The Race for Iran

The full extent of the ramifications of the extraordinary developments in Egypt since the beginning of this year—for Egypt itself, for the Middle East, and for the world—will not be clear for some time.  At this juncture, though, it seems virtually certain that post-Mubarak Egypt will have a much more balanced foreign policy than has been the case for several decades. 

One of the most striking indicators of the new direction in Egyptian foreign policy has been the strongly positive shift in Cairo’s posture toward the Islamic Republic.  Just yesterday, the London-based, Palestinian-owned Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported that, after a meeting with the head of the Iranian interest section in Cairo, Foreign Minister Nabil al-Arabi announced that “the ongoing contacts between Cairo and Tehran aimed at normalizing relations, because the ‘Egypt of the revolution’ wanted to establish normal relations with all states around the world.  He then affirmed that he accepted an invitation from the Iranian foreign minister to visit Tehran.” 

In an opinion piece yesterday, the chief editor of Al-Quds Al-Arabi, ‘Abd al-Bari Atwan, suggested that the foreign policy of Egypt “is adopting the same method as ‘Erdoğan’s Turkey,’ i.e. normalizing relations with all the neighbors based on a ‘zero problems’ policy, while allowing economic and strategic interests to prevail and resorting to dialogue to resolve all the old conflicts”.  (We are grateful to our friends at Conflicts Forum, see here, for bringing this piece to our attention.)  Atwan then helpfully summarizes a number of important manifestations of this new Egyptian policy:     

“1- The secret visit undertaken by the new Egyptian intelligence chief who succeeded to Omar Suleiman, Brigadier General Murad Mawafi, to Syria and his meeting with senior Syrian officials to discuss the areas of security and strategic coordination between the two countries over several files.

2- The authorization granted to several Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip to head to Damascus via Cairo Airport for the first time in months, in a clear breach of the blockade that was imposed by the regime of the ousted president, which would not allow these leaders to leave the Strip blockaded by the Israelis unless the movement signed the Palestinian reconciliation paper.

3 – The approval of the passage of Iranian warships through the Suez Canal on their way to the Syrian Lattakia port without any harassment, despite the Israeli and American protests. 

4 – The easing of the tone toward Hezbollah and its allies in Lebanon and its replacement with a friendlier inclination, while moving away from the March 14 alliance headed by former Prime Minister Sa’d al-Hariri. 

5 – The selection of Sudan as the first destination for new Egyptian Prime Minister Issam Sharaf, which confirms that the Nile Basin will be a priority for the new era and will surpass all others—especially Gulf security.” 

This is heady stuff, in geopolitical terms.  There is a view, advanced by some voices in the region and by a number of American analysts and commentators (including some we normally agree with), that, over time, Egypt will start to compete with Iran for regional influence, acting as an attractive Sunni partner for Syria, Turkey, and others.  In this view, Egypt’s return to something like its traditional role in the Arab and Muslim worlds will give other regional states greater diplomatic “optionality” and, in the long run, diminish the Islamic Republic’s standing. 

We think that Egypt under a post-Mubarak political order will be strongly inclined to pursue better relations with the Islamic Republic and other members of the Middle East’s “resistance bloc”.  (This trend is clearly captured by the various points in Atwan’s opinion piece.)  From a strategic perspective, we believe this means that Egypt will add its considerable weight to the Iran-Syria-Turkey (and perhaps Iraq) axis. 

Iran and Turkey are both big countries with, under their current leaderships, foreign policy narratives that their own publics and publics across the region find attractive.  (Syria is not nearly as big as Iran or Turkey, of course, but has its own compelling foreign policy narrative.)  Egypt is also big, but, under Sadat and Mubarak, took itself out of the attractive narrative business through collusion with Israel and strategic partnership with the United States. 

Now, Egypt is back in play, with considerable potential to develop a more attractive political and foreign policy narrative of its own.  The argument that it might do this in competition with Iran and Turkey is not unreasonable, but we think it is wrong.  It seems to us much more likely that Egypt will develop its political and foreign policy narrative alongside Iran and Turkey.  In this regard, we continue to be struck by the observation Syrian President Bashar al-Assad offered to us last year—that Iran, Syria, and Turkey had all been able to rise together, in terms of their regional influence.  We anticipate that Egypt will be welcome to join that ascendance, and that post-Mubarak Cairo will find it worthwhile to do so.        

