John McCain: Born for War. (mistydawnphoto / Shutterstock.com)

Amazingly, Sen. John McCain wasn’t always as gung ho about sending Americans off to fight in foreign lands as he is today. In September 1983, Senator McCain voted against President Reagan’s decision to put American troops in Lebanon as part of a multinational peacekeeping force. On the Senate floor, he spoke eloquently about the risks of interventionism. “The fundamental question is: What is the United States’ interest in Lebanon?” said McCain. “It is said we are there to keep the peace. I ask, what peace? It is said we are there to aid the government. I ask, what government? It is said we are there to stabilize the region. I ask, how can the U.S. presence stabilize the region?… The longer we stay in Lebanon, the harder it will be for us to leave. We will be trapped by the case we make for having our troops there in the first place.”

Fast forward two decades and there isn’t a war John McCain doesn’t want America to be involved in. If there’s a conflict going on, you can pretty safely bet that McCain wants in on it.

Consider the following:

1. McCain is trying to up American involvement in the civil war raging in Syria. One of the most vocal critics of the Obama administration’s Syria policy, McCain secretly made a trip across the Turkey-Syria border with Gen. Salem Idris, the leader of the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). He stayed in the country for several hours before returning to Turkey. According to The Daily Beast, “Both in Syria and Turkey, McCain and Idris met with assembled leaders of Free Syrian Army units that traveled from around the country to see the U.S. senator. Inside those meetings, rebel leaders called on the United States to step up its support to the Syrian armed opposition and provide them with heavy weapons, a no-fly zone, and airstrikes on the Syrian regime and the forces of Hezbollah, which is increasingly active in Syria.” Apparently not bothered by the disasters of US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the raging anti Americanism in the Middle East, McCain thinks more involvement  will improve the situation. Or maybe he doesn’t care about that either, and just wants more war.

2. He helped the Bush Administration build a case for war in Iraq, despite any evidence of WMDs or Saddam’s links to Al-Qaeda. McCain was one of the most vocal supporters of the war in Iraq and helped Bush and Cheney build a fictitious case against Saddam that led to one of the greatest strategic disaster in US military history. McCain is the only veteran in the Senate who has not turned against the war and still maintains it was a great idea.

3. Unwilling to accept that America’s role in Iraq was increasingly pointless and counterproductive, McCain was a huge supporter of the ‘Surge’ in 2007. The Bush Administration deployed more than 20,000 soldiers into Iraq, five additional brigades, (the majority of them going to Baghdad), and extended the tour of most of the Army troops in country. If there are two options on the table – less war or more war, you can bet McCain will always opt for the latter.

4. McCain believes in America’s divine right to occupy a country for as long as it likes in order to achieve its objectives. During a at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire in 2008, McCain was asked about the Bush administration’s willingness to keep troops in Iraq for 50 years. McCain cut the questionner off and said “Make it a hundred.”

5. McCain has long been a proponent of attacking Iran. Despite Iran not threatening anyone, not having nuclear weapons and not building any, McCain has ratcheted up the rhetoric against them for years, threatening them with military action and hammering Obama for being ‘weak’ when dealing with them. Back in 2009, Joe Klein observed that: “For two years now, John McCain has been entirely consistent on Iran: every last statement he’s made–at least, those that I’ve seen–has been (a) fabulously uninformed and (b) dangerously bellicose.”

An example: During a campaign appearance in South Carolina in 2007,  McCain was asked by an audience member about potential U.S. military action in Iran. ”How many times do we have to prove that these people are blowing up people now, never mind if they get a nuclear weapon. When do we send them an airmail message to Tehran?” a man asked. McCain replied, “That old, eh, that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran — “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, anyway, ah ….”.

Hilarious.

6. Regardless of its illegality, McCain has advocated bombing the infrastructure of enemy countries. Under Article 54 of Protocol I of the 1977 Geneva Conventions, it states that:

It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive

And here was McCain on the bombing of  Serbia during the Balklans crisis in 1999:

No infrastructure targets should have been off limits. And while we all grieve over civilian casualties as well as our own losses, they are unavoidable.

7. McCain was vehemently anti the use of torture as an interrogation method by the military, then suddenly announced that the CIA shouldn’t be held to the same standards. In a statement submitted for the Congressional Record, McCain explained that the CIA had the right to use ‘alternative interrogation techniques’ that were ‘different’ from those used by the US military. In other words, McCain doesn’t believe in torture unless the CIA does it. Then it’s ok.

8. There is good evidence that John McCain’s thirst for war is almost entirely down to political ambition. In a devastating critique of his record on war in The American Conservative, Justin Raimondo argues that McCain’s extreme narcissism and relentless political ambition has lead to a complete evolution on American interventionism:

It is impossible to know what is in McCain’s heart. There may be a purely ideological explanation for his changing viewpoint. But what seems to account for his evolution from realism to hopped-up interventionism is nothing more than sheer ambition. This was the case in 1983, when he defied the Reagan administration over sending U.S. soldiers to die at the hands of a Beirut suicide bomber, and in 1999, when the cry went up to take on Slobodan Milosevic. He was positioning himself against his own party, while staking out a distinctive stance independent of the Democrats. It was, in short, an instance of a presidential candidate maneuvering himself to increase his appeal to the electorate—and, most importantly, the media.

In short, John McCain is pro or anti war depending on whether it benefits him politically. Given America’s economic decline, increasing wealth inequality and general political apathy, war is a useful tool to distract the public. And therefore, the more John McCain supports it.

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By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

The controversy over Iran’s nuclear activities has at least as much to do with the future of international order as it does with nonproliferation. For this reason, all of the BRICS countries [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa] have much at stake in how the Iranian nuclear issue is handled.

Conflict over Iran’s nuclear program is driven by two different approaches to interpreting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty(NPT); these approaches, in turn, are rooted in different conceptions of international order.

Which interpretation of the NPT ultimately prevails on the Iranian nuclear issue will go a long way to determine whether a rules-based view of international order gains ascendancy over a policy-oriented approach in which the goals of international policy are defined mainly by America and its partners.

And that will go a long way to determine whether rising non-Western states emerge as true power centers in a multipolar world, or whether they continue, in important ways, to be subordinated to hegemonic preferences of the West — and especially the United States.

The NPT is appropriately understood as a set of three bargains among signatories: non-weapons states commit not to obtain nuclear weapons; countries recognized as weapons states (America, Russia, Britain, France, and China) commit to nuclear disarmament; and all parties agree that signatories have an “inalienable right” to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. One approach to interpreting the NPT gives these bargains equal standing; the other holds that the goal of nonproliferation trumps the other two.

There have long been strains between weapons states and non-weapons states over nuclear powers’ poor compliance with their commitment to disarm. Today, though, disputes about NPT interpretation are particularly acute over perceived tensions between blocking nuclear proliferation and enabling peaceful use of nuclear technology.

