acanuck's picture

    Iran rejects, rebuffs and rebukes Obama overture. Really, is that what just happened?

    Well, can't say we didn't try. Back to the War Room!

    My God, our media don't do nuance very well, do they? Thank God Obama will read the actual translation of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's speech. Because it had lines like "If you change your behavior, we will change our behavior" -- a near-exact parallel to Obama's offer "If you unclench your fist ..." with the added notion of "After you, Alphonse."

    Has anyone noticed it took Khamenei just one day to respond to Obama's appeal? Yeah, that's treating it with contempt and derision, isn't it? While sticking with the media's groupthink assessment that Khamenei has dismissed Obama's overture, the L.A. Times reported that Khamenei read carefully from his speech, as if his words had been carefully weighed. You can bet they were. Example:

    "Have you released Iranian assets? Have you lifted oppressive sanctions? Have you given up mudslinging and making accusations against the great Iranian nation and its officials? Have you given up your unconditional support for the Zionist regime? Even the language remains unchanged," Khamenei said.

    Here Khamenei has set out four concrete things he thinks Obama could do to signal his overture is more than window-dressing. Notice that Israel comes in only at No. 4, almost an afterthought. Notice also what he's asking for: "give up your unconditional support" for Israel. With a Netanyahu-Lieberman government looming, that one's a gimme. Check. Done and done.

    Obama's already changed the tone with his televised appeal, so No. 3 appears to be no problem. Nos. 1 and 2? Hey, let's sit down and talk about those. So rather than dismissing Obama's offer, as the media have almost universally concluded, Khamenei has started negotiating.

    Comments

    The MSM doesn't do nuance at all. They're black and white, just report the facts types. They would print a story with a nice big headline of 'The World Is Flat' because some politician said it...and it isn't their job to fact check people, just to report on what was said (kinda having a flashback to the WoMD claims that were widely reported on as fact leading up to the Iraq War). With that kind of mindset nuance is about as foreign to them as a little green space alien. /rant

    Fortunately the diplomats and our political leaders, the only ones who matter in this process, do nuance very well. The MSM will figure out there was a nuance factor to this story eventually.


    I love TPM, you guys are so smart. I saw the headlines over at HuffPo and was instantly disgusted with Iran. I immediately thought what a slap in the face it was to the Obama Administration. I'm sure other Americans are reacting the same way. Your post has really put a different light on things.



    The news media have been dealing with lack of nuance for the last eight years--cowboy diplomacy doesn't lend itself well to subtlety. They also haven't had to work very hard for a living during that period.

    I have hope that the competent journalists will come out of their creative comas and start generating stories with some meat on the bones. Natural Selection will rid us of the hacks that have infiltrated the news community, disguising themselves as reporters.

    Meanwhile, we'll have to rely on observers such as you to make sure the truth gets out.


    Clarification: my comment was directed to acanuck and Libertine.


    Good analysis. Successful diplomacy takes time and persistent effort, just as with developing any kind of healthy human relationship.


    It still makes me wonder if Obama can make a deal along lines suggested by Khamenei, i.e. unfreeze the assets, lift the sanctions and probably remove Hezbollah and Hamas from the list of terrorist organizations. If Iran shuts down the parts of its nuclear program we find disturbing (e.g. agree to rely on Russian uranium fuel).

    It sound so rational that it must be deemed utterly insane by our foreign policy establishment.


    I think all of that can be achieved if we proceed in a step-wise fashion. We lift some sanctions, Iran cuts-off financial support to Hezbollah, or something along those lines. It's a slow walk, we take one step forward, Iran takes one-step forward. After awhile, maybe, we end up close enough to shake hands.


    Nice post. That's exactly the way I read the Iranian reaction also. We've gone from two pinheads sniping at each other (Bush, Amajinadad) to a substantiative public dialog with the genuine leader of Iran.

    What? Was Iran supposed to just come skipping out of the woods and say: "Oh never mind. Since it's OBAMA, we'll just forget about all that stuff we said was important to us last week."

