By Brian Whitmore
Posted on 12/14/2004 10:13:13 PM PST by DoctorZIn
Top News Story
Congressman Warns of Iranian Attack on U.S.
BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
December 14, 2004
WASHINGTON - A senior Republican congressman has been warning America's intelligence community for more than a year of an alleged Iranian plot to crash commercial airliners into a New Hampshire nuclear reactor.
Since February 2003, Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania has held a series of secret meetings in Paris with a former high-ranking official in the Shah's government who has correctly predicted, according to Mr. Weldon, a number of internal developments in Iran ranging from the regime's atomic weapons programs to its support for international terrorism, including Al Qaeda.
Based on two informants inside the mullahs' inner circle, Mr. Weldon's source, whom he code-named "Ali," relayed allegations to the Pennsylvania lawmaker that an Iranian-backed terrorist cell is seeking to hijack Canadian airliners and crash them into an American reactor. The target of the operation was only identified by Ali as SEA, leading Mr. Weldon to predict it was the Seabrook reactor in New Hampshire, about 40 miles north of Boston. Ali told the congressman that the attack was first planned for between November 23 and December 3, 2003, but was postponed to take place after this year's presidential election.
For nearly two years, Mr. Weldon tried to quietly press the CIA and a Senate panel that oversees Langley to follow up on the intelligence his Iranian source in Paris was providing. But these efforts came to nothing, according to Mr. Weldon. So now Mr. Weldon is going public. The congressman said in an interview last week that he intended to publish a book early next year outlining the intelligence he has collected from various sources that he said will detail an Iranian plot to conduct a more lethal attack on America than September 11, 2001.
"I get a lot of wackos who come to see me, who claim to have information," he said. "In this case, this source came to me from a former member of Congress, a Democrat. I followed up a lead. That lead developed an ongoing process of information-sharing for two years that I took to the highest levels of the intelligence community."
In Washington, the new book from Mr. Weldon, based in part on his meetings with Ali, will provide fresh ammunition for the Republicans against an intelligence community perceived by the White House as hostile to the president's policies.
Last month, the new director of the CIA, Porter Goss, a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sent many of the most senior analysts and operations officers into early retirement. In a speech he gave to the staff at Langley, Mr. Goss had to remind the employees that the president sets national security policy.
But if Mr. Weldon's source turns out to be right, America could also be losing a valuable intelligence asset on Iran, a country where most intelligence analysts in America concede the CIA has too few human sources.
The congressman's experience with America's spy service in the last year echoes frustrations from other American officials and analysts who have cultivated Iranians willing to provide America with intelligence, but who have been ignored. After a December 2001 meeting in Rome between Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin and Iran-Contra figure Manucher Ghorbanifar, the State Department and CIA went out of their way to shut down the channel. Mr. Franklin is now the target of a grand jury investigation into alleged espionage activities for passing information to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
A summary of Ali's predictions were outlined in a November 2003 letter to the Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Roberts from Kansas. In its opening lines, Mr. Weldon wrote, "This letter is to warn you of an intelligence failure in the process of happening."
Later in the letter, Mr. Weldon, who is the vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, wrote, "I am not asserting that such an attack shall occur. But given [Ali's] record of accurate predictions, shouldn't the Intelligence Community at least be investigating his story?"
The letter and an accompanying memo titled, "Ali: a Credible Source," goes into detail about information Mr. Weldon's source provided that was later confirmed in the press. For example, Ali first passed on the Iranian threat to the reactor at a Paris meeting on May 17, 2003.
On August 22, 2003, the Toronto Star reported the arrest of 19 people in Canada for immigration violations who were suspected of being connected in a terrorist conspiracy. One of the men in the cell was taking flight lessons and had flown an airplane directly over an Ontario nuclear power plant, according to the newspaper.
So, impressed with the quality of his source's information, Mr. Weldon met in 2003 with the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, to plead his case to get funding for Ali. But the CIA, according to the Pennsylvania lawmaker, demanded to know the identities of Ali's sources inside Iran, a condition Mr. Weldon said was unreasonable given the high-risk espionage.
"I took this straight to the top," Mr. Weldon said in an interview. "I wanted to work through the channels but I did not get anywhere."
Frustrated with the CIA's response, Mr. Weldon took his case to the Senate panel that oversees the agency.
He pressed them in the 2003 letter to hold a hearing on the matter and urge the CIA to get Ali the money to continue to pay off his sources inside the Islamic republic. According to Mr. Weldon, the committee did not respond in any meaningful way. "One or two senior people called the chief of staff. Not the kind of response I wanted. I had to get this off my shoulders," he said in an interview.
Mr. Weldon said more of Ali's intelligence will be shared in his forthcoming book, which he promised would "shake Washington."
He said that the manuscript, which he has just completed, details how Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, "has set up a separate entity in the government the president does not know about, which includes all the terrorist groups connected to bin Laden and others. They are avowed to consummate a major attack inside the United States. In the book I name this plot."
