projects can also be taken as tacit PA recognition of Israel’s “facts on the ground.”
Take, for example, the road between Ramallah and Bethlehem. The direct route between these two important West Bank cities goes through Jerusalem and is just over 18 miles long. But Jerusalem is a forbidden city for West Bank Palestinians, who must take an alternative path, a narrow road winding for 34 miles over a treacherous mountain pass. Palestinians call it Wadi al-Nar (Hell Valley). Improving the road would make it safer, bringing obvious economic benefits, but could also be taken to imply that the PA accepts Israel’s decree that Jerusalem is a no-go zone for West Bankers. Given that the Palestinian national movement envisions East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, the question is sensitive indeed. Should the PA widen the road or abstain? Should the PA renovate the heart of Ramallah, knowing that it lacks true sovereignty there and cannot prevent Israeli army jeeps (or tanks) from driving downtown and back out at will?
A New Paradigm
Mahmoud ‘Abbas, the PA’s nominal president, and Salam Fayyad, its nominal premier and finance minister, have decided to rebuild the dangerous Ramallah-Bethlehem road and spruce up the city center. (‘Abbas’ term as president expired in 2009, but has since been arbitrarily extended. Fayyad heads the PA’s appointed administrative apparatus in the West Bank; the premier and finance minister of the elected Hamas government sit besieged in Gaza.) They are undeterred by critics who argue that the PA roads are “cementing the Israeli occupation” and are complementary to the Israeli-built network of bypass roads linking the West Bank settlements to each other and to Israel proper. [1] The choice to upgrade the infrastructure symbolizes the entirety of the new approach adopted by ‘Abbas, and particularly Fayyad. In 2009, the pundit Thomas Friedman called it “Fayyadism,” “the most exciting new idea in Arab governance ever.” [2]What is this “Fayyadism”? At one level it is personal. It refers to merits rarely attributed to a Palestinian (or any Arab) politician: integrity, honesty and competence. Salam Fayyad, a former International Monetary Fund economist, is lauded for his understated personal style, a quiet demeanor that Friedman hastens to compare favorably to that of Yasser Arafat. As political theory and practice, however, Fayyadism is a far more controversial. The political scientist Nathan Brown sums up many of the objections in the title of his essay on Palestinian politics: “Fayyad Is Not the Problem, but Fayyadism Is Not the Solution to Palestine’s Political Crisis.” [3]
Fayyad’s political vision, underwritten by ‘Abbas, is to reverse the time-honored sequence of priorities for the Palestinian national movement. Previously, the Palestinians have demanded that Israel and the international community recognize and protect their rights, whether the right of return for people made refugees in 1948 or the collective right to self-determination, before getting involved in the nitty-gritty of governance. In the eyes of ‘Abbas and Fayyad, this strategy has not only failed to secure the Palestinians’ basic national rights, but has also brought disaster to the Palestinian cause. As the weaker party by far, the Palestinians cannot beat Israel on either the physical or diplomatic battlefields, so they should stop trying. As Fayyad’s sympathizers are fond of saying, “If you want to defeat Mike Tyson, you don’t invite him to the boxing ring but to the chessboard.”
The new strategy has several elements, including the creation of state institutions before the attainment of sovereignty. The idea is that having properly functioning institutions is a precondition for, rather than a consequence of, political independence. National rights can be secured by a proven record of discipline in building and maintaining these institutions and by honoring signed agreements. Rather than waiting for peace to bring the long-awaited economic dividends, relative prosperity and the rule of law will bring peace.
The most controversial element of the new paradigm is that it assumes the abandonment of all forms of armed struggle as a means of pressuring Israel to accept Palestinian rights. President ‘Abbas tirelessly assures all who want to hear it, and even those who do not, that a “third armed intifada” is out of the question. His approach posits that, if the PA builds institutions, revives the economy and adheres to contractual agreements in letter and spirit (even while the other side does not), international and Arab pressure will force Israel to recognize Palestinian rights. These rights, as ‘Abbas understands them, are clearly stated in the Arab Peace Initiative adopted by the Arab League in 2002: The Palestinian side will end the struggle in return for an independent, economically viable and sovereign Palestinian state on the basis of the pre-1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a “just settlement” of the refugee problem. The PA has gone much further, making clear that it is ready to accept land swaps, so that West Bank settlement blocs can be annexed to Israel. Among still other concessions, ‘Abbas and his team have indicated they will also agree to a purely symbolic return of refugees to Israel proper and borders guarded by international forces.
And what about Hamas, the Islamist party that since mid-2007 has been ruling the besieged Gaza Strip? Hamas has not renounced “armed struggle” as a means of securing Palestinian rights and has not recognized Israel in the unambiguous language the US and its allies demand. But the devotees of Fayyadism are not worried: When their new strategy ushers in economic wellbeing and a resolution to the conflict, Gaza will fall by itself, like an apple from the tree, into their hands.
Preconditions
It has been clear from the beginning, however, that deploying the new strategy — and, eventually, checkmating Israel on the chessboard — would require Israel’s consent. Israel would have to step back from forward deployments to allow PA security forces to rein in the lawlessness that prevailed after the second intifada in West Bank cities. It would have to limit, if not totally stop, its army’s frequent incursions into PA-administered areas in order that the PA might enjoy some credibility and popular respect. Finally, Israel would have to ease its restrictions on the movement of people and goods and guarantee the flow of clearance money (the taxes that Israel collects on behalf of the PA and stopped transferring in full to PA coffers at the beginning of 2006). The success of the new strategy also required an understanding with the international community to secure the continuous flow of aid and to train the PA’s security personnel, both to enforce law and order and to put an effective end to militant operations against Israel and Israeli settlers.Most of these preconditions have been, more or less, achieved. The lawlessness in West Bank cities began to subside in 2005, largely because activists of the intifada were put on the PA’s payroll. To stop Israel’s military interventions, the PA maintained close security cooperation with the occupying power. This level of cooperation has subjected the PA to harsh criticism, particularly because it has not been totally successful in stopping the Israeli army’s incursions, the latest of which was a large-scale sally in the middle of the month of Ramadan.
Fayyad and ‘Abbas have attempted since 2007 to generate momentum in the West Bank for the establishment of the state of Palestine, speaking in terms of anticipation and preparation. Over and over, while cutting ribbons on projects large and small in almost every village in the West Bank, Fayyad has repeated the message: “We ought to be ready, and we will no longer accept open-ended negotiation, with respect to either time or ultimate goal.” He has tried to mobilize Palestinians behind his vision for the country and, at the same time, worked to build up his own constituency after the dismal finish of his Third Way party in the 2006 legislative elections.
The mobilization has taken an official textual form as well. In August 2009, Ramallah’s Interim Thirteenth Government announced its program under the telling title: “Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State.” The program specified the steps that each ministry and PA agency would take to ready itself for the establishment of the state of Palestine by 2011. In mid-April, the same government published the sixth National Development Plan (2011-2013) under the no less revealing title: “Establishing the State, Building Our Future.”
What is the outcome of all this activity? The PA can brag about a number of achievements. The gross domestic product has seen remarkable growth, particularly in the West Bank. Real GDP growth in the Palestinian territories was no less than 9.3 percent in 2010, at a time when the average rate in the Middle East and North Africa was less than 4 percent. In contrast to previous years, the PA was able to pay the salaries of its 146,000 employees in the West Bank almost on time (the good record of meeting payroll obligations came to an end in July). Last, but not least, the UN Development Program, the IMF, the World Bank and the European Union have all issued reports praising the PA for its commitment, financial transparency, delivery of public services and economic policies. The IMF has even labeled the PA’s finances a model for developing countries in terms of transparency.
This rosy picture hides several worrisome trends, however, particularly on the economic front. Worse, the PA has little, if anything, to brag about on the political front. The goal of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state does not appear any closer to fruition or even any more attainable.
Resource Gaps
The economic concerns can be classified under two headings: sustainability and distribution of gains across society. The aggregate GDP growth, as an April 2011 World Bank report puts it, “does not appear sustainable. It reflects recovery from the very low base reached during the second intifada and is still mainly confined to the non-tradable sector and primarily donor-driven.” Palestinians are better off than they were in 2006, in other words, but worse off than they were before the fall of 2000. Per capita GDP in the West Bank and Gaza was $1,500 in 2010, about 8 percent lower, in real terms, than the level in 1999. And without heavy external subventions, the growth would be substantially less: According to OECD data, total foreign aid to the Palestinian territories amounted to $3.03 billion in 2009, or about 60 percent of the GDP.The economy of the West Bank and Gaza suffers from huge resource gaps, with regard to investment and commodity imports: domestic savings fall 44 percent short of investment, and imports exceed exports by 50 percent (both ratios are relative to GDP in 2009). These two gaps imply that the Palestinian economy consumes far more than it produces. The trade balance deficit exceeded $3 billion in 2010. In the past, these gaps were filled by the remittances of Palestinians working in Israel and the Gulf countries. But they are filled now mainly by foreign aid.
External aid creates conditions akin to those in oil-producing countries. Like oil revenue, aid is windfall money — what economists call “rent” — that allows countries to consume without producing. Dependency on rent leaves behind negative economic, as well as social and political, effects. Governments become less accountable to citizens because they do not have to collect taxes; services become something granted from on high rather than a public good, based on tough tradeoffs and paid for with collected taxes. On the economic level, the huge inflow of aid, along with the proximity of the West Bank and Gaza to the developed economy of Israel and the resulting distortions in prices and wages, explain why growth in the Palestinian territories has been almost exclusively confined to the service sector and construction of residential buildings. Services and trade account now for over 70 percent of the GDP in the West Bank and Gaza. The share of exports to GDP is only 12 percent, one of the lowest ratios in the lower middle-income countries of the world.
At the same time, foreign aid amounted to 47 percent of the total revenues of the PA’s current budget. Another 37 percent comes from the customs clearance money that Israel collects on the Palestinians’ behalf, by the terms of the 1994 Paris Protocol that is part of the Oslo accords. By right and by treaty, this money belongs to the Palestinians. But since the mid-1990s, and picking up with the outbreak of the 2000 intifada, Israel has impounded the funds every now and then as a punitive measure. (Israel transfers no money to the Hamas government in Gaza.) These two figures are sufficient to demonstrate the vulnerability of the PA’s finances. A delay (politically motivated, some suggest) in the arrival of aid from Arab countries in July forced the PA to pay only 50 percent of the salaries of its 146,000 public employees. The payroll amounts to $1.56 billion annually, accounting for 35 percent of the PA’s recurrent expenditures. When the extra 23,000 people employed by the Hamas government are included, public-sector employment accounts for about one quarter of total employment in the West Bank and Gaza.
The second problem looming on the horizon is the uneven distribution of the benefits of growth. The growth in GDP has not been accompanied by a parallel increase in employment or a reduction of poverty rates. Poverty is a major social problem, with 26 percent of Palestinian large families (and 38 percent of Gazans) spending less than $640 per month on basic needs in 2010. And despite the GDP growth of 2010, the official unemployment rate barely declined — falling by 0.6 percent in the West Bank and by less than 1 percent in Gaza. In 2010, the unemployment rate was as high as 24 percent overall (17 percent in the West Bank and 38 percent in Gaza).
The Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute estimates that the private sector needs to create no fewer than 30,000 new jobs every year just to keep the staggering unemployment rates constant. The estimate assumes that the present labor participation rate of 41 percent also remains constant. The labor participation rate is the proportion of the working-age population who are employed or unemployed and looking for a job. Palestine’s rate is very low compared with most middle-income countries, in which the average proportion is 60 percent.
It goes without saying that the Palestinian economy must generate far more than 30,000 jobs per annum if unemployment is to be reduced. When one considers the needs to limit the public-sector payroll, to absorb the 78,000 Palestinians currently working in Israel and Israeli settlements, and to allow for a rise in the labor participation ratio, the size of the challenge becomes even more obvious. The high overall unemployment rate masks still more causes for concern. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics labor market survey for the first quarter of 2011 reveals three alarming facts: Unemployment is highly concentrated in the 15-24 year-old age group. Unemployment among these young people is as high as 40 percent. Second, unemployment is precipitously high among university graduates — logged at 33 percent for graduates of teachers’ colleges, 24 percent for graduates in computer studies and 31 percent of graduates in mathematics and statistics. Third, unlike what pertains for men, the higher a woman’s education level, the harder it is for her to find a job.
The Ceiling
The above economic problems are not all structural, although some definitely are. The call to build up the economy as if the occupation does not exist, a call that was eagerly promoted and generously financed by international actors, has faded away. There is, after all, a limit on how much an economy can grow when 60 percent of its rightful natural resources (located in Area C, the portion of the West Bank still under full Israel control) are beyond its grasp. The severe policymaking constraints on the PA and the extraordinary degree of risk and uncertainty, even regarding as simple a thing as moving from one West Bank village to another, express themselves in the negative economic trends. “We hit the ceiling,” PA officials are apt to say. “Not much more can be done for the economy under the present constraints.” The World Bank took its time but finally came to the same conclusion. “Ultimately, sustainable economic growth in West Bank and Gaza can only be underpinned by a vibrant private sector,” says the Bank in an April 2011 report. “The latter will not rebound significantly while Israeli restrictions on access to natural resources and markets remain in place, and as long as investors are deterred by the increased cost of business associated with the closure regime.” With its myriad of checkpoints, and the ability to erect more at any moment, Israel throws up constant obstacles to commerce and business travel.It is hard to believe that Fayyad, the skilled ex-IMF economist, was not aware from the start of the “ceiling” that Israel’s occupation imposes on the Palestinian territories’ economic recovery. It seems, therefore, that all the talk of building institutions and economic booms was aimed at buying time. Fayyad hoped that if the PA stabilized the economy, demonstrated good will toward Israel and enforced law and order, then international pressure, particularly from the Obama administration, would persuade Israel to deliver an end to the occupation. The Europeans and the Arabs went along because none of them has a better strategy and all are tired of being “payers but not players” in the Israeli-Palestinian theater.
Fayyad can proclaim his mission accomplished with regard to institutional readiness. The PA has passed the world’s test with honors, and the examining committee was none less than the UN Development Program, the IMF, the World Bank and the EU. An IMF report in April declared that the PA is “now able to conduct the sound economic policies expected of a future well-functioning Palestinian state, given its solid track record in reforms and institution-building in the public finance and financial areas.” The World Bank used a slightly different formulation: “If the Palestinian Authority maintains its performance in institution-building and delivery of public services, it is well positioned for the establishment of a state at any point in the near future.” Some independent observers suggest that the process of building institutions was “more authoritarian than democratic,” [4] but the more powerful judges were willing to overlook such deficiencies.
Since when, however, has the creation of states been conditioned upon institutional readiness? Who asked South Sudan if it had properly transparent institutions before recognizing it as an independent entity? Were Kosovo’s adequate? And did either of these fledgling states need to demonstrate “economic viability” before being recognized by other countries? History affirms, almost without exception, that state creation is a purely political decision that has owed nothing to these other factors. Shortages of economic or institutional viability may have played a role in dissolving states, but not in creating them or drawing their borders.
The PA’s decision to advance a statehood bid at the UN is a desperate reaction, rather than a strategic move. It comes from despair at the Obama administration’s unwillingness to enforce its own vision of a negotiated settlement of the conflict. After fulfilling its part of the deal and meeting all the conditions laid down by the US, both in President Barack Obama’s public speeches and behind closed doors, the PA has discovered that the US will not come through. The strategy of Fayyadism has arrived at a dead end. The failure on the political front will kill off its economic and institutional vision. Throughout the buildup to the UN bid, the US did little more than threaten the Palestinians with a veto at the Security Council. And Israel decided that the PA’s appeal to the most multilateral organization on earth is a “unilateral” move for which the Palestinians should be punished. Little will change on the ground after September. The Palestinians will seek, and will probably get, the majority vote they seek at the UN General Assembly, and the US and key allies will remain in Israel’s corner. The result, at the diplomatic level, will be deadlock. And the PA will face more of the dilemmas it faced in Wadi al-Nar and downtown Ramallah. But the Middle East is changing and people in many Arab countries are insisting on having more say in their governments’ policies toward Israel. The Arab street will from now on play just as important a role as the Israeli street in deciding the direction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The pressure is mounting on Israel, no matter how invulnerable it looks now. It is far from obvious that Israel will be able to sustain the unprecedented no-state (and no-vote) non-solution it has imposed so far in the West Bank and Gaza.
Author’s Note: I would like to thank David Cobham for helpful comments and insights.
Endnotes
[1] Nadia Hijab and Jesse Rosenfeld, “Palestinian Roads: Cementing Statehood or Israeli Annexation?” The Nation, April 30, 2010.[2] Thomas Friedman, “Green Shoots in Palestine,” New York Times, August 4, 2009.
[3] Nathan Brown, “Fayyad Is Not the Problem, but Fayyadism Is Not the Solution to Palestine’s Political Crisis,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Commentary, September 17, 2010.
[4] Ibid.
Filed under:
The Question of Palestine in Miniature
by The Editors | published September 16, 2011
The countdown to September 23 has begun. On that day, if he does not renege on his September 16 speech, Mahmoud ‘Abbas will present a formal request for full UN membership for a state of Palestine. The UN Security Council, which must approve such requests, will not do so, because the United States will act upon its repeated vows to exercise its veto. And then?
The world, by all indications, will denounce the Obama administration for rank hypocrisy. How can President Barack Obama deliver speech after speech endorsing Palestinian statehood in principle and then block it in practice? Several advisers to ‘Abbas, the nominal president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), think the embarrassment to the White House will be enough to make the point. Others want him to rub Obama’s nose in it, taking a request for upgraded non-member observer status to the General Assembly. When that proposal passes overwhelmingly, they insist, the PA will have declared its independence of the United States, specifically the US monopoly on the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” The Palestinians, meanwhile, might be one big step closer to full voting UN membership, since no polity seeking statehood would have achieved this status before. And they might win access to UN bodies like the International Criminal Court, where Palestinian claims against Israel could then be pursued directly. It would be, as these advisers like to say, istihqaq Aylul, loosely translated, “the September claim of our just due.” And then?
If the US, Israel and European states get their way, ‘Abbas will never face even the initial dilemma, because he will have been dissuaded from submitting a request to the world body in the first place. There have been frenetic diplomatic efforts to avert the Security Council scenario. The Obama administration has dispatched high-ranking officials to Ramallah bearing bludgeons hidden in bouquets of unspecified blandishment. In Washington, pro-Israel members of the House of Representatives have summoned a slew of witnesses to urge that US aid to the PA be slashed if ‘Abbas persists. At a September 14 hearing on the subject, Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) upped the ante: “I believe it is appropriate to point out that, should the Palestinians pursue their unilateralist course, the hundreds of millions of dollars in annual assistance that we have given them in recent years will likely be terminated.”
Berman and his colleagues echo Israel’s line of attack on the putative Palestinian initiative, which is not to oppose the idea of a Palestinian state, but to object that ‘Abbas proposes to act outside the framework of bilateral negotiations with Israel supervised by the US. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plans to make this case to the General Assembly on September 23, as the “unilateralist” PA argues its brief before the Security Council. Netanyahu must know the tenor of his plaints will fall on scornful ears. Israel has spent each of the 18 years since the conclusion of the Oslo accords with the Palestinians unilaterally violating their letter and intent, whether with continuous building of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, withholding of customs revenue from the PA or any number of other policies deepening the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. And the General Assembly delegates will know that it is he, not ‘Abbas, who has torpedoed the possibility of meaningful negotiations under the Oslo aegis, with his refusal to freeze settlement construction. So, to look reasonable, Netanyahu has indicated Israeli assent to an upgrade of the PA’s observer status. His real audience in New York will not be the General Assembly, but the mainstream American media, which he calculates will reproduce his broader message that if there is no peace in Israel-Palestine, the Palestinians, once again, are at fault.
European states are laboring, on the one hand, to help the US avoid the whole mess and, on the other hand, to craft some formulation for future Palestinian status at the UN that will not upset Washington but that ‘Abbas can present as an accomplishment. In the past, when ‘Abbas has hinted at maneuvers of which the US and Israel disapprove, he has not followed through, content with one promise or another or cowed by heavy pressure. Most notorious of all, at US-Israeli behest, he agreed to defer a UN Human Rights Council vote on the Goldstone report, the investigation of the 2008-2009 Gaza war that could have been used to support war crimes cases against Israeli officials. With this record in mind, there was great skepticism into early September that ‘Abbas would push matters so far on the statehood bid, but now all seem to think he is serious. The rush for damage control is on: In Israel, the government continues to inveigh against the PA even as on September 15 it approved the PA’s application to purchase riot gear for its security forces. The PA, it seems, is not sure it can control the demonstrations it has called in West Bank towns as the UN drama unfolds.
Herein lie the most painful ironies of the PA’s 17-year existence, oft-stated, but still poorly understood in the West: As a non-sovereign entity, it must beseech its overlords for the trappings of autonomy. As the constable of its appointed domains, the PA must crack the heads of the Palestinians it claims to represent if they transgress the boundaries of official discourse. As a creature of the Oslo accords, it cannot transcend the terms of these agreements between an occupying power and an occupied people. No one can doubt who the arbiters of the agreements are: When Palestinians narrowly elected Hamas to head the PA in 2006, Israel and the US imposed a tight physical and diplomatic siege upon the Hamas-affiliated officers and their territorial seat in the Gaza Strip.
Hence ‘Abbas must listen when American legislators thunder and at least wince when they brandish the stick of cut-off aid, monies upon which the PA’s administrative apparatus and its some 140,000 West Bank employees depend. The Obama administration has been cagey about the Congressional threats, with State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland demurring: “We have not chosen to use our humanitarian aid in such a fashion.” It is significant, as well, that not only the pro-Israel Washington Institute of Near East Policy, but also the hawkish Elliott Abrams, point man for the Middle East on the George W. Bush administration’s National Security Council, testified against cutting aid before Congress. But Congress has been more pro-Israel than the pro-Israel lobby before, and it could act “unilaterally” itself, denying future aid appropriations or introducing new punitive strictures on disbursements. With the 2012 presidential campaign approaching, moreover, and attacks on Obama’s pro-Israel bonafides already appearing on New York billboards, the White House will be loath to battle over aid to a rump PA that the likes of Berman have targeted for “collapse.” The vaguer, but angrier warnings of “dire consequences” coming from the far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, and others in the Israeli government are likewise not to be dismissed lightly. If no one expects that the most successful of UN gambits will improve the lot of ordinary Palestinians one iota, either in Gaza or in the West Bank, it is quite possible that their plight will worsen.
At a deeper level, many Palestinian critics of the UN initiatives are right to point out the similarities between “non-member” status and the “provisional state” of which Israeli politicians have frequently spoken. Such a truncated administrative body would neither rule nor govern in Palestine. It would lack control of its borders or firmly defined borders at all, since it would have no power to halt settlement expansion or forward progress of the wall Israel is building in the West Bank. It would have no army, but a gendarmerie that would secure the PA’s meager prerogatives and certainly would not deter Israeli military operations across the Green Line. With the West Bank ever more carved up by concrete barriers, barbed-wire fences and bypass roads, it would have no “territorial contiguity” and hence no “viability” as a polity or economy, to use two more buzzwords of the late Oslo era. Israel might be pleased to see such an entity gain recognition at the UN: It would have no meaningful authority, but it would be vested in the eyes of the international community with responsibility for Palestinians’ welfare that Israel has never wanted. Israel might even receive a boost in its attempts to portray its incursions and aerial bombardments as part of a conflict between two roughly equal sides rather than assaults upon a mostly defenseless occupied population. Maximum power, minimum accountability — it is a restatement of the adage, “Maximum land, minimum Palestinians,” that underwrote the Allon Plan of 1967, the envisioned “village leagues” of the 1970s and other schemes of Israeli control over the years.
The UN puzzle sitting before ‘Abbas, therefore, is a small-scale version of the existential stumper: In the face of these realities, what is the Palestinian leadership, such as it is, to do?
Many observers ask why ‘Abbas and his entourage broached the UN possibilities at all. The Ramallah politicos abandoned previous threats to dissolve the PA to the derision of all concerned; ‘Abbas has withdrawn more than one pledge to resign. Why choose another course that highlights one’s fecklessness vis-à-vis the powers that be, even if it wins the plaudits of the Arab League, Turkey and supporters of the principle of self-determination worldwide? There is another reality that likely forced the PA’s hand.
