Joseph Cirincione thinks that the Bush administration is actually serious about a strike against Iran:

Nothing is clear, yet. For months, I have told interviewers that no senior political or military official was seriously considering a military attack on Iran. In the last few weeks, I have changed my view. In part, this shift was triggered by colleagues with close ties to the Pentagon and the executive branch who have convinced me that some senior officials have already made up their minds: They want to hit Iran.

If Joseph Cirincione were just some yahoo with a blog I would scoff like this: “ha ha ha.” But Joseph Cirincione is not just some yahoo with a blog. He knows an awful lot about proliferation and related issues, and he talks to a lot of the right people.

Still, I’m not convinced. I’m willing to believe that the Cheney crowd wants to hit Iran, and perhaps is even laying plans for that, but the Bush administration surely has its hands full now, and I think we can expect the situation in Iraq to continue to deteriorate. Hitting Iran very hard and then invading is completely impossible. Hitting Iran less than very hard would only invite painful retaliation in Iraq. The manly men in the Cheney clique might want to ignore that, but I doubt anyone else will.

All the same, I wouldn’t be surprised if some idiots were working right now on covert stuff in Iran that eventually backfires and seriously embarrasses everyone.

David Ignatius’s column today would be the subject of a lengthy what-does-this-say-about-American-political-culture? post if I were still blogging in earnest. Little snippets:

Juxtaposed this week are the two poles of the emerging world: India and Iran. They are alpha and omega, the dream and the nightmare. One symbolizes the promise of globalization, the other the threat of global disorder.

What they share, unfortunately, is a passion to be members of the nuclear club. India has nuclear weapons; Iran wants them. Between them stands the United States, trying to set rules that will apply to both — rewarding the good boy while maintaining an ability to punish the bad one.
. . .
The world is ready to accept India as a nuclear power because its actions have given other nations confidence that it seeks to play a stabilizing role. A world where behavior matters gets the incentives right: It forces Iran to demonstrate its reliability so that, over time, it can be seen in the same league as India and Pakistan.

Throughout the piece Ignatius switches, apparently as little more than a stylistic variant, between “the world,” “the West” and the “United States.” Like a parent – patient, wise and firm – the U.S. will sort out the “boys” – lesser countries – depending on how they behave.

How all of this is supposed to work, how the U.S. is supposed to get anyone else to take its role as global father-figure, after the Iraq War, after its own irresponsible nuclear behaviour, is a mystery. Irresponsible behaviour on the part of the U.S. includes: developing, for a time, nuclear bunker busters, refusing to do anything serious about nuclear weapons stockpiles, and, reportedly, threatening to use U.S. nuclear weapons against Iraq at the beginning of the first Gulf War (Baker to Aziz). It’s often conveniently forgotten that the non-proliferation conventions frequently appealed to by the U.S. also contain provisions requiring nuclear powers to take certain steps which they haven’t taken.

The mention of Pakistan at the end of the bit quoted is a nice touch, too, isn’t it? India’s rhetoric about nuclear weapons has been pretty irresponsible at times (2002, especially), but Pakistan is just such an irresponsible, reckless proliferationist basket case that Ignatius’s might have done better just to pretend that India was the only nuclear power on the subcontinent. Ignatius knows, of course, that Pakistan is useful to the U.S. in related but different areas, and that this means that Big Daddy U.S. has special reasons to overlook Pakistan’s own history with nuclear weapons. And he knows that overlooking Pakistan’s own behaviour is inconsistent with his attempt to defend some sort of standard against which to measure Iranian behaviour. So – facts be damned – Pakistan gets tacked on as an afterthought as part of a “league” that includes India and other responsible fledgling nuclear powers.

I’m not saying the U.S. should just throw in the towel on nuclear proliferation. On the contrary, it needs to get serious about it. But it’s a non-starter to single out Iran when the problem also includes the U.S. and France and Pakistan, along with a boatload of inconvenient facts.

Ahmadinejad’s words are a threat, not a slur.

Time Magazine recently published a piece about Iran’s (alleged) activities in Iraq. The piece is interesting, but my overall impression was very much like Henley’s.

I’m especially interested in getting some feedback on this post (on Iran and nuclear weapons). If you have any thoughts, please jump right in.

The BBC:

US President George W Bush says he still has not ruled out the option of using force against Iran, after it resumed work on its nuclear programme.

He said he was working on a diplomatic solution, but was sceptical that one could be found.

The UN’s atomic watchdog has called on Iran to halt nuclear fuel development.