Analysis: How Close Is Iran To The Bomb?This week, the foreign ministers of Britain, France, and Germany and EU foreign-policy chief Javier Solana met with Iran's top nuclear negotiator in an ongoing attempt to convince Iran to permanently suspend its uranium-enrichment activities. Meanwhile, with each passing day, Iran could be getting closer to producing a nuclear bomb, a growing number of nonproliferation officials believe.
Is this site producing a nuclear weapon? (file photo)
Since the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) began investigating Iran's nuclear program in February 2003, and as more and more details of Tehran's atomic activities have emerged, the sense of alarm has become increasingly widespread.
Iran has demonstrated a proven ability to enrich uranium, and has been developing an infrastructure that could eventually produce large quantities of weapons-grade material. If left unhindered by international controls, Tehran could reach the nuclear threshold in just a few years' time, officials, diplomats, and analysts say.
"They know how to drive, and now they just need to build a car," said a senior Western official in Vienna familiar with the Iranian situation. "Provided they don't hit any bottlenecks, they are about two to five years away," the official added. More conservative estimates say they could be a decade away.
Over the past two years, the international community has been trying to create as many bottlenecks as possible.
Ever since Iran admitted in October 2003 to conducting 18 years of clandestine research in uranium enrichment -- a process that produces fuel that can be used in nuclear weapons -- the nation's nuclear industry has come under unprecedented scrutiny.Some familiar with the issue say Iran appears to have already crossed a critical threshold in know-how and soon could be in position to develop a nuclear weapon
In an effort to avoid UN Security Council sanctions, Iran signed an agreement with the European Union on 14 November to suspend activities related to uranium enrichment, a process that can produce fuel for nuclear weapons, and the IAEA agreed to monitor the freeze.
But despite the intense international spotlight, officials and diplomats familiar with the issue say Iran appears to have already crossed a critical threshold in know-how and soon could be in position to develop an atomic weapon.
"They are just sitting on a nice capability to enrich uranium," a Western official close to the IAEA said. "Right now, Iran can produce small amounts of fissile material. But once they can produce large amounts, the bomb is just months away."
Although oil-rich, Iran insists its nuclear program is solely to generate electricity.
An Emerging Nuclear Infrastructure
Among Iran's known facilities, officials are most troubled by an underground centrifuge enrichment plant in Natanz, 200 miles south of Tehran, which Iran kept secret until the National Council for Resistance of Iran, an exile opposition group, exposed it in August 2002.
In February 2003, IAEA inspectors discovered highly enriched uranium there and at another site. Inspectors later discovered that Iran had also separated small amounts of plutonium, another pointer toward a potential weapons program.
Enriching uranium and separating plutonium are allowed under the nonproliferation treaty, as long as they are reported to the IAEA and open to agency safeguards and inspections to assure that they are for peaceful purposes. By covering up such activities, Iran caused many who had previously given the country the benefit of the doubt to suspect it was trying to develop nuclear weapons.
Before enrichment work there was suspended and put under IAEA safeguards, a pilot plant at Natanz had approximately 200 centrifuges installed. A second large-scale plant at Natanz that is under construction could, at full capacity, house as many as 50,000 centrifuges and produce enough bomb-grade uranium for 15 to 20 nuclear weapons a year, according to some analysts.
Iran has also acquired a design for and begun research and development on the advanced P-2 centrifuge, which could enrich uranium faster than the older P-1 design used at Natanz. Officials familiar with the investigation into Iran's nuclear program say Iran got the P-2 centrifuge design from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear program, who also provided similar nuclear know-how to Libya and North Korea.
But what worries officials most are not the facilities they know about, but those that many suspect are still undeclared and hidden. Officials are particularly concerned about Lavizan, a military research site in northern Iran, a facility that the United States alleges housed a nuclear facility.
Satellite images showed that buildings, which had been there in August 2003, had been razed to the ground by March 2004 and that topsoil had been taken away. The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) think tank said on its website that razing the buildings was suspicious "because it is the type of measure Iran would need to take if it was trying to defeat the powerful environmental-sampling capabilities of IAEA inspectors." Environmental sampling involves samples taken to find traces of radiation.
As tension mounted over Iran's nuclear program, Tehran announced in September that it had tested what it called a new "strategic missile" and delivered it to its armed forces. Iran currently has an arsenal of Shihab-3 missiles, which according to published reports have a range of between 1,300 and 1,500 kilometers -- meaning it could hit Israel and parts of Europe -- and is capable of carrying a 700-1,000-kilogram warhead.
Responses And Consequences
The specter of a nuclear-armed Iran, which could threaten Israel, set off a dangerous arms race, and further destabilize the Middle East, is something the United States and its allies are furiously seeking to prevent.
The United States has pushed for Iran to be reported to the UN Security Council, which could impose sanctions, while the European Union has offered Tehran a series of economic and political incentives to give up its nuclear ambitions.
