WarSclerotic

Obama administration: Iran talks preferable to war – CNN Political Ticker – CNN.com Blogs.

2 hours ago

CNN Chief White House Correspondent Jessica Yellin

Foreign Policy Debate: On Libya, Middle East, Obama Faces Tough Questions And Few Easy Answers.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — A few weeks ago, a former CIA analyst and a national security adviser to the campaign of President Barack Obama lost a debate about the future of the Middle East to a blogger and a doctor.

The question being argued, during an episode of the debate program “Intelligence Squared,” was whether Islamist democracies, of the sort that have emerged in the aftermath of the revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, were better than the dictatorships that preceded them.

The dictatorships won the debate.

It’s not a perfect analogue to the foreign policy discussion taking place in the current presidential campaign: for one thing, the Intelligence Squared audience was not a representative sample of the country, and the options facing Obama and his opponent, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, are not nearly as stark.

But as the election turns toward foreign policy with Monday night’s final debate in Boca Raton, Fla., there’s reason to see an ominous sign for a president who has thrown his support behind the popular uprisings in countries like Egypt and Libya: Americans are worried about the discord in the Middle East, and the sort of complex explanations required to make sense of it increasingly do not satisfy.

“There’s an enormous amount of fatigue with the Muslim Middle East, and people fear it, on both the left and on the right,” said Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA analyst and now a senior fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, a neoconservative think tank, who argued on behalf of democracy in the Intelligence Squared debate. (His partner was Brian Katulis, an informal Obama adviser and senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress. Their opponents were the anti-Islamic watchdog Daniel Pipes, and Zuhdi Jasser, a doctor who runs the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.)

After a wave of protests at several American embassies in countries like Tunisia and Egypt, and the devastating attack on an American diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, Obama has increasingly had to defend his policy of supporting the democratic transitions, despite the chaos some seem to have brought with them.

“It was absolutely the right thing for us to do to align ourselves with democracy, universal rights, a notion that people have to be able to participate in their own governance,” Obama said last month on “60 Minutes.”

But the American public is showing signs of growing restless. One recent poll from the Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans do not believe the Arab revolutions will improve life in those countries. Fifty-four percent agreed that it is more important to have stability than democracy.

More worrisome for the Obama campaign are the indications that his lead on foreign policy matters has been slipping somewhat, especially since the September attack in Benghazi. A recent Wall Street Journal poll gave the president an eight point lead over Romney, 46 percent to 38 percent, down seven points from the year before. In September, a Bloomberg poll found that Obama trailed Romney for the first time on who would better handle terrorism, 48 to 42.

So far, Romney has avoided creating a clear contrast between himself and Obama on many of the central pieces of the president’s foreign policy. They both agree on the timeline for withdrawal in Afghanistan, have similar suggestions for handling the crisis in Syria, and Romney has expressed broad support for the administration’s tough tactics with Iran, even if he has rarely credited Obama for doing so.

Instead, the overarching distinction Romney has sought to draw in his past speeches on foreign policy has been one of tone: he speaks of “leadership” and “American exceptionalism,” while painting Obama’s foreign policy as riddled with “passivity,” as he said in a recent speech at the Virginia Military Institute.

In this sense, the rising unrest in the Middle East has provided Romney with the opening that his specific policy prescriptions have not: it allows him to portray the president’s foreign policy as “unraveling,” as he put it in the second debate, and force Obama to come up with the convoluted answers.

“As the dust settles, as the murdered are buried, Americans are asking how this happened, how the threats we face have grown so much worse, and what this calls on America to do,” Romney said during his VMI speech. “These are the right questions.”

“One of the things a president is supposed to do is when you have these kinds of tremendously important things happening in the Middle East is to give to the American people a sense of what is happening, a way to go forward,” said Eliot Cohen, a former Bush Administration official who now advises the Romney campaign, in a recent media briefing. “You haven’t had any attempt to portray to the American people, What is going on here, How should we think about it, What should we do about it?”

They are questions that resist snappy answers. Obama’s statement to “60 Minutes last month” defending the burgeoning democracies was actually part of a wonky, 200-word answer that navigated anti-American extremism and what he called “bumps in the road.”

“I’d said even at the time that this is going to be a rocky path,” Obama said.

Later, in a detailed response to a question from HuffPost on the same topic, Colin Kahl, a top Obama foreign policy surrogate, offered up many of the same points, and added that the revolution in the United States took decades, and a Civil War, before it settled down.

