Understanding Iran’s Diplomatic Strategy

Iran Has Been Developing Nuclear Capacities In Order To Obtain Leverage In Diplomatic Talks With The United States

By Gareth Porter,
April 28, 2012
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

In January 2009, just before Gary Samore left his position as Vice-President for Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, he summed up his rather cynical view of how Iran would conduct negotiations.

"The logical position the Iranians are bound to take," he wrote in a post on the Council’s website, "is: ‘We’re happy to talk forever, as long as we can keep building centrifuges.’" 

A few days later, Samore was named President Barack Obama’s top adviser on nuclear proliferation, making him one of the most influential figures in the administration with regards to diplomacy toward Iran.

The strategy he attributed to Tehran of using negotiations to "play for time" while advancing to the goal of enough enriched uranium for nuclear weapons has been clearly expressed in recent statements by Obama and other senior administration officials in anticipation of new nuclear talks with Tehran.

‘Coercive Diplomacy’

For Obama’s advisers, assuming Iran was simply "playing for time" justifies a heavy reliance on "coercive diplomacy", which combines a boycott of the country’s crude oil exports and hints that an Iranian failure to come to agreement would open the way for an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites. But that conventional wisdom, which the Obama administration inherited from the Bush administration, ignores the accumulated evidence that Iran’s diplomacy strategy is to accumulate centrifuges, not in order to support a weapons programme, but rather to negotiate a larger bargain with the United States.

That strategy, gleaned from sources in direct contact with Iranian national security officials and from Iran’s actual diplomatic record, can be summed up in three principles:

1. Iran should negotiate with the United States only when it has achieved sufficient negotiating leverage to achieve substantial concessions.
2. The objective of negotiations with the United States is to end US policies of overt hostility to the Islamic Republic and have them accept Iran’s legitimate role in the regional politics of the Middle East.
3. Iran’s primary negotiating chip in any talks is a stockpile of enriched uranium.

Contrary to the convenient argument that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei resists agreement with the United States, he and leading officials on the Supreme National Security Council have long viewed negotiations with the United States as the only way that the Iran can achieve full security and emerge as a full-fledged regional power.

But Khamenei has very decided views about the timing of such negotiations. The proposal by then President Mohammed Khatemi to engage the United States in a political dialogue in January 1998 was sharply criticised by Khamenei. However, Khamenei’s argument was not that negotiations with the United States were unacceptable in principle, but rather that Iran was not yet in a strong enough bargaining position to achieve a favourable outcome.

Soon after George W Bush demonised Iran as part of the "Axis of Evil" in late 2001 and early 2002, Khamenei again denounced the idea of negotiations with the United States under those conditions as useless. But a series of seismic changes over the next year altered the Supreme Leader’s strategic assessment.

Increased Bargaining Power

The first such change was the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In the short run, US military presence on Iran’s border posed the threat of a possible US invasion of Iran. But if Iran had only been afraid of such an invasion, it would certainly have mobilised public opinion to prepare to defend the country.

Instead Khamenei prepared for a complex diplomatic engagement with the United States on the assumption that Iran now had new diplomatic leverage. The proposal Iran made to the Bush administration in May 2003 clearly assumed that the United States would be unable to gain control over Iraq without Iran’s help. It offered "Iranian influence for activity supporting political stabilisation and the establishment of democratic institutions and a nonreligious government".

The Iranian national security elite believed two other developments in 2002 and early 2003 gave Iran bargaining chips it could use in negotiations with Washington. One was the Bush administration’s need for Iran’s cooperation in interrogating al-Qaeda leaders who had been detained in Iran after fleeing from Afghanistan. But the biggest source of leverage, the Iranians believed, was the Bush administration’s dramatically increased concern about Iran’s ability to enrich uranium, which had taken US intelligence by surprise. After the first IAEA visit to the uranium facility at Natanz in February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed alarm, saying Natanz showed that "Iran is much further along, with a far more robust nuclear weapons development program than anyone said it had".

The convergence of those three new developments convinced Khamenei that the moment had come to engage the United States diplomatically. Khamenei approved a secret proposal to the Bush administration in April 2003 for negotiations on the full range of issues dividing the two countries.  

Despite the Bush administration’s refusal to even acknowledge it, that proposal reveals the broad outlines of what Iran hopes to accomplish in negotiations with Washington. It offered to establish three parallel working groups to negotiate "road maps" on the three main areas of contention: the nuclear programme, "terrorism and regional security", and "economic cooperation". On the issue of its nuclear programme, the Iranian proposal offered to accept much tighter controls by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), including the adoption of new IAEA protocol that would guarantee the IAEA access to any facility, whether declared or undeclared, on short notice – in return for "full access to peaceful nuclear technology".

Iran’s negotiating document also offered to accept, as part of a "grand bargain" with the United States, the March 2002 Arab League declaration embracing the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Beyond that diplomatic position, Iran offered to stop "any material support to Palestinian opposition groups [Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc] from Iranian territory" and to put "pressure on these organisations to stop violent actions against civilians within borders of 1967".  And it even offered to "take action on Hezbollah to become a mere political organisation within Lebanon".

The 2003 proposal thus made it clear that, in the end, Iranian support for Hezbollah and Hamas against Israel represented valued bargaining chips to be played in ultimate negotiations with the United States.

