Monday, December 31, 2007

Focus - Iran

FOCUS - Iran

The release of the National Intelligence Estimate, then events in Pakistan have conspired to dislodge the Iranian nuclear threat from center stage. It is key that we remain focused. Iran remains the #1 threat to the interests of the United States.

The NIE’s facile conclusions, actually a coup engineered by ex-State officials who have been chronic appeasers, had to be accepted by the Bush administration because if not the report would have been leaked and the administration would have been accused of a cover up.

Very little has changed. Our view is that Iran has simply delayed warhead production so it can buy time for the more difficult task of enriching uranium. That’s the hard part. Once you have the fuel any fool knows you can make the bomb in months.

We have been a paladin for tough sanctions all along yet given that the release of the NIE gave both Russia and China the excuse to back away from meaningful sanctions the irony is that this piece of dagger diplomacy makes an Israeli attack even more likely.

Robert Craven

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

MID EAST: Near-Term Considerations

Dec/18/07

MID EAST: Near-term considerations.

"Time magazine hasn’t announced its pick for man of the year yet," write the editors of the National Review, "but we certainly know ours: Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the multinational force in Iraq and architect of the surge strategy that is turning the tide in the war. Petraeus formulated a brilliant counterinsurgency plan. He executed it with care and diligence. And when much of this country didn’t want to notice the security gains that the surge had wrought, he took the national media spotlight to defend his strategy and his honor."

Background: Top-down national reconciliation had failed because decades of Saddam’s totalitarianism, followed by the brutality of the post-invasion insurgency destroyed much of the political infrastructure of Iran, causing the Iraqis to revert to the most basic political attachment - tribe and locality. Petraeus’ genius has been to adapt American strategy to capitalize on that development, encouraging the emergence of and allying ourselves with tribal and provincial leaders - without waiting for some cosmic national deliverance from the still dysfunctional apparatus in Baghdad.

We noted earlier that advances in Iraq will be institutionalized. Now, the worst is over. It is Iran which remains center stage. And, "Iran retains key nuclear capabilities despite having frozen weapons development in 2003, and its ambitions cannot be considered benign," a senior U.S. spy official told Congress on Thursday, Dec 6. Iran still had the "most important" component of a future program, a uranium-enrichment plant. Iran also is working on ballistic missiles. These are 100% bad guys, notwithstanding the recent NIE which gave them a pass, and which we believe was nothing more that a political hit job on Bush by former State Dept officials who are on record opposing sanctions of any kind.

Vic Hanson notes that, "As the increasingly isolated Iranian economy tanks and the country becomes an international embarrassment, demonstrations against the government continue." And WE must continue to convince the world community that tougher sanctions, culminating with a blockade of gasoline imports if necessary, provide the only solution short of military and if we can’t, we act alone. It is KEY that we orchestrate the Iranians masses to function as a proxy for our policy. This is not a difficult concept folks.

Robert Craven