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Tuesday, April 30, 2013
UANI Calls on GM to End Partnership with Peugeot, Given New Auto Figures Showing that Peugeot Cars are Still being Produced in Iran
IW News Brief: Boston and the Aftermath of Terror
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IW News Brief: Boston and the Aftermath of Terror
by David J. Rusin • Apr 30, 2013 at
2:45 pm
  Be the first of your
friends to like this.The IW database includes dozens of articles scrutinizing the many narratives, questions, and controversies to arise in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings carried out by two Muslim immigrants, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Several key developments are highlighted below: Political correctness at the FBI Following reports that Russian officials had contacted Washington about Tamerlan Tsarnaev's extremism years ago — warnings investigated and then set aside by the FBI — some suspect that political correctness paved the path to the attack. "The FBI can't talk about Islam and they can't talk about jihad," notes counterterrorism expert Sebastian Gorka, citing policies that de-emphasize radical Islam as a driver of violence. "I have zero doubt it affected their investigation of Tsarnaev," adds specialist Patrick Poole. Congressmen have voiced concerns as well. The FBI also dropped the ball prior to the Fort Hood bloodbath. In that case, the Washington field office cautioned its San Diego counterpart that probing Nidal Hasan was a "politically sensitive" subject, and internal emails classified Hasan's messages to an al-Qaeda operative as mere "research." Furthermore, building on its record of Muslim outreach follies, the agency recently caved to Islamists on training and expunged "biased" materials. Its "Guiding Principles: Touchstone Document on Training" declares that if someone belongs to a group that engages in both violence and "constitutionally protected activities," the FBI must not assume that the person is involved in the former. As columnist Matthew Vadum opines, "It's not that much of an exaggeration to say that the FBI could not have done anything about Tsarnaev unless he strapped on a suicide vest in front of them, called them 'infidels,' and detailed his abominable plans."
As the authorities trace the Tsarnaev brothers' road to extremism, some point to the Cambridge mosque they attended. Charles Jacobs of Americans for Peace and Tolerance has stated that "if the story emerges that they were radicalized in America … the Islamic Society of Boston [ISB] and its leaders provide an interesting place to look." Indeed they do. The ISB's first president was Abdurahman Alamoudi, now imprisoned in connection with an assassination plot. Muslim Brotherhood cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi was listed among its trustees, and multiple convicted terrorists, including "Lady al-Qaeda" Aafia Siddiqui, prayed on the premises. Sheikh Ahmed Mansour, a reformist Muslim, recently reflected on a past visit: "Their writings and teachings were fanatical. … I left Egypt to escape the Muslim Brotherhood, but I had found it there." In positive news, Governor Deval Patrick's office withdrew an invitation to Suhaib Webb, imam of the affiliated ISB Cultural Center (ISBCC) in Roxbury, to speak at an interfaith service on April 18. The center is managed by the Muslim American Society (MAS), which, according to prosecutors, "was founded as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America." Another ISBCC imam once exhorted congregants to "grab on to the gun and the sword" in Siddiqui's defense. "Officials who change course when confronted with the facts need to be commended," the Clarion Project's Ryan Mauro explains. "Thank [the governor] by contacting his office here." Rays of light in the media darkness While many media outlets downplayed jihad, others were surprisingly candid: USA Today ran a detailed piece on the ISB's radicalism. The Islamist-friendly Bill O'Reilly blasted Nihad Awad of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for denying Islam's role in terrorism. Bill Maher mocked Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, when he asserted that "it's not like people who are Muslim who do wacky things have a monopoly on it." Maher called the idea that all faiths are equal in terms of inspiring violence "liberal bulls—t," perhaps opening the eyes of viewers who reflexively discount criticism of Islam from the right. Daniel Pipes sees the Boston bombings as "education by murder," noting that Westerners "learn best about Islamism when blood flows in the streets." This process is aided when the bloodshed encourages prominent media figures to overcome inhibitions and speak truthfully about jihad.
Amid the predictable hype about anti-Muslim backlash — which almost never occurs — the Associated Press relays this refreshingly frank tidbit: "Muslim civil rights leaders say the anti-Islam reaction has been more muted this time than after other attacks since Sept. 11. … Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations … said his organization has seen no uptick in reports of harassment, assaults, or damage to mosques since the April 15 bombings." No surprise here: Muslims in the U.S. actually suffer hate crimes at a lower rate than blacks, Jews, or gays. Blogger Brendan O'Neill sums it up: "Time and again, left-leaning campaigners and observers respond to terror attacks in the West by panicking about the possibly racist response of Joe Public — and time and again, their fears prove ill-founded and Joe Public proves himself a more decent, tolerant person than they give him credit for. What this reveals is that liberal concern over Islamophobia, liberal fretting about anti-Muslim bigotry, is ironically driven by a bigotry of its own, by an deeply prejudiced view of everyday people as hateful and stupid."
* * *
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The Iranian Nuclear Impasse :: MEQ Reviews
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The Iranian Nuclear Crisis: A Memoir
by Seyed Hossein Mousavian
Washington D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2012. 597 pp. $25, paper. Also: Iran: The Nuclear Challenge Edited by Robert Blackwill. New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2012. 77+xii pp. $9.99, paper. U.S. and Iranian Strategic Competition by Anthony Cordesman, Adam Mausner, and Aram Nerguizian Washington D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2012. 937 pp. Free download. Reviewed by Patrick Clawson
Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2013, pp. 87-89
  Be the first of your
friends to like this.Mousavian's account gains credibility from his previous position as spokesman for Iran's nuclear negotiating team as well as through the vigorous promotion of his views on U.S. television and at lectures in elite venues. His personal story is intriguing: An important official on Iran's Supreme National Security Council, he was, in effect, jailed for his opposition to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and is now a fellow at Princeton, though clearly still deeply supportive of the Islamic Republic. But the reason his book will become the standard reference is not necessarily due to his pedigree: It is the care with which it was prepared, with 1,113 footnotes to all the right sources. On question after question, Mousavian recounts the facts in detail, providing the references to check up and follow further. But for all that Mousavian gets the details right, he casts the nuclear impasse in a profoundly misleading way. The fundamental problem has always been that Iran has not lived up to its obligations under the international agreements to which it is a party. At its heart, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is a trade-off: Countries have the right to dangerous nuclear technology if they accept the responsibility to be fully transparent about what they are doing. The irony is that had Iran, an NPT signatory, followed through on the requirements of the treaty, Washington may have been profoundly unhappy about Iran's nuclear progress but could have done little to mobilize international pressure. On this, as so many other issues, the Islamic Republic's leaders have systematically miscalculated where Iran's national interests lie. Their attitude, shared by Mousavian, is the profound arrogance of asserting rights but refusing responsibilities. In Mousavian's account, Iran never did anything worse than miss some tactical opportunities. And in his telling, that only happened after he left the job. Mousavian makes a persuasive case that Iran was better served by his policy, which was to blow smoke in the West's eyes rather than to spit into them. The prolonged negotiations he describes persuaded Europe that Iran should be offered incentives and not penalized so as to entice it into further negotiations and temporary concessions. His team understood the importance of looking reasonable, whereas Supreme Leader Ali Khamene'i's priority seems to be what the ayatollah called resistance to "global arrogance."[1] In contrast to Iran's excellent track record, Mousavian presents the West—especially the United States—as continuously taking unreasonable positions and missing chances to improve relations. But not surprisingly, there is a telling omission: The George W. Bush administration is often castigated for spurning an alleged May 2003 Iranian "grand bargain" to open talks with Washington about all the issues separating the two sides. Mousavian makes no mention of it whatsoever. While Mousavian recognizes that many issues besides the nuclear program separate Washington and Tehran, the Council on Foreign Relations' (CFR) Iran: The Nuclear Challenge edited by Blackwill simply ignores that strategic context. While it could be argued that the CFR report is intentionally only about the nuclear issue, the obvious response is that Iran's pursuit of nuclear capabilities is not isolated from its other activities, nor are vital U.S. interests about Iran confined to its nuclear program: Most U.S. sanctions on Iran can be justified as reactions to its state support of terrorism, not just its nuclear program. This narrow focus on Iran's nuclear program is all the more striking given the main theme in Blackwill's insightful concluding essay: Consider carefully and do not jump to conclusions. He warns against unanticipated consequences, artificial analogies, false certainty, and short-term thinking that ignores longer term repercussions. He suggests eleven pertinent questions to focus thinking about a potential preemptive attack, bringing great depth of knowledge to the subject. Regrettably, he hardly mentions how actions on the nuclear issue could affect broader U.S. interests regarding Iran. In particular, his essay is infused with the implicit view that the Islamic Republic is a given, not an unnatural system whose days may be numbered. If one concludes that the Islamic Republic will, at some point in time, disappear, then U.S. policy thinking ought to be much more about timing: Delaying the nuclear program becomes a potential route to successful resolution of the problems between the two states, depending on what nuclear policy a successor regime might pursue. The six other authors in the CFR volume offer much insight about sanctions, negotiations, military options, regime change, the implications of a nuclear-armed Iran as well as what is known about the Iranian nuclear program. But their lens is so centered on the nuclear issue that everything else is essentially left out of the picture. For instance, Elliott Abrams' essay on regime change, while presenting a thoughtful evaluation of current U.S. programs and practical suggestions for alternatives, devotes exactly one sentence to the nonnuclear advantages for U.S. strategic interests were the Islamic Republic to fall. Surely the end of the mullahcracy would have vast repercussions on world Islamist movements and on the Middle East. To take one point that preoccupies U.S. Persian Gulf allies: Were Washington to form a close working relationship with a friendly Tehran, might that make relations with the gulf monarchies less important to U.S. administrations? Under those circumstances, Washington might choose to be more supportive of the forces calling for democratic reform in those countries, a prospect the ruling families find profoundly unsettling. In comparison to the tight focus of the CFR volume, the great strength of U.S. and Iranian Strategic Competition is that Cordesman, et al., capture the full character of U.S.-Iran relations. They demonstrate that the United States and Iran are in a low-level war, or in "strategic competition," a phrase often used in national security circles. That war has many fronts, which the authors cover in great (sometimes excessive) detail. Separate chapters, generally coauthored by Cordesman and one or more collaborators, cover the nature of the strategic competition in general, as well as sanctions and energy, the gulf military balance, and competition between Washington and Tehran in various parts of the world including Iraq, the Levant, Turkey, the Caucasus, "Af–Pak," Europe, Russia, China, Latin America, and Africa. The concluding chapter, on policy implications, stresses that the U.S. administrations must compete with the Iranians in a wide array of geographic arenas and with many policy instruments. That is, in effect, something Washington is now doing but not always with a conscious understanding of how all these disparate efforts should fit together. Cordesman is led to the pessimistic conclusion that the mullahs' pursuit of nuclear weapons is part of a concerted strategy around which the entire military and national security strategy is built. Restrictions on Tehran's enrichment activities, he argues, are not likely to impede Iran's nuclear progress much because it has developed such a varied and robust set of nuclear weapons-related programs (including delivery options) that it could break down the remaining work into compartmentalized programs. Each is readily concealed and could be presented to a credulous international community as peaceful in intent. He concludes that if one studies the full range of strategic competition between Washington and Tehran, the current P5+1-Iran negotiations—even if fully successful—would make only a small difference in the mullahs' challenge to U.S. policymakers and not much of a difference to its nuclear pursuits. Cordesman's message is not likely to have the resonance of Mousavian's. Too many in the West seem inclined to assume that Iran is being reasonable in the current nuclear impasse and that more understanding of the developing world is needed. Unfortunately, if history is any guide, few international problems can be solved through the greater display of empathy, especially toward rogue regimes. Patrick Clawson is director for research at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. [1] Karim Sadjadpour, Reading Khamenei: The World View of Iran's Most Powerful Leader (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2008), pp. 3, 23; Ali Khamene'i, speech, Tehran, Sept. 9, 1998. |
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