Prepping for the Pain, Part I

BRITAIN AND IRAN'S PAINFUL STEPS BRACE THEM FOR THE FUTURE. HOW ABOUT THE U.S.?

For very different reasons, Britain and Iran were in the news this week for macroeconomic decisions that cause their citizens pain in the near term while positioning each country better to face looming hazards.

In Britain, the Conservative-led unity government unveiled a budget that will cut nearly all public spending by a quarter over the next five years while re-jiggering the country's tax structure to spare the poorest and squeeze the wealthiest. The lone bright spot is a reduction in corporate taxes to encourage job creation in the hope of not sending the country spilling back into recession. The move helps soothe bond-rating agencies chary of a Greece-style meltdown in northern Europe, and puts the country onto a more solid financial footing in the future.

Meanwhile Iran has been rationing gas and increasing its refining capacity in response to potential U.S. sanctions targeting fuel imports. The new sanctions would probably have little effect on Iran, and none at all on Iranian leadership, but workaday Iranian citizens are undoubtedly grumbling. (The story above notes that Tehran may even use U.S. sanctions as an excuse to remove an economically inefficient fuel subsidy, which will turn the grumbles into screams, but will still improve Tehran's economic posture in the long run.)

Britain's moves may still hurt its poorest citizens while Iran's help continue the country's outlaw nuclear program, but both countries are acting to ensure their longer-term good.

One can only hope U.S. federal government—which like the UK is laden with debt, legacy wars and an aging workforce—will somehow find a way to take unpopular but necessary economic steps to get out of debt and right its sagging balance sheet.

The Game = Iran?

Always entertaining, Marc ("Abu Aardvark") Lynch spends an amazing amount of Foreign Policy's time comparing rapper Jay-Z's hegemonic power with the potentially rising power of his near (but not near-peer) competitor, The Game.

You don't even have to know anything about rap to appreciate this piece (my own knowledge of rap stops abruptly with Straight Outta Compton). Lynch lays out the hegemon's options as well as the challenger's, and you can just read along and enjoy the ride.

Twitter Silliness

THE MICRO-MESSAGING SERVICE HASN’T MADE A DAMN BIT OF DIFFERENCE IN IRAN.

With advance apologies to my colleagues whose job it is to spread the Good Word about social networking services to yet-benighted duchies and baronies within the federal government:

A strange-bedfellows combination of public diplomats, bloggers and assorted techies has been frothing since Iran-election protesters apparently used Twitter to both organize gatherings and appeal to the outside world for help. For a few days it appeared (in Western media accounts) that all Iran was tweeting when it wasn’t being kicked and beaten.

And yet, Twitter has really changed nothing except to lightly augment accounts of election-related disputes and rioting—and it enjoys that prominent role only because there have been few alternatives, what with Iran’s idled Internet and cell-phone networks and its lack of Western reporters.

As Noam Cohen pointed out in last Sunday’s Times, only a relatively small number of Iranians apparently used Twitter to organize protests; Iran is still primarily a word-of-mouth country rather than a texting or an Internet country.

And Twitter has other problems, among them that it’s so easy to use that pro-government forces use it themselves to spoof protest organizers and disseminate propaganda. Not to mention that those tweeting almost always lack training as observers or journalists; they’re just people who are frightened or angry and liable to write whatever they’re thinking at the moment—which is precisely what Twitter was designed for.

If anything, YouTube should be given credit for getting Iranian civilian videos of thug violence out of Iran, rallying world opinion in a visceral fashion that 140 dry characters cannot. In fact YouTube is choked with videos of baseej violence, and nothing has changed because of them, either.

Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei continue to move all the levers of power, speculation about Moussavi’s and Rafsanjani’s whereabouts and intentions notwithstanding. After some initial restraint, the Tehran government has deployed its knee-breakers in earnest to lock down both the capital and the provinces, and they appear to be succeeding.

As someone pointed out in the quaint, analog world of radio here in D.C. today, the first street protests against the Shah started in 1977 but didn’t reach critical mass until 1979.

My advice to Twitterers: Wait a couple of years to see whether #Revolution occurs, then a decade or so after that for everyone to write their books, before anyone proclaims that Twitter has come of age.

Persians in Space

THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC GOES WHERE NO MERELY ARAB NATION HAS GONE BEFORE.


I once horrified an Iranian colleague by suggesting that Iran and the U.S. were natural allies: ethnically diverse nations that were wealthier and better-educated than their regional peers, and both with whopping superiority complexes based on past successes.

Iran has always felt that it, not Egypt and especially not those nuts over in Saudi Arabia, should be seen as the rightful leader of the Muslim world, as it was during the Safavid period centuries ago.

Yesterday Tehran gave a big boost to its muttered claims of superiority by launching its first-ever satellite, a feat that no other Muslim country is even close to duplicating.

Like China's launching of men into space over the past few years, the satellite launch demonstrates technological leadership and discipline that's head and shoulders above any regional competitor.

Although the satellite is small, from a soft-power standpoint it wouldn't matter whether Tehran had launched a Nerf football into orbit. It's a clear win for Iran, and on the 30th anniversary of the Revolution to boot.

