Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 165 – Info, analysis, discussion

My new book project, & a request

I know that my posting here at JWN has been a little episodic in recent weeks. One big reason is that I’ve been working on conceptualizing and pulling together the planning for my next book. And now that I’m on the point of signing the contract for it with one of the US’s most forward-looking, capable, and agile publishing houses, Paradigm Publishers, I wanted to tell y’all a little bit about the project and start requesting your help on some portions of it.
The book actually takes off from two posts I put up on JWN back in May, on the theme of “Global Security after Iraq” (here and here). But instead of taking a disembodied, view-from-nowhere-y, approach to the topic, I have decided to make the book a manifesto within the US body politic. It’s not that I don’t like interacting a global audience. I love doing it! When we get a good, multinational and multicultural discussion going here on JWN I think it enriches and informs us all. But still, I do think that those of us who have the numerous benefits of US citizenship also need to take seriously the special responsibility we have to put a particular focus on the change we can achieve by interacting with our fellow-citizens– and most particularly, with those who don’t already think along more or less the same lines as us…
So the main topic I’ll be addressing in this book is “The US and the world after Iraq.”
Exciting, huh?
Even more exciting (read “scary”), when you consider that Paradigm wants me to have a punchy, strong manuscript on this topic ready for them this September 15th, so they can get it into their Spring 2008 list and have it out fairly early during next year’s election season here.
Oh my.
So… I have the eight chapters more or less mapped out, and today I started writing the first of them. This is a fabulous project! The book is intended for a concerned but not specialist readership. It will have an innovative format and a lot of visual aids in the form of tables, boxes, maps, etc. I may well ask y’all for suggestions regarding these graphic elements, as I go along and figure out what they should be.
In addition, the chapters may or may not have epigraphs– you know, the snappy little quotes from other authors that usually stand at the head of a chapter or other body of text.
So here’s the thing. In Ch.1, I am making in broad terms the case that the US drawdown or complete withdrawal from Iraq gives us, the US citizenry, a unique opportunity to rethink the terms and nature of our relationship with the rest of the world. Including, we can and should start reframing many of the things that our leaders have tried to force us to think of only as “threats” (that necessarily have to be responded to through forceful and on many occasions unilateral military action)… So that we can start looking at them more in the way of challenges that (1) we share with many or most other people around the world, and that therefore (2) are amenable much more to cooperative, global action than to blindly pursued, unilateral military action…
I am also introducing the idea in this chapter that our country needs to move from pursuit of a Global Control Paradigm to pursuit of a Global Inclusion model for action (as described a bit in this JWN post.)
So right now, can any of you send me good, short quotes along these lines that I might consider for use as epigraphs for this chapter?
Salient quotes from within the bounds of the mainstream US discourse, or from individuals with a truly global inspirational quality, would be particularly useful. (We can’t have them all from, say, the Dalai Lama… Or alternatively, all from Zbigniew Brzezinski or Chuck Hagel… But those are some examples of the kinds of people whose quotes might be helpful in the general argument I am trying to make in the book… Oh, never forgetting Thomas Jefferson, Abigail Adams, or other icons of US history, of course… )
Anyway, if you can contribute some quotes you think I might consider for this chapter– preferably, with full source-citation, including page numbers where appropriate, that would be excellent.
Thanks for any help you can give on this score.
I shall doubtless be coming back later for a lot more help. All those whose contributions are used will have that fact acknowledged in the book; and JWN readers who over the next three months make multiple helpful contributions to my work on the book will receive one or more free copies, as well.
Let’s harness the power of the internet together!

22,000: the Iraqis held by the US in Iraq

Buried deep in this WaPo story today was the news that, oh by the way, “the number of detainees held by the U.S. military in Iraq has increased to almost 22,000, from 15,400 six months ago.”
Think about it. These are nearly all men of bread-winning age, most likely with an average of around five dependents. That makes more than 100,000 people who are directly affected by this mass-detention situation.
In the circumstances faced by the US military (and everyone else) in today’s Iraq, the US military doesn’t even claim to have “probable cause” for the detention of each one of these men; and it certainly doesn’t have the capacity to hold individualized hearings to investigate the nature of any allegations that may have been made against them.
Actually, the vast majority of these detainees are probably not being held because they are judged through any rational process to be personally guilty of having committed a crime. No, they are most likely being held “preventively”, that is, because of a generalized fear that they might commit some action against the US occupation forces in Iraq, someday. (Sort of on a par with the reasoning Bush used to invade their country in the first place– doing this “preventively”, rather than to respond to or even “pre-empt” any evidently threatening Iraqi attack against the US.)
Now, as that WaPo article makes clear, there has arisen another strong incentive to increase the number of detainees, as well: The bulk of the article is about the informal “amnesty” process that many US units are now using toward Iraqi tribal sheikhs, whereby men loyal to these sheikhs who are in detention are released into the sheikhs’ control in return for the sheikhs agreeing to work as allies with the occupation force.
So under this model, if a local US officer wants to win the support of a local sheikh, he has every incentive to capture a few of the sheikhs’ supporters as hostages– an action, I should note that,

Oh, and here we are, in news from Ramallah, that,

[= local tribal leader with whom a deal has been done]

Of course I share the joy of those families. But that’s not the point. The point is that these two occupying powers– the US and Israel– have no darn business at all engaging in the antecedent broad campaigns of hostage-taking, undertaken for purely manipulative political ends rather than through any form of due-process, regulated, criminal justice procedure.
That AP report from Ramallah spells out that “thousands more Palestinians remained in Israeli jails”. 22,000 Iraqis meanwhile languish in US prisons in Iraq– and many further thousands of (mostly Sunni) political hostages languish in terrible conditions in prisons run by the Iraqi ‘government’, as well.
The NYT today carried a stomach-turning series of photos taken inside one of these Iraqi government jails. You have to know that, since the people in charge of this jail let the photographer in, it was evidently among the “most humane” of the prisons they run. (We can probably hardly even imagine the life-threatening squalor and the torture chambers inside some of their other prisons…) But even the scenes in these photos reminded me of the intense overcrowding I glimpsed during the short visit I made to the Central Prison in Kigali, Rwanda, in June 2002.
Yes, post-genocide Rwanda is just another of the many US-supported regimes around the world that have used massive campaigns of “preventive” detentions– i.e., political hostage-taking– as a way of intimidating and coercing whole populations judged too critical of the central government.
If you want to get a bit of historical context on this whole phenomenon of how colonial regimes use mass detentions in an attempt to subjugate whole populations, you should read this article that I published not too long ago, on the ghastly mass incarceration campaigns that Britain used against the Kikuyu of northern Kenya in the 1950s…. Or better still, study the award-winning historical study of the topic by Caroline Elkins that I was reviewing there.
In my own much smaller researches into the effects of the Rwandan government’s more recent mass-detention campaigns against their country’s majority Hutu population I was able to confirm her findings that such campaigns have devastating and long-lasting effects not only on the detainees themselves but also on their families and on the broader fabric of society that is rent asunder by the detentions…
In today’s Iraq, the US government has a lot to answer for. The effects of the ongoing mass-detention campaign should not be forgotten.
Meanwhile, the tide of history is certainly running against the ability of the Bushites to “win” this contest in Iraq. (Whatever “winning” would mean.) So all these detentions, all these campaigns the US military is engaging in to arm this faction or that faction inside Iraq– they will lead to nothing… Nothing, that is, except to deepen the scars of violence that the US occupation has carved deep into the very being of Iraqi society.

Forced ‘confessions’ in Tehran

My heart aches for Shaul Bakhash and Haleh Bakhash, respectively the husband and daughter of the Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiari, who has been detained in Iran’s notorious Evin prison for the past couple of months.
This week, Iran’s state television has been airing a two-part series featuring material from interviews conducted with Esfandiari and with Kian Tajbakhsh, another detained Iranian-American who’s been working on urban planning issues in Iran under contract for George Soros’s Open Society Institute. A slide show accompanying that AP story has image grabs from the series. In them, you can see Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh talking with an apparently off-camera interviewer… But the interviews are reportedly all cut up and edited to be intercut with material about the (US-supported) Orange Revolution in Ukraine and similarly US-supported ‘people power’ movements in other countries, to give the impression that Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh are admitting that their activities have been part of some nefarious plot to use their ‘people-to-people’ contacts with their own compatriots in Iran to foment instability and revolution inside Iran.
I find that ‘confessions’ made by people under arrest or detention and broadcast or otherwise publicized by their jailers are always a stomach-turning business. In these images, we see Esfandiari, who normally appears in public immaculately made-up and carefully dressed in her very professional clothing, sitting on a sofa in a black chador with no make-up and looking very tired.
I happen to be a person who doesn’t like to wear make-up. But I recognize that for many women, it is an important part of the way they appear in public; and I should imagine for Esfandiari and her family it may be very demeaning and disquieting for her to appear in public like that.
The content of these interviews, which the Iranian authorities are apparently trying to persuade everyone are ‘true confessions’, is probably nothing more than coerced or carefully edited and re-edited garbage. And we should probably all treat them like that.
At least, though, we do see these two detained people on our screens. Their families say they have lost weight and have been kept in physical conditions far, far worse than the comfy-looking sitting-room where they appear to have been filmed. But they certainly don’t look as if they’ve been treated anywhere near as badly as the US’s former detainees in Abu Ghraib (for example). And they have reportedly been allowed to have short but fairly regular phone contact with one friend or family member each throughout their detention, which is being undertaken by the Iranian authorities during the conduct of a judicial investigation into their activities in Iran.)
Meanwhile, in Iraq, Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, US government agencies are holding thousands of detainees, with most of them being held completely outside of the sphere of anything resembling due process. These detainees include five Iranian diplomats, who were held for some months before they were even given access to the consular service of the government they represented. It is probably also fair to guess that a large proportion of the detainees being held by the US in these places have not had the opportunity to inform their families of the fact or location of their place of detention, let alone to have any form of phone access to their families.
The families of those detainees are every bit as human, and as anguished, as Shaul and Haleh Bakhash. So while my heart goes out to those two, and while of course I hope that Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh are either freed unconditionally or brought with due speed to a fair trial, still I wish exactly the same for all those detainees held by the US and its surrogates, and for their families.
Sadly, the US government, which US citizens might hope would be in a great position to petition other governments in defense of the rights of US citizens unfairly detained in other countries, currently has no credibility whatsoever in this matter. Maybe US citizens should understand that when our government abuses the rights of others, it puts all of us who travel overseas at great risk?
My hope for Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh is that these nauseating broadcast ‘confessions are– as with the British sailors back in March– a precursor to the Iranian government releasing them. But who knows?
And my hope for all the detainees held quite unfairly by my own government is that they too can either speedily win either their complete freedom or at least their day in a fair and duly constituted court of law.

More violence-inciting doctors

Further to the rush of commentary last week on “how could” a medical doctor engage in violence, as a handful of Muslim-immigrant physicians in Britain recently have, I thought of a few more names of violence-inciting docs (to add to that of the notorious Dr. Baruch Goldstein referenced by Juan Cole and others.)
They are, in no particular order: Che Guevara, Charles Krauthammer, Radovan Karadzic, and Frantz Fanon, all of them trained as physicians, but advocates in one context or another of the use of coercive violence. (The latter three of these, interestingly, were trained as psychiatrists.)
The Hippocratic Oath, of course, enjoins doctors to “do no harm”. But in reality, the practice of modern, western-style medicine often involves cutting into people, giving them powerful chemo drugs, or doing other things that in themselves are potentially risky or even sometimes life-threatening– but to do so in pursuit of the future (and hopefully greater) good of becoming either wholly or partially cured. Thus can perhaps too easily be inculcated the idea that “the end justifies the means”?

Bush whitewashes, tries to prop up Abu Mazen

President Bush today made a speech in the White House with the clear intention of assuring an ever-skeptical world that he is concerned about the Palestinian question, and that he’s confident that PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Abbas’s illegitimately installed Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, can “deliver” something worthwhile to the Palestinian people.
In order to do this, Bush had to airbrush out a whole lot of extremely unsavory facts about the circumstances in which the Fayyad administration came into being. For example, he said,

(Ahem, what about the parliament that the Palestinians democratically elected back in January 2006, which the US government systematically tried to undermine from the day it was elected, and which has now been rendered inoperative through Israel’s broad arrests of legislators and through Abbas’s unconstitutional appointment of Fayyad?? ~ HC)

(!)

So the way he presents it, Hamas is only a “terrorist” organization that uses unconscionable violence against Palestinians (as well as Israelis). He makes zero mention at all of Hamas’s victory in the 2006 elections– or, of Israel’s quite unforgivable detention of more than half of the duly elected Hamas legislators. All that is airbrushed out of Bush’s view of “history.”
Luckily, yesterday US readers were able to read this sterling piece of reporting by the NYT’s Steve Erlanger, who used his extensive understanding of the realities in the occupied Palestinian territories to write at length about the deep corruption into which Fateh has fallen, the horribly corrosive effects Israel’s stonewalling on the peace “process” has had on the lives of Palestinians, the commission by some Fateh bodies of torture and other forms of gross abuse against other Palestinians over the years, the US- and Israel-orchestrated campaign against the Parliamentary leadership elected by the Palestinians last year, and so on…
And nor does he spare Hamas from his scrutiny (though he gives a far more informed description of the political realities within which it operates, and in which it has grown so strong in recent years than anything G.W. Bush could even dream of producing). Erlanger led his piece thus:

was nearly as brutal as Hamas

Not quite the image of Fateh as the nonviolent “peace-lovers” that George Bush was trying to convey, it seems?
(Do read the rest of Erlanger’s piece, if you can.)
So, back to Bush…
He describes a few fairly rapid steps he wants the US and its allies in the so-called “Quartet” to take. Then, he says this:

reflecting previous lines and current realities, and mutually agreed adjustments. America is prepared to lead discussions to address these issues, but they must be resolved by Palestinians and Israelis, themselves.

I really don’t see how anyone can take seriously any more the notion that America has any remaining legitimacy to continue “leading” the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. For 34 years now– ever since the brief convening of an international Middle East peace conference in Geneva in December 1973– the US arrogated to itself the claimed “right” to dominate all aspects of Israeli-Arab peacemaking. And for a while, the rest of the world was, for a broad variety of reasons, prepared to go along with that.
Twenty years later, in 1993, the Norwegians handed to the Americans on a plate a unique opportunity to build on the relationships of trust that Norwegian negotiators had built up between the PLO and Israeli leaders, including a commitment the Israelis and Palestinians had both signed on to, that by 1999 they would have concluded a permanent peace agreement between them– and the Americans completely squandered that opportunity… Through first and foremost their continued pursuit of blatantly one-sided pro-Israeli partisanship, but also through their recourse to all sorts of silly, time-wasting ruses under the rubric of “confidence-building”, peace-“processing” etc, etc, and through President Clinton’s deep failure to engage with the need to work seriously on the all-important negotiations for a final peace agreement (as opposed to all those time-wasting little side-talks about this or that situation under the endlessly prolonged ‘interim’ situation.)
Well, 34 years of failed American “leadership” in the Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy notwithstanding, here is President Bush breezily telling us that once again, “America is prepared to lead discussions to address these issues, but they must be resolved by Palestinians and Israelis, themselves.”
No mention there, you will note, of such things as “the principles of international law”. No. Under this so-called American “leadership”, these two parties– the one a state with the world’s third- or fourth-largest army, a GNP in the mega-billions, nuclear weapons, a massive prison system, and many other means of violent coercion at its disposal, and the other a ragtag collection of sad and corrupt little US-financed “ministries” under Abbas’s and Fayyad’s control, deploying a few little pop-guns (but oh, not against Israel)– are going to be able to sit down together and negotiate a fair, sustainable outcome?
I don’t think so.
That’s why getting a firm grounding of “the principles of international law” into the process is so important. Without that, the Palestinians can’t “negotiate” anything worthwhile or lasting.
Bush goes on, embedding some fairly racist assumptions about the nature of Palestinians into his discourse:

(I’m not sure what the first half of the preceding sentence means. But maybe it doesn’t matter? ~HC)

reduce their footprint without reducing their security

The “reduce their footprint without reducing their security” line is quite cute… But it falls far short of calling for an unequivocal withdrawal of Israel from the areas its army occupied during the war of 1967. Whatever happened to that fine clause embedded in Resolution 242 about “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force”? Has George Bush, the Emperor of the Whole World, now decided that acquiring territory by force has become quite acceptable?
Bush again:

(This ‘Ad-Hoc Liaison Committee’ completely follows the model the Bushites love to use for addressing thorny international issues. Rather than using the existing and far more legitimate channels for multilateral action– primarily, the UN– they like to pull together ‘ad-hoc committees’ of their own choosing, and under their own leadership, to address this or that problem– and quite free from the constraints of anything called ‘international law’. I really don’t don’t see why other countries continue to go along with this norm-corroding, self-serving approach. Unfortunately, regarding the ‘Quartet’, even the UN itself went along. ~HC)

(He honestly thinks he’s been elected ‘leader of the whole world’? What madness is this?)

Secretary Rice will chair the meeting.

(Take that, Tony Blair!)

And then we have this… I knew it had to come into the speech somewhere!

between extremists and moderates.

So let’s see what this sudden burst of (claimed) Bushist enthusiasm for Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy leads to… Will we see a serious attempt by the US government to curb Israel’s settlement-building project? Will we see a serious attempt by them to push Israel into lifting the debilitating shackles it has placed on the ability of the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza to maintain anything like a “normal” economic, social, and political life?
I wait to be pleasantly surprised. But I am not holding my breath. Quite honestly, I think humanity could devise a better mode of global “leadership” than this one.

U. Iweala on whitefolk who want to ‘save’ Africa

Uzodinma Iweala, a young novelist from Washington DC and Nigeria, has a great opinion piece in today’s WaPo that should be must-reading for all young whitefolk who get the urge to “save” Africa.
He writes:

used as props in the West’s fantasy of itself.

not only do such depictions tend to ignore the West’s prominent role in creating many of the unfortunate situations on the continent, they also ignore the incredible work Africans have done and continue to do to fix those problems.

Africa doesn’t want to be saved. Africa wants the world to acknowledge that through fair partnerships with other members of the global community, we ourselves are capable of unprecedented growth.

Fair partnerships? We are still a long, long way away from that. One excellent first move would be for the US, the EU and Japan to immediately end the massive subsidies their governments give to their own agricultural producers– primarily, at this point, it should be noted, producers who are part of large-scale agribusiness concerns. These subsidies have completely tipped the playing field of international trade against farmers in Africa and other low-income parts of the world, and have forced them off their farms and into penury and, far too often, into a state of a desperate struggle for the resources needed for basic survival that too often becomes full-scale conflict fueled by– you guessed it!– Western exporters of small arms.
Yes, let’s have some fairness and basic inter-human respect restored to these relationships, indeed.

Sam Waterston: Commencent Address for America

Actor Sam Waterston, known to the nation as Jack McCoy on the long running TV series Law & Order, recently delivered one of the best commencement speeches anywhere — at Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson, on July 4th, as part of the annual ceremony for new citizens.
With wit, history, and splendid twists of phrase, Waterston earned what may have been the only standing ovation in 25 years of Monticello Independence Day speeches.
You can read the full text here, or listen to an audio podcast here.

(Technical note: Visitors presently need to click on the “streaming audio” link on the right, as the mp3 version on the “left” mysteriously cuts off 4 sentences from the end…. I’m hoping Monticello may yet place the full 22 minute streaming video of this speech on its web too.)

The entire speech is worth the effort to read/hear/view in full. Savor it. With one of the most recognizable voices in all of America (his past roles include Abraham Lincoln and yes, Thomas Jefferson), “old guy” Waterston breathes new life into the art of citizenship. He alerts citizens, new and old, that citizenship in a democracy requires not mere passive “pursuit of happiness” but “active interference” in how our politicians protect our “lives and liberty.”
Waterston puts “the participation back into ‘participatory democracy’.”
Rejecting the misplaced hope that “America is the all-time greatest self-correcting nation” or that ordinary citizen mistakes will “gum up” the magical functioning of our government, Waterston instead cites Jefferson’s ultimate faith in the people:

“The evils flowing from the duperies of the people [— that is, the ignorant errors of folks like you and me —] are less injurious than those from the egoism of their agents [ — that is, the arrogant errors of those who speak and act for us].”

Rather than relying on agents, lobbyists, or any opinion dictator:

“America has been marvelously able to correct its course in the past because the founding idea — of individual freedom expressed through direct representation — has stirred its citizens to participate, and interfere. Information from the people makes the government smarter. Insufficient information from us makes it dumber….
In our country, things are ‘normal’ only when your voices are clearly heard. The old model of our citizenly relation to politics was of a group of people under a tree, taking turns on the stump all day, discussing the issues of the time. The old model was the town meeting where every citizen can have their say. Old citizens like me hope that between you and the Internet the old model will get a new lease on life.”

I especially appreciate Waterston’s rebuke of the God-like status being given to mind-numbing public opinion polls:

“We can’t let ourselves become mere units of statistical analysis. It appears to be so, that if you ask any 1000 Americans their views on anything, you’ll have a pretty good idea what all Americans think. You might almost conclude that individuals didn’t matter at all anymore.

Yet individuals can prove the opposite, that we’re potentially more than the “mere grain of sand in a vast statistical ocean.”

“Men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master,” as Jefferson predicted. But will we, by our silence, indifference, or inaction, give the trust away, cede it to the wealthy, present it to the entrenched, hand it off to the government, entrust it to any process or procedure that excludes our voices? It could happen.”

Waterston then spins his own quote for the ages:

“As graduating citizens, you will know how the government is set up: the justly familiar separation of powers, the well-known system of checks and balances, and the famous three branches of government: the executive branch, the judicial branch, and the legislative branch.
If these are the branches, what is the tree? Do not think it’s the government.
We are the tree from which the government springs and spreads into its three branches. Every citizen is part of the root system, part of the trunk, no mere twig or leaf. Help our government never to forget it.”

The conclusion then follows for the new citizens at Monticello and for us all:

“So it turns out citizenship isn’t just a great privilege and opportunity, though it is all that, it’s also a job. I’m sorry to be the one to bring you this news, so late in the process. But don’t worry, it’s a great job. Everything that happens within this country politically, and everywhere in the world its influence is felt, falls within its province. It’s a job with a lot of scope. You’ll never be able to complain again about being bored at work. As we multiply our individual voices, we multiply the chances for our country’s success.”

Out of Iraq and Into Iran?

Pressure at long last is mounting across the U.S. political spectrum and heartland for either a withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, or a dramatic pull-back from the front-lines. You’d think the neocons and their congressional supplicants and the Christian-Likudist “Amen Chorus” would be chastened, hesitant, or dispirited. To the contrary, they’re launching a full-court press for a major military blitz against Iran.
I’ll just highlight a few major items to illustrate this theme:
From Kevin Clarke, senior editor of the U.S. Catholic Magazine:

“These regular mailings from the Israel Project to “opinion agents” such as yours truly are, in effect, a public relations campaign for war. The monthly missives I receive from this one pro-Israel lobby are a small part of a broader effort to “secure the information stream” and prep Americans for the next exotic stop in the war on terror: sunny Iran. Now to the average shmoe, even contemplating another war while the overtaxed U.S. military machine seems bogged down in Iraq and losing ground in Afghanistan might seem laughably disconnected from reality….
Iraq was supposed to be the demo-sideshow to the real fight to alter the political reality on the ground of the Middle East, an effort that “logically” ends not in Jerusalem or Baghdad but in Tehran. The fact that the build-up stages to this “inevitable” confrontation—taking out Saddam Hussein, removing the Taliban from power, and neutralizing Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza—have not exactly gone according to script has not deterred these determined folks. Now like bourbon-addled, nicotine-fingered Vegas high-rollers on a bad run, these guys are asking America to double-down on the great Islamic Enlightenment project.”

As leading examples, we could of course refer to recent screeds to bomb Iran by Senator Lieberman or by Commentary’s roving (raving?) editor, Norman Podhoretz. Podhoretz blindly waves the bloody shirt of 9/11 in the direction of Iran, the center of all “Islamofascism.” (For more on such bombing “logic,” refer again to Helena Cobban’s courageous deconstruction of a similar call by Louis-René Beres.)
We now have tycoon and former Presidential candidate Steve Forbes thumping the tub in the July 23rd issue of the magazine that bears his name. Forbes to Bush: never mind if you screwed-up Iraq, “history” will judge you according to whether or not you take down Iran.

“If President Bush doesn’t stop the mullahs,… his presidency will be judged a failure….The importance of events in Iran overshadows what is happening in Iraq. If President Bush defangs nuclear-obsessed Iran, all his other setbacks and disappointments will fade into insignificance as time passes.”

Forbes proposes supporting Iranian expatriates and minorities and a “capital blockade” of investments going into Iran. If these measures doesn’t bring about “regime change” (which they won’t), then Forbes has in mind a full-scale blockade of Iran. Never mind what that would do to western economies (imagine oil prices tripling overnight), Forbes has bought the lobby line that current Iranian rationing of gasoline (due to ruinous policies of subsidizing petrol and importing 40% of Iran’s needs) render it critically vulnerable to blocking Iran’s imports of gasoline (much of which comes from Kuwait).

Memo to Forbes: check industry sources about Iran having several major domestic refining expansion projects soon to come on line. (By contrast, has a singe new refinery project been even started here in the USA — a key reason for high gas prices here in the “free market?” The MSM here in the west hasn’t touched Bush’s failures to build refineries in the US. But I digress.)

Anticipating perhaps that the non-lethal means he proposes will not work or work before Bush is history, Forbes ends up joining Lieberman, Beres, etc. in calling for the “monumental” move of bombing Iran, to “set the mullahs’ nuclear ambitions back a decade or more.”
Steven Kinzer incisively notes that the groundwork for the most recent campaigns to attack Iran was laid in the strained US efforts pin Iraqi violence on Iran (as amplified by Michael R. Gordon, no less, in above- the-fold “reporting” in the New York Times).
Yet Kinzer also asks, “even if Iran could be found directly responsible for the death of Americans,” would such actions via proxy be “so outrageously provocative” to justify an American assault on Iran? Kinzer contends they would not, and cites examples of the US not attacking China over Korea, or the Soviet Union in Vietnam.
In stark contrast to Forbes’ concern for Bush’s legacy, Kinzer shrewdly concludes:

“Attacking Iran would accomplish at least one thing Bush must be seeking. It will assure that future historians will not remember the invasion of Iraq as his biggest blunder.”

If President Bush really hopes for positive mark on in his foreign policy record, he’d be far better off taking a page out of Nixon and get serious about diplomacy, without preconditions, with today’s equivalent of what China was for Nixon – Iran.

“Whistling in the Dark” (Iran-media spat)

For all of the ongoing press woes in the Islamic Republic of Iran, commentaries in Iranian papers can still be extraordinarily boisterous — too lively at times for Iran’s neighbors.
A loud case in point is an editorial by Hoseyn Shari’atmadari in Iran’s hardline Keyhan newspaper. (The entire editorial is appended in the continuation; translation by the US taxpayer funded OSC service) It seems Keyhan has less interest in defending fellow hardliners under siege at home, than picking a fuss with foreign bogeys.
The Keyhan editorial touched off a firestorm of condemnations from the southern Arab side of the Persian Gulf. No wonder, as in “point ten,” Shari’atmadari provocatively raises the old Iranian claim to Bahrain:

“…Bahrain was once part of Iran’s soil. In the process of an illegal collusion between the doomed shah and the Governments of America and Britain, it was separated from Iran. Today, the most important demand of the people of Bahrain is that this province separated from Iran be returned to its main motherland: Islamic Iran. Obviously, this absolute right of Iran and the people of its separated province cannot and should not be ignored.”

Such exaggerated bluster is about as helpful as President Ahmadinejad’s incendiary comments about the Holocaust, Israel, and map-wiping.
All too predictably, this editorial segment inspired a unified chorus of condemnations from the Bahraini press and elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula, with different writers now one-upping each other in demands for the “official” to be removed or contradicted by the Iranian foreign ministry. Some papers are dredging up claims about southwestern Iran having once been Arab controlled.
While Shari’atmadari, as head of the Keyhan Foundation, technically serves at the pleasure of Iran’s Supreme Leader, it should be recognized that Keyhan editorials are anything but an authoritative voice for Iranian foreign policy. (far less than The Weekly Standard in the US is an authoritative voice for neocon elements within the Bush-Cheney Administration)
Of course, Shari’atmadari’s July 10th controversial essay has a context, as he was but one of many Iranian writers reacting to the routine reiteration by the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council on July 5th in support of the claim by the United Arab Emirates to the disputed Islands of Abu Musa and the two Tunbs.
On July 7th, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Ali Hosseini reiterated Iran’s standard statement that these Islands “are and will remain inseparable and integral parts of Iranian territory” while also complaining (in standard form) that the “repetition of the baseless stance… is surprising give that fact that Iran and the UAE enjoy enhanced contacts and relations.”
Nothing in the official statements about Bahrain, nor any nasty comments about the legitimacy of governments among the Arab Sheikhdoms.
Of course, the modern dispute over the Islands predates the Iranian Revolution and instead is rooted in Britain’s withdrawal of its forces from the Persian Gulf in the early 1970’s. Iran enforced its claims over these 3 islands, while at the same time forgoing its claim to the island of Bahrain. Iranians of most stripes still view the dispute with the UAE in nationalistic terms, and from time to time this or that Iranian hardliner will trot out variations on the theme that the Shah (& his American “bosses”) betrayed Iran in giving up Bahrain.
Not the stuff of diplomacy, to be sure. For those seeking to maintain American domination over the Gulf, this latest media stoking of residual sectarian, ethnic, and territorial tensions will be music to their ears. Divide & conquer.
I expect the “grown-ups” in the foreign policy establishments in Iran and in the neighboring Arab states will work to keep a lid on this sort of heat.
Speaking of which, we’re encouraged by communications efforts between American and Iranian naval commanders in the Persian Gulf, as revealed in an excellent report in the Los Angeles Times. Not quite the top-level hot-line and “deconflict” mechanism that Helena Cobban and Pat Lang have been proposing, but such “professionalism” between commanders in dangerously crowded waters is not what those looking to provoke a war would wish to see.

Continue reading ““Whistling in the Dark” (Iran-media spat)”

Iranian Bikers for peace…?

I’m all for exploring new ways to work for peace, including by demonstrations, marches, marathons, even “honking for peace.” Sure beats marching for war — like when Jerome Corsi (of “Swift boat veterans” infamy) in June 2005 walked from Philly to DC, to drum up support for his “Iran Freedom Foundation” and his demands for the US to get rough towards “Atomic Iran.”
Yet I was pleasantly surprised to learn of a group of 14 Iranian youth who have been “biking for peace” around Europe and America since May 11th. They’ve been in the US since June 16th. I’ve confirmed that these youth are from Iran, and they’re here with considerable backing from assorted Iranian non-governmental organizations – in Iran. While their tour has received limited publicity here in the US; surely both governments had to have been involved with the permissions….?
The peace bikers finished their journey this afternoon at the Washington Cathedral. If they had come through Charlottesville, I might have dusted off the road bike to join them. I like the description of their goals at their “Miles for Peace” web site, beginning with their invocation of Sa’di .
This bike caravan may have been too “fast” for me. According to the “Miles for Peace” web site, on July 8th, they were to “leave Los Angeles, heading for Baltimore.” The next day, July 9th, they were 3,000 miles east in Baltimore. Must be some new pedal or gearing technology. (Now if they could bottle that, they wouldn’t need nuclear energy.)
I hope these peace-bikers encountered no obstacles for visas or from customs, nor from counter-protests along the way. If one scans through the splendid photos for their peace adventure, one could well say these riders were rather brave, if nothing else, for biking close order on California freeways or downtown New York – without helmets.
Yet there may be an even more profound irony at work here. Far more than Iran’s detractors admit, Iranian women have made great educational and professional strides, and certainly compared to certain neighbors to the south. Considerable difficulties remain, and Iranian women’s groups are pushing back against recent set-backs. That said, even though Iranian women can drive and even race cars, they still can’t ride bikes.
As pointed out recently by Farzaneh Milani in a USA Today oped, Iran recently announced production of an “Islamic bicycle.” Milani, a specialist on women’s literature in Iran, is not impressed by the “new technology,” which is said to come “fully equipped with a cabin to conceal parts of a female cyclist’s body.” Milani deems it “less about the bike and more about suppressing women,” a “desperate but ultimately futile attempt.”
But this “Biking for Peace” group didn’t use any of the “Islamic bicycles.” (Indeed, I’ve yet to see or hear of reports in Iran confirming they even exist.)
Consider then the multiple levels of irony at work here: Vibrant and energetic young Iranians are out campaigning for peace in major western cities, on their bicycles – the very bicycles that the Iranian women in the group would be forbidden from riding back home in Iran.
One wonders if these creative peacemakers and their sponsors weren’t sending messages in both directions.