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.

Redlining their own neighborhood

This view of last week's UN highjinks from the great Iranian cartoonist Mana Neyestani, passed on from Richard Silverstein's Tikun Olam.

Also from Silverstein, an excellent rundown of the State Department's removal from its list of terrorist organizations of the Iranian exile group Mujahedin-e-Khalq, which I have fussed about before. Silverstein's post also features a brilliant postography, or whatever you call a bibliography of online writings.

I do think Silverstein is too harsh in calling the delisting one of Hillary Clinton's "great shams". The official notice is pretty honest, anyway—

With today’s actions, the Department does not overlook or forget the MEK’s past acts of terrorism, including its involvement in the killing of U.S. citizens in Iran in the 1970s and an attack on U.S. soil in 1992. The Department also has serious concerns about the MEK as an organization, particularly with regard to allegations of abuse committed against its own members.

—though it doesn't mention very recent acts of terrorism, namely those assassinations of Iranian physicists. But something really had to be done about them, especially those abused members; they are absolutely not welcome in Iraq, now that Iran and Iraq are close allies (thanks, President Bush and Ambassador Wolfowitz and all you cute kids!),  and you're going to have a lot of trouble getting some other country to adopt them if you don't stop calling them terrorists ("Hello, Prime Minister? I've got some Persian terrorists in need of a home, you don't suppose you could—Prime Minister? Are we cut off?").

Red line district (addendum)

Updated 9/28/2012

From Wide Asleep in America. And read his post!

Prime Minister Netanyahu drew his red line!

He drew it on his own personal copy of Iran's nuclear bomb design, produced by Acme Mass Destruction Products, Ltd., of Monument Valley, Arizona, and brought it into the United Nations General Assembly for show and tell, so we could see how serious the situation was.

If this reminds you of General Colin Powell at the United Nations, keep in mind that the general's pictures were of actually occurring objects that simply happened, as it turned out, not to be mobile biological weapons labs, although if any mobile biological weapons labs existed they would probably look quite a lot like that. Whereas Prime Minister Netanyahu's picture is of an obviously fictional object, because what he is trying to persuade us of is not the empirical truth but the moral truth, which is that people really need to pay more attention to him and that line is really red. Not green, or thin and blue, or what have you.

#Netanyahu has drawn literal 'red line' on his diagram. Powerful message. Powerfull moment. #UNGA
— Tom Rogan (@troganthinks) September 27, 2012

What I'm saying. If he'd just drawn a figurative red line, what kind of impact would that have? Not powerfull, in any case. Just full. Of it.

Update 9/28

Bibi's use of that chart was one of the most effective, gripping, uses of a chart I've ever seen. Is the world listening??
— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) September 27, 2012

If the world's not listening, then "effective" is hardly the word you want; if the world is laughing, as seems to be the case, that wasn't the effect the PM was aiming at. It certainly didn't convince anybody to take the "threat" more seriously, whether they took it seriously at all in the first place or not. However "gripped" Ari Fleischer may have personally felt.

More interesting is the Times reading, that

the substance of his speech suggested a softening of what had been a difficult dispute with the Obama administration on how to confront Iran over its nuclear program.

This by putting some praise for Obama into the speech (maybe not a big thing, but not that easy for Netanyahu to push past his lips), and by an interesting feature of that red line, which is that although it is drawn on the cartoon bomb, it can move around on the calendar, and has now slipped over to next April, so that we can stop worrying about his Iran attack coming before the election. Which I interpret to mean that in the famous September 11 phone call Netanyahu lost the game of chicken, and that is extremely good news.

(The Times also mentions by the bye that

Right now, Iran does not possess enough [medium-enriched] fuel to make a single weapon. In fact, its stockpile of it has declined in recent months, as it has converted some for the research reactor.

Although it is also noted that they've got at least six years' worth of fuel for the medical reactor at this point, so I have to admit that as an excuse it is starting to wear a little thin.)

