Valentina Pasquali

Washington D.C. – In an effort to identify the causes of, and possible solutions to the growing divide between public opinions in the United States and the Muslim world, Juan Cole discussed his most recent work, Engaging the Muslim World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), at a book launch hosted by the Middle East Institute in Washington D.C. Assessing the damage on Muslim perceptions of America inflicted by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq of 2003, Cole argued that a withdrawal, albeit slow, of U.S. troops will contribute significantly to improving relationships with the region at large.

A professor of history at the University of Michigan, fluent in several Middle Eastern languages, and a frequent commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, Cole tried to extricate the causes of the growing disenchantment with the United States among the Muslim public, despite the many alliances the U.S. entertains in the Middle East and across the Muslim world. Take Indonesia for example, suggested Cole. According to a series of polls conducted over time by the Pew Charitable Trust and Gallup, in 2000 75% of Indonesians held a positive view of the United States. This figure fell to 15% in 2004 and has now regained some ground hitting 37% in 2009, still only half of what it was nine years earlier.

Cole believes that, alongside the languishing stalemate in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the occupation of Iraq devised by the Bush Administration is heavily responsible for this dramatic change in attitudes. In Cole’s most conservative estimate, 300,000 Iraqis have been killed during the war, as a result of fighting and infrastructure failures caused by military operations. Not to count the orphans, the widows and the millions of displaced citizens the war left behind. Additionally, scandals like that of the prison at Abu Grahib became major issues for Muslims around the world. “In an effort to curb the insurgency using harsh questioning techniques and torture, the Bush Administration ended up creating huge new numbers of insurgents,” Cole said at the Middle East Institute.

According to Cole, the U.S. needs to accept blame for a sort of idleness, the lack of a prompt and effective response to the deterioration of the situation on the ground (Cole reported that Sweden, for example, without having anything to do with the invasion, has already accepted 40,000 Iraqi immigrants.) Cole holds the American corporate media partially responsible for the some of the disinformation that kept the American people from understanding more about the tragedy that was unfolding. “We are not well served by our corporate media. I don’t think the U.S. public was ever aware of what the Iraq war really was for the Iraqi people,” lamented Cole. TV networks in particular had a tendency to sanitize the war, showing images of the craters that would be left by the bombs, but not of the blood and the corpses and the spare limbs that dominated the scene immediately following the explosion. This imagery, instead, made it regularly on outlets such as Al Jazeera. Because of the sanitization of the more gruesome aspects of the war, Cole believes that the human costs of the U.S. military engagement in Iraq were never fully recognized at home.

As all of this is on the minds of the Iraqis, and of people across the Muslim world, U.S. military presence in Iraq has, according to Cole, become utterly unacceptable. Yet, while polls show a certain amount of support among Muslims for violent retaliation against the U.S. armed forces based in the Middle East, even those who feel more strongly about the issue do not express any desire to ever hit the United States homeland. Mostly what people want is withdrawal, which is good news according to Cole, especially since President Obama seems determined to go through with it. To be fair, Cole did not argue that all Americans must necessarily disappear from Iraq at once, something that those he nicknamed “withdrawal extremists” are calling for. Cole simply claimed that Muslims would welcome a steady and consistent reduction of armed forces deployed in Iraq.

While being extremely critical of the policies of the Bush Administration, Cole also recognized that the situation in Iraq has improved and that U.S. forces exercise today far more command and control then ever before. However, he insisted that the relative stabilization of the country should not be understood as vindicating the invasion. “It would be like saying that, when the black plague began subsiding in medieval Europe, the Norwegian rat had been vindicated,” Call remarked ironically.

Overall, Cole’s present assessment is that Iraq has been building some fundamental capabilities and that there is increasing promise that it might come back together and at least provide for its own security. “I’m somewhat optimistic that Iraq might get its act together and that a U.S. withdrawal could actually be possible without ensuing disaster,” Cole suggested. The one issue that remains unresolved and that could create hurdles in the years ahead is the Arab-Kurd relationship, which is again showing signs of distress. The new American Administration should also be aware that, even in the best-case scenario of a fully recovering Iraq that maintains a positive relationship with Washington, relations between Baghdad and Teheran will continue to be warmer than the U.S. would like. “I think the U.S. will have to suck it up, because the Bush Administration created an Iran that is more powerful in the Middle East than it used to be,” argued Cole. What the U.S. can and should do, according to the University of Michigan’s professor, is to ensure a more hands-on leadership than the previous administration was able to practice. “I hope President Obama and Vice-President Biden will take more active control of what happens including in trying to tackle the case of the Kurds,” explained Cole.