This is especially so for fuel-cycle technology, the ultimate “dual use” capability — for the same material that fuels power, medical and research reactors can, at higher levels of fissile isotope concentration, be used in nuclear bombs. The dispute is engaged most immediately over whether Iran, as a non-weapons party to the NPT, has a right to enrich uranium under international safeguards.

For those holding that the NPT’s three bargains have equal standing, Tehran’s right to enrich is clear — from the NPT itself, its negotiating history and decades of state practice, with at least a dozen states having developed safeguarded fuel cycle infrastructures potentially able to support a weapons program. On this basis, the diplomatic solution is also clear: Western recognition of Iran’s nuclear rights in return for greater transparency through more intrusive verification and monitoring.

Those recognizing Iran’s nuclear rights take what international lawyers call a “positivist” view of global order, whereby the rules of international relations are created through the consent of independent sovereign states and are to be interpreted narrowly. Such a rules-based approach is strongly favored by non-Western states, including BRICS — for it is the only way international rules might constrain established powers as well as rising powers and the less powerful.

Those who believe nonproliferation trumps the NPT’s other goals claim that there is no treaty-based “right” to enrich, and that weapons states and others with nuclear industries should decide which non-weapons states can possess fuel-cycle technologies.

From these premises, the George W. Bush administration sought a worldwide ban on transferring fuel-cycle technologies to countries not already possessing them. Since this effort failed, Washington has pushed the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group to make such transfers conditional on recipients’ acceptance of the Additional Protocol to the NPT — an instrument devised at U.S. instigation in the 1990s to enable more intrusive and proactive inspections in non-weapons states.

America has pressed the UN Security Council to adopt resolutions telling Tehran to suspend enrichment, even though it is part of Iran’s “inalienable right” to peaceful use of nuclear technology; such resolutions violate UN Charter provisions that the Council act “in accordance with the purposes and principles of the United Nations” and “with the present charter.”

The Obama administration has also defined its preferred diplomatic outcome and, with Britain and France, imposed it on the P5+1: Iran must promptly stop enriching at the near 20 percent level to fuel its sole (and safeguarded) research reactor; it must then comply with Security Council calls to cease all enrichment.

U.S. officials say Iran might be “allowed” a circumscribed enrichment program, after suspending for a decade or more, but London and Paris insist that “zero enrichment” is the only acceptable long-term outcome.

Those asserting that Iran has no right to enrich — America, Britain, France and Israel — take a policy- or results-oriented view of international order. In this view, what matters in responding to international challenges are the goals motivating states to create particular rules in the first place — not the rules themselves, but the goals underlying them.

This approach also ascribes a special role in interpreting rules to the most powerful states — those with the resources and willingness to act in order to enforce the rules. Unsurprisingly, this approach is favored by established Western powers — above all, by the United States.

All of the BRICS have, in various ways, pushed back against a de facto unilateral rewriting of the NPT by America and its European partners. Since abandoning nuclear-weapons programs during democratization and joining the NPT, Brazil and South Africa have staunchly defended non-weapons states’ right to peaceful use of nuclear technology, including enrichment.

With Argentina, they resisted U.S. efforts to make transfers of fuel-cycle technology contingent on accepting the Additional Protocol (which Brazil has refused to sign), ultimately forcing Washington to compromise. With Turkey, Brazil brokered the Tehran Declaration in May 2010, whereby Iran accepted U.S. terms that it swap most of its then stockpile of enriched uranium for new fuel for its research reactor. But the Declaration openly recognized Iran’s right to enrich; for this reason, the Obama administration rejected it.

The recently concluded 5th BRICS Summit in Durban saw a joint declaration that referred to the official BRICS position on Iran: “We believe there is no alternative to a negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear issue. We recognize Iran’s right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy consistent with its international obligations, and support resolution of the issues involved through political and diplomatic means and dialogue.”

At the same time, the BRICS have all, to varying degrees, accommodated Washington on the Iranian issue. Russian and Chinese officials acknowledge there will be no diplomatic solution absent Western recognition of Tehran’s nuclear rights. Yet China and Russia endorsed all six Security Council resolutions requiring Iran to suspend enrichment.

Beijing and Moscow did so partly to keep America in the Council with the issue, where they can exert ongoing influence — and restraint — over Washington; at their insistence, the resolutions state explicitly that none of them can be construed as authorizing the use of force against Iran. Still, they acquiesced to resolutions that make a diplomatic settlement harder and that contradict a truly rules-based model of international order.

Russia, China and the other BRICS have also accommodated Washington’s increasing reliance on the threatened imposition of “secondary” sanctions against third-country entities doing business with the Islamic Republic. Such measures violate U.S. commitments under the World Trade Organization, which allows members to cut trade with states they deem national security threats but not to sanction other members over lawful business with third countries.

If challenged on this in the WTO’s Dispute Resolution Mechanism, America would surely lose; for this reason, U.S. administrations have been reluctant actually to impose secondary sanctions on non-U.S. entities transacting with Iran.

Nevertheless, companies, banks, and even governments in all of the BRICS have cut back on their Iranian transactions — feeding American elites’ sense that, notwithstanding their illegality, secondary sanctions help leverage non-Western states’ compliance with Washington’s policy preferences and vision of (U.S.-dominated) world order.

If the BRICS want to move decisively from a still relatively unipolar world to a genuinely multipolar world, they will, at some point, have to call Washington’s bluff on Iran-related secondary sanctions. They will also have to accelerate the development of alternatives to U.S.-dominated mechanisms for conducting and settling international transactions — a project to which the proposed new BRICS bank could contribute significantly.

Finally, they will need to be more willing to oppose, openly, America’s efforts to unilaterally rewrite international law and hijack international institutions for its own hegemonic purposes. By doing so, they will underscore that the United States ultimately isolates itself by acting as a flailing — and failing — imperial power.

Flynt Leverett served as a Middle East expert on George W. Bush’s National Security Council staff until the Iraq War and worked previously at the State Department and at the Central Intelligence Agency. Hillary Mann Leverett was the NSC expert on Iran and – from 2001 to 2003 – was one of only a few U.S. diplomats authorized to negotiate with the Iranians over Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and Iraq. They are authors of the new book, Going to Tehran. Also posted at: http://goingtotehran.com/whats-at-stake-for-non-western-powers-in-the-iranian-nuclear-issue ; http://thebricspost.com/the-iranian-nuclear-issue-whats-at-stake-for-the-brics/ ; http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/04/201343015211353590.html ; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/flynt-and-hillary-mann-leverett/the-real-reason-america-c_b_3178637.html?utm_hp_ref=world

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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David Albright, former weapons inspector and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security.

By Robert Parry

The neocon-flagship Washington Post and its investigative reporter Joby Warrick are at it again, hyping an account about Iran’s nuclear program pushed by discredited nuclear expert David Albright, who famously gave cover for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq a decade ago.

The latest Albright/Warrick alarm, which leads Thursday’s Washington Post, cites Iran’s alleged effort to place an Internet order for 100,000 ring-shaped magnets that would work in some of the country’s older centrifuges.

