Valentina Pasquali

Washington D.C. – Almost eight years after aircrafts flown by terrorists hit the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington D.C., the U.S.-led ‘war on terror’ is far from won and Al-Qaeda, identified as the perpetrator of those and many other attacks on American military forces as well as civilians, has grown into the name-brand for an international franchise of increasingly decentralized terrorist groups.

Estimates on the overall cost of the so-called ‘war on terror’ vary widely and range from the $700 billion calculated by the Congressional Research Service to the about $4 trillion some private analysts claim have been spend. This money includes budget appropriations for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other military operations decided by the Bush Administration in response to 9/11. We are talking about a rather large sum, independent of the exact amount; which begs the uncomfortable question of how effectively this money has been used and with what results.

“Al-Qaeda probably is weaker than it was in 2001, because its leadership has been on the run and it has suffered losses of much of its cadre,” Paul Pillar says to Washington Prism in an e-mail interview. Pillar is a former CIA and National Intelligence officer and a visiting professor at Georgetown University where he teaches security studies.

American anti-terrorism operations have been focused on the military structure of Al-Qaeda, and on its leadership. The long list of targeted assassinations of the organization’s high-level officials, (for example Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s, Al-Qaeda’s number one in Iraq, in 2006), is a testimony to this strategy.

“The elimination of a number of senior Al-Qaeda militants has damaged the network,” argues Paul Wilkinson in a separate interview, “but the damage is likely to be repaired very rapidly.  There is no evidence that Al-Qaeda is short of new recruits or experienced operatives.” Wilkinson is a former professor of International Relations and former Director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He’s one of Europe’s foremost experts on Al-Qaeda and terrorist networks.

The fact is that, however painful a setback the removal of senior operatives might be for Al-Qaeda, the organization has shown a strong track record in filling vacancies at mid-to-senior-levels. Moreover, Al-Qaeda has repeatedly shown itself able to reorganize after major blows.  “They suffered a major setback in Iraq but they have consolidated their position in Pakistan and are expanding their influence and pressure in Africa, including not only the Horn of Africa but also in West Africa,” claims Wilkinson.

As a result, it is hard to say what the overall balance of targeted assassinations might be. For example, what is the real effect of the operation carried out by the CIA that reportedly killed Abu Laith al-Libi, one of Al-Qaeda’s most senior officials, in a frontier province of Pakistan at the end of last year? “The loss of valuable experience probably is a net minus for the group, although as with any organization, the possibility of upward mobility and fresh blood can be an offsetting advantage,” Paul Pillar explains.

Moreover, while targeting Al-Qaeda’s central structure might hamper the activities of the ‘parent’ cell, it simultaneously propels the outgrowth of many smaller and far flung offspring. “We have noticed that, beginning with 9/11 and then continuing with the attacks in London, Madrid and Mumbai, we are experiencing more of the phenomenon that Mark Sageman called ‘the bunch of guys,’” argues Gary LaFree during a telephone interview. LaFree is the Director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a center of excellence of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security based at the University of Maryland. The result of this American strategy intensely focused on “Al-Qaeda central” has been increased activity on the part of people that have very little or almost no contact between one another or with the Al-Qaeda’s leadership. “They are increasingly like a decentralized franchising operation,” says LaFree, “which is very much alive and well.”

This increasing decentralization is changing the definition of terrorism, and it creates problems for those experts and academics that try to categorize the activities of terrorist groups. “The definition of what Al-Qaeda really is and what can be counted as Al-Qaeda’s actions is especially problematic in Iraq. In this country the violence is so widespread that it is very difficult to separate out what might be just military actions, insurgencies, ordinary crime or terrorism,” LaFree explains. He outlines the challenges he faces in recording attacks in Iraq to his database of over 80,000 incidents of terrorism that have happened all over the world since 1970. While more traditionalist terrorist groups, such as the Irish IRA, would normally claim responsibility for their action (55% of LaFree’s 80,000 recorded attacks have a clear attribution,) Al-Qaeda rarely does the same. In Iraq, for example, after the U.S. invasion of 2003 terrorist cells claimed responsibility for only 9% of all episodes of violence. This significantly complicates the job of those who are tasked with assessing the fluctuating strength of Al-Qaeda and the developments in its internal power structure.

Overall, LaFree is convinced that the U.S. has been relatively successful in weakening the leadership of Al-Qaeda. “The part that we probably have been much less successful with is stopping the social movement that has grown around Al-Qaeda,” he argues. According to LaFree, removing the opponent’s leadership has always been a critical strategy of conventional war-fighting, but is not as true anymore. “Hitting the opponent’s leadership doesn’t have the same meaning when there is a fair amount of support and sympathy for the kind of ideas that are being propounded,” he says.

LaFree’s START Center, in partnership with worldpublicopinion.org, conducted several surveys of public opinion in the Middle East: “We have found a fair amount of support from the general population for either Al-Qaeda or ideas associated with it,” explains LaFree. Worldpublicopinion.org, managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, is a consortium of research centers studying the response of global public opinion to international developments. The results of the latest round of polling, released on February 24^th, show for example that large majorities throughout the Muslim world agree with Al-Qaeda’s goal of pushing U.S. military forces out of predominantly Muslim countries. This is true for 87 percent of Egyptians, 64 percent of Indonesians, and 60 percent of Pakistanis. The survey also indicates that Muslim public opinion overwhelmingly rejects the use of attacks on civilians as a tactic to pursue these goals. Nevertheless, this poll illustrates that some of Al-Qaeda’s claims resonate well beyond its military operatives and to ordinary people throughout the Muslim world. Substantial numbers, in some cases majorities, of those interviewed by START and worldpublicopinion.org even approve of attacks on American troops based in Muslim countries.

The lack of a more comprehensive approach on the part of the U.S., one that would address the social implications of Al-Qaeda rather than its military prowess alone, has resulted in a three-legged and inconclusive war, at least thus far. “The organization is not crippled.  Even less crippled is the wider radical Islamist movement, which extends well beyond Al-Qaeda,” argues Paul Pillar. And Wilkinson echoes him: “I suspect that the prediction of a fatal schism in the network is premature.”

Gary LaFree is wary of an exclusively military approach to fighting international terrorism. “Simply going after what the military calls ‘the bad guys,’ has little impact on people living in a remote part of Pakistan or Iraq or Afghanistan,” he warns. Instead, the U.S. should pay more attention to winning over people’s hearts and minds. “We have to remember that our opponents are providing social services, that they actually have a presence in the communities. If this battle is lost, then it is likely that the whole war will be lost too,” argues LaFree.

Of the specific policies undertaken by the Bush Administration, Paul Pillar appreciates the increased attention paid to security countermeasures on American territory as the most effective step taken in recent years. “What has not worked has been the outgoing administration’s tendency to lump all terrorism into a single category and to use a ‘either you’re for us or for the terrorist’ approach,” Pillar argues.

According to Pillar, the new Obama Administration should “quietly discard the harmful and misleading ‘war on terror’ terminology.” In his opinion, this rhetoric has played into the view put forward by extremists of a religious war in which the United States is waging war on Islam.  For Gary LaFree, the new U.S. Government must look for international partners. “The idea that one country can go at it alone without international cooperation is a dangerous one,” he says. LaFree concludes on a quasi-optimist note, by recalling the spontaneous outburst of global support for the U.S. that followed 9/11, and which has been squandered thereafter: “the world community as a whole is not happy with random violence and people being tortured and killed, no matter who is behind it.”

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

The results of two rounds of U.S.-led polling of public opinion in Iran, conducted in 2006 and 2008, portray a moderate Iranian people. The studies show Iranians as relatively pleased with their own system of government and electoral system, although critical of certain aspects of it. Iranians appear open to multilateralism and international organizations, even in the realm of human rights. While they are eager to push forward with the nuclear program, they don’t necessarily want to develop nuclear weapons. They long to be treated as an important regional actor but don’t wish for regional hegemony. They are suspicious of terrorist groups and even hold a generally positive view of the American people. In this overall temperate picture, deeply rooted animosity toward the U.S. Government remains as a fundamental component of the Iranian identity.

While Iran’s presidential elections approach, and as the Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress discuss opportunities for an overture toward Teheran, Washington Prism’s Valentina Pasquali spoke to Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org and the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) of the University of Maryland, about his experience assessing the Iranian psyche. Mr. Kull is a political psychologist who studies world public opinion on international issues. He directed both the 2006 and the 2008 surveys in Iran.

Valentina Pasquali: What would you say was the most striking result of your two rounds of surveys in Iran?

Steven Kull: What comes through quite strongly is the extent to which Iranians are not in a revolutionary mindset. There is this image of Iranians being swept up by the kind of zeal one associates with the early days of the Bolsheviks, that they have an ideology that they are aiming to spread. I just don’t see any evidence of this, in the polling data and the focus groups. Iranians are supportive of an Islamic state, but they are also reaching out to the West in a variety of ways: they endorse democracy and human rights, and endorse changes for the role of women. They are evolving and trying to integrate these liberal ideas into their own system. But it is a struggle; they are not, by any means, ready to abandon their Islamic roots. They perceive the West, particularly the United States, as exerting a destabilizing effect on them and making it more difficult for them to find their way. In short, on the one hand, the number of people who truly identify with the revolutionary Islamic mindset is quite small. On the other, I should also underscore that the idea that Iranians, underneath it all, love America, love the West, and can’t wait for the current government to fall so that they can become a western-style democracy, is also a dream unsupported by reality.

VP: Where do Iranian people stand on the nuclear issue?

SK: Both in the polling and the focus groups we found widespread determination on the part of the Iranians to acquire a capacity to enrich uranium, combined with a strong sense of the constraints that should be put on developing a nuclear weapon. A fairly large majority perceives that developing a nuclear weapon would be contrary to the principles of Islam. The Iranian elite and religious leaders have put forward this view and it would be very difficult for them to change course. Maybe public opinion doesn’t determine their decisions, but there is something to be said about the normative environment the leadership has created, rooted in the idea that it would not be legitimate to acquire nuclear weapons. I think it would require a significant trigger for them to switch course, something would have to happen that dramatically increased the threat to Iran. It’s quite unlikely that they would just abruptly cross that line.