Of course, senior Egyptian diplomats say that what Egypt is pursuing “are normal relations—basic normal relations, no less, no more” with Iran, see here.  That is exactly what Turkey, under the AKP, has done—pursued normal relations with regional parties from which it had previously been estranged.  Turkey has not dropped its relations with the United States, pulled out of NATO, or anything of the sort.  It has simply expanded the range of its regional relationships.  But that, as we have seen, can have enormous geopolitical consequences. 

And that is precisely what potentially could happen with Egypt’s new foreign policy.  With regard to Egypt’s relations with Israel, senior Egyptian diplomats say those relations with remain more or less the same—but note that “the immediate willingness of Egypt to accommodate Israeli concerns and demands out of the wish to impress the US is, however, off the table”, see here.  If Egypt establishes “basic normal relations” with Iran and other players in the Middle East’s resistance bloc, the geopolitical consequences will be huge, even if Cairo maintains most elements of its relationships with Israel and the United States.         

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

Photo by Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images

Over the past several weeks, Iran has not received quite as much attention as usual in Washington because of the extraordinary developments across the Arab world.  But Iran and its place in the region have been constant points of reference in the Obama Administration’s reactive responses to the developments. 

U.S. officials, speaking on background to various media outlets, have said that, since the beginning of the “Arab awakening” or “Arab spring”, President Obama has wanted to use the wave of popular agitation for political change in a growing number of Arab countries as the basis for an alternative “narrative” and America’s role in it, which could be used against both Al-Qa’ida and the Islamic Republic (what a parallel!).  What, exactly, is the role that such Iran-related calculations played in the President’s decision to order U.S. forces to attack targets in Libya? 

The explanations offered by the President and senior members of his Administration for this decision have been (to be generous) strategically incoherent.  Looking behind the presidential speeches and talking points, we would identify three distinct arguments for the Libya intervention, each championed by a different faction within the Obama Administration.  Each of these arguments has Iran-related dimensions.    

One is the “liberal imperialist” argument (to borrow John Mearsheimer’s excellent phrase).  Those espousing this argument believe there is a genuine moral imperative to violate traditional norms of sovereignty and nonintervention to rescue populations deemed by the international community as threatened by their own governments.  A number of those who champion this cause within the Obama Administration—e.g., Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—believe that the biggest foreign policy failure of the Clinton Administration was its decision not to support humanitarian intervention in Rwanda.  They are determined that President Obama will not repeat this mistake.  Above all, they want to establish a robust, international mechanism for humanitarian intervention, and saw the Administration’s response to the Libyan case as critical to this end. 

By effectively endorsing this argument, though, President Obama has set a truly dangerous precedent that blatantly disregards a sober evaluation of on-the-ground conditions.  To this day, the Obama Administration cannot tell the American people how many Libyans were killed by Qaddafi’s forces prior to the NATO intervention.  Obama’s reference to what might have happened in Benghazi if the United States and its partners did not intervene militarily ignores the record of past uprisings in Libya—when Qaddafi’s responses to those uprisings did not result in the deaths of thousands or spur massive refugee flows to Egypt. 

Make no mistake—Obama has supplemented the George W. Bush doctrine of “preventive” war with his own doctrine of “preventive” humanitarian intervention.  And there are clearly forces in the American body politic—if not within the Obama Administration itself—who would ultimately like to use this as a precedent for eventual action against Iran. 

Second, there is the “leader of the free world” argument.  Those espousing this argument believe that, even if U.S. vital interests were not directly threatened by events in Libya (as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates candidly acknowledged), America’s broader foreign policy equities mandated some form of U.S. intervention. 

For this camp—including a number of senior officials at the State Department—the enthusiasm of key European allies (well, France and Britain) and the “unprecedented” endorsement of the Arab League put pressure on the Obama Administration to do something.  How could the United States claim to be the world’s leader—and call on other states to support it when Washington’s own enthusiasm for military action was higher, as might ultimately come to be regarding Iran—if it blew off the Europeans and Arabs in this case?  

Obama took this argument a step further, in his public explanation of the Libya decision—the availability of international support for humanitarian intervention in a particular case, he said, helps make it in America’s interest to intervene in that case.  This statement is an absurd conflation of ends and means.

Third, there is the “demonstration effect”argument.  Those espousing this argument believe that the United States has a strong interest in reversing perceptions that U.S. influence in the Middle East is declining as Iranian influence is growing. 

It is always difficult to reverse perceptions when they are basically congruent with reality. 

So, none of the arguments advanced by various factions within the Obama Administration for military intervention stands up to serious scrutiny.  But, beyond this, the U.S. military intervention in Libya has done potentially grave damage to America’s non-proliferation and counter-terrorism policies.  After the way the Obama Administration has treated Qadafi, why should any government be willing to trade-off its nuclear capabilities or ties to groups that the United States considers terrorist organizations in return for what it thinks are implicit security assurances stemming from its new relationship with Washington?

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

Our Yale University colleague, the distinguished professor of law and political science, and author, most recently of The Decline and Fall of the American Republic, Bruce Ackerman, published a very important piece last week in Foreign Policy.  To read the original with links, click here.  Excerpts are below:

By Bruce Ackerman

“In taking the country into a war with Libya, Barack Obama’s administration is breaking new ground in its construction of an imperial presidency — an executive who increasingly acts independently of Congress at home and abroad. Obtaining a U.N. Security Council resolution has legitimated U.S. bombing raids under international law. But the U.N. Charter is not a substitute for the U.S. Constitution, which gives Congress, not the president, the power ‘to declare war.’

After the Vietnam War, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution, which granted the president the power to act unilaterally for 60 days in response to a ‘national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces’…

But, again, these provisions have little to do with the constitutionality of the Libyan intervention, since Libya did not attack our ‘armed forces.’  The president failed to mention this fundamental point in giving Congress notice of his decision…

Without an armed “attack,” there is no compelling reason for the president to cut Congress out of a crucial decision on war and peace.

This is particularly striking since, in the Libyan case, the president had plenty of time to get congressional support. A broad coalition — from Senator John McCain to Senator John Kerry — could have been mobilized on behalf of a bipartisan resolution as the administration engaged in the necessary international diplomacy. But apparently Obama thought it more important to lobby the Arab League than the U.S. Congress.

In cutting out Congress, Obama has overstepped even the dubious precedent set when President Bill Clinton bombed Kosovo in 1999. Then, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel asserted that Congress had given its consent by appropriating funds for the Kosovo campaign. It was a big stretch, given the actual facts — but Obama can’t even take advantage of this same desperate expedient, since Congress has appropriated no funds for the Libyan war. The president is simply using money appropriated to the Pentagon for general purposes to conduct the current air campaign.

The War Powers Resolution doesn’t authorize a single day of Libyan bombing. But it does provide an escape hatch, stating that it is not “intended to alter the constitutional authority of the Congress or of the President.” So it’s open for Obama to assert that his power as commander in chief allows him to wage war without Congress, despite the Constitution’s insistence to the contrary.

Many modern presidents have made such claims, and Harry Truman acted upon this assertion in Korea. But it’s surprising to find Obama on the verge of ratifying such precedents. He was elected in reaction to the unilateralist assertions of John Yoo and other apologists for George W. Bush-era illegalities. Yet he is now moving onto ground that even Bush did not occupy. After a lot of talk about his inherent powers, Bush did get Congress to authorize his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, Obama is putting Bush-era talk into action in Libya — without congressional authorization.

The president’s insistence that his Libyan campaign is limited in its purposes and duration is no excuse. These are precisely the issues that he should have defined in collaboration with Congress. Now that he claims inherent power, why can’t he redefine U.S. objectives on his own? No less important, what is to stop some future president from using Obama’s precedent to justify even more aggressively unilateral actions? ” (emphasis added)

We commend the piece below, written by our colleague, Steve Walt, in Foreign Policy.  It can viewed at Foreign Policy by clicking here. Steve is the Robert and Renee Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.  His analysis of the “neocon-liberal alliance” has very powerful applications to understanding U.S. policymaking with regard to Iran.

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

What Intervention in Libya Tells us About the Neocon-Liberal Alliance

By Stephen Walt

Last Wednesday I spoke at an event at Hofstra University, on the subject of “Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy.” The other panelists were former DNC chair and 2004 presidential candidate Howard Dean and longtime Republican campaign guru Ed Rollins. The organizers at Hofstra were efficient and friendly, the audience asked good questions, and I thought both Dean and Rollins were gracious and insightful in their comments. All in all, it was a very successful session.

During the Q & A, I talked about the narrowness of foreign policy debate in Washington and the close political kinship between the liberal interventionists of the Democratic Party and the neoconservatives that dominate the GOP. At one point, I said that “liberal inteventionists are just ‘kinder, gentler’ neocons, and neocons are just liberal interventionsts on steroids.”

Dean challenged me rather forcefully on this point, declaring that there was simply no similarity whatsoever between a smart and sensible person like U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and a “crazy guy” like Paul Wolfowitz. (I didn’t write down Dean’s exact words, but I am certain that he portrayed Wolfowitz in more-or-less those terms). I responded by listing all the similarites between the two schools of thought, and the discussion went on from there.

I mention this anecdote because I wonder what Dean would say now. In case you hadn’t noticed, over the weekend President Obama took the nation to war against Libya, largely on the advice of liberal interventionists like Ambassador Rice, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and NSC aides Samantha Power and Michael McFaul. According to several news reports I’ve read, he did this despite objections from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. 

The only important intellectual difference between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists is that the former have disdain for international institutions (which they see as constraints on U.S. power), and the latter see them as a useful way to legitimate American dominance. Both groups extol the virtues of democracy, both groups believe that U.S. power — and especially its military power — can be a highly effective tool of statecraft. Both groups are deeply alarmed at the prospect that WMD might be in the hands of anybody but the United States and its closest allies, and both groups think it is America’s right and responsibility to fix lots of problems all over the world. Both groups consistently over-estimate how easy it will be to do this, however, which is why each has a propensity to get us involved in conflicts where our vital interests are not engaged and that end up costing a lot more than they initially expect.

So if you’re baffled by how Mr. “Change You Can Believe In” morphed into Mr. “More of the Same,” you shouldn’t really be surprised. George Bush left in disgrace and Barack Obama took his place, but he brought with him a group of foreign policy advisors whose basic world views were not that different from the people they were replacing. I’m not saying their attitudes were identical, but the similarities are probably more important than the areas of disagreement. Most of the U.S. foreign policy establishment has become addicted to empire, it seems, and it doesn’t really matter which party happens to be occupying Pennsylvania Avenue.

So where does this leave us? For starters, Barack Obama now owns not one but two wars. He inherited a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, and he chose to escalate instead of withdrawing.  Instead of being George Bush’s mismanaged blunder, Afghanistan became “Obama’s War.” And now he’s taken on a second, potentially open-ended military commitment, after no public debate, scant consultation with Congress, without a clear articulation of national interest, and in the face of great public skepticism. Talk about going with a gut instinct.

When the Security Council passed Resolution 1973 last week and it was clear we were going to war, I credited the administration with letting Europe and the Arab League take the lead in the operation. My fear back then, however, was that the Europeans and Arab states would not be up to the job and that Uncle Sucker would end up holding the bag. But even there I gave them too much credit, insofar as U.S. forces have been extensively involved from the very start, and the Arab League has already gone wobbly on us. Can anyone really doubt that this affair will be perceived by people around the world as a United States-led operation, no matter what we say about it?

More importantly, despite Obama’s declaration that he would not send ground troops into Libya — a statement made to assuage an overcommitted military, reassure a skeptical public, or both — what is he going to do if the air assault doesn’t work? What if Qaddafi hangs tough, which would hardly be surprising given the dearth of attractive alternatives that he’s facing? What if his supporters see this as another case of illegitimate Western interferences, and continue to back him? What if he moves forces back into the cities he controls, blends them in with the local population, and dares us to bomb civilians? Will the United States and its allies continue to pummel Libya until he says uncle? Or will Obama and Sarkozy and Cameron then decide that now it’s time for special forces, or even ground troops?

And even if we are successful, what then? As in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, over forty years of Qaddafi’s erratic and despotic rule have left Libya in very poor shape despite its oil wealth. Apart from some potentially fractious tribes, the country is almost completely lacking in effective national institutions. If Qaddafi goes we will own the place, and we will probably have to do something substantial to rebuild it lest it turn into an exporter of refugees, a breeding ground for criminals, or the sort of terrorist “safe haven” we’re supposedly trying to prevent in Afghanistan.

But the real lesson is what it tells us about America’s inability to resist the temptation to meddle with military power. Because the United States seems so much stronger than a country like Libya, well-intentioned liberal hawks can easily convince themselves that they can use the mailed fist at low cost and without onerous unintended consequences. When you have a big hammer the whole world looks like a nail; when you have thousand of cruise missiles and smart bombs and lots of B-2s and F-18s, the whole world looks like a target set. The United States doesn’t get involved everywhere that despots crack down on rebels (as our limp reaction to the crackdowns in Yemen and Bahrain demonstrate), but lately we always seems to doing this sort of thing somewhere. Even a smart guy like Barack Obama couldn’t keep himself from going abroad in search of a monster to destroy.

And even if this little adventure goes better than I expect, it’s likely to come back to haunt us later. One reason that the Bush administration could stampede the country to war in Iraq was the apparent ease with which the United States had toppled the Taliban back in 2001. After a string of seeming successes dating back to the 1991 Gulf War, U.S. leaders and the American public had become convinced that the Pentagon had a magic formula for remaking whole countries without breaking a sweat. It took the debacle in Iraq and the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan to remind us of the limits of military power, and it seems to have taken Obama less than two years on the job to forget that lesson. We may get reminded again in Libya, but if we don’t, the neocon/liberal alliance will be emboldened and we’ll be more likely to stumble into a quagmire somewhere else.

And who’s the big winner here? Back in Beijing, China’s leaders must be smiling as they watch Washington walk open-eyed into another potential quagmire.  

Photo by AFP/Getty Imades

Today, the White House confirmed, see here, that it was “aware, obviously, of the invitation” extended to Saudi Arabia to invade Bahrain.  But U.S. government officials continue to decline to say what Secretary of Defense Gates said or did not say to his Bahraini interlocutors 36 hours before Saudi Arabia’s military offensive.  And, U.S. government officials have refused to call for the removal of foreign troops from Bahrain.  

For many in Iran, and indeed for Shia throughout the Persian Gulf, this is painfully reminiscent of American silence when Iraq invaded the Islamic Republic in 1980.  And, as it became clear that the United States was supporting Saddam Hussein in his war of aggression against Iran, it seems increasingly likely that the Obama Administration will be seen as supporting the use of armed force against a Shia majority population in Bahrain.

In this regard, it is telling that the Obama Administration refuses to call for democracy in Bahrain.  According to the White House spokesman, President Obama, in phone conversations with Saudi King Abdullah and Bahraini King Hamad, “stressed the importance of a political process as the only way to peacefully address the legitimate grievances of Bahrainis and to lead to a Bahrain that is stable, just, more unified and responsive to its people.”

As Hillary Mann Leverett pointed out anew today on Al Jazeera, see here, the way the Obama Administration is speaking about what Saudi and Bahraini security forces are doing is strikingly similar to the way in which the United States speaks about how Israel treats Palestinians.  In both cases, Washington exhorts all parties to show restraint and not to do anything that would undermine possibilities for dialogue.  And, in both cases, it criticizes people trying to defend their rights for “instigating violence.”  The contrast between this and the way in which the Obama Administration insists that Qaddafi “must go” should prompt serious questioning of the real motives for U.S. policy.

The real difference is this: Qaddafi is never going to carry America’s water again.  But, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are key to America’s ability to project military power in the Persian Gulf.  If Bahrain got a government that actually represented the sentiments of its people, the U.S. Fifth Fleet might not get kicked out immediately—but, for sure, that government would not allow U.S. military forces operating out of Bahrain would to be used in an attack against Iran.  And that would mean the Obama administration could no longer credibly claim that “all options are on the table” against Iran.

So, in order to cover up for its failed Iran policy, the Obama Administration is prepared to put America’s long-term strategic position in the region and American lives at risk.  For, at this point, the United States is coming to be seen as complicit in Bahraini eyes in the armed occupation of Bahrain.  As a Bahraini teacher said to an American journalist: “I wish the Americans would help us.  But the day after your defense minister came here, the Saudi troops came in.”  As we’ve noted previously, the work of University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape brilliantly demonstrates that this is a formula which is likely to generate suicide terror attacks against U.S. interests.

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett