Trita Parsi and Reza Marashi write: With the elections behind him, President Obama must quickly shift his focus to key foreign policy challenges that were put on pause due to election season paralysis. On Iran, the President should hit the ground running.

Obama has a unique opportunity to make headway on the diplomatic front between November 8 and March 20, when the Iranian New Year hits. After that, Iran enters its own election season and the paralysis that comes with it. This may be his last best shot to resolve the U.S.-Iran conflict peacefully.

While both sides believe they are in a position of strength, reality is that neither Washington nor Tehran holds a trump card. U.S.-led sanctions cannot force capitulation or regime change in Iran (See: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq), and America will not succumb to an Iranian nuclear fait accompli.

The only real solution is a negotiated one — but how can Obama make diplomacy succeed? Here are four recommendations. [Continue reading…]

Yossi Melman writes: Sometime in 2010, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak met with their top five cabinet ministers for a routine yet secret meeting to discuss pressing security and foreign-policy issues. The group, which has no legal status and does not have the authority to make decisions,​ is known as the “Secret Seven,” inspired by the “Secret Seven” series of adventure novels for children by the British author Enid Blyton.

Also present at that meeting (the date of which Israeli censors do not allow to be specified) were Israel’s security chiefs, including then-Mossad director Meir Dagan, Chief of the General Staff Major-General Gabi Ashkenazi and a few others.

Minutes before that meeting ended, Netanyahu turned to the chief of staff, General Ashkenazi, and told him to “set the systems for P-plus,” a term meaning to swiftly increase the preparedness of the military in case of a war with Iran. The measures to be taken in such a situation could include moving military units, strengthening intelligence capabilities and preparing the home front for a war.

The 2010 incident was reported earlier this week in the opening of a new season of “Uvda” (“fact” in Hebrew), a flagship program of Channel 2, Israel’s largest commercial and privately owned TV station.

The story hit Israeli headlines and reverberated in major Middle Eastern and Western media outlets. The prime minister’s words two years ago are now interpreted by the Israeli and international media as an order for the military to begin the countdown to an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

But the truth of what happened, which went farther than that particular meeting involving Netanyahu, Barak and their top military and security echelon, is much more complex and intriguing than the way it was broadcast and understood.

The truth is that Netanyahu and Barak did not order the military to plan a direct, all-out attack on Iran. Their true intention was to trigger a chain of events which would create tension and provoke Iran, and eventually could have led to a war that might drag in the United States. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: From a suspected Israeli airstrike in Sudan to cyber warfare in the Gulf and a drone shot down over Israel, the largely hidden war between Iran and its foes seems heating up and spreading.

Despite months of speculation, most experts and governments believe the risk of a direct Israeli strike on Tehran’s nuclear program stirring regional conflict has eased, at least for now. But all sides, it seems, are finding other ways to fight.

For the US and European powers , the main focus remains on oil export sanctions that are inflicting ever more damage on Iran’s economy.

But the Obama administration and Israel have also ploughed resources into covert operations – a campaign that now appears to have prompted an increasingly sophisticated Iranian reaction.

With Iranian hackers suspected of severely damaging Saudi oil facility computers and a suspected Hezbollah drone shot down over Israel, tactics and tools once seen as the sole purview of the United States are now clearly being used on both sides.

The mounting body count in Syria, some believe, is also in part a consequence of the proxy war being waged there.

“In many ways, it’s reminiscent of the Cold War, particularly the proxy conflicts,” says Hayat Alvi, lecturer in Middle Eastern politics at the US Naval War College. “But unlike in the Cold War, there are now a much larger number of asymmetrical warfare techniques. Most of this is happening behind the scenes, but in the modern world we are finding it difficult to keep them secret for that long.”

The New York Times reports: An Israeli news channel reported Sunday night that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak asked the Israeli military in 2010 to prepare for an imminent attack on the Iranian nuclear program, but that their efforts were blocked by concerns over whether the military could do so and whether the men had the authority to give such an order.

The report, by the respected investigative journalist Ilana Dayan, came in the form of a promotional preview for an hourlong documentary about Israel’s decision-making process regarding Iran, which is scheduled to be broadcast Monday night. Ms. Dayan said on the channel’s evening newscast on Sunday that Mr. Netanyahu, in a meeting with a small circle of top ministers, turned to Gabi Ashkenazi, the head of the Israeli Defense Forces at the time, and told him to “set the systems for P-plus,” a term meaning that an operation would start soon.

