Obama clings to hope as Iran hawks circle
Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - As nuclear negotiations between Iran and the West continue to move
slowly, United States President Barack Obama is coming under growing pressure
from what appears to be a concerted lobbying and media campaign urging him to
act more aggressively to stop Iran's nuclear program.
Obama has given Tehran an end-of-September deadline to respond substantively to
his offer of diplomatic engagement. But already hawks in the US - backed by
hardline pro-Israel organizations - have pressed him to quickly impose
"crippling" economic sanctions against Tehran, and some are arguing that he
should make preparations for a military attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.
The pressure campaign kicked off in earnest last week. On
September 10, hundreds of leaders and activists from the US Jewish community
descended on Washington to lobby for harsher sanctions, while widely publicized
media reports suggested that Iran is already nearing the verge of nuclear
capability.
Leaders from Jewish groups came for a national "Advocacy Day on Iran", during
which they met with key congressional figures.
Representative Howard Berman, a California Democrat who heads the House Foreign
Affairs Committee, suggested that the clock "has almost run out" on Iran's
nuclear program, and indicated that he would move ahead next month with a bill
imposing sanctions on Iran's refined petroleum imports "absent some compelling
evidence why I should do otherwise".
The bill, the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA), has for months been
the top lobbying priority of hawkish pro-Israel lobbying groups led by the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). To their frustration, Berman
has held up consideration of the bill for most of the past year
Not all US Jewish groups are lining up behind the legislation, however.
Americans for Peace Now (APN), for instance, issued a statement arguing that
"arbitrary deadlines are a mistake" and that "pursuing sanctions that target
the Iranian people, rather than their leaders, is a morally and strategically
perilous path that the Obama administration must reject".
MJ Rosenberg, a foreign policy analyst at Media Matters Action Network,
suggested on the website TPMCafe that the advocacy day "marks the start of the
fall push on Iran".
The advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) has launched an intensive
television advertising campaign this month claiming that the US "must isolate
Iran economically to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon".
UANI's two co-founders are now both high-ranking officials in the Obama
administration - Dennis Ross, currently overseeing Iran policy at the National
Security Council (NSC), and Richard Holbrooke, now the State Department special
representative in charge of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Also on Thursday, the New York Times published a front-page story claiming that
US intelligence agencies believe "that Iran has created enough nuclear fuel to
make a rapid, if risky, sprint for a nuclear weapon", although the article did
not provide an estimate of when Iran could have a nuclear capability.
The same day, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by former Senators
Charles Robb and Daniel Coats and retired four-star Air Force General Chuck
Wald. Claiming that Iran "will be able to manufacture enough highly enriched
uranium for a nuclear weapon in 2010", the authors urged Obama "to begin
preparations for the use of military options" against Iran.
However, official US intelligence estimates provide a far slower timeline. In
February, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dennis Blair told Congress
that Iran would be unable to produce highly enriched uranium (HEU) until at
least 2013, and stated that there is "no evidence" that Iran had even made a
decision to produce HEU.
Iran insists that its nuclear program is intended solely for civilian purposes.
In 2007, the US intelligence community released a National Intelligence
Estimate suggesting that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
The campaign comes on the eve of a series of key international meetings in late
September, including the annual opening of the UN General Assembly in New York
and the Group of 20 (G-20) Summit in Pittsburgh.
Iran and its nuclear program are expected to be a major topic for world leaders
who will attend these meetings, and hawks in Washington and Jerusalem hope that
Obama will use them to push for the imposition of far-reaching economic
sanctions by the UN Security Council as soon as possible.
While Obama faces pressure to move quickly to sanctions, the government of
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is still struggling at home to overcome
challenges to its legitimacy resulting from the disputed presidential election
in June. Many analysts suggest that Iran's government is currently in no
position to respond coherently to US engagement.
Last week, Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki submitted Tehran's new
proposals to representatives of the "Iran Six" powers - the US, China, Russia,
Britain, France and Germany - for talks on its nuclear program and related
issues. (See Iran
steps up to the nuclear table , Asia Times Online, September 11, 2009.)
As reported by Asia Times Online, "While the content of the package remains
confidential, various Iranian officials, including Mottaki, have provided
information that hints at a comprehensive approach that combines nuclear issues
with other issues on Iran's foreign policy plate."
This was immediately praised by the IAEA's outgoing director general, Mohammad
ElBaradei, who urged parties to "talk to each other and not at each other",
according to a diplomat who attended the meeting.
But the five-page-proposal has been deemed too vague by Washington, with State
Department spokesman PJ Crowley dismissing it last week as "not really
responsive" to US concerns. Other analysts suggested that the Iranian proposal
was more promising than initial media reports would indicate.
"Iran's uncompromising stance and its cursory references to nuclear matters are
most likely an opening bid, and not a red line," wrote National Iranian
American Council president Trita Parsi in the Huffington Post.
He suggests that the proposal's language "may offer an opening to push strongly
for transparency and acceptance of intrusive inspections and verification
mechanisms".
The Obama administration, however, continues to hold out hope for the
engagement strategy.
"We'll be looking to see how ready Iran is to actually engage, and we will be
testing that willingness to engage in the next few weeks," Crowley said.
At the same time, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov all but ruled out his
country's cooperation with new sanctions against Tehran at the Security
Council, and called instead for renewed negotiations based on Iran's reply.
Lavrov's comments came shortly after a secret and still-mysterious visit to
Russia by Israel's right-wing Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (See
Netanyahu plays a Russian rope trick , Asia Times Online, Sep 14,
2009).
The latest developments - along with growing amount of attention being paid to
US policy in Afghanistan, at the expense of Iran - have only added to the
frustration of Iran hawks in Washington. They believe increasingly that
economic sanctions alone, even if they are imposed multilaterally, are unlikely
to be enough to persuade Tehran to halt what they see as its drive to obtain a
nuclear weapon.
For this reason, many suggest that the US should either make preparations to
attack Iran militarily itself, or step aside and allow Israel to do so.
"No one should believe that tighter sanctions will, in the foreseeable future,
have any impact on Iran's nuclear weapons program," former UN ambassador John
Bolton, a noted hardliner, wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month.
"Adopting tougher economic sanctions is simply another detour away from hard
decisions on whether to accept a nuclear Iran or support using force to prevent
it."
Earlier that month, the Journal featured an article by General Wald - who was
one of the co-authors of Thursday's op-ed urging preparations for a military
strike - entitled "Of Course There's a Military Option on Iran".
But critics suggest that the constant threats of military action against Tehran
will only make the regime's leadership more intransigent on the nuclear issue.
"Pointing a gun at their heads merely reinforces their desire for a reliable
deterrent, and probably strengthens the hand of any Iranian officials who think
they ought to get a bomb as soon as possible," wrote Stephen Walt, a professor
of international relations at Harvard University, on the website of Foreign
Policy magazine.
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