Manipulating language is a wonderful thing. The Obama Administration, by putting the word 'public' in front of option, seeks to imply the public would still have have choice in matters pertaining to health. Lieberman looks behind the veiled curtain and has many issues and his obdurateness may de-rail Obama, Pelosi, Reid's ambitious efforts.
Madison feared political parties would become the death knell of our Republic. Independent Senator Lieberman has become living proof why Madison was right. Lieberman's independent spirit and lack of political party affiliation has buttressed his power making him a force to be reckoned with and a defender of the American people's interests.
Perhaps Lieberman can bring Obama around to being a better president than his current policies would suggest. It is a long shot but one Obama should consider but then, Obama would have to go against the Far Left and he might lack that kind of courage.
My February speaker, Kim Strassel, interviews the Conn. Senator. (See 1 below.)
The 'public option' concept is not just limited to health care. Its application in education is also being resisted.
Perhaps it is finally dawning on Americans that Obama and the Left want to intrude government into virtually every facet of American life and eventually control more and more of the nation's private sector. (See 2 below.)
British humor from my Brit friend. (See 3 below.)
A lawyer playing president builds his case? (See 4 below.)
Michael Goodwin sees a man in a muddle drowning in a puddle. (See 4a below.)
Then Mona Charen piles on with her comments - no chivalry. (See 4b below.)
But have no fear the fate of the world is all being decided on a college campus. (See 4c below.)
Dick
1)No Way, No How, to the Public Option: The Connecticut senator, free of partisan loyalties, has a pivotal role in the health-care debate
By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
'About two months ago my wife and I were out with another couple, and they said 'So, how's it going?'—and I knew what they meant. I said, 'I'm doing my own independent thing, but for the first time in five years, I feel out of the crossfire . . .' And my wife said, 'Knowing you, before long you'll mess up.'" Joe Lieberman laughs a big, hearty laugh, then adds: "And then came the public option!"
The senator from Connecticut doesn't look sorry. Sitting in his office on Wednesday, he looks like he's having the time of his life. Ever since his bruising 2006 re-election, in which he quit the Democratic Party to run as an independent, Mr. Lieberman has been a man unleashed. He's caucused with Democrats yet campaigned for John McCain. He's enthusiastically supporting President Barack Obama's Afghanistan surge and just as spiritedly criticizing his decision to try 9/11 terrorists in U.S. courts. He's joined Democrats to reform health care, even as he's promised to torpedo their government-run insurance option.
And he can't be ignored: He's crucial to mustering the 60 votes necessary to overcome Republican filibusters. Mr. Lieberman says he was "surprised" to have his influence, but he isn't afraid to use it. "I always felt I was an independent-minded person . . . but there is no question that having been re-elected as an 'independent' does give me a feeling of liberation . . . I don't feel like I have to view everything through the prism of partisanship." He grins and adds: "Through anything."
Back in October, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid snipped that Mr. Lieberman was "the least of" his health care "problems." That's no longer true, if it ever was. He has the power to strip a public option out of the Senate health-care bill, and even demand a more moderate rewrite. Mr. Lieberman himself puts the odds of a bill getting through at "greater than 50-50" but bluntly warns: "It won't be what Senator Reid put in."
"They are going to have to drop some things . . . the obvious being the public option"—a controversial, government-run insurance program that Mr. Lieberman adamantly opposes on philosophical and economic grounds. Unlike some Democrats who have criticized it but remained open to negotiation, he says he is not bluffing.
"I'm being more stubborn and certain about this . . . I think it's such a significant step for the country to create another entitlement program and to have the government going into a business, I feel like I've got to say no."
.When Mr. Lieberman says no public option, he means no public option—not an "opt-in" or an "opt out" or a "trigger" (a public option only comes into effect if private insurers fail to spread enough coverage). "We are at the point now where this has become the classic legislative process of trying to get a fig leaf that everyone can hide behind. And I don't want to do that."
