Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion
Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute
Daniel Graeber covers the debate about Iraq on university campuses and finds that attention has largely turned elsewhere.
And, indeed, even Gen. Ray Odierno, who had earlier opposed a quick drawdown in Iraq, is now suggesting that he may accelerate the US troop exodus.
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A suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into a NATO convoy in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday morning. There are reportedly casualties but early reports did not specify them.
Roadside bombs set by anti-government guerrillas in Afghanistan killed 36 civilians in a 24-hour period ending Tuesday, with a single bombing of a bus near Qandahar accounting for 30 of the dead (and 39 of the wounded). Another bomb in Qandahar killed 5 civilians. Yet another bomb killed a woman in Spingar, Nangarhar.
In addition, 22 Taliban are alleged to have been killed in fighting with Afghan Army and NATO forces in Farah Province. Tuesday's death toll is thus likely around 60 if all deaths from political violence were tabulated.
Some key statistics:
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Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, reaffirmed Monday that a date would soon be set for the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect the planned nuclear enrichment facility near Qom about which the Iranian government informed the IAEA on Monday a week ago.
If Iran really does permit full, ongoing IAEA inspections of the facility, then it cannot be used for weapons production. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted Sunday that Iran cannot use the Natanz plant for bomb-making because it is being regularly inspected by the UN.
Scott Ritter, an experienced inspector himself, dispels the myths about the new Qom facility and urges against new economic sanctions on Iran as counter-productive. Great transparency and more inspections should be the demand of the West, he says.
I made the same point on MSNBC on Monday with Nora O'Donnell:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
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Haggai Ram writes in a guest editorial for IC:
Before, during and after the recent UN General Assembly meeting, the Israeli government, much like Sisyphus, who was condemned to repeat forever a meaningless task, once again stepped up its campaign against Iran’s nuclear program. The immediate objective is patently clear: to push the United Nations Security Council to expand sanctions against Iran and perhaps also to lay down the justification for a future Israeli preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The tactic used is not new either. It consists of a well known, well orchestrated endeavor to conjure up a radioactively reified picture of Iran as a Nazi Germany-like power obsessively bent on making good on its alleged pledge to have the Jewish state “wiped off the map.” Thus, on a recent trip to Russia Israeli President Shimon Peres described the prospects of an Iranian nuclear bomb in ominous terms as “a flying concentration camp”; and Netanyahu, while on a trip to Germany, warned Iran that Israel will not allow “those who wish to perpetrate mass deaths, those who call for the destruction of the Jewish people or the Jewish state, to go unchallenged.”
In assessing the Jewish state’s unrelenting recourse to drawing analogies between Iran and Nazi Germany, one should not dismiss the genuine feelings of vulnerability among Israelis stemming from the trauma of the Jewish Holocaust during World War II. This explains, in part, why despite Israel’s overwhelming military superiority and its own nuclear arsenal, Israeli Jews today are deeply concerned about the likelihood of an impending “second” Holocaust. However misplaced and exaggerated, the reality of such feelings, their importance, must be recognized.
Persistently voicing venomous anti-Israel rhetoric and allegedly pursuing nuclear weapons capabilities, the Iranian government, no doubt, has not been helpful in reducing these misplaced anxieties. To these we should add the reverberations of the electoral earthquake that has shaken the Islamic republic to its core since last June. Indeed, the fraudulent presidential elections and their aftermath have demonstrated to the Israelis the brutal force which that government is prepared to unleash — even against its own people — in order to ensure its survival.
Yet one should also not ignore the dubious dividends that the Israeli government now expects to reap from producing such tenuous analogies. It is no secret that the Obama administration has been exploring ways to bringing about the resumption of the long-stalled Middle East talks. To that end, it has mounted pressure on Israel to agree to a partial freeze on the construction of settlements on occupied Palestinian land. By playing up the purported genocidal threat issuing from Iran, the Netanyahu government thus hopes to avoid making any concessions that are likely to bring about a meaningful breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. "The message is: Iran is an existential threat to Israel; settlements are not," as an Israeli official recently told The Guardian.
In my recent book, Iranophobia (2009), I have demonstrated how the Jewish state has time and again (ab)used the specter of the “Iranian threat” in order to cover up, and divert attention away from, both domestic oversights and the continuing apartheid regime in the Palestinian territories. Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s incumbent Foreign Minister, is a case in point. When asked in the wake of the devastation that the Israeli military had sown in Gaza last year, “What you think is the first most strategic threat to Israel,” Lieberman responded: “Iran, Iran, Iran… As long as there’s no solution to the Iranian problem we will deal with neither the settlements nor the settlers… Only after we will have taken care of … Iran it will become possible to talk about… the problem in Judea, Samaria, and the Golan Heights.”
These fanciful expressions concerning the existential threat posed to Israel by Iran are misleading for two reasons: First, because when compared to the extraordinary misery and depredation which the Iranian government has exacted on its own people, the actual threat which it poses to the Jewish state pales into insignificance; and second, because such expressions have thus far enabled the Jewish state to exacerbate, rather than help to alleviate, the Palestinian problem. It is this yet-to-be resolved problem — and not Iran — that presents the Jewish state with the most serious challenge to its survival.
Haggai Ram teaches the history of the Middle East at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. His most recent book is Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession (Stanford University Press, 2009).
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There is no good evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. It has offered to allow regular International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of the newly announced facility near Qom, which would effectively prevent it from being used for weapons production.
There is a secret nuclear facility in the Middle East, however, producing plutonium and not just enriched uranium, which has the capacity to make 10 nuclear warheads a year.
Here is a 3-D reconstruction of the most dangerous weapons plant in the Middle East, at Dimona in Israel.
It is Israel's ongoing nuclear weapon production that drives the nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Saddam wanted a bomb because Israel had one. The Iranians were then worried both about an Iraqi and an Israeli bomb. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and others are annoyed at their geostrategic helplessness in the face of Israeli nukes.
Israel's nuclear arsenal is the region's Original Sin.
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On Sunday morning, a Taliban suicide bombing attack struck at the entourage of Ismail Khan, the Afghan Minister of Energy and Water, in Herat, according to the Afghan Voice Agency writing in Persian. Ismail Khan is from the western, Dari Persian-speaking city of Herat, and was its governor before being inducted into the central government's cabinet. The attack killed five persons and wounded 17, and left Ismail Khan unhurt but angry.
Ismail Khan had come to Herat a week ago with government permission, for the Eid al-Fitra or Festival of the Breaking of the Fast. He spent the last week meeting with people and is said to have heard from them increasing urgency about the deterioration of security in Herat.
The old-time warlord announced that he would no longer be attending cabinet meetings, in protest against the deteriorating security situation. Ismail Khan had reestablished himself in Herat in late 2001 as part of the Northern Alliance overthrow of the Taliban, and thereafter ruled it with an iron fist. He came into increasing conflict with local tribal leaders, and for the sake of social peace, President Hamid Karzai brought him to the capital as a cabinet minister. He must be furious that he no can no longer as much as visit his old province without nearly being killed by Taliban, a sign of bad security indeed, since there are few Pashtuns and fewer Taliban in Herat.
Ismail Khan said that he refuses to sit in cabinet meeings until the security situation is improved.
He is also quoted by AVA as saying that "The fate of the Americans in Afghanistan will be worse than that of the Russians."
That observation struck me as ominous. Members of the Karzai cabinet are hiving off and betting against the US military's ability to to keep peace in the country.
Meanwhile, presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah pledged to continue the charge against Karzai for voter fraud.
The enmity between Abdullah and Karzai stands in the way of the favored US means of dealing with the problem. The US wants a national unity government. Both Karzai and Ismail are refusing this way of proceeding (Abdullah fears no post given him in a Karzai government will have meaningful power attached to it).
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American and Western discussions of what to do about Iran almost completely ignore Iraq. But no economic sanctions can effectively be placed on Iran without Iraqi support. A gasoline embargo would fail completely if Iraqis smuggled gasoline to Iran (which they certainly would, both for economic and religious reasons). Jalal Talabani, the president of Iraq, said Saturday that new sanctions on Iran "would not work" and that Iraq would never allow its airspace to be used for an aggressive attack on Iran "by any country" (he's looking at you, Israel and US).
Somehow I don't think this is what Bush was going for when he invaded Iraq.
Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council makes a more extended version of Talabani's argument.
Meanwhile, the Turkish government is seeking from its parliament authorization to extend its bombing campaigns against guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers Party (PPK) inside Iraq.
The US military once held 26,000 Iraqi prisoners, most picked up at the site of bombings and other guerrilla attacks. It has released all but 8,000, but the US officers are worried that those released often go back to guerrilla activity-- some of them for the salary. The Status of Forces Agreement requires the US to turn over to the Iraqi government all prisoners for whom specific and detailed criminal cases cannot be built.
Aljazeera English discusses the United Nations Human Development Report on Iraq. Iraq has dropped off the American radar, but the country faces enormous challenges, from ongoing violence to lack of basic human services.
Tomdispatch.com argues that the military-industrial Establishment is miring President Obama in Middle Eastern wars.
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The news in the US is about several terrorist plots, some by Christians and some by Muslim expatriates, which have been averted by good police work, by the FBI and its local colleagues.
In Pakistan, the news is about a terrorist plot that was not averted.
Update: Two further blasts in the Northwest brought the death toll to 17, with 150 wounded. These actions are a sign that the Pakistani Taliban are regrouping after their defeat in Swat, when the Pakistani military took them on frontally.
A bomb blast shook the commercial district of the northern city of Peshawar on Saturday morning, killing at least 7 persons and wounding 50. Peshawar is an important forward staging ground for NATO materiel and equipment, intended to go across the Khyber Pass into Pakistan. The guerrillas figure if they can ratchet up the pressure they can impede further US operations in Afghanistan proper.
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Usama Bin Laden's latest screed on the Western evacutation from Afghanistan is the height of hypocrisy, since Bin Laden actively connived at getting Western troops to go there. Abdel Bar Atwan is a prominent Arab journalist and intellectual. Here what he said about his meeting with Bin Laden in 1996:
' Osama Bin Laden told me when I interviewed him in November 1996, “I can’t fight the Americans on the American mainland. It is too far. But if I succeed in bringing the Americans where I can find them, where I can fight them on my own terms, on my turf, on my own ground, this will be the greatest success.”'
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So I did this posting on Thursday night, below, on how I perceive President Obama to be maneuvering Iran into a box, wherein it faced increasing chances of the ratcheting up of sanctions by the United Nations Security Council. Then I went to bed and got on a plane the next morning and checked in late Friday to find that Obama had announced that Iran had informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that they had begun construction on a second nuclear enrichment facility inside a mountain near the holy city of Qom not far from the capital of Tehran.
AP has video:
Obama alleged that Iran had declined to honor its commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to inform the IAEA immediately when it began such construction, and that the facility was of a size (3000 centrifuges) that it could not plausibly be intended for the peaceful enrichment of uranium to run reactors for electricity generation. (50,000 centrifuges enriching to 2-5% or so would be required for the latter). On the other hand, if you were intensively enriching to make a bomb, 3000 if used over and over again on the same uranium stock could get it up to the 90% enriched level typically nowadays needed for a proper nuclear warhead.
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shot back that no nuclear enrichment has been carried out at Qom and that Iran is only required by the NPT to inform the IAEA 6 months before such a site goes operational, which is precisely what he alleges Iran has done. He underlined that Iran was the one who told the IAEA about the facility, and fully intended that it should be inspected by UN inspectors. He denied that the facility's size said anything about its intended function. As an engineer and mathematician himself, he taunted Obama, saying that the American president had no idea what he was talking about in relating size to function.
Julian Borger and Patrick Wintour of the Guardian report that Iran was forced to acknowledge the site because Western intelligence had picked it up in satellite photographs and then gathered information on it by other means. Ahmadinejad is correct in saying that by the letter of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has not done anything illegal, insofar as the site has not gone operational and Iran is giving 6 months notice. However, the Iranian government had additionally pledged to the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2006 that it would alert the UN to any new new nuclear facility immediately. So Iran may not have broken the law but it has broken its word.
For Iran to break its word on this matter is, moreover, as serious as for it to break the law. (This self-destructive and overly cocky way of proceeding in Tehran was the subject of my column for Salon this week, asking if Ahmadinejad is intent on turning his country into an international pariah.) Iran's enemies, who want it put under severe economic sanctions of the sort that turned Iraq into a fourth-world country, and ideally would like to see the regime in Tehran overthrown-- if necessary by military means-- will point to the secret development of a new enrichment site as a sign of Tehran's essential deviousness. It will be alleged that if there is one secret site there may be more. It will be alleged that you cannot trust anything Tehran says, and so its denials should be disregarded and action should be taken.
The thrust of my piece Friday morning was that Obama was tightening the noose on Iran. I was able to see that without knowing exactly why. I had wondered whether it had to do with the regime's neo-authoritarian direction as of the contested elections in June.
The revelations on Friday do not change everything, though Neoconservatives will hype them as though they do. Iran has been less than forthcoming, not for the first time, but it may just be within the letter of the law. And, if it allows thorough inspections of the Qom site, it is hard to see how it could produce tons of U-235 there surreptitiously (the inspectors would immediately detect that). I share President Obama's puzzlement as to what in the world they want a 3000- centrifuge site for.
But the law and the facts of the matter are less important than the determination of Europe and the US that Iran not develop even the Japan option. And this Qom facility and the delay in notification are powerful political arrows in the sanctions quiver. You wonder if Russia's Putin and China's Hu might not now acquiesce in tightened sanctions.
Since some of my readers appear not to know my record of writing on these matters and seem to confuse analysis with punditry, I should say that I am personally opposed to further sanctions on Iran unless they are very carefully targeted so as not to harm ordinary people. Regimes running oil states are not very vulnerable to sanctions. Moreover, sanctions against Iran are deeply unfair if Israel, India and Pakistan are held harmless for ignoring the NPT altogether and for developing their bombs. In fact, the way the UNSC is proceeding against Iran is such as to destroy the NPT, because any country in its right mind would prefer to withdraw from it and just do as it pleases, a la Israel, than to submit to it and have that submission be a pretext for sanctions, even where the signatory country had done nothing contrary to the letter of the law.
Finally, I leave readers with a caveat. There may be less to the Qom plant than meets the eye. Beware the Hype.
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President Obama is slowly putting Iran in a box. His cancellation of the useless and expensive so-called "missile shield" program in eastern Europe, which had needlessly antagonized Russia, has been rewarded with greater Russian cooperativeness on Iran. The US right wing accused Obama of a failure of nerve. But in fact his move was shrewd and gutsy, since he predisposed Russia to increased cooperation with the US in regard to Iran's nuclear research program. Obama's full court press for a United Nations Security Council resolution on nuclear disarmament also pulled the rug out from under Iran's previous grandstanding tactics, whereby it accused the US and its allies of only wanting nuclear dominance, not the abolition of nukes.
Obama chaired the UN Security Council at the summit level on Thursday, and managed to get through an important resolution on nuclear disarmament.
United Nations Television has video:
The BBC notes that there are increasing fears that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is breaking down. It was originally pitched as a bargain between the nuclear powers and the rest of the world, such that the countries with nukes would gradually get rid of them, while sharing expertise in nuclear energy-generation, while the other countries would agree not to acquire them.
Israel was the first non-European country to refuse to sign and then to go on to develop nuclear weapons by the early 1970s, with French and British help.
Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency censured Israel for its estimated 200 warheads, acquiescing in a resolution introduced by Arab states. The vote was another sign, in the wake of the damning Goldstone report on Israeli atrocities in Gaza, that the international community is fast losing patience with unilateral Israeli policies.
In the 1990s, India and Pakistan got the bomb (India had done some low-yield test as early as the 1970s). More recently, North Korea has. Many countries have or seek what is called the "Japan option." It is generally thought that Japan could construct a nuclear weapon very rapidly if it felt threatened enough. This emergency capacity is also thought to be sought by Iran, which denies that it currently has a weapons research program. 
Russian President Dmitri Medvedov signalled on Thursday that his country could eventually support further UNSC sanctions on Iran if Tehran declines to be more transparent about its nuclear research program with the IAEA. His position appeared more open to increased sanctions than that expressed recently by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who is widely regarded as the de facto ruler of the Russian Federation.
Russia Today has video:
Medvedev's flexibility comes in the wake of the Obama administration's cancellation of plans for missile shield installations in eastern Europe. Although both countries deny that there is any quid pro quo, it seems obvious that Obama's good will gesture has yielded positive results in Moscow with regard to Iran policy.
Washington's earlier push at the United Nations against the Iranian nuclear research program foundered when Iran charged hypocrisy on the part of the nuclear powers and insisted that its program is solely peaceful (an allegation that as far as US intelligence can tell is probably true). Obama's stress on new nuclear disarmament agreements is in part intended to blunt any further Iranian diplomatic campaign and to put Iran in the position of looking obstreperous if it is not forthcoming in the upcoming negotiations with the 5 permanent UNSC members plus Germany.
UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown took a hard line position, urging further US sanction, according to ITN:
Brown erred in charging Iran with having a nuclear weapons program, which US intelligence can find no evidence for. But because it is using centrifuge technology that is open-ended and could be suitable for dual use, Western leaders such as Brown are suspicious that the program has weapons implications down the road.
China disagreed with Brown's stance, and is opposed to further sanctions on Iran. But China has a doctrine of "Harmonious Development," which prescribes that it stays out of the way of the other great powers and avoid political adventurism while it grows its economy. The Chinese might well be susceptible to US and UK pressure to move against Iran if the outcome of the forthcoming 5 + 1 talks is disappointing.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's appearance at the UN was decried by Israeli liberals as clownish. He seemed to take Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's bait by trying to offer documentary proof of the Holocaust (the event is not in doubt and doesn't need to be proven) and then by referring to little Hamas in Gaza (pop. 1.5 mn.) as Nazis. Isn't there a rule that if you make an analogy to the Nazis in your argument, you automatically lose? And since Israel declined to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has a couple hundred warheads, and has occasionally brandished them against other countries, Netanyahu altogether lacks credibility as a critic of Iran's peaceful civilian nuclear research program.
Andrew Butters at at Time magazine explores the issue of whether making the Middle East a nuclear-free zone, as some have suggested, is a realistic goal. He concludes that it is more realistic than might be at first assumed.
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Aljazeera English reports on Ahmadinejad's appearance at the United Nations:
IRNA gives lengthy excerpts from Ahmadinejad's address at the United Nations.
' President Ahmadinejad, who began his address thanking Almighty God for having granted him the chance to attend the “important global assembly”, said that he had already spoken to world leaders about the major challenges with which the world nations have been entangled during the past four years. . .'
“I have also reiterated the need for a drastic change in type of viewing and dealing with the human beings and the world developments and to establish new justice seeking and humane systems aimed at constructing a bright future . . .”
'Ahmadinejad said that “today” he wished to continue that discussion. “It goes without saying that continuation of the status quo of the world is quite impossible. The present unsatisfactory unilateral conditions are against the innate nature of the human beings and in direct contrast against the goal behind the creation of the human beings and the universe.. . “It is no longer possible to increase wealth artificially by printing paper money, amounting up to tens of billion dollars without real baking for it, and to inject it into the veins of the world economy and to transfer severe budget deficits into the other countries’ economies by transferring their wealth to certain countries. . . “The unleashed economy machine of capitalism that had been unjustly set has now reached the end of its way and is now out of order and this unilateral equation does not work any longer.”'
“Time is now over for some people to present their own definitions of democracy and freedom and to consider themselves as the meter sticks for the authenticity of such definitions, under such conditions that they themselves are breaching the same norms before anyone else. They play the roles of the judge, the prosecutor and the executioner all by themselves and meanwhile they act against the countries where true democracy is observed." . . .
“The second point; “Changes and evolutions need to take place both at theoretical sphere and in practice, in structures and in methods, basically and at grass-root level. “The hegemonic liberalist and capitalist mentalities that detach the human beings from their ethical systems and from the heaven, not only present them no salvation, but also lead them towards misery, including wars, poverty and various types of deprivation.' . . .
' “The Iranian nation has left behind a very glorious, totally free election, and marked a new chapter of national blossoming and broad global interactions with their landslide votes, putting the heavy weigh of responsibility on my shoulders." '
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Ido Oren and Ty Solomon write in a guest op-ed for IC:
Five years ago, Charles Duelfer, Head of the Iraq Survey Group, presented to Congress the final report of his 1200 member team, which concluded that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction when it was invaded by the United States in 2003. Because the danger posed by WMD was the Bush Administration’s chief justification for the Iraq war, the failure to discover the illicit arms provoked a fiery political scandal. The ensuing debate revolved around the following question: did the Bush Administration intentionally distort the truth about Iraq’s WMD, as the administration’s harsh critics charged, or did the WMD fiasco result from an unintentional if grave “intelligence failure,” as the administration’s more moderate critics would have it? Alas, the debate sidestepped another equally important question: what role did the use of the phrase “weapons of mass destruction”—a phrase that few Americans were familiar with prior to 2002—play in the successful marketing of the war to the American people? Did this ominous phrase merely describe an Iraqi threat or did its incantation rather create and magnify the threat?
Consider the following excerpt from a speech delivered by President Bush in Fort Hood, Texas, on January 3, 2003:
"The Iraqi regime has used weapons of mass destruction. They not only had weapons of mass destruction, they used weapons of mass destruction. They used weapons of mass destruction in other countries, they have used weapons of mass destruction on their own people. That’s why I say Iraq is a threat, a real threat."
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The NYT says that President Barack Obama is reconsidering his plan to greatly increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan, and to be suffering "buyer's remorse" for sending 21,000 more troops there soon after his inauguration and before a proper policy review. The article suggests a stark difference of opinion between vice president Joe Biden (who has the most foreign policy experience of anyone in the administration) and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Biden is said to favor fewer US troops and a focus on al-Qaeda in the Pakistani badlands. Clinton is afraid the Taliban will take back over Afghanistan and invite al-Qaeda back in there.
At the moment, US policy toward Afghanistan consists of several levels:
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Top challenges for Obama at the United Nations this week, including Tuesday's climate conference, and then the G20 on Thursday and Friday. In many instances, we can blame the difficult position he will find himself in on the US Senate.
1. Obama came into office with an ambitious agenda to develop alternative energy and cut US carbon emissions. So far Congress has done little on these issues, and no climate bill is expected from the Senate this year nor, perhaps, next. China's decision to set specific goals for its "carbon intensity" may leave the US behind as the world's biggest polluter that has no idea what to do about it.
2. If the Obama administration and Russia do not make significant progress in nuclear disarmament and getting a successor to the START I treaty, they will look like hypocrites when they ask the world to sanction North Korea for its nuclear weapons program and Iran for its efforts to enrich uranium. In the wake of Iran's stolen election and its defiance of the international community with regard to its nuclear research program, the old centerpiece of Obama's changed Middle East policy-- engagement with Iran-- has had to be put on hold, and it may even fall off the agenda.
3. In January, Obama announced the most ambitious goal in the Mideast since Clinton, of finalizing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since then, aside from arranging some meetings for his special envoy George Mitchell, he has accomplished nothing worth mentioning on this front. Worse, he has been openly defied by the far rightwing Likud government of Binyamin Netanyahu, who has announced that he will build more housing on Palestinian land for Israeli illegal immigrants into Palestinian territory. Netanyahu can count on majority support in Congress and the Senate because of the clout of the Israel lobbies, especially AIPAC. As Stephen M. Walt pointed out in WaPo, Obama is in danger of being rendered irrelevant and helpless by Israeli intransigence, and few expect Tuesday's summit to change things. Obama should just announce that he will recognize a Palestinian state in 2011, and that the Israelis had better negotiate with the Palestinians to get a good deal from them, since they will be sovereign on a date certain whether Netanyahu likes it or not.
4. Obama wants his European and NATO allies to commit more troops and more resources to Afghanistan. Despite his popularity on the continent, they are mostly resisting his pressure. Canada is leaving in 2011. Leaks in the British press suggest that PM Gordon Brown wants to reduce the UK's troop contingent from 9,000 to 4,500 over the next few years. The divisions in Obama's own administration and its ambivalence about sending more US troops to Afghanistan will only add to European and NATO misgivings about making major new commitments.
5. Obama still has not gotten significant regulation and other reform of Wall Street practices enacted, so that all the shady dealings that caused last year's massive collapse are still licit. Moreover, bankers are still giving each other enormous multi-million-dollar annual bonuses to celebrate the jobs they've been doing (which look to the rest of us pretty piss poor, and, to boot, for which we are now often footing the bill). Many European countries want to impose a cap on these bonuses, putting Obama in the position of defending Wall Street excess to the rest of the world. Instead, he would have wanted to be a leader in reforming the global finance system away from barricuda laissez-faire and ever more unequal distribution of national incomes. Regulatory reform could have come from several directions, but, again, the Senate could and should have been one of them. It hasn't been.
In short, Obama's promises of major change on a whole range of issues show little signs of even taking root much less bearing fruit. Some sort of relatively conservative health care reform and a military withdrawal from an unstable Iraq appear likely to be his only near-term successes. Unlike Lyndon Johnson, he has not used his Congressional majority to initiate a whole series of legislative changes. In many instances, he seems to be being thwarted primarily by that legislative millionaires' club, the US Senate. Domestically, he faces a deadline of the congressional elections of November 2010, which could well weaken his party in the Senate and leave him a helpless giant. Internationally, he confronts a skeptical world waiting to see the dramatic 180-degree turn from Bush administration policies that it so hated, and which so far, with the exception of Iraq and the canceled missile shield, have not materialized in any practical way.
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My column is out in Salon.com, on the way in which Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are turning Iran into a pariah state. I warn that if they keep going down this path, they are going to end up like North Korea.
Excerpt:
'Iran's hard-liners are pushing their country into a dangerous and perhaps crippling isolation that could, if Tehran continues on this path, eventually make it another North Korea. Having damaged their legitimacy at home with a stolen election, which is still being actively protested in the streets months later, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are thumbing their noses at the international community. The regime is adamant that it will make no concessions in regard to its nuclear research program, even in the face of a threat of increased United Nations sanctions. And Ahmadinejad, on the cusp of his trip to New York this week to speak to the U.N. General Assembly, has veered even deeper into a David Duke-like rhetoric about the Holocaust and the role of Jews in history.'
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There is a serious and growing rift between the Obama White House and the uniformed officers over Afghanistan policy, according to Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karen DeYoung at WaPo. They have seen the review produced by Gen. Stanley McChrystal,which warns that unless more US troops are injected into Afghanistan during the next year, the counter-insurgency effort could fail. McChrystal sketched out his approach, modeled in some ways on what the military learned in Iraq, at a time when Obama had momentum on Afghanistan and he assumed that Washington was committed to a counter-insurgency effort.
In the meantime, the US public turned against the war, the Democrats in Congress started resisting sending more troops, and Hamid Karzai destroyed the legitimacy of his government by trying to steal the presidential election. Some administration advisers are apparently urging the US to get out of Afghanstan but to retain the capability of hitting dangerous persons and groups with aerial drones.
On the Sunday talk shows, Obama seemed somewhat hostile to the idea of sending more troops, and certainly before the strategic goals were spelled out.
Apparently military officers are just furious with the president for not making a decision by now one way or another. It is true that Hamlet wouldn't last 5 minutes in Afghanistan.
I wonder if another thing that happened wasn't the successful Pakistani military campaign against the Pakistani Taliban in the Swat Valley, which revealed to Washington that Pakistan is not after all a failed state on the verge of collapse, and that there were regional actors who could and would take on the extremists under some circumstances.
One hope that Washington repeatedly expresses is that an Afghan national army can be trained and the country turned over to it in only a few years. Ann Jones at Tomdispatch.com suggests, based on her own experience in Kabul, that the Afghan army may not actually exist, and may, in fact be a scam whereby an Afghan joins, takes the basic training pay, and then disappears. Some may even go through it two and three times. She points out that when 4,000 Marines went into Helmand Province this spring, they were accompanied by only 600 Afghan troops, and she wonders where the others are. She has a dark suspicion that no such army tens of thousands strong even exists. The US may even have trained persons who then defected to the Taliban.
The Afghan elections are not over, and may not be over until next spring. It is still not clear if a ballot recount to counter fraud will cause enough ballots to be thrown out to force incumbent Hamid Karzai into a runoff against his rival, Abdullah Abdullah. It is probably too late to plan and hold a runoff this fall, since winter snows are coming in the mountains, so things may just be unsettled until the spring.
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The USG Open Source Center translates Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's Eid al-Fitr Sermon, in which he categorically rejects the idea of Iran ever developing, possessing or using nuclear weapons.
Iran's Supreme Leader Rejects Nuclear Weapons
Speech by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i at a meeting with senior officials and people on Id al-Fitr -- recorded
Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Document Type: OSC Translated Text
(Ayatollah Khamene'i) They (Western countries) falsely accuse the Islamic republic's establishment of producing nuclear weapons. We fundamentally reject nuclear weapons and prohibit the use and production of nuclear weapons. This is because of our ideology, not because of politics or fear of arrogant powers or an onslaught of international propaganda. We stand firm for our ideology.
At the same time, they are aware of this. The US officials who claim that the Iranian missiles are dangerous or that we seek to produce atomic bombs know themselves that such statements are false. But it is part of the policy of Iranophobia that dominates the behavior of these arrogant governments today. They should correct their behaviour. The Iranian nation is vigilant and understands their enmity, and it will stand firm against them. The Islamic Republic will not surrender in the face of any attack.
(Description of Source: Tehran Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1 in Persian -- state-run television)
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Iranian authorities maintained that they counted the ballots of a nationwide election in June in only about 10 hours and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad immediately claimed victory, despite widespread suspicions of fraud.
Afghanistan held its presidential election on August 20 and all the ballots are still not counted, and it isn't clear whether there will be a runoff election because of widespread ballot fraud.
But Ahmadinejad knows how to handle all this. The Tehran Times writes: "President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has congratulated his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai on his re-election. In a telephone conversation on Thursday, Ahmadinejad said that Afghan people have voted for Karzai as he is a 'devout and competent' leader."
You wonder if Karzai can survive that endorsement.
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Newsweek is reporting that the US intelligence community continues to assess that Iran is not working on getting a nuclear weapon. Iran insists that its nuclear energy research program is for the purpose of producing fuel for the Bushehr reactors when their construction is complete. I.e. they are seeking an "exotic way of boiling water" (the ironic definition of nuclear power for electricity generation). As far as US intelligence can tell, the Iranian claim is correct. The Israelis and Germans are wild men on this issue, but a) the US has better intelligence on the nuclear issue than do they; b) the Israeli and German intelligence agencies got Iraq badly wrong; c) Israel in particular wants to strike Iran for political reasons, to take it down a notch, and may be seeing the raw intelligence through that lens.
The other news is about so-called suppressed documents in the files at the International Atomic Energy Agency, which are alleged to show a nuclear weapons research program. Gareth Porter argues convincingly that the reason that the IAEA never took the documents seriously is that there is every reason to think they are forgeries, perhaps by the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) political cult, which wants to have the US overthrow the clerical regime in Tehran so that MEK can take over the country.
As for the Western press leaks that Iran now has enough nuclear material to make a bomb or now has the technical ability to make a bomb, both are nonsense. You need to enrich uranium to 90% to make a bomb. Iran claims to be able to enrich to 4% and a lot of observers think that is an exaggeration. So ipso facto Iran cannot possibly have produced enough fissile material for a bomb. Moreover, you need to have a weapons program trying to enrich to 90% to produce a bomb, which Iran does not have, from everything US intelligence can discover. Either the journalists are being fed fraudulent documents or they are just orally being misled.
Many American Jewish organizations are dismayed by the right-wing Likud Party's beating of war drums against Iran.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is putting pressure on Iran about its nuclear research.
I talked with MSNBC's Alex Witt on Saturday about Iran's nuclear research program:
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Note: Revised 9/21/09
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave a sermon on Friday for "Jerusalem Day" that is full of the most vile crackpot anti-Semitism that can be imagined.
Anti-Semitism as a form of bigotry typically ascribes the most abject motives and character to Jews in general at the same time as they are depicted as secretly controlling the world. The original version of this posting did not post extended Open Source Center translation. Here are a couple of paragraphs, below. But note that the the first two sentences were not in the Persian text. The OSC translators listened to the original radio broadcast, however, and so it is possible that Ahmadinejad added things orally that were not in his prepared remarks. I have compared the translation to the Persian text and have altered some of my original readings.
'Before the First World War, certain noises were made in order to organize an evil current to dominate the entire world. Using their colonial experiences, they [the imperial European states] plotted to dominate all nations and the world's material and intellectual properties. After the First World War, they abused the ignorance of the nations and Muslims of the region, and they put Palestine under the trusteeship of the old colonialist, Britain. They provided an opportunity for the organized criminal Zionists and the[se] rushed into Palestine. Under the cover of buying farms, gardens, and lands, they occupied a major part of the land by the use of weapons and carrying out massacres and assassinations. By the help of the British government and relying on her force, they displaced the people.
Before the Second World War, the noises and activities were intensified. In European countries, a complicated show started which was called anti-Semitism. Of course, some governments and their people have always abhorred the Jews because of indecent behavior by some of the Jews and they were willing to evict the Jews out of Europe. However, some European governments and statesmen and the Zionist network did the main plot of anti-Semitism. They produced hundreds of films. They wrote hundreds of books and circulated rumors. They started a psychological war in order to make them (the Jews) escape to Palestine.'
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A suicide bomber used a huge truck bomb to blow up the market in the Shiite village of Ustarzai, Kohat District, killing 33 and wounding 80. Many shops, buildings and vehicles were destroyed in the blast. The village is largely inhabited by Bangash Pashtuns, who tend to follow the Shiite branch of Islam, unlike most other Pashtuns, who are Sunnis. The attack was probably, despite their denials, the work of the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (TTP) or the Movement of Pakistani Taliban, now headed up by Hakimu'llah Mahsud from Orakzai Agency in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (very vaguely like US Indian reservations, but for the Pashtun tribes up there). The attack follows on a bombing on Thursday that had left 6 dead. 
Kohat is in red
On Saturday morning, tribal notables in the area held a peace jirga of congress that gathered Sunni and Shiite leaders together to defuse the tensions caused by the bombing.
The TTP is furious that the Pakistani military took them on and forced them out of the Swat valley. Although many Sunnis in Swat supported the operation, all Shiites did, and the Pakistani Taliban hate Shiite Islam anyway. The operation might have been revenge for the Pakistani army's invasion of Swat, or it could just be a manifestation of the hyper-Sunni Taliban's hatred of Shiites. The Bangash Shiites may be seen by the Taliban as a local intelligence asset for the government in its fight against Talibanism.
Pakistan's Shiite population is probably about 13% of the country, and they have been brutally targeted by Sunni Muslim extremists in recent years. The Shiite Pakistanis, along with mystical Sufis and secularists, are die-hard opponents of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
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Guerrillas attacked an Italian convoy in Kabul on Thursday, killing 6 Italian troops and 10 Afghan civilians, and wounding over 50 others.
Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi as a result called for foreign troops to depart Afghanistan sooner rather than later. It had already been decided that 500 of Italy's 3000-strong military mission would soon go home.
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President Barack Obama has scrapped an expensive ($56 bn so far) and probably useless "missile shield" program in the Czech Republic and Poland to which Russia had vehemently objected, and which had increasingly been described as aimed not at Russia but at Iran. In fact, the proposed ten anti-missile missiles in Poland the proposed radar station in the Czech Republic were part of wide-ranging push by Washington to encircle Russia while it was weak. Russia had indicated that the missile shield plan was an obstacle to further talks on nuclear disarmament.
Instead, Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates say that they will conduct missile defense from aircraft carriers at sea-- that they haven't given up on the principle, but are just doing it smarter. They are even cleverly turning the bizarre Iranian argument against its Republican inventors, pointing out that if the fear is really (wink, wink) Tehran, well it doesn't have ICBMs or anything and the anti-missile batteries such as the Patriots on US naval vessels would be more effective.
Aljazeera English has video:
The so-called shield on land was causing a lot of trouble for no good reason. AFP notes, "Critics argued the system could not be proven to work, was focused on a non-existent threat from Iranian long-range hardware and needlessly angered Russia."
It is controversial among scientists whether missile defense is practical. I can't imagine why in the world Iran would fire a missile at the Czech Republic or any other European country (Iran's military budget is comparable to that of Norway or Singapore-- it isn't exactly a hulking behemoth stalking Europe). The US policy establishment has a long history of using euphemisms. Thus, Washington types often say "North Korea" when they actually mean China, because no one cares if they p.o. Pyongyang, but angering Beijing is unwise. Obviously, the Bush administration was talking about an Iranian strike on Europe as a symbolic way of speaking of a Russian attack.
But despite White House denials, surely the cancellation of the system is mainly about Obama's hope for a more positive engagement with Russia. The Afghanistan War lurks in the background; Russia's willingness to allow NATO to transship materiel for Afghanistan by rail is crucial now that the Karachi-Khyber Pass route in Pakistan is problematic. If you fight a war in a landlocked country, you need the help of neighbors for logistics. In Afghanistan's case, that means Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in the first instance, and beyond Central Asia (itself landlocked), the Russian Federation. Fred Weir at CSM wonders if the cancellation will convince Russia to be more willing to see UN Security Council sanctions on Iran increased (personally, I doubt that).
Aljazeera English discusses what Obama might get for the move from Russia:
The rightwing squawkers at this move should explain how, practically, they would supply US troops if Russia were to turn hostile to such transshipment. The American Right is responsible for putting the US in this position of weakness by miring it in two Asian land wars and deregulating the economy into collapse. That they attack Obama for doing what is necessary to extricate us is mere posturing and hypocrisy.
They should also explain why America's closest allies-- Britain, France and Germany-- all greeted the decision with effusive praise and hopes that it would contribute to better relations with Russia.
Still, the decision was received with dismay by some Polish and Czech politicians, who fear it will embolden Russian reassertion. (The Czech left, in contrast, was delighted). Again Aljazeerah English has a good reporet:
Obama's smart move is a form of social intelligence-- he has reversed Bush's cowboy go-it-alone-ism, and is creating the conditions for US 'resource cumulation'-- getting others to cooperate in achieving shared goals.
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President Barack Obama said Wednesday that he would wait for a while before deciding whether to send more US troops to Afghanistan. The administration is said to be deeply divided on the issue, and Obama says he wants further reports from the State Department and other civilian agencies before he makes a final determination.
Obama also rejected any analogy between Vietnam and Afghanistan: “You have to learn lessons from history. On the other hand, each historical moment is different. You never step into the same river twice. And so Afghanistan is not Vietnam.” Obama may be the first American president to quote pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus.
Obama, however, is taking an unusually anti-social science stance in saying this. Social history, political science and sociology are all premised on our ability to attain at least medium-range generalizations about big social movements and groups. Thus, the process of decolonization after WW II, while it unfolded differently in different colonies/ countries, did have some common or at least widespread characteristics. One of the reasons the Project for a New American Century and the Bush administration failed in their attempt to reinvent 19th-century empire in the 21st century is that peoples of the global south are now politically and socially mobilized en masse in a way they were not in 1850. Some 15,000 British troops could no longer hope to hold all of India. In some important respects, "Vietnam" partook of characteristics of decolonization and one could compare it to Algeria, e.g.
On Wednesday morning, MSNBC's "Morning Joe" had as a guest Jamie Rubin, an adjunct professor at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia U., and a "kitchen" adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president (also husband of CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour). Rubin also took up cudgels against the Vietnam analogy. He said that in Vietnam the whole world was against the US, whereas in Afghanistan this is not the case. But the extremely wealthy Oil Gulf is against the US-- at least its private billionaires are-- and Pakistan is at least ambivalent. Russia is also ambivalent, worried about a permanent US landlocked aircraft carrier on the doorstep of Central Asia. And, anyway, movements sometimes succeed even if they are based only on one ethnicity in a country and even if they are mainly indigenous.
Here's a key exchange:
"MR. BARNICLE: . . . Admiral Mullen said yesterday in a public forum, a Senate hearing, that one of the things we've done very badly, we've under- resourced very badly for four or five years our commitment to Afghanistan.
That is basically throwing the prior Joint Chiefs and the top military command and an administration right under the bus.
MR. RUBIN: Well, I think he has. He's thrown under the bus the effort that went into Afghanistan for six, seven years, is the point I was making. He's making the argument for resetting the clock.
The Bush administration, the military, the Pentagon -- including Secretary Gates, who's still there, are all focused on Iraq. They put the best troops, the best intelligence, the best resources, the daily commitment to Iraq. And yes, in 2008 we had a turnaround there.
The fundamental question that the Congress is going to face, and I think administration officials are struggling with, is is Iraq a reasonable analogy now?
Will the surge that worked in Iraq, is there an analogous situation in Afghanistan?
If have top-level effort, if the president focuses on it, if we have additional surge of military forces, if we reset the objectives --
Because we lowered the objectives in Iraq, where we began working with Sunni warlords that previously we weren't prepared to work with.
So if we lower the objectives and increase the resources, I believe we can achieve this mission.
But we're going to have to have a serious national debate over the next several months in order to do that, and I think we're going to need to hear a lot more from the administration about all of these issues.
And we need to really, really put to bed the issue that I think is behind everybody here, which is that this is another Vietnam.
And I think that Vietnam is a terribly debilitating analogy for our country. Every time something is difficult, we say, oh, it's Vietnam.
Afghanistan and Vietnam have nothing to do with each other. The whole world is on our side in Afghanistan; the whole world was clearly not on our side in Vietnam.
The people in Afghanistan prefer an outcome that's not the Taliban, while in Vietnam, as you know, the situation was different.
So let's take that analogy, throw it out the window, and deal with the facts on the ground. It's going to be hard enough, with those facts, to win the argument."
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Muslim Denunciations of al-Qaeda and Terrorism
Suggested Books about the Middle East
Michigan War Studies Review. Many excellent resources.
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Awards
Winner, October 5, 2007, Scott Nearing Award for Courageous Scholarship (Awarded by the Graduate Students of the Political Science Department, University of Pennsylvania).
Winner, 2005 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, Hunter College.
Winner, 2004 Koufax Award for Best Expert Blog
Winner, 2004 Koufax Award for Best
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