Now, it is also clear that the Iranians are aware of the fact that having a nuclear energy program serves more purposes than just nuclear energy. They want to be one step closer to having nuclear weapons capability. They perceive that this would give them a number of benefits: greater status and a deterrent effect on other parties. Moreover, there is a widespread perception that neighboring countries are not complying with the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Iranians think that others are secretly developing nuclear weapons and that the NPT regime is fragile, and, as a result, they want to be well positioned should the NPT regime collapse.

VP: In the discussion of your work in Iran, you addressed the overstated perception Iranians have of American power in the world. Were you able to assess what this perception was born out of?

SK: The majority of Iranians we polled think the U.S. controls most of what happens in the world. In the focus groups we did, some of the views that were expressed were particularly potent, for example the idea that the U.S. controls Al-Qaeda. Why? I don’t have an easy answer to that. It is a belief that seems to have a quasi-religious connotation. When Iranians use the term ‘the Great Satan,’ they honestly describe how they perceive the U.S.; something like a cosmic principle, and not just an ordinary state that happens to be rather rich and well armed. Certainly the long history of the U.S. having a highly intrusive role in Iran matters. In general, I would say that there is a tendency in that part of the world toward conspiracy theory, a tendency to see complex organizing themes behind the surface of things. Even on the Al Jazeera website there is a section called conspiracy theory. With respect to Iranians in particular, there also is a history of discovering at a later time that America was behind something that they had not previously assumed. And so it has become a kind of default position to assume that America is behind something. Iranians’ perception of being under siege works as an important glue holding their society together. I think the best comparison to try understanding Iran is America shortly after 9/11. America was so cohesive, and there was very little criticism of the government. All the polls showed that the people’s attitude toward the government or everything American became much more positive. It’s not that people were lying, or making things up. But when people feel threatened, they tend to huddle closer together. Iran has that same quality, constantly feeling under siege.

VP: What do you think is the effect of international sanctions on the psyche of the Iranian people?

SK: It’s not something we polled on directly, but based on my experience, sanctions contribute to this generalized sense of being under pressure by the West. It also justifies the economic failures of the current government and it feeds into this idea that the U.S. is hostile to Islam itself and is out to undermine it.

VP: What was the people’s view of President Ahmadinejad, at least at the time of your most recent survey?

SK: About two-thirds of the people we interviewed at the beginning of 2008 expressed a favorable opinion. Because we heard so much about people coming to Iran and hearing negative views of the president we proofed further and divided people according to income and education. People with higher education or higher income were not as positive, they were more divided about Ahmadinejad. And those tend to probably be the people that Westerners encounter more often when they come to Tehran.

VP: How would you explain the animosity of the Iranian people toward the U.S. Government?

SK: I think it is important to recognize how deep the roots of this animosity are and how far back they go. For many people in Iran the experience of the Shah was a very negative one and the U.S. was always associated with it. I don’t think other Muslim countries have a history that could trigger that depth of animosity. However, it is also true that Iran has a stronger than average attraction to the west. It’s kind of a complex love/hate relation, which you can find broadly in the Muslim world but is more common in Iran. There is some magnetism, while, at the same time, animosity toward the U.S. plays a huge role in the structure of society. So much that it would be difficult to break away from it. Many politicians and leaders embrace this national narrative rooted in a negative relationship with the U.S. An effort to change this approach would rattle fundamental structures in Iran, and could be very destructive to the Iranian identity.

I do think that there is a genuine desire among most Iranians to improve relations; the question is whether or not this can be done in a way that does not make Iranians feel like they are just submitting. They have a strong sense of pride and any agreement would need not to be received as some kind of defeat, or capitulation. I think that the proposition that Tom Pickering, and others, have put forward as far as the nuclear weapons program, to multilateralize it or to create some kind of structure with intrusive inspections and a limit capacity to enrich uranium, would go over. We polled on it and the majority of Iranians said they would accept it. And it has been alluded to by a few Iranian leaders. To actually bring it about would probably require a more complex bargain touching on a wide array of components, as for example the removal of some or all of the economic sanctions. From the first to the second poll we conducted in Iran, we found an increase in the readiness to support steps that would improve relations with the U.S., such as growing diplomatic contacts and more people-to-people exchanges. Probably, some combination of removal of economic sanctions, limited enrichment capacity with highly intrusive inspections, and greater cultural contacts, could be a package that, from all the indications I have, would be feasible. Clearly, giving up the idea of regime change is a key part of this grand bargain. I don’t have poll data to show this but, from everything I see, the Iranian people as well as the Islamic regime find the rhetoric of regime change annoying and threatening. Iranians don’t react thinking that the U.S. is simply going after their government but not after them. Rather, they see this as part of the American attempt to undermine their way of life. And they identify with the regime. I think this is the most important thing that U.S. government leaders can understand better. When we threaten the Iranian government, the Iranian people feel threatened too.

VP: According to your study, Iranians view most terrorist organizations in a negative light. However, this doesn’t apply to Hezbollah and Hamas, outlining a difficult relationship with Israel. What is your understanding of the general perception of Israel among regular Iranian people?

SK: There is a very negative view. The polling numbers are extremely negative and there is definitely a lot of hostility. It’s also striking that, while Iranians reject attacks on civilians quite strongly, when asked about Palestinians attacking Israeli civilians they are more divided. I think that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is very engaging to Iranians, and other Muslims, because it is a very distinct and vivid narrative of Muslims being victimized, in their mind, by a Western based force that ultimately works on behalf of the United States. It’s not so much that they care about the Palestinians per se, but they identify with the Palestinians and the conflict strikes a very strong emotional chord.

But in all honesty, I don’t think you would find the desire to annihilate the state of Israel to be the majority opinion in Iran. My impression is that Iranians would probably be fine with the two-state solution, and that the Arab initiative that is in play right now would be attractive to them. I don’t see any real indication that Iranians are dead-set on some kind of maximal outcome where Israel is eliminated. They don’t perceive themselves as pursuing maximal outcomes at all. They perceive themselves as in a defensive mode.

VP: Do you have a sense of how consistent, or inconsistent, the mood of the Iranian public is? Your latest survey was conducted approximately 12 months ago; do you have reasons to believe that, were you to do another one now, the results would be fairly similar, or quite the contrary, completely different?

SK: All publics are pretty stable and so, as a general baseline, as a pollster you don’t expect big change. The most interesting question is what changes might be happening given the new U.S. Administration of President Barack Obama. To the extent that we have data from the Muslim world, but not Iran, I can tell you that people are hopeful, but on a wait-and-see mode. Iranians have an elaborate belief system that says it is impossible for the U.S. to change, that the U.S. is structurally the way it is, driven by lobbies, and particularly the Israeli lobby. There is this narrative that says that Obama couldn’t change these things even if he wanted to. But I still think that, underneath, there is hope nonetheless, and that, if the U.S. does offer an overture, it would be difficult for Iran not to respond in some way.

VP: While surveying people in Iran you were free to touch upon almost every topic, with the exception of the clergy and the role of the Supreme Leader. Do you have a sense of how much the lack of such discussion clouds the overall validity of the survey?

SK: To make things clear, it wasn’t the government that forbade us to ask these questions, they didn’t have any direct involvement; rather the local polling organization we selected did its own self-censorship. And I think that, if we had brought the issue of the role of the clergy up directly in the focus groups, people would have been uncomfortable. I certainly would like to understand this issue better. From what I read, I don’t see a lot of signs that people are burning to actually discuss it though. It’s not that they are fully content. In a sense, this is comparable to asking Americans about the Supreme Court. “Should we get rid of the Supreme Court?” Americans don’t really think about it. They generally like the Supreme Court, they have some respect for it, but it’s mostly just part of the furniture. In Iran, the clergy is not one of those things that people are accustomed to challenging, no more so than the Americans are accustomed to challenging the Constitution. It should be understood that the Council of Guardians can be criticized, for example, for excluding candidates from elections. People do it all the time in Parliament, and there are demonstrations against such decisions. Specific choices can be questioned. But whether the Council of Guardians ought to have any role at all, that’s probably a question beyond what Iranians are willing to discuss. This is, in a way, very similar to asking Americans whether the Supreme Court should have any role. Here, where we have a Constitution and a Supreme Court that interprets it. In Iran the idea that the clergy plays some role in the interpretation of Sharia law and the Koran is not seen as something to question. However people might have criticisms about specific decisions, like people here might have criticisms about specific Supreme Court decisions. To an extent that we have trouble understanding, Iranians don’t perceive Islam, and even the Islamic state they have, as intrinsically opposed to democracy. Again, we have constraints on democracy here as well, it’s not like the majority can make any decision it wants; it is limited by the Constitution and how the Supreme Court interprets it. Iranians would say that this is the same for them, although they would probably acknowledge that their system is more restrictive. But they don’t see it as intrinsically problematic. Words like democracy and human rights are popular words.

VP: What do you think a U.S. Government official should come away from these surveys with? What is most important to understand about the views of the Iranian people?

SK: The combination of openness to the West as well as the rootedness in the idea of an Islamic government. That democracy and an Islamic government are not contradictory. And that Iranians are not in a pre-revolutionary state, but even open to influences from the West. I think it’s very important to get rid of the notion that they are against us; they are simply struggling with the process of modernization, and that is a difficult process. They are people with very proud roots, they achieved very high level of culture, but in the current period they are not doing so well, which is humiliating to them. They are also not ready to abandon their roots. Even as they open up to Western influences. In the end, you have some rejectionists, as you might say, and you have those that are totally ready to go over to the Western model, but the big majority both wants to keep its root and be in a relationship with the West. The problem is that we are not good at talking to that group, we tend to threaten the former and seduce the latter, or treat them as some kind of ally, but we haven’t found a good voice for the middle masses. This approach is rooted in our fantasy that, underneath, everybody is like us and people really want what we have. I think we really must let go of this, while also understand more clearly that Iranians are not in a revolutionary mindset. A lot would follow from this, I think.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington D.C. – On the eve of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s much anticipated visit to the Middle East, Elliott Abrams, former senior adviser on the Near and Middle East to the Bush Administration and currently senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, outlined the challenges Clinton will face as the new top U.S. diplomat, and portrayed a gloom state of affairs in the region, at the core of which is the stand-still in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“There’s very little belief, in the Middle East, that political negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians are possible,” Abrams, a leading neoconservative who was involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, said in a conference call with reporters. Currently, it is impossible to say who would even be a legitimate representative of either party at a negotiating table. In addition to a long-standing split within the Palestinian camp – where the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) represents only a part of the population, the other having embraced Hamas — the general elections recently held in Israel, and which have yet to yield a national government, only contributed to complicating the picture.

