Iran’s two-level game.

Abbas Milani has an interesting piece in The New Republic today about Iranian reformers trying to buy Western support by selling out the leadership on the nuclear issue. A democratic Iran, Milani says, is the only one that will resolve the nuclear standoff. Though I’m sure this point has not escaped those in White House, it’s hard to think that Milani or Karoubi, who made the speech, should hold out hope. For American policy to tilt in that direction would be ever-so-dangerous. It just goes to show you what a delicate balance Khamenei has on his hands, and how many very long levers the United States has arrayed in front of it. These are two-level games at their best.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Arms Control, Middle East , Iran, Karoubi, Milani

Bravo on missile defense.

Brian (Don’t miss his post below! He knows much more than I do about this) and I share the opinion that Obama’s decision to do away with Bush’s byzantine missile defense system in Eastern Europe is unquestionably a good decision. (That said, of course it will be questioned. Here’s why those queries are likely to be misplaced.

1. Obama’s scheme is better for missile defense. The Times article above notes that “The Obama team relied heavily on research by a Stanford University physicist, Dean Wilkering, who presented the government with research this year arguing that Poland and the Czech Republic were not the most effective places to station a missile defense system against the most likely Iranian threat. Instead, he said, more optimal places to station missiles and radar systems would be in Turkey or the Balkans.” I assume this is because interceptors launched from the Eastern Mediterranean or the Balkans can intercept any Iranian ballistic missile at the peak of its trajectory into low earth orbit, possibly before some countermeasures are feasibly deployed. (Though I can’t imagine this range is sufficiently close for boost-phase intercept.) About the worst time to intercept a missile is on its way down. The new system would correct this.

2. The other reason why the new scheme is better for missile defense is that it relies on proven American technology that can be deployed now. The SM-3 is the RIM-161 Standard Missile-3, which relies on the AN/SPY-2 radar. Together they comprise the dramatically successful AEGIS missile defense system, which can be deployed on Ticonderoga and Arleigh-Burke class missile destroyers. The system has been deployed successfully for years and is useful in a range of scenarios (we used it this past year to shoot down one of our aging spy satellites). Furthermore, the AEGIS system is undergoing active development: the AN/SPY-3 radar is set to be deployed on the DDG-1000 destroyer (the procurement of which was curtailed to two) and compatible with other missile cruisers, while the SM-6 will allow the AEGIS to intercept small aircraft and agile cruise missiles. Having these capabilities consistently deployed in the Middle East obviously allows for a wider range of missions and defense capabilities. This means: it works, it can get there faster, and it’s better. I don’t want to hear one peep about how this is weakening our security.

3. We must have traded the system for something. The trade would almost exactly parallel Kennedy’s famous decision to trade away the obsolete Jupiter medium-range ballistic to the Soviet Union for a favorable resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. We lost nothing in the trade and gained a great deal—which hopefully is what happened here. For the same reason as the previous deal, no deal would be disclosed as a quid-pro-quo, but if the Russians take a tougher stance in the next round of Iran negotiations, don’t be so surprised.

4. AEGIS destroyers are removable. Sorry, but permanent assets are expensive, and bad for renegotiating security commitments to even our allies. It means the hegemon can’t be extorted for extra rent or security commitments just because an Eastern European country put another guy in charge who needs to demonstrate his independence from the Americans.

5. The new system does away with this bizarre charade over this old system, in which it wasn’t good for us, and wasn’t really bad for the Russians’ deterrent, but goddamnit we were both going to stick to our guns and drag everything down around us. I disagree with Brian about this (though of course I could stand to be corrected): the Eastern Europe missile defense system posed no threat to Russia’s ability to attack Western Europe because Russia has a) more ballistic missiles than this system ever could have stopped, and b) cruise missiles. The system was an issue because of our security alliances with Eastern European countries (which will continue, but in a less-abrasive fashion).

6. Sorry again, but it’s cheaper, and that matters—not just in this environment, but always.

So those are six good reasons: the new system can—hit ballistic missiles better; hit other stuff better; gain us valuable concessions; assist in offshore balancing; restore sanity to defense discussions; save money. There is a seventh, broader, reason but that requires another post.

Bravo.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Arms Control, Europe, Middle East , missile defense

Palestinian elections coming up.

