The breach between Turkey and Israel

You know this is going to play well in Turkey.

[Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Danny] Ayalon [(Well known to this blog for his claim that we're getting UN Security Council sanctions on Iran this month)]refused to shake [Turkey's] Ambassador Ahmet Oguz Celikkol's hand when asked to do so by journalists attending the official reprimand at his office, and said in Hebrew that "we just want it to be seen that he is seated below us and that there is only one flag here".

A breach is developing between Israel and Turkey. I'm trying to be careful not to overstate it. It is impossible to know how long Erdogan will remain Prime Minister and who will secede him in office. Ayalon is not helping, but the problems are more structural.

Tensions between Turkey and Kurdish separatists have increased dramatically since the US invasion of Iraq. It seemed to me that until late 2007, around the time of the NIE about Iran's nuclear program, that the US was actively working to leave the Kurds of Iraq effectively independent. That policy changed late in Bush's term and Barack Obama inherited and continues a policy of holding Iraq together which means limiting the independent power of the Kurds to the degree possible given the commitments the US had made to them earlier. But there is a sense in which the damage is already done.

A Turkey that is angry at the US has even less patience for Israel or the US project of making sure 5 million Jewish people have a secure majority state in a region of over 200 million people that do not consider it legitimate.

Turkey's foreign policy has historically been devised and implemented by Turkey's military independent and even superior in rank to Turkey's civilian leadership. Turkey's foreign policy has, under Erdogan and his AKP party been coming increasingly under the purview of the civilian leadership. This is a process that is ongoing and possibly still reversible to some degree, but Turkey's voters are less pro-Israel than its generals.

It seems that Turkey's move away from Israel is structural. There will be swings back and forth but by the end, Turkey's foreign policy will reflect that Turkey's voters empathize with the Arabs of Palestine just as strongly or more strongly than US voters empathize with the 5 million Jewish people in Palestine.

Analogies between Zionism and Apartheid/anti-Zionism and Nazis

I often use the situation in Southern Africa in, say, the 1970s to illustrate points regarding Israel today. Israel is not a mirror image of Apartheid South Africa. There were important tactical differences between how in the late 1940s Jewish people in Israel engineered a political majority on territory that until that time had a non-Jewish demographic majority and how the whites of South Africa engineered a political majority for themselves. But the existence of differences does not invalidate analogies. However complaints that analogies are invalid can be the impetus for taking a closer look, which I'll do now.

I am often amazed though, that people who claim analogies between Apartheid South Africa and Zionist Israel are a priori misleading or propaganda are extremely comfortable analogizing any rival or threat to Israel as Nazis. This is an important point because various examples of these analogies between current parties that threaten Israel and Nazis can be instructive as to the uses and limits of analogies in explaining present phenomena.

Here is Israel's prime minister comparing Iran to the Nazis:

"It's 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs," Netanyahu told delegates to the annual United Jewish Communities General Assembly, repeating the line several times, like a chorus, during his address. "Believe him and stop him," the opposition leader said of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "This is what we must do. Everything else pales before this."

Netanyahu's analogy is an appeal to the emotion of his audience. Iran is not racing towards atomic bombs but is building a capacity that it could use build one in theory if it was to leave the NPT. This is a threat to Israel because Israel's survival depends on Israel being able to issue threats against its neighbors of catastrophic losses while an Iranian ability, even after the fact, to retaliate for such a catastrophe weakens Israel's threat.

But Nazi Germany did not have nuclear weapons or a capability to make nuclear weapons. Ahmadinejad has never said or implied that Jewish people are defective in any way as individuals or as a group, and he often specifically distinguishes between Zionism, which he says is a political philosophy that he considers evil and Jewish people. While Nazis did clearly believe in ethnic differences between Jewish people and Aryan people, Ahmadinejad does not.

As far as I can tell, the analogy is that the Nazis threatened the interests of Jewish people through a program of liquidating their population while Ahmadinejad and Iran, in Netanyahu's opinion, threaten the interests of Jewish people in two ways: First by advocating that Palestinians be able to participate in a referendum that could determine that there should not be a majority Jewish state; and second by overcoming the current situation in which Israel can credibly threaten nuclear attacks on other states in its region without a credible possibility of response.

Netanyahu is drawing a parallel between death camps and a situation where 5 million Jewish people choose to either live in Palestine without a Jewish majority or leave the territory. How the analogy works in this case is that the parallel is drawn but not examined openly enough that the audience asks if these are really parallel situations. Which means, fortunately for Netanyahu, that he gets to avoid making a case that death camps are in some way comparable to a referendum. That would be an extremely difficult argument for him to make if he was to try.

I find myself drawing the parallel between Israel and South Africa to make one of four points. The first is that it is possible for the people of a region, even if they are reasonable and not in any way bigots, to reject a state that is accepted by the United States or by the United Nations. The second is that a state that is rejected by the people of its region has unusual security requirements that stem from that regional rejection. The third is that meeting the unusual security requirements of a rejected state imposes heavy costs on the state itself, on the region that rejects it and potentially on its supporters. The fourth is that it is possible to construct arrangements that protect individual rights and interests without imposing or guaranteeing an ethnic majority in some territory.

These are all points that I could make without South Africa, but when my argument is that something is not impossible, an actual example can lend that argument a very strong element of support.

None of these points requires that South Africa be exactly like Israel. However Apartheid's supporters did plan to offer multiple states to Black people, each to be dominated by the White state which, for security reasons, would withhold aspects of normal state sovereignty to the non-White states. Apartheid's supporters had even found leaders of some of these states who were Black people and who expressed support for the plan. Maybe a fifth point is that rejection of a multiple state plan can be reasonable and admirable, as Africans, led by the Nelson Mandela's ANC, rejected any partition plan for South Africa.

As far as the emotional content of the analogy, Black South Africans in their struggle against Apartheid are nearly universally seen in the West as in line with Western values (even as the West was their primary enemy for the entire conflict) and morally upright. An argument that rejection of two states in Palestine is inherently depraved can be validly neutralized by the example of the Black South African rejection of multiple states.

I'm not inordinately threatened by Netanyahu's analogy of Iran to the Nazis. Hiding behind that analogy is an argument that I don't think he'd even attempt to make directly. There is a degree of intimidation and manipulation, as Netanyahu is attempting, without argument, to smear the idea of anti-Semitism around and create an environment in the West where it is not polite to disagree with him. Netanyahu and his country have done a lot worse things than that though.

Supporters of Israel do not like analogies of Zionism to Apartheid. Each analogy stands on its own argument. Maybe the arguments are flawed, I think they are not. Superficial differences between Israel and Apartheid South Africa do not, in reasonable discourse, invalidate the arguments or the analogies.

A nitpick about the description of Iran's election

During the summer, mainstream US press reports that mentioned Iran's June election often quoted someone who would refer to them as "fraudulent elections". Most editorials and opinion pieces followed the same practice, despite the fact that as time passed, significant evidence was not being produced that the election results did not reflect the preferences of the Iranian people.

More recently, I've been seeing the election referred to as "disputed". It is difficult to call that unfair, though Barack Obama's US citizenship is also disputed, possibly by about the same proportion of the population as only 10% of Iranians do not consider Ahmadinejad the legitimate president of Iran according to a WorldPublicOpinion.org poll.

Yesterday, for the first time I saw a new formulation in a Washington Post article about the Revolutionary Guards by Thomas Erdbrink.

The Guard's expanded economic role is mirrored by a greater role in politics and security since the disputed presidential election in June, which the government says was won by incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a landslide but which the opposition says was stolen.

What I find interesting is that Ahmadinejad and his supporters still say he won in a landslide but the opposition does not any more say the election was stolen. By the end of the summer the opposition has been saying "nobody knows who won", "Mousavi may have won" or funniest, "by now, it doesn't matter who won".

Evidence of fraud just never panned out. Mousavi's extremely early and disruptive claims that there was certainly fraud so people should take to the streets before evidence could be gathered and evaluated seem now to have been a poorly-made decision. His new claim, and that of his supporters, is that the process should be more transparent. The votes are counted mostly by trusted local figures such as teachers all over the country in the same polling locations where the ballots are cast. The results are published so the people who do the counting can read them and verify their result. The process is actually pretty transparent already. Far more transparent than computer voting machines in the United States, but in theory any election could be more transparent. Mousavi's current claim that more transparency is needed is far from an assertion that the election was stolen.

