The IMF’s assessments of Iran’s economy have arrived. They offer an interesting snapshot of the Iranian economy and a glimpse into the effectiveness of international and U.S. sanctions. Basically, the report boils down to this:

1. “UN and U.S. sanctions against certain Iranian institutions have created difficulties for trade financing and payments, discouraged foreign investment, and adversely affected the profitability of the targeted financial institutions.”

2. The overall economic situation is not bad, however, and could vastly improve through a number of economic reforms.

3. Its current strength is related to high oil prices and a significant reduction of the price of crude would adversely affect Iran’s internal situation.

4. Several structural problems remain, which prevent the system from performing better–chiefly high inflation.

So, according to the IMF, if

prices for Iranian crude remain at $85-$90 per barrel, reforms advance unevenly, double-digit inflation persists, and oil production stagnates . . . Iran’s growth potential would dwindle, a budget deficit most likely requiring CBI financing would emerge, and the economy’s vulnerability to a possible fall in oil prices would increase.

There is a lesson to be learned in this assessment: short of finding the magic wand necessary to reduce oil prices below $85 a barrel, the West can only increase pressure on Iran by smart sanctions that will make the other problems more acute. Otherwise, we can only rely on Iran’s governmental incompetence in managing its own economy–not exactly a strong strategy, despite Ahmadinejad’s record to date.

Writing in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal Europe, Ron Asmus made a number of very sensible suggestions for NATO on how to calibrate its response to Russia in the wake of the crisis in the Caucasus. Clearly, NATO is neither the EU nor the UN, so it cannot start ordering its member states to impose visa restrictions, or freeze foreign assets, or the like. But it could have adopted a number of measures that would have signalled to Russia–in the words of NATO Secretary General Jaap De Hoop Scheffer–that the Georgia issue is not “business as usual.”

Asmus identifies two strategic imperatives:

The Alliance must take steps to reassure those members fearing Russian pressure that NATO’s mutual-defense commitments are credible and real. And ministers must consider speeding up enlargement plans to lock in stability in the Balkans and bring in Ukraine and the southern Caucasus.

Clearly, as he goes on to say, these steps must include strong statements and go beyond the rhetoric straight into the realm of practical and meaningful action:

The Alliance should . . . reassure current members who feel threatened by Russia’s move and, above all, Moscow’s rationale for action. Since the Alliance began enlarging a decade ago, it has not conducted any defense planning against a possible Russian military threat to new members in Central and Eastern Europe or the Baltic states. We have unilaterally refrained from such steps partly as a confidence-building step toward Russia. New members have complained bitterly about this. It is why the Alliance is seen by many in the region as hollow. It is time to take this step as a prudent part of Alliance defense planning.

Asmus goes further and suggests that NATO should move “toward fast-track enlargement” changing the benchmarks for membership in order to accommodate countries in the Caucasus like Georgia and Azerbaijan:

We need to embrace them quickly in spite of their imperfections. That means granting them so-called Membership Action Plans and moving toward fast-track enlargement. We should not give up our goal of pushing for democratic reform in these countries. But let’s first help make them safe.

These are all eminently sound and wise suggestions. But little of this wise advice made it into the final NATO statement and shopping list of actions the Alliance will now undertake as a response to Russia. As the Journal’s editors point out today, the final statement is what Russia calls it:

‘”Empty words.” That’s how Moscow glibly dismissed NATO’s criticism yesterday of Russia’s continued occupation of Georgia. The Russians may be bullies, but like all bullies they know weakness when they see it.

No fast track to membership, no military aid, no concrete sanctions against Moscow. The only thing the final statement of the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting said yesterday was this:

The Alliance is considering seriously the implications of Russia’s actions for the NATO-Russia relationship. In 2002, we established the NATO-Russia Council, a framework for discussions with Russia, including on issues that divide the Alliance and Russia. We have determined that we cannot continue with business as usual. We call on Moscow to demonstrate–both in word and deed–its continued commitment to the principles upon which we agreed to base our relationship.

Given what Moscow has been busy doing in Georgia in the last two weeks, it is hard to gauge what NATO foreign ministers mean by “continued commitment.” If the Georgia incursion means anything, it is the confirmation of a pattern in Russia’s behavior that emerged quite some time ago. Woe to an alliance that cannot stand behind the principles it was established to defend.

