Foreign Minister Javad Zarif – Video Dailymotion.
Israel is the source of all the trouble in the region…
Butter wouldn’t melt in Iran’s mouth…
Holocaust a myth? Oh, a mistranslation…
Bomb? What bomb.
Lie after lie after lie…
All with a sweet smile… 🙂
–
Islamic terrorists kill at least 40 students in attack on Nigerian college | Fox News.
( Another contribution from “the religion of peace”….. – JW )
Islamic terrorists dressed in Nigerian military uniforms assaulted a college inside the country Sunday, gunning down dozens of students as they slept in their dorms and shot others trying to flee, witnesses say.
“They started gathering students into groups outside, then they opened fire and killed one group and then moved onto the next group and killed them. It was so terrible,” one surviving student, who would only give his first name of Idris, told Reuters.
As many as 50 students may have been killed in the attack, which began at about 1 a.m. in rural Gujba, Provost Molima Idi Mato of Yobe State College of Agriculture, told The Associated Press.
“They attacked our students while they were sleeping in their hostels, they opened fire at them,” he said. The extremists also torched classrooms.
Nigeria State Police Commissioner Sanusi Rufai told Reuters
that he suspected that the terrorist group Boko Haram was behind the attack, but declined to elaborate.
Boko Haram is aiming to establish an Islamic state in northern Nigeria and has intensified attacks on civilians in revenge for a Nigerian military offensive against the group, Reuters reports.
Idi Mato said he could not give an exact death toll as security forces still are recovering bodies of students mostly aged between 18 and 22.
The Nigerian military has collected 42 bodies and transported 18 wounded students to Damaturu Specialist Hospital, 25 miles north, said a military intelligence official, who insisted on anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press.
The extremists rode into the college in two double-cabin pickup all-terrain vehicles and on motorcycles, some dressed in Nigerian military camouflage uniforms, a surviving student, Ibrahim Mohammed, told the AP. He said they appeared to know the layout of the college, attacking the four male hostels but avoiding the one hostel reserved for women.
“We ran into the bush, nobody is left in the school now,” Mohammed said.
Almost all those killed were Muslims, as is the college’s student body, said Adamu Usman, a survivor from Gujba who was helping the wounded at the hospital.
Wailing relatives gathered outside the hospital morgue, where rescue workers laid out bloody bodies in an orderly row on the lawn for family members to identify their loved ones.
One body had its fists clenched to the chest in a protective gesture. Another had hands clasped under the chin, as if in prayer. A third had arms raised in surrender.
Provost Idi Mato confirmed the school’s other 1,000 enrolled students have fled the college.
He said there were no security forces stationed at the college despite government assurances that they would be deployed. The state commissioner for education, Mohammmed Lamin, called a news conference two weeks ago urging all schools to reopen and promising protection from soldiers and police.
Most schools in the area closed after militants on July 6 killed 29 pupils and a teacher, burning some alive in their hostels, at Mamudo outside Damaturu.
Northeastern Nigeria is under a military state of emergency to battle an Islamic uprising prosecuted by Boko Haram militants who have killed more than 1,700 people since 2010 in their quest to install an Islamic state, though half the country’s 160 million citizens are Christian. Boko Haram means Western education is forbidden in the local Hausa language.
United States President Barack Obama on Tuesday described the group as one of the most vicious terrorist organizations in the world, speaking at a meeting with Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan at which both reaffirmed their commitment to fight terrorism.
Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau last week published a video to prove he is alive and prove false military claims that they might have killed him in an ongoing crackdown.
Government and security officials claim they are winning their war on terror in the northeast but Sunday’s attack and others belie those assurances.
The Islamic extremists have killed at least 30 other civilians in the past week.
Twenty-seven people died in separate attacks Wednesday and Thursday night on two villages of Borno state near the northeast border with Cameroon, according to the chairman of the Gamboru-Ngala local government council, Modu-Gana Bukar Sheriiff.
The military spokesman did not respond to requests for information on those attacks, but a security official confirmed the death toll. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to give information to journalists.
Also Thursday, police said suspected Islamic militants killed a pastor, his son and a village head and torched their Christian church in Dorawa, about 100 kilometers from Damaturu. They said the gunmen used explosives to set fire to the church and five homes.
Meanwhile, farmers and government officials are fleeing threats of imminent attacks from Boko Haram in the area of the Gwoza Hills, a mountainous area with caves that shelter the militants despite repeated aerial bombardments by the military.
A local government official said there had been a series of attacks in recent weeks and threats of more. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared for his life, said Gwoza town was deserted when he visited it briefly under heavy security escort on Thursday.