On Vacation

Taking vacation from today through August 19. Rural. Low-tech. Distant. Before I head to the hinterlands, a few quick shots:

Some U.S. brands' popularity may be declining because their newness has worn off or because people don't like America. Where does that leave China, with its latest product-safety disaster that the Wall Street Journal captioned "Poison Me Elmo"?

If you haven't read Mark Bowden's Guests of the Ayatollah, do. I'm only fifty pages in and it's been tough to put down since page one. Bowden interviewed participants on all sides of the Iranian hostage crisis and his reporting makes those events fresh nearly 30 years later.

Finally, the "Karen Hughes is too prominent/Karen Hughes is nowhere to be found" debate rages on as the undersecretary for PD quietly pops up on the West Bank, says a few words in support of U.S. policy, then leaves. I suspect Hughes simply can't find a happy medium that will satisfy the press between now and 2009, but wish her luck anyway.

Off to vacation.

"Our Independence from Foreign Funding Is Our Only Strength"

The Times magazine ran a depressing little piece this past Sunday on successes and failures in public diplomacy toward Iran ("Hard Realities of Soft Power"). It dissects the disposition of about $75 million in funds meant to influence Iranian opinion, but unfortunately, the funds—and administration officials' pronouncements in support of Iranian civil-society organizations (CSOs)—have had unintended consequences.

It seems like most of the failure has come from this combination:

Publicized U.S. Funding of Iranian CSOs + Administration Sabre-Rattling + Absence of External Oppressor = Tehran Crackdown on CSOs

I occasionally give Cold War-era FSO and USIA types a hard time, because some seem to reflexively reach for a toolkit that contains some combination of Voice of America programming and touring American musical groups as our front line of public diplomacy; but in this case, it would be nice to head back to a Cold War model that looked something like this:

Highly Covert Funding + Steady But Judicious U.S. Talk About Democratic Futures + External Oppressor + Patience = End of USSR

Maybe it's time to redouble U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, where the Taliban are at least externally inspired and supported—and get out of Iraq, where we are the external oppressor of some large fraction of the population.

U.S. to Enter Talks with Iran and Syria on Iraq

U.S. FOREIGN POLICY MAY MOVE FROM BULL IN A CHINA SHOP TO BULL MARKET.


Bummer about the stock market yesterday; hooray for today's rebound. But did anyone notice a major shift in U.S. foreign policy amidst all the financial hand-wringing?

Even if the talks ultimately accomplish nothing for the U.S. situation in Iraq, or for the Iraqis themselves, they are still a badly needed sign to the world that U.S. foreign policy need not be unreasonable in the Middle East.

If nations were stocks in a public-diplomacy market, the American issue would have ended the last two days hundreds of points higher.

Suddenly, Turkmenistan

IF YOU WERE PARANOID, YOU’D SAY IRAN WAS REMAKING ALL ITS NEIGHBORS. PERHAPS WE SHOULD BE PALS.


Saparmurad Niyazov, paranoid dictator of Turkmenistan, died suddenly this week and it’s power struggles, ahoy! in Central Asia for natural gas, land and post-Soviet democracy, as successors scramble for power:

Early signs of internal discord were evident in an official announcement that the speaker of the parliament's lower house, who under constitutional rules should have become acting president, had been placed under criminal investigation.

With winter closing in, the global energy industry was monitoring the surprise news from Turkmenistan closely. Turkmen gas is already an important element in state-controlled Gazprom's ability to meet customer demand at home and abroad and could become vital as demand rises over the next decade.

The United States has lobbied Turkmenistan, so far unsuccessfully, to build a pipeline across the Caspian Sea that would bypass Russian territory to deliver gas to the outside world. European countries have quietly supported the idea, which would reduce their dependence on Russia for supplies of natural gas.

The strategic competition known as the Great Game that bedeviled Central Asia more than a century ago may get a rerun as Western-oriented and exiled opposition leaders return to Turkmenistan and jostle with Russian surrogates for power in the vacuum left by Niyazov's death.

Complicating the mix are tribal politics and the loyalties of the powerful security services.

The Niyazov government was dominated by the Akhal Teke tribe, but the desert country's major gas fields lie in areas dominated by other tribes. Tensions over distribution of power and benefits from the sales never surfaced because Niyazov maintained an internal security cocoon that smothered dissent.

Largely desert country. Centralized power on one tribe’s ground, valuable resources on another tribe’s. Repressed peoples yearning to breathe free. Dissenters returning from abroad for hastily called elections. Tension between Islam and secularism.

If I were as paranoid as Niyazov was, I’d wonder why the 21st century’s maximum craziness all seems to occur in countries that border Iran.

I’m not saying Ahmadinejad’s bloody fingerprints are all over this, but because Iran borders so many countries—besides those I linked to above, it shares frontiers with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Turkey, and half a dozen Gulf states—the U.S. must deal with Iran eventually, particularly as Tehran closes in on working nuclear weapons. Better, I think, to start befriending the Islamic Republic now than later; by being in a position to influence Tehran, Washington would be better able to influence the politics of Iran’s neighbors, with benefits for U.S. interests.

Remember that Iran was helping to sustain Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance before 9/11, and had absorbed millions of Afghan refugees on its own. No one knew how valuable these Iranian actions would be to the West until 9/11 threw Afghan politics into high relief; without Iran, there would likely have been no Northern Alliance left for the U.S. to ally itself with, and many more Americans would have died to force the Taliban out of the country.