“Iran recently sought to acquire tens of thousands of highly specialized magnets used in centrifuge machines, according to experts and diplomats, a sign that the country may be planning a major expansion of its nuclear program that could shorten the path to an atomic weapons capability,” Warrick wrote in his lede paragraph.

You have to read to the end of the long story to hear a less strident voice, saying that Iran had previously informed inspectors for the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency that it planned to build more of its old and clunkier centrifuges, which use this sort of magnet, and that the enrichment was for civilian energy, not a nuclear bomb.

“Olli Heinonen, who led IAEA nuclear inspections inside Iran before his retirement in 2010, said the type of magnet sought by Iran was highly specific to the IR-1 centrifuge and could not, for example, be used in the advanced IR-2M centrifuges that Iran has recently tested,” according to the final paragraphs of Warrick’s article.

“‘The numbers in the order make sense, because Iran originally told us it wanted to build more than 50,000 of the IR-1s,’ Heinonen said. ‘The failure rate on these machines is 10 percent a year, so you need a surplus.’”

At the bottom of Warrick’s story, you’d also learn that “Iran has avoided what many experts consider Israel’s new ‘red line’: a stockpile of medium-enriched uranium greater than 530 pounds, roughly the amount needed to build a weapon if further purified. At the current pace, Iran could reach that theoretical threshold by the middle of next year, said a Western diplomat privy to internal IAEA reports on Iran’s nuclear progress.”

So there’s nothing urgent or particularly provocative about this alleged purchase, though the structure and placement of the Post story suggest that you’re not really supposed to read to the end to find that out. You should simply leap to the intended conclusion that Iran is on the verge of building an atomic bomb and that it’s time for President Barack Obama to join Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in another Middle East war.

The Misleading Analyst

The Post’s pressure on the Obama administration to fall in line with Netanyahu’s belligerence toward Iran has been building for years, often with Warrick channeling anti-Iranian propaganda from Albright, who heads a private research group called the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS).

A decade ago, Albright and the ISIS were key figures in stoking the hysteria for invading Iraq around the false allegations of its WMD program. In recent years, Albright and his institute have adopted a similar role regarding Iran and its purported pursuit of a nuclear weapon, even though U.S. intelligence agencies say Iran terminated that weapons project in 2003.

Nevertheless, Albright has transformed his organization into a sparkplug for a new confrontation with Iran. Though Albright insists that he is an objective professional, ISIS has published hundreds of articles about Iran, which has not produced a single nuclear bomb, while barely mentioning Israel’s rogue nuclear arsenal.

An examination of the ISIS Web site reveals only a few technical articles relating to Israel’s nukes while ISIS has expanded its coverage of Iran’s nuclear program so much that it’s been moved onto a separate Web site. The articles not only hype developments in Iran but also attack U.S. media critics who question the fear-mongering about Iran.

More than a year ago when a non-mainstream journalist confronted Albright about the disparity between ISIS’s concentration on Iran and de minimis coverage of Israel, he angrily responded that he was working on a report about Israel’s nuclear program. However, there is still no substantive assessment of Israel’s large nuclear arsenal on the ISIS Web site, which goes back to 1993.

Despite this evidence of bias, the Post and other mainstream U.S. news outlets typically present Albright as a neutral analyst. They also ignore his checkered past, for instance, his prominent role in promoting President Bush’s pre-invasion case that Iraq possessed stockpiles of WMD.

At the end of summer 2002, as Bush was beginning his advertising roll-out for the Iraq invasion and dispatching his top aides to the Sunday talk shows to warn about “smoking guns” and “mushroom clouds,” Albright co-authored a Sept. 10, 2002, article – entitled “Is the Activity at Al Qaim Related to Nuclear Efforts?” – which declared:

“High-resolution commercial satellite imagery shows an apparently operational facility at the site of Iraq’s al Qaim phosphate plant and uranium extraction facility … This site was where Iraq extracted uranium for its nuclear weapons program in the 1980s. … This image raises questions about whether Iraq has rebuilt a uranium extraction facility at the site, possibly even underground. … The uranium could be used in a clandestine nuclear weapons effort.”

Albright’s alarming allegations fit neatly with Bush’s propaganda barrage, although as the months wore on – with Bush’s warnings about aluminum tubes and yellowcake from Africa growing more outlandish – Albright did display more skepticism about the existence of a revived Iraqi nuclear program.

Still, he remained a “go-to” expert on other Iraqi purported WMD, such as chemical and biological weapons. In a typical quote on Oct. 5, 2002, Albright told CNN: “In terms of the chemical and biological weapons, Iraq has those now.”

Taken In

After Bush launched the Iraq invasion in March 2003 and Iraq’s secret WMD caches didn’t materialize, Albright admitted that he had been conned, explaining to the Los Angeles Times: “If there are no weapons of mass destruction, I’ll be mad as hell.

“I certainly accepted the administration claims on chemical and biological weapons. I figured they were telling the truth. If there is no [unconventional weapons program], I will feel taken, because they asserted these things with such assurance.” [See FAIR’s “The Great WMD Hunt,”]

Given the horrendous costs in blood and treasure resulting from the Iraq fiasco, an objective journalist might feel compelled to mention Albright’s track record of bias and errors. But the Post’s Warrick doesn’t. If you read mid-way into Warrick’s article on Thursday, you’ll find the esteemed Albright and his ISIS at the core of the story, receiving credit for obtaining copies of the magnet purchase order.

“With two magnets needed per machine,” Warrick writes, “the order technically could supply Iran with enough material for 50,000 new gas centrifuges, although some of the magnets would probably have been reserved for repairs and spare parts, said David Albright, ISIS president and a former IAEA inspector. ‘It implies that they want to build a lot more centrifuges,’ he said.”

Warrick does include the boiler plate that Iran “insists” that it is not building a nuclear bomb – with almost the wink-wink of who would believe that – but the reporter doesn’t mention that U.S. intelligence agencies agree that Iran has not resumed work on a nuclear weapon or that Israel maintains a sophisticated and undeclared nuclear arsenal of its own.

Though Warrick cites the concerns of Prime Minister Netanyahu about Iran’s nuclear program, the reporter doesn’t observe that Israel is arguably the world’s most notorious rogue nuclear state. It has built up its undeclared nuclear arsenal after refusing to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and keeping IAEA inspectors away from its nuclear facilities.

By contrast, Iran signed the NPT, has renounced nuclear weapons, and has allowed IAEA inspectors to monitor its nuclear energy program. Granted, Iran’s cooperation has been less than stellar but its record is far superior to Israel’s.

Yet, Albright and his ISIS – like Warrick and the Post – have largely turned a blind eye to Israel’s nukes and focused instead on Iran’s theoretical bomb-making.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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John McCain (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is probably not the best line of attack from the Republicans on Susan Rice. From Buzzfeed:

Republicans aimed criticism at U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice Thursday for having modest stakes in companies that did business with Iran. And while the revelation has driven new questions and fodder for those opposing her nomination as secretary of state, one of Rice’s most vocal critics, Senator John McCain, maintains investments in two of the same companies — ENI and Royal Dutch Shell –through funds revealed in his financial disclosures.

