I may be MIA, but I still read

For those of you who are interested in what is going on with the Middle East, specifically their relations to the U.S., The AEI is a great place to read some of the latest and greatest. This article appeared today, and though it is an essay, there are plenty of facts to be weeded out that can give you a bit of a scare over the state of our diplomatic relations with Iran. I will paste the article for ease of reading at the end of my post.

One last suggestion before I go: I highly recommend you read Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. It may help you develop a more human understanding of the recent history of Iran and the role of women in their society. I am reading it now and it is amazing. Nafisi's writing is very accessible and combined with my recent involvement with charities that focus on supporting women internationally, this book really helps me go beyond the statistics I hear quoted in the news or read in textbooks. The whole situation becomes that much more real, and complicated, and internalized, and...well, you get the picture. Go read the book!

*****
The U.S. vs. Iran
By Michael Rubin
Posted: Wednesday, September 20, 2006

The Iranian government continues to enrich uranium despite Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's generous package of incentives--and in defiance of the U.N.'s Aug. 31 deadline. Still, European officials hold out hope for the success of diplomacy. On Sept. 15, Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, said, "We are really making progress. Never before have we had a level of engagement . . . as we have now." Diplomats will look for any hopeful sign from Iranian President's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's forthcoming U.N. speech. But can talk work? Successful diplomacy requires that both sides negotiate in good faith and honor commitments. That Tehran's track record undercuts confidence should not surprise. From its very inception, the Islamic Republic has eschewed diplomatic norms.

On Nov. 4, 1979, Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding 52 hostages for 444 days. Warren Christopher, deputy secretary of state during the crisis, called the Iranian move a "flagrant violation" of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. But Iranian officials endorsed the seizure. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini praised the students. His successor as supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, showed support with a visit to the embassy soon after its seizure. Ironically, while the Iranian leadership often demands apologies for transgressions both real and imagined, it continues to uphold the righteousness of hostage seizure, underscoring official contempt for diplomatic convention.

Still, the embassy seizure might be long forgotten had Tehran's disdain for diplomatic norms been the exception rather than the rule. In 1986, former U.S. national security advisor Robert McFarlane's traveled to Tehran. While the Iran-Contra Affair is remembered today for the Reagan administration's attempts to circumvent Congressional prohibition of funding of the Nicaraguan resistance, it also illustrates the inadvisability of trusting Tehran. President Reagan sought to win the release of American hostages in Lebanon but, as soon as Washington compensated Tehran for its bad behavior, its militias accelerated hostage seizure. Diplomatic enticement--bribery by another name--backfired. But diplomacy is not just about incentives; it is also about trust. What could have been just a failed initiative turned to scandal when, on the seventh anniversary of the embassy seizure, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, today the chairman of the Expediency Council, broke a pledge of secrecy and revealed the meetings to the international press.

Iranian authorities showed diplomatic duplicity once again after Khomeini issued a declaration calling for author Salman Rushdie's death. Four months before Khomeini's death, then-president Khamenei demanded that Mr. Rushdie apologize in exchange for cancellation of a religious edict ordering his murder. Mr. Rushdie apologized, but the Iranian government nevertheless kept the bounty in place. President Khamenei was insincere, his diplomacy was a tactic. By winning an apology, he confirmed Mr. Rushdie's guilt.

Iranian lying should not surprise; what should is how often Western governments fall prey to it. The British government demanded that Tehran lift the bounty on Mr. Rushdie's head as a precondition to re-establish relations. On Sept. 24, 1998, the Iranian government said it would do nothing to harm Mr. Rushdie. No sooner had London and Tehran exchanged ambassadors, than Iranian authorities once again reversed themselves.
For U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, the cost of Iranian lying is high. While Iranian diplomats pledged not to destabilize Afghanistan and, indeed, cooperate in its reconstruction, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps sent in operatives disguised as school teachers to further instability. As Afghan President Hamid Karzai struggled to wrest control away from warlords, Afghan commanders intercepted a dozen Iranian agents and proxies organizing armed resistance.

