Hopefully we won't see a Middle East replay of "The Guns of August," as Barbara Tuchman titled her account of the slide toward World War I. But the region is edgy this summer as negotiators struggle to resolve confrontations with Syria and Iran.

One small sign of the rising tension is that Saudi Arabia is said to have alerted some of its military and security officials to cancel their summer leaves. Saudi and U.S. sources say this limited mobilization reflects worries about possible military conflict with Iran, the war of succession in Syria, and Sunni-Shiite tensions in neighboring Bahrain.

Diplomats are working overtime to defuse these regional crises, but so far without success. Kofi Annan, the former U.N. secretary general, has led an international effort to broker a political transition in Syria, but it hasn't budged President Bashar al-Assad. Annan said Monday that he'd had "constructive" talks with Assad and would soon present proposals to the Syrian opposition. But it's depressing how little headway Annan has made, despite broad international agreement that Assad should go to Damascus.

On the Iranian front, talks are continuing over controls on Tehran's nuclear program. This effort is backed by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany, but meetings in Istanbul, Baghdad and Moscow have produced little beyond an exchange of paper. Talks are continuing among technical "experts" who perhaps can explore a deal outside the parameters of the canned negotiating scripts.

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By Scott Shane

July 9, 2012

The New York Times  

WASHINGTON - In his first major speech last month, Mohamed Morsi, the new Egyptian president, pledged to seek the release of a notorious Egyptian terrorist from a North Carolina prison. Not long before that, a member of a designated terrorist organization, Gamaa al-Islamiyya - who also happens to be a recently elected member of the Egyptian Parliament - was welcomed to Washington as part of an official delegation sponsored by the State Department.

Obama administration officials made no public comment on Mr. Morsi's promise and struggled to explain why the Egyptian Parliament member, Hani Nour Eldin, got a visa, citing privacy rules and declining to say whether he had been granted a waiver from the ban on such visitors or whether his affiliation simply escaped notice.

Pressed by reporters after the visa quickly became a Congressional controversy, a State Department spokeswoman, Victoria J. Nuland, said Mr. Eldin had been judged to pose no threat to the United States.

"It's a new day in Egypt," she added. "It's a new day in a lot of countries across the Middle East and North Africa."

For the Obama administration, as it navigates the tumultuous effects of the Arab Spring, it's a complicated day, as well. Long-held assumptions about who is a friend of the United States and who is not have been upset, leaving many Americans confused.

"Right now, the United States is kind of in a trance when it looks at the Middle East," said Akbar Ahmed, chairman of Islamic studies at American University. "Everything has changed."

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JERUSALEM - Flouting international opinion, an Israeli government-appointed commission of jurists said Monday that Israel's presence in the West Bank was not occupation and recommended that the state grant approval for scores of unauthorized Jewish settlement outposts there.

The committee's legal arguments, while nonbinding, could provide backup for the government should it decide to grant the outposts retroactive official status. But such a move would inevitably stir international outrage and deal a significant blow to prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.

"The report relates to the question of legality and legitimacy of the settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement issued by his office, referring to the West Bank by its biblical name. He added that the report's conclusions would be submitted to a ministerial committee on settlement affairs for discussion and that "the facts and claims" presented in the report "merit serious examination."

Most of the world views the areas that Israel conquered from Jordan in the 1967 war, and where the Palestinians want to establish a future state, as occupied territory, and all Israeli construction there as a violation of international law. Israel distinguishes between its 120 or so established settlements in the West Bank and those that went up since the 1990s with some government support, but without formal government authorization.

The three-member committee, led by Edmund Levy, a retired Supreme Court justice, confirmed a position long held by Israel that those territories are not occupied, since Jordan's previous hold over them was never internationally recognized, and that their fate must be determined in negotiations.

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July 8, 2012

Micheal Makovsky and Blaise Misztal

The Wall Street Jounral  

As efforts continue to prevent Iran from making nuclear weapons, a central Iranian negotiating demand is acknowledgment of its "right" to enrich uranium under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Although spurious, this assertion has gone without a forceful public challenge. By categorically refuting the claim, the United States and its international partners could fortify and clarify their stance against Iran's nuclear program.

The crux of world concern is Iran's uranium-enrichment program. Enrichment can produce fuel for electricity-generating nuclear reactors and fissile material for a nuclear weapon. Iran currently produces 3.5% and 20% enriched uranium, claiming that it requires the former for electricity generation and the latter for medical isotopes. While 20% is not yet weapons-grade (which is above 90%), the larger and more highly enriched Iran's uranium stockpile grows, the faster it can be turned into a nuclear weapon. Each month Iran produces enough 20%-enriched uranium to meet its medical needs for a year (nearly 20 pounds), yet it continues to expand its infrastructure for enriching uranium to this level.

Iran says it is not breaking any rules and has a right to enrich uranium. Earlier this year, its chief negotiator demanded that "any right which is indicated in the Nonproliferation Treaty should be respected." During the Moscow talks in June with representatives of six world powers, AP quoted an Iranian delegate as saying that, "Our minimum demand . . . is for them to recognize our right to uranium enrichment. If this is not accepted by the other side, then the talks will definitely collapse."

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) grants no such right. Its Article IV merely states: "[N]othing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with articles I and II of this Treaty."
 

This raises two problems for Iran's assertion. First, enrichment isn't specifically enumerated. As the late nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter warned, "the NPT is, after all, a treaty against proliferation, not for nuclear development." Nothing in the NPT implies a right to possess all, especially potentially military, elements of nuclear technology.
 

Second, the right to peaceful use of nuclear energy is based on compliance with Article II of the treaty, which requires that any country without nuclear weapons "undertakes . . . not to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons." Further, the country must, under Article III, accept International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) "verification of the fulfillment of its obligations."
 

Iran has consistently violated these obligations. It has denied the IAEA unrestricted access to its nuclear facilities and failed to explain mounting evidence, such as suspected explosives testing, of a nuclear-weapons program. In 2005, the IAEA declared that "Iran's many failures and breaches of its obligations to comply with its NPT Safeguards Agreement . . . constitute noncompliance," and referred the matter to the United Nations Security Council. This and subsequent findings formed the legal basis for six Security Council resolutions calling on Iran to "suspend all enrichment-related" activities, and levying sanctions until it does.

Iran considers the Security Council's actions illegitimate. If the NPT grants a right to enrich, Iran reasons, then "the reference of its nuclear dossier to the U.N. Security Council from the IAEA has been illegal," according to one Iranian negotiator. And if U.N. attempts to impinge on Iran's right to enrich are illegal, then so too must be the sanctions imposed for that purpose.

By making this argument, Iran seeks to maintain the rhetorical high ground no matter what happens. If the world accedes to Iran's terms and allows continued enrichment-even as an interim "confidence-building measure" that some experts support-international powers would cede any legal basis for demanding further concessions or continuing to impose sanctions. Alternatively, if talks fail definitively, as appears likely, Iran can keep claiming to be the illegally and unjustifiably aggrieved party.
 

Iran's legal transgressions may not be its gravest crimes against peace. But they should be exposed for what they are: further evidence of Tehran's unwillingness to stop a nuclear program that violates international law. The Obama administration has rightfully sought to curtail Iran's dangerous enrichment work. Now the administration should work with international partners to prevent Iranian grandstanding from weakening their stance or skewing public opinion. It's time to unequivocally refute Iran's fallacious claim of a right to enrich uranium.
 

Mr. Makovsky, a former Pentagon official, is director of the Bipartisan Policy Center's Foreign Policy Project, of which Mr. Misztal is associate director.

It's not often that the United States has the obligation, or the opportunity, to completely remake its relationship with one of the world's major nations. Usually, for better or for worse, ties are locked in by history, perpetuated by enduring elites, and defended by powerful lobbies. Even bad policies are hard to change.

Now, however, Washington has no choice but to rebuild its connection with Egypt - the most populous and historically most important Arab nation, the owner of the Suez Canal and a prime U.S. ally for more than 40 years. It is a daunting, even scary prospect for the State Department and Obama White House. But it is also offers a chance to correct some of the mistakes America has made for decades in its dealings with Arab leaders. The remake launches this week when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visits Cairo.

The need for a revamp has been obvious for some time, but it became imperative last month when Mohammed Morsi, the candidate of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, won Egypt's first free election for president. Up until then, and despite Egypt's popular revolution last year, U.S. policy had centered on the powerful military and the succession of pharaoh-like leaders it backed. Year after year, strategic allegiance and peace with Israel was purchased with $1.5 billion in annual military and economic aid.

Now it gets complicated. For the foreseeable future, U.S. officials will have to navigate between Morsi and the Brotherhood, with their nominally democratic but fundamentally anti-Western agenda; the military, which is doing its best to block the creation of democratic institutions while preserving its lifelines with the Pentagon and Israel; and the secular democratic forces that led last year's revolution, which are broadly pro-Western but are squeezed by both the generals and the clerics.

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