Israel heads for a terrifying split

Matt Steingless The Economist

APPEARANCES to the contrary, the Israeli government does not have a problem with the terms of the deal that was struck on Iran's nuclear programme on Sunday. Rather, the Israeli government has a problem with the fact that a deal was struck on Iran's nuclear programme on Sunday. Over the course of the negotiations, it has become abundantly clear that Binyamin Netanyahu and the conservative coalition he leads do not want a diplomatic resolution to the standoff over Iran's efforts to develop nuclear weapons on any terms that Iran would be willing to accept. That puts Israel at loggerheads with the majority of Americans; perhaps more important, it puts Israel at loggerheads with a large fraction of American Jews.

It is too early for polls on responses to the actual deal, but the last poll before the deal by CNN last week had Americans supporting (by a 56%-39% margin) a compromise along the lines struck over the weekend, with a partial relaxation of sanctions in exchange for restrictions that would contain but not end Iran's nuclear programme. Meanwhile, a poll of American Jews by the Anti-Defamation Leagueearly this month found that if Israel were to carry out a military strike against Iran, 48% thought America should take a "neutral" position, while just 40% would favour supporting Israel. That stand-offishness was in line with a broad decrease in support for aggressive anti-Iranian positions that emerged in a poll by the American Jewish Committee in October, which found backing for American military action against Iran had fallen to 52% from 67% in 2012.

Mr Netanyahu calls the agreement with Iran a "historic mistake", and insists that "Israel has the right and the obligation to defend itself, by itself, against any threat"—in other words, that Israel will strike Iran on its own if it decides the agreement is not working. It is not entirely clear what Israel would regard as "not working". Up to this point, the Israelis, when forced to provide specifics on what it is they expect Iran to do, have laid out conditions so onerous that they cannot realistically be met by any Iranian government. The Israelis wanted Iran to completely dismantle its entire uranium enrichment programme and eliminate all stockpiles of enriched fuel. They were not prepared to endorse the interim deal, which halts much of Iran’s nuclear programme, walks back some aspects of it and includes intrusive inspections. They insisted on a total Iranian capitulation.

Such an insistence on total capitulation is characteristic of hard-liners in conflicts like this, and I confess I rarely understand the mentality behind it. In some cases the motivation behind making demands so onerous that the opponent cannot possibly grant them is clear: the hard-liner wants to provoke an armed conflict which he thinks he can win, and a compromise solution might forestall the war. This was the case, for example, with the demands America made of Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the Iraq war. In other cases, the motivation is different: the hard-liner understands that his internal political power within his own country is reinforced by the conflict, even if (perhaps especially if) his side appears to be losing, so he makes demands that ensure conflict will continue. This is the case with Hamas's refusal to recognise Israel's right to exist. A final possibility is that the hard-liner is delusional, and actually believes that insistence on maximalist demands will lead to the surrender or collapse of the other side.

I don't know which of these motivations is driving the Israeli government's insistence on unattainable goals in negotiations with Iran. Perhaps it is a combination of the three. What is certain is that Mr Netanyahu is risking a split between Israel and America, and between Israel and American Jews, of a type that has never before occurred. The American people are not interested in fighting another war in the Middle East. They do not see the Iranian nuclear programme as an immediate, existential threat. They do not dismiss the election of a moderate Iranian president willing to sign an agreement with the United States, one containing significant sacrifices for Iran, as a deceitful trick by a totalitarian government. They believe that Iran's shift in direction may be real, and they have endorsed a deal that rewards that shift in direction.

The same is true for a large fraction of American Jews. American Jews are largely liberal, and largely support Barack Obama; Mr Netanyahu's relentless baiting of Mr Obama over the past five years has already tested their willingness to take Israel's side. Now, Mr Netanyahu's threat to stage a unilateral attack on Iran risks creating an unprecedented schism. In every previous conflict between Israel and its regional enemies, even when Israel initiated the military action (as in the 1956 and 1967 wars, and to some extent the invasions of Lebanon and Gaza), American Jews have accepted Israeli assessments of the threat. This time, many of them won't. An Israeli attack on Iran that resulted in Iranian and regional Shiite attacks on American targets and interests, against the wishes and best judgment of most Americans and many American Jews, could lead to an irreversible break. The fact is that Mr Netanyahu is wrong about the deal signed on Sunday: it reduces, rather than increases, the risk of an Iranian nuclear bomb. But even if Mr Netanyahu were right, an increase in the risk of an Iranian nuclear bomb poses nowhere near as great a threat to Israel's security as losing the solidarity of American Jews.

(Photo credit: AFP)

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November 25, 2013

Chilling Look at Newtown Killer, but No ‘Why’

By JOSEPH BERGER and MARC SANTORA

NEWTOWN, Conn. — Adam Lanza spent the final months of his life mostly alone in his bedroom. His windows were covered with black trash bags. He was preoccupied with violent video games and created a spreadsheet of some of the worst massacres in American history.

Mr. Lanza refused to speak even to his mother, communicating with her only by email, even though their bedrooms shared the same floor of their house on Yogananda Street.

He would not eat unless his food was arranged in a particular way on his plate. He hated birthdays and holidays, and forbade his mother from putting up a Christmas tree.

He also made her get rid of a cat he did not like.

No one else was allowed into his room, including his mother, who nevertheless did her son’s laundry daily because he changed his clothes often.

Among their few outings together were trips to the shooting range. She planned to buy him a gun for Christmas last year.

Mr. Lanza, 20, could not connect with people but obsessed over “Dance Dance Revolution,” an interactive video game he played in the lobby of a nearby movie theater, spending as long as 10 hours at a time trying to follow dance routines as they flashed on the screen.

Last year, four days before her son killed 20 first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School and then shot himself, Ms. Lanza cooked him some of his favorite meals and then left for a three-day trip to New Hampshire.

Ms. Lanza returned on Dec. 13 at 10 p.m.

The next morning, her son shot and killed her in her bed.

