WH INFLUENCE FADES IN MID-EAST

NEED TO KNOW: NATIONAL SECURITY

The End of the Affair

Not long ago, it seemed as if the White House could give marching orders to Middle Eastern regimes. What happened?

By Yochi J. Dreazen

Updated: October 20, 2011 | 6:38 p.m.
October 20, 2011 | 5:00 p.m.

AP PHOTO/MOHAMMAD HANNON

A rare bright spot: Celebrations in Libya.

The death of former Libyan ruler Muammar el-Qaddafi allows the Obama administration to claim credit for ending a war it never wanted to fight. The White House wavered for weeks before it reluctantly joined the NATO campaign. It deployed far fewer aides to Libya than its allies, pledged much less money, and was the last major allied power to recognize the interim government. But the White House has a simple reason for celebrating—and slightly exaggerating—its role in ousting Qaddafi: American power is on the wane throughout the Middle East, and Libya is a rare success story.

From Iraq to Israel, Egypt to Bahrain, Washington finds itself relegated to the sidelines rather than directing the action. During the George W. Bush administration, Washington—using carrots and sticks—persuaded a number of governments to do its bidding: Saudi Arabia made peace overtures to Israel; Palestine held elections; monarchies like Jordan and Morocco pursued halting democratic reforms; Iraq cracked down on Shia militias and enfranchised its disenchanted Sunni minority; and Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip and offered a peace deal to the Palestinians. The Bush White House suffered many stumbles—none bigger than the invasion of Iraq—but regional governments at least took Washington’s wishes seriously.

Today, not so much. Bahrain ordered a crackdown on protesters, ignoring American exhortations to negotiate with the demonstrators. President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen returned to his country despite President Obama’s demand that he step aside. Egypt’s military rulers rejected U.S. requests to lift a hated emergency law and to free a Jewish-American law student accused of spying. Iraq rebuffed an offer to extend the American troop presence and proclaimed support for Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. Israel continues to build settlements in the West Bank. “People in the region recognize that we’re not as dominant a power as we thought we were, that we were just as surprised by the Arab Spring as they were … and that we are, if anything, less capable of directing where things go from here than the indigenous peoples and governments,” says Gordon Adams, a foreign-policy professor at American University.

U.S. influence in the Middle East is ebbing for three primary reasons. First, the American public—preoccupied with economic issues and exhausted by a decade of war—has lost its appetite for deep engagement in the region, giving local rulers confidence that they can ignore Washington without major repercussions. Second, Arab governments, which watched Obama throw Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak under the bus, think that Washington will no longer trade mild political repression for stability. And third, the image of Mubarak on trial (in a cage) has motivated rulers to avoid a similar fate by using any means necessary to hold onto power.

Israel has its own reasons for tuning out the White House. In addition to settlement expansions, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used a televised West Wing appearance this summer to upbraid Obama for suggesting negotiations based on the country’s pre-1967 borders. Netanyahu’s hard-line positions on borders and negotiations with the Palestinians have bipartisan support in Congress. Israeli officials say privately that Netanyahu expects Obama to lose the 2012 election, and so the prime minister merely plans to wait the president out. “Netanyahu wasn’t the one who blinked first,” Adams noted.

The result? American entreaties are falling on deaf ears. During a recent trip to Cairo, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta asked Egypt’s military rulers to repeal by November a law letting them detain protesters indefinitely; with less than two weeks to go, they show no sign of doing so. In Yemen, Saleh has refused to honor his pledge to transfer power, despite American pressure. When Bahraini authorities sentenced 20 doctors and nurses to long prison sentences last month for treating wounded protesters, State Department officials criticized the action. A Bahraini court recently set aside the original sentences, but the medical professionals will be tried again in the coming weeks, and it’s far from clear if, or when, they’ll be freed.

