Middle East Reality

M. Ali from RaceForIran points out the Western double-standard on martyrdom

2012-01-29T16:57:00.003-05:00

A pretty brilliant comment. Not much I could add.

M. Ali says:
January 29, 2012 at 4:51 pm

To the western racist, an Iranian, facing certain death & yet facing his enemy in the Iraq War, is considered insane, worshiping death, and desiring suicide. Yet, the same act would be considered heroic in the west. Both historical references & pop culture shows that the west values self-sacrifice greatly, if done by the western individual or group.

Tons of examples can be found in their pop culture. Will Smith, drove his airplane, straight into the alien ship in “Independence Day”, saving the world through his act of sacrifice, a suicide attack. I don’t remember any review of the film claiming that the hero of that film was a dangerous religious fanatic, or that its ending affecting its mainstream appeal.

Even in western political slogans, we see a strong emphasis on self-death. “Give me freedom or give me death”and “it is better to die on one’s feet than live while on your knees”shows that the west also believes that life, just for the sake of being alive, is not worth much.

Therefore, this double standard exists. If a western man, gives his life for the greater good, he is a hero. If the Iranian holds the same belief, he is an Islamist fanatic, martyring himself for 72 virgins (when was the last time, you have heard any Muslim talk about the 72 virgins?), and loving death.

Speaking of double standards, “the hidden imam” is not unique to Islam or Shiaism. The Messiah is supposed to return in almost all religions (even non-Abrahamic ones) at the end of days, and it is one, they all look forward to. Yet it is shown as unique to Iran.

Two state solution: Lies for Americans

2012-01-29T13:18:00.008-05:00

The benefit of the two state solution is not that it is feasible, but that it exists as an ideal to help, especially Americans, find comfort in supporting an ethnic state nearly identical to the state Apartheid advocates hoped to accomplish with offers - rejected by Nelson Mandela, the ANC and the broader anti-Apartheid movement - to create separate subordinate Bantu-stans which would have diverted enough non-White potential voters to make an enforced White political majority state viable.

Obama claims now that he opposed Apartheid when US activists were demonstrating against it. I believe him for the most part, except that it is difficult to reconcile that previous position with Obama's 2012 State of the Union address which contained nothing Ronald Reagan might not have said.

So for Barack Hussein Obama, a person with Muslims in his direct family, Bantu-stans were unacceptable for Black South Africans, but an admirable goal for Palestinians. That part is easy to explain: Barack Obama is now the most spectacular Uncle Tom in human history.

But over at Informed Comment, we see a guest editorial by more authors who have arrived at the conclusion that the Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank that would be necessary for a two state solution is not feasible.

To counter this argument, critics may point to the withdrawal of Jewish settlements from Gaza in 2005. That example, however, actually supports our argument. In order to remove 8,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza, an easily isolated region of no religious significance to Jews, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a military hero idolized by both the settlers and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) had to deploy the entire man and woman power of all of Israel’s security forces. Moreover, the Gaza withdrawal was not done in agreement with the Palestinians, or in order to facilitate peace with them. It was done unilaterally, in order to make Israel’s control of Gaza more efficient. Judging by this example, removing 100,000 settlers from the West Bank, in order to enable the establishment of a Palestinian state, would be an impossible task.

This article misses the point that the purpose of the two state solution is not to actually happen, but to provide a moral illusion that the permanent subjugation of the Palestinian people is temporary.

Is it genuine naivete or cynical deception of self and others? I’m not sure, but Barack Obama will tell you, and tells audiences continuously, that the United States supports Palestinians being under the military control of Israel only as a temporary measure. It will end when two states are agreed upon, which is right around corner.

From all indications, Barack Obama would feel - or at least claim to feel - morally justified in his support for Zionism if this two state solution was "around the corner" forever.

Westerners sometimes support this illusion with deliberately misleading polls asking Arab and Muslim populations if they would accept Israel if Israel met conditions that left and right wing Israeli officials repeatedly announce that they will never meet. These are efforts to deceive audiences, primarily Western and especially American audiences, to believe the day will (soon!) come when the Arab and Muslim worlds will happily accept the US and Zionist effective colonial control over their region that is necessary for Israel to be viable as an enforced Jewish political majority state.

We’ve reached and gone far past the point that US support for a two state solution is a just typical Western lie, not much different from US claims of support for democracy as it effectively maintains colonies in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE, Kuwait and others.

Will Egypt escape American colonialism in 2012?

2012-01-29T12:19:00.003-05:00

Egypt, which is currently the key story of the Middle East, has answered one question by demonstrating that religiously aligned parties are in a position to control Egypt's civilian government. A second question - will Egypt's constitution carve control of policies important to the United States outside of civilian control - has not yet been answered.

Protesters are currently in Tahrir Square in Egypt advocating for full civilian control of policy and for it to be attained earlier than the June date the military dictatorship claims is its schedule. Of the two, the date of transfer and the fullness of the transfer, the fullness of the transfer is the more important. That question will be determined by who sits on the committee to write the post-Mubarak Egyptian constitution and what the constitution ends up saying.

A struggle is certainly occurring behind the scenes. In public advocates of US policy such as Juan Cole are lying by suggesting that Egypt's Islamic parties are on the side of the military and the US in pursuing the US' objective of preventing civilian control of Egypt's foreign policy.

Elbaradei is reportedly afraid that the Muslim Brotherhood will like having its parliamentary majority so much, and will like having the opportunity to shape the new Egyptian constitution, that they will strike a deal with the military to let them do as they please.

In public, left-wing US president Jimmy Carter has come out explicitly favoring an arrangement like that colonial Great Britain presented Egypt in 1922.

Colonial Great Britain in 1922:

The unprecedented movement of Egyptians all across the country that ensued from those early demonstrations quickly overwhelmed British expectations. When at last the combined forces of the occupying army and the Interior Ministry were able to quell months of strikes and protests, the British were compelled to reconsider their position towards Egypt. The eventual outcome of that process was the unilateral decision in March 1922 to grant Egypt a qualified independence. Although the country would be governed thereafter as a constitutional monarchy, the British retained the right to intervene in any matters seen to affect the security of imperial communications, the interests and safety of foreigners on Egyptian soil, the threat of foreign invasion, or the status of Egypt's relationship with the Sudan.

Jimmy Carter in 2012:

“ ‘Full civilian control’ is a little excessive, I think,” Mr. Carter said, after describing a meeting he had Tuesday with Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, leader of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF. “I don’t think the SCAF is going to turn over full responsibility to the civilian government. There are going to be some privileges of the military that would probably be protected.”

...

“If the civilian leadership decided to give the SCAF immunity from prosecution, say, for the death of the people in Tahrir Square over the last few months, I would have no objection to that,” Mr. Carter said. Protecting the military budget from full civilian scrutiny might be another point where civilian political leaders could compromise, he said.

This brings up the interesting question of what exactly is in the secret military budget that the pro-US military dictatorship and US officials are so adamant must remain outside of view of the people of Egypt and their representatives.

A plausible guess is that the United States has long term commitments of direct cash payments to members of Egypt's military, not only to Tantawi but in different amounts to Egyptian military officials at even relatively low ranks. So that US leverage over Egypt partly takes the form of direct, possibly even monthly, payments to various Egyptian officers directly from US military and intelligence services.

One thing 2011 has proven beyond any question regarding Egypt, is that there are people in the country who want all of Egypt's policies, including foreign policies, to reflect the values, perceptions and sensibilities of the people of Egypt. Those people have important assets in their struggle against the United States and what is effectively a colonial dictatorship that currently rules their country. It is possible but it is not a safe bet to expect the advocates of accountable government for Egypt to lose.

A European diplomat would be satisfied with Iran having Japan's capabilities

2012-01-25T13:14:00.005-05:00

I'm actually surprised to see this in the New York Times:

While the United States and Israel have not taken military options off the table, pursuing them is unpalatable, at least for now. Several American and European officials say privately that the most attainable outcome for the West could be for Iran to maintain the knowledge and technology necessary to build a nuclear weapon while stopping short of doing so. That would allow it to assert its sovereignty and save face after years of diplomatic tensions.

While that might seem to be a big concession on the part of the United States, Iran would first have to make even bigger ones: demonstrate that it could be trusted and drop its veil of secrecy so that inspectors could verify that its nuclear work was peaceful, steps Iran has resisted.

In other words, Iran would have to become a country like Japan, which has the capability to become an atomic power virtually overnight, if need be, but has rejected taking the final steps to possessing nuclear weapons. “If you’re asking whether we would be satisfied with Iran becoming Japan, then the answer is a qualified yes,” a senior European diplomat said. “But it would have to be verifiable, and we are a long ways away from trusting the regime.”

I'm sure the diplomat has qualifications in mind that were not stated. Most likely the qualification is that Iran can, according to him, gain legal nuclear weapons capabilities after proving to the US' satisfaction that its program is peaceful. What that would mean is just that the US would never be satisfied, so in effect, it would be the same permanent suspension of Iran's nuclear program that the West has been trying to achieve since 2005.

If "demonstrate that it can be trusted" means to accept an indefinite suspension to be lifted when the US gives permission, then Iran is never going to "demonstrate that it can be trusted."

I have to say, the West has all of these euphemisms, misleading and distortive statements about its position regarding Iran's nuclear program that it does become tedious. "Fulfill its obligations" means suspend enrichment. "Enter serious negotiations" means suspend enrichment before negotiations can begin as described in the UNSC resolutions.

However, if the West has a semi-reasonable set of verification measures, such as the Additional Protocols and increased monitoring regimens, then it can present its set and this dispute is over, because verification that Iran was not building an actual weapon has never been the issue of dispute in this conflict.

Stratfor, George Friedman argue that a resolution between the US and Iran may be possible

2012-01-25T12:41:00.010-05:00

Gary Sick was earlier. Here George Friedman of Stratfor presents an argument that it may be possible for the Obama administration and Iran to reach some agreement that reduces tensions. Again I disagree, but I'll be wrong when I see an indication that the US is willing to abandon its policy that Iran must not be able to acquire legal nuclear weapons capabilities like those Japan, Brazil and many other countries have.

For structural reasons, I don't think that is possible. It would be very difficult for Iran to both have legal nuclear weapons capabilities and to be a weak enough power to fit into the US' objective for a balance of artificially weak powers in the region.

George Friedman presents a scenario where the US wants three things regarding the Persian Gulf: 1) that the US does not have to directly intervene 2) that there is no disruption to the flow of oil 3) that Iran not become more powerful.

Iran wants three things: 1) Reduction in the US presence in the Persian Gulf, 2) Recognition as a major power in the region 3) An arrangement of some sort that shifts more Gulf oil revenues to Iran.

For Friedman, the nuclear issue in itself is not important while negotiations somehow or other can resolve the US' differences with Iran over their differences.

If Friedman was right and these were the US' and Iran's primary objectives, then other than the US' third, these objectives are complementary. All the US has to do to ensure free flow of oil is stop increasing tension with Iran. The US could accommodate all three of Friedman's supposed Iranian objections without harming its own objectives if it papers over the objective of Iran not becoming more powerful.

It is not clear from Friedman why Iran not being powerful would be a first order objective for the US.

What Friedman misses is that the constraint the US' commitment to Israel puts on US policy in its region. I've talked about why the US' commitment to Israel led to the US' intervention in Iraq.

A balance of powers could have been accomplished without an invasion of Iraq. A balance of powers could be accomplished without the expensive current attempt to economically isolate Iran.

A balance of very weak powers. Subject to the constraint that none of the powers is strong enough to threaten Israel is much more expensive to emplace and maintain. The US does it for emotional reasons, but will stop when the costs become too high. But the cost of maintaining that constraint is part of the cost of US support for Israel.

US policy in the Middle East is driven by oil and the strategic implications of a large amount of that resource that is concentrated in the region. But the US has accepted, for reasons that have nothing to do with pure strategy, a strategic priority in protecting Israel's status as a Jewish state that imposes heavy and costly constraints on that policy.

In short, balance of power is easy. Balance of power where none of the balanced powers prevents Israel from being viable as an enforced Jewish political majority state is much more difficult.

That difficulty alone explains why it is a US objective that Iran not be powerful.

As an aside, many Westerners have convinced themselves that the Arab world is prepared to accept Israel in the context of a two-state solution. I've talked about this before, but it is interesting to discuss the polls that supposedly support this idea. Western pollsters like to go to Arab and Muslim populations and ask: "If Israel retreats to the 1967 borders, accepts the Palestinian refugees and resolves other issues to the Palestinians' satisfaction, would you accept Israel?"

That's a complicated question, huh? Not the simpler, more relevant and more direct "Do you consider Israel a legitimate country". Readers Digest asked that question of Iranians in 2006. But I guess Western pollsters have learned their lesson. I've never seen the results of that poll question asked of a Middle Eastern population publicly released since. Populations that, unlike Iran's, are Arab and majority Sunni can be presumed to be even less likely to consider Israel legitimate.

Question 18: Level of Agreement - The state of Israel is illegitimate and should not exist

Strong disagreement: 3.9%
Mild disagreement: 4.6% (Total disagree, 8.5%)
Neutral: 21.1%
Mild agreement: 14.6%
Strong agreement: 51.9% (Total agree, 66.5%)

But Israel has never offered to retreat to the 1967 borders or accept the Palestinian refugees. What the Arab populations that are being polled are being asked is an impossible and irrelevant hypothetical. When Israel's actual conditions, that Israel keep some of the territory and that the right of refugees to return be limited, are added, even the supposed majority that supports two states always disappears. But what this question does is allows Westerners to continue to feel justified in terms of their own moral systems as they support Zionism, which is the whole point. Westerners fooling other Westerners who willingly go along. I guess interesting to observe, nothing to actually take seriously.

So anyway, Friedman seriously underestimates the deepness of the dispute between the United States and Iran. Iran cannot agree to remain a weak enough state to fit into the US weak balance of power that Israel requires to remain viable. Until the US removes that constraint on its regional policy, it will be in opposition to Iran and to any and every independent, which is to say non-colonial, state in the region.

Congratulations Egypt on an important tangible step toward representative accountable government

2012-01-23T02:58:00.003-05:00

There are good days and bad days. Today is a good day.

In Egypt, the power to set and execute policy has not been taken from the pro-US military dictatorship, but a process has begun that has a fair chance of ultimately producing that outcome. The elections, after delays did happen and they were a solid victory for the people of Egypt against the dictatorship and its supporters in Washington DC.

Of course I wanted to have seen the pro-US military dictatorship fully removed from Egypt's political system by now. And of course the United States has been working to prevent civilian control of those aspects of policy the US considers most important. But while complete victory for Egyptian democracy and complete defeat for modern US colonialism has not been achieved, we cannot lose sight of the fact that Egypt on Monday January 23 has one sitting body of political power that reflects an honest attempt to represent the views, sensibilities and positions of the Egyptian people.

One of the jobs of Egypt's People's Assembly will now be to attain the political power that it legitimately deserves. The Muslim Brotherhood, whose aligned parties won the most seats, has issued a magnanimous statement, saying that it is working toward an orderly transfer of power and that representatives should look beyond their narrowly defined electoral constituencies toward all people of Egypt:

What happened is a major step in the march of the revolution. After just one day, full legislative powers will be transferred from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) to the People’s Assembly elected by nearly 30 million Egyptians. This Assembly is the first institution to be established in a democratic way after the revolution. Those who wish to rush things should ponder and appreciate and give this event its due, and protect the democratic process with all the people who look forward to the day they recover full sovereignty, freedom and free-will by completing the transfer of executive power to the elected civilian authority and the drafting of a new permanent constitution.

Everyone should gather around major goals that achieve the greater good of the homeland and the people, their interests and priorities. Those who enter parliament should realize that they are not representatives of their own respective parties only, nor of their respective districts only, but representatives of the Egyptian people, the full spectrum of sectors, communities and leanings, with all their hopes and aspirations and their revolution ambitions, and join those endeavoring to replace corrupt, rough laws-of-the-forest with fair and good and balanced legislation, and to monitor the executive branch, so it stays on the straight and narrow.

I am ecstatic. I am as happy today as I was the day Mubarak left power. Like on that day, there is a lot of work that remains for the Egyptians to do. Like on that day, those who believe Egypt's policy should be set by Egyptians have adversaries, like Barack Obama, who would like to continue secret foreign control of Egyptian policy. But like that day, an important step has been taken toward Egyptian independence.

Is a breakthrough possible on Iran's nuclear issue?

2012-01-21T12:36:00.003-05:00

The US' dispute with Iran over Iran's nuclear program is really not difficult to understand. Signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty can have legal nuclear weapons capabilities as long as they do not build actual nuclear weapons. Japan has legal nuclear weapons capabilities, Brazil does, many other countries do. If a country with legal nuclear weapons capabilities is provoked, it is free - under the terms of the NPT - to leave the treaty and build nuclear weapons in response.

Israel believes that it should have not only a monopoly of nuclear weapons in its region, but also no other country in its region should have the capability to make nuclear weapons. If Japan was in Israel's region, its nuclear program would be unacceptable to Israel and therefore to the United States. The United States today would be whipping up a more intense blizzard of lies, evasions, distortions and exaggerations about Japan's nuclear program than it is now about Iran's far more modest nuclear capabilities.

Gary Sick has recently suggested that possibly the United States is signaling flexibility with Iran that may lead to a breakthrough on the nuclear dispute. There is not much room for hope on that score unless and until the United States abandons its position that legal nuclear weapons capabilities like those Japan, Canada, Brazil and many other countries have must be prohibited at all costs from non-Jewish countries in Israel's region.

That kind of three-dimensional chess is not only complicated; it is not normally regarded as a U.S. strong suit. Naturally, you cannot conduct major negotiations with Iran without attracting public attention, whether in the United States, in Israel, in the Arab Middle East states, or elsewhere. But if you throw enough anti-Iran dust in the air, you may defuse any concerted attack – figuratively or otherwise.

The new sanctions go into effect in six months, just before the political nominating conventions. President Obama will have to have something positive to show before that time if he is to justify putting the sanctions on hold. This is the diplomatic equivalent of a two-minute drill in football. It is a thing a beauty when it works, but it is not for the faint of heart.

Barack Obama recently gave an interview with Time Magazine. Looking at the interview, there is more that says Sick is wrong than that he is right. I want to look more closely at the three questions Obama was asked involving Iran and Obama's responses.

Romney says if you are re-elected, Iran will get a nuclear weapon, and if he is elected, it won’t. Will you make a categorical statement like that: If you are re-elected, Iran will not get a nuclear weapon?

I have made myself clear since I began running for the presidency that we will take every step available to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. What I’ve also said is that our efforts are going to be … Excuse me. When I came into office, what we had was a situation in which the world was divided, Iran was unified, it was on the move in the region. And because of effective diplomacy, unprecedented pressure with respect to sanctions, our ability to get countries like Russia and China — that had previously balked at any serious pressure on Iran — to work with us, Iran now faces a unified world community, Iran is isolated, its standing in the region is diminished. It is feeling enormous economic pressure.

And we are in a position where, even as we apply that pressure, we’re also saying to them, There is an avenue to resolve this, which is a diplomatic path where they forego nuclear weapons, abide by international rules and can have peaceful nuclear power as other countries do, subject to the restrictions of the [Nuclear] Non-Proliferation Treaty.

It was once interesting that Barack Obama has a special definition of "peaceful nuclear power" for Israel's region that there and only there excludes the legal nuclear weapons capabilities that countries like Japan have. Now it is just old and boring.

Obama made concessions to at least Russia and likely also to China that Bush was not willing to make in exchange for cooperation on Iran. Russia's leaders are responsible for the strategic interests of Russia, the same for China. One could not ask Russia to turn down a delay the expansion of the US missile defense system on Iran's behalf, nor should China's government not accept leniency on its currency manipulation.

The United States, if it is willing to pay, can get stronger sanctions against Iran. The United States, if it wants, can go to war with Iran. Nobody has ever doubted this. Obama may be overly proud of himself for demonstrating something that was never in question. But the United States, no more than it did when Obama came to office, has no plausible way to prevent Iran from at least acquiring legal nuclear weapons capabilities.

What a US president is one day going to have to do, which we are not seeing in Obama, is tell Israel that its desire for a regional monopoly on nuclear capabilities just is not deliverable by the US. Seeing even a hint of that will indicate progress on the nuclear issue.

I also wonder if people forget that Obama is not staking new ground when he says that he accepts Iran's right to nuclear power. George Bush's position was identical. Iran can have nuclear power as long as it does not enrich uranium - which is to say as long as it does not acquire or attempt to acquire legal nuclear weapons capabilities. When Obama says that it is not a concession or an indication of flexibility.

But the way, the Iranians might see it as that they have made proposals — the Brazilian-Turkish proposal — and that they never go anywhere. They aren’t the basis of negotiations.

Yes, I think if you take a look at the track record, the Iranians have simply not engaged in serious negotiations on these issues.

We actually put forward a very serious proposal that would have allowed them to display good faith. They need medical isotopes; there was a way to take out some of their low-enriched uranium so that they could not — so that there was clarity that they were not stockpiling that to try to upgrade to weapons-grade uranium. In exchange, the international community would provide the medical isotopes that they needed for their research facility. And they delayed and they delayed, and they hemmed and they hawed, and then when finally the Brazilian-Indian proposal was put forward, it was at a point where they were now declaring that they were about to move forward on 20% enriched uranium, which would defeat the whole purpose of showing good faith that they weren’t stockpiling uranium that could be transformed into weapons-grade.

So, not to get too bogged down in the details, the point is that the Iranians have a very clear path where they say, We’re not going to produce weapons, we won’t stockpile material that can be used for weapons. The international community then says, We will work with you to develop your peaceful nuclear energy capacity, subject to the kinds of inspections that other countries have agreed to in the past. This is not difficult to do. What makes it difficult is Iran’s insistence that it is not subject to the same rules that everybody else is subject to.

The original US offer to Iran, that it trade 3.5% low enriched uranium for 20% LEU in a form usable for Iran's research reactor to make medical isotopes was, on paper, a giveaway to Iran. It would have been the kind of gesture that would have marked a drastic change in the US' approach to Iran and certainly would have built at least good feelings from Iran if not confidence.

The question Iran faced was is this a goodwill gesture, or is it a trap? Will Iran export its LEU and get reactor fuel in return or will it export its LEU and be told that it has to indefinitely suspend enrichment to ever get reactor fuel? The United States is pretty open now that it had been a trap. The United States did not intend then and does not intend now to ever give Iran reactor fuel unless Iran accepts conditions that Iran has already rejected in the strongest possible terms consistently since at least 2006.

Yes, Obama is lying to describe the offer as a "very serious proposal".

Also stockpiling low enriched uranium is legal and is peaceful, at least outside of Israel's region.

But Obama's most outrageous lie is that he has a way of getting carried away and claiming Iran does not want to follow the same rules as everybody else. That is the type of lie that rightfully inspires deep doubts about a person's moral make-up. If Obama is able to repeatedly describe Iran's refusal to accept conditions only imposed on non-Jewish countries in Israel's region as "Iran’s insistence that it is not subject to the same rules that everybody else is subject to", then he is unusually unselfconscious about dishonesty.

If Gary Sick was right, and the US was expressing flexibility to resolve the dispute, then Obama would have left out the part about stockpiling material that could be used for a weapon. Iran has today about 5 tons of LEU. Very roughly, the US' goal in the original TRR offer was to lower Iran's stock to less than one ton. I can't speak for Iran, but it strikes me as very unlikely that Iran will submit to the condition that Obama reiterates when he says that.

Suppose that with all this pressure you have been able to put on Iran, and the economic pressure, suppose the consequence is that the price of oil keeps rising, but Iran does not make any significant concession. Won’t it be fair to say the policy will have failed?

It is fair to say that this isn’t an easy problem, and anybody who claims otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Obviously, Iran sits in a volatile region during a volatile period of time, and their own internal conflicts makes it that much more difficult, I think, for them to make big strategic decisions. Having said that, our goal consistently has been to combine pressure with an opportunity for them to make good decisions and to mobilize the international community to maximize that pressure.

Can we guarantee that Iran takes the smarter path? No. Which is why I have repeatedly said we don’t take any options off the table in preventing them from getting a nuclear weapon. But what I can confidently say, based on discussions that I’ve had across this government and with governments around the world, is that of all the various difficult options available to us, we’ve taken the one that is most likely to accomplish our goal and one that is most consistent with America’s security interest.

An implication of Obama's last statement is that the US' current policy of sanctions is the most likely to accomplish the goal of preventing Iran from attaining legal nuclear weapons capabilities. What makes that interesting is that sanctions are unlikely to prevent Iran from attaining those capabilities, so Obama is very indirectly but correctly saying that a military strike is even more unlikely to prevent Iran from at least attaining legal nuclear weapons capabilities.

What Obama or a future US leader is going to have to say is: "We tried and it didn't work, so Israel is going to have to live with it." When Obama or a later US president gives an indication that he is ready to face that reality, then that indication will be a sign that a breakthrough over Iran's nuclear dispute is possible.

So far, contrary to Gary Sick, I don't see a good sign of that.

Netanyahu's office official statement: Iran is the greatest threat to Israel

2012-01-21T04:10:00.015-05:00

This is what effective colonialism looks like in 2012.

The Prime Minister's Office released a statement Thursday rejecting the claims. According to the statement, Netanyahu told the foreign affairs committee of the Dutch parliament during a visit to the Netherlands that he never called the two newspapers enemies of Israel, and that it was in fact Iran and its extensions that were the country's greatest adversaries.

One might wonder why Saudi Arabia, which has much more oil revenue than Iran, spends more than twice as much on weapons as Iran and Israel combined and has a population even more vehemently anti-Zionist than Iran's is not a greater threat to Israel - according to the official position of Israel's Prime Minister - than Iran.

Oh yes, Saudi Arabia still has a subject colonial-style dictatorship and is more accountable to its patron the United States than to the people of its country.

Few analysts believe Riyadh, the world's top oil exporter and a key ally for the United States, is likely to embark upon a weapons programme in defiance of U.S. calls for restraint.

The same can be said for other effective US colonies such as Jordan, Egypt, Kuwait, UAE and others. Would Israel as an enforced Jewish majority state be viable if the US was not able to direct the foreign policies of these states on Israel's behalf?

One thing we can say that it is at very least questionable that Israel could survive in the region if Saudi Arabia and the other effective US colonies in the region, were, like Iran, independent enough to pursue foreign policies reflective of the views and values of their people.

The second thing we can say is that popular control of foreign policy for non-Jews in Israel's region is a chance Barack Obama, Juan Cole, MJ Rosenberg, Jimmy Carter and other supporters of effective US colonialism on Israel's behalf are not willing to take. Some of these supporters of pro-Israel effective colonialism are more honest in their opposition to popular control of policy by people who are not Jewish in Israel's region than others.

Movies and the US' historical support for Zionism

2012-01-19T22:41:00.005-05:00

I clearly remember a piece on CNN.com, probably more than ten years ago which gave background information about the US' relation to Israel. It pointed to a poll that showed that in 1947 or 1948, people in the United States favored people as opposed to Arabs by a margin of about two to one. 28% to 13% if memory serves. I have not seen a link to that since but one day it likely will re-emerge and I'll have a place, here, to put it so I'll be able to find it subsequently.

I often read that the United States did not favor Israel until 1967. This is not true and it was not perceived in the region to be true at the time. The United States may have taken the role of Israel's primary patron from Britain and France around that period, but come on, if the USSR had been supposedly relatively neutral, but Israel's primary patrons had been Poland and East Germany, the people of the region would very understandably have been far better disposed to the US than to the USSR.

But what brings this up is two interesting comments over at RaceforIran, one by Fiorangela, one by Richard Steven Hack.

Fioangela's (January 19, 2012 at 3:48 pm):

The skewed values that are seeded in Anglo-American culture were planted there by emotional media — religious liturgies, entertainment, quasi-religious fiction and fictionalized and valorized history. Norman Finkelstein observed in a videod conference titled The Coming Break-up of American Zionism, that what most people understand about Israel they learned from the movie “Exodus.” Then he hummed the iconic theme song.

Hack's (January 19, 2012 at 10:33 pm):

And I was initially conditioned toward Israel decades ago by the movie, “Cast a Giant Shadow”, with Kirk Douglas. That movie promoted the myth that the poor Jews were being attacked by an overwhelming Arab force, abandoned by everyone internationally (except John Wayne!), and that they had no weapons, no armor, no planes, no nothing but the will to survive. And all Arabs were cowardly, stupid subhumans…

Then, of course, eventually I read Wikipedia… Which revealed all of that was so much total ruminant evacuation… The Jews had more men, better trained men, better arms, and had been using terrorism against the Brits and Arabs for decades in order to force the native Palestinians off their own lands so they could form a colonialist, imperialist, terrorist, rogue Zionist state without any justification whatsoever other than that they were “God’s Chosen People”.

And we’re supposed to think the mullahs are crazy…

Today most people in the United States have in their heads preposterously fictional ideas of what Israel and Zionism represent. The pro-US commenters in this blog may well generally be more guilty of that than most. It is interesting to read from people in the United States exactly how these false ideas were born.

Israel is a UN member state

2012-01-19T18:56:00.005-05:00

I see this statement made often, just saw it recently made over at raceforiran so I thought I'd write a quick response.

At the time Israel became a UN member state, the UN also determined that Congo should be a Belgian colony (along with many other such as Vietnam and Algeria for France and India for Great Britain), Apartheid South Africa was a UN member state. The UN was at the time an openly racist, openly Western colonialist institution.

The statement I see often is true. Israel is a UN member state. I've never been sure what argument that statement was ever meant to advance.