Here’s something else for your radar screen. As Obama and his envoy George Mitchell try to step up efforts to rekindle the Arab-Israeli peace process, the next Palestinian elections are almost upon us—and while we should be skeptical of any American polling of the Palestinian territories, Abbas and Fatah seem to have made exciting strides in both the West Bank and Gaza (to the tune of a 14 point lead, by some accounts).

White House spokespeople seem taken aback by Israel’s recent authorization of thousands of new houses in the West Bank (to assuage domestic constituencies “in anticipation of restarting peace talks”), it should hardly be surprising; the next six months or so will be a dead zone for any new peace initiatives until the elections pass. And indeed they should: a Palestinian Authority with a fresh mandate would make a much more favorable negotiating partner, and Obama has a lot of groundwork to lay.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Middle East , Israel, Palestine

The UAE rolls over.

Regrettably, I have to post this without comment: the BBC reports that the UAE seized North Korean cargo containing conventional arms bound for Iran. Why without comment? Because it’s either too small to be consequential or too big to get my head around. As an argument for the latter, consider it phrased this way: an Arab ally of the United States moved of its own accord to uphold a United Nations Security Council resolution to the detriment of another Middle Eastern country’s ability to support terrorists in another state in the region. (Rocket-propelled grenades are not used for putting down dissident revolts.)

Hegemonic coercion? Bandwagoning? Regional balancing? Reputational gains? Normative socialization? Thanks, but no comment.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Arms Control, Middle East , DPRK, uae

Preemptive adherence to international law.

The Jerusalem Post has a fascinating article today about growing concern within the IDF about the legal fallout over how they prosecute wars or interventions. The rising concern has encouraged the IDF to take steps to limit their legal exposure, like attaching legal advisors “to commanders from the Brigade level up and are present when the target banks are drawn up, where questions are asked about whether the target is purely military or has a dual purpose” and also being proactive about investigating incidents internally to forestall questions from international jurists or advocacy groups.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the following unattributed quote was indicative of many in the IDF, though: ”There are hundreds of petitions, cases, legal opinions and actions cropping up across the world. The phenomenon is very wide and growing. The other side has a lot of money that comes from countries and people not friendly to Israel. This is another front in the war, and if we don’t realize it we’ll have a problem,” the senior defense source said.

It’s unfortunate to see such virulent and parochial resistance to the spread of international norms of military conduct, but it is a testament to their power. Furthermore, it seems that this is a deep difference in spreading norms qua norms or norms attached to legal enforcement. An international norm cannot receive compliance until a) a tipping point in the number of states that subscribe to it can levy overwhelming normative pressure, or; b) the state in question comes to accept it. Furthermore, international norms can be effectively contested: as Charlie Kupchan and I argued in Democracy, the current effort to redefine sovereignty is encouraging a disproportionately large blowback among recalcitrant states; international legal norms, at least among relatively-socialized states, face no such possibility because of the strength of the condemnation involved in a war crimes claim. The spread of international legal norms does not occur at the edge of their expansion; in this case, compliance outstrips the spread of enforceable legal statutes. In short, legal norms may carry with them an multiplier for compliance, while rhetorical norms might face a penalty for efficacy.

I’m generally skeptical of the utility of international law, but this is a pretty good argument. Because the senior defense source can complain all he can, or ensure compliance with the letter rather than the spirit of the law, but in any case it is progress.

Filed under: Middle East, the next order , international law, international norms, Israel, war crimes

Iranian endgame?

Today, with the first real palliative measure the government offered (the concession that the vote counts from some fifty towns exceeded their populations); the dispersal of a scant thousand or so protestors in Tehran by force; perhaps also,the Lede reports, the breakup of the memorial service for Neda Soltan; and Tehran, says Roger Cohen, ‘a city in military lockdown’—with these signs it looks as though the Iranian government is pursuing an endgame. The concession regarding the votes is well chosen: because it is legal in Iran to vote in municipalities where you do not legally reside, there is always some number of these towns in which vote count exceeds population. Accordingly, this concession does little to contradict Ayatollah Khamenei’s public statements or admit government culpability, but does offer the first alternative explanation of a figure the opposition has pointed to as an irregularity. It is therefore the first real recognition of a reformist point, and should go some distance to assuaging the indignation of those on the margins of the movement.

Mousavi’s absence from the public eye today could mean that Monday’s lull was deceptive. With the ‘legal’ groundwork having been laid for the authorities to arrest or otherwise harass him, and with the crackdown tightening, his strategy for each day coming becomes that much more difficult.

