The Saudi-Israeli-French Axis of Anxiety Over US-Iran Rapprochement

As US-Iran rapprochement inches toward at least partial consummation in Geneva, I wish to offer a few observations:

1)       The Iran nuclear weapons threat has always been a McGuffin, an excuse for various powers to advance an anti-Iran agenda.

2)      Chief among the usual suspects is, of course, Israel under PM Netanyahu.  If the Israeli government is able to spin Iran as a nuclear (almost) capable existential threat to Israel, then Israel can make an absolute claim on US sympathy, support, and protection.  If Iran returns to good relations with the United States, the US will arguably become less willing to bear the sizable political, diplomatic, and economic cost of deferring to Israel’s priorities—on the Palestinian question, on regional security, and its obstinate refusal to acknowledge its nuclear arsenal and integrate it into the international arms control regime.

3)      The other regional power most interested in thumping the Iran-threat drum is Saudi Arabia.  However, I would argue that the high-profile anti-Iran stance of the Kingdom (probably symbolized but not necessarily created by the notorious Prince Bandar) has little to do with the threat of “Iran hegemonism” (a canard frequently retailed in the big-name press) and a lot to do with Saudi Arabia’s decision to go pro-active against the popular democratic agitation expressed by the Arab Spring uprisings by supporting conservative Sunni theology and governance, not just in Shi’ite inflected countries like Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, but also in nations like Libya (where Saudi Arabia and its creature, the Gulf Co-Operation Council were the primary motive force in demanding intervention against Gaddafi) and Egypt.  It’s easy for Saudi Arabia to piggyback on the anti-Iran campaign promoted by the US and Israel and cite Iranian subversion as a pretext for the campaign of conservative Sunni rollback; if Iran is removed from the league table of existential enemies subverting the Sunni heartland, Saudi Arabia is left in the exposed position of protecting Wahhabi obscurantism against liberal democracy.  That’s not a happy place to be.

4)      Western observers have been rather surprised by France’s unapologetic sabotage of the Iran nuclear negotiations in Geneva at Israel's behest.  I saw some left-of-center complaining that France’s motivation was the greedy desire to muscle in on the lucrative Saudi arms business.  Perhaps, but I think the strategic nature of French involvement should be emphasized.  Recall that France’s traditional sphere of influence in the Middle East has been the Levant—that chunk of coastline that includes southern Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon.  France claims a paternal interest in the bloody, fascistic and pro-Israeli antics of the Lebanese Maronite community, a Catholic grouping whose origins date back to the Crusades and is perhaps the most conspicuous legacy of the French enthusiasm for meddling in the Middle East.  Before Syria blew up, France was at the center of an initiative to install Bashar al-Assad in the affections of the West.  Also, recall that the Libyan adventure was a creature of French enthusiasm; that France was also easily the most eager advocate of a US military strike on Syria after somebody crossed President Obama’s gas warfare red line.  With the United States displaying a desire to tilt toward Iran, if only a little bit, the Middle East jigsaw puzzle has been shaken up and France has the best potential of any Western power to shape and profit from the new alignment.  We can justifiably bitch about France carrying Israel’s water, but if the US pivots toward Asia, as it has promised, there is a strong case for redefining the Arab Middle East as a Mediterranean construct, with France playing the role of keystone (and Iran scolder-in-chief).  If Iran wants a European ally, well, Germany is probably there for the asking.

For the edification of China Matters readers, I offer two pieces from the archives below the fold.

First, a piece on the longstanding Saudi eagerness to push dissent into the sectarian pigeonhole, not only in Bahrain but in the entire Persian Gulf region. Hopefully, this provides a corrective to the rather ludicrous assertions of Iranian subversion, typified by allegations that the minority Assad regime is suicidally promoting sectarianism in Syria. The truth is, the Sunni affiliation of the Syrian majority is considered to be a dragon to be awakened in the service of conservative Saudi rollback against non-sectarian democracy, both in the kingdom and in the region.

Second, a discussion of the perennial question of whether Israel can pose a credible unilateral threat to Iran’s nuclear program with a military strike. When I originally wrote the post, it was considered unlikely that Saudi Arabia would provide refueling facilities to Israeli fighter bombers, and plausible that the US occupying forces in Iraq might provide the service. How things have changed. Under the current circumstances, I would say that Saudi Arabia’s enthusiasm for fighting to the last American has simply been transferred to Israel. I think that neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia have the stomach to bomb Iran and, perhaps, start a regional war without strong US backing of the sort that the Obama administration appears loathe to provide; hope I’m right. In any case, the real game is in Syria and western Iraq, regions that if not for that exasperating problem of al Qaeda blowback, would be viewed with unalloyed joy as fertile fields for conservative Sunni rollback and continued bloodshed, no matter what happens with Iran.

Israel 'bombs' Syria as envoy presses peace talks bid

That's how the story "Israel bombs Syria as envoy presses peace talks bid" was displayed courtesy of my Yahoo! home page.

Huh?  What's with the quotation marks? 

In the body of the article, you get:

A US official confirmed to AFP that "there was an Israeli strike" but gave no details on the location or the target.

Pretty direct.  I don't think Yahoo! needs to hide behind the air quotes.  I guess the simple phrase "Israel bombs Syria" felt too accusatory.  Maybe if a US ally bombs somebody it has to be presented as 'in response to an unacceptable security threat, targeted kinetic actions within the scope of international law as we understand it were undertaken'.  In that case, it's just easier to put airquotes around 'bomb' to alert the reader that it's not just a bombing.  There's more to it in the whole moral, security, and strategic megillah than just dropping a 'bomb' on somebody.

You also get:

The reported air strike on a military base in regime stronghold Latakia on Wednesday would be the first Israeli strike on Syria since a US-Russian accord on chemical weapons averted punitive US military action last month.

...

Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya television said Israel had targeted a shipment of surface-to-surface missiles destined for Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese Shiite movement fighting alongside the regime.

Kind of interesting that Al-Arabiya got the scoop.  Another indication of that burgeoning Saudi-Israeli alliance, I guess.

Maybe there was some special intel that these missiles would eventually make it to Lebanon, though Latakia is pretty far (about 100 miles) from Lebanon and Hezbollah.  Or maybe the Israeli-Saudi alliance is also interested in degrading Syrian capabilities and is using the missile story as an excuse to take potshots at Syria.  Or maybe this is a political shot across the bow to rebuke the United States and comfort militants with the demonstration that some people are still gung-ho on military strikes against the Assad regime.