Iran, which denies it is secretly trying to develop nuclear arms, restarted work at its uranium conversion plant at Isfahan on Monday.

“All options are on the table,” said Mr Bush, when asked about the possible use of force during an interview for Israeli TV.

“The use of force is the last option for any president. You know we have used force in the recent past to secure our country,” he said.

The BBC’s Jonathan Beale in Washington says the president wants to send a clear warning to Tehran, although in reality the US already has its hands full in neighbouring Iraq.

I think Mr. Beale is on to something there. For the reason he gives, and others, I’m inclined to doubt that the U.S. (or Israel) is going to use force against Iran over this issue. On the other hand, the time is certainly right, in the sense that Iran doesn’t have nukes just yet, and force will be much harder to apply after that point. We’ll see.

One interesting question is: Does the U.S. have any right at all to behave in this way? So much of the reporting on the Iran/nukes issue seems to simply assume that Europe and the U.S. are behaving perfectly reasonably in demanding (and backing the demands with threats) that Iran restrict its activities in ways that they wouldn’t themselves accept (in Europe, think especially of the French). Notice that this is distinct from the question of whether I want Iran to have nukes. I most certainly do not. The question is rather: Given U.S. behaviour, what right does the Bush administration have to put this kind of pressure on Iran? The relevant U.S. behaviour includes maintaining enormous stockpiles of nuclear weapons, and aggressively pushing forward in the development of new nuclear technologies, including mini-nukes, which they’re marginally more likely to use than the regular kind. Also relevant: The U.S. did threaten Iraq with a nuclear strike during the first Gulf War, and everyone knows it. It was a bluff, I’m sure, but it’s still relevant to what a rational actor in the region might expect to come up against in the future.

If you want to argue that Iran has no legitimate right to nukes, in contrast to France and the U.S., I think your best bet is to appeal to the deeply flawed character of the Iranian political system. The idea would be that the Iranian government can’t legitimately possess nukes, then, because it isn’t in fact a legitimate government. It isn’t a legitimate government, because, e.g., its recent elections were too flawed for it to plausibly be said to legitimately represent the citizens of Iran.

The problem is: I doubt this works.

For one thing, it conveniently looks only at the domestic behaviour of the Iranian regime, and ignores behaviour on the international stage. There is no question that the U.S. treats its own citizens better than Iran does. But the U.S. is responsible for some pretty ugly stuff, if we broaden our perspective to include international behaviour.

But even if we set this aside, there is still this: The elections were seriously flawed, and there is much to be desired in the workings of Iranian society today, as far as I can tell. If they want to throw themselves another revolution to get rid of those awful Mullahs, I wish them well. But for all its problems, Iran is a good deal more open than a lot of countries. With a country like North Korea, I really do think that the government is so thoroughly wretched and so thoroughly lacking in legitimacy that its citizens are better thought of as essentially prisoners, and when we refer to the “government,” we ought to do so only if we remember that we’re stretching language. But Iran isn’t like that. And so long as the government of Iran is the government, it has a right and a responsibility to defend the sovereignty of the country. If that’s the case, I don’t see why the development of a nuclear deterrent is necessarily wrong, unless it is for reasons that rule out the development of a nuclear deterrent for all countries.

What do people think? Does Iran have a right to develop a nukes? Or, in case you think that no country has actually has the right to develop nukes, are there special reasons that give Iran even less of a right to develop nukes than the U.S. or France?

Guardian:

American special forces have been on the ground inside Iran scouting for US air strike targets for suspected nuclear weapons sites, according to the renowned US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
…
“This is a war against terrorism and Iraq is just one campaign,” Hersh quotes one former US intelligence official as saying. “The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next we’re going to have the Iranian campaign.”

Another unnamed source described as a consultant close to the Pentagon said: “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible.”

Matthew Yglesias writes:

Seriously, though, one of the major impediments to thinking about these questions is that it’s hard to muster a great deal of sympathy for folks like the guys running Iran. Nevertheless, in order to understand what’s happening, one needs to understand how things look from their perspective. It’s obvious now that the US national security establishment went badly awry by failing to understand how the world looked to Saddam Hussein. In retrospect, as we see, he had some perfectly good reasons for pretending to have more in the way of WMD than he really had.