Filed under: Middle East , Iran

Narrowing the game.

Clemons, who has been relentlessly informative on Iran, gets the jump on this piece of news: The Tehran Times is reporting that The Assembly of Experts and a clerics association in Qom have both released statements supporting Khamenei’s hardline sermon on Friday against the protests and promising reprisals. The post immediately below suggests just how important this is: Rafsanjani appears not to have succeeded in his power struggle; the protests have failed to provoke a sufficiently powerful countervailing coalition to Khamenei’s continued leadership. Tonight, the Iranian uprising looks deflated and nearly defeated. If it is to continue at all, it will have to be on the strength of will large numbers of protestors to face martial force. The soft crackdown of today, in which nobody seems to have lost their life (thankfully), makes large numbers of protestors even less likely tomorrow.

However, even if the protests cannot sustain themselves through the next week, the effects on Iranian society will continue to be felt for decades. Khamenei has to know he is on tenuous ground.

Update: I have no definite information, but there were reports today of protestors having lost their lives. A BBC reporter apparently saw a protestor shot. Despite the violence, tear gas, and beatings, police and basij must have been ordered not to kill anybody. Still, it’s best not to claim to know for sure.

Update-2: State media reports that thirteen protestors were killed Saturday, and perhaps the number is higher. This is not the soft crackdown it seemed to be initially. My mistake hopefully serves as a reminder that in authoritarian countries, no news does not mean no happenings. We should be thankful, at least, that the number came out eventually and that as much information has trickled out as it has. The violence of the crackdown means that more will come Sunday, and Monday, and beyond.

Filed under: Middle East , Assembly of Experts, Iran

Gaming out Iran.

• A supporter of defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi throws flowers during riots in Tehran on June 13, 2009. By Olivier Laban-Mattei/AFP/Getty, via Andrew Sullivan.

I’d planned to write a post considering different endgame scenarios for the Iran uprising , but Steve Clemons just pointed at Robert Tait’s piece in The Guardian that takes on the topic reasonably well. Tait paints Khamenei as having been installed by a coalition of ‘hard core of radical mullahs, revolutionary guards and intelligence officers’ who are trying to push the Islamic republic into an Islamic ‘government’ with less accountability, and so trying to divert the revolution. His four scenarios are the following:

1. The Guardian Council allows a full recount, a new election occurs, Mousavi wins, and Ahmadinejad assents.
2. Ahmadinejad’s victory is ratified, and a soft crackdown disperses the protestors and the situation crops up later.
3. The Council rejects revisiting the election, protests spread, Khamenei orders a purge of reformists, and demonstrations peter out.
4. A second revolution: ”An insider cabal of senior clerical and establishment conservatives challenges Khamenei and forces his resignation after a vote in the Assembly of Experts. Former president Hashemi Rafsanjani is elected in his stead and orders an investigation into the actions of Ahmadinejad and other senior members of the regime. Hardliners rally round the president while reformists demand new elections. Amid growing instability, Iran’s unique Islamic/secular system of governance appears in danger of collapse.”

This fourth scenario seems the odd one to me. First, it seems that there are more scenarios possible within this fourth. Second, it seems strange to assert that Rafsanjani could succeed in deposing the Ayatollah without this shift trickling down to the Presidential level. Let’s consider more that could occur in between demonstrations collapsing without effect and full collapse.

• Rafsanjani finds the support he needs in Qom, and the clerics could privately dangle Khamenei’s position under his nose. Khamenei feeling the breath on his neck, could turn on Ahmadinejad, leash the Revolutionary Guard, permit new elections, and then proscribe the powers of the office of the Presidency to enact social progressivism. Mousavi and Khamenei are not dissimilar in terms of foreign policy, and perhaps Mousavi could be bought off with the promise of symbolic or incremental social or economic reform. Clearly, Khamenei would not prefer to share a stage with Mousavi, but he has always known how tenuous his position is and has proved resilient in the past. Iran persists with Rafsanjani holding a stick over the Ayatollah’s head in perpetuity. Perhaps this situation is the best we can hope for, because under this scenario, Iran would not face a hardliner backlash.
• After a harsh crackdown or other misstep, Rafsanjani finds the support he needs among the Assembly of Experts, and the Assembly votes to revoke Khamenei’s tenure as Supreme Leader, which it is constitutionally empowered to do. Rafsanjani or a close ally is nominated by the Assembly to assume the Supreme Leadership and a new election is ordered. This is the purpose of the Assembly, but never having exercised this power before, its deployment now would certainly lead to a struggle. If Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard decided to resist the decision, the result would be the collapse of the revolutionary constitution and the imposition of a new governmental form, civil war, or both.
• However, Khamenei, disgraced, may not resist and allow Rafsanjani to assume his position. The military would then be forced to make their own decision and may opt for a putsch.