If the mission was meant to send a message, it's rather ironic if Yahoo! soft-pedaled it with those craven quotation marks.

News Flash: GI Joe Discovers Nuclear Weapons in Israel

The movie GI Joe: Retaliation is crap.

To call it a video game movie is an insult to good video games.  It is a bad video game movie.

The expository scenes—where the characters move their mouths and words come out—are treated as cut scenes i.e. brief pauses to reward players with a bathroom break after they have completed a previous level, and provide the arbitrary framing that enables another session of witless, button-mashing mayhem on the next level.

Fans of common sense, physics, and conservation of momentum will be amused and/or appalled by the revelation—spoiler alert!—that Cobra’s super weapon is a gravity bomb…released from an orbiting satellite.

The audience’s primary diversion during and after the film is ridiculing the logical inconsistencies and plot holes in the movie—and noting the numerous missed opportunities for comic relief (obviously, the dubious determination was made that action, no matter how absurd, sells and character and comedy do not play in the critical foreign markets).  The possibilities are virtually limitless.

However, GI Joe: Retaliation does perform one remarkable geopolitical service.  It treats the existence of Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons arsenal as a matter of fact.

When the world’s nuclear weapons powers are gathered for an asinine episode of Armageddon brinksmanship orchestrated by Cobra, the attendees are: USA, France, Great Britain, Russia, China, India, North Korea…and Israel (in the first act of the movie, Pakistan was deemed unworthy of retaining its nuclear weapons and was summarily disarmed by the GI Joe team, thereby forfeiting its place at the atomic roundtable).

I wonder how this plot point snuck into the movie.  Perhaps the producers believe they will lock in the lucrative Iranian market with the admission that Israel is, indeed, a covert nuclear weapons power.

In any case, it was interesting to see.  Pretty much the only interesting thing in GI Joe: Retaliation.

Israel Attack on Iran: Same BS Different Day

“Israel to attack Iran” is a hardy if never-blooming perennial.  I rerun this post (originally written on the occasion of Israel’s bombing of an alleged nuclear facility in Syria in 2007) every year as a reminder of the rather daunting technical issues involved in flying from Israel to Iran and blowing things up in a truly convincing fashion, even as the same threats are put forward again and again.

Blowing things up in a truly convincing fashion involves a) flying there b) getting refueled in mid-air c) getting rearmed d) going back and do it again and again against Iran’s dispersed and hardened nuclear facilities.

So it won’t be an orgasmic one-off like the Osiraq reactor strike against Iraq, a nice quasi-surgical demonstration of civilized Israeli warfare.  It would be a grinding, prolonged assault, presumably with plenty of Iranian casualties, and with the unmistakable, sustained assistance of a local ally to keep the planes in the air.

Iran’s nuclear facilities are beyond the combat range of Israel’s fighter bombers.  So Israeli planes would not only need to overfly Iraq or Saudi Arabia and/or Turkey with or without permission; they would have need to get refueled over Iraq or Saudi Arabia as well on the return trip.

It doesn’t look like the US is going to provide refueling facilities, leaving it up to local partners (unlikely/infeasible) or Israel itself.

This year, the presence of a pro-Iranian government in Iraq would make it necessary for Israel to cross Iraqi airspace without permission, and defy the Iraqi government in prolonged fashion by having Israel’s tankers hovering over Iraq for multiple bouts of mid-air refueling.

And I don’t think Turkey’s going to be keen about permitting overflight, since they aren’t even signing on to the proposed bilateral sanctions against Iran.

That leaves the Saudis.  Saudi Arabia is in the midst of an aggressive rollback against Iran in particular and Shi’ites in general, and the London Times quoted an anonymous Saudi source as saying Israeli jets attacking Iran would be waved through Saudi airspace.

Doesn’t quite pass the smell test for me, though.  I don’t think the Saudi government is happy to harass the Iranians, but I don’t think they have the stomach for taking the Israeli side in a full-blown war.

On the record comments in December from Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s top security honcho, will undoubtedly be dismissed as disinformation by Western observers because he’s calling for a nuclear-free Middle East (a slap at Israel!), but I think his statement more closely reflect Saudi reality:

Replying to a question about the possibility of an attack on Iran to force it to roll back its nuclear program and the impact of such an action, Prince Turki reiterated that the impact will be “calamitous … cataclysmic, not just catastrophic.”

He said that Iranian actions have provoked worldwide opposition but at the same time suggests that Iran's nuclear program is being singled out, while Israel is being given a clean chit. Any unilateral decision to launch a military attack aimed at halting the nuclear program of Iran could have huge consequences, he warned.

As to the technical issues of refueling, the IDF has made a big deal of demonstrating that it does not need US refueling services, as this report indicates:

In the last days of May and first week of June, 2008, Israel staged an impressive and well-reported exercise over Crete with the participation of the Greek air force. More than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighter jets, as well as Israeli rescue helicopters and mid-air refueling planes flew a massive number of mock strikes. Israeli planes reportedly never landed but were continuously refueled from airborne platforms. Israel demonstrated that a 1400 km distance could be negotiated with Israeli aircraft remaining aloft and effective. Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment facility is 1400 km from Israel.

Early in 2011, the Jersusalem Post reported Israel took delivery of a 707 for conversion into a tanker for refueling its F15-I fighter bombers coming back for Iran.  How many additional tankers Israel has is “classified”, but an unsourced thread puts the total number of converted 707s to eight.

The JPost article went on to say:

The air force has conducted a major upgrade of its tanker fleet in recent years and now plans to wait for the US Air Force to choose its future tanker before buying additional aircraft.

Reading between the lines, maybe the United States is not particularly keen on delivering tankers and enhancing Israel’s capability to conduct unilateral air operations against Iran.

Accordingto Karl Vick at Time magazine, Israel doesn’t have the tanker capacity or, for that matter the ordnance, to devastate Iran for weeks:

What everyone agrees, however, is that as formidable as the Israeli Air Force is, it simply lacks the capacity to mount the kind of sustained, weeks-long aerial bombardment required to knock down Iran’s nuclear program, with the requisite pauses for damage assessments followed by fresh waves of bombing.  Without forward platforms like air craft carriers, Israel’s air armada must rely on mid-air refueling to reach targets more than 1,000 miles away, and anyone who reads Israel’s order of battle sees it simply doesn’t have but a half dozen or so.  Another drawback noted by analysts is Israel’s inventory of bunker-busting bombs, the sort that penetrate deep into concrete or rock that shield the centrifuge arrays at Natanz and now Fordow, near Qum.  Israel has loads of GBU-28s, which might penetrate Natanz. But only the U.S. Air Force has the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator that could take on Fordow, the mountainside redoubt where critics suspect Iran would enrich uranium to military levels.