“At the end of the day, [the Romney campaign’s] political argument is, ‘Look at this scary place,’ and ‘If only you had tougher folks like the Republicans in charge, all these fears would go away,'” Kahl said. “But there’s no substance to that argument.”

In the Intelligence Squared debate, however, it wasn’t necessarily the substantive arguments that won the day, Gerecht said. Instead, it was the audience’s anxiety about the ongoing disarray, and the sort of worrisome questions about what the changes might bring that the Romney campaign has been raising.

“People are very skeptical about what’s going to come from these revolutions,” said Jamie M. Fly, the executive director of the Foreign Policy Institute, a conservative think tank, and an occasional adviser to the Romney campaign.

“A lot of that is because we don’t have a clear sense in terms of our policy right now, what our goals are, what we’re doing to shape these developments and the forces that are emerging. And that’s a problem for a lot of average Americans — they look at these situations and think, ‘We are just helpless. We don’t think this administration has a real policy.'”

The Truth About Libya – Failed Foreign Policy – YouTube.

A joint SecureAmericaNow.org – A RightChange.com Production.

America was attacked on September 11th, 2012 by Al Qaeda at our consulate in Libya. Our consulate was burned and four Americans including our ambassador were murdered.

President Obama and his administration denied it was a terrorist attack for weeks. Since then, Americans have learned that Obama and his administration knew it was an act of terror all along and chose to tell the public it was because of a Youtube video protest. It’s time for Obama to tell the truth on Libya. We can’t afford more apologies, excuses, and weakness.

( Thanks to: Steven K. Harr – JW )

For What it’s Worth -10-22-12 – YouTube.

A series of vids I hope to make on a daily basis regarding stories posted on “A Sclerotic Goes to War.”

Today’s vid covers:

1. NY Times leak of Obama planning one-on-one talks with Iran after the election.
2. Uri Lubrani: “Under no circumstances will this regime divest itself of the nuclear program. They’ve gone much too far on it and been too successful. They’re going to continue with it, no matter what,” Lubrani said in an interview. He said the Iranian leaders he’d met over the years were all highly skilled negotiators who would run circles around American officials.

Any and all feedback in the comments on this post would be most appreciated.

Joseph Wouk

Israel’s Top Iran Expert: You Can’t Out-Negotiate the Mullahs – The Daily Beast.

Oct 22, 2012 9:00 AM EDT

Sure, Iran’s open to haggle with the United States about nukes. But there’s no way the nation will ever stop enriching uranium, Israel’s top Iran expert tells Dan Ephron.

Israel’s top Iran expert, a former spy who predicted the downfall of the shah in 1979, has news for President Barack Obama or anyone else hoping to talk Iran out of its nuclear program: forget about out-negotiating the mullahs.

Uri Lubrani, who was Israel’s ambassador to Iran from 1973 to 1978, told The Daily Beast that the Iran’s reported willingness to engage directly with the United States was yet another sign that sanctions were hurting the regime. But he said with dead certainty that Iran would not agree to stop enriching uranium—no matter what incentives it is offered.

His remarks, following a report in The New York Times that Iran had agreed to direct talks with Washington, echoed the skepticism of Israel’s top political officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But they carried more weight and less political baggage coming from Lubrani, who at 86 is among the grand old men of Israeli secret affairs.

“Under no circumstances will this regime divest itself of the nuclear program. They’ve gone much too far on it and been too successful. They’re going to continue with it, no matter what,” Lubrani said in an interview. He said the Iranian leaders he’d met over the years were all highly skilled negotiators who would run circles around American officials.

“They are traders in their tradition. They’re bazaaris. They know how to how to haggle, when to catch an adversary when he’s weak. They’re pros,” Lubrani said.

“It took me a long time to understand this. I developed a gut feeling out of sheer experience. No Ivy League graduate will ever really understand the soul and the tradition and the behavior of the Iranians.”

Lubrani helped spearhead relations between Israel and Iran in the 1970s that included military exchanges, oil deals, and commercial ties. The two countries even worked together on a developing a missile that could carry a nuclear warhead, according to reports.

But after visiting the shah’s lavish resort island of Kish in 1977, Lubrani cautioned Israeli officials at home that the regime had grown so corrupt, its days were numbered, according to various accounts. American officials apparently dismissed his warnings.

When Islamists ousted the shah in a 1979, Iran went from friend of Israel to menacing foe.

The report in The New York Times said Iran had agreed in principle to face-to-face talks but wanted them to start after the U.S. election next month. While administration officials denied a final agreement had been reached, the issue seemed sure to come up in the debate tonight between Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the last one before the elections next month.