Mr. Ashkenazi and Meir Dagan, who was the head of the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, at the time, would later say that this was an attempt at “stealing a war,” Ms. Dayan reported, because in their view such an order required a decision of the full cabinet, not the smaller group in the meeting, who were then known as the forum of seven.

Both Mr. Ashkenazi, who is now retired, and Mr. Dagan, who stepped down after the meeting, have become vocal critics of plans for a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran, and of Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Barak’s aggressive approach.

Ms. Dayan said in the preview report on Sunday that the issue deepened a divide in Israel’s top echelon.

Mr. Ashkenazi was quoted saying of the P-plus order: “This is not something you do unless you are certain you want to execute at the end. This accordion will make music if you keep playing it.” But Mr. Barak told Ms. Dayan that “it is not true that creating a situation where the I.D.F. and the country’s operational systems are, for a few hours or for a few days, on alert to carry out certain operations means the state of Israel is compelled to act.”

“Eventually, at the moment of truth, the answer that was given was that, in fact, the ability did not exist,” Mr. Barak said in the clip that was shown on Sunday. [Continue reading…]

David Patrikarakos describes witnessing a recently conducted war game “designed to explore the likely outcome of an Israeli pre-emptive attack on Iran.” All participants were Israelis and their conclusion was that Israel would accomplish its goal — almost total destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities — and that the global response would effectively focus on preventing military escalation. Simply put, Israel would win and Iran would lose.

I had seen Israel’s perspective on a possible attack and now wanted an Iranian view, so I caught a flight to Istanbul to put the game’s results to Hossein Mousavian, a former member of Iran’s nuclear negotiating team. He believed the game was deeply flawed.

Dismissing the limited nature of Iran’s response, Mousavian argued that in reality Iran would respond ‘by all means’, employing the total power of its armed forces to draw Israel into a long-term war. Perhaps, more importantly, Mousavian argued that Iran would see the US as complicit.

Iranians, he said, are convinced that Israel is too small to attack Iran unilaterally Iran. “They see Israeli as just a baby,” he said. “One that would never act without US assistance.”

The attack would also have huge regional consequences, he continued. Most obviously, Iran would use its status as the symbol of resistance against Israel in the Middle East to stoke the high levels of anti-Americanism that already exist there. Even groups like Al Qaeda, he argued, who are Iran’s enemies, would use “inflamed Muslim sentiment to launch attacks at American citizens across the world and on US soldiers on the many American bases in the region.”

At the end of our interview, he leaned forward, took my arm and looked me right in the eyes. He recalled the Israeli strikes on an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 and a Syrian reactor in 2007.

“This is the big mistake that people make,” he told me. “To think if Israel attacks Iran, like it attacked Iraq and Syria, the Iranians would not retaliate.

“The nation is one hundred percent different. The whole region would be engulfed.”

Rajan Menon writes: The on-again, off-again musings about a deal between Washington and Tehran are on again. A deal might reconcile the most important demands of each side: Iran’s insistence that it has a legal right to an independent fuel cycle for what it insists is a nonmilitary nuclear program and the declaration of the United States that Iran must not be permitted to build nuclear weapons. The latest round of speculation follows recent press reports that the two parties have agreed to hold bilateral negotiations following the U.S. presidential elections.

Yet soon after the news broke, both sides weighed in with their own spin. The White House, while reiterating that it has always been open to direct talks, insisted that there has been no formal agreement to hold them. Was this clarification meant to ensure that the American pubic received an accurate account? Was the denial of a formal agreement, preceded as it was by what appears to have been a leak about possible talks between Tehran and Washington, meant to prevent rising expectations that could then be dashed, making the Obama administration look feckless? Or was it, given that Election Day is nigh, designed to show that the administration is making progress on a diplomatic solution but to do in a way that would provide parry charges by Mitt Romney that Obama is rushing toward talks that would allow Iran time to build nuclear arms? There is no clear answer.

Iran quickly dismissed the reports about impending one-on-one talks. Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi insisted that Iran was engaged in negotiations with the five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany, the so-called P5+1 but that it was not conducting talks with the United States. This was a tad ambiguous: given his choice of words, Salehi did not deny that Iran had broached the idea of talks or that it had responded positively after the United States had done so.

