Who Wants War With Iran?

By Patrick J Buchanan

Appearing alongside CIA Director David Petraeus before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last week, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said of Iran:

“We don’t believe they’ve actually made the decision to go ahead with a nuclear weapon.”

Before the hearing, as James Fallows of The Atlantic reports, Clapper released his “Worldwide Threat Assessment.” It read, “We do not know … if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.”

Clapper thus reaffirmed the assessment of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies in 2007, reportedly repeated in 2011, that the U.S. does not believe that Iran has decided to become a nuclear weapons state.

In December, when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that if Iran went all out, it might be able to build a nuclear weapon in a year, Pentagon spokesman George Little hastily clarified his comments:

“The secretary was clear that we have no indication that the Iranians have made a decision to develop a nuclear weapon.”

On Jan. 8, Panetta himself told CBS:

“(Is Iran) 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 redline to Iran is: Do not develop a nuclear weapon.”

On Super Bowl Sunday, President Barack Obama told NBC’s Matt Lauer that he hopes to solve the Iranian problem “diplomatically.”

From the above, we may conclude that the administration does not believe that Iran has crossed any redline on the nuclear issue — and President Obama does not want war with Iran.

Who, then, does want war? Ayatollah Ali Khamenei? Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

From their actions, it would appear not. If Iran wanted war with the United States, any terror attack inside this country or on U.S. forces in Iraq or Afghanistan could bring that about in an afternoon.

Expulsion of the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors from the Natanz enrichment facility, covering up the IAEA cameras, breaking the seals on the low-enriched uranium stockpiled there, or removing the LEU would be a fire bell for the Pentagon.

But the IAEA inspectors and LEU are still there.

When the alleged plot by a used-car salesman in Texas to hire Mexican cartel criminals to blow up a D.C. restaurant and kill the Saudi ambassador was revealed, Iran denied it emphatically and demanded to interview the alleged mastermind.

Moreover, Tehran has yet to retaliate for the assassinations of five of its nuclear scientists and four terror attacks by Jundallah in Sistan-Baluchistan and PJAK, a Kurdish terrorist organization operating out of Iraqi Kurdistan. Iran has alleged Western and Israeli involvement in these attacks.

Now that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has denied any U.S. involvement, Mossad is the prime suspect behind the killing of the nuclear scientists. And U.S. writer Mark Perry, in Foreign Policy, alleges that Mossad agents posed as CIA and used U.S. dollars in London to recruit Jundallah.

If this is true, this would be a false flag operation to provoke Iran into lashing out at America. Apparently, Iran did not take the bait.

Why have the Iranians not followed through on their threat to close the Strait of Hormuz and begun to dial it back?

War with the United States would be a disaster. Though the Tehran regime might survive — as Saddam Hussein’s survived Desert Storm — Iran’s navy, most of its armor, anti-aircraft and anti-ship defenses, and its strategic missile force would be destroyed, as would much of the country’s infrastructure. Iran would be set back years.

Who, then, wants war with Iran?

All those who would like to see exactly that happen to Iran.

And who are they? The Netanyahu government and its echo chamber in U.S. politics and media, the neoconservatives, members of Congress, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

And as the Obama administration is the major force in U.S. politics opposed to war with Iran, its defeat in November would increase, to near certitude, the probability of a U.S. war with Iran in 2013.

Yet if the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community are correct — Iran does not have a bomb and has not decided to build a bomb — why should we go to war with Iran?

Answer: Iran represents “an existential threat” to Israel.

But Israel has 200 atomic bombs and three ways to deliver them, while Iran has never built, tested or weaponized a nuclear device. Who is the existential threat to whom here?

And though a U.S. war on Iran would be calamitous for Iran, it would be no cakewalk for Americans, who could become terrorist targets for years in the Gulf, Afghanistan, Baghdad’s Green Zone, Lebanon and even here in the USA.

Year 2012 is thus shaping up as a war-or-peace election, with Republicans the war party and Democrats the peace-and-diplomacy party.

And as the months pass between now and November, this will become clear to the nation.

-This Op/Ed was published in Eurasia Review on 08/02/2012
-Patrick J. Buchanan is an American conservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster

Syrian Repression, The Chinese-Russian Veto, And U.S. Hypocrisy

By Stephen Zunes

As the Syrian regime continues to slaughter unarmed civilians, the major powers at the United Nations continue to put their narrow geopolitical agenda ahead of international humanitarian law. Just as France shields Morocco from accountability for its ongoing occupation and repression in Western Sahara and just as the United States shields Israel from having to live up to its obligations under international humanitarian law, Russia and China have used their permanent seats on the UN Security Council to protect the Syrian regime from accountability for its savage repression against its own citizens.

On Saturday, Russia and China vetoed an otherwise unanimous UN Security Council resolution condemning the ongoing repression in Syria and calling for a halt to violence on all sides, unfettered access for Arab League monitors, and “a Syrian-led political transition to a democratic, plural political system, in which citizens are equal regardless of their affiliations or ethnicities or beliefs.”

Although the joint Russian and Chinese veto of the resolution is inexcusable, the self-righteous reaction by U.S. officials betrays hypocrisy on a grand scale and fails to take into account a series of policy blunders that have contributed to the tragic impasse.

