Iran: The Genius of Washington's "Strategic Leaking" on Nukes & Sanctions

Gary Sick has offered the following reading of latest US policy, with private manoeuvres and public "spin", on Iran's nuclear programme and sanctions.

My own reaction is that this is "too clever by half", not on the part of the author but as attributed to Washington. As I wrote Sick, "Could it be that there there are two factions still battling within the Administraton? One faction, probably coming out of the State Department, is not as keen on aggressive sanctions. Linked to this is a wish to move the debate to the human rights rather than nuclear focus. The other faction, probably in the National Security Council and Department of Defense, is keener on a sanctions-first, nuclear-first focus. So they use New York Times as the ventriloquist's dummy for their line. I'm not sure Obama is a central player in this battle."

Sick's concise response: "One of the great benefits of strategic leaking is that it conceals the real intentions of the leakers, thereby leaving interpretation up to the observer."

Pretend for a moment that you are the president of the United States and you have gotten yourself into a bit of a hole with your Iran policy.

The Latest from Iran (4 January): Watching and Debating

First you offered to negotiate with Iran over nuclear (and potentially other) issues without the Bush preconditions. But there were powerful political forces that felt this was an example of your inexperience and even appeasement tendencies. So you unwisely accepted a six month deadline for the negotiations to show that you meant business. You tried to soften that by saying you would take another look at the issue at the end of the year, but everyone ignored that and let you know that January 1 was the drop-dead date to solve all the negotiating problems with Iran.

In the meantime, the most serious internal revolt in 30 years exploded in Iran. It was not clear how this would affect the behavior of the regime on international issues. Some said the regime was weakened and vulnerable and so would more readily yield to pressure; others thought Iran’s rulers would become more belligerent internationally to compensate for their internal weakness.

You had a couple of rounds of meetings with the Iranians and jointly came up with a fiendishly clever ploy. Iran would ship out quite a lot of its low enriched uranium (LEU), thereby reducing its stockpile that might be turned into a bomb, and Russia and France would provide them with more highly enriched fuel to be used in their research reactor that makes medical isotopes. Everybody wins. But when the Iranians took this home, they were savaged by their own political opposition for buying a pig in a poke. In disarray, they backtracked and started looking for a face-saving alternative, specifically to conduct the swap on Iranian soil or, later, in Turkey.

This situation was complicated by the discovery (or Iranian announcement, we’re not quite sure) of a previously unannounced uranium enrichment site, which was immediately inspected by the IAEA. Some think that this was Iran’s Plan B, to have a separate enrichment capability if the primary site at Natanz was bombed by Israel or the US; others think the site was intended as a covert production line to produce a bomb. The punditocracy decides that it was a covert bomb production line.

Moreover, the punditocracy, which had already decided on the deadline of January 1, now decides that the Iranians negotiated in bad faith and the negotiations were at a total dead end. The congress, which had reluctantly stayed quiet on the subject, now returned to its usual political game of looking tough by bashing Iran. Sanctions bills threatening interdiction of gasoline shipments to Iran were passed overwhelmingly in the House and were due to pass with equal margins when the Senate returned in January.

Your critics (who wanted merely token negotiations followed by crippling sanctions and, if possible, war) rubbed their hands in anticipation. A leading neoconservative gleefully remarked that everything was proceeding according to script. AIPAC issued a triumphant declaration as gasoline sanctions rolled through the Congress.

So, Mr. President, here you are on January 1. The “deadline” is upon you. Your allies and your opponents in congress are ready to hit you with a dilemma — either impose crippling sanctions or look like an appeaser. Yet you know that gasoline sanctions are perhaps the worst idea to come out of the congress since they opposed the purchase of Alaska. The sanctions would enrich and empower the Revolutionary Guards, undercut the Green opposition, identify the US as the enemy of the ordinary citizen in Iran, and possibly start us down the slippery slope to another disastrous war in the Middle East. But it looks great on a bumper sticker, and Glenn Beck [of Fox Television] will savage anyone who dares oppose it.

So what to do?

Well, Mr. President, you have some cards of your own up your sleeve. You know that Israel is not really going to attack Iran. They can’t do anything significant without US help, and George Bush already told them not to expect that. But they have invested so much in their campaign to convince the Israeli population and the entire world that Israel’s survival as a nation is imminently in peril that they can’t be seen to back down. They might welcome some help to get them off their own sticky wicket.

You also know that the Iranian nuclear program is nowhere near a bomb and has actually made little progress in that direction for years, regardless of the punditocracy consensus to the contrary in defiance of the facts. There is plenty of time if you can just calm the domestic political furor.

