International Finance Corporation invests $2.9 billion in the Middle East and North Africa
MEMO | February 7, 2013
International Finance Corporation invests $2.9 billion in the Middle East and North AfricaFigures released by the International Finance Corporation show that its investments for the fiscal year 2012 in the Middle East and North Africa have reached a record $2.9 billion. Fifty-seven projects have been supported across 12 countries as part of the Corporation’s efforts to restore investors’ confidence in the region, with a focus on the long-term possibilities after the end of the political crises. It is the IFC’s highest annual commitment in the region to date, representing a 21 per cent increase over 2011.
Twenty-five advisory projects were launched with a total value of $17.6 million to improve opportunities for obtaining access to finance and strengthen corporate governance and practices of small and medium enterprises. Almost $600 million has been pumped into infrastructure projects in the MENA region. One IFC initiative is the Arab Financing Facility for Infrastructure (AFFI), established in partnership with the World Bank and the Islamic Development Bank to encourage infrastructure investment.
In order to address what it calls the “the mismatch between the needs of the labour markets and the education outcomes in the Arab World”, the IFC pointed to the launch of the e4e (Education for Employment) initiative for Arab youth in Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia and Morocco, in collaboration with the Islamic Development Bank. The e4e team has also sought and received funding for the project from Britain’s Department for International Development among other donors.
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Nuclear accident could cost France $580bn, study shows
Press TV – February 7, 2013
A study shows that a possible nuclear accident in France would cost the country about 430 billion euros ($580 billion), which is equivalent to 20 percent of its economic output.
The study, conducted by the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN), showed that a possible disaster in one of the nuclear reactors in France and a release of radioactivity into the environment would displace an estimated 100,000 people, destroy crops and cause massive power cuts, Reuters reported on Wednesday.
Jacques Repussard, the head of the IRSN, said, “A major accident would have terrible consequences, but we would have to deal with them because the country wouldn’t be annihilated, so we have to talk about it, however difficult it is.”
A nuclear crisis would also take its toll on exports of French delicacies and the tourism industry, costing the country about 160 billion euros ($126 billion), the study indicated.
Patrick Momal, the IRSN economist responsible for the study, said, “Tourism is an important activity for France and direct costs would not only hit the affected region, but the whole country.”
Momal, who is also a former World Bank economist, unveiled two disaster scenarios prompting a core meltdown at a typical 900-megawatt nuclear reactor in France, which include a “major” accident similar to that of Japan’s Fukushima reactor.
In March 2011, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake followed by a devastating tsunami hit the northeastern coast of Japan.
The quake triggered a nuclear disaster by knocking out power to cooling systems at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, resulting in meltdowns and radioactivity release.
France is the world’s most nuclear-dependent country and operates 58 reactors, which supply about 75 percent of its electricity demand.
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Israeli lies on Iranian nuclear program exposed
By Yusuf Fernandez | Press TV | February 5, 2013
In recent days, reports about an alleged Israeli-US bombing attack that would have allegedly destroyed a large portion of the Fordo nuclear enrichment plant in Qom were circulating in Western media. However, its falsehood was soon revealed by several sources.
The story first appeared on February 25th when an Iranian defector going by the pseudonym Reza Kahlili published an evidence-free article in the US site wnd.com, in which he claimed that the Fordo plant had been the target of a sabotage operation. The article claimed that a blast deep within Fordo had “destroyed much of the installation and trapped about 240 personnel deep underground”.
However, the first doubts came due to the personality of the author himself, as Kahlili, a defector, is widely considered as a liar because of his previous claims. He wrote some months ago that Iran actually had nuclear weapons.
Kahlili’s sole source was Hamid Reza Zakeri, another Iranian defector, who is also notorious for his lies against Iran. A US official has been quoted by some US media as saying that Zakeri was “a fabricator or monumental proportions”.
This is not the first time that defectors are used in order to launch false accusations against a country. In the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, New York Times reporter Judith Miller (and some others) published several stories about Saddam Hussein´s non-existent weapons of mass destruction programs and these reports were used by the Bush administration as a pretext to launch the war. Later, all these allegations turned out to be false and the newspaper was forced to admit that Miller had based her reports on Iraqi defectors. In that sense, the case for the war on Iraq was built on a set of fabricated documents and deliberately manipulated intelligence that US media outlets uncritically reproduced.