The possibilities go on, but in any case it is not at all clear why hardliners would permit the Khamenei to be deposed but rally around Ahmadinejad. The Presidency would do them little good without the Supreme Leadership.

Remember—the power struggle determines the outcome, but the struggle can only continue if the streets are full. Today, riot troops are said to have outnumbered protestors, several times over. The government has not offered real palliative gestures; the question now is whether protestors are willing to put themselves in harm’s way. The fact that they face the Basij and the Revolutionary Guard, rather than a professional, conservative military establishment means that they might very well be in harm’s way. This does not seem to be the kind of uprising in which the  military folds its hand in solidarity.

Filed under: Middle East , Assembly of Experts, Iran, Khamenei

On the Basij.

The New York Times’ Iranian coverage has been totally insufficient, their blog The Lede has been one of the best sources online for bits of information on the Iranian protests. More and more it has moved away from reporting random things on twitter and aggregating useful commentary from around the web. Their coverage on Friday included an excellent post (at 4:09pm; no direct link) regarding the Basij. (It draws on this post from the New Yorker.) The Basij seems to have formed as a civilian corps during the Iran-Iraq war and was reinvented in 1998 to confront any instances of public disorder. It consists of 18-30 year old hardliners, not all ‘religious zealots,’ who come from a loose constellation of groups controlled by local clerics and are ultimately funded and controlled by the Revolutionary Guard. The post is full of other fascinating bits of information, like this one: President Ahmadinejad is a Basiji.

Tonight, no post on the Basij would be complete without pointing at Steve Clemons’ assertion that young members of the opposition have been spending their nights Basij hunting. If, as Khamenei promises, the government cracks down on protestors tomorrow, it will not be the only violence taking place in Tehran; we should all hope that the secret street battles between reformists and Basij militants does not erupt into outright war. If Kahmenei takes the leash off the militia and funnels them heavier weapons, the results could be even more disastrous than if troops confronted protestors directly.

Filed under: Middle East , Basij, Iran

The upshot for Iranian foreign relations.

The effect of the recent stolen election and its subsequent fallout is also worth considering in depth. From the American perspective, President Obama’s presumptive plans are necessarily altered. Iran and the United States still do not carry on normal diplomatic relations—they have not since 1979—and relations cannot be established within the next year. This may seem like a simple answer, but it is not. The simple answer is that we do not reward countries for slipping backwards from democracy. But notice that if democracy proponents have been right about Iran, falsifying the results of an already severely proscribed election—for a position that is subordinate to a religious figure with no direct accountability to the public—does not change Iran’s situation categorically. Still, the argument holds some merit: for Obama to sit down with Ahmadinejad now would indeed show weakened resolve for democracy promotion.

I think the stronger reason Washington cannot advance diplomatic relations now is internal domestic considerations. For Obama to be seen as rewarding this behavior would never be forgotten by the hundreds of thousands who have crowded the Tehran streets this week. Even President Bush knew that the Iranian demographics slant toward reform; to discard that advantage would be absurd.

The other angle to consider is how Iran’s position will change on the issues that divide Iran and the West—Israel, human rights, Lebanon, nuclear weapons. Joseph Cirincione gets starry-eyed, writing that a second Ahmadinejad term will weaken the Ayatollah’s grip on foreign relations; ‘A weakened Ahmadinejad will be pressed to compromise,’ across the board, as Russia drops its patronage and opposition to the West becomes unpopular. This seems plausible, but far from certain. It seems more likely that each of these issues will vary on its own: the next regime may moderate its position on one issue while hardening their position on the others; I don’t expect an Ahmadinejad regime to line up with the West. Human rights dialogues are likely to be the first to moderate; security issues are a different matter altogether, and taking a harder line may strengthen the regime. The Ayatollah can’t give up his nuclear program in response to mass protests!

Filed under: Middle East , Ayatollah, Cirincione, Iran