By now Erdbrink may be the only person left who believes there are people still saying the election was stolen.

Why and how US Iran policy is paralyzed, as shown in the Wall Street Journal

Jay Solomon's Wall Street Journal article on current US thinking on Iran paints a picture of a Barack Obama administration completely bewildered by the question of how to set policy regarding Iran's nuclear program.

In a signal of the White House's increased attention to Iran's political upheaval, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered over coffee at the State Department this week with four leading Iran scholars and mapped out the current dynamics, said U.S. officials. One issue explored was how the U.S. should respond if Tehran suddenly expressed a desire to reach a compromise on the nuclear issue. Mrs. Clinton asked whether the U.S. could reach a pact without crippling the prospects for the Green Movement.

OK. Who are these four supposed Iran scholars? How should the US respond if the Iranians suddenly express a desire to comply with US demands? As long as the US condition for "compromise" remains that the US should wield a veto over Iran's right to enrich uranium, Iran is not going to suddenly express a desire to compromise. There is no reason for a fantasy role playing game like this even to come up in a meeting between the US Secretary of State and four experts on Iran.

This expresses a fundamentally unserious approach to the issue of Iran's nuclear program. If I read a report of Iran's foreign minister meeting four supposed US experts examining the scenario of how Iran should respond if suddenly the US agreed to stop supporting Israel, I'd be disappointed that Iran's foreign minister doesn't know enough to understand that this is not a plausible scenario that merits examination. I'd be more disappointed in the experts who allowed the foreign minister to waste his and their time.

The article has more indications that the administration is unable to choose a direction in which to move.

In recent weeks, senior Green Movement figures -- who have been speaking at major Washington think tanks -- have made up a list of IRGC-related companies they suggest targeting, which has been forwarded to the Obama administration by third parties.
...
Both the Obama administration and the Iranian dissidents have been wary of any direct contacts, due to fears such meetings could provide ammunition for Tehran.

Now administration officials obviously cooperated with Jay Solomon in sourcing this article. They could have imposed a condition that Solomon not directly tie the Green Movement to the administration in the same article. The supposed senior Green Movement figures would have done well to avoid discussing their cooperation with the Obama administration with the press. On the other hand, these are people giving speeches at Washington think tanks.

This is how the article starts:

The Obama administration is increasingly questioning the long-term stability of Tehran's government and moving to find ways to support Iran's opposition "Green Movement," said senior U.S. officials.

I'm not bothered that it is true that the US is trying to support the Green Movement, but I am bothered by reports being put into US newspapers. It seems to me that this is a sign that the US has given up any serious hope that the Green Movement can topple Iran's regime. I can only imagine that U.S. intelligence services have replicated the W.P.O. poll reporting over 80% popular support for the regime and found that support still high enough that it would not be raised higher if the US openly ties itself to the Green movement. That is what Solomon's article is doing.

The US commitment to the security of a majority state for 5 million Jewish people in Palestine puts a severe constraint on US policy in the region. In the case of Iran, it means the US cannot accept an arrangement that would leave Iran "nuclear capable", or having the option to build a bomb in an emergency even while remaining in the NPT the way Japan and Brazil do. Ariel Roth of the US Council on Foreign relations explains:

More broadly, as the Palestinian-American political scientist Hilal Khashan’s work on Arab attitudes toward peace has shown, the willingness of Arabs to make peace with Israel is a direct function of their perception of Israel’s invincibility. Just as an Iranian nuclear capability would imply a nuclear guarantee for anti-Zionist proxies, an Egyptian or Saudi nuclear capability would reduce incentives for other Arab states to make peace with Israel because, shielded under an Arab nuclear umbrella, they would no longer fear catastrophic defeat or further loss of territory.

Today the United States distorts its entire Middle East policy through the prism that the 5 million Jewish people of Palestine must retain the ability to threaten everyone else in the region with catastrophic defeat or loss of territory. This is not a long-term sustainable situation. Israel has a peculiar security need that is almost immeasurably expensive for the US to provide. A single state that accepts Palestinians and Jewish people equally without necessarily having a Jewish majority would not have that security need. Among many other things, if one state prevailed, the US would be able to end its confrontation over Iran's nuclear program on terms acceptable to the Iranians. With one state that is not necessarily Jewish-majority, the US could also end its expensive sanctions against Iran because Hamas and Hezbollah would no longer be a threat to Palestine.

Instead, while today the US cannot accept Iranian enrichment, it also cannot stop Iranian enrichment. Limited sanctions will not stop Iran's enrichment, but neither will broad sanctions or a military attack. The US does not have a choice between accepting an Iranian nuclear capability or bombing Iran. The US has a choice between accepting an Iranian nuclear capability or bombing Iran and then accepting an Iranian nuclear capability.

Iran will have a nuclear capability, the question is will this capability arrive in an environment of increasing cooperation or increasing hostility between the US and Iran. Of course, especially with vulnerable US positions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US would prefer increasing cooperation.

But the dilemma is that Israel's security requires it to be able to make unanswerable catastrophic threats against its neighbors, while Iran cannot be stopped from breaking Israel's regional monopoly in nuclear capability. This dilemma has paralyzed the Obama administration's decision-making process. It has reached the point that Clinton spends time in meetings imagining what the US should do if she and her analysts pretend that Iran suddenly and for no particular reason just decides to submit to US demands.

The US is pursuing a long-shot chance that maybe the Green Movement will overthrow the Islamic Republic, but doesn't even take that chance seriously enough to take basic steps such as hiding or at least denying any involvement.

The US is in a bad situation. Its best move, if it does not want to formally accept Iranian enrichment, is to stall. Unfortunately for the Obama administration, supporters of Israel are able to apply pressure that the US take action, even though no action will prevent Iran from reaching nuclear capability and US measures, whether targeted sanctions or a full military attack, can only poison the environment, making conflict and US losses more likely.

No support for Israel means no 9/11 and no war against Islam

Matt Yglesias, one of the more prominent young Jewish US bloggers writes, certainly correctly, that Al-Qaeda would not go out of business if a Palestinian state was created. I imagine Yglesias' point is that Al Qaeda's hostility against the US would continue even after a fair resolution to the dispute over Zionism has been reached. If that's his point, where he's wrong is in his belief that the creation of a Palestinian state would constitute a fair resolution of the conflict.

It is weird because Yglesias, like any reasonably informed follower of events in the Middle East, could easily produce a list of conditions that the Palestinian state would have to submit to and can easily understand why any condition on that list would be unacceptable to the Palestinians and those in the region who empathize with the Palestinians. But he will not allow himself to take the next logical step forward to understand that if those conditions are imposed, many Palestinians and those who would support them would not consider it a fair resolution.

Examples of the conditions I'm referring to include that the Palestinians will have to accept less than 22% of the territory of Palestine for a population about equal in size to the Jewish population, that the country would not have a military, that the country would not control its own borders, that the country would, at Israel's discretion, have to host foreign troops, that the country would not control its natural resources and that refugees would be formally denied their right to return. Supporters of Israel consider all of these conditions fair. Many Palestinians and their supporters do not. My point here is that Yglesias should be able to anticipate that Palestinians would not consider the imposition of these conditions fair. That he does not is the result of a mental block that clouds his understanding of the region.

But the interesting part of his post is his discussion of the reaction to true statements that Israel plays a role in radicalizing Muslims

This reality makes a lot of American Jews uncomfortable to the point where they try to insist on denying that Israel has anything to do with anyone’s motives for doing anything, but that’s absurd.

I want here to write about exactly how absurd it is to deny that Israel is the most important ultimate source of hostility against the US among Muslims. I also want to mention quickly that pointing out realities that make Jewish Americans uncomfortable also often provoke false accusations of anti-Jewish bigotry. False accusations of anti-Semitism and the threat to issue such false accusations play an important role in distorting US discourse on the Middle East.

