On New Sanctions- The Iran View

By Mark Pyruz

That there will be a cost to pay for maintaining a legalist position toward its nuclear program, the Islamic Republic of Iran's leadership understand full well. From previous experiences with the West where the West has failed to deliver and continually moved the nuclear goalposts, they realize that it is nuclear rights and, to an extent, their very sovereignty that is at issue here. When one frames the issue in real Iranian terms, the Iranian position is well understood and predictable. Dennis Ross himself has written on taking advantage of this, and on purposely advancing an offer of false engagement that is intended to be rejected, in order to boost an anti-Iran agenda that deprives Iran of its nuclear rights, and moves forward elements of economic warfare to be directed against the Islamic Republic. This is a matter of public record, which everyone has read including the Iranians.

A considerable amount of effort is being undertaken by the US State Department, to further isolate Iran and advance this anti-Iran agenda. One wonders how a sincere effort of US engagement by President Obama toward Iran would fare if a similar level of effort were undertaken beyond that of an abrupt take-it-or-leave-it offer, comparable to the exertion of the USG's current anti-Iran efforts.

That the USG will ultimately succeed toward this latest anti-Iran effort is to be expected. But success this time around is also costing America, in terms of its leadership role on these related issues. The 118 member Non-Aligned Movement is behind the Islamic Republic of Iran's right to nuclear power, and the double standard policies exhibited by US policy is not being lost on rising regional powers, such as Turkey, China and Brazil. While these takeaways may appear minor for the US compared to the level of economic sacrifice the Iranians are willing to accept in order to retain their nuclear rights and sovereignty, nevertheless this has a cumulative and enduring effect on US world standing.

The Islamic Republic of Iran remains a revolutionary nation. Issues of rights and sovereignty shared by nations of the developing world make up elements of this revolutionary personality, and a shared cause such as the nuclear rights of developing nations allows revolutionary Iran to once again exhibit moral courage on the world stage, in the face of obvious double standard and hypocrisy. For the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran, this is of considerable importance, in addition to the very real advantages of developing an indigenous nuclear industry. Toward this endeavor, they appear to have the majority support of the Iranian people.

Dennis Ross on Iran Options

Dennis Ross, US special envoy on Iran, has raised the possibility of serious containment or using force against Iran if the current impasse over the nuclear program could not be resolved.

In a new book written by Ross and WINEP fellow David Makovsky, “Myths, Illusions & Peace - Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East,” the authors look at the diplomatic overture toward Iran as as a means to prepare the public for serious actions against the country.

"Tougher policies - either militarily or meaningful containment - will be easier to sell internationally and domestically if we have diplomatically tried to resolve our differences with Iran in a serious and credible fashion," the authors wrote [Reuters, 21 July].

Dennis Ross's Iran Plan

Robert Dreyfuss in an article appearing in the April 27, 2009 edition of The Nation argues that Dennis Ross, Obama administration's special advisor on Iran, is the key person forming Iran policy and favors the blockade of Iranian gasoline imports and oil exports followed by kinetic action.

When Dennis Ross, a hawkish, pro-Israel adviser to Barack Obama's presidential campaign, was elevated in February to the post of special adviser on "the Gulf and Southwest Asia"--i.e., Iran--Ross's critics hoped that his influence would be marginal. After all, unlike special envoys George Mitchell (Israel-Palestine) and Richard Holbrooke (Afghanistan-Pakistan), whose appointments were announced with fanfare, Ross's appointment was long delayed and then announced quietly, at night, in a press release.

But diplomats and Middle East watchers hoping Ross would be sidelined are wrong. He is building an empire at the State Department: hiring staff and, with his legendary flair for bureaucratic wrangling, cementing liaisons with a wide range of US officials. The Iran portfolio is his, says an insider. "Everything we've seen indicates that Ross has completely taken over the issue," says a key Iran specialist. "He's acting as if he's the guy. Wherever you go at State, they tell you, 'You've gotta go through Dennis.'"
It's paradoxical that Obama, who made opening a dialogue with Iran into a crucial plank in his campaign, would hand the Iran file to Ross. Since taking office, Obama has taken a number of important steps to open lines to Iran, including a remarkable holiday greeting by video in which the president spoke directly to "the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran," adding, "We seek engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect." He invited Iran to attend an international conference on Afghanistan, where a top Iranian diplomat shook hands with Holbrooke; he's allowing American diplomats to engage their Iranian counterparts; and he's reportedly planning to dispatch a letter directly to Iran's leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet Ross, like his neoconservative co-thinkers, is explicitly skeptical about the usefulness of diplomacy with Iran.