He said militants had chased medical officers from the government hospital in Gwoza, which had been treating some victims of attacks. And he said they had burned down three public schools in the area.
The official said the Gwoza local government has set up offices in Maiduguri, the state capital to the north.
More than 30,000 people have fled the terrorist attacks to neighboring Cameroon and Chad and the uprising combined with the military emergency has forced farmers from their fields and vendors from their markets.
The attacks come as Nigeria prepares to celebrate 52 years of independence from Britain on Tuesday and amid political jockeying in the run up to presidential elections next year with many northern Muslim politicians saying they do not want another term for Jonathan, who is from the predominantly Christian south.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Hawkish senators of both parties jointly announced Sunday that they’ll soon be pushing additional sanctions against Iran.
Declaring themselves “underwhelmed” by President Hassan Rouhani’s peace overtures, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) took to The Washington Post to make their case. Their op-ed throws cold water on the White House’s optimism that administration officials can reach a deal with Rouhani to avert a showdown over Tehran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.
“We expected a charm offensive. We readied ourselves for a possible diplomatic breakthrough. But we were left underwhelmed,” they wrote.
“In the coming days, we will be outspoken in our support for furthering sanctions against Iran, requiring countries to again reduce their purchases of Iranian petroleum and imposing further prohibitions on strategic sectors of the Iranian economy.”
The senators outlined “four strategic elements” they say are “necessary to achieve a resolution of this issue: an explicit and continuing message that the United States will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapons capability, a sincere demonstration of openness to negotiations by Iran, the maintenance and toughening of sanctions and a convincing threat of the use of force.”
They said they had been “cautiously hopeful” ahead of Rouhani’s visit to the U.N. General Assembly in New York last week. But they said they were disappointed by several incidents, including Rouhani’s criticism of the United States and Israel in his U.N. speech and his “weak” decision not to meet with Obama for a handshake, although the two spoke by phone on Friday – the first direct conversation between presidents of the two countries since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
“As Rouhani returns home, diplomacy remains our hope and goal,” they said. “But our resolve to prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear weapons capability remains unchanged.”
Iranian foreign minister: Israel has an arsenal of 200 nuclear warheads | JPost | Israel News.
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif accused Israel on Sunday of having an arsenal of 200 nuclear warheads, and said it is the source of insecurity in the Middle East.
“Israel has 200 nuclear warheads. Israel is the source of insecurity in our region. Israel is the source of aggression and violation of human rights of the Palestinian people. It should not have the audacity to continue to lie to the American people and to the world and mislead everybody,” Zarif told ABC’s This Week in his first appearance on the show in 26 years
He also responded to reports in the Sunday Times that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu intends to present US President Barack Obama during their meeting on Monday intelligence showing Iran already has enough enriched uranium to produce some nuclear weapon, is developing a nuclear detonator and is testing missiles that could carry nuclear warheads.”Mr. Netanyahu and his colleagues have been saying since 1991 – and you can refer to your records – that Iran is six months away from a nuclear weapon. And we are how many years, 22 years after that and they are still saying we’re six months away from nuclear weapons,” he said.
“We’re not seeking nuclear weapons. So, we’re not six months, six years, sixty years away from nuclear weapons. We don’t want nuclear weapons. We believe nuclear weapons are detrimental to our security. We believe those who have the illusion that nuclear weapons provide them with security are badly mistaken. We need to have a region and a world free from nuclear weapons,” he continued.
Zarif was also asked about a passage on Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s English website that refers to the Holocaust as “a myth.”
The passage, Zarif said, is a mistranslation from Farsi.
“The Holocaust is not a myth. Nobody is talking about the myth,” he said.
“If it said it [on Ayatollah Khamenei’s website], it’s a bad translation. And it is translated out of context that they have,” he continued, explaining that the Ayatollah was “simply asking that we should do some studies” on the topic.
Zarif also promised to speak to the Ayatollah’s team about changing the translation.
Echoing similar statements made by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani when he was asked to address the issue, Zarif made the leap from the Nazis’ condemnable crime to the suffering of the Palestinian people.
“We condemn the killing of innocent people, whether it happened in Nazi Germany or whether it’s happening in Palestine. One crime, however heinous – and [the] Holocaust was a heinous crime, it was a genocide, it must never be allowed to be repeated. But that crime cannot be, and should not be, a justification to trample the rights of the Palestinian people for 60 years. We should have abandoned this game and start recognizing the fact that without respect for the rights of the Palestinians we will never have peace in our region,” he said.