So, why do we keep talking about Israel’s threats to attack Iran?

I’ve frequently commented that the main purpose of the attack-Iran threat is to yank America’s chain, and forestall possible rapprochement between the United States and Iran.

The Obama administration knows this, I think, and I find its politically-motivated willingness to continue with the sanctions charade, and the low level but cruel and destabilizing program of assassination, sabotage, and economic warfare against Iran rather shameful.

Friday, October 05, 2007

 

The Mystery of the Dropped Fuel Tanks

An e-mail from a reader concerning the Israeli raid on a purported North-Korea-linked military facility in Syria stated:

FYI, the combat radius of an F-15 in deep strike mode is 1800km
The distance to the Syrian target is ~ 700 km.

No need for drop tanks........

Hmmm. Too interesting to pass up.

The Internet is a treasure trove for armchair commanders and aviation and weapons enthusiasts. Industrious googling yielded the following information:

During the raid, some Israeli aircraft jettisoned two external fuel tanks up by the Turkish border.

The tanks were from an F-15I fighter bomber , called the “Ra’am” or “Thunder”, itself the Israeli variant of the F-15E Strike Eagle.

In agreement with my correspondent, the Observer states the Ra’am is:

...the newest generation of Israeli long-range bomber, which has a combat range of over 2,000km when equipped with the drop tanks.

But I think the Observer (and perhaps *gasp* a loyal reader) got it wrong. Either they confused cruising range with combat range, or confused the current F15I with its previous incarnations (for instance the F15C does have a combat radius of 2000 km).

The F-15E is a completely different animal from previous F-15s, which were sleek interceptors, designed “without a pound for the ground” i.e. no air to ground armament, for those days of air-to-air combat with the parfait knights of the Soviet bloc.

The F-15E is a big, fat hog of a plane, sometimes nicknamed the Flying Tennis Court, or Rodan for its resemblance to the ungainly but murderous superpterodactyl featured in the Godzilla movies.

It’s meant to carry big bombs and missiles to blow up stuff on the ground and the people standing in it or next to it, and fight its way out if necessary.

So it’s got bigger engines and less range than previous F15s.

According to the data I dug up, the F-15E has a combat radius—the distance it can be expected to fly for a mission assuming high speed, fuel-consuming maneuvers--of 790 miles (see here and here ).

To achieve this radius, it needs its internal fuel plus external fuel.

Internal fuel capacity is 5,952 kg.

External fuel consists of two components:

Conforming fuel tanks or CFTs with a total capacity of 4500 kg. They are integral parts of the plane—one report I read said the plane isn’t really designed to fly without them—and can’t be jettisoned.

Then there’s another 5500 kg in conventional external fuel tanks—the kind that were dropped during the mission.

With a fistful of caveats, the combat radius for an F-15I without the external fuel tanks would be around 500+ miles.

Distance from the Hatzerim airbase (home of the F-15I-equipped 69th Squadron) near Beersheba to Dayr az Zawr: 420 miles.

So you might think that the conventional external fuel tanks weren’t needed for this particular mission, and the only reason to carry them was for road-testing prior to some Iran-related hanky-panky.

Maybe yes, maybe no.

If the Israelis really did bomb Dayr az Zawr, it’s unclear why they went barnstorming up to the Turkish border a hundred miles away.

But they certainly did go, and to fly that kind of mission including a flyby of the Turkish border, I think they would need the external fuel tanks.

Maybe the Turkey excursion was to test some fancy new electronic countermeasures equipment mounted on another plane, called “Suter”, to disrupt Russian air defense hardware recently supplied to Syria—and Iran, for Israel’s benefit and our own.

Aviation Week put out the story courtesy of “U.S. officials”:

A Kuwaiti newspaper wrote that "Russian experts are studying why the two state-of-the art Russian-built radar systems in Syria did not detect the Israeli jets entering Syrian territory. Iran reportedly has asked the same question, since it is buying the same systems and might have paid for the Syrian acquisitions."


We got a certain amount of military chest-thumping about how cool this new gear is, but these planes only jettison their fuel tanks if they’ve been engaged and need extra speed and mobility, which leads one to believe it couldn’t have worked too great.

As to Israeli insistence that they’ll take out Iran if we can’t get off our collective rears, I found this analysis interesting and persuasive.

It argues that the Israeli air force simply doesn’t have the horses to haul the armament needed to make a terminal dent in the hardened and dispersed Iranian facilities on a 1200-mile mission—remember, more fuel means fewer weapons carried--unless the U.S. either assists in the refueling of the Israeli planes or allows them to stage the assault U.S. from bases in Iraq.

And maybe not even then.

Bottom line:

Theoretically, the Israelis could do this, but at great risk of failure. If they decide to attack Natanz, they will have to inflict sufficient damage the first time - they probably will not be able to mount follow-on strikes at other facilities.

When all the analyses are done, there is only one military capable of the sustained widespread air operations required to eliminate Iran's nuclear weapons research program - the United States.

So it looks like the Israelis could start something—but it would be up to Uncle Sam to finish the job.

I take this as support for my thesis that a key data point for Israel from the Syria raid was the nature of the U.S. support it did—or did not—elicit, and what that would mean for Israel if it conducted a dramatic but less than conclusive raid on Natanz with the hope that the U.S. could be dragged into the campaign.

So: War with Iran—it’s up to us. Don’t know whether that’s reassuring or disturbing.

What Happened on the Mavi Marmara

The PR aftermath of the Gaza flotilla incident has not been edifying for people who worry about the future of Israel, the media, or the truth.

Anyway, the media apparently believes that the interests of journalism, the truth, and its readers has been served by covering the story for about 48 hours. Not coincidentally, for those 48 hours, Israel had the airwaves to itself, having detained the flotilla members incommunicado in Israel for that period.

The Israeli narrative emerging from that furious 2-day blitz is a reprise of the "intelligence failure" dodge employed by the United States to excuse the Iraq invasion. Faulty execution is blamed for an unfortunate cock-up during which a bunch of people got killed.