According to Abrams, the hope for a broad base coalition that would include both Likud and Kadima parties, an option more conducive to dialogue with the Palestinians, has already been crashed. Despite widespread popular support for such a solution, and Likud leader and Prime Minister-Designate Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts, Kadima’s Tzipi Livni is resistant to aligning her party with Israel’s more conservative factions. “The U.S. would prefer a broader base government,” Abrams said. Nevertheless, it unlikely that Washington will put any direct pressure on Livni. “It’s hard to know what the outcome of a direct intervention would be, and how Kadima would react to it,” Abrams explained.

Political negotiations over the future of Palestine have been languishing for a long time. Discussions have long reached a point where the minimum the Palestinian Authority is willing to accept is more than the maximum the Israeli Government is willing to concede. Increased Palestinian ambitions make things worse. In Abrams’ opinion, the idea that the creation of a Palestinian state is a matter of urgency and should be attended to immediately is relatively new and was not, for example, part of the road-map. The road-map contemplated incremental steps and an interim stage before a state could ever be created. “I think these issues shouldn’t be taboo. One can envision many different combinations beyond what the Palestinian Authority wants now,” Abrams claimed.

Because of the unlikelihood that a political agreement will be reached in the near-term, Abrams encouraged all parties involved to focus on a step-by-step approach aimed at improving material standards of living in the West Bank, leaving Gaza aside for the time being. “The economy in the West Bank has not collapsed yet. It is actually in a decent state. Even more could be achieved if the Israelis loosened road blocks and checkpoints. We should work to strengthen some of those Palestinian institutions, like the police force, that one day will be needed for a Palestinian state,” Abrams advised.

In this context, Abrams believes that the issue of Jewish settlements in the territories should be downgraded. In his opinion, population growth in the settlements doesn’t have, per se, a huge impact on the daily lives of Palestinians, nor does it hamper the possibility of the creation of a Palestinian state. The real problem lies, instead, in potential land expansion. However, according to Abrams, there has been little evidence of this in recent years. “The U.S. should tell Israel to exercise pressure on its settlers to avoid outgrowth of the settlements. For the rest, we should keep our ammunitions for issues that affect Palestinians more deeply,” Abrams advised.

As for Gaza itself, the Israeli blockade still stands. As a consequence only humanitarian supplies (i.e. medicines and food) are being allowed in, while other kinds of products, for example materials needed for reconstruction efforts, are not. “I don’t think Netanyahu will mend this position,” Abrams predicted, indicating that one, although difficult, possibility would be to get these supplies into Gaza through Egypt. “The Egyptians will be resistant because they don’t want the Israelis to offload Gaza on them,” Abrams explained. Things are further complicated by the fact that Israel considers an even more porous border between Egypt and Gaza as a potential threat in terms of arms smuggling. The Israelis are convinced, and many Egyptians agree, that Iranian weapons come into Gaza via the tunnels under the Egyptian border. Reportedly, most arms shipments leave Iran by sea, circumnavigate the Gulf of Aden, and ultimately stop short of the Suez Canal and hit land in places such as Somalia and Eritrea, finally arriving in Gaza via land.

In the context of Iran, Abrams criticized the Obama Administration’s new approach. Irrespective of whether or not the U.S might eventually start direct diplomacy with Teheran, Abrams believes that Washington should have never taken the military option off the table. “We need to keep the Iranians off balance and we need to keep them worried,” Abrams said. “Instead, I think we left the Iranians with the feeling that the possibility of a U.S. strike is totally out of the question,” he regretted.

While it appears increasingly unlikely that the U.S. will attack Iran, it is hard to predict what Israel might do. “They do see Iran as an existential threat and they believe that a nuclear Iran could trigger a second holocaust,” Abrams explained. According to him, Israel will have to consider how effective a military strike could be and assess the political and social consequences it would have. Abrams disagreed that attacking Iran would trigger a backlash and increase support for the regime. While he conceded that this could happen in the short run, a military intervention could cause the Iranian people to doubt their choice of leadership in the long run.

Finally, Elliott Abrams touched on the nomination of Dennis Ross to be Secretary Clinton’s special adviser to South West Asia and the Persian Gulf. The choice of Ross, criticized in Iran for his pro-Israel stances, had long been expected and turned out to be for a less significant role than what had been anticipated.
“I’m not sure why he wasn’t officially nominated for Iran. There are many speculations as to why that happened,” Abrams said. Interestingly, Ross has not been given the role of an envoy, such as George Mitchell for the Middle East, and is not tasked with outreach. Rather, Ross might be assigned to a behind-the-scene role of private consultations with Secretary Clinton. Clearly, Ross’ final job will also depend on what approach the Obama Administration decides to take toward Iran and on when any form of direct engagement might actually start.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Seven years after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C. of September 11^th, and the subsequent launch of the United States’ so-called “war on terror,” the international community continues grappling with the Al-Qaeda brand of terrorism. Valentina Pasquali asked Gary LaFree, one of America’s foremost experts, to evaluate the strength of Al-Qaeda today, as President Barack Obama begins reviewing, and reforming, the policies adopted by his predecessor George W. Bush. A professor of criminology and criminal justice, LaFree is the Director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a center of excellence of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security based at the University of Maryland.

Valentina Pasquali (VP): In early January, CIA officials announced they had killed two top-level Al-Qaeda officers in Pakistan. This is the latest of several such successes, but what should we make of it exactly? What does it mean for the so-called “war on terror”?

Gary LaFree (GL): It seems to me that the majority of experts and analysts in the field of terrorism studies would agree that the United States has been relatively successful in crippling the leadership of Al Qaeda. The part that we probably have been much less successful with is stopping the social movement that has grown around Al Qaeda. START has conducted several polls of public opinion in the Middle East and we have found a fair amount of support from the general population for either Al Qaeda or ideas associated with it. There is an interesting split here, and researchers and policy-makers must deal with it in assessing the “war on terror.” On the one hand the U.S. has been relatively successful in either imprisoning, killing or isolating the top leadership, on the other hand the Al Qaeda social movement, this sort of Al Qaeda franchise, is very much alive and well. While, from the perspective of a conventional-war situation, removing leadership has always been a critical strategy of war-fighting, this is not as true anymore, considering the sort of conflict that we are fighting against Al Qaeda. Hitting the opponent’s leadership doesn’t have the same meaning when there is a fair amount of support and sympathy for the kind ideas that are being propounded.

VP: These latest killings were widely publicized in U.S. media. Do you think this is meant for domestic purposes, or is it also meant to demoralize Al-Qaeda’s members or potential recruits? How do people in the Middle East react to news that the Al-Qaeda leadership has suffered yet another blow?

GL: This is an interesting question, and probably above my pay grade. My guess is the media is too diverse and independent to be controlled by the political process in this way. I suspect that this hypothesis is much too sophisticated for the relative strength of the political establishment.

As far as the Middle East is concerned, in our polling of the region we haven’t framed the question in exactly this fashion. I would say that, in general, targeted assassinations are a real tricky business and that it’s easy to get a backlash from them. If you look at past studies we have done, especially in the case of the conflict in Northern Ireland, there is some evidence suggesting that the British strategy of relying on targeted assassination backfired, creating an important backlash and strengthening the goals of the Irish Republican Army. I think the same is true in Israel.

Vice-versa, what really has come through from the polls we have done in Pakistan, Morocco, Egypt and Indonesia, is that public opinion reacts very differently when terrorists attack the U.S. military or American civilians. Attacks on the military in Iraq, for example, have a much higher rate of support than attacks on citizens. I think this is interesting, because it shows that the public has not yet really caught on the very blurred relationship between civilians and the military that the U.S. has been creating in Iraq, where many private contractors and non-military personnel do essentially military jobs.

VP: How quickly do you think the Al Qaeda leadership is able to regenerate itself? How successfully can they find new leaders that are as influential and effective as the previous ones?

GL: First of all, let me make clear that we deal entirely with unclassified information. I guess that if you spoke to someone in the CIA you would get a very different picture. In any case, we have noticed that, beginning with 9/11 and then continuing with the attacks in London, Madrid and Mumbai, we are experiencing more of the phenomenon that Mark Sageman called “the bunch of guys.” In other words, there is increased activity on the part of people that have very little or almost no contact with the central Al-Qaeda leadership. They are increasingly like a decentralized franchising operation.

As the U.S. puts increasing pressure on Al-Qaeda central, other outgrowths of the group spring up somewhere else. As a result, the connections between these separate groups are pretty much exclusively media-driven. I think this is one of the most interesting aspects of the world where we live in. This mechanism reminds me of that young boy in Minnesota, who, a few months ago, went into a school and started killing people. He later claimed to be have been inspired by right-wing organizations he read about on the web. He had no contact with these except through the internet. I think this scenario applies to a group like Al-Qaeda, where an increasing number of contacts happen outside of some centralized organization.

This creates real problems for our research. At START, we have been collecting records of terrorist attacks, from Al Qaeda as well as other terrorist groups, and we have now about 80,000 instances categorized, dating back to 1970. It is hard these days to decide how we should record the action of a group calling itself Al Qaeda of Iraq and committing a violent attack in Iraq. Whether it should be considered a case of domestic terrorism or whether everything that is linked to Al Qaeda should go under the label of international terrorism simply because the franchise operates in different countries. It has become a complicated question.

VP: From what you are saying, it appears that there is an increasing problem even just defining international terrorism and Al-Qaeda. Is this the case?

GL: Absolutely. The study of terrorism has always been based on the prototypical IRA or ETA-type of model, characterized by a strong organizational structure. Al-Qaeda’s kind of franchising operation, where a group of people in Europe, without any direct contact with Al-Qaeda’s central leadership, would launch an attack that they claimed was inspired by Al-Qaeda, is a very different model.