Israel has also made it clear that it will not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran and has strongly hinted that it may use military strikes to eliminate nuclear sites there should diplomacy fail. Israel plans to buy about 5,000 U.S.-made smart bombs, including 500 1-ton bunker busters that can penetrate 2-meter-thick concrete walls, according to recent press reports.
But many diplomats and officials fear that neither sanctions nor military strikes would solve the issue.
Should the Security Council eventually impose sanctions, an increasingly isolated Iran may pull out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), as North Korea did last year and Tehran has repeatedly threatened to do, and pursue a weapons program unfettered. And while Iran would stand to lose a lot in terms of trade and investment if it withdrew from the treaty, such a defiant move could boost Tehran's prestige in the region. ''If Iran dropped out of the NPT, you would have at least 30 countries, mostly in the Middle East, cheering them on," a senior Western official close to the IAEA said.
Trying to solve the issue militarily, officials say, is also fraught with peril. Officials have voiced concerns that in the event of a military strike Iran might attempt to further subvert the situation in neighboring Iraq by influencing Shi'ite Muslims there.
Moreover, U.S. military intelligence has simulated a U.S. strike on Iran's nuclear facilities but they were unhappy with the war game's outcome because they could not prevent the conflict from escalating.
Analysts have also warned it would be difficult to hit Iran's nuclear sites with absolute confidence, since they are in hardened facilities and the locations of all of them are not known.
"You could have failed to decisively set back the program but at the same time prompt Iran to take a number of steps in retaliation, including to destabilize the situation in Iraq," said Robert Einhorn, who served as the Clinton administration's assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation.
Analysts say that the strongest card the international community has to play is the fact that Iran craves international respectability and badly needs increased trade and investment -- and would risk severe diplomatic ostracism, or worse, by going nuclear.
"Iran can be a pariah with nuclear weapons, or it can choose to become a respected, integrated member of the international community," Einhorn said. "Iran is not North Korea. The North Korean regime may want isolation," he added.
TEHRAN, Dec 15 (Reuters) - Iran does not care whether Mohamed ElBaradei remains head of the U.N. atomic watchdog, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator said on Wednesday following reports that Washington was trying to oust him.
Iran unconcerned about ElBaradei's fate at IAEA
15 Dec 2004 08:42:11 GMTSource: Reuters
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that U.S. officials were sifting through intercepted phone conversations between ElBaradei and Iranian officials looking for evidence that he was helping Tehran rebuff U.S. accusations it is seeking atomic bombs.
ElBaradei has said he plans to stand for re-election next year for a third term as secretary-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is engaged in a probe of Iran's nuclear activities.
Some U.S. and other officials have privately complained that ElBaradei has been too soft on Iran, which denies seeking nuclear arms.
But Iran's Supreme National Security Council secretary Hassan Rohani, asked whether ElBaradei's re-election would affect Iran's nuclear case, said:
"We are not cooperating with the people of the IAEA but rather we are cooperating with an international agency.
"It does not matter to us who the secretary-general is," the ISNA students news agency quoted him as saying.
Rohani added that Tehran was impatient for results from talks with the European Union, which is hoping to persuade Iran to scrap potentially weapons-related nuclear activities in return for economic, technological and security cooperation.
"One of our new red lines is that this round of negotiations should not be long. It will be unacceptable to us if we feel negotiations are a waste of time," he said.
Iran has frozen key nuclear activities such as uranium enrichment while the EU talks continue. But Iran says it will resume atomic work within three to six months.
"We are committed to the agreement and, as long as Europe respects its commitments, carries them out carefully, the negotiations move forward and our goals in these negotiations are achieved, we will remain committed," Rohani said.
Iran Tells Russia to Expand Nuclear TiesWed Dec 15, 2004 09:43 AM ETBy Maria Golovnina
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Iran told nuclear partner Russia on Wednesday it would have to show "readiness" to expand nuclear ties with Tehran to secure a solid share of Iran's atomic market in face of growing competition from Europe.
Moscow has built a $1 billion nuclear reactor in Iran in defiance of strong criticism from the United States, which believes Tehran can use the facility to make atomic bombs.
But Russia's stance on Iran toughened since President Vladimir Putin's re-election in March gave more priority to ties with Washington, with both softening their criticism of each others' military operations in Iraq and Chechnya.
Gholamreza Shafei, Iran's ambassador to Moscow, said further nuclear cooperation with Russia depended "on how much such ties will correspond with our national interests and also how much there is willingness from Russia to cooperate with ... Iran to broaden ties in peaceful nuclear energy use."
In written answers to Reuters questions, he also said: "Our ties with Russia depend on how much the Russian side is effectively ready to cooperate with us."
Russia has enjoyed a near-monopoly status on Iran's nuclear market since the early 1990s when the two agreed to build a 1,000-megawatt nuclear plant near the port of Bushehr.
Seeking to remove Bushehr as a irritant in relations with the United States, Russia has maintained Iran's nuclear program is peaceful.
