Juan Cole: Logical Errors in GOP Debate on the Middle East. Photograph via Flickr by IowaPolitics. Why Gingrich’s claims are fallacies and card-stacking. By **Juan Cole** By arrangement with Juan Cole. The candidates to be the Republican standard bearer in this year’s presidential campaign addressed Iran and Syria in the course of their debate. Except for Ron Paul, they resorted to propaganda and logical fallacies. This use of erroneous arguments by canny men who have been in positions of high responsibility can only be explained if we assume ulterior motives. All but Paul virtually promised the U.S. public that they would go to war with Iran if elected. Gingrich then, having completely misrepresented Ahmadinejad, ends by saying it would be wise to “believe dictators.” Newt Gingrich was the first to take the Iran question. Gingrich said, “The fact is, this is a dictator, Ahmadinejad, who has said he doesn’t believe the Holocaust existed.
Gingrich begins with name calling, to appeal to the emotions. One problem is that Ahmadinejad is not a dictator. Bush Was Right - By Gary C. Gambill. When mass demonstrations began spreading across the Arab world early last year, conservative commentators lost no time in singing the praises of George W. Bush, the first U.S. president to aggressively push for democratization in the region. Today, with Islamists dominating politics wherever tyrants have stumbled or fallen, many of those who waxed eloquent about Bush's Freedom Agenda have either fallen silent or taken to arguing that Islamist ascendancy will prove to be a temporary setback on the road to liberal democracy.
Those who were critical of it all along are having a field day. In fact, even if the Arab Spring constitutes "an unshackling of Islam, not an outbreak of fervor for freedom in the Western sense," it is proof positive that the Bush administration correctly diagnosed the causes of Arab political dysfunction and made extraordinarily sound -- if short-lived -- policy changes to combat it. This trend is not confined to Egypt. Mario Tama/Getty Images. Colin Powell on the Bush Administration's Iraq War Mistakes. State Department exempts 11 countries from Iran sanctions.
The State Department announced on Tuesday that it would exempt 10 European countries and Japan from penalties for doing business with Iran's central bank, because those countries are making significant progress toward weaning themselves off of Iranian oil. "I am pleased to announce that an initial group of eleven countries has significantly reduced their volume of crude oil purchases from Iran -- Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
As a result, I will report to the Congress that sanctions pursuant to Section 1245 of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012 (NDAA) will not apply to the financial institutions based in these countries, for a renewable period of 180 days," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a Tuesday statement. "The actions taken by these countries were not easy. Sen. "The sanctions are working," he said. Struggles with Iran for influence in Iraq - By Josh Rogin. The first major test of U.S. post-war influence in Iraq is now raging over efforts to stop Iran from funneling arms to Syria through Iraqi airspace, but the Iraqis are either unwilling or unable to assure the United States the shipments will cease. Last week, the Washington Times reported that the Iraqi government was refusing to halt Iranian cargo flights to Syria that fly over Iraqi airspace, despite the fact that U.S. officials believe the flights carry massive and illegal shipments of arms to aid President Bashar al-Assad's regime, which is murdering civilians by the thousands in its struggle to keep power.
Publicly, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malikihas stated the shipments contain "humanitarian goods, not weapons. " However, U.S. officials aren't buying that excuse, and have been repeatedly pressing Maliki behind the scenes to make Iran halt the arms shipments, with limited if any success. "The Iraqi government is trying to cooperate. "Maliki is not a lover of Iran. News Desk: Our Men in Iran? From the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain peaks, has the look of northwest Iran. The site, some sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, was once used for nuclear testing, and now includes a counterintelligence training facility and a private airport capable of handling Boeing 737 aircraft. It’s a restricted area, and inhospitable—in certain sections, the curious are warned that the site’s security personnel are authorized to use deadly force, if necessary, against intruders.
It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of six American citizens. Illustration by Guy Billout. Obama Ordered Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran. "Disarmament Wars" by Jonathan Schell. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – On April 13, Iran is scheduled meet with representatives of China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States – the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – plus Germany (the so-called “P5+1”) in an effort to decide the fate of Iran’s nuclear program. Meanwhile, North Korea is reportedly preparing its third nuclear test, as if to provide a discordant sound track for the talks.
