Rooyesh

What to do about Iran? The question has haunted US policy-makers since George W Bush entered the White House in 2000. Now, frustrated by Iran’s muscle-flexing in the Middle East and aware of the drawbacks of military action, the administration seems to have settled on a policy of containment.

“It is a dangerous regime,” says Peter Rodman, a strong advocate of containment who was until recently a senior Pentagon official, “and we have to stand up to it.”

A veteran of the Reagan administration and a protege of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Mr Rodman uses the word “containment” with explicit echoes of America’s Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union.

He sees Iran as an essentially ideological threat, and puts little faith in diplomacy as a solution.

Achilles heel?

Current US policy is one of limited engagement with Iran - in an effort to find common ground on Iraq - and the application of pressures, including United Nations sanctions.

Mr Rodman regards the UN sanctions, designed to make it harder for Iran to pursue its nuclear programme, as feeble.

He wants individual countries to put pressure on banks to stop lending to Iran, and on companies to restrict investment in the all-important oil and gas sector.

Many in Washington think Iran’s economy is its Achilles heel.

It is suffering from high inflation and unemployment, and there is a widespread perception that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has mismanaged the economy.

In June, angry Iranian motorists set fire to petrol stations to protest at the introduction of petrol rationing.

‘Pressure not enough’

But Michael Hirsh, a senior editor at Newsweek, who has just returned from a visit to Tehran, thinks the administration’s hopes are misplaced.

He does not believe economic pressure will “force the Iranians to throw up their hands and say, ‘OK, we give up our nuclear programme’”.

Thomas Pickering, a veteran US diplomat with long experience of the Middle East, thinks pressures alone are not enough.

“Pressures without openings - to try to resolve the impact and effect of the pressures - are just pressures,” he says.

The effect, he adds, is that of a pressure cooker without a relief valve.

Military option

In dealing with Iran, the administration is handicapped by its difficulties in Iraq, where the Iranians have great influence.

It is not possible, says former State Department official James Dobbins, to stabilise Iraq and at the same time destabilise Iran.

There are some in Washington who think that, if diplomacy fails, the administration should resort to military action.

But the dangers of doing so are widely acknowledged.

Striking at Iran would further inflame the Middle East, cause Iranians to rally round an unpopular regime - and probably set back its nuclear programme by only a few years.

“Iran can’t be fixed right now,” says Jon Alterman, who runs the Middle East programme at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The problem has to be managed, he says, even if that means passing it to the next administration - and perhaps the one after that.

Source: BBC

Washington’s reported plan to name Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a “specially designated global terrorist” organization may be less about raising pressure on Tehran than about raising pressure on U.S. allies to support a tougher line with Iran. In fact, the move reflects Washington’s relative isolation on the question of how to deal with Iran.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that the move is primarily directed at appeasing Bush Administration hawks and U.S. legislators who have been agitating for a more aggressive posture on Iran, and at turning the screws on European allies who are reluctant at this stage to escalate U.N. sanctions on Tehran over its nuclear program. Naming the IRG as a terrorist group could be used to pressure foreign corporations whose business ties with Iran potentially involve dealings with the IRG, which is extensively involved in Iran’s economy. The rationale offered for the move is to curb an organization that has long been at the forefront of Iranian support for Hizballah and other radical groups in the region — and, the Administration alleges, is playing an active destabilizing role in Iraq. In fact, it is Tehran’s role in Iraq and other neighboring countries, rather than the state of its nuclear program, that has been the focus of much of the Administration’s recent statements on Iran. U.S. officials from President Bush on down have sought to portray Iran, and organizations associated with the Revolutionary Guards specifically, as the prime source of trouble in its neighborhood.