Iran says its nuclear program is civilian in nature but international agencies have repeatedly caught the regime hiding key facilities or lying about its uranium enrichment. Netanyahu, reacting to the Times account, said he had heard nothing from Washington about possible talks.

“I have no information about such contacts, and I cannot say whether there is truth in the report,” he said at a public event Sunday. “I can say, though, that Iran has used negotiations to buy time with America.” Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said he hoped the story was unsubstantiated.

“They are traders in their tradition. They’re bazaaris. They know how to how to haggle.”

“There are 10 years of cumulative experience, and the Iranians have deceived the Security Council and the P5+1 time and time again,” Lieberman said, referring to the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany.

Netanyahu has long been skeptical about the chances of weaning Iran of its nuclear program through diplomacy, pushing instead for the United States to pledge to use military force if Iran crosses certain red lines. But Lubrani, who continued helping shape Israel’s policy toward Iran in the decades since serving there, believes it would be a mistake to attack the installations. He advocates instead quiet support for Iranian opposition groups that could foment regime change.

Lubrani criticized the Obama administration for failing to sufficiently support Iranian protesters when they rose up against the regime in June 2009. “I don’t believe in a military solution,” Lubrani said in the interview. “I believe the solution is in the people of Iran getting rid of this regime. And the west has to support them.”

Israel Hayom | A well-timed leak?.

Israel Hayom | Obama is gambling on Iran.

The Stakes in Tonight’s Foreign Policy Debate.

Foreign policy, the topic of tonight’s debate, was suddenly thrust into the voters’ consciousness by the murder of 4 Americans, including our ambassador, in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11. Intensifying the fallout of this event has been the Obama administration’s incoherent, clumsy, duplicitous, and rapidly unraveling attempt to blame the terrorist murders on a YouTube movie trailer lampooning Mohammed, in order to downplay the strength of the heavily armed jihadist outfits, some connected to al Qaeda, now swarming in Libya as a result of our overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi.

If Governor Romney wants to succeed, he must focus on the Benghazi attack and subsequent misdirection not just to highlight the administration’s increasingly obvious attempt to spin a carefully planned terrorist attack into a spontaneous reaction to an offensive video. More importantly, Romney must use the attack to emphasize its real significance: the political expediencies, character flaws, and dubious ideological assumptions behind Obama’s foreign policy failures.

The evidence of this failure is obvious throughout the Middle East. Start with Libya, the country most in the news. Eighteen months after U.S. air power facilitated the overthrow of Gaddafi In Libya, a weak central government is dominated by hundreds of heavily armed militant Islamist bands, some with links to al Qaeda, of the sort that killed our ambassador. Before his death, ambassador Chris Stevens reported that black al Qaeda battle-flags were flying over government buildings in Benghazi. This is consistent with an August 2012 report from the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress, which documented al Qaeda’s influence in Libya and concluded, “The Libyan Revolution may have created an environment conducive to jihad and empowered the large and active community of Libyan jihadists, which is known to be well connected to international jihad.”

Elsewhere in Africa, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is active across a broad swath of North Africa, and is suspected of complicity in the Benghazi attack. Al Qaeda-linked militants control territory in northern Mali the size of France, and are applying shari’a law, including punishments like stoning, amputation, and public beatings.  In Nigeria the jihadist group Boko Haram, whose real name is “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad,” is also linked to AQIM, with whom it shares training, funds, and explosives. Boko Haram has been murdering Christians and others, 650 in this year alone, in order to fulfill the mandate of its name. And in Yemen, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula continues to battle the government and to plot terrorist attacks. Contrary to Obama’s claims, Al Qaeda’s leadership may have been degraded, but the franchise continues to be strong and active.

Likewise in the Middle East, where the jihadist Muslim Brothers have come to power in Egypt, the region’s most populous country, thanks to Obama’s abandonment of the brutal but reliable Hosni Mubarak, who had kept them in check. Even as al Qaeda terrorists have stepped up attacks in Iraq in the wake of our withdrawal, that country is strengthening its ties to Iran, allowing the Iranians to cross Iraqi air space in order to deliver arms to Syria’s Bashar al Assad. In Syria, numerous jihadist groups fighting Assad are gaining valuable battlefield experience in tactics and weapons, including surface-to-air missiles probably acquired from Gaddafi’s looted arsenals. The Taliban in Afghanistan are surging in anticipation of Obama’s announced 2014 withdrawal, with U.S.-trained Afghan security forces turning their weapons on coalition troops, killing 51 this year. Given the weakness of the corrupt regime of Hamid Karzai, there is a very good chance that the Taliban will reestablish itself as a major power in Afghanistan after U.S. forces withdraw in 2014.

