Middle East

By Peter Feaver

How should we measure success in the talks with Iran that begin today? I propose the following sliding scale.

1. Breathtaking, mission accomplished victory: Iran agrees to abandon its nuclear weapons program, submit to a rigorous verification and safeguards regime, and open substantive dialogue on its support for global terrorism. If this is achieved, President Obama would be a shoo-in for the Nobel Peace Prize. Chance of this happening: I would guess near zero.

2. Demonstrable and significant progress: Iran's continued recalcitrance is identified early by all the relevant players, especially Russia and China, and the UN Security Council responds within a few weeks with a substantial ramping up of de facto sanctions on Iran -- sanctions that involve the effective participation of Iran's chief trading partners, the EU, Russia, China, and India. Chance of this happening: I would guess not zero, but maybe just a 1-in-10 chance.

3. No progress beyond what the Bush team already achieved: Iran's continued recalcitrance provokes a range of global rhetorical censure ranging from Chinese tut-tutting to American (or French or British) bluster. The United States unilaterally increases sanctions pressure, but only incrementally because U.S. unilateral leverage over Iran is minimal. Europeans agree to review their options for an incremental increase of sanctions pressure themselves, but do not commit irrevocably to a ramp up in pressure. Russians and Chinese acknowledge that Iran has not been forthcoming, but block further sanctions on the grounds that these would be counterproductive. Chance of this happening: I would guess this is the most likely outcome, so maybe a 4-in-10 chance.

4. Less progress than what the Bush team already achieved: Iran's continued recalcitrance even after the U.S. has played its "hole card" of the evidence of Iranian duplicity concerning the second enrichment site splits the international coalition and key members, likely Russia or China, blame the United States for its mishandling of the negotiations. Chance of this happening: I fear this is the next most-likely-outcome, so maybe a 3-in-10 chance.

5. False progress is achieved: Desperate to show progress, the United States accepts a fig-leaf arrangement, or merely declares the negotiations fruitful when they are not, and so there is neither true progress towards Iranian relinquishment of their nuclear program nor increased leverage imposed on them to make a deal in the next round more likely. Chance of this happening: I don't think this is as likely as some Obama critics think, but there is a non-trivial possibility of this happening, perhaps barely a 2-in-10 chance.

6. U.S. capitulation: Desperate for a deal, the United States follows the advice of some and signs a grand bargain agreement that "resolves" the issue by preemptively conceding to all of Iran's demands, including the demand that the world community stop complaining about the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Chance of this happening: not likely, probably only marginally more likely than outcome #1.

It should be noted that when Dennis Ross, a key player on the Obama team, outlined his strategy for Iran, it was essentially the Bush administration strategy and so was likely only to produce what the Bush team had been able to produce -- or a slight improvement thereupon. While he hoped for Outcome #1, he acknowledged that it might more realistically only achieve #2 in the medium-term. For that reason, I do not think it is fair to declare the strategy a failure if it doesn't achieve #1. However, if it doesn't achieve #2, I think it is fair, and perfectly within the terms established by Team Obama, to declare it a failure.

By Peter Feaver

It is early but perhaps not too early to do a quick assessment on how Team Obama is doing on the three things I am tracking on the Iran issue.

On the micro-tactics level of whether the Team was rattled by the news, the early indications are mixed but on the whole favorable. On the positive side, the New York Times has an extensive tic-toc that makes it clear that the administration had been developing a game-plan for the rollout of this information for quite some time. And Obama knew that the Iranians knew that we knew and were developing a plan to deal with the contingency that Iran forced our hand. On the negative side, even though Obama understood that our hand could be forced at any time, the Iranians were nevertheless able to gain a modest tactical advantage by determining the release of the information and by releasing it before we had adequately briefed our Security Council partners. As a result, we lost an important opportunity: using President Obama’s historic chairing of the UN Security Council meeting to unveil the information. Still, Team Obama adjusted to the fluidity of the unfolding events and it probably helped that the UNGA duties meant the President was focused on foreign policy and not doing yet another health care photo-op. I score this as moderately encouraging. Barring further revelations, this metric is probably complete.