The role Israel plays in inflaming the war between the West and the Muslim world is wider than just in Israel's own policies. Israel is justifiably blamed for US support for US support for authoritarian dictatorships in countries that submit to US control, such as Egypt. When Barack Obama is able to mention only one policy to defend support for Egypt's dictator, which is that Egypt maintains its peace with Israel, what Obama himself is saying is that the reason the US favors over 60 million Egyptians living under dictatorship is to ensure that 5 million Jewish people are able to have a majority state in Palestine.

The US starvation of over 500,000 Iraqis, the US attacks on and occupation of Lebanon and the economic boycotts in the region on countries like Iran, Libya and Syria are justifiably believed by non-Jewish people in the region to have as their ultimate objectives the security of a Jewish majority state for 5 million Jewish people in Palestine. US policies directly and indirectly in support of the idea that there must be a Jewish majority state in Palestine together are reasonably seen to constitute an unprovoked war against the non-Jewish people of the region.

On September 10, 2001, the United States was not an innocent disengaged target of unexplainable hatred and extremism. The United States was conducting a war to subjugate the non-Jewish people of Israel's region to force those non-Jewish people accept the legitimacy of a state that they reject for the same reasons Black Africans rejected White-majority South Africa. Even worse, the United States was conducting this war against the non-Jewish people of the region (who are mostly Muslim, but include Christians, atheists and other religions) without any consequences to the United States itself.

In 2001, Osama Bin Laden had real grievances with the United States all of which were related to the US project to keep Israel's region of over 200 million non-Jews safe for 5 million Jewish people to have a majority Jewish state. If the United States had not supported Israel there would have been no 9/11 attack against the United States. I'll point out here that the rights of Jewish individuals can be protected in a one-state solution that does not have a Jewish majority but that would not necessitate the US waging war against the non-Jewish people of its region.

Some supporters of Israel acknowledge the cost the US pays to support Israel and believe it is a good thing. 3,000 Americans died on 9/11 and it sucks for them and their families but at least 5 million Jewish people in Palestine do not have to worry that they may have to live under Muslim majority rule. More than 5,000 US troops died in the subsequent invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq that were the direct result of 9/11. Hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq were killed, and millions displaced. Probably trillions of dollars of economic resources will be diverted to the war effort just in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some supporters of Israel think the US should be willing to pay whatever it costs to make sure no Palestinian Jacob Zuma could be elected to rule Israel with non-Jewish support.

But what Yglesias says "makes a lot of American Jews uncomfortable" is the idea that the United States may stop believing its support for Israel carries an acceptable cost. Preventing that from happening requires minimizing the fact that support for Israel has consequences for the US even to, what Yglesias acknowledges is, the point of absurdity. The discomfort with the idea of calculating the full cost of Israel to the United States also generates sometimes sincere, sometimes cynical accusations of anti-Semitism which intimidate and distort the US foreign policy decision-making process.

The United States is trillions of dollars and thousands of lives poorer than it would have been if US policy-makers could have conceived of advocating a peaceful and gradual transition to one state that protects the rights of Jewish people but at the same time would not require US support for regional authoritarian dictatorships, the denial of technology to other countries in the region, occupations, economic blockades and generally war against the non-Jewish people in the region.

The war the US is waging to defend the idea that there must be a majority Jewish state is becoming more expensive. Eventually the expense will have undeniable consequences for all Americans. As Yglesias says, looking at those costs can make Jewish Americans uncomfortable but the over 300 million people of the United States and the over 200 million non-Jewish people in Israel's region will eventually reach the limit of what they are willing to pay to ensure that 5 million Jewish people in Palestine can maintain a majority state.

If in the 1990s, the United States had switched to advocacy of one state that could accommodate all of the people of Palestine without necessarily having a Jewish political majority, that would have signified victory for the non-Jews in the war the US had been waging against the non-Jews of the region up to that point. With the war over, the attack on 9/11 would not, and could not, have happened. That the US was unable to advocate one state was a mistake then as it is now.

US leverage over Saudi Arabia: One example of how the patron/puppet relationship works

I've looked at this before when I was shocked by an explanation of how backwards the Saudi monarchical succession system is.

The big question regarding the Saudi succession hangs over whether, and how, the kingship will ever be transferred from the numerous ageing brothers and half-brothers who stand in line after Crown Prince Sultan, to the "next generation" of princes - some of the more senior of whom are already nearing 70 years old.

Earlier this year, King Abdullah named his 76-year-old half-brother Naif ibn Abdul-Aziz as "second deputy prime minister", a position that places him a likely - but not certain - second in line to throne after Sultan.

When King Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, the founder of the modern Saudi state, died in 1953, he left some 37 sons from his 22 wives. Various of these sons have ruled the kingdom in turn since then.

Many of Abdul-Aziz's sons had a dozen or more sons of their own. Saudi Arabia has no system of "primogeniture" (first-son succession.) Thus, there are hundreds of possible eventual claimants to the throne. Indeed, the youngest of Abdul-Aziz's sons, Prince Muqrin, is, at 64, some years younger than several of the next-generation princes who now hope to become king.

Nothing has really changed since then. The United States supports the Saudi monarchy because, contrary to what would be expected from a democracy, the Saudi monarchy does not use oil fields to fund what George Bush described as "terrorist ambitions". Specifically, Saudi Arabia's greater oil revenues, greater resources per-capita and closer distance to Israel would make a democratic Saudi Arabia far more of an existential threat to Israel than a democratic Iran is.

We see what the Americans get out of the relationship. Here is a recollection of Ray Close, one time CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia:

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.

What do the Saudis get out of the relationship? Why was it so important to Saudi Arabia's puppet king that the US president not be angered by this pathetic Saudi gesture? And why would the Saudis make the effort of sending fake troops to Syria to hide their relationship with the United States?

I think there are two primary factors. The first is that in the modern era, weird family dictatorships live on borrowed time. The United States has publicly allocated $75 million per year to overthrow Iran's elected government. Far less than one percent of that would be enough to push the corrupt and effete Saudi dictatorship out of its palaces. Would the alternative be better for Israel? Quite possibly not, but maybe the US could scrounge up an Abbas or Mubarak somewhere in Saudi Arabia - either way it would be the end of King Abdullah's shopping trips to Paris and skiing trips to Colorado, and the threat of that far overwhelms any calculation of national interests or values on the part of the Saudi monarchy.

The second factor is that monarchy inherently leads to a sycophantic outlook on the world. The British decorated his father with the title of king with the understanding that he would be pliant to imperial desires and he has been bred all of his life to seek approval from a foreign ruler - Great Britain as a source of approval has transferred seamlessly to the United States. A person not raised to understand this relationship would be nauseated to see it up close, but Abdul Aziz in 1932 offered up himself and his family almost as a harem of prostitutes for British and later American control in exchange for British assistance in gaining control of a kingdom.

I sometimes see analysts try to back-apply some strategic rationale for Saudi policy. There is none. Saudi policy is as different from what a democratic Saudi Arabia would pursue as the Shah's policy was different from what the Islamic Republic of Iran pursues. In practical terms, the Saudi monarch does whatever the United States tells him to do, though he's learned to distract attention from that relationship with independent-seeming symbolic gestures.

US leverage over Saudi Arabia is really just a quirk of the colonial system left over by the British and maintained despite the fact that the US is not an instinctively colonial nation because of the threat that an independent Saudi Arabia would pose to Israel.

Two more Iran and South Africa links

LETTER TO AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI, IRAN, FEBRUARY 13, 1979⁽¹⁾

Maputo,
People's Republic of Mozambique,
February 13, 1979

His Excellency Ayatollah Khomeini,⁽²⁾
Teheran
Islamic Republic of Iran

On behalf of the African National Congress and the oppressed masses of South Africa we express to you our immense joy at the glorious success of the Iranian revolution. Your victory demonstrates the irresistible power of a people united in the pursuit of a just cause. Your historic victory has shattered the infamous conspiracy of Reza Pahlevi and Vorster-Botha against our two peoples which guaranteed the racists their soil. Your victory therefore constitutes an enormous contribution to the success of our struggle against a brutal racist fascist dictatorship. The ANC joins all progressive humanity in the celebration of your achievement and welcomes the new Iran into the ranks of the anti-imperialist and anti-racist community of nations. We salute the heroic Iranian people. We lower our banners in memory of the fallen martyrs who made victory possible. Their blood has cemented our bonds of solidarity in common struggle for a just world. Long live the Great Iranian Revolution.

