Atlantic Sentinel

Author: Daniel DePetris

  • “Inflexible” Nuclear Negotiator Frontrunner in Iran’s Election

    With a few days left to go in the campaign, millions of Iranians are preparing to cast their ballots this Friday to determine who will become their next president. While the disqualification of former president and presumed pragmatic Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani dealt a severe blow to the prospect of a moderate or reformist victory, the election season still had its share of excitement.

    It is certainly not uncommon in the world of politics for candidates to accuse one another of being unpatriotic, unfit for the job or inexperienced. It was a frequent ingredient of the last presidential election in the United States. What is unusual about Iran it that such criticisms tend to spiraling into shouting matches while millions are watching. (more…)

  • United States See Rise in Iranian-Sponsored Terrorism

    After a delay of several months, the United States State Department’s annual report on terrorist activities worldwide — a document that was much anticipated in Washington DC — was released last week. If the final report is anything close to the summary, analysts will discover some interesting trends in the data.

    Although the report is long and dense at times, there are a few noteworthy developments that need to be highlighted in order to fully understand how terrorism has adapted in the last year. (more…)

  • Rafsanjani’s Disqualification Highlights Iranian Regime’s Shortcomings

    A mere week after Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani had registered his name for next month’s presidential election at the last minute, the body in charge of vetting candidates for the Iranian presidency decided to disqualify him, underlining just how authoritarian the Islamic republic has become.

    For many Iranians, it was ironic that Rafsanjani was defeated by the very political system that he helped create and nurture, both as an original founder of the Islamic republic and as president for eight years.

    All of the excitement that the relatively pragmatic candidate’s registration generated was deflated by the Guardian Council’s collective decision. For Rafsanjani himself, it is a debilitating blow worthy of public condemnation — “”I think it is not possible to run the country worse than this, even if it had been planned in advance,” he was quoted as saying by opposition websites — but for his conservative rivals close to the supreme leader, it was a necessary evil in order to further consolidate their influence. (more…)

  • Congress Seeks More Iran Sanctions, Frustrates Diplomatic Efforts

    With multilateral negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program once again at a standstill, the United States Congress has launched a renewed push to target Iranian financial institutions and cut their access to international markets.

    The House of Representatives and Senate are working on own separate bills that would tighten the economic screws on Tehran for its nuclear noncompliance, a campaign that has the potential to further complicate the Obama Administration’s negotiating strategy.

    On May Wednesday, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs proposed one of the toughest pieces of legislation to date on Iran’s nuclear program. The bill, if enacted, would target any foreign bank, company or individual that knowingly conducts commercial trade with an Iranian institution that is under sanctions. Countries that currently import Iranian crude oil will be mandated to decrease the amount they purchase over the next year. And the legislation would put additional sanctions on Iran’s shipping industry in an attempt to obstruct the country’s ability to ship goods.

    In other words, the House proposal would deny much of Iran’s economy access to markets, creating a small trade embargo. (more…)

  • Kerry-Lavrov Agreement Unlikely to Affect Syrian War

    As far as Arab and European countries and the United States are concerned, Russia has been anything but helpful in Syria. Three United Nations Security Council resolutions that would have sanctioned Syrian president Bashar Assad were vetoed by the Russians who have continued to sell military equipment to his regime.

    Secretary of State John Kerry sought to snap that streak when he traveled to Moscow last week and, to his credit, succeeded in one respect: getting the Russians to publicly support a transitional government in Syria.

    Secretary Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov both reaffirmed their commitment to the Geneva communiqué that the two powers signed in June of last year. It called for negotiations between the Assad regime and opposition in pursuit of an interim government. 

    Kerry was so upbeat about his most recent trip to Russia that he speculated that his new Syria initiative could begin in early June and said that a tremendous amount of preparation had already been done.

    Yet to the frustration of both the Americans and Russians, pledging allegiance to the Geneva accord and the theory of a transitional government in Syria is premised on the assumption that negotiations can stop the shooting and resolve the civil war. Despite both sides in the conflict deploying evermore brutal violence, the European Union and the United States still seem to hope that cooler heads will eventually prevail and that, however horrible the situation in Syria may be, its ramifications can be contained within Syria’s borders.

    The Syrians who are doing the fighting and dying do not appear to be viewing the Kerry-Lavrov initiative the same way. Grotesque scenes of massacres along sectarian lines, the execution of prisoners of war and the mutilation of bodies do not suggest that there is much room for meaningful talks.

    There have been no goodwill gestures from either the Assad regime or opposition umbrella groups besides public interest in the diplomatic route. As much as Russia, the United Nations and the United States might like to see a negotiated settlement, the protagonists are nowhere near agreement on the issues that are so important to ending the carnage: whether Assad can be a part of the equation; what Syria will look like in the future; how transitional justice for war crimes will be meted out; who will be allowed to serve in a transitional administration.