According to Gerhard Schroeder, it’s clearly Georgia:

The hostilities undoubtedly have their historic causes, as well, and the conflict has had several historic precursors. But the moment that triggered the current armed hostilities was the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia. This should not be glossed over.

Clearly it should not. To say that Georgia invaded South Ossetia is a bit like saying that the United States invaded Rhode Island or that Germany invaded Frankfurt. I blogged earlier today about the new “useful idiots” and their defense of evil in the world–picking on the Guardian columnist Seumas Milne as a perfect example. But in fairness to Schroeder, at least the former German Chancellor is being amply rewarded for his effort. How’s your Russian, Mr. Schroeder? Your explanation sounds like it came straight out of a Russian script . . .

Speaking of useful idiots, last week activist website The Struggle published an appeal in defense of Iran and against a military attack on the Islamic Republic, signed by 150 Jewish activists, intellectuals and other such types–including the ever-mobilized Noam Chomsky, Uri Davis, Moshe Machover, Avi Shlaim and Antony Loewenstein.

The communiqué, the organizational affiliations of some of its signatories, and the comments included require little additional comment beyond what’s been said in the past about these “Good” Jews and their morbid obsession with victimhood. I’d just like to note here that among the signatories there is one Professor Bertell Ollman. Ollman, in the pages of Tikkun, published in 2005 a “Letter of Resignation from the Jewish People.” In it, he said that he “was appalled to finish my life with my umbilical cord still tied to a people with whom I can no longer identify.” So how come he’s now signing himself as a Jew?

Iran’s air force commander announced on Sunday that its fighter jets have now an increased range–they can fly 3,000 kilometers without refueling. If true, it’s possible that Iran would be able to strike Israeli targets (a mere 1,000 kilometers away) and report back to base. It is hard to evaluate Iran’s air force capability, since its procurements are rather opaque, and military supplies come from countries such as China, Russia, and North Korea–not exactly the most transparent ones. Reporting back to base is also a secondary matter in a culture that glorifies martyrdom. If planes could carry a deadly payload of non-conventional weapons, why should Iran’s air force commander worry too much about their returning to Iran after a successful strike? Nevertheless, such boastful claims have been dismissed by military experts, who noted the difference between merely flying such a length and carrying out a successful military operation while doing so.

Yesterday, David Hazony commented on an interview that former Italian president Francesco Cossiga gave to the Italian daily Il Corriere Della Sera. In the interview, Cossiga dropped a political bomb–something he is fond of doing–by saying that the Bologna train station massacre of 1980 was not the doing of neo-Fascist terrorists, but the accidental explosion of two explosive laden suitcases that Palestinian couriers were taking through Italy. He went on to explain that there existed an agreement between Italy’s government and Palestinian groups which allowed Palestinians to roam free with arms and impunity across the Italian peninsula in exchange for a guarantee that Palestinians would not carry out any attack inside Italy.

One correction is in order about David’s posting: first, Cossiga was indeed President when the Achille Lauro hijacking took place–he had been in office for four months by then. However, Italy’s president has a largely ceremonial role and Cossiga had no direct role in the ensuing events–including the one played by Italian forces at the Sicilian air base of Sigonella, where terrorist Abu Abbas was taken away from the hands of American forces and ceremoniously allowed to escape by the Italian government. The real culprit in the affair was then-Prime Bettino Craxi (now deceased), leader of the Italian Socialists and a longtime friend of the PLO. He was the one to blame for letting Abbas slip; he was responsible for one of the worst bilateral crises in the history of Italian-American relations. Cossiga has his faults, but that’s not one of them.

Back at the Guardian’s Comment is Free, Alan Johnson offers a brilliant reading of the Caucasus crisis:

‘Finlandisation is back. During the cold war the term described those states which had a formal independence but existed in barely disguised servitude to Moscow. Finland, Jean-Francois Revel noted in his 1983 book, How Democracies Perish, “preserved the inviolability of its territory, what was left of it, and the right to live privately in a non-totalitarian society” but was forbidden to accept Marshall Plan aid, join the EEC or sign trade agreements with Europe. It took its orders from Moscow in foreign policy

This is the fate Putin (and some in the west) now seek to impose on Georgia. And now, as then, Russia hopes to impose Finlandisation by a mix of hard and soft power.

Hard power, needless to say, is offered by Russia’s military, though, as Stuart Koehl explained at the Weekly Standard, there’s more than meets the eye.

