Tony Karon writes: Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu amplified his skepticism of President Obama’s Iran strategy on Wednesday, when he used a Holocaust remembrance speech to warn that Iran was building nuclear weapons in order to destroy Israel. “The Iranian regime is acting openly and decisively toward our destruction, and it is acting feverishly to develop a nuclear weapon to achieve this goal,” Netanyahu said, two days after accusing the Administration and its partners of giving Iran a “freebie” in last weekend’s nuclear talks in Istanbul. The combination of those statements creates an impression that the Israelis see the current diplomacy with Iran as prevarication in the face of a mortal threat to Israel — a message calculated to raise the domestic political heat on President Obama.

Of course, the U.S. and Israeli intelligence assessment is that Iran is not in fact currently embarked on a feverish dash to build nuclear weapons; it has not yet taken the strategic decision to build such weapons even as it steadily accumulates the capability to do so. And even Netanyahu’s Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, has suggested that a nuclear-armed Iran would be unlikely to launch a nuclear attack on Israel, given Israel’s own capability to “lay waste” to Iran. Administration officials believe that because Iran has not yet opted to build nuclear weapons and the pressure of steadily escalating sanctions has made Tehran more amenable to compromise, it remains possible to seek a deal to limit Iran’s nuclear work — and that if it could be achieved, such a solution represents the best and most durable solution. Still, it should come as no surprise that Israel’s leaders are agitated and openly skeptical over the U.S. entering a new process of diplomatic engagement on Iran’s nuclear program. They know that even the best-case diplomatic outcome would fall short of Israel’s demands but might do enough to de-escalate the conflict and push the issue off the international community’s crisis agenda.

The principles guiding the ongoing talks between negotiators from Iran and the P5+1 group, as laid out by chief Western negotiator and EU Foreign Policy chief Catherine Ashton on Saturday, are compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a sustained process of step-by-step concrete actions undertaken on a basis of reciprocity. That framework alone is cause for disquiet in Israel, which is not a signatory to the NPT and which insists that Iran cannot be allowed to maintain any uranium-enrichment capability. Although the NPT obliges Iran to account for all its nuclear work to the satisfaction of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — which Iran has yet to do — it also guarantees Iran’s right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. A diplomatic solution based on the NPT, therefore, would be one that strengthens the safeguards against Iran using its nuclear capability to build weapons but would not dismantle and remove Iran’s enrichment capability as Israel — as well as France and more hawkish elements in Washington — has demanded. The Obama Administration’s position on the issue has been ambiguous, having initially inherited the Bush Administration’s zero-enrichment stance but more recently spoken of Iran’s having the right to a peaceful nuclear program in line with the NPT.

Setting aside the comic book narrative that portrays suicidal “mad mullahs” plotting to commit a second Holocaust, it is widely assumed that if Iran actually succeeded in becoming a nuclear-armed state, it’s nuclear weapons would be a strategic asset. The thinking goes that nuclear strength offers a layer of protection that will deter military adventurism among ones adversaries. But could Iran be confident that calculus would apply to Israel?

Fred Kaplan describes the reasons why deterrence is weaker if nuclear adversaries are much closer together than the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In the case of Iran and Israel however, proximity is not the only issue. In the cost-benefit analysis the Iranians have presumably had under long review, they must surely have asked and be asking themselves this question: How great is the risk that Israel might launch a nuclear strike on Iran preemptively because its leaders panicked?

As much as Israel has sought to cultivate its mad dog image, it’s hard not to also see that Israel’s political leaders have a long history of overreacting to threats that were much smaller than perceived. This tendency to overreact, far from presenting the image of a country that is supremely vigilant about its security, suggests a kind of institutionalized and culturally embedded hyper-vigilance. Israel acts like a state in perpetual trauma — a country that displays the symptoms of PTSD. If it operates on a hair-trigger now, susceptible to being “set off” by tiny “threats” like flotillas and flytillas, how much more sensitive would that hair-trigger become if the threat was the possibility of a nuclear strike from Iran?

Netanyahu and others in Israel might for political purposes frequently overstate their own fears about Iran, but the question Iranians and everyone else should be asking is whether Israel’s use of its own nuclear weapons will sooner or later become inevitable and if the consensus is that it will, then the most urgent task becomes: What would it take to disarm the most dangerous nuclear state in the world?

Fred Kaplan writes:

Moscow and Washington are 5,000 miles apart. If they were 900 miles apart (as Tehran and Jerusalem are), there probably would have been a nuclear war at some point in the last 50 years. It takes a half hour for an ICBM to fly from Moscow to Washington; that’s just barely enough time for the president to decide what to do if a blip on the radar screen suggests an attack is underway. It takes about five minutes for a short-range missile to fly from Tehran to Israel. That’s probably not enough time.

