The Political Conundrum!

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to address a Canadian House of Commons Foreign Relations Subcommittee concerning the potential use and impact of sanctions on Iran and its quest for nuclear weapons. This oral testimony can be found here. At that time we were all awaiting the outcome of the Iranian Presidential elections and there was much speculation that a significant change might be in the offing. The outcome of those elections did effect change, but few could have predicted the context or direction those changes took.

We are now faced with an even more dangerous Iran – An Iran in the throes of a domestic upheaval that has illegitimized the government as representative of the Iranian people, hardened its position vis a vis the outside world, and made productive dialogue with Iran’s current leaders a virtual impossibility. What Western government leader would, in the present context, now be willing to engage with, and thereby strengthen and re-legitimize the Ahmadinejad administration and his Mullah regime overseers?

Yet, through all the turmoil in Iran there is no indication that those now ruling Iran have indicated any willingness to change course, or slow down their unmonitored uranium enrichment and their daily advances toward nuclear weapons capability. Each day brings Iran closer to that irreversible point after which Iran’s neighbors, and the rest of the world, must consider Iran to be nuclear weapons capable. It is that point that risks setting off an unstoppable proliferation of nuclear weapons programs in the Middle East, and beyond.

If dialogue with the current Iranian regime is not now possible, other options must be pursued. And the one option that stands out is for the West to apply significant sanctions pressure against the Ahmadinejad regime, and the mullahs, IRGC and other quasi military forces that are upholding it. We don’t need a UN Security Council resolution to accomplish this. But, we do need our European allies and friends, and other countries opposed to what is going on in Iran to join us in apply such measures. Europe remains the key. Western Europe alone accounts for Iran’s largest slice of trade and largest sources of revenues. Together we must impress also on the UAE, and especially Dubai, that it can no longer do business as usual with Iran with regard to circumventing sanctions Iran, or providing Iran’s corrupt leaders a safe place to deposit their money.

Let’s be clear. The low-impact sanctions now on the table simply will not work. We need to move forward now on putting in place sanctions that really target Iran’s political and economic vulnerabilities – the elements that can truly heighten the stress on its leaders. These vulnerabilities include Iran’s fragile financial system, Iran’s energy sector, Iran’s transportation and communication sector, and Iran’s elite investment entities..

Iran’s leaders will only change course if and when they are convinced that the international community will, in fact, take the steps necessary to deprive them of the resources they depend on to retain their positions of power and authority, or that they have squirreled away. Iran’s Mullahs and favored business leaders must be made to feel the pinch of sanctions. So far they have enjoyed a free ride, and with corruption running high throughout Iran’s ruling circles, there is quite a bit of their money outside Iran that could and should be frozen.

Europe, Japan and Canada should be convinced to join with us now also in cutting off Iran’s access to high tech items, including potentially dual-use, equipment and expertise. Together, we must put Dubai and the freeport of Jebel Ali on notice that we will no longer countenance their acting as intermediaries for transshipments of such goods to Iran.

With a daily consumption of more than 18 million gallons of gasoline Iran must now import some 180 to 200 million gallons of gasoline per month. The availability of gasoline exports to Iran should be curtailed. Rising petroleum prices have already been the cause of civil unrest, and gasoline shortages could have a significant impact on local business activity and put increased pressure on Iranian leaders to alter course.
Europe, Canada and Japan should also act restrict Iranian ship access to their ports, and refuse to insure or re-insure, or at least impose extra premiums on insuring, Iranian ships and cargoes.

Travel restrictions on Iran’s leaders should also be broadened, and cultural, sporting and scientific exchanges with Iran curtailed.

These are examples of measure that can be taken now to convince Iran we mean business. These are the kind of measures that give us our last best chance of heading off a graver crisis just a few years down the road.

In his new book Homeland Security, Assessing the First Five Years, former DHS secretary Michael Chertoff argues:

Al-Qaeda and its network are our most serious immediate threat, they may not be our most serious long-term threat….[Hezbollah] has developed capabilities that Al-Qaeda can only dream of, including large quantities of missiles and highly sophisticated explosives.

Chertoff’s statement is conventional wisdom among many terrorism experts. Shortly after 9/11 then Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage stated:

Hezbollah may be the 'A-Team of Terrorists' and maybe al-Qaeda is actually the 'B' team.

But Hezbollah has not carried out a successful out-of-area attack since the 1996 Khobar strike. Is Hezbollah still capable of carrying out long-range terror attacks?

In 1992, exactly one month after Israel assassinated Hezbollah Secretary-General Abbas al-Musawi, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires was bombed. Two years later, on July 18, 1994 Hezbollah bombed the Jewish communal offices in Buenos Aires, at least partially in response to Israel’s capture of Hezbollah leader Mustafa Dirani on May 21 and a bombing of a Hezbollah training camp on June 2.

In contrast, it has been almost a year and a half since Hezbollah terror master-mind Imad Mughniyeh was assassinated. Hezbollah has threatened revenge against Israel for the assassination of Mughniyeh. But attempts to kidnap Israeli tourists and bomb the Israeli embassy in Baku have been foiled. Azerbaijan borders Iran and Iran has a very large Azerbaijani population, so Hezbollah and its IRGC allies should have had a relatively easy time carrying out an attack.

Has Hezbollah’s ability to launch an attack deteriorated, or is it merely biding its time? In and of itself, this is an important question – but it achieves even greater significance in light of the unstable situation in Iran. One constraint on Western action is the concern of long-range terror by Hezbollah and its allies in the IRGC. If that threat is not be as significant as previously assessed, then one barrier to action is lowered.

Read the full post here.

Thousands of miles from home, US soldiers and fans of Michael Jackson stationed north of Baghdad expressed shock over the death of the pop legend. Some of the troops stopped in their tracks, dining trays in hand, as they watched the latest updates.

The 16-year-old girl who survived a drug-filled night that ended with her friend 's death in a Fort Lewis barracks came forward today to say the soldier whom the two girls were visiting did not provide drugs to them.

Islamabad called for an end to U.S. missile attacks on its soil, two days after a suspected drone strike killed 80 people in the country's northwest.

Where were Iraq’s WMD? How close was Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda, really?

These were vital - but still unanswered - questions when the Iraqi despot was yanked out of a spider hole in December 2003 and placed in U.S. military detention. Lives were at stake - along with the entire political rationale for the U.S.-led coalition invading Iraq. Only one man could say for sure, and now that the U.S. finally had him in custody, they had to find out.

There was only one way: Break Saddam.

The FBI’s newly-declassified interrogation files on Saddam Hussein, reported exclusively in yesterday’s New York Daily News, stand in contrast to the dark view espoused by Team Bush: extreme interrogation techniques extract confessions from “high-value” detainees who resist questioning.

The CIA and FBI were intent on getting Saddam to explain what happened to the missing weapons of mass destruction, his operational ties - if any - to Al Qaeda and admit his own crimes against humanity by gassing and slaughtering his own people. CIA WMD hunter David Kay had resigned in frustration in late January 2004, and the missing arsenal was vexing Team Bush just as special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was beginning his probe of the White House over leaks in retaliation against Iraq war critic Joe Wilson.

The pressure was intense.

A young, Arabic-speaking, Lebanese-American FBI agent named George Piro was picked to get Saddam to confess. Detailed interrogation plans were drawn up, and Piro sat down with one of the most brutally ruthless world leaders of the late 20th century, prepared to play mental chess with a master of manipulation, whose intelligence ranged from cunning street smarts to quirky political intuition.

The first FBI interrogation of Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti - in a program codenamed “Desert Spider” - took place Feb. 7, 2004, in a dingy cell at Baghdad International Airport. Memos obtained by The News through a 2006 Freedom of Information Act request for Saddam’s file show that top FBI and Justice Department officials had decided Feb. 6 not to read high-value detainees Miranda rights or to identify interrogators to detainees in any way other than as “representatives of the United States Government” or “U.S. Government agents.” Saddam assumed Piro was a top Bush aide - not a low-ranking street agent.

Sizing up the G-man, Saddam observed that Piro (an FBI supervisory special agent) was “smart,” and predicted, “Perhaps a conversation between two such educated people will not be useful or successful.” He decreed that it was only important to him what people say or think about him “in the future, 500 or 1,000 years from now.”

The ex-leader ranted about all he had done for Iraq, which “barely had anything” when he came to power in a bloodbath 40 years ago. Piro asked if he had ever failed in his decades as Iraq’s leader, but Saddam countered, “Do you think I would tell my enemy if I made a mistake?”

His ego as yet undiminished by captivity, Saddam gloated that “the only political parties existing in Iraq are the ones with the weapons” - a reference to the growing lethality of the Sunni insurgency - and said it made no difference what anybody thought about him. “Hussein believes people will love him more after he passes away than they do now,” Piro wrote in his first FBI “302” report back to Washington.

Read my complete post on how the FBI broke Saddam Hussein and the original FBI interrogation reports at the Daily News' Mouth of the Potomac Blog.

Long before Ian Fleming dreamed up James Bond, the British military was planning to develop poison darts, lethal weapons that would have pleased 007 and his gadget man, Q.

Foreign ministers of NATO and Russia meet on Saturday for the first time since last year's war between Russia and Georgia, which caused the alliance to freeze ties with the Kremlin.

If you are reading this blog because you want news and info about Afghanistan, then I have another site for you to add to your list. Please don’t quit reading this site, but add to your list of sites to read my good friend PJ Tobia’s.

PJ has a blog up called the Afghan Desk at http://trueslant.com/pjtobia/ and is constantly putting material up there. PJ is the guy who broke open to the world about the grave injustices done to CPT Roger Hill and 1SG Tommy Scott during their Article-32 hearing.

PJ is now freelancing in Afghanistan on his own, and not under the Army embed program. This means he is free and clear to talk about whatever he wants, whenever he wants.

In his opening post on this new blog he setup since leaving the army embed program he stated

I’m a freelance writer and reporter living in Kabul, Afghanistan. I’d like to use this space to comment on major developments in the US-led war here, but also to bring you the context of these events. A lot happens in this country that doesn’t get reported, not because the MSM is somehow incapable, but because “news events” tend to be narrowly defined by editors. What often gets left out are the social and political dynamics that led to the news event happening in the first place.

So be sure to check out http://trueslant.com/pjtobia/ and get the latest unfiltered news from Afghanistan.

Well it appears that the Taliban is more than willing to sacrifice civilian lives as part of their ongoing fight against coalition forces.

"When the air strikes came, we did not feel pain because we know that when we start jihad we have to accept that our women, our daughters and children, may be killed in the fight," Mahmoud said.

 

In fact one Taliban leader even says it is the Taliban fighter’s duty to go be among civilians so they die too.

 

"When Talebs are part of that community and live amongst the people, when the Americans arrive, they have to go the house where their brother is, where their family is, so when (Americans] come to our house to kill us, they will kill our families, too."

news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Taleban-chief-says-fighters-must.5364658.jp

 

And yet GEN McChrystal is now ordering our forces to walk away from the a battle when the enemy moves to be in close proximity of civilians. I think we can give the enemy the point in this match.

 

I will be blogging more about GEN McChrystal’s decision soon.