Two Cheers for Obama!

Tribune

Written By: Ian Williams

Published: August 7, 2015 Last modified: August 8, 2015

Attacked almost as fervently by the left as by the right, Barack Obama is now doing what second-term presidents often do – looking to his legacy. He has been remarkably successful, not least in the face of a rabidly hostile right wing in Congress and with a frequently lukewarm Democratic Party in support. Many Democrat legislators would make New Labour’s worst sound like Bolsheviks in comparison.

For Americans, Obamacare is his signature legacy. Although deeply flawed in comparison with a single payer system, compared with what passed for healthcare before, it is a huge step forward. Like most American legislation, it is a complex product of messy compromises with the pharmaceutical and insurance lobbies which had to be persuaded not to kill the reforms completely It is sad but true that while donors have considerable influence in the Tory Party, and were gaining it rapidly in New Labour, in the United States, quite often they literally write the law. That is one of the reasons why donor-driven policy making has failed to reform the American financial system since the sector is a major donor to the Democrats.

Even so, Obamacare has offered millions of Americans health insurance coverage who could not afford it before and has even managed to constrain the cost inflation that has already made American healthcare the most expensive in world. Diehard Republicans have tried more than 50 times to repeal it. The Republican leadership is glad at the failure. Depriving millions of voters of healthcare in the run up to an election would have brought reality crashing down on the empty rhetoric of the Republican right.

Foreign policy is a traditional recourse of second-term presidents trying to make the history books and here Obama has faced down strong lobbies such as the Israel and Cuba to make a mark. It is only a couple of decades since Bill Clinton bowed down to the Cuban American Foundation and ratcheted up sanctions against Havana in return for campaign donation. Obama has now finally normalised relations with Cuba and is surviving unscathed. Third-generation Cuban Americans now either don’t care or even actually welcome more access to their ancestral homeland. The business community is more concerned with getting its toe in the door than closing the gate on Cuba business. It has long been clear even to the more rational American conservatives that Cuba is no threat to the US nor to the hemisphere and that the policy has been counterproductive. The domestic lobby was moribund, and internationally there was nothing but praise for the move.

Over Iran, he has had to work much harder to overcome the prejudices and passions against Teheran where there are unlikely allies from the Saudis to the Israelis uniting to sabotage the deal. Obama has had to take on the mother of lobbies, AIPAC and its allies, exhorted on by Benjamin Netanyahu and a host of derangedly conservative Likudnik billionaires. Again, he saw his chance. Polling showed that Netanyahu’s support among the American Jews was minimal. Fewer and fewer American Jews see their identity as particularly tied to Israel and, like the general American public after Iraq and Afghanistan, even fewer relished the idea of another all-out war in the Middle East – let alone the one that the Israeli leadership is so ostentatiously trying to provoke. John Kerry and Obama have kept the line to get the agreement which is now enshrined in United Nations Security Council resolution 2231. Netanyahu’s attempts to interfere directly in Washington’s foreign policy decisions have been so outrageous that he might well have alienated the Democrats away from the hitherto unbreakable bipartisan support for the Israel lobby.

But Obama’s administration is so overcome with its own temerity that it shows signs of the “fight or flight” syndrome. The release of the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard is clearly an attempt to compensate Netanyahu, as is the public talk of increasing military and economic aid. So, can he force a durable Middle East peace settlement on Netanyahu and Israel? It was one of his first avowed ambitions on taking office, and after all the humiliations he has endured at the hands of Israel’s Prime Minster, it would be of deep personal and historical significance to pull it off now with political pressure instead of the traditional pandering.

About Ian Williams

Ian Williams is Tribune's UN correspondent

Half Cheer for Hillary

Ian Williams

Written By: Ian Williams

Published: April 18, 2015 Last modified: April 15, 2015

When many on the left were gushing adulatory about the election of America’s first black president, I tried to sound a cautionary note. Barack Obama was not really the second coming, but neither was he the Antichrist. And he was lot more promising than Hillary Clinton. Predictably, the vociferous sections of the left who revile anyone who is in power, started to fulminate as soon as he did not deliver the millennium. But then, he had never promised it. Sceptical to begin with, now the election circus hits town, I have to admit that Obama is actually doing better than I expected.

For all its manifest faults, Obamacare has delivered health insurance to around 16 millions of Americans who did not have it before. That is a huge achievement, not least in the American context, since those people were almost by definition not wealthy and therefore not in a position to bribe the legislators to pass the healthcare act. On the economy, Obama trod very carefully. Perhaps too much so, but he did complete the job of stopping the crash and turning the American economy round. He actually delivered a stimulus package without mentioning it. Perhaps he could and should have advertised government’s role in turning things around – but he had a mostly hostile Congress around, ranging from deranged Tea Party types to the right of the Democratic Party who overlapped what is left of the sane wing of the Republicans. Best to do good by stealth than shout and be thwarted.

He also extricated the United States from the tail end of the debacles in the Middle East initiated by George W Bush and Tony Blair, although their legacy has come back to haunt him. Reality there is messy, but it is surely no mean achievement to resist the pressures from so many powerful lobbies to start yet more wars in Iran and Syria. Resisting Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel lobby in order to reach a deal with Iran represents a major step forward. One does not have to admire the domestic policies of the Iranian ayatollahs to recognise just how unjust and counterproductive American policy has been. India and Pakistan that have fought numerous wars, and both have nuclear arsenals, the latter just a coup away from control by Taliban sympathisers. In a breath-taking display of hypocrisy, India, which has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, voted at the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Iran to the United Nations Security Council because there was a faint suspicion that Iran could develop the same nuclear fuel refining capacity to which it was entitled under the NPT!

One definition of chutzpah has to be the calls for war against Iran by Israel, a non-signatory of the NPT, the possessor of nuclear weapons, and wager of multiple wars and acts of aggression against almost every other country in the neighbourhood. Obama’s forestalling Netanyahu is an outstanding display of vertebracy among recent White House incumbents, as well as bringing comfort to all­ who wondered when the odious Likudnik would get his comeuppance. And what is more, it was good politics.

Obama has also defied the Cuban exile lobby. Much of Cuba’s economic travails derive as much from pseudo-Marxist mismanagement by the government, but normalisation will at the very least deprive the Castro regime of its excuses and hasten reform.

So what about Hillary Clinton? She would be Blair in a trouser suit. They share a conviction that the business of politics is get wonderful people like themselves elected, and if that means taking money from people and doing their bidding, what’s the beef if they get elected. Hillary is as free with her political favours to corporate donors as her husband was to doting interns. But unlike him, she keeps her promises to them.

At the moment, she is faraway the front Democratic candidate, which impales any sensible person on the horns of a dilemma. But wriggling apart, in the end, is it better to have an utterly cynical and selfish president who is in the same dimension as the rest of us, or a Republican ensconced in the Twilight Zone? Remembering what happened when people deserted James Callaghan and got Margaret Thatcher, there will be many who will reluctantly but inevitably make their mark next to Hillary Clinton, who might or might not reintroduce Rodham back as her middle name depending on what the polls tell her.

About Ian Williams

Ian Williams is Tribune's UN correspondent

Ban Right on Iran

WRMEA, March/April 2014, Pages 28-29

United Nations Report

Despite Outcome, Ban Was Right to Invite Iran to Syria Talks

By Ian Williams

U.N. and Arab League envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi (l) and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the Jan. 22 press conference closing the Geneva II peace talks on Syria. (Philippe Desmazes/AFP/Getty Images)

George Orwell invented “non-persons” in his novel 1984—people so politically incorrect they were treated as if they did not exist. He also invented the “Two Minutes Hate,” in which crowds were worked into paroxysms of rage at the mention of Big Brother’s political opponent.

Today it is not Big Brother but the Dog’s Tail which decides which is a non-country or a non-person, and identifies which countries are so unfit that they can only be ritually vilified. In Washington, the powers that be seem to blithely forget the years in which the old China lobby persuaded them to ignore Beijing, and the sore loser faction bade them to boycott Hanoi—or how, until recently, no one could talk to the Palestinians. Even now, we can only talk to some Palestinians.

In a recent example of this selective and consciously directed amnesia, Norway’s permanent representative to the U.N. told the Security Council that his country was “deeply concerned about the deteriorating economic and humanitarian situation in Gaza. We call for the lifting of the restrictions in compliance with Security Council Resolution 1860 in all its elements, including the need for security for all the civilian populations.”