Simply put, 2011 is not 1994 or 2006. The Arab revolts, despite the formidable obstacles they have encountered, have cleared the atmosphere in the Middle East of its relentless gloom. Young, middle-aged and even elderly, Arabs in country after country have poured into the streets to elucidate a more hopeful vision, one that does not bow (however grudgingly) to the inevitability of injustice. In Tunisia and Egypt, in particular, these demonstrators achieved victories that would have been unthinkable before. And the protesters want more than greater democracy at home. As Rashid Khalidi writes in Critical Inquiry, “They have put us all on notice: ‘The people want the fall of the regime.’ They mean by this the regimes in each and every Arab country that robbed citizens of their dignity. They also mean a regional regime whose cornerstone was a humiliating submission to the dictates of the United States and Israel, and which robbed all the Arabs of their collective dignity.”
To assert the truth of these words is not to resurrect the pan-Arab nationalism of the 1960s or to foresee an assembly of Arab armies at the gates of Jerusalem. It is simply to take seriously the sea change in mentalité, particularly among the region’s youth, that attends the historical moment. Even leaders as worn and compromised as Mahmoud ‘Abbas and his circle cannot ignore what is happening, if only to coopt the fighting spirit or blunt its force. In February, still stinging from criticism of his Goldstone report capitulation, and worried that Palestinians would organize for the fall of his regime, ‘Abbas defied the US and Israel in pressing for a Security Council resolution on the illegality of settlements. (The US vetoed it.)
Today, at the tactical level, it is probable that dissension within the ranks of Fatah, the de facto ruling party of the West Bank and ‘Abbas’ own faction, pushed the nominal Palestinian president into further action. He sought to parry the thrusts of party figures who had long advocated for the UN route and to channel popular pressure in a direction he could influence, if not control per se. The certainty with which his spokesmen declaim his intention to proceed at the Security Council is surely born of these factors, as well. Having staked a virtual Palestinian flag at UN headquarters, he cannot now uproot it if he hopes to remain party chairman. Having taken a stand for the principle that Palestinians, like any other nation, have a right to seek self-determination, whatever they are told to do by others, he cannot now back down without “dire consequences” to be designed by Palestinians.
Some form of enhanced UN recognition could offer ‘Abbas and the PA external legitimacy and their own sense of hope against daunting odds. But the UN initiative, whatever shape it takes, could also be empty symbolism or, worse, a seal of approval on creeping apartheid if it is only an isolated tactic. Caution is warranted in two respects.
The UN maneuver has potential to break the US stranglehold on Israel-Palestine diplomacy only if ‘Abbas and his confreres take additional steps toward a comprehensive strategy of internationalization. First on such an agenda would be revival of efforts to unify the PA and Palestinian national movement, from which ‘Abbas has retreated over the summer, and insistence that Israel and the US lift the Gaza blockade, which ‘Abbas’ wing of the PA has of course championed as a means of defeating its rival Hamas. Steps two and three would be resuscitation of the Goldstone report and pursuit of the 2004 International Court of Justice opinion against Israel’s separation wall. But given the doldrums of reconciliation talks, and the dearth of other signs of strategic thinking in Ramallah, there is reason to fear that ‘Abbas will pocket the coming US veto and desist, hoping that the ensuing hubbub itself will prod the US and Israel back to the negotiating table. It is almost surely a vain hope, and in any case, renewed bilateral parleys under unilateral US tutelage can lead only to reinforcement of the Oslo paradigm and further dispossession of the Palestinians.
What media outlets are dubbing the “showdown” at the UN also comes at a juncture of eroded US hegemony. Its economy teetering on the brink of double-dip recession, its overseas wars unending and its historical coddling of dictators laid bare, the US is in no position to tell the Palestinians what to do, particularly since Washington will not rein in its Israeli ally. If the September 16 Washington Post is correct, the Obama administration failed even to extract a non-apology apology, one devoid of assumption of guilt, from Israel for its May 2010 raid on the Gaza aid flotilla. The White House had thought such an Israeli statement would diffuse international anger over the impending veto. If US weakness made the UN gambit possible for the Palestinians, it also makes the US a highly questionable patron going forward. It is the paradox of global affairs in miniature: Washington’s clout is hollow, yet there is nothing to replace it, so it lives on as simulacrum.
Whether now or in 25 years’ time, no force but the Palestinian people is likely to tear down the walls and redress the systemic wrongs in the lands between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It is the Palestinian people’s struggle, ultimately, and not the ventures of quasi-governments, that the world supports. The PA sectors loyal to ‘Abbas and the West Bank chief administrator, Salam Fayyad, will not mount or harness a genuine popular movement to challenge the status quo; by the logic of Oslo, they cannot. Perhaps the groundswell, whether it is an uprising or a campaign of mass civil disobedience or something not yet imagined, must come from sources that, as in Tunisia and Egypt before January, are largely unknown today. But the Palestinians have striven heroically, for decades before the 2011 Arab awakening, for justice and freedom. Their two intifadas have cost them dearly. If liberation is to transpire, the onus is upon outside backers of Palestinian rights — in the Arab world, the West and elsewhere — to develop new means of solidarity and, in particular, new ways of holding Israel accountable to the international law it has flouted for so long.
The world, by all indications, will denounce the Obama administration for rank hypocrisy. How can President Barack Obama deliver speech after speech endorsing Palestinian statehood in principle and then block it in practice? Several advisers to ‘Abbas, the nominal president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), think the embarrassment to the White House will be enough to make the point. Others want him to rub Obama’s nose in it, taking a request for upgraded non-member observer status to the General Assembly. When that proposal passes overwhelmingly, they insist, the PA will have declared its independence of the United States, specifically the US monopoly on the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” The Palestinians, meanwhile, might be one big step closer to full voting UN membership, since no polity seeking statehood would have achieved this status before. And they might win access to UN bodies like the International Criminal Court, where Palestinian claims against Israel could then be pursued directly. It would be, as these advisers like to say, istihqaq Aylul, loosely translated, “the September claim of our just due.” And then?
If the US, Israel and European states get their way, ‘Abbas will never face even the initial dilemma, because he will have been dissuaded from submitting a request to the world body in the first place. There have been frenetic diplomatic efforts to avert the Security Council scenario. The Obama administration has dispatched high-ranking officials to Ramallah bearing bludgeons hidden in bouquets of unspecified blandishment. In Washington, pro-Israel members of the House of Representatives have summoned a slew of witnesses to urge that US aid to the PA be slashed if ‘Abbas persists. At a September 14 hearing on the subject, Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) upped the ante: “I believe it is appropriate to point out that, should the Palestinians pursue their unilateralist course, the hundreds of millions of dollars in annual assistance that we have given them in recent years will likely be terminated.”
Berman and his colleagues echo Israel’s line of attack on the putative Palestinian initiative, which is not to oppose the idea of a Palestinian state, but to object that ‘Abbas proposes to act outside the framework of bilateral negotiations with Israel supervised by the US. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plans to make this case to the General Assembly on September 23, as the “unilateralist” PA argues its brief before the Security Council. Netanyahu must know the tenor of his plaints will fall on scornful ears. Israel has spent each of the 18 years since the conclusion of the Oslo accords with the Palestinians unilaterally violating their letter and intent, whether with continuous building of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, withholding of customs revenue from the PA or any number of other policies deepening the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. And the General Assembly delegates will know that it is he, not ‘Abbas, who has torpedoed the possibility of meaningful negotiations under the Oslo aegis, with his refusal to freeze settlement construction. So, to look reasonable, Netanyahu has indicated Israeli assent to an upgrade of the PA’s observer status. His real audience in New York will not be the General Assembly, but the mainstream American media, which he calculates will reproduce his broader message that if there is no peace in Israel-Palestine, the Palestinians, once again, are at fault.
European states are laboring, on the one hand, to help the US avoid the whole mess and, on the other hand, to craft some formulation for future Palestinian status at the UN that will not upset Washington but that ‘Abbas can present as an accomplishment. In the past, when ‘Abbas has hinted at maneuvers of which the US and Israel disapprove, he has not followed through, content with one promise or another or cowed by heavy pressure. Most notorious of all, at US-Israeli behest, he agreed to defer a UN Human Rights Council vote on the Goldstone report, the investigation of the 2008-2009 Gaza war that could have been used to support war crimes cases against Israeli officials. With this record in mind, there was great skepticism into early September that ‘Abbas would push matters so far on the statehood bid, but now all seem to think he is serious. The rush for damage control is on: In Israel, the government continues to inveigh against the PA even as on September 15 it approved the PA’s application to purchase riot gear for its security forces. The PA, it seems, is not sure it can control the demonstrations it has called in West Bank towns as the UN drama unfolds.
Herein lie the most painful ironies of the PA’s 17-year existence, oft-stated, but still poorly understood in the West: As a non-sovereign entity, it must beseech its overlords for the trappings of autonomy. As the constable of its appointed domains, the PA must crack the heads of the Palestinians it claims to represent if they transgress the boundaries of official discourse. As a creature of the Oslo accords, it cannot transcend the terms of these agreements between an occupying power and an occupied people. No one can doubt who the arbiters of the agreements are: When Palestinians narrowly elected Hamas to head the PA in 2006, Israel and the US imposed a tight physical and diplomatic siege upon the Hamas-affiliated officers and their territorial seat in the Gaza Strip.
Hence ‘Abbas must listen when American legislators thunder and at least wince when they brandish the stick of cut-off aid, monies upon which the PA’s administrative apparatus and its some 140,000 West Bank employees depend. The Obama administration has been cagey about the Congressional threats, with State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland demurring: “We have not chosen to use our humanitarian aid in such a fashion.” It is significant, as well, that not only the pro-Israel Washington Institute of Near East Policy, but also the hawkish Elliott Abrams, point man for the Middle East on the George W. Bush administration’s National Security Council, testified against cutting aid before Congress. But Congress has been more pro-Israel than the pro-Israel lobby before, and it could act “unilaterally” itself, denying future aid appropriations or introducing new punitive strictures on disbursements. With the 2012 presidential campaign approaching, moreover, and attacks on Obama’s pro-Israel bonafides already appearing on New York billboards, the White House will be loath to battle over aid to a rump PA that the likes of Berman have targeted for “collapse.” The vaguer, but angrier warnings of “dire consequences” coming from the far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, and others in the Israeli government are likewise not to be dismissed lightly. If no one expects that the most successful of UN gambits will improve the lot of ordinary Palestinians one iota, either in Gaza or in the West Bank, it is quite possible that their plight will worsen.
At a deeper level, many Palestinian critics of the UN initiatives are right to point out the similarities between “non-member” status and the “provisional state” of which Israeli politicians have frequently spoken. Such a truncated administrative body would neither rule nor govern in Palestine. It would lack control of its borders or firmly defined borders at all, since it would have no power to halt settlement expansion or forward progress of the wall Israel is building in the West Bank. It would have no army, but a gendarmerie that would secure the PA’s meager prerogatives and certainly would not deter Israeli military operations across the Green Line. With the West Bank ever more carved up by concrete barriers, barbed-wire fences and bypass roads, it would have no “territorial contiguity” and hence no “viability” as a polity or economy, to use two more buzzwords of the late Oslo era. Israel might be pleased to see such an entity gain recognition at the UN: It would have no meaningful authority, but it would be vested in the eyes of the international community with responsibility for Palestinians’ welfare that Israel has never wanted. Israel might even receive a boost in its attempts to portray its incursions and aerial bombardments as part of a conflict between two roughly equal sides rather than assaults upon a mostly defenseless occupied population. Maximum power, minimum accountability — it is a restatement of the adage, “Maximum land, minimum Palestinians,” that underwrote the Allon Plan of 1967, the envisioned “village leagues” of the 1970s and other schemes of Israeli control over the years.
The UN puzzle sitting before ‘Abbas, therefore, is a small-scale version of the existential stumper: In the face of these realities, what is the Palestinian leadership, such as it is, to do?
Many observers ask why ‘Abbas and his entourage broached the UN possibilities at all. The Ramallah politicos abandoned previous threats to dissolve the PA to the derision of all concerned; ‘Abbas has withdrawn more than one pledge to resign. Why choose another course that highlights one’s fecklessness vis-à-vis the powers that be, even if it wins the plaudits of the Arab League, Turkey and supporters of the principle of self-determination worldwide? There is another reality that likely forced the PA’s hand.
Simply put, 2011 is not 1994 or 2006. The Arab revolts, despite the formidable obstacles they have encountered, have cleared the atmosphere in the Middle East of its relentless gloom. Young, middle-aged and even elderly, Arabs in country after country have poured into the streets to elucidate a more hopeful vision, one that does not bow (however grudgingly) to the inevitability of injustice. In Tunisia and Egypt, in particular, these demonstrators achieved victories that would have been unthinkable before. And the protesters want more than greater democracy at home. As Rashid Khalidi writes in Critical Inquiry, “They have put us all on notice: ‘The people want the fall of the regime.’ They mean by this the regimes in each and every Arab country that robbed citizens of their dignity. They also mean a regional regime whose cornerstone was a humiliating submission to the dictates of the United States and Israel, and which robbed all the Arabs of their collective dignity.”
To assert the truth of these words is not to resurrect the pan-Arab nationalism of the 1960s or to foresee an assembly of Arab armies at the gates of Jerusalem. It is simply to take seriously the sea change in mentalité, particularly among the region’s youth, that attends the historical moment. Even leaders as worn and compromised as Mahmoud ‘Abbas and his circle cannot ignore what is happening, if only to coopt the fighting spirit or blunt its force. In February, still stinging from criticism of his Goldstone report capitulation, and worried that Palestinians would organize for the fall of his regime, ‘Abbas defied the US and Israel in pressing for a Security Council resolution on the illegality of settlements. (The US vetoed it.)
Today, at the tactical level, it is probable that dissension within the ranks of Fatah, the de facto ruling party of the West Bank and ‘Abbas’ own faction, pushed the nominal Palestinian president into further action. He sought to parry the thrusts of party figures who had long advocated for the UN route and to channel popular pressure in a direction he could influence, if not control per se. The certainty with which his spokesmen declaim his intention to proceed at the Security Council is surely born of these factors, as well. Having staked a virtual Palestinian flag at UN headquarters, he cannot now uproot it if he hopes to remain party chairman. Having taken a stand for the principle that Palestinians, like any other nation, have a right to seek self-determination, whatever they are told to do by others, he cannot now back down without “dire consequences” to be designed by Palestinians.
Some form of enhanced UN recognition could offer ‘Abbas and the PA external legitimacy and their own sense of hope against daunting odds. But the UN initiative, whatever shape it takes, could also be empty symbolism or, worse, a seal of approval on creeping apartheid if it is only an isolated tactic. Caution is warranted in two respects.
The UN maneuver has potential to break the US stranglehold on Israel-Palestine diplomacy only if ‘Abbas and his confreres take additional steps toward a comprehensive strategy of internationalization. First on such an agenda would be revival of efforts to unify the PA and Palestinian national movement, from which ‘Abbas has retreated over the summer, and insistence that Israel and the US lift the Gaza blockade, which ‘Abbas’ wing of the PA has of course championed as a means of defeating its rival Hamas. Steps two and three would be resuscitation of the Goldstone report and pursuit of the 2004 International Court of Justice opinion against Israel’s separation wall. But given the doldrums of reconciliation talks, and the dearth of other signs of strategic thinking in Ramallah, there is reason to fear that ‘Abbas will pocket the coming US veto and desist, hoping that the ensuing hubbub itself will prod the US and Israel back to the negotiating table. It is almost surely a vain hope, and in any case, renewed bilateral parleys under unilateral US tutelage can lead only to reinforcement of the Oslo paradigm and further dispossession of the Palestinians.
What media outlets are dubbing the “showdown” at the UN also comes at a juncture of eroded US hegemony. Its economy teetering on the brink of double-dip recession, its overseas wars unending and its historical coddling of dictators laid bare, the US is in no position to tell the Palestinians what to do, particularly since Washington will not rein in its Israeli ally. If the September 16 Washington Post is correct, the Obama administration failed even to extract a non-apology apology, one devoid of assumption of guilt, from Israel for its May 2010 raid on the Gaza aid flotilla. The White House had thought such an Israeli statement would diffuse international anger over the impending veto. If US weakness made the UN gambit possible for the Palestinians, it also makes the US a highly questionable patron going forward. It is the paradox of global affairs in miniature: Washington’s clout is hollow, yet there is nothing to replace it, so it lives on as simulacrum.
Whether now or in 25 years’ time, no force but the Palestinian people is likely to tear down the walls and redress the systemic wrongs in the lands between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It is the Palestinian people’s struggle, ultimately, and not the ventures of quasi-governments, that the world supports. The PA sectors loyal to ‘Abbas and the West Bank chief administrator, Salam Fayyad, will not mount or harness a genuine popular movement to challenge the status quo; by the logic of Oslo, they cannot. Perhaps the groundswell, whether it is an uprising or a campaign of mass civil disobedience or something not yet imagined, must come from sources that, as in Tunisia and Egypt before January, are largely unknown today. But the Palestinians have striven heroically, for decades before the 2011 Arab awakening, for justice and freedom. Their two intifadas have cost them dearly. If liberation is to transpire, the onus is upon outside backers of Palestinian rights — in the Arab world, the West and elsewhere — to develop new means of solidarity and, in particular, new ways of holding Israel accountable to the international law it has flouted for so long.
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Balancing the East, Upgrading the West
U.S. Grand Strategy in an Age of Upheaval
At the same time, the United States should continue to engage cooperatively in the economically dynamic but also potentially conflicted East. If the United States and China can accommodate each other on a broad range of issues, the prospects for stability in Asia will be greatly increased. That is especially likely if the United States can encourage a genuine reconciliation between China and Japan while mitigating the growing rivalry between China and India.
To respond effectively in both the western and eastern parts of Eurasia, the world’s central and most critical continent, the United States must play a dual role. It must be the promoter and guarantor of greater and broader unity in the West, and it must be the balancer and conciliator between the major powers in the East. Both roles are essential, and each is needed to reinforce the other. But to have the credibility and the capacity to pursue both successfully, the United States must show the world that it has the will to renovate itself at home. Americans must place greater emphasis on the more subtle dimensions of national power, such as innovation, education, the balance of force and diplomacy, and the quality of political leadership.
A LARGER WEST
If the United States does not promote the emergence of an enlarged West, dire consequences could follow.
For the United States to succeed as the promoter and guarantor of a renewed West, it will need to maintain close ties with Europe, continue its commitment to NATO, and manage, along with Europe, a step-by-step process of welcoming both Turkey and a truly democratizing Russia into the West. To guarantee the West’s geopolitical relevance, Washington must remain active in European security. It must also encourage the deeper unification of the European Union: the close cooperation among France, Germany, and the United Kingdom — Europe’s central political, economic, and military alignment — should continue and broaden.To engage Russia while safeguarding Western unity, the French-German-Polish consultative triangle could play a constructive role in advancing the ongoing but still tenuous reconciliation between Poland and Russia. The EU’s backing would help make Russian-Polish reconciliation more comprehensive, much as the German-Polish one has already become, with both reconciliations contributing to greater stability in Europe. But in order for Russian-Polish reconciliation to endure, it has to move from the governmental level to the social level, through extensive people-to-people contacts and joint educational initiatives. Expedient accommodations made by governments that are not grounded in basic changes in popular attitudes will not last. The model should be the French-German friendship after World War II, which was initiated at the highest political levels by Paris and Bonn and successfully promoted on the social and cultural level, as well.
As the United States and Europe seek to enlarge the West, Russia itself will have to evolve in order to become more closely linked with the EU. Its leadership will have to face the fact that Russia’s future will be uncertain if it remains a relatively empty and underdeveloped space between the rich West and the dynamic East. This will not change even if Russia entices some Central Asian states to join Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s quaint idea of a Eurasian Union. Also, although a significant portion of the Russian public is ahead of its government in favoring EU membership, most Russians are unaware of how exacting many of the qualifying standards for membership are, especially with regard to democratic reform.
The process of the EU and Russia coming closer is likely to stall occasionally and then lurch forward again, progressing in stages and including transitional arrangements. To the extent possible, it should proceed simultaneously on the social, economic, political, and security levels. One can envisage more and more opportunities for social interactions, increasingly similar legal and constitutional arrangements, joint security exercises between NATO and the Russian military, and new institutions for coordinating policy within a continually expanding West, all resulting in Russia’s increasing readiness for eventual membership in the EU.
It is not unrealistic to imagine a larger configuration of the West emerging after 2025. In the course of the next several decades, Russia could embark on a comprehensive law-based democratic transformation compatible with both EU and NATO standards, and Turkey could become a full member of the EU, putting both countries on their way to integration with the transatlantic community. But even before that occurs, a deepening geopolitical community of interest could arise among the United States, Europe (including Turkey), and Russia. Since any westward gravitation by Russia would likely be preceded and encouraged by closer ties between Ukraine and the EU, the institutional seat for a collective consultative organ (or perhaps initially for an expanded Council of Europe) could be located in Kiev, the ancient capital of Kievan Rus, whose location would be symbolic of the West’s renewed vitality and enlarging scope.
If the United States does not promote the emergence of an enlarged West, dire consequences could follow: historical resentments could come back to life, new conflicts of interest could arise, and shortsighted competitive partnerships could take shape. Russia could exploit its energy assets and, emboldened by Western disunity, seek to quickly absorb Ukraine, reawakening its own imperial ambitions and contributing to greater international disarray. With the EU passive, individual European states, in search of greater commercial opportunities, could then seek their own accommodations with Russia. One can envisage a scenario in which economic self-interest leads Germany or Italy, for example, to develop a special relationship with Russia. France and the United Kingdom could then draw closer while viewing Germany askance, with Poland and the Baltic states desperately pleading for additional U.S. security guarantees. The result would be not a new and more vital West but rather a progressively splintering and increasingly pessimistic West.
THE COMPLEX EAST
Such a disunited West would not be able to compete with China for global relevance. So far, China has not articulated an ideological dogma that would make its recent performance appear universally applicable, and the United States has been careful not to make ideology the central focus of its relations with China. Wisely, both Washington and Beijing have embraced the concept of a “constructive partnership” in global affairs, and the United States, although critical of China’s violations of human rights, has been careful not to stigmatize the Chinese socioeconomic system as a whole.
But if an anxious United States and an overconfident China were to slide into increasing political hostility, it is more than likely that both countries would face off in a mutually destructive ideological conflict. Washington would argue that Beijing’s success is based on tyranny and is damaging to the United States’ economic well-being; Beijing, meanwhile, would interpret that U.S. message as an attempt to undermine and possibly even fragment the Chinese system. At the same time, China would stress its successful rejection of Western supremacy, appealing to those in the developing world who already subscribe to a historical narrative highly hostile to the West in general and to the United States in particular. Such a scenario would be damaging and counterproductive for both countries. Hence, intelligent self-interest should prompt the United States and China to exercise ideological self-restraint, resisting the temptation to universalize the distinctive features of their respective socioeconomic systems and to demonize each other.
The U.S. role in Asia should be that of regional balancer, replicating the role played by the United Kingdom in intra-European politics during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The United States can and should help Asian states avoid a struggle for regional domination by mediating conflicts and offsetting power imbalances among potential rivals. In doing so, it should respect China’s special historic and geopolitical role in maintaining stability on the Far Eastern mainland. Engaging with China in a dialogue regarding regional stability would not only help reduce the possibility of U.S.-Chinese conflicts but also diminish the probability of miscalculation between China and Japan, or China and India, and even at some point between China and Russia over the resources and independent status of the Central Asian states. Thus, the United States’ balancing engagement in Asia is ultimately in China’s interest, as well.
At the same time, the United States must recognize that stability in Asia can no longer be imposed by a non-Asian power, least of all by the direct application of U.S. military power. Indeed, U.S. efforts to buttress Asian stability could prove self-defeating, propelling Washington into a costly repeat of its recent wars, potentially even resulting in a replay of the tragic events of Europe in the twentieth century. If the United States fashioned an anti-Chinese alliance with India (or, less likely, with Vietnam) or promoted an anti-Chinese militarization in Japan, it could generate dangerous mutual resentment. In the twenty-first century, geopolitical equilibrium on the Asian mainland cannot depend on external military alliances with non-Asian powers.