Finally, the secret proposal revealed what Iran hoped to obtain in return for giving up its negotiating chips. The list of Iranian aims included an end to US "hostile behaviour and rectification of status of Iran in the US", including its removal from the "axis of evil" and the "terrorism list", as well as an end to all economic sanctions against Iran. It also sought "recognition of Iran’s legitimate security interests in the region" and Iran’s right to have an "appropriate defence capacity" – presumably meaning the deterrent capability conferred by ballistic missiles.

Ultimate Aims

The demands for an end to official US enmity towards Iran and for a seat at the table in future regional security discussions have continued to be the ultimate aims behind Iranian efforts to manoeuvre the United States into serious negotiations.

The Bush administration remained hostile to serious negotiations with Iran. Negotiations with the British, French and German governments could only advance Iran’s interests if the Europeans were willing to press the United States on direct talks. But the Europeans offered only narrow economic benefits in return for ending Iran’s uranium enrichment and refused, at the insistence of the Bush administration, to talk about Iran’s broader security interests.

By mid-2006, after Iran had resumed uranium enrichment, Khamenei and his advisers were convinced that Iran’s diplomatic leverage had increased significantly. Khamenei’s top foreign-policy adviser, Ali Akbar Velayati, Iran’s foreign minister from 1981 to 1997, offered a rare glimpse of Iran’s strategic assessment at a seminar in Tehran on May 18, 2006. Addressing the evolution of Iran’s bargaining position in relation to the United States, he said: "We have at no time until now had such powerful means for haggling."

Velayati referred specifically to "the influence we have now in Iraq and Palestine".

What he did not say was that Iran was seeking to rapidly increase the number of centrifuges at Natanz in order to create "facts on the ground" that would give the US a motive to come to the negotiating table. As top officials of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council told one observer in Tehran, the stockpile of low-enriched uranium Iran would be accumulating were bargaining chips to be used in the eventual negotiations with Washington.

Velyati was not coy about drawing the policy conclusion. "Now that we have the power to haggle", he said, "Why don’t we haggle?"

Failed Diplomatic Triumph

The Obama administration’s failure to grasp the logic underlying Iran’s negotiating strategy ensured the failure of the first round of US-Iran negotiations in October 2009. The US proposal for a swap of roughly three quarters of all the low-enriched uranium Iran had accumulated to fuel Iran’s Tehran Research Reactor was aimed at stripping Iran of most of its low-enriched uranium.

For the United States, that was viewed as a diplomatic triumph. But all of Iran’s political factions united in objecting to the demand on the grounds that it would deprive Iran of the leverage it had gained from its LEU stockpile. Mir Hossein Mousavi, Ahmadinejad’s rival in the June 2009 presidential election, expressed that complaint indirectly, observing that if Iran agreed to give up so much of its LEU, the efforts of thousands of scientists would "go up in smoke".

After no agreement was reached on a fuel swap plan, Iran began enriching uranium to 20 per cent, to serve as fuel for its research reactor. That was regarded by the West as a big step closer to weapons grade enrichment, partly on the ground that Iran could not fabricate the fuel rods needed for the reactor. But Iran was really accumulating more bargaining chips for the negotiations it still hoped to have eventually with Washington.

In the present negotiations with the P5+1, Iran is still pursuing the same objectives with the same hope of cashing in its accumulated negotiating chips. That is why Syed Hossein Mousavian, who was spokesman for Iran’s nuclear negotiating team between 2003 and 2005 and foreign policy adviser to the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, has warned that the "piecemeal approach" so dear to the hearts of US officials is a formula for diplomatic failure. 

Iran "needs to know the entire game plan, including the end goal, before committing itself to anything", Mousavian wrote. The history of Iranian efforts to achieve a negotiated settlement supports Mousavian’s warning. It is time for the United States to shed its shallow propagandistic view of Iranian strategy, and accept the necessity for real bargaining with Iran on fundamental issues.

Reprinted from Al-Jazeera with permission of the author.

Klout and The Evolution Of Digital Diplomacy

Alexandre Meneghini/AP - A man, wearing a t-shirt with the design of U.S. flag painted on, takes part on Friday prayers at the main square of the rebel-held town of Benghazi, Libya, Friday, Aug. 12, 2011.


By Brian D. Fung,
Published: August 22, 2011
Courtesy Of "The Washington Post"

If there’s one thing the Internet has given us, it’s a treasure trove of data about ourselves. We now have access to terabytes of information on the way we interact with our favorite brands. All this information is crunchable in countless ways — and, for better or for worse, collected automatically. For years, few people cared, aside from marketers and advertisers. But that may be changing, as U.S. officials shift gears to a digital-first diplomatic strategy in the face of rising anti-Americanism worldwide.

America’s reputation abroad has reached a new low. In the Middle East, America is evenless popular now than when President George W. Bush occupied the White House. Washington’s image has suffered the most in Turkey, plummeting from a high of 52 percent in 2000 to a dismal 10 percent in 2011. In Asia this past week, Vice President Joe Biden tried to build bridges with Chinese President Hu Jintao’s presumptive successor, but the visit was clouded by doubts about the U.S. deficit.