Using the Veto

Since 1970, China has used its veto power eight times, Russia (including the former Soviet Union) has used its veto power 13 times, and the United States has used its veto power 83 times, primarily in defense of allies accused of violating international humanitarian law. Forty-two of these U.S. vetoes were to protect Israel from criticism for illegal activities, including suspected war crimes. To this day, Israel occupies and colonizes a large swath of southwestern Syria in violation of a series of UN Security Council resolutions. Yet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insists that it is the Russians and Chinese who have “neutered” the Security Council’s ability to defend basic human rights.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice expressed the feelings of many human rights advocates around the world when she said that she was “disgusted” by the Russian-Chinese veto. Ironically, Rice herself disgusted many human rights advocates around the world last year when she vetoed an otherwise unanimous UN Security Council resolution that simply reiterated a longstanding principle of international humanitarian law—codified in the Fourth Geneva Convention, four previous UNSC resolutions, and a landmark World Court decision—that Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal and there should be a freeze on further construction. 

By contrast, the call in Saturday’s resolution for an internationally recognized government to effectively hand over power to the opposition, although justifiable in light of the extraordinary repression, is a virtually unprecedented move by the UN Security Council. Although territories under foreign military occupation, like those occupied by Israel, are clearly under UN purview, the willingness of the UN to challenge human rights abuses within a country’s internationally recognized borders is relatively new.

Obama’s veto last year, then, was on far weaker ground legally than last weekend’s veto by China and Russia. So were most of the other UN Security Council resolutions vetoed by previous U.S. administrations.

Still, the double veto by Russia and China is particularly disappointing because it foiled what could have been an important precedent of the international community taking a stand against internal repression by delegitimizing a sitting government because of its large-scale killing of civilian citizens.  Given Russia’s large-scale killings of Chechen civilians and China’s massacres of its citizens in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere, it is a precedent that neither regime wanted to see.

Only recently has the UN Security Council even attempted to address large-scale and systematic human rights abuses within the borders of its member states. Despite the Russian and Chinese veto, it’s a credit to the growing influence of human rights advocates and civil society activists (notwithstanding the hypocrisy and double standards of some of the resolution’s sponsors) that the resolution even came before the Security Council in the first place. If Assad eventually falls, Russia and China will find themselves on the wrong side of history.

Though the veto has prevented the Security Council from being able to curb aggression and promote the peaceful settlement of conflicts, the resolution nonetheless forced recalcitrant governments to embarrass themselves before world opinion and perhaps think twice before so openly defending repression in the future.

Other Factors Strengthening Assad and His Allies

There are other factors that have unfortunately played into the hands of the Assad regime and its international supporters.

The turn to armed struggle by some elements of the Syrian resistance has weakened the moral imperative to sanction the Syrian regime. It has allowed Assad’s backers to call the Syrian uprising a civil war led by Islamist extremists, a claim no one took seriously when the struggle largely maintained its nonviolent discipline. Instead of coming to the defense of an unarmed populace being brutally massacred by an illegitimate repressive regime, the rise of the Free Syrian Army has given the appearance that the UN is attempting to take sides in a civil war.

Although it is certainly understandable that the large-scale killings of peaceful protesters could lead many in the resistance to support armed struggle, it was just such nonviolent discipline that led to so many defections from the Syrian armed forces in the first place. Soldiers and officers are far more likely to defect if they are being ordered to shoot into an unarmed group of demonstrators than if they are being shot at. General strikes and other actions were crippling the economy, leading to major fissures among the regime’s supporters. The rise of the Free Syrian Army, however, appears to have solidified the regime’s wavering support.

Indeed, according to a recent study of the more than 300 major uprisings against autocratic regimes and colonial powers over the past century, unarmed resistance has proved to be more than twice as successful as armed resistance.

Another factor that may have helped prompt the Russian and Chinese veto was the two countries’ willingness to allow passage of last year’s resolution on Libya, which called for the establishment of a no-fly zone and other defensive measures to protect the civilian population from attacks by Gaddafi’s forces. Unfortunately, NATO went well beyond its UNSC mandate to protect civilian lives and effectively became the air force for the rebels—and even ended up being responsible for scores of civilian casualties itself. Although the recently vetoed resolution on Syria did not authorize foreign intervention, NATO’s overreach on Libya certainly contributed to Russia and China’s intransigence on Syria.

Still another factor has been the U.S.  use of the UN to unfairly single out Syria in the past. For example, the United States imposed strict sanctions on Syria in 2003 (the “Syria Accountability Act”), in part because of Syria’s violation of UNSC Resolution 520, which called for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Lebanon. However, the only foreign forces mentioned by name in the UN resolution were those of Israel, which occupied southern Lebanon for 22 years with the active support of the U.S. government, which successfully blocked the enforcement of that resolution and nine subsequent resolutions calling for Israel’s unconditional withdrawal. (Israel finally pulled its occupation forces out of Lebanon in May 2000 over U.S. objections.)