Netanyahu lands in US, vows to tell ‘the truth’ about Iran | The Times of Israel.
Ahead of meeting with Obama and UN address, PM derides Rouhani’s gestures as ‘sweet talk and… smiles’
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu landed in New York Sunday morning local time for a four-day visit to the United States, vowing to expose “the truth” in the wake of Iran’s recent overtures to the United States.
Israel is concerned over the thaw in Western-Iranian ties that has been developing at breathtaking pace in the last few days and culminated Friday with a phone call between the American and Iranian presidents.
“I am going there to represent the interests of the people of Israel, our readiness to defend ourselves and our hope for peace,” Netanyahu told reporters on the plane before taking off for the US. “I will say the truth. In the face of the sweet talk and the smiles one needs to tell the truth. Only the truth, today, is vital to the security of the world, and of course essential to the security of our country.”
On Monday, Netanyahu is scheduled to meet US President Barack Obama at the White House. A day later, he will be the final world leader to address this year’s United Nations General Assembly in New York.
The prime minister has said he regards Iran’s outreach as a “smokescreen” designed to “fool” the West while the regime advances toward a nuclear weapons capability. He has set out conditions that he wants the international community to maintain before any lessening of economic sanctions.
Netanyahu’s meeting with Obama will mark the first time the two leaders have sat together since the American president’s March visit to Israel, and, more dramatically, since the historic phone call between Obama and his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani — the latest in a series of developments last week that signaled a warming of ties between the new nations. The last time a sitting US president spoke to a sitting Iranian president was before the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
Netanyahu issued no direct comment on the Obama-Rouhani conversation and instructed his ministers to remain mum. He intends to discuss Israel’s position on the Iranian president’s charm offensive – which included more benevolent rhetoric on ties with the US and the West, a stated willingness to compromise on transparency of the Iranian nuclear program and an acknowledgement that the Holocaust occurred – during his meetings with senior US officials. He will also make a public plea against easing the sanctions on the regime during his speech Tuesday at the General Assembly.
“Netanyahu understands that there is a lot of euphoria,” according to an unnamed senior Israeli official quoted by The New York Times. “Netanyahu knows that people in the international community will want to believe. I think you’ll see in his remarks a lot of facts, a lot of facts that no one denies.”
Before his meeting with Obama, Netanyahu is scheduled to meet on Sunday afternoon with the foreign minister of Turkmenistan, Rashid Meredov, in New York. Israel’s diplomatic relations with Turkmenistan, a mostly Muslim country that borders Iran, date back to 1992, yet Shemi Tzur became Israel’s first resident ambassador in the Turkmen capital, Ashgabat, less than half a year ago.
Later on Sunday, Netanyahu is to meet with Canadian Foreign Minster John Baird. Canada has traditionally been one of Israel’s staunchest allies and strongest supporters on the international stage.
On Monday, Netanyahu, who is being accompanied by Deputy Foreign Minister Ze’ev Elkin, will fly to Washington for an 11:15 a.m. meeting with Obama. The meeting has tentatively been scheduled to last two hours and 15 minutes, and is expected to deal with the Syrian crisis and the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, in addition to the Iranian nuclear program and the West’s response to Rouhani’s outreach.
Later on Monday, Netanyahu is also to meet with Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry, before attending a farewell ceremony for outgoing Israeli ambassador to Washington Michael Oren on Capitol Hill.
On Tuesday, Netanyahu will be the last speaker to address the 68th General Assembly at the UN’s headquarter in New York. After his speech, he will meet with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. A meeting with American Jewish leaders is scheduled for Wednesday, before he returns to Israel.
Iran’s foreign minister: Holocaust not a myth | The Times of Israel.
Mohammad Javad Zarif dismisses Israel’s claims about Iran’s nuclear program, says ‘smile attack is much better than a lie attack’
Iran’s foreign minister on Sunday reiterated his acknowledgement the Holocaust was not a myth, and condemned Israel for maintaining a nuclear arsenal when Iran has no intention itself of developing atomic weapons.
Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said the “Holocaust was a heinous crime and should never be allowed to be repeated,” and dismissed reports that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s website featured a statement of Holocaust denial. Zarif claimed it was a misunderstanding over translation.
“This is the problem when you translate something from Persian to English,” he explained during a Sunday morning interview with ABC’s “This Week” program as reported by the Huffington Post. “You may lose some of the meaning. This has unfortunately been the case several times over. The point is, we condemn the killing of innocent people whether it happens in Nazi Germany or whether it is happening in Palestine.”