With a rash of pressing issues on the domestic front, President Obama has mostly left the unenviable task of repairing America’s image to State Department diplomats. Since 2009, much of that work has been done through social media channels as part of the Obama administration’s drive toward digital diplomacy. U.S. State Department officials now operate some 230 Facebook accounts, 80 Twitter feeds, 55 YouTube channels and 40 pages on Flickr, according to the Lowy Institute for International Policy. Digital diplomats broadcast messages and multimedia, attract commenters to specially designed forums in foreign languages and monitor trending topics in an attempt to take the world’s pulse. But whether conducted online or off, public diplomacy has always been an inexact science. How do diplomats know whether their efforts are paying off?

While we’re still a ways from being able to identify a direct relationship between specific public diplomacy campaigns and changes in foreign opinion, social analytics applications like Klout may soon become a vital tool for digital diplomats. Klout, whichTime magazine included in a list of the year’s 50 best Web sites on August 16, gives its users a score based on how influential they are across a range of social networks. Contributing to the social savviness readout is a wealth of information about users’ most engaged followers and the topics they respond to best.

It’s not hard to see how diplomats can turn this data to their advantage. In an environment that often rewards targeted communication over indiscriminate broadcasting, diplomats have an interest in finding out who their followers are and what they like. Posting content that influencers will spread themselves can maximize the State Department’s impact via network effects while economizing effort. And by learning about their audience, diplomats will be able to tailor their engagement strategy and make course corrections, just as commercial brands do in the private sector.

Of course, Klout isn’t the only company in the burgeoning social analytics industry. For years, Facebook’s Insights feature has given fan page managers access to demographic and behavioral information that helps them promote content more effectively. And Twitter isreportedly is working on its own analytics application, which is currently in private testing.

Social analytics services don’t solve everything. They tell us little about how digital diplomacy advances U.S. foreign policy goals, for example. But they do provide an innovative medium-term solution to the traditional challenge associated with public diplomacy: defining and measuring success.

Brian D. Fung is a freelance journalist who writes about politics and technology. He has worked previously at Foreign Policy magazine, CBS News, NBC and on Capitol Hill. A graduate student at the London School of Economics, Brian holds a degree in political science from Middlebury College. He can be reached via Twitter at @b_fung.

Time To Talk (Properly) To Iran

Iran Is Almost Certain To Go For A Full Enrichment Programme. But The West Should Still Talk To It.

By Abdullah Baabood
December 12, 2010
Courtesy Of "The-Diplomat"

On the sidelines of the Valdai conference in Malta, The Diplomat speaks with Abdullah Baabood, director of the Gulf Research Centre at Cambridge University, about Iran's nuclear programme.

 Do you think sanctions are an effective way of dealing with concerns over Iran’s nuclear programme?

I don’t think sanctions are going to work. For Iran, this is an issue of national pride. I believe the international community should talk with Iran and discuss with it its programme, its intentions, to see how we can all convince it not to follow a military option, and instead help it achieve its stated objective of civilian nuclear power. I don’t think international efforts should stop, but I don’t think sanctions are going to work to force Iran to change course, and they may even bolster the Iranian leadership position. I think dialogue, exchanges of views and probably helping them achieve a civilian programme would probably be more conducive.

So you’d like to see the US engage properly with Iran?

Certainly. Iran hasn’t always been at odds with the United States. Iran during the Shah was a close friend and ally and one part of the US policy in the Gulf. The US was relying on Iran as one of twin pillars, the other pillar being Saudi Arabia. Of course, since the Islamic Revolution, relations haven’t been friendly, but that doesn’t mean they have to continue on this trend.

I think the United States has an interest in talking to Iran, and I believe Iran also has an interest in talking to the US. At the moment there’s a problem of who’s going to start first, but I believe that finally they’ll have to talk and I think that can resolve many issues.

Iran needs to be comfortable as far as the United States’ intentions go, and the regime needs to be recognized as a regional power–and rightly so. Iran, on the other hand, also needs to re-establish its relationship with the international community, and so it can’t continue to be at odds with the United States. They may have issues that they don’t see eye to eye on, but it’s something they can try to iron out. I think in the end, the Iranian-American relationship is going to be conducive to rehabilitating Iran and bringing it back to the international community.

Do you think it’s inevitable that Iran will continue down the nuclear programme path that it’s now on?

I think that it’s inevitable that it will go for the full enrichment programme. They’ll most likely want to achieve at least the capability of producing nuclear arms, which they believe will add a lot to their international status and their position as a regional power. Whether they’ll go all the way toward producing a bomb, though, is questionable. I do hope that they don’t and that the international community will be able to find a solution. But they believe they have a right to enrich and to have their own nuclear technology that’s not dependent on outside powers and outside supply. And as long as they do that under international supervision and scrutiny, and with the intention of it being civilian power, I think the world should be able to work with them.

I’m not supporting in any way Iran producing the bomb. It’s a very fragile and unstable area and we don’t want further proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. But Iran is of course being very ambiguous and saying that if we want to talk about this, we should bring in the whole Middle East and make sure that Israel’s nuclear facilities are also brought under scrutiny. And this is where I think the international community is at odds in that they’re trying to stop Iran developing what they say is a civilian programme, but they’re not trying to deal with the ambiguity of Israel’s supposed nuclear arsenal. The international community isn’t subjecting its facilities to international supervision and scrutiny even though that would help not only in terms of knowing what’s there, but also ensuring that international safeguards are being implemented.

