Iran Back on Washington's Front Burner

The mullahs in Tehran have got to be starting to feel the heat, with an IAEA report slated for release on Wednesday expected to detail Iran's advances in building a nuclear weapon and chatter growing in Israel about a preemptive strike.

The rhetoric is ramping up in Congress, as well, and the IAEA report will likely only strengthen the hawks on Capitol Hill. Already, the revelation last month of an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States have prompted calls for punitive measures, as my colleague Tim Starks and I reported at the time.

Since then, the House Foreign Affairs Committee has marked up and passed an aggressive bipartisan sanctions bill that would force the administration to pursue a wide array of international companies doing business with Tehran. The Senate outlook for the bill is hazy at the moment (CQ, $) -- different blocs of senators are pursuing different tracks which makes action this year unlikely. But freshman Sen. Mark Kirk, R-IL, is now threatening to try and enact one of the toughest measures in the House bill -- sanctioning companies doing business with Iran's Central Bank -- through an amendment to pending appropriations legislation.

That no doubt is making the Obama administration uneasy. However, it's going to be difficult for the White House to resist the drumbeat for stiff countermeasures against an ever-defiant Iran. What remains unclear is whether any amount of international pressure can shift Iran's calculations at this point. It has not looked promising up to this point.

Mullen's Comments on Pakistan Changed Everything ... and Nothing

Every few months, it seems, relations between the United States and Pakistan reach a new low --just this week, in fact, former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said told an audience at the Carnegie Endowment they had reached their lowest point yet. And yet, behind the scenes, officials with both government continue to communicate and cooperate on a number of different fronts.

Retiring Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen’s testimony to Congress last month that one of the region’s most notorious militant groups was a “veritable arm” of Pakistani intelligence is likely to make that dialogue more difficult. In a piece for this week's CQ Weekly magazine, I looked into the ways that Mullen's remarks strengthen the hardliners on Pakistan in Congress, and the likelihood they will force cuts in aid to Islamabad.

What still remains in question whether just some or all of the approximately $5 billion aid requested for fiscal year 2012 will be cut, and whether policymakers will try to go further, perhaps pushing for inclusion of the Haqqani network on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations, among other measures. Such moves would increase the pressure on elements inside Pakistan, but they also are bound to make it more difficult to build a cooperative, regional solution to the war across the border in Afghanistan. Because there's still no getting around the fact, experts say, that Islamabad will need to play an integral part in any such settlement.

Is the GOP trying to starve the United Nations into submission?

House Foreign Affairs Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) -- and longtime United Nations critics -- has been drawing a lot of press for a bill she says would force major reforms at the UN, but which critics say would undermine the entire institution.

In a piece I wrote for Foreign Policy that ran on their web site this week, I explain how Ros-Lehtinen's bill is unlikely to get through Congress, but the U.N. and their backers still have plenty to worry about from Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Rubio Rising

Is it possible to have one foot in the Tea Party and one in U.S. foreign policy's most fervent camp of hawks? Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is going to find out

Rubio's speech Tuesday in North Carolina on America's role in the world -- he's calling for a robust one -- is just the Republican freshman's latest effort to burnish his credentials on international affairs, even as he toes a staunch fiscal conservative line at home.

Lessons of Libya

It should come as no surprise to anyone who lives in Washington -- or follows the policy debates here -- that what lessons policy makers should draw from the overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya depend on who you ask.

Is it a victory for Western interventionism, the "responsibility to protect" doctrine, and all the rest? Or a defeat -- ultimately -- for the whole paradigm? A validation of Barack Obama's so-called "leading from behind" strategy of foreign engagement? Or a success despite Obama's lack of assertiveness? The debate has only grown more fierce since Tripoli's fall last month.

Liberals like Nick Kristof seized the NATO-backed rebels' victory over Muammar el-Qaddafi as affirmation the U.S. decision to commit American forces.

"The question of humanitarian intervention is one of the knottiest in foreign policy, and it will arise again. The next time it does, let’s remember a lesson of Libya: It is better to inconsistently save some lives than to consistently save none."

CNN's Fareed Zakari also saw it as validation for Obama -- but for his process it followed more than the specifics of his Libya policy.

"The Libya intervention is so significant precisely because it did not follow the traditional pattern of U.S.-led interventions. Indeed, it launched a new era in U.S. foreign policy."

That would be an era of "limited intervention," according to Zakaria.

"The question before Libya was: Could such interventions be successful while keeping costs under control - both human and financial.
Today's answer is: Yes."

On the flip side you have folks like the Cato Institute's Doug Bandow who argue that the long term impacts of the rebel victory in Libya will be a net defeat for the U.S. - it will discourage other nations from giving up their WMD stockpiles and from cooperating on vaguely worded humanitarian missions at the United Nations, not to mention create a power vacuum in North Africa where Islamists, terrorists and arms traffickers can thrive.

The best take I've read so far on the lessons of Libya is from Stephen M. Walt, who brings much of the pie-in-the-sky prognosticating back to earth with one simple fact - we simply don't know yet what the post-Qaddafi Libya will become.

"Even if Qaddafi set a very low standard for effective or just governance, the end-result of his ouster may not be as gratifying as we hope. More importantly, we also ought to guard against the common tendency to draw big policy conclusions from a single case, especially when we don't have good theories to help us understand the differences between different outcomes," Walt writes.

Then, social scientist that he is, Walt lays out a set of questions to help evaluate Libya's development from here, and how it fits into the broader pantheon of revolutions assisted from outside.

Stop, think, observe before drawing conclusions? What a refreshing idea.

As an aside -- one entity that has not contributed at all to the Libya post-mortem ($) is Congress, which has cemented more than ever its impotency when it comes to decisions to use military force.

What's Next for the West & Libya

I spoke to local affiliate Fox 5 in the wake of Libyan rebels' takeover of Tripoli last week. The Western world has talked a big game about helping Libya transition to a democracy, but underlying that rhetoric seems to be a recognition among all involved that this process is going to be the most challenging legacy of the Arab Spring yet.

And it's not clear how much the West is going to step up on this one. The one thing the rebel council can count on from the international community the unfreezing of several billion in Qaddafi regime assets -- the United States finally succeeded in cutting a deal in the U.N. late last week to open those floodgates. But they shouldn't expect much more financial assistance at this point. As I wrote last week, even the most outspoken advocates of U.S. intervention in the Libyan uprising in Congress are saying publicly there's no need to send cash aid ($) to the Benghazi.

U.S. Ambassador to Syria: Should He Stay or Should He Go?

Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain all recalled their ambassadors from Syria Monday, a rebuke of Bashar al-Assad's escalating war against his own people. The State Department, however, insisted that U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford will stay in Damascus, despite the new level of brutality the Assad regime has sunk to.

Ford, State Department spox Mark Toner said, "is playing an important role on the ground, bearing witness to what’s going on in Syria."

Ford, himself, made the same pitch at his Senate confirmation hearing  last week ($), though only one senator - Pennsylvania Democrat Bob Casey, the chair of the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Middle East - stayed to hear it. The career foreign service officer, who was sent to Damascus in January, emphasized his outreach to the Syrian opposition.

"It's really important now to give Syrians an ear and to amplify their voices especially when the international media is barred from Syria," Ford said.

Ford was roundly applauded in DC when he visited the city of Hama after the government's last sustained assault against dissidents there. But that hasn't changed the minds of a crowd of GOP lawmakers who are convinced that the presence of a top diplomat in the country conveys a certain level of status and tacit approval to the government in power. They blocked Ford's appointment last time around, and they are likely to do so again when his recess appointment expires. The latest round of envoy withdrawals is only likely to strengthen their hand.