Iraq is an even more glaring example. The White House—anxious about Iranian influence and Iraqi political and security challenges—tried to sell the Iraqis on a deal to keep 2,000 to 3,000 troops in the country as trainers beyond the end of this year. The surprising thing isn’t that the White House worked hard to keep American forces in Iraq. It’s that the Iraqi government (installed with U.S. backing and kept afloat by aid from Washington) didn’t hesitate to say no. Barring a major reversal, the last of the 43,000 remaining troops will leave Iraq in six weeks.

In Libya, Arabic news channels showed Qaddafi’s corpse, and crowds jubilantly waved Libya’s pre-Qaddafi flag in Surt and Tripoli, talking optimistically about their future and firing guns into the air. The White House has its own reason to celebrate: It may be its last Mideast win for quite some time. 

This article appeared in the Saturday, October 22, 2011 edition of National Journal.

Verizon, AT&T or Sprint for your iPhone?

Q. Hi Kim. I love your radio show! I'm going to buy an iPhone 4S soon if I can get my hands on one. It'll be my first smartphone, and I'm really excited! I'm having trouble deciding between Sprint, AT&T and Verizon, though. Which carrier do you think is best? Thanks! - Matt of Oklahoma City, OK, listens to my national radio show on KOKC 1520 AM

A. That's a great question, Matt, and thanks for listening to the show. You're smart to carefully consider your cellular provider options, because you're locking yourself into a two-year commitment. The cost of changing your mind is dear - all three carriers charge a $350 early termination fee. Yikes! The three networks generally provide good nationwide coverage, but reception can be iffy on the local level because of terrain and tower locations. In addition, some carriers have better data pipelines than voice pipelines. Since you listen to my show, you may have heard me refer to AT&T as having "no bars in more places." There are still areas around in my hometown of Phoenix where my calls just get dropped. Talk about annoying. Fortunately, it is getting better. In Phoenix, Verizon has better call coverage than AT&T. AT&T, on the other hand, offers better data speeds. It may be totally reverse where you live. Ask friends and family about their cellular reception experience in your area. Cell companies also offer coverage maps on their sites. These are good but nothing beats the honest opinion of a trusted friend.  1  2  3  4  5  Next >

Peace in Our Time with Iran: BHO FOREIGN POLICY FAILS AGAIN

Peace in Our Time with Iran

Posted by Kenneth R. Timmerman Bio ↓ on Oct 20th, 2011

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Now we can all rest assured. Iran’s nuclear weapons program has “stumbled badly” and is “beset by poorly performing equipment, shortages of parts and other woes,” the Washington Post proclaimed on Tuesday.

An alleged joint U.S.-Israeli cyber attack known as Stuxnet and other problems have taken “a mounting toll” on Iran’s nuclear centrifuge program that could “hurt Iran’s ability to break out quickly” into the ranks of the world’s nuclear powers,” the Post concluded.

In other words, it’s “peace in our time” when it comes to Iran. Obama’s policy of pressure and incentives (the old “carrots and sticks” approach) is working. We can all go home, pop open a good bottle, and relax.

In case you were wondering about his “administration” sources, the author of this good news story, Joby Warrick, jetted off to Libya with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as his story appeared on the front page of Post’s printed edition on Tuesday. Pravda has spoken.

To give his fairy tale the “audacity of hope,” Warrick cited two just-released reports by David Albright, who briefly worked as an on-site inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Citing fragmentary evidence gathered by IAEA inspectors in Iran, Albright extrapolated graphs for the production of low-enriched uranium (LEU) at Iran’s primary enrichment plant at Natanz, which many analysts believe was hit by the Stuxnet virus in the fall of 2009.

While overall production of LEU appeared to have remained stable, there appears to have been an abrupt drop over the summer. Albright attributes this to problems Iran is having with acquiring centrifuge production materials, and to the lingering impact of Stuxnet. “Without question, they have been set back,” he told the Post.

But at the same time, the IAEA data shows that Iran has actually increased significantly the number of centrifuges that are actively spinning. So if their setbacks are temporary, they quite feasibly could dramatically increase their production in the very near future. That is just the opposite of what theWashington Post wants you to believe.