    The reality is that the fractious rebel movement on the ground, combined with President Assad’s determination to prevail and the radicalization that is taking place along sectarian and ideological lines, is not an environment that suits diplomacy well.

    Diplomacy can only succeed if one side is convinced that it will lose or if the combatants are convinced that they have more to gain from talking than fighting. Since both Assad and his opponents are going for broke and engaging in even more horrific human rights abuses, the compromise that Kerry and Lavrov are talking about, however commendable, is unlikely to yield anything concrete.

  • Rafsanjani’s Candidacy Undermines Supreme Leader’s Election Plan

    Before Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani registered as a contender for the Iranian presidency with only minutes to spare on Saturday, this year’s election was likely to be a largely ceremonial affair.

    The disputed 2009 election, which pitted the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against a reformist candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and snowballed into a million man “Green revolution” that rocked the Islamic republic’s political system suggested that this time around, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would do everything he could to tightly control the vote. And for the first few months of this year, it did appear that conservatives favorable to Khamenei were going to be the only candidates in the race.

    Rafsanjani’s candidacy has turned expectations upside down. While the former president is hardly an idealist in the mold of Mohammad Khatami, another former president, he is also far removed from the religious hardliners that surround Ayatollah Khamenei. (more…)

  • Libyan Degaddafication Law’s Scope Raises Concern

    After months of anticipation and weeks of jubilant protests in the capital, Libyan lawmakers enacted a political isolation law last week that prohibits officials who served the previous regime from reentering public service.

    To the revolutionaries who fought against dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s security forces for eight months during Libya’s civil war, as well for the activists who spent decades in exile before the uprising erupted in February 2011, the law is final proof that their long and sometimes bloody work was worthwhile.

    Thousands of Libyans celebrated in the streets of Tripoli once news of the law’s passing spread, some honking their horns joyfully at its strict prohibition on all of Gaddafi’s former henchmen.

    Having won 80 percent support in the legislature, the law’s enactment, more than two years after Libyans took up arms against Gaddafi, was an indication that the North African country still has to rid itself of all vestiges of the old order but is simultaneously committed to building a political system from scratch after four decades of authoritarian rule.

    That the task is difficult was plain ahead of the vote when democracy observers warned that the law could be used to sideline political opponents. Although designed to root out Gaddafi loyalists from positions of power, the text of the isolation law is sufficiently broad to theoretically kick out anymore who held any important position while Gaddafi was in power. (more…)

  • Majority Arabs, Turks Opposes Arming Syria’s Rebels

    With lawmakers in the United States pushing President Barack Obama into providing military support to the Syrian opposition and Israel striking targets in the vicinity of the capital Damascus, commentators are predicting that the civil war in Syria may be entering a new stage with greater foreign involvement.

    Fortunately for the Obama Administration, which has been put into an uncomfortable position since suspected chemical weapons use in Syria crossed the president’s “red line,” a vast majority of people both in the Middle East and the United States does not believe that foreign intervention would be a wise course of action.

    Indeed, while many Middle Easterners fear that the violence in Syria could affect their own societies, a majority of them in five of the six countries recently surveyed by the Pew Research Center oppose sending rebels to the rebels who are trying to end the Assad regime. (more…)

  • Rising Sunni Discontent Test for Iraq’s Shia Premier

    It is not unusual for thousands of Iraqis to march in the streets, railing against their government. The country’s Sunnis, who dominated politics under Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime, have particular grievances with Shia prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s administration, the most important being the abolition of counterterrorism laws that they view as discriminatory to their sect.

    This was how last week’s protests started. Things changed on Tuesday last week when an Iraqi army unit stormed a protest camp in Hawija near Kirkuk north of Baghdad in pursuit of suspects involved in the killing of a soldier a few days prior. By the time the operation was over, dozens of people lay dead in the carnage. When news of the incident spread across the country, protesters and insurgents in Sunni areas were quick to pick up arms in retribution. In one such incident, four Iraqi troops were ambushed at a checkpoint in Ramadi and killed by unidentified gunmen. Five more were killed in Abu Ghraib.

    By Sunday, over two hundred people had died and many more wounded. The situation could get deadlier yet unless Maliki and representatives of the protest movement are able to sit down and strike up some type of accord. (more…)

  • Reelected Hamas Leader Has Opportunity for Reconciliation

    Last year, Khaled Mashal was considered a lame-duck figure to many in the Hamas movement. His power was challenged by hardliners based in the Gaza Strip. His refusal to support Syria’s Bashar al-Assad over the rebellion cost the Islamist group a vital lifeline of support. A reconciliation agreement with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas that was promoted by Mashal stalled immediately after it was signed.

    Things got so bad that Mashal decided to announce his resignation as Hamas’ political bureau chief, ending what would have been a sixteen year reign.

    Fast forward to today and Khaled Mashal has defied the expectations of many. After an internal election process that was drawn out for a year and kept compartmentalized from outsiders, members of Hamas’ ruling council once again elected him this month. Despite all the reported division within Hamas, Mashal emerged as the viable candidate that its different factions could accept. (more…)

  • Initiative to Restart Peace Talks Stalls over Israeli Objections

    Solving the rift between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators is difficult enough when both are in the middle of a diplomatic session. But it is even harder when the two sides cannot agree on the terms of diplomacy to begin with.

    This is what Secretary of State John Kerry is experiencing in the Holy Land only a few months on the job and despite three high level visits to Israel and the Palestinian territories.

    No one assumed that getting the lagging peace process off the ground would be an easy task. Kerry, during his most recent visits to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, acknowledged as much when he told a news conference that everyone, even he, had a lot of homework to do before talks could resume.

    It was a polite way of saying that Israel and the Palestinians are still far apart on the issues that have long divided them, including the final borders of a Palestinian state, the status of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees and Jewish settlements. (more…)

  • Kerry Could Revive 2002 Israeli-Palestinian Peace Plan

    Much like President Barack Obama’s trip to the Middle East last month, the White House played down a weekend visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories by Secretary of State John Kerry who talked with officials from both sides in what is dubbed a “quiet” effort on the part of the United States to revive the peace process.

    Kerry spoke with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas at his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah as well as Israeli president Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

    Other than words that peace is desirable, possible and in the interest of all parties involved, nothing exciting was produced from all of Kerry’s meetings. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians are, after all, widely divided on the core issues, let alone what a final settlement should look like. And despite talk of wanting to move the peace process forward, the mistrust between Jerusalem and Ramallah is at such a height that ordinary Palestinians are no longer sure that a two-state solution is possible anymore.

    Yet with John Kerry, the United States have an intensely focused diplomat with decades of experience in containing conflicts and finding ways to resolve them. Those who know the former Democratic senator well acknowledge that he has long taken a special interest in solving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Kerry’s three trips to the Middle East in under a month is a testament to that desire and while recent diplomacy is certainly not on par with the Henry Kissinger and James Baker tours of previous decades, it is a strong signal that the Obama Administration wants to be more proactive than less. (more…)

  • Iran Expected to Respond to Powers’ Enrichment Offer

    Hoping to use the positive momentum that was produced during the first round of discussions with Iranian negotiators, representatives of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany initiated fresh talks with Tehran this weekend in Kazakhstan over the country’s nuclear program.

    Friday’s negotiations are the first since February when both sides tried to narrow their differences over what would be an appropriate cap to Iran’s uranium enrichment efforts.

    In contrast to three rounds of dialogue last year, when both sides refused to budge from their respective positions, this year’s diplomacy between Iran and world powers has taken on a more conciliatory tone. The maximalist position that the Security Council members took last year — Tehran was asked to stop all enrichment to 20 percent, ship that uranium out of the country and shut down the Fordow enrichment plant — has been discarded for a much more moderate proposal: Iran would receive a slight relaxation of economic sanctions in exchange for halting uranium enrichment at the 20 percent level. (more…)

  • Obama Rejects Increasing Support for Syria’s Rebels

    In a stunning disclosure of American policy on Syria, Foreign Policy magazine has learned that President Barack Obama rejected a request from his own national security advisors to provide military equipment to the Middle Eastern country’s rebels.

    The items that were discussed were nonlethal, meaning that shipping weapons and ammunition to the rebels who are battling the regime of President Bashar al-Assad was never on the table. But night vision goggles and body armor that could have made its way into the hands of Syria’s rebels would have nonetheless assisted the opponents of Assad in the fight by making them more effective in the field.

    The fact that President Obama refused to expand American assistance to the Syrian resistance is not, in itself, entirely startling. His administration has gone against the wishes of its national-security establishment in the past, most notably when the White House shot down a plan to funnel weapons to vetted opposition groups.

    It is nevertheless surprising to learn that President Obama does not agree with some of his very top advisors, again. (more…)

  • Despite Lacking Substance, Obama’s Israel Visit Impressed

    President Barack Obama wrapped up his Middle East trip this weekend defying the expectations of many, impressing millions of Israelis with his comments and emphasizing how important it is for Israelis, Palestinians and Arabs alike to give the peace process another chance.

    From a substantive point of view, the American president’s trip was lacking in detail. No new peace initiative was given to the Israelis or Palestinians. Unlike in previous encounters with both sides, Obama made it a policy on this trip to stick with talking about the prospects for peace rather than diving into it. Thrusting himself in the middle of another attempt at Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, particularly when the trust deficit is so high between the parties, was the last thing that he wanted to do.

    Yet a lack of substance does not mean that the visit was purely ceremonial, nor does it mean that Obama’s discussions with political leaders in Jerusalem and Ramallah were a waste of time. (more…)