Israel will still be a UN member state after it accepts non-Jewish refugees and their descendants, no longer has an enforced Jewish political majority, changes its flag and changes its name.

If Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, UAE, Kuwait and other current effective US colonies were free to pursue foreign policies set by those countries' voters, we would see post-Zionist Israel this decade. Much faster than the eight years between US sanctions on Apartheid South Africa and the installation of that country's first Black prime minister.

The United States is expending a tremendous amount of resources preventing fewer than six million Jewish people from suffering the indignity that befell South Africa's White population. South Africa's Whites live under a majority-Black government but US policy is that Israel's Jews must, at any cost, - especially any cost to the non-Jewish people of the region - never live under a majority non-Jewish government.

The question of Israel is how long the US will be able and willing to pay the cost of subjugating over 400 million non-Jews in Israel's region on behalf of those fewer than six million Jews.

The fact that Israel as an enforced Jewish political majority state is a UN member could not be less relevant.

Juan Cole's intellectual dishonesty regarding Egyptian democracy

2012-01-16T17:34:00.006-05:00

MJ Rosenberg, a far-left liberal Zionist, has at times been open about his opposition to democracy for Israel's far more populous neighbors if that might lead to Israeli Jewish people, as happened to South African White people decades ago, suffering the indignity of losing their enforced political majority state and living under non-Jewish rule.

I think that a democratic Egypt could very well repudiate the peace treaty with Israel leading to war, major Israeli (and potentially American) losses and even the end of the Jewish state.

Sorry, that is too high a price to pay.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has recently reached that level of honesty, at least when describing his behavior as president and the policies of his successors up to and including Barack Obama.

Many Egyptians, he said, now complain that for three decades the United States supported a dictatorship at odds with its values to preserve peace with Israel.

“I think that is true, we were,” he said. “And I can’t say I wasn’t doing that as well.”

Juan Cole has not reached that level of honesty. He presents efforts by the pro-US military dictatorship to retain power after a civilian government sits as necessary to protect the rights of women and Copts. (When has the pro-US military dictatorship of Egypt ever protected the rights of women or Copts?)

Cole also has a theory that he'll peddle to anyone naive enough to believe it, that Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is conspiring with the pro-US Egyptian military dictatorship to leave the pro-US dictatorship in control of those areas of policy most important to the United States.

Elbaradei is reportedly afraid that the Muslim Brotherhood will like having its parliamentary majority so much, and will like having the opportunity to shape the new Egptian constitution, that they will strike a deal with the military to let them do as they please.

The problem is that this blames the Muslim Brotherhood and not the US. That is a cop-out for a person who votes in US government elections but does not have any influence over the Muslim Brotherhood.

Jimmy Carter, for example, and of course in coordination with the Obama administration, recently met with Egypt's military dictatorship and left endorsing its plan to withhold political power from the civilian government.

“ ‘Full civilian control’ is a little excessive, I think,” Mr. Carter said, after describing a meeting he had Tuesday with Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, leader of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF. “I don’t think the SCAF is going to turn over full responsibility to the civilian government. There are going to be some privileges of the military that would probably be protected.”

Has any Muslim Brother ever called civilian control of the military excessive?

Who has at least a 30 year record of efforts in coordination with the military dictatorship to deny power to Egyptian civilians, the Muslim Brotherhood or the US government?

Cole claims ElBaradei is reportedly afraid of collusion between Egypt's pro-US military dictatorship and the Muslim Brotherhood. I have not seen that report. Cole has never linked to such a report on his website. Maybe such a report exists, but we cannot say so for sure. On the other hand, ElBaradei is actually on record expressly deriding secret collusion between the Egyptian military and the US government.

Speaking to the Iranian semi-official Fars news agency on Tuesday, Elbaradiei, the former International Atomic Energy Agency head, indicated that the future of Israel's peace treaty with Egypt was at the center of a recent and secret round of talks between U.S. officials and members of the Egyptian Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

"The negotiations were completely secret and confidential," ElBaradei told Fars, adding that what the ruling military indicated "said was that the talks were about bilateral and mutual relations, but I believe that Americans wanted to ensure that the deals signed between Egypt and Israel will remain intact if Islamists ascend to power."

The US and the military dictatorship have nothing to talk about regarding post-transfer policy unless the military maintains control of foreign policy, so coordinating these issues with them is at the very least tacit collaboration by the US with the military's efforts to limit democracy.

I have not seen comparable tangible evidence of Muslim Brotherhood collaboration with the military government, nor have I seen a convincing argument that they have a motive to limit their own power in a future government.

What Juan Cole is doing is both providing academic cover for and deflecting attention away from US anti-democratic efforts in Egypt currently being being made by the Barack Obama administration. What he is doing sharply contradicts US professed democratic values, so he lies to himself first, then to us next, but United States' policy is fundamentally anti-democratic in its policy in Israel's region.

Cole's arguments that Egypt's pro-US military dictatorship is protecting political rights for women and Copts, as well as his speculations that the Muslim Brotherhood is conspiring to reduce the amount of political power it will have may not be coherent, but they are supportive of US anti-democratic policy. Unlike Rosenberg and Carter, Cole finds himself unable to be honest about his opposition to democracy.

False flag operations: How independent of the United States is Israel?

2012-01-15T05:37:00.003-05:00

A story is emerging that United States intelligence services are aware of and angry about members of Israel's intelligence services impersonating US agents to orchestrate terrorist actions in Iran. This is the report of Mark Perry's recent article in Foreign Policy Magazine.

I think there are three broad messages advanced by the article. 1) The audience of the article is to believe that the United States is actually sincere in its opposition to terrorism in general, and not opportunistically opposed to terrorism against some targets while favoring it against others. 2) The audience is to believe that Israel operates, and is therefore capable of operating outside of US control. 3) The audience is also to believe that this Israeli program has introduced some degree of tension to the US/Israeli relationship.

In a practical sense, I don't believe any of these three messages are true.

But while the intended implications of the article are probably false, the details I'd guess are likely true. The amount of coordinated lying that would be necessary to get a professional journalist to publish an article in one of the US' most mainstream foreign policy periodicals sourced by recently retired and active high-level US intelligence officials is implausible.

If an Israeli agent was to contact a Muslim anywhere in the world, why would he not claim to be American, or maybe European? Why introduce the additional issues involved with representing the government that occupies Jerusalem when instead one can just claim to represent a different government? I've always assumed that would be Israel's way of operating ever since Israel's inception.

I think we can assume the base of the story is true and I imagine it is also true that there has been some discussion of Israel's practice of impersonating Americans in Washington to some degree. It is also true that Americans are not necessarily happy with or supportive of this Israeli practice.

The story is basically true, but let's look at the false implications:

Ideally the United States opposes terrorism. Ideally the United States believes humans have an inherent right to government that makes policies that reflect their values. There are today well over 100 million people living in pro-US dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, UAE and others. Israel would not be viable without these dictatorships. The one quasi-moral proposition in the Middle East that the United States effectively supports is that there must be an enforced Jewish majority state.

The United States continuously demonstrates that it is willing, and in fact eager, on behalf of Israel to compromise on the ideal that representative institutions should be empowered to make policy. Most recently in former US President Jimmy Carter's statement that Egyptian democratic control of Egyptian policy currently made by the pro-US military dictatorship would be "a little excessive". Democracy is literally the United States' founding value. I can't imagine there being any question that no matter how defined, the United States would compromise its much more recent opposition to terrorism on Israel's behalf.

More interesting is the question of how independent Israel is of the United States. A point to bear in mind is that the amount of leverage the US has over Israel is immeasurable. Israel cannot survive as a Jewish state vigorous without US assistance. If the United States threatens to withhold that assistance, Israel has no choice but to do whatever the US tells it to do. There is nothing the United States could want Israel to do that Israel could refuse to do.

This point is not well understood, so I want to spend some more time here. It is instructive to look at the fall of Apartheid in South Africa. The US formally approved sanctions over-riding Ronald Reagan's veto in 1986. Eight years later in 1994, the flag and national language had changed, a majority Black government was in place and the enforced White political majority state was over.

Israel as an enforced Jewish political majority state is in a more, not less, vulnerable position than South Africa as an enforced White political majority state. Apartheid South Africa never had potentially hostile neighbors whose military expenditures compared to South Africa's. South Africa had a regional nuclear monopoly and a far greater gap in industrialization from its potential adversaries. South Africa also had natural river and desert barriers separating its most important population and industrial centers from any form of external attack.

The Whites of South Africa accepted the indignity of living under the rule of non-Whites while facing much less of an imminent physical threat to their country than Israel would face the day after the US hypothetically withdrew its support.

Saudi Arabia spends more than 2.5 times what Israel spends on its military. Saudi Arabia does not militarily dominate Israel because it follows the orders not to issued by the United States. The Saudi government expends a tremendous amount of resources both bribing and punishing its own people to maintain this relationship with the United States that keeps it militarily subordinate to Israel.

Similar, if less extreme stories can be told about all of the US' colonies in Israel's region, including Egypt, Jordan, UAE, Kuwait and others.

In order to prevent Iran from achieving legal nuclear weapons capabilities like those Japan, Brazil and many other countries have, the United States seems to have slowed the development of missile defense against the US' own primary nuclear rival Russia. That's probably a good thing for Russia and maybe for the world, but that is a very expensive concession the United States has made for the sake of maintaining Israel's regional nuclear monopoly. The United States has withdrawn threats to act on concerns regarding China's currency policies for Chinese cooperation over Iran. Again probably good for China and for the world, but another compromise of US core interests.

Keeping Israel viable as an enforced Jewish majority state is an excruciatingly expensive proposition for the United States.

The threat by the US to stop making these expenditures would mean that there could not be an Israel. There is no Israeli policy that any Israeli government could maintain in the face of such a threat.

But like South Africa, Israel has a nuclear monopoly. Some people think Israel has a "Samson Option" in which it could destroy its region or even attack the United States if its enforced Jewish majority political system was threatened. Israel using nuclear weapons likely would not ultimately result in the extinction of both Israel as an enforced Jewish political majority state and Judaism as a religion and ethnic group, but that would be a serious risk, especially long-term. As hostile as Israel's strategic situation could ever be, an Israel nuclear attack on anyone could only ever make it worse.

It is unthinkable that any Israeli or Jewish leadership would prefer to make their strategic environment worse while also risking the future of Judaism as an ethnic group and religion rather than, like White South Africans, suffer the indignity of losing their enforced political majority and living under non-Jewish rule. There is no "Samson Option". Israel depends for its existence on a host of expensive actions by the United States, such as maintaining a structure of colonies on its behalf, and without those actions, Israel is not viable with or without nuclear weapons.

Israel is a US supplicant. It cannot act in opposition to US will and continue to exist as an enforced Jewish political majority state.

That leads to the last false implication of the Perry article, that there is tension between the United States and Israel over the false flag or any issue. The United States, for domestic political reasons, structurally bends its foreign policy in favor of Israel. As long as that is the case, in practical terms it does not make sense to speak of tension. The US domestic political system would not allow the US to effectively express any tension, so in any meaningful sense, such tension could not exist.

Israel has the ability to reject what the US claims to request only to the degree that the United States is incapable, for domestic political reasons, of imposing consequences for that rejection. False flag operations are in this case no different from settlements in the occupied territories. In practical terms they do not cause tension because in practical terms they do not impact the US' foreign policy alignment on Israel's behalf. Actions that the United States must, for political reason, act as if it supports, in practical terms it supports.

So the Perry article is somewhat interesting. It exonerates the US of committing certain actions that the US admits are crimes against Iran, but does not do so in a convincing or practically meaningful way.

Jimmy Carter: Democracy for Egypt is "excessive"

2012-01-14T07:37:00.008-05:00

Jimmy Carter says he expects that Egypt's military will retain control over Egyptian policy after civilian political institutions are in place. We read a New York Times article entitled: "Carter Says Egypt’s Military Is Likely to Retain Some Political Powers".

There are so many interesting things about this article. The first is the stance Carter takes. He is presenting himself not as an advocate of limiting democracy, but as an observer. So in Carter's private meeting with Egypt's military dictator, we are to believe Carter himself didn't advocate a position on this issue.

Juan Cole takes this position also. He claims he is not endorsing the military's bid to limit the scope of the control Egypt's voters have over Egyptian policy. He is merely reporting a trend he observes. One might ask at that point, well do you approve or disapprove of this anti-democratic trend you're observing? That's the point where comments stop making it past Cole's moderation filter. Cole refuses to answer.

Jimmy Carter does not refuse to answer that question. Like MJ Rosenberg in 2006, Carter now openly admits he has opposed democracy in Egypt for Israel's sake ever since the Camp David agreements.

But he also acknowledged that in retrospect the Egyptian revolution had cast a new light on the alliance he helped forge with Egypt’s military-backed strongmen, first President Anwar el-Sadat and then his successor, Mr. Mubarak. Many Egyptians, he said, now complain that for three decades the United States supported a dictatorship at odds with its values to preserve peace with Israel.

“I think that is true, we were,” he said. “And I can’t say I wasn’t doing that as well.”

This is accurate except for the verb tense problem. He admits he can't say he wasn't doing it. He also can't say he isn't doing it right now.

“ ‘Full civilian control’ is a little excessive, I think,” Mr. Carter said, after describing a meeting he had Tuesday with Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, leader of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF. “I don’t think the SCAF is going to turn over full responsibility to the civilian government. There are going to be some privileges of the military that would probably be protected.”

Excessive? Carter was president of a country with full civilian control over its military. Carter is saying that there is a different standard for majority non-Jewish countries in Israel's region.

Carter, Cole, Obama and Tantawi may not get their wish. The people of Egypt may well reject this updated version of the limited sovereignty the British empire offered Egypt in 1922. But it is clear in what direction US policy in pressuring the Egyptian dictatorship. Any American who claims to support Egyptian democracy is part of a fringe taking a position at odds with the mainstream US liberal and conservative foreign policy.

Questions for Westerners (especially in the US) about democracy in the Middle East (especially Egypt)

2012-01-11T23:15:00.011-05:00

Well this blog has gotten some passionate defenders of the US' agenda in the Middle East. These readers and commenters can be helpful because they can explain the US motivations in the Middle East in their own words.

So far, I'll mention George Carty, Dermot Maloney (who has answered the first), noname7364, Quemo Jones and Cowboy. I'd also like to encourage all Westerners, especially those generally supportive of US policies regarding the Middle East to answer these questions.

US policy has been very clear for decades in providing the answers to these questions. It will be interesting to see how the answers of questions by supporters of US policy match actual US policy.

Here are the questions:

1) Assuming Egypt's voters want Egypt to be as hostile against Israel as Iran is, would you oppose that democratic outcome for Egypt?

2) If Egypt was to become as hostile against Israel as Iran is, how do you think the US should respond to Egypt in that case? Should the US work to prevent Egypt from attaining legal nuclear weapons capabilities like those Japan, Brazil and other countries have? How?

3) Assuming Egypt's voters want to be as generous in supplying arms and materials to Palestinians as US voters are in supplying Israel, should the US just watch this happen? What, if anything, should the US do to prevent that?

Glenn Greenwald: US pro-democratic propaganda in the Middle East has been lies all along

2012-01-10T22:52:00.005-05:00

Over at RaceForIran, Richard Steven Hack posted a link to a Salon article by Glen Greenwald. I'm quoting the first two and then the last paragraphs of it. In the body is an example of the New York Times euphemistically encouraging US opposition to Egyptian policy being set by Egyptian voters. It is an extremely well written piece about US policy in the Middle East.

Media coverage of the Arab Spring somehow depicted the U.S. as sympathetic to and supportive of the democratic protesters notwithstanding the nation’s decades-long financial and military support for most of the targeted despots. That’s because a central staple of American domestic propaganda about its foreign policy is that the nation is “pro-democracy” — that’s the banner under which Americans wars are typically prettified — even though “democracy” in this regard really means “a government which serves American interests regardless of how their power is acquired,” while “despot” means “a government which defies American orders even if they’re democratically elected.”

It’s always preferable when pretenses of this sort are dropped — the ugly truth is better than pretty lies — and the events in the Arab world have forced the explicit relinquishment of this pro-democracy conceit. That’s because one of the prime aims of America’s support for Arab dictators has been to ensure that the actual views and beliefs of those nations’ populations remain suppressed, because those views are often so antithetical to the perceived national interests of the U.S. government. The last thing the U.S. government has wanted (or wants now) is actual democracy in the Arab world, in large part because democracy will enable the populations’ beliefs — driven by high levels of anti-American sentiment and opposition to Israeli actions – to be empowered rather than ignored.

...

The Post explains that Iran has now “opened six new missions there — in Colombia, Nicaragua, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay and Bolivia — and has expanded embassies in Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela”; Iran’s President, the article informs us, is now embarking on a trip to Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and Nicaragua. Other than Cuba, all of those nations are governed by democratically elected leaders. But many of them periodically defy American dictates and act against American interests; they are thus magically transformed into “despots.” By contrast, try to find any high-level American official using such a term to describe, say, America’s close friends ruling Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates. That is what is meant by “democracy” and “freedom” and “despots” when used in establishment American foreign policy discussions.

There is not much I could add to the piece itself. I strongly suggest reading it in full. Instead I'll try to place Greenwald in context of the US policy opinion spectrum.

Greenwald is part of the anti-colonialist fringe of the US political spectrum. The pro-colonialist mainstream right and the pro-colonialist mainstream left of the US political spectrum are united in their pursuit of the policies as well as the deceptions in support of those policies that Greenwald describes. Barack Obama is far closer to George W. Bush than he is to Glenn Greenwald. Juan Cole and MJ Rosenberg are far closer to Jeffrey Goldberg and Caroline Glick than they are to Greenwald.

To a person outside of the US pro-colonialist mainstream, Obama, Bush, Cole, Rosenberg, Goldberg and Glick are not substantially different from each other in their agendas, their objectives or their methods. The United States is a far more profoundly colonialist - and also profoundly racist - country than anyone with limited experience with the country might guess.

Panetta: No. Iran is not trying to develop a nuclear weapon

2012-01-08T15:55:00.006-05:00

United States officials have typically gone back and forth when discussing Iran's nuclear program between saying the US will not accept Iran building a nuclear weapon and saying the US will not accept Iran having the capabilities to build a weapon.

George W. Bush showed us one example of this in October 2007:

"If Iran had a nuclear weapon, it’d be a dangerous threat to world peace," Mr. Bush said. "So I told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."

"I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously," he said.

You'll notice Bush not drawing a distinction between the knowledge necessary to build a weapon - which is part of legal nuclear weapons capabilities that many NPT non-weapons states have - and deployed nuclear weapons.

What is dishonest about Bush's position is that he is blithely confounding two very different concepts. A weapon is very different from the knowledge necessary to make a weapon, and preventing a country like Iran from acquiring what he describes as the knowledge necessary to make a weapon would be a much more difficult task. Also a task the directly opposes both the letter and the spirit of the non-proliferation treaty which guarantees access to nuclear technology to all signatories "without discrimination".

Barack Obama in April 2010 made a similar statement.

All the evidence indicates that the Iranians are trying to develop the capacity to develop nuclear weapons. They might decide that, once they have that capacity that they'd hold off right at the edge -- in order not to incur -- more sanctions. But, if they've got nuclear weapons-building capacity -- and they are flouting international resolutions, that creates huge destabilizing effects in the region and will trigger an arms race in the Middle East that is bad for U.S. national security but is also bad for the entire world.

Again, the US objective is to prevent Iran from attaining legal nuclear weapons capabilities.

Aside. I've meant to mention something about this idea of an arms race. Saudi Arabia is not an independent country. If it was, it would have entered the nuclear arms race when Israel, the country most Arab people consider their biggest threat acquired nuclear weapons. The US has ordered Saudi Arabia not to acquire even legal nuclear weapons capabilities and Saudi Arabia follows US orders. Iran having the legal nuclear weapons capabilities would not make Saudi Arabia any more independent than it is today.

The sources of the UK's Daily Mail confirm this.

Few analysts believe Riyadh, the world's top oil exporter and a key ally for the United States, is likely to embark upon a weapons programme in defiance of U.S. calls for restraint. But Turki's remarks signal the extent of concern over non-Arab Iran's military ambitions among Arab Gulf countries.

The Daily Mail is right. Saudi Arabia, under its current government is not independent enough that its possible responses merit consideration. Egypt, so far, is the same - a subject non-independent client state. But if Egypt becomes independent, which may well begin as a process in 2012, it would not build its nuclear program because of Iran, but because of Israel. Turkey has never expressed concern with Iran attaining legal nuclear weapons capabilities and in the 2010 Tehran declaration proposing that Iran export enriched uranium for TRR fuel Turkey has officially expressed agreement with Iran's right to enrich uranium domestically.

The idea of Iranian legal nuclear weapons capabilities fueling an arms race has always been a lie and Barack Obama knew it was false in 2010 when he said it. His concern with Iran having legal nuclear weapons capabilities has always been that it might limit Israel's ability to invade its neighbors as Jeffrey Goldberg has described.

But US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta this year has said something that may be slightly different:

I think the international strategy here, and this really has been an international strategy to apply sanctions, to apply diplomatic pressure on them, to try to convince Iran that if, you know, they want to do what's right, they need to join the international family of nations and act in a responsible way. I think the pressure of the sanctions, I think the pressure of diplomatic pressures from everywhere -- Europe, United States, elsewhere-- is working to put pressure on them, to make them understand that they cannot continue to do what they're doing. Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability. And that's what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is do not develop a nuclear weapon. That's a red line for us.

So Panetta says Iran cannot continue to do what it's doing, but what Iran is doing is not building a nuclear weapon. But Panetta has separated actually building a weapon into a different category. Building a weapon is a red line. What Iran is doing, building what outside of Israel's region would be legal nuclear weapons capabilities does not cross a red line.

The United States does not have any plausible options that would prevent Iran from acquiring legal nuclear weapons capabilities. Sanctions will not do it. A military attack would not do it. The incentives the US is able to offer - constrained by the US commitment to prevent any country in Israel's region from becoming powerful enough to threaten it - are not enough to get Iran to voluntarily accept US demands to indefinitely limit its nuclear program.

The US would like to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear capabilities, but it does not have resources that would enable it to deliver that desire. The most likely scenario from here is that the US presses for sanctions, possibly enough to put Iran into a war footing. Iranians are harmed, US troops are harmed, US interests are harmed, and ten years from now Iran's government is just as solidly in place and its nuclear program has developed just as much as if the US had not bothered.

The US has the option of literally making sacrifices for nothing. Or the US can begin acknowledging that having legal capabilities to make a nuclear weapon is a concept separate from deploying actual nuclear weapons. While the US would rather Iran not have those capabilities, it may be approaching the point that it cannot commit to preventing Iran from acquiring them.

The US, according to Panetta, now has two separate objectives regarding Iran's nuclear program. One is preventing Iran from acquiring legal nuclear weapons capabilities. That objective is a concern. The other is preventing Iran from deploying an actual nuclear weapon. That is a red line.

I'm often overly optimistic. But depending on how flexible the US is willing to be about its concern, not its red line, it is possible that both the US and Iran can benefit from avoiding further escalation. An important question remains: Is the United States psychologically capable of admitting that its powers are limited? That there are things the US can be concerned about but that it cannot prevent.

Panetta possibly is taking a step in that direction. If the US goes further in that direction a large amount of pointless loss of lives and resources can be avoided.

A guide for non-Westerners to understand Western concerns about theocracy

2012-01-07T17:06:00.002-05:00

Westerners say they are concerned with theocracy but they really are not. It is a lie and it is understandable that someone might believe that lie because they say it so often. But you'll understand the Western position on governments in the Middle East much better once you see past it.

To Westerners both "theocracy" and "like Iran" mean hostile to Israel, and because the US is committed to Israel, for Westerners that necessarily implies hostile to the US.

Saudi Arabia, for example, is a real theocracy. You'll very rarely, almost never, see an expression of concern about Saudi Arabia's internal policies in Western commentary.

Westerners are simply not concerned about whether Egyptians are ruled by Sharia law, much less whether or not there is a bill of rights in Egypt. We've seen the Mubarak dictatorship that Juan Cole a year ago described as "unproblematic for the US". Westerners are concerned that Egypt will pose a threat to Israel.

If it does, Westerners are prepared to call Egypt a repressive dictatorship no matter how fair its elections actually are or what freedoms are afforded to its citizens.

The United States and the West will oppose Egypt if and only if Egypt develops into a threat to Israel. Then they will lie and say this opposition is based on "theocracy" or "rights" or "repression".

Westerners cannot just say "we oppose any government of any type that does not accept Israel" because that statement would contradict deeply held core Western ideals. But that statement is true, so Westerners lie, first to themselves and then to non-Westerners.

Hezbollah, for example, barely has a veto in a Lebanese political process that is heavily weighted against Shiites. Westerners present Lebanon, Lebanon, as a repressive dictatorship. While ignoring, for example, Jordan.

It's a game. You can play if you want. But if you don't want to play, it is very safe to ignore any Western feigned concern for "sharia" or "theocracy" or "rights" in the greater Middle East.

Juan Cole and the tension of liberal colonialism

2012-01-02T15:50:00.006-05:00

Juan Cole has listed 5 foreign policy challenges for the US in 2012, number 3 being Syria and number 2 being Egypt. One might be charitable and describe Cole as neutral on the issue of states in the Middle East being independent and accountable to their populations rather than to Cole's country, the United States. But one must admit that he expresses comfort and reassurance at the idea that the foreign policies at least of these countries are not determined locally.

My comment posted there did not pass the moderation filter, but I'll leave it here.

The Muslim Brotherhood is making it clear that they want to submit the 1979 Camp David Peace treaty to a national referendum. A Muslim Brotherhood prime minister or president is most unlikely to be willing to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu or to continue to help impose a blockade on the Palestinian civilians of Gaza. The Egyptian military is still ultimately in control, and it does not want hostilities with Israel, so that this change is unlikely to go beyond producing tensions.

What makes you write, in the context of a future with a sitting parliament and an Islamist post-Mubarak prime minister, that the Egyptian military is still ultimately in control? The constitution of post-Mubarak Egypt has not been written or at least not released to the public.

Have you heard indications of this behind the scenes from Obama administration officials?

You also present it as a reassuring thing, which raises the question, do you approve of Egypt’s voters not being sovereign over Egypt’s foreign policy but that instead Egypt’s foreign policy should remain accountable to the United States?

In any case, rising Egyptian-Israeli tensions for the first time since the early 1970s present a severe challenge to US policy, which attempts to maintain good relations with both.

That’s an interesting way to put that. Would you describe the US’ relationship with Iran under the Shah as an “attempt to maintain good relations” with Iran? The Shah, like Mubarak and Tantawi, was a dictator over whom the United States held tremendous leverage and over whom his own people had no leverage until at least hundreds were dying in the streets in protest. Is that your idea of good relations?

The crisis in Syria remains grave. It can only end in one of three ways: The regime succeeds in repressing the reform movement, 2) the reform movement comes to power, or 3) the regime makes enough changes to allow a slow transition away from one-party authoritarianism.

I don’t remember ever reading you characterize Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or UAE as authoritarian.

Last year the phrase you used to describe the Mubarak dictatorship was “unproblematic for the US”. No mention of authoritarianism there either.

And of course, you’ve referred in agreement to Freedom House describing Morocco and Kuwait as “partly free”.

Do you give passes to pro-US authoritarian dictatorships in the Middle East? If so, why?

Cole came to prominence as a critic of the George W. Bush administration. I once thought he was far more liberal than he actually is. Cole's only criticism of Mubarak, of Iran's Shah, and if he's consistent also his only criticism of the British indirect rule of parts of India and Great Britain's control of the colonies that are now called UAE is that those examples of colonialism may not effectively hold those countries under control.

If Western countries are actually able to hold non-Western countries effectively, Cole's language indicates that he favors colonial-style relations. That puts him in agreement with Barack Obama no more or less than it does with Winston Churchill and Cecil Rhodes.

Mohamed ElBaradei discloses US efforts to limit Egyptian democracy

2011-12-30T04:51:00.007-05:00

Reported in the Jerusalem Post, Mohamed ElBaradei says the US has been holding secret talks with Egypt's military dictatorship about Egypt's peace treaty with Israel.

Speaking to the Iranian semi-official Fars news agency on Tuesday, Elbaradiei, the former International Atomic Energy Agency head, indicated that the future of Israel's peace treaty with Egypt was at the center of a recent and secret round of talks between U.S. officials and members of the Egyptian Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

"The negotiations were completely secret and confidential," ElBaradei told Fars, adding that what the ruling military indicated "said was that the talks were about bilateral and mutual relations, but I believe that Americans wanted to ensure that the deals signed between Egypt and Israel will remain intact if Islamists ascend to power."

A couple of things to mention, now that unless ElBaradei is lying, there is no question the US is imposing its influence on Egypt's dictatorship (as it has for more than three decades up to now).

1) The US could have been holding secret discussions about holding elections in September when the SCAS said it would hold them. It is clear that the problem is not that the US does not have leverage over Egypt's military government. The problem is that the US chooses to use its leverage to advance a single agenda, Israel's strategic position.

2) The SCAS has claimed to be an interim government that in theory should not be in a position to make any commitments about Egypt's future relations with Israel - and certainly not any commitments that specifically take into account that Islamists, not the military, is poised to win the elections.

3) The United States has issued a public statement claiming that military dictatorship should transfer power to a civilian government. Afterwards, the US began holding secret discussions with the dictatorship directly aimed at limiting the scope of powers of any future civilian government by retaining the power to set policy related to Israel in the military dictatorship.

The United States strongly believes that the new Egyptian government must be empowered with real authority immediately. We believe that Egypt’s transition to democracy must continue, with elections proceeding expeditiously, and all necessary measures taken to ensure security and prevent intimidation. Most importantly, we believe that the full transfer of power to a civilian government must take place in a just and inclusive manner that responds to the legitimate aspirations of the Egyptian people, as soon as possible.

4) We occasionally see claims that Egypt's military holds power despite the wishes of the US because it benefits from control of the country. Instead we see the military agreeing with the United States to relinquish control of the country and to maintain control only over the policies, regarding Israel, that the United States wants to prevent from falling into the hands of Egypt's voters.

The truth about the United States' and Barack Obama's role in preventing Egypt's voters from controlling Egyptian policy is already seeping out.

Does the United States have the luxury of being able to do nothing against Iran?

2011-12-28T11:15:00.003-05:00

The United States, on behalf of Israel, has taken the position that Iran must not be able to develop a nuclear weapon. The United States, also on behalf of Israel, has deceptively redefined "nuclear weapon" to mean the technology necessary to build a nuclear weapon, whether or not Iran actually does build one.

By the definition the United States uses with Iran; Japan, Brazil, Canada, Germany and many other countries have nuclear weapons, even though they are non-nuclear weapons states by the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The US' redefinition of "nuclear weapon" has no support in any document and explicitly violates the terms of the NPT which are to be applied "without discrimination".

US leaders, nuclear policy experts and the US society generally justify the US' stance because Iran poses the kind of threat to Israel's viability as an enforced majority Jewish political state that a strong Angola could have posed to South Africa's viability as an enforced majority White political state. US leaders, nuclear and foreign policy experts and society generally have decided that the non-Jewish people of Israel's region should be denied technology and along with being subjected to various forms of warfare or preferably rule by leadership accountable to Israel's allies rather than to their own populations - colonialism - to ensure that the Jewish people of Israel never suffer the indignity of living under a non-Jewish prime minister.

Iran's leaders, policy experts and society generally disagree with their counterparts in the United States about whether the viability of a state for fewer than six million Jewish people should be a determining factor in the access to technology of over 70 million Iranians.

Aside, in the most important development in the recent history of the Middle East, the people of Egypt are poised to break out of the colonial relationship Hosni Mubarak maintained with the United States on Israel's behalf against the interests of the Egyptian people. The United States is certainly working to reduce the scope of Egyptian independence, but it is not at all clear that it will be successful.

But in Iran a question is coming to the fore more quickly than with other countries in the region: what if there is something Israel insists it needs to be viable, but the US just cannot deliver it?

The first problem for the US is that it has a position that is not coherent enough to even express publicly. The US and Israel state in public that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon. And then behind closed doors say "by 'nuclear weapon' we also mean what Japan has". Of course Japan does not have a nuclear weapon, but because the United States and Israel cannot even honestly express their position to their own publics, the discussions that would be necessary to reach an informed societal consensus on the way forward can't happen.

The bigger problem for the US is that every action it could take hoping to prevent Iran from attaining legal nuclear weapons capabilities would have the reverse effect of at least demonstrating to Iran that these capabilities are strategically important while increasing the Iranian sense that it has sacrificed for them while also increasing the value to Iran of presenting the world with a fait accompli and building an actual weapon.

US, Israeli or Western acts of sabotage have literally made martyrs out of Iranian scientists and have increased the political attachment Iran has to its nuclear program. The sanctions that have be placed on Iran since 2006 when it began a pilot program to enrich uranium have made the workshop-level program Iran was willing to accept then unacceptable now since Iran has paid a substantial price for the tons of low enriched uranium now in its stockpile.

Historically, sanctions strengthen central governments rather than weakening them. US efforts could take a toll on Iranian civilians, but Iran's government would be put into the stronger position of directing more limited resources to a population more dependent on it. Sanctions that are damaging also invite Iranian retaliations of various forms that increase the costs on all sides while making legal nuclear weapons capabilities more strategically important for Iran.

An actual attack on Iran's nuclear facilities might or might not cause Iran to leave the NPT, but there is no question that Iran's nuclear program would be brought back at least to the stage it reached before the bombing and that a post-bombing Iran would be more, not less inclined to deploy actual nuclear weapons.

So what if the US really wants Israel to have a monopoly of nuclear weapons in its region, and for every non-Jewish state in the region to be denied legal nuclear weapons capabilities such as those Japan has, but the US is unable to fulfill that desire?

Sanctions would be painful for Iran, and Iran's retaliations could be painful for the US, but in the end, they wouldn't work. Directly attacking Iran's facilities also wouldn't work. What if there is no course the US can take that would prevent Iran, ten years from now, from honestly being able to say, as Japan and Brazil can today, that the only thing preventing the deployment of a nuclear weapon is a political decision?

What if the only options available to the US are to do nothing, or to take actions that will only tip the political decision Iran will still ultimately be able to make further in the direction of deploying an actual nuclear weapon?

Some American observers have this idea that there is nothing the United States cannot do. For over a trillion dollars with a maximal occupation, the United States could not establish a pro-US government in Iraq. With a tremendous effort multiple times the scale of that in Iraq, the United States might be able to capture Tehran. Maybe. But ten years after, there very likely would be an anti-US government there that would revisit the nuclear issue.

It is coming into view that one thing on the list of things the United States cannot do is prevent Iran from at least attaining a legal nuclear weapons capability.

Israel really wants to prevent Iran from attaining that. Israel is not going to get its wish. As a consolation, Israel would like Iran to be under harsh economic penalties. The US and Europe would pay a heavy cost to indulge Israel on that issue.

A commenter here recently said that the United States may not have the luxury of doing nothing about Iran's nuclear program. Doing nothing may well be the United States' least counter-productive option regarding Iran's nuclear program. The type of thinking embodied in that comment may very soon crash into the wall of reality.

Pentagon: "We have no indication that the Iranians have made a decision to develop a nuclear weapon"

2011-12-21T01:38:00.002-05:00

Filed in the category of things that are well understood by people who follow the Iranian nuclear issue closely, but very often deliberately distorted for more casual audiences.

From the New York Times:

In an interview broadcast Monday on “CBS Evening News,” Mr. Panetta was asked whether Iran could have a nuclear weapon in 2012.

“It would be sometime around a year that they would be able to do it,” he said. “Perhaps a little less.”

...

But on Tuesday, George Little, the Pentagon press secretary, said Mr. Panetta’s comments should not be taken as a prediction that Iran would have a nuclear weapon within a year.

“The secretary was clear that we have no indication that the Iranians have made a decision to develop a nuclear weapon,” Mr. Little said. “He was asked to comment on prospective and aggressive timelines on Iran’s possible production of nuclear weapons — and he said if, and only if, they made such a decision. He didn’t say that Iran would, in fact, have a nuclear weapon in 2012.”

Mr. Little said inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency remained in Iran and had “good access to Iran’s continuing production of low-enriched uranium.” Should Iran choose to “break out” — diverting low-enriched uranium to produce weapons-grade highly enriched uranium — the inspectors could detect it, Mr. Little said.

As long as the secretary was clear.

US power in Iraq is now in a freefall

2011-12-20T01:03:00.005-05:00

The US, contrary to my expectations, seems to have pulled its troops out of Iraq. There has been talk in the Western press that after the pullout is complete, Iraq and the US would more quietly come up with a way to bring a significant number of troops back into the country. Recent events make that seem either unlikely or irrelevant.

Instead the US now has 20,000 troops in Kuwait, a country that does not have to worry about voters disapproving of foreign policy decisions.

As an aside, the question over Egypt is will that country become more like Iraq, where voters' preferences already significantly influence policy-making, or will Egypt become more like Kuwait, a country leftist commentator Juan Cole and the right-wing US organization "Freedom House" describe as "partly free" because while any preference expressed by voters can be overruled by a pro-US dictator, there is a democratic veneer in the form of a parliament with limited policy power.

But the US has openly been working to find a place in Iraqi politics for former CIA agent Iyad Allawi and his Iraqiya party and in the days after the US withdrawal of troops from Iraq that effort has decisively failed.

Again about Egypt, because the Egyptian conflict is by far the most important event in the Middle East today, yes, I expect US influence over Egypt to decline very quickly after a government accountable to Egyptian voters takes power. But that is what democracy is. The opposite of that is colonialism. The US has to decide, and after deciding it will make even more clear to the world than it already has, whether or not the US intends to remain a colonial power in the Middle East on behalf of Israel. The cost of the US maintaining its current colonial role will only increase.

But there was a recent attempted attack, in the Green Zone, on Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's life, and Maliki seems to believe that parts of the Iraqiya party were behind it. It is impossible that this attempt was not discussed in last weeks' meeting between Maliki and Barack Obama in Washington DC, but I've found no mention of it in press reports of their meeting.

An article in the Telegraph references the claim that there are elements of the country that are working to execute a coup against Maliki's government:

Over the past two months, Mr Maliki has ordered the arrest of hundreds of people connected to Saddam's ousted Ba'ath party after claiming that intelligence documents provided by Libya's transitional government showed they were plotting a coup.

I'm not sure what to make of this connection to Libya, but that country, now that the tens of thousands of senseless and avoidable deaths of civilians and soldiers caused by NATO's intervention are behind us, is going to be another interesting political system to watch over the next year.

The Christian Science Monitor tells a story of Vice President Tariq al Hashimi, a Sunni member of the Iraqiya party being detained but then released on the way to Kurdistan.

Hashimi and several other Sunni politicians were about to fly to Kurdistan Sunday evening for dinner with Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani when Maliki's head of military intelligence ordered them not to depart. According to one account, from a leading politician who declined to be identified due the sensitivity of the issue, Hashimi, vice premier Saleh al-Mutlaq, and Finance Minister Rafie al-Essawi were already aboard the plane when they were ordered to disembark.
...
After a flurry of phone calls involving political figures from nearly every party, Maliki relented and allowed the men to continue the journey.

The New York Times later introduces the detail that Kurdistan is not under Baghdad's control.

On Monday night, Mr. Hashimi was in the northern semiautonomous region of Kurdistan, beyond the reach of security forces controlled by Baghdad. It was unclear when — or if — he would return to Baghdad.

Effectively Iraq has been dismembered and while I've seen hints, I have not until now seen this spelled out explicitly in a mainstream Western news source.

The freefall in US power in Iraq though is represented by the direct intercession by the US Embassy on behalf of members of Hashimi's security detail who made videotaped confessions again reported in the Christian Science Monitor:

Iraq's Interior Ministry announced Saturday that it would televise the confessions of the first two suspects that night, but the plan touched off a firestorm. The US embassy, silent for most of the past year in the face of other political excesses, objected publicly. It said in a statement that US officials had not yet seen the actual confessions and urged Iraq to investigate all allegations "in a transparent manner in accordance with Iraqi law."

On Sunday, Iraq's supreme judicial authority ruled that the confessions of the alleged "cell" members couldn't be aired until the investigation is completed.

A normal embassy does not expect to see actual confessions before a government makes a decision to report them or not. Ambassador James Jeffrey acted in this case as if the station in Baghdad is not a normal embassy. Which is to say the United States fairly openly and routinely tries to intervene in Iraqi politics in a way that at least somewhat subverts Iraqi sovereignty.

But striking is the total failure of that intervention, reported the next day by the New York Times:

The government made its case against Mr. Hashimi in a half-hour television broadcast that was as aggressively promoted as a prime-time special. In grainy video confessions, three men said they had committed murders on Mr. Hashimi’s behalf. They said they had blown up cars, attacked convoys with silenced pistols and were rewarded with envelopes containing $3,000 in American bills.

The faction of the Iraqi political system most beholden to the United States has not only never gained a secure foothold in power in Baghdad, but now faces eviction from even participating in Iraq's national political system. US leverage over Iraq remains in the form of military and economic agreements and the Saddam Hussein-era Chapter 7 UN Security Council sanctions that the George Bush and Barack Obama have very pettily refused to lift after Saddam Hussein was deposed.

But for the US to have any influence over Iraq at all, there also have to be people inside of Iraq's political system who want to cooperate, to show deference toward the US. This episode shows that the US is losing this very rapidly.

Eric Margolis and Stratfor's George Friedman discuss US policy on Egypt

2011-12-18T11:11:00.005-05:00

There are two narratives regarding Egypt that are developing in the United States. One honest, and one dishonest. The United States being the United States, the honest one is probably in the minority. Articles from Eric Margolis and George Friedman of Stratfor illustrate these two narratives.

Let's look at Eric Margolis' article "Time to apologize for the West's shameful support of dictatorship in Egypt"

Egyptians clearly want democracy and parliamentary government, as do people across the Arab world. But Egypt’s mighty military-security establishment and its western backers do not: they are fighting a bitter action to slow down real democracy and to safeguard their privileges and power.

Egypt’s military gets nearly $3 billion in US funds and arms each year, plus millions more in “black” money from CIA and the Pentagon – in addition to millions in economic aid. The US supplies all of the military’s key weapons systems and retains control of the spare parts keeping them operating. The most important US intelligence and security agencies maintain large stations in Cairo to protect the regime. Half of Egypt’s food imports are financed by the US.

Many of Egypt’s key generals “trained” at US military colleges and defense courses where they were vetted by CIA and DIA. As with Turkey’s large armed forces – at least until nine years ago – Egypt’s military was joined at the hip to the US defense establishment and arms industry. In exchange, Egypt agreed to become a tacit ally of Israel.

Given Egypt’s role as a virtual US protectorate, the flood of hypocrisy now issuing from Washington, London, Paris and Ottawa over their alleged support of Egyptian democracy is striking. For the past thirty years, these powers have ardently backed Egypt’s notably ruthless, brutal dictatorship whose security forces used torture, rape, and murder to terrorize its citizens.

While Egyptians want democracy, the military wants political figureheads and the right to intervene in politics to protect its interests aka “national security” – the same demands used for decades by the rightwing Turkish military to block democracy. Egypt’s generals insist there be no investigations of human rights abuses. Washington is trying to sustain the Egypt-Israel alliance that all Egyptians detest.

There is not much to add to Margolis' statement, except that when he says that the Western backers of Egypt's dictatorship are fighting to prevent democracy from arising in the country, it raises the question of how that works, how these Western backers of Egypt's dictatorship justify their efforts to prevent Egyptian democracy.

George Friedman gives us a look into the perspective of current Western colonialism in his article "Egypt and the Idealist-Realist Debate in U.S. Foreign Policy".

Then pose this scenario: Assume there is a choice between a repressive, undemocratic regime that is in the interests of a Western country and a regime that is democratic but repressive by Western standards and hostile to those interests. Which is preferable, and what steps should be taken?

These are blindingly complex questions that some observers — the realists as opposed to the idealists — say not only are unanswerable but also undermine the ability to pursue national interests without in any way improving the moral character of the world. In other words, you are choosing between two types of repression from a Western point of view and there is no preference. Therefore, a country like the United States should ignore the moral question altogether and focus on a simpler question, and one that’s answerable: the national interest.

Egypt is an excellent place to point out the tension within U.S. foreign policy between idealists, who argue that pursuing Enlightenment principles is in the national interest, and realists, who argue that the pursuit of principles is very different from their attainment. You can wind up with regimes that are neither just nor protective of American interests. In other words, the United States can wind up with a regime hostile to the United States and oppressive by American standards. Far from a moral improvement, this would be a practical disaster.

Friedman's basic argument is that an Egyptian democracy would be repressive by Western standards so the United States is in an ambiguous position in that it supports a colonial-style dictatorship, but is, in the minds of US officials such as Barack Obama, saving the Egyptians from a democratic government that would be repressive.

When Westerners like Barack Obama and George Friedman tell the story, the colonial dictatorships that the US implements to save countries like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait and others from repressive democracies just happen also to follow US directions on policies that the US considers important. It just happens that if these countries did not follow US direction in their foreign policy, Israel as a enforced Jewish political majority state would not be viable. Friedman's entire article does not mention Israel. Obama often speaks before Jewish audiences in the United States without whom he could not be elected and tells them that the viability of Israel is his primary foreign policy objective.

Does Friedman believe that a democratic Muslim majority regime in Egypt would necessarily be repressive by his or Western standards? I can't read his mind. It is a stupid thing to believe if he really believes it. More likely this is an example of directed reasoning. The US has to oppose democracy in Egypt for Israel to be viable. He wants Israel to be viable. So he believes what he has to believe to advocate US opposition to democracy in Egypt. It is quite possible that he does not even notice it happening in his thought process.

It's striking how little has changed. Friedman writes an article that could have been used to justify Great Britain's colonialism a century ago. Whether he is lying primarily to us or to himself, Friedman's reasoning is ultimately motivated by the idea that preventing fewer than six million Jews from suffering the indignity of losing their majority state the way white South Africans have outweighs the right of over 80 million Egyptians to control the policies of their government.

The decline of the post-Revolutionary United States

2011-12-17T12:23:00.004-05:00

Lidia, one of the commenters here, wrote about the decline in US civil liberties that has been accelerating more rapidly since 2001. Some people are surprised, I admit that I had been one, to see this acceleration in the withdrawal of the US commitment to civil liberties continue under President Barack Obama. From the Patriot Act to US torture facilities to the most recent law that arguably purports to nullify the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution for people accused by the government of aiding terrorism.

That is a topic that I have not written enough about but that is ripe for much more discussion.

I've for a long time believed that the US' pretensions of civil liberties are during the modern era more an artifact of the US' position as a nearly unchallenged power than of any US ideological position, and much less any reflection of US virtue.

As the US becomes less relatively powerful in a global sense, it certainly will give up the rights and protections it could offer when it was more dominant.

That, for most of the seven billion people in the world is probably more a good thing than a bad thing.

The US long ago stopped being the revolutionary country it was when it was founded. The US of 1780, keeping in mind that it was institutionally racist, was a radical nation. Before the formal invention of communism - which is an extension of liberal ideas - the US was one of the most radically liberal nations in the world.

The US of 1780 was a country that could sacrifice the secure execution of power by its government itself to an ideal such as freedom of speech. The US of 1780 was, for its time, a revolutionary country.

Today's US does not believe in sacrifice for ideals. Sacrifice for ideals is close to what it means for a government, an organization or even a person to be revolutionary. The 1780s US, racism aside, was more like 1960s Cuba or 1980s Iran than the 2011 US.

So the freedom of speech we see in the US in 2011 is not like the freedom of speech that existed in the US in 1780. The freedom of speech available in the US today comes only from the fact that the US government now has a lot of resources to securely execute power despite that.

The important thing I'm getting at is that as we see freedom of speech decline, we are seeing an accurate reflection of the decline of US relative global power - according to the perceptions of the US government itself.

From a global point of view, that is more exciting than troubling to me. I certainly welcome it and I'll do what I can to maintain myself as an individual but I as an individual, on a global scale, am very comfortable anyway. I'm nobody to worry about.

I've noticed what you've noticed, Lidia, but my feeling about it is far more intrigued than fearful.

Seeing Syria's conflict through the lenses of Egypt and Iraq

2011-12-17T11:36:00.003-05:00

Barack Obama should not have a vote about whether Syria's president Bashar Assad is legitimate. His position that Assad must leave makes a graceful resolution of this dispute nearly, if not fully, impossible.

That US position implies continued support for the foreign supplies of weapons that are entering Syria from the territories of US allies that can only make the situation more deadly.

The US has no problem with what happened in Iraq and the neutered state that is the result of the tremendous death and dislocation that occurred there. Crudely speaking, Iraq is far less of a threat to US regional objectives - particularly Israel's military dominance that the US is committed to maintaining - than it would have been if that violence had not occurred.

We just don't know how much support Assad has. There really is one legitimate way to determine what political grouping has how much support and that is elections.

Barack Obama is not Syria's ally. A foreign demand that elections must be post-Assad amounts to an unacceptable foreign demand for regime change. No government would submit to that. It is really a demand for civil war.

There are widespread attacks on government forces. Ambushes, not defensive actions to protect demonstrations. As long as US allies are willing to pay for them (almost certainly directed by or coordinated with the Obama administration) I guess there is no way to stop them, but they are very unfortunate and are an attack on Syria itself more than on Assad.

The way out has always been elections. There were local elections in Syria that have been very sparsely reported in the West. But whether or how western news agencies cover Syrian elections is only minimally important. Elections can not only generate legitimacy for the Syrian government but probably more importantly, they can establish a legitimate domestic opposition. If Assad either wins the most votes in a national election or loses to a Syrian who is not based in Turkey and supported by the United States and hands power to that person, then that would effectively mark the end of this conflict, at least from the point of view of legitimacy.

This is all playing against the background of the US visions for non-Jewish countries in Israel's region. We have Iraq which was neutered by hugely destructive sanctions, invasion, occupation and civil war and that for some time will no longer be an effective regional power. We have Egypt where a pro-US dictatorship is attempting to retain control of foreign policy to keep the country subordinate to Israel while allowing some veneer of civilian control over domestic issues and we have what are effectively pure colonies. Countries like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, UAE and others have relationships with the United States effectively identical to the nominally independent Princedoms of the Indian Raj of Great Britain.

The United States may well fail in Egypt, but the success or failure of the US to maintain control over at least the aspects of Egyptian policy that are most important to it will either way have an important impact on the apparent legitimacy of the US-backed opposition to Assad.

A year later, the US should still be embarrassed by the death of Mohammad Bouazizi

2011-12-17T11:06:00.004-05:00

Ben Ali was a dictator over whom the US held a tremendous amount of leverage long before Mohammad Bouazizi died.

All Americans should be embarrassed by Bouazizi’s death and by the fact that the United States did not act in line with the its own professed founding values long before by making a full transfer of sovereign power to popularly accountable political bodies a condition of US cooperation.

All Americans should be more embarrassed that in Jordan, in Saudi Arabia, in UAE in Kuwait and other countries, the US maintains its relationships with unaccountable pro-US dictators that reflect the colonial relationships many of those same governments had with imperial Great Britain a century ago.

Lastly, Egypt’s current pro-US dictatorship has communicated to the Western news establishment that it hopes to continue to hold Egypt’s foreign policy outside of the control of any elected government.

December 1, 2011 – New York Times:

The new majority is likely to increase the difficulty of sustaining the United States’ close military and political partnership with post-Mubarak Egypt, though the military has said it plans to maintain a monopoly over many aspects of foreign affairs.

December 18, 2011 – New York Times:

But the generals have insisted that they retain full control of the interim government, and they have sought to carve out permanent institutional autonomy and political powers under the new charter.

The Obama administration calls for the dictatorship to cede “real power” to the civilians. But real power is not necessarily all power and is not necessarily inconsistent with the plans the pro-US dictatorship has expressed. Imperial Great Britain offered “real power” to Egypt in 1922, as long as that power did not impinge on the British prerogative to direct policy on matters Britain considered important.

The US State Department on November 25, 2011:

The United States strongly believes that the new Egyptian government must be empowered with real authority immediately. We believe that Egypt’s transition to democracy must continue, with elections proceeding expeditiously, and all necessary measures taken to ensure security and prevent intimidation. Most importantly, we believe that the full transfer of power to a civilian government must take place in a just and inclusive manner that responds to the legitimate aspirations of the Egyptian people, as soon as possible.

Now that Egypt’s dictatorship has publicly expressed to the US news media that it intends to retain control of Egypt’s foreign affairs – which it currently executes under the direction of the United States – after it has fully transferred the powers it intends to transfer to a civilian government, the US has notably not publicly or even off of the record expressed opposition or disapproval of this plan.

The United States has a military that is fully subordinate to its elected government. American presidents, officials, press, analysts and commentators should be embarrassed by the plans of the pro-US dictatorship to deny that sovereignty to the people who elect Egypt’s government.

More than a generation from now, memoirs may be released and records declassified that show the full extent of US involvement in the plans of the pro-US Egyptian dictatorship to deny political power to any elected government. The US and Britain officially denied their role in wresting power from the elected bodies of Iran for decades after 1953.

But even what is known today about US policy in the Middle East should be, by America’s professed founding values, an embarrassment to every aware person in the United States. That embarrassment should have existed long before, while still being greatly magnified by, the death of Mohammad Bouazizi.

The implications of Jeffery Goldberg's Israel/Iran nuclear scenario

2011-12-15T14:39:00.003-05:00

Jeffery Goldberg is usually not worth paying attention to but recently, certainly accidentally, he has spelled out the type of scenario that drives Israel's and the West's (on behalf of Israel) desire that Iran not only meet the normal obligations of the NPT to not build a nuclear weapon, but in addition that Iran not have what Japan, Brazil, Canada, Germany and many other NPT-non nuclear weapons states have, legal nuclear weapons capabilities.

Examined closely, Goldberg makes an argument exactly opposite from what he is trying to make, but that might merit a closer look.

But I'm beginning to question the seriousness of some of the players in this drama: If Iran's nuclear program is actually unacceptable, then why the hesitancy to sanction Iran's Central Bank? I know the reason, of course: Such sanctions might lead to a spike in gasoline prices. But either you think Iran's nuclear program is the most serious foreign policy challenge facing America, or you don't.

First, Goldberg believes the US should suffer economic consequences of sanctioning Iran's central bank because Iran's nuclear program is the most serious foreign policy challenge facing America. That raises the question of what if the sanctions Goldberg recommends do not actually slow Iran's nuclear program?

It is perverse but the scenario Goldberg later spells out also demonstrates that the more the US is willing to sacrifice to prevent Iran from having legal nuclear weapons capabilities like other countries, the more that US sacrifice confirms the strategic value of those capabilities particularly to Iran.

From Goldberg:

Imagine the following scenario: Hezbollah launches a serious attack on Israel's north. Israel begins to retaliate. Iran, coming to the defense of its Lebanese proxy, makes a not-so-subtle threat: If you invade Lebanon, we will respond, without saying how. At the same time, Israeli intelligence learns that Iran is mating nuclear warheads to their fissile cores. Do you think Israel is going to wait to pre-empt a possible Iranian nuclear attack?

My first observation is that Israel may well not have better options for attacking Iran in the indeterminate future of this scenario than it does today. As of today, Israel does not have any option that would destroy Iran's nuclear program. Even the US, according to bombing advocates, could only set back Iran's program for a short period while also making it more likely that Iran actually eventually would build a weapon.

But let's add more flesh to Goldberg's scenario. Hezbollah's serious attack was prompted by what? An assassination attempt on Nasrallah? Israel bombing Beirut or the Bekaa valley? If Goldberg is imagining that just out of the blue, Hezbollah began attacking Israel's north that just confirms how unserious he is. On the other hand, the scenario Goldberg is spelling out does show how, for Zionists more serious than Goldberg, an Iranian legal nuclear weapons capability could deter Israeli provocations against Lebanon that otherwise would have been considered.

Now let's look at the Iranian threat: "If you invade Lebanon, we will respond."

Goldberg may not realize this, but Israel does have the option of not invading Lebanon.

And now to the core of Goldberg's scenario: "At the same time, Israeli intelligence learns that Iran is mating nuclear warheads to their fissile cores." We see Goldberg is not imagining Iran entering his scenario with deployed nuclear weapons. He is imagining Iran being capable of, in response to what it considers a provocation, producing fissile material that it could use in a relatively short time to produce a weapon. Many states that are non-weapons members of the NPT have that capability right now.

Members of the US nuclear policy community have as far as I've seen been completely unable to produce a coherent justification for their insistence that Iran must not have legal nuclear weapons capabilities. They acknowledge that it is legal and that many other countries have it, but for reasons they refuse to put into words, they believe countries in Israel's region should not have those capabilities. This scenario that Goldberg presents is ultimately their motivation. They believe Israel must be able to attack anyone in its region who opposes Zionism without fear of an eventual response.

So we see the treat Goldberg imagines for Israel. Hezbollah would have more options and Israel's ability to "retaliate" by invading Lebanon would be complicated by Iran having legal nuclear weapons capabilities. Where is the threat to the US though? Goldberg says US consumers should pay higher gas prices, not even expressing confidence that these higher gas prices would actually accomplish the intention of coercing Iran to give up legal nuclear weapons capabilities. But nothing about Goldberg's scenario makes Iran's nuclear program the most serious foreign policy challenge facing America.

What does the United States intend to threaten Iran with that makes it so important that Iran not have a legal stock of fissile material? When Goldberg says that it is worth harming the US economy which is gingerly recovering from a recession he may be speaking solely on behalf of Israel, hoping Israel maintains the ability to invade Lebanon. But if Barack Obama agrees, it is reasonable or at least prudent for Iranian planners to assume Obama agrees because the US hopes to gain the option of attacking Tehran, occupying or militarily breaking Iran apart.

Goldberg's spike in gas prices would be far more likely to cost Obama his second term in office than they would be to cause Iran to relinquish its rights and agree with Goldberg that no country in Israel's region can have legal nuclear weapons capabilities. What does the US have planned that taking such a risk might be worth the cost to Obama? If Obama is willing to take that risk, he is telling Iranian planners that legal nuclear weapons capabilities may one day save their country.

Members of the Western nuclear policy communities from unnamed analysts up the President Barack Obama are constantly lying about the dispute over Iran's nuclear program. When they say "nuclear weapon" in the context of Iran, they are deceptively redefining that term to mean legal nuclear weapons capabilities such as those Japan has. But they lie so they don't have to answer the question, why, specifically, is it so important that Iran not have legal nuclear weapons capabilities.

Goldberg comes as close as anyone I've seen to addressing the real question, at least from Israel's point of view.

Until the US side can say to Iran, in public, that this is why we want to prevent Iran from having legal nuclear weapons capabilities that other NPT signatories have, the US is leaving Iran with no choice but to assume that the US is ultimately motivated by a desire to compromise Iran's sovereignty.

Newt Gingrich on Palestine

2011-12-11T17:09:00.004-05:00

Newt Gingrich's position on Palestine does not deserve much response. Juan Cole's post on the subject is pretty much all anyone needs to read to thoroughly rebut Gingrich's claims.

The important thing to realize is that Gingrich is not an outlier in Washington, and that the US government consistently acts as though it believes exactly what Gingrich says.

But historically, Gingrich's claims are nonsense.

It is stupid because all nations are invented, and they have all been invented in the past couple of hundred years. There were peoples in pre-modern times, but in the absence of printing, literacy, modern communications, and the new post-empire model of the Enlightenment state with its educational institutions, they weren’t really nations. Those who supposedly spoke a common language couldn’t even understand one another across regions (north and south Italy, e.g.) As Eric Hobsbawm observed, people think that nations created states, but in fact states created nations. States standardized languages, e.g.

So the Palestinians aren’t more of an invented nation than anyone else.

Gingrich said that there had never been a Palestinian state in history. If you want to play the romantic nationalist game of finding ancient forebears for modern nations, it would be easy in the case of the Palestinians, who were mentioned by the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians. But today’s Palestinians are equally descended from the ancient Canaanites and as well as from the ancient Jews.

...

The European Jews ultimately formed a third of the population in Mandate Palestine, and at the end of WW II, they became militant, formed militias, assassinated officials, engaged in terrorism, and ultimately chased the British out and ethnically cleansed some 700,000 Palestinians, allowing them to create the state of Israel. The 1948 war did not necessitate the ethnic cleansing. Jordanian forces never threatened to come into the territory designated for Israel in the UNGA partition plan.

I'd add that what has happened with Gingrich and the Republicans is that Barack Obama is so similar in his Middle East policies to George Bush that in order to differentiate themselves Republicans have to move further out on the ideological spectrum. Obama having black skin makes the effect even more pronounced.

Ray Takeyh, another American colonialist worries about Iran's nuclear program

2011-12-11T13:50:00.005-05:00

Ray Takeyh, of the US Council on Foreign Relations and an unfortunately influential part of the US foreign policy establishment seeks to answer the question "why Iran remains defiant on the nuclear bomb". Iran does not remain defiant on the nuclear bomb. Iran has said completely consistently at all levels of its policy apparatus that it intends to gain the types of technologies that countries like Japan have and that it does not need to build a weapon once it is there.

Nobody has ever shown a strategic reason why Iran would not remain in the NPT and verifiably weapons-free once it attains legal nuclear weapons capability. Taking the extra step to a weapon would only make strategic sense if the US or Israel did something stupid and unexpected like attacked Tehran or staged troops for an invasion.

The same level of provocation that would bring leaving the NPT into consideration for Japan would be required for actually building a weapon to make sense for Iran. If the US and Israel do not intend to launch a provocation of that sort, there is no reason for Iran to leave the NPT, or visibly break the seals on its fissile material and make a weapon.

Takeyh knows this. More important than his why is Iran defiant question is the question why do Ray Takeyh and the rest of the US nuclear policy establishment deliberately lie regarding Iran, by describing capabilities that are legal and acceptable in non-nuclear weapons countries such as Japan, Canada, Brazil and many others, as "the nuclear bomb" in the case of Iran.

The answer to that question is that Israel perceives that it needs all of its neighbors to not only lack nuclear weapons, but also to lack the legal nuclear weapons capabilities that are allowed to all countries explicitly without discrimination under the NPT. The United States, today under Barack Obama, earlier under George W. Bush dutifully is exerting extraordinary efforts to deny the over 80 million people of Iran legal technology so that fewer than six million Jewish people in Palestine have less fear of being pressured into abandoning Zionism the way White South Africans were in the 1980s and 1990s successfully pressured into abandoning their enforced White political majority state.

So Takeyh is lying for Israel. Bill Clinton said he would jump into a ditch with a rifle to sacrifice his life for Israel. All Takeyh is doing is being dishonest. If you ask Takeyh does Japan have "the nuclear bomb", Takeyh will, obviously, say no. If you ask Takeyh would Iran have "the nuclear bomb" if it had the exact same nuclear program Japan has, after some dodging and squirming, he'll eventually say yes. He's redefined "the nuclear bomb" in the case of Iran to mislead his audience.

It is not, by now, particularly interesting, but that is what's happening. With that said, let's look at some of the text of his Washington Post op-ed piece.

Instead of conceding to intrusive U.N. resolutions or amending their behavior on issues of terrorism and regional subversion, Iran’s rulers sense that once they obtain the bomb, they can return to the international fold on their own terms.

"Terrorism and regional subversion". There are 22 states in the Arab league. Two of those states have some degree of public accountability over their foreign policy - Iraq and Lebanon, both states that often either vote with Iran on international questions or abstain. The rest, other than Syria, are more accountable to their US embassies and local US military headquarters than they are to any constituency of their people. Most of the region that Takeyh claims Iran wants to "subvert" consists of governments closer to the Shah's Iran than even to today's Lebanon which is more or less democratic despite denying proportional political power to Shiites.

Iran is a threat to US colonies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE, Kuwait and others if nothing else by its own example of no longer being a US colony. This is what Takeyh is describing as "regional subversion". There is a string of colonies that the US maintains without which Israel would not be viable as an enforced Jewish political majority state. Takeyh worries that if Iran develops legal nuclear weapons capabilities, it will threaten this string of colonies held by Takeyh's government.

By terrorism, Takeyh means Hamas and Hezbollah. Any government in the region that is accountable to its people will support organizations like those, because by the local values of the region, those are the good guys. Those are groups that are opposing among other things, the oppression of the Palestinians. Takeyh disagrees, and Takeyh wants the governments of the region to be accountable to people with his views rather than to people with local views.

This is the connection between legal nuclear weapons capabilities and democracy. Takeyh is concerned that if Iran attains legal nuclear weapons capabilities, the United States will be less able to impose anti-democratic policies on the people of Iran and elsewhere in Israel's region.

A clerical leadership whose sense of confidence is shadowed by its imagined fears sees the bomb as a means of ameliorating its vulnerabilities while escaping its predicament on the cheap.

The predicament that Takeyh fears Iran may be able to escape is that it is no longer effectively a US colony the way it was in 1975 and the way many of its neighbors are today. The local values of Tehran determine Iran's policy with respect to foreign affairs rather than the local values of New York, Florida and Washington DC as was previously the case in Iran and is now the case, for example, in today's Egypt.

Takeyh, if you read between the lines, is clear that the issue with Iran is not nuclear proliferation, but the US gaining and maintaining the ability to impose anti-democratic policies on the people of Iran. This desire to subjugate the people of Israel's region in this way is present throughout the US and Western political spectrums, from the liberal imperialists like Barack Obama and Jon Stewart to conservative imperialists like Newt Gingrich and John Bolton.

Exactly why Barack Obama and Juan Cole are wrong about Syria

2011-12-11T13:18:00.004-05:00

This is an edited version of what was originally a comment left at Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog. It may make it past the moderation filter, it may not. But as long as it is published somewhere, I'm not too concerned with Cole's editorial decisions.

Cole: Of course al-Assad has a choice! He could stop shooting demonstrators and hold free elections. That is the way you get a soft landing for Alawites. The path he is on likely ends in tragedy for everyone.

This is both wrong and a topic on which Cole neither specifies his reasoning nor allows discussion in his comments section, which is a detriment to the blog Informed Comment.

Peaceful protests cannot remove state armed forces from territory. Occupy Wall Street, for example, could not create a free or liberated area even in the one square block area of Zucotti Park.

Liberated area, in Homs or Benghazi means armed rebellion. Period. If alongside the armed rebellion there is or has been a peaceful component, the peaceful component is neither the threat to the regime nor the target of regime's armed response.

I've said before, in a comment that was not published, that Barack Obama would absolutely not allow any small town in Texas or anywhere in the US to become liberated territory, territory free of any armed security presence loyal to the US government. He would put down the rebellion that would be necessary to liberate the territory with overwhelming force. He would call the liberators terrorists and would not care at all if Juan Cole or anyone else claimed the movement was mostly peaceful or overwhelmingly peaceful.

Of course, Cole and others calling the Syrian opposition mostly peaceful would not call a movement that created or aimed to create liberated territory in Texas from which it would be possible for forces to stage to fight the government in other places "largely peaceful". It would be an insult to the intelligence of their audience for them to do so, no more or less than it is now in the case of Syria.

The part about free elections. The Turkey-based opposition, supported by Barack Obama's position that Assad is not legitimate, has put severe limits on what it, in coordination with the US would accept as "free elections". Assad and his supporters cannot run as candidates in what Obama has defined as free elections. Once free elections becomes externally directed regime change, as has become the case with Syria, then it is no longer a demand that any sovereign government could accept.

US policy today aims to dismantle Syria, to plunge Syria into a civil war. I can only guess that the US and Israel hope that 1) at least during the war, Syria will be less able to assist Hezbollah and Hamas 2) possibly Saudi money will be able to influence Syria more during and after the war than it can now 3) the US can prevent Russia from modernizing or maybe even keeping a naval base on Syrian territory.

There is no question that from the beginning the opposition sought to create liberated territory inside of Syria that no sovereign state, least of all the US under Barack Obama, would tolerate. There is no question that ambushes on Syrian government forces were present from the very beginning of the uprising. There is no question that the opposition has access to external resources.

We also have to remember that the policies that the US opposes Assad for are policies that themselves are legitimate according to local values. To get a Syria that does not support Hamas means that Syria has to, in the end, be undemocratic. To get a Syria that aligns with the US, while the US pursues its primary regional objective of being the patron of Israel, in essentially anti-democratic.

Which leads to a last point. The right to protest was abused in 1953 in Iran to produce an anti-democratic outcome. The US and Israel transparently hope to accomplish the same in Syria. US commentators such as Juan Cole and US political figures such as Barack Obama, George Bush and Hillary Clinton seem to fetishize the right to protest, much more than they support the more important and more primary right to government that is accountable to the governed.

The US stands opposed to the right to accountable government in Bahrain as well as in what are effectively US colonies of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait and others. In Bahrain, for example, a democratic majority could vote to evict the US base from their country.

The US has issued a statement calling for "real power" to be relinquished by the SCAS in Egypt. That is actually consistent with the arrangement imperial Great Britain attempted to impose on Egypt in 1922. The civilian government would have "real power" except in matters of foreign affairs where Britain reserved the right to intervene.

What Obama has not called for is for the military to _EVER_ fully return to the barracks and to be subordinate to the civilian government the way the military of the US is subordinate to the civilian government. Juan Cole noticeably also has never called for that.

So the US position on Syria is wrong - according to the values that the US professes to stand for - in a lot of ways. These do not seem to be innocent mistakes but rather the result of perception skewed by the fundamental idea that the US is justified in preventing over 400 million people in Egypt's region from being able to hold the foreign affairs of their governments accountable for the sake of an enforced political majority state for fewer than six million Jewish people.

Iraq's December 7, 2002 declaration: 12,000 pages that said there were no WMD programs

2011-12-01T14:46:00.005-05:00

A story is gaining popularity that Saddam Hussein shares the blame with the United States for the US 2003 invasion because he did not clearly say that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. It is the type of story Americans and other Westerners like to believe but it is completely untrue.

As a result of the U.S. and British campaign, and after prolonged negotiations between the United States, Britain, France, Russia and other U.N. Security Council members, the United Nations declared that Iraq would have to accept even more intrusive inspections than under the previous inspection regime - to be carried out by the U.N. Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) - or face "serious consequences." Iraq agreed to accept the U.N. decision and inspections resumed in late November 2002. On December 7, 2002, Iraq submitted its 12,000 page declaration, which claimed that it had no current WMD programs. Intelligence analysts from the United States and other nations immediately began to scrutinize the document, and senior U.S. officials quickly rejected the claims.

Iraq was completely clear that it had no weapons of mass destruction. The US classified the report and did not allow access to it for non-permanent members of the UN Security Council nor the public.

Then the US fairly transparently resumed lying. This time adding that the report's statements were false. At no point, before the war or to this day, did the US ever point to a specific statement it claimed was false. We know now that the claim that Iraq made in those 12,000 pages that it had no weapons of mass destruction was true.

Iraq was not ambiguous about its lack of WMD. It did not make any effort to create doubts in anyone's mind. What happened in 2002 and 2003 was that the US created a false pretext to invade a country that it considered a threat to Israel and to the string of dictatorships the US maintains on Israel's behalf.

The lying was all on the US' side.

Years later, Condoleeza Rice told Tzipi Livni that the occupation was protecting Israel.

Discussing the needs of Israel regarding Palestinian security forces in a future-Palestinian state, former foreign minister Tzipi Livni expressed concern over a third-party military force protecting a Palestinian state's external borders. Secretary Rice inserted, "At this time there is no threat from the east because our forces are in Iraq and will stay there for a long time." Chief Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat added, "For a very, very long time."

She may have been wrong about that. It depends on what configuration of mercenaries and US troops Barack Obama is able to pressure the Maliki government into retaining. But there is no question about her understanding of the effect of the US occupation at that time.

This is what the United States lied for. Saying that Saddam Hussein was partly to blame is just another lie.

Left I On The News on Syria

2011-12-01T11:47:00.002-05:00

Left I On The News is a very good blog whose focus is not mostly the Middle East. I will just repost the key paragraphs of an observation about Western news regarding Syria's unrest:

And who were those 12 "civilians"? Well, they might have been "innocent civilians," killed by Syrian government troops in a wanton slaughter. No doubt that's what most people will believe. But they might also be innocent civilians killed by the blast which blew up the government vehicle, that is, they might have been killed by the rebels. Or, presumably excepting the woman and child, they might not have been "innocent civilians" at all, but armed rebels who were killed as the army counter-attacked after the attack which killed 9 soldiers.

The Syrian Office of Human Rights (per Wikipedia) says 2,738 civilians and 970 security forces have been killed. But that's conveniently nebulous. Who were those "civilians"? Were they all just non-violent "Occupy Syria" protesters, and not a one part of the group responsible for the deaths of 970 security forces? Hardly likely. The Syrian government claims that 1,400 security forces, 716 insurgents, and 700 civilians have been killed, which may reflect its own bias, but at least tries to differentiate between the types of civilians killed.

Given that it is widely understood that armed forces, with resources from sources outside of and hostile to Syria are waging an armed resistance to Syria's government, I've never much or even any stock in these supposed casualty numbers that are being released. Barack Obama would respond to attempts to establish areas on US territory but outside of the control of the US government that were funded, possibly funded or even not funded by external adversaries of the United States at least as ruthlessly.

But Eli from Left I does raise an important point, especially for those who aren't as skeptical of US policy in the Middle East as I am.

First results of Egyptian elections: Egyptian military has promised democracy will be limited

2011-12-01T10:06:00.004-05:00

There are indications that Islamists have done well in Egypt's first round of elections. Perhaps better than expected.

The party formed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s mainstream Islamist group, appeared to have taken about 40 percent of the vote, as expected. But a big surprise was the strong showing of ultraconservative Islamists, called Salafis, many of whom see most popular entertainment as sinful and reject women’s participation in voting or public life.

Analysts in the state-run news media said early returns indicated that Salafi groups could take as much as a quarter of the vote, giving the two groups of Islamists combined control of nearly 65 percent of the parliamentary seats.

Later in the article, the New York Times explains that the Egyptian military dictatorship has given assurances to Westerners that Egypt's voters will not control foreign policy.

The new majority is likely to increase the difficulty of sustaining the United States’ close military and political partnership with post-Mubarak Egypt, though the military has said it plans to maintain a monopoly over many aspects of foreign affairs.

It almost goes without saying that what the New York Times is relieved to report is that for the benefit of Israel, or so that fewer than six million Jewish people can have an enforced political majority state (unlike white South Africans who suffer the indignity of living in a non-white political majority state), more than 80 million people should be denied representative or accountable control over their foreign policy.

Barack Obama lied when he said colonialism is over.

The West was blamed as the source of all ills, a half-century after the end of colonialism.

Many of the states of the Middle East are the exact same states, ruled by the exact same regimes put in place by imperial Great Britain. If colonialism ended in UAE or Jordan, when did that happen? Not only do those regimes not have different relationships with the United States than their acknowledged colonial predecessors had with their global empire, but no event has marked their freedom or independence from imperial control.

Obama is not mistaken. He is lying. He knows his control over the policies of the US empire in the Middle East operates exactly the way Winston Churchill's empire controlled largely the same subordinate political bodies.

It may be instructive to take another look at how Egypt was treated as a colonial subordinate around 100 years ago.

When at last the combined forces of the occupying army and the Interior Ministry were able to quell months of strikes and protests, the British were compelled to reconsider their position towards Egypt. The eventual outcome of that process was the unilateral decision in March 1922 to grant Egypt a qualified independence. Although the country would be governed thereafter as a constitutional monarchy, the British retained the right to intervene in any matters seen to affect the security of imperial communications, the interests and safety of foreigners on Egyptian soil, the threat of foreign invasion, or the status of Egypt's relationship with the Sudan.

But beyond the fact that Obama lied about the colonial status of the Middle East, it is important to understand why he lied.

The United States is not a proudly colonialist country, even as much as Great Britain was in 1922. By the United States' professed values, the concerns of fewer six million Jewish people do not outweigh those of more than 80 million Egyptians. The idea that US policy should be shifted to that degree is racist even by the US' own currently claimed moral standards.

The idea that the rights of over 400 million people in Israel's region, including in this example 80 million Egyptians, should be limited to ensure that fewer than six million Jewish people never have to live in a non-Jewish political majority state has survived as long as it has in the United States people like Juan Cole and organizations like the New York Times closing discussion to prevent the issue from being raised.

This is a topic that is not even, according to US values, subject to debate. Is a majority Jewish state worth harming 400 million non-Jews in Israel's region? No. By US claimed values there is no coherent argument that could be made otherwise.

Instead gatekeepers have prevented the question from being asked on any substantial scale. But as the power and effectiveness of these gatekeepers decrease, Israel's viability as an enforced Jewish political majority state decreases with it.

New shipments of teargas from the US to Egypt's dictatorship

2011-11-30T09:18:00.006-05:00

Indications are growing that the US, with its current client dictatorship in Egypt and supported by the full spectrum of the US political class, from left to right, hopes to impose on Egypt a constrained democracy, where some issues are within the purview of elected bodies, but others, those of importance to the United States, which is mostly to say issues related to Israel, remain under the control of the pro-US dictator.

This is similar to the arrangement, qualified independence, that Imperial Great Britain offered Egypt as reform in 1922. It is also similar to the arrangements in Morocco and Kuwait, that Juan Cole approvingly cites Freedom House as calling "partly free". This arrangement is what Thomas Friedman or Charlie Rose are effectively advocating when they say that the Arab Spring "isn't about Israel".

What they mean, but won't say because of its implications, is that non-Jewish people in Israel's region don't deserve full local control of their governments' policies. They should be satisfied with a "partly free" government that can control issues of less importance to them. This is not a right-wing view, but is the position of the colonialist left, from Juan Cole and Barack Obama across to the colonialist right of George Bush and John McCain.

It is a bigoted position, a racist position. But Juan Cole, Barack Obama, George Bush and John McCain are bigots, racists. No more or less than Winston Churchill and Cecil Rhodes of previous colonial eras.

It is in this context that we look at the United States resupplying the Egyptian dictatorship with tear gas.

A group of employees at the Adabiya Seaport in Suez have confirmed, with the documents to prove it, that a three-stage shipment of in total 21 tons of tear gas canisters is on course for the port from the American port of Wilmington.

Employees say the container ship Danica, carrying seven tons of tear-gas canisters made by the American company Combined Systems, has already arrived at the port, with two similar shipments from the same company expected to arrive within the week.

And the dictatorship, now that the order has been exposed, is moving to receive the teargas.

A shipment of anti-riot material imported by the Interior Ministry from the United States was released upon orders, a senior official in Suez, speaking on condition of anonymity, said.

He added that the employees were reluctant to release the shipment, in solidarity with the victims of last week’s violence in Tahrir Square and Mohamed Mahmoud Street.

This is the evil of our time. The colonialism that is necessary for Israel to be viable is to 2011 what slavery was to 1811. It can be argued that both are or were symptoms of larger phenomena but on their own each extracts too large a cost in human suffering, such as the deaths in Tahrir Square of Egyptians resisting pro-US dictatorships both back in January and last week.

Winding down, rather than escalating the violence in Syria

2011-11-28T23:57:00.005-05:00

Some quotes and then some thoughts about the violence in Syria.

First, Helena Cobban who is one of the best English-language bloggers on the Middle East on the situation in Syria as of November 25:

Turkey's AK government has shifted into a position of much stronger support for the Syrian opposition, with PM Erdogan now openly calling for the resignation of Syria's President Asad, while leaders and members of the militarized, oppositionist 'Free Syrian Army' have been given considerable freedom to organize in the encampments of Syrian refugees in Turkey.

Attempts by western governments to win a UNSC resolution that would, as with Resolution 1970 in re Libya, have provided a basis for future military action against Syria were rebuffed when both Russia and China vetoed it.

The Arab League has launched its own strong-seeming diplomatic and political intervention that requires the Syrian government to end the use of repression and violence, engage in negotiations with the opposition, and allow the entry of Arab league monitors-- actually, the deadline for that latter step was November 25.

The Arab League-cum-NATO military action against Libya (which was also supported by NATO member Turkey) had been cited as a desired precedent by many in the Syrian opposition. That action was eventually successful in taking over the whole of Libya and killing President Qadhafi. But it took them seven months and a lot of bloody fighting to achieve that; and the outcome inside Libya has been very far from what most pro-democracy, pro-rights activists in the west had hoped for.

Then Eric Margolis, who uses his judgement as a source. His judgement agrees with mine, but without documentation, will not be persuasive to anyone inclined to disagree with him.

Syria’s conflict is confusing. It began a year ago when insurgent groups slipped in from neighboring Lebanon. They were armed, supplied and trained by the CIA, Britain’s MI6, and Israel’s Mossad. Their finances came from the US Congress, which voted in the 1980’s to fund overthrowing Syria’s Assad regime because of its antagonism to Israel and support for Palestinians, and from the Saudis.

In the 1920’s, a leading Zionist thinker, Vladimir Jabotinsky, proclaimed the Arab world was a brittle mosaic of tribes and clans. A few sharp raps, he predicted, would splinter the whole fragile mess and leave a new Jewish state as paramount power of the Mideast and its oil. He was thinking primarily of Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.

These armed Syrian groups of mercenaries, Assad-hating Lebanese fascists, and CIA-cultivated anti-Assad exiles lit the fuse in Syria. Their attacks, mainly along the Lebanese border, ignited resistance by long repressed Sunni Muslim conservatives, bitter foes of the Assad’s Alawi-dominated regime. Alawi – an offshoot of Iran’s Shia and Turkey’s Alevi –tend to be poor, clannish and disliked by mainstream Sunni as heretics.

Many of Syria’s smaller cities and towns have revolted, but not yet its large cities, Damascus, Latakia and Aleppo but their vital economies are collapsing.

The harshest sanctions ever imposed, those against Saddam Hussein's Iraq that killed more than half of a million people, mostly children and the elderly did not accomplish or even threaten regime change. The economy collapsing, especially when Syria will continue to have some supplies of basic foods would actually make regime survival easier.

More from Margolis:

Syria is a long-time ally of Iran. The Western powers and Israel are avid to tear apart Syria, thus dealing a severe blow to not only Iran, but Syria’s other allies, Lebanon’s Hezbullah and Palestine’s Hamas.

Equally important, if Syria collapses, its highly strategic Golan Heights, annexed by Israel since 1967, will remain unchallenged in Israel’s hands. Golan is Israel’s primary source of ground water.

A splintering Syria will be a catastrophe for the central Mideast. But the US, France, Israel and Britain are so blinded by their anti-Iran passion, they are ready to destroy Syria to get at Great Satan Iranian. That’s like burning down your house to get rid of mice.

And Neelabh Mishra from an Indian publication, Outlook India:

The so-called uprising in Syria lies largely along an arc of towns near the borders—with Lebanon, Iraq or Turkey—indicating a degree of backing from across the borders. Non-western diplomats talk of four strands of opposition: a) Peasants uncomfortable with the recent market-driven policies of the Assad government. It’s an ‘economic resentment’, articulated in the terminology of popular non-fundamentalist Islam. b) Progressive sections of the middle classes, who genuinely want democratic reforms. c) Wahabi hardline Islamists backed by fundamentalist Arab elements, largely from Saudi Arabia. d) People who resented the secularist, Arab socialist Ba’ath party takeover and left Syria for western pastures. They have made their money in the West, live there and want to refashion Syria with western support, in the western image, and allied to western interests.

Government leaders like Bouthaina and foreign minister Walid al-Moallem differentiate between what they call the opposition rooted in the country and the violent armed bands, backed by foreign powers, which infiltrate their peaceful demonstrations. Certain Syria-based opposition groups responded to the government’s negotiation initiative, opened through the offices of the Grand Mufti Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun. He told us his son was recently assassinated by fundamentalist Islamists. About democratic reforms, Bouthaina sounds quite candid: “We are serious in recognising that reforms are Syria’s need of the hour.” Hence, she says, the government has lifted the emergency enforced for decades in Syria and announced a timeline for multi-party parliamentary elections in February next year, governorate elections, also in November 2012, and presidential elections in 2014. Therefore the government accepted the Arab League’s proposal for widened talks with the opposition, but it is adamant in not compromising with Syria’s secular ethos.

My position on Syria has not changed much over the last few weeks. The plan presented by Assad according to Outlook India is much more democratic than that presented by Egypt's pro-US military dictatorship. Given that Assad is able to rally large demonstrations of support, it is more likely than not that despite the funds that I (agreeing with Eric Margolis) am sure Saudi Arabia and Turkey are making available to rebels, the Syrian protests will fade out in a manner similar to the eventual fade of Iran's Green protests.

The same basic reason holds. In Iran, there was no compelling argument that the central claim, of electoral fraud, was true, so there was no fuel to sustain increases unrest in the face of government efforts to stifle that unrest. In Syria, in the end I expect to see that support among the population of Syria for what we saw in Libya or Iraq instead of non-violent elections on dates already announced will not remain at high enough levels to sustain the uprising.

An opposition needs a compelling story. The votes were stolen would have been a compelling story in Iran if evidence to support it had emerged. Assad is not respecting the wishes of the majority of Syrians by remaining would have been a more compelling story if Assad had not announced election dates.

What I hope Assad does now is that in February, come what may, the polls remain open long enough that there is no question the regime made an effort to gauge the will of the people in the revolting towns. The central cities are very likely to be open, and enough of the population resides in those cities that if the opposition is able to hamper voting along the border, numerically the election results can still be persuasive.

I guess the US and Israel hope Turkey has invaded by then. An invasion would be a bad move. Turkey would not prove to be better at holding Syrian territory than Israel was at holding Lebanese territory. Hezbollah-style rather than tank-heavy armies are the way of the future in the Middle East. Turkey would be helping Syria revolutionize its armed forces if it tries to take territory. It would be a horrible move for Turkey and I would have been sure six months ago that Erdogan would not make a mistake like that, but am less certain today.

Saudi Arabia is leading the pro-US dictatorships into more active hostility with Syria but short of a war against Turkey, Assad's hold on power is not particularly threatened for the time it will take to reach elections, which will give us a lot of new information about the legitimacy of Assad's regime.

As has become usual from Barack Obama, US policy is squarely on the side of useless preventable loss of human life and a total disregard Arab or non-Jewish life in the Middle East. The US' current policy regarding Syria is as bad Obama's Middle East policies almost always are. Fortunately, Syria has a better than even chance of averting the fate the US has planned for it on Israel's behalf.

Capitalism, imperialism and Zionism

2011-11-27T11:11:00.003-05:00

I want to put into one place my thoughts on what is the root cause of what, between capitalism, imperialism and Zionism. There is an argument that the Middle East is so strategically important, or has so much oil, that there is an imperialistic or capitalist impulse to station an outpost there, and Zionism is an expression of that impulse. In other words, either imperialism created Zionism, or capitalism created Zionism.

Maybe instead of "created" the argument can be that imperialism or capitalism sustains Zionism. And maybe instead of "Zionism", the argument can be that imperialism or capitalism sustains what we know of as the enforced Jewish political majority state of Israel.

Underneath that argument, I think, is the idea that international strategy, as practiced by powerful states, empires and power-blocs, is a cold and rational endeavor that should not be explained by sentimentality, emotions or individual biases.

The point of this post is to invite discussion on this topic. So I'll put my position here first.

What I believe the arguments that Zionism is an artifact of a broader phenomenon miss is that Zionism makes other things harder. Capitalist goals are more difficult for Israel's backers to achieve than they would be if there was no Israel. Imperialist goals are more difficult for Israel's backers to achieve than they would be if there was no Israel.

Capitalism first, the US capitalist class would have no problem trading with and profiting from Iran's energy reserves today. The US is foregoing substantial profits for its position with respect to Iran that no US capitalist or strategist believes will ever be recovered.

Iran is also notable in that there has been a clear contest between capitalist interests and Zionist interests in the US political system and Zionism won. An AIPAC lobbyist recounts the story here:

So we get ILSA. It passes overwhelmingly. That same year I brought some Conoco guys to AIPAC's policy conference, where half the House and half the Senate usually attend, and they knew that night that they would never win anything against us. So they began to cooperate. A lot of the oil companies realized, 'We're not gonna beat these guys in Congress, so we might as well try to tailor their activities, where we at least have some room to work.' And I was the go-between. I was the guy.

