The Monroe Doctrine Leg of the Appalachian Trail Posted by Adam Blickstein

So apparently, buried deep within the stimulus bill, was the "Monroe Doctrine Provision of Appalachian Trail Expansion," providing funds to expand the reach of the popular hiking trail so that "all Americans, whether North or South, can enjoy the uninterrupted and exotic natural expanses of this great hemisphere, from Mount Katahdin in Maine to the Rio de la Plata in Argentina." This, apparently, is what inspired Governor Sanford's journey south. Note: Red line denotes existing trail. Blue denotes the new so-called "Monroe Doctrine leg":

NSN Daily Update: 6/24/09 Posted by The National Security Network

For today's complete daily update, click here.

What We're Reading

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed that Iran will not yield to protestors “at any cost.” In his speech yesterday, President Obama sharpened his criticism of the Iranian government’s crackdown, saying he was “outraged” and “appalled” by the events of the past few days. Iranian officials reported the arrests of several foreign nationals in connection with the protests.

Former detainees at the U.S.’s Bagram military base in Afghanistan have alleged abuse at the hands of American soldiers.

Missile strikes by a U.S. drone in Pakistan killed at least 43 people.

After a four-year hiatus, Obama is sending an ambassador to Syria, indicating the deepening engagement between the U.S. and the Syrian government.

The former Prime Minister of Kosovo, Agim Ceku, was arrested in Bulgaria on Tuesday. He is wanted for alleged war crimes committed during the 1998-99 war in Kosovo, when he was a commander in the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army.

Commentary of the Day

John Podesta urges Congress to pass the American Clean Energy and Security Act.

Thomas Friedman calls on Americans to “end our addiction” to oil in our own “green” revolution.

Robert Cohen argues Iran’s Islamic Republic system has been weakened.

Tim Rutten calls Twitter “tyranny’s new nightmare.

WashTimes Breathless Over Previously Reported Letter to Iran Posted by Adam Blickstein

EXCLUSIVE usually denotes the dissemination of previously unreported news, which is why the headline of a pending Washington Times piece reading "EXCLUSIVE: U.S. contacted Iran's ayatollah before election," also featured prominently on the Drudgereport, is curious. Why? Well first the article reads thusly:

An Iranian with knowledge of the overture, however, told The Washington Times that the letter was sent between May 4 and May 10 and laid out the prospect of "cooperation in regional and bilateral relations" and a resolution of the dispute over Iran's nuclear program.

The Iranian, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the topic, said the letter was given to the Iranian Foreign Ministry by a representative of the Swiss Embassy, which represents U.S. interests in Iran in the absence of U.S.-Iran diplomatic relations. The letter was then delivered to the office of Ayatollah Khamenei, he said.

"Before the election" and a "over a month before the election" are two different things. I'm not claiming that the Washington Times is at the vanguard of journalistic integrity, but it seems a little egregious to claim that any letter sent, being generous here, nearly 35 days before Iranians actually voted was a pre-election letter. But what's worse is that news of this letter isn't new, nor is it exclusive. In fact, its existence had been widely reported earlier this year (even in the Weekly Standard). As the Guardian said in January:

Officials of Barack Obama's administration have drafted a letter to Iran from the president aimed at unfreezing US-Iranian relations and opening the way for face-to-face talks, the Guardian has learned.

The US state department has been working on drafts of the letter since Obama was elected on 4 November last year. It is in reply to a lengthy letter of congratulations sent by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on 6 November.

This letter seems extremely consistent with the thoughtful and methodical re-engagement with Iran Obama has advocated and in part executed. While the frame presented by the Times alludes to directly implies that the letter is another indication Obama's reaction to the events unfolding in Iran have been recalcitrant and unsupportive of the Iranian people, in reality, the letter's origins date from right after Obama himself was elected and before he even took office, far before Mir-Hossein Mousavi even declared his candidacy for the Presidency in Iran. So while the Times tees this up in the context of Iran's election, and seeks to stoke the fires of Republican partisan sniping on a sensitive international issue, they are pretty far off base both in their exclusivity claims and couching of reality.

In fact, according to an expert cited in the Guardian article, an effect of the letter would be to divide the hardline clerics from those in Iran who seek better relations in the west, the exact dynamics now partially at play amidst the turmoil and chaos unfolding both on the streets and in Qom:

"There will be disputes inside the system about such a letter. There are lot of radicals who don't want to see ordinary relations between Tehran and Washington."