Soft power is supplied, just like during the Soviet era, by “useful idiots” intent on defending Russia’s mischief in the name of a number of seemingly benign causes - peace, justice, dignity and so on.

Johnson has one particular such apologist in mind - Seumas Milne, the former comment editor of the Guardian (and currently a regular Guardian columnist) for writing one such apology for Russian adventurism. One must give Milne credit for being coherent and consistent in his writing, at least. It is tempting to say that his apology is genuine, the fruit of his devotion to defending anyone who hates America and the Western way of life. He is not just defending Russia - something that may have to do with his nostalgia for Communism. He is intent on advocating an alternative world order that will ‘resist’ not just American hegemony as he sees it, but also the spread of global capitalism and free market economy. Which is why Milne seamlessly moves from defending Russia’s aggressive imperialism, to a defense of Iran’s regime, to an impassioned paean for Hugo Chavez’ “left-wing nationalism,” and support for Hamas.

Throughout these arguments there is a common thread that unites the seemingly different players: of Chavez, Milne said that

his oil-rich government has not only spearheaded a challenge to US domination and free-market dogma that has swept through the continent. It has also led the first serious attempt since the collapse of the Soviet Union to create a social alternative to the neoliberal uniformity imposed across the globe.

Of Iran:

Iran and its allies now offer the only effective challenge to US domination of the Middle East and its resources. It’s hardly surprising that the US is alarmed by the increased influence of an avowedly anti-imperialist state sitting astride a sea of oil, now making common cause with other radical, independent regimes in Latin America.

In his defense (or eulogy?!) of communism Milne hopes for a comeback much in the same vein:

With the new imperialism now being resisted in both the Muslim world and Latin America, growing international demands for social justice and ever greater doubts about whether the environmental crisis can be solved within the existing economic system, the pressure for political and social alternatives will increase.

And as for Hamas, oh well, they are the “resistance.” Need one say more?

So let’s get back to Georgia - yet another US puppet for Milne, who dubs the country (and much of the EU as well) “former Soviet territory” in order to explain that Russia is just breaking the capitalist pro-American encirclement to reclaim its own:

Over the past decade, Nato’s relentless eastward expansion has brought the western military alliance hard up against Russia’s borders and deep into former Soviet territory. American military bases have spread across eastern Europe and central Asia, as the US has helped install one anti-Russian client government after another through a series of colour-coded revolutions. Now the Bush administration is preparing to site a missile defence system in eastern Europe transparently targeted at Russia.

Anyone who understands anything about military matters would know that ten interceptors in Poland and a radar station in the Czech Republic are anything but “transparently targeted at Russia” and its several thousands nuclear warheads. The only transparent thing about this sentence is how faithful it is to the original found in the Russian. But what comes next is even worse:

As long as Georgia proper’s independence is respected - best protected by opting for neutrality - that should be no bad thing. Unipolar domination of the world has squeezed the space for genuine self-determination and the return of some counterweight has to be welcome.

That is what unites Venezuela, Iran, Russia and Hamas - or Hezbollah, China, and Zimbabwe - they could become, at least in Milne’s aspirations, an effective counterweight to the West.

It is not clear how forcing neutrality on Georgia - as Johnson aptly noted, Finlandization is exactly what Milne seems to have in mind - squares with Georgian self-determination. What if the Georgians want to be part of NATO, friends of the Americans, and offer their territory to bypass the Russian stranglehold on energy supplies from Central Asia to Europe? It is clear that Milne, like others, willingly offers himself to be the mouthpiece of any radical, crazy, authoritarian, violent, extremist, brutal and ruthless dictator or terrorist, as long as their brutality is directed at the West and their friends. Not only is Finlandization back, as Johnson writes, but also Lenin’s “useful idiots.”

The shamelessness of the UN is no secret, but even its bureaucrats should have the good sense not to get caught on camera. Click here to view UNIFIL’s peacekeepers saluting the passing coffins of Hezbollah and Palestinian terrorists returned to Beirut as part of the prisoner swap with Israel. Notice they seem also to be saluting the image of virgin-bound Imad Mughniya - the mastermind of the U.S. Marines barracks suicide bombing that cost the lives of 241 soldiers in 1983.

If we needed confirmation that UNFIL’s implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 is worse than ineffective, we now have it. The only questions left are: how long until the next war? And will peacekeepers clear the way for the advancing armies or will they provide, as in the past, cover and excuses for the people they are now saluting?