Not only or even primarily for moral reasons or to be consistent with its professed values, the United States should abandon Zionism for commercial or capitalist reasons. The Middle East would be much different if there had never been an Israel and it would be much different if the US had abandoned Zionism and advocated a one-state egalitarian resolution to the Zionist conflict at any point in its history.

But in those alternative Middle Easts, the United States, it is pretty clear to me, would be collecting more profits in the region rather than less. The huge commercial advantages that US firms enjoyed relative to the rest of the world immediately after World War II would be dissipating more slowly and would today remain larger rather than smaller if the US had not associated itself with Zionism.

Strategically again, the US' goals are more difficult to reach because of its commitment to Zionism than it would be without. The United States does have a strategic interest in ensuring that no one state gains monopoly control over all of the oil in the region. For that reason, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, UAE and Saudi Arabia have to remain in some modicum of balance, with none completely dominant over the other.

But there are other places where the US has an interest in some modicum of balance. For example between France, Great Britain and Germany, between Brazil and Argentina or between South Korea, China and Japan. Those other places are instructive in that the balance does not have to be of artificially weak states.

Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia have to, by US strategic goals, be not substantially out of balance with each other, but also - and this is the unique result of the US commitment to Zionism - each weaker than Israel, a country with fewer than six million Jews and no significant natural resources.

Other than the oil states, the United States maintains a string of pro-US colonial dictatorships in Egypt, Jordan and others that provide the US no strategic service at all other than protecting Israel as an enforced majority Jewish political state from those countries' populations.

The US can strategically tolerate popularly accountable governments in Japan, Brazil and France but cannot in Israel's region because its commitment to Zionism poses a more difficult constraint on US strategic policy in the Middle East.

It seems that from a US strategic point of view, the Middle East has worked out for the best. Again, the US was in an unparalleled position of world dominance after World War II and it had enough resources to conduct its strategic policy while bearing the constraints imposed by Zionism. That does not mean Zionism did not make it more difficult.

The United States is actively fighting against the people of the Middle East in a way that it is not fighting against the people of Europe or the people of South America. For the first time that I remember, the administration of the president of the United States, while in office, has begun to admit that it does not believe it can win that fight forever.

First, we cannot ignore the long-term population trends that result from the Israeli occupation. ...

Second, we cannot be blind to the political implications of continued conflict. ...

And then finally, we must recognize that the ever-evolving technology of war is making it harder to guarantee Israel's security. ...

Looking again at Iran, a plausible-sounding argument can be made that the Shah was trading oil on what for technical reasons, were the best prices he could get. But there was no explaining his relations with Israel. Just as there is no explaining Mubarak's or Tantawi's maintenance of the blockade of Gaza or Jordan's or Saudi Arabia's coordination of their policy regarding the Palestinians with the US and Israel.

Looking at the Cold War, again remembering that the US entered the Cold War with tremendous material and strategic advantages, there should have been no contest for the allegiance of the most religious region in the world for the side that believes that the public sphere should coexist with the separate religious sphere against the side of militant athiests.

Religion should have been one of the US' most powerful weapons for use against the USSR in the Middle East. Zionism instead turned it into a weapon the USSR could use against the US. Nasser, speaking before an audience of trade unionists, justified his relationship with the Soviet Union not in terms of the advancement of workers (and this was a trade union audience) but in terms of the Soviet Union's offers of assistance in overcoming Zionism.

We must know and learn a big lesson today. We must actually see that, in its hypocrisy and in its talks with the Arabs, the United States sides with Israel 100 per cent and is partial in favour of Israel. Why is Britain biased towards Israel? The West is on Israel's side. General de Gaulle's personality caused him to remain impartial on this question and not to toe the US or the British line; France therefore did not take sides with Israel.

The Soviet Union's attitude was great and splendid. It supported the Arabs and the Arab nation. It went to the extent of stating that, together with the Arabs and the Arab nation, it would resist any interference or aggression.

Today every Arab knows foes and friends. If we do not learn who our enemies and our friends are, Israel will always be able to benefit from this behaviour. It is clear that the United States is an enemy of the Arabs because it is completely biased in favour of Israel. It is also clear that Britain is an enemy of the Arabs because she, too, is completely biased in favour of Israel. On this basis we must treat our enemies and those who side with our enemies as actual enemies. We can accord them such treatment. In fact we are not States without status. We are States of status occupying an important place in the world. Our States have thousands of years of civilization behind them -7,000 years of civilization. Indeed, we can do much; we can expose the hypocrisy - the hypocrisy of our enemies if they try to persuade us that they wish to serve our interest. The United States seeks to serve only Israel's interests. Britain also seeks to serve only Israel's interests.

West ended up militarily overpowering Nasser's Egypt by using resources from its member countries but we should not lose sight of the fact that but for Zionism, the West need have no more reason to defeat Egypt than it ever had to defeat Brazil in war.

Zionism makes dictatorships like Iran's Shah or those of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE, Kuwait and others necessary from a US strategic point of view while at the same time provides a clear, easy to understand and nearly universally agreed-upon popular criticism of the stooge dictatorships the US needs. This is an intrinsically unstable arrangement and US strategists have the luxury of tolerating more stable arrangements everywhere else in the world.

The place where US strategic policy is most likely to go wrong, the place where the most strategic, diplomatic and military efforts must be exerted to prevent US strategic objectives from failing is the Middle East. Because of Zionism.

So I still believe the best explanation for US support of Israel is that US Jews form the heart of an effective lobbying group on Israel's behalf. Because of this lobbying, the United States pays a far higher price to achieve its capitalist and imperialist objectives than it does elsewhere in the world and that it would if it advocated a South Africa-style one state resolution to the conflict over Zionism.

New Brookings poll of some Arab countries

2011-11-26T12:17:00.004-05:00

There are some interesting results. The people of the Middle East are aware of the destructive role the US plays in their region.

More people in the Middle East think the US is primarily motivated by controlling oil than by protecting Israel. This continues a trend over the last two years and is the first of the last three years that controlling oil has overtaken Israel.

The US oil lobby has directly attempted to oppose the Israel lobby and was humiliated.

A lot of the oil companies realized, 'We're not gonna beat these guys in Congress, so we might as well try to tailor their activities, where we at least have some room to work.'

So I hold that many Arabs mistaken impression of US motivation. But the numbers show that impression:

Which TWO of the following factors do you believe are most important in driving American policy in the Middle East?	2011	2010	2009
Controlling oil	53	47	39
Protecting Israel	44	50	52
Weakening the Muslim world	32	34	38
Preserving regional and global dominance	29	36	25
Promoting peace and stability	8	6	8
Fighting terrorism	8	5	4

I encourage anyone to scroll through the released results for yourself.

What two countries pose the biggest threat to you?
Israel 71%
US 59%
Iran 18%

There is international pressure on Iran to curtail its nuclear program. What is your opinion?
Iran has a right to its program 64% (53% in 2009)
Iran should be pressured to stop its nuclear program 25% (40% in 2009)

I also note that Brookings was careful not to ask directly what the respondents think about Israel’s legitimacy as a enforced Jewish majority state.

Instead it asks if Israel returns all 1967 territory, which is not even on the table, would the respondents accept Israel. The results were still not positive for Israel, but more positive than a relevant question would have yielded.

Netanyahu is lying, but he is also right about the potential of the Arab Spring

2011-11-25T11:38:00.003-05:00

Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking before the Israeli Knesset, explained why Israel opposes pro-democracy movements in its region:

He said the Arab Spring was becoming an "Islamic, anti-western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli, undemocratic wave".

Speaking to the parliament amid renewed protests and violence in Egypt, Mr Netanyahu said concessions to the Palestinians were unwise in a period of instability in the region.

"In February, when millions of Egyptians thronged to the streets in Cairo, commentators and quite a few Israeli members of the opposition said that we're facing a new era of liberalism and progress … They said I was trying to scare the public and was on the wrong side of history and don't see where things are heading." But, he told the Knesset, events had proved him correct.

When he cautioned Barack Obama and other Western leaders against backing the revolt against Hosni Mubarak's regime, he was told he failed to understand reality. "I ask today, who here didn't understand reality? Who here didn't understand history?"

I've seen several polls asking various Middle Eastern populations whether or not they consider Israel as an enforced political majority Jewish entity a legitimate state.

I've never seen even 30% of any population answer yes.

An Egypt that does not consider Israel legitimate (and that thereby reflects the values, beliefs and sensibilities of the Egyptian people), even if for pragmatic reasons it does not break the treaty or send tanks toward Tel Aviv, makes Israel as an enforced Jewish political majority state a lot less viable. For example, just by making it impossible to squeeze the people of Gaza if they elect a party like Hamas.

If Saudi Arabia, which already spends more than 2.5 times as much as Israel on weapons, has a bigger area, and whose location could put all of Israel's territory under a modern anti-aircraft umbrella, had policies that matched the values, beliefs and sensibilities of its people it would render Israel as an enforced Jewish political majority state almost immediately non-viable.

Egypt becoming democratic not only threatens Israel directly, but weakens by example the dictatorships Israel needs in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and others.

Netanyahu is basically right. Israel needs a region of pro-US colonial-style dictatorships. He uses terms as favorable to his party and to Israel as possible, but looking past those terms, if the US is unwilling to support dictatorships, there can be no Israel.

That puts the questions back on Westerners. Are you willing to support colonial dictatorships for Israel's sake, how much are you willing to sacrifice of your own blood and treasure to do that, and how do you justify your stance?

Aaron Jakes explains Tahrir Square as part of Egypt's ongoing struggle against colonialism

2011-11-23T10:09:00.004-05:00

A very important opinion piece to read over at Al Jazeera English. Written by Aaron Jakes, a doctoral candidate in the departments of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University.

Given the extraordinary eventfulness of the present, it is hardly surprising that few, if any, commentators have thought to dwell on so banal a matter as the name of a street. But doing so begins to disclose a bitter and potentially instructive irony in the current moment. The Mohammad Mahmoud in question was one of the four members of the original wafd or "delegation" that sought to represent Egypt at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and thereby to argue before the international community for Egypt's independence from British colonial rule. On March 8, 1919, in an effort to forestall any threat to their Egyptian Protectorate, British authorities arrested all four men and exiled them to Malta. The following day, groups of students began organising demonstrations in the major streets and squares of Cairo; within a week, protests against British rule had spread to Egypt's other major cities as well as hundreds of towns and villages throughout the countryside.

From the earliest days of the January 25 uprising onwards, political analysts both in Egypt and abroad have expressed an eagerness to adduce comparative cases as lenses through which to view the present and, perhaps, glimpse the future. At various points in the last 10 months, we have heard that Egypt today could become Turkey after 1961, France after 1968, Iran after 1979, or Poland after 1989. Lost in the face of this compulsive yearning to conjure the ideal model are the possibilities both that what we are now witnessing might be genuinely new, and that Egypt's own history might in some way help us to understand the significance of the present.

Greater attention to that history reveals that Egypt's current military rulers are the inheritors not merely of the Mubarak regime but also of the colonial order that the events of 1919 failed to fully overturn. Throughout the long decades following the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, colonial rule rested on a rigid logic of security that rejected the very notion that Egyptians themselves might be capable of serious political thought. As a budding nationalist movement mounted its first vocal challenges to colonial occupation in the early decades of the twentieth century, the Interior Ministry became the central node in an increasingly dense network of surveillance and repression. So confident were British officials in the effectiveness of this security apparatus and the superficiality of calls for popular mobilisation that they dismissed the first protests in March 1919 as limited to a mere clique of disgruntled and unemployed youth with no better use for their time.

Unfinished business

The unprecedented movement of Egyptians all across the country that ensued from those early demonstrations quickly overwhelmed British expectations. When at last the combined forces of the occupying army and the Interior Ministry were able to quell months of strikes and protests, the British were compelled to reconsider their position towards Egypt. The eventual outcome of that process was the unilateral decision in March 1922 to grant Egypt a qualified independence. Although the country would be governed thereafter as a constitutional monarchy, the British retained the right to intervene in any matters seen to affect the security of imperial communications, the interests and safety of foreigners on Egyptian soil, the threat of foreign invasion, or the status of Egypt's relationship with the Sudan.

Following the discussion of the Arab Spring in the West, there is a constant and insistent refrain from the the Western Middle East policy establishment. That this is not about the United States and not about Israel. It is kind of defensive and I've always thought mildly wrong being that the US hasn't been randomly supporting these dictatorships for generations. But recent events in Egypt shine new light on exactly what that refrain means.

Hillary Clinton and the Barack Obama administration, even before the Arab Spring began, had begun to claim that the US wants "reform" in its colonies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE, Kuwait and others. That formulation has always been consistent with a veneer of political participation without government being fully accountable to the people governed.

That would be, of course, the most recent echo of "constitutional monarchy, the British retained the right to intervene in any matters seen to affect the security of imperial communications, the interests and safety of foreigners on Egyptian soil, the threat of foreign invasion, or the status of Egypt's relationship with the Sudan." In Clinton's version, the US would retain the right to intervene in matters seen to affect especially the security of Israel and other possible US regional interests.

Mubarak's successor as Egypt's pro-US dictator, Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, proposed to the people of Egypt to stall any transfer of power to civilians until 2013, after the US presidential election is over, to reserve a right for the military to overturn decisions of the civil government and to withhold the military's budget from civilian scrutiny.

Juan Cole presented this stalling and limitation of the power of elected officials as situation as steps that may prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from making Egypt more religious. This was, to him, "co-existence" between the military and civilian government, as opposed to what Cole claimed the Muslim Brotherhood wanted, which is also what the United States has, which is the subordination of the military to civilian rule.

Underlying this, when we hear this refrain from Tom Friedman, or Hillary Clinton, or Charlie Rose or Barack Obama is the idea that the people of Egypt don't really want to control Egypt's policy with respect to Israel. That is not what the Arab Spring is "about". The people of Egypt will be happy, or satisfied with an elected body with some nominal control over purely domestic issues but limited in its authority in the area the US cares about.

That's good enough for them.

This is the US vision for all of its colonies and the people of Egypt this week are saying that the limited authority Egypt's current pro-US dictator has offered is not enough. Once again, the military's proposal did not become unacceptable when people died opposing it. By the values the US claims to uphold, this suggestion never should have been made.

Juan Cole more recently points out that Leon Panetta publicly called for Tantawi to lift the state of emergency. Tantawi seems to have said no. Tantawi did not say no to the US order to maintain the siege on Gaza. He did not say no to the US order to restore the unpopular gas pipeline to Israel that Egyptians have destroyed many times. He did not say no to the order to use special forces to free the Israeli embassy. But in Cole's story, Tantawi suddenly grows an independent spirit when the US suggests he lift the state of emergency. Cole's story is not believable. The same pressure that the US applies to help Israel keep Gaza on a diet, or to ensure that children in Gaza go hungry for their parents' voting for the wrong party, could and by the US' professed values, should have been applied to ensure that Tantawi kept his earlier commitment to elections by September earlier this year.

Instead Egyptians are dying in protest. There is no indication that the predictable and preventable deaths of Egyptians matters to Cole or Obama in the least. There was an explicit attempt by the Tantawi dictatorship to retain for the US, in the spirit of Imperial Great Britain in 1922, the right to override the decisions of any Egyptian elected officials on matters that concern the US.

When Westerners say the Arab Spring is not about Israel, that statement is superficially true, but it is leading in a false, dangerous and condescending direction. The suggestion it makes is that the people of the Arab world should be happy with a different, limited, 1922, form of "democracy". The kind of "democracy" that could see the government of 80 million Egyptians, regardless of the views or sensibilities of those Egyptians, cooperate with a siege on over a million fellow Arabs and fellow Muslims for the sake of the US and Israel.

Mohammad Larijani on legal nuclear capability, including sharing with Saudi Arabia

2011-11-22T15:40:00.006-05:00

The Charlie Rose Show, on November 18 featured an interview with Mohammad Javad Larijani, head of Iran’s Human Rights Council and close adviser to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei that was fairly informative.

Below is the segment regarding the dispute between Iran and the West over Iran's nuclear program. This transcription is at from about 13:50 until about 19:35 in the interview after which Rose moves to the subject of sanctions.

ROSE: There has been an argument, I think, by Graham Allison and I want to be clear about this, in which he suggests you look at this on a football field and if, an American football field, and if you're advancing down the field that Iran is about at the 30 yard line, so it's already advanced 70 yards. It has 30 yards to go to have a nuclear program on explosive devices and you only have 30 to go and that you can take 20% enriched and over a process of a couple of years make it into weapon grade material

LARIJANI: Well, this is not a good similarity. I mean, we are, right now, if you ask in terms of real work in the field, we are 100% away from the military use. If you ask in terms of capability, hypothetically, is Iran capable to do that if it decides, obviously yes. Any country who has nuclear technology is capable of doing that. I mean the Germans can do it in two months. The Japanese in less than a month or others in

ROSE: Is that where you want to be though? Do you want to be exactly where the Germans and Japanese are?

LARIJANI: We want to be beyond them because this is capability here

ROSE: But you want to have the same capability that the Japanese and the Germans do

LARIJANI: It is a natural outcome. If you are advanced in this area of science, then you will acquire this capability

ROSE: But that's an interesting question. If you're saying, yes you want the same capability that Japan and Germany have

LARIJANI: Beyond that. We even want to get more sophisticated then they

ROSE: Then you want to have the capability that would allow you to, if you decided to take the additional step of making a nuclear device, happen within months, that's the capacity you would like to have?

LARIJANI: So what? Should we be punished because we are advanced?

ROSE: No.

LARIJANI: It is like a man who has faculty of thinking, then you say "Ok, if you are strong in thinking, you may think in the wrong direction. So, close out your thinking." I mean, this is the natural capacity of a nation. How should we be deprived of that? Is there a limit for Iranians for advancement in science and technology?

ROSE: So you're basically saying, we want the capacity to make a nuclear weapon

LARIJANI: No.

ROSE: Even though we don't have a program to actually make a weapon we just want the capacity, which is exactly what the Japanese have

LARIJANI: Even that is not the correct wording

ROSE: What's the wording? The ability, the capacity, the materials?

LARIJANI: The correct wording is that we want advancement in science and technology related to nuclear area, not directed toward the weapon area

ROSE: So you want to be at a level where instantly you could turn it

LARIJANI: It's naturally, it comes. If you are advanced in making a good machine then you can make another machine

ROSE: The problem comes in the debate. There is a great fear of Iran having a nuclear weapon. It would destabilize the region and many other reasons are expressed. It violates the NPT and all of that. If Iran violates the NPT, so will other countries violate the NPT as you well know. They worry about that. Do you worry about that?

LARIJANI: Not at all.

ROSE: You don't worry about that?

LARIJANI: Not at all. Instability in the region is not stemming from Iran. Violating the NPT also is not a big problem for the United States.

ROSE: Would you like to Saudi Arabia have a nuclear weapon? Would you like to see, ah?

LARIJANI: Nuclear weapon or nuclear technology? Two things.

ROSE: Ok. Fair. Nuclear weapon. Would you like to see Saudi Arabia, would you like it to have a nuclear weapon?

LARIJANI: We are a signatory of NPT, we are a sincere signatory to the NPT. We think non-proliferation is a benefit of Iran and all of us.

ROSE: Would you like to see Saudi Arabia have the same kind of capability to produce a nuclear weapon that you say, capability, if you decided to go that last distance

LARIJANI: We are an advocate of a Middle East free of nuclear weapons. But in terms of developing nuclear technology for all other peaceful uses, we are even ready to share with them our capability. No problem.

ROSE: All of it?

LARIJANI: Yes.

ROSE: How close are you if you wanted to today, today, to make a nuclear weapon, an explosive device, how close are you if, in fact, you made that decision?

LARIJANI: Well, professionally, I cannot answer that rigorously, only thing, because it depends on a lot of points, but I tell you personally that to build a bomb is not a big deal, I mean from the technological point of view

ROSE: Having the material to build a bomb is a big deal otherwise you wouldn't be engaged in this

LARIJANI: (Nodding no) I mean, you see Pakistan already has a bomb

ROSE: many bombs

LARIJANI: but their technology is far behind us, in nuclear sense. To build a bomb through plutonium, they use a candle-type reactor, but, well, we think the area of science and technology in this area is so interesting. I mean, why would we need a weapon at all? We are so strong in the region. We are capable to deter any eminent threat. Why would we need an atomic bomb?

ROSE: That's a very good question

LARIJANI: We don't need it

ROSE: Ok, but you do need the capacity do to it. You've just said that.

LARIJANI: No. The capacity is natural. When you get strong you can lift heavy weight. I mean, this is obvious.

ROSE: Let's see. I hear you, and I hear you clearly.

I want to highlight this exchange:

ROSE: Would you like to see Saudi Arabia have the same kind of capability to produce a nuclear weapon that you say, capability, if you decided to go that last distance

LARIJANI: We are an advocate of a Middle East free of nuclear weapons. But in terms of developing nuclear technology for all other peaceful uses, we are even ready to share with them our capability. No problem.

The supposed rivalry between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia goes in only one direction: from Israel against Iran. Saudi Arabia takes Israeli orders transmitted through the United States, but this is not an organic dispute.

When Iran and Saudi Arabia were fellow US colonies with Iran ruled by the Shah, the two countries had good relations. When what we call Saudi Arabia gets, like Iran, a political system that reflects the values and positions of the people governed rather than the instructions from the US embassy, they are going to have good relations again.

"2011: An Arab Springtime?" An article by Samir Amin

2011-11-21T01:31:00.004-05:00

I've recently read an article by Samir Amin, the director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal mostly about the current anti-dictatorship movement in Egypt called 2011: An Arab Springtime?

Samir Amin does a service in presenting Egypt's current anti-dictatorship movement as part of a particularly long tradition in Egypt of working to free itself from colonial subjugation. It is very thought-provoking to look at Tahrir Square in 2011 as the continuation of a process that began even before 1820 of efforts to render Egypt independent of foreign control.

Amin strikes me though as unjustifiably hostile against Islamism. I don't see the degree of cooperation between the Muslim Brotherhood and Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak that Amin sees, much less his cooperation between Islamists and the West.

Lastly, there are groups in Egypt that Amin supports as a socialist. Workers groups and non-bourgeois religious groups. These are the groups that I understand Amin to want to see gain power. I don't have any particular Egyptian group that I'm rooting for, as long as Egyptians are able to debate policy among themselves and through some mechanism the views and values of the median Egyptian are reflected in policy.

I would agree with Amin that democracy is not everything and that oppression and imbalanced relationships and injustice can and will continue after Egyptians have put into place a process to choose their own leaders. But that is a better problem to have than the problem of being ruled by a foreign-controlled colonial government as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, UAE and others are. I also have a substantial degree of faith that if Egyptians are able to hold their leadership accountable, they will make the best progress I can hope for towards addressing other problems.

In fact, if Egypt has a representative government and I believe it is not solving problems adequately, my opinion by that point is irrelevant. All I want is for Egypt to be ruled by the winners of peaceful and graceful Egyptian political processes. If Egypt's voters make mistakes by my standards or especially by theirs, Egypt's voters have the right to make mistakes and to learn from them as they will.

So that was my impression of the article from memory. I'm going to look over it for quotations that struck me as memorable.

Egypt was the first country in the periphery of globalized capitalism that tried to “emerge.” Even at the start of the 19th century, well before Japan and China, the Viceroy Mohammed Ali had conceived and undertaken a program of renovation for Egypt and its near neighbors in the Arab Mashreq [Mashreq means “East,” i.e., eastern North Africa and the Levant, ed.]. That vigorous experiment took up two-thirds of the 19th century and only belatedly ran out of breath in the 1870′s, during the second half of the reign of the Khedive Ismail. The analysis of its failure cannot ignore the violence of the foreign aggression by Great Britain, the foremost power of industrial capitalism during that period. Twice, in [the naval campaign of] 1840 and then by taking control of the Khedive’s finances during the 1870′s, and then finally by military occupation in 1882, England fiercely pursued its objective: to make sure that a modern Egypt would fail to emerge. Certainly the Egyptian project was subject to the limitations of its time since it manifestly envisaged emergence within and through capitalism, unlike Egypt’s second attempt at emergence—which we will discuss further on. That project’s own social contradictions, like its underlying political, cultural, and ideological presuppositions, undoubtedly had their share of responsibility for its failure. The fact remains that without imperialist aggression those contradictions would probably have been overcome, as they were in Japan.

I consider this very important history to keep in mind when looking at today's anti-dictatorship protest movement. The movement did not start in 2011 but is the continuation of a now centuries-old drive to deal with similar external forces that have been working to control Egypt to advance external agendas.

A first coup d’état in 1952 by the “Free Officers,” and above all a second coup in 1954 by which Nasser took control, was taken by some to “crown” the continual flow of struggles and by others to put it to an end. Rejecting the view of the Egyptian awakening advanced above, Nasserism put forth an ideological discourse that wiped out the whole history of the years from 1919 to 1952 in order to push the start of the “Egyptian Revolution” to July 1952. At that time many among the communists had denounced this discourse and analyzed the coups d’état of 1952 and 1954 as aimed at putting an end to the radicalization of the democratic movement. They were not wrong, since Nasserism only took the shape of an anti-imperialist project after the Bandung Conference of April 1955. Nasserism then contributed all it had to give: a resolutely anti-imperialist international posture (in association with the pan-Arab and pan-African movements) and some progressive (but not “socialist”) social reforms. The whole thing done from above, not only “without democracy” (the popular masses being denied any right to organize by and for themselves) but even by “abolishing” any form of political life. This was an invitation to political Islam to fill the vacuum thus created. In only ten short years (1955-1965) the Nasserist project used up its progressive potential. Its exhaustion offered imperialism, henceforward led by the United States, the chance to break the movement by mobilizing to that end its regional military instrument: Israel. The 1967 defeat marked the end of the tide that had flowed for a half-century. Its reflux was initiated by Nasser himself who chose the path of concessions to the Right (the infitah or “opening,” an opening to capitalist globalization of course) rather than the radicalization called for by, among others, the student movement (which held the stage briefly in 1970, shortly before and then after the death of Nasser). His successor, Sadat, intensified and extended the rightward turn and integrated the Muslim Brotherhood into his new autocratic system. Mubarak continued along the same path.

For all of my admiration of Nasser, he was not an advocate for democracy which I have to see as a weakness or valid criticism of him. Noam Chomsky also says that Israel did the US a service by confronting Egyptian nationalism. Other than Israel, I don't think Egyptian nationalism by 1960 posed a particular threat to the West. If not for Israel, the United States would have had a much bigger advantage in the Middle East in its Cold War contest against the militantly atheist USSR. I don't think of Israel as the West's regional military instrument but rather as a burden the West carries for various reasons that I discuss elsewhere.

But about the idea that Sadat integrated the Muslim Brotherhood into Egyptian society and Mubarak continued that, I'm very skeptical. Many Islamists were tortured after the assassination of Sadat and the Egyptian state could fairly by that point have been said to be at war with political Islam.

The collusion between the imperialist powers and political Islam is, of course, neither new nor particular to Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood, from its foundation in 1927 up to the present, has always been a useful ally for imperialism and for the local reactionary bloc. It has always been a fierce enemy of the Egyptian democratic movements. And the multibillionaires currently leading the Brotherhood are not destined to go over to the democratic cause! Political Islam throughout the Muslim world is quite assuredly a strategic ally of the United States and its NATO minority partners. Washington armed and financed the Taliban, who they called “Freedom Fighters,” in their war against the national/popular regime (termed “communist”) in Afghanistan before, during, and after the Soviet intervention. When the Taliban shut the girls’ schools created by the “communists” there were “democrats” and even “feminists” at hand to claim that it was necessary to “respect traditions!”

If the Muslim Brotherhood does take steps to deny voting rights to Egyptians or demonstrates a refusal to accept the results of elections, then those steps or that demonstration will be a valid criticism of the Muslim Brotherhood. So far, I have not seen the Muslim Brotherhood act against democracy and am optimistic that I will not. A government that the Muslim Brotherhood, at the very least, can work with is nearly certain to be the result of any reasonably democratic Egyptian political process. I just cannot go along with Amin's portrayal of the group, in today's context, as an opponent of democracy or ally of the imperialists.

Mao was not wrong when he affirmed that really existing (which is to say, naturally imperialist) capitalism had nothing to offer to the peoples of the three continents (the periphery made up of Asia, Africa, and Latin America—a “minority” counting 85% of world population!) and that the South was a “storm zone,” a zone of repeated revolts potentially (but only potentially) pregnant with revolutionary advances toward socialist transcendence of capitalism.

The “Arab spring” is enlisted in that reality. The case is one of social revolts potentially pregnant with concrete alternatives that in the long run can register within a socialist perspective. Which is why the capitalist system, monopoly capital dominant at the world level, cannot tolerate the development of these movements. It will mobilize all possible means of destabilization, from economic and financial pressures up to military threats. It will support, according to circumstances, either fascist and fascistic false alternatives or the imposition of military dictatorships. Not a word from Obama’s mouth is to be believed. Obama is Bush with a different style of speech. Duplicity is built into the speech of all the leaders of the imperialist triad (United States, Western Europe, Japan).

If you look at South America, or the rest of Africa or the rest of Asia, you will not see that the US is a particularly benevolent influence in any of them. But you will not see the intensity of intervention, the desperate hostility against democracy that you see from the US in the Middle East anywhere else either. Once a post-Zionist Middle East becomes a region not much different from the rest of the world, there still will be a lot of work to do, but the Middle East is a special case where the West has an additional agenda that Amin does not seem to me to be fully taking into account.

Amin is mostly right, but Egypt is not like, say South Korea. Israel would not be viable of Egypt achieved South Korea's levels of industrialization and technology so the Egyptian people are in a more profound conflict with the US as Israel's patron than even the people of South Korea - which is not to deny or belittle the degree that the people of South Korea have been in conflict with the US.

