Honest Ahmadinejad

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should get out more. We mean that without irony. The Iranian President spoke yesterday in New York at the start of the U.N. conference reviewing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and nothing could have done more to expose the folly of relying on arms control to maintain global security.

The Iranian couldn’t have been clearer that his country intends to ignore any and all U.N. pressure to stop building its bomb. He averred that the world has “not a single credible proof” that Iran intends to build a bomb, notwithstanding the world’s discovery of its secret uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz in 2002 and its secret underground facility near Qom last year. He even said the U.S. should be suspended from the U.N. atomic agency’s board because “it used nuclear weapons against Japan” and depleted uranium weapons in Iraq.

Delegates from the U.S., U.K. and France walked out during the speech, to their credit. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs chimed in that the remarks were “wild accusations,” and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took to the podium later in the day to accuse Iran of “flouting the rules” and declaring it is “time for a strong international response.”

This is all true enough, but it ignores Mr. Ahmadinejad’s real message, which is that Iran won’t be deterred by a stricter world antiproliferation treaty, or by one more U.N. Security Council resolution, or by the moral example, as President Obama likes to put it, of a new U.S.-Russian arms treaty. Iran wants the bomb in order to become a more potent Mideast power that can do as it pleases without having to worry about opposition from the world’s largest nations.

Give Mr. Ahmadinejad credit for lack of artifice. He says what he and the ruling class in Tehran believe and thus betrays what they intend, however “wild.”

The truly humiliating spectacle is the sight of the world’s leading powers devoting a month to updating a treaty designed to stop proliferation even as Mr. Ahmadinejad makes a mockery of that effort before their very eyes.

If Iran does get a nuclear weapon, or even the capacity to make one at a moment’s notice, it would be the most damaging act of proliferation since Stalin got the hydrogen bomb. The event would set off a regional nuclear arms race, as Turkey, Egypt, the Saudis and perhaps even the Gulf states seek their own nuclear deterrent. The rest of the world would see that Iran was able to face down the world’s leading powers—and prevail. The damage to world order would be traumatic. And that is before the increased risks of global nuclear terrorism from Iranian proliferation.

If Mr. Obama and other world leaders were serious about Iran, they wouldn’t merely walk out on Iran’s president. They would rally the world to stop him, explaining the grave stakes to the public, and making clear to Iran that there is a deadline to diplomacy and that military force will be used if diplomacy fails. The only serious person at the U.N. on Monday was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Editorial, Wall Street Journal

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The NPT Illusion

Disarmament fantasies help the Iranian regime.

These are strange days for New York City’s finest. Over the weekend, they deployed in force to find the terrorist who tried to bomb Times Square. Yesterday, they deployed in force to protect the terrorist who is president of Iran. One of these guys works in propane, fireworks and gasoline; the other guy in enriched uranium, polonium triggers and ballistic missiles.

That other guy—the one who didn’t roll into town in a Pathfinder—was in Manhattan to unload on this month’s U.N. review conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. And unload he did: on the Truman administration, on the Obama administration, on “the Zionist regime,” on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, on the NPT itself. For all this, Iran is still considered a member in good standing of the treaty, entitled to its seat at the International Atomic Energy Agency and its right to the nuclear reactors.

Does this make sense? In the upside-down universe of Turtle Bay—the same one in which Iran was just elected by acclamation to the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women—it does. What’s stranger is that it also makes sense to President Obama, who has called the NPT the “cornerstone of the world’s efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.” If that’s the cornerstone, it’s no wonder the edifice on top of it is collapsing.

The case for the NPT is that it has slowed nuclear proliferation by offering a grand bargain between the world’s nuclear haves and have-nots. The haves promise to work toward the elimination of their arsenals via arms-control treaties; the have-nots get access to civilian nuclear technology while promising not to build weapons of their own.

As a show of global good citizenship, last month President Obama signed another arms-control treaty with Russia, and yesterday disclosed previously classified information about the exact size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. This surely made a deep impression in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Bhutan, where conspicuous displays of moral stainlessness are considered the essence of geopolitical strategy.

As for the effect of the administration’s gesture politics, it probably hasn’t been what Mr. Obama envisioned. A biting U.N. sanctions resolution on Iran is nowhere in sight. The regime’s nuclear bids proceed undeterred. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt are openly entertaining doubts about U.S. seriousness—while entertaining nuclear futures of their own.

And it turns out that when it comes to a U.N. beauty contest, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad beats Barack Obama every time. Twenty-four countries walked out of Ahmadinejad’s speech yesterday. Another 168 remained in their seats, including those virtuous Scandinavians.

There’s a reason the NPT has failed the administration. It enshrines a status quo that is 40 years out of date. Today, four of the world’s nine nuclear-weapons states are not signatories to the treaty. Of those four, three—India, Israel and Pakistan—are democracies and allies of the U.S. And yet the NPT treats them as pariahs for not subscribing to a treaty that fails to recognize their imperative national security interests, at least as they themselves perceive them. The Canadas of the world may be happy to go along with the NPT, secure as they are under America’s nuclear umbrella. That was a luxury India, Israel and Pakistan did not enjoy when they embarked on their nuclear programs.

Now Iran, in connivance with the usual Middle Eastern suspects (and their useful idiots in the West), is trying to use the NPT as a cudgel to force Israel to disarm. That makes perfect sense if you subscribe, as Mr. Obama does, to the theology of nuclear disarmament. It makes no sense if you think the distinction that matters when it comes to nuclear weapons is between responsible, democratic states, and reckless, unstable and dictatorial ones. Nobody lies awake at night wondering what David Cameron might do if he gets his finger on the U.K.’s nuclear trigger.

The world today is rapidly moving toward what strategist Andrew Krepinevich calls the “second nuclear age,” in which deterrence no longer works as it did during the Cold War. “It may be,” he writes, “that leaders of the newly armed nuclear states do not calculate costs and benefits in a manner similar to the United States.” Yet we haven’t even begun to think seriously about how to navigate these waters. Hillary Clinton’s mindless calls yesterday about strengthening the NPT won’t do.

One day a Pathfinder with tinted windows may park itself in Times Square with something more than propane tanks in the back seat. We may not be able to stop it. But we will live more securely if the driver of that car knows exactly what we intend to do next.

Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal

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Iran Sanctions Are Failing. What’s Next?

Has the U.S. abandoned plans to target the Iranian regime’s access to banking and credit and to isolate Iranian air and shipping transport? While recent reports to that effect have been strenuously denied by the administration, it has become clear that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s promise of “crippling sanctions” and President Barack Obama’s “aggressive” penalties are little more than talk. The administration simply cannot persuade a critical mass of nations to join with it.

At this juncture, there are blunt questions that need to be asked. Can sanctions even work? Can we live with a nuclear Iran? Is military action inevitable? But first, some foreign policy forensics are in order.

Candidate Obama told us engagement would be his byword, and to give him credit, he proffered a generous, open hand to Tehran. If his hand remained outstretched a little too long, he was secure in the knowledge that the world rarely criticizes an American president who is willing to make sacrifices for peace (especially if those sacrifices are measured in terms of American national security). But Mr. Obama was more than committed to dialogue with Iran: He was unwilling to take no for an answer.

How else to explain Mr. Obama’s lack of interest in the Iranian people’s democratic protests against the regime. Or his seeming indifference to Tehran’s failure to meet repeated international deadlines to respond to an offer endorsed by all five permanent U.N. Security Council members (and Germany) to allow Iran to enrich uranium in Russia, receiving back enriched fuel rods that do not lend themselves to weapons production. One might have hoped the administration was using that time to build international consensus for a plan B. But apparently that’s not the case.

After months of begging, China will agree only to discuss the possibility of a fourth U.N. Security Council resolution punishing Tehran’s noncompliance with its nonproliferation commitments. But along with Russia, it has already ruled out any measures to target the regime or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Even nonpermanent U.N. Security Council members Japan, Brazil and Turkey have reportedly rebuffed the administration requests to support tougher sanctions.

Meanwhile, Tehran continues to work toward a nuclear weapon, with the International Atomic Energy Agency now looking for two new nuclear sites in the Islamic Republic. Any talk of a tidal wave of ad hoc sanctions among various like-minded Western nations has fallen by the wayside. True, companies like Royal Dutch Shell, major oil trader Vitol and others have decided to take a pass on new deals with Iran. Others are less cautious.

In the past few weeks, among other reported business with Iran, Turkey announced it was mulling a $5.5 billion investment in Iran’s natural-gas sector. Iran and Pakistan signed a deal paving the way for the construction of a major pipeline. And a unit of China National Petroleum inked a $143 million contract with Iran’s state-run North Drilling Company to deliver equipment for NDC’s Persian Gulf oil fields.

Sanctions increasingly appear to be a fading hope. Thus we are left with a stark alternative: Either Iran gets a nuclear weapon and we manage the risk, or someone acts to eliminate the threat.

Unofficial Washington has long been discussing options for containment of a nuclear Iran. Setting aside the viability of containment (I have my doubts), surely these challenges must be apparent to some on the Obama team. But you’d never know it from administration officials, who continue to privately profess faith in the (weak) sanctions route. Badgered by those in the region most directly menaced by a nuclear Iran, administration officials have reportedly refused to engage in discussion of possible next steps.

The implications of this ostrich-like behavior are grave. Some Gulf states (including, some say, Qatar, which hosts American forces and equipment) have begun to openly propitiate the Tehran regime, anticipating its regional dominance once it is armed with nuclear weapons. Others, not reassured by Clinton drop-bys and ineffectual back-patting, have begun to explore their own nuclear option. Repeated rumors that Saudi Arabia is negotiating to buy an off-the-shelf Pakistani nuclear weapon should not be ignored.

What of Israel? The mess of U.S.-Israel relations has ironically only bolstered the fears of Arab governments that the current U.S. administration is a feckless ally. If the U.S. won’t stand by Israel, by whom will it stand? Conversely, our adversaries view both the distancing from Israel and the debacle of Iran policy as evidence of American retreat. All the ingredients of a regional powder keg are in place.

Finally, there is the military option. Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu left Washington last week befuddled by Mr. Obama’s intentions on Iran. Should Israel decide to attack Iran, the shock waves will not leave the U.S. unscathed. Of course, Mr. Obama could decide that we must take action. But no one, Iran included, believes he will take action.

And so, as the failure of Mr. Obama’s Iran policy becomes manifest to all but the president, we drift toward war. The only questions remaining, one Washington politico tells me, are who starts it, and how it ends.

Ms. Pletka is vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

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How the Next Middle East War Could Start

The three most plausible scenarios all involve Iran.

This May, Israel will celebrate its 62nd Independence Day. And barring the unexpected, the country will have good reason to celebrate. This will have been the safest year in a decade and a half for Israeli civilians—the year with the fewest fatalities in acts of war or terror.

Ironically, Israel’s most bitter foes are responsible for this achievement. The leadership of both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza have imposed a temporary policy of nonconfrontation on their respective followers, as well as on other armed groups operating within the territories they control. They are now part of the administration and don’t want to be blamed for igniting another war in the region. As a result, the once almost daily rocket attacks on civilian targets in the north and south of Israel have been reduced to a trickle.

This is as good as it gets in this part of the world. But the truth is that the Middle East remains as ever on the brink of war. One careless move by any party, and the now dormant volcano could erupt once again.

Israel is certainly aware of this volatility, and it is preparing for the worst. In late February the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conducted a secret war game, code-named Firestone 12, which simulated a general conflict in the region. Under the scenario used in the exercise, Iran instructs its Hezbollah proxies to initiate military action against Israel in order to divert attention from the Iranian nuclear project. Israel responds with massive force against Hezbollah in Lebanon, which draws Syria and Hamas into the conflict.

The exercise was supposed to conclude with the mobilization of a large number of reserves. But because military and political tensions were running high, the army decided not to call up the additional units.

Until recently, the most plausible scenario for the outbreak of the next war would have begun with an Israeli aerial assault on Iranian nuclear installations. This would lead to a response by members of the group that the Israeli intelligence community refers to as the “radical front”: Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. But for now, this scenario is regarded as somewhat less likely, since it appears that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will go along with the U.S. demand that Israel allow time for sanctions to achieve their purpose.

Yet there are other scenarios that create a very real danger of war breaking out.

Scenario I: Hamas attacks in order to break the impasse. These are hard times for Hamas. It sustained a military defeat at the hands of Israel in late 2008 and is now engaged in a bitter confrontation with Egypt over a barrier Egypt is constructing to prevent smuggling from the Sinai Peninsula into Gaza. Various sources, including IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, who briefed parliament on Tuesday, have suggested that Hamas may try to break the impasse by instigating a military operation to upset the balance of forces in the region. In addition, the organization’s desire to avenge the assassination of senior commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh last January in Dubai has only increased its motivation to act.

Scenario II: Hezbollah avenges Imad Mughniyeh’s assassination. Hezbollah believes that the Mossad was behind the assassination of the organization’s military commander two years ago. Mughniyeh was the most wanted terrorist on the FBI’s list before Sept. 11, 2001, and he was in charge of the suicide attacks on the American Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1982/1983. Mossad and the CIA tried to catch or kill him numerous times in the past.

In order to avenge Mughniyeh’s death, Hezbollah attempted to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Azerbaijan, attack Israeli tourists in the Sinai, and abduct Israeli businessmen in Africa. Yet these failures have not blunted its resolve. Any successful act of revenge—especially if it is a spectacular operation such as killing a large number of Israelis or Jews outside Israel, or assassinating a prominent figure inside Israel—would lead to considerable public pressure on the Israeli government to take action against Hezbollah inside Lebanon.

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Scenario III: Syria supplies Hezbollah with “equilibrium-breaking” weapons. Today Syria is Hezbollah’s chief supplier of arms. Many Iranian-developed weapons are manufactured in Syria and transported to Lebanon where they are delivered to the Shiite organization. Syria possesses a number of weapons systems, mainly various types of long-range missiles and anti-aircraft and antinaval missiles, that Israel regards as “equilibrium-breaking” (i.e., systems that in the hands of Hezbollah would threaten Israel’s ability to operate with impunity in Lebanon’s airspace and along its coastline).

The Syrian ambassador to Washington, Imad Mustafa, was recently summoned to the State Department, where he was informed that the U.S. expects Syria to cease arming Hezbollah because of the very real risk of war. This meeting took place after Israel came close to attacking a Syrian arms convoy, deciding not to at the last moment.

This final scenario is perhaps the most dangerous. Syrian President Bashar Assad has taken significant risks in the past, most recently when he embarked on the joint Syrian-Iranian-North Korean nuclear project knowing full well that Israel would not be able to allow it to reach completion. If Mr. Netanyahu shows less restraint than he has so far and orders an attack on a Syrian military convoy, the high number of Syrian casualties that would likely ensue could force Mr. Assad’s hand.

What these three scenarios all have in common is the centrality of Iran: It is arming Hamas, it effectively controls Hezbollah, and it is doing its best to involve Syria in open confrontation with Israel. To date, these attempts have been unsuccessful. But only the U.S. has the ability to take decisive steps to prevent a general conflagration in the region.

Mr. Bergman, senior military and intelligence analyst for Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli daily, is the author of “The Secret War With Iran” (Free Press, 2008).

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To only say Iranian nukes are unacceptable is to accept them

In March 1936, Hitler occupied the Rhineland. The French prime minister, Leon Blum, denounced the act as “unacceptable.” But France, Britain and the rest of the world accepted it. Years later, the French political thinker Raymond Aron commented, “To say that something is unacceptable was to say that one accepted it.”

In March 2010, as Iran moved ahead with its nuclear weapons program, the American secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, speaking at the policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last week, said no fewer than four times in one paragraph that a nuclear-armed Iran would be “unacceptable.” It would be unacceptable simply, “unacceptable to the United States,” “unacceptable to Israel” and “unacceptable to the region and the international community.”

Then, perhaps sensing the ghost of Raymond Aron at her shoulder, Clinton hastened to add: “So let me be very clear: The United States is determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

But this attempt at reassurance merely conjured up (at least for me) another ghost: that of Richard Nixon. Didn’t Nixon always say, at moments of utmost insincerity, that he wanted to make something very clear?

What is becoming increasingly clear, from the Clinton speech and from the overall behavior of her administration — and for that matter from the action or, rather, inaction of the “international community” — is that we are all moving toward accepting an Iranian nuclear weapon.

Consider Clinton’s speech.

The secretary of state devoted six paragraphs out of 52 to Iran.

She began by acknowledging that “for Israel, there is no greater strategic threat” than the prospect of the current Iranian regime with nuclear arms.

She explained how threatening such a prospect would be to Israel, the region and the world, culminating in the cascade of “unacceptables.”

She then briefly defended the Obama administration’s decision to try engagement, acknowledged (basically) that engagement had failed, but claimed that at least “[t]he world has seen that it is Iran, not the United States, responsible for the impasse.” She noted that “with its secret nuclear facilities, increasing violations of its obligations under the nonproliferation regime and an unjustified expansion of its enrichment activities, more and more nations are finally expressing deep concerns about Iran’s intentions.”

And what are the newly perceptive and ever more deeply concerned nations of the world doing about Iran? “There is a growing international consensus on taking steps to pressure Iran’s leaders to change course.” What kind of pressure? New U.N. Security Council resolutions with “sanctions that will bite.”

Now, these won’t be quite the “crippling” sanctions Clinton promised last year — but they’ll be biting ones. (Then we learned, late in the week, that the sanctions were being adjusted so they wouldn’t bite too much — so as to get the “international community” on board.) Of course, three Security Council resolutions seeking to pressure Iran’s leaders were passed during the Bush administration, before the great international awakening brought about by President Obama’s engagement policy. Clinton had to acknowledge that “it is taking time to produce these new sanctions.” But she maintained that “time is a worthwhile investment for winning the broadest possible support for our efforts.” And she reiterated that “we will not compromise our commitment to preventing Iran from acquiring those nuclear weapons.”

Notice what Clinton conspicuously failed to mention as part of that “commitment” — another word, by the way, about whose unhappy diplomatic history Raymond Aron would undoubtedly have had mordant comments. What the secretary of state did not say is that all options are on the table. What she did not say is that force remains a last but credible resort against this regime’s nuclear plans. What she did not say is that we would try to help the opposition change who “Iran’s leaders” are.

So: Nothing about regime change. Nothing about the possible use of force. Just broadly supported “sanctions that will bite,” but not too much.

Then Clinton turned — one can almost hear the sigh of relief — to other issues, because, after all, “Iran is not the only threat on the horizon. Israel is confronting some of the toughest challenges in her history.” And we were off into the maze of the peace process, the settlements, and other ephemera and trivialities.

