WarSclerotic

Candid on differences with PM, Obama sets out optimist’s Mideast vision | The Times of Israel.

Even Iran can change, the president insists. Indeed so, Netanyahu would likely retort, so why have you not shown more determination to get rid of the Islamists?

By David Horovitz December 8, 2013, 12:41 am

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama embrace at a ceremony held in honor of Obama as he lands at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv, on March 20, 2013 (photo credit: Miriam Alster/Flash90)

As one might expect from an adept, articulate speaker, knowing he was sitting with a mature, respectful audience unlikely to directly confront him too nastily, President Barack Obama was in confident and relaxed mood during his interview with Haim Saban in Washington, DC, on Saturday. But it was still quite striking to see him smile and nod in broad assent when asked, by Israeli journalist Ilana Dayan toward the end of the session, whether he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might analyze the interim deal struck with Iran in Geneva last month rather differently.

“I think that’s probably a good bet,” Obama said, grinning hugely. “That’s more than 50/50.” Cue considerable audience laughter.

Rarely has the president been so candid in setting out his philosophy for grappling with the Middle East, and rarely so open and easygoing in acknowledging the profound differences in approach between him and Netanyahu, albeit while stressing the shared goals of Israeli-Palestinian peace and ensuring Iran not attain the bomb.

Netanyahu has rejected the Geneva deal as a “historic mistake” because he fears the sanctions pressure will now collapse, and because he is concerned that Iran will be left with an enrichment capability that will enable it to break out to the bomb when it so chooses. But most fundamentally, he considers the agreement a mistake because it lets the regime off the hook — ensuring it will survive. And so long as the regime survives, Netanyahu is certain that Islamist Iran will constitute a profound threat to the free world in general, and to Israel in particular.

Obama, in the most illuminating passage of his appearance, set out a dramatically different mindset. Yes, he acknowledged, “one has to assume” that even President Hassan Rouhani holds to an ideology “that is hostile to the United States and to Israel.” But the fact that Rouhani was elected last June — as the least hardline of six presidential candidates — spoke volumes about the Iranian public’s mindset. Ordinary Iranians, said Obama, plainly want “a change of direction,” a shift in the way they “interact with the world.”

The Middle East will undergo a great deal of change in the coming decade, Obama continued, warming to his theme. “Wherever we see the impulses of a people to move away from conflict, violence, and toward diplomatic resolution of conflicts, we should be ready and prepared to engage them — understanding, though, that ultimately it’s not what you say, it’s what you do.”

It was vital not to “be naive about the dangers” posed by the Iranian regime, the president stressed, and to “fight them wherever they are engaging in terrorism or actions that are hostile to us or our allies. But we have to not constantly assume that it’s not possible for Iran, like any country, to change over time.”

Don’t assume the worst? Assuming the worst is precisely what I am duty-bound to do, Netanyahu, had he been in the room, would likely have wanted to retort.

The president peppered his remarks with the customary reiteration of Israel’s right and responsibility to protect its interests, and to determine how to safeguard its security as it sees fit. When discussing the Palestinian issue, he took pains to stress that the US could not and would not “dictate” terms to Israel. And he said that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas would have to make serious compromises, during what he termed a “transitional period,” in order to ensure that Israel could be confident of its long-term security as a Jewish state.

But his key points of difference with Netanyahu came through loud and clear: The prime minister was unrealistic in the terms he was demanding of Iran — the regime won’t just “cave” under the relentless pressure Netanyahu wants, Obama argued — and the prime minister was sometimes unnecessarily bleak when contemplating the challenges facing Israel in the fast-shifting region.

Of course, Obama noted, Netanyahu would himself soon be addressing the very same forum, via satellite from Jerusalem, and would set out his own positions.

It will be interesting to see whether Netanyahu, who speaks on Sunday, will match Obama for easygoing candor and for open acknowledgement of the yawning gulf between their mindsets.

