But Obama probably also shouldn’t have said this. The president joked to a group of Russian businessmen about how Czar Alexander II gave America “a pretty good deal on Alaska,” which the United States bought from Imperial Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million in gold.
It’s still a sore subject. The first time I visited the post-Soviet Europe as an exchange student in western Ukraine, Alaska came up as I was speaking to a classroom full of high school students. NATO was in the midst of bombing Serbia — on whose behalf Russia entered the First World War — and the ethnic Russian teacher explained that the military action wasn’t the only thing Russians wanted the United States to roll back. Alaska, she said to my astonishment, should be Russia’s again. “We are hoping,” she said earnestly, explaining that this could be a way to deepen trust and respect between Cold War rivals.
That has been my experience, too. I haven’t found the subject to be one about which Russians have much of a sense of humor. I’d appreciate hearing others’ experience to the contrary.
It’s also what’s come out in the scanty Russian language media coverage of President Obama’s visit. Most Russian commentators were more likely to complain about President Obama’s referring to PM Vladimir Putin as “president”. They appeared more predisposed to attribute it to ignorance rather than a slip of the tongue, as I did.
President Obama’s speech was covered live by any of Russia’s major news outlets and the flavor of the coverage it’s received was captured pretty well in this article in the New York Times:
“We don’t really understand why Obama is such a star,” said Kirill Zagorodnov, 25, one of the graduates. “It’s a question of trust, how he behaves, how he positions himself, that typical charisma, which in Russia is often parodied. Russians really are not accustomed to it. It is like he is trying to manipulate the public.”
Others suggested that after decades of social turmoil, Russians were simply exhausted with politics, and had been so often disappointed by Western leaders that they were not inclined to get excited by the latest one. Asked by one Moscow newspaper what they expected to come out of Mr. Obama’s visit, most respondents had the same answer: traffic jams.
It may not come out in my writing but I am, generally speaking, not unfavorably disposed to President Obama, particularly in the area of foreign policy. When an error is made I think that gentle criticism is warranted and that’s how I saw the incident: an unforced error.
The picture above is of the check for $7.2 million issued by the United States for the purchase of Alaska.
According to NYT op-ed contributor Russell Leigh Moses the Chinese authorities have employed a successful and repeatable formula in controlling the protests in Xinjiang Province that have claimed more than 150 lives.
Step 1: Cut off cellphone and Internet Access
Many Chinese officials are quite sophisticated in their responses to threats to their governance, and they are not tone-deaf to technology. Cellphone service and Internet access were both blocked within a few hours of the first demonstrations in Xinjiang.
Step 2: Control the message
When word of the unrest cascaded out, much of the news was artfully managed by officials. Friends of mine in Beijing received unsolicited messages on their cellphones that provided the government version of the unrest. Government representatives handed out discs with pictures taken by state news organizations.
The state news media talked up the looting and burning of Han businesses but said nothing about attacks on Uighur establishments, and repeated mantras about stability and order.
Step 3: Crack down forcefully
Rumors ran rampant in the run-up to these riots, but at the end of the day, bullets flew faster and struck harder than netizens’ bulletins.
Step 4: Reward successful repression of dissent
Party cadres know that Beijing’s leadership is largely composed of officials who have not been shy about using force when protests emerged. For example, the crushing of dissent that took place in Beijing and Tibet in 1989 is seen by Chinese decision-makers and the cadres they sponsor as creating the conditions for economic reform. Party members seem to be keenly aware that that those who supported the crackdowns were quickly helicoptered into high-level positions.
An authoritarian regime with the will to crush dissent and the wherewithal to do so can stay in power indefinitely. Those are critical differences between the Chinese regime and the Soviet. The Chinese regime still has the willingness to crack down with whatever force is necessary to keep itself in control and, buoyed with trade dollars, it has plenty of resources to do it with.
Above paramilitary police patrol in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang Province.
July 6 (Bloomberg) — U.S. President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev called for a reduction of their nuclear arsenals to between 1,500 and 1,675 warheads and between 500 and 1,100 delivery vehicles, according to a “joint understanding” reached today in Moscow.
Under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expires in December, and a 2002 Moscow agreement the maximum allowable number of warheads is 2,200 and the maximum number of launch vehicles is 1,600, according to the document.