Compared with what comes out of mealy-mouthed Washington, this sounds like a strong statement. But readers accustomed to the sound of silence will note the absence of names in this otherwise resounding declaration by Norway in the first Security Council meeting of 2014 on the Middle East situation. In what perilously approached Orwell’s Doublethink, Norway could not bring itself to name Israel as the country maintaining the restrictions its diplomat was deploring in defiance of previous resolutions.

In contrast, Iran did not disguise its favorite target the way it used to, since the former “Zionist Entity” has now graduated to become “The Israeli Regime”—which, the Iranian envoy pointed out, “is the only one in the region that possesses all types of Weapons of Mass Destruction but is not a party to any of the treaties banning them.”

He added that it “should also be compelled to join such treaties, in particular to accede to the NPT, without any further delay and precondition, and place all its nuclear activities under the IAEA comprehensive safeguards, in order to remove the only obstacle for the establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East proposed by Iran in 1974.”

One might not totally appreciate the messenger, but the message is spot on!

Despite, or perhaps even because of, such eminently good common sense, Washington banned Tehran from the peace talks in Geneva, to which U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon very sensibly had invited it.

As Ban recognized, you do not make peace by refusing to talk to opponents, and vetoing Iran’s involvement makes it more difficult to achieve peace. The whole debacle suggests that the Obama administration is acting from the Clinton-era script when its dealings with the U.N. are concerned. It is not surprising that Secretary- General Ban has quipped that SG stood for “Scape Goat,” but this debacle, unfairly, had him dubbed as Washington’s poodle—for taking a step with the full knowledge of the State Department and U.S. administration, but which the U.S. then expediently repudiated.

Despite being the victim of poison gas attacks itself, it is true that Iran has not exactly covered itself with ethical or humanitarian glory during the Syrian tragedy. But then, neither has Russia, which has supplied the bulk of the weaponry for the regime. And yet no one has suggested banning Moscow from the talks, or even the Assad regime itself. Additionally, after that regime, among the major obstacles to a rational and democratic solution are the fundamentalist fighters bankrolled by major Arab oil states—with whom the U.S. maintains the closest and most amicable relations.

The problem is that in some quarters—including these armers and bankers of war criminals—Iran is a non-country, which leads to palpably nonsensical acrobatics by Washington and others. The U.S. can have bases in countries bankrolling “terrorist” groups, but because those profoundly undemocratic regimes do not like Iran, the U.S. must be careful about talking to Tehran.

So Israel could sell the ayatollahs weapons in the course of Iran-Contra, during which the U.S. itself was using Tehran to arm right-wing terrorists in Nicaragua. The U.S. and Iran can both support the Iraqi government in defeating Sunni insurgents and terrorists in Iraq, and indeed colluded to combat the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But because President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry were, quite correctly, talking to Iran on the nuclear issue, they were on a short leash from AIPAC on Iranian entanglements. This time the dog had more than one tail: There was external pressure from Arabs and Israel, and of course the internal pressure from Congress being whipped up by AIPAC.

Clearly in the real world, it is to everyone’s advantage to have at the table a major player in the conflict—if you want it to end. But diplomacy is often best orchestrated to the sound of silence. Not mentioning issues is often crucial to getting parties to agree to talks, and so Iran’s invitation to the peace talks involved eliding the issue of whether Iran explicitly accepted the Geneva Communiqué on which the talks were based. It had not, but showed signs that it could be nudged that way.

So Ban, with the full knowledge of the U.S., invited Iran to the talks, despite the fudge on whether or not Tehran had signed off on the communiqué. He was taking a bold risk. He rightly believed that Iran should be there, but the talks were the property of the participants, each of which had an implicit veto.

It was a delicate operation, depending on complicity and discretion from all parties. Someone somewhere blew enough to bring the house of cards down. The U.S. side seems to have demanded explicit guarantees of Iranian acceptance of the communiqué, which precipitated an explicit repudiation of them by Tehran. That led to Washington demanding that Ban withdraw the invitation to Iran. American briefers immediately began to castigate Ban’s incompetence, even though it was U.S. diplomatic ineptitude that seems to have precipitated the collapse.

Was it the usual Iran haters who blew the structure down, or did someone in the administration do it so that they could appease AIPAC for defeating it on the sanctions issue? There were so many places such a complex operation could be toppled, it would be difficult to tell. It could be that one part of the administration knew what was happening, and another didn’t.

Clearly, Ban also, justifiably, feels let down by the Iranians for rising to the American bait so quickly. They should have just shut up and turned up.

But the name-calling cannot disguise the inalienable truth that if the talks are to be successful then Iran should be involved in them, that Ban was right to invite them and the U.S. foolish to disinvite them.

As a corollary, if the U.S. had a coherent foreign policy it would build on its common ground with Iran—in Iraq, in Afghanistan and, increasingly, on the nuclear issue, to persuade Tehran that there were advantages in working with Washington to force Assad to the negotiating table. Indeed, the U.S., as its own hydrocarbons bubble up out of the ground, could persuade the Arab Iran-haters to cease their pernicious activities in backing terrorist bands that tend to make Assad look good, even as they open a fifth column in the opposition’s ranks.

Washington could have expressed its regrets at the Iranian invitation, and let it stand. It is not in the longterm interests of the U.S., or any other responsive great power, to diminish the appearance of independence by the United Nations. In the end, the Geneva Talks epitomize the U.N.’s dilemma. The organization is needed to provide a neutral space, an arena for the negotiations. But it also needs the active collaboration of its most powerful and involved members to produce results.

A secretary-general can only play the hand he is dealt, and in this case Ban’s two aces turned to jokers. He should not let it dissuade him from trying to do the right thing in the future.

Truth to tell and the uses and uses of ambiguity

The Sound of Silence

Written By: Ian Williams

Tribune  February 9, 2014 Last modified: February 5, 2014

The Geneva talks on Syria showed that the current United States administration has followed the old habits of its predecessors – putting truth in Ban Ki-moon’s quip that the SG stood for “scapegoat” rather than Secretary General.
It has been unkindly said that a diplomat is someone who is sent abroad to lie for his country. In fact, skilled diplomats would not lie, but they can be very parsimonious with the truth. Just as in real life, it is not good policy to tell people that they are ugly – even if it is true. If you are trying to reconcile enemies, you chose your words carefully. George Orwell wrote disparagingly in The Politics of the English Language about how official speech “falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details”, but that is precisely what you have to do to get warring parties who are not necessarily rational in their discourse to talk to one another.
Fudging issues is often crucial to securing agreement to talks, and so Iran’s invitation to Geneva involved eliding the issue of whether Iran explicitly accepted the communiqué on which the talks were based. It had not done so explicitly, but showed signs that it could be nudged that way.
So Ban, with the full knowledge of the US, invited Iran to the talks, despite the fudge on whether Teheran had signed off on the Geneva communiqué. He was taking a bold risk. He rightly believed that Iran should be there, but the talks were the property of the participants, each of which had an implicit veto.
It was a delicate operation, depending on complicity and discretion from all parties. Someone somewhere blew hard enough to bring the house of cards down. The US side seems to have belatedly demanded explicit guarantees of Iranian acceptance of the communiqué, which precipitated an explicit repudiation of them from Teheran. That led to Washington demanding that Ban withdraw the invitation to Iran. US briefers immediately began to castigate Ban’s incompetence even though it was US diplomatic ineptitude that seems to have precipitated the collapse.
This is stupid on so many levels, not least since it owed as much to covering the rears of Barack Obama and John Kerry. This debacle, unfairly, had Ban dubbed the US’s poodle by some and incompetent by others for taking a step with the full knowledge of the US administration but which the US then expediently repudiated.
Because Obama and Kerry were, quite correctly, talking to Iran on the nuclear issue. But they were on a short leash from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on Iranian entanglements. This time the dog had more than one tail. There was external pressure from Gulf Arabs and Israel, and the internal pressure from the US Congress being whipped in by AIPAC. The US could have expressed its regrets at the Iranian invitation, and let it stand. It is not in the long-term interests of Washington, or any other responsible great power, to diminish the appearance of independence by the United Nations.
Ban also, justifiably, feels let down by the Iranians for rising to the American bait so quickly. They should have just shut up and turned up. But the name-calling cannot disguise the inalienable truth that, if the talks are to be successful, then the Iranians should be involved and that Ban was right to invite them.
As a corollary, if the US had a joined-up foreign policy, it would build on its common ground with Iran – in Iraq, in Afghanistan and increasingly on the nuclear issue, to persuade the ayatollahs that there were advantages in working with the US to force Bashar al-Assad to the negotiating table.
Indeed, the US could try to persuade the Arab Iran-haters to cease their pernicious activities in backing terrorist bands in Syria that tend to make Assad look good even as they open a fifth column in the opposition’s ranks.
In the end, the Geneva talks epitomise the UN’s dilemma. The organisation is needed to provide a neutral space, an arena for the negotiations. But the UN needs the active collaboration of its most powerful and involved members states to produce results. A Secretary General can only play the hand he is dealt. In this case, Ban’s two aces turned out to be to jokers. He should not let it dissuade him from trying to do the right thing in the future.