The guiding principle of the United States’ foreign policy in Asia should be to uphold U.S. obligations to Japan and South Korea while not allowing itself to be drawn into a war between Asian powers on the mainland. The United States has been entrenched in Japan and South Korea for more than 50 years, and the independence and the self-confidence of these countries would be shattered — along with the U.S. role in the Pacific — if any doubts were to arise regarding the durability of long-standing U.S. treaty commitments.
The U.S.-Japanese relationship is particularly vital and should be the springboard for a concerted effort to develop a U.S.-Japanese-Chinese cooperative triangle. Such a triangle would provide a structure that could deal with strategic concerns resulting from China’s increased regional presence. Just as political stability in Europe after World War II would not have developed without the progressive expansion of French-German reconciliation to German-Polish reconciliation, so, too, the deliberate nurturing of a deepening Chinese-Japanese relationship could serve as the point of departure for greater stability in the Far East.
In the context of this triangular relationship, Chinese-Japanese reconciliation would help enhance and solidify more comprehensive U.S.-Chinese cooperation. China knows that the United States’ commitment to Japan is steadfast, that the bond between the two countries is deep and genuine, and that Japan’s security is directly dependent on the United States. And knowing that a conflict with China would be mutually destructive, Tokyo understands that U.S. engagement with China is indirectly a contribution to Japan’s own security. In that context, China should not view U.S. support for Japan’s security as a threat, nor should Japan view the pursuit of a closer and more extensive U.S.-Chinese partnership as a danger to its own interests. A deepening triangular relationship could also diminish Japanese concerns over the yuan’s eventually becoming the world’s third reserve currency, thereby further consolidating China’s stake in the existing international system and mitigating U.S. anxieties over China’s future role.
Given such a setting of enhanced regional accommodation and assuming the expansion of the bilateral U.S.-Chinese relationship, three sensitive U.S.-Chinese issues will have to be peacefully resolved: the first in the near future, the second over the course of the next several years, and the third probably within a decade or so. First, the United States should reassess its reconnaissance operations on the edges of Chinese territorial waters, as well as the periodic U.S. naval patrols within international waters that are also part of the Chinese economic zone. They are as provocative to Beijing as the reverse situation would be to Washington. Moreover, the U.S. military’s air reconnaissance missions pose serious risks of unintentional collisions, since the Chinese air force usually responds to such missions by sending up fighter planes for up-close inspection and sometimes harassment of the U.S. planes.
Second, given that the continuing modernization of China’s military capabilities could eventually give rise to legitimate U.S. security concerns, including over U.S. commitments to Japan and South Korea, the United States and China should engage in regular consultations regarding their long-term military planning and seek to craft measures of reciprocal reassurance.
Third, the future status of Taiwan could become the most contentious issue between the two countries. Washington no longer recognizes Taiwan as a sovereign state and acknowledges Beijing’s view that China and Taiwan are part of a single nation. But at the same time, the United States sells weapons to Taiwan. Thus, any long-term U.S.-Chinese accommodation will have to address the fact that a separate Taiwan, protected indefinitely by U.S. arms sales, will provoke intensifying Chinese hostility. An eventual resolution along the lines of former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s well-known formula for Hong Kong of “one country, two systems,” but redefined as “one country, several systems,” may provide the basis for Taipei’s eventual reassociation with China, while still allowing Taiwan and China to maintain distinctive political, social, and military arrangements (in particular, excluding the deployment of People’s Liberation Army troops on the island). Regardless of the exact formula, given China’s growing power and the greatly expanding social links between Taiwan and the mainland, it is doubtful that Taiwan can indefinitely avoid a more formal connection with China.
TOWARD RECIPROCAL COOPERATION
More than 1,500 years ago, during the first half of the first millennium, the politics of the relatively civilized parts of Europe were largely dominated by the coexistence of the two distinct western and eastern halves of the Roman Empire. The Western Empire, with its capital most of the time in Rome, was beset by conflicts with marauding barbarians. With its troops permanently stationed abroad in extensive and expensive fortifications, Rome was politically overextended and came close to bankruptcy midway through the fifth century. Meanwhile, divisive conflicts between Christians and pagans sapped Rome’s social cohesion, and heavy taxation and corruption crippled its economic vitality. In 476, with the killing of Romulus Augustulus by the barbarians, the by then moribund Western Roman Empire officially collapsed.
During the same period, the Eastern Roman Empire — soon to become known as Byzantium — exhibited more dynamic urban and economic growth and proved more successful in its diplomatic and security policies. After the fall of Rome, Byzantium continued to thrive for centuries. It reconquered parts of the old Western Empire and lived on (although later through much conflict) until the rise of the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century.
Rome’s dire travails in the middle of the fifth century did not damage Byzantium’s more hopeful prospects, because in those days, the world was compartmentalized into distinct segments that were geographically isolated and politically and economically insulated from one another. The fate of one did not directly and immediately affect the prospects of the other. But that is no longer the case. Today, with distance made irrelevant by the immediacy of communications and the near-instant speed of financial transactions, the well-being of the most advanced parts of the world is becoming increasingly interdependent. In our time, unlike 1,500 years ago, the West and the East cannot keep aloof from each other: their relationship can only be either reciprocally cooperative or mutually damaging.
How to Engage Iran
What Went Wrong Last Time — And How to Fix It
February 9, 2012
Collection
The cases for, and against, a military attack against Iran to deter its nuclear program.
Members of the Iranian air force re-enact Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s arrival to Iran in 1979. (Courtesy Reuters)
Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, two major schools of thought have influenced Iran’s foreign policy toward the United States. The first maintains that Iran and the United States can reach a compromise based on mutual respect, noninterference in domestic affairs, and the advancement of shared interests. Those who hold this view acknowledge the animosity and historical grievances between the two countries but argue that it is possible to normalize their relations. The second school is more pessimistic. It deeply distrusts the United States and believes that Washington is neither ready nor committed to solving the disputes between the two countries.
Having worked within the Iranian government for nearly 30 years, and having sat on the secretariat of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council for much of the decade before 2005, I was involved in discussions about both of these two approaches. My first personal experience in these matters dates to the late 1980s, when the critical issue facing the United States and Europe was the release of Western hostages in Lebanon. During that period, Iran received dozens of messages from Washington proposing that each side, echoing U.S. President George H. W. Bush’s 1989 inaugural address, show “goodwill for goodwill.”
That year, Bush offered then Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani a deal: If Iran assisted in securing the release of U.S. and Western hostages in Lebanon, the United States would respond with a gesture of its own. In response, Tehran emphasized its expectation that the United States would unfreeze and return billions of dollars in Iranian assets that were being held in the United States. The Iranian leadership also came away from discussions believing that Israel would reciprocate by releasing some Lebanese hostages, specifically Sheikh Abdul Karim Obeid, the leader of Hezbollah.
It would be misguided for the United States to count on exploiting possible cleavages within the Iranian leadership. Iran’s prominent politicians have their differences — like those in all countries — but they will be united against foreign interference and aggression.
Then the two schools of thought came into play. Rafsanjani believed that this deal could be a confidence-building measure that would lead to rapprochement with the United States. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, warned against trusting the United States and thought it naive to expect Washington to repay Tehran’s efforts in kind. Then, as now, he believes that the United States is after nothing less in Iran than regime change. Ultimately, Iran decided to play a key role in securing the release of all Western hostages in Lebanon. But the United States neither released Iranian assets nor facilitated the release of Lebanese hostages.Despite the affront, in subsequent years, Ayatollah Khamenei did not prevent Rafsanjani or, later, President Muhammad Khatami, from making more overtures to the West. In 1997, for example, Iran ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, an agreement to decommission all chemical weapons by 2012. The same year, it also joined the Biological Weapons Convention. After 2001, Iran helped the United States oust the Taliban from much of Afghanistan, and for 20 consecutive months, between 2003 and 2005, it cooperated with the International Atomic Energy Agency. As the IAEA requested, the government opened various military facilities to inspections, suspended its enrichment activities, and implemented the Additional Protocol.
Although Iran expected that these gestures would open the way for it to continue a nuclear program (which it is authorized to do as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), the United States and the West simply developed a new set of complaints against Iran. These included questions about Iran’s nuclear-related program, its intentions toward Israel, and its hostility toward the U.S. military role in the region, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rather than reward Iran for cooperation, the United States implemented new sanctions and worked to increase international pressure on Tehran.
Ayatollah Khamenei was not surprised by Washington’s behavior. Throughout this time, he routinely rejected direct talks with the United States aimed at a rapprochement. He argued that the United States wanted to negotiate from a position of strength; accordingly, it employed intimidation, pressure, and sanctions to bully Iran into submission. The West’s increasingly hostile reactions to what Iran’s leaders believed were moderate policies eventually gave the radicals the upper hand in domestic policies. And that ultimately led to the rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Looking back, it is difficult to list all of the steps that each side might have taken to reverse the downward spiral in relations that followed. Certainly, the West, the United States in particular, missed great opportunities during the moderate presidencies of Rafsanjani and Khatami. More certainly, both sides would have needed a stronger commitment to changing the direction of U.S.-Iran relations.
U.S. President Barack Obama’s inauguration offered an opportunity for a new beginning. And once in office, he immediately signaled his willingness to enter into a dialogue with the Islamic Republic on a wide range of issues, aiming to remove 30 years of hostilities and create “constructive ties” between the two countries. In my view, even though the Iranian leadership was still skeptical about Obama’s ability to break many long-standing U.S. policies, it believed in his personal intentions. For that reason, Iran’s leaders decided to test the possibility of a breakthrough by granting a freer hand to Ahmadinejad in managing the relationship with Washington.
To be sure, much of Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric about the relationship was harsh. But Iran made some unprecedented overtures as well. As Mohamed El Baradei, the former director of the IAEA, revealed in his memoir, Ahmadinejad sent a message in 2009 through him offering Obama a grand bargain. According to El Baradei, the Iranian president expressed a desire for direct talks with the United States, which would lead to bilateral negotiations, without preconditions. The talks would be held on the basis of mutual respect, and Iran would agree to help the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Obama did not respond.
Almost all Westerners blame Tehran for the decline in relations since. They point to the failure of an initiative to swap Iran’s highly enriched uranium for less-enriched fuel rods, which Russia and the United States proposed in Geneva in October 2009. A short time after that meeting, the Iranian government told El Baradei that Tehran would be willing to make the deal directly with the United States. Washington rejected the offer. Iran subsequently signed a similar agreement with Brazil and Turkey. That could have been an important confidence-building measure, but the United States rejected it, too.
In December 2010, the United States demonstrated for the first time a readiness to recognize Iran’s legitimate right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. In an interview with the BBC, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that Iran could enrich uranium once it demonstrated that it could do so in a responsible manner in accordance with its international obligations. In response, Iran made new overtures toward the United States. A reliable source told me that, during a February 2011 conference in Sweden, Iran’s deputy foreign minister extended an official invitation to Marc Grossman, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, to visit Iran for talks on cooperation in Afghanistan. Washington dismissed the offer.
Then, in October 2011, Iran invited an IAEA team, led by Deputy Director General Herman Nackaerts, to visit the research-and- development sections of its heavy-water and centrifuge facilities. A contact told me that during the visit, Fereydoon Abbasi-Davani, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, offered a blank check to the IAEA, granting full transparency, openness to inspections, and cooperation with the IAEA. He also informed Nackaerts of Iran’s receptiveness to putting the country’s nuclear program under “full IAEA supervision,” including implementing the Additional Protocol for five years, provided that sanctions against Iran were lifted.
Trying to make Iran’s good intentions clearer, during a trip to New York in September 2011, Ahmadinejad announced that two American hikers who were being held in Iranian custody would be released. He signaled Iran’s readiness to stop uranium enrichment to 20 percent if the United States gave the country fuel rods for the Tehran Research Reactor in return. This was an immensely important move to satisfy some of the West’s demands and demonstrate that Iran is not seeking highly enriched uranium.
But the United States responded negatively again. Washington accused Tehran of plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States. It also influenced the substance and tone of the IAEA’s November report on Iran by adding accusations of possible military dimensions to the country’s nuclear program. Last month, Washington sanctioned the Central Bank of Iran; in effect, placed an oil embargo on the country; sponsored a UN resolution against Iran on terrorism; and orchestrated a UN resolution condemning Iran on human rights.
Explaining his Iran policy in New York in January, Obama proudly announced that he had mobilized the world and built an “unprecedented” sanctions regime targeting Iran. Obama said U.S.-led sanctions had reduced Iran’s economy to “shambles.” Three short years after the Obama administration introduced an engagement policy, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta named Iran a “pariah state,” reminding many of the previous administration’s branding of Iran as part of the “axis of evil.” Panetta noted that he hoped Obama’s new policy would weaken the regime so that “they have to make a decision about whether they continue to be a pariah or whether they decide to join the international community.”
These statements are clear evidence that Obama’s engagement policy has failed. In fact, they support Ayatollah Khamenei’s assessment that the core goal of U.S. policy is regime change. The door to rapprochement is closing. To keep it from slamming shut, the United States should declare, without condition, that it does not seek regime change in Tehran. Beyond that, the recognition of several principles is essential to bettering U.S.-Iranian relations after more than 30 bad years. For starters, both governments should practice patience and try to show mutual goodwill.
For one, both the United States and Iran are eager to understand the other’s end game. Together, the two countries should draft a “grand agenda,” which would include nuclear and all other bilateral, international, and regional issues to be discussed; outline what the ultimate goal will be; and describe what each side can gain by achieving it.
The United States and Iran should also work together on establishing security and stability in Afghanistan and preventing the Taliban’s full return to power; securing and stabilizing Iraq; creating a Persian Gulf body to ensure regional stability; cooperating during accidents and emergencies at sea, ensuring freedom of navigation, and fighting piracy; encouraging development in Central Asia and the Caucasus; establishing a joint working group for combating the spread of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism; and eliminating weapons of mass destruction and drug trafficking in the Middle East. Finally, the two countries could do much good by strengthening the ties between their people through tourism, promoting academic and cultural exchanges, and facilitating visas.
It would be misguided for the United States to count on exploiting possible cleavages within the Iranian leadership. Iran’s prominent politicians have their differences — like those in all countries — but they will be united against foreign interference and aggression. Both capitals should also progressively reduce threat-making, hostile behavior, and punitive measures during engagement to prove that they seek a healthier relationship. Engagement policy should be accompanied by actual positive actions, not just words.
I know enough about the dangers involved in the current direction of U.S. and Iranian policies to believe that change is essential. There is a peaceful path — one that will satisfy both Iranian and U.S. objectives while respecting Iran’s legitimate nuclear rights. Washington and Tehran must find that right path together, and, despite what passes for debate in the international arena today, I believe they can.
Time to Attack Iran
Why a Strike Is the Least Bad Option
Response
To suggest a nuclear Iran would result in a cascade of proliferation across the Middle East neglects the United States’ power to prevent clients from building their own bombs.
Response
Matthew Kroenig’s recent article in this magazine argued that a military strike against Iran would be “the least bad option” for stopping its nuclear program. But the war Kroenig calls for would be far messier than he predicts, and Washington still has better options available.
Response
Bombing Iran’s nuclear program would only be a temporary fix. Instead, the United States should plan a larger military operation that also aims to destabilize the regime and, in turn, resolves the Iranian nuclear crisis once and for all.
In early October, U.S. officials accused Iranian operatives of planning to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States on American soil. Iran denied the charges, but the episode has already managed to increase tensions between Washington and Tehran. Although the Obama administration has not publicly threatened to retaliate with military force, the allegations have underscored the real and growing risk that the two sides could go to war sometime soon — particularly over Iran’s advancing nuclear program.
For several years now, starting long before this episode, American pundits and policymakers have been debating whether the United States should attack Iran and attempt to eliminate its nuclear facilities. Proponents of a strike have argued that the only thing worse than military action against Iran would be an Iran armed with nuclear weapons. Critics, meanwhile, have warned that such a raid would likely fail and, even if it succeeded, would spark a full-fledged war and a global economic crisis. They have urged the United States to rely on nonmilitary options, such as diplomacy, sanctions, and covert operations, to prevent Iran from acquiring a bomb. Fearing the costs of a bombing campaign, most critics maintain that if these other tactics fail to impede Tehran’s progress, the United States should simply learn to live with a nuclear Iran.
But skeptics of military action fail to appreciate the true danger that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose to U.S. interests in the Middle East and beyond. And their grim forecasts assume that the cure would be worse than the disease — that is, that the consequences of a U.S. assault on Iran would be as bad as or worse than those of Iran achieving its nuclear ambitions. But that is a faulty assumption. The truth is that a military strike intended to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, if managed carefully, could spare the region and the world a very real threat and dramatically improve the long-term national security of the United States.
Deterring Iran would come at a heavy price.
DANGERS OF DETERRENCEYears of international pressure have failed to halt Iran’s attempt to build a nuclear program. The Stuxnet computer worm, which attacked control systems in Iranian nuclear facilities, temporarily disrupted Tehran’s enrichment effort, but a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency this past May revealed that the targeted plants have fully recovered from the assault. And the latest IAEA findings on Iran, released in November, provided the most compelling evidence yet that the Islamic Republic has weathered sanctions and sabotage, allegedly testing nuclear triggering devices and redesigning its missiles to carry nuclear payloads. The Institute for Science and International Security, a nonprofit research institution, estimates that Iran could now produce its first nuclear weapon within six months of deciding to do so. Tehran’s plans to move sensitive nuclear operations into more secure facilities over the course of the coming year could reduce the window for effective military action even further. If Iran expels IAEA inspectors, begins enriching its stockpiles of uranium to weapons-grade levels of 90 percent, or installs advanced centrifuges at its uranium-enrichment facility in Qom, the United States must strike immediately or forfeit its last opportunity to prevent Iran from joining the nuclear club.
Some states in the region are doubting U.S. resolve to stop the program and are shifting their allegiances to Tehran. Others have begun to discuss launching their own nuclear initiatives to counter a possible Iranian bomb. For those nations and the United States itself, the threat will only continue to grow as Tehran moves closer to its goal. A nuclear-armed Iran would immediately limit U.S. freedom of action in the Middle East. With atomic power behind it, Iran could threaten any U.S. political or military initiative in the Middle East with nuclear war, forcing Washington to think twice before acting in the region. Iran’s regional rivals, such as Saudi Arabia, would likely decide to acquire their own nuclear arsenals, sparking an arms race. To constrain its geopolitical rivals, Iran could choose to spur proliferation by transferring nuclear technology to its allies — other countries and terrorist groups alike. Having the bomb would give Iran greater cover for conventional aggression and coercive diplomacy, and the battles between its terrorist proxies and Israel, for example, could escalate. And Iran and Israel lack nearly all the safeguards that helped the United States and the Soviet Union avoid a nuclear exchange during the Cold War — secure second-strike capabilities, clear lines of communication, long flight times for ballistic missiles from one country to the other, and experience managing nuclear arsenals. To be sure, a nuclear-armed Iran would not intentionally launch a suicidal nuclear war. But the volatile nuclear balance between Iran and Israel could easily spiral out of control as a crisis unfolds, resulting in a nuclear exchange between the two countries that could draw the United States in, as well.
These security threats would require Washington to contain Tehran. Yet deterrence would come at a heavy price. To keep the Iranian threat at bay, the United States would need to deploy naval and ground units and potentially nuclear weapons across the Middle East, keeping a large force in the area for decades to come. Alongside those troops, the United States would have to permanently deploy significant intelligence assets to monitor any attempts by Iran to transfer its nuclear technology. And it would also need to devote perhaps billions of dollars to improving its allies’ capability to defend themselves. This might include helping Israel construct submarine-launched ballistic missiles and hardened ballistic missile silos to ensure that it can maintain a secure second-strike capability. Most of all, to make containment credible, the United States would need to extend its nuclear umbrella to its partners in the region, pledging to defend them with military force should Iran launch an attack.
In other words, to contain a nuclear Iran, the United States would need to make a substantial investment of political and military capital to the Middle East in the midst of an economic crisis and at a time when it is attempting to shift its forces out of the region. Deterrence would come with enormous economic and geopolitical costs and would have to remain in place as long as Iran remained hostile to U.S. interests, which could mean decades or longer. Given the instability of the region, this effort might still fail, resulting in a war far more costly and destructive than the one that critics of a preemptive strike on Iran now hope to avoid.
A FEASIBLE TARGET
A nuclear Iran would impose a huge burden on the United States. But that does not necessarily mean that Washington should resort to military means. In deciding whether it should, the first question to answer is if an attack on Iran’s nuclear program could even work. Doubters point out that the United States might not know the location of Iran’s key facilities. Given Tehran’s previous attempts to hide the construction of such stations, most notably the uranium-enrichment facilities in Natanz and Qom, it is possible that the regime already possesses nuclear assets that a bombing campaign might miss, which would leave Iran’s program damaged but alive.
This scenario is possible, but not likely; indeed, such fears are probably overblown. U.S. intelligence agencies, the IAEA, and opposition groups within Iran have provided timely warning of Tehran’s nuclear activities in the past — exposing, for example, Iran’s secret construction at Natanz and Qom before those facilities ever became operational. Thus, although Tehran might again attempt to build clandestine facilities, Washington has a very good chance of catching it before they go online. And given the amount of time it takes to construct and activate a nuclear facility, the scarcity of Iran’s resources, and its failure to hide the facilities in Natanz and Qom successfully, it is unlikely that Tehran has any significant operational nuclear facilities still unknown to Western intelligence agencies.
Even if the United States managed to identify all of Iran’s nuclear plants, however, actually destroying them could prove enormously difficult. Critics of a U.S. assault argue that Iran’s nuclear facilities are dispersed across the country, buried deep underground and hardened against attack, and ringed with air defenses, making a raid complex and dangerous. In addition, they claim that Iran has purposefully placed its nuclear facilities near civilian populations, which would almost certainly come under fire in a U.S. raid, potentially leading to hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths.
These obstacles, however, would not prevent the United States from disabling or demolishing Iran’s known nuclear facilities. A preventive operation would need to target the uranium-conversion plant at Isfahan, the heavy-water reactor at Arak, and various centrifuge-manufacturing sites near Natanz and Tehran, all of which are located aboveground and are highly vulnerable to air strikes. It would also have to hit the Natanz facility, which, although it is buried under reinforced concrete and ringed by air defenses, would not survive an attack from the U.S. military’s new bunker-busting bomb, the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator, capable of penetrating up to 200 feet of reinforced concrete. The plant in Qom is built into the side of a mountain and thus represents a more challenging target. But the facility is not yet operational and still contains little nuclear equipment, so if the United States acted quickly, it would not need to destroy it.
Attempting to manage a nuclear-armed Iran is not only a terrible option but the worst.
Washington would also be able to limit civilian casualties in any campaign. Iran built its most critical nuclear plants, such as the one in Natanz, away from heavily populated areas. For those less important facilities that exist near civilian centers, such as the centrifuge-manufacturing sites, U.S. precision-guided missiles could pinpoint specific buildings while leaving their surroundings unscathed. The United States could reduce the collateral damage even further by striking at night or simply leaving those less important plants off its target list at little cost to the overall success of the mission. Although Iran would undoubtedly publicize any human suffering in the wake of a military action, the majority of the victims would be the military personnel, engineers, scientists, and technicians working at the facilities.SETTING THE RIGHT REDLINES
The fact that the United States can likely set back or destroy Iran’s nuclear program does not necessarily mean that it should. Such an attack could have potentially devastating consequences — for international security, the global economy, and Iranian domestic politics — all of which need to be accounted for.
To begin with, critics note, U.S. military action could easily spark a full-blown war. Iran might retaliate against U.S. troops or allies, launching missiles at military installations or civilian populations in the Gulf or perhaps even Europe. It could activate its proxies abroad, stirring sectarian tensions in Iraq, disrupting the Arab Spring, and ordering terrorist attacks against Israel and the United States. This could draw Israel or other states into the fighting and compel the United States to escalate the conflict in response. Powerful allies of Iran, including China and Russia, may attempt to economically and diplomatically isolate the United States. In the midst of such spiraling violence, neither side may see a clear path out of the battle, resulting in a long-lasting, devastating war, whose impact may critically damage the United States’ standing in the Muslim world.