The definition of what Al-Qaeda really is and what can be counted as Al-Qaeda’s actions is especially problematic in Iraq. In this country the violence is so widespread that it is very difficult to separate out what might be just military actions, insurgencies, ordinary crime or terrorism.

Additionally, groups like the IRA and the ETA usually claimed responsibility for their acts, which always made it pretty easy to tell when they staged an attack. Al-Qaeda instead rarely does the same. In 55% of those 80,000 attacks listed on our database, a group or another has claimed some responsibility. Instead, if we look only at Iraq, after the U.S. led invasion in 2003, that number was only 9%. In other words, you have a ton of violence but you don’t really know what’s going on for sure.

VP: Compared to 2001, how would you assess today the strength and ability of organize to Al-Qaeda? To what extent do you think the “war on terror” may have crippled it?

GL: One of the ways we have tried to do this is by going through our records, all the way back to the beginnings of Al-Qaeda, and counting the number of fatalities and incidents that we could clearly attribute to Al-Qaeda. The highest number of attacks occurred in 2005; 2007 comes in second. So even if there has been a decline from 2005, it is not at all a huge decline. On the other hand, if you look at deaths and fatalities attributed to Al-Qaeda, 9/11 marked the highest point, because there were so many casualties just that day, since it was such an unusually big attack. The second highest years were 2004 and 2005, with both around 500 victims.

VP: What lessons can we learn from past mistakes and successes? What strategies do you think have worked best and which ones are ineffective?

GL: First and foremost that this is not conventional warfare. If we think we can rely on bombs and fighter planes without paying attention to the impact our actions have on the local population, we are very likely going to lose the conflict. I would say this is something that everybody agrees with at this stage of the game. It is clear that we have to remember that our opponents are providing social services, that they actually have a presence in the communities. Simply going after what the military calls “the bad guys,” has little impact on people living in a remote part of Pakistan or Iraq or Afghanistan: they don’t get any direct benefit out of the bomb going off in a distant location and they remain more concerned about their own safety and the safety of their family. If this battle is lost, then it is likely that the whole war will be lost too.

We also must learn that fighter bombers are not surgical instruments. Although they have become more sophisticated, they still make mistakes all the time, which create a backlash in how the local population looks at the military operation.

In a sense, this exemplifies exactly what is so effective about terrorism. It is a technique that takes the power of the other side and turns it against them. You can win a battle and still lose the campaign, and certainly lose out in world opinion.

Finally, one of the things that occurred to me after five years of running this center is that there is a curious kind of morality involved in terrorism. The public is really turned off when a large powerful army comes in and kills a bunch of people by mistake. They are also turned off, though, when terrorist groups do similar things. Most people are not thrilled to see beheadings on the internet. I think it works in both directions; government miscalculate and so do terrorist groups.

VP: Do you feel that the Al-Qaeda leadership has a sense of this public morality?

GL: They are sophisticated, they are very sophisticated. Yes, I’m absolutely sure they are aware. Blowing up innocent people, in general this sort of extreme violence, doesn’t play that well with public opinion. As I mentioned previously, we have done quite a bit of research on the British and the IRA — they are so well-studied and we thought we could learn a lot from them. The British lost a lot of ground with the population when they came down the hardest, because they were seen as cruel, while the IRA had people willing to take their own life to resist them.

VP: What are the steps ahead? What is your advice to the new Obama Administration?

GL: Above all else, I would say to him that if he wants to be successful, he has to look for international partners. At START, we have just finished a project for which we studied 53 terrorist groups identified by the U.S. Government as the most dangerous threats for the U.S. We found that a striking 97% of their attacks were in fact not carried out against American targets. In other words, countries like Pakistan have a huge interest in controlling terrorist groups that operate on their territories because they are the ones who get hit the worst. The idea that one country can go at it alone without international cooperation is a dangerous one, but I think the Obama Administration has really got that.

The world community as a whole is not happy with random violence and people being tortured and killed, no matter who is behind it. In fact, the U.S. had a tremendous amount of goodwill after 9/11. However, this doesn’t mean that you can be a bully. To the contrary, you have to be very careful how you exercise that kind of power and authority. In the Northern Ireland case, one of the British’s most successful decisions as far as public support was a military surge in 1972: they put many troops in with very little resistance to it, and allowed for very few casualties. The problem with this strategy is that, on the one hand, you must want to follow through and, on the other hand, you also have to be willing to get out as soon as possible. Most countries would not be thrilled with long-term occupations. Moreover, you have to be aware that the moment you start killing a lot of innocent people, the public gets tired of you.

VP: How do you see the future? Is there any reason to be optimistic?

GL: There are a couple of thoughts that can be comforting. Terrorism, while it appears from the outside to be incredibly prevalent, is much less common than people think. Consider all the vulnerable targets that fortunately people do not exploit or hit; an act of terrorism remains a relatively rare event. It is also a very cyclical phenomenon. So much of the terrorism from the 1970s was centered in Europe, and most of that has died out. In the 1980s, terrorism was predominantly Latin American, and most of that has disappeared as well. Now we are in a Jihadi period, but this also won’t go on forever. Terrorism tends to go in waves and fortunately we will get through this period; hopefully soon rather than later.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington D.C. – On the 30^th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution and as the new U.S. Administration of President Barack Obama promises to seek out channels for direct diplomacy with the Islamic Republic of Iran, American experts continue gathering in Washington to discuss the legacy of the 1979 take-over of Iran by the clergy. Despite the promise of new beginnings, old misconceptions and mutual mistrust continue to dominate the relations between the United States and Iran, which some fear might cripple renewed efforts toward engagement.

Two former Foreign Service officers who were posted in Iran during the lead-up to the revolution spoke at an event organized by the Middle East Institute, a think tank in Washington D.C., pointing out the strings of developments and setbacks that drove U.S. foreign policy towards defeat in 1979.

Guilty of wishful thinking, the U.S. had a very inaccurate understanding of the situation on the ground in Iran, argued Charlie Haas, country director for Iran at the Department of State from 1975 to 1978 and Deputy Chief of Mission in Tehran in 1978-79. Up until the last few months of the regime of Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi, Haas recalled, “Washington thought that Iran was on the march, that things in Teheran were looking good, that the Shah was solidly in control, and that we were getting a lot of value out of all of this.” By the fall of 1978, when the situation had turned for the worst, the U.S. had decided to support the Shah until the very end, no matter how unpopular he had become. Scant regard was also paid to how such a decision would potentially spoil any opportunity to maintain some, however diminished, level of engagement with the Islamic Republic.

To its own detriment, Washington had severely underestimated the magnitude of the Islamic revolution and proved unequipped to deal with the consequences it bore. According to Henry Precht, a political and military officer at the Embassy in Tehran for the four years prior to the Revolution and the then State Department country director for Iran during the hostage crisis, five factors played a central role in the unfolding of events: ignorance, ideology, inertia, insults and Israel – the five Is.

The U.S. showed a remarkable lack of understanding of domestic Iranian politics, as Washington obstinately equated the whole of Iran with the person of the Shah (a tendency that, inexplicably, remains alive even today when the U.S. equates all of Iran to the words and actions of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad). Forgetting the existence and demands of the other forty millions Iranians, the U.S. ended up in an unsustainable position. Rigid anti-communism was partially responsible for such complete devotion to the Shah. Zbigniew Brzezinski, then National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, viewed Iran as the lynchpin in the wall of containment around the Soviet Union and wouldn’t let go of his ideologically aligned ally Mohamed Reza Pahlavi. In addition to flat-out misconceptions and inflexible ideological stances, a kind of inertia in U.S. policy also made it impossible for Washington to change course. In the years that preceded the Islamic revolution, Iran suffered from rampant inflation and economic chaos, and the regime was becoming increasingly unpopular. “Basically, we were witnessing a war between the Shah and his people and the Shah was not going to prevail,” Henry Precht recalled. He became convinced that the U.S. should change approach and adjust to the changing time, but “because of inertia nobody accepted to embark upon this path,” Haas said.

The rise to power of Iran’s Islamist regime presented the U.S. with many more unexpected turns. During his exile in Paris, surrounded by westernized mullahs, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had managed to convince the world that he was another Gandhi coming along to rescue Iran from foreign subjugation. However, once he returned to Teheran in February of 1979, the more conservative clergy that had never left the country and had suffered a great deal of persecution under the Shah successfully took the revolution into a more fundamentalist direction. This departure triggered two developments. The U.S. and Iran embraced the rhetoric of insults, sparring accusations and blame, which quickly caused the relationship to deteriorate and then entirely collapse. The arrival of the Iranian theocracy, and the implications for Israel, also meant that Jerusalem became a prominent consideration in shaping Washington’s policy toward Teheran. This had not necessarily been the case in the past.

Some of the same dynamics that characterized the days immediately preceding and immediately following the Iranian revolution are still at play thirty years later and will partly influence the way bilateral dealings will develop under President Obama. Alex Vatanka, US Security Editor of Jane’s Information Group, and Trita Parsi, President of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), discussed the future of U.S.-Iran relationship at the Middle East Institute, in a separate panel.

The departing point for any new discussion about Iranian politics is the announcement made last Monday by former President Mohammad Khatami that he will run for office again this year, in the presidential elections scheduled for June. Since the ultimate power of the Islamic Republic lies in the hands of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and since all important decision-making happens behind closed doors, Vatanka speculated whether or not the Supreme Leader gave Khatami the green light. Ayatollah Khamenei might have had reasons to do so, especially considering the state of Iran’s economy and the increasingly unpopular government of President Ahmadinejad. In addition, and in spite of his reformist agenda, Khatami does not look like the confrontational personality that would ever truly challenge the Ayatollah and his supremacy. “If the Supreme Leader did give Khatami the ok, which I think is the case, Ahmadinejad’s road toward re-election will be steep,” predicted Vatanka. However, he added, if Khatami chose to run despite the opinion of Khamenei, “Iran is facing a period of political commotion like it hasn’t in a long time.”

Iran’s internal politics is increasingly fractured, Vatanka claimed, and the infighting between different factions is on the rise. This development should not be confused with a weakness of the regime. Rather, this is a testimony of how comfortable the Islamic Republic has grown, allowing for internal debate because it feels unchallenged otherwise. “I’m definitely not one of those who subscribe to the view that the regime is on the verge of collapse,” argued Vatanka, forecasting that the internal balance between reformists and conservatives and the debate on who holds the true legacy of the revolution will continue well into the next decade.