It’s time for some strategic leaking.

First, give an exclusive interview to The Washington Post just before the New Year’s “deadline” that makes two major points: (1) The administration’s policy of engagement has succeeded in creating turmoil and fractures within Iran’s leadership, i.e. the policy has been a success, not a failure; and (2) the administration is planning for highly targeted sanctions that will hit the Revolutionary Guards rather than the average Iranian citizen. That sends a clear signal to the congress that its infatuation with petroleum sanctions is not replicated in the White House, for all the reasons listed above, and to the uber hawks that there will be no rush to war with Iran in the new year. At the same time, launch a major rhetorical campaign by the president in support of the civil and political rights of the Iranian opposition.

It works. The increasingly hawkish Washington Post editorial board commends the president for his “shift” on human rights (though piously calling for more) and ignores the sanctions game in congress.

Of course, having fed the Washington Post, the New York Times is jealous and needs its own exclusive. Provide that over the New Year holiday by letting as many as six top administration officials meet privately and anonymously with two NYT reporters to let them in on some more secrets: (1) In another cunning success, the administration has outed the covert Iran bomb production facility at Qom thereby rendering it useless; (2) hint that the administration may be responsible for sabotaging Iran’s centrifuges, which accounts for the fact (completely unacknowledged until now, despite being reported for the past two years by the IAEA) that Iran is not actually using about half of its installed centrifuges; (3) reiterate that the coming sanctions are to be aimed at the Revolutionary Guards, not the average Iranian citizen, and are likely to succeed because the regime is so weakened internally; and (4) declare unequivocally that the Iranian “breakout capability,” i.e. its ability to shift from nuclear energy to actually building a bomb, is now years away.

This also works. The two NYT reporters, though apparently a bit confused about this U-turn in threat assessment from only three months ago, dutifully report what they have been told. The administration is credited with several successes, and the reporters seem convinced that the White House is showing toughness and skill in derailing the Iranian nuclear rush to the bomb. In the meantime, the reporters scarcely note that the administration is not declaring the negotiations dead after all and is pursuing the Turkish option of a uranium swap. No mention of a deadline.

Finally, the NYT reports that the Israelis have been persuaded that the targeted sanctions now being discussed are worth trying “at least for a few months.” That was attributed to a senior Israeli official on the basis of back channel talks, but it had actually been announced by Prime Minister Netanyahu to the Knesset a week earlier in a speech that received almost no attention in the U.S. No more talk of deadlines, crippling sanctions or air strikes.

In short, Mr. President, you have taken what appeared to be a losing hand and, with a few well-placed leaks, transformed it into a victory over Iran. You have converted a lose-lose proposition of crippling sanctions vs appeasement into an Iranian nuclear collapse. The imminent threat of Iran has become an indefinite delay of its breakout capability. The huffing and puffing of the congress has been rendered irrelevant even before it hits your desk. A deadline has become a new beginning of negotiations. And you brought the Israelis along with you, without a peep of complaint. As for the punditocracy, so far so good.

Not bad for a beginner, Mr. President!

The Latest from Iran (3 January): Re-positioning

2220 GMT: BBC Persian is reporting on the Mojahedin of Islamic Revolution. One interesting claim in the statement: anti-establishment monarchist slogans were encouraged by Government agent provocateurs in the Ashura crowd.

222055 GMT: The Mojahedin of Islamic Revolution, following the earlier endorsement of the Islamic Iran Participation Front of the Mousavi post-Ashura statement (1420 GMT), have issued their response to the declaration.

NEW Iran: Authority and Challenge — Bring Out the (Multi-Sided) Chessboard
Iran Video of Week: Ahmadinejad 0, Tractor 1
Iran: The Non-Violent “Watershed” of the Mousavi Statement (Shahryar)
Iran: A Gut Reaction to Mousavi’s “Martyrdom v. Compromise” Statement (Lucas)
Iran Document: Mousavi’s “5 Stages to Resolution” Statement (1 January)
The Latest from Iran (2 January): The Ripples of the Mousavi Statement

2000 GMT: The Regime's Fist-Waving. Edward Yeranian of the Voice of America has a useful summary of today's denunciations of protesters, invocation of "foreign agents", and threats of prosecution from Minister of Interior Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar (1645 GMT) and the head of Iran's judiciary, Sadegh Larijani. Press TV continues to play up the Larijani combination of assurance ("fair trial") and warning ("investigate the events quickly and firmly").

1800 GMT: Green 88 members Mohammad Rafati and Mohammad Keighobadi have been arrested.

1645 GMT: Your Daily US-UK-Israel-MKO Announcement. It's Minister of Interior Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar reciting the litany today: "The rioters are encouraged and supported by Britain, the US and the Zionist regime. The involvement of the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO), enemies and those who seek to take revenge on the Islamic establishment during the past 30 years is quite clear."

Can't say this wins award for originality, although Mohammad-Najjar's promise that some MKO members will soon appear in court --- reportedly some Ashura detainees went on trial today --- has an ominous hint of a new scene in the staged drama.


1625 GMT: More Tough Shows for the Media. On a day when Governments in Washington and Tehran have been spinning tales away from the central front of the internal conflict in Iran, it did not take long for this one to get a headline.

This morning Press TV gave up space to a bit of tough puffery from the Iranian military, with Brigadier General Ahmad-Reza Pourdastan announcing a large military exercise next month to "improve the force's defensive capabilities" and "boost the region's security".

No big prizes for breaking the political code in this move: facing diplomatic pressure and possibly more sanctions on the nuclear issue and looking more than a bit shaky at home, Tehran puts up a show of strength against the ever-present "foreign enemies". CNN has already obliged, recycling the Press TV report and immediately putting it in the context of the US and Israeli portrayal of "time running out" to address Iran's "threat".

Meanwhile, the media's set-up of a case for more sanctions on Iran continues. The New York Times advertisement for the pro-sanctions forces in the Obama Administration (see 0840 GMT), who are working with pro-sanctions forces in Israel, has turned into a magic media circle, with Israel's Haaretz citing the article and bolstering the line: if there are more sanctions, then no Israeli military action.

1455 GMT: The Exam Strike. For the second day in a row, students at Amir Kabir University in Tehran have protested by refusing to sit their examinations.

1425 GMT: A Victory for the Regime. Amidst the political and religious challenges it is facing, the Iranian authorities have succeeded in curbing Ayatollah Ali Mohammad Dastgheib. After days of attacks on the Qoba Mosque in Shiraz, the Government has confiscated Dastgheib's offices and restricted the cleric's movements.

1420 GMT: Boosting the Mousavi Initaitive. The reformist Islamic Iran Participation Front has issued a statement of enthusiastic support for the Mousavi five-point resolution in the post-Ashura statement.

1245 GMT: Regime Divisions (cont.). Ayande News criticises the attempt by Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, in the name of the Qom Seminary Teachers Association, to denounce the marja (eminent cleric) status of Ayatollah Sane'i (see yesterday's updates).

Ayande has also launched a full-blooded attack on the editor of Kayhan, the "hard-line" Hossein Shariatmadari, accusing him of past duplicity (opposing Ayatollah Khamenei) and current misinformation (minimising the number of anti-regime demonstrators in protests).

Now here's the intriguing part: Ayande has been claimed to be linked to the Presidential candidate Mohsen Rezaei, who just wrote the Supreme Leader asking for reconciliation with a "retreating" Mir Hossein Mousavi. Is this the other part of the initiative, an assault upon those, including allies of President Ahmadinejad, who would block such a deal?

1230 GMT: Breaking the Freedom Movement. Iran's authorities have detained three more senior members of the party: Amir Khorram, Mohsen Mohagheghi, and Sara Tavassoli (daughter of the director of the Freedom Movement's offices).

1200 GMT: Let's Crush Them (But Do It Fairly). Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting is featuring a story of the head of Iran's judiciary, Sadegh Larijani, speaking about "fair trials" for those who have caused "fitna" (secular sedition).

1150 GMT: More Media Follies. This time it's Paul Harris of The Observer of London who goes Nuclear Critical. His attention to Iran is part of a wider piece on the challenges for President Obama, but the headline points to Tehran Emergency: "Barack Obama talks tough on terror as Iran raises nuclear stakes". Harris bases this diplomatic Red Alert on:

--- "A deadline for Iran to accept a UN-brokered deal passed on Thursday and raised the prospect of a fresh round of sanctions against Tehran" (as we noted months ago, the Obama Administration was going to let any deadline slip because it has not declared a break-down of the nuclear discussions);

--- "A senior Iranian figure said the west had just one month to come up with a better deal for it to swap its low-enriched uranium for nuclear fuel" (as we noted yesterday, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki's "ultimatum" was more a rhetorical defence against likely sanctions and an intervention in the domestic crisis, trying to boost the Government with "nationalist" sentiment)

--- "Many experts, however, think any resolution to the situation is unlikely." (no names, no details)

What "distinguishes" Harris' analysis, however, is not an omission of Iran's domestic situation but a distortion of it. He makes a point of noticing "last week, tens of thousands of supporters of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime demonstrated in Tehran in organised protests against foreign interference in Iran's affairs" --- you see, this is not only a Iranian Government on the verge of nuclear weapons, but one with popular support --- but he never mentions the anti-regime protests that took place only three days earlier.

1140 GMT: The Domestic Troubles. Testimony to our New Year analysis about the complex challenges to the Ahmadinejad Government --- "Iran's parliament rejected on Sunday the government's request to withdraw a bill aimed at gradually cutting energy and food subsidies".

The Government put forth the subsidy reduction plan as a key plank in its economic programme last autumn. In November, however, the Parliament linked any cut to the overall budget, requiring the Government to put the money into a special account for public spending.

At that point, Ahmadinejad called for the withdrawal of the entire proposal. He got his answer --- economically and politically --- today.

1025 GMT: Handling the Mousavi Statement. A bizarre article from Press TV's website, "Mousavi's statement draws varied reactions" --- instead of considering the political responses that we have noted in our analyses, the article opens with this clumsy attempt at belittling the opposition leader: "The Tehran Municipality has been clearing the Iranian capital of graffiti containing negative comments about defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi."

The last paragraphs do try to set out a party line, but even this is uncertain: "Some, such as Mohsen Rezaei, another defeated presidential candidate, described the declaration as a "retreat" from the position of denying the legitimacy of Ahmadienjad's administration. Others however, condemned the statement, repeating their earlier calls for judicial action against the "leaders of Fitna (Arabic for anarchy)."

1020 GMT: Iranian television is reporting that the first trials, held in Revolutionary Court, of those arrested on Ashura (27 December) have begun.

1010 GMT: Latest Arrests. Journalist Rouzbeh Karimi and his wife, lawyer Forough Mirzaee, have been detained.

0840 GMT: US Sanctions and the Nuclear-First Approach. After weeks in which the White House seemed to shift to a rights-first vision of Iran, a faction in the Obama Administration appear to have re-staked the "All about Nukes, All about Sanctions" ground.

An article by The New York Times' David Sanger and William Broad, the go-to reporters for the nukes/sanctions officials, bluntly opens with the statement that the recent internal tension and demands of the Green movement are again pawns in the nuclear game:

As President Obama faces pressure to back up his year-end ultimatum for diplomatic progress with Iran, the administration says that domestic unrest and signs of unexpected trouble in Tehran’s nuclear program make its leaders particularly vulnerable to strong and immediate new sanctions....

Although repeated rounds of sanctions over many years have not dissuaded Iran from pursuing nuclear technology, an administration official involved in the Iran policy said the hope was that the current troubles “give us a window to impose the first sanctions that may make the Iranians think the nuclear program isn’t worth the price tag.”

Beyond the relegation of the internal conflict in Iran to a supporting role in other campaigns, what is bizarre about this public-relations piece is that it promotes sanctions even though the possibility of any supposed Iranian nuclear weapon has diminished in recent months:

Obama administration officials said they believed that the bomb-development effort was seriously derailed by the exposure three months ago of the country’s secret enrichment plant under construction near the holy city of Qum....

In addition, international nuclear inspectors report that at Iran’s plant in Natanz, where thousands of centrifuges spin to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel, the number of the machines that are currently operating has dropped by 20 percent since the summer, a decline nuclear experts attribute to technical problems. [Note: EA pointed this out in the autumn; Sanger and Broad ignored the technical issue until the article today.]

The illogic and the (cynical?) political manoeuvring is beside the main point, however. This articles and others, such as a recent piece in The Washington Post that Israel was quite happy to go with the sanctions route, all point to the Administration's acceptance of sanctions measures that will be passed by the US Congress within the next month.

0820 GMT: As the drama of public conflict recedes for the moment --- although the regime continues to arrest activists, journalists, and key organisers ---and is replaced by the political manoeuvres both inside and outside the Iranian establishment, we have posted an analysis, "Bring Out the (Multi-Sided) Chessboard".

Middle East Inside Line: Saudi Arabia's al-Faisal "Israel is Like a Spoiled Child"

On Saturday, after a meeting with his Turkish counterpart Prof. Ahmet Davutoglu, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal criticized Israel, blaming international actors for "spoiling" Israel in the region with their "unjust treatment":

The reason why a solution cannot be reached is the preferential treatment that Israel gets. When other countries violate international law, they get punished, except for Israel. If war crimes are committed, other countries get punished, except Israel.

Israel has become in the international community like a spoiled child. It does what it wants without being questioned or punished.

Israel-Palestine: Gideon Levy “The Time for Words is Over”
Israel-Palestine: Is Egypt Bringing Abbas to Peace Talks?

Faisal said that Tel Aviv's plan to construct 700 apartments in East Jerusalem is "a source of worry, which we strongly condemn". He asserted that Washington and other players should take a "firm and serious" stand to put an end to Israeli construction on land that Palestinians want for a future state.

The statement is the latest attempted pressure from Al-Faisal, who had also proposed to Barack Obama, before the US President's Cairo speech this spring, that the US should use economic and military assistance to get Israeli concessions. The plan would have altered the 2007 Memorandum of Understanding, promising that Israel would receive $30 billion over 10 years, but Washington had already assured Israel that there would be no cut.

For his part, Davutoglu said that Israel should end the "catastrophe and calamity" in the Gaza Strip and should freeze the building of settlements.

Afghanistan and the Long War: "Obama, Tell Me How This Ends"

From Andrew Bacevich in The New York Daily News:

On the march to Baghdad, back when America's war on terror was young, a rising star in the United States military lobbed this enigmatic bon mot to an accommodating reporter: "Tell me how this ends." Thus did then-Maj. Gen. David Petraeus in 2003 neatly frame the issue that still today haunts the U.S.-led effort to defeat violent anti-Western jihadism.

To know how something ends implies knowing where it's going. Yet eight years after it began, the war on terror is headed back to where it started. The prequel is the sequel, Afghanistan replacing Iraq as the once and now once again central front.

Afghanistan: A Few Numbers You Might Want to Know About the War

So are we making progress? Even as President Obama escalates the war in Afghanistan, that question hangs in the air, ignored by all. Rather than explaining how the struggle will end, the President merely affirms that it must continue, his eye fixed on pacifying a country of which his own secretary of state recently remarked "We have no long-term stake there."

How pacifying Afghanistan will bring us closer to the figurative Berlin or Tokyo that defines our ultimate objective is unclear. True, the 9/11 plot was hatched in Afghanistan, and we want to prevent any recurrence of that event. It's also true that Dallas was the site of our last presidential assassination. Yet no one thinks that posting Secret Service agents in the Texas School Book Depository holds the key to keeping our current President safe.

Then there is the Af-Pak argument --- that U.S. military action in Afghanistan is necessary to ensuring the stability of nuclear-armed Pakistan. Selling Pakistanis on the logic of this argument poses a challenge, however, given that the eight-year Western military presence in Afghanistan corresponds to an eight-year period during which Pakistan has edged steadily closer to internal collapse.

In reality, the chief rationale for pouring more troops into Afghanistan derives from a determination to restore the credibility of American arms, badly tarnished in Iraq. Thanks to Petraeus' rediscovery of counterinsurgency doctrine, road-tested in Surge I, U.S. forces ostensibly won a belated but significant triumph. Surge II could show that Iraq was no fluke.

Military analysts who a decade ago were touting the wonders of precision-guided munitions now cite counterinsurgency as the new American way of war. Killing the enemy has become passé. Advanced thinking now assigns top priority to "securing the people," insulating them from violence and winning them over with good governance. Twenty-first century American military officers speak the language of 20th century social reformers, sounding less like George Patton and more like Jane Addams.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has declared his intention to remedy "the weakness of \[Afghan political\] institutions, the unpunished abuse of power by corrupt officials and powerbrokers, a widespread sense of political disenfranchisement and a longstanding lack of economic opportunity."

Undertaken in Louisiana or Illinois, this would qualify as an ambitious agenda. In Afghanistan, it qualifies as a tall order indeed.

But assume the best: If McChrystal replicates in Afghanistan the success that Petraeus achieved in Iraq - ignore, please, the government ministries imploding in Baghdad - where does that leave us?

To sustain public support, a protracted war needs a persuasive narrative. Americans after Dec. 7, 1941, didn't know when their war would end. But they took comfort in knowing where and how it was going to end: with enemy armies destroyed and enemy capitals occupied.

Americans today haven't a clue when, where or how their war will end. The Long War, as the Pentagon aptly calls it, has no coherent narrative. When it comes to defining victory, U.S. political and military leaders are flying blind.

Historically, the default strategy for wars that lack a plausible victory narrative is attrition. When you don't know how to win, you try to outlast your opponent, hoping he'll run out of troops, money and will before you do. Think World War I, but also Vietnam.

The revival of counterinsurgency doctrine, celebrated as evidence of enlightened military practice, commits America to a postmodern version of attrition. Rather than wearing the enemy down, we'll build contested countries up, while expending hundreds of billions of dollars (borrowed from abroad) and hundreds of soldiers' lives (sent from home).

How does this end? The verdict is already written: The Long War ends not in victory but in exhaustion and insolvency, when the United States runs out of troops and out of money.