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tattooed-alchemist · 8 years ago

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The 2016 election has made soothsayers of any number of historians, academics and philosophers, but one of the few filmmakers who saw Donald Trump coming was the documentarian Adam Curtis. One might even argue that Trump's victory was the closing argument of a thesis he has been refining and developing for the last 15 years.

Since his 2002 opus, The Century of Self, Curtis has traced the myriad ways in which the left has abandoned politics in favor of a radical individualism, online and off, that has allowed reactionary forces to metastasize in the West and across the globe. As he ominously declares at the beginning of his latest film, Hypernormalisation (2016), these forces are now puncturing "the fragile surface of our carefully constructed fake world."

Drawing from the BBC's vast video archive, Curtis' films are ambitious, addictive and haunting. In The Power of Nightmares (2004), he charts the eery parallels between the neoconservative and radical Islamist movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the ways in which our political leaders have preyed upon our fears to maintain their grip on power. The documentary also examines the ways in which we're still living in the shadows of the Cold War, decades after perestroika. The Trap (2007) offers a searing look at how Britain's and the United States' attempts to free themselves from bureaucracy have given rise to a bloodless and oppressive managerialism, while their efforts to spread democracy abroad have yielded only violent mayhem. All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, released in 2011, explores how our reliance on computers to forge a stable world has produced just the opposite.

Curtis spoke with AlterNet last week about a range of subjects, and then a strange thing happened, as he might pronounce in one of his documentaries. The Syrian government launched a chemical weapons assault killing scores of civilians, and the U.S. responded with a missile strike of its own. Or so the dominant political-media narrative would dictate. What follows is a composite of our conversation before and after, over the phone and via email—a fragmented Q&A for a complex and possibly unknowable moment in history.

Jacob Sugarman: So in less than a week since we first spoke, Donald Trump has done a complete about-face on Syria and Bashar al-Assad. Obviously we're just hours removed from the airstrike, but what are your first impressions? Does this signal to you that the Pentagon is dictating his foreign policy? Is this bombing campaign an elaborate piece of political theater or is it more likely the opening gambit in a prolonged assault?

Adam Curtis: No one knows what the attack means, or how it will play out. It is far too early. My first reaction is that what may be happening is that President Trump is stepping for the first time into the real world. But he will discover that the consequences may be very different and far more complex than he imagines.

Firstly, the question that has not really been addressed is, why did the Syrians use chemical weapons? If, as we are constantly being told, the regime is winning the civil war, why did they do something like that? Some analysts and journalists are saying that possibly Assad is not winning; that the Syrian army is exhausted and starting to fall apart; and that the Russians are finding the conflict far more difficult to deal with than they imagined, especially with just dropping bombs. Most of the really hard fighting for Aleppo was not done by the Syrian army but by Hezbollah, which is becoming a really serious army. And behind them are the Revolutionary Guards of Iran.

Secondly, such an intervention leads to the question, who are the goodies and who are the baddies in this war? If President Trump has turned against Assad and will genuinely work for his removal, then who should replace him? This is the reality that President Obama faced and recoiled from because there is no simple answer. Just as the Americans discovered in Afghanistan, which had also been fighting a civil war since 1978, everyone is compromised in some way, because they have all been sucked into a grinding struggle for power. The truth is that no-one in America who is pushing for something to be done about Syria—the liberal humanitarians, the neoconservatives, the globalists in the military—has any real answer about who to support.

The other possibility is that it may be just another part of the pantomime, a missile hit designed to distract from scandals at home. But that takes you back to President Clinton’s missile attack against Osama bin Laden’s training camps in 1998—an attack that many believed was not only a retaliation for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania but an attempt at distracting attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. And looking back that doesn’t seem to have been a very good idea. It had a very counter-productive effect on the Taliban. Up to that point they were really fed up with bin Laden and were looking for ways to be rid of him, even possibly giving him up to the Americans. After the attacks the Taliban stopped all that.

The truth is that we in the West have so simplified our vision of the world, into a battle between good and evil, that we now find it impossible to understand the reality. It was a process that started in the 1990s under Clinton and Blair, but both Trump and his enemies, the liberal interventionists, have inherited that one-dimensional view. It is dangerous because it ignores the realities of power in societies. And Trump may find he is opening the door to something very complicated, not just Syria but the forces that surround it—Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel, all of whom are deeply involved in the conflict.

And it will also have a terrible effect for Trump domestically. All the hard-line isolationists who backed him will be furious. It’s just what Hillary Clinton would have done, they will cry. Trump has become a deep state puppet.

JS: We're more than 70 days into Trump's presidency, just a few weeks short of the juncture when historians and political analysts begin to assess an office in earnest. Do you see America sliding into authoritarianism or fascism, or are the evils of this administration more banal than that?

AC: America is not sliding into fascism. That's just hysteria by the liberals who can't face up to the fact that they lost the election, so they either have to blame the Russians or giant historical forces. Basically, a right-wing president has been elected, and he's created a brilliant machine that captures liberals and keeps them completely preoccupied. What he does is he wakes up in the morning, tweets something that he knows isn't true, they get very upset and spend the whole day writing in big capital letters on social media, "This is outrageous. This is bad. This is fascism." What they're not facing up to is the real question, which is why did Donald Trump win the election? What other forces in the country had they, the liberals, not seen?

They weren't defeated by something as grand as fascism. They were defeated by a man who's connected with a disaffected group in America, like the people who voted for Brexit in my country. I think there's a great deal of narcissism which Mr. Trump has worked at how to play on beautifully.

JS: Your most recent documentary is called Hypernormalisation. Can you explain what a hypenormalised state is and how it creates an opening for somebody like Trump to exploit?

AC: The term was created by a guy called Alexei Yurchak, who wrote a book about the last days of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. What he described was a world where everyone knew that the system in place wasn't working and that the politicians didn't believe it any longer. Yet at the same time, because they didn't have any alternative, everyone just accepted it as normal even though they knew it was abnormal. So he gave it this term hypernormalisation. I'm not trying to say that the West is in any way like the Soviet Union at all. It's very different. What I was trying to argue, or imply in this film gently, was that we may be in a very similar situation where we know that the system has become somewhat corrupted. But more than that, we know that those in charge don't really believe in the system any longer, have no vision of the future. And what's more, they know that we know that.

What Trump is doing is playing with the fakery. It may be instinctive. He's saying things that he knows that we know aren't true, at which point everyone gets locked into a game of what's true and what's not true. This misses the real point of politics, which is to tell a powerful story that offers a vision of the future. I don't think Trump has a vision of the future. I think he's the last of the old politicians.

JS: It doesn't seem like Trump has any kind of ideology beyond a base self-interest, but I don't think the same is true of some of the people in his administration. What do you make of someone like Steve Bannon? Do you see him as a descendent of Leo Strauss, as you've argued the neoconservatives were, or am I giving him more gravitas than he deserves? [Editor's note: This portion of the interview was conducted before Bannon was removed from the National Security Council.]

AC: I think you should pay more attention to the traditional, hard-right-wing people who have risen to power with Trump. Donald comes from the world of finance and he is doing what finance wants to do. I would argue that actually it shows that really nothing has changed, which is a very hypernormal situation. We know that many of the people who possibly should have been prosecuted after the financial crisis of 2008 were not. Now it's carrying on while liberals boo and hiss at the man in charge. Behind the scenery, everyone is just carrying on managing the system in their own interests as they have before.

Steve Bannon? I don't know. We have a phrase in Britain, which is "All mouth, no trousers." He's a degraded clash-of-civilizations man, and he's a bit late to the table on that one because [Jean-Marie Le Pen] tried that in 2004. It didn't work. I'm far more interested in what I would call real power, which is the power of finance. It's really extraordinary that Trump has moved into a position of power. People from the political financial world would never in a million years let him borrow their money, which makes you wonder whether he is a part of the pantomime.

JS: One of the ideas you put forth on the eve of the election is that Trump is actually a product of 1970s counterculture. I'm not sure how many people would make that association.

AC: If you shut your eyes and listen to Donald Trump, or half of what Donald Trump says, he sounds like one of those paranoid hippies who kept talking about The Man, big T, big M. The Man is this sort of corrupt political insider who doesn't care about anything except power and is pulling the wool over your eyes. At the end of the 1960s, the left turned against politics and said, Look, all politics is shit. Everyone is corrupt. Therefore what you have to do is detach yourself from politics and really turn to those who you trust. Out of that you got the politics of individualism, which then rose up and supported Reagan. What's really fascinating, which I shared in a series called "The Century of the Self," is how many people who'd come out of the counterculture ended up voting for Reagan in 1980 because he offered that sort of individualism. But if you listen to Trump, it's the discourse of the counterculture, and he's playing with that.

JS: So if Trump is the apotheosis of this radical individualism and all these cultural signs pointed to him, or someone like him becoming president, are there any markers for what might come next? What gives you hope for the future?

AC: The thing that makes me really sad, and to an extent, angry, is the complete failure of the liberals and the progressives to actually face up to what people like Trump really mean. What it means is that there are groups in this country, many of them poor, many of them part of the working class, who are feeling frightened, alone, and afraid of the future. They voted for Trump or for Brexit in my country as a way of expressing that, because the traditional politics would not let them do it. The liberals would not go and connect with those people. What they do is they spend their time saying they're stupid, which is the most stupid thing you can possibly do.

What the left has got to do is go and find a common line for those people and genuinely offer them something. If they did that, they could make politics noble and important again. But instead they're hunkering down, sneering, and trying to blame Vladimir Putin. I mean, I'm sure Russians did hack practically every server in America, but that's not the real reason why Donald Trump won. Progressives have not faced up to this. In a sense, I'm hopeful because the failure of Trump to be able to deliver what he has promised gives great opportunities for the left to reinvent itself. The only person who interests me is Bernie Sanders. He's going around having what he calls town hall meetings with those people, and I think that's really good.

JS: Why do you think liberals are so frightened of these big animating ideas? I found it very telling how few Democrats were willing to come out in support of a single-payer health care system or even a public option after Trump's latest bill went down in flames, Sanders being a notable exception.

AC: One of the great unanswered questions of my time is why the optimism and idealism of liberals, who used the power of state to change the world for the better, collapsed so quickly and turned to pessimism. If you talk to groups of liberals now, it's like talking to people who think the plane's going to crash all the time. They dream of apocalypse and read books by Cormac McCarthy and say that sugar's going to kill them. Which it may well do, but it's not the biggest thing to worry about. I think it's terribly sad, but Trump has presented a great opportunity for them. As you say, he's failing in all his policies, isn't he? Of course, if they do miss that opportunity, then the real nasty nationalist right will start to make the running, and that's a danger in the future.

JS: I can't help but notice that the kind politics you're advocating sound a lot like those Obama ran on in 2008. Do you think he failed to live up to the promises of that campaign? Is Donald Trump a part of his legacy now?

AC: I don't know, but I don't think so. I think Obama was a very decent guy. Since the early 1990s, real power has shifted away from politicians to all sorts of institutions that we almost don't have the perception apparatus to see or understand. Frankly, a journalist doesn't. I think Obama found himself facing a lot of that. But it's us as well. At the same time that Obama came to power, we, the liberals, the Democrats, the progressives retreated to digital playgrounds owned by five or six very giant corporations. I think they left Obama quite isolated, actually. So far from snarling and spitting at him, which much of the left has done, they should actually turn around and look at themselves and wonder, possibly did we go down the wrong avenue believing all that internet utopianism? I just think that it's time for a little humility among some of the progressives in their attitude to Obama.

As I point out in Hypernormalisation, the Occupy movement had a fantastic slogan and the goodwill of lots of people who would normally never support a rebellious movement like that. Yet when they actually got together, they found they had no ideas. I think it's pretty rich that they then turned around and tried to blame Obama for not having a picture of the future when, quite frankly, they didn't. If you want to change the world, A, you've got to work at it very hard, and B, you've got to challenge power, and that's quite frightening and quite difficult, and you have to have a very strong idea of what you want.

JS: Let's return to the subject of Putin, who makes an appearance in several of your films, Hypernormalisation included. In recent weeks, it seems like a lot of legitimate concerns about the Trump administration's ties to the Kremlin have given way to rampant conspiracy theorizing. How do you explain it?

AC: Russia has been the Other ever since about 1951 for America, and then everyone tried to make it be Islamists. By about 2007 that wasn't working, and everyone now seems to have switched back to Russia. When Barry Goldwater was running for president, the John Birch Society was saying that the president was probably controlled by the Soviet Union. If you listen to the liberals now, they sound remarkably similar.

I am sure that the Russians probably did hack into the Democrats' computers. And I am sure that they may have leaked stuff to meddle with the election and to mess with confidence in the whole democratic process. I would also not be surprised if Donald Trump, and people around him, have had all kinds of dealings with dodgy people in Russia. Given the weird mixture of business and politics in that country, it might be quite likely.

But to an outsider, the way the Democrats and their supporters are obsessing with Russia looks very strange and hysterical. From a distance it seems as if they are desperately trying to avoid facing up to the very powerful reality that was revealed by the election. Instead they seem to be retreating into a kind of magical thinking. Looking for something, anything that will be like a magic wand and wave President Trump away. And then they can go back to normality. It can’t help crossing one’s mind that maybe the Democrats are looking for an excuse that will mean they don’t have to change, that they don’t have to give things up in today’s unequal, brutal and unfair society.

JS: What would you say to those who might feel helpless or even paralyzed by the horrific events that seem to be unfolding almost daily?

AC: Stop. Stop blaming. Stop sitting in the bubble and feeling sad. Stop sneering at the people who voted for Donald Trump and Brexit. Reconnect with them, and make politics noble again. Make it powerful. There are only two ways of changing the world. One is if you've got large amounts of money. The other is to use collective action, the collective power that politics allows you. Too many on the left have embraced a new kind of democracy online and gotten trapped in echo chambers. You can't say "You can't trust any politicians," because actually that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. What I'm saying is get engaged.