Even since Syria withdrew its forces from Lebanon in 2005, U.S. sanctions have remained in effect because of other U.S. conditions, such as the demand that Syria unilaterally halt its development and deployment of missiles as well as chemical and biological weapons. Yet the United States allowed its allies Israel, Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia to continue developing their larger and more advanced missile systems, and allowed Israel and Egypt in particular to develop their larger and more sophisticated arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.

In a further irony, the primary sponsor of last weekend’s resolution on Syria was Morocco, a non-permanent member of UN Security Council that is currently in violation of a series of Security Council resolutions regarding its illegal occupation of Western Sahara. Secretary of State Clinton, backed by a bipartisan majority of the U.S. Senate, is on record supporting Morocco’s refusal to abide by these resolutions, effectively recognizing the kingdom’s illegal annexation of the territory by supporting the Moroccan king’s limited “autonomy” proposal.

The Syria Accountability Act demanded that the UN remove Syria from its non-permanent seat in the Security Council because of its violation of UNSC resolution 520. But no such demand has been made by the United States regarding Morocco, despite its far more numerous and egregious violations of UNSC resolutions.

Such double standards inevitably raise questions about what is actually motivating the United States and other Western powers, which have long been the primary backers of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, and other Arab dictatorships that have unleashed state violence against unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators.

Indeed, Washington was targeting the Syrian regime for possible overthrow long before the popular indigenous pro-democracy struggle erupted last year. The Syrian Accountability Act included clauses stating that the Syrian regime threatened “the national security interests of the United States” and warned that “Syria will be held accountable” for the deaths of American soldiers in the region if Syrian arms are involved. These clauses raised concerns that the resolution, which was adopted with only four dissenting votes in both houses of Congress, might be paving the way for a U.S. attack. Just as the 1998 “Iraq Liberation Act” was used in part as the basis for the 2003 U.S. invasion of that country, the late Senator Robert Byrd warned that the Syrian Accountability Act “could later be used to build a case for military intervention against Syria.”

Although foreign military intervention is not the answer, the international community needs to take decisive steps to stop the repression in Syria and support a transition to democracy. The Russian and Chinese veto of the moderate and reasonable UN Security Council resolution was unconscionable. Unfortunately, the policies of the United States and its allies have made it all the more difficult for the UN and peoples of the world to oppose Syrian government repression and defend the Syrian people.

-This commentary was published in Foreign Policy In Focus on 07/02/2012
-Stephen Zunes, a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist and senior analyst, is a professor of Politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco. He is the author, along with Jacob Mundy, of Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution (Syracuse University Press, 2010)

Small Potatoes Rule The Day In Lebanon

By David Kenner

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati answered questions on Twitter on Sunday afternoon, one day after Russia and China vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria - a step that seems virtually guaranteed to plunge Lebanon's eastern neighbor into further violence. So what did the premier want to talk about? Spoiled spuds.

"I realize that some of you are being kept busy with a story on expired potato chips which clearly changes the usual focus of the discussion," Mikati wrote. "Let me reassure you that instructions have been given to investigate expired potato chips story, perform related Lab tests & take measures."

Mikati was referring to a dastardly plot to alter the expiration date of 35 tons of potato chips at a warehouse owned by his brother-in-law. Whatever the facts of the case, it is something less than the great struggles against dictatorship seizing the rest of the Middle East. It also says volumes about the issue Mikati doesn't want to talk about: The slow-motion collapse of President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

Mikati's line is that Lebanon will "disassociate" itself from events in Syria, remaining neutral in order to avoid the blowback from the incipient civil war. But all the major political actors in Beirut are doing precisely the opposite -- even those within Mikati's own government. Lebanese Ambassador to the U.N. Nawaf Salam, for example, was talking with U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice on the floor of the Security Council just before the key vote on Syria. Salam reports to Lebanon's Foreign Ministry, which is run by a representative of the Amal party, a close ally of Hezbollah. It's difficult to see how inserting himself into the proceedings serves the purpose of "disassociating" Lebanon from events to the east.

The examples are piling up. As Hezbollah stages raids on towns in search of Syrian dissidents, arms smugglers carry weapons across the border to Syrian militiamen. Hassan Nasrallah promises to stand by Assad to the end, and Sunni leader Saad Hariri says that "change is imminent" in Damascus.

Violence is also piling up. Eight Lebanese have reportedly been killed in Syrian incursions across the border since the uprising began, and the Lebanese Army is now using helicopters in the north to search for "terrorist groups" at the request of the Syrian regime. And twice in the past three months, Lebanese parliamentarians have gotten into fistfights on live television.

There is little point in criticizing Lebanon's prime minister, who is picking from a series of bad options, of being disingenuous. But from the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser to the civil war, Lebanon has a sad history of being destabilized by regional forces beyond its control. If Syria is poised to become 1980s Lebanon on steroids, as my colleague Marc Lynch writes, Beirut will get pulled down into the tragedy sooner or later.

This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 06/02/2012

The Global War On Christians In The Muslim World

From one end of the Muslim world to the other, Christians are being murdered for their faith.

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

We hear so often about Muslims as victims of abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Spring’s fight against tyranny. But, in fact, a wholly different kind of war is underway—an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm.