Most dangerously, Iran continues its march to the acquisition of nuclear weapons with which it can “wipe Israel off the map,” as President Ahmadinejad has threatened. According to a recent DEBKA report, Iran’s “nuclear program’s high-speed uranium enrichment plant has now been entirely sequestered in the fortified underground Fordo site near Qom,” which means the Israelis will not be able to destroy the site completely without America’s help. DEBKA continues, “The Iranians are preparing to change the ‘active formation’ of the Fordo centrifuges and adapt them for refining uranium up to the 60 percent level, a short step before the weapons grade of 90 percent. The conversion is expected to be ready to go in the second half of December or early January 2013.” Yet despite this fast approaching point of no return, the Obama administration has refused to back up non-lethal sanctions with a credible threat of force, leaving the Iranians to calculate correctly that they have enough time to reach nuclear capability.

Finally, Obama has chilled relations with our one reliable ally in the Middle East, Israel. He has accepted the specious pretext that “settlements” are the roadblock to peace, claimed that negotiations must start with the indefensible 1967 armistice line, snubbed and insulted Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, and worst of all, refused to back vigorously and unequivocally Israel’s attempts to eliminate the existential threat represented by a nuclear-armed Iran. Indeed, his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, said of an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran, “I don’t want to be complicit if they [Israel] choose to do it.” Such hostile talk has emboldened the Iranians and disheartened not just Israel, but other allies like Saudi Arabia who know what sort of disruptions and dangers will follow the mullahs’ getting the bomb.

Obama, in short, has reversed the famous aphorism of the Roman general Sulla: under his foreign policy, America has become no better enemy, no worse friend. Our retreat and weakness have diminished America’s stabilizing role in the region, creating a vacuum other countries are eager to fill. As Amir Taheri recently wrote, “For six decades American power acted as the pole that kept the tent [regional stability] up. Over the past four years, however, Barack Obama has pulled that pole away, allowing the tent to sag and, in parts, collapse. As opportunist powers, Russia, Iran and Turkey are trying to fill the vacuum created by America’s retreat. Thus, Russia has just returned as a top supplier of weapons to Iraq, clinching a $4.2 billion contract, partly thanks to lobbying by Iran.” Under Obama, the United States now has little influence over events, even as our own national interests, values, and security are put in jeopardy by these developments.

If Romney wants to gain the upper hand tonight, he needs to highlight this litany of failure. More important, he has to identity the flaws of character and ideology that have led to foreign policy disaster. The political needs of reelection, of course, have shaped Obama’s reactions to events. He staked his foreign policy success on the narrative that our major problem was al Qaeda, so all we needed to do was kill bin Laden and use drone strikes to degrade al Qaeda’s leadership. Hence Obama’s recent assertions that “Al Qaeda’s on its heels” and  “Al Qaeda is on the run.” Couple the war on al Qaeda to “democracy promotion” in the region, and all our terrorist problems would disappear. As Obama said on “60 Minutes,” follow this policy and “over the long term we are more likely to get a Middle East and North Africa that is more peaceful, more prosperous and more aligned with…our interests.”

That narrative explains Obama’s clumsy attempt to attribute the Benghazi attack to the “disgusting” YouTube video and the “spontaneous reaction,” as U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice said five days after the attack, that the video provoked, thus supporting the “al Qaeda on its heels” claim. But as we’ve seen above, al Qaeda is not just active, but growing. It is the mother ship of numerous other jihadist outfits with whom it cooperates and coordinates. But Obama’s admission that the attack was a carefully planned lethal celebration of the 9/11 attacks would perforce have repudiated the linchpin of his alleged foreign policy success, and it would have shown that contrary to his “60 Minutes” assertions, during his administration the region has become less peaceful and less aligned with our interests.

But equally important are the failures of Obama’s character, particularly his grandiose estimation of his world-historical significance. Believing that Muslims would react positively to his Muslim name and Muslim roots, Obama thought that all he had to do was show up, and all these countries would forget their national interests and religious beliefs. Of course that arrogant assumption has failed miserably, as surveys of the region show. According to the Pew Research Center, confidence in Obama exceeds 25% only in one country, Lebanon. And those numbers are significantly lower than they were when he took office in 2009. These data should not surprise anyone who knows that nations base their policies on their own culturally specific beliefs and national interests, not on other leaders’ charm or efforts at ingratiation. All Obama’s solicitous “outreach” has achieved is to create the impression that America is a weak enemy and an unreliable ally.