About Ian Williams

Ian Williams is Tribune's UN correspondent

An ethical foreign policy?

  I use Grammarly's plagiarism checker because it shows me who is copying my work!

 Sanity prevails over Iran

by Ian Williams

Tribune Monday, December 2nd, 2013

Iran’s nuclear agreement recalls Robin Cook’s statement about foreign policy having an ethical dimension, often misquoted as “an ethical foreign policy.” Cook realised that ethics was just one of several dimensions. The Iran imbroglio almost has as many tangled dimensions as string theory – with the ethical one hard to find. Even the Israeli stock markets bounced upwards on news of the Iranian accord, showing the invisible hand in a better light than the long faces of Benjamin Netanyahu and his ideological supporters in the United States Congress at the reduced prospects of Armageddon in the Middle East.
Sanity is to be treasured wherever it can be found, not least because it seems a rare commodity. Barack Obama and John Kerry deserve congratulations for standing up against Netanyahu and his supporters in Washington.
One does not have to love the ayatollahs and their theocracy to sympathise with Iran, whose pariah status in its own right could be considered hard-earned, not least over its immoral and expedient support for the regime in Damascus.
But any objective perspective on Iran has to step back to include its opponents in the overview. Why is it that the loudest yelps against Iran’s alleged nuclear capability come from Israel, a state that itself has a large nuclear arsenal? Why do the claims that Iran is a threat to peace come from the same state which has noisily and repeatedly threatened to attack Iran, in between inciting the US to do so?
The West backed a bloody invasion of Iran by Iraq under Saddam Hussein, involving the proven use of chemical weapons and gas. When Saddam invaded Kuwait, the Western powers rammed through the punishing reparations to the Gulf States, which are still being paid by Saddam’s victims, the people of Iraq.
A United Nations commission determined that Iraq was the aggressor against Iran, which was scarcely needed, since it was so obvious. However, when I asked an Iranian diplomat at the UN why it did not leverage that aggression finding into first dibs on the Iraqi compensation payments to the Gulf States, he said that all Iran wanted was the vindication. It puts in context Teheran’s punctiliousness about international recognition of its legal right to have a nuclear enrichment programme, even if it agrees not to exercise it. It is a pattern that befits a theocracy.
India, which is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, developed its nuclear weapons and then voted at the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Iran to the Security Council for a civil nuclear programme that was within the NPT terms. In return, the US, in effect, gave up nuclear sanctions against India, with its declared arsenal, to enlist support against Iran, which has repeatedly declared it has no ambitions for a weapons programme and whose supreme leader has actually issued a fatwa against them.
Incidentally, while there is undoubted repression of journalists and dissidents in Iran, I actually told Iranian television, live, that even if the Iranians had the legal right to, they should not have a civil nuclear programme because it was environmentally damaging and economically devastating. They have had me back on their screens often since.
One can sincerely doubt whether any country, let alone Iran, needs a civil nuclear programme. Certainly, the costs that British consumers have been saddled with for electricity from the planned nuclear generators should raise questions about how economic such power is.
The cost of energy is clearly a factor in all this. I pointed out on Iranian TV that Iran was importing refined petroleum products because it lacked the technology to process the oil it was pumping.
The Gulf States, whose treatment of religious minorities, women and dissenters makes the ayatollahs seem positively liberated, have been supporting Israeli and the US bellicosity – behind the scenes, of course, since it ill befits the custodian of the two shrines to incite a unbeliever’s attack on a Muslim nation. Would Obama have dared thwart them and the Israeli lobby at the same time if natural gas had not relieved the US from its long-time energy dependence?
We can be pleased that Obama and Kerry have pulled off a deal and averted the immediate threat of war. But why should common sense be such a long-winded process? And how did shallow expedience so often hold it up?

SPURNING THE PRIZE!

The Saudi decision to refuse its Security Council seat is as idiosyncratic as one would expect from an absolute monarchy that names its country after its own clan. It is even possible the King did not know what his foreign ministry was doing when they campaigned for a seat.  The last time Saudi  Arabia made a bid for serious UN glory was in 1991 when its UN Ambassador Samir Shihabi ran for President of the General Assembly, overturning the expected candidate, Papua New Guinea. The quip at the time was that most of the hands raised for the Saudi candidacy had a Rolex on their wrists.

More seriously, it showed the dilemma for a Saudi regime of trying to look after its home constituency and yet pander to its essential foreign backers. One of Shihabi’s first tasks was to preside over the special meeting of the General Assembly called by George H W Bush to rescind the “Zionism is Racism” resolution of the UN. Shihabi absented himself from the meeting - as in fact so did the Israeli ambassador since Israel saw the move as Bush’s attempt to win over AIPAC after refusing the loan guarantees that the Israelis wanted to build settlements with.

That hints at the reasoning behind the shocking decision.  Saudi diplomacy by its very nature has to be somewhat duplicitous. It wants Iran hobbled, for example, but cannot be seen supporting an attack on a Muslim country. On the Israeli issues it would have to confront its existential ally, the US, publicly, or go along with that  many more where its domestic Wahabi base would be unhappy if the Saudi representative voted the foreign ministry’s head rather than the Imam’s heart. So perhaps the decision is not so shocking after all!

On balance, of course, the Security Council will benefit from a Saudi absence. It might be occasionally correct on Middle Eastern issues but on almost everything else it is solidly on the side of reaction with little to recommend it except oil and money.

Iran, reality impinges in DC

http://www.tribunemagazine.org/2013/10/ian-williams-21/

It may only be a small step, but it may be a step forward

by Ian Williams

Sunday, October 6th, 2013

As Winston Churchill said: “America always does the right thing, but only after it has tried everything else first.” Finally responding to Iranian overtures has taken so long that his dictum has been tested close to destruction. And everything is connected. Apart from the symbolic handshake, American officials and politicians have been dealing with Iran all along.
One cannot help wondering if there were not some subtext on Syria behind the current rapprochement. Iran is one of the few nations in modern times to suffer chemical warfare, and, in their own odd way ,the ayatollahs can be quite principled – as we were reminded at the United Nations, about the fatwa against nuclear weapons. Is it possible that the sarin in Syria might test the Damascus-Teheran axis?
Even so, Barack Obama’s uncritical proclamation of American exceptionalism in his UN speech counterpoints his willingness to talk to Teheran. The latter shows some pragmatic acceptance that other countries than the United States and Israel have domestic policies with which their leaders have to cope with. The occasion recalls one of the better US ambassadors to the UN, Bill Richardson, who looked puzzled when questioned why other countries should accept a US offer to pay some of its arrears to the UN, but leave hundreds of millions owing. “But Congress has passed this.” Even such liberal and well-meaning statesman had difficulty accepting that there was anything between Capitol Hill and heaven, which puts into context Obama’s original thought that if Congress approved air raids on Syria, why would the UN be involved?
Mark Twain averred: “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” Successive generations of representatives have reinforced his point with their votes. But the contemporary breed has a particularly obtuse outlook in which the criminality is permeated with an ideological rigour that is disturbing because the stench of corruption is (only partially) masked with the whiff of sanctimony.
If Obama had gone to Congress for support to bomb Syria without a UN resolution, then some legislators would have opposed it because of its illegality. But diehard conservatives would have opposed it because they have written the Good Samaritan out of their texts. They do not see that is any of America’s business what is being done in a far away country of which they genuinely know little and care less. Indeed, their phobia about “Obamacare” shows that they do not care much about suffering at home.
However, American conservatism is not monolithic. The neo-conservatives, as their name implies, are new. Unusually, their focus is on foreign policy, as befits their Trotskyist antecedents, and they now substitute a pro-Israel and anti-Islamist sensibility for their former rabid anti-communism. The older conservatives draw on the isolationist trends that kept the US out of the League of Nations and the Second World War for so long.
The spectrum is varied. Principles are fine, but a lot of them depend on domestic lobbies to be re-elected. So neo-cons and older conservatives alike will go along with powerful campaign funders such as the defence industry lobby. Some of the libertarian right are so firmly isolationist that they defy their conservative colleagues and oppose intervention even when Israel wants it.
Which, sort of, brings us back to Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu is on his way to Washington, and is unhappy with the idea of any kind of a deal with Iran. It is remotely possible that Obama will finally tell the arrogant Likudnik that the tail does not always wag the dog. It will be difficult, and diplomatically stupid, for the administration to withdraw from a deal brokered with the Russians and Europeans. But will the Palestinians end up paying the price, with yet more concessions ton settlements and arms aid? John Kerry’s willingness to chastise the European Union over embargoes on settlements is a reminder of the lobby-trimmed limits to ethics in US foreign policy.
So the shifts in foreign policy might not be as tectonic as one would hope, but any concession to global reality in the face of domestic lobbying has to be a step forward.

