Kenneth M. Pollack's Blog, page 16

U.S. Nuclear and Extended Deterrence: Considerations and Challenges

Steven Pifer, Richard C. Bush, Vanda Felbab-Brown, Martin S. Indyk, Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack explore the considerations that shaped President Obama's Nuclear Posture Review, and examine the ability of the United States to maintain effective extended deterrence for its allies.

Saban Forum 2009: The U.S.-Israel Partnership

On November 14-16, 2009, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings brought together top Israeli and American policymakers, journalists, and members of the public and private sectors to Jerusalem for discussions on the most critical issues in the Middle East. The Saban Forum Proceedings presents summaries and photographs of the dialogue sessions, the list of participants, the program and a transcript of the event's keynote address.

Iraq's Long, Hot Summer?

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The final count of Iraq's March 7 elections gave former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's Iraqiya coalition a two-seat win over current Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition. Following this development, Kenneth Pollack outlines the major challenges still ahead in forming a new Iraqi government and offers recommendations for U.S. diplomacy going forward.

Iraq: An Elections Preview

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Kenneth Pollack explains why the recent Iraqi general elections will not likely solve the political logjam in Baghdad quickly or completely.

Osiraq Redux: A Crisis Simulation of an Israeli Strike on the Iranian Nuclear Program

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In December 2009, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy conducted a day-long simulation of the diplomatic and military fallout that could result from an Israeli military strike against the Iranian nuclear program. In this Middle East Memo, Kenneth M. Pollack analyzes the critical decisions each side made during the wargame.

Iraq's Ban On Democracy

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The Iraqi government's decision to ban nearly 500 Sunni politicians from the March 7 nationwide elections has quickly become a potential threat to the country's political stability and security.  Kenneth M. Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon argue that this move could reignite sectarian violence in Iraq and potentially jeopardize President Obama's plan to draw down American forces.

The Obama Administration: Facing Challenges in the Middle East

The Obama administration faced a set of urgent, complex, and intractable challenges in the Middle East.  It had to curb Iran's nuclear program, reduce the American military role in Iraq while stabilizing the country, find a more effective way to deal with Middle Eastern sources of terrorism, resurrect a moribund Arab-Israeli peace process, and re-establish American leadership in a key region where the vast majority of the people saw Washington as the cause of their problems, not the solution. With so many other challenges demanding President Obama's attention, this was never going to be an easy task, nor one that could possibly be completed in the first year of a new administration.

Certainly, the administration deserves credit for embracing these challenges and declaring a willingness to tackle them in ways very different from its predecessor.  However, across the board, the results have yet to match the promise of its ambitious rhetoric. This is very much a work in progress. It has arguably done best on Iran, where it did enact a new approach, only to see Iran's domestic dynamics change dramatically in a way that now calls into question the viability of that new policy. On Iraq too, the administration is clearly marching in a different direction, but it is not yet clear that its approach will deliver the stability that American national interests demand. And the breakthrough to Arab-Israeli peace that was to be the engine of the administration's strategy has yet to materialize resulting in considerable disillusionment in the region.

Iran. 
On Iran, the Obama administration quickly adopted the best policy available, one of "carrots and sticks" in which the Islamic Republic would be offered engagement and real economic and political incentives to cease its pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability, or face harsh international sanctions if it refused. Unfortunately, no sooner had the administration begun to put this policy into practice than the disputed June 2009 Iranian presidential elections effectively obviated its entire premise by bringing to power a much harder line regime in Tehran, one uninterested in better relations with the West and more concerned with internal challenges. The administration's "strategic reset" of relations with Russia and patient and painstaking efforts with China, have brought laudable international cooperation against Iran so far. However, this newfound solidarity is unlikely to translate into sanctions powerful enough to convince a hardline Iranian regime to suspend its uranium enrichment or even ship its stockpile of low enriched uranium out of the country. Moreover, the administration has been frustratingly meek in its support for the new Iranian opposition or in condemning the regime's violent repression. This restraint has been driven by the increasingly chimerical hope that Tehran will seek meaningful compromise and engagement with the West but it comes at a price:  the Iranian opposition depends on support from the international community to demonstrate that the regime is isolated abroad as well as at home. And by avoiding real pressure on Iranian human rights violations in favor of engagement with a regime that appears to have little interest in meaningful compromise, the Obama administration risks getting neither. 

Iraq.
Iraq too has been a mixed bag. There the Obama administration needed to drawdown American troops and push forward an Iraqi political system that by 2009 had become paralyzed while preventing a slide back into sectarian warfare, all too common in states that have undergone a major intercommunal civil war.

Despite the occasional bombing outrage, overall levels of violence continue to fall. The administration also succeeded in prodding the various Iraqi factions to enact an election law that provides for a reasonably good system of "open-list" elections. It quashed a bid to put the security agreement by which U.S. troops are to remain in country till the start of 2012 to a popular referendum that almost certainly would have failed, and in so doing thrown the country's entire security situation into chaos. In late February 2009, the president announced a 19-month drawdown plan for Iraq that would see U.S. forces reduced to about 50,000 by August 2010 and the end of American combat operations. Although this plan still remains possible, it seems increasingly difficult to reconcile with Iraqi political needs, and the administration has not yet demonstrated a willingness to modify it if the situation deteriorates. In particular, the Iraqi elections seem likely to produce a deeply fragmented parliament unable to form a government for many months. Such protracted wrangling will create opportunities and pressures for various groups to use violence to influence the negotiations. If the United States is seen as blithely withdrawing its troops without regard for mounting violence, this alone could push the country back into civil war. Finally, the administration continues to debate how and to what extent it will scale back civilian efforts in Iraq, and many Iraqi leaders remain frightened that Washington plans to take a far more hands-off approach--one for which they fear their country is unready.

Terrorism and Yemen. The attempted Christmas terrorist attack by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) finally brought the problem of Yemen into the popular American political debate. Yemen, and potentially Somalia, represents a critical problem for the Obama administration: how to prevent a failing state from becoming a new base for al Qaeda operations. Yemen faces an open civil war with Houthi tribesmen in the north and a  smoldering second one with unhappy southerners. The government is corrupt and incompetent, its economy continues to spiral downward, and al Qaeda (which set up shop in Yemen back in the 1990s—remember the bombing of the USS Cole?) has been busily expanding its operations in Yemen's ungoverned tribal regions. 

Although the Obama administration has made clear that it is not going to deal with terrorist refuges the way that the Bush 43 administration did (and the country remains staunchly on the President's side on this matter), it has not yet explained how it does plan to handle them—let alone demonstrated that its approach can work better than its predecessor's. A failure to do so will create tremendous problems for the administration both at home and in the region. If Yemen becomes a major base for al Qaeda terrorist operations, it could undercut support for the president's Afghanistan policy. The question the administration will then face is, 'Why invest so much in an uncertain war in Afghanistan if success there fails to eliminate, or even significantly reduce al Qaeda's operations because the group has developed other launch pads?

The Arab-Israeli Conflict. 
Achieving a breakthrough to comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace was meant to be the cornerstone of the Obama administration's integrated Middle East strategy. The appointment of George Mitchell as the president's envoy for Middle East peace on day two signaled the seriousness of that commitment.  However, a deeply divided Palestinian polity with a weak leader, the eventual formation of an Israeli government with a right wing leader, and Arab state reluctance to play an overt facilitating role, gave Mitchell little to work with.  And the president's insistence on a complete settlements freeze, including natural growth, only complicated matters: the Palestinian leadership could insist on nothing less, while Israeli politics was bound to produce just that (a 10-month freeze that excludes Jerusalem and grandfathers existing construction).  A parallel Israeli-Syrian negotiation also failed to materialize because of the all-too-familiar Syrian insistence on a prior Israeli commitment to full withdrawal from the Golan Heights and an Israeli insistence on negotiations without preconditions. By the end of the year, the process looked more bogged down than it had at the outset of the administration.  

As serious as the situation has become, it is by no means hopeless. Obama's prodding has generated Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's commitment to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. A ground-up process of building responsible, accountable and capable institutions of statehood is gaining traction in the West Bank. Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation there has reached unprecedented proportions with a commensurate drop in terrorist activity. If a persistent Mitchell can succeed – with Egyptian, Jordanian, and Saudi support – to jump-start final status negotiations, it may be possible to leverage Israeli-Syrian negotiations too, and multilateral negotiations on regional issues. However, that will still leave the vexed problem of Hamas and Gaza – violence emanating from there could easily blow up a fragile process. And weak leaders will still have great difficulty compromising on such intractable issues as Jerusalem and refugees. It would be one of the Middle East's many ironies that an administration determined to achieve a breakthrough to peace, managed in its second year only to produce a breakthrough to a revived peace process.  But in such a barren landscape, that would be an achievement nevertheless. 

Muslim World Outreach. It would also do much to enhance the credibility of President Obama's signature effort to improve relations with the Arab and Muslim Worlds. He made a very effective opening move with his June 2009 Cairo speech which received high approval ratings with his primary audience (even as it lost him important support among Israelis). But the failure so far to achieve progress on the hot button Palestinian issue, combined with the troop surge in Afghanistan and the delay in closing Guantanamo Bay, have opened up a gap between rhetoric and reality that America's opponents have been quick to exploit. This just adds to the importance of achieving substantive progress on the administration's other Middle East goals in its second year.
 

Authors

Martin S. IndykKenneth M. Pollack


Publication: The Brookings Institution

Obama's Challenges in the Middle East

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In this installment of the Status Report, a series of policy assessments of the Obama administration's first year, Martin Indyk and Kenneth M. Pollack give the administration a B for confronting major challenges in the Middle East. This grade reflects an A for effort, and a C for results that have so far not matched the promise of the administration's ambitious agenda.

The Iran Talks in Geneva: Too Soon to Tell

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Thursday's discussions between the P5-plus-one and the government of Iran were certainly interesting, but hardly earth-shaking.

The key question going into the talks concerned Iran's intentions, and the key read for the United States and its allies is what Iran's behavior in the talks might have to say about their ultimate intentions. Here, there were always three possibilities:

The Iranians would grandstand and agree to nothing. They would "admit nothing, deny everything and make counteraccusations," and in so doing make clear that the regime had absolutely no interest in serious compromise with the international community, were unconcerned by the threat of international sanctions, and were determined to proclaim their enmity to the West and unwilligness to abide by any additional international constraints on their nuclear program.




The Iranians would demonstrate a willingness to compromise on small, but not irrelevant interests because they are sincere in wanting to reach a negotiated settlement of their differences with the West, but were wary of the West and so needed to start gradually.




The Iranians would demonstrate a willingness to compromise on small, but not irrelevant interests because they had no interest in making real compromises on their nuclear program (or other issues of importance to the West) but they were hoping to avoid further sanctions if possible and recognized that creating a false process of negotiations was the best way to do this – particularly in light of last week's bombshell revelation of the secret Qom facility. Thus, concessions would be a way to draw the sting of that revelation, as well as the bad feelings they created in Europe as a result of the brutal crackdown against their internal opposition over the summer, but would be a tactic to relieve that pressure and create circumstances that would preclude the imposition of further sanctions.

In Geneva, Iran did agree to some small, but not irrelevant compromises: agreeing to reprocess some of the low-enriched uranium manufactured at Natanz to refuel the Tehran research reactor, and agreeing to relatively near term IAEA inspections of the Qom facility. That is interesting because it does seem to rule out (1) as the Iranian position. Given the fact that the hardest line elements in the regime have consolidated their control over the government since the disputed June 12 election, that President Ahmadinejad has been extremely strident in his rhetoric since then, and that the regime has largely silenced and/or imprisoned most of the voices of moderation that previously had been important players in Iranian politics, it seemed entirely possible before the Geneva talks that the Iranians would adopt the kind of strident, no-concessions approach envisioned in the first approach above. Geneva has revealed that they did not.

Unfortunately, Geneva has done nothing to help us determine whether the Iranians are pursuing (2) or (3) from the above list. Their actions are fully consistent with both, and the vast majority of Iran experts, including most Iranians, believe that this regime means to pursue (3), but specifically because many Westerners will want to believe that they are pursuing (2) and this will maintain that fiction, and because doing so aids the Chinese and Russians in precluding the imposition of new sanctions against Iran as long as the talks are ongoing and the Iranians seem to be cooperating. Thus Geneva did not answer the most important question of all: whether the Iranians are sincere in claiming to want a negotiated settlement of the outstanding differences between Tehran and the international community.

As a final thought, even if you accept the above analysis, it is still interesting that the Iranians opted for (3) rather than (1). It suggests that they would at least prefer not to come under additional sanctions even if – as many suspect, and Iranian regime officials have claimed – they believe they can withstand them if it comes to that. But there is one other explanation, which is that it may be a sign that the Russian government is pushing the Iranians to make symbolic compromises to help Russia's delicate diplomacy with the United States, and having nothing to do with the Iranian regime's preferred course of action. At present, Russia wields considerable influence in Tehran, and it may be that for purposes of their own, the Russians want the Iranians to appear more reasonable so that the Russians can make the case to the United States that they are pressuring the Iranians as Washington desires. Moscow may be telling their Iranian friends something to the effect of, "don't act completely obnoxious, because that will put us (the Russians) in a difficult position with the Americans and Europeans that we don't want to be in. Make some minor concessions for our sake, and we'll take care of you.". In other words, it may not be Iranian fear of sanctions that drove them to (3) vice (1), it may be their relationship with the Russians and the fact that the Russians wanted them to seem accommodating for their own reasons.

Authors

Kenneth M. Pollack


Image Source: Reuters/Dominic Favre

Which Path to Persia? : Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran

Brookings Institution Press 2009 220pp.


What do we do about Iran? The Islamic Republic presents a confounding series of challenges for the Obama administration. Over the past thirty years, Washington has produced an unimpressive track record of policies -- ranging from undeclared warfare to
unilateral concessions -- that have limited some Iranian mischief-making but have largely failed to convince Tehran to drop its support for terrorist groups, its pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability, or its wider efforts to overturn the regional status quo.


Which Path to Persia? objectively presents the most important policy options available to the United States in crafting a new strategy toward Iran. It considers four different types of solutions: diplomacy, military, regime change, and containment. Among the diplomatic options are one approach that would employ "bigger carrots and bigger sticks" and a strategy of pure engagement that would abandon sanctions and focus on changing Iran's strategic perceptions. The various military options include a full-scale invasion, an air campaign to destroy Iran's nuclear program, and allowing an Israeli air strike against the same. Regime change could take the form of triggering a popular revolution, supporting an insurgency, or aiding a military coup. Last, containment would involve deterring Iran
from trying to wield a future nuclear arsenal while hindering its ability to cause trouble in the region.


As Iran moves forward with its nuclear program, the urgency increases for the United States to implement a new policy. This distinguished group of authors, all senior fellows with the Saban Center at Brookings, points out that no one strategy is ideal and that all involve heavy costs, significant risks, and potentially painful trade-offs. With an eye to these perils, they address how the different options could be combined to produce an
integrated strategy that makes the best choice from a bad lot.



ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Kenneth M. Pollack

Ken Pollack is an expert on national security, military affairs and the Persian Gulf. He was Director for Persian Gulf affairs at the National Security Council. He also spent seven years in the CIA as a Persian Gulf military analyst. He is the author of A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East.

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Daniel L. Byman

Daniel Byman focuses on counterterrorism and Middle East security. He is also a professor at Georgetown University's Security Studies Program.

Martin S. Indyk

Martin Indyk is acting vice president and director of Foreign Policy at Brookings. A former ambassador to Israel and assistant secretary of state for near east affairs during the Clinton administration, he currently focuses on the Clinton administration's diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Suzanne Maloney

Suzanne Maloney studies Iran, the political economy of the Persian Gulf and Middle East energy policy. A former U.S. State Department policy advisor, she has also counseled private companies on Middle East issues. Maloney recently published a book titled Iran's Long Reach: Iran as a Pivotal State in the Muslim World .

Michael E. O'Hanlon

Michael O'Hanlon specializes in U.S. national security policy. He is senior author of the Iraq Index. A former defense budget analyst who advised members of Congress on military spending, he specializes in Iraq, North Korea, homeland security, the use of military force and other defense issues.

Bruce Riedel

A former CIA officer, Bruce Riedel focuses on political transition, terrorism and conflict resolution. He was a senior advisor to three U.S. presidents on Middle East and South Asian issues. At the request of President Obama he chaired an interagency review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan for the White House that was completed in March 2009.

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