But diplomats in Moscow have hinted Iran is unhappy with the way Russia has dragged its feet on Bushehr, delaying construction schedules at times of political sensitivity.
Russia is now worried it might lose a key nuclear market in the Middle East after the European Union's "Big Three" offered last month to help Iran with peaceful atomic technology if it abandons its nuclear fuel production capabilities.
Britain, France and Germany are currently in talks with Iran aimed at brokering a long-term agreement on Tehran's nuclear activities. Iran says its nuclear facilities will only be used to generate electricity, and Russia agrees.
ENEMIES BECOME RIVALS
Shafei's remarks only confirmed Russian worries. But he repeated Moscow would still be able to play a big role in Iran.
"Under such circumstances, the previous enemies of nuclear cooperation between Russia and Iran will turn into 'new rivals' and 'Iran's partners'," he said.
"It's true that under such circumstances Russia will face competitors on the Iranian market but at the same time the Iranian market will stop being closed and limited.
"Russia will be able to play an active role at least in half of this big market, and it will be definitely bigger than the previously narrow market," he said.
Russia's foreign ministry was not available for comment.
A high-ranking Russian official familiar with the Iranian situation said Tehran could be simply trying to use the EU offer as a bargaining chip to get the best deal out of Russia.
"We are ready to expand cooperation with Iran, but it's not easy. Iranians could be difficult too. When European nuclear companies enter the Iranian market, we'll deal with it. But it's too early to talk about this yet," the official said.
Western diplomats in Vienna said leading nuclear firms in the EU would be loathe to offer any nuclear technology to Iran for fear of jeopardising lucrative U.S. business. (additional reporting by Louis Charbonneau in Vienna)
Iran conditions talks with US on change of Washington's attitude
www.chinaview.cn 2004-12-15 23:47:30
TEHRAN, Dec. 15 (Xinhuanet) -- Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi on Wednesday conditioned negotiations with the United States on a change in Washington's attitude toward Tehran, the official IRNA news agency reported.
"Iran will hold talks with the United States only when it changes its policies towards Iran and takes on an approach based on mutual respect," Kharazi was quoted as saying.
"So long as the United States continues its hostile policies against Iran, negotiations will be out of question," he stressed.The foreign minister described the US opposition to Iran's entry into the WTO as a hostile move.
"The United States does not even let any negotiation about such membership start by using its veto right," he said. Iran and the United States, who had been close allies in the 1970s, turned into enemies after Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979. The United States accused Iran of secretly developing nuclear weapons and sponsoring terrorists, categorizing Iran in the so-called "axis of evil" and imposing harsh sanctions on the country.Iran, in return, termed the United States as enemy of the whole Islamic world.
More Iraqi refugees leave Iran for home
Wednesday, December 15, 2004 - ©2004 IranMania.comLONDON, Dec 15 (IranMania) - The UN High Commissioner for Refugees on Tuesday reported of the closing down of eight Iraqi refugee camps in Iran, Iran’s Hamshahri Daily reported.
The UNHCR Spokeswoman, Jennifer Pagonis added that most of the refugees retuned to Iraq following the downfall of former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein.
According to the UN official two other refugee camps in Iran are to be closed down by the end of December.
“So far, around 42,000 of 50,000 Iraqi refugees in Iran have returned home.” Pagonis said.
Bush Urges Syria, Iran Not to Meddle in Iraq
Wednesday, December 15, 2004 1:08 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush urged Syria and Iran not to meddle in Iraqi internal affairs on Wednesday after Iraq's defense minister complained the two were helping the Iraqi insurgency.
"We will continue to make it clear to both Syria and Iran that ... meddling in the internal affairs of Iraq is not in their interests," Bush told reporters at the end of a meeting with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
He called on Iraq's neighbors to work with the interim Iraqi government to enforce border security ahead of elections scheduled for Jan. 30.
"We expect there to be help in establishing a society in which people are able to elect their leaders, and ... we expect people to work with the Iraqi interim government to enforce borders to stop the flow of people and money that aim to help these terrorists," the president said.
"For the good of the area ... there ought to be a peaceful country where the different religions can come together," he added.
NEOCON V. NEOCON ON IRAN.
Identity Crisis
by Franklin FoerPost date 12.14.04 | Issue date 12.20.04
n the weeks after September 11, 2001, Clifford May, a former journalist and Republican National Committee official, launched a new think tank called the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). Unlike the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) or other Washington bastions of chin-tugging wonks, FDD devotes itself almost exclusively to Topic A: international terrorism. While FDD has a smattering of Democrats like Chuck Schumer on its board, its approach announces its ideological allegiances. The group strongly advocates liberal democracy, aggressively promoted by the United States, as the antidote to Middle Eastern terrorism. That is, the group trumpets the Bush doctrine.