Why is he adamant? Mr. Lieberman says that while he is not "a conspiratorial person," he believes the public option is intended as a way for the government to take over health care. "I've been working for health-care reform in different ways since I arrived here," he says. "It was always about how do we make the system more efficient and less costly, and how do we expand coverage to people who can't afford it, and how do we adopt some consumer protections from the insurance companies . . . So where did this public option come from?" It was barely a blip, he says, in last year's presidential campaign.
"I started to ask some of my colleagues in the Democratic caucus, privately, and two of them said "some in our caucus, and some outside in interest groups, after the president won such a great victory and there were more Democrats in the Senate and the House, said this is the moment to go for single payer.'" So, I joke, the senator is, in fact, as big a "conspiracy theorist" as me. He laughingly rejoins: "But I have evidence!"
Mr. Lieberman notes that the public option serves no other purpose: "It doesn't help one poor person get insurance who doesn't have it now. It doesn't compel one insurance company to provide insurance to somebody who has an illness. And . . . it doesn't do anything to reduce the cost of insurance."
Mr. Lieberman dismisses Democratic arguments that it is necessary to keep insurers honest. "Sometimes the private sector does things that are wrong, and when they do, you regulate—sometimes you litigate," he says. "But never in the history of America . . . have we tried to keep one industry honest by having government go into that business to compete with the industry."
He is also "really fixed on the national debt." Several provisions in the Reid bill, he says, will result in "the government accepting unlimited liability for debts incurred by this government-run public option." And those debts will come. "If we create this, it's going to run deficits. Not for evil reasons. Congress just likes to say 'yes' when people ask for additional services to be covered."
There's also the question of priorities; "[W]e have problems in the health-care system that need to be fixed, but we have much more urgent problems in our economy. One, getting out of the recession. Two, doing something about the awful debt."
He doesn't believe the bill is deficit-neutral and has "concerns as to whether we or succeeding Congresses will really adopt" the proposed cuts to Medicare. While he's not opposed to taxes, he's opposed to immediate ones. He wants to "push off" the $10 billion "fee" on industry players. "It's not overwhelming, but $10 billion is $10 billion. My concern is that if you apply the tax right away, it is probably going to result in higher premiums for people who have insurance, and that's not a good thing to do in a recession."
Mr. Lieberman says the Democrats' "political problems" come from "supporting two goals which don't go together"—increasing coverage and reducing health-care costs. The bill needs more of the latter. He'll push to finance it with a cap on the tax exclusion Americans get through their employers for health plans because this exclusion, he says, has the "most effect on creating incentives not to overuse the insurance system." He will also work with Republicans to enact malpractice reform.
Does he risk overplaying his hand? Maine Republican Olympia Snowe has suggested she'd support a "trigger" for a public option, and if Democrats win her over, they don't need Mr. Lieberman. He responds that he's not alone. "[Arkansas] Sen. [Blanche] Lincoln, when she spoke explaining why she was voting [to go to debate], was very absolute about her opposition to the public option. I think there's at least Blanche and me, and maybe one or two others."
Mr. Reid's problem is that liberals are threatening to bolt if the bill doesn't include a public option. Mr. Lieberman is unsympathetic. "Some people say to me, 'You would stop health-care reform because of the public option? I mean, you support a lot of this stuff!' So I say, I'll ask it another way: 'You mean the people who are supporting the public option, which is new to this debate, would stop all these reforms because they are stubborn?'"
***
When I last interviewed Mr. Lieberman three years ago, he was helping an embattled Republican president hold on to Iraq. Now he's appeared on TV to help a Democratic president keep his party on board with a troop surge in Afghanistan. He offers warm words about Mr. Obama's Tuesday speech announcing an additional 30,000 troops, and while some feel the president could have been stronger, he gives Mr. Obama credit for his political courage.
"He made a decision that is at odds with the majority of the members of the Democratic Party—not just here in Congress, but as reflected in every opinion poll. So you've got to say that he put what he thought were the national security interest ahead of partisan political interests. There was no easy way out here—but there were easier ways, politically."