(signed) Oliver Tambo
President
African National Congress (South Africa)

¹ From: Mayibuye, April 1979

² Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran which overthrew the Shah of Iran in February 1979.

---

ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT NELSON MANDELA AT A BANQUET IN HONOUR OF PRESIDENT RAFSANJANI OF IRAN

Pretoria, 12 September 1996

Your Excellency President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani;
Distinguished Guests;
Ladies and gentlemen,

It is a great privilege to host you and your distinguished delegation. We hope that you will enjoy your short stay in our country. I still remember with great fondness the visit we paid to your country four years ago.

At the time of that visit, our country was still clawing its way out of decades of the apartheid nightmare. Our first ever democratic elections still lay ahead of us. As you know, Mr. President, that transition was a resounding success and we are today a fully-fledged democracy.

Within a short time democratic South Africa has been accepted among the nations of the world. We are an active member of a number of international and regional organisations. As survivors of a repressive and criminal system, we have identified the protection of human rights as a top priority in our foreign policy.

Our freedom has brought the opportunity at last to address the basic needs of our people. Although the task is gigantic, an encouraging start has been made along the road of Reconstruction and Development towards the goals we have set ourselves.

As we rebuild our country we also seek to strengthen bonds with those who stood by us during the darkest of times. After the triumph of the 1979 Revolution your country, Mr. President, sacrificed much in support of our cause. Iran refused to oil the system which the world regarded as a crime against humanity. That approach informed your policy towards South Africa until apartheid was dismantled. Although we conveyed our gratitude through your high-powered delegation at the inauguration of our Government, I still feel obliged to say once more to the people of Iran: "Thank you."

Today we meet as free men and women. With the bitter history behind us, we must now tackle the daunting task of eradicating poverty and improving the lives of our peoples. The ties of brotherhood we forged during the struggle for freedom form the foundation of co-operation in this new campaign.

Mr. President;

It is heartening that relations between our governments have made very good progress, thanks in part to the work of the Joint Commission which we established. Indeed we can boast of good working relations in a variety of fields.

The potential for economic co-operation has been manifested by the way trade between our countries has multiplied; as well as the growing interchange of business delegations. More work is being done to further strengthen these relations, including the exploration of ways to redress the imbalance in the trade between our two countries.

A key to our development lies in closer co-operation with other developing countries. No country will succeed in breaking out of underdevelopment on its own. Southern Africa and the Gulf States need to share resources and experiences, and pull together in unison until we achieve our goal. That is why South Africa places such emphasis on the activities of our regional economic bloc, SADC. And that is why we play an active role in organisations like the OAU, the Commonwealth, and the Non Aligned Movement.

Mr. President;

I look forward to our meeting tomorrow. I do so with the conviction that we will be able to explore possibilities for further joint co-operation as well as ways to broaden our trade ties and improve mutual understanding between our two nations.

Ladies and gentlemen;

May I now ask you to join me in wishing long life to President Rafsanjani and the flourishing of relations between the peoples of Iran and South Africa.

Issued by: The Office of the President

Mandela honors Khomeini stand

Just making sure this isn't lost either to history or next time I want to find it.

Star News - July 22, 1992 (Wilmington, North Carolina)

Nicosia, Cyprus - Nelson Mandela placed a wreath at Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's shrine on Tuesday in acknowledgment of Iran's steadfast stand against apartheid, Tehran radio reported.

Iran, which often refers to itself as the defender of the world's oppressed people, has been among the most outspoken Middle Eastern countries in condemning apartheid.

"We are here to thank the Iranian government and nation for their support in black people's struggle against apartheid," the radio quoted Mr. Mandela as saying after arriving in Tehran Tuesday. The report was monitored in Nicosia

This makes me so proud of Khomeini, of the Iranian revolution and of the Iranian people.

Khomeini, after assuming power in Iran was willing to talk with the United States. I've read that Khomeini said Iran is willing to talk to any nation, even the US, except Zionist Israel and Apartheid South Africa. I've looked for the link recently without finding it which means that when I come across a striking piece of information in the future, I have to do a better job of linking to it and quoting it here.

Obama administration's take on Iran's nuclear program

The New York Times has for a long time functioned as the mouthpiece of choice for the White House. The January 2 article by David Sanger and William Broad represents the current state of US public policy on that issue.

There is not much new. Not much that could not be gleamed from observing the behavior of the administration up to now. But there are a few things that can be commented on.

The long-discussed sanctions would initiate the latest phase in a strategy to force Iran to comply with United Nations demands to halt production of nuclear fuel. It comes as the administration has completed a fresh review of Iran’s nuclear progress.

So we see the administration is still insisting on Iran suspending enrichment. That basically spells the whole game. There is one question that determines what course the conflict over Iran's nuclear program will take. That question is, does the US accept Iran enriching uranium.

As of now, the answer is no. The United States, and Iran's neighbors other than Israel have never been threatened by Iran enriching uranium. Israel believes, quite possibly with reason, that it cannot survive long term without a monopoly over the threat to use nuclear weapons in its region. If Iran enriches, even without making a weapon, that threatens Israel because Iran would have the ability in theory to build a weapon later to retaliate against an Israeli nuclear attack on one of its neighbors. Israel believes that to survive its nuclear threat must be unanswerable. Neither the US nor any of Iran's other regional neighbors is threatened by an Iranian virtual nuclear capability.

The US commitment to Israel prevents the US from accepting Iranian enrichment. When Ahmadinejad says that the US must choose between Israel and Iran, and when Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei says that "one of the main reasons behind the enmity of the global hegemony toward the Islamic Republic is the Palestinian issue", US policy towards Iran's nuclear issue provides an argument that they are right.

In interviews, Mr. Obama’s strategists said that while Iran’s top political and military leaders remained determined to develop nuclear weapons, they were distracted by turmoil in the streets and political infighting, and that the drive to produce nuclear fuel appeared to have faltered in recent months.

Preventing enrichment is not necessary to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. It is necessary to prevent Iran from developing the capability to build weapons in an emergency. There is not now, nor has there ever been any indication that Iran has decided to build weapons. This is a distinction that is well known by experts, the New York Times is also aware of the distinction but is transmitting a deliberately misleading explanation of Iran's goals.

Although repeated rounds of sanctions over many years have not dissuaded Iran from pursuing nuclear technology, an administration official involved in the Iran policy said the hope was that the current troubles “give us a window to impose the first sanctions that may make the Iranians think the nuclear program isn’t worth the price tag.”

There are no sanctions that will convince Iran to give up right to nuclear capability and I think US strategists fully understand that. As of today, partly because of the US positions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran does not have to worry about attacks from the US. One day those US positions will be gone, and the ability to build a weapon in an emergency may be what prevents the US from considering attacking Iran the way it attacked Iraq in 2003. The more the US insists Iran give up a potential weapons capability, the more important it is that Iran keep that capability.

US strategists understand that sanctions, especially targeted sanctions, will not deter Iran from acquiring a nuclear capability. What sanctions do, is allow the Obama administration to seem as if it is doing something, rather than ignoring Israel's security needs. What sanctions cost is that they increase the level of hostility between the US and Iran, which hurts Iranians and Americans, especially in the region.

Is this a tradeoff that the United States really wants to make? I'm not going to believe it until I see a commitment to sanctions that I have not seen yet. Sanctions strengthen the voices in Iran of parties that would rather see the US suffer humiliating failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Actual sanctions would be the first escalation of hostility since Bush deescalated hostility in the last two years of his presidency. Bush had good reasons, based on US interests, to de-escalate. I'm not yet convinced that Obama has decided to reverse that, rather than trying to bluff the Iranians.

It seems as if US strategists do not understand the basic point that no proposal that does not explicitly allow Iran to continue enrichment would be satisfactory to any section of Iran's decision making community. I don't think that's what's happening. I think US strategists do understand that Iran will not accept the kinds of deals the US is willing to make, but the US, to avoid publicly giving up on what Israel considers a strategic necessity, is stalling. It is also considering stalling in a way that risks the lives of US soldiers neighboring Iran.