The Bush doctrine, and its neoconservative supporters, have always had one indisputable virtue: clarity, marked by crystalline goals and a coherent playbook. This clarity gave them an enormous rhetorical advantage in making the case for war in Iraq, a case that May and FDD helped articulate. Now, Iran has forced itself to the fore of the foreign policy agenda with its furtive pursuit of nuclear weapons and often dismissive attitude toward the diplomats trying to keep the country in the nonproliferation shed. By all measures, the Bush doctrine should fit snugly onto Iran--the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism on a quest for weapons of mass destruction, a country where the masses demonstrably yearn to breathe free.
But, when I called May to learn his policy prescription for Iran, he provided a surprising answer, one that I soon found echoed that of many other Bush doctrine adherents. "I've got no sense of where this should ultimately go. Everybody is studying this, but I'm honestly trying to understand this myself and come up with my position," he told me. "This is complicated stuff." Not at all what we've come to expect from the neocons.
From Bosnia to Iraq, polarization has been a defining feature of post-cold-war foreign policy debates. But the Iran debate doesn't just trace traditional faults between realists and neoconservative hardliners. In this instance, the neocons can't come to a consensus among themselves. The Weekly Standard's editorialists, for instance, have remained silent on the subject. And neocons who have taken positions don't agree. Institutions that played a large role in making Saddam Hussein a top foreign policy concern, such as AEI and the Project for a New American Century, are split over how to proceed. The Committee on the Present Danger, a coalition of cold war intellectuals that recently reassembled to promote hard-line foreign policy, has heatedly debated a proposed white paper on Iran. Even two of the most prominent hawks in the administration aren't on the same page. In November, Under Secretary of State John Bolton spoke at a Washington confab hosted by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. When asked about the prospect of preemptive military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, he replied, "No options are off the table"--and then smiled broadly. Across the country in San Francisco, at almost the same time as Bolton's revelatory grin, Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith fielded the very same question but described strikes as "not a sensible option."
In part, the lack of neocon consensus can be attributed to the nature of the problem. Nobody--not the Council on Foreign Relations, not John Kerry's brain trust--has designed a plausible policy to walk Iran back from the nuclear brink. Or, as Kenneth M. Pollack concludes in his new book, The Persian Puzzle, this is a "problem from Hell" with no good solution. But the muted, muddled response of neocons is also indicative of a deep divide within the doctrine.
Over the last four years, no entry in the political dictionary has been as overused and abused as "neoconservative." On editorial pages and blogs, the term's definition has stretched to indiscriminately include pretty much every believer in a hawkish foreign policy. But, just because the term has suffered these distortions doesn't mean that it should be discarded. It describes a distinct subset of the right. During the 1990s, a group of out-of-power intellectuals gathered in a cluster of Washington institutions--think tanks like AEI, magazines like the Standard--where they produced articles and anthologies proposing a new post-cold-war course for U.S. foreign policy, a course that included regime change in Iraq, a tougher attitude toward China, opposition to the emerging international legal system, and, above all, a more robust deployment of U.S. power. They weren't battling just the Clintonites' liberal internationalism, but also devotees of Pat Buchanan's isolationism and Brent Scowcroft's realism. Many denizens of these institutions proudly identified themselves as neoconservative.
All their apparent agreement on the great issues of the day, however, obscured important internal disagreements and inconsistencies. The neoconservative mind has always had two lobes. One side drives neocons toward idealistic language about America's ability to spread human rights and democracy. This is the half that dominates the thinking of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and the president's senior Middle East adviser, Elliot Abrams. In a speech to the National Endowment for Democracy in 2003, President Bush provided the locus classicus of this strain when he announced his "forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East" and called for a "global democratic revolution."
The colder, more analytic lobe of the neocon brain endorses all this talk about democracy. But it couches these goals in a more realist context. It doesn't want democracy planted out of altruism. It wants democracy planted when it can promote U.S. interests. Charles Krauthammer and Jeanne Kirkpatrick have been the most prominent spokespeople for this lobe. Many of these neocons, such as Krauthammer, scoffed at the Balkan interventions as social work. And they don't mind temporary alliances with dictatorships and nasty regimes. "We often need such dictators to win the larger struggle against a global threat to liberty," Krauthammer wrote two years ago in Time, defending the U.S. partnership with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
If you were to peer into the minds--or at least the writings--of most rank-and-file neocons, you'd find that the idealist and realist sides co-exist in almost equal proportion. Iran, however, brings these two lobes into conflict. Each policy option that might promote democracy comes at the expense of neocon goals for U.S. security. Each policy that might promote security comes at the expense of their liberal concerns. Iraq, it turns out, was not the first in a series of bold ventures toward a new Pax Americana, as both neoconservatives and their detractors imagined, but an anomaly--a freak instance in which events conspired to produce the clarity that could temporarily bridge the two halves of the neocon brain. In Iran, no policy can bring the neocons' competing goals into concert. The result is the current paralysis, a moment of indecision that exposes limits of neoconservatism.
