Schrödinger's foreign policy

Schrödinger's cat T-shirt, from Zazzle.ca.

Here's one of those observer's paradox moments, caught just as it was happening last night, beginning with a startling Twitter exchange:

Yes, God forbid: RT @lrozen WH denies NYT story: "It’s not true that US & Iran have agreed to 1-on-1 talks or any meeting after US election"
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 20, 2012

Meaning, of course this Times story must be wrong, because although Obama has repeatedly asserted that he would agree to bilateral talks with Iran, we all know he can't mean it, since he is actually a fiendish and unregenerate warmonger.

But when I looked at the Times story, that's not at all how I saw it. In the first place, they didn't seem to think the denial was very significant: they dropped it into the sixth paragraph of a pretty long piece, like a police crowd estimate or some other untrustworthy factoid that has to be included, without comment (Ryan Cooper must feel the same; he doesn't even mention the denial; Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Liberman prays that the denial is true). In other words, they treated the denial as an inevitable pro forma element of the story and stood by the story itself.

The White House denied that a final agreement had been reached. “It’s not true that the United States and Iran have agreed to one-on-one talks or any meeting after the American elections,” Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman, said Saturday evening. He added, however, that the administration was open to such talks, and has “said from the outset that we would be prepared to meet bilaterally.”

Reports of the agreement have circulated among a small group of diplomats involved with Iran.

(Emptywheel notes that the story first appeared without the sixth paragraph, which was inserted after the White House denial was published in various other places; the wording "until after the American elections" suggests to her that the negotiations have in fact already begun, with Secretary of State Clinton in the lead.)

And then the Times story isn't, after all, that the US and Iran are going to have direct bilateral talks on the nuclear issue—it's that certain unidentified US officials say they will, so that the immediate question is: why are they saying so? And it's easier to come up with an answer if you stipulate that what they are saying is more or less true.

Because why exactly would they be lying about it? If they're working for the president's agenda, are they trying to set it up as an item for Monday's debate? Because peace with Iran is such an irresistible vote-getter in Colorado and Virginia? That's hard to believe. Then again, another denial-denier, Anshel Pfeffer for Haaretz, proposes exactly that:

If indeed the report is accurate, despite the administration's denial (which came with the intriguing caveat that the Americans "have said from the outset that we would be prepared to meet bilaterally"), the winners and losers in the high-stakes nuclear showdown are already clear.

[Obama] began his first term promising to engage the Iranians diplomatically, and though the talks will only begin after the elections, at least he can point to some sort of progress. The specific timing of the leak, on the eve of the third and final presidential debate which is to deal with foreign policy issues is rather suggestive.... Naturally, this is already being spun as an achievement for the administration – finally overcoming Iran's opposition to direct talks.

Other winners, in this view, would include Ayatollah Khamenei, the Israeli security establishment which thinks Binyamin Netanyahu's Iran policy is dangerously insane, and Ehud Barak, currently positioning himself to replace Netanyahu; losers would be Netanyahu himself, his American-Adelsonian surrogate Willard Mitt Romney, who thinks the president of the United States is a proconsul of the Israeli Empire, and Lady Catherine Ashton, the ineffective chief of the European Union and the P5 + 1 talks. To which I would add Mr. Ahmadinejad, who is clearly not going to get any credit for this development with Iranian voters (because we constantly forget that Iran is in its weird way a democracy, and that the Ayatollah probably hates Ahmadinejad as much as he does any of the country's pesky liberals).

So we'd be looking at a very carefully planned leak functioning as an October surprise for Adelson, Netanyahu, and poor Willard. Assuming that the American war fatigue extends to wars that haven't even properly started yet, and that Aipac's or Likud's hold over our politics has really diminished over the past four years. What I don't get is how it works: doesn't Obama have to repeat the denial at the foreign policy debate? If it's officially untrue, how exactly do the Democrats use it?

For that we'll have to wait and see. But to respond automatically, as Greenwald does, on the basis of the assumption that Obama is an agent of Empire and everything he does must be interpreted in that light, is just as short-sighted, if not as stupid, as Drs. D'Souza and Gingrich assuming Obama is an agent of the Mau-Mau party bent on destroying King Leopold and so forth. Nobody's locked into position, but what they say has a relationship, however complex, with what they mean, and the way we watch the situation affects how it develops.

Image by Ooklah at DeviantArt.

Later that afternoon:
Richard Silverstein cites a new Brookings poll according to which a majority of Americans, 53%, would prefer to take a neutral view in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran, as against 12% who would encourage it and 29% who would oppose. So maybe we're ready to make that deal.