While outsiders have a limited view of Iran’s nuclear program, the Obama administration officials said they believed that the bomb-development effort was seriously derailed by the exposure three months ago of the country’s secret enrichment plant under construction near the holy city of Qum. Exposure of the site deprived Iran of its best chance of covertly producing the highly enriched uranium needed to make fuel for nuclear weapons.
...
American officials say that the Qum plant is now useless to the Iranians. “They spent three years and tens of millions of dollars on a covert plant that they will probably never turn on,” said the senior official involved in the White House strategy.

I'm not sure if they're serious, but that's not what Qum is. Qum is part of the Iranian nuclear program that might or even might not survive a US attack. An Iranian nuclear weapons capability means that in an emergency, it could build a weapon. In that emergency, Iran expects to be bombed by the US. After the bombing is over, Iran expects to have some surviving facilities and assets, and expects to have information on those assets the US does not have. Maybe Qum, or usable parts of Qum would survive, since it is underground. Maybe some other facilities would be missed by the US concentrating on Qum. One way or another, after being bombed, Iran will reconstruct what it can and have the option of building a weapon.

The point of Qum is that US military planners cannot confidently tell the US President that Iran will remain unable to reconstitute its program for some given amount of time after the bombing. That lack of confidence, the inability for US planners to be sure Iran will not be able to retaliate with a nuclear weapon a year or two years after being bombed can be enough to deter an attack in the first place. That is the point of Qum. Qum is effective without ever being turned on.

In addition, international nuclear inspectors report that at Iran’s plant in Natanz, where thousands of centrifuges spin to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel, the number of the machines that are currently operating has dropped by 20 percent since the summer, a decline nuclear experts attribute to technical problems. Others, including some European officials, believe the problems may have been accentuated by a series of covert efforts by the West to undermine Iran’s program, including sabotage on its imported equipment and infrastructure.
...
R. Scott Kemp, a Princeton University physicist, said that another factor was in the basic design of the centrifuges, obtained from Pakistan nearly two decades ago. “I suspect design problems,” Mr. Kemp said. “The machines run hot and have short lives. They’re terrible. It’s a really bad design.”

It is possible that Iran's technical difficulties or Western covert operations have slowed down Iran's production. Another part of the story could be that Iran made a political decision to hold its production at a certain pace in agreement with the West. While the number of centrifuges went down, the production of LEU remained about constant. The monthly production of LEU did not go up substantially even as the number of centrifuges went up. There could well have been an agreement with the Bush administration that was part of a package including Iran restraining Sadr and capping LEU production while the US produced the 2007 NIE and stopped pressing for sanctions.

These factors have led the administration’s policy makers to lengthen their estimate of how long it would take Iran to accomplish what nuclear experts call “covert breakout” — the ability to secretly produce a workable weapon.

“For now, the Iranians don’t have a credible breakout option, and we don’t think they will have one for at least 18 months, maybe two or three years,” said one senior administration official at the center of the White House Iran strategy. The administration has told allies that the longer time frame would allow the sanctions to have an effect before Iran could develop its nuclear ability.

I'm not sure "covert breakout" is necessary. In an emergency, Iran would openly break out, within the terms of the NPT. Iran is very close to having overt breakout capability now, and certainly will be there by the time the US is able to attack if the US were to want to. By focusing on a new target of "covert breakout" capability, the US may be rationalizing in advance two or three years of preventing Iran from suspending enrichment.

[Edit: It struck me that what the administration is doing is fighting against the idea that Iran's reach for nuclear capability is a fait accompli. But this is still a matter of stalling. Every year it will get harder and harder to redefine nuclear capability in a way that allows the region to pretend Israel still has a monopoly on potential nuclear threats. Here's where I'll also point out explicitly that a one-state solution would not have this peculiar need Israel perceives of a nuclear monopoly - just as one-state majority-Black South Africa does not. Fitting with a common theme on this blog, keeping a majority-Jewish Israel in Palestine is hugely expensive for the US. The Iran nuclear issue is just another of those costs.]

What the administration is doing through the New York Times is refusing to abandon the idea that Iran will suspend enrichment. Everyone should understand that this means Iran will continue building its stockpile of LEU. The administration is threatening sanctions - which may be a bluff or may not be. And the administration is now publicly reasserting that there are covert programs on Iranian soil aimed at sabotaging the nuclear program.

17 notes about Zbigniew Brzezinski's "Hope to Audacity" article in Foreign Affairs

Zbigniew Brzezinski represents views very close to the mainstream US foreign policy communities' understanding of the world. This is especially true under a Democratic president, but the differences between US Democrats and US Republicans on foreign policy are so small that I do not think they are meaningful outside of the United States. Neocons do not dispute Brzezinski's basic assumptions. As an example, there is not much practical difference in policy between late George W. Bush in 2007 and Barack Obama in 2008. Obama has not even given a foreign policy speech that George W. Bush could not have given with fairly minor revisions. Brzezinski's article (text) puts a wide range of these views in one place and I think it can be instructive to examine them. I have to point out that this article was written before early December so there may have been developments that Brzezinski could not have been aware of when he wrote. Quotes from Brzezinski's article are numbered and bold.

1)
• Islam is not an enemy, and the "global war on terror" does not define the United States' current role in the world;
• the United States will be a fair-minded and assertive mediator when it comes to attaining lasting peace between Israel and Palestine;

This is a good place to start. Most Americans do not understand that Brzezinski's first statement simply is not true. Most Americans would like it to be true. And in fact, given the limits to the American ability to examine America's own basic consensus premises, it appears true. But it is not true. The US really is at war in a very real sense against Islam.

There need not be a war between the US and Islam. The US could support one state that accepts all refugees and guarantees individual rights to Jewish people which would end the need for a host of policies undertaken by the US in the region that harm mostly Muslims, but also non-Jewish Christians, non-religious people and followers of other religions in the region. But the US does not support a one state solution. The US today does not seem capable of even envisioning a one state solution which would mean the failure of the Zionist project. As long as this is the case, the US will, naively and to some degree unknowingly, continue to wage war against the non-Jewish people of Israel's region.

The United States is participating and in many ways enabling the starvation of 1.5 million people in Gaza. That is what enemies do. There is a long list of provocations the US implements in the Middle East. The list includes efforts to deny political representation to huge populations of countries in Israel's region. It includes multiple sanctions, it includes the two occupations the US is now implementing and it includes the current destabilization of Pakistan.

The US mainstream consensus accepts as a basic premise that there must be a Jewish state in Palestine. Given that constraint, US efforts are both reasonable and necessary. When Brzezinski uses the term "fair minded" he implicitly includes his premise that there must exist a Jewish majority state in that term. This is a failure on Brzezinski's part to perceive that there can be a different understanding of fairness than his own.

Hamas must be starved out of office or they would set a precedent that would threaten the security of Israel as a Jewish-majority political entity. Dictators should be supported, because they are "good for the region". Countries that are not good for the region must be punished. The US can and should occupy countries that otherwise would use their resources to threaten the status of Jewish majority Israel or its supporters. Massive bribery that distorts the entire political system of a country is acceptable and preferable to that country following the preferences of its population which would be to leave alone elements of their societies that would strike back against Israel or its supporters.

If you are unable, as Brzezinski, Obama and most members of the US foreign policy are unable, to question the cosmic necessity of the existence of a Jewish state, then the US is making reasonable and fair efforts to bring about peace and coexistence. If you are able to question the necessity of a Jewish state in Palestine, then the US is siding with injustice and in doing so imposing entire swathes of needless and unprovoked misery on a tremendous number of Muslim people.

With Brzezinski's premises, the US is not at war with Islam. For people who do not accept his premise that there must be a Jewish state, the US is at war with Islam, at least in Israel's greater region. The general US failure to question the premise that there must be a Jewish majority state in Palestine comes from the fact that supporters of Israel have successfully established the threat to falsely accuse anyone who examines that premise of being an anti-Jewish bigot. We'll come back to this because it is very interesting how much the US as a nation pays for this established threat of false accusations of anti-Semitism. Of course the non-Jewish people of the Middle East pay an immeasurably higher price.