    We've taken great strides in kicking the pinheads out of government. Now how do we get them out of the news meda?


    There has been some speculation that The Plan is to be seen to be reaching out to Iran for the benefit of public consumption and to show our allies that we did try and look what happened.

    An anonymous official who was with Hillary Clinton at the donor's conference in Sharm el-Sheikh early this month leaked that she told the FM of the UAE that she doubted that Iran would respond positively to Obama. This account includes a similiar interpretation of the Iranian response to Obama's earlier speech:

    "Earier this month, responding to Obama’s offer of engagement, Iran’s hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a speech that “the Iranian nation is ready for talks, but in a fair atmosphere with mutual respect.”

    Yet Tehran has not made any public concessions or announcements about its nuclear program, or on other issues that would make it easier for Obama to proceed with his pledge to hold direct talks.

    The apparent rebuff by Tehran could make it easier for Obama to develop consensus on additional measures against Iran among European allies and Russia, which long resisted Bush administration’s calls for tougher sanctions."
    http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/19541.html

    This Haaretz report raises some questions:

    "Senior U.S. officials are preparing to present President Barack Obama with a plan for dialogue with Iran on its nuclear program, including increased international sanctions against Tehran alongside dialogue.

    Top Israeli and U.S. officials have been holding meetings on Iran.

    The unofficial dialogue between Washington and Tehran, bitter enemies since the Islamic Revolution toppled American ally Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979, will begin within two weeks, even before Obama approves the plan.

    Senior U.S. diplomats will meet their Iranian counterparts in two meetings about the future of Afghanistan - one in Moscow on March 27 and the other in the Netherlands on March 31.

    The senior U.S. official leading the American rapprochement with Iran is Dennis Ross.

    Senior Israeli officials and Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, who was recently in Washington, have informed the U.S. what Israel thinks about dialogue with Iran.

    In talks with the American officials, Israel has learned that the U.S. is planning to conduct a "parallel" approach - beginning a dialogue with Iran, while working with Russia, China, Germany, France and Britain to formulate new sanctions against Iran.

    The U.S. will coordinate its efforts with Israel and with moderate Arab states as well.

    The goal is to combine talks with pressure in order to convince the Iranian leadership to respond to western demands that it curtail its nuclear program."
    http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1072808.html

    The Plan will proceed independently of Obama's approval?

    The Plan involves asking for Iranian help re Afghanistan while concurrently trying to ramp up sanctions and pressure?

    Is it designed to fail?


    Most of your argument makes a lot of sense to me. Look, I believe Obama feels pretty strongly about Iran not getting the bomb. And I think the current Iranian rulers (and many of Iran's people, including anti-mullah urban ones) wants it, or wants to appear that it is trying to get it, in order to have first nation status, the "respect" they are always yammering about. Without one, you're not even Pakistan or India.

    That said, I think the Obama administration looks at it this way: Iran has one pretty extraordinay revolution, it's possible that it might have another or something like it some day. They are always watching the internal politics, and, we don't know how much meddling the CIA was doing with Bush and we don't know what Obama has sanctioned on that front, either. What happens in Iraq is always also seriously in the mix. We still have a camp of 3,500 Iranian People's Mujahedin in Iraq and it has suggested that the Iranian drone we just shot down in Iraq in February was spying on them. (That drone incident is another reason for them not to take Obama's holiday felicitations seriously, in some way it sounds like a joke in light of that.)