McCain holds stock holds between $1,000-$15,000 in the JPMorgan International Value Fund through his spouse, according to his 2011 financial disclosure form. 3.6% of the fund is currently invested in Royal Dutch Shell, the dutch oil company which owes Iran more than $1 billion in oil payments.

It is amazing Republicans are still trying to derail Rice’s path to Secretary of State, and this latest attack is almost as ridiculous as the Benghazi debacle. Given the Republicans sat quietly while Bush and Cheney directly pressured the CIA to doctor information it presented the public in regards to Iraq, and did nothing when it was revealed they ignored specific warnings about attacks previous to 9/11, their new found horror at Susan Rice’s innocent relaying of a faulty CIA report is an insult to the public’s intelligence. The latest tack is equally hypocritical and pointless, but they’re obviously banking on hurling so much mud on Rice that something will stick.

It’s unlikely that any of this will work as President Obama has forcefully defended Rice at every opportunity and will probably spend some of his Presidential election victory capital on ensuring her pathway to the position. So it’s really venom for venom’s sake, and it’s not making the Republicans look good. The public will see this as the merciless hounding of a black women by lots of angry white conservatives, and probably rightly so.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From TPM:

Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal on Wednesday praised Egypt for its role in brokering a cease-fire with Israel and thanked Iran for supplying his organization’s militants with arms during the eight-day conflict.

Meshaal asserted emphatically that Israel failed to reach its goals during the aerial bombardment of Gaza — an assessment diametrically opposed to the response from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), which declared its military operation a success shortly after the cease-fire agreement was reached.

“After eight days, God stayed their hand from the people of Gaza, and they were compelled to submit to the conditions of the resistance,” Meshaal told reporters in a Cairo hotel. “Israel has failed in all its goals.”

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By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett: As President Obama signaled renewed interest last week in a “diplomatic resolution to the problem” with Iran, liberal advocates of soft regime change are again coming out of the woodwork to profess their support for engaging Tehran.

The New York Times’ Roger Cohen published a columnin this week that reveals much about the outlook of many liberal political and policy elites regarding diplomacy with the Islamic Republic. As the re-elected Obama administration gears up for another go at nuclear negotiations with Tehran, the kind of mendaciousness and self-deception manifested in Cohen’s piece is all too likely to characterize the Iran policy debate in Washington.

Cohen opens by noting that, “in re-electing Barack Obama, [the American people] voted for peace and against a third war in a Muslim nation in little over a decade.” At the same time, Obama faces “no more immediate strategic challenge” than the Iranian nuclear issue:

“The question of whether the quest for Israeli-Palestinian peace or for a breakthrough with Iran should be the first diplomatic priority for Obama’s second term amounts to a no-brainer. It’s Iran, stupid. (There are no good options in Syria and — as with most Middle Eastern issues — American non-communication with Iran on the matter is unhelpful. Iran’s constructive role in the 2001 Bonn conference on Afghanistan is too often forgotten.)

“War with Iran would be devastating, to a Middle East in transition, to U.S. interests from Afghanistan to Egypt, and to the global economy. The time available for averting conflict is limited.”

These considerations — and other factors of longer standing — should point the United States toward diplomacy with Tehran. Yet, in Obama’s first term, Cohen writes, “Republican machismo prevailed on many fronts. Demonization of Iran was a never-ending source of rhetorical inspiration. Democrats were not far behind.” Now, “diplomacy is in urgent need of resurrection.”

On the surface, anyway, so far so good. But what Cohen fails to mention is that a cadre of Obama supporters, himself included, are at least as responsible as neoconservatives for sabotaging prospects for successful U.S.-Iranian diplomacy during Obama’s first term.

And these self-professedly well-meaning liberals did so because, fundamentally, they are no less devoted than neoconservatives to the pursuit of regime change in Iran. In contrast to the neocons, liberals don’t think that war is the smart way to go about encouraging regime change in Iran — but they are no less focused on regime change as their ultimate objective there.

Following the Islamic Republic’s 2009 presidential election, Roger Cohen was one of the most assiduous voices in the Western media claiming that the election had been stolen, that incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had lost his popular support, and that the massive electoral fraud required to deprive challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi of his electoral victory had undermined the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy.

See, for example, this piece, from early July 2009, in which Cohen describes the re-elected President Ahmadinejad, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, the Revolutionary Guards, and the basij as “Iran’s ruthless usurpers,” asserting that “the government is now illegitimate” and, therefore, should not be engaged.

Of course, Cohen had no evidence for any of these claims. Neither Mousavi nor anyone in his campaign or anyone connected with the Green Movement ever presented any hard evidence of electoral fraud, either at polling stations or in the counting of votes — even though, given the way the election was conducted, it would have been relatively easy to do so had fraud actually occurred.

Moreover, every methodologically sound poll carried out in Iran before and after the election — 14 in all, by Western polling groups as well as by the University of Tehran, see here — indicated that Ahmadinejad’s re-election with just over 60 percent of the vote (what the official results showed) was eminently plausible.

As weeks and months went by, and no proof of electoral fraud emerged — much less fraud on the scale needed to account for Ahmadinejad’s 11-million vote victory margin — Cohen ultimately fell back on “sometimes you have to smell the truth.” (For its part, The New York Times seemed all too happy to publish such fatuousness.)

It was also evident that the Green Movement did not represent anything close to a majority of Iranians and that within a week of the election its social base was already contracting.

Cohen was certainly not alone in advancing this kind of evidence-free analysis. Other liberal stalwarts — including Ploughshares Fund president Joseph Cirincione, Thomas Friedman (Cohen’s colleague at The New York Times), Barbara Slavin, and Robin Wright — joined in.

The West’s “best” and “most respected” Iran analysts — including Ali Ansari, Reza Aslan, Farideh Farhi, Suzanne Maloney, Trita Parsi, Karim Sadjadpour, and Ray Takeyh (several of them expatriates who want the Islamic Republic to disappear so that their vision of a secular liberal Iran might be fulfilled, even though that is manifestly not what most Iranians who actually live in their country want) — gave it their imprimatur.

Virtually all of these figures had anticipated that Mousavi’s electoral challenge to Ahmadinejad would succeed. Their hopeful expectation rested not on dispassionate analysis of Iranian political trends, but on a deeply held, largely unquestioned assumption: that Iran is inevitably headed toward liberal democracy — because that’s what American liberals and many U.S.-based Iranian expatriates want it to become, just like neoconservatives do.

(What is the ultimate goal for Parsi and the organization he heads, the National Iranian American Council? According to NIAC’s Web site, “a world in which the United States and a democratic Iran” — no mention of the Islamic Republic — “enjoy peaceful, cooperative relations.”)