If you consider that Israel declared during the 1973 war that they had plans to use nuclear arms, then that’s very worrying indeed. So this is why I think the international community should work toward disarmament, or at least bringing arms under control. This doesn’t just apply to Israel, but any other country in the region. We don’t need an arms race, especially with weapons of mass destruction.

How destabilizing do you think a military strike against Iran would be?

Initially it was thought that the United States would do the first military strike, but I think the US government now doesn’t have the stomach to do that—they’re too entrenched in the Afghan and Iraqi quagmires and they need to find solutions to those. So I don’t think they want to start another conflict in the region.

Israel is threatening to strike against the Iranians. But I think it’s rather difficult because of the way the Iranians have prepared their facilities; they expected there might be such a move so they have either hidden them or built them in civilian areas so it makes it very difficult to destroy them, or at least all of them. And on the other hand, Iran has said it will retaliate for any strike. They’d start with the American bases and the American presence in the region, which is quite extensive. This would mean attacking bases in the Gulf, and that could lead to an all out war in the region.

The Gulf is a very important region for many reasons, including supplying the world with its energy needs. So if there was an all out war, it would be devastating not just for the Gulf, which would bear the brunt of this conflict, but also to the global economy, which has already been suffering from the financial crisis. And I think Iran is very serious in terms of retaliating, so I don’t think the military option should be there. The region has witnessed many wars over the last few decades and no one has an appetite for another long drawn out war.

I believe that the international community should find a solution, even it means living with a nuclear armed Iran. It’s not something I would propose, but I’d rather have that than war in the region. We’ve lived with other regional nuclear powers – India, Pakistan and Israel – and we should learn to live with a nuclear armed Iran, although only as a last option.

How stable would you say the regime in Iran currently is?

That’s a good question in that it also relates to the nuclear programme. I believe that the regime in Iran is unstable and that the regime sees state security through the prism of the regime’s security itself. There’s of course the fact that the regime feels threatened internally and externally, and the two are related. What we have to remember is that this is a regime based on theocracy and the Shiite teaching of the Imam. It’s also the only Shiite regime in the world, and therefore they feel that they have to protect it.

But when they look around them, they see there’s a lot of internal dissent supported by the West and that there’s opposition from the United States and some other countries in the region who are against it and who have made it clear they want regime change. So I think the whole issue of nuclear arms in Iran is related to the regime’s insecurity and this may relate to one of your questions earlier about whether the United States should have a dialogue with Iran. I think if they do, it would go a long way toward helping the regime feel comfortable and that other countries are not out there to change it and that they accept it is as it is so it doesn’t need to go all the way to becoming a nuclear power to protect itself.

I believe that the regime feels under threat. Iran sees itself surrounded by nuclear powers – India, Pakistan, Israel, nuclear submarines belonging to the US. So they feel threatened by all this and believe to protect their regime, they need to develop nuclear technology.

Rebalancing The World

The Brazilian/Turkish Initiative

By Richard Falk
May 30, 2010
Courtesy Of "Information Clearing House"

It may turn out that May 17, 2010 will be remembered as an important milestone on the road to a real new world order. Remember that the phrase ‘new world order’ came to prominence in 1990 after Iraq’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait. It was used by George W. H. Bush, the elder of the two Bush presidents, to signify the possibility after the end of the Cold War to find a consensus within the UN Security Council enabling a unified response to aggressive war. The new world order turned out to be a mobilizing idea invoked for a particular situation. The United States did not want to create expectations that it would always be available to lead a coalition against would be breakers of world peace. The whole undertaking of a ‘new world order’ disappeared from diplomacy right after the First Gulf War of 1991. What one wonders now is whether the Brazilian/Turkish effort to resolve the Iran nuclear crisis with the West is not expressive of a new world, this time a ‘real new world order.’

May 17th was the day that the Brazilian/Turkish initiative bore fruit in Tehran, with Iran agreeing to a ten-point arrangement designed to defuse the mounting confrontation with the United States and Israel with regard to its enrichment facilities. The essence of the deal was that Iran would ship 1200 kilograms of low enriched uranium (LEU) to Turkey for deposit, and receive in return 120 kilograms of uranium enriched to 20% for use in an Iranian nuclear reactor devoted to medical research. The agreement reaffirmed support for the Non-Proliferation Treaty, as well as acknowledged Iran’s right under the treaty to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, which meant the entire fuel cycle, including the enrichment phase.

The bargain negotiated in Tehran closely resembled an arrangement reached some months earlier in which Iran had agreed to turn over a similar amount of low enriched uranium to France and Russia in exchange for their promise of providing fuel rods that could be used in the same medical research reactor. That earlier deal floundered as Iran raised political objections, and then withdrew. The United States had welcomed this earlier arrangement as a desirable confidence-building step toward resolving the underlying conflict, but it wasted no time repudiating the May 17th agreement, which seemed so similar.