Is 30,000 troops enough? Mr. Lieberman says he was reassured by the comments of Gen. Stanley McChrystal. And words "privately" with Gen. David Petraeus that this number was sufficient "to turn the tide."
Like many, he was concerned by the 18-month deadline Mr. Obama mentioned. But after probing Defense Secretary Bob Gates in a Senate hearing this week, he's now more confident. "[Gates] compared it to the so-called 'overwatch,' which is really what we did in Iraq. As we felt the Iraqis were prepared to take over in certain areas, we pulled back but we didn't pull out." Mr. Lieberman believes this "pull back" is what begins in July 2011, and also felt he got assurances that it would start only in "uncontested" areas—and that there is no deadline for when all 30,000 troops must leave.
Mr. Lieberman notes that the president's speech needs follow up in order to rally the country, but adds, "The ultimate way the public supports a war is when it succeeds." He remembers the years of state residents protesting Iraq outside his office. "Honestly, it never even comes up now. Never. Because it succeeded."
On the administration's broader war on terror, his appraisal is more "mixed." The Obama team has "come around" to the importance of the Patriot Act, which must soon be reauthorized, and "[o]n the intelligence gathering, court-authorized surveillance, they've been strong." Closing Guantanamo, however, "makes no sense"; he says "[w]e're going to have to either build or pay for a facility here that's not going to be any better—it's probably going to be worse."
He's totally against the administration's decision to try 9/11 terrorists in federal court. He notes that the U.S. has used military tribunals since the Revolutionary War, and moreover, the U.S. Congress passed tribunal legislation giving detainees due process that goes "way beyond even the Geneva Convention."
So why did the administration do it? Mr. Lieberman drops the "ideology" word. "Part of is to show the world how well we treat the people who did the worst deeds to us," he says. But he adds, "it doesn't really change anybody's attitude toward us—in a way that changes their behavior toward us."
He was "skeptical" of Mr. Obama's decision to engage Iran but figured it was worth a try. "It was a test of Iran and, of course, they have profoundly failed the test. The only positive to come out of it . . . is that the world now has no reason to blame us for the state of relations."
Mr. Lieberman is now working on legislation to allow Mr. Obama to impose tougher economic sanctions. Just as important, he says, the U.S. must do more to support the Iranian opposition. "The only thing this fanatical regime cares about more than building nuclear weapons is its own survival" and until that's in doubt, they won't cooperate.
As for Mr. Lieberman's future, he seems unlikely to become less independent any time soon. He ends with an amusing conversation he recently had with his son: "One person will say to him, 'Your dad, I thought he was a good guy. How could he stop health reform?!' Then another person says "I can't believe your father is all that stands between America and our economic system as we know it!'" From the mischievous look on Sen. Lieberman's face, you can tell he loves that no one can fit him in a box.
2)Public Option Campus Revolt :The federal student-loan takeover gets booed in academia
There's encouraging news on that other Washington effort to force Americans into a government-run system. The White House plan to drive private lenders out of the market for student loans is igniting a backlash on campus and Capitol Hill.
The typical tale of a free-speech controversy on campus involves administrators landing on some poor undergrad who violates political correctness. But in this story the administrators have been afraid to speak as the Department of Education pressured them to drop private lenders and embrace the department's own Direct Lending (DL) program. The pending bill, which has passed the House but is stalled in the Senate, would ban private lenders from making federally guaranteed loans after July 1, 2010.
Congress has already enacted regulations in recent years to discourage making loans without a federal guarantee. And many lenders have quit the business. Now the White House and Democrats like California Rep. George Miller want to go further and convert students from private loans largely backed by the taxpayer into government loans made and serviced by government and backed by the taxpayer. Think of this as a prelude to how Congress will rig the rules for any public option in health care.
