'Each man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world'
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

'Artists are tricky fellows sir, forever shaping the world according to some design of their own'
-- Jonathan Strange, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Tuesday 20 March 2012

Iran (4)

David Shorr at thebulletin reviews Trita Parsi's 'A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran'. The book is welcome in drawing attention to the myriad actors involved in pulling Obama in different directions and proving central to his consideration in dealing with Iran.

Meanwhile, Joseph Wouk runs a Debka story that is interesting in an of itself. The content is absolutely unverified but does state that after the RQ170 crashed in Iran, Obama has cancelled all drone flights over the country, relying solely on satellite relays. That led the israelis to try and fit a drone with the necessary imaging but the drone crashed and the Israelis haven't proceeded, with the accompanying loss of data being received on sensitive installations.

Yahoo! runs the story that the Israelis and US agree that Iran does not currently have a bomb, but that's good news for the Israelis, who can hence argue that they can go in without a nuclear reprisal.

Without continuous drone footage of the installations, there's going to be much less of a granular understanding of the sites, couple with the loss of the RQ170 there are going to be so many unknowns involved in a strike, which might also play into the hands of the republican nominee (israelis running wild on Obama's watch). So Obama will press stridently for diplomacy.

Saturday 17 March 2012

Iran (3)

The role of narratives in establishing norms have become a central consideration in policy formulation, accelerated by the past decade of a war against terror, and what exactly that might mean, and how exactly language has shaped policy.

Two articles have now considered the effect of the media debate on policy formulation with regards to Iran. Stephen Walt in FP and Benn in the generally left-of-centre Haaretz (thanks to Nina for the latter link).

With the discourse shaped towards "not if but when", the next development will be post-conflict planning discourse, without the conflict having yet occurred. In that way, societies will start to live with the idea of the conflict. Then when it happens, it's simply a part of the normative framework of the foreign policy.

So the next discussions will be on how Iran will respond - will it use Hezbollah and can it. Will it act in Hormuz? Will it start an energy war? How will this affect the internal dynamics of the country? It's a little early for history to repeat itself, but expect some analysts to suggest that the nation will rise up once Israel and American take action against the nuclear installations which are the property of a tyrannical regime.

Also, Ahmadinejad is getting sidelined after his support base was weakened in parliamentary elections for the majilis earlier in the month. Hardliners are now in place.

Tuesday 13 March 2012

Iran and Media-disseminated Evidence

Satellite images of key installations may be all too familiar. Colin Powell's 'worst day' at the United Nations (a former aide, Col. Wilkerson called it the 'lowest point' in my life), pointing to images to show evidence of ongoing Iraqi WMD programmes are still fresh in the memory.

But among several media outlets that run a recent satellite "bust" on Iran was USA Today, under the headline, Satellite images indicate Iranian nuke cleanup. "Possibly" the cleanup was to erase traces of the testing of a nuclear trigger. All the diplomats cited were accredited to the IAEA.

The BBC reported on British Prime Minister's visit to Washington. One pundit asserted that the Israelis wouldn't act against Iran without US support, and that Obama wouldn't act without Cameron, which shows a wonderful Anglocentric worldview. The NYT reports Cameron will join Obama in calling for diplomacy not war.

Obama does want to proceed through multilateral intiatives when venturing into foreign policy and many pundits argue that Israel doesn't have the ability to take out Iran's nuclear installations unilaterally. According to some sources Netanyahu made a request for weaponry from the US during his visit including bunker-busters, allowing Israel to increase the window of time it had before commencing a strike, which would give diplomacy more time. The article does not say whether the request was granted.

Meanwhile the Jerusalem Post is working on the when not if premise, in running a story that Netanyahu won't attack Iran before his wife gets to see Madonna.

We are living, after all, in a material world.

Sunday 11 March 2012

Top Gunning

Article from David Sirota at the Seattle Times on the military-entertainment complex.

The image of the military has been recalibrated during the war on terror. Cameraphones linked to the internet have led to various perspectives on the conflict being disseminated globally, instantaneously. And the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan have seen a uniformed professional coalition fighting an unseen, highly motivated enemy using assymetric tactics.

The tactical aspect of the war on terror may be best remembered by history for the rise of the IED as a space-denial weapon. This week saw six British deaths from a blast in Afghanistan. At least five of the six had only deployed on 14 February 2012.

It's a re-evaluation of soldiering, in that they never got to face an enemy, that suggests the Western militaries will face a hard time reinvigorating the warrior branding. For how Pentagon see that may be helped, read Sirota's article.

James der Derian has also written over the years on the rise of the military-media machine.

Wednesday 7 March 2012

Iran Strike Norm (2)

Foreign Affairs have a debate chaired by Jonathan Tepperman (thanks to Nina for drawing my attention to this) on the pros and cons of attacking Iran which is available to watch here. True to CFR form the debate is non-partisan and each side are given fair due. The debate came on the back of Kroenig's popular (in the sense that it was at one point the most viewed) article in Jan/Feb 2012, Time to Attack Iran.

Yahoo! News ran the headline, "On Iran, Obama assails Republican candidates for ‘beating the drums of war’". In fact, Obama didn't assail them for beating the war drum, only for beating the drum without really understanding what the beat meant. As the article notes:

"Some of these folks have a lot of bluster and a lot of big talk," he said scornfully at his first White House press conference of 2012, but "those folks don't have a lot of responsibilities. They're not commander in chief."
"The one thing that we have not done is: We haven't launched a war. If some of these folks think that it's time to launch a war, they should say so. And they should explain to the American people exactly why they would do that and what the consequences would be," he said. "Everything else is just talk."

That's mainstreaming the notion of attack. It also gets Iraq and Afghanistan out of the foreign policy discourse and back to American high tech military action.

Tepperman during the CFR debate also draws attention to a piece that first appeared in an Israeli security-related blog, Debkafile, that Russia have upgraded a Syrian surveillance station, in order to give it greater detection capabilities over Israeli airspace. David Fulghum in Aviation Week asserts that Syrian installations, particularly early warning systems, and in Lebanon are key to the Iranian problem. Air defence, supplied by Russia, is of such a level in Syria that arguably the most influential US General, James Mattis, head of CENTCOM, said, when considering assisting the Free Syrian Army, that these defences meant any strike against the Assad regime's forces would be difficult.

And there is a very big intelligence call to make. Iran has been after the S300 Russian air defence system, for some time:


With Russia apparently not willing to supply it, Iran came into some leverage with the captured RQ-170 sentinel drone. Why does it want the S300 air defence? Because it is capable against stealth aircraft and cruise missiles. Exactly the method of an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear assets. It was reported in Russian media in 09 that Iran had shifted its hopes to a Chinese replica system but the RQ170 would prove valuable for both China and Russia, the former having a rapidly expanding drone capability.

Meanwhile, diplomacy aimed at inspections to assess use and capability is being renewed.

Internal tensions run high in Iran. It shouldn't be thought of as a homogeneous state, united its anti-American rhetoric. It has a tech-savvy youth - bloggers, tweeters of the facebook generation - and in this regard identify with their Western counterparts. Massive resource wealth handled so very badly by the ruling entity will lead, inevitably, to revolution. Any outside intervention will coagulate the state against the aggressor and set back the internal change.

Sunday 4 March 2012

Normative expectation of attack on Iranian nuclear facilities

There have been several diplomats speaking recently about the possibility of an attack upon Iran's nuclear facilities. This is less war-mongering, more generating a normative expectation of an attack. By the late Summer, this discourse will have become dominant. An autumn air strike will be expected and anticipated. There's an article on this at Salon.com by Glenn Greenwald, which makes much the same point.

First is Ehud Barak's candid interview in a piece in the the New York Times on January 25. The article gives the sense that the time has arrived. Particularly here:
1. Does Israel have the ability to cause severe damage to Iran’s nuclear sites and bring about a major delay in the Iranian nuclear project? And can the military and the Israeli people withstand the inevitable counterattack?
2. Does Israel have overt or tacit support, particularly from America, for carrying out an attack?
3. Have all other possibilities for the containment of Iran’s nuclear threat been exhausted, bringing Israel to the point of last resort? If so, is this the last opportunity for an attack?
For the first time since the Iranian nuclear threat emerged in the mid-1990s, at least some of Israel’s most powerful leaders believe that the response to all of these questions is yes.

And Barak Obama's recent speech to AIPAC (4 March 2012), which probably won't win him friends in the Arab world and will be construed negatively, severely restricting any possibility of progress in his (inevitable) second term on the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire:

"When the Goldstone report unfairly singled out Israel for criticism, we challenged it. When Israel was isolated in the aftermath of the flotilla incident, we supported them. When the Durban conference was commemorated, we boycotted it, and we will always reject the notion that Zionism is racism."

The important section is here:

"Let's begin with a basic truth that you all understand: No Israeli government can tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of a regime that denies the Holocaust, threatens to wipe Israel off the map and sponsors terrorist groups committed to Israel's destruction. And so I understand the profound historical obligation that weighs on the shoulders of Bibi Netanyahu and Ehud Barak and all of Israel's leaders.
A nuclear-armed Iran is completely counter to Israel's security interests. But it is also counter to the national security interests of the United States.
Indeed, the entire world has an interest in preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. A nuclear-armed Iran would thoroughly undermine the nonproliferation regime that we've done so much to build. There are risks that an Iranian nuclear weapon could fall into the hands of a terrorist organization. It is almost certain that others in the region would feel compelled to get their own nuclear weapon, triggering an arms race in one of the world's most volatile regions. It would embolden a regime that has brutalized its own people, and it would embolden Iran's proxies, who have carried out terrorist attacks from the Levant to southwest Asia.
And that is why, four years ago, I made a commitment to the American people and said that we would use all elements of American power to pressure Iran and prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon. And that is what we have done."
[full text here]

Invoking the world serves to develop an international norm that would legitimize a strike against Iran. The strike would be in the interests of the world. Obama is bowing to the inevitable - that an Israeli strike is seemingly certain and now the diplomats are generating a discourse to accomodate that action so that when it occurs, it will seem an inevitable action, and hence the consequences, whatever they should be, are simply a factor that must be accepted. By the Summer, expect more articles like this one from the BBC online, examining how an Israeli strike might occur.

On the issue of Iran, the Saudis interests are very much aligned with Israel's. The house of Saud has seen the encroachment of Iranian influence into the Middle East through Iraq and now the region has seen allegiances become extremely fluid. A nuclear Iran would be able to pursue much more aggressive foreign policy in the region, without risking retaliation. The bizarre reports of an Iranian assassination attempt on the Saudi ambassador in Washington, pursued via a Mexican cartel only served to highlight the depth of the mutual emnity. Hence Saudi Arabia will be pushing for action, too. The Saudis could offer to ameliorate some of the shockwaves by increasing oil production after the strike.

Moderate views are being drowned out by a larger, more powerful discourse aimed at establishing a normative preference for military action. And building up the image of Iran as barbaric and powerful similarly serves to add to the normative preference.