Author: Helena

The Palestinian agreement; the Saudis’ new stance

Please, please, please– let’s hope that this time the Fateh-Hamas agreement can be made to stick, and the hard-pressed people of the Occupied Palestinian Territories be relieved of the economic strangulation and internal conflict to which they have been subject for far too long now!!
Here is the account in Arabic-language Al-Hayat of the agreement that PA President Mahmoud Abbas and the head of Hamas’s political bureau, Khaled Meshaal, concluded on Thursday evening in Mecca.
That account includes the text of the “Mecca Declaration” concluded there, and also the text of the “letter of appointment” handed by Abbas to the (Hamas) PA Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh. This latter text included this:

    “I call on you to be committed to the higher interests of the Palestinian people and to the preservation of its rights, and to work to realize them on the basis of the decisions of the Palestinian National Council, the Basic Laws, the document of national agreement, and the decisions of the Arab summits. And on that basis I call on you to respect the decisions of international legitimacy and the agreements that the PLO signed.”

Presumably, by accepting that letter, Haniyeh was agreeing to form his new government on that basis.
The Hayat reporters there in Mecca write that the parties agreed that Fateh will get six ministers in the new National Unity Government, Hamas will get nine, and the rest– including the all-important Interior Minister– will all be independents.
In this account, Al-Jazeera English gives this (still incomplete) list of portfolios:

    * Ziyad Abu Amr, an independent, is the new foreign minister.
    * Salam Fayyad, from the Third Way party, becomes finance minister.
    * The remaining ministerial posts include nine ministers from Hamas and six from Fatah.
    * Four other ministerial posts will be distributed among other Palestinian factions.
    * Five posts will be assigned to independent politicians not belonging to any political faction.
    * Three of the independents will be nominated by Hamas and two by Fatah.

There is much more to say about this agreement than I have time to write here. I am not sure if it will “open the door” for whatever limp Palestinian-Israeli “diplomatic initiative” Condi Rice might be cooking up for later this month… At first blush, it would seem not to.
But for Palestinians living under horrendous conditions of international siege and threatened internal fitna (internal collapse/ civil war) inside the OPTs, that probably is not the first order of business. For them, the most urgent priorities are to ward off the fitna and to find a way to reopen the channels to the external aid that Israel’s inhumane economic siege has forced them to be reliant on.
This agreement– which was concluded under the direct auspices of both the Saudi King Abdullah ibn Abdel-Aziz and his Crown Prince, Sultan Ibn Abdel-Aziz– holds considerable promise of meeting both those goals to a significant extent.
Presumably, now, the Saudis have also undertaken to “underwrite” the process of intra-Palestinian reconciliation that they have so prominently brokered, by assuring the Palestinian parties– and the new government, which will be formed very soon– of the Kingdom’s financial support.
That is a new situation.
In brokering this deal, King Abdullah has moved decisively beyond the limits of the behavior toward the Palestinians– and Hamas, in particular– that the US has been seeking to impose on all members of the international community.
That is presumably why he felt he needed also to associate his Crown Prince with this action, as well.
(All this certainly underscores what I was writing here yesterday about the Saudis’ current stance on regional affairs.)
The reactions of the US and Israel to the deal have been notably frosty.
But what are the Americans going to be able to do about King Abdullah’s naughty transgression? I really don’t think they’re in a position to do very much at all. The Israelis may well try to block Saudi aid getting into the OPTs, or take other actions to block the implementation of the initiative… And the US and Israel may try to continue to support acts by rogue members of the notoriously ill-disciplined Fateh security services that are aimed at keeping the pot of internal tensions at boiling point. But given the near-unanimous jubilation with which the Palestinian greeted the news of the Mecca Declaration, any such rogue agents may have a hard time putting together their networks or building a following.
(Note that deeply embedded racism in that BBC account I linked to above. Though the text of the piece gives quite a lot of detail about the “jubilant scenes” that greeted the announcement of the agreement in Gaza, the headline says stiffly “Muted response to Mecca agreement”– as though the only “response” that actually counts is that of Israel and the United States!)
Anyway, for more on the jubilation in Gaza, see this account from Al-Jazeera English.

More thinking on the coming withdrawal

The generally very wise Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld has a must-read article in the online edition of New Perspectives Quarterly. It’s titled ” The Fall: Consequences of US Withdrawal From Iraq” and starts thus:

    Now that the American people have recognized that the war in Iraq is hopeless, what comes next? The answer is, the US is going to cut its losses and withdraw.

Then, with admirable focus, he gets right into the nitty-gritty of what that will entail:

    Withdrawing 140,000 soldiers with all their equipment is a very complex operation. In 1945 and 1973, the US simply evacuated its troops, leaving most of its equipment to its West European and South Vietnamese protégés respectively.
    This time, however, things are different. So precious is modern defense equipment that not even the largest power on earth can afford to abandon large quantities of it; in this respect, the model is the First Gulf War, not Vietnam or World War II.
    Second, whatever equipment is left in Iraq is very likely to fall into the hands of America’s enemies. Thus the Pentagon will have no choice but to evacuate millions of tons of war materiel the way it came—in other words, back at least as far as Kuwait. Doing so will be time-consuming and enormously expensive. Inevitably, it will also involve casualties as the road-bound convoys making their way south are shot up and bombed.

Van C is completely right both in his assessment that the US will have to withdraw from the melee in Iraq, and in his approach of starting from the “ground truth” of the logistics of any matter.
Longtime JWN readers might recall that back in July 2005, when I started thinking seriously about the modalities and logistics of how the US might withdraw from Iraq, I too noted the huge scale of the logistical challenge involved… I wrote here, for example, “Given the need to muster the necessary sealift, airlift, and other logistics, I think that 4-5 months from the date that Washington makes the total-withdrawal decision to the time the last British squadron follows the last US troops out of the door would be about right.”
However, I disagree with Van Creveld’s forecast that “the road-bound convoys making their way south [would be] shot up and bombed.” Why do I disagree there? Primarily because if there is a chance of serious harrassment of the withdrawal convoys as they head for the exits, then no responsible US commander is going to order such a withdrawal. In other words, the US generals themselves– that is, the men who have accepted responsibility for the lives and welfare of the men and women under their command– are honor bound to insist that the political leadership do everything in its power to create conditions on the ground that will permit a withdrawal that is orderly and as safe as possible.
(I probably don’t need to remind most readers of the horrendous scale of the losses the British– and “British” Indian– forces suffered in Iraq in 1916-1917.)
That was why, back in that July 2005 post on JWN and in all my many writings since then on how the US can plan an orderly withdrawal from Iraq– for which, check out the links at the top of the main page sidebar there– I have simply taken it as given that once the Prez has taken the tough decision that he needs to order a full withdrawal, the first order of business will be to conduct whatever contacts are necessary to create the climate in Iraq and the region within which the US commanders can organize their orderly withdrawal with the absolute minimum level of casualties.
And yes, of course that incoludes contacts with an Iran that strategically dominates the exit routes not only within Iraq but also right along the Gulf to the Straits of Hormuz.
In that July 2005 post, I wrote this:

    How can US troops redeploying out of Iraq be assured they won’t be harrassed/attacked along the way?
    This is a concern with some validity. The US authorities could negotiate an agreement on this matter with the Jaafari government. Of course, at present, the Jaafari government is not a body viewed as representative by many Iraqis, especially the more nationalistic ones. But if he could say to his compatriots: “Look, here is the plan for the total withdrawal of US troops so let’s all calm things down,” then he actually might suddenly develop nationwide credibility. And even if he didn’t gain that, simply the fact that the US troops are visibly following a well-publicized and timely withdrawal schedule would certainly mean that many other Iraqi leaders at the local level would come forward and say, “Yes, let’s make sure this goes smoothly.”

Of course, the political situation in Iraq has changed (deteriorated) a huge amount since the days of the Jaafari “government”. In the “Three-step program” for a US withdrawal that I laid out just one month ago, I updated that portion of the plan. The first of the three steps I describe there is that the president should make a public announcement of “His firm intention to pull all US troops out of Iraq by a date certain, perhaps 4-6 months ahead.”
Then my description of the second step starts like this:

    (2) The clock starts ticking on the timetable announced by the President. That fact and the other new diplomatic realities created by his announcement all act together to start transforming the political dynamics within Iraq, the region, and indeed the US, as well. The Iraqi parties and movements all have a powerful incentive to work with each other and the UN for the speedy success of the negotiation over the post-occupation political order…

Btw, the third step is: “(3) On the date certain the last US troops leave Iraq and there is a handing-over ceremony.”
Anyway, that is one criticism– albeit, one with very significant political/strategic implications– of what Van Creveld wrote in NPQ. I also have some disagreements with his forecast of the kind of political order that will exist inside Iraq after the US withdrawal.
Regarding regional balances after the US withdrawal, he writes that Iran’s regional position has already been significantly strengthened by the US’s actions in Iraq. Then, this:

    To make sure some future American president does not get it into his or her head to attack Iran as Iraq was attacked (essentially, for no reason at all), the Iranians are going to press ahead as fast as they can in building nuclear weapons.
    A powerful Iran presents a threat to the world’s oil supplies and should therefore worry Washington. To deter Iran, US forces will have to stay in the region for the indefinite future; most probably they will be divided between Kuwait, much of which has already been turned into a vast US base; Oman; and some other Gulf states. One can only hope that the forces in question, and the political will behind them, will be strong enough to deter Iran from engaging in adventures. If not, then God help us all.
    Some countries in the Middle East ought to be even more worried about Iran than the US. While turning to the latter for protection, several of them will almost certainly take a second look into the possibility of starting their own nuclear programs. Each time a country proliferates, its neighbors will ask whether they, too, need to do the same. In time, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Syria may all end up with nuclear arsenals. How this will affect the regional balance of power is impossible to say…

For my part, I’m not so sure about this. In the context of a serious retrenchment of US power in the Gulf region, should we not all be redoubling our efforts to negotiate the transformation of the entire Middle East into a zone verifiedly free of all weapons of mass destruction? Surely, for all persons anywhere who are concerned about the dangers of nuclear proliferation, this turning-point in the Gulf towards which we are now approaching should surely give us all new impetus, as well as a new opportunity to work urgently to negotiate an agreement to this end.
Van Creveld seems to be a nuclear-proliferation fatalist. I note, in addition, that he makes no mention of the one indigenous power within the Middle East that already has a robust nuclear arsenal– Israel. And nor does he mention the fact that US Navy ships in the fleets now assembling in the Gulf are also nuclear-armed….
He ends by essaying a look into the global strategic implications of the coming US withdrawal from Iraq:

    Before 2003, many people looked at the US as a colossus that was bestriding the earth. Whatever else, the war has left the US with its international position weakened; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice may bark, but she can hardly bite. So shattered and demoralized are the armed forces that they can only fill their ranks by taking in 41-year-old grandmothers. Hence, the first task confronting Robert Gates, nominated to be the new secretary of defense, and his eventual successors must be to rebuild them to the point where they may again be used if necessary.
    Above all, the US must take a hard look at its foreign policy. What role should the strongest power on earth play in the international arena, and just what are the limits of that role? How can American power be matched with its finite economic possibilities—the US balance of payment gap and deficit are now huge—and under what circumstances should it be used? If American power is used, what should its objectives be?

He is asking some very important questions here. But I believe that he is far too cautious and indeed, from his perspective, “optimistic” in his assessment of the global strategic effects of the whole US military debacle inside Iraq. He seems to assume that it would easily be possible for the US to effect a complete restoration of the kind of military-based US hegemony over the world that existed prior to 2003. I believe that is unlikely to happen, for a number of reasons. And from my perspective as someone committed to building relations of equality and mutual respect among all the people of the world regardless of citizenship, and who hates all the effects of violence, I truly do not seek the restoration of that hegemony.
Look what that situation of unfettered hegemony allowed the US government to do back in 2003…
Yes, we might now have a Congress in Washington that is more “conservative” than Mr. Bush regarding the idea of launching optional military aggressions overseas… But still, our country needs to use the imminent prospect of retrenchment in Iraq to re-think the entirety of its stance vis-a-vis the other peoples of the world. And I will certainly be making the case that this should be a relationship of equality and non-militarism.
(This discussion about the extent of the US’s retrenchment in world affairs is broadly similar to the one undertaken in Britain after the debacle of the Suez affair in 1956… Too bad that Tony Blair never really learned the lesson of that debacle or shared it with his good friend in the White House, eh?)
—————-
… In the context of this discussion of the prospects regarding a US withdrawal from Iraq, I just want to note, even if somewhat belatedly, the testimony that Zbigniew Brzezinksi gave to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 1. (PDF original here.)
That was an important statement, from a man who was Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor back in the day and who has certainly retained and honed his powers of analysis and understanding in the decades since then.
Here’s some of what he said:

    It is time for the White House to come to terms with two central realities:

      1. The war in Iraq is a historic, strategic, and moral calamity. Undertaken under false assumptions, it is undermining America’s global legitimacy. Its collateral civilian casualties as well as some abuses are tarnishing America’s moral credentials. Driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability.
      2. Only a political strategy that is historically relevant rather than reminiscent of colonial tutelage can provide the needed framework for a tolerable resolution of both the war in Iraq and the intensifying regional tensions.

    … The quest for a political solution for the growing chaos in Iraq should involve four steps:
    1. The United States should reaffirm explicitly and unambiguously its determination to leave Iraq in a reasonably short period of time.
    Ambiguity regarding the duration of the occupation in fact encourages unwillingness to compromise and intensifies the on-going civil strife. Moreover, such a public declaration is needed to allay fears in the Middle East of a new and enduring American imperial hegemony. Right or wrong, many view the establishment of such a hegemony as the primary reason for the American intervention in a region only recently free of colonial domination. That perception should be discredited from the highest U.S. level. Perhaps the U.S. Congress could do so by a joint resolution.
    2. The United States should announce that it is undertaking talks with the Iraqi leaders to jointly set with them a date by which U.S. military disengagement should be completed, and the resulting setting of such a date should be announced as a joint decision. In the meantime, the U.S. should avoid military escalation.
    It is necessary to engage all Iraqi leaders — including those who do not reside within “the Green Zone” — in a serious discussion regarding the proposed and jointly defined date for U.S. military disengagement because the very dialogue itself will help identify the authentic Iraqi leaders with the self-confidence and capacity to stand on their own legs without U.S. military protection…
    3. The United States should issue jointly with appropriate Iraqi leaders, or perhaps let the Iraqi leaders issue, an invitation to all neighbors of Iraq (and perhaps some other Muslim countries such as Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, and Pakistan) to engage in a dialogue regarding how best to enhance stability in Iraq in conjunction with U.S. military disengagement and to participate eventually in a conference regarding regional stability.
    The United States and the Iraqi leadership need to engage Iraq’s neighbors in serious discussion regarding the region’s security problems, but such discussions cannot be undertaken while the U.S. is perceived as an occupier for an indefinite duration. Iran and Syria have no reason to help the United States consolidate a permanent regional hegemony. It is ironic, however, that both Iran and Syria have lately called for a regional dialogue, exploiting thereby the self-defeating character of the largely passive — and mainly sloganeering — U.S. diplomacy.
    A serious regional dialogue, promoted directly or indirectly by the U.S., could be buttressed at some point by a wider circle of consultations involving other powers with a stake in the region’s stability, such as the EU, China, Japan, India, and Russia. Members of this Committee might consider exploring informally with the states mentioned their potential interest in such a wider dialogue.
    4. Concurrently, the United States should activate a credible and energetic effort to finally reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace, making it clear in the process as to what the basic parameters of such a final accommodation ought to involve.
    The United States needs to convince the region that the U.S. is committed both to Israel’s enduring security and to fairness for the Palestinians who have waited for more than forty years now for their own separate state. Only an external and activist intervention can promote the long-delayed settlement for the record shows that the Israelis and the Palestinians will never do so on their own. Without such a settlement, both nationalist and fundamentalist passions in the region will in the longer run doom any Arab regime which is perceived as supportive of U.S. regional hegemony.

There’s a tremendous amount of good sense there. Let’s hope that all the Senators paid good heed.

Fadlallah speaks to the Sunnis

This post on Abu Aardvark yesterday is definitely worth reading. It’s his live-blogged account of a discussion on Al-Jazeera yesterday between program host Ahmed Mansour and Lebanon’s highest Shiite religious authority Sayed Mohamed Husayn Fadlallah. As Marc writes there,

    It never used to be seen as unusual for someone like Fadlallah to be featured on al-Jazeera, but in the current state of Sunni-Shia hysteria I guess it’s worth noting.
    It’s also an absolutely fascinating encounter, one of the most interesting I’ve seen since this whole Shia-Sunni business got going (note: all that follows is liveblogging, not from transcript, so apologies if some of the wording isn’t exactly right). Mansour sympathizes with the Sunni insurgency – he was the reporter whose reporting from Falluja in 2004 caused such problems for the American campaign there. He pushed Fadlallah hard, in his polite but dogged way, on the position of the Shia in Arab politics. A lot of major tropes in current Sunni-Shia tensions were raised openly, with no screaming. This chance for a major Shia personality to directly address a vast Sunni audience, and to air sensitive issues openly in a calm setting, was a good example of what a platform like al-Jazeera can offer – sure, some people will complain about some of the points which were made being inflammatory or offensive, but the point is that all of those points are already very much out there anyway, and at least here they could be rebutted or debated.
    … Fadlallah firmly denounced Sunni-Shia bloodshed of any kind, and called on all intra-Muslim killing to stop. But he also aired complaints about the “takfiris” (his word [ML]; means something like “hardline Sunni repudiators of Shiites” ~HC) who openly called for the killing of Shia Muslims. Fadlallah’s bottom line: the Muslim umma needs to understand that the problems are not between Sunni and Shia but between Islam and the American administration.
    Overall, a simply fascinating exchange. No time to analyze it any further, but well worth everyone’s attention.

It does sound like an interesting program. We don’t have t.v. here. If anyone can point me to a downloadable version or a trancsript of it, that would be great.
Update, Fri a.m. Cairo time:
Thanks to the kind soul who sent me the fairly lengthy BBC-monitoring account of the program, which you can now read here.

Questions about US democracy

Several times over the past three months– that is, ever since our state’s election of Jim Webb to the Senate!– I’ve had some real regrets that the US doesn’t have a parliamentary system.
If we had a parliamentary system, the groundswell of political change that made itself shown on November 7th would have resulted in a change of government and a significant change in national policy.
Instead of which, we got– what?!?!? A surge in exactly the same kinds of ‘dead-ender’ policies the administration has been pursuing in Iraq since 2003????
Where in all this is the idea of responsiveness to the will of the people? For the absolutely crucial job of president, in the absence of the kind of gross personal misconduct that would activate the clunky machinery of impeachment, we only ever have one chance to change the person there every four years– whatever else might be happening in the world outside the White House… In what sense can we say that preservation of these totally inflexible election schedules is “democratic”?
Back in 1988 or so, when I became a citizen, I do recall learning all kinds of little factoids about the US political system. But I don’t recall ever learning the justification for the inflexible nature of these election schedules. Was it something to do with the problems of trans-continental communication back in the 1780s, or something about the need to keep these three branches of government all marching along according to their own rigid schedules so they could continue to play the much-hallowed “checks and balances” role against each other?
If anyone (briefly) could enlighten me on that, I’d be grateful.
I’d also love to know if there’s ever been any movement in US history that sought to to shift the country towards a more responsive, perhaps more parliamentary kind of system. The rigidity of this one we have now just seems terribly dysfunctional….

CSM column on Arab opinion, more background

Scott H. was amazingly quick in getting his kind commentary on my latest CSM column up onto the blog. (I’ve also archived the column here.) I just want, quickly, to give y’all a bit more background to the piece.
I planned the column in discussions with my editor at the CSM on Monday. (That, taking into account the fact that he was running this op-ed piece, which is more on the inside-Iran effects of a US attack on Iran, on Tuesday.) I wrote mine on Tuesday. It came in at around 960 words. Yesterday, after doing some tweaking with the text and bringing it down to around 850 words, the editor called me to say he really, really needed me to be ready to cut it further– to around 680. I took out my scissors and did one big “snip”, taking out 2-3 paras I’d had up near the top reiterating the strong plea I expressed in this CSM column in September for the establishment of a reliable hot-line between these two combat-ready militaries.
I just made a choice there. In my original version I was making two main arguments– and clearly there was only room for one. Should I repeat the argument that I’d already made back then, or focus on this other one, which is backed up by solid new evidence that I’ve gathered while here in Cairo so far, about the rosiness or otherwise of the expected regional scenario in the event of a US attack on Iran? … I guess in the end it was a no-brainer; and the resulting scissor-work was clean and easy.
But I don’t want anyone to forget that important argument about the need for a hot-line!
… So now, I just want to fill in a little more background on the piece. I’ve been meeting some really interesting Egyptians (and some other Arabs) during the time I’ve been in Cairo, but because of the way my schedule has been structured so far, these have included many more people of fairly strong pro-US inclinations, than they have people more opposed to the US. Thus, for example, the three people I quoted in that column– Saad Ibrahim, the former Egyptian ambassador, and the high-level Saudi executive– are all people whom I’d judge to be of generally pro-US bent. And I have found that among these pro-US people, the warnings about the disastrous consequences of a US attack on Iran and the resulting opposition to the idea of such an attack have both been expressed in extremely strong terms, and either unanimously or nearly so.
I imagine that when, as I soon hope to, I get to interview people associated with the Muslim Brotherhood or other parties and trends less friendly to the US, I will probably find their level of opposition to a US attack on Iran to be even stronger.
But what I want to note here is that the people I quoted in the column, and the other Egyptians and Arabs I’ve talked to here who have all expressed opposition to an attack on Iran are not by any means people of a deep anti-US bias. I think that’s a very important point to get across, and I wish I’d had the wordage in the column to be able to make it there.
(Nice to have this blog and be able to make it here, huh?)
I also want to note that I am really glad that this week, in particular, I have been able to be here in Cairo and provide a little of my own “ground truth” to a US elite discourse that has become worryingly drenched in the “spin” and otherwise misleading general impressions being disseminated by some of the juggernauts in the MSM.
For example, in the NYT of February 6, Michael Slackman and Hassan Fattah had this long article about what they described as “Saudi Arabia’s more pronounced public posture to counter Iran’s rise.”
Slackman and Fattah noted– rightly, imho– that the Kingdom has gone into something of a frenzy of new regional diplomacy within the past 4-6 weeks. But they wrote of this shift into diplomatic activism that it,

    is occurring with encouragement from the Bush administration. Its goal is to see an American-backed alliance of Sunni Arab states including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt, along with a Fatah-led Palestine and Israel, opposing Iran, Syria and the radical groups they support.

So what they’re saying is that the Saudis are working with Washington to help assemble the American-backed alliance of Sunni Arab states (a.k.a. in Issandr el-Amrani’s immortal phrase, “the Sunni Arab-Dominated Dictatorships Against the Mullahs, or SADDAM.”)
Yes, S&F do also warn along the way that “Riyadh’s goals may not always be in alignment with those of the White House, and could complicate American interests…”
But don’t you really think that their whole, very nicely funded piece of writing– with content from handsomely compensated reporters in Riyadh, Jiddah, Washington, and Cairo– might have included some reference to the warnings I heard again and again from the people I’ve talked to, namely that the anti-Americanism in the Sunni Arab countries is far stronger and deeper than the more recent concerns that have been expressed about the rise in Shiite or Iranian influence?
By not including those warnings– which surely, they would have heard from their interlocutors if they even started to ask the kinds of questions I’ve been asking– don’t you think these reporters are just helping to construct the kind of “rosy scenario” regarding outcomes that, today as in 2003, can make launching of an attack much more conceivable for members of the US policy elite, and therefore significantly more probable?
I would also characterize the motivations and content of the Saudis’ current diplomatic activism very differently from these NYT-ers. Where S&F write about the Kingdom’s “public posture to counter Iran’s rise”, I would describe its posture as being more aimed at energetically exploring the potential of mediation and other forms of diplomacy to help resolve the region’s burning problems and thereby de-escalate the tensions that threaten to engulf all of it.
There is, of course, a world of difference between an anti-Iran posture and a pro-mediation posture. Yet S&F seem unable to tell the difference and want to convey to Americans that the Saudis are almost completely on the US side in the confrontation with Iran?
Look, I’ve been in this business of reporting on and analyzing the behavior and attitudes of Arabs and Israelis for 32 years now. I know there’s always a lot of nuance involved in trying to “read” actions such as the ones the Kingdom has been undertaking over the past few weeks. But the big question I’ve been asking all the Egyptians and other Arabs I’ve been meeting so far has been “Do you think a US attack on Iran would be a good idea?” And unanimously, the answer I’ve heard– from all these very pro-US people I’ve been talking to– has been “NO!”
And that is really the bottom line that people in decisionmaking circles inside the US need to hear right now.

Influential Brit-tank urges US-Iran talks: the text

The Foreign Policy Centre, which is a relatively young but well connected British think-tank, earlier this week issued a significant report titled Time to Talk: The case for Diplomatic Solutions on Iran.
That link there goes to an easy-to-download and -read HTML version of the Executive Summary and Recommendations sections of the report.
I made that HTML version myself, as a public service, by cut-n-pasting from the PDF version of the report that’s posted on the FPC website— because I think the report is important but I am totally fed-up with trying to download, read, and use materials that are posted on the web only in the form of clunky great PDF files. And I imagine many other people might be, too.
A plea to the friends at the FPC: When you have important and serious contributions to add to the global discourse on crucial issues, please do so in a way that is web-friendly and thus aids the timely dissemination of your ideas to the global public, and not just in a form that is optimized for people who can come along in person to pick up your dead-tree version, along with all the over-stylized graphics and totally dysfunctional broad white spaces associated therewith!
Do you think anyone at FPC ever actually tries to use the PDF versions they put up on the web??
I am in Egypt for most of this month. Like the vast majority of the world’s other people, I am now nearly wholly reliant on the web for my connection to the global discourse. I see no way that I could, in anything like timely fashion, get ahold of the dead-tree version of the FPC report… So I am totally reliant on what FPC has put up on the web; and this is, as I said, extremely hard-to-use and inadequate.
FPC should take a page out of the “communications strategy” book used by, for example, Human Rights Watch. When they have a report to issue they will typically produce a “Media Release” that contains the main points of the report, plus a couple of canned quotes attributed to (or perhaps even uttered by?) some person connected with the report. They send that Release out to their media contacts and also post its whole text in HTML on their website, along with a link to the full text of the report that is in PDF or sometimes in HTML as well.
By contrast, when looking for material about the “Time to Talk” report on the FPC website today (Wednesday) I found only a very dated notice telling me that the report “will be launched… at 10.30am on Monday 5 February 2007”, along with a few additional pieces of teaser information about it… And then, links– presumably added subsequent to the launch?– to: the PDF version of the whole text in English, a Farsi-language version of the Executive Summary, and a BBC report on the launch.
Kudos to them for producing– and in timely fashion even if only as a clunky PDF file– the Farsi-language materials.
But another gripe I had with what they offered was that the report’s Executive Summary did not even contain the Recommendations! Why on earth not? Instead, as it stood there in the first 2-3 pages of the dead-tree (and PDF) versions, the Summary ended by arguing that “Diplomacy is the only viable option”, without telling you what the content of that diplomacy should be… For that, you need to scroll down the white wastelands of the PDF file till you get to the “Recommendations” included at the end of the main text.
But they should, surely, be right there in the Exec Summary?
They’re pretty good– and they do constitute, after all, the main argument of this report. They are addressed primarily to a British, or British-governmental, audience.
Here’s what they say:

    Recommendations
    Even according to the worst-case scenario, there is time for further diplomacy. This time should be used to build confidence between the negotiating partners, helping to break cycles of mutual hostility, and to develop Iranian interests in established and potential political and economic relationships with the international community. The possible consequences of military action could be so serious that governments have a responsibility to ensure that all diplomatic options have been exhausted. At present, this is not the case.
    The UK has a role to play in catalysing this process, mediating between EU member states and the US. Through genuine commitment to the diplomatic process, the UK can indicate that it is willing to treat Iran fairly in negotiations, which would strengthen the hand of moderates within Iran and send an important signal to the Iranian people.
    The diplomatic track is clearly fraught with difficulties. But as long as fundamental obstacles remain in place – such as preconditions concerning the suspension of Iran’s enrichment activities – the potential of diplomacy cannot fully be tapped. Diplomatic strategies are most likely to progress if the UK government and other key parties agree:
    ➔ To either remove preconditions for negotiations or find a compromise that allows both the US and Iran to move forward without having to concede on their respective red lines;
    ➔ To seek direct negotiations between Iran and the US;
    ➔ To prioritise proposals and demands by assessing the security risks associated with the different technologies being developed by Iran (i.e. enrichment and reprocessing) and to agree to this assessment within the UN Security Council – Iran’s plans to use reprocessing technology should be addressed promptly;
    ➔ To develop the proposals offered by the P5+1 on 6 June 2006 in return for tighter inspections and a commitment from Iran to abandon all ambitions towards reprocessing (as offered by the Iranians in 2005);
    ➔ To explicitly address mutual security guarantees for the US, Israel and Iran.
    The UK has an important role to play in fostering a climate of pragmatism. It is recommended that the UK government continue to give full backing to the diplomatic process whilst directly addressing the need for full and direct negotiations between Iran and the US administration. The time available should be used to build confidence on both sides, and the UK has a crucial role to play in supporting that process. Only through direct US-Iranian engagement can an agreement be found and the potentially devastating consequences of military action be avoided.

That last paragraph is crucial.
Will Tony Blair respond positively to FPC’s urgings, I wonder? In the “About us” page on their website they say: “The Foreign Policy Centre is a leading European think tank launched under the patronage of the British Prime Minister Tony Blair to develop a vision of a fair and rule-based world order… ” I am not entirely sure what “patronage” involves in this context. It should, surely, at the very least imply that he gives serious consideration to the arguments they make?
But anyway, the general arguments there are relevant for a readership far beyond the wave-tossed borders of the British Isles– including, a readership in the halls of power in the United States. Particularly the arguments the report makes for an intensification of the diplomacy and the opening of direct negotiations between Iran and the USA.
Anyway, do feel free to download and broadly distribute the HTML file I’ve produced there.

JWN celebrates 4th blogiversary

Gosh, has it been four years already? And who knows, one day I might even figure out what I want to do with this blog…
I sometimes look up from the keyboard long enough to wonder whether it’s all been worthwhile in any meaningful way. Has it made any real difference in the world? Is there perhaps a more effective use I could make of the non-trivial amounts of time I spend doing this?
On the other hand, writing always helps me think more clearly… Plus, with this blog format and the way the comments-board discussions have developed here, I feel I’ve created a very worthwhile forum for cooperative learning. I’ve long been convinced that learning is a fundamentally social activity, and the way we have created new funds of knowledge through our discussions here has underscored that point for me many times.
The blog would feel to me like a very different place indeed if we didn’t have all the great comments discussions here. Yes, it’s true they sometimes get a bit raucous, ill-focused, or non-courteous. But I have learned a tremendous amount from contributions made by so many of the commenters here.
So the first thing I want to do today is say a big thank you to all the commenters! (Particularly the ones who keep inside the courtesy guidelines– whether they agree with me, or not.)
And secondly, for nostalgia’s sake, I just want to go back to my inaugural post here, February 6, 2003. Here it is, in its entirety (and with all my crappy original formating):

    I listened to Colin Powell’s presentation at the U.N. yesterday, read the text carefully. I was sad for so many reasons. Let me count the ways:
    (1) Sad to see this good person beating the drums of war.
    (2) Sad to think of the war that his presentation–and his having agreed to play this role– has brought us that much closer to.
    (3) Sad, actually, to read the content and see how thin and tenuous his case was. It seemed like an insult to the intelligence of listeners– especially, the recycling of the tired old ‘aluminum tubes’ business. Mohamed el-Baradei laid that one to rest a while ago, saying the tubes in question actually could not be helpfully used for nuclear fuel production. So why did Powell drag that one in?? It seems like an insult to Baradei and the rest of us.
    Look, I know better than many other people how terribly Saddam has behaved in the past– and most likely, he’s still behaving that way. But if containment worked for Joe Stalin, why on earth would we imagine it can’t work for this regime, whose raw power is a thousand times smaller than Stalin’s??
    Feb 4th, I went to see ‘Bowling for Columbine’. (Okay, I was late getting around to it.) But it was good to see it the night before Powell’s speech. I think Mike Moore got it just about right. There’s a huge industry out there dedicated to whipping up the fearfulness of Americans; and that keeps U.S. citizens opting for huge military expenditures, tough police and incarceration, etc– at the expense of the basic social programs which would make our community healthier and safer.

The posts I put up over the six weeks that followed there– that is, until the outbreak of war– make pretty poignant reading, too, imho.
Then, in the column I published February 13, 2003 for the CSM, I took apart the claim Powell had made in that UN speech about the links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda… I note that in Fiasco, the book Tom Ricks recently published about the launching and early years of the US war in Iraq, he says that back in February 2003 Colin Powell was broadly successful in persuading all US commentators of the validity of the arguments he made at the UN.
He wasn’t. He never persuaded me; and I was able to write about the flaws in his case both here at JWN and also in CSM. So why didn’t Tom Ricks mention that? Was he not looking– or did he read what I wrote at the time but discount it all for some reason?
I guess I should ask him when I get the chance.
Anyway, that’s for another day. For today, I am just really glad that the internet and this great, easy-to-use blogging software have allowed us all to have such a great global conversation here at JWN.
Long may the conversation continue.

Kuwaiti singer satirizes Bush policies

Thanks to Juan Cole for the link to this 5-minute video, which is a hard-hitting anti-Bush satire energetically sung (and performed) by the Kuwaiti singer Shams. She sings a well-known Egyptian popular song of romantic repudiation. “Hi! How are you… You think you’re so great? I never want to see you again!” while hamming it up with a dizzying array of props representing aspects of Bush’s policy in the Middle East. And yes, that includes Washington’s “information” policies, too, with repeated visual references to newspaper stories and to round-table type TV talk-shows…
I’ve remarked before on the complex relationship between pornography and war. In this video– which was apparently shot in Cairo and used remarkably high production values– Shams does her own mocking (and I would say, extremely feminist) riff on that relationship… She sashays provocatively up to a cardboard image of Bush at the “presidential” podium before she takes over the podium herself… She stands dancing and primping in a sand desert in front of huge letters spelling out “DEMOCRACY” before hitting into the sand various heavily armed US soldiers undertaking operations all around her… She wanders with a “lovelorn” look around a sound-studio full of (male) talking heads hung from puppets’ strings around a table, and being manipulated by members of the Bush administration before, with a wicked smile, she snips the string of one of the puppets. (The string/rope left swinging there at the end is an eery visual reminder — same lighting and all– of the videos of the Saddam execution.)
You have to see how she blows the blond toupee off the head of an ageing Arab male journo, provocatively fans herself with the card holding her “detainee number” as she stands in a police line-up, or disports herself langorously along the top of the large letters “GUANTANAMO” laid out in front of (an image of) the White House…
In the fast-paced denouement of the video a cowboy-hatted Bush propositions her on top of a castle built in the sand in the form of an economist’s graph showing, I think, oil-price rises. She swats Bush off the castle (more Saddam hanging imagery here), then throws down on top of him a stone block that turns out to be an “E” that is rapidly joined by all the other letters of the word “LIBERTY”… which is then itself immediately placed behind iron bars… Finally, from a fortune-teller Shams learns that her future is to walk happily off into the sunset with… Naji al-Ali’s iconic, Kuwaiti-born child, Handala. (And if you don’t know who Handala is, or what he represents, then you probably need to find out. Hint: “old-fashioned” pan-Arab nationalism… )
As we all saw with the Saddam execution videos, rapidly distributed video imagery can have a massive effect on public attitudes. This one has been very cleverly crafted to satirize many, many aspects of the Bush administration’s policy in the Middle East from a broadly Arab-nationalistic perspective.
Another Kuwaiti woman, English-language columnist Muna al-Fuzai, presumably recognized this power in the video when she sputtered:

    I watched the video recording of this song on TV yesterday and it made me sick to the gut. What I watched was not art but mockery. This video clip is an insult to all Americans and all the good that they stand for and even die for! Why is it so easy for Arab artistes to attack the Western leaders while they won’t dare say a word against their own rulers? Why can’t they get it? What on earth do they know about the art of criticism? Since the past couple of weeks, some dailies somewhat managed to cover bits and pieces of this song until they finally aired it on television. What a sick decision.
    The essence of art is to appreciate as well as learn from it, but what I watched was pure adulterated [I think she means “unadulterated”?] insult and humiliation…

As a US citizen, I’d like to say that I don’t consider the video “an insult to all Americans and all the good that they stand for and even die for.” I think it’s an astute, well-crafted criticism of not just the content of George Bush’s misbegotten and ill-fated war against Iraq but also the hypocrisy of the wide-reaching propaganda effort that has surrounded his pursuit of the war. And if it’s produced in a way that makes its Arabic-language viewers laugh or even crack a small smile, that is fine by me. A bit of humor can really help a person to survive some tough and otherwise dispiriting times!
I do not see the video as unfairly mocking “all that Americans stand for”: I read the references there to “liberty”, “democracy”, etc., as introduced precisely to pinpoint the disconnect between the Bushists’ very public espousal of those values and their actual practices in places like “Guantanamo.”
For his part, Juan Cole called the video “the oddest thing, but certainly a ‘resistance’ video of a sort.” I don’t know why he sees it as odd. It is political satire presented in the populist genre of an Arabic-language music video. Not “odd”, but rather inventive, I’d say.
Anyway, if you have a fast internet connection, check out the video and tell us what you think.

    Update, later Monday:

The Egyptian popular culture site Yallabina tells us:

    After signing a two-million-dollar contract with Surprise, an American producing company, singer Shams video-clipped Ahlan Ezayak. The song is Egyptian, and it’s written by Ekram Assi, composed by Mohamed Rohayem and musically arranged by Dr. Ashraf Abdo.
    The video-clip was directed by French director “Costas Mroudis”. A whole cast, of technicians and artists, was brought from France and other European countries to take part in the video-clip, which was shot in only 3 days.

Whither the Shiite-Sunni “split”

So here I am in Cairo. One of the big issues I plan to look here at is this much-reported-on polarization of attitudes between the Shiites and Sunnis of the Middle East.
Abu Aardvark and Badger are two of the people who have done the most to give us the details of how this relatively new polarization has been spreading almost “virally” throughout much of the Arab world. (There is also some very deadly Shiite-Sunni tension in Pakistan, that is more of a long-running thing; and a certain amount of it historically in Afghanistan, too. But I think the dynamics there might be a bit different? Anyway, I don’t feel qualified to comment on those phenomena. The Middle East alone is quite hard enough to fathom and explain.)
What is frequently described as a Shiite-Sunni “polarization” in today’s Arab world is, in fact, more like a tsunami of anti-Shiite agitation, propagandizing, and also apparently real sentiment that has been sweeping many Sunni-dominated Arab socieies. One of the first things to note is how incredibly fast this tsunami has gathered its force. I mean, it was only last September that we were hearing about the vendors in Cairo’s (deeply Sunni) street-markets naming the choicest among their special Eid baskets of dates after Hizbullah head Sayed Hassan Nasrallah… But here we are today, a bare 4-5 months later, and rumors– never yet substantiated!– of widespread and scary Shiite campaigns to convert Sunnis, and other nefarious plots that are all somehow Shiite-related seem to be sweeping through Egypt and other Sunni Arab communities like wildfire.
So one of the things that I want to do while I’m here is to really probe what’s been happening. And also, to survey the possible future directions in which this sign of sectarian fitna (complete social breakdown) might go.
It seems evident that the whole series of episodes that surrounded the execution of Saddam (and his half brother) at year’s end did a lot to catalyze and/or exacerbate this tsunami of anti-Shiite feeling among many Sunnis… But that is certainly not all that has been afoot. Other very relevant factors include the fact that after three-years-plus of increasingly sectarian carnage in Iraq, the nerves and sensibilities of nearly everyone in the Arab world are very raw. At this level, it doesn’t even “help” the argument much to note that the greatest number by far of casualties from sectarian violence there have been Shiites– those thousands of Iraqi Shiites who have been killed over the past three-plus years by acts of anti-civilian violence of almost mind-numbing callousness… Bombs in markets, bombs in mosques, bombs at religious festivals, etc etc.
And yes, there has also been some extremely callous counter-violence against Iraqi Sunnis. The torture chambers, the mass arrest campaigns, the hundreds of mutilated bodies of Sunni men tossed out on the roadside… But in addition to the hurt from that violence there is also, probably, for many Iraqi Sunnis a broader sense of a stark new vulnerability. From having been valued members of (for many of them) a relatively well-cared-for and well-educated elite– and lauded by many of their fellow Arabs for their role as a bulwark against Iran– most of Iraq’s Sunnis were reduced within a few short months to being members of an extremely vulnerable minority in their own country. That kind of rapid downward mobility can easily– as in post-1919 Germany– be a ready incubator for hate-fueled or even genocidal ideologies…
And in another corner of the Arab world we have Lebanon, where the “national unity” of last summer turned very rapidly– and with the determined help of the Americans– into a sullen form of Shiite-Sunni jousting for power. In Lebanon, too, as in Iraq, the Sunnis have been faced with having to give up a social and political ascendancy over the Shiites (though notably never, in Lebanon, over the Christians) that dated back to the days of the– determinedly Sunni– Ottoman Empire. In a sense, I suppose you could say that what is happening in both Lebanon and Iraq is a last-stage crumbling away of some last vestiges of the Ottoman-bequeathed social order…. And it hasn’t been a happy process for the Sunni communities of those two countries.
Add into this mix a few other complicating factors, too. Starting off with a powerful US-Israeli strategic axis in the region that (a) has projected a very powerful message that the use of force is quite okay in the modern era, while resisting and blocking nearly all the available channels for talking through differences rather than fighting over them, (b) has played a documented role in stoking the internal discord and violence in at least one very visible area: occupied Palestine, and (c) has showed itself openly eager to try to enrol the Sunni Arab regimes, and as much as possible of the Arab publics, in a coalition dedicated to confronting or rolling back the growth of Iran’s regional power. Which, by the way, is Shiite.
The complete smashing-up of the Iraqi state, which many other Arabs had in an earlier era seen as a bastion of the “Arab nation’s” defense against Iran, has certainly heightened all these sensitivities and fears. (Less so, I think, the Iranian nuclear program, though that has been the focus of most of the concern in the west. The Middle Eastern Arabs have, after all, lived for many decades now under the shadow of a local power that is nuclear-armed and has a record of hostile actions against them that is considerably lengthier than Iran’s.)
Then, too, have you seen how easily all these descriptions of the nature of this current crisis can slide between one based primarily on sect (Sunni and Shiite) and one based primarily on ethnicity (Arab and Iranian)? This is another complex aspect of the problem. And in this regard, once again, as in the early 1980s, the ultimate (or at least medium-term) allegiances of the ethnic-Arab Shiites who populate the northern reaches of the Arabian/Persian Gulf will prove key to the way the whole situation turns out.
When Saddam invaded Iran in September 1980, he and his people were betting (as some neocons do once again today) that they could rely on the anti-Persian sentiments of many of Iran’s non-Persian nationalities… Including crucially, the allegedly pro-Baghdad sentiments of those millions of ethnic Arabs who populate Iran’s Ahvaz region, to the east of the Shatt al-Arab. (Very productive oil territory, too.)
But it didn’t work. Back in the 1980s some combination of “national” (i.e. pan-Iranian) and sectarian (Shiite) allegiance proved strong enough to overcome any tendency the Ahvaz Arabs might have had towards ethnic solidarity with Baghdad. They didn’t rise against the mullahs’ regime in Teheran. And nor did any of the other peripheral ethnic minorities whom Saddam had been relying on.
This time around, a lot of what determines how the present threat of regionwide fitna turns out will hang on the outcome of a broadly similar clash of loyalties amongst the many millions of Shiites of southern Iraq— who are the close neighbors and sometimes cousins of their co-ethnics and Shiite co-sectarians right acorss the border. Over the coming months and years will they show their loyalties more to the Iraqi nation and their Arab ethnicity, or to their Shiite co-sectarians in Iran? (This is another take on the issue of the “battle of the narratives” inside Iraq that i wrote about a month ago, here.)
I’ll note a couple of things in this regard. The Iraqis Shiites may have “won” an unprecedented degree of political power, due to the US toppling of Saddam and the subsequent de-Baathification campaigns pursued under US auspices. But if political power was something they longed for for all these decades past, then the actual experience they have had of it in the past four years must have been extremely disappointing. Many of their communities have been ravaged by those hundreds of acts of enormous, anti-civilian savagery, and have lost any sense of public security. And meanwhile the “government” to which they were handed the keys was one that (1) had already been denuded of all the actual instruments of governance, and (2) continued to have its freedom of action circumscribed at every turn by the Americans… So they couldn’t even use the government to assure their own most basic security and wellbeing, let alone having tmuch wherewithal with which to reach out “generously” to their Sunni compatriots.
Also, we’ve seen generally lousy leadership from all strata of the political class in Iraq: Shiite, Sunni, or “nationalist”. Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising, given the extent to which Saddam, Hussein had stripped the country of any ability to generate good and visionary successor leaders. He murdered scores of such individuals as they arose within the country! Tom Friedman has famously (and perhaps more than slightly accusingly) asked, “Where is the Arab Martin Luther King, Jr.?” I would say that more than that, what would be great would be an Arab Nelson Mandela: someone who could help unify his people around a clear and compelling political program, stick to it until victory, and then act with gracious magnanimity to the people who had thereby lost a degree of their earlier power.
(Mandela and the ANC achieved this, I should note, through a nuanced combination of main reliance on unarmed civilian mass action, supplemented by the actions of a relatively small but symbolically important armed wing. But mainly what strikes me about the ANC’s strength was its focus on organizing, organizing, organizing… and on an internal discipline that was honed over 82 years of nationalist struggle before they reached victory in 1994.)
The nearest that the Arab Shiites have to such a figure is Sayed Hassan Nasrallah. But I don’t think he yet has anything like the gravitas and wisdom of Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. It would be great to see him reach out with some gestures of grand magnanimity to the many distressed Sunnis in the Arab world… Particularly, the distressed Sunnis of Iraq.
And then, talking of distressed Sunnis, we also of course have the Palestinians… whose duly elected parliamentary leaders of the Hamas movement have maintained good relations with Teheran. Now Hamas also has close ideological and organizational relations with the Muslim Brotherhood in both Egypt and Jordan. It must be a constant, looming concern for the Bushists that the harshness of the Israeli policies against Hamas that they in general strongly support might at any point tip the political balance in one or both of those key, overwhelmingly Sunni countries against their present pro-US rulers and in favor of the Muslim Brothers… So the anti-Shiite, anti-Iranian propaganda campaigns that these regimes in Cairo and Amman have been undertaking also seem to have the goal of trying to distract their peoples’ attention away from the crisis that continues to grip the Palestinians.
Where is this all headed? That’s one of the things I want to try to figure out more over over my two-plus-week visit here.
One general observation I’ll make is that these days, and perhaps especially in this region, history seems to be proceeding at a dizzyingly fast pace. Near the head of this (admittedly slightly rambly) post I noted the speed with which the present round of anti-Shiite agitation seems to have sunk some roots in Sunni Arab communities. But this trend could stop, or even be reversed, with just the same kind of speed. I have the distinct sense that the coming three to six months will be momentous for this whole region… And yes, I believe that will be the case even if (God willing!) the Bushists should finally decide not to launch any military attack against Iran.
But if they do take such a foolhardy and callous step, then the whole region might erupt in quite unpredictable ways.

War-clouds over Iran?

Are the imminent arrival of the additional US Navy carrier battle group to the waters of the Persian/Arabian Gulf and the despatch of an admiral as the first-ever head of US CentCom decisive signs that some form of an American military strike against Iran is about to begin?
Other signs of this include the increase in the volume of the continuous barrage of anti-Iranian accusations made by the Bush administration, and their apparent orchestration of a very broad anti-Iranian propaganda campaign by their principal aid-recipients in the Arab world. (I’m now in Egypt. You can certainly see some signs of that here.)
In a well compiled contribution to Open Democracy the British analyst Paul Rogers writes:

    Today, in the context of the changed mood in Washington – and even though it is an extraordinarily dangerous prospect and seems so far-fetched as to be unbelievable – the risk [of such an attack] can no longer be ignored.
    …As the United States predicament in Iraq has steadily deteriorated, the reaction among the more hawkish opinion-formers in the US has been to insist in the strongest terms on the need for victory in Iraq, while seeing Iran as the real reason for current failures. Iran therefore must be dealt with, initially at least in terms of destroying any nuclear capability it may possess or be seeking to acquire. This objective is aided by the rhetoric of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, especially his holocaust-denial propaganda..
    In one sense, Iran was always the main issue for neo-conservatives: “the road to Tehran runs through Baghdad” was their mantra. Indeed there was a strong view in 2003 that the best way to deal with Iran was by installing a client administration in Iraq, secured by a substantial permanent American military presence at four large bases. Iraq would become a western bastion, with the added double benefit of reducing the significance of a somewhat unpredictable House of Saud while ensuring the Iran would know its place. In essence, regime termination to Iran’s east (Afghanistan) and west (Iraq) within two years would achieve a precious strategic success: a pliant Tehran.
    It has not exactly worked out like that…

The Bushists have certainly raised tensions with Iran to a new high over recent weeks,. They have also made many preparations at the levels of both military logistics and propganda/rhetoric for an even greater confrontation with Teheran that may lead– whether by intention or through some “accident” (planned or unplanned)– to an outbreak of actual military conflict.
As I wrote here last September, the two sides urgently need a hot-line arrangement, whether at the level of military-to-military, or leader-to-leader, in order to avert mishaps or miscommunications that might lead to disaster. The inauguration of such a deconfliction mechanism could also be the first step towards building further confidence and establishing further means of averting conflicts.
But meanwhile, what we have from Washington instead is an eery repeat of the kind of propaganda preparations, now directed against Iran, that we saw four years ago directed against Iraq. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann has pulled together some old Bush tapes from 2002 to show the keen degree of overlap there. You can view them here. (Hat-tip to D. Froomkin.)
I do note, too, that much of the US MSM– which in 2002 were still nearly all drinking the Bushists’ Koolaid– seem to be much more skeptical and wary of what’s happening this time round.
I’m planning a column for the CSM this week that implores the President not to take us once again down the path of a completely voluntary and quite predictably harmful war. Back in 2002, I was one of that majority of experienced American analysts of the current Middle East who warned loudly that an invasion of Iraq would lead to such harmful consequences as: the incubation of stiff, anti-US resistance by Iraqis, the strengthening of the Shiite Islamist trends, and extremely complex conflicts over Kirkuk and the whole of northern Iraq. The Bushists chose not to listen to us, preferring instead the counsels of Bernard Lewis (a scholar of medieval Islam) and of others– primarily, pro-Israeli ideologues– who assured them that an invasion of Iraq would be “a cakewalk”, whose success at bringing about a pro-US transformation there was virtually guaranteed..
I take no pleasure whatsoever in saying that I and the colleagues who agreed with me then were right. Lewis, Cheney, Adelman, Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Woolsey, and all that sad group of pro-war propagandists of that day were wrong.
They have never been held to any account. I think this should be a matter of keen concern to all Americans, as well as all Iraqis (whose sufferings since March 2003 have been a hundred times worse.)
But it completely beggars belief that the counsels of war coming yet again from some of these very same people are once again being listened to by the President.
Just one small footnote from me here: Some friends have suggested that in what I wrote here about the late-January incident at PJCC Karbala I was helping to provide ammunition for the anti-Iranian propaganda campaign in the US. That was certainly not my intention. As I wrote there, I did think that it was “possible” that some Iranian government-backed formation had undertaken the attack on US forces there. But I also noted explicitly that, “I’m in no position to put a probability figure on that scenario.”
Beyond that, I want to note that even if there was an Iranian government hand of some kind in the Karbala attack, I don’t think this would in any way qualify as a “casus belli” for a US attack on Iran.
Finally, since I’m in a hurry here, I just want to put in Paul Rogers’ assessment of the kinds of damage that cane be predicted from a US attack on Iran:

    It is clear that a full-scale US air attack on Iranian nuclear facilities and related infrastructure could do substantial damage, as well as causing hundreds and probably thousands of casualties. Even a more limited Israeli raid would have a major effect.
    Equally clear is the wide range of options open to Iran in responding to such an attack – especially as its principal immediate effect would be a fundamental unifying of opinion in favour of the government (no matter how unpopular it might be in other respects).
    The possibilities include:
    * immediate withdrawal from the non-proliferation treaty and a wholehearted effort to develop nuclear weapons as quickly as possible – leading to further action by the United States and Israel, and a long war
    * action against US forces in Iraq, through Shi’a militia intermediaries on a far larger scale than at present
    * direct involvement of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in Iraq
    * closure of the Straits of Hormuz, causing a steep increase in world oil prices
    * aid and encouragement to Hizbollah in southern Lebanon (especially if Israel was involved in the attacks)
    * paramilitary attacks on oil facilities in western Gulf states.
    Furthermore, an attack on Iran would be seen by Shi’a groups in many other countries as an attack on them; this would create potential for severe disturbance, not least in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain…

I agree with just about all of that. I would add, however, that any large-scale US or Israeli attack on Iran could very well trigger storms of outrage from a much broader spectrum of Muslim groups than Rogers lists… Yes, including many Sunni Arabs.
It is to try to forestall that possibility, of course, that the US and its allies in the region are now engaged in such a frenzy of anti-Iranian propagandizing. But I am not sure at all that they will succeed.