Asked only in the Q&A session his opinion on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Cole did not even try to hide the hopelessness he feels about the situation: “I’m very pessimistic about the conflict. I really don’t see an end to it,” he admitted. Describing the newly formed Israeli government as the “farthest right we have seen in history,” Cole predicted that it could be decades before a solution is reached. Cole foresees three possible scenarios. He finds it unlikely that an agreement will be found on a variation of the two-state solution. Also unlikely, but not as much as one might think, is the apocalyptic view that Israelis will proceed with the expulsion of the Palestinians from Palestine, which would trigger a conflict of enormous proportion throughout the region. Finally, and more likely, Cole believes that we are about to witness a long period of, what he described as “apartheid,” which could continue for two to three decades. This would not be a stable long term solution, and it would probably attract increasingly strict sanctions on Israel, maybe not from the U.S. but certainly from the Europeans. But, according to Cole, Israel is really not capable of surviving without trading with Europe and, at some point, the conflict would just end with a one-state solution, where Palestinians will be granted Israeli citizenship. Apparently, one-third of Palestinians already appear willing to accept it, showing that this third scenario might be the more likely, albeit in the very long run.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

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

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. – 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

Washington D.C. – Ever since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the United States Government has been hard-pressed to solve the riddle posed by Iran and, more recently, to curb Teheran’s nuclear ambitions and support for international terrorism. The latest American attempt centers on the implementation of economic sanctions tailored to hurt Iran’s private sector. This new refined sanctions policy is an idea of Stuart Levey’s, the Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the Department of the Treasury. More sophisticated than the traditional reliance on comprehensive sanctions imposed on countries as a whole, Levey’s creation is yet to yield definite results.

“Entities that engage in nuclear proliferation, as well as terrorist organizations, need access to the global financial system in order to fund their activities,” Levey explained at a recent conference organized in Washington D.C. by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. As a consequence, the thinking is that if the U.S. Government manages to constrain these organizations’ transactions with recognized financial institutions, it can successfully curtail their unlawful activities.

The premise to Levey’s philosophy is that banks and financial institutions are risk-averse and are dependent on their credibility among clients to conduct business in a profitable way. If they were to recognize that a partner engaged in bad behavior, they would sever ties in order to preserve their standing. “In the case of Iran the evidence of bad behavior is very extensive,” Levey commented, claiming that Iran regularly abuses the financial system to pursue uranium enrichment and to fund organizations such as Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Once the Iranian entities involved in this back-door transactions are identified and sanctioned by the U.S. Government, and once their names become known to all financial institutions wishing to comply with international regulations, the latter will necessarily withdraw their support, protecting their business with the Americans and leaving the sinful to scramble for money.

Since the launch of the program, Stuart Levey has visited over 70 financial institutions worldwide, trying to convince them to cut off relations with selected Iranian entities. Since 2006, the U.S. Treasury Department designated, among others, banks Saderat, Sepah and Melli. “There is now a wide consensus that Iran poses a threat to the international financial system,” Levey said, noting that Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) in Iran have dried up because nobody is willing to finance them anymore.

According to former Washington Post correspondent Robin Wright, who was also part of the discussion at the Wilson Center, an example of how the lack of foreign investments is already hurting Iran’s economy can be found in the South Pars gas field. The South Pars field, which Iran shares with Kuwait, is one of the biggest gas reserves in the world. “Yet, many multinational oil companies have been recently cutting their pledged funding and, as a result, Iran’s portion of the field is underdeveloped,” Wright pointed out.

Despite expressing harsh criticism of the Bush Administration’s policies toward Iran, Wright defended Stuart Levey’s endeavor: “Levey’s story is good,” she declared, noting that what started as a U.S.-only strategy is now being slowly embraced by many international partners. These include the European Union and Australia, but also multilateral organizations such as the United Nations and the Financial Action Task Force – the world’s financial watchdog based in Paris and representing the 34 largest economies. Citing her own independent research, Wright said that over 90 major financial institutions worldwide have limited, if not entirely cut off, business with Iran – other than for those goods that are exempt from the sanctions regime, such as agricultural goods and medicines. “Iran has become a dangerous business,” Wright added.

