Benefiting from the author’s background in intelligence, “The Persian Puzzle” is a meticulous and important analysis of how American-Iranian relations have failed consistently since 1953, the year the CIA stumbled into Iran’s postcolonial mess and engineered a coup. Salon spoke with Pollack by phone from his office at the Brookings Institute in Washington.

You were a main figure in Persian Gulf intelligence operations in the 1990s. How did we get Iraq’s intentions and capabilities so wrong?

Well, I wouldn’t say we got anything wrong on the intention side. I think we got it absolutely right. I look back at the chapters I wrote in “The Threatening Storm” about what Saddam was thinking and I think everything we’ve seen since the invasion confirms Saddam’s intentions. If he ever got a nuclear weapon, we’d be in a great deal of trouble — that was a game we simply didn’t want to play.

The problem was, we got his capabilities absolutely wrong. One reason for that was that the intelligence community had gotten Iraq’s nuclear problem wrong in 1991. In the ’80s, we believed Iraq’s nuclear program was really primitive. We only found out after the Persian Gulf War that the Iraqis were much closer to acquiring a nuclear weapon than anyone ever thought. That created a mindset in the intelligence community that the Iraqis are hell-bent on developing these weapons, they are very good at covering their tracks, and every time we catch them, they’re further along than we expect. And that was reinforced between 1994 and 1996, when a number of high-ranking Iraqi officials defected and we suddenly learn the Iraqis were cheating.

Another issue was Saddam’s bizarre behavior. In the 1997-1998 time frame, he had given up most of his WMD program and he’d destroyed his stockpiles. He expected that this would get the sanctions lifted. Well, if you want the sanctions lifted, genius, when you destroy your WMD, tell everyone! But instead, he became even more aggressive in resisting the inspections.

Would we have caught these mistakes if we hadn’t rushed into war?

Look, I was all for going slower, and I said that at the time. I never thought we needed to go to war in 2003. Of course, I wanted to wait longer for a whole variety of other reasons, diplomatic, economic, political, all those other reasons that are coming home to haunt us. But I think we might have gotten a better intelligence picture had we not rushed to war.

Of course, the neocons wanted to go to war for a whole variety of reasons, and as Paul Wolfowitz said, they just latched on to the WMD threat because it was the one thing that everyone agreed on. It’s hard to imagine how you could have derailed that train — after Afghanistan, they absolutely believed you could fight wars quickly and cheaply without much effort in the reconstruction phase. They believed Saddam was the source of all evil in the Middle East, and they really did believe that he was in bed with al-Qaida even though there was no evidence of that. They just believed these things.

I’m not convinced that a perfectly accurate picture of Iraqi WMD would have changed the march to war at all. Certainly it would have convinced me; and a lot of other people in my category probably would have fallen off. But do you honestly believe that me and Joe Biden and David Remnick could have stopped President Bush from going to war with Iraq? I don’t.

When word first got around that Ken Pollack was writing a book on Iran, a lot of people responded, “Uh-oh, time to strap on the combat boots again.” But you’re advocating a very different approach. Why?

If I thought invasion was the best answer for Iran, I would recommend it in a heartbeat. But there are very important differences between Iran and Iraq. The first of them is intention: Saddam Hussein wanted nuclear weapons, as best as we understand it, to enable aggression. He willfully disregarded deterrent threats and information that should have caused him to pause. He did everything that would make you think that he would be hard, if not impossible, to deter.

The Iranians aren’t like that. Since the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini, they’ve been aggressive and nasty and anti-American, but they’re not irrational, and they’re not as reckless as Saddam Hussein was. They recognize deterrent threats and they pull back when confronted with superior force. That’s not to say it’s a good idea for them to have a nuclear weapon, but the threat is of a different category than Saddam’s Iraq or North Korea.

With Iraq, we’d thought the combination of sanctions and inspections weren’t stopping the progress of the Iraqis’ nuclear program. With Iran, we haven’t tried sanctions and inspections yet, and there’s a lot of evidence that if we did employ a multilateral diplomatic approach to Iran, it would have real benefits. You always go for the diplomatic options before you reach for the sword.

Also, in Iran, the military options don’t look very good. Against Iraq, it was entirely conceivable for us to invade the country and rebuild it properly. We didn’t rebuild it properly; instead we decided we’d listen to Ahmed Chalabi and fuck things up. Iran would be a very difficult country both to occupy and rebuild. We could invade it, but that would be a lot harder than Iraq. It’s a much bigger country, with much bigger problems in many ways. And there may be a better way to handle this.

“The Persian Puzzle” is largely a history of Iran in the 20th century that points out errors repeated by both sides. What have we gotten wrong about Iranian politics, and what have they gotten wrong about our foreign policy?

Iranians, by and large, are steeped in history, or their version of it. They blamed the United States for the 1953 coup — which they’re right to do — but also for the oppression they felt during the Shah’s era, which they believed we were behind. And so the leaders who came to power during the revolution defined themselves as being anti-American. Today, their support for Syria, their support for terrorism, a lot of their opposition to Israel, stems from that. There’s nothing particularly incompatible about our current strategic positions, but so much bad blood has been institutionalized within Iranian domestic politics.

Iranians can’t get past their history, and Americans mostly don’t know that history. There is an imbalance of attention, for lack of a better term. Iranians are very focused on the United States, even obsessed, and they think that the United States is obsessed with them. In point of fact, it’s exactly the opposite. A lot of our mistakes have come from trying to pretend that Iran can mind its own business. We’re constantly being bitten in the ass when we try to do that.