There are apparently differences of opinion on the wisdom of this move. In an editorial this morning the LA Times hails it:
The agreement of the two presidents to cut deployed nuclear warheads from the range of 1,700-2,200 each to 1,500-1,675 each, and to reduce delivery systems, sets the stage for negotiations to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that expires in December. This is a far more modest goal than we would have liked, but perhaps the numbers are less important than the goal itself. The two sides renewed their commitment to pursuing nuclear arms reduction, and that’s what matters.
In the first place, locking in specific reductions for U.S. forces prior to the conclusion of the ongoing Nuclear Posture Review is putting the cart before the horse. The Obama administration’s team at the Pentagon is currently examining U.S. strategic force requirements. Before specific limits are set on U.S. forces, it should complete the review. Strategic requirements should drive force numbers; arms-control numbers should not dictate strategy.
Second, the new agreement not only calls for reductions in the number of nuclear warheads (to between 1,500 and 1,675), but for cuts in the number of strategic force launchers. Under the 1991 START I Treaty, each side was limited to 1,600 launchers. Yesterday’s agreement calls for each side to be limited to between 500 and 1,100 launchers each.
According to open Russian sources, it was Russia that pushed for the lower limit of 500 launchers in negotiations. In the weeks leading up to this summit, it also has been openly stated that Moscow would like the number of deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched missiles (SLBMS), and strategic bombers to be reduced “several times” below the current limit of 1,600. Moving toward very low numbers of launchers is a smart position for Russia, but not for the U.S.
I’ll hold my water until we can take the Senate’s temperature on this issue. Recall Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. The president makes treaties but two-thirds of Senate must concur. Any number of treaties negotiated and signed by presidents have languished for lack of the Senate’s support.
Ultimately, then, the two men practiced classic Realpolitik, foregoing public talks about irreconcilable differences while striving to make some advances in areas of mutual interest. That, frankly, falls far short of a “reset” in the relationship that the Obama administration has been touting. But it not nothing.
Over the weekend North Korea fired a volley of short range missiles into the Sea of Japan in defiance of UNSC resolutions, heightening tensions between North Korea and its neighbors, South Korea and Japan. The Guardian Council has certified the election results in Iran and President Ahmadinejad and the “hardliners” that he represents seem even more firmly in control of Iran than they were before the election. He blames us and the Brits for the protests against the patently phony election that overwhelmingly returned him to office. Even as the U. S. envoy returns to Venezuela, Venezuela’s President Chavez blames the United States for the coup in Honduras that has ousted its president.
MOSCOW — President Obama arrived in Moscow Monday for a summit meeting with Russian leaders that is aimed at reaching an agreement to cut stockpiles of nuclear warheads, but is also expected to touch on the war in Afghanistan, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, terrorism and the jousting for influence in other former Soviet countries.
The summit meeting comes less than a year after the conflict in Georgia caused the worst tensions between the United States and Russia since the end of the cold war. Mr. Obama has called for a “reset” in relations, and the summit meeting will offer the most telling evidence so far about how difficult it will be to achieve this goal.
In opening remarks at the Kremlin, Mr. Obama and President Dmitri A. Medvedev said they hoped that the meeting would improve relations in both tone and substance. Mr. Obama noted that he and Mr. Medvedev had met previously at the Group of 8 summit meeting in April in London.
“We are confident that we can continue to build off the extraordinary discussions that we had in London,” Mr. Obama said, “and that on a whole host of issues — including security issues, economic issues, energy issues, environmental issues — that the United States and Russia have more in common than they have differences, and that if we work hard during these next few days, that we can make extraordinary progress that will benefit the people of both countries.”
There is no more important bilateral relationship between nations than that between Russia and the United States. Between them the two nations have at least 95% of the world’s nuclear weapons. We literally have the ability to destroy the world.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much basis for a good relationship between Russia and the United States. Russia’s population is dwindling, its economy languishing, it survives largely by selling its natural resources. Russia would be a difficult market for American goods and its natural customer for its oil and gas is Europe. We don’t really need Russia’s cooperation on pressing world issues like climate change.
Russia has had consistent and clear interests over the period of the last 200 years or more: annexing or at least neutralizing its neighbors.
