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by Garry Trudeau

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January 29, 2012

Tunisia Faces a Balancing Act

of Democracy and Religion

January 30, 2012
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID

TUNIS — The insults were furious. “Infidel!” and “Apostate!” the religious protesters shouted at the two men who had come to the courthouse to show their support for a television director on trial on charges of blasphemy. Fists, then a head butt followed.

When the scuffle ended a few minutes later, Tunisia, which much of the Arab world sees as a model for revolution, had witnessed a crucial scene in what some have cast as a gathering contest for its soul.

“We’re surrendering our right to think and speak differently,” said Hamadi Redissi, one of the two men, still bearing a scab on his forehead from the attack last week.

The challenges before Tunisia’s year-old revolution are immense — righting an ailing economy, drafting a new constitution and recovering from decades of dictatorship that cauterized civic life. But in the first months of a coalition government led by the Ennahda Party, seen as one of the most pragmatic of the region’s Islamist movements, the most emotional of struggles has surged to the forefront: a fight over the identity of an Arab and Muslim society that its authoritarian leaders had always cast as adamantly secular.

The popular revolts that began to sweep across the Middle East one year ago have forced societies like Tunisia’s, removed from the grip of authoritarian leaders and celebrating an imagined unity, to confront their own complexity. The aftermath has brought elections in Egypt and Tunisia as well as more decisive Islamist influence in Morocco, Libya and, perhaps, Syria. The upheaval has given competing Islamist movements a chance to exert influence and define themselves locally and on the world stage. It has also given rise to fears, where people in places like Tunis, a seaside metropolis proud of its cosmopolitanism, worry about what a revolution they embraced might unleash.

An opposition newspaper has warned darkly of puritanical Islamists declaring their own fief in some backwater town. Protests convulsed a university in Tunis over its refusal to let female students take examinations while wearing veils that concealed their faces. Then there is the trial Mr. Redissi attended on Jan. 23, of a television director who faces as many as five years in prison for broadcasting the French animated movie “Persepolis,” which contains a brief scene depicting God that many here have deemed blasphemous.

The trial was postponed again, this time until April. But its symbolism, precedence and implications infused a secular rally Saturday that drew thousands to downtown Tunis in one of the biggest demonstrations here in recent months.

“Make a common front against fanaticism,” one banner declared.

Tunisia and Egypt are remarkable for how much freer they have become in the year since their revolts. They may become more conservative, too, as Islamist parties inspire and articulate the mores and attitudes of populations that have always been more traditional than the urban elite. Some here hope the contest may eventually strike a balance between religious sensitivity and freedom of expression, an issue as familiar in the West as it is in Muslim countries. Others worry that debates pressed by the most fervent — over the veil, sunbathing on beaches and racy fare in the media — may polarize societies and embroil nascent governments in debates they seem to prefer to avoid.

“It’s like a war of attrition,” said Said Ferjani, a member of Ennahda’s political bureau, who complained that his party was trapped between two extremes, the most ardently secular and the religious. “They’re trying not to let us focus on the real issues.”

Nearly everyone here seems to agree that “Persepolis” was broadcast Oct. 7 on Nessma TV as a provocation of some sort. Abdelhalim Messaoudi, a journalist at Nessma, said he envisioned the film, about a girl’s childhood in revolutionary Iran, “as a pretext to start a conversation.” But many in Tunisia, both pious and less so, were taken aback by the brief scene in which God was personified — speaking in Tunisian slang no less. A week later, a crowd of Salafis — the term used for the most conservative Islamists — attacked the house of Nabil Karoui, the station’s director, and he was soon charged with libeling religion and broadcasting information that could “harm public order or good morals.”

The trial, which Human Rights Watch called “a disturbing turn for the nascent Tunisian democracy,” was originally scheduled for Nov. 16, then postponed until January.

On Jan. 23, crowds gathered outside the colonnaded courthouse, along a sylvan street in Tunisia’s old town, known as the casbah. Tempers flared and, in a scene captured on YouTube, Mr. Redissi and Zied Krichen, the editor of the newspaper Al Maghreb, tried to leave.

“All I could think was to not look behind me, walk ahead, and not open my mouth,” said Mr. Krichen, who is 54. A man rushed toward him, hitting him from behind. When Mr. Redissi, 59, turned to defend his colleague, he was head-butted. At first, the police did nothing, then helped escort the two men to a police station down the road.

Mr. Messaoudi, who was sitting at a cafe across the street, was also assaulted.

Two days later, in a statement many secular figures deemed too timid, Samir Dilou, a government spokesman and a member of Ennahda, reiterated the party’s view that the film was “a violation of the sacred.” But he condemned the violence and promised to act. One of the assailants, identified in the video, was later arrested.

For people like Mr. Messaoudi, though, the incident reflected a months-long trend of thuggery by Salafis, from an attack on a theater airing a film they deemed objectionable to their brief control last month over a northern Tunisian town called Sanjan. Some secular figures acknowledge that Ennahda is embarrassed by the incidents, loath to be grouped with the Salafis. Others view both as part of a broader Islamist outlook that celebrates Tunisia’s Muslim identity as a way to promote a more conservative society.

“Certain Islamist factions want to turn identity into their Trojan horse,” Mr. Messaoudi said. “They use the pretext of protecting their identity as a way to crush what we have achieved as a Tunisian society. They want to crush the pillars of civil society.”

The debates in Tunisia often echo similar confrontations in Turkey, another country with a long history of secular authoritarian rule now governed by a party inspired by political Islam. In both, secular elites long considered themselves a majority and were treated as such by the state. In both, those elites now recognize themselves as minorities and are often mobilized more by the threat than the reality of religious intolerance.

Mr. Redissi, a columnist and professor, predicted secular Tunisians might soon retreat to enclaves.

“We’ve become the ahl al-dhimma,” he said, offering a term in Islamic law to denote protected minorities in a Muslim state. “It’s like the Middle Ages.”

As in Egypt, the prominence of the Salafis since the revolution has taken many Tunisians by surprise. Their numbers pale before their brethren in Egypt, but like them, they are assertive and determined to make their presence felt, often embarrassing more moderate counterparts like Ennahda and the Muslim Brotherhood. On Friday, they organized a demonstration in front of the Foreign Ministry in support of Syrian protesters. For weeks, they held a sit-in at Manouba University here in Tunis to demand that women in full veils be allowed to take exams, eventually forcing the campus to close for a time.

“There are red lines not to be crossed,” said Abdel-Qadir al-Hashemi, a 28-year-old Salafi activist who helped organize the protest at Manouba. “The film ‘Persepolis’ was a provocation, simply a provocation, with the goal of driving us toward violence.”

A few of his colleagues turned out for the secular protest Saturday.

“Go back to your caves and mind your own business!” someone shouted at them.

They heckled back.

“You lost your daddy, Ben Ali!” one of them taunted, referring to the Tunisian dictator, President Zine El-Abdine Ben Ali, who was forced into exile in Saudi Arabia last year.

Even secular figures like Mr. Redissi suggest that Ennahda would rather avoid the debate over “Persepolis.” He predicted the trial would be postponed until after the next elections that follow the drafting of the constitution, in a year or so. Others insisted that Ennahda take a stronger stand against the Salafis before society became even more polarized.

“I don’t see either action or reaction — where is the government?” asked Ahmed Ounaïes, a former diplomat who briefly served as foreign minister after the revolution. “What is Ennahda’s concept of Tunisia of tomorrow? It hasn’t made that clear.”

In Ennahda’s offices, Mr. Ferjani shook his head. He complained that the case had been “blown out of proportion,” that media were recklessly fueling the debate and that the forces of the old government were inciting Salafis to tarnish Ennahda. But he conceded that the line between freedom of expression and religious sensitivity would not be drawn soon.

“The struggle is philosophical,” he said, “and it will go on and on and on.”

    Tunisia Faces a Balancing Act of Democracy and Religion, NYT, 30.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/world/africa/tunisia-navigates-a-democratic-path-tinged-with-religion.html

European Leaders Agree to New Budget Discipline Measures

January 30, 2012
The New York Times
By STEPHEN CASTLE and JAMES KANTER

BRUSSELS — All but two European Union countries agreed Monday to new and tougher measures to enforce budget discipline in the euro zone, but the bloc still showed few signs of producing a comprehensive solution for the sovereign debt crisis or a credible plan to revive fragile economies across Europe’s weakened Mediterranean tier.

The meeting of 27 European Union heads of state and government here in Brussels was aimed at completing the text of a so-called fiscal compact for the 17 nations relying on or intending to join the euro zone — with only Britain and the Czech Republic opting not to adopt the measures.

After a meeting lasting seven hours, the leaders also issued a declaration calling for a new push to restart growth and combat joblessness across the Continent.

But a number of politicians and analysts said the pledge by the European leaders to create new jobs was mostly empty, and others complained that the proposed rules to keep deficits under control contained little to actually help nations with high borrowing costs.

The summit declaration also skirted the continuing problems in Greece, where a second bailout is being held up by the inability of the government in Athens to complete a deal with private holders of Greek bonds over the losses they should accept.

Until Athens and its private-sector creditors can agree on a $132 billion writedown on Greek government debt, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union are not prepared to sign off on a further bailout. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said the Greek situation would not be addressed until after representatives of Greece’s so-called troika of creditors — the European Union, the I.M.F. and the European Central Bank — report back on their investigation into what will be needed for Greece to manage its finances on its own.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, told a news conference at the end of the summit that there would be a “definitive agreement” on the private sector’s involvement in reducing Greek debt in coming days. After Monday night’s summit meeting, informal talks continued between the Greek prime minister, Lucas Papademos, and European officials.

Despite the various other problems to deal with, an agreement on the fiscal compact could clear the way for Germany to accept stronger efforts by the European Central Bank to support ailing countries and a more comprehensive bailout fund aimed at protecting Italy and Spain against the risk of default.

“It is an important step forward to a stability union,” Mrs. Merkel told reporters. “For those looking at the union and the euro from the outside, it is a very important to show this commitment.” Britain, which clashed openly with France and Germany last month over the pact, did not give any ground Monday and was joined by the Czech Republic, which also elected to stay outside.

“We are not signing this treaty,” David Cameron, the British prime minister, said. “We are not ratifying it. And it places no obligations” on the United Kingdom, he said.

He added: “Our national interest is that these countries get on and sort out the mess that is the euro.”

Mr. Sarkozy sounded philosophical about the Britons’ intransigence. “There are different degrees of integration and everyone is free to choose where they stand,” he said.

While European leaders agreed to bring a permanent bailout fund into existence earlier than previously foreseen, they postponed any final decisions on its ultimate size and how it will be financed. The International Monetary Fund has been pressing Europe to commit enough money to provide a credible backstop that would insure that Italy and Spain could pay their bills and continue to finance their debts.

Germany backed away from a suggestion that it wanted the government in Athens to cede temporarily control over tax and spending decisions to a new, all-powerful, budget commissioner before it can secure further bailouts. Italy won its battle to restrict the scope of the fiscal compact, which calls for making it easier to impose sanctions against countries that break European Union budget rules. The text said the compact would make it harder to block sanctions against countries that exceed annual deficit targets but that the same tough system would not apply to nations with excessive overall debt, like Italy.

The compact will come into force in those nations that agree to its terms once 12 euro zone nations have ratified it. That would prevent the project being held up if one or two nations hold referendums on the deal.

Still, impatience with the German focus on belt-tightening loomed large over the summit meeting.

“You don’t have to be an economics professor to know that if you have zero growth you are not going to sort things out,” said Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament. Critics of austerity point to Greece, which is being strangled by a vicious cycle of deficit cutting, declining tax revenues and more budget cutting, while making little if any progress on its overall budget deficit.

Guy Verhofstadt, leader of the centrist liberal and democrat group, and a former prime minister of Belgium, took a similar stand.

“The new agreement consolidates fiscal discipline but omits completely to address the other side of the coin — that of solidarity and investment that will create jobs and growth,” Mr. Verhofstadt said. “E.U. leaders should act instead of producing more paper.”

    European Leaders Agree to New Budget Discipline Measures, NYT, 30.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/world/europe/eu-leaders-fall-short-of-far-reaching-debt-solution.html

Citing Violence, Arab League Suspends Monitoring in Syria

January 28, 2012
The New York Times
By NADA BAKRI and KAREEM FAHIM

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Arab League suspended its monitoring mission in Syria on Saturday after a sharp escalation of violence there, as government armed forces battled opposition fighters across the country.

Intensified fighting in recent weeks has added weight to the belief, expressed by Arab League officials and others, that Syria’s civil conflict has moved well beyond the peaceful demonstration movement that began 10 months ago into an armed struggle against President Bashar al-Assad’s government in several parts of the country. Since its start, the upheaval has claimed more than 5,400 lives, according to the United Nations.

The head of the Arab League, Nabil al-Araby, said in a statement Saturday that after discussions with Arab foreign ministers, the 22-member body had decided to suspend the monitors’ mission in Syria because of “a severe deterioration in the situation and the continued use of violence.” A final decision about the mission’s future is due in the coming days.

Mr. Araby blamed the Syrian government for the bloodshed, saying that it has decided “to escalate the military option in complete violation of its commitments to the Arab plan” and added that “innocent citizens” were the victims. The Syrian government has denied that it is facing a popular uprising, insisting instead that it has been battling armed terrorist groups funded by foreign interests.

Mr. Araby’s deputy, Ahmed Ben Heli, told reporters at the League’s headquarters in Cairo that about 100 monitors would remain in Damascus in the meantime.

The monitoring mission’s effectiveness has come under increasingly sharp questioning since it began a month ago, and on Tuesday several gulf countries ended their participation in it. The head of the monitoring mission, Lt. Gen. Muhammad Ahmed al-Dabi, of Sudan, called on all Syrian parties to halt violence on Friday.

The mission’s mandate was to observe the implementation of a peace plan and was extended for a second month. The suspension came a week after the Arab League called on President Assad to step down and said it was going to take an Arab peace proposal to the United Nations to help end violence in Syria. That plan would have Mr. Assad hand power to a vice president while an interim government was formed. Mr. Araby and other Arab League officials were traveling to New York on Saturday in preparation to meet with United Nations officials.

Activists and residents have reported heavy clashes between security forces loyal to the government and opposition armed fighters on the outskirts of Damascus and in southern Syria.

The Arab League observers traveled to the town of Rankous on Saturday morning, a restive city near the Lebanese border from which the government has had to withdraw its troops. The observers never made it inside. One of the members of the team said that Syrian Army officers had told them it was too dangerous because snipers and gunmen were menacing the town.

During a visit to Rankous by reporters after the observers left, residents and fighters who said they were with the Free Syrian Army opposition militia told a different story. They said that the army, which had surrounded the town of 23,000 people with tanks, had been shelling for days. Most of the residents had fled, but about 50 families remained in the town, they said.

Soon after a group of reporters arrived in the center of Rankous, tanks could be seen taking up positions on the outskirts. Within about an hour, shelling and heavy machine gun fire could be heard. The Free Syrian Army fighters said government snipers were surrounding the town. Bullets whistled by a house where they had taken up positions.

By nightfall, at a spot on the edge of the town where observers had visited earlier in the morning and seen nothing, several tanks had moved into place, tightening a cordon around Rankous.

“It’s under the government’s full siege now,” said Col. Ammar Alwawi, an Free Syrian Army official speaking by phone from Turkey. “If the regime continues the use of force there, there will be a massacre. They can’t enter. There are civilians there who didn’t leave their houses.”

Nada Bakri reported from Beirut, and Kareem Fahim from Rankous, Syria.

    Citing Violence, Arab League Suspends Monitoring in Syria, NYT, 28.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/world/middleeast/arab-league-suspends-its-monitoring-in-syria.html

Iran Says It May Cut Off Its Oil Exports to Europe

January 26, 2012
The New York Times
By RICK GLADSTONE and J. DAVID GOODMAN

Iran struck a combative tone Thursday in its confrontation with the West over the nuclear issue, threatening to terminate oil exports to European nations even before their embargo takes effect this summer. But its president also acknowledged that the regimen of punitive sanctions imposed on Iran, which he had long dismissed as insignificant, were hurting ordinary Iranians.

“It is a big lie that they are not targeting the people,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said of the sanctions in a speech reported by Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency. Directing his ire at the Western powers that have imposed the sanctions, which have constricted Iran’s ability to sell oil and conduct international financial transactions, he said, “You are the real enemy of people and are putting pressure on them.”

Political analysts said Mr. Ahmadinejad’s acknowledgment of sanction pain, in an otherwise bellicose speech, was a departure from the government depiction of Iran as an immune fortress. They said it may reflect the harsh reality that the corrosive effect of sanctions on Iran’s currency, exports and employment could no longer be ignored by Iranian politicians facing their audience at home.

Just one day earlier, Mr. Ahmadinejad was forced to reverse himself and approve a sharp rise in bank deposit interest rates as part of an effort to stop a plunge in the value of Iran’s currency, the rial, which accelerated after the European Union announced the oil embargo on Monday. Many Iranians have been seeking to sell rials for gold and foreign currencies, fearful that their own money is becoming worthless.

“Iran’s official narrative has long been that sanctions have a negligible impact, and in fact have been helpful in making the country economically self-sufficient,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “While it may be tough to suddenly pivot from that and say that sanctions are the cause of Iran’s economic malaise, it’s no longer possible to dismiss the impact of sanctions when everyone in Iran has been affected by the country’s ongoing currency crisis.”

The uranium enrichment program at the heart of the sanctions has become the most urgent point of contention between Iran and the West, which has long suspected that the Iranians are working to build a nuclear weapon despite their repeated denials. Iran has said it is enriching uranium for civilian energy and medical purposes. Israel, which considers Iran its most dangerous adversary, has hinted at the possibility of a pre-emptive military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

In his speech, at an industrial project ceremony in southeast Iran, Mr. Ahmadinejad expressed his country’s willingness to re-engage with the Western powers in negotiations over its uranium enrichment program, as his foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, had said last week.

But Mr. Ahmadinejad also accused them of insincerity in their own offers to resume the talks, which were suspended a year ago.

“I admonish you to pave the right track and do not make any excuses while the time is ripe for negotiations,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. “Be friendly to Iranians because it is no longer a time of making noises and bullying others in the world.”

A more belligerent warning came from Iran’s Parliament, where lawmakers were working on a plan to stop Iran’s oil exports to Europe in retaliation for the embargo, which is to begin July 1.

“Europe will burn in the fire of Iran’s oil wells,” Nasser Soudani, a member of the Parliament’s energy committee, said in remarks carried by the Fars News Agency.

Under their plan, he said, “All European countries that made Iran the target of their sanctions will not be able to buy even one drop of oil from Iran.”

Mr. Soudani further predicted that the Europeans, who are heavily reliant on imported oil, would have no choice but to renounce the embargo because “abandoning Iran’s oil would mean the extinguishing of the candles of their economic lives.”

His remarks may have been intended to rattle the global oil market, where the price of crude has sometimes jumped in response to previous threats by Iran, the world’s fourth-largest oil exporter.

But crude prices, which have hovered around the $100-per-barrel range, were little changed on Thursday, partly reflecting what oil traders said was ample evidence that other producers — notably Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Libya — could compensate for any absence of Iranian oil.

Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Paris.

    Iran Says It May Cut Off Its Oil Exports to Europe?, NYT, 26.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/world/middleeast/ahmadinejad-says-iran-is-ready-for-nuclear-talks.html

Will Israel Attack Iran?

January 25, 2012
The New York Times
By RONEN BERGMAN

As the Sabbath evening approached on Jan. 13, Ehud Barak paced the wide living-room floor of his home high above a street in north Tel Aviv, its walls lined with thousands of books on subjects ranging from philosophy and poetry to military strategy. Barak, the Israeli defense minister, is the most decorated soldier in the country’s history and one of its most experienced and controversial politicians. He has served as chief of the general staff for the Israel Defense Forces, interior minister, foreign minister and prime minister. He now faces, along with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and 12 other members of Israel’s inner security cabinet, the most important decision of his life — whether to launch a pre-emptive attack against Iran. We met in the late afternoon, and our conversation — the first of several over the next week — lasted for two and a half hours, long past nightfall. “This is not about some abstract concept,” Barak said as he gazed out at the lights of Tel Aviv, “but a genuine concern. The Iranians are, after all, a nation whose leaders have set themselves a strategic goal of wiping Israel off the map.”

When I mentioned to Barak the opinion voiced by the former Mossad chief Meir Dagan and the former chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi — that the Iranian threat was not as imminent as he and Netanyahu have suggested and that a military strike would be catastrophic (and that they, Barak and Netanyahu, were cynically looking to score populist points at the expense of national security), Barak reacted with uncharacteristic anger. He and Netanyahu, he said, are responsible “in a very direct and concrete way for the existence of the State of Israel — indeed, for the future of the Jewish people.” As for the top-ranking military personnel with whom I’ve spoken who argued that an attack on Iran was either unnecessary or would be ineffective at this stage, Barak said: “It’s good to have diversity in thinking and for people to voice their opinions. But at the end of the day, when the military command looks up, it sees us — the minister of defense and the prime minister. When we look up, we see nothing but the sky above us.”

Netanyahu and Barak have both repeatedly stressed that a decision has not yet been made and that a deadline for making one has not been set. As we spoke, however, Barak laid out three categories of questions, which he characterized as “Israel’s ability to act,” “international legitimacy” and “necessity,” all of which require affirmative responses before a decision is made to attack:

1. Does Israel have the ability to cause severe damage to Iran’s nuclear sites and bring about a major delay in the Iranian nuclear project? And can the military and the Israeli people withstand the inevitable counterattack?

2. Does Israel have overt or tacit support, particularly from America, for carrying out an attack?

3. Have all other possibilities for the containment of Iran’s nuclear threat been exhausted, bringing Israel to the point of last resort? If so, is this the last opportunity for an attack?

For the first time since the Iranian nuclear threat emerged in the mid-1990s, at least some of Israel’s most powerful leaders believe that the response to all of these questions is yes.

At various points in our conversation, Barak underscored that if Israel or the rest of the world waits too long, the moment will arrive — sometime in the coming year, he says — beyond which it will no longer be possible to act. “It will not be possible to use any surgical means to bring about a significant delay,” he said. “Not for us, not for Europe and not for the United States. After that, the question will remain very important, but it will become purely theoretical and pass out of our hands — the statesmen and decision-makers — and into yours — the journalists and historians.”

Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s vice prime minister and minister of strategic affairs, is the third leg in the triangle supporting a very aggressive stance toward Iran. When I spoke with him on the afternoon of Jan. 18, the same day that Barak stated publicly that any decision to strike pre-emptively was “very far off,” Ya’alon, while reiterating that an attack was the last option, took pains to emphasize Israel’s resolve. “Our policy is that in one way or another, Iran’s nuclear program must be stopped,” he said. “It is a matter of months before the Iranians will be able to attain military nuclear capability. Israel should not have to lead the struggle against Iran. It is up to the international community to confront the regime, but nevertheless Israel has to be ready to defend itself. And we are prepared to defend ourselves,” Ya’alon went on, “in any way and anywhere that we see fit.”

For years, Israeli and American intelligence agencies assumed that if Iran were to gain the ability to build a bomb, it would be a result of its relationship with Russia, which was building a nuclear reactor for Iran at a site called Bushehr and had assisted the Iranians in their missile-development program. Throughout the 1990s, Israel and the United States devoted vast resources to weakening the nuclear links between Russia and Iran and applied enormous diplomatic pressure on Russia to cut off the relationship. Ultimately, the Russians made it clear that they would do all in their power to slow down construction on the Iranian reactor and assured Israel that even if it was completed (which it later was), it wouldn’t be possible to produce the refined uranium or plutonium needed for nuclear weapons there.

But the Russians weren’t Iran’s only connection to nuclear power. Robert Einhorn, currently special adviser for nonproliferation and arms control at the U. S. State Department, told me in 2003: “Both countries invested huge efforts, overt and covert, in order to find out what exactly Russia was supplying to Iran and in attempts to prevent that supply. We were convinced that this was the main path taken by Iran to secure the Doomsday weapon. But only very belatedly did it emerge that if Iran one day achieved its goal, it will not be by the Russian path at all. It made its great advance toward nuclear weaponry on another path altogether — a secret one — that was concealed from our sight.”

That secret path was Iran’s clandestine relationship with the network of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atom bomb. Cooperation between American, British and Israeli intelligence services led to the discovery in 2002 of a uranium-enrichment facility built with Khan’s assistance at Natanz, 200 miles south of Tehran. When this information was verified, a great outcry erupted throughout Israel’s military and intelligence establishment, with some demanding that the site be bombed at once. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did not authorize an attack. Instead, information about the site was leaked to a dissident Iranian group, the National Resistance Council, which announced that Iran was building a centrifuge installation at Natanz. This led to a visit to the site by a team of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, who were surprised to discover that Iran was well on its way to completing the nuclear fuel cycle — the series of processes for the enrichment of uranium that is a critical stage in producing a bomb.

Despite the discovery of the Natanz site and the international sanctions that followed, Israeli intelligence reported in early 2004 that Iran’s nuclear project was still progressing. Sharon assigned responsibility for putting an end to the program to Meir Dagan, then head of the Mossad. The two knew each other from the 1970s, when Sharon was the general in charge of the southern command of the Israel Defense Forces and Dagan was a young officer whom he put in charge of a top-secret unit whose purpose was the systematic assassination of Palestine Liberation Organization militiamen in the Gaza Strip. As Sharon put it at the time: “Dagan’s specialty is separating an Arab from his head.”

Sharon granted the Mossad virtually unlimited funds and powers to “stop the Iranian bomb.” As one recently retired senior Mossad officer told me: “There was no operation, there was no project that was not carried out because of a lack of funding.”

At a number of secret meetings with U.S. officials between 2004 and 2007, Dagan detailed a “five-front strategy” that involved political pressure, covert measures, counterproliferation, sanctions and regime change. In a secret cable sent to the U.S. in August 2007, he stressed that “the United States, Israel and like-minded countries must push on all five fronts in a simultaneous joint effort.” He went on to say: “Some are bearing fruit now. Others” — and here he emphasized efforts to encourage ethnic resistance in Iran — “will bear fruit in due time, especially if they are given more attention.”

