EFTA01919881.pdf

From: Office of Tene Rod-Larsen Sent Sat 6/28/2014 10:06:33 AM Subject: June 28 update 28 June 2014 Arti,l, I NYT While Iraqi Burns Editorial The Daily Beast NN by ISIS Won't Take Baghdad Jamie Dettmer Article 3. The Daily Beast Israel could be dragged into ISIS's war Eli Lake Nrticle 4 The New Republic The Middle East that France and Britain drew is finally unravelling and there's very little the U.S. can do to stop it John B. Judis The Council on Foreign Relations I ran Nuclear Deal in Sight? An interviewee with Suzanne Maloney The Economist Jean-Claude Juncker will be the next commission boss, even though nobody wants him EFTA_R1_00362507 EFTA01919881  \T - CNN I.S. job far from done in Afghanistan Stephen J. Hadley and Kristin M. Lord ankle I. NYT While Iraq Burns Editorial June 27, 2014 -- In the face of a violent offensive by Sunni militants, Iraq's future as a unified state is becoming less and less likely. As the Sunni militants take hold of a large swath of northwest Iraq, the Kurds, who operate a semiautonomous province in northeast Iraq, are edging toward independence, leaving Shiites controlling Baghdad and regions in the south. Yet Prime Minister Nun Kamal al-Maliki seems to have no interest in finding a new way forward from a catastrophe his policies ignited. In Baghdad this week, Secretary of State John Kerry pressed Mr. Maliki, who represents the Shiite majority, to form a national unity government that would share power more equitably among the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish groups. That is perhaps the only way to forestall complete division of the country and even greater violence as the insurgents drive toward Baghdad. EFTA_R1_00362508 EFTA01919882 Instead, Mr. Maliki has refused to make political concessions demanded by Sunnis and Kurds. His recalcitrance has raised concerns even among Shiites, some of whom are working with the Sunnis and Kurds to replace him. Over eight years, Mr. Maliki's arrests of Sunni opponents and his refusal to fully include them and the Kurds in Iraq's political life have fueled resentments that have allowed extremists to flourish. On Wednesday, an offshoot of Al Qaeda known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which has taken over the northwest region, attacked one of Iraq's largest air bases and was heading toward the Haditha Dam. The group is also fighting in Syria, with the aim of creating a caliphate straddling the two countries. Mr. Maliki promised Mr. Kerry that next week Parliament would begin choosing a new government, based on the April 30 election results that gave his State of Law party the most seats. American and other Western officials have already indicated that they would prefer to see Mr. Maliki step down as prime minister. Meanwhile, the Kurds, who have run their own enclave since 1991 and have made it Iraq's most prosperous region, now see an opportunity to establish an independent Kurdistan. The chaos of the militants' offensive gave the Kurds, backed by their pesh merga security forces, an opening on June 12 to seize the disputed city of Kirkuk, which has oil. It also prompted Masoud Barzani, the Kurdish leader, to revive the idea of independence, a move Mr. Kerry asked him to reconsider, with little apparent success. For now, Mr. Kerry and other Western officials are still stressing the importance of preserving a unified Iraq. But no one should EFTA_R1_00362509 EFTA01919883 have any illusions. After three years of war, Syria has basically split along sectarian lines, and some experts see a similar future for Iraq, where the Iraqi Army so far has been incapable of protecting the country and is considered unlikely to dislodge ISIS. Although President Obama has wisely ruled out a return of American ground troops, he has deployed 300 advisers (plus private security guards to protect them) to help the Iraqi Army and to develop targets for potential military strikes against the militants. Obama administration officials have said any strikes will depend on factors like support from Iraq's political leaders and intelligence that identifies precise ISIS targets. But military advice and support won't accomplish much if Mr. Maliki and other Iraqi leaders refuse to join together to save their state. Article 2. The Daily Beast Why ISIS Won't Take Baghdad Jamie Dettmer 28 June 2014 -- Beirut, Lebanon — Fighters loyal to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) have at times been as close as six miles to Baghdad, according to Iraqi and Kurdish commanders interviewed by The Daily Beast. But the Iraqi capital may well be "a city too far" for this ferocious al-Qaeda EFTA_R1_00362510 EFTA01919884 offshoot that is determined, as its name says, to establish a state of its own. While there's no solid consensus among intelligence analysts in the region about ISIS's precise strategy, several interviewed in recent days say the jihadists are likely to launch demoralizing commando raids and a suicide bombing blitz in Baghdad, probably timed to coincide with the arrival of the main contingent of US military advisers. (An advance guard arrived Tuesday.) The Americans presumably will make the defense of the capital a priority, but that may be precisely what ISIS hopes they will do, because it has other interests. "The priority, I think, for ISIS is to build their Islamic State straddling the Syria-Iraq border — that is their ultimate objective—and trying to capture Baghdad would be too big for them to accomplish; it could also sidetrack them," says a US intelligence official based in the Middle East who is closely monitoring ISIS. ISIS has not picked difficult battles. It has calculated carefully where it could move with the biggest impact and the