Daily Archives: September 11, 2009

Iran urges disposal of all nuclear arms

Iran urges disposal of all nuclear arms
By Thomas Erdbrink, Washington Post, September 11, 2009

Iran is not prepared to discuss halting its uranium enrichment program in response to Western demands but is proposing instead a worldwide control system aimed at eliminating nuclear weapons, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s top political aide said in an interview Thursday.

In a set of proposals handed to the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany on Wednesday, Iran also offered to cooperate on solving problems in Afghanistan and fighting terrorism and to collaborate on oil and gas projects, Mojtaba Samareh Hashemi said. A longtime confidant of the president’s, Samareh Hashemi is reportedly being considered for the key post of first vice president in Ahmadinejad’s new government.

As described by Samareh Hashemi, Iran’s offer is similar to a call by President Obama in April to eliminate the world’s nuclear weapons. Later this month, Obama is scheduled to chair a special session of the U.N. General Assembly’s annual meeting aimed at seeking consensus on preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, rather than targeting individual nations such as Iran and North Korea. Ahmadinejad is also scheduled to attend the U.N. meeting and has said he is ready to debate Obama publicly.

“It’s not really responsive to our greatest concern, which is obviously Iran’s nuclear program,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said of Tehran’s package of proposals. “Iran reiterated its view that as far as it is concerned, its nuclear file is closed. . . . That is certainly not the case. There are many outstanding issues.” [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — As usual, Iran’s position is portrayed as being one of intransigence, yet at the core of the conflict here is a dispute over whether one side can claim the “right” to dictate the parameters of engagement. The US and its allies are in effect saying: we are the ones who get to set the agenda.

Is 2009 a real change from 2008? I’m still waiting to spot the difference.

The specific nuclear clause in Iran’s proposal is this:

Promoting the universality of NPT mobilizing global resolve and putting into action real and fundamental programmes toward complete disarmament and preventing development and proliferation of nuclear, chemical and microbial weapons.

How serious a proposal is this?

In a way it’s clearly simply a rhetorical challenge. It’s a way of calling Obama’s bluff. Was his Prague declaration more than a piece of campaign-style fluff? A way of offering Europeans a feel-good moment that would make his tour Kennedyesque? Or was he serious?

If nuclear disarmament is ever going to reach the negotiating table then the Middle East’s sole nuclear power is first going to have to come out of the closet. And this goes to the heart of the current impasse: Iran’s opponents insist that the nuclear file cannot include discussion about Israel’s nuclear weapons. Iran must curtail its nuclear aspirations (even though we don’t actually know what they are) while Israel is at liberty to conceal its nuclear actualities.

“They’re baaaaack….”
By Stephen Walt, Foreign Policy, September 11, 2009

When I started blogging back in January, one of my early posts questioned the belief that Obama’s election had ended talk of military action against Iran. I thought this view was “almost certainly premature,” because I didn’t think a rapid diplomatic breakthrough was likely and I knew that advocates of a more forceful approach would soon come out of the woodwork and start pushing the new administration to get tough with Tehran.

Well, I hate to say I told you so, but … Right on cue, Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal had an op-ed from former Senators Dan Coats and Chuck Robb and retired Air Force general Chuck Wald, recommending that Obama “begin preparations for the use of military options” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. They argue that keeping the threat of force “on the table” is the only way to achieve a diplomatic solution, but they also make it clear that they favor bombing Iran if diplomacy fails. In their words, “making preparations now will enable the president, should all other measures fail to bring Tehran to the negotiating table, to use military force to retard Iran’s nuclear program.” [continued…]

Russia says sanctions against Iran are unlikely
By Clifford J Levy, New York Times, September 11, 2009

Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov on Thursday all but ruled out imposing new sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, brushing aside growing Western concerns that Iran had made significant progress in recent months in a bid for nuclear weapons.

Mr. Lavrov said he believed that a new set of proposals that Iran gave to European nations on Wednesday offered a viable basis for negotiations to end the dispute. He said he did not believe that the United Nations Security Council would approve new sanctions against Iran, which could ban Iran from exporting oil or importing gasoline.

“Based on a brief review of the Iranian papers, my impression is there is something there to use,” Mr. Lavrov said at a gathering of experts on Russia. “The most important thing is Iran is ready for a comprehensive discussion of the situation, what positive role it can play in Iraq, Afghanistan and the region.” [continued…]

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To save Afghanistan, look to its past

To save Afghanistan, look to its past
By Ansar Rahel and Jon Krakauer, New York Times, September 11, 2009

No matter who is ultimately certified as the winner of Afghanistan’s presidential election, the vote was plagued by so much fraud and violence, and had such low turnout, that it is inconceivable the Afghan people will regard the victor as a legitimate leader. And if a majority of Afghans do not consider the president and his government to be legitimate, the military campaign now being waged by the United States and its allies is doomed to fail, regardless of the number of troops deployed.

Current discussions about cobbling together mistrustful factions into a new power-sharing government will produce neither enduring democracy nor short-term peace. The slate must be wiped clean. Afghans need to start again from scratch and choose their leader by a fresh process that restores legitimacy to the national government.

Fortunately, such a process already exists — one that is both highly respected by the Afghan people and recognized in the Afghan Constitution: the convening of an emergency loya jirga, or grand assembly. The loya jirga has been called in times of national crisis in Afghanistan for centuries. In 1747, such an assembly in Kandahar selected Ahmad Shah Durrani as the first king of Afghanistan, uniting a patchwork of contentious tribal entities into the modern Afghan state. The loya jirga, moreover, is not only deeply rooted in Pashtun tradition, but is also consistent with notions of Western representative democracy. [continued…]

Obama faces doubts from Democrats on Afghanistan
By Eric Schmitt and David E Sanger, New York Times, September 11, 2009

The leading Senate Democrat on military matters said Thursday that he was against sending more American combat troops to Afghanistan until the United States speeded up the training and equipping of more Afghan security forces.

The comments by the senator, Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who is the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, illustrate the growing skepticism President Obama is facing in his own party as the White House decides whether to commit more deeply to a war that has begun losing public support, even as American commanders acknowledge that the situation on the ground has deteriorated.

Senator Levin’s comments, made in an interview and in the draft of a speech he will deliver Friday, are significant because his stature on military matters gives him the ability to sway fellow lawmakers, and his pivotal committee position provides a platform for vetting Mr. Obama’s major decisions on troops. [continued…]

Pelosi sees support ebbing for Afghan war
By Yochi J Dreazen and Naftali Bendavid, Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2009

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she sees little congressional support for boosting troop levels in Afghanistan, putting the Democratic majority in Congress on a possible collision course with the Obama administration over the future conduct of the war there.

The remarks Thursday by Ms. Pelosi (D., Calif.) make her the highest-ranking Democrat to signal opposition to the administration’s handling of the Afghan war, a top national-security priority.

The remarks also underscored the increasingly complex political dynamics confronting President Barack Obama as he considers whether to send additional U.S. forces to Afghanistan. [continued…]

Afghan warlord General Atta Mohammad Nur warning raises fear of election violence
By Jerome Starkey and James Hider, The Times, September 11, 2009

One of Afghanistan’s most powerful warlords has defended the popular right to protest against the presidential election results, raising fears that the country could be engulfed by violence if supporters of the losing candidates reject the poll as being rigged.

General Atta Mohammad Nur, who broke ranks with the Government to support President Karzai’s main election rival, insisted: “It is the right of our people to defend their votes. Demonstrations, gatherings, strikes and protests against fraud being carried out by the current system are the absolute right of the people.”

Speaking on national television, he accused the country’s Interior Minister, Hanif Atmar, of “forcing people to keep silent”. [continued…]

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How 9/11 should be remembered

How 9/11 should be remembered
By Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch, September 10, 2009

Eight years ago, 2,600 people lost their lives in Manhattan, and then several million people lost their story. The al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers did not defeat New Yorkers. It destroyed the buildings, contaminated the region, killed thousands, and disrupted the global economy, but it most assuredly did not conquer the citizenry. They were only defeated when their resilience was stolen from them by clichés, by the invisibility of what they accomplished that extraordinary morning, and by the very word “terrorism,” which suggests that they, or we, were all terrified. The distortion, even obliteration, of what actually happened was a necessary precursor to launching the obscene response that culminated in a war on Iraq, a war we lost (even if some of us don’t know that yet), and the loss of civil liberties and democratic principles that went with it. [continued…]

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The American leviathan

The American leviathan
By Stephen Glain, The Nation, September 9, 2009

News travels fast across the red desert bush of remote Djibouti. Even as US military reservists erect a field hospital around a cluster of tents and blockhouses near a desolate watering hole, dozens of tribespeople are waiting for treatment in orderly rows. They arrive with maladies of every sort: bad teeth, diarrhea, fevers, colds, arthritis. At the triage center, an elderly tribesman has had a thorn removed from his foot, a wound that had been infected for months. At the dental surgery station, Navy Lt. Bill Anderson, an orthodontist from Northfield, New Jersey, will over the next few hours extract a dozen rotting or impacted teeth using instruments that sparkle in the late-morning sun.

The reservists are attached to a Djibouti-based task force of some 1,800 soldiers, marines, sailors and Air Force personnel. Embedded with them is an aid specialist from the Agency for International Development, which provides guidance for the operation. She is reticent and refers questions to the agency’s country leader, Stephanie Funk. The next day, Funk acknowledges that USAID’s solitary representation on the triage mission is symptomatic of a new age in US foreign policy–one in which America, in peacetime as much as in war, is personified abroad more by soldiers than by civilians. “If we had the numbers and the money to do fieldwork, we would, but our budgets have been declining for years,” Funk said in her office on the US Embassy compound in Djibouti City. “The Pentagon has got both numbers and money. For every fifty of them, there’s only one of me.”

Quietly, gradually–and inevitably, given the weight of its colossal budget and imperial writ–the Pentagon has all but eclipsed the State Department at the center of US foreign policy-making. The process began with the dawn of America’s post-World War II global empire and deepened in the mid-1980s, with the expansion of worldwide combatant commands. It matured during the Clinton years, with the military’s migration into humanitarian aid and disaster relief work, and accelerated rapidly with George W. Bush’s declaration of endless conflict in the “global war on terror” and a near-doubling of military spending. [continued…]

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Iran’s supreme leader warns opposition figures

Iran’s supreme leader warns opposition figures
By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times, September 11, 2009

Iran’s top spiritual and political authority urged opposition leaders to act within the rules of the Islamic Republic or face harsh scrutiny, and said his nation would withstand international pressure over its nuclear program.

Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also laid the groundwork for the possible arrest of key opposition leaders if they call for street protests or continue to allege massive vote-rigging in the June 12 reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“The system will not take action against anyone as long as they perform within the framework of the system, do not resort to violence, do not disturb the calm in society and do not carry out unlawful actions such as spreading lies and rumors,” he said during Friday prayers before a crowd of Islamic Republic luminaries and supporters at Tehran University. [continued…]

IRGC commander acknowledges military involvement in election politics
By Dr. Farideh Farhi, NIAC, September 7, 2009

Islamic Revolution’s Guard Corps (IRGC) Commander Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari’s speech on September 2, delivered in front of early military leaders of the Iran-Iraq War is significant for several reasons. First, it is noteworthy for his public acknowledgment of IRGC’s direct involvement in the elections and the crackdown. This acknowledgment came in reference to a February 2009 statement by former president Mohammad Khatami According to Jafari, Khatami said, “If in this election Ahmadinejad falls, then rahbari [office of the leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] will be effectively eliminated…through the defeat of principlists, we must contain the power of rahbari.” [continued…]

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