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Rand: How to Defuse Iran's Nuclear Threat:

An Israeli or American attack on Iranian nuclear facilities would make it more, not less, likely that the Iranian regime would decide to produce and deploy nuclear weapons. Such an attack would also make it more, not less, difficult to contain Iranian influence.

A group of experts at the Rand Corporation have produced a study of practical and effective ways to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

Their prescription: Bolster Diplomacy, Israeli Security, and the Iranian Citizenry

Full text is available at the link above.

The 2012 U.S. presidential election campaign kicked off in earnest this week, as President Obama formally launched his re-election bid and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney sealed his claim to the Republican nomination.  Barring unforeseen events, the next significant milestone in the campaign between now and the Democratic and Republican conventions this summer will be [...]

Last month, in connection with the P5+1 nuclear talks with Iran in Istanbul, Hillary appeared in a CNN International Special Presentation with Christiane Amanpour,  A Nuclear Iran: The Expert Intel.  Other guests included Mohammad Javad Larajani and Robert Kelley (formerly with the IAEA).  The video can be viewed by clicking here (it is in three [...]

Earlier this month, Flynt gave a public lecture at Pennsylvania State University’s School of International Affairs and Dickinson School of Law, where he teaches.  His presentation was entitled “Energy, Economics, and the Lost Art of Grand Strategy:  American Policy Toward the Persian Gulf and Rising Asia in the 21st Century,” and can be seen here.  In this lecture, [...]

In the run-up to this weekend’s P5+1 “negotiations” with the Islamic Republic, two of America’s leading newspapers published stories reflecting deep-seated myths about the Islamic Republic rather than reporting on real facts.  First, Farnaz Fassihi of The Wall Street Journal “reported”, see here, on the perennial myth that internal divisions had “seeped” into the nuclear file [...]

Earlier this week, Hillary went on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story to talk about the United States’ “strategic pivot” (as the Obama Administration describes it) toward Asia, from the Middle East, see here or click on video above.  The other panelists are Barry Pavel, a former National Security Council defense policy staffer for both the George [...]

We are very grateful to all our readers for their interest and dedication to an informed debate on www.RaceForIran.com. The purpose of the comment section is to promote informed debate, share pertinent information and news items—as links, not copyright-infringing cut-and-paste copying of others’ text, and encourage constructive criticism and analysis about Iran and its geopolitics. The comment [...]

As we have discussed in multiple posts, major Western media outlets brought an agenda-driven and intellectually sloppy approach to their coverage of the Islamic Republic’s 2009 presidential election.  From their coverage of the Islamic Republic’s recent parliamentary elections, it would seem that there has not been much of a learning curve.  One all-too-typical example is The [...]

  Flynt recently made a short video for Penn State’s School of International Affairs, where he holds a faculty appointment, about a range of Iran-related issues, click  here or on the video pictured above.  He discusses the impact of sanctions and other sorts of coercive pressure on Iran, arguing that “we are not going to be [...]

  Hillary appeared on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story earlier this week to discuss the role of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in U.S. presidential elections, click here or on the picture above.  The other panelists were John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago international relations scholar and co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, [...]

Hillary was interviewed by Scott Horton on Antiwar Radio today, you can listen to it here, to discuss Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington and the various public statements, by Netanyahu and President Obama associated with the visit.  The Obama Administration congratulated itself over not letting Netanyahu tie it to a specific red [...]

The next 72 hours are critical for President Barack Obama to make his case to America’s pro-Israel constituencies and Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that he will continue to follow their lead in dealing with the Islamic Republic of Iran.   AIPAC’s annual policy conference opens tomorrow in Washington, DC, with an estimated 13,000 participants ready [...]

Now just how likely is a war with Iran?:

This is an excellent roundup of the various political positions concerning relations with Iran, by the astute Jim Lobe.

Bottom line: For the time being, there is more room for diplomacy.