Madness over Iran

Rein in Israel from madness and mayhem

by Ian Williams

Tribune January 27th, 2012

The financial and fornicatory hypocrisy of the Republican ­candidates is nauseating. But the salacious interest it excites allows the media and the electorate to overlook foreign policy. But then, in some ways we are fortunate that the rest of the world has not been a big item in the debates. Texas Governor Rick Perry dropped out shortly after saying Turkey, a Nato member and recently a voice of balanced reason in the region, was run by an Islamic dictator and should not be allowed to be a member.
However, the other turkeys are every bit as bad, as they pander their way to see who can get most primary votes from Christian Zionists and cheques from Likud reactionaries. British leaders still bask in the illusion of the “special relationship”, but on Capitol Hill, the term is almost ­exclusively used for Israel and the United States. For better or worse, two world wars, Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the half century of Britain being a prime nuclear target on America’s behalf, is not exactly at the front of legislative thoughts.
Between them, the candidates seem to have made it axiomatic that Israel should attack Iran, with US support. However, polls suggest, not surprisingly after the ­debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan, that one of the few points of unity for an otherwise bitterly divided American electorate is ­opposition to a new war. Even in Israel only 41 per cent support an attack, which is ­surprisingly high, considering who would suffer most in any exchange of weapons with Tehran. But Republican candidates happily cheer terrorist assassinations of Iranian scientists.
The one exception among the candidates, Ron Paul, has become the standard bearer of some on America’s alleged left, who are prepared to overlook his profoundly reactionary domestic policies because his America-firster views lead him to oppose Israeli influence in Washington.
This is no time to get sentimental about ayatollahs, and the appropriate response to Israeli threats is certainly not adulation for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The regime in Iran is almost as attached to fundamentalist religion and the death penalty as a southern Republican governor. It does appear to have stolen the last election, but some informed observers think that it might have won anyway.
However, if there is one thing that seems to unite Iranians, it is the nuclear programme, with many Iranians probably going beyond the government, which still disclaims a military nuclear option. As an aside, I am often invited as a pundit on Iran’s Press TV, and have told them, live, that they should disclaim civilian, let alone military nuclear programmes, abide by even unjust United Nations resolutions, and invest in their refining capacity instead. Last week I reached the limits of their ­tolerance. They called me about the ­Falklands, and when I told them I would say that even English speakers had the right to self-determination, my slot was immediately dropped.
I also said that Argentina used the issue to divert domestic discontent about the economy – which is a role that Iran plays for Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters in the Israel lobby in the US, where Iran can whip the majority of liberal-minded Jews into support for the occupying state.
So, begin with principles. It is useful to treat it like a mathematical equation and substitute the terms. Take out Iran and put it in Israel, Pakistan or India, the real rogue states. The difference is that Iran has signed the non-proliferation treaty and they have not. However, it could withdraw from the treaty, like North Korea, and it has not. If Israel attacks Iranian facilities and murders its citizens, it should not complain if its Dimona nuclear facility is targeted.
Even the International Atomic Energy Agency, despite some worries, has not concluded that Iran has moved decisively towards military nuclear capability. The UN Security Council only became involved when a kangaroo court on the IAEA’s ­ruling body referred the case – with nuclear India one of those supporting the referral, strongly instigated by Israel, the one ­definite nuclear state in the Middle East, with its several hundred war heads.
So is this a crusade, or jihad (since the Saudis seem to be onside) for civil rights? The Wahhabi theocracy in Saudi Arabia makes the most conservative ayatollahs appear positively Anglican in their ­tolerance. We are being invited to support or condone an illegal and unethical war that would unite Iranians and much of the Middle East against Israel and the West, and risk the destruction of Israel with collateral damage to its neighbours not to mention a high chance of casualties among the “oppressed” Iranians.
One does not expect our lords and ­masters to be too concerned about mere human body counts, but they should worry that one sure consequence would be a drastic spike in oil prices that could push the world economy, already teetering on the brink, over the edge, with a calculable chance of escalation. It seems a high price to pay so Netanyahu can keep on building settlements.

Keystone Cops in FBI endanger the world

Iran Assassination Plot Has Earmarks of FBI Care and Feeding

By Ian Williams, October 19, 2011

Last weekend the Martin Luther King memorial was unveiled in Washington, evoking  his speech “I have a dream.” I was having a dream too, but mine wandered between nightmare and “déjà vu all over again.” Unlike many on the left in the USA, when I see President Obama I see a fundamentally decent person reading a script written by others -- which in this dream is like Colin Powell reciting his fundamentally flawed brief at the UN about Iraqi weapons.
The taurine faecal evidence of an Iranian plot to kill a Saudi envoy in the US has all the conviction of Hitler describing Polish infiltration into German territory in 1939 -- and all the humiliation of seeing a decent person’s integrity being abused.
The “plot” recalls how much of American governmental behavior evokes the unreformed eighteenth century British polity on which it is based. Apart from the overtly corrupt electoral system gerrymandered into an American version of rotten boroughs and the Gradgrindish attitudes to public welfare, that is no more apparent than in the legal system.
Maybe they no longer hang people for pickpocketing any item worth more than a shilling, but they do execute quite a few on dubiously assembled evidence that relies on paid informants and, especially in the case of the FBI, on paid instigators.
So one does not have to join the  Iranian Ayatollah Fan Club to be skeptical of the latest allegations. It is a sad fact that almost every terrorist plot the FBI has unearthed for many years -- even before 9-11 -- has also been planted and nurtured by the FBI. Even in the long-forgotten first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 it was an Egyptian officer who was also a paid FBI informant who seems to have instigated the completely inept plot, for which arch-enemy of the Mubarak regime Sheik Omar Abdul-Rahman is still serving a life sentence -- or not, since the actual charges of conspiracy and sedition are reminiscent of days of repression in Britain around the time of the Peterloo massacre that moved Shelley to stirring verses, rarely taught in English Lit classes.
It does not take a close shave with Occam’s razor to question whether Teheran really sent a wire transfer of a $100,000 to the USA to secure the assassination of the Saudi Ambassador. Firstly, every transfer of more than $10,000 has to be registered, and rings alarms bells for money laundering, and secondly, sadly, among Mexican cartels, that sum buys a wholesale massacre, not a retail murder.
Then there is the old question, Cui Bono? Who would benefit? One can never totally discount the stupidity of the Iranian regime, but this goes beyond expectations. Iran would gain little from offing a Saudi diplomat -- but lose lots. The FBI gets itself yet another (contrived) terrorist plot to justify its huge spending and the intrusions into civil liberties it has been allowed under the so-called “war on terror.” Its previous record of getting informants and instigators who are paid and pardoned of other crimes to set up the weak and gullible to be arrested with a fanfare certainly fits the script here: an arrested drug smuggler paid to suborn an Iranian immigrant second hand car salesman struggling under a huge debt load.
But Israel wants an excuse to attack Iran -- and hitherto even a complaisant Washington has warned against that. Obama might not support, but if persuaded by these amateur theatricals, like Colin Powell, he might not oppose an assault very vigorously. And there are many in his administration for whom the question “Is it good for Israel?” outweighs whether it is good for Obama, let alone America.
Even if this were just Keystone Cops stuff from a xenophobically insular FBI, without thought for the international consequences, it could have profound international consequences. Quite apart from the  sanguinary consequences to Israel itself, not to mention to Iran and the region, of any solid manifestation of Netanyahu’s bellicosity, a closure of the Gulf and removal of a huge portion of the world’s oil supplies would be all that is needed to bring the whole house of cards, dollar and Euros, tumbling down.
And to return to Martin Luther King, let us remember, despite official American media amnesia. King was a democratic socialist, who was assassinated while being tailed by the FBI, as he supported a strike by a municipal workers’ union. He knew the FBI well -- he would be properly skeptical of any claim they made. And he would be occupying Wall St, not calling for war on Iran.