And when those pesky Iranian voters did not defer to liberal outsiders’ vision for their future — most Iranians, it seems, want a system that seeks to combine participatory politics with principles of Islamic governance — many of the same liberals and expatriates persisted in their penchant for analysis-by-wishful-thinking, cavalierly dismissing the election results as the product of fraud.

This sort of wishful thinking is not benignly incorrect; it has had real (and negative) impact on the prospects for U.S.-Iranian diplomacy — which most liberals say they prefer to U.S. military action against Iran or another ill-begotten American campaign for coercive regime change in the Middle East.

Cohen, Parsi, and other like-minded activists and commentators led the charge in pressing the Obama administration to take what Parsi called a “tactical pause” from diplomacy with Tehran — which had not even commenced at that point — because the Islamic Republic was potentially on the verge of collapse.

Or, as Cohen wrote (rather floridly) in early July 2009: “Obama must leave [Khamenei and Ahmadinejad] dangling for the foreseeable future. He should refrain indefinitely from talk of engagement. … To do otherwise would be to embrace the usurpers. …

“I’ve argued strongly for engagement with Iran as a game-changer. America renewed relations with the Soviet Union at the time of the Great Terror and China at the time of the Cultural Revolution. Operation Jackboot has not, as yet at least, involved mass killings.

“But the Iran of today is not the Iran of three weeks ago; it is in volatile flux from without and within. Its Robespierres are running amok. Obama must do nothing to suggest business as usual. Let Ahmadinejad, he of the bipolar mood swings, fret and sweat. Let him writhe in the turbid puddle of his self-proclaimed ‘justice’ and ‘ethics’ … The price of Obama’s engagement may just have become Ahmadinejad’s departure. I think it has.”

Deploying such unsubstantiated but inflammatory claims, it was Obama’s liberal base in 2009 which derailed possibilities for U.S.-Iranian nuclear diplomacy — just as Bush’s neoconservative stalwarts did with their designation of Iran as part of an “Axis of Evil” in the wake of 9/11.

The Obama administration had previously decided to delay serious engagement with Tehran until after the June 2009 election, hoping that it could then deal with a Mousavi-led government. There was, of course, no reason to expect that such a government would have taken a fundamentally different tack in nuclear negotiations with the United States — but that wasn’t the point for Mousavi’s backers in Washington.

The point was to enhance Mousavi’s chances for victory, and with that victory, get Iran back on the path toward a more Westernized, liberalized, and ultimately secularized political future.

With the controversy (fueled by Cohen, Parsi and others) that followed Ahmadinejad’s re-election victory, the administration did not get back on track to start nuclear talks with Iran until the fall of 2009 — even though Obama had promised Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that, if negotiations had not produced results by the end of 2009, the United States would put diplomacy aside and push for new sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

This meant that the Obama administration put its (convoluted and one-sided) proposal for a fuel “swap” to refuel the Tehran Research Reactor on the table as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, thereby dooming prospects for a deal — just as a re-elected Obama administration is today considering making even more one-sided, take-it-or-leave-it proposals to Iran regarding its nuclear activities.

More broadly, the unsubstantiated portrayal of the 2009 election as stolen — the portrayal pushed by Cohen, Friedman, Parsi, Sadjadpour et al. — has helped to enable neoconservative policy outcomes. Thus, NIAC’s advocacy of “targeted” or “precision” sanctions against the Iranian government has served only to facilitate the passage of broad-based sanctions.

Similarly, by arguing that he was all in favor of diplomacy with the Islamic Republic, just not after a particular election and not with what he alleged (again, with no evidence), were political thieves, Cohen provided de facto legitimation to neoconservatives, supporters of the MEK, the pro-Israel lobby and others who say that (take your pick) Iranian officials’ rhetoric about Israel, Tehran’s support for groups resisting Israeli occupation, the Islamic Republic’s insistence on including religion in its constitution, its alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons, and/or Iranians’ annual commemoration of Husayn’s martyrdom on Ashura render engagement with Iran a fool’s errand — politically, morally, and strategically.

For U.S. policymakers, the most fundamental question with regard to pursuing diplomacy with Iran should be: Is diplomatic engagement with Tehran, with the goal of strategic realignment between the United States and the Islamic Republic, in America’s interest?

If it is (as we strongly believe to be the case), then the only question left is: What does the United States need to do to make engagement work? Anything else is not just unhelpful; it is dangerously counter-productive, ensuring that diplomacy will fail and that the risks of a strategically disastrous war (disastrous, first of all, for the United States) will rise.

But that is what the liberal approach, epitomized by Cohen, Parsi, Slavin et al. has done: it has made real rapprochement between the United States and Iran less likely and war ultimately more likely.

Today, Cohen, Parsi, Slavin and others have hopped back on the pro-diplomacy bandwagon. But look at what they and other like-minded commentators think diplomacy should entail.

As Cohen writes: “What do we want from Iran? Open up all its nuclear facilities, get rid of all its 20 percent enriched uranium, end all threats to Israel, stop rampant human rights abuses, changed policies on Hamas and Hezbollah, a constructive approach to Syria.”

Outside the nuclear sphere, an Iran that accepted such an agenda would no longer be the Islamic Republic. Indeed, John Bolton wouldn’t have any problem with that agenda; he would simply disagree with Cohen that it is possible to get Tehran to accept, through diplomacy, such thoroughgoing revision of its (internal as well as external) political orientation.

Likewise, Parsi and NIAC once again favor diplomacy — but they stipulate that American engagement with Tehran must include “human rights as a core issue.”

This is strategic and diplomatic nonsense. Sino-American rapprochement would never have worked had Nixon and Kissinger made human rights a “core issue”; U.S.-Iranian rapprochement won’t work on that basis either.

Insisting that Iran “end all threats to Israel” — when, in fact, the Islamic Republic has never threatened to attack Israel while Israel assassinates Iranian scientists and routinely threatens to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities — is a formula for failure.

However much they may cringe at the term, the liberals’ commitment to what might be described as a strategy of “soft” regime change in Iran is clear. In his latest Op-Ed, Cohen quotes Rockefeller Brothers’ Fund president Stephen Heintz as saying that he avoids “the phrase ‘diplomatic solution’ in conversations about Iran on Capitol Hill” in favor of “’political solution.’ Diplomacy just sounds too wimpy.”

For Heintz, it undoubtedly does. For the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has provided funding to Parsi’s NIAC to conduct “nonpolitical trainings” for Iranian oppositionists — just as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund supported efforts to encourage political change in the former Yugoslavia and color revolutions in former Soviet-bloc states.

(Also — and, we suspect, not coincidentally — the Rockefeller Brothers Fund underwrote Ali Ansari’s substantively flawed “scholarly” work to delegitimate the Islamic Republic’s 2009 election.)

We are all in favor of a “political solution.” But such a solution requires real rapprochement between the United States and Iran, based on American acceptance of the Islamic Republic as a legitimate political entity representing real (and legitimate) national interests.

It would seem that liberals are not any more inclined toward a genuine political solution than neoconservatives are.

Flynt Leverett served as a Middle East expert on George W. Bush’s National Security Council staff until the Iraq War and worked previously at the State Department and at the Central Intelligence Agency. Hillary Mann Leverett was the NSC expert on Iran and – from 2001 to 2003 – was one of only a few U.S. diplomats authorized to negotiate with the Iranians over Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and Iraq. [This article was originally published at RaceforIran.com.]

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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A supply helicopter approaches Forward Operating Base Salerno in Afghanistan’s Khowst province on Nov. 5, 2012. (Photo credit: U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Abram Pinnington)

By Paul R. Pillar: After a campaign and election in which, at least as much as in most other election years, foreign policy took a back seat to domestic concerns, we — and the newly re-elected president — should take stock of the foreign policy significance of the electoral decision the American people just made.

Possibly the most significant implication is that the nation has dodged a bullet in the form of what would have been, given a different election outcome, a likely return of neoconservatives to positions of power and influence.

Perhaps a President-elect Romney would have surprised us with his appointments, but the ideological pattern in his party and the identities of his advisers suggest otherwise. They suggest that future historians would be scratching their heads to explain how, so soon after the Iraq War, promoters of that enormously costly blunder would be back in position to inflict still more damage.

Lowering the risk of ideologically-driven disasters should be only part of the stock-taking. There are broader implications, having mostly to do with the incumbent president entering his second and final term.

Although Barack Obama is still young enough for us to expect from him vigorous leadership right up until January 2017, he will never be running for office again. That should lift much of the weight of the political millstone that drags down policy-making on foreign as well as domestic affairs.

It does not remove the millstone completely; domestic political opposition, sometimes of a puerile sort, is a factor even for second-term presidents as they try to strike deals and build coalitions. But a second term opens up distance from the kind of reductionism in the discussion of foreign policy that is part of any effort to win election or re-election.

The extra intrusion of domestic politics whenever hoped-for re-election is a factor impairs the making of sound foreign policy in at least three respects. First, it amplifies the influence of small but nonetheless assertive interests that are different from the U.S. national interest.

Second, it requires an oversimplification or dumbing-down of policy questions and thus leaves little room for care and precision in crafting strategies well-suited for a complicated world. Third, it encourages politicians to adhere to low-risk positions unlikely to generate political vulnerabilities before the next election. Such low-risk positions tend to lead to policies that are uncreative and offer little potential for positive breakthroughs.

What are some of the themes and directions that our second-term president should adopt to take advantage of having been relieved from the burdens of his last round of electoral politics?

One is suggested by an unfortunate tendency that the just-completed campaign season exhibited regarding foreign as well as domestic policy: the tendency to treat a vote for or against the incumbent president as if it were just an expression of approval or disapproval of whatever is going well or going poorly in the country or in the world.

Such an attitude mistakenly disregards the causes of the good news or bad news, disregards whether the alternative candidate would have done anything different or better, and disregards whether whatever we are happy or dissatisfied with is something any U.S. president can do much about.

The countervailing theme that the re-elected president ought to start emphasizing is that there are many unpleasant things going on in the world that neither he nor the United States as a whole can reshape to our satisfaction, that it is not the responsibility of the United States to correct all such situations around the world, and that attempts to assume such responsibility will often result in costly frustration and failure.

Making such observations while seeking re-election invites charges of wimpiness or of trying to avoid responsibility. But the observations are true.

A related theme is that the United States needs to pay more attention to the damage it inflicts, the anger it incurs and the resistance it engenders through many of its own actions — even well-intentioned ones — around the world and to how the effects redound negatively to U.S. national interests. This refers especially to the use of force in other countries.

Voicing any such theme amid an election campaign is political poison; it invites attacks from opponents for straying from the exceptionalist orthodoxy that America is never anything other than good and great. Now that Mr. Obama is no longer running against an opponent who conjures up mythical “apology tours,” he should not have to worry as much about such attacks.

In fact, the President can educate the public about the realities behind this theme without compromising at all the concept of America’s greatness, which involves stature and influence that does not require using a hammer to pound at every gnat that flies by.

As for more specific issues, recall how the presidential candidates responded when they were asked in the last debate to name the biggest foreign or security threat facing the United States (always a flawed question, in its requirement to single out one topic to the exclusion of others).

President Obama replied, “terrorism.” A safe answer, but now the President should foster a public discussion about the actual extent of terrorist threats to U.S. interests and about the costs and consequences of measures and policies aimed at countering those threats. The discussion should include material costs amid larger budgetary stringency, and it should include the broader consequences of killing individual suspected terrorists.

Governor Romney’s reply to the same question was “Iran.” The substantively appropriate response by his opponent would have been to ask how a second-rate power thousands of miles away could be considered the greatest threat facing the world’s sole superpower.

But any such questioning would have been politically risky, and so neither candidate rose above the demonization and alarmism in which public discussion in the United States about Iran has been mired. With the election over (and especially before Iran gets preoccupied with its own presidential election in the spring), the administration needs to get away from the demonization and alarmism.

Unfortunately, as Jacob Heilbrunn points out, Mr. Obama has boxed himself in somewhat with his categorical statements, matching those of Romney, that an Iranian nuclear weapon would be unacceptable. The good news is that there is definitely an opportunity for negotiating an agreement with Tehran that keeps Iran short of even deciding to build a nuclear weapon.

The administration needs to seize that opportunity, with all of the flexibility in negotiations that seizing it requires. The biggest impediment to doing so is likely to be resistance in Congress over the relaxing of sanctions.

The agitation over Iran has primarily been a project of the Israeli government, and this involves an area where the outcome of the election potentially makes a major difference. If Romney had won we would have a president who would outsource a major chunk of U.S. foreign policy to Benjamin Netanyahu, has already written off giving any attention to the defining conflict in the Middle East, and in hoping for re-election would have to keep thinking about what Sheldon Adelson will say the next time he sees him.

Mr. Obama has an opportunity to set another course, one far more attuned to the interests of the United States than to those of a foreign government. The opportunity stems not only from his status as a second-termer but also from encouraging signs in recent years (including the voice vote on Jerusalem at this year’s Democratic Party convention) that increasing numbers of people are coming to see the political force that has enforced unquestioning support to the policies of the Israeli government as being something of a naked emperor.

President Obama can claim a mandate of sorts for setting a new course in this regard. In addition to winning the votes of a large majority of American Jews, election-night polling showed that four-fifths of that segment of the electorate believe that a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be negotiated, that the United States should take an active role accomplishing this, and that resolution of that conflict is an important U.S. national security interest.

The lobby that has impeded progress on this subject is, though weakened, still very much around. Opposing it will generate a lot of political ugliness. But the ugliness is not a good excuse for drifting along the old course. What comes closer to a legitimate excuse is the amount of presidential attention required amid fiscal cliffs and all the other demands on that attention.

Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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The US military is now taking Israel’s increasingly belligerent rhetoric against Iran more seriously and is directly warning it not to take any action. The delicate and volatile situation puts the United State’s interests in the area in jeopardy and it is now calculating that confronting Israel and potentially offending its ally is the only way to prevent the situation from dangerously escalating. From the Guardian:

US military commanders have warned their Israeli counterparts that any action against Iran would severely limit the ability of American forces in the region to mount their own operations against the Iranian nuclear programme by cutting off vital logistical support from Gulf Arab allies.

US naval, air and ground forces are dependent for bases, refuelling and supplies on Gulf Arab rulers who are deeply concerned about the progress Iran has made in its nuclear programme, but also about the rising challenge to their regimes posed by the Arab spring and the galvanising impact on popular unrest of an Israeli attack on Iran.

The US Fifth Fleet is headquartered in Bahrain and the US air force has major bases in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Senior US officers believe the one case in which they could not rely fully on those bases for military operations against Iranian installations would be if Israel acted first.

I don’t think the US has any intentions of attacking Iran, at least under an Obama administration, so it is using the argument that an early Israeli attack would hamper its own military plans as a way of appearing to aggressively oppose Iran while pursuing a more intelligent response to the threat it perceives. The pentagon understand that another war in the Middle East would dangerously overstretch the military and embroil the US in a potentially lethal conflict with no viable exit strategy. The aftermath of a regime changing assault on Iran would be awful beyond belief, and a power vacuum would open up that could pull the entire region into chaos.

It’s clear that the US sees Iran as a threat to its interest in the region but it knows that it cannot pursue all out war against a country that 1. Has the ability to fight back, and 2. Wields serious influence in the region.

Under Netanyahu’s extremist neo con government in Israel, there is little thought for the consequences of war with Iran. Netanyahu would already be in Iran had the US not stopped it, understanding that Israel’s own survival is at stake. It marks a small but significant turning point in US foreign policy that it is now overtly telling Israel to back off. These small decisions make big impacts, furthering the argument that despite the ideological closeness of the US Presidential candidates, it does make a difference who is in power.

It is unclear whether Romney would commit to following Israel into a war with Iran, but his rhetoric suggests he would override his own military advisers and pursue Netanyahu’s strategy of all out aggression. Romney could of course change his mind should he get into office (and he certainly has a track record of doing so), but it’s probably not a bet the American public should make.

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By Robert Parry: A deal to resolve the Iranian nuclear dispute, based on face-to-face negotiations between Iranian and U.S. officials, could follow quickly upon President Barack Obama’s reelection on Nov. 6, but those bilateral relations would likely veer toward confrontation if Mitt Romney wins and his neocon advisers retake control of U.S. foreign policy.

Sources familiar with the status of the talks say the potential settlement is much closer than is publicly understood, with a reelected President Obama prepared to relax the harsh economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for tight constraints on any Iranian nuclear program, assuring that it is for peaceful purposes only.

One person familiar with the status of talks said the post-election discussions also could lead to a broader rapprochement between Iran and the United States, two countries that have been at odds since 1979 when Iranian radicals overran the U.S. Embassy and took American diplomatic personnel hostage.

However, the prospects for peace could head off in a very different direction if Romney wins. His neocon advisers are considered likely to hijack the Iran sanctions and use them to force “regime change” in Tehran, rather than for their current narrow purpose of compelling Iran to negotiate seriously on limiting its nuclear program.

By effectively shifting the application of the sanctions from nuclear negotiations to regime change, the neocons could put Iran and the United States on course for another war in the Middle East, much as the neocons did in steadily ratcheting up tensions with Iraq in 2002-2003 until a peaceful resolution became impossible.

Despite the disastrous Iraq War, Washington’s influential neocons have never given up on their dream of violently remaking the Middle East through U.S.-imposed “regime change” in countries considered hostile to America and Israel.

If the new Romney administration did redeploy the sanctions for the purpose of “regime change” in Iran, the Islamic government might press ahead toward development of a nuclear weapon for self-defense. That, in turn, could precipitate a U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, since Romney has declared that he would not accept Iran even having the “capability” to build an A-bomb, let alone an actual bomb.

Contradictory Remarks

Though Iran’s current readiness to make major concessions on its nuclear program marks a success for the Obama administration’s diplomacy, President Obama has been reluctant to tout the pending resolution of the crisis in the final days of the campaign out of fear that it would open him to attacks as soft on Iran.

That concern left the President making contradictory remarks at last Monday’s debate. He initially disparaged a New York Times report on a tentative agreement for bilateral talks between the United States and Iran, but later in the debate seemed to confirm that such an arrangement was in the offing.

In response to a question from moderator Bob Schieffer about the shape of a possible deal with Iran, Obama responded, “Well, first of all, those were reports in the newspaper. They are not true. But our goal is to get Iran to recognize it needs to give up its nuclear program and abide by the U.N. resolutions that have been in place, because they have the opportunity to re-enter the community of nations, and we would welcome that.”

However, several questions later, Obama briefly returned to the topic, telling Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney: “I’m pleased that you now are endorsing our policy of applying diplomatic pressure and potentially having bilateral discussions with the Iranians to end their nuclear program.”

A day earlier, on Oct. 21, the Times cited Obama administration officials as saying that the United States and Iran “have agreed in principle for the first time to one-on-one negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.” But the Times added that “Iranian officials have insisted that the talks wait until after the presidential election … telling their American counterparts that they want to know with whom they would be negotiating.”

The Times reported that the agreement was “a result of intense, secret exchanges between American and Iranian officials that date almost to the beginning of President Obama’s term.”

One intelligence source familiar with the talks told me that the framework for a deal was largely hammered out by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta during his time as CIA director before he took the Pentagon job in mid-2011. But the source said the tough international sanctions, which the Obama administration engineered over the past year, have convinced Iranian leaders that it is time to get serious and to reach a settlement.

The source added that the scope of the bilateral talks could be much broader than just Iran’s nuclear program, which is expected to be suspended although with allowances for civilian nuclear energy. Under the plan, Iran also would tone down its rhetoric against Israel, ease bellicose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad off the political stage and clear the way for the election of a more moderate president next year, the source said.

Regionally, Iran would be pressed to use its influence with Hezbollah to halt any hostilities toward Israel and to assist in tamping down the civil conflict in Syria. In exchange, the United States would gradually lift the sanctions, allow Iran’s international oil sales to recover, and take steps toward establishing diplomatic relations.

“It’s going to be a whole sea change,” the source said, although adding that the framework is likely to collapse if Romney wins the election. “If Mitt becomes president,” the source said, “you’ll have chaos in the Middle East.”

Romney’s Hard Line

The Times’s article also noted that plans for face-to-face talks might collapse if Romney wins: “It is also far from clear that Mr. Obama’s opponent, Mitt Romney, would go through with the negotiation should he win election. Mr. Romney has repeatedly criticized the president as showing weakness on Iran and failing to stand firmly with Israel against the Iranian nuclear threat. …

“The prospect of one-on-one negotiations could put Mr. Romney in an awkward spot, since he has opposed allowing Iran to enrich uranium to any level — a concession that experts say will probably figure in any deal on the nuclear program.”