The private lenders have been the most popular choice, while—big surprise—the government's program has a history of shoddy customer service. But before the bill has even come to the Senate floor, federal officials have been making unsolicited contacts to schools urging them to accept this "public option." In October, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sent a letter to schools nationwide offering to help them "in taking the necessary steps to ensure uninterrupted access to federal student loans by ensuring your institution is Direct Loan-ready for the 2010-2011 academic year."
Schools got the message. The leader of a large university recently refused to discuss the issue with us on the record, fearful that the feds are taking names. Rep. John Kline (R., Minn.) has asked the Department of Education's inspector general to investigate efforts by officials to encourage outside groups to advocate for the ban on private lenders. He wants to know if department staff violated a federal law against lobbying with appropriated funds, among other possible offenses.
Several House Democrats wrote to Mr. Duncan this week questioning the "aggressive outreach" to schools on behalf of one option while Congress is still considering others. We seem to remember from our student days that the executive branch is supposed to enforce laws only after the legislature has written them. Over in the Senate, more than a dozen Democrats have criticized the Administration's plan, and Senator Bob Casey has offered an alternative that would allow private lenders to stay in business.
Meanwhile, faced with the prospect of a monopoly government-run loan provider, the tweed-jacket crowd is finding its voice. Mr. Duncan spoke this week at a conference for financial aid officers in Nashville, and he may be sorry that he agreed to take questions from the audience. To vigorous applause, several attendees questioned whether financing that's good enough for government work will be good enough for their students.
Ted Malone of the University of Alaska said that the department had already "created an impossible-to-administer program" for Pell Grants and therefore said it's "hard to trust that you're going to be looking out for our best interests" when forcing all colleges into the government-run lending system.
Another speaker talked about how hard the private firms work to serve students and said, "My partnership with my lenders is being taken away from me."
Sheila Nelson Hensley of Virginia's Bluefield College said, "I'm concerned that there's going to be a delay in us receiving our funds, which will ultimately affect our students and the cash flow of our institution."
When even such natural allies as college administrators are warning that Team Obama is moving too quickly and too far left, perhaps it's time to go back to school on this issue. Focusing on the needs of students and taxpayers—rather than an ideological conviction that government always knows and does best—would be a good place to start.
3)Number 8: Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
Number 7: Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach a person to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks.
Number 6: Some people are like a Slinky ... not really good for anything, but you still can't help but smile when you shove them down the stairs.
Number 5: Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
Number 4: All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.
Number 3: Why does a slight tax increase cost you £200.00 and a substantial tax cut save you £0.30?
Number 2: In the '60's, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.
AND THE NUMBER 1 THOUGHT FOR 2009: We know exactly where one cow with Mad-cow-disease is located among the millions and millions of cows in the UK , but we haven't got a clue as to where thousands of illegal immigrants and terrorists are located. Maybe we should put the Department of Agriculture in charge of immigration.
And the BONUS thought for today: "Life is like a Curry. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow."
4)US to focus on uranium findings in Syria - evidence of Iranian proliferation
A senior official in the Obama administration described the UN nuclear watchdog inspectors' discovery of traces of highly processed plutonium at the bombed Syrian-North Korean facility at Dir a-Zur as a "smoking gun" - evidence of Iran's covert nuclear activities and proliferation, Washington sources report.
It was confirmed by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors in their Nov. 30 visit to the site which was demolished by Israel in September 2007.
Obama administration sources are confident that with this information of Iranian violations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, even Russia and China will have to endorse stiff new sanctions against the Islamic Republic.
The soil samples the inspectors collected at their last visit to Dir a-Zur confirmed an earlier discovery of uranium used in separating out bomb-grade plutonium from spent nuclear fuel which the US believes was supplied by Iran. Those experiments were clearly further along that previously assessed.
The same traces were found at the Syrian nuclear research reactor near Damascus.
Washington intends to present these findings as solid evidence of the tie-in between the Syrian and Iranian military nuclear programs, together with proofs of Tehran's direct involvement in the planning and construction of the demolished Syria reactor.