Is Iran trying to prove that the economic sanctions and the resulting tumble in the rial’s value have not forced it to change course and deal directly with the United States in hopes of relief? Is Salehi’s denial just a tactic designed to allow Tehran to negotiate with Washington eventually but without seeming desperate in the run-up to talks? Is it meant to calm Iranian hard-liners, ever vigilant for indications that the regime is yielding to pressure? Is it a sign that, despite the power attributed to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, there is no consensus within Iran’s leadership about how to cope with the pressures created by the sanctions? (The rial has lost some 40 percent of its value, Iran has lost half the revenue it gets from oil sale and ordinary Iranians are facing rising prices for basic goods.) Again, this remains unclear. [Continue reading…]

(Note – The web servers of The National Interest got knocked out by Hurricane Sandy — while they are being fixed TNI is using a WordPress backup site.)

Haaretz reports: An Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities won’t destabilize the Middle East, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview to a French magazine on Tuesday, adding, moreover, that such a move would only serve to restore security in the region.

“Five minutes after [an attack], contrary to what the skeptics say, I think a feeling of relief will spread across the region,” Netanyahu told Paris Match, adding: “Iran isn’t popular in the Arab world, far from it. Some governments in the region, as well as their citizens, have understood that a nuclear-armed Iran would be dangerous for them, not just for Israel.”

The premier’s interview, one to which he gave much importance, was geared at influencing public opinion in France ahead of his visit to the country on Wednesday.

Laura Rozen writes: In a sign of Iranian interest in streamlining back channel contacts and reducing mixed messages ahead of anticipated, resumed nuclear negotiations next month, Iran was said to appoint a central point of contact for approaches from outside-government Americans, two Iran nuclear experts told Al-Monitor this week.

Mostafa Dolatyar, a career Iranian diplomat who heads the Iranian think tank, the Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS), which has close ties to Iran’s foreign ministry, was tapped by Iran’s leadership to coordinate contacts with American outside-government policy experts, including those with former senior US officials involved unofficially in relaying ideas for shaping a possible nuclear compromise, the analysts told Al-Monitor in interviews this week. The IPIS channel is for coordinating non-official US contacts, which in the absence of formal diplomatic ties, have formed an important, if not unproblematic, part of Iran’s diplomatic scouting and Washington’s and Tehran’s imperfect efforts to understand and influence each others’ policy positions.

The appointment is the result of a desire “on the Iranian side for a more structured approach to dealing with America,” Mark Fitzpatrick, an Iran nuclear expert at the Institute for International and Strategic Studies (IISS) in London, told Al-Monitor in an interview Monday, adding that he now doubts that there are agreed plans for direct US-Iran talks after the elections.

“I was told … that Iran had appointed one person to be the channel for all approaches from the Americans,” specifically for former officials and non-governmental experts, Fitzpatrick continued. “And Iran wants to structure that so that Iran is speaking from one voice.” [Continue reading…]

Iran’s Mehr news agency reports: Member of Parliament Esmail Kosari announced on Sunday that Iran has photos of restricted areas in Israel, which were transmitted by a drone launched into Israeli airspace earlier this month.

On October 6, Israel shot down an Iranian-made drone operated by Hezbollah that had penetrated hundreds of kilometers into Israeli airspace and gotten very close to the Dimona nuclear plant without being detected by advanced Israeli and U.S. radar systems.

The drone transmitted photos of Israel’s “sensitive bases” said Kosari, who is a member of the Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Committee.

“These aircraft transmit their photos… and now we have photos of restricted areas,” he added.

He also stated that Hezbollah possesses more advanced aircraft, adding, “That is why we say that if Israel intends to take the smallest action against us, we will respond to the regime within their territorial boundaries.”

He went on to say that Iran has the expertise to design and manufacture unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can carry weapons.

On Sunday, Iranian Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi said Iran has manufactured UAVs that are far more advanced than the drone which the Hezbollah resistance movement recently sent into Israel.

In April, Iran announced it had started to back-engineer the RQ-170 Sentinel, a U.S. surveillance drone that was brought down by the armed forces of the Islamic Republic last year.

Stephen Walt writes: What if our current policy towards Iran actually works, and Tehran gives in to every one of our demands? You’d think that would be a crowning diplomatic success, wouldn’t you? Think again. In fact, a one-sided triumph over Iran might solve little, because a deal dictated by Washington probably wouldn’t last.