From 2005 onward, various intelligence arms and the U.S. Treasury, working together with the Mossad, began a worldwide campaign to locate and sabotage the financial underpinnings of the Iranian nuclear project. The Mossad provided the Americans with information on Iranian firms that served as fronts for the country’s nuclear acquisitions and financial institutions that assisted in the financing of terrorist organizations, as well as a banking front established by Iran and Syria to handle all of these activities. The Americans subsequently tried to persuade several large corporations and European governments — especially France, Germany and Britain — to cease cooperating with Iranian financial institutions, and last month the Senate approved sanctions against Iran’s central bank.

In addition to these interventions, as well as to efforts to disrupt the supply of nuclear materials to Iran, since 2005 the Iranian nuclear project has been hit by a series of mishaps and disasters, for which the Iranians hold Western intelligence services — especially the Mossad — responsible. According to the Iranian media, two transformers blew up and 50 centrifuges were ruined during the first attempt to enrich uranium at Natanz in April 2006. A spokesman for the Iranian Atomic Energy Council stated that the raw materials had been “tampered with.” Between January 2006 and July 2007, three airplanes belonging to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards crashed under mysterious circumstances. Some reports said the planes had simply “stopped working.” The Iranians suspected the Mossad, as they did when they discovered that two lethal computer viruses had penetrated the computer system of the nuclear project and caused widespread damage, knocking out a large number of centrifuges.

In January 2007, several insulation units in the connecting fixtures of the centrifuges, which were purchased from a middleman on the black market in Eastern Europe, turned out to be flawed and unusable. Iran concluded that some of the merchants were actually straw companies that were set up to outfit the Iranian nuclear effort with faulty parts.

Of all the covert operations, the most controversial have been the assassinations of Iranian scientists working on the nuclear project. In January 2007, Dr. Ardeshir Husseinpour, a 44-year-old nuclear scientist working at the Isfahan uranium plant, died under mysterious circumstances. The official announcement of his death said he was asphyxiated “following a gas leak,” but Iranian intelligence is convinced that he was the victim of an Israeli assassination.

Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physicist, was killed in January 2010, when a booby-trapped motorcycle parked nearby exploded as he was getting into his car. (Some contend that Mohammadi was not killed by the Mossad, but by Iranian agents because of his supposed support for the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi.) Later that year, on Nov. 29, a manhunt took place in the streets of Tehran for two motorcyclists who had just blown up the cars of two senior figures in the Iranian nuclear project, Majid Shahriari and Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani. The motorcyclists attached limpet mines (also known as magnet bombs) to the cars and then sped away. Shahriari was killed by the blast in his Peugeot 405, but Abbassi-Davani and his wife managed to escape their car before it exploded. Following this assassination attempt, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appointed Abbassi-Davani vice president of Iran and head of the country’s atomic agency. Today he is heavily guarded wherever he goes, as is the scientific head of the nuclear project, Mohsin Fakhri-Zadeh, whose lectures at Tehran University were discontinued as a precautionary measure.

This past July, a motorcyclist ambushed Darioush Rezaei Nejad, a nuclear physicist and a researcher for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, as he sat in his car outside his house. The biker drew a pistol and shot the scientist dead through the car window.

Four months later, in November, a huge explosion occurred at a Revolutionary Guards base 30 miles west of Tehran. The cloud of smoke was visible from the city, where residents could feel the ground shake and hear their windows rattle, and satellite photos showed that almost the entire base was obliterated. Brig. Gen. Hassan Moghaddam, head of the Revolutionary Guards’ missile-development division, was killed, as were 16 of his personnel. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s spiritual leader, paid respect by coming to the funeral service for the general and visiting the widow at her home, where he called Moghaddam a martyr.

Just this month, on Jan. 11, two years after his colleague and friend Massoud Ali Mohammadi was killed, a deputy director at the Natanz uranium-enrichment facility named Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan left his home and headed for a laboratory in downtown Tehran. A few months earlier, a photograph of him accompanying Ahmadinejad on a tour of nuclear installations appeared in newspapers across the globe. Two motorcyclists drove up to his car and attached a limpet mine that killed him on the spot.

Israelis cannot enter Iran, so Israel, Iranian officials believe, has devoted huge resources to recruiting Iranians who leave the country on business trips and turning them into agents. Some have been recruited under a false flag, meaning that the organization’s recruiters pose as other nationalities, so that the Iranian agents won’t know they are on the payroll of “the Zionist enemy,” as Israel is called in Iran. Also, as much as possible, the Mossad prefers to carry out its violent operations based on the blue-and-white principle, a reference to the colors of Israel’s national flag, which means that they are executed only by Israeli citizens who are regular Mossad operatives and not by assassins recruited in the target country. Operating in Iran, however, is impossible for the Mossad’s sabotage-and-assassination unit, known as Caesarea, so the assassins must come from elsewhere. Iranian intelligence believes that over the last several years, the Mossad has financed and armed two Iranian opposition groups, the Muhjahedin Khalq (MEK) and the Jundallah, and has set up a forward base in Kurdistan to mobilize the Kurdish minority in Iran, as well as other minorities, training some of them at a secret base near Tel Aviv.

Officially, Israel has never admitted any involvement in these assassinations, and after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke out against the killing of Ahmadi-Roshan this month, President Shimon Peres said he had no knowledge of Israeli involvement. The Iranians vowed revenge after the murder, and on Jan. 13, as I spoke with Ehud Barak at his home in Tel Aviv, the country’s intelligence community was conducting an emergency operation to thwart a joint attack by Iran and Hezbollah against Israeli and Jewish targets in Bangkok. Local Thai forces, reportedly acting on information supplied by the Mossad, raided a Hezbollah hideout in Bangkok and later apprehended a member of the terror cell as he tried to flee the country. The prisoner reportedly confessed that he and his fellow cell members intended to blow up the Israeli Embassy and a synagogue.

Meir Dagan, while not taking credit for the assassinations, has praised the hits against Iranian scientists attributed to the Mossad, saying that beyond “the removal of important brains” from the project, the killings have brought about what is referred to in the Mossad as white defection — in other words, the Iranian scientists are so frightened that many have requested to be transferred to civilian projects. “There is no doubt,” a former top Mossad official told me over breakfast on Jan. 11, just a few hours after news of Ahmadi-Roshan’s assassination came from Tehran, “that being a scientist in a prestigious nuclear project that is generously financed by the state carries with it advantages like status, advancement, research budgets and fat salaries. On the other hand, when a scientist — one who is not a trained soldier or used to facing life-threatening situations, who has a wife and children — watches his colleagues being bumped off one after the other, he definitely begins to fear that the day will come when a man on a motorbike knocks on his car window.”

As we spoke, a man approached and, having recognized me as a journalist who reports on these issues, apologized before asking: “When is the war going to break out? When will the Iranians bomb us?” The Mossad official smiled as I tried to reassure the man that we wouldn’t be nuked tomorrow. Similar scenes occur almost every day — Israelis watch the news, have heard that bomb shelters are being prepared, know that Israel test-fired a missile into the sea two months ago — and a kind of panic has begun to overtake Israeli society, anxiety that missiles will start raining down soon.

Dagan believes that his five-fronts strategy has succeeded in significantly delaying Iran’s progress toward developing nuclear weapons; specifically “the use of all the weapons together,” he told me and a small group of Israeli journalists early last year. “In the mind of the Iranian citizen, a link has been created between his economic difficulties and the nuclear project. Today in Iran, there is a profound internal debate about this matter, which has divided the Iranian leadership.” He beamed when he added, “It pleases me that the timeline of the project has been pushed forward several times since 2003 because of these mysterious disruptions.”

Barak and Netanyahu are less convinced of the Mossad’s long-term success. From the beginning of their terms (Barak as defense minister in June 2007, Netanyahu as prime minister in March 2009), they have held the opinion that Israel must have a military option ready in case covert efforts fail. Barak ordered extensive military preparations for an attack on Iran that continue to this day and have become more frequent in recent months. He was not alone in fearing that the Mossad’s covert operations, combined with sanctions, would not be sufficient. The I.D.F. and military intelligence have also experienced waning enthusiasm. Three very senior military intelligence officers, one who is still serving and two who retired recently, told me that with all due respect for Dagan’s success in slowing down the Iranian nuclear project, Iran was still making progress. One recalled Israel’s operations against Iraq’s nuclear program in the late 1970s, when the Mossad eliminated some of the scientists working on the project and intimidated others. On the night of April 6, 1979, a team of Mossad operatives entered the French port town La Seyne-sur-Mer and blew up a shipment necessary for the cooling system of the Iraqi reactor’s core that was being manufactured in France. The French police found no trace of the perpetrators. An unknown organization for the defense of the environment claimed responsibility.

The attack was successful, but a year later the damage was repaired and further sabotage efforts were thwarted. The project advanced until late in 1980, when it was discovered that a shipment of fuel rods containing enriched uranium had been sent from France to Baghdad, and they were about to be fed into the reactor’s core. Israel determined that it had no other option but to launch Operation Opera, a surprise airstrike in June 1981 on the Tammuz-Osirak reactor just outside Baghdad.

Similarly, Dagan’s critics say, the Iranians have managed to overcome most setbacks and to replace the slain scientists. According to latest intelligence, Iran now has some 10,000 functioning centrifuges, and they have streamlined the enrichment process. Iran today has five tons of low-grade fissile material, enough, when converted to high-grade material, to make about five to six bombs; it also has about 175 pounds of medium-grade material, of which it would need about 500 pounds to make a bomb. It is believed that Iran’s nuclear scientists estimate that it will take them nine months, from the moment they are given the order, to assemble their first explosive device and another six months to be able to reduce it to the dimensions of a payload for their Shahab-3 missiles, which are capable of reaching Israel. They are holding the fissile material at sites across the country, most notably at the Fordo facility, near the holy city Qom, in a bunker that Israeli intelligence estimates is 220 feet deep, beyond the reach of even the most advanced bunker-busting bombs possessed by the United States.

Barak serves as the senior Israeli representative in the complex dialogue with the United States on this topic. He disagrees with the parallels that some Israeli politicians, mainly his boss, Netanyahu, draw between Ahmadinejad and Adolf Hitler, and espouses far more moderate views. “I accept that Iran has other reasons for developing nuclear bombs, apart from its desire to destroy Israel, but we cannot ignore the risk,” he told me earlier this month. “An Iranian bomb would ensure the survival of the current regime, which otherwise would not make it to its 40th anniversary in light of the admiration that the young generation in Iran has displayed for the West. With a bomb, it would be very hard to budge the administration.” Barak went on: “The moment Iran goes nuclear, other countries in the region will feel compelled to do the same. The Saudi Arabians have told the Americans as much, and one can think of both Turkey and Egypt in this context, not to mention the danger that weapons-grade materials will leak out to terror groups.

“From our point of view,” Barak said, “a nuclear state offers an entirely different kind of protection to its proxies. Imagine if we enter another military confrontation with Hezbollah, which has over 50,000 rockets that threaten the whole area of Israel, including several thousand that can reach Tel Aviv. A nuclear Iran announces that an attack on Hezbollah is tantamount to an attack on Iran. We would not necessarily give up on it, but it would definitely restrict our range of operations.”

At that point Barak leaned forward and said with the utmost solemnity: “And if a nuclear Iran covets and occupies some gulf state, who will liberate it? The bottom line is that we must deal with the problem now.”

He warned that no more than one year remains to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weaponry. This is because it is close to entering its “immunity zone” — a term coined by Barak that refers to the point when Iran’s accumulated know-how, raw materials, experience and equipment (as well as the distribution of materials among its underground facilities) — will be such that an attack could not derail the nuclear project. Israel estimates that Iran’s nuclear program is about nine months away from being able to withstand an Israeli attack; America, with its superior firepower, has a time frame of 15 months. In either case, they are presented with a very narrow window of opportunity. One very senior Israeli security source told me: “The Americans tell us there is time, and we tell them that they only have about six to nine months more than we do and that therefore the sanctions have to be brought to a culmination now, in order to exhaust that track.”

Many European analysts and some intelligence agencies have in the past responded to Israel’s warnings with skepticism, if not outright suspicion. Some have argued that Israel has intentionally exaggerated its assessments to create an atmosphere of fear that would drag Europe into its extensive economic campaign against Iran, a skepticism bolstered by the C.I.A.’s incorrect assessment about Iraqi W.M.D. before to the Iraq war.

Israel’s discourse with the United States on the subject of Iran’s nuclear project is more significant, and more fraught, than it is with Europe. The U.S. has made efforts to stiffen sanctions against Iran and to mobilize countries like Russia and China to apply sanctions in exchange for substantial American concessions. But beneath the surface of this cooperation, there are signs of mutual suspicion. As one senior American official wrote to the State Department and the Pentagon in November 2009, after an Israeli intelligence projection that Iran would have a complete nuclear arsenal by 2012: “It is unclear if the Israelis firmly believe this or are using worst-case estimates to raise greater urgency from the United States.”

For their part, the Israelis suspect that the Obama administration has abandoned any aggressive strategy that would ensure the prevention of a nuclear Iran and is merely playing a game of words to appease them. The Israelis find evidence of this in the shift in language used by the administration, from “threshold prevention” — meaning American resolve to stop Iran from having a nuclear-energy program that could allow for the ability to create weapons — to “weapons prevention,” which means the conditions can exist, but there is an American commitment to stop Iran from assembling an actual bomb.

“I fail to grasp the Americans’ logic,” a senior Israeli intelligence source told me. “If someone says we’ll stop them from getting there by praying for more glitches in the centrifuges, I understand. If someone says we must attack soon to stop them, I get it. But if someone says we’ll stop them after they are already there, that I do not understand.”

Over the past year, Western intelligence agencies, in particular the C.I.A., have moved closer to Israel’s assessments of the Iranian nuclear project. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta expressed this explicitly when he said that Iran would be able to reach nuclear-weapons capabilities within a year. The International Atomic Energy Agency published a scathing report stating that Iran was in breach of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and was possibly trying to develop nuclear weapons. Emboldened by this newfound accord, Israel’s leaders have adopted a harsher tone against Iran. Ya’alon, the deputy prime minister, told me in October: “We have had some arguments with the U.S. administration over the past two years, but on the Iranian issue we have managed to close the gaps to a certain extent. The president’s statements at his last meeting with the prime minister — that ‘we are committed to prevent ’ and ‘all the options are on the table’ — are highly important. They began with the sanctions too late, but they have moved from a policy of engagement to a much more active (sanctions) policy against Iran. All of these are positive developments.” On the other hand, Ya’alon sighed as he admitted: “The main arguments are ahead of us. This is clear.”

Now that the facts have been largely agreed upon, the arguments Ya’alon anticipates are those that will stem from the question of how to act — and what will happen if Israel decides that the moment for action has arrived. The most delicate issue between the two countries is what America is signaling to Israel and whether Israel should inform America in advance of a decision to attack.

Matthew Kroenig is the Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and worked as a special adviser in the Pentagon from July 2010 to July 2011. One of his tasks was defense policy and strategy on Iran. When I spoke with Kroenig last week, he said: “My understanding is that the United States has asked Israel not to attack Iran and to provide Washington with notice if it intends to strike. Israel responded negatively to both requests. It refused to guarantee that it will not attack or to provide prior notice if it does.” Kroenig went on, “My hunch is that Israel would choose to give warning of an hour or two, just enough to maintain good relations between the countries but not quite enough to allow Washington to prevent the attack.” Kroenig said Israel was correct in its timeline of Iran’s nuclear development and that the next year will be critical. “The future can evolve in three ways,” he said. “Iran and the international community could agree to a negotiated settlement; Israel and the United States could acquiesce to a nuclear-armed Iran; or Israel or the United States could attack. Nobody wants to go in the direction of a military strike,” he added, “but unfortunately this is the most likely scenario. The more interesting question is not whether it happens but how. The United States should treat this option more seriously and begin gathering international support and building the case for the use of force under international law.”

In June 2007, I met with a former director of the Mossad, Meir Amit, who handed me a document stamped, “Top secret, for your eyes only.” Amit wanted to demonstrate the complexity of the relations between the United States and Israel, especially when it comes to Israeli military operations in the Middle East that could significantly impact American interests in the region.

Almost 45 years ago, on May 25, 1967, in the midst of the international crisis that precipitated the Six-Day War, Amit, then head of the Mossad, summoned John Hadden, the C.I.A. chief in Tel Aviv, to an urgent meeting at his home. The meeting took place against the background of the mounting tensions in the Middle East, the concentration of a massive Egyptian force in the Sinai Peninsula, the closing of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and the threats by President Gamal Abdel Nasser to destroy the State of Israel.

In what he later described as “the most difficult meeting I have ever had with a representative of a foreign intelligence service,” Amit laid out Israel’s arguments for attacking Egypt. The conversation between them, which was transcribed in the document Amit passed on to me, went as follows:

Amit: “We are approaching a turning point that is more important for you than it is for us. After all, you people know everything. We are in a grave situation, and I believe we have reached it, because we have not acted yet. . . . Personally, I am sorry that we did not react immediately. It is possible that we may have broken some rules if we had, but the outcome would have been to your benefit. I was in favor of acting. We should have struck before the build-up.”

Hadden: “That would have brought Russia and the United States against you.”

Amit: “You are wrong. . . . We have now reached a new stage, after the expulsion of the U.N. inspectors. You should know that it’s your problem, not ours.”

Hadden: “Help us by giving us a good reason to come in on your side. Get them to fire at something, a ship, for example.”

Amit: “That is not the point.”

Hadden: “If you attack, the United States will land forces to help the attacked state protect itself.”

Amit: “I can’t believe what I am hearing.”

Hadden: “Do not surprise us.”

Amit: “Surprise is one of the secrets of success.”

Hadden: “I don’t know what the significance of American aid is for you.”

Amit: “It isn’t aid for us, it is for yourselves.”

That ill-tempered meeting, and Hadden’s threats, encouraged the Israeli security cabinet to ban the military from carrying out an immediate assault against the Egyptian troops in the Sinai, although they were perceived as a grave threat to the existence of Israel. Amit did not accept Hadden’s response as final, however, and flew to the United States to meet with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Upon his return, he reported to the Israeli cabinet that when he told McNamara that Israel could not reconcile itself to Egypt’s military actions, the secretary replied, “I read you very clearly.” When Amit then asked McNamara if he should remain in Washington for another week, to see how matters developed, McNamara responded, “Young man, go home, that is where you are needed now.”

From this exchange, Amit concluded that the United States was giving Israel “a flickering green light” to attack Egypt. He told the cabinet that if the Americans were given one more week to exhaust their diplomatic efforts, “they will hesitate to act against us.” The next day, the cabinet decided to begin the Six-Day War, which changed the course of Middle Eastern history.

Amit handed me the minutes of that conversation from the same armchair that he sat in during his meeting with Hadden. It is striking how that dialogue anticipated the one now under way between Israel and the United States. Substitute “Tehran” for “Cairo” and “Strait of Hormuz” for “Straits of Tiran,” and it could have taken place this past week. Since 1967, the unspoken understanding that America should agree, at least tacitly, to Israeli military actions has been at the center of relations between the two countries.

During my lengthy conversation with Barak, I pulled out the transcript of the Amit-Hadden meeting. Amit was his commander when Barak was a young officer, in a unit that carried out commando raids deep inside enemy territory. Barak, a history buff, smiled at the comparison, and then he completely rejected it. “Relations with the United States are far closer today,” he said. “There are no threats, no recriminations, only cooperation and mutual respect for each other’s sovereignty.”

In our conversation on Jan. 18, Ya’alon, the deputy prime minister, was sharp in his criticism of the international community’s stance on Iran. “These are critical hours on the question of which way the international community will take the policy,” he said. “The West must stand united and resolute, and what is happening so far is not enough. The Iranian regime must be placed under pressure and isolated. Sanctions that bite must be imposed against it, something that has not happened as yet, and a credible military option should be on the table as a last resort. In order to avoid it, the sanctions must be stepped up.” It is, of course, important for Ya’alon to argue that this is not just an Israeli-Iranian dispute, but a threat to America’s well-being. “The Iranian regime will be several times more dangerous if it has a nuclear device in its hands,” he went on. “One that it could bring into the United States. It is not for nothing that it is establishing bases for itself in Latin America and creating links with drug dealers on the U.S.-Mexican border. This is happening in order to smuggle ordnance into the United States for the carrying out of terror attacks. Imagine this regime getting nuclear weapons to the U.S.-Mexico border and managing to smuggle it into Texas, for example. This is not a far-fetched scenario.”

Ehud Barak dislikes this kind of criticism of the United States, and in a rather testy tone in a phone conversation with me on Jan. 18 said: “Our discourse with the United States is based on listening and mutual respect, together with an understanding that it is our primary ally. The U.S. is what helps us to preserve the military advantage of Israel, more than ever before. This administration contributes to the security of Israel in an extraordinary way and does a lot to prevent a nuclear Iran. We’re not in confrontation with America. We’re not in agreement on every detail, we can have differences — and not unimportant ones — but we should not talk as if we are speaking about a hostile entity.”

Over the last four years, since Barak was appointed minister of defense, the Israeli military has prepared in unprecedented ways for a strike against Iran. It has also grappled with questions of how it will manage the repercussions of such an attack. Much of the effort is dedicated to strengthening the country’s civil defenses — bomb shelters, air-raid sirens and the like — areas in which serious defects were discovered during the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Civilian disaster exercises are being held intermittently, and gas masks have been distributed to the population.

On the operational level, any attack would be extremely complex. Iran learned the lessons of Iraq, and has dispersed its nuclear installations throughout its vast territory. There is no way of knowing for certain if the Iranians have managed to conceal any key facilities from Israeli intelligence. Israel has limited air power and no aircraft carriers. If it attacked Iran, because of the 1,000 or so miles between its bases and its potential targets, Israeli planes would have to refuel in the air at least once (and more than once if faced with aerial engagements). The bombardment would require pinpoint precision in order to spend the shortest amount of time over the targets, which are heavily defended by antiaircraft-missile batteries.

In the end, a successful attack would not eliminate the knowledge possessed by the project’s scientists, and it is possible that Iran, with its highly developed technological infrastructure, would be able to rebuild the damaged or wrecked sites. What is more, unlike Syria, which did not respond after the destruction of its reactor in 2007, Iran has openly declared that it would strike back ferociously if attacked. Iran has hundreds of Shahab missiles armed with warheads that can reach Israel, and it could harness Hezbollah to strike at Israeli communities with its 50,000 rockets, some of which can hit Tel Aviv. (Hamas in Gaza, which is also supported by Iran, might also fire a considerable number of rockets on Israeli cities.) According to Israeli intelligence, Iran and Hezbollah have also planted roughly 40 terrorist sleeper cells across the globe, ready to hit Israeli and Jewish targets if Iran deems it necessary to retaliate. And if Israel responded to a Hezbollah bombardment against Lebanese targets, Syria may feel compelled to begin operations against Israel, leading to a full-scale war. On top of all this, Tehran has already threatened to close off the Persian Gulf to shipping, which would generate a devastating ripple through the world economy as a consequence of the rise in the price of oil.

The proponents of an attack argue that the problems delineated above, including missiles from Iran and Lebanon and terror attacks abroad, are ones Israel will have to deal with regardless of whether it attacks Iran now — and if Iran goes nuclear, dealing with these problems will become far more difficult.

The Israeli Air Force is where most of the preparations are taking place. It maintains planes with the long-range capacity required to deliver ordnance to targets in Iran, as well as unmanned aircraft capable of carrying bombs to those targets and remaining airborne for up to 48 hours. Israel believes that these platforms have the capacity to cause enough damage to set the Iranian nuclear project back by three to five years.

In January 2010, the Mossad sent a hit team to Dubai to liquidate the high-ranking Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was coordinating the smuggling of rockets from Iran to Gaza. The assassination was carried out successfully, but almost the entire operation and all its team members were recorded on closed-circuit surveillance TV cameras. The operation caused a diplomatic uproar and was a major embarrassment for the Mossad. In the aftermath, Netanyahu decided not to extend Dagan’s already exceptionally long term, informing him that he would be replaced in January 2011. That decision was not well received by Dagan, and three days before he was due to leave his post, I and several other Israeli journalists were surprised to receive invitations to a meeting with him at Mossad headquarters.

We were told to congregate in the parking lot of a movie-theater complex north of Tel Aviv, where we were warned by Mossad security personnel, “Do not bring computers, recording devices, cellphones. You will be carefully searched, and we want to avoid unpleasantness. Leave everything in your cars and enter our vehicles carrying only paper and pens.” We were then loaded into cars with opaque windows and escorted by black Jeeps to a site that we knew was not marked on any map. The cars went through a series of security checks, requiring our escorts to explain who we were and show paperwork at each roadblock.

This was the first time in the history of the Mossad that a group of journalists was invited to meet the director of the organization at one of the country’s most secret sites. After the search was performed and we were seated, the outgoing chief entered the room. Dagan, who was wounded twice in combat, once seriously, during the Six-Day War, started by saying: “There are advantages to being wounded in the back. You have a doctor’s certificate that you have a backbone.” He then went into a discourse about Iran and sharply criticized the heads of government for even contemplating “the foolish idea” of attacking it.

“The use of state violence has intolerable costs,” he said. “The working assumption that it is possible to totally halt the Iranian nuclear project by means of a military attack is incorrect. There is no such military capability. It is possible to cause a delay, but even that would only be for a limited period of time.”

He warned that attacking Iran would start an unwanted war with Hezbollah and Hamas: “I am not convinced that Syria will not be drawn into the war. While the Syrians won’t charge at us in tanks, we will see a massive offensive of missiles against our home front. Civilians will be on the front lines. What is Israel’s defensive capability against such an offensive? I know of no solution that we have for this problem.”

Asked if he had said these things to Israel’s decision-makers, Dagan replied: “I have expressed my opinion to them with the same emphasis as I have here now. Sometimes I raised my voice, because I lose my temper easily and am overcome with zeal when I speak.”

In later conversations Dagan criticized Netanyahu and Barak, and in a lecture at Tel Aviv University he observed, “The fact that someone has been elected doesn’t mean that he is smart.”

In the audience at that lecture was Rafi Eitan, 85, one of the Mossad’s most seasoned and well-known operatives. Eitan agreed with Dagan that Israel lacked the capabilities to attack Iran. When I spoke with him in October, Eitan said: “As early as 2006 (when Eitan was a senior cabinet minister), I told the cabinet that Israel couldn’t afford to attack Iran. First of all, because the home front is not ready. I told anyone who wanted and still wants to attack, they should just think about two missiles a day, no more than that, falling on Tel Aviv. And what will you do then? Beyond that, our attack won’t cause them significant damage. I was told during one of the discussions that it would delay them for three years, and I replied, ‘Not even three months.’ After all, they have scattered their facilities all over the country and under the ground. ‘What harm can you do to them?’ I asked. ‘You’ll manage to hit the entrances, and they’ll have them rebuilt in three months.’ ”

Asked if it was possible to stop a determined Iran from becoming a nuclear power, Eitan replied: “No. In the end they’ll get their bomb. The way to fight it is by changing the regime there. This is where we have really failed. We should encourage the opposition groups who turn to us over and over to ask for our help, and instead, we send them away empty-handed.”

Israeli law stipulates that only the 14 members of the security cabinet have the authority to make decisions on whether to go to war. The cabinet has not yet been asked to vote, but the ministers might, under pressure from Netanyahu and Barak, answer these crucial questions about Iran in the affirmative: that these coming months are indeed the last opportunity to attack before Iran enters the “immunity zone”; that the broad international agreement on Iran’s intentions and the failure of sanctions to stop the project have created sufficient legitimacy for an attack; and that Israel does indeed possess the capabilities to cause significant damage to the Iranian project.

In recent weeks, Israelis have obsessively questioned whether Netanyahu and Barak are really planning a strike or if they are just putting up a front to pressure Europe and the U.S. to impose tougher sanctions. I believe that both of these things are true, but as a senior intelligence officer who often participates in meetings with Israel’s top leadership told me, the only individuals who really know their intentions are, of course, Netanyahu and Barak, and recent statements that no decision is imminent must surely be taken into account.

After speaking with many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012. Perhaps in the small and ever-diminishing window that is left, the United States will choose to intervene after all, but here, from the Israeli perspective, there is not much hope for that. Instead there is that peculiar Israeli mixture of fear — rooted in the sense that Israel is dependent on the tacit support of other nations to survive — and tenacity, the fierce conviction, right or wrong, that only the Israelis can ultimately defend themselves.

Ronen Bergman, an analyst for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, is the author of ‘‘The Secret War With Iran’’ and a contributing writer for the magazine.

Editor: Joel Lovell

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 25, 2012

An earlier version misstated part of the name of a treaty that limits the proliferation

of nuclear weapons. It is the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, not Proliferation.

    Will Israel Attack Iran?, NYT, 25.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/magazine/will-israel-attack-iran.html

Israel Senses Bluffing in Iran’s Threats of Retaliation

January 26, 2012
The New York Times
By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — Israeli intelligence estimates, backed by academic studies, have cast doubt on the widespread assumption that a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would set off a catastrophic set of events like a regional conflagration, widespread acts of terrorism and sky-high oil prices.

The estimates, which have been largely adopted by the country’s most senior officials, conclude that the threat of Iranian retaliation is partly bluff. They are playing an important role in Israel’s calculation of whether ultimately to strike Iran, or to try to persuade the United States to do so, even as Tehran faces tough new economic sanctions from the West.

“A war is no picnic,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio in November. But if Israel feels itself forced into action, the retaliation would be bearable, he said. “There will not be 100,000 dead or 10,000 dead or 1,000 dead. The state of Israel will not be destroyed.”

The Iranian government, which says its nuclear program is for civilian purposes, has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz — through which 90 percent of gulf oil passes — and if attacked, to retaliate with all its military might.

But Israeli assessments reject the threats as overblown. Mr. Barak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have embraced those analyses as they focus on how to stop what they view as Iran’s determination to obtain nuclear weapons.

No issue in Israel is more fraught than the debate over the wisdom and feasibility of a strike on Iran. Some argue that even a successful military strike would do no more than delay any Iranian nuclear weapons program, and perhaps increase Iran’s determination to acquire the capability. Security officials are increasingly kept from journalists or barred from discussing Iran. Much of the public talk is as much message delivery as actual policy.

With the region in turmoil and the Europeans having agreed to harsh sanctions against Iran, strategic assessments can quickly lose their currency. “They’re like cartons of milk — check the sell-by date,” one senior official said.

But conversations with eight current and recent top Israeli security officials suggested several things: since Israel has been demanding the new sanctions, including an oil embargo and seizure of Iran’s Central Bank assets, it will give the sanctions some months to work; the sanctions are viewed here as probably insufficient; a military attack remains a very real option; and postattack situations are considered less perilous than one in which Iran has nuclear weapons.

“Take every scenario of confrontation and attack by Iran and its proxies and then ask yourself, ‘How would it look if they had a nuclear weapon?’ ” a senior official said. “In nearly every scenario, the situation looks worse.”

The core analysis is based on an examination of Iran’s interests and abilities, along with recent threats and conflicts. Before the United States-led war against Iraq in 1991, Saddam Hussein vowed that if attacked he would “burn half of Israel.” He fired about 40 Scud missiles at Israel, which did limited damage. Similar fears of retaliation were voiced before the Iraq war in 2003 and in 2006, during Israel’s war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. In the latter, about 4,000 rockets were fired at Israel by Hezbollah, most of them causing limited harm.

“If you put all those retaliations together and add in the terrorism of recent years, we are probably facing some multiple of that,” a retired official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, citing an internal study. “I’m not saying Iran will not react. But it will be nothing like London during World War II.”

A paper soon to be published by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, written by Amos Yadlin, former chief of military intelligence, and Yoel Guzansky, who headed the Iran desk at Israel’s National Security Council until 2009, argues that the Iranian threat to close the Strait of Hormuz is largely a bluff.

The paper contends that, despite the risks of Iranian provocation, Iran would not be able to close the waterway for any length of time and that it would not be in Iran’s own interest to do so.

“If others are closing the taps on you, why close your own?” Mr. Guzansky said. Sealing the strait could also lead to all-out confrontation with the United States, something the authors say they believe Iran wants to avoid.

A separate paper just published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies says that the fear of missile warfare against Israel is exaggerated since the missiles would be able to inflict only limited physical damage.

Most Israeli analysts, like most officials and analysts abroad, reject these arguments. They say that Iran has been preparing for an attack for some years and will react robustly, as will its allies, Hezbollah and Hamas. Moreover, they say, an attack will at best delay the Iranian program by a couple of years and lead Tehran to redouble its efforts to build such a weapon.

But Mr. Barak and Mr. Netanyahu believe that those concerns will pale if Iran does get a nuclear weapon. This was a point made in a public forum in Jerusalem this week by Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel, chief of the army’s planning division. Speaking of the former leaders of Libya and Iraq, he said, “Who would have dared deal with Qaddafi or Saddam Hussein if they had a nuclear capability? No way.”

General Eshel added that when a senior Indian officer was visiting recently, he was asked why the Indians had done so little in response to the 2008 attacks in Mumbai. “When the other side has a nuclear capability and is prepared to use it, you think twice,” the officer replied, referring to Pakistan.

Mr. Netanyahu has made no secret of his belief that the current Iranian leadership, which has called for Israel’s destruction and which finances and arms militant groups on Israel’s borders, is the contemporary equivalent of the Nazis who tried to eliminate the Jews.

Both Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Barak argue that sanctions on Iran’s banking and energy sectors, like the ones getting under way, are vital tools for pressuring the Iranian government internally and keeping it under world opprobrium. But they also suspect that such sanctions will not slow the country’s nuclear program and therefore consider a military option to be vital.

“With all the sanctions, which are unprecedented,” Mr. Barak said on the radio this week, “I don’t think we are very close to a situation in which the Iranian leaders will look each other in the eye and say: ‘There is no choice. We have to stop the nuclear program.’ ”

Mr. Netanyahu has told visitors that he believes the Tehran government to be deeply unpopular, indeed despised, and that a careful attack on its nuclear facilities might even be welcomed by Iranian citizens. They might see it, he has said, as the equivalent of removing the crown jewels from a hated monarch.

Most analysts here and abroad take a different view. They argue that while the Iranian government remains unpopular, the nuclear program has wide support in Iran, and one way to unite the people behind their rulers would be through an Israeli strike.

A former senior official who had top security clearance said he was worried that Mr. Barak and Mr. Netanyahu wanted to attack Iran — a step requiring agreement from other top ministers — and that such a step would be catastrophic both militarily and diplomatically.

“The Iranians have 400 missiles they can shoot at Israel,” he said. “And imagine Israel’s isolation after it attacked. For what? A delay of a year and a half? We are successfully delaying them with other methods.” That was a reference to the sabotage of the Iranian program through the sale of faulty parts and the introduction of computer worms and malfunctions as well as the killing of nuclear scientists.

The official said that the defense establishment was not enthusiastic about an attack. It hoped that sanctions and diplomacy would work and that if military action were needed it would come from the United States.

But this approach poses a difficulty. America’s weapons and equipment are far more powerful than Israel’s. So as Iran enriches uranium underground, Washington can wait longer to decide to attack and still be effective. Israel worries that in the coming year Iran will enter what officials call a zone of immunity, meaning its facilities will move beyond reach.

On Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu spoke on International Holocaust Remembrance Day and reminded his listeners why he might feel the need for Israel to launch an attack. He said: “I want to mention the main lesson of the Holocaust when it comes to our fate. We can only rely on ourselves.”

Isabel Kershner contributed reporting.

    Israel Senses Bluffing in Iran’s Threats of Retaliation, NYT, 26.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/world/middleeast/israelis-see-irans-threats-of-retaliation-as-bluff.html

U.S. Military Frees 2 Western Hostages From Somali Pirates

January 25, 2012
The New York Times
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

KHARTOUM, Sudan — American commandos raced into Somalia early Wednesday and rescued two aid workers, an American woman and a Danish man, after a shootout with Somali pirates who had been holding them captive for months.

The American forces — drawn from the same Navy commando unit that killed Osama bin Laden — swooped in and killed nine pirates before spiriting away the hostages, who were not harmed, American officials said.

It appeared that President Obama was fully aware of the raid as he was about to give his State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, which would have been early Wednesday in Somalia.

When Mr. Obama was overheard congratulating Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta as the president entered the House chamber for his State of the Union Message, the two hostages were already safe, though the mission was not yet complete. The president made no mention of the rescue in Somalia, but he did refer to Bin Laden’s killing in a similar operation conducted in May by Navy Seals.

In a statement on Wednesday, the president said he authorized the operation on Monday, and he mentioned the American hostage, Jessica Buchanan, by name.

“Thanks to the extraordinary courage and capabilities of our Special Operations forces, yesterday Jessica Buchanan was rescued and she is on her way home. As commander in chief, I could not be prouder of the troops who carried out this mission, and the dedicated professionals who supported their efforts.”

The statement continued: “Last night I spoke with Jessica Buchanan’s father and told him that all Americans have Jessica in our thoughts and prayers and give thanks that she will soon be reunited with her family. The United States will not tolerate the abduction of our people, and will spare no effort to secure the safety of our citizens and to bring their captors to justice. This is yet another message to the world that the United States of America will stand strongly against any threats to our people.”

American officials said Wednesday that the assault team for the hostage-rescue mission drew from the Navy commando unit commonly referred to as Seal Team Six, the Navy’s top-tier counterterrorism organization, which carried out the deadly raid on Bin Laden inside Pakistan. But officials stressed that the rescue mission included personnel from the other armed services as well, and that the commandos themselves were not necessarily the same people who conducted the Bin Laden raid.

Somalia is considered one of the most dangerous places in the world, plagued by pirate gangs and countless militant groups, a lawless nation that has languished for 21 years without a functioning government. Several Westerners have recently been kidnapped, typically for ransom, and it seems that as Somalia’s pirates have a harder time hijacking ships on the high seas because of the beefed up naval efforts, they are increasingly turning to snatching foreigners on land.

In this case, though, senior Pentagon officials said the kidnappers appeared to have no direct links to any of the pirate bands that have attacked shipping lanes off Somalia. They appeared to be a criminal gang, with no ties to local terrorist organizations or other ideological militant bands.

On Oct. 25, Ms. Buchanan and Poul Hagen Thisted, the Danish aid worker, were kidnapped by two truckloads of gunmen as they headed to the airport in Galkayo, a central Somalia town on the edge of pirate territory. The two were working for the Danish Demining Group, one of the few Western organizations that was still operating in that area.

Somali officials immediately suspected that a local employee had tipped off the gunmen. Negotiations with pirates can drag on for months. One British couple sailing around the world on a small sailboat was kidnapped by pirates from this same patch of central Somalia and then held in captivity in punishing conditions for more than a year.

Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, the internationally recognized but relatively impotent authority based in the capital, Mogadishu, has little influence over the pirates. Neither do the traditional, clan-based militias that still operate in these areas but cannot afford the weaponry or manpower now fielded by well-financed pirate gangs.

Somalia is also considered a no-go zone for conventional American military operations, but it has been the site of several special operations raids, usually to kill wanted terrorism suspects. American forces stage the raids from a constellation of bases ringing Somalia, in Ethiopia, Djibouti and Kenya.

According to local leaders in Galkayo, dark helicopters began circling over the area late Tuesday night. Sometime around 3 a.m., the American commandos landed near a small village called Hiimo Gaabo, south of Galkayo and a firefight erupted.

The commandos freed the hostages, and the helicopters took off. By dawn, after morning prayers, the bodies of the nine pirates killed in the raid were brought back to Hiimo Gaabo.

According to the local leaders, three to six pirates were captured.

One American official said an assault team of Special Operations troops parachuted in from fixed wing aircraft, not helicopters, under cloak of darkness to a landing area about a mile’s walk from the actual target. The paratroopers landed, then walked to an encampment where the kidnappers where holding the two hostages.

Within minutes, shots rang out. The hostages were located and secured. Nine Somalis were killed and an unknown number wounded in the ensuing firefight with the commandos. No Somali prisoners were taken, the official said. American helicopters then landed nearby and whisked the commandos and the two former hostages out of the area, and flew them to Camp Lemonier in Djibouti.

“The aid workers are fine, they are in Djibouti and in good shape,” said a United Nations official who was not authorized to speak publicly. The official said that local leaders in the area were pleased with the rescue operation, because there is little sympathy for the pirate gangs, which are blamed for sullying Somalia’s reputation and causing inflation by carelessly spending millions of dollars of ransom money.

Several local leaders in Galkayo had just returned from trying to secure the release of another American, a freelance journalist who was kidnapped last week in Galkayo. He remains in captivity in Hobyo, a pirate den on the Somali coast, because the pirates holding him refuse to let him go without a hefty ransom.

“Maybe this will send a message,” the United Nations official said.

Helene Cooper, Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

    U.S. Military Frees 2 Western Hostages From Somali Pirates, NYT, 25.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/world/africa/us-raid-frees-2-hostages-from-somali-pirates.html

Bomb-Bomb-Bomb, Bomb-Bomb-Iran?

January 22, 2012
The New York Times
By BILL KELLER

O.K., Mr. President, here’s the plan. Sometime in the next few months you order the Department of Defense to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity. Yes, I know it’s an election year, and some people will say this is a cynical rally-round-the-flag move on your part, but a nuclear Iran is a problem that just won’t wait.

Our pre-emptive strike, designated Operation Yes We Can, will entail bombing the yellowcake-conversion plant at Isfahan, the uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordo, the heavy-water reactor at Arak, and various centrifuge-manufacturing sites near Natanz and Tehran. True, the Natanz facility is buried under 30 feet of reinforced concrete and surrounded by air defenses, but our new bunker-buster, the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator, will turn the place into bouncing rubble. Fordo is more problematic, built into the side of a mountain, but with enough sorties we can rattle those centrifuges. Excuse me? Does that take care of everything? Um, that we know of.

Civilian casualties? Not a big deal, sir, given the uncanny accuracy of our precision-guided missiles. Iran will probably try to score sympathy points by trotting out dead bodies and wailing widows, but the majority of the victims will be the military personnel, engineers, scientists and technicians working at the facilities. Fair game, in other words.

Critics will say that these surgical strikes could easily spark a full-blown regional war. They will tell you that the Revolutionary Guard — not the most predictable bunch — will lash out against U.S. and allied targets, either directly or through terrorist proxies. And the regime might actually close off the vital oil route through the Strait of Hormuz. Not to worry, Mr. President. We can do much to mitigate these threats. For one thing, we can reassure the Iranian regime that we just want to eliminate their nukes, not overthrow the government — and of course they will take our word for it, if we can figure out how to convey the message to a country with which we have no formal contacts. Maybe post it on Facebook?

To be sure, we could just let the Israelis do the bombing. Their trigger fingers are getting itchier by the day. But they probably can’t do the job thoroughly without us, and we’d get sucked into the aftermath anyway. We might as well do it right and get the credit. Really, sir, what could possibly go wrong?

The scenario above is extracted from an article by Matthew Kroenig in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. (The particulars are Kroenig’s; the mordant attitude is mine.) Kroenig, an academic who spent a year as a fellow at the Obama administration’s Defense Department, apparently aspires to the Strangelovian superhawk role occupied in previous decades by the likes of John Bolton and Richard Perle. His former colleagues at Defense were pretty appalled by his article, which combines the alarmist worst case of the Iranian nuclear threat with the rosiest best case of America’s ability to make things better. (Does this remind you of another pre-emptive war in a country beginning with I?)

This scenario represents one pole in a debate that is the most abused foreign policy issue in this presidential campaign year. The opposite pole, also awful to contemplate, is the prospect of living with a nuclear Iran. In that case, the fear of most American experts is not that Iran would decide to incinerate Israel. (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does a good impression of an evil madman, but Iran is not suicidal.) The more realistic dangers, plenty scary, are that a conventional conflict in that conflict-prone neighborhood would spiral into Armageddon, or that Iran would extend its protective nuclear umbrella over menacing proxies like Hezbollah, or that Arab neighbors would feel obliged to join the nuclear arms race.

For now, American policy lives between these poles of attack and acquiescence, in the realm of uncertain calculation and imperfect options. If you want to measure your next president against a hellish dilemma, here’s your chance.

In the Republican field we have one candidate (Rick Santorum) who is about as close as you can get to the bomb-sooner-rather-than-later extreme, another (Ron Paul) who is at the let-Iran-be-Iran extreme, and Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are in between. Of particular interest is Romney, who has performed the same rhetorical trick with Iran that he did with health care. That is, he condemns Obama for doing pretty much what Romney would do.

Although much about Iran’s theocracy is murky, a few assumptions are widely accepted by specialists in and out of government.

First, for all its denials, the Iranian regime is determined to acquire nuclear weapons, or at least the capacity to make them quickly in the event of an outside threat. Having a nuclear option is seen as a matter of Persian pride and national survival in the face of enemies (namely us) who the Iranians believe are bent on toppling the Islamic state. The nuclear program is popular in Iran, even with many of the opposition figures admired in the West. The actual state of the program is not entirely clear, but the best open-source estimates are that if Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered full-speed-ahead — which there is no sign he has done — they could have an actual weapon in a year or so.

American policy has been consistent through the Bush and Obama administrations: (1) a declaration that a nuclear Iran is “unacceptable”; (2) a combination of sticks (sanctions) and carrots (supplies of nuclear fuel suitable for domestic industrial needs in exchange for forgoing weapons); (3) unfettered international inspections; (4) a refusal to take military options off the table; (5) a concerted effort to restrain Israel from attacking Iran unilaterally — beyond the Israelis’ presumed campaign to slow Iran’s progress by sabotage and assassination; and (6) a wish that Iran’s hard-liners could be replaced by a more benign regime, tempered by a realization that there is very little we can do to make that happen. This is also the gist of Romney’s Iran playbook, for all his bluster about Obama the appeaser.

In practice, Obama’s policy promises to be tougher than Bush’s. Because Obama started out with an offer of direct talks — which the Iranians foolishly spurned — world opinion has shifted in our direction. We may now have sufficient global support to enact the one measure that would be genuinely crippling — a boycott of Iranian oil. The administration and the Europeans, with help from Saudi Arabia, are working hard to persuade such major Iranian oil customers as Japan and South Korea to switch suppliers. The Iranians take this threat to their economic livelihood seriously enough that people who follow the subject no longer minimize the chance of a naval confrontation in the Strait of Hormuz. It’s not impossible that we will get war with Iran even without bombing its nuclear facilities.

That’s not the only problem with the current — let’s call it the Obamney — approach to Iran.

The point of tough sanctions, of course, is to force Iranians to the bargaining table, where we can do a deal that removes the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran. (You can find some thoughts on what such a deal might entail on my blog.) But the mistrust is so deep, and the election-year pressure to act with manly resolve is so intense, that it’s hard to imagine the administration would feel free to accept an overture from Tehran. Anything short of a humiliating, unilateral Iranian climb-down would be portrayed by the armchair warriors as an Obama surrender. Likewise, if Israel does decide to strike out on its own, Bibi Netanyahu knows that candidate Obama will feel immense pressure to go along.

That short-term paradox comes wrapped up in a long-term paradox: an attack on Iran is almost certain to unify the Iranian people around the mullahs and provoke the supreme leader to redouble Iran’s nuclear pursuits, only deeper underground this time, and without international inspectors around. Over at the Pentagon, you sometimes hear it put this way: Bombing Iran is the best way to guarantee exactly what we are trying to prevent.

    Bomb-Bomb-Bomb, Bomb-Bomb-Iran?, NYT, 22.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/23/opinion/keller-bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb-iran.html

Self-Immolation Is on the Rise in the Arab World

January 20, 2012
The New York Times
By NADA BAKRI

BEIRUT, Lebanon — More than a year after a young Tunisian set himself on fire and touched off revolutions throughout the Arab world, self-immolation, symbolic of systemic frustration and helplessness, has become increasingly common across the region.

On Wednesday, five young men self-immolated in Morocco, adding to the grim tally for a month in which others have set themselves on fire in Tunisia, Jordan and Bahrain.

“This is truly sad,” said Nabil Dajani, a professor of media studies at the American University of Beirut. “The governments are indifferent. And they still talk about democracy when there is a hierarchy of needs that should be addressed first.”

The death of Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit vendor from southern Tunisia who set himself on fire on Dec. 17, 2010, helped incite an uprising that toppled the government of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. But the repercussions of these recent acts have been far fewer.

Hardly anyone is paying attention. Arab newspapers and television have devoted little coverage to those who self-immolate. And the rise of the practice also illustrates how little the Arab revolts have changed the conditions that led to mass unrest in the first place. Economic conditions in much of North Africa and the Middle East are as difficult as before; indeed, in many places, like Egypt and Libya, they have grown worse.

This month, a 52-year-old pensioner in Jordan, facing crushing debt, burned himself to death. In Bahrain, where antigovernment protests have been crushed by force, a 59-year-old woman died Saturday after setting herself on fire on the roof of her building. Seven other people immolated themselves in Tunisia and Morocco.

The five in the Moroccan capital, Rabat, on Wednesday were unemployed university graduates, part of a national group called Unemployed Graduates. They had joined a protest of about 160 members of the movement who have been occupying an administrative building of the Ministry of Higher Education for the past two weeks.

Adil Sbaii, a 33-year-old spokesman for the movement, said the five men had threatened to set themselves on fire if the police did not let supporters, standing outside the building, bring the protesters food and medicine, as they had done every day for the past two weeks. The authorities, it seems, did not take their threat seriously.

“One of the guys who set himself on fire came out of the building, poured gas on himself and started threatening the police to let him pick up the bread brought by the others or he’d set himself on fire,” said Mr. Sbaii, who witnessed the episode.

He said he was not sure how or when exactly the first man burned himself but “all of a sudden the guy, as he was picking up the bread, was caught on fire, and then another one next to him, who had poured gas also on himself, was caught on fire as well.”

Three of the five were hospitalized, and two were reported to be in a serious condition. In a startling video, posted on YouTube, one man covered in flames is seen running amid a crowd of protesters and police officers.

The official unemployment rate in Morocco is 9.1 percent nationally, but it is 16 percent for university graduates. The economy has been steadily growing in the last several years, but it is still unable to create jobs for many.

Morocco’s new elected government, dominated by Islamists who won at the polls last year, announced an economic plan on Thursday that would rely heavily on the private sector to create jobs for the millions who are unemployed, rather than provide government jobs, as many of the unemployed say they want. Some also have insisted on greater communication with officials. Morocco is a constitutional monarchy.

“We are asking the government to open a dialogue with these people and not lead them to despair,” said Samira Kinani, of the Moroccan Association of Human Rights in Rabat. “If there was transparency, the unemployed graduates would not react in such extreme ways.”

The self-immolations this month in Tunisia and Morocco came after several others across the region.

The BBC reported this month that 107 Tunisians tried to kill themselves by self-immolation in the first six months after Mr. Bouazizi’s death.

“The living conditions of so many have become miserable,” said Jihad al-Khazen, a columnist with Al-Hayat, a pan-Arab newspaper. “It is the result of desperation, and a feeling among many in the Arab world that their own lives have lost their value.”

Aida Alami contributed reporting from Casablanca, Morocco,

and an employee of The New York Times from Beirut.

    Self-Immolation Is on the Rise in the Arab World, NYT, 20.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/world/africa/self-immolation-on-the-rise-in-the-arab-world.html

Egypt’s Economic Crisis

January 20, 2012
The New York Times

In the year since President Hosni Mubarak was ousted, Egypt has faced many challenges: the military-led government’s brutality against protesters and pro-democracy groups, its resistance to handing power to civilian leaders and the rise of Islamists in the country’s first free elections. Now worsening economic conditions are further sabotaging hopes for a democratic future.

The country’s foreign currency reserves have fallen from a peak of $36 billion to about $10 billion and could run out entirely by March. The currency is under severe pressure, and a steep drop in the exchange rate could bring painful inflation and more social unrest. Youth unemployment is about 25 percent, a dangerous situation where 60 percent of the citizens are 30 and under.

Egyptians want jobs, education and a say in governance. Many are justifiably angry about the military’s autocratic control — and will be angrier still if economic conditions deteriorate further. They aren’t the only ones with a stake in the outcome. Egypt is the fourth-largest economy in the Middle East. Its success, or failure, will have a huge impact on the region and beyond.

Egypt’s military rulers are now realizing how big a threat the collapsing economy is — and they clearly don’t want to be blamed. In May, they rejected a $3.2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, saying it would infringe on Egypt’s sovereignty. They wanted the money, but with no strings attached — no mandatory reforms or austerity measures, like cutting food and fuel subsidies. Now desperate, they resurrected the loan request this week and welcomed an I.M.F. delegation to discuss possible components of an economic program. The I.M.F. probably won’t make a decision on that request until March.

The fund’s officials say that they do not intend to impose conditions on the loan. But even without conditions, Egypt must make reforms if it wants to spur private business ventures, foreign investment and growth. Such measures can never be sustained without public support.

In a recent interview with Reuters news service, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s economic committee, Ashraf Badr el-Din, suggested that the Brotherhood and other main parties are moving toward consensus on managing the economy. If true, that’s a good sign. The United States, the European Union and the gulf states last year promised billions of dollars in assistance to Egypt, but most of it has not materialized as they waited for signs of political stability. If the I.M.F. negotiations over the loan terms succeed, those countries should move quickly on their commitments, including offers to begin free-trade talks with Egypt.

Washington and its allies may not have much sway with the military rulers or the newly elected political leaders in the short term, but they have to build long-term relationships with all segments of civil society. Some say Egypt could be one of the world’s top 10 economies in a generation. That’s a goal worth working toward.

    Egypt’s Economic Crisis, NYT, 20.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/opinion/egypts-economic-crisis.html

Trust, but Verify

January 17, 2012
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

A few items came across the desk last week that underscore the challenge America faces in making policy toward the Islamist parties that are emerging as the early beneficiaries of the uprisings across the Arab world. The first was a news article about the Jan. 11 meeting in Cairo between Bill Burns, a deputy secretary of state, and Muhammad Morsi, the chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party, during which Morsi said his party “believes in the importance of U.S.-Egyptian relations,” but said they “must be balanced.”

Two days later came a report from the Middle East Media Research Institute, which tracks the Arab media, about recent writings on the Muslim Brotherhood Web site, Ikhwanonline.com. It said the site “contains articles with anti-Semitic motifs, including Holocaust denials and descriptions of the ‘Jewish character’ as covetous, exploitative, and a source of evil in human society. ...Among these are articles calling to kill Zionists and praising the Sept. 9, 2011, attack on the Israeli Embassy in Cairo — which one article called a landmark of the Egyptian revolution.”

Finally, came the news that Naguib Sawiris — an Egyptian telecommunications mogul and Coptic Christian who is the founder of one of Egypt’s new secular, liberal parties — was being charged with “contempt of religion” for re-tweeting images from last June that show Mickey Mouse with a full beard and wearing a traditional Islamic robe and Minnie Mouse wearing a full-face veil with just slits for her eyes.

There are two ways to read these news reports. One is that the Brotherhood and other Islamists are cleverly hoodwinking the naïve foreigners, feeding them the lines they want to hear. The other is that the Islamists never expected to be dominating Egypt’s new Parliament — with more responsibility than other parties for completing the country’s democratic transition, constitution-writing and election of a new president — and they are trying to figure out how to reconcile some of their ideology, with all of their new responsibilities.

My view is that both can be — and are — true at the same time.

In my mind, we all have to guard against lazy happy talk about the rise of the Islamist parties in Egypt (“I’ve met with them; they all seem reasonable”) and lazy determinism (“Just read what they say in Arabic; they clearly have a secret plan to take over Egypt”).

In the happy talk department, please don’t tell me that the rule of Turkey’s Islamist Justice and Development Party, known as the A.K.P., proves that no one has anything to fear about Islamists taking power democratically. There is much I admire in the A.K.P.’s performance. (The recent suggestion by Gov. Rick Perry of Texas that the A.K.P. is a party of “Islamic terrorists” is shockingly stupid.) But I will only cite the A.K.P. as a reassuring example of Islam and democracy in harmony after I see it lose an election and vacate power. That is the real test. As The Economist noted about the rule of the A.K.P. in Turkey in its Nov. 26 issue, “Around 76 journalists are now behind bars” in Turkey, “more than in China, many of them for supposed terrorist crimes. ... The West does not seem to notice the steady deterioration in human rights in Turkey, instead extolling it as a model for the Arab spring.”

American policy needs to be based on the assumption that, like all parties, Islamist parties contain moderates, centrists and hard-liners — and, in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, lots of small businessmen. Which wing will dominate as they assume the responsibilities of governing is still an open question.

America needs to offer the Islamists firm, quiet (you can easily trigger a nationalist backlash) and patient engagement that says: “We believe in free and fair elections, human rights, women’s rights, minority rights, free markets, civilian control of the military, religious tolerance and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, and we will offer assistance to anyone who respects those principles.”

Egypt is not destined to be Iran, but the Muslim Brotherhood is not destined to be the Muslim version of Christian Democrats either. There is an evolution under way — this is a very plastic moment — and our best chance of having an effect is to make sure we deal in a principled way with the Islamists (and also, by the way, with Israel, as the Islamists will be watching for any double standard) and with the Egyptian Army. The Egyptian Army is also trying to figure out its role in this new Egypt. It is balancing its desire to protect its economic interests, avoid prosecution for any killings of demonstrators and maintain its status as guardian of Egypt’s secular nationalist tradition. We need the Egyptian Army to play the constructive role that the Turkish Army once played — as midwife and protector of a gradual democratic transition — and not become the Pakistani Army, which evolved into a predatory institution dedicated to an aggressive foreign policy to justify its huge budget.

In short, the days of dealing with Egypt with one phone call to one man just one time are over. This is going to require really, really, really sophisticated diplomacy with multiple players — seven days a week.

    Trust, but Verify, NYT, 17.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/opinion/trust-but-verify.html

Iran Face-Off Testing Obama the Candidate

January 16, 2012
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — The escalating American confrontation with Iran poses a major new political threat to President Obama as he heads into his campaign for re-election, presenting him with choices that could harm either the economic recovery or his image as a firm leader.

Sanctions against Iran’s oil exports that the president signed into law on New Year’s Eve started a fateful clock ticking. In late June, when the campaign is in full swing, Mr. Obama will have to decide whether to take action against countries, including some staunch allies, if they continue to buy Iranian oil through its central bank.

After fierce lobbying by the White House, which opposed this hardening in the sanctions that have been its main tool in pressuring Tehran, Congress agreed to modify the legislation to give Mr. Obama leeway to delay action if he concludes the clampdown would disrupt the oil market. He may also invoke a waiver to exempt any country from sanctions based on national security considerations.

But using either of those escape hatches could open the president to charges that he is weak on Iran, which is viewed by Western powers as determined to achieve a nuclear weapons capability and which has drawn a tough response from Europe as well.

Republican candidates, led by Mitt Romney, have threatened to use military action to prevent Tehran from building a bomb, and have criticized Mr. Obama for not doing enough to stop it from joining the nuclear club.

“If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon,” Mr. Romney declared in South Carolina in November. “And if we elect Mitt Romney, they will not have a nuclear weapon.”

Few inside the administration see a surefire way of preventing Iran from crossing the nuclear weapons threshold, though none are ready to discuss moving to a focus on containing a nuclear Iran.

The administration is deeply reluctant to use military action, and the United States strenuously denied involvement in the recent killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist. Instead, it has focused mainly on using economic pressure to make Iran pay a high price for expanding its nuclear efforts despite international sanctions.

“To appear to back off, when the Iranians are proceeding pell-mell with their nuclear program, would be very difficult for the administration, particularly in an election year,” said Stuart E. Eizenstat, a former senior official at the Treasury and State Departments who helped draft sanctions against Iran during the Clinton administration.

“On the other hand,” he said, “sanctions could harm the economy and his re-election chances. It is an excruciatingly difficult set of choices, and one he will face sooner rather than later.”

Senator Mark Steven Kirk, an Illinois Republican who sponsored the sanctions bill, along with Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, added another variable to the president’s difficult calculus, arguing that sanctions may be the only thing that dissuades Israel from mounting a pre-emptive military strike on Iran’s nuclear installations.

“The first waiver would trigger a whole lot of other waiver applications, potentially gutting the policy,” he said. “The more you gut the policy, the more likely you make military action by Israel. The pro-Israel community would not want a gutting of the sanctions.”

The administration says that it plans to put the sanctions in effect rigorously, and that the modifications it negotiated with Congress will allow Mr. Obama to do so without rattling the oil market. The European Union is expected to impose its own sanctions on Iran’s oil exports next week, making it easier for the United States to carry out its measures.

Administration officials point to some encouraging signs: major importers of Iranian oil, like Japan and South Korea, are searching for alternative suppliers. And Iran’s currency, the rial, has plummeted since the sanctions were signed, raising pressure on the government.

Referring to the tense negotiations with Congress, a senior Treasury official said, “It was a question of tactics and timing, not the target.”

With his ending of the Iraq war and the killings of Osama bin Laden and other leaders of Al Qaeda, Mr. Obama has projected an air of competence on national security, and he is arguably less vulnerable in that field than previous Democratic presidents.

But trying to influence the world’s oil market is a different kind of challenge, experts say. Already, Iran’s leaders are maneuvering to drive up oil prices, whether to signal that sanctions could bring repercussions, or to mitigate the effects of reduced sales. Iran’s threat to shut off the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes, sent prices soaring this month.

“Oil has to be replaced with more oil,” said Daniel Yergin, an oil expert who has written a book, “The Quest,” about energy security. Cutting off one of the world’s leading oil exporters without squeezing the overall flow of oil is an extremely complex undertaking, he said. “I’m hard pressed to think of a precedent for this,” he added.

Then, too, there is the fragile state of the economy, even with recent signs of life in the job market. An oil crisis is one of those shocks, like a collapse of the euro, that could derail the recovery. Fears about rising oil prices led the White House to oppose efforts on Capitol Hill to impose draconian sanctions against Iran’s central bank.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, in a letter last month to the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said a total crackdown on the central bank could undermine the administration’s “carefully phased” approach and “yield a net economic benefit to the Iranian regime.”

But the administration found itself dealing with a rare bipartisan show of resolve. The sanctions passed the Senate by a unanimous vote, almost unheard of in today’s contentious atmosphere. The bill was attached to a crucial $662 billion military spending bill.

Under the terms of the legislation, Mr. Obama must, within 180 days, cut off access to the United States to any public or private financial institution that buys oil through the Central Bank of Iran. The goal is, effectively, to shut down the central bank, depriving the Iranian government of financing for its nuclear activities.

Mr. Obama retains two important levers: he can delay sanctions if he determines there is not enough oil in the market, and he can exempt any country that has “significantly reduced its volume of crude oil purchases from Iran.” Administration officials, seeking to preserve flexibility, said they would not quantify “significant.”

An early test of the administration’s approach will come at the end of February, when the law mandates that it cut off private financial institutions that conduct non-oil transactions with Iran’s central bank, except for the sale of food, medicine and medical devices.

Senator Kirk said carrying out the oil sanctions might be less complicated than it appeared, with Saudi Arabia pledging to step up production and with Libya and Iraq both bringing production back online. But the administration’s opposition to the original draft of his legislation, he said, belied the president’s threats to the Iranian government.

“It’s been a strange political journey for the president because he said he was tough on Iran,” Mr. Kirk said.

    Iran Face-Off Testing Obama the Candidate, NYT, 16.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/world/middleeast/faceoff-with-iran-complicates-obamas-re-election-campaign.html

Preventing a Nuclear Iran, Peacefully

January 15, 2012
The New York Times
By SHIBLEY TELHAMI and STEVEN KULL

Washington

THE debate over how to handle Iran’s nuclear program is notable for its gloom and doom. Many people assume that Israel must choose between letting Iran develop nuclear weapons or attacking before it gets the bomb. But this is a false choice. There is a third option: working toward a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East. And it is more feasible than most assume.

Attacking Iran might set its nuclear program back a few years, but it will most likely encourage Iran to aggressively seek — and probably develop — nuclear weapons. Slowing Iran down has some value, but the costs are high and the risks even greater. Iran would almost certainly retaliate, leading to all-out war at a time when Israel is still at odds with various Arab countries, and its relations with Turkey are tense.

Many hawks who argue for war believe that Iran poses an “existential threat” to Israel. They assume Iran is insensitive to the logic of nuclear deterrence and would be prepared to use nuclear weapons without fear of the consequences (which could include killing millions of Palestinians and the loss of millions of Iranian civilians from an inevitable Israeli retaliation). And even if Israel strikes, Iran is still likely to acquire nuclear weapons eventually and would then be even more inclined to use them.

Despite all the talk of an “existential threat,” less than half of Israelis support a strike on Iran. According to our November poll, carried out in cooperation with the Dahaf Institute in Israel, only 43 percent of Israeli Jews support a military strike on Iran — even though 90 percent of them think that Iran will eventually acquire nuclear weapons.

Most important, when asked whether it would be better for both Israel and Iran to have the bomb, or for neither to have it, 65 percent of Israeli Jews said neither. And a remarkable 64 percent favored the idea of a nuclear-free zone, even when it was explained that this would mean Israel giving up its nuclear weapons.

The Israeli public also seems willing to move away from a secretive nuclear policy toward greater openness about Israel’s nuclear facilities. Sixty percent of respondents favored “a system of full international inspections” of all nuclear facilities, including Israel’s and Iran’s, as a step toward regional disarmament.

If Israel’s nuclear program were to become part of the equation, it would be a game-changer. Iran has until now effectively accused the West of employing a double standard because it does not demand Israeli disarmament, earning it many fans across the Arab world.

And a nuclear-free zone may be hard for Iran to refuse. Iranian diplomats have said they would be open to an intrusive role for the United Nations if it accepted Iran’s right to enrich uranium for energy production — not to the higher levels necessary for weapons. And a 2007 poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that the Iranian people would favor such a deal.

We cannot take what Iranian officials say at face value, but an international push for a nuclear-free Middle East would publicly test them. And most Arab leaders would rather not start down the nuclear path — a real risk if Iran gets the bomb — and have therefore welcomed the proposal of a nuclear-free zone.

Some Israeli officials may also take the idea seriously. As Avner Cohen’s recent book “The Worst-Kept Secret” shows, Israel’s policy of “opacity” — not acknowledging having nuclear weapons while letting everyone know it does — has existed since 1969, but is now becoming outdated. Indeed, no one outside Israel today sees any ambiguity about the fact that Israel possesses a large nuclear arsenal.

Although Israeli leaders have in the past expressed openness to the idea of a nuclear-free zone, they have always insisted that there must first be peace between Israel and its neighbors.

But the stalemate with Iran could actually delay or prevent peace in the region. As the former Israeli spy chief, Meir Dagan, argued earlier this month, Israel’s current stance might actually accelerate Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons and encourage Arab states to follow suit. Moreover, talk of an “existential threat” projects Israel as weak, hurts its morale, and reduces its foreign policy options. This helps explain why three leading Israeli security experts — the Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, a former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, and a former military chief of staff, Dan Halutz — all recently declared that a nuclear Iran would not pose an existential threat to Israel.

While full elimination of nuclear weapons is improbable without peace, starting the inevitably long and arduous process of negotiations toward that end is vital.

Given that Israelis overwhelmingly believe that Iran is on its way to acquiring nuclear weapons and several security experts have begun to question current policy, there is now an opportunity for a genuine debate on the real choices: relying on cold-war-style “mutual assured destruction” once Iran develops nuclear weapons or pursuing a path toward a nuclear-weapons-free Middle East, with a chance that Iran — and Arabs — will never develop the bomb at all.

There should be no illusions that successfully negotiating a path toward regional nuclear disarmament will be easy. But the mere conversation could transform a debate that at present is stuck between two undesirable options: an Iranian bomb or war.

Shibley Telhami is a professor of government at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Steven Kull is director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes.

    Preventing a Nuclear Iran, Peacefully, NYT, 15.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/16/opinion/preventing-a-nuclear-iran-peacefully.html

Fear of Civil War Mounts in Syria as Crisis Deepens

January 14, 2012
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The failure of an Arab League mission to stanch violence in Syria, an international community with little leverage and a government as defiant as its opposition is in disarray have left Syria descending into a protracted, chaotic and perhaps unnegotiable conflict.

The opposition speaks less of prospects for the fall of President Bashar al-Assad and more about a civil war that some argue has already begun, with the government losing control over some regions and its authority ebbing in the suburbs of the capital and parts of major cities like Homs and Hama. Even the capital, Damascus, which had remained calm for months, has been carved up with checkpoints and its residents have been frightened by the sounds of gunfire.

The deepening stalemate underlines the extent to which events are slipping out of control. In a town about a half-hour drive from Damascus, the police station was recently burned down and in retaliation electricity and water were cut off, diplomats say. For a time, residents drew water in buckets from a well. Some people are too afraid to drive major highways at night.

In Homs, a city that a Lebanese politician called “the Stalingrad of the Syrian revolution,” reports have grown of sectarian cleansing of once-mixed neighborhoods, where some roads have become borders too dangerous for taxis to cross. In a suggestion that reflected the sense of desperation, the emir of Qatar said in an interview with CBS, an excerpt of which was released Saturday, that Arab troops should intervene in Syria to “stop the killing.”

“There’s absolutely no sign of light,” said a Western diplomat in Damascus, a city once so calm it was called Syria’s Green Zone. “If anything, it’s darker than ever. And I don’t know where it’s going to end. I can’t tell you. I don’t think anyone can.”

The forbidding tableau painted by diplomats, residents, opposition figures and even some government supporters suggests a far more complicated picture than that offered by Mr. Assad, who delivered a 15,000-word speech on Tuesday, declaring, “We will defeat this conspiracy without any doubt.” The next day, he appeared in public for the first time since the uprising began in a Syrian backwater last March.

More telling, perhaps, was the arrival of a Russian ship last week, said to be carrying ammunition and seeming to signal the determination of the government to fight to the end.

“Day by day, Syrians are closer to fighting each other,” said a 30-year-old activist in Arabeen, near the capital, who gave his name as Abdel-Rahman and joined a protest of about 1,000 people there on Friday. “Bashar has divided Syrians into two groups — one with him, one against him — and the coming days will bring more blood into the streets.”

In the other Arab revolts, diplomacy and, in Libya’s case, armed intervention proved crucial in the unfolding of events. Even Bahrain had an international commission whose report on the uprising there was viewed by the United States and some parties in that gulf state as a basis for reform. Syria has emerged as the country where the stalemate inside is mirrored by deadlock abroad.

Syria still counts on the support of Russia and China in the United Nations Security Council. In the Arab world, Syria has allies in Iraq and Algeria, whose foreign minister said Wednesday that Syria “is in the process of making more of an effort.”

But on Sunday, the secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, urged Mr. Assad to halt the violence against the protesters and said the time of dynasties and one-man rule in the Arab world were coming to an end.

“Today, I say again to President Assad of Syria: Stop the violence. Stop killing your people. The path of repression is a dead end,” news agencies quoted Mr. Ban as saying at a conference in Lebanon on political reform.

Another diplomat in Damascus was fatalistic. “There’s not much more that anyone, at the international level, can do,” he said. “There’s not much more the Arab League can, either.”

Syria’s agreement to allow 165 observers from the Arab League last month to monitor a deal that seemed stillborn even when it was announced — a government pledge to end violence, free prisoners and pull the military from cities — was viewed as one of the last diplomatic tools.

But last week, one of the monitors, an Algerian named Anwar Malek, resigned in disgust, saying the mission had only given Mr. Assad cover to continue the crackdown. Opposition activists say hundreds have died since the monitors arrived.

“Bashar was looking for a shield, and he found it with us,” Mr. Malek said in an interview. “The mission has failed until now. It hasn’t achieved anything.”

He said at least three other monitors were also quitting.

The mission’s leader, Lt. Gen. Muhammad Ahmed al-Dabi, who once ran Sudan’s notorious military intelligence agency, attacked Mr. Malek, saying he stayed in his hotel room rather than doing his job. But Nabil el-Araby, the Arab League’s secretary general, acknowledged where Syria might be headed, with or without the monitors.

“Yes, I fear a civil war, and the events that we see and hear about now could lead to a civil war,” he said in an interview with an Egyptian television station.

He echoed a growing sentiment in many capitals, the potential for Syria’s crisis to intersect with a combustible array of rivalries in the region.

Peter Harling, a Syria analyst with the International Crisis Group, said, “I’ve never seen something quite so ominous take shape in the region in 15 years.”

As with past speeches, Mr. Assad’s address on Tuesday was not meant for the protesters challenging his 11-year rule. His audience, analysts say, was his supporters, who were by many accounts buoyed by his projection of confidence and his suggestion of reform: a constitutional referendum and the prospect of a national unity government.

“They finally grasped it, and this is the first positive sign they’ve shown,” said a 28-year-old Damascus resident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He tried to attend the rally on Wednesday but got stuck in traffic. “They’ve now moved from defense to offense.”

Mr. Assad still commands a largely loyal government. Unlike in Libya, defections from within the leadership, or even diplomatic service, have been few — so rare, in fact, that the departure of a mid-ranking cleric from the state’s religious establishment recently was hailed as a victory by the opposition.

For many, the calculus remains much as it did at the beginning of the uprising. Though some soldiers have defected from the military, the more essential security forces, dominated by Mr. Assad’s own Alawite clan, have remained cohesive. Their loyalty, along with support from nervous Christians — who with the Alawites make up more than a fifth of the country — means his fall is not imminent or even likely.

But residents and diplomats speak of the erosion of his authority, often framed as the diminishment of the prestige of the state. Embassies have drastically reduced their staffs, and residents in Damascus speak of a growing anxiety after twin bombings tore through a fortified part of the capital in December.

“There is nothing happening around us, but psychologically, the stress ... I don’t know, it’s hitting home now,” said a 29-year-old bank employee in Damascus who declined to give her name. “The last explosions were really close. It’s very stressful.”

In Homs, beleaguered but still famous for its humor, residents have poked fun at the grimness. A joke these days has a husband bringing home a chicken. He suggests his wife cook it in the oven. But there’s no gas, she tells him. The stove? No electricity, she says. Spared, the chicken declares, “God, Syria, Bashar and no one else!”

Activists admit to a growing vacuum in embattled streets, as the bitterly divided exiled opposition fails to connect with the domestic protest movement.

“They don’t understand the situation on the ground, and they have to be blamed for that,” said Wissam Tarif, an activist with Avaaz, a human rights and advocacy group. He warned about a growing armed presence in Syria, with no leadership. “It’s a very dangerous business. The vacuum will eventually be filled. By whom, we don’t know.”

Another resident in Damascus, where blackouts are becoming more frequent and longer, cast the future starkly.

“Each side is trying to eliminate or belittle the other,” he said. “They both refuse to acknowledge the other side. When you talk to them, they will convince you that, come on already, it’s a done deal, God is with them. God must be torn, I tell you.”

 

Hwaida Saad and an employee of The New York Times

contributed reporting from Beirut, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.

    Fear of Civil War Mounts in Syria as Crisis Deepens, NYT, 14.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/world/middleeast/syria-in-deep-crisis-may-be-slipping-out-of-control.html

Getting to Know You ...

January 14, 2012
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Cairo

I’M sitting in the campaign office of Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, the doctor who has split from the Muslim Brotherhood to run for president of Egypt on a reformist agenda. As I listen to his team — three young Egyptian professionals volunteering their time — describe their strategy, this thought occurs to me: I’ve met more new, interesting Egyptians, of all political persuasions, in the last week than I have in the last 30 years. That is no accident. Egypt under Hosni Mubarak was a country where there was only one person to talk to, one person who was empowered to decide. Everyone else was just waiting for Godot. And the conversations were all one way — from top to bottom.

That is not the case anymore. Egyptians are finding their own voices again and rediscovering who their neighbors are. In some ways, they have been shocked. A Muslim Brotherhood leader told me that he was totally surprised when the elections showed how many Salafi Muslims lived in Egypt. When the fundamentalists tell you that they had no idea there were so many superfundamentalists, you can imagine how surprised the liberals were. The Egyptian generals have been stunned at how many unarmed secular youths have been willing to confront troops in the streets to get the army to cede power. There is a certain “Oh-you-live-here-too?” quality to Egyptian life today.

The longer you stay here, though, the more it becomes clear that Egypt has not had a revolution yet. It’s had an uprising. The basic military regime that has ruled Egypt since 1952 is still in charge — only a military council has replaced the Mubaraks. But this uprising has lifted the heavy lid off this society and let in oxygen. That, plus the recent parliamentary elections, has enabled all these newly emergent people, parties and voices — from all walks of Egyptian life — to surface. Whoever becomes Egypt’s next president had better be ready for a two-way conversation with all these emerging forces.

But for Egypt to have a democratic revolution — a real change in the power structure and institutions — all these newly empowered parties will have to find a way to work together to produce a new constitution and a new president. That will not be easy. The economic and social problems that Egypt has to overcome today are staggering. They will require the whole society to pull together, but the divisions and lack of trust today between the new and old power centers — the army, the security police, the Tahrir youth, the Islamists, the Christians, the traditionalist silent majority, the secular liberals — are substantial. This country needs a weekend retreat to get to know itself anew.

It’s no wonder. All the Arab autocrats, like Mubarak, ran their countries the same way — “like protection rackets,” says Daniel Brumberg, the co-director of Democracy and Governance Studies at Georgetown University. Different groups — ethnic or religious minorities, the business sector, Islamists and secular activists — were played off against, and “protected” from, each other by the leader who sat atop the pyramid. Everyone was afraid of everyone.

The hopeful news is that real politics has broken out here, and some Egyptians are working on building lines of trust across the new power centers. Take Amr Hamzawy, a secular liberal who was just elected to Parliament, which opens on Jan. 23. He and others have begun a quiet discussion with the Islamist parties about how to cooperate on legislation to get Egypt growing again and to show that the new power holders can produce a better Egypt.

Speaking of the new Parliament members, Hamzawy said, “We are just being introduced to each other — with different stereotypes, and different packages of demands and interests and reservations. But we have a society waiting. We have to deliver. The big challenge is to transcend the polarization of the elections. We will not be able to deliver if we polarize in Parliament. We have to transcend ideological differences. From a strictly liberal perspective, we have around 20 percent. The political Islam camp has about two-thirds. So our job is to work to pull moderates from the political Islam camp to the center. Our challenge is to define that new strategic center for Egypt.”

Hamzawy added: “I am humbled and impressed by the commitment of Egyptians to their country. ... I was running against a Muslim Brotherhood candidate. I had over 800 volunteers, and I did not pay anyone a penny. It is not a passive society anymore. It is a society eager to be in action.”

Egyptian politics for the last 50 years has been largely a struggle between the army and the Brotherhood, and both today are suspected of having secret agendas to grab power alone. I’d keep a wary eye on both of them.

But here’s what’s new: They are not the only ones anymore with plans for Egypt’s future and the energy to push them. Somehow all of these new and old forces have to now find a way to share power to rebuild this country. Egypt has wasted so much of the past 30 years. It doesn’t have another minute to waste. Or, as the Egyptian journalist Lamees El-Hadidi, who lived through it all, remarked to me, her generation doesn’t want to lose “the past and the future.”

    Getting to Know You ..., NYT, 14.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/friedman-getting-to-know-you.html

Why Is Europe a Dirty Word?

January 14, 2012
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

PARIS

QUELLE horreur! One of the uglier revelations about President Obama emerging from the Republican primaries is that he is trying to turn the United States into Europe.

“He wants us to turn into a European-style welfare state,” warned Mitt Romney. Countless versions of that horrific vision creep into Romney’s speeches, suggesting that it would “poison the very spirit of America.”

Rick Santorum agrees, fretting that Obama is “trying to impose some sort of European socialism on the United States.”

Who knew? Our president is plotting to turn us into Europeans. Imagine:

It’s a languid morning in Peoria, as a husband and wife are having breakfast. “You’re sure you don’t want eggs and bacon?” the wife asks. “Oh, no, I prefer these croissants,” the husband replies. “They have a lovely je ne sais quoi.”

He dips the croissant into his café au-lait and chews it with zest. “What do you want to do this evening?” he asks. “Now that we’re only working 35 hours a week, we have so much more time. You want to go to the new Bond film?”

“I’d rather go to a subtitled art film,” she suggests. “Or watch a pretentious intellectual television show.”

“I hear Kim Kardashian is launching a reality TV show where she discusses philosophy and global politics with Bernard-Henri Lévy,” he muses. “Oh, chérie, that reminds me, let’s take advantage of the new pétanque channel and host a super-boules party.”

“Parfait! And we must work out our vacation, now that we can take all of August off. Instead of a weekend watching ultimate fighting in Vegas, let’s go on a monthlong wine country tour.”

“How romantic!” he exclaims. “I used to worry about getting sick on the road. But now that we have universal health care, no problem!”

Look out: another term of Obama, and we’ll all greet each other with double pecks on the cheek.

Yet there is something serious going on. The Republican candidates unleash these attacks on Obama because so many Americans have in mind a caricature of Europe as an effete, failed socialist system. As Romney puts it: “Europe isn’t working in Europe. It’s not going to work here.”

(Monsieur Romney is getting his comeuppance. Newt Gingrich has released an attack ad, called “The French Connection,” showing clips of Romney speaking the language of Paris. The scandalized narrator warns: “Just like John Kerry, he speaks French!”)

But the basic notion of Europe as a failure is a dangerous misconception. The reality is far more complicated.

What is true is that Europe is in an economic mess. Quite aside from the current economic crisis, labor laws are often too rigid, and the effect has been to make companies reluctant to hire in the first place. Unemployment rates therefore are stubbornly high, especially for the young. And Europe’s welfare state has been too generous, creating long-term budget problems as baby boomers retire.

“The dirty little secret of European governments was that we lived in a way we couldn’t afford,” Sylvie Kauffmann, the editorial director of the newspaper Le Monde, told me. “We lived beyond our means. We can’t live this lie anymore.”

Yet Kauffmann also notes that Europeans aren’t questioning the basic European model of safety nets, and are aghast that Americans tolerate the way bad luck sometimes leaves families homeless.

It’s absurd to dismiss Europe. After all, Norway is richer per capita than the United States. Moreover, according to figures from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, per-capita G.N.P. in France was 64 percent of the American figure in 1960. That rose to 73 percent by 2010. Zut alors! The socialists gained on us!

Meanwhile, they did it without breaking a sweat. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that employed Americans averaged 1,741 hours at work in 2010. In France, the figure was 1,439 hours.

If Europe was as anticapitalist as Americans assume, its companies would be collapsing. But there are 172 European corporations among the Fortune Global 500, compared with just 133 from the United States.

Europe gets some important things right. It has addressed energy issues and climate change far more seriously than America has. It now has more economic mobility than the United States, partly because of strong public education systems. America used to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world; now France and Britain are both ahead of us.

Back in 1960, French life expectancy was just a few months longer than in the United States, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. By 2009, the French were living almost three years longer than we were.

So it is worth acknowledging Europe’s labor rigidities and its lethargy in resolving the current economic crisis. Its problems are real. But embracing a caricature of Europe as a failure reveals our own ignorance — and chauvinism.

    Why Is Europe a Dirty Word?, NYT, 1.14.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/kristof-why-is-europe-a-dirty-word.html

U.S. Restores Full Ties to Myanmar After Rapid Reforms

January 13, 2012
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and SETH MYDANS

WASHINGTON — The United States moved to restore full diplomatic relations with Myanmar on Friday, rewarding the sweeping political and economic changes that the country’s new civilian government has made, including a cease-fire with ethnic rebels and, only hours before, the release of hundreds of political prisoners.

Freeing the prisoners, which President Obama praised as a “substantial step forward for democratic reform,” was one of the most significant gestures yet by Myanmar’s new civilian government to address international concerns about the country’s repressive history, which led to decades of diplomatic and economic isolation.

Among 651 prisoners given amnesty on Friday were leaders of the brutally repressed student protests in 1988; a former prime minister, Khin Nyunt, ousted in an internal purge in 2004; and monks and others involved in antigovernment protests in 2007 that were known as the “saffron revolution.” A senior State Department official in Washington described Myanmar’s move on Friday as the largest single release of political prisoners in Asia’s history.

The administration’s reciprocal announcement is the latest in a series of cautious moves that have significantly eased tensions between the United States and Myanmar, also known as Burma. The diplomatic engagement — which one senior administration official said would have seemed unthinkable a year ago — now appears to be accelerating, though he and other officials stopped short of calling it irreversible.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who visited the country for the first time only six weeks ago, said in Washington: “This is a momentous day for the diverse people of Burma. And we will continue to support them and their efforts and to encourage their government to take bold steps.”

A renewed relationship between the two countries has the potential to remake American diplomacy in Asia, where the Obama administration says it hopes to refocus its foreign policy at a time when China’s influence is expanding. The closer ties could enhance trade and help integrate Myanmar into regional alliances sympathetic to the West.

Since taking office last March, the country’s president, U Thein Sein, has overseen a raft of changes that appear to indicate a new willingness to end military rule for the first time since a coup in 1962.

He has sought to reform the economy, allow political competition and end the country’s economic and diplomatic dependence on China, its huge neighbor to the north. In a move that presages a far broader shift in policies, his government halted work in September on a $3.6 billion dam under construction on the Irrawaddy River by a Chinese state company.

The United States never fully severed relations with Myanmar, as it did over the years with Iran, Cuba and North Korea, but it downgraded relations and withdrew its ambassador after elections in 1990. Those elections were won by the party of the main opposition leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, though never recognized by the military government, which instead cracked down and put her under house arrest. Subsequent administrations have since toughened sanctions on most trade with Myanmar.

The Obama administration is not yet considering lifting sanctions, but Mrs. Clinton announced that it would soon nominate an ambassador and invite Myanmar to send one to Washington. She pledged other actions in response to continued reforms, though she did not spell them out.

Mrs. Clinton, who met with Mr. Thein Sein in the country’s newly built capital, Naypyidaw, pressed him to follow through with the nascent reforms, which he appears to be doing. Since her visit, the government scheduled special elections on April 1 to fill 48 vacant parliamentary seats. For the first time since 1990, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi and her party will be allowed to seek elected office.

The prisoner release was another critical benchmark that administration officials had tracked closely before announcing Friday’s step. Only two months ago, Mr. Thein Sein denied the existence of political prisoners in his country, even though there have been several smaller releases since he took office. Privately, however, he indicated a willingness to release more, though only after a deliberate legal and political process, the officials said.

Even so, the scope of Friday’s releases appeared to catch many by surprise. Televised reports from Myanmar showed inmates emerging from the gates of a prison into jubilant crowds of relatives and supporters.

The releases — described in official reports as an amnesty — occurred around the country and included political activists, journalists, leaders of ethnic minority groups and relatives of the dictator who led the coup in 1962, Gen. Ne Win.

The exact number of political prisoners in Myanmar remains a matter of dispute, but by some accounts Mr. Thein Sein’s government has now released as many as half of 1,000 to 2,000 in custody.

The former prime minister, Mr. Khin Nyunt, had been under house since 2004. Once a senior member of the military junta that overturned the 1990 elections and a head of its dreaded intelligence services, he fell afoul of the government in 2004 after proposing a “road map to democracy” and was purged.

“The democratic process is on the right track,” he said Friday outside his home.

Representative Joseph Crowley, a Democrat from New York City, traveled this week to Myanmar and met with families of political prisoners — including some released on Friday — but said there was no advance knowledge of their release.

In a telephone interview from India, he called the exchange of ambassadors “a measured response” to what appeared to be genuine changes inside the country. “If things deteriorate, we have the ability to pull back,” he said.

He added, though, “I want to believe this is real.”

The thaw with Myanmar is in some ways a belated success of the Obama administration’s early policy to engage with the United States’ enemies. The effort has failed with Syria, Iran and North Korea, and for at least for the first two years, Myanmar was no different. That has left many administration officials — and members of Congress — wary of moving too quickly.

Mr. Crowley’s visit is the first of a flurry of Congressional delegations that have been coordinated with the administration to reinforce the American message — and maintain support for the diplomatic opening. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi and other government opponents in Myanmar have broad, bipartisan support on Capitol Hill.

Myanmar, isolated for so long, is suddenly a diplomatic destination of choice. The British foreign secretary, William Hague, visited last week. France announced that its foreign minister, Alain Juppé, would travel there this weekend.

The Senate’s Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, departed for Myanmar on Friday, soon to be followed by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. Mr. McConnell, who annually sponsors legislation sanctioning Myanmar, said in a statement that Mr. Thein Sein’s government needed to do more to ensure free elections and disclose its military ties with North Korea.

Even so, he went on, “It appears entirely appropriate that the United States would consider restoration of more formal diplomatic ties.”

Steven Lee Myers reported from Washington and Seth Mydans from Bangkok.

    U.S. Restores Full Ties to Myanmar After Rapid Reforms, NYT, 13.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/world/asia/united-states-resumes-diplomatic-relations-with-myanmar.html

Dangerous Tension With Iran

January 12, 2012
The New York Times

With tensions rising over Iran’s nuclear program, the Obama administration has now warned the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz would provoke an American response. Earlier this week, international monitors confirmed that Iran has begun enriching uranium at a new underground plant. The United States and Europe are tightening sanctions to choke off Iranian oil revenues. On Wednesday, an Iranian nuclear scientist died in a bomb attack en route to work, and a government newspaper signaled that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps might retaliate.

Many officials, experts and commentators increasingly expect some kind of military confrontation. No one should want to see Iran, with its contempt for international law, acquire a nuclear weapon. But a military strike on the nuclear facilities would be a disaster.

We don’t know whether any mix of sanctions and inducements could persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. There is another option besides force: negotiations with the United States and other major powers over curbing Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for ending sanctions and diplomatic isolation. Iran’s fractured leadership so far has not committed to serious talks, but President Obama and his allies have not paid enough attention to that alternative.

The United Nations Security Council demanded that Iran stop enriching uranium more than five years ago. Iran claims it only wants access to nuclear technology for electricity and other peaceful purposes. But that excuse is hollow. The major powers have said that power generation would be guaranteed if Iran abandons its weapons ambitions. Instead, Iran is still enriching uranium and mastering other technologies that would allow it to build a nuclear weapon. According to the latest report from United Nations inspectors, Iran has created computer models of nuclear explosions, conducted experiments on nuclear triggers and completed advanced research on a warhead that could be delivered by a medium-range missile.

An accelerating covert campaign of assassinations, bombings, cyberattacks and defections — carried out mainly by Israel, according to The Times — is slowing the program, but whether that is enough is unclear.

Economic pressure could be more effective if the United Nations Security Council ratcheted up its existing sanctions. A new round has been delayed by opposition from Russia and China. The United States and Europe have been imposing their own penalties, and Tehran’s recent threat to shut the Strait of Hormuz, gateway to one-fifth of the world’s oil trade, is an obvious sign of its growing economic desperation.

A new United States law that would penalize foreign companies that do business with Iran’s central bank — which they must do to buy Iranian oil — and an oil embargo that European Union foreign ministers plan to approve on Jan. 23 could have an even bigger impact. The Obama administration and European officials seem likely to phase in these sanctions in a way that limits the damage to the world economy. On Thursday, Japan pledged to buy less Iranian oil, China and South Korea were looking for alternative suppliers, and India’s intent was unclear. Tehran is more likely to respond if all the major importers apply pressure together.

The Americans and Europeans are working with Turkey to set up a new round of negotiations with Iran in Istanbul. The Iranians need to know that the economic pressure will not let up until they stop the nuclear program.

    Dangerous Tension With Iran, NYT, 12.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/opinion/dangerous-tension-with-iran.html

U.S. Sends Top Iranian Leader a Warning on Strait Threat

January 12, 2012
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER, ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is relying on a secret channel of communication to warn Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that closing the Strait of Hormuz is a “red line” that would provoke an American response, according to United States government officials.

The officials declined to describe the unusual contact between the two governments, and whether there had been an Iranian reply. Senior Obama administration officials have said publicly that Iran would cross a “red line” if it made good on recent threats to close the strait, a strategically crucial waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman, where 16 million barrels of oil — about a fifth of the world’s daily oil trade — flow through every day.

Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this past weekend that the United States would “take action and reopen the strait,” which could be accomplished only by military means, including minesweepers, warship escorts and potentially airstrikes. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta told troops in Texas on Thursday that the United States would not tolerate Iran’s closing of the strait.

The secret communications channel was chosen to underscore privately to Iran the depth of American concern about rising tensions over the strait, where American naval officials say their biggest fear is that an overzealous Revolutionary Guards naval captain could do something provocative on his own, setting off a larger crisis.

“If you ask me what keeps me awake at night, it’s the Strait of Hormuz and the business going on in the Arabian Gulf,” Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert, the chief of naval operations, said in Washington this week.

Administration officials and Iran analysts said they continued to believe that Iran’s threats to close the strait, coming amid deep frictions over Iran’s nuclear program and possible sanctions, were bluster and an attempt to drive up the price of oil. Blocking the route for the vast majority of Iran’s petroleum exports — and for its food and consumer imports — would amount to economic suicide.

“They would basically be taking a vow of poverty with themselves,” said Dennis B. Ross, who until last month was one of President Obama’s most influential advisers on Iran. “I don’t think they’re in such a mood of self sacrifice.”

But Pentagon officials, who plan for every contingency, said that, however unlikely, Iran does have the military capability to close the strait. Although Iran’s naval forces are hardly a match for those of the United States, for two decades Iran has been investing in the weaponry of “asymmetric warfare” — mines, fleets of heavily armed speed boats and antiship cruise missiles hidden along Iran’s 1,000 miles of Persian Gulf coastline — which have become a threat to the world’s most powerful navy.

“The simple answer is yes, they can block it,” General Dempsey said on CBS on Sunday.

Estimates by naval analysts of how long it could take for American forces to reopen the strait range from a day to several months, but the consensus is that while Iran’s naval forces could inflict damage, they would ultimately be destroyed.

“Their surface fleet would be at the bottom of the ocean, but they could score a lucky hit,” said Michael Connell, the director of the Iranian studies program at the Center for Naval Analysis, a research organization for the Navy and Marine Corps. “An antiship cruise missile could disable a carrier.”

Iran has two navies: one, its traditional state navy of aging big ships dating from the era of the shah, and the other a politically favored Revolutionary Guards navy of fast-attack speedboats and guerrilla tactics. Senior American naval officers say that the Iranian state navy is for the most part professional and predictable, but that the Revolutionary Guards navy, which has responsibility for the operations in the Persian Gulf, is not.

“You get cowboys who do their own thing,” Mr. Connell said. One officer with experience at the Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain said the Revolutionary Guards navy shows “a high probability for buffoonery.”

The Revolutionary Guards navy has been steadily building and buying faster missile boats and stockpiling what American experts say are at least 2,000 naval mines. Many are relatively primitive, about the size of an American garbage can, and easy to slip into the water. “Iran’s credible mining threat can be an effective deterrent to potential enemy forces,” an unclassified report by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the American Navy’s intelligence arm, concluded in 2009. “The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow chokepoint that could be mined effectively in a relatively short amount of time” — with disruptions within hours and more serious blockage in place over days.

Although the United States would respond with minesweepers, analysts said American naval forces might encounter layers of simultaneous attacks. The Iranians could launch antiship missiles from their coastline, islands or oil platforms and at the same time surround any American ship with missile-armed speedboats. “The immediate issue is to get the mines,” Mr. Connell said. “But they’re going to have to deal with the antiship cruise missiles and you’ll have small boats swarming and it’s all going to be happening at the same time.”

The United States could take out the antiship missile launchers with strikes from fighter jets or missiles, but analysts said it could take time to do so because the launchers on shore are mobile and often camouflaged.

The tight squeeze of the strait, which is less than 35 miles wide at its narrowest point, offers little maneuvering room for warships. “It would be like a knife fight in a phone booth,” said a senior Navy officer. The strait’s shipping lanes are even narrower: both the inbound and outbound lanes are two miles wide, with only a two-mile-wide stretch separating them.

American officials indicated that the recent and delicate messages expressing concern about the Strait of Hormuz were conveyed through a channel other than the Swiss government, which the United States has often used as a neutral party to relay diplomatic messages to Tehran.

The United States and Iran have a history of conflicts in the strait — most recently in January 2008, when the Bush administration chastised Iran for a “provocative act” after five armed Iranian speedboats approached three American warships in international waters, then maneuvered aggressively as radio threats were issued that the American ships would be blown up. The confrontation ended without shots fired or injuries.

In 2002, a classified, $250 million Defense Department war game concluded that small, agile speedboats swarming a naval convoy could inflict devastating damage on more powerful warships. In that game, the Blue Team navy, representing the United States, lost 16 major warships — an aircraft carrier, cruisers and amphibious vessels — when they were sunk to the bottom of the Persian Gulf in an attack that included swarming tactics by enemy speedboats.

“The sheer numbers involved overloaded their ability, both mentally and electronically, to handle the attack,” Lt. Gen. Paul K. Van Riper, a retired Marine Corps officer who served in the war game as commander of a Red Team force representing an unnamed Persian Gulf military, said in 2008, when the results of the war game were assessed again in light of Iranian naval actions at the time. “The whole thing was over in 5, maybe 10 minutes.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 12, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the naval service in Iran that has responsibility for operations in the Persian Gulf, including the Strait of Hormuz. It is the Revolutionary Guards navy.

    U.S. Sends Top Iranian Leader a Warning on Strait Threat, NYT, 12.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/world/middleeast/us-warns-top-iran-leader-not-to-shut-strait-of-hormuz.html

Iran Signals Revenge Over Killing of Scientist

January 12, 2012
The New York Times
By RICK GLADSTONE

Iran expressed deepening fury at Israel and the United States on Thursday over the drive-by bombing that killed a nuclear scientist in Tehran the day before, and signaled that its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps might carry out revenge assassinations.

News of the scientist’s killing dominated Iran’s state-run news media, which were filled with vitriolic denunciations both of Israel, seen in Iran as the main suspect in his death, and the United States, where top officials have gone out of their way to issue strongly worded denials of responsibility.

Israeli officials, who regard Iran as their country’s main enemy, have not categorically denied any Israeli role in the killing, which came against a backdrop of growing pressure on Iran over its disputed nuclear program. Western nations suspect that Iran is working toward building a nuclear weapon, despite Iran’s repeated assertions that its program is peaceful.

Iran’s official government reaction to the scientist’s killing on Wednesday was more restrained, saying that Iran would not be dissuaded from its right to peaceful nuclear energy and demanding that the United Nations Security Council investigate and condemn the attack. The Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Khazaee, said in a letter to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that the killing was part of a campaign of terrorist acts against Iran committed by “certain foreign quarters,” an oblique reference to Israel and the United States.

A much stronger call for retribution came Thursday from one Iranian newspaper in particular, Kayhan, a mouthpiece for the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and for the Revolutionary Guards.

“We should retaliate against Israel for martyring of our young scientist,” Kayhan’s general director, Hossein Shariatmadari, who was appointed by the ayatollah, said in an editorial. Referring to the Israelis, he wrote, “These corrupted people are easily identifiable and readily within our reach.”

The Kayhan editorial, as translated by Agence France-Presse and other Western news services, also said, “The Islamic republic has gathered much experience in 32 years, thus assassinations of Israeli officials and military members are achievable.”

Another hard-line newspaper, Resalat, said, “The only way to finish with the enemy’s futile actions is retaliation for the assassination of Iran’s scientist.”

Ayatollah Khamenei added his voice to the condemnations from Iran, posting a condolence message on his Web site that accused the American and Israeli intelligence services of orchestrating the “cowardly murder” of the scientist, who is to be buried on Friday. “Punish the perpetrators of these crimes,” he wrote.

The scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, 32, was deputy director of the Natanz uranium enrichment plant. He was killed on his way to work in rush-hour traffic in Tehran on Wednesday morning. Iranian news accounts said that a motorcyclist slapped a magnetized bomb on his car, killing Mr. Roshan and mortally wounding his driver and bodyguard, identified as Reza Qashaqei.

Mr. Roshan was at least the fifth Iranian scientist with nuclear connections to be killed since 2007.

Kayhan’s account of Mr. Roshan’s death quoted his mother, Sediqeh Salari, as saying: “They assassinated my son to remind us how much they hate our guts, to show their hostility. These are Iran’s sworn enemies.”

The scientists’ deaths are part of what current and former American officials and specialists on Iran have called an accelerating covert campaign of assassinations, bombings, defections and digital attacks, which they believe has been carried out mainly by Israel in an effort to subvert Iran’s nuclear program.

Artin Afkhami contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 13, 2012

An article on Thursday about covert actions to set back Iran’s nuclear program misstated, in some editions, the title of an Iranian nuclear scientist who was killed in a car bombing on Wednesday in Tehran. The scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was deputy director — not director — of commercial affairs at the Natanz uranium enrichment site.

    Iran Signals Revenge Over Killing of Scientist, NYT, 12.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/world/middleeast/
    iran-outrage-over-scientist-killing-deepens-as-it-signals-revenge.html

Pakistan’s Besieged Government

January 11, 2012
The New York Times

Pakistan’s civilian governments are typically short-lived and cast aside by military coups. This disastrous pattern could be repeating itself as the current civilian government comes under increasing pressure from the army and the Supreme Court.

On Wednesday, the standoff hardened when Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani fired his defense secretary, Naeem Khalid Lodhi — a retired general and confidante of the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani — and replaced him with a civilian, Nargis Sethi. Infuriated military officials said they might refuse to work with the new secretary and warned vaguely of “serious ramifications with potentially grievous consequences” after Mr. Gilani publicly criticized them in an interview.

This sort of byzantine infighting is hardly uncommon in Pakistan. But a stable Pakistan is critical to America’s interests in the region. The army should focus on what it can do best: fight the militants working to bring down the state and destabilize the region. For its part, the civilian government needs to deal with Pakistan’s severe economic troubles and repair a political culture in which voices of moderation are increasingly snuffed out.

Tensions have built steadily ever since Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambassador to Washington, was accused in October of drafting an anonymous memo that purportedly warned of a coup and sought Washington’s help in preventing it.

Mr. Haqqani is now under a Supreme Court investigation instigated by the country’s top generals. Mr. Haqqani denies writing the memo but has never made secret his distaste for the iron rule of Pakistan’s generals, who already felt humiliated by the surprise American raid on Osama bin Laden.

Mr. Haqqani’s passport has been confiscated, and he has taken refuge in Mr. Gilani’s home. The State Department has called for fair and transparent treatment of Mr. Haqqani in line with Pakistani and international law, and it must continue to press that point.

Two Pakistani officials and a journalist were assassinated last year — evidence of the country’s instability and a chilling warning to the few still brave enough to speak up for a tolerant and democratic society.

Pakistan’s Supreme Court is causing further trouble for the prime minister, threatening to remove him from office for failing to comply with court orders to reopen long-ago corruption cases against President Asif Ali Zardari, himself a fierce adversary of the military. According to a report in The Times, many Pakistani officials suspect the military is using the judiciary to weaken — even topple — the government before the March election for the Senate, which Mr. Zardari’s party is expected to win.

No civilian government in Pakistan has ever finished its term. This one has survived longer than the others and is up for re-election by 2013. Every effort must be made to have that vote go forward so another — and, one hopes, more competent — civilian government can succeed it. The court needs to stay out of politics and focus on building a fair, unbiased legal system. Likewise the military. The generals say they don’t want to govern, but no civilian will ever be able to do a competent job if the military keeps pulling the strings. Although relations with Pakistan are at an all-time low, the United States should keep engaging the country’s civilian leaders and encouraging its civil society whenever possible.

    Pakistan’s Besieged Government, NYT, 11.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/opinion/pakistans-besieged-government.html

Adversaries of Iran Said to Be Stepping Up Covert Actions

January 11, 2012
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — As arguments flare in Israel and the United States about a possible military strike to set back Iran’s nuclear program, an accelerating covert campaign of assassinations, bombings, cyberattacks and defections appears intended to make that debate irrelevant, according to current and former American officials and specialists on Iran.

The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim on Wednesday when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran’s morning rush hour.

The scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was a department supervisor at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant, a participant in what Western leaders believe is Iran’s halting but determined progress toward a nuclear weapon. He was at least the fifth scientist with nuclear connections to be killed since 2007; a sixth scientist, Fereydoon Abbasi, survived a 2010 attack and was put in charge of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.

Iranian officials immediately blamed both Israel and the United States for the latest death, which came less than two months after a suspicious explosion at an Iranian missile base that killed a top general and 16 other people. While American officials deny a role in lethal activities, the United States is believed to engage in other covert efforts against the Iranian nuclear program.

The assassination drew an unusually strong condemnation from the White House and the State Department, which disavowed any American complicity. The statements by the United States appeared to reflect serious concern about the growing number of lethal attacks, which some experts believe could backfire by undercutting future negotiations and prompting Iran to redouble what the West suspects is a quest for a nuclear capacity.

“The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this,” said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared to expand the denial beyond Wednesday’s killing, “categorically” denying “any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.”

“We believe that there has to be an understanding between Iran, its neighbors and the international community that finds a way forward for it to end its provocative behavior, end its search for nuclear weapons and rejoin the international community,” Mrs. Clinton said.