2)
As a result, his grand redefinition of U.S. foreign policy is vulnerable to dilution or delay by upper-level officials who have the bureaucratic predisposition to favor caution over action and the familiar over the innovative. Some of them may even be unsympathetic to the president's priorities regarding the Middle East and Iran.

I read this and think Dennis Ross. But Hillary Clinton herself and others in the Obama administration are far more strident in their inclination to put US resources at the disposal of the objective of securing Israel's status as a Jewish majority state that can threaten but cannot be credibly threatened by its neighbors. It is really difficult to put responsibility for the Obama administration policies, or the failure of their implementation anywhere but on Obama himself.

3)
It is not fashionable to say this, but it is demonstrably true that -- deservedly or not -- much of the current hostility toward the United States in the Middle East and the Islamic world as a whole has been generated by the bloodshed and suffering produced by this prolonged conflict. Osama bin Laden's self-serving justifications for 9/11 are a reminder that the United States itself is also a victim of the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum.

What an interesting statement by Brzezinski. Actually, this statement alone left me no choice but to write a blog post about Brzezinski's article. Yes. Much of the current hostility against the US is generated directly or indirectly by the conflict over Zionism.

The first thing I want to look at is "deservedly or not". This is a reflection back to Brzezinski's premise that there must be a secure Jewish-majority state, so US actions to ensure the security of Israel do not deserve to create hostility, regardless of the misery those actions may cause. If you do not accept the premise that there must be a secure Jewish majority state, then the US has the option of not starving the people of Gaza, but instead of demanding Hamas to recognize Israel, demanding that they respect the rights of Jewish individuals, which Hamas likely would do. By Brzezinski’s view of the world, the US has no choice and does not deserve the hostility it has attracted. By the view of the world that is free from his false premise, the US has a choice and has deliberately decided to harm the non-Jewish people of the region.

If the question is deservedly or not, the answer is deservedly. Brzezinski is unable to see that, as are most of his colleagues in the US foreign policy establishment. But the people of the region are able to understand that. This divergence in perceptions threatens to become increasingly expensive for the United States.

Then I want to look at "It is not fashionable to say this". How cute. No, it is not fashionable to say it at all. And it is not fashionable for a reason. The true statement that Israel imposes heavy costs on the United States often leads supporters of Israel to accuse the maker of that statement of anti-Jewish bigotry. This accusation of anti-Semitism is often false, but a false accusation of bigotry can still exact a psychic cost on its target. The avoidance in the background of potential false accusations of anti-Semitism has distorted US foreign policy in very basic and harmful ways.

Lastly and least important, Bin Laden is self serving only in the sense that the ideology for which he sacrificed a life of wealth and comfort is himself. But Brzezinski is correct that Bin Laden has stated clearly that 9/11 was in retaliation for acts the US commits in the name of protecting Israel. If the US had advocated a one state solution in the 1990s, the US would not have been the target of 9/11 if that attack happened at all and the huge expense of invading Afghanistan would have been avoided.

4)
First, Palestinian refugees should not be granted the right of return to what is now Israel, because Israel cannot be expected to commit suicide for the sake of peace. The refugees will have to be resettled within the Palestinian state, with compensation and maybe some expression of regret for their suffering. This will be very difficult for the Palestinian national movement to swallow, but there is no alternative.

There is an alternative. It is really an unexamined, false and very destructive premise that allows Brzezinski to believe there is not. Politically-White South Africa committed suicide for peace. The post World War II world has seen many examples of political entities committing suicide for peace.

"This will be very difficult for the Palestinian national movement to swallow". Umm. Yes. And what if they do not? What if the Palestinians vote against this condition that Brzezinski admits would be very difficult to swallow? Then the US is justified in continuing to starve anyone in the region who does not accept Israel as a Jewish-majority state? Then if the US continues to pay billions in annual bribes to autocratic Arab dictators to repress their populations, any hostility that engenders will be undeserved?

This is an example of how Brzezinski's premise that there must be a Jewish-majority state truly limits his ability to understand the people of the Middle East. It is as if there is a physical barrier preventing him from seeing past that question. The Palestinians just have to accept that there cannot be a right to return for people who aren't Jewish. They just have to, and because of his premises, no further discussion is needed. These blinders systematically cause Western analysts to crash into unexpected behaviors of non-Jewish people in the region when they try to put their ideas in place in the real world.

5)
Third, a settlement must be based on the 1967 lines, but with territorial swaps that would allow the large settlements to be incorporated into Israel without any further reduction of the territory of the Palestinian state. That means some territorial compensation for Palestine from parts of northern and southern Israel that border the West Bank. It is important to remember that although the Israeli and Palestinian populations are almost equal in number, under the 1967 lines the Palestinian territories account for only 22 percent of the old British mandate, whereas the Israeli territories account for 78 percent.

It is interesting that Brzezinski knows that Jewish people have 78 percent of the territory for a smaller proportion of the population but is unable to draw what for every non-Jewish person in the region - whether Arab, Persian, Copt, Druze or whatever, whether Muslim, Christian, Zoroastrian, atheist or whatever - is an obvious implication: that Zionism as applied in and before 1948 and as is maintained today is fundamentally an injustice that cannot be rectified in a way satisfactory to those Jewish people who would benefit from the injustice persisting, if those Jewish people have the option of just maintaining the injustice in place. Just another example of his unexamined, false and destructive premise that there must be a Jewish majority state.

6)
Fourth, the United States or NATO must make a commitment to station troops along the Jordan River. Such a move would reinforce Israel's security with strategic depth. It would reduce Israel's fears that an independent Palestine could some day serve as a springboard for a major Arab attack on Israel.

Wow. Now it is a testament to the pliancy of Mahmoud Abbas that this is even under discussion. But this is the first time I'm really examining the idea of US bases in Palestine to be held indefinitely regardless of the wishes of the people of Palestine. This is a move towards classical colonialism, the thing is that colonialism has been discredited not because of the recognition of the inherent value of man, but because it does not pay. The cost of these troops, if history is a guide, would vastly outweigh any benefit the US would get from having them there.

More generally, Brzezinski's conception of the concessions the Palestinians would have to make for a two state solution are enough that they would not in the end be a solution at all. We'd be left with Palestinians told that they would starve if they do not vote for this arrangement - which alone would render the outcome illegitimate for many people in the region. But to ensure that the Palestinians are unable to continue to resist, Jordan still has to remain under its US-supported colonial rulers. Egypt has to continue under its dictator. When the Palestinians vote wrong, once again they'll have to starve. The provocations against the non-Jewish people of the region would continue, and the impulse to respond would continue.

The costs the US would be required to expend for dealing with regional responses to Israel would continue to increase and this Jewish-majority Israel would still be threatened by other states in the region breaking its monopoly on the threat to use nuclear weapons. Brzezinski's conception of a two state solution is not easy to distinguish from what we see today, so that even if it was to be reached, it would still be unfashionable but true to say that Jewish-majority Israel still deservedly creates costly-to-manage regional hostility against the US as its supporter.

7)
[On the subject of Iran]
Without quite saying so, he has basically downgraded the U.S. military option, although it is still fashionable to say that "all options remain on the table." But the prospects for a successful negotiation are still quite uncertain.

Obama has not downgraded the option, but left it in the same position it occupied when he came into office. Bush late in his term continued to say all options remain on the table, but is widely known to have vetoed any military option. The fact of the matter is that by 2007, Iran had achieved, partly because of the US positions in Iraq and Afghanistan "escalation dominance" in which as hostilities ratchet up in plausible scenarios, the US would end up hurt enough that the US would regret the conflict as much or more than Iran.

I'm not sure why the US insists on saying publicly that there is a military option on the table, maybe it makes US politicians feel strong or virile. Nobody believes it anywhere, while saying it strengthens hard-liners in Iran.

8)
The United States has to be realistic when discussing this aspect, since the clock cannot be turned back: the Iranians have the capability to enrich uranium, and they are not going to give it up. But it is still possible, perhaps through a more intrusive inspection regime, to fashion a reasonably credible arrangement that prevents weaponization.