Deadline pundit punditing on Obama's SOTU on Press TV

To learn more about the issues that Obama addressed in his annual speech, Press TV conducted a phone interview with Ian Williams from Foreign Policy in Focus. Following is the transcript of the interview:

Press TV: Obama mentioned, indirectly, about the US economic decline but all the indications are that the US is currently on the decline as an economic powerhouse worldwide and that became very clear by [Chinese] President Hu Jintao's recent visit there. Do you think that he did good enough job in the speech of not only realizing this fact but relaying it to the American public?

Williams: That was a very carefully crafted speech because he was, on the one hand, playing to the old American gallery of exceptionalism: we are wonderful people, we can do it, we have potential, we can rise to the occasion and on the other hand, he was warning that decline is heading up so they have to turn around and do something about it because although the US obviously is in a far more powerless economic state that it was four or five years ago, it is still the biggest economy in the world and people still do use the dollar so it is not exactly broken yet even if it is breaking.

Otherwise, he was very careful on the issues that he missed out on. He didn't mention foreclosures; he certainly didn't mention the Israel/Palestine issue. I think a lot of what he was saying was really a careful case of entrapment for Republicans because he was taking them on the face value and very often when Americans say they want cuts in spending, they mean they want cuts in spending in things other than what I want. If cuts in spending means defense, then they are not going to like it, if cut means in their own district, they don't like they either. He was very careful in what he said and what he offered as well, he invoked the role of lobbyists and both parties are almost run by lobbyists but the Republicans far more so and has thrown the gauntlet down to them, let's simplify tax. You say you want to reduce cooperation tax, let's have a low rate of cooperation tax but make sure everybody pays it and stop exemptions into it.

So a lot of what he was saying was really a careful trap. He said let's reform Health care, but you'd better not take away people's coverage who have got cancer and all of this is a very nuance response to the slogans from the other side [Republicans].

Press TV: Moving on to the foreign policy front, he said that the Iraq war is coming to an end, but of course we have reports that say some American bases may remain in Iraq and many forces will remain in Iraq to train Iraqi forces. How accurate was what he said, especially on foreign policy front?

Williams: A lot of what he was saying was quite true, but let's say he told the truth but not the whole truth. He never said that he was against the war in Afghanistan; he said he would withdraw troops from Iraq and that he would make sure that the Taliban are beaten in Afghanistan. So, he is not breaking any promises there. The fact that it is taking so long is making it very unpopular with the American public and he has to do something about that. But there he was saying it to the Republicans because no Republican administration is going to turn around and say the war that President Bush started was wrong and you should pull out so he is on fairly safe ground. We have to remember everything, especially at this juncture, was addressing the domestic audience, it was not addressing the world at large.

Press TV: On the issue of Tunisia, he said that the US stands with the people of Tunisia. With protests being seen yesterday in Egypt as well, and we can only imagine that Mubarak's knees are now shaking in his palace, and these are all of course US allies, is it not a bit hypocritical then for him to say that the US stands with the people of Tunisia when the US for decades has stood not in fact with people of Tunisia but with the leaders of Tunisia?

Williams: Well, now it stands with the people of Tunisia. It is true as I said he was telling the truth but not the whole truth. The fact that until the day the dictator disappeared, the US was one of its most staunch supporters, he chose not to mention that and he chose not to mention Egypt and the democracy protests there. So it is usual for them mentioning items they look upon favorably and ignoring those that they don't.

In general, his foreign policy is not going to go well in the State of the Union. For example he talked about the cuts in defense budget, and I think if you examine that, he is not actually cutting the defense budget, what they are offering to do is to cut the rate of increase in the defense budget, which is a play with mathematics, which means the defense budget is still going to grow, is still far too large but they are going to trim some parts of it off, they plan for spending on useless dinosaurian defense systems that only benefit the lobbyists in the aerospace industry.

Everything he says has a different interpretation but by most standards what he has been doing is to challenge the Republicans to meet on their own grounds. You want to repeal the Healthcare bill, hey, come on then, take the insurance off those people who just got it under this bill, make sure you have the money to pay for all of the extra things that they are involved, the 130 trillion dollar extra costs. He is saying about the government, he said you are attacking the government, look at what the government has done for this country, do you really want the government to stop building roads and bridges; you really want to stop developing the science that made transistors, the Internet and all of the other things. In that sense, in the good social democratic way, he is challenging the basic neo-liberal instincts of the Republicans and the Tea party people, really showing them to be hypocrites. He says you want to be bipartisan, stop shouting silly slogans and come and work to solve these problems and this is the way to do it.

Press TV: On the issue of jobs that a lot of people say was the main focus of his speech, considering the fact it was the number one domestic issue within the US, he said that the US is at risk of losing out to rapidly developing economy in south Asia, specially China and India, etc. Do you think that he was able to say anything of significant in his speech concerning that issue?

Williams: This speech was broad and he didn't get into particulars. However, he is talking about improving American education system using federal money which Republicans...they want to reduce government spending, so there is the challenge. He is talking about developing infrastructure, he is talking about developing green technology, he has been talking about using government money for basic research and for grants for cutting-edge technologies in energy saving etc. And some of the things he said were, by his standards, pretty bold. He said he wants to end tax concessions to oil companies because they are making quite enough money as it is that is a direct challenge to Republicans who are bankrolled by the oil companies even if their Tea party demonstrators denounce them.

Interestingly he has restated that he wants to take back the tax cuts on the richest percentage, that is quite surprising. He didn't hedge there, that is what he wants to do and this is unconscionable that you give money to the richest people in the society.

MN/PKH

My enemy's enemy is still my enemy.

My enemy's enemy is still my enemy

Just because Mahmoud Ahmadinejad thumbs his nose at the US doesn't mean leftists should support his brutal regime


o Ian Williams
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 June 2009


Allegedly, there are no agnostics in foxholes. Certainly there are few on Fox News, but there are almost as few in the remnants of the hard left. They are all imbued with deep certainty when they take a position, especially on far away countries of which they know little.

In fact, the extremes of both left and right see the world as a spherical Rorschach test, an inkblot in which they can see their primeval hates and desires. It is amazing how symmetrical their views can be.

The Iranian Guardian Council that whittled down the original 400 presidential candidates to four, presumably saw Mir Hossein Mousavi as entirely reliable on nuclear issues, Israel and general disdain for the Great Satan. However here in the US, the right sees him as a potential quisling for the west, and the left see him as a CIA agent.

Despite those shared premises the alternative universes of hard left and right then begin to diverge, since the neocons call for intervention while the left that traditionally approves of anti-imperialist kleptocrats and autocrats thinks intervention is already taking place.

In fact, there is a lot of room for scepticism and agnosticism, not least when you triangulate between those who just "knew" that the replacement of Saddam Hussein would lead to a pro-western Iraq with friendly relations with Israel, and those who admired the murderous Iraqi tyrant's courage, strength and indefatigability.

Ironically, exactly those latter qualities were of course exercised against Iran and their current idol, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with warm applause from Britain and the US.

In reality, it is almost an OJ Simpson moment in Iran. Just as the Los Angeles Police Department framed a guilty man, it is entirely possible that the populist Ahmadinejad stole an election he might have won. I know the prevailing reaction in the US is "But who would vote for such a schmuck?" Well the country that twice elected George Bush might not the best platform from which to launch such a question.

Indeed, if more Iranians had read the Wall Street Journal and saw John Bolton's editorial urging Israel once again to attack Iran just before the election, it could have caused almost as much of a landslide for Ahmadinejad as if Obama followed neocon advice to endorse Mousavi.

And as for the demonstrators, well, if you see a guy in black mask and a big bag skulking away from your house, you can be forgiven for shouting: "Stop thief." When the Guardian Council declares that "Statistics provided by the candidates, who claim more than 100% of those eligible have cast their ballot in 80 to 170 cities are not accurate – the incident has happened in only 50 cities," there is indeed room for suspicion about the results.

Certainly the response of the regime had all the hallmarks of a heist. From the immediate clampdown on electronic communications of all kinds, the assaults on the opposition by the police, the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij are not the actions of a group confident in their legitimacy and victory.

Regardless of the actual result, shooting down unarmed demonstrators, charging their bereaved families $3,000 "bullet fees" and arresting the opposition is not going to get my support. More to the point, one hopes that the Iranian electorate, even if they had voted for Ahmadinejad, will question the legitimacy of a regime that uses such tactics, no matter how or whether elected.

