8/28/09

(The Daily will remain on an intermittent schedule until Labor Day)

The inauguration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a second presidential term earlier this month has not dissipated discontent with the regime or ended political turmoil. Political and religious leaders have organized behind the scenes and opposition leaders continue to make explosive allegations against the government.

This coming month, the fractious regime will be pushed back into the international spotlight. A clogged September calendar will see Iran dominate the agenda of international meetings in Frankfurt, Vienna, Pittsburgh, and New York. The Obama administration spent the summer working to forge a unified international stance on Iran and making clear, through Secretary Gates and others, that it is also expecting action from the Iranians and will not simply allow Iran to use negotiations to run out the clock. Obama has set September as a deadline for Iran to accept talks over its nuclear program or face greater sanctions. Despite Iran’s political uncertainty, engagement remains the best way of forcing a decision from the regime – either move in a new direction offered by the Obama administration or face consequences from a united international community.  

Iranian politics remains in turmoil, with shifting loyalties, show trials, sensational rape allegations and odd international missteps suggesting that, though the regime is in control, the political situation remains highly uncertain.  As the Washington Post set the scene, “The protesters have been routed from the streets of Tehran, but the political turmoil in Iran continues unabated behind the scenes. The authority of both the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is being overtly challenged by religious and secular elites.”  The New York Times says that “The election and its violent aftermath have caused unprecedented fissures among the political and clerical elite.” The Post goes on to say that “In the past weeks, the regime has pressed ahead with its Stalinist mass show trial, a sickening spectacle in which prominent figures who protested the outcome of the disputed June 12 presidential election are undergoing a ritualized humiliation that has further embittered the opposition... At the same time, the revolutionary leadership is facing intensified opposition... a group of clerics has challenged the standing of Mr. Khamenei -- an event that would have been unthinkable a few months ago -- by issuing an anonymous letter calling him a dictator and insisting that he be ousted. The country's senior judicial official named a bitter critic of Mr. Ahmadinejad to the powerful position of prosecutor general. Mr. Ahmadinejad, for his part, nominated a list of loyalists to fill ministerial posts in his government, defying key parliamentary leaders who had insisted that competent professionals anchor the cabinet.” In addition the New York Times notes, that “Earlier this month, Mehdi Karroubi, the reformist cleric who placed fourth among the presidential contenders, stunned many Iranians by charging that some of the thousands of men and women who were arrested for protesting after the disputed election had been raped.”

This uncertainty has filtered through to Iran’s diplomacy, where some “experts said that the Iranian president and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, might have calculated that resolving the nuclear standoff could satisfy two needs. It could help the troubled economy by heading off new sanctions — and possibly assist in lifting existing sanctions — while giving the two leaders much-needed credibility for having achieved a positive policy objective.” However, other “Experts were quick to caution that this outline might well prove to be wishful thinking. Trying to discern events in Iran today is something like the Kremlin-watching that went on during the cold war. Repression, arrests and censorship have made independent reporting impossible in Iran. Indeed, there is a competing view that Iran will never make any concessions on its nuclear program, figuring that conflict with Washington may restore some degree of national unity.” [Washington Post, 8/27/09. NY Times, 8/27/09. NY Times, 8/20/09]

September is a critical month for Iran policy.  Iran is likely to receive significant attention from the Obama administration in September. “President Barack Obama has set a late September deadline for Iran to respond to his calls for direct talks on the nuclear issue or face greater financial penalties,” reported the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.  The Journal noted that “[r]epresentatives of the Security Council, plus Germany, are meeting in Frankfurt next week to discuss Iran. The international community will also deliberate on Iran's nuclear programs during two weeks of IAEA meetings beginning Sept. 7 in Vienna. The diplomacy will then shift to the U.S., where meetings on Iran will be held at the Group of 20 meetings in Pittsburgh and then at the U.N. General Assembly the last week in September. ‘Clearly, there's been a concerted effort internationally to impose a time frame on Iran so that the nuclear crisis doesn't drag on,’ said Michael Adler, an expert on Iran's nuclear program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.”

The flurry of activity represents a recognition on the part of the Administration that it cannot wait forever for Iran to reciprocate its outreach, a point articulated by Defense Secretary Robert Gates in July: "[The President] has been quite clear that this is not an open-ended offer to engage. We're very mindful of the possibility that the Iranians would simply try to run out the clock. The president is certainly anticipating or hoping for some kind of a response this fall, perhaps by the time of the U.N. General Assembly." [WSJ, 8/26/09. Secretary of Defense Gates, CNN, 7/27/09]

A broad consensus remains that engagement with Iran, though tougher than ever, but it is still the best policy for advancing U.S. interests – even as the outlines of a “back end” strategy have also emerged.  

• Brookings Institution Iran expert Suzanne Maloney testified before Congress, that despite the new obstacles that have emerged following Iran’s presidential elections, engagement represents the only path forward: “the Obama administration's interest in engagement was never predicated on the palatability of the Iranian leadership - indeed, until very recently the conventional American wisdom tended to presume a second Ahmadinejad term - but on the urgency of the world's concerns and the even less promising prospects for the array of alternative U.S. policy options."  

• U.S. Rep. Howard Berman (D – CA) echoed Maloney’s remarks in an interview before a briefing of Jewish community leaders in Los Angeles, saying “The Bush administration’s policy of trying to isolate Iran, coupled with military threats, simply didn’t work,” according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

• Deputy National Security advisor Tom Donilon talked with the New York Times’ Roger Cohen about  a “back end” to the policy of engagement. According to Cohen, “[t]he back end is punitive sanctions, in the event engagement fails, that would change the Iranian calculus on further uranium refinement: cutting off Iranian banks’ access to credit; extending that isolation to insurance and shipping; stopping refined petroleum products from reaching Iran.” However, as Cohen adds, for that back-end to be available “Obama will need to prove his outreach is more than rhetoric and that other nations have bought into the notion that a near-boycott of Iran should be imposed.” [JTA, 8/15/09. Suzanne Maloney, 7/22/09. NY Times, 8/02/09]

What We’re Reading

General McChrystal’s new war tactics may be reducing civilian causalities in Afghanistan. A senior Taliban commander is captured. Fraud concerns from last week’s presidential election are still being sorted out. And Afghan émigrés adjust to a new life in Europe.

Terrorists failed to kill a member of the Saudi royal family in a bombing.

Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asks for a new strategic direction in communicating to the Muslim world.

The Justice Department investigation into CIA interrogation practices has exposed an institutional rift between two agencies. The CIA pledged to cover the legal fees of any personnel prosecuted in the upcoming investigations.

Guantanamo detainees organized a hunger strike in 2006, according to recently released memos.

The US military continually vetted and assessed the stories of reporters embedded with troops, defense officials say.

As fighting subsides in Darfur, Southern Sudan is coming under increasing international scrutiny.

A deal may be in place to allow ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya back into the country.

The Democratic Party of Japan is poised to take power after decades of Liberal Democratic Party rule.

China published new rules for the use of the People’s Armed Police, a large paramilitary force used against Uighers in Western China.

The Michigan Messenger reports on an NSN letter to Rep. Pete Hoekstra, criticizing his politicization of the Guantanamo detainee issue.

Commentary of the Day

Paul Wolfowitz has a long piece in Foreign Policy critiquing the status of realism in America foreign policy.  Stephen M. Walt, David J. Rothkopf, Daniel W. Drezner, and Steve Clemons respond.

The NYT rebukes Iran’s use of show trials in the ongoing post-election turmoil.

The Financial Times’ Phillip Stevens looks at the current stalemate between Israel and U.S. efforts to push the peace process forward.

The LA Times examines the toll the oil industry has taken on the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Nuclear weapons and terrorism expert Bennett Ramberg, looks back at the 60th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s first nuclear test.