But more than anything else, the widespread self-loathing, self-doubt, and guilt over America’s presumed historical crimes like colonialism, racism, and imperialism have undermined our foreign policy by projecting weakness and a lack of confidence in our own principles and way of life. We saw this in Obama’s infamous 2009 Cairo speech, in which he extolled––before an audience including Muslim Brothers sitting in the front row–– the mythical superiority of Islamic culture, and implicitly apologized for “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.” Given this history of exploitation and oppression, Muslim terrorism thus must be understood as a response to these historical injustices, a reaction to our sins rather than the expression of religious beliefs.

This progressive reflex to blame America first explains why Obama spent so much time after the Benghazi attack talking about the obscure YouTube video. In his remarks on September 12, rather than explicitly linking the murder of Americans to terrorist jihadists and defending the First Amendment, he harped on the video and thundered, “We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others.” In his U.N. speech, again he referred 6 times to the video, and said nothing specific about jihadist terror, not to mention failing vigorously to defend the central human right of free speech enshrined in our own First Amendment. Indeed, the producer of the video has been jailed on a minor probation violation, creating that “chilling effect” the ACLU usually frets over, and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dempsey personally called a marginal pastor and counseled him to refrain from exercising his First Amendment rights. Worse yet, the administration produced an ad shown in Pakistan once more protesting our love of Islam and castigating the video, even as across the region Christians and other religions are murdered, brutalized, and driven into exile.

This betrayal of a quintessential political right and the de facto validation of the “malevolent culture of Islamic supremacism,” as Andy McCarthy writes, illustrates the delusional ideologies that have created Obama’s foreign policy now threatening our security and interests. They have made America look weak and exhausted, a civilization of unparalleled military and economic power but crippled by abject moral poverty, one more terrorist attack away from capitulation and retreat. That is the point Romney needs to hammer home tonight if his priority is to expose Obama’s foreign policy failure.

Former Mossad Chief Dumps on Romney over Iran – Defense/Security – News – Israel National News.

Ephraim Halevy

Israel news photo: Flash 90

Ephraim HaLevy, the formerly close-mouthed director of the Mossad, who is a critic of Netanyahu and against striking Iran, continues to make up for lost time and speaks out again on Iran, this time criticizing Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for making the Islamic Republic’s nuclear threat an election issue.

HaLevy also urged direct Washington-Tehran talks on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear development program.

The former Mossad director took potshots at Romney, whom he said has delivered “a heavy blow to the ultimate interests of the United States and Israel.”

“Obama has placed emphasis on negotiations,” HaLevy told Laura Rozen, writing for the Al-Monitor website that focuses on Middle East affairs and Arab media.

“In this current election for the U.S. presidency, his hands are tied,” HaLevy reasoned. “He cannot proceed, because he cannot appear soft on Israel’s security.

“Negotiating with Iran is perceived as a sign of beginning to forsake Israel. That is where I think the basic difference is between Romney and Obama. What Romney is doing is mortally destroying any chance of a resolution without war. Therefore when [he recently] said, he doesn’t think there should be a war with Iran, this does not ring true. It is not consistent with other things he has said.”

HaLevy also took the opportunity to speak out negatively against Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. “He does not induce confidence [in the Israeli public]. He is invoking Auschwitz twice a week. He has created a situation in which he’s ‘damned if he did, damned if he didn’t’ bomb Iran, since he created such a buildup,” HaLevy concluded.

Concerning American attempts to “engage” Iran, he told several media outlets Sunday that direct discussions would help the United States understand its enemy better. HaLevy previously has upset most Israeli political and military officials by public ridiculing any idea that the IDF could successfully attack Iran, a move he has said would be a “disaster.”

“I was 40 years in the business of dealing with adversaries — some of them very bitter ones,” he told Rozen. “I realized that, in order to be effective with one’s enemies, you have to have two essential capabilities: To overcome them by force if necessary … And do everything you can to get into their minds and try to understand how they see things … and where, if at all, there is room for common ground of one kind or another.

“I think that what we have had over the years is an abundance of one side, and a dearth of the other.”

HaLevy believes that Iran would like to find a way out of what has become a tightening noose as a result of Western economic sanctions. “They are beginning to really hurt,” he said. Netanyahu said in the United Nations that sanctions hurt the Iranian people, but have no effect on the nuclear program.