There were several times during the Cold War when America’s finely tuned radars mistook a flock of geese for a flight of Soviet missiles or when a software glitch produced a false warning of an attack. In all these instances, the leaders could afford to wait a bit to see how the signals panned out. According to David Hoffman’s frightening book The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, there was an incident in 1983 when a Soviet early-warning satellite picked up signals of an American missile attack. The signal in this case was never straightened out; the system kept warning of an attack all the way until the point when the warheads would have exploded, had there really been an attack. Luckily, the Soviet lieutenant colonel at the monitoring station, thinking that this couldn’t really be happening, decided—on his own authority—to tell his commander that it was a false alarm and, therefore, there was no need to launch the Soviets’ own ICBMs. He was lying: According to the warning system, the attack was real. But by lying, he probably prevented World War III.

It’s not at all clear that an Iranian or Israeli officer would keep his cool under similar circumstances (or that he’d be so laid back to begin with)—especially if the false warning coincided with a diplomatic crisis or a military exercise or some other moment of extraordinary tension.

I don’t think the Iranian nuclear program constitutes an urgent danger. But if there is a way to nip this whole panoply of nightmare scenarios in the bud—if there’s a diplomatic route to keeping Iran from going nuclear—then it’s worth pursuing, at some effort and cost.

Tony Karon writes: Staying within the “clock is ticking” metaphor favored by the Obama Administration when discussing diplomacy with Iran, Saturday’s talks in Istanbul could be said to have hit the snooze button. The doomsday alarm could yet sound, but not for a while yet. Iran and Western powers agreed Saturday to hold another round of talks—in Baghdad, of all places, at Iran’s request—on May 23. That means a proverbial “diplomatic window” (another rhetorical favorite of Administration officials) will remain open at least for the next five weeks.

And there are indications from Istanbul that the parties are working towards a formula for keeping the window open a lot longer. “We have agreed that the Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT] forms a key basis for what must be serious engagement, to ensure all the obligations under the NPT are met by Iran while fully respecting Iran’s right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy,” said the West’s chief negotiator, EU foreign policy chief Dame Catherine Ashton, at the conclusion of Saturday’s talks. “We want now to move to a sustained process of serious dialogue, where we can take urgent practical steps to build confidence and lead on to compliance by Iran with all its international obligations. In our efforts to do so, we will be guided by the principle of the step-by-step approach and reciprocity.”

Despite no breakthroughs or even substantial discussion in Istanbul over specific proposals, there’s more to Ashton’s comments than pablum. Successful negotiations require a common framework in which each side is able to see its core concerns addressed, even if their understandings of that common framework are different.

Haaretz reports: The round of nuclear talks between the six major world powers and Iran ended on Saturday in Istanbul without a significant breakthrough but with an agreement to reconvene next month. Sources close to the talks told Haaretz that the Iranians are demanding an American and European commitment not to carry out a military attack on their country as long as the talks continue.

Western and Turkish diplomats said Saturday’s meeting, which involved the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China – in addition to Germany and the Iranians, was held in a positive atmosphere.

“They met in a constructive atmosphere,” said Michael Mann, a spokesman for European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, after the morning session of talks Saturday. “We had a positive feeling that they did want to engage.”

Iran’s ISNA news agency reported that an American envoy had asked for a meeting with Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili and that Jalili had accepted, but another news agency, Fars, later denied that.

The Istanbul talks were the first such meeting for 15 months. A second round is scheduled to take place in the Iraqi capital Baghdad on May 23.

Expectations for the talks in Istanbul had been low at the outset. The United States termed them a last chance at a diplomatic solution to the crisis over the Iranian nuclear program. The U.S. and Israel have not ruled out military action to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites.

The major drama at the talks in Turkey was simply the fact that they took place, this time without prior conditions. In January last year, the Iranians refused to enter into discussions without a commitment to lift international sanctions against their country. For its part, the U.S. had refused at the time to discuss removing sanctions without a halt by the Iranians of their nuclear fuel enrichment operations.

This time around, among the details leaked from the conference hall was an indication that the world powers would agree to continued Iranian nuclear enrichment activities at the relatively low level of 3.5 percent, and would not require that the Fordo underground facility near the Iranian city of Qom be dismantled. The world powers would require continuous monitoring of nuclear fuel production sites, according to the leaks.

Western officials have made clear their immediate priority is to persuade Tehran to cease the higher-grade uranium enrichment it began in 2010. It has since expanded that work, shortening the time it would need for the relatively rapid development of nuclear weapons. Iran has signaled some flexibility over limiting its uranium enrichment to a fissile purity of 20 percent, compared with the 5 percent level required for nuclear power plants, but also suggests it is not ready to do so yet.

A Turkish government source told Haaretz that following a series of contacts by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with the Iranian leadership, there was a sense that Iran was ready to forgo uranium enrichment at a level of 20 percent for a short period, but would demand the immediate lifting of some of the international sanctions in return and the gradual scrapping of others.

Also to be considered in the next round of discussions is a Russian proposal for a blueprint for the talks including a time line, in an effort to build a sense of trust between Iran and the Western powers. The plan would call for Iran to gradually halt uranium enrichment while the West would at the same time remove sanctions. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has vowed that his country would not cede its right to enrichment activities, claiming that they are designed for peaceful purposes.