    The Iranians have repeatedly made it explicit that the carrot-and-stick approach won't sway them. Obama promised such an approach during the election campaign, but he is a realist and the U.S. absolutely needs a rapprochement with Iran.
    I think a lot of people -- especially Dennis Ross -- are trying to inflate Ross's role in this process. And squeezing new sanctions out of Europe and the Russians? Good luck with that.
    A lot, of course, depends on which faction wins the presidential election in three months. Hard-liner Ahmadinejad has not yet said whether he will run for the post again; the last thing the U.S. wants is to throw the election his way.
    As for internal Iranian politics, one point I neglected to mention is the fact that Khamenei chose to answer Obama on behalf of the country, shutting Ahmadinejad out. Very symbolic.
    Here's a rather good second-day analysis (from a European, not a U.S. agency, naturally):
    http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jxlz-o2pTtBtLRTktl169QEIxL1w


    A bit more on what I was thinking on it recently here in a comment on a Rosenberg post. I really didn't expect a good reaction to the message. Also I thought the BBC analyst laid it out pretty well, and there was a link on that BBC page to the strong Iranian reaction against his carrot-and-stick statements in December after the election but before inauguration, and that reminded me of how they are already girded against him unless he does something drastic. A holiday greeting of good will was not going to do much at all.


    I agree relations will change step by step, but the scenarios that new and piotr outline seem narrower than what is called for. Iran is seeking a new relationship with the West, not piecemeal solutions to irritants (though those go hand in hand).
    What gives me hope is that Obama understands that. Inviting Iran to the coming talks on Afghanistan is precisely the right kind of gesture to make.
    It may be all the Israelis and the right talk about, but the nuclear-weapons issue really is overblown. Khamenei has declared his country does not seek such weapons, and a U.S.-Iranian protocol could make such a pledge transparently verifiable. By, for example, allowing U.S. monitors at all nuclear facilities, and setting limits on the degree of enrichment that can occur.
    Iran won't give up the right to enrich, which every other country is free to exercise.


    Art: As I mentioned above, inviting Iran to an international meeting on Afghanistan is a pretty concrete positive step. Iranians hated the Taliban even before the West joined in.
    As for the bomb, Iran says it doesn't seek one, the IAEA says there's no evidence it seeks one, and U.S. intelligence agrees.
    Israel and U.S. hawks insist Iran mustn't be allowed to enrich uranium at all, but enrichment is allowed under the non-proliferation treaty (which Israel has never signed).
    So Iran will continue to enrich. The most the West can reasonably aim for is agreement on stringent, verifiable limits. Such a deal is reachable.
    A key Iranian demand is an end to U.S.-funded insurgencies along its eastern and western borders.


    For anyone still following this thread, Juan Cole is a day late to the debate, but he echos my initial take on Khamenei's response to Obama:
    http://www.juancole.com/


    Errrr... why are we suddenly reading a discussion from 2009 from another blog?


    Blame the Google. For some reason known only to the Google itself, it has decided to direct enough people to this page to make it into the "Top Hits" section of the day.


    Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1999  2009. Great year, do you remember the good times?


    I don't even remember 2012. Ask Maiello.


    I don't suspect he remembers either, even if he says he does. I remember New Year's Eve 2008->9 and the good butterfly feeling in my stomach thinking about the coming Obama inauguration as I watched the fireworks over the far away mountains from my cottage. I hope to have similar quality memories this year.


    You sure it isn't the Martians?


    Shhhh.... Michael's been covering for the Martians for some time. I have it on the Q. T. they're even helping fund this blogsite (yeah, Martians are cheapskates, what can you do...)


    He tries to blame it on Google.  But Google itself may have been taken over by Martians:  the word "google" could be taken to mean something like "overlord" in the Martian language.

    Google has many relationships with another big company, Microsoft.  Microsoft is located in Redmond, Washington.  "Redmond" means "red world", as in the Red Planet.

    Google is gradually acquiring all the information in our world, probably to help the invasion.  It's no coincidence that they are starting to reveal themselves less than a year after the death of David Bowie, the same Bowie who tried to call our attention to the Spiders From Mars.

    And where would the spiders from Mars trap their prey?  In the World Wide Web!


    Hmmm... I thought Google and Microsoft were fighting, whereas Apple not only uses the red orb as its symbol with a bit taken out of it - i.e. first colonization. Of course they set up in Cupertino, i.e. little copper (reddish) - Martians are not known for their subtlety.


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