Iran talk: What’s in a war?

By William J. Fallon, Chuck Hagel, Lee Hamilton, Thomas Pickering and Anthony Zinni, Published: September 28 2012

The Washington Post  

War with Iran is not inevitable, but U.S. national security would be seriously threatened by a nuclear-armed Iran. Particularly given the recent speeches at the U.N. General Assembly, military action is being discussed intensely. Public discussion of military action, however, is often reduced to rhetoric and partisan politics. We propose a nonpartisan, reasoned debate about the implications for the United States of another war in the wider Middle East.

Thomas Jefferson said, “In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion, and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.” In a publication released this month, “Weighing Benefits and Cost of Military Action Against Iran,” and posted online at TheIranProject.org, more than 30 former senior U.S. government officials and regional experts have come together to invoke the art of reasoning. We do not agree with every word in the report, but we have shared understandings of its message.

We joined this effort because we believe a fact-based discussion of the objectives, costs, benefits, timing, capabilities and exit strategy should govern any decision to use military force. Our position is fully consistent with the policy of presidents for more than a decade of keeping all options on the table, including the use of military force, thereby increasing pressure on Iran while working toward a political solution. Since the consequences of a military attack are so significant for U.S. interests, we seek to ensure that the spectrum of objectives, as well as potential consequences, is understood.

If the United States attacks, it could set back for several years Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon. If the objective were large-scale damage to Iran’s military and weapons capability, the United States could achieve substantial success. But without large numbers of troops on the ground, we doubt that U.S. military attacks from the air — even if supplemented by other means such as drones, covert operations and cyberattacks — could eliminate Iran’s capability to build a nuclear weapon, unseat the regime or force it to capitulate to U.S. demands.

U.S. intelligence officials have said they believe Iran already has the know-how and much of the technology to build a nuclear weapon. U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials agree that Iran’s leaders have not yet made a decision to build one. But the U.S. government has indicated that if Iran were to produce weapons-grade enriched uranium and build a weapon, the military option must be considered. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said this month that the United States would have “a little more than a year . . . to take the action necessary” should Iran decide to make a dash for a nuclear weapon. We believe that there would be sufficient warning time to decide how to respond.

Though not the only way to achieve these objectives, a U.S. attack would demonstrate the country’s credibility as an ally to other nations in the region and would derail Iran’s nuclear ambitions for several years, providing space for other, potentially longer-term solutions. An attack would also make clear the United States’ full commitment to nonproliferation as other nations contemplate moves in that direction.

The costs are more difficult to estimate than the benefits because of uncertainty about the scale and type of Iran’s reaction. Iran is likely to retaliate directly but also to pursue an asymmetrical response, including heightened terrorist activity and covert operations as well as using surrogates such as Hezbollah. An increase in the price of oil could keep the market unstable for weeks or months and disrupt the global economy.
The conflict could also escalate into a regional war involving Syria, Hezbollah, the Palestinians and other Arab states and terrorist groups. While a U.S.-led attack on Iran might be quietly welcomed by the leaders of many Arab states, and certainly by Israel, it would most likely be greeted with hostility from wide swaths of the region’s Muslims.

Other consequences might include the increased likelihood of a decision by Iran to build a nuclear weapon; more instability in a region still seeking its footing; and the opportunity for extremist groups such as al-Qaeda to attract recruits.

When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama wisely described the dilemma that the United States faces as a great nation: “part of our challenge is reconciling these two seemingly irreconcilable truths — that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly.” The United States needs to have a nonpartisan, reasoned discussion about the choice between necessity and human folly.

An Evangelical Back From Exile, Lifting Romney

September 22, 2012
NYT
By JO BECKER


DULUTH, Ga. — Ralph Reed is clearly relishing his revival.

Just six years ago, the man who turned the Christian Coalition into such a powerful political force that he was called “God’s right-hand man” was all but written off, tarnished by his ties to the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, then trounced in his campaign to become Georgia’s lieutenant governor.

But after several years in political purgatory, Mr. Reed has found his way back.

At the Republican convention in Tampa, Fla., he was sought after by party luminaries and afforded the ultimate status accommodation, a room in the same hotel as Mitt Romney. And soon he plans to unleash a sophisticated, microtargeted get-out-the-evangelical-vote operation that he believes could nudge open a margin of victory if Mr. Romney can keep the race close.

The other day, sitting in an office lined with framed photographs from back in the heyday — here with President George W. Bush at a White House Christmas party, there with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican — the preternaturally youthful evangelical operative, 51, propped his black ostrich cowboy boots on a coffee table and made what he admits seems an audacious prediction: that record numbers of socially conservative evangelical Protestants will turn out for the first presidential election in history without a Protestant on the Republican ticket.

“God,” he said with a laugh, “has a sense of humor.”

That may be, but Mr. Reed has a plan. And he has the money to back it up: an estimated $10 million to $12 million from contributors across the Republican spectrum, according to a partial list of donors and people with direct knowledge of his operation.

Three years ago, Mr. Reed formed the Faith and Freedom Coalition and began assembling what he calls the largest-ever database of reliably conservative religious voters. In the coming weeks, he says, each of those 17.1 million registered voters in 15 key states will receive three phone calls and at least three pieces of mail. Seven million of them will get e-mail and text messages. Two million will be visited by one of more than 5,000 volunteers. Over 25 million voter guides will be distributed in 117,000 churches.

White evangelicals are a crucial voting constituency, 26 percent of the 2008 electorate and overwhelmingly Republican in recent presidential cycles, exit polls show. With so few truly undecided voters left, bumping up evangelical turnout in swing states like Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio would almost certainly help Mr. Romney.

But the success of Mr. Reed’s turnout-stimulus campaign will hinge on a variety of factors, not least whether those voters so dislike some of President Obama’s policies that they can overcome their mistrust of Mr. Romney’s Mormon faith and reversals on issues like abortion. And in an election dominated by jobs and the economy, it remains an open question whether culture-war hot buttons, like the president’s support for same-sex marriage, will be as potent as in the past.

In 2004, Mr. Reed was an architect of an evangelical turnout apparatus that is credited with helping Mr. Bush win re-election. Then came the Abramoff influence-peddling scandal. Though Mr. Reed was not charged, the work his consulting firm did for Mr. Abramoff’s Indian gambling clients by opposing plans for rivals’ casinos sullied his reputation among Christian conservatives, many of whom oppose gambling. Mr. Reed acknowledges that he used bad judgment.

Clint Austin, a Christian lobbyist who used to work with Mr. Reed, said, “Money and power always find a way to get in the same room, and it’s sometimes hard to resist the allure of that. I want to say this with humility because I’m not his judge, but there were so many causes for concern, and a lot of us felt like he needed to step back and get himself refocused.

“And I think that’s what he’s now done.”

Mr. Reed began by aligning himself with Mr. Romney during the primary campaign against Senator John McCain, the eventual Republican nominee in 2008, said Mr. Reed’s friend Deal W. Hudson, president of the Pennsylvania Catholics Network. Mr. Reed distributed a film, “Amendment 6,” that linked the idea of religious tolerance to evangelicals’ acceptance of Mormonism.

“That movie was a great example of how Ralph works,” said Matt Towery, a Georgia political analyst. “I don’t mean this pejoratively, but he is an opportunist. He finds himself an opportunity and he hits it, and he hits it hard.”

With much of the work once done by party committees and campaigns now outsourced to “super PACs” and other outside groups, Mr. Reed saw another opportunity. In 2008, the Obama campaign won the turnout wars with technology and microtargeting data made available by the growth in online shopping.

The Faith and Freedom Coalition, formed in 2009, is Mr. Reed’s attempt to do the same on the right.

To identify religious voters most likely to vote Republican, the group used 171 data points.

It acquired megachurch membership lists. It mined public records for holders of hunting or boating licenses, and warranty surveys for people who answered yes to the question “Do you read the Bible?” It determined who had downloaded conservative-themed books, like “Going Rogue” by Sarah Palin, onto their e-readers, and whether those people also drove pickup trucks. It drilled down further, looking for married voters with children, preferably owners of homes worth more than $100,000.

Finally, names that overlapped at least a dozen or so data points were overlaid with voting records to yield a database with the addresses and, in many cases, e-mail addresses and cellphone numbers of the more than 17 million faith-centric registered voters — not just evangelical Protestants but also Mass-attending Catholics. The group is also reaching out to nearly two million more people who have never registered to vote.

One measure of the coalition’s potential influence is its contributors, who represent a broader Republican constituency than simply the religious right. The group is not required to disclose its donors, but a partial list was obtained by The New York Times.

For example, one donor, Bernard Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, supports abortion rights but wants smaller government. On the other hand, the mutual fund manager Foster Friess is a patron of religious conservative causes and was a leading donor to a super PAC that supported Rick Santorum. Another donor is John M. Templeton Jr., who runs a foundation devoted to pursuing “new insights at the boundary between theology and science.”

In addition to its presidential election turnout campaign, the group plans to focus on two state ballot measures: a proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in Minnesota and an effort to recall an Iowa Supreme Court justice who voted to legalize same-sex marriage in the state.

Mr. Reed and his allies agree that social issues alone will not turn the election.

Same-sex marriage, for instance, “doesn’t raise the temperature of the bulk of the Catholic Mass-going voters,” said Mr. Hudson, adding that while it was still a concern, “attitudes about homosexuals have changed so much over the last several years.”

So the group plans to pair its social message with a broader economic one. The president’s health care overhaul will be depicted as both big government spending and an assault on religious liberty; the law mandates that employees of organizations affiliated with religions, like hospitals, universities and charities, be able to obtain free contraception through their health care plans.

In addition, Mr. Obama’s testy relations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, an important issue for many evangelicals, will be highlighted, said Gary Marx, the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s executive director.

Some Republican operatives doubt Mr. Reed will be able to mobilize a new evangelical army.

Still, one early test was the coalition’s work in the 2009 Virginia governor’s race, where exit polls showed that evangelicals’ share of the electorate had jumped to 34 percent from 28 percent in 2008.

“Ralph’s organization played an incredibly important role,” said Phil Cox, the campaign manager for the Republican winner, Bob McDonnell. “He speaks the language.”

Egypt’s New Leader Spells Out Terms for U.S.-Arab Ties

September 22, 2012
NYT
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and STEVEN ERLANGER

CAIRO — On the eve of his first trip to the United States as Egypt’s new Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi said the United States needed to fundamentally change its approach to the Arab world, showing greater respect for its values and helping build a Palestinian state, if it hoped to overcome decades of pent-up anger.

A former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mr. Morsi sought in a 90-minute interview with The New York Times to introduce himself to the American public and to revise the terms of relations between his country and the United States after the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, an autocratic but reliable ally.

He said it was up to Washington to repair relations with the Arab world and to revitalize the alliance with Egypt, long a cornerstone of regional stability.

If Washington is asking Egypt to honor its treaty with Israel, he said, Washington should also live up to its own Camp David commitment to Palestinian self-rule. He said the United States must respect the Arab world’s history and culture, even when that conflicts with Western values.

And he dismissed criticism from the White House that he did not move fast enough to condemn protesters who recently climbed over the United States Embassy wall and burned the American flag in anger over a video that mocked the Prophet Muhammad.

“We took our time” in responding to avoid an explosive backlash, he said, but then dealt “decisively” with the small, violent element among the demonstrators.

“We can never condone this kind of violence, but we need to deal with the situation wisely,” he said, noting that the embassy employees were never in danger.

Mr. Morsi, who will travel to New York on Sunday for a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, arrives at a delicate moment. He faces political pressure at home to prove his independence, but demands from the West for reassurance that Egypt under Islamist rule will remain a stable partner.

Mr. Morsi, 61, whose office was still adorned with nautical paintings that Mr. Mubarak left behind, said the United States should not expect Egypt to live by its rules.

“If you want to judge the performance of the Egyptian people by the standards of German or Chinese or American culture, then there is no room for judgment,” he said. “When the Egyptians decide something, probably it is not appropriate for the U.S. When the Americans decide something, this, of course, is not appropriate for Egypt.”

He suggested that Egypt would not be hostile to the West, but would not be as compliant as Mr. Mubarak either.

“Successive American administrations essentially purchased with American taxpayer money the dislike, if not the hatred, of the peoples of the region,” he said, by backing dictatorial governments over popular opposition and supporting Israel over the Palestinians.

He initially sought to meet with President Obama at the White House during his visit this week, but he received a cool reception, aides to both presidents said. Mindful of the complicated election-year politics of a visit with Egypt’s Islamist leader, Mr. Morsi dropped his request.

His silence in the immediate aftermath of the embassy protest elicited a tense telephone call from Mr. Obama, who also told a television interviewer that at that moment he did not consider Egypt an ally, if not an enemy either. When asked if he considered the United States an ally, Mr. Morsi answered in English, “That depends on your definition of ally,” smiling at his deliberate echo of Mr. Obama. But he said he envisioned the two nations as “real friends.”

Mr. Morsi spoke in an ornate palace that Mr. Mubarak inaugurated three decades ago, a world away from the Nile Delta farm where the new president grew up, or the prison cells where he had been confined by Mr. Mubarak for his role in the Brotherhood. Three months after his swearing-in, the most noticeable change to the presidential office was a plaque on his desk bearing the Koranic admonition, “Be conscious of a day on which you will return to God.”

A stocky figure with a trim beard and wire-rim glasses, he earned a doctorate in materials science at the University of Southern California in the early 1980s. He spoke with an easy confidence in his new authority, reveling in an approval rating he said was at 70 percent. When he grew animated, he slipped from Arabic into crisp English.

Little known at home or abroad until just a few months ago, he was the Brotherhood’s second choice as a presidential nominee after the first choice was disqualified. On the night of the election, the generals who had ruled since Mr. Mubarak’s ouster issued a decree keeping most presidential powers for themselves.

But last month Mr. Morsi confounded all expectations by prying full executive authority back from the generals. In the interview, when an interpreter suggested that the generals had “decided” to exit politics, Mr. Morsi quickly corrected him.

“No, no, it is not that they ‘decided’ to do it,” he interjected in English, determined to clarify that it was he who removed them. “This is the will of the Egyptian people through the elected president, right?

“The president of the Arab Republic of Egypt is the commander of the armed forces, full stop. Egypt now is a real civil state. It is not theocratic, it is not military. It is democratic, free, constitutional, lawful and modern.”

He added, “We are behaving according to the Egyptian people’s choice and will, nothing else — is it clear?”

He praised Mr. Obama for moving “decisively and quickly” to support the Arab Spring revolutions, and he said he believed that Americans supported “the right of the people of the region to enjoy the same freedoms that Americans have.”

Arabs and Americans have “a shared objective, each to live free in their own land, according to their customs and values, in a fair and democratic fashion,” he said, adding that he hoped for “a harmonious, peaceful coexistence.”

But he also argued that Americans “have a special responsibility” for the Palestinians because the United States had signed the 1978 Camp David accord. The agreement called for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank and Gaza to make way for full Palestinian self-rule.

“As long as peace and justice are not fulfilled for the Palestinians, then the treaty remains unfulfilled,” he said.

He made no apologies for his roots in the Brotherhood, the insular religious revival group that was Mr. Mubarak’s main opposition and now dominates Egyptian politics.

“I grew up with the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said. “I learned my principles in the Muslim Brotherhood. I learned how to love my country with the Muslim Brotherhood. I learned politics with the Brotherhood. I was a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

He left the group when he took office but remains a member of its political party. But he said he sees “absolutely no conflict” between his loyalty to the Brotherhood and his vows to govern on behalf of all, including members of the Christian minority or those with more secular views.

“I prove my independence by taking the correct acts for my country,” he said. “If I see something good from the Muslim Brotherhood, I will take it. If I see something better in the Wafd” — Egypt’s oldest liberal party — “I will take it.”

He repeatedly vowed to uphold equal citizenship rights of all Egyptians, regardless of religion, sex or class. But he stood by the religious arguments he once made as a Brotherhood leader that neither a woman nor a Christian would be a suitable president.

“We are talking about values, beliefs, cultures, history, reality,” he said. He said the Islamic position on presidential eligibility was a matter for Muslim scholars to decide, not him. But regardless of his own views or the Brotherhood’s, he said, civil law was another matter.

“I will not prevent a woman from being nominated as a candidate for the presidential campaign,” he said. “This is not in the Constitution. This is not in the law. But if you want to ask me if I will vote for her or not, that is something else, that is different.”

He was also eager to reminisce about his taste of American culture as a graduate student at the University of Southern California. “Go, Trojans!” he said, and he remembered learning about the world from Barbara Walters in the morning and Walter Cronkite at night. “And that’s the way it is!” Mr. Morsi said with a smile.

But he also displayed some ambivalence. He effused about his admiration for American work habits, punctuality and time management. But when an interpreter said that Mr. Morsi had “learned a lot” in the United States, he quickly interjected a qualifier in English: “Scientifically!”

He was troubled by the gangs and street of violence of Los Angeles, he said, and dismayed by the West’s looser sexual mores, mentioning couples living together out of wedlock and what he called “naked restaurants,” like Hooters.

“I don’t admire that,” he said. “But that is the society. They are living their way.”