The viewpoint of Russians, expressed neatly by Fyodor Lukyanov in the Russian Gazeta, is that it’s all our fault:
On Moscow’s part, too, there’s a desire to break the deadlock, but Russia doesn’t feel it bears any blame for creating it. A common opinion is that Americans have made a pile of mistakes, so now the ball will be in their court for a long time to come. Moscow doesn’t believe it needs to change anything, but is more than ready to respond more constructively to U.S. proposals. Russian representatives acknowledge that that the climate of negotiations has changed for the better, and so two angry monologues have given way to a difficult dialogue.
There’s a grain of truth to that. When you consider the expansion of NATO membership into some of the countries that made up the old Warsaw Pact, U. S. participation in what many Russians viewed as anti-Slav military actions against Yugoslavia, the overtures made to countries like Georgia or Ukraine in Russias “near abroad”, and the plans to deploy missile defense in the Czech Republic or Poland which Russians characteristically view as being directed against them, the view isn’t completely without basis.
While nuclear arms reduction is certainly a vital interest of the U. S. is it our only interest? Very nearly all that we have to offer Russia other than our own arms reduction is to give them a free hand in their dealings with their neighbors. Is arms reduction important enough to us that we should stand on the sidelines as Russia re-assembles the old Soviet Union or creates a chaotically weak buffer zone around it?
So much for soft power. Mr Obama’s friendly outreach to other states – be they hostile, unco-operative or even supposedly friendly – has been no more productive, say the critics. China is about as implacable, North Korea just as deranged, Europe just as feckless. Russia, which Mr Obama visits this week, bullies and bribes its near-abroad with as little finesse as usual. What a surprise: the world is not smiling back.
He is not attacking President Obama’s foreign policy but rather defending it:
In foreign policy, Mr Obama is muddling through. He can do no more. He never exaggerated the transformational power of a handshake. His supporters did, to be sure, and he did not go out of his way to disabuse them. But the oddest thing, after Iran, is where some of those supporters have ended up. They stupidly believed that the president’s face was all it would take to change the world. Suddenly they want him to be less like Barack Obama and more like George W. Bush.
In my experience nearly every president has come into office convinced that the foreign policy mess he inherited is largely the fault of his predecessor and has left office disabused of that notion, largely reaffirming the decisions of his predecessor. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union there have been four different American administrations, two Republican and two Democratic. Each has come into office with the full intention of revitalizing and improving the relationship between Russia and the United States. Three have left office with relations no better than that of his predecessor or possibly even worse. That includes George W. Bush.
What have been constant through the period are Russia’s perceived national interests and the character of Russia’s government. I wish President Obama the very greatest of success in his meetings with President Medvedev. He has his work cut out for him.
In accordance with the status of forces agreement negotiated between the U. S. government and the Iraqi national government last year under Presidents Bush and Maliki, respectively, U. S. forces are no longer to be seen on the streets of Baghdad:
BAGHDAD — Iraq declared a public holiday Tuesday to celebrate the official withdrawal of American troops from Iraqi cities and towns, emptying the streets as many people stayed home because they feared violence.
As official Iraq celebrated, the American military announced the death of four soldiers on Monday from combat operations in Baghdad, a reminder of the continuing hazards for American troops here and the vulnerability of soldiers as they wrap up operations in the field.
In the past few weeks, with the approach of the official date for withdrawal, nationalist sentiments have spread within the Iraqi government and military, with officials all but boasting publicly that Iraq is ready to handle the security situation on its own. The date of June 30 was set in an Iraqi-American security agreement that went into effect on Jan. 1, 2009.
Although the number of daily attacks have been cut in half, security in Mosul is still precarious. Iraqi officials last week agreed to allow several dozen US soldiers to remain at each of five small bases within the city. After June 30, those combat outposts will be called “joint security stations” and the American soldiers will assist their Iraqi counterparts under the new stricter rules.
“The coalition is going to stay in some of the places where we need them – we will call for help,” said General Ghazal.
Additionally, American trainers will continue to be embedded with Iraqi units and I suspect they’ll be spotted in Iraqi cities from time to time.
Although there may be an increase in violence in Iraq as a consequence of the reduced visibility of American forces, I think that this small move in the direction of complete Iraqi sovereignty is wholly salutary and I’d also hope for a substantial reduction in the forces we have in Iraq by the end of the year. I don’t think I have too many illusions about the situation in Iraq. I think the situation will remain dangerous and fractious for the foreseeable future.
I opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and I opposed our withdrawal from Iraq in 2005 or 2006. I think that events have proven me right on both scores. Now I think it’s time for us to start leaving.
When we see the kinds of images that have been coming out of Iran over the past two weeks, we tend to think back to 1989 and Eastern Europe. Then, when people took to the streets and challenged their governments, those seemingly stable regimes proved to be hollow and quickly collapsed. What emerged was liberal democracy. Could Iran yet undergo its own velvet revolution?
It’s possible but unlikely. While the regime’s legitimacy has cracked — a fatal wound in the long run — for now it will probably be able to use its guns and money to consolidate power. And it has plenty of both. Remember, the price of oil was less than $20 a barrel back in 1989. It is $69 now. More important, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has pointed out, 1989 was highly unusual. As a historical precedent, it has not proved a useful guide to other antidictatorial movements.
He continues by analyzing how the forces of democracy, religion, and nationalism shape the events in Iran and concludes:
In this context, President Obama has been right to tread cautiously — for the most part — to extend his moral support to Iranian protesters but not get politically involved. The United States has always underestimated the raw power of nationalism across the world, assuming that people will not be taken in by cheap and transparent appeals against foreign domination. But look at what is happening in Iraq, where Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki boasts that U.S. troop withdrawals are a “a heroic repulsion of the foreign occupiers.” Of course Maliki would not be in office but for those occupying forces, who protect his government to this day. A canny politician, though, he knows what will appeal to the Iraqi people.
Ahmadinejad is also a politician with considerable mass appeal. He knows that accusing the United States and Britain of interference works in some quarters. Our effort should be to make sure that those accusations seem as loony and baseless as possible. Were President Obama to get out in front, vociferously supporting the protests, he would be helping Ahmadinejad’s strategy, not America’s.
I don’t know whether what we’re seeing in Iran is the beginning of a “Velvet Revolution”. I suspect that Mr. Zakaria may be correct although possibly for the wrong reasons.
The dynamics of revolutions (and in this context I’m speaking of the 1979 revolution against the Shah) is that they are unlikely to be replaced by non-revolutionary government until the revolutionaries have lost the spirit to confront the forces that oppose them. This is typically a generational matter. In my view the Soviet Union didn’t collapse because of anything that we did or because Gorbachev was a liberalizer or far-sighted statesman but because he was a bureaucrat, the first Soviet premier who didn’t remember the Revolution.
The current Iranian government has money as a consequence of its oil revenues, it has control of all of the major means of information dissemination, and it has the will to deploy force to put down its opposition. It if doesn’t trust the regular military it has the IRG or hired foreign thugs. As long as all three of those remain the case, I suspect that a gentle revolution will be very difficult for Iran.
Just as the US public initially rallied behind the war President Bush — even to the point of re-electing him — Americans have now thrown their support behind the debt president Obama. The mistakes of the Bush administration are now widely accepted. The mistakes of the Obama administration are still not recognized as such. They are seen as the truth.
Glenn follows the link with a quote from a reader:
“The piece drips with der Spiegel’s typical anti-Americanism, but when your spending alarms even the Europeans, it’s time to reconsider.”
The article is worth reading if only because it illustrates nicely a point I made before the election: Germans will be suspicious of the American president because he’s the American president, not merely because of the policies he’s supported. Any foreseeable American president is bound to make decisions that won’t make Germany happy.
Frankly, I doubt that the Germans are particularly concerned about our spending. Rather, I suspect they’re complaining that we don’t tax ourselves enough.
According to the OECD the tax to GDP ratio in the United States is about 28.3% as of 2007, the most recent year for which they have statistics, while for Germans it’s about 36%. By German standards we’re undertaxed and getting more so rapidly. Our public debt to GDP ratio is rising rapidly, too, from where it is now (which has been roughly the same as Germany or France) into the same territory as Belgium’s or even Japan’s.
Would Germany be happier if we behaved more like Germany? Frankly, I doubt it. If we did we’d be spending less than 2% of our GDP on our military which means that there would be little counterbalance to a resurgent Russia. Further, until very recently Germany has been one of the few countries running a trade surplus with China. Simply stated the Chinese factories producing consumer goods for sale in the United States are built and stocked with German machines. If we behaved like Germany we’d have been running a trade surplus with China which means that the Germans wouldn’t have been able to sell all that heavy machinery to the Chinese.