A 48-page report released on Monday by the state’s attorney in Danbury, Stephen J. Sedensky III, offers a vivid and chilling portrait of the young man responsible for one of the nation’s worst mass shootings, and chronicles his rampage in the school.

But what it does not answer is why.

The long-awaited report does not suggest a motive for Mr. Lanza’s actions, even as it offers a glimpse into his strange, troubled life. It comes nearly a year after the shooting set off a national discussion about gun control, mental health and violence in American popular culture.

In that time, families of the Sandy Hook Elementary victims have struggled to put their lives back together, the town has tried to heal and the school has been razed. But, until Monday, little information compiled by investigators had been publicly released.

Even basic facts, like the path Mr. Lanza took inside the school, were kept secret.

After the shooting, the Connecticut General Assembly passed bills to limit what could be made public. The state also fought to prevent the release of the recordings of the emergency calls to 911 from people inside the school. At a hearing on Monday before the report’s release, Judge Eliot Prescott of New Britain Superior Court said that he would review the tapes and soon decide whether to release them.

The report was based on voluminous evidence and interviews conducted by the Connecticut State Police and the state’s attorney’s office, along with federal authorities. It marks the end of the investigation.

Investigators struggled to make sense of “contradictory” descriptions of Mr. Lanza by those who knew him.

The report notes that while “significant mental health issues” affected his ability to live a normal life and interact with others, it remained unclear if they contributed in any way to his actions last December. Mr. Lanza received a diagnosis in 2005 of an autism variant known as Asperger’s syndrome, but there is no evidence that people with Asperger’s are more likely than others to commit violent crimes.

Mr. Lanza was treated by mental health professionals, according to the report, but none of them saw anything that predicted his future behavior.

“Tutoring, desensitization and medication were recommended,” the report said. “The shooter refused to take suggested medication and did not engage in suggested behavior therapies.”

There were reports of troubling behavior as early as the fifth grade, when Mr. Lanza produced “The Big Book of Granny” for a class project. The main character had a gun in her cane and shot people.

In 2006, as a seventh grader, Mr. Lanza was described by a teacher as intelligent but obsessed with violent imagery.

His mother noted a change in his behavior around that time. He stopped riding his bicycle or climbing trees. He no longer showed interest in his saxophone, dropping out of a school band. His life turned increasingly inward.

Investigators found a wealth of disturbing digital evidence at the Lanza home, but were not able to recover any information from one hard drive that he had destroyed.

Mr. Lanza had two videos showing suicide by gunshot, a five-second video dramatization showing a child being shot, and images of Mr. Lanza himself holding a gun to his head.

He collected information on gun violence, including newspaper articles from 1891 “pertaining to the shooting of schoolchildren,” the report said. He used spreadsheets to chronicle mass shootings. He also had “materials regarding the topic of pedophilia and advocating for the rights for pedophiles.” The report made a point of noting that the materials were not child pornography, and the report did not otherwise address pedophilia.

Mr. Lanza was enthralled by violent video games, including one called “School Shooting,” a modified version of another online game.

His mother, Nancy Lanza, who separated from his father, Peter Lanza, in 2001, lived alone with Adam. She was concerned about him, saying she could not have a job because he required her constant attention. It was unclear how aware Ms. Lanza was of his strong interest in death and violence, and she continued to provide him with weapons.

“The mother wanted to buy the shooter a CZ-83 pistol for Christmas and had prepared a check for that purchase to give the shooter,” the report said. “The mother never expressed fear of the shooter, for her own safety or that of anyone else.”

A spokesman for the father said Peter Lanza, a tax director for the energy and finance division of General Electric in Stamford, was baffled by his son’s hostility toward him, and every attempt to reach out to the son was rejected. The two had not spoken in two years, said the spokesman, who asked for anonymity because he did not want to be identified with the attack.

As details of the report were made public, there was disbelief expressed by some people that Ms. Lanza could not have been aware of the darkness building within her son.

Michele Gay, whose daughter Josephine was killed at the school, read the report and said of Mr. Lanza’s bizarre behavior: “You would want treatment for someone like that. The problem here is that he was completely isolated from anyone but his mother, and the mother did not have the ability or understanding to help her son.” Ms. Gay said she found it particularly hard to fathom why Ms. Lanza would want to give her son a gun for Christmas.

By 2012, the report said, Mr. Lanza was also estranged from his older brother, Ryan, who had also moved away. Ms. Lanza was planning to move from Newtown, possibly to Washington or to North Carolina, with Adam. To prepare the house for sale, she intended to buy a recreational vehicle for Adam to sleep in because he refused to go to a hotel.

Mr. Lanza carefully planned his attack. According to information from a GPS device he owned, he drove to the vicinity of the school one day before the assault, while his mother was out of town.

When he went to Sandy Hook Elementary on Dec. 14, he was armed with 30-round magazines for a Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle, along with several other weapons. Shortly after 9:30 a.m., he blasted his way through the plate-glass window at the locked front entrance.

In less than 10 minutes, Mr. Lanza fired 154 rounds from the rifle, killing the 26 children and staff members. At 9:40, he took his own life with a pistol.

“He was wearing a pale green pocket vest over a black polo-style short-sleeve shirt over a black T-shirt,” the report said. “He had yellow-colored earplugs in each ear. He was wearing black cargo pocket pants, black socks, black sneakers, a black canvas belt and black fingerless gloves on each hand. He had an empty camouflage drop holster that was affixed to his right thigh.”

Relatives of the victims were permitted to view a draft of the report earlier this month.

After nearly a year of speaking with investigators, sharing stories with other families of victims and endless news media accounts, some said there was little surprising in the draft report. The family of Victoria Soto, a first-grade teacher whom Mr. Lanza killed as she tried to keep her students out of the line of fire, released a statement noting that there were some questions that could never be answered.

“While others search for the answer as to why this happened, we search for the how,” the statement read. “How can we live without Vicki?

“So, yes, we have read the report. No, we cannot make sense of why it happened. We don’t know if anyone ever will. We don’t know if we will ever be whole again. We don’t know if we will go a day without pain. We don’t know if anything will ever make sense again.”