The Iranian regime and its pursuit of nuclear weapons constitute the dominant threat to the security of Israel and to the national security interests of the United States in the Middle East. While presidents Bush and Obama have proclaimed that this Iranian regime obtaining nuclear weapons would be unacceptable, they have done nothing effective to stop it. Now we are also apparently pressuring Israel not to act to stop Iran from getting nuclear arms.

Is it so hard to remember what happens when liberal democracies accept the unacceptable? Is it too much to hope that, for the government of the United States in 2010, accepting the unacceptable should be unacceptable?

William Kristol is editor of the Weekly Standard.

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/26/AR2010032603067.html

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The Netanyahu Diaries

What Israel’s prime minister really thinks.

The following note was discovered aboard the plane that brought Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington yesterday. It appears to be the Israeli prime minister’s personal talking points—with deletions in brackets—for his meeting today with President Obama. Handwriting experts are unable to confirm the note’s authenticity.

Good to see you again, Mr. President. [And thanks for not having me skulk out the side door like the last time I was here].

And congratulations on your big health care victory! Well done, Mr. President, on your historic achievement. As you probably know, we Israelis have a similar system, and it has worked out pretty well for decades [though our doctors don't labor under ruinous medmal premiums and the constant threat of tort bar annihilation and also we're a tiny country with a huge tax burden that drives one in nine people, including many doctors, to live abroad.]

Point is, we’re a nice little liberal democracy, with women’s rights and gay rights, and Arab Israelis and black Israelis in parliament, and welfare and universal health care. Even when we go to war we don’t just carpet bomb our enemies, [like your hero Franklin Roosevelt did to the innocent civilians of Dresden and Tokyo]. I don’t get why we rate most-hated-nation status from all those so-called progressives [wearing your face on their tee-shirts].

[Question to self: Why are the same people who erupt at the thought of prayer in school so often more in sympathy with Hamas in Gaza than with us?]

But on to more pressing matters. We’ve had a bad few weeks, your administration and mine. I’m glad we can talk them over face-to-face. As Hillary told me the other day [isn't she a charmer?], it takes a true friend to tell the hard truth. I’m sure you’ll agree that in our friendship that works both ways.

I know that, from your part, you think the hard truth is that we’ve got to get out of the settlements. You don’t have to sell me on that score. I’ve said repeatedly that we don’t want to rule over the Palestinians; I’m all for a two-state solution in theory. It’s the practice of it that’s got me concerned. In fact, it’s what got me elected.

So here’s the first hard truth: Just as you’ve got your Ben Nelsons and Bart Stupaks, I’ve got my Avigdor Lieberman ultra-nationalists and Eli Yishai ultra-Orthodox. Some of them have ideological red lines; some of them just want stuff. That’s how politics works. So what’s my Cornhusker kickback, or my executive order on abortion funding? I’d welcome your ideas; [you're obviously good at this].

This brings me to the second hard truth, Mr. President: Most Israelis don’t trust you, the way they trusted George W. Bush or [even] Bill Clinton. And let me tell you why that’s a problem.

When my predecessor Arik Sharon pulled out of Gaza, he didn’t do so through negotiations with the Palestinians. Those negotiations fail time and again, in part because the Palestinians figure they can hold out for more, in part because they’re cutting their own deals with Hamas.

So what Sharon did was negotiate with you, the United States. And what he got was a promise, in writing, that the U.S. would not insist on a full withdrawal to the 1967 lines in any final settlement agreement.

My problem is that Hillary disavowed that promise last year, and you did so again by treating a neighborhood in Jerusalem as a “settlement.” So when you pledge your commitment to Israel’s everlasting security, how can we take your word for it, or know that your successor won’t also renege? We don’t want to wind up like Belgium before World War I, relying on phony guarantees of neutrality.

Mr. President, you need to start building some serious trust with Israelis if you mean to give me the political tools to negotiate with the Palestinians. Honestly, you didn’t help yourself by ratcheting up the rhetoric against us the way you did. If your purpose was to show the Palestinians that you’re going to play hardball with us, all you did was give them a reason to be even more uncompromising than before. And if your purpose was to try to drive me from office, it didn’t work either: To Israelis, you came across not as anti-Bibi, but as anti-Israel.

But the hardest truth is that Israelis are losing faith that you’ll do whatever it takes to stop Iran’s nuclear bid. The sanctions you promise keep getting delayed and watered down. Hillary gave a fine speech at AIPAC yesterday, but we all know that you’re already planning on containing a nuclear Iran. That’s not acceptable to me.

Let’s make a deal, Mr. President: Our settlements for your bombers. We can’t fully destroy Iran’s nuclear sites—but you can. You can’t dismantle our settlements—but we can. We’ll all come out the better for it, including the Palestinians. Think about it, Barack.

Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal

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Obama’s Legacy and the Iranian Bomb

Neville Chamberlain was remembered for appeasing Germany, not his progressive social programs.

The gravest threat faced by the world today is a nuclear-armed Iran. Of all the nations capable of producing nuclear weapons, Iran is the only one that might use them to attack an enemy.

There are several ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons. The first is by dropping an atomic bomb on Israel, as its leaders have repeatedly threatened to do. Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president of Iran, boasted in 2004 that an Iranian attack would kill as many as five million Jews. Mr. Rafsanjani estimated that even if Israel retaliated with its own nuclear bombs, Iran would probably lose about 15 million people, which he said would be a small “sacrifice” of the billion Muslims in the world.

The second way in which Iran could use nuclear weapons would be to hand them off to its surrogates, Hezbollah or Hamas. A third way would be for a terrorist group, such as al Qaeda, to get its hands on Iranian nuclear material. It could do so with the consent of Iran or by working with rogue elements within the Iranian regime.

Finally, Iran could use its nuclear weapons without ever detonating a bomb. By constantly threatening Israel with nuclear annihilation, it could engender so much fear among Israelis as to incite mass immigration, a brain drain, or a significant decline in people moving to Israel.

These are the specific ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons, primarily against the Jewish state. But there are other ways in which a nuclear-armed Iran would endanger the world. First, it would cause an arms race in which every nation in the Middle East would seek to obtain nuclear weapons.

Second, it would almost certainly provoke Israel into engaging in either a pre-emptive or retaliatory attack, thus inflaming the entire region or inciting further attacks against Israel by Hezbollah and Hamas.

Third, it would provide Iran with a nuclear umbrella under which it could accelerate its efforts at regional hegemony. Had Iraq operated under a nuclear umbrella when it invaded Kuwait in 1990, Saddam Hussein’s forces would still be in Kuwait.

Fourth, it would embolden the most radical elements in the Middle East to continue their war of words and deeds against the United States and its allies.

And finally, it would inevitably unleash the law of unintended consequences: Simply put, nobody knows the extent of the harm a nuclear-armed Iran could produce.

In these respects, allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons is somewhat analogous to the decision by the victors of World War I to allow Nazi Germany to rearm during the 1930s. Even the Nazis were surprised at this complacency. Joseph Goebbels expected the French and British to prevent the Nazis from rebuilding Germany’s war machine.

In 1940, Goebbels told a group of German journalists that if he had been the French premier when Hitler came to power he would have said, “The new Reich Chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!”

But, Goebbels continued, “they didn’t do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and well armed, better than they, then they started the war!”

Most people today are not aware that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain helped restore Great Britain’s financial stability during the Great Depression and also passed legislation to extend unemployment benefits, pay pensions to retired workers and otherwise help those hit hard by the slumping economy. But history does remember his failure to confront Hitler. That is Chamberlain’s enduring legacy.

So too will Iran’s construction of nuclear weapons, if it manages to do so in the next few years, become President Barack Obama’s enduring legacy. Regardless of his passage of health-care reform and regardless of whether he restores jobs and helps the economy recover, Mr. Obama will be remembered for allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. History will not treat kindly any leader who allows so much power to be accumulated by the world’s first suicide nation—a nation whose leaders have not only expressed but, during the Iran-Iraq war, demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice millions of their own people to an apocalyptic mission of destruction.

If Iran were to become a nuclear power, there would be plenty of blame to go around. A National Intelligence Report, issued on President George W. Bush’s watch, distorted the truth by suggestion that Iran had ended its quest for nuclear weapons. It also withheld the fact that U.S. intelligence had discovered a nuclear facility near Qum, Iran, that could be used only for the production of nuclear weapons. Chamberlain, too, was not entirely to blame for Hitler’s initial triumphs. He became prime minister after his predecessors allowed Germany to rearm. Nevertheless, it is Chamberlain who has come to symbolize the failure to prevent Hitler’s ascendancy. So too will Mr. Obama come to symbolize the failure of the West if Iran acquires nuclear weapons on his watch.

Mr. Dershowitz is a law professor at Harvard. His latest book is “The Case for Moral Clarity” (Camera, 2009).

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Iran’s New World Order

Its nuclear program is part of a larger plan to radically reduce U.S. power.

Ahmad Khatami, an influential cleric and mentor to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, recently said publicly that the United States has to “regard Iran as a great power in the political sphere. The people of Iran have realized there is nothing you can do to us.”

The statement is part bravado, but it also offers an important clue about the Iranian regime’s mind set and ultimate goal. Its nuclear program, support for terrorism and stirring of anti-American sentiments are aimed at vaulting Iran to a position of global prominence.

Iran regards acquiring a nuclear-weapon capability as a crucial step to achieving international stature. And from its leaders’ perspective, why not? All five of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council have nuclear weapons and Israel, India and Pakistan all saw their influence grow after becoming nuclear states.

So Iranian officials dismiss the impact economic sanctions have on their country, use Western talk of regime change to repress internal opposition, and play down the extent of damage that military strikes could have on their nuclear programs. Mr. Ahmadinejad demonstrated Iran’s nonchalant response to foreign fury by announcing at the Islamic Revolution’s 31st anniversary celebration on Feb. 11 that Iran had successfully enriched uranium to 20% and is now “a nuclear state.”

Yet Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared a week later that use of nuclear weapons is undesired by Iran and prohibited by Islam: “We don’t have any belief in the atomic bomb and don’t pursue it.”

In an interview in Tehran last September, Mr. Ahmadinejad said, “We believe nuclear arms belong to the past and to the old generation.” And during his visit to Japan last week, Ali Larijani, speaker of Iran’s parliament, said that Iran could follow Japan’s example—gain the technology to build nuclear warheads, but not actually assemble them until they are necessary.

These statements suggest that the Iranian regime is rational and making a series of calculated geopolitical maneuvers. In Ahmadinejad’s own words, Tehran is attempting to craft a new world order: “We need to establish new systems and take measures based on those systems,” he said in October 2009, adding that “Many countries will join the new systems.”

To craft this new order, Iranian officials are testing the limits of U.S. power and influence, seeking to show that both are limited to hollow words and ineffective deeds. One way is by splitting Russia and China from the other nations in the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany) when it comes to imposing sanctions on Iran. By forcing such a split, Iranian officials hope to demonstrate that America and its partners are no longer pre-eminent.

Another way is by the support Tehran is extending to Hamas and Hezbollah; this is to thwart the U.S. and Israel and thereby become a player in the Middle Eastern peace process. The regime is also building strong diplomatic, economic and military ties with countries in Latin America to extend its influence to a region considered U.S. dominion since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.

When asked by American news media in September 2009, Mr. Ahmadinejad stressed that “The world is on the threshold of major developments . . . . [F]or one or two countries to think . . . they are the ones who make the major global decisions which others should follow, well that period has come to an end.”

The Islamic Republic, in short, regards the U.S. as a washed-up world power that can no longer run the global show.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have both said recently that the U.S. must lead the world. They are right. As the leader of the Free World, the U.S. can do much more than any other nation to extend prosperity and human freedom across the globe.

But words are insufficient. After constant demands, sporadic threats and inconsistent economic sanctions, the U.S. faces a profound leadership test on Iran. To keep its position of unparalleled influence, the U.S. must demonstrate that it can thwart both the Iranian regime’s nuclear and world-wide ambitions.

Mr. Choksy is a professor of Iranian, Islamic and international studies and a former director of the Middle Eastern studies program at Indiana University, Bloomington.

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Obama and Iran

Engagement has failed. The President needs a new strategy.

These have been busy days for Iran’s leadership. On January 28, the regime hanged two government opponents and sentenced 10 others to die. It has arrested and jailed some 500 opponents since December. Last week, it shut off access to Gmail and Google Buzz, as it already has done with Twitter, to prevent opposition forces from organizing. On the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, it jammed the streets of Tehran with supporters and security forces. Oh, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that Iran has begun enriching uranium to 20% purity, making it a “nuclear state.”

Maybe now we can all agree that “engagement” with Iran has failed. So where does the Obama Administration go from here? It seems to be moving on multiple, not always coherent, fronts.

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Last Wednesday, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on a commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps along with several IRGC-related companies said to be involved in WMD programs. And this week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that Iran may be evolving into a military dictatorship, with the Revolutionary Guards essentially running the show.

The U.S. is also trying to get the U.N. Security Council to agree to a new round of sanctions on Iran, over continued Chinese opposition. A Western diplomatic source tells us we can probably expect another essentially symbolic U.N. resolution in the coming weeks.

Then there is Congress, which in the past two months has voted overwhelmingly for legislation that targets companies doing energy business with Iran. The two bills must now be reconciled, but the State Department has previously sought to postpone the measures on grounds that they would constrain its room for diplomatic maneuver and could hurt the Iranian people.

Our sources tell us the Administration may now reluctantly be willing to let Congress play bad cop as it pursues its sanctions options at the U.N. and, separately, with the Europeans. That’s fine as far as it goes, and we hope the Administration understands that the Congressional bills would also have a major impact on the Revolutionary Guard, which dominates Iran’s energy business and takes a huge cut from the $6 billion-plus annual gasoline trade, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Then again, we doubt even this Administration thinks that these sanctions alone can alter the regime’s behavior, much less force its collapse. Instead—and in the absence of a credible threat of the use of U.S. military force—the Administration seems to be gambling its Iran policy on a set of assumptions that look increasingly wishful.

One of these assumptions is that there may still be a “grand bargain” to be struck with the Iranian leadership, notwithstanding its refusals to do so last year amid President Obama’s overtures. The Administration also allowed itself to imagine that Iran’s protest movement would force the regime to take a more conciliatory nuclear line. It seems to have done the opposite.

Another assumption is that Iran has encountered serious technical difficulties in its nuclear program, out of some combination of incompetence and perhaps sabotage. We certainly hope that’s true. But the driving fact is that Iran seems to have repeatedly surmounted these obstacles over the years, and last year it surprised U.N. inspectors by producing more low-enriched uranium than anticipated. Enrichment only becomes easier as it moves to higher states of purity. And yesterday, the U.N. nuclear agency said it is worried that Iran may already be working on a nuclear warhead.

Then there is the whispered assumption that a nuclear Iran would be “containable.” But leaving aside the view that a religiously fanatic regime can never safely be trusted with a bomb, a nuclear Iran would open the Pandora’s box of nuclear proliferation in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey. For an Administration that has made nuclear nonproliferation a centerpiece of its agenda, allowing Iran to go nuclear would seem an odd way to advance that goal.

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All of this suggests the need for a new U.S. strategy that drops the engagement illusion and begins to treat Iran as the single biggest threat to Mideast and U.S. security. Sanctions can be part of that strategy, but they will need to be more comprehensive than anything to date. They must also be ramped up rapidly because they will need time to be felt by the regime. The U.S. should give up on the U.N., which will only delay and dilute such pressure, and build a sanctions coalition of the willing.

The U.S. can also speak and act far more forcefully and clearly on behalf of Iran’s domestic opposition. The regime’s recent crackdown suggests that the chances of regime change in the near term are remote, but popular animosity against Iran’s rulers still seethes underground. The U.S. should assist that opposition in any way it can, especially with technology to help communicate with each other and the world.

Finally, the option of a military strike will have to be put squarely on the table. Sanctions have little chance of working unless they are backed by a credible military threat, and in any case Israel is more likely to act if it concludes that the U.S. won’t. The risks of military action are obvious, but the danger to the world from a nuclear Iran is far worse.

After a year of lost time, Mr. Obama needs to put aside the diplomatic illusions of his campaign and make the hard decisions to stop the Revolutionary Guards from getting the bomb.

Editorial, Wall Street Journal

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Iran Has Designs on Iraq

Progress has been very real, but Joe Biden’s claims of victory are premature

Vice President Joe Biden recently told Larry King that Iraq “could be one of the great achievements of this administration.” Mr. Biden’s transparent attempt to take credit for Bush administration policies aside, it’s worth asking how exactly does the Obama administration define success in Iraq?

Mr. Biden said, “You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government,” echoing President Obama’s remarks at Camp Lejeune in February 2009. But he also said, “You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer,” echoing the only comment the president made about Iraq in last month’s State of the Union address: “I promised that I would end this war, and that is what I am doing as president.”

A campaign poster for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The problem is that progress in Iraq is not as inevitable as Mr. Biden suggests. Iraq faces a political and constitutional crisis weeks away from the most important election it will ever hold. People working on behalf of Iran are actively seeking to spoil this election. They want to exclude Sunni leaders from the next government, align Iraq’s Shiites into a single political bloc, expel American forces, and create a government in Baghdad that is dependent on Tehran.

Success remains possible, but only if the Obama administration abandons the campaign rhetoric of “end this war” and commits itself to helping Iraqis build a just, accountable, representative government. It needs to establish long-term security ties that will bind our two states together, including the continuing deployment of American military forces in Iraq if the Iraqis so desire.

Many fundamental questions will be answered this year about how Iraq is to be governed that will shape its development for decades. Is the election free, fair and inclusive? Do all communities emerge from it with leaders who they feel represent them? Is there a peaceful transition of power? What is the relationship between the central government and provincial governments? What role will the military play in the evolving political system? Does Iran get to vet Iraqi political candidates? What relationship will the U.S. have with Iraq over the long term?

Tehran seems to know what answers it wants regarding Iraq’s future. Iranian officials, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki and Chairman of the Assembly of Experts Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, worked doggedly in 2009 to rebuild the coalition of the three major Iraqi Shiite parties that had run in 2005 as a bloc. That effort failed when Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki refused to join.

The Iranians then actively but unsuccessfully lobbied for Iraq’s parliament to pass a closed-list election law in October 2009 in which the people could not choose particular candidates, seeking to increase their control of political parties and thus electoral outcomes.

On Jan. 7, 2010, when Foreign Minister Mottaki visited Iraq, the Accountability and Justice Commission (which was established in August 2003 to vet individuals who might serve in the government for links to the Baath Party) announced that it was banning more than 500 candidates from the upcoming parliamentary elections. They included some of the most prominent Sunni leaders who had been running on cross-sectarian lists.