Why do only the Israeli hawks get heard?:

Philip Weiss, founder and co-editor of Mondoweiss.net wonders why only the sensational (and incorrect) claims of impending war with Iran get all the attention of the NYT and other main stream media outlets. Along the way, he quotes my own debunking comments from this blog.

Great maps of the Persian Gulf:

If you enjoy maps, or if you are simply interested in learning more, Mike Izady, the webmaster of the Gulf/2000 project at Columbia Univ., has a treat for you at http://gulf2000.columbia.edu/maps.shtml

The Israeli Generals Revolt:

Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is convinced that Iran is on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon. He believes that the Iranians cannot be deterred through diplomacy, and he views the Iranian threat as one that may bring about a second Jewish Holocaust.

His generals disagree.

In one of the most astounding public breaks by the Israeli national security establishment with a sitting prime minister, Netanyahu’s own military Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz has stated that Iran’s leadership is rational. Gantz is not alone. 

[Read the full text of this article by Joel Rubin, the Director of Policy and Government Affairs at the Ploughshares Fund, at the link above.]

Emanuele Ottolenghi of the right wing Foundation for the Defense of Democracies has written a clumsy hatchet job about me: Gary Sick, Discredited but Honored, Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2012, pp. 73-79. 

 Why, he wonders, could anyone give credence to my views when I had been so thoroughly discredited for my work on the “October Surprise,” the allegation that members of the Reagan campaign conspired with members of Khomeini’s Islamic Republic to prevent the release of American hostages until after the election of Ronald Reagan in November 1980. To demonstrate just how wrong I was, he fixes on a tiny episode, the sale of arms brokered by someone named Mehdi Kashani.

The episode in fact involved clandestine shipments of military equipment from Israel to Iran. Mr. Ottolenghi manages to spin his web of accusations without ever mentioning that fact. Instead, he focuses exclusively on the confusion of two different individuals – Mehdi Kashani and Ahmed Kashani – in the story told by a self-proclaimed Israeli Mossad agent named Ari Ben Menashe. It is true that Menashe melded these two different individuals in his story. I clearly pointed out the confusion in the names.

But the reason this story was of any significance was that it demonstrated that, despite the Islamic revolution in Iran, Israel continued to conduct clandestine arms deals with Iran throughout the early 1980s, up to the moment of the Iran-contra affair when the Reagan administration secretly shipped arms to Iran at Israeli instigation. That fact did not rely on Menashe’s tangled tale: there was a contract and I had a copy.

Here is where it gets interesting. On December 3, 2010, Mr. Ottolenghi contacted me by email, saying: “I am contacting you because I am conducting some research on an Iranian gentleman named Mehdi Kashani. You referred to him several times in your seminal book October Surprise. In particular, on page 294, footnote 24, you mention that you are in possession of a copy of a document with Kashani’s signature from January 1983 that links him to the ASCO Malta arms sale to Iran…”

I said I had forgotten this particular footnoted item, but if it was important to him I would make my files available to him. On January 24, 2011, Ottolenghi’s research assistant, Laura Grossman, came to my apartment and spent two hours looking though my files from twenty years earlier. She found the contract and made a copy of it. A few days later I received the following email:

Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2011 11:19:24 +0100 

From: Emanuele Ottolenghi <emanuele.ottolenghi@gmail.com>

To: ggs2@columbia.edu 

Subject: RE: query about Mehdi Kashani

Dear Professor Sick, I just wanted to thank you again for being so gracious and letting my colleague Laura come and sift through your archive. The material she forwarded is exactly what I was hoping to find and it confirms my assumptions about Mr Kashani – who remains active in Europe today in a number of commercial endeavours. Again, thank you for being willing to share your material.

My warmest regards,

Emanuele Ottolenghi

In his article, which accuses me of misleading research, he somehow fails to even mention this.