That's exactly why both this letter and the breadth of Obama's actions and rhetoric towards Iran are important: they exude calibration and nuance. Neither of these are readily grasped by the fire-breathing Right and publications like the Times, which is a reason we shouldn't be surprised why to them this letter is further evidence of Obama's paucity on the subject. Regardless, since its on Drudge, expect some in the GOP and in the media to try and hammer Obama for this even if the letter and the election are completely disconnected.

2 Steps Back is 10 Steps Forward Posted by Patrick Barry

It strikes me that Spencer is giving Thomas Joscelyn too much credit for moving the conservative arguments on Iran in an intellectually reasonable direction.  Joscelyn writes:

Look, this is the same tired old game the Iranian hardliners have played for thirty years. When something goes wrong for the regime, they blame America. Ayatollah Khomeini was a master of this game.

Spencer thinks Joscelyn is differentiating himself from those conservatives who would take that argument and conclude "well, if we're going to get blamed for it anyway, we might as well do some stuff in support of the opposition," by pointing out that "the current generation of Iranian protesters doesn't harbor nearly the degree of anti-Americanism that its parents do." 

I guess I don't see the distinction.  So what if Joscelyn doesn't explicitly conclude that the Administration might as well intervene since it makes no difference for whether the regimes uses the U.S. as a whipping boy? His analysis still leads you in that direction.

And though I'll concede that the demographic composition of the demonstrators likely differs from past movements in ways that complicate the lessons of non-intrusion, Trita Parsi's advice to let the demonstrators lead still holds.  In addition to Spencer's point - that the U.S. should want to avoid being an albatross around the neck of a successful opposition - it can't be emphasized enough how little we know about the opposition in its current form.  Yes, there have been calls for greater U.S. involvement.  But those calls have been met with pleas just as persuasive for the U.S. to stay out.  For all the signs printed in English, there have also hundreds, maybe thousands, of nightly chants shrouded in the spirit of 1979.  Joscelyn's argument focuses entirely on whether the U.S. could wind up empowering the regime. Yet that is only one of many possible unintended consequences U.S. interference could bring.  Given how little we know that the demonstrators and what motivates them, there are almost definitely others. 

Iran Bans Protesting Players Posted by Max Bergmann

The Guardian reports that four of the players that wore green arm bands in protest have been "retired" or banned for life.

According to the pro-government newspaper Iran, four players – Ali Karimi, 31, Mehdi Mahdavikia, 32, Hosein Ka'abi, 24 and Vahid Hashemian, 32 – have been "retired" from the sport after their gesture in last Wednesday's match against South Korea in Seoul. They were among six players who took to the field wearing wristbands in the colour of the defeated opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi...Most of the players obeyed instructions to remove the armwear at half-time, but Mahdavikia wore his green captain's armband for the entire match. The four are also said to have been banned from giving media interviews.

The fate of the other two players who wore the wristbands is unknown. None of the team members were given back their passports upon returning to Tehran after the match, which ended in a 1-1 draw – a result that ended Iran's hopes of qualifying for next year's tournament.

Remember Iran is a soccer-crazed country. When Iran qualified for the world cup in 1997 there was even a "soccer revolution" in which thousands of women stormed the national stadium to celebrate the victory - thereby breaking the ban on women in stadiums. Banning the protesting players is a very overt public response by the regime that would likely anger many thousands of Iranian soccer fans. Apparently, one of the players, Karimi, is one of Iran's biggest soccer stars - he even played for Bayern Munich at one point.

When do they shoot? Why do they shoot? Posted by Shadi Hamid

The success of any mass opposition movement is premised on the fact of numbers. It is easier for a regime to shoot when the crowd is small than when it is large. But it is also the case that, from the standpoint of an authoritarian government, there is greater reason to shoot when the crowd is larger than when it is smaller. After all, it is fairly easy to disperse a small crowd. There may not even be a need for the government to even intervene. After all, a small protest is not, by itself, threatening.

So the question remains: “when does a government shoot?”