The portrayal of Muslims as victims or heroes is at best partially accurate. In recent years the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania. In some countries it is governments and their agents that have burned churches and imprisoned parishioners. In others, rebel groups and vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving them from regions where their roots go back centuries.

The media’s reticence on the subject no doubt has several sources. One may be fear of provoking additional violence. Another is most likely the influence of lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation—a kind of United Nations of Islam centered in Saudi Arabia—and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Over the past decade, these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading leading public figures and journalists in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a systematic and sinister derangement called “Islamophobia”—a term that is meant to elicit the same moral disapproval as xenophobia or homophobia.

But a fair-minded assessment of recent events and trends leads to the conclusion that the scale and severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the bloody Christophobia currently coursing through Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other. The conspiracy of silence surrounding this violent expression of religious intolerance has to stop. Nothing less than the fate of Christianity—and ultimately of all religious minorities—in the Islamic world is at stake.

From blasphemy laws to brutal murders to bombings to mutilations and the burning of holy sites, Christians in so many nations live in fear. In Nigeria many have suffered all of these forms of persecution. The nation has the largest Christian minority (40 percent) in proportion to its population (160 million) of any majority-Muslim country. For years, Muslims and Christians in Nigeria have lived on the edge of civil war. Islamist radicals provoke much if not most of the tension. The newest such organization is an outfit that calls itself Boko Haram, which means “Western education is sacrilege.” Its aim is to establish Sharia in Nigeria. To this end it has stated that it will kill all Christians in the country.

In the month of January 2012 alone, Boko Haram was responsible for 54 deaths. In 2011 its members killed at least 510 people and burned down or destroyed more than 350 churches in 10 northern states. They use guns, gasoline bombs, and even machetes, shouting “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”) while launching attacks on unsuspecting citizens. They have attacked churches, a Christmas Day gathering (killing 42 Catholics), beer parlors, a town hall, beauty salons, and banks. They have so far focused on killing Christian clerics, politicians, students, policemen, and soldiers, as well as Muslim clerics who condemn their mayhem. While they started out by using crude methods like hit-and-run assassinations from the back of motorbikes in 2009, the latest AP reports indicate that the group’s recent attacks show a new level of potency and sophistication.

The Christophobia that has plagued Sudan for years takes a very different form. The authoritarian government of the Sunni Muslim north of the country has for decades tormented Christian and animist minorities in the south. What has often been described as a civil war is in practice the Sudanese government’s sustained persecution of religious minorities. This persecution culminated in the infamous genocide in Darfur that began in 2003. Even though Sudan’s Muslim president, Omar al-Bashir, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which charged him with three counts of genocide, and despite the euphoria that greeted the semi-independence he grant-ed to South Sudan in July of last year, the violence has not ended. In South Kordofan, Christians are still subject-ed to aerial bombardment, targeted killings, the kidnap-ping of children, and other atrocities. Reports from the United Nations indicate that between 53,000 and 75,000 innocent civilians have been displaced from their residences and that houses and buildings have been looted and destroyed.

Both kinds of persecution—undertaken by extragovernmental groups as well as by agents of the state—have come together in Egypt in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. On Oct. 9 of last year in the Maspero area of Cairo, Coptic Christians (who make up roughly 11 percent of Egypt’s population of 81 million) marched in protest against a wave of attacks by Islamists—including church burnings, rapes, mutilations, and murders—that followed the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship. During the protest, Egyptian security forces drove their trucks into the crowd and fired on protesters, crushing and killing at least 24 and wounding more than 300 people. By the end of the year more than 200,000 Copts had fled their homes in anticipation of more attacks. With Islamists poised to gain much greater power in the wake of recent elections, their fears appear to be justified.

Egypt is not the only Arab country that seems bent on wiping out its Christian minority. Since 2003 more than 900 Iraqi Christians (most of them Assyrians) have been killed by terrorist violence in Baghdad alone, and 70 churches have been burned, according to the Assyrian International News Agency (AINA). Thousands of Iraqi Christians have fled as a result of violence directed specifically at them, reducing the number of Christians in the country to fewer than half a million from just over a million before 2003. AINA understandably describes this as an “incipient genocide or ethnic cleansing of Assyrians in Iraq.”

The 2.8 million Christians who live in Pakistan make up only about 1.6 percent of the population of more than 170 million. As members of such a tiny minority, they live in perpetual fear not only of Islamist terrorists but also of Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws. There is, for example, the notorious case of a Christian woman who was sentenced to death for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad. When international pressure persuaded Punjab Gov. Salman Taseer to explore ways of freeing her, he was killed by his bodyguard. The bodyguard was then celebrated by prominent Muslim clerics as a hero—and though he was sentenced to death late last year, the judge who imposed the sentence now lives in hiding, fearing for his life.

Such cases are not unusual in Pakistan. The nation’s blasphemy laws are routinely used by criminals and intolerant Pakistani Muslims to bully religious minorities. Simply to declare belief in the Christian Trinity is considered blasphemous, since it contradicts mainstream Muslim theological doctrines. When a Christian group is suspected of transgressing the blasphemy laws, the consequences can be brutal. Just ask the members of the Christian aid group World Vision. Its offices were attacked in the spring of 2010 by 10 gunmen armed with grenades, leaving six people dead and four wounded. A militant Muslim group claimed responsibility for the attack on the grounds that World Vision was working to subvert Islam. (In fact, it was helping the survivors of a major earthquake.)