Widely viewed as a cog in the machine of Israel's Washington lobby, Ross was not likely to be welcomed in Tehran--and he wasn't. Iran's state radio described his appointment as "an apparent contradiction" with Obama's "announced policy to bring change in United States foreign policy." Kazem Jalali, a hardline member of the Iranian parliament's national security committee, joked that it "would have been so much better to pick Ariel Sharon or Ehud Olmert as special envoy to Iran." More seriously, a former White House official says that Ross has told colleagues that he believes the United States will ultimately have no choice but to attack Iran in response to its nuclear program.

Not quite a neoconservative himself, Ross has palled around with neocons for most of his career. In the 1970s and '80s he worked alongside Paul Wolfowitz at the Defense and State Departments, and with Andrew Marshall, a neoconservative strategist who leads the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessments. In 1985 Ross helped launch the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the Israel lobby's leading think tank.

From the late 1980s through 2000, Ross served as point man on Arab-Israeli issues for George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, acquiring a reputation as a highly skilled diplomat, albeit one with a pronounced pro-Israel tilt. He led the US side at the July 2000 Camp David summit, but he was deeply mistrusted by Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, and the feeling was mutual. At a crucial moment in the negotiations, Ross threw a tantrum, hurling a briefing book into a table full of juice and fruit. Not surprisingly, when Arafat rejected the Israelis' less-than-generous offer, Ross heaped blame on the Palestinians for scuttling the talks, the failure of which led directly to Ariel Sharon's rise to power and the second intifada. Daniel Kurtzer, an Orthodox Jew who served as US ambassador to Israel and Egypt and who was one of Obama's top Middle East advisers last year, co-wrote a book in which he explained, "The perception always was that Dennis started from the Israeli bottom line, that he listened to what Israel wanted and then tried to sell it to the Arabs."

From 2001 until his appointment in February, Ross was at WINEP, where he helped to oversee a series of reports designed to ring alarm bells about Iran's nuclear research and to support closer US-Israeli ties in response. Last summer, while advising Obama, he co-chaired a task force that produced a paper titled "Strengthening the Partnership: How to Deepen U.S.-Israel Cooperation on the Iranian Nuclear Challenge." That report opted for an alarmist view of Iran's nuclear program and proposed that the next president set up a formal US-Israeli mechanism for coordinating policy toward Iran (including any future need for "preventive military action"). Along with Holbrooke, Ross also helped found United Against Nuclear Iran, a group established to publicize warnings about Iran to the American public and the media. UANI's advisory board includes former CIA director James Woolsey and Fouad Ajami, perhaps the top Middle East expert for the neoconservative movement.

In September, Ross served as a key member of another task force organized by the Bipartisan Policy Center. The group assembled a flock of hawks under the leadership of Michael Makovsky, brother of WINEP's David Makovsky, who served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the heyday of the Pentagon neocons from 2002 to 2006. Its report, "Meeting the Challenge: U.S. Policy Toward Iranian Nuclear Development"--written by Michael Rubin, a neoconservative hardliner at the American Enterprise Institute--read like a declaration of war.

The core of the Bipartisan Policy Center report predicted that diplomacy with Iran is likely to fail. Anticipating failure, Ross and his colleagues recommended "prepositioning military assets" by the United States--i.e., a military buildup--coupled with a US "show of force" in the Gulf. This would be followed almost immediately by a blockade of Iranian gasoline imports and oil exports, meant to paralyze Iran's economy, followed by what they call, not so euphemistically, "kinetic action."

That "kinetic action"--a US assault on Iran--should, in fact, be massive, suggested the Ross-Rubin task force. It should hit dozens of sites alleged to be part of Iran's nuclear research program, along with other targets, including Iranian air defense sites, Revolutionary Guard facilities, much of Iran's military-industrial complex, communications systems, munitions storage facilities, airfields and naval facilities. Eventually, the report concluded, the United States would also have to attack Iran's ground forces, electric power plants and electrical grids, bridges and "manufacturing plants, including steel, autos, buses, etc."

Like virtually all of his neoconservative confreres, Ross does not argue that negotiations with Iran should not proceed. Surrendering to the inevitability of a US-Iran dialogue, they insist instead that any such talks proceed according to a strict time limit, measured in weeks or, at most, a few months. In November, Iran specialist Patrick Clawson, Ross's colleague at WINEP, described any US-Iran dialogue that might emerge as mere theater. "What we've got to do is...show the world that we're doing a heck of a lot to try and engage the Iranians," he said. "Our principal target with these offers [to Iran] is not Iran. Our principal target with these offers is, in fact, American public opinion [and] world public opinion." Once that's done, he implied, the United States would have to take out its big stick.

The reality, however, is that negotiations between Iran and the United States might take many, many months, perhaps years. Putting US-Iran diplomacy on a short fuse, as Ross and his colleagues want to do, guarantees its failure, setting the stage for harsher sanctions, embargoes and the "kinetic action" that Ross has suggested might follow.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090427/dreyfuss