If the talks fail, and military action against Iran becomes more likely, no one should be surprised. Over the past decade, a new kind of war has been invented: a war designed to stop a country from obtaining nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The first “disarmament war” was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Its goal, spelled out plainly by US President George W. This experience illustrates one of the great drawbacks of the use of force as a tool of disarmament. America's war on Iran: the plan revealed. The United States is more seriously preparing for military action against Iran than is widely realised. An attack - obviating the need for one by Israel - may not be immediate and is not yet certain, but it is being intensively planned. The third round of talks between Iran and the "P5+1" group, held in Moscow on 18-19 June 2012, ended in stalemate.
A formal process will continue at a lower level, but amid an atmosphere of continuing mutual suspicion and in a situation where United States electoral politics work against compromise. Iran believes that most of the P5+1 is bargaining that sanctions increase their impact until Tehran bends to its will, whereas Washington holds that it is the Iranians who are happy to prolong matters while they accelerate uranium enrichment (see "Syria and Iran: a diplomatic tunnel", 25 June 2012).. The high European commitment to diplomacy over Iran has in part been motivated by the risk of Israel attacking Iran. A question of timing A state of mind. Obama to Iran and Israel: 'As President of the United States, I Don't Bluff' - Jeffrey Goldberg - International. Dismissing a strategy of "containment," the president tells me it's "unacceptable" for the Islamic Republic to have a nuclear weapon.
At the White House on Monday, President Obama will seek to persuade the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to postpone whatever plans he may have to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities in the coming months. Obama will argue that under his leadership, the United States "has Israel's back," and that he will order the U.S. military to destroy Iran's nuclear program if economic sanctions fail to compel Tehran to shelve its nuclear ambitions. In the most extensive interview he has given about the looming Iran crisis, Obama told me earlier this week that both Iran and Israel should take seriously the possibility of American action against Iran's nuclear facilities.
"I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as president of the United States, I don't bluff. " "You're talking about the most volatile region in the world," he said. Iran Is the Great Distraction - By David Rothkopf. Iran has called America the Great Satan. Israel has called Iran an existential threat. For both the United States and Israel, whose leaders are meeting Monday to discuss how to handle Tehran's nuclear program, Iran should be called the Great Distraction. By focusing on Iran, indeed by having some among Israel's top leaders seemingly obsessed about it, Israel is ignoring (or seeking an excuse to ignore) the real existential threats on and within its own borders -- demographic, social, and economic.
By allowing Iran to occupy too much bandwidth, American leaders have also taken their eye off the ball. There are far greater national security threats and opportunities that require attention right now, from fixing the broken U.S. economic model to exploring the potential for a sound energy policy in order to both strengthen that economy and dramatically reduce the leverage and thereby the relevance of regimes like the one in Tehran.
So, while Iran is a danger, it is not the greatest danger. How the U.S. and Iran Keep Failing To Find a Peace They Both Want - Trita Parsi - International. A grand bargain would serve everyone, which is why both countries have tried to put aside tensions and strike a deal. So why are the U.S. and Iran perpetually stuck in confrontation? U.S. President Barack Obama, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and Iranian President Mohammad Khatami have all attempted to reach out across the hostile U.S. -Iran divide / Reuters The 30-year-old U.S. -Iran enmity is no longer a phenomenon; it is an institution. For three decades, politicians and bureaucrats in both countries have made careers out of demonizing each other.
Israel and some of its supporters in the United States, in particular, have feared that a thaw in U.S. relations with Iran would come at the expense of America's special friendship with the Jewish state. But the strategic cost to the United States and Iran of this prolonged feud has been staggering. "The moment was lost," David Miliband told me With the election of Barack Obama, the stars aligned for a radical shift in U.S. Backed Into a Corner - By Hossein Mousavian. The Obama administration has done more to undermine Iran over the past three years than any U.S. presidency in the 33 years since the Iranian revolution. Under the shadow of a policy of "engagement," the United States and Israel have led a campaign of economic, cyber, and covert war against Iran. Yet this coercive approach, conducted along with sporadic negotiations on nuclear issues between Iran and the P5+1 group of China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States has failed to resolve the future of Iran's nuclear program.
The primary issue is mistrust. American and Western politicians continuously reiterate their mistrust of Tehran but seem not to understand that this mistrust is mutual. Iran has profound reasons to distrust the West. The United States and the Britain orchestrated the 1953 coup that removed Iran's democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, and installed a dictator, supporting him for a quarter century. Iran and the United States Face Off in Turkey. As U.S. and Iranian officials prepare to face off in Istanbul this weekend to negotiate the future of Iran's nuclear program, stakes are high and expectations are low. The meetings will mark the first direct talks on Iran's nuclear program in nearly 15 months.