Given where U.S. policy is today, there are two paths to a resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue. Both are inherently coercive. The first path is the one we are currently on: The United States and its allies keep ratcheting up economic sanctions until the Iranian economy collapses, accompanied by a fair amount of human suffering and untold deaths due to economic hardship. At that point, the clerical regime either says “uncle” or gets overthrown. In either case, whoever is in charge in Iran subsequently agrees to abandon all nuclear enrichment, get rid of all their current stockpile of enriched uranium, and dismantle all their centrifuges, with compliance to be verified by the United States and the IAEA.

In this scenario, a tightening vise of economic pressure will convince Iran to do what the late Muammar Qaddafi did in Libya in 2003 and abandon any interest in a nuclear capability. Unfortunately for us, Tehran has probably noticed what happened to him, which makes it less likely that they’d ever surrender in quite the same way.

The second path is the military option: The United States attacks Iran and destroys as much of its nuclear infrastructure as it can find. We also manage to convince Iran that we’ll keep coming back to repeat the job if they try to rebuild. In response, the clerical regime ignores the popular outrage that our attack would provoke and agrees to remain a non-nuclear power in perpetuity.

Let’s ignore for the moment the fact that U.S. intelligence services still believe that Iran is not actively seeking nuclear weapons at all, a view that our allies in Great Britain apparently share. Let’s also leave aside the question of whether either of these two paths is likely to succeed. Instead, let’s suppose one of them did, and Iran capitulated to our current demands. Would that be a good thing? I’m not so sure. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: The UK government has reiterated that it does not believe military action against Iran would be appropriate at the moment, following the disclosure that Britain has rebuffed US requests to use UK military bases to support the buildup of forces in the Gulf.

Downing Street said: “We are working closely with the US with regard to UK bases” but “the government does not think military action is the right course at this point of time”.

David Cameron made a lengthy speech last week urging Israel to show restraint, and pointing to the way in which sanctions are having an impact on the Iranian economy.

The Guardian has been told that US diplomats have also lobbied for the use of British bases in Cyprus, and for permission to fly from US bases on Ascension Island in the Atlantic and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, both of which are British territories.

The US approaches are part of contingency planning over the nuclear standoff with Tehran, but British ministers have so far reacted coolly. On Friday, Downing Street said such contingency planning was something that was done as a matter of routine.

They have pointed US officials to legal advice drafted by the attorney general’s office and which has been circulated to Downing Street, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence.

It states that providing assistance to forces that could be involved in a pre-emptive strike would be a clear breach of international law on the basis that Iran, which has consistently denied it has plans to develop a nuclear weapon, does not currently represent “a clear and present threat”. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: Britain has rebuffed US pleas to use military bases in the UK to support the build-up of forces in the Gulf, citing secret legal advice which states that any pre-emptive strike on Iran could be in breach of international law.

The Guardian has been told that US diplomats have also lobbied for the use of British bases in Cyprus, and for permission to fly from US bases on Ascension Island in the Atlantic and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, both of which are British territories.

The US approaches are part of contingency planning over the nuclear standoff with Tehran, but British ministers have so far reacted coolly. They have pointed US officials to legal advice drafted by the attorney general’s office which has been circulated to Downing Street, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence.

This makes clear that Iran, which has consistently denied it has plans to develop a nuclear weapon, does not currently represent “a clear and present threat”. Providing assistance to forces that could be involved in a pre-emptive strike would be a clear breach of international law, it states.

“The UK would be in breach of international law if it facilitated what amounted to a pre-emptive strike on Iran,” said a senior Whitehall source. “It is explicit. The government has been using this to push back against the Americans.”

Robert Wright writes: Sunday’s New York Times carried a story that will presumably come up in Monday’s foreign policy debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney: The U.S. and Iran have reportedly agreed “in principle” to have direct bilateral negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, negotiations that could start after the election if Obama wins it.

If true, this is good news. Iran has long resisted direct talks with the U.S., and lots of people think this format would be more productive than the current cumbersome format known as “P5+1” (the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany on one side of the table, Iran on the other). One reason Iran may have been reluctant to depart from the P5+1 format is that it includes Russia and China, which are relatively sympathetic to Tehran. Maybe, now that sanctions are starting to do serious damage to its economy, Iran figures it can’t afford to hold out for the optimal deal and needs to cut to the chase. In any event, the new Iranian position reported by the Times is auspicious.

So, if we lived in a rational world, the New York Times story would be hailed as validation of Obama’s foreign policy — there might even be suspicions that the Obama administration leaked the news to glorify itself!