The "tactical failure" storyline for the Gaza flotilla involves unprepared, underarmed, and naive commandos abseiling into the hands of an vicious mob.

That sounds a lot better for Israel than what appears to be the actual story: Israeli ships and helicopters raked the Mavi Marmara with tear gas, flash grenades, rubber-jacketed steel bullets, and live ammunition, killing and wounding several people, to soften it up prior to boarding; their commandos descended on the ship and got the worst of it for a few minutes as a few infuriated and and terrified activists tried to fight back with steel bars they had wrenched from the ship's railings and the occasional deck chair; after more bloodshed the passengers raised the white flag and the vessel was subdued.

One of Al Jazeera's correspondent on the Mavi Marmara, Jamal Elshayyal emerged from detention in Israel to give a teleconferenced account of the assault from Istanbul.

At 3:20 in the clip, this exchange occurs between the Al Jazeera anchor and Elshayyal:

Anchor: I want to ask you about a sequence of events because we've heard from the Israelis on a number of occasions that they did not fire live ammunition until the weapons of two Israeli soldiers were taken away on board. In other words, it couldn't have happened until Israeli soldiers themselves were on the Mavi Marmara...

Elshayyal: There is no doubt from what I saw that live ammunition was fired before any Israeli soldier was on deck.



I wonder if the accounts of Elshayyal and other passengers on the flotilla will gain any traction.

In response to the blizzard of Israeli spin and prevarication--and an unwillingness to dig into the testimony of the emerging flotilla witnesses, whose cameras were seized by the Israelis-- the media seems to be retreating to the comfortable and safe ground of "Fog O' War".

The LA Times dutifully threw dirt on the grave of the flotilla story in its June 4 coverage. A photo caption reads: "Amid widespread anger, some were willing to reserve judgment. "We don't know which side is right. We don't accurately know what really happened," one mourner said.

Actually, it looks pretty clear what really happened.

The Israeli armed forces attacked a Turkish flag vessel in international waters.

That is the real issue, one that the Israeli media operation is working determinedly to obscure--with the happy cooperation of the international media--by diverting attention to the who-shot-whom-when-and-where-and-how-badly-did-the-victim-deserve-it conundrum.

China Matters Iran/NPT Scorecard...

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Israel, Iran, and Obama’s NPT “Grand Bargain”

A Great Deal for Russia, But Not for China

I have an article up at Asia Times titled US seeks to turn China over Iran sanctions.

I go over the evidence that the United States is trying to shift gears and engage China as a great power with an acknowledged stake in Iran, and not just an amoral, oil-grubbing obstacle to America’s Middle East diplomacy.

I make the case that the Obama administration’s top two China hands, James Steinberg and Jeffrey Bader, don’t have a lot of levers when they go to Beijing this week. The U.S. is intent on rolling back China in the Middle East and elsewhere, and there is little in the way of concrete “strategic reassurance” (Mr. Steinberg’s coinage describing the current U.S. policy) that we have to offer.

That doesn’t mean that China won’t look at the disposition of forces and abstain or even vote “aye” or “yea” or “yippy-ki-yay m***” in the Security Council; it means whatever they do, they won’t be happy about getting pushed to the wall on Iran and they’ll be thinking about short-and-long-term countermeasures.

One of the things that the Chinese will be thinking about is the NPT Reform Conference in New York City in May 2010.

This extremely boring-sounding conference is actually the linchpin of President Obama’s strategy to re-order the international security order on the basis of a multilateralized commitment by the developed world to forestall proliferation of nuclear weapons technology—instead of building military and diplomatic coalitions around America’s need to assert full-spectrum dominance over its enemies and competitors.

I think the correct frame to view America’s rather over-the-top campaign to bring Iran to heel through sanctions is not “mad mullahs must not be allowed to gain nuclear weapons and bully our buddies in Middle East sandbox”.

Instead, neutralizing Iran should be viewed in the context of the Obama’s administrations efforts to universalize its non-proliferation doctrine by dealing with the most aggravating and problematic proliferation issue.

Not Iran.

Israel.

The presence of Israel at the forefront of the effort to impose “crippling” sanctions on Iran is something of an anomaly.

Israel is itself a proliferation bad boy. It isn’t a member of the NPT; it has a highly destabilizing undeclared arsenal of over 200 nuclear weapons; and it proliferated in a major way to the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Arab countries have routinely deplored the West’s double standard in ignoring Israel’s existing nuclear weapons transgressions while fixating on Iran’s unproved and unprovable intentions.

It would appear to be paradoxical for the Obama administration—which makes a fetish out of deep thinking and forward planning—to send Israel around the world to carry the flag for Iran sanctions.

But that’s exactly what happened.

Israel’s Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, just concluded a trip to the United States to lobby for sanctions.

Benjamin Netanyahu paid a high-profile visit to Russia to bargain for its UNSC vote.

An Israeli delegation just returned from beating the sanctions drum in China.

The action is not limited to permanent members of the UN Security Council.

Israeli delegations are also lobbying non-permanent members of the Security Council—countries that can’t veto a sanctions resolution but can contribute to the nine-vote yes tally needed to pass it—far from Israel’s conventional sphere of influence and interest.

Countries like Brazil, Gabon, and Uganda.

To me, all this activity makes sense only in terms of the Obama administration’s overarching desire to reshape the global security regime around non-proliferation.

And I think those plans include an as yet publicly undisclosed role for Israel.

President Obama’s claim to global moral and geopolitical leadership rests in considerable part on his championing of the cause of nuclear disarmament—the primary justification for his Nobel Peace Prize.

The Obama administration’s ambitions for a “grand bargain” reconciling nuclear-weapons and non-nuclear states within the framework of a new and improved NPT are a matter of detailed public record.

They involve universal participation in a stringent NPT regime achieved by a full toolbox of carrots and sticks: a de facto ban on domestic enrichment by nuclear have-nots enabled by an internationalized LEU fuel supply facility in Russia and universal adoption of the adversarial Model Additional Protocol; a new START treaty with Russia, a U.S. commitment to a denuclearized security regime by promulgation of a new, no-nukes Nuclear Posture Review, and negotiation of a ban on creation of new fissile material to deliver on the forgotten promise of disarmament by the nuclear weapons states under the NPT; and U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

The whole Obama approach, with its core elements of a new START treaty and Russian hosting of the LEU facility, seems designed to welcome Russia—the most significant player in nuclear weapons outside of the United States—into the world security-regime fold as a key partner instead of an antagonist.

Beating on Iran for its unpopular nuclear program at Washington’s behest would seem to be a small price to pay for the opportunity for Moscow to join Obama’s non-proliferation team, end the U.S. campaign to isolate and harass it geopolitically, and perhaps gain acceptance of the “near-beyond” in Eastern Europe and Central Asia as Russia’s legitimate sphere of influence.

It’s not surprising that Moscow is interested in playing ball with Washington as a result.

Despite all these interlocking and complementary initiatives, it is difficult to see how the nuclear-weapon lions will lie down with the nukeless lambs unless the U.S. also has plans to bring Israel into a new non-proliferation regime, perhaps as part of an India-style deal that allows it to declare and keep its weapons.

In the past, Israeli participation in any international nuclear arms control regime was considered to be impossible.

Israel has not declared its nuclear arsenal and is not a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty which, as recently as May 2009, it derided as totally ineffectual.

However, the Obama administration’s outreach to Iran in early 2009 and a contemporaneous call for all nations—with Israel explicitly named—to sign the NPT treaty elicited great dismay in Israel.

Israel faced the possibility that, in the case of a U.S. nuclear deal and rapprochement with Tehran, Israel would be isolated as the nuclear rogue state and would have to negotiate the status of its arsenal from a position of weakness.

This apparently inspired a sea change in Israeli attitudes toward the NPT regime.

For whatever reason, the U.S. outreach to Iran failed to bear fruit and Israel seems to have made the intricate adjustments necessary to replace Iran as a key supporting element in President Obama’s global disarmament strategy.

By a remarkable coincidence, the crucial event may have been revealed just as the West presented its doomed nuclear fuel swap proposal in Geneva on October 1, 2009:

On October 2, 2009, Eli Lake reported in the Washington Times that President Obama had, at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s request, agreed to reaffirm the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy toward the Israeli nuclear arsenal that has prevailed since the Nixon administration: that the United States would passively accept Israel’s nuclear weapons status as long as Israel did not declare or test a device.”

In the context of President Obama’s overarching commitment to the NPT, there was immediate speculation as to the possible quid pro quo he demanded for continuing the charade of ignoring Israel’s nuclear weapons status.

Lake quoted David Albright of ISIS as remarking:

"One hopes that the price for such concessions is Israeli agreement to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty and an acceptance of the long-term goal of a Middle East weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone," he said.

The “long term goal” is described in Israel as the “long corridor”:

Israel has declared it will officially eschew nuclear weapons if the nations of the Middle East sign peace treaties acknowledging Israel’s right to exist, and the region is devoid of all weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological as well as nuclear weapons, and missile stockpiles have been decreased.

That, of course, brings us to Iran and its enrichment program.

It is difficult to understand Israel’s high-profile involvement in the Iran sanctions negotiations unless Israel has come to an understanding with the United States concerning entry into the non-proliferation regime and has been charged with communicating assurances to the various skeptical nations that it is poised to become an NPT good citizen if the Iran problem is dealt with in a satisfactory way.

If President Obama hopes to bring Israel to the NPT Review party in New York City in May 2010, it looks like he’s going to need Iran’s scalp on his belt—Iran convincingly isolated and ostracized by the family of nations because of its insistence on its enrichment rights.

But he also might just be bringing an Iran mess.

There are signs that the NPT Review Conference in New York in May 2010 is eerily recapitulating the debacle at the Copenhagen climate conference in December 2009.

It appears the Obama administration will enter the conference with only a fraction of the national commitments needed to put it in the moral and diplomatic driver’s seat and impose the deal it made with a small circle of great powers on the hundred-plus developing nations.

Cooperation with Russia on START and establishment of the internationalized LEU fuel facility are well advanced.

However, Laura Rozen reports that the Russian leadership is unwilling to pull the trigger and announce the conclusion of an agreement.

I think the Russians understand that, without the START treaty, President Obama risks going into the NPT conference virtually empty-handed.

America’s own ratification of the crucial Model Additional Protocol for IAEA safeguards is gutted by an enormous national security exemption; thanks to DoD resistance, the Nuclear Posture Review posture calls for continued improvement of the US nuclear arsenal instead of its elimination; and ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and negotiation of a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty are distant dreams, given the implacable and united hostility of the emboldened Republicans in Congress.

In the absence of significant progress in the United States, a new START treaty and a startling, new public statement by Israel concerning its willingness to enter into the non-proliferation regime are the best hopes for the Obama administration to go into the NPT review conference with some momentum.

I think the Russians realize they have this leverage and are making life miserable for the U.S. negotiators. That includes dancing around on the issue of Iran sanctions which, if my theory holds, has been sold to Moscow by the U.S. and Israel as the linchpin of a new non-proliferation regime with Russia near its center.

China is really the odd man out in this scenario, especially if a non-proliferation united front including Israel, Russia, and the Arab States orchestrated by the United States trumps China’s preferred tactic--economic and diplomatic engagement--as the preferred method for dealing with Tehran.

China may decide to take a leaf from its Copenhagen playbook and act as the spoiler at the NPT conference in alliance with elements in the developing world that will be shut out of the nuclear fuel cycle by the strict new NPT regime envisioned by the United States.

Or, as the U.S. apparently hopes, Beijing will decide to stick to its knitting in Greater China, while leaving the rest of the world as spheres of influence for the United States, Russia, India, and Brazil.

Grand bargain, indeed.

Weathervane Watch

...Or, Keeping Up With Uzi Arad

The folks at Just World News are interested in the issue of whom Israeli right-wing security honcho Uzi Arad is meeting with during his visit to the United States, and whether his trip is deliberate poke in the eye of the Obama administration.

Uzi Arad is Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security advisor. There was some awkwardness about permitting Arad to participate in classified US discussions with Netanyahu, or even to come to the United States, because of his involvement in the Larry Franklin espionage affair; hence the speculation about the possible provocative character of his trip to the United States.

I don’t think Arad’s visit is an attempt to insult the United States. I think it’s a rather desperate attempt to demonstrate that Uzi Arad still has U.S. juice and thereby buttress his rather shaky credentials as the Likud administration’s custodian of the American relationship in the Obama era.

In my opinion, Uzi Arad’s main mission in life is not to bend American policy to the will of the Likud.

His main job is to determine the prevailing trend in US policy toward Israel and find a viable place inside it for his government and himself.

China Matters took a look at Uzi Arad because of his statements on what was once a hot-button issue involving North Korea: the bombing of the alleged Syrian nuclear facility in September 2007.