n paper, of course, neocons have been far from muddled in their pronouncements about Iran. In January 2002, Bush famously placed the country in the axis of evil. The following year, neocons celebrated the U.S. victory in Iraq by issuing ominous warnings to the mullahs in Tehran. William Kristol, editor of the The Weekly Standard, announced, "The next great battle--not, we hope, a military battle--will be for Iran." A Standard essay by Max Boot, author of The Savage Wars of Peace, outlined a course the Iranians could follow "to avoid a visit from the 3rd Infantry Division"--a few basic steps that included quitting their pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
In practice, however, the Bush administration shunned such sentiments. First in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, the U.S. government quietly courted the Iranians, trying to ensure that the mullahs didn't muck up its strategic objectives in Central Asia and the Middle East. Top American officials rewarded this cooperation with public praise. Describing Iran's role in the Afghan war, Richard Haass, then-director of the State Department policy planning staff, declared in 2001, "By and large, the Iranian role diplomatically has been quite constructive." And, in 2003, the United States acceded to Iranian demands and shut down the Washington office representing the political arm of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an armed Marxist Islamist group that has long tormented the mullahs.
With American words and deeds so badly out of sync, the United States missed an unprecedented opportunity to steer events in Iran. "I've never seen the [Tehran] regime as vulnerable as before the Iraq war," says the Hoover Institution's Abbas Milani, "and never seen it as consolidated as today." The regime suffered through bursts of protest in 2002 and 2003. At the same time that it faced opposition in the street, the regime faced a far milder brand of opposition in the Majilis, the parliament, where a reformist movement had flourished since Mohammad Reza Khatami took over the presidency in 1997. But, this January, the mullahs set about eviscerating this movement. A month before the Majilis elections, they disqualified about 2,500 candidates and barred 87 sitting members of parliament, including Khatami's brother, from seeking reelection. At the same time, the regime worked to shore up its future with another bold maneuver. Using revenue from high oil prices and digesting knowledge bought off the Pakistanis, it sped up its nuclear program.
During this period, the Bush administration could have brought its rhetoric and policy into agreement. Before the Iraq war or just after, it could have leveraged the vulnerability of the Iranian regime, not to mention the presence of American troops on the country's eastern and western borders, to pursue a policy of either engagement or aggressive confrontation. Had the administration vigorously pursued one or the other during this window of opportunity, it might have succeeded in transforming Iran. Instead, it chose neither path, leaving nuclear negotiations to the Europeans while voicing few complaints about the mullahs' political repression. It is typical for hawks to blame the State Department for our inchoate attitude toward the Iranians. But the neocons were complicit in this. With their own divided minds, they didn't have a clear alternative to push. So they joined with their intramural adversaries, and, in Pollack's words, "simply deferred the issue altogether."
hanks to this inaction, the situation has now reached a crisis point. Although nobody knows when the Iranians will have enriched enough uranium for a bomb, everybody agrees there's little time to stop them. Neoconservative doctrine holds that the best long-term hope for preventing a nuclear Iran is the country's liberalization. Indeed, that's the policy proposed by one school of hawks. They don't want to follow the Iraqi example, using the U.S. military to impose democracy. The robustness of Iran's army and the ruggedness of its topography make it too difficult for that. Instead, these neocons argue that, despite the regime's crackdowns, Iran smolders in a prerevolutionary state. A bit of funding for opposition groups and encouragement from the U.S. government, conveyed in radio broadcasts and forthright presidential addresses to the Iranian people, could inspire the masses to rise up. Michael Ledeen, a former Reagan administration official, is the architect of this argument. Earlier this fall, he wrote in National Review Online, "In Iran today, upwards of 70 percent of the population is openly hostile to the regime, vocally desirous of freedom and democracy, and bravely supportive of the Bush Doctrine to bring democratic revolution to the entire region. If we could bring down the Soviet Empire by inspiring and supporting a small percentage of the people, surely the chances of successful revolution in Iran are more likely. By orders of magnitude."
But neocons haven't rallied around this regime-change recipe for a reason. While it satisfies the idealistic half of the neocon brain, it leaves the other half nervous and wanting. Above all, many neocons believe that promoting regime change will not stop Iran from getting the bomb. For starters, very few of them share Ledeen's assessment of the regime's health. AEI's Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA specialist, told me, "The Iranian clerical regime has deep roots." Or, as Gary Schmitt of the Project for the New American Century bluntly states, "You're confronted by the fact that the reformers and democrats are stuffed." Then there's the disheartening fact that the U.S. government has no obvious democratic opposition groups on which to shower money and support. While neocons unanimously want greater funding for Los Angeles-based TV networks that beam into Iran, they bemoan the paucity of other options. "There's nothing like the Iraqi National Congress to unite people behind and fund," one Iran hawk laments.