Despite that, the Iranians believe that we’re determined to manipulate their politics?

And that we do so constantly. To this day, Iranians will kind of cozy up to you and say, “All right, tell me the truth: Why did the CIA put Khomeini in charge?” And of course, of all the things the CIA might have wanted to do, putting Khomeini in charge was not one of them.

When it comes to the current regime, what do we actually know about them? Do we even know who’s in charge?

It’s difficult to say. We have what we think is a decent picture of the bare bones of Iranian decision making. But in terms of when Iran decides to do something, who made the decision and why, it’s often like reading tea leaves. Iran has a vibrant political culture, and though I’m purposefully steering away from the term “freedom of the press,” there are a lot of different viewpoints heard. But although we have more of a window into Iran’s political debate than into many other countries, it’s very difficult to know where different players within the Iranian political system are lining up. Iran has 10,000 different key players, and on every issue, they line up differently. So it’s very hard to know on any given issue who’s siding with whom, who’s making which arguments, who believes what.

You reveal that during the Clinton administration, our diplomats couldn’t get a two-sentence message through Iranian security to Iran’s reformist president, Khatani. Do we currently have the resources and connections inside Iran to boost democracy there?

I think that our ability to do so is exceedingly limited. But there aren’t particularly compelling reasons not to try. It’s important, but mostly for the sake of the United States being able to say, “We have a consistent position on democratization.” I’m deeply dubious that pursuing regime change is going to solve our problems there. The historical pattern is that every time that the United States has tried to reach out and help a group within Iran, it has backfired on us. Typically, it’s caused harm to the group we were trying to help.

I do think that regime change is coming to Iran and there’s no doubt that the vast majority of the Iranian people want a different kind of Iran. But I suspect it’s going to be a very long time. The Iranians have demonstrated that they’re willing to use enormous amounts of force to hold on to power. They’ve stumbled on the China model of liberalizing the social and economic sphere while clamping down on the political sphere — focusing the energies of their young generation on economics and hedonism, for lack of a better term.

There’s another reason why I think regime change is not the answer for us: Our problems with Iran are ultimately very short term. Terrorism is an immediate problem. The nuclear issue is immediate too, not because Iran is about to get a weapon — the estimates out there are three to 10 years — but because right now there’s a window to use diplomatic means to solve it. We have short-term problems that require short-term solutions. Regime change is at best a very long-term fix.

How has having 150,000 troops in the country next door affected our relationship with Iran?

Well, right after the fall of Baghdad, the Iranians were very concerned that we would make Iran next — the famous “right turn at Tikrit” — where the 3rd Armored was going to turn right and drive into Iran. They were nervous about that for quite some time.

But now, paradoxically, the Iranians see America’s involvement in Iraq as a tremendous source of weakness, and they’re really strutting their stuff. I believe one of the reasons they’ve been so brazen about their nuclear enrichment program is that they believe the United States is so completely bogged down in Iraq that we don’t have the military capacity to come after them, even if we wanted to do so. You hear this regularly from Iranian officials.

But there are also other layers. A really big one is that Iraq has now become a common interest of those two countries, just like Afghanistan is a common interest. Neither Iran nor the United States wants to see chaos there, and both countries seem to believe that the best outcome for both of them, as well as for the Iraqis, is to have a stable, pluralistic system in Iraq that will allow the Shia majority to have political clout equivalent to their demographic clout.

The Iranians aren’t under the illusion that the Iraqi Shia are going to be their puppets — they remember the Iran-Iraq war, when Iraq’s Shia fought them tooth and nail. But the Iranians are deeply afraid of chaos in Iraq spilling over into Iran and they recognize having a pluralist Iraq where the Shia are in the ascendancy is an Iraq they could live with. That would be such a nice change for them. As a result, we’ve seen a great deal of tacit cooperation between Iran and the United States over Iraq.

Now, obviously there are also Revolutionary Guards running around Iraq doing nasty things.

So some Iranian agents are blowing things up in Iraq, and others are trying to keep the peace?

Exactly. That’s always the case with Iran, because Iran doesn’t have a fully coherent government. There are multiple governments, and some of these elements freelance.

Are you saying that we need to defer to Iran to keep the peace?

I would never say that we should simply accommodate Iran, but we need to keep their interests in mind. If we’re going to make any move against Iran, whether it’s in Iraq or elsewhere, I think we need to keep in mind that they have the ability to retaliate against us in Iraq. They’re not omnipotent, by any stretch of the imagination, but they have a great deal of influence and a lot of personnel who are a great deal more capable than the Iraqi insurgents.

If the Iranians ever declared war on us in Iraq, they could make Iraq a hellish place. Remember what they did in Lebanon, and keep in mind that there they had a very small contingent of Revolutionary Guards, it was very far away, and they cared much less. So I think we need to be careful of how we handle Iran because we’re vulnerable to them in Iraq.

Your book argues that our best hope for convincing Iran to end its nuclear program is to work with the Europeans to develop a unified “carrot and stick” approach. What do we need to do to make this happen?

A lot really depends on whether the Europeans are serious about Iran. I think that there is reason to believe that they are now, though during the 1990s, when I talked with European diplomats, they would do anything to pretend that the Iranians weren’t supporting terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. They were desperate to look the other way.

Why was that?