The hiatus has been anything but quiet. Since the two sides last met in Istanbul in January 2011, the Arab Spring has thrown the region into upheaval, international sanctions have choked Tehran's finances, and Israel has led the charge for military attacks on Iranian nuclear sites. Come Monday, there will be no durable resolution to the controversy, uncertainty, and concern surrounding Iran's nuclear program. Even so, Washington and Tehran might not emerge from the weekend empty-handed but with modest confidence-building measures demonstrating that there is still room -- and time -- for debate. In the run-up to Istanbul, both sides have been spinning messages in the popular news media. To continue reading, please log in. Register. The Magazine - We Can Live with a Nuclear Iran. March/April 2012We Can Live with a Nuclear Iran Fears of a bomb in Tehran’s hands are overhyped, and a war to prevent it would be a disaster. By Paul Pillar At around 8:30 in the morning on Wednesday, January 11, while much of Tehran was snarled in its usual rush-hour traffic, a motorcyclist drew alongside a gray Peugeot and affixed a magnetic bomb to its exterior.
The ensuing blast killed the car’s thirty-two-year-old passenger, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a professor of chemistry and the deputy director of Iran’s premiere uranium enrichment facility. The assassin disappeared into traffic, and Roshan became the fifth Iranian nuclear scientist to die in violent or mysterious circumstances since 2007. The attack was, in a sense, fairly typical of the covert war being waged against Iran’s nuclear program, a campaign that has included computer sabotage as well as the serial assassination of Iranian scientists. Thus we find ourselves at a strange pass. Juan Cole, The Iran Conundrum. Understanding Iran's diplomatic strategy. Washington, DC - In January 2009, just before Gary Samore left his position as Vice-President for Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, he summed up his rather cynical view of how Iran would conduct negotiations.
"The logical position the Iranians are bound to take," he wrote in a post on the Council's website, "is: 'We're happy to talk forever, as long as we can keep building centrifuges.'" A few days later, Samore was named President Barack Obama's top adviser on nuclear proliferation, making him one of the most influential figures in the administration with regards to diplomacy toward Iran. The strategy he attributed to Tehran of using negotiations to "play for time" while advancing to the goal of enough enriched uranium for nuclear weapons has been clearly expressed in recent statements by Obama and other senior administration officials in anticipation of new nuclear talks with Tehran. 'Coercive diplomacy' Increased bargaining power Ultimate aims Failed diplomatic triumph.
Netanyahu and Obama play high-stakes poker over Iran. "Keeping Cool in the Nuclear Heat" by Gareth Evans. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space CANBERRA – Perhaps it is going too far to say, as someone did after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill two years ago, that most Americans want a president who is cool, calm, and collected in a crisis – except when there is a crisis.
But of all the charges thrown at President Barack Obama by his domestic political opponents, the hardest for most outsiders to accept is that he is too emotionally disengaged: all brain cells and no red-blood cells. Certainly in defense and foreign policy, a cool and measured response to the extreme provocations that often come with that territory is what the world wants, and needs, from the leader of its reigning superpower.
Nowhere is that need greater than in the cases of North Korea and Iran, owing to the destructive potential of the weapons that they have or may be developing. With North Korea, the provocations continue to come thick and fast. With Iran, the stakes are, and always have been, higher. Is Israel REALLY a "Strategic Asset?" Friendship Under Fire - By David Makovsky. Peter Beinart: Obama Betrayed Ideals on Israel. Beinart Fires Back. America's Israel Obsession - By Shmuel Rosner. This Week at War: Rules of the Game - By Robert Haddick. The Second-Term Illusion - By Aaron David Miller. Six Big Lies about How Jerusalem Runs Washington - By Aaron David Miller. US seeks extra $70m for Israel defence shield - Americas.
AIPAC, Israel, and the Hypocritical Claim of Backing a Two-State Solution. News Desk: The Emergency Committee for Israel Cries Wolf. MJ Rosenberg: Why Peter Beinart's Book Is Driving the "Pro-Israel" Establishment Crazy. Zionism is the Problem. How Obama Missed an Opportunity for Middle East Peace - By Steven White and P.J. Dermer. Separate Justice System for Muslims. Tongue-cutting at Al Jazeera - Glenn Greenwald. Beware the American Muslim Vote. The Libyan precedent is not a hopeful one for Syria. Losing Egypt. What Obama should say when Kurdistan's President Masoud Barzani visits Washington. America, Oil, and War in the Middle East.