Israel spreads the story
Shortly after the Fordo story appeared, Israeli sites and officials tried to make it pass as true. The website of the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot repeated the claim and it was later echoed by the Times of London, which added that the story had been confirmed by Israeli intelligence officials. “We are still in the preliminary stages of understanding what happened and how significant it is,” one Israeli official told the London Times. “Israel believes the Iranians have not evacuated the (Fordo´s) surrounding area. It is unclear whether that is because no harmful substances have been released, or because Tehran is trying to avoid sparking panic among residents.”
For his part, Israeli acting Defense Minister, Avi Dichter, reacted to the story by saying that indeed any explosion in Iran was “good news”.
Of course, Israeli officials always knew that the story was false but it is clear that they wanted to feed the notion that they -with US help- were conducting a successful secret war against Iran in order to reinforce their own extremist stance. However, as these stories are revealed as lies, the effect is counterproductive to them because they expose themselves, once again, as liars before the international community, especially on the Iran nuclear issue.
However, two senior Iranian officials dismissed reports of the explosion. Deputy head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency Seyyed Shamseddin Barbroudi said there had been no explosion at the Fordo facility, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA). The chairman of the Iranian parliament’s Committee for Foreign Policy and National Security, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, said they were “baseless lies” meant to impact talks on Iran´s nuclear program, reported IRNA.
The Iranians´ statements were then confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which claimed that there were no signs of any explosion whatever in Fordo. The IAEA has live cameras at the site and its inspectors regularly visit it, and, therefore, they would have known if it had been “in ruins with hundreds trapped within”. “We understand that Iran has denied that there has been an incident at Fordo. This is consistent with our observations,” IAEA spokeswoman Gill Tudor said.
The White House also rejected the report as unreliable. “We have no information to confirm the allegations in the report and we do not believe the report is credible,” spokesman Jay Carney said in a briefing with reporters. “We do not believe those are credible reports.”
The false diagram
The Fordo false explosion was not the only Israeli fabrication on the Iranian nuclear issue. On November 27th 2012, the Associated Press agency published a report claiming that it had discovered the existence of alleged evidence of “Iranian work on a nuclear bomb”. “Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima”, the agency said.
This evidence, according to AP, was a “graph” which the agency said was “leaked” to it by “officials from a country critical of Iran’s atomic program” to “bolster their arguments that Iran’s nuclear program must be halted before it produces a weapon”. Moreover, “an intelligence summary was provided with the drawing” claiming that “Iran is working not on isolated experiments, but rather on a single program aimed at mastering all aspects of nuclear arms development.”
Why did AP hide which country had delivered the diagram? It said that officials of that country wanted anonumity, so the agency gave it anonymity. However, everybody was certain it was Israel.
The author of the AP report, George Jahn is also notorious because every time there is a possibility of a diplomatic solution to the crisis over Iran´s nuclear program, he reports an “exclusive” anti-Iranian revelation, always provided to him by “an official of a country tracking Iran’s nuclear program,” or “an official of a country that has been severely critical of Iran´s nuclear program.”
Nevertheless, experts soon discovered that the diagram was fake and amateurish. According to the British newspaper The Guardian, it simply showed that “the bulk of the nuclear fission yield is produced in a short 0.1 microsecond pulse”, which is a common knowledge for any physics student. Later, it was equally discovered that it is widely available all over the Internet and in university textbooks. Even worse, the diagram contained huge errors, which were unlikely to have been made by research scientists who work in a state-run national program.
Scott Kemp, an assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told IPS he suspects the graph leaked to AP was “adapted from the open literature”. He said he believed its authors “were told they ought to look into the literature and found that paper, copied (the graph) and made their own plot from it.”
After the hoax became exposed, Western diplomats privately accused Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, of being behind the leaks, which would be part of an effort to implicate a murdered Iranian in an alleged weapons program. The diplomats also said Mossad is becoming increasingly active in Austria, the home of the IAEA and the place where George Jahn works, in order to drive support for a war on Iran.
Therefore, what AP presented as a kind of highly specialized and very complex document was only a very common graph, which can be easily found on the internet. The agency helped create and spread a dangerous hoax and its credibility was severely damaged by this serious incident that demonstrated that it let itself be manipulated by officials “of an anonymous state” in order to incriminate Iran. The agency did not tell the public who gave it the false and misleading information with the evident goal of misleading the public into believing that Iran had a weapons programme.
