Annals of National Security
Preparing the Battlefield
The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.
by Seymour M. Hersh
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh
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Sunday, June 29, 2008
Oil Giants Get Ready to Return to Iraq. It Was Oil, All Along by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
Oil Giants Get Ready to Return to Iraq
It Was Oil, All Along
By BILL MOYERS
and MICHAEL WINSHIP
Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire, and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be....the bottom line. It is about oil.
Alan Greenspan said so last fall. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, safely out of office, confessed in his memoir,
"...Everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." He elaborated in an interview with the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, "If Saddam Hussein had been head of Iraq and there was no oil under those sands, our response to him would not have been as strong as it was in the first gulf war."
Remember, also, that soon after the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, told the press that war was our only strategic choice. "...We had virtually no economic options with Iraq," he explained, "because the country floats on a sea of oil."
Shades of Daniel Plainview, the monstrous petroleum tycoon in the movie There Will Be Blood. Half-mad, he exclaims, "There's a whole ocean of oil under our feet!" then adds, "No one can get at it except for me!"
No wonder American troops only guarded the Ministries of Oil and the Interior in Baghdad, even as looters pillaged museums of their priceless antiquities. They were making sure no one could get at the oil except... guess who?
Here's a recent headline in The New York Times: "Deals with Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back." Read on: "Four western companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power."
There you have it. After a long exile, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP are back in Iraq. And on the wings of no-bid contracts - that's right, sweetheart deals like those given Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater. The kind of deals you get only if you have friends in high places. And these war profiteers have friends in very high places.
Let's go back a few years to the 1990's, when private citizen Dick Cheney was running Halliburton, the big energy supplier. That's when he told the oil industry that, "By 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."
Fast forward to Cheney's first heady days in the White House. The oil industry and other energy conglomerates have been headed backdoor keys to the White House, and their CEO's and lobbyists were trooping in and out for meetings with their old opal, now Vice President Cheney. The meetings are secret, conducted under tight security, but as we reported five years ago, among the documents that turned up from some of those meetings were maps of oil fields in Iraq - and a list of companies who wanted access to them.
The conservative group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club filed suit to try to find out who attended the meetings and what was discussed, but the White House fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the press and public from learning the whole truth.
Think about it. These secret meetings took place six months before 9/11, two years before Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq. We still don't know what they were about. What we know is that this is the oil industry that's enjoying swollen profits these days. It would be laughable if it weren't so painful to remember that their erstwhile cheerleader for invading Iraq - the press mogul Rupert Murdoch - once said that a successful war there would bring us $20 a barrel of oil. The last time we looked, it was more than $140 a barrel. Where are you, Rupert, when the facts need checking and the predictions are revisited?
At a congressional hearing this week, James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who exactly twenty years ago alerted Congress and the world to the dangers of global warming, compared the chief executives of Big Oil to the tobacco moguls who denied that nicotine is addictive or that there's a link between smoking and cancer. Hansen, who the administration has tried again and again to silence, said these barons of black gold should be tried for committing crimes against humanity and nature in opposing efforts to deal with global warming.
Perhaps those sweetheart deals in Iraq should be added to his proposed indictments. They have been purchased at a very high price. Four thousand American soldiers dead, tens of thousands permanently wounded for life, hundreds of thousands of dead and crippled Iraqis plus five million displaced, and a cost that will mount into trillions of dollars. The political analyst Kevin Phillips says America has become little more than an "energy protection force," doing anything to gain access to expensive fuel without regard to the lives of others or the earth itself. One thinks again of Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. His lust for oil came at the price of his son and his soul
Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.
It Was Oil, All Along
By BILL MOYERS
and MICHAEL WINSHIP
Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire, and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be....the bottom line. It is about oil.
Alan Greenspan said so last fall. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, safely out of office, confessed in his memoir,
"...Everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." He elaborated in an interview with the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, "If Saddam Hussein had been head of Iraq and there was no oil under those sands, our response to him would not have been as strong as it was in the first gulf war."
Remember, also, that soon after the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, told the press that war was our only strategic choice. "...We had virtually no economic options with Iraq," he explained, "because the country floats on a sea of oil."
Shades of Daniel Plainview, the monstrous petroleum tycoon in the movie There Will Be Blood. Half-mad, he exclaims, "There's a whole ocean of oil under our feet!" then adds, "No one can get at it except for me!"
No wonder American troops only guarded the Ministries of Oil and the Interior in Baghdad, even as looters pillaged museums of their priceless antiquities. They were making sure no one could get at the oil except... guess who?
Here's a recent headline in The New York Times: "Deals with Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back." Read on: "Four western companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power."
There you have it. After a long exile, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP are back in Iraq. And on the wings of no-bid contracts - that's right, sweetheart deals like those given Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater. The kind of deals you get only if you have friends in high places. And these war profiteers have friends in very high places.
Let's go back a few years to the 1990's, when private citizen Dick Cheney was running Halliburton, the big energy supplier. That's when he told the oil industry that, "By 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."
Fast forward to Cheney's first heady days in the White House. The oil industry and other energy conglomerates have been headed backdoor keys to the White House, and their CEO's and lobbyists were trooping in and out for meetings with their old opal, now Vice President Cheney. The meetings are secret, conducted under tight security, but as we reported five years ago, among the documents that turned up from some of those meetings were maps of oil fields in Iraq - and a list of companies who wanted access to them.
The conservative group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club filed suit to try to find out who attended the meetings and what was discussed, but the White House fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the press and public from learning the whole truth.
Think about it. These secret meetings took place six months before 9/11, two years before Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq. We still don't know what they were about. What we know is that this is the oil industry that's enjoying swollen profits these days. It would be laughable if it weren't so painful to remember that their erstwhile cheerleader for invading Iraq - the press mogul Rupert Murdoch - once said that a successful war there would bring us $20 a barrel of oil. The last time we looked, it was more than $140 a barrel. Where are you, Rupert, when the facts need checking and the predictions are revisited?
At a congressional hearing this week, James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who exactly twenty years ago alerted Congress and the world to the dangers of global warming, compared the chief executives of Big Oil to the tobacco moguls who denied that nicotine is addictive or that there's a link between smoking and cancer. Hansen, who the administration has tried again and again to silence, said these barons of black gold should be tried for committing crimes against humanity and nature in opposing efforts to deal with global warming.
Perhaps those sweetheart deals in Iraq should be added to his proposed indictments. They have been purchased at a very high price. Four thousand American soldiers dead, tens of thousands permanently wounded for life, hundreds of thousands of dead and crippled Iraqis plus five million displaced, and a cost that will mount into trillions of dollars. The political analyst Kevin Phillips says America has become little more than an "energy protection force," doing anything to gain access to expensive fuel without regard to the lives of others or the earth itself. One thinks again of Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. His lust for oil came at the price of his son and his soul
Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.
Guess What "Surprise" Republicans Yearn For
Guess What "Surprise" Republicans Yearn For
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn06282008.html
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Everybody knows it, but it took a tacky Republican operator to come right out and say it. Charlie Black, John McCain's campaign adviser, recently let drop to Fortune magazine that another terrorist attack on U.S. soil would be a "big advantage" for the Republican presidential candidate. Of course McCain lost no time in distancing himself from Black's remark, with the same bogus moral outrage with which he decries racist slurs on his opponent. "I cannot imagine why he would say it. It's not true. I've worked tirelessly since 9/11 to prevent another attack on the United States of America. My record is very clear." Black duly threw on some sackcloth and echoed McCain: "I deeply regret the comments. They were inappropriate. I recognize that John McCain has devoted his entire adult life to protecting his country and placing its security before every other consideration."
Now, Black is no novice in campaign tactics. Nearly 40 years ago he helped put Jesse Helms in the US senate, and has been an innovative dirty trickster ever since. He knew exactly what he was doing when he let drop that remark to Fortune, just as McCain no doubt approved the indiscretion. Both men know that McCain's last best hope of beating Barack Obama in the November election is to rattle the nation's teeth with vivid evocations of national emergency, and stampede the fearful voters into putting a "war hero" into the Oval Office. Both men also know that almost seven years after the Trade Towers went down, the possibility of a terrorist attack is not the prime source of disquiet for most Americans, who can barely afford to drive to work or pay the mortgage on their homes.
The signs that the "war on terror" is losing its political edge are manifold. In the months after the 9/11 attack the Bush administration faced no serious opposition in trampling the US constitution under foot in the name of national security. The Patriot Act shot through Congress with just one senatorial "No" vote, from Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. The symbol of U.S. "resolve" around the world became the prison at Guantanamo, filled to this day with men against whom no formal charges had been laid, subjected to appalling tortures and denied the right to legal counsel.
This month the U.S. courts have delivered two resounding rebuffs to the White House's efforts to say that prisoners haled to Guantanamo had no rights under U.S. law. On June 12 , in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, the US Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, that Lakhdar Boumediene, a Bosnian citizen seized in October 2001, was entitled to habeas corpus – i.e., the right under the US constitution to have an independent court of law review the legality of his detention. Justice Anthony Kennedy stated ringingly in his draft of the majority opinion, "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."
The right erupted in fury, denouncing "the Boumediene Five". The Wall Street Journal bellowed in an editorial that the majority justices had signed the death warrants of American soldiers fighting terror overseas. At a town hall meeting in Pemberton, N.J., McCain called it "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country." For his part Obama reiterated his "firm belief that we can track terrorists, we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution."
Then, this last Monday, a three-judge federal court in Washington followed swiftly in the tracks on the June 12 ruling, declaring that Hozaifa Parhat, a 33-year-old Uighur Muslim from the oppressed Xinjiang province of China, seized in Turkmenistan in 2001, had the right to seek release immediately through a writ of habeas corpus. Thus, in the space of less than a fortnight, the US courts sliced away what Bush and his lawyers have insisted for seven years to be the vital right to hold terrorists indefinitely, without charges or rights of any sort.
Judges mostly rule in tune with the temper of the times, and the decisions this month are no exception. The surmise of those who dream, like Black, of a new terrorist attack, is that if one had rocked America on June 1 of this year the judges might well have held their hand. David Addington, senior aide to vice president Dick Cheney was quoted last year by Jack Goldsmith, a former Justice Department lawyer, as having said yearningly that "we're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court," referring to the secret and in fact compliant FISA court that oversees clandestine wiretapping.
Almost every presidential election sees allegations of an imminent "October surprise". There's zero doubt what sort of surprise McCain and the desperate Republicans are yearning for.
The Truth About Petraeus' Surge , the Sixties, and much else besides
Watching the princes and princesses of the Fourth Estate last week mourning Russert, their fallen champion, I brooded as no doubt did many other CounterPunchers on the staggering failures of the Fourth Estate in the Bush era. How effortlessly they rolled from the WMD debacle into the chipper early reports of the war's glorious progress, then into promotion of the surge and now, for well over a year, into ecstatic bulletins on the Surge's success.
As antidote, I strongly recommend a detailed repot by that excellent journalist and historian. Gareth Porter, in our latest CounterPunch newsletter. Here's how Porter begins his detailed report:
Throughout 2007 and 2008, Gen. David Petraeus successfully directed the development of a propaganda scenario portraying a fierce struggle for Iraq between shadowy figures in Iran, fueling "proxy war" against the United States through its support for "special groups," and U.S. forces working to roll up those Iranian-sponsored networks.
That story line was extraordinarily useful to the Bush administration – or, more precisely, to the Bush-Cheney White House and the U.S. military command in Iraq. It served three distinct purposes simultaneously. First, it provided a new rationale for U.S. occupation in Iraq that promised to stretch years into the future – fighting Shiite foes, which were supposedly sponsored by Iran. As al Qaeda's power seemed to fade during 2007, that purpose filled what would otherwise have been a void in regard to reasons for a continued U.S. military role in the country.
Second, the assertion of Iranian troublemaking in Iraq provided a rationale for the limited attack on Iranian bases, which was Dick Cheney's ambition, and, thus, for a possible trigger for an Iranian response that could justify an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
But it also serves to divert attention from the embarrassing fact that the Bush administration and Iran have been backing the same horse in Iraq. Since early 2005, Iranian strategy has been centered on support for Shiite-dominated regime in Baghdad, because those governments were led by and dependent on the political support of loyal Iraqi agents of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the time the IRGC had created the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party in Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. The Baghdad regime, therefore, represents a joint U.S.-Iranian condominium.
The "proxy war" propaganda claim has revolved around one central lie, which is that Iran has used "special groups," meaning militia groups that have broken away from Sadr, to try to force the United States out of Iraq and destabilize the Iraqi regime. The term "special groups" itself was invented not by Iran but by the U.S. military…"
Porter goes on to build up a devastating case against the mendacious constructs of Petraeus and his staff. He pinions the eager gullibility of Congress and press in swallowing the story. His piece alone is worth a subscripton to our twice-monthly newsletter.
Another excellent piece in the same newsletter is former US Senator Jim Abourezk's account of the White Clay whiskey peddlers selling alcoholic beverages to the Indians. This squalid epic goes back to the 1800s, and stretches forward to the present day. Jim was born on the Rosebud reservation, and became the nation's first Arab-American senator back in the 1970s, serving with great distinction. He remains a crusading lawyer in Sioux Falls and recounts his ongoing efforts to shut down the illegal liquor trade in White Clay which has caused so much human disaster.
Moving from the epic to the ridiculous, I have to hand Gerard DeGroot: The 60s Unplugged. A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade. You think Todd Gitlin is silly? They just never let go. I write an unflattering assessment of DeGroot's preposterous work. All in the CounerPunch newsletter. Now, all you have to do is subscribe.
Ahmed Shawki and "Democracy Now"
Ahmed Shawki is usually a jovial fellow, as well as being one of the leading lights of the Trotskyist tendency known as the International Socialist Organization. What has made the Chicago-based Ahmed distinctly less jovial in the years since 9/11/2001 is unendingly bad treatment at airline security. Because of his name and ethnic contour he gets screwed around in all manner of outrageous ways.
Imagine, therefore, the fury and distress of Ahmed and his family when Amy Goodman's Democracy Now, on the unlucky day of Friday, June 13, ran a story on Shawki Ahmed Omar, an American citizen captured and detained in Iraq by United States military forces, without legal process and with no meaningful access to counsel. Democracy Now chose to illustrate this story on its site with a photograph of Ahmed Shawki, of Chicago. Dilligent efforts were immediately made to get Democracy Now to fix the problem on its site, but without getting any satisfaction from an apparently indifferent crew at the Temple of Goodman. Finally, in the middle of the following week, Goodman did okay a correction, albeit relocating Ahmed from Chicago to California.