Back at the Guardian’s comment is free, Inayat Bunglawala writes the usual “in defense of Iran” piece. This he does cleverly, insinuating that we should be skeptical about all this Iran talk and focus instead on the “real” threat:

The one thing I do know, however, is that over the years a number of our UK-based newspapers have been more than willing to play up the threat of alleged Iranian weapons while downplaying the danger of the very real Israeli ones.

Clearly, Bunglawala must have missed an article by yet another journalist–the Guardian’s Ian Black–who on Thursday of last week wrote a news analysis headlined “Arabs fear fallout from nuclear conflict.” The main message was that ‘Nervous Arab states fear a war in the Gulf but a nuclear-armed Iran is an even greater concern.’ Clearly, in the Gulf the ‘danger of the very real’ Israeli bombs does not keep many people awake at night. It has not done so among any of the moderate regional powers who recognize, albeit grudgingly, that Israel as a status quo power has the bomb to deter its enemies, not to blow everyone up in the attempt to export Zionism to the Gulf. Iran, on the other hand, is a revolutionary power whose ambitions are to change the face of the region. The bomb would greatly enhance the country’s power to disrupt the existing order.

And one need not befriend spies to know that something is up in Iran. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s reports on Iran are a treasure trove of information about why we need to worry about Iran’s nuclear program, as the last report by IAEA Director General, Dr Mohammad El Baradei, shows very clearly and worryingly.

So why is Bunglawala writing this column, when the IAEA says such incriminating things? It is hard to figure, and we can only guess. One thing is known: Bunglawala is the assistant-secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, a Sunni Muslim organization with a long record of flirting with radicalism–more on the credentials of both MCB and Bunglawala can be found here, here, and here.

So perhaps it is what manages to unite Sunni and Shia radicals across their otherwise great sectarian divide, namely the hatred for Israel. After all, if there is anything to be learned from today’s sad headlines, it is that a Sunni pro-Western Lebanese prime minister has proclaimed today a national holiday to celebrate the release of a child murderer; that a “moderate” and “secular” Palestinian President has offered this “hero” his most heartfelt congratulations, while his fundamentalist Hamas nemesis, Gaza’s Prime minister Ismail Haniyeh, expressed similar joy. All rushing to celebrate, congratulate, applaud, and exalt a Shiite, Iranian-backed Hezbollah leader–Hassan Nasrallah. Strange bedfellows, indeed.

A few weeks before being elected Prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, then acting PM, gave an interview to Ha’aretz where he outlined his vision for Israel’s future under his premiership. In light of today’s exchange of child murderer Samir Kuntar for the bodies of two slain Israeli soldiers, two things stand out. Asked about whether a leader must “give a personal example to his nation,” he said “most definitely.”

Asked about what the future held for Israel, he added,

It will be a country with less external violence and more personal security. A country that is dealing more effectively with the social ills . . . It will be a country that is fun to live in.

How fun will it be tonight in Israel? and what example has Mr. Olmert set for his nation?

Just Journalism has released a report on the British news coverage of Israel’s 60th anniversary. Unsurprisingly, the report shows a marked bias against Israel, especially among the left-leaning media. The Guardian and the BBC for example had the biggest amount of coverage (the Guardian alone had eight op-eds on the subject) and the least friendly (66% of the Guardian coverage was negative, 27% was neutral and only 7% was positive). There are many important data and much insightful analysis in the report, and I recommend reading the entire thing.

Commenting on his support for the prisoner swap between Israel and Hezbollah, Israel’s minister for infrastructure, Benyamin Ben Eliezer, reportedly declared that “When I voted in favor, standing before my eyes was the suffering of the families . . . We want every mother to know that Israel will do its utmost in order to return her son when he is in the guard.” These are noble words, but one gets the impression that Minister Ben Eliezer, alongside his colleagues who supported the deal, focused too much on the families of Israel’s two prisoners in Lebanon (who are presumed dead) and forgot the family of a third prisoner, Gilad Shalit, who is most likely still alive and in Gaza. Will this deal make it easier for the Shalit family? Will it make it more likely for him to come home alive? Hard to fathom. As Bret Stephens says today in the Wall Street Journal,

But whatever happens, Israel has once again demonstrated to its enemies that their strategy of taking hostages works. Worse, it works even when those hostages are killed. If Regev and Goldwasser are dead, the situation of Cpl. Shalit - and any other Israeli who might be taken alive by Hezbollah or its ilk - becomes infinitely more precarious.

For this, Shalit and his family must thank Ben Eliezer and the Israeli government. Had the two Israeli soldiers been alive, this would have been an understandable dilemma - and a deal which would not necessarily jeopardise Shalit’s life. But as it may turn out, Israel capitulated for a bag of bones. It is the perfect recipe to get some more.

According to news reports, Israel is on the verge of finalizing a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah, the implementation of which is anticipated to take place next Wednesday. As Haaretz reports,

[o]ne possible obstacle to the cabinet’s approval is the terms of the current deal, which go against promises the state made to Arad’s family when it redeemed Elhanan Tenenbaum in 2004 - not to release Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar without also obtaining substantive information about Arad’s fate.

To keep its word to Arad’s family, this government now has three options:  the first would be to keep the promise and, in the wake of Hezbollah’s vague report on Arad’s fate, call the whole thing off. The second would be to explain to the Arad family that the imperatives of state demand the return of Israel’s captive soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, dead or alive, even if the cost is breaking a promise made four years ago to the Arad family. Then of course, there is the third option - stick to the deal with Hezbollah and challenge the meaning of the word “substantive,” thereby pretending that this government kept all its commitments.

The first choice might consign Regev and Goldwasser - or their remains - to the same fate of Arad. The second choice would give those two families a peace of mind which this very same act might forever deny to the Arad family. And the third course of action would be spin.

Which course of action do you think Olmert will embrace? I suspect playing with words will be it.

Freedom of speech is considered to be the mother of democratic freedoms. And England is considered the mother of democracy. Nevertheless, in recent times, British libel laws have been used and abused not so much to protect reputable individuals from calumny but to silence critics of questionable figures and to cover up questionable practices.

In a recent comment, Nick Cohen, Observer columnist and author of the book What’s Left?, denounces the latest fashion in libel suits in the UK–something people like Rachel Ehrenfeld are painfully familiar with. The trigger for Cohen’s comments was a libel suit launched a few days ago by Mohammad Sawalha, president of the British Muslim Initiative, against the British blog Harry’s Place, arguably one of the best English language blogs.

The ostensible reason for the lawsuit is explained here. Harry’s Place made the mistake of raising an eyebrow at remarks Mr. Sawalha made commenting on a recent anti-Israel demonstration in London, where he reportedly referred to the “Jewish evil” in Britain. Harry’s Place drew the information from Al-Jazeera, and when Al-Jazeera amended the term to “Jewish lobby,” Harry’s Place reported the change in an update. And though Harry’s Place did not refer to Mr. Sawalha as an anti-Semite for having reportedly used such language, they are now being sued for having done so.

It bears mentioning, as Harry’s Place documents, that the individuals involved in the British Muslim Initiative are all linked in some way to Hamas–according to a recent BBC documentary, Sawalha is a Hamas pointman who coordinated funding for the terror organization from London. And given the views that Hamas espouses on Jews and the kind of education about Jews it gives to the next generation of Palestinians, it would not be far-fetched to suggest that the association of Sawalha with Hamas, with or without the words he reportedly uttered, is enough to make him a candidate for that sort of epithet.

This is the latest chapter in the efforts by enemies of freedom (in this case, by people who are linked to an EU-designated terror organization) to exploit the laws and protections granted by Europe’s open society to subvert it from within. Kudos, then, to all those who can support Harry’s Place and to several British pundits, journalists, analysts ,and intellectuals, who have decided–because of Mr. Sawalha’s lawsuit–have decided to withdraw from participation in debates alongside British Muslim Initiative spokesmen.

Following the end of the Cold War, a study was commissioned by the US government to understand the new context of nuclear deterrence after the demise of the Soviet Union and in anticipation of possible future confrontations against regional powers with nuclear arsenal. the main point of the study, which is partially available, was that one needed “a value-based deterrence, holding at risk those assets that mean most to an opponent.”

Reading that document today brings to mind Iran’s nuclear standoff with the West. Yesterday, Ali Shirazi, the Supreme Leader’s representative to the Revolutionary Guards, stated that “The first U.S. shot on Iran would set the United States’ vital interests in the world on fire.” Shirazi does not reveal what exactly Iran would do if attacked, but he tries to evoke in our mind a scenario of terrible consequences. According to the “Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence,”

We must communicate. specifically, what we want to deter without saying what is permitted.’ And ‘We must be ambiguous about details of our response (or preemption) if what we value is threatened, but it must be clear that our actions would have terrible consequences for them.

Clearly, Iran has read the document.

But the most remarkable part of the recommendations is precisely in the section that addresses the central tenet of the new doctrine, namely that “We must communicate our capability to hold at risk what they value and, if possible, to protect what we value.” In expanding this concept, the author of the “Essentials” goes on, in a prescient fashion, to evoke Soviet deterrence in a particular instance when Soviet citizens where kidnapped in Lebanon:

The story of the tactic applied by the Soviets during the earliest days of the Lebanon chaos is a case in point. When three of its citizens and their driver were kidnapped and killed, two days later the Soviets had delivered to the leader of the revolutionary activity a package containing a single testicle–that of his eldest son–with a message that said, in no uncertain terms, “never bother our people again.” It was successful throughout the period of the conflicts there. Such an insightful tailoring of what is valued within a culture, and its weaving into a deterrence message, along with a projection of the capability that can be mustered, is the type of creative thinking that must go into deciding what to hold at risk in framing deterrent targeting for multilateral situations in the future. At the same time this story illustrates just how much more difficult it is for a society such as ours to frame its deterrent messages-that our society would never condone the taking of such actions makes it more difficult for us to deter acts of terrorism.

Have we learned the lessons of the “Essentials” in dealing with Iran? Hardly, if one considers the opening paragraph of the latest offer the West has recently delivered. I in no way think that that the Five Permanent Members of the Security Council should have sent Iran the testicle of, say, the eldest son of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. But it is clear, from reading the language of international diplomacy to Iran against the background of the “Essentials,” that our strategy does not aim to establish deterrence vis-à-vis Iran. If anything, it is doing all it can to undermine it.

Some of the recent U.S. and Israeli drive for a peace settlement with the Palestinians is predicated upon the assumption that a new pragmatic coalition exists in the region–a moderate front made up of the Sunni powers plus Israel, united by the fear of Iran. This much was illustrated by Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, at the Annapolis Conference last November, when she said

This is the time for decision. Everyone must decide which side they are on, and the sides, ladies and gentlemen, have changed. They are no longer Israel on one side and the Palestinians on the other side. They are no longer the Arabs on one side and the Jews on the other side. In one camp is everyone who is sitting here in this room - Jews, Muslims and Christians, Israelis, and Arabs, Americans, and Europeans. And on the other side, there is Iran, with its allies and its proxies, agitating and doing mischief.

The view that Iran is a bigger threat to the Arab world than Israel is counterintuitive. But it does not necessarily translate–as some believe and advocate–into an Arab willingness to stand up to Iran alongside Israel and the U.S. Martin Kramer made that clear as early as last January, in his remarks at the Herzliyah annual conference. Now comes an op-ed in Lebanon’s Daily Star, by the Middle East Institute’s Thomas Lippman, reiterating what only the blind cannot see in the Persian Gulf:

In the simplest terms, the Saudis recognize that Iran is a major regional power, a potentially aggressive neighbor that is not going away. Iran is much more capable of making trouble for Saudi Arabia than the other way around, and therefore the kingdom’s security over time requires accommodation with Iran, however difficult it may be to manage the relationship. Americans and other foreigners may come and go, but Iran and its nearly 80 million people - almost four times the population of Saudi Arabia - will remain, a few kilometers across the Gulf.

Whoever thought that Tehran’s rise as a regional power would herd even the best of our allies in the region in Israel’s arms as a way to contain and deflect Iran’s threats forget the history and the geography of the region. FM Livni’s definition of sides ignores regional realities–where not taking sides is a sophisticated skill and the very essence of the art of survival.

Peacemaking may or may not have a chance–though if one counts the odds, it is more the latter than the former. But it is naive, if not outright folly, to count on countries like Saudi Arabia to radically change decades of foreign policy in a bid that at least in the Arab world would be highly controversial, given the yield. Aligning themselves with Western and Jewish infidels as a shield against the Shi’a would not make moderate Sunni monarchies safer. Saudi Arabia would only gain a possible showdown with Iran, whose fallout would hit Saudi shores before it even registers in Europe or the U.S. Pursue peace if you will, but don’t make Saudi help part of that strategy–it never paid, and will never now, especially in the shadow of Iran’s looming nuclear power.