Iran will also be shown to have supplied Syria with the nuclear materials and technology for its operation as part of its own program to attain a nuclear weapons capability.
The US will use this body of evidence to demonstrate Iran has been in grave breach of its NPT obligations since 2007. This week, officials in Tehran said their government has no plans to abdicate from the treaty.
According to Washington sources, the Obama administration may decide to plant the information in the US and world media before making a formal presentation.
Last Thursday, Dec. 3, Iran's national security council director Saeed Jalili visited Damascus for urgent consultations with Syrian leaders on fending off the coming American assault on its nuclear program based on the evidence of Syria covert nuclear activities. His party included members of Iran's nuclear energy commission who helped build the Syria's North Korean reactor.
Jalili and Syrian president Bashar Assad spent several hours discussing how to respond to the forthcoming American revelations.
Their talks were violently interrupted by the bomb blast on an Iranian pilgrim bus in central Damascus. Official figures have not been released but the number of dead is believed to be fifteen Iranians with many more injured. Assad ordered Syrian officials on the spot to claim the blast was an accident and not an act of terror. Both sides assumed that the hand behind the attack had advance knowledge of the Iranian-Syrian conference and was bent on sabotaging it.
4a)Bam: Man in the muddle
By MICHAEL GOODWIN
Perhaps it was inevitable. A man who voted "present" 130 times in the Illinois Legislature couldn't possibly morph into a savvy and decisive leader of the free world in such a short time.
Yet even the pessimists among us are alarmed by the cloud of uncertainty and confusion hanging over the White House. Less than a year on the job, President Obama seems to have run out of both charm and ideas.
The biggest issues facing a president are the economy and national security. They are the whole ballgame. Everything else is detail.
It is now frighteningly obvious Obama doesn't have a clear, understandable strategy on either.
It's one thing to lack confidence in a president's plan. It's quite another when he doesn't have a plan.
He began his hokey job summit by conceding many viewed it as a gimmick, then promptly confirmed those suspicions by saying it was time to put aside partisanship. This from the guy who gives blank checks and high praise to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, the most partisan congressional leaders in recent memory.
Obama also said he was open to new ideas, then shot down a corporate executive who complained too many big-government initiatives were creating uncertainty and leading employers to hold off hiring.
The president said it was a "legitimate concern," then plunged ahead by rote to defend health care, carbon taxes and massive education spending -- the very things the exec said were the problem.
Why bother telling him anything? He doesn't listen to what he doesn't want to hear.
He certainly didn't listen to the advisers who warned him his Afghanistan speech would come off as a muddle. It was clear to some in his endless war council that sending 30,000 more troops to fight a war he called vital, then slapping an 18-month limit was by definition a contradiction.
Predictably, liberals blasted the escalation, under which Obama has tripled the American troop presence from about 35,000 to over 100,000. Conservatives blasted the deadline as dangerous to those troops and their mission.
As a fuming Sen. John McCain memorably declared, "You can't have it both ways."
Apparently, you can if you are Barack Obama. At least you think you can.
He is probably taking comfort in a common political conceit. To wit, that bipartisan criticism proves the policy is the sound middle between extremes.
Not this time. This time, the middle path reflects a transparent effort at political compromise that has nothing to do with sound policy. After three months of deliberation, he punted on the central question.
Either the war is vital, or it's not. It can't be vital until an arbitrary deadline.
Two days of hearings on Capitol Hill didn't clarify the issue. Top aides alternately called the deadline flexible and important, leaving the muddle in place.
If Obama has any sense of the dimensions of the doubts he faces, he's keeping it well hidden. He's going to Copenhagen to push for global emissions rules, even as the science consensus he touts was arrived at by cooking the books and squelching dissent.
If he actually succeeded getting the rules in place at home, they would add another burden to job creation and economic growth. Still he plunges forward, unmolested by inconvenient facts.
Facts schmacts, reality is what the White House says it is.
Take the $787 billion stimulus bill, the economic equivalent of an empty suit. Just in time for the jobs summit, Vice President Joe Biden suddenly declared it saved or created up to 1.6 million jobs. That was a cool million jobs more than claimed before.
Poof. A million more jobs. That was easy.
4b)Does Obama Listen to Himself?
By Mona Charen
Barack Obama is demonstrating bottomless reservoirs of gracelessness. A full 13 months after his election, in the course of justifying the deployment of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, President Obama could not spare a word of praise for George W. Bush -- not even when recounting the nation's "unified" response to 9/11. To the contrary, throughout his pained recitation of the choices we face in Afghanistan, he adverted at least half a dozen times to the supposed blunders of his predecessor.
It's beginning to sound whiny -- and unpresidential. Enough about the terrible mess he inherited. Let's hear a little more about the tremendous honor that has been bestowed on him. Ronald Reagan inherited a worse situation in 1980 -- inflation at 13.5 percent; the prime rate at 21 percent; the Soviets in Afghanistan; American hostages in Tehran; communist coups in 10 new countries over the previous decade -- but Reagan never impugned his predecessor. As biographer Lou Cannon noted "Reagan ... was generous to Carter in his public statements even though he did not care for him."
George W. Bush showed the same chivalry toward Bill Clinton, declining to breathe a negative word about him -- even when sorely tempted by the pardon scandal that further tarnished an already clouded tenure. Even now, despite the unremitting barrage from his successor, Bush keeps silent, true to his tradition of civility toward opponents.
President Obama is so spiteful that he warps history to fit his prejudices. Everything was going brilliantly in Afghanistan, he explains, until "the decision was made to wage a second war, in Iraq." Iraq took the lion's share of resources and ruined our international reputation, he argues. But in the next sentence, without acknowledging the surge (far less the courage Bush demonstrated in pursuing it despite tremendous political and military pressure against it), Obama boasts that "we are bringing the Iraq War to a successful conclusion" and "successfully leaving Iraq to its people."
No doubt Obama's "success" in Iraq is attributable, as he sees it, to the fact that "I've spent this year renewing our alliances and forging new partnerships" including "a new beginning" between America and the Muslim world. Oh yes, that's going so well. As the Taliban gain strength in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the chief object of Mr. Obama's flirtation, Iran, spat in the eyes of the U.S. and the U.N. last week by announcing that it will build 10 new nuclear enrichment facilities. This follows contemptuous brush-offs from Iran's bosses. In November, Ayatollah Khameini again spurned Obama's "many private approaches" saying it would be "perverted" to negotiate with the United States.
President Obama has been crystal clear that Bush's "arrogance" led to disaster for the United States. And once again, he's at pains to emphasize his new approach. The president assured the Afghans that "America is your partner, never your patron" (though a miserably poor and besieged country might like a patron very much). The odd thing is Obama's tone toward our "partners" sounded downright scolding in several places. "This effort must be based on performance. The days of providing a blank check are over." That is not exactly partnerish talk. "... We will be clear," he continued, "about what we expect from those who receive our assistance ... We expect those who are ineffective or corrupt to be held accountable."
It would be nice if that standard were applied to Washington, D.C., far less Kabul. But this is the tone of his vaunted new diplomacy? Of Pakistan, the president said, "In the past, we too often defined our relationship ... narrowly. Those days are over. Moving forward, we are committed to a partnership ... built on ... mutual interest, mutual respect, and mutual trust." But then comes the poke in the shoulder: "... We have made it clear that we cannot tolerate a safe haven for terrorists whose location is known and whose intentions are clear."
Well, perhaps President Obama doesn't realize how he sounds. That must be it. He had the gall, after kneecapping Bush, to demand a halt to "rancor" and "partisanship." But the greater outrage was his pious declaration that "we must make it clear to every man, woman, and child around the world who lives under the dark cloud of tyranny that America will speak out on behalf of their human rights"? This from the man whose State Department told China early on that human rights were not our priority; who has decided he can deal with the butchers of Darfur; who averted his eyes from the bloody crackdown on protests in Iran; and who tamely permitted the Chinese to censor his words during his visit.
But there's no cause for self-examination. There's still George W. Bush to kick around.
4c)Who Loses the Iran Game
By David Ignatius
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- How will the confrontation over Iran's nuclear program evolve during the next year? If a simulation game played at Harvard last week is any guide, the situation won't look pretty: Iran will be closer to having the bomb and America will fail to obtain tough U.N. sanctions; diplomatic relations with Russia, China and Europe will be strained; and Israel will be threatening unilateral military action.
My scorecard had Team Iran as the winner and Team America as the loser. The U.S. team -- unable to stop the Iranian nuclear program and unwilling to go to war -- concluded the game by embracing a strategy of containment and deterrence. The Iranian team wound up with Russia and China as its diplomatic protectors. And the Israeli team ended in a sharp break with Washington.
Mind you, this was just an exercise. But it revealed some important real-life dynamics -- and the inability of any diplomatic strategy, so far, to stop the Iranian nuclear push.
The simulation was organized by Graham Allison, the head of the Belfer Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. It was animated by the key players: Nicholas Burns, former undersecretary of state, as President Barack Obama; and Dore Gold, Israel's former ambassador to the United Nations, as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. They agreed to let me use their names in this summary.
The gamers framed their strategies realistically: Obama's America wants to avoid war, which means restraining Israel; Iran wants to continue its nuclear program, even as it dickers over a deal to enrich uranium outside its borders, such as the one floated in Geneva in October; Israel doesn't trust America to stop Iran, and is looking for help from the Gulf Arab countries and Europe.
The Obama team was confounded by congressional demands for unilateral U.S. sanctions against companies involved in Iran's energy sector. This shot at Iran ended up backfiring, since some of the key companies were from Russia and China -- the very nations whose support the U.S. needs for strong U.N. sanctions. The Russians and Chinese were so offended that they began negotiating with Tehran behind America's back.
"We started out thinking we were playing a weak hand, but by the end, everyone was negotiating for us," said the leader of the Iranian team, Columbia University professor Gary Sick. By the December 2010 hypothetical endpoint, Iran had doubled its supply of low-enriched uranium and was pushing ahead with weaponization.
The trickiest problem for our imaginary Obama was his relationship with the fictive Netanyahu. As Burns and Gold played these roles, they had two sharp exchanges in which America asked for assurances that Israel wouldn't attack Iran without U.S. permission. The Israeli prime minister, as played by Gold, refused to make that pledge, insisting that Israel alone must decide how to protect its security. Whereupon Burns' president warned that if Israel did strike, contrary to U.S. interests, Washington might publicly denounce the attack -- producing an open break as in the 1956 Suez crisis.
The two key players agreed later that the simulation highlighted real tensions that the two countries need to understand better. "The most difficult problem we have is how to restrain Israel," said Burns. "My own view is that we need to play for a long-term solution, avoid a third war in the greater Middle East and wear down the Iranians over time."
Gold said the game clarified for him a worrying difference of opinion between U.S. and Israeli leaders: "The U.S. is moving away from preventing a nuclear Iran to containing a nuclear Iran -- with deterrence based on the Cold War experience. That became clear in the simulation. Israel, in contrast, still believes a nuclear Iran must be prevented."
The game showed that diplomacy will become much harder next year. As Burns explains: "The U.S. probably will get no help from Russia and China, Iran will be divided and immobile, Europe will be weak, and the U.S. may have to restrain Israel."
What worried me most about this game is what worries me in real life: There is a "fog of diplomacy," comparable to Clausewitz's famous fog of war. Players aren't always clear what's really happening; they misread or ignore signals sent by others; they take actions that have unintended and sometimes devastating consequences.
The simulated world of December 2010 looks ragged and dangerous. If the real players truly mean to contain Iran and stop it from getting the bomb, they need to avoid the snares that were so evident in the Harvard game.
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