Ahmed Chalabi, a leading member of the Iranian-backed Shiite list, helped drive the ban through the commission. So did Ali Faisal al-Lami. Mr. Lami was arrested in 2008 for orchestrating an attack by the Iranian proxy group Aseeb Ahl al Haq (AAH) that killed six Iraqis and four Americans in Sadr City. AAH splinters re-activated its military activities, after a year long cease-fire, by kidnapping an American contractor on Jan. 23. AAH is nevertheless running candidates such as Mr. Lami for parliamentary seats.

But politics is by no means Tehran’s only sphere of influence in Iraq. The Iranian armed forces violated Iraqi sovereignty on at least two occasions in 2009—U.S. forces shot down an Iranian drone in Iraqi territory in March 2009, and Iranian troops ostentatiously seized an Iraqi oil well in December 2009 as the Iraqis completed a round of international oil bids.

Against this continuous Iranian campaign of engagement, intimidation and political machinations, the Obama administration has offered little more than moral support. In practical terms, this administration has done little to implement the nonmilitary aspects of the Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA) that would signal an American commitment to Iraq.

On the security side, the administration has wisely abided by the Iraqi insistence that we withdraw our forces from Iraq’s cities, conduct all military operations only in partnership with Iraqi forces, subordinate all of our military operations to Iraqi legal processes, and generally respect Iraqi sovereignty.

But it has remained publicly inflexible about the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces and the ending of all U.S. combat missions by August of this year. Those specific requirements were imposed solely and unilaterally by the Obama administration and were never part of the international agreements between the U.S. and Iraq. The time line for drawing down U.S. forces and changing their mission in 2010 must be based upon the conditions on the ground, not arbitrary deadlines.

The U.S. has steadfastly refused to discuss a long-term military partnership with Iraq beyond 2011, despite the fact that the Iraqi military will not be able to defend Iraq on its own by then. It has refused fully to increase civilian efforts in order to accomplish tasks that had been performed by military forces now withdrawing. It has reduced funding for the Commander’s Emergency Response Program, which allows the military to provide “urgent humanitarian relief and reconstruction” projects, as well as for other forms of humanitarian and security assistance.

Despite the vice president’s many trips, the administration has consistently defined success as complete disengagement. Many Iraqi leaders interpreted the SFA as an indication that their country would develop a special relationship with the U.S. Instead, the Obama administration has given them every reason to believe that they will be—at best—just another country in the Middle East.

Success in Iraq has been very real, and there is every prospect that it can continue. Nevertheless, American military forces continue to play a vital role in Iraq’s development. They are engaged in peacekeeping operations along the Kurd-Arab seam. They continue to support Provincial Reconstruction Teams and, thereby, a large portion of the U.S. civilian efforts. They are the ultimate guarantors of the upcoming Iraqi elections. And they ensure Iraq’s survival in the face of continuing Iranian military aggression. They also provide the U.S. with continuing leverage at a critical period in Iraq’s political development, if we choose to use it.

Mr. Biden’s comments and the administration’s actions suggest that Iraq is on a glide-path to success even as U.S. forces are on a glide-path to withdrawal. The reality is different.

The situation in Iraq is dynamic and evolving, and the U.S. cannot take any outcome for granted. Active American engagement will continue to be vital to achieving a just, accountable, representative government in Iraq, especially as Iranian senior leaders actively attempt to undermine the democratic, secular and cross-sectarian political process that has emerged in Iraq since 2008.

Ms. Kagan is the president of the Institute for the Study of War and the author of “The Surge: A Military History,” published by Encounter Books. Mr. Kagan is a resident scholar and director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Iran, Beacon of Liberty?

ON Thursday, the birthday of the Islamic Republic of Iran, we will see whether the democratic opposition movement has been driven underground by the increasingly brutal harassment from the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iranian society has become like molten rock under high pressure: more eruptions are inevitable. And if the dissidents can take to the streets, they will.

In any case, the fraudulent June 12 presidential elections and the subsequent internal tumult ought to make us wonder what would happen if Iran actually went democratic. President Obama and his advisers — still devoted to engagement and the hope that Iran’s nuclear-weapons program can be peacefully derailed (despite Tehran’s stepping up of its enrichment program this week), and probably skeptical that Ayatollah Khamenei and his Revolutionary Guards Corps could lose power — have likely spent little time envisioning a region where the Islamic Republic as we have known it no longer exists. At least, nobody from the administration’s foreign-policy brain trust has laid out any plans for that contingency.

But given the troubles facing Ayatollah Khamenei, the near certainty that the clerical regime is going to get a lot nastier soon and the momentous possibilities of a democratic Iran, the White House should give it some thought. Mr. Khamenei is confronting a democracy movement that has grown larger despite an almost total lack of organization and charismatic leadership.

Iran’s militarized theocracy will survive or perish depending on the strength of the Revolutionary Guards, the praetorian branch of the military that has become a self-sustaining fundamentalist conglomerate. Yet many guardsmen and their children, like the children of the clerical elite, are graduates of Iran’s best universities. And if there is one factor that has inclined Iranians toward the opposition, it has been higher education — a point the regime has surely noted when it comes to the probable loyalties of the country’s nuclear physicists.

In fact, many rank-and-file guardsmen voted for Mohammad Khatami, the reformist candidate, in the 1997 presidential election, even though their senior officers detested him. It’s likely this schism remains.

The funeral in December of the regime’s bête noire, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, where hundreds of thousands turned out, suggests the regime may also be encountering resistance from the clerical establishment.

The senior clergymen of the holy city of Qum have never had any regard for Ayatollah Khamenei’s religious credentials and political pretensions; their quiescence has been achieved through intimidation by the regime and their inability to see any political alternative. But part of Ayatollah Montazeri’s appealing dissent, which has been echoed by other Shiite clerics since his death, is that the Islamic Republic doesn’t have to change much for the differences to be telling. Just freeing the Parliament from unelected clerical oversight would be a revolutionary step.

We will likely know in the coming months if the opposition can draw into the streets larger numbers of the mostazafan, “the oppressed poor,” who have been the popular bedrock of the regime since the 1979 revolution. The economic “reforms” that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has planned will probably worsen Iran’s already debilitating inflation and unemployment. An opposition combining the young mullahs, college-educated bureaucrats within Iran’s bloated civil service and a significant slice of the urban poor could be too diverse for the guards, a partly conscripted force, to suppress.

The guards rose to prominence defending the homeland against an Iraqi invader; they have not yet shown that they have the fortitude to kill their countrymen like the Russian secret police or the Chinese Red Guards. Note how much time and effort the regime has spent to deflect blame for the killing of one young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, in the post-election rioting last summer. A self-confident regime would have killed unapologetically. Senior guardsmen may want to unleash a bloodbath to preserve the status quo, but Ayatollah Khamenei, who lacks the cold-blooded will of the state’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, doesn’t seem to want to slaughter Iranians or make himself a hostage of his henchmen.

When regimes start to crack, the unthinkable becomes thinkable. Ayatollah Khamenei’s supporters could start to wonder whether their influence could survive in a more open political system. Iranian journalists are reporting that former guardsmen who’ve joined the opposition are signaling their one-time brothers that they could have a soft landing in a new order. However much the regime has worked to brainwash its security force (“the bulwark against disbelief”), if more Iranians are killed, rank-and-file guardsmen may suspend their belief and choose not to shoot.

A democratic revolution in Tehran could well prove the most momentous Mideastern event since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. A politically freer Iran would bring front and center the great Islamic debate of our times: How can one be both a good Muslim and a democrat? How does one pay homage to Islamic law but give ultimate authority to the people’s elected representatives? How can a Muslim import the best of the West without suffering debilitating guilt?

To an extent seen in no other country, Iran’s intellectuals have battled and evolved over these questions. For a century, the country has been trying to develop constitutional government. For 30 years, dissident clerics and lay intellectuals have struggled to reassert the democratic promise in the revolution.

Especially for religious dissidents, democracy is now seen as a keystone of a more moral order, where the faith can no longer be used to countenance dictatorship. An operating assumption of President Obama’s speech to the Islamic world in Cairo last year is that Washington can work with authoritarian regimes against extremism — that Muslims don’t need to be politically free to tame religious militancy. But the evolution of Christianity, which never had Islam’s deep fusion of church and state, tells us something different: that it has been the West’s political evolution — from autocracy to democracy — which has, more than anything, depoliticized Christianity.

The same process is happening to Islam in Iran, but at a much faster pace than anything seen in the West. As a result, millions of Iranians — the sons and daughters of once faithful revolutionaries — have secularized. Whereas secularizing Westernized autocracies like the shah’s prompted upwellings of religious radicalism, Iran’s religious dictatorship has produced a softening secularization that is likely to last, since both nonreligious and faithful Iranians increasingly see representative government as indispensable to their values.

The impact of all this on Muslims everywhere is likely to be profound. In the Middle East, the Iranian Revolution catapulted Islamic fundamentalism into the foreground. An Iranian democratization couldn’t help but shake Sunni fundamentalists who, too, have wrestled with the tension between the Holy Law and voting. Sunni Arabs often like to pretend that they live in a different world from their Shiite Iranian cousins, but the truth is the opposite: cross-fertilization has been enormous. With Iranian democracy growing, liberal Arabs and Sunni Islamists would become much bolder in their demands.

Iran’s transformation would also remind Turkey’s ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party, whose commitment to democratic values has been increasingly shaky, that an authoritarian path creates revolt. And an Iranian democracy would powerfully affect Iraq, whose elected government has struggled with its own Tehran-backed demons. A democratic Iran would have little sympathy for Iraqis who prefer autocracy and religious militancy.

A democratic Tehran would also likely reduce its aid to Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Baathist dictatorship in Syria. Palestinian fundamentalists who now receive substantial Iranian financing would also likely be a subject of heavy debate in a free Parliament, as would aid to other radical Sunni groups throughout the Middle East and Tehran’s disconcerting contacts with Al Qaeda (which were detailed by the 9/11 commission report). Iran could easily become what Ayatollah Khomeini had wished — the model that transforms the Middle East — albeit not in the manner he hoped for.

Last, a democratic Iran would bring the reopening of the American Embassy, a symbolic measure of the highest significance that has long been popular among ordinary Iranians. The “Great Satan” would be no more.

President Obama has nothing to lose by moving away from engaging Ayatollah Khamenei and toward a vigorous engagement with the Iranian people’s quest for popular sovereignty. Rhetoric, sanctions aimed at cutting off Iran’s gasoline imports and intelligent covert aid to dissidents should be harnessed to the democratic cause. President Obama has an openly willing partner in the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to make Iranian liberté a trans-Atlantic affair.

The administration should have no illusions: Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime is irretrievably paranoid. In its eyes, Western states, which have so far done next to nothing to help the democracy movement, are as culpable as the dissidents for Iran’s troubles. The supreme leader will seek ways to get even. And he isn’t going to give up his nukes. But a democratic Iran probably would.

Without the bogeyman of a Great Satan and the militant dream of regional hegemony, a Persian Parliament, overwhelmed with the people’s demands, would find much better things than enriched uranium to spend the nation’s money on. And if the clerical regime cracks, Mr. Obama will get credit. In no other endeavor, foreign or domestic, is the president likely to earn as much.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is a former Middle Eastern specialist in the C.I.A.’s clandestine service.

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What Became of the ‘Freedom Agenda’?

President Obama can avoid his predecessor’s mistakes without alienating the people of countries like Iran.

President Obama’s recent drop in the polls has not been accompanied by a corresponding rebound in public opinion concerning the foreign policy of his predecessor George W. Bush. This is particularly true with regard to the promotion of democracy in the Middle East, or what the Bush administration called the “Freedom Agenda.” The consensus of foreign-policy experts on the left and right now deems this a naïve initiative that was rightly abandoned by the Bush administration itself shortly after the rise of Hamas in the Gaza elections of 2006.

While Mr. Obama paid lip service to the need for greater Middle East democracy in his June 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim world, he has done very little concretely to back this up in terms of quiet pressure for democratic change on the part of allies like Egypt, Jordan or Morocco. Indeed, the administration’s ramping up of military support for Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh in the wake of the attempted Christmas day airliner bombing suggests that we’ve gone back to the traditional U.S. policy of reliance on Arab strongmen.

This would be a big mistake. For the core premises of the Freedom Agenda remain essentially correct, even as its enunciation in the midst of the Iraq invasion undercut its credibility. Mr. Obama runs the risk of falling in bed with the same set of Middle Eastern authoritarians and alienating broad political populations in the region. He may even live to see them blow up in his face for lack of legitimacy, just as the Shah of Iran did in 1979.

The Bush administration asserted a number of points under the rubric of the Freedom Agenda that remain valid to the present moment. Back in 2003, President Bush said that “Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom . . . did nothing to make us safe. . . . As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export.”

In his second inaugural in January 2005, Mr. Bush went on to say that there was no cultural reason why the Arab world should remain the one part of the world resistant to the broad wave of democracy evident everywhere else.

As a report published last month by the U.S. Institute of Peace, “In Pursuit of Democracy and Security in the Greater Middle East,” argues, there are good reasons for thinking that the lack of democracy in the Arab world is political rather than cultural. Arab authoritarians like Hosni Mubarak of Egypt have tolerated—and in some cases promoted—the participation of Islamist candidates in elections as part of a strategy to prove to Western backers that they are the only thing standing in the way of cataclysmic Islamic revolution.

They’ve also gotten good at a cynical game of state-managed liberalization, whereby they open up their political systems just enough to convince outsiders that they are “transitioning” to genuine democracy, only to clamp down again once their control is threatened.

All of this has led, in the view of the Institute of Peace report, to an increasingly dangerous political, social and ideological gap between rulers and their societies. And in this struggle between state and society, the U.S. is widely seen throughout the region as selfishly propping up an unjust and corrupt old order.

The problem with the Bush administration’s Freedom Agenda wasn’t its fundamental analysis, but the way that it was articulated in the midst of the highly unpopular Iraq war. Democracy promotion was used from the start to justify the invasion, and in the eyes of many Arabs became synonymous with American occupation.

The high-flown rhetoric of Bush’s second inaugural, when he asserted that there could be no difference between U.S. security interests and our democratic ideals, was manifestly hyperbolic and led to inevitable charges of hypocrisy when the U.S. failed to endorse Hamas as the sole representatives of the Palestinians in Gaza. By making Middle East democracy promotion an instrument of the war on terror, the U.S. both tainted the cause of democracy itself and undermined the credibility of its own foreign policy.

Mr. Obama arrived in office with none of this baggage, and therefore had an opportunity to recommit the United States to peaceful democratic change. But the window is rapidly closing as the U.S. draws closer to the region’s authoritarian rulers. In Jordan, for example, cooperation on the war on terrorism has been accompanied by the regime’s curbing of political freedoms through the passing of nearly 100 temporary new laws. This has not prevented Mr. Obama from telling King Abdullah “Your Majesty, we need to clone you.”

The most immediate danger lies in Yemen, which has become the focus of counterterrorism efforts since the abortive Christmas day attack. There is a genuine al Qaeda threat in Yemen, but President Saleh has made his own situation worse by clamping down on popular protest in the south of the country and picking a fight with the Houthis in the north.

Putting family members in key positions, his corrupt regime nonetheless received nearly $70 million from the U.S. in military assistance last year and is scheduled for even more in the future. Rather than aggressively pressing Mr. Saleh to negotiate with opposition groups and broaden his base of support, we are repeating the classic mistake of putting all of our eggs in one authoritarian basket and making cooperation on counterterrorism the primary criterion for economic and political support.

Taking a Middle Eastern democracy agenda seriously does not mean that we should return to the loud trumpeting of promises of support for regional democracy that we cannot keep. Nor does it mean playing the authoritarians’ game of affirming fake liberalization as the real article of democracy.

It does mean working quietly behind the scenes to push friendly authoritarians towards a genuine broadening of political space in their countries through the repeal of countless exceptional laws, defamation codes, party registration statutes and the like that hinder the emergence of real democratic contestation.

The longstanding risk that true democratization will lead to takeover by radical Islamists remains real; our ideals do not require us to commit suicide in this manner. But the idea that radicalism is the only alternative to an illegitimate status quo is one we need not accept.

Mr. Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is author of “America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy” (Yale, 2006).

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Defiant talk

Iran’s opposition

Iran’s opposition refuses to give up

IT WAS a comment calculated to provoke the Iranian regime shortly before the anniversary of the 1979 revolution. Mir Hosein Mousavi, a leader of Iran’s opposition Green Movement and a thwarted candidate in last June’s presidential elections, this week declared that the revolution has failed in most of its aims. Mr Mousavi suggested that the revolution has been unable to do away with “the roots of tyranny and dictatorship” in the country and likened the current regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to that of the shah, the unpopular king who was deposed after strikes and public protests.

Mr Mousavi has timed his comments to encourage a new round of anti-government protests that are expected next week. His defiance is courageous in the face of months of intense repression by the government and a particularly intense recent crackdown on opposition members. Late in January two men were executed after being accused of trying to topple the government. The two had been detained in the unrest following the disputed elections. Another nine people have been sentenced to death for taking part in pro-opposition demonstrations.

More executions could follow soon. Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, a hardline cleric who heads the powerful Guardian Council and is a close ally of Mr Ahmadinejad, has welcomed the latest hangings. He has also suggested that executions early in the post-election unrest would have deterred demonstrators. He has urged Sadeq Larijani, the head of the judiciary, to continue with more executions. Although Mr Larijani has responded by vowing to respect legal procedure, others in the judiciary say that those facing death sentences will meet their fate soon.

Mr Mousavi’s statement marks a new line of attack. Until now, despite fiercely criticising Mr Ahmadinejad’s re-election, he has continued to support the Iranian system of Islamic government. But his latest comments suggest that he is now willing to challenge the foundations of the Islamic republic. An aggressive response from the government seems likely, with more violent crackdowns on demonstrations expected.

The government has already warned against demonstrations to coincide with the anniversary of the ouster of the shah. Yet some resilient young men and women, especially in Tehran, the capital, are expected to risk taking to the streets again. Mr Mousavi is not alone in encouraging them. Muhammad Khatami, a reformist former president, has called for peaceful protests next week. A peaceful official response is most unlikely.

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Obama’s Iraq policy must be focused on more than withdrawal

In a 71-minute State of the Union address, President Obama managed no more than 101 perfunctory words about Iraq. Throughout its term, the administration has recoiled from discussing Iraq’s geostrategic significance and especially America’s relation to it.

Yet while Iraq is being exorcised from our debate, its reality is bound to obtrude on our consciousness. The U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq will not alter the geostrategic importance of the country even as it alters that context.

Mesopotamia has been the strategic focal point of the region for millennia. Its resources affect countries far away. The dividing line between the Shiite and the Sunni worlds runs through its center — indeed, through its capital. Iraq’s Kurdish provinces rest uneasily between Turkey and Iran and indigenous adversaries within Iraq. It cannot be in the American interest to leave the region as a vacuum.

Nor is it possible to separate Iraq from the conflict with revolutionary jihad. The outcome in Iraq will influence the psychological balance in the war against radical Islam, specifically whether the ongoing withdrawal from Iraq comes to be perceived as a retreat from the region or a more effective way to sustain it.

But Iraq has largely disappeared from policy debates in Washington. There are special envoys for every critical country in the region except Iraq, the country whose evolution will help determine how American relevance to the currents of the region will be judged. The Obama administration needs to find its voice to convey that Iraq continues to play a significant role in American strategy. Brief visits by high officials are useful as symbols. But of what? Operational continuity is needed in a strategic concept for a region over which the specter of Iran increasingly looms.

Before the war, the equilibrium between Iraq and Iran was a principal geopolitical reality within the region. At that time, the government in Baghdad was a Sunni-run dictatorship. The Shiite-dominated, partly democratic structure that has emerged from the war has not yet found the appropriate balance among its Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish components. Nor is its long-term relationship to Iran settled. If radicals prevail in the Shiite part, and the Shiite part comes to dominate the Sunni and Kurdish regions, and if it then lines up with Tehran, we will witness — and will have partially contributed to — a fundamental shift in the balance of the region.

The outcome in Iraq will have profound consequences, above all, in Saudi Arabia, the key country in the Persian Gulf, as well as in the other Gulf states and in Lebanon, where Hezbollah, financed by Iran, is already a Shiite state within the state. The United States therefore has an important stake in a moderate evolution of Iraq’s domestic and foreign policies.

The Obama administration is stalemated in negotiations with Iran to contain the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Whether the nuclear issue is settled by diplomacy or other evolutions, the stability of the region will be crucially affected by the ability to bring about a political and strategic equilibrium between Iran and Iraq. Without such an arrangement, the region runs the risk of living indefinitely on top of a heap of explosives toward which a smoldering fuse is burning.

The formal expressions of administration policy on Iraq primarily concern the rate of withdrawal. Even President Obama’s reference to Iraq in his State of the Union speech was largely in that context. Few high-level Iraqi leaders are invited to Washington, and their reception is reserved. America needs to remain an active diplomatic player. Its presence must be perceived to have some purpose beyond withdrawal. An expression of political commitment to the region is needed. In executing an exit strategy, we must make sure that strategy remains linked to exit.

Mr. Kissinger was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977.

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/02/AR2010020202682.html

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Seven Myths About Iran

How long will it take for the lesson to stick?

‘We have been trying to negotiate [with the Iranians] for five, six years. We’ve tried everything. We have met every Iranian. We have tried to open every possible channel. We’ve had new ideas and the result is this: nothing.”

Thus did a senior Western diplomat recently describe to me his country’s efforts to reach a negotiated settlement with Tehran over its nuclear programs. In doing so, he also finally disposed of the myth, nearly a decade in the making, that Iran was ready to abandon those programs in exchange for a “grand bargain” with the West.

Let’s dispose of a few other myths—and hope it doesn’t take years for the lesson to stick:

(1) Military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities would accomplish nothing.

That’s the argument made by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who last year told a Senate Committee that “a military attack will only buy us time and send the program deeper and more covert.”

Maybe so, but what’s wrong with buying time? Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor also bought time while driving Saddam’s nuclear programs underground. But it ensured that it was a non-nuclear Iraq that invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia nine years later, a point recognized by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney when he thanked the Israeli commander of the Osirak operation for making “our job much easier in Desert Storm.”

(2) A strike would rally Iranians to the side of the regime.

The case would be more persuasive if the regime had any remaining claims on Iranian patriotism. It no longer does, if it ever did. It also would be more persuasive if the nuclear program were as broadly popular as some of the regime’s apologists claim. On the contrary, one of the more popular chants of the demonstrators goes, “Iran is green and fertile, it doesn’t need nukes.”

Yet even if the nuclear program enjoyed widespread support, it isn’t clear how Iranians would react in the event of military strikes. Argentine dictator Leopoldo Galtieri whooped up a nationalist fervor when he invaded the Falklands in 1982, but was ousted from office just a week after Port Stanley fell to the British. When a regime gambles its prestige on a single controversial enterprise, it cannot afford to lose it.

(3) Sanctions don’t work, and usually wind up strengthening the regime at the expense of its own people.

That’s only true when the sanctioned regimes have strong internal controls, relatively pliant populations, and zero interest in international respectability. It’s also true that sanctions alone are never a silver bullet. But as Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies points out, they can be “silver shrapnel,” particularly when the target country is as politically vulnerable as Iran is now, and when it is also critically reliant on the consumption of imported gasoline.

That’s why the House was right when it overwhelmingly approved the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act in December, and when the Senate unanimously passed a similar bill (against the administration’s objections) last Thursday. Over time, the regime will surely find ways to skirt the sanctions, which prohibit companies that do business in Iran’s energy sector from also doing business in the U.S. But in the critical short term, these sanctions might provoke the kind of mass unrest that could tip the scales against the regime.

(4) The world can live with a nuclear Iran, just as we live with other nasty nuclear powers.

Assume that’s true. (I don’t.) Can we also live with nuclear Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey? The problem with the “realist” view is that it fails to take account of the fears a nuclear Iran inspires among the status quo regimes in its neighborhood. Containment was complicated enough during the Cold War. Now imagine a four- or five-way standoff among Arabs, Persians, Turks and Israelis, some religiously fanatic, in the world’s most volatile neighborhood.

(5) The Iranian regime is headed for the ash heap of history. The best policy is to do as little as possible until it crumbles from within.

Communist regimes were also destined for the ash heap. Unfortunately, it took them decades to get there, during which they murdered tens of millions of people. It matters a great deal to Iran’s people, and its neighbors, that the regime go quietly. But it also matters that it go quickly, and waiting on events is not a policy.

(6) The more support we show Iran’s demonstrators, the more we hurt their cause.

This was the administration’s view after the June 12 election, as it walked on tiptoes to avoid the perception of “meddling.” The regime accused the U.S. of meddling all the same.

But protest movements like Iran’s (or Poland’s, or South Africa’s) are sustained by a sense of moral legitimacy that global support uniquely conveys. When will American liberals get behind Iranian rights, as they have, say, Tibetan ones? Maybe when President Obama tells them to.

(7) Israel will ultimately dispose of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The more policy makers fall for the first six myths, the less mythical the seventh one becomes.

Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204575038971915808294.html

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Intelligence from Tehran Elevates Concern in the West

The Secret Nuclear Dossier

The West has long been suspicous of Iran’s nuclear program. SPIEGEL has obtained new documents on secret tests and leadership structures that call into question Tehran’s claims to be exclusively interested in the peaceful use of the technology.

A suspected uranium-enrichment facility near Qom, as seen in a satellite photograph from Sept. 27, 2009. The discovery has renewed suspicions that Iran is working on a secret nuclear program.

It was probably the last attempt to defuse the nuclear dispute with Tehran without having to turn to dramatic new sanctions or military action. The plan, devised at the White House in October, had Russian and Chinese support and came with the seal of approval of the US president. It was clearly a Barack Obama operation.

Under the plan, Iran would send a large share of its low enriched uranium abroad, all at once, for a period of one year, receiving internationally monitored quantities of nuclear fuel elements in return. It was a deal that provided benefits for all sides. The Iranians would have enough material for what they claim is their civilian nuclear program, as well as for scientific experiments, and the world could be assured that Tehran would not be left with enough fissile material for its secret domestic uranium enrichment program — and for what the West assumes is the building of a nuclear bomb.

Tehran’s leaders initially agreed to the proposal “in principle.” But for weeks they put off the international community with vague allusions to a “final response,” and when that response finally materialized, it came in the form of a “counter-proposal.” Under this proposal, Tehran insisted that the exchange could not take place all at once, but only in stages, and that the material would not be sent abroad. Instead, Tehran wanted the exchange to take place in Iran.

Once again, the Iranian leadership has rebuffed the West with phony promises of its willingness to compromise. The government in Tehran officially rejected the nuclear exchange plan last Tuesday. To make matters worse, after the West’s discovery of a secret uranium enrichment plant near Qom, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defiantly announced that he would never give in, and in fact would build 10 more enrichment plants instead.

Highly Volatile Material

But officials in Washington and European capitals are currently not as concerned about these cocky, unrealistic announcements as they are about intelligence reports based on sources within Iran and information from high-ranking defectors. The new information, say American experts, will likely prompt the US government to reassess the risks coming from the mullah-controlled country in the coming days and raise the alarm level from yellow to red. Skeptics who in the past, sometimes justifiably so, treated alarmist reports as Israeli propaganda, are also extremely worried. They include the experts from the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), whose goal is prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

After an extensive internal investigation, IAEA officials concluded that a computer obtained from Iran years ago contains highly volatile material. The laptop reached the Americans through Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), and was then passed on to the IAEA in Vienna.

Reports by Ali Reza Asgari, Iran’s former deputy defense minister who managed to defect to the United States, where he was given a new identity, proved to be just as informative. Nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri, who “disappeared” during a pilgrimage to Mecca in June 2009, is also believed to have particularly valuable information. The Iranian authorities accused Saudi Arabia and the United States of kidnapping the expert, but it is more likely that he defected.

Iran’s government has come under pressure as a result of the new charges. They center on the question of who exactly is responsible for the country’s nuclear program — and what this says about its true nature. The government has consistently told the IAEA that the only agency involved in uranium enrichment is the National Energy Council, and that its work was exclusively dedicated to the peaceful use of the technology.

But if the claims are true that have been made in an intelligence dossier currently under review in diplomatic circles in Washington, Vienna, Tel Aviv and Berlin, portions of which SPIEGEL has obtained, this is a half-truth at best.

According to the classified document, there is a secret military branch of Iran’s nuclear research program that answers to the Defense Ministry and has clandestine structures. The officials who have read the dossier conclude that the government in Tehran is serious about developing a bomb, and that its plans are well advanced. There are two names that appear again and again in the documents, particularly in connection with the secret weapons program: Kamran Daneshjoo and Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

Secret Heart of Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program

Daneshjoo, 52, Iran’s new minister of science, research and technology, is also responsible for the country’s nuclear energy agency, and he is seen as a close ally of Ahmadinejad. Opposition leaders say he is a hardliner who was partly responsible for the apparently rigged presidential election in June. Daneshjoo’s biography includes only marginal references to his possible nuclear expertise. In describing himself, the man with the steely-gray beard writes that he studied engineering in the British city of Manchester, and then spent several years working at a Tehran “Center for Aviation Technology.” Western experts believe that this center developed into a sub-organization of the Defense Ministry known as the FEDAT, an acronym for the “Department for Expanded High-Technology Applications” — the secret heart of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The head of that organization is Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, 48, an officer in the Revolutionary Guard and a professor at Tehran’s Imam Hossein University.

Western intelligence agencies believe that although the nuclear energy agency and the FEDAT compete in some areas, they have agreed to a division of labor on the central issue of nuclear weapons research, with the nuclear agency primarily supervising uranium enrichment while the FEDAT is involved in the construction of a nuclear warhead to be used in Iran’s Shahab missiles. Experts believe that Iran’s scientists could produce a primitive, truck-sized version of the bomb this year, but that it would have to be compressed to a size that would fit into a nuclear warhead to yield the strategic threat potential that has Israel and the West so alarmed — and that they could reach that stage by sometime between 2012 and 2014.

The Iranians are believed to have conducted non-nuclear tests of a detonating mechanism for a nuclear bomb more than six years ago. The challenge in the technology is to uniformly ignite the conventional explosives surrounding the uranium core — which is needed to produce the desired chain reaction. It is believed that the test series was conducted with a warhead encased in aluminum. In other words, everything but the core was “real.” According to the reports, the Tehran engineers used thin fibers and a measuring circuit board in place of the fissile material. This enabled them to measure the shock waves and photograph flashes that simulate the detonation of a nuclear bomb with some degree of accuracy. The results were apparently so encouraging that the Iranian government has since classified the technology as “feasible.”

SPIEGEL obtained access to a FEDAT organizational chart and a list of the names of scientists working for the agency. The Vienna-based IAEA also has these documents, but the Iranian president claims that they are forged and are being used to discredit his country. After reporting two years ago that the Iranians had frozen their nuclear weapons research in 2003, the CIA and other intelligence agencies will probably paint a significantly more sobering scenario just as the UN Security Council is considering tougher sanctions against Iran.

Mulling Sanctions

When France assumes the Council’s rotating chairmanship in February, Washington could push for a showdown. While Moscow is not ruling out additional punitive measures, China, which has negotiated billions in energy deals with Iran, is more likely to block such measures.

China could, however, approve “smart” sanctions, such as travel restrictions for senior members of the Revolutionary Guard and nuclear scientists. Fakhrizadeh is already on a list of officials subject to such restrictions, and Daneshjoo could well be added in the future.

But the West would presumably be on its own when enforcing sanctions that would be truly harmful to Iran — and to its own, profitable trade relations with Tehran. The most effective trade weapon would be a fuel embargo. Because of a lack of refinery capacity Iran, which has the world’s second-largest oil reserves, imports almost half of the gasoline it uses. Sanctions would trigger a sharp rise in the price of gasoline, inevitably leading to social unrest. Experts are divided over whether it would be directed against the unpopular regime or if the country’s leaders could once again inflame the Iranian people against the “evil West.”

This leaves the military option. Apart from the political consequences and the possibility of counter-attacks, bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would be extremely difficult. The nuclear experts have literally buried themselves and their facilities underground, in locations that would be virtually impossible to reach with conventional weapons.

While even Israeli experts are skeptical over how much damage bombing the facilities could do to the nuclear program, the normally levelheaded US General David Petraeus sounded downright belligerent when asked whether the Iranian nuclear facilities could be attacked militarily. “Well, they certainly can be bombed,” he said just two weeks ago in Washington.

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,673802,00.html

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The Iranian Exile’s Eye

One day last June, on the quiet Tehran street where I lived, I noticed a man in a white Peugeot across the street looking at me, straight in the eye, as I started to drive out of my garage. “There she is,” he said, and he rushed to start his own car.

I pulled onto the street and looked in the mirror. Behind me was a gray car, already tailing me. Next to it rode two disheveled men on a motorcycle.

So, I said to myself. I’m under surveillance. They’ve sent a whole team.

I drove around the block and returned home. I called a lawyer. My driver went to his office and fetched me papers to sign, so the lawyer could represent me if I was arrested.

But I took no chances. I stayed inside my apartment building for three days. Then I went straight to the airport.

It was time to leave Iran.

I am an Iranian, a journalist now living in exile like hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others. We were driven out after the June elections that were widely considered fraudulent, and the protests and repression that followed. Our offense was that we covered them too thoroughly.

A daughter of a modern, middle-class family, I was raised to be ambitious and independent. I grew up in Tehran, and studied English translation at the university there. I worked as a stringer for Western media, then studied political science at the University of Toronto from 1999 to 2001, and returned home to report from Tehran for The New York Times.

During periods of turmoil, I learned to lie low and report what I could, through a screen of warnings that some things — demonstrators’ slogans, even executions that had been announced domestically — were too sensitive to be reported outside Iran. But I thought the Iranian government was learning to tolerate us.

All of that changed last June.

Faced with furious street protests by an inconsolable political opposition, the government went to extraordinary lengths to suppress any news about the aftermath of the election. Taking pictures of protests became a crime; reporters working for foreign news media outlets were banned from leaving their offices. Many friends and almost all of my sources were thrown in jail.

One day, the phone rang and a sympathetic hard-line source warned me I would be shot by snipers if I was seen on the streets. Still, I kept going out to report. Only after the surveillance team arrived, about 10 days later, did I and my family decide to leave.

And yet, when we boarded the plane, two emotions were pulling me apart. I was relieved at my narrow escape. But a large piece of me longed to stay. Tehran’s familiar maple-shaded streets were now convulsed in some of the largest and bloodiest protests since the 1979 revolution; I wanted to tell the story, to continue being part of Iran’s fate. I was desolate at the thought of being cast out, with my friends dispersed, my contacts unreachable.

More than anything, I feared falling into what Iranian journalists call “the exile syndrome” — my understanding of Iran would be frozen in the moment of leaving, and I’d be unable to keep up with events on the ground. No doubt the government expected the same for me and others.

As things worked out, we could not have been more wrong. Protest was not about to die in Iran. Neither was news about it, nor our part in telling the story. Three things have made all the difference: the global reach of the Internet; the networking skills of exiled journalists and our sources; and the resourcefulness of Iran’s dissidents in sending information and images out.

When I reached Toronto (I had acquired dual citizenship there while a student), I did feel alone and overwhelmed at first. I realized, for the first time, the toll that the stresses of working in Tehran had been taking on me. I felt a bit like an abused child who had not dared speak about the abuse while it was occurring.

In my mind, I went over the times when sources who had been released from prison told me that interrogators had shown them pictures of people outside my home — a signal of how closely my life was being monitored. It had made me fear anything odd happening in public, like the time a sloppily dressed man on a scooter cut me off, flashing a pistol and handcuffs under the back of his shirt as I drove near my home. He dismounted to yell at me. I locked myself in the car. Then he disappeared. After that, I never again took my two toddlers to a public park in Tehran, fearing they would learn too much about the dangers their mother faced.

Soon after reaching Toronto, I went to New York to cover a hunger strike in support of the Iranian opposition. I was stunned to see more than a dozen former sources of mine — onetime members of Parliament, activists and bloggers — who had gone into exile a few years before. Some were so well informed that they seemed to have just come from a meeting in Tehran.

For me, that was like a new dawn: rather than being cut off, I had made contact with another Iran — a virtual one on the Internet, linking reformers abroad to bloggers and demonstrators still inside the country, and to reporters and sources outside. In fact, by following blogs and the cellphone videos seeping out of Iran, in some ways I could report more productively than when I had to fear and outwit the government.

For example, my contacts helped me find and interview a young man who had left Iran after being in prison, where he said a guard had raped him. That interview could not have happened in Iran. Last month, I could freely translate the harsh slogans that protestors hurled about the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. There were palpably genuine videos on YouTube from places I recognized, with crowds chanting slogans I knew — or new ones. The slogans were now in fact fiercer, the leaders of the movement less timid, and at least some of the demonstrators clearly angrier.