I had of course done the usual background search on Ottolenghi. He is identified, for example, as follows in RightWeb: “Emanuele Ottolenghi is a Brussels-based senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), an advocacy organization in Washington, D.C., that has promoted an expansive “war on terror” and housed a slate of well-known neoconservative writers. Ottolenghi is also a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, a Cold War-era pressure group that was revived by leading hawks to push militarist U.S. foreign policies after 9/11, and is the former director of the Brussels-based Transatlantic Institute, a think tank affiliated with the American Jewish Committee, which previously published Commentary magazine and has backed other European–based “pro-Israel” groups like UN Watch.” 

I suspected he was up to something. On the other hand, I had nothing to hide. In fact, Laura’s search of my files turned up the very document mentioned in the footnote supporting my point about the Israeli clandestine arms sale to Iran.

Ottolenghi fails to mention that the arms transaction was between Israel and Iran, that Mehdi Kashani was indeed an arms dealer involved in transactions between Israel and Iran, that my book October Surprise was precisely correct about the arms transaction, and that I had personally provided him a copy of the contract that proved it.

With all of this dissembling, he now claims that his discovery that I was in fact telling the truth is evidence that I should be discredited. The intent to smear me is self-evident. What is peculiar is the extraordinarily clumsy and self-incriminating way he went about it.

It is one thing to be ideologically biased; it is quite another to be simply inept.

Picco: Secrets to negotiating with Iran:

Giandomenico Picco worked with the notorious Imad Mughniyeh to free Western hostages 20 years ago. The talks were so secretive that Picco has only just revealed that Israeli intelligence confirmed Mughniyeh’s identity. As Iran nuclear talks escalate, the veteran negotiator suggests using “out of the box” solutions and showing a little respect. 

Limbert: A "yellow-pad" approach to negotiations with Iran:

John Limbert, who has a truly distinguished career as a U.S. diplomat and scholar of Iran, writes that the precedents for US-Iran negotiations are not good, and that it’s time to use former president Nixon’s “yellow pad” method, which distills items for negotiation into “what we want” and “what they want.” The exercise sounds simple, but it’s not, especially given years of US-Iran estrangement and mutual hostility. 

Blame Saddam: Another Way of Seeing Iran’s Nuclear Program: Blame Saddam: Another Way of Seeing Iran’s Nuclear Program

READ LATERby KARL VICK  •  APRIL 19, 2012

In 2003, Iran set aside the portion of its nuclear program devoted to developing a weapon.  That was the assessment of the American intelligence community, which among other things eavesdropped on hardliners complaining to one another about the decision. But why did Iran stop?

The conventional wisdom cites the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which at that point looked like a great success.  The thinking is with 100,000 American troops on its longest border and tens of thousands more next door in Afghanistan, the mullahs simply got spooked.  President George W. Bush had, after all, named them as part of his “axis of evil” and already launched one war in the name of corralling weapons of mass destruction.

But there’s an alternate explanation, one that casts the entire Iranian nuclear program at a new and different angle.  This explanation also assumes the mullahs’ decision pivoted on the fall of Baghdad, but mostly because Saddam Hussein fell with it. Iran has more than its share of enemies, but Saddam was the the only one who spent eight years trying to conquer the place, launching the Iran-Iraq war in 1980 to topple the religious republic. It was the Iraqi dictator’s pursuit of nuclear weapons that prompted Iran to revive a moribund nuclear program and explore the business of atomic warheads as well.  And it was Saddam’s demise that provided reason to abandon the effort – a logic that may well have been reinforced by the presence of all those U.S. troops on the doorstep.

“When the revolution happened in 1979 the Shah of course was in the midst of developing a nuclear power program, and everybody suspected that he was really going to go for a bomb,” notes Gary Sick, a Columbia University expert who was at the National Security Council when the U.S.-backed Shah Reza Pahlavi was overthrown by crowds chanting the name of Grand Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini.  “We have subsequently learned, from memoirs, that he wanted to have what he called a surge capability, by which he meant a breakout capability, whereby you have the means to assemble a weapon if you make the decision.” Any country with nuclear power has that capability; it’s typically just a matter of enriching uranium to a level of purity that renders it suitable for weapons.

“When the revolution happened all of that stopped,” Sick says, “and Khomeini, who operated on the supposition that everything the Shah did must be bad, issued a fatwa saying nuclear weapons are sinful.”  The cleric was not simply contrary, of course. The Koran is pretty clear on the rules of war. You are not to kill non-combatants: “You do not kill indiscriminately,” noted Sick, who laid out the alternate narrative for TIME. “That is the rule of Islam.”

The Iranians appeared to take the rule seriously. When Iraq fired missiles, Iran wanted to fire back. But its woefully inaccurate missiles were almost sure to hit civilians.  The Iranians’ solution was to issue statements announcing that they were at least aiming at military targets.  At the White House at the time, Sick took it all in. “They would always announce that they were aiming their weapons at a certain thing, in Basra or Baghdad, and of course their weapons were hugely inaccurate, but they could at least console themselves that they didn’t want to.  I read all of their announcements during that period.  They were meticulous actually as far as these things go, not to kill indiscriminately….”

Then Saddam began using WMD. His forces fired shells filled with mustard gas, some even with Sarin, the nerve agent.  Iranian intelligence passed on credible reports that Iraq was developing the means to manufacture a nuclear weapon.  It was at this point that the mullahs reconsidered their own policy.  The decision came in 1984, according to internal documents at the International Atomic Energy Agency.  Khomeini lifted the fatwa, and Iran revived the shah’s nuclear effort. This time the justification was found in the Koran’s permission for self-defense.

Of course, the worries about an Iraqi bomb were entirely valid.   By the time U.S. forces entered Iraq in the First Gulf War, in 1991, the nuclear program appeared to be within a year of producing a deliverable weapon.  The program was dismantled under UN supervision as a condition of Saddam’s surrender. And despite the dictator’s subsequent bluster and a lot of bad U.S. intelligence used to justify the 2003 invasion, it was never actually revived.

The Iranians may not have known that any more than the West did. “They believed Saddam was developing a nuclear weapon,” Sick says. “He wanted people to believe. We did. Iran believed that too.”  So Tehran continued its own clandestine program, begun with the help of Pakistan.  The project included what Sick terms  “table-top experiments” with weaponization, “looking at what it would take to make a nuclear weapon. That,” he says, “ is the stuff that all the talk is about in the UN Security Council, all these efforts before 2003.”

Indeed, most of what appears in the annex of the Nov. 8, 2011 report of the IAEA, titled “Possible Military Dimensions to Iran’s Nuclear Programme,” documents efforts from before 2003, though inspectors also raise suspicions about some work done since.  But if it pays to be skeptical of Iran’s leadership,  it never hurts to bring the Iran-Iraq war into an effort to understand Iranian thinking.  The eight-year war was the searing experience of national life, claiming at least 300,000 lives and perhaps twice that.  Billboards honoring the war dead still line major freeways. Tehran’s main military cemetery is a city unto itself.

Comparatively speaking, the belligerence toward Washington and Israel is almost elective, though that could change in a heartbeat if one or both countries launch an attack on the nuclear facilities. Since being exposed in 2002, the program has become synonymous with scientific advancement and defiant national pride.  Sick suggests the hidden side of the program, exploring weaponization, remains a source of embarrassment even as history, in that Khomeini’s successor as Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, has repeated the fatwa against atomic weapons, emphatically and repeatedly.

So as negotiations between world powers and Tehran resume next month, it may be fitting that the meeting will be in Baghdad. “The reality is they’ve already been around that track once,” says Sick. “They put in the prohibition. They suspended it, at least, when they believed they were faced with an adversary who really wanted to do away with them.  But after that they went back to Khomeini’s position, which became Khamenei’s position.”

And it’s entirely possible, he says, that the entire Iranian enterprise has come full circle, returning to the position of the Shah, who got his start with a US program called Atoms for Peace, and took things from there.  It’s all the mullahs claim to want as well.  “That does not mean they won’t have a surge or breakout potential,” Sick says. “But that’s true of at least 40 countries in the world right now, so Iran wouldn’t be alone.”