U.S. officials now routinely blame Iran for many of the attacks on U.S. forces inside Iraq — despite limited evidence to back the claim — and accuse it of destabilizing the Iraqi government by supporting radical Shi’ite militia. The Administration also insists that Iran has been working to destabilize the Karzai government in Afghanistan, and accuses it of funneling weapons to the Taliban. Adopting a more aggressive posture toward Iran’s regional role may play well on Capitol Hill, but the White House is clearly having trouble selling it abroad. Just last week, the leaders of the two governments most reliant on U.S. military protection directly contradicted President Bush’s claims that Iran was causing trouble in their countries. Both Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai and Iran’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki publicly reiterated their view of Iran as a friend and a positive influence for stability in their countries, leaving President Bush to huffily demur. Iran helped install the Karzai government and has a longstanding hostility towards the Taliban. And Tehran has also been a vocal supporter of the Iraqi government, whose leaders have been historically close to Iran.

In both cases, though, these governments fear that the strategic rivalry between Iran and the U.S. could prompt both sides to take actions that could provoke the other and prompt an escalation that negatively affect both Afghan and Iraqi stability. In other words, it’s not Iran they fear, but an Iran-U.S. confrontation. So, the Karzai and Maliki statements highlight a key problem facing those who seek a more aggressive U.S. posture towards Iran: Outside of Israel, there’s very little international support for confronting Tehran. It’s not that European and Arab allies don’t share U.S. concerns over Iran’s increasingly assertive regional role, or over the fact that its civilian nuclear energy program will eventually put nuclear weapons within easy reach of the Islamic Republic. But neither the Europeans nor the Arabs see much good being achieved by either economic isolation or military action against Iran. Like the Europeans, the Bush Administration routinely proclaims its support for a “diplomatic solution” to the nuclear standoff. But unlike the Europeans, until now the Bush Administration appears to have taken “diplomatic solution” to mean simply Iranian acquiescence to Western terms as a result of non-military pressure. The Europeans know that’s unrealistic, and are more inclined toward a give-and-take approach to diplomacy.

They have lately been encouraged by Iran’s moves to restore cooperation with the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which prompted them to shelve any discussion of further U.N. sanctions until September, to allow more time for talks between Iran and the Europeans. But the hawks on Capitol Hill and in the Administration know that such engagement is unlikely to produce a satisfactory Iranian climb-down, pointing out that the sanctions so far imposed have not ended Iran’s uranium enrichment. But that position enjoys little support among the countries whose support the U.S. has worked hard to court over Iran. Far-reaching compromises with Iran are not on the agenda of the current U.S. administration, nor are they likely to be. But pursuing a harder line effectively isolates the U.S. from its European and Arab allies. Those allies, of course, are well aware that the current U.S. administration has less than 18 months left in office, and they hope for a successor more open to compromise. But they may also be increasingly fearful of what the outgoing Administration may do on Iran before leaving office. That bad-cop fear, of course, is what Secretary of State Condi Rice is trading on when she warns European governments that their failure to back stronger sanctions will force the U.S. to act alone.

Source: Time

Kaveh L Afrasiabi writes in the Asian Time online the Bush administration has leaped toward war with Iran by, in essence, declaring war with the main branch of Iran’s military, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which it plans to brand as a terrorist organization.

A logical evolution of US President George W Bush’s ill-defined, boundless “war on terror”, the White House’s move is dangerous to the core, opening the way for open confrontation with Iran. This may begin in Iraq, where the IRGC is reportedly most active and, ironically, where the US and Iran have their largest common denominators.

A New York Times editorial has dismissed this move as “amateurish” and a mere “theatric” on the part of the lame-duck president, while at the same time admitting that it represents a concession to “conflict-obsessed administration hawks who are lobbying for military strikes”. The political analysts who argue that the main impact of this initiative is “political” are plain wrong. It is a giant step toward war with Iran, irrespective of how well, or poorly, it is thought of, particularly in terms of its immediate and long-term implications, let alone the timing of it.