In my view the bottom line is that very little that we could do would make Germany happy and, consequently, what they think isn’t that interesting to us.
The BBC is reporting that China National Radio has said that the Chinese government will reject a Chinese firm’s acquisition of the Hummer division of General Motors:
A Chinese firm’s bid to buy the gas-guzzling Hummer car brand will be blocked on environmental grounds, according to Chinese state radio.
Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery emerged as the surprise buyer for the brand earlier this year.
But China National Radio said Hummer is at odds with the country’s planning agency’s attempts to decrease pollution from Chinese manufacturers.
But Sichuan Tengzhong disputed the accuracy of the radio report.
“The fact that it is from an article from a state media organisation does not mean it is government policy,” the company said in a statement.
“Some people may have views and speculation, but the Chinese government has a process that we respect.”
The acquisition from General Motors needs Chinese regulatory approval.
CNR is quoted as saying that Sichuan Tengzhong “lacks experience in car production”.
I’ve got to admit that I found this very surprising. My take on the acquisition has been that STHIM was picking up Hummer at fire sale prices in order to acquire the dealer network and gain a foothold in the U. S. market for its own products. The Chinese company is a manufacturer of highway construction equipment and has been getting increasingly into heavy truck production in recent years. I didn’t think it was entirely a coincidence that shortly after the U. S. Congress passed a huge domestic stimulus package which included quite a bit of road and bridge building that a Chinese company that produces road and bridge building equipment would make a move that gives it a position in the American market.
If the story proves true I suspect that it has more to do with internal Chinese politics than it does with the rationality of the acquisition or environmental considerations. And if the deal flops, it wouldn’t be particularly good news for GM which is trying to shed brands and maybe pick up a little cash.
Like many others I’ve been following the events unfolding in Iran with great albeit not obsessive interest. I haven’t been following the tweets for a number of reasons not the least of which is that I can’t distinguish among rumors, reports of actual events, and disinformation. So I’ve been using more conventional news sources and have found the English language the best, not merely because English is the language with which I’m most familiar.
I think The Guardian’s coverage has been particularly good. They’re updating automatically and the updates are coming pretty frequently with lots of good background.
The Times of London has been good, too, although not quite as good as The Guardian.
I haven’t found other U. S. sources particularly useful. CNN has lots of coverage but I don’t find it nearly as useful or insightful as the sources listed above. I haven’t found German, French, or Russian language sites particularly useful.
The American Enterprise Institute has started a site called IranTracker. On the site they’re aggregating “incident statistics and map for protests, arrests, and deaths”. They’re listing both corroborated and uncorroborated reports, and plotting them using Google Maps. The graphic above is a screen capture of their map.
I’m not sure of how much credit to give the site. If there’s any validity to the info they’re presenting, the protests have largely been quelled following a violent crackdown by the Iranian authorities and paramilitaries.
I’d appreciate suggestions of other useful sources in comments, particularly from media outside the Anglosphere.
I was always skeptical of the idea that democracy in Iraq would be so attractive in the Middle East that it would spread virally throughout the region. However, Iraq does serve as a useful model to its neighbor, Iran, in one particular and the editorial board of the Christian Science Monitor is performing good service in reminding us of that:
Ever since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the weakest reed in Iran’s complex system of government has been the claim of a supreme leader with absolute political authority based on his Islamic credentials. It is an idea not accepted by the 90 percent of the world’s Muslims who are Sunni. And it is rejected outside Iran in other Shiite strongholds, such as in Hezbollah-controlled areas of Lebanon and in Iraq.
Known in Arabic as velayat-e motlaqeh-ye faqih (guardian or the jurist), this concocted religious doctrine, enshrined in Iran’s Constitution, was recently rejected by a leading Iranian cleric, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeric, who was once the designated successor to the founder of the Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
[…]
But the debate over a supreme leader may not fade. There are signs in Iran of increasing popularity for Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the leading Shiite figure in Iraq. Since the 2003 US invasion, he has supported a democracy that is run by secular leaders and inclusive of all faiths. (The Shiite spiritual leader in Lebanon, Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, also does not see himself as a political leader.)
