It'll soon be make-your-mind-up time about Iran.

When Russia and China join the rest of the world in condemning Iran for lack of cooperation over its uranium enrichment programme (Cuba, Venezuela and Malaysia were the only countries to vote against the IAEA resolution last week), you can be pretty sure things are getting serious again.

A couple of months ago, it looked as if Iran might be prepared to go along with the idea that it should open up its hitherto-undisclosed nuclear research plant at Qom and send its low-enriched uranium to Russia to be further enriched so that it could be used for medical purposes. (I wrote about it at the time here.)

But since then, there's been no progress - and now Tehran has announced that it plans to build 10 more uranium enrichment plants to produce fuel for a big expansion of a nuclear power programme.

So what's going on? Is Tehran just stringing the UN along, dropping tantalising hints every now and again that it might be prepared to cooperate, while all the time carrying on with its enrichment programme?

Or is there is a behind-the-scenes power struggle under way, with different factions in Tehran fighting for supremacy?

The former White House Iran expert Gary Sick argues that the apparent hardening of the Iranian position is a sign that following the bitterly disputed presidential election in June, the Revolutionary Guards have in effect seized power.

He writes on the Daily Beast website: "I am personally convinced that the Revolutionary Guard Corps is now rapidly becoming the dominant force in Iranian politics--greater than President Ahmadinejad, and greater even than Ayatollah Khamenei himself, though the pasdaran [Revolutionary Guards] and others continue to pay lip service to his "leadership."

"I base this judgment, among other things, on the fact that senior leaders of the pasdaran no longer have any compunction about taking positions that differ from those of the President or the Supreme Leader; yet neither the President nor the Supreme Leader ever dare disagree with the pasdaran."

Whoever is calling the shots in Tehran, the Obama administration will soon have to decide what to do. There are three options: keep trying to talk, but in the knowledge that Iran may, despite its consistent denials, be well on the way to developing a nuclear weapons capacity; introduce a Security Council resolution to mandate tougher sanctions, but in the knowledge that they may have only a marginal effect, if that; or start gearing up for a possible military strike, as is being urged by Israel.

Steven Simon at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations has written a detailed piece here about how Israel may be tempted to go it alone with military strikes against Iran's known nuclear facilities.

He says: "Israel is capable of carrying out these attacks unilaterally. Its F-16 and F-15 aircraft, equipped with conformal fuel tanks and refueled with 707-based and KC-130 tankers toward the beginning and end of their flight profiles, have the range to reach the target set, deliver their payloads in the face of Iranian air defenses, and return to their bases.

"The munitions necessary to penetrate the targets are currently in Israel's inventory in sufficient numbers; they include Bomb Live Unit (BLU)-109 and BLU 113 bombs that carry two thousand and five thousand pounds, respectively, of high-energy explosives. These GPS-guided weapons are extremely accurate and can be lofted from attacking aircraft fifteen kilometers from their target, thereby reducing the attackers' need to fly through air defenses. Israel also has a laser-guided version of these bombs that is more accurate than the GPS variant and could deploy a special-operations laser designation unit to illuminate aim points as it is reported to have done in the attack on the al-Kibar facility in Syria."

But of course if Israel were to decide to send its bombers to Iran, they would need to cross Iraq first, and that would mean either getting permission from Washington, or running the risk of US air force interceptors scrambling to stop them.

Steven Simon argues that it is very much in US interests to ensure that things don't get to that point. "Israel is not eager for war with Iran, or to disrupt its special relationship with the United States. But the fact remains that it considers the Iranian threat an existential one and its bilateral relationship with the United States a durable one, and will act if it perceives momentous jeopardy to the Israeli people or state."

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

I have a question for you: where have more US military personnel died this year - in Afghanistan, or Iraq?

Afghanistan, of course, is the right answer: 297 deaths so far this year, compared to 144 in Iraq. (There have so far been 98 UK military deaths in Afghanistan.)

But it's also the wrong answer. Because more US men and women in uniform have committed suicide this year - at least 334 - than have died in either Afghanistan or Iraq.

I mention it because it's worth taking into account as we prepare for President Obama's announcement next Tuesday evening (Wednesday morning if you're in the UK) on his plans for future military deployments in Afghanistan.

He knows that for tens of thousands of American military families - and for many, many more who live in their communities - what matters is not only how many men and women are killed in action, but how deep are the scars, both physical and mental, that they bear long after they have returned home.

So my hunch is that the President will present his decision next week as a strategy for getting out of Afghanistan. This, he will say, is what we intend to do so that we can leave the place to its own people, knowing that we have given them a decent chance of running it themselves.

I suggest that you look not so much at how many extra troops he's decided to send (32-35,000 seems to be the current best estimate), but where he's sending them and what he's asking them to do. Because according to many analysts, there's now a growing realisation in Washington that killing Taliban fighters doesn't get you very far.

One of the most common questions that policy-makers get asked when they're making decisions about military deployments is: "How will we know when we've won?" After all, no one expects the Taliban to sign a formal surrender document.

So, the usual answer is: when the people of Afghanistan can be relatively confident that they and their families are secure, and when there is a degree of political stability that looks likely to last.

Take a look at how other insurgencies in the region have been tackled. According to Paul Staniland, writing on the website ForeignPolicy.com, the usual deal involves "messy and ambiguous bargains that states make with armed groups and local political actors combining accommodation, coercion, bribery, and coexistence."

He calls it "ugly stability". "The government accepts that insurgents will continue to control parts of their own community, but insurgents know that pushing the state too hard can trigger a crackdown. Governments flip over some former insurgents to act as pro-state militias, insurgents and warlords sponsor normal politicians, and both sides become linked to peripheral war economies. A strange but often enduring quasi-stability can persist, whether in Karachi, the Bodo hills, or Nagaland."

In other words, it's not anything like what you'll find in Westminster or Washington, but in a way, it works. And it's an approach that closely resembles what a US army special operations officer, Major Jim Grant, is reported to have outlined in a paper called "One Tribe at a Time: A strategy for Success in Afghanistan."

According to Fred Kaplan, of Slate.com, Grant's premise is that Afghanistan "has never had a strong central government and never will. Its society and power structure are, and always will be, built around tribes - and any U.S. or NATO effort to defeat the Taliban must be built around tribes, as well."

So is this the picture that's emerging? Forget all that stuff about democracy and women's rights - what this is about now is getting out as quickly as possible without leaving behind too much of a mess. According to an increasing number of analysts, that's likely to be the best offer available.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

The Euro-chatterati can be divided broadly into two camps, following the choice of Herman van Rompuy and Cathy Ashton as EU council president and foreign policy chief respectively. In the words of a Financial Times leader on Saturday: "Supporters of the European Union are dismayed, just as Eurosceptics are sneeringly exultant."

But just for the sake of argument - and simply in the interest of encouraging some debate - let us suppose there is a third camp, those who might suggest that for the people who live in the EU, this could have been something of a triumph.

Let us take the Financial Times leader-writer's viewpoint: "By lasering in on the lowest common denominator ... leaders of the big member-states ... reveal themselves as geopolitical pygmies."

If you were seeking to contradict that in a debate, I suppose you could reply: "On the contrary: by insisting that unelected officials must remain clearly and unambiguously subservient to the elected leaders of all member-states, the leaders have shown themselves to have a better understanding of what democracy means than some leader-writers."

And you could point to a comment elsewhere in the FT (in the print edition only, not the online version, oddly): an anonymous US official is quoted as saying "Selecting a foreign minister with next to no foreign policy experience has sent a discouraging and disappointing signal to anxious US allies."

Foreign minister? Who said anything about a foreign minister, you might ask. And you might in turn quote the FT's own Brussels bureau chief, Tony Barber: "Perhaps the real winners are the EU's governments and the cross-national centre-right and centre-left political party groups that dominate the European parliament."

In other words, you might suggest, the people who have actually been elected to represent the EU's 375 million voters.

The core of the Euro-enthusiasts' case is to be found elsewhere in that same FT article: "Globalisation is pushing the world into an age of unsentimental Great Power politics, in which Europe must get its act together to avoid being pushed to the sidelines by Brazil, China, India, Russia, the US and so on. The EU's remedy is the Lisbon Treaty, a set of reforms intended to strengthen its cohesion and upgrade its global influence."

To which you might reply - if you still had the energy and appetite to debate these matters: "Fine, if that is the case, let us elect an EU president and an EU foreign minister so that they can meet all those other leaders as equals." Because the big difference between Brazil, China, India, etc. on the one hand, and the EU on the other, you might argue, is that the former are all independent nation states, and the EU is not.

But you would have to concede that whenever EU voters have been asked if they want the EU to resemble more closely a nation-state, or super-state, they tend to have answered with a resounding No. Which, you might suggest, could be why the EU leaders decided to do the choosing themselves.

Let me make it clear: it is not my intention to advance any particular argument. I just think these are interesting, and important, issues to consider.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?