WarSclerotic

Judiciary Chief: Iraq Favors Broadening Ties with Iran, FARS News Agency (Iran), May 18, 2014

(See also Why are We Surprised that Iran is Exporting Weapons to Iraq? — DM)

Al-Shammari, for his part, hailed Iran’s determination to support the Iraqi stability and security as well as the democratic process.

“Broadening judicial relations between Iran and Iraq is the most important goal of my four-day visit to Tehran,” al-Mahmoud told reporters after a meeting with his Iranian counterpart Amoli Larijani in Tehran on Sunday.

He noted that the two countries’ judicial delegations should exchange visits in a bid to deepen the bilateral relations.

Al-Mahmoud pointed to his meeting Amoli Larijani, and said, “The meeting pursued expansion of ties and achieving the planned objectives.”

During his four-day visit to Iran, al-Mahmoud is also slated to confer with other high ranking officials, including President Hassan Rouhani and Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani.

Iran and Iraq have enjoyed growing ties ever since the overthrow of the former Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, during the 2003 US invasion of the Muslim country.

In mid-April, Iranian Justice Minister Mostafa Pour Mohammadi and his Iraqi counterpart Hassan al-Shammari in a meeting in Baghdad explored avenues for bolstering and reinvigorating mutual cooperation.

Pour Mohammadi pointed to the current Iran-Iraq judicial relations, and said, “The two countries should expand judicial cooperation, organize cross-border travel, tackle illegal entries and determine the fate of detainees.”

Al-Shammari, for his part, hailed Iran’s determination to support the Iraqi stability and security as well as the democratic process.

During the meeting, the Iranian and Iraqi justice ministers signed a memorandum of understating (MoU) on extradition of prisoners.

According to the agreement, the Iranian and Iraqi justice ministries will set up a joint committee at the earliest to examine the situation of the prisoners and prepare the ground for their extradition.

Grading Obama’s Foreign Policy, New York Times, Ross Douthat, May 17, 2014

(This is from the New York Times. Although President Obama’s “foreign policy” seems to have very low priority for American voters, some of the comments, available at the NY Times article, are interesting. — DM)

In the Holy Land, Kerry’s recent push for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations ended in predictable failure, and in Iraq the caldron is boiling and Iranian influence is growing — in part, The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins suggested last month, because the White House’s indecision undercut negotiations that might have left a small but stabilizing U.S. force in place.

[T]he global stage hasn’t been a second-term refuge for President Obama; it’s been an arena of setbacks, crises and defeats. His foreign policy looked modestly successful when he was running for re-election. Now it stinks of failure.

[R]ecent events do not inspire much confidence. Instead, future defenses of Obama’s foreign policy may boil down to just six words: “At least he didn’t invade Iraq.”

SECOND terms are often a time when presidents, balked by domestic opposition, turn to the world stage to secure their legacy — opening doors to China, closing out the Cold War, chasing Middle Eastern peace.

But the global stage hasn’t been a second-term refuge for President Obama; it’s been an arena of setbacks, crises and defeats. His foreign policy looked modestly successful when he was running for re-election. Now it stinks of failure.

Failure is a relative term, to be sure. His predecessor’s invasion of Iraq still looms as the largest American blunder of the post-Vietnam era. None of Obama’s difficulties have rivaled that debacle. And many of the sweeping conservative critiques of his foreign policy — that Obama has weakened America’s position in the world, that he’s too chary about using military force — lack perspective on how much damage the Iraq war did to American interests, and how many current problems can be traced back to errors made in 2003.

But the absence of an Iraq-scale fiasco is not identical to success, and history shouldn’t grade this president on a curve set by Donald Rumsfeld. Obama is responsible for the initiatives he’s pursued, the strategies he’s blessed and the priorities he’s set. And almost nothing on that list is working out.

Start with Libya, the site of Obama’s own war of choice. The consuming Republican focus on Benghazi has tended to obscure the fact that post-Qaddafi Libya is generally a disaster area — its government nonfunctional, its territory a safe harbor for jihadists, its former ruler’s weaponry and fighters destabilizing sub-Saharan Africa. (Some of those weapons, for instance, appear to be in the hands of Nigeria’s most-wanted kidnappers, Boko Haram.)