My take is that quite possibly there was a nuclear facility of some sort getting built, but it was not an imminent threat to Israel.

In my view, the Israeli government blew it up because it wanted the Bush administration to turn back the clock to the good old days of unilateral pre-emption, keep the IAEA’s multilateral mitts off the Middle East’s nuclear issues, and, through a powerful U.S. condemnation of Syria, get an implied show of U.S. support for a strike against Iran.

U.S. support for a strike against Iran is absolutely critical because—and I think this bears repeating in light of Mr. Netanyahu’s threats that Israel will take out the Iranian nuclear program itself if the U.S. doesn’t step up—because active U.S. participation is needed to degrade the Iranian nuclear program in a meaningful way.

Not just refueling support.

Active participation, as in bunches of U.S. bombs and missiles showering down on Iran’s dispersed and hardened facilities (armament enthusiasts can refer to this discussion of the technical obstacles to a lone Israeli attack on Iran).

And I think everybody who matters, in Tel Aviv, Washington, and Tehran, not to mention Moscow and Peking, knows this.

With the Bush administration depopulated of its neo-con enthusiasts and war-weary bureaucrats at State/Langley/DoD calling the shots, the whole “nuclear reactor in Syria” story was allowed to fizzle.

And Uzi Arad, who had at first vigorously fluffed the story to his network of U.S. reporters, let the issue drop.

Apparently, Mr. Azad believes that his most important brief is to keep Israel’s lines of communication open to the people holding power in Washington, in order to maintain good relations with Israel’s most important ally while assuring a central role for himself and the continued prosperity of his Herzliya security conference—the pre-eminent right-of-center venue for developing the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Arad obligingly conceptualized, endorsed, or reinforced every significant U.S. policy shift of the Bush years, from Clean Break to democracy crusade to countering the existential Islamicist threat. I expect he will, albeit with some difficulty, make similar efforts to ingratiate himself to the Obama administration.

Uzi Arad derives his clout from his image as the ultimate insider—not a lone voice crying in the wilderness.

When the United States showed no interest in running with the Syrian allegations, he briskly dropped the matter.

At the present time, Mr. Arad is undoubtedly anxious about the rapprochement between the United States and Iran.

Good relations between Washington and Tehran inevitably detract from the importance of Israel as America’s only true buddy in the United States.

If the U.S. no longer gives absolute priority to backing Israel, Tel Aviv’s freedom of movement—and the ability to evade the dire consequences of its confrontational policies toward the Palestinians by shifting the frame of reference to a pan-Middle East battle against Islamicist extremism—is significantly curtailed.

The logic of U.S.-Iranian cooperation—and the benefits of Iranian support to a successful disengagement from Iraq and rolling back the Taliban in Afghanistan--is currently so compelling to the Obama administration that I don’t think that Uzi Arad is trying to buck the tide.

Mr. Arad and Netanyahu’s objectives at the present time presumably involve holding the line until the U.S.-Iranian relationship comes acropper, either from internal contradictions or active Israeli connivance.

All that matters now is making a show of cleaving to the Obama administration’s line on Palestine, so that Prime Minister Netanyahu and Mr. Arad can still present themselves as Israel’s effective interlocutors with the United States.

So the weathervane flops to the left for the time being.

Chas Freeman’s Departure Isn’t Good for Israel…

…It’s Bad for Afghanistan

AIPAC—or at least a militantly hard-line faction of AIPAC—well, maybe the fellow-travellers of a borderline-deranged ex-AIPAC bossman named Steven Rosen now awaiting trial on espionage charges—can tie Chas Freeman’s scalp to its belt.

Understandable handwringing on thoughtful foreign policy blogs that hoped Freeman taking over something called the National Intelligence Council would lead to a more sensible, less reflexively pro-Israel stance on Middle East issues, as Laura Rozen reports.

Of course, AIPAC has not endeared itself or its patron to the Obama administration by spearheading a nasty, humiliating, and successful battle to bar a high-level and qualified nominee from a significant post.

Ms. Rozen linked to a blog post by the Israel Policy Forum’s M.J Rosenberg:

The campaign to defeat Chas Freeman… may come at a cost. The perception, almost universally held, that he was brought down because he is a strong and vocal opponent of Israel's West Bank and settlement policies is, not good for the Jewish community and the pro-Israel community in particular.
…
What does it all mean? …[A] insider I spoke to last night said: "This was a real pyrrhhic victory. One, the administration is pissed off. And, two, Obama is going to be more determined than ever to take a strong stand on settlements, Gaza relief, and negotiations. They shot their wad on Freeman. They will not think that was so smart a few months from now."

Let me tell you what it all means, MJ.

As far as Israel’s lobbying position in Washington, zip.

Israel’s access to buckets of U.S. money and shiploads of arms is secure as long as the grass grows and the rivers run, no matter what it does with settlements on the West Bank or to the people of Gaza.

The real significance of the fight against Freeman takes us away from the traditional need to affirm the right of Israel to exist, enjoy America’s commitment to its continued survival, and consume its yearly entitlement of what I guess could be called “white steak” from the U.S. budget.

It has everything to do with trying to disrupt the Obama’s initiative to engage with Iran—an initiative that has the active encouragement of Russia, probably tacit support from China, and the active interest of Iran itself.

Iran has an interesting battery of carrots to offer the United States. Beyond helping keep the lid on in Iraq by moderating the behavior of the majority Sh’ia against the Sunni, an active Iranian role in Afghanistan could do the United States a world of good, especially in opening some kind of second front against the Taliban in the opium heartland of western Afghanistan and providing an alternative to the risky Pakistan route for U.S. and NATO supplies into Afghanistan.

But rapprochement with Iran is anathema to the Israeli government, since it would replace the current situation—where it is assumed that the interests of Tel Aviv and Washington are identical and, if there is a conflict, Israeli priorities should prevail because it has the most at stake—with a more complicated arrangement in which Israel’s position might be downgraded to that of just another stakeholder, whose interests might be compromised by Washington for the sake of its geopolitical objectives and bilateral dealings with Iran.