Why the discrepancy in the American response? It is true that in recent months Iran has increased its LEU production, making 1200 kg of its existing stockpile amount to 50% of its total rather than the 80% that would have been transferred in the earlier arrangement. Also, there were some unspecified features in the May 17th plan, including how the enriched uranium would be provided to Iran, and whether there would be a system of verification as to its use. In this regard, it would have seemed appropriate if genuinely troubled by this for Washington to request Iran to transfer a larger quantity of LEU and to spell out the details, but this is not what happened.

Instead of welcoming this notable effort to reduce regional tensions, the Brazilian/Turkish initiative was immediately branded as an amateurish irrelevance by the American Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton. She insisted that the concerns about Iranian nuclear enrichment be left exclusively in the hands of the ‘major powers,’ and immediately rallied China and Russia (in addition to France and the United Kingdom) to support a fourth round of punitive sanctions that were to be presented to the UN Security Council in the near future. It now appears that the five permanent members of the Security Council will support this intensification of sanctions that is expected to call for an arms embargo on heavy weapons, travel restrictions on Iranian officials, a boycott of banks and companies listed as linked to Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, and authority to search ships to and from Iran suspected of carrying prohibited items. Such a resolution if implemented would certainly increase tensions in the Middle East without any discouragement of the Iranian nuclear program. Indeed a new round of sanctions would almost certainly increase Iran’s incentives to exercise its full rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and complete its development of the complete fuel cycle as has been previously done by several other parties to the treaty, including Japan, Germany, and The Netherlands.

Given the generally constructive character of the agreement reached in Tehran, the uncompromisingly hostile reaction in Washington can only be understood in one of two ways, neither of which is reassuring. If the U.S. Government, with or without Israeli prodding, had already resolved to impose sanctions, then any development that seems to cast doubt on such a coercive approach would be regarded as unwelcome. The evidence strongly suggests that the United States was determined to go forward with additional sanctions. This made the Brazil/Turkey initiative seem like a deliberate obstruction that was essentially resented as it has been reported that American leaders tried in talk Brasilia and Ankara out of making any independent steps to resolve the crisis.

Perhaps, the more weighty explanation of the hostile response has to do with the changing cast of players in the geopolitical power game. If this reasoning is correct, then the United States angry response was intended to deliver a reprimand to Brazil and Turkey, warning them to leave questions pertaining to nuclear weapons in the hands of what Hilary Clinton called ‘the major powers.’ In effect, the non-Western world should have no say in shaping global security policy, and any attempt to do so would be rebuffed in the strongest possible terms.

Yet the world of 2010 is very different from what it was in the late 20th century. Globalization, the decline of American power, and the rise of non-Western states have changed the landscape. This process has recently accelerated as a result of the world economic crisis, and the difficulties in the Euro zone. As the famous Bob Dylan 1960’s song goes, “The times, they are a-changing.” Recall that it was not long ago that the G-8 was scrapped in favor of the more inclusive G-20. Recently, as well, much attention has been given to the rise of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries. What seems most at stake in this attempt to supersede and nullify the Iran deal is banishing the Brazilian and Turkish intruders from the geopolitical playing field. For the West to claim that the Security Council remains representative of the arrangement of power in 2010 is ludicrous. The identity of the five permanent members has not been altered since 1945, which is a misguided effort to overlook the fundamental shifts in world power that have taken place in recent decades. Both Brazil and Turkey were elected to be non-permanent two year members of the Security Council, which both governments interpret as conferring a special responsibility to work for peace and justice in the world. AS the May 17th agreement shows, these governments possess the political will to make a difference in world politics.

Further, this is not just a childish ploy to grab a few headlines and tweak the old guard. The confrontation with Iran is exceedingly dangerous, agitated by Israel’s periodic threats of launching a military attack and reports of pushing the United States in an escalating direction. Such a strategy of tension could easily produce a devastating regional war, disrupting the world economy, and causing widespread human suffering. Both Brazil and Turkey have strong national interests in working for regional peace and security, and one way to do this is to calm the diplomatic waters with regard to Iran’s contested nuclear program. The fact that Iran seems prepared to go ahead with the agreement, at least if the UN refrains from further sanctions, strongly favors giving the deal a chance to succeed, or at worst, working to make it more reassuring to those countries that suspect Iran of secretly planning to become a nuclear weapons state.

The concern about Iran seems genuine in many quarters, given the inflammatory language sometimes used by President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and considering the repressive internal practices in Iran. At the same time, even in this regard the United States leadership has rather dirty hands. While insisting that Iran cannot be allowed to do what several other non-nuclear states have already done in conformity with Non-Proliferation Treaty, the United States has acknowledged that it has been engaged in a variety of military activities under Pentagon auspices within Iranian territory. (For confirmation see Mark Mazzeti, “U.S. Is Said to Expand Secret Actions in Mideast,” NY Times, May 24, 2010). Also, it is impossible to overlook the dispiriting silence that has long insulated Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal from scrutiny and censure, as well as the closely related refusal of the Western powers to back proposals put forward by Egypt and others for a nuclear free Middle East.

Back in 2003 Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense, made headlines by contrasting ‘Old Europe’ (especially France and Germany) that he denigrated as decadent because it opposed the invasion of Iraq, and ‘New Europe’ that was the flourishing wave of the future in Eastern Europe that favored American policy. Now it is Old Europe that is again partnering with the United States, and so restored to the good graces of Washington. In this sense, Brazil and Turkey are being treated as trespassers who refuse to absent themselves from any further engagement in Middle East diplomacy.