Then swing northeast to Syria, where this administration’s stated policy is that Bashar al-Assad has to go, and that there is a “red line” — backed by force, if necessary — around the use of chemical weapons. Well, Assad isn’t going; he’s winning. And the White House’s claims of progress on the chemical weapons front were undermined by Secretary of State John Kerry’s acknowledgment last week that “raw data” suggested a “number of instances” in which Assad’s governmentrecently used chlorine gas.

The picture doesn’t look better when you turn south or east. In the Holy Land, Kerry’s recent push for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations ended in predictable failure, and in Iraq the caldron is boiling and Iranian influence is growing — in part, The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins suggested last month, because the White House’s indecision undercut negotiations that might have left a small but stabilizing U.S. force in place.

Similar status-of-forces negotiations are ongoing in Afghanistan, and the backdrop is even grimmer: The surge of forces ordered by Obama (also amid much indecision) failed to replicate the success of Gen. David Petraeus’s salvage operation in Iraq, and even with an American presence the Taliban are barely being held at bay.

As for the White House’s major diplomatic projects, one — the “reset” with Russia — has ended in the shambles of the Ukraine crisis. A second, the opening to Iran, is still being pursued, with deadlines looming, and it’s the administration’s best remaining hope for a paradigm-altering achievement. But that hope is still a thin one (complicated, for instance, by Iran’s continuing pursuit of ballistic missiles), and it’s just as likely that Obama will have unsettled America’s existing alliances in the region to very little gain.

As for the promised “pivot to Asia,” let me know when it actually happens, and maybe I’ll have something to say about it.

But most presidents do win some clear victories. Not everyone gets to end the Cold War, but there’s usually some diplomatic initiative that leaves a positive legacy (even Jimmy Carter had the Camp David accords), some military or humanitarian intervention (even George W. Bush had his AIDS-in-Africa initiative) that looks like a success.

Osama bin Laden — an “except” that has to be qualified by Islamist terrorism’s resurgence — if Obama’s presidency ended today I have no idea what major foreign policy achievements his defenders could reasonably cite.

There is still time for it to be otherwise — for the administration to brilliantly exploit Vladimir Putin’s possible overreach, or seal a lasting nuclear deal with Iran, or craft a strategy to soothe the nationalisms gathering on the Indian subcontinent and the Pacific Rim.

But recent events do not inspire much confidence. Instead, future defenses of Obama’s foreign policy may boil down to just six words: “At least he didn’t invade Iraq.”

Why are We Surprised that Iran is Exporting Weapons to Iraq? Jewish Press, J.E. Dyer, May 18, 2014

(See also Iraq signs deal to buy arms, ammunition from Iran. — DM)

Reuters reported in February that Iraq and Iran signed an arms deal in November of 2013, right after Nouri al-Maliki got home from a visit to Washington (during which he petitioned Obama for more arms to fight off the “ISIS” insurgency waging war across Syria and western Iraq).

Iran’s approach to Jerusalem – where the radical clerics quite literally expect to fight under the Mahdi’s banner (see here for more from Ayatollah Khamenei on the 12th Imam) – has to be incremental and cumulative. Defeating the ISIS insurgency is a step along the way to consolidating an unresisting client corridor across the heart of the Middle East.

Iran’s motivation to involve herself in the fight against ISIS is strong. So is her motivation to make a de facto ally of Iraq. Although the U.S. has provided Baghdad with some arms to combat ISIS, it would take a much greater level of commitment and involvement on our part to overcome the geopolitical forces that drive Baghdad and Tehran together in this instance.

It’s an opportunity for the United States as well, but it’s clear we’re not going to take it. The best thing we could possibly do is strengthen a loose coalition of regional pragmatists in defeating the threat posed by ISIS – and thereby sideline Iran.

Flag of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (a/k/a Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIL)

There are two layers to this question, which is popping up on TV screens this weekend. One is the geopolitical layer; the other is the simple-tracing-of-facts layer.

Starting with the latter, Reuters reported in February that Iraq and Iran signed an arms deal in November of 2013, right after Nouri al-Maliki got home from a visit to Washington (during which he petitioned Obama for more arms to fight off the “ISIS” insurgency waging war across Syria and western Iraq).

The ISIS insurgency – “Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham” – is often rendered “ISIL” in English, for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. In either case, the territorial reference is to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. The insurgents are Sunni jihadists, and their principal focus at the moment has been scoped by the Syrian civil war, in which they are fighting the Assad regime. Most of the ISIS guerrillas come from abroad; a major contingent of them is from the Chechen Caucasus, where Islamist insurgents have waged a war against Russian rule for nearly a quarter century now. (For more on all this, see the last link above to my January 2014 post. The map shows the corridor between Syria and Baghdad where the ISIS insurgency has sought to plant roots.)