If the slow siege brought onto the regime in Teheran by its financial isolation is progressively hampering Iran’s development, noted the speakers at the Wilson Center, the mismanagement of the country’s own resources perpetrated by the current leadership is rapidly accelerating the crisis. “President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has squandered Iran’s reserves,” Robin Wright said. By some measures, she maintained, Iran currently holds only eight to nine billion dollars in its Oil Stabilization Fund, the country’s rainy-day account. Official government figures put this number around 25 billion, still much less than what it should have been considering the massive spike in gas prices this past summer.

In the meantime, falling oil prices in recent months have threatened Iran’s oil revenues, upon which the country’s economy is heavily dependent. The budget of the Islamic Republic relies on minimum price of about $60 a barrel. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has predicted that Iran will face an unsustainable deficit if oil remained under even $75 per barrel. In any case, Iran cannot afford current prices of around $46 a barrel. President Ahmadinejad’s first response to the crisis has been to lower interest rates below inflation levels, which, for economists worldwide, is the recipe for disaster. “Timing is on the side of the U.S. for the first time,” Wright commented.

As a result of a faltering Iranian economy, an increasing number of prominent figures, from senior clerics, to economists, to former government officials, have spoken out against the performance of President Ahmadinejad. According to both Stuart Levey and Robin Wright, this should be taken as an indication that an internal debate has been unleashed creating strong incentives for the leadership to change its behavior. This, ultimately, is Levey’s and the Department of Treasury’s goal.

However, according to former IMF Executive Jahangir Amuzegar, this interpretation overlooks other important facts. According to Amuzegar, in recent years Teheran has scored a series of successes, especially in the political and economic arena. First of all, Iran emerged from the two U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as a much stronger player and is seen increasingly as the predominant power in the region. Teheran also managed to defy resolutions of the UN Security Council without serious repercussions, was invited to join the Gulf Cooperation Council – which ironically was first established to counter Teheran during the Iran-Iraq war – and to take on observer status at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Iran has also been courted by India, China and a few countries in South America, primarily Venezuela, for its unparalleled oil reserves.

At the military level, Amuzegar explained, Iran is equipped today with more developed technology and has increased its number of active nuclear centrifuges. Even from the economic standpoint not all the news from Teheran has been gloomy. Some of its dollar-denominated transactions have simply been moved to Euros and Yen. Iran’s reserves in the European Union have gone up while Teheran’s liability against them has gone down. Big banks that have curtailed service to Iran have been substituted by smaller boutique institutions, especially banks based in the Far East that have few contacts with the U.S. And finally, U.S. exports to Iran have increased more than tenfold under George W Bush’s watch, particularly those traveling via Dubai.

“Iranians are very good at adapting,” commented Robin Wright, who agreed that many businesses already found their way around even the latest round of U.S. sanctions. To avoid the restrictions imposed on them by the international financial system, Iranians have been increasingly relying on an informal structure for transactions, an unofficial version of Western Union that is known as the Hawala system. Anybody can send money into Iran by using a network of private individuals that will pass it along a chain of personal connection until it reaches the final recipient. The money never goes through regular financial institutions and, as a result, is particularly hard to trace. In addition, many Iranian businesses hurt by the sanctions have simply been moved to Dubai, which now has a population of Persians as large as that of locals. Recently, Wright pointed out, Dubai has been collaborating more with the U.S., taking small steps in limiting the number of visas granted to Iranian citizens or enforcing stricter security controls on them. Nevertheless Dubai has become Iran’s number one trading partner and, as a result, is deeply invested in its relation with Teheran.

Sanction regimes also present another, fundamental challenge: their ability, or inability some would say, to hit the right target. According to Stuart Levey’s of the Treasury Department, this new strategy, comprising measures aimed at the private sector, should contribute to drying up financing for Iran’s businesses that operate at the international level. “Although it might not be the perfect target,” Levey conceded, “It is still a pretty good target, since these are people that have means and leverage.” In his opinion, these influential Iranians, unhappy at the consequences of the behavior of their own government, would pressure Teheran into adjusting its policies. As a consequence, they would help the U.S. achieve its goals.

Nevertheless, it appears that even Levey’s carefully crafted sanctions plan is failing to protect ordinary citizens in Iran. “Ali the plumber and Amid the carpenter, who eat rice and bread; that’s who has been hurt by the sanctions,” said Amuzegar, referring to Iran’s staggering inflation and rising cost of staple food. “The people who are suffering are precisely those that the U.S. Government keeps saying will not be touched,” Amuzegar continued, “everybody else is thriving.” The risk, Robin Wright noted, is that the U.S. could be alienating the people who least like the regime already, while government-controlled businesses are much better equipped to weather the storm. “So far we are targeting the 20% of businesses in private hands in Iran. But the 80% of the economy is in the hands of the government,” Wright commented.