Perhaps, we are witnessing the passing of an era in world politics, which has not yet been acknowledged. It is two decades since Charles Krauthammer, writing in Foreign Affairs, declared that “The immediate post-Cold War world is not multipolar. It is unipolar. The center of world power is the unchallenged superpower, the United States, attended by its Western allies.” The abrupt rejection of the Brazil/Turkey initiative can probably best understood as a nostalgic clinging to the ‘unipolar moment’ long after its reality has passed into history.

Turkey has already demonstrated the enormous gains for itself and the region arising from the pursuit of an independent and activist foreign policy based on resolving conflicts and reducing tensions to the extent possible, with benefits for peace, stability, and prosperity. Not all of its initiatives have met with success. It tried to encourage the world to treat Hamas as a political actor after it fairly won elections in Gaza back in January 2006, but was rebuffed by Washington and Tel Aviv. Similarly, it brought to bear its mediating skill in trying to broker a peace deal between Israel and Syria, only to have the process break down after a series of promising negotiating rounds. Maybe also the Brazil/Turkey initiative will be effectively beaten down, but that would not mean it was not worth trying, or that such governments should not keep trying to supplant war and militarism with diplomacy and cooperative international relations. Outside of Western diplomatic circles it is already widely appreciated that the May 17th agreement reveals the exciting reality of a new geopolitical landscape in which the countries of the global South are now beginning to act as subjects, and no longer content to be mere objects in scenarios devised in the North. At some point this reality might well be christened as the ‘real new world order’!

Richard Falk , Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and author of “Crimes of War: Iraq” and “The Costs of War: International Law, the UN, and World Order after Iraq” Also, current UN Rapporteur for Palestine.

CounterTerror Adviser Defends Jihad As 'Legitimate Tenet Of Islam'

Published May 27, 2010
Courtesy Of "FOX News"

White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan speaks to reporters in the White House Jan. 7. (AP Photo)

The president's top counterterrorism adviser on Wednesday called jihad a "legitimate tenet of Islam," arguing that the term "jihadists" should not be used to describe America's enemies.

During a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, John Brennan described violent extremists as victims of "political, economic and social forces," but said that those plotting attacks on the United States should not be described in "religious terms."

He repeated the administration argument that the enemy is not "terrorism," because terrorism is a "tactic," and not terror, because terror is a "state of mind" -- though Brennan's title, deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security, includes the word "terrorism" in it. But then Brennan said that the word "jihad" should not be applied either.

"Nor do we describe our enemy as 'jihadists' or 'Islamists' because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one's community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children," Brennan said.

The technical, broadest definition of jihad is a "struggle" in the name of Islam and the term does not connote "holy war" for all Muslims. However, jihad frequently connotes images of military combat or warfare, and some of the world's most wanted terrorists including Usama bin Laden commonly use the word to call for war against the West.

Brennan defined the enemy as members of bin Laden's Al Qaeda network and "its terrorist affiliates."

But Brennan argued that it would be "counterproductive" for the United States to use the term, as it would "play into the false perception" that the "murderers" leading war against the West are doing so in the name of a "holy cause."

"Moreover, describing our enemy in religious terms would lend credence to the lie propagated by Al Qaeda and its affiliates to justify terrorism -- that the United States is somehow at war against Islam," he said.

The comment comes after Brennan, in a February speech in which he described his respect for the tolerance and devotion of Middle Eastern nations, referred to Jerusalem on first reference by its Arabic name, Al-Quds.

"In all my travels the city I have come to love most is al-Quds, Jerusalem, where three great faiths come together," Brennan said at an event co-sponsored by the White House Office of Public Engagement and the Islamic Center at New York University and the Islamic Law Students Association at NYU.

A US Sanctioned Meeting With Hamas In Doha

Confirmed

By Clayton Swisher
In The Middle East
On April 2nd, 2010
Courtesy Of Al-Jazeera

.

Photo courtesy of Mohamed Nanabhay

I've been scooped on a story I should have owned.

On February 23rd a US foreign service officer named Rachel Schneller appeared on a panel with Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan, right here in Doha, at a Forum I attended that was hosted by the Al Jazeera Cente for Strategic Studies.

According to today's Wall Street Journal, she acknowledged sitting with Hamdan afterwards for a friendly cup of tea, in a meeting that had the blessing of her superiors back at the US state department.

Now that is news.

Below is what I submitted that night from Dubai (I had to travel from Doha that afternoon on business and could not finish the discussion).

But first, a quick explanation on why I asked our web editors not to run it that night.

A good friend, rich in contacts and very helpful to me in the past, was also in Doha to participate with Rachel in the Forum. When I called him to fact check something he very strongly urged me by phone to kill the story, even though Schneller's panel with Hamdan was televised live on Al Jazeera Arabic Mubashar (the CSPAN equivalent). I did so in the interests of preserving both my friendship and contact, and also to avoid upsetting the good offices and hospitality of the Jazeera Centre and their gutsy guest. That's just the way it goes sometimes.