Back on February 6, concerning the signs of U.S.-Iranian rapprochement, I wrote oh-so-presciently (the China Matters crystal ball was polished to a brilliant sheen for this one):

Direct U.S. dealmaking with Iran (in effect, giving a higher priority to America’s own strategic interests a la Walt-Miersheimer at the expense of unequivocal support of Israel’s priorities and preferences) is Israel’s greatest fear, so any thawing of relations between Washington and Tehran will have to run the multiple gauntlets of opposition, resistance, provocation, and sabotage thrown down by the Israeli government (soon, apparently, to be run by the hard-right Benjamin Netanyahu) and its allies in the United States.

So, consider l’affaire Freeman the first conspicuous salvo in the effort to sabotage the Obama administration’s outreach to Tehran.

Under the Bush administration, when the identity of U.S. and Israeli priorities was pretty much a given, regional confrontation was a welcome opportunity to advance Full Spectrum Dominance, and the idea of fighting two billion-dollar wars (plus for good measure a Global War on Terror) was considered to play to America’s economic and military strengths, AIPAC’s trashing of Middle East realists was not such a big deal.

But now we are in classic Walt-Miersheimer territory, where the Obama administration’s intense desire to disengage from Iraq and fix Afghanistan requires at the very least a divergence from Israeli priorities and at worst (from Tel Aviv’s point of view) bilateral engagement with Iran.

Provocation, obstruction and even the active sabotage of U.S. Iran initiatives inflicts few costs on Israel. Israel’s political position in Washington is secure, and its claim to unstinting U.S. support is enhanced rather than damaged if it occupies an isolated position at the center of a dysfunctional Middle East filled with Muslim nations hostile both to it and the United States.

For the United States, it’s different. The Obama administration is trying to unwind from overextended positions in Iraq and Afghanistan. It needs the help of regional powers that have real reach and positive interests inside Iraq and Afghanistan to avoid a catastrophic clusterf*ck that would damage U.S. interests and cripple the Obama presidency.

That means Iran. And Syria.

Not Israel.

I anticipate unending efforts by Israel’s supporters in the U.S. Congress, media, and think tank commentariat to make the political cost of dealing with Iran unsupportable for the Obama administration. And with the economy stuck in a mile-deep rut, President Obama may in fact decide not to pick a fight over Iran and do little more than prolong the bloody standoffs in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The possibility that Freeman was brought down by an ad hoc operation run on a shoestring by a rogue ex-AIPAC official working the political and media pipe organ like the neo-conservatives did in the run-up to the Iraq war is an indication that the guns are in place, the mines are laid, and—more disturbingly—that the Obama administration wandered into the battlefield bereft of a plan, arms, or allies close at hand and got its hat handed to it.

However, while the Schumers and Liebermans of this world celebrate Freeman’s withdrawal and engage in their enthusiastic osculation of AIPAC’s obliging hindquarters, they should consider that continued confrontation in the Middle East and drift in U.S. policy will have real costs for American interests and the world.

In order to pull the world out of recession, it’s better to have functioning states and economies in the Middle East and South Asia and working relationships with global and regional powers--not billion-dollar sinkholes for destabilizing security spending and defiant antagonism to Russia, China, and Iran.

That means we need concerted multi-lateral efforts to ratchet down the existential crises looming in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and, potentially, Iraq. The world system is in shaky shape and today we may not be able to afford the domestic political division, confrontation-and-conflict based foreign policy, and international instability that indulging the Israel lobby traditionally brings.

Astounding But True: The Road to the Iran NIE Ran Through Pyongyang

In the wake of the release of the Iran National Intelligence Estimate debunking the claims of a ongoing nuclear weapons program--claims that served as the justification for our campaign to isolate, sanction, and weaken Iran--China Matters reminds an astounded world that we predicted the collapse of the Bush administration’s strategy of confronting Iran back in October.

What I actually wrote was:

To summarize, the multilateral, sanctions-based united front against Iran is deaddeaddeaddeaddeaddead.

Dead, OK?

It was a situation that was pretty clear only if one saw how determinedly key players in other capitals were pushing back against our Iran policy.

It’s an unsurprising but regrettable fact of life that the United States—and its opinion leaders and shapers—find it difficult to understand an international situation in which our framing and priorities are not necessarily decisive.

The true surprise is how abruptly we kicked the props out from under the Israeli government.

For hardliners in Israel and the United States, asserting the existential Iranian nuclear threat to Israel was crucial to keeping the foreign policy realists at bay.

By undermining the position that our Iran policy has to be subordinated to the premise that Iran posed an imminent and implacable threat to Israel, the NIE opens the door to engagement with Tehran that might remove Israel—and reflexive U.S. support for its independent nuclear deterrent and its militarized regional security policy—away from the center of U.S. strategic thinking for the Middle East.

Maybe Secretary Rice has succeeded in imposing a new look at Middle East policy on the Bush administration; and maybe that explains why Frank Gaffney was squealing like a stuck pig about the Annapolis conference.

The unexpected interaction between North Korea and the Middle East—the furor over Israel’s bombing of the purported nuclear site in Syria—and its role in the efforts of conservatives in the United States and Israel to construct a nuclear crisis-driven narrative for Middle East diplomacy, is addressed in separate post from November, Uzi Arad’s Astounding Tales .

There I addressed the abortive attempt to create the appearance of a proliferation crisis in Syria and wrote:

But it turns out that the key foreign policy conflict in Washington isn’t between “bomb Syria and/or Iran” and “don’t bomb Syria and/or Iran”.

It’s between proceeding with the same policy of regional escalation that led us into Iraq or discreetly dialing back to the old Palestine-centric approach to solving Israel’s security problem—something I’d call creeping Bakerism.

And if the Palestinian issue is accepted in Washington as the true root of Israel’s problems, then the Iranian issue can be handled separately, as a wary negotiation and accommodation between the world’s only hyperpower and an important regional Islamic player.

So maybe the path to understanding the Middle East lies through Asia. Funny, huh?

Below is the full text of the October 26 post.


Iran Recapitulates North Korea—Not Iraq

October 25:

Speaking at a news conference after talks with Portuguese President Anibal Cavaco Silva, Putin pointed to the long negotiations with North Korea that led to an agreement earlier this year for that communist nation to begin dismantling its nuclear facilities. "Not long ago it didn't seem possible to resolve the situation with North Korea's nuclear program, but we have practically solved it relying on peaceful means," he said.

October 11:

In the overseas edition of the People's Daily -- the ruling Communist Party's mouthpiece -- China's former ambassador to Iran said six-party negotiations hosted by Beijing set an example for engaging Tehran, which is pressing ahead with nuclear development that Western powers say could give it weapons capability.