The bottom line is that ISIS is fighting to gain control of territory over which radical Iran wants control herself. Iraq, under the current government, has no interest in wielding an outsize influence over her neighbors to the west; the priority in Baghdad is reestablishing control over Anbar Province. But the larger aspirations of ISIS clash directly with those of the mullahs in Tehran.

Tehran is still arming Assad and still seeking to arm Hezbollah and Hamas, as evidenced by the attempt in March to ship advanced artillery rockets to one or the other, or both. Besides the shadowy nature of the shipping route, a key feature of that attempt at arming the terrorists was that it combined arms stocks from both Iran and Syria. That aspect of the transaction is informative on multiple levels. At the most general level, it suggests how Iran sees Syria and the overall fight in the region: as an Iranian military and geopolitical campaign.

The mullahs don’t see themselves as narrowly locked in combat with a single opponent (ISIS). They have a much broader strategic objective of maintaining decisive influence where they have had it, and gaining it where they don’t. They want to turn the same territory that ISIS is after into a quiescent client-region. Much of it had fallen to them already, at the onset of the Arab Spring in January 2011: all of Syria, and the southern portion of Lebanon.

The Iranian leaders know they can’t just make abrupt moves against central Lebanon or Israel; their interim goal is to hold sway over vulnerable territories that border Beirut and Israel. And that’s a hydra-headed problem. Under today’s conditions, the Saudis would spearhead an Arab coalition to fight Iran for Lebanon – and for the West Bank, for that matter. Cairo won’t stand by and let Iranian influence build up – or, more accurately, let it change course or take new initiatives – in Gaza. Israel, of course, will defend her territory.

So Iran’s approach to Jerusalem – where the radical clerics quite literally expect to fight under the Mahdi’s banner (see here for more from Ayatollah Khamenei on the 12th Imam) – has to be incremental and cumulative. Defeating the ISIS insurgency is a step along the way to consolidating an unresisting client corridor across the heart of the Middle East.

The ISIS guerrillas constitute an emerging operational problem for Iran, one that has arisen because of the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war. It’s part of the regional jockeying predicted in this series from 2009 (see here for an update in 2011). The jockeying will intensify, and the alignment of Iraq is actually quite an important factor in the mix, one that can either slow Iran down significantly, or greatly accelerate the establishment of conditions friendly for her long-term goals.

Iran’s motivation to involve herself in the fight against ISIS is strong. So is her motivation to make a de facto ally of Iraq. Although the U.S. has provided Baghdad with some arms to combat ISIS, it would take a much greater level of commitment and involvement on our part to overcome the geopolitical forces that drive Baghdad and Tehran together in this instance.

Key terrain for the Mahdi. (Google map)

The bottom line is that ISIS is fighting to gain control of territory over which radical Iran wants control herself. Iraq, under the current government, has no interest in wielding an outsize influence over her neighbors to the west; the priority in Baghdad is reestablishing control over Anbar Province. But the larger aspirations of ISIS clash directly with those of the mullahs in Tehran.Tehran is still arming Assad and still seeking to arm Hezbollah and Hamas, as evidenced by the attempt in March to ship advanced artillery rockets to one or the other, or both. Besides the shadowy nature of the shipping route, a key feature of that attempt at arming the terrorists was that it combined arms stocks from both Iran and Syria. That aspect of the transaction is informative on multiple levels. At the most general level, it suggests how Iran sees Syria and the overall fight in the region: as an Iranian military and geopolitical campaign.

The mullahs don’t see themselves as narrowly locked in combat with a single opponent (ISIS). They have a much broader strategic objective of maintaining decisive influence where they have had it, and gaining it where they don’t. They want to turn the same territory that ISIS is after into a quiescent client-region. Much of it had fallen to them already, at the onset of the Arab Spring in January 2011: all of Syria, and the southern portion of Lebanon.

The Iranian leaders know they can’t just make abrupt moves against central Lebanon or Israel; their interim goal is to hold sway over vulnerable territories that border Beirut and Israel. And that’s a hydra-headed problem. Under today’s conditions, the Saudis would spearhead an Arab coalition to fight Iran for Lebanon – and for the West Bank, for that matter. Cairo won’t stand by and let Iranian influence build up – or, more accurately, let it change course or take new initiatives – in Gaza. Israel, of course, will defend her territory.