Frank Browning and Steve Weissman write: With his controversial poem on Israel and Iran, Günter Grass has irritated, provoked and outraged people everywhere. As Germany’s greatest living writer and a Nobel laureate in literature, he has also raised a question both inconvenient and impolite. How can decent people support a preemptive war against Iran for moving ever closer to a limited nuclear capability and, at the same time, turn a blind eye to Israel’s extensive arsenal of existing atomic bombs?

Especially in a country with so much Jewish blood on its hands, this is – or was – a question that no Good German should ask in public. It was even more verboten when asked by someone who had belatedly admitted that as a teenager he had served, however briefly, in the Nazi paramilitary unit, the Waffen SS. But the 84-year-old Grass dared to break the taboo. He spoke out and said “What Must Be Said.”

Yet why do I hesitate to name
that other land in which
for years—although kept secret—
a growing nuclear power has existed
beyond supervision or verification,
subject to no inspection of any kind?

Predicting he would be branded an anti-Semite, as he has been in full measure, Grass named Israel and called its atomic power a threat to “an already fragile world peace.” Nor did he stop there. He berated his own country for complicity by selling the Israelis “yet another submarine equipped to transport nuclear warheads.”

Germany had already given Israel two Dolphin-class submarines, and subsidized one-third of the $540 million cost of another. The Germans are planning to similarly subsidize the sale of the latest submarine.

Nuclear arms and submarines are enough to drag down any poem, and “What Must Be Said” lacks elegance and grace, at least in the English translation by Breon Mitchell. But as a poet, Grass risks even more in suggesting a political solution. Our leaders should renounce the use of force, he writes, directly countering Obama’s insistence on keeping a military option on the table. And they should “insist that the governments of both Iran and Israel allow an international authority free and open inspection of the nuclear potential and capability of both.”

No other course offers help
to Israelis and Palestinians alike,
to all those living side by side in enmity
in this region occupied by illusions,
and ultimately, to all of us.

Will any significant world leader take up the challenge and publicly support such an even-handed and common-sense approach? Not if the Israeli government of Bibi Netanyahu and his defenders in Europe and the United States have their way. Their purpose in reviling Grass as a Nazi and anti-Semite is precisely to silence anyone who might even consider following his lead.

The New York Times reports: Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has no affinity for the authorities in Iran, who she fears would have her arrested or worse if she returned home. But she has found herself standing with them in opposition to the onerous nuclear sanctions imposed on her country.

As representatives of Iran and six world powers prepared to resume negotiations on Iran’s uranium enrichment activities this weekend in Istanbul, Ms. Ebadi said that the sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union were misdirected.

Although meant to pressure the Iranian government to compromise on its nuclear program, “the very stringent sanctions have really been a tremendous blow to people,” Ms. Ebadi said in a telephone interview. “The people need these sanctions to be removed for a sustainable life.”

The sanctions have contributed to acute shortages of foreign goods there, rising inflation and unemployment and a sharply devalued currency. Further deprivations loom, especially if a European Union ban on Iranian oil sales goes ahead as planned in less than three months.

Ali Akbar Salehi, foreign minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran, writes: Forty-five years ago, the United States sold my country a research reactor as well as weapons-grade uranium as its fuel. Not long afterward, America agreed to help Iran set up the full nuclear fuel cycle along with atomic power plants. The U.S. argument was that nuclear power would provide for the growing needs of our economy and free our remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals.

That rationale has not changed.

Still, after the Islamic Revolution in our country in 1979, all understandings with the United States in the nuclear field unraveled. Washington even cut off fuel deliveries to the very facility it supplied. To secure fuel from other sources, Iran was forced to modify the reactor to run on uranium enriched to around 20 percent. The Tehran Research Reactor still operates, supplying isotopes used in the medical treatment of 800,000 of my fellow Iranians every year.

But getting to this point was not easy. In 2009, we put forward a request to the International Atomic Energy Agency for fuel for the reactor as its supply was running out, threatening the lives of many Iranians. When we agreed to exchange a major portion of our stock of low-enriched uranium for reactor fuel in 2010 — a proposal by the Obama administration — the response we got from the White House was a push for more U.N. Security Council sanctions.

Again, we did what every government is obliged to do: protect and ensure the well-being of our citizens. Thanks to the grace of God and the hard work of our committed and growing cadre of scientists, we managed to do something we had never done before: enrich uranium to the needed 20 percent and mold it into fuel plates for the reactor. We have never failed when faced with no option but to provide for our own needs.

All relationships — whether between parents and children, spouses or even nation-states — are based on trust. The example of the Tehran Research Reactor vividly illustrates the key issue between Iran and the United States: lack of trust.

We have strongly marked our opposition to weapons of mass destruction on many occasions. Almost seven years ago, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made a binding commitment. He issued a religious edict — a fatwa — forbidding the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons. Our stance against weapons of mass destruction, which is far from new, has been put to the test. When Saddam Hussein attacked us with chemical arms in the 1980s, we did not retaliate with the same means. And when it comes to our nuclear energy program, the IAEA has failed to find any military dimension, despite an unprecedented number of man-hours in intrusive inspections. [Continue reading…]

Chris McGreal reports: Amid the sabre-rattling and bluster over Iran, a furious if little-noticed debate is boiling over the legal basis for a US or Israeli attack on Tehran’s nuclear programme.