least resistance. Mosul was not Stalingrad, holding out against a powerful siege; it was more like Copenhagen in World War II, folding without a fight. A concerted ISIS campaign to capture Baghdad would no doubt trigger greater military reaction from the Iranians -- key backers of the Shia-dominated government of beleaguered Prime Minister Noun al-Maliki — who already have sent members of their Revolutionary Guard and military supplies to bolster Iraqi security forces. The Iranians reportedly are flying surveillance drone flights on behalf of Maliki's government as well. EFTA_R1_00362511 EFTA01919885 Such attacks as do take place in and around Baghdad will likely aim to sow political discord and fan sectarian divisions, keeping Maliki's government wrong-footed and on the defensive. Iraqi troops and allied Shia militiamen are holding a line north of Baghdad and trying to establish what army commanders call the Baghdad Belt around the capital. But they are making little headway mounting an offensive, relying on instead on the spotty use of airpower to take the fight into ISIS territory. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and other ISIS leaders have made clear their ambition to establish a caliphate stretching from Aleppo in Syria right across northern and western Iraq. "ISIS is not only talking the talk about establishing an Islamic state, it is walking the walk," jihadist expert Aaron Zelin notes in a research paper on the group released Thursday by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a D.C.-based think tank. "Further, the reality of a proto-state and ISIS's willingness to try to govern—this khilafa project, as many within the group call it—is quite appealing to jihadists," says Zelin. It is helping to attract recruits and undermine the standing of al-Qaeda, whose leadership disowned ISIS earlier this year, partly over its state- building aspirations. On Baghdad, Zelin told The Daily Beast that ISIS has always had a presence in the capital. "I don't think they can take it, though," he said. "With 80 percent of the population being Shia, it would pretty much be impossible, though they may take Sunni neighborhoods." Mideast expert Jonathan Schanzer of the US-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies says ISIS lacks the manpower to hold Baghdad even if it could succeed in storming the capital. EFTA_R1_00362512 EFTA01919886 "Strategically for ISIS, invading Baghdad would therefore seem like a mistake," says Schanzer. But he adds the caveat, "We also don't know what kind of quiet support it enjoys from the disaffected Sunnis -- former Baathists are said to be among ISIS base of support -- who could help the group conquer and hold the seat of power in Iraq." The Mideast-based American intelligence official says al- Baghdadi and his inner core of advisers made up of experienced Iraqi jihadists and military veterans -- as well as some Chechens -- are unlikely to make the mistake of trying to mount a full-scale assault on the capital. He argues the group's leadership has shown a remarkable grasp of military strategy, astutely withdrawing from towns in rebel- controlled provinces in northern Syria when faced by a backlash from Syrian rebel groups and thus avoiding defeats, negotiating with local Sunni tribes in both Syria and Iraq and entering a pact with former Saddam Hussein-era military officers and Iraqi Baath party members to unleash an audacious Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Most ISIS military operations have focused on isolating the capital by securing important land routes around it or consolidating their hold on Sunni towns already captured, and by overrunning pockets of resistance in the majority-Sunni zones of western, south-western and northern Iraq bordering Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Another priority target has been refineries and oil wells. Already in eastern Syria ISIS has been smuggling and selling oil from wells captured in the uprising against Bashar al-Assad. It's a EFTA_R1_00362513 EFTA01919887 lucrative trade that has helped swell the jihadist group's coffers and transform it into the world's wealthiest terrorist organization. Taking a chunk of Iraq's oil production could make it much richer still. The insurgents are continuing an intense fight at Iraq's Baiji oil refinery, the country's largest, despite Iraqi government claims that its forces have asserted full control over the facility. Meanwhile, a jihadist bombing campaign in Baghdad appears to have started. Two car bombs hit Baghdad's suburbs during the week, the latest killing 19 and wounding more than 40. Infuriated Shia vowed revenge. Al-Baghdadi, who appears to be the master strategist, was trained by the late Abu Mousab al- Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant who also defied al-Qaeda's top leadership. Al-Baghdadi has been following his mentor's vicious playbook, including beheadings and suicide bombings as well as targeting non-Sunnis or Sunnis opposed to his brand of jihad. Al- Zarqawi believed in the importance of purging apostates — something his follower clearly endorses. The brutality appears to have the terrifying spin-off: inspiring and attracting recruits eager to join in a "successful" jihad, and especially one that has them fighting Shia, whom they consider heretics. ISIS says it killed at least 1,700 people after seizing the city of Mosul two weeks ago. Refugees from the city told The Daily Beast they had heard that 300 Shia Muslim and Christian inmates of Mosul prison had been executed. And on Friday Human Rights Watch said ISIS had appeared to have massacred Iraqi soldiers — possibly as many as 200 of them -- who had surrendered. As ISIS no doubt had hoped, its