So Iran’s approach to Jerusalem – where the radical clerics quite literally expect to fight under the Mahdi’s banner (see here for more from Ayatollah Khamenei on the 12th Imam) – has to be incremental and cumulative. Defeating the ISIS insurgency is a step along the way to consolidating an unresisting client corridor across the heart of the Middle East.

The ISIS guerrillas constitute an emerging operational problem for Iran, one that has arisen because of the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war. It’s part of the regional jockeying predicted in this series from 2009 (see here for an update in 2011). The jockeying will intensify, and the alignment of Iraq is actually quite an important factor in the mix, one that can either slow Iran down significantly, or greatly accelerate the establishment of conditions friendly for her long-term goals.

Iran’s motivation to involve herself in the fight against ISIS is strong. So is her motivation to make a de facto ally of Iraq. Although the U.S. has provided Baghdad with some arms to combat ISIS, it would take a much greater level of commitment and involvement on our part to overcome the geopolitical forces that drive Baghdad and Tehran together in this instance.

The coming together is cause for alarm in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and for speculation at the very least in Turkey, Russia, and the Gulf nations. Al-Maliki’s affinity for Iran (he’s a Shia and a long-time friend of Iran) doesn’t mean that he wants to sit in Tehran’s pocket. He will inevitably want to retain some level of independence – and there may be someone who wants badly enough to help him do that. It’s a window of opportunity for, say, Russia, China, or even India, from their various strategic perspectives. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility for France or Germany to get back into a bit of power-brokering, along this regional axis.

It’s an opportunity for the United States as well, but it’s clear we’re not going to take it. The best thing we could possibly do is strengthen a loose coalition of regional pragmatists in defeating the threat posed by ISIS – and thereby sideline Iran. Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon all have viable factions that would do their own work, and produce outcomes that were an improvement for their people and that we could live with, if we gave them active help and showed ourselves reliable. No American boots on the ground would be necessary. The whole point would be for the Iraqis to win their battle, and the Syrians theirs, and so forth.

To have that opportunity, what the local peoples need that only America can provide is protection from the interventions of Iran and Russia. Some active shouldering of the two predators would be required. But the best such protection is success for the alternative client model: the model of a nation doing its own security work with U.S. backing.

That’s what is missing in this situation. And as long as it is, the arms trade between Iran and Iraq will do nothing but grow, and the State Department will vow every few months that it’s “looking into” this unacceptable development, which – all but irrelevantly – violates the UN sanctions on Iran.

Israel Hayom | Blaming Israel again.

Elliot Abrams

Friday’s New York Times carried a useful guide to President Barack Obama’s understanding of his own failures in the “Middle East peace process.” He blames the Palestinians a tiny bit, the Israelis a great deal, and himself not at all.

Here are the key paragraphs:

“Publicly, Mr. Obama has said that both sides bear responsibility for the latest collapse. But the president believes that more than any other factor, Israel’s drumbeat of settlement announcements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem poisoned the atmosphere and doomed any chance of a breakthrough with the Palestinians.

“‘At every juncture, there was a settlement announcement,’ said [a senior administration] official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “It was the thing that kept throwing a wrench in the gears.'”

There are a number of comments worth making about these remarks. First, note that the term “settlement” is used for construction in Jerusalem, Israel’s capital. Second, note that there is no reference to the 10-month settlement freeze Israel undertook in November 2009. For that decision Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu paid a domestic political price, but got nothing in return from the Palestinians — who did not come to the table until the 10th month, when they knew the freeze was ending — or from Obama, who apparently has forgotten the whole thing.

Third, note that the reference is to a “drumbeat of settlement announcements,” rather than actual construction. That’s because there is no big increase in settlement activity, in new construction or in confiscation of land for settlements. Government officials at various levels of responsibility in the municipal and national governments can and do make announcements, sometimes for political reasons.

A careful analysis would show that the administration’s accusation of vast increases in construction activity is wrong, but it seems there has been no such analysis done. Instead, the president and envoy Martin Indyk make vague references to “rampant” activity and “large-scale” land confiscation, offering no evidence for their charges.

Surely they are sophisticated enough to know that such announcements are political acts, often meant to embarrass Netanyahu and often misleading as to whether additional new construction is coming. And if they are sophisticated enough to know this, then their continuing insistence that Israel is to blame for the breakdown in talks is simply misleading and unfair. Because they know that according to the numbers there is no explosion of settlement activity; they know that when Israel did undertake a construction freeze, it did not bring the Palestinians to the table; they know that such a freeze has never been a precondition for talks before the Obama administration tried to make it so.

One thing missing in every account of the administration’s reaction to the breakdown of the talks, and it is introspection. Never do we read of any serious internal effort to assess what the president, or Secretary of State John Kerry, or Indyk, may have gotten wrong. It seems easier to blame Israel and “settlement announcements.”

US accepts Shahab-3s in Iran’s missile arsenal, but not long-range ICBMs. Deep resentment in Jerusalem.

DEBKAfile Special Report May 18, 2014, 9:16 AM (IDT)

However, neither Jerusalem nor the Gulf leaders accepted Washington’s explanations. Their disquiet was further exacerbated by the failure of latest round of nuclear negotiations with the six powers, which took place in Vienna Thursday, May 15, to bridge gaps between the sides and so prevented a start on the drafting of a final accord.

These widening gaps reflect the growing controversy over nuclear diplomacy in Tehran.

Saturday night, May 17, President Hassan Rouhani speaking to associates at a private meeting voiced his frustration with Khamenei: “That person thinks he knows everything and lays down policy without considering all the facts,” he complained.

Rouhani understands that tactical compromises will not bring about substantial relief from economic sanctions that at preying on his country. He is urging substantial concessions of Iran’s nuclear aspirations, enough to convince the world that his country is not after a nuclear weapon.

Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards have rejected this approach. They are not open to real concessions either on their nuclear program or missile arsenal. This intransigence shows no sign of softening under the Obama administration’s willingness for compromise at the expense of Iran’s potential targets.

Iran defiant on Arak facility, right to enrich uranium as nuclear talks appear to falter | JPost | Israel News.

By JPOST.COM STAFF, REUTERS, MICHAEL WILNER

05/18/2014 10:01

As the recent round of talks in Vienna ends with few signs of progress, Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi says heavy water reactor, seen as potential source of plutonium for nuclear bomb, will continue to function.

As talks between world powers and Iran came to a close without any signs of progress, Tehran said Sunday that the Arak research reactor, which the West fears can be used to make plutonium for a nuclear bomb, would continue its work with 40 megawatts of power.

In comments carried by Iran’s Press TV, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi emphasized that the Arak reactor would remain a heavy water facility and also stressed that Iran has the right to enrich uranium.

The fate of Arak which has not yet been completed is one of the central issues in negotiations between Iran and the world powers, aimed at reaching a long-term deal on Tehran’s nuclear program by a July 20 deadline.

Araqchi said on Friday that no progress had been made during the fourth round of negotiations in Vienna.

“The talks were serious and constructive but no progress has been made,” Araqchi told reporters at the end of the fourth round of negotiations between Iran and the United States, France, Germany, Britain, China and Russia.

The negotiations began in February and are aimed at reaching a long-term deal to curb sensitive parts of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for a gradual lifting of sanctions.

“We have not reached the point to start drafting the final agreement,” he said.

“Talks have been slow and difficult. Significant gaps remain,” a US official said after the talks concluded. “Iran still has some hard decisions to make. We’re concerned that progress is not being made and that time is short.”

After three months of comparing expectations rather than negotiating possible compromises, the sides had planned at the May 13-16 meeting to start drafting the text of a final agreement that could overcome many years of enmity and mistrust and dispel fears of a devastating, wider Middle East war.

Tehran claims its nuclear program is for only power generation and medical purposes.

In April, Ali Akbar Salehi, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said the P5+1 powers had agreed to a proposal presented by Iran to alter thea course of production at the Arak plant.

Heavy-water reactors such as Arak, fueled by natural uranium, are seen as especially suitable for yielding plutonium.

To do so, however, a spent fuel pre-processing plant would be needed to extract it. Iran is not known to have any such plant.

If operating optimally, Arak – located about 250 km. southwest of Tehran – could produce about 9 kg. of plutonium annually, the US Institute for Science and International Security says.

Any deal must lower that amount, Western experts say.

In April, Princeton University experts said that annual plutonium production could be cut to less than a kilogram – well below the roughly 8 kg. needed for an atomic bomb – if Iran altered the way Arak is fueled and lowered its power capacity.