In Iraq, too, Iranian diplomacy has been duplicitous. Prior to the Iraq war, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi and U.N. Ambassador Mohammad Javad Zarif, pledged Iranian noninterference to British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and Zalmay Khalilzad, then President George W. Bush's envoy to the free Iraqis. But, Iranian journalists now describe how, days after Saddam's fall, the Iranian leadership dispatched 2,000 Revolutionary Guards replete with radio transmitters, money, and supplies. On Nov. 18, 2003, Mr. Kharrazi again pledged good behavior. He lied outright; his promise coincided with a new deployment of Iranian intelligence across Iraq. The Revolutionary Guard stepped up its training of Muqtada al-Sadr's militia. Hasan Kazemi Qomi, previously Iran's liaison to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, became Tehran's top diplomat in Baghdad. Mr. Qomi assured diplomats that "Iran will not accept anything that destabilizes Iraq." Four months later, Iraqi forces captured 30 Iranians fighting alongside Sadr's militia.

* * *

Earlier this month, I traveled to the Middle East to meet Shiite tribal leaders and urban notables from southern Iraq. They described how Iran has transformed its consulates in Karbala and Basra into distribution points for everything from money to shaped charges. That Tehran uses diplomatic pouches and protocols to safeguard its network reflects their insincerity. While the West approaches diplomacy with sincerity, the Islamic Republic mocks diplomatic convention to shield subversion.

Iran's nuclear program raises the stakes of its deceit to U.S. national security. There is little doubt that Tehran's nuclear program is not peaceful. On Feb. 14, 2005, Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer Kharrazi, secretary-general of Iranian Hezbollah, promised, "We are able to produce atomic bombs and we will do that." In February 2006, Mohsen Gharavian, a Qom theologian well-connected to the Islamic Republic's staunchest ideologues, called Iran's possession of nuclear weapons "natural."

Iran's nuclear program has advanced through the trust of diplomats and their willingness to provide hard currency in the name of dialogue and engagement. Between 2000 and 2005, European Union trade with Iran almost tripled. Tehran invested much of this money in arms and nuclear infrastructure. For more than a decade, through both the Rafsanjani and Khatami administrations, Iranian authorities hid the existence of a uranium enrichment plant at Natanz and a heavy water plant at Khondab. That Western diplomats label Mr. Rafsanjani a pragmatist and Mr. Khatami a reformer underscores the danger of judging Iranian officials by style rather than action.

In February 2003, the Iranian authorities opened the secret plants to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors. Their subsequent report was damning: Not only had the Iranian government designed the Natanz facility to house at least 50,000 centrifuges, but Tehran had the import of almost a ton of uranium from China, and could not account for missing processed uranium. During subsequent inspections, Iranian authorities repeatedly changed their stories when asked about the origin of weapons-grade uranium traces. Subsequent inspections exposed other lies. Finally, on Sept. 24, 2004, the IAEA Board of Governors, after recalling a litany of Iranian mistruths, found Iran in breach of its Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement. While Iranian officials have made many subsequent pledges to cooperate, their actions belie their words. They have yet to abide by the Additional Protocol's inspection standards and, earlier this year, turned away IAEA inspectors from Natanz in violation of the NPT.

While diplomacy necessarily involves talking to adversaries, Washington should not assume that the ayatollahs operate from the same set of ground rules. During his long exile in Najaf, Khomeini endorsed taqiya, religiously sanctioned dissembling. From his perspective and that of his followers, the ends justify the means. Hence, Khomeini saw nothing wrong when he told the Guardian newspaper, just months before his return to Iran, "I don't want to have the power of government in my hand; I am not interested in personal power." Tehran may still conduct diplomacy to fish for incentive and reward but, at its core, Iranian diplomacy is insincere. The Iranian leadership will say anything and do anything to buy the time necessary to acquire nuclear capability. That Foggy Bottom still advises against any strategy that might undercut the possibility of some illusionary breakthrough signals triumph not of realism but of negligence. Diplomacy cannot succeed if one side is playing for real and the other only for time.

Almost a homeowner, but not quite

Last night Anthony and I went out with our realtor to look for a new place to call home. Anthony set the stage by minute one with, “Tom, I’m ready to buy a house tonight.”

We found a wonderful condo in Columbia Heights, not far from the Metro and oddly enough, the site of the future Target and Best Buy (maybe even Whole Foods!). The condo is in a beautiful Spanish-style building, is on the top floor, gets a ton of sunlight, has a small balcony, and has some really unique touches like Italian ceramic countertops. The building itself has grilling areas, a fenced-in pet area, and bike storage. Basically, you can see why the unit holds a lot of attraction for us.

Unfortunately, Anthony leaves for UNGA tomorrow and there was no way in hell we could have all the paperwork done in time to make an offer. We’ve put that all off until he gets back in about ten days, and we’re crossing our fingers that the condo isn’t sold by then. Wish us luck.

And in case any of you are wondering what my blog title today is referring back to, we have Shel Silverstein to thank for shaping my early years:

"Almost perfect... but not quite." Those were the words of Mary Hume At her seventh birthday party, Looking 'round the ribboned room. "This tablecloth is pink not white-- Almost perfect... but not quite."

"Almost perfect... but not quite." Those were the words of grown-up Mary Talking about her handsome beau, The one she wasn't gonna marry. "Squeezes me a bit too tight-- Almost perfect... but not quite."

"Almost perfect... but not quite." Those were the words of ol' Miss Hume Teaching in the seventh grade, Grading papers in the gloom Late at night up in her room. "They never cross their t's just right-- Almost perfect... but not quite."

Ninety-eight the day she died Complainin' 'bout the spotless floor. People shook their heads and sighed, "Guess that she'll like heaven more." Up went her soul on feathered wings, Out the door, up out of sight. Another voice from heaven came-- "Almost perfect... but not quite."

Too pooped to party, but too in love with a paycheck to go home

I got to bed late last night, as will become the usual now that I'm back in school, and I'm starting the caffeine intake so I can make it through class til 10PM. So if I sound less than coherent, I blame the coffee.

Without going into too much detail, I am less than pleased with my landlord these days. I sent him an updated list of outstanding work that still needs to be done in our apartment - things like making the heat and air conditioning work, updating the apartment by increasing security measures, etc. - and he called me at work to tell me that if I want all these amenities, "Then maybe this isn't the right building for you." In other words, move out.

This is exactly the kind of thing that makes me hate him more. If he isn't complaining about how he can't afford to fix things in the apartment, or asking me to "just run to the hardware store" and pick something up, he's telling me to move or get marriage counseling (yes, he actually suggested that too). Uh, I don't care about your problems - you're the landlord, THAT'S YOUR JOB.

If I actually had the money and time, I sincerely would go ahead and move out, but the DC rental market is on the rise as far as cost is concerned, and apartments are now $100-300 more expensive than they were just last year. The equivalent of my apartment, in a halfway decent location, seems to be running at about $1600.

So I guess that my landlord is stuck with me, bitching, moaning, and all. I'm sure he's excited about that - just about as excited as I am. In fact, if nothing happens to improve the situation here, I'm about a millimeter away from calling the DC Housing Regulation Authority.

Other than that, I'm still working with my realtor to buy a new place. We still haven't decided if we want to live in DC or move out to the suburbs. It all comes down to price, and location vs. amenities. In the city, what we can afford will likely be small, poorly assembled, and in a transitional neighborhood. And although we haven't looked in MD or VA yet, it appears that we would be trading convenience for space, a yard, better construction, longer commutes, and a decent neighborhood. Oooh, pick me for the two-hour commute! Pick ME!

Attention world: Ryan is on sabbatical

Since starting grad school and re-realizing that I am a slow reader – not to mention a procrastinator – I just thought it would be nice to warn you that I cannot be counted on for any kind of consistency. Not in emails, not in blogging, not even in scooping the kitty litter.

So if you are looking for that responsible Ryan of yours, she is on hiatus. At least until mid-December, when she is allowed out of her gilded graduate cage for a few weeks to celebrate the holidays.

I can't believe...

...that Steve Irwin is dead. Although I never knew him personally, I feel a connection to the people I invite into my living room on a regular basis - whether these people are in fact in my living room, or whether they are just flickering images on my television set. Had it been possible, Steve was the kind of guy I would have wanted to befriend and I am saddened by his family's loss.

Yay school!

Last night I finished my first week of classes for the MPA program at George Mason University. This semester, I registered for three classes: Intro to Public/Nonprofit Administration, Organization Theory and Management Behavior, and Managing in the International Arena. However, later today I will be dropping Intro to Public/yadda yadda yadda from my schedule as I only want to take 2 classes per semester and not overwhelm my little brain.

I began classes on Monday night. To prepare, I drank a cup of French Roast from Caribou on my drive from DC to the Fairfax campus. BAD MOVE. I was jittery throughout all of Org Theory and nauseous through Intro Yadda Yadda. It didn’t help that I didn’t have any time to eat the sandwich I bought at Potbelly’s earlier, or that the second professor was so fidgety that he was giving me motion sickness. The highlight of my Monday night was the fact that my second professor of the evening was dorky funny AND had a four-inch rip down the seam of his pants so you could see his boxer shorts.

I am entertained by the little things in life, what can I say?