From the U.S. point of view, however, Vatanka reminded that reformists and conservatives are all Islamists and that the U.S. should not take the news of Khatami’s candidature as a reason to daydream about a complete change in Iran’s politics. After all, it is Ayatollah Khamenei who always has the last word, particularly with regard to matters of foreign policy. First and foremost, the U.S. should remember, Ayatollah Khamenei has an interest in preserving the supremacy of his office and, secondly, in guaranteeing the survival of the theocracy. As a result, one should expect that, in order to engage actively and directly with the U.S., Iran will ask for a full recognition of the regime as it is today, looking for a strategic shift on the part of Washington. “Once the regime is officially accepted by the U.S., and Iranians don’t feel it is at all right now, only then the debate on the U.S.-Iran relationship will change completely,” Vatanka speculated.

Trita Parsi echoed him, reflecting on a few questions that loom large on the Obama Administration as the President tries to find ways to open a fulfilling dialogue with Teheran. Parsi reiterated the fact that Iran wants security guarantees before it begins a direct diplomatic relationship with the U.S. The Iranian leadership has been talking about being included in the debate over the Middle East, to be granted a seat at the table. However, Parsi noted, Teheran has not yet put forward a comprehensive vision of what this inclusion should mean. He believes that the U.S. should seize this opportunity and be the first to lay out a plan for what the U.S.-Iran relationship should ideally look like in the future. “If we don’t present a long-term, strategic vision, Iranians will simply assume that the U.S. is only after regime change and, with that in mind, won’t fully cooperate even in areas in which we do share common interests,” Parsi claimed. After all, he recalled, Iranians were very disappointed when in 2002 President George W. Bush included Iran in the ‘axis of evil’ only weeks after Teheran had been cooperating with Washington on Afghanistan. President Obama should abandon all step-by-step and tactical-type approaches, which have failed in the past, and leave aside all remaining hesitation to move forward with a comprehensive vision and a strategic shift.

According to Trita Parsi, President Obama should also adopt a new kind of rhetoric when talking about Iran, like he did in his inaugural address, where he pledged to relate to the Muslim world on the basis of “mutual respect.” Americans should also finally drop the idea of a ‘carrot and stick’ approach. Iranians are offended by it because it is a language normally reserved for donkeys.

In addition, there is a matter of timing: the U.S. Administration must decide whether or not to begin a dialogue with Iran before the Iranian presidential elections take place in June. There have been charges that initiating a relationship now would only help the electoral campaign of President Ahmadinejad. It has also been claimed that it would be much easier for President Obama to speak to Khatami than to President Ahmadiejad. “The truth is we really don’t know and any time we have tried to play Iranian politics in the past we failed,” Trita Parsi argued. As a result, he advises the U.S. to leave the elections issue aside and to establish government to government relations that are independent of individuals on either side of the aisle. Opening up talks immediately could also facilitate the task of a possible reformist government, were Khatami to win the vote. In fact, one could make the case that Iranian reformers would enjoy more leeway in continuing negotiations that were initiated under conservative rule, rather than launching diplomatic engagement themselves.

Finally, President Obama needs to decide how to approach the very delicate nuclear issue. According to Trita Parsi, the U.S. should remain focused on what is achievable, rather than relying on hawkish rhetoric that only contributes antagonizing the Iranians. “Washington should want to discuss weaponization rather than enrichment,” argued Trita Parsi. As a signatory to the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran is prevented from developing nuclear weapons and should be held accountable for that. However, the NPT entitles Iran to enrichment, making it pointless to try and stop Teheran from enriching uranium.

Concluding his presentation, Trita Parsi recognized that the chances for the kind of ambitious strategic approach he laid out are very slim, even under President Obama. Nevertheless, the matter of fact is that, for the first time in thirty years, Barack Obama ran and won his presidential campaign on the promise to engage Teheran. This, according to Parsi, is unprecedented and should not be discounted.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington D.C. – After 30 years of missteps and false starts, the new administration of President Barack Obama should embrace a completely new course of action in its approach to the Islamic Republic of Iran. This, in short, is the recommendation that emerged from a panel of experts hosted on Friday by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a think tank in Washington D.C. Although to different degrees, Giandomenico Picco, Robert Litwak, Robin Wright, and John Tirman, all advised the U.S. to abandon old postures toward Teheran and launch an entirely different policy approach aimed at building long-lasting mutual trust and move the bilateral relationship beyond those sensitive issues, such as Iran’s alleged proliferation activities, which have stalled it for the last three decades.

Counting on the fact that President Obama’s will be a “refreshing change” from past policies, Robin Wright proposed a five-step incremental approach to breaking the ongoing stalemate in U.S.-Iran relations. In the initial stage, argued the former Washington Post’s foreign correspondent and now scholar at the Wilson Center, the two parties should outline long-term goals for the relationship. “The U.S. needs to frame the debate in terms that are more appealing to the Iranians,” Wright said, suggesting that, for example, Washington abandon its ‘carrots and sticks’ rhetoric. Such language antagonizes the Iranians and will backfire. It is also overblown, since it is unlikely that new international sanctions will be agreed upon. “President Obama doesn’t need more sticks just yet,” claimed Wright.

The U.S. and Teheran should then launch a phase of more aggressive and meaningful confidence building measures. Among the ideas that Wright put forward was the creation of an American-Iranian joint commission on chemical weapons. Chemical weapons have been of great concern to the Iranians since the war against Iraq, during which Saddam Hussein famously used them against the Iranian forces. This commission would allow the U.S. to start a dialogue with Iran about WMD without addressing directly the nuclear issue.

In a third and more developed stage, Washington and Teheran should define an actual agenda for talks. According to Wright, issues of regional stability and power balance might offer the more fertile ground for negotiations, especially in the case of Afghanistan. This is an area where Iranian and American interests can overlap and where the two countries have cooperated in the past. Wright suggested, for example, that the two parties unite in the fight against the widespread cultivation of crops, such as poppy seeds, meant to be sold on the international drug market. The U.S. should encourage the Iranians, probably the world’s most competent pomegranate-growers, to help the Afghans turn their vast poppy seeds cultivations into pomegranates fields, which would represent a safer and more lucrative alternative for Afghan farmers.

If this type of engagement yielded positive results, the U.S. and Iran could move forward and extend the discussion to more sensitive and long-standing issues, in particular the stand-off over Iran’s nuclear program. Finally, Robin Wright’s five-step approach would reach the stage of a conclusive agreement. “But we are so far away from that that I really don’t want to even try to frame it,” Wright concluded.

John Tirman, the executive director of Center for International Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), agreed with Wright that it is important to let go of the ‘carrot and stick’ rhetoric, “because it suggests that Iranians can either be bought off or beaten into submission.” Tirman also confessed his disappointment at both President Obama and Vice-President Biden, who have already used this language several times. Beyond this, Tirman brought the discussion one step further and criticized Robin Wright’s approach as too timid.

The U.S. should accept the failure of the policy of coercion practiced in the last thirty years, Tirman argued. This policy has left Iran stronger as a regional player, more integrated economically with rising powers such as China and India, and a highly-regarded leader in the Muslim world. “Despite all predictions of its demise, Iran today is ever more bold, and the regime in Teheran partially democratic and partially even popular in the eyes of its own people,” Tirman commented. As a result, Washington should set aside all tendencies toward gradualism and embrace a much more courageous stance, which he called transformational diplomacy.

According to Tirman, a transformational diplomacy must be based on a new language of dialogue, which moves past the use of patronizing and often demeaning rhetoric defining Iran like a ‘rogue state.’ The U.S. should recognize Iran’s legitimate security interests, acknowledge Iran’s proud civilization and accept the Islamic Republic’s legitimate sovereignty on Iranian territory. To back this renewed language of dialogue with actions, Washington should also lift sanctions swiftly and unilaterally, Tirman argued. The U.S. and Iran should rapidly normalize their relationship and use it as an instrument to move forward, rather than as a reward in its own merit. Finally, Tirman urged the U.S. to abandon all threats, not just rhetorically. “There should be an actual disavowal of military actions, including covert operations, and of any aim at regime change, including the so called ‘democratization program’ and the use of soft-power,” concluded Tirman.

More cautious, although still a clear cut from the policies of the Bush’s years, was the assessment by Robert Litwak, the director of international security studies at the Wilson Center and former director for nonproliferation in the National Security Council under the first Clinton Administration. Approaching the stalemate from the nuclear perspective, Litwak argued for establishing direct and transparent dialogue, while keeping the pressure on the Islamic Republic. “Iran’s nuclear program is consequential and incremental, but it is not a crash course to build nuclear weapons as soon as possible,” Litwak said. Accordingly, a U.S. military strike on Iran would undoubtedly be dangerous and ineffective. It would not stop the development of nuclear weapons but only set it back some time – “you can’t bomb knowledge,” Litwak noted – and it would mark the beginning of an all-out war with the Islamic Republic and the people of Iran. Given these circumstances, Litwak believes that Washington should not so much abandon sanctions, but rather improve incentives for Teheran to comply with international rules. “The U.S. should send a clear signal that it would completely abandon any desire for regime change, if Iran followed through on the most sensitive issues,” Litwak suggested. By taking the regime change option off the table in Washington, Litwak concluded, it might be possible to put behavior change on the table in Teheran.

Finally, a former senior level diplomat at the United Nations shared his decade-long experience negotiating with the leadership of the Islamic Republic as a way to outline changes in the internal structure of the government in Teheran. Giandomenico Picco, who took active part in the talks that led to the August 8th 1988 cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq war, described a regime increasingly controlled by the clergy and in which Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s will has become progressively more relevant. “The Supreme Leader would accept to be involved in diplomacy with the U.S. if he knew what the end game would be for Iran, but also for his own future,” said Picco. In more recent years, Picco has also been noticing a growing political relevance of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), which has become a key player in Iran’s internal power struggles, one that cannot be underestimated. In the framework of renewed engagement with Iran, Picco recommended that he U.S. take these developments into account if it wants to achieve successful talks with the Islamic Republic.