Referring to relations with the US, Zarif said his country was willing to forgive the United States’ history with Iran but cannot forget decades of distrust between the two nations.
Zarif said Tehran was open to negotiations with the United States over its nuclear program, but Washington must end its crippling sanctions. Zarif said Iran was not developing a military nuclear program and has no desire for one.
“Having an Iran that does not have nuclear weapons is not just your goal, it’s first and foremost our goal,” he said during the televised interview on Sunday. Zarif also said Iran was willing to open its nuclear facilities to international inspectors.
“We have taken the first steps toward addressing an important issue both for Iran, the United States and the international community,” Zarif said, “a necessary first step toward removing the tensions and doubts and misgivings that the two sides have had about each other for the last 30 years.”
However, Zarif lashed out at Israel for attacking Iranian scientists while the Jewish state itself maintained an arsenal of nuclear weapons.
“We are not six months and not six years away from nuclear weapons,” he said. “Israel has 200 nuclear missiles. [Israel] is a source of disturbance and lies to the world and the US.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday headed to the United States for a meeting with President Barack Obama. As he boarded his plane in Israel, Netanyahu said he was heading to the United Nations to “tell the truth in the face of the sweet talk and the onslaught of smiles.”
Zarif scoffed at those concerns.
“Well, a smile attack is much better than a lie attack,” Zarif said.
He also said Israeli leaders have been warning that Tehran is months away from having a nuclear weapon since 1991 and those fears have never been realized.
“Israel can’t kill all of our scientists,” he added. “No one is talking about that. The US is against terror but it doesn’t respond to terror.”
The foreign minister’s comments followed a sudden thaw in US-Iranian relations after decades as adversaries. US President Barack Obama and Iranian President Hasan Rouhani spoke Friday by telephone, the first direct contact between the two countries’ leaders in three decades.
Netanyahu’s mission: Setting parameters for Obama’s Iran diplomacy | The Times of Israel.
It’s too late to stop the US president engaging with Rouhani; what the PM will attempt is to ensure that Iran cannot access anything more than ‘peaceful nuclear energy’
NEW YORK — “Any miscalculation of one’s position, and of course, of others, will bear historic damages; a mistake by one actor will have negative impact on all others.” These words were spoken Tuesday by President Hasan Rouhani, but they aptly reflect what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is currently thinking about the thawing relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America.
Netanyahu has made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t mind standing alone in his opposition to the Iranian overtures, and that he will continue to pour cold water on the budding détente between Tehran and Washington. He seems to embrace being the sole voice of dissent to a Western chorus that is willing to test Iran’s sincerity, and it wouldn’t be surprising if the prime minister makes a point about being a party-pooper during his speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday.
It has become a tradition for Netanyahu to insert some sort of gimmick into his major speeches to draw attention, be it a visual aid such as last year’s UN cartoon bomb or rhetorical shtick like the similarly awkward “nuclear duck” he discussed in a March 2012 speech to AIPAC delegates. So internet meme-makers, be prepared. A possible motif for his speech at the UN this week could be an image of Rouhani barely a week ago, presiding over a military parade which featured Shehab-3 missile trucks bearing anti-American messages and the slogan “Israel must be destroyed.” “And I’m the party-pooper?” Netanyahu might ask.
The unchanged anti-US and anti-Israel slogans at the military parade were first highlighted by Dore Gold, a former ambassador to the UN and longtime Netanyahu confidant. Gold, the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, is accompanying the prime minister on this trip, and is likely helping Netanyahu finalize the text for Tuesday’s speech, together with the prime minister’s outgoing senior adviser and incoming ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer.
Netanyahu and his speechwriters, as of Sunday, had said very little about its content, beyond that it will compare the Iranian regime to North Korea and warn of the inherent dangers in striking deals with rogue states. The prime minister will almost certainly mention the fact that Rouhani was Iran’s nuclear negotiator in 2003 and has reportedly prided himself on fooling the West into believing that the program had been halted. He may also highlight Rouhani’s place at the heart of the regime going back many more years. He could well point, too, to the Iranian who was recently arrested in Israel on suspicion of scouting ahead for a terror attack against the US embassy in Tel Aviv, news of which was conveniently released by the Shin Bet security agency just as Netanyahu landed in the US. Beware, President Obama, he will be intimating, that friendly man who wished you well on the phone the other day is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the duplicitous messenger of a regime bent on America’s demise.
“I will tell the truth in the face of the sweet talk and the onslaught of smiles. One must talk facts and one must tell the truth,” the prime minister told this and other reporters traveling with him on the Boeing 767 that took him to New York. “Telling the truth today is vital for the security and peace of the world and, of course, it is vital for the security of the State of Israel.”
To that end, in his talks Monday with Obama and his address at the General Assembly the next day, the Israeli prime minister will likely reiterate his four demands that Iran halt uranium enrichment, remove already enriched material, close the Fordo nuclear facility, and discontinue the plutonium track in Arak.
But few at the UN will listen to Netanyahu — and not only because they won’t like his bleak message. He will be the final speaker of this year’s General Assembly, and most world leaders will have left town.
Last year, Netanyahu’s red line for Iran, and the cartoon bomb on which he drew it, dominated world headlines. This year, Rouhani was the General Assembly’s great attraction. But the real star — for better or worse — was that mechanism of statecraft called diplomacy, employed by both Obama and Rouhani. A friendly conversation between the presidents of Iran and the US was all but unthinkable just a week ago, yet a little sweet rhetoric from Tehran, encouraged by Washington, facilitated it
Just a few weeks ago, for that matter, no one would have believed that the UN Security Council could pass a resolution requiring Damascus to destroy its entire arsenal of chemical weapons. But what some analysts have started calling the “Obama doctrine” — which might be said to hold that even rogue regimes can be made to forgo their WMD, with the right mix of carrot and stick — had its impact there too. The key question in both cases, to which Netanyahu strongly believes the answer is no, is whether Syria and Iran will actually do what they are telling the international community they are willing to do.
Netanyahu knows all too well that the Iranian diplomatic train has left the station. Obama is already engaging with Rouhani, regardless of what “my friend Bibi” has to say. It’s too late to dissuade the president from at least testing Rouhani’s sincerity. Rather, at the White House on Monday, the Israeli leader will focus on the substance of that engagement, trying to define the parameters of a possible deal as tightly as possible.
Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry will all do their utmost to convince their bitter guest that Israel has nothing to fear, that they won’t be fooled by what Netanyahu calls the Iranian “smokescreen,” that they will not lose sight of their commitment to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Netanyahu will present intelligence showing that the Iranian drive to the bomb has not slowed since Rouhani took office. In the end, the devil will be in the details: Will Iran allow surprise inspections by international observers at all its nuclear facilities and real-time monitoring of activities? How much uranium will it be allowed to enrich and retain, at what level, for its ostensible nonmilitary purposes? Will the Fordo complex be closed, and the plutonium route to the bomb abandoned? When will which sanctions be relaxed in return?
The Americans “respect the right of the Iranian people to access peaceful nuclear energy,” Obama said last week. Netanyahu mission is to ensure that this is all they can ever access. His concern is that even the most effective presentation to Obama, and the corniest attention-grabbing gimmicks at the UN, may not be enough.
Susan Rice on Iran: Every reason to be skeptical – Israel News, Ynetnews.
Obama’s national security adviser tells CNN sanctions to remain in place until Tehran lives up to commitments regarding nuclear program. ‘Any agreement must be fully verifiable and enforceable,’ she says
Yitzhak Benhorin
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WASHINGTON – US National Security Adviser Susan Rice attempted to assuage the concerns of Israel and other US-allies in the Middle East over the possibility that Washington would fall for an Iranian ploy to buy time in its pursuit of a nuclear weapon. Rice said that Obama had carefully chosen his words when he said that Iran had the right to use enriched uranium but not actively enrich uranium itself.
“It’s way too soon to presume either the prospect of an agreement on the nuclear program, which we hope to be able to achieve, but we’re quite sober about the potential for that,” Rice told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS.
“If we could have a peaceful resolution of the nuclear program and an end to Iran’s support for terrorism and other behavior that has concerned us over many years, then we could begin a serious discussion about the future.”
‘Charm offensive.’ Iran’s Rohani
Addressing the subject of a meeting of foreign ministers of the six world powers with the Iranian foreign minister last week, she said that the Iranians had pledged not to obtain a nuclear weapon, but nuclear energy. She added that the US stressed that Iran must live up to its commitment to the international community and that the sanctions would stay in place until they are met. “We and others in the international community have every reason to be skeptical of that and we need to test it, and any agreement must be fully verifiable and enforceable,” Rice said.
The national security adviser stressed that if Iran makes good on its commitments to the International Atomic Energy Agency and complies with the resolutions of the UN Security Council, it would have the right to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
Rice also discussed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s warning regarding the Iranian “charm offensive” and said the White House was in close contact with Israel and other allies and that they were all in agreement regarding the measures that are necessary in order to make certain that at the end of the process, Iran does not have military nuclear power.
Rice further told CNN that the US and Iran were still far from normalizing relations. The two countries severed diplomatic relations following the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
A friendly Iran and its gentle president – Alarabiya.net English | Front Page.
Whenever American-Iranian political reconciliation looms on the horizon we panic. This is what is happening these days after Iranian President Hassan Rowhani and his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama crossed paths in the corridors of the United Nations building, but did not meet.
Some of us might go to the extent of thinking a “conspiracy” is being cooked up, others might believe that there is a hidden alliance and cooperation between the two countries and will soon be revealed. An American-Iranian alliance will officially be announced at our expense, us in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. We would then fall from sitting on the lap of the U.S., only to see Iran taking our place there at the expense of our interests and rights.
I believe that we all need psychotherapy sessions and courses in real political science so we can recover our self-confidence and see that we are stronger than we think. I would like to quote here Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former ambassador to U.S. and head of Saudi intelligence, who once stated that “Iran is a tiger made of paper.”
With a President like Barack Obama, Iranians can arrange a “settlement” for a long-term peace agreement in the region with their wide smile.
Jamal Khashoggi
We simply need to be focused in order to identify our strategic allies and our constant interests, and realize that the Arabs were able to make a place for themselves in the history of the Middle East that also was home to super powers, such as the Ottoman Empire and the Byzantine kingdom.
The Middle East is then capable of containing every country of the region, including Iran and Turkey, and we have to be aware that a reconciliation with Iran is in the interest of everyone and that we have to look forward to it more than the Americans. However, we need to form a block of allies that are not affected by narrow interests and who share with us the same vision of a “nation,” a noble term that some are trying to destroy in order to achieve a bigger interest.
We should all forget about the old fighting rules that prevailed in the region until the end of the seventies. We no longer need the post of the “region’s policemen,” which was the main reason behind the rivalry between the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and Israel.
Saddam Hussein had at the same time thanked and blamed the U.S. presence in the Middle East. Saddam altered the ethical codes for Arabs in the region after Iraq invaded Kuwait. The average Gulf Arab was shocked and did not recover yet so it welcomed the U.S. military presence in the region after it had previously rejected it with the rest of the Arabs.
The second rule that should also be abolished is that the Iranian-Arab conflict is inevitable. Some of us would go farther and give it a sectarian side, speaking of a Sunni-Shiite conflict, so they call to mind historical facts about the confrontations between Safavid and Ottoman Empires, the conspiracies of the Shiites in the Abbasid palaces, and their struggle with Salah ad-Din. These subjects should not be brought out of history books and injected in our contemporary political scene. Iran bears the responsibility for it more than others because it has distinguished itself since its revolution victory, through a “sectarian” constitution that was stretched to reach “vulnerable” Shiites in the Arab world, and was ready without any hesitation to fight “vulnerable” Sunnis, if they ever revolted against a secular Baathist repressive regime like Syria’s.
The rise of Shiite fundamentalism has coincided with the rise of similar Salafist fundamentalism, which is an Islamic current, soaked in the history and conflicts between Sunnis and Shiites. The two intellectual and ideological cases interlaced with the real policy, hence the relations conflicted but there was an always wise person like Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, who set the standards for the relationship with Iran during the presidency of Rafsanjani who was also a wise president. When the Ahmadinejad came to power, the relationship deteriorated. Nevertheless, the Saudi king has never stopped trying to recover the ties with the Iranian president but in vain.
So the quest for the normalization of relations with Iran is a “real policy,” from which the kingdom will benefit. Saudi Arabia has tried it several times and the UAE are still practicing it through enormous economic relations despite its firm demands to restore the three islands occupied by Iran. Oman has also implemented this policy during the first visit to Iran by a foreign leader since moderate President Hassan Rowhani came to power. Sultan Qaboos is said to have conveyed a message from the United States to Iran.
The U.S. and the West have changed; there is no longer an aggressive America that is willing to order its intelligence agency to conspire and overthrow an elected prime minister as it did in the fifties with Dr. Mossadegh, which formed a wave of hatred between Khomeini’s Iran and the great Satan. America and the West abandoned their “colonial” character and their mission as the world’s police from the Philippines to Panama through Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and the Gulf too. Unfortunately for the Syrian people, the purification moment has only hit the old imperialist world, while they are in dire need for an “unconcealed imperialist interference” that would save them from a dictator who is ready to kill them with a chemical weapon.