So I could report, free of government edicts, that the protests were entering a new phase, even as I remembered a cardinal self-imposed rule for any reporting from Iran: There is no way to predict where any movement might be heading, or when it might be stopped.

There is an irony in all this; the years of authoritarian control had educated much of Iran in the need for circumventing restrictions on the Internet, and now I was seeing and hearing the results on my computer and television.

Last month, during and after the funeral of the reformist Grand Ayatollah Hossain Ali Montazeri, one of the demonstrators’ most useful tools was the Bluetooth short-range radio signal that Americans use mainly to link a cellphone to an earpiece, or a printer to a laptop. Long ago, Iranian dissidents discovered that Bluetooth can as easily link cellphones to each other in a crowd.

And that made “Bluetooth” a verb in Iran: a way to turn citizen reportage instantly viral. A protester Bluetooths a video clip to others nearby, and they do the same. Suddenly, if the authorities want to keep the image from escaping the scene, they must confiscate hundreds or thousands of phones and cameras.

The authorities have tried to fight back against such techniques and the Internet itself, but have fallen short. In November they announced that a new police unit, the “cyber-army,” would sweep the Web of dissent. It blocked Twitter feeds for a few hours in December, and an opposition Web site. But other blogs and Web sites mushroomed faster than the government could keep up.

Perhaps the first leader to use the Internet against Iran’s rulers was Ayatollah Montazeri himself, a revolutionary in 1979 who turned critical of the government and was dismissed as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s heir in 1988. In 2000, while under house arrest, he posted on the Internet a banned 600-page memoir revealing that while in power, he had opposed the execution of some 3,000 political detainees.

That changed his public image from an architect of Iran’s theocracy to a human-rights champion, one reason that hundreds of thousands turned out for his funeral on Dec. 21 despite government restrictions, making it a flashpoint between the protesters and the government.

Five days after the funeral, images of members of the pro-government Basij militia disrupting a speech by former President Mohammad Khatami, a reformist, were posted on the Internet. At the same time, from Canada, I could speak over the phone to people marching to northern Tehran in support of Mr. Khatami. I heard gunshots in the background and, the next day, I spoke to a doctor at a hospital where protesters who had been shot were being treated.

On Dec. 30, the government staged a demonstration to counter those by the opposition. Ayatollah Ahmad Alam Olhoda condemned the reformist protesters as “followers of the path of Satan” and praised the pro-government demonstrators as “followers of the path of God.”

But that exhortation did not stand on its own in my mind. Against it played a video captured three days earlier, on Dec. 27 on Karim-khan Street, in a middle-class area of Tehran that I knew well. The video showed a man shooting blindly into the crowd; I could hear protestors identify him as a member of the Basij.

Then came a cry: “Hamleh!” — “Attack!” And dozens of men and women rushed menacingly toward the armed man, in an amazing turnaround. It seemed, to this reporter, safe to conclude that fear had evaporated among many of those who joined the opposition that day.

It is not clear what happened next, but the government has confirmed the deaths of at least eight protesters in Tehran on Dec. 27. The opposition claims the toll is higher. And, as I write, its voice is still being reported.

Nazili Fatha, New York Times

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/weekinreview/17fathi.html

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The West’s Betrayal of Iran

Europe’s ‘dialogue’ with the mullahs is just camouflage to cover up the trade and appeasement.

This Sunday, Iran’s freedom movement has reached a new dimension. At demonstrations throughout the country, the brave people of Iran chanted: “Yazid will be overthrown, this will be the month of blood,” referring to the caliph who killed the founder of Shiite belief, Imam Hossein. Yazid is of course a thinly-veiled code for the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

The Iranian people know that liberty has its price and they are willing to pay it to make a free and democratic Iran possible. The response of the “international community,” though, has been shameful.

The Iranian victims of Western appeasement.

Sure, France immediately condemned the violence against peaceful protesters and called for “a political solution.” Italy called “for a dialogue with the opposition.” And the United States and Germany joined with their talk of the Iranian people’s “universal rights” (U.S. National Security Council Spokesman Mike Hammer) and that the world “will observe and not look away,” in the words of German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle.

These words sound hollow to the Iranian people. Over the past 30 years, the West has done nothing except to “look away” whenever Iranians were oppressed, tortured and murdered. What only really counted, particularly for Europeans, was trade. And now six months after the emergence of powerful yet peaceful resistance that is bringing down one of the most brutal dictatorships of our age, the international community still has not been able to put the needs and wishes of the millions of freedom-loving Iranians at the center of its Iran policy. Words of solidarity mean nothing if they are not followed by tough action.

Since the rigged June elections, there can be no more doubt that this regime is as illegitimate is it is oppressive. And yet it was precisely during this period of popular unrest against the mullahs that the free world restarted negotiations with Tehran. This was a stunning betrayal. A betrayal of the freedom-seeking people of Iran and a betrayal of our own universal values. Despite the pictures of millions of Iranians risking their lives for freedom, the international community refuses to acknowledge and support the democratic, peaceful and prosperous alternative to the Islamist rulers. People in the West still think this all about the fraudulent re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and don’t recognize that it is regime change that the Iranian people want.

Over the past six months it has been almost unbearable for me to be so far away from the country that I love and miss so much. It is a deep inspiration to me to witness the courage and love for freedom of my fellow Iranians, two-thirds of whom were born in this undemocratic system. This young Iranian generation has brilliantly educated itself—in spite, not because, of the Islamic Republic, whose schools only teach Islamist ideology.

It is obvious that these young and educated Iranians, literally connected with the world through new information technology, want to overcome tyranny. But these facts have never shaped Europe’s Iran strategy. Instead, Europe insisted on keeping up a “dialogue” with a brutal apparatus of power that does not even respect its own citizens, let alone people in the West. The talk about dialogue was of course only camouflage to cover up the trade and appeasement.

And since this year, even the new U.S. administration has joined this appeasement policy. It’s a failed policy that has already cost so many lives of my fellow Iranians. It has brought the Islamic Republic closer to nuclear weapons, endangering the entire region.

It is not too late to shape a new kind of Iran policy. Barack Obama is the first U.S. President with Muslim roots. Of all democratic leaders, he should be the one to realize that Iran is ruled by a totalitarian dictatorship, not by religious men of peace. And when during Ashura, the most important Shiite mourning period, the security forces severely beat and kill peaceful demonstrators, it is simply not enough for Mr. Obama to leave it to his staff to condemn this brutality. This is a moment when the U.S. President himself needs to find the right words to condemn the oppressors and side with the protestors.

I’m blessed to live in a free and democratic country. It is my duty and that of all democrats not to keep silent about what Iranians are going through, and not to let them down.

Ms. Farzan is an Iranian-born author who lives in Berlin.

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703278604574624171652809240.html

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Kerry of Tehran

His trip would convey legitimacy that the dictatorship is especially eager to have at the current moment.

John Kerry lost the Secretary of State sweepstakes to Hillary Clinton, but that hasn’t lowered his diplomatic ambitions. The Journal reported Thursday that the Senate Foreign Relations Chairman is mulling a trip to Iran, and with the blessing of the Obama Administration.

If the mullahs had any sense, they’d send him a government plane. Beset by almost daily demonstrations by a democratic opposition that has been growing despite beatings and arrests since the stolen June election, Mr. Kerry would arrive from Washington to show the Iranian people that at least someone still favors the regime. He would be the most senior American to visit Tehran in 30 years and his trip would convey legitimacy that the dictatorship is especially eager to have at the current moment.

The Kerry mission would also look like a panicky effort to persuade the Ayatollah Ali Khamanei to accept the increasingly plaintive U.S. offers of engagement. Mr. Obama has set the end of this month as his latest deadline for progress on nuclear talks before he says he’ll seek tougher sanctions against Iran at the U.N.

But if a year of personal Presidential letters and Administration entreaties hasn’t worked, why would a Senatorial trip? The regime would probably exploit the visit for its own domestic purposes, perhaps adding to its P.R. coup by releasing to Mr. Kerry the three hapless American hikers it has promised to put on trial for having “suspicious aims” as they wandered across the border with Iraq.

The Iranians who need support now are the democrats in prison, in the streets, and increasingly in the mosques as the regime loses its legitimacy even among many clerics. Please do them no more harm, Senator.

Editorial, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704039704574616271463790160.html

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2009: The year of living fecklessly

On Tuesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not just reject President Obama’s latest feckless floating nuclear deadline. He spat on it, declaring that Iran “will continue resisting” until the United States has gotten rid of its 8,000 nuclear warheads.

So ends 2009, the year of “engagement,” of the extended hand, of the gratuitous apology — and of spinning centrifuges, two-stage rockets and a secret enrichment facility that brought Iran materially closer to becoming a nuclear power.

We lost a year. But it was not just any year. It was a year of spectacularly squandered opportunity. In Iran, it was a year of revolution, beginning with a contested election and culminating this week in huge demonstrations mourning the death of the dissident Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri — and demanding no longer a recount of the stolen election but the overthrow of the clerical dictatorship.

Obama responded by distancing himself from this new birth of freedom. First, scandalous silence. Then, a few grudging words. Then relentless engagement with the murderous regime. With offer after offer, gesture after gesture — to not Iran, but the “Islamic Republic of Iran,” as Obama ever so respectfully called these clerical fascists — the United States conferred legitimacy on a regime desperate to regain it.

Why is this so important? Because revolutions succeed at that singular moment, that imperceptible historical inflection, when the people, and particularly those in power, realize that the regime has lost the mandate of heaven. With this weakening dictatorship desperate for affirmation, why is the United States repeatedly offering just such affirmation?

Apart from ostracizing and delegitimizing these gangsters, we should be encouraging and reinforcing the demonstrators. This is no trivial matter. When pursued, beaten, arrested and imprisoned, dissidents can easily succumb to feelings of despair and isolation. Natan Sharansky testifies to the electric effect Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire speech had on lifting spirits in the gulag. The news was spread cell to cell in code tapped on the walls. They knew they weren’t alone, that America was committed to their cause.

Yet so aloof has Obama been that on Hate America Day (Nov. 4, the anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran), pro-American counter-demonstrators chanted, “Obama, Obama, you are either with us or with them,” i.e., their oppressors.

Such cool indifference is more than a betrayal of our values. It’s a strategic blunder of the first order.

Forget about human rights. Assume you care only about the nuclear issue. How to defuse it? Negotiations are going nowhere, and whatever U.N. sanctions we might get will be weak, partial, grudging and late. The only real hope is regime change. The revered and widely supported Montazeri had actually issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons.

And even if a successor government were to act otherwise, the nuclear threat would be highly attenuated because it’s not the weapon but the regime that creates the danger. (Think India or Britain, for example.) Any proliferation is troubling, but a nonaggressive pro-Western Tehran would completely change the strategic equation and make the threat minimal and manageable.

What should we do? Pressure from without — cutting off gasoline supplies, for example — to complement and reinforce pressure from within. The pressure should be aimed not at changing the current regime’s nuclear policy — that will never happen — but at helping change the regime itself.

Give the kind of covert support to assist dissident communication and circumvent censorship that, for example, we gave Solidarity in Poland during the 1980s. (In those days that meant broadcasting equipment and copying machines.) But of equal importance is robust rhetorical and diplomatic support from the very highest level: full-throated denunciation of the regime’s savagery and persecution. In detail — highlighting cases, the way Western leaders adopted the causes of Sharansky and Andrei Sakharov during the rise of the dissident movement that helped bring down the Soviet empire.

Will this revolution succeed? The odds are long but the reward immense. Its ripple effects would extend from Afghanistan to Iraq (in both conflicts, Iran actively supports insurgents who have long been killing Americans and their allies) to Lebanon and Gaza where Iran’s proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, are arming for war.

One way or the other, Iran will dominate 2010. Either there will be an Israeli attack or Iran will arrive at — or cross — the nuclear threshold. Unless revolution intervenes. Which is why to fail to do everything in our power to support this popular revolt is unforgivable.

Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/24/AR2009122402646.html

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Iran’s Regime ‘Has Every Reason to Be Worried’

The World from Berlin

Iranians attend the funeral ceremony of Iranian dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri on Monday.

Monday saw tens of thousands of regime critics marching in Iran for the funeral of a senior dissident cleric. Mourning turned to chants of “death to the dictator,” and German commentators believe there is more to come.

Tens of thousands of anti-regime protestors marched through the streets of Iran’s holy city of Qom on Monday. They had gathered for the funeral procession of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the most senior of the regime’s critics, who had died in his sleep Sunday at the age of 87.

The event reportedly turned into the largest civil protest since those that followed the contested re-election in June of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which left an unknown number of protestors dead. In Monday’s demonstration, protestors chanted “death to the dictator” and carried slogans voicing their support for the opposition leaders to whom Montazeri had given his support. Mir Hossein Mousavi, the head of the opposition Green Movement, and Mahdi Karroubi, a prominent protest leader, also took part in the demonstration.

Montazeri was one of the leaders of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution and had been the heir apparent for a time to Ayatollah Khomeini. However, he fell out of favor with the regime in the 1980s because he thought that the clerics who later came to rule the country should have served in an advisory role to political leaders rather than holding on to the reins of power themselves. After serving five years under house arrest, he was released in 2003 and kept a low profile until he publically expressed his outrage over June’s disputed elections.

Foreign media were blocked from the site, but footage posted online shows massive crowds. There are also reports of clashes between protestors and security forces as well as hundreds of arrests, but the situation doesn’t appear to be as tense as it was in June. Still, the Associated Press is reported that some private news sources were shut down, prominent critics were arrested on the way to the protest, Internet service was slowed and mobile phone service was unreliable.

In Tuesday’s newspapers, German commentators see the protests as a signal of a reinvigorated opposition movement. Likewise, they predict that next Sunday will tell whether the protest movement can keep its steam or will be suppressed with greater might.

Conservative Die Welt writes:

“The regime-controlled Iranian media only gave passing mention to Montazeri’s death and did not even refer to him as a grand ayatollah.”

“Montazeri was the spiritual father of the reform movement. He lent both inspiration and spiritual legitimacy to the ‘green’ opposition movement as well as a political face to Mir Hossein Mousavi. Montazeri embodied the notion of an enlightened Islam.”

“But the opposition needn’t die with him. In fact, as the mass protests at Montazeri’s funeral have shown … the opposite could actually be the case. Shiites traditionally hold memorial ceremonies seven days after one’s death. In the case of Montazeri, it will fall right on the Day of Ashura, one of the most important religious holidays for Shiites. It commemorates the death of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who died in the Battle of Karbala in AD 680 and is reverred as a martyr. It is a day of mourning that could change into one of rage against the hated religious dictatorship. Montazeri’s death will serve as a catalyst. The regime has every reason to be worried.”

The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

“The ‘green’ opposition movement in Iran won’t allow itself to be intimidated by either threats or brutal violence. … The death and burial of 87-year-old Grand Ayatollah Montazeri … are bringing thousands into the streets. … And, once again, Mousavi and Karroubi, the underdog candidates in the presidential elections held six months ago, are marching with them. At that time, Montazeri had already voiced his support for them and criticized the ‘falsifications’ of the incumbent president. Despite the supression, the opposition has had a certain effect precisely because both this and the earlier protest were articulated within the system of the Islamic Republic. But can such actions really alter the circumstances?”

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

“Montazeri clearly expressed what many other critical clerics would only hint at. He recognized the doubts that many Iranians had about the president’s re-election, their longing for freedom and that the goals of the reform movement were warranted. His morally based stance made the official suspicions that the opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi were foreign agents seem even more ridiculous.”

“Montazeri didn’t consider either himself or the Ayatollah Khomeini … to be infallible. He was willing to face up to his mistakes, which is something that the powerful in the current regime have never done. In November, when Iran was celebrating the 30th anniversary of the occupation of the American Embassy in Tehran, Montazeri said: ‘At the time, I supported it, but not today. It was a mistake.’ Iranians have appreciated this kind of frankness much more than the regime’s hot-air choir.”

Left-wing Die Tagezeitung writes:

“In 1979, Montazeri only wanted a religious authority to make sure that the state didn’t violate fundamental Islamic principles. But things turned out differently. Today, Ali Khamenei rules like a dictator. Montazeri was what we in the West hope for in a public intellectual. He constantly got into the thick of things and did not shy away from criticizing the government in harsh terms.”

“In historical terms, he played the role that the Shia clergy traditionally played before it came into power in Iran. For many, he represented both restraint and a refuge. And losing his critical voice will weigh heavily on all of those in Iran who are currently mobilizing for reform.”

“On the other hand, Montazeri’s death could open up new opportunities for protest. Shiites traditionally commemorate their dead on the third, seventh and 40th days after their deaths, so it’s fairly easy to figure out when the next demonstrations against the regime will be held. On top of that, it is currently Muharram, the month of mourning for Muslims, and the seventh day after Montazeri’s death will fall on Ashura, which is next Sunday. For practicing Shiites, this is the most important holiday of the year. And the regime cannot outlaw commemorative marches on this day.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,668596,00.html

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The Peoples’ Revolt in Iran

The regime is losing legitimacy, even as Obama engages it.

The foundation stones of Iran’s Islamic Republic were shaken again yesterday, showing that the largest antigovernment movement in its 30 years may be one of the biggest stories of next year as well. Now imagine the possibilities if the Obama Administration began to support Iran’s democrats.

The perseverance of the so-called Green Movement is something to behold. Millions of Iranians mobilized against the outcome of June’s fraudulent presidential election, and their protests were violently repressed. But the cause has only grown in scope, with the aim of many becoming nothing less than the death of a hated system.

Yesterday offered a glimpse into the regime’s crisis of legitimacy. As in the waning days of the Shah in the late 1970s, Iranians merely need an excuse to show what they think of their rulers. The funeral of a leading Shiite cleric who’d inspired and guided the opposition brought out tens to hundreds of thousands to Iran’s religious capital of Qom. Media coverage is severely restricted, but the demonstration’s size was impossible to deny.

Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri

Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who died Sunday, was no ordinary religious figure. He stood alongside the leader of the Islamic Revolution, his mentor Ayatollah Khomeini, and he was handpicked to replace him. But Montazeri broke with the ruling mullahs in the late 1980s, criticizing their violence and repression. And in recent months, he became a spiritual leader to the opposition.

He knew the regime intimately: “A political system based on force, oppression, changing people’s votes, killing, closure, arresting and using Stalinist and medieval torture, creating repression, censorship of newspapers, interruption of the means of mass communications, jailing the enlightened and the elite of society for false reasons, and forcing them to make false confessions in jail, is condemned and illegitimate,” he wrote.

