Daily Archives: September 27, 2007

OPINION & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Israel and the world can live with a nuclear Iran

The world can live with a nuclear Iran
By Martin van Creveld, The Forward, September 24, 2007

In case Bush does decide to attack Iran, it is questionable whether Iran’s large, well-dispersed and well-camouflaged nuclear program can really be knocked out. This is all the more doubtful because, in contrast to the Israeli attacks on Iraq back in 1981 and on Syria three weeks ago, the element of surprise will be lacking. And even if it can be done, whether doing so will serve a useful purpose is also questionable.

Since 1945 hardly one year has gone by in which some voices — mainly American ones concerned about preserving Washington’s monopoly over nuclear weapons to the greatest extent possible — did not decry the terrible consequences that would follow if additional countries went nuclear. So far, not one of those warnings has come true. To the contrary: in every place where nuclear weapons were introduced, large-scale wars between their owners have disappeared.

General John Abizaid, the former commander of United States Central Command, is only the latest in a long list of experts to argue that the world can live with a nuclear Iran. Their views deserve to be carefully considered, lest Ahmadinejad’s fear-driven posturing cause anybody to do something stupid. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Martin van Creveld, a world-renowned professor of military history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has a habit of being bluntly truthful. This is what he said in an interview earlier this year:

“We are in no danger at all of having an Iranian nuclear weapon dropped on us. We cannot say so too openly, however, because we have a history of using any threat in order to get weapons … thanks to the Iranian threat, we are getting weapons from the U.S. and Germany.”

“Our armed forces are not the 30th strongest in the world, but rather the second or third… We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets that can launch them at targets in all directions. Most European capitals are targets of our air force … We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that this will happen before Israel goes under.”

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NEWS & ANALYSIS: Iran – an enemy of convenience

Senate urges Bush to declare Iran Guard a terrorist group
By David M. Herszenhorn, New York Times, September 27, 2007

The Senate approved a resolution on Wednesday urging the Bush administration to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization, and lawmakers briefly set aside partisan differences to approve a measure calling for stepped-up diplomacy to forge a political solution in Iraq.

Since last month, the White House has been weighing whether to declare the Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist group or to take a narrower step focusing on only the Guard’s elite Quds Force. Either approach would signal a more confrontational posture by declaring a part of the Iranian military a terrorist operation. [complete article]

The secret dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States
Trita Parsi interviewed on Democracy Now, September 25, 2007

TRITA PARSI: Israel has for a very long time been a critical factor in America’s formulation of a policy vis-à-vis Iran. But what’s really interesting is that the influence of Israel has gone in completely different directions, if we just go back fifteen years. During the 1980s, in spite of the Iranian Revolution, in spite of Ayatollah Khomeini’s many, many harsh remarks about Israel, far, far worse than what anything Ahmadinejad has said so far, Israel at the time was the country that was lobbying the United States to open up talks with Iran to try to rebuild the US-Iran relations, because of strategic imperatives that Israel had. Israel needed Iran, because it was fearing the Arab world and a potential war with the Arabs.

After 1991, ’92, that’s when you see the real shift in Israeli-Iranian relations, because that’s when the entire geopolitical map of the Middle East is redrawn. The Soviet Union collapses. The last standing army of the Arabs, that of Saddam Hussein, is defeated in the Persian Gulf War. And you have an entirely new security environment in the Middle East, in which the two factors, the Soviets and the Arabs, that had pushed Iran and Israel closer together suddenly evaporate. But as their security environment improves, they also start to realize that they may be ending up in a situation in which they can become potential threats to each other. And that’s when you see how the Israelis shift 180 degrees. Now the Israeli argument was that the United States should not talk to Iran, because there is no such thing as Iranian moderates.

And ever since, the Israelis and the pro-Israel interest in the United States have lobbied to make sure that there is no dialogue or there’s no rapprochement between the United States and Iran. And the Iranians have done similar things. They have undermined every US foreign policy initiative in the Middle East that they feared would be beneficial to Israel. So the real shift in Israeli-Iranian relations come after the Cold War, not with the revolution in 1979. [complete article]

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NEWS & OPINION: Breaking up Iraq – a neo-colonial fantasy

Senate backs separating Iraq into 3 regions
By Noam N. Levey, Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2007

Implicitly criticizing the Bush administration’s reliance on the Iraqi central government to unify the country, the U.S. Senate on Wednesday overwhelmingly endorsed the decentralization of Iraq into semi-autonomous regions.

The nonbinding measure sponsored by Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) — which supports a “federal system” that would divide Iraq into sectarian-dominated regions — won unusually broad bipartisan support, passing 75 to 23. [complete article]

The U.S. Senate votes to partition Iraq. Softly
By Reidar Visser, Historiae.org, September 27, 2007

All in all the Biden amendment serves as an alarming but useful numerical indication of the level of support for an “ethnic” approach to Iraqi politics in the US Senate. It does not bode well for the future that the challengers to President Bush seem to converge on a scheme that would be even more unpalatable to the Muslim world than Washington’s current policy. True, Bush invaded Iraq, and Paul Bremer weakened it severely. There are worrying signs that some in the State Department, like Ryan Crocker, are already indistinguishable from Biden by tirelessly “encouraging” Sunnis to think in terms of federalism. But if his partition plans were implemented, Joe Biden would be remembered by Muslims and Arabs around the world in an altogether different way. He would be considered alongside other historical personalities who routinely are being accused by Middle Easterners for having destroyed their region completely: Arthur Balfour, Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot. [complete article]

Iraq’s partition fantasy
By Reidar Visser, Open Democracy, May 19, 2006

…if the pundits who urge partition had bothered to check what actually happened when centrifugal forces were pushed to the maximum in the south of Iraq in the 1920s, they would have seen that regionalism, not sectarianism, has historically been the main competitor to Iraqi nationalism south of Baghdad – and a feeble one at that.

The idea of tripartite break-up, on the other hand finds little resonance in Iraqi history. In testimony to their sublime artificiality, contemporary partitionist misnomers like “Shi’istan” and “Sunnistan” are altogether absent from the historical record; like much of the pro-partition advocacy they exist solely in the minds of outsiders who base their entire argument on far-fetched parallels to European political experiences. [complete article]

See also, Thousands of Iraqi Arabs paid to leave Kirkuk (AFP).

Editor’s Comment — In a recent interview, Iraq expert, Toby Dodge, was particularly blunt in dismissing the Biden plan. “The idea that we have three neat communities is sociologically and politically illiterate. It has deliberately ignored the sociological complexities of Iraq in order to get a neat policy prescription that allows America to get out of Iraq. That is dangerous and reckless, and it isn’t the solution.”

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OPINION: America’s moral bankruptcy

Refugees? What refugees?
By Roger Cohen, New York Times, September 27, 2007

In January, Sweden admitted 1,500 Iraqis, compared to 15 that entered the United States. In April, the respective numbers were 1,421 and 1; in May, 1,367 and 1; and in August 1,469 and 529.

True, the Iraqis in Sweden are asylum-seekers, whereas those reaching these shores have refugee status conferred by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. But the numbers — representing the bulk of the Iraqis getting into a country of nine million and another of 300 million — are no less of an indictment for that.

When Tobias Billstrom, the migration minister, says, “Yes, of course the United States should do more,” you can feel his indignation about to erupt like milk boiling over. He notes that given the huge population difference, Sweden’s intake of Iraqis “is the equivalent of the U.S. taking in about 500,000 refugees.”

Of all the Iraq war scandals, America’s failure to do more for refugees, including thousands who put their lives at risk for the U.S., stands out for its moral bankruptcy. Last time I checked, Sweden did not invade Iraq. Its generosity shames President Bush’s fear-infused nation. [complete article]

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NEWS: Gates wants to leave at least 35,000 American troops in Iraq

U.S. needs ‘long-term presence’ in Iraq, Gates says
By David S. Cloud, New York Times, September 27, 2007

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told Congress on Wednesday that he envisioned keeping five combat brigades in Iraq as a “long-term presence.”

Mr. Gates told the Senate Appropriations Committee, “When I speak of a long-term presence, I’m thinking of a very modest U.S. presence with no permanent bases, where we can continue to go after Al Qaeda in Iraq and help the Iraqi forces.”

He added that “in my head” he envisioned a force as a quarter of the current combat brigades. [complete article]

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OPINION: Getting out of Iraq

Leave the office furniture behind. It isn’t worth one soldier’s life
By Gregory Cochran, The American Conservative, September 24, 2007

… we should aim to get our troops out safely, with their weapons intact. Weapons are important—we win more because of superior equipment than superior training or talent. That equipment is expensive, takes a long time to replace with our existing procurement system, and we might actually need it if we found ourselves in a war of necessity.

Second, we should forget about accomplishing anything else. If we couldn’t create a compliant Iraq with 150,000 troops, we won’t manage it with 50,000 or 20,000. Many of our presidential candidates—you can recognize them by the humps on their backs—are talking about retaining smaller numbers of troops in Iraq, hoping to achieve some political end or at least disguise defeat, but that pig won’t fly. Our forces are tremendously powerful (compared to the insurgents) and never lose battles, but leaving small residual forces in a fundamentally hostile country—a solid majority of non-Kurdish Iraqis now find attacks on coalition forces acceptable—is asking for trouble. The British tried that in Basra, and they took rocket and mortar fire every day while achieving nothing.

From this point of view, decisions about moving day become straightforward. For example, what should we do about the vast amount of non-combat materiel in Iraq? We’ve accumulated dentist chairs, chapel pews, swimming-pool filtration systems, office complexes, multimillion-dollar fitness centers, air-conditioners, refrigerators, prefab latrines, Coke machines, even 50-inch plasma TVs. We have stockpiles of 50-gallon oil drums full of battery acid, contaminated oil, and industrial solvents. We’re being told that it all has to be shipped home. I have a better idea: leave it all behind. I’m sure that the Army bureaucracy thinks that we’ve got to move these refrigerators, got to move these TV’s. They’re wrong. Maybe they fear that leaving a single vending machine behind means that they will have to personally answer to the Coca-Cola Company. [complete article]

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NEWS & ANALYSIS: Myanmar revolution – background, events, eyewitness accounts, analysis

On the brink
The Economist, September 27, 2007

There are reckoned to be 400,000 monks in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), about the same as the number of soldiers under the ruling junta’s command. The soldiers have the guns. The monks have the public’s support and, judging from the past fortnight’s protests, the courage and determination to defy the regime. But Myanmar’s tragic recent history suggests that when an immovable junta meets unstoppable protests, much blood is spilled. In the last pro-democracy protests on this scale, in 1988, it took several rounds of massacres before the demonstrations finally subsided, leaving the regime as strong as ever. By September 27th, with a crackdown under way, and the first deaths from clashes with security forces, it seemed hard to imagine that things would be very different this time.

One genuine difference is that, in the age of the internet and digital cameras, images of the spectacular protests in Yangon, the main city, have spread at lightning speed across Myanmar itself, encouraging people in other towns to stage demonstrations of their own; and around the world, bringing the crisis to the attention of leaders as they gathered in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. The remarkable images from Myanmar have meant that, for a while at least, a country that has been brutalised and pauperised by a callous and incompetent regime for 45 years has the attention it deserves. [complete article]

Myanmar monks’ three demands
Al Jazeera, September 27, 2007

There are three steps that we want.

“The first step is to reduce all commodity prices, fuel prices, rice and cooking oil prices immediately.

“The second step – release all political prisoners, including Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and all detainees arrested during ongoing demonstrations over the fuel price hike.

“The third step – enter a dialogue with pro-democracy forces for national reconciliation immediately, to resolve the crisis and difficulties facing and suffered by the people.” [complete article]

See also, Nine killed in Burmese crackdown (BBC), Economics at the root of Myanmar protests (PINR), Monks in the vanguard for regime change (Brian McCartan), General Than Shwe – the man behind the Myanmar madness (Richard Ehrlich and Shawn W Crispin), Timeline – 45 years of resistance and repression in Myanmar (Reuters), and Rule of lords (blog on human rights in Burma and Thailand).

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RUMOR: The world’s best-circulated rumor

The world according to John Bolton
Foreign Policy, September, 2007

FOREIGN POLICY: It’s been a tense week on the nuclear front, with Syria accusing Israel of invading its airspace, and then North Korea blasting Israel for doing so. You’ve been one of the only people who have spoken openly about the likelihood that Israel bombed nuclear facilities in Syria. If that were the case, why do you think Israel wouldn’t announce it had done so?

JOHN BOLTON: Well, I don’t think we really know what the target of the Israeli raid was. There seems to be a lot of indication that there was a North Korean-Syrian project in the nuclear field, although obviously the details of that are not known. And what that suggests is that we need very clear answers from the North Koreans in the context of the six-party talks [as to] whether indeed they are proliferating nuclear technology, whether they’re outsourcing their program—or just exactly what it is they’re doing.

Now, what the Israeli raid actually hit, I don’t think people know. I was certainly reacting against the notion that it was an attack on a shipment of missiles bound from Iran to Hezbollah, because I don’t think the Israelis would take the risks inherent in an attack on Syrian territory against a target like that. To me, it suggests that it was a higher-value target, and a nuclear facility of some kind would definitely qualify. But what exactly the target is, I don’t know myself, and I’m not sure that there’s anything but speculation out there at this point. [complete article]

Congress throws covert Israeli attack on Syria out into the open
By Nathan Guttman, The Forward, September 26, 2007

As Israel and the United States struggle to maintain a veil of ambiguity over Israel’s alleged air strike against Syria earlier this month, Congress is bringing the issue out into the open and giving American sanction to an event that now seems all but confirmed.

Democrat Robert Wexler from Florida introduced a resolution this week supporting Israel’s covert operation and backing the country’s right to defend itself “in the face of an imminent nuclear or military threat from Syria.”

“This is the world’s worst-kept secret,” Wexler told the Forward this week, stressing that his proposed resolution did not reveal anything that wasn’t already reported in the world press. [complete article]

Hillary Clinton says she supports ‘apparent’ IAF action in Syria
Haaretz, September 27, 2007

New York Senator Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday evening that she supports what she said was the Israel Air Force’s “apparent” action against a nuclear facility in Syria.

Clinton spoke during a televised debate for the leading candidates vying for the Democratic nomination for U.S. president.

The candidates largely evaded questions on the incident, on which foreign media has speculated but Israel remains quiet. The moderator of the debate, Tim Russert of NBC, raised the issue of Syria when asking whether the candidates would support an Israeli strike on Iran, should it acquire nuclear capabilities. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Clinton and Congress don’t need to know what happened in Syria before they voice their support. Fat chance they’ll be counseling restraint when it comes to Iran.

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NEWS: Blackwater “may be worse than Abu Ghraib”

Private security puts diplomats, military at odds
By Sudarsan Raghavan and Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, September 26, 2007

A confrontation between the U.S. military and the State Department is unfolding over the involvement of Blackwater USA in the shooting deaths of Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad square Sept. 16, bringing to the surface long-simmering tensions between the military and private security companies in Iraq, according to U.S. military and government officials.

In high-level meetings over the past several days, U.S. military officials have pressed State Department officials to assert more control over Blackwater, which operates under the department’s authority, said a U.S. government official with knowledge of the discussions. “The military is very sensitive to its relationship that they’ve built with the Iraqis being altered or even severely degraded by actions such as this event,” the official said.

“This is a nightmare,” said a senior U.S. military official. “We had guys who saw the aftermath, and it was very bad. This is going to hurt us badly. It may be worse than Abu Ghraib, and it comes at a time when we’re trying to have an impact for the long term.” [complete article]

See also, Blackwater tops firms in Iraq in shooting rate (NYT) and State Dept: corruption in Iraq is classified (David Corn).

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OPINION: The Muslim Brotherhood is not at odds with its democratic rivals

The Muslim Brotherhood will stand up for all Egyptians
By Ibrahim El Houdaiby, The Forward, September 26, 2007

In her opinion article, [Mona] Eltahawy criticizes the Muslim Brotherhood’s leader, Mohammed Mahdi Akef, for calling her “naked” because she was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt and pants. I could not agree more with her.

Not wearing the hijab, or headscarf, makes a woman unveiled, not naked. I realize how offensive it is to call someone “naked” for not wearing a headscarf, and I find Akef’s comment unjustifiable.

To be clear, I support Akef’s stance on wearing the hijab, and like him view it as a religious obligation. There has been consensus on that among Islamic scholars for centuries.

Yet this has got nothing to do with the Muslim Brotherhood as a political group. While we believe that wearing the hijab is an obligation, we believe it is an individual woman’s choice to uphold it — a choice that the state should not interfere in. [complete article]

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NEWS & ANALYSIS: Barghouti’s chance to become Palestinian president; Saudi’s quest for diplomatic cover; IDF killings in Gaza

The next Palestinian president?
By Dion Nissenbaum, Checkpoint Jerusalem, September 26, 2007

Barghouti has something Abbas never will: Respect on “the street,” with Hamas leaders and among the political elite.

From his prison cell, Barghouti has worked to establish himself as a diplomat. He routinely issues statements calling for Palestinian unity. He helped draft a platform signed by prisoners across the political spectrum that helped lay the groundwork for the now-fractured PA unity government. And politicians regularly seek his advice and counsell.

But he has never been tested as a politician on the world stage, and there are serious doubts about Barghouti’s abilities as a diplomat and negotiator.

Still, the options are limited. Fatah’s old leadership is largely discredited and viewed as corrupt. Barghouti represents the new guard that has a chance to start with a cleaner slate.

When Israel thought it was in its interests, it has freed people like Barghouti before. The fact that the idea is being floated again suggests that Israeli leaders understand that the idea of freeing Barghouti should be in play. [complete article]

Saudi asks Israel to abandon barrier as a gesture to Arabs
By Helene Cooper, New York Times, September 27, 2007

Israel should stop work on a security barrier in and along the West Bank and halt settlement activity there as a good-will gesture to assure Arab states that it is serious about comprehensive peace talks, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister said yesterday.

The minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, stopped short of making his demand a condition for Arab attendance at a planned Middle East peace conference. And he said that in recent days, he had become encouraged about the prospects for the conference, which the United States is to sponsor in November. But he would not promise that Saudi Arabia would attend, a major Israeli objective. [complete article]

Israel kills 12 Palestinians in Gaza in 24 hours
By Adel Zaanoun, AFP, September 27, 2007

The Israeli military killed three Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, bringing to 12 the death toll in one of the bloodiest 24 hours in the Hamas-run territory in recent months.

The escalation, in which another 21 people were wounded, followed a warning by Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak that the clock was ticking down to a widescale military operation in Gaza aimed at curbing near daily rocket fire. [complete article]

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