I queried the ISO's Sharon Smith, who is married to Shawki, about the facts of the matter and here's how she answered:
Hi Alex,
No, Ahmed hasn't suddenly moved West. He still lives in Chicago, as he has since 1983. But an Ahmed Shawki with a California address is all we got in the way of a correction from DN! on Wednesday of this past week.
And even that took 5 days. After the photo appeared on Friday, June 13, presenting a photo of Ahmed Shawki from Chicago as the alleged terrorist Shawqi Ahmed Omar (please be sure that I do not wish to imply that Omar is an actual terrorist), Ahmed's photo stayed there for all the world to see until the following Monday morning. So for several days, Ahmed's photo was associated with a convicted Iraqi terrorist, and we had to wait until Wednesday for a broadcast correction (that erroneously stated Ahmed's residence as in California rather than Illinois).
Needless to say, this was a very traumatic experience for Ahmed. He faced racism before 9-11, but since then he has been pulled off airplanes and our family was driven out of our last neighborhood due to anti-Arab racism. And as we all know, various government agencies are not looking for facts, but only excuses, to further harass and incarcerate Arabs and Muslims. So this was a big deal for us. We had no direct contact with anyone at DN! but relied on mutual acquaintances to state our case, as soon as the photo appeared. We became increasingly frustrated, as the days went by and no action was taken to make this correction—which at some future point, could be crucial if Ahmed is targeted by one of the many agencies empowered to do so. Because we had no direct contact with DN!, we can't state with any accuracy what DN!'s official response was to this error on their part. And no one from DN ever attempted to contact Ahmed directly, either to apologize or to get the facts straight.
Needless to say, we are extremely disappointed by this outcome. We expected better from Democracy Now! which we have had, until now, nothing but respect. For those who purport to be bringing integrity back into the news media, we expected, well, a bit more integrity.
Sharon
In Russert's Wake
My dry-eyed remarks about Tim Russert here last week elicited a large number of enthusiastic letters from CounterPunchers astounded at the commotion at his passing. In a separate piece I did on Russert I concluded thus:
After the Watergate scandal was over in 1974 and Nixon bundled off in disgrace to California, Katharine Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Company and employer of Woodward and Bernstein, cautioned journalists: ""The press these days," she sternly told them, "should ... be rather careful about its role. We may have acquired some tendencies about over-involvement that we had better overcome. We had better not yield to the temptation to go on refighting the next war and see conspiracy and cover-up where they do not exist." Out of that warning came the failures to see conspiracy where it did exist, in the manufacture of the WMD threat and in the treatment of politics as business-as-usual, somewhat like a game -- an approach in which Russert excelled and which made him many friends and far too few enemies. He never had to lunch alone. In the 1880s, Joseph Pulitzer hung a sign in the newsroom of his paper, the New York World, which read: "The World has no friends." Russert, as the recent obsequies attest, had far too many.
A few days later, on June 25m came this amusing sequel from Chicago-based CounterPuncher, John Mauck:
Hey Alexander, Today on the Washington Post website, they had an online discussion with Len Downey [The Post's dreary editor]. Per your column I asked a simple question: Chicago: Hey Len, What is your opinion of Katharine Graham's quote: "The press these days should be rather careful about its role. We may have acquired some tendencies about over-involvement that we had better overcome. We had better not yield to the temptation to go on refighting the next war and see conspiracy and cover-up where they do not exist."
To this I got an amusing answer: Leonard Downie Jr.: It's timeless wisdom. She said that many years ago, and it was true then and it's true now. We keep that responsibility in mind every day." I thought that might crack you up. Keep up the Counterpunching!
A few other notes from my Russert mailbag:
Alex, You wrote, "Final question: Since NBC had a huge stake in Tim Russert's future ("Meet the Press" brought in $50 million a year and they paid him around $5 million a year) you'd have thought the network's executives would have taken a look at the tv screen and raised the alarm. Across the past three months he looked in increasingly awful shape, bright red in the face, overweight and sometimes with a slightly glazed, sad look. I told people I thought he was set to die of a heart attack right there in the studio, which is exactly what happened."
You weren't the only one, I never watched, but my mother-in-law, a retired nurse, thought the same thing. She saw him on MTP the Sunday before he died, and thought, he looks awful. She was really alarmed and wanted to call and urge that he get immediate medical attention!
Richard Estes
And this one from Tom Layman, in Champaign, Illinois:
Alex: Very insightful. I don't know how many times the honor-givers mentioned his interview with Cheney prior to the war as if merely asking a question lit a fire under Cheney's feet. But what stands out to me (& I have yet to bring this up elsewhere where I can reply) is his question to Dennis Kucinich in the primary debates about UFOs. The "Journalist of record" was making an obvious attempt to marginalize Dennis as a nut case. I don't recall anyone ever making that kind of leap with, say, Bush's claim that God wanted him to invade Iraq.
Tom
An architect in Nashville send this larger perspective on Russert:
Alexander:
Bravo! Finally someone speaks the truth. Sat. I was on a very challenging bike ride for my age (58, same age as Russert). I got back into biking after a bad back injury and was told it might help and was riding for a while beside a younger man(50) who was well.. rich he was riding an expensive bike. Anyway, he commented that he had left his high stress job where he was a CEO and got into this biking as it lowered his BP ( his BP was through the roof when he was CEO.) and that his Dad had died much as Tim Russert had at about the same age. "Hell he looked awful these past months" he commented.
I noted to him a number of male acquaintances, friends etc that had died of heart attacks between what I think are the make or break it years for men age 50-60.
The conversation started when he yelled to me "Hey have you noticed how no one is saying why Tim Russert died.. like working himself to death a true American role model".
He noted that he had the money but was heading in the same direction so he bought his "vanity bike" to try something else and it had led him to a better life.
Certainly there were other options for Tim also. Maybe not as drastic as giving up the helm as this ex CEO had but certainly working less hours and integrating some exercise or family and friend time in. I don't buy the family man stuff either. Way back when I had a more high profile job when my kids were very young one day they said "Daddy will you ever be home for Dinner?". I worked literally 20 minutes away and had nor been home in almost 2 years for dinner because of my job. I had gained 20 plus and smoked like hell and no exercise. Well this "OL" Marine quit that job (those type of jobs do not allow or at least in those days a way to work less) I was in my late 30's then and I still look back knowing it was the right move. I am still alive and saw my kids grow and shared much with them. I fared on the lousy side for a time for income and have not worked onprestigious projects but that all seems to mean less and less as I age.
Tennessee Architect
Nashville.
A distinctly unflattering one:
Alex,
Thanks for the article on the " Russert Send-Off ". The are some very revealing points. Like that of Russert not having any enemies despite 20 Years in the News Business. I was curious as to what his salary was and the figure you quote, 5 Million Dollars, is also revealing. Why should that be so revealing ? Let me touch upon a subject that was not brought up in your article.
In the Russert Send-Off NBC put a number of video interviews of News Media "Luminaries" and bio pieces on their website. One of those bio pieces focused on Russert's father who is quite elderly. And like most Octegenarians Russert's father has not been able to tend to his own needs. Up until recently the elder Russert has been forced to accept the generosity of his neighbors who prepared his meals and took care of his clothes. It was also revealed that Russert wanted to put his father in a "Senior Citizen's Home" against his father's wishes. You know, those places where you are warehoused until you have the dignity to kick-off. For someone like the younger Russert, with all his money, to do that to do that to his father shows you what type of family man he really was. I wonder if Russert Sr' s neighbors really know what old Tim's net worth really was ? And if they do what they think of him now ? Some "Family Man" !
Sincerely
Bob Marston
A man of the cloth had this to say:
I was sadden but not surprised that the news media ran amok and raised Mr. Russert higher than God. However, I do remember Mr. Russert, as you stated in the amen corner for the war, and I also remember that when the White House wanted to send out propaganda and disinformation, Russert was their man. Dick Cheney knew who to call, and why would Libby throw Russert name in the hat of who was told what? However, the mainstream news media had to make themselves look good especially after Scott McClellan throw them under the bus, so Russert's grandiose send off was a pat on the back for themselves. Furthermore, Russert grilled Obama about Farrakhan, but he seemed not to care about the war, poverty, economical downturns, and many of the social issues and other pertinent issues that this country faced, and Brian Williams was a part of the grilling team too. After all, these two so-called powerhouses could get away with it, just like Williams fabricated his story in Tennessee by stating that McCain was received well at the anniversary of Dr. King. McCain was booed so loudly, one could not hear the broadcast.
And to add to the knighting and apostleship of Russert, the media said that the rainbow in the sky was Russert's rainbow. However, someone's hermeneutics is displaced because the last time that I read the Old Testament, the rainbow was a covenant and a token to remind us that God would not destroy the earth in seed time and harvest by flood, and after seeing the floods in Illinois and Wisconsin, we certainly needed that reminder. Some may call me a busy body fanatical preacher, but so many lives have been lost because of the lies told to get us to Iraq, and now the oil companies hope to prosper, and Bushes Executive order 13303 will aid them. Finally, the mainstream news media has blood on its hand like Pilate, yet soap and water will not remove the stains. So in order to remove the blood stains, why not use Russert the same way as they used him along with others to sell this heinous criminal war.
Rev. S.D. Whitaker
And lastly, from Louisiana:
Hearing all this noise about Russert being such an astute political observer, I wondered whether I had missed this. He seemed somewhat conventional & low-octane prosaic to me, and a lot of his "sharp questioning" missed the mark. But the real thing I have against him is having Rush Limbaugh in his show & going on & on about how Limbaugh was a modern Walter Lippmann. In fact, I was wondering whether it was some sort of a joke, as not even Limbaugh harbored such a pretension. Limbaugh is basically an entertainer of modest, if not mediocre accomplishments, as well as an out-and-out flâneur. He has never made any claims to have inhabited a heavy-thinker bureau, but Russert slobbered all over him as if he were a philosopher king. Maybe there are some reactionaries who would earn such an encomium, but not Limbaugh or that low-life snob, William F. Buckley, jr. I never did get over how Russert was so gulled by Limbaugh & fawned over him disgustingly. Pretty soon we shall be free of all this weeping & moaning over Russert; but why didn't someone cite Don Vito Corleone? Remember when he asked Johnny Fontaine: "You spend time with your family?"
Donald Juneau
As the commotion began to subside, the New York Times ran a news story stuffed with self-aggrandizing quotes from doctors, all to the general effect that Russert had seemed to be in the best of health, his vital indicators seemed to be in the comfort zone, his pills seemed to be working, and then, gosh darn it, he keels over. Moral: the Reaper strikes when he wants and there ain't a thing a bunch of overpaid doctors can do about it.
So how come plenty of people were able to to a free, unsolicited diagnosis of T. Russert on TV and say, My God, call a doctor someone. That guy's in awful shape.
My Life with Thomas Mann
In his always entertaining and instructive column on this site The Musical Patriot David Yearsley this weekend describes the appalling sunburn inflicted on him by Thomas Mann, for reasons I shall not divulge, except to say Yearsley took Mann with him on holiday.
How many arms has Thomas Mann turned into spaghetti, lugging his vast novels around Europe in the vain hope that on some beach or restful glade the traveller will finally settle accounts with the Joseph Trilogy. When I left Oxford I took my girlfriend Jenny Barnes plus Joseph and his weighty Brothers on a tour of Mallorca. The vehicle was a Lambretta, and Thomas Mann x 3 rode postillion, right behind Jenny, who was right behind me. I wasn't used to the Lambretta or to the weight of three hardback vols of T. Mann. I would over-rev, the Lambretta would rise on its rear wheel and fall over backwards on top of Jenny and me and Thomas. One time this happened was right outside the gates of Robert Graves's house in Deya. I ripped my pants and sat on the Mann vols as Jenny sewed the pants up. Mann tagged along the whole of the trip, but I never got anywhere with him. A very over-rated novelist in my opinion.
Footnote: A shorter version of the first item in this Diary ran on The First Post last Friday. Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn06282008.html
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Everybody knows it, but it took a tacky Republican operator to come right out and say it. Charlie Black, John McCain's campaign adviser, recently let drop to Fortune magazine that another terrorist attack on U.S. soil would be a "big advantage" for the Republican presidential candidate. Of course McCain lost no time in distancing himself from Black's remark, with the same bogus moral outrage with which he decries racist slurs on his opponent. "I cannot imagine why he would say it. It's not true. I've worked tirelessly since 9/11 to prevent another attack on the United States of America. My record is very clear." Black duly threw on some sackcloth and echoed McCain: "I deeply regret the comments. They were inappropriate. I recognize that John McCain has devoted his entire adult life to protecting his country and placing its security before every other consideration."
Now, Black is no novice in campaign tactics. Nearly 40 years ago he helped put Jesse Helms in the US senate, and has been an innovative dirty trickster ever since. He knew exactly what he was doing when he let drop that remark to Fortune, just as McCain no doubt approved the indiscretion. Both men know that McCain's last best hope of beating Barack Obama in the November election is to rattle the nation's teeth with vivid evocations of national emergency, and stampede the fearful voters into putting a "war hero" into the Oval Office. Both men also know that almost seven years after the Trade Towers went down, the possibility of a terrorist attack is not the prime source of disquiet for most Americans, who can barely afford to drive to work or pay the mortgage on their homes.
The signs that the "war on terror" is losing its political edge are manifold. In the months after the 9/11 attack the Bush administration faced no serious opposition in trampling the US constitution under foot in the name of national security. The Patriot Act shot through Congress with just one senatorial "No" vote, from Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. The symbol of U.S. "resolve" around the world became the prison at Guantanamo, filled to this day with men against whom no formal charges had been laid, subjected to appalling tortures and denied the right to legal counsel.
This month the U.S. courts have delivered two resounding rebuffs to the White House's efforts to say that prisoners haled to Guantanamo had no rights under U.S. law. On June 12 , in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, the US Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, that Lakhdar Boumediene, a Bosnian citizen seized in October 2001, was entitled to habeas corpus – i.e., the right under the US constitution to have an independent court of law review the legality of his detention. Justice Anthony Kennedy stated ringingly in his draft of the majority opinion, "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."
The right erupted in fury, denouncing "the Boumediene Five". The Wall Street Journal bellowed in an editorial that the majority justices had signed the death warrants of American soldiers fighting terror overseas. At a town hall meeting in Pemberton, N.J., McCain called it "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country." For his part Obama reiterated his "firm belief that we can track terrorists, we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution."
Then, this last Monday, a three-judge federal court in Washington followed swiftly in the tracks on the June 12 ruling, declaring that Hozaifa Parhat, a 33-year-old Uighur Muslim from the oppressed Xinjiang province of China, seized in Turkmenistan in 2001, had the right to seek release immediately through a writ of habeas corpus. Thus, in the space of less than a fortnight, the US courts sliced away what Bush and his lawyers have insisted for seven years to be the vital right to hold terrorists indefinitely, without charges or rights of any sort.
Judges mostly rule in tune with the temper of the times, and the decisions this month are no exception. The surmise of those who dream, like Black, of a new terrorist attack, is that if one had rocked America on June 1 of this year the judges might well have held their hand. David Addington, senior aide to vice president Dick Cheney was quoted last year by Jack Goldsmith, a former Justice Department lawyer, as having said yearningly that "we're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court," referring to the secret and in fact compliant FISA court that oversees clandestine wiretapping.
Almost every presidential election sees allegations of an imminent "October surprise". There's zero doubt what sort of surprise McCain and the desperate Republicans are yearning for.
The Truth About Petraeus' Surge , the Sixties, and much else besides
Watching the princes and princesses of the Fourth Estate last week mourning Russert, their fallen champion, I brooded as no doubt did many other CounterPunchers on the staggering failures of the Fourth Estate in the Bush era. How effortlessly they rolled from the WMD debacle into the chipper early reports of the war's glorious progress, then into promotion of the surge and now, for well over a year, into ecstatic bulletins on the Surge's success.
As antidote, I strongly recommend a detailed repot by that excellent journalist and historian. Gareth Porter, in our latest CounterPunch newsletter. Here's how Porter begins his detailed report:
Throughout 2007 and 2008, Gen. David Petraeus successfully directed the development of a propaganda scenario portraying a fierce struggle for Iraq between shadowy figures in Iran, fueling "proxy war" against the United States through its support for "special groups," and U.S. forces working to roll up those Iranian-sponsored networks.
That story line was extraordinarily useful to the Bush administration – or, more precisely, to the Bush-Cheney White House and the U.S. military command in Iraq. It served three distinct purposes simultaneously. First, it provided a new rationale for U.S. occupation in Iraq that promised to stretch years into the future – fighting Shiite foes, which were supposedly sponsored by Iran. As al Qaeda's power seemed to fade during 2007, that purpose filled what would otherwise have been a void in regard to reasons for a continued U.S. military role in the country.
Second, the assertion of Iranian troublemaking in Iraq provided a rationale for the limited attack on Iranian bases, which was Dick Cheney's ambition, and, thus, for a possible trigger for an Iranian response that could justify an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
But it also serves to divert attention from the embarrassing fact that the Bush administration and Iran have been backing the same horse in Iraq. Since early 2005, Iranian strategy has been centered on support for Shiite-dominated regime in Baghdad, because those governments were led by and dependent on the political support of loyal Iraqi agents of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the time the IRGC had created the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party in Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. The Baghdad regime, therefore, represents a joint U.S.-Iranian condominium.
The "proxy war" propaganda claim has revolved around one central lie, which is that Iran has used "special groups," meaning militia groups that have broken away from Sadr, to try to force the United States out of Iraq and destabilize the Iraqi regime. The term "special groups" itself was invented not by Iran but by the U.S. military…"
Porter goes on to build up a devastating case against the mendacious constructs of Petraeus and his staff. He pinions the eager gullibility of Congress and press in swallowing the story. His piece alone is worth a subscripton to our twice-monthly newsletter.
Another excellent piece in the same newsletter is former US Senator Jim Abourezk's account of the White Clay whiskey peddlers selling alcoholic beverages to the Indians. This squalid epic goes back to the 1800s, and stretches forward to the present day. Jim was born on the Rosebud reservation, and became the nation's first Arab-American senator back in the 1970s, serving with great distinction. He remains a crusading lawyer in Sioux Falls and recounts his ongoing efforts to shut down the illegal liquor trade in White Clay which has caused so much human disaster.
Moving from the epic to the ridiculous, I have to hand Gerard DeGroot: The 60s Unplugged. A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade. You think Todd Gitlin is silly? They just never let go. I write an unflattering assessment of DeGroot's preposterous work. All in the CounerPunch newsletter. Now, all you have to do is subscribe.
Ahmed Shawki and "Democracy Now"
Ahmed Shawki is usually a jovial fellow, as well as being one of the leading lights of the Trotskyist tendency known as the International Socialist Organization. What has made the Chicago-based Ahmed distinctly less jovial in the years since 9/11/2001 is unendingly bad treatment at airline security. Because of his name and ethnic contour he gets screwed around in all manner of outrageous ways.
Imagine, therefore, the fury and distress of Ahmed and his family when Amy Goodman's Democracy Now, on the unlucky day of Friday, June 13, ran a story on Shawki Ahmed Omar, an American citizen captured and detained in Iraq by United States military forces, without legal process and with no meaningful access to counsel. Democracy Now chose to illustrate this story on its site with a photograph of Ahmed Shawki, of Chicago. Dilligent efforts were immediately made to get Democracy Now to fix the problem on its site, but without getting any satisfaction from an apparently indifferent crew at the Temple of Goodman. Finally, in the middle of the following week, Goodman did okay a correction, albeit relocating Ahmed from Chicago to California.
I queried the ISO's Sharon Smith, who is married to Shawki, about the facts of the matter and here's how she answered:
Hi Alex,
No, Ahmed hasn't suddenly moved West. He still lives in Chicago, as he has since 1983. But an Ahmed Shawki with a California address is all we got in the way of a correction from DN! on Wednesday of this past week.
And even that took 5 days. After the photo appeared on Friday, June 13, presenting a photo of Ahmed Shawki from Chicago as the alleged terrorist Shawqi Ahmed Omar (please be sure that I do not wish to imply that Omar is an actual terrorist), Ahmed's photo stayed there for all the world to see until the following Monday morning. So for several days, Ahmed's photo was associated with a convicted Iraqi terrorist, and we had to wait until Wednesday for a broadcast correction (that erroneously stated Ahmed's residence as in California rather than Illinois).
Needless to say, this was a very traumatic experience for Ahmed. He faced racism before 9-11, but since then he has been pulled off airplanes and our family was driven out of our last neighborhood due to anti-Arab racism. And as we all know, various government agencies are not looking for facts, but only excuses, to further harass and incarcerate Arabs and Muslims. So this was a big deal for us. We had no direct contact with anyone at DN! but relied on mutual acquaintances to state our case, as soon as the photo appeared. We became increasingly frustrated, as the days went by and no action was taken to make this correction—which at some future point, could be crucial if Ahmed is targeted by one of the many agencies empowered to do so. Because we had no direct contact with DN!, we can't state with any accuracy what DN!'s official response was to this error on their part. And no one from DN ever attempted to contact Ahmed directly, either to apologize or to get the facts straight.
Needless to say, we are extremely disappointed by this outcome. We expected better from Democracy Now! which we have had, until now, nothing but respect. For those who purport to be bringing integrity back into the news media, we expected, well, a bit more integrity.
Sharon
In Russert's Wake
My dry-eyed remarks about Tim Russert here last week elicited a large number of enthusiastic letters from CounterPunchers astounded at the commotion at his passing. In a separate piece I did on Russert I concluded thus:
After the Watergate scandal was over in 1974 and Nixon bundled off in disgrace to California, Katharine Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Company and employer of Woodward and Bernstein, cautioned journalists: ""The press these days," she sternly told them, "should ... be rather careful about its role. We may have acquired some tendencies about over-involvement that we had better overcome. We had better not yield to the temptation to go on refighting the next war and see conspiracy and cover-up where they do not exist." Out of that warning came the failures to see conspiracy where it did exist, in the manufacture of the WMD threat and in the treatment of politics as business-as-usual, somewhat like a game -- an approach in which Russert excelled and which made him many friends and far too few enemies. He never had to lunch alone. In the 1880s, Joseph Pulitzer hung a sign in the newsroom of his paper, the New York World, which read: "The World has no friends." Russert, as the recent obsequies attest, had far too many.
A few days later, on June 25m came this amusing sequel from Chicago-based CounterPuncher, John Mauck:
Hey Alexander, Today on the Washington Post website, they had an online discussion with Len Downey [The Post's dreary editor]. Per your column I asked a simple question: Chicago: Hey Len, What is your opinion of Katharine Graham's quote: "The press these days should be rather careful about its role. We may have acquired some tendencies about over-involvement that we had better overcome. We had better not yield to the temptation to go on refighting the next war and see conspiracy and cover-up where they do not exist."
To this I got an amusing answer: Leonard Downie Jr.: It's timeless wisdom. She said that many years ago, and it was true then and it's true now. We keep that responsibility in mind every day." I thought that might crack you up. Keep up the Counterpunching!
A few other notes from my Russert mailbag:
Alex, You wrote, "Final question: Since NBC had a huge stake in Tim Russert's future ("Meet the Press" brought in $50 million a year and they paid him around $5 million a year) you'd have thought the network's executives would have taken a look at the tv screen and raised the alarm. Across the past three months he looked in increasingly awful shape, bright red in the face, overweight and sometimes with a slightly glazed, sad look. I told people I thought he was set to die of a heart attack right there in the studio, which is exactly what happened."
You weren't the only one, I never watched, but my mother-in-law, a retired nurse, thought the same thing. She saw him on MTP the Sunday before he died, and thought, he looks awful. She was really alarmed and wanted to call and urge that he get immediate medical attention!
Richard Estes
And this one from Tom Layman, in Champaign, Illinois:
Alex: Very insightful. I don't know how many times the honor-givers mentioned his interview with Cheney prior to the war as if merely asking a question lit a fire under Cheney's feet. But what stands out to me (& I have yet to bring this up elsewhere where I can reply) is his question to Dennis Kucinich in the primary debates about UFOs. The "Journalist of record" was making an obvious attempt to marginalize Dennis as a nut case. I don't recall anyone ever making that kind of leap with, say, Bush's claim that God wanted him to invade Iraq.
Tom
An architect in Nashville send this larger perspective on Russert:
Alexander:
Bravo! Finally someone speaks the truth. Sat. I was on a very challenging bike ride for my age (58, same age as Russert). I got back into biking after a bad back injury and was told it might help and was riding for a while beside a younger man(50) who was well.. rich he was riding an expensive bike. Anyway, he commented that he had left his high stress job where he was a CEO and got into this biking as it lowered his BP ( his BP was through the roof when he was CEO.) and that his Dad had died much as Tim Russert had at about the same age. "Hell he looked awful these past months" he commented.
I noted to him a number of male acquaintances, friends etc that had died of heart attacks between what I think are the make or break it years for men age 50-60.
The conversation started when he yelled to me "Hey have you noticed how no one is saying why Tim Russert died.. like working himself to death a true American role model".
He noted that he had the money but was heading in the same direction so he bought his "vanity bike" to try something else and it had led him to a better life.
Certainly there were other options for Tim also. Maybe not as drastic as giving up the helm as this ex CEO had but certainly working less hours and integrating some exercise or family and friend time in. I don't buy the family man stuff either. Way back when I had a more high profile job when my kids were very young one day they said "Daddy will you ever be home for Dinner?". I worked literally 20 minutes away and had nor been home in almost 2 years for dinner because of my job. I had gained 20 plus and smoked like hell and no exercise. Well this "OL" Marine quit that job (those type of jobs do not allow or at least in those days a way to work less) I was in my late 30's then and I still look back knowing it was the right move. I am still alive and saw my kids grow and shared much with them. I fared on the lousy side for a time for income and have not worked onprestigious projects but that all seems to mean less and less as I age.
Tennessee Architect
Nashville.
A distinctly unflattering one:
Alex,
Thanks for the article on the " Russert Send-Off ". The are some very revealing points. Like that of Russert not having any enemies despite 20 Years in the News Business. I was curious as to what his salary was and the figure you quote, 5 Million Dollars, is also revealing. Why should that be so revealing ? Let me touch upon a subject that was not brought up in your article.
In the Russert Send-Off NBC put a number of video interviews of News Media "Luminaries" and bio pieces on their website. One of those bio pieces focused on Russert's father who is quite elderly. And like most Octegenarians Russert's father has not been able to tend to his own needs. Up until recently the elder Russert has been forced to accept the generosity of his neighbors who prepared his meals and took care of his clothes. It was also revealed that Russert wanted to put his father in a "Senior Citizen's Home" against his father's wishes. You know, those places where you are warehoused until you have the dignity to kick-off. For someone like the younger Russert, with all his money, to do that to do that to his father shows you what type of family man he really was. I wonder if Russert Sr' s neighbors really know what old Tim's net worth really was ? And if they do what they think of him now ? Some "Family Man" !
Sincerely
Bob Marston
A man of the cloth had this to say:
I was sadden but not surprised that the news media ran amok and raised Mr. Russert higher than God. However, I do remember Mr. Russert, as you stated in the amen corner for the war, and I also remember that when the White House wanted to send out propaganda and disinformation, Russert was their man. Dick Cheney knew who to call, and why would Libby throw Russert name in the hat of who was told what? However, the mainstream news media had to make themselves look good especially after Scott McClellan throw them under the bus, so Russert's grandiose send off was a pat on the back for themselves. Furthermore, Russert grilled Obama about Farrakhan, but he seemed not to care about the war, poverty, economical downturns, and many of the social issues and other pertinent issues that this country faced, and Brian Williams was a part of the grilling team too. After all, these two so-called powerhouses could get away with it, just like Williams fabricated his story in Tennessee by stating that McCain was received well at the anniversary of Dr. King. McCain was booed so loudly, one could not hear the broadcast.