The threat of a military strike hangs over this weekend’s talks in Istanbul between the major powers and Iran.

The Israeli leadership says an attack will come within months, not years, if the present diplomatic push fails. The US Congress is not far behind, with the Republican leadership pledging to pass an authorisation for the use of “overwhelming military force” if there are signs Iran is developing a nuclear weapon.

Barack Obama is more cautious, but says the “military option” remains on the table if sanctions fail to persuade Tehran to give up its enriched uranium.

But while intelligence agencies grapple to assess whether Tehran is attempting to develop a nuclear weapon and militaries on both sides of the Atlantic consider the logistics of bombing Iran, legal authorities are confronting the challenge of constructing a legal case for attack, if it comes.

And already there is considerable dispute over the issue.

Alan Dershowitz, the renowned jurist and supporter of Israel, has argued that the US and the Jewish state can invoke a long-standing right under customary international law of “pro-active self-defence” as well as article 51 of the United Nations charter.

Sceptics counter that international law only permits military action in response to an imminent attack, or if one is under way. They say there is no immediate threat because, as the White House has said, there is no evidence Tehran is building a nuclear weapon. [Continue reading…]

Matthew Duss writes: Talks between Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany resume again this weekend, with Tehran giving hints that it may take a more constructive attitude to negotiations than it did during the previous round in 2011. Iranian nuclear officials have suggested that Iran might curtail its 20 percent uranium enrichment program, which would meet almost halfway the expected demands of the United States and its so-called P5+1 negotiating partners.

The United States and its allies reportedly plan to demand the immediate cessation of uranium enrichment to 20 percent, and a closure of the hardened Fordow enrichment plant, possibly in exchange for promises of no further sanctions. If the United States and its international partners are able to achieve these objectives, they will significantly slow Iran’s progress toward having the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon, score a victory for the two-track policy of diplomacy and economic pressure, and provide a template for more fully resolving outstanding issues surrounding Iran’s nuclear program in future talks.

Will that happen? Predicting the future is a fool’s game, but it’s important to recognize that the United States and its partners are going into talks with Iran this weekend in a position of strength that would have been hard to imagine four short years ago. This is in large part thanks to the Obama administration’s hard diplomatic work rebuilding alliances and, importantly, its demonstrated willingness to engage in good faith with the Iranian regime.

The idea that the world can be divided into powers that can be trusted with nuclear weapons and those that can’t is the foundation of the dispute with Iran, but if this idea really carried any weight, why would President Obama be an advocate of global nuclear disarmament?

Admittedly, he’s a half-hearted advocate — he’s presented it as a long-term goal, but a goal without a deadline is just a dream. Disarmament is Obama’s nice idea. But any serious proponent of disarmament recognizes that no one can be trusted with nuclear weapons.

Imagine your Uncle Harry and Aunt Judy come over for dinner. Uncle Harry’s a retired nuclear scientist and quite a handyman. Over dinner Aunt Judy proudly mentions he has just completed a project he’s been laboring over for many years: he’s constructed a suitcase nuclear bomb and it’s in the trunk of their car outside.

You flip out.

“Don’t worry,” Aunt Judy assures you. “Uncle Harry’s totally trustworthy.”

But you don’t care whether Uncle Harry is as trustworthy as Moses. It doesn’t make you any less scared of the bomb.

As for how trustworthy the Israelis are with their arsenal of nuclear bombs, since they won’t even admit they possess any, I’d say they should inspire less confidence than Uncle Harry.

And as for the method and extent of a possible Israeli attack on Iran — whether it would only involve conventional weapons and whether it would just employ aircraft or perhaps also ballistic missiles — I don’t recall anything specific be placed upon or removed from that proverbial table that accommodates all threats. So who’s to say one way or the other whether Günther Grass’s fears about such an attack are overblown? We don’t know.

Jerry Haber writes: Grass’s poem What must be said has been defended and attacked throughout the globe. The poem protests against the German sale of a nuclear submarine to Israel; appeals for international control of the Israel and Iranian nuclear program by an authority accepted by both governments; and, though by a German author, refuses to be silent about Israel’s nuclear power, despite Germany’s past crimes against the Jewish people (and humanity). Grass speaks as a German who does not want to be indirectly responsible for a horrific catastrophe, but rather, as he puts it,  wants to give help to Israelis, Palestinians, and others in the region “and, finally, to ourselves as well.” This part of Grass’s poem, the main part, is eminently reasonable. Only a twisted mind would find it anti-Semitic or even anti-Zionist.

The poem employs, however, rhetoric that is offensive to Iranians and to Israelis.  It calls the Iranian leader a loudmouth who keeps his people under his thumb and pushes them  to organized cheering. It imputes to the Israeli leaders the claim to have a right to a first strike capability that could “snuff out” or “annihilate” the Iranian people by using the nuclear submarine sold it by the Germans.Both claims belong more to the exaggerated bombast of living rooms (and blogs) than to a serious cri de coeur. They demean the poet, and they enable the poem to be easily dismissed by the partisans.