True, the United States at this point cannot prevent Iran from continuing to enrich. Further, Iran can develop, as is its right, the ability to build a weapon if it felt it needed to in an emergency. Further still, Iran developing that ability threatens Israel whose strategic doctrine, in the opinion of Israelis, depends on Israel being able to issue overwhelming and unanswerable threats to its neighbors.

But while everyone knows Iran cannot be coerced or forced to give up enrichment, Barack Obama is not willing to say so. Iran will not commit to a more intrusive inspection regime before Obama commits to Iran enriching uranium. Where Obama is stuck is that to make the concession to reality that he cannot prevent Iran from becoming nuclear capable, he would have to take a position that could call into question his commitment to the security of Israel as a Jewish state. In the US foreign policy community, to lack a commitment to Israel's security threatens to provoke the accusation of anti-Jewish bigotry.

We possibly will see sanctions against that harm the lives of Iranian people in tangible ways, that make it more difficult to find a job or that increase the rate of inflation throughout Iran's economy and causing Iranians relying on their savings to do with less because Barack Obama would be made uncomfortable by false accusations of anti-Semitism. Brzezinski may believe that hostility that results from this is undeserved, or that the deservedness of such hostility is questionable. Few in Iran or the wider region would agree.

9)
Iran's credibility was undermined by the convoluted manner in which Tehran complicated a promising compromise for a cooperative Iranian-Russian-French arrangement for processing its enriched uranium.

I think almost everyone in the US foreign policy community wrongly interprets what happened with this deal. The deal as presented - Iran shipping out almost all of its uranium at once instead of in pieces - is only beneficial to the West if the West does not intend to return fuel until Iran suspends enrichment. Otherwise, one batch or many lead to identical outcomes. Iran was not going to stop enrichment, so since the US would not relent on its insistence that there be one batch, the deal died. Brzezinski can think what he wants about Iranian credibility, but it was a bad deal.

10)
The position of Russia is ambiguous since as a major energy supplier to Europe, it stands to benefit financially from a prolonged crisis in the Persian Gulf that would prevent the entrance of Iranian oil into the European market. Indeed, from the Russian geopolitical perspective, a steep rise in the price of oil as a result of a conflict in the Persian Gulf would be most economically damaging to the United States and China -- countries whose global preeminence Russia tends to resent and even fear -- and would make Europe even more dependent on Russian energy.

This is a very interesting issue that I've thought about but never fully fleshed out. To the degree Russia and even China see themselves as rivals of the United States, watching the US sink resources into the Middle East, trying to pin down every non-Jewish person in the region while Russia and China get to position themselves as the good side must seem only partially bad. If the US was to make the mistake of allowing its hostility with Iran to escalate to full scale war, it could be good for Russia the way the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was good for the US and China.

It is difficult to figure out exactly what motivates Russia in this situation, but Russia may well quietly hope the US falls deeper in and remains engaged longer in the project of making the Middle East safe for Zionism in all of the forms this project takes. China's motivations may be similar. If the US looks like it really would go to war, I'm not sure it could count on Russia or China to prevent it.

11)
Should the United States' long-term goal be the evolution of Iran into a stabilizing power in the Middle East? To state the issue even more sharply and simply: Should its policy be designed to encourage Iran to eventually become a partner of the United States again -- and even, as it was for three decades, of Israel?

This is a very important point. Westerners really have to stop this. The Shah's foreign policy was not normal. The Shah's foreign policy is not a model for modern Iran to emulate. The Shah was a pro-US stooge dictator who followed US commands because his rule depended on the US for legitimacy rather than the views of those he ruled. I often see the sentiment expressed that Iran has "historically" had good relations with Israel. Iran is a majority Muslim country. It's good relations with Israel were very ahistorical. Presenting it as something to return to is an insult to the Iranian people.

To make the point again, one day Egypt will overthrow Mubarak and whoever else the US has propped up to replace him. When that happens, do not tell a democratic Egypt that since it had good relations with Israel under Mubarak, who depended on the US Congress allocating him an allowance, the democratic Egypt might have the same relations.

One day Palestine will have a leader who is able to win an election against organized opposition. When that happens, do not tell a democratically endorsed Palestinian leader that he should replicate the good relations with Israel that existed under Israel's chosen puppet Abbas.

This should be common sense and I'm always stunned when I see this idea that Iran had good relations with Israel under the Shah presented as if that is meaningful. But for Brzezinski, with Brzezinski's unexamined, false and destructive premise that there must be a Jewish state, it seems the Shah pursued a reasonable foreign policy while the Islamic Republic is mysteriously and unexplainably hostile to Israel. This premise is a real problem for his analysis.

12)
The Taliban are not a global revolutionary or terrorist movement, and although they are a broad alliance with a rather medieval vision of what Afghanistan ought to be, they do not directly threaten the West.

Good and not often mentioned point about the Taliban. The Taliban never hated the US and never had any interest in attacking the United States. But the Taliban did, accurately, see the US as engaging in a war against Muslims and allowed Bin Laden's group to organize on its territory. Any Muslim controlled territory would do that, unless the US has some form of leverage.

What that means is that because the US supports Israel, it now has a national security objective in acquiring leverage over every Muslim-majority territory. It is a process that in itself creates more provocations against the Muslim world that create still more impulse for responses. This is a spiral that ends with the entire Muslim world colonial zed or the US unable to afford to continue. Bin Laden's calculation in orchestrating the 9/11 attack is that it is more likely to end with the second.

13)
Additionally, the United States needs to develop a policy for gaining the support of Pakistan, not just in denying the Taliban a sanctuary in Pakistan but also in pressuring the Taliban in Afghanistan to accommodate. Given that many Pakistanis may prefer a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to a secular Afghanistan that leans toward Pakistan's archrival, India, the United States needs to assuage Pakistan's security concerns in order to gain its full cooperation in the campaign against the irreconcilable elements of the Taliban.

Pakistan is a case of another country that does not intrinsically hate the US, but that left to its own devices does not mind providing resources for parties that would punish the US and West for their attacks on the Muslim world. Bribing the corrupt leader Zardari to prosecute a war against the Taliban in which the people of Pakistan otherwise would not engage just continues the cycle.

14)
The consequences of a failed peace process in the Middle East, a military collision with Iran, and an intensifying military engagement in Afghanistan and Pakistan all happening simultaneously could commit the United States for many years to a lonely and self-destructive conflict in a huge and volatile area. Eventually, that could spell the end of the United States' current global preeminence.

This dramatic conclusion is true, except that what Brzezinski considers a successful peace process would, for the purposes he's trying to achieve of ending the US war against Islam, still be a failed peace process. The US has to begin looking to the resolution in South Africa for an example of an outcome that treats every individual equally, allows a right to return regardless of ethnicity and does not require a spiraling cycle of increasingly emotive provocations and increasing responses between the US or the West and the Muslim world.

The US was in a position of relative power in 1945 that has never been seen before in history, and the US had the right to use that power as it saw fit. One way the US has been using its power is managing the project of keeping a region of over 200 million non-Jewish people unable to pose a threat to the political majority status of 5 million Jewish people in Palestine. Today the US has a far smaller margin of power over its rivals while the over 200 million people who have to be subjugated are growing more resourceful and capable. Those non-Jewish people of the region are also increasingly coming to understand the role the US plays and becoming more inclined to strike against the US directly.

The process by which the US is losing its position is certainly accelerated by the inability of its foreign policy establishment to question the necessity of a Jewish majority state in Palestine. There is a remaining question of will this process be arrested or will it continue to its conclusion. Arresting it sooner is better for the interests for the over 300 million US citizens as well as the hundreds of millions of people in Israel's extended region. But this is a choice the US can only make for itself.

15)
[On US domestic problems that interfere with the formulation and application of good foreign policy]
The first is that foreign policy lobbies have become more influential in U.S. politics. Thanks to their access to Congress, a variety of lobbies -- some financially well endowed, some backed by foreign interests -- have been promoting, to an unprecedented degree, legislative intervention in foreign-policy making. Now more than ever, Congress not only actively opposes foreign policy decisions but even imposes some on the president. (The pending legislation on sanctions against Iran is but one example.) Such congressional intervention, promoted by lobbies, is a serious handicap in shaping a foreign policy meant to be responsive to the ever-changing realities of global politics and makes it more difficult to ensure that U.S. -- not foreign -- interests are the point of departure.