Not even Indonesia—often touted as the world’s most tolerant, democratic, and modern majority-Muslim nation—has been immune to the fevers of Christophobia. According to data compiled by the Christian Post, the number of violent incidents committed against religious minorities (and at 7 percent of the population, Christians are the country’s largest minority) increased by nearly 40 percent, from 198 to 276, between 2010 and 2011.

The litany of suffering could be extended. In Iran dozens of Christians have been arrested and jailed for daring to worship outside of the officially sanctioned church system. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, deserves to be placed in a category of its own. Despite the fact that more than a million Christians live in the country as foreign workers, churches and even private acts of Christian prayer are banned; to enforce these totalitarian restrictions, the religious police regularly raid the homes of Christians and bring them up on charges of blasphemy in courts where their testimony carries less legal weight than a Muslim’s. Even in Ethiopia, where Christians make up a majority of the population, church burnings by members of the Muslim minority have become a problem.

It should be clear from this catalog of atrocities that anti-Christian violence is a major and underreported problem. No, the violence isn’t centrally planned or coordinated by some international Islamist agency. In that sense the global war on Christians isn’t a traditional war at all. It is, rather, a spontaneous expression of anti-Christian animus by Muslims that transcends cultures, regions, and ethnicities.

As Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, pointed out in an interview with Newsweek, Christian minorities in many majority-Muslim nations have “lost the protection of their societies.” This is especially so in countries with growing radical Islamist (Salafist) movements. In those nations, vigilantes often feel they can act with impunity—and government inaction often proves them right. The old idea of the Ottoman Turks—that non-Muslims in Muslim societies deserve protection (albeit as second-class citizens)—has all but vanished from wide swaths of the Islamic world, and increasingly the result is bloodshed and oppression.

So let us please get our priorities straight. Yes, Western governments should protect Muslim minorities from intolerance. And of course we should ensure that they can worship, live, and work freely and without fear. It is the protection of the freedom of conscience and speech that distinguishes free societies from unfree ones. But we also need to keep perspective about the scale and severity of intolerance. Cartoons, films, and writings are one thing; knives, guns, and grenades are something else entirely.

As for what the West can do to help religious minorities in Muslim-majority societies, my answer is that it needs to begin using the billions of dollars in aid it gives to the offending countries as leverage. Then there is trade and investment. Besides diplomatic pressure, these aid and trade relationships can and should be made conditional on the protection of the freedom of conscience and worship for all citizens.

Instead of falling for overblown tales of Western Islamophobia, let’s take a real stand against the Christophobia infecting the Muslim world. Tolerance is for everyone—except the intolerant.

-This article was published as the cover story of Newsweek on 06/02/2012
-Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and escaped an arranged marriage by immigrating to the Netherlands in 1992. She served as a member of the Dutch parliament from 2003 to 2006 and is currently a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Her autobiography, Infidel, was a 2007 New York Times bestseller

Russia And China Challenge The West On Syria: What Implications For Iran?

By TONY KARON

The U.N. Security Council meets to discuss a European-Arab draft resolution endorsing an Arab League plan calling for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to give up power in New York Feb. 4, 2012.

The breach among the Permanent Five members of the U.N. Security Council in Saturday’s vote on Syria’s increasingly bloody power struggle could have profound implications for Syria’s immediate future. But it may also signal trouble ahead for international diplomacy on Iran.

Russia and China prompted a furious reaction from the U.S. (as well as France and Britain, and Arab League countries) for vetoing a resolution watered down to accommodate their concerns by removing the explicit demand for President Bashar Assad to cede power. Russia complained that the resolution was “unbalanced” because it didn’t make sufficient demands on opposition groups to end attacks on the regime. Syria’s power struggle has certainly come to resemble a civil war in recent weeks as the regime’s willingness to deploy its armed forces to suppress challenges to its authority have prompted an increasingly militarized response. But the international community’s failure to agree on terms for a political solution underscore the likelihood of a more protracted and bloody settling of accounts in Syria.

The veto left Western and Arab countries seeking ways of supporting the Syrian opposition outside of a U.N. framework. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on “friends of a democratic Syria” to coordinate efforts to support the opposition — although there’s no appetite in Western capitals for any repeat of even the relatively limited NATO air war in support of Libya’s rebellion, and Secretary Clinton was careful to specify the need to promote peaceful democratic opposition, even if she expressed understanding for those who chose to take up arms in response to Assad’s repression.

The military option among  the opposition is fast eclipsing hopes for a negotiated transition to democracy, and amid an escalating war it’s also to be expected that some regional players could seek ways to boost the fighting capacity of an opposition currently heavily outgunned by the regime. In response to rumors that Qatar has already begun secreting arms to rebel forces, the country’s minister of foreign affairs told Al Jazeera: “It is not the position of Qatar or the Arab League to supply arms. Our mandate, our clear mandate, is to stop the killing in Syria, put the regime with the opposition at one table, and start a serious dialogue to bring Syria out of this chaos.” Failing such an outcome, however, it’s worth remembering that the tiny but wealthy emirate has played the leading role in galvanizing the Arab League to take a more forceful stance, and also that in the Libya case, it went far beyond what was required by the U.N. resolution authorizing a NATO-led air campaign (which Qatar’s air force joined) but also reportedly sent weapons to insurgent fighters and eventually deployed special forces to help organize the rebel assault that captured Tripoli.

But the strength of the regime’s security forces, and the sectarian basis on which it claims support — relying more on the Allawite, Christian and Kurdish minorities’ fears for their prospects under a predominantly Sunni opposition than on love for Assad — suggest it may not fall nearly as easily as Gaddafi did.

Assad and his supporters expressed satisfaction with Russia and China’s veto, and as if to prove the point of its critics, regime forces on Sunday continued a ferocious artillery assault on the opposition stronghold of Homs, where activists claim hundreds have been killed in recent days.

But Russia — which continues to arm the Assad regime — appears to be making diplomatic moves of its own, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov — accompanied by President Dmitry Medvedev and Russia’s intelligence chief — due to visit Damascus on Tuesday for talks with Assad, in which the Russian foreign ministry says they will press for “urgent reforms” to “stabilize the situation.”

Just what Russia will demand of Syria remains unclear — Lavrov last week told Australian TV that “We never said that President Assad remaining in power is the solution to the crisis” — nor whether the regime is willing to make a political accommodation with the rebellion. But having wielded its veto and continued its arms shipments, Moscow certainly has more leverage over Assad than most outside players.

Still, the growing body count most eloquently frames the question of whether a conflict that has taken on the form of open civil war can be resolved through a political settlement based on conditions that pertained before it broke out. Not only has Assad shown no inclination to stand down and instead taken a military path, but there’s no single opposition leadership that can credibly claim to speak for all those fighting the regime on the ground. The Syrian National Council may enjoy diplomatic favor in foreign capitals, but its authority has been questioned by opposition groups on the ground, and it has no control over the Free Syrian Army, the loose-knit organization of military defectors waging armed struggle against the regime.

By breaking with the Western powers and wielding a veto at the risk of considerable opprobrium, Russia and China may be signaling a new willingness to challenge Western influence in shaping Middle East outcomes. Their motivations range from domestic political and economic concerns to a geostrategic calculation that their own interests are served by limiting Western intervention in the region. Washington’s Russian “reset” has not produced a strategic rapprochement with Moscow, while its Asia policy is now effectively premised on a strategic rivalry with China — both countries may also be becoming more assertive in challenging the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East.

And the willingness of Beijing and Moscow to break with their Western counterparts among the Permanent Five (veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council) on Syria also casts a shadow over the Obama Administration’s efforts to isolate and pressure Iran over its nuclear program.

Russia and China have long made clear that their perception of the Iran issue is quite different from that of the Western powers — while they believe Iran is required to comply with its NPT obligations, they don’t believe Iran is developing nuclear weapons or that it’s program poses a threat to international security, and they have demanded a greater emphasis on dialogue with Tehran in resolving the issue and addressing its underlying strategic rivalry.

The Obama Administration has worked hard to win Russian and Chinese support for a limited set of Security Council sanctions, even though both countries have bluntly rejected compliance with the unilateral measures against Iran’s energy sector adopted by the U.S. and its European allies.

The Syria vote served up a reminder of just how unlikely it is that the Security Council will pass any significant escalation of sanctions against Iran, much less provide legal authorization for the military option President Obama insists has not been taken off the table.

Russia and China are part of the structure through which the Western powers negotiate with Iran — the “Permanent Five + One” (the one being Germany, which is not a permanent member by virtue of having been on the losing side of World War II).

The Council vote will have certainly reassured Iran that there are significant strategic differences between the Western powers and Moscow and Beijing. It may also portend a more assertive effort by Russia to sell its own version of a compromise on Iran, which has thus far not been embraced by Western powers.

Whereas Russia’s position on Syria has few regional backers, it’s stance on Iran — particularly the emphasis on dialogue over sanctions and military threats — may be closer to that of some of the regional powers most willing to confront the Assad regime, including Turkey and Qatar.

Qatari officials speaking at a security conference in Munich at the weekend rejected talk of military action or even of tightening sanctions against Iran, instead urging stepped up negotiations. Turkey’s foreign minister took a similar position on Iran, even as he criticized Moscow and Beijing for their Syria veto, which he branded a reflexive Cold War hostility to the West. Perhaps. But because the Cold War-proper is long over, the latest developments may signal a new era of geopolitical competition with significant consequences for the Middle East.

This commentary was published in Time magazine’s blog on 06/02/2012 

Live, On The Egyptian Street

It’s already the conventional view that new social media inspired and aided the Arab Spring, especially the Egyptian revolution. The reality was a little different

By Navid Hassanpour

The world saw the Egyptian revolution happen onscreen. It was broadcast live, in real time, through Twitter and Facebook status updates, a political thriller with millions of actors. The protest banners and placards were addressed to the lenses of the media and through them to the world. Satellite television channels became part of the event: Wael Ghonim, a Google executive briefly imprisoned, said: “If you want to liberate a society just give them the internet” (1).

In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak’s decision to interrupt all internet communications and mobile networks early on 28 January 2011 allows us to gauge the results of disruption. From that moment popular demonstration took off. The three-day Tahrir Square demonstration did not end and there were protests across Cairo and other cities, including Alexandria and Suez. The demonstrations overwhelmed Mubarak’s security forces by the end of the day and at around 7pm the military was brought in to replace the police. They refused to intervene. A few days later, Mubarak’s 30-year rule collapsed.

The arguments for the revolutionary role of new social media are well known: free online and print media disseminate knowledge and awareness about the conflict and extent of oppression. Informed citizens are more likely to act, and to seize any political possibilities. This view ignores the fact that seditious communication is invisible to the ruling elite. If they were aware of it, they would disrupt it. Free discussion in public media is more likely to result in more conventional political transitions, not sudden mass revolts. Also, “revolutionary” information is not always reliable. It is easy to forget that Prague’s velvet revolution began with false rumours of the brutal killing of a 19-year-old  student (2). Or that the fall of the Berlin Wall started with a misleading statement at a news conference broadcast on East German television, prompting protesters to demand free passage to the western side of Berlin (3). In times of civil unrest, exaggeration and lack of information often work more effectively than realistic accounts of oppression and participation.

Spreading the word

Centralised state propaganda is thought of as pacifying, but social media can also stall collective risk-taking. What commands calm is not “visibility” to the incumbent, but perceptibility to everybody else. The status quo is not the result of the incumbent regime’s informed coercion but of common acquiescence, a common predictability built on a shared knowledge of the state of affairs. When that common knowledge disintegrates, crowds shape an idea of risk that is independent of the state. Disruption of customary means of communication on 28 January interrupted visibility, prompting Egyptians to create new and subterranean links in service of an anti-regime rebellion.

Full connectivity in social networks can, in fact, hinder collective action. If there is a risk-averse majority and a radical minority, adding more links among the majority does not necessarily help mobilisation. But removing regular communication channels provides radicals with more effective venues for organisation through local networks, decentralising opposition.

In Cairo, on 28 January, when the Egyptian government blocked communications, it forced Egyptians to find new ways of propagating, collecting and producing news. During the social media hiatus, older tactics were used together with new mass communication: satellite television stations such as Al-Jazeera broadcast news gathered through landline phones. People concerned about family members joined the crowds in streets to find out what was going on. Some ran messenger networks on Cairo’s metro lines. Everywhere, there were risky stand-offs and people gathered at local focal points — squares, strategic buildings, and mosques — instead of trying to reach Tahrir.

But over the next few days, the protests didn’t again disperse this way, despite the return of mobile communications and the internet and the further weakening of the regime. People went to Tahrir Square even when it was almost too crowded to get in.

Exacerbating unrest

The disruption of internet and mobile phone communications had exacerbated the unrest. It had implicated many apolitical citizens unaware of or uninterested in the unrest; forced more face-to-face communication, more physical presence in streets; and decentralised the rebellion through new hybrid communications. The authorities found small revolts everywhere much harder to repress than one massive gathering in Tahrir.

The government had deprived itself of credible means for indirectly communicating the possibility of retaliation. Protests proliferated as threats failed. The Lede blog, hosted by The New York Times, reported from Alexandria on 28 January: “‘It is clear that the very extensive police force in Egypt is no longer able to control these crowds. There are too many protests in too many places,’ said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director of Human Rights Watch.”

Similar processes seems to have been at work in Damascus on 3 June 2011 (4). After several weeks of violent repression, the Syrian government decided to use the same tactic as Mubarak’s regime. On 3 June the internet was shut down for a day. An Associated Press correspondent reported from Beirut: “Friday’s protests appeared to be the biggest of the 10-week uprising, with people gathering in larger numbers in cities and towns that before had less participation. Protesters also gathered in several Damascus suburbs, as well as the capital’s central Midan neighbourhood, which has seen demonstrations in recent weeks” (5). Proliferation of protests and a discernable rise in the dispersion of the protests — the parallels with Egypt are intriguing. Could censoring Twitter be more revolutionary than Twitter itself?

-This article was published in Le Monde Diplomatique in its February 2012 Issue
-Navid Hassanpour is a doctoral candidate in political science at Yale University

Notes

(1) Interview by CNN, 11 February 2011.
(2) The New York Times, 18 November 2009.
(3) The Washington Post, 1 November 2009.
(4) With foreign media correspondents largely absent in Syria, coverage of events in Damascus and Hama was not comparable to that from Cairo.
(5) “Syria troops kill 34 during massive protest”, Associated Press, 3 June 2011

Iran Not In A Hurry For Rapprochement

Compromising on the nuclear issue may give rise to more demands from the West, notably improvement in rights and greater openness

By Mehrdad Balali

                                                              Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

If common sense, not ideology, were the guiding force behind Iranian leaders’ actions, they would have had every reason to rush to a meeting with western powers to settle their nuclear differences. Under mounting pressure from inside and out, the Islamic Republic of Iran is going through one of the most critical phases of its three-decade history, amid a bitter power struggle, popular discontent and an economy breaking down under the weight of international sanctions. So far, the divided leadership has stubbornly denied these problems, remaining defiant both toward the West and its own people crying out for change. The question is for how much longer can the situation go on, and whether or not the regime will eventually swallow the bitter medicine to ensure its own survival.