But we don’t live in a rational world. We live in a world where (on much of the right, at least) negotiation is equated with capitulation. And that explains why there’s been much speculation that the Times story was leaked by people who oppose these negotiations and/or people who want to help Mitt Romney. The thinking goes like this: In Monday’s debate, Romney can depict this as Obama’s secret plan to implement Munich-style appeasement after re-election, cutting some shady deal that would be bad for the U.S. and for its ally Israel. [Continue reading…]

Laura Rozen writes: Efraim Halevy served as chief of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, under three Israeli prime ministers and led the secret negotiations with Jordan’s King Hussein that made way for Israel’s historic 1994 peace treaty with that country. Other assignments in a four-decade government career include serving as Mossad station chief in Washington in the 1970s under then-Israeli ambassador to the United States Yitzhak Rabin, for whom, as prime minister, Halevy served as Mossad chief until Rabin’s 1995 assassination. Halevy also served as Israeli national security advisor and Israeli ambassador to the European Union in the late 1990s.

Born in Britain — Halevy moved to Israel in 1948 at the age of 14 — and wearing a trench coat with a newspaper tucked under his arm on a drizzly morning in Washington on Friday, Oct. 19, Halevy, 78, evoked George Smiley, the protagonist in the John Le Carre British spy novels, who is burdened by the knowledge of state secrets too sensitive and ugly to share. But it is Halevy’s fierce advocacy for dialogue with mortal enemies such as Iran and Hamas, combined with a biography laden with hard political experience, that makes him so iconoclastic, especially in the current Israeli political and national security landscape.

“I was 40 years in the business of dealing with adversaries — some of them very bitter ones, some we fought successive wars with,” Halevy said in an interview with Al-Monitor. “Over the years … I realized that, in order to be effective with one’s enemies, you have to have two essential capabilities: To overcome them by force if necessary … And do everything you can to get into their minds and try to understand how they see things … and where if at all there is room for common ground of one kind or another.”

“I think that what we have had over the years is an abundance of one side, and a dearth of the other,” Halevy said.

Halevy most especially emphasized the need for dialogue with Iran, and to try to understand the Iranians — a position rarely heard from top Israeli officials, even those who have expressed opposition to unilateral Israeli military action on Iran.

“The Iranians, in their heart of hearts, would like to get out of their conundrum,” Halevy told Al-Monitor. “The sanctions have been very effective. They are beginning to really hurt.” [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: The question of whether the United States should seek to engage Iran in one-on-one talks on its nuclear program joined the likely topics for Monday’s final presidential debate as supporters of President Obama and Mitt Romney jousted on Sunday over the issue.

The prospect of such talks was raised in an article published over the weekend by The New York Times that said Iran and the United States had agreed in principle to direct talks after the presidential election.

On Saturday, the White House denied that a final agreement on direct talks had been reached, while saying that it remained open to such contacts. On Sunday, the Iranian Foreign Ministry dismissed the report.

But if the report proved to be true, said a supporter of Mr. Romney, the Republican candidate, Iran’s motives should be seriously questioned.

“I hope we don’t take the bait,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I think this is a ploy by the Iranians” to buy time for their nuclear program and divide the international coalition, he said.

A supporter of Mr. Obama, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said on the same program that the tough international sanctions the president helped marshal against Iran might be bearing fruit exactly as hoped, forcing Iran to blink.

“This month of October, the currency in Iran has declined 40 percent in value,” said Mr. Durbin, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. “There is unrest in the streets of Tehran, and the leaders in Iran are feeling it. That’s exactly what we wanted the sanctions program to do.”

The Times, citing unnamed senior Obama administration officials, reported over the weekend that after secret exchanges, American and Iranian officials had agreed in principle to hold one-on-one negotiations between the nations, which have not had official diplomatic relations since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, denied on Sunday that any direct talks had been scheduled. “We do not have anything such as talks with the United States,” he told the semiofficial Fars news agency. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: The Obama administration has moved quickly to water down a report that the US and Iran have agreed in principle to meet one-on-one for negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme.

The New York Times said secret talks between officials that began early in Barack Obama’s term as president had delivered the provisional agreement. Iran had insisted the talks wait until after the November presidential election, the New York Times said, attributing the information to a senior official in the Obama administration.

However the National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said in response that the United States would continue to work with fellow permanent members of the UN security council and Germany.

“It’s not true that the United States and Iran have agreed to one-on-one talks or any meeting after the American elections,” the statement said.