Recently and after having scored a heavy defeat in the latest parliamentary elections, where he and his his right-wing partner Avigdor Lieberman lost 25% of their seats in the Knesset, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to hide his current political weakness by shifting the public´s attention to Iran. In his “victory speech”, he insisted that his first challenge would be “preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons”.
Of course, this rhetoric does not deceive anyone, as even the US and the IAEA reports recognize that Iran continues to use civilian enriched uranium only for civilian purposes. US officials have recently said that the assessment included in the 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, which claims that there is no evidence whatever of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, remains the consensus view of the US´s 16 intelligence agencies.
The international community is actually fed up with Israel’s false allegations and fabrications against Iran. Netanyahu and his Zionist supporters in the US probably know that the American and Western public cannot be manipulated into supporting an attack on Iran, as all the polls show.
Another for-Israel war in the Middle East would not benefit anyone but the far right in Israel, the pro-Israeli lobby in the US and its neocon agents. It would not only devastate the Middle East and kill hundreds of thousands, if not more, but it would also produce a decades-long conflict between the Muslim world and the West that would also destroy the West´s economy. Due to all this, the international community and the peoples of the world must confront these Zionist plots threatening the existence and hopes of humanity.
Related article
- IAEA Dismisses Reports of Explosion at Iran’s Fordo (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Khamenei rejects talks with US under pressure
Press TV – February 7, 2013
The leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, has rejected any talks with the United States under pressure and threats.
“I am not a diplomat. I am a revolutionary and speak frankly, honestly, and firmly. An offer of talks makes sense only when the side [that makes the offer] shows its goodwill,” Ayatollah Khamenei said in a meeting with the officials and commanders of Iran’s Navy on Thursday.
“You (the Americans) point the gun at Iran and say either negotiations or we pull the trigger! You should know that pressure and negotiations don’t go together, and the [Iranian] nation will not be intimidated by such things.”
Ayatollah Khamenei pointed to the remarks by American officials that ‘the ball is now in Iran’s court,’ and noted, “The ball is in your court, because you should answer the question of whether speaking of negotiations at the same time as continuing pressure and threats makes any sense at all.”
The Leader pointed out, however, that, “We, of course, understand their (the Americans’) need for negotiations, because the Middle East policy of the Americans has failed, and in order to compensate for this failure, they need to play a trump card.”
Taking Iran to the negotiating table is the trump card that the US needs, Ayatollah Khamenei noted, adding that the US seeks to tell the world it has good will. “However, no one sees any goodwill.”
Speaking at the 49th annual Munich Security Conference in Germany on February 2, US Vice President Joe Biden said Washington was ready to hold direct talks with Iran over the country’s nuclear energy program.
The United States, the Israeli regime and some of their allies have repeatedly accused Iran of pursuing non-civilian objectives in its nuclear energy program.
Iran argues that as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it is entitled to develop and acquire nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
The Talented Mr. Takeyh: Why Doesn’t the Council on Foreign Relations Fellow Like Flynt & Hillary Mann Leverett?
By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America | February 7, 2013
If there’s one thing mainstream “Iran experts” hate, it’s well-credentialed, experienced analysts who dare challenge Beltway orthodoxies, buck conventional wisdom and demythologize the banal, bromidic and Manichean foreign policy narrative of the United States government and its obedient media. Such perspectives are shunned by “serious” scholars who play by the rules they and their former bosses themselves wrote; those propounding such subversive ideas are likewise excoriated and banished, labeled apostates and attacked personally for failing to fall in line.
Enter Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett, two former National Security Council officials, who have long questioned the wisdom and efficacy of the past thirty years of U.S. policy towards Iran. Their new expertly researched and meticulously-sourced book, Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran, details and debunks numerous propagandized myths and delusional misunderstandings that many Americans have been led to believe about the country that is consistently referred to by our politicians and pundits as “the world’s most dangerous state.” The Leveretts argue that, by at least taking into account the Iranian side of things and reviewing the misguided, myopic and unsustainable American policies toward Iran, the groundwork may be laid for a constructive and beneficial change of course for both nations; by engaging openly and acknowledging past grievances – rather than ignoring, justifying or ridiculing them – a new future is possible, one without threats or war, without sabotage and cyberattacks, without demonization and demagoguery.
The problem is, without such things, the revolving door of Beltway think-tankery and government appointments might not spin so lucratively for our “Iran expert” industry. As a result, the Leveretts and their ideas are pilloried by political and policy elites who confuse heterodoxy for apologia.
