Author Archives: News Sources

Pakistan blocks anti-drone protest in tribal region

The Associated Press reports: The Pakistani military blocked a convoy carrying thousands of Pakistanis and a small contingent of U.S. anti-war activists from entering a lawless tribal region along the border with Afghanistan on Sunday to protest American drone strikes.

The group, led by cricket star turned politician Imran Khan and his political party, was turned back just miles from the border of South Waziristan. After an hour of fruitless negotiations, Khan announced that the caravan would backtrack to the city of Tank, about 15 kilometers (nine miles) away. There, he delivered a speech to the crowd of about 10,000.

Khan has harshly criticized the Pakistani government’s cooperation with Washington in the fight against Islamist militants. He has been especially outspoken against U.S. drone strikes targeting militants and has argued that the country’s alliance with Washington is the main reason Pakistan is facing a homegrown Taliban insurgency. He has suggested before that militant activity in Pakistan’s tribal areas will dissipate when the U.S. ends the war across the border in Afghanistan.

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Follow the money: From Islamophobia to Israel right or wrong

Elly Bulkin and Donna Nevel write: You don’t have to get more than a minute into Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West (2007) to begin to see how inextricably it ties Islamophobia to hardline Israeli policies. Despite its initial disclaimer, the film demonizes all Muslims, and through explicit statements and rapid-fire images, makes clear that there is a direct connection between Nazis and both Palestinians and Muslims.

Obsession played a brief but high-profile role during the 2008 presidential election campaign when the Clarion Fund distributed 28 million DVDs as a newspaper insert in swing states. A few years later, Clarion’s The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America (2008) — about an Islamic enemy that, purportedly, “the government is too afraid to name” — made its own headlines with reports that the New York City Police Department had showed the film to nearly 1,500 police officers. And in 2011, Clarion got still more attention when it issued its third big film, Iranium. The film pushes the Israeli and neoconservative narrative about Iran’s nuclear program and the need for military action against Iran, using a “clash of civilizations” framework that attributes “unavoidable” conflict to fundamental cultural differences between Islamic and Western civilizations.

Obsession and The Third Jihad ignited a firestorm of criticism from Muslim, civil rights and other groups. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) condemned Obsession for spreading “scurrilous accusations against Islam and Muslims,” while the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) denounced The Third Jihad as “blatantly anti-Muslim”. Activists, researchers, and journalists have commented on Obsession’s mistranslations and The Third Jihad’s use of a “discredited conspiracy theory”. They have also noted the films’ countless distortions and manipulations: benign images of Muslims at prayer made sinister by “scary music” and “repeated images of an Islamic flag flying over the White House” — “cherry picking . . . inflammatory images and splicing them together to create fear”.

But others, particularly supporters of Israel’s right-wing policies, found these films’ virulently anti-Muslim message to their liking. All three films have been effectively mainstreamed in the Jewish community, with local showings sponsored by such groups as Hillel and the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, and the Dallas Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and B’nai B’rith chapters. Obsession has become a staple of David Horowitz’s “Islamo-Fascism Awareness” weeks on college campuses. Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire supporter of Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney — and a critic of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) from the right — has distributed copies of Obsession to young people on Birthright-sponsored tours to Israel, a project he funds. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s preference for killing terrorists rather than torturing them

In a review of No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama bin Laden, Steve Coll writes:

In early 2009, in a speech at the National Archives, Obama announced that he would end the policy of using interrogation methods judged to be torture by the International Red Cross, and that he would close Guantánamo’s prison. He indicated that he would be open to trying some terrorists before military commissions, rather than dispatching all of Guantánamo’s inmates to federal courtrooms, but he declared that we “cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values.” He promised policies based on “an abiding confidence in the rule of law and due process.” He added that “fidelity to our values” is the “reason why enemy soldiers have surrendered to us in battle, knowing they’d receive better treatment from America’s Armed Forces than from their own government.”