Despite the broadly agreed call for more meaningful and comprehensive engagement, all panelists at the Wilson Center remained guarded on the prospects of what can actually be achieved. And, particularly in the case of Robin Wright and John Tirman, disappointment was palpable with President’s Obama selection of Dennis Ross, a big proponent of the ‘bigger sticks, bigger carrots’ approach, as a senior advisor on Iran.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism – Persian Edition

Washington D.C. – Thirty years after the Islamic Revolution’s rise to power in Iran, a group of experts gathered last week at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington D.C., to assess the state of the government in Teheran and the future of U.S.-Iran relationships. The picture that emerged is one of a pragmatic regime, which has been shifting away from a purely ideological approach to policy, but is still solidly in the hands of the clergy; a regime that is undergoing a process of increasing militarization while the country suffers from a severe economic crisis. Iran, the speakers at AEI agreed, is by no means on the verge of a total collapse. However, it faces some internal criticism in the face of growing international isolation.

Ironically, while the stated goal of the 1979 revolution had been to break with the past, the Islamic Republic (IRI) is faced today with some of the same problems that plagued the government of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Ali Alfoneh, a researcher at AEI and a doctoral candidate at the University Copenhagen in Denmark, believes that, not unlike the Shah, the theocratic regime has contributed to modernizing the country, especially in the field of education. Yet the population is still starved for civil liberties. “Iran comprises an urbanized population with access to both state-controlled media and foreign broadcasts, and foreign products,” Mr. Alfoneh explained. “There is now a very large, urban, educated middle class that longs for political rights,” he continued. If the regime keeps denying freedom to its people, Mr. Alfoneh argued, Iranians could potentially take on a new revolutionary turn, similar to that of 1979. Well aware of this risk, the regime shows no qualms in using force to maintain control and is increasingly relying on its military wing, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), to curb popular demands.

According to Arash Sigarchi, an Iranian journalist who was imprisoned in Iran after publishing criticism of the government on his blog Panjereh Eltehab and recently fled to the U.S., this is a betrayal of the promises of the revolution. The Islamic Republic came to power relatively easily and with wide support from the population because it had vowed to bring human rights and civil liberties. “In the end, however, the Islamic leadership defaulted on its own promises,” Mr. Sigarchi commented. He predicts that the regime’s only hope for long-term survival is by slowly conceding democratic freedoms to the Iranian people. “If the Islamic Government chooses such course, it will enjoy a good deal of endurance,” Mr. Sigarchi concluded, “but not if it continues on its current path.”

Looking to Iran from the outside in, Alex Vatanka — senior Middle-East analyst at Jane’s Information Group — outlined some of the latest developments with regard to Teheran’s posture on the regional and global stages. Vatanka described an increasingly daring regime, especially in its foreign policy. “Teheran used to just desperately try to reduce its isolation. Today, instead, the IRI is much bolder, and is aggressively trying to expand its influence,” Vatanka argued. In his opinion, the West should reassess its widespread overstatement of Iran’s ideological nature and begin looking at it as a pragmatic force driven by self-interest. “Ahmadinejad’s foreign policy is, at times, almost devoid of Islamist ideology,” Vatanka said. Beyond rhetoric, he claimed, there is no trace of any attempt by the Islamic regime to export the revolution. Despite this increased influence on the regional stage, the Islamic Republic is paying a high price for the maintenance of its independence, in the form of international isolation. “Isolation hampers economic growth and creates resentment among the population,” Vatanka pointed out.

The economy remains the Achilles’ heel of President Ahmadinejad. According to Patrick Clawson, an economist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the revolution of 1979 has been followed by 30 years of abysmal economic performance. This has been caused, in chronological order, by the war with Iraq, the decline in oil prices of the 1980s, and, more recently, because of the economic policies adopted by the regime. With a touch of monarchic nostalgia, Clawson attacked the widespread understanding among the Iranian people that the economic performance under the Shah had been at least as terrible. During the 1960s, Clawson argued, Iran’s economy was growing at the fastest rate in the world. “Iran is, by no means, on the edge of economic collapse,” Clawson said, taking note of the country’s modest growth. “However, modest growth has left Iranians terribly dissatisfied, since they expected extraordinary growth and since even the modest growth has been mismanaged by the regime,” Clawson commented.

In spite of its large reserves of oil and natural gas, Iran continues to be reliant on global oil prices. The regime has done an exceptionally poor job at developing the country’s oil fields, causing its oil production to be extremely rigid. “Just consider that, over the last ten years, Iran’s oil revenues increased seven-folds, while production remained stagnant,” pointed out Michael Makovski, the foreign policy director at the Bipartisan Policy Center. According to Makovski, its incapacity to rapidly increase oil output exposes the regime to a series of vulnerabilities. A budget surplus, for example, can quickly become a budget deficit, hampering the ability of the government to give subsidies in exchange for favors. It also decreases Iran’s leverage against oil importing countries. Finally, it makes a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities less costly for the international markets, since only a relatively small percentage of global oil production comes from Iran.

In order to respond to growing challenges in the field of economics, the regime in Teheran has been pushing for an increasing militarization. According to Ali Alfoneh, this trend dates back to 1988 and the end of the Iran-Iraq war. At the time, IRGC soldiers had to return to a distraught Iran after paying great personal sacrifice on the altar of an unsuccessful holy war. “President Rafsanjani knew that these frustrated troops could stage a coup,” Aloneh explained. Rafsanjani then decided to help the IRGC carve an influential role within the Iranian economy, a way to bribe officers to stay out of politics. The IRGC’s growing relevance in all realms of life in the Islamic Republic has continued steadily over the following decades, peaking under Ahmadinejad: “Today the IRGC as an ideological army has gone completely out of control,” Ali Alfoneh declared.

Recently, the head of the IRGC Ali Jafari ordered a major restructuring of the corps. According to Michael Connell, director of the Iran project at the Center for Naval Analyses, Jafari’s main concern is the possibility of a “velvet revolution,” triggered by internal discontent brought upon the regime by U.S.-led soft-power operations. The basic principle of Jafari’s reform is one of decentralization. The leadership of the IRGC plans on giving lower-level officers more latitude. “More autonomy might guarantee longevity to the regime in case of an attempted coup or a decapitation from the top,” Connell explained. At the same time, he warned, this approach “exposes the regime to the threat of individual units going rogue.”

Where does the U.S. stand with regard to this picture and in what direction are U.S.-Iran relations headed? The bottom line, outlined Professor John Limbert of the U.S. Naval Academy, is that the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran have been estranged for thirty years: “we have been exchanging insults, calling each other names and we have misused history to make the other look like the perfect enemy; devious and evil.” In order to heal this very difficult relation, both parties must move past their long-standing grievances towards one another.

From the U.S. perspective, it was at the beginning of the revolution that the bilateral relation was almost fatally wounded. The hostage crisis of 1979-1981 — Iranian revolutionaries took over the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and kept 52 American officials (John Limbert among them) hostage for 444 days — had more of an impact on the psyche of the Americans than even the toppling of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a close ally for over two decades. “The hostage crisis was the biggest mistake in the history of Iranian diplomacy,” claimed Mohsen Sazegara, an Iranian political activist that returned to Teheran from Paris on the same plane as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on February 1^st 1979 and held several high-ranking positions during the earlier years of the Islamic Republic. Today Sazegara, who tried to run for the Iranian presidential elections in 2001 until the Guardian Council rejected his application, lives in the U.S. Sazegara also lamented that too many Iranians still appear unwilling to put the 1953 coup behind them and continue resenting the U.S. for having facilitated the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq.

“In the history of diplomacy,” said Michael Metrinko, “thirty years is a very long time.” Metrinko, who was among the hostages taken at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and now serves as a Ministry Reform Advisor at the U.S. Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, noted that within Iran’s very young population there is little personal memory of the 1979 crisis and, therefore, this is an opportune moment for Washington and Teheran to move forward. “I don’t believe there is a place for emotions in politics, and for demonization in the relationship between countries,” he argued.

According to Ambassador Limbert, the way forward must start with leaving the “sermonizing and moralizing at the door.” The U.S. must stop asking Iranians for a change in behavior: “I can’t think of a language that sounds more condescending that that,” Limbert declared. Washington should also show more respect for the history of Iran, one of grandeur and grievances. In the last 100 years, the latter have taken the front seat, affecting Iran’s political mood. “Iranians believe that the West is always out to cheat,” Limbert pointed out. Finally, in the eventuality that the Obama Administration will act on its pledge to open up a direct diplomatic channel with Teheran, Americans must be prepared for the overture to be turned down at first. “We must expect progress to be slow and difficult, yet we must also abandon our misconceptions and expect Iranians to be professional and pragmatic in pursuing their self-interest,” Limbert concluded.

Less optimistic was Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We can’t fix the U.S. – Iran relation because anti-Americanism is too deeply engrained in the genes of the Iranian Revolution,” Alterman said. However, he continued, the U.S. can manage the hostility far better than it has in the past. This can only happen through increased contacts. “Our policy of isolation has not worked, to the contrary. Sanctions have had increasingly less effect,” Alterman claimed.

AEI’s Michael Rubin put forward some of the questions that the Obama Administration will be confronted with in the case it decides to push forward with a diplomatic overture toward Iran. In particular, Rubin discussed the matter of timing and advised against entering talks before Iran’s presidential elections scheduled for this upcoming June: “We don’t want to interfere, one way or another, or let Ahmadinejad claim negotiations with the U.S. as his own personal victory,” Rubin argued.

There was surprisingly little talk about other options on the table. With a new U.S. administration that just entered office and with a president that has promised to engage directly with Teheran, the speakers at AEI decided to address the ifs and buts of negotiations rather than entering a discussion about alternative courses of action. They were asked at one point about the reaction of the Iranian people in case Washington decided to pursue the military option. Most experts agreed that, independent of whether or not the people of Iran like the Islamic regime, in a scenario of a U.S.-led invasion of Iran, the population would rally behind its government because of national pride. “Any military action would feed in the Iranians’ long sense of grievance for the humiliation brought upon them by foreigners,” John Limbert argued. “Against an invasion, the people of Iran would defend the regime, even if they disagree with it,” echoed Michael Rubin. In any case, nobody argued for the full lifting of sanctions, but simply for a more varied and multi-faceted “carrot and stick” approach.