In a supremely smug and self-satisfied pseudo-review of Going to Tehran, just published in Survival, the journal of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, Washington’s “go-to” Iran analyst Ray Takeyh launches what is surely a paradigmatic opening salvo on the Leveretts’ work. Needless to say, he didn’t like the book; his review is the intellectual equivalent of a drive-by shooting. While lambasting the Leveretts, Takeyh fails to actually address any of their contentions or claims, preferring to make grandiose statements condemning their analyses of Iranian politics and foreign policy and their policy recommendations without bothering to back up these statements with evidence or explanation.
Takeyh is a mainstay of the Washington establishment – a Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow before and after a stint in the Obama State Department and a founding member of the neoconservative-created Iran Strategy Task Force who has become a tireless advocate for the collective punishment of the Iranian population in a futile attempt to inspire homegrown regime change (if not, at times, all-out war against a third Middle Eastern nation in just over a decade). Unsurprisingly, he dismisses out of hand the notion that “the principal cause of disorder in the Middle East today is a hegemonic America seeking to impose its imperial template on the region.”
This is exactly the worldview that has produced the disastrous U.S. foreign policy of the last few decades, policies advocated time and time again by the same people – not only people like Takeyh, but including literally Takeyh himself – never learning from their mistakes or conceiving there might be a different way to engage the world (say, by not bullying, threatening, demanding, dictating, punishing, bombing, invading, destroying, dismantling, overthrowing, occupying, and propping up dictators). Takeyh’s contemptuous rejection of history means that those who disagree with him – like the Leveretts, even though their experience in government and direct contact with on-the-ground reality in today’s Iran dwarfs Takeyh’s – must inevitably be minions of the ayatollahs.
Takeyh’s dismissal of the Leveretts’ work is especially ironic, given that his own analytic nonsense is legion. He routinely makes statements that aren’t based in fact and that dispute even the most hysterical estimates of the United States government. He has no problem co-writing tomes of warmongering lunacy with psychotics like Matthew Kroenig, convicted criminals and racist demagogues like Elliott Abrams, and garbled inanity with his wife’s insane colleague at the Saban Center and perennial war champion Kenneth Pollack. Everything he writes is easily destroyed with a basic perusal of facts.
Never bothering to cite any evidence, Takeyh has long assumed Iran – oh sorry, I mean, “the mullahs” (how spooky!) – are building a nuclear bomb and only the fierce determination of the United States, its benevolent buddy Israel and vital Arab dictator friends can stop it, if not by beating the Islamic Republic into submission through economic and covert warfare, then perhaps by military might. In April 2003, he wrote, “Tehran often claims that instability in the region forces it to pursue nuclear weapons, when in fact it is Iran’s possession of such weapons that would increase instability.” Actually, Iranian officials have never claimed anything remotely like that, instead declaring their commitment never to build nuclear weapons consistently for over 20 years. In 2011, Takeyh assured Washington Post readers, “Exact estimates vary, but in the next few years Iran will be in [a] position to detonate a nuclear device.”
In October 2011, when the US government tried to pretend that a bumbling, bipolar Iranian used-car salesman in Texas had been tasked by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to hire a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in a DC restaurant (it is literally impossible to read that without chuckling), Takeyh took to the airwaves to comment on the alleged plot. Speaking on NPR, Takeyh wholly endorsed the U.S. government’s version of events, never for a second doubting their authenticity. Though he claimed it was “unusual,” Takeyh made sure to add, “I don’t know what the evidence about this it, but I’m not in position to doubt it.”
There you have it, folks, Takeyh’s entire method of scholarship in a nutshell.
Takeyh’s disdain for empirical reality allows him to take multiple, often contradictory positions on many issues—whatever it takes to align himself with “centrist” foreign policy hawks in the Democratic Party’s national security establishment. In 2006, after the occupation of Iraq had turned irrevocably catastrophic and Democrats were looking for ways to distance themselves from Bush’s Middle East follies, Takeyh argued “for the United States to become more directly engaged in negotiations with Iranians and also make an offer of some corresponding concessions.” While assuming an Iranian desire for latent nuclear weapons capability, he held, “I don’t think they’ve made up their mind yet to cross the threshold and actually weaponize [nuclear power].” He added, “For those who suggest that it is absolutely conclusively determined that Iran wants to have nuclear weapons, I think it behooves them to provide some kind of evidence for that claim.” Just months later, though, Takeyh told the Senate that Iranian leaders were determined to achieve hegemony in the Persian Gulf and that, from their vantage, “it is only through the attainment of the bomb that Iran can negate the nefarious American plots to undermine its stature and power.”
As the possibility of Democratic victory in the 2008 presidential election drew closer, Takeyh’s views grew more hawkish. His transformation into an Iran hawk accelerated with his brief stint in the State Department during the Obama administration’s first year. In 2010, he co-wrote a journal essay and accompanying op-ed that sought to characterize war with Iran as a natural outcome, a normalized and inevitable progression of history. Over the next couple of years, he fully realized his penchant for conflating Iran’s monitored and safeguarded nuclear energy program with a nefarious, clandestine weapons program.
This conflation is present in Takeyh’s attempted takedown of Going to Tehran, where he references Iran’s “nuclear infractions,” but provides no evidence for them other than collective Beltway wisdom, displaying a complete ignorance of what IAEA reports actually say and where such accusations actually come from (unverified American and Israeli allegations). His determination to blame only Iranian “intransigence” for the current nuclear dispute epitomizes the intellectual dishonesty for which most Washington think-tanks are unfortunately revered.
Takeyh’s analytic malfeasance extends to Iran’s domestic politics as well. His conversion from unimpressive establishment scholar to full-blown neocon fellow traveler is underscored by his remarkable insistence that Iran’s clerics are to blame for the 1953 CIA coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh (sic). Takeyh also refuses to understand the reality of the Green Movement in Iran, elevating them to surreal heights of organization, unity and potential.
In his review of Going to Tehran, Takeyh notes what he calls “transparent electoral fraud in the presidential election” of 2009, but again fails to advance any actual documentation to support this contention. Since 2010, he has been warning us all of Ahmadinejad’s impending consolidation of power over the Iranian government. This didn’t happen. Good call, Ray, how astute.
The self-serving vacuity of Takeyh’s review is especially glaring in his treatment of the Leveretts’ critique of U.S. policy toward Iran. As the Leveretts themselves have already noted, Takeyh is adamant that the U.S. has often and openly reached out diplomatically to Tehran but can’t seem to square this with reality – including statements made by his former boss, Dennis Ross, who sees the perception of failed diplomacy as necessary to sell the American public on a new illegal war against another enemy that poses absolutely no threat to the United States.
Takeyh complements his rewriting of diplomatic history with a selective – indeed exploitative – focus on human rights issues in Iran. Along with the vast majority of the Leveretts’ detractors (and anyone else who rejects a reality-based approach to the three-decades-long U.S.-Iranian impasse), Takeyh seems unaware that basing American foreign policy on human rights is not only disingenuous, but also contrary to how the U.S. actually operates all over the world.
Going to Tehran is a policy prescription addressed primarily to the government of the United States, not to human rights organizations. Iran has as abhorrent a human rights record as many other countries – far worse than many, better than others. But the United States government has never cared one iota about human rights when it comes to strategic partnership with its closest and most trusted political allies (let alone its own actions).
Whether looking at our torture regime, our indefinite detention, our illegal drone program, our invasions, our assassinations, our surveillance state, our contempt for due process, our racist justice system and bloated prisons, and – perhaps, most relevant – our continued support and encouragement of ongoing Israeli war crimes, ethnic cleansing, colonization and occupation of Palestine alongside weapons sales and willful blindness to the atrocities of true dictatorships like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, the concept that American diplomacy or interests rest upon virtuousness and humane practices is not only hypocritical; it’s downright laughable. As Glenn Greenwald recently wrote about Iran, Syria and Libya, “That the US and its Nato allies – eager benefactors of the world’s worst tyrants – are opposed to those regimes out of concern for democracy and human rights is a pretense, a conceit, so glaring and obvious that it really defies belief that people are willing to advocate it in public with a straight face.”
If our government cared about human rights it wouldn’t be subjecting the Iranian people (who wholeheartedly oppose American sanctions and constant bullying) to collective punishment, just like it did the people of Iraq – the half million Iraqi children sacrificed to similar sanctions know full well the American consideration for human rights. Takeyh reflects this duplicity in his review, noting the appalling history of “show trials, mass repression and persistent international transgressions” in Iran and condemning the Leveretts for not making this the focus of their book. Yet if Takeyh actually cared about fundamental human rights and the importance of international law, he would not only call for Congress to sanction Israel and Saudi Arabia, he would be outraged by the closeness of these governments to his own here in the United States. But he doesn’t. Only Iran is the target of his anger and concern.