jihadist violence is already triggering a Shia backlash in Baghdad, with reports of dozens of abductions and killings of Sunnis in the capital by vengeful Shia EFTA_R1_00362514 EFTA01919888 groups. The vendettas are likely to keep Sunnis loyal to the insurgency, if for no other reason than their need for protection. Jamie Dettmer is an independent American-Britishforeign correspondent. Article 3. The Daily Beast Israel could be dragged into ISIS's war, Obama admin warns Eli Lake 27 June 2014 -- If ISIS threatens the survival of Jordan, the Obama administration believes, it would ask for help from two of the least popular countries in the Middle East: America and Israel. The terror group that's taken over major portions of Iraq and Syria won't be content with roiling those two countries, senior Obama administration officials told Senators in a classified briefing this week. The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) also has its eyes on Jordan; in fact, its jihadists are already Tweeting out photos and messages claiming a key southern town in Jordan already belongs to them. EFTA_R1_00362515 EFTA01919889 An ISIS attack on Jordan could make an already complex conflict nightmarishly tangled, the officials added in their briefing. If the Jordanians are seriously threatened by ISIS, they would almost certainly try to enlist Israel and the United States into the war now engulfing the Middle East. "The concern was that Jordan could not repel a full assault from ISIS on its own at this point," said one senator, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Another Senate staff member said the U.S. officials who briefed the members responded to the question of what Jordan's leaders would do if they faced a military onslaught from ISIS by saying: "They will ask Israel and the United States for as much help as they can get." If ISIS were to draw Israel into the regional conflict it would make the region's strange politics even stranger. In Iraq and Syria, Israel's arch nemesis, Iran, is fighting ISIS. Israel, on the other hand, has used its air force from time to time to bomb Hezbollah positions in Syria and Lebanon, the Lebanese militia aligned with Iran. If Israel were to fight against ISIS in Jordan, it would become a de facto ally of Iran, a regime dedicated to its destruction. But Jordan is also an important ally for Israel. It is one of two countries (along with Egypt) to have a peace treaty with the Jewish state. Jordanian security forces help patrol the east bank of the Jordan River that borders Israel and both countries share intelligence about terrorist groups in the region. For now the one thing Iran and Israel do agree on is that U.S. intervention in Iraq is risky. Khamenei has told Obama to just stay out. Netanyahu was more subtle, warning that Obama EFTA_R1_00362516 EFTA01919890 should not promise Iran anything in the nuclear negotiations that might entice its cooperation in Iraq. His advice was for Obama to weaken both sides. But behind the scenes, Israeli diplomats have told their American counterparts that Israel would be prepared to take military action to save the Hashemite Kingdom. Thomas Sanderson, the co-director for transnational threats at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Israel and the United States view the survival of the Jordanian monarchy as a paramount national security objective. "I think Israel and the United States would identify a substantial threat to Jordan as a threat to themselves and would offer all appropriate assets to the Jordanians," he said. Sanderson, who is a former contractor for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said those assets would include air power and intelligence resources, but he stressed that whatever Israel and the United States offered Jordan would be tailored to the kind of threat ISIS posed. "It's impossible to rule out boots on the ground from Israel or the United States, but that is the least likely scenario. Amman would have to be under siege for that to happen," he said. While the U.S. intelligence community estimates that ISIS only has 3,000 to 5,000 fighters who are full members of the organization, the group is nonetheless a potent force. In its military campaigns in Iraq and Syria, ISIS has seized millions of dollars worth of cash and advanced military equipment from bases abandoned by the Iraqi and Syrian armies. EFTA_R1_00362517 EFTA01919891 That said, Jordan's special operations forces are considered by military experts to be professional and competent. The tiny country that borders Syria, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iraq has survived terrorism, insurrection and regional war since it gained independence in 1946. A spokeswoman for the Jordanian embassy in Washington, Dana Daoud, said the country's military and security forces were fully capable of meeting the ISIS threat. "We are in full control of our borders and our Jordanian Armed Forces are being very vigilant," she said. "We have taken all the precautionary measures. So far, we have not detected any abnormal movement. however, if anything threatens our security or gets near our borders it will face the full strength of our Jordanian Armed Forces." Earlier this week, Jordan closed a major border crossing with Iraq. Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat who serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and is a co-chair of the Congressional Friends of Jordan Caucus, said in an interview that the threat from ISIS could draw the United States into the conflict. But he also said he had more confidence in Jordan's military than he did in Iraq's. "I don't think there is any sense that the rank and file Jordanian forces will melt away the way the Iraqis did," he said. "It's a different context in Jordan. If the need arises, they will provide more than a match for ISIS." In the last two decades Jordan has made a strategic decision to ally closely with America. Today the country is one of America's closest partners in counter-terrorism. After U.S. EFTA_R1_00362518 EFTA01919892 forces lost access to Iraqi military bases in 2011, Jordan emerged as the most important base for the CIA in the region. The CIA, for example, trains Syrian rebels from positions inside Jordan. On Thursday, the White House asked Congress to authorize an additional $500 million for military training and equipment for those opposition forces. At times, the close partnership with Jordan has resulted in tragedy. A triple agent provided to the CIA by Jordanian intelligence ended up detonating himself and seven other CIA operatives at one of the agency's outpost in Khost, Afghanistan in 2009. In the last year, the U.S. military has also positioned batteries of Patriot missiles and a fleet of F-16s inside Jordan along with a contingency of U.S. soldiers known as Centcom-Forward Jordan. That group is led Brig. General Dennis McKean, one of whose missions is to help plan for Jordan's defense in the midst of the chaos that has enflamed the region. "Jordan is a very close partner to the United States, and we have shared their concerns about violence spilling across the border for some time," said Commander Bill Speaks, a spokesman for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. "We are committed to supporting Jordan's security and continually assess the situation and how best to support our friends in the region." One of those threats today is coming from the southern Jordanian city of Ma'an. Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a Shillman- Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum who specializes in jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq, said, "Jordan is a part of the Sham, the Levant states that also include Lebanon, that ISIS EFTA_R1_00362519 EFTA01919893 aims to control as part of its near-term ambitions. But Jordan is a more viable target for them than Lebanon at the moment and the signs of local support, like in Ma'an, will embolden them." Even before the ISIS offensive in Iraq, supporters of the group had tweeted maps showing the city of Ma'an in southern Jordan, as part of a regional Caliphate. Last week, a photo from Ma'an showed ISIS supporters holding a banner declaring the city "the Fallujah of Jordan," comparing it to the city in western Iraq that fell to ISIS in January. With the threat to Jordan rising, Secretary of State John Kerry met Thursday with Jordan's Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh in Paris in a group that also included Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal and Emirati Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed. "The reason that he pulled them together is because, one, the threat of [ISIS] is not just to Iraq. It's to the region," said a senior administration official. But Kerry and the Arab foreign ministers didn't discuss any specifics of how to work together to fight against ISIS, the official added. They talked generally about the situation on the ground, the formation of the new Iraqi government, and their shared frustration with Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, but not about direct security cooperation. "As a sort of front-line state in the fight against [ISIS], Jordan is certainly one of the countries that we are directly referencing when we talk about the potential of a threat," the official said. "That said, the current focus of [ISIS] activity is inside Iraq, is inside Syria, and to the extent that [ISIS] has sort of designs on other places, that was not directly discussed today." EFTA_R1_00362520 EFTA01919894 The threat to Jordan is on the minds of many lawmakers though in Washington. Schiff said that if the Kingdom of Jordan were in danger of falling, "We would be prepared to provide a whole different level of material support than anything we are talking about in Iraq." He added, "I still don't think there are many foreseeable circumstances for American boots on the ground, nor do I think the Jordanians would ask for them. But the willingness to provide greater material support, greater intelligence support, and the willingness to stand behind the Jordanian government is an order of magnitude greater than what we have done for Iraq." Perhaps that's one of the reasons why the senators who emerged from this week's briefing on ISIS were so grim. "We have to be concerned no longer simply about what's happening in Iraq, but the risk it poses to Jordan and other countries in the region as well," he said. "We need to work closely with our allies in the region, particularly Jordan, to protect them from the growing risk that this poses." Eli Lake is the senior national-security correspondentfor The Daily Beast. He has lived in Cairo and traveled to war zones in Sudan, Iraq, and Gaza. He is one of thefew journalists to report from all three members of President Bush's axis of evil: Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. — with additional reporting by Josh Rogin and Jacob Siegel EFTA_R1_00362521 EFTA01919895 The New Republic The Middle East that France and Britain drew is finally unravelling and there's very little the U.S. can do to stop it John B. Judis June 26, 2014 -- The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) publishes a weekly webzine, The Islamic State Report. The latest issue is headlined "Smashing the Borders of the Tawaghit." ("Tawaghit" are non-Muslim creations.) ISIS, citing the Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916 between the British and French, boasts that it is destroying the "partitioning of Muslim lands by crusader powers." That may seem like a quixotic task for a relatively small band of irregulars, but in trying to redraw the map of Iraq and Syria, ISIS has hit upon a weak link in the chain holding the nations of the Middle East together. It is easy to blame what is going on in Iraq or Syria on dictators and terrorists, but these various bad actors are bit players in a drama that goes back at least to World War I. What is happening is that the arrangements that the British and French created during and after World War I—which established the very existence of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan, and later contributed to the creation of Israel—are unraveling. Some of EFTA_R1_00362522 EFTA01919896 these states will survive in their present form, but others will not. The United States may, perhaps, be able to slow or moderate the process, but it won't be able to stop it. If you look at a map of the Middle East in 1917, you won't find Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, or Palestine. Since the sixteenth century, that area was part of the Ottoman Empire and was divided into districts that didn't match past or future states. The British and French created the future states—not in order to ease their inhabitants' transition to self-rule, as they were supposed to do under the mandate of the League of Nations, but in order to maintain their own rule over lands they believed had either great economic or strategic significance. In 1916, as The Islamic State Report indicates, the French and British agreed to divide up the Ottoman Middle East in the event that they defeated Germany and their Ottoman ally. The French claimed the lands from the Lebanese border to Mosul; the British got part of Palestine and what would be Jordan and Southern Iran from Baghdad to Basra. After the war, the two countries modified these plans under the aegis of the League of Nations. At San Remo in 1920, the British got the territory that in 1921 they divided into Palestine and Transjordan and all of what became Iraq. (France gave up northern Iraq in exchange for 25 percent of oil revenues.) The French got greater Syria, which they divided into a coastal state, Lebanon, and four states to the east that would later become Syria. EFTA_R1_00362523 EFTA01919897 These lands had always contained a mix of religions and ethnicities, but in setting out borders and establishing their rule, the British and French deepened sectarian and ethnic divisions. The new state of Iraq included the Kurds in the North (who were Sunni Muslims, but not Arabs), who had been promised partial autonomy earlier by the French; Sunnis in the center and west, whose leaders the British and the British-appointed king turned into the country's comprador ruling class; and the Shiites in the South, who were aligned with Iran, and who had been at odds with the Sunnis for centuries. After the British took power, a revolt broke out that the British brutally suppressed, but resentment toward the British and toward the central government in Baghdad persisted. In the new state of Transjordan (which later became Jordan), the British installed the son of a Saudi ruler to preside over the Bedouin population; and in Palestine, it promised the Jews a homeland and their own fledgling state within a state under the Balfour Declaration while promising only civil and religious rights to the Palestinian Arabs who made up the overwhelming majority of inhabitants. EFTA_R1_00362524 EFTA01919898 In the new state of Lebanon, the French elevated the Christian Maronites into the country's ruling elite, and created borders that gave them a slight majority over the Shia and Sunni Muslims. In the land that became Syria, the French initially separated the Alawites (from whom the Assad family would descend) and the Druze into their own states and empowered the urban Sunni Muslims in Damascus and Aleppo. During World War II, Syria was finally united in the state that exists today. From the beginning, these newly created states were engulfed by riots, revolts, and even civil war. Most of the early revolts were directed against the colonial authorities, but after World War II, when these states won their independence, the different religious denominations, ethnicities and nationalities fought each other for supremacy—the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites in Iraq, the Jews and Arabs in Palestine (and later Israelis and Palestinians), the Maronites and Muslims in Lebanon, and the Alawites and Sunnis in Syria. The resulting strife was not a product of the Arab character or of Islam. As University of Oklahoma political scientist Joshua Landis has noted, the turmoil in these lands was very similar to that which took place, and is still taking place, in the various states constructed and deconstructed in Central and Eastern Europe in the wake of the breakup of the Austro- Hungarian and Russian empires and Germany's defeat after World War I. In Lebanon, the turmoil has been almost continuous. Lebanon still lacks a stable governing authority. In Iraq and Syria, inter- sectarian and inter-ethnic conflict were temporarily stilled by dictatorships that severely repressed any hint of revolt. Israel used its military to contain the conflict with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and in Gaza. But in Iraq and Syria, the lid EFTA_R1_00362525 EFTA01919899 of repression came off, as a result of the American invasion in 2003 that ousted Saddam Hussein and as a result of the Arab Spring spreading to Syria. Theoretically, the lid could be reimposed in either country by a brutal dictatorship, but it looks increasingly unlikely that either Iraq's Noun al-Maliki or Syria's Bashar al Assad will be able to impose order on their deeply divided states. What's most likely is that Iraq and Syria, like the former Yugoslavia, will splinter into separate states. Iraq's Kurds are likely to be the first to go. The danger for the United States does not lie in the breakup of these states, but in the empowerment of terrorist groups like ISIS that could threaten the region's oil output and use their base in lawless areas to spread disorder and terror elsewhere, including the West. In the long run, the United States has to worry about instability in a region that is so important to the world economy and that will eventually have more than one nuclear power. In the past, the United States has been of two minds in dealing with disorder in the Middle East. The United States generally backed kings and dictators as long as they were friendly to the United States. But under George W. Bush, the United States sought to create a democratic revolution in the region by ousting Saddam. That proved to be futile and dangerous, but the Obama administration appeared to endorse those objectives in 2011 in the wake of the Arab Spring revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. At present, the administration's strategy seems ad hoc—enthusiastically embracing Egypt's repressive government, while calling for Bashar al Assad's removal. What the history of the region suggests is that—to put it in EFTA_R1_00362526 EFTA01919900 somewhat vague terms—things are going to have to sort themselves out. The people of this region will have to learn how to govern themselves through experience, as the people of other nations, including the United States, have had to do. Outside of Israel, where the United States can exert pressure to end the occupation, but is often reluctant to do so, American influence is very limited. There will be more dictators, but also fledgling democracies. And American objectives will probably have to be limited to preventing terrorist attacks on the West, the interruption of oil supplies, and the subversion by groups like ISIS of the more stable regimes in the region. Its principal tools are diplomacy (that must include Iran), sanctions, and as a very last resort, narrowly targeted armed intervention. ISIS won't get its Caliphate, but the United States won't get its United States of Arabia either. John B. Judis is an American journalist, who is a senior editor at The New Republic and a contributing editor to The American Prospect. Article 5 The Council on Foreign Relations Iran Nuclear Deal in Sight? An interviewee with Suzanne Maloney EFTA_R1_00362527 EFTA01919901 June 26, 2014 -- The United States and its negotiating partners still must overcome substantial differences with Iran in talks over its controversial nuclear program, but a comprehensive agreement with Tehran before a July 20 deadline is likely, says Iran expert Suzanne Maloney. The major issue looming over the deliberations is "breakout timelines," she explains. "This all gets into the question of how quickly Iran might be able to race toward nuclear weapons capability if it chose to do so—either overtly by breaking an agreement, or covertly while the world continued to believe that Iran had somehow been constrained" Meanwhile, she worries that some Iranian hard-liners may view the sectarian crisis unfolding in Iraq as a negotiating chip in the nuclear talks. The negotiations that have been going for several months between the so-called P5+1 nations [the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany] and Iran over its nuclear program are now reaching a sort of denouement. They will resume again on July 2, and they're supposed to end by July 20, although they can be extended another six months. Do you think they will reach a deal before the deadline? We are really at a crunch point, and my own estimate is that we will come to a comprehensive agreement with Tehran on its nuclear program prior to the July 20 deadline. It remains to be seen how the negotiators are going to work through the substantial differences that remain. And it really does all come down to the issue that has bedeviled this negotiation: the question of enrichment within Iran and how much is considered acceptable from the perspective of the international community, and concerns about Iran's ability to push toward a nuclear EFTA_R1_00362528 EFTA01919902 weapon. In other words, the issue is how many nuclear centrifuges Iran can keep? There are a number of sticking points at this stage, but the issue of centrifuges is where the two sides appear to be very much dug in. Iran has, theoretically, nineteen thousand centrifuges? Yes, although less than half of those are actually operational. But the issue is breakout timelines and how many centrifuges can remain operational, at what level, what type of centrifuge, and to what extent Iran can continue to manufacture and do research on centrifuge capabilities. This all gets into the question of how quickly Iran might be able to race toward nuclear weapons capability if it chose to do so—either overtly by breaking an agreement, or covertly while the world continued to believe that Iran had somehow been constrained. This is the ultimate question that American negotiators and their partners in the P5+1 are attempting to deal with. In short, [they want] to create a system through which the world can have some degree of confidence of what Iran is doing with respect to its nuclear program and detect any attempt to rush toward a nuclear weapon. And you are confident that they will make a deal by July 20? I am confident that a deal will be struck in part because the Iranians, in particular, have invested so much in this process to date. They pushed forward with the negotiations in the very days after the election of President Hassan Rouhani, by appointing a EFTA_R1_00362529 EFTA01919903 team that was empowered to make major decisions on what had always been a very sensitive issue, and then by agreeing to this interim accord that brought the Iranians very little in terms of sanctions relief and really did incorporate some significant concessions with respect to the nuclear program. To walk away from this process now would bring the Iranians nothing but political trouble at home and would not fundamentally help them in the one area that has provoked their interest in negotiations, which is the health of their economy. Obviously, the Obama administration and its partners in the P5+1 are also very invested in getting to a diplomatic resolution of this issue. Certainly no one in Washington is eager to see the prospect of another military conflict in the Middle East, but I think it's the Iranians who are hungrier at this point simply because the economy needs the sanctions relief. Now there have been concessions made by Iran apparently over this Arak water reactor and a few other areas? Yes, they appear to have found a formula for dealing with the heavy water plant at Arak as well as the Fordow underground facility. Those will probably be compromises that are not considered ideal from the perspective of those that worry about Iran's proliferation tendencies, but they are certainly far preferable to leaving those facilities wholly unchecked or in their current state. But the real area in which there continues to be some significant distance is centrifuge numbers and the size and scope of the program. Talk about the politics here. Would an agreement on the nuclear issue open the way to a possible normalization of relations between the United States and Iran? EFTA_R1_00362530 EFTA01919904 I don't think we are anywhere near normalization of relations between the United States and Iran. This is in part because neither side has a compelling political interest in altering the context of their relationship. A nuclear agreement would be a very important arms control agreement, but it wouldn't change the competing interests between the two countries and the conflict between the ideology of the Islamic Republic and that of Washington and the broader Western world. What we are seeing with respect to the nuclear agreement is extremely important and would be a major step forward. It would inevitably open up channels for additional dialogue on other issues, but it's quite clear from the statements of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, and other senior leaders within Iran that the political climate there is not one in which they envision a warming of relations between the two countries—at least not at this time. Iran is a country that is constantly in flux. If we are able to sustain an agreement on the nuclear issue, anything is possible in its aftermath. But I don't think it's inevitable, and I don't think at this stage that the Iranians are looking to change the tenor of the relationship. At the time the [Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria] started its incursion into Iraq, Secretary of State John Kerry was saying he'd be willing to test the diplomatic waters with Iran. And there were some discussions with the Iranians outside the nuclear talks, briefly, but nothing really came of that, right? For the most part, the Iranian security establishment has insisted they are not interested in that kind of dialogue. That said, it's inevitable that as U.S. involvement in Iraq's crisis deepens, and as Iran is involved in a very substantial way in trying to buttress EFTA_R1_00362531 EFTA01919905 the [Nouri al-] Maliki government's capability to fend off the attackers, that there will be some kind of channel open between Tehran and Washington, at the very minimum to deal with the efforts that are taking place in parallel. The interests of Iran and Washington are not identical in Iraq, but there is a considerable degree of overlap, both in their disinterest in seeing any further ground gained by ISIS or other takfiri terrorists, but also their interest in seeing some kind of stable outcome and territorial integrity remaining within the state of Iraq. We'll just have to see how that plays out, I guess. The interesting part for me is the timing on all of this. It really does come at a difficult moment with respect to the nuclear issue. I worry that some Iranian hard-liners may see the situation in Iraq as potentially additional leverage for their position on the nuclear issue, despite the fact that there will be no explicit or even implicit quid pro quo between the two issues. If I were sitting in Tehran, I would be more hopeful about sanctions erosion and the ability for Iran to rehabilitate itself even outside a nuclear agreement, given what's happening on the ground in Iraq. I don't yet see that playing out yet within the nuclear dialogue. And, of course, with this being an election year for the U.S. Congress, there will be a lot of rhetoric coming up this fall if there is no agreement reached in July. In speaking with people in the [Obama] administration, I sense a certain fatalism that they will be damned if they do get an agreement, and damned if they don't. There is also a sense of real conviction that what the administration is trying to do is the EFTA_R1_00362532 EFTA01919906 best possible outcome for a very long-standing and intractable problem. So there is a willingness and a determination to move forward, irrespective of what kind of trouble-making or backlash we might be seeing from Congress. There is also conviction on the part of