Here is what I originally submitted, which I cautiously titled with a question mark. (The WSJ confirmed that Foggy Bottom formally approved the meet, so no grammatical caveats needed).

February 23rd:

A US diplomat sits with Hamas?

I could not believe my eyes this morning at the Al Jazeera Centre for Strategic Studies conference on Political Islam. Perusing the programme I noticed a panel that included Hamas politburo member and spokesman Osama Hamdan alongside my friend and fellow blogger Steve Clemons.

But what made my eyes pop out was the panel's inclusion of Rachel Schneller, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations AND commissioned US Foreign Service Officer.

I had to travel and did not make their debate but heard from colleagues that it was quite impressive.

Rachel is on loan to CFR but maintains her US government affiliation while onsecondment to America's premier foreign policy NGO. US diplomats frequently go on loan to such quirky posts like the Multinational Force Observers (MFO) Sinai, touniversities, or for 1-year assignments at other institutions like the United Nations. While foreign service officers sometimes are required to technicaly "resign," these programmes are typically seen as career enhancing, with the understanding by all parties that your desk (and security clearances) await you upon return.

I can't imagine she would have attended this conference without thinking through all of these things. Hamdan was not a surprise guest.

The optic of a quasi-active US diplomat sharing a most public platform with a Hamas official was striking.

I can only imagine the buzz back at CFR's watercooler when she returns. Former Bush administration hardliner and fellow CFR scholar Elliot Abrams may want to sit when he learns the news. Es tu Brute?

It was Abrams mission during 2000-2008 period to see the Hamas movement decimated, embargoed--even overthrown. But still they remain, with the same credibilty and legitimacy that many Islamist groups enjoy in the region.

Rachel must be worrying about the stigma. Therepy is close at hand. Steve Clemonsand Robert Malley are both in Doha to participate in the Al Jazeera Centre's 3-day forum. Clemons did a fantastic interview with Hamas Leader Khalid Mishaal recently, and did not seem to suffer as his access to Washington's political establishment remains legendary.

Robert Malley, who also spoke at the Al Jazeera forum, might have some pointers too onhow to mitigate the "reputational" costs, though they're not as high as they used to be. Malley was an extremely trusted aide of then President Bill Clinton when he advised him on Arab-Israeli matters at the White House. Pity that Rob was thrown under the busas an Obama campaign foreign policy adviser for his willingness to meet with Hamas as senior director of the International Crisis Group NGO. Malley is still a player on Arab-Israeli policy in Washington and many believe his contacts will be vindicated in the future.

Many in Washington and Tel Aviv have advocated meeting with Hamas, includingColin Powell and former Mossad chief Efram Halevy, and then of course they've also gained company with former US President Jimmy Carter.

I'm curious to see if higher-level, less ambiguous contacts will follow this important, baby step.

Bravo to the Al Jazeera Centre for Strategic Studies for making history. And it all happened in sunny Doha.

Note on photograph at the top of this story: Schneller sits on the far right, Hamdan on the far left

The Need To Engage 'Terrorists'

Talking To Terrorists

By Mark Perry
Reviewed by Allen Quicke
February 13, 2010
Courtesy Of Asia Times Online

"They are Nazis!" - Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, referring to Iraq's Sunni tribes.

"Every Sunni is a Ba'athist, every Ba'athist is a Saddamist, and every Saddamist is a Nazi." - L Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, 2003-4

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names, says a Chinese proverb that doubtless derives from Confucius: "If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success."

This book is in large part the stories of a handful of people who managed to break the shackles of official terminology and learn the right names of things. Some of them were able to use the knowledge to carry their affairs "on to success"; some, like Mark Perry, the author of this book, are trying to pass on to others the right names. In the case of Perry, this is clearly no dry academic exercise but an urgent mission, for the cost of calling things by the wrong names has been measured in flesh and blood since September 11, 2001, and the body count is rising. Perry performs his task with understated, but obvious, passion.

The second half of this book charts Perry's own voyage of discovery as he investigates "political Islam", as he calls it, and talks with the "terrorists", as Washington calls them. Much of this material was originally published by Asia Times Online in a 2006 series, How to lose the 'war on terror'. There is much to be learnt from Perry's discussions with leaders of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas - much that one can only hope Western leaders learn very soon, because if they don't, they will continue to play directly into the hands of Osama bin Laden and the "war on terror" is lost.

The first half of the book demonstrates how such wisdom, put to practical use in Iraq, turned the tide of war. It is a brutal yet wonderful irony that it was the soldiers in the field, boots on the ground, who cottoned on first while the "grunts" in Washington - the soldiers' political masters, so-called statesmen and women, policymakers and strategists - were sending them to die while they chanted their meaningless mantra, "We don't talk to terrorists," and drooled over their dreams of remaking the Middle East.

Early in his quest, in 2005, Perry meets someone he has been told has "close ties to the Sunni-led Iraqi insurgency". Perry asks his interlocutor about rumors that senior US military officers had quietly met with Iraqi insurgents, led by "a sheikh", in Jordan the previous year. The question is avoided and the discussion moves on to other topics, until it finally dawns on Perry that he is talking to a "terrorist":

"You're the sheikh," I said.
"That's right." "You're with the Iraqi insurgency," I said. "You're the political wing of the Iraqi insurgency." "Yes, that's so."
I hesitated for only a moment. "I don't think I can be in this room," I said.
This was followed by silence, as a smile spread across his face.
"Why not?" he asked.
"Because you're killing Americans," I said.
"Yes, that's right," he said, "but don't worry. I've been meeting with American military officers in this room for the last eighteen months ..."