An Iranian by birth, Mr. Sistani holds much sway over the clerical establishment in Iran’s most religious city, Qom. And he lives in the Iraqi city of Najaf, the most holy of Shiite sites and a popular pilgrimage for Iranians.
Ali Sistani is deserving of praise as the Monitor reminds us. His example and teaching stand in stark opposition to Khomeinism and as such he presents a rebuke and threat to the Iranian ruling oligarchy.
Many of us have been dissatisfied with the legalistic calibrations of the Obama administration’s response to Iran, which have been disproportionate to the sweeping events there. We’ve been rooting for the politicians in the administration, like Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who have been working for a more sincere and heartfelt response.
But the comments of the first few days are not that important. What’s important is that the Obama administration understands the scope of what is happening. And on the big issue, my understanding is that the administration has it exactly right.
The core lesson of these events is that the Iranian regime is fragile at the core. Like all autocratic regimes, it has become rigid, paranoid, insular, insecure, impulsive, clumsy and illegitimate. The people running the regime know it, which is why the Revolutionary Guard is seeking to consolidate power into a small, rigid, insulated circle. The Iranians on the streets know it. The world knows it.
From now on, the central issue of Iran-Western relations won’t be the nuclear program. The regime is more fragile than the program. The regime is more likely to go away than the program.
He concludes:
Recently, many people thought it was clever to say that elections on their own don’t make democracies. But election campaigns stoke the mind and fraudulent elections outrage the soul. The Iranian elections have stirred a whirlwind that will lead, someday, to the regime’s collapse. Hastening that day is now the central goal.
I’m not as sanguine as Brooks is. While I support the Iranian people in their legitimate aspirations for freedom, it’s not completely clear to me that’s the direction in which a new Iranian revolution founded on Mir Hossein Mousavi would lead. There are revolutions and there are revolutions.
Americans had a very good idea of where their revolution, inspired by men like Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin, would lead 300 years ago. They’d made little secret of their views and their views favored freedom.
Russia, contrariwise, has seen four governments in a century: the Tsar’s, the Provisional Government that followed the February Revolution, Lenin’s as it emerged after the October Revolution of 1917, and the present government. Today’s Russian government may be better than the Tsar’s (the matter might be disputed) but it’s not a century better. But, again, it’s no surprise. Lenin was quite clear in his views and his views were not liberal.
If the Iranian people were surprised by the Khomeinist government that was put in place after the Shah was ousted thirty years ago, it can only be because they hadn’t been paying attention. Ruhollah Khomeini, too, had made his views quite clear, bizarre as they might have been to most Westerners. He was definitely not a liberal.
Mousavi was a close associate of Khomeini’s and he has established a substantial public record over the last thirty years. He is rather clearly not a liberal, either.
We can’t be certain what sort of government might emerge if a new Iranian revolution materializes from the demonstrations that are going on in Tehran right now. While I believe, again, that we should be enthusiastic in our support for freedom for the Iranian people, we need to meld that with caution lest we support what’s just a different group of oppressors.
Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has raised the stakes in the ongoing confrontation between his government and those demonstrating against the results of last week’s election:
TEHRAN — In his first public response to days of protests, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sternly warned opponents Friday to stay off the streets and denied opposition claims that last week’s disputed election was rigged, praising the ballot as an “epic moment that became a historic moment.”
In a somber and lengthy sermon at Friday prayers in Tehran, he called directly for an end to the protests by hundreds of thousands of Iranians demanding a new election.
“Street challenge is not acceptable,” Ayatollah Khamenei said. “This is challenging democracy after the elections.” He said opposition leaders would be “held responsible for chaos” if they did not end the protests.
His remarks seemed to deepen the confrontation between Iran’s rulers and supporters of the main opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, who have accused the authorities of rigging the vote.
Ayatollah Khamenei urged dissenters to pursue their complaints about the June 12 election only through legal channels, insisting that the turnout — officially put at 85 percent — showed the ballot to be a reflection of the national will.
Speaking in front of an audience of thousands that included President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he endorsed the president’s policies and insisted that the margin of victory — 11 million votes — accorded to Mr. Ahmadinejad in the official tally was so big that it could not have been falsified. “How can 11 million votes be replaced or changed?” he said.