During the civil rights movement in America in the late '50s and early '60s, young white activists went down to the South, united with young black activists and worked for years to confront vested interests, ruthless power. Some of them were killed, many were beaten up. Most of them were completely anonymous, but they changed the world. And there is a great hunger for that kind of change.

#hypernormalization #authoritarianism #hysteria #distraction #deep state #puppet #collective power

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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The Dangers Posed by the Killing of Qassem Suleimani

By Dexter Filkins | Published Jan 3, 2020 | New Yorker | Posted Jan. 5, 2020 |

The killing of Qassem Suleimani, the Iranian commander targeted by an American strike Thursday night, is the most consequential act taken against the regime in Tehran in thirty years—even if we don’t know what those consequences will be. One thing is clear: we’re entering a dangerous period, in which the conflict between the two countries could easily spin out of control.

Suleimani’s biography as a pivotal figure in Iran and the region is well known. Since the late nineteen-nineties, he was engaged in trying to remake the Middle East to Iran’s advantage, directing his proxies to kill or dispatch anyone who impeded his vision of an Iranian-dominated sphere of influence stretching from Tehran to the Mediterranean Sea. He was remarkably successful, legendary even—certainly the most influential operative in the region in modern times. He was involved in sponsoring terrorist attacks, propping up despots like Bashar al-Assad in Syria, helping to assassinate at least one foreign leader—the Prime Minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri—and killing hundreds of American soldiers along the way. In the latter years of the American war in Iraq, Suleimani’s militias deployed a particularly bloody weapon against U.S. soldiers—the “explosively formed penetrator,” or E.F.P.—which tore through the armor of U.S. military vehicles and wreaked havoc on soldiers and marines. It was no small irony that he died on the road to the Baghdad International Airport, where so many Americans soldiers and Iraqis died by ambush.

Suleimani’s death is a heavy blow to the Iranian regime. He was not just the central figure in the country’s foreign policy and military; he was also considered a pillar of the Revolution itself. Since 1979, Iran has regarded its defense against foreign enemies, particularly the United States, as central to its survival. Suleimani’s vision of the region was formed in the nineteen-eighties, during the Iran-Iraq War, which left more than a million people dead and for which the Iranians, not entirely without reason, blamed the U.S. and its allies. Suleimani, a veteran of that war, vowed that nothing like it would happen to Iran again, and he built the Quds Force—a wing of the Revolutionary Guard—into a small, mobile army capable of waging asymmetric warfare against the country’s enemies, including the United States. When I asked Ryan Crocker, a veteran American diplomat, what motivated Suleimani, he said that it was love of country—and also something more visceral: “Nationalism drives him, and the love of the fight.”

U.S. officials from previous Administrations have said that Suleimani did not live as a well-guarded recluse like Osama bin Laden, in Pakistan, and the military could have killed him; but the U.S. decided that it was not worth provoking a large-scale retaliation. “Suleimani was lucky,’’ Meir Dagan, the former head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, once told me. “It’s important to be lucky.” (Dagan died in 2016.)

Suleimani has been replaced by his longtime deputy, but it’s not clear that any commander in Iran is his equal in guile or status. He was as skilled in diplomacy as he was on the battlefield, and as comfortable with diplomats as he was with front-line soldiers, whom he adored. And he had an especially close relationship with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader. “A guy like Suleimani—they don’t have any more like him,’’ John Maguire, a twenty-three-year veteran of the C.I.A. specializing in the Middle East, told me. Maguire is one of the few Americans ever to come to face to face with Suleimani. They met in Baghdad, in 2004, when Iraqi politicians were trying to broker a rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran. “He had a command presence,” Maguire said. “He walked into the room and you could feel him.”

In Iraq, Suleimani had four deputies, who helped oversee the Shiite militias who have, most recently, been leading demonstrations against the American Embassy. The leader of one of those militias, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, of Kata’ib Hezbollah, died in the same strike as Suleimani. Muhandis has a long record of attacking Americans, too, beginning with the bombing of the American and French Embassies in Kuwait, in 1983. Kata’ib Hezbollah—an organization backed, trained, armed, and directed by Suleimani—is responsible for the deaths of scores of American soldiers in Iraq. Ever since the Trump Administration walked away from the nuclear deal signed under the Obama Administration, the U.S. and Iran have engaged in a series of provocative acts. By killing Suleimani, the Trump Administration has risked a wider, more unpredictable conflict, which could flare in many places and in many ways. It’s hard to imagine that the Iranian regime won’t respond to the American strike—it will feel that it has to. But where, and how? Maguire told me that the Quds Force has long specialized in two tactics: hostage-taking and truck-bombing. But the Americans are so well fortified in Iraq (and across the Middle East), and the American military presence in Iraq is so robust, that it’s more possible that the Iranians, if they decide to retaliate, will do so elsewhere. “It’s a better bet that they will choose another place—somewhere where the Americans are not as well protected,’’ he said. Maguire told me that he is not convinced that the Iranians will respond right away, or even at all, because of the deep sense of shock of losing Suleimani. “It’s a body blow to the regime,’’ he said. The biggest danger, of course, is that the Iranians respond, and possibly miscalculate, and then the United States does the same. That’s how wars start.

President Trump said on Friday, as he has previously, that the U.S. is not seeking war or regime change in Iran. Yet, since taking office, the Trump Administration has made regime change its implicit policy. By pulling out of the Iranian nuclear accord and imposing crippling sanctions on the country, Trump’s advisers have wagered that they can bring the regime down. By killing Suleimani, the Administration has taken the fight directly to its leadership.

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Dexter Filkins is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “The Forever War,” which won a National Book Critics Circle Award.

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(Read Dexter Filkins’s 2013 Profile of Qassem Suleimani to see how important is was to Iran's leadership.)

THE SHADOW COMMANDER: Qassem Suleimani is the Iranian operative who has been reshaping the Middle East. Now he’s directing Assad’s war in Syria.

Dagan died in 2016.) PART 1 OF 2 |

By DEXTER FILKINS | Published Sept 23, 2013 | New Yorker Magazine | Posted January 5, 2020|

Last February, some of Iran’s most influential leaders gathered at the Amir al-Momenin Mosque, in northeast Tehran, inside a gated community reserved for officers of the Revolutionary Guard. They had come to pay their last respects to a fallen comrade. Hassan Shateri, a veteran of Iran’s covert wars throughout the Middle East and South Asia, was a senior commander in a powerful, élite branch of the Revolutionary Guard called the Quds Force. The force is the sharp instrument of Iranian foreign policy, roughly analogous to a combined C.I.A. and Special Forces; its name comes from the Persian word for Jerusalem, which its fighters have promised to liberate. Since 1979, its goal has been to subvert Iran’s enemies and extend the country’s influence across the Middle East. Shateri had spent much of his career abroad, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, where the Quds Force helped Shiite militias kill American soldiers.

Shateri had been killed two days before, on the road that runs between Damascus and Beirut. He had gone to Syria, along with thousands of other members of the Quds Force, to rescue the country’s besieged President, Bashar al-Assad, a crucial ally of Iran. In the past few years, Shateri had worked under an alias as the Quds Force’s chief in Lebanon; there he had helped sustain the armed group Hezbollah, which at the time of the funeral had begun to pour men into Syria to fight for the regime. The circumstances of his death were unclear: one Iranian official said that Shateri had been “directly targeted” by “the Zionist regime,” as Iranians habitually refer to Israel.

At the funeral, the mourners sobbed, and some beat their chests in the Shiite way. Shateri’s casket was wrapped in an Iranian flag, and gathered around it were the commander of the Revolutionary Guard, dressed in green fatigues; a member of the plot to murder four exiled opposition leaders in a Berlin restaurant in 1992; and the father of Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah commander believed to be responsible for the bombings that killed more than two hundred and fifty Americans in Beirut in 1983. Mughniyeh was assassinated in 2008, purportedly by Israeli agents. In the ethos of the Iranian revolution, to die was to serve. Before Shateri’s funeral, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s Supreme Leader, released a note of praise: “In the end, he drank the sweet syrup of martyrdom.”

Kneeling in the second row on the mosque’s carpeted floor was Major General Qassem Suleimani, the Quds Force’s leader: a small man of fifty-six, with silver hair, a close-cropped beard, and a look of intense self-containment. It was Suleimani who had sent Shateri, an old and trusted friend, to his death. As Revolutionary Guard commanders, he and Shateri belonged to a small fraternity formed during the Sacred Defense, the name given to the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted from 1980 to 1988 and left as many as a million people dead. It was a catastrophic fight, but for Iran it was the beginning of a three-decade project to build a Shiite sphere of influence, stretching across Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean. Along with its allies in Syria and Lebanon, Iran forms an Axis of Resistance, arrayed against the region’s dominant Sunni powers and the West. In Syria, the project hung in the balance, and Suleimani was mounting a desperate fight, even if the price of victory was a sectarian conflict that engulfed the region for years.

Suleimani took command of the Quds Force fifteen years ago, and in that time he has sought to reshape the Middle East in Iran’s favor, working as a power broker and as a military force: assassinating rivals, arming allies, and, for most of a decade, directing a network of militant groups that killed hundreds of Americans in Iraq. The U.S. Department of the Treasury has sanctioned Suleimani for his role in supporting the Assad regime, and for abetting terrorism. And yet he has remained mostly invisible to the outside world, even as he runs agents and directs operations. “Suleimani is the single most powerful operative in the Middle East today,” John Maguire, a former C.I.A. officer in Iraq, told me, “and no one’s ever heard of him.”

When Suleimani appears in public—often to speak at veterans’ events or to meet with Khamenei—he carries himself inconspicuously and rarely raises his voice, exhibiting a trait that Arabs call khilib, or understated charisma. “He is so short, but he has this presence,” a former senior Iraqi official told me. “There will be ten people in a room, and when Suleimani walks in he doesn’t come and sit with you. He sits over there on the other side of room, by himself, in a very quiet way. Doesn’t speak, doesn’t comment, just sits and listens. And so of course everyone is thinking only about him.”

At the funeral, Suleimani was dressed in a black jacket and a black shirt with no tie, in the Iranian style; his long, angular face and his arched eyebrows were twisted with pain. The Quds Force had never lost such a high-ranking officer abroad. The day before the funeral, Suleimani had travelled to Shateri’s home to offer condolences to his family. He has a fierce attachment to martyred soldiers, and often visits their families; in a recent interview with Iranian media, he said, “When I see the children of the martyrs, I want to smell their scent, and I lose myself.” As the funeral continued, he and the other mourners bent forward to pray, pressing their foreheads to the carpet. “One of the rarest people, who brought the revolution and the whole world to you, is gone,” Alireza Panahian, the imam, told the mourners. Suleimani cradled his head in his palm and began to weep.

The early months of 2013, around the time of Shateri’s death, marked a low point for the Iranian intervention in Syria. Assad was steadily losing ground to the rebels, who are dominated by Sunnis, Iran’s rivals. If Assad fell, the Iranian regime would lose its link to Hezbollah, its forward base against Israel. In a speech, one Iranian cleric said, “If we lose Syria, we cannot keep Tehran.”

Although the Iranians were severely strained by American sanctions, imposed to stop the regime from developing a nuclear weapon, they were unstinting in their efforts to save Assad. Among other things, they extended a seven-billion-dollar loan to shore up the Syrian economy. “I don’t think the Iranians are calculating this in terms of dollars,” a Middle Eastern security official told me. “They regard the loss of Assad as an existential threat.” For Suleimani, saving Assad seemed a matter of pride, especially if it meant distinguishing himself from the Americans. “Suleimani told us the Iranians would do whatever was necessary,” a former Iraqi leader told me. “He said, ‘We’re not like the Americans. We don’t abandon our friends.’ ”

Last year, Suleimani asked Kurdish leaders in Iraq to allow him to open a supply route across northern Iraq and into Syria. For years, he had bullied and bribed the Kurds into coöperating with his plans, but this time they rebuffed him. Worse, Assad’s soldiers wouldn’t fight—or, when they did, they mostly butchered civilians, driving the populace to the rebels. “The Syrian Army is useless!” Suleimani told an Iraqi politician. He longed for the Basij, the Iranian militia whose fighters crushed the popular uprisings against the regime in 2009. “Give me one brigade of the Basij, and I could conquer the whole country,” he said. In August, 2012, anti-Assad rebels captured forty-eight Iranians inside Syria. Iranian leaders protested that they were pilgrims, come to pray at a holy Shiite shrine, but the rebels, as well as Western intelligence agencies, said that they were members of the Quds Force. In any case, they were valuable enough so that Assad agreed to release more than two thousand captured rebels to have them freed. And then Shateri was killed.

Finally, Suleimani began flying into Damascus frequently so that he could assume personal control of the Iranian intervention. “He’s running the war himself,” an American defense official told me. In Damascus, he is said to work out of a heavily fortified command post in a nondescript building, where he has installed a multinational array of officers: the heads of the Syrian military, a Hezbollah commander, and a coördinator of Iraqi Shiite militias, which Suleimani mobilized and brought to the fight. If Suleimani couldn’t have the Basij, he settled for the next best thing: Brigadier General Hossein Hamedani, the Basij’s former deputy commander. Hamedani, another comrade from the Iran-Iraq War, was experienced in running the kind of irregular militias that the Iranians were assembling, in order to keep on fighting if Assad fell.

Late last year, Western officials began to notice a sharp increase in Iranian supply flights into the Damascus airport. Instead of a handful a week, planes were coming every day, carrying weapons and ammunition—“tons of it,” the Middle Eastern security official told me—along with officers from the Quds Force. According to American officials, the officers coördinated attacks, trained militias, and set up an elaborate system to monitor rebel communications. They also forced the various branches of Assad’s security services—designed to spy on one another—to work together. The Middle Eastern security official said that the number of Quds Force operatives, along with the Iraqi Shiite militiamen they brought with them, reached into the thousands. “They’re spread out across the entire country,” he told me.

A turning point came in April, after rebels captured the Syrian town of Qusayr, near the Lebanese border. To retake the town, Suleimani called on Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, to send in more than two thousand fighters. It wasn’t a difficult sell. Qusayr sits at the entrance to the Bekaa Valley, the main conduit for missiles and other matériel to Hezbollah; if it was closed, Hezbollah would find it difficult to survive. Suleimani and Nasrallah are old friends, having coöperated for years in Lebanon and in the many places around the world where Hezbollah operatives have performed terrorist missions at the Iranians’ behest. According to Will Fulton, an Iran expert at the American Enterprise Institute, Hezbollah fighters encircled Qusayr, cutting off the roads, then moved in. Dozens of them were killed, as were at least eight Iranian officers. On June 5th, the town fell. “The whole operation was orchestrated by Suleimani,” Maguire, who is still active in the region, said. “It was a great victory for him.”

Despite all of Suleimani’s rough work, his image among Iran’s faithful is that of an irreproachable war hero—a decorated veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, in which he became a division commander while still in his twenties. In public, he is almost theatrically modest. During a recent appearance, he described himself as “the smallest soldier,” and, according to the Iranian press, rebuffed members of the audience who tried to kiss his hand. His power comes mostly from his close relationship with Khamenei, who provides the guiding vision for Iranian society. The Supreme Leader, who usually reserves his highest praise for fallen soldiers, has referred to Suleimani as “a living martyr of the revolution.” Suleimani is a hard-line supporter of Iran’s authoritarian system. In July, 1999, at the height of student protests, he signed, with other Revolutionary Guard commanders, a letter warning the reformist President Mohammad Khatami that if he didn’t put down the revolt the military would—perhaps deposing Khatami in the process. “Our patience has run out,” the generals wrote. The police crushed the demonstrators, as they did again, a decade later.

Iran’s government is intensely fractious, and there are many figures around Khamenei who help shape foreign policy, including Revolutionary Guard commanders, senior clerics, and Foreign Ministry officials. But Suleimani has been given a remarkably free hand in implementing Khamenei’s vision. “He has ties to every corner of the system,” Meir Dagan, the former head of Mossad, told me. “He is what I call politically clever. He has a relationship with everyone.” Officials describe him as a believer in Islam and in the revolution; while many senior figures in the Revolutionary Guard have grown wealthy through the Guard’s control over key Iranian industries, Suleimani has been endowed with a personal fortune by the Supreme Leader. “He’s well taken care of,” Maguire said.

Suleimani lives in Tehran, and appears to lead the home life of a bureaucrat in middle age. “He gets up at four every morning, and he’s in bed by nine-thirty every night,” the Iraqi politician, who has known him for many years, told me, shaking his head in disbelief. Suleimani has a bad prostate and recurring back pain. He’s “respectful of his wife,” the Middle Eastern security official told me, sometimes taking her along on trips. He has three sons and two daughters, and is evidently a strict but loving father. He is said to be especially worried about his daughter Nargis, who lives in Malaysia. “She is deviating from the ways of Islam,” the Middle Eastern official said.

Maguire told me, “Suleimani is a far more polished guy than most. He can move in political circles, but he’s also got the substance to be intimidating.” Although he is widely read, his aesthetic tastes appear to be strictly traditional. “I don’t think he’d listen to classical music,” the Middle Eastern official told me. “The European thing—I don’t think that’s his vibe, basically.” Suleimani has little formal education, but, the former senior Iraqi official told me, “he is a very shrewd, frighteningly intelligent strategist.” His tools include payoffs for politicians across the Middle East, intimidation when it is needed, and murder as a last resort. Over the years, the Quds Force has built an international network of assets, some of them drawn from the Iranian diaspora, who can be called on to support missions. “They’re everywhere,” a second Middle Eastern security official said. In 2010, according to Western officials, the Quds Force and Hezbollah launched a new campaign against American and Israeli targets—in apparent retaliation for the covert effort to slow down the Iranian nuclear program, which has included cyber attacks and assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists.

Since then, Suleimani has orchestrated attacks in places as far flung as Thailand, New Delhi, Lagos, and Nairobi—at least thirty attempts in the past two years alone. The most notorious was a scheme, in 2011, to hire a Mexican drug cartel to blow up the Saudi Ambassador to the United States as he sat down to eat at a restaurant a few miles from the White House. The cartel member approached by Suleimani’s agent turned out to be an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. (The Quds Force appears to be more effective close to home, and a number of the remote plans have gone awry.) Still, after the plot collapsed, two former American officials told a congressional committee that Suleimani should be assassinated. “Suleimani travels a lot,” one said. “He is all over the place. Go get him. Either try to capture him or kill him.” In Iran, more than two hundred dignitaries signed an outraged letter in his defense; a social-media campaign proclaimed, “We are all Qassem Suleimani.”

Several Middle Eastern officials, some of whom I have known for a decade, stopped talking the moment I brought up Suleimani. “We don’t want to have any part of this,” a Kurdish official in Iraq said. Among spies in the West, he appears to exist in a special category, an enemy both hated and admired: a Middle Eastern equivalent of Karla, the elusive Soviet master spy in John le Carré’s novels. When I called Dagan, the former Mossad chief, and mentioned Suleimani’s name, there was a long pause on the line. “Ah,” he said, in a tone of weary irony, “a very good friend.”

In March, 2009, on the eve of the Iranian New Year, Suleimani led a group of Iran-Iraq War veterans to the Paa-Alam Heights, a barren, rocky promontory on the Iraqi border. In 1986, Paa-Alam was the scene of one of the terrible battles over the Faw Peninsula, where tens of thousands of men died while hardly advancing a step. A video recording from the visit shows Suleimani standing on a mountaintop, recounting the battle to his old comrades. In a gentle voice, he speaks over a soundtrack of music and prayers.

“This is the Dasht-e-Abbas Road,” Suleimani says, pointing into the valley below. “This area stood between us and the enemy.” Later, Suleimani and the group stand on the banks of a creek, where he reads aloud the names of fallen Iranian soldiers, his voice trembling with emotion. During a break, he speaks with an interviewer, and describes the fighting in near-mystical terms. “The battlefield is mankind’s lost paradise—the paradise in which morality and human conduct are at their highest,” he says. “One type of paradise that men imagine is about streams, beautiful maidens, and lush landscape. But there is another kind of paradise—the battlefield.”

Suleimani was born in Rabor, an impoverished mountain village in eastern Iran. When he was a boy, his father, like many other farmers, took out an agricultural loan from the government of the Shah. He owed nine hundred toman—about a hundred dollars at the time—and couldn’t pay it back. In a brief memoir, Suleimani wrote of leaving home with a young relative named Ahmad Suleimani, who was in a similar situation. “At night, we couldn’t fall asleep with the sadness of thinking that government agents were coming to arrest our fathers,” he wrote. Together, they travelled to Kerman, the nearest city, to try to clear their family’s debt. The place was unwelcoming. “We were only thirteen, and our bodies were so tiny, wherever we went, they wouldn’t hire us,” he wrote. “Until one day, when we were hired as laborers at a school construction site on Khajoo Street, which was where the city ended. They paid us two toman per day.” After eight months, they had saved enough money to bring home, but the winter snow was too deep. They were told to seek out a local driver named Pahlavan—“Champion”—who was a “strong man who could lift up a cow or a donkey with his teeth.” During the drive, whenever the car got stuck, “he would lift up the Jeep and put it aside!” In Suleimani’s telling, Pahlavan is an ardent detractor of the Shah. He says of the two boys, “This is the time for them to rest and play, not work as a laborer in a strange city. I spit on the life they have made for us!” They arrived home, Suleimani writes, “just as the lights were coming on in the village homes. When the news travelled in our village, there was pandemonium.”

As a young man, Suleimani gave few signs of greater ambition. According to Ali Alfoneh, an Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, he had only a high-school education, and worked for Kerman’s municipal water department. But it was a revolutionary time, and the country’s gathering unrest was making itself felt. Away from work, Suleimani spent hours lifting weights in local gyms, which, like many in the Middle East, offered physical training and inspiration for the warrior spirit. During Ramadan, he attended sermons by a travelling preacher named Hojjat Kamyab—a protégé of Khamenei’s—and it was there that he became inspired by the possibility of Islamic revolution.

In 1979, when Suleimani was twenty-two, the Shah fell to a popular uprising led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the name of Islam. Swept up in the fervor, Suleimani joined the Revolutionary Guard, a force established by Iran’s new clerical leadership to prevent the military from mounting a coup. Though he received little training—perhaps only a forty-five-day course—he advanced rapidly. As a young guardsman, Suleimani was dispatched to northwestern Iran, where he helped crush an uprising by ethnic Kurds.

When the revolution was eighteen months old, Saddam Hussein sent the Iraqi Army sweeping across the border, hoping to take advantage of the internal chaos. Instead, the invasion solidified Khomeini’s leadership and unified the country in resistance, starting a brutal, entrenched war. Suleimani was sent to the front with a simple task, to supply water to the soldiers there, and he never left. “I entered the war on a fifteen-day mission, and ended up staying until the end,” he has said. A photograph from that time shows the young Suleimani dressed in green fatigues, with no insignia of rank, his black eyes focussed on a far horizon. “We were all young and wanted to serve the revolution,” he told an interviewer in 2005.

Suleimani earned a reputation for bravery and élan, especially as a result of reconnaissance missions he undertook behind Iraqi lines. He returned from several missions bearing a goat, which his soldiers slaughtered and grilled. “Even the Iraqis, our enemy, admired him for this,” a former Revolutionary Guard officer who defected to the United States told me. On Iraqi radio, Suleimani became known as “the goat thief.” In recognition of his effectiveness, Alfoneh said, he was put in charge of a brigade from Kerman, with men from the gyms where he lifted weights.

The Iranian Army was badly overmatched, and its commanders resorted to crude and costly tactics. In “human wave” assaults, they sent thousands of young men directly into the Iraqi lines, often to clear minefields, and soldiers died at a precipitous rate. Suleimani seemed distressed by the loss of life. Before sending his men into battle, he would embrace each one and bid him goodbye; in speeches, he praised martyred soldiers and begged their forgiveness for not being martyred himself. When Suleimani’s superiors announced plans to attack the Faw Peninsula, he dismissed them as wasteful and foolhardy. The former Revolutionary Guard officer recalled seeing Suleimani in 1985, after a battle in which his brigade had suffered many dead and wounded. He was sitting alone in a corner of a tent. “He was very silent, thinking about the people he’d lost,” the officer said.

Ahmad, the young relative who travelled with Suleimani to Kerman, was killed in 1984. On at least one occasion, Suleimani himself was wounded. Still, he didn’t lose enthusiasm for his work. In the nineteen-eighties, Reuel Marc Gerecht was a young C.I.A. officer posted to Istanbul, where he recruited from the thousands of Iranian soldiers who went there to recuperate. “You’d get a whole variety of guardsmen,” Gerecht, who has written extensively on Iran, told me. “You’d get clerics, you’d get people who came to breathe and whore and drink.” Gerecht divided the veterans into two groups. “There were the broken and the burned out, the hollow-eyed—the guys who had been destroyed,” he said. “And then there were the bright-eyed guys who just couldn’t wait to get back to the front. I’d put Suleimani in the latter category.”

Ryan Crocker, the American Ambassador to Iraq from 2007 to 2009, got a similar feeling. During the Iraq War, Crocker sometimes dealt with Suleimani indirectly, through Iraqi leaders who shuttled in and out of Tehran. Once, he asked one of the Iraqis if Suleimani was especially religious. The answer was “Not really,” Crocker told me. “He attends mosque periodically. Religion doesn’t drive him. Nationalism drives him, and the love of the fight.”

Iran’s leaders took two lessons from the Iran-Iraq War. The first was that Iran was surrounded by enemies, near and far. To the regime, the invasion was not so much an Iraqi plot as a Western one. American officials were aware of Saddam’s preparations to invade Iran in 1980, and they later provided him with targeting information used in chemical-weapons attacks; the weapons themselves were built with the help of Western European firms. The memory of these attacks is an especially bitter one. “Do you know how many people are still suffering from the effects of chemical weapons?” Mehdi Khalaji, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said. “Thousands of former soldiers. They believe these were Western weapons given to Saddam.” In 1987, during a battle with the Iraqi Army, a division under Suleimani’s command was attacked by artillery shells containing chemical weapons. More than a hundred of his men suffered the effects.

The other lesson drawn from the Iran-Iraq War was the futility of fighting a head-to-head confrontation. In 1982, after the Iranians expelled the Iraqi forces, Khomeini ordered his men to keep going, to “liberate” Iraq and push on to Jerusalem. Six years and hundreds of thousands of lives later, he agreed to a ceasefire. According to Alfoneh, many of the generals of Suleimani’s generation believe they could have succeeded had the clerics not flinched. “Many of them feel like they were stabbed in the back,” he said. “They have nurtured this myth for nearly thirty years.” But Iran’s leaders did not want another bloodbath. Instead, they had to build the capacity to wage asymmetrical warfare—attacking stronger powers indirectly, outside of Iran.