Those wary of a U.S. strike also point out that Iran could retaliate by attempting to close the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow access point to the Persian Gulf through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply travels. And even if Iran did not threaten the strait, speculators, fearing possible supply disruptions, would bid up the price of oil, possibly triggering a wider economic crisis at an already fragile moment.
None of these outcomes is predetermined, however; indeed, the United States could do much to mitigate them. Tehran would certainly feel like it needed to respond to a U.S. attack, in order to reestablish deterrence and save face domestically. But it would also likely seek to calibrate its actions to avoid starting a conflict that could lead to the destruction of its military or the regime itself. In all likelihood, the Iranian leadership would resort to its worst forms of retaliation, such as closing the Strait of Hormuz or launching missiles at southern Europe, only if it felt that its very existence was threatened. A targeted U.S. operation need not threaten Tehran in such a fundamental way.
To make sure it doesn’t and to reassure the Iranian regime, the United States could first make clear that it is interested only in destroying Iran’s nuclear program, not in overthrowing the government. It could then identify certain forms of retaliation to which it would respond with devastating military action, such as attempting to close the Strait of Hormuz, conducting massive and sustained attacks on Gulf states and U.S. troops or ships, or launching terrorist attacks in the United States itself. Washington would then need to clearly articulate these “redlines” to Tehran during and after the attack to ensure that the message was not lost in battle. And it would need to accept the fact that it would have to absorb Iranian responses that fell short of these redlines without escalating the conflict. This might include accepting token missile strikes against U.S. bases and ships in the region — several salvos over the course of a few days that soon taper off — or the harassment of commercial and U.S. naval vessels. To avoid the kind of casualties that could compel the White House to escalate the struggle, the United States would need to evacuate nonessential personnel from U.S. bases within range of Iranian missiles and ensure that its troops were safely in bunkers before Iran launched its response. Washington might also need to allow for stepped-up support to Iran’s proxies in Afghanistan and Iraq and missile and terrorist attacks against Israel. In doing so, it could induce Iran to follow the path of Iraq and Syria, both of which refrained from starting a war after Israel struck their nuclear reactors in 1981 and 2007, respectively.
Even if Tehran did cross Washington’s redlines, the United States could still manage the confrontation. At the outset of any such violation, it could target the Iranian weapons that it finds most threatening to prevent Tehran from deploying them. To de-escalate the situation quickly and prevent a wider regional war, the United States could also secure the agreement of its allies to avoid responding to an Iranian attack. This would keep other armies, particularly the Israel Defense Forces, out of the fray. Israel should prove willing to accept such an arrangement in exchange for a U.S. promise to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat. Indeed, it struck a similar agreement with the United States during the Gulf War, when it refrained from responding to the launching of Scud missiles by Saddam Hussein.
Finally, the U.S. government could blunt the economic consequences of a strike. For example, it could offset any disruption of oil supplies by opening its Strategic Petroleum Reserve and quietly encouraging some Gulf states to increase their production in the run-up to the attack. Given that many oil-producing nations in the region, especially Saudi Arabia, have urged the United States to attack Iran, they would likely cooperate.
Washington could also reduce the political fallout of military action by building global support for it in advance. Many countries may still criticize the United States for using force, but some — the Arab states in particular — would privately thank Washington for eliminating the Iranian threat. By building such a consensus in the lead-up to an attack and taking the outlined steps to mitigate it once it began, the United States could avoid an international crisis and limit the scope of the conflict.
ANY TIME IS GOOD TIME
Critics have another objection: even if the United States managed to eliminate Iran’s nuclear facilities and mitigate the consequences, the effects might not last long. Sure enough, there is no guarantee that an assault would deter Iran from attempting to rebuild its plants; it may even harden Iran’s resolve to acquire nuclear technology as a means of retaliating or protecting itself in the future. The United States might not have the wherewithal or the political capital to launch another raid, forcing it to rely on the same ineffective tools that it now uses to restrain Iran’s nuclear drive. If that happens, U.S. action will have only delayed the inevitable.
Yet according to the IAEA, Iran already appears fully committed to developing a nuclear weapons program and needs no further motivation from the United States. And it will not be able to simply resume its progress after its entire nuclear infrastructure is reduced to rubble. Indeed, such a devastating offensive could well force Iran to quit the nuclear game altogether, as Iraq did after its nuclear program was destroyed in the Gulf War and as Syria did after the 2007 Israeli strike. And even if Iran did try to reconstitute its nuclear program, it would be forced to contend with continued international pressure, greater difficulty in securing necessary nuclear materials on the international market, and the lurking possibility of subsequent attacks. Military action could, therefore, delay Iran’s nuclear program by anywhere from a few years to a decade, and perhaps even indefinitely.
Skeptics might still counter that at best a strike would only buy time. But time is a valuable commodity. Countries often hope to delay worst-case scenarios as far into the future as possible in the hope that this might eliminate the threat altogether. Those countries whose nuclear facilities have been attacked — most recently Iraq and Syria — have proved unwilling or unable to restart their programs. Thus, what appears to be only a temporary setback to Iran could eventually become a game changer.
Yet another argument against military action against Iran is that it would embolden the hard-liners within Iran’s government, helping them rally the population around the regime and eliminate any remaining reformists. This critique ignores the fact that the hard-liners are already firmly in control. The ruling regime has become so extreme that it has sidelined even those leaders once considered to be right-wingers, such as former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, for their perceived softness. And Rafsanjani or the former presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi would likely continue the nuclear program if he assumed power. An attack might actually create more openings for dissidents in the long term (after temporarily uniting Iran behind Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), giving them grounds for criticizing a government that invited disaster. Even if a strike would strengthen Iran’s hard-liners, the United States must not prioritize the outcomes of Iran’s domestic political tussles over its vital national security interest in preventing Tehran from developing nuclear weapons.
STRIKE NOW OR SUFFER LATER
Attacking Iran is hardly an attractive prospect. But the United States can anticipate and reduce many of the feared consequences of such an attack. If it does so successfully, it can remove the incentive for other nations in the region to start their own atomic programs and, more broadly, strengthen global nonproliferation by demonstrating that it will use military force to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. It can also head off a possible Israeli operation against Iran, which, given Israel’s limited capability to mitigate a potential battle and inflict lasting damage, would likely result in far more devastating consequences and carry a far lower probability of success than a U.S. attack. Finally, a carefully managed U.S. attack would prove less risky than the prospect of containing a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic — a costly, decades-long proposition that would likely still result in grave national security threats. Indeed, attempting to manage a nuclear-armed Iran is not only a terrible option but the worst.
With the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq winding down and the United States facing economic hardship at home, Americans have little appetite for further strife. Yet Iran’s rapid nuclear development will ultimately force the United States to choose between a conventional conflict and a possible nuclear war. Faced with that decision, the United States should conduct a surgical strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, absorb an inevitable round of retaliation, and then seek to quickly de-escalate the crisis. Addressing the threat now will spare the United States from confronting a far more dangerous situation in the future.
Read more at Foreign Affairs’ The Iran Debate: To Strike or Not to Strike.
Related
Snapshot, June 9, 2009
The debate in Washington about Iran’s nuclear program has lost all sense of proportion. A nuclear-armed Iran would be a threat, but largely to the regime in Tehran.
Snapshot, October 11, 2011
Yesterday’s announcement of a plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States is just the latest story in the struggle now unfolding between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Snapshot, May 15, 2009
Israel is pushing the Obama administration to tackle Iran’s nuclear program before the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Washington shouldn’t listen.
Overblown
Why an Iranian Nuclear Bomb Is Not the End of the World
June 9, 2009
This view is not new, however: the Obama administration’s rhetoric is almost identical to that of the Bush administration. Alarmists inside the U.S. government, among U.S. allies, and throughout the nonproliferation community argue that the messianic nature of the Islamic Republic and the extremely provocative rhetoric emanating from its current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, make Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear capability too grave a danger to condone.
In addition, Iran has a long record of assisting terrorist groups and even using them to do its bidding — most notably Hezbollah in Lebanon — raising concerns about the support Tehran might provide such groups after acquiring a weapons capability.
A final oft-repeated worry is the possibility that Iran might feel emboldened by possession of a bomb. A nuclear Iran, this argument goes, would change the balance of power in the region and allow it to increase its training and material support to Hamas, Hezbollah, and various militias in Iraq. Some fear Iran would even seek to strengthen Shiite groups in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
A credible threat to use a nuclear bomb would mean the end of a theocratically ruled Iran.
It would be irresponsible to be apathetic about the ramifications of a nuclear Iran. However, twentieth-century history, the character and limitations of nuclear weapons, and the Iranian regime’s behavior should temper concerns that an Iranian bomb undoubtedly would, in the words of Admiral Mullen, have “tragic and drastic” consequences.Since the advent of the nuclear age, scientists, activists, academics, and politicians have feared that the spread of atomic weapons would prove unstoppable. The rhetoric one hears today regarding the probable reaction of Middle Eastern countries to a nuclear Iran echoes concerns put forth by experts when the Soviet Union, China, and even France got the bomb. Yet the worst-case scenarios rarely came to pass — Germany and Japan, for instance, remained nonnuclear despite expectations — and there is no reason to suspect that the Middle East will buck this historical trend.
Analysts are particularly concerned about the reactions of countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia to an Iranian nuclear program. What they seem to forget is that the Arab world already has been living with a nuclear neighbor, Israel — a state against which many Arab countries have fought wars and still do not recognize. Still, the Arab world has been unable or unwilling to respond in kind. An Iranian nuclear capability would not threaten these states more, or even as much as, an Israeli weapon. And in terms of prestige and influence, a Persian bomb should not be any more significant to these states than a Jewish one.
Furthermore, developing a nuclear weapon is not as simple as flipping a switch. Libya spent close to two decades trying to acquire a nuclear weapon before giving up its program in 2003. Technology has never been the region’s strong suit, and even with A. Q. Khan-supplied centrifuge drawings readily available, it would be foolish to expect a rash of nuclear successes in the near future.
Fears that Iran actually plans to use nuclear weapons in an attempt to spread its Islamic revolution or to support fellow Muslims in Palestine are also exaggerated. Iran’s governing elite is just as preoccupied with self-preservation as any other regime. Leaders in Tehran understand that Israel would react to a nuclear attack — or the genuine threat of one — with devastating force. By most media accounts, Israel has upward of 200 nuclear weapons deployable via aircraft, ballistic missiles, and submarine, ensuring it the ability to respond quickly and decisively to any Iranian provocation. A credible threat to use a nuclear bomb would mean the end of a theocratically ruled Iran because of Israel’s formidable preemptive capability.
Ahmadinejad’s hyperbole aside, Iran’s actions in the past and recent public commentary by its clerics suggest that Iran would not risk facing such a devastating response. Iran’s foreign policy has been fairly risk-averse since the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, peppers his speeches with the usual condemnation of the United States and Israel, but he has also stressed that “Islam condemns the massacre of defenseless people, whether Muslim or Christian or others, anywhere and by any means.” It might be safe to conclude that he is less concerned with the fate of the “others,” but it is, of course, a fact that a nuclear attack against Israel would kill thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Muslims.
The prospect of Iran deciding to give Hezbollah nuclear material is extremely remote, as it is hard to think of a scenario in which Iran would benefit from a terrorist client possessing a bomb. Unlike Hezbollah’s Katyusha rockets, nuclear weapons are not malfunctioning devices that travel less than ten miles and rarely kill anyone. Israel would certainly know where to retaliate if Hezbollah brandished a nuclear weapon, and Tehran would be reckless to cede control of such a prized asset to an ally such as Hezbollah, thereby tying its own fate to that group’s decision-making.
The most worrisome concern regarding an Iranian nuclear capability is that nuclear weapons would give it a free hand to pursue its regional ambitions, whether taking a more dominant role in Iraq’s internal politics or increasing material and logistical support to groups such as Hezbollah. But a nuclear weapon would not change Iran’s basic calculation of what it can pull off without incurring an unacceptable response. A crude nuclear capability would not necessarily preclude either the United States or Israel from responding to an Iranian act of aggression — and Iran would have the most to lose from an escalating crisis.
In fact, once Iran is known to have the bomb, it would become imperative for the regime to avoid actions that could lead to escalation. If anything, Iran might find that possession of a nuclear weapon actually diminishes its options in the Middle East and forces it to act with greater restraint. Actions against superior powers that in the past might have been viewed as simple irritants — such as assenting to Katyusha launches against Israel and providing rudimentary explosives to groups challenging U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan — suddenly would seem, even with a limited nuclear capability, far more ominous and almost invite an overwhelming response.
This, then, begs the question: If Iran does not plan on using a nuclear weapon, if the regime would never give a bomb to a terrorist group, and if a nuclear capability would not provide Iran cover to pursue its interests more aggressively, why are the mullahs challenging the West and enduring sanctions in order to acquire one?
A nuclear weapon would not change Iran’s basic calculation of what it can pull off without incurring an unacceptable response.
Iran might feel that a nuclear weapon, with all of its inherent risk, would at least rule out any serious talk of regime change. Certain hard-line elements within Iran may view a small weapons capability necessary to prevent Washington from considering any operation designed to topple the regime. That said, it is not entirely clear that the regime is seeking an actual weapon. Enriching uranium to fuel nuclear power plants that do not yet exist might not make sense economically or otherwise, but that has never stopped seemingly rational countries from making similar decisions in the past. Moreover, Iran might be content to stop short of producing an actual weapon and settle for a latent capability. The regime may believe the ability to produce fissile material alone is enough of a deterrent, making the pain and cost of producing an actual bomb unnecessary. As noted above, U.S. policymakers have shown no hesitation in giving the impression that a nuclear Iran would change the region irrevocably. It is certainly not lost on Iran that Washington talks as if it already has been deterred by a country that has done nothing more than enrich a small amount of uranium and launch missiles that could hit the United States only after catching a 4,000-mile-per-hour tailwind.This is not to say that a nuclear-armed Iran poses no threat to the region or to the world. Deterrence at first glance worked well in the last century, but Tehran could miscalculate and take action that invites preemption, causing devastation to its population. Groups with disparate agendas in Iran could succeed in providing nuclear technology to a terrorist group for financial or ideological reasons; Iran, like every other state in the world, is far from unitary. In this sense, the international community should oppose Iran going nuclear as much as it should any other country doing so.
But the tenor of today’s debate has lost all sense of proportion. A nuclear-armed Iran would increase risk, but ironically it is Iranian civilians and the Islamic Republic’s own leaders who would bear the brunt of it.
Misreading the Map
The Road to Jerusalem Does Not Lead Through Tehran
May 15, 2009
Reading List
An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on Syrian politics.
Netanyahu framed the issue in a speech he made in Washington earlier this month. “There is something happening today in the Middle East, and I can say that for the first time in my lifetime I believe that Arabs and Jews see the common danger,” he told supporters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “This wasn’t always the case,” he added.
Or was it? In fact, there have been many times when key players in Jerusalem and Washington have convinced themselves that focusing on some third party would make Israeli-Palestinian peace possible. But it has not worked in the past, and it won’t work now.
During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Soviet Union provided diplomatic and military support for the new Jewish state. Many Israelis, echoing Soviet propaganda, promoted the idea that the defeat of the imperialist powers in the Middle East and the collapse of their corrupt lackeys in the Arab world — including in Palestine — would help usher in a new age of cooperation between progressive Israelis and Palestinians. It didn’t happen.
The message emanating from Israel and some of its supporters in the United States is that the road to Jerusalem leads through Iran.
Throughout the Cold War, a mirror-image fantasy popular in Jerusalem and Washington blamed Soviet support for Arab radicals as the driver of the Arab-Israeli conflict. According to this argument, Palestinian nationalism was simply another radical Marxist-oriented movement controlled by Moscow. Seeing the Arab-Israeli confrontation as a minor sideshow to the larger U.S.-Soviet struggle, Washington treated Israel’s creeping annexation of the West Bank with benign neglect and gave Israel a yellow light to invade Lebanon in 1982 — leading to disastrous consequences in both cases.The George W. Bush administration saw its foray into Iraq as a substitute for a diplomatic strategy to bring about Israeli-Palestinian peace. But the notion that the road to Jerusalem led through Baghdad — that transforming Iraq into a pro-American liberal democracy and promoting a “freedom agenda” in the Middle East would empower regional forces supporting peace with Israel — proved to be an illusion. Instead of strengthening the pro-American bloc in the Middle East, weakening the power of radical political Islam, and accelerating the peace process, the Bush administration’s policies helped tilt the regional balance of power toward Iran and its satellites, empowering anti-American and anti-Israeli forces in Lebanon and Palestine and generating mistrust and violence in the Holy Land.
Now the message emanating from Israel and some of its supporters in the United States is that the road to Jerusalem leads through Iran. Netanyahu contends that since Iran is permanently hostile to Israel’s existence and supports Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, the only way to make Israeli-Palestinian peace possible is to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear capability and throw it back on its heels. Since leading Arab states such as Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia are also worried about Iran’s rising power, the argument continues, Washington might be able to put together a regional consensus aimed at containing Iran — and possibly even persuade its partners to become more forthcoming in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As Elliott Abrams, a deputy national security adviser in the Bush administration, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, “There is a critical struggle under way right now in the Middle East, but it is not between Israelis and Palestinians; it is the people aligned with us — including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian Authority, Israel and the United Arab Emirates — against Iran, Qatar, Syria, Hezbollah and the Palestinian rejectionist groups. Mr. Netanyahu will tell the president this, but no one knows if the president will buy it — at least until he consults with those Arab leaders and hears the same thing.”
It is true that some Sunni Arab governments worry about the rising influence of Iran and its Shiite partners in the region and are concerned about the prospects for a diplomatic détente between Washington and Tehran that could erode their current leverage over U.S. policy. But the fact that they share certain U.S. or Israeli strategic concerns will not create the foundation for long-term strategic alliances (as opposed to ad-hoc tactical arrangements). In the Middle East, as elsewhere, one-night stands do not necessarily lead to marriage.
And any notion that Amman, Cairo, or Riyadh might go so far as to approve and perhaps even applaud an American or Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear military installations is based on wishful thinking. Sunni Arab leaders are concerned about the potential for backlash by angry publics against their regimes after any such attack. They also realize that Iran would be in a good position to unleash its regional proxies against Israel and the United States, rather than vice versa. So Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia would probably hedge their bets as Iran responds to an outside attack while Israel would be exposed to massive Iranian retaliation. That could force the United States into a costly, direct military intervention on Israel’s side and throw the region into chaos. At the end of the day, Washington would discover that the chief alternative to invading Iran and toppling its regime was engaging Tehran diplomatically — an option available to it today, without all the messy preliminaries.
The Obama administration seems to understand this, and is welcoming Tehran’s cooperation in establishing stability in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon while continuing talks with Iran on its nuclear program through the so-called P5-plus-1 setting. This is the most sensible course to take, but at best it is likely only to slow down Iran’s drive to build a nuclear bomb, as opposed to stopping Iran’s nuclear program entirely. So Israel and the United States should also start preparing for an eventual “day after” by developing an effective nuclear deterrence strategy against Tehran and working with allies across Europe and the Middle East to contain the Iranian challenge.
As for Israel, Obama must recognize that the main threat to Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state is not Iran but its conflict with the Palestinians — a conflict that will continue to serve as a catalyst for growing anti-Israel and anti-American radicalization in the region at large unless and until it is resolved. Resolving the conflict, in turn, will require the relevant local parties to deal directly with the core problems: the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, settlements, refugees, violence, and Jerusalem.
Washington cannot make a deal for the Israelis and the Palestinians, but it can and should help them do so themselves. At the very least, it should not make matters worse by allowing itself to be distracted yet again from the main task at hand. If anything, successful U.S. efforts to achieve a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians would make it more difficult for Iranian radicals to win support across the region. It is more likely that the road to Tehran leads through Jerusalem than that the road to Jerusalem leads through Tehran.
The Crisis Areas: The Middle East: War Dangers and Receding Peace Prospects
American peacekeeping turned into American bloodletting in 1983. More than any event since the war and oil embargo almost exactly ten years earlier, the October 23 suicide bombing of Marine headquarters in Beirut brought the Middle East conflict home directly to vast numbers of Americans stunned by the carnage that eventually claimed 241 lives-more casualties than in any other single incident since the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam.The terrorist attack that Sunday morning was a pivotal event of 1983 for American policy. It symbolized the year’s shift in Washington’s agenda, away from the overall Arab-Israeli peace process and toward the acute dangers of the deepened Lebanese morass left in the wake of Israel’s invasion of that country in 1982. It signaled, as later developments would confirm, that the United States was edging toward military confrontation with Soviet-backed Syria, which Washington charged with complicity in the bombing attack and which had become Washington’s principal adversary in a struggle over the future of Lebanon. It severely strained the uneasy consensus in the United States behind policy in Lebanon, particularly the decision to keep the Marines there, and by year-end the consensus cracked wide open.
America’s longstanding policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict had been fashioned by then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger during the tense, waning days of the 1973 Middle East War. Underlying this policy were three premises deceptively simple to state but monumentally difficult to convert into practice: America’s supreme national interest is to avoid an Arab-Israeli war that embroils the superpowers; an American-brokered negotiating process promising the Israelis peace and security and the Arabs the return of territories lost in 1967 must be the engine of Middle East peacemaking; this peace process must eventually embrace, or appear to hold out the prospect of embracing, Israel’s relationships with Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and-somehow-the Palestinians.
When Ronald Reagan went before a national television audience on September 1, 1982, to unveil his celebrated peace initiative, he confirmed and embellished this inherited American peace policy, explicitly invoking, as he rarely did, continuity with the foreign policies of his predecessors. Although he had badly neglected the peace process for a year and a half while chasing the phantom of an Arab-Israeli strategic consensus against the Soviet Union, he now outlined a more precise and categorical vision of how to deal with the Palestinian problem than any American President had ever dared before. While rebuilding a war-devastated Lebanon, the President said, American energies would also be turned toward getting Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians to agree that the West Bank Palestinians be given self-government in association with Jordan. Israel must freeze the burgeoning Jewish settlements on the West Bank and renounce any claim to permanent control. Palestinians must set aside their goal of an independent state and find a way to work with Jordan. Jordan’s King Hussein must do what he had refused to do since Camp David. He must join the peace process: not only join it, but become its linchpin.
The President referred to Lebanon only in passing during his landmark speech. Washington’s conventional wisdom at the time was optimistic, in retrospect hopelessly and inexplicably so. Foreign troops would evacuate Lebanon soon-before Christmas, some senior Administration officials said. Evacuation, they hoped, would create an opportunity for Lebanon’s leaders to reassert control over portions of the country vacated by the Israelis, the Syrians, and the Palestinians who remained after the enforced departure from Beirut of PLO leader Yassir Arafat and his main fighting forces.
But optimism on this score receded sharply as it became clear that Israel was reluctant to withdraw unless it could nail down maximum gains from its war in Lebanon, and that Syria would not withdraw before the Israelis. Syria had told American negotiators in October that Damascus agreed in principle to the idea of Israeli-Syrian troop withdrawal. Achieving withdrawal of foreign forces from Lebanon became, therefore, Washington’s second broad objective, in tandem with the effort to move forward with the President’s larger peace proposal regarding the West Bank.
When their moments of truth came in 1983, both the Reagan peace plan and the American effort to bring about withdrawal of foreign forces from Lebanon evaporated into mirages; it became a year when nearly everything that could have gone wrong with Washington’s Middle East diplomacy did go wrong. Hostage to the crisis in Lebanon, brushed aside defiantly by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, rejected by the PLO, and fatally weakened by Jordan’s refusal to negotiate without official Palestinian sanction, the President’s initiative collapsed by mid-April.
By then, too, Washington had spent six months trying to find a key that would open the door on the troop withdrawal issue in Lebanon. In an important shift in strategy at the end of 1982, the United States invested its main energy in trying to get Israel and Lebanon to reach an agreement that was supposed to be a prelude to the withdrawal of all foreign forces. This new approach relegated Syria to the sidelines, where it presumably was supposed to remain until an Israeli-Lebanese deal was sealed that would enable Damascus to come on board. After the collapse of the President’s peace initiative, the United States redoubled its efforts in Lebanon. Secretary of State George Shultz went to the region and brought back in May a Lebanese-Israeli agreement, but it quickly became and remains as much a part of the problem as of the solution in Lebanon.
As the Lebanese impasse hardened, Washington expanded its political and military commitments to Lebanese President Amin Gemayel’s fragile government, accelerated its programs of training and assistance to the Lebanese Army, and made clear in a variety of ways its determination to put U.S. prestige and credibility behind the survival of Gemayel’s government as the legitimate instrument of a unified and independent Lebanon. Yet, as the year progressed, such a Lebanon seemed always beyond reach and, for the most skeptical observers of that country’s politics, perhaps even beyond imagination.
Darkening not only the Lebanese scene throughout, but also the larger Middle East setting that shaped prospects for the Reagan peace plan, was the shadow of Syrian President Hafez Assad. No development in 1983 had so surprising, so dramatic, or so large an impact on American policy objectives as Syria’s masterful resurgence as a political and military force in the region.1 Humiliated by his military defeat at the hands of Israel in the summer of 1982, Assad turned to the Soviet Union and put as the first order of business the rebuilding of his devastated military arsenal at a pace and to a level that turned out to be staggering. Moscow provided some $2.5 billion worth of equipment, roughly double what had been lost during the 1982 war, and including advanced fighter aircraft and tanks in numbers exceeding what had been destroyed by the Israelis. It also provided Syria with sophisticated surface-to-air missiles; 8,000 Soviet personnel-most of them to man these air defense installations and related communications centers, the rest to train Assad’s army-and a number of surface-to-surface missiles possessing greater accuracy-though not longer range-than any previously in the Syrian inventory.
Although several more years, at least, would be needed before the Syrians could absorb and master the newest high-technology matériel, the powerful momentum of the Soviet supply effort and the formidable military prowess that it augured for Syria in the not-too-distant future no doubt emboldened Assad’s shrewd, high-risk diplomacy during 1983. He broke Arafat’s control over a unified PLO and brought a portion of the Palestinian movement under Syrian control. He did much to sabotage the Reagan peace initiative, torpedoed the Israeli-Lebanese agreement, gained a strangle-hold over the process of national reconciliation among Lebanon’s contending political forces, and served notice that he would no longer be odd man out of any serious dimension of Middle East diplomacy, whether in Lebanon or beyond.
For the Soviet Union, the Syrian connection is the only remaining window of opportunity and influence in the Middle East. But the Moscow-Damascus relationship remained a wary one, as it had been since they reluctantly consecrated their treaty relationship in 1980. During 1983, Moscow disapproved strongly of Assad’s campaign against Arafat, and the Kremlin reportedly encouraged Syrian caution in the increasingly dangerous confrontation with the United States. Assad knew, for his part, that however much Moscow might relish Syria’s success in thwarting American aims in the Middle East and in intensifying pressures that might lead to removal of U.S. troops from Lebanon, the Soviet Union did not countenance the sort of adventurism that would draw the superpowers into a direct confrontation.
By the closing months of 1983, American diplomacy was forced to concentrate mainly on containing a severely deteriorating situation in Lebanon. Moreover, it was a diplomacy that became increasingly muscular, backed by ever more menacing firepower from American naval and air forces in the Eastern Mediterranean, and coupled with strong doses of sometimes apocalyptic Presidential rhetoric in the White House.
The initial spasm of new violence in September was triggered by the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the volatile Shouf mountains around Beirut: the resulting vacuum provided Syrian-backed opposition to the Gemayel government an opportunity to launch a serious, frontal military challenge. From the time American naval guns provided their first direct support for Gemayel’s government forces in September to the most serious escalation in December, when U.S. planes hit Syrian positions in Lebanon in retaliation for Syria’s attack against American reconnaissance aircraft, the stakes for the United States had risen starkly. And America’s military options in Lebanon had not been enhanced by Washington’s dramatic refurbishment of a so-called strategic cooperation with Israel, which it hoped would weigh against Syria and its allies in Lebanon. Israel, although eager to repair its tattered relationship with Washington, set modest limits on its willingness to do Washington’s bidding in Lebanon, where Israel’s own disastrous and misguided adventures in 1982 traumatized its public and destroyed the formidable Menachem Begin.
The huge Marine casualties, signs of numbing political stalemate in the Lebanese reconciliation process, the clear determination of Syria to use force to assert its control over Lebanon, the risks of greatly enlarged conflict with Syria, the ominous and combustible proximity of American and Soviet troops in the region, the magnified dangers in this proximity because of the abysmal state of Soviet-American relations-all posed the gravest challenges to American strategy in the region. For, paradoxically, none of Washington’s more assertive military actions dampened the impression that Washington was at the mercy of events in Lebanon rather than in control of them-and that, in the end, Syria might have time on its side.
Nor did the strands of American foreign policy seem to fit together very well for an American public that grew steadily more confused and anxious, even less so for the President’s political advisers, who worried that Lebanon might become Reagan’s Achilles’ heel in the upcoming election year. Public support for the President’s decision to keep the Marines in Lebanon after the October slaughter was initially strong. But it declined thereafter and at no time was it based on any clear understanding of what the Marines were there to do or of how, with honor, they were going to get out. These questions, more than any others, were paramount for the American public and Ronald Reagan at the end of a year of relentless seige and deepening jeopardy for U.S. policy in the Middle East.
II
The soul of the Reagan peace plan of September 1982 was a gamble on Hussein: that he would challenge a reluctant and suspicious Israel with a genuine negotiating option, that he would be Washington’s lever against an Israel whose Likud government was determined never to relinquish the West Bank. Periodically between 1967 and Begin’s election in 1977, in secret and in public, directly and through intermediaries, Hussein and successive Israeli leaders had tried to come to terms about the West Bank and failed utterly. Now Washington wanted to tease Hussein into taking the plunge once again, despite long odds and grave personal and political risks for the King.
In the aftermath of the 1982 war, Washington believed the time was ripe. The PLO was weakened and its embattled leader Yassir Arafat was presumably more pliant, his military option gone, his political options dwindling. Syria’s humiliation in the war had diminished the likelihood of Syrian or Soviet mischief-making, and Syria was further hampered by its isolation in the Arab world over its support for Iran in the Gulf war. Begin would not last forever, and Israel’s public and Labor Party opposition, Washington believed, might be amenable to compromise over the West Bank. The Israeli-Palestinian war in Lebanon must now become the basis for an Israeli-Palestinian peace.
And Hussein seemed ready. After giving the Reagan Plan a qualified endorsement, Hussein met with Arafat and began what seemed to be a promising, if tentative, effort to work out a common approach to negotiations about the West Bank. In effect, such an approach would have reversed the Arab world’s Rabat decision in 1974, which gave the PLO the exclusive right to represent the Palestinians in any peace negotiations. Most important, Hussein was greatly encouraged by the results of his critical talks with Ronald Reagan in Washington at the end of December 1982.
“We’ll be partners for the next six years,” Reagan reportedly told Hussein. He secretly pledged to try to halt Israeli settlements on the West Bank and Gaza if Jordan simply offered to join the peace talks. Reagan promised that the United States would telescope the negotiating process, to avoid the lengthy haggling that had killed the Camp David autonomy negotiations in 1979-81. And he promised sophisticated weapons, including F-16 aircraft-knowing what was until October 1983 a tightly held secret, namely that the United States and Jordan had been working for several years to outfit a Jordanian mobile strike force for use in the Persian Gulf, mainly in the event of internal threats to conservative Arab states emanating from Iran or from domestic sources of instability.
Though reassured, Hussein nevertheless was stalked by a long history of disappointed reliance on the United States. President Lyndon Johnson had promised him in 1967 that Israel would be out of the West Bank within six months. Kissinger, soon after taking the helm at the National Security Council, had initially been convinced that the first step toward peace should be an Israeli-Jordanian deal, but he changed his mind after realizing how problematic an Israeli consensus would be, especially regarding the status of Jerusalem-an issue that could not be avoided in any West Bank negotiations. Kissinger tried in 1974 to make a West Bank agreement palatable to Jordan and Israel, but the gap between the paltry terms offered by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s weak and divided government and Hussein’s maximal demands could not be bridged. Because Camp David gave the King so few incentives to join the peace process-he was neither consulted in advance nor present at the summit negotiations that assigned Jordan a principal role in the proposed autonomy talks-Hussein opted out and stayed out.
Hussein’s hopes faded quickly. Even at the outset of 1983, it was clear that Washington was not going to succeed in getting Israeli, Syrian, and PLO troops out of Lebanon on anything like the optimistic schedule originally anticipated. By miscalculation and default, Reagan had encouraged a linkage between the peace plan and progress in Lebanon; and in their own way Hussein and other Arab leaders had too, by insisting that the peace process could not get under way until Washington demonstrated its credibility in Lebanon. It was a trap that victimized the Reagan initiative throughout early 1983. Those who controlled events in Lebanon, especially Israel and Syria, were given a veto over the peace initiative, which they both opposed vehemently. Presidential assurances were not followed by urgent diplomacy from Washington to keep the Reagan initiative alive.
Israel meanwhile accelerated its plans for new settlements on the West Bank, no doubt intending a message aimed as much at Washington as at Hussein. Hussein knew, of course, that by the spring of 1983 the election of 1984 would become a factor in the United States; he was convinced that it would not be the political season for the sustained American pressure on Israel that would be required for making genuine progress on a revived peace process. During early 1983 Washington’s credibility in Hussein’s eyes seemed to dissolve on all counts. Then Arafat’s ability to bring along his own constituency became more and more in doubt, and in the end, this was the factor that brought the Reagan enterprise to a halt.
Arafat’s room for maneuver was narrowed not only by well-known and rather predictable divisions within the Palestinian movement, but also by Hafez Assad’s fresh determination to end Arafat’s stewardship over the PLO and to bring a chastened PLO under complete Syrian control. Soon after the end of the 1982 war in Lebanon, as Arafat began testing the waters with Hussein and showed open signs of willingness to join a negotiating process, Syria’s anger at the PLO leader became more pointed, more public, and more threatening. Damascus openly challenged Arafat’s legitimacy as PLO leader in the fall of 1982, then gave its apparent blessing to anti-Arafat Palestinian terrorists led by PLO renegade Abu Nidal, and finally helped to promote a portentous split that was developing within Arafat’s own Fatah organization. The links between the Fatah dissidents and Syria were already active early in 1983 and they matured throughout the year.2 The dissidents were deeply rejectionist in their overall thrust, opposed to negotiations on the basis of any peace plan, committed to military action against Israel, and unwilling to contemplate any dealings between Arafat and Hussein.
The PLO leader’s first major test came in mid-February at a tumultuous session in Algiers of the 350-delegate Palestinian National Council, representing Palestinians from around the world and meeting for the first time in nearly two years. Deep ambivalence about the Arafat-Hussein talks among the organizations making up the PLO was obvious during the wide-open debates at the PNC. The council-usually responsive to Arafat’s wishes-waffled in its formal resolutions, neither giving Arafat his head nor reining him in. The Reagan Plan was not rejected explicitly and unequivocally, but neither was it endorsed as a basis for negotiations. Arafat’s talks with Hussein could continue, but no bargain could be struck unless the PLO represented the Palestinians, and unless the negotiations were based on the right of the Palestinians to self-determination, including the right to set up an independent state before deciding whether to confederate with Jordan-all conditions which stood at the heart of the Fez plan adopted by the Arab Summit in September 1982 and intended as a unified and basically affirmative Arab answer to the Reagan initiative.
Arafat, acting as if he had been vindicated at the PNC meeting, proceeded into the final frenzied weeks of his maneuverings. He tried to outflank Hussein elsewhere in the Arab world, hoping to get a better deal than Hussein was likely to give him in Amman. He repeatedly postponed face-to-face negotiations, while warning Hussein not to go forward without PLO approval. Hussein insisted that time was running out, and reportedly said that he might have to approach West Bank Palestinians without Arafat. He made it clear to Arafat that responsibility would fall on his shoulders if this negotiating opportunity passed and the West Bank slid further into Israel’s grasp.
The showdown came at the beginning of April in ten hours of private negotiations between Hussein and Arafat. When it was over, what was striking was not their failure but rather how close they had come to success. The talks foundered over predictable issues: could Jordan speak for the Palestinians? Would the Reagan Plan alone be the centerpiece at the negotiating table? Hussein and Arafat reached agreement, and a joint announcement was drafted, answering both questions in the affirmative and indicating that Hussein would lead a negotiating delegation including PLO-approved Palestinians not themselves members of the organization. Hussein signed, but Arafat backed away at the last minute, claiming that he needed time, a couple of days, to clear it with the rest of the Palestinian leadership. The PLO leader never returned to Amman, for he was decisively repudiated, for the first time ever, by both the PLO Executive Committee and the Central Committee of Fatah.
To preserve the unity that he had always put uppermost over diplomacy, Arafat retreated-a fateful choice, for by the end of the year his organization was shattered by the Syrian-backed mutiny and Arafat ended up with neither unity nor diplomacy. Even before his negotiations with Hussein were officially broken off, one of Arafat’s most moderate associates was gunned down in Europe, a killing widely interpreted as a Syrian-sponsored warning to Arafat. Later the same day, April 10, Hussein released a remarkable, sharply worded 11-page document defending his efforts historically on behalf of the Palestinians of the West Bank, blaming the collapse of the talks on Arafat, and saying that the PLO was now responsible for saving the West Bank. Hussein did not reject the Reagan Plan, and still has not done so. But the Jordanian-Palestinian rivalry, fed by passionate historical animosity and reflecting deeply divided political perspectives about the West Bank, had devoured an opportunity to throw down the diplomatic gauntlet to Israel.
III
Virtually unnoticed on that same April 10 was an event that symbolically confirmed the collapse of the second gamble implicit in the Reagan Plan-the gamble that Israel’s apparently relentless drive to absorb the West Bank could be stemmed by the President’s peace initiative, and eventually reversed by a successful negotiating process. Begin’s last word on these matters, Reagan was wagering, might not be Israel’s. On the day that Hussein released his statement, Israel announced its decision to publish the most ambitious plan ever sanctioned officially by the Israeli government for encouraging Jewish settlers to move to the West Bank. The settlements issue was to become the measure of Washington’s ability to press Israel for concessions and the measure of Israel’s determination to resist. Moreover, as some of the President’s best-informed advisers knew, the evidence had been accumulating throughout 1982 that the Israeli government was planning a bold and innovative new approach to the settlements. When these plans went into high gear in 1983, Israel’s unequivocal rebuff to the Reagan Plan was sealed not merely with words but with bulldozers and bricks and mortar and macadam that together are remaking the map of the West Bank.
Released at a time when some 27,000 Jewish settlers were already living in nearly 100 settlements on the West Bank, the new five-year plan envisages 57 new settlements and as many as 100,000 more settlers in the 1980s. The novelty of the plan, however, is not in its numbers, but in the new breed of settlers that will transform the plan into reality. Settlers who are suburbanites, not zealots. Families seeking a good life, not activists seeking ideological or religious satisfaction. Workers commuting from planned communities to jobs in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, not pioneers motivated by Zionist attachments to the land and willing to scratch a subsistence out of barren hillsides. Israelis who are eager to escape the high costs and congestion of their country’s metropolitan areas, not patriots convinced that their new planned communities will bolster Israel’s security. Indeed, these are Israelis who believe that Israel without the West Bank is even now unthinkable, who believe that there is no longer reason to forego personal or family comfort for the sake of politics or principle, who believe that the combined impact of 16 years of Labor and Likud policies on the West Bank has forever erased the once-clear “green line” that divided pre-1967 Israel from the land of Biblical Judea and Samaria.
Israeli settlements are but the surface manifestations of a vast and often esoteric network of security, political, and socioeconomic policies that have tightened Israel’s grip over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip since 1967, embracing all aspects of daily life for the million-plus resident Palestinians, as well as all-important dimensions of planning for the future of these occupied lands. Over the years Washington’s ritual protests against the settlements have produced dreary testimony to American ineffectuality and Israeli tenacity. The State Department first protested against the settlements in the summer of 1967, soon after the first new dot or two began appearing on the West Bank map, and regular protests followed. Kissinger, in the mid-1970s, rather than condemning the settlements at every turn-this, when there were fewer than two dozen of them on the West Bank with a couple of thousand settlers-simply said they were not important to his ongoing diplomacy. “I don’t see those installations,” he once said in reference to the West Bank settlements. “They’re transparent. I look right through them. When the time comes for me to open my dossiers on Golan and the West Bank, I shan’t let them impede a settlement. When the time comes, the President will prevail on the Israelis to withdraw.” For Jimmy Carter, the years of Camp David thrust the settlements issue into unprecedented prominence, but it was Begin and not Carter who prevailed.
Now it was Ronald Reagan’s turn. He did more than merely call for a settlements freeze in his peace initiative. Immediately after his speech he instructed the American Ambassador in Israel to convey to Begin a message that was political dynamite: the United States would not support the continuation of the settlements as extraterritorial outposts in a negotiated settlement. Begin’s rejection of the initiative was coupled with announcements of new settlements, which his key deputies called Israel’s “answer” to the Reagan Plan. And despite continuing evidence of Reagan’s displeasure over the rebuff on this issue-displeasure shared in some measure by some of Begin’s political opposition in Israel and by many within an American Jewish community seriously divided about Begin’s West Bank line-Begin did not let up on the settlement push.
In January, the Israeli government launched a conspicuous television, radio and newspaper advertising campaign to boost the new settlement drive. In April, at about the time the new five-year plan was released, the government sponsored, outside Tel Aviv, a public exhibition that brought tens of thousands of Israelis to view booths and displays offering attractive flats, land deals, subsidized financing arrangements, and a glimpse of the new world awaiting them on the West Bank.
In the final hours of the Hussein-Arafat talks, Washington tried to avert their breakdown by going public with the President’s earlier private pledge to Hussein promising an American effort to halt the settlements if Jordan agreed to enter negotiations. Israel promptly dismissed the move for the tactical expedient that it was, and yet another round of reaction and counter-reaction came to an end. With that, Israel proceeded on schedule with plans to complete new clusters of settlements key to the early progress toward the goals outlined in the five-year plan, and by the end of 1983 the settler population on the West Bank had increased approximately 10,000 over what it had been at the outset of the year.
Israel’s ongoing West Bank and settlement policies now pose an immense challenge to American policymakers. First, important elements of those policies have been consciously framed in the past five years to limit the scope of any Camp David autonomy agreement that might be negotiated, in effect to preempt the possible outcomes that the autonomy negotiations of the late 1970s and early 1980s were intended to hold open, at least in the American view. Second, the sheer scale of the new settlement plans will make their ultimate success dependent indirectly on the continuation of present American aid levels to Israel. For the settlements push will now become, in economic terms, one of the largest claims on the scarce resources of the grievously stricken Israeli economy, which sank into deep crisis in late 1983. No one doubts that Israel’s economy, more than ever before, can only manage with large infusions of U.S. assistance. Third, the historical momentum of the changes on the West Bank is now so powerful that it has become a political fact in its own right, intertwined with arguments inside and outside Israel about whether the process of absorption has become-in a practical sense-irreversible.
The point of no return is fast approaching; that much is sure. The closer it gets, the more the trends on the West Bank make a mockery not only of the Camp David formula but of the Reagan Plan or of any other blueprint purporting to promise an end to Israeli control. They make a mockery of claims that Israel is settling the West Bank because it wants to encourage the Arabs to negotiate, or that Israel is planting new settlements for security reasons. They make a mockery of the declared platform of Israel’s opposition Labor Party and that of Israel’s small but vocal peace movement, both of which profess to offer West Bank compromise as a realistic security and political option, or as a moral imperative. They make a mockery, as well, of the hopes of all those supporters of Israel in the United States who genuinely want to believe that a peaceful future for Israel based on an accommodation with the Palestinians and the Jordanians is still achievable.
IV
Ronald Reagan’s third gamble in his peace initiative was the hope that the diplomatic spotlight could be kept pointed at the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which had become the focal issue for Washington’s Arab-Israeli diplomacy since Camp David. This gamble, too, was lost-almost immediately-in the chain of events following the mid-September massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila camps, by Phalangist militia operating in Israeli-occupied West Beirut, and by the worsening Lebanon imbroglio. Developments in Lebanon did more than smother the Reagan Plan. They pushed the country closer to partition, provoked a devastating political and leadership crisis in Israel, provided Syria with ample opportunities to reverse its fortunes, and triggered erratic swings in U.S. relations with Israel. Above all else, Lebanon sucked Washington into deeper and increasingly unmanageable commitments, throwing American Middle East policy away from the central issues of Arab-Israeli peace and war, and into the multiple crises of a country that had never been a confrontation state.
The architect of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon was also the architect of Israel’s immediate postwar diplomacy concerning Lebanon. Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon wanted to dictate to Lebanon a peace settlement that would justify in Israel the tragic and costly war that he had engineered. Sharon envisioned a so-called new order in Lebanon, a Maronite Christian-dominated state led by Bashir Gemayel and allied with Israel. And, as nothing less than a self-appointed nemesis for Washington, Sharon also wanted to demonstrate that Israel did not need Washington as an intermediary in Lebanon, or concerning the West Bank.
The United States, on the other hand, while committed to a settlement that would preserve Israel’s security on its northern border, sought to maintain for Lebanon a freedom of maneuver enabling it to remain in an Arab rather than an Israeli orbit. In Washington’s view, this objective required an independent and unified Lebanon resistant to Syrian domination, retaining the confidence of its mainstream Arab backers, and prepared to reform long-obsolete Christian and Muslim power-sharing arrangements-so that there could be an end to the wretched civil war that had savaged Lebanon for nearly a decade.
While some Israeli leaders sensed that the assassination of Bashir in September 1982 ended Sharon’s dream, the tenacious defense minister proceeded to stake out his maximum claims on Bashir’s successor, his elder brother Amin, narrowing the room for compromise with Muslim and leftist forces that had initially endorsed Amin’s presidency and on whom he depended for support in negotiations to get Israeli troops out of Lebanon. Sharon insisted on a fundamentally political agreement with Lebanon, a deal as close as possible to a full and firm peace treaty, coupled with a strong Israeli security presence in southern Lebanon. Amin, with Washington’s encouragement-encouragement that drew harsh public criticism from Sharon-held out for a much more limited agreement than Sharon wanted, one that went some distance toward meeting Israel’s security needs but that remained military in character and aimed above all else at bringing about Israeli and Syrian withdrawal. The broad lines were thus drawn for the first phase of diplomatic skirmishing in late 1982 and early 1983.
By the time U.S. Ambassador Philip Habib was able to nudge Israel and Lebanon into face-to-face negotiations during the final days of 1982, Washington’s original timetable for withdrawal had already slipped. The talks were deadlocked first by diversionary haggling over minor issues and then by serious substantive disagreement. In Lebanon’s Shouf mountains, serious fighting erupted between Druze forces and Phalangist militia who had entered the traditionally Druze and non-Phalangist Christian area on the coat-tails of Israeli invaders. The Israelis remained interposed between the warring factions and astride the Beirut-Damascus highway. Sharon was convinced that only by holding positions in such threatening proximity to the Syrian capital could Israel persuade Assad to withdraw from Lebanon.
In Israel, the wrenching crisis following the Sabra and Shatila massacres was coming to a head as the independent inquiry commission led by Supreme Court Justice Yitzhak Kahan prepared to release its findings in 1983. And in Washington reports circulated that charged Israel with stalling on the withdrawal negotiations not only to deflect attention from the flagging peace initiative but also to await the release of the Kahan report. U.S.-Israeli tensions accumulated. The White House openly opposed increases in aid to Israel. Hints were dropped that Begin was not welcome in Washington until there was progress in Lebanon. Sharon secretly met with his contacts in Lebanon to end-run Washington’s mediation. Much-publicized frictions pitted American Marine peacekeepers in Beirut against Israeli soldiers still occupying portions of the city.