Ailing at his death, Montazeri leaves behind a legacy Iranian modernizers can build on. Like the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq, he believed that the Shiite clergy should stay out of democratic politics. He also helped shape views on Iran’s nuclear program. In October, Montazeri issued a fatwa against developing an Iranian bomb. His statement confirmed the view among Green Movement figures who believe an atomic weapon will only consolidate the regime’s hold on power and isolate Iran.

Absent religious legitimacy for the so-called Islamic Republic, the current rulers must rely on blunt means of preservation, such as the elite Revolutionary Guards and the Basiji militias. Thus Iran seems to be morphing into a military dictatorship, not unlike the Poland of Wojciech Jaruzelski after the “workers”—the supposed communist vanguard—turned against that regime.

Relying on thugs carries risks. During the summer protests, many protestors were killed, tortured and raped in the regime’s jails. Among the dead is the son of a prominent conservative parliamentarian. Supreme leader Ali Khamenei sought to damp public outrage by closing the most notorious prison at Kahrizak, but pressure has continued to build. Reversing months of denials, the government on Saturday acknowledged the abuses, bringing charges against 12 military officials for the murder of three young protestors this summer.

Previously a neutral broker in Iranian politics, Khamenei undermined himself by siding so openly with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after June’s elections. The decision to prosecute, which he would have had to sign off on, may be another miscalculation. A trial could help expose the corruption at the heart of this system.

(Another Polish parallel comes to mind: The 1984 trial of the secret policemen who murdered the pro-Solidarity priest, Father Jerzy Popieluszko, that further hurt that government’s credibility.)

Which brings us to President Obama. Throughout this turbulent year in Iran, the White House has been behind the democratic curve. When the demonstrations started, Mr. Obama abdicated his moral authority by refusing to take sides, while pushing ahead with plans to negotiate a grand diplomatic bargain with Mr. Ahmadinejad that trades recognition for suspending the nuclear program.

Mr. Obama has since moved at least to embrace “universal values,” and in his Nobel address this month he mentioned the democracy protestors by name. The White House yesterday sent condolences to Montazeri’s friends and family, which is what passes for democratic daring in this Administration.

But the White House is also still pleading for talks even as its December deadline passes without any concession from Tehran. Meantime, the Iranian opposition virtually begs Washington not to confer any legitimacy on the regime, and the democracy demonstrators crave American support. Iran’s civil society clock may now be ticking faster than its nuclear clock. However hard it may be to achieve, a new regime in Tehran offers the best peaceful way to halt Iran’s atomic program. Shouldn’t American policy be directed toward realizing that goal?

Editorial, Wall Street Journal

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704304504574610103365849572.html

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Cleric’s Death, Torture Case Jolt Iran

Iran’s opposition on Sunday seized upon the death of one of the Islamic republic’s founding fathers — a revered ayatollah who was also a fierce critic of the nation’s leadership — to take to the streets in mourning.

Fearing that mourners could quickly turn into antigovernment protesters, Iranian authorities tightened security across the country. In Tehran, crowds held up pictures of the dead cleric and chanted, “This is the month of blood, the regime is coming down,” according to eyewitnesses and videos posted on YouTube.

But the death of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who passed away in his sleep, was only one of two surprises to shake Iran over the weekend.

Hours earlier, on Saturday, military prosecutors alleged that prison guards tortured to death at least three student protesters in July, contradicting months of denials by top leaders. The reversal is one of the biggest blows to Tehran’s credibility since government protests first erupted six months ago.

Either development, by itself, would provide a rallying point for the opposition, which claims last summer’s presidential election was a fraud and is demanding a political overhaul. Together, they represent the widening array of challenges facing the Iranian regime.

The murder allegations center on Tehran’s notorious Kahrizak prison, where three protesters died in July. A young doctor who claimed to have evidence of torture at the prison, Ramin Pourandarjani, later himself died under mysterious circumstances. In recent weeks Dr. Pourandarjani, who was the subject of a page-one article in The Wall Street Journal on Saturday, has emerged as a martyr figure for the opposition.

Complicating matters, the weekend’s events coincide with the 10-day Muharram religious holiday, during which Shiite Muslims traditionally hold emotionally charged street processions to honor a revered Shiite saint. The opposition already had vowed to mark this year’s ceremonies with massive daily protests against the government.

Iran’s leadership maintains a firm grip on power and quickly moved to assert its control, using tools that have proved effective in the past to tamp down unrest. Prominent opposition figures and activists reported receiving threatening phone calls from security agents on Sunday, warning them against attending Monday’s funeral, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. Five prominent opposition figures were reportedly arrested on the road to the holy city of Qom, where the ayatollah’s funeral service was planned.

On Sunday, as news spread of the death of Ayatollah Montazeri, 87 years old, spontaneous protests erupted in several Iranian cities and at university campuses, according to video circulating on the Internet Sunday afternoon. In one clip from Najafabad, Mr. Montazeri’s home town, crowds chanted, “Our green Montazeri, congratulations on your freedom.” Green is the adopted color of the Iranian opposition movement.

At several Tehran universities, professors canceled classes. Students staged sit-ins and marches, reciting verses from the Quran and chanting, “It’s a day of mourning in Iran, the Green people of Iran are in mourning.” Iran’s main student-activist group called on students across the nation to take to the streets Monday in a sign of respect for Ayatollah Montazeri.

The family of Ayatollah Montazeri said it would hold the funeral Monday in Qom. By midday Sunday, opposition Web sites were calling on supporters to join them for Ayatollah Montazeri’s funeral.

His death provides an opportunity for Iran’s dissident clergy members, who have mostly remained on the sidelines, to publicly show support for the opposition. This is significant because, in Iran, political movements have little chance to succeed without backing from the clergy.

An image showing Kahrizak prison, according to opposition Web sites, where prosecutors now allege guards tortured to death at least three student protesters in July.

On Sunday, Iranian security forces took positions around Ayatollah Montazeri’s house, monitoring the parade of visitors, according to his family. “Our house has been packed, people are coming and going, including many of Qom’s senior clerics,” said grandson Nasser Montazeri, reached by phone in Qom.

For the government, the risk is that mourning processions become political marches.

“The emotional and political impact of Ayatollah Montazeri’s death could morph into a widespread flame that the government cannot contain,” said Mohamad Javad Akbarein, a religious scholar and former student of the ayatollah’s.

This year’s antigovernment protests, the biggest since the Islamic revolution more than 30 years ago, are at a crucial point. In recent months, demonstrations have evolved from protests against the handling of the election to denunciations of the Islamic regime and its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Government-controlled media played down the news of Ayatollah Montazeri’s death. Supreme Leader Khamenei offered his condolences, calling him “a well-versed jurist and a prominent master.”

Ayatollah Montazeri, frail in recent years, was once in line to succeed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, as Supreme Leader. But he and Mr. Khomeini fell out in the late 1980s.

Ayatollah Montazeri accused Ayatollah Khamenei of creating a dictatorship in the name of Islam. Ayatollah Montazeri was placed under house arrest from 1997 to 2003. In time, he gained a large spiritual following because of his advocacy of reform inside the Islamic Republic and his calls for more democracy.

His lofty standing in the clerical establishment — he outranked even Ayatollah Khamenei as an Islamic scholar — helped to protect him over the years as he criticized the government. In the past six months, Ayatollah Montazeri’s role grew more prominent, dovetailing with demands by protesters who rallied against what they saw as a stolen election in June by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The ayatollah aligned with the so-called Green Movement, led by opposition candidates who lost to Mr. Ahmadinejad. He harshly criticized Iran’s rulers, at one point calling the Ahmadinejad government “illegitimate.”

In one of his many broadsides, Ayatollah Montazeri warned Ayatollah Khamenei that merely closing the Kahrizak prison — site of the alleged torture deaths in July — was an attempt to “fool people. You can’t blame all these sins on a building.”

“The people of Iran are not stupid, and if those responsible are not persecuted, people will not remain silent,” Ayatollah Montazeri said in a July 29 statement, the day after the prison was shut.

On Saturday, Iranian military prosecutors issued charges against 12 officials at the prison. That action directly challenges the account of prison deaths provided so far by the government of Mr. Ahmadinejad.

The charges underscore what appeared to be a widening rift in the government about how to deal with the protest movement.

Hard-line elements aligned with Mr. Ahmadinejad, including the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij militia, have spearheaded a broad and sometimes violent crackdown on protesters. More moderate elements, including many members of parliament, have insisted on probing alleged abuses in that crackdown.

Ayatollah Khamenei, who has the final say in all matters of state, appears to waver between the two. While he has backed Mr. Ahmadinejad and demanded protesters abandon the streets, he also shut down Kahrizak prison. He would also have approved Saturday’s announcement of the charges against the prison staff.

Prosecutors said three prison officials, all from Iran’s armed forces, had been charged with first-degree murder. Another nine military officials at the detention center face other, unspecified criminal charges. Authorities didn’t name the suspects.

Kahrizak prison was a main depository for prisoners rounded up in the unrest that followed the June elections. At the height of the unrest, some 140 protesters were held there. Three young men died in custody, one of them the son of a top conservative politician.

Allegations of torture there crystallized public outrage, as opposition Web sites published horrifying claims by prisoners of filthy conditions, blood-stained walls and routine beatings in underground holding cells.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s government vehemently denied any abuse took place. Senior security and police officials made multiple statements blaming the deaths in Kahrizak on meningitis. The victims’ parents said their sons’ bodies had visible signs of torture and beating.

In a statement Saturday posted by official Iranian news agencies, military prosecutors said: “The coroner’s office has rejected that meningitis was the cause of the deaths and has confirmed the existence of signs of repeated beatings on the bodies and has declared that the wounds inflicted were the cause of the deaths.”

Dr. Pourandarjani, the young doctor who died recently under mysterious circumstances, had seen the bodies of the three victims and signed their death certificates. According to his family, he testified to a parliamentary committee that the prisoners had died of severe blows to their heads and bodies.

Saturday’s statement by prosecutors doesn’t mention Dr. Pourandarjani. But it does say that they based their conclusions on medical reports of detainees and witness testimonies made to the parliamentary committee. Dr. Pourandarjani is believed to have been the only person in a position to provide these.

Farnaz Fassihi, Wall Street Journal

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126129141238099009.html

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A thousand and one excuses

Iran’s nuclear programme

But they are running out

IS IRAN trying to build a bomb, or is its nuclear work aimed merely at keeping the lights on? Gathering evidence, and Iran’s refusal to heed a string of UN Security Council resolutions and stop its suspect activities, make the question seem quaint.

Few believe the tales Iranian officials have spun since the first news, in 2002, of their covert efforts to enrich uranium—usable for civilian nuclear reactors, but abusable at high enrichment for making weapons. Yet even the recent discovery of another hitherto secret enrichment plant being built deep in a mountainside on a heavily guarded military compound near the city of Qom had a ready explanation: to keep “civilian” enrichment going if other nuclear sites were attacked.

A steady leak of documents in recent months appears to tell a compelling story at odds with Iran’s version. A memo published in Britain by the Times, if authentic, shows Iran in 2007 about to embark on a four-year set of experiments, picking up on related past work, to develop a neutron initiator, or bomb trigger, containing uranium deuteride, or UD3 (a compound used by Pakistan in its bombs). The actual tests, however, would be done with substances less likely to be detected by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear guardian.

Some, like Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, have hitherto complained that, for all Iran’s odd behaviour, there is no hard evidence it is after a bomb. The experiments reported in the Times have no other purpose. Iranian officials dismiss these and other documents as forgeries, yet refuse inspectors access to scientists in Iran who could answer their questions.

Publicly, IAEA inspectors say they cannot confirm that Iran’s nuclear programme is entirely peaceful. Behind closed doors, they reportedly judge it has mastered the skills it would need to build a nuclear weapon. They have had the report about neutron initiators for some time, part of a trove of documents collected from different governments. These describe weapons-related design work and other experiments, as well as the organisational structure of Iran’s military effort.

The IAEA says much of this material is credible and consistent. Critics, however, hark back to a controversial 2007 American National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iran had indeed had a warhead-building programme but ended it in 2003. The British, French and German intelligence services soon let it be known they thought work had resumed; Israel’s spies say it never stopped. It may have started again by late 2005, after Iran’s fiery president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took office.

Meanwhile, Iran continues to enrich uranium. After months of intensified efforts to coax it into talks, diplomats from America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China look like starting 2010 in discussions about tougher sanctions instead. And Iran’s evasive tactics, combined with the threats issued periodically by Mr Ahmadinejad and Iran’s latest test of its 2,000km Sejjil missile on December 16th, will ensure that Israel in particular keeps “all options” on the table for dealing with Iran’s defiance.

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Full article: http://www.economist.com/world/middleeast-africa/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15136660&source=features_box1

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Iranian Scorecard

The Administration opposes a bipartisan sanctions bill.

In his Inaugural address, President Obama promised the world’s dictators—with Iran plainly in mind—that he would “extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Here’s a status report on the mullahs’ knuckles:

• Weapons of mass destruction. On Wednesday, Iran tested a new version of its Sajjil-2 medium-range ballistic missile, a sophisticated solid-fuel model with a range of 1,200 miles—enough to target parts of Eastern Europe.

Also this week came news that Western intelligence agencies have an undated Farsi-language document titled “outlook for special neutron-related activities over the next four years.” It concerns technical aspects of a neutron initiator, which is used to set off nuclear explosions and has no other practical application. The document remains unauthenticated, and Iran denies working on a nuclear weapon. But it squares with accumulating evidence, from the International Atomic Energy Agency and other sources, that Iran continues to pursue nuclear weapons design and uranium enrichment.

• Support for terrorists. Iran also continues to supply Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon with weapons and money, and there’s reason to suspect the help extends to Colombia’s terrorist FARC. Centcom Commander David Petraeus told ABC News Wednesday that Iran “provides a modest level of equipment, explosives and perhaps some funding to the Taliban in western Afghanistan.” As for Iraq, he says, “there are daily attacks with the so-called signature weapons only made by Iran—the explosively formed projectile, forms of improvised explosive devices, etc.”

• Political gestures. Isolated regimes sometimes signal their desire for better relations through seemingly small gestures: ping-pong tournaments, for instance. Tehran has taken a different tack.

On Monday, it announced that three American hikers arrested along its border with Iraq in July would be put on trial. The charge? “Suspicious aims.” New charges were also brought last month against Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, who was already sentenced to at least 12 years in prison on espionage charges. The regime has been going after other foreign nationals, including French teacher Clotilde Reiss, who is living under house arrest in the French embassy in Tehran. Christopher Dickey notes in Newsweek that “since [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad took over four years ago, some 35 foreign nationals or dual nationals have been imprisoned for use as chump change in one sordid deal or another.”

• Diplomacy. In October, the U.S. and its allies offered to enrich Iran’s uranium in facilities outside the country, supposedly for the production of medical isotopes. The idea was that doing so would at least reduce Iran’s growing stockpile of uranium and thus postpone the day when it would have enough to rapidly build a bomb.

Tehran finally came back with a counterproposal late last week, in which no uranium would leave Iranian soil. Even Hillary Clinton admits it’s a nonstarter: “I don’t think anyone can doubt that our outreach has produced very little in terms of any kind of positive response from the Iranians,” the Secretary of State told reporters.

Given those remarks, we would have imagined that Mrs. Clinton would take it as good news that on Tuesday the House voted 412-12 in favor of a new round of unilateral sanctions on Iran. The Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act would forbid any company that does energy business with Iran from having access to U.S. markets.

Instead, last week Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg wrote to Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry urging that the Senate postpone taking up the House bill. “I am concerned that this legislation, in its current form, might weaken rather than strengthen international unity and support for our efforts,” wrote Mr. Steinberg.

So let’s see: Iran spurns every overture from the U.S. and continues to develop WMD while abusing its neighbors. In response, the Administration, which had set a December deadline for diplomacy, now says it opposes precisely the kind of sanctions it once promised to impose if Iran didn’t come clean, never mind overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress. For an explanation of why Iran’s behavior remains unchanged, look no further.

Editorial, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704541004574600274098469020.html

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Why Iran can’t be contained

Iran is proceeding with an aggressive nuclear weapons program, and a few dogged holdouts notwithstanding, much of the Obama administration has come to terms with that reality. Official Washington has resigned itself to pursuing a containment policy that some argue will limit Iran’s ability to proliferate, terrorize and otherwise exploit being a nuclear power. But it is wrong to think a nuclear Iran can be contained.

The containment argument runs along Cold War lines: The price of breakout is too high; the regime cares only about power, not about using weapons; containment will be simple because the Arabs are so scared of Iran they’ll do anything to help us; President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doesn’t have his finger on the button. In fact, these arguments are either false or misleading.

The Shiite regime in Tehran is far more skilled than its Sunni counterparts in the world of nuclear aspirations and sponsoring terrorists. A careful student of history, it surely realizes that the international community has meted out little punishment to nuclear transgressors. Tehran probably sees itself more in the mold of India, a great power whose nuclear weapons are acknowledged and now accepted, than of North Korea, a lunocracy without serious global aspirations or influence. Those Iranian officials who advocate withdrawal from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty do so not because they see Iran becoming the Shiite hermit kingdom but because they think Persia no longer needs to be constrained by status-quo powers and their status-quo treaties.

Advocates of containment and deterrence suggest that Iran will be encircled by a “like-minded group” of nations bent on raising the costs of adventurism. This absurd notion rests on weak reeds in Europe and Arabs deeply hesitant to act. And who can blame the neighboring Arabs? Egged on by distant powers to cut Iranian access to banking and shipping, they suspect they will be hung out to dry by the next world leader eyeing a Nobel Peace Prize.

Worse, the common notion of deterrence is ill-designed for the regime in Tehran. Perhaps it is unfair to suggest that today’s Iranian leadership is fashioned from different cloth than the Soviets; after all, we are often reminded that the doctrine of mutually assured destruction worked with the Soviet Union for half a century. But even the most ardent hawks have serious doubts about U.S. resolve to “totally obliterate” Iran in the event of a nuclear attack on, say, Israel — despite Hillary Clinton’s threat, as a presidential candidate, to do just that. Rather, most see the usual hemming and hawing about “certainty,” “provocations” and “escalation” as the far more likely rhetoric should such an event occur. And if we in Washington see it that way, why would the Iranians think differently?