Undoubtedly, President Ahmadinejad is facing rising criticism even within Iran, and his position has been severely weakened by the ongoing financial crisis. “If we continue on this trajectory, the regime might start considering Ahmadinejad as a liability,” argued Robin Wright. However, even if Ahmadinejad loses the upcoming presidential elections, scheduled for June of 2009, politics in Iran is not bound to change very much, maintained Amuzegar, especially with regard to nuclear proliferation and support for terrorism. “I agree that Ahmadinejad might lose, but I doubt that anybody different would take his place,” Amuzegar insisted.

Despite the appreciation for Levey’s effort, there is widespread agreement that the ongoing attempts of the U.S. Government aimed at undermining the Iranian leadership might not pay off. While the development of a nuclear weapons program by Iran might still be negotiated and maybe prevented, “the U.S. will have to learn to live with uranium enrichment,” Robin Wright avowed. A recent report by the Peterson Institute of International Economics titled “Economic Sanctions Reconsidered,” says it best: “It’s hard to bully a bully with economic measures,” the authors suggest.

“Of course it hasn’t worked yet,” Stuart Levey said trying to respond to the criticisms of his sanctions plan. “But, as a government official, what I can do is keep going. We are getting the right signals,” he concluded.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism – Persian Edition

Thomas Frank is the author of best selling “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” and recently became a weekly columnist for the Wall Street Journal. In his newly published book, “The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule,” Mr. Frank describes what he believes to be the principles of conservative politics as a philosophy of laissez-faire.

He lays out how Republican Presidents and Congresses in the last twenty-eight years have, little by little, undermined the foundations of the liberal state and dismembered the U.S. Government, making it the inefficient and corrupt machine voters think it is today.

“The Wrecking Crew” begins with a witty portray of Washington DC in the new millennium. In Frank’s account, the national capital has become a city solely dominated by glass high-rises sprawling up in Rosslyn, across the Potomac in Virginia, inhabited by lobbyists in designer suits, and subjugated to the encompassing presence of private consulting firms and government contractors.

Mr. Frank wonders how metropolitan DC became one of the wealthiest regions in the country and the destination of choice for young ivy-leaguers seeking high paying jobs in the private sector, when it was once the place for passionate young men and women wanting to dedicate their lives to public service.

The answer, according to Frank, lies in the takeover of Washington DC by conservatives that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and went into full force with the Newt Gingrich’s Congress in 1994.

Despising the liberal state while worshipping the Market, the conservative revolution, slowly but methodically, proceeded to disrupt the government from within: “Believing effective government to be somewhere between impossible and undesirable, conservatism takes steps to ensure its impotence,” writes Frank. To achieve their goals, conservatives used a variety of means. They shrank the role of government agencies they deeply distrusted by appointing some of those agencies’ staunchest opponents to run them.

Instead of letting government attend to the tasks it had always been responsible for, conservatives preferred handing over many of those tasks to private companies. Conservatives also understood, before and better than anyone else, the business potential of politics and successfully turned it into a lucrative enterprise with the help of industries such as lobbying. They also pushed for unconstrained deregulation to favor big corporations, and reduced public oversight of the private sector. As a result, Frank believes that conservatives created a fertile ground for corruption, wasteful spending and inefficiencies, and that they weakened the state to the point it had to give in to the power of money.

Thomas Frank’s tale of the conservative self-fulfilling prophecy on the futility of government is carefully researched and offers a wealth of details. The line-up of interviews, the historical analysis and the data presented are impressive and provide depth to Mr.

Frank’s argument. The book is also audacious, sharply written and often amusing. Thomas Frank’s relentless attack on conservatives, however, appear at times too narrowly focused, merely depicting Washington DC as a city abandoned into the hands of a bunch of reckless cowboys.

It makes the reader wonder what liberal Americans in the national capital and across the country were doing while the GOP was taking the US Government apart. Do they bear any responsibility for the ballooning deficit and the uncontrolled growth of the budget? Have they also mistakenly relied on tools so damaging to transparency in politics, such as lobbying? And what can Americans do today to get their country back on track?

In this interview with Washington Prism, Thomas Frank talks about “The Wrecking Crew,” Conservatism, and what it all means for the ongoing Presidential campaign.

Washington Prism (WP): In your book you portray the take-over of Washington DC by conservatives and their distaste for the liberal state. How would you describe their mission with regard to reforming the role of government?

