Showing posts with label POLITICS. Show all posts

Thursday, July 2, 2009

SODOMY PART III

POLITICS: U.S. Uses False Taliban Aid Charge to Pressure Iran
By Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Jul 2 (IPS) - The Barack Obama administration has given new prominence to a Bush administration charge that Iran is providing military training and assistance to the Taliban in Afghanistan, for which no evidence has ever been produced, and which has been discredited by data obtained by IPS from the Pentagon itself.

The new twist in the charge is that it is being made in the context of serious talks between NATO officials and Iran involving possible Iranian cooperation in NATO's logistical support for the war against the insurgents in Afghanistan.

Since the early to mid-1990s, Iranian policy in Afghanistan has been more consistently and firmly opposed to the Taliban than that of the United States.

The Obama administration thus appears to be pressing that charge as a means of increasing the political-diplomatic pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme, despite NATO's need for Iranian help on Afghanistan.

CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus declared in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee Apr. 1, "In Afghanistan, Iran appears to have hedged its longstanding public support for the Karzai government by providing opportunistic support to the Taliban."

Defence Secretary Robert Gates told reporters in Brussels Jun. 12, "Iran is playing a double game" in Afghanistan by "sending in a relatively modest level of weapons and capabilities to attack ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) and coalition forces."

The State Department's annual report on terrorism, published Apr. 30, 2009, claimed that the Iranian Qods Force had "provided training to the Taliban on small unit tactics, small arms, explosives and indirect fire weapons." It also charged that Iran had "arranged arms shipments including small arms and associated ammunition, rocket propelled grenades, mortar rounds, 107mm rockets, and plastic explosives to select Taliban members."

The report offered no evidence in support of those charges, however, and Rhonda Shore, public affairs officer in the State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, refused to answer questions from IPS about those charges in the report.

A military official who refused to be identified told IPS the charge of Iranian assistance to the Taliban is based on "an intelligence assessment", which was limited to "suspected" Iranian shipment of arms to the Taliban and did not extend to training. That admission indicates that the charge of shipments of weapons to the Taliban by Iran is not based on hard evidence.

The only explicit U.S. claim of specific evidence relating to an Iranian arms shipment to insurgents in Afghanistan has been refuted by data collected by the Pentagon's own office on improvised explosives.

In an April 2008 Pentagon news briefing, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen said in reference to Iranian authorities, "[W]e're seeing some evidence that they're supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan".

When pressed by reporters for the evidence, however, Mullen admitted that there was no "constant stream of arms supply at this point" and that the basis for the charge was primarily "evidence some time ago" that Iranians were providing amour-piercing EFPs (explosively formed projectiles) to the Taliban.

That was a reference to a July 2007 allegation by the U.S. command in Afghanistan, under obvious pressure from the White House, that Iranian-made EFPs had appeared in Afghanistan.

Col. Tom Kelly, a U.S. deputy chief of staff of the ISAF, told reporters Jul. 18, 2007 that five EFPs that had been found in Herat near the Iranian border and in Kabul were "very sophisticated", and that "they're really not manufactured in any other places other than, our knowledge is, Iran".

That was the same argument that had been used by the U.S. command in Iraq to charge Iran with exporting EFPs to Shi'a insurgents there.

But in response to a query from this writer last July, the Pentagon's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organisation (JIEDDO), which is responsible for tracking the use of roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, provided the first hard data on EFPs found in Afghanistan. The data showed that there was no connection on which to base even an inferential connection between those EFPs and Iran.

Every one of the 13 EFPs reported to have been found in Afghanistan up to that time were "crude and unsophisticated", according to Irene Smith, a spokesperson for Gen. Anthony Tata, JIEDDO's deputy director for operations and training. In fact, the insurgents in Afghanistan had not shown the ability to make the kind of EFPs that had been found in Iraq, Smith said.

The U.S. command in Afghanistan, moreover, does not appear to be an enthusiastic supporter of the administration's political line on the issue. NATO officials began a serious dialog with Iran last March which focused on the possibility of moving supplies for NATO troops to Afghanistan from Iranian ports.

At an off the record seminar in Washington last month, a senior U.S. military officer in Afghanistan said the Iranian policy toward Afghanistan is neither a "major problem" nor a "growing problem" for the war against the Taliban, according to one of the attendees.

The lack of enthusiasm of the U.S. command in Afghanistan for charges of Iranian support for the Taliban suggests that the impetus for such charges is coming from those in the administration who are trying to ramp up the overall pressure on Iran to make concessions on its nuclear programme.

Gilles Dorronsoro, a specialist on Afghanistan and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, says he sees sharp differences between the position of those responsible for Afghanistan and those whose primary concern is Iran's nuclear programme.

"You have one discourse of officials in Afghanistan, who would support collaboration with Iran," Dorronsoro said in an interview with IPS. "It's very clear that those people don't want a crisis with Iran and don't want to push Iran too far."

But those who want to put pressure on Iran to stop its enrichment programme, he said, "are acting as though they are building some kind of legal case against Iran."

The Bush administration initially claimed it had evidence of Iranian aid to the Taliban in 2007 that didn't exist, only to have it refuted by the U.S. command in Afghanistan.

In April and May 2007, NATO forces in Helmand province found mortars, C-4 explosives and electrical components believed to have been manufactured in Iran. Then Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns asserted that the United States had "irrefutable evidence" that those weapons were provided to the Taliban by the Qods Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

When State Department spokesman Sean McCormack was questioned about the Burns statement on Jun. 13, 2007, McCormack admitted that the charge was an inference.

Gen. Dan McNeill, then the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, rejected the idea that any official Iranian role could be reasonably inferred from Iranian weapons showing up in Afghanistan.

"[W]hen you say weapons being provided by Iran, that would suggest there is some more formal entity involved in getting these weapons here," he told Jim Loney of Reuters. McNeill said he had "no information to support that there's anything formal in some arrangement out of Iran to provide weapons here."

The obvious alternative explanation for Iranian weapons in arms shipments is that drug lords and the Taliban have used commercial arms smugglers to get the weapons from Iran into the country. Arms dealers have close ties with Afghan officials, and have been reported to use police convoys to carry smuggled arms, according to a BBC2 television report last September.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

Sunday, June 28, 2009

U.S.: Neo-Cons, Republicans Paint Obama as Weak on "Rogues"

U.S.: Neo-Cons, Republicans Paint Obama as Weak on "Rogues"
By Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Jun 22 (IPS) - In what appears increasingly to be an orchestrated campaign, right-wing Republicans and Israel-centred neo-conservatives are pulling out all the stops in depicting President Barack Obama as "weak" on national security and promoting democracy abroad.

While they have been pressing that charge on Obama since even before he defeated Sen. John McCain in last November's elections, the past week's turmoil in Iran – and Obama's thus-far cautious reaction to it - has raised the volume to fever pitch.

A "parade of Republican lawmakers", as the right-wing Washington Times put it, appeared on the weekend's public-affairs television programmes urging Obama to speak out more strongly against repressive actions by Tehran's security forces against opposition demonstrators.

Similarly, the latest edition of the neo-conservative Weekly Standard magazine devoted its lead editorial and no less than half of its articles this week to the same theme, with William Kristol, its editor, and Stephen Hayes, who has often served as a mouthpiece for former Vice President Dick Cheney, accusing Obama of acting as a "de facto ally of (Iranian) President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei."

The neo-conservative editorial board of the Wall Street Journal also weighed in Monday with a lead editorial that warned that the current crisis in Iran, as well as the enforcement of U.N. sanctions against North Korea – the U.S. Navy is currently tracking a vessel believed to be carrying proscribed cargo from Nampo to Myanmar - in the wake of its nuclear test last month, marks a "major test of his Presidency". It suggested that Obama's failure to take a harder line against both "rogues" would put him in the same category as former President Jimmy Carter.

"We'll soon learn if Mr. Obama is made of sterner stuff," the editorial asserted, warning that any effort to engage Tehran diplomatically in the wake of the current crackdown "will lend (the government) legitimacy at the expense of the Iranian people."

The chorus of right-wing criticism came as Obama himself became increasingly outspoken about the situation in Iran over the weekend, after Friday's endorsement by Khamenei of the results of the disputed election and subsequent clashes between demonstrators and security forces that killed at least 10 people Saturday.

In a statement released by the White House Saturday afternoon, he called "on the Iranian government to stop all violence and unjust actions against it own people" and warned, "If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent not coercion."

Obama is expected to have more to say about the situation in Iran during a press conference scheduled for mid-day Tuesday.

Obama and his defenders have argued that more aggressive U.S. support for the opposition led by former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Moussavi could prove counter-productive, particularly in light of the fraught history between the two nations, notably the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) role in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq and the restoration of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1953, not to mention U.S. support for Iraq during the bloody Iran-Iraq War.

"It's not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling, the U.S. president meddling in Iranian elections," Obama said late last week.

"The last thing I want to do is to have the United States be a foil for those forces inside Iran who would love nothing better than to make this an argument about the United States," he said in an interview released by the White House Sunday. "We shouldn't be playing into that."

That assessment is shared by much of the foreign policy establishment, including more moderate Republicans.

"I think the president has handled this well," former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said last week. "Anything that the United States says that puts us totally behind one of the contenders, behind Moussavi, would be a handicap for that person."

That assessment was echoed Saturday by ret. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to former Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush. "I think the administration is about right in their reaction," he told the Journal. "We have to keep our eye on the ball. While it would be comforting to blast what is happening over there, you have to ask how it would help matters. A more belligerent tone would not be helpful."

But that has not deterred the critics whose prominent political leader to date has been none other than McCain himself, as well as two of his closest associates, Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham and the neo-conservative independent Democrat, Joseph Lieberman. Graham Sunday accused Obama of being "timid and passive" in dealing with Iran.

In an interview Monday with Fox News, McCain dismissed the notion that a stronger stand against the government could backfire, given Washington's past support for the Shah or other U.S. actions.

"Look, the point is that, all during the Cold War, there was the liberal elites who said we should not do anything to upset the Russians, whether it be the Prague Spring or the workers in Poland, in Gdansk," he said.

"And there was Ronald Reagan who, said, 'Take down this wall,' called [the Soviet Union] an evil empire... And to say we don't want to - quote - 'meddle,' of course, is - is -is not in keeping with that tradition in any way. In fact, it's a direct contradiction of it."

McCain has also called for the U.S. Navy to stop and board the North Korean vessel, the Kang Nam, which reportedly is being shadowed, ironically, by the USS John S. McCain, which is named for the senator's father and grandfather, both of whom were admirals.

The ship is believed to be carrying military cargo proscribed by the U.N. Security Council which last month approved a resolution authorising member states to search – but only with the crew's permission – suspect vessels. Pyongyang has said it would consider any interception an "act of war".

"Will the president let (North Korean leader) Kim Jon Il make a mockery of U.N. condemnations?" the Journal asked Monday.

*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

The Fox Guarding the Chicken Coop

Dennis Ross and Iran

By SASAN FAYAZMANESH

In October 2008 I presented a paper, entitled “What the Future has in Store for Iran,” at a conference on Middle East Studies. The paper, which was subsequently posted at Payvand.com , examined what the US policy toward Iran might look like if either Barack Obama or John McCain came to office. The conclusion of my essay, stated in its last two lines, was: “In the case of McCain, the war [waged against Iran] might come sooner than later. In Obama’s case, one might see a period of ‘tough’ or ‘aggressive diplomacy’ before hostilities begin.”

My conclusion was based on the argument that the US foreign policy toward the Middle East has become institutionalized and it makes very little difference who is the president. The starting point of the argument was an analysis that appeared in The Jerusalem Post just before the Bush Administration took office, predicting that the US Middle East policy would be made more by the neoconservative forces within the new administration than anyone else. In one essay, on December 8, 2000, The Jerusalem Post wrote that both Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz “are the type of candidates the pro-Israel lobby is pushing.” In another article on January 19, 2001, entitled “All the president’s Middle East men,” The Jerusalem Post expressed how the “Jewish and pro-Israel communities are jumping for joy,” knowing that people like Wolfowitz will be in the new administration. The essay predicted: “What you will have are two institutions grappling for control of policy.” It then added: “It is no secret in Washington–or anywhere else for that matter–that the policies will be determined less by Bush himself and more by his inner circle of advisers.”

The message of the Israeli analysts was clear: the Middle East foreign policy of the US has become institutionalized; and rather than watching the US president, one has to watch the institutions that would make the policy. Given this message, my analysis of what the future has in store for Iran concentrated on a few neoconservative institutions and individuals. In particular, I predicted that if Obama were to be elected, the US policy on Iran would be made mostly by Dennis Ross, the “consultant” to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP or simply Washington Institute), a “think tank” affiliate of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). That prediction has now come true. On February 23, 2009, it became official that Dennis Ross is the “Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for the Gulf and Southwest Asia.” [1] The title, as will be explained below, is not what Ross had hoped for, but he would still be in a position to influence the US policy toward Iran.

Who is Dennis Ross, what does he advocate, how was he positioned to become the adviser on Iran in the Obama Administration and what will he do to Iran if he gets the chance? Let me briefly review the case.

Dennis Ross is best known as the dishonest broker who led the so-called negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians during the Clinton Administration. He was “Israel’s lawyer,” to use Aaron David Miller’s apt description of the role that Ross’s “negotiating team” played in the Clinton era, particularly in 1999-2000. [2]

Ross, along with Martin Indyk—who was Clinton’s national security advisor and the US Ambassador to Israel—is a cofounder of the Washington Institute. [3] After leaving office in 2000, Ross became the director of the WINEP. Once the 2008 presidential election approached, Ross jockeyed for a position, left his directorship job and became a “Consultant” to the institute.[4] Originally, Ross and Indyk represented one wing of the WINEP, a wing which appeared to be close to the Israeli Labor Party. Another wing, closer to the Likud Party, and particularly Benjamin Netanyahu, consisted of individuals such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, individuals who played a pivotal role in planning the invasion of Iraq. [5] The difference between the Likud and the Labor wing of the Washington Institute was mostly one of the means employed rather than the end sought. [6] Both wings of the WINEP, similar to Kadima, strove toward a “Greater Israel” (Eretz Yisrael) that includes all or most of “Judea and Samaria.” They both saw Iran’s support for the Palestinian resistance as the biggest obstacle in achieving that goal. As such, the charge that Iran is developing nuclear weapons and posing an “existential threat” to Israel became a convenient tool for “containing” Iran and stopping its support for the Palestinians. [7] What separated the two sides was that the Labor wing believed that sanctions will eventually bring Iran to its knees, cause either a popular uprising to overthrow the Iranian “regime” or make Iran ripe for a US invasion. The Likud wing, however, had very little patience for sanctions. It wanted an immediate result, a series of military attacks against Iran, replacing the Iranian “regime” with a US-Israeli friendly government, as was done in Iraq. With the emergence of the Kadima Party in Israel in 2005, which brought together the likes of the Likud Party member Ariel Sharon and Labor Party member Shimon Peres, the differences between the two wings of the Washington Institute has mostly disappeared. Clinton’s Middle East men, such as Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk and Richard Holbrooke, are hardly distinguishable from Bush’s men, such as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. But since the latter group is temporarily out of office, the former is filling in. Ross has become the designated senior Israeli lobby man in Obama’s Administration. He has no expertise when it comes to Iran. But he knows that for the cause of Eretz Yisrael Iran must be contained; and given this goal, he knows how to recite, ad nauseum, all the usual lines of Israel and its lobby groups against Iran.

After breaking the back of the Palestinians and pushing for the invasion of Iraq, the Israeli lobby groups concentrated their forces to contain Iran. Given the Iraq fiasco and the neoconservatives falling from grace, the Israeli lobby groups settled on Dennis Ross, “Israel’s lawyer,” to lead the task of containing Iran. Since Ross has no knowledge of Iran, other members of the lobby, particularly their Iran “experts,” have been assisting Ross in his new role. Among these is the ex-Trotskyite, neoconservative Patrick Clawson, WINEP’s “deputy director for research” and an anti-Iran zealot who has been obsessed for decades with the containment of Iran and Iraq. [8] Over the years, with the help of these individuals Ross has developed a strategy to contain Iran. The strategy consists of arguing that: 1) Iran is developing nuclear weapons; 2) Iran is a threat to the US and an existential threat to Israel, and Israel will not tolerate “mullahs with nukes” (Sydney Morning Herald, October 16, 2004); 3) “nuclear deterrent rules that governed relations between the United States and the Soviet Union” do not hold when it comes to Iran, since Iranians, especially their president, are irrational and believe in the “coming of the 12th Imam” (The Washington Post, May 1, 2006); 4) Iran’s nuclear ambitions will start a nuclear arms race in the Middle East; 5) the Bush Administration’s policy of dealing with Iran did not work, because it did not have enough sticks or carrots; 6) the US should push for a direct, but “tough” or aggressive diplomacy to stop Iran from enriching uranium and supporting “terrorism” (Newsweek, December 8, 2008) [9]; 7) the aggressive diplomacy should include pressuring the Europeans, as well as the Chinese and Russians, to stop trading with Iran; 8) the prohibition of trade should include preventing Iran from importing refined oil products and, ultimately, blockading Iran; and 9) once this tough and aggressive diplomacy fails and Iran does not change its “behavior,” then the US could legitimately launch military attacks against Iran, arguing that the it did everything in its power to resolve the situation peacefully.

The above arguments were summarized on March 13, 2008, in a news report in The Jerusalem Post, entitled “Visiting Obama Middle East adviser: He’d be great for Israel.” According to this report, Mel Levine—a “staunchly pro-Israel” former congressman from Los Angeles and, along with Dennis Ross, “one of Obama’s seven Middle East advisers”—told The Jerusalem Post during a visit to Israel that Obama believes that “the way to stop Iran was with a combination of carrots and sticks.” Levine was further quoted as saying: “He believes that if you use carrots and sticks and engage in multilateral aggressive diplomacy then if you need to use the military option or do anything that needs to be done you are much more likely to get support of allies, more international support and broader American support.” Mr. Levin had cut to the chase and stated clearly what Dennis Ross had been advocating for years, but in a more convoluted and diplomatic language. The “tough” and “aggressive diplomacy,” as Mr. Levin had made clear, was nothing but a series of motions that would set the stage for military action against Iran.

Ross’s arguments are often devoid of any factual content, as I have shown in “What the Future has in Store for Iran.” For example, in June 2008 the Washington Institute published a “Presidential Study Group Reports” entitled “Strengthening the Partnership: How to Deepen U.S.-Israel Cooperation on the Iranian Nuclear Challenge.” [10] One of the two “co-convenors” of the report was Dennis Ross. [11] Subsequently, the advisors to both presidential candidates endorsed the report. [12] As I argued in my October essay, this 6-page WINEP report—which was funded by a foundation supporting neoconservative causes, and was drafted in consultation with the WINEP’s “Israeli counterparts”—contains almost nothing factual and, indeed, in several places contains errors. For example, like much of Ross’s other writings, this report tries to give the reader the false impression that Iran is building nuclear weapons. Yet, anyone familiar with the International Atomic Energy Agency’sreports knows that after many years of inspection, the IAEA has been unable to show any evidence of diversion of nuclear material in Iran. Or the report claims that the UN Security Council resolutions calling on Iran to suspend its enrichment program have been “unanimous.” As I have stated in my essay, even a cursory look at the news would reveal that this claim is false. For example, the third UN Security Council resolution, Resolution1803, did not pass unanimously. Indonesia abstained during the vote. [13] Furthermore, as most news sources pointed out, “Libya, South Africa and Vietnam joined Indonesia in expressing reservations [about the resolution]” (AFP, March 3, 2008). Ross’s arguments, as I have shown in my October essay, are also often quite illogical. It is, for example, not at all clear why Iran’s nuclear ambitions will start a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, while Israel’s decades-old possession of nuclear weapons has not led to such an arms race. Similarly, it is not clear why Iranians, who might have certain religious beliefs, are irrational, but Israelis, who justify the existence of Israel on religious grounds, are rational.

After the June 2008 “Presidential Study Group Reports,” which was endorsed by Obama’s and McCain’s advisors, Ross and company wrote the September 2008 “report of an independent task force sponsored by the bipartisan policy center” on “U.S. policy toward Iranian Nuclear Development.” [14] In this report they put forward the same falsehoods and illogical arguments. At the same time a neoconservative campaign was launched, under the title “United Against Nuclear Iran” (UANI), in which Ross played a prominent role as the “Co-Founder and Co-Chairman.” The “Advisory Board” of UANI included, beside Ross, such notable figures as the neoconservative Mark Wallace, the President of UANI, advisor to Sarah Palin and a John Bolton recruit for a position at the UN; R. James Woolsey the neoconservative and member of the advisory board of The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs; Henry Sokolski the neoconservative signatory of the “Project for the New American Century signatory”; and Richard C. Holbrooke, another “Co-Founder and Co-Chairman” of UANI. [15] The neoconservative campaign included a slick and scary video advertisement, which is still available on the web. [16] The video started with the message “Stop Terrorism, Stop Human Rights Abuses, Stop Nuclear Iran.” Small prints at the bottom of the message read “Paid for by the American Coalition Against Nuclear Iran, Inc.” Following the introduction six hands appeared, black and white, joining in a circle around a map of Iran. The viewer was asked to “join the cause” by clicking on the video. If followed, a note would appear that read: “Send a message to the nation that Iran’s nuclear program is unacceptable. Join United Against Nuclear Iran today and receive news updates and event reminders.” Then the viewer was asked for name and email address. This was followed by an ominous video about Iran’s alleged development of nuclear weapons, repeating the same falsehoods and illogical arguments put forward by Dennis Ross and company on behest of the Israeli lobby groups.

After President Obama took office, the media was filled with the news of the impending appointment of Dennis Ross as Iran envoy. Yet the appointment appeared to be postponed. Various explanations appeared in the media for the postponement. Some reasoned that the postponement was at least partly due to Ross’s close ties with Israel. For example, on February 3, 2009, Robert Naiman wrote in theHuffington Post that “allegation of ‘dual loyalty’ is being raised against Dennis Ross.” He further mentioned that Ross is “still chair of the board of the Jerusalem-based ‘Jewish People Policy Planning Institute,’ as indicated by that organization’s website.” [17] Others emphasized the fact that as far as Iran is concerned Ross’s appointment might kill any chance of rapprochement between Iran and the US. For example, The Christian Science Monitor reported on February 5, 2009, that from an Iranian perspective Ross is the “pioneer of the American-Zionist lobby” and under his leadership during the Clinton years the US policy was “not one millimeter different from Israeli policy.” The report quoted a “Western diplomat” as saying: “There is no doubt they [Iranians] are all going to look at Ross as an Israeli proxy.”

Some of the explanations given for the postponement of Ross’s appointment also explain his vague and broad job title, “Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for the Gulf and Southwest Asia.” Before the end of the 2008 presidential election there were rumors that Ross might be considered for the position of the Secretary of State (Haaretz, October 24, 2008). Once Obama was elected, and Hilary Clinton became Secretary of State, Ross apparently hoped to become at least the “special envoy to Iran.” But given his close ties with Israel and the fact that his containment plans were well known to the Iranians, he had to settle for a less provocative title. Needless to say that the new title, “Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for the Gulf and Southwest Asia,” is still quite provocative as far as Iran is concerned, since changing the name of the Persian Gulf to simply “Gulf” is offensive to many Iranians.

Whatever the reason for the postponement of Ross’s appointment and change of title, one thing is clear: the sly fox is now guarding the chicken coop. As Mel Levine said about Ross: “He’d be great for Israel.” With the help of Richard Holbrooke, Stuart Levey—Bush’s Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, who is now in Obama’s Administration—and all the other “president’s Middle East men,” Dennis Ross might be able to finish the unfinished business of the neoconservatives, the containment of Iraq and Iran. The Israelis and pro-Israel communities must be jumping with joy once again!

Sasan Fayazmanesh is Professor of Economics at
California State University, Fresno. He can be reached at:sasan.fayazmanesh@gmail.com

Notes

1. See Daily Press Briefing, The U.D. Department of States:http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2009/02/119730.htm or The Washington Post.

2. See “Israel’s Lawyer,” The Washington Post, May 23, 2005.

3. See Swisher, Clayton E., 2004, The truth about Camp David: the untold story about the collapse of the Middle East peace process, New York: Nation Books, p.35.

4. See: http://www.washingtoninstitute.org

5. The name of these individuals appears on the “Board of Advisors.” See “About the Institute,” available at:http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/.

6. Ross, for example, supported the invasion of Iraq, even though he was critical of some of the post-invasion policies of the Bush Administration (see “Obama's Conservative Mideast Pick,” Time, July16, 2008).

7. For different meanings of “containment” see my book: The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment, Routledge, 2008.

8. For Clawson’s relentless attempt to contain Iran see The United States and Iran Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual ContainmentRoutledge, 2008.

9. Dennis Ross, “Iran: Talk Tough With Tehran”:http://www.newsweek.com/id/171256/output/print

10. The report’s title was: “2008 Presidential task Forces: Task Force on the Future of U.S.-Israel Relations: Strengthening the Partnership: How to Deepen the US-Israel Cooperation on The Iranian Nuclear Challenge.”

11. The other “co-convenors” was Robert Satloff. The two Washington Institute participants, who apparently wrote the piece, were the neoconservatives Patrick Clawson, “deputy director of research,” and David Makovsky, “senior fellow and director, Project on the Middle East Peace Process.”

12. On behest of Obama Anthony Lake and Susan Rice endorsed it, and on behalf of McCain former congressman Vin Weber and the neoconservative R. James Woolsey signed the document.

13. See Security Council Resolution 1803, March 3, 2008.

14. See “Meeting the Challenge: U.S. Policy Toward Iranian Nuclear Development”.

15. See “Leadership” of “United Against Nuclear Iran”:

16. See http://www.unitedagainstnucleariran.com/video/view/4.

17. http://www.jpppi.org.il/ and http://www.jpppi.org.il/JPPPI/