The answer isn’t as easy as people think, but I believe it comes down to economics. Germany’s trade with Iran is $5 billion, and that’s not a lot of money in the context of the German economy, but the money is very concentrated in a few very big German firms that have a great deal of political clout. And while $5 billion may not be a lot of money to Germany, it is a lot of money to Siemens. But I’m hopeful that the Europeans have seen the light and will put security interests ahead of crass commercial interests. The real issue here is whether the Europeans are serious, and whether our administration can get its head out of the sand to strike the deal with them.

You book mentions that the decision to include Iran in the “Axis of Evil” speech was made entirely by Bush’s speechwriting team. Do we have a coherent policy toward Iran, or did I just answer my own question?

To some extent you did. I always bristle when somebody says, “The administration doesn’t have a policy toward X, Y or Z.” Because usually that means the person either doesn’t like the policy or just doesn’t understand it.

But in the case of Iran in the second Bush administration, it’s actually true. The principals have never sat down and met and decided on an Iran policy. Senior administration officials will tell you that their policy is to refer the problem to the Security Council, but that’s not a policy. They know damn well that the Chinese will veto any measure directed against Iran in the Security Council. So at best, they’re kind of kicking the can down the road.

I think that this is a huge mistake. I think there’s a real shot at influencing Iran’s decision making over the next couple of years, and I don’t think we’re going to have this shot for very long. If we work with the Europeans and present the Iranians with a fundamental choice about what kind of a country they want, and what they want their country’s role in the world to be, I think there’s a very good likelihood that they’ll be forced to make the choice we want them to. But the Europeans aren’t going to stick with this policy forever if the United States doesn’t come around, and at some point, the Iranians are going to become self-sufficient in terms of acquiring a nuclear weapon. Once that happens, our ability to shape their decision making goes out the window. We’ll wind up being forced to choose among a bunch of really bad options, air strikes, or invasion, or just trying to live with Iran.

You wrote that “living with a nuclear Iran will not be easy, but it will not be impossible, either.” If Iran becomes a nuclear state in the next four years, do you think the Bush administration would reach the same conclusion?

In a perverse sense, I think the administration agrees with that sentence of mine. When you hear from even the most hawkish senior administration officials, they don’t believe that invasion is a good option. I’ve had a couple of fairly senior neocons outside of the government tell me that at the end of the day Iran’s going to get nuclear weapons, and there’s no way to stop them. The only difference between our policies, they say to me, is that you’re going to make concessions to them and we won’t.

This deal would have been a major diplomatic breakthrough. It would have greatly reduced Iran’s capacity to develop a nuclear weapon, defused tensions in the region, calmed the oil markets, driven prices at the pump down and made it impossible for Netanyahu to attack Iran. In a presidential campaign as tight as this one, a significant drop in gas prices could be the difference between Obama being reelected and Romney defeating him. So why didn’t the Obama administration take the deal?

The ostensible reason, piously mouthed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is that the U.S. believes that the upcoming, even harsher round of sanctions on Tehran will generate even further concessions. According to this line of reasoning, Iran only came to the bargaining table because of sanctions, and more sanctions will produce better results.

But this justification is transparently false. First, Iran has made it clear again and again that it will never allow itself to be seen as folding under U.S. pressure. It is prepared to negotiate, but successful diplomacy requires not just sticks but carrots. The carrot the P5+1 offered at Baghdad was ridiculous: If the Iranians agreed to suspend 20 percent enrichment, what they would receive in return was not a reduction in sanctions, but rather spare aircraft parts. For Tehran, accepting this deal would have been tantamount to surrendering. As Iranian analyst Hasan Abadini said, “Giving up 20 percent enrichment levels in return for plane spare parts is a joke.” These are not arcane diplomatic mysteries. As Iran expert Gary Sick pointed out in an interview on NPR, what it will take to reach a resolution of this issue is clearly understood by all the players involved. It is no more possible that the Iranians would have taken that deal than that the Palestinians would agree to establish their state in Jordan.

Second, Clinton’s argument that the Iranians will make more concessions begs the question: what concessions? The only remaining significant concession Iran could make would be to agree to give up enriching uranium altogether – and it has made it clear that it is never going to give up that right, which it is guaranteed as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Agreement. In an interview with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, former Iranian negotiator Seyed Hossein Mousavian made it clear that Iran would be prepared to give up 20 percent enrichment if its rights to enrich uranium were recognized.

All of this makes clear that the U.S. knew going into the negotiations that they were not going to succeed. The entire process was an elaborate ritual whose dual purpose was to inoculate President Obama against charges that he was “soft on Tehran” and to make it impossible for Netanyahu to go postal.

In fact, despite the conventional wisdom, it is extremely unlikely that the far-right Israeli leader will attack Iran. His constant threats to do so were the reason that Congress imposed the latest round of sanctions, against the Obama administration’s wishes. But despite Congress’s lockstep support for Netanyahu and anything he decides to do, up to and including an attack on Iran, it would be far too risky for Netanyahu to actually do it. The American people, unlike their bought-off, coerced and/or ideologically myopic political representatives, are sick of Middle East wars. Many, including increasing numbers of American Jews, are growing weary of Israeli intransigence and extremism. They’re also broke. An Israeli attack on Iran would draw in the U.S. and plunge the world into a depression – and the American people would hold Israel to account. Netanyahu may, as the former head of Israel’s spy service said, be “messianic,” but even he knows better than to jeopardize his country’s relationship with America. However, in order to manipulate America, it is essential that he constantly give the impression that he is about to attack Iran.

The Obama administration probably knows that Netanyahu is bluffing. But it has to play out this farce to placate Congress, keep pro-Israel Democrats writing checks, remove a Romney attack line and generally appear tough on Iran.

The irony is that the U.S. and Israel are always claiming that Iran uses negotiations over its nuclear program to play for time while it works feverishly to develop a bomb. But playing for time is precisely what the U.S. just did.

Obama is trying to run out the clock on Iran before the November election. He adroitly stalled the nuke-Iran hysteria that built up during the AIPAC conference in March, but he did so at a price, painting himself into a corner with tough rhetoric denying that containment of a nuclear Iran was an option and threatening to use military force. The negotiations in Baghdad had to fail in order for him to maintain that posture.

His strategy may work. He may stumble over the finish line in November, still dragging out negotiations. And he may overcome the serious headwind of high gas prices and beat Romney. But there is nothing good to be said about his weak and pandering approach. It will not stop the Iranian nuclear program, it is causing the Iranian people to suffer, and it hurts the average U.S. citizen. At bottom, it is an approach predicated not on achieving real progress in dealing with the Tehran regime but on overthrowing it. As such, it is antithetical to Obama’s proclaimed desire to reach out to Iran and to reset America’s relationship with the Middle East. In the long run, he will have to decide whether he really wants to continue a brinkmanship game that locks the U.S. into the self-defeating Middle East policies it pursued during the Bush years.

For the truth is that Obama’s Iran policy represents the last vestige of Bush-era neoconservative extremism. The moralistic, shrill, militaristic Manichean worldview that brought us the “Axis of Evil” and the Iraq war is gone – except when it comes to Iran.

Obama’s schizoid foreign policy – extreme and ideological on Iran, pragmatic and flexible everywhere else — was brought into sharp relief this week. Even as the Baghdad summit broke down, events elsewhere in the Middle East and South Asia demonstrated the utter failure of Bush’s approach – and provided a cautionary warning to Obama of the follies of continuing it with Iran.

Start with Iraq, where Bush’s nine-year-long military adventure is coming to an inglorious end. That unprovoked invasion was supposed to bring an end to an evil regime and transform the Middle East – the same reasons neocons now give for attacking Iran. It left an ethnically fractured, horribly wounded land in the grip of a strongman that is just now emerging from a nightmarish civil war and is still plagued by sectarian violence and terrorism. Our moral responsibility predates the war: America’s crippling pre-war sanctions devastated Iraq’s entire society, and they were one of the reasons why it was so difficult to rebuild it. Congressional proponents of sanctions against Iran should take note.

Then there’s Afghanistan, where after 11 agonizing years we have essentially given up. Afghanistan has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that even a superpower cannot always succeed in imposing its will, that cultural and anthropological differences are critical, and that trying to combine nation building and counterinsurgency in one of the most backward and impoverished places on Earth is a recipe for disaster. The best we can hope for now is that not too many more U.S. troops are shot dead by the Afghans they are training – and that the Taliban does not roll into Kabul the moment we roll out.

Next there’s Syria, where an appalling regime is locked in a brutal struggle with a murky opposition and where all the options are so bad that we have no choice but to remain on the sidelines.

Finally, there’s Egypt, where a nascent democracy is fighting to be born. Everything about this inspiring, painful and threatened revolution, culminating in this week’s elections, was generated by the Egyptian people themselves. America had nothing to do with it. Contrary to claims made by Bush apologists, the appalling example of Iraq was actually a disincentive to throw off Mubarak’s tyranny. As for the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, that dire event so feared by neoconservatives and Islamophobes, they may turn out to be the stable, conservative, don’t-rock-the-boat party.

The lessons these different situations hold for our dealings with Iran are very simple. First, we have far less ability to control what happens in the Middle East than we think. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we tried to impose our will directly and failed. In the other two, we either do not have the ability to intervene (Egypt) or the risks of doing so would be too high (Syria). Second, none of these situations are susceptible to the kind of good-and-evil moralizing that characterized Bush’s approach to the Middle East. Individually they are incredibly complex, and as a whole they are even more complex. There is no simple way to approach any of them. Basing our policy toward them on a Manichaean, good guys vs. bad guys worldview is self-defeating. Bashir Assad is a bad guy, but if we sided with the rebels, we could unleash a civil war even more catastrophic than the one going on now. Some of the Salafis in Egypt may be planning to ban beer and abrogate the Camp David treaty, but if we tried to prevent them from taking power, we would be thwarting the will of those Egyptian people who want those outcomes. Nouri al-Maliki may be a sectarian thug, but the alternative could be worse. Hamid Karzai may be a corrupt, drug-addled charlatan, but he’s the guy who’s there.

And so on, down the list, from Pakistan to Hamas to Netanyahu to Libya. The real world, as opposed to the black-and-white world of the neocons, is all about complexity, grey areas, compromises, diplomacy, flexibility. It’s about accepting that America will have to deal with regimes that do not toe our line. It’s about realizing that our soft power is more effective than our military power. It’s about putting down the Big Stick and trying to actually listen to what the people in the region are saying. It’s the opposite of the Bush Doctrine.

Obama knows this, but the dead hand of neoconservative ideology still drives his Iran policy. Until he shakes it off and accepts that Iran is a regional power and must be dealt with realistically, even though it does not always share our interests, his Middle East policy will continue to resemble that of his predecessor.

From the Atlantic to the Pacific, Argentina to the Philippines, here are the six areas of conflict — all tied to energy supplies — that have made news in just the first few months of 2012:

* A brewing war between Sudan and South Sudan: On April 10th, forces from the newly independent state of South Sudan occupied the oil center of Heglig, a town granted to Sudan as part of a peace settlement that allowed the southerners to secede in 2011.  The northerners, based in Khartoum, then mobilized their own forces and drove the South Sudanese out of Heglig.  Fighting has since erupted all along the contested border between the two countries, accompanied by air strikes on towns in South Sudan.  Although the fighting has not yet reached the level of a full-scale war, international efforts to negotiate a cease-fire and a peaceful resolution to the dispute have yet to meet with success.

This conflict is being fueled by many factors, including economic disparities between the two Sudans and an abiding animosity between the southerners (who are mostly black Africans and Christians or animists) and the northerners (mostly Arabs and Muslims).  But oil — and the revenues produced by oil — remains at the heart of the matter.  When Sudan was divided in 2011, the most prolific oil fields wound up in the south, while the only pipeline capable of transporting the south’s oil to international markets (and thus generating revenue) remained in the hands of the northerners.  They have been demanding exceptionally high “transit fees” — $32-$36 per barrel compared to the common rate of $1 per barrel — for the privilege of bringing the South’s oil to market.  When the southerners refused to accept such rates, the northerners confiscated money they had already collected from the south’s oil exports, its only significant source of funds.  In response, the southerners stopped producing oil altogether and, it appears, launched their military action against the north.  The situation remains explosive.

* Naval clash in the South China Sea: On April 7th, a Philippine naval warship, the 378-foot Gregorio del Pilar, arrived at Scarborough Shoal, a small island in the South China Sea, and detained eight Chinese fishing boats anchored there, accusing them of illegal fishing activities in Filipino sovereign waters.  China promptly sent two naval vessels of its own to the area, claiming that the Gregorio del Pilar was harassing Chinese ships in Chinese, not Filipino waters.  The fishing boats were eventually allowed to depart without further incident and tensions have eased somewhat.  However, neither side has displayed any inclination to surrender its claim to the island, and both sides continue to deploy warships in the contested area.

As in Sudan, multiple factors are driving this clash, but energy is the dominant motive.  The South China Sea is thought to harbor large deposits of oil and natural gas, and all the countries that encircle it, including China and the Philippines, want to exploit these reserves.  Manila claims a 200-nautical mile “exclusive economic zone” stretching into the South China Sea from its western shores, an area it calls the West Philippine Sea; Filipino companies say they have found large natural gas reserves in this area and have announced plans to begin exploiting them.  Claiming the many small islands that dot the South China Sea (including Scarborough Shoal) as its own, Beijing has asserted sovereignty over the entire region, including the waters claimed by Manila; it, too, has announced plans to drill in the area.  Despite years of talks, no solution has yet been found to the dispute and further clashes are likely.

* Egypt cuts off the natural gas flow to Israel: On April 22nd, the Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation and Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company informed Israeli energy officials that they were “terminating the gas and purchase agreement” under which Egypt had been supplying gas to Israel.  This followed months of demonstrations in Cairo by the youthful protestors who succeeded in deposing autocrat Hosni Mubarak and are now seeking a more independent Egyptian foreign policy — one less beholden to the United States and Israel.  It also followed scores of attacks on the pipelines carrying the gas across the Negev Desert to Israel, which the Egyptian military has seemed powerless to prevent.

Ostensibly, the decision was taken in response to a dispute over Israeli payments for Egyptian gas, but all parties involved have interpreted it as part of a drive by Egypt’s new government to demonstrate greater distance from the ousted Mubarak regime and his (U.S.-encouraged) policy of cooperation with Israel.  The Egyptian-Israeli gas link was one of the most significant outcomes of the 1979 peace treaty between the two countries, and its annulment clearly signals a period of greater discord; it may also cause energy shortages in Israel, especially during peak summer demand periods.  On a larger scale, the cutoff suggests a new inclination to use energy (or its denial) as a form of political warfare and coercion.

* Argentina seizes YPF: On April 16th, Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, announced that her government would seize a majority stake in YPF, the nation’s largest oil company.  Under President Kirchner’s plans, which she detailed on national television, the government would take a 51% controlling stake in YPF, which is now majority-owned by Spain’s largest corporation, the energy firm Repsol YPF.  The seizure of its Argentinean subsidiary is seen in Madrid (and other European capitals) as a major threat that must now be combated.  Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel García Margallo, said that Kirchner’s move “broke the climate of cordiality and friendship that presided over relations between Spain and Argentina.”  Several days later, in what is reported to be only the first of several retaliatory steps, Spain announced that it would stop importing biofuels from Argentina, its principal supplier — a trade worth nearly $1 billion a year to the Argentineans.
As in the other conflicts, this clash is driven by many urges, including a powerful strain of nationalism stretching back to the Peronist era, along with Kirchner’s apparent desire to boost her standing in the polls.  Just as important, however, is Argentina’s urge to derive greater economic and political benefit from its energy reserves, which include the world’s third-largest deposits of shale gas.  While long-term rival Brazil is gaining immense power and prestige from the development of its offshore “pre-salt” petroleum reserves, Argentina has seen its energy production languish.  Repsol may not be to blame for this, but many Argentineans evidently believe that, with YPF under government control, it will now be possible to accelerate development of the country’s energy endowment, possibly in collaboration with a more aggressive foreign partner like BP or ExxonMobil.

* Argentina re-ignites the Falklands crisis: At an April 15th-16th Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia — the one at which U.S. Secret Service agents were caught fraternizing with prostitutes — Argentina sought fresh hemispheric condemnation of Britain’s continued occupation of the Falkland Islands (called Las Malvinas by the Argentineans).  It won strong support from every country present save (predictably) Canada and the United States.  Argentina, which says the islands are part of its sovereign territory, has been raising this issue ever since it lost a war over the Falklands in 1982, but has recently stepped up its campaign on several fronts — denouncing London in numerous international venues and preventing British cruise ships that visit the Falklands from docking in Argentinean harbors.  The British have responded by beefing up their military forces in the region and warning the Argentineans to avoid any rash moves.

When Argentina and the U.K. fought their war over the Falklands, little was at stake save national pride, the stature of the country’s respective leaders (Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher vs. an unpopular military junta), and a few sparsely populated islands.  Since then, the stakes have risen immeasurably as a result of recent seismic surveys of the waters surrounding the islands that indicated the existence of massive deposits of oil and natural gas.  Several UK-based energy firms, including Desire Petroleum and Rockhopper Exploration, have begun off-shore drilling in the area and have reported promising discoveries.  Desperate to duplicate Brazil’s success in the development of offshore oil and gas, Argentina claims the discoveries lie in its sovereign territory and that the drilling there is illegal; the British, of course, insist that it’s their territory.  No one knows how this simmering potential crisis will unfold, but a replay of the 1982 war — this time over energy — is hardly out of the question.

* U.S. forces mobilize for war with Iran: Throughout the winter and early spring, it appeared that an armed clash of some sort pitting Iran against Israel and/or the United States was almost inevitable.  Neither side seemed prepared to back down on key demands, especially on Iran’s nuclear program, and any talk of a compromise solution was deemed unrealistic.  Today, however, the risk of war has diminished somewhat — at least through this election year in the U.S. — as talks have finally gotten under way between the major powers and Iran, and as both have adopted (slightly) more accommodating stances.  In addition, U.S. officials have been tamping down war talk and figures in the Israeli military and intelligence communities have spoken out against rash military actions.  However, the Iranians continue to enrich uranium, and leaders on all sides say they are fully prepared to employ force if the peace talks fail.

For the Iranians, this means blocking the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel through which one-third of the world’s tradable oil passes every day.  The U.S., for its part, has insisted that it will keep the Strait open and, if necessary, eliminate Iranian nuclear capabilities.  Whether to intimidate Iran, prepare for the real thing, or possibly both, the U.S. has been building up its military capabilities in the Persian Gulf area, deploying two aircraft carrier battle groups in the neighborhood along with an assortment of air and amphibious-assault capabilities.

One can debate the extent to which Washington’s long-running feud with Iran is driven by oil, but there is no question that the current crisis bears heavily on global oil supply prospects, both through Iran’s threats to close the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for forthcoming sanctions on Iranian oil exports, and the likelihood that any air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities will lead to the same thing.  Either way, the U.S. military would undoubtedly assume the lead role in destroying Iranian military capabilities and restoring oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. This is the energy-driven crisis that just won’t go away.

How Energy Drives the World

All of these disputes have one thing in common: the conviction of ruling elites around the world that the possession of energy assets — especially oil and gas deposits — is essential to prop up national wealth, power, and prestige.

This is hardly a new phenomenon.  Early in the last century, Winston Churchill was perhaps the first prominent leader to appreciate the strategic importance of oil.  As First Lord of the Admiralty, he converted British warships from coal to oil and then persuaded the cabinet to nationalize the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the forerunner of British Petroleum (now BP).  The pursuit of energy supplies for both industry and war-fighting played a major role in the diplomacy of the period between the World Wars, as well as in the strategic planning of the Axis powers during World War II.  It also explains America’s long-term drive to remain the dominant power in the Persian Gulf that culminated in the first Gulf War of 1990-91 and its inevitable sequel, the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The years since World War II have seen a variety of changes in the energy industry, including a shift in many areas from private to state ownership of oil and natural gas reserves.  By and large, however, the industry has been able to deliver ever-increasing quantities of fuel to satisfy the ever-growing needs of a globalizing economy and an expanding, rapidly urbanizing world population.  So long as supplies were abundant and prices remained relatively affordable, energy consumers around the world, including most governments, were largely content with the existing system of collaboration among private and state-owned energy leviathans.

But that energy equation is changing ominously as the challenge of fueling the planet grows more difficult.  Many of the giant oil and gas fields that quenched the world’s energy thirst in years past are being depleted at a rapid pace.  The new fields being brought on line to take their place are, on average, smaller and harder to exploit.  Many of the most promising new sources of energy — like Brazil’s “pre-salt” petroleum reserves deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean, Canadian tar sands, and American shale gas — require the utilization of sophisticated and costly technologies.  Though global energy supplies are continuing to grow, they are doing so at a slower pace than in the past and are continually falling short of demand.  All this adds to the upward pressure on prices, causing anxiety among countries lacking adequate domestic reserves (and joy among those with an abundance).

The world has long been bifurcated between energy-surplus and energy-deficit states, with the former deriving enormous political and economic advantages from their privileged condition and the latter struggling mightily to escape their subordinate position.  Now, that bifurcation is looking more like a chasm.  In such a global environment, friction and conflict over oil and gas reserves — leading to energy conflicts of all sorts — is only likely to increase.

Looking, again, at April’s six energy disputes, one can see clear evidence of these underlying forces in every case.  South Sudan is desperate to sell its oil in order to acquire the income needed to kick-start its economy; Sudan, on the other hand, resents the loss of oil revenues it controlled when the nation was still united, and appears no less determined to keep as much of the South’s oil money as it can for itself.  China and the Philippines both want the right to develop oil and gas reserves in the South China Sea, and even if the deposits around Scarborough Shoal prove meager, China is unwilling to back down in any localized dispute that might undermine its claim to sovereignty over the entire region.

Egypt, although not a major energy producer, clearly seeks to employ its oil and gas supplies for maximum political and economic advantage — an approach sure to be copied by other small and mid-sized suppliers.  Israel, heavily dependent on imports for its energy, must now turn elsewhere for vital supplies or accelerate the development of disputed, newly discovered offshore gas fields, a move that could provoke fresh conflict with Lebanon, which says they lie in its own territorial waters.  And Argentina, jealous of Brazil’s growing clout, appears determined to extract greater advantage from its own energy resources, even if this means inflaming tensions with Spain and Great Britain.

And these are just some of the countries involved in significant disputes over energy.  Any clash with Iran — whatever the motivation — is bound to jeopardize the petroleum supply of every oil-importing country, sparking a major international crisis with unforeseeable consequences.  China’s determination to control its offshore hydrocarbon reserves has pushed it into conflict with other countries with offshore claims in the South China Sea, and into a similar dispute with Japan in the East China Sea.  Energy-related disputes of this sort can also be found in the Caspian Sea and in globally warming, increasingly ice-free Arctic regions.

The seeds of energy conflicts and war sprouting in so many places simultaneously suggest that we are entering a new period in which key state actors will be more inclined to employ force — or the threat of force — to gain control over valuable deposits of oil and natural gas.  In other words, we’re now on a planet heading into energy overdrive.

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But the NYPD’s “covertly follow every single Muslim in the tri-state area” approach to counter-terrorism has its defenders. Like Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who believes Americans Muslims have the right to worship wherever they see fit so long as they don’t pay any attention to the unmarked vans parked across the street.

And the department argues that it is allowed to carry out surveillance wherever it chooses, because there’s no law against just going around looking at things and taking some pictures, right? No, of course not, unless you look sort of Middle Eastern.

The NYPD earlier this week announced that they had totally caught some people who were almost definitely probably Iranian spies. These spies were caught red-handed spying all over the place!

Authorities have interviewed at least 13 people since 2005 with ties to Iran’s government who were seen taking pictures of New York City landmarks, a senior New York Police Department official said Wednesday.

The NYPD’s Mitchell Silber told Congress that Hezbollah and Iran definitely want to blow up New York, and the proof is three incidents of people “associated with the Iranian government” getting caught photographing things, in New York. (I am not much of a terrorist, but if you want pictures of New York City landmarks in order to figure out how best to blow them up why not try Flickr? There are hundreds of thousands of photos of every landmark in the city already online!)

While other so-called intelligence experts say ” there are no known or specific threats indicating Iranian plans to attack inside the U.S.,” Long Island-based Islamaphobe Republican Congressman Peter King and documented supporter of terrorism wants us all to be on high alert, because Hezbollah is everywhere:

Opening the hearing, King said, “We have a duty to prepare for the worst,” warning there may be hundreds of Hezbollah operatives in the United States, including 84 Iranian diplomats at the United Nations and in Washington who, “it must be presumed, are intelligence officers.”

Stop telling the NYPD not to spy on all the Muslims, everywhere! If they don’t keep tabs on all of them, the Iranians will get us!

Hadley was speaking at a panel at the University of Maryland, alongside former Carter administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski went further, saying that even if Iran did obtain nuclear weapons, it could be contained. According to Brzezinski, who was the top policymaker during the time of the Iran revolution and hostage crisis in 1979 and 1980, a nuclear Iran is something the world can live with. “Deterrence needs to be given a chance to work,” he said. “The Iranians are devious, but they are not suicidal.”

The panel was moderated by Shibley Telhami, a veteran pollster and scholar on the Middle East. Telhami released a poll finding that only one in four Americans favor Israel conducting a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program. Close to 70 percent favor the U.S. and other major powers continuing to pursue negotiations with Iran, a position that is supported by majorities of Republicans (58 percent), Democrats (79 percent) and Independents (67 percent). The poll, conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, found only 14 percent of respondents said the U.S. should encourage Israel to strike Iran’s program. Steven Kull, director of PIPA, said, “One of the reasons Americans are so cool toward the idea of Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear program is that most believe that it is not likely to produce much benefit.”

Brzezinski agreed heartily. “We have no idea how such a war would end,” he said. “Iran has military capabilities, it could retaliate by destabilizing Iraq.”

Hadley was much more worried about the consequences of a nuclear Iran. “Iran is different than North Korea, which is more inward-directed,” he said. “I worry that they would be more ambitious in support of terrorism and that other countries” in the region would also want nuclear weapons. Still, Hadley believes that the Obama administration has been pursuing the right approach with Iran, focusing on sanctions instead of opting for military action. Even if covert action or taking other approaches to delaying Iran’s nuclear weapons program only worked for two or three years, that would be worth it, he said.

“The Iranian public is watching what is going on in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya,” he said. Delaying a military strike may offer a chance for something to change in Iran, either through diplomacy or through the leadership’s reconsideration of its foreign-affairs approach. He believes Iran’s recent agreement to nuclear talks came as a result of increasing pressure on the regime.

Brzezinski is worried about a situation whereby Iran is forced to choose between a humiliating retreat and crippling sanctions. Such an ultimatum offers no chance for the regime to take a face-saving retreat, similar to how the Soviet Union was granted concessions in return for removing its missiles from Cuba during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. “The Israelis have been predicting since 1994 every year that Iran will have nuclear weapons the next year,” he said. While the United States has a rightful moral obligation toward Israel, Brzezinski said, offering it protection under America’s nuclear umbrella and resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are the best way to integrate it permanently into the international community.

In contrast to some top Republicans, Hadley said that America should engage with Islamist and Muslim political parties that have gained power in Egypt and elsewhere. “Just because they have the word ‘Islamic’ or ‘Muslim’ in the name — we should be pushing them to pursue pluralism,” he said.

Hadley’s comments are a marker of how top Bush administration official have been chastened by the Iraq disaster. With the important exception of Cheney and Rumsfeld, all seem to admit that the war did not go as planned — to the extent that it was planned). One of the few good things to come out of the Iraq war is that it has cautioned American leaders against starting another.

In a rhetorical style that was less hostile than usual, Ayatollah Khamenei hailed Obama’s comments as “good words” and called them “an exit from delusion.” Meanwhile, his nuclear negotiator, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, resumed talks in Vienna over Iran’s controversial nuclear program with five western powers including China for the first time in more than a year. He called the talks “a new chapter.”

Both seemed to be efforts to divert threats at a time when hawks in Israel are beating the drums of war and calling for a military strike as soon as spring to stop Iran from making a nuclear bomb. Sanctions are crippling Iran’s economy and the value of its currency, the rial, has plunged since fall to half against the U.S. dollar.  

It is too early to take Ayatollah Khamenei’s comments as an overture to the West. “I think we have to wait and see if anything will come out of the nuclear talks,” said Mehdi Khalaji, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “So far he just seemed glad that war is not imminent.”

The victory of Ayatollah Khamenei’s supporters in the March 2 elections has, at least symbolically, solidified his authority. According to official figures, his supporters won 75 percent of the seats. The fate of the remaining 65 seats in the 290-member assembly will be decided in run-off elections.

The fact that supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won only 2 seats, compared to 70 percent of the seats in 2008, is being interpreted as nothing but a clear victory for Ayatollah Khamenei.

Ayatollah Khamenei, who has the final word on state matters, has made Ahmadinejad a target after he challenged his authority. The president tried to reopen relations with the United States, despite opposition from the supreme leader, believing that rapprochement with the West would be popular with Iranian electorate. He appointed his supporters to key ministries that had been historically controlled by the supreme leader. Ayatollah Khamenei lashed back late last year and publically embarrassed the president by reappointing the Intelligence Minister whom Ahmadinejad had fired.

The elections were not only about sidelining Ahmadinejad, but also restoring the prestige and an image of strength to the supreme leader. In the days before the election, Ayatollah Khamenei was concerned only with turn out. The elections were the first since the 2009 presidential race that triggered massive anti-regime protests. Khamenei had gone to extreme lengths to support Ahmadinejad against pro-reform forces that demanded more political and social openness.

Before the vote this month, Ayatollah Khamenei urged people to vote in large numbers to “smack the face” of the enemies, a reference to Israel and the United States. His supporters equated low turnout with an invitation for a military strike, because a low turnout would project an image of weakness at a time when the country had come under increasing threats.

The opposition movement that drew hundreds of thousands into the streets boycotted the election and urged its supporters to stay away from the polls. Their candidates were banned from running and their leaders have been under house arrest for the past year.

No independent reporting confirmed the 64 percent turnout. The regime boasted that it was an “epic victory,” compared to 57 percent that voted in parliamentary votes in 2008. Foreign reporters were not allowed to roam freely and were bused to specific polling stations where they were greeted with enthusiastic voters.

Apathy among the large middle-class generated almost no citizen journalism except for calls from Iran to a call-in program on BBC Persian Service that was beamed into Iran on satellite. Callers said the polling places in Tehran and large cities were deserted.

The contrasting numbers that the government released in the early hours of the count failed to convince people it was different from the 2009 election that was widely viewed as fraudulent. One government official put the turnout at 34 percent while the Interior Minister, Mostafa Najar, said it was 64 percent. Eventually, the Interior Ministry, which was counting the votes, deleted the turnout figure all together from its website. The semi-official news agency, Mehr, even reported the total number of votes as being higher than the number of eligible voters in a small city of Ilam.

Although there were no immediate claims of irregularities, it was Ahmadinejad’s younger sister, Parvin Ahmadinejad, who vowed this time that she would make formal complaints of fraud in her hometown of Garmsar where she lost to a rival candidate.

As for Ahmadinejad, he will become the first president next week in the Islamic regime to be summoned before parliament to answer MP’s questions over alleged mismanagement. The move has been seen as an effort to curb his power. In another blow, the Guardian Council, a watchdog body close to Ayatollah Khamenei, blocked the president from setting up a committee responsible for supervising the implementation of the constitution. The committee would have given Ahmadinejad more leverage to ensure that, as president, he was given all the power the constitution granted him.