The Israeli military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, writing on Facebook about the attack, said, “I don’t know who took revenge on the Iranian scientist, but I am definitely not shedding a tear,” Israeli news media reported.

Like the drone strikes that the Obama administration has embraced as a core tactic against Al Qaeda, the multifaceted covert campaign against Iran has appeared to offer an alternative to war. But at most it has slowed, not halted, Iran’s enrichment of uranium, a potential fuel for a nuclear weapon. And some skeptics believe that it may harden Iran’s resolve or set a dangerous precedent for a strategy that could be used against the United States and its allies.

Neither Israeli nor American officials will discuss the covert campaign in any detail, leaving some uncertainty about the perpetrators and their purpose. For instance, Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said he believed that at least some of the murdered scientists might have been killed by the Iranian government. Some of them had shown sympathy for the Iranian opposition, he said, and not all appeared to have been high-ranking experts.

“I think there is reason to doubt the idea that all the hits have been carried out by Israel,” Mr. Sadjadpour said. “It’s very puzzling that Iranian nuclear scientists, whose movements are likely carefully monitored by the state, can be executed in broad daylight, sometimes in rush-hour traffic, and their culprits never found.”

A more common view, however, is expressed by Patrick Clawson, director of the Iran Security Initiative at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “I often get asked when Israel might attack Iran,” Mr. Clawson said. “I say, ‘Two years ago.’ ”

Mr. Clawson said the covert campaign was far preferable to overt airstrikes by Israel or the United States on suspected Iranian nuclear sites. “Sabotage and assassination is the way to go, if you can do it,” he said. “It doesn’t provoke a nationalist reaction in Iran, which could strengthen the regime. And it allows Iran to climb down if it decides the cost of pursuing a nuclear weapon is too high.”

A former senior Israeli security official, who would speak of the covert campaign only in general terms and on the condition of anonymity, said the uncertainty about who was responsible was useful. “It’s not enough to guess,” he said. “You can’t prove it, so you can’t retaliate. When it’s very, very clear who’s behind an attack, the world behaves differently.”

The former Israeli official noted that Iran carried out many assassinations of enemies, mostly Iranian opposition figures, during the 1980s and 1990s, and had been recently accused of plotting to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States in Washington.

“In Arabic, there’s a proverb: If you are shooting, don’t complain about being shot,” he said. But he portrayed the killings and bombings as part of a larger Israeli strategy to prevent all-out war.

“I think the cocktail of diplomacy, of sanctions, of covert activity might bring us something,” the former official said. “I think it’s the right policy while we still have time.”

Israel has used assassination as a tool of statecraft since its creation in 1948, historians say, killing dozens of Palestinian and other militants and a small number of foreign scientists, military officials or people accused of being Holocaust collaborators.

But there is no exact precedent for what appears to be the current campaign against Iran, involving Israel and the United States and a broad array of methods.

The assassinations have been carried out primarily by motorcyclists who attach magnetic bombs to the victim’s car, often in heavy traffic, before speeding away.

Iran’s Mehr news agency said Wednesday’s explosion took place on Gol Nabi Street, on Mr. Roshan’s route to work, at 8:20 a.m. The news agency said the scientist, who also taught at a technical university, was deputy director of commercial affairs at the Natanz site, evidently in charge of buying equipment and materials. Two other people were wounded, and one later died in a hospital, Iranian officials said.

Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Khazaee, sent a letter of protest to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, blaming “certain foreign quarters” for what he called “terrorist acts” aimed at disrupting Iran’s “peaceful nuclear program, under the false assumption that diplomacy alone would not be enough for that purpose.”

The ambassador’s letter complained of sabotage, a possible reference to the Stuxnet computer worm, believed to be a joint American-Israeli project, that reportedly led to the destruction in 2010 of about a fifth of the centrifuges Iran uses to enrich uranium. It also said the covert campaign included “a military strike on Iran,” evidently a reference to a mysterious explosion that destroyed much of an Iranian missile base on Nov. 12.

That explosion, which Iran experts say they believe was probably an Israeli effort, killed Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, who was in charge of Iran’s missile program. Satellite photographs show multiple buildings at the site leveled or heavily damaged.

The C.I.A., according to current and former officials, has repeatedly tried to derail Iran’s uranium enrichment program by covert means, including introducing sabotaged parts into Iran’s supply chain.

In addition, the agency is believed to have encouraged some Iranian nuclear scientists to defect, an effort that came to light in 2010 when a scientist, Shahram Amiri, who had come to the United States, claimed to have been kidnapped by the C.I.A. and returned to Iran. (Press reports say he has since been arrested and tried for treason.) A former deputy defense minister, Ali-Reza Asgari, disappeared while visiting Turkey in 2006 and is widely believed to have defected, possibly to the United States.

William C. Banks, an expert on national security law at Syracuse University, said he believed that for the United States even to provide specific intelligence to Israel to help kill an Iranian scientist would violate a longstanding executive order banning assassinations. The legal rationale for drone strikes against terrorist suspects — that the United States is at war with Al Qaeda and its allies — would not apply, he said.

“Under international law, aiding and abetting would be the same as pulling the trigger,” Mr. Banks said. He added, “We would be in a precarious position morally, and the entire world is watching, especially China and Russia.”

Gary Sick, a specialist on Iran at Columbia, said he believed that the covert campaign, combined with sanctions, would not persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear work.

“It’s important to turn around and ask how the U.S. would feel if our revenue was being cut off, our scientists were being killed and we were under cyberattack,” Mr. Sick said. “Would we give in, or would we double down? I think we’d fight back, and Iran will, too.”

Reporting was contributed by Steven Lee Myers from Washington,

David E. Sanger from Cairo, Alan Cowell from London

and Rick Gladstone from New York.

    Adversaries of Iran Said to Be Stepping Up Covert Actions, NYT, 11.1.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/world/middleeast/iran-adversaries-said-to-step-up-covert-actions.html

Iran Reports Killing of Nuclear Scientist

January 11, 2012
The New York Times
By ALAN COWELL and RICK GLADSTONE

LONDON — At a time of growing tension over its nuclear program and growing belligerence toward the West, Iran reported on Wednesday that an Iranian nuclear scientist died in what was termed a “terrorist bomb blast” in northern Tehran when a bomb planted by a motorcyclist exploded under his car.

It was the fourth such killing reported in two years and Iranian officials indicated that they believed Israel was responsible for the attack. News photographs from the scene in northern Tehran showed a car draped in a pale blue tarp being lifted onto a tow truck.

The scientist was identified as Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, 32, a professor at Tehran’s technical university, and a department supervisor at the Natan uranium enrichment facility — one of two known sites where Western leaders suspect Iranian scientists are advancing toward the creation of a nuclear weapon.

Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but is facing a growing battery of international sanctions designed to force it to halt its enrichment program and negotiate with the West. On Jan. 23, European Union foreign ministers are to discuss a possible oil export embargo, adding further pressure.

The semi-official Fars news agency, which has close links to the powerful Revolutionary Guards Corps, said on Wednesday the reported bombing resembled the methods used in attacks in November 2010 against two other nuclear specialists — Majid Shariari, who was killed, and Ferydoun Abbasi, who was wounded and is now the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization..

Earlier in 2010, a physics professor, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, was also assassinated in Tehran.

Iran blamed the attacks in 2010 on Israel and the United States and the latest killing is bound to deepen an embattled mood in Tehran as the country’s divided leaders approach parliamentary elections in March. The latest bombing seemed likely to draw similar accusations.

“The bomb was a magnetic one and the same as the ones previously used for the assassination of the scientists and is the work of the Zionists,” Fars quoted Tehran’s deputy governor, Safarali Baratloo, as saying, according to Reuters, reflecting a suspicion that the West and its allies were waging covert war.

The Associated Press quoted Theodore Karasik, a security expert at the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis in Dubai, as saying Western powers and their allies “appear to be relying on covert war tactics to try to delay and degrade Iran’s nuclear advancement.” He said the use of magnetic bombs bears the hallmarks of covert operations.

“It’s a very common way to eliminate someone,” he added. “It’s clean, easy and efficient.”

In recent days, several events have combined to create the deepest tension with the United States since the Islamic revolution in 1979 and the subsequent seizure of hostages at the American Embassy in Tehran.

Last weekend, Iran’s top nuclear official said the country was about to start production at its second major uranium enrichment site, in a defiant declaration that its nuclear program would continue despite the sanctions.

The announcement came two months after the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear oversight body based in Vienna, published a report in November that Iranian scientists had engaged in secret and possibly continuing efforts to construct a nuclear weapon.

The imminent opening of the site — the Fordo plant, near the city of Qum -- confronted the United States and its allies with difficult choices about how far to go to limit Iran’s nuclear abilities. The new facility is buried deep underground on a well-defended military site and is considered far more resistant to airstrikes than the existing enrichment site at Natanz, limiting what Israeli officials, in particular, consider an important deterrent to Iran’s nuclear aims.

On Monday, Iran announced that Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, a former United States Marine from Flint, Mich., had been convicted of spying for the C.I.A. and sentenced to death. He was arrested last August while he was visiting Iran for the first time.

His family, traumatized by the news, has asserted Mr. Hekmati’s innocence, saying he was visiting relatives, and has characterized the prosecution as a grave misunderstanding.

Mr. Hekmati served in the Marines for four years, spent five months in Iraq and took linguistics training in Arabic at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif. He was carrying his former military identification with him when arrested in Iran — atypical behavior for a spy.

Nonetheless, Iranian investigators may have been intrigued by Mr. Hekmati’s post-military linguistics work. In 2006, he started his own company, Lucid Linguistics, doing document translation that specialized in Arabic, Persian and “military-related matters,” according its Web site. “Our main goal is to assist organizations whose focus is on the current Global War on Terrorism and who are working to bridge the language barrier for our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the site said.

Possibly more intriguing to the Iranians was work done a few years later by Mr. Hekmati while working for Kuma Games, which specializes in recreating military confrontations that enable players to participate in games based on real events.

A Pentagon language-training contract won in 2009 by Kuma Games, a New York-based company that develops reality-based war games — including one called “Assault on Iran” — lists Mr. Hekmati as a main contact.

That $95,920 contract, and Mr. Hekmati’s military background, his Iranian heritage and some linguistics work he did for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, help explain why the authorities in Iran had him arrested.

At the same time, Iran has intensified belligerency to the naval activities of the American Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf and has threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil shipping route.

The United States Navy has responded with two well-publicized sea rescues in the area within a week.

On Tuesday, a vessel on patrol with the Navy’s Fifth Fleet near the Persian Gulf saved a group of distressed Iranian mariners, pulling them to safety from a cargo dhow that was foundering with a flooded engine room, the naval central command reported.

In a statement, the command said the Coast Guard patrol boat Monomoy, on assignment with a Fifth Fleet task force in the northern Arabian Gulf, approached the stricken Iranian dhow, the Ya-Hussayn, after the dhow’s crew hailed the Monomoy with flares and flashlights before dawn.

Last Friday, the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis broke up a high-seas pirate attack on a cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman. Sailors from an American destroyer boarded the pirates’ mother ship and freed 13 Iranian hostages who had been held captive there for more than a month.

Alan Cowell reported from London, and Rick Gladstone from New York.

    Iran Reports Killing of Nuclear Scientist, NYT, 11.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/world/middleeast/iran-reports-killing-of-nuclear-scientist.html

Political Islam Without Oil

January 10, 2012
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Cairo

With the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and the even more puritanical Salafist Al Nour Party having stunned both themselves and Egyptians by garnering more than 60 percent of the seats in Egypt’s parliamentary elections, we’re about to see a unique lab test for the Middle East: What happens when political Islam has to wrestle with modernity and globalization without oil?

Islamist movements have long dominated Iran and Saudi Arabia. Both the ayatollahs in Iran and the Wahhabi Salafists in Saudi Arabia, though, were able to have their ideology and the fruits of modernity, too, because they had vast oil wealth to buy off any contradictions. Saudi Arabia could underutilize its women and impose strict religious mores on its society, banks and schools. Iran’s clerics could snub the world, pursue nuclearization and impose heavy political and religious restrictions. And both could still offer their people improved living standards, because they had oil.

Egypt’s Islamist parties will not have that luxury. They will have to open up to the world, and they seem to be realizing that. Egypt is a net importer of oil. It also imports 40 percent of its food. And tourism constitutes one-tenth of its gross domestic product. With unemployment rampant and the Egyptian pound eroding, Egypt will probably need assistance from the International Monetary Fund, a major injection of foreign investment and a big upgrade in modern education to provide jobs for all those youths who organized last year’s rebellion. Egypt needs to be integrated with the world.

The Muslim Brotherhood, whose party is called Freedom and Justice, draws a lot of support from the middle classes and small businesses. The Salafist Al Nour Party is dominated by religious sheiks and the rural and urban poor.

Essam el-Erian, the vice chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood’s party, told me: “We hope that we can pull the Salafists — not that they pull us — and that both of us will be pulled by the people’s needs.” He made very clear that while both Freedom and Justice and Al Nour are Islamist parties, they are very different, and they may not join hands in power: “As a political group, they are newcomers, and I hope all can wait to discover the difference between Al Nour and Freedom and Justice.”

On the peace treaty with Israel, Erian said: “This is the commitment of the state — not any group or party — and we have said we are respecting the commitments of the Egyptian state from the past.” Ultimately, he added, relations with Israel will be determined by how it treats the Palestinians.

But generally speaking, he said, Egypt’s economic plight “is pushing us to be concerned about our own affairs.”

Muhammad Khairat el-Shater, the vice chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood and its economic guru, made clear to me over strawberry juice at his home that his organization intends to lean into the world. “It is no longer a matter of choice whether one can be with or against globalization,” he said. “It is a reality. From our perspective, we favor the widest possible engagement with globalization through win-win situations.”

Nader Bakkar, a spokesman for Al Nour, insisted that his party would move cautiously. “We are the guardians of Shariah,” he told me, referring to Islamic law, “and we want people to be with us on the same principles, but we have an open door to all the intellectuals in all fields.” He said his party’s economic model was Brazil. “We don’t like the theocratic model,” he added. “I can promise you that we will not be another dictatorship, and the Egyptian people will not give us a chance to be another dictatorship.”

In November, Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, an independent Salafist cleric and presidential candidate, was asked by an interviewer how, as president, he would react to a woman wearing a bikini on the beach? “She would be arrested,” he said.

The Al Nour Party quickly said he was not speaking for it. Agence France-Presse quoted another spokesman for Al Nour, Muhammad Nour, as also dismissing fears raised in the news media that the Salafists might ban alcohol, a staple of Egypt’s tourist hotels. “Maybe 20,000 out of 80 million Egyptians drink alcohol,” he said. “Forty million don’t have sanitary water. Do you think that, in Parliament, I’ll busy myself with people who don’t have water, or people who get drunk?”

What to make of all this? Egyptian Islamists have some big decisions. It has been easy to maintain a high degree of ideological purity all these years they’ve been out of power. But their sudden rise to the top of Egyptian politics coincides with the free fall of Egypt’s economy. And as soon as Parliament is seated on Jan. 23, Egypt’s Islamists will have the biggest responsibility for fixing that economy — without oil. (A similar drama is playing out in Tunisia.)

They don’t want to blow this chance to lead, yet they want to be true to their Islamic roots, yet they know their supporters elected them to deliver clean government, education and jobs, not mosques. It will be fascinating to watch them deal with these tugs and pulls. Where they come out will have a huge impact on the future of political Islam in this region.

    Political Islam Without Oil, NYT, 10.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/opinion/friedman-political-islam-without-oil.html

America Abroad

January 9, 2012
The New York Times
By ROGER COHEN

LONDON — Perhaps the most successful U.S. chief executive of the past decade is stepping down this month. Samuel Palmisano of I.B.M. has presided over a remarkable transformation of the technology giant, extracting it from the personal computer business and shifting it toward services and software to power a “Smarter Planet.”

In a fascinating interview with my colleague Steve Lohr, Palmisano said the first of the four questions in his guiding business framework was, “Why would someone spend their money with you — so what is unique about you?” At root, business is still about getting money out of your pocket into mine. By being unsentimental in making I.B.M. unique, Palmisano ensured a lot of money flowed the company’s way.

Profits followed. The stock price surged. Warren Buffett, who knows which way the wind blows, recently acquired a stake of more than 5 percent. I.B.M. has been re-imagined, not least in the way it has shifted from being a U.S. multinational to a global corporation powered by rapid expansion in growth markets like India and China.

The question arises: If an American colossus like I.B.M. can be turned around, can America itself? Are the “declinists” on the United States, focused on hard power and America’s falling share of global output, missing something? Before I get to that, let’s take a closer look at I.B.M.’s shifting focus and its implications.

As Lohr has reported, I.B.M. no longer breaks out its global payroll by region. But last time it did, in 2008, it reported that its worldwide employment grew by 21 percent to 386,558, while the U.S. head count fell 11 percent to 120,589. It seems unlikely this trend has halted. By some estimates, huge growth in India has brought the number of I.B.M. employees there to over 100,000, perhaps equivalent to the current number in the United States.

I.B.M. is not alone. U.S.-based global corporations added 683,000 workers in China during the 1999-2009 decade, a 172 percent increase, and 392,000 workers in India, a 542 percent increase. In all they added 1.5 million workers to payrolls in the Asia and Pacific region, while cutting 864,600 workers at home, according to figures from the Commerce Department.

American isolationism has become an oxymoron. As these figures show, it’s a non-option.

On one level this shift poses problems for the United States: Cash-rich companies are creating jobs elsewhere rather than at home. On another, however, the global American corporation expands U.S. power in ways that are hard to quantify but significant. They tend to propagate cultures of openness, connectedness and transparency.

“A General Electric or a Goldman or a Twitter tries to work in each country in culturally appropriate ways, but at their base these companies hold an American set of values. And that is what influence is,” Xenia Dormandy, a senior fellow at Chatham House, told me. “Power viewed in state terms alone, or even primarily, is a false premise these days.”

The conspicuous failure of American hard power — in Iraq and Afghanistan — has tended to obscure the way American soft power has flourished over the past decade. For a while soft power was undercut because the U.S. reputation was tarnished, but the Arab awakening has demonstrated how powerful American-driven social media are in opening up closed societies. Facebook and Twitter have been conspicuous. But when I.B.M. invests massively in Africa — which it has identified as the next major emerging growth market — it is also investing in an openness that advances U.S. interests.

When I was at Harvard recently, Joseph Nye, the professor and former dean of the Kennedy School of Government, made an interesting point. He noted that a rising China has 1.3 billion citizens. But America at its best has 7 billion in that it draws on the world’s talents, as its corporations and colleges demonstrate. Nye in general is skeptical of the “declinists.”

I agree. That’s not because another American century is dawning — it’s not; nor because the power shift to Asia is illusory; nor because U.S. problems of paralyzed government, high deficits and inadequate schools are negligible. No, it’s because the defeat of American hard power has been overdrawn and the magnetism of American soft power underestimated. And we are going into a world where, as Nye has written, “War remains possible, but it is much less acceptable now than it was a century or even a half-century ago.”

The United States is adaptable. The mistakes of the past decade are being corrected through more effective counterterrorism, withdrawal from the major wars, and a slimmed down military budget. Some event, or political lurch, could blow these moves off course, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that consumer confidence is improving as America overcomes its great post-9/11 disorientation.

Palmisano’s third guiding question was, “Why would society allow you to operate in their defined geography — their country?” That looks like a way of saying no nation is going to welcome a big-footing America. And he urged America to educate itself into the 21st-century, a course hard to follow when trillions are going to far-flung wars.

Smarter U.S. power could still confound the “declinists.”

    America Abroad, NYT, 9.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/opinion/america-abroad.html

Iran Imposes Death Sentence on U.S. Man Accused of Spying

January 9, 2012
The New York Times
By HARVEY MORRIS

LONDON — Iran’s Revolutionary Court has sentenced to death a former United States military serviceman of Iranian descent on charges of spying for the Central Intelligence Agency, the semiofficial Fars news agency reported on Monday.

The former serviceman, Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, 28, is the first American to receive a death sentence in Iran since the Iranian revolution more than 30 years ago ushered in the estrangement in American-Iranian relations that have reached new levels of tension in recent months. Mr. Hekmati’s family in the United States has insisted he is no spy and was merely visiting family in Iran.

“It’s a very shocking sentence,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, a New York-based advocacy group that has been following Mr. Hekmati’s case.

Mr. Hekmati, who has been imprisoned in Iran since August, had been charged by prosecutors with receiving espionage training at American bases in Afghanistan and Iraq before infiltrating Iran.

The Fars agency said he was sentenced to death for “cooperating with the hostile country and spying for the C.I.A.”

“The court found him Corrupt on Earth and Mohareb (waging war on God),” according to Fars. The formulation is routinely used in cases against alleged enemies of the Islamic Republic and the charge carries the death sentence.

Mr. Hekmati’s detention became public last month when Iranian state television broadcast video images of him. It identified him as an American-born Iranian-American from Arizona.

In the video, the man identified as Mr. Hekmati said he joined the United States Army after graduating from high school in 2001, served in Iraq and received training in languages and espionage.

He said he was sent to Iran by the C.I.A. to gain the trust of the Iranian authorities by handing over information, some misleading and some accurate. If his first mission was successful, he said he was told, there would be more missions.

The claims in the video could not be verified at the time. The C.I.A. declined to comment after the broadcast on Dec. 18.

In the televised confession, Mr. Hekmati was shown speaking in fluent English and Farsi. He said he was a C.I.A. operative sent to infiltrate the Iranian intelligence ministry.

Iranian officials said their agents had identified him at the American-run Bagram air base in Afghanistan and tracked him as he infiltrated Iran. Mr. Hekmati’s family in the United States told American news media that he had traveled to Iran to visit his Iranian grandmothers and was not a spy.

The United States had demanded Mr. Hekmati’s release and the State Department said last month that Iran had not permitted diplomats from the Swiss Embassy, which represents American interests in Iran, to see him before or during his trial.

Accusations by Iran of espionage inside its borders are common, and Iran often announces that it has captured or executed people it says are spies for Western powers and Israel.

On Sunday, Heydar Moslehi, the Iranian intelligence minister, said Iran had arrested several spies who sought to carry out American plans to disrupt parliamentary elections in March, according to Fars.

Speaking to reporters after a cabinet meeting in Tehran, Mr. Moslehi said: “Our intelligence apparatus had complete information about the activities of the arrested spies. The detainees were in contact with abroad through cyberspace networks. We arrested them after we obtained full information about their espionage activities.”

Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York, and Artin Afkhami from Boston.

    Iran Imposes Death Sentence on U.S. Man Accused of Spying, NYT, 9.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/world/middleeast/iran-imposes-death-sentence-on-alleged-us-spy.html

Islamists in Egypt Back Timing of Military Handover

January 8, 2012
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — Poised to dominate the new Parliament here, Egypt’s largest Islamist group is putting off an expected confrontation with Egypt’s military rulers, keeping its distance from more radical Islamist parties and hoping that the United States will continue to support the country financially, a top leader of the group’s political arm said Sunday.

In a wide-ranging interview, Essam el-Erian, a senior leader of the political party founded by the group, the Muslim Brotherhood, said the party had decided to support keeping the caretaker prime minister and cabinet appointed by the ruling military council in office for the next six months.

Mr. Erian and other party leaders had previously suggested that they might act to have the Parliament challenge the council over control of the posts, perhaps as soon as later this month at the legislative body’s first meeting. But on Sunday, Mr. Erian said the party intended to let the caretakers stay on until the military’s preferred date for a handover of power, after the new Constitution is approved and a president is elected in June.

To many Egyptians, the conciliatory tone evokes a frequent criticism that the Muslim Brotherhood has often been too willing to accommodate those in power. Many still talk about how it initially collaborated with the military-led government after Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1952 coup — until Colonel Nasser turned on the Brotherhood and ordered a crackdown that jailed or executed many of its leaders.

Mr. Erian made it clear in the interview, though, that the Muslim Brotherhood does not expect the military rulers to relinquish all power on their own. The party’s first step in ultimately removing them, he said, would be to defend the authority of the Parliament to choose, on its own, the members of a planned 100-person constitutional assembly.

“Of course, the military wants to delay or disturb the composition of the assembly,” Mr. Erian said. But although the military has sought permanent powers and autonomy, Mr. Erian said, the public is against its continued rule in any form. “No people can support this now,” he said.

Still, Mr. Erian said, governing Egypt for the time being would require “cooperation” between the military council, the caretaker government and the Parliament. Once a new president is elected and a new constitution is ratified, he said, “within three months we can have the military back in their camps safely.”

He spoke as preliminary results of the third and final round of parliamentary voting confirmed the Brotherhood’s commanding lead. It captured nearly 40 percent of the votes cast for party lists of candidates, and some analysts said that once all runoffs between individual candidates are decided, the Brotherhood could reach an outright majority of seats, though that appeared to be a long shot.

Sitting in a parlor in the rundown headquarters of the Brotherhood’s political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, Mr. Erian expressed satisfaction that, after decades of mutual distrust, Washington appeared willing to accept a Brotherhood-led government in Egypt.

Recently, he has met with American officials like Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Ambassador Anne W. Patterson, and he is soon to meet with Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns. Mr. Erian brushed aside recent reports by some Arab news outlets that the Brotherhood planned to reject American aid to Egypt, including the military aid of about $1.3 billion a year that Egypt has received since it signed the Camp David accord with Israel in 1978.

“If the Americans are ready to support a democratic government in Egypt, this means a lot,” Mr. Erian said, adding that he hoped the United States would “continue the aid, but without political pressure.”

The Brotherhood, he said, would honor the Camp David accord. “This is a commitment of the state, not a group or a party, and this we respect,” he said.

But Mr. Erian also said that it was now time for Israel to understand the implications of the democratic openings of the Arab Spring — “the biggest change in the Arab world’s history” — which have given new voice to Arab anger at Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.

And he reminded his American visitors that they were not the only ones to come calling. “Everyone wants to see us,” he said. “The Chinese were here, the Russians were here.”

Mr. Erian acknowledged that the Brotherhood was surprised by the electoral strength shown by the ultraconservative Islamists known as Salafis, whose Al Nour party has received about 25 percent of the vote so far. Salafi leaders have espoused a variety of radical proposals about applying Saudi Arabia-style Islamic law in Egypt as soon as possible — cutting off the hands of thieves, stoning adulterers, banning alcohol, imposing conservative standards of decency on women’s dress, and censoring arts and entertainment.

“It is clear that they are a political power,” Mr. Erian said.

Still, he dismissed the fears of many Western observers, including some in Washington, that the need to compete with the Salafis would pull the Brotherhood to the right. “We hope that we can pull the Salafis toward us, and both of us will be pulled by the people’s needs,” Mr. Erian said.

Indeed, he seemed to regard the Salafis as unsophisticated upstarts compared with the 80-year-old Brotherhood. He sought to explain the Salafis’ popularity the way some liberal analysts have tried to explain movements like the Brotherhood — in terms of social class.

While the Egyptian elite was “divided,” Mr. Erian said, the Brotherhood — dominated by doctors, engineers and professionals preaching virtue and discipline — appealed to the upper-middle and lower-middle classes. The Salafis, he said, appealed to “the lower classes, the marginalized, the people who are always out of the scene.”

If the new government addressed the problem of poverty, Mr. Erian said, it could help diminish the Salafis’ appeal.

But he also argued that taking part in the democratic political process would moderate Salafi ideology, just it had the Brotherhood’s. Mr. Erian himself was at the forefront of a generation of Brotherhood leaders who won election to Parliament during a period of Hosni Mubarak’s rule when Mr. Mubarak tolerated them as an opposition group; they grew accustomed to the norms of multiparty government, like building coalitions and appealing to moderate voters.

“Inclusion in the political process was good for the Muslim Brotherhood, and we hope it will be good for the Salafis too,” Mr. Erian said. “When you meet the facts on the ground, you develop new tools; you learn.”

Asked about the Brotherhood’s position on Salafi calls to ban the sale of alcohol or the wearing of bikinis, Mr. Erian replied: “Are you sure that is very important? We are keen to discuss the major issues.” The biggest of those issues, Mr. Erian said, is the form the new Constitution will take.

“To have a democracy in the Arab world, to make compatibility between our Arab Islamic culture and democratic values, democratic principles,” he said, “this is our huge burden.”

    Islamists in Egypt Back Timing of Military Handover, NYT, 8.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/world/middleeast/muslim-brotherhood-backs-egyptian-militarys-transition-date.html

Iran Trumpets Nuclear Ability at a Second Location

January 8, 2012
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

CAIRO — Iran’s top nuclear official announced this weekend that the country was on the verge of starting production at its second major uranium enrichment site, in a defiant declaration that its nuclear program would continue despite new international sanctions restricting its oil revenue.

The announcement, made through official news media reports, came after a week of escalating confrontations between Washington and Tehran, including a threat that Iran would respond with military force if the United States tried to send an aircraft carrier strike group back into the Strait of Hormuz.

The imminent opening of the enrichment site — the Fordo plant, near the city of Qum — confronts the United States and its allies with difficult choices about how far to go to limit Iran’s nuclear abilities. The new facility is buried deep underground on a well-defended military site and is considered far more resistant to airstrikes than the existing enrichment site at Natanz, limiting what Israeli officials, in particular, consider an important deterrent to Iran’s nuclear aims.

When the existence of the Qum facility was first disclosed by President Obama and his counterparts in France and Britain in the fall of 2009, American officials expressed doubts that Iran would ever go forward with the facility. But once it goes into operation, the chances of disabling it, in the words of one former top Israeli official, “diminish very dramatically.”

The declaration that the facility was nearly ready came in an interview on Saturday with Fereydoon Abbasi, who was made the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization shortly after surviving an assassination attempt in 2010. The official news agency Mehr quoted him as saying, “The Fordo site near Qum would soon be opened and become operational.” Iranian newspapers reported the development on Sunday.

While Iran has often exaggerated its abilities, nuclear experts say this claim is plausible. In December, inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that during a visit to the plant they saw the finishing touches put on enrichment centrifuges and said they expected the facility to be operating soon.

Iran says its nuclear program is critical to its national security — not because it is seeking weapons, but because it wants an alternative energy source to oil and is seeking to refuel a reactor that makes medical isotopes.

Four years of sanctions have deeply hurt Iran’s economy, but have not changed its nuclear strategy. But the new American sanctions, along with an oil embargo under discussion in Europe, aim to undercut the government by squeezing its most important source of revenue: oil sales. In response, Iran has clearly signaled that the sanctions have only hardened its determination to proceed. On Sunday, for instance, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad began a highly publicized series of visits to South American leaders that have been critical of the United States, starting with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

More troublingly, Iran threatened early last week to close off shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, an action that analysts say could send global oil prices soaring. Iran conducted military exercises in the waterway, and then said it would use force to bar any re-entry of the United States aircraft carrier John C. Stennis and its escort ships.

While American officials and outside experts have dismissed the threat as hyperbole, and say they have every intention of patrolling the area with a carrier, there is broad concern that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Navy could harass oil tankers passing through the narrow strait or lay mines that could create significant risks to shipping.

The opening of the plant does not significantly affect estimates of how long it could take Iran to produce a nuclear weapon, if that is its true intention. The new facility has been inspected regularly, and unless the Iranians barred inspectors or managed to deceive them, any effort to produce uranium at bomb-grade levels would most likely be detected. American officials have estimated that they would have six months to a year to react, if needed, before the enrichment was completed.

But should it come to that, the Fordo plant site itself would greatly complicate any military action. Satellite photographs show it is surrounded by antiaircraft guns, and the mountainous setting was designed to make a bombing campaign nearly impossible. Mr. Abbasi said Saturday that the plant would house a new generation of centrifuges — the machines that spin at supersonic speeds to enrich the purity of uranium — though inspectors largely saw older, far less efficient models at the plant.

“No one has a full sense of the Iranian production plan there,” said one diplomat who has studied the few details Iran has shared about the plant. “And I think that’s the point.”

Already Iran has produced enough fuel to manufacture about four weapons, but only if the fuel goes through further enrichment, nuclear experts say. Some of the fuel at Fordo, Mr. Abbasi said, would be enriched to 20 percent purity for use in a research reactor in Tehran; because of the oddities about how uranium is enriched, those batches would be the easiest to convert for use in weapons.

It is that ability that has Israel most concerned. So Israeli officials were relieved in December when Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, speaking at a conference in Washington, strongly suggested that the United States was determined to stop not only a weapon, but the ability to produce one.

But on Sunday, appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Mr. Panetta was less specific about how close to the line Iran would be allowed to go. Sanctions and separate embargoes against Iran were “working to put pressure on them, to make them understand that they cannot continue to do what they’re doing,” Mr. Panetta said, in comments that were taped before Mr. Abbasi’s announcement. “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability. And that’s what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is: do not develop a nuclear weapon. That’s a red line for us.”

In saying that the United States did not have any evidence that Iran was seeking to develop a nuclear weapon, Mr. Panetta was hewing closely to the conclusions the often fractious American intelligence agencies agreed upon in 2007 and again in 2010. Two National Intelligence Estimates, designed to reflect the consensus of the intelligence community, concluded that Iranian leaders had made no political decision yet to build an actual weapon. Instead, they described a series of steps that would take Iran right up to that line — and position it to assemble a weapon fairly quickly if a decision to do so were made.

When asked on “Face the Nation” about the how difficult it would be to take out Iran’s nuclear ability in a military strike, Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said: “Well, I would rather not discuss the degree of difficulty and in any way encourage them to read anything into that. But I will say that my responsibility is to encourage the right degree of planning, to understand the risks associated with any kind of military option, in some cases to position assets, to provide those options in a timely fashion. And all those activities are going on.”

    Iran Trumpets Nuclear Ability at a Second Location, NYT, 8.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/world/middleeast/iran-will-soon-move-uranium-work-underground-official-says.html

Watching Elephants Fly

January 7, 2012
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Cairo

SOMEDAY I’d love to create a journalism course based on covering the uprising in Egypt, now approaching its first anniversary. Lesson No. 1 would be the following: Whenever you see elephants flying, shut up and take notes. The Egyptian uprising is the equivalent of elephants flying. No one predicted it, and no one had seen this before. If you didn’t see it coming, what makes you think you know where it’s going? That’s why the smartest thing now is to just shut up and take notes.

If you do, the first thing you’ll write is that the Islamist parties — the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist Al Nour Party — just crushed the secular liberals, who actually sparked the rebellion here, in the free Egyptian parliamentary elections, winning some 65 percent of the seats. To not be worried about the theocratic, antipluralistic, anti-women’s-rights, xenophobic strands in these Islamist parties is to be recklessly naïve. But to assume that the Islamists will not be impacted, or moderated, by the responsibilities of power, by the contending new power centers here and by the priority of the public for jobs and clean government is to miss the dynamism of Egyptian politics today.

Come with me to Cairo’s dirt-poor Shubra el-Khema neighborhood and the dilapidated Omar Abdel Aziz School, where I watched the last round of voting on Wednesday at a women-only voting center. We were guided by Amr Hassan, a 22-year-old commerce student from the ’hood — a secular youth, who fought to topple the Hosni Mubarak regime in Tahrir Square last year.

Here is what was so striking: virtually all the women we interviewed after the voting — all of whom were veiled, some with only slits for their eyes — said that they had voted for either the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafists. But almost none said they had voted that way for religious reasons.

Many said they voted for Islamists because they were neighbors, people they knew, while secular liberal candidates had never once visited. Some illiterate elderly women confided that they could not read the ballot and just voted where their kids told them to. But practically all of them said they had voted for the Muslim Brotherhood or Salafist candidates because they expected them to deliver better, more honest government — not more mosques or liquor bans.

Here are some quotes from Egyptian women on why they voted Islamist: “I love the Muslim Brotherhood; they are the only honest ones. ... I want good education and clean air to breathe. ... We need proper medical care. ... I want my kids to be properly educated. They can’t find any jobs. ... The Muslim Brotherhood is not just an Islamist party. It is going to help solve all the problems of the country. ... We have to get the youth working and to raise salaries. Education here is only getting worse. ... My biggest fear is lack of security. We sit in our homes — afraid. You are afraid your son won’t be able to go back and forth to school without being kidnapped.”

Meanwhile, when I asked our young guide Hassan, the revolutionary, whom he had voted for, he said that he wrote on his ballot “Down with the SCAF” — the acronym for the Egyptian military council now running the country. He spat out his disgust with the fact that while secular youth like him toppled Mubarak, the Islamist parties were winning the elections and the army generals — who abandoned Mubarak to save themselves — were still in power!

And there you have Egypt today — a four-way power struggle between the army, the rising Islamist parties, the smaller liberal parties and the secular youth of Tahrir Square. All of them will have a say in how this story plays out. “We want to see a new Egyptian government with new thoughts,” said Hassan. “I am ready to go back into Tahrir Square if I have to.”

Indeed, everyone feels more empowered now. The army has its guns and now runs the country; both the Islamists and the liberals have won electoral mandates; and the secular youth from Tahrir feel empowered by the street — by their now proven ability to mobilize and to fight whenever they see things going awry. Even the silent majority here, called “The Party of the Couch,” feels more empowered, having just voted in high numbers in an election where the votes actually got counted.

My favorite election story was told to me by an international observer, who asked not to be identified. His voting station had just closed and as the polling workers were loading up the box filled with votes onto a bus to be taken to a central counting station, an Egyptian woman, who had just voted, ran over to them and shouted: “Please, never leave that box alone. This is our future. Go and make sure they put it in the right place.”

That box and all the hopes stuffed into it by so many average Egyptians is surely necessary for a new beginning here. But it is not sufficient. The country needs a leader — there is still a huge vacuum at the top — who can take all those votes, all those hopes, and meld them into a strategy to create the jobs, schooling, justice and security that all Egyptians clearly crave. If that happens, those ballot boxes really will have delivered a different future for Egypt. Until then, I am just taking notes.

    Watching Elephants Fly, NYT, 7.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/friedman-watching-elephants-fly.html

For Iranians Waylaid by Pirates, U.S. to the Rescue

January 6, 2012
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS

ABOARD THE FISHING VESSEL AL MULAHI, in the Gulf of Oman — Senior Iranian military officials this week bluntly warned an American aircraft carrier that it would confront the “full force” of the Iranian military if it tried to re-enter the Persian Gulf.

On Friday, Fazel Ur Rehman, a 28-year-old Iranian fisherman, had a warmer greeting for the carrier task force.

“It is like you were sent by God,” said Mr. Rehman, huddled under a blanket in this vessel’s stern. “Every night we prayed for God to rescue us. And now you are here.”

In a naval action that mixed diplomacy, drama and Middle Eastern politics, the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis broke up a high-seas pirate attack on a cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman, then sailors from an American destroyer boarded the pirates’ mother ship and freed 13 Iranian hostages who had been held captive there for more than a month.

The rapidly unfolding events began Thursday morning when the pirates attacked a Bahamian-flagged ship, the motor vessel Sunshine, unaware that the Stennis was steaming less than eight miles away.

It ended Friday with the tables fully turned. The captured Somali pirates, 15 in all, were brought aboard the U.S.S. Kidd, an American destroyer traveling with the Stennis. They were then shuttled by helicopter to the aircraft carrier and locked up in its brig.

This fishing vessel and its crew, provided fuel and food by the Navy, then set sail for its home port of Chah Bahar, Iran.

The rescue, 210 miles off the coast of Iran, occurred against a tense political backdrop. On Tuesday the Iranian defense minister and a brigadier general threatened the Stennis with attack if it sought to return to the Persian Gulf, which it had left roughly a week before. The warning set up fears of a confrontation over the vital oil shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz.

None of that tension was evident at sea. The Sunshine, a 583-foot cargo ship carrying bulk cargo from Calais, France, to Bandar Abbas, Iran, continued its journey. The freed hostages, Iranian citizens, greeted the American sailors with wide-eyed relief.

Mahmed Younes, 28, the fishing vessel’s captain, said he and his crew had been captured roughly 45 days ago by pirates in a skiff, who boarded their 82-foot dhow and forced it to an anchorage in the northern Somali port of Xaafuun. There, the pirates took on provisions and more gunmen.

In late December the pirates, using their hostages to run the dhow, set back out to sea, hunting for a tanker or large cargo ship to capture and hold for ransom.

For several days, Al Mulahi roamed the Gulf of Oman, unmolested under its Iranian flag, the pirates and former hostages said. They saw several ships. But the pirates’ leader, Bashir Bhotan, 32, did not think any of them would command a high ransom. They let them pass.

“The pirates told us, ‘If you get us a good ship, we will let you go free,’ ” Captain Younes said. “We told them, ‘How can we get you a ship? We are fishermen, not hunters.’ ”

On Thursday morning, six of the pirates set out in a fiberglass skiff and found their quarry — the Sunshine, 100 miles from the shore of Oman. One of the pirates, Mohammed Mahmoud, 33, later said this was the type of vessel they would hope might fetch a ransom of several million dollars.

Brandishing a rocket-propelled grenade and several Kalashnikov rifles, they rushed alongside, threw a grappling hook and tried to lash a ladder to the Sunshine’s side. They hoped to scale the gunwales and seize the bridge.

Their plans unraveled immediately. As the Sunshine radioed for help, and tried to deter the boarding by spraying the pirates with fire hoses, the pirates were unable to board.

“Our ladder broke,” Mr. Mahmoud said.

Then an American helicopter appeared.

Neither the pirates nor the crew of the Sunshine had known it, but three Navy ships — the Stennis; the U.S.N.S. Rainier, a supply ship; and the U.S.S. Mobile Bay, a guided-missile cruiser — were steaming in formation a few miles away. The carrier was taking on provisions from the Rainier and had several helicopters in the air when the Sunshine radioed its distress call.

Aboard the carrier, Rear Adm. Craig S. Faller, who commands the carrier strike group, looked at the chart and radar images of the Sunshine’s location with something like disbelief. The Sunshine and the Stennis were only a few miles apart. “These might be the dumbest pirates ever,” he said.

He ordered a helicopter and the cruiser toward the Sunshine and other helicopters to investigate the radar images of other ships in the area, to search for the skiff’s possible mother ship.

Seeing the approaching aircraft, the pirates let the Sunshine pull away and tossed their weapons over the side, they said.

Aboard the carrier, the officers watched a video feed from the helicopter, showing the six men in T-shirts and tank tops in a small white boat, bobbing on the waves. For a few minutes the Somalis seemed unsure what to do. Then they put their hands atop their heads.

“They are surrendering, they are surrendering,” said Capt. Todd W. Malloy, the carrier strike group’s chief of staff. A boarding team from the Mobile Bay soon approached in an inflatable boat.

The pirates told them they were at sea “for fun,” the sailors said. There were no weapons on board and the Sunshine had steamed away. The Mobile Bay’s sailors began to take the pirates’ fingerprints and photographs for a biometric database.

Meanwhile, two other Navy helicopters had made four passes by Al Mulahi. The fishing vessel was about 30 miles away and carried a skiff identical to the pirate’s skiff on the dhow’s deck. But Al Mulahi was flying an Iranian flag, which made boarding the vessel politically delicate. There were no pirates visible on board.

The Navy quickly made a plan. The sailors on the boarding team gave the pirates oranges and water and set them free. But a helicopter from the Mobile Bay lingered outside of eyesight and followed the skiff’s movements with long-range optics.

The skiff headed toward the Iranian dhow.

The Kidd, a guided-missile destroyer serving as the command ship for Combined Task Force 151, an international counterpiracy team off the coast of Africa, steamed toward the dhow from 120 miles away. Several hours later, after the pirates boarded the dhow, the Kidd approached and called Al Mulahi on a bridge-to-bridge radio.

The ship asked if the dhow had any foreigners aboard. The dhow answered that it did not.

“While doing surveillance aerially, we had seen that there were Middle Easterners aboard and Somalis, and that socially they were not intermingling,” said Cmdr. Jennifer Ellinger, the top officer on the Kidd. “We could also see that some of the clothing hanging on board was Somali.”

A brief standoff ensued, as the ship and dhow bobbed alongside each other at sea. The Somalis were hiding and forcing the Iranian captain, a hostage, to speak to the American ship.

The ship had brought many of its crew who spoke different languages onto the bridge. One of the sailors, Chief Petty Officer Jagdeep Sidhu, speaks English, Punjabi, Urdu and Hindi.

Al Mulahi is from eastern Iran, near Pakistan, where many residents speak Urdu. He heard Captain Younes use an Urdu phrase, and was given the radio to hail him.

“At first he was hesitant to answer because he was afraid,” Chief Sidhu said. “But the Somalis could not understand Urdu, and he was able finally to muster enough courage and say: ‘We need help. Please help.’ ”

With the dhow’s request, the political uncertainties of boarding an Iranian-flagged vessel were lifted, because the ship’s master had asked for help. Rear Adm. Kaleem Shaukat, the Pakistani commanding Combined Task Force 151, gave permission, and late in the afternoon two inflatable boats from the Kidd ferried armed sailors to Al Mulahi.

They climbed aboard and discovered six Somalis hiding near the bow and nine more inside a cargo space. The Somalis did not resist, and were searched and moved to the bow, where they were held overnight.

A search of the dhow found four assault rifles and ammunition. Several of the Somalis, slumped with resignation, discussed their lives as pirates with a reporter and photographer traveling with the boarding team.

They said they knew the risks of being caught, but had been willing to try nonetheless. Mr. Mahmoud said he had three wives and seven children to feed. “In Somalia we have no jobs,” he said. “That’s the reason to go to sea. Our country has a civil war, and I don’t have skills.”

He said this had been his maiden voyage, a claim that could not be independently verified.

He said they had set sail with a rifle for every man and a single rocket-propelled grenade with 10 rockets, but, when the Navy approached from multiple directions, “we put them in the sea.”

As he sat smoking a cigarette a large liquid natural gas tanker steamed by on the horizon. “Ahhh,” he said. “L.N.G.”

He looked at it longingly. “Before we would have liked to catch that ship,” he said. Then he looked at the armed sailors standing about five yards away. He exhaled smoke and shook his head. “Not now,” he said.

On Friday morning, Mr. Bhotan, the leader of the pirate crew, looked dejectedly as his former charges were ferried away on inflatable boats to the Kidd, where they were showered, dressed in white suits and flex-cuffed before being flown to the carrier.

Al Mulahi, soon to be given fresh fuel from the Kidd for the journey home, was about to sail back to Iran. Mr. Bhotan said he did not know what would happen to him. “I am a prisoner,” he said.

    For Iranians Waylaid by Pirates, U.S. to the Rescue, NYT, 6.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/07/world/middleeast/for-iranians-held-by-pirates-us-to-the-rescue.html

Why Islamism Is Winning

January 6, 2012
The New York Times
By JOHN M. OWEN IV

Charlottesville, Va.

EGYPT’S final round of parliamentary elections won’t end until next week, but the outcome is becoming clear. The Muslim Brotherhood will most likely win half the lower house of Parliament, and more extreme Islamists will occupy a quarter. Secular parties will be left with just 25 percent of the seats.

Islamism did not cause the Arab Spring. The region’s authoritarian governments had simply failed to deliver on their promises. Though Arab authoritarianism had a good run from the 1950s until the 1980s, economies eventually stagnated, debts mounted and growing, well-educated populations saw the prosperous egalitarian societies they had been promised receding over the horizon, aggrieving virtually everyone, secularists and Islamists alike.

The last few weeks, however, have confirmed that a revolution’s consequences need not follow from its causes. Rather than bringing secular revolutionaries to power, the Arab Spring is producing flowers of a decidedly Islamist hue. More unsettling to many, Islamists are winning fairly: religious parties are placing first in free, open elections in Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt. So why are so many Arabs voting for parties that seem politically regressive to Westerners?

The West’s own history furnishes an answer. From 1820 to 1850, Europe resembled today’s Arab world in two ways. Both regions experienced historic and seemingly contagious rebellions that swept from country to country. And in both cases, frustrated people in many nations with relatively little in common rallied around a single ideology — one not of their own making, but inherited from previous generations of radicals.

In 19th-century Europe, that ideology was liberalism. It emerged in the late 18th century from the American, Dutch, Polish and especially French revolutions. Whereas the chief political divide in society had long been between monarchs and aristocrats, the revolutions drew a new line between the “old regime” of monarchy, nobility and church, and the new commercial classes and small landholders. For the latter group, it was the old regime that produced the predatory taxes, bankrupt treasuries, corruption, perpetual wars and other pathologies that dragged down their societies. The liberal solution was to extend rights and liberties beyond the aristocracy, which had inherited them from the Middle Ages.

Suppressing liberalism became the chief aim of absolutist regimes in Austria, Russia and Prussia after they helped defeat France in 1815. Prince Klemens von Metternich, Austria’s powerful chancellor, claimed that “English principles” of liberty were foreign to the Continent. But networks of liberals — Italian carbonari, Freemasons, English Radicals — continued to operate underground, communicating across societies and providing a common language for dissent.

This helped lay the ideological groundwork for Spain’s liberal revolution in 1820. From there, revolts spread to Portugal, the Italian states of Naples and Piedmont, and Greece. News of the Spanish revolution even spurred the adoption of liberal constitutions in the nascent states of Gran Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru and Mexico. Despite their varied grievances, in each case liberalism served as a rallying point and political program on which the malcontents could agree.

A decade later, in July 1830, a revolution toppled France’s conservative Bourbon monarchy. Insurrection spread to Belgium, Switzerland, a number of German and Italian states and Poland. Once again, a variety of complaints were distilled into the rejection of the old regime and the acceptance of liberalism.

The revolutions of 1848 were more numerous and consequential but remarkably similar to the earlier ones. Rebels with little in common — factory workers in Paris, peasants in Ireland, artisans in Vienna — followed a script written in the 1790s that was rehearsed continuously in the ensuing years across the continent.

Today, rural and urban Arabs with widely varying cultures and histories are showing that they share more than a deep frustration with despots and a demand for dignity. Most, whether moderate or radical, or living in a monarchy or a republic, share a common inherited language of dissent: Islamism.

Political Islam, especially the strict version practiced by Salafists in Egypt, is thriving largely because it is tapping into ideological roots that were laid down long before the revolts began. Invented in the 1920s by the Muslim Brotherhood, kept alive by their many affiliates and offshoots, boosted by the failures of Nasserism and Baathism, allegedly bankrolled by Saudi and Qatari money, and inspired by the defiant example of revolutionary Iran, Islamism has for years provided a coherent narrative about what ails Muslim societies and where the cure lies. Far from rendering Islamism unnecessary, as some experts forecast, the Arab Spring has increased its credibility; Islamists, after all, have long condemned these corrupt regimes as destined to fail.

Liberalism in 19th-century Europe, and Islamism in the Arab world today, are like channels dug by one generation of activists and kept open, sometimes quietly, by future ones. When the storms of revolution arrive, whether in Europe or the Middle East, the waters will find those channels. Islamism is winning out because it is the deepest and widest channel into which today’s Arab discontent can flow.

John M. Owen IV, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia,

is the author of “The Clash of Ideas in World Politics:

Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510-2010.”

    Why Islamism Is Winning, NYT, 6.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/07/opinion/why-islamism-is-winning.html

Prosecutors in Egypt Call for Mubarak to Be Hanged

January 5, 2012
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — Egyptian prosecutors called on Thursday for hanging former President Hosni Mubarak, saying his authority over the security forces made him responsible for the deaths of hundreds of protesters who challenged his rule.

Egyptian law authorizes the death penalty for the deliberate murder of a single victim, one of the prosecutors, Mostafa Khater, told the court. So what, he asked, is the appropriate sentence for killing hundreds? “There is life for you in the law of retribution, o men of understanding,” he said, quoting the Koran.

The prosecutors laid out their closing arguments in the historic trial of Egypt’s disgraced head of state as Egypt’s military rulers and their activist opponents braced for mass demonstrations on the Jan. 25 anniversary of the protests that forced him out. The final defense arguments are expected as early as next week, so the panel of judges could render a verdict before the anniversary.

The final decision could help determine whether that date is a day of anger or celebration. But the deliberations over a man who ruled with an iron fist for nearly three decades are also riveting the region. Tunisia seeks the extradition of its former president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, now in Saudi Arabia, the first of the Arab leaders forced from power by a popular uprising. Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s son and heir apparent, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, awaits trial in Libya.

President Bashar al-Assad in Syria is directing far greater violence against the protesters hoping to end his rule, with the killing of an estimated 5,000 demonstrators in the past 10 months. And President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen has taken the first step toward leaving power amid charges that he, too, authorized his military to attack demonstrators who demanded his exit.

In Cairo, the prosecutors have predicated their case against Mr. Mubarak on the principle that he was responsible for the deaths by virtue of his official position — that, like the other Arab leaders, he either knew or should have known about the killings by his own security forces in the central squares of Egyptian cities.

“He is responsible for what happened and must bear the legal and political responsibility for what happened,” said the lead prosecutor, Mustafa Suleiman, news agencies reported. “It is irrational and illogical to assume that he did not know that protesters were being targeted.”

After five months of intermittent sessions bogged down by legal squabbles and technical motions, prosecutors have failed to produce specific testimony or evidence that Mr. Mubarak, 83, directly ordered the use of force or the shooting of demonstrators. They contended on Tuesday that the police had obstructed their efforts to gather evidence, forcing the prosecution to rely on showing video of police violence that was previously shown on private television networks.

Mr. Mubarak and his interior minister, Habib el-Adly, both said in sworn depositions that the president had not given orders to use force, Mr. Suleiman acknowledged dismissively. “This is crazy people’s talk,” he said.

“He is the one with the interest in oppressing these protests and in killing the protesters who only went out to call for his ouster,” Mr. Suleiman added. Except for orders from above, the security officers themselves would have no other motive to kill the demonstrators, he argued.

To make its case, the prosecution drew on events as long ago as 1997. The interior minister then was blamed, and fired by Mr. Mubarak, when terrorists killed foreign tourists in Luxor that year. But there was no evidence that Mr. Mubarak had felt such anger or sought to punish Mr. Adly for allowing the killings of so many Egyptian citizens last year, Mr. Suleiman said. “How could he be enraged for the lives of a number of foreigners but not care or be equally enraged for his people?” the prosecutor asked.

Prosecutors introduced statements at the trial from the depositions of former Interior Ministry officials and from Mr. Mubarak’s former intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, to show that the ministry could never have given an order to shoot protesters without presidential authorization.

At one point, Mr. Suleiman also sought indirectly to discredit the testimony of Egypt’s de facto chief executive, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who was Mr. Mubarak’s defense minister as well as a close friend. Mr. Tantawi testified in a closed court that Mr. Mubarak had never ordered the military to use force against protesters, people present have said and the Egyptian news media have reported.

But in his deposition Mr. Mubarak said that after the police force collapsed on Jan. 28 the armed forces refused his order to go to the streets to control the chaos. “When I found that they did nothing and didn’t perform their role the way that was required, I was forced to step down,” he said, according to the deposition.

What had Mr. Mubarak asked of the armed forces if not to use force, the prosecutors asked. How else did he want them to control the streets?

Victims’ lawyers who had previously complained that the prosecution seemed half-hearted were on Thursday pronouncing themselves delighted.

Mr. Mubarak, said to be ailing, listened on his back inside the metal cage that serves in Egyptian courts as a docket. He is charged with Mr. Adly and Mr. Adly’s top aides with conspiring to kill protesters in an attempt to hold on to power. Mr. Mubarak is also charged along with his sons Gamal and Alaa of corruption.

Egypt’s new rulers — the military — have the power to veto a death sentence.

A day after prosecutors accused the police of obstructing the case, state media reported Thursday that the current interior minister had said that his ministry’s near-total collapse after Jan. 28 had handicapped its ability to produce certain evidence.

 

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.

    Prosecutors in Egypt Call for Mubarak to Be Hanged, NYT, 5.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/world/middleeast/egyptian-prosecutors-say-hosni-mubarak-should-be-hanged.html

Oil Price Would Skyrocket if Iran Closed the Strait of Hormuz

January 4, 2012
The New York Times
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

HOUSTON — If Iran were to follow through with its threat to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, a vital transit route for almost one-fifth of the oil traded globally, the impact would be immediate: Energy analysts say the price of oil would start to soar and could rise 50 percent or more within days.

An Iranian blockade by means of mining, airstrikes or sabotage is logistically well within Tehran’s military capabilities. But despite rising tensions with the West, including a tentative ban on European imports of Iranian oil announced Wednesday, Iran is unlikely to take such hostile action, according to most Middle East political experts.

United States officials say the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, based in nearby Bahrain, stands ready to defend the shipping route and, if necessary, retaliate militarily against Iran.

Iran’s own shaky economy relies on exporting at least two million barrels of oil a day through the strait, which is the only sea route from the Persian Gulf and “the world’s most important oil choke point,” according to Energy Department analysts.

A blockade would also punish China, Iran’s most important oil customer and a major recipient of Persian Gulf oil. China has invested heavily in Iranian oil fields and has opposed Western efforts to sanction Iran over its nuclear program.

Despite such deterrents to armed confrontation, oil and foreign policy analysts say a miscalculation is possible that could cause an overreaction from one side or the other.

“I fear we may be blundering toward a crisis nobody wants,” said Helima Croft, senior geopolitical strategist at Barclays Capital. “There is a peril of engaging in brinksmanship from all sides.”

Various Iranian officials in recent weeks have said they would blockade the strait, which is only 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, if the United States and Europe imposed a tight oil embargo on their country in an effort to thwart its development of nuclear weapons.

That did not stop President Obama from signing legislation last weekend imposing sanctions against Iran’s Central Bank intended to make it more difficult for the country to sell its oil, nor did it dissuade the European Union from moving toward a ban on Iranian oil imports.

Energy analysts say even a partial blockage of the Strait of Hormuz could raise the world price of oil within days by $50 a barrel or more, and that would quickly push the price of a gallon of regular gasoline to well over $4 a gallon. “You would get an international reaction that would not only be high, but irrationally high,” said Lawrence J. Goldstein, a director of the Energy Policy Research Foundation.

Just the threat of such a development has helped keep oil prices above $100 a barrel in recent weeks despite a return of Libyan oil to world markets, worries of a European economic downturn and weakening American gasoline demand. Oil prices rose slightly on Wednesday as the political tensions intensified.

American officials have warned Iran against violating international laws that protect commercial shipping in international waters, adding that the Navy would guarantee free sea traffic.

“If the Iranians chose to use their modest navy and antiship missiles to attack allied forces, they would see a probable swift devastation of their naval capability,” said David L. Goldwyn, former State Department coordinator for international energy affairs. “We would take out their frigates.”

More than 85 percent of the oil and most of the natural gas that flows through the strait goes to China, Japan, India, South Korea and other Asian nations. But a blockade would have a ripple effect on global oil prices.

Since Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates all rely on the strait to ship their oil and natural gas exports, a blockade might undermine some of those governments in an already unstable region.

Analysts say that a crisis over the Strait of Hormuz would most likely bring China and the United States into something of an alliance to restore shipments, although Mr. Goldwyn said China would more likely resort to private diplomacy instead of military force.

Europe and the United States would probably feel the least direct impact because they have strategic oil reserves and could get some Persian Gulf oil through Red Sea pipelines. Saudi Arabia has pipelines that could transport about five million barrels out of the region, while Iraq and the United Arab Emirates also have pipelines with large capacities.

But transportation costs would be higher if the strait were blocked, and several million barrels of oil exports would remain stranded, sending energy prices soaring on global markets.

“To close the Strait of Hormuz would be an act of war against the whole world,” said Sadad Ibrahim Al-Husseini, former head of exploration and development at Saudi Aramco. “You just can’t play with the global economy and assume that nobody is going to react.”

The Iranians have struck in the strait before. In the 1980s, Iran attacked Kuwaiti tankers carrying Iraqi oil, and the Reagan administration reflagged Kuwaiti ships under American flags and escorted them with American warships. Iran backed down, partially, but continued to plant mines.

In 1988, an American frigate hit an Iranian mine and nearly sank. United States warships retaliated by destroying some Iranian oil platforms. Attacks and counterattacks continued for months, and a missile from an American warship accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger aircraft, killing 290 passengers.

Energy experts say a crisis in the strait would most likely unfold gradually, with Iran using its threats as a way to increase oil prices and shipping costs for the West as retaliation against the tightening of sanctions. So far, energy experts say, insurance companies have not raised prices for covering tankers, but shipping companies are already preparing to pay bonuses for crews facing more hazardous duties.

“My guess is this is a lot of threats,” said Michael A. Levi, an energy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, “but there is no certainty in this kind of situation.”

    Oil Price Would Skyrocket if Iran Closed the Strait of Hormuz, NYT, 4.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/business/oil-price-would-skyrocket-if-iran-closed-the-strait.html

Work as Usual for U.S. Warship After Warning by Iran

January 4, 2012
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS

ABOARD U.S.S. JOHN C. STENNIS, in the North Arabian Sea — If Iran’s warning on Tuesday to this American aircraft carrier was intended to disrupt the ship’s routine or provoke a high-seas reaction, nothing of the sort was evident on Wednesday.

Steaming in international waters over the horizon from the Iranian fleet, the John C. Stennis spent the day and the early hours of the night launching and recovering aircraft for its latest mission — supporting ground troops in Afghanistan. All visible indications were that the carrier’s crew was keeping to its scheduled work, regardless of any political or diplomatic fallout from Iran’s warnings.

“It is business as usual here,” said Rear Adm. Craig S. Faller, commander of the carrier strike group, as he watched a large-screen radar image showing the nearby sea and sky cluttered with commercial traffic.

The screen also showed Navy jets flying back and forth in a narrow air corridor to Afghanistan, known as “the boulevard.”

The day’s sorties, not the words of Iran, commanded attention here throughout the afternoon and evening. Returning pilots discussed low-elevation passes to suppress Taliban fighters near an Italian patrol in Farah Province and to help British troops under fire in Helmand Province. The subject of Iran barely came up in the briefings and meetings.

Later, after another cycle of returning aircraft came roaring back onto the deck, one by one, the ship sounded taps at 10 p.m. The crew maintained a normal watch schedule. So began an ordinary night for a warship at sea, no matter the saber-rattling of the previous day.

On Tuesday, the chief of Iran’s military, Maj. Gen. Ataollah Salehi, was quoted by a semiofficial Iranian news agency as telling “the American warship that passed through the Strait of Hormuz and went to the Gulf of Oman not to return to the Persian Gulf.”

The remark was an unmistakable reference to this ship. After providing air support to American troops during the last weeks of the Iraq war, the John C. Stennis steamed through the strait about a week ago, leaving the Persian Gulf to take up station in the nearby North Arabian Sea.

General Salehi, who commands Iran’s navy and air force as well as its army, added, darkly, “The Islamic Republic of Iran will not repeat its warning.”

But the scenes on the ship throughout Wednesday, along with the behavior of the Iranian Navy, suggested that the threats were mainly for popular consumption, not as a marker of imminent confrontation.

On the John C. Stennis the radar images extended to the Iranian coastline. Clusters of Iranian warships, which have been conducting a large-scale Iranian naval exercise, were marked in red on the screen. But the American and Iranian ships were widely separated. They did not challenge one another. Each minded its own business, which for the Americans was a busy day pushing jets north toward the Afghan war.

Late in the afternoon, Admiral Faller noted that the only disruption his crew had felt came in the form of worried e-mails to officers and sailors from friends and family in the United States who had been following coverage of the general’s threat.

Investors were worried, too, and they bid up oil prices. But the Iranian ships did not escalate the tensions or menace the carrier and the warships accompanying it in any way, the ship’s crew said.

“They don’t go out of their way to come and check us out, and we don’t go out of our way to divert from our primary missions,” the admiral said.

Out on the sea, General Salehi’s warning felt, if not carefully calibrated, then at least carefully timed.

Anyone with an Internet connection could have seen from the ship’s Facebook page and its commanders’ ample statements to the news media in recent months that the carrier’s high-seas deployment, which follows a roughly predictable pattern, was winding down. Any casual follower of ship movements could have deduced that the John C. Stennis was probably not scheduled to return to the Persian Gulf anyhow.

As they planned the next day’s missions even as the last aircraft returned to the ship, Admiral Faller and his officers and crew had no comment about the general’s threat.

They referred to what had been said already in Washington: that United States ships sailed lawfully in international waters, and that they would not tolerate any effort by Iran or any other nation to close the Strait of Hormuz.

As for that, they said, everything was normal in the strait that day. “We get all the news,” Admiral Faller said. “We get CNN. We get Fox. We have access to the Internet, and we are voracious consumers of information. We saw those statements. But we also watch the sea. And we haven’t seen anything unprofessional at sea.”

    Work as Usual for U.S. Warship After Warning by Iran, NYT, 4.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/world/middleeast/work-as-usual-for-uss-john-c-stennis-after-warning-by-iran.html

Overtures to Egypt’s Islamists Reverse Longtime U.S. Policy

January 3, 2012
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and STEVEN LEE MYERS

CAIRO — With the Muslim Brotherhood pulling within reach of an outright majority in Egypt’s new Parliament, the Obama administration has begun to reverse decades of mistrust and hostility as it seeks to forge closer ties with an organization once viewed as irreconcilably opposed to United States interests.

The administration’s overtures — including high-level meetings in recent weeks — constitute a historic shift in a foreign policy held by successive American administrations that steadfastly supported the autocratic government of President Hosni Mubarak in part out of concern for the Brotherhood’s Islamist ideology and historic ties to militants.

The shift is, on one level, an acknowledgment of the new political reality here, and indeed around the region, as Islamist groups come to power. Having won nearly half the seats contested in the first two rounds of the country’s legislative elections, the Brotherhood on Tuesday entered the third and final round with a chance to extend its lead to a clear majority as the vote moved into districts long considered strongholds.

The reversal also reflects the administration’s growing acceptance of the Brotherhood’s repeated assurances that its lawmakers want to build a modern democracy that will respect individual freedoms, free markets and international commitments, including Egypt’s treaty with Israel.

And at the same time it underscores Washington’s increasing frustration with Egypt’s military rulers, who have sought to carve out permanent political powers for themselves and used deadly force against protesters seeking an end to their rule.

The administration, however, has also sought to preserve its deep ties to the military rulers, who have held themselves up as potential guardians of their state’s secular character. The administration has never explicitly threatened to take away the $1.3 billion a year in American military aid to Egypt, though new Congressional restrictions could force cuts.

Nevertheless, as the Brotherhood moves toward an expected showdown with the military this month over who should control the interim government — the newly elected Parliament or the ruling military council — the administration’s public outreach to the Brotherhood could give the Islamic movement in Egypt important support. It could also confer greater international legitimacy on the Brotherhood.

It would be “totally impractical” not to engage with the Brotherhood “because of U.S. security and regional interests in Egypt,” a senior administration official involved in shaping the new policy said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic affairs.

“There doesn’t seem to me to be any other way to do it, except to engage with the party that won the election,” the official said, adding, “They’ve been very specific about conveying a moderate message — on regional security and domestic issues, and economic issues, as well.”

Some close to the administration have even called this emerging American relationship with the Brotherhood a first step toward a pattern that could take shape with the Islamist parties’ coming to power around the region in the aftermath of the uprisings of the Arab Spring. Islamists have taken important roles in Morocco, Libya, Tunisia and Egypt in less than a year.

“You’re certainly going to have to figure out how to deal with democratic governments that don’t espouse every policy or value you have,” said Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and recently joined with the ambassador to Egypt, Anne W. Patterson, for a meeting with top leaders of the Brotherhood’s political party.

He compared the Obama administration’s outreach to President Ronald Reagan’s arms negotiations with the Soviet Union. “The United States needs to deal with the new reality,” Mr. Kerry said. “And it needs to step up its game.”

In the meeting with the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, he said, the Brotherhood’s leaders said they were eager to work with the United States and other Western countries, especially in economic areas.

“They certainly expressed a direction that shouldn’t be a challenge to us, provided they follow through,” he said, adding, “Obviously the proof will be in the pudding.”

Brotherhood leaders, for their part, often talk publicly here of their eagerness for Egypt to have cooperative relations “as equals” with the United States. The Brotherhood renounced violence as a political tool around the time the 1952 revolution overthrew the British-backed monarchy. Over the years, many of its leaders said they had become comfortable with multiparty electoral democracy while serving as members of a tolerated — if marginalized — parliamentary minority under Mr. Mubarak.

They also seem to revel in their new standing. After the meeting with Senator Kerry and Ambassador Patterson, the Brotherhood’s newspaper and Web site reported that Mr. Kerry said “he was not surprised at the progress and leading position of the Freedom and Justice Party on the electoral landscape in Egypt, emphasizing his respect for the public will in Egypt.”

“Egypt is a big country with a long honorable history and plays an important role in Arab, Islamic and international issues, and therefore respects the conventions and treaties that were signed,” the Brotherhood leaders said they told Mr. Kerry.

But, on the group’s English language Web page, the report also urged the United States “to hear the peoples, not to hear of them,” and advised “that America could play a role in the economic development and stability of various peoples of the world, if it wished.”

On Tuesday, the administration intensified its criticism of Egypt’s military rulers over raids that last week shut down 10 civil society groups, including at least 3 American-financed democracy-building groups, as part of an investigation of illicit foreign financing that has been laden with conspiratorial and anti-American rhetoric.

“It is, frankly, unacceptable to us that that situation has not been returned to normal,” a State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said, charging that Egypt’s military rulers had broken pledges last week to top American officials, including Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta.

She called the officials behind the campaign against the organizations “old Mubarak holdover types who clearly are not on the new page with the Egyptian people.”

The administration’s willingness to engage with the Brotherhood could open President Obama to new attacks by Republicans who are already accusing him letting Islamists take over a pivotal ally. Some analysts, though, said the overtures amounted to a tacit admission that the United States should have begun such outreach to the region’s Islamist opposition long ago.

Discreet American contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood go back to the early 1990s, although they were previously limited to unpublicized meetings with members of Parliament who also belonged to the Brotherhood but were elected as independents. And even those timid encounters evoked vitriol from Mr. Mubarak.

“Your government is in contact with these terrorists from the Muslim Brotherhood,” he reportedly told the American journalist Mary Anne Weaver in 1994. “Very secretly, without our knowledge at first,” he said, adding, “I can assure you these groups will never take over this country.”

Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar, argued that the United States missed chances to build ties to moderate Islamists earlier. When Mr. Mubarak jailed thousands of prominent Brotherhood members in 2005 and 2006, for example, the organization reached out to Washington.

“Now the Brotherhood knows it is in a stronger position and it is almost as if the U.S. is chasing them and they are sitting pretty,” Mr. Hamid said. “But what can the U.S. do, intervene and change the election results?” he asked. “The only alternative is to be against democracy in the region.”

Egypt’s elections are expected to continue to Wednesday, with runoffs next week, and Parliament’s first session is expected to open Jan. 23, two days before the anniversary of the protests that forced out Mr. Mubarak.

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo,

and Steven Lee Myers from Washington.

    Overtures to Egypt’s Islamists Reverse Longtime U.S. Policy, NYT, 3.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/world/middleeast/us-reverses-policy-in-reaching-out-to-muslim-brotherhood.html

Iran Warns the United States Over Aircraft Carrier

January 3, 2012
The New York Times
By J. DAVID GOODMAN

Iran’s military sharpened its tone toward the United States on Tuesday with a blunt warning that an American aircraft carrier that left the Persian Gulf through the strategic Strait of Hormuz last week should not return.

The warning, by Iran’s army chief, was the latest and most aggressive volley in a nearly daily exchange of barbed statements between Iran and the United States. Iran has just finished ambitious naval exercises near the strait, and it has repeatedly threatened to close the passage — through which roughly one-fifth of all the crude oil traded worldwide passes — if Western powers move forward with new sanctions on Iran’s petroleum exports.

“We recommend to the American warship that passed through the Strait of Hormuz and went to Gulf of Oman not to return to the Persian Gulf,” said Maj. Gen. Ataollah Salehi, the commander in chief of the army, as reported by Iran’s official news agency, IRNA. “The Islamic Republic of Iran will not repeat its warning.”

General Salehi did not say what action Iran would take if the carrier were to re-enter the Persian Gulf.

A spokesman for the Defense Department, Cmdr. Bill Speaks, declined to discuss future movements of the carrier, the John C. Stennis. He said that “the deployment of U.S. military assets in the Persian Gulf region will continue as it has for decades.”

The United States dismissed Iran’s threats to close the strait. “The U.S. Navy operates under international maritime conventions to maintain a constant state of high vigilance in order to ensure the continued, safe flow of maritime traffic in waterways critical to global commerce,” Commander Speaks said.

Iran’s economy, already reeling from Western sanctions over its nuclear program, has been hit hard by discussion of new sanctions aimed at its oil exports, the world’s third-largest. President Obama is preparing to sign new legislation that could penalize buyers of Iranian oil, and the European Union has openly talked of a boycott of Iran’s oil. On Tuesday, France urged the European Union to adopt stricter sanctions, including an oil embargo, by the end of the month.

Iran’s currency, the rial, fell to new record lows against the dollar on Tuesday, news agencies reported. Oil prices rose sharply in early trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, with the benchmark contract for crude up more than 3 percent to $102 a barrel.

The attempts by Iran’s leadership to flex the country’s muscles on the world stage coincide with efforts to stamp out dissent at home ahead of planned parliamentary elections in March, the first ballot to be held since a disputed presidential vote in 2009 prompted national protests and a severe crackdown.

On Tuesday, an Iranian court sentenced Faezeh Hashemi, the daughter of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, to six months in prison for spreading what it termed “propaganda against the Islamic system,” the semiofficial Mehr news agency reported. The court also barred her from engaging in any political, cultural or media activities for five years.

Last week, access to the Web site of Mr. Rafsanjani, who is widely perceived as having supported Mir Hussein Moussavi against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2009 election, was blocked in Iran.

Ms. Hashemi, a former member of Parliament and an outspoken critic of Mr. Ahmadinejad, has been active in opposition politics; she was briefly detained last year after being accused of chanting antigovernment slogans during a banned rally in Tehran. She was also detained during a demonstration in 2009 over the disputed presidential election.

The government has prosecuted and convicted many opposition members since the 2009 street protests, but it has so far shied away from holding trials for Mr. Moussavi or Mehdi Karroubi, the principal opposition figures in Iran, who have been under house arrest for months.

While the Iranian leadership has offered assurances that reformist candidates would be permitted to run for office in the March elections, Mr. Moussavi or Mr. Karroubi have urged their supporters to stay home.

    Iran Warns the United States Over Aircraft Carrier, NYT, 3.1.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/world/middleeast/iran-warns-the-united-states-over-aircraft-carrier.html

Charges of US Bias as Taiwan Election Nears

January 1, 2012
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Washington has been lavishing attention on Taiwan, stepping up official visits and saying it will likely allow visa-free travel to the U.S. The moves are raising suspicions that America is trying to influence a tight presidential election here in January.

President Ma Ying-jeou has seized on Washington's favors, touting them as reasons voters should re-elect him. The Taipei Times, which supports his main opponent, Tsai Ing-wen, said in an editorial: "Foolhardy or malicious, inadvertent or by design, the U.S. has taken sides in next month's elections."

The U.S. denies doing so, but Tamkang University political scientist Edward Chen said the timing of the visa announcement just a few weeks before the Jan. 14 poll "carried political connotations."

While the U.S. has influenced Taiwan's politics since it stationed military forces on the island during the Cold War, Washington has generally kept aloof in presidential elections.

The de facto American embassy in Taipei said that Washington remains neutral this time too, wanting to see a free and fair vote in one of Asia's most dynamic democracies. "The United States does not interfere in foreign elections," said Sheila Paskman, spokeswoman at the American Institute in Taiwan. "And that includes Taiwan's."

Whether or not Washington intended to boost Ma, its recent moves have reinforced perceptions that the U.S. sees its interests better served by him.

Ma has made his signature policy the tying of Taiwan's high-tech economy ever closer to China's lucrative markets. Beijing, which claims the island as its own, has been delighted, muting past threats of military force.

The result has been to ease tensions across the 100-mile- (160-kilometer-) wide Taiwan Strait to their lowest level since China and Taiwan split amid civil war in 1949. That reduces the chances that the U.S. would be embroiled in a conflict at a time when it is trying to repair its economy, steady relations with Beijing and re-engage in East Asia after a decade of preoccupation with Iraq and Afghanistan.

By contrast, Tsai's Democratic Progressive Party supports formal independence from China, as opposed to the de facto independence Taiwan has now. Her predecessor as party leader, Chen Shui-bian, frequently angered Beijing — and gave America fits — when he was president from 2000-2008. Though Tsai has backed away from his brinksmanship with China, she has never publicly renounced independence.

There is "no doubt in my mind that Washington would be more comfortable with a Ma win," international relations specialist Arthur Waldron of the University of Pennsylvania wrote in an email. "One of the traditional and overwrought fears in D.C. is that a DPP administration will come in and 'make trouble.'"

Polls show a very tight race. Though Ma holds a slight edge, a surge by third-party candidate James Soong — a former member of Ma's Nationalist Party — would likely take more votes away from Ma than Tsai.

Ma has campaigned as the candidate most capable of building ties with China without sacrificing Taiwan's close links with the United States, still its most important partner 33 years after Washington transferred its recognition from Taipei to Beijing as the government of China.

The U.S. is legally obligated to provide Taiwan with weapons to defend itself against a possible Chinese attack and maintains a large commercial presence on the island, with $20 billion in investments.

With many Taiwanese visiting the U.S. frequently, visa-free travel would be a popular move. After the American Institute announced that the program could begin soon if a U.S. investigation finds no problems with Taiwan's security procedures, Ma called it "a major diplomatic breakthrough" that raises Taiwan-U.S. relations to their highest point in 30 years.

Earlier this month the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the deputy energy secretary made visits to Taiwan that were heavily publicized by the American Institute. Such visits have been rare in recent years, to prevent China from charging that Washington is reneging on its recognition of Beijing.

Tsai and her campaign have minimized criticism, fearing that a tiff with Washington would cost her votes. She traveled to Washington in September to meet with officials and try to set them at ease about her leadership.

Amid that outreach, the Financial Times quoted an unnamed U.S. official as saying that Tsai had created doubts about her ability to maintain stable China-Taiwan relations — a statement that caused a firestorm in the Taiwanese media, which saw it as evidence of U.S. meddling.

Ultimately, analysts say what's at stake is the best way for a small, democratic island to coexist with a powerful China.

"Washington is intervening quietly in Taiwan's elections," said June Teufel Dreyer, an Asia expert at the University of Miami. "What the State Department seems to want is a gradual folding of Taiwan into (China) — a bit like watching one of those protoplasmic creatures oozing around and eventually incorporating its prey. No eagle sinks talons into fish or cat grabs struggling bird, just slow integration."

    Charges of US Bias as Taiwan Election Nears, NYT, 1.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/01/01/world/asia/AP-AS-Taiwan-Americas-Candidate.html