Many also scoff at the notion that a responsible Iranian leader would risk using or transferring nuclear weapons or technology. We are told that Ahmadinejad (who most acknowledge is crazy enough to use such a weapon) won’t make the final decision. But the regime is remarkably opaque, and shifting power centers ensure that even capable intelligence agencies have low levels of certainty about decision-making in Iran’s nuclear program. If our intelligence community’s prognostications about Iran’s reaction to the Obama engagement policy are any indication (apparently they predicted that Iran was desperate to talk), then it seems safe to conclude that no one knows whose finger will be on Iran’s nuclear trigger.

It is possible that Iran will amass enough fissile material to make a bomb and then choose not to fashion a weapon or test. But that is not the history of states that have clandestine nuclear programs, particularly those with advanced delivery systems and warheads. It’s also possible that once it possesses such a weapon, Iran will neither use it nor share the technology. But there are few things Iran has not been willing to share, and it is certain to be tempted to use its nuclear weapons as a shield from behind which it can engage in adventurism in Lebanon, Iraq and Israel.

Advocates of a containment policy suggest that in the absence of effective diplomacy or sanctions that deliver results, the stark U.S. options are acquiescence or military action. Privately, Obama administration officials confess that they believe Israeli action will preempt our policy debate, as Israel’s tolerance for an Iranian nuke is significantly lower than our own. But subcontracting American national security to Israel is an appalling notion, and we cannot assume that an Israeli action would not provoke a wider regional conflict into which the United States would be drawn.

There are few good options available to roll back Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Nonetheless, after a year of false starts and failed initiatives, the Obama administration should be pressed to find a new way forward. At the very least, we must hope the president’s new policy will not find footing in the false notion that a nuclear Iran can be contained.

The writer is vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/14/AR2009121402713.html

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The Tehran-Caracas Nuclear Axis

Ahmadinejad and Chávez: new evidence of a radioactive relationship.

Here’s one from the Department of We Are The World: Hugo Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will address the U.N.’s climate summit in Copenhagen. Say what you will about these two gentlemen—the support for terrorists, the Holocaust denial, the suppression of civil liberties—at least nobody can accuse them of being global warming “deniers.”

On the contrary, the two leaders, who met in Caracas last month for at least the 11th time, have been nothing if not cooperative when it comes to environmentally friendly and carbon-neutral technologies. Bicycles, for instance: In 2005, Chávez directed his government to “follow seriously the project of manufacturing Iranian bicycles in Venezuela.” An Iranian dairy products plant (no doubt ecologically sensitive) also set up shop hard on the Colombian border, in territory controlled by Colombia’s terrorist FARC.

Ahmadinejad and Chávez: A new document sheds light on this radioactive relationship.

Then there was the tractor factory Iran built in Ciudad Bolivar. In January, the Associated Press reported that Turkish authorities had seized 22 containers labeled “tractor parts.” What they contained, according to one Turkish official, “was enough to set up an explosives lab.”

But perhaps the most interesting Iranian venture is a supposed gold mine not far from Angel Falls, in a remote area known as the Roraima Basin. The basin straddles Venezuela’s border with neighboring Guyana, where a Canadian company, U308, thinks it has found the “geological look-alike” to Canada’s Athabasca Basin. The Athabasca, the company’s Web site adds, “is the world’s largest resource of uranium.”

In 2006, Chávez publicly mocked suspicions of nuclear cooperation with Iran, saying it “shows they have no limit in their capacity to invent lies.” In September, however, Rodolfo Sanz, Venezuela’s minister of basic industries, acknowledged that “Iran is helping us with geophysical aerial probes and geochemical analyses” in its search for uranium.

The official basis for this cooperation seems to be a Nov. 14, 2008 memorandum of understanding signed by the two countries’ ministers of science and technology and given to me by a credible foreign intelligence source. “The two parties agreed to cooperate in the field of nuclear technology,” reads the Spanish version of the document, which also makes mention of the “peaceful use of alternative energies.” Days later, the Venezuelan government submitted a paper to the International Atomic Energy Agency on the “Introduction of a Nuclear Power Programme.” (Online readers can see the memorandum for themselves in their Farsi and Spanish versions. One mystery: The Farsi version makes no mention of nuclear cooperation.)

Iran would certainly require large and reliable supplies of uranium if it is going to enrich the nuclear fuel in 10 separate plants—an ambition Ahmadinejad spelled out last month. It would also require an extensive financial and logistical infrastructure network in Venezuela, not to mention unusually good political connections. All this it has in spades.

Consider financing. In January 2008, the Bank of International Development opened its doors for business in Caracas. At the top of its list of its directors, all of whom are Iranian, is one Tahmasb Mazaheri, former governor of the central bank of Iran. As it turns out, the bank is a subsidiary of the Export Development Bank of Iran, which in October 2008 was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for providing “financial services to Iran’s Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics.”

Or consider logistics. For nearly three years, Venezuelan airline ConViasa has been flying an Airbus 340 to Damascus and Tehran. Neither city is a typical Venezuelan tourist destination, to say the least. What goes into the cargo hold of that big plane is an interesting question. Also interesting is that in October 2008 the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, also sanctioned by Treasury, announced it had established a direct shipping route to Venezuela.

Finally, there are the political connections. What do Fadi Kabboul, Aref Richany Jimenez, Radwan Sabbagh and Tarek Zaidan El Aissami Maddah have in common? The answer is that they are, respectively, executive director for planning of Venezuelan oil company PdVSA; the president of Venezuela’s military-industrial complex; the president of a major state-owned mining concern; and, finally, the minister of interior. Latin Americans of Middle Eastern descent have long played prominent roles in national politics and business. But these are all fingertip positions in what gives the Iranian-Venezuelan relationship its worrying grip.

Forty-seven years ago, Americans woke up to the fact that a distant power could threaten us much closer to home. Perhaps it’s time Camelot 2.0 take note that we are now on course for a replay.

Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal

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The regime’s ramparts are shaky

Iran’s resilient opposition

Seven months after a disputed election, opposition to the clerical regime and its controversially re-elected president refuses to die

EVER since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was returned to power in June’s dodgy election, protests have erupted in Iran at irregular intervals. The most recent was on December 7th, officially “Student Day”. Across the country, tens of thousands of demonstrators managed to evade the security forces, forcing a way out of the universities into the streets, where non-student protesters joined them. There were reports of hundreds of arrests and severe beatings by the feared baseej militia, which answers to the Revolutionary Guard, the Islamic regime’s armed bullies. In Tehran, the capital and hottest spot, on the day after the demonstration students in the university’s technical faculty were again attacked by plainclothes agents, and further arrests were made.

To the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and senior members of Iran’s panoply of security organs, this is all part of a “soft war”—of disinformation, sabotage and provocation—being waged on the regime by the nation’s enemies. Earlier this month a troupe of pro-government actors performed a grotesque re-enactment of the last moments of Neda Agha Soltan, whose death by police bullet on June 20th was watched on television across the world, to perpetuate the fiction that she was somehow murdered by Western powers. Speculation swirls around the death by poisoning of a doctor who served in a prison where opposition detainees were killed and tortured this summer. Shirin Ebadi, a human-rights lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize-winner who has criticised the regime from abroad, has been threatened with prosecution on charges of tax evasion if she dares to return home.

Even on calm days, Tehran wears a scowling, joyless aspect. Phalanxes of police patrol the main streets and parks under the pretext of combating drug abuse, double parking and (in the case of Iran’s women) offensively thick amounts of eyeliner. The purpose of all the menace, most people think, is to intimidate the opposition.

Brutality and boastfulness have been the state’s favoured tactics to emasculate the “green movement”, as it is known after the campaign colours of its main figurehead, Mir Hosein Mousavi, who is widely thought to have won June’s election. During the summer there was a steady flow of reports describing deaths of dissidents on the streets and torture in jails. Scores of them were paraded in a show trial where they faced a range of capital charges.

But now such techniques seem to have given way to a subtler but equally determined type of tyranny. Having suffered grievously in jail, some prominent opponents of Mr Ahmadinejad have recently been let out pending appeal. The authorities seem to have silenced some of the freed detainees by demanding exorbitant bail or by threatening them and their families with further horrors. The judiciary has shied away from turning political personalities into martyrs. The five dissidents who are known to have been sentenced to death for their part in the summer’s disturbances were not well known.

At the same time, Iranians in many walks of life describe a slow but perceptible tightening of conditions. To the list of prominent activists, human-rights lawyers and filmmakers banned from leaving the country has now been added the name of Parastu Forouhar, the courageous daughter of dissidents murdered by government agents in 1998. On December 5th her passport was confiscated when she tried to leave for Germany, where she lives.

The number of banned anti-government newspapers and websites grows, while officials call for ever more strident measures to limit the pernicious influence of Western mores on an unsuspecting populace. The latest ideas include handing over control of some schools to clerics, segregating the sexes in universities and banning make-up for female television presenters. Some officials even promote the old Shia Muslim institution of temporary marriage as an alternative to illicit Western-style out-of-wedlock relationships. Conversation in middle-class households often revolves around visa and immigration applications.

Shades of green

In any event, despite this month’s efforts, the protests have lost some of their dynamism. Government propagandists depict the green movement as a busted flush. Fear and fatigue partly account for the dwindling number of demonstrators, but so does confusion over the protesters’ aims and capacity. In the words of a Tehran housewife, “The trouble is, the opposition is not agreed on what it wants.”

In the election’s aftermath, the movement had an attractively simple goal: to replace Mr Ahmadinejad with Mr Mousavi. The protests shrank when it became clear that the supreme leader, who has the last word on all state matters, would protect his president, and when he repeatedly turned overwhelming force against the protesters. Since then the authorities have refrained, despite loud exhortations by extreme hardliners, from arresting Mr Mousavi and a second defeated candidate-turned-opposition leader, Mehdi Karroubi.

Though they have conducted their pro-democracy campaign with tenacity and courage, Messrs Mousavi and Karroubi still proclaim their allegiance to the Islamic Republic, and notably to the “guardianship of the jurist”, the system of clerical rule that Mr Khamenei inherited in 1989 on the death of the regime’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. They also express broad support for Iran’s declared goal of self-sufficiency in nuclear fuel, and toe the official line, widely disbelieved in Europe and America, that Iran is interested solely in producing power for civilian use, not for nuclear weapons. But as the thwarted candidates’ backers become more radical, these views on nuclear issues are starting to sound rather quaint.

Enough of the jurist

For those tens of thousands of Iranians, in Tehran and other cities such as Mashhad and Isfahan, who are still willing to risk a truncheon charge or tear gas, not to mention the possibility of arrest and disappearance, the guardianship of the jurist (known in Persian as velayat-e faqih) has outlived its usefulness. When they are out demonstrating, many such people call not only for Mr Ahmadinejad’s head but also for Mr Khamenei’s. The old slogan, “Death to Israel!” has been replaced by “Death to Russia!” and “Death to China!”—allusions to the diplomatic and economic protection Iran enjoys from these two permanent members of the UN Security Council, and to Russia’s rumoured help in training Iran’s security forces in the dark arts of repression and crowd control.

Not long ago, a large majority of Iranians backed Iran’s nuclear programme. The efforts of Messrs Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to portray Western countries as vindictively hoarding technology for themselves and their Israeli clients found an appreciative audience. Some Iranians did not conceal their hope that the Islamic Republic, whatever its public words on the subject, would end up making a bomb.

Eyes wide shut

Though no reliable poll has recently been conducted, anecdotal evidence suggests attitudes on such issues are changing. Those who view Mr Ahmadinejad’s presidency as illegitimate tend to abjure all his policies. Though the supreme leader sets foreign policy, Mr Ahmadinejad has aggressively championed Iran’s pursuit of nuclear self-sufficiency, epitomised by his recent provocative statement that Iran would build ten more uranium-enrichment plants. Nowadays, some opposition people regard a nuclear-capable Iran with scarcely less alarm than Iran’s foreign foes.

A further change concerns the demonstrators’ attitude to violence. At the outset of the protests, many demonstrators saw non-violence as an article of faith. Since then, it has become an expedient but far from indispensable tactic. One middle-class Tehrani, a regular and non-violent marcher, frets for his teenage nephew, who has taken to demonstrating alongside a band of muscular toughs from south Tehran’s poor districts. “My nephew”, he says, “came back from a recent demo covered in blood, but it wasn’t his own. It was the blood of a baseej.” For the moment, younger male protesters arm themselves with bricks, rocks and screwdrivers, but few people would be surprised if more radical groups were stashing away firearms.

The main achievement of Iran’s democracy movement is to have survived. Mr Ahmadinejad, who has a winner’s chutzpah but little of the acumen, has helped. His still sizeable constituency of support, particularly among poorer Iranians, is more than offset by the passionate loathing he arouses in millions of his countrymen. One middle-class Tehran woman says that every time she attends a protest she vows it will be her last. She is unsure of the green movement’s aims and fears being beaten. “But then I see Ahmadinejad grinning on the television and I’m so appalled by him and what he’s done, I can’t bring myself to stop going.”

Moreover, the dictatorship that Mr Ahmadinejad shows every sign of wanting to set up is incompetent and fractured, its ability to make and implement policy increasingly weak. Iran’s prestige rose as America stumbled in Iraq. But talk of its becoming a regional superpower sounds overblown. Partly as a result of American pressure on international financial outfits, Iran is struggling to expand its oil industry. Separatist groups rattle the border provinces of Baluchistan and Kurdistan. Mr Ahmadinejad’s recent tour of South America and Africa showed Iran to be less isolated than the United States and Europe would like it to be. But its key friends, China and Russia, are not known for their constancy.

Indeed, the Islamic Republic may get lonelier now that its leaders have turned down the overtures of President Barack Obama and spurned a multinational proposal that Iran’s low-enriched uranium be turned into fuel rods abroad before being returned for monitored use in Iran—a deal which, its architects hoped, may have led to an accommodation on a range of matters. The president and his allies sounded most eager to cut a deal with Mr Obama but were undermined by internal rivalry and perhaps by the supreme leader himself, who does not hide his loathing of America. Mr Obama has high hopes of persuading China and Russia to harden UN sanctions.

The leaders’ last refuge

Messrs Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, whose denunciations of the West are as strident as ever, may well reckon that increased international pressure on Iran will—as in the past—galvanise Iranians in defence of their regime. But many in the opposition, taking their cue from Mrs Ebadi, now think Iranians will be pushed the other way. She has called for European governments to downgrade relations with Iran. Many of her followers dreaded the sight of Iran and the America achieving a detente that might bolster a regime they are now bent on undermining.

At home, Mr Ahmadinejad’s imperious and vindictive personality has alienated many conservatives, too. During his first term he annoyed parliamentarians, including those sharing his views, so that many proposed laws were blocked or watered down. Last week, they irritated the president by introducing a raft of amendments to a bill to phase out costly subsidies. For instance, Mr Ahmadinejad has tried in vain to seize control of Tehran’s underground railway from an ambitious and well-regarded mayor.

The president is also distrusted by some of Iran’s grandest ayatollahs. They are painfully aware of the damage months of repression have done to the Islamic Republic’s claims to moral rectitude.

Mr Ahmadinejad’s consuming vendetta has been against Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who remains rich and influential. The president and his allies regularly impugn Mr Rafsanjani’s integrity and that of his children, one of whom happens to run the Tehran metro.

True to his reputation for wilfulness, Mr Ahmadinejad seems to have turned a deaf ear to Mr Khamenei’s request that he lay off Mr Rafsanjani, who remains a firm if undeclared supporter of the opposition movement. Mr Rafsanjani’s daughter, a former parliamentarian, was cheered when she appeared among the demonstrators on December 7th.

He won’t drop his guard

For the moment, Mr Ahmadinejad seems secure. The supreme leader has linked his destiny to his president’s, perhaps judging that to accede to the opposition’s demands would encourage scrutiny of his own unaccountable powers. The pair share a power base among the Revolutionary Guard and its underlings, the baseej. The guard has benefited greatly. Under the complaisant eye of Mr Ahmadinejad, a former guardsman, it has won a big, even dominant, place in the economy.

The Revolutionary Guard signalled its aggressive interest in business back in 2004, during the presidency of Mr Ahmadinejad’s reformist predecessor, Muhammad Khatami, when its people seized Tehran’s new airport from the government. Mr Karroubi, then parliament’s speaker, caused a stir when he complained of the traffic of contraband through unregulated, guard-controlled jetties.

Since then, particularly since Mr Ahmadinejad came to power, the Revolutionary Guard has built an empire that encompasses oil and gas, construction, food production and clinics. In October a consortium controlled by the guard bought 51% of Iran’s telecoms monopoly. The central bank has allowed a guard-owned finance company to set up a bank.

So is Mr Ahmadinejad set fair for the next three-plus years in power? He may yet reckon that his plan to phase out subsidies, assuming it is implemented, will free him to direct more aid at his own, poorer supporters. But sceptics say inflation will gallop if the scheme goes awry.

For Messrs Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, their immediate task, made more urgent by the demonstrations of December 7th, is to end the protests and, with them, a perception of their own impotence. Now, on the eve of the mourning month of Muharram, when mass open-air parades may be a pretext for more demonstrations, Mr Khamenei’s advisers may well be urging him to shed more blood and also to arrest Mr Mousavi or Mr Karroubi or both.

But this might not work. A massive show of violence could suggest panic in the corridors of power, and could bring more people onto the streets. The movement does not need Mr Mousavi or Mr Karroubi to survive. In the words of Mohsen Armin, an influential reformist who backs Mr Mousavi, “No one is controlling the street protests.”

Having previously played their hand quite skilfully, the Islamic Republic’s leaders face an acute dilemma. Each act of brutality, though perhaps effective in the short run, erodes the credibility of a regime that prides itself on being close to God. Each time the security forces arrest more people or inflict cruelties behind the doors of Iran’s prisons, more and more people are confronted by the ugly face of the Islamic Republic fighting for its survival.

So the protests go on. In the taunting words of Mr Mousavi, “In the streets, you are fighting with shadows. And your ramparts are collapsing, one by one, in the hearts of the people.”

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Full article and photos: http://www.economist.com/world/middleeast-africa/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15065598&source=hptextfeature

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The Right Sanctions Can Still Stop Iran

Iran’s investors and commercial partners must be denied access to U.S. and European capital markets.

The word “inevitable” has crept into most discussions of sanctions on Iran; even the Russians have used it. National Security Adviser Jim Jones says that the “window is closing” for Iran to accept the international community’s offer to begin enrichment abroad and avoid international censure. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton memorably warned Iran last April of “crippling sanctions” if Tehran persisted in its illicit nuclear program.

But there is one word we don’t hear in connection with possible Iran sanctions: effective.

With the Islamic Republic getting closer and closer to enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon, only a game-changing set of coordinated and punitive economic and political measures can force the regime to make unpalatable choices. But that will require America and her allies to toss the old sanctions playbook and explore new ideas.