If he does, the prime minister might remark that, in fact, he fully shares the president’s belief that the Iranian public wants a much improved interaction with the free world. It is for precisely that reason, he might add, that he is baffled and horrified by Obama’s apparent readiness to condemn Iranians to continued oppression by the uranium-enriching regime of the ayatollahs.

Cave under the pressure? That’s exactly what the regime would have done, Netanyahu might feel moved to add (though even candor has its limits), if only Obama hadn’t caved first.

Inflexible on Iran, empathetic on Palestine | The Times of Israel.

In the past, Obama seemed receptive to Israeli concerns over Tehran’s nuclear program — less so to Jerusalem’s peace process demands. Now that seems to have been reversed

By Raphael Ahren December 8, 2013, 1:11 pm

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama in New York, September 21, 2011 (photo credit: Avi Ohayon/GPO/Flash90)

Analysts of American Middle East policy have long wondered about the existence of a “linkage” between the Iranian nuclear threat and the Israeli-Palestinian peace conflict.

At the United Nations General Assembly in September, US President Barack Obama said, “In the near term, America’s diplomatic efforts will focus on two particular issues: Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.” The obvious juxtaposition of the two not-directly-related issues suggested the president sought to revive a venerable formula known in Hebrew as “Gar’in tmurat Falestin” — the nuclear issue in exchange for Palestine. Routinely rejected by American and Israeli officials, this often-quoted theory postulates that Washington is willing to be tough on Iran if Jerusalem is forthcoming on the Palestinian issue. But statements Obama made Saturday suggest the opposite is now the case.

Speaking at the Saban Forum in Washington, the president defended the interim nuclear deal the US and five world powers struck with Iran in November. While he declared that “nothing in this agreement… grants Iran a right to enrich” uranium, he also made plain that in a permanent agreement, Iran will be allowed to do exactly that.

“It is my strong belief that we can envision a end state that gives us an assurance that even if they have some modest enrichment capability, it is so constrained and the inspections are so intrusive that they, as a practical matter, do not have breakout capacity,” Obama said.

For Israel, this is an absolute no-no. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his associates have said as much time and again. “It needs to be clear: In the final agreement Iran will not have the capability to create a nuclear weapon. To assure that, Iran must not have any capacity to enrich uranium or produce plutonium,” Intelligence and Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz said later Saturday, in the Israeli government’s first response to Obama’s candid appearance at the Saban event.

The administration, while asserting that Israel’s security is sacrosanct, defends the temporary Geneva agreement -– a deal Israel considers a dangerous and “historic mistake” — and seems determined to reach a long-term arrangement that would essentially allow Iran to remain a threshold state, capable of a breakout to nuclear capability within a matter of months.

“Frankly, theoretically, they will always have some [breakout capacity],” Obama said, because “the technology here is available to any good physics student at pretty much any university around the world. And they have already gone through the cycle to the point where the knowledge, we’re not going to be able to eliminate.”

The Obama administration clearly is not inclined to give in to Israel’s demands vis-à-vis Iran, regarding as unrealistic Netanyahu’s insistence on the dismantling of Iran’s entire program. Said Obama to much laughter Saturday: “One can envision an ideal world in which Iran said, we’ll destroy every element and facility and you name it, it’s all gone. I can envision a world in which Congress passed every one of my bills that I put forward.”

But Washington does seem more willing to accommodate Jerusalem’s requirements regarding the peace negotiations with the Palestinians. To be sure, Obama and his indefatigable secretary of state, John Kerry, are exerting tremendous pressure on Netanyahu to reach an agreement. But recent statements from the two indicate that they respect two of Israel’s key demands: recognition by the Palestinians as a Jewish state and ironclad security arrangements, including an Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley.

Obama endorsed Netanyahu’s demands that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people over a year ago. But on Saturday, he for the first time publicly indicated that even under a final status deal, Israeli troops will remain stationed on the territory of a future Palestinian state, at least for some time.