Thomas Frank (TF): Conservative tradition doesn’t have a problem with government per se; they just want to be able to control it. Think of John Jay, for example. He once said: “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” What they really dislike is the liberal state. However, it’s hard even for conservatives to simply do away with all the agencies that that they dislike, such as the Department of Labor or the Environmental Protection Agency, because the public expects these agencies to exist. Conservatives can’t simply abolish them, and so they decided to capture them from the inside and then use them for goals different from those that they were originally set up with.

WP: Laying out the means that the Republicans used to fail the liberal state, you mention an excessive reliance on private contractors, deregulation, and the growth of lobbying. Where were the Democrats while all of this was taking place and why have they not been capable of preserving the liberal state?

TF: The reality is that there are plenty of Democrats that are conservatives. During the Reagan years Congress was in the hands of the Democrats but Ronald Reagan had his way because there were plenty of Democratic Congressmen that went along with him, supporting free-market ideals and a policy of laissez-fair.

The larger problem, however, is the ever-growing role of money in politics, which has pulled the Democrats, as well as the Republicans, to the right. When I was growing up, until the 1980s, I always had the feeling that Republicans would be able to win a Presidential Election here and there but would never be able to control Congress because the majority of the people were democrats because they were working-class. The Democrats used to appeal to these voters on the basis of economic issues, but the problem became that these issues are not popular with people who fund politics. The Democrats have been faced with this dilemma for years and they have not found a solution.

WP: As a response to the ongoing financial crisis, the Bush Administration is stepping in with government money to rescue private businesses gone badly. How would you explain this in the theoretical framework of small government, free market and laissez-faire that you describe as the conservative trademark?

TF: Nobody really believes in free market, it’s just an ideological slogan. What conservatives believe in is class power, and of course they’re going to rescue these big corporations. There is also another argument, that some of these institutions must be rescued or it’ll be the destruction of the financial system. This is definitely is the case of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. You wouldn’t be able to get a mortgage in the U.S. anymore, had the government not rescued them. In any case, the market has done this to itself and it’s a problem for conservatives. I think it’s embarrassing to them and that it will be embarrassing for McCain. This is a philosophy of government, based on deregulation, which was put on trial and is failing miserably. It has returned markets to what they were before the New Deal and it should not surprise anyone that the markets are behaving like they were behaving then, with these unexpected crashes.

WP: Watching the ongoing Presidential Campaign, one would think that all candidates read your book and are now running against broken Washington. Polls suggest that voters are accepting the claim on the part of both Obama and McCain. How do you explain a Republican running on a platform of change after eight years of GOP Administration? Is there something about John McCain and Sarah Palin that makes the claim legitimate?

TF: I don’t know, I don’t know. You people in the media seem to believe him. It’s ridiculous. This is the party that has ruled Washington on and off for twenty years. I agree that McCain has been on the off with his party on a few occasion, but he agrees with the philosophy of George W. Bush. Yes, he’s not personally corrupt, and in that sense he is o.k. And Sarah Palin is definitely not from DC.

They clearly went to find her as far as possible from DC. But they still believe in the same philosophy. I don’t honestly know why people believe him; it’s preposterous that he can talk about change. The truth is that these people live and breathe cynicism. They are cynic about government, about voters, about everything. That’s the nature of the beast.

WP: Do you have anything positive to say about conservatives and Republican politics?

TF: I was a Republican when I was young. Everyone in Kansas is a Republican, but we used to have very liberal Republicans. McCain talks a lot about Teddy Roosevelt. He was a great President. Unfortunately liberal Republicans are gone and they won’t come back. After the 1960s, the two parties sorted themselves out. Before, you would have very conservative Democrats from the South and very liberal Republicans, especially from the Northeast. But today, if you are going to be a liberal, you will become a Democrat.

WP: What should the Democrats do to appeal to voters in defense of the liberal state?

Democrats have to appeal to blue-collar workers by talking about economic issues. They must emphasize how the current government has not been able to respond to their needs. They need to fight hard for social security. It’s really important that they reach out to blue-collar voters. For example, and I don’t think they will do it, but if they said that they were going to renegotiate NAFTA, they would win the elections in a heartbeat.

WP: NAFTA is an international agreement. Don’t you think that the Democrats can only promise so much, because renegotiating it will depend on other countries and factors beyond the Democrats’ control?

TF: We can do whatever the heck we want; we are Americans (laughing). If we decided to renegotiate NAFTA, we could. Can you imagine if the Americans started pushing the whole world to the left? Instead of invading Iraq, renegotiated NAFTA? What would the rest of the world think (laughing)?