Albright has a history of downplaying the progress of Iran’s nuclear program, and tried to get Rep. Sylvester Reyes (D, Tx) to call back a report by the Republican staff of the House intelligence committee in 2007 once he took over as committee chairman.

The report warned that the IAEA and the U.S. intelligence community were downplaying the seriousness of Iran’s nuclear weapons efforts, in particular, its successful procurement of centrifuge gear from Pakistani nuclear weapons guru A. Q. Khan, as I described on this website at the time.

The HPSCI report criticized then IAEA Secretary General Mohamad ElBaradei for firing chief inspector Christophe Charlier, a U.S. nuclear weapons expert, for raising concerns about Iranian deception. Albright defended ElBaradei for firing the Charlier and called on HPSCI to recall the report.

In a parallel report, released on Monday, Albright claimed that Iran appears to have abandoned using imported maraging steel to make the bellows of its new, more efficient uranium enrichment centrifuge design. Instead, they are using carbon fiber, a material Iran claims to be manufacturing locally.

There are several possible explanations for the shift. Albright says the most likely is that U.S. and international “sanctions may have forced Iran into choosing a less desirable technical centrifuge design.”

In fact, according to design information Iran provided the IAEA, Iran always intended to use carbon fiber for the bellows and rotors of its newer, more efficient IR-2 centrifuges, and is not resorting to a cheap substitute because of sanctions.

A fellow left-leaning analyst writing the “arms control wonk” website pointed out four years ago that Iran’s IR-2 (also known as P-2) centrifuges would be using carbon fiber, not maraging steel.

Despite this evidence, Albright concluded, “Constraints on Iran’s advanced centrifuge program have resulted directly from the effectiveness of targeted sanctions against critical goods necessary for the manufacture of centrifuge components.” That certainly warranted a front-page story in Tuesday’s Washington Post, since it gave the key to the “Peace in Our Time” theme that ran throughout.

But Warrick went even further by tying the apparent (and I believe, unsubstantiated) setbacks in Iran’s nuclear programs to the apparent stumble-bunnie plotto assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, DC.

‘“We’re used to seeing them do bad things, but this plot was so bizarre, it could be a sign of desperation, a reflection of the fact that they’re feeling under siege,” said [an Obama administration] official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so he could discuss the matter candidly,” Warrick reported.

In other words, this attempted act of terror was not an act of war; it was the act of a desperate man that can be safely ignored.

To further enhance the impression that we have nothing to worry about, Warrick then hauled out a real whopper:

“U.S. officials have said that the alleged assassination plot originated from elements within Iran’s elite Quds Force, a covert paramilitary group. But it is not clear whether the nation’s top leaders knew about or approved the plan,” he wrote (emphasis mine).

Now the indictment states clearly that Gen. Qassem Suleymani, the head of the Quds Force, approved the plot. The Quds Force is the overseas expeditionary wing of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, the IRGC, and takes its orders directly from Supreme leader ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Gen. Suleymani is a close confidant of Khamenei. What more “top” leader could possible have approved such a plot?

The Obama White House believes that Khamenei feels trapped, and they are trying to give him some wiggle room. They argue that he is fighting for his political life against Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani, both of whom would like to unseat him, and that he doesn’t have a direct line to Washington so he can arrange a Kumbaya moment with our president.

So what we are getting is excuses for the Iranian regime’s murderous impulses. Next perhaps will be, “the devil made him do it.”

The IAEA has already told us that Iran has cold-tested the components of a workable nuclear weapons design. Forget this nonsense about some illusory “setback” to their program. All clandestine nuclear weapons programs, including our own in the 1940s, have had their setbacks. Our biggest worry should be the upcoming nuclear weapons test Iran is planning to conduct with North Korea, especially if they focus on a smaller yield but potent EMP warhead.

Peace in our time? Sure, we’ve seen that film before, and we ought to know how it ends.

Stay tuned.