Some profound wisdom on Iran from former Clinton foreign policy advisor, Flynt Leverett (co-written with Hillary Mann Leverett), who is critical of the Obama administration approach toward Iran:
President Obama…should not be excused for [his] failure to learn the lessons of recent history in the Middle East — that the prospect of strategic cooperation with Israel is profoundly unpopular with Arab publics and that even moderate Arab regimes cannot sustain such cooperation. The notion of an Israeli-moderate Arab coalition united to contain Iran is not only delusional, it would leave the Palestinian and Syrian-Lebanese tracks of the Arab-Israeli conflict unresolved and prospects for their resolution in free fall. These tracks cannot be resolved without meaningful American interaction with Iran and its regional allies, Hamas and Hezbollah.
…What is hard about the Iran problem is not periodic inflammatory statements from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or episodes like Ms. Saberi’s detention. What is really hard is that getting America’s Iran policy “right” would require a president to take positions that some allies and domestic constituencies won’t like.
To fix our Iran policy, the president would have to commit not to use force to change the borders or the form of government of the Islamic Republic. He would also have to accept that Iran will continue enriching uranium, and that the only realistic potential resolution to the nuclear issue would leave Iran in effect like Japan — a nation with an increasingly sophisticated nuclear fuel-cycle program that is carefully safeguarded to manage proliferation risks. Additionally, the president would have to accept that Iran’s relationships with Hamas and Hezbollah will continue, and be willing to work with Tehran to integrate these groups into lasting settlements of the Middle East’s core political conflicts.
It was not easy for President Richard Nixon to discard a quarter-century of failed policy toward the People’s Republic of China and to reorient America’s posture toward Beijing in ways that have served America’s interests extremely well for more than 30 years. That took strategic vision, political ruthlessness and personal determination. We hope that President Obama — contrary to his record so far — will soon begin to demonstrate those same qualities in forging a new approach toward Iran.
This speaks to my extreme discomfort with Obama’s “agreement” with Netanyahu, during their White House meeting, that Iran should be given a brief interval to disarm, after which draconian sanctions should be invoked. This too is the approach advocated by Dennis Ross, who comes in for his share of justified knocks in the Leverett article. What is clear from the latter is that neither Ross nor Obama really have a clue how to “reach” the Iranians. They, or at least Obama, may have good intentions; but such good intentions minus conviction and leadership will lead us into a heap of trouble. And listening to a word Bibi has to say on this subject will bring double trouble. He doesn’t even bring good intentions to the table.
H/t to Helena Cobban.
If its true that “the president said that he did not realize, when he came to office, how “hard” the Iran problem would be,” and therefor balks and retreats from his publicly avowed policies because of these internal “problems,” then he deserves to be destroyed.
Regardless of Hillary, Ross or any of the civilian/political appointees in the chief executive, Leverett is expressing the views of the majority within the uniformed and career civil service agencies and departments of the national security state. He himself, having been a ‘national security official’ must have all his articles or analysis’s reviewed by the CIA before publication.
The previous administration ran roughshod over these uniformed and career civil servants, shifting blame unto them for their failures. This ultimately let to a fight that a journalist called the “war in heaven.” Another war Bushites and their neocon/Likudnik allies started and lost. Maybe Obama will discover as Bush learned, that his greatest opponents aren’t in Congress, foreign lobbies or traitors within his own administration.
If Obama is going to be the President he advertised himself to be, he has to act sometime on or shortly after 12 June next. He doesn’t have till the end of the year, which makes a red herring out of any so called compromises or give away to Netanyahu. Leverett, Cobban and others are warning about the constituencies and interests driving conflict and war, and unless Obama acts decisively and soon any and all opportunities to prevent it will be gone by December.
I have the impression that the Iranians are making far more effort to understand the USA than the USA is making to comprehend Iran, for Iranian PressTV interviewed me this past Sunday: http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2009/05/martillo-on-iranian-presstv_26.html .
Here’s the thing. Hillary was more liberal on domestic policy than Obama. The reason that so many of us voted for Obama was for a change in foreign policy, especially with respect to Hillary’s threat to “obliterate Iran.” If Obama lied about changing our foreign policy, I would just as soon have Hillary and, I would heartily agree that Obama deserves to be destroyed.
Again Roger Cohen in the New York Times surprises:
/snip/
The president ceded to Israeli pressure for a timetable on any Iran talks, saying a “reassessment” should be possible by year’s end (Israel had pressed for an October deadline). Obama talked of the possibility of “much stronger international sanctions” against Iran, undermining his groundbreaking earlier overture that included a core truth: “This process will not be advanced by threats.”
Obama also allowed Netanyahu to compliment him for “leaving all options on the table” — the standard formula for a possible U.S. military strike against Iran — when he said nothing of the sort. The president did, however, use that tired phrase in a Newsweek interview this month — another mistake given the unthinkable consequences of a third U.S. war front in the Muslim world.
/snip/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/opinion/28iht-edcohen.html?_r=1&ref=global