“We continue to work with the P5+1 [five permanent members of the UN security council plus Germany] on a diplomatic solution and have said from the outset that we would be prepared to meet bilaterally.”

Vietor said on Saturday that Obama had made clear that he would do whatever was necessary to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Vietor said Iran must meet its obligations or it would “continue to face crippling sanctions and increased pressure”.

This sounds like a non-denial denial — and also suggests that the New York Times has been used (willingly) to tee-up a question that Obama wants the next debate to focus on: the candidates’ willingness to negotiate with Iran.

The assumption, reasonably, is presumably that Romney cannot persuasively argue that negotiation is a bad thing, nor that willingness to negotiate is in and of itself a sign of weakness. Yet, in expressing his reservations about negotiating he will also inevitably present himself as a handicapped negotiator and thus make Obama look like the more viable deal maker.

The New York Times reports: The United States and Iran have agreed for the first time to one-on-one negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, according to Obama administration officials, setting the stage for what could be a last-ditch diplomatic effort to avert a military strike on Iran.

Iranian officials have insisted that the talks wait until after the presidential election, a senior administration official said, telling their American counterparts that they want to know with whom they would be negotiating.

News of the agreement — a result of intense, secret exchanges between American and Iranian officials that date almost to the beginning of President Obama’s term — comes at a critical moment in the presidential contest, just two weeks before Election Day and the weekend before the final debate, which is to focus on national security and foreign policy.

It has the potential to help Mr. Obama make the case that he is nearing a diplomatic breakthrough in the decade-long effort by the world’s major powers to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, but it could pose a risk if Iran is seen as using the prospect of the direct talks to buy time.

It is also far from clear that Mr. Obama’s opponent, Mitt Romney, would go through with the negotiation should he win election. Mr. Romney has repeatedly criticized the president as showing weakness on Iran and failing to stand firmly with Israel against the Iranian nuclear threat. [Continue reading…]

This puts Romney in an interesting and awkward position.

He’ll find it hard to say that he refuses to enter into such negotiations. “I promise that I won’t talk to the Iranians,” just won’t sound like a vote winner from a guy who currently wants to paint himself as Mr Moderation.

But neither does he want to cast himself as an echo of Obama 2008 — willing to talk to America’s enemies.

So how’s he going to fashion some sort of credible middle ground?

To talk, or not to talk. That is the question.

Rolf Ekéus and Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer write: The Iraq War might seem a thing of the past. But nearly ten years after combat began, the United States and its allies are using policies to address the Iranian nuclear challenge that are eerily similar to those it pursued in the run-up to Operation Enduring Freedom. Just as they did with Saddam Hussein, concerned governments have implemented economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and low-level violence to weaken the Iranian regime and prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons, with the long-term objective of regime change. In Iraq, and seemingly now in Iran, diplomacy and inspections became a means to an end: building up a casus belli. The strategy failed miserably in Iraq a decade ago. It probably will in Iran, too.

This is not to suggest that Iran poses no threat. Tehran has reached the threshold of having a nuclear weapons capability. In August, an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report stated that the country has 2,100 centrifuges in an underground site and has intensified production of nuclear fuel. To curb the Iranian nuclear program, concerned states have applied increasingly severe economic sanctions on the Iranian central bank and its crude oil sector, carried out cyber attacks on Iranian centrifuges, and attempted targeted assassinations of Iranian scientists and engineers. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem and Washington, decision-makers appear to be aligning their time frames for a preventive attack [http://nyti.ms/QphdvD]. At the United Nations in early October, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued for instituting a redline on Iran’s nuclear proliferation: Should Iran enrich uranium beyond a certain point, he urged, the world would agree to attack. European diplomats characterized his speech as reminiscent of former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s to the United Nations in 2003, albeit with lower-quality graphics.

But calling for war while intensifying pressure on Iran, without also clearly defining steps Tehran could take to defuse the tension, removes any incentives for Iran to change its behavior. In the short term, the hostility of Western nations is likely to make it more difficult for Iranian moderates to rein in the nuclear program. And in the longer term, Tehran will increasingly question whether Iran ought to remain within the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in the face of economic sanctions, violence, and isolation. Without eyes on the ground, moreover, it will grow ever more difficult to assess Tehran’s actual progress toward the nuclear weapons threshold. The world could miss the emergence of an Iranian breakout capability, or else blunder into another unjustified war. [Continue reading…]