The February report of the Kahan commission placed squarely on Sharon the brunt of the blame for failing to prevent or to stop the massacre, and recommended that he resign, or failing this, that the prime minister consider removing him. Reluctant to force him out of the Cabinet entirely, Begin made him a minister without portfolio and replaced him with Ambassador to Washington Moshe Arens. Arens had a distinctly different agenda in Lebanon. He wanted to repair frayed ties with Washington. He was not saddled with Sharon’s overwhelming need to justify the war in Lebanon. He was more sensitive to Israel’s domestic malaise, which worsened as continued involvement in Lebanon promised only more casualties, declining political gains, unprecedented dissent at home, and indefinite occupation in what was coming to be called Israel’s North Bank. Arens, therefore, backed away from Sharon’s most ambitious demands, but he and the Cabinet laid out a tough position: special Israeli security arrangements in southern Lebanon; a continuing role there for Major Haddad, Israel’s surrogate and local ally; and normalization with Lebanon that would include cross-border flows of people and goods. Washington signaled its frustrations with Israel by withholding shipments of F-16 aircraft, saying they would not be delivered until Israel left Lebanon. The negotiations dragged on into the spring, until Washington moved decisively to break the logjam.
Washington’s new activism was born of great impatience, even a touch of desperation, fueled not only by the stigma of hobbled diplomacy but also by indications that the Marines in Lebanon might be exposed to a growing vulnerability that they could neither avoid nor eliminate by force of arms. The core of the problem was the ambiguity of the mandate for the Marines. Originally sent to Beirut in August 1982, along with French and Italian peacekeepers, to oversee the departure of PLO fighters from the city, the Marines did their job and left promptly in early September. In the aftermath of the massacres in the Palestinian camps that same month, the Marines were sent back at the request of President Amin Gemayel, who had just succeeded his murdered brother, Bashir.
At the time, Reagan reported to Congress that the Marines would be needed only for a limited period, that there was no expectation or intention to involve them in combat responsibilities, and that the Marines would be operating in an essentially non-hostile environment, risking at worst isolated acts of violence but assured that the armed factions in Lebanon would not interfere with the peacekeepers. The purposes of the Marine deployment were stated generally by Administration officials: to assist the government of Lebanon and the nascent Lebanese Army in carrying out their responsibilities in the Beirut area, and to help further the overall objective of restoring the sovereignty, political independence, and territorial integrity of Lebanon. These assumptions shaped the original understandings of America’s partners in the peacekeeping force, once again the Italians and the French, joined in early 1983 by the British.
For many months the 1,200 Marines stationed at Beirut’s international airport performed their mission without major incident. But in March 1983 came the first direct attack on members of the Marine contingent; other evidence also suggested the beginning of a possible campaign to force the peacekeeping contingents out of Lebanon. In mid-April, a car bomb demolished the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. Congress was becoming nervous about the role of the Marines. The Hussein-Arafat talks had collapsed. If Reagan’s Middle East diplomacy was to show results, they would have to come in Lebanon. So the President dispatched George Shultz on April 22 on his first trip to the region, with a mandate to bring home an agreement. Before leaving Washington, Shultz let Arens know that the White House would be prepared to reward Israeli flexibility with a more forthcoming attitude toward pending military and economic aid issues.
By May 17, Shultz had shuttled his way to an agreement; two days later it was already a dead letter. The fatal flaw was miscalculation of the Syrian factor. The agreement between Israel and Lebanon was very generous to Israel. It ended the state of war between the two countries, established liaison offices to conduct diplomatic relations, and set a six-month deadline for opening negotiations on normalization, while de facto normalization would meanwhile be maintained. A security belt stretching 28 miles into southern Lebanon was delineated, within which joint Israeli and Lebanese patrols would operate for at least two years. Tacitly, an important role for Haddad and for his forces was preserved, in future security arrangements in the south. Eight to twelve weeks after the agreement took effect, Israel would withdraw all of its troops. The hitch: there was no provision indicating when it would go into effect, and Israel had always insisted that it would not withdraw independently of Syrian and PLO withdrawal. Syria, in other words, held the veto. It was an agreement, as Israel’s Abba Eban would say, that had non-implementation built into it.
Syria had never specified exactly the conditions under which it would withdraw if Lebanon and Israel reached an agreement, though its general and always vague assurances of late 1982 were, as months passed, hedged with conditions that left Assad a wide open door for refusing to go along with a deal that he did not like. Moreover, Syria’s resistance became more likely, as well as more credible, as its military capabilities grew. In early January Syria had warned that no agreement could be carried out without its consent, and that Israel must not be allowed to realize political or military gains in return for agreeing to end its occupation of Lebanon. In the months that followed, Assad branded Israel’s evolving terms as capitulationist.
Habib chose to assume that these objections were for the record only and that Syria would in the end leave Lebanon if Israel did likewise. The Saudis and other Arab players encouraged Habib’s expectations.
But when the pact was sealed, Syria’s rejection was unequivocal. Assad encouraged his allies in Lebanon to coalesce against it. He imposed sanctions on Lebanon. He received Shultz in Damascus only to give him an unvarnished statement of Syrian opposition to the Secretary of State’s handiwork. He thereafter officially declared Habib persona non grata, ending his effectiveness as Reagan’s Middle East envoy.
A carbon copy of Camp David-so went one of the Syrian charges against the withdrawal agreement. For Assad, the comparison was not mere rhetoric. True, Syria has historical ambitions in a Lebanon that it regards as part of Greater Syria-ambitions fed by the Syrian leader’s aspirations to a position of leadership in the Arab fold. True, Syria’s opposition to the agreement was buttressed by its judgment that Israel’s resolve in Lebanon was weakening, that Amin Gemayel’s power was shaky, and that the United States seemed on the defensive. True, the Assad regime, resting on a minority Alawite base vulnerable to internal and external pressures, wanted to make sure that Lebanon would not become an arena for anti-Syrian activities by opponents of the regime.
Yet it was also true that Assad wanted to underscore as firmly as possible that he would no longer be shunted aside in Middle East diplomacy, left to face Israel alone as happened after the second Israel-Egyptian disengagement agreement in the mid-1970s and in the separate peace in 1979 between Israel and Egypt. Camp David, the Reagan Plan, and now the Lebanese-Israeli agreement were all, in Assad’s view, recipes for Syrian isolation. Speculation and uncertainty persist, as they have for many years, about Syria’s ultimate intentions toward peace with Israel on terms consistent with a moderate Arab consensus. But in 1983 Assad removed all doubt about his short-term objectives: the American-led peace process must be scuttled, and nothing would soon take its place without Syrian consent. So he helped torpedo the Hussein-Arafat negotiations, and stepped up his campaign against Arafat by fomenting ever more singlemindedly in the spring the mutiny against him by Fatah rebels. And he made it clear to all concerned that any new efforts to revive the Reagan initiative would be met with relentless hostility from Damascus and the PLO remnants under its thumb.
V
For most of 1983, Assad played spoiler to American objectives. But during the final months of the year he used his levers of diplomacy and military power for more ambitious ends: to dominate and control the political progress in Lebanon, to narrow the options for implementing the May agreement between Israel and Lebanon, and to face down the United States and Israel in an escalating contest of arms. Central among Syrian aims was a determination to bring about the exit of American Marines from Lebanon, and Damascus manipulated not just their vulnerability in the field but the vulnerability of their commander-in-chief at home, faced as he was by widening controversy about perpetuating the Marine presence.
Syria confronted Washington with its most dangerous challenge as Lebanon’s agony intensified-as many had predicted it would-because of developments in the volatile Shouf Mountains. The violence that had flared there in the winter of 1982-83 had confirmed for many Lebanese Muslim observers that Phalangist aims could not be contained by Gemayel, who had not only placed Phalangist officials in key governmental positions but also had not restrained Phalangist ambitions in the Shouf. When severe fighting there erupted again during Shultz’s shuttle mission, it was a sign that Gemayel’s power would before too long be tested in the Shouf, where Israel was growing increasingly restive with its interpositionary role.
Over the summer, indications multiplied that Israel-despite objections from Gemayel and Washington, the latter still insisting on a single, complete withdrawal on the terms agreed in May-was planning to redeploy its forces from the mountains to more defensible lines in the south, at the Awali River. It was a move that could be read as a further step toward the partition of Lebanon, in the wake of the failure of the withdrawal agreement, as well as toward the reduction of Israeli casualties. When the redeployment finally happened in early September, American diplomacy and military power had to fill the vacuum as hostilities engulfed Beirut’s suburbs and the Shouf.
The fighting between Syrian-backed Druze and the government’s Lebanese Armed Forces-newly rebuilt and improved with American assistance but untested and not capable of large-scale operations without active American support-brought Lebanon to the brink of full-scale civil war. An obscure village called Suk al Gharb, in the hills overlooking Beirut, became the unlikely cockpit for the renewed conflict and for a test of wills between the United States and Syria.
First to protect the American Marines in the peacekeeping contingent and later to assist directly the combat forces of President Gemayel, Reagan authorized the first U.S. naval bombardment in the Mediterranean since World War II. American firepower struck positions in Syrian-controlled territory and massive barrages were directed against Druze attackers threatening to roll back Lebanese Army defenders from Suk al Gharb. Not until the end of September did the crisis ease, and then only after two sets of extremely complicated negotiations had been successfully completed.
The first set was in Washington, where Congress reached a compromise with the White House that allowed the President to keep the Marines in Lebanon for another 18 months, an outcome shaped less by enthusiasm for an obviously vulnerable Marine role than by a deference to presidential prerogative and to claims that an obligatory earlier pullout under the terms of the War Powers Act of 1973 would weaken U.S. negotiating leverage. The second negotiations were in the Middle East, where the new American envoy, Robert McFarlane, working closely with Saudi Arabia, mediated a cease-fire and an agreement among Lebanese leaders to begin national reconciliation talks over new power-sharing arrangements among contending Christian and Muslim leaders. Announced in Damascus and initially hailed by the Soviet Union, the deal seemed to open the way to what Reagan called “a new beginning in Lebanon.”
To get this agreement, Washington reportedly squeezed Gemayel to compromise and deal with his Syrian-backed opponents. The United States tried for a brief time to signal its interest in meeting legitimate Syrian interests in Lebanon, hoping to enlist Assad’s tolerance for measures that would move the reconciliation process forward and create conditions for withdrawal of American troops from Lebanon. But from this point on, the hoped-for reconciliation process turned into a roller coaster of expected breakthroughs that usually never came and backsliding that regularly threw up more stubborn obstacles. And from this point on, too, the U.S.-Syrian collision began showing signs of spiraling out of control.
Nearly all of October passed without the reconciliation talks getting under way, largely because of early disagreements over a site for the proposed negotiations, an issue that involved both important political symbolism for the parties and genuine considerations of personal security. Washington’s assessment of Syrian intentions underwent revision, meanwhile, as the President and his top foreign policy spokesmen proclaimed that Syria’s initially positive attitude toward the September agreement had turned to obstructionism, and that the continuing and expanding Soviet supply of advanced missiles to Syria cast serious doubt on Syrian intentions in the region. Syria now tightened its noose around Yassir Arafat, who had surreptitiously returned to Lebanon in late September. The Syrians maneuvered politically to replace him as PLO leader, forced him to leave the Bekaa Valley with some 1,000 Fatah loyalist troops, and penned them in on the outskirts of Tripoli in northern Lebanon under the guns of Syrian-sponsored PLO mutineers. Lebanese factions allied with Damascus stepped up attacks against the Marines.
In all, as the September cease-fire weakened and as all parties used the interlude to gear up militarily for another round of fighting, Syria seemed bent on a multifront drive to work its will and to test the United States. The terrorist bombing of Marine headquarters, as well as those of the French contingent, was followed by a similar attack on an Israeli installation in Tyre. The President declared, in his October 27 speech, a vital American interest in Lebanon. Washington and Damascus were on collision courses.
The long-awaited reconciliation talks finally got under way in Geneva on the last day of October, with Syria an observer along with Saudi Arabia. Not since the onset of Lebanon’s civil war in 1975 had Lebanese leaders from all factions faced each other at the negotiating table. It was hardly surprising, however, that their immensely complicated and difficult task of inching toward a new political bargain among five key Lebanese negotiating blocs became immediately overshadowed by the single question of the future of the May withdrawal agreement. Syria insisted it must be abrogated before any progress could be made on the reconciliation dialogue, and the eventual compromise was more blurred than Damascus would have liked. The May agreement was neither to be ratified nor scrapped; parties to the reconciliation talks decided, in effect, to freeze the agreement; and they gave President Gemayel, his stature enhanced by the recognition given him by his conferees, a mandate to find another formula, in negotiations with the United States and other powers, for achieving Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.
With only this result to show for a week of talks, Lebanon’s formal reconciliation dialogue did not resume for the remainder of the year, its prospects dampened mercilessly by the cascade of new violence and military action in Lebanon. By mid-November, the Syrian-PLO rebel assault against Arafat’s forces around Tripoli moved into high gear, despite Soviet remonstrances to Syria and Arab uneasiness with the Syrian drive to crush Arafat. Elsewhere in Lebanon the September cease-fire began to come unstuck. The United States had moved to increase its naval forces dramatically, and Israel and France retaliated against Iranian-backed groups identified as perpetrators of the recent terrorism. Particularly worrisome were the first incidents of scattered Syrian antiaircraft attacks against American reconnaissance planes.
To counter growing Syrian assertiveness, Washington turned to Israel in November and the two countries celebrated at the end of the month a peculiar love-feast that masqueraded as “strategic cooperation.” But what was happening was not particularly strategic, and it was cooperative in a very limited sense only. Washington had run out of short-term leverage against Damascus and wanted to show clear evidence of joint Israeli-American determination. But Israel’s leaders, though eager to make the most of Washington’s new twist, knew full well that neither their public nor their military were prepared to be Washington’s sword against Syria in Lebanon. Washington, for its part, made it plain that combined military operations with the Israelis in Lebanon were not in the cards. And leaders in both countries knew that if they were drawn into a war with Syria, the risks of confrontation with the Soviet Union could bring the two superpowers into a collusion that would work to Israel’s disadvantage. Moreover, fundamental, perhaps even irreconcilable, differences remained between U.S. and Israeli views on the overall peace process and on the West Bank in particular.
Thus the so-called strategic cooperation boiled down to a genuine convergence of important tactical aims, immediate diplomatic objectives, and mutual political needs-cemented by the fact that both countries’ installations in Lebanon had been subjected to terrorist attack. There were to be new understandings on technical military ventures of various kinds, as well as enhanced intelligence cooperation. American aid was to be more generous, and Washington hoped that Israel would ease its opposition to American arms sales to moderate Arab states, especially Jordan. Israel’s new Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, who had taken the reins in October after Menachem Begin resigned, a broken and disconsolate man as a result of the Lebanese debacle, had reason to be pleased that he could show at home that Israel’s essential relationship with the United States was being and presumably would be preserved under Likud rule. Reagan had reason to be comfortable in the knowledge that he could enter an election year without the disadvantages of “an Israel issue” working against him from Democratic Party challengers visibly eager to play on such an issue.
The new American-Israeli strategy aroused unanimous criticism and dismay from Arab states, including those generally considered most friendly toward the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan. President Gemayel, moreover, had visited Washington at the beginning of December, only to come away with renewed American pledges to seek the full implementation of the Israeli-Lebanese agreement. It also quickly became evident that closer ties with Israel would do little to ease Washington’s predicament in Lebanon during the dangerous days of December, and would not prevent the reemergence at the end of the year of American-Israeli disagreement over the fate of Yassir Arafat and the course of the overall Middle East peace process.
At the beginning of December, in response to a heavy and concentrated Syrian anti-aircraft attack against U.S. reconnaissance jets over Lebanon, Washington launched its first air strikes of the Lebanese conflict and its first direct attack against Syrian forces. Twenty-eight carrier-based planes attacked Syrian gun positions in the mountains east of Beirut; two were shot down, with one airman killed and another, Lieutenant Robert Goodman, captured by the Syrians, who declared that he would not be released until the Lebanon war was over and until the United States was out of Lebanon. In the stormy weeks that followed, unease with the latest escalation rose sharply among America’s partners in the multinational peacekeeping force, the American public, and among observers who judged that while the military gains from the air raid were demonstrable, the American losses were such that Syria could take considerable comfort from an outcome that at the very least was a psychological victory for Damascus. Fresh Marine casualties followed in renewed attacks against their static positions in Beirut. By mid-month the United States unleashed its heaviest naval gunfire to date in Lebanon from the massive guns of the battleship New Jersey, which shelled Syrian and Syrian-backed Druze positions.
Yet another Lebanese cease-fire followed these exchanges, setting the stage not only for a pause in the American-Syrian confrontation, but also for Yassir Arafat’s denouement in Tripoli. The PLO leader had agreed at the end of November to a Saudi proposal for his evacuation from Tripoli, but implementation was short-circuited by difficulties in working out satisfactory international guarantees for safe passage of Arafat and his 4,000 loyalists, and by obstruction and harassment from Israeli gunboats that shelled the Tripoli harbor area after Arafat claimed responsibility for a terrorist attack in Jerusalem. But safe passage was arranged, although only after the United States weighed in behind the plan at the urging of President Gemayel and after Washington pressed Israel into non-interference.
Israel’s reluctance to go along with the plan was then in part motivated by a wish to deny Arafat another hero’s departure from Lebanon, complete with the fanfare that accompanied his exodus 16 months earlier. Muted though it was, Arafat’s evacuation on December 20 did lead to developments that confirmed Israel’s apprehensions about a possible Arafat political resurgence. He paid a surprise visit to Egypt, his first since Sadat’s peace diplomacy began six years earlier. His meeting with President Hosni Mubarak, short on substance apparently but long on symbolic importance, fed intense speculation that Arafat might be signaling a willingness to cast his lot with Arab states favoring a renewed peace process and to try once again to reach an accord with Jordan. Mubarak’s part in the meeting suggested that he was prepared to quicken the pace of his efforts to end Egypt’s isolation in the Arab world, taking advantage of heightened Arab disaffection with Syria for its treatment of Arafat and its support for Iran. Washington applauded the meeting publicly. Israel was outraged over the meeting as well as over the American reaction, an outrage shared, ironically, by Syria and Arafat’s opponents within the fractured Palestinian movement.
The U.S. response to the Arafat-Mubarak reconciliation reflected a hope in Washington that Jordan would be encouraged by the split in the PLO to press once again for a Jordanian-Palestinian understanding that could facilitate negotiations over the West Bank. Arafat, according to this reading of events, lost no support from West Bank Palestinians during his besieged last weeks in Lebanon. Broad Palestinian antipathy deepened toward Syria and the PLO rebels it sustained.
A continuing Palestinian leadership vacuum on the West Bank precluded negotiations without a Jordanian-Palestinian understanding, even though key Palestinians in the occupied territories showed a recent disposition to stake out a more assertive role. And Arafat was still a prime player in reaching such an understanding.
This was a script freighted with optimism. King Hussein will do Arafat no favors, and hinted that he would soon be exploring avenues-such as reconvening the Jordanian Parliament with West Bank representation-that would minimize rather than fully reincarnate a lead role for Arafat. Syrian opposition was as certain as anything can be, and Syria’s capabilities for obstruction were surely greater now than they were in the spring of 1983-a string of attacks against Jordanian diplomats in the closing months of 1983 was generally regarded as a Syrian-orchestrated message to Hussein. Israel’s opposition was no less certain. Having charged that the Arafat-Mubarak meeting was a first step in the resuscitation of the Reagan initiative, Israeli officials declared that they would respond by accelerating the settlements program. All of this left America’s peace policy dangling in a nether world of high ambitions and low credibility, a mix even more unpromising at the end of the year than at the beginning.
VI
At the turn of the New Year, the leitmotifs that had dominated the Lebanon story and the fate of the Reagan peace plan-stalemated conflict and diplomatic immobilism-had also dominated the other two arenas in the region of high strategic interest and potential danger for the United States: the war in Afghanistan and the conflict between Iraq and Iran.
As the fourth anniversary of Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan passed in December, more than 100,000 Soviet troops remained locked in a no-win, no-retreat confrontation with a loosely organized grouping of some 25,000 Afghan resistance fighters, the Mujahedeen. Moscow’s dilemma runs deep in Afghanistan. The Babrak Karmal regime remains riven by factionalism, which this year deteriorated into open fighting, and which has prompted more open signs of Soviet frustration with Karmal’s inability to unify the opposing factions despite his much-publicized efforts to do so during 1983.
Disarray at the top of the Karmal regime has impeded Soviet hopes on many fronts: the Afghan army, numbering 40,000-50,000 soldiers, falls far short of the strength and effectiveness that Moscow would like. The Soviet forces, which continued to be deployed and used selectively to control key areas and counter major insurgent threats, were not able in major battles with the Mujahedeen to tip the balance significantly, and the resistance displayed throughout the year an increased capacity to harass them and to take the resistance into new locations, including Kabul and other major cities. But none of these pressures seriously undermined Soviet staying power; casualties remained at tolerable levels, and Moscow’s readiness to deploy more force if necessary seemed firm.
Increases in covert as well as overt Pakistani and American support for the resistance were pronounced in 1983, but the Mujahedeen, too, remained divided and disorganized and far from being able to coalesce into the kind of political or military front that could take maximum advantage of the broad popular support enjoyed by the resistance.
Fresh diplomatic efforts to end the occupation were the most important developments of the year. Arranged and conducted under U.N. auspices, the secret negotiations that had gotten under way in 1982 produced in April 1983 a blueprint for a comprehensive settlement, which had been worked out indirectly with Islamabad and Kabul and with background consultations along the way with American and Soviet leaders. The essence of the envisaged compromise was that the Soviet Union would agree to a progressive withdrawal in return for Pakistan’s agreement to end its support for the resistance, and the use of its territory for transmission of American and other aid to the Mujahedeen. But efforts to turn the plan into an operative treaty faltered badly over the summer and remain in limbo. Close observers of the negotiations believed that both the United States and the Soviet Union retreated from earlier indications of possible interest, each blaming the other for the impasse.
In the stalemated and horrendously costly war between Iran and Iraq, the flashpoint that set alarms ringing throughout the West was Iraq’s threat in July to take the war to the economic heartland of Iran by attacking Iran’s oil production capabilities, a threat made more ominous by the revelation a month earlier that France would provide Iraq with Super Etendard jet fighter-bombers carrying the Exocet missiles that Argentina had used successfully against British warships during the Falklands war. Iran counter-threatened that it would answer an Iraqi attack by blocking all oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, through which passes 20 percent of the world’s oil trade, and later hinted that it would attack Arab states supporting Iraq. Washington warned immediately that it was prepared to take whatever action was necessary to keep the straits open.
Iraq’s ratcheting up of the stakes in this conflict, which it had been foolhardy enough to begin three years earlier, was a product of desperation-over the prospect of unacceptable losses in the war of attrition, over the state of its badly crippled economy and curtailment of its own oil exports by the war, over the impotence of the superpowers and a variety of other interlocutors to end the conflict. Baghdad and Teheran escalated their war, and their war of words, during the rest of the year, as Iraq shelled Iranian cities with long-range surface-to-surface missiles and launched new air attacks, and as Iran opened a new ground offensive.
By year-end, the battlefront stalemate continued, but American policy moved, at first gradually and then more conspicuously, toward what was dubbed a “tilt” toward Iraq. Having earlier eased its initial opposition to the French jet deal-the planes were delivered in October-and taken other diplomatic steps in Iraq’s direction, the Administration openly declared that an Iraqi defeat would be contrary to U.S. interests. This was Washington’s most pointed shift to date, though still a limited one, from its official posture of neutrality, a shift reinforced by late-year visits to the Gulf by American planners for consultations over how to deal with Iranian threats, by Ambassador Rumsfeld’s December visit to Iraq, and by active consideration of other measures that would strengthen Iraq’s economic capacity and restrict American economic dealings with Iran.
More than its own and the American public’s preoccupation with the Lebanese crisis suggested on the surface, the Reagan Administration’s private worries were intense at the end of 1983 that the Gulf powderkeg could explode into a nightmarish strategic crisis, threatening disruption of the global oil trade and a wider military conflict in the region. The United States saw its gestures toward Iraq as a potential deterrent to a slide toward such a crisis. Washington, too, was eager to pressure Syria by these moves toward its enemy in Baghdad, and to respond against Iran, which Washington held responsible for instigating the attacks by Shi’ite fundamentalist terrorists against American and French targets not only in Lebanon in October but also in Kuwait in December.
VII
Notwithstanding these apprehensions about the Gulf, Washington’s attention at the close of the year remained riveted on Lebanon. There were two surprising developments. The first, and the more far-reaching, was the unexpectedly harsh inside indictment of the Administration’s policy from the Long Commission, a five-member panel established by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger to inquire into the circumstances surrounding the bombing attack on the Marine headquarters. Going beyond its formal mandate in a coda section of its report that reflected widely known reservations within the defense establishment, the Long Commission criticized the over-reliance on military options at the expense of diplomatic alternatives for achieving American objectives in Lebanon, and urged what it described as “a more vigorous and demanding approach to pursuing diplomatic alternatives.”
Just as the impact of the report’s findings were receiving wide publicity, the second surprise development captured the public eye-and confounded official Washington-for many days: the personal mission to Damascus by Democratic Party hopeful Jesse Jackson. He managed after meetings with Hafez Assad, then emerging from nearly two months of confinement for illness, to bring home Lieutenant Goodman, the captured American pilot whom Syria had said it would not release until the United States left Lebanon. By this time, there had been a mid-December pause in the Syrian-U.S. standoff in Lebanon that had lengthened into a palpable relaxation of tensions, with both Damascus and Washington sobered and wishing to avoid another cycle.
In the aftermath of the Jackson success, the atmospherics between the two capitals improved noticeably. With encouragement from Syria as well as Israel, and active mediation by the United States, new discussions got under way among Lebanese leaders for security arrangements that would extend President Gemayel’s reach and authority into opposition Muslim and Druze territory in return for political concessions to these groups that might regenerate the long-stalled reconciliation process. The arrangements also could include creation of buffer zones and withdrawal of Phalangist units from key areas of the Shouf. This prospect of political progress, in turn, was being held out by the Reagan Administration as the key to the withdrawal of the Marines, calls for which became more insistent and frequent, and came from more domestic quarters, at the turn of the year.
———–KEEP FREE MEDIA FREE———– 
The social safety net, initiated in the 1930′s, has been
quietly replaced with such dubious schemes as workfare.by Sally Covington
SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER IS ALL WELL AND GOOD, BUT APPLYING
THE DICTUM, “MONEY TALKS,”CONSERVATIVE FOUNDATIONS HAVE
LONG BEEN BANKROLLING LIKE-MINDED THINK TANKS AND ADVOCACY
GROUPS. TOGETHER, THEY HAVE EFFECTED RADICAL CHANGE.
| Proclaiming their movement a war of ideas, conservatives began to mobilize resources for battle in the 1960s. They built new institutional bastions; recruited, trained, and equipped their intellectual warriors; forged new weapons as cable television, the Internet, and other communications technologies evolved; and threw their resources into policy and political battles. By 1984, moderate Republican John Saloma warned of a “major new presence in American politics.” If left unchecked, he accurately predicted, “the new conservative labyrinth” would pull the nation’s political center sharply to the right. Today, that labyrinth is larger, more sophisticated, and increasingly able to influence what gets on and what stays off the public policy agenda. From the decision to abandon the federal guarantee of cash assistance to the poor, to changes in the federal tax structure, to interest in medical savings accounts and the privatization of Social Security, conservative policy ideas and rhetoric | have come to dominate the nation’s political conversation, reflecting what political scientist Walter Dean Burnham has called a “hegemony of market theology.” Spearheading the assault has been a core group of 12 conservative foundations: the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Carthage Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, the Charles G. Koch, David H. Koch and Claude R. Lambe charitable foundations, the Phillip M. McKenna Foundation, the JM Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Henry Salvatori Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. In 1994,they controlled more than $1.1 billion in assets; from 1992-94, they awarded $300 million in grants, and targeted $210 million to support a wide array of projects and institutions. Over the last two decades, the 12 have mounted an impressively coherent and concerted effort to shape public policy by undermining and ultimately redirecting what they regard as the institutional |
The Heritage Foundation Board Trustees (front from left):Mildge Decter,
Richard M.Scaife, David R. Brown, Edwin J.Feulner Jr., and Bard Van Andrel-
Gaby; (back row)Fredric Rench, Preston A. Wells, Thomas L. Rhodes, William
J. Hume, Thomas A. Roe, and Frank Shakespeare. Not pictured:Jed Bush,
Grover Coors, J. William Middendorf II, William E. Simon, and Jay Van Andel.
| strongholds of modern American liberalism: academia, Congress, the judiciary, executive branch agencies, major media, religious institutions, and philanthropy itself. They channeled some $80 million to right-wing policy institutions actively promoting an anti-government, unregulated markets agenda. Another $89 million supported conservative scholars and academic programs, with $27 million targeted to recruit and train the next generation of right-wing leaders in conservative legal principles, free-market economics, political journalism and policy analysis. And $41.5 million was invested to build a conservative media apparatus, support pro-market legal organizations, fund state-level think tanks and advocacy organizations, and mobilize new philanthropic resources for conservative policy change. The strong role that conservative foundations have played in shaping national and state policy debates reflects not only impressive cash | reserves, but also a sophisticated funding strategy: * Their grants are overtly and unabashedly political. They single out and support aggressive and entrepreneurial organizations committed to government rollback through the privatization of government services, deregulation of industry and the environment, devolution of authority from the federal to state and local governments, and deep cuts in federal anti-poverty spending. *They work to build strong institutions by providing general operating support rather than project-specific funding. This unrestricted money allows groups considerable flexibility to attract, train, and keep talented people, launch special projects, and develop their databases and skills. *They recognize that national budget and policy priorities significantly impact what happens on the state, local and even neighborhood levels, and fund accordingly. |
action in social welfare and economic
development policy seem off limits
and inappropriate.”
| *They emphasize marketing and communications techniques, funding grant recipients to flood the media and political marketplace with conservative policy ideas and to communicate with and mobilize their constituency base on behalf of these ideas. *They emphasize networking with other groups around a common reform agenda. *They invest in the recruitment, training, placement, and media visibility of conservative public intellectuals and policy leadership. *They fund across the institutional spectrum, recognizing that institutions or programs that support conservative scholarship, rapid-fire research and advocacy, lobbying, strategic litigation, leadership development and constituency mobilization are all important components of an effective policy movement. *They have made long-term funding commitments, | providing large grants over a multi-year and, in some cases, multi-decade period. Longterm funding has financially anchored conservative institutions and enabled them to take the political offensive on key social, economic, and regulatory policy issues. *They concentrate their grants, with 18 percent of the grantees getting more than 75 percent of the funding.A significant portion of the conservative foundations_ largesshas flowed to a small group of think tanks that according to a sociologist “were particularly critical in the shift of the economic debate to the right [and] provided much of the groundwork for the radical change in policy taking place from 1978 through 1981.” Well-endowed with the financial and human resources to market their policy ideas, these institutions have effectively repositioned the boundaries of national policy discussion, redefining key concepts, molding public opinion, |
| and pushing for a variety of specific policy reforms. Through the constant repetition and dissemination of conservative policy ideas, they have provided a philosophical underpinning for many of the most important fiscal and social policies developed and implemented over the past 16 years. And in the end, they have succeeded in making “positive government action in social welfare and economic development policy seem off limits and inappropriate”SUPPLY SIDE SWIPE The ramifications of conservative funding streams have been profound. In terms of political process, the existence of powerful and well-funded conservative “counter-institutions” raises the specter of what some have called “supply-side” politics. Political scientist Samuel Kernell has suggested that when aggressive marketing is linked to modern means of communication, those with resources to broadcast |  |
| messages will find their place in the citizen-consumer marketplace irrespective of existing demand. This “supply-side” politics, he contends, is “so psychologically powerful as to determine what voters will think they want.”6 One of the most impressive supply-side successes has been shaping national economic policy. As Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency, conservatives saw and seized their opening. Four private institutions the National Bureau of Economic Research, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, American Enterprise Institute, and Center for the Study of American Business led the push for “trickle-down” policies. Large tax cuts they argued, using everything from sound bites to scholarly journals would generate revenues by stimulating the national economy. Supply-side economic theory laid the basis for what became the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, a piece of legislation that reduced federal income tax rates by 25 percent over a three-year period. | This deep and sweeping tax cut not only meant a cumulative loss of $1 trillion to the Treasury Department by 1987, it also helped to create unprecedented federal deficits during the 1980s. The federal deficit was then used politically to justify “a frontal assault on the revenue base of the modern welfare state” by creating a zero-sum legislative environment, pitting individual programs against each other in the fight for revenues while rendering an expansion of federal social policy extremely difficult. James Galbraith was one of many who tried in vain to debunk trickle-down theory as “reactionary and deeply implausible,” saying that “it springs from a never-never land of abstract theory concocted over 25 years by the disciples of Milton Friedman and purveyed.” But, with few research and advocacy institutions having the money and clout to focus policy attention on such matters as wage stagnation, rising inequality, real and hidden uneployment, and poverty, the “conservative fiscal |
| consensus” triumphed. The government’s main economic management task devolved to balancing the budget, with debate centering on how many years that goal should take. There is “a common ground on economic policy,” lamented Galbraith, “that now stretches with differences only of degree from the radical right to Bill Clinton.” This conservative victory established a strategy model, set the stage for some of the most aggressively anti-poor legislation in a century, and ushered in a right-wing revolution likely to dominate both policy forums and the popular debate for years to come.THE WAR ON THE POOR As conservative grantees hammered home on the revenue side of national fiscal policy, they did not neglect the expenditure side. Indeed, it is in the particular area of federal anti-poverty programs that conservative grantees have launched their most sustained and vitriolic attacks. | In the early 1980s, the Manhattan Institute sponsored and heavily promoted two publications that urged the elimination of federal anti-poverty programs. George Gilder’s book, Wealth and Poverty, contended that poverty was the result of personal irresponsibility coupled with government programs that rewarded and encouraged it; Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 extended the argument, stating that afdc and other anti-poverty programs reduced marriage incentives, discouraged workers from accepting low-wage jobs, and encouraged out-of-wedlock births among low income teenage and adult women. These books were followed by Lawrence Mead’s Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship, which blamed governments for perpetuating poverty by failing to require welfare recipients to work. Other conservative grantees have used their funds for more than a decade to capitalize on and extend the works by Gilder, Murray, and Mead, spreading |
At this New York City-run shelter for homeless families,
adults and children are packed into a converted gym.
| conservative political rhetoric and policy opinion through major media and conservative-controlled print and broadcast outlets. They have redefined the problem by arguing that poverty is a relative concept, that the poor are significantly better off than is popularly understood, that moral failure causes the poor to be poor, and that government action has perpetuated rather than alleviated poverty by coddling the poor and entrapping them in a system that debases and clientizes them. The 15-year conservative campaign to demonize the poor and eviscerate the government programs that minimally support them culminated in the passage of welfare “reform” in 1996. That legislation dismantled the Aid to Families with Dependent Children, eliminating the only federal program guaranteeing cash assistance to poor women and their children. The anti-poor crusade also led to significant cuts in federal anti-poverty spending, with programs serving the poor absorbing a full 93 percent of the 1995 and 1996 budget | cuts, even though those programs constituted only 24 percent of all entitlement spending. The conservative attacks on oor people, affirmative action, and government programs serving low-income constituencies and their constant reaffirmation of market efficiencies without recognizing market inequities or failure has not only led to an array of specific policies, but has also inhibited the development of alternative policies to address growing concentrations of poverty and inner-city decline, the social costs of which are astronomical. Despite recently reported gains in the incomes of poor Americans last year, the nation remains an economically and racially divided one, with more than 40 million Americans lacking health insurance, an appalling 20 percent child poverty rate, a rising prison population, the disappearance of jobs in inner city neighborhoods, and sharp and continuing inequities in education and educational opportunity. Although such economic inequities and social divisions |
| might be expected to raise serious questions about the nation_s political ethic, the current institutional forces driving federal and state policy debates almost guarantee that these will not even be asked.MARKETING THE PRODUCT The proliferation and continued heavy funding of policy institutions such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Heritage Foundation threatens to tilt the debate even further to the right on key policy issues and options. These groups flood the media with hundreds of opinion editorials. Their top staff appear as political pundits and policy experts on dozens of television and radio shows across the country. And their lobbyists work the legislative arenas, distributing policy proposals, briefing papers, and position statements. Given the growing political importance of the media, conservative policy institutions have clearly | stated the need for strong marketing and communications. “I make no bones about marketing,” said AEI_s former president, William Baroody: We pay as much attention to the dissemination of the product as we do to the content. We’re probably the first major think tank to get into the electronic media. We hire ghost writers for scholars to produce op-ed articles that are sent to the one hundred and one cooperating newspapers three pieces every two weeks. In the late 1980s, the Heritage Foundation made the same point in an article advising others how to start and run an effective think tank: The easy part is getting your message right. The real test is getting your message out. … Everything you do, every day, must involve marketing in as many as six dimensions. Market your policy recommendations, market the principles and values behind them, market the tangible publications and events your organization is producing. Market the think tank concept itself. Then market your specific |
| organizations. And never stop marketing yourself and the other key individuals who personify the organization. A decade later, the marketing strategies of conservative institutions are even more sophisticated and aggressive. The Hoover Institution’s public affairs office, for example, links to 900 media centers across the US and 450 abroad. The Reason Foundation, a national public policy research organization that also serves as a national clearinghouse on privatization, had 359 television and radio appearances in 1995 and more than 1,500 citations in national newspapers and magazines. The Manhattan Institute has held more than 600 forums or briefings for journalists and policy makers on multiple public policy issues and concerns, from tort reform to federal welfare policy. And the National Center for Policy Analysis reports that “ncpa ideas” have been discussed in 573 nationally syndicated columns and 184 wire stories over the 12 years of its existence. Relying not just on the mainstream | media to disseminate their ideas, conservative institutions have created a variety of conservative-controlled media outlets and projects, newsletters and policy journals, web sites, and television and radio broadcasting networks. The Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, for example, launched a strategic venture in 1995 to co-publish with William F. Buckley_s National Review, the National Review West, that goes out to 80,000 political conservatives in the Western states. The Free Congress Foundation, in addition to its National Empowerment Television, is publishing NetNewsNow, a broadcast fax letter sent around the country to more than 400 radio producers and news editors, and the Heartland Institute_s PolicyFax, which makes a variety of easy-to-read policy reports available free to journalists and legislators. Conservative foundations also provided $2,734,263 to four right-of-center magazines between 1990 and 1993, |
| including the The National Interest, The Public Interest, The New Criterion, and The American Spectator. Over the same time period, however, four left of center publications The Nation, The Progressive, In These Times, and Mother Jones received only $269,500 from foundations. Based on such funding disparities, one journalist concluded: “America’s conservative philanthropies eagerly fund the enterprise of shaping opinion and defining policy debates, while similar efforts by progressive philanthropies are, by comparison, sporadic and half hearted.” “Think tank” journals also fit nicely into the conservatives’ broader communications strategy by providing publishing opportunities for conservative thinkers and policy advocates. These in-house publications, as journalist Lawrence Soley has noted, “bear names that closely resemble those of [more] legitimate journals,” masking the “academic anemia” of think tank staff while giving them apparently impressive publications records. AEI’s William Schneider, for | example, published 16 articles in the Institute’s Public Opinion but not a single article in Public Opinion Quarterly, a respected journal of social science published since 1937. Yet, Schneider became one of the most “sought-after” political pundits, appearing 72 times on network news |
| programs between 1987 and 1989, and serving as a regular political commentator for National Public Radio_s Morning Edition. Meanwhile, as conservatives decried the media’s left bias, they saw their institutions mentioned in various media almost 8,000 times in 1995, while liberal or progressive think tanks received only 1,152 citations. The consequence as true today as it was when journalist Karen Rothmyer wrote 16 years ago is that “Layer upon layer of seminars, studies, conferences, and interviews [can] do much to push along, if not create, the issues, which the become the national agenda of debate. … By multiplying the authorities to whom the media are prepared to give a friendly hearing, [conservative donors] have helped to create an illusion of diversity where none exists. The result could be an increasing number of one-sided debates in which the challengers are far outnumbered, if indeed they are heard from at all.” | CONSERVATIVE RESOURCE MOBILIZATION Complementing the strong marketing and communications focus of groups such as AEI and the Heritage Foundation are a variety of conservative foundation strategies to mobilize or redirect philanthropic resources in ways consistent with their policy agenda. In fact, the contemporary origins of the conservative funding movement go back to the early 1970s, when William E. Simon, former treasury secretary under Presidents Nixon and Ford, and other prominent conservatives, began to urge donors to align their philanthropy with their presumed political and public policy interests. For Simon, who became president of the John M. Olin Foundation in 1977 and still holds that title, one key element of that alignment involved funding public intellectuals who could provide a sound defense of free-market policies and government rollback that were so ardently desired by new right enthusiasts. In Time for Truth, |
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| Simon wrote: “Funds generated by business must rush by the multimillions to the aid of liberty … to funnel desperately needed funds to scholars, social scientists, writers, and journalists who understand the relationship between political and economic liberty.” He called on the business community to “cease the mindless subsidizing of colleges and universities whose departments of economy, government, politics, and history are hostile to capitalism,” and to move funds from “the media which serve as megaphones for anti-capitalist opinion” to those more “pro-freedom” and “pro-business.” Since then, a variety of investigative reporters and scholars have documented the hundreds of millions of dollars that conservative donors have invested to reshape the nation_s political conversation and policy priorities. One such report, published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in the early 1980s, documented the millions of dollars that Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon oil fortune and | chair of the Sarah Scaife Foundation, alone has invested in right-wing policy institutions. Dubbed the “financier of the right,” Scaife was found to have made substantial investments over the 1970s and early 1980s in more than 100 “ideological organizations.” A more scholarly analysis of right-wing funding found that 10 conservative institutions received a total of $88 million between 1977 and 1986 to finance their policy activities. Sociologist Michael Patrick Allen found that the 12 “sustaining” foundations increased their support of these ten policy institutions by over 330 percent during the 10-year period studied. These and other data demonstrate a long-term pattern of politically motivated investment by conservative donors. The role that conservative foundations have played in reinvigorating the intellectual, institutional and leadership base of US conservatism does not have a significant parallel in the philanthropic mainstream. While conservative donors see themselves as part of a larger movement to defeat |
| “big government liberalism,” and fund accordingly, mainstream foundations operate within a tradition of American pragmatism by adopting a problem-oriented, field-specific approach to social improvement. The ideological commitments of conservative foundations and the caution of mainstream ones have exacerbated, if not created, a gap in the resources available to multi-issue public policy institutions working on the right and left of the policy spectrum. Consider, for example, that the combined revenue base of such conservative multi-issue policy institutions as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, the Cato Institute, and Citizens for a Sound Economy exceeded $77 million in 1995. In strong contrast, the roughly equivalent progressive (e.g., multi-issue, left-of-center groups whose work focuses on domestic policies at the national level) the Institute for Policy Studies, the Economic Policy Institute, | Citizens for Tax Justice, and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities had only $9 million at their collective disposal in 1995. Adding the Twentieth Century Fund, the Center for the Study of Social Policy, OMB Watch, and the Center for Community Change would push the combined 1995 budgets of these eight organizations to $18.6 million, still less than a quarter of the top five conservative groups. While revenue base may be only one factor underlying (or contributing to) organizational capacity and effectiveness, surely it is a critical one.RESHAPING THE INSTITUTIONAL LANDSCAPE The long-term investments that conservative foundations have made in building a “counter-establishment” of research, advocacy, media, legal, philanthropic, and religious sector organizations have paid off handsomely. These donors have altered the mix of organizations actively seeking to influence public policy in |
 | Washington, DC, and in state capitals. In doing so, they have reshaped the institutional landscape of US politics and policymaking profoundly. Their long-term support of policy institutions has occurred at a time of significant change in American politics change that has facilitated the emergence of groups like the Heritage Foundation as particularly influential policy actors. Among the most important of these changes are the long-term decline in electoral participation, the deepening class skew to US voting patterns, the transformation of political parties into top-down fundraising vehicles, the growing role of money in politics, the rising political importance of the media, and the decline of institutions (such as unions and political parties) that once played a stronger balancing role in setting national, state, and local priorities. Over time, these changes interacted in a way that reduced opportunities for low income people to exercise influence while enlarging such opportunities for upper-income constituencies. Philanthropic money thus converged with political opportunity in a way that has not only pushed the debate to the right but also exacerbated America’s “participatory |
| inequality.” Beyond the groups previously mentioned, the institutional actors receiving significant support over the 1992-1994 period include media groups, legal organizations, state-level advcates, and religious sector organizations. The following list represents a sampling of grantee institutions and activities.MEDIA ORGANIZATIONS: * American Spectator Educational Foundation received grants totaling $1.7 million with more than $600,000 to expand editorial staff and reporting at The American Spectator, $515,000 in flexible general operating support, and $485,000 in special project funding. Its subscription base lunged from 38,000 in 1992 to 335,000 today. * National Affairs is the funding vehicle which handled grants for The Public Interest and The National Interest ($1.9 million), and the Foundation for Cultural Review | for The New Criterion ($1.6 million). * Commentary magazine got a tidy $1 million. * American Studies Center. Grants worth $410,000 helped ASC spread “Radio America” to 2,000 radio stations across the country, produce conservative programming, and support two conservative daily radio shows the “Alan Keyes Show” and “Dateline Washington.” *Firing Line (William F. Buckley), Think Tank (Ben Wattenberg), Peggy Noonan on Values, and other conservative public television public affairs programs, got $3.2 million. * Center for the Study of Popular Culture (cspc), Accuracy in Media, the Center for Media and Public Affairs, the Center for Science, Technology and Media, the Media Research Center, the Media Institute, and others were granted $5.2 million “to perpetuate the myth of a liberal bias in mainstream media reportage,” with particular criticism leveled against the |
The right-wing approach to social problems has boosted the already
astronomical US prison population. Here Suffolk, Massachusetts county jail.
| Public Broadcasting Service. With seed money from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, cspc launched the Media Integrity Project in 1987 to attack PBS for “left-wing bias.” Other critics, including Laurence Jarvik, a former Bradley Research Scholar at the Heritage Foundation and a current fellow at the Capital Research Center, have called for cutting funds or privatizing PBS. Accuracy in Media criticized PBS for “blatantly pro-Communist propaganda.” The efforts of these media grantees have made right-wing issues and views increasingly respectable and have pressured major media to become more responsive. Through scandalmongering and issue emphasis, conservative media outlets help to shape the news agenda for more established media while organized attacks on public television have pushed PBS to augment already substantial conservative public affairs programming. The result is an even further narrowing of viewpoint. As the former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, | Berkeley, Ben Bagdikian observes, “what gets reported enters the public agenda. What is not reported may not be lost forever, but it may be lost at a time when it is most needed.”LEGAL ORGANIZATIONS: * The Institute for Justice (IJ), the top grant recipient, received $2.9 million in 24 separate grants to support litigation, training, and outreach activities focused on four areas: private property rights, economic liberty, school choice, and the First Amendment. The IJ’s budget increased to more than $1 million less than a year after it was founded in 1991 and is presently $2.3 million. * The Center for Individual Rights and the Washington Legal Foundation were also heavily funded to reverse affirmative action programs of the federal government and in higher education. These foundations not only emphasized litigation, but worked to nurture and coordinate a growing network |
| of like-minded law students, alumni, and attorneys. The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, founded by two Yale law school students in the early 1980s, received $1.6 million in grants to support its efforts to transform the legal profession, which it sees as “currently dominated by a form of liberal orthodoxy [advocating] a centralized and uniform society.” According to the Federalist Society_s 1995 annual report, its Student Division has more than 4,900 law student members in more than 140 law schools across the country, up from 2,137 members in 1989. Its Lawyers Division boasts more than 15,000 attorneys and legal professionals and more than 50 active chapters. The Society also publishes The Federalist (circulation 57,000), and other legal monographs and reports, and sponsors a Continuing Legal Education program.STATE/REGIONAL THINK TANKS ADVOCACY GROUPS: *The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, heavily | funded since its inception by the Bradley Foundation, has pushed to shape state education and welfare policy in accordance with key conservative principles. * The Pacific Institute for Public Policy Research aggressively worked for California’s Proposition 209, the ballot initiative to eliminate that state’s affirmative action program. * The Heartland Institute publishes Intellectual Ammunition, a glossy, 25-page journal featuring condensed versions of policy statements and position papers of most of the think tanks and advocacy organizations to which the 12 foundations directed grants between 1992 and 1994. The May/June 1996 issue introduced PolicyFax, a regular insert described by Illinois state senator Chris Lauzen as: a revolutionary public policy fax-on-demand research service that enables you to receive, by fax, the full text of thousands of documents from more than one hundred of the nation’s leading think tanks, publications, |
| and trade associations. PolicyFax is easy to use, and it’s free for elected officials and journalists. The 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week service features topics from crime to the economy to welfare, including South Carolinians Have Nothing to Worry about from Concealed Handguns; Four Steps to Reforming Superfund, Medical Savings Accounts: The Right Way to Reform Health Care: Benefits of the Flat Tax; and Effective Compassion. * The American Legislative Exchange Council (alec) and the newer State Policy Network. Provide technical assistance, develop model legislation, and report about communications activities and conferences. Alec, well-funded by private family foundations and corporate contributors, is a powerful and growing membership organization, with almost 26,000 state legislators more than one-third of the nation’s total. The organization, which has a staff of 30, responds to 700 information requests each month, and has | developed more than 150 pieces of model legislation ranging from education to tax policy. It maintains legislative task forces on every important state policy issue, including education, health care, tax and fiscal policy, and criminal justice.RELIGIOUS SECTOR ORGANIZATIONS: The Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), founded in 1982, believes that “the National and World Councils of churches are theologically and politically flawed.” Its early focus was international, supporting US foreign policy in Central America during the Reagan years. Today, IRD publishes Faith and Freedom and monitors “mainliners and other Christian groups that often claim to speak for millions but really represent only an extreme few.” * The Institute on Religion and Public Life and the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion |
| and Liberty both seek to influence the religious community through seminars, colloquia, sponsored research, book projects, newsletters, and journals. They work to instill a stronger appreciation of the morality of capitalism in the US and around the world. To counter “the clergy’s disturbing bias against the business community and free enterprise,” the Acton Institute runs three-day conferences for seminarians and divinity students to “introduce them to the moral and ethical basis of free market economies.” In 1995, it also launched a national welfare reform initiative to help shape national policy debates, believing that “churches and private individuals and organizations, not the government, can best help change people’s lives.” Other national think tanks, both large and small, have decried the national moral decay and blamed teenage pregnancy, single-parent families, crime, and drugs on ceaseless expansion of the Leviathan state. This linkage between morality, poverty, and government | spending consistently propagated by a wide range of conservative grantees has contributed to the movement’s overall political coherence, helping unite religious right activists and the often more secular fiscal conservatives. When moral failure is invoked to explain the plight of the poor, both can unite around a policy agenda stressing market discipline and the replacement of government social programs with personal responsibility. As James Morone noted, “Once the lines are drawn [between a righteous us and a malevolent them], one can forget about social justice, progressive thinking, or universal programs. Instead the overarching policy question becomes, “How do we protect ourselves and our children? Never mind health care build more jails.”INTEGRATED STRATEGY Conservative foundations bring to their grant making programs a clear vision and strong political intention, |
| funding to promote a social and public policy agenda fundamentally based on unregulated markets and limited government. They have created and anchored key institutions, concentrating their resources to sustain and expand a critical mass of advocacy, litigation and public policy groups working on the right of US politics and culture. The results have been cumulative and impressive. Scholars develop the intellectual basis for conservative social perspectives and policy views. Conservative think tanks and advocacy organizations produce hundreds of policy reports, briefings, action alerts, monographs and analyses on matters both broad and specific, from national fiscal policy to regulatory reform. Business-sponsored law firms pursue strategic litigation to advance conservative legal principles. Conservative media outlets profile policy approaches and proposals to inform and mobilize opinion while attacking the political and journalistic mainstream. And fellowships, internships, and leadership training | programs create an effective pipeline for moving young conservatives into the fields of law, economics, government and journalism. Further leveraging their investments, the 12 foundations have targeted their grants to support activities and projects intended to bring conservative scholars, policy analysts, grassroots leaders, and public officials into frequent contact with each other. Think tank leaders attend meetings to learn how to use new information and communication technologies for greater public opinion and policy impact. Grassroots activists are linked by satellite to training conferences focusing on how best to frame issues for public consumption. Students are subsidized to participate in public policy programs that teach them the essentials of free market economics and place them in think tanks, advocacy organizations, law firms and media outlets for further training. And organizations and projects are supported to build linkages and communication between grant making institutions |
| and grant recipients. In funding a policy movement rather than specific program areas, these 12 foundations distinguish themselves from the philanthropic mainstream, which has long maintained a pragmatic, non-ideological and field-specific approach to the grant making enterprise. The success of conservative foundation grantees in developing and marketing both general principles and specific policy proposals has also been enhanced by the institutional weaknesses of those who would place alternative policies on the table for political debate. The political implications and policy consequences of this imbalance have been profound. First, the heavy investments that conservative foundations have made in New Right policy and advocacy institutions have helped to create a supply-side version of American politics in which certain policy ideas find their way into the political marketplace regardless of existing citizen demand. Second, the multiplication of institutional voices marketing conservative policies and policy approaches has resulted in policy decisions with disastrous and disproportionate consequences for low income constituencies. The strategic grant making of the 12 foundations offers valuable lessons | for those grant makers and others interested in national and state public policy matters. Seven stand out in particular. They include: * Understanding the importance of ideology andoverarching frameworks; * Building strong institutions by providing ample general operating support and awarding large, multi-year grants; * Maintaining a national policy focus; * Recognizing the importance of marketing, media, and persuasive communications; * Creating and cultivating public intellectuals and policy leaders; * Funding comprehensively for social transformation and policy change by awarding grants across sectors, blending research and advocacy, supporting litigation, and encouraging the public participation of core constituencies; and *Taking a long-haul approach. While each of these lessons alone has funding power and significance, it is the combination that has given conservative philanthropy its vast clout. |
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by Wayne MadsenFOR AT LEAST HALF A CENTURY, THE US HAS BEEN
INTERCEPTING AND DECRYPTING THE TOP SECRET
DOCUMENTS OF MOST OF THE WORLD’S GOVERNMENTS
| It may be the greatest intelligence scam of the century: For decades, the US has routinely intercepted and deciphered top secret encrypted messages of 120 countries. These nations had bought the world’s most sophisticated and supposedly secure commercial encryption technology from Crypto AG, a Swiss company that staked its reputation and the security concerns of its clients on its neutrality. The purchasing nations, confident that their communications were protected, sent messages from their capitals to embassies, military missions, trade offices, and espionage dens around the world, via telex, radio, teletype, and facsimile. They not only conducted sensitive albeit legal business and diplomacy, but sometimes strayed into criminal matters, issuing orders to assassinate political leaders, bomb commercial buildings, and engage in drug and arms smuggling. All the while, because of a secret agreement between the National Security Agency | (NSA) and Crypto AG, they might as well have been hand delivering the message to Washington. Their Crypto AG machines had been rigged so that when customers used them, the random encryption key could be automatically and clandestinely transmitted with the enciphered message. NSA analysts could read the message traffic as easily as they could the morning newspaper. The cover shielding the NSA-Crypto AG relationship was torn in March 1992, when the Iranian military counterintelligence service arrested Hans Buehler, Crypto AG’s marketing representative in Teheran. The Iranian government charged the tall, 50ish businessman with spying for the “intelligence services of the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States of America.” “I was questioned for five hours a day for nine months,” Buehler says. “I was never beaten, but I was strapped to wooden benches and told I would be beaten. I was told Crypto was a spy center” that worked with |
| foreign intelligence services. Despite prolonged interrogation, Buehler-who had worked for Crypto AG for 13 years and was on his 25th trip to Iran -apparently maintained his ignorance. “I didn’t know that the equipment was bugged, otherwise the Iranians ould have gotten it out of me by their many _methods._ ” With millions of dollars in contracts and a major international spy operation at stake, the company was eager to make the incident and Buehler go away, even though the salesman had brought in 40 percent of Crypto’s 100 million Swiss franc sales revenue. Crypto bought Buehler’s freedom with a $1 million payment to the Iranians, returned him to Switzerland, and then, astonishingly, fired him and ordered the bewildered salesman to repay the bond. The cover-up backfired, however, when current and former Crypto employees came to | Buehler’s defense and shared their first-hand knowledge of manipulated cipher equipment. “I hold proofs [sic] of the rigging of code machines,” said an unidentified former Crypto AG engineer. “Fifteen years ago, I saw American and German engineers doctoring our machines. It took me some time until I was certain about the manipulations. The proofs: technical documents. … I put them in a bank safety deposit box. Then I informed the federal prosecutors_ office in Berne. There were many conversations. Suddenly, these contacts were broken off and the affair petered out.” The engineer told another reporter: the schemes and the cipher keys were created by them [NSA and BND (Bundesnacrichtendienst-the German intelligence service)]. I immediately, discreetly, notified the Swiss prosecutors. There was an investigation. I was never able to find out |
 |  After Hans Buehler was arrested in Iran onspying chrges, the Crypto AG image of neutrality suffered and various nations reexamined their security arrangements. |
| the result. Today, the Buehler affair brings everything out in the open again. And, I’m afraid. What happened to Hans Buehler could happen to any other salesperson of Crypto AG. It’s not a question of attacking this company; it’s a question of saving lives. … When the Swiss media began to reveal the background of Buehler’s story, Crypto AG responded with a lawsuit in an attempt to quash the story and muzzle Buehler. The suit was settled days before former Crypto engineers were to testify that they thought the machines had been altered. The parties agreed not to disclose the settlement and Crypto sought to reassure its clients. Informed sources in Switzerland and the Middle East confirmed that Crypto AG settled because it, and the NSA and BND, didn_t want to reveal anything in court. | Nevertheless, the damage to Crypto AG’s credibility was already done. Customers from Saddam Hussein to the Pope grew nervous. Informed of the details around the Hans Buehler incident, the Vatican Ñ which uses Swiss cipher machines to secure diplomatic communications transmitted from the Holy See to the many papal nuncios around the world-showed a marked lack of charity. An official branded the perpetrators “bandits!” SWISS CHEESE NEUTRALITY Although the Iranians may have been technically wrong about Buehler’s complicity in the massive deception, they were right that something was rotten at Crypto AG. And even before the firing of Hans Buehler, some of Cypto’s engineers were |
| ambivalent about secret deals with the NSA. “At first, I was idealistic,” said Juerg Spoerndli, who left Crypto in 1994. “But I adapted quickly. … The new aim was to help Big Brother USA look over these countries_ shoulders. We_d say, _It’s better to let the USA see what these dictators are doing._ ” Soon, however, Spoerndli grew apprehensive over the manipulation. “It’s still an imperialistic approach to the world. I don_t think it’s the way business should be done.” Ruedi Hug, another former Crypto AG engineer, was also critical. “I feel betrayed,” he declared. “They always told us, _We are the best. Our equipment is not breakable, blah, blah, blah. … Switzerland is a neutral country._ ” Apparently not. A document released in 1995 by Britain’s Public Records Office indicates that Switzerland and nato concluded a secret deal in 1956. The | “Top Secret” document, dated February 10, 1956, with the reference “prem 11/1224,” was written by the famous British World War II figure, Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery. While “Monty” was a vice-commander of nato, he discussed a secret alliance with Swiss Defense Minister Paul Chaudet. In peacetime, Switzerland would be officially neutral, but in wartime, it would side with nato. A US document released in 1995 shows Switzerland’s importance to US national security. A Presidential directive on national security prepared for President Truman states that “Switzerland … delivers precision instruments and other materials necessary for the armament of the USA and NATO countries [emphasis added].” Germany’s BND, too, has apparently cooperated with the US encryption rigging scheme through Siemens Defense Electronics Group of Munich. |
| A previous director of Siemens called Crypto AG a “secret Siemens daughter,” while a former Crypto AG financial director said, “the owner of the firm [Crypto] is the Federal Republic [of Germany].” The Siemens connection to Crypto was remarkably incestuous. Siemens provided technical assistance for the machine manipulation process. Suspicion about the German electronics giant’s role in Crypto’s operations was heightened when it was reported that Siemens helped raise the $1 million to spring Buehler from his Teheran prison cell. In fact, after revelations of the Crypto-Siemens association hit the Swiss press, Crypto’s managing director Michael Grupe informed the employees that the advisory board to Crypto’s board of directors was being dissolved. The two advisers-Alfred Nowosad and Helmut Wiesner-were both full-time Siemens employees. With the world media describing | the company as a silent partner of German and American signals intelligence (sigint) agencies around the world, Grube announced that “Crypto is changing its profile.” The German government’s contribution to the encryption rigging scheme also included its pressuring another Swiss firm, Gretag Data Systems AG, to allow a “red thread” program to be installed in the encryption software. “Red threading” is the software equivalent of sending in a Greek Trojan horse.18 Once owned by AT&T, this encryption manufacturer was acquired in 1995 by Information Resources Engineering (IRE), Inc. of Baltimore, Maryland.19 Interestingly, IRE is staffed by a number of ex-NSA cryptographic engineers. A third Swiss encryption company, Info Guard AG, was fully acquired by Crypto AG on June 16, 1994. Info Guard, which had been 50 percent |
 Boris Hagelin and one of his early cryptographic machines. |  |
| owned by Crypto AG, primarily sells encryption units to banks in Switzerland and abroad. Although German and American sigint agencies were involved in manipulating Crypto’s cipher machines, Motorola, one of the NSA’s major US contractors, performed the actual technical lteration, according to a former Crypto AG chief engineer who was personally involved in the manipulation process. CRYPTO HUDDLE Once the cipher machines were rigged to include the secret decryption key, the BND and NSA codebreakers could use the transmitted key to read any message sent by Crypto AG’s 120 country customers. One previous Crypto AG employee | contends that all developmental Crypto AG equipment had to be sent for approval to the NSA and to the German Central Cipher Bureau (Zentralstelle für Chiffrierung [ZfCH]), now the Federal Information Security Agency (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik [BSI] which is also Department 62 of the BND) in Bad Godesberg, near Bonn. In other cases, Crypto AG was apparently forced to market encryption equipment manufactured in the US, sent to Crypto, and passed off as Swiss equipment. In the 1970s, as Crypto was moving from electro-mechanical to computerized crypto units, a former Crypto AG engineer in Switzerland inspected one of the first prototype computerized machines sent from the US. He remarked that since the code could be easily broken, he found the machine useless. But when he told his superiors that he |
| could improve the encryption process if he was given access to the mathematical functions, two US cryptographic “experts” refused to disclose the information. According to a confidential Crypto AG memorandum, one of the NSA “experts” may have been Nora L. Mackabee, an NSA cryptographer who is now retired on a horse farm in Maryland along with her husband Lester, another retired NSA employee. Between August 19 and 20, 1975, three Crypto AG engineers huddled with Mackabee (identified as representing “IA” Ñ most likely “intelligence agency”) along with three Motorola engineers and one other American, Herb Frank. One Motorola engineer recalled that Frank was probably from another US intelligence agency based in northern Virginia but described him as a non-technical person who seemed to be making the administrative arrangements for | Mackabee. Crypto engineer Juerg Spoerndli, who was responsible for designing the firm’s encryption equipment, had heard from older engineers about the visits in earlier years by mysterious Americans. He concluded that NSA was ordering the design changes through German intermediaries. He confirmed the manipulation and admitted that in the late 1970s, he was “ordered to change algorithms under mysterious circumstances”25 to weaken his cipher units. PRIVACY? HA! Although the Buehler incident lent credence to the NSA Trojan Horse theory, it was not the first time that suspicions were |
Radomes ar NSA listening station, Menwith Hill, England.
| raised. Teheran had become concerned in 1987 when US official claimed “conclusive evidence that Iran ordered the kidnapping” of ABC News Beirut correspondent Charles Glass.26 Washington’s alleged proof was coded Iranian diplomatic cables Ñ intercepted by the NSA Ñ between Teheran and the Hezbollah (Party of God) terrorist group in Lebanon via Iran’s embassies in Beirut and Damascus. The next year, when a terrorist bomb brought down PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, it seems the NSA gained information by intercepting the communications of Iranian Interior Minister Ali Akbar Mohta shemi. It was apparently these messages that implicated Iran, not Libya. One intelligence summary, prepared by the US Air Force Intelligence Agency, cites Iran’s Mohtashemi as the mastermind. Released in redacted form pursuant | to a Freedom of Information Act (foia) request by lawyers for the bankrupt Pan American Airlines, it states: Mohtashemi is closely connected with the Al Abas and Abu Nidal terrorist groups. He is actually a long-time friend of Abu Nidal. He has recently paid 10 million dollars in cash and gold to these two organizations to carry out terrorist activities and was the one who paid the same amount to bomb PanAm Flight 103 in retaliation for the U.S. shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus. Mohtashemi has also spent time in Lebanon. An Israeli intercept of Iranian diplomatic coded communications between Mohtashemi’s Interior Ministry in Teheran and the Iranian embassy in Beirut (where Mohtashemi once served as ambassador) revealed Ñ more than two years before Buehler was arrested by Iran Ñ that the Shi_ite |
| cleric transferred $1.2 to $2 million used for the bombing of PanAm 103 to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command headed by Ahmed Jibril. Such revelations must have made the Iranians extremely suspect of the security of their diplomatic traffic. The role of Israel may be explained by a little-reported intelligence alliance. NSA maintains a link with the Israeli sigint entity, “Department 8200,” located in northern Tel Aviv at Herzliya. The sigint link is said to involve the British Government Communications Headquarters (gchq) base on Cyprus. Israel’s ability to crack the Iranian Crypto AG codes indicates that Israel had access to the key decoding programs. The ease with which the West was reading Iranian coded transactions obviously meant that someone in Israel’s sigint services possessed the decryption keys. | Then in 1992, Buehler was arrested. As the Swiss authorities struggled to put the pieces together, they at first believed that the Iranian secret services were retaliating for the arrest in Switzerland of Zeynold Abedine Sarhadi, an employee of the Iranian embassy in Berne and a nephew of former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani. Swiss police had arrested Sarhadi in early 1992 and were planning to extradite him to France to face trial for the 1991 assassination in Paris of former Iranian Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar. On August 7, 1991, one day before Bakhtiar was found dead with his throat slit, the Teheran headquarters of the Iranian Intelligence Service, vevak, transmitted a coded message to Iranian diplomatic missions in London, Paris, Bonn, and Geneva, inquiring “Is Bakhtiar dead?” The Iranians concluded from Western press reports |
| that Briish and American sigint operators had intercepted and decoded the message (as reported by L_Express of Paris) and knew that Teheran was behind the assassination. They realized that their code had been broken,30 looked to their Crypto AG cipher machines, and picked up Buehler. According to one European source, they may also have been tipped off by Stasi files of the ex-East German regime that found their way to Iran and revealed the Crypto AG ruse. In any case, the Iranians immediately began grilling prisoner 01228-1 about the role he and his company played in giving Iranian and Libyan codes to the US. Iran knew that Bakhtiar’s assassination had compromised the intelligence functions of the Iranian UN mission and embassy in Geneva. The NSA had already identified one of the assassins, Mohammed Azadi, from intercepts of his | phone calls from a pay phone in the town of Annecy in Savoy and an Istanbul apartment to the Iranian diplomatic mission in Geneva. On December 6, 1994, a special French terrorism court convicted two Iranians of murdering Bakhtiar, but strangely, it acquitted Sarhadi. “Justice has not been entirely served [for] reasons of state,” complained Bakhtiar’s widow bitterly. Those “reasons” may have included a tacit agreement among France, Switzerland, the German BND, and the NSA to spare Sarhadi in order to avoid producing captured transmissions and preserve the questionable secrecy surrounding the Crypto AG cipher manipulation program. It was not only the “rogue states” that were targeted. During the sensitive Anglo-Irish negotiations of 1985, the NSA’s British counterpart, the gchq, was able to decipher the |
In this official NSA PR photo, the agency intercepts a message from above.
| coded diplomatic traffic being sent between the Irish embassy in London and the Irish Foreign Ministry in Dublin. It was reported in the Irish press that Dublin had purchased a cryptographic system from Crypto AG worth more than a million Irish pounds. It was also reported that the NSA routinely monitored and deciphered the Irish diplomatic messages. Later, during the Falklands War, British gchq operators were able to decrypt classified Argentine message traffic because the Argentineans were using rigged Crypto AG cipher machines. Former British Foreign Office minister Ted Rowlands publicly stated that gchq had penetrated Argentine diplomatic codes. | US: CRYPTO BULLY If it turns out that the extent of communications interception is as broad as suspected, the international implications are profound. Every country in the world that used secure communications is potentially affected. Some have sought to abandon Crypto AG, but found their options limited. The US had at times required purchase of specific machines as a condition for favors. Pakistan was allegedly granted American military credits with only one provision, that it buy its encryption equipment from Crypto AG. Additionally, “It is not unheard of for NSA to offer preferential export treatment to a |
| company if it builds a back door into its equipment,” says one person with long experience in the field. “I_ve seen it. I_ve been in the room.” Several countries abandoned Crypto AG but failed to ensure secrecy. The Libyans switched to Gretag units after the NSA cited secret communications to allege Libyan involvement in the 1986 La Belle disco bombing in West Berlin. One senior US official said the fact that the Libyans were making their codes more difficult to crack would “make our job tougher.” But the NSA seemed to have the Gretag base covered as well. According to one knowledgeable cryptographic industry expert, NSA’s program to co-opt the services of encryption manufacturrs probably extends to all those within reach of NSA operatives. US cryptographic companies would be definite candidates for such participation. | The NSA program also likely extends to companies in nato and pro-US countries which have close relationships with GCHQ, NSA, and the BND. Even neutral countries_ firms are not off-limits to NSA manipulations. A former Crypto AG employee confirmed that high-level US officials approached neutral European countries and argued that their cooperation was essential to the Cold War struggle against the Soviets. The NSA allegedly received support from cryptographic companies Crypto AG and Gretag AG in Switzerland, Transvertex in Sweden, Nokia in Finland, and even newly-privatized firms in post-Communist Hungary.39 In 1970, according to a secret German BND intelligence paper, supplied to the author, the Germans planned to “fuse” the operations of three cryptographic firms-Crypto AG, Grattner AG (another Swiss cipher firm), and |
| Ericsson of Sweden. Securocrats often turn to the boogeyman of “rogue” nations in order to justify the expense and ethical necessity of eavesdropping on all forms of international communication, but in reality many intercepts involve messages by neutral or allied nations. NSA’s 1993 release of the World War II era “magic” intercepts under foia pressure revealed that US military intelligence read not only messages by Axis nations, but also intercepted and decrypted the top secret communications of Allied and neutral nations. Switzerland was among the more than 30 countries whose messages were being read. Since Swiss-made cipher machines were used by many governments at the time, it is likely that the US has been reading such messages for over half a century. An early example is the use of top secret intercepts by the US delegation to the 1945 founding convention of the United Nations in San Francisco. | Fifty years of intercepted communication have given the US and its co-conspirators trade, diplomatic, economic and strategic advantages. By intercepting the “bottom line” negotiating positions of foreign governments, they have been able to shape international treaties and negotiations in their own favor: They will know, for example, the exact health status of the king of Saudi Arabia, the secret financial transactions of the president of Peru, the negotiating position of South Africa’s trade delegation to the World Trade Organization, or the anti-abortion strategy of the Pope in the United Nations. Such information, presented daily to the president and the secretary of state in their intelligence briefings, is extremely useful and allows the US to play high-stakes diplomatic poker with a mirror behind everyone else’s back. |
| See also: Exposing the Global Surveillance System about Project ECHELON Networking with Spooks about control over the internet domain name system Big Brother Goes Hi Tech about loss of privacy in the information age The Secret FISA Court: Rubberstamping on Rights about the loss of legal protections from covert surveillance. |
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