And to add to the knighting and apostleship of Russert, the media said that the rainbow in the sky was Russert's rainbow. However, someone's hermeneutics is displaced because the last time that I read the Old Testament, the rainbow was a covenant and a token to remind us that God would not destroy the earth in seed time and harvest by flood, and after seeing the floods in Illinois and Wisconsin, we certainly needed that reminder. Some may call me a busy body fanatical preacher, but so many lives have been lost because of the lies told to get us to Iraq, and now the oil companies hope to prosper, and Bushes Executive order 13303 will aid them. Finally, the mainstream news media has blood on its hand like Pilate, yet soap and water will not remove the stains. So in order to remove the blood stains, why not use Russert the same way as they used him along with others to sell this heinous criminal war.
Rev. S.D. Whitaker
And lastly, from Louisiana:
Hearing all this noise about Russert being such an astute political observer, I wondered whether I had missed this. He seemed somewhat conventional & low-octane prosaic to me, and a lot of his "sharp questioning" missed the mark. But the real thing I have against him is having Rush Limbaugh in his show & going on & on about how Limbaugh was a modern Walter Lippmann. In fact, I was wondering whether it was some sort of a joke, as not even Limbaugh harbored such a pretension. Limbaugh is basically an entertainer of modest, if not mediocre accomplishments, as well as an out-and-out flâneur. He has never made any claims to have inhabited a heavy-thinker bureau, but Russert slobbered all over him as if he were a philosopher king. Maybe there are some reactionaries who would earn such an encomium, but not Limbaugh or that low-life snob, William F. Buckley, jr. I never did get over how Russert was so gulled by Limbaugh & fawned over him disgustingly. Pretty soon we shall be free of all this weeping & moaning over Russert; but why didn't someone cite Don Vito Corleone? Remember when he asked Johnny Fontaine: "You spend time with your family?"
Donald Juneau
As the commotion began to subside, the New York Times ran a news story stuffed with self-aggrandizing quotes from doctors, all to the general effect that Russert had seemed to be in the best of health, his vital indicators seemed to be in the comfort zone, his pills seemed to be working, and then, gosh darn it, he keels over. Moral: the Reaper strikes when he wants and there ain't a thing a bunch of overpaid doctors can do about it.
So how come plenty of people were able to to a free, unsolicited diagnosis of T. Russert on TV and say, My God, call a doctor someone. That guy's in awful shape.
My Life with Thomas Mann
In his always entertaining and instructive column on this site The Musical Patriot David Yearsley this weekend describes the appalling sunburn inflicted on him by Thomas Mann, for reasons I shall not divulge, except to say Yearsley took Mann with him on holiday.
How many arms has Thomas Mann turned into spaghetti, lugging his vast novels around Europe in the vain hope that on some beach or restful glade the traveller will finally settle accounts with the Joseph Trilogy. When I left Oxford I took my girlfriend Jenny Barnes plus Joseph and his weighty Brothers on a tour of Mallorca. The vehicle was a Lambretta, and Thomas Mann x 3 rode postillion, right behind Jenny, who was right behind me. I wasn't used to the Lambretta or to the weight of three hardback vols of T. Mann. I would over-rev, the Lambretta would rise on its rear wheel and fall over backwards on top of Jenny and me and Thomas. One time this happened was right outside the gates of Robert Graves's house in Deya. I ripped my pants and sat on the Mann vols as Jenny sewed the pants up. Mann tagged along the whole of the trip, but I never got anywhere with him. A very over-rated novelist in my opinion.
Footnote: A shorter version of the first item in this Diary ran on The First Post last Friday. Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com
For Oil Contracts, a Question of Motive - Peter Goodman, New York Times
For Oil Contracts, a Question of Motive - Peter Goodman, New York Times
The question hanging over Iraq is whether its natural endowment will be used to help create a sustainable new state, or will instead be managed in ways that reward the cronies and allies of the country whose army toppled Mr. Hussein. Or perhaps both at the same time. That basic question was yanked back to the fore recently when word emerged from Baghdad, in a report in The New York Times, that the Iraqi oil ministry was close to awarding contracts to service its oil fields to some of the largest Western oil companies. While relatively small, these contracts could serve as a foot in the door for much more lucrative licenses to explore widely for Iraqi oil. Some 40 companies from around the world had jockeyed for the contracts, but they were being awarded without competitive bids, the report said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/weekinreview/29good.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin
The question hanging over Iraq is whether its natural endowment will be used to help create a sustainable new state, or will instead be managed in ways that reward the cronies and allies of the country whose army toppled Mr. Hussein. Or perhaps both at the same time. That basic question was yanked back to the fore recently when word emerged from Baghdad, in a report in The New York Times, that the Iraqi oil ministry was close to awarding contracts to service its oil fields to some of the largest Western oil companies. While relatively small, these contracts could serve as a foot in the door for much more lucrative licenses to explore widely for Iraqi oil. Some 40 companies from around the world had jockeyed for the contracts, but they were being awarded without competitive bids, the report said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/weekinreview/29good.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin
More `Near-nuclear' States May Loom
More `Near-nuclear' States May Loom - Associated Press
At a recent meeting of members of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Ukrainian chairman sought to strike an upbeat note about the future, highlighting the "public and political momentum towards a world free of nuclear weapons." Volodyrmyr Yelchenko was right: Statesmen as diverse as Henry Kissinger and Mikhail Gorbachev have taken up the cause of "nuclear abolition." And this year's US presidential contenders both support a more favorable American stance toward arms control. But other forces are pushing back. Renewed interest in nuclear energy, to stem global warming, is expected to give more states the technological building blocks for a bomb. The continuing revelations about the Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan's network, which reportedly had blueprints for a compact weapon, show that globalized nuclear smuggling is growing more sophisticated and dangerous.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/28/AR2008062801237.html
At a recent meeting of members of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Ukrainian chairman sought to strike an upbeat note about the future, highlighting the "public and political momentum towards a world free of nuclear weapons." Volodyrmyr Yelchenko was right: Statesmen as diverse as Henry Kissinger and Mikhail Gorbachev have taken up the cause of "nuclear abolition." And this year's US presidential contenders both support a more favorable American stance toward arms control. But other forces are pushing back. Renewed interest in nuclear energy, to stem global warming, is expected to give more states the technological building blocks for a bomb. The continuing revelations about the Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan's network, which reportedly had blueprints for a compact weapon, show that globalized nuclear smuggling is growing more sophisticated and dangerous.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/28/AR2008062801237.html
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Iran: The Threat By Thomas Powers
The New York Review of Books
Volume 55, Number 12 · July 17, 2008
Iran: The Threat
By Thomas Powers
At a moment of serious challenge, battered by two wars, ballooning debt, and a faltering economy, the United States appears to have lost its capacity to think clearly. Consider what passes for national discussion on the matter of Iran. The open question is whether the United States should or will attack Iran if it continues to reject American demands to give up uranium enrichment. Ignore for the moment whether the United States has any legal or moral justification for attacking Iran. Set aside the question whether Iran, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently claimed in a speech at West Point, "is hellbent on acquiring nuclear weapons." Focus instead on purely practical questions. By any standards Iran is a tough nut to crack: it is nearly three times the size of Texas, with a population of 70 million and a big income from oil which the world cannot afford to lose. Iran is believed to have the ability to block the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf through which much of the world's oil must pass on its way to market.
Keep in mind that the rising price of oil already threatens the world's economy. Iran also has a large army and deep ties to the population of Shiite coreligionists next door in Iraq. The American military already has its hands full with a hard-to-manage war in Iraq, and is proposing to send additional combat brigades to deal with a growing insurgency in Afghanistan. And yet with all these sound reasons for avoiding war with Iran, the United States for five years has repeatedly threatened it with military attack. These threats have lately acquired a new edge.
President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are the primary authors of these threats, but others join them in proclaiming that "all options" must remain "on the table." The option they wish to emphasize is the option of military attack. The presidential candidates in the middle of this campaign year agree that Iran is a major security threat to the United States. Senator Hillary Clinton in the last days of April threatened to "totally obliterate" Iran—presumably with nuclear weapons—if it attacked Israel. Senator Barack Obama dismissed Clinton's threat as "bluster" in the familiar Bush style but agrees that Iran cannot be permitted to build nuclear weapons, and he too insists that a US attack on Iran is one of the options which must remain "on the table." The presumptive Republican candidate, John McCain, takes a position as unyielding as the President's: Iran must abandon nuclear enrichment, stop "meddling" in Iraq with support for Shiite militias, and stop its sponsorship of "terrorism" carried out by Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Any of these threatening activities, in McCain's view, might justify a showdown with Iran.
Sometimes the President's threats are chillingly explicit. In April the administration released details of the intelligence that explained an Israeli air strike last September on a large, blocklike building in which Syria, with the help of North Korea, had allegedly been building a nuclear reactor. Releasing this information, Bush said in April, was Washington's way of "sending a message to Iran and the world for that matter about just how destabilizing nuclear proliferation would be in the Middle East."
The message to Iran was clear—stop or run the risk of a similar attack. Left ambiguous was the question of attack by whom—Israel, which proved itself willing with the attack in Syria, or the United States, which has more planes and missiles at its command? The kind of attack Iran might expect has been spelled out in news stories over the last few years. Some Iranian nuclear research sites are buried as much as seventy meters underground, and there are scores, perhaps hundreds of sites in all, so any serious American effort to destroy Iranian nuclear programs would require intense and numerous strikes by US bombers and missiles. For a time some administration officials lobbied to include the use of nuclear weapons in the strike options for attacking Iran's protected nuclear targets, but vigorous opposition from the Joint Chiefs of Staff scotched that possibility two years ago.
Yet even conventional bombing attacks are acts of war; unprovoked they are acts of aggression. Iran has said it would respond to an attack but without specifying how. Possible counterattacks might target shipping in the Persian Gulf, or US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, or something else the US has not anticipated. Such an exchange could not long be confined to tit for tat. An all-out American bombing program might force Iran to capitulate, or it might not. The next step would be invasion, destruction of Iran's conventional army, occupation of Iran's capital, and change of Iran's regime, which has long been an openly declared policy objective of the United States.
Is there anyone outside the US government who thinks it makes sense to invite trouble on this scale? Even some insiders are of two minds. "Another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need," Gates said in his speech at West Point, "and, in fact, I believe it would be disastrous on a number of levels. But the military option must be kept on the table."
Forgive me, but why? The military option is a threat; if the threat is carried out it promises widening war and the possibility of failure on the scale of disaster. Why does a policy of courting disaster have to remain on the table?
Nothing in the modern affairs of nations has been more exhaustively analyzed and debated than the utility and dangers of nuclear weapons, and yet the dangers posed by Iran with a bomb have been barely discussed. They are treated as a given. The core idea is that Iran cannot be trusted because the country is run by religious fanatics crazy enough to use a bomb if they had one. This is not the first time such arguments have been made. Some Americans, including Air Force generals, believed in the late 1940s that a preemptive war against the Soviet Union was justified by the peril of Moscow with a bomb. Twenty years later the Russians, in their turn, were so alarmed by the prospect of Beijing with a bomb that they quietly proposed to the Americans a joint effort to destroy the Chinese nuclear development effort with a preemptive attack.
The world's experience with nuclear weapons to date has shown that nuclear powers do not use them, and they seriously threaten to use them only to deter attack. Britain, France, Russia, China, Israel, South Africa, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all acquired nuclear weapons in spite of international opposition. None has behaved recklessly with its new power. What changes is that nuclear pow-ers have to be treated differently; in particular they cannot be casually threatened.
More recently the examples of Iraq and Libya have suggested that international sanctions work more effectively than military threats to persuade nations to give up bomb programs. As is now well known, American fears of Saddam Hussein with a bomb were unfounded. In early 2003, when the US was loudly insisting that only military invasion and regime change could keep Saddam from acquiring a bomb, the United Nations arms inspector Hans Blix said that whether the danger was real or imaginary could be determined by international weapons inspectors in a matter of months. In the event, the Americans themselves, after a year spent ransacking Iraq for evidence of nuclear weapons activity, announced that Saddam's bomb program had been completely shut down a dozen years previously, in 1991. But despite the success of sanctions against Iraq the United States continues to speak as if only threats or actual attack might block an Iranian bomb.
Official reluctance to spell out why Tehran more than other nations cannot be trusted with a bomb has been matched by reluctance to consider why Tehran might want one in the first place. Iran's nuclear weapons program began under the Shah in the 1970s, sputtered for a time after the revolution, and was then revived after the Persian Gulf war in 1991 which evicted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. The Iranian government flatly denies that it is pursuing nuclear weapons, hell-bent or otherwise. Recently the CIA released its own conclusion that Tehran had abandoned any formal R&D effort to design nuclear weapons and fit them to a delivery system.
But whether or not that is or remains true is in one sense irrelevant; the hard part—say 90 percent of the challenge—in manufacturing nuclear weapons is making fissionable material, and in that Iran appears to be well on its way to success with its new, more efficient design of centrifuges for uranium enrichment. So set aside the question of whether Iran wants an enrichment program to make bomb-grade material or only for the production of electricity; if they get either, they could get both. It is a relatively—stress relatively—simple task to turn highly enriched uranium into a weapon. Iran with highly enriched uranium poses almost the same threat as Iran with a bomb. What we ought to ask, then, is why Iran wants its own production capacity for making the stuff of bombs?
What US officials say, when they say anything at all, is that Tehran wants a bomb in order to dominate the Persian Gulf region and to threaten its neighbors, especially Israel. This is a misreading of how other nuclear powers have made use of their weapons. As tools of coercive diplomacy nuclear weapons are almost entirely useless, but they are extremely effective in blocking large-scale or regime-threatening attack. There is no evidence that Iran has a different motive, and plenty of reason for Iran to fear that attack is a real possibility.
Indeed, the Bush administration, far from trying to quiet Iran's fears, makes a point of confirming them every few months. These threats are not limited to words, but are supported with practical steps—the presence of large American armies just across Iran's borders in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the dispatch of the world's largest fleet of warships to cruise along Iran's Persian Gulf coastline. The Bush administration further accuses Iran of "meddling" in the affairs of its neighbors, of supplying weapons and training to Iraqis who kill Americans, and of being the world's principal state sponsor of terrorism. Fear that Saddam Hussein might provide nuclear weapons to terrorist groups was the leading American justification for the invasion of Iraq, and the same concern is often cited about Iran.