Despite widespread acceptance, even among these conservative analysts, of the intentions by the Obama Administration to pursue direct and high-level engagement with Iran, a sense of unease and suspicion towards Teheran remained palpable. This was made particularly clear by the words of the key-note speaker, President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Jeffrey Gedmin. Addressing issues of public diplomacy, Gedmin advocated for as large an engagement as possible with the people of Iran, using soft-power to mobilize public opinion from the bottom up. Quoting former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns, Gedmin said: “In Iran today the critical divide is not between hard liners and moderates but between society and the regime.” He encouraged the use of foreign broadcasts, such as Voice of America, BBC Persian and his own Radio Farda to bypass the regime and speak directly to the Iranian people. Gedmin also advised the U.S. Government to open discussions with Iranian trade unions, environmentalist groups, cultural institutions and with women’s and minority rights groups. Advocating the use of soft power aimed at influencing the internal balance of power in Iran, Gadmin though seemed to miss a fundamental point: it will be hard for President Obama to convince the leadership in Teheran to talk openly and negotiate honestly, if the Islamic Republic continues to feel that the U.S. is simultaneously trying to overthrow the regime.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington D.C. – Only a few days before stepping down from his position as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations to accommodate President Obama’s appointee Susan Rice, Zalmay Khalilzad drew a few conclusions about his years at the UN, and about his career as a diplomat, at an event organized by the New America Foundation (NAF) in Washington D.C.

Describing his overall experience as a “net positive,” Ambassador Khalilzad argued that the UN is an institution that “can and has been useful,” whenever the United States finds ways to approach it effectively. During his tenure, Khalilzad stood apart from his predecessor John Bolton by being more attentive towards the opinions of other representatives. “The mere factor of engaging and listening moves your interlocutors towards your domain,” the ambassador said during his conversation with Steve Clemons, Director of the American Strategy Program at NAF.

Prior to serving as the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad was the Chief of Mission at the American embassies in Kabul and Baghdad. In Afghanistan, he oversaw the strenuous negotiations that led to the drafting of the country’s constitution, was involved with Afghanistan’s first elections, and helped to organize the first meeting of the Afghan parliament. “We worked very hard during those days, using persuasion and engagement. Sometime we would summon the threat of the use of force, we had to deal with all sorts of people,” Khalilzad recalled. In 2005, the ambassador was transferred from Kabul to Baghdad. Although at that point things in Afghanistan seemed to be turning for the better, Khalilzad remembers that “the Afghan people were quite concerned with the general assumption that Afghanistan had already succeeded.”

Today, crippled by a new spike in violence and an increasingly corrupted central government, Afghanistan seems to have plunged back into its worst days. President Barack Obama’s more immediate plans entail sending more U.S. troops into the country. “I think it is a mistake to think that you can solve this as a military issue,” Ambassador Khalilzad claimed, stressing the need for a more comprehensive approach that focuses increased resources on strengthening governance. According to Khalilzad, the Afghan Government must also improve its below-standard performance. “Success in Afghanistan will not be achieved without the Afghan Government doing its part,” the ambassador argued. Khalilzad praised the idea put forward by the new administration of nominating a czar that would oversee U.S. policies towards Afghanistan and Pakistan as inherently interrelated (former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke was appointed to this job on Thursday). The ambassador also argued for a more active role for the UN in war-torn countries such as Afghanistan. With many players active on the ground, he noted, there is a growing need for coordination. “The right representatives from the UN can certainly do that job,” Khalilzad claimed.

Born in Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad was the highest ranking Muslim in the Bush Administration (there are none yet in the cabinet President Obama has assembled.) “I am who I am but I don’t get up every day thinking that I’m a Muslim born in Afghanistan,” the ambassador claimed, denying that he ever felt particular tensions between his professional role as a representative of the U.S. Government and his personal ties to Afghanistan. Nevertheless, he admitted that Afghanistan remains “very close to his heart.” It was no coincidence that Afghanistan was at the heart of the conversation with Steve Clemons.

Beyond issues ravaging his native land, Zalmay Khalilzad also addressed the gravity of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, arguing that it is one of the key factors destabilizing the Middle East. According to Khalilzad, a widespread agreement already exists on the fact that the only solution to the conflict is that of two co-existing states. Only Hamas and Iran continue opposing the plan, Khalilzad said, and refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Israel. Nevertheless, the ambassador doubted that Israel could ever achieve anything with an exclusively military approach: “I don’t know if there is any military solution that is feasible. You can’t just get rid of Hamas,” Khalilzad said. Rather, in the long-term Israel might be better served by a strategy of engagement and by trying to turn Hamas into a more willing interlocutor.

A difficult moment for Zalmay Khalilzad came when he was asked about the decision of the U.S. Government to abstain from voting on the UN Security Council resolution of January 9^th, which called for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. The cease-fire and the resolution itself had been negotiated directly by then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who spent three full days in the Middle East to personally participate in preparatory talks. Secretary Rice also personally attended the session of the UN Security Council in question and, then surprisingly, abstained from voting on her own resolution. “Our abstention was a matter of the timing of the resolution and not of the content,” Ambassador Khalilzad tried unconvincingly to explain at NAF. “Secretary Rice said clearly that we supported the content of the resolution,” he added.

Khalilzad, who was a fervent supporter of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, was also asked by a person in the audience whether he was ready to apologize for a decision that many now consider to have been misguided. The ambassador defended his stance explaining that it had stemmed from a personal assessment of what had gone wrong at the end of the first Gulf War. Then, U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq without toppling Saddam Hussein. This left the Iraqi people dealing simultaneously with a brutal dictator and with a strict regime of international sanctions. Khalilzad believed that something had to be done: “I stand behind what I wrote after the liberation of Kuwait,” declared the ambassador.

“On balance, I’m very satisfied,” Ambassador Khalilzad said in reference to his term at the UN. He admitted, however, to a number of areas where he wishes he had accomplished more but was not able to. Among others, the ambassador listed the crises in Darfur and Zimbabwe and the puzzle that is the regime in Burma. He also admitted to have not completed the kind of reform and streamlining of the UN bureaucracy that he had hoped to achieve while in office.

In the future, Ambassador Khalilzad sees himself doing research at a think tank, writing a book, and possibly participating in a working group that focuses on Afghanistan and its surrounding region.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism – Persian Edition

Bruce A. Williams is a Professor of Media Studies & Sociology at the University of Virginia. In the past, he has taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, and the London School of Economics. His current research interests focus on the role of a changing media environment in shaping citizenship in the United States. He has received funding for this research from the National Science Foundation and the Cultures of Consumption Research Program of the University of London. He has published three books and more than forty scholarly journal articles and book chapters. Professor Williams recently came back from a trip to Israel where he attended an international media studies conference on media coverage of crises and conflicts. In this interview with Valentina Pasquali, Professor Williams offers his assessment of the quality of the coverage provided by U.S. media on the ongoing conflict in Gaza, a coverage that he says he has been following “obsessively.”

Valentina Pasquali (VP): There has been some criticism of the U.S. media coverage of the ongoing Israeli ground invasion of Gaza. What is your assessment? Do you find there to be biases in the way American media have been covering the conflict?

Bruce Williams (BW): As an academic, I don’t think the word bias is a useful one. I believe that anytime you tell a story, whether you are a journalist or anybody else trying to describe world events, you always have a perspective. I don’t believe there is any such thing as a neutral, objective perspective.

Rather, I can point out some of the things that I noticed in the coverage, especially in comparison to what I was watching and reading while in Israel. Please note that I don’t know Hebrew and, as such, I was following things on the English-language versions of the Israeli media, such as the Jerusalem Post, or on Sky News and Fox on the satellite.

I think that there are stark differences in the coverage in the United States and in Israel, at least as far as I’ve been able to see. But I wouldn’t capture them by saying than one is more biased than the other. I think they are just different.

The coverage that I saw in Israel very much emphasized the Israeli perspective, for example, in the very prominent, very individualized coverage dedicated to the soldiers who got killed. In the coverage that I’ve been following in the American media instead, I think the stories reflect the numbers. U.S. coverage talks a lot more about Palestinian deaths and Palestinian casualties, and this is a reflection of the difference between almost over 900 dead on the Palestinian side — by most accounts — as opposed to 13 dead — all of whom but three were soldiers — on the Israeli side. In the American coverage there seems to be more attention for Palestinian deaths because they so far outnumber Israeli deaths.

VP: Do you have an example of this?

BW: I’ll give you one that I was struck by when I was in Israel. The same day the U.N. school was hit by the IDF and 30 people seeking shelter there lost their lives, a rocket from Gaza destroyed a kindergarten in southern Israel. True, there were no casualties on the Israeli side, because the school was closed. But I happen to know that the Israeli Minister of Education was there that day debating whether she should open the schools or not. To me, the idea, on both sides, that schools can be destroyed is an important issue. I would have liked to at least see a brief mention of that in the American coverage. Maybe I missed it, but I did not. I recognize it is difficult for journalists, because the fact of the matter is that 30 Palestinians who thought they were safe and sheltered under U.N. protection were killed, while nobody was killed in the Israeli kindergarten. But it seems to me that one can at least point to that connection.

VP: What do you think of the prohibition to access Gaza imposed by the Israel Government on foreign journalists?

BW: To back up one step, I think the Israeli Government had a very well defined media strategy when it came to this conflict. It was not going to repeat what it saw as the mistakes made in the invasion of Lebanon. There was an attempt to keep reporters out, to tightly cover all of the information and images that were coming out of Gaza. Both in the U.S., and, for what I was able to see, in Israel, there were rather frustrated reporters having to stick by the military and having to take pictures from quite the distance.

Initially, over a short period of time, this led to the ability of the Israeli Government to shape the kind of coverage that they were getting. Overtime, however, such tight control has eroded. As a result, now we are getting some rather horrific images coming out of Gaza, images that are being shown on Al-Jazeera and in general produced by the Palestinians themselves.

My impression is that the media strategy that the Israeli Government developed was rather sophisticated and, for a short period of time, effective. However, I believe that the reality of media coverage of conflicts today is that any strategy that aims to control information has a pretty short lifespan.