Even if regime change were possible, what happens if it doesn't transpire quickly enough? If the mullahs are able to build nuclear weapons, they will be able to buy themselves an even longer lease on life. Gerecht points out that Iranians have openly contrasted the fates of Kim Jong Il and Saddam, their cohorts in the axis of evil. They have noticed that the dictator with the bomb escaped unscathed, living comfortably behind a nuclear cordon sanitaire. What's more, the mullahs have hinted that they have big plans for their nuclear-protected regime. Sirus Naseri, a trusted regime official who negotiated last month's deal with the Europeans to suspend Iran's uranium-enrichment activities, has said, "We face a crisis. Once we get over this crisis, we can resume what we were hoping to do." Some analysts have found ominous overtones in this cryptic message. With the confidence that it can deter U.S. interference, the mullahs could un-self-consciously finish the job of eliminating their domestic opposition once and for all.
Finally, though neocons argue that democratic regimes are less dangerous, in Iran, the democrats may be just as determined in their pursuit of the bomb as the mullahs. Aside from the MEK, which has been frequently compared to a cult, very few of the regime's opponents have openly criticized the nuclear program. "You have a failure of the opposition to engage the nuclear question," bemoans Hoover's Milani. In fact, even longtime opponents of the regime have defended Tehran's atomic ambitions. Ardeshir Zahedi, who served as a foreign minister under the Shah, argued earlier this year in The Wall Street Journal that there's nothing inherently wrong with an Iranian bomb: "A peaceful Iran with no ambitions to export an ideology or seek regional hegemony would be no more threatening than Britain, which also has a nuclear arsenal." And some longtime advocates of republican government in Iran have gone so far as to applaud the mullahs for protecting the country's sovereign right to develop a nuclear program. That's not to say that a democratic regime wouldn't be far more susceptible to diplomatic prodding than the less-than-rational theocrats. But the fact that the regime's hardened opponents have their own nuclear hopes makes regime change a less attractive solution to the current crisis--further contributing to the policy's paucity of support, even among the neocons who have waxed most Jeffersonian about the virtues of liberal democracy.
There's an irony to this position. Gerecht has been one of the most vocal critics of the CIA, penning pieces decrying the "sorry state" of the agency. Of course, the efficacy of a strike depends entirely on accurately locating enough nuclear sites to make the venture worthwhile. Put another way, it requires reams of precise intelligence from the bureaucracy Gerecht has long decried. In fact, this reliance on the CIA, an organization that hawks have long battled, has turned some neocons off the option altogether. AEI's Tom Donnelly sarcastically quips, "They got Iraqi WMD so right."
Neocons like Donnelly have also argued that the Osirak parallel doesn't hold. Whereas Iraq in 1981 concentrated its nuclear activity, Iran has dispersed it throughout the country and hidden it well. "It's not a single facility you can take out. They've been very clever about hiding it," former CIA Director James Woolsey told me. So clever, in fact, that U.S. intelligence agencies have not uncovered much of it. Revelations, like the 2002 discovery of nuclear facilities in the towns of Arak and Natanz, have largely originated with the MEK, which has somehow managed to infiltrate Iranian ranks. Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who has studied the preemptive option more carefully than anyone, concludes, "The Israeli raid on Osirak was a unique case, characterized by conditions that are unlikely to be replicated again elsewhere. Preventive action by the United States against Iran's nuclear program today would have to contend with intelligence, military-technical, and political challenges more daunting than those faced by Israel [in 1981]."
Even if a preemptive strike delivered the advertised security benefits, it would still harm the American vision for a democratic Middle East. Unlike Osirak, strikes against Iranian facilities would be far from clinical. The Iranians have reportedly submerged their nuclear workshops in densely populated areas like metropolitan Tehran, locales that guarantee civilian carnage. This carnage might be worth the price, except that it would likely cause the Iranian people to rally nationalistically around the mullahs, further postponing the regime's collapse. "We'd drive all those wonderful students and reformers and disgruntled clergy who are so ready to challenge the government into the mullahs' arms," Woolsey argues. Even supporters of strikes concede this backlash will occur. They just doubt that it will be long-lasting. Gerecht says, "You belittle the opposition by assuming that they will disappear. The constitutional movement goes back nearly a century. It will survive just fine." But, as critics of strikes counter, Iranian nationalism goes back further still. And, even in the current pro-Western climate, without bombs falling on their country, Iranian politicians occasionally squeeze considerable mileage out of anti-Americanism.
A preemptive strike could inadvertently undermine an even more profound neocon objective. "Iraq provides an ideal theater for Iran to exact revenge against us," argues the Council on Foreign Relations' Ray Takeyh. "They have one hundred thousand targets there." The Iranians, of course, have an extensive network of proxies and spies in the country. According to an important investigation by Edward T. Pound in U.S. News & World Report, U.S. intelligence believes this network has sponsored Ansar Al Islam, the group that has orchestrated the insurgency and planned terrorist attacks. The Iranians reportedly plotted to assassinate L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and they issue a $500 bounty for each coalition soldier that insurgents kill. But all this trouble represents only a fraction of the problems the Iranians could cause if they wanted--for instance, in the relatively peaceful Shia south, where they could decisively crush any chance for success in Iraq by forcing the coalition to fight the insurgency on yet another bloody front. In other words, a preemptive strike against Iran would likely trigger a chain of events that would doom neoconservatism's grandest experiment.