U.S. officials that the efforts to negotiate a resolution to the nuclear crisis with Iran is consistent with the preferences of the American people, who are deeply disinclined at this point to engage militarily any further in the Middle East. Suzanne Maloney, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Brookings Institution. ick 6 The Economist Jean-Claude Juncker will be the next commission boss, even though nobody wants him Jun 28th 2014 -- IN THE caricature of the British press, Jean- Claude Juncker is a dangerous, drunk, anti-British, European arch-federalist, whose father was conscripted into the Wehrmacht. As European Union leaders prepare to choose Mr Juncker as the next president of the European Commission, blocking Mr Juncker has become a vital national interest for Britain's David Cameron. The entry of such a man to the Berlaymont, Mr Cameron warns, could hasten Britain's exit from the EU. EFTA_R1_00362533 EFTA01919907 In the flesh, however, Mr Juncker is rather hard to dislike. At a time when politicians are bland, Luxembourg's former prime minister is a dinosaur who loves to drink, smoke, gossip and joke. He can be disarmingly frank, such as when admitting he had to lie to save the euro. It is the nature of the commission to pursue integration. And Mr Juncker's run-ins with Tony Blair should be kept in perspective: his bad relations with Nicolas Sarkozy scarcely make him anti-French. Mr Juncker's faults are of a different, less sensational variety. First, for all his experience, the 59-year-old is past his prime and offers little new to regain voters' trust after the rise of anti-EU parties in May's elections. He lacks the administrative skill to reform an unwieldy bureaucracy. Yet it would not be the first time that the EU has opted for unthreatening mediocrity: two previous Luxembourgers, Gaston Thom and Jacques Santer, spring to mind. The second, deeper problem is that Mr Juncker has been chosen by an indirect system known as Spitzenkandidaten, or "lead candidates", which sets a bad precedent. Instead of being picked by a consensus of European leaders, the commission president has emerged via a promise from the main pan-European political parties that the candidate from the largest group would run the commission. Mr Juncker was the choice of the centre-right European People's Party (EPP), which came top in May. The change shifts power from elected governments to the parliament, and endangers the commission's many functions requiring impartiality, including competition policy. The son of a steelworker, Mr Juncker entered Luxembourg politics soon after graduating in law from the University of EFTA_R1_00362534 EFTA01919908 Strasbourg. On the "social" wing of the Christian Democrats, he was elected to the chamber of deputies in 1984, immediately became labour minister and then finance minister in 1989. He became prime minister in 1995, succeeding Mr Santer. Mr Juncker will be the third commission president from Luxembourg, a grand duchy of just half a million souls that enjoys the EU's highest living standards, thanks to the bounty of financial services. Such prominence is in part due to the fact that, squeezed between France and Germany, Luxembourg acts as a bridge between the two. Mr Juncker's life has been bound up with the euro. He negotiated the Maastricht treaty, served 18 years as prime minister and was president of the euro group of finance ministers. (His was a supporting role: phone records show that during the euro crisis the American treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, spoke to him just twice, compared with 58 calls to the European Central Bank president and 36 to the German finance minister.) In January 2013 his colleagues had had enough of his rambling late-night meetings lubricated with cognac and replaced him with a Dutchman, Jeroen Dijsselbloem. In Luxembourg a spy scandal came to a head in July 2013, forcing Mr Juncker to resign. His Christian Democrats were still the biggest party after October's election, but his coalition partners switched sides to back the Liberals' Xavier Bettel. Mr Juncker thus unexpectedly became available as a Spitzenkandidat just as Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, grudgingly accepted the idea. She supported him as the EPP nominee mainly because, as a recognisable name and a fluent German-speaker, he could cross swords with Martin Schulz, the German president of the European Parliament who was lead EFTA_R1_00362535 EFTA01919909 candidate for the centre-left. But when the EPP won, Mrs Merkel found that she could not turn her back on Mr Juncker without being accused of betraying the promise of more democracy. Suicide in Flanders field The Spitzenkandidaten system has now acquired a force that nobody except for Mr Cameron dares challenge. At a summit on June 26th-27th, starting with a dinner in the town of Ypres, scene of carnage in the first world war, he will stage a last desperate charge against Mr Juncker. He will be almost alone. Cowardice, the prime minister will shout; suicide, the rest will respond. Mr Cameron may well be fighting the right battle, but with the wrong tactics. He responded late to the threat of Spitzenkandidaten; he misread the political constraints on Mrs Merkel (again paying a price for pulling his Conservatives out of the EPP); and he allowed a question of principle to become a personal attack. Mr Juncker will become an accidental president because he is most people's second choice. He himself hoped to be president of the European Council, representing leaders, where he could have been a good backroom dealmaker. For Mrs Merkel he is better than Mr Schulz. For Mr Schulz, backing Mr Juncker is the price for increasing the power of the pa