Generally, when the masses take over the streets, hardliners, considering how to respond, are likely to hesitate when faced with the prospect of bloodshed. This explains, for example, the half-hearted nature of the 1974 Spinola coup in Portugal. In the event of mass mobilization, the costs of suppression tend to be higher than the costs of toleration, making a brutal response on the part of the regime less likely.However, in contexts of sharp ideological polarization, the equation can change, as regime hardliners begin to see the unfolding conflict in stark, binary terms. The conflict takes on an increasingly existential tone. And when politics becomes a zero-sum game, then the perceived costs of toleration come to be seen as greater than the perceived costs of suppression. And so the regime moves to suppress.

I’m not sure if we’ve gotten to this point in Iran. While the Iranian government’s response to the protestors has been brutal, it has not reached the level of brutality that we've seen elsewhere in the Middle East, particularly in countries like Syria (1982) or Algeria (1991-2), where the opposition was literally massacred en masse or rounded up and put in desert concentration camps. The Syrian regime practically wiped out an entire city, in the Hama massacre of 1982, with some putting the death toll between 10,000 and 20,000.

The Syrian and Algerian regimes were willing to resort to this kind of brutality, in part because the ideological divisions were much starker than they currently are today in Iran. These conflicts were between Islamists and secularists, the latter of whom were convinced that the former threatened its very way of life. There was no room for negotiation or compromise (at least from the standpoint of the secular governments. Many in the Islamist opposition, at least in Algeria, were open to power-sharing agreements). In Iran, it would be a mistake to assume that Ahmedinijad and Moussavi are ideologically similar. That may have been the case two weeks ago, but Moussavi is no longer the person he was then. He has become a vessel for the aspirations of a movement, and so he must be judged within this changing context. Still, Moussavi is not a liberal, nor a secularist. He is - for now at least - part of the same revolutionary family as his newfound adversaries. For this reason, it is harder for the hardliners to advocate an “Algerian solution.”

NSN Daily Update: 6/22/09 Posted by The Editors

For today's complete Daily Update, click here.

What We're Reading

Opposition protesters stayed off the streets of Iran this weekend, as security forces dramatically increased their presence and family members of prominent opposition supporter, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, were arrested over the weekend. Still, the Guardian Council, the body of clerics which oversaw the election, admitted there were electoral irregularities in over 50 Iranian cities. Both sides claim the mantle of Islam in their posturing as Israeli politicians begin to openly supporter the aspirations of protesting Iranians. Experts also claim that Iran is using sophisticated internet spying technology to not just block information, but track individual Iranians.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev proposed dramatic cuts in his country’s nuclear stockpile, while the President of the Russian region of Ingushetia survived an assassination attempt which killed four of his bodyguards.

The US Commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, set up new restrictions against the use of airstrikes while the Pakistan Army attempts to consolidate tactical gains against the Taliban within their own country. Mullah Omar, the head of the Afghan Taliban, is said to now assert more operational control over Taliban fighters as they prepare for upcoming US troop deployments.

A US naval ship is shadowing a North Korean freighter as it delivers suspected missile components to the military regime in Myanmar. This is a first test of the latest round of sanctions against North Korea.

Commentary of the Day

E.J. Dionne Jr. explains why progressives are the natural allies of the Iranian opposition, whereas Paul J. Saunders explains why Obama’s critics on Iran are wrong to portray Obama as “siding with the regime”. Meanwhile, Thomas Barnett argues in Esquire why Obama should allow Iran’s “Red State” regime to die on its own.

The Economist profiles Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s evolution from Obama’s fiercest opponent to one of his closest allies.

Khamenei's Defiant Speech Posted by Michael Cohen

I start off by saying that I am far from an expert on Iran so take my comments here with a grain of salt, but reading Ayatollah Khamenei's incredibly defiant speech today from Tehran I'm just having a hard time understanding what he's thinking.

By portraying the opposition, and in particular, demonstrators as virtual enemies of Iranian democracy he has seemingly put himself in a political box. What if the demonstrations continue, even in the face of violence?  For example, there is a major rally planned for tomorrow in Tehran. If it goes forward, Khamenei seemingly has two unpalatable choices - a bloody crackdown or do nothing. If he chooses the former well there is no guarantee that stops the protests and what if elements of the military and police are unwilling to wreak violence on their countrymen? And isn't there a distinct possibility that sustained violence may actually spur not stifle the protests?

And if Khamenei he chooses the latter course and doesn't order a crackdown his credibility is completely shot. At this point it's going to be pretty hard to offer concessions to the opposition after his rhetorical assault on them today. It does appear that Khamenei is misjudging the depth of anger among Iranians and he has seriously overplayed his hand.

Yet one thing does seem clear, for all the silliness coming from Krauthammer and others about the need for the US to get more involved, the future of Iran is in the hands of the Iranian people. If they march tomorrow in large numbers; if they defy their Supreme Leader it won't matter much what Barack Obama says. The Iranians, themselves, will have decided the fate of their country.

Andrew Sullivan makes a similar point:

I fear deeply what is about to happen. But I also sense that the Gandhi-strategy of the majority is a winning one. If they can sustain their numbers and withstand the nightly raids, and if they can overwhelm the capital tomorrow in another peaceful show of strength, then they can win. And the world will change. This is their struggle now.

Obama is no Reagan Posted by The National Security Network

From NSN intern Rodrigo Seira

In a special report published today by the American Spectator, Jeffrey Lord contrast Obama’s “timid” response to the Iranian elections with conservative idol Ronald Reagan’s “we win, they loose” approach to foreign policy. Using Reagan’s reaction to the Polish strikes in 1980, Lord concludes that when you compare the two presidents “the miserable inadequacy of the Obama foreign policy is thrust into a stark and shameful relief.”

Of the mounting conservative criticism of Obama’s handling of the situation in Iran, this is among the more ridiculous arguments.  “Timid” compared to Reagan? What about Iran-Contra???

For a more complete rebuttal of the Reagan argument, see Matt Duss’ article in American Prospect.

GOP Uses Iran Resolution to Slam Obama, Undermine Iranian People Posted by Adam Blickstein

Dave Weigel has a good round-up of the debate that just transpired on the House floor over Iran. No one should be surprised that while the language of the resolution is fairly innocuous, the GOP is going to use it as a wedge against the Administration, and utilize the optics that the House acted on behalf of the Iranian people while Obama remains silent as a calculated strategy to hammer the President's approach towards Iran, which has been supported by Henry Kissinger, Pat Buchanan, Nick Burns, and Dick Lugar, amongst other.  Just look at the statements Republicans just made on the floor (from Weigel):

Eric Cantor: “America’s moral responsibility to speak out on the protection of human rights wherever they are violated...I urge President Obama to follow the lead of this House.”

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher: Silence would be a “betrayal of our fundamental principles” and a show of “weakness,” and reminded the House that he had been a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan.

Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart: “The president of the United States has been silent and confused.”

And Mike Pence's statement introducing the resolution far exceeded the rhetoric in the resolution itself:

"For days hundreds of thousands of dissidents have taken to the streets of Iran in support of freedom and democracy. The American cause is freedom and in that cause the American people will not be silent.

It's clear that on its merits, the resolution itself is not necessarily bad (and indeed the Administration appears to have a hand in its crafting), and is not completely opposed by members of the Iranian human rights community. But that's in a vacuum. This is American politics and the GOP's political calculation is very shrewd and very insidious. This resolution will give the Republican party cover to slam Obama's 'inaction' on behalf of the Iranian people, and sets them up for a weekend of messaging along these lines, including on the Sunday shows. And in the end, while from the domestic political angle this might score points for the GOP at a very superficial and visceral level (especially in the media), the biggest impact is it will provide another talking point for Khameini and Ahmadinejad to accuse America of meddling in Iranian affairs. In fact, Khameini already attacked the West today on those lines:

"The enemies [of Iran] are targeting the Islamic establishment's legitimacy by questioning the election and its authenticity before and after [the vote]."

Through this resolution and subsequent Republican statements which far exceed the moderate tone of the resolution's text itself, the GOP provides Khameini, the Iranian state media, and Ahmadinejad with talking points confirming the regime's assertions of American interference as well as providing the appearance of an American government divided. Such political posturing might help the Republican's cause of demonizing the Administration and decrying weakness of its foreign policy. But in the end, the resolution itself is merely a vehicle for subsequent statements, releases and press conferences. This is where the dangerous rhetoric will emanate from which will only add fuel to the fire for those in Iran who seek to suppress the protesters and quell the march of freedom that continues to build in the streets of Tehran and elsewhere.

While they display the veneer of being on the side of the Iranian people, in the end Cantor, Pence, Rohrabacher and others today confirmed themselves as the leading speechwriters and providers of talking points for Iran's oppressive regime. It's too bad they put partisan American politics above actually supporting the people of Iran.