He went on: “The Islamic republic state would not cheat and would not betray the vote of the people.”
That certainly looks to me as though it’s setting the stage for an increasingly violent response to the demonstrators on the part of the Iranian authorities.
He also singled out the United States and the United Kingdom for criticism, blaming the two countries for inciting Iranians against their government.
Now it may simply be a case of who swerves first. The demonstrators may give up; the government may give up; some formula may be found for bringing Mousavi back into the fold; or the government forces may forcefully end the demonstrations.
The United States is a very large and diverse country, its people have many differing views as you’d expect in such a country, and, not particularly surprisingly, some of those views are in diametric opposition. That’s particularly apparent in Americans’ views of how we should interact with Iran.
Isolationism remains a strong strain of thought in the United States and many if not most Americans are largely uninterested in what goes on in the next county let alone halfway across the world as long as it doesn’t affect their daily lives. These Americans would just as soon ignore the Iranian election as anything else. Another strain of isolationism sees dealing with Iran as the responsibility of international institutions: the United Nations, NATO, the IAEA, anybody as long as it doesn’t involve us. Make no mistake “let George do it” is as isolationistic as simply wishing it wouldn’t bother us.
For some Americans, pessimistic realists, the only way to deal with Iran is military force. So far those who favor attacking or invading Iran haven’t come up with an explanation of how they’ll achieve their objectives with anything short of an exterminatory strike or why such a course would be morally justifiable, what forces they’d use for an invasion of Iran, or that there’s political support for such a course of action.
In the blogosphere lately optimistic idealists have been stridently vocal in their support for the Iranian people’s aspirations for freedom. That presupposes that those in Iran who want a freer, more democratic Iran are representative of Iranians, generally, that if a fair reckoning of the vote had been made it would have resulted in a different outcome, that any likely outcome of the processes that are unfolding in Iran would result in a freer, more democratic Iran, and that how we or our government react can have any positive influence on how events develop in Iran.
President Obama has heretofore taken the position that we should negotiate with whomever is elected to the presidency in Iran and has responded warily to the demonstrators and whatever opposition movement they represent.
This morning Nader Mousavizadeh, consulting senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, makes an interesting suggestion in an op-ed in the Washington Post, that we should engage Iran and ignore Ahmadinejad:
First, the administration should provide unequivocal recognition of Iran’s popular movement for greater freedoms and openness, and condemn the government’s crackdown. Whether an “Obama effect” has been at work in the streets of Tehran the past few days is not important; what matters is that after 30 years, the tired chant of “Death to America” has been replaced by “Death to the dictator.” A change is echoing down the capital’s boulevards that this U.S. president cannot fail to honor.
Second, the administration should interpret Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s sanction of Ahmadinejad’s “victory” as confirmation — if any was needed — that the supreme leader is the power that matters in Iran, and, as such, is the person with whom a strategic dialogue should be established. Taking Ahmadinejad’s bait for another four years would be both counter-productive and unnecessary. Already, the Obama administration has explored ways to establish a line of communication with Khamenei. Through trusted intermediaries and imaginative diplomacy, opportunities for a direct dialogue with the supreme leader will present themselves. They must be seized.
The key elements of this negotiation are well known: persuading Iran not to weaponize its nuclear program and to urge its allies in Hamas and Hezbollah to pursue their aims through political and not military means. In return, Iran could look forward to acceptance of a legitimate role for itself in regional security and, over time, reintegration into the international community. It is as clear now as it was before last week’s voting that such a strategic dialogue, however challenging, is better served by starting with areas of common interest — such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq — as opposed to the nuclear dispute. If Iran’s true nuclear capabilities remain shrouded in mystery today, its people’s intentions regarding a future of greater freedoms and peaceful engagement with the world have never been clearer.
That’s a program that makes sense to me. To his “key elements” I’d add ensuring that Iran conforms fully to its obligations under the NPT and relevant UN resolutions on North Korea.
That might be interpreted as placing President Obama in something of a predicament but I don’t think that’s true. Pursuing different policies when circumstances change, as they clearly have been revealed to have done in Iran, isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of sanity.