The seriousness of American threats is confirmed by the fact that no significant national leader in the United States has ever disowned or objected to them in clear, vigorous, principled language. It is as if the whole country listens to the administration's threats with breath held, wondering if Bush and Cheney really mean to do as they say, and in effect leaving the decision entirely to them. Americans may count on the President to think twice, but why would leaders in Tehran, responsible for the lives of 70 million citizens, want to depend on President Bush's restraint for their survival and safety? Bush has a history. On his own authority, without the sanction of any international body, he attacked Iraq five years ago and precipitated a bloody chain of events that shows no sign of ending. It would be natural, indeed inevitable, for any government in Tehran, seeing what has happened next door, to ask what could save Iran from a similar fate. An answer is not far to seek: nuclear weapons with a reliable delivery system could do that.
The continuing military occupation of Iraq, the expansion of military efforts in Afghanistan, the desire to carry the war against the Taliban across the border into Pakistan, and the resort to military threats to force the government of Iran to give up its nuclear programs all represent examples of what has become the American approach during the Bush years to getting what it wants in the world—relying on military force to resolve political problems. How else are we to explain two wars and the threat of a third? Sometime during the Clinton years a faction of the Republican Party in exile lost patience with the accepted way of conducting foreign relations. Talking, negotiating, proposing alternatives, cajoling allies with economic and military aid, taking conflicts to the United Nations, convening conferences, sitting on commissions and issuing, repeating, and underlining warnings—in short, all the other "options on the table"—came to be seen in certain Republican circles as time-wasting, irresolute, and futile—a pattern of weakness that invites defiance.
The argument of the neoconservatives, stated in its nakedest form at the outset of the Bush administration, notes that the United States is the world's sole great power. We have a military capability that dwarfs all others. We need not defer to weak and corrupt governments that treat us with disdain.
The change was already underway when the shock of the attacks on September 11 created something like a Dirty Harry moment—an abrupt end to patience, a breaking with civility, a rejection of pettifogging legality, a brushing aside of caution in the use of force, all those Aunt Sally hesitations which Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld intended to root out as part of the Pentagon's "old think." The goal was a kind of internal liberation of the national psyche—comfort with the word "imperial," unashamed acceptance of power, eagerness to put "boots on the ground," plain talk with anybody who stood in our way, prompt action if they did not step aside. Preemption was the dominant word in the new national security strat-egy issued in 2002. At West Point that spring the President said, "America will not wait to be attacked again. We will confront emerging threats before they fully materialize." The idea was in effect to clean up Dodge—to stop fooling around, remove defiant regimes, and make the Middle East safe for America and its friends.
Rarely has a theory been quashed by reality more abruptly. Iraq, as we discovered after the capture of Baghdad, had in fact posed no threat whatever, and its occupation brought a host of expensive and intractable new problems that continue to sap American strength. In Afghanistan as well, little went as planned. The Taliban was removed, not destroyed, and gradually it has returned. Pakistan, once a chief American ally in the region, now resists American pressure to pursue the Taliban into Pakistan's tribal areas. In Iraq, most American initiatives during five years of war have had the effect of strengthening the Shiite friends and allies of Iran. The government in Baghdad confers often with Iran, and the influence of Iran is heavily felt in Lebanon and Gaza. Iran dismisses all threats aimed at its nuclear programs as if the United States and Israel were powerless.
With its time in power rapidly running out, the Bush administration is mired in two frustrating wars, stretched thin militarily, living on borrowed money, and exhausted intellectually. It would be hard to name a time when the United States faced a wider range of political problems, or had better reasons to avoid additional military entanglements. Bush and Cheney concede nothing of the kind, but promise "serious consequences" for continued Iranian defiance. It is a strange fact that the locus of opposition to attack on Iran is not in Congress but in the Pentagon, where an insider told the reporter Seymour Hersh two years ago, "There is a war about the war going on inside the building." When the administration planned to add a third aircraft carrier group to the Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf, the move was blocked by the then newly promoted chief of Central Command, Admiral William Fallon, who told friends that war with Iran "isn't going to happen on my watch."
Until his resignation in March, Fallon often contradicted and undermined the tough talk of the administration, speaking dismissively about the prospects of war with Iran. "Another war is just not where we want to go," he told the Financial Times. "This constant drumbeat of conflict...is not helpful and not useful," he said to al-Jazeera television. In recent months Fallon also traveled in Afghanistan and spoke at candid length with the military writer Thomas Barnett, who was working on an article for Esquire. When the article was ready to go to the printer Fallon invited an Esquire photographer to Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, to take his picture. War with Iran, yes or no, Barnett wrote, would "all come down to one man"—Fallon. The White House was not happy with Fallon's interference, Barnett reported. Washington rumor said Fallon's time was short. His removal, Barnett predicted, "may well mean that the president and vice-president intend to take military action against Iran before the end of this year...." A week after Barnett's piece appeared in Esquire, Gates announced that Fallon was retiring at his own request. The Esquire article had been the talk of the Pentagon nonstop; leaked stories were coming from all directions. Fallon wasn't just on his way out; Gates said he would be gone by the end of the month.
Fallon's open and outspoken resistance to the idea of war with Iran represents something new and extraordinary—maybe. It is too early to be sure. But beneath the surface of recent statements by Fallon, Gates, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, something large seems to be swelling up—resistance by the Pentagon to passive acceptance of a wider war. To see the shape of the conflict one must first accept the seriousness of both parties—the administration in making its threats to stop Iran's nuclear program, and Pentagon officials when they say a wider war would be practically difficult and strategically unnecessary.
This showdown—if it is truly taking place—has been a long time coming. Ten years ago a young Army major, H.R. McMaster, published a history of American escalation of the war in Vietnam, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam. McMaster's argument, stripped to its core, was that against their own best judgment the joint chiefs passively acquiesced to White House pressure to expand the war. Johnson, with his eye on a second term, did not want to be the first American president to lose a war, and the joint chiefs did not want to run their careers aground. Despite the harshness of McMaster's conclusion his book was widely read in the Pentagon and made a deep impression on a generation of rising officers, many of them now of flag rank and in positions of responsibility.[*]
When a reporter asked Gates if Fallon's departure "means we're going to war with Iran," the secretary called the idea "ridiculous." But he didn't leave it at that. He began his own campaign of public remarks stressing the importance of a peaceful resolution of the challenge posed by Iran's nuclear program. As he had at West Point, Gates held fast to the administration's basic stance—"all options are on the table"—but he drained the pugnacity of the claim with Fallon-like flourishes. "We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage...and then sit down and talk with them," Gates said in mid-May. "There is no doubt that... we would be very hard-pressed to fight another major conventional war right now." Admiral Mullen sounded a similar note when he recently told a television journalist in Israel that he was "very hopeful" that the US could avoid a conflict with Iran, which he evaluated as "a very significant challenge." Mullen added:
I certainly share the concern about Iran and about the leadership, and I think it is very important that we increase as much as possible the financial pressure, the diplomatic pressure, the political pressure, and at the same time keep all the military options on the table.
Develop some leverage...sit down and talk...financial pressure, diplomatic pressure, political pressure....
These are unfamiliar words coming from the Bush administration. They roughly echo the approach of Barack Obama, who has said he would "talk" to the leaders of Iran, meaning that he would commence discussion of serious issues without first demanding con-cessions. The Bush administration rejects this idea. A few years back, at a moment when Iran still had a relatively moderate president and was prepared to offer major concessions to the US, it refused to talk to Iran at all; now it is prepared to talk, but only after Iran has suspended its uranium enrichment program. The words are slightly altered, but the stance remains intransigent.
In his recent speech to the Israeli Knesset, Bush, without naming Obama, denounced his approach as "this foolish delusion," discredited in the 1930s when the British thought they could "talk" to Hitler. In the world according to the neoconservatives no failing of character is more craven or pusillanimous than a willingness to talk to fascists, Nazis, or dictators. Bush plunged the rhetorical knife in deep: "We have an obligation to call this what it is— the false comfort of appeasement."
Bush and Cheney prefer the language of flat command that implies "or else." A long list might be appended here of their frequent warnings that the United States does not trust Iran with the knowledge to enrich bomb-grade uranium and will not tolerate an Iranian bomb. Many of these warnings have been issued in the last month or two and we may expect a continuing barrage until their final days in office. The President's frustration is plainly evident: Saddam Hussein may be gone, but Iran remains defiant, and more powerful than ever. The President's male pride seems to have been aroused; he said he was going to solve the Iranian problem and he doesn't want to back down. The intensity of Bush's desire to crush this final opponent is evident in his words and his body language, but does he retain the power to carry out his threats?
From one point of view the answer seems obvious. It is too late. With the exception only of the neoconservative faithful, every close observer of the American–Iranian standoff says that the administration's threats are empty, that the United States does not have the military resources, or the political support at home, or the agreement of allies abroad, to carry out a full-scale air attack on Iran's nuclear infrastructure, much less to invade and occupy the country. Two of the skeptics, Gates and Mullen, are running the Pentagon, and their cautioning remarks, only a step this side of insubordination, would seem to make attack impossible. But if attack is impossible, why does Bush talk himself into an ever-tighter corner by continuing to issue threats? Does he believe Iran will cave? Are these the only words he thinks people will still listen to? Is he hoping to tie the hands of the next president? Or is he preparing to summon the power of his office to carry out the last option on the table? One hardly knows whether to take the question seriously. It seems alarmist and overexcited even to pose it when the realities are so clear. But it is impossible to be sure—Bush has a history.
In an article I wrote in these pages in March 2003, I took up a concern that has preoccupied me ever since—the danger that the war would spread to engulf the region. That article concludes:
But a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein won't by itself provide a "decision outcome" in the present case because there are two rogue states with programs to build nuclear weapons in the Middle East. The theory says that both have to go, and if President Bush can be taken at his word, he thinks the same thing. To me, the implication seems clear: Iraq first, Iran next.
We're not free of this danger yet.
—June 19, 2008
Notes
[*] McMaster, a 1984 graduate of West Point, went on to distinguish himself in Iraq, where he later served as an adviser to the American commander there, General David Petraeus. His name was recently added by Petraeus to an official Army list of nominees for promotion to brigadier general. McMaster is also one of the Army's leading theorists of counterinsurgency.
Volume 55, Number 12 · July 17, 2008
Iran: The Threat
By Thomas Powers
At a moment of serious challenge, battered by two wars, ballooning debt, and a faltering economy, the United States appears to have lost its capacity to think clearly. Consider what passes for national discussion on the matter of Iran. The open question is whether the United States should or will attack Iran if it continues to reject American demands to give up uranium enrichment. Ignore for the moment whether the United States has any legal or moral justification for attacking Iran. Set aside the question whether Iran, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently claimed in a speech at West Point, "is hellbent on acquiring nuclear weapons." Focus instead on purely practical questions. By any standards Iran is a tough nut to crack: it is nearly three times the size of Texas, with a population of 70 million and a big income from oil which the world cannot afford to lose. Iran is believed to have the ability to block the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf through which much of the world's oil must pass on its way to market.
Keep in mind that the rising price of oil already threatens the world's economy. Iran also has a large army and deep ties to the population of Shiite coreligionists next door in Iraq. The American military already has its hands full with a hard-to-manage war in Iraq, and is proposing to send additional combat brigades to deal with a growing insurgency in Afghanistan. And yet with all these sound reasons for avoiding war with Iran, the United States for five years has repeatedly threatened it with military attack. These threats have lately acquired a new edge.
President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are the primary authors of these threats, but others join them in proclaiming that "all options" must remain "on the table." The option they wish to emphasize is the option of military attack. The presidential candidates in the middle of this campaign year agree that Iran is a major security threat to the United States. Senator Hillary Clinton in the last days of April threatened to "totally obliterate" Iran—presumably with nuclear weapons—if it attacked Israel. Senator Barack Obama dismissed Clinton's threat as "bluster" in the familiar Bush style but agrees that Iran cannot be permitted to build nuclear weapons, and he too insists that a US attack on Iran is one of the options which must remain "on the table." The presumptive Republican candidate, John McCain, takes a position as unyielding as the President's: Iran must abandon nuclear enrichment, stop "meddling" in Iraq with support for Shiite militias, and stop its sponsorship of "terrorism" carried out by Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Any of these threatening activities, in McCain's view, might justify a showdown with Iran.
Sometimes the President's threats are chillingly explicit. In April the administration released details of the intelligence that explained an Israeli air strike last September on a large, blocklike building in which Syria, with the help of North Korea, had allegedly been building a nuclear reactor. Releasing this information, Bush said in April, was Washington's way of "sending a message to Iran and the world for that matter about just how destabilizing nuclear proliferation would be in the Middle East."
The message to Iran was clear—stop or run the risk of a similar attack. Left ambiguous was the question of attack by whom—Israel, which proved itself willing with the attack in Syria, or the United States, which has more planes and missiles at its command? The kind of attack Iran might expect has been spelled out in news stories over the last few years. Some Iranian nuclear research sites are buried as much as seventy meters underground, and there are scores, perhaps hundreds of sites in all, so any serious American effort to destroy Iranian nuclear programs would require intense and numerous strikes by US bombers and missiles. For a time some administration officials lobbied to include the use of nuclear weapons in the strike options for attacking Iran's protected nuclear targets, but vigorous opposition from the Joint Chiefs of Staff scotched that possibility two years ago.
Yet even conventional bombing attacks are acts of war; unprovoked they are acts of aggression. Iran has said it would respond to an attack but without specifying how. Possible counterattacks might target shipping in the Persian Gulf, or US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, or something else the US has not anticipated. Such an exchange could not long be confined to tit for tat. An all-out American bombing program might force Iran to capitulate, or it might not. The next step would be invasion, destruction of Iran's conventional army, occupation of Iran's capital, and change of Iran's regime, which has long been an openly declared policy objective of the United States.
Is there anyone outside the US government who thinks it makes sense to invite trouble on this scale? Even some insiders are of two minds. "Another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need," Gates said in his speech at West Point, "and, in fact, I believe it would be disastrous on a number of levels. But the military option must be kept on the table."
Forgive me, but why? The military option is a threat; if the threat is carried out it promises widening war and the possibility of failure on the scale of disaster. Why does a policy of courting disaster have to remain on the table?
Nothing in the modern affairs of nations has been more exhaustively analyzed and debated than the utility and dangers of nuclear weapons, and yet the dangers posed by Iran with a bomb have been barely discussed. They are treated as a given. The core idea is that Iran cannot be trusted because the country is run by religious fanatics crazy enough to use a bomb if they had one. This is not the first time such arguments have been made. Some Americans, including Air Force generals, believed in the late 1940s that a preemptive war against the Soviet Union was justified by the peril of Moscow with a bomb. Twenty years later the Russians, in their turn, were so alarmed by the prospect of Beijing with a bomb that they quietly proposed to the Americans a joint effort to destroy the Chinese nuclear development effort with a preemptive attack.
The world's experience with nuclear weapons to date has shown that nuclear powers do not use them, and they seriously threaten to use them only to deter attack. Britain, France, Russia, China, Israel, South Africa, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all acquired nuclear weapons in spite of international opposition. None has behaved recklessly with its new power. What changes is that nuclear pow-ers have to be treated differently; in particular they cannot be casually threatened.
More recently the examples of Iraq and Libya have suggested that international sanctions work more effectively than military threats to persuade nations to give up bomb programs. As is now well known, American fears of Saddam Hussein with a bomb were unfounded. In early 2003, when the US was loudly insisting that only military invasion and regime change could keep Saddam from acquiring a bomb, the United Nations arms inspector Hans Blix said that whether the danger was real or imaginary could be determined by international weapons inspectors in a matter of months. In the event, the Americans themselves, after a year spent ransacking Iraq for evidence of nuclear weapons activity, announced that Saddam's bomb program had been completely shut down a dozen years previously, in 1991. But despite the success of sanctions against Iraq the United States continues to speak as if only threats or actual attack might block an Iranian bomb.
Official reluctance to spell out why Tehran more than other nations cannot be trusted with a bomb has been matched by reluctance to consider why Tehran might want one in the first place. Iran's nuclear weapons program began under the Shah in the 1970s, sputtered for a time after the revolution, and was then revived after the Persian Gulf war in 1991 which evicted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. The Iranian government flatly denies that it is pursuing nuclear weapons, hell-bent or otherwise. Recently the CIA released its own conclusion that Tehran had abandoned any formal R&D effort to design nuclear weapons and fit them to a delivery system.
But whether or not that is or remains true is in one sense irrelevant; the hard part—say 90 percent of the challenge—in manufacturing nuclear weapons is making fissionable material, and in that Iran appears to be well on its way to success with its new, more efficient design of centrifuges for uranium enrichment. So set aside the question of whether Iran wants an enrichment program to make bomb-grade material or only for the production of electricity; if they get either, they could get both. It is a relatively—stress relatively—simple task to turn highly enriched uranium into a weapon. Iran with highly enriched uranium poses almost the same threat as Iran with a bomb. What we ought to ask, then, is why Iran wants its own production capacity for making the stuff of bombs?
What US officials say, when they say anything at all, is that Tehran wants a bomb in order to dominate the Persian Gulf region and to threaten its neighbors, especially Israel. This is a misreading of how other nuclear powers have made use of their weapons. As tools of coercive diplomacy nuclear weapons are almost entirely useless, but they are extremely effective in blocking large-scale or regime-threatening attack. There is no evidence that Iran has a different motive, and plenty of reason for Iran to fear that attack is a real possibility.
Indeed, the Bush administration, far from trying to quiet Iran's fears, makes a point of confirming them every few months. These threats are not limited to words, but are supported with practical steps—the presence of large American armies just across Iran's borders in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the dispatch of the world's largest fleet of warships to cruise along Iran's Persian Gulf coastline. The Bush administration further accuses Iran of "meddling" in the affairs of its neighbors, of supplying weapons and training to Iraqis who kill Americans, and of being the world's principal state sponsor of terrorism. Fear that Saddam Hussein might provide nuclear weapons to terrorist groups was the leading American justification for the invasion of Iraq, and the same concern is often cited about Iran.
The seriousness of American threats is confirmed by the fact that no significant national leader in the United States has ever disowned or objected to them in clear, vigorous, principled language. It is as if the whole country listens to the administration's threats with breath held, wondering if Bush and Cheney really mean to do as they say, and in effect leaving the decision entirely to them. Americans may count on the President to think twice, but why would leaders in Tehran, responsible for the lives of 70 million citizens, want to depend on President Bush's restraint for their survival and safety? Bush has a history. On his own authority, without the sanction of any international body, he attacked Iraq five years ago and precipitated a bloody chain of events that shows no sign of ending. It would be natural, indeed inevitable, for any government in Tehran, seeing what has happened next door, to ask what could save Iran from a similar fate. An answer is not far to seek: nuclear weapons with a reliable delivery system could do that.
The continuing military occupation of Iraq, the expansion of military efforts in Afghanistan, the desire to carry the war against the Taliban across the border into Pakistan, and the resort to military threats to force the government of Iran to give up its nuclear programs all represent examples of what has become the American approach during the Bush years to getting what it wants in the world—relying on military force to resolve political problems. How else are we to explain two wars and the threat of a third? Sometime during the Clinton years a faction of the Republican Party in exile lost patience with the accepted way of conducting foreign relations. Talking, negotiating, proposing alternatives, cajoling allies with economic and military aid, taking conflicts to the United Nations, convening conferences, sitting on commissions and issuing, repeating, and underlining warnings—in short, all the other "options on the table"—came to be seen in certain Republican circles as time-wasting, irresolute, and futile—a pattern of weakness that invites defiance.
The argument of the neoconservatives, stated in its nakedest form at the outset of the Bush administration, notes that the United States is the world's sole great power. We have a military capability that dwarfs all others. We need not defer to weak and corrupt governments that treat us with disdain.
The change was already underway when the shock of the attacks on September 11 created something like a Dirty Harry moment—an abrupt end to patience, a breaking with civility, a rejection of pettifogging legality, a brushing aside of caution in the use of force, all those Aunt Sally hesitations which Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld intended to root out as part of the Pentagon's "old think." The goal was a kind of internal liberation of the national psyche—comfort with the word "imperial," unashamed acceptance of power, eagerness to put "boots on the ground," plain talk with anybody who stood in our way, prompt action if they did not step aside. Preemption was the dominant word in the new national security strat-egy issued in 2002. At West Point that spring the President said, "America will not wait to be attacked again. We will confront emerging threats before they fully materialize." The idea was in effect to clean up Dodge—to stop fooling around, remove defiant regimes, and make the Middle East safe for America and its friends.
Rarely has a theory been quashed by reality more abruptly. Iraq, as we discovered after the capture of Baghdad, had in fact posed no threat whatever, and its occupation brought a host of expensive and intractable new problems that continue to sap American strength. In Afghanistan as well, little went as planned. The Taliban was removed, not destroyed, and gradually it has returned. Pakistan, once a chief American ally in the region, now resists American pressure to pursue the Taliban into Pakistan's tribal areas. In Iraq, most American initiatives during five years of war have had the effect of strengthening the Shiite friends and allies of Iran. The government in Baghdad confers often with Iran, and the influence of Iran is heavily felt in Lebanon and Gaza. Iran dismisses all threats aimed at its nuclear programs as if the United States and Israel were powerless.
With its time in power rapidly running out, the Bush administration is mired in two frustrating wars, stretched thin militarily, living on borrowed money, and exhausted intellectually. It would be hard to name a time when the United States faced a wider range of political problems, or had better reasons to avoid additional military entanglements. Bush and Cheney concede nothing of the kind, but promise "serious consequences" for continued Iranian defiance. It is a strange fact that the locus of opposition to attack on Iran is not in Congress but in the Pentagon, where an insider told the reporter Seymour Hersh two years ago, "There is a war about the war going on inside the building." When the administration planned to add a third aircraft carrier group to the Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf, the move was blocked by the then newly promoted chief of Central Command, Admiral William Fallon, who told friends that war with Iran "isn't going to happen on my watch."
Until his resignation in March, Fallon often contradicted and undermined the tough talk of the administration, speaking dismissively about the prospects of war with Iran. "Another war is just not where we want to go," he told the Financial Times. "This constant drumbeat of conflict...is not helpful and not useful," he said to al-Jazeera television. In recent months Fallon also traveled in Afghanistan and spoke at candid length with the military writer Thomas Barnett, who was working on an article for Esquire. When the article was ready to go to the printer Fallon invited an Esquire photographer to Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, to take his picture. War with Iran, yes or no, Barnett wrote, would "all come down to one man"—Fallon. The White House was not happy with Fallon's interference, Barnett reported. Washington rumor said Fallon's time was short. His removal, Barnett predicted, "may well mean that the president and vice-president intend to take military action against Iran before the end of this year...." A week after Barnett's piece appeared in Esquire, Gates announced that Fallon was retiring at his own request. The Esquire article had been the talk of the Pentagon nonstop; leaked stories were coming from all directions. Fallon wasn't just on his way out; Gates said he would be gone by the end of the month.
Fallon's open and outspoken resistance to the idea of war with Iran represents something new and extraordinary—maybe. It is too early to be sure. But beneath the surface of recent statements by Fallon, Gates, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, something large seems to be swelling up—resistance by the Pentagon to passive acceptance of a wider war. To see the shape of the conflict one must first accept the seriousness of both parties—the administration in making its threats to stop Iran's nuclear program, and Pentagon officials when they say a wider war would be practically difficult and strategically unnecessary.
This showdown—if it is truly taking place—has been a long time coming. Ten years ago a young Army major, H.R. McMaster, published a history of American escalation of the war in Vietnam, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam. McMaster's argument, stripped to its core, was that against their own best judgment the joint chiefs passively acquiesced to White House pressure to expand the war. Johnson, with his eye on a second term, did not want to be the first American president to lose a war, and the joint chiefs did not want to run their careers aground. Despite the harshness of McMaster's conclusion his book was widely read in the Pentagon and made a deep impression on a generation of rising officers, many of them now of flag rank and in positions of responsibility.[*]
When a reporter asked Gates if Fallon's departure "means we're going to war with Iran," the secretary called the idea "ridiculous." But he didn't leave it at that. He began his own campaign of public remarks stressing the importance of a peaceful resolution of the challenge posed by Iran's nuclear program. As he had at West Point, Gates held fast to the administration's basic stance—"all options are on the table"—but he drained the pugnacity of the claim with Fallon-like flourishes. "We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage...and then sit down and talk with them," Gates said in mid-May. "There is no doubt that... we would be very hard-pressed to fight another major conventional war right now." Admiral Mullen sounded a similar note when he recently told a television journalist in Israel that he was "very hopeful" that the US could avoid a conflict with Iran, which he evaluated as "a very significant challenge." Mullen added:
I certainly share the concern about Iran and about the leadership, and I think it is very important that we increase as much as possible the financial pressure, the diplomatic pressure, the political pressure, and at the same time keep all the military options on the table.
Develop some leverage...sit down and talk...financial pressure, diplomatic pressure, political pressure....
These are unfamiliar words coming from the Bush administration. They roughly echo the approach of Barack Obama, who has said he would "talk" to the leaders of Iran, meaning that he would commence discussion of serious issues without first demanding con-cessions. The Bush administration rejects this idea. A few years back, at a moment when Iran still had a relatively moderate president and was prepared to offer major concessions to the US, it refused to talk to Iran at all; now it is prepared to talk, but only after Iran has suspended its uranium enrichment program. The words are slightly altered, but the stance remains intransigent.
In his recent speech to the Israeli Knesset, Bush, without naming Obama, denounced his approach as "this foolish delusion," discredited in the 1930s when the British thought they could "talk" to Hitler. In the world according to the neoconservatives no failing of character is more craven or pusillanimous than a willingness to talk to fascists, Nazis, or dictators. Bush plunged the rhetorical knife in deep: "We have an obligation to call this what it is— the false comfort of appeasement."
Bush and Cheney prefer the language of flat command that implies "or else." A long list might be appended here of their frequent warnings that the United States does not trust Iran with the knowledge to enrich bomb-grade uranium and will not tolerate an Iranian bomb. Many of these warnings have been issued in the last month or two and we may expect a continuing barrage until their final days in office. The President's frustration is plainly evident: Saddam Hussein may be gone, but Iran remains defiant, and more powerful than ever. The President's male pride seems to have been aroused; he said he was going to solve the Iranian problem and he doesn't want to back down. The intensity of Bush's desire to crush this final opponent is evident in his words and his body language, but does he retain the power to carry out his threats?
From one point of view the answer seems obvious. It is too late. With the exception only of the neoconservative faithful, every close observer of the American–Iranian standoff says that the administration's threats are empty, that the United States does not have the military resources, or the political support at home, or the agreement of allies abroad, to carry out a full-scale air attack on Iran's nuclear infrastructure, much less to invade and occupy the country. Two of the skeptics, Gates and Mullen, are running the Pentagon, and their cautioning remarks, only a step this side of insubordination, would seem to make attack impossible. But if attack is impossible, why does Bush talk himself into an ever-tighter corner by continuing to issue threats? Does he believe Iran will cave? Are these the only words he thinks people will still listen to? Is he hoping to tie the hands of the next president? Or is he preparing to summon the power of his office to carry out the last option on the table? One hardly knows whether to take the question seriously. It seems alarmist and overexcited even to pose it when the realities are so clear. But it is impossible to be sure—Bush has a history.
In an article I wrote in these pages in March 2003, I took up a concern that has preoccupied me ever since—the danger that the war would spread to engulf the region. That article concludes:
But a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein won't by itself provide a "decision outcome" in the present case because there are two rogue states with programs to build nuclear weapons in the Middle East. The theory says that both have to go, and if President Bush can be taken at his word, he thinks the same thing. To me, the implication seems clear: Iraq first, Iran next.
We're not free of this danger yet.
—June 19, 2008
Notes
[*] McMaster, a 1984 graduate of West Point, went on to distinguish himself in Iraq, where he later served as an adviser to the American commander there, General David Petraeus. His name was recently added by Petraeus to an official Army list of nominees for promotion to brigadier general. McMaster is also one of the Army's leading theorists of counterinsurgency.
Prisons of war, furnaces of radicalism: The global detention policy of the United States and its allies is incubating the insurgents of the future.
OPEN DEMOCRACY
6/26/08
Prisons of war, furnaces of radicalism: The global detention policy of the United States and its allies is incubating the insurgents of the future.
Paul Rogers
A long-term consequence of the Iraq war is the production of a new generation of young paramilitaries with combat experience in urban environments against the world's best equipped army (see "Afghanistan in an amorphous war", 19 June 2008). Even if the conflict in Iraq does ease in the coming months, the experience of combat there will serve well an al-Qaida movement that measures its aims in decades rather than years.
The battalions of paramilitaries in Afghanistan that fought against Soviet conscripts in the 1980s war operated in a largely rural environment, in a conflict very different from its successor. Indeed, in one of the many "blowback" effects of the "war on terror", the methods and technologies that have been learned in Iraq have now been exported back to Afghanistan. The use of roadside-bombs, for example, has escalated alarmingly in the first half of 2008, demonstrating the skills of Taliban militias as they develop their guerrilla tactics.
The jail blowback
If the combat experience gained in Iraq has been one aid to the paramilitary movements, another has been the unexpected effect of the holding by the United States and its allies of large numbers of people without trial, sometimes for years on end. The overall figures are difficult to assess, although there were indications in 2007 that at least 120,000 people have been detained since 9/11. The great majority of these have been in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the incarcerated also include some thousands of people across the middle east and south Asia, and hundreds in Europe.
Some details surface from time to time. It is known, for example, that the United States forces in Afghanistan are building a new prison at Bagram capable of housing 600 long-term and up to 1,100 short-term prisoners (see "A world beyond control", 22 May 2008). This is in addition to, and outside the control of, the Afghan prison system. The numbers are far higher in Iraq, where the US forces are currently detaining 21,000 Iraqis - a number exceeded by thousands more held in Iraqi prisons. The American-held number represents a decrease of 4,000 from mid-2007, though US contractors are in the process of building new prisons in the country, such as one in Taji near Baghdad (see Walter Pincus, "U.S. Official Cites 'Hardening' Of Iraqi Detainees", Washington Post, 10 June 2008).
In addition, there is a constant throughput of detainees as new people are imprisoned and others are released. At present, thirty people are detained and imprisoned by US forces every day, while fifty are released. This explains the net drop in overall numbers but also means that, at current rates, about 10,000 more Iraqis experience detention in the US system each year.
US sources report that their own personnel are getting more efficient at determining which detainees are the most radical and will be kept in prison for long periods of time. They estimate that there are approximately 8,000 detainees who cannot be proved to have committed crimes under the Iraqi judicial system and cannot therefore be handed over to the Iraqi for trial. These are people, though, who are deemed to pose such serious security threats that they must be incarcerate even without judicial process.
What this means is that there are many thousands of "hard-core" detainees in the prisons who are interacting repeatedly with much greater numbers coming through the system. It has to be remembered that all of these people are being detained without trial by what is seen as a foreign occupying force. The potential for radicalisation within prison, let alone the impact on their friends and families, is therefore considerable.
In a related issue, there has been recurrent concern within the British prison system that convicted Muslim prisoners will do their best to proselytise fellow Muslim convicts in prison for non-political offences (see Jamie Doward, "Extremists train young convicts for terror plots", Observer, 15 July 2007). The chief prisons inspector, Anne Owers, drew attention to this issue in supporting the work of Muslim chaplains while highlighting a lack of training for prison officers (see Dominic Casciani, "Warning over jail radicalisation", BBC News, 14 April 2008).
The enemy effect
The worries reflected in the British reports are shared elsewhere. The most striking example comes from the most closely guarded and controversial detention centre - Guantánamo in Cuba (see David Rose, "Guantánamo: America's war on human rights
", 23 September 2004). A remarkable report by one of the best informed of US journalists, Tom Lasseter of McClatchy Newspapers, gives some indication of the extent of the problem (see Tom Lasseter, "How Guantánamo became a terror training ground", Miami Herald, 17 June 2008).
He starts with an example that is worth quoting in full:
"Mohammed Naim Farouq was a thug in the lawless Zormat district of eastern Afghanistan. He ran a kidnapping and extortion racket, and he controlled his turf with a band of gunmen who rode around in trucks with AK-47 rifles."
"US troops detained him in 2002, although he had no clear ties to the Taliban or al-Qaida. By the time Farouq was released from the Guantánamo Bay detention camp the following year, however - after more than twelve months of what he described as abuse and humiliation at the hands of American soldiers - he'd made connections to high-level militants."
"In fact, he had become a Taliban leader. When the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency released a stack of 20 'most wanted' playing cards in 2006 identifying militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan - with Osama bin Laden at the top - Farouq was 16 cards into the deck."
The detention
In a detailed survey by the McClatchy newspaper group, sixty-six former Guantánamo detainees were interviewed and gave a picture of abuse and mistreatment of prisoners that served to build up considerable anger, resentment and above all, a pervasive anti-American mood. What also became clear, both from former detainees and some informal contacts in the US defence department, was that convinced Islamists were adept at using the prison system and the feelings of ordinary detainees to build up a group of potential recruits to their cause.
Some of the techniques were sophisticated, even if they were exploiting the kinds of structures and lines of communication that exist in most prisons. After the original Camp X-ray at Guantánamo had been replaced by Camp Delta, the detention-centre was organised into a series of units that varied in the severity of treatment depending on the perceived security threats from detainees. Those considered most dangerous and difficult were assigned to the most secure units whereas others, including many prisoners with no jihadist connections, were assigned to easier units.
However, even middle-ranking al-Qaida supporters were sufficiently experienced to avoid drawing attention to themselves, so that they could end up in an "easy" unit where they could concentrate on proselytising other inmates. As Lasseter puts it: "An angry cab driver from Kabul... may have been more likely to attack a guard and end up in Camp Three [high security] than an al Qaeda militant was." Furthermore, senior al-Qaida leaders could order middle-level supporters to cause trouble so that they would end up in a high security unit, enabling them to deliver messages as part of an effective communications network.
Lasseter's report is primarily significant because it is describing circumstances in a particularly high-security detention centre that is very well resourced and has a substantial staff of guards and detention specialists. In Iraq, the US military are dealing with tens of thousands of detainees, the great majority of whom do not turn out to be dangerous insurgents or paramilitary radicals. If even Guantánamo, with all its security and organisation, can be a paramilitary recruiting-station, then much larger and more loosely organised prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan may well be far more potent.
What this suggests, yet once more, is that yet another part of America's "war on terror" - the detention of over 120,000 people - stands to be deeply counterproductive. The end results may not become clear for years or even decades but, once again, the United States is inadvertently doing al-Qaida's job for it.
6/26/08
Prisons of war, furnaces of radicalism: The global detention policy of the United States and its allies is incubating the insurgents of the future.
Paul Rogers
A long-term consequence of the Iraq war is the production of a new generation of young paramilitaries with combat experience in urban environments against the world's best equipped army (see "Afghanistan in an amorphous war", 19 June 2008). Even if the conflict in Iraq does ease in the coming months, the experience of combat there will serve well an al-Qaida movement that measures its aims in decades rather than years.
The battalions of paramilitaries in Afghanistan that fought against Soviet conscripts in the 1980s war operated in a largely rural environment, in a conflict very different from its successor. Indeed, in one of the many "blowback" effects of the "war on terror", the methods and technologies that have been learned in Iraq have now been exported back to Afghanistan. The use of roadside-bombs, for example, has escalated alarmingly in the first half of 2008, demonstrating the skills of Taliban militias as they develop their guerrilla tactics.
The jail blowback
If the combat experience gained in Iraq has been one aid to the paramilitary movements, another has been the unexpected effect of the holding by the United States and its allies of large numbers of people without trial, sometimes for years on end. The overall figures are difficult to assess, although there were indications in 2007 that at least 120,000 people have been detained since 9/11. The great majority of these have been in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the incarcerated also include some thousands of people across the middle east and south Asia, and hundreds in Europe.
Some details surface from time to time. It is known, for example, that the United States forces in Afghanistan are building a new prison at Bagram capable of housing 600 long-term and up to 1,100 short-term prisoners (see "A world beyond control", 22 May 2008). This is in addition to, and outside the control of, the Afghan prison system. The numbers are far higher in Iraq, where the US forces are currently detaining 21,000 Iraqis - a number exceeded by thousands more held in Iraqi prisons. The American-held number represents a decrease of 4,000 from mid-2007, though US contractors are in the process of building new prisons in the country, such as one in Taji near Baghdad (see Walter Pincus, "U.S. Official Cites 'Hardening' Of Iraqi Detainees", Washington Post, 10 June 2008).
In addition, there is a constant throughput of detainees as new people are imprisoned and others are released. At present, thirty people are detained and imprisoned by US forces every day, while fifty are released. This explains the net drop in overall numbers but also means that, at current rates, about 10,000 more Iraqis experience detention in the US system each year.
US sources report that their own personnel are getting more efficient at determining which detainees are the most radical and will be kept in prison for long periods of time. They estimate that there are approximately 8,000 detainees who cannot be proved to have committed crimes under the Iraqi judicial system and cannot therefore be handed over to the Iraqi for trial. These are people, though, who are deemed to pose such serious security threats that they must be incarcerate even without judicial process.
What this means is that there are many thousands of "hard-core" detainees in the prisons who are interacting repeatedly with much greater numbers coming through the system. It has to be remembered that all of these people are being detained without trial by what is seen as a foreign occupying force. The potential for radicalisation within prison, let alone the impact on their friends and families, is therefore considerable.
In a related issue, there has been recurrent concern within the British prison system that convicted Muslim prisoners will do their best to proselytise fellow Muslim convicts in prison for non-political offences (see Jamie Doward, "Extremists train young convicts for terror plots", Observer, 15 July 2007). The chief prisons inspector, Anne Owers, drew attention to this issue in supporting the work of Muslim chaplains while highlighting a lack of training for prison officers (see Dominic Casciani, "Warning over jail radicalisation", BBC News, 14 April 2008).
The enemy effect
The worries reflected in the British reports are shared elsewhere. The most striking example comes from the most closely guarded and controversial detention centre - Guantánamo in Cuba (see David Rose, "Guantánamo: America's war on human rights
", 23 September 2004). A remarkable report by one of the best informed of US journalists, Tom Lasseter of McClatchy Newspapers, gives some indication of the extent of the problem (see Tom Lasseter, "How Guantánamo became a terror training ground", Miami Herald, 17 June 2008).
He starts with an example that is worth quoting in full:
"Mohammed Naim Farouq was a thug in the lawless Zormat district of eastern Afghanistan. He ran a kidnapping and extortion racket, and he controlled his turf with a band of gunmen who rode around in trucks with AK-47 rifles."
"US troops detained him in 2002, although he had no clear ties to the Taliban or al-Qaida. By the time Farouq was released from the Guantánamo Bay detention camp the following year, however - after more than twelve months of what he described as abuse and humiliation at the hands of American soldiers - he'd made connections to high-level militants."
"In fact, he had become a Taliban leader. When the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency released a stack of 20 'most wanted' playing cards in 2006 identifying militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan - with Osama bin Laden at the top - Farouq was 16 cards into the deck."
The detention
In a detailed survey by the McClatchy newspaper group, sixty-six former Guantánamo detainees were interviewed and gave a picture of abuse and mistreatment of prisoners that served to build up considerable anger, resentment and above all, a pervasive anti-American mood. What also became clear, both from former detainees and some informal contacts in the US defence department, was that convinced Islamists were adept at using the prison system and the feelings of ordinary detainees to build up a group of potential recruits to their cause.
Some of the techniques were sophisticated, even if they were exploiting the kinds of structures and lines of communication that exist in most prisons. After the original Camp X-ray at Guantánamo had been replaced by Camp Delta, the detention-centre was organised into a series of units that varied in the severity of treatment depending on the perceived security threats from detainees. Those considered most dangerous and difficult were assigned to the most secure units whereas others, including many prisoners with no jihadist connections, were assigned to easier units.
However, even middle-ranking al-Qaida supporters were sufficiently experienced to avoid drawing attention to themselves, so that they could end up in an "easy" unit where they could concentrate on proselytising other inmates. As Lasseter puts it: "An angry cab driver from Kabul... may have been more likely to attack a guard and end up in Camp Three [high security] than an al Qaeda militant was." Furthermore, senior al-Qaida leaders could order middle-level supporters to cause trouble so that they would end up in a high security unit, enabling them to deliver messages as part of an effective communications network.
Lasseter's report is primarily significant because it is describing circumstances in a particularly high-security detention centre that is very well resourced and has a substantial staff of guards and detention specialists. In Iraq, the US military are dealing with tens of thousands of detainees, the great majority of whom do not turn out to be dangerous insurgents or paramilitary radicals. If even Guantánamo, with all its security and organisation, can be a paramilitary recruiting-station, then much larger and more loosely organised prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan may well be far more potent.
What this suggests, yet once more, is that yet another part of America's "war on terror" - the detention of over 120,000 people - stands to be deeply counterproductive. The end results may not become clear for years or even decades but, once again, the United States is inadvertently doing al-Qaida's job for it.
Zionism's Dead End
June 28, 2008
Zionism's Dead End
Separation or ethnic cleansing? Israel's encaging of Gaza aims to achieve both
by Jonathan Cook
The following is taken from a talk delivered at the Conference for the Right of Return and the Secular Democratic State, held in Haifa on June 21.
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/cook.php?articleid=13058
Zionism's Dead End
Separation or ethnic cleansing? Israel's encaging of Gaza aims to achieve both
by Jonathan Cook
The following is taken from a talk delivered at the Conference for the Right of Return and the Secular Democratic State, held in Haifa on June 21.
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/cook.php?articleid=13058
A Legacy to Die For
June 28, 2008
A Legacy to Die For
by Gordon Prather
President George W. Bush says it will be about fifty years before historians can properly evaluate his legacy. Of course, that’s not true; some historians already know what Bush’s legacy will likely be: the deliberate destruction of the existing international nuclear-weapons proliferation-prevention regime.
But it is slightly comforting, isn’t it, knowing that God apparently hasn’t told Bush to precipitate Armageddon before leaving office.
According to recent reports by Mainstream Media Persons – who apparently reformat their hard-drives each night before retiring – Bush and Condi-baby are hanging their legacy hopes on the "successful" outcome of the present Six-Party (China, Russia, Japan, United States, South and North Korea) Talks.
Quoth Bush; "If North Korea continues to make the right choices it can repair its relationship with the international community."