Keen observers will notice a pattern here.Russia and China—two of the five veto holders on the Security Council—want the North Korea deal to serve as the template for Iran.

What does this mean?

It means that world opinion has abandoned the Bush administration on the creation of a united front of coercion against Iran.

This is exactly what happened last year, in a development apparently only noticed by yours truly, after the detonation of the North Korean bomb.

Condi Rice criss-crossed the globe in a futile quest to cobble together an international coalition that would employ the mechanism of the U.N. sanctions regime backed by Proliferation Security Initiative to institute a destabilizing blockade of North Korea.

The effort finally collapsed at the APEC summit in Hanoi, when President Bush got the definitive word that China and even South Korea, our befuddled second-tier ally, wouldn’t sign on to the effort.

Instead of the United States pulling the strings as an army of righteous puppets encircled North Korea, our allies decided they didn’t have the confidence in our leadership.

More to the point, they weren’t assured of our solicitude in making sure they didn’t bear a disproportionate share of the political and geopolitical costs of a risky security initiative orchestrated by a great power with a truly terrible track record—and told Washington to play its own hand directly with Pyongyang.

There is a fundamental contradiction in unilateral policy trying to exploit the tools of multilateralism. Our callous incompetence in Iraq provided a practical demonstration of the risks. Our so-called allies don’t trust us. We have to get it front and stay in front.

As a result, Christopher Hill met with the North Koreans in Berlin and got the ball rolling. Although the negotiations continued under the aegis of the Six Party talks, it was always up to the United States to make the key concessions to demonstrate the viability of the process.

Given the absurd fiasco of the hardliner-orchestrated four-month delay in lifting the Banco Delta Asia sanctions, not only the North Koreans but the rest of the world community learned the importance of “trust yet verify” in gauging American commitment to any multilateral initiatives.

And it looks like America’s none-too-subtle attempts to leverage the power of its unilateral financial sanctions—actually targeting our recalcitrant “allies” who still insist on doing business with Iran, since we don’t do any business with Iran anyway—aren’t going to gain a lot of traction (the title of the LA Times article U.S. Move on Iran alienating for Europe pretty much says it all).

I would like to think that even observers overly enamored of the soft-power character of U.S. financial sanctions might recognize the fundamental and fatal contradiction at the heart of our policy—we don’t sanction the enemy, we have to sanction our allies because they don’t support our policy—but I’m not holding my breath.

To summarize, the multilateral, sanctions-based united front against Iran is deaddeaddeaddeaddeaddead.

Dead, OK?

What’s left is Dick Cheney’s Duke Nuke ‘em approach or North Korea-style engagement...or drift.

Never count a sociopathic monomaniac out, I guess, but with a year left in Bush’s lame duck administration, the hardliners bailing out in droves, and the uniformed services dead set against another Middle East war, the real choice is whether we will enter into a “grand bargain” with Iran or let the current toxic policy meander on.

Given the fundamentally dysfunctional character of our foreign policy, toxic meander is probably the way to go.

So what we’re going to get for the next 18 months is systematic well-poisoning by the hardliners working to sabotage direct negotiation with Tehran and preserve a debilitating state of hostility.

Current case in point: the North Korean nukes in Syria kerfluffle.

Even if there was a serious Syrian effort to develop some kind of nuclear thingee—and it’s still far from clear, as Jeffrey Lewis points out —it was years from fruition. It was probably worth observing but it certainly wasn’t worth bombing.

However, it was bombed, and is being pushed into the center of debate by hardliners in Tel Aviv and Washington.

The subtext, as I explained here , is to impose a zero sum them-or-us narrative of existential nuclear crisis on Middle Eastern affairs, in order to forestall bilateral talks between Washington and Tehran and a grand bargain that might help extricate us from our self-inflicted Iraq problem, but also remove Israel from its central place in Middle Eastern affairs as America’s only important ally.

The usual dingbat suspects in the House of Representatives are tossing Hail Maries in an attempt to use possible proliferation to Syria as justification for pulling the plug on the Six Party Agreement with North Korea, thereby discrediting the realists and negotiations with Axis of Evil nations.

But the practical hardliner goal isn’t war—it’s just to muddy the waters enough to keep peace from breaking out.

That’s what makes the current Iran flurry so tedious.Everybody’s bending over backward not to provide a sanctions process or casus belli that would empower the Washington hardliners.

Iran, Russia, China, and Europe are only interested in running out the clock until the Bush administration is safely out of office.

And maybe Israel, too.

Based on the way I look at things, this excerpt from Haaretz posted by the estimable Laura Rozen rang like a thunderclap:

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said a few months ago in a series of closed discussions that in her opinion that Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel, Haaretz magazine reveals in an article on Livni to be published Friday. Livni also criticized the exaggerated use that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears. Last week, former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy said similar things about Iran.

Because if significant elements of the Israeli government are ready to consider a world in which the Iranian nuclear threat is managed instead of destroyed—and Israel perhaps accepts a place under the US deterrent umbrella, mothballs its nukes, and abandons its regional ambitions for the miserable and depressing work of working on its local Palestinian problem—and leak their views to a receptive media and public, then the neocon dream of creative destruction of the Middle East is drawing its last breaths.

Unfortunately, of course, while there’s life there’s hope.

Hardline elements in Israel and the United States are only interested in keeping things screwed up enough that the Democrats can’t take the presidency and draw on the momentum of a credible, ongoing bipartisan realist process of rapprochement to normalize relations with Iran.

If they can screw up things badly enough, in another decade—an eyeblink to your far-sighted neocon--the door will be left open for genuine military conflict down the road when, maybe, the armed forces are done licking their Iraq wounds and are ready for another budget-fattening go at a land war on the Eurasian continent.

So we get this zombie kabuki, with the hardline advocates of a dead, discredited policy trying to infect the realists with their poison, and the realists are trying to pretend they’re zombies in order to avoid attack.

Outlook for 2007 and 2008: drift, danger, and dysfunction.

I think the reason the Left and Right fixate on the remote possibility of an Iran war is because it distracts us from the true nature of the U.S. situation: a distrusted, discredited, and marginalized hyperpower, unable to effectively play its military card, resented for its record of unremitting error and duplicity, feared as a dangerous, unpredictable and out-of-control force that must be cajoled, flattered, and accommodated at great cost while distracting the smaller and more vulnerable nations of the earth from the very immediate and real dangers that they now have to face alone.

We’re on the sidelines and nobody wants us to get back in the game.