On the more serious matter of whether the Obama team is poised to exploit this opportunity to establish the leverage they need, the early indicators may be a wee bit less promising. Consider this quote from that same NYT article:

There was “a fair amount at anger” within the administration over Iran’s disclosure, a senior administration official said. But there was also some satisfaction. A second senior official said: “Everybody’s been asking, ‘Where’s our leverage?’ Well, now we just got that leverage.”

If the advisor meant “leverage over Iran,” then I am worried. The public awareness that Iran has been cheating does not really contribute much leverage over Iran. Yes, it is embarrassing for them, and it means that Ahmadinejad and others will squirm for a while trying to answer awkward questions. But it does not provide us much real leverage, the sort of leverage that would adjust the Iranian regime’s cost-benefit calculation.

If, however, the advisor meant “leverage over Russia and China and, heck, even France, Germany, Britain, and India,” then I am encouraged. For that is the real impact of this news: it makes the case for sanctions stronger than ever, and it provides the Obama team with their best chance to get the sanctions before negotiations start in earnest rather than waiting until the negotiations fail and then trying to get the sanctions imposed. The “try negotiations first and then try sanctions” sequence had been Obama’s strategy. I did not meet anyone with real experience in governing who would say (off-the-record) that the sanctions would be forthcoming. There are simply too many exit ramps available for our wobbly partners in that sequence: Did negotiations fail because of the Iranians, or was it someone else’s fault? Have they really failed? Wasn’t there an encouraging exchange or two we should explore again? The problem with “tools of a last resort” is that in international diplomacy one can never know when the last resort has been reached.

So the old plan was this: try to negotiate with the Iranians without much leverage on our side (because we had not yet imposed the crippling sanctions) -- and then, when the negotiations fail, try to persuade our partners that the failure was due to Iranian misbehavior and so get them to do what they have refused for years to do and impose crippling sanctions. Then we would have leverage to try negotiations again.

What I can’t tell yet is whether the Obama team realizes they have an opportunity now to forge a plan with a (modestly) higher likelihood of success: use the revealed Iranian duplicity to exploit new-found (and doubtless temporary) Russian resolve to impose the crippling sanctions now. With the United States holding (again, temporarily) the UNSC chair, we can adjust the agenda in this way and with all those soft power assets to spend, President Obama might be able to pull it off. A brief window of opportunity has been opened. Do our leaders realize that, and are they marshalling the forces to jump through the window?

Which leads us to the third indicator: how Team Obama is handling interactions with the “in-laws.” The quality of the interactions depends on results and, of course, it is too early to see any real results. (I haven’t seen anything solid on the Israeli angle, but my eyes are peeled.) The coding of this metric depends on the coding of the second metric. If Obama is using this news to assemble leverage that consists of little more than lots of stern faces on our side of the negotiating table on October 1 coupled with some sincere promises from those stern-faced stalwarts that if the Iranians mess with us again then this time, really, we will consider crippling economic sanctions -- well, in that case, I think his diplomacy and powers of persuasion will be sufficient to get the in-laws on board such a leaky vessel. But if he is trying to assemble serious leverage now so that negotiations have the best possible chance of producing results, then he will face his toughest diplomatic challenge of his young tenure, and we will soon see whether he is succeeding in that task.

By Peter Feaver

Secretary Clinton's awkward Iran statement last week and the extensive efforts at damage control that she did yesterday on Meet the Press underline a basic challenge of statecraft and contingency planning: It is hard not to have Plan B interfere with Plan A.

In this case, Plan A is the effort to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and Plan B concerns what we would do if Plan A fails and Iran succeeds in getting a nuclear weapon. It would be irresponsible of the Obama administration not to be evaluating various Plans B, including the one option Clinton mentioned in her original statement: extending some sort of defensive shield over America's Middle Eastern friends to neutralize the strategic advantages Iran might hope to derive from their nuclear arsenal. However, press attention to Plan B undermines Plan A because it gives the impression that the United States has resigned itself to living with an Iranian nuclear weapon.