Moving toward Iran, the regime’s leaders are unpleasant people, and it’s certainly possible that they’re hell-bent on acquiring a nuclear weapon no matter what and intend to use this weapon to grievously injure America’s fundamental interests. But it’s also definitely the case that the Iranian government has long had some perfectly good reasons to feel threatened by its many (Pakistan, Russia, Israel) near-nuclear neighbors which have now been joined by some very good reasons to feel threatened by the United States of America. It may be the case that this latter set of concerns is really all (along with some prestige considerations) that’s driving the Iranian nuclear program. If that’s the case, then a deal should be workable. But a workable deal wouldn’t have the form of a cash-for-promises kind of thing. Instead, the US (and, to some extent, other allies) would need to offer Iran concessions that resolve its fundamental security concerns. With something like that on the table, were the offer to be rejected it would be reasonable to conclude that the nuclear program is not primarily defensive in nature. Last but by no means least, one must keep in mind that the consequences of military action would almost certainly be very very bad.

Type “Iran” into the search bar to the side to confirm that Iranian mullahs with nukes give me the willies. But I would like to know what kind of agreement would actually address Iran’s “fundamental security concerns”. Likewise, I’d like to hear more about what is “primarily defensive in nature”.

Would a guarantee from the U.S. to refrain from attacking address Iran’s fundamental security concerns? Really, what would that guarantee be worth? And, just as important, what would Iran’s leadership think that guarantee would be worth? What recourse would Iran have if the U.S. started nibbling away at the agreement? After all, there are a lot of ways that the U.S. could seriously threaten Iran short of commencing major hostilities. What happens if the U.S. takes a jab or two at Iran via a proxy, like Israel? Or if Israel goes freelancing, with half-hearted U.S. support? Or if Israel goes freelancing, against the wishes of the U.S., but with U.S. military hardware and after-the-fact diplomatic and military support to deal with the consequences? And anyway, as the whole debate about preventative/preemptive war ought to remind us, questions about what is primarily defensive in nature are awfully slippery. If you ask me – no one did, alas – the mini-nuke bunker busters currently under development within the U.S. military aren’t defensive in nature. Neither are a lot of things that seem to come naturally to the Bush administration (or the Clinton administration, for that matter). So will U.S. negotiators say that Iran ought to limit itself to military programs that are primarily defensive in nature, unlike the U.S.? And how will their Iranian counterparts feel about that? And how will the way they feel about that influence the way they think about it? (Really, issues of prestige and pride matter here, as Yglesias points out. Believe it or not, sometimes the rest of the world finds hypocrisy galling. Sometimes they find hypocrisy galling enough to dig in their heels on issues where a cost/benefit analysis suggests they shouldn’t.)

My fundamental lack of sympathy for hardline Iranian leaders encourages me to regard the prospect of a nuclear Iran with real anxiety. But here is Iran’s situation: It sits in the heart of a very dangerous neighbourhood, immediately beside a radically destabilized sworn enemy, which is currently occupied by another sworn enemy – a nuclear hyper power, no less. Israel, yet another sworn enemy, and itself a nuclear power, waits and watches and rattles its sabres. Another neighbour, Pakistan, has nuclear weapons, and it isn’t too far fetched to imagine the country some day falling into the clutches of hardline Sunni extremists. Forget whose fault any of this is. Iran’s leaders would have to be bonkers to give up the prospect of nuclear weapons – at least, short of concessions from the U.S. (and probably others) that the U.S. (and others) could never accept, and perhaps even shouldn’t (after all, everyone else has good reasons to protect themselves too). Yglesias sees Iran’s strategic situation at least as clearly as I do. It’s interesting that we come away with such different senses of what Iran would, could, or should be willing to agree to.

Here is all that we – the rest of the world, that is – can really do: In the short term, we can encourage and support anti-proliferation regimes, which do at least slow the pace of nuclear proliferation, if nothing else. We can buy off countries that do choose to cooperate, e.g., Libya. We can strive to reduce the most blatant forms of hypocrisy on the part of the recognize nuclear powers. We can (peacefully) promote genuine democratic movements, on the theory that in the very long-run, a democratic world will eventually look much more like present Europe than early 20th Century Europe. And we can work to find just solutions to the conflicts which may some day spin out of control into full-blown nuclear holocausts.

But that, I’m afraid, is all that we can do. It’s a pity we’re not doing it better.

The WaPo tells us:

Iran agreed yesterday to immediately suspend its nuclear programs in exchange for European guarantees that it will not face the prospect of U.N. Security Council sanctions as long as their agreement holds.

The nuclear deal, accepted by Iranian officials in a meeting in Tehran with French, German and British ambassadors, set the stage for a serious test of whether diplomatic engagement is capable of halting Tehran’s nuclear ambitions in the long term.