While I remain agnostic about the numbers, I was sure about one thing, and pretty much proven right. On the hard left, the ghosts of the Comintern and heirs of WH Auden's necessary murderers reflexively and with few if any qualifications support Ahmadinejad, just as they did Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic's bloody trail across the Balkans, or Hugo Chávez's thuggish tactics against any centres of alternative power, or indeed Fidel Castro's robust ways with dissidents. To be bathed in the blood of the Leninist lamb, all a thuggish kleptocrat has to do is to oppose Uncle Sam.

It is unfairly alleged that there is a Middle Eastern aphorism about my enemy's enemy being my friend. It is in fact the hard left's modern position, made all the worse, because we never hear that agnostic qualifier "but" – as in "He opposes US imperialism, but he has reduced his people to poverty, locked up the opposition, tortured and shot dissidents and censored the media."

Luckily most people are less ideological and accept that if we condemn Bush for violating human rights, the same criticism applies to Milosevic, the butcher of Srebrenica; Chávez, the dissolver of opposition local governments; Castro, the imprisoner of independent journalists; or now the theocrats who shoot down demonstrators on the streets.

We did not think that winning elections gave Bush the right to repress all opposition, and anyone who thinks that Ahmadinejad's dubious triumph gives him a license for brutality is guilty of, to put it mildly, moral inconsistency.

Iran and Nukes

Cif America
Pride before a fall
With the US beating the war drums, Iran should carefully consider if its nuclear energy programme is worth the effort

Ian Williams
guardian.co.uk, Monday June 30, 2008

Seymour Hersh's latest revelations, that the US has stepped up covert operations, show that Iran is playing a very high stakes game for its nuclear ambitions. National pride is one thing but, given the risk of an attack from the US or even Israel, Iran's civil nuclear programme doesn't make a lot of sense.

True, until the US took the issue to the UN Security Council, there was nothing "illegal" about Iran's uranium refinement programme. We have the IAEA, and indeed the US government's own National Intelligence Estimate, agreeing that whatever Iranians are up to, it is not a weapons production programme. They are compliant members of the IAEA and have disavowed any interest in weapons.

But as I told an Iranian pundit on Press TV last week, just because I may have the legal right to burn my house down, does not mean it is a very clever thing to do.

Sadly the people who are telling the Iranians that, the British, French and US governments, have somewhat diminished credibility since they are all pushing for their own civil nuclear power stations under the guise of green technology. The greenest nuclear power gets is that there may be a green glow from all that untreated nuclear waste, which none of them have successfully shown how they will cope with it.

To substantiate their activities, the Iranians claim that they need the nuclear power stations for energy self-sufficiency and to ensure that their scientific expertise is world class. Britain and the US went for a nuclear programme despite being lands of coal surrounded by a sea of oil and gas, so they are hardly in a position to object to that claim.

But in fact Iranian technology, science, and indeed conservation, is badly mistargetted with its nuclear project. Iran subsidises domestic petrol supplies and – despite being the world's fourth largest exporter of crude - is desperately short of refinery capacity and has to import petrol.

One would have thought that a better use of Iranian capital and brainpower would be to develop refinery capacity now and research conservation methods, maybe even charging an economic price for gasoline, rather than pour resources into building future Chernobyls a few decades down the line. The Russians are, very slowly, building the reactor at Bushehr, which they quite correctly point out, is entirely within the NPT and IAEA safeguards. The original reactor, planned under President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace programme, was to have been built by the Germans in the 1970s for the Shah – with no protest from the USA or indeed Israel.

Somewhat contradicting their environmental green-ness, Iranians argue that since their only major export, aside from pistachio nuts, is oil, it is better to use nuclear power for domestic energy and save the natural gas and oil for export. In economic terms, this is a really bad strategy, which traps them in commodity dependence. Once again, there are better things they could do with their scientists and capital, and the Gulf States just across the water could show them.

In fact, I suspect the Iranian point about national prestige (shared across the political spectrum) is really the most important factor. Tehran can truly claim victimization. The US has echoed Israel, the only non-signatory to the Non Proliferation Treaty, and the only nuclear power in the region, by threatening direct military action against Iran. To get the vote needed to refer Iran to the Security Council, the US stroked India, another NPT hold out, and maintained the flow of weaponry and subsidies to Pakistan, another nuclear power.

The hawks in Israel and the USA are publicly chomping at the bit for an attack against Iran, which has solidified domestic support for Iran's government, which could probably get a big majority of the population in support of an actual weapons programme. After all, John McCain - who could conceivably be president - mimicked the Beach Boys, singing "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran", while his opponent Barack Obama promised Aipac that no option was ruled out against Iran.

If Bush and Israel can be restrained from starting Armageddon before Inauguration Day, and if Obama keeps up to his earlier promise, there is maladroit diplomacy on all sides to untangle. Above all, the Iranians want a little respect. When the Security Council was imposing punitive damages on Saddam Hussein for invading Kuwait, the UN released its report branding Iraq the aggressor in the war against Iran. I went to the Iranian ambassador to the UN and asked why they were not asking for damages since, after all, as Saddam's first victim they had a fair claim. He replied that all Iran wanted was vindication. Morality or madness, they have been consistent about it since.

Some stroking is called for. The US and the Europe should recognise that Iran has the right to the full fuel cycle, but ask what it is worth not to exercise that right, or ask nicely if the Iranians would sign on for the additional protocols for the IAEA and accept additional inspections.

In return, the US could agree a non-aggression pact with Iran, and promise to hold off any unprovoked Israeli attack, not to mention open up trading and financial relations.

Of course this would be pandering to a dogmatic and religiose government with authoritarian tendencies that executes and imprisons far too many of its own citizens. But most countries managed to maintain relations with the Bush administration despite all that. The last war Iran was involved in was when Saddam Hussein was encouraged by the West to attack. Who is the real threat to peace around there?

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

Deadline pundit on TV! OK Iranian, but still

It's nice to know my pulpitting makes news!

Ian

Is Peace Even on the Agenda?
Washington seeks confrontation not reconciliation with Iran
Chris Gelken (chrisg) Email Article Print Article
Published 2008-03-04 06:00 (KST)
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has returned to Tehran after his landmark two-day visit to Iraq.

Upon his arrival in Baghdad, Ahmadinejad was feted and warmly welcomed with military bands and honor guards. It's hard to believe such a reception would be laid on for the man that Washington accuses of being largely responsible for destabilizing Iraq.


"Well obviously the ruling party in Washington must be seething," author and political analyst Ian Williams told PressTV News. "This has got to raise serious questions for the American public."

How is it, Williams asked, that after 160,000 troops and 4,000 dead, Western leaders have to sneak in and out of Iraq under cover of secrecy "while Iran, the other part of the alleged Axis of Evil, can send its president along a flower strewn route in a motorcade through the streets of Baghdad, and be greeted by the government that the US troops have supposedly put in power?"

In contrast to Ahmadinejad's colorful arrival in Iraq, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, arrived in Baghdad on an unannounced visit with his itinerary a closely guarded secret.

Notwithstanding two wars, years of crippling sanctions and continued occupation, Washington accuses Tehran of "meddling" and "interfering" in Iraq, a country with which Iran shares a 1,500-kilometer border.

"It seems very odd," Williams said, "that most of the attacks on the US forces are coming from the Sunni militias and al-Qaida, and these are the people who it is least likely for the Iranians to be supporting. It's possible that some weapons might come from Iran. But in the end, the aircraft that went into the World Trade Center were American but they certainly were not directed by the United States."

Iran denies charges that it has been supplying weapons to any groups in Iraq, an assertion flatly rejected by Washington. With the entire region awash with weapons combined with Iraq's long and porous border, the possibility that sympathetic or criminal elements might be smuggling guns and ammunition is a possibility that, apparently, has not occurred to Pentagon and White House analysts.

Painting Iran as the culprit for continued instability in Iraq, on the other hand, appears to suit Washington policymakers.

"It's a claim the Bush administration is going to make because it wants to avoid confronting the reality that it actually has to talk to the Iranian leadership and come to some sensible provisions for the region. It's very difficult for them to admit that. They are ideologically incapable of it at the moment," Williams told PressTV.

Government statements from Baghdad said talks between Ahmadinejad and Iraqi leaders focused mainly on economic, political and security issues -- all areas where the United States has considerable influence or vested interests.

In a separate interview, Mahmoud Othman, member of the Iraqi Council of Representatives, told PressTV's Middle East Today that with warnings from Washington to be wary of Iran on the one hand, and accusations from Tehran that the United States is to blame for the insecurity in Iraq on the other, Baghdad needs to tread a fine line in order to maintain a balance.