In the years since, the president has struggled to live up to those pledges. In the one case where he took a major political risk to try a high-profile al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist in federal court, his decision ended badly. In late 2009, on the recommendation of Attorney General Holder, Obama ordered Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the bin Laden ally who masterminded the September 11 attacks, transferred from Guantánamo to stand trial in the Southern District of New York. Republicans accused Obama of going soft and whipped up a political backlash that forced the president to retreat; Mohammed is now facing a trial before a military commission at Guantánamo.

In planning for Abbottabad, White House lawyers would almost certainly have assured Obama that it would be legal to kill bin Laden outright. The “Authorization for the Use of Military Force” enacted by Congress a week after the September 11 attacks provided for the use of deadly force against al-Qaeda’s leaders. Also, under international and American laws arising from the rights of self-defense, if a terrorist is actively planning deadly operations, it can be legal to strike first. We know from White House disclosures that Obama seriously considered bombing the Abbottabad compound to smithereens. He demurred out of concern that it might not be clear after the attack whether bin Laden had been there at all. Yet if the president had decided on bombing, he would surely have justified his decision by pointing to the principles of self-defense, just as he uses this doctrine to justify the dozens of drone strikes he has authorized against suspected militants in countries where the United States is not formally at war.

The Abbottabad raid, as it was ultimately designed, seems to have brought into play different questions of international and American law concerning the requirement of soldiers to accept surrenders when they are offered. Having chosen to go in on the ground, Obama evidently did not wish to design a mission that precluded the theoretical possibility that bin Laden might surrender. Instead, he approved rules of engagement that made bin Laden’s surrender all but impossible.

Coll concludes:

[T]he Obama administration’s terrorist-targeting and detention system is heavily biased toward killing, inconsonant with constitutional and democratic principles, and unsustainable. The president has become personally invested in a system of targeted killing of dozens of suspected militants annually by drone strikes and Special Forces raids where the legal standards employed to designate targets for lethal action or to review periodic reports of mistakes are entirely secret.

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Free speech in action on New York subways

The New York Times reports: Striking back against an anti-jihad advertisement in the subways widely perceived as anti-Muslim, two religious groups – one Jewish, one Christian – are taking out subway ads of their own to urge tolerance.

Rabbis for Human Rights – North America and the group Sojourners, led by the Christian author and social-justice advocate Jim Wallis, are unveiling their campaigns on Monday. Their ads will be placed near the anti-jihad ads in the same Manhattan subway stations, leaders of both groups said and transit officials confirmed. The groups said their campaigns were coincidental.

The ad by Rabbis for Human Rights turns the language of the earlier ad, placed by a pro-Israel group, on its head. The original ad says, “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad.” The ad by Rabbis for Human Rights says, “In the choice between love and hate, choose love. Help stop bigotry against our Muslim neighbors.”

“We wanted to make it clear that it is in response to the anti-Islam ad,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights, whose members include rabbis from all streams of Judaism.

The Sojourners ad simply says, “Love your Muslim neighbors.”

Another Christian group, United Methodist Women, an affiliate of the United Methodist Church, has placed similar ads in the same 10 Manhattan stations where the anti-jihad appears. The ads, which went up on Wednesday, say, “Hate speech is not civilized. Support peace in word and deed.”

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Just war moral philosophy and the 2008–09 Israeli campaign in Gaza

In a 37-page article for the journal International Security, Jerome Slater writes: Scholars and policymakers regard the Israeli-Palestinian conºict as one of the most serious and intractable conflicts in today’s world. In particular, there continues to be fierce controversy over the most recent large-scale Israeli military action in that conflict: the three-week attack on Gaza that began on December 27, 2008. Operation Cast Lead, as Israelis call the attack, was justified by Israel and its supporters as a legitimate use of force in self-defense, the purpose of which was to end Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Israel’s civilian population. Even critics of Cast Lead have mostly accepted this argument—despite condemning Israel’s methods and, especially, its indiscriminate attacks on Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and sometimes direct attacks on noncombatants. In particular, most of the leading investigations of Cast Lead, including those by the Goldstone Commission, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B’Tselem (Israel’s leading human rights organization) did not seek to refute the self-defense argument, even as they concluded that Israel had been guilty of war crimes because of the manner in which it conducted the attack on Gaza.

The argument of this article, however, is not only that the Israeli methods were morally (and, in most cases, legally) wrong,1 but that the very purpose of Cast Lead cannot be justified as one of self-defense. Rather, I argue that Cast Lead was a moral catastrophe, a wholesale violation of the just war philosophy that has guided Western thought on war and morality for more than 2,000 years. In addition, with regard to the history of Israeli military strategies, Cast
Lead was hardly unprecedented, because it must be understood in the context of Israel’s “iron wall” strategy, which from the outset has included deliberate attacks on civilians or their economy, institutions, and infrastructures. [Continue reading…]

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Eric Hobsbawm: A British internationalist

Ramachandra Guha writes: In 1980, as a beginning graduate student, I was directed by my thesis supervisor to a short, pungent piece by Eric Hobsbawm that had just appeared in the journal Past and Present. This was a response to a previous essay in the same journal, by Lawrence Stone, that celebrated the “revival of narrative” in historical writing. In Stone’s view, this was a welcome departure from the arid, analytical, social-scientific and (not least) Marxian trends that had previously dominated the discipline. Hobsbawm, who died on Monday at the age of 95, saw Stone’s triumphalism as misplaced; to be sure, historians needed to write well, but they had also to analyse and synthesize, to explain events and processes in terms of what they meant to human values and institutions.

I first read Hobsbawm in 1980; I last read him in 2011, when seeking to understand an armed insurgent named Kishenji much written about in the Indian press. The man saw himself as an Indian Mao Zedong, who would one day capture state power in New Delhi; but he seemed rather to be what Hobsbawm called a “social bandit,” raiding the rich and killing policemen while being given refuge by the peasants and tribals with whom he identified. From Hobsbawm I learnt to see Kishenji as a figure of romance and daring but — despite his inflated self-image and the paranoia of the right-wing press — of no real historical or political significance.

I never met Eric Hobsbawm, yet he has kept me company throughout my working life. I suspect my experience is representative — other Indian, African and Latin American historians who never saw the man in the flesh likewise read his work very closely. And there was a great deal for us to read: some 30 books published over seven decades of a very long life and very active career. [Continue reading…]

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What the drones protest march in Waziristan aims to achieve

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NBC News reports: Dozens of anti-drone activists have traveled to Pakistan to join a march to the country’s tribal areas, where more than 300 strikes have killed thousands of people in the last eight years.

The 32 members of Code Pink have ignored a State Department travel warning to take part in Pakistani presidential candidate Imran Khan’s “peace rally” to the remote area bordering Afghanistan, where the vast majority of the nearly 350 US drone strikes in Pakistan have occurred.

“People are taking great risks to come here,” said Medea Banjamin, co-director of Code Pink. “It shows the depth of conviction that we have to say that ‘I don’t want my government killing innocent people in my name and I’m going to put my body on the line to try to stop it.’ “

James Jeffrey writes: The British civil rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith and international cricketer turned politician Imran Khan will begin a peace march on 7 October into Pakistan’s Waziristan region. Their aim is to highlight the plight of innocent people killed or injured by US drones.

Smith took the precautionary measure of writing to President Obama and his CIA director, David Petraeus, informing them about the march. In the letter, he requested that the president ensure the names of him and the other marchers would not be on the weekly kill list the president reviews, along with security officials, in the White House situation room. Smith wrote:

“Please remember that you and I are both lawyers from the same tradition, and it would be unseemly (as well as being both illegal and upsetting for my family) if you were to authorize my assassination.”

Like the sealed corridors in which the top secret kill list nomination process occurs – an account of which was reportedly leaked by the Obama administration to the New York Times – Waziristan has, until now, remained in the shadows, a place about which very little is known or reported. It is hoped the march will help open the area to public scrutiny by taking media there to gather independent information. [Continue reading…]

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Iranians offer 9-step plan to end nuclear crisis

The New York Times reports: With harsh economic sanctions contributing to the first major protests in Iran in three years, Iranian officials have begun to describe what they call a “nine-step plan” to defuse the nuclear crisis with the West by gradually suspending the production of the uranium that would be easiest for them to convert into a nuclear weapon.

But the plan requires so many concessions by the West, starting with the dismantling of all the sanctions that are blocking oil sales and setting off the collapse of the Iranian currency, that American officials have dismissed it as unworkable. Nonetheless, Iranian officials used their visit to the United Nations last week to attempt to drum up support, indicating that the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is finally feeling the pressure.

“Within the intelligence community, I think it’s fair to say that there is split opinion about whether the upper level of the regime is getting seriously worried,” one senior intelligence official said when asked why the Iranians appeared to be backing away from their earlier stand that nothing would stop them from producing more medium-enriched uranium, which can be turned into bomb fuel in a matter of months.

“He’s erratic, and we’ve seen him walk up to the edge of deals before and walk away,” the official said, referring to Ayatollah Khamenei.

The Iranian plan is based on a proposal made to European officials in July. It essentially calls for a step-by-step dismantling of the sanctions while the Iranians end work at one of two sites where they are enriching what is known as “20 percent uranium.” Only when the Iranians reach step No. 9 — after all the sanctions are gone and badly depressed oil revenues have begun to flow again — would there be a “suspension” of the medium-enriched uranium production at the deep underground site called Fordow. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian government forces bombard Homs

The New York Times reports: Syrian government warplanes and artillery were reported on Friday to have launched a ferocious barrage against the central city of Homs while, near the capital, Damascus, rebels said they captured an air defense base with a cache of surface-to-air missiles.

The fighting came a day after the bloody, 18-month conflict raised broad fears of regional repercussions when Turkish artillery hit Syria for a second consecutive day on Thursday following a mortar attack on Wednesday that killed five Turkish civilians. Turkey’s Parliament reinforced Ankara’s resolute message by authorizing further military action against Syria.

The confrontation between the two countries along the divide between the NATO alliance and the Arab world threatened to escalate a confrontation that has highlighted Turkey’s fraught double role as it tries to stay out of direct involvement in the fight against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria while offering haven and support to the rebels.

Inside war-battered Syria, Friday’s bombardment of Homs by airstrikes, tank and mortar fire subjected rebel strongholds to their heaviest bombardment in months, according to The Associated Press quoting activists. Some analysts suggested that the focus on big cities like Homs and Aleppo further north showed that the government was maintaining its focus on urban warfare rather than regional maneuvering.

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Bankers still overpaid, says Morgan Stanley boss

The Guardian reports: The chief executive of the US investment bank Morgan Stanley has said Wall Street pay is still “way too high” and remuneration and jobs will have to be sacrificed to boost shareholder returns.

The comments by James Gorman, who took over the running of the bank in 2010, set him apart from longer standing peers who have always defended high pay as necessary for retaining key staff.

But Gorman told the Financial Times: “Compensation is way too high. As a shareholder I’m sort of sympathetic to the shareholder view that the industry is still overpaid.”

Morgan Stanley is cutting 4,000 jobs, 7% of its workforce, by the end of this year and the bank said it would consider more redundancies next year and pay cuts for the remaining staff.

Gorman said that in the past bankers’ pay had always increased with revenues, but never came down when revenues came down, as banks were so afraid of losing staff. “That’s a classic Wall Street case of ‘heads I win; tails you lose’. The current Wall Street management is a little tougher-minded about that and shareholders are certainly tougher-minded.”

His comments follow announcements from a string of European banks ceding to pressure from shareholders over pay. Deutsche Bank last month said it was cutting bonuses and would spend less of its revenue on pay. UBS said it was considering capping bonuses and linking them to the bank’s profitability. The Barclays chief executive, Antony Jenkins, said bonuses would be linked to the way staff did business, not just the revenues they generated.

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Obama pays price for ducking the questions

Dana Millbank writes: Barack Obama received a valuable reminder in his drubbing at Wednesday night’s debate: He is a president, not a king.

In the hours after the Republican challenger Mitt Romney embarrassed the incumbent in their first meeting, Obama loyalists expressed puzzlement that the incumbent had done badly. But Obama has only himself to blame, because he set himself up for Wednesday’s emperor-has-no-clothes moment. For the past four years, he has worked assiduously to avoid being questioned, maintaining a regal detachment from the media and other sources of dissent and skeptical inquiry.

Obama has set a modern record for refusal to be quizzed by the media, taking questions from reporters far less often than Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and even George W. Bush. Though his opponent in 2008 promised to take questions from lawmakers like the British prime minister does, Obama has shied from mixing it up with members of Congress, too. And, especially since Rahm Emanuel’s departure, Obama is surrounded by a large number of yes men who aren’t likely to get in his face.

This insularity led directly to the Denver debacle: Obama was out of practice and unprepared to be challenged. The White House had supposed that Obama’s forays into social media — town hall meetings with YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the like — would replace traditional presidential communication. By relying on such venues, Obama’s argument skills atrophied, and he was ill-equipped to engage in old-fashioned give and take. [Continue reading…]

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Does Obama really want to get re-elected?

Kevin Baker writes: The president seemed unable to concentrate or focus throughout the debate, mouthing occasional numbers and assorted caveats to points he could never really complete. When it came to the issues, he offhandedly conceded much of the Republican worldview, something he is now apt to do at anytime, without warning.

What caused the financial crisis? Well, it had something to do with the banks. But Obama also had to admit it was poor people “who took out home mortgages they couldn’t afford.”

Physically, he looked shamefaced, even guilty. Whenever Romney made some point, he would drop his head, purse his lips, and nod, like a prisoner in the dock admitting to some shabby crime.

There is no reasonable explanation — no acceptable explanation — for such a performance.

We will get one, of course. We always do. Michael Dukakis had a cold for his big debate, and besides he was afraid that his wife couldn’t stand the mental strain of being First Lady. Al Gore never really wanted the political career that his father pressured him into. Etc., etc., etc. Barack Obama has repeatedly informed us that he hates living in the White House and can’t wait to be an ex-president.

Yet all of these personalized, psychological apologetics merely underscore the essential disconnect between the leadership of the Democratic party and its base. The leadership is now filled almost exclusively with careerists, who have no real goals they want to accomplish beyond their own advancement, and who actively don’t want to pursue any of the liberal ideas they pretend to support.

They don’t sound like they believe what they’re saying . . . because they don’t believe what they’re saying.

Neither does Mitt Romney, but he was able to put on a convincing act last night, visibly gaining confidence and command with each sally. By the end of the night, he seemed to have channeled not only Ronald Reagan’s genial manner and poise but even his voice.

Romney and his advisers displayed a sleight-of-hand beyond anything I thought them capable of. In Romney’s reach back toward the center in the debate, he had to lie almost incessantly, breezily denying most of the things he has been advocating in almost two years of campaigning. And it didn’t help Obama that Jim Lehrer looked as if he was up well past his bedtime, barely able to keep track of the debate much less effectively monitor it.

Obama had a perfect opportunity to impose his own agenda on last night’s debate. He could and should have made the entire evening a debate on Romney’s shocking contention that nearly half the country is made up of “victims and dependents,” mooching off the rest of us simply because they are not currently paying federal income taxes.

Romney did not want this made public, but he has not denied that he believes it, admitting only that he expressed himself badly. Could there possibly be any better setup? Obama could have turned the whole evening into a seminar on just how radical and bizarre Republican thinking has become. All of Romney’s attempts to obfuscate and lie about the figures of his fantastical schemes for balancing the budget could have been easily bulldozed.

A real president, a president of the professional ability that Democrats used to elect routinely, could have managed such a feat while simultaneously threatening the mullahs of Tehran into submission and making a condolence call to a sick child.

Instead, Obama signaled that he wants out. His diehard supporters are already trying to wave away this weirdly awful, unengaged performance as just his latest turn of Zen mastery, but that dog won’t hunt. They should steel themselves for more shocking displays of indifference over the next month on the part of this strangely diffident individual. It’s quite possible that he means what he says, and he really can’t wait to become an ex-president.

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Inside Pakistan’s drone country

BBC News reports: Pakistan’s tribal region of Waziristan, constantly watched and regularly bombarded by US military drones, has been called the most dangerous place on earth. The relentless assault exacts a huge psychological toll on the people who live there.

The US missile-attacks destroy militant training compounds and cars but they also hit mosques, homes, religious schools and civilian vehicles.

I witnessed the fear, stress and depression this causes for the tribal communities on a visit to the region in May.

The drones do not suddenly appear over the horizon, carry out the attack and leave. At any given time of the day, at least four are hovering in the sky, emitting a distinctive and menacing buzzing sound.

They call them “mosquitoes”.

“Anybody who has been listening to the buzzing all through the day usually can’t sleep at night,” says Abdul Waheed, a tribesman in North Waziristan.

“It’s like a blind man’s stick – it can hit anybody at any time.”

People here tell me that it is not just Taliban and al-Qaeda members who are targeted, many ordinary citizens have been killed as well.

In some cases, tribesmen, motivated by a clan or blood feud, have pointed out a rival as a Taliban member or al-Qaeda sympathiser, they say, in the hope he will be blown to bits.

Everybody believes they could be next.

“There is only one way to sleep now,” says Mateen Khan, a car mechanic in the town of Miranshah. “I take sleeping pills like many other people here. It is either that or stay awake all night.”

As I drive into Waziristan via the Orakzai tribal region the road is littered with sites of drone attacks – some militant compounds, but most of all vehicles. [Continue reading…]

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What hurts Iranians may not harm the regime

Ali Gharib writes: Now is the autumn of Iranian discontent. And who can blame them? Over the past week, the value of Iran’s Rial fell 40 percent against the dollar.

The economic woes drove Iranians into the streets of Tehran yesterday, where they reportedly clashed with riot police during a few modestly-sized and — best as I can tell — relatively isolated protests. The largest, and perhaps most significant, were in Iran’s famed bazaar, which shut down as protesters moved through, and outside the Bank of Iran. At the former locale, the shopkeepers’ closures ostensibly protected their stalls from demonstrators, but that doesn’t seem to be how the story actually played out.

The latest protests seem unlikely to be the spark that brings down the Islamic Republic. Instead, they focused on the government’s mismanagement of the economy — a realm, unlike foreign affairs and the nuclear program, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad actually has power to enact policies. But the showing could be a harbinger of what’s to come as Iranians go to the polls next year.

Many analysts and media accounts speculated that the bazaaris had a hand in organizing the protests, a notion confirmed by a source in Tehran who normally keeps abreast of opposition goings-on by social media. The source found out about the protests late, remarking: “This time it’s the bazaar, no need for Facebook or e-mail.” [Continue reading…]

Tony Karon writes: For Iran’s citizens, who have seen the prices of many basic foodstuffs more than double since last year, and who are struggling to access even life-saving medicines, the effect of the sanctions is more than mere “collateral damage.” The sanctions are, as U.S. officials like to point out, designed to put Iran’s economy in a “chokehold”, in the hope that one of the effects will be that the resultant economic pain rouses them to defy and challenge the regime, forcing it to rethink its nuclear program in order to win Iran’s release from the stranglehold of sanctions that are fomenting rebellion. While official statements might insist that innocent Iranians are not the target of that “chokehold,” an unnamed senior U.S. intelligence officer showed no such squeamishness when explaining the sanctions strategy to the Washington Post earlier this year. “In addition to the direct pressure sanctions exert on the regime’s ability to finance its priorities,” the official said, “another option here is that they will create hate and discontent at the street level so that the Iranian leaders realize that they need to change their ways.”

Advocates of that line of thinking may have seen Wednesday’s protests as vindication — but it may not be that simple. While President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad eagerly concurs that it is Western sanctions that are behind the economic chaos in Iran, his political opponents — loyalists of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei — actually blame Ahmadinejad’s mismanagement of the economy for the precipitous currency collapse. That sentiment appears to have been shared by many on the streets in the series of small demonstrations around Tehran on Wednesday: Most of the protesters’ rage appears to have been directed at Ahmadinejad, who was accused of failing to take measures necessary to protect Iranian living standards. After all, the Iranian economy isn’t exactly on the verge of collapse, and the regime is believed to have a foreign currency reserve of some $100 billion. Indeed, the fact that it is still sending billions in aid to prop up the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad — another sore point with protesters on Wednesday — underscores the fact that is not exactly bankrupt, yet.

So, even if sanctions are fueling the economic pain that is prompting Iranians to return to streets in protest, the expectation that such demonstrations will prompt Iran’s leaders to surrender a nuclear program that has been among their long-term priorities requires a considerable leap of faith. ”It would be optimistic at best to hope that the deteriorating economic circumstances will spur Iran’s leaders to shift their nuclear stance,” said Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy last month. “They do not seem to know or care much about the country’s economic situation — their own income has been hurt only a little, if at all, and they appear unconcerned about the prospect of popular unrest given their past success at repressing opposition. For now, they are likely to stay the course on both domestic economic policy and the nuclear issue.” [Continue reading…]

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‘Turkey does not want war with Syria’ — aide to Erdogan

The New York Times reports: Turkey’s Parliament approved a motion Thursday that authorizes further military action against Syria, as Turkey began its second day of shelling targets within Syria in response to a mortar attack that killed five civilians.

The measure, which was ratified after several hours of a closed-door session in the capital, Ankara, permits cross-border raids, although senior officials insisted that NATO ally Turkey did not want a war with its Arab neighbor — an escalation that could turn Syria’s bloody civil strife into a regional conflict with international involvement.

The motion read, in part, “The ongoing crisis in Syria affects the stability and security in the region and now the escalating animosity affects our national security,” according to the semiofficial Anatolian News Agency.

The Turkish military pounded targets inside Syria on Thursday in retaliation for the mortar attack a day earlier that killed five civilians in Turkey.

Local news reports said Turkish shells fell inside Syria on at least 10 occasions after midnight, landing near the border town of Tel Abyad, some six miles inside Syrian territory, across a historic fault line where modern Turkey abuts Arab lands that once formed part of the Ottoman Empire.

State television said the shelling continued until dawn with four more barrages until the guns fell silent around 6:45 a.m. Activist groups in Syria said the shelling killed several Syrian government soldiers.

The exchanges sent tremors across a region fearful that the mounting violence in Syria would spill into neighboring countries. Ibrahim Kalin, a senior aide to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, wrote on Twitter feed: “Turkey does not want war with Syria. But Turkey is capable of protecting its borders and will retaliate when necessary.” In a separate message, he said: “Political, diplomatic initiatives will continue.” [Continue reading…]

AFP reports: Turkish troops pounded targets in Syria on Thursday morning in reprisal for cross-border fire that killed five Turkish civilians the previous day, a security source said.

“Artillery fire resumed at 0300 GMT this morning,” the source told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Several Syrian soldiers have been killed as a result of overnight Turkish shelling across the border, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights watchdog said earlier, without giving an exact figure.

AFP also reports: Syria has admitted it was responsible for a shelling that killed five civilians on Turkish soil and apologised, Turkey’s deputy prime minister said today.

“The Syrian side has admitted what it did and apologised,” Besir Atalay told reporters.

Michael Koplow sees little evidence that either Turkey, NATO, or Syria have an interest in seeing further escalation.

First, as I have noted too many times to count and as Aaron Stein firmly argued yesterday, there is simply no appetite on NATO’s part to get involved in Syria. Turkey was able to convene an Article 4 meeting in which NATO strongly condemned the Syrian shelling that killed five Turkish civilians, but that is about as far as NATO is willing to go. NATO is not going to get involved in setting up a buffer zone, a no-fly zone, or a humanitarian corridor inside Syria, and the U.S. is also not going to commit to doing any of those things any time soon. It has been clear for a year now that Turkey is not going to invade Syria on its own, which is why Ankara has desperately been trying to convince outside actors to intervene, and absent an international intervention, I don’t see yesterday’s incident changing this calculus. Without international support – and I’d note that Prime Minister Erdoğan has explicitly ruled out anything outside of official UN auspices – Turkey is going to stay out of Syria. With reports of Hizballah fighters and IRGC soldiers crawling inside Syrian borders, the Turkish government does not want to get entangled in a scenario that might quickly blow up out of its control.

Second, there is no reason for Syria not to back away from this as quickly as possible. The only way in which Turkey will be drawn into Syria unilaterally is if the Assad regime escalates this in a serious way, and while Assad and the Syrian army are unpredictable, this is not a fight they are eager to have. Syria has spent months testing Turkey’s patience and trying to figure out what its boundaries are, and yesterday’s events will make it clear to Syria that this was one step too far. The regime has its hands full with the FSA and doesn’t need to add the Turkish military into the mix, which explains the quick decision to express sorrow over the death of Turkish civilians and a promise to investigate. There are two possibilities here; either the shelling was unintentional, in which case Syria has every reason to back down, or it was done on purpose to test how far Turkey is willing to go in retaliation, in which case mission accomplished and Syria still has every reason to now back down. While allowing for the fact that this cannot necessarily be gamed out in an entirely logical manner, I don’t see a scenario in which Syria decides to turn this into a high intensity conflict.

There is little question that Turkey had no choice but to retaliate in some form yesterday. When Syrian forces shot across the border last spring and killed two Syrian refugees in Turkish camps, Turkey threatened retaliatory action but did nothing. When the Turkish F-4 reconnaissance plane was downed this summer, Turkey moved tanks and artillery to the border but ultimately stood down. This time, however, Turkish civilians died, and no government can afford to sit idly by when its citizens are targeted and killed by a hostile foreign government.

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Inequality and its perils

Jonathan Rauch writes: At a salon dinner in Washington recently, the subject was inequality. An economist took the floor. Economic inequality, he said, is not a problem. Poverty is a problem, certainly. Unemployment, yes. Slow growth, yes. But he had never yet seen a good reason to believe that inequality, as such—the widening gap between top and bottom, as distinct from poverty or stagnation—is harmful to the economy.

Perhaps he spoke too soon.

Once in a while, a new economic narrative gives renewed strength to an old political ideology. Two generations ago, supply-side economics transformed conservatism’s case against big government from a merely ideological claim to an economic one. After decades in which Keynesians had dismissed conservatism as an economic dead end (“Hooverism”), supply-siders turned the tables. The Right could argue that reducing spending and (especially) tax rates was a matter not merely of political preference but of economic urgency.

Something potentially analogous is stirring among the Left. An emerging view holds that inequality has reached levels that are damaging not only to liberals’ sense of justice but to the economy’s stability and growth. If this narrative catches on, it could give the egalitarian Left new purchase in the national economic debate.

“Widely unequal societies do not function efficiently, and their economies are neither stable nor sustainable in the long term,” Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, writes in his new book, The Price of Inequality. “Taken to its extreme—and this is where we are now—this trend distorts a country and its economy as much as the quick and easy revenues of the extractive industry distort oil- or mineral-rich countries.”

Stiglitz’s formulation is a good two-sentence summary of the emerging macroeconomic indictment of inequality, and the two key words in his second sentence, “extreme” and “distort,” make good handles for grasping the arguments. [Continue reading…]

An interview with Richard Wilkinson co-author of the book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger and co-founder of The Equality Trust:

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