Coinciding with President Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s highly publicized trip to Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan, the news received front-page coverage in the New York Times, next to a photograph of Ahmadinejad and his Afghan host, President Hamid Karzai, as if intended to spoil Ahmadinejad’s moment by denigrating the Iranian regime. Just two weeks ago, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice implicitly put Iran on a par with the Soviet Union by invoking comparisons to the Cold War, and in essence compared it to al-Qaeda.

Thus if an unintended side-effect of the Cold War terminology was to enhance Iran’s global image, the “terrorist” label for the IRGC aims to deliver a psychological blow to Iran by de-legitimizing the country.

Also, it serves the United States’ purpose at the United Nations Security Council, where a British-prepared draft of a new round of sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program has been floating around for a while and will likely be acted on this autumn. The draft calls for tightening the screws on Iran by broadening the list of blacklisted Iranian companies and even may lead to the interdiction of Iranian ships in the Persian Gulf. This is indeed a dangerous move that could easily trigger open confrontation.

With the window of opportunity for Bush to use the “military option” closing because of the US presidential elections next year, the administration’s hawks - “it is now or never” - have received a huge boost by the move to label the IRGC as terrorists. It paves the way for potential US strikes at the IRGC’s installations inside Iran, perhaps as a prelude to broader attacks on the country’s nuclear facilities. At least that is how it is being interpreted in Iran, whose national-security concerns have skyrocketed as a result of the labeling.

“The US double-speak with Iran, talking security cooperation on the one hand and on the other ratcheting up the war rhetoric, does not make sense and gives the impression that the supporters of dialogue have lost in Washington,” a prominent Tehran University political scientist who wished to remain anonymous told Asia Times Online.

The US has “unfettered” itself for a strike on Iran by targeting the IRGC, and that translates into heightened security concerns. “The United States never branded the KGB [Russian secret service] or the Soviet army as terrorist, and that shows the limits of the Cold War comparison,” the Tehran political scientist said. His only optimism: there are “two US governments” speaking with divergent voices, ie, “deterrence diplomacy and preemptive action”, and “that usually, historically speaking, spells policy paralysis”.

However, no one in Iran can possibly place too much faith on that kind of optimism. Rather, the net effect of this labeling, following the recent “shoot to kill” order of Bush with regard to Iranian operatives in Iraq accused of aiding the anti-occupation insurgents, is to elevate fears of a US “preemptory” strike on Iran. Particularly concerned are many top government officials, lawmakers and present or former civil and military functionaries who are or were at some point affiliated with the IRGC.

There is also a legal implication. Under international law, the United States’ move could be challenged as illegal, and untenable, by isolating a branch of the Iranian government for selective targeting. This is contrary to the 1981 Algiers Accord’s pledge of non-interference in Iran’s internal affairs by the US government.

Should the terror label on the IRGC be in place soon, US customs and homeland-security officials could, theoretically, arrest members of Ahmadinejad’s delegation due to travel to the UN headquarters in New York next month because of suspected ties to the IRGC. Even Ahmadinejad, with his past as a commander of the Basij Corps, a paramilitary arm of the IRGC, risks arrest.

The US has opened a Pandora’s box with a hasty decision that may have unintended consequences far beyond its planned  coercive diplomacy toward Iran. The first casualty could be the US-Iran dialogue on Iraq’s security, although this would simultaneously appease Israeli hawks who dread dialogue and any hints of Cold War-style detente between Tehran and Washington.

It would also become more difficult for Syria to collaborate with Iran with respect to Lebanon’s Hezbollah, who owe much to the

IRGC since their inception in the early 1980s. The consensus in Iran is that chaos in Iraq is in Israel’s interests, but not that of the US, and that the United States’ Middle East policy is being held hostage by pro-Israel lobbyists who have painted an enemy image of the dreaded IRGC that is neither accurate nor in tune with the history of US-IRGC interaction.

The US and the IRGC
The current noise masks a hidden history of cooperation between the US military and the IRGC - in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Afghanistan and, more and more likely, Iraq.

In Bosnia, the US military and intelligence interacted with the IRGC, which had trained Bosnian Muslims, and fought alongside it against their Serbian enemies. They also funneled arms to the IRGC, mainly through Croatia, with the tacit consent of the US government.

In Afghanistan, US military commanders have had similar interaction with commanders of the IRGC, including the elite Quds division of the IRGC, which supported anti-Taliban forces and helped those forces take over Kabul in 2001 with relative ease.

In Iraq, the IRGC has supported various Shi’ite militias as well as the Iraqi military and intelligence and, unofficially, it can credit for the relative stability of the eight Shi’ite provinces, including those in the south. The new US diplomatic engagement of Iran over Iraq is having direct and immediate effects on Iran’s behavior inside Iraq, promising further results by the joint expert committees set up as a result of the latest round in the dialogue.

Yet true to the United States’ traditional Janus-faced approach toward Iran, just as Iranian and US military and intelligence officials are about to embark on systematic discussions over Iraq and regional security, they will in effect be prevented from doing so by the labeling of the IRGC as terrorist.

Coming ‘war of attrition’?

The idea of an all-out military confrontation between the US and Iran, triggered by a US attack on the IRGC, has its watered-down version in a “war of attrition” whereby instead of inter-state warfare, we would witness medium-to-low-intensity clashes.

The question, then, is whether or not the US superpower, addicted to its military doctrine of “superior and overwhelming response”, will tolerate occasional bruises at the hands of the Iranians. The answer is highly unlikely given the myriad prestige issues involved and, in turn, this raises the advisability of the labeling initiative with such huge implications nested in it.

No matter, the stage is now set for direct physical clashes between Iran and the US, which has blamed the death of hundreds of its soldiers on Iranian-made roadside bombs. One plausible scenario is the United States’ “hot pursuit” of the IRGC inside Iranian territory, initially through “hit and run” commando operations, soliciting an Iranian response, direct or indirect, potentially spiraling out of control.

The hallucination of a protracted “small warfare with Iran” that would somehow insulate both sides from an unwanted big “clash of titans” is just that, a fantasy born and bred in the minds of war-obsessed hawks in Washington and Israel.

France said Friday it is considering measures for a new U.N. Security Council resolution targeting Iranian leaders who have defied the international community over their country’s nuclear program. The United Nations has already imposed financial sanctions on a list of companies — some linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps — involved in Iran’s nuclear program.

The sanctions were imposed last year to punish Iran for refusing to halt uranium enrichment. “We are considering additional measures, in the framework of a new Security Council resolution, against members and backers of the Iranian regime refusing to comply with demands of the international community,” Hugues Moret, a French Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in an online briefing Friday. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has called for international unity over Iran’s nuclear program, which several Western countries fear masks plans to develop weapons. Iran says its intention is to produce electricity. Russia and China have thwarted attempts by fellow permanent Security Council members the U.S., Britain and France to impose harsh U.N. sanctions, and have stalled efforts to create new penalties this summer in the face of continued Iranian refusal to freeze its nuclear enrichment activities.

Source: Associated Press

As President Bush escalates the United States’ confrontation with Iran across a broad front, U.S. allies in Europe and the Middle East are growing worried that the steps will achieve little, but will undercut diplomacy and increase the chances of war. In the latest step, Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are considering designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps , the elite military force that serves as the guardian of Iran’s Islamic state, as a foreign terrorist organization.

News of the decision was leaked to newspapers in what a senior State Department official and Washington -based diplomats said was a sign of an intensifying internal struggle within the U.S. government between proponents of military action and opponents, led by Rice. State Department officials and foreign diplomats see Rice’s push for the declaration against the Revolutionary Guards as an effort to blunt arguments by Vice President Dick Cheney and his allies for air strikes on Iran . By making the declaration, they feel, Rice can strike out at a key Iranian institution without resorting to military action while still pushing for sanctions in the United Nations . Partisans of military force argue that Rice’s strategy has failed to change Tehran’s behavior.

“It really does seem this is more tied to the internal debate that is going on in the administration on Iran , rather than a serious attempt to influence Iranian behavior,” said an Arab diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. “How that debate will play out is what’s concerning” Arab and European countries, he said. Designating the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group “is the State Department trying to do something short of war,” said former U.S. diplomat Charles Dunbar , a professor of international relations at Boston University . “What else can we do?” said Dunbar, who worked for the State Department in Tehran from 1963 to 1967. The Revolutionary Guard would be the first military unit of a sovereign government ever placed on the department’s list of terrorist organizations. The move would allow the Treasury Department to go after the group’s finances and those of its reputed business network inside and outside Iran .

The Bush administration has been engaging Iran in a increasingly strident war of words since the spring, when the Bush administration demanded tougher U.N. sanctions over Iran’s nuclear energy program. The White House says that Bush remains committed to diplomatic and financial actions to persuade Iran to stop enriching nuclear fuel, which the U.S. says can be made into a bomb but that Iran insists is intended only for electricity generation. Recently, the administration has stepped up the rhetoric, accusing Iran of providing Shiite Muslim militias in Iraq with particularly deadly roadside bombs that have killed dozens of U.S. service members. “We are confronting Iranian behavior across a variety of different fronts on a number of different, quote- unquote, battlefields, if you will,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Wednesday. Earlier this year, the Pentagon temporarily moved an additional aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf as a warning to Iran . U.S. commanders in Iraq have also highlighted intelligence they say shows that the Revolutionary Guard’s Qods force is shipping sophisticated road-side bombs, known as explosively formed penetrators, into Iraq . Bush and his aides also have accused Iran of playing an unhelpful role in Afghanistan — although some State Department officials say the reality is much more complicated.

Finally, Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates traveled to the Middle East in late July and early August, bearing promises of billions in weapons sales to friendly Arab states and a $30 billlion, 10-year military aid package to Israel . The rationale: Iran . What remains unclear is what the administration will do if none of those steps has an impact on Iran , whose leaders seem confident as they see Bush unpopular at home and bogged down in Iraq . “The coercion … undermines diplomacy. And once diplomacy is undermined, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Ray Takeyh , an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations . By early 2008, “You’re in a position where you have a series of escalatory measures … And then the military option becomes something you can consider,” Takeyh said. On the nuclear front, since taking office in 2005, Rice has backed a European-led effort to persuade Iran to stop enriching uranium in exchange for economic, political and security benefits. The U.N. Security Council has passed two resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran for its nuclear work. But negotiations on a third have stalled and a September deadline for enacting new sanctions will likely be missed, say State Department officials and diplomats. Critics say that designating the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group could further undermine the effort, and also scuttle U.S.-Iranian talks in Baghdad on Iraq’s security. Those talks have achieved little. On Iran’s role in Iraq , U.S. ground commanders in Iraq oppose proposals from Cheney and his allies to counter-attack inside Iran itself, saying they believe they can contain Iran’s growing influence without acting outside Iraq .

Privately, some are hostile to suggestions that the military strike another country, saying they are mired in Iraq . “Let them put on the uniform and go there then,” said one military official in Baghdad who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the topic. Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno , the No. 2 commander in Iraq , said Friday that Shi’ite factions, backed by Iranian groups, are now responsible for nearly half the attacks in Iraq , compared to 30 percent in January. Odierno said he could deal with the problem inside Iraq , without going over the border into Iran . But he conceded that the military still is learning about how Iranian networks run through Iraq . “We’re just in the beginning stages” of denting Iranian influence, he said. Iran’s abilities are “still significant. So we still have an awful lot of work to do.”

By: Warren P. Strobel and Nancy A. Youssef, McClatchy Newspapers