In all the public reconsideration of the Iraq war, neocons have barely wrestled with the implications of the invasion's failure for their worldview, content to blame the mess on errors of execution. The Iran debate, however, exposes as much as their writings on Iraq omit. For decades, a near-limitless belief in U.S. power has bridged neocon foreign policy thinking. That's why it is stunning to hear so many neocons ultimately express pessimism about the Bush administration's prospects for preventing the Iranian bomb. "The horse is ninety percent out of the barn," says Donnelly. "They're going to get the bomb unless we invade. That's not an option. So, I'd say, the time to stop this from happening has pretty much passed. Now, the question is, what are you going to do about it?"
And there's no surer sign that neoconservatism has been chastened than the manner in which neocons describe themselves when discussing Iran. Where many of them once unabashedly self-identified as members of an intellectual movement, they now deny that such a movement ever existed. They refer to neoconservatism in quotation marks, as if the term were merely a concoction of overactive left-wing imaginations. David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, told me, "This really is an example of what academics call essentialism. Hostile critics invent this thing called neoconservatism that unfailingly favors unilateral military force. But, when the so-called 'neoconservatives' examine Iran and don't advocate the use of unilateral military force, the critics feel like a dirty trick has been played upon them." Denial may be the first step on the path to recovery.
US Clarifies Trade Sanctions To Allow Dissident Views
[Excerpt]
December 15, 2004
Dow Jones Newswires
Campion Walsh
WASHINGTON -- The Treasury Department on Wednesday clarified U.S. trade sanctions against Cuba, Iran and Sudan, allowing publication of dissident and academic views from these countries.
Previous guidance on trade sanctions was interpreted by some as discouraging publication of dissident speech, said Stuart Levey, Treasury undersecretary in charge of the office of terrorism and financial intelligence.
"That is the opposite of what we want," Levey said in a press release. "This new policy will ensure those dissident voices and others will be heard without undermining our sanctions policy."
On Sept. 27, U.S. publishing industry groups sued the U.S. Treasury Department in federal court over what they described as continued attempts to control publication of information and literature from embargoed countries. The plaintiffs - including the Association of American Publishers, the Association of University Presses and the PEN American Center - said Treasury rulings had created uncertainty and confusion for publishers.
Under the new Treasury rule U.S. citizens and firms are allowed to freely engage in Cuba, Iran and Sudan in most "transactions necessary and ordinarily incident to the publishing of manuscripts, books, journals and newspapers..., in paper or electronic format."
Prohibitions remain on publishing activities involving the governments of the three countries, with an exception for academic and research institutions.
Restrictions also remain on operation of publishing houses, sales outlets or other offices in the three countries. But the sale and export of books to these countries continues to be allowed, Treasury spokeswoman Molly Millerwise said.
The U.S. has had Cuba under a trade embargo since 1963, Iran under trade sanctions since 1995 and Sudan under trade sanctions since 1997. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control oversees the sanctions. ...
-By Campion Walsh, Dow Jones Newswires; 202 862 9249; campion.walsh@ dowjones.com
Everything in this article might be absolutely true. Unfortunately, due to our past experiences with Chalabi's people and the missing WMDs in Iraq, as well as our past experience with Iranian "moderates", the story will be laughed off and dismissed as lacking any probative value.
I can tell you Rep. Curt Weldon has long been a strong supporter of American national security (meaning, it's been his focus, or one of them). I have a great deal of respect for him. I remember hearing him in the '90's being highly critical of Russia, that was when I first heard of him (I was only a teenager back then, plus consider that the Internet of then was hardly anything like it is now). I'm certain that he's not publishing the book for primarily money reasons. Sure, he'll enjoy the rewards of his labors (hey, this is capitalism - work hard, then get paid for your labors). But please take note that writing a book will get you more attention than a press conference or a speech in Congress. If nothing else, maybe it can help eliminate the insanity that has captured nearly all newsrooms - that we're just fighting rougue elements in Iraq. No, people - we're fighting Iran. Iran has killed hundreds of American soldiers in the last year and a half. Stop making the ill-informed think we're fighting Iraqis! Not anymore than the 9/11 hijackers were Americans.
Anyway, needless to say, I'll be look forward to Weldon's book. It appears that it may contain some explosive information. I hope so. Hopefully, it'll be a bestseller...
Very encouraged about Iraq's comments on Iran and Syria! I'm sure they are getting some behind-the-scenes messages that they better stop if they know what's good for them (of course they won't, of course). And BUsh finally talked about Iran! Not much, the standard line, but it is a start. I'm looking to some substantial Iranian references in the State of the Union in about a month and a half or so. If he doesn't mention Iran, I'll be shocked and sorely disappointed. At any rate, I'm hoping he can recount with pleasure the successful Iraqi elections. The Afghan elections went just fine. From all accounts, I'd say it went smoother than the 2000 US presidential election!
Freedom on the march...
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