Because for the U.S. government, human rights abuses are used merely as a bludgeon against its adversaries while the myriad transgressions of its strategic partners are routinely ignored (if not, in the case of Israel, even funded and justified), Takeyh’s argument is disingenuous at minimum. As always, he and his fellow mavens of the established foreign policy community are silent about America’s role as the guarantor of Middle Eastern tyranny, as long as its puppet dictators do our bidding, namely with regard to acquiescing to Israeli regional hegemony and following the U.S. lead on isolating and threatening Iran.
In the most recent Human Rights Watch report, we learn that a large Middle Eastern country, ruled by an unelected religious fundamentalist misogynistic elite, has “arrested hundreds of peaceful protesters during 2012, and sentenced activists from across the country to prison for expressing critical political and religious views.” Not only this, but “thousands of people are in arbitrary detention, and human rights activists were put on trial on politicized charges. The Ministry of Interior forbids public protests. Since 2011, security forces have killed at least 14 protesters in the Eastern province who were seeking political reforms.”
It finds that the “government has gone to considerable lengths to punish, intimidate, and harass those who express opinions that deviate from the official line,” while “lawyers are not generally allowed to assist suspects during interrogation, and face obstacles to examining witnesses or presenting evidence at trial.” Furthermore, “Authorities have used specialized criminal courts, set up to try terrorism cases, to prosecute a growing number of peaceful dissidents on politicized charges.”
What country is this? Saudi Arabia, the leading U.S. trading partner in the Middle East, which receiving billions upon billions of high-tech weaponry from our noble nation year after year. The United States uses a secret Saudi base as a launchpad for lethal drone strikes in neighboring Yemen and is even working closely with the Kingdom on its nascent nuclear program. One wonders if this recent case (one of the worst things I have ever heard about) will cause the U.S. to reconsider its relationship with Saudi Arabia. Don’t hold your breath. But just imagine if that had happened in Iran.
Our best friend in the world, Israel, meanwhile is a militarized colonial state in routine contravention of existing international and humanitarian law. Ample evidence reveals the illegality of Israel’s Apartheid Annexation Wall, Israel’s use of administrative detention to hold Palestinians indefinitely without charge or trial and the rampant Israeli arrest of Palestinian children and toddlers, who suffer abuse – mental, physical and sexual – and who are tortured during and traumatized by their imprisonment. Palestinian communities are constantly victimized by housing demolitions and eviction, a particularly vindictive form of collective punishment favored by the Israeli government.
None of this seems to bother our government one bit and any attempt to hold Israel accountable for its crimes is met with derision in the circles in which Mr. Takeyh travels, all expenses paid, of course.
The issue isn’t about whitewashing or justifying abuse and repression; it’s about U.S. government policy, which clearly has no problem overlooking such horrors depending on who commits them. If the U.S. were consistent in its concern for human rights (rather than selectively using them only to condemn its enemies), Takeyh might have a point. But it isn’t, so he doesn’t.
The Leveretts explicitly address this issue in Going to Tehran. They write, “Washington has never demonstrated that it cares about human rights in the Middle East for their own sake. It cares about them when and where caring appears to serve other policy goals.” In their explicitly stated effort “to outline a potentially far more efficacious diplomatic approach” (p.388), the Leveretts point out that “the only way human rights conditions in the Islamic Republic, as defined by Western liberals, are likely to improve is in a context of U.S.-Iranian rapprochement, whereby the United States had credibly given up regime change as a policy goal.” (p.326)
While conventional Washington wisdom (and actual acts of Congress and executive orders by the President) hold that the U.S. government should be critical of Iran’s human rights record as a matter of policy, doing so is pure propaganda. The United States is in no position to affect the violations of the Iranian government because it has no diplomatic presence, credibility or connection to the Islamic Republic. As George W. Bush admitted in December 2004, in a rare moment of candor and honesty, “We’re relying upon others, because we’ve sanctioned ourselves out of influence with Iran…We don’t have much leverage with the Iranians right now.”
Takeyh, by employing ad hominem attacks on the Leveretts in an effort to label them apologists for theocratic authoritarianism and thereby discredit their views, is trying to poison the well, so to speak, with anti-war progressives who might find a new approach to Iran novel and welcome. He calls Going to Tehran “tedious,” “stale,” and “trite.” That’s coming from a guy who works at the Council on Foreign Relations and writes about implementing even more “crippling” sanctions on Iranians in order to compel their government’s capitulation to American and Israeli diktat. How original, fresh, and innovative!
Regardless of whether one finds their arguments compelling or their history sufficiently comprehensive, the Leveretts deliver a blow to the establishment narrative of “what to do about Iran.” It is no surprise that Ray Takeyh is offended by the Leveretts – they directly address the danger he and others like him in the official foreign policy community pose to those who oppose another war.
They write that the claims put forward by Takeyh “that Iran’s leadership is too ideologically constrained, fractious, or politically dependent on anti-Americanism to pursue a strategic opening to the United States are not just at odds with the historical record. Such claims push the United States ever further in its support of coercive regime change and, ultimately, down the disastrous path toward war.” (p.108)
The main thesis of Going to Tehran, as evident in the book’s title, holds that, as American power declines worldwide, recognition of faulty and detrimental foreign policy is required for the U.S. to better adapt to an ever-changing and more independent Middle East; a region in which Iranian influence is ascendant whether we like it or not. They see the precedent set by Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China as the best way forward with regard to Iran.
Such a suggestion, while increasingly relevant, is not actually new. A noted foreign policy expert proffered an identical view in 2006, explaining, “First of all, this is not a unique historical moment for the United States. We’ve been in this position before. If you look back in the late 1960s, early ’70s, we were in a position in East Asia where our power was declining because of the Vietnam War, and the Chinese power was increasing because of China’s own capability and declining American power. And then there was certainly antagonism between the two countries.
Lamenting the “conceptual divergence” of Iranian and American negotiating positions, the analyst continued,
“I think you have to accept certain basic realities. Iran is an important power with influence in the region, and the purpose of the negotiation would be how to establish a framework for regulation of its influence. Therefore, in a perverse sense, negotiations [are] a form of containment. We’re negotiating as a means of containing Iran’s influence, surely as we negotiated with the Chinese in the early 1970s as means of coming to some arrangements to rationalize U.S.-Sino American relations as a means of regulating Chinese power.”
He further insisted that the United States must take a bold step to enter into “comprehensive negotiations on all of Iranian concerns and all of our concerns. Our concerns are human rights, terrorism; they have their own grievances and so forth. And these negotiations will take place ultimately without precondition,” just as negotiations with China in 1970 were not preconditioned.
Again making the explicit analogy to Nixon’s overture to Beijing, he stated, “The purpose of these negotiations would be to foster an arrangement where Tehran’s relationship with Washington is more meaningful to it than various gradation of uranium or potentially its ties with Hezbollah.” This way, he concluded, an “end point” would be reached “by creating a new framework and a new basis for U.S.- Iran relations,” which would, in order to be at all successful would have to recognize Iran’s position in its own neighborhood. “[I]n all these discussions and negotiations,” he affirmed, “we have to appreciate that in a sense we are legitimizing Iran ‘s at least Persian Gulf if not larger regional aspirations.”
That analyst was Ray Takeyh. He was addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of the 109th Congress. Sitting on the Committee at the time of his statement were John Kerry and Chuck Hagel. Its ranking member was Joe Biden. Also on the committee? The junior Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama.
Just six months later, Takeyh wrote in Foreign Affairs that no U.S. policy regarding Iran in the past thirty years has worked. Noting the impossibility of regime change, military action, isolation and obstinacy, Takeyh wrote the U.S. government must abandon these “incoherent policies” and “must rethink its strategy from the ground up.”
He continued,
“The Islamic Republic is not going away anytime soon, and its growing regional influence cannot be limited. Washington must eschew superficially appealing military options, the prospect of conditional talks, and its policy of containing Iran in favor of a new policy of détente. In particular, it should offer pragmatists in Tehran a chance to resume diplomatic and economic relations.”
He added, “The sooner Washington recognizes these truths and finally normalizes relations with its most enduring Middle Eastern foe, the better.”
This is literally what Going to Tehran is about. Literally.
By attacking the Leveretts’ new book, Takeyh is attacking the very ideas he himself has espoused so confidently, both in a leading policy journal and to a senate Committee that included the current administration’s President, Vice President, Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense themselves.
But he doesn’t want you to know that.
Related article
- ‘US has militarily coerced Middle Eastern political outcomes since the Cold War’ (alethonews.wordpress.com)