All in all, I found it a good and interesting article. I'm most appreciative that it connects the current movement to a longer struggle. I am not as anti-Islamist as Amin is though.

Saudi anger at the US supposedly makes Saudi Arabia work harder for US/Israeli interests

2011-11-20T16:43:00.004-05:00

One reads these stories about how Saudi Arabia is upset with the United States - most recently one by David Ignatius in the Washington Post and thinks "he can't be serious".

Saudis describe the kingdom’s growing role as a reaction, in part, to the diminished clout of the United States. They still regard the U.S.- Saudi relationship as valuable, but it’s no longer seen as a guarantor of their security. For that, the Saudis have decided they must rely more on themselves — and, down the road, on a wider set of friends that includes their military partner, Pakistan, and their largest oil customer, China.

So the story apparently is that Saudi Arabia is angry with the United States for not supporting Mubarak and for abandoning its demand that Israel stop its settlement expansion. In its anger, Saudi Arabia is buying more weapons from the United States, giving more money to pro-US dictatorships in the region and taking more aggressive steps against anti-US regimes, most notably Syria.

So what would Saudi Arabia do if it was happy with the United States?

Another part of the story is that Saudi Arabia is going to be more confrontational against Iran. Why? The people of Iran disagree with the people of the United States about whether or not Israel is legitimate. But the people of Iran agree with the people of Saudi Arabia about that. Israel sees Iran as its enemy, but why would Saudi Arabia?

This supposed rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran (that began when the Shah was removed) was concocted entirely in Washington DC and Tel Aviv with instructions issued to the Saudi government through the US embassy. It is really a conceptual mistake to think of Saudi Arabia as an independent agent in the Middle East. The Saudi government is an arm of US Middle East policy. Saudi Arabia, like Egypt, Jordan, UAE, Kuwait and others, is effectively a US colony - accountable for policy only to the United States and certainly not to any domestic constituency.

Big weapons purchases have been a Saudi penchant for decades. More interesting, in some ways, is their quiet effort to provide support to friendly regimes to keep the region from blowing itself up in this period of instability. The Saudis have budgeted $4 billion this year to help Egypt, $1.4 billion for Jordan, and $500 million annually over the next decade for Bahrain and Oman. They will doubtless pump money, as well, to Syria, Yemen and Lebanon once the smoke clears in those volatile countries.

“In outlays, we’ve budgeted $15 billion a year just to keep the peace,” says one Saudi source, adding up the economic assistance to Arab neighbors. But that’s hardly a stretch for a country that, by year-end, will have about $650 billion in foreign reserves.

None of the countries in the string of US colonies in the Middle East would pursue policies remotely resembling those we see if domestic voters could remove them for failing to adhere to the values of the people they rule. But Saudi Arabia, in coordination with the United States, is spending huge amounts of money to prevent that from happening.

Which brings us to Ignatius and articles like this - articles that claim that Saudi Arabia is asserting its independence from the United States without pointing to any action that the United States would not approve of. The point of this article is exactly to direct the readers attention away from relationships that, in 2011, does not differ in any tangible way from the relationship the predecessor governments of today's colonies had with Imperial Great Britain in 1911.

What Ignatius is doing is helping Americans behave as colonialists without thinking of themselves as colonialists. Americans are sometimes offended at the suggestion that the relationship between the US and most of the Arab world is colonial, but not offended by the fact that these governments are accountable to the US and not to their own people.

Saudi Arabia spends almost two and a half times more money on weapons than Israel and buys its weapons from a supplier that explicitly commits that Israel will militarily dominate Saudi Arabia and any combination of other countries that might join it. Saudi Arabia does not respond to Israel's nuclear program. Saudi Arabia uses its money to oppose every anti-Zionist organization in its region. Saudi Arabia does these things because the United States tells it to. If instead, the US instructed the Saudi government to hold contested national elections, the Saudi government would submit to that US demand just as easily.

Ignatius, this story and all of these stories that we are reading ultimately are aimed at distracting Americans away from the realities of the relationship between the US and the string of colonial dictatorships that the US maintains for Israel's sake. They are effective because Americans want to be distracted. It is a small piece of good news that the minority of people in the West who don't participate in this multi-sided delusion does seem to me to be growing.

Thoughts on articles suggested by commenters

2011-11-20T11:38:00.007-05:00

I often run out of things to write because while most Westerners wildly misunderstand the Middle East, it is only because they misunderstand a small number of specific things:
    1) Right now we're waiting on Egypt, which is by far the current situation with the most potential to reshape the Middle East.
    2) The Western position on Iran's nuclear program is literally indefensible.
    3) There is a string of colonies that the US maintains, for Israel's sake, over Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, UAE and others.
    4) The US' relationship with those countries and with the rest of the region is both indefensible by the US' own values and massively costly.
    5) If the US was to lose its control of those colonies, Israel as an enforced Jewish political majority state would not be viable the way South Africa as an enforced White political majority state was not viable.

There may be some other statements I've missed, but from a Western foreign policy perspective, that is a summary of Middle East and I often feel like I'm writing combinations of those five statements in article form over and over. Because of that, I've invited anyone who comments on my blog to suggest articles for me to write about.

Pirouz_2 has accepted that invitation.

By the way, I remember you were saying that you wouldn't mind commenting on any articles we suggest. Recently I read the following article by Samir Amin about Egypt. I was wondering what is your take on it:

http://monthlyreview.org/commentary/2011-an-arab-springtime

I've read the article and will read it again to put my thoughts into a post later today. I reiterate my invitation to anyone reading this who has any suggestion about an article on the internet.

I also wonder, for those who read or comment here, what small number of statements you would present to summarize the state of the Middle East. What you would add to or change in the list I wrote above.

Juan Cole and Egypt's army vs. the people of Egypt

2011-11-20T10:08:00.012-05:00

I know that I've recently been writing about Juan Cole too much. Informed Comment is becoming, increasingly, an easy target. During the Bush administration, Cole opposed some of Bush's policies regarding the Middle East and also offered rationales for his opposition that I, maybe mistakenly, interpreted as anti-imperialist/anti-colonialist positions on his part.

So more than other analysts, and maybe more than is fair, seeing Cole now present himself as a full-fledged advocate for the US' nominally indirect colonial control of the region is disconcerting for me. That's my explanation for emphasis I've given here recently to one English-language blog. On the other hand, I don't know of another blogger today as influential on US Middle East policy as Cole. And beginning at latest by the US intervention into Libya, that influence has been pretty much entirely negative. That influence has been used pretty much entirely to justify efforts to sustain the orbit of colonies the US maintains in the region over countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE, Kuwait and others.

Anyway, Cole once again shocked me yesterday with his rationalization of Egypt's dictator Tantawi's efforts to ensure that Egypt's voters could not alter the relationship the US has established with Egypt's military. Which would mean that Egypt's voters would not be able to overturn foreign or military policies dictated from the US embassy in Cairo.

As the military has taken steps that angered the Brotherhood, that cozy relationship has faltered. The SCAF issued constitutional guidelines, which may make it more difficult for the Muslim Brotherhood to change Egyptian law further in a religious direction. And the military postponed the beginning of elections until late November, a step that benefits the secular opposition.

So the protests on Friday demanded not just that the military step down by next May but that it withdraw those constitutional guidelines.

The question of military rule has all along been the other shoe waiting to drop since the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in February. The Egyptian military hopes for a co-existence with the civilian government once it is established next year. Friday’s protesters want a subordination of the military to the civil state.

"May make it more difficult for the Muslim Brotherhood to change Egyptian law further in a religious direction." A person either respects majority rule or does not. Saying elected representatives should not write the constitution, for any reason, directly contradicts the essence of democracy.

What if the people of Egypt want to change Egyptian law in a religious direction? Who is Cole to say they should not be able to do that? Portugal's voters, analysts or academics cannot impose same-sex marriage on the voters of the United States. And Portugal does not have either the agenda or history of distorting and manipulating political systems that the US has regarding the Middle East.

When the people vote for a different policy is when that different policy should happen. And if you want to see a change in policy, you make your most convincing argument to get the median person in the political system to agree with you. This is not a foreign concept to Juan Cole.

And beyond that, this focus on religious rule is dishonest. Cole has not once said the United States should withdraw cooperation from or take any tangible action regarding Saudi Arabia, today the most restrictive religious-based government in the world. Cole is not justifying popular non-participation in Egypt's constitutional process for the sake of religious rights. He is justifying it for the sake of maintaining Egypt's unpopular cooperation with Israel despite that cooperation being indefensible in terms of the values of the Egyptian people.

But as bad and dishonest as that is, I've seen it before. The stunning statement was "the Egyptian military hopes for a co-existence with the civilian government once it is established next year". "Co-existence"? Cole comes from a country where the highest general salutes the civilian president who often has never served in the armed forces the same way that general would be saluted by any second-month private in the army.

Subordination of the military to civilian rule is widely understood in the West (and by Cole) to be a foundational pre-requisite of democracy. It's actually a cliche. People who don't know anything about politics know that you cannot have democracy without civilian control over the military. To see Cole describe a situation where there is no civilian control over the military as "coexistance" is bizarre.

Juan Cole, just like Barack Obama, has become a great illustration of my contention that across its political and ideological spectrum, the United States is a profoundly negative, even a profoundly evil - in terms of the US' own moral system - influence on the Middle East. This is not a factional problem. Cole and Obama represent the left wing of US policy thought the way Cheney and Bush represent the right wing, but their disdain for the rights of the people of the Middle East is identical.

The United States actively works, constantly and in many ways, to subvert the political rights, sabotage the economic systems and physically attack the over 400 million non-Jewish people of the Middle East ultimately in hopes that fewer than six million Jewish people can more firmly grasp an enforced Jewish political majority state in a region that sees that state's creation and perpetuation as an injustice.

Until at least one faction emerges in the US political system that opposes Zionism, there will be no principled US support of the other values the US claims to uphold. Obama's statement that "sometimes short term interests will not align perfectly with our long term values" is a direct expression of that.

Eventually there will be another Republican US president. Juan Cole's criticisms of that Republican president's policies may give the impression that Cole has any concern at all for the rights, values or lives of non-Jewish people in the Middle East. The same may be true for some future Democratic-party challenger to that Republican president. I won't be fooled again. I regret to admit that it seems I was fooled the first time.

Egyptians take to Tahrir Square again

2011-11-18T16:08:00.003-05:00

I honestly am optimistic about Egypt.

Tens of thousands of Islamist and secular protesters gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square and Alexandria on Friday for a mass rally to pressure the ruling military council to hand over power to a civilian government.

The demonstration, dubbed the "Friday of One Demand," was called in response to a document of "supraconstitutional" principles floated by the government that declares the military the guardian of "constitutional legitimacy", suggesting the armed forces could have the final word on major policies even after a civilian parliament and president are elected.

The idea that policy should be insulated or protected from the will of the people in the Middle East has a lot of currency in Israel, a lot of currency in the US Congress and a lot of currency in the Barack Obama White House. But it does not have a lot of currency in Egypt.

Despite the parade of US delegations that have been meeting Egypt's current dictator, Mohamed Hussein Tantawi in secret, Egypt's military council has not come up with a rationale that they can express in public for why the people of the country should not set Egypt's policy. That is important because there is a limit to how hard anyone will fight for something they do not believe in.

The examples of Iran and Egypt have demonstrated conclusively for the region that the once widely-held idea that Islamism is inherently politically backward compared to secularism is wrong. Turkey's Attaturk and Egypt's Nasser may have subscribed to that idea but history has discredited it.

There still is a fight to come. With presidential elections delayed until 2013 and this weird multi-stage parliamentary election schedule that Tantawi has presented, it is now clear that the dictatorship is stalling on its commitment to relinquish power.

Barack Obama says that short term considerations may override what he claims is some long-term US value for democracy. Every indication is that he is solidly on the side of dictatorship with Tantawi, and that he is on that side for the sake of Israel. I'll say again that Barack Obama is the most spectacular Uncle Tom in world history.

On the other hand, fortunately, Obama and Tantawi cannot alone determine the future of Egypt. I don't think the outcome Obama and Tantawi are aiming for, where there is the veneer of a democratic parliament that not only does not set foreign policy, but that cannot even see the military's budget would be acceptable to the people of Egypt. It seems that Obama and Tantawi want to turn Egypt into Kuwait and call that democracy but I don't think Egypt would be governable by Tantawi if he makes a long-term attempt at it.

Egypt is the one important situation in the Middle East today. Its people have resumed demanding that it leave the colonial orbit Egypt currently inhabits along with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, UAE and others. If the people of Egypt are successful despite the efforts of the United States and the current dictatorship, then a new Middle East will be born.

Stratfor on Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya is more or less right this time

2011-11-17T12:53:00.003-05:00

George Friedman from Stratfor's most recent essay about the Middle East is for the most part accurate. It does not make any bold predictions, but does outline the current and coming conflicts.

Iran's best case is that its alignment with the powers in Iraq and Syria will grow closer as US influence in Iraq continues to decline and if Syria does not fall to the current disturbances.

Libya had never been of strategic importance. It was already selling oil, was already not acting against Israel other than purely symbolically. Claims that Gaddafi was a genocidal maniac are just stupid, not worthy of response. What Barack Obama got out of Libya was that he made a statement that leaders who are not pure stooges like Mubarak can also be forced out of power. That statement only cost tens of thousands of unnecessarily lost Libyan lives.

There is currently less focus on the US colonies of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE and others when attention is directed toward Libya and Syria. The colonies are more comfortable in this position but again, that is not worth one life. It was a betrayal of humanity for Barack Obama to trade Libyan life as cheaply and easily as he did.

If Syria survives, which still from outside seems the most likely course of events, then Assad's cooperation with Israel and the regional colonies will only decrease. If he falls, that would be a victory for the US and Israel, especially if Syria implodes as Iraq did and becomes unable have an impact on the region outside of its borders.

I'm still hoping this situation resolves relatively gracefully.

Iraq was destroyed by a constant but changing campaign of US hostility that began around 1990. Iraq is now beginning to rebuild but the US has established a presence and vectors of influence on the Iraqi government that though declining, are declining from a previous state of complete dependency. Iraq at its height was more responsive to US direction than even Saudi Arabia. As US influence declines, that is where it is declining from.

The hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been killed there by various US policies since 1990 were killed for a largely successful campaign to prevent Iraq from threatening Israel and the string of colonies the US maintains in the region for Israel's sake. It is interesting that the US also sacrificed over 4400 US troops for this, as well as hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars of costs related to its occupations in the region.

Iraq is now rebuilding, and is somewhat independent. Decades from now when it has restored its ability to influence the region outside its borders it may pose new problems for the US, or the region may by that time be unrecognizable on today's terms.

Egypt's elections remain the crucial event in the upcoming future. The military, certainly with US encouragement, is working to limit the influence Egypt's voters have both on the constitution and on Egyptian foreign policy. But the military does not have a rationale for excluding the people of Egypt that it can say in public and it has active and ideologically coherent opponents. It is not clear that the military will successfully exclude the public from policy after elections now that Mubarak is gone.

The United States continues to make huge sacrifices in diplomatic power, money and lives to remain a negative influence on the region. The net impact of the last twenty years is that after these huge expenditures, the US goal of securing an enforced Jewish political majority state is more difficult to achieve than before.

There is a real question of not only should - which is clearly no from a moral standpoint, even by the professed US moral system - but could the US maintain its commitment to support an enforced Jewish political majority state for twenty more years. By 2031, we'll have seen the answer to that question.

The crazy theory that Israel supports Assad

2011-11-17T10:41:00.003-05:00

Our intelligence has been insulted again on Juan Cole's blog, where he claims Israel supports Assad in the current disturbances and says Assad can hang on if Israel provides covert aid. There is no word for this position other than dishonest. Cole knows better and is lying to his readers.

The United States is clearly working to force Assad out. The Obama administration publicly said the opposition should not put down its arms. Obama is not doing this against Israel's wishes.

Where Syria is headed from worst to best case from Israel/US point of view:

1) Assad hangs on and the opposition loses steam and dwindles
2) As in Libya, an opposition council which has made commitments to Western parties takes power by force, holds elections after some delay and maybe, depending on what constitution is written, eventually leaves Syrian foreign policy as independent of US pressure as it is today, but quite plausibly does not.
3) Syria is mired in a deep civil war and internal destruction that makes it unable to influence the rest of the region for an extended period of time, even if hostile forces nominally win. This is what we've seen in Iraq.

If the Muslim Brotherhood completely took over Syria, the worst they could to do Israel is support Hamas and Hezbollah, which is exactly what Assad is doing. Syria is not in a position to wage a conventional war with Israel regardless of its leadership.

Today's Syria, or 2010 Syria is the worst case scenario for Israel. If you disagree, then what specific policy could Syria pursue that would be worse for Israel?

The best case for both the welfare of the people of Syria and for the principle of democracy would be for violence on all sides, particularly against the state to be subdued for long enough for elections to be organized in which anyone, including Assad can campaign and run.

Then after seeing election results it will be clear whether or not Assad has more or less popular support than the very passionate protesters in small cities who have outside support. It is very possible, almost likely, that he does.

If Assad is less popular than some alternative, then a graceful exit should be determined.

US policy, with Cole's support, seems designed to ensure scenario 3 above happens. That is a great outcome for Israel and a horrible outcome for the people of Syria.

Scenario 1 then elections is the only one that could possibly lead to a graceful transition of power even if Assad does not have more popular support than some Syrian alternative. Cole and Obama are doing everything in their power to foreclose this possibility.

Dieter Bednarz from Spiegel writes a typically outrageous interview with an Iranian official

2011-11-15T00:15:00.003-05:00

Not to learn anything, but as entertainment you may want to read this interview published by Spiegel, a German publication after the recent IAEA report with its much-hyped Annex of Alleged Studies that Baradei refused to include. If I was to guess, the report was written by Gary Samore in the Obama administration and Amano dutifully signed his name onto it.

Here is my favorite moment in the interview, delivered by Dieter Bednarz:

SPIEGEL: Israel's government fears nothing more than a nuclear bomb in your government's hands, and appears to be preparing an attack on your nuclear facilities.

Salehi: We don't anticipate an attack. Israel knows how delicate the situation is. As proof that our nuclear program is peaceful in nature, we have established the conditions necessary for the required IAEA monitoring. I'd also like to point out here that no other country has worked as intensively with the IAEA in this area as the Islamic Republic of Iran.

SPIEGEL: So you claim.

Salehi: During the most recent visit from Herman Nackaerts, the IAEA's head of nuclear inspections, we cooperated with the inspectors beyond the scope of our obligations. Mr. Nackaerts and his boss, Mr. Amano, even thanked us for our cooperation.

I see no indication from the interview that Bednarz understands even the basic outline of the dispute between Iran and the West over Iran's nuclear program, but a professional journalist could get up to speed relatively quickly with openly available sources.

One good source would be Daniel Joyner's article "Iran's Nuclear Program and the Legal Mandate of the IAEA", which argues that even if all of the claims of the Annex of the recent IAEA report are true, because that Annex admits the activities do not constitute the construction of any nuclear weapon, those activities are not prohibited by the NPT. This, according to Joyner, is why Amano expresses "concern", but cannot invoke any rule which these activities, if true, violate.

Democracy: Barack Obama's, Juan Cole, and most Westerners' hypocrisy on Syria

2011-11-14T12:02:00.008-05:00

The problem with Syria isn’t, or shouldn’t be, that a government kills people it believes threaten its rule. The United States killed 625,000 people on both sides in its Civil War.

The problem is, or should be, that Syria is not accountable to the Syrian people. We don't know if Assad is the most popular political figure in Syria or not. But efforts should be underway to determine his political popularity and to move toward a graceful transition of power, with minimized loss of life, if he is not.

Civil war, which always causes huge losses of life, should be avoided if at all possible. The US should first do no harm. The US should not make statements or take positions that make civil war more likely, as occurred in Libya where that country's tens of thousands of deaths may or may not one day lead to popularly accountable government that may or may not have as much popular support as Gaddafi had.

The US should not actively support dictatorship and should not actively encourage civil war in Syria, just as in Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE, Kuwait and others in the region, most of which have governments that are accountable to the US rather more than to their own people.

Juan Cole, like Barack Obama, should, by the US’ professed values, speak out against all of these governments, and withhold US cooperation for these dictatorial rulerships before hundreds or thousands of people die resisting them. Mubarak did not become a dictator when protesters died occupying Tahrir Square. The United States should, by its professed values, have said Mubarak should relinquish power long before then.

Juan Cole, like Barack Obama, should, by the US’ professed values, say that the dictators of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait and others should leave today. Just as much as they say this about Syria.

Neither Obama nor Cole is willing to speak against the pro-US dictatorships in the region. Probably because these pro-US dictatorships are necessary for Israel to be viable, and therefore both of their careers could be threatened by any challenge to US support for these dictatorships.

But the truth is the truth whether or not it appears in speeches by the President of the United States or on the Informed Comment blog.

This leads to the problem (or maybe for Obama and Cole the benefit) with elevating a supposed right to protest above the right to accountable government, or the right of people ruled to government that reflects the values and sensibilities of the majority.

Protests can be manipulated externally, as the US did in Iran in 1953 resulting in the installation of a pro-US stooge dictator. Was foreign assistance covertly used to help establish a liberated territory around Benghazi? What role are foreigners, and what role is the US playing in the conflict in Syria? We may learn a generation from now. Now we know that liberated territory does not happen as the result of peaceful protests. Liberated territory is the result of local armed forces loyal to the state being out-gunned.

If somebody expels all armed forces loyal to the United States federal government from Miami, we can be sure Barack Obama will order columns of tanks with air support to recapture that city. We can also be sure that there will be substantial civilian casualties. Obama will label whoever "liberated" Miami as terrorists in the exact same terms Gaddafi used for the rebels of Benghazi and Assad used for the rebels of Hama.

There are non-violent protests occurring in the United States today. Of course none has established a liberated area the size of a city or town, which is to say a large zone free of security forces aligned with the government. There is no non-violent way to do that.

But because there is no current armed uprising against the pro-US dictatorships of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE and others, Obama and Cole are comfortable supporting these governments with their silence.

About Egypt, I hope Egypt escapes from the US colonial orbit that it is in now. But no transfer of power to a civilian government has been committed to this or next year, and there are emerging signs that any transfer, if it does happen, will be incomplete, and will not make Egypt's policy regarding Israel accountable to any government elected by the Egyptian people.

There is no reason to expect Obama or Cole to be more critical of a post-Tahrir unaccountable government than they were of Egypt pre-Tahrir. Or than they are of the other effective US colonies in the region. Not to defend them, but to understand them:

1) They have no choice. Neither could hold their current positions if they did not support, or if it was perceived that their support was even in question for whatever is necessary for there to be a viable enforce-majority Jewish political state in Palestine.

2) They are American. They developed both personally and professionally in environments where it has always been assumed that the interests of the non-White people (as defined by US terms) of the region should be secondary to those of the Whites of the region. This may seem more surprising regarding Obama than Cole, but Obama's childhood home was racially more similar to Cole's than it was to, say, Jesse Jackson's.

With great courage and honesty, both of these two factors could be overcome. Unfortunately great courage or honesty cannot be attributed to either Barack Obama or Juan Cole especially on this issue.

Why is it important to Westerners that Iran not have legal nuclear weapons capabilities?

2011-11-12T11:45:00.010-05:00

I asked this question over at armscontrolwonk.com and got answers that though over-wordy and indirect, essentially confirmed that for Western analysts, Israel has turned the Middle East into a special region where it is important for one country to have a monopoly on both actual nuclear weapons and the technological capabilities to make them. Despite reluctant admissions that it is otherwise legitimate for non-weapons NPT countries to gain those capabilities.

I'll define the term "legal nuclear weapons capability" as I use it as a situation where a country clearly does not have weapons today because there is no fissile material that the IAEA does not have under safeguards, but where that country could make weapons in a few months if it was to make that decision. Japan, Brazil, Canada, Germany and dozens of other countries have what I describe here as legal nuclear weapons capability.

The fact of the matter is that a position where a country clearly does not have weapons today even though it could visibly make them later if provoked is a good deal. It means that, for example, Argentina does not have to worry that a surprise nuclear attack might come from Brazil tomorrow. This has real value to Brazil's and Argentina's region. Western analysts, when trying to whip up a frenzy over Iran's nuclear program often lose track of or belittle the value of being verifiably nuclear free today, even for a country that could, if it feels it needs to, build nuclear weapons six months from now. Hopefully these nations never will feel they need to.

Brazil, Japan, Canada, Germany and many others have not exploited a loophole. They have taken a very serious and solid step towards a world without nuclear fears. The United States, not to mention Israel, is far behind these countries in terms of non-proliferation, is far behind Iran on that subject today since all of Iran's fissile material is accounted for by the IAEA as not in military programs and would remain far behind Iran even if Iran was to attain legal nuclear weapons capability.

The NPT was negotiated and despite not being everything the US might dream of, not demanding permanent subjugation of the rest of the world to a small number of permanent nuclear powers, the NPT as negotiated does a lot to provide security and stability. The world would be a much better place if Israel, the United States and every country that is not an NPT non-weapons state went to legal nuclear weapons capability rather than the positions they hold today.

The reason Iran did not follow the path to legal nuclear weapons capability that Japan did is that the United States very actively and intensely blocked that path from Iran. Every single legal agreement Iran made with European countries, Russia and China during the 80s, 90s and early 00s, was broken by Iran's foreign partners under US pressure.

What if the US had not feverishly worked to prevent Iran from following the path Japan followed? Germany would have finished Bushehr, Iran would have acquired uranium conversion and enrichment technology from Russia and China and would today have what I defined above as substantial legal nuclear weapons capability as well as a substantial domestic nuclear power industry. The United States is the exact sole reason Iran did not arrive at a state of legal nuclear weapons capability fully openly.

Clearly that outcome was not acceptable to the US because the US expended significant political and diplomatic capital to prevent that outcome. Now that that outcome has been averted, it is easy for Western analysts today to say that outcome would have been acceptable to them. But them saying that is not believable, not to me and I don't think to anyone with common sense noting that they were not objecting to that US policy when it was happening, don't say it was wrong today, and do not today call for the US to stop its efforts to prevent Iran from moving to that model.

Despite a lot of fluster and misdirection, it is not Iran's path to legal nuclear weapons capability that concerns Western nuclear policy analysts, it is Iran's acquisition of legal nuclear weapons capability itself.

If Iran's strategy is to accomplish legal nuclear weapons capability in order to undercut the rationale that has supported US efforts to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear power-generating technology that would be a valid and rational strategy. Later the US will be in a weaker position to pressure other countries from providing assistance and Iran will be able to get more nuclear technological assistance, if it needs it. This would be a sound reason for Iran to accomplish a state of legal nuclear weapons capability and to ensure that it never commits future generations to relinquish this capability beyond the intrinsic value of legal legal nuclear weapons capability itself.

But other than pointing out that Iran's path to legal nuclear weapons capability was undertaken more in secret than Japan's we have seen some direct justifications for why Western analysts believe Iran should be held to a different standard.

We've seen a statement that one is sure Iran plans to deploy actual nuclear weapons. We've seen a statement that Iran's "neighbors" think legal nuclear weapons capability is the same thing as actual nuclear weapons and we've seen a statement that the Middle East is different from the West Pacific and South America and so reasonably should be treated differently.

Iran with legal nuclear weapons capability could refrain from leaving the NPT or diverting fissile material away from IAEA supervision unless or until some severe provocation occurred. By severe provocation I mean a bombing attack, a ground invasion or visible preparations for a ground invasion. Such a stance would itself actually deter the types of provocations that would cause Iran to build actual weapons.

This would be the rational course of action, it is the action consistent with every Iranian statement, public or intercepted, at every level for many years.

To say one is sure Iran will deploy actual nuclear weapons sounds suspiciously like saying one is sure the US will bomb Iran, insert ground troops or visibly prepare to insert ground troops into Iran.

I don't know if they are aware, but when Western analysts express certainty that Iran will build an actual weapon, they strengthen the case for Iran building and maintaining a legal nuclear weapons capability.

The United States wants the freedom to make a severe provocation of Iran without the threat that such a provocation would move Iran into a state of nuclear ambiguity or of possession of an actual nuclear weapon.

The US and Israel have that freedom regarding Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, UAE, Kuwait and others but likely would not if these countries, which I describe as US colonies, were more accountable to their own people than to the US embassies in their countries.

The fact that governments that are not accountable to their own people have not responded to Israel's regional nuclear monopoly says more about the directions that have come from US embassies than it does about the strategic interests of the people of those countries.

We also saw a statement that "Iran's neighbors" think legal nuclear weapons capability is the same thing as actual nuclear weapons. Now if by "Iran's neighbors" Western analysts mean Israel, they are close to agreement with me.

Of course Israel can tell the difference between legal nuclear weapons capability and actual nuclear weapons. There is at least one person in that country who can read the NPT. What Western analysts really mean when they say it perceives those different concepts as the same is nothing more than that Israel really does not want Iran to have legal nuclear weapons capability.

Lastly we saw a statement that most people understand that the Middle East is different from the other regions. Other than avoiding the question of exactly what is the difference, this is also similar to what I've written earlier. Why is the Western Pacific more similar to South America than either is to the Middle East, so that Japan and Brazil can have legal nuclear weapons capability but Iran can't?

Well, most of the 400 million people in the greater Middle East disagree with the United States and with most of the US and Western nuclear and policy establishments about the legitimacy of Israel as an enforced Jewish political majority state.

The enforced Jewish political majority state in Israel is seen as an injustice in its region just as the enforced White political majority state in South Africa was seen as an injustice in Africa. If the rest of the region is strong, such a state is not viable. Most of the US and Western nuclear and policy establishments are ultimately motivated by the idea that Israel cannot be allowed to become non-viable.

Because of that, it is important to the West that the US have a particular freedom to launch provocative measures against Iran in a way that does not have an analog in other regions.

That's pretty much what is driving the dispute between the US and Iran over its nuclear issue. You can read some words by Western analysts themselves over at armscontrolwonk.

Moon of Alabama catches two major nuclear-related lies in one month

2011-11-07T23:55:00.003-05:00

Not much for me to add here. First the US and Western nuclear policy communities were astir over the idea that a yarn-knitting facility in Syria was actually a planned centrifuge facility. It turns out, and members of the Western nuclear policy community now admit, that the accusation was just false.

I want to give full credit for that to "b" from Moon of Alabama here.

Shortly thereafter, we learned that there is supposedly a steel tube in Iran that can be used to test triggers for nuclear devices. The expertise to use this tube was supposedly transferred to Iran from a Ukrainian nuclear weapons scientist named Vyacheslav Danilenko.

Danilenko is not a nuclear scientist but works on an industrial process that makes small diamonds used industrially to polish smooth surfaces.

Thanks again to b at MoonOfAlabama. A place I need to visit more frequently.

So what does this all mean?

There is exactly one reason Iran having technology that could in theory be used to create a nuclear weapon is more sinister than Japan or Brazil having such technology. Iran is close to Israel and Brazil is not.

Barack Obama, David Sanger - one of the New York Times' primary scare-mongers regarding Iran - and David Albright - one the the Western press' main sources for anti-Iran nuclear information - are each committed to the idea that Israel must have a nuclear advantage over all of its neighbors and are each willing to blatantly lie if necessary toward that end.

Once the United States committed that six million Jewish people must be dominant over more than 400 million people in the region, then modern colonialism in the US' relations with Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE and others, murders of scientists, sanctions, government-created computer viruses and attempts to deny industrialization and large swaths of technology to large populations follow directly from that commitment.

Obama, Sanger and Albright are proponents of that commitment. Distortions and lies meant to harm Iran for Israel's sake are going to come from these three faster than even b can debunk them.

The problem with US Middle East policy is not Democrats or Republicans

2011-11-07T12:16:00.006-05:00

There are fewer than six million Jewish people in Israel. There are about 420 million people in the Greater Middle East, defined as Arab countries plus Iran and Turkey.

The United States has an explicit commitment, that Barack Obama describes as unbreakable, that the small number of Jewish people has an militarily unchallengeable majority state in their region of 420 million people even at the cost of opposing accountability or control of their own government's policies for everyone else.

This is not a Republican issue. Neither George Bush, Newt Gingrich nor Herman Cain is fundamentally worse on the Middle East than Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or John Kerry.

A country that wants to overrule 420 million people's assessment of the legitimacy of Israel has to do it in the evil ways we see the United States behaving in the Middle East today. This is where the US invasion of Iraq, sanctions on Iran, air strikes on Libya, support for children going hungry in Gaza and support for a string of 19th century-style colonial dictatorships over Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE and others flow from.

It is always silly to see a US Democrat criticize a US Republican regarding Middle East policies. Or vice versa. The problem is not the personality or party of the president. There is, even by American moral standards, a fundamental evil embedded in the US political process.

Either any American would subordinate the interests of 420 million people to those of 6 million people, or that American could not be president of the United States. Democrat or Republican.

Will the US lose its vulnerability in Iraq when the troops leave?

2011-11-05T15:51:00.004-04:00

I had not put much thought into that question, assuming that between the troops in boats in the Persian Gulf and the troops in Afghanistan, Iran doesn't need vulnerable US troops in Iraq as sufficient deterrence from an unprovoked US strike.

But Juan Cole points me to another factor that I had not considered. There are still thousands of Americans working officially in Iraq in the Green Zone after the last combat troop and trainer is gone.

Even the US embassy in Baghdad would be vulnerable to massive attack, especially once the troops are out. Al-Maliki supported Lebanon’s Hizbullah against Israel during the 2006 war, and would certainly adopt the same position in the event of another conflict, kicked off by a bombing of the Natanz facility.

An Iranian response to a US attack could probably kill almost as many US personnel in action after the US leaves Iraq as it could kill there now. The political effect of a sustained campaign against US forces on the US' political desire to remain in the region could be just as profound in a post-exit Iraq.

In a very real way, nothing changes with the US pulling troops out of Iraq other than the US saving money on the costs of keeping them there and the US slowly losing leverage over the Iraqi government.

It is a good thing, and I am glad for many reasons to see the US troops leave. But it does not substantially change the strategic situation one way or another.

Egypt's military proposes that the defense budget be kept secret

2011-11-05T15:33:00.009-04:00

This seems to me like the type of proposal that would, unfortunately originate from Barack Obama's US State Department.

Concerns were heightened this week when the military-backed interim government announced parameters for writing Egypt's new constitution. The proposals allow the generals to appoint 80% of the constitutional committee. They also state that the defense budget would be kept secret and the military would be the "guardian" of the constitution, raising the possibility of intervention in legislative and presidential affairs.

Keeping the defense budget secret is the exact measure necessary to make Egypt's relationship with the United States, which is implemented by US public and non-public contributions to various members of Egypt's military, immune from popular accountability.

Simply put, in 2011, in the Middle East, under Barack Obama, the United States is not a force for good. The United States is the most active opponent of democracy in that region and probably in the world.

There is not much more to say other than hoping the people of Egypt, along with the people of the US colonies of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, UAE and others are successful in their efforts to break from the grip of the colonial structure Obama and the US hold in place for the sake of Israel.

When a $15 trillion country like the US goes to a relatively poor country like Egypt, or Jordan, or Saudi Arabia, or the other colonies - as was the case with Great Britain when it was the world hegemon - and asks does anyone want to accept a lot of money to be our stooge, somebody is going to say yes.

If it was not Tantawi or one of the Abdullahs it would be someone else. The problem is not the stooges, the problem is the US in 2011 being as opposed to locally accountable government as Great Britain was in 1811.

This is really not in line with the US' professed values, and does not match the US' post-cold war behavior anywhere else in the world. But this US colonialism is what is needed for Israel to remain a viable Jewish political majority state. Equivalently something like it would have been needed if the US persisted in John F. Kennedy's, Ronald Reagan's and Dick Cheney's commitment to supporting a White political majority state in South Africa.

But all good people wish the people of Egypt, as well as the people of Libya and others in the region good luck and strength in the very trying situation they find themselves it because of the United States.

Juan Cole, once again, pathetically wrong about Libya

2011-11-05T14:56:00.008-04:00

I left a long comment on Juan Cole's blog in response to another of his silly posts regarding Libya. In this one, he just points to a different silly post by Michael Berube. Cole, of course, is very sensitive on this issue, and while I've been surprised to see some of my comments published in the past and this may also be published in that link, as of now, I expect that it will not be. So I'll put it here so that my time in writing it and getting links to support it will not be entirely wasted if Cole feels it does not meet his editorial standards.

There are some problems with that essay. Firstly, where is the actual person on the left that Berube is supposedly criticizing? He could have quoted, say Glenn Greenwald from Salon, but did not. That way he avoided responding to real arguments. We have to say that was a cowardly tactic. Whoever Berube is responding to may well be more a figment of his own imagination than a real person.

On the other hand, the civil war that NATO created out of civil unrest killed probably at least 30,000 Libyans.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/26/libya-war-saving-lives-catastrophic-failure

None of the comparables, not the putting down of civil unrest in Bahrain, not the putting down of civil unrest in Syria, not China in Tienanmen Square resulted in death tolls near that level.

Obama supporters claim we'll never know how many lives would have been lost in putting down the rebellion if NATO had not intervened. We do know, we use comparable situations. At most a tenth of the amount that were actually lost would have been lost if NATO had not intervened. Otherwise we have to just say history is just not a guide, so we make up whatever number makes us feel good. That argument says Saddam Hussein "might" have killed every single Iraqi if the US had not invaded in 2003. Some people will dishonestly say we'll never know, but really we know.

Did this cost that Barack Obama ensured that the people of Libya would pay result in more representative government for Libyans? So far no. Even if it did, that's a lot of lost human life for that goal.

For far less loss of human life Barack Obama could tell the US puppet regime in Saudi Arabia that the US will not arm and equip a new military force of 35,000 troops to defend his regime unless it holds national elections.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=13635972#.TrWEu3LPyAg

Instead Barack Obama sends congratulations to the next in line to be the US' stooge dictator of that country, AND TO THE PEOPLE OF SAUDI ARABIA for his appointment.

http://www.france24.com/en/20111028-obama-congratulates-saudis-new-crown-prince

But in the words of Barack Obama: "there will be times when our short term interests do not align perfectly with our long term vision of the region."

http://m.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/05/19/remarks-president-middle-east-and-north-africa

"Not perfectly" is right. Not at all would have been right also, given that his and his supporters' claims to support democracy, and more astoundingly, their claims that the democracy that hopefully may emerge is worth over 20,000 Libyan lives. Worth young people setting themselves on fire, but not worth the risk to Obama's political career that would be represented by being lax at maintaining the string of pro-Israel, popularly-unaccountable governments in the region.

So, rather than a straw-man argument, I'll present a real one. The predictable loss of human life that followed from NATO's intervention in Libya was just a gratuitous waste. It demonstrated that Barack Obama and his supporters do not value Libyan life relative to very small policy benefits to the US or to Libya and it is hard to escape the conclusion that there is an underlying bigotry that is even more unexpected and disappointing in Obama's case as a Black man raised in a Muslim family than than it is in the case of most Westerners.

I do not call for the US to intervene in that way in Egypt and don't call for such an intervention in Saudi Arabia. In both cases I only call for the US to stop supporting political systems that are more accountable to the US embassies in their countries than to their people.

Obama's strategy of supporting pro-Israel dictatorships while working to destabilize elected or non-elected anti-Israel governments is not morally defensible. His supporters are actually the best examples of "woolly thinking, outrageous lies, moon-eyed leader-worship, false equivalences, and simplistic proxies for actual thought".

A million apologies to Pirouz

2011-11-03T20:03:00.002-04:00

And to anyone else whose comment is caught in this site's spam filter.

I haven't been posting much recently or coming by here. Just writers block, or more a situation where the Middle East hinges in every important way on what happens in Egypt, specifically Egypt's elections, but those have been postponed and Egypt, certainly at the US' urging, has adopted an innovative three stage election process.

Mubarak is gone. Mubarakism is gone. I also don't want to judge Egypt harshly before there is something tangible to judge. But the shape of the Middle East depends on how the Egyptians vote, how the US' allies in Egypt respond to the elections, and the responses and counter-responses from there.

Nothing else in the Middle East is really important comparatively.

Assad will be in power at least until we've seen the first set of results in Egypt and what happens in Syria after that will be strongly influenced by what happens in Egypt in ways that I can't predict until Egypt is in sharper focus.

Hurray for Iraq for, contrary to US efforts, apparently choosing to fully remove US troops.

US influence has been on the decline for a long time now.

Iran loses its threat to attack the US in Iraq, but gains decreased US capabilities to thwart Iraqi cooperation with Iran with regard to Syria now and Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in future years.

For Iran to inflict pain on the US after a strike - which means US killed in action, which is the only thing that does have a political impact on US decision-making - Iran's option at this point is targets in US ships and in Afghanistan.

Iran is capable of working this out. I am not concerned that there might be a US or Israeli attack in 2012, or that if there had been an attack it would not leave Iran in a stronger position after all of the dust settles.

So really, nothing has changed in the region since I was last posting regularly, and nothing is going to change until we see elections. Because of that it has been hard for me to find motivation to post anything.

I'd love to comment on any articles anyone finds so please leave links in the comments section. I'm turning off the spam filter to the degree that I can. Again, sorry for the comments that were blocked.

Juan Cole on Al-Qaeda and the 9/11: Mostly right about US domestic situation, mostly wrong about the Middle East

2011-09-13T22:03:00.004-04:00

Juan Cole is notoriously sensitive about opposing views in the comments section of his blog. It was much less noticeable to me during the presidency of George W. Bush, whom Cole opposed than it is during the presidency of Barack Obama whom Cole supports. With Obama president, Cole is not far from just another jingoistic American, and not even the most fair. Other jingoistic Americans - Americans who are willing to bend any logical or moral principle in favor of their support for country - are usually more willing than Cole to expose their ideas to public scrutiny than Cole has been recently. At least on his own site.

Oh well. Other people have blogs. I have a blog. Over at RaceForIran.com , Flynt and Hillary Leverett have an unmoderated comments section. I'm told that Scott Lucas' Enduring America site has a comments section to which opposing views can easily be presented without alteration.

But if you read Cole's 9/11 article about the impact of Al-Qaeda in the Middle East and the US, you'll see that it's wrong in somewhat interesting ways. Cole presents the idea that Al-Qaeda's goal is to create a caliphate that, I guess, Bin Laden would rule. This is a very popular idea in the United States. I've only seen this idea presented by American supposed experts on Al-Qaeda. None of Bin Laden's interviews or statements, no statement of any kind from any member of Al-Qaeda, in fact no Muslim at all, as far as I've ever heard, has advocated creating the caliphate Cole talks about.

Now if someone digs up a statement that mentions a caliphate made by a Muslim in an aspirational tone, I'll stand corrected, but still, that is not a primary motivating factor or we'd read it a lot more than we have, which for me is never.

What motivated 9/11? A long term plan to build a caliphate, or the idea that the United States, from a long distance away, was killing Muslims and should suffer some consequence for that? The second seems a more obvious explanation, and is supported by Bin Laden's actual statements rather than what might be a fantasy in the minds of US-based researchers into Al-Qaeda.

(As a quick aside, here's a statement by Cole: "Had [the US] lifted the blockade on medicine and chlorine in Iraq, it would have forestalled charges of being implicated in the deaths of half a million children." Well, probably. Had the US not taken actions to kill hundreds of thousands of children and elderly in Iraq, then charges that the US took actions to kill hundred of thousands of children and elderly probably would have been "forestalled".)

The main error that pervades Cole's essay is this supposed caliphate motivation on the part of Al-Qaeda.

The second major error is that Cole speaks as if Egypt, Tunisia, Libya or any former pro-US dictatorship has been replaced by an accountable government. None have. I vigorously hope that they all will, but so far they have not. The efficacy of the Arab spring model for political change has not been demonstrated yet, and will not have been demonstrated until a government takes power that has defeated its opposition by getting more votes.

Every statement Cole makes about what the Arab spring has proven is so far false. I hope his statements become true as soon as possible. I hoped in February that they would have been proven true by now. But for now they are not true.

After that, he makes a lot of mistakes about the Middle East, but comparatively minor. He claims the student groups have been more important in the protest movements than the Islamists. None of the movements so far could have extracted promises of reform without both. Both were necessary, neither was sufficient. To say one was more important is inaccurate, but in a minor way.

He makes a weird claim that the Arab Spring proves that most Middle East publics have expressed a preference for parliamentary democracy instead of direct democracy. First, most Middle East publics, numerically, are still ruled by pro-US colonial dictators. Second, there is a consensus among political scientists, especially but not only in the West, that parliamentary systems are in many ways superior to the US' older model of government. This expert consensus has resulted in no public recently ever being given a choice between parliamentary and direct democracy. Third, even if Cole was right about this, which he isn't, this is the type of detail that still would hardly merit mention in any overview essay such as Cole's. I can't figure out what that's all about.

Cole also claims that there were no major Al-Qaeda attacks on the US post 9/11 because the first attacks were bait that accomplished their goal of causing the US reaction that occurred. That's just wrong. There were no later attacks because the US acted much more vigilantly to discover and break up potential attacks. Clearly Bin Laden did not have the ability to launch further major attacks on the US and refrained because the US had already invaded Iraq.

But where Cole is closer to right is the impact of 9/11 on the US. 9/11 unleashed forces in the United States that want the US itself to be a more tightly controlled and less politically free state. Barack Obama claimed, now obviously falsely, to oppose that tendency. Cole manages to criticize the actions of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld to push the US in that direction without noting that Obama has expanded far more of their programs than he reduced.

Americans very rarely understand that freedom is a luxury and a by-product of wealth. Make Iran or Cuba two or three orders of magnitude more wealthy than their potential adversaries and either of them would likely be more politically free than the United States is. Both Iran and Cuba are ideologically inspired nations the way the US was in the late 1700s when its constitution was written and is far less today.

The personal freedoms afforded by the United States to its citizens come from its relative wealth and relative security from foreign intervention and not much more than that. Put either George Bush or Barack Obama where Cuba is, with a rich, hostile enemy to the north, and either will build far more ruthless dictatorships than Castro has, because neither, unlike Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Fidel Castro and Ruholluh Khomeini is motivated by a revolutionary vision of how good a state can be.

Related to the idea of the cost of the luxury of personal freedom, is the price to the US of Israel - the price of maintaining the string of colonial dictatorships necessary to fulfill the US' commitment that Israel will militarily dominate neighbors with far greater populations and economic resources. This cost was far higher on 9/12/01 than it was on 9/10/01. And continues to be much higher to this day.

Barack Obama, very disappointingly, in May claimed the US is still willing to pay any price. As the price goes up, we'll see where the US' commitment breaks. So far, Al-Qaeda has done far more than any other group or organization to raise the direct cost to the US of its commitment to Israel's ability to dominate its region. Iran comes second and the Arab Spring, so far, has not had any impact at all.

After Egyptian elections and a transfer of power that I vigorously hope to see, and that Obama (and Cole because of Cole's essentially blind loyalty to Obama) is much less enthusiastic about, possibly (hopefully for me) the relative impacts of the groups may change. So far it has not, and in a fundamental way Cole seems not to understand that.

Some Wikileaks about Egypt

2011-09-12T13:06:00.004-04:00

http://wikileaks.org/cable/2007/12/07CAIRO3503.html

¶3. (S) A serious political commitment, supported by dedicated and properly trained personnel, is key to progress. The Egyptians claim that they respond aggressively to Israeli intelligence leads, while both sides bicker over whether and how Egypt could deploy more Border Guard Forces. Meanwhile, the Egyptians continue to offer excuses for the problem they face: the need to "squeeze" Hamas, while avoiding being seen as complicit in Israel's "siege" of Gaza. Egyptian General Intelligence Chief Omar Soliman told us Egypt wants Gaza to go "hungry" but not "starve." Minister of Defense Field Marshal Tantawi and the Director of Military Intelligence MG Mowafy both pressed recently for the return of EUBAM monitors to oversee the crossing between Gaza and Egypt of Palestinians with urgent humanitarian circumstances. In their moments of greatest frustration, Tantawi and Soliman each have claimed that the IDF would be "welcome" to re-invade Philadelphi, if the IDF thought that would stop the smuggling.
...
¶8. (S) The Egyptians are surprised and alarmed at the turn their relations with both the U.S. and Israel have taken in recent months. Mubarak and his security chiefs viscerally want Hamas "to fail." They thought their self-interest in this objective was so obvious to us, to Abu Mazen, and to the Israelis -- as it is to Mubarak's domestic opposition -- as to be beyond all question. They are looking for a way to get things back on track with the U.S. and the Israelis and to do all they can to thwart Hamas, but the GOE is intensely uncomfortable at squeezing the people of Gaza in the face of opposition charges that Mubarak, as America's tool, is supporting Israel's "siege of Gaza." Also, it is unclear whether the MOD can get a full grip on the fundamental security concerns in the Sinai, especially smuggling, given the practical restraints of troop limits and the generally poor performance of the Egyptian armed forces overall. The GOE wants regular openings at Rafah, when circumstances allow, to reduce the economic pressure that sustains smuggling and to ease the Gazans' humanitarian crisis while keeping Hamas under pressure. They also want their discussions with the United States, particularly when it comes to Egypt's FMF, not to pass through a perceived "Israeli filter" (Ref D). Meanwhile, the Egyptians show no grasp of Israeli outrage at continuing mortar and rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza -- mirroring the Israeli failure to comprehend the GOE's dilemma over Gaza and Hamas.

http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/09/06CAIRO5748.html

¶2. (C) CENTCOM Commanding General John Abizaid, accompanied by the Ambassador, met on August 30 with Egyptian Minister of Defense Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi to review U.S.-Egyptian mil-mil relations and discuss the regional situation. Abizaid and Tantawi agreed that the U.S.-Egyptian relationship is very strong; but, added Tantawi, "we want even more." General Abizaid thanked Tantawi for Egypt's cooperation in areas as diverse as granting overflight clearances to facilitating usage of the Suez Canal. Tantawi said it was important for the U.S. to remember that, while Egyptian political and military leaders understood the value of the U.S.-Egyptian relationship, "the simple people do not see it." We need to work together to convince them, too. The key, according to Tantawi, is the reinvigoration of the peace process. "It is not a peace process just for the Palestinians and Israelis, but for the region as a whole."

http://wikileaks.org/cable/2007/11/07CAIRO3333.html

¶2. (C) Comment: The Egyptians had initially indicated they would make a decision on the LOR by December 15. This apparently very quick turnaround is welcome. Tanatawi had agreed in principle to similar but less specific recommendations a year ago and ended up not signing an LOR. The USACE report gave us the technical arguments needed, and the Egyptians are conscious of their standing in Congress if they take no action. While Tantawi still needs to actually sign the letter, we are optimistic the MoD will sign the LOR this time.

http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=07CAIRO974

¶1. (C) Summary: In a recent meeting with poloff, independent parliamentarian Anwar Esmat El Sadat (protect), nephew of the former President, discussed presidential son Gamal Mubarak's possible succession of his father, and opined that Gamal increasingly views Minister of Defense Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and EGIS head Omar Suleiman as a threat to his presidential ambitions. Sadat alleged that Tantawi recently told him, in confidence, of his deepening frustration with Gamal. End summary.
---------------------------------------------
GAMAL ANGLING TO "GET RID" OF HIS COMPETITION
---------------------------------------------
¶2. (S) On March 29, Sadat noted to poloff his assessment that the recently approved constitutional amendments package is largely aimed at ensuring Gamal Mubarak's succession of his father, and "a more controllable, stable political scene when he does take the reins." Opining that "Gamal and his clique" are becoming more confident in the inevitability of Gamal's succession, and are now angling to remove potential "stumbling blocks," Sadat said that speculation among Cairo's elite is that there could be a cabinet reshuffle as soon as May or June, in which Minister of Defense Tantawi and/or EGIS head Omar Suleiman would be replaced. "Those two are increasingly viewed as a threat by Gamal and those around him," and thus Gamal is reportedly pushing Mubarak to get them out of the way, so they "could not pose any problems" in the event of a succession. Sadat speculated that "hitches" to a Gamal succession could occur if Mubarak died before installing his son: "Gamal knows this, and so wants to stack the deck in his favor as much as possible now, while Mubarak is firmly in control, just in case his father drops dead sooner rather than later."
¶3. (S) Sadat said Tantawi had commented to him in a recent private meeting that, "he has had it 'up to here' with Gamal and his cronies, and the tremendous corruption they are facilitating." "Tantawi told me he is having trouble sleeping at night," he continued, "and that he cannot stand what has happened to the country, and what may yet happen to the country." Disappointed by the recent constitutional amendments, and skeptical about the will of either Mubarak or Gamal to push forward meaningful political reforms, Sadat said he viewed a post-Mubarak military coup as "the best possible way out for Egypt ... we are in a terrible spot, and that is the best of all the bad options available." (Note: Sadat provided no further details about a possible coup scenario, and appeared to simply be theorizing about the future. To date, we have not heard other interlocutors speculate about a possible coup option. End note).

http://wikileaks.org/cable/2008/02/08CAIRO255.html

¶6. (C) A/S Welch responded that there would be four losers -- including the Palestinians. Tantawi agreed. The Egyptians have tried to get the PA and Hamas to work together to address the Gaza border issue, but they have very deep divisions. We are forced to deal with Hamas on the tactical level, Tantawi said -- they are the ones on the other side of the border. A/S Welch stressed that the United States believes in dealing only with the PA; we do not believe in dealing with Hamas. It is very important that Hamas not be seen as the authority. All the political credit for solving this crisis must go to Egypt, Israel, the U.S. and the PA -- not Hamas.

http://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/02/09TELAVIV422.html

¶7. (C) Harel admitted that whether the IDF wanted to be in the humanitarian business or not, the IDF was obliged by law to continue to provide humanitarian support to Gaza, and the delivery of humanitarian supplies were a daily part of Cast Lead. It was HAMAS, Harel stated, that decided to continue to shoot even during the humanitarian pauses, and the recent seizure of humanitarian supplies from UNRWA by HAMAS further proves who cares more about civilians in Gaza. In response to a question on how the international community can get Gaza,s borders open, Harel said there were several conditions -- Gilad Shalit is released; there is a cease fire agreement in place; HAMAS stops all rocket fire into Israel; HAMAS slows its force build up; and mechanisms are in place to slow the smuggling into Gaza from the Sinai. Harel further stated that Israel must control who the aid is assisting, and that Israel is not ready for the free flow of goods into Gaza.

Comparisons between Egypt today and South Korea in 1980

2011-07-18T06:00:00.003-04:00

In 1979 a popular student uprising began in South Korea, which was then a US ally under dictatorial rule. The uprising was, with some degree of US collusion, brutally repressed by the South Korean military. The military leader of that repression started a party whose candidate later ran for and won the South Korean presidency in an election in 1987. Korea has since been described by the US CIA as a "fully functioning modern democracy" which is some term of art that I've only seen applied to South Korea itself.

As the mass and social media beamed the so-called “Arab Spring” around the world, analysts and pundits in the United States quickly began comparing the revolts to past uprisings, particularly those during the Cold War, which had shaken U.S. foreign policy. A favorite topic, particularly on Fox News, was Egypt’s purported similarity to the Iranian revolution of 1979, which toppled the pro-US Shah of Iran and eventually led to a Shiite Islamic state hostile to the United States. A few opportunistic neocon voices also compared the Obama administration’s public support for Mubarak’s opponents to Washington’s past actions to pressure Ferdinand Marcos and Suharto to end their dictatorial rule in the Philippines and Indonesia once popular uprisings had already sealed their fate.

But not a single analyst or journalist of note mentioned what remains one of the most significant rebellions against a US-backed tyrant of the past half-century: the student and worker uprising in South Korea in 1979 and 1980, which was mercilessly crushed by the Korean military with the US support. Korea didn’t even make the list of near-revolutions: in mid-February, PBS published a list of “30 Years of Uprisings” that had “brought down governments and transformed societies” or were either “dissipated” or “crushed.” The list included Iran, the Philippines, the Baltics, China’s Tiananmen Square, the 1997 Kosovo Rebellion against Serbia and the 1998 Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela – but unaccountably skipped South Korea as well as Taiwan.

Egypt's recent announcement that, contrary to the March referendum, elections will be delayed beyond September brings to mind questions of whether Egypt's current US-sponsored dictator, Mohamed Tantawi, has plans or hopes of following a similar path.

Egypt's ruling Supreme Council of Armed Forces says it is delaying scheduled September elections until October or November, officials said.

Bikya Masr reported Thursday the military, which took power after the overthrow of former President Hosni Mubarak, still supports democracy and a transition to civilian rule, but the announced delay angered protesters gathered at Cairo's Tahrir Square where the movement to oust Mubarak began.

Colonialism and Americanism aside, I hope, for Tantawi's sake, that he does not intend to follow South Korea's Chun Doo Hwan. Dictator is not a good lifestyle compared to respectable military leader. There is an unnecessarily high chance that the endeavor would end very badly for Tantawi and his family, possibly much worse than its ending for Mubarak.

The clumsy move of the US and French ambassadors visiting a demonstration, of course, backfires

2011-07-17T18:00:00.000-04:00

Sometimes one wonders if the US' entire Middle East strategy is run by heavily armed and well financed seven year old children. Publicly sending Ambassadors to observe anti-government protests in a secondary city of Syria was probably the most senseless US policy activity since the airstrikes on Libya. Here is the result.

BEIRUT (AP) — A witness in Syria's capital says security guards at the French Embassy have fired into the air to drive back protesters taking part in two-pronged demonstrations outside the French and American embassies in Damascus.

The protests Monday come days after the U.S. and French ambassadors visited the opposition stronghold of Hama in central Syria. The witness says crowds were not allowed to get near the U.S. Embassy.

The witness, Hiam al-Hassan, says about 300 people had gathered outside the French Embassy. Hundreds others were at the American diplomatic compound.

The fundamentals in Syria remain. Unless a national consensus develops that Assad must leave immediately, as developed in Egypt, Assad can't be forced out of power. And it is very unlikely at this point that such a consensus can emerge.

But other than the US and French ambassadors, there is likely no significant constituency in Syria who would want to see the country go to civil war like we see in Libya to remove Assad.

Panetta claims Iran is supporting Shia militias in Iraq

2011-07-17T06:00:00.005-04:00

The US is a rapidly declining influence in Iraq, but a failure to coerce the Iraqi government to request an extension of the troop agreement would be a humiliation.

The recent attacks on American soldiers which have spiked recently probably are meant mostly to pressure Iraq's civilian leaders to resist pressure from the US Embassy and from Iraqi military leaders who are part of US chains of command. The US is probably a secondary target. Possibly deaths of US soldiers may remind US politicians of the continuous losses in Iraq that did not have an explanation that would satisfy US voters.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said Sunday that weapons supplied by Iran are behind a rash of attacks against American forces in Iraq, part of an escalating campaign of violence ahead of the planned U.S. troop withdrawal by the end of the year.

"We're seeing more of those weapons going in from Iran, and they've really hurt us," said Panetta, who arrived in Baghdad on an unannounced visit after a two-day stop in Afghanistan.

It is easily possible that Iraqi parties that want the US to leave are able to get arms from Iran. Some of their arms ultimately come from China and Russia, Iraqis who want the US to leave have resources and can buy arms on the market.

Of course, if US troops leave Iraq, Iran and everybody else will be unable to supply Iraqis with weapons to kill US troops.

Turkey's AKP resolves parliament seating dispute

2011-07-16T18:00:00.005-04:00

The major opposition party (CHP) to Recep Tayyip Erdogan's political party (AKP) in Turkey was boycotting the parliament, refusing to be sworn in because of a dispute over the arrest and imprisonment of CHP members who had won seats in the election.

The 135 members of the Republican People's Party (CHP) began taking their oaths in the 550-seat parliament in the afternoon, after three hours of negotiations with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdgogan.

With that issue moving behind us, we still have Kurdish political party maintaining the boycott. The story of the Kurdish dispute is strategically the story of Turkey today. US/Israeli support for the Kurds in Iraq is far more than Gaza the root of Turkey's distancing itself from Israel recently. Far more than for Syria, Iraq or Iran, the Kurds in Turkey are a fundamental strategic threat to the country.

The Kurdish party the BDP has not yet ended their boycott. While they will and this in itself will not pose a problem for Erdogan and his AKP, the issue of how Kurds fit into Turkey is still a sensitive one.

We will see how it resolves itself.

Continuing protests to keep Egypt's military rulers in check

2011-07-16T06:00:00.004-04:00

The people of Egypt have built an expectation that there will be a government accountable to them, unlike the Mubarak government that was accountable to the United States as part of the US/Zionist colonial structure that now includes Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Kuwait and others.

“We are not worried over the possibility of losing public support; when we staged a sit-in in protest against the appointment of Ahmed Shafik as prime minister we were less than a thousand. But eventually we achieved what we were after and were praised by everyone.

“Now there are thousands in the current sit-in, which means we are on the right track.”

At around 6pm, around three thousand protesters marched from the square towards the Cabinet office to demonstrate their displeasure with the interim government's handling of the revolution's demands.

Also importantly, I have not read of a single Egyptian who offers a philosophical or ideological justification for Egypt's government not being accountable to its people or for groups that could get popular support being marginalized out of politics.

This is in contrast to a generation ago when, odd as it may seem today, there was a seriously held belief in many places in the Middle East that given the opportunity the people would vote for Islam-oriented parties that would leave their countries vulnerable.

The intervening decades may have made the opposite case. Iran, with an Islam-oriented government has been able to both hold elections and fend of Western pressure while the region's non-democracies have further devolved into humiliations of and disgraces to their people and their religion.

Today, nobody in the Middle East seriously buys the Nasser/Attaturk/Pavlavi idea from the mid 1900s that a country should, for strategic reasons, prevent religious parties or organizations from attaining political power.

Because not a single person is calling for it, it seems very unlikely that Egypt will fail in the relatively near future to put its government under civilian electoral accountability. I have some worry that the US may pressure the military council to delay this process with the hope of making the delay indefinite and then effectively permanent, but the people of Egypt, including the people on Egypt's ruling military council do not seem to be moving in that direction.

If the ruling military council was to bow to US requests to constrain the role of what it calls Islamist parties, the protesters would not accept that and would force them out as they forced out Mubarak.

I hope it is this year as has been promised, but I am very confident that before this time next year there will be an elected government in place in Egypt that has strong mechanisms in place that require it to adopt to the will of the people ruled rather than foreigners. Egypt will leave the US/Zionist colonial structure.

J-Street vs AIPAC's visions of the US maintaining the US/Zionist colonial structure

2011-07-15T18:00:00.010-04:00

MJ Rosenberg is known to regulars of this blog for his 2006 statement openly endorsing dictatorships for over 100 million non-Jewish people in Israel's region to protect Israel.

Jordan, for instance, is not a democracy in the western sense but it is precisely the kind of neighbor Israel needs. Egypt is not a democracy but is at peace with Israel. A democratic Egypt probably would not be.

His original statement is no longer linkable. He was quite proud of the statement at the time.

Arnold, you are right. I think that a democratic Egypt could very well repudiate the peace treaty with Israel leading to war, major Israeli (and potentially American) losses and even the end of the Jewish state. Sorry, that is too high a price to pay.

Posted by M.J. Rosenberg
January 3, 2007 9:34 AM

In a new article, he describes a legislative process where mostly unconcerned US congresspeople endorse whatever they are told to endorse by AIPAC because the alternative would be to lose campaign financing at best or to have an opponent funded sufficiently to remove them from office.

Besides, and I say this with two decades of experience working on Capitol Hill, very few senators or House members care very much about Israel (or the Palestinians) one way or another. Why stick your neck out over an issue that is not very important to you?

This indifference to Israel (and the Palestinians) is one of the secrets of the lobby's success. It is also one of the reason J Street has had such a hard time making inroads on the Hill. The J Street approach requires actually caring about Israel and crafting a U.S. strategy that help would ensure its survival. The lobby approach requires reading AIPAC talking points into the Congressional Record and voting "aye" every time an AIPAC bill comes up. If one does not care much one way or another, why stand up against one of the most powerful interest groups Washington has ever known?

Think of it this way. If you had a sibling or a child in Congress and he or she asked you if he should just go along with AIPAC or bravely resist (risking campaign donations), what would you say?

There are certainly US congresspeople who are as sure that Netanyahu's vision for Israel is correct as Netanyahu is. Netanyahu's vision is basically that the United States suppress the hundreds of millions of of people of Israel's region who are not Jewish on Israel's behalf forever.

Netanyahu's vision is kind of Israel's only hope. Rosenberg's and Obama's idea that once there are two states, the colonial structure that now includes Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Kuwait and others will either be unnecessary or easier to maintain is very likely to prove false if the people of the region ever get to vote on their government's policies.

The Palestinian people are clearly being put under duress. They are being told that if they do not vote the way Israel and the United States prefer, they will go hungry as is happening in Gaza. If a vote is ever reached, and the people of Palestine under those terms vote to accept reservations more onerous than those Nelson Mandela and the ANC rejected, the result of that vote likely will not be considered valid and therefore will still require the same colonial structure to enforce it that the US is expending a tremendous amount of resources holding in place today.

The two state solution doesn't really make sense, and its job is not really to make sense. The purpose of the peace process and the two state is to shield people like MJ Rosenberg and Barack Obama from the implications of the reality that pro-Israel US Congresswoman Illeana Ros-Lehtinen - one of many US congresspeople who clearly are familiar with and directly concerned about Israel - and Benjamin Netanyahu intend for the US to hold the colonial structure that Rosenberg approves of forever.

Barack Obama claims to see the Rosenberg's approved colonial structure that the US has held in place for the last 60 years as a temporary situation that does not align perfectly with the US' long term values.

There will be times when our short-term interests do not align perfectly with our long-term vision of the region

This is what Barack Obama needs to believe to continue to support Israel and the dictatorships Israel needs to remain viable while at the same time believing that he is not just a black-skinned Bill Clinton, Cecil Rhodes or Winston Churchill.

Rosenberg is right. Netanyahu's path will lead to the end of Zionism's viability. Ros-Lehtinen is also right. Rosenberg's path would lead to the end of Zionism's viability. If the United States is unwilling or unable to be a permanent Middle East colonial power, then Israel, or Zionism is not viable.

Rosenberg's dispute with AIPAC is over the proposition that Israel's supporters should at least lie to Israel's American sponsors. At least let them think wrongly that they aren't working to permanently keep the region politically in the 1800s. Netanyahu believes that Israel's supporters have the votes that they don't need the lie of a peace process. Netanyahu expects the United States, on Israel's behalf, to permanently suppress the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Barack Obama is acting like he is stupid enough to continue to fall for this lie. Maybe he thinks it would be anti-Semitic to do otherwise. Or maybe he really is stupid enough. There is no indication that he examined these issues closely before he ran for president and he is now surrounded by true believers.

AIPAC and J-Street, are both ultimately betting that the US will never lose the ability and capacity to shield Israel from its region that does not believe it is legitimate. I don't think that is a safe bet for the long term.

On the other hand, but Rosenberg and Netanyahu would rather see the US/Zionist colonial structure last for as long as possible. Even when it eventually fails, the 5.7 million Jews of Palestine would have gotten more years out of the Zionist enterprise, at the expense of the non-Jews of the region, than they could have hoped for without pliable US leaders.

Leon Panetta, the US' "enduring presence" in the Middle East and the US/Zionist colonial structure

2011-07-15T06:00:00.000-04:00

The New York Times has released an unusually clear view of the US' intention to remain militarily in the Middle East directly interposed with the difficulties the US is having in getting permission to remain from Iraq, a country it currently occupies and whose constitution it helped write.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said here on Monday that the United States military would have an “enduring presence” for many years in the Middle East. He pushed Prime Minister Nuri Kamal-al Maliki to name a defense minister and to let the United States know whether he wanted some American troops to remain in Iraq beyond the end of this year or not.

For comic relief, Mr. Panetta tried to explain the US' occupation of Iraq to US troops there.

“The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked, and 3,000 not just Americans, but 3,000 human beings got killed, innocent human beings, because of Al Qaeda,” Mr. Panetta told Army troops at Camp Victory, the sprawling American military base in Baghdad.

500,000 human beings were killed by US-orchestrated sanctions against Iraq in the years before 9/11. Beyond that, I'll leave it to the reader to count the different ways in which Panetta's statement conflicts with both morality and reality.

Importantly, US troops in Iraq have no idea why they are there. They are defending a US/Zionist colonial structure that fundamentally conflicts with the values the US most earnestly claims to hold. They are defending the idea that over 100 million Arabs must not have governments that represent their views or are accountable to them for the sake of 5.7 million Jewish people in Palestine.

Of course, Panetta has not helped clarify the soldiers' mission for them. Neither, ever, will Barack Obama.

Oil off the shores of Israel and Lebanon

2011-07-14T18:00:00.003-04:00

As of today, there is no military in the Mediterranean that could challenge Israel, with the support of the United States, from claiming any resources it wants. It seems Israel is taking full advantage of this situation.

"President Michel Sleiman warns against any unilateral decisions Israel may take on maritime borders which would be a breach of international law, as is Israel's habit," Sleiman's office said in a statement.

This is not a natural or inevitable state of affairs. It is the result of the regional US/Zionist colonial structure that denies representative or accountable government to over 100 million Arabs for the sake of 5.7 million Jewish people in Palestine.

Moqtada al-Sadr says Mahdi Army will not force the US out of Iraq

2011-07-14T06:00:00.003-04:00

Moqtada al-Sadr has announced that if the US does not leave by December, the Mahdi Army will not be mobilized to drive it out, but instead an organization called the Promised Day Brigade will.

Sadr said his decision about the Mahdi Army came after a recent incident in the Amine district of eastern Baghdad where a militiaman in a local dispute had called in gunmen who had shot and killed one resident and wounded another.

"I am innocent of all the abuses that people commit in my name," Sadr said.

We can assume that this Promised Day Brigade is more disciplined and under more reliable control than the larger Mahdi Army.

A problem the United States has in Iraq is that after accepting Iraq's demand that it commit to leave, the US could not credibly offer to stay for any limited period. If the US offers to keep 10,000 troops in Iraq for, say, three more years, it will be obvious to all involved that the US intends to pressure Iraq's government three years from now to extend the stay further.

If Iraq wants the US to leave ever, it has to maintain its position that the US must leave this year.

It is not clear that Iraq's politicians will be able to maintain that position. The United States is applying the most pressure it can apply - which probably means favors, threats and cargo-plane loads of US hundred dollar bills.

But whether the US stays or not, US influence is on the decline and will prove costly not only in terms of hundred dollar bills, but also in terms of lives of US soldiers.

US and French Ambassadors visit opposition demonstration in Hama

2011-07-13T18:00:00.003-04:00

France, led by Nicolas Sarkozy, the most ardent supporter of Zionism in political power outside of Israel is increasingly aligning itself in support of US policies to support and maintain the US/Zionist colonial structure in the region.

In a symbolic show of solidarity, U.S. ambassador Robert Ford and French ambassador Eric Chevallier visited Hama to put pressure on Assad not to crush the protest.

Syria condemned Ford's visit as incitement and proof that Washington was playing a role in 15 weeks of unrest which have challenged Assad's grip on power.

In a clumsy and shortsighted move, the ambassadors from the US and France actually announced that they would come to observe a planned demonstration against the Syrian government in Hama and then actually came. Those actions certainly increased the level of excitement and led to a bigger turnout - but have now clearly associated the entire movement with foreign supporters.

Syria can function with Hama holding demonstrations for as long as they feel inclined before the demonstrations die down. Hama is not Cairo. Hama is also not Benghazi. Syrian forces are well able to prevent the entrance to the city of any supplies that could help stage a rebellion.

I guess the US and France hope Saudi influence will be able to emplace a pro-US/Israel interim government after Assad and that Saudi money will be able to accomplish a pro-US/Israel outcome to any elections afterwards. Both of these hopes would actually be very hard to pull off, even if Assad were to somehow be forced out of power.

Syria could have stopped the visit which was announced publicly before the demonstration happened, but seemingly saw the US and France preparing to hand it a free propaganda victory and graciously accepted the gesture.

The US/Zionist colonial structure that now contains Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Kuwait and others is not maintained by clever policies or deft persuasive efforts. The US is again showing that it has a severe shortage of cleverness. The colonial structure is maintained by the blunt force of money and guns.

We're seeing, especially in Egypt, what happens when the money and guns start proving to be insufficient.

Saudi Arabia joins US boycott of Palestinians

2011-07-13T06:00:00.003-04:00

From Reuters we get one illustration of why Israel would not be viable without the US/Zionist colonial structure that includes Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Kuwait and others.

Palestinian officials have said Arab governments are to blame for the shortfall in the funding they need to fill a $970 million hole in their 2011 budget.

They are reluctant to name states but a review of sums paid by donors this year shows Saudi Arabia, a big contributor in recent years, has yet to offer any budgetary support.

Riyadh, a close U.S. ally, has donated some $620 million in budget support to the Palestinian Authority since 2008.

A democratic Republic of Arabia, or even one accountable to Arabs rather than to Barack Obama, with around $200 billion per year in oil revenue would both offer the Palestinians far more support than about $200 million per year when it actually gives and would not coordinate its support for Palestine with the Israel's patron, the United States.

For many reasons Israel would not be viable if the US/Zionist colonial structure was to lose even Saudi Arabia.

According to Livni: Europeans starting to talk about 1-state solution

2011-07-12T18:00:00.003-04:00

It is interesting that the Jerusalem Post does not produce a direct quote or include discussion of length to its statement that former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni said that Europeans were beginning to talk about a one state solution.

The fact that Europeans are starting to talk about a one-state solution shows that Israel's standing in the world is sliding, opposition leader Tzipi Livni told Army Radio on Monday.

"There are many Jews around the world who say they love Israel, but do not understand its policies. They say there is a disconnect between them and the state," Livni said.

It could be that the idea of Zionism ending the way Apartheid did, without any representative state remaining is too painful for the staff, writers and editors of the Jerusalem Post to discuss in any detail.

The alternative to ending Zionism, to the one state that Livni and the Jerusalem Post fear, is that over 100 million people must be ruled by colonial-style dictatorships accountable to Israel's allies and benefactors rather than to their own people.

The people ruled by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Kuwait and others being sacrificed to Zionism, to the idea that 5.7 million Jewish people in Palestine must have a reserved-majority state.

This reality is hard to face sometimes, not only for Livni but maybe more importantly for the American leadership apparatus.

Secret gas prices in Egypt's deal with Israel

2011-07-11T18:00:00.003-04:00

Not much to say. The Egyptians keep blowing up the pipeline. When they get to vote on it they won't have to blow it up any more.

Egyptian authorities have kept gas export prices to Israel confidential. Local media estimate between 70 cents and $1.50 per million British gas units (BTUs, or British thermal units) whereas Israeli media cite a higher price of $2.50 to $4 per million BTUs.

Secret gas prices? This is what it means to be a dictatorship that is part of the US/Zionist colonial structure that includes Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Kuwait and others.

Just a humiliation of the 80 million people of Egypt for the sake of the 5.7 million Jewish people of Palestine.

France wants Gaddafi out of Libya, but has no idea what the people of Libya want

2011-07-11T06:00:00.004-04:00

This is a crazy thing for the people of Libya to be dying over.

"We ... are delighted to say that in Malabo, the summit of the African Union delivered a public statement which is closer (to) the position of France and the coalition than before," Alain Juppe told reporters in Addis Ababa.

"We agreed that we must now find a political outcome to the situation in Libya and this solution implies a genuine ceasefire and also an inclusive national dialogue between all the parties," Juppe said.

"The key point is the withdrawal of Kadhafi from power, from his military and civilian responsibilities and we agreed to work all together to reach this goal," Juppe added.

Barack Obama and Nato's insistence that Gaddafi be removed from power, based on nothing more moral or strategic than "Mubarak lost power, so Gaddafi should go too" is primarily a horrible waste of human life. Elections easily could have been held by now after which we would see whether or not there is a national vision in Libya that has more support than Gaddafi's.

The fact of the matter is that Tripoli is more populous than the base of the rebellion and it is completely plausible that more Libyans support the current government than oppose it. We should be finding out, but instead we are seeing an emotional reaction to the possible loss of Egypt from the US/Zionist colonial structure. We can only imagine what kind of spastic and destructive response we'll see when what we call Saudi Arabia shows signs of escaping.

For Thomas Friedman, colonialism is "wholesale politics"

2011-07-10T18:00:00.003-04:00

Thomas Friedman thinks the process of having subject rulers in colonies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Kuwait and others prevent the people they rule from enacting policies in line with their views is "wholesale politics".

If you look into the different “shop” windows across the Middle East, it is increasingly apparent that the Arab uprisings are bringing to a close the era of “Middle East Wholesale” and ushering in the era of “Middle East Retail.” Everyone is going to have to pay more for their stability.

Nothing to say here except these shops don't sell rugs, they sell tyranny, repression and brutality for over 100 million Arabs so that 5.7 million Jewish people in Palestine can have a viable state.

Thomas Friedman, like Barack Obama, is an eager buyer of this product. Lamenting the possibility that it may no longer be on sale after Egypt holds elections (for which, as you'd expect, they've found pretexts under which they would like to see delays).

There is a fundamental ugliness of the United States that comes most clearly into view when you look at its policies regarding the Middle East.

Another look at the US colony of Saudi Arabia

2011-07-10T06:00:00.001-04:00

I've written before about Saudi Arabia's bizarre political succession system - designed perfectly to guarantee permanent incompetent, even buffoonish leadership.

Following the recent death of Fahd ibn Abdel-Aziz ibn Saud, there are now at least 18 other sons of Abdel-Aziz-- or most likely, more-- who potentially could be in line to the throne, after Abdullah ibn Abdel-Aziz, the new king. Miqrin, the youngest of these awlad (children of) Abdel-Aziz, is indeed in his fifties, and has many uncles who are patrilineal grandsons of Abdel-Aziz who are older (and most probably wiser) than him.

I've written about retired CIA analyst of Arab affairs Ray Close's account of Saudi Arabia's pretending to participate in the war against Israel, while promising the United States that it would not participate.

Similarly, I recall when Prince Fahd bin Abdal Aziz called me to a meeting very late one evening in the early days of the 1973 war and asked me to send an urgent personal message from him to Richard Nixon informing the president that he had felt obliged to contribute a brigade of Saudi troops to the Golan front to support the Syrian offensive there, but that he had personally instructed the commander of the unit not to fire a single shot. That, Fahd told me with considerable emotion and obvious sincerity, was his solemn promise to his American friend. Again, prudence, wisdom, and desire to maintain a traditional and mutually valuable relationship — motives that were not, I regret to say, received in Washington with the respect and appreciation that they deserved.

I've never written about how during the era of open colonialism a joke emerged that Winston Churchill drew Saudi Arabia's border and hiccuped around the border of Jordan.

Winston's Hiccup or Churchill's Sneeze is the huge zigzag in Jordan's eastern border with Saudi Arabia, supposedly because Winston Churchill drew the boundary of Transjordan after a generous and lengthy lunch.

But I have written about how, when public relations services of both the United States and Saudi Arabia are claiming there is some tension or rivalry between the colonial patron and its subject, the US has actually committed to increase it commitment to the regime in the form of training a new 35,000 person force that can be used on the US and regime's behalf to prevent any Saudi Tahrir Square from developing.

Despite their deepening political divide, the United States and Saudi Arabia are quietly expanding defense ties on a vast scale, led by a little-known project to develop an elite force to protect the kingdom’s oil riches and future nuclear sites.

...

The special security force is expected to grow to at least 35,000 members, trained and equipped by U.S. personnel as part of a multiagency effort that includes staff from the Justice Department, Energy Department and Pentagon. It is overseen by the U.S. Central Command.

So it seems like a former official of Saudi Arabia claims that Iran becoming a threshold state the way Brazil has would cause Saudi Arabia to respond the way the Saudis have not responded to Israel amassing hundreds of nuclear weapons.

"We cannot live in a situation where Iran has nuclear weapons and we don't. It's as simple as that," the official said. "If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, that will be unacceptable to us and we will have to follow suit."

Officials in Riyadh said that Saudi Arabia would reluctantly push ahead with its own civilian nuclear programme.

Is anyone actually listening to these people? Saudi Arabia is probably the least respectable government on Earth. If the United States does not give Saudi Arabia permission to build nuclear weapons, which it will not, Saudi Arabia will not build nuclear weapons, nor will it acquire technology that would give it capabilities to eventually respond, even in theory, to an Israeli nuclear attack on its territory such as on the cities of Mecca, Medina or Riyadh.

National Geographic: An American reflection on youth uprisings in the Middle East

2011-07-09T18:00:00.002-04:00

The US has a tremendous amount of leverage in its colonies in the Middle East: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Kuwait and others and there is something both callous and cowardly about American politicians or even analysts saying democratic reform, the signature and defining value of the United States should be led in the countries by children. Further by children setting themselves on fire.

The United States did not have to wait for that in Tunisia or Egypt. It does not have to wait for that in Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Morocco. The US knows these governments are not accountable to their people. Either that is ok, either the US will continue to support them, or it is not ok and the US will publicly outline the consequences these countries will face if their dictatorships continue.

The fact is that it is OK. As MJ Rosenberg once said:

Jordan, for instance, is not a democracy in the western sense but it is precisely the kind of neighbor Israel needs. Egypt is not a democracy but is at peace with Israel. A democratic Egypt probably would not be.

Rosenberg is a moderate or left-wing Zionist and his position is the US' position.

The onus should not be on children and young adults under 30 to overturn dictatorships ruled indirectly from Washington DC.

National Geographic's Jeffery Bartholet remarks on just that happening:

Some 60 percent of the people in the Middle East are under 30 years old, and many of them are angry. Like young people everywhere, they have ambitions. They want, they need, they crave. They feel constrained—especially, perhaps, when they watch satellite television or surf the Internet. There they can see how the rest of the world lives. Social media (including personal blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more) allow young men and women to share their frustrations in ways they couldn't in the past. They're not alone anymore. Now they have allies. They have power.

I'd like to see the role the US plays in holding over 100 million people in the Middle East powerless brought to a close. But them being powerless is exactly the kind of situation Israel needs.

There should never have been arms available for successionists in Sudan or anywhere else in the global South

2011-07-09T06:00:00.003-04:00

The breakup of Africa's largest country will be a sad event. Smaller countries have fewer resources with which to face a potentially hostile global environment. Smaller countries unnecessarily duplicate national services. Most importantly, the process of breaking countries apart necessarily is a horrible waste of human life.

Secessionist movements in the Sudan and Congo have ready access to outside weapons while potential secessionist movements in California or Michigan have no access at all. Period. That's the difference. The Michigan Militia can tell a heartfelt story of how they are aggrieved just as well as any secessionists anywhere in the world, but nobody is shipping cargo planes full of arms to them.

Given weapons, the US would treat secessionists just as brutally as Gaddafi treated Benghazi.

Unfortunately, the global South has a much smaller proportion of people who've had the luxury to gain an understanding of the harm that is done taking large countries and breaking them into small pieces and of the increased weakness and vulnerability of smaller countries compared to larger ones.

There are good days and bad days. The day Mubarak left office was a good day. The day Sudan officially separates is a bad day. And on both good days and bad days we have to just keep moving forward.

US oil companies versus AIPAC: We're not gonna beat those guys in Congress

2011-07-08T18:00:00.001-04:00

PBS has published an inside account of the US pro-Israeli lobbying apparatus. The story is told by Keith Weissman, a former senior AIPAC lobbyist:

"So we get ILSA. It passes overwhelmingly. That same year I brought some Conoco guys to AIPAC's policy conference, where half the House and half the Senate usually attend, and they knew that night that they would never win anything against us. So they began to cooperate. A lot of the oil companies realized, 'We're not gonna beat these guys in Congress, so we might as well try to tailor their activities, where we at least have some room to work.' And I was the go-between. I was the guy. I mean, BP still credits me with being the guy who greased the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, because of my work with them. That was originally designed as an anti-Iran project.

Out of nowhere, Saudi Arabia makes an appearance.

Even Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, and Adel al-Jubeir -- then the Saudi embassy spokesman and currently the ambassador -- welcomed AIPAC's work in helping to support the BTC pipeline and isolating Iran, its Persian Gulf rival, economically. Remembers Weissman:

"Prince Bandar used to send us messages. I used to meet with Adel al-Jubeir a couple times a year. Adel used to joke that if we could force an American embargo on Iranian oil, he'd buy us all Mercedes! Because Saudi [Arabia] would have had the excess capacity to make up for Iran at that time."

AIPAC discussions on US calls for regime change.

"[Support for regime change] was the personal opinion of many people in AIPAC, but it never uttered the words 'regime change.' And I think my efforts were part of the reason why they never did," he says, adding: "How would it look anyway? This is what makes it so stupid! The American Jewish community choosing the next government of Iran? Helping to change the next government of Iran? How can that government have any legitimacy? It's completely ridiculous. And I think the arguments that I raised against it convinced AIPAC, no matter what they personally thought, they realized that what I was saying was right."

This is mostly not new information, but interesting to see it in one place and spoken from the inside.

Chalabi and AIPAC did have relations before the invasion of Iraq, of course. But Weissman was highly skeptical of Chalabi. "Chalabi came to AIPAC in the late 1990s," he recalls. "I'll never forget sitting across the table from him, and he said, 'If I ever become president of Iraq, one of the first things I'll do is to recognize Israel.' And I think to myself, 'The second thing you'll do is, you'll get a bullet in the back of your head.' And I walked out of the room. I knew he was a complete idiot. Or a liar."

But he adds: "There were a lot of contacts between the Jewish community and the INC. In 2000, 2001, the INC spoke at the AIPAC policy conference. So there were links between the Jewish community groups and the Iraqi exiles, and also between the neocons and the Iraqi exiles." But Weissman insists that even so, the FBI and the Justice Department erred in believing that the contacts amounted to anything like espionage or a national security threat that required an FBI inquiry. Instead, he says, the FBI launched an investigation to go after what they saw as a conspiracy to support war in Iraq and, after that, regime change in Iran. Personally, Weissman believes that both the war in Iraq and regime change in Iran were wrongheaded. "I think that they were all bad policies, policies that a lot of people in the U.S. government badly wanted to discredit," he says.

And an explanation of why a liberal Jewish US citizen who personally opposes AIPAC's positions would have worked for the primary Jewish lobbying organization:

And Weissman? Why didn't he just quit, and do something else? It turns out that sometimes the simplest explanation is the one that rings most true. It was a job. "Well," he says. "Two kids in college. I finally got up to over a hundred thousand dollars. I got to work on issues that I liked, and I was able to have some influence. I was listened to. I was able to keep AIPAC away from the Iraqi opposition in the 1990s, and to keep AIPAC away from regime change later on. Those were the things I liked, and those were the things I thought I did good on."

Finally, he says, "And I was looking for another job when all this happened."

A couple of things about this article that I recommend.

1) We see a direct conflict between the Israel lobby and the oil lobby, and we see not only that the Israel lobby won, but that it did so decisively and to the degree that the oil learned the lesson to refrain from trying to oppose the Israel lobby in the future.

2) Possibly even more than I had realized, hostility between Iran and the United States is the product of lobbying in the US on behalf of Israel. While "moderates" such as Weisman have ensured that AIPAC itself does not officially call for regime change, it is clear that refraining for regime change calls goes against the instincts of AIPAC members and funders themselves as well as against the impulses of proponents of Israel in the Bush and Obama administrations, including Dennis Ross, Hillary Clinton and most of the US Middle East diplomatic corps.

3) Saudi Arabia. I'm going to make the obvious point that this supposed rivalry with Iran was not an issue when Iran was ruled by a US-imposed dictator, the Shah. When the Shah was overthrown, suddenly the US-oriented dictator of what we call 'Saudi' Arabia realized that Iran was some eternal rival. One way or another, Saudi Arabia also managed to be in a rivalry with Egypt after Nasser freed his people of a British oriented dictator.

Yet somehow, neither Egypt under Nasser or Iran ever offered to buy gifts for the US Israel lobby in return for anti-Saudi policies. In fact, no mention of any complaints at all with the Saudis on the part of AIPAC.

The article overall is a relatively rare moment of confirmation of how and why the US operates its US/Zionist colonial structure in the Middle East, which contains Egypt (as of now), Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Kuwait and others - and which works to prevent the development of countries in the region that are outside that structure such as Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Syria and others.