It has become a cliché to suggest that sanctions are not the silver bullet to shut down Iran’s nuclear weapons programs. After all, we are well into our third decade of U.S. sanctions against Iran—and into our fourth year of United Nations measures designed to back Tehran away from the nuclear ledge. Chin-stroking diplomats and regime apologists suggest that the failure of coercion only underscores the importance of persuasion. But the Obama administration’s zealous engagement overture has also failed.

Part of the problem has been the “too little, too late” nature of almost every effort at sanctions. The unilateral (largely British and American) and multilateral sanctions now in place might have altered the course of Tehran’s nuclear program 15 years ago. But Iran’s own political evolution, growing international accommodation, and President Barack Obama’s earnest efforts to diminish American international leadership only reassure the Ahmadinejad regime that defiance is the correct course.

Among the new measures reportedly being contemplated by the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany) are an expansion of the travel ban on Iranian officials, a ban on insurance and reinsurance for Iranian tankers, broader banking sanctions and a ban on international lending to Iran. That’s encouraging, but neither Russia nor China will back serious sanctions; at best we can hope for new nips at the mullahs’ ankles.

Thus there is widespread, if not publicly expressed, resignation inside the Obama administration that Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon can’t be stopped. Senior officials have begun to explore containment options. Outside the administration, many who see Iran as a potent threat to the United States and our Middle East allies, and an existential threat to Israel, now dismiss sanctions and advocate a military strike.

Even if containment succeeds in curbing nuclear proliferation in the short term, however, it will be profoundly destabilizing to the region. Inevitably, even a “contained” Iran will feel empowered to interfere in its neighbors’ affairs and to export ever-more sophisticated conventional weapons. And Mr. Obama simply isn’t going to bomb Iran. Which brings us back to sanctions.

In the coming days, Congress is poised to pass the most stringent Iran sanctions bill of recent years, the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act. The bill will target Iran’s greatest economic vulnerability: its dependence on imports of refined petroleum. But this only expands the list of possible sanctions targets and enhances the smorgasbord of options available to the president should he decide to act.

It will not compel the administration to impose sanctions on Iran’s financial enablers. In other words, too little, too late.

Are there other sanctions that could cause a wholesale shift—even a tactical one—in the Iranian regime’s thinking about its options? Achieving international consensus on some kinds of draconian measures may well be impossible.

But that may not be necessary, if the U.S. is willing to throw its full might behind a truly tough sanctions regime. And if, as diplomats suggest privately, there is now significant enthusiasm in Britain and France for an ad hoc coalition pressing forward with new sanctions, even more is possible. This week, the notoriously timid government of Austria suggested that absent international consensus on sanctions, the European Union would move ahead unilaterally—something the U.K has already done in sanctioning Iranian banks—ahead of both the United Nations and the EU.

Among possible new options: a complete travel ban for all regime officials (a similar ban was in place on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq), a ban on all correspondent relationships with Iranian banks (which facilitate letters of credit and foreign financing of Iranian business and trade), and an end to all export financing (which remains in the billions of dollars per annum to this day). Also: denial of landing rights to Iran Air (in addition to IranAir Cargo, something already under consideration), and denial of access to capital markets for Iran’s most important investors and commercial partners.

Some disapprove of diplomatic interference in business and finance. Yet it is undeniable that financial measures like the 2007 crackdown on North Korean account holder Banco Delta Asia have been extremely effective.

The U.S. has not begun to exercise its leverage in that area. Consider that in the last two years, Brazil’s Petrobras, China’s Sinopec, Italy’s Eni, Japan’s Mitsui Petrochemical and Norway’s Statoil have all reportedly made deals worth more than $10 million each in Iran’s energy sector. All are listed on the New York Stock Exchange (except for Mitsui’s parent, which is on the Nasdaq). Should Iran’s economic enablers be listed on American exchanges?

Sanctions such as these will hit hardest at the regime, and affect ordinary Iranians only incidentally. They will also deepen the divide between the public and the military-religious dictatorship, targeting the means of regime enrichment that comes all too often at the expense of the Iranian public.

It is often said that sanctions are a bludgeon, rather than a scalpel. At the very least, they should be a heavy bludgeon.

Ms. Pletka is vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

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An Iranian nuclear bomb, or the bombing of Iran?

Nuclear proliferation

After years of fruitless diplomacy, Iran is on the threshold of becoming a nuclear power. The options are grim

A SECRET uranium-enrichment plant is discovered, built in a mountainside on a well-defended military compound outside the city of Qom. It is a clear breach of nuclear safeguards agreements and promises made when Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Iran brazens it out, trying to bamboozle inspectors into believing there is nothing more. It defiantly declares its “nuclear rights” to this “civilian” effort with a purpose, it says, that is nothing more sinister than providing electricity to Iranians.

To diplomats from America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China, it is a depressingly familiar tale. Iran’s belligerent shrug at the discovery of the Fordow plant—reported by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear guardian, to be in an “advanced state of construction”, with everything but the centrifuges installed—is exactly the one played out after the unmasking of its other formerly secret enrichment plant, at Natanz, in 2002.

Russia and China, hitherto most reluctant to contemplate stiffer sanctions on Iran for its nuclear defiance, are now wondering what to do next. “We will not stand aside” if others agree on sanctions, said a senior Russian diplomat this week. Diplomats from the six are to meet in mid-December to start taking stock.

What has changed in the intervening seven years is far from reassuring. Iran is much further on with its enrichment plans. Natanz has some 8,000 centrifuge enrichment machines (out of a planned 54,000), though only about half are spinning with uranium gas. It has accumulated a stock of 5% enriched uranium which, if Iran breaks out and enriches it further to bomb-usable 90% (easy compared with achieving the first 5%), would be enough for a bomb, and will soon be enough for two. Inspectors, meanwhile, suspect that Iran may have other secret sites. They have plenty of evidence to suggest that Iran has done warhead development, besides other experiments whose purpose can only be to build a nuclear weapon, or enable one to be assembled at speed.

But Iran refuses to answer their questions, and now threatens to increase its enrichment effort tenfold. An exaggerated boast, perhaps: it appears to be running short of uranium ore, as well as high-strength steel for the planned expansion at Natanz. But it is moving ahead fast.

Some in Tehran are even hinting that the country could pull out of the NPT altogether. Being in or out “makes no difference”, said Ali Larijani, the speaker of parliament and a former nuclear negotiator. But he was immediately contradicted by the head of Iran’s atomic agency, who said that the only reason to pull out of the treaty would be to develop nuclear weapons, and that would be a “sin”. The very threat of it brings the world a step closer to the catastrophic choice that France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, laid out in 2007: an Iranian nuclear bomb, or the bombing of Iran.

The outstretched hand

This year, it was hoped, would be different. With a new American president ready to be conciliatory, diplomats had tried even harder to draw Iran into talks. When Iran recently announced that it needed 20% enriched uranium to replace the fuel rods in a research reactor that produces medical isotopes (and was built by America in Tehran in the 1960s, when times were better), a deal was proposed involving America, Russia, France and the IAEA. Most of Iran’s own low-enriched uranium (LEU), for which it has no practical civilian use because it has no working nuclear-power reactors that could burn it, would be taken out of the country, enriched in Russia, made into fuel rods in France and then returned to Iran, all under the auspices of the IAEA. Removing most of Iran’s uranium stock would create a breathing space, if only of a few months, for more talks.

This was the first step to seeing whether a broader deal could be struck. Under such an agreement, Iran would end the part of its nuclear work with military potential until confidence was restored. In return it would get various benefits, including improved political and trade ties, discussions about regional security and even co-operation on advanced civilian nuclear technologies.

Iran’s provocative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at first seemed tempted. He saw the deal as a means of legitimising Iran’s own enrichment programme. But it fell foul of Iran’s opaque and unstable politics, all the more volatile since Mr Ahmadinejad’s rigged re-election in June. The president found himself outflanked by both reformers and hardliners, all denouncing his readiness to export Iran’s hard-won enriched uranium. The deal collapsed. On December 2nd Mr Ahmadinejad announced that Iran would obtain 20% enriched uranium all by itself, by producing it inside the country.

The failure of the fuel deal and the revelations at Qom have particularly disappointed the outgoing head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei. Mr ElBaradei points out that the Qom site is not only illegal, but also “reduces confidence” in Iran’s claim not to have other secret facilities. For Fordow raises new questions, including where the uranium for such a secret operation would come from. There are two possible answers. It could come through the diversion of stocks of low-enriched uranium from Natanz, which could then be quickly spun into the bomb-grade sort. Or another secret plant could prepare uranium hexafluoride (UF6), the compound that is spun and enriched as a gas in the centrifuges, from Iran’s uranium ore. This can be mined or imported without the inspectors knowing, because Iran has refused to give them the powers they need. Iran says Fordow was only an attempt to hedge its bets in case Natanz was destroyed. But it increases suspicions that Iran was seeking a break-out option.

Talking sanctions

The IAEA’s board voted 25-3—crucially, with the support of both Russia and China—to censure Iran for its latest safeguards breaches and to refer the matter, yet again, to the UN Security Council. Even before the Qom revelations, the six had agreed to give Iran until the end of the year before deciding what to do next. Perhaps it was always hopeless to think that Iran, with its long record of cheating and playing for time, was ever going to be serious about reaching a deal. The question is whether America’s year of attempted engagement will now make it easier to convince Russia, China and other sceptics of the need for stiffer sanctions.

Both Russia and China have already signed up for a string of limited UN-imposed sanctions on Iran. These have so far mostly targeted members of the Revolutionary Guard and its offshoots and the companies they control, which are thought to be involved in nuclear-related trade. But both countries have been careful to exempt the things they most value in their trade with Iran—items which, if included, would make Tehran take notice.

Hide and seek in Qom

For Russia, that has included the sale of conventional weapons—although reports that it has refused to supply Iran with advanced S-300 air defences, despite an earlier agreement to do so, would seem to be born out by Iranian complaints. Since 1995 Russia has also been helping Iran to complete a nuclear-power reactor at Bushehr. America had at first opposed the project. It changed tack when Russia agreed not only to supply the necessary fuel rods, but also to take back the spent fuel. This project has since been cited as proof that outsiders are not trying to deprive Iran of civilian nuclear power. Yet there have been repeated delays, and the reactor will now not start up until March. With Iran in repeated violation of nuclear safeguards, a ban on nuclear trade looks attractive to some.

China, too, has big commercial interests in Iran, with investment contracts estimated at some $120 billion. Iran is already one of China’s biggest suppliers of oil. The government in Beijing will be loth to put those supplies at risk—though Saudi Arabia and some of the smaller Gulf states, quietly keen to keep up pressure on Iran, could help China find alternative supplies.

Some European countries still trade heavily with Iran, too, although many companies have started to draw back. Government-backed credits are harder to come by, and ties to Iranian banks have been cut. But this has mostly been done under pressure from America. Faced with the choice of continuing to deal with their Iranian counterparts, or retaining entry to the much more lucrative American financial markets, most banks have backed away. Yet in the Gulf itself, as well as in Asia, Iran has found circuitous routes to get the imports it needs, including petrol.

It is not just commercial interests that give Russia and China pause when it comes to devising tough new sanctions. Neither has much truck with sanctions anyway, since both have suffered from them in the past. Both resented America’s unilateral intervention in Iraq in 2003. And Russia has no particular wish to help America and Iran end their confrontation, since their difficult relations ever since the shah’s overthrow in 1979 have opened a door to Russian influence in the region.

Both Russia and China have insisted until now that there has been no hard evidence that Iran is doing anything wrong. Neither thinks Iran’s missiles are aimed at them. Instead Russia has been keen to maintain good relations with a potentially awkward neighbour that could stir up trouble, but mostly hasn’t, in Russia’s own unstable border regions.

Yet Iran’s own actions make this hands-off strategy increasingly untenable. The closer Iran seems to get to the nuclear ambition it claims not to have, the more nervous its other neighbours have become. Indeed, Arab states seem far more anxious about a Persian bomb than they have been for the past 40 years about Israel’s presumed nuclear arsenal. It was the threat of wider proliferation in the Middle East, and potentially beyond, as well as the risk that Israel could act alone if nothing was done to rein in Iran, that was cited recently by two senior American officials in Beijing to try to persuade China to shift on sanctions.

Time for a strike?

A bipartisan American report, by two ex-senators and a former air-force general, says the United States must now plan overtly for military action, if only to strengthen diplomacy. Charles Wald, the general, says the Iranians “frankly don’t believe that we would do anything against them”. America is trying to woo the Muslim world, draw down in Iraq and build up in Afghanistan. As Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of America’s joint chiefs of staff, said on November 4th: “The last thing in the world that I need right now is a third conflict—as we’re trying to work our way through these other two.”

Israel’s threats of military action might be more credible than America’s. In 1981 it bombed Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor, and in 2007 it bombed a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor under construction. As a result, Israel likes to argue, the world owes the Jewish state a huge debt of gratitude. (By the same token, perhaps Saddam should be thanked for bombing Iran’s reactor at Bushehr in the 1980s.) Last year Israel carried out a long-distance military air exercise over Greece that looked like a rehearsal for action in Iran. In June a missile-carrying Israeli submarine ostentatiously sailed through the Suez Canal. And recently Israel and America conducted large-scale missile-defence exercises to demonstrate their ability to fend off possible retaliation by Iran.

What could provoke military action, whether by America or by Israel? There are several possibilities. One might be an Iranian decision to expel nuclear inspectors or withdraw from the NPT, as North Korea did in 2003 before making and testing atomic bombs. Another cause might be the growth of Iran’s stockpile of LEU to the point where it has enough fissile material to break out of the NPT and test more than one bomb. Yet another factor might be the delivery of those Russian S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, which would make bombing much more difficult. Arguably the biggest trigger would be the conviction that diplomacy has reached an impasse.

Acquiring nuclear weapons requires three elements: fissile material (such as highly enriched uranium, HEU, or plutonium), a delivery system and a warhead. The enrichment plants at Natanz, Qom and perhaps elsewhere give Iran an early route to HEU. A planned heavy-water reactor at Arak will produce large quantities of plutonium as a by-product, but will not be completed for some years.

Iran has been working on a range of ballistic missiles. Its liquid-fuel Shahab-3, with a range of 1,300km (810 miles) or more, can already reach Israel. In May it tested the 2,000-km Sejjil missile. As a solid-fuel rocket, this could be fired at short notice from mobile launchers. Atomic bombs can be put on aircraft or even smuggled in ships. But missiles are the quickest and most reliable way to deliver them.

Finally, Iran has also worked on fitting a bomb inside a missile cone. IAEA inspectors have found evidence that Iran had designs to make uranium hemispheres (used in warheads) and had experimented with ultra-fast triggers that would be needed to “implode” these and set off a nuclear explosion. A contentious American intelligence assessment in 2007 said Iran’s work on warheads had stopped in 2003, although Israel, Britain and France dispute this. A secret annexe to an IAEA report earlier this year reckoned that Iran “has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device based on HEU”. It had also worked on fitting a bomb on a missile warhead.

So the main constraint on Iran going nuclear is the availability of fissile material. If it decides to break out of the NPT it might need a few months to build a bomb, but would risk military action; if it decides to sneak out clandestinely it might take years. Iran may yet choose to stop “one turn of the screwdriver” short of a bomb.

Iran has learned from Israel’s previous actions. It has dispersed and buried its nuclear facilities to make them harder to strike. In contrast with the “Two Minutes over Baghdad” of Israel’s raid on Osiraq, there is no easy shot. If anything, it has become harder to hobble Iran as time has passed. The discovery of Qom, as well as Iran’s plan to build ten more enrichment plants, suggests there may be more hidden sites.

Two months over Iran?

Perhaps the best opportunity to halt Iran’s programme by military means would have been an early strike on the Isfahan conversion plant. This turns uranium ore into UF6, the essential preliminary step before enrichment. It is above ground, and thus more vulnerable to attack. It was the first part of the nuclear programme to be restarted by Iran in 2005, and has since produced enough UF6 for scores of bombs.

A report last month by the Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank in New York, suggests that Israel could limit itself to three targets: Isfahan, Arak and Natanz. But to strike the centrifuges at Natanz, buried under 23 metres of soil and cement, it would have to use several bunker-busting bombs in “burrowing” mode: dropping bombs repeatedly on the same crater to dig down to the protected centrifuges. The report reckons that three bombs per “aim point” would give a 70% chance of success.

Still, the repeated sorties and loitering time needed to achieve this would probably require suppressing Iran’s air defences, which in turns requires more sorties, perhaps hundreds. Israel would be operating at the limit of its range, even with air-to-air refuelling, and would probably have to cross the air space of other countries. It might not be able to sustain such an operation. And would attacking a few sites really crimp Iran’s nuclear programme, or merely drive it entirely out of sight?

General Wald, for one, suggests that Israeli action may be little more than a “pinprick”. This may be galling for Israelis, but few would contest that the American air force, with planes deployed closer to Iran and the ability to bring in aircraft carriers, could do a much more thorough job. America is unlikely to escape blame for Israeli military action, so it might as well join in, say some. A bigger American operation could go after more nuclear sites and take out some of Iran’s means of retaliation: missile sites and naval bases. It might even want to strike a blow against the Revolutionary Guards. This scenario starts to look like a major air war; closer to two months over Iran than two minutes.

Iran could do much damage to the West in return. It could fire missiles, perhaps tipped with chemical or biological weapons, at American bases or Israel. It could attack oil installations in the Gulf, and try to choke off the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. The American navy thinks any such disruption would be temporary. But fighting in the confined waters of the Gulf makes warships more vulnerable to surprise attacks and anti-shipping missiles.

Many Muslims would regard a military strike on Iran as another war against Islam. Iran could stoke anti-American insurgencies across its borders in Iraq and Afghanistan. It could also prod its Lebanese proxy, Hizbullah, and the Palestinian Hamas movement to resume their missile war against Israel. Israel periodically intercepts Iranian weapons shipments to Lebanon and Gaza; the latest, containing hundreds of tonnes of rockets, missiles, mortars, grenades and anti-tank weapons allegedly destined for Hizbullah, was seized last month off Cyprus. Iran, perhaps through Hizbullah, could also resort to terrorist tactics around the world.

So which will it be: a war with Iran, or a nuclear-armed Iran? Short of a revolution that sweeps away the Iranian regime—ushering in one that agrees, like post-apartheid South Africa, to give up its nuclear technology—sanctions may offer the only hope of avoiding the awful choice.

The Economist

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Full article and photos: http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15016192&source=hptextfeature

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