As it turns out there was an independent nationwide poll taken in Iran three weeks before the election and the results of the poll were consistent with the election results. In their op-ed in the Washington Post Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty, whose organizations produced the poll, conclude:
Allegations of fraud and electoral manipulation will serve to further isolate Iran and are likely to increase its belligerence and intransigence against the outside world. Before other countries, including the United States, jump to the conclusion that the Iranian presidential elections were fraudulent, with the grave consequences such charges could bring, they should consider all independent information. The fact may simply be that the reelection of President Ahmadinejad is what the Iranian people wanted.
Ballen and Doherty deal with the obvious criticism that respondents were only giving safe answers:
Some might argue that the professed support for Ahmadinejad we found simply reflected fearful respondents’ reluctance to provide honest answers to pollsters. Yet the integrity of our results is confirmed by the politically risky responses Iranians were willing to give to a host of questions. For instance, nearly four in five Iranians — including most Ahmadinejad supporters — said they wanted to change the political system to give them the right to elect Iran’s supreme leader, who is not currently subject to popular vote. Similarly, Iranians chose free elections and a free press as their most important priorities for their government, virtually tied with improving the national economy. These were hardly “politically correct” responses to voice publicly in a largely authoritarian society.
At this point this is my understanding of the facts as we know them. According to the official results, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won by a substantial margin. Those results are consistent with the findings of an independent nationwide poll taken three weeks before the election. Preliminary statistical analyses of the results do not satisfy a prima facie case for fraud as the determining factor in the elections. The structure of the Iranian political system is such that it is incapable of producing a legitimate outcome by our standards.
There have been rallies and demonstrations both opposed to the election results and in support of them over the weekend in Iran. The government has put down opposition demonstrations, frequently violently.
There are reports of detentions of opposition candidates, mass arrests, killings of opposition demonstrators, and the use of Arabic-speaking bullyboys by the government in putting down the demonstration. All of these are consistent with past incidents that challenged the ruling oligarchy but to the best of my knowledge they remain unconfirmed.
Some have questioned the results of the elections based on inferences about how people in specific regions might have voted. Those are certainly suggestive of some degree of vote fraud and I don’t doubt that some degree of vote fraud was involved in boosting totals for the official winner. I don’t honestly know whether that jiggering resulted in a change in the outcome or just a higher apparent total for the incumbent. Considering the known facts I suspect more the latter.
Rather than name calling or impugning the intelligence or motives of those who have arrived at evaluations different from our own, it might be more productive to discuss what might have happened in the Iranian election, relating our conclusions to the facts as we know them and clearly distinguishing among facts, suppositions, inferences, and preferences. Further, what do the facts on the ground portend for the relationship between our two countries?
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mahmud Ahmadinedschad hat einen überwältigenden Wahlsieg errungen. Sind Sie überrascht?
Leverett: Nein. Ich wäre überrascht gewesen, wenn er verloren hätte. Die westlichen Medien haben die Begeisterung für seinen wichtigsten Herausforderer Hossein Mussawi grob überschätzt. Sie haben fast gar nicht mitbekommen, wie eindeutig Ahmadinedschad etwa als Sieger der TV-Debatte im Wahlkampf angesehen wurde. Bei amerikanischen und westlichen Politikern gab es viel Wunschdenken - und das hatte leider auch einen starken Einfluss auf die Medienberichterstattung.
English:
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has won an overwhelming electoral victory. Are you surprised?
Leverett: No. I would have been surprised if he had lost. The Western media overstated the surge of his main challenger Hossein Mousavi over the last couple of weeks. They missed almost entirely how Ahmadinejad was perceived to have been the victor in the TV debate, for instance. There was an extraordinary amount of wishful thinking among American and Western policymakers and that has had a marked impact on the media coverage.
For German speakers the rest of the interview is very interesting. Leverett goes on to emphasize that the Western media sold us all a bill of goods, that American politicians mistakenly assume that the Iranian political system works the way ours does, some observations about President Obama’s Cairo speech, etc.
Please note that Leverett’s comments are much in the same vein as were mine yesterday.
Update
Andrew Sullivan needs to read a little more closely. I’m not defending the Iranian regime and in virtually every post I’ve written on this subject I’ve said as clear as clear can be that I don’t think the Iranian system is capable of producing a legitimate result.
This morning in the Washington Post Stephen Stromberg echoes a point I made over at my place yesterday about President Obama’s flat joke about the purchase of Alaska, made during his Moscow visit:
