Category Archives: Issues

Why the Laura Poitras case is bigger than you think

Jack Murtha writes: When the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras filed a complaint under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) against three US government agencies this week, most media outlets ran stories on the details that built her argument, overlooking the issue of public records.

After all, who could resist the story of a bitter and burned federal government hounding a journalist who appeared to have crossed some unspoken line? More than 50 times between 2006 and 2012, her lawsuit alleges, security forces targeted the journalist for intense rounds of detention and questioning. Government officials had, at one point, even confiscated her laptop, cellphone, and notebooks. Poitras’ films had largely focused on the rotten fruits of post-9/11 America, both at home and abroad. She went on to win top-notch awards for her work with Edward Snowden, the former government contractor who in 2013 leaked National Security Agency files on hidden mass-surveillance programs.

It’s an important story with profound implications for the press. Yet lost in the narrative was the legal spine of her case, a second threat to journalism in this country: the worrisome way the federal government handles FOIA requests. [Continue reading…]

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The greed fueling America’s torture disgrace

Katherine Eban writes: Why, exactly, did the United States end up torturing detainees during George W. Bush’s administration’s war on terror, when there was no scientific proof that coercive interrogations would yield valuable intelligence, and ample proof that it would harm our national security interests, elicit false information and spread unnecessary ill will throughout the Muslim world, possibly for generations to come?

It’s a head scratcher, to say the least, but a blockbuster report issued last week suggests one answer: greed. Specifically, the greed of psychologists who hoped to receive, and in some cases did receive, financial benefits in exchange for providing the Pentagon with intellectual and moral cover for its torture of detainees.

The American Psychological Association, roughly the equivalent of the American Medical Association for psychologists, played a crucial, long-hidden role in the story of American torture. James Elmer Mitchell, who created the C.I.A.’s torture program with Bruce Jessen, was a member of the A.P.A. Psychologists sold the C.I.A. and the Pentagon on a menu of aggressive interrogation techniques presented as scientifically proven to be effective; in reality, they were based on Communist methods designed not to find the truth but to produce false confessions that could be used for propaganda purposes. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. phases out 200th coal plant as momentum for renewable energy grows

The Sierra Club: Alliant Energy, a major Iowa utility, has committed to phase out coal use at six of its plants in the state, marking the 200th coal plant to shut down in the United States. This marks a milestone in the country’s transition to clean energy and underscores Iowa’s growth as a clean energy state. The announced coal plant retirements are the result of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign advocacy, which has been a driving force in the national transition to renewable sources of power. The retirement of 200 coal plants nationwide represents the phase out of nearly 40 percent of the 523 U.S. coal plants that were in operation just five years ago. The work of Sierra Club and more than 100 allied organizations to retire these plants and replace them with clean energy has enabled the United States to lead the industrialized world in cutting global warming pollution, and has put the White House on firm footing to push for a strong international climate accord in Paris at the end of this year.

“The days of coal-fired power plants putting Americans at risk are coming to an end,” said Michael Brune, Executive Director of the Sierra Club. “In Iowa and across the country, people are demanding clean air and clean water—and they are winning. Iowa is a leader in America’s transition from coal to renewable energy, and is providing a model for other communities as they demand and realize a 100 percent clean energy future.”

Today’s landmark settlement requires Alliant to phase out coal use or install pollution controls at all eight of its coal-fired power plants to comply with the Clean Air Act. The plants were emitting more pollution than was allowed by the company’s air permits, contributing to an estimated 32 deaths and 541 asthma attacks annually, and costing local residents $15.3 million in healthcare bills each year according to plant-level 2010 estimates by Clean Air Task Force (CATF). [Continue reading…]

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Continued destruction of Earth’s plant life places humankind in jeopardy

University of Georgia: Unless humans slow the destruction of Earth’s declining supply of plant life, civilization like it is now may become completely unsustainable, according to a paper published recently by University of Georgia researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“You can think of the Earth like a battery that has been charged very slowly over billions of years,” said the study’s lead author, John Schramski, an associate professor in UGA’s College of Engineering. “The sun’s energy is stored in plants and fossil fuels, but humans are draining energy much faster than it can be replenished.”

Earth was once a barren landscape devoid of life, he explained, and it was only after billions of years that simple organisms evolved the ability to transform the sun’s light into energy. This eventually led to an explosion of plant and animal life that bathed the planet with lush forests and extraordinarily diverse ecosystems.

The study’s calculations are grounded in the fundamental principles of thermodynamics, a branch of physics concerned with the relationship between heat and mechanical energy. Chemical energy is stored in plants, or biomass, which is used for food and fuel, but which is also destroyed to make room for agriculture and expanding cities.

Scientists estimate that the Earth contained approximately 1,000 billion tons of carbon in living biomass 2,000 years ago. Since that time, humans have reduced that amount by almost half. It is estimated that just over 10 percent of that biomass was destroyed in just the last century.

“If we don’t reverse this trend, we’ll eventually reach a point where the biomass battery discharges to a level at which Earth can no longer sustain us,” Schramski said.

Working with James H. Brown from the University of New Mexico, Schramski and UGA’s David Gattie, an associate professor in the College of Engineering, show that the vast majority of losses come from deforestation, hastened by the advent of large-scale mechanized farming and the need to feed a rapidly growing population. As more biomass is destroyed, the planet has less stored energy, which it needs to maintain Earth’s complex food webs and biogeochemical balances.

“As the planet becomes less hospitable and more people depend on fewer available energy options, their standard of living and very survival will become increasingly vulnerable to fluctuations, such as droughts, disease epidemics and social unrest,” Schramski said.

If human beings do not go extinct, and biomass drops below sustainable thresholds, the population will decline drastically, and people will be forced to return to life as hunter-gatherers or simple horticulturalists, according to the paper.

“I’m not an ardent environmentalist; my training and my scientific work are rooted in thermodynamics,” Schramski said. “These laws are absolute and incontrovertible; we have a limited amount of biomass energy available on the planet, and once it’s exhausted, there is absolutely nothing to replace it.”

Schramski and his collaborators are hopeful that recognition of the importance of biomass, elimination of its destruction and increased reliance on renewable energy will slow the steady march toward an uncertain future, but the measures required to stop that progression may have to be drastic.

“I call myself a realistic optimist,” Schramski said. “I’ve gone through these numbers countless times looking for some kind of mitigating factor that suggests we’re wrong, but I haven’t found it.”

The study, on “Human Domination of the Biosphere: Rapid Discharge of the Earth-Space Battery Foretells the Future of Humankind,” is available online here.

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A DUI, the Second Amendment, and jihad

Borrowing a trademarked slogan from “Hijabman,” Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez wrote as his senior quote in the 2008 Red Bank High School yearbook: “My name causes national security alerts. What does yours do?”

No doubt he chose this statement at that time because he shared the same sense of frustration experienced by millions of ordinary Muslims, viewed with suspicion in post-9/11 America. And no doubt there are now many Islamophobic Americans who see those words as prophetic rather than ironic.

Indeed, the discovery of a short-lived blog attributed to Abdulazeez, writing on religious themes, will reinforce the assumption that the shooting rampage that the 24-year-old gunman went on in Chattanooga yesterday, was inspired by Islam.

Yet if Abdulazeez was an Islamic extremist, it’s strange that he would have selected the parable of the blind men and the elephant for one of the two entries on his blog.

Choosing a story that illustrates why no one has a monopoly on truth — a story shared by Sufis, Hindus, Buddhists and Jains — Abdulazeez wanted to disavow the narrow-mindedness of fellow Muslims:

As Muslims, we often do this. We have a certain understanding of Islam and keep a tunnel vision of what we think Islam is. What we know is Islam and everything else is not. And we don’t have appreciation for other points of view and accept the fact that we may be missing some important parts of the religion.

This appeal for tolerance doesn’t sound like the kind of message that would be expressed by anyone with an affinity for ISIS or any other extremist group.

Since Abdulazeez’s deadly motives will likely never be known, we can do no more than speculate about what was running through his mind yesterday.

The fact that in April he’d been stopped while apparently driving under the influence of marijuana, further undermines the notion that he was some kind of religious zealot.

Perhaps he dreaded an upcoming court appearance and ensuing parental rebukes for bringing shame upon his family.

A neighbor told the New York Times that Abdulazeez and his sisters were well behaved and polite, with strict parents and a structured lifestyle. Maybe in those circumstances, dying in a hail of bullets seemed preferable to living with a criminal record.

While the media focuses on questions about this case that will most likely never be answered, the elephant in the room — just as it was after the Charleston massacre — is gun control. (A national campaign against the Confederate flag turned out to be a very effective way of dodging that political bullet after the last mass shooting.)

The reason the contents of the mind of an Abdulazeez or a Dylann Roof suddenly become objects of national fascination, actually has nothing to do with anything of intrinsic interest about the cognitive functions of killers.

It is simply because these particular aberrant thoughts could find expression through the barrel of a gun — thoughts that could be translated into violence just as easily as attending, for instance, the Camp Jordan Arena gun show in Chattanooga last weekend.

The “right of the people to keep and bear Arms” is what allowed Abdulazeez and Roof to gun down their victims, and yet this constitutional anachronism continues to be held as sacrosanct.

It is as though the gun was an indispensable extension of the American spirit, when in reality this passion for firearms is nothing more than the most graphic manifestation of American narrow-mindedness.

A country that spends billions of dollars on national security and fights an endless war on terrorism, yet is still reluctant to erect effective barriers to mass killing.

That’s plain dumb!

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Iran is about to open for business

Azadeh Moaveni writes: Mobile phones in Tehran started beeping and buzzing well before Iran’s nuclear agreement with the West was finalized. They carried an important sentiment that couldn’t wait for the niggling details to be ironed out in the talks between Iran, on one side, and China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S. on the other. “Congratulations, the agreement is almost signed! Come dine with us for less,” read the text from a local pizzeria. Discounts and specials celebrating the coming end of the sanctions pinged around the capital.

In the offices of Takhfifan, Iran’s answer to Groupon, staffers interrupted their weekly meeting every 10 minutes to refresh the news on their laptops. “We’re all counting the seconds,” said Nazanin Daneshvar, the site’s founder, hoping “that we’ll get back to a better place after such a long, difficult time.” Daneshvar’s marketing platform is thriving: It boasts a million subscribers who grab daily deals on everything from concert tickets to swimming pool passes. An Iran reopened for global business could eventually bring in Western companies and investors, which might finally mean economic growth of a different scale. A normal scale.

Even normality — the most modest expectation — would be vastly different from the Tehran I last experienced in 2009, before that summer’s Green Movement uprising. Like many dual-national Iranian journalists, I haven’t dared to return since the violent suppression of the protests. (Reporter Jason Rezaian of the Washington Post has been detained on espionage charges for more than a year.) I’ve followed the country through family and friends, most of whom tell the same tale: six years of diminished hopes and sullenness, brought on by global economic ostracism. [Continue reading…]

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Iran unlikely to spend most of its post-sanctions funds on militants, CIA says

The Los Angeles Times reports: A secret U.S. intelligence assessment predicts that Iran’s government will pump most of an expected $100-billion windfall from the lifting of international sanctions into the country’s flagging economy and won’t significantly boost funding for militant groups it supports in the Middle East.

Intelligence analysts concluded that even if Tehran increased support for Hezbollah commanders in Lebanon, Houthi rebels in Yemen or President Bashar Assad’s embattled government in Syria, the extra cash is unlikely to tip the balance of power in the world’s most volatile region, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the intelligence document.

The controversial CIA report, on which key members of Congress have been briefed, provides ammunition to both sides in the battle brewing on Capitol Hill over what White House aides call President Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement, a sweeping multinational agreement that aims to block Iran’s ability to build nuclear weapons for at least a decade in exchange for the easing of sanctions that have hobbled its economy. [Continue reading…]

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The nuclear physicist answering lawmakers’ questions on Iran deal

The Wall Street Journal reports: As the White House ramps up its campaign to sell its Iran nuclear deal to a skeptical Congress, a shaggy-haired scientist is proving to be its best asset on Capitol Hill.

Both Republicans and Democrats called Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professor, the administration’s most credible source of information on the accord reached this week aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear program and the negotiations that produced it.

“He’s by far been the best witness, the best person to talk to,” said Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R. Tenn.). On Thursday, Mr. Corker said Mr. Moniz would testify at the committee’s first hearing on the final deal next week, along with Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.

The agreement reached Tuesday in Vienna puts strict limits on Iran’s nuclear program for the next decade that are designed to keep Tehran from being at least 12 months away from amassing enough nuclear fuel for a bomb. In exchange, the U.S., the European Union and the United Nations will lift economic sanctions on Iran.

Mr. Moniz, 70 years old, played a key role over the months of talks that led to the accord between Iran and six global powers. In particular, he had a string of one-on-one technical discussions with Ali Akbar Salehi, now chairman of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. Mr. Salehi studied at MIT in the 1970s, when Mr. Moniz taught at the school, though they didn’t meet there.

“It’s extraordinarily fortunate that at this moment in time we have, in the cabinet and on the negotiating team, an honest-to-goodness nuclear physicist who knows this stuff,” said Sen. Angus King (I., Maine). [Continue reading…]

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Watchdog blasts Turkey’s record on press freedom

McClatchy reports: Turkey remains the top jailer of journalists in Europe and should “reform the laws criminalizing freedom of expression” as well as the way courts implement those laws, the leading European human rights watchdog said Thursday.

Turkish jails currently hold 21 media representatives, according to the report from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. That number appears to be a significant improvement on 2012, when 95 journalists were being held.

But in addition, “many more journalists and social media users face trials that could result in prison sentences,” said Dunja Mijatovic, the OSCE representative on Freedom of the Media. And many journalists are now on trial – “so many that it would be hard to oversee,” she told McClatchy in a separate interview. [Continue reading…]

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Max Blumenthal: The next Gaza war

We’ve just passed the first “anniversary” — if such a word can even be used with such a catastrophe — of Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s third invasion of the Gaza Strip in recent years. That small bit of land has now suffered more devastation than just about any place on the planet. In the wake of the third war since 2008, more than 100,000 displaced Gazans remain homeless or crowded in with relatives. Whole neighborhoods, destroyed in the conflict, have yet to be rebuilt. A year later, there is still next to no electricity, the area’s sole power plant having been taken out by Israeli air strikes, and the situation when it comes to sewage and potable water, is disastrous. Blockaded and devastated by repeated wars, Gaza’s manufacturing sector has almost disappeared, while its economy is “on the verge of collapse,” according to the World Bank. In short, by any standard, Gaza is not a livable place and yet 1.8 million people (more than half of them under 18 years old, 43% under 15) are crammed into it with nowhere to go and in most cases nothing to do. After all, Gaza now has what may be the highest unemployment rate on the planet at 44%, with youth unemployment reaching 60%.

The great Israeli reporter Amira Hass, author of the classic book Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege, recently put the matter this way: “In practice, Gaza has become a huge, let me be blunt, concentration camp… This is not a novelty… This did not start, unlike what many people think, with the rise of Hamas… This policy of sealing off Gaza, of making Gazans into… defacto prisoners, started [in 1991]… So if I want to sum up the reality of Gaza: it is a huge prison… It is an Israel-meditated, pre-meditated, pre-planned, and planned project to separate Gaza from the West Bank.”

Max Blumenthal’s new book, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza, catches the nightmare of the third war in this tiny piece of land in the last six-and-a-half years in a uniquely gripping way. In its pages, you follow him directly into the devastation of the Israeli invasion. (He entered Gaza during the first extended truce of the war.) I doubt there could be a more vivid account of what it felt like, as a Palestinian civilian, to endure those weeks of horror, massive destruction, and killing. Today at TomDispatch, he looks back on that experience and forward to what he doesn’t doubt will be the fourth war of its kind. If he’s right, then sadly, in the years to come, some reporter will be writing yet another book on a Gaza war. Tom Engelhardt

The fire next time
Before homes are even rebuilt in the ruins of the Gaza Strip, another war looms
By Max Blumenthal

“A fourth operation in the Gaza Strip is inevitable, just as a third Lebanon war is inevitable,” declared Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in February. His ominous comments came just days after an anti-tank missile fired by the Lebanon-based guerrilla group Hezbollah killed two soldiers in an Israeli army convoy. It, in turn, was a response to an Israeli air strike that resulted in the assassination of several high-ranking Hezbollah figures.

Lieberman offered his prediction only four months after his government concluded Operation Protective Edge, the third war between Israel and the armed factions of the Gaza Strip, which had managed to reduce about 20% of besieged Gaza to an apocalyptic moonscape. Even before the assault was launched, Gaza was a warehouse for surplus humanity — a 360-square-kilometer ghetto of Palestinian refugees expelled by and excluded from the self-proclaimed Jewish state. For this population, whose members are mostly under the age of 18, the violence has become a life ritual that repeats every year or two. As the first anniversary of Protective Edge passes, Lieberman’s unsettling prophecy appears increasingly likely to come true. Indeed, odds are that the months of relative “quiet” that followed his statement will prove nothing more than an interregnum between Israel’s ever more devastating military escalations.

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Dealing with Iran post-deal

Frederic C. Hof writes: One may see the nuclear agreement with Iran as the product of a faulty premise and still respect the industry of US Secretary of State John Kerry and his team in arriving at respectable terms consistent with that premise. One may see the prospect of a regionally aggressive Iran soon to be flush with cash as alarming and still — given the positions of Washington’s closest allies and the international community in general — counsel Congress to show solidarity with the commander-in-chief. What really matters at this point is that the United States and its partners pivot from their exclusive focus on closing the nuclear deal to address Iranian behavior that makes the battle against the so-called Islamic State (ISIL or ISIS) something between difficult and impossible.

The premise has been that Iran, left to its own devices, will field nuclear weapons, and that a nuclear-armed Iran would be exponentially more dangerous to its neighbors and to the region than it is now. Two years of track two discussions with senior, well-informed Iranian interlocutors have convinced me that this is not the case.

My Iranian interlocutors — hardliners and pragmatists alike — were gratified by Tehran’s accomplishments in Syria and elsewhere, in particular the preservation in Damascus of a regime completely in the service of Iran’s Lebanese militia: Hezbollah. They noted that Iran’s successful intervention in Syria had been accomplished without a nuclear arsenal. They pointed out that having such an arsenal would encourage their enemies to go nuclear. A thoroughly nuclearized region could complicate an aggressive Iranian policy of armed intervention by potentially turning every intervention into a nuclear crisis. [Continue reading…]

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Wall Street’s role in Greece’s debt crisis

Chris Arnade writes: One of the first lessons I was taught on Wall Street was, “Know who the fool is.” That was the gist of it. The more detailed description, yelled at me repeatedly was, “Know who the fucking idiot with the money is and cram as much toxic shit down their throat as they can take. But be nice to them first.”

When I joined in Salomon Brothers in ‘93, Japanese customers (mostly smaller banks and large industrial companies) were considered the fool. My first five years were spent constructing complex financial products, ones with huge profit margins for us — “toxic waste” in Wall Street lingo — to sell to them. By the turn of the century many of those customers had collapsed, partly from the toxic waste we sold them, partly from all the other crazy things they were buying.

The launch of the common European currency, the euro, ushered in a period of European financial confidence, and we on Wall Street started to take advantage of another willing fool: European banks. More precisely northern European banks. [Continue reading…]

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Greek parliament passes debt agreement, but European democracy is on its knees

By Jonathan Hopkin, London School of Economics and Political Science

Almost as soon as the Greek deal was agreed, it began to come apart at the seams. Passage of the necessary legislation through the Greek parliament led to Syriza splitting in two as Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, drew on the votes of the right to force through a deal which is worse than anything that was on offer before the referendum on July 5.

Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, revealed that many in the German government actually want Greece to leave the euro, effectively admitting that the deal was deliberately designed to be as tough as possible to force Tsipras to reject it. The deal’s passage through the German parliament will not be straightforward, and Finnish politicians have also expressed deep scepticism.

Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been engaging in a propaganda battle against its European partners in the Troika, leaking a memorandum in which it argues that Greece’s debt is unsustainable and implying that the agreement will fail.

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Greece leaving euro seen costlier than write-off

Bloomberg reports: The hardliners who reject a Greek debt writedown to keep it in the euro are willing to pay much more to drive it out.

A “Grexit” would cost creditors almost 100 billion euros ($110 billion) more than keeping Greece in the currency union, reckons Alberto Gallo, head of macro credit research at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc. Zsolt Darvas at the Bruegel institute estimates that about 75 percent of the debt would not be paid to creditors following the return of the drachma.

“What this tells you is that policy makers are following politics instead of rational economics,” Gallo said. [Continue reading…]

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Human impact on the oceans is growing — and climate change is the biggest culprit

The Washington Post reports: The world’s oceans have suffered a lot at the hands of humans — ask any marine conservationist. Unsustainable fishing, pollution and the effects of climate change are just a few of the issues that worry scientists and environmentalists.

While we have a good idea of which activities are causing harm to the ocean, scientists have been less clear on which ones are the most damaging and which regions of the ocean are getting the worst of it. Now, new research has allowed scientists to map the impacts of 19 different types of human activity that have harmed the ocean over a span of five years. The study was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

The researchers used global-scale data to map the cumulative impacts of human activities between 2008 and 2013, pinpointing which areas are under increasing stress, which areas are experiencing a decrease and which human activities are having the biggest impacts in which areas. They found that nearly two-thirds of the ocean in experiencing an increase in these man-made impacts — and climate change is the worst of all, driving the majority of the changes the researchers observed. [Continue reading…]

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Earth’s degradation threatens major health gains: study

AFP reports: The unprecedented degradation of Earth’s natural resources coupled with climate change could reverse major gains in human health over the last 150 years, according to a sweeping scientific review published Thursday.

“We have been mortgaging the health of future generations to realise economic and development gains in the present,” said the report, written by 15 leading academics and published in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet.

“By unsustainably exploiting nature’s resources, human civilisation has flourished but now risks substantial health effects from the degradation of nature’s life support systems in the future.”

Climate change, ocean acidification, depleted water sources, polluted land, over-fishing, biodiversity loss –- all unintended by-products of humanity’s drive to develop and prosper –- “pose serious challenges to the global health gains of the past several decades”, especially in poorer nations, the 60-page report concludes. [Continue reading…]

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What does the Iran deal mean for Syria?

Aron Lund writes: In the conspiratorial world of Syrian politics, speculation is rife about secret “Syria clauses” in the deal. The opposition fears an under-the-table deal benefiting Iran and Assad, while government supporters are afraid that Iran will now move to improve its relations with the West by sacrificing Assad. Neither seems very likely and negotiators are probably correct when they claim that the Vienna process focused exclusively on the nuclear issue. But it is no secret that there are those on both sides who would like to see a more comprehensive rapprochement, or at least improved coordination in the struggle against the extremists of the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

With the nuclear deal now signed and perhaps secure, there is suddenly room for new talks to begin. Or if they are already secretly under way, such parallel diplomatic tracks can be accelerated without fear of upsetting the nuclear talks. Whatever happens, Iraq and Syria will be top concerns for all involved, although the former may make for more fruitful discussions than the latter.

In pushing so hard for the nuclear deal, Barack Obama has seemingly wagered that some combination of trade and talks will be more successful at incentivizing U.S.-friendly Iranian politics than the isolation and military threats of the past decades. Whether he is right or wrong, it is not an unreasonable assumption. For Assad, too, today’s celebration must therefore be tinged with quiet concern over how an improvement in Iranian-Western relations might affect Tehran’s political priorities in coming years. A historic achievement this may well have been, but history has a way of unfolding at its own pace and in its own ways. [Continue reading…]

Rasha Elass writes: President Bashar al Assad appears heartened by the Iran nuclear deal, presuming that Tehran will continue to be his main backer. Many analysts say Assad would not have survived this long without Iran’s support, and would quickly falter without it.

Assad may be right, but not entirely.

While it is true that Iran will not abandon its hegemony over Syria, a hegemony that has grown to unprecedented levels in government-controlled areas from Damascus to Syria’s coastline, there is a flip side to this equation.

Bolstering Assad has become expensive for Iran, which has injected billions of dollars into Damascus, and has sent military and security personnel to aid Assad’s military operations in Syria. While it is difficult to know exact numbers, Iran has been public about the hundreds of casualties it is enduring in Syria so far, a cost that many Iranians may find pointless.

With Iran coming in from the cold, there might be political capital to be harvested if Tehran emerged as a real broker to a resolution in Syria.

One way of doing this is to keep the Assad regime somewhat in tact, but without Assad himself. For months, some Syrian opposition members have been floating this idea as well, preferring it as a way of moving forward while avoiding a post-Saddam scenario, when the US dismantled the military and the entire government in Baghdad. It is a workable solution if Syrian opposition is well represented in the new, transitional government. Iran may also prefer this solution because it puts an end to a seemingly endless war, yet it maintains Tehran’s leverage over Damascus.

Already Turkey is calling on Iran to step up to this challenge. [Continue reading…]

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Why Israel, Saudi Arabia, and neocons hate the Iran deal

Fred Kaplan writes: Here’s the thing to keep in mind about most critics of the Iran nuclear deal that was signed Tuesday morning: Their objections have nothing to do with the details of the deal.

The most diehard opponents — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi King Salman, and a boatload of neocons led by the perennial naysayer John Bolton — issued their fusillades against the accord (“an historic mistake,” “diplomatic Waterloo,” to say nothing of the standard charges of “appeasement” from those with no understanding of history) long before they could possibly have browsed its 159 pages of legalese and technical annexes.

What worries these critics most is not that Iran might enrich its uranium into an A-bomb. (If that were the case, why would they so virulently oppose a deal that put off this prospect by more than a decade?) No, what worries them much more deeply is that Iran might rejoin the community of nations, possibly even as a diplomatic (and eventually trading) partner of the United States and Europe. [Continue reading…]

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