The Quds Force was an ideal tool. Khomeini had created the prototype for the force in 1979, with the goal of protecting Iran and exporting the Islamic Revolution. The first big opportunity came in Lebanon, where Revolutionary Guard officers were dispatched in 1982 to help organize Shiite militias in the many-sided Lebanese civil war. Those efforts resulted in the creation of Hezbollah, which developed under Iranian guidance. Hezbollah’s military commander, the brilliant and murderous Imad Mughniyeh, helped form what became known as the Special Security Apparatus, a wing of Hezbollah that works closely with the Quds Force. With assistance from Iran, Hezbollah helped orchestrate attacks on the American Embassy and on French and American military barracks. “In the early days, when Hezbollah was totally dependent on Iranian help, Mughniyeh and others were basically willing Iranian assets,” David Crist, a historian for the U.S. military and the author of “The Twilight War,” says.

For all of the Iranian regime’s aggressiveness, some of its religious zeal seemed to burn out. In 1989, Khomeini stopped urging Iranians to spread the revolution, and called instead for expediency to preserve its gains. Persian self-interest was the order of the day, even if it was indistinguishable from revolutionary fervor. In those years, Suleimani worked along Iran’s eastern frontier, aiding Afghan rebels who were holding out against the Taliban. The Iranian regime regarded the Taliban with intense hostility, in large part because of their persecution of Afghanistan’s minority Shiite population. (At one point, the two countries nearly went to war; Iran mobilized a quarter of a million troops, and its leaders denounced the Taliban as an affront to Islam.) In an area that breeds corruption, Suleimani made a name for himself battling opium smugglers along the Afghan border.

In 1998, Suleimani was named the head of the Quds Force, taking over an agency that had already built a lethal résumé: American and Argentine officials believe that the Iranian regime helped Hezbollah orchestrate the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, which killed twenty-nine people, and the attack on the Jewish center in the same city two years later, which killed eighty-five. Suleimani has built the Quds Force into an organization with extraordinary reach, with branches focussed on intelligence, finance, politics, sabotage, and special operations. With a base in the former U.S. Embassy compound in Tehran, the force has between ten thousand and twenty thousand members, divided between combatants and those who train and oversee foreign assets. Its members are picked for their skill and their allegiance to the doctrine of the Islamic Revolution (as well as, in some cases, their family connections). According to the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, fighters are recruited throughout the region, trained in Shiraz and Tehran, indoctrinated at the Jerusalem Operation College, in Qom, and then “sent on months-long missions to Afghanistan and Iraq to gain experience in field operational work. They usually travel under the guise of Iranian construction workers.”

After taking command, Suleimani strengthened relationships in Lebanon, with Mughniyeh and with Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s chief. By then, the Israeli military had occupied southern Lebanon for sixteen years, and Hezbollah was eager to take control of the country, so Suleimani sent in Quds Force operatives to help. “They had a huge presence—training, advising, planning,” Crocker said. In 2000, the Israelis withdrew, exhausted by relentless Hezbollah attacks. It was a signal victory for the Shiites, and, Crocker said, “another example of how countries like Syria and Iran can play a long game, knowing that we can’t.”

Since then, the regime has given aid to a variety of militant Islamist groups opposed to America’s allies in the region, such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. The help has gone not only to Shiites but also to Sunni groups like Hamas—helping to form an archipelago of alliances that stretches from Baghdad to Beirut. “No one in Tehran started out with a master plan to build the Axis of Resistance, but opportunities presented themselves,” a Western diplomat in Baghdad told me. “In each case, Suleimani was smarter, faster, and better resourced than anyone else in the region. By grasping at opportunities as they came, he built the thing, slowly but surely.”

n the chaotic days after the attacks of September 11th, Ryan Crocker, then a senior State Department official, flew discreetly to Geneva to meet a group of Iranian diplomats. “I’d fly out on a Friday and then back on Sunday, so nobody in the office knew where I’d been,” Crocker told me. “We’d stay up all night in those meetings.” It seemed clear to Crocker that the Iranians were answering to Suleimani, whom they referred to as “Haji Qassem,” and that they were eager to help the United States destroy their mutual enemy, the Taliban. Although the United States and Iran broke off diplomatic relations in 1980, after American diplomats in Tehran were taken hostage, Crocker wasn’t surprised to find that Suleimani was flexible. “You don’t live through eight years of brutal war without being pretty pragmatic,” he said. Sometimes Suleimani passed messages to Crocker, but he avoided putting anything in writing. “Haji Qassem’s way too smart for that,” Crocker said. “He’s not going to leave paper trails for the Americans.”

Before the bombing began, Crocker sensed that the Iranians were growing impatient with the Bush Administration, thinking that it was taking too long to attack the Taliban. At a meeting in early October, 2001, the lead Iranian negotiator stood up and slammed a sheaf of papers on the table. “If you guys don’t stop building these fairy-tale governments in the sky, and actually start doing some shooting on the ground, none of this is ever going to happen!” he shouted. “When you’re ready to talk about serious fighting, you know where to find me.” He stomped out of the room. “It was a great moment,” Crocker said.

The coöperation between the two countries lasted through the initial phase of the war. At one point, the lead negotiator handed Crocker a map detailing the disposition of Taliban forces. “Here’s our advice: hit them here first, and then hit them over here. And here’s the logic.” Stunned, Crocker asked, “Can I take notes?” The negotiator replied, “You can keep the map.” The flow of information went both ways. On one occasion, Crocker said, he gave his counterparts the location of an Al Qaeda facilitator living in the eastern city of Mashhad. The Iranians detained him and brought him to Afghanistan’s new leaders, who, Crocker believes, turned him over to the U.S. The negotiator told Crocker, “Haji Qassem is very pleased with our coöperation.”

The good will didn’t last. In January, 2002, Crocker, who was by then the deputy chief of the American Embassy in Kabul, was awakened one night by aides, who told him that President George W. Bush, in his State of the Union Address, had named Iran as part of an “Axis of Evil.” Like many senior diplomats, Crocker was caught off guard. He saw the negotiator the next day at the U.N. compound in Kabul, and he was furious. “You completely damaged me,” Crocker recalled him saying. “Suleimani is in a tearing rage. He feels compromised.” The negotiator told Crocker that, at great political risk, Suleimani had been contemplating a complete reëvaluation of the United States, saying, “Maybe it’s time to rethink our relationship with the Americans.” The Axis of Evil speech brought the meetings to an end. Reformers inside the government, who had advocated a rapprochement with the United States, were put on the defensive. Recalling that time, Crocker shook his head. “We were just that close,” he said. “One word in one speech changed history.”

Before the meetings fell apart, Crocker talked with the lead negotiator about the possibility of war in Iraq. “Look,” Crocker said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do have some responsibility for Iraq—it’s my portfolio—and I can read the signs, and I think we’re going to go in.” He saw an enormous opportunity. The Iranians despised Saddam, and Crocker figured that they would be willing to work with the U.S. “I was not a fan of the invasion,” he told me. “But I was thinking, If we’re going to do it, let’s see if we can flip an enemy into a friend—at least tactically for this, and then let’s see where we can take it.” The negotiator indicated that the Iranians were willing to talk, and that Iraq, like Afghanistan, was part of Suleimani’s brief: “It’s one guy running both shows.”

After the invasion began, in March, 2003, Iranian officials were frantic to let the Americans know that they wanted peace. Many of them watched the regimes topple in Afghanistan and Iraq and were convinced that they were next. “They were scared shitless,” Maguire, the former C.I.A. officer in Baghdad, told me. “They were sending runners across the border to our élite elements saying, ‘Look, we don’t want any trouble with you.’ We had an enormous upper hand.” That same year, American officials determined that Iran had reconfigured its plans to develop a nuclear weapon to proceed more slowly and covertly, lest it invite a Western attack.

After Saddam’s regime collapsed, Crocker was dispatched to Baghdad to organize a fledgling government, called the Iraqi Governing Council. He realized that many Iraqi politicians were flying to Tehran for consultations, and he jumped at the chance to negotiate indirectly with Suleimani. In the course of the summer, Crocker passed him the names of prospective Shiite candidates, and the two men vetted each one. Crocker did not offer veto power, but he abandoned candidates whom Suleimani found especially objectionable. “The formation of the governing council was in its essence a negotiation between Tehran and Washington,” he said.

That exchange was the high point of Iranian-American coöperation. “After we formed the governing council, everything collapsed,” Crocker said. As the American occupation faltered, Suleimani began an aggressive campaign of sabotage. Many Americans and Iraqis I interviewed thought that the change of strategy was the result of opportunism: the Iranians became aggressive when the fear of an American invasion began to recede.

For years, Suleimani had sent operatives into Iraq to cultivate Shiite militias, so, when Saddam fell, he already had a fighting force in place: the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of a Shiite political party called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The Party’s leaders so thoroughly identified with the Iranian revolution that Badr’s militiamen had fought alongside Iranian forces in the Iran-Iraq War.

The Badr Brigade spent much of its time carrying out revenge killings against Baathists, and largely held its fire against the Americans. But another Iranian-backed militia—the Mahdi Army, headed by the populist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr—began confronting the Americans early. In August, 2004, after the Americans launched a particularly bloody counteroffensive, I walked through a makeshift graveyard in the holy city of Najaf, south of Baghdad, and found dozens of shallow graves, each marked by a tiny glass jar containing a slip of paper with the fallen fighter’s name and address. Many of them were marked “Tehran.”

Suleimani found Sadr unpredictable and difficult to manage, so the Quds Force began to organize other militias that were willing to attack the Americans. Its operatives trained fighters in Iran, sometimes helped by their comrades in Hezbollah. Suleimani’s control over some of the Iraqi militias at times appeared to be total. At one point, a senior Iraqi official, on a trip to Washington, publicly blamed the Supreme Leader for escalating the violence in Iraq. Soon after returning to Baghdad, he told me, he received messages from the leaders of two Iraqi Shiite militias. Both posed the same question: Do you want to die?

In 2004, the Quds Force began flooding Iraq with lethal roadside bombs that the Americans referred to as E.F.P.s, for “explosively formed projectiles.” The E.F.P.s, which fire a molten copper slug able to penetrate armor, began to wreak havoc on American troops, accounting for nearly twenty per cent of combat deaths. E.F.P.s could be made only by skilled technicians, and they were often triggered by sophisticated motion sensors. “There was zero question where they were coming from,” General Stanley McChrystal, who at the time was the head of the Joint Special Operations Command, told me. “We knew where all the factories were in Iran. The E.F.P.s killed hundreds of Americans.”

Suleimani’s campaign against the United States crossed the Sunni-Shiite divide, which he has always been willing to set aside for a larger purpose. Iraqi and Western officials told me that, early in the war, Suleimani encouraged the head of intelligence for the Assad regime to facilitate the movement of Sunni extremists through Syria to fight the Americans. In many cases, Al Qaeda was also allowed a degree of freedom in Iran as well. Crocker told me that in May, 2003, the Americans received intelligence that Al Qaeda fighters in Iran were preparing an attack on Western targets in Saudi Arabia. Crocker was alarmed. “They were there, under Iranian protection, planning operations,” he said. He flew to Geneva and passed a warning to the Iranians, but to no avail; militants bombed three residential compounds in Riyadh, killing thirty-five people, including nine Americans.

As it turned out, the Iranian strategy of abetting Sunni extremists backfired horrendously: shortly after the occupation began, the same extremists began attacking Shiite civilians and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government. It was a preview of the civil war to come. “Welcome to the Middle East,” the Western diplomat in Baghdad told me. “Suleimani wanted to bleed the Americans, so he invited in the jihadis, and things got out of control.”

Still, Iran’s policy toward the Americans in Iraq was not entirely hostile—both countries, after all, were trying to empower Iraq’s Shiite majority—and so Suleimani alternated between bargaining with the Americans and killing them. Throughout the war, he summoned Iraqi leaders to Tehran to broker deals, usually intended to maximize Shiite power. At least once, he even travelled into the heart of American power in Baghdad. “Suleimani came into the Green Zone to meet the Iraqis,” the Iraqi politician told me. “I think the Americans wanted to arrest him, but they figured they couldn’t.”

As both sides sought an advantage, the shifting allegiances led to uncomfortable, sometimes bizarre encounters. The leaders of the two main Kurdish parties, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, met regularly with both Suleimani and the Americans. While the Kurds’ relationship with the U.S. was usually warm, their ties to Iranian leaders like Suleimani were deeper and more complex; the Iranian regime had sheltered Iraq’s Kurds during their war with Saddam. But it was never an equal relationship. Kurdish leaders say that Suleimani’s objective has always been to keep Iraq’s political parties divided and unstable, insuring that the country stayed weak: the Iran-Iraq War was never far from his mind. “It is very difficult for us to say no to Suleimani,” a senior Kurdish official told me. “When we say no, he makes trouble for us. Bombings. Shootings. The Iranians are our neighbors. They’ve always been there, and they always will be. We have to deal with them.”

A senior intelligence officer in Baghdad recalled visiting Talabani at his house during a trip to northern Iraq. When he walked in, Qassem Suleimani was sitting there, wearing a black shirt and black jacket. The two men looked each other up and down. “He knew who I was; I knew who he was. We shook hands, didn’t say anything,” the officer said. “I’ve never seen Talabani so deferential to anyone. He was terrified.”

In the years after the invasion, General McChrystal concentrated on defeating Sunni insurgents, and, like other American commanders in Iraq, he largely refrained from pursuing Quds Force agents. Provoking Iran would only exacerbate the conflict, and, in any case, many of the agents operated under the protection of diplomatic cover. But, as the war dragged on, the Iranian-backed militias loomed ever larger. In late 2006, McChrystal told me, he formed a task force to kill and capture Iranian-backed insurgents, as well as Quds Force operatives.

That December, American commandos raided the compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a powerful Shiite politician, and found General Mohsen Chizari, the head of operations for the Quds Force. According to “The Endgame,” by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, the commandos detained Chizari, sending shock waves through Baghdad. “Everybody was stunned,” a former senior military commander told me. “All the Iranians were stunned. We had broken the unwritten law.” Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, demanded that the Americans turn over Chizari. When they did—reluctantly—Maliki released him. After the incident, the American Ambassador told Maliki that the next time they caught an Iranian operative they were going to keep him.

A month later, McChrystal received reports that General Mohammed Ali Jafari, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, might be in a convoy heading toward the Iraqi border. According to other intelligence sources, Suleimani was riding with him. A group of Kurdish fighters were waiting to welcome them when they crossed over. McChrystal decided to allow the Iranians to cross the border. “We didn’t want to get into a gunfight with the Kurds,” he said.

McChrystal’s men tracked the convoy as it drove a hundred miles into Iraq, to the Kurdish city of Erbil, and stopped at a nondescript building, which had a small sign that read “Consulate.” No one knew that such a consulate existed, but the fact that it did meant that the men inside were operating under diplomatic cover. The Americans moved in anyway, and took five Iranians into custody. All were carrying diplomatic passports, and all, according to McChrystal, were Quds Force members. Neither Suleimani nor Jafari was there; they had evidently broken off from the convoy at the last minute and taken refuge in a safe house controlled by the Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani. “Suleimani was lucky,” Dagan, the former Mossad chief, told me, referring to the raid. “It’s important to be lucky.”

Nine days later, five new black S.U.V.s pulled up to the gates of the Karbala Provincial Center, in southern Iraq. The men inside spoke English, wore American-style uniforms, and flashed I.D.s, and so they were allowed through the gates. In the compound, they jumped out of their vehicles and ran directly to a building where American soldiers were working. They killed one and captured four, ignoring everyone else. In a few hours, the four captives were dead, shot at close range.

The raid was carried out by Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, one of the Iranian-backed militias. American officials speculated that Suleimani had ordered the raid, in response to the capture of the Quds Force operatives in Erbil. Within two months, the Americans had killed the alleged leader of the attack and rounded up several of the participants. One of them was Ali Musa Daqduq, a Hezbollah commander who had trained in Iran. At first, Daqduq pretended to be unable to speak, and the Americans nicknamed him Hamid the Mute. But after a time, they said, he started talking, and told them that the operation had been ordered by Iranian officials. For the first time, American commanders publicly pointed to Suleimani. At a press conference, Brigadier General Kevin Bergner said, “The Quds Force knew of and supported planning for the eventual Karbala attack that killed five coalition soldiers.”

As the covert war with Iran intensified, American officials considered crossing into Iran to attack training camps and bomb factories. “Some of us wanted very badly to hit them,” a senior American officer who was in Iraq at the time told me. Those debates lasted well into 2011, until the last American soldiers left the country. Each time, the Americans decided against crossing the border, figuring that it would be too easy for the Iranians to escalate the fighting.

Around the same time, Suleimani struck up a correspondence with senior American officials, sending messages through intermediaries—sometimes seeking to reassure the Americans, sometimes to extract something. One of the first came in early 2008, when the Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani, handed a cell phone with a text message to General David Petraeus, who had taken over the year before as the commander of American forces. “Dear General Petraeus,” the text read, “you should know that I, Qassem Suleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan. And indeed, the ambassador in Baghdad is a Quds Force member. The individual who’s going to replace him is a Quds Force member.” After the five American soldiers were killed in Karbala, Suleimani sent a message to the American Ambassador. “I swear on the grave of Khomeini I haven’t authorized a bullet against the U.S.,” Suleimani said. None of the Americans believed him.

In a report to the White House, Petraeus wrote that Suleimani was “truly evil.” Yet at times the two men were all but negotiating. According to diplomatic cables revealed by WikiLeaks, Petraeus sent messages through Iraqi officials to Suleimani, asking him to call off rocket attacks on the American Embassy and on U.S. bases. In 2008, the Americans and the Iraqi Army were pressing an offensive against the Mahdi Army—Moqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite militia—and, in retribution, the militia was bombarding the Green Zone regularly. Suleimani, who sensed a political opening, sent Petraeus a message lamenting the situation and saying that he had assigned men to apprehend the attackers. Petraeus replied, “I was born on a Sunday, but it wasn’t last Sunday.” Eventually, Suleimani brokered a ceasefire between Sadr and the government.

At times, Suleimani seemed to take pleasure in taunting his American counterparts, and stories of his exploits spread. In the summer of 2006, during the thirty-four-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the violence in Baghdad appeared to ebb. When the fighting ended, the Iraqi politician told me, Suleimani supposedly sent a message to the American command. “I hope you have been enjoying the peace and quiet in Baghdad,” it read. “I’ve been busy in Beirut!”

In a speech in 1990, Khamenei said that the mission of the Quds Force is to “establish popular Hezbollah cells all over the world.” Although that goal has not been met, Hezbollah has become the most influential force in Lebanon—a military power and a political party that nearly supersedes the state. Some experts on the region believe that it has grown less dependent on Iran as it has matured. But, at a dinner in Beirut last year, Walid Joumblatt, a Lebanese politician, complained that Hezbollah’s leaders were still in thrall to Tehran. “You have to sit and talk with them, but what do you say?” he said to me. “They don’t decide. It’s Khamenei and Qassem Suleimani who decide.”

Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has endorsed the concept of Velayat-e Faqih, which recognizes Iran’s Supreme Leader as the ultimate authority, and he has acknowledged the presence of Quds Force operatives in Lebanon. From 2000 to 2006, Iran contributed a hundred million dollars a year to Hezbollah. Its fighters are attractive proxies: unlike the Iranians, they speak Arabic, making them better equipped to operate in Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world. Working with the Iranians, they have either launched or prepared to launch attacks in Cyprus, Azerbaijan, and Turkey.

They don’t always act together. After a Hezbollah operative attacked a tour bus filled with Israelis in Bulgaria, last July, American authorities learned that Suleimani had asked his subordinates, “Does anyone know about this?” No one did. “Hezbollah acted on its own in that one,” an American defense official told me. Nonetheless, the Quds Force appears to have been involved in a number of the most significant moments in Lebanon’s recent history. In 2006, Nasrallah ordered a group of his fighters to kidnap Israeli soldiers—an operation that the Middle Eastern security official told me was carried out with Suleimani’s help. A brief but fierce war ensued, in which the Israel Defense Forces destroyed much of Lebanon. “I don’t think Suleimani expected that reaction,” the official said.

The question of Iranian influence in Lebanon resurfaced in 2011, when the United Nations-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon charged four senior members of Hezbollah with assassinating the former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, in 2005. Hariri, a Sunni, had been trying to take Lebanon out of the Iranian-Syrian orbit. On Valentine’s Day, he was killed by a suicide truck bomb whose payload weighed more than five thousand pounds.

Prosecutors identified the alleged Hezbollah assassins by means of “co-location analysis”—matching disposable cell phones used at the time of the murder with other phones that belonged to the suspects. They refrained from indicting Syrian officials, but, they said, they had convincing evidence that Assad’s government was involved in Hariri’s killing. A senior investigator for the Special Tribunal told me that there was also reason to suspect the Iranians: “Our theory of the case was that Hezbollah pulled the trigger, but could not and would not have done so without the blessing and logistical support from both Syria and Iran.” One of the phones believed to have been used by the killers had made at least a dozen calls to Iran before and after the assassination. But investigators told me that they didn’t know who in Iran was called, and that they couldn’t persuade Western intelligence agencies to help them. As it turned out, the agencies knew quite a bit. The senior intelligence officer told me that Iranian operatives were overheard talking minutes before the assassination. “There were Iranians on the phones directing the attack,” he said. Robert Baer, a former senior C.I.A. official, told me, “If indeed Iran was involved, Suleimani was undoubtedly at the center of this.”

Meanwhile, the four Hezbollah suspects in the killing have disappeared. One of them, Mustafa Badreddine—Imad Mughniyeh’s brother-in-law and a longtime Hezbollah bomb maker—was spotted in Syria by the rebels, who say that he is fighting for Assad.

n December 22, 2010, James Jeffrey, the American Ambassador to Iraq, and General Lloyd Austin, the top American commander there, issued a note of congratulations to the Iraqi people on the formation of a new government, led by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The country had been without a government for nine months, after parliamentary elections ended in an impasse. The composition of the government was critical; at the time of the election, there were still nearly a hundred thousand American troops in the country, and U.S. commanders were still hoping to leave a residual force behind. “We look forward to working with the new coalition government in furthering our common vision of a democratic Iraq,” the two men said.

What Jeffrey and Austin didn’t say was that the crucial deal that brought the Iraqi government together was made not by them but by Suleimani. In the months before, according to several Iraqi and Western officials, Suleimani invited senior Shiite and Kurdish leaders to meet with him in Tehran and Qom, and extracted from them a promise to support Maliki, his preferred candidate. The deal had a complex array of enticements. Maliki and Assad disliked each other; Suleimani brought them together by forging an agreement to build a lucrative oil pipeline from Iraq to the Syrian border. In order to bring the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in line, Suleimani agreed to place his men in the Iraqi service ministries.

Most remarkable, according to the Iraqi and Western officials, were the two conditions that Suleimani imposed on the Iraqis. The first was that Jalal Talabani, a longtime friend of the Iranian regime, become President. The second was that Maliki and his coalition partners insist that all American troops leave the country. “Suleimani said: no Americans,” the former Iraqi leader told me. “A ten-year relationship, down the drain.”

Iraqi officials told me that, at the time of Jeffrey’s announcement, the Americans knew that Suleimani had pushed them out of the country but were too embarrassed to admit it in public. “We were laughing at the Americans,” the former Iraqi leader told me, growing angry as he recalled the situation. “Fuck it! Fuck it!” he said. “Suleimani completely outmaneuvered them, and in public they were congratulating themselves for putting the government together.”

The deal was a heavy blow to Ayad Allawi, a pro-American secular politician whose party had won the most parliamentary seats in the elections, but who failed to put together a majority coalition. In an interview in Jordan, he said that with U.S. backing he could have built a majority. Instead, the Americans pushed him aside in favor of Maliki. He told me that Vice-President Joe Biden called to tell him to abandon his bid for Prime Minister, saying, “You can’t form a government.”

Allawi said he suspected that the Americans weren’t willing to deal with the trouble the Iranians would have made if he had become Prime Minister. They wanted to stay in Iraq, he said, but only if the effort involved was minimal. “I needed American support,” he said. “But they wanted to leave, and they handed the country to the Iranians. Iraq is a failed state now, an Iranian colony.”

According to American and Iraqi former officials, Suleimani exerts leverage over Iraqi politics by paying officials, by subsidizing newspapers and television stations, and, when necessary, by intimidation. Few are immune to his enticements. “I have yet to see one Shia political party not taking money from Qassem Suleimani,” the former senior Iraqi official told me. “He’s the most powerful man in Iraq, without question.”

Even Maliki often feels like a prisoner of the Iranians. Exiled by Saddam, Maliki lived for a short time in Iran, but then moved to Syria—in part to escape Iranian influence, Iraqis who know him say. Crocker said that Maliki once told him, “You can’t know what arrogance is until you are an Iraqi Arab forced to take refuge with the Iranians.” The Iraqi politician, who is close to both men, told me that Maliki resents Suleimani, and that the feeling is mutual. “Maliki says Suleimani doesn’t listen,” he told me. “Suleimani says Maliki just lies.”

Still, Maliki may be amply repaying Suleimani for his efforts to make him Prime Minister. According to the former senior intelligence officer, Maliki’s government is presiding over a number of schemes, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, to help the Iranian regime outwit Western economic sanctions. A prominent Iraqi businessman told me that Iranian-backed agents regularly use the Iraqi banking system to undertake fraudulent transactions that allow them to sell Iraqi currency at a huge profit. “If the banks refuse, they are shut down by the government,” he said.

The other main source of revenue for the Iranians is oil, officials say: Maliki’s government sets aside the equivalent of two hundred thousand barrels of oil a day—about twenty million dollars’ worth, at current prices—and sends the money to Suleimani. In this way, the Quds Force has made itself immune to the economic pressures of Western sanctions. “It’s a self-funding covert-action program,” the former senior intelligence officer said. “Suleimani doesn’t even need the Iranian budget to fund his operations.”

Last December, when Assad’s regime appeared close to collapse, American officials spotted Syrian technicians preparing bombs carrying the nerve agent sarin to be loaded onto aircraft. All indications were that they were plotting an enormous chemical attack. Frantic, the Americans called leaders in Russia, who called their counterparts in Tehran. According to the American defense official, Suleimani appeared to be instrumental in persuading Assad to refrain from using the weapons.

Suleimani’s sentiments about the ethics of chemical weapons are unknown. During the Iran-Iraq War, thousands of Iranian soldiers suffered from chemical attacks, and the survivors still speak publicly of the trauma. But some American officials believe that his efforts to restrain Assad had a more pragmatic inspiration: the fear of provoking American military intervention. “Both the Russians and the Iranians have said to Assad, ‘We can’t support you in the court of world opinion if you use this stuff,’ ” a former senior American military official said.

The regime is believed to have used chemical weapons at least fourteen times since last year. Yet even after the enormous sarin attack on August 21st, which killed fourteen hundred civilians, Suleimani’s support for Syria has been unbending. To save Assad, Suleimani has called on every asset he built since taking over the Quds Force: Hezbollah fighters, Shiite militiamen from around the Arab world, and all the money and matériel he could squeeze out of his own besieged government. In Baghdad, a young Iraqi Shiite who called himself Abu Hassan told me that he was recruited to fight by a group of Iraqi men. He took a bus to the Iranian city of Mashhad, where he and three dozen other Iraqis received two weeks of instruction from Iranian trainers. The men travelled to the Shiite shrine of Sayyidah Zaynab, near Damascus, where they spent three months fighting for the Assad government, along with soldiers from Hezbollah and snipers from Iran. “We lost a lot of people,” Abu Hassan told me.

Suleimani’s greatest achievement may be persuading his proxies in the Iraqi government to allow Iran to use its airspace to fly men and munitions to Damascus. General James Mattis, who until March was the commander of all American military forces in the Middle East, told me that without this aid the Assad regime would have collapsed months ago. The flights are overseen by the Iraqi transportation minister, Hadi al-Amri, who is an old ally of Suleimani’s—the former head of the Badr Brigade, and a soldier on the Iranian side in the Iran-Iraq War. In an interview in Baghdad, Amri denied that the Iranians were using Iraqi airspace to send weapons. But he made clear his affection for his former commander. “I love Qassem Suleimani!” he said, pounding the table. “He is my dearest friend.”

So far, Maliki has resisted pressure to supply Assad overland through Iraq. But he hasn’t stopped the flights; the prospect of a radical Sunni regime in Syria overcame his reservations about becoming involved in a civil war. “Maliki dislikes the Iranians, and he loathes Assad, but he hates Al Nusra,” Crocker told me. “He doesn’t want an Al Qaeda government in Damascus.”

This kind of starkly sectarian atmosphere may be Suleimani’s most lasting impact on the Middle East. To save his Iranian empire in Syria and Lebanon, he has helped fuel a Sunni-Shiite conflict that threatens to engulf the region for years to come—a war that he appears happy to wage. “He has every reason to believe that Iran is the rising power in the region,” Mattis told me. “We’ve never dealt him a body blow.”

In June, a new, moderate President, Hassan Rouhani, was elected in Iran, promising to end the sanctions, which have exhausted the country and demolished its middle class. Hopes have risen in the West that Khamenei might allow Rouhani to strike a deal. Although Rouhani is a moderate only by Iranian standards—he is a Shiite cleric and a longtime adherent of the revolution—his new administration has made a series of good-will gestures, including the release of eleven political prisoners and an exchange of letters with President Obama. Rouhani is in New York this week to speak at the United Nations and, possibly, to meet with Obama. The talks will surely center on the potential for Iran to restrain its nuclear program, in exchange for relaxed sanctions.

Many in the West are hoping that Iran will also help find an end to the grinding war in Syria. Assad’s deputy prime minister recently offered the possibility of a cease-fire, saying, “Let nobody have any fear that the regime in its present form will continue.” But he did not say that Assad would step down, which the rebels have said is a necessary condition of negotiations. There have been hints from powerful Iranians that Assad isn’t worth holding on to. In a recent speech, the former President Hashemi Rafsanjani said, “The people have been the target of chemical attacks by their own government.” (After a leaked recording of the speech caused a stir in Iran, Rafsanjani denied the remarks.) But a less sympathetic regime in Syria would split the Axis of Resistance, and radically complicate Iran’s partnership with Hezbollah. In any case, the Iranian regime may be too fragmented to come to a consensus. “Anytime you see a statement coming out of the government, just remember there’s a rat’s nest of people fighting underneath the surface,” Kevan Harris, a sociologist at Princeton who has studied Iran extensively, told me. As Rouhani tries to engage the West, he will have to contend with the hard-liners, including Suleimani and his comrades, who for more than a decade have defined their foreign policy as a covert war on the U.S. and Israel. “They don’t trust the other side,” Harris said. “They feel that any concession they make will be seen by the West as a sign of weakness.”

For Suleimani, giving up Assad would mean abandoning the project of expansion that has occupied him for fifteen years. In a recent speech before the Assembly of Experts—the clerics who choose the Supreme Leader—he spoke about Syria in fiercely determined language. “We do not pay attention to the propaganda of the enemy, because Syria is the front line of the resistance and this reality is undeniable,’’ he said. “We have a duty to defend Muslims because they are under pressure and oppression.” Suleimani was fighting the same war, against the same foes, that he’d been fighting his entire life; for him, it seemed, the compromises of statecraft could not compare with the paradise of the battlefield. “We will support Syria to the end,” he said. ♦

Published in the print edition of the September 30, 2013, issue.

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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Trump wants to talk. Iran isn’t interested.

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/trump-wants-to-talk-iran-isnt-interested/

Trump wants to talk. Iran isn’t interested.

“We are fully prepared to enrich uranium at any level and with any amount,” said Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, according to media reports. | Ebrahim Noroozi/AP Photo

Defense

When it comes to nuclear negotiations, Iran is not North Korea.

President Donald Trump wants to sit down with Iranian leaders — but they don’t share his eagerness to talk, revealing the limits of the president’s personal diplomatic overtures.

While another adversary, North Korea, has come to the table for one-on-ones with Trump, Tehran on Sunday responded to Trump’s combination of pleas and economic sanctions with provocation.

Story Continued Below

Iranian officials said they would, within hours, start enriching uranium above the limits set under a 2015 international nuclear deal, the latest in a series of potentially fatal stab-wounds in the agreement. They also said Iran would keep reducing its compliance with the deal every 60 days unless world powers shield it from the sanctions that Trump reimposed after quitting the agreement last year.

“We are fully prepared to enrich uranium at any level and with any amount,” said Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, according to media reports.

It’s an approach that has left the two countries at risk of an eventual military confrontation.

But Iran’s moves are a calculated gamble, officials and analysts said — an attempt to both rebuke Trump and pressure European leaders, who are trying to salvage the nuclear deal, to stand up to the United States. The Iranians also may be betting that Trump, who has shown little appetite for war, will fold first, lifting sanctions in exchange for talks.

Iran is “testing limits to gauge the response of the U.S. and the other key stakeholders,” said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran scholar at the Brookings Institution. “It’s a very effective way to try to read a mercurial U.S. administration and inject some greater urgency among the other parties to the deal.”

A U.S. official familiar with the issue told POLITICO on Sunday that the Trump team hopes for three things: that Europe imposes some sanctions on Iran to keep it from further violating the deal; that a financial mechanism the Europeans have set up to help Iran obtain non-sanctioned goods succeeds; and that recent U.S. military maneuvers in the Middle East are enough to deter Iran from further military escalation.

“Fundamentally, we want them to stay in the deal,” the U.S. official said, when asked why the Trump administration wants the European financial mechanism, known as INSTEX, to work. There’s no desire to engage in an all-out war with Iran or see it build a nuclear weapon, the official said.

Both Iran and North Korea have faced Trump’s fury over their nuclear programs, including his imposition of severe sanctions. But while North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, who already possesses nuclear weapons, has accepted talks, Iran’s Islamist rulers, who lack nukes, remain unwilling to talk to Trump.

The reasons are many. Iran has an anti-U.S. ideology forged during a revolution 40 years ago — its leaders rarely respond well to insults and threats from a country they call the “Great Satan.” And unlike North Korea, where Kim rules with an iron fist, Iran has competing political power centers, even if Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei technically has the final say.

Additionally, Tehran is still smarting from Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the 2015 nuclear deal. There’s also lingering suspicion in Tehran that the Trump administration really wants to oust the Iranian regime — not just change its behavior.

Kim, on the other hand, may see more use in talking to Trump than goading him, even if the pair traded heated rhetorical barbs in 2017. The 30-something dictator may be willing to try the negotiations route because he already has built a nuclear arsenal and is less worried about a U.S. attack.

Kim’s goal, some analysts say, is to improve his country’s economy, and bolster his rule, by convincing Trump to remove sanctions. Kim may be betting that he can convince Trump to at least offer some sanctions relief for limited nuclear-related promises on his part.

Iran, meanwhile, insists it has no desire to build a nuclear weapon. The oil-rich country has always said its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, such as generating energy. But there’s always the possibility that Trump’s willingness to sit down with Kim could lead Iran to decide that it needs to have a nuclear weapon for more long-term leverage.

Any such move by Iran, however, could have immediate consequences, including spurring a new Middle East war or a nuclear arms race. U.S. allies in the Middle East — notably Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — are loathe to see Iran become a nuclear state. Israel has even suggested in the past it would launch a preventive strike to keep Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

The possibility of a military confrontation is already high in the Middle East following a series of attacks on international oil tankers that the U.S. has blamed on Iran. The U.S. has sent hundreds more troops to the region as a hedge against Tehran.

To some Iran watchers, Tehran is erring by not talking to Trump now.

“Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would be smart to follow Kim’s approach,” said Mark Dubowitz of the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which generally supports Trump’s tough policies toward Iran. “The deal of the century could await him if he put aside decades of anti-Americanism and met Trump at a summit.”

But to others, Iran’s reticence is predictable. “You can’t overcome some aspects of the revolutionary ideology still in Iran today,” Maloney said. Unlike North Korea’s Kim, “Iranians complicate their own path by being incapable of that kind of heroic flexibility.”

In any case, comparisons between the two countries can only go so far. “They’resuis generis. They’re extremely different,” a former top Obama administration official said. “They do watch each other, though, they do.”

Trump has repeatedly made it clear that he would rather talk to Iran than fight.

He called off a military strike on Iran at the last minute last month after it shot down a U.S. drone, has promised the country economic riches if it bends to his demands and has quite literally urged Iran to “call me.” The president and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have even said the U.S. is willing to talk to Iran without any pre-conditions.

It’s also clear that Trump worries that a war with Iran would hurt him with his Republican electoral base during the 2020 election. He ran for office promising to pull the U.S. out of Middle East entanglements.

But as he often does, Trump has undermined himself by being inconsistent. He has threatened to “obliterate” Iran, beefed up America’s troop presence in the Middle East and sanctioned Khamenei. The Trump administration has also threatened to sanction Iran’s foreign minister, a move that would further undermine a shot at diplomacy.

Last week, as it became clear Iran would move toward greater enrichment of uranium, Trump tweeted: “Be careful with the threats, Iran. They can come back to bite you like nobody has been bitten before!”

Trump has said the 2015 nuclear deal wasn’t long-lasting enough and that it should have covered Iran’s many troubling non-nuclear activities. In recent months, however, he’s further confused the situation by saying he simply wants Iran to give up any path to nuclear weapons. At other times, he has said he also wants Iran to stop funding “terror” groups.

Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, has repeatedly dismissed the possibility of talking to Trump. The country’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, recently said Iran won’t bow to threats from anyone.

“We will not give in to international pressure and along with the people of the world,” he said, according to media reports. “We will make them talk to the people of Iran with language of respect and never threaten an Iranian.”

Trump initially pursued a tough approach with North Korea before turning to personal diplomacy. He threatened Kim with “fire and fury,” heaped sanctions on his regime and boasted that his nuclear button was “bigger” than the autocrat’s. Kim responded with insults, too, calling Trump a “dotard.”

Eventually, however, Kim and Trump met and have since showered each other with praise. At their first summit, in 2018 in Singapore, the pair signed a vague joint declaration saying they were committed to the path of denuclearization.

A second summit, in Vietnam earlier this year, ended early as neither side would agree to the other’s terms for a more substantive nuclear agreement. The two met in late June at the Demilitarized Zone that separates North and South Korea.

It’s too soon to tell if the diplomacy at the DMZ will jump-start the stalled nuclear negotiations, and to date Kim has taken no serious step toward reducing his nuclear arsenal. But if Kim walks away with a good deal, Iranian leaders may reconsider talking to Trump.

The odds are, though, that Iran’s government would prefer to wait, hoping that Trump will not get re-elected in 2020. It would be easier for Khamenei to agree to talk with a new U.S. president than deal with a man who tore up the last deal the Iranian leader struck with America.

Given the damage done to the Iranian economy by Trump-imposed sanctions, however, Iran may have little choice but to talk to him if he is reelected. Still, the Iranians may insist that the U.S. offer some sort of limited concession before negotiations can take place, such as partial sanctions relief.

“To risk meeting Trump now while being pretty sure nothing substantive would come of it is to make yourself look small at home in front of your own people when you have said this man is not worth talking to,” said Alex Vatanka, an Iran specialist and senior fellow with the Middle East Institute.

#Foreign #interested #Politics #wants

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mysteriouslyzealouspandalov-blog · 5 years ago

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The US-Israeli relationship faces a storm on the horizon | Michael H Fuchs

New Post has been published on https://relationshipguideto.com/must-see/the-us-israeli-relationship-faces-a-storm-on-the-horizon-michael-h-fuchs/

The US-Israeli relationship faces a storm on the horizon | Michael H Fuchs

One version is all sunshine and rainbows the other, a deepening extremism in both countries. And these two vastly different versions are struggling to co-exist

The split-screen images of Israeli and US officials smiling at the opening of the American embassy in Jerusalem, while Israel killed Gazans just miles away, reflected a striking indifference by leaders in the United States and Israel to the consequences of the occupation of Palestinian territories. And, despite the paeans that the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the White House senior adviser, Jared Kushner, paid to the strength of the ties between the two countries, those images highlighted a rot eating away at the US-Israel relationship.

Even before the violence in Gaza and the embassy opening, on my trip to Israel last week, the duality of the US-Israel relationship was stark.

As I stood in the Golan Heights on the border with Syria, it was easy to see the value of the partnership. Just one day earlier, the Iron Dome missile defense system (developed jointly by the US and Israel) had protected Israel from rockets fired from Iranian bases in Syria.

Just a few days before, as I stood in an Israeli settlement in the Palestinian city of Hebron, it was difficult to understand how the United States can provide support for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) that protect Israelis committing illegal acts in taking Palestinian land in some cases acts that are condemned even by Israeli courts.

These two experiences were emblematic of two vastly different versions of the US-Israel relationship trying and increasingly struggling to coexist.

One version of the US-Israel relationship is all sunshine and rainbows: deep political and military bonds between governments, extensive trade, special ties between peoples, and Americas backing for the historical justice of safeguarding a democratic homeland for the Jewish people.

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The other version of the relationship is one of deepening polarization in both countries: the rightwing Israeli government cozies up to US Republicans and pursues extreme policies, while American views of Israel are increasingly divided along partisan lines.

Israel wants to be judged on its thriving democracy and economy, for which it deserves real credit. But one cannot ignore Israels military occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza where a combined almost 5 million Palestinians live. Government-supported settlements in the West Bank are expanding, slowly taking over Palestinian land in what appears to be a creeping annexation.

In America, views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are more partisan than theyve been since 1978, according to one study, which revealed that 79% of Republicans say their sympathies lie more with Israel than with the Palestinians, while only 27% of Democrats are more sympathetic to Israel. Another study revealed that, while a large majority of Democrats see Israel as a strategic asset, 55% of Democrats also see Israel as a strategic burden, and 60% of Democrats believe the United States should impose sanctions or take serious action in response to Israeli settlements.

The political fight in the United States over the Iran nuclear deal illustrates the partisan divide. In 2015 there was a Democratic uproar when the Republicans invited the Israeli prime minister to speak to Congress in opposition to the Iran nuclear deal being pushed by a Democratic president. This growing link between Israeli and American rightwing parties was reinforced by Netanyahus recent presentation supposedly showing Irans previous nuclear ambitions, which was just days later referenced by Donald Trump as justification for violating the deal.

The same goes for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Trump is backing Netanyahus government with hardly a critical word of Israeli activity towards the Palestinians. The embassy move is a case in point it gains nothing for the United States, makes it impossible for the Palestinians to view this administration as a neutral mediator for peace talks, and stoked violence.

Israel has genuine security concerns, and the second intifada left deep scars on the Israeli psyche. For Israelis who remember wondering each day if their children were going to be killed by a suicide bomber on the way to school, the occupation allows Israelis to keep the Palestinians out of sight and out of mind. This is no small part of the reason why rightwing parties promising security have run Israel for almost two decades now.

The relationship could become unrecognizable, with a hyper-partisan segment of America supporting an Israel that has lost much of its claim to democracy. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

But Israel cannot remain a democracy in the long run while continuing to rule millions of Palestinians who do not have any say in their governance. As I stood in the settlement in Hebron next to a young Israeli soldier guarding Israeli settlers, it was clear that while Israel is good at solving short-term problems say, protecting Israeli settlers it is not good at figuring out long-term solutions, like preventing Israel from becoming a perpetual occupier.

As one Israeli journalist told me in response to a discussion of the myriad challenges facing Israel, well schlep through. Surely, the US-Israel relationship will also schlep through but what kind of relationship will it be?

On my trip, I repeatedly heard the claim that fewer American Jews support Israel because they are moving away from Judaism, not because of Israeli policies towards Palestinians. As an American Jew who strongly supports Israel, but not necessarily Israels policies, this deeply offended me. Instead of criticizing American Jews for how they choose to live their personal lives, Israelis should recognize that, whatever the reason, falling support for Israel among a younger generation of American Jews will fracture the US-Israel relationship.

Fueling the fire in America are radicals such as Sheldon Adelson, who funds the largest Israeli daily newspaper Israel Today to support a rightwing agenda, and who has offered to pay for the new US embassy in Jerusalem. The Trump administration chose Pastor Robert Jeffress as one of the speakers at the opening of the Jerusalem embassy the same Jeffress who once said: Mormonism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism they lead people to an eternity of separation from God in hell.

There are no obvious perfect solutions. But if the United States and Israel dont work together to confront longer-term trends, the relationship could become unrecognizable, with a hyper-partisan segment of America supporting an Israel that has lost much of its claim to democracy. And that would be devastating for both countries.

Michael H Fuchs is a contributing opinion writer for the Guardian US. He is also a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and a former deputy assistant secretary of state for east Asian and Pacific affairs

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us

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zumwaltlord · 6 years ago

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About US abolishing its military.....

....That’s one hell of a not only national suicide, but a worldwide self destruction as well. I’ve seen plenty of people here and there say how United States of America should abolish all of its military because that would somehow magically end all wars and everything will be peaceful....except for the fact the consequences of that actions are far more horrific than imagined.

Obviously, that would mean that United States would lose nearly all of the influence and power in the world. Great, no more “endless wars”, right? No more “Military Industrial Complex causing all wars”, right? Except....

Not only would the biggest US allies (European countries, which are in NATO, Japan, South Korea, etc....) lose the one country that would always be on their side, but they would be left wide open towards the aggressions towards the adversary countries. Speaking of aggressions....

Either Russia and China would fill up the power vacuum left by the decision of abolishing US military. Considering their behaviors as of late (especially by Russia), would it be really better if Russia or China had the leading spot? Historically looking, although America was by far no saint (and at times quite hypocritical when it comes to democracy, that’s realpolitik folks), the Russian allies fared far worse than American allies. And by far worse, I mean Russia (at time Soviet Union) had basically total control over them. At least with states behind US back, they had they were free to make their own decisions (mostly and didn’t treat them like hell like Soviet Union did).

Would wars magically stop if US abolished its military?

NO!

While it is true that United States is a participant of many wars (some of which could have been entirely avoided like 2003 invasion of Iraq, that was quite a bloody mess) and it’s foreign policy is quite a wreck (again how they handled Iraq, iirc abolishing their military and such), wars wouldn’t just magically disappear from the planet. In fact, it would lead up to much costlier and bloodier wars. United States is the one thing that keeps many regions in check. If the one cap that holds the liquid of instability is gone, all hell would have gone loose. Russia would very likely try to conquer Baltic states and such, China would launch an offense against Republic of China without holding back and lets not even get into the zones such as border between North and South Korea, entire Persian Gulf (which US is one of the many responsible for the current state, but the proxy wars between them would easily turn into conventional wars (example: Iran vs Israel, Iran vs Saudi Arabia, etc...), India and Pakistan, etc.... Besides, there’s been plenty of wars without US interference (look up wars near Russia and plenty of African wars and so on, the list is long).

For military industrial complex, well someone else would just take up the torch (at this point it’s pretty obvious who) so in that regard, not much would change.

“But they bomb defenseless 3rd world countries!!!”

Defenseless countries, you say.

Once again, America is no saint (as proven Operation Condor, atrocities in Vietnam and their actions in Indonesia, hoo boy.), but to say that every adversary that US has fought is innocent is not only flat out baffling, but denial of war crimes by the other side.

Let’s look at three major examples:

(North) Vietnam

Serbia

Iraq

These three are often used as examples of “defenseless” countries that US has fought. Lets start with Vietnam.

Vietnam is often thought of as “defenseless country with only farmers, how could we lose to them?”. That train of thought is quite wrong, as they were heavily backed up by Soviet Union, China and others (including Sweden) and they fought like tigers. They were masters of their own terrain and knew how to strike such a colossal force.

My Lai is often brought up as one of the biggest stains in American history, but did you know that North Vietnam did a massacre (at least) ten times bigger than My Lai?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_at_Hu%E1%BA%BF

Yeah, plus the acts of terror used by Viet Cong on South Vietnamese citizens. So this debunks both defenseless and innocent out of Vietnam.

Now onto Serbia....honestly the denial of Serbian atrocities in Yugoslav wars is flat out disgusting...I mean....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srebrenica_massacre

This explains it all. (I could go into more detail later)

Iraq is a bit of a doozy, since US was heavily involved, but to say Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s rule was defenseless and innocent is quite wrong. He attacked Kuwait with relative ease, so I wouldn’t say that’s defenseless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_chemical_attack

This, along with many atrocities done under Saddam, rules out Iraq out of innocent.

The point is that, while America is not immune from atrocities, neither is any other country on this planet, regardless if they are western or eastern. Sometimes an intervention is in fact necessary (I would say how US and NATO handled Yugoslav wars was successful).

Now onto next point, abolishing its military would make US a huge sitting duck with a target board painted on it. What can you do when you are (literally) defenseless and then someone with a professional army takes over you? Nothing, that’s what. Only small islands with no neighbors and no strategic relevance can afford abolishing their own military, not a superpower that, yes, it might sound ridiculous, has kept the world more peaceful than before (it is true that the amount of proxy wars has risen, but it’s a compromise of a potentially full scale conflict, which would likely end the world in the process). Wars as a whole, have always been there and always will. They are tragic and bloody, but we humans are a very flawed species. However we can hope we shall never get a full scale conflict in the future.

Not of mention plenty of jobs would have been lost. Is that really worth it?

I am not against the claim that we should fight less wars, less blood (of actual innocents, not extremists or combatants painted as “innocents”) spilled the better. But it must be understood that a functioning nation needs a military for deterrence and defense, otherwise its just free land for any country with ambitious. It depends on the government on how military is used (a lot of times governments make not only poor, but flat out immoral use of their armies), just like any other branch.

United States military, as flawed as they might be, is responsible for the burden of keeping the world a much better and safer place than ever before. It didn’t go well when they played an isolationist before, did they? (Pearl Harbor comes to mind...). I hope a well future for the world and I believe in United States that it will continue its job as the protector of liberty, even if that liberty is shaky.

US government, CIA and their foreign policies are not good though. Bleh.

The world is a gray place. There will always be conflict, but best we can do is to decrease the amount of wars going on. So far, I think it works.

Just don’t be self destructive and look at the reality, that’s all I ask.

#us military #rant #I am gonna get a lot of shit of this #vent #military #oh boy...

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opedguy · 6 years ago

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Trump-Putin Summit Fuels Wild Speculation

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), July 14, 2018,--Showing the outrageous partisanship on Capitol Hill, Democrats, led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) demand that 72-year-old President Donald Trump cancel his July 16 summit in Helsinki with 65-year-old Russian President Vladimir Putin. With Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein announcing 12 indictments of Russian GRU military intelligence operatives for hacking the Democratic National Committee [DNC] and former Hillary campaign Chairman John Podesta, Schumer and Pelosi demand Trump cancel. Since Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula March 1, 2014, Capitol Hill Democrats and Republicans want nothing to do with Putin. Trump campaigned on a promise to improve U.S.-Russian relations, something that deteriorated under former President Barack Obama’s two terms in office.

With the Democrat Party’s hard left, led by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and the Congressional Black and Hispanic caucuses, accusing Trump of colluding with the Kremlin to win the 2016 presidential election, they want nothing to do with Putin. Yesterday’s 29-page DOJ indictments lay out the case against Kremlin’s GRU military intelligence hacking unit, exposing nefarious activity at the Kremlin. When Wikileak’s exiled founder Julian Assange released damaging emails from the DNC and Podesta July 6, 2016, it embarrassed former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign. Among the most embarrassing emails were from former interim DNC Chairman Donna Brazille who admitted to giving Hillary debate questions in advance of a CNN debate. Brazille was fired by the DNC and CNN for abusing her position to give Hillary an unfair advantage over Trump.

Democrats expressed concerns that Putin would run circles around Trump at their July 16 summit. But if you follow Democrats’ logic, it’s better, like Obama, to have no working relationship with Putin. Trump believes in linkage where a foreign leader like Putin can help the U.S. on the opposite sides of the globe. Whether Democrats and their media friends like it or not, Putin’s a powerful world leader, with strong business ties to Germany, something Trump pointed out at the July 11-12 NATO summit in Brussels. Whatever European Union and Democrats’ objections to Putin’s behavior, especially in Crimea, Trump thinks it’s better to have a working relationship with Moscow. Regardless of what happened in the 2016 election, Trump wants Putin to lean on the Iranians in Syria, currently engaged in mischief near Israel’s Golan Heights, not to mention fueling a proxy war in Yemen.

Trump has Israel and Saudi Arabia in mind when he seeks from Putin some assurances of containing a growing Iranian threat to the region. Obama spent the better part of seven years backing the Saudi proxy war against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Seven years of fighting left over 400,000 dead, 12 million more displaced to the Mideast and Europe. Saudi-U.S.-EU-backed seven-year-old proxy in Syria drove the U.K out of the European Union. Exit polls for the June 23, 2016 Brexit vote indicate that British voters wanted out of the EU because of immigration quotas imposed on the U.K. When Trump meets with Putin Monday, Democrats have an agenda for Trump: Confront Putin over Mueller’s indictments of 12 GRU agents. EU officials want Trump to deal with Iranian provocations in the Golan Heights, prompting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to order strikes on Syrian and Iranian troops.

Not one U.S. or EU official expects Trump to deal North Korea, where the dictator Kim Jong-un looks like he’s dragging his feet on de-nuclearization. Before Trump met with Kim June 12, Washington and Brussels were concerned about war on the Korean Peninsula. Since Trump’s meeting with Kim, tensions have been ratcheted down for the moment. “It is a fantasy to assume that Russia can in any way get Iran out of Syria,” said an unnamed Western diplomat. “Iran has expended billions of dollars and hundreds, thousands of lives to secure its position in Syria,” drawing attention to the real problem of Iran in Syria. Iran operates in Syria at the invitation of al-Assad. Russia has no interest in fighting Iran’s battles, including any vendetta the Mullah government has with Israel. Trump’s meeting with Putin walks a fine line, especially pushing him too hard on Russian meddling issue.

Unlike Democrats and the press, Trump holds a nuanced position on Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign. Trump doesn’t deny that Russian GRU operatives hacked the email servers of the DNC and Podesta. Trump has a problem with Democrats and the press leaping to the conclusion that his campaign colluded with the Kremlin. Putin’s well-known vendetta with Hillary prompted him to expose her shenanigans to help Trump get elected. Mueller’s July 13 indictments emphatically state that no American worked with GRU military intelligence to dig up dirt on Hillary. Trump must do what he can to build rapport with the Russian leader. With a stronger working relationship, Trump can enlist Putin’s help on a variety of world issues, including North Korea, Syria and China’s incursion in the South China Sea. Without Putin’s help, Trump has little leverage on the world stage.

About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

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trendingnewsb · 7 years ago

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Israels Ex-Prime Minister Ehud Barak Says Keep the Iran Nuclear Deal

TEL AVIVEhud BarakIsraels most decorated soldier, former army chief of staff, and former prime ministerwas in an introspective and relaxed mood one recent Friday.

Not surprising for a man, now 76 and sporting a late-age black beard, whose life began even before Israels creation and brought him to the states highest pinnacles of power. Also explaining the mood was the English-language memoir he has coming out this week in the U.S.titled My Country, My Life: Fighting for Israel, Searching for Peacea long and weighty effort, he said with relief, that interweaves his own personal and political journey with that of his nation.

A notoriously evasive interview subject, Baraks responses come out in torrents, like a university lecturer confident in both his own intellect and that of his audience. At various points during a long and expansive conversationabout Iran, Syria, Russia, the Palestinians, Benjamin Netanyahu, and morehe throws in references to Hume, Kant, Fukuyama and Jonathan Haidt, as well as the many Israeli and world leaders (Obama, Putin, Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin, to name a few) he has worked with going back decades.

Hes not obfuscating necessarily, but rather patiently explaining, trying to convince, trying to make you see things his way. If hesitation creeps into his voiceif he feigns uncertaintythen its likely for a greater purpose. I do my best to open peoples eyes and make people aware of where this government is taking us, he said, jibing with his recent reemergence on the public stage as a fierce critic of the current Netanyahu government.

There are few in Israeli politics with the experience and gravitas to make a stronger case. Yet he himself has been out of politics for five years now, his last position as Netanyahus defense minister, a role his left-wing (Labor Party) base likely still hasnt forgiven. Its precisely this fact, though, combined with the reality that hes one of only three still-living prime ministers, that arguably gives him the most insight into the many fraught issues facing Israel today.

Take the perceived weightiest of them all: Iran. Barak, as defense minister from 2009 to 2013, was deeply involved in the run-up to the signing of the Iran nuclear agreement. Indeed, he, more than Netanyahu, was known to be a hardliner on the issue, even going so far as to ready Israel for a preemptive military strike against Irans nuclear facilities. For a variety of reasons it didnt happen, he told me. There was actually strong opposition from within the security establishment and also from the [Israeli] president and the media. A lot of opposition.

The Iranians are bad guys and they remain bad guys, but they have kept the letter of the agreement quite systematically [and] all in all it delays the new starting point or countdown towards a nuclear capability.

Ehud Barak

However, once U.S. President Barack Obama signed the nuclear deal with Iran, in 2015, Baraks thinking changeda point obviously relevant for the current moment. I think this deal was bad, I said it in real time, and other approaches should have been taken. But once it was signed its no longer a philosophical question, its a practical question. Is it smarter to tear it apart or keep it in place? he posited. And here there are many points of view on both sides. Theres a lot of logic in maintaining it in place.

The Iranians, according to Barak, are bad guys and they remain bad guys, but after the deal was signed and began to be implemented they kept the letter of the agreement quite systematically [and] all in all it delays the new starting point or countdown towards a nuclear capability.

Obama was an intelligent president, Barak went on, he understood that he took a certain gamble for the first half of the term of the agreement. Its clear that the Iranians would do nothing because they want to harvest all the benefits. But about the second half, its only a gamble.

If Barak had his way post-deal, Israel and the U.S.including under Obamawould have come together behind closed doors to hedge against the risk: bringing all their intelligence assets to bear on monitoring Irans behavior, finding agreement on what exactly would constitute a nuclear breakout, as well as clear guidelines for putting the military option back on the table. I thought we could do it, he said, but Bibias he repeatedly called Netanyahu, using his nicknamechose to do something else with the big speech [to the U.S. Congress in 2015] that I thought was a mistake. But thats all about the past.

This wasnt the only time during the conversation that Barak diverged from his former boss on Iran strategy (and many issues besides). Even Netanyahus public reveal last week of over a hundred thousand documents from Irans nuclear archive, allegedly obtained via a daring Mossad operation, failed to sway Baraks opinion.

As Barak put it, it was a truly remarkable intelligence achievement… and there was lots of material [there], but nothing thats new. Nothing substantive about what they did and didnt do that wasnt already known to intelligence for years now. Not one new item. In this respect, [Netanyahu] didnt bring what he should have brought, i.e. the smoking gun.

The best is always to be extremely calculated and perceived as totally unpredictable. In the real world thats not easy to execute.

Ehud Barak

Contra Netanyahus emphasis on Tehrans perfidiousness, Barak stressed that everyone knew the whole time that Iran is lying, and that was one of the reasons for all the arrangements in the nuclear agreement. Theres no proof that [Iran] continued doing things that arent permitted, he stated flatly.

Netanyahus performance, though, may have served a different purpose: to sway public opinion in general, and support Donald Trumps inclination to pull out of the nuclear deal on March 12 in particular. Barak assessed that this was almost a foregone conclusion, especially with John Bolton and Mike Pompeo now advising the U.S. president. For all that, he didnt think that the U.S. pulling out would necessarily spell the end of the nuclear deal (a multinational agreement, it should be remembered, between Iran and five additional world powers) nor that Iran itself would pull out and race ahead towards a bomb.

[The Iranians] arent backgammon players, theyre chess players, he said, using a clich that coming from someone elses mouth, with less direct experience battling Iran and its proxies, wouldve seemed trite. They are clever and self-controlled enough not to provide this excuse, especially to this wildcard U.S. administration. Irans real fear, he observed, was a direct military clash with the U.S. that would spell the end of the Islamic Republic; they would, at least in the early going, likely avoid giving Trump this pretext.

In the longer term, however, the U.S. leaving the agreement may provide Tehran diplomatic cover if it was caught violating the terms of the deal. The Americans started it, American behavior basically legitimized our own deviation, Barak said, channeling his inner Iranian official.

Barak freely admitted that this was all speculation: an assessment, to be sure, based on his time at the highest levels of global politics, but also a dangerous game. There was no guarantee that Netanyahu and Trumps wishesto apply renewed pressure on Iran, in the hope of getting a better dealwould work out. Wouldnt the chances of miscalculation and war increase?

The best is always to be extremely calculated and perceived as totally unpredictable. In the real world thats not easy to execute, he said.

Ive known Putin from his first day in the Kremlin, hes an extremely practical person, effective, with two feet well on the ground.

Ehud Barak

As with most Israeli officials who came up through the military, Barak maintains a remarkable equanimity regarding the prospects of potential future conflicts. He recalls, albeit as a young child, Israels first war, for its independence in 1947-48, and the American assessments that the fledgling Jewish community in the Holy Land wouldnt survive. Put in this light, the looming confrontation, for instance, between Israel and Iran over Syria and possibly Lebanon too isnt inevitable and nobody needs it, certainly not Israel, he said, but more to the point, were the strongest country in the region so if were compelled or coerced into a war well hit back very strongly.

The fact that this arena has come to the fore in recent months, with Tehran and Jerusalem now publicly trading threats and occasional direct fire, isnt helpfulhe wouldve much preferred to keep all of it out of the public eye and run through clandestine channels. Surprisingly, he had relatively positive words for the Russian role in Syria.

Ive known Putin from his first day in the Kremlin, hes an extremely practical person, effective, with two feet well on the ground, Barak said. Russian interests in Syria, supporting their client Bashar al-Assad, were complicated, he allowed, but that didnt mean that they were wholly in line with those of Iran or Hezbollah. I met with Putin more than once during the critical stages of the Syrian civil war we exchanged views very openly. We have to take the Russians as a fact, and a fact thats not necessarily unfriendly to Israel, he added. [So] Russia is not just part of the problemit could be part of the solution They could be a stabilizer if we find ourselves on the verge of deterioration or escalation.

Closer to home, Barak wasnt too alarmed, either, by the recent bloodshed on the Gaza border, or the prospects of increased violence in the wider Palestinian Territories come mid-May when the 70th anniversary of Israels independence and what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, coincides with the move of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

We should never underestimate anything, but we also shouldnt be alarmed by everything. You need to walk between those two lines, Barak said, like a man who had gone countless rounds in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Were in a tough neighborhood, but we have the tools to handle these types of things. Indeed, in line with most Israelis, Barak was grateful to Trump for his very important and positive decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem on May 14.

In truth, though, the only real issue that alarmed him was the Palestinian question, and the lack of any tangible moves towards, if not peace, then a separation or painful divorce. Unlike Iran, Barak was adamant on this point: the only existential risk facing Israel was the prospect of a one-state reality. Well end up either as a non-Jewish or a non-democratic entity, or probably both, with a lot violence or even a civil war. Something that has nothing to do with the Zionist vision or project.

Barak was adamant on this point: the only existential risk facing Israel was the prospect of a one-state reality.

The dilemma that began after the 1967 war, with the Israeli conquest of the West Bank and, subsequently, the massive settlement enterprise, had in Baraks telling now morphed into a debate about what to do with the isolated settlements. This is the entire heart of the argument, he said. At the end everyone in Israel agrees that eighty percent of the settlers that live in the settlement blocs and the [east] Jerusalem neighborhoodswhose entire territory is 5 percent [of the West Bank]would leave approximately 94 percent of the territory for the Palestinians.

The Right wants everything, and at the end itll clash with the world who will demand that therell be nothing, he continued. Theres no logic, because strategically and truthfully we just need the settlement blocs. This is the technical argument. But anyone who wants one-state has to continue with the isolated settlements because thats what helps him to undermine [the prospect of a two-state solution].

And yet, hadnt Barak been the one that seared in the Israeli consciousness the notion that there was no partner on the Palestinian side, coming out of the failed Camp David peace summit in July 2000 when he was prime minister? This is a bit of an urban legend, he replied forcefully. What I actually said was we dont have a partner in Arafat this moment its not no partner cosmically, universally it was just an objective description of what I found.

For nearly two decades this one statement had been processed and simplified and distortedinto something that matches the feeling of frustration in Israeli society, he continued.

What really happened when I came to power? he said. I looked at it as coming to a two-family home, us and the Palestinians. And a fire is about to break out on both sides. The leaders want to put the fire out, but the other guy [Arafat] already has a medal for being the best firefighterthe Nobel Peace Prizebut you cant know if in reality hes not a pyromaniac. And you cant know! Unless you go to Camp David and try to make a very generous [offer].

For Barak now this was all in the past. He stressed repeatedly that regardless of the leadership on the Palestinian side, Israel had to take certain steps in order to keep the option of two states alive. Its about us, our future, our identity, and our security.

Given the stakes, how did he explain the fact that others in Israel, especially the current government, viewed things so diametrically different?

There are cynical people in politics. Theyre intelligent people[so] its hard to assess that they dont see what I see… [but] with political people you have no choice but to judge them not on what you think they understand but on their actions in practice.

In this regard, his criticism of Netanyahu is unsparing, summing up years of disappointment with a man whom he has known since their days together in the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit. Bibi is serious, hes not a lightweight. Hes a thoughtful person, but he developed a mindset that is extremely pessimistic, passive, anxious and self-victimizing. This is a good recipe for politics and a bad recipe for statesmanship.

Netanyahu, in Baraks telling, understood the risks outlined above, as well as the opportunities involved in the Palestinian issueespecially as a necessary precondition for a full, public alliance with the moderate Sunni Arab states in the region. Its on the table, and Bibi talks about it, he said. But somehow deep in his heart hes rejecting it, he doesnt want to move.

It wasnt a coincidence, Barak said, that nearly all senior Israeli security officials, similar to him, who enter politics come out on the left side of the political spectrum. I call it the reality principle, stupid! These people are dealing with life and death on a daily basis, protecting our people, so they make judgments on how to be most effective to protect the country to save lives. They dont think politically. And it ended up that their positions are on the center-left sideit means something about the reality, not about them.

For all that, though, the Israeli Right has been winning elections for most of the last 40 years (except for Barak and Yitzhak Rabins tenures in the 1990s). It seems that even with the Israeli security establishment firmly in favor of separating from the Palestinians, the Israeli public remains unconvinced. The power and political influence of the generals in Israeli society isnt what it once was, was it?

Barak agreed, and chalked it up to, essentially, Israel being a victim of its own success. After 1967, and certainly by the 1980s, there was no real existential security threat facing Israel. Wars became smaller and less conclusive, special forces operations less James Bond and more surgical. Couple this with a modernizing society and booming economy, and many other arenas were created, he said, from which people could distinguish themselves and reach high levels of public attention and recognitionhi-tech, academia, journalism, televisionmore than a general who does important things but you dont see him every day.

Barak, inevitably, wouldnt be drawn on whether he planned to re-enter politics. I hope not, he demurred, unconvincingly, but you can never say never in politics. Perhaps if there was an acute crisis he would feel compelled to come back, although he was at pains to stress that he hoped such a crisis wouldnt arise.

Despite Netanyahu and the Palestinian question, he was very optimistic about the Jewish States future, an optimism, he said, that was based on something concreteits up to us.

Sometimes the greatest risk is being unable to take one, he said. The entire history of Zionism was built on a well-calibrated judgement of reality and the readiness to take important steps to avoid a future calamity Im a big believer in the abilities and talents and the capacity to come to our senses in time. And to take the appropriate actions so that our worst predictions dont come true.

Barak had built his career, and life, on just such bold action, some would say for both good and illwhether as a commando, senior military officer, and statesman. As the interview came to a close, Baraks next guest was already waiting. Like Barak in his day, this individual was a recently retired army chief of staff who was now weighing entering politics, as the latest great white hope of the Israeli Left.

Are you two thinking of forming a party? this reporter asked, only half-in-jest. Barak deflected the question, saying only that his guest was a big fan of heavy motorcycles. Sure.

Perhaps Ehud Barak has one more ride left on his journey, and one last chapter to write.

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/israels-ex-prime-minister-ehud-barak-says-keep-the-iran-nuclear-deal

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