My own sense is that the Israeli Government media strategy was designed for a very brief war, or incursion, one in which you get in, you do what you planned on doing as quickly as possible, then you get out and declare victory. But the longer this military campaign goes on, the more it tilts the coverage, and increasingly places the whole idea behind it in a pretty unfavorable light.

In this case, like in many military adventures, things can get out of control very quickly. What you are seeing now, I believe, is what is sometimes referred to as “mission creep.” You go in, you have pretty well defined goals to achieve, and, if you are initially successful, then you create many new goals. For someone who studies media, if we put aside the military and political issues that are raised, it is very clear that the longer this goes on, the more the coverage is going to support the Palestinian perspective.

VP: How do Israeli journalists feel about their own government media strategy? Are they frustrated or do they think they have sufficient access to information?

BW: I think they are also very frustrated. I think that journalists, whether they are Israeli, American or anyone else, want to be there, want to see it for themselves. What is interesting is that, at a time like this when Israeli public opinion is still overwhelmingly in favor of this conflict, Israeli journalists would be unlikely to write very critical things, even if they were given access. However, I think they feel incredibly frustrated that they are not given access.

VP: You mentioned that one important reason why the coverage has been changing and tilting towards a more pro-Palestinian perspective is the fact that images from Gaza have increasingly been broadcasted out by Al-Jazeera and by the Palestinians themselves. Do you think that U.S. media organizations are doing all they can to get access?

BW: What truly strikes me is that the situation in Gaza looks a lot like the situation journalists face in Baghdad. There, as long as you stay inside the Green Zone, you are relatively safe. At the same time, the more you stay inside the Green Zone, the more what you see, what you say, and what you can write is shaped by what the American and Iraqi governments want you to see, say and write.

However, if you leave the Green Zone, the work becomes very dangerous. There already are many dead journalists to prove this.

I would imagine that Gaza is also a pretty dangerous place to be. It is hard to say what more journalists could actually do a situation that appears so dangerous and volatile.

I read the New York Times the closest, the Washington Post coming second. My opinion is that the Times’ coverage has been of a very high-quality, even-handed but realistic. I also think that, like in much of the rest of the coverage, overtime it has become more and more critical of Israel.

VP: The assumed notion that the U.S. media coverage is tilted towards a pro-Israeli perspective seems to have roots in opinion pieces and editorial pages rather than news coverage. Do you agree?

BW: I kind of disagree. However I can see why it could look that way from a Palestinian perspective.

Moving away from the day to day newsgathering that gets done, I think it is important to point out that, unlike many previous actions taken by the Israeli Government, including the invasion of Lebanon, Israel enjoyed this time an unusual amount of international support, right from the get-go.

I believe that is because of Hamas. It is certainly not surprising that the United States would aggressively defend Israel’s right to act and denounce Hamas. The European Union was also very supportive of Israel’s right to intervene. This is a result of the fact that Hamas controls Gaza and the recognition that it was Hamas that ended the cease-fire with Israel.

All this said, I was struck by how even-handed The New York Times was in its own editorial pages. From the very beginning The New York Times recognized Israel’s legitimate right to act but also urged them to get out quickly and to deal seriously with the Palestinian issue.

The paper was very much in line with this idea that Israel had a very short window of time to act. They needed to do what they needed to do very quickly and then they had to put broader attention to a real peace settlement.

But, as I said, I do understand where some of the concerns could come from. To go back to something I said before, to the long-term threat of the rockets that get launched from Gaza: in the end I think that they pose very little real risk to the Israeli citizens. I don’t know how many Israelis have been killed by these rockets, but I’m sure it’s a pretty small number. I don’t want to minimize this. I certainly wouldn’t want to live thinking whether there was someone that would try to mortar Charlottesville, Virginia, every day. It is an intolerable situation. But this amounts to a sort of existential crisis, a crisis of how people feel as they try to live an ordinary life.

Living in the Gaza Strip for the same kind of ordinary Palestinian citizens, instead, is a nightmare. It’s not an existential question; it’s a question of starvation, of not having a job, and not having any sense of what a future could look like. From the perspective of ordinary Palestinians, the situation just seems to keep getting worse and worse. We are further away from having a Palestinian Government that can speak for all Palestinians in some kind of a peace settlement. We are further away from this than we were five years ago, further away that we were even three weeks ago. That is a horrible situation.

VP: Do you think that this even-handedness is true only for the New York Times? Or does it apply in general to the U.S. media?

BW: To be honest I have not seen the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but I think the Washington Post has been pretty even-handed. With the exception of maybe Fox News, I think there is recognition that Israel has a right to defend itself, but, at the same time, that it has an obligation to do this very quickly and that it must deal soon with some kind of serious attempt to negotiate a peace settlement with the Palestinians.

In any case, I think that, by far, the best and most interesting coverage I heard is on National Public Radio. For example, NPR recently interviewed Mustafa Barghouti, who is someone that I have actually met and I have huge respect for. He is not politically affiliated either with Hamas or Fatah. In this respect, he speaks for a Palestinian view that I agree with. One of the things he said in his interview with NPR is that Israel and the United States have tried to turn Hamas into the bad guys and Abbas into the good guy. At the same time, it’s not like they have done anything that would lead Abbas to succeed.

In another story that I heard on NPR just this morning, Palestinians in the occupied territories were being interviewed and said what Barghouti has been saying, that there are many more military checkpoints now that they were a year ago. And the truth is that, no matter what Ehud Olmert has said, he has not closed down not even the settlements his own government declared illegal. From this perspective, there is a feeling of real hopelessness now.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York City. His research and teaching encompass the history of the modern Middle East with an emphasis on the emergence of national identity and the involvement of external powers in the region. He is particularly interested in the role of the press in the formation of new publics and new senses of community. An American of Palestinian descent, Professor Khalidi has often been an outspoken voice in the debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this phone interview with Valentina Pasquali he expresses his criticism for the coverage of the ongoing Israel invasion of Gaza offered by the U.S. media, which he calls “one-sided” and “unbalanced.”

Valentina Pasquali: What is your opinion of the coverage of the ongoing Israeli invasion of Gaza provided by the U.S. media?

Rashid Khalidi: I find the coverage absolutely appalling, extremely one-sided and not meeting the lowest of journalistic standards. It consists of a mere repetition of Israeli talking points, without any attempt to determine whether they are accurate or inaccurate. There is also a lack of proper coverage of the Gaza side, despite the fact that the majority of the casualties are in Gaza.

The U.S. media has quietly submitted to the Israeli-mandated blockade of Gaza that has kept journalists out for well over a month before this invasion began. The American media has been systematically manipulated with the talking points that are being distributed by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, which have become the backbone of the American coverage. This is actually one of the best examples of media manipulation I have ever seen. And it is all part of the Israeli planning for the offensive.

What is interesting is that the Israeli media has covered extensively this effort to ensure an Israeli spin to this operation. But nobody talks about it here in the U.S.

For example, in keeping with the recommendations of the Winograd Commission — this looked into the Israeli failure in Lebanon in 2006 and determined that Israel had failed to control the message — the Israeli Government set up the National Information Directorate, under the control of the Foreign Ministry, six months ago. This has been planning for the management of the invasion’s PR for months.

We are now seeing it put in practice. I have received, through my own sources, some of the daily briefings with bullet points sent out to the media by the Foreign Ministry and the game played by Israel is very clear. This is amply covered in the Israeli media, even in English, and yet the U.S. media chooses to look at things in the way the Israelis want them to. This interview is the first to date where anybody even asks me about this issue.

VP: Do you find any specific U.S. outlet being more of a victim of such manipulation or is this a general trend?

RK: It is a general trend. Television is particularly vulnerable, but I find it across the board, in commentary on television, in commentary on the newspapers and in the general daily news coverage. The bottom line is that you cannot cover a conflict if your journalists are not allowed to be on the ground. U.S. media are submitting to this ridiculous blockade since November and they are covering exactly what Israel wants them to cover. As a result there is an inherent built-in bias. You don’t have journalists on the frontline covering the deaths of over six hundred people. And the four or five Israelis that have been killed have been covered by hundreds of journalists. There are no western journalists, except one working for Al-Jazeera, in the whole of the Gaza Strip.

VP: Do you see any qualitative difference between opinion pieces and straight-out reporting?

RK: Some of the reporting has been better than average. I have actually not seen much in the way of opinion pieces on the American media that reflect anything but an Israeli point of view. There might have been, but I haven’t noticed. Instead, some of the reporting from stringers inside Gaza, for example in the New York Times, has been adequate.

VP: What do you think of Israeli media coverage of the invasion, of the English-language media especially?

RK: The media coverage is much better in Israel, especially when it comes to the print press. There is a greater variety of commentary in the Israeli media. I have read at least eight-twelve opinion pieces which are far more hard-hitting than anything I’ve seen in the American media. I’m currently writing an op-ed for the New York Times and, if they publish it, I think it will be the first piece in the U.S. media.

VP: What do you think is the effect of this kind of coverage on the American public and, as a result, on the political debate in the U.S.?

RK: It reinforces the universal pro-Israel bias of the American political class. We are at a point where you have to watch the Daily Show to get a sense of how unbalanced the American coverage is. On Monday they had a very amusing piece showing how one-sided the American coverage, on both the Republican and Democratic side, has been on this issue.

VP: Given the restrictions that the Israeli Government is trying to impose on foreign media, what would you say American media organizations should do that they are not doing?

RK: They should not cover any story unless they are allowed to go in. Any self-respecting journalist should demand that their editors and publishers insist on access to both sides, which is been denied only by Israel, as a condition for covering the side that dominates the battlefield, which is the Israelis.

VP: Would you want to add any other thought?

RK: I would want to add that images tent to trump words. And the images that Israel produces and that might engender sympathy are few and far between, whereas the images that come out of Gaza in spite of this systematic, and quite cynical, censorship have been heart rending and have balanced out to some degree the spin that has dominated the written media or the television. You can see in the front page of the New York Times the day it published the image of the dying Palestinian child. Even in the very limited coverage of the carnage in Gaza that is allowed in the American media, the images outweigh the words. Israel is suffering the same kind of problem it had in 2006, in 1982 during the invasion of Lebanon, and during the first couple of years of the intifada in 1987-1988, when the images outweighed all the lies and the spin and the manipulations. This might happen now again, it depends on how long this operation continues.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism