Russia won't back 'crippling sanctions'

Herb Keinon – Jerusalem Post February 25, 2010


Israel and the US will hold a one-day, high-level strategic dialogue on Thursday expected to focus on sanctions against Iran, a day after Russia announced it opposes “paralyzing” sanctions aimed at the Islamic Republic’s energy sector.

A week after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu returned from Moscow, where he publicly called for “crippling sanctions” and “sanctions with teeth” against Iranian energy exports and imports, Oleg Rozhkov, the deputy head of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s security and disarmament department, said that Moscow would not back “crippling or paralyzing” sanctions that could lead to the “political or economic or financial isolation” of Iran.

According to Reuters, Rozhkov – when asked by a reporter what sanctions Russia might support – replied, “Those that are directed at resolving nonproliferation questions linked to Iran’s nuclear program.

“What relation to nonproliferation is there in forbidding banking activities with Iran?” he asked. “This is a financial blockade. And oil and gas. These sanctions are aimed only at paralyzing the country and paralyzing the regime.”

Despite these comments, the Israeli and US teams on Thursday are expected to concentrate on the issue of sanctions to halt Iran’s nuclear program. A possible military strike is not expected to be discussed, since Washington has made clear that while it might need to be discussed in the future, the military option is not now on the agenda.

There is currently no known discussion between Israel and the US, at any level, about military action, even though over the years both countries have said that it should not be taken off the table.

In Washington, meanwhile, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Iran’s continuing refusal to provide more information on its nuclear program had left the international community “little choice” but to impose new, tough sanctions on Teheran.

In congressional testimony on Wednesday, Clinton said Iran’s failure to accept the Obama administration’s offers of engagement and prove its nuclear intentions were peaceful had given the US and its partners new resolve in pressuring Teheran to comply with international demands through fresh penalties.

“We have pursued a dual-track approach to Iran that has exposed its refusal to live up to its responsibilities and helped us achieve a new unity with our international partners,” she told the Senate Appropriations Committee.

“Iran has left the international community little choice but to impose greater costs and pressure in the face of its provocative steps. We are now working actively with our partners to prepare and implement new measures to pressure Iran to change its course,” Clinton said, in comments that seemed at odds with Rozhkov’s statement in Moscow.

Netanyahu’s office had no comment on Rozhkov’s remarks, while one government official said Israel would likely seek clarification from the Kremlin.

The position articulated by Rozhkov runs contrary to the impression Netanyahu gave reporters last week in Moscow when, after meeting with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, he said the feeling toward sanctions in Moscow today was dramatically different than it was 10 months ago.

Clinton addressed the possibility that Congress might impose its own sanctions on Iran, besides those the US was seeking through the UN Security Council. Congressional sanctions might be tougher than any for which the United States could win international approval at the UN, but the US wants international backing for its tough stance against Iran and sees the UN penalties as a powerful symbol of world resolve against an Iranian bomb.

The comments from Moscow came as a bit of a surprise, as top officials both in Washington and Jerusalem have expressed optimism in recent weeks that significant nonmilitary action, such as “crippling” sanctions, could have a real impact on Teheran.

The Israeli delegation to Thursday’s strategic dialogue in Jerusalem will be led by Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, while the US team will be headed by Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg. This is the first meeting of the strategic dialogue framework, which was set up in 1999, since Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama came into office.

The meeting comes as both Jerusalem and Washington believe that Iran is making its international position more difficult by continuing to talk about enriching uranium to higher levels. While it is unclear exactly which way China – which holds a veto on the UN Security Council – will vote on sanctions, there is a growing sense that it would be unlikely to buck the will of most of the rest of the world – and the other permanent members of the Security Council – and scuttle sanctions. This assessment is largely based on previous Chinese behavior and Beijing’s general reticence to defy international consensus.

A high-level Israeli delegation, led by Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya’alon and Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, left for Beijing on Wednesday to lobby on behalf of sanctions.

In the run-up to the Security Council sanctions vote, expected sometime in March, the US is doing its utmost to distance itself from any hint that sanctions were intended for regime change in Teheran, and not only to stop the nuclear program. The fear is that this could chase both Russia and China away from supporting a fourth round of sanctions.

For instance, Rozhkov told reporters on Wednesday that “Russia isn’t working or participating in actions which should lead to overthrowing the existing regime. We are working with the US and others... only to solve those concerns we have regarding Iranian nuclear efforts.”

Also on Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested that a delay in delivering air-defense missiles to Iran was connected with concerns about regional tensions.

Russia signed a contract in 2007 to sell S-300 missiles to Iran, a move that would substantially boost the country’s defense capacities and make an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities more difficult.

Lavrov, when asked about the delivery, said Russia never takes “any actions leading to the destabilization of this or that region. All deliveries of Russian weapons abroad follow from the need to strictly respect this principle.”

It marks the first time Russia has publicly called into question the wisdom of honoring its contractual obligations to Iran. Various Russian defense officials had suggested in recent weeks, including the day before Netanyahu went to Moscow last week, that the commitment to supply the missiles would be fulfilled.

When pressed on the specific reason for the missile holdup, Lavrov broadened the question by referring to arms sales by any country to South America, the Caucasus and the Middle East.

“There are certain principles we need to be guided by when selling arms,” he said. “We cannot sell weapons if it will destabilize any of these regions.”

Netanyahu, asked after his meeting last week with President Dmitry Medvedev whether he had received assurances that Moscow would not supply the weapons systems, said, “I trust what I heard from the president of Russia. I trust him because I know that in this issue, Russia is guided by concerns about regional stability.” 

'Buy farmland and gold,' advises Dr Doom

The world’s most powerful investors have been advised to buy farmland, stock up on gold and prepare for a “dirty war” by Marc Faber, the notoriously bearish market pundit, who predicted the 1987 stock market crash.

The bleak warning of social and financial meltdown, delivered today in Tokyo at a gathering of 700 pension and sovereign wealth fund managers.

Dr Faber, who advised his audience to pull out of American stocks one week before the 1987 crash and was among a handful who predicted the more recent financial crisis, vies with the Nouriel Roubini, the economist, as a rival claimant for the nickname Dr Doom.

Speaking today, Dr Faber said that investors, who control billions of dollars of assets, should start considering the effects of more disruptive events than mere market volatility.

“The next war will be a dirty war,” he told fund managers: "What are you going to do when your mobile phone gets shut down or the internet stops working or the city water supplies get poisoned?”

His investment advice, which was the first keynote speech of CLSA’s annual investment forum in Tokyo, included a suggestion that fund managers buy houses in the countryside because it was more likely that violence, biological attack and other acts of a “dirty war” would happen in cities.

He also said that they should consider holding part of their wealth in the form of precious metals “because they can be carried”.

One London-based hedge fund manager described Mr Faber’s address as “excellent, chilling stuff: good at putting you off lunch, but not something I can tell clients asking me about quarterly returns at the end of March”.

Dr Faber did offer a few more traditional investment tips, although their theme fitted his general mode of pessimism.

In Asia, particularly, he said, stock pickers should play on future food and water shortages by buying into companies with exposure to agriculture and water treatment technologies.

One of Dr Faber’s darker scenarios involves growing military tension between China and the United States over access to limited oil resources.

Today the US has a considerable advantage over China because it has free access to oceans on both coasts, and has potential energy suppliers to the north and south in Canada and Mexico.

It also commands an 11-strong fleet of aircraft carriers that could, if necessary, secure supply routes in a conflict situation.

China and emerging Asia, meanwhile, face the uncertainty of supplies that must travel from the Middle East through winding sea lanes and the Malacca bottleneck.
American military presence in Central Asia, Dr Faber said, may add to the level of concern in Beijing.

“When I tell people to prepare themselves for a dirty war, they ask me: “America against whom?” I tell them that for sure they will find someone.”

At the heart of Dr Faber’s argument is a fundamentally gloomy view on the US economy and its capacity to service a growing mountain of debt.

His belief, fund managers were told, is that the US is going to go bankrupt.

Under President Obama, he said, the country’s annual fiscal deficit will not drop below $1 trillion and could rise beyond that figure.

Arch bears have predicted that US debt repayments could hit 35 per cent of tax revenues within ten years. 

Hurdles Hinder Counterterrorism Center

By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — The nation’s main counterterrorism center, created in response to the intelligence failures in the years before Sept. 11, is struggling because of flawed staffing and internal cultural clashes, according to a new study financed by Congress.

The result, the study concludes, is a lack of coordination and communication among the agencies that are supposed to take the lead in planning the fight against terrorism, including the C.I.A. and the State Department. The findings come just weeks after the National Counterterrorism Center was criticized for missing clear warning signs that a 23-year-old Nigerian man was said to be plotting to blow up a Detroit-bound commercial airliner on Dec. 25.

The counterterrorism center’s mission is to gather information from across the government, pull it all together and assess terrorist threats facing the United States, then develop a plan for the government to combat them. But the new report found that the center’s planning arm did not have enough authority to do its main job of coordinating the White House’s counterterrorism priorities.

The center’s planning operation is supposed to be staffed by representatives of various agencies, but not all of them send their best and brightest, the report said. It also cited examples in which the C.I.A. and the State Department did not even participate in some plans developed by the center that were later criticized for lacking important insights those agencies could offer.

As a result, the center’s planning arm “has been forced to develop national plans without the expertise of some of the most important players,” the report determined.

The counterterrorism center was part of the overhaul of the government after Sept. 11, including the creation of the director of national intelligence. Now, years after the attacks, the entire reorganization is coming under scrutiny, raising fundamental questions about who is in charge of the nation’s counterterrorism policy and its execution.

“The fluid nature of modern terrorism necessitates an agile and integrated response,” the report concluded. “Yet our national security system is organized along functional lines (diplomatic, military, intelligence, law enforcement, etc.) with weak and cumbersome integrating mechanisms across these functions.”

The 196-page report is the result of an eight-month study by the Project on National Security Reform, a nonpartisan research and policy organization in Washington. It was financed by Congress and draws on more than 60 interviews with current and former government and Congressional officials, including nearly a dozen officials at the counterterrorism center. The study is scheduled to be made public this week. The authors provided a copy to The New York Times.

The center noted in a statement on Monday that the study found the center had “made progress” in linking national policy with operations, adding that the report’s recommendations “provide an extremely thoughtful and useful critique of how counterterrorism actions are or are not fully synchronized across the U.S. government.”

The report found that the center’s planning arm struggled with “systemic impediments” like overlapping statutes, culture clashes with different agencies and tensions with two formidable players: the State Department’s counterterrorism office and the C.I.A.

Under President Obama, the report determined, counterterrorism issues have become more decentralized within the National Security Council’s different directorates, leaving the counterterrorism center’s planning arm to collect and catalog policies and operations going on at the C.I.A., the Pentagon and the Departments of State and Homeland Security, rather than help shape overall government strategy.

The planning arm has not yet figured out good ways to measure the effectiveness of the steps the government is taking against extremists. “The basic but fundamental question remains unanswered: How is the United States doing in its attempt to counter terrorism?” the report concluded. And the study is critical of Congress for failing to create committees that cut across national security issues. The planning arm “lacks a champion in either chamber of Congress,” the report found.

Since the counterterrorism center was created in 2004, its planning arm has been largely focused on a comprehensive review to assign counterterrorism roles and responsibilities to each federal agency, producing then revising a document called the National Implementation Plan. But pointedly, the counterterrorism center does not direct any specific operations.

Since the completion of that longer-term project, the study’s authors found that the center’s 100-person planning arm had become more involved in immediate counterterrorism issues: working on various classified projects involving Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and threats to the United States at home.

The study called on Mr. Obama to issue an executive order to define the nation’s counterterrorism architecture in order to address some of the problems and improve coordination. It also recommended giving the center’s director, currently Michael E. Leiter, a say in the choice of counterterrorism officials at other federal agencies, a step the 9/11 Commission had recommended but was not adopted.

The report was directed by Robert S. Kravinsky, a Pentagon planner on assignment to the group, and James R. Locher III, a former Pentagon official and senior Congressional aide who is the group’s president.

Until they joined the administration, Gen. James L. Jones, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, and Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, were members of the group’s board of advisers, which now includes Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to the first President Bush.