There are indeed some indications that at least some among a cacophony of discordant voices coming out of Iran are aware of this predicament. While many generals and hard-line clerics maintain a posture of bravado on the nuclear issue, threatening to cut oil to the West or close the Strait of Hormuz, the more sensible officials within President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government sound a more conciliatory note. Ahmadinejad himself recently pleaded with western countries to drop their antagonism toward his country and try and reach a settlement on the nuclear standoff: “Why should we shun talks? It is you who come up with excuses each time and issue resolutions on the verge of talks so that negotiations collapse.”

Underscoring Tehran’s eagerness for talks towards ending the sanctions, Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said a senior UN nuclear agency team on a fact-finding mission in Iran last week could extend its visit for “as much as it wants.” There have been tentative talks of a new round of negotiations between Iran and “P5+1” (Germany plus all permanent members of the UN Security Council) in the coming weeks, possibly in Turkey, but a date has not been firmed up amid wide differences between the two sides.

Ahmadinejad and his executive team have legitimate reasons to extend the olive branch. Mounting external pressure — coupled with extensive corruption, mismanagement and the government’s shock-therapy price liberalisation programme — have plunged Iran’s petroleum-reliant economy into virtual chaos, with unemployment and inflation going through the roof and the rial continuing its downward spiral against major currencies. Living an ordinary life in Iran is growing ever more haphazard amid total political and economic uncertainty and fear of a military attack by Israel or the US. Few on the streets of Tehran or elsewhere in Iran have a clue where their country is heading and those with the means are packing to leave.

This all is a heavy price Iranians have had to pay for their leaders’ dogged insistence to defend their so-called “nuclear rights,” but with the situation growing grimmer day by day, even those citizens taking pride in their country’s atomic programme are having second thoughts. As things stand, survival, not technological prowess, is the supreme worry on the mind of the average man on the street.

Against this dismal backdrop, Ahmadinejad might be given a freer hand this time to try and reach a deal with “P5+1.” Oddly enough, Islamic hawks rallying behind Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have been more muted nowadays, giving rise to speculation that a heated high-level debate is underway behind closed doors to stop the country’s march to the edge of a precipice.

It remains to be seen if the Iranian leadership will eventually come up with something tangible to woo the world powers back to the negotiating table, but any concession would have to be immediately reciprocated to avoid making it look like a surrender from Iran. Both Khamenei and Ahmadinejad will have much to lose in political prestige should Tehran give in flatly to UN demands for an immediate halt in uranium enrichment, and the country has already paid too high a price to suddenly pull back on its principles.

Ahmadinejad actually swept to power in 2005 partly due to his uncompromising stance on the nuclear issue, a pseudo-nationalistic position that earned him respect from hardliners and overwhelming backing from the supreme leader. But this rigid policy has further isolated Iran and stripped its leaders of all their bargaining cards. At the present juncture, Tehran seems to have been driven against a wall with little room to manoeuvre, as stakes grow higher and Israel and the US itch for war.

Even if the nuclear standoff does not come to a clash, the paralysing effects of sanctions alone may be enough to reignite the social unrest that followed the disputed presidential election in 2009. The Islamic regime brutally quelled those protests, putting its leaders under house arrest and imprisoning many intellectuals and political activists. But general disenchantment with the system continues to smoulder and is likely to flare with the slightest trigger.

For the time being, the Iranian government continues to rule with an iron fist, suppressing all dissent at home in total disregard of international condemnations. The fierce campaign against freedom of expression has taken victims even among some unlikely figures such as former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. A pragmatic voice in the Islamic system, Rafsanjani has paid dearly for his visceral distaste for Ahmadinejad and for supporting the 2009 Green Movement protests which nearly brought the Islamic regime to its knees. Rafsanjani has since fallen from grace, his website shut down for its mildly critical contents, and his daughter tried and convicted on political charges.

Few experts believe the present situation is tenable, however, especially in light of a deepening political strife in the run-up to the parliamentary elections in March. With all critics jailed or forced into silence, hardliners loyal to Ahmadinejad and the supreme leader are expected to maintain their grip on the next parliament. But the two hardline camps have been at each other’s throats for a while and there are no signs the country is moving toward national reconciliation.

So Iran’s rulers may have no choice but to pursue their current hard-nosed policy, ignoring world opinion while cracking down on critics at home. They well understand that compromising on the nuclear issue may give rise to more undeliverable demands from the West, notably improvement in human rights practices and greater social and political openness. This could in fact be the reason why the Iranians are not in a hurry to work for rapprochement with the West. They don’t want to get themselves in a situation where they will be forced to concede until there is nothing left of the Islamic republic as it is today.

-This commentary was published in The Gulf News on 05/02/2012
–Mehrdad Balali is a journalist and writer living in California. His novel Houri was recently published in New York