But suppose Grass had been more accurate in his description of the possible consequences of Israel’s attack? Suppose that instead of writing “a strike to snuff out the Iranian people” he had written  “a strike that may kill or maim hundreds of thousands of people”?

According to the Center for the Strategic and International Studies, a strike on the Bushehr Nuclear Reactor alone “will cause the immediate death of thousands of people living in or adjacent to the site, and thousands of subsequent cancer deaths or even up to hundreds of thousands depending on the population density along the contamination plume.”

Criticism of Israel on that score would not only not count as being anti-Semitic; it could even be advanced by those “sympathetic to Israel’s dilemma.” Or so says Bloomberg’s Jeffrey Goldberg:

The morality of a [pre-emptive Israeli] strike, which could cause substantial Iranian casualties, would be questioned even by those sympathetic to Israel’s dilemma.

Goldberg is astounded at the line that Grass did use and considers the poem anti-Semitic. But had Grass’s poem included the more “modest” claim of the possible hundreds of thousands of casualties, rather than the possible annihilation of the Iranian people, would Goldberg have dropped the anti-Semitism charge? In a post accusing Grass of anti-Semitism, Goldberg says that Israel is “contemplating targeting six to eight nuclear sites in Iran for conventional aerial bombardment,” which may be correct,though one retired American general thinks otherwise.  There is, to be sure, a clear difference between the nuclear bombing of conventional sites and the conventional bombing of nuclear sites. But what they share in common is the possible causation of  “substantial Iranian casualties,” to use Goldberg’s phrase. So why is Grass being anti-Semitic when he morally criticizes the consequences of an Israeli strike, whereas Goldberg is not?

If I understand Goldberg correctly, there are two distinctions between Grass’s standing vis-à-vis the moral criticism of Israel, and his own. First,  Grass is a German and a former member of the SS.  So he has to shut up – unless, perhaps, he proves himself to be one of those Germans who are “sympathetic to Israel’s dilemma.”

Second, Goldberg misreads Grass as saying that Israel seeks to annihilate the Iranians. This is nowhere stated or implied by Grass in his poem.  Instead, he says that Israel seeks the right of a preventative first strike which could annihilate the Iranian people. What’s the difference between the two? Well, it’s the difference between saying that Israel attacked Gaza in Operation Cast Lead in a way that could (and, in fact, did) kill fourteen hundred Gazans and between saying that  Israel sought to kill fourteen hundred Gazans.

Why does Goldberg read Grass in this way? He writes

To make yourself believe that Israel is seeking to murder the 74 million people of Iran, you must make yourself believe that the leaders of the Jewish state outstrip Adolf Hitler in genocidal intent.

Goldberg reads Grass as accusing Israel of outdoing Hitler in its evil “genocidal intent” – a reading that is interesting for what it says about Goldberg’s own mind,  but it is more interesting for what it says about the manner in which some Israeli advocates  think about criticism of Israeli military power, to turn one of Goldberg’s felicitous phrases.  What could be more anti-Semitic than accusing Israel of being more genocidal than Hitler? After all, to call for a nuclear embargo on Israel is to imply that Israelis cannot be trusted to act responsibly in the use of nuclear weapons, or in the bombing of nuclear facilities. It is to demean the Israelis, to place them on the same level, if not lower, than the Islamist regime in Iran. It is to claim that like the Iranians the Israelis are not to be trusted with nuclear weapons because we suspect them of genocidal intent. [Continue reading…]

Christian Science Monitor reports: Twenty-five cents a gallon – that’s about how much some international energy experts say the tough US sanctions on Iran’s oil industry are costing Americans at the pump.

As US consumers cope with gas prices that are approaching an average of $4 a gallon, some international trade experts say the cost of the sanctions the US imposes – as in the case of the Iran measures – is something political leaders should discuss more openly. Instead, they say, most politicians act as if sanctions affect only the country targeted – something these experts say isn’t true.

“The approach is always that the costs are for them and the benefits are for us,” says Bill Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC), a Washington lobbying organization that generally opposes economic sanctions. “The Iran case is interesting,” he adds, “because of the impact of sanctions on our energy sector.”

What sanctions? Top five countries buying oil from Iran.

Energy experts say it’s difficult to pinpoint precisely how much sanctions on Iran are costing consumers as they filter down to the gas pump. But Lucian Pugliaresi, president of the Energy Policy Research Foundation, a Washington nonprofit organization that studies energy economics, says it’s possible to make an estimate.

The sanctions the US and other countries have slapped on Iran’s energy sector and on its central bank (aimed at curtailing its oil exports) are costing Iran about 300,000 barrels a day in exports, Mr. Pugliaresi estimates. When added to other factors affecting the international oil market, that decrease in exports may have added about $10 to the current price of a barrel for crude, he says.

And that $10 increase translates roughly to about a 25-cent increase in the cost of a gallon of gas in the US, Pugliaresi says.

David Ignatius writes: President Obama has signaled Iran that the United States would accept an Iranian civilian nuclear program if Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei can back up his recent public claim that his nation “will never pursue nuclear weapons.”

This verbal message was sent through Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who visited Khamenei last week. A few days before traveling to Iran, Erdogan had held a two-hour meeting with Obama in Seoul, in which they discussed what Erdogan would tell the ayatollah about the nuclear issue and Syria.

Obama advised Erdogan that the Iranians should realize that time is running out for a peaceful settlement and that Tehran should take advantage of the current window for negotiations. Obama didn’t specify whether Iran would be allowed to enrich uranium domestically as part of the civilian program the United States would endorse. That delicate issue evidently would be left for the negotiations that are supposed to start April 13, at a venue yet to be decided.

Erdogan is said to have replied that he would convey Obama’s views to Khamenei, and it’s believed he did so when he met the Iranian leader on Thursday. Erdogan also met President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other senior Iranian officials during his visit.

The statement highlighted by Obama as a potential starting point was made on state television in February. Khamenei said: “The Iranian nation has never pursued and will never pursue nuclear weapons. . . . Iran is not after nuclear weapons because the Islamic Republic, logically, religiously and theoretically, considers the possession of nuclear weapons a grave sin and believes the proliferation of such weapons is senseless, destructive and dangerous.”

The challenge for negotiators is whether it’s possible to turn Khamenei’s public rhetoric into a serious and verifiable commitment not to build a bomb. When Obama cited this statement to Erdogan as something to build on, the Turkish leader is said to have nodded in agreement.

But the diplomatic path still seems blocked, judging by recent haggling over the meeting place for negotiations. Istanbul was expected to be the venue, but the Iranians last weekend balked and suggested instead that negotiators meet in Iraq or China. U.S. officials see this foot-dragging as a sign that the Iranian leadership is still struggling to frame its negotiating position.

The Erdogan back channel to Iran is the most dramatic evidence yet of the close relationship Obama has forged with the Turkish leader. Erdogan, who heads an Islamist party that is often cited as a model by Muslim democrats, has been a key U.S. partner in handling Syria and other crises flowing from the Arab Spring uprisings.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reports: A war of words between Turkish and Iranian leaders intensified Thursday, threatening to delay or even scuttle a new round of talks between Iran and world powers, and raising fresh doubt about whether Tehran will bargain over its disputed nuclear program.

One day after Iranian leaders ruled out talks in Istanbul next week because of Turkey’s position on the Syrian uprising, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Iran of dishonesty.

“It is necessary to act honestly,” Erdogan said at a news conference in Ankara, Turkey, according to Reuters. The Iranians “continue to lose prestige in the world because of a lack of honesty.”

The broadside marked a remarkable turnabout for Erdogan, who has worked hard for years to cultivate ties with Tehran. He has repeatedly taken Iran’s side in its dispute with the West over its nuclear development efforts.

Seymour Hersh writes: From the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain peaks, has the look of northwest Iran. The site, some sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, was once used for nuclear testing, and now includes a counterintelligence training facility and a private airport capable of handling Boeing 737 aircraft. It’s a restricted area, and inhospitable—in certain sections, the curious are warned that the site’s security personnel are authorized to use deadly force, if necessary, against intruders.

It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of six American citizens. It was initially part of the broad-based revolution that led to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran. But, within a few years, the group was waging a bloody internal war with the ruling clerics, and, in 1997, it was listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. In 2002, the M.E.K. earned some international credibility by publicly revealing—accurately—that Iran had begun enriching uranium at a secret underground location. Mohamed ElBaradei, who at the time was the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency, told me later that he had been informed that the information was supplied by the Mossad. The M.E.K.’s ties with Western intelligence deepened after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, and JSOC began operating inside Iran in an effort to substantiate the Bush Administration’s fears that Iran was building the bomb at one or more secret underground locations. Funds were covertly passed to a number of dissident organizations, for intelligence collection and, ultimately, for anti-regime terrorist activities. Directly, or indirectly, the M.E.K. ended up with resources like arms and intelligence. Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants.

Despite the growing ties, and a much-intensified lobbying effort organized by its advocates, M.E.K. has remained on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations—which meant that secrecy was essential in the Nevada training. “We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American intelligence official told me. “We were deploying them over long distances in the desert and mountains, and building their capacity in communications—coördinating commo is a big deal.” (A spokesman for J.S.O.C. said that “U.S. Special Operations Forces were neither aware of nor involved in the training of M.E.K. members.”)

The training ended sometime before President Obama took office, the former official said. In a separate interview, a retired four-star general, who has advised the Bush and Obama Administrations on national-security issues, said that he had been privately briefed in 2005 about the training of Iranians associated with the M.E.K. in Nevada by an American involved in the program. They got “the standard training,” he said, “in commo, crypto [cryptography], small-unit tactics, and weaponry—that went on for six months,” the retired general said. “They were kept in little pods.” He also was told, he said, that the men doing the training were from JSOC, which, by 2005, had become a major instrument in the Bush Administration’s global war on terror. “The JSOC trainers were not front-line guys who had been in the field, but second- and third-tier guys—trainers and the like—and they started going off the reservation. ‘If we’re going to teach you tactics, let me show you some really sexy stuff…’ ”

It was the ad-hoc training that provoked the worried telephone calls to him, the former general said. “I told one of the guys who called me that they were all in over their heads, and all of them could end up trouble unless they got something in writing. The Iranians are very, very good at counterintelligence, and stuff like this is just too hard to contain.” [Continue reading…]

Max Fisher writes: Even if Hersh is wrong, there is a long list of U.S. leaders and officials who would like to make him right. Members of the “MEK lobby,” as it’s often called, support at least removing the group from the list of officially designated terrorist groups, and often some combination of arming or funding the fighters. They include: two former CIA directors, a former FBI director, a former attorney general, Bush’s first homeland security chief, Obama’s first national security adviser, Rudy Giuliani, and Howard Dean. A House resolution calling for MEK to be de-listed as a terrorist group has 97 co-sponsors.

It’s not a coincidence that the pro-MEK position can seem confusing, even contradictory. The world is too complicated and interconnected for “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” to work as a foreign policy mandate. It leads the U.S. to work against its own long-term interests, “solving” short-term problems by creating bigger, longer-term problems. For example: supporting Arab dictators to suppress the Arab Islamist parties that may soon take over, supporting Latin American rightist who ended up being murderous dictators, supporting anti-Soviet fighters who later turned against us, and so on. Sometimes, the U.S. even supports enemies-of-our-enemies who are actively and currently also our enemy: Afghan drug ring leader Ahmed Wali Karzai, for example, or, starting in 2003, Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi.

Still, let’s assume, for the purposes of discussion, that American MEK enthusiasts are right in arguing that the radical Marxist group, which assassinated six Americans in the 1970s, has since become, and always will be, as American as apple pie. Supporting this terrorist group is still likely to do far more harm than good.

The U.S. has a long history of arming rebels, insurgents, and outright terrorists who want to fight our enemies for us. Even when it works — and it often doesn’t — the U.S.-sponsored fighters often spread small arms, exacerbate anti-American attitudes, and entrench a cycle of violence that can continues for years and sometimes spin out of control. When Congress shoveled millions of dollars into CIA programs to support anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan, much of the guns and money by design went to the extremists. A December 1984 CIA memo identified “fundamentalists” such as Mujahideen leader (and current American enemy) Gulbidden Hekmatyar as “the best fighters” and thus best recipient of American backing. Even the Afghan extremists who didn’t turn against the U.S. did use their arms and money to rampage across Afghanistan, sowing the chaos, violence, mistrust, corruption, crime, and poverty that has plagued the country for now 30 years.

In his new poem, “What Must Be Said,” Germany’s most celebrated writer Günter Grass writes: “I’ve broken my silence/ because I’m sick of the West’s hypocrisy…” yet that hypocrisy is itself merely a shield for Israel’s own hypocrisy.

Israel treats the mere possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat while refusing to acknowledge the existential threat that it poses to everyone in the region through its own concealed and uninspected arsenal of hundreds of nuclear weapons.

Grass hopes that having broken his own silence others will follow his lead and demand “the governments of/ both Iran and Israel allow an international authority/ free and open inspection of/ the nuclear potential and capability of both.”

This reads and no doubt is intended much more as a political statement than a work of poetry, though it nevertheless contains a poetic force in what can be seen as a symbolic and historic transition: that not even Germans are willing to keep reissuing the license that allows Israelis to use the Holocaust as a perfect shield for deflecting all criticism.

Hans Kundnani writes:

[W]hat makes the publication of the poem significant is that it expresses a sense of anger against Israel that – justified or not – many Germans seem increasingly to share. This anger is partly a response to Israel’s rightward shift during the past decade. But it seems also to be a product of developments in Germany and in particular the way that the Holocaust has receded in significance during the last decade. Increasingly, Germans seem to see themselves as victims rather than perpetrators.

A poll in January 2009 – during the Gaza war – suggested that German attitudes to Israel were in flux. Nearly half of respondents said they saw Israel as an “aggressive country” and only around a third of respondents said they felt Germany had a special responsibility towards Israel. Sixty per cent said Germany had no special responsibility (the figure was even higher among younger Germans and among those living in the former East Germany).

This anger against Israel is exacerbated by the sense some Germans have of not being able to say what they really think – as Grass suggests in the poem. This has created a pent-up resentment towards Israel that could at some point explode. It will be interesting to see whether Grass’s poem leads in the next few weeks and months to the debate about Germany’s “special relationship” with Israel that he seems to hope it would.

Angela Merkel – who has declined to comment on Grass’s poem – is personally committed to the Jewish state but is under increasing pressure on this issue, on which she is unusually out of step with German public opinion.

Last year, Germany voted in favour of a UN resolution demanding a halt to Israeli settlement expansion – an unusual break with Israel. Later in the year, Germany opposed the Palestinian statehood bid at the UN. But according to one poll, 84% of Germans supported Palestinian statehood and 76% believed Germany should act to recognise it – an even higher proportion in each case than in France or the UK.

An Israeli military strike on Iran could create a sudden rupture between Germany and Israel in the way that the Iraq war did between Germany and the US. My sense is that were Israel to launch a military strike on Iran, what remaining sympathy there is in Germany for Israel would evaporate almost overnight.

A quarter of the population don’t have access to bomb shelters, an estimated 100,000 rockets and missiles are pointing towards Israel, it’s missile defense shield is incomplete and yet, during a war anticipated to last three weeks during which thousands of missiles would be launched towards Israel, less than 300 Israelis would get killed. That’s the worst-case scenario, Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet has been told.

Gareth Porter reports that one of Israel’s leading experts on Iranian missiles and the head of its missile defence programme for nearly a decade, says Iranian missiles are capable of doing significant damage to Israeli targets.

Uzi Rubin, who was in charge of Israel’s missile defence from 1991 to 1999 and presided over the development of the Arrow anti- missile system, has a much more sombre view of Iran’s capabilities.

The “bad news” for Israel, Rubin told IPS in an interview, is that the primary factor affecting Iran’s capability to retaliate is the rapidly declining cost of increased precision in ballistic missiles. Within a very short time, Iran has already improved the accuracy of its missiles from a few kilometres from the target to just a few metres, according to Rubin.

That improvement would give Iran the ability to hit key Israeli economic infrastructure and administrative targets, he said. “I’m asking my military friends how they feel about waging war without electricity,” said Rubin.

The consequences of Iranian missile strikes on administrative targets could be even more serious, Rubin believes. “If the civilian government collapses,” he said, “the military will find it difficult to wage a war.”

Rubin is even worried that, if the accuracy of Iranian missiles improves further, which he believes is “bound to happen”, Iran will be able to carry out pinpoint attacks on Israel’s air bases, which are concentrated in just a few places.

Some Israeli analysts have suggested that Israel could hit Iranian missiles in a preemptive strike, but Rubin said Israel can no longer count on being able to hit Iranian missiles before they are launched.

Iran’s longer-range missiles have always been displayed on mobile transporter erector launchers (TELs), as Rubin pointed out in an article in Arms Control Today earlier this year. “The message was clear,” Rubin wrote. “Iran’s missile force is fully mobile, hence, not pre-emptable.”

Rubin, who has argued for more resources to be devoted to the Arrow anti-missile system, acknowledged that it can only limit the number of missiles that get through. In an e-mail to IPS, he cited the Arrow system’s record of more than 80 percent success in various tests over the years, but also noted that such a record “does not assure an identical success rate in real combat”.

Meanwhile, last month the New York Times reported that the Pentagon estimates that several hundred Americans could be killed in the event of an Israeli strike on Iran.

A classified war simulation held this month to assess the repercussions of an Israeli attack on Iran forecasts that the strike would lead to a wider regional war, which could draw in the United States and leave hundreds of Americans dead, according to American officials.

The officials said the so-called war game was not designed as a rehearsal for American military action — and they emphasized that the exercise’s results were not the only possible outcome of a real-world conflict.

But the game has raised fears among top American planners that it may be impossible to preclude American involvement in any escalating confrontation with Iran, the officials said. In the debate among policy makers over the consequences of any Israeli attack, that reaction may give stronger voice to those in the White House, Pentagon and intelligence community who have warned that a strike could prove perilous for the United States.

The results of the war game were particularly troubling to Gen. James N. Mattis, who commands all American forces in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, according to officials who either participated in the Central Command exercise or who were briefed on the results and spoke on condition of anonymity because of its classified nature. When the exercise had concluded earlier this month, according to the officials, General Mattis told aides that an Israeli first strike would be likely to have dire consequences across the region and for United States forces there.

The two-week war game, called Internal Look, played out a narrative in which the United States found it was pulled into the conflict after Iranian missiles struck a Navy warship in the Persian Gulf, killing about 200 Americans, according to officials with knowledge of the exercise. The United States then retaliated by carrying out its own strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Trita Parsi writes: The Chairman of Joints Chief of Staff Martin Dempsey serves “Iran’s interests.”

So says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Dempsey’s public caution about an Israeli attack on Iran – “I don’t think a wise thing at this moment is for Israel to launch a military attack on Iran” – earned him this dubious honor.

For the Netanyahu government to level such serious accusations against America’s top military commander necessitates a revision of the meaning of chutzpah. We need a stronger term.

But those leveling such accusations—whether in the Likud-led government or their supporters in the US—are the ones that have the most to hide. If the same (flawed and anti-democratic) methodology of questioning the loyalty and patriotism of their domestic political opponents and implying that they are in cohoots with an enemy state were applied to them, a very disturbing picture would emerge.

Who would the true winners and losers of an Israeli attack on Iran be, for instance?

The Obama administration and the US military strongly oppose an Israeli preventive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Their opposition, of course, is not rooted in any sympathy with the repressive regime in Tehran. Nor is it necessarily rooted in America’s already compromised military position in the region. It is because a strike would not destroy Iran’s nuclear program. It would intsead increase the likelihood of a nuclear armed Iran down the road. It would unravel the international consensus against Iran. It would undermine the Iranian pro-democracy movement and fortify the regime’s grip on power. And, perhaps most importantly, it would eliminate the current insight we have into the Iranian nuclear program and provide the Iranians with a dash-out capability.