Clinton's assignment on Meet the Press was to knock down that impression. She did not disavow the defensive shield option of Plan B, unlike White House spinners who had sought to distance Obama from her earlier remarks by claiming they were just her "personal" views (a very odd way to treat the country's chief diplomat). But she drew sharp lines -- and drew them more sharply than President Obama has -- concerning Iran's control of the nuclear fuel cycle, essentially adopting a very hawkish stance concerning Plan A.

Reasonable people can debate whether a defensive shield is a good component of a sound Plan B (no one, not even the most ideologically committed academic realist, I hope, would pretend that it is by itself a sufficient Plan B). But no reasonable person can be dismayed that the Obama administration is doing such contingency planning. And while we debate the merits of this or that component, we should not be punishing the administration for the fact that they are doing contingency planning. It is hard enough to do it well without piling on from those of us on the bench.

Excessive concern about leaks concerning contingency planning can undermine it. Arguably, one of the reasons that the Phase IV planning on Iraq had the problems that it had was due to this concern. In the first term, during the critical coercive diplomacy phase on Iraq, the Bush administration was concerned that leaks about "occupation" planning would undermine the coercion efforts (giving the impression that a long-term occupation was inevitable). That concern may have led the team to unwisely constrain the planning; as a result, Phase IV was considerably under-developed compared to Phases I, II, and III.

Bottom line: let's constructively critique the various options under consideration, but let's not punish the administration for considering them.

By Peter Feaver

I had some sympathy for the Obama folks when I read this newspaper account of yesterday's meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki. Apparently, it was a solid, business-oriented meeting. And since President Obama has reportedly stopped holding regular video-teleconferencing with Maliki (a staple of US-Iraqi relations under the last Administration), this meeting was especially important.

What caught my eye was President Obama's comment at the end of the story: ""Overall," Obama said, "we have been very encouraged by the progress that has been made."

This statement struck me as both honest and misleading. Honest, because if you start with a January 2007 frame of reference -- say then-candidate Obama's claim that surge was going to have no impact on violence -- then the progress has been remarkable and very encouraging. But it also struck me as misleading in the sense that it did not also say that the recent spike in violence, and even more the recent flare-up of Arab-Kurdish tensions, is undoubtedly discouraging, and I would be surprised if the Obama team did not feel the same. Of course, as the Post story related, Obama also acknowledged that there are "tough days ahead" in Iraq. But the overall message was one of progress, a word he invoked 6 times in the prepared remarks and 3 times in the answer to the first question and that is the lede for the story.

That got me wondering: would those folks (say the mainstream Bob Woodward or Tom Ricks, let alone other people in the nuttier fringes of the Bush-bashing chorus) who established a cottage industry lambasting Bush Administration rhetoric as "happy talk" rise up and start calling a foul on President Obama? President Bush regularly caveated his statements of progress with reminders that there were "tough days ahead" and, if memory serves, Rumsfeld was the guy who coined "long, hard slog." In their coverage of Bush, sometimes the reporters would include mention of the caveats and qualify their lede accordingly; sometimes the reporters would include mention of the caveats and yet stick to a "happy talk" lede; and sometimes the reporters would simply omit any mention of the caveats, perhaps the better to advance the "happy talk" lede. Regardless of how many times President Bush presented carefully caveated assessments, the Bush-bashers could always rest their indictment on one or two off-the-cuff uncaveated remarks.

At what point will Obama's rhetoric on Iraq suffer this same fate? I hope never and, even more, I hope it never deserves to. It is appropriate for President Obama to balance "if it bleeds, it leads" coverage with mention of developments that are not getting as much press attention. And it is appropriate for President Obama in public to exhort the Iraqis towards greater progress by emphasizing the positive rather than dwelling on the negative. In fact, President Obama has talked so little in public about Iraq I would welcome virtually anything he said. Of course, I also hope that President Obama is as candid and clear-eyed about the challenges in private as his predecessor was, and I hope he continues to offer appropriate caveats even if he is stressing a publicly optimistic message. If the "happy talk police" give him the free pass they never gave his predecessor, so be it. The Iraqi challenge is hard enough without having to duck "police" brutality, even if it is only rhetorical.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

The Washington Post is spinning this comment from Ali Akbar Velayati, one of Iran's former foreign ministers and an ally of the regime leader Ayatollah Khamenei, as a positive and hopeful sign: "America accepts a nuclear Iran, but Britain and France cannot stand a nuclear Iran." It is true that this statement is, by Iranian standards, a compliment to President Obama, but I am not sure it is a very auspicious omen about the fruitfulness of any coming negotiations with Iran.

To be clear, I do think it is worth negotiating with Iran, under proper conditions. Indeed, I think it is worth negotiating with Iran even if you believe that such negotiations will fail and that the military option is the best of a bad set of options. I am not ready to endorse the military option, but I don’t see how any such option is viable without having conducted more intensive negotiations than we have thus far. Put it another way: It seems to me that negotiations are a necessary precursor to the military option, and they are probably even a necessary precursor to ramping up non-military coercive pressure, too.

But it is dispiriting to see the Iranians praise Obama as someone who “gets it” -- who gets that Iran really needs to be a nuclear power. I don’t think it is necessarily a fair assessment of Obama’s position, but it could be a fairly revealing indication of Iran’s position. And that depresses an already pessimistic assessment about the possibility of achieving a meaningful settlement with Iran that leaves Iran short of nuclear-weapons capability.

The only plausible “acceptable” diplomatic solution I can imagine is one in which we give Iran some sort of fig-leafs on a few key issues: “yes, they have a ‘right’ to control the fuel cycle”; and “yes, they have understandable security needs that make nuclear weapons attractive”; and “yes, even under the NPT, they retain the right some day to leave the NPT if they so chose” and so on. In exchange for these rhetorical concessions and lots of other goodies, Iran would agree to forego these “rights” for some long period of time (at least a decade or more) and would agree to intrusive inspections that verified they were honoring those promises (even if only for a decade or so). This would not solve the Iranian nuclear issue for all time, but it would kick the can far enough down the road to be counted a success. (Note: even the most optimistic outcome for a military option would only delay an Iranian nuclear program by a decade.)

If Velayti was hinting at those sorts of fig leafs in his statement, then I agree with the Post that this is, relatively speaking, a positive sign. But I think he is saying something different: that the Iranians perceive Obama to be so eager to cut a deal with Iran that he will accept a nuclear Iran. If that is the case, then Obama would be starting any such negotiations with a weak hand.

By Peter Feaver

The recent Kurdish gambit on a separate constitution is precisely the sort of thing I was worried about in making Vice President Biden the point man on Iraqi political reconciliation. When he was running for president, Biden sought to distinguish himself on the Iraq issue by prominently embracing the plan proposed by Peter Galbraith for forcibly dividing Iraq into three regions. This plan was popular with the Kurds -- no surprise, Galbraith was a long-time supporter of Kurdish interests -- but with no one else in the region (although the Iranians may have secretly liked it). It was panned by independent experts, and the American media generously avoided taking it seriously.

The Kurds may have taken it seriously, however, and their recent actions would seem drawn from the Galbraith-Biden playbook. Of course, one cannot blame Biden for Kurdish obstreperousness, but it is undeniably awkward to have America’s point man on the issue criticizing the Kurds for doing what for years he claimed was the only long-term solution for Iraq.

Biden is hardly the first political leader to be caught undermining his own campaign rhetoric on vital matters of national security. President Bush, himself, campaigned against the idea of using the military for nation-building and then committed the military to two massive nation-building projects in Afghanistan and Iraq. But Biden’s predicament is especially thorny, because to accomplish his new assignment, he must go beyond the pedestrian political hypocrisy of saying one thing and doing another. He must also somehow persuade the Iraqis that he no longer believes what he once emphatically said. And he must accomplish this at a time when American prestige and leverage (what the Iraqis call wasta) is steadily diminishing in Iraq.

By Peter Feaver

While I am thinking about the intersection of personnel and policy, I wonder what to make of this bit of news: apparently VP Biden will be tapped as the "unofficial envoy to Iraq." This appears not to be the same role as that filled by General Lute, President Bush's "Iraq czar" who was primarily responsible for knocking heads together back in DC to help the mission overseas.  Lute still remains (for the time being) but his position has been downgraded several levels from an Assistant to the President down to a Special Assistant to the President. And, obviously, it is not the same position as the official envoy to Iraq, Ambassador Chris Hill -- the President's personal civilian representative in Baghdad -- although it sounds like it will overlap heavily with that position. Having someone at a senior level focused on Iraq makes sense and it does not get much more senior than the Vice President. So on paper, at least, this is not a bad idea. What concerns me is precisely what Rahm Emanuel told Newsweek, namely that Biden "... knows the players...He brings a lot of experience and expertise on this issue to the table..."

He knows the players alright and, more to the point, the players know him.  What they know him best for is his prominent embrace of the Galbraith plan of a forced partition of Iraq into three parts -- one dominated by the Kurds in the north, one dominated by the Shia in the south, and the remainder dominated by the Sunnis. This plan was later picked up by Les Gelb and eventually by then-Senator Biden. By the time the presidential campaign was in full swing, the media was calling it the Biden plan. It certainly was a bold and strategic idea -- one might even call it Churchillian. Unfortunately, except for the Kurds -- for whom Galbraith was a long-time advocate - it was not popular in the region. On the contrary, it was viewed much the way that Churchill was viewed -- as colonialist meddling that would plunge the region still further into war. Indeed, the terrorists had claimed that the purpose of the US invasion of Iraq in the first place was to divide up Iraq and grab its oil and so the Galbraith-Gelb-Biden plan may have felt like a recruiting bonanza. I bet one could find jihadi websites touting it as the secret "real plan" for Iraq. Of course, Vice President Biden is now working for President Obama and President Obama has largely embraced the Bush plan for Iraq not the Galbraith plan. I have no reason to doubt VP Biden's current commitment to this same plan which aims to make Iraq a unified and stable partner. But I wonder if the famously conspiracy-minded folks in the Middle East will have the same benign view or whether instead they will believe that Biden will be seeking to implement partition. If their perceptions veer off in that direction, transition policy in Iraq could get even tougher than it is likely to be -- and that is more than tough enough.

By Peter Feaver

I was wrong (and lots of people are adding, "again"). It turns out that Dennis Ross will not be taking up the strategic planning portfolio, as I had previously thought, but will instead take up the broader Middle East portfolio. The wiring diagram is not clear from afar (and may not even be clear from close up) but it looks like he will have a position more like a combination of the roles filled by Elliott Abrams, who covered everywhere the "Near East and North Africa" from Morocco to Iran (but not Iraq), plus Meghan O'Sullivan, who had Iraq and Afghanistan. He also has Pakistan, and so that gives him a remarkably broad regional portfolio that encompasses the two hot war military conflicts plus arguably the most urgent national security problem (Iran). It encompasses the portfolios of two formidable Special Envoys housed at State -- George Mitchell (Israel-Palestine) and Richard Holbrooke (Af-Pak). It also, quite deliberately I suspect, matches almost exactly the portfolio of General Petraeus, CENTCOM commander. That is a lot of grist for one mill, and more world-historical-figures than most mortals could hope to coordinate. But Dennis has formidable talents and will, I believe, work well with Tom Donilon, the deputy national security advisor who is said to have been the one most keen to bring him on board. So I think it will work out well. For my part, I will be interested to see how all these people coordinate with the Global Engagement Directorate which struck me as an intriguing office when it was announced (especially for the region that comprises Dennis Ross's portfolio)  but which, so far as I can tell, is still in the process of getting its sea legs.

As for my old post on the NSC's strategic planning cell, I now believe it is being filled by Ambassador Mary Yates. She has a long and distinguished record of public service. She is a career Foreign Service Officer with an extensive career with emphasis on Africa. She most recently served as the senior civilian advisor at the new military command of AFRICOM. This experience of close coordination with the uniformed and civilian sectors of the Department of Defense -- at the intersection of policy and operations - will be valuable for her in her new post. The key to succeeding in the strategic planning office lies in establishing close working relationships vertically with the top people -- Jones and Donilon -- and horizontally with the other heavyweights at the NSC -- likely to be Ross and McDonough - and diagonally with the other key offices in the White House. If Ambassador Yates can do that, the office has the potential to make useful contributions to the system. The Obama administration likes to think big about domestic and foreign affairs and so it is a good time to be sitting in the "big think" chair.