During the Oct. 22 debate, Romney displayed ignorance about basic facts regarding Iran and he indicated that he shared the view of his neocon advisers that the civil war in Syria amounted to “an opportunity.”

In the third presidential debate, Romney said, “Syria’s an opportunity for us because Syria plays an important role in the Middle East, particularly right now. Syria is Iran’s only ally in the Arab world. It’s their route to the sea. It’s the route for them to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon, which threatens, of course, our ally Israel. And so seeing Syria remove [President Bashar al] Assad is a very high priority for us. Number two, seeing a — a replacement government being responsible people is critical for us.”

The “route to the sea” gaffe – mistaking Iran for some landlocked country – exposed Romney’s weak sense of world geography, since Iran sits on the Persian Gulf. Iran also has no common border with Syria. Iraq rests between the two countries.

But Romney’s clumsy geopolitical statement resurrected the neocons’ longstanding goal of forcing “regime change” in Syria and Iran – as well as Iraq under Saddam Hussein – and thus starving Israel’s close-in enemies, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas, of outside support. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Moderate Mitt: Neocon Trojan Horse.”]

For Romney’s neocon advisers, who dominate his campaign’s inner foreign policy circle, torpedoing a potential settlement on Iran’s nuclear program would be their first challenge in establishing their preeminence in a Romney administration next year.

Even if bilateral talks are held after a Romney victory, the neocons could guide them toward deliberate failure and then use the collapse as a demonstration of Iranian intransigence, thus justifying an eventual U.S.-Israeli military strike.

So, in a very practical way, a possible war with Iran — and the fate of millions of civilians who could be caught up in the carnage – will be on the ballot in the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 6.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

(Originally posted at ConsortiumNews.com)

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By Bob Cesca: Anyone who believed Mitt Romney’s shape-shifting performance as “Peacenik Mitt” on Monday night is an amnesic, naive doofus. As we all know by now, Romney will do and say whatever is necessary to make it through the day. This is his strategy. By now, the Republicans, like the monochromatic lockstep Borg hive they are, will vote for Romney no matter what he says. This liberates Romney to take the form of Sergeant Slaughter one day, then [insert the Transformers switcheroo sound effect here] to the left Code Pink the next day.

However, in reviewing the debate it’s clear that he wasn’t entirely Peacenik Mitt throughout. If you look closely, Romney’s real motives for war made a few subtle appearances.

First, during the debate, we heard statements like this about fighting extremism in the Middle East: “But we can’t kill our way out of this mess.” Peacenik Mitt. Has anyone seen Dennis Kucinich and Mitt Romney in the same room together? Hmm.

Then there was the following about-face minutes later: “Well, my strategy’s pretty straightforward, which is to go after the bad guys, to make sure we do our very best to interrupt them, to — to kill them, to take them out of the picture.”

I’m sure Romney meant to say disrupt them and not “interrupt them,” which is what Romney typically does to debate moderators. So to what extent will Romney go in his effort to get “the bad guys?” What will he do to interrupt and kill them? And by “them,” is he talking about Palestinians who, in the 47 Percent video, Romney said aren’t willing to negotiate a peaceful solution with Israel? What about Assaad and the Syrian military? Is he talking about Iran? North Korea (which wasn’t mentioned at all last night for some reason)? If it’s any of these flashpoint states, such action would require more than drones and a few sorties. We’re talking about ground wars not unlike Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps far worse if Russia drops in on the side of Syria and China drops in on the side of Iran.

Yet, seconds later, Romney said, “We don’t want another Iraq. We don’t want another Afghanistan.”

That’s peculiar because while Romney has, in fact, supported the 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan, he has always pledged to leave American soldiers behind as a “residual force,” while reserving the prerogative to entirely change his mind. Knowing how Romney changes his mind more often than he changes his Dad jeans, I think we can expect the worst on that front.

As for Iraq, the president was exactly right during the third debate. Romney, in his major foreign policy speech just over two weeks ago, Mitt Romney said, “In Iraq, the costly gains made by our troops are being eroded by rising violence, a resurgent Al-Qaeda, the weakening of democracy in Baghdad, and the rising influence of Iran. And yet, America’s ability to influence events for the better in Iraq has been undermined by the abrupt withdrawal of our entire troop presence.”

It’s difficult to be more explicit than that. He supports maintaining our influence in Iraq with the use of American footsoldiers. In Iraq. Even though he said he didn’t want another Iraq.

The president reminded Romney about the Iraq section of his speech, “This is just a few weeks ago that you indicated that we should still have troops in Iraq.”

Romney snapped back, “No, I didn’t.” Lie.

Reading remarks like his Iraq statement would be shocking were it not for the fact that 15 of Romney’s 22 foreign policy advisers are ex-Bush administration neoconservative war hawks. Six of those advisers are former members of the defunct Project for a New American Century (PNAC): the thinktank that had lobbied for another incursion into Iraq since the early 1990s. You might recognize some names from the rogues gallery: former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden, Cofer Black, Dan Senor and former U.N. ambassador John Bolton. Knowing he didn’t want to repeat his father’s mistake of running for re-election without the advantage of being a war president, the neocons had a receptive and ready partner in the Oval Office. And because Bush had little experience in this arena, he deferred to these hawks on just about everything. Just the way they wanted it. And so they puppeteered Bush into two concurrent wars, costing trillions of dollars in deficit spending, thousands of American lives and scores of Iraqi and Afghan lives.

Much like Richard Nixon, who ran on a peace agenda and a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam then subsequently bombed Cambodia and Laos into the stone age, it’s worth noting that Bush ran as a peace-loving compassionate conservative as well. Later, in a televised prime time address to the nation, Bush, as president, said about the Middle East, “The United States with other countries will work to advance liberty and peace in that region.” In this same address, he used the word “peace” or a variation of “peace,” such as “peaceful,” 12 times. This speech was deliverd on March 17, 2003, two days before Bush ordered the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Another foreign policy neophyte has surrounded himself with the same cabal of master manipulators driven by a singular goal: to commit the world’s most powerful and sophisticated arsenal to tame the Muslim world. And, like Bush, he’s couching it in the cuddly fuzzy terms of “peace.” During Monday’s debate, Romney said something very similar Bush’s pre-Iraq line, “Let me — let me step back and talk about what I think our mission has to be in the Middle East, and even more broadly, because our purpose is to make sure the world is more — is peaceful. We want a peaceful planet.” Again, this line popped up within minutes of talking about killing “the bad guys” and taking them “out of the picture.”

First on the hit list will invariably be Iran, of course, where the neocons left off with Bush. Romney has repeatedly accused Iran of not responding to sanctions or other peaceful means of coercion, so the only alternative left would be an invasion and he’s hired the perfect architects for the job of manufacturing yet another endless war on that continent.

To Bush’s credit, he refused to capitulate to arm-twisting, full-court pressure from Dick Cheney and the neocons to attack Iran. They’ll definitely have a better shot with Romney. Hopefully they’ll never get that shot.

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