He argued that not talking with an enemy does not make them illegitimate, while “there is nothing to lose” by establishing dialogue.

“What has happened, in order to meet public opinion, both Israel and the U.S. governments have tied our own hands,” Halevy said. “In the end, you create an inherent disadvantage for yourself…  “You have to understand what it is that makes Iran tick.”

HaLevy’s comments came two days after The New York Times reported that the Obama administration has reached an agreement with Iran for direct talks, but the report quickly was denied and apparently referred to back-channel talks that, according to Strategic Minister Moshe Ya’alon, are no secret.

During the interview, HaLevy said that his view that “engaging” the enemy in dialogue also should have applied to Hamas but that it is “too late now” because “In order to meet public opinion, both Israel and the U.S. governments have tied our own hands. There is a law…which prohibits U.S. officials from talking to Hamas…In the end, you create an inherent disadvantage for yourself.”

Iran Talks Surprise Has Observers Mystified Ahead Of Foreign Policy Debate.

Posted: 10/21/2012 9:48 pm EDT Updated: 10/21/2012 11:36 pm EDT

At first, the news from The New York Times Saturday evening that the U.S. and Iran had agreed “in principle” to one-on-one nuclear negotiations, had every appearance of an “October surprise” — a last-second international event designed to tip the scales toward the commander in chief.

After all, it came a little more than two weeks before the end of the presidential campaign, and on the eve of the final debate between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, which is slated to focus on foreign policy. Pundits wasted no time in delivering instantaneous analysis on how the news would impact the race.

But a day later, and after the White House formally denied the report, there is little clarity about what impact, if any, the news of the negotiations could have on the remainder of the race, or on Monday’s debate in Boca Raton, Fla.

“It’s going to be interesting to see how the candidates handle it, especially because you’ve had the White House basically deny the story,” said Jamie Fly, the executive director of the conservative Foreign Policy Institute. “My guess is there will be some skepticism on both sides during the debate. I don’t think either will go all in on the issue.”

Over the course of Sunday, surrogates for both campaigns discussed the Iran revelations, but without the typical sort of vigor that might characterize a topic that was expected to seize headlines. Analysts found themselves largely mystified.

Two prominent missing voices in the conversation were those of the candidates themselves, both of whom seemed to go out of their way to avoid addressing it on Sunday. Both Obama and Romney spent the day sequestered in campaign prep.

The one time Romney emerged, to play a game of pick-up football on the beach, he ignored a question about Iran from the press pool. A campaign spokesman did not respond to a request for comment from The Huffington Post.

One of the few comments from the Romney team came from Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who criticized the move in an appearance on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”

“The last thing we would want to do is abandon our allies on this and to make it a one-on-one negotiation,” said Portman, who has been helping Romney prep for the debates.

Most of the other comments from political figures on Sunday were uncharacteristically reticent. On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) opted to not discuss the reports at all, since the White House had denied them.

“I don’t think there’s anything further to comment on that story,” Rubio said.

David Axelrod, one of Obama’s top political advisers, did discuss Iran negotiations on “Meet the Press,” but only in abstract, while defending the president’s policy of pursuing talks.

“For two years, the president traveled the world putting together a withering international coalition,” Axelrod said. “And now the sanctions that they agreed on are bringing the Iranian economy to its knees. They’re feeling the heat. And that’s what the sanctions were meant to do.”

Asked on Sunday which candidate had emerged with an advantage from the negotiations story, two Iran policy experts offered The Huffington Post opposing views.

“I don’t see how the administration uses it as a success story,” said Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council and a longtime advocate of U.S.-Iran talks. “Obama’s going to try to make the argument that the sanctions are working, that we got the Iranians back to the table. And Romney is going to say, ‘After four years, this is your idea of success?'”

On the other hand, said Karim Sadjadpour, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the news might make it somewhat harder for Romney to challenge Obama’s tactics without shifting towards militancy.

“The only thing Romney can really do to get to the right of Obama on Iran policy is to say he’d bomb Iran if elected president, or would actively promote and pursue a policy of regime change,” Sadjadpour said. “Given the misgivings Americans have about the Iraq war, I don’t think those are winning talking points for him.”

That is, of course, assuming the issue has any effect at all.

“I don’t really see it having a meaningful impact on the presidential campaign,” Sadjadpour said. “I’d venture that more Americans are interested in Kim Kardashian-Kanye West relations than they are US-Iran relations.”