My third class was last night and it’s being taught by an adjunct. What that means in GMU terminology is that my professor has a day job. His just happens to be President of the Peace Corps Association – which is exactly why I registered for the class in the first place. As a Masters International student, I really want to take advantage of these kinds of classes where I will gain more insight into international development and global issues.

In between classes, I have already signed up for every email listserv I could find, am investigating professional associations to join, met with my program’s dedicated Career Services counselor, and scheduled some one-on-one time with a PIA professor. Oh, and I’ve also house-hunted with my realtor this week.

Needless to say, I’m a little pooped, but I’m excited to be back in school.

Some fun factoids from Ryan’s return to college:

• At grad school orientation, I met the Dean of my program – who promptly fell asleep next to a small group of us during the program held in the Arts Center;
• I spent about $100 between the car rental and parking to get my butt to orientation, only to return home with a GMU mug;
• The orientation speakers commented on the make-up of the incoming graduate students – 80% of us are supposed to be full-time workers, and over 60% are over the age of 30. That being said, I am one of the oldest members in each of my classes, and most of my classmates just graduated from undergrad so they don’t have jobs yet;
• It appears that none of the professors I’ve contacted thus far have any idea what the Masters International program is – apparently, I’m on my own on that score;
• Out of the three classes I attended this week, I met two other suckers… I mean, Masters International students;
• Managing in the International Arena is the smallest class I have taken since high school (the smallest class I ever took was AP Calculus, with only five of us taking class via satellite with a professor from Ohio State University or somewhere) – the class totals eight people, but only six showed up last night;
• The most thrilling news for me is that I was able to purchase four books for one of my classes and it only cost me $115. At Penn, it cost me $115 just to LOOK at the bookstore, let alone leave with some course books;
• I have barely scratched the surface of my homework, but I’m already exhausted.

Let the good times begin…

Anthony's input

After the conversation that was launched by my last post regarding airport security, Anthony requested that I post this Newsweek editorial. As the good boyfriend he is, and as a security expert, he wanted me to re-publish an article that makes my readers consider the inadequacy of the security measures already in place in our airports today. So, without further ado, here is the Newsweek article:

Flying Blind
Airline security needs to be based on common sense, not policies that will turn citizens into inmates of their own countries

By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
Updated: 10:44 a.m. ET Aug 29, 2006

Aug. 29, 2006 - Flying used to be about freedom. No matter where you intended to land, there was something magical about escaping to the heavens. Now, as we know, flying is more like going to prison, if not, indeed, to hell.

As it happens, I once spent a week interviewing inmates and staff at what was then the main “super-max” federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. It was the successor to Alcatraz, and the predecessor of the facility that opened in Florence, Colorado, in 1994. “Security” was its aim, its ethos, its excuse for everything. Life in Marion had so many grim limitations and restrictions that the worst of the worst criminals convicted in federal courts—spies, drug lords, racist murderers, gang leaders—actually would try to behave themselves in hopes they might someday get out of its peculiar purgatory, even though the greatest escape they could achieve was transfer to another federal pen.

The operative principle for prison security was that anything one inmate managed to make into a weapon would be taken away from everyone. Saran Wrap was a case in point. Sandwiches had come in it. But one of the inmates discovered a way to burn an aspirin tablet, generating enough heat to melt the wrap, harden it, and make a dagger, so no more cellophane on the sandwiches. Ditto bed springs. They could be cut, twisted and sharpened into weapons, so the beds were concrete slabs.

The cardboard backing on every legal pad at Marion was torn off because one prisoner managed to fashion it into a crude bomb filled with match heads, using bits of metal zipper as shrapnel. The most benign objects were, in the imagination of the inmates and the guards, potential deadly weapons. One by one, they were taken away until each convict’s life was made as barren as it could possibly be made.

"Big Brother is always watching," the warden at Marion told me. The basic goal was to keep prisoners safe from each other and alive: “pure security,” he called it. "Every day that goes by and no inmate or staff member is seriously hurt, we've accomplished our mission."

Doubtless those responsible for airline safety have a similarly fatalist, minimalist view, and not without cause. It’s been five years since September 11, 2001, when 19 men using box cutters on commercial flights changed the world forever. No one would ever want to see that again. But the draconian security measures taken after an alleged airline terror plot was revealed in Britain earlier this month have exposed the reductio ad absurdum of current thinking about what makes us safe, or not.

The last few days have seen a stunning series of exaggerated reactions to minor incidents. On Friday alone, half a dozen little security breaches or anonymous threats suddenly escalated into significant aircraft diversions or delays around the United States. Earlier last week, a United Airlines flight from London to Washington D.C. landed in Boston—accompanied by fighter jets—when a 59-year-old American woman named Catherine Mayo acted like a nut. She reportedly urinated outside the plane’s galley and allegedly mumbled something about Al Qaeda.

(Afterwards, it turned out Mayo has spent a lot of time traveling in Pakistan, ostensibly as a journalist. She wrote an article in 2003 for the English-language Daily Times there that blamed American psychiatrists for what she called the “manic depression” of the United States after 9/11. “This is a woman with very serious mental health issues,” Mayo’s public defender told the court in Boston during her initial hearing on Friday.)

And then there was Northwest Flight 042. When a dozen young Indian businessmen returning from a wedding boarded it in Amsterdam for the last leg of their flight home to Mumbai last week, they were in a decidedly rambunctious mood. (Although all were Muslim, it’s not clear how observant or abstemious they were.) They were trading seats, playing with their cell phones, allegedly refusing to turn them off, and some reportedly taunted the cabin crew by tossing the phones to each other.

American sky marshals on board got involved. About 10 minutes out from Amsterdam, the pilot wheeled around, escorted back to the ground by fighter jets (which seems to be standard operating procedure). The alleged troublemakers were hauled off, but Dutch officials then cleared them to fly home the next day.

The Indian press quickly declared the real “crime” of the businessmen was the color of their skin. "If brown equals terrorist, doesn't white equal racist?" suggested an editorial in the Hindustan Times. And knee-jerk prejudice might have played a role, but the essence of the problem lies in the fact that so much has come to seem sinister that overwhelmed security staff and paranoid passengers see threats everywhere they look: in a beard or a prayer, a cell phone or a soft drink.

By coincidence, a Newsweek reporter was on the previous leg of Northwest Flight 042, which went from Minneapolis to Amsterdam that same day. Barbie Nadeau was returning home to Rome from vacation in the States with her husband and two little boys, ages 6 and 4. In Minnesota, the security obsession was less with skin tones and Motorolas than with run-of-the-mill liquids. Parents of little kids were watched especially closely, it seemed, because the screeners suspected they might be smuggling boxes of juice on board.

As Nadeau points out in an e-mail, her family’s two carry-on bags had enough electronics in them to wire a missile: “a laptop, a portable DVD player, a sound-blaster adapter and headphones, two cell phones, four MP3 players with headphones, a BlackBerry, a brick of AA batteries and two hand-held video games.” The security woman paid them no attention. “She dug around the electronics, searching for juice. About three other moms nearby were going through the same harassment…”

Nadeau concedes that the screeners and airline staff were just doing their job, “but it struck me that the security was so focused on finding and confiscating any liquid item, they were actually not focusing on any other potentially suspicious things anyone might be carrying. Case in point: nail clippers. I didn't realize they were in my bag, but they got by in Minneapolis, only to be confiscated in Amsterdam.”

Ah, yes, nail clippers. I have searched in vain for the example of nail clippers being used to hijack an airplane—on the face of it a pretty ludicrous proposition—but I guess someone could imagine they might be. Just as Saran Wrap can become a dagger. Or the cardboard back of a legal pad can be made into a bomb with zipper shrapnel.

We are walking in our socks through security checks, you realize, not because anybody ever succeeded in blowing up a plane with explosive shoes, but because one man tried and failed. Moms are surreptitiously smuggling juice boxes for their kids because the alleged plotters in Britain reportedly wanted to mix up explosives on board planes using different liquid components. But recent reporting on that case suggests they may not have known what they were doing, or how to do it.

Should we be concerned and careful? Yes. And we shouldn’t think there are easy answers. The much-vaunted Israeli model for airline security works at one single airport, Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion, and with one small airline overseas, El Al, using highly educated screeners, many of whom are performing their national military service. Can the U.S. use the same psychological profiling techniques at hundreds of airports with screeners paid a little over the minimum wage and, perhaps, a high school diploma? Doubtful. Is better physical screening the answer? Bernard E. Harcourt, a professor at the University of Chicago who has written extensively on these issues suggested in an International Herald Tribune op-ed last week that the best approach would be “to eliminate most carry-ons and emulate high-security prisons…”

In fact, security systems will continue evolving, as will terrorist efforts to get around them. But the policies that develop in that process have to be based on a cool, common sense assessment of the real threats, not sensationalism and cover-your-ass bureaucracy. The failed dreams of would-be terrorists cannot be the measure of the threat against us. To achieve “pure security,” in the end, Americans would have to become inmates of their own country.