One to Watch: Iran Tests First Nuclear Plant

Related Post: Diplomatic Question of the Day - What Exactly is Dennis Ross In Charge Of?

Iran, in a high-profile ceremony on Wednesday, announced it has carried out successful tests at its Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power plant. The visiting head of Russia's state nuclear company, Sergei Kiriyenko, hailed "significant improvements" in the first Iranian nuclear facility to provide electricity.

So far, no real attempt to turn the news into a sign that Tehran is closer to dropping a bomb on us. The Times had a lengthy article shifting from atomic energy to "the United States and European Union suspect that Iran is secretly building a nuclear bomb". US media have been quiet, however, and there has been no reaction from the Obama Administration.

Engagement with Iran? An Additional View of Professor Gary Sick's Analysis

On Tuesday, we published Chris Emery's summary of last week's talk in London by Professor Gary Sick on Iran and the state of US-Iranian relations. A reader who was also at the talk has offered these additional observations:

Chris Emery has written up some excellent notes on Professor Sick's analysis, so I won't re-hash though them all. I think that the one article covering the talk, Bronwen Maddox in The Times of London, missed the point a little bit. She went for the sensational headline grabber, "Why an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is not an option", rather than writing about the larger picture which Sick examined. These include the re-definitions of Israeli/Arab/Iranian roles and their positions in the Middle East due to the redistributions of power in the last eight years. I also think it's a bit too early to render a judgement of whether Sick is as off the spectrum with the Obama Administration as Maddox makes out.

Sick seemed to be almost exactly replicating Trita Parsi's power-cycle competition thesis on the threat and rivalry reassessment, developed for 1990-92, to the current era- which in a nerdy way is pretty fascinating. I might be looking into this a bit too much but I have noticed an increase in the material overplaying the threat depiction of Iran to Israel, echoing the very aggressive posture of Israel's Shimon Peres in 1992. - http://jcpa.org/text/ahmadinejad2-words.pdf See, for example, Joshua Teitelbaum in the Hoover Digest on "What Iranian Leaders Really Say About Doing Away with Israel", Jeremy Issacharoff's recent piece in the Washington Times,  anda bunch more.

Sick kept repeating the need to reassure the Arab states (particularly Saudi Arabia/Egypt) and Israel that if there was a rapprochement towards Iran, they would not be left with a role deficit and/or isolated in the region. And I liked the point about U.S.-Iranian relations not being a foreign policy problem but a domestic problem.

Sick urged the US to hold back the full negotiation efforts with Iran until after the election, and let the "engagement" debate develop organically in Iran throughout the election campaign. I think the last thing [former President Mohammad] Khatami needs is to be considered America's candidate in the race. Although Sick didn't go into details about the Iranian election, it will be interesting if it ends up being a two-way race between Khatami and Ahmadinejad. The Iranian electorate will be faced with a choice based on two very divergent policy differences and governing styles, and it will then be the first really contested election in Iran's post-revolutionary period in which people will be choosing between two candidates with not only divergent ideas but also divergent records.

Sick urged the Obama Admininstration not to repeat the mistakes of Bush in having an incoherent policy towards Iran; however, I think "mixed signals" has been a perpetual theme of America's Iranian policy for the last thirty years. I would have liked to hear more about what should be on the agenda for U.S.-Iran talks.

UPDATE: The US Airbases Inside Pakistan

It took the media only five days, after Senator Dianne Feinstein referred in a hearing to US airbases inside Pakistan, to find the supposedly super-secret location for American missile strikes and bombing raids.

The Times of London reports:

The CIA has been using the Shamsi airfield — originally built by Arab sheikhs for falconry expeditions in the southwestern province of Baluchistan — for at least a year. The strip, which is about 30 miles from the Afghan border, allows US forces to launch a Drone within minutes of receiving actionable intelligence as well as allowing them to attack targets further afield.

Shamsi was used for the 2001 American operations to overthrow the Taliban but the Pakistan Government claimed the US left in 2006.

The Times supports its discovery with evidence of a contract to deliver 730,000 gallons of aviation fuel, worth $3.2 million, to Shamsi.

You have to hand it to the US embassy in Pakistan, however. They are not giving up the public ruse, even if their statement seems to be uncomfortably close to protesting too much:

No. No. No. No. No. We unequivocally and emphatically can tell you that there is no basing of US troops in Pakistan. There is no basing of US Air Force, Navy, Marines, Army, none, on the record and emphatically. I want that to be very clear. And that is the answer any way you want to put it. There is no base here, no troops billeted. We do not operate here.

But, in a demonstration of how super-secret this entire operation is, a local journalist explains, "We can see the planes flying from the base. The area around the base is a high-security zone and no one is allowed there.”

Update on Obama v. The Military: Where Next in Afghanistan?

Is President Obama preparing to stall out the military's request for 25,000 more US troops to Afghanistan?

The Times of London, in an article that is not replicated elsewhere, thinks so. It asserts, on the basis of an unnamed source:

The Pentagon was set to announce the deployment of 17,000 extra soldiers and marines last week but Robert Gates, the defence secretary, postponed the decision after questions from Obama.

The president was concerned by a lack of strategy at his first meeting with Gates and the US joint chiefs of staff last month in “the tank”, the secure conference room in the Pentagon. He asked: “What’s the endgame?” and did not receive a convincing answer.

On its own, that's not strong evidence that Obama is going to block the military's insistence on a "surge" to be announced before the NATO summit on 5 April. However, the excellent Juan Cole stacks up the reasons why Obama might want to pull the plug on Genius/General David Petraeus's plan.

As we've noted for weeks, the US is in a real logistical bind. With the closure of its main supply route from Pakistan, it has to find an alternative for all those extra forces. Russia, however, is playing a double game: while it says publicly it will allow the US to move supplies across its territory, it has encouraged Kyrgyzstan to close the US Manas airbase that is needed for the effort. Meanwhile Uzbekistan, which did host US bases after 9/11 but then evicted American forces in 2005, is only prepared to allow non-military supplies across its supplies.

Conclusion? The US is going to have pay a very high price --- economic and political --- to get full support for an alternative supply route. That is --- and here's a crazy thought --- unless it's prepared to supply Afghanistan from the west via Iran.

But, as good as Cole's analysis is, I think it misses the wider political point. It's pretty clear that Washington would prefer to see the back of President Hamid Karzai, its choice to lead Afghanistan in 2001 but a leader who --- depending on your point of view --- is too tolerant of corruption or too critical of the US approach to be a solid ally in this new surge.

However, unless the US is prepared to abandon the semblance of national government, it needs someone to play the political partner in Kabul. And Karzai, who is getting bolder even as his position is more and more tenuous, has made the process more difficult by suspending elections for the foreseeable future.

That means that, short of a coup, the Obama Administration is encumbered by a national leader who is now an opponent of its plans. And that means that, even if the US can find short-term military success against the insurgents, it has no political "endgame" in sight.

I'm wary of the V-word as an analogy but, for students of history, it might not be a bad idea to revisit Ngo Dinh Diem and Saigon 1963. Let's hope that Barack Obama chooses to take a glance, and draw any suitable lessons, this week.