Joseph Berger reported from Newtown, and Marc Santora from New York. Elizabeth Maker contributed reporting from Newtown, and Kristin Hussey from New Britain, Conn.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 25, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the Connecticut city from which Kristin Hussey contributed reporting. It is New Britain, not Bridgeport.

 

Widespread skepticism greets Us Iran Deal

World Doubts Obama Will Enforce Red Line on Iran

Josh Rogin Daily Beast

The Iran gambit has risks and, if a final deal isn’t achieved after six months, the possibility of war rises. World leaders say President Obama’s credibility to enforce the deadline has been badly damaged.

The interim nuclear deal struck on Sunday morning avoids outright confrontation with Iran for six months, but foreign leaders and international experts warned that the gamble over reaching a final deal could substantially raise the risk of open conflict.

Over 200 officials, lawmakers, and experts from more than 50 countries were meeting at the Halifax International Security Forum as news broke over the weekend, many suggested that President Obama’s credibility to stop Iran from going nuclear after the deadline if no final deal is reached had been badly damaged by his wavering red lines on Syria.

The deal, which would see Iran freeze large parts of its nuclear program in exchange for modest sanctions relief, gives negotiators from Iran, the United States, Britain, France, China, Russia, and Germany six months to work out a comprehensive agreement that would prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

World leaders at the forum were cautiously optimistic about the new deal, but several warned that the new six month deadline for a final deal carried a huge downside risk. If there’s no final deal, the prospects of war will rise and a weakened Obama administration will be less able to prevent it.

“My worry is not over the next six months,” said Dov Zakheim, former undersecretary of Defense in the Bush administration. “The problem to me is that the president has once again laid out another red line and his track record with red lines is ambiguous. The red line this time is the six months.”

“What happens if nothing more is achieved after the six month period or Iran cheats and nobody does anything about it? If either of those things happen, I believe the Israelis will attack,” he said.

Pundits and politicians, including Secretary of State John Kerry, vigorously debated the Iran nuclear deal on this week's Sunday talk shows.

Obama previously set a red line regarding Syria, warning that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would trigger an international response. Following the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack there that killed over 1,400 Syrians, Obama decided to launch limited military strikes against Syria and then reversed himself when Syria agreed to give up its chemical weapons capabilities.

Several foreign officials said that the Syrian red line episode had eroded the Obama administration’s credibility around the world, which raises questions over promises made about Iran.

“When you draw red lines and then they are crossed and you don’t do anything about it, two things happen: Your enemies become emboldened and your allies become less sure,” said British Member of Parliament Liam Fox, a former Secretary of State for Defence. “That’s been the problem.”

Moshe Ya'alon, Israel’s Minister of Defense, said America’s actions throughout the Arab Spring, including Obama’s failure to enforce his Syria red line, have created the impression that the West is not willing or able to confront Iran and its Shiite Muslim allies, who are bent on expanding their regional influence and pursuing a nuclear capability despite any interim deal.

“According to the Sunni Arab camp, the West is in retreat… According to the Iranian perspective, the West is the Great Satan America. In this regard, the West should be defeated, according to the Iranian ideology,” he said. “Regarding the deal, they feel like there is weakness on behalf of the West which might be exploited by them to defeat the West.”

Some foreign leaders argued that the Iranians have placed their own credibility on the line alongside the P5+1 countries, creating pressure on Iran to continue negotiating toward a final deal.

“This [interim deal] is quite limited, it’s time-bounded, and it’s modest,” said MP Andrew Murrison, Britain’s Minister for International Security Strategy, “At the end of the six months, if nothing has happened, I think this will look as badly for Iran as it will for the international community which is trying to move this forward.”

Camille Grand, director of the Fondation Pour la Recherche Stratégique, said the final deal would be much tougher to achieve than the interim deal, but it was too early to say whether or not there would be a result that could avert open conflict with Iran.

“We’ve achieved a little bit by putting pressure on them and we’ve done better than was expected,” he said. “It is an interim agreement not a final agreement, which is substantive but not historic… I think it’s a very important agreement but it’s a stepping stone to something else, and that something else is not defined yet.”

The West has already made a major concession, by implicitly if not outright acknowledging Iran’s right to enrich uranium, said Grand. The administration maintains it has not recognized Iran’s right to enrich uranium but has said that some enrichment may be allowed as part of a final deal.

“Have [the Iranians] made the strategic decision to abandon their nuclear ambitions? I’m not sure yet,” said Grand. “At the moment we can claim a win-win situation. I’m not sure that will be feasible six months from now.”

Critics of the deal point out that it does not address Iran’s missile or weapons programs, which can proceed unabated while nuclear negotiations continue.

“As much as we all hope we can stop Iran’s progress toward WMD peacefully, I think we have to worry that what we are doing is freezing some capacity while other development goes on,” said Kurt Volker, the head of the McCain Institute in Washington, DC.

Overall, if Iran’s intention to pursue a nuclear weapon has not changed, nothing in the current deal will ultimately stop Iran from achieving that goal, said Hussain Haqqani, former Pakistani Ambassador to Washington.

“Based on what happened in the case of India and Pakistan, if a nation is determined enough to get weapons of mass destruction, it does. So the question is, is this deal enough of an incentive for everybody in Iran including the hardliners to give up their nuclear intentions?” he said. “The baby has been born. Now we have to see how it turns out when it grows up.”

After a decade of decline San Francisco Enters a Cruel Tech Boom Era

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November 24, 2013

Backlash by the Bay: Tech Riches Alter a City

By ERICA GOODE and CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

SAN FRANCISCO — If there was a tipping point, a moment that crystallized the anger building here toward the so-called technorati for driving up housing prices and threatening the city’s bohemian identity, it came in response to a diatribe posted online in August by a young Internet entrepreneur.

The author, a start-up founder named Peter Shih, listed 10 things he hated about San Francisco. Homeless people, for example. And the “constantly PMSing” weather. And “girls who are obviously 4s and behave like they’re 9s.”

The backlash was immediate. Fliers appeared on telephone poles calling Mr. Shih a “woman hatin’ nerd toucher.” CheapAir offered him a free ticket back to New York. Readers responded that what they hated about San Francisco were “entitled” technology workers like him.

Mr. Shih, who said he received death threats after the post, deleted it and apologized.

But a nerve had been struck. As the center of the technology industry has moved north from Silicon Valley to San Francisco and the largess from tech companies has flowed into the city — Twitter’s stock offering unleashed an estimated 1,600 new millionaires — income disparities have widened sharply, housing prices have soared and orange construction cranes dot the skyline. The tech workers have, rightly or wrongly, received the blame.

Resentment simmers, at the fleets of Google buses that ferry workers to the company’s headquarters in Mountain View and back; the code jockeys who crowd elite coffeehouses, heads buried in their laptops; and the sleek black Uber cars that whisk hipsters from bar to bar. Late last month, two tech millionaires opened the Battery, an invitation-only, $2,400-a-year club in an old factory in the financial district, cars lining up for valet parking.

For critics, such sights are symbols of a city in danger of losing its diversity — one that artists, families and middle-class workers can no longer afford. On the day of Twitter’s public offering this month, 150 demonstrators protested outside the company with signs reading “People not profit” and “We’re the public, what are you offering?”

More and more longtime residents are being forced out as landlords and speculators race to capitalize on the money stream.

Mary Elizabeth Phillips, a retired accountant, is fighting eviction from the rent-controlled apartment where she has lived for almost half a century. If her new landlords have their way, she will have to move in April, shortly after her 98th birthday, because they want to sell the units.

Her neighborhood has given way around her. The car dealership across the street is now a luxury apartment complex, complete with rooftop herb garden, a butterfly habitat and a Whole Foods.

“I can understand it from an investment standpoint,” she said of her landlords’ actions. “But I don’t think I’d ever be that coldblooded about this.”

While the technology boom has bred hostility, it has also brought San Francisco undeniable benefits. Mayor Edwin M. Lee credits the technology sector with helping to pull the city out of the recession, creating jobs and nourishing a thriving economy that is the envy of cash-starved cities across the country.

The industry is “not so much taking over but complementing the job creation we want in the city,” Mr. Lee said while giving a tour of middle Market Street to show off its “renaissance” from a seedy skid row to a tech district where Twitter, Square and other companies have made their home.

Yet city officials must grapple with the arithmetic of squeezing more people into the limited space afforded by San Francisco’s 49 square miles. And it is the housing shortage that underlies much of the sniping about tech workers.

San Francisco has the least affordable housing in the nation, with just 14 percent of homes accessible to middle-class buyers, said Jed Kolko, chief economist at the real estate website Trulia. The median rent is also the highest in the country, at $3,250 a month for a two-bedroom apartment.

“Affordable housing projects are constructed, and the money set aside for that purpose is used, but the demand is just far greater than what can be supplied,” said Fred Brousseau of the city budget and legislative analyst’s office. Evictions under a provision of state law that allows landlords to evict rent-controlled tenants if they convert a building for sale have more than tripled in the past three years, just as they did during the first tech boom.

To Yelly Brandon, a 36-year-old hairstylist, and her boyfriend, Anthony Rocco, an archivist, the obstacles to finding housing became clear when they spent two months searching for an apartment. At open houses, they said, they were competing with young tech workers, who offered more than the asking price and cash up front.

“People were just throwing money in the air,” Ms. Brandon said.

The influx of wealth is, in turn, changing the tenor of neighborhoods. Fort Mason, a renovated military post on the bay, has been nicknamed “Frat Mason” for the 20-something “tech bros” — tech company salespeople, marketing employees and start-up founders — who have moved into luxury apartments there and play bocce on the great lawn.

Nowhere are the changes starker than in the Mission District, once a working-class Hispanic neighborhood, now a destination for the tech elite.

Evan Williams of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook have bought homes near there.

Longtime residents of the Mission District complain that high-end apartments, expensive restaurants and exclusive boutiques are crowding out the bodegas, bookstores and Mexican bars. They complain about workers who, like residents of a bedroom community, board company buses every morning and return every evening to drink and dine on Valencia Street.

And they grumble about less tangible things: an insensitivity in interactions in stores and on the street, or a seeming disregard for neighborhood traditions. The annual Day of the Dead procession, meant to be solemn, has turned into a rowdy affair that many newcomers seem to view as a kind of Mexican Halloween.

“Some of the people in the stores that I knew, they are good people and nice people, and then I see them get evicted and then the people who move in there are not as nice,” said Rene Yañez, an artist and founder of Galería de la Raza in the 1970s, who started the procession. Mr. Yañez and his partner, who is battling cancer, are being evicted from the apartment they have occupied for decades.

Evictions are higher in this neighborhood than in any other part of the city.

“They are not only expelling the homeless and the gangbangers,” said Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a performance artist. “They are also expelling the performance artists, the poets, the muralists, the activists, the working-class families — all these wonderful urban tribes that made this neighborhood a very special neighborhood for decades.”

“One day,” he added, “they will wake up to an extremely unbearable ocean of sameness.”

Some tech companies are trying to give back. Salesforce has donated millions of dollars to the public schools, and Twitter, which declined to comment on its effect on the city, is providing lawyers to help fight evictions, under an agreement with the city in exchange for tax breaks.

But the onus, many people say, is really on the city government.

“There has to be some kind of public support to make sure you don’t just have a city of the very wealthy, but people to make the city run,” said Kevin Starr, an urban planning expert at the University of Southern California.

“You can’t have a city of just rich people,” he said. “A city needs restaurant workers, a city needs schoolteachers, a city needs taxi drivers.”

Mr. Lee says he has a strong commitment to affordable housing — he pointed to the Housing Trust Fund, which will provide $1.5 billion in affordable housing over the next 30 years — and to preserving the character of San Francisco’s neighborhoods.

Wholesale evictions, he said, are “not good for the city.”

He conceded, “We have to figure some things out.”

For his part, Mr. Shih said the response to his post was a lesson he will not soon forget. He has augmented his work on Airbrite, the company he and a colleague started, with volunteering at homeless shelters.

“What I did was wrong,” he said. “I feel like the changes the tech scene has made to San Francisco have made people very angry, and I was caught in the cross-fire.”

 

Iran Agrees to Six Month Suspension of Nuclear Program

From The New York Times

Mark Ländler in Geneva

GENEVA — The United States and five other world powers announced a landmark accord Sunday morning that would temporarily freeze Iran’s nuclear program and lay the foundation for a more sweeping agreement.

It was the first time in nearly a decade, American officials said, that an international agreement had been reached to halt much of Iran’s nuclear program and roll some elements of it back.

The aim of the accord, which is to last six months, is to give international negotiators time to pursue a more comprehensive pact that would ratchet back much of Iran’s nuclear program and ensure that it could be used only for peaceful purposes.

Shortly after the agreement was signed at 3 a.m. in the Palace of Nations in Geneva, President Obama, speaking from the State Dining Room in the White House, hailed it as the most “significant and tangible” progress of a diplomatic campaign that began when he took office.

“Today, that diplomacy opened up a new path toward a world that is more secure,” he said, “a future in which we can verify that Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful and that it cannot build a nuclear weapon.”

In Geneva, the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said he hoped the agreement would lead to a “restoration” of trust between Iran and the United States. Smiling and avuncular, he reiterated Iran’s longstanding assertion that its nuclear program was peaceful, adding that the Iranian people deserved respect from the West.

Secretary of State John Kerry, who flew to Geneva early Saturday for the second time in two weeks in an effort to complete the deal, said it would “require Iran to prove the peaceful nature of its nuclear program.”

Iran, which has long resisted international monitoring efforts and built clandestine nuclear facilities, agreed to stop enriching uranium beyond 5 percent, a level that would be sufficient for energy production but that would require further enrichment for bomb-making. To make good on that pledge, Iran will dismantle links between networks of centrifuges.

Its stockpile of uranium enriched to 20 percent, a short hop from weapons-grade fuel, would be diluted or converted into oxide so that it could not be readily used for military purposes. Iran agreed that it would not install any new centrifuges, start up any that are not already operating or build new enrichment facilities.

The agreement, however, does not require Iran to stop enriching uranium to a low level of 3.5 percent, or to dismantle any of its existing centrifuges.

The accord was a disappointment for Israel, which had urged the United States to pursue a stronger agreement that would lead to a complete end to Iran’s enrichment program. But Iran made it clear that continuing enrichment was a prerequisite for any agreement.

The United States did not accept Iran’s claim that it had a “right to enrich” under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. But American officials signaled last week that they were open to a compromise in which the two sides would essentially agree to disagree on how the proliferation treaty should be interpreted, while Tehran continued to enrich.

In return for the initial agreement, the United States agreed to provide $6 billion to $7 billion in sanctions relief. Of this, roughly $4.2 billion would be oil revenue that has been frozen in foreign banks.

This limited sanctions relief can be accomplished by executive order, allowing the Obama administration to make the deal without having to appeal to Congress, where there is strong criticism of any agreement that does not fully dismantle Iran’s nuclear program.

The fact that the accord would only pause the Iranian program was seized on by critics who said it would reward Iran for institutionalizing the status quo.

Mr. Obama addressed those concerns in his speech, insisting that the easing of sanctions could be reversed if Iran failed to reach a final agreement or reneged on the terms of this one.

“Nothing will be agreed to unless everything is agreed to,” he said.

He also noted the qualms of Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf allies of the United States, saying they “had good reason to be skeptical of Iran’s intentions.” But he said he had a “profound responsibility” to test the possibilities of a diplomatic solution.

In Geneva, Mr. Kerry said of the agreement: “It will make our partners in the region safer. It will make our ally Israel safer.”

Mark Landler contributed reporting from Washington.

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The deal would also add at least several weeks, and perhaps more than a month, to the time Iran would need to produce weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear device, according to estimates by nuclear experts. American officials argued that it would preclude Iran from shortening the time it would need to produce enough bomb-grade uranium for a nuclear device even further, and would provide additional warning if Iran sought to “break out” of its commitment to pursue only a peaceful nuclear program.

A second and even more contentious debate centered on whether an initial deal would, as the Obama administration said, serve as a “first step” toward a comprehensive solution of the nuclear issue, one that would leave Iran with a peaceful nuclear program that could not easily be used for military purposes.

Two former American national security advisers, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, recently sent a letter to key American lawmakers endorsing the administration’s approach. “The apparent commitment of the new government of Iran to reverse course on its nuclear activities needs to be tested to insure it cannot rapidly build a nuclear weapon,” they wrote.

But some experts, including a former official who has worked on the Iranian issue for the White House, said it was unlikely that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would ever close the door on the option to develop nuclear weapons. Instead, they said, any initial six-month agreement is more likely to be followed by a series of partial agreements that constrain Iran’s nuclear activities but do not definitively solve the nuclear issues.

“At the end of six months, we may see another half step and six more months of negotiations — ad infinitum,” said Gary Samore, a senior aide on nonproliferation issues on the National Security Council in Mr. Obama’s first term. Mr. Samore is now president of United Against Nuclear Iran, a nonprofit group that advocates tough sanctions against Iran unless it does more to curtail its nuclear program.

The agreement also reflected compromises on other issues.

On the contentious issue of the heavy water reactor Iran is building near Arak, which could produce plutonium and therefore another path to a bomb, Iran agreed not to produce fuel for the plant, install additional reactor components there or put the plant into operation.

Iran is not required to dismantle the facility, however, or convert the plant into a light water reactor that would be less useful for military purposes.

Regarding enrichment, Iran’s stockpile of such low-enriched uranium would be allowed to temporarily increase to about eight tons from about seven tons currently. But Tehran would be required to shrink this stockpile by the end of the six-month agreement back to seven tons. This would be done by installing equipment to covert some of that stockpile to oxide.

To guard against cheating, international monitors would be allowed to visit the Natanz enrichment facility and the underground nuclear enrichment plant at Fordo on a daily basis to check the film from cameras installed there.

But Iran did not agree to all of the intrusive inspection regime that the International Atomic Energy Agency had said was needed to ensure that the Iranian program is peaceful.

Mark Landler contributed reporting from Washington.

The Return of Russian Hard Power?

Michael Weiss the Daily Beast

As Russia plays war games on imaginary NATO targets and Putin pumps billions into the army, the country’s Eastern bloc neighbors are growing increasingly concerned about the return of Kremlin’s military muscle.

Last Good Friday, two Russian Tu-22M3 bombers, escorted by four Su-27 fighter aircraft, simulated an aerial assault on two military targets in Sweden— the first near the capital Stockholm and the second in a southern part of the country. This was then followed in September by Zapad-13 (“Zapad” means “West”), Russia’s biannual military exercise, which this year was jointly held with Belarusian forces variously in Belarus, along the borders of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and in Kaliningrad, Russia’s non-contiguous seaport territory that lies between Poland and Lithuania.

Russian President Vladimir Putin carrying a hunting rifle in the Republic of Tuva. (AFP/Getty)

Though initially billed as a counterterrorism operation targeting “illegal armed groups,” Zapad-13 was very clearly aimed at fighting conventional armies on European soil. Which ones? Stephen Blank of the Jamestown Foundation has noted that the “simulated ‘terrorists’ were apparently Balts intent on mounting operations in Belarus against that government and on behalf of their supposedly oppressed ethnic kinsmen.” (Moscow propaganda usually has it that independent Baltic states with pro-European and pro-American bents are the modern-day embodiment of Nazi regimes insufficiently grateful for their “liberation” and occupation by the Red Army.)

An estimated 70,000 soldiers took part in Zapad-13, three times the number given in advance to NATO by the Russian government, although this year, contrary to reports in the Polish press, Russia did not simulate a nuclear strike on Warsaw, as it has in the past. Seventy thousand troops, however, imply quite lot of “terrorists” in need of vanquishing by land, air or sea. Included in the order of battle were a Belarusian amphibious landing force, Russian paratroopers and Spetsgruppy (special forces), and 10,000 paramilitary troops from Russia’s Interior Ministry as well as unmanned aerial vehicles for targeting and damage assessment.

According to Karlis Neretnieks of the Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences, the exercise was intended to put Europe on notice that Russia’s military is vastly improved from its dilapidated state during the 2008 “summer war” with Georgia: “Altogether we see a rapidly increasing Russian capability to mount large scale, complex, military operations in its neighbourhood, coordinated with operations in other areas. It would be a mistake to see this as just a problem for the Baltic States.” On October 28, five more Russian warplanes staged mock bombing runs against Sweden, Poland and Lithuania while en route to an airbase in Kaliningrad, though this time, the Swedish Air Force was ready and dispatched two jets to intercept the Russian bombers. (Colombia and Japan have also recently had their airspaces violated or buzzed by Russian long-range bombers, sending their respective Air Forces into states of alert.)

All of this transpired, it should be noted, at a time when only two countries in NATO —Poland and Estonia, both of which are deeply unsettled by routine Russian mock-invasions of their territories—are meeting their annual defense expenditure requirements for membership in the alliance and when the Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski can easily envisage another war fought on the continent, in contrast with the bland reassurances of NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen that such a contingency is a thing of the past. Try telling that to the other countries that once fell on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. To them, Russian hard power is most certainly “back” and now poses a more immediate threat to Europe than at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the margins of the U.N. General Assembly last September, one diplomat confided in the sense of alarm with which Eastern European countries registered President Obama’s claim, in his address at Turtle Bay, that “[w]e’re no longer in a Cold War.” If only Russia agreed.

For one thing, NATO’s own just-concluded war game belied any sense of continental security. Zapad-13 and the other unannounced pretend-invasions were no doubt staged by Russia in pre-emptive response to Operation Steadfast Jazz 2013, the largest NATO live-fire exercise in seven years. It was conducted in all three Baltic states and Poland, from November 2-9, largely to reaffirm the alliance’s commitment to their defense in the event that, as Rasmussen put it, “any country with bad intentions” tries to attack them. He denied, however, that Steadfast Jazz was in any way a rebuttal to Zapad-13. It was a “signal to anyone who might have an intention to attack a NATO ally,” he said, “but I don’t expect Russia to have any intention to attack NATO allies…so you might say it is a signal ‘to whom it may concern.’” In a show of how little Washington, at least under the current administration, seems to fret about its Eastern European allies, a measly 160 personnel out of a total 6,000 came from the United States, while France sent more than 1,000. Sweden, Finland and Ukraine, none of them NATO members, also participated.

Steadfast Jazz didn’t go off without some expected interference from those “whom-it-may-concern.” Before and during the exercise, Estonian and Latvian government websites were hit with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCD COE), which is based in Tallinn, was erroneously linked to the defacement of several Ukrainian government and NGO websites, with forged email accounts from CCD COE claiming that these assaults were all part of Steadfast Jazz. Similar attacks then followed against the Latvian Ministry of Defence and Defence Forces sites. As Piret Pernik at the Estonian think tank the International Centre for Defence Studies writes, what was so extraordinary about these incidents was how the Russian state-controlled press reported on them. On November 4, for instance, regnum.ru, a news service which Estonian intelligence has linked to Russia’s security services, published an article suggesting that CCD COE “accidentally” hit Ukrainian and Latvian portals during Steadfast Jazz’s conventional military operations. Then, on November 6, Voice of Russia, also run by the Kremlin, reiterated these claims with the assessment that NATO was so incompetent in the realm of cyber-security that it wound up attacking itself. Pernik didn’t think this message coordination between “hacktivist” groups and Russian media organs a mere coincidence and neither should you.

NATO has long been the obsession and bugbear of the Kremlin, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union deprived Moscow of its Warsaw Pact military counterbalance. And despite the fact that Russian officials have conceded in their more truthful moments that NATO’s planned missile defense shield, which is now being installed in Eastern Europe, poses no real security threat to their territory, they nevertheless characterize the program aimed at intercepting Iranian and North Korean ballistic missiles—as hostile. This was exactly what the newly appointed Russian Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, did at the last Valdai International Discussion Club, a yearly chin-wag for regime loyalists and softies marketed as the Russian answer to the German Marshall Fund conferences. Shoigu, who replaced the scandal-plagued and reform-minded Anatoly Serdykuov, helped increase Russia’s military budget this year by 26 percent. He is now viewed as the most popular and recognizable minister in Russia, according to recent polls.

Indeed, Shoigu’s a true man of the times in the sense that he is completely backward-looking. He wants a return to Soviet-era mobilization, a policy fraught with past failures, and, as part of his ambitious ministry overhaul, he’s now overseeing the production of naval ships at a level that is only half of what the U.S. currently spends (just a few years ago, that amount was less than a tenth). By 2020, if current targets are met, Russia will have added 40 new, combat-ready brigades to its army, giving it eight more than what the U.S. is projected to have by 2017. Seventy percent of those forces will be outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment. The defense ministry has also announced plans to create a million-man, active-duty army by 2020. As the U.S. languishes in sequestration blues, Putin has unilaterally pledged $755 billion to completely modernizing the Russian army and restoring it to its lost period of grandeur. Two horribly mismanaged wars in Chechnya in the mid-to-late 90s, and a less-than-stellar performance in 2008 against Georgia provided the justification for this mass renovation. Putin has said, with near Five-Year Plan hyperbole, that modernizatsiia can become a catch-all economic reform in its own right, “a locomotive that will pull the various industries: metallurgy, mechanical engineering, the chemical and radio-electric industries, the entire IT and telecommunications range.”

And yet, as impressive as these statistics are on paper, they’re still coming from a state notorious for cooking its books and undershooting the mark across all sectors. They should therefore be assessed with a fair degree of skepticism. To start with, no ambitious state investment scheme in Russia is ever honestly pursued, be it the Skolkovo dot-com village, which former president Dmitry Medvedev wanted to erect on the outskirts of Moscow and which is now a project rife with embezzlement allegations and counter-allegations, or the much-hyped Sochi Olympics, which has already cost some $50 billion. Sochi is not only the most expensive Games in world history but also, as opposition figures Boris Nemtsov and Leonid Martynyuk have surmised, one of the most excessive self-enrichment schemes in Russian history, with roughly half the inflated budget going to “embezzlement and kickbacks” that have a habit of benefiting Putin’s closest friends. The ruling United Russia party is now, thanks to opposition leader Alexey Navalny, universally known as the “party of crooks and thieves.” In 2011, Transparency International’s Bribe Paying Index ranked Russia as the worst in the world for perceived likeliness for palm-greasing. About 16 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product—$300 billion out of $1.5 trillion—is frittered away annually in corruption schemes.

It seems highly likely, then, that Russia’s military modernization program will similarly devolve into a racket. Though there are also prima facie fudges with Shoigu’s forward-thinking. Alexander Golts, a Russian military expert, has ably dealt with the million-man military myth, citing two clear and insurmountable problems. “The first and most important reason is that the acute demographic decline has resulted in a sharp drop in the number of young men reaching 18 years of age—to 800,000,” he wrote in the Moscow Times recently. “The second reason is that widespread corruption allows thousands of eligible conscripts to receive exemption from service.”  Pay a bribe, skip the draft. Nor is contract service a panacea given the strong disincentive for young Russians to want to join the ranks: the especially barbaric hazing ritual known asdedovshchina graduates plenty of body-bags per year in lieu of fit soldiers. My colleague Andrew Bowen has also suggested that lackluster International Monetary Fund forecasts for Russian economic growth will undermine any long-term blue-sky military plans. Finally, manufacturing standards in the military industry are as robust as elsewhere in Russia: ships that do not sail and missiles that do not launch are still a common problem. In fact, when Russia’s only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, sailed for Syria well over a year ago, a source close to the U.S. Navy told me that the American Sixth Fleet was on hand in case of an emergency. What kind of emergency? “The Kuznetsov might sink.”

One skeptic of this hard-power reassertion theory is Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russia’s security services who teaches at New York University. He told me that a British Royal Navy officer informed him a few years ago that “if ever it were necessary to deal with the Russian fleet in the Mediterranean, NATO could leave it to the Italians to do it without any help.”  Galeotti also agrees that militarymodernizatsiia is a convenient cover for greasing the palms of Russia’s already surfeited officer class. “Efforts to build a million-man army and massive new procurement programs seem to be mechanisms to keep generals in work and transfer tax money to the defense-industrial sector and corrupt managers and middlemen rather than having any bearing on Russia’s genuine security needs,” Galeotti said, citing as the most pressing security need, the rise of a domestic ultra-nationalist far right—which has taken to riots and pogroms against migrant workers in recent months—and a more muscular China.

But rather than focus on these imminent threats, Russia’s painted a bullseye on the back of another perceived external nemesis, the European Union, which has lately found itself the subject of febrile propaganda campaigns and obnoxious attempts to derail its greater commercial and trade cooperation with former Soviet republics. Notwithstanding the 2008 credit implosion and its continuing knock-on effects in southern eurozone countries, which have threatened a destabilizing “exit” from the common currency, former Easter bloc countries still view the EU as a more reliable partner for international business and trade than they do Russia. That’s why the Kremlin has created a shadow EU known as the Customs Union, which includes Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, and whose sole mission seems to be keeping ex-satellites from being lured into Brussels’ orbit. Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Azerbaijan were set to sign an Association Agreement with the EU at the Eastern Partnership Summit in Vilnius on November 28-29, which would offer them economic incentives amounting to free trade and possibly pave the way toward full membership later on. Such incentives, however, come with political preconditions related to freedom of speech, human rights and standards of living. Russia not only wants a neo-Soviet protectorate with these countries—one enforced by tariff arrangements instead of tanks—but it also wants them to behave more like Russia, which is to say dictatorially and outside the confines of international legal norms. Armenia, for instance, was going to sign the Association Agreement until Putin brought President Serzh Sargsyan to Moscow for a private conference. Whatever occurred between the two has not been publicly disclosed, although no doubt Russia’s military support, upon which Armenian is heavily dependent (Armenia’s sole air defence is provided by the Russian base at Gyumri), was raised as a reason to resist the westward pull. Armenia has now decided to join the Customs Union.

Russia’s Department of Public Health also proscribed the importation of Moldova’s wine, just it had previously done with Georgia’s, citing a pretext of unmet sanitary conditions—though fermented Moldovan grapes were evidently hygienic enough for Russian consumption before the Association Agreement was mooted. Sergei Glazyev, an advisor to Putin, left no room for second-guessing this hostile gesture when he said that Ukraine’s tropism toward the EU was “suicidal,” perhaps only leaving out that the suicide would be assisted. In fact, Glazyev threatened to partition Ukraine as punishment, ominously warning that the Kremlin would be “legally entitled to support” ethnic Russians in the country who did not wish to move closer to Brussels—exactly the kind of language Moscow has used to justify a de facto military annexation of Georgia’s breakaway regions Abkhazia and South Ossetia. So starting in August, Ukrainian goods were halted for a laborious inspections regimen at the Ukraine-Russia border (though no such restrictions apply to Russian goods traveling the opposite direction), creating what Ukrainian officials refer to as a “customs terror” that could cost Kiev as much as $2.5 billion by year’s end. Moscow has also intimated that it will deport the many Ukrainian migrant laborers who work in Russia and who generate billions of dollars in capital. Vladimir Pastukhov, in Novaya Gazeta, described the relationship as a triangle, featuring Ukraine as a cheating husband, the EU as an attractive young mistress and Russia as a bitchy wife. Lorena Bobbitt comes to mind.

What is new in the Kremlin’s bullying of its “near abroad” is also new in Russia. Legalized bigotry, whereby “homosexual propaganda” —purportedly conceived to combat pedophilia but defined so nebulously as to endanger the entire gay population—is now being exported to Ukraine to scuttle Kiev’s lurch toward Brussels. A brilliant piece of investigative journalism, by J. Lester Feder of BuzzFeed, found that Ukraine’s growing anti-LGBT movement, rife with NGOs that equate the Association Agreement with the “homosexualizing of Ukraine,” is largely the work of Russian agitprop. One such group, Ukrainian Choice, Feder writes, is “funded by Viktor Medvedchuk, a wealthy businessman and former parliamentarian, who is so close to the Russian president that local media routinely allude to the fact that Vladimir Putin is his child’s godfather.” The EU thus faces a dilemma: push back against Ukrainian intolerance on a major civil rights issue and risk driving the country further into Moscow’s embrace; stay silent, and forfeit any economic compact in accordance with the Treaty of Rome’s rules on human rights requirements. It’s a zugzwang because either way, Putin wins. And he just did.

On Thursday, the Ukrainian Prime Minister Nikolai Azarov’s cabinet posted a decree stating that the government was no longer pursuing an Association Agreement with the E.U. and instead prescribed a trilateral commission consisting of Kiev, Moscow and the Brussels to address Ukraine’s faltering economy in accordance with more Kremlin-friendly trade arrangements. Interested onlookers of this affair, such asSwedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, knew Ukraine was headed in this direction for weeks. Among the outstanding quarrels with the E.U. is President Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to bend on the politicized incarceration and torture of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who was convicted of abuse of office in 2011 and remains the most visible casualty of the wreckage that is Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. Yanukovych’s party abstained from a series of parliamentary votes that would have allowed Tymoshenko to be transported to Germany for medical treatment (she was badly beaten by prison guards last year). “Ukraine government suddenly bows deeply to the Kremlin,” Bildt tweeted after the cabinet rendered its decision.

Even those countries that Russia doesn’t consider within its own back yard or that it didn’t used to occupy militarily are susceptible to nastiness. The Netherlands, too, has lately discovered the cost of crossing the KGB-czar. When Putin travelled to Amsterdam in April, rather than being greeted as dignified head of state, he found a city justifiably enraged at Russia’s new anti-LGBT law. Amsterdam’s mayor refused to meet him and even flew a rainbow LGBT flag atop City Hall. One Dutch businessman who used to live in Moscow told The Guardian that Putin “was insulted to his core, and for a couple of weeks afterwards there was a non-stop campaign on Russian TV showing Holland to be a modern Sodom and Gomorrah, run by paedophiles and hashish dealers.” Dutch police subsequently arrested at high-ranking diplomat from the Russian embassy in The Hague after neighbors complained that he and his wife were drunk. Little more than a week later, that diplomat’s openly gay counterpart in the Dutch embassy in Moscow had his home invaded by vandals who wrote “LGBT” in lipstick on a mirror. Finally, Russia arrested 30 Greenpeace activists—two of them Dutch—and two journalists for scaling an offshore Russian oil rig in the Arctic in protest of the drilling. First charged with “piracy,” each member of the retinue now faces seven years in jail if found guilty of “hooliganism.” Twenty-nine of the 30, including the two Dutch journalists, have now been granted bailed after spending over two months in jail. Yesterday, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg, to which the Dutch government appealed on human rights grounds, also ruled yesterday that the Dutch-flagged Greenpeace boat, Arctic Sunrise, and all 30 passengers should be permanently released.

All of this suggests that the more immediate threat that a re-energized and revanchist Russia poses to the West isn’t advancing armies or aerial assaults but a sophisticated combination of hard and soft power plays that have become something of a Putinist stock-in-trade. These will include new trade wars, cyber attacks, acts of espionage, energy blackmails, and a more updated version of what the KGB used to term “active measures,” that is, the spreading of misinformation and propaganda, designed to make Russia’s enemies—chiefly Washington and Brussels—look bad. So while Russia’s military strives toward great-power worthiness unto 2020, Moscow’s old hostilities will be dealt with using familiar old methods.