I have to say that I find lobbies, including the pro-Israel lobby that I sometimes see humorously described (with capitalization) as "The Lobby", are over-estimated in their importance in distorting US foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. Of course, any argument that lobbies have no effect are wrong, but given Brzezinski’s premises, if he was put into power and every lobby dismantled, he would make the same mistakes Obama is making. In a long essay, Brzezinski makes a minor mention of lobbies, which is about right. The real problem is not the lobby, but the premises upon which foreign policy conclusions are generally constructed in the US.

16)
The resulting polarization not only makes a bipartisan foreign policy less likely, but it also encourages the infusion of demagogy into policy conflicts. And it poisons the public discourse. Still worse, personal vilification and hateful, as well as potentially violent, rhetoric are becoming widespread in that realm of political debate that is subject to neither fact checking nor libel laws: the blogosphere.

Hahaha.

Seriously though, there was once a far higher barrier preventing non-specialists from getting information about foreign policy. Specialists who become familiar with the Middle East for many reasons tend to be more stridently pro-Israel than the US lay population. In the terms of this essay, specialists accept the unexamined, false and destructive premise that there must be a Jewish-majority state in Palestine more uncritically than the vast majority of Americans who have never put much thought into the matter.

Here we have a situation where, if information can be spread quickly enough, non-specialists who are able to examine premises the specialists are blind to, just may be able to prevent the US from harming a lot more people while wasting a huge amount of resources and spiraling towards irrelevance.

17)
Last but not least, of the large democratic countries, the United States has one of the least informed publics when it comes to global affairs. Many Americans, as various National Geographic surveys have shown, are not even familiar with basic global geography. Their knowledge of other countries' histories and cultures is not much better. How can a public unfamiliar with geography or foreign history have even an elementary grasp of, say, the geopolitical dilemmas that the United States faces in Afghanistan and Pakistan? With the accelerating decline in the circulation of newspapers and the trivialization of once genuinely informative television reporting, reliable and timely news about critical global issues is becoming less available to the general public. In that context, demagogically formulated solutions tend to become more appealing, especially in critical moments.

The insularity of Americans, which I guess comes from the historical lack of threats since the US is oceans away from its rivals, has allowed the US to develop in a naive and uninformed way. The oceans are becoming smaller though. US citizens are becoming more informed. I have not seen a poll, but I'd guess more Americans can identify every Middle East state, not only Iraq and Afghanistan - but Egypt, Saudi Arabia and more than could just ten years ago in 2000. The US will never be a country of foreign affairs students, but no country is. I think information has the potential to be a strong, not a weak point for the creation and application of US foreign policy in the future.

So what we've seen in Brzezinski's essay is that in defense of Obama's policy he shows the failures of analysis that he shares with Obama and most of the US foreign policy establishment. On the other hand, he is unusually candid about the challenges the US faces, even if as of today, he would not be prepared to meet those challenges.

Three strikes for Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon

An interesting point is that Israel is a small country, with a small population base. Israel's Jewish population, from which Israel structurally draws all of its significant leadership, is about 5 million people, which is the size of the metropolitan area of a medium-sized US city (the actual city plus its suburbs).

In a competitive system that selects leadership based on some form of political skill, a small population base limits the expected level of talent for the leadership. This is a long way to say nobody would expect Israel's national leadership to be as talented as Russia's leadership, just as nobody would expect the mayor of Albuquerque New Mexico to be as talented as the US President.

Israel has more talented leadership than the colonial stooge states - for example Saudi Arabia's leadership is selected from a dozen or so direct descendants of the Saudi king who first began collaborating with the British empire. Egypt draws its leadership from the pool of Egyptians acceptable to Israel. So Israel has an advantage over its neighbors that is artificially maintained by US resources but from time to time you see just how poorly led the country is by any standard of comparison except what the US imposes on its neighbors.

Barak Ravid from Haaretz reports on a question and answer session by Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon. The quotes just go from bad to worse.

"It is not certain that the regime in power now in Iran will be there in one year," Ayalon said at a question-and-answer session in Tel Aviv.

So this will start us off. Now "certain" is a strong word. "Not certain" is a powerful hedge. It is possible that an asteroid hits earth or somehow the sun stops burning. Because of that Ayalon is correct to say it is not certain that Iran's regime will be in power a year from now. But in real life, it is certain. Just like it is certain that the US controversy over Barack Obama's birth certificate will not lead to Obama's removal from office.

Americans analysts, because of their disagreement with Iran's leadership over Israel, and the intense emotional antipathy that engenders, systematically over-estimate the capabilities and significance of internal opposition to the regime. It is largely projection. If Iran's regime ruled over a population of people like Juan Cole, Gary Sick and Michael Slackman, its demise would be imminent. Instead Iran's regime rules over a population of people who agree with it on most issues. (Really if Iran's regime ruled over a population of people who think like US analysts, its positions would match those of the people it rules and who vote in its elections.)

But if Americans project their antipathy onto Iran's population, we can only imagine how strong that tendency is in Israel. Avalon's hope of regime change in Iran will certainly be dashed in 2010. Even US analysts do not go as far as he does.

"The world is uniting against Iran's nuclear program and within a month there will be United Nations Security Council sanctions," Ayalon said. "There is agreement in Washington, Moscow and Beijing that a nuclear Iran would destroy the current world order."

Woah, slow down.

There aren't going to be UN Security Council sanctions this month. This is the Deputy Foreign Minister of a country that considers Iran its primary rival. He doesn't read newspapers? "Destroy the current world order?" What? I'm not sure an actual response is necessary.

Ayalon also addressed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's recent efforts to relaunch peace talks with the Palestinians, saying, "The Palestinians need to understand that time is working against them," Channel 10 news reported.

This statement is the reason I wrote a post about the article. Do Israel's leaders really think time is working against the Palestinians? Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama do not think so. One explanation could be that Israel's leaders have a distorted view of their situation out of necessity, because it is painful to envision the failure of the Zionist project. Another explanation though, is that Israel has such a small Jewish population that that it just cannot produce leadership talented enough to identify basic facts about the situation they find themselves in.

Looking at 2009 predictions

My 2009 predictions were pretty timid but not much unexpected happened, as far as the predictions went. News in 2009 came in the form of issues I didn't anticipate in January such as Yemen and the attempted green revolution rather than predictions that were actually wrong.

Egypt continues its corruption-based relationship with the US. I was surprised by how excitedly and unashamedly Obama endorses this relationship. For me, Egypt is the issue that proves that on foreign policy, Barack Obama is a weak and dishonest embarrassment to the liberal movement that expended the most resources to elevate him to office.

Gaza remains in Hamas hands. Hemmed in though by Egypt which is more hostile than I expected.

Netanyahu stayed in the lead and won.

Abbas is still in power in the West Bank.

Hezbollah won the popular vote and but did not win a majority of seats in Lebanon's Parliament. The US was either unwilling or unable to persuade its Lebanese allies to maintain their denial of a Hezbollah veto in cabinet.

Syria and Turkey did not have ground-breaking events but Syria is significantly less diplomatically isolated than it was a year ago and Turkey surprised me with how it has turned away from Israel in its public statements.

We have a civil war in Yemen that involves Saudi Arabia.

There was no deal to slow Iran's enrichment. The Obama administration lost a year by not giving up its no enrichment demand. We only have a few years to go before Iran unilaterally suspends because it has enriched all it needs. I didn't even have a prediction about Iran's election, but nothing was at stake as far as foreign policy was concerned.

Pakistan has been slowly becoming more violent but has not imploded.

Obama is increasing the amount of troops in Afghanistan by more than I expected, we have not seen the payments to the Taliban start, but that does not mean they have not. That will be clearer this time next year.

Overall I'm struck by two things. The first is that areas that we know to look at are pretty easy to project one year into the future. The second is that there can be major events over the course of a year in issues that didn't even seem interesting when the year started.

If Khamenei was as drunk as I am right now

I wonder if he'd be willing to trade almost all of Iran's enriched uranium for a promise from Barack Obama that he'd get reactor fuel sometime next year.

Maybe.

Still probably not.

No. Definitely not. That would be crazy.