The only really regrettable thing is the suffering of ordinary Iranian people under sanctions imposed to placate this fool and keep him from causing any greater damage. And there may be a big element of bluff there, too, as I have sometimes imagined. That is, the suffering of Iranians may be caused less by the sanctions than by Ahmedinejad's economic mismanagement. They certainly don't seem to be having much trouble selling oil; I heard somewhere that they are producing less oil than they can sell, in the hope of jacking up the price, but Dr. Google can't seem to find me a citation. Here, in any case, is some evidence:

Iranian supply fell by 50,000 bpd to 2.80 million bpd, matching July's rate, the survey found. Output in July was Iran's lowest since 1988, according to figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Output from Iran is down sharply this year due to U.S. and European sanctions on the country over its nuclear program. The embargo bars EU insurance firms from covering Iran's exports, hindering imports by some non-EU buyers.

Some sources expected a small recovery in Iranian exports this month as some customers, including South Korea, returned. But some buyers say Iran's tanker fleet has been struggling to meet delivery schedules, slowing down exports.

"There is clearly a problem with the tanker issues and over the longer term it's probably going to get more and more difficult," said one industry source, who estimated Iranian exports in September were on a par with August's.

See what I mean? The authors of this don't, but this is a weird kind of embargo ("Sorry, we're fresh out—under embargo, so naturally the stuff is selling like hot, umm, springs").

It will be many decades, perhaps, before it's possible to cut through all this multilateral bluffing to find out what was in fact going on, but I think at that point it will become clear that Obama (or the team of Obama and Clinton) was as refined and ruthless a diplomatic maneuverer as Talleyrand, and that he has prevented some pretty awful things.

Airborne Elephant Watch: Tehran!

Thomas P. Friedman (I don't know why I keep calling him that, his middle initial is L) leapt into it at the last minute yesterday as if terrified of missing an opportunity to be totally wrong, as he was, chiding Egypt's president Morsi for attending the meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Tehran:

Excuse me, President Morsi, but there is only one reason the Iranian regime wants to hold the meeting in Tehran and have heads of state like you attend, and that is to signal to Iran’s people that the world approves of their country’s clerical leadership and therefore they should never, ever, ever again think about launching a democracy movement — the exact same kind of democracy movement that brought you, Mr. Morsi, to power in Egypt.

Flying Elephants. By Tattoomaus78 at DeviantArt.

Because what Morsi signaled to Iran's people turned out to be quite different, more along the lines of the world disapproves of their country's clerical leadership and democracy movements of the kind that brought him to power are eminently praiseworthy, especially in Syria—the Iranian foreign minister walked out, while poor little president Ahmadinejad squirmed, I guess, on the dais next to the fulminating Egyptian.

“The Syrian people are fighting with courage, looking for freedom and human dignity,” Mr. Morsi said, suggesting that all parties at the gathering shared responsibility for the bloodshed. “We must all be fully aware that this will not stop unless we act.”

Mr. Morsi, pointedly, did not mention unrest in Bahrain, possibly to avoid offending Saudi Arabia, which has helped Bahrain’s monarchy suppress the uprising.

Then the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, noted that the Holocaust really did take place. Actually virtually all educated Iranians, including the country's 25,000 Jews, are aware of this; the purpose of mentioning it was to remind them that Ahmadinejad doesn't care whether people think he is educated or not—the nation's crude, embarrassing brother-in-law. Ban also scolded the leaders for inattention to human rights and for lack of transparency in their nuclear affairs, and a splendid time was had by all.

None of this will persuade Friedman, of course. He's so committed to working out his model of who's bad and who's good that he can't think about anything getting better. But Morsi is fast replacing old Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in my heart as favorite post-Islamist politician. His current démarche on the subject of Syria, cutting Iran in (as is self-evidently necessary) and therefore inevitably cutting the US out, seems like the first idea anybody has had about Syria that could lead to a reduction in the number of killings instead of a further increase.

And Friedman? Suck. On. That.

From The Garlic.

Presidents on parade

Snappy comebacks:

The German foreign minister, Guido Westerweile, said that President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus was "Europe's last dictator." Lukashenko said, "It's better to be a dictator than gay." But how can he be sure?

But it's best to be the Prez.

From The Australian. Photo by AP.

Man up, Vova! Moscow doesn't believe in tears! (Not my line, alas, but too good to pass up. Apparently state TV actually broadcast the gorgeous old Brezhnev-era movie on election [jump]