These two maps depict official Iranian presidential election results by province with varying degrees of detail. The map on the left has been produced by Critical Threats, a project of the American Enterprise Institute. The map on the right has been prepared by the Guardian Datablog. Click on the thumbnail of each to view full-scale original.

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From May 31 to June 4, Israel will conduct its largest country-wide civil defense drill ever, code-named “Turning Point 3.” At its height, on June 2, a siren will sound, and all Israelis will be expected to enter protected rooms and shelters for a few minutes. In advance of the drill, Israel’s Home Front Command has distributed this color-coded map to all homes (click on image to enlarge), graphically depicting the amount of time residents of each part of the country have “to reach protected space.” “Post this map on your refrigerator,” the map says, “just to be on the safe side!” To lighten the message (for children?), the map includes playful figures such as a smiling camel and frolicking dolphins.

This updated map, released today by UNOSAT, presents reported military operations and attacks by Israel and Hamas from December 25 to January 5, within and surrounding the Gaza Strip. Click on thumbnail to view the map.

This map, released today by UNOSAT, presents reported attacks by Israel and Hamas from December 25 to 31, within and surrounding the Gaza Strip. “Damage locations have been taken exclusively from open media sources. Many recorded damage sites shown are approximate and may not represent all known incident locations.” Click on the thumbnail to open the map.

The Islamic Republic has been pursuing a nuclear program for the better part of two decades. Concerns over Iranian intentions were among the reasons cited by Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel, for example, when he inaugurated Germany’s “critical dialogue” in 1992. Subsequent years have been littered with failed diplomatic initiatives, most notably: Reagan’s controversial outreach in 1983; critical dialogue; a broader European critical engagement; Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s apology; and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s offer to sit down with Iran if it suspended enrichment for the duration of talks, and her subsequent decision to reverse course and sign onto a generous incentive package. The constant throughout all of these initiatives has been continuation of Tehran’s nuclear program. Whether under ‘pragmatist’ president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, ‘reformist’ president Mohammad Khatami, or ‘principalist’ (Persian: usulgarayan) president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, there have been differences of rhetoric, but remarkable continuity of Iran’s nuclear investments.

The clock is running down, though. President Obama will need to make decisions which Presidents Bush, Clinton, and Bush deferred. After all, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has confirmed that the Islamic Republic has now installed 4,000 centrifuges in its overt enrichment plant. According to Senators Dan Coats and Chuck Robb’s task force on U.S. Policy toward Iranian Nuclear Development (for which I served as drafter), with just 6,000 P-1 centrifuges, fuel-grade 4.8 percent enriched uranium feed, and tails enrichment of 2.26 percent, the Islamic Republic could produce 20 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium in 16 days; i.e., in the period between IAEA inspections. That is not to say that Iran can produce a bomb in less than three weeks, but producing a crude-bomb’s worth of 93.1 percent highly enriched uranium is the most difficult process in an indigenous bomb program.

Early in his administration, Obama will have to determine whether the United States can live with a nuclear weapons-capable Islamic Republic. If he decides the answer is no and if diplomatic and economic coercion fails to persuade Iran’s leaders to back away from their program, this would then mean commitment to a 1998 Operation Desert Fox-type operation. Any kinetic action against Iran would bring short-term gain at tremendous long-term cost: Iranians are nationalistic and would rally around the flag. While the Islamic Republic does not need nuclear arms for its defense, any military action against the Iran’s nuclear program would justify Tehran’s arguments in world opinion as the regime rebuilt.

Regardless, Obama’s policy positions and voting record suggest that he would never order any strike. This leaves both containment and deterrence as U.S. strategies. The problem here, though, is that across the political spectrum, U.S. officials speak of both strategies in rhetorical terms without acknowledging what they require. In this essay for the American Enterprise Institute’s Middle Eastern Outlook series, I explore what would be necessary to deter or contain a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic of Iran, and the consequences of speaking of either strategy without laying the groundwork for them.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

Israeli Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Giora Eiland served as head of the Israeli National Security Council from 2004 to 2006. He is the author of a new paper, “Rethinking the Two-State Solution” (The Washington Institute for Near East Policy), in which he argues for exploration of two other alternatives: the “Jordanian option” and a “regional approach.” Regarding the latter, Eiland writes:

Because Israel and the Palestinians have to share a parcel of land that is too small for both of them, neither can make substantive concessions, creating a zero-sum game that could lead to a true dead end. The only real contribution that the Arab countries can offer is exactly what the Israelis and Palestinians need—more land. The regional approach proposed in this paper involves a multilateral swap that would produce net gains for all relevant parties. For example, this solution would triple Gaza’s size—the only way to offer a real prospect for the poor population of that area, and the only way to shift public opinion away from Hamas and toward a plan with real hope.

Eiland’s idea is not new. MESH has already featured a discussion of an even more ambitious regional land swap, and another on a trilateral swap involving Israel, Egypt, and the Palestinians. But until now, land swaps have been championed most vigorously by geographers. Eiland may be the first ex-official to propose them, even providing a map of a three-way scenario. (The map may be enlarged by clicking on it.)

Update: There are comments on this post by Nabil Fahmy, former Egyptian ambassador to the United States, and Marwan Muasher, former Jordanian foreign minister and ambassador to the United States, as well as by MESH members.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

Information Week publishes a story on the Internet Mapping Project:

2008 is the tenth anniversary of a project to map the Internet. Undertaken by Lumeta, the effort was undertaken as a long-range research project to study the growth of the online world…. The project gathers routing data to all backbone routers hosted by ISPs. The map shows only the shortest path to each router. Lumeta says these paths can change over time as routers are reconfigured. Maps can be constructed based on a variety of data points, including IP address blocks, geography, Top Level Domains (TLDs) and service providers.

The report is accompanied by a number of sample maps, including this internet map of the Middle East. (Click on thumbnail to enlarge.)

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Gal Luft :: During the first term of the next president, some 68 million new cars will roll onto America’s roads. In China, the world’s fastest growing auto market, sales of new cars will surpass those in the United States as early as 2015, and in India millions of $3,000 Tata Nano cars will soon begin to flood the bustling streets of Calcutta and Mumbai. Most of these cars will have a street life of roughly 15 years and (barring action by those countries’ leadership) almost all of them will be able to run on nothing but petroleum, locking our future to OPEC and its whims for decades to come. In the words of the International Energy Agency: “We are ending up with 95 percent of the world relying for its economic well being on decisions made by five or six countries in the Middle East.”

Avoiding such an outcome should be a top priority for the next administration. Unfortunately, despite the broad agreement by both presidential candidates on the urgent need to reduce petroleum dependence, they both focus on solutions that are politically contentious (like domestic drilling and increasing mandatory fuel efficiency standards) and that are by and large tactical rather than strategic. The reality is that neither efforts to expand petroleum supply nor those to crimp petroleum demand will be enough to materially address America’s strategic vulnerability. Such solutions do not address the roots of our energy vulnerability: oil’s monopoly in the global transportation sector—almost all of the world’s cars, trucks, ships and planes can run on nothing but petroleum—and the stranglehold of OPEC over the consuming nations’ economies.

This cartel, which owns 78 percent of global reserves, produces today about as much oil as it did thirty years, despite the fact that the global economy and non-OPEC production have doubled over the same period. Policies that perpetuate the petroleum standard, doing nothing to address the lack of transportation fuel choice, would therefore guarantee a worsening future dependence on the oil cartel as the relative share of non-OPEC oil reserves and production further shrinks.

The new president should therefore declare a strategic goal to break the petroleum standard and replace it with an Open Fuel Standard. This would require that every automobile sold in the United States (and, by extension, throughout the world, since no automaker would give up on the U.S. market) must be able to run on non-petroleum fuels in addition to gasoline. Flexible fuel cars (which cost automakers $100 extra to make and can run on any combination of alcohol and gasoline), electric cars and plug-in hybrids cars (which enable us to use made-in-America electricity) are only some of the solutions at hand. Only through competition at the pump (and the socket) can we drive down the price of oil, reduce its strategic value and curb the transfer of wealth from oil importing countries to OPEC. To bring those solutions to the marketplace in mass would require some presidential signatures, and like everything in life there is some cost involved. But christening more aircraft carriers than would otherwise be needed isn’t cheap either.

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Jacqueline Newmyer :: The next president’s foreign policy should be attentive to the ways in which the balance of global economic and military power has tilted toward Asia. To the extent that the Bush administration has been preoccupied with Central Asia and the Middle East since 9/11, an eastward shift in the U.S.’s foreign policy focus may be warranted. That said, the new administration should keep three points in mind as it crafts a Middle East agenda:

1. As the United States draws down its forces in Iraq (while renewing attention to Afghanistan), other external powers with strategic interests in the region are likely to perceive a vacuum to fill. For instance, China can be expected to continue to expand its ties in the Middle East by means of investments and agreements in Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The United States may want to try to prevent any other single outside power from exercising undo influence. Options would include allowing India to develop better relations with Iran; encouraging Indian, Korean, and Japanese development of Iraq; and maintaining naval and air forces in the region.
2. The U.S.-India nuclear agreement is likely to have follow-on effects in the Gulf, where India has traditionally had strong ties. New Delhi will have incentives to transfer technology received from the United States. If American know-how is going to spread, it would be best for Washington to try to shape that process and build capital that might prove useful in the event of a future Middle East conflagration or crisis.
3. Whether John McCain or Barack Obama prevails, the United States will be led by a president with a compelling biography and personal appeal. Such a commander in chief creates a potential competitive advantage in executive diplomacy for the United States, relative to China and other Asian powers, in a region with a tradition of charismatic leadership and around the world. At least at the beginning of the first 100 days, the new occupant of the White House will project an image of U.S. strength, based on a record of self-sacrifice and resolve or a demonstration of the American electorate’s liberal tolerance and openness. Both kinds of strength have their uses in outreach to strategic interlocutors. After a campaign that seems poised to revolve around domestic issues, President McCain or Obama would do well to exploit this advantage by visiting allies with interests in the Middle East early in his term.

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Stephen Peter Rosen :: There are a number of ways in which we can think about the president’s agenda during his first 100 days. My suggestions reflect the belief that the new president will have essentially no staff in place, precious little knowledge of the ongoing work of the permanent bureaucracy, and not enough time to have developed a long term strategy. As a result, an agenda for the first 100 days should address an urgent problem in the international environment, and should make use of the president’s political capital at home in order to undertake necessary but difficult initiatives.

Most issues in the Middle East are not amenable to bold initiatives. The Arab-Israeli problem is not a problem, but a more or less permanent condition. Managing Iran will call for the slow and quiet development of American and allied military capabilities in the region, and new nuclear guarantees. Iraq and Afghanistan are problems for the long haul, both militarily and economically. Limiting the growth of Chinese influence in the region is a basic strategic goal, which presidential diplomacy can assist, as Jacqueline Newmyer points out.

But the destabilization of Pakistan could occur quickly and might already be underway before the new president is sworn in. There is a generation of Pakistani Army officers who came of professional age in the 1990s, who remember the United States walking away from Afghanistan and abandoning Pakistan. They are reported to be more Islamist than their elders. The frontier province in the north of Pakistan is the current home of Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda is safe there from the Pakistani Army. No Pakistani officer, old or young, was willing to fire on Pakistani civilians in the rioting earlier this year. The expectation, valid for 60 years, that the Pakistani Army will be able to hold the country together, is no longer supportable.

The American president-elect should begin private discussions with India, Israel, and China about what those countries would do in the event of a civil war in Pakistan that splits the Pakistani Army. This discussion would focus on how to contain the effects of the war within Pakistan, and how to ensure control of Pakistani nuclear weapons. The president-elect must not only ask the American military to present their contingency plans for such an event, but become deeply involved in shaping them. Homeland security must prepare for Pakistani nuclear weapons that are suddenly not under verifiable control. History, recent and old, confirms that absent a process that educates both political leaders and military officers about their often conflicting perspectives and needs, military plans will fail.

This is a problem which can benefit from timely preparation, in the days before and during the first 100 days of the next president.

Today (Sunday) is the inaugural conference in Paris of the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM). French President Nicolas Sarkozy, father of the idea, originally proposed a body independent of the EU, linking together all the states bordering the Mediterranean sea. He also proposed that the new Union take a lead in Arab-Israeli peacemaking, since it would include both Israel and Arab states.

But opposition within the EU to a separate entity has led to the inclusion of the full EU membership in the UfM, as well as its incorporation within the existing Barcelona Process, the EU’s own decade-old Euro-Med initiative. Arab opposition to normalization with Israel has also reduced the Union’s initial agenda to promotion of development projects. Nevertheless, the conference will be attended by a wide range of Middle Eastern prime ministers and presidents, including Ehud Olmert and Bashar Asad. This paper, by the Euro-Mediterranean Study Commission (EuroMeSCo) provides some context.

The French newspaper Le Figaro, which has an online dossier of articles about the UfM, has prepared an interactive map (in French) showing the current likely composition of the UfM, the scope of Sarkozy’s original plan, likely co-presidents, possible sites of the secretariat, development projects, and budget. (If the map doesn’t appear right below, click here.)

This week, Iranian television showed missile test launches that included a new version of the Shahab-3 missile, which Tehran claims can travel 2,000 kilometers, or 1,250 miles. Various media outlets accompanied this news with maps showing the range of the Shahab-3. An interesting variation in these maps involves just how much of Europe (Russia excluded) is included within that range, and how much emphasis is given to Israel.

• This map, from the BBC, shows Iran’s missile range covering the eastern edge of Europe, and specifically names Greece and Romania as falling within that range. The context of this map is a story on U.S. efforts to establish a missile defense umbrella over Europe, and so it specifically names potential U.S. partners Poland and the Czech Republic. It also shows one city, Moscow, capital of Russia, which opposes the U.S. plan. Israel is shown but not emphasized. The map implies the U.S. view that Iran’s capabilities are a European problem, and perhaps should be a Russian one too.

• This map, from the New York Times, shows the most extensive coverage of Europe, specifically naming Greece and Ukraine and showing their entire territory within range. Israel is not singled out.

• This map, from Agence France-Presse, includes somewhat less of Europe in Iran’s range, and does not name any European country. Israel is emphasized.

• This Los Angeles Times map does not show any part of Europe within missile range of Iran, not even the small part of Turkey in Europe. The map highlights Israel in bold. The message: It’s Israel vs. Iran.

• This London Guardian map includes a sliver of Europe, and Ukraine is named, but the emphasis is clearly on Israel.