"I think the Iraqi leadership is stuck in between the conflict between Iran and America and obviously both countries have their influence in Iraq. That is why Iraq has tried to arrange meetings between the two countries," Othman said.

Speaking on the same edition of Middle East Today, professor of politics and head of the Department of American Studies at Tehran University, Seyed Mohammad Marandi said from Tehran's perspective it seems Washington is determined to maintain its hostile policy toward Iran.

"But this is not really in the interests of the United States," he said, "If Iraq is to stabilize, and if the American government wants Iraq to stabilize, then the most important neighbor Iraq has is Iran because of its very long borders and because of the economic potential that exists between the two countries."

But according to Williams, Iraq's mediation efforts are unlikely to bear fruit in the short term.

"I don't think it's the beginning of a rapprochement in itself," he told PressTV News, "I think wiser heads in Washington might draw some lessons from it and say we really have to deal with this."

Williams noted that Iran has previously been remarkably cooperative in both Afghanistan against the Taliban and in Iraq against Saddam Hussein, "and the United States at the time did not grasp those opportunities."

Closer ties with Iran would be at odds with Washington's policies toward Israel, Williams said, and blamed a stubborn inability to admit past mistakes for the continued standoff.

"There are elements in Washington that refuse to admit that they've been wrong, that they basically either were having illusions or pipe dreams about the whole Axis of Evil to begin with, and there's this bedrock reluctance to engage sensibly with Iran."

Williams was speaking on the eve of a Security Council meeting seeking to impose further sanctions on Iran over its nuclear activities, an event taking place at the time of filing this article.

"Sadly," Williams said, "when you look at the 'resolutionary' creep at the United Nations it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that some people in Washington still want to see a confrontation with Iran."

The Day the Dark Ages Began: Full text

Yesterday, November 4, was the anniversary of the 1979 student takeover of the American Embassy in Teheran, where over 50 hostages were kept until Iran released them on the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as president of the United States 444 days later, perhaps coincidentally, although many argue otherwise.

For many people, the incident is ancient history. But it is one of those seemingly inconsequential, "for want of a nail", events that change the course of history in profound ways.

To mark the occasion, this weekend I was on PressTV, Iran's international network, along with Massoumeh Ebtekar, the spokeswoman of the students and known to the hostages, without fondness, as "Sister Mary". She is still active politically and now a reformist - but totally unrepentant about the hostage -taking. She has just >written a book about it, which was published in Canada because she could not find a publisher in the US prepared to take the risk of associating with the wrong side in the "war on terror" - and to be fair, the surviving hostages would almost certainly have litigated any royalties she was due.

She felt that occupying the embassy preserved the Islamic Revolution against American counter-coups. I differed. The student occupation was understandable in the context of American support for the Shah, but totally reprehensible when, unplanned, it turned into long-term hostage taking.

Of all recent American presidents, Jimmy Carter is the one who would have tried to accommodate a democratic regime in Iran. But he was a strongly moral man, and to turn away the cancer-stricken Shah from medical treatment would have been unthinkable. But for obvious reasons of history, Iranian students and Ayatollahs did not think in terms of American presidents having moral qualms. They were happier to come to a deal with Ronald Reagan.

By ensuring Reagan's defeat of Jimmy Carter, the hostage crisis ushered in one of the most regressive eras in US history. It also represented the end of the New Deal and Great Society era, and the resurrection of Gradgrindism as a philosophy in the domestic governance in the US. Since then, the rich have prospered beyond measure while working Americans have, if they are lucky, trodden water.

And it was not only at home in the US that it marked the end of any sense of community. Globally as well, it heralded the triumph of American militarism and unilateralism.

We are still living with the unintended consequences of the bushy tailed, bright-eyed enthusiasm of those Iranian students, and in Iraq, Americans and Iraqis alike are dying with them.

The crisis had its results closer to home as well. The Iranian revolution, which had joined more secular democratic and Islamist elements, became the hybrid theo-democracy it is now, with the Ayatollahs able to over-rule democratically elected politicians. Ms Ebtekar thinks this is a good thing. Many, not necessarily pro-American, inside and outside Iran would differ, and both the new regime and the hostage crisis left Iran pretty much friendless when Saddam Hussein invaded a year later.

The Iranian anchorwoman wanted to know if I could think of anything positive to conclude from the incident. The one small point I could think of was that it showed Americans how unpopular abroad their government's policies were. But as we saw after 9/11, there is strong trend in the US, in fact, the one now in power, that feels fortified by foreign disapproval. And, after all, taking diplomats hostage violated international law, as indeed the US forces have done by taking Iranian diplomats prisoner in Iraq - despite the protests of the Iraqi government.

In the past the US has found it convenient to overlook direct and indirect attacks agaianst it, such - for example - Franco's past as a Nazi ally, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, not to mention the Korean and Vietnam Wars. If the embassy hostage issue were brought up in arguments against talking to Iran, after 28 years, it would be an excuse, not a reason - and not a very good one either. Perhaps Washington could apologise for the Shah, Tehran for the embassy - and the students to the world for the dark ages they inadvertently ushered in.

The Day the Dark Ages Began

The Day the Dark Ages Began - how bright eyed bushy tailed students in Teheran gave us Reagan, Bush, Star Wars, Iraq and Ayatollahs in the Guardian Comment is Free

Humpty Dumpty and the War on Terror

Today's Guardian Comment is Free piece on the War on Terror and its abuses.

Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know

Iran, Nixon, Bush, and terminal idiocy

Tribune Column 21 September

Richard Nixon famously had the "Madman Strategy" to intimidate his enemies. But it was not really a strategy, it was more of a tactic. It is George W. Bush who has elevated lunacy or at least idiocy, to a strategy. And what is more, it appears the ailment is contagious, possibly even epidemic.

Of course it makes no sense to attack Iran… but all the signs are that that is what the White House coterie is up to. The rhetoric from all the usual suspects is uncannily similar to what we heard the run up to the Iraq invasion – along with the detachment from reality of the deluded proponents.

Just consider General Petraeus's evidence to Congress last week. He is a political general, appointed by Bush to tell the legislators what the White House wanted to hear. And he did. The legislators and the press, hypnotized by the uniform, took what he said as gospel; although some of the bolder souls did indeed point out that he has consistently seen silver linings in the clouds over Baghdad.

Petraeus's delivery elided Al-Qaeda, insurgents, Iran and the Shi'a militias as if they were a seamless whole, implying that Teheran is behind the deaths of Americans in Iraq, and by a few degrees of separation, sponsoring Osama Bin Laden.

Let us consider Iran. It is indeed governed by faith-based zealots who are enthusiastic practitioners of the death penalty. But unlike the US it has not invaded any of its neighbouring countries.

Indeed, Saddam Hussein, with American and British support invaded Iran and fought one of the longest and most bloody wars of aggression of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Ahmedinejad is, to put it kindly, not the brightest star in the diplomatic firmament, but on examination, a lot of what his detractors accuse him of saying is the subject of willful mistranslation, and he has consistently denied military nuclear ambitions.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty binds Iran. – unlike nuclear powers Indian and Pakistan, the former of which has been given the green light by the US in defiance of the treaty while the latter has military and security officers who have a proven record of favoring the Taliban. It is legitimate to ask why on earth an oil–rich country like Iran should embark on a perilous road to nuclear energy, but one could answer that the reasons may be similar to those which impelled a coal and oil rich country like Great Britain to be actively considering expansion of nuclear reactor capability.

But who do you trust on these issues? Nobel prize-winner Mohammed El Baradei of the IAEA, who was completely vindicated about Iraq's lack of a nuclear programme, or the recidivist liars and fabulists who hymned our way into the disastrous invasion?

As El Baradei said in Vienna this week, "There are rules on how to use force, and I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 700,000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons."

He thinks he has pulled off a deal, but it is hardly surprising that the murderous clots who brought us the Iraq debacle are again attacking him furiously. Of course, they might be right, and Iran may indeed have nuclear ambitions. But the burden of proof really has to meet an even higher standard than normal because of their own proven predilection for telling political expedient whoppers.

Of course, some of the biggest proponents of an attack on Iran come from Israel. Israel has invaded its neighbour Lebanon over and over again, using modern weaponry supplied by the United States. It has nuclear weapons. It recently flew a provocative sortie into Syria, possibly alienating Turkey in the process. It is occupying parts of Syria, the West Bank and Gaza. So do we really take their word for it that Iran needs dealing with?

