Us politics

If you're looking ahead to 2010, it's a safe bet that Iran is going to be an even bigger issue than it was this year.  The violence currently rocking the country is an echo of June's presidential election, and a reminder, too, of the continuing internal pressure that the Iranian regime faces.   The question now is whether that will be joined by external pressure of some form.  After provocation after procovation on Tehran's part, it's hard to envision the West keeping its "hand of friendship" outstretched much longer.  But it's also unlikely that  Barack Obama – his eyes on the domestic polls – will want to talk too tough after committing 30,000 more troops to the unpopular Afghan conflict.

President Obama will announce his new Afghan policy on Tuesday night at 8pm eastern time, the early hours of Wednesday morning UK time. Obama will announce a troop increase and the signs are that he will send 30,000 plus in reinforcements. This is welcome, the nearer Obama gets to giving General McChrystal the 40,000 troops he has asked for the better. But the process has done the White House little credit and shown Obama to be even less solicitous of the concerns of his allies than President Bush. Bob Ainsworth's said yesterday that a 'period of hiatus' in Washington had undercut public support for the war in this country. This is undoubtedly true.

As President Obama continues to consider his options on Afghanistan, The New York Times has a good primer on what the military could do with the various levels of reinforcements being considered. This is what the military believes it could do with an extra 40,000 troops: "Should President Obama decide to send 40,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan, the most ambitious plan under consideration at the White House, the military would have enormous flexibility to deploy as many as 15,000 troops to the Taliban center of gravity in the south, 5,000 to the critical eastern border with Pakistan and 10,000 as trainers for the Afghan security forces.

There's something futile about Gordon Brown's and, now, David Miliband's speeches on Afghanistan.  After all, the world is still waiting to hear what Obama's strategy is for the country.  Will he increase troop numbers – and by how much?  What does he actually want to achieve with them?  Until that's known, it's a little premature to talk about a "comprehensive political framework" for handing security responsibilities over to the Afghan army. Worse, though, the PM's statements may actually be damaging.  Sure, it's frustrating that the US President is leaving his allies hanging.

Now that the facts are becoming clearer, it seems that Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s horrific act was religiously motivated. His apparent screams of ‘Allahu Akbar’ confirm that. In addition, it has emerged that Hasan was investigated for apparently equating suicide bombers with soldiers. Allegedly, he wrote: ‘There was a grenade thrown amongs a group of American soldiers. One of the soldiers, feeling that it was to late for everyone to flee jumped on the grave with the intention of saving his comrades. Indeed he saved them. He inentionally took his life (suicide) for a noble cause i.e. saving the lives of his soldier. To say that this soldier committed suicide is inappropriate.

Today, two of my colleagues, former senior MoD official Nick Witney and US analyst Jeremy Shapiro, issued a hard-hitting report about transatlantic relationships. Their message is simple. Europe has the US president it wished for, but Barack Obama lacks the strong transatlantic partner he desired. With EU leaders heading to Washington for their transatlantic summit on 3 November, Shapiro and Witney caution European governments: an unsentimental President Obama has already lost patience with a Europe lacking coherence and purpose. In a post-American world, the United States knows it needs effective partners. And if Europe cannot step up, the US will look for other privileged partners to do business with. Unfortunately, many Europeans are in denial about how the world is changing.

At the headquarters of the Defense Intelligence Agency outside of Washington DC, there are no cardboard mockups of Iran’s nuclear sites that can be used for briefing the military on plans of attack. Instead, there is a very cool 3D map table that allows the viewer to fly into and through the many layers of the nuclear facilities. A movement of the hands can expand or contract the view from an image of an individual room to the perspective from an overhead satellite. On the basis of that briefing, an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites looks easy, right down to the dialing in of the depth at which a new line of bunker busting bombs would have to detonate to do the maximum damage. If only the reality of intelligence was so simple.

I have just returned from DC, where the talk of the town, or at least of the foreign policy community, is how long Richard Holbrooke has left in the Obama administration. A well-connected friend suggested The Bulldozer has, at most, two months left. Perhaps most telling has been Holbrooke's absence in the recent efforts to persuade Hamid Karzai to accept a second round of voting in the presidential election. The Economist hailed John Kerry's impromptu diplomacy, which secured Karzai's consent and gave Holbrooke the epithet "now-absent". Diplomats I have spoken to say President Karzai is currently refusing to see Holbrooke at all, possibly sensing a chance to divide and weaken the US players.

The strategic logic behind President Obama’s decision to alter US plans for a missile defence shield based in Eastern Europe was that this would persuade the Russians, who didn’t like the shield, to agree to the US’s push for tougher sanctions on Iran. But it appears that Moscow isn’t going to play ball.   The Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared after a meeting with Hillary Clinton yesterday that, “Threats, sanctions and threats of pressure in the current situation, we are convinced, would be counterproductive.” So, all that Obama’s concession has done is anger the Czechs and the Poles who weren’t told about the move until the last minute. Iran is an issue that hasn’t gone away.

New Majority points out another reason why Obama should have politely told the Nobel Peace prize committee that he would rather they didn’t award him the prize: “The Nobel Committee has created a pretty little problem for White House counsel Greg Craig this morning. The value of the gift is $1.4 million. Technically, it’s a “Foreign Official Gift,” so it has to be retained by the U.S. government. Donating the money to charity will be very difficult, because first the gift will have to pass through the president’s hands -and the law requires that he must spend $1.4 million of his own money to buy the $1.4 million from the U.S. government.

The discovery that Iran's regime has, yet again, deceived the international community and secretly built an additional nuclear facility has made world leaders re-focus on the issue. On Friday, the US, UK and France said the UN had to be given immediate access and urged tough new sanctions. Even Russia expressed concern. Today, the Iranian regime's  response came. According to Ali Akbar Salehi, who heads the Atomic Energy Organisation, Iran will keep its uranium enrichment level at up to five percent - much lower than bomb-grade. "We don't want to change the arrangement of five-percent enrichment merely to produce 150 to 300 kilos of 20-percent (enriched) fuel," ILNA news agency quoted the nuclear chief as saying.

The ‘Appeal to Conscience’ World Statesman of the Year ought to be treated with more respect, otherwise the award becomes a mockery. The news that President Obama rebuffed the PM’s requests for bilateral talks at the UN or G20 meetings capped a dreadful day for Gordon Brown. A White House spokesman told the BBC: “Any stories that suggest trouble in the bilateral relationship between the US and UK are totally absurd.” To imply that the ‘special relationship is on the rocks is exaggeration, but there’s no doubt that Obama, who held bilateral talks with the leaders of China, Russia and Japan, departed from the Bush administration’s Anglo-American axis.