“Ultimately, the Palestinians have to also recognize that there is going to be a transition period where the Israeli people cannot expect a replica of Gaza in the West Bank. That is unacceptable,” Obama said, referring to the incessant rocket fire on Israeli towns that followed the 2005 disengagement from the Hamas-ruled coastal strip. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas needs to be “willing to understand that this transition period requires some restraint on the part of the Palestinians as well,” Obama said. “They don’t get everything that they want on day one.”

Later on, when asked how Israel can be expected to sign a final status agreement when the PA is currently not in control of Gaza, Obama said that a peace deal would have “to happen in stages.” He reiterated his idea of a “transition period,” during which a deal will have been signed but not all details will have been worked out. “And the security requirements that Israel requires will have to be met.”

Speaking at the Saban Forum right after Obama, Kerry also said that Israel will have to be allowed to maintain a security presence on the territory of a future Palestinian state to secure Israel’s eastern border.

As much as Washington is pushing Jerusalem toward a peace deal with the Palestinians, the Americans seem to accept Israel’s security caveats vis-à-vis the Jordan Valley. They are less understanding when it comes to Netanyahu’s position on the Iranian threat. But while a final-status deal between the international community and Iran seems set to take shape over the coming months — a deal Israel will doubtless ferociously reject — a final-status deal with the Palestinians seems as elusive as ever.

Peres says he’s willing to meet Rouhani: ‘Iran is not our enemy’ | JPost | Israel News.

By NIV ELIS, JPOST.COM STAFF

12/08/2013 10:02

In question and answer session at Globes Business Conference, president says Israel prefers diplomatic solution to Iran threat, claims peace can be achieved in Kerry’s time frame, and comes out in favor of gay marriage.

President Shimon Peres on Sunday said that he would have no problem meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

“Why not?” he said in an interview with CNN’s Richard Quest at the Globes Israel Business Conference in Tel Aviv. Israel and Iran are not enemies, he said.

The important factor was not the man in question, but his policies, and the goal was to turn enemies into friends. Peres compared the decision to Israel’s choice to meet with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat ahead of the Oslo Peace agreements.

Peres said that he had his doubts whether Rouhani could follow through on his promises of moderation given the political climate in Iran and the strength of hardliners, such as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

The president said that Israel, like the United States prefers to stop Iran’s nuclear drive through diplomatic measures.

“We also prefer economic or political pressure before anyone begins to shoot. We are not in a hurry to shoot,” he stated.

He rejected the idea that Israel was isolated on the Iranian issue, stating that there was an “impressive coalition” of countries who do not want to see Iran with a nuclear bomb, including the Russians and the Chinese.

Peres said that while there have been arguments with the United States over the handling of Iran’s nuclear program, “basically the relations have remained as they were and as they should be.”

He also addressed the peace process, saying that he thought it was possible to complete an agreement with the Palestinians in the nine-month period set out by US Secretary of State John Kerry, but that he was not certain it would happen.

Peres said that now, as opposed to in the past, all the major parties in Israel, on the Left and Right, are in favor of a two-state solution.

Peres was asked his stance on gay marriage in Israel during the interview session, and responded that everybody was born equal and had a right to love who they wanted to love.

When pressed, as to whether that was a “yes” or “no” to the whether he supported gay marriage he responded, “I think everybody will take it as a yes.”

Though the question referenced a bill that would give gay male couples equal tax status, which does not explicitly legalize gay marriage, the interviewer specifically used the term “gay marriage” in his question.

Iran forging ahead with uranium enrichment technology | JPost | Israel News.

By REUTERS

12/07/2013 22:54

Development does not appear to contravene interim agreement but material can provide fissile core of nuclear bomb.

DUBAI – Iran is moving ahead with testing more efficient uranium enrichment technology, a spokesman for its atomic energy agency said on Saturday, in news that may concern world powers who last month agreed a deal to curb Tehran’s atomic activities.

Spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi was quoted by state news agency IRNA as saying that initial testing on a new generation of more sophisticated centrifuges had been completed, underlining Iran’s determination to keep refining uranium in what it says is work to make fuel for a planned network of nuclear power plants.

Although the development does not appear to contravene the interim agreement struck between world powers and Iran last month, it may concern the West nonetheless, as the material can also provide the fissile core of a nuclear bomb if enriched to a high degree.

“The new generation of centrifuges was produced with a higher capacity compared with the first generation machines and we have completed initial tests,” Kamalvandi was quoted as saying.

“The production of a new generation of centrifuges is in line with the (Iranian atomic energy) agency’s approach of upgrading the quality of enrichment machines and increasing the rate of production by using the maximum infrastructure facilities”.

Kamalvandi said the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had been informed of the development.

Iran’s development of a new generation of centrifuges – machines that spin at supersonic speed to increase the ratio of the fissile isotope – could enable it to refine uranium much faster.

Under the Nov. 24 interim accord with the six world powers, Iran promised not to start operating them or install any more for a period of six months. But the agreement seems to allow it to continue with research and development activity at a nearby Natanz pilot plant.

Iran earlier this year stoked the West’s worries by starting to install a new centrifuge – the IR-2m – at its Natanz enrichment plant. Iran is testing the IR-2m and other models at its research and development facility at Natanz.

Kamalvandi did not specify whether the new centrifuge model he was referring to was the IR-2m.

It is currently using a 1970s model, the IR1, to refine uranium at the main Natanz plant and its efforts to replace this breakdown-prone centrifuge are being closely watched.

Some experts believe the IR-2m can enrich uranium 2-3 times faster than the IR-1.

UN inspectors arrived in Tehran on Saturday and are due for the first time in more than two years to visit a plant linked to a planned heavy-water reactor that could yield nuclear bomb fuel, taking up an initial gesture by Iran to open its disputed nuclear program up to greater scrutiny.

Obama: Iran must shut Fordo, give up making centrifuges. Palestinians must accept framework deal.

Barack Obama at Saban Forum

US President Barack Obama addressed the Iranian nuclear and Palestinian issues in terms sympathetic to the Israeli case at the Saban annual forum in Washington Saturday, Dec. 7.

On the final accord with Iran, he spoke of constraints for making sure Iran was prevented from attaining a nuclear weapon.

He then called on the Palestinians to accept that the current round of talks with Israel would produce, at best, a framework accord without covering in full all the details of their dispute. It would also omit the Gaza Strip and a provide for a transition period before a final settlement.
The negotiations now in progress would therefore only cover the West Bank, for the time being, the US president said. He expressed the hope that Gaza’s Hamas rulers would be inspired by the success of the Palestinian-Israeli deal and want to emulate it.

This was the first time Obama had recognized that the current round of Palestinian-Israeli talks initiated by US Secretary of State John Kerry would not be able to reach a final settlement during his presidency – only, at best, interim agreements on some of the issues.

On the nuclear question, he said Iran would have to exercise “extraordinary restraints.” For a peaceful nuclear program, he said, “they don’t need an underground enrichment plant in Fordo, certainly not a heavy water plant in Arak or centrifuges.”
He did not refer directly to the military dimensions of that program, but insisted that no ideal option exists. “If it were possible to halt uranium enrichment and break up Iran’s nuclear capacity by any other means we would have taken it,” he said. We therefore decided to test Iran by diplomacy.

In contrast to the Palestinian question, Obama was clear that a final and comprehensive accord must be reached in six months time to make it impossible for Iran to attain a nuclear bomb. He promised that the international community would be party to every detail of this deal and Israel would be consulted.

In Obama’s view the final accord must contain four elements:

1. The shutdown of the underground nuclear enrichment plant at Fordo;

2. Give up the heavy water reactor under construction at Arak;
3. Stop manufacturing advanced centrifuges. This was a reference to the extra-fast IR2 machines, without which the Iranians would find it difficult to enrich uranium at high speed to weapon grade.
4. Permission for low-grade uranium enrichment up to the 3.5 percent level.
debkafile’s sources comment that in his answers to the questions put to him by Haim Saban, the US President made an effort to accommodate some of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s objections and views on the two most contentious issues weighing on relations between Washington and Jerusalem: Iran and the Palestinians.
This cut the ground from under Netanyahu’s leading political opponents, such as former prime minister Ehud Olmert, ex-Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin and others, who contest his policies as needlessly antagonizing the United States.

At the same time, neither Tehran nor the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas is likely to accept the propositions Obama presented Saturday.

Iran, in particular, will certainly fume over his comment that diplomacy will not only test Iran on its nuclear intentions but may also be used to “ultimately defeat some of its other agendas in the Middle East” to which the US is opposed. He cited terrorism, subversion and threats against “our friends and allies.”

Tehran may even walk away from the diplomatic process for a time in protest.
Obama lowered expectations from the Palestinian-Israeli track because he had seen John Kerry’s account of Mahmoud Abbas’s rejection of the new US security plan when they met in Ramallah Thursday, Dec. 5.

In this plan, Obama said that US Gen. John Allen Gen. Allen had outlined security arrangements for the two sides with which he believed “Israel should be able to feel comfortable in the transition period leading up to a final settlement.” He admitted he was not sure it would be acceptable to the Palestinians.

The day it happens… – YouTube.

When Israel is finally forced to launch against Iran’s nuclear program.

God be with us…

–

Charles Krauthammer: Woe to U.S. allies – The Washington Post.

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: December 6

Three crises, one president, many bewildered friends.

The first crisis, barely noticed here, is Ukraine’s sudden turn away from Europe and back to the Russian embrace.

After years of negotiations for a major trading agreement with the European Union, Ukraine succumbed to characteristically blunt and brutal economic threats from Russia and abruptly walked away. Ukraine is instead considering joining the Moscow-centered Customs Union with Russia’s fellow dictatorships Belarus and Kazakhstan.

This is no trivial matter. Ukraine is not just the largest European country, it’s the linchpin for Vladimir Putin’s dream of a renewed imperial Russia, hegemonic in its neighborhood and rolling back the quarter-century advancement of the “Europe whole and free” bequeathed by America’s victory in the Cold War.

The U.S. response? Almost imperceptible. As with Iran’s ruthlessly crushed Green Revolution of 2009, the hundreds of thousands of protesters who’ve turned out to reverse this betrayal of Ukrainian independence have found no voice in Washington. Can’t this administration even rhetorically support those seeking a democratic future, as we did during Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004?

A Post online headline explains: “With Russia in mind, U.S. takes cautious approach on Ukraine unrest.” We must not offend Putin. We must not jeopardize Obama’s precious “reset,” a farce that has yielded nothing but the well-earned distrust of allies such as Poland and the Czech Republic whom we wantonly undercut in a vain effort to appease Russia on missile defense.

Why not outbid Putin? We’re talking about a $10 billion to $15 billion package from Western economies with more than $30 trillion in GDP to alter the strategic balance between a free Europe and an aggressively authoritarian Russia — and prevent a barely solvent Russian kleptocracy living off oil, gas and vodka, from blackmailing its way to regional hegemony.

The second crisis is the Middle East — the collapse of confidence of U.S. allies as America romances Iran.

The Gulf Arabs are stunned at their double abandonment. In the nuclear negotiations with Iran, the U.S. has overthrown seven years of Security Council resolutions prohibiting uranium enrichment and effectively recognized Iran as a threshold nuclear state. This follows our near-abandonment of the Syrian revolution and de facto recognition of both the Assad regime and Iran’s “Shiite Crescent” of client states stretching to the Mediterranean.

Equally dumbfounded are the Israelis, now trapped by an agreement designed less to stop the Iranian nuclear program than to prevent the Israeli Air Force from stopping the Iranian nuclear program.

Neither Arab nor Israeli can quite fathom Obama’s naivete in imagining some strategic condominium with a regime that defines its very purpose as overthrowing American power and expelling it from the region.

Better diplomacy than war, say Obama’s apologists, an adolescent response implying that all diplomacy is the same, as if a diplomacy of capitulation is no different from a diplomacy of pressure.

What to do? Apply pressure. Congress should immediately pass punishing new sanctions to be implemented exactly six months hence — when the current interim accord is supposed to end — if the Iranians have not lived up to the agreement and refuse to negotiate a final deal that fully liquidates their nuclear weapons program.

The third crisis is unfolding over the East China Sea, where, in open challenge to Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” China has brazenly declared a huge expansion of its airspace into waters claimed by Japan and South Korea.

Obama’s first response — sending B-52s through that airspace without acknowledging the Chinese — was quick and firm. Japan and South Korea followed suit. But when Japan then told its civilian carriers not to comply with Chinese demands for identification, the State Department (and FAA) told U.S. air carriers to submit.

Which, of course, left the Japanese hanging. It got worse. During Vice President Biden’s visit to China, the administration buckled. Rather than insisting on a withdrawal of China’s outrageous claim, we began urging mere nonenforcement.

Again leaving our friends stunned. They need an ally, not an intermediary. Here is the U.S. again going over the heads of allies to accommodate a common adversary. We should be declaring the Chinese claim null and void, ordering our commercial airlines to join Japan in acting accordingly, and supplying them with joint military escorts if necessary.

This would not be an exercise in belligerence but a demonstration that if other countries unilaterally overturn the status quo, they will meet a firm, united, multilateral response from the West.

Led by us. From in front.

No one’s asking for a JFK-like commitment to “bear any burden” to “assure the . . . success of liberty.” Or a Reaganesque tearing down of walls. Or even a Clintonian assertion of America as the indispensable nation. America’s allies are seeking simply a reconsideration of the policy of retreat that marks this administration’s response to red-line challenges all over the world — and leaves them naked.

George Will: Containing Iran is the least awful choice – The Washington Post.

By George F. Will, Saturday, December 7, 3:04 AM

In his disproportionate praise of the six-month agreement with Iran, Barack Obama said: “For the first time in nearly a decade, we have halted the progress of the Iranian nuclear program.”

But if the program, now several decades old, had really been “halted” shortly after U.S. forces invaded neighboring Iraq, we would not be desperately pursuing agreements to stop it now, as about 10,000 centrifuges spin to enrich uranium.

If Denmark wanted to develop nuclear weapons, we would consider that nation daft but not dangerous. Iran’s nuclear program is alarming because Iran’s regime is opaque in its decision-making, frightening in its motives (measured by its rhetoric) and barbaric in its behavior. “Manes,” writes Kenneth M. Pollack of the Brookings Institution, “from whose name the word manichean derives, was a Persian who conceived of the world as being divided into good and evil.” But Pollack says suicidal tendencies are not among the irrationalities of the Iranian leadership, who are not “insane millenarians.”

In “Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy,” Pollack argues that Iran’s nuclear program has been, so far, more beneficial to the United States than to Iran. Because of the anxieties and sanctions the program has triggered, Iran is more isolated, weak, impoverished and internally divided than at any time since it became a U.S. adversary in 1979. And one possible — Pollack thinks probable — result of Iran acquiring a nuclear arsenal would be Saudi Arabia doing so. Pollack considers this perhaps “the most compelling reason” for Iran to stop just short of weaponization.

Writing several months before the recent agreement was reached, Pollack said that, given Iran’s adamant refusal to give up all enrichment, it will retain at least a “breakout capability” — the ability to dash to weaponization in a matter of months, even weeks. Hence the need to plan serious, aggressive containment.

In September 2012, the Senate voted 90 to 1 for a nonbinding resolution “ruling out any policy that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat.” The implication was that containment is a tepid and passive policy. But it was not such during the 45 years the United States contained the Soviet Union. And containment can involve much more than mere deterrence of Iran, against which the United States has already waged cyberwarfare.

Pollack believes that, were it not for Israel “repeatedly sounding the alarm,” Iran “probably would have crossed the nuclear threshold long ago.” But if a nuclear Iran is for Israel unthinkable because it is uncontainable, Israel’s only self-reliant recourse — a nuclear attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure — is unthinkable. And, Pollack thinks, unnecessary. The existence of Israel’s nuclear arsenal is a sufficient deterrent: The Iranian leadership is “aggressive, anti-American, anti-status quo, anti-Semitic, duplicitous, and murderous, but it is not irrational, and overall, it is not imprudent.”

There will be no constitutional impropriety if Congress recoils against the easing of sanctions and votes to impose even stiffer ones on Iran. The president has primary but not exclusive responsibility for foreign policy. It is time for a debate about the role of sanctions in a containment policy whose ultimate objective is regime change. For many decades prior to 1989, humanity was haunted by the possibility that facets of modernity — bureaucracy and propaganda technologies — could produce permanent tyrannies impervious to change. (See Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”) In “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” George Orwell wrote, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.” Since 1989, however, tyrannies seem more brittle. And Pollack believes “the basic ingredients of regime change exist in Iran,” which “today is a land of labor protests and political demonstrations.”

Pollack may be too sanguine when he says that, since the brutal smashing of the Green Revolution of June 2009, “the Islamic Republic has been delegitimized and is starting to hollow out.” His fear is that even massive U.S. air strikes would only delay the danger that provoked them and thus might “prove to be nothing more than a prelude to invasion, as they were in Iraq and almost were in Kosovo.”

The logic of nuclear deterrence has not yet failed in the 64 years since the world acquired its second nuclear power. This logic does not guarantee certainty, but, says Pollack, “the small residual doubt cannot be allowed to be determinative.” His basic point is: “Our choices are awful, but choose we must.” Containment is the least awful response to Iran’s coming nuclear capability.

BBC News – Hagel: US military power must back Iran nuclear deal.

Chuck Hagel sought to reassure regional leaders of continued US support

Diplomacy with Iran must be backed by military power, US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel has said.

Mr Hagel, speaking in Bahrain, said Washington was committed to maintaining a strong force in the Gulf region.

Iran recently agreed to curb some nuclear activities for six months in return for sanctions relief.

Analysts say Washington’s Gulf Arab partners are worried the US will lose focus on the Middle East as it boosts its presence in Asia.

Mr Hagel told the Manama Dialogue – a regional security forum – the US has more than 35,000 military personnel in the region and would not reduce that number.

“We know diplomacy cannot operate in a vacuum,” Mr Hagel said.

“Our success will continue to hinge on America’s military power, and the credibility of our assurances to our allies and partners in the Middle East.”

“Iran has been a profoundly destabilising influence and a nuclear-armed Iran would pose an unacceptable threat to regional and global stability,” he added.

Under the interim deal agreed with six world powers in Geneva, Tehran will receive some $7bn (£4.3bn) in sanctions relief while talks continue to find a more permanent agreement.

Although the accord was generally welcomed, Israel said it was a “historic mistake” and some US senators have said it is too soft on Iran.

Mr Hagel said the agreement “bought time for meaningful negotiation, not for deception”.

He said US diplomacy would ultimately be backed up by military commitments and co-operation with regional partners.

Heightened tension

“As America emerges from a long period of war, it will not shirk its responsibilities,” Mr Hagel said.

“America’s commitment to this region is proven. And it is enduring.”

Mr Hagel’s remarks came at a time of heightened tension between Washington and its Gulf Arab partners.

Saudi Arabia reacted angrily when the US backed down from launching a military strike against Syria in September following chemical weapons attacks near Damascus.

Saudi officials very publicly criticised Washington for what they perceived as its timid approach to the region.

Mr Hagel told the Manama Dialogue that while the US would continue to provide aid to Syrian refugees and the neighbouring countries of Jordan and Turkey, the rise of violent extremism among rebel groups in Syria had to be addressed.

“We will continue to work with partners throughout the region to help bring about a political settlement to end this conflict,” he said.

However, he called for efforts to ensure that aid for the opposition “does not fall into the wrong hands.”

The Obama administration has signalled a strategic shift in its foreign policy towards the Pacific region, in recognition of China’s growing military power.

Articles: The Iranian Agreement and the Strategy of Deterrence.

By Abraham H. Miller