Luckily, there are some signs of inoculation against this pervasive insanity. It appears that British officers are demurring at being moved to the Iranian border in order to act as a trip wire if the Revolutionary Guards come swarming over the Iraqi border in retaliation for whatever the Israelis or Americans have done. But they hardly need to.

The Anglo-American invasion of Iraq handed over control of large swathes of the country to Shi'a groups and militia who, if you believe Petraeus, take orders from their coreligionists in Teheran. Even taking his conspiracist scripts with a hint of skepticism, one can assume that the Shi'a in Iraq will not take kindly to an attack on Iran whether by the US, or by Israel with tacit US backing.

There is no way that Israel would attack Iran in the teeth of US displeasure, and of course any Iranian retaliation would then trigger American support. I suppose it would then mean that US troops would be out of Iraq, dead or alive, but with the parlous state of the world economy, all it needs is Gulf Oil to be out of the markets to cause the mother of all crashes.

But surely the Democrats in Congress would oppose an attack? Don't bet on it. Mesmerized by talk of terrorism and attacks on GI's, whipped in by AIPAC, the Israel Lobby, most of the presidential contenders are sleepwalking to disaster- assisted it might be added by inept diplomacy. It's no way to run a world.

Wanted: Three Regime Changes

From this weeks Tribune in London, my column on the prisoners

http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/Templates/contents.html

Old Rabbie Burns, who had more lines than the average Trotskyist guru, had the best one for the Iran prisoners crisis:

“O wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

It wad frae monie a blunder free us

An foolish notion.”

I hope Tony Blair drew some such appropriate lessons from the extremely tepid response of the UN Security Council to the peremptory British demand for a condemnation of the Iranian arrest of the British sailors, which also implied general acceptance of British evidence on the location of both the boat and the boundary.

Far from accepting the Palmerstonian terms proposed by London, the best Blair could get from the other members was an anodyne press statement expressing a pious hope for a speedy resolution of the problem. The other members of the Council did not have to be in the Revolutionary Guard fan club to see that some balance was called for. The Iranians have indeed breached the Geneva Conventions by showing a woman prisoner smoking and wearing a headscarf.

Admittedly, no one spliced the mainbrace for them, but as so many people immediately thought, that was so much better than an orange boiler suit, gag and blindfold, with fetching shackles for accessories. And better still than being naked and sexually humiliated, or draped with electric wires, beset with savage dogs.

And while we know where the British prisoners are – they have not been chained to the deck of a charter plane and flown to some place where totalitarian torturers can demonstrate by how much the science has advanced since the Inquisition closed shop.

There is indeed a threat of show trial, which no one takes seriously. But their fate will be resolved, and almost certainly satisfactorily, well within the five years that it has taken our special relations in Washington to bring the Guantanamo prisoners to trial. While we fret about the fifteen, let us remember that the rest of the world sees how superior Blair’s friend Bush is to Stalin.

This was not a good week for an American ally to discover an attachment to prisoners’ rights. Uncle Joe had show trials, and then sent the survivors to the Gulag. The Pentagon sends people to the Gitmo Gulag – and then years later has a “No-Show” trial, in which hand-picked judges refuse to let the defendants see the evidence against them, sack their lawyers, and insist on an admission of guilt or being rendered back into the system. And that was for David Hicks, a privileged white citizen of Australia, whose Prime Minister, next in line up the White House rectum after Blair, is under heavy public pressure about the case.

This in no way mitigates the illegality – and indeed the stupidity - of the Revolutionary Guards and their backers in Teheran, who would have been better disarming their prisoners and handing them back with souvenir packages of pistachio nuts and signed portraits of Ahmadinejad to remind them of their stay.


But let us consider the Iranian point of view. For months, there has been drumbeat of war from Washington and Israel. There are three US and French carrier groups just off shore. With close assistance from Britain, which also owns Diego Garcia, the likeliest main base for operations, the US has been ratcheting up an Iraqi-style WMD resolution against Iran, while building up its forces in Iraq close to the border.

Ironically, the resolutions’ title in the Council records is “Non-Proliferation.” Think about that. Three overt nuclear powers, Britain, which is about to update Trident, France, and the US, which between them have been pushing nuclear power as an answer to Climate Change bribed India, another nuclear power that is not even a signatory to the Non Proliferation Treaty, to refer Iran’s nuclear programme from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The most vociferous proponent of this action is Israel itself, the only nuclear power in the region, which has made overt threats of action against Iran


One could see why the Iranians did not exactly offer flowers or a floating red carpet to Royal Naval personnel operating along the disputed maritime boundary. In fact, if anything, if the Revolutionary Guards had they intellect to match their paranoia, they should have suspected that this was deliberate allied provocation.

One hopes that the Iranians have the good sense to climb down. But then one would hope that the US would have the good sense to offer the Iranians what they really want – direct talks with Washington and a Libyan style deal.

On one small point the Americans who want a regime change in Teheran may have a point. The whole tragicomical set of circumstances that led to the prisoner crisis could best be resolved by regime change – in London, Washington and Teheran.

Sanity Is the Real Hostage-full text

Sanity is the real hostage
In the case of the 15 British hostages, everyone is acting foolishly - and ignoring Iran's grievances.

Comment is free piece from the Guardian, as usual proving my point with rabid commentators wanting war, now!

March 29, 2007
Events in Gulf could be spinning out of control. And sanity is the missing factor in what looks like a replay of 1914.


George Orwell said, "There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side for reaction".

I would submit that the threatened confrontation with Iran is the exception to Orwell's rule. It is looking like competitive cretinism. There are people in Washington who want an excuse to whack Iran, and there are people in Iran who seem determined to provide them with excuses to do so. The Iranians may have taken 15 British hostages, but the allies have 150,000 potential hostages in Iraq waiting to be mopped up the moment Israel or the US initiates military action.

Whether or not the British sailors that the Iranians took prisoner were on the Iranian side of the murky line up the Shatt al-Arab, the Iranians have not been clever. They've been acting as if they were coached in diplomacy by John Bolton, with a total disregard for how the rest of the world sees them, as they have been since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took power. With global opinion of the Bush administration at an all time low, it really takes studied ineptitude to drop the ball as often as Ahmadinejad has.

Sadly for Iran, the US has better diplomats than Bolton. Washington, with the eager connivance of London and Paris, has been spinning a web around Tehran. This side of divine judgment, it does not really matter that the Iranian President never actually called for Israel to be wiped off the map. Iran has done little or nothing to dispel the eagerly promoted perception that he did.

And yes, the US is holding five Iranians with diplomatic status in Iraq - against the protests of the allegedly sovereign Iraqi government - but all attention is focussed on the fifteen British prisoners. Even if they had been across the boundary, the clever thing to do would have been a showy protest and repatriation, rather than threatening charges against them.

But there is more than PR involved. It is true that the IAEA's reference to the Security Council was on dubious grounds, and that Iran has probably been more observant of the Non-Proliferation Treaty than the US, the UK or France - and certainly more so than India. But it should have noticed that whether it was through sweet talking or elbow twisting Washington secured a majority on the IAEA Council, and has gone on to secure a unanimous, if diluted, resolution in the UN Security Council. That is quite an achievement for Western diplomacy when you consider the almost universal mistrust of Washington's intentions, and indeed sanity.

Iran is quite right in saying that the UN Security Council resolutions disregard previous international law, not to mention justice and fairness. They have bitter memories of the almost total silence of the body during Saddam Hussein's eight-year war against them. But it is difficult to call for application of UN resolutions against, for example, Israel, if you disregard them yourself.

It is a bit like standing in the square in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, knowing just how obtuse and pig-headed both sides could be and the consequent gory results of the assassin's shot. If there is a war, there is unlikely to be a clear cut winner on either side: all sides will lose, untold thousands will die. There will be immense damage to whatever is left of the global framework of international law and almost certainly an enhancement of Islamic resentment against the west with all its consequences. This is a War for Terror in the future.

There are solutions: Iran wants normalization of relations with the US - such as has already happened with Libya and seems to be happening with Pyongyang. Supporting the deal with North Korea does not involve us canonizing Kim Jong Il, and a deal with Iran does not involve supporting its repression of civil rights at home.

While we may wish for regime change in both Tehran and Washington as one way out of the impasse; and, at the very least, Tony Blair should not be allowed to use the hostages as an excuse to back the war party in Israel and the US. He should also be pressuring Bush to do what the Iraqi government wants and release the Iranians - and to engage the US in direct talks. As well as the 15 sailors, he has to think of the remaining British forces in Basra, hostage to American or Israeli belligerence as much as Iranian Islamic fervour.