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington DC – It was a black Monday on Wall Street, with the Dow Jones that dropped 500 points – the worst loss in seven years – after a series of dramatic events that hit the US financial system over the weekend. Major investment bank Lehman Brothers went bankrupt; Bank of America abruptly bought off failing Merrill Lynch; and insurance group AIG says it is in desperate need of new cash injections. All of this came only weeks after the government-led bailout of mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and of investment firm Bear Sterns.

Benn Steil and Sebastian Mallaby, from the Council on Foreign Relations, held a media conference call in the afternoon to explain the significance of this chain of events. “The stakes of this current crisis go well beyond just a few financial institutions,” said Mr. Mallaby, Director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geo-economics. According to the former Washington Post columnist, the US role on the global stage is at risk. The world is watching the American model of free-standing investment banking and innovative financial engineering taking a serious hit and being outperformed by the more conservative European approach. While some of the most important financial institutions in the world collapse under the weight of debt they don’t have the cash to repay, “New York’s position as the pre-eminent go to place for ambitious young financiers is at risk.” As a longer-term result, the US might be losing economic competitiveness if highly innovative industries such as software and finance start migrating elsewhere.

According to Benn Steil, Director of the International Economics Council on Foreign Relations, the biggest concern for the US Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve is to salvage the credibility of dollar-denominated assets and prevent flight of capital abroad. “We do need to be concerned about the future of the Fed and Treasury, especially as they keep expanding their lending activities and last resort interventions,” Mr. Steil said. Inflation spurred by the need of the Federal Reserve to guarantee an excessive number of bad assets – by injecting increasing liquidity into the market — could motivate investors to abandon the US and pour their money onto Europe, for example. And, not coincidentally, the European Central Bank is already imposing much stricter restrictions on the kind of assets it takes as collaterals for its loans. In this sense, the decision by the US Government to refrain from intervening in the case of Lehman Brothers tried to send the message that the American financial system is still on solid footing with the exception of a few bad apples: “It was the right decision of the Fed and the Treasury not to step in with any sort of financial guarantees for Lehman Brothers and to let them go if that needed to be the case,” Mr. Steil commented.

The current financial crisis could potentially have a distressing effect on the already dwindling value of the dollar. High-level Chinese officials are among those concerned, especially over the exceptionally loose US monetary policy. China is particularly affected by it, since it continues buying US Treasury bonds in order to keep the value of the Yuan stable while the demand for Chinese exports increases. Benn Steil explained that the bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae stemmed from precisely this consideration. The main appeal of US Government bonds for foreign investors is that those assets are some of the most risk-free, since the Federal Reserve will always have the money to guarantee them, “at least in the sense that they can print the dollars needed to back those liabilities,” Mr. Steil noted. Worried that letting go of those investments could seriously damage the reputation of dollar-denominated assets, hampering capital inflows to the US from abroad, the government had no choice but to intervene in the case of Freddie and Fannie – which were always partially government owned.

In any case, it is expected that foreign governments will be careful in abandoning the US market, since many of them hold the majority of their national reserves in dollar-denominated assets. It would be counterproductive for them to diversify at a rate that would contribute to a sudden crash of the dollar and hence undermine the value of their own reserves. However, because foreign governments have accumulated enormous stocks of US assets in the past, “the threat of selling them does have the potential of becoming an important leverage in foreign policy,” Mr. Mallaby explained, since they could threat to disrupt the US financial markets at any time.

News of the financial meltdown, of course, reached the campaign trail and both Barack Obama and John McCain made the economy the centerpiece of their stump speeches on Monday. However, according to Mr. Mallaby, it would be unreasonable to ask them to introduce specific solutions in these remaining two months of the campaign, when it becomes very hard to talk about real policy issues and even more so about technicalities such as derivatives and collateralized securities: “They don’t want to look like they are indifferent but at the same time they don’t want voters to roll their eyes,” Mr. Mallaby said. As a result we should expect both candidates to focus on the more easily understood consequences that the financial turmoil will have on the real economy.

Finally, it remains to be seen whether the American electorate will hold the Bush Administration at all responsible for the turmoil on the financial markets. Although Mr. Mallaby and Mr. Beil said this would not be entirely fair, since the roots of the crisis are much deeper than whatever regulatory stance taken by George W. Bush in the past eight years, they acknowledged that this could very well happen. “I would think that there is always a risk for an incumbent party, especially for one that has been in office for two terms,” Mr. Mallaby concluded.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism