Free Iran:  His reply shouldn’t come as a surprise.  Khamenei knows opening up to the US means the end of his regime.  As such, engaging him is both a waste of time and fraught with potentially disastrous unintended consequences.  The US’ only objective should be to empower the Iranian people -  EMPOWER THE IRANIAN PEOPLE.

TEHRAN (AFP) – Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in his new year address to the nation on Sunday accused the US president of plotting against Iran as crowds of worshippers shouted “Death to Obama!”

In his defiant outburst, the all-powerful Khamenei dismissed President Barack Obama’s frequent offers of dialogue with Iran which began with last year’s historic Nowrouz greeting marking the Persian new year.

Khamenei’s personal tirade comes as Tehran is locked in a stalemate over its nuclear programme, with Washington pushing for a fourth round of sanctions against the Islamic republic.

He lashed out at the Obama administration in his speech, broadcast live on state television, saying after last June’s presidential election, the United States had taken a “worst stand” against Tehran.

He said Obama’s offer last year of a “new beginning” with Tehran turned out to be “deceptive,” as he had thought at the time that it would be.

“The US government and new administration claimed they wanted to have fair and correct relations, wrote letters and sent messages and even shouted through loudspeakers ‘we want to normalise relations with the Islamic republic,’ but unfortunately in practice they did the opposite,” Khamenei said.

“The US president called the (post-election) rioters human rights activists.

“You take the side of rioters and call it a civil movement. Are you not ashamed? You are in no position to speak of human rights. Did you reduce the killings in Iraq and Afghanistan?” Khamenei asked as worshippers, their fists raised, chanted “Death to Obama! Death to America!”

Khamenei, who is also Iran’s military commander-in-chief, said that Iran “condemns” such “arrogant” powers.

“You cannot talk about peace and friendship and at the same time plot and plan sedition and think that you can hurt the regime of the Islamic republic of Iran,” he said.

A significant part of his speech focused on the controversial re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, saying the nation’s “enemies had plans” to derail the poll but that this was prevented by a massive voter turn-out.

“By resorting to violence, they wanted to change the result of the election. they wanted to trigger violence by bringing people to the arena and by burning buses… but the Iranian nation triumphed,” the cleric said.

“They wanted to divide the people between majority and minority… and to spark a civil war, but the nation was alert. If they had been able to do so, the US and Zionist regime would have sent troops to Tehran’s streets, but they knew it would hurt them. So they spread propaganda and supported the rioters.”

See also:

WP:  Iran’s supreme leader cold to Obama overture

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s supreme leader sharply denounced the United States on Sunday, accusing it of plotting to overthrow its clerical leadership, in a chilly response to an overture by President Barack Obama for better cultural ties with Iran.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei did not outright reject Obama’s offer, saying Iran would keep an eye on Washington’s intentions. But the supreme leader said that so far, Washington’s offers of engagement with Tehran have been a deception.

The exchange was a sign of how Obama’s hopes for dialogue with Iran have broken down amid Tehran’s rejection of Western demands over its nuclear program and its heavy crackdown on the opposition following disputed presidential elections last June.

In his message, released Friday night to coincide with the Iranian new year, Nowruz, Obama told the Iranian people that the Americans want better cultural exchanges with Iran – but he also criticized the Iranian leadership for “turning its back” on U.S. overtures.

NYT:  Iran’s Leaders Respond to Obama [Video]

BBC:  Iranian leader accuses US of plotting against Iran

Go to AFP.

The South Asia Center of the Atlantic Council hosted a debate between experts Michael Ledeen and Flynt Leverett on how best to approach Iran’s nuclear ambitions and on possible courses of action for the U.S. and its allies to halt Iran’s capacity to weaponize its nuclear program.  Washington Post columnist and creator of PostGlobal David Ignatius moderated the discussion, and Frederick Kempe, President and CEO of the Atlantic Council, provided an introduction.

Both the tempo and the temperature of the dialogue on Iran have been on the rise in recent months, as the Obama administration attempts to craft a new policy towards the country in the wake of contentious elections and outbreaks of public unrest.  Many different solutions have been offered by analysts – ranging from military action to sharper economic sanctions to support for dissident movements.  But are these solutions practicable?  Do we really understand Iran and its motivations?

Podcast (MP3):

Speakers:

• Frederick Kempe, President and CEO, Atlantic Council
• David Ignatius, Columnist, Washington Post
• Michael Ledeen, Freedom Scholar, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
• Flynt Leverett, Senior Research Fellow, New American Foundation
  

March 3, 2010

FREDERICK KEMPE:  Welcome.  I’m Fred Kempe, president and CEO of the Atlantic Council.  It’s a particular personal pleasure for me to introduce today’s event.  And it’s not only because of the importance of the subject or the brilliance of the speakers or the platform of the relatively new South Asia Center.  In the space of one year, I think that Shuja as director and his staff have turned it into an intellectual center for this kind of conversation and Shuja himself has set himself apart I think as one of this town’s – or perhaps beyond this town’s – leading experts on the region.

For me, however, it’s a particular personal pleasure to introduce the moderator.  You all know David Ignatius is a uniquely talented columnist and novelist.  His children know him as the person who got a movie made from one of his books where they got to meet Leonardo Dicaprio.  You also know that in the noise that is U.S. commentary these days he is consistently wise, well-informed and ahead of the curve.  And as a novelist he is consistently readable.

What you probably don’t know is that, as a friend, he is equally as gifted and as durable.  And so I want to thank him for that as well.

But, with that, let me turn over to David, who has some practice in dealing with people who don’t entirely agree with each other.  (Laughter.)

DAVID IGNATIUS:  Well, I am delighted to be moderating this panel, especially after that wonderful introduction from Fred.  People in Washington always refer to each other as my good friend, my dear friend.  Fred and I actually are good and dear friends; we go back to the early 1980s.  We’ve seen each other through more life crises than you’d imagine.  Anybody who wants some really good stories about Fred Kempe, you can call me, but I won’t tell you.  (Laughter.)

Another Washington is to advertise debates that aren’t really debates.  As we all know, the range of permissible opinion in Washington normally stretches from A to B, maybe to C.  This morning we’re going to give you the whole alphabet.  We have a genuine disagreement about what the United States should do on arguably our most important foreign policy priority.

And we have two people to argue the opposing points of view who don’t mind controversy, who don’t want to round off the edges of what they have to say so as to fit the conventional Washington structure of the debate.  If anything they’re going to probably push it a little to extremes.  Somebody asked me if I had a flak jacket ready.  I, knowing both of these gentlemen, I know that that’s not necessary but I do think that we’re going to get something that’s unusual for Washington, which is, as I say, a real debate about something that matters.

Let me introduce them briefly.  On my left, Flynt Leverett, as you know, is now with the New America Foundation, a director of one of their initiatives.  He is known to us as somebody who was very active in foreign policy and policy analysis first with the CIA in the 1990s – he served as an analyst in the directorate of intelligence from 1992 to 2001; then went in 2001 to the policy planning staff at the State Department; and then in 2002 went to the National Security Council where he was involved in policy questions for the Near East and South Asia – and in that role observed the possibilities for openings to Iran that he then has discussed in some important articles that I’m sure you’re familiar with and that we’ll talk about today. See More.

Using four crises spread over four decades, from just after World War II to the 1980s, John Limbert appraises the negotiating style of Iran and of those it confronts.

Using four crises spread over four decades, from just after World War II to the 1980s, Limbert appraises the negotiating style of Iran and of those it confronts. The 1945-47 Azerbaijan crisis pitted Iran against the Soviet Union, with the United States playing a limited role. The 1951-53 oil nationalization crisis and the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq marked the moment the United States replaced the United Kingdom as the dominant Western power in Iran. The last two crises — the 1979-81 Iranian hostage crisis and the U.S. effort throughout the 1980s to free Americans held hostage in Lebanon — were bilateral confrontations between Washington and Tehran. Drawing on these four cases and more, Limbert offers advice on negotiating with Iran and addresses the need to overcome “mutual myth-perceptions” in U.S.-Iranian relations. Now serving as a senior official on Iran in the State Department, Limbert was one of those held hostage in Tehran from 1979 to 1981. Yet as this splendid study of U.S.-Iranian relations demonstrates, he emerged from that bitter experience with an ability to bring to his appraisal a rare combination of insight, dispassion, and empathy.

Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett claim they aren’t influence peddlers, but their emails suggest otherwise.

“We don’t know of a single ‘Western scholar’ or ‘policy wonk’ … who thinks that access to the Iranian regime is going to make them powerful, rich, or both,” Flynt Leverett and his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, recently wrote on their website, raceforiran.com. The two Iran lobbyists were responding to my profile of them in Tablet Magazine two weeks ago, in which I wrote that contacts in a closed society have real value for policy types. “[A]ccess to the regime is a form of currency that can make you powerful, or rich, or both,” I wrote.

In Leveretts’ response to my article, they also claimed to have been quite offended when I suggested while interviewing them that their prospective trip to Iran “was facilitated via Muhammad Marandi on behalf of the IRGC,” or the Revolutionary Guards Corps. They charge that this information was made up, either by my sources or by me. Go to original article.

With Secretary of State Hillary Clinton describing Iran as a military dictatorship and the Obama administration trying to persuade its partners to impose tighter sanctions on Tehran, many experts say the U.S. seems to be giving up on the idea of engagement. But, if that’s the case, John Limbert says he wouldn’t be at the State Department. The former Iran hostage was brought out of retirement to become the deputy assistant secretary of state for Iran and trying to find ways to engage his former captors is still part of his job. Limbert acknowledges it hasn’t been easy, but he says the Obama administration is not giving up. Go to NPR.

resident Barack Obama spent his first year in office laying the foundation for a new, multilateral U.S. foreign policy.

While it is too early to talk of an “Obama Doctrine”, a signature aspect of his foreign policy has been his offer to extend a hand to U.S. foes like Iran and North Korea.

WHAT HAS THE ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY YIELDED?

Obama made his most visible overtures toward Tehran, including sending a video message last year to mark the New Year celebration of Nowruz. But the administration has also tried to engage North Korea, Cuba, Myanmar and Syria.

The strategy has yet to yield breakthroughs but the administration believes it has achieved results, particularly on Iran where Washington is seeking international support for sanctions to pressure Iran over its nuclear program.

The White House says its offer to talk to Tehran created more international support to isolate Iran because the United States is no longer perceived as the problem. Go to Reuters.

As engagement with Iran gained political momentum in the United States during the 2008 presidential campaign, some of its advocates were quick to cite the analogy of Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China in portraying outreach to Tehran as a similarly bold policy stroke. The experience of the past year, which has seen Iran’s leaders crack down at home and spurn outreach from the West, has exposed the superficiality of this comparison. As political scientist Michael Mandelbaum has observed, Chairman Mao was motivated, after all, not by American charm but by Soviet belligerence. China in the early 1970s had recently lost a border war to the USSR and faced a Soviet army massing on its border, pushing it into Washington’s arms. The Iranian regime, on the other hand, has been eager to keep America at arm’s length. Go to Foreign Policy.

IND:  For those that have advocated engagement, how is that engagement working out for you?

A group of Iranian MPs is demanding that the country cut its diplomatic ties with Britain in a sign of the country’s deteriorating relations with the West. Go to Telegraph.

And, speaking of Iran, this is the year when Mr. Obama must go from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde with that country, the experts say. Nobody thinks there’s much chance that the Iranian government will suddenly suspend its enrichment of uranium, as Mr. Obama would like. But Mr. Perkovich argues that Mr. Obama has done much to unhinge the government there, by giving the opposition in Iran more of a reason to view the United States with a kinder eye, thanks to Mr. Obama’s overtures over the past year. Still, since the president can’t depend on the Iranian opposition toppling the government, 2010 is the year he must show he is standing tough to try to contain Iran. Which means harsher Security Council sanctions. Go to NY Times.

IND:  Mr. Lopez makes a good case as to why sanctions may prove ineffective.  However, his solution would most likely prove ineffective as well. The answer is not to bend further backwards trying to engage this regime but rather to speak up for the human rights of the Iranian people so as to make it far more difficult for the regime to repress them. His essay was published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

…It is true that both the House bill and other Obama administration proposals to freeze the assets of Iranian banks, select Iranian elites, and the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps may enforce crippling sanctions on the country. But they may not be able to have any real impact on the regime...Yet Iran has been the target of U.S. sanctions for 30 years and U.N. sanctions since 2006. None of these coercive measures has resulted in Tehran giving up its nuclear research. After all, Iran has become used to surviving outside the international system rendering sanctions useless.

…Worse yet, sanctions could have the opposite effect. In nations where strong internal opposition exists, such as Iran, sanctions provide a country’s beleaguered leadership with a classic “rally around the flag” policy tool that justifies further internal repression by blaming the extreme economic and political emergency on sanctions. So new sanctions could allow Tehran to blame outsiders for domestic dissent and serve as a rationale for further repression.

The U.S. response shouldn’t be further sanctions, but instead new proposals that invite, embarrass, cajole, and/or incentivize Tehran to embrace some version of the previously offered deal.  IND: The regime will only see such policies as a sign of weakness and will become more emboldened. Go to original article.

U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Iran John Limbert tells RFE/RL that there are similarities between the current postelection unrest in Iran and the events that led up to that country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Limbert, who was among the 53 Americans held hostage for 444 days after Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 in support of the revolution, talks to RFE/RL correspondent Golnaz Esfandiari about the current crackdown in Iran and the nuclear issue.

Limbert: Our stance toward the regrettable events of recent days in Iran is very clear. We believe that the Iranian people, like all other nations in the world, have the right to a government that treats its citizens humanely. The people of Iran also have the inalienable right to express their views — [they] have freedom of speech. They have the right to criticize their leaders freely without facing violence.  IND:  With all due respect to Mr. Limbert, we believe engaging this regime isn’t the way to realize these rights for the Iranian people. Go to Radio Free Europe.

IND:  Another factually inaccurate piece by the Leveretts.  Because they were published in the NY Times, I posted their essay but their essay is misleading and tries to create confusion.  For instance, they write: Antigovernment Iranian Web sites claim there were “tens of thousands” of Ashura protesters; others in Iran say there were 2,000 to 4,000. IND:  Who are these “others” – the Basijis, the Iranian government propaganda agents, etc.?   Who?  Why don’t you name your sources?  How could they even write this number when all the videos of the protesters showed otherwise?  Were all those videos fake? Go to NY Times.

IND:  An excellent critique of realism.  Although we don’t subscribe to the neocon foreign policy either, we really enjoyed this scathing criticism of realism.

Sure, the new thinking goes, Americans might prefer that democracy succeed in Iran. But right now the most important issue is the mullahs’ nukes, and that must dominate Washington’s calculus. When ideals and interest collide, ideals must give way. That has certainly been the Obama administration’s approach—not just on Iran but also Russia, China, Venezuela, and Middle East dictatorships. The nature of a country’s regime is thought irrelevant. The only thing that matters are “interests,” ours and theirs, and making them converge.

This is thought to be the essence of realism. But history suggests it doesn’t fit reality. The nature of a country’s regime does matter: not only as a moral issue for the United States but also as a strategic one. That’s because ideology is often decisive in shaping the foreign policies of other nations. Ideology determines their ambitions. It is through an ideological lens that countries determine who their friends and foes are. Even a government’s perception of its interests is shaped by the nature of the regime.

…All these examples show how ideology still matters. So how should it affect U.S. foreign policy? On Iran it might dictate a very different approach than that taken by both the Obama and Bush administrations. IND:  Speaking only for myself [Free Iran], how much I have detested both their approaches. Instead of focusing primarily on Iran’s nuclear program, the United States should concentrate on the nature of Iran’s regime and the possibility of reform or radical change. Instead of using sanctions to try to force the current government to give up its weapons program—a project unlikely to succeed—the United States and the Europeans would do better to devise sanctions that would force Tehran either to undertake genuine democratic reforms or lose power. Given the current instability of the Ahmadinejad regime, this strategy might even work. When combined with a vigorous domestic opposition, foreign pressures and sanctions have brought about change in places like South Africa, Chile, and Serbia. Since the June 12 elections, the rulers in Tehran have struggled to maintain their grip on power. Who knows what effect new sanctions might have? Go to Newsweek.

IND:  We wish Mr. Sick would explain what has his years of engaging (we think appeasing) this regime actually accomplished.  We think virtually nothing.  Alternatively, how much more brutal will this regime have to get before he changes his views about the nature of this regime and how to deal with it?

Backed into a corner by events on the ground in Iran and a hawkish Congress that wants to enact a foolish sanctions regime, Barack Obama’s administration has played the press masterfully.

IND:  Agreed on this point.  But the rest of this essay, which is about a series of hypothetical leaks, is simply nonsense. Yet you know that gasoline sanctions are perhaps the worst idea to come out of Congress since they opposed the purchase of Alaska. The sanctions would enrich and empower the Revolutionary Guards, undercut the Green opposition, identify the U.S. as the enemy of the ordinary citizen in Iran, and possibly start us down the slippery slope to another disastrous war in the Middle East. Go to Foreign Policy.

IND:  This article focuses on the merits of President Obama’s engagement policy.  According to the administration, one achievement of engaging Iran is that Russia and China, now that the US has shown good faith and exhausted all possibilities, would be more likely to join the West in sanctioning Iran.  We beg to differ.  Although they may pay more lip service and may join in some limited sanctions, China and Russia would be highly unlikely to join in sanctions that would really undermine the regime.  Their traditional lack of support was not because the US did not reach out to Tehran – rather because of their self interest.  They like the status quo, playing the US against Iran and, thus, driving a better bargain from both.  Otherwise, how could they sell billions of military hardware to Iran or get oil and gas rights without having to compete with the Exxons of the world which possess the technology that Iran desperately needs?  Moreover, with Iran out of the picture, they think maybe the US would have fewer reasons to overlook their human rights track record and may come after their dictatorial regimes next.  They like the Islamic republic to remain a thorn in the side of the US.

If there is a one-word handle that fits the conduct of foreign relations in Barack Obama’s first year as president, it is “engagement.” The Obama administration has engaged with Iran, Russia, Burma, Sudan, North Korea. “Engagement” sounds harmless — something any sensible administration would do (though the Bush administration apparently did far less of it).

But what, in fact, does President Obama have to show for “engagement” itself? And how do you keep score?

If, in fact, President Obama has dispatched senior officials to talk to their counterparts in the most authoritarian states in the hope that treating them with respect will change their behavior, then events have so far proven him naïve. Persistent attempts to draw the poison from our relations with Iran have had absolutely no effect on Iran’s nuclear program, or its sponsorship of terrorism. The North Koreans remain similarly intransigent. Ditto Myanmar and Sudan.

Iran is both the most important, and the most passionately disputed, case. Engagement here would seem to have been a failure — but only if you take the policy wholly at face value. One senior administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record says that while the offer of engagement was “never just an instrument or a ploy,” and remains on the table, the very public effort to exhaust all available means of persuasion has helped move Europe, Russia and China toward a tougher stance.

“Iran had an alliance with Russia and China,” he said, “and they were in a confrontation with the West. That’s not the dynamic anymore.” Should Iran remain recalcitrant, he said, “I remain convinced that we will get a resolution that Russia supports.” Go to NY Times.