European officials were reviewing Iran’s acceptance letter, diplomats said, and expected to brief Washington today before making an official announcement.

The European deal will require months, and possibly years, of further negotiations before Iran agrees to permanently end its nuclear work and falls far short of the strategic decision the Bush administration said Tehran needs to make to convince the world it is not a danger.

Nice try, but I think it’ll be pointless in the end. So much of the negotiation, compromise, back-and-forth, threats, discussion, and etc. etc. etc. about this issue seems to suppose that these people for some mysterious reason take their security less seriously than we take our own. They don’t.

They’re not impressed:

Iran: Civil society activists and human rights defenders under attack

Efforts by Iran’s judiciary to curtail freedom of expression and association are now increasingly encroaching on human rights defenders and civil society activists. Reports of around 25 internet journalists and civil society activists arbitrarily arrested in recent weeks mark an alarming rise in human rights violations in Iran.

“The judiciary has placed Iran’s growing civil society under attack. The targeted arbitrary arrests and detention in secret places along with reports of ill treatment of activists like Omid Memariyan, Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh and journalist Hanifmazrou’i clearly expose the judiciary’s intention to clamp down on Iran’s burgeoning civil society”, Amnesty International said today. . .

Today’s post from me, such as it is, can be found in the comments section of this post.

Busy, busy, busy.

Today’s Papers has this lovely paragraph:

The NYT and WP tease Iran’s announcement that it will start converting uranium into gas, in defiance of U.N. watchdogs. Iran says it’s making the gas just for nuclear reactors, which, technically, could be true. Meanwhile, the Times notices a military parade yesterday in Tehran, complete with long-range missiles draped with banners as such, “Crush America” and “Wipe Israel Off The Map.”

It’s probably too late to do anything about Iran’s nuclear program. But it boggles my mind that there are people who find John Ashcroft alarming, but not Iranian mullahs. For the love of Pete, I would not be surprised to learn that some of those mullahs think that Jews have hooves. At least tremble along with me, ok?

Speaking of Iran’s nukes program, here’s a nice warning in the Tehran Times about the dangers of “appeasement” on this issue. Obviously I’m horrified by this whole mess, but it is strangely refreshing, after all these years of the standard appeasement talk, to hear the same language coming up on the other side. Who knew an idiotic debating trick (call something “appeasement” and walk away, your argumentative work done) could cut both ways?

Speaking of the Tehran Times, do you think that this piece on the genocide in Darfur is fair and balanced? Guess what I think . . .

Wow! Thinking about Mullahs has put in the mood to sin! So let me close with a reminder to make sure that you get your vices in the right order when you’re busy straying from the path of virtue. Today’s advice is: Remember, kids, if you’re gonna screw around, make sure to get stoned afterwards.

Laura Rozen summarizes a consensus view on Iran’s nuclear program:

. . . almost everybody agrees multilateral diplomacy will fail; e.g. even if the IAEA ultimately reports Iran being in noncompliance with the NPT to the UN Security Council, that Europe and possibly Japan and China with its energy demands will not impose an oil embargo on Iran. And that is about the only thing that could possibly persuade Iran at this point to turn back. So then what? I think what it comes down to is Europe ultimately thinks it can live with a nuclear Iran. In the US, I am inclined to think that those who are unwilling to live with Iran going nuclear are going to prevail.

I’ll betcha diplomacy fails and Iran goes ahead with its nuclear program. But I don’t see how those in the U.S. who are unwilling to live with Iran going nuclear are going to prevail. What exactly are they going to do about it? The U.S. has troops tied down in Iraq, not a lot of diplomatic capital, not a lot of energy for this, and no real domestic support for a major initiative against Iran.

I suppose that it is possible that Israel will try to strike against Iran’s nuclear installations, presumably with U.S. support or encouragement. But even that seems iffy. It’s a huge risk, and everyone knows it.

One of Atrios’ guest bloggers has fallen for a long discredited story blaming the Halabja massacre on the Iranians. The preponderance of the evidence appears to be against this story, and I’m irritated that Eschaton is recirculating it uncritically. Ironically, the fabrication dates from the period in which the CIA was actively trying to come up with excuses for Saddam Hussein, in order to justify the U.S. tilt towards Iraq in its conflict with Iran – precisely the sort of thing that lefty bloggers never tire (rightly, of course) of slagging them for.

Human Rights Watch urges Europe to get tough on Iran:
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