Sheikh al-Gaood is a central figure in this part of the book, which is a blow-by-blow account of how Iraq's el-Anbar province, in 2005 a vast killing field for American soldiers and Iraqis alike, was redeemed. The unlikely heroes of the story are the "terrorists" - or Nazis, as Wolfowitz would have it - and the US Marine officers who were pitted against them until they learned to call things by their right names.

In al-Anbar, these marine officers began to understand that the people they were fighting - the Sunni resistance - were neither terrorists, Nazis nor even Saddamists. They were simply people who had been thrown out of their jobs, civilian and military, as the US imposed its policy - a tragic blunder - of "de-Ba'athification", and installed Shi'ite lackeys in Baghdad to rule them. In fact, the "enemy" was only the enemy because Washington had decreed it so - and this on the flimsiest of rationales.

Perry describes how Iraq became conflated with Germany and the Allied policy of de-Nazification at the end of World War II:

Wolfowitz was also taking cues from Ahmed Chalabi's ideas about de-Ba'athification. Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, had provided Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense forpolicy, with a paper on German de-Nazification at the end of World War II. The paper emphasized Chalabi's view that the successful American occupation of Germany had been due to the wholesale removal of Nazi officials in the German government, a highly suspect and controversial claim. "No one checked to see if it was true," an army colonel who reviewed the study said. "Feith and his crew just took it on faith."

Chalabi had insisted that "Iraq needs a comprehensive program of de-Ba'athification even more extensive than the de-Nazification effort in Germany," adding, bewilderingly, "You cannot cut off the viper's head and leave the body festering." (You can't?)

As for Wolfowitz, whose "They are Nazis!" was jotted in the margin of a memo from his boss at the Pentagon, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, exploring the possibility of engaging with the Sunni resistance:

[O]ne of Rumsfeld's senior assistants later characterized it [thus]: "Wolfowitz was almost unbalanced about this. He thought that Sunni resistance wasn't even a resistance. You couldn't deal with them. He always described them as 'Nazis'. The word was almost a personal tic. When anyone talked about this he would get so angry he would start shaking. It was a little weird."

While Wolfowitz was doing his shaking in the Pentagon and American soldiers were dying in Iraq, the marines in al-Anbar, with officers from 3rd Civil Affairs Group, 1 Marine Expeditionary Force, in the vanguard, were quietly making contact with members of the resistance. They learned from one resistance leader:

"We are not your enemy ... al-Qaeda is your enemy. If you let us, we will get rid of them. But you can't fight us at the same time. We're different. We will stop shooting and take care of the real terrorists. We're not terrorists, we're the insurgents. There's a difference."

As one American involved in this early engagement put it:

"We did not teach the Iraqis; they taught us. We abandoned our prejudices; we questioned what we were told; we rejected the easy language of terrorism. We listened. We learned."

Gradually and with many setbacks, the two sides learnt to work together for the good of al-Anbar. One such setback came when Washington ordered an assault on Fallujah to punish insurgents for the deaths of four employees of Blackwater, the private contractor. When Lieutenant General James Conway, the marine commander in al-Anbar, received the order, he was first dumbfounded and then enraged: "What the hell are they thinking? We shouldn't be doing this. It'll only make things worse, a lot worse," he yelled as he kicked his hat around the room.

Other setbacks were provided by the "dead-enders" in Washington who insisted that the insurgency could and would be defeated by the force of arms. On one occasion, Colonel John Coleman, Conway's chief of staff, arrived in Amman, Jordan, for a conference with resistance leaders, only to be turned back at the airport. The US State Department had got wind of the conference and had had Coleman declared persona non grata in Jordan.

Nevertheless, al-Anbar was eventually stabilized. Many have attempted to take the credit, from then secretary of stateCondoleezza Rice, who has claimed she supported engagement in al-Anbar from the beginning, to proponents of the troop "surge" that has become the accepted explanation for the American "victory" in Iraq. Perry, however, writes that America's success there "had to do not with a surge in troops but with a surge in thinking ... The real gamble in Iraq was not in deploying more troops to kill terrorists; the real gamble in Iraq was in sending marines to talk to them."

Today's Washington, it seems, remains somewhat unclear on the concept as it attempts to simultaneously "surge" and engage with the Taliban in Afghanistan. There is apparently a new mantra: "First we hit them, then we talk to them" - as if this makes for more effective dialogue aimed at lasting peace and stability.

American statesmen and policymakers should read this book, urgently. For it is not in terrorist dens that the villains of the al-Anbar story are found, but in Washington's corridors of power - civilians all, but with countless wasted lives to answer for. "Chickenhawk" is the right name for them.

Talking to Terrorists: Why America must Engage with its Enemies by Mark Perry. Basic Books, New York, 2009. ISBN-10: 0465011179. Price US$26.95, 240 pages.

Allen Quicke is Editor of atimes.net.

(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.)