Therefore, the reconciliation -and not deal since it is an imperialist word”-with Iran is now possible more than ever, but the problem is Iran because the Iranians are the only ones who do not want to change. They want to use all the previous changes for the interest of their policy; for instance, negotiating on their nuclear project means that we will continue to negotiate and they will continue with their project. As for the peaceful solution in Syria, it means that Saudis and Turks should stop supporting the opposition, while Iran continues sending tons of weapons and thousands of men along with Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Qods Force, to protect the Sayeda Zeinab’s shrine! And while doing this “holy” task, Bashar will eventually stay in power, and may all the Takfiri Syrian people go to hell.
With a President like Barack Obama, Iranians can arrange a “settlement” for a long-term peace agreement in the region with their wide smile, the kind articles of president Rowhani and his good willing promises published all over American newspapers. During that time, the projects of Ahmadinejad and the supreme leader will be sustained, with the graciousness and kindness of Sheikh Rowhani.
This article was first published in al-Hayat on Sept. 29, 2013.
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Jamal Khashoggi is a Saudi journalist, columnist, author, and general manager of the upcoming Al Arab News Channel. He previously served as a media aide to Prince Turki al Faisal while he was Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States. Khashoggi has written for various daily and weekly Arab newspapers, including Asharq al-Awsat, al-Majalla and al-Hayat, and was editor-in-chief of the Saudi-based al-Watan. He was a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan, Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan, and other Middle Eastern countries. He is also a political commentator for Saudi-based and international news channels. Twitter: @JKhashoggi
Containing Iran is to do the unthinkable – Alarabiya.net English | Front Page.
During the crucial months of debates that preceded the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Kenneth Pollack, a liberal hawk who had worked as an analyst at the CIA and the National Security Council (NSC) published “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq” which provided the intellectual underpinnings, particularly to the reluctant liberals for “a full-scale invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam (Hussein), eradicate his weapons of mass destruction, and rebuild Iraq as a prosperous and stable society.”
Eleven years later, Iran and its potential nuclear menace has replaced Iraq as the Middle Eastern country that could be at the receiving end of America’s military might if it continues to challenge Security Council resolutions and pursue its clandestine nuclear program. President Obama has pledged repeatedly that he will use the full spectrum of U.S. options available to prevent the emergence of a nuclear Iran including the military option, while insisting that containment is not one of those options.
Ironically, Pollack the unreconstructed hawk, who has thrown himself once again in the ongoing sharp debate raging in the country about the best way to deal with the threatening Iranian nuclear storm, finds himself now swimming against the tide to the other bank opposite the military option. This time, Pollack is not brandishing a sword but a new well-argued book with a title demonstrating the difficulty of his task: “Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy.”
Containment can take many shapes, some confrontational, some far more passive. One of the keys to making containment work will be “determining how assertive or reserved to be at any time.”
Hisham Melhem
In more than 400 pages of cogent, clear and crisp analysis of all the possible options available to the United States (and Israel) to neutralize Iran’s nuclear program and ambitions, he argues, after observing that all the “choices are awful” that containment, warts and all, is the least bad option. Pollack told me that his goal is nothing short of rehabilitating the concept of containment which has become a dirty word in the contemporary political lexicon in America, synonymous with the dreaded and loaded word of “appeasement.” Pollack devotes time, space and intellectual rigor in the third part of the book aptly titled: “Containment,” explaining, wrestling with and justifying “the strategy that dare not speak its name.”
Pollack’s reversal of roles from supporting the military option against Iraq in 2002 and his current defense of a policy of containment towards Iran, both of which are controversial and susceptible to misrepresentations explain this caveat in the introduction: “In the past, my views on various issues have been misrepresented. I tried to write a balanced, nuanced book about Iraq in 2002 only to find it caricatured by people who read nothing but the subtitle—or cherry-picked lines from it.” Later in the conclusion he says “I supported a war against Saddam, albeit not the one that the Bush 43 administration waged.” To insulate himself against those who would distort or misrepresent his views, Pollack writes a crisp one page summary of his thesis in the introduction and in the conclusion a full comparison of the advantages/disadvantages of the military option and of containment.
Pollack believes that the U.S. should offer Iran attractive, substantive inducements to reach a deal in return for serious concessions on its nuclear program that would include robust and intrusive inspection regime. Concomitant with that, and in order to ratchet up the pressure, the U.S. should support Iranian opposition group, and even raise the specter of regime change. If a diplomatic deal is beyond reach, then the U.S. will come to a fork in the road and will be forced to make a decision and chose either the path of military force to deprive Iran of a nuclear arsenal, or the path of containment and make the unthinkable, thinkable and relevant.
Pollack gives the military option a fair hearing, and he stresses that he does not oppose it in the absolute, but sees it necessary under certain circumstances, but he deeply believes that a military strike is very likely to turn into a war with Iran, and war in his view will not resolve the problem and will lead to many unforeseen ramification. Pollack reviews all military options available to the American president from air strikes (the most likely option) to a blockade and finally an invasion. And since Iran is very likely to retaliate “it would be irresponsible for a president to order air strikes against Iran without having accepted that doing so may mean committing the United States to an eventual invasion.”
Pollack sees many disadvantages to air strikes beginning with Iran’s likely withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which will lead to the termination of the work of the inspectors of The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which in turn will allow Iran to rebuilt its nuclear infrastructure without anyone reporting on it. Air strikes, may lead to an Iranian escalation that could target Israel and or the Gulf Cooperation council (GCC) states; and if air strikes are not that successful, Iran will go back to rebuilding its capabilities and the U.S. will go back to containment anyway.
Pollack is very dismissive of Israel’s ability to inflict serious damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities. He does not believe that Israel has a credible military option. He told me “historically, every time the Israelis had military options they exercised them, without talking about them. Look at how they destroyed the Iraqi and Syrian nuclear reactors.” Moreover, Pollack believes that from an American perspective an Israeli strike is a “terrible idea” and it might be “disastrous for the United States, Israel, and our other allies.”
He goes further, stating that “Israel’s ability to cause meaningful damage to the Iranian nuclear program has now diminished to the point where it should not be a driving consideration in our approach to Iran”. Finally, Pollack addresses the notion that is at the core of the belief of Israeli leaders and their supporters which claim that the religious ideology of clerical establishment in Iran could drive them to trigger a nuclear Holocaust. Pollack sees nothing in past actions by Iranian leaders (notwithstanding the outrageous rhetoric of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) “that comport with this notion, whereas much that they have done runs against it.”
Pollack goes to great lengths to explain containment, showing that it is as old as civilization, citing Thucydides’ description in the Peloponnesian War of how Sparta tried to contain the power of its chief rival Athens. Of course he touches on the most successful containment strategy in modern times, when the U.S. adopted the intellectual framework put forth by George Kennan’s to contain the rising power of a belligerent Soviet Union after the Second World War, a strategy that was employed also against China, Cuba and Iran itself.
Pollack is fully aware of the limitations and disadvantages of containment; he even devotes a full chapter describing “the problems of containment”. Containment of a nuclear Iran will not stop it from continuing to subvert America’s allies, or prevent these allies from seeking their own nuclear weapons. A nuclear Iran could wreak havoc in the oil market, and could encourage other nations to opt out of the NPT.
For all these reasons, Pollack’s version of containment is anything but passive. One of his many concerns is to stress that containment” does not mean appeasement, or even acceptance of a nuclear Iran. Containment can take many shapes, some confrontational, some far more passive. One of the keys to making containment work will be “determining how assertive or reserved to be at any time.” However, the most important aspect in a strategy of containment is that it seeks to prevent a hostile nation like Iran from undermining America’s interests and the interests of its allies and prevent it from committing aggression beyond its border, and maintaining the pressure on it “until the structural flaws in its political system bring an end to the regime itself.”
Again and again, Pollack returns to weighing the risks and costs of war vs. containment only to stress that “I do not believe that the containment of Iran, including a nuclear Iran, will be easy or painless, just preferable to the alternative”. Pollack’s book went to the presses before the election of President Hassan Rowhani, and before the beginning of the negotiations between the P+5 and Iran and the bilateral U.S.-Iran talks. While the road ahead is fraught with huge obstacles, this process could be promising. However, if the efforts to achieve a diplomatic solution crumble to Iran’s nuclear challenge, which is a realistic prospect, Pollack’s book will then be a crucial intellectual framework for those who seek a rational, realistic and effective, if not perfect strategy of containment.
This article was first published in Lebanon-based Annahar on Sept. 26, 2013.
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Hisham Melhem is the bureau chief of Al Arabiya News Channel in Washington, DC. Melhem has interviewed many American and international public figures, including Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, among others. Melhem speaks regularly at college campuses, think tanks and interest groups on U.S.-Arab relations, political Islam, intra-Arab relations, Arab-Israeli issues, media in the Arab World, Arab images in American media , U.S. public policies and other related topics. He is also the correspondent for Annahar, the leading Lebanese daily. For four years he hosted “Across the Ocean,” a weekly current affairs program on U.S.-Arab relations for Al Arabiya. Follow him on Twitter : @hisham_melhem
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