And what would amount to North Korea making the "right choices"?
Well, for one thing, those Dirty Commies could "admit" that Bush was right to charge them in the fall of 2002 with having a "secret enriched-uranium based nuclear weapons program."
You see, way back in 1992, North Korea threatened to withdraw from the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, largely because of disputes with the International Atomic Energy Agency about the quantities of materials to be "declared" under the Safeguards Agreement North Korea was required to conclude with the IAEA as a condition of being a no-nuke-yet signatory to the NPT.
That would never do, since at the time President Clinton was hell-bent on building his intended legacy, getting every nation – including India, Pakistan and Israel – to (a) become a NPT signatory and (b) sign and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Hence, the Clinton-negotiated Agreed Framework of 1994, under which North Korea agreed to not only remain a NPT-signatory, but to "freeze" its plutonium-producing reactors and related facilities and to "eventually dismantle these reactors and related facilities," all subject to IAEA oversight, of course.
What did the DPRK get in return?
"The US will provide formal assurances to the DPRK, against the threat or use of nuclear weapons by the U.S."
Furthermore;
"The two sides will move toward full normalization of political and economic relations."
But Bush the Younger became President and almost immediately repudiated Clinton’s efforts to implement the Agreed Framework, telling South Korea’s president and North Korean emissaries he had no intentions of "normalizing" relations with North Korea.
And, in his first State of the Union Address, Bush essentially accused North Korea, Iran and Iraq of having clandestine nuclear weapons programs.
"States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.
"I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
But – at that time – North Korea, Iran and Iraq were NPT signatories and had their "declared" nuclear facilities subject to IAEA periodic inspection. Furthermore, both Iraq and North Korea were subject to additional stringent IAEA surveillance.
Obviously, if Bush was to advance the American Hegemony, to impose regime change on Iraq, Iran and North Korea, on the false pretext they had nukes, the IAEA nuke proliferation-prevention regime had to be discredited or superseded.
So, in October 2002, months after we now know Bush had already decided to launch a war with Iraq, Bush unilaterally abrogated the Agreed Framework, charging that North Korea had a secret enriched-uranium nuke program.
Then, Bush announced his own National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction in late 2002 and developed from it the Proliferation Security Initiative of 2003, whose objective was to create a web of international "counter-proliferation partnerships" to prevent "proliferators" from "carrying out their trade in WMD and missile-related technology."
According to Bonkers Bolton – then Undersecretary of State for Non-Proliferation – the PSI was necessary because "proliferators and those facilitating the procurement of deadly capabilities are circumventing existing laws, treaties and controls against WMD proliferation." Unlike the existing UN nuke proliferation-prevention regime, "PSI is not diverted by disputes about candidacies for director general, agency budgets, agendas for meetings and the like."
By then, of course, North Korea had already withdrawn from the NPT – which rendered their IAEA Safeguards Agreement null and void – and was busily producing weapons-grade plutonium in their Soviet-built 20 MWt research reactor.
Soon the North Koreans tested – at least semi-successfully – a plutonium-based nuclear weapon.
Alarmed that Bush might launch another war of aggression, this time against their neighbor, North Korea, which might once again – as it did in 1950 – involve them, the Chinese and Russians got Bush to participate in the so-called Six-Party talks, with the objective of a negotiated peace settlement for the Korean War.
You see, in 1948, China had officially become the People’s Republic of China. But the United States refused to recognize the PRC; refused to allow them to take China veto-wielding seat on the UN Security Council. In protest, the Soviet Union was boycotting the UN Security Council. Hence, neither the PRC or Soviet Union were able to veto President Truman’s UN "police action."
However, PRC and Soviet "volunteers" were able to force us into a military stalemate in 1953 at the 38th Parallel, which was the North-South boundary agreed to by Truman and Stalin at Potsdam in 1945.
The resulting armistice – which is now in its 55th year – is actually a negotiated ceasefire between the Commander of UN forces and the Commanders of the North Korean and Chinese forces.
The Fifth Round of the Six-Party talks concluded last year with all parties agreeing, inter alia, to what amounts to a "side-bar."
"The DPRK and the U.S. will start bilateral talks aimed at resolving bilateral issues and moving toward full diplomatic relations."
So, are we back to where Clinton had us with the US-DPRK Agreed Framework of 1994?
Well, not quite;
For one thing, North Korea's neighbors – Russia and China – are much more powerful, economically and militarily, than they were in 1994. Furthermore, they will effectively be acting as guarantors that neither North Korea or the U.S. can unilaterally abrogate the associated U.S.-DPRK bilateral agreements.
Finally, Article IV of the Agreed Framework says,
"Both sides will work together to strengthen the international nuclear [weapons] non-proliferation regime."
Now, what was it that Bush’s Legacy will likely be?
Oh, yes – the deliberate destruction of the existing international nuclear-weapons proliferation-prevention regime.
http://www.antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=13060
A Legacy to Die For
by Gordon Prather
President George W. Bush says it will be about fifty years before historians can properly evaluate his legacy. Of course, that’s not true; some historians already know what Bush’s legacy will likely be: the deliberate destruction of the existing international nuclear-weapons proliferation-prevention regime.
But it is slightly comforting, isn’t it, knowing that God apparently hasn’t told Bush to precipitate Armageddon before leaving office.
According to recent reports by Mainstream Media Persons – who apparently reformat their hard-drives each night before retiring – Bush and Condi-baby are hanging their legacy hopes on the "successful" outcome of the present Six-Party (China, Russia, Japan, United States, South and North Korea) Talks.
Quoth Bush; "If North Korea continues to make the right choices it can repair its relationship with the international community."
And what would amount to North Korea making the "right choices"?
Well, for one thing, those Dirty Commies could "admit" that Bush was right to charge them in the fall of 2002 with having a "secret enriched-uranium based nuclear weapons program."
You see, way back in 1992, North Korea threatened to withdraw from the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, largely because of disputes with the International Atomic Energy Agency about the quantities of materials to be "declared" under the Safeguards Agreement North Korea was required to conclude with the IAEA as a condition of being a no-nuke-yet signatory to the NPT.
That would never do, since at the time President Clinton was hell-bent on building his intended legacy, getting every nation – including India, Pakistan and Israel – to (a) become a NPT signatory and (b) sign and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Hence, the Clinton-negotiated Agreed Framework of 1994, under which North Korea agreed to not only remain a NPT-signatory, but to "freeze" its plutonium-producing reactors and related facilities and to "eventually dismantle these reactors and related facilities," all subject to IAEA oversight, of course.
What did the DPRK get in return?
"The US will provide formal assurances to the DPRK, against the threat or use of nuclear weapons by the U.S."
Furthermore;
"The two sides will move toward full normalization of political and economic relations."
But Bush the Younger became President and almost immediately repudiated Clinton’s efforts to implement the Agreed Framework, telling South Korea’s president and North Korean emissaries he had no intentions of "normalizing" relations with North Korea.
And, in his first State of the Union Address, Bush essentially accused North Korea, Iran and Iraq of having clandestine nuclear weapons programs.
"States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.
"I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
But – at that time – North Korea, Iran and Iraq were NPT signatories and had their "declared" nuclear facilities subject to IAEA periodic inspection. Furthermore, both Iraq and North Korea were subject to additional stringent IAEA surveillance.
Obviously, if Bush was to advance the American Hegemony, to impose regime change on Iraq, Iran and North Korea, on the false pretext they had nukes, the IAEA nuke proliferation-prevention regime had to be discredited or superseded.
So, in October 2002, months after we now know Bush had already decided to launch a war with Iraq, Bush unilaterally abrogated the Agreed Framework, charging that North Korea had a secret enriched-uranium nuke program.
Then, Bush announced his own National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction in late 2002 and developed from it the Proliferation Security Initiative of 2003, whose objective was to create a web of international "counter-proliferation partnerships" to prevent "proliferators" from "carrying out their trade in WMD and missile-related technology."
According to Bonkers Bolton – then Undersecretary of State for Non-Proliferation – the PSI was necessary because "proliferators and those facilitating the procurement of deadly capabilities are circumventing existing laws, treaties and controls against WMD proliferation." Unlike the existing UN nuke proliferation-prevention regime, "PSI is not diverted by disputes about candidacies for director general, agency budgets, agendas for meetings and the like."
By then, of course, North Korea had already withdrawn from the NPT – which rendered their IAEA Safeguards Agreement null and void – and was busily producing weapons-grade plutonium in their Soviet-built 20 MWt research reactor.
Soon the North Koreans tested – at least semi-successfully – a plutonium-based nuclear weapon.
Alarmed that Bush might launch another war of aggression, this time against their neighbor, North Korea, which might once again – as it did in 1950 – involve them, the Chinese and Russians got Bush to participate in the so-called Six-Party talks, with the objective of a negotiated peace settlement for the Korean War.
You see, in 1948, China had officially become the People’s Republic of China. But the United States refused to recognize the PRC; refused to allow them to take China veto-wielding seat on the UN Security Council. In protest, the Soviet Union was boycotting the UN Security Council. Hence, neither the PRC or Soviet Union were able to veto President Truman’s UN "police action."
However, PRC and Soviet "volunteers" were able to force us into a military stalemate in 1953 at the 38th Parallel, which was the North-South boundary agreed to by Truman and Stalin at Potsdam in 1945.
The resulting armistice – which is now in its 55th year – is actually a negotiated ceasefire between the Commander of UN forces and the Commanders of the North Korean and Chinese forces.
The Fifth Round of the Six-Party talks concluded last year with all parties agreeing, inter alia, to what amounts to a "side-bar."
"The DPRK and the U.S. will start bilateral talks aimed at resolving bilateral issues and moving toward full diplomatic relations."
So, are we back to where Clinton had us with the US-DPRK Agreed Framework of 1994?
Well, not quite;
For one thing, North Korea's neighbors – Russia and China – are much more powerful, economically and militarily, than they were in 1994. Furthermore, they will effectively be acting as guarantors that neither North Korea or the U.S. can unilaterally abrogate the associated U.S.-DPRK bilateral agreements.
Finally, Article IV of the Agreed Framework says,
"Both sides will work together to strengthen the international nuclear [weapons] non-proliferation regime."
Now, what was it that Bush’s Legacy will likely be?
Oh, yes – the deliberate destruction of the existing international nuclear-weapons proliferation-prevention regime.
http://www.antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=13060
Talking to Iran Is Not So Controversial: Don't look now but there is a broad consensus on what the next administration should do about Iran.
THE AMERICAN PROSPECT
6/25/08
Talking to Iran Is Not So Controversial: Don't look now but there is a broad consensus on what the next administration should do about Iran.
Ilan Goldenberg
If two years ago you were to tell me that the Democratic presidential nominee would make engaging with Iran a central element of his campaign, I would have thought you were joking. After all, talking to a country that has historically enjoyed a favorability rating of a whopping 10 percent in the United States and has a president known for his anti-Western rhetoric probably isn't going to be all that popular. Not to mention the fact that the most substantive interaction Americans have had with Iran over the last 30 years involved watching blindfolded hostages and burning American flags on their television screens.
Yet incredibly, in a feat that defies conventional wisdom, Barack Obama is more than just holding his own against John McCain. When it comes to Iran he has the American public and most foreign-policy experts squarely behind him.
Obama's position is that we should be willing to engage in direct talks with the Iranian regime and offer them a choice: greater economic incentives and regular diplomatic relations in exchange for greater cooperation or economic sanctions and political isolation for their intransigence. John McCain and President Bush both argue that the United States should only talk to Iran if it first agrees to the precondition of suspending its uranium-enrichment program. Essentially, they are demanding that Iran give up its most significant bargaining chip before even sitting down at the table. In the meantime, McCain has called for more robust sanctions and has continued the Bush administration's pattern of saber rattling -- even jokingly singing about "bomb, bomb, bombing" Iran.
Americans support the idea of dealing directly with the Iranian regime. A recent Gallup poll found that despite extremely low opinions of Iran, 59 percent believe it's a good idea for the president to meet with the Iranian leadership. A Public Agenda/Foreign Affairs poll taken this spring found that 47 percent of Americans believed that establishing better relations with Iran through diplomacy was the one best way for the United States to deal with Iran while 40 percent supported economic sanctions, military threats or military action. This represented a 21 point swing from the fall of 2007 when only 35 percent supported diplomatic talks as the best option and 49 percent argued for more aggressive policies.
Meanwhile, experts and former government officials from across the political spectrum are also coming to the conclusion that direct talks must be part of a comprehensive strategy. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group Report that included former Secretaries of State James Baker and Laurence Eagleburger, both Republicans, argued in December 2006 that the United States should engage Iran on the question of Iraq. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Michael Mullen, recently stated that he "would like to have a healthy dialogue with Iran." At a recent conference hosted by the centrist Center for New American Security (CNAS), Jim Dobbins, who worked with the Iranians when he was leading U.S. negotiating efforts after the war in Afghanistan, Dennis Ross, who served as special envoy to the Middle East during the Clinton Administration, and Suzanne Maloney, who was on the State Department's policy planning staff working Iran issues from 2005 to 2007, all agreed that direct talks should be an important component of U.S. strategy.
This consensus further reinforces a new CNAS report arguing that the Bush administration's continued emphasis on using military threats as leverage is actually making any diplomatic breakthrough less likely. Richard Haas, who has served in a number of Republican administrations and is currently the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, also supports direct talks and even a neoconservative like Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has argued that talks are a good idea. (Although admittedly he believes that they will likely fail, and that the outcome will be greater international support for harsher measures against the Iranian regime.)
A number of factors account for the growing consensus on Iran. First, the Iraq War has dramatically changed the country's views on the use of force. Polling over the past few years has shown a reduction in the number of Americans who see military force as the most effective tool for keeping America safe and a related increase in support for diplomacy. Before the invasion the public was led to believe that that the war would be quick, easy and cheap. But with more than 4,100 American casualties, approximately 30,000 wounded, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, and direct costs alone topping $500 billion Americans have been reminded that war is hard, expensive, and unpredictable, and that the use of military force should only be seen as a last resort.
In addition to Iraq, the absolute failure of our Iran policy has also caused people to reconsider. The Bush administration has refused to engage with Iran at a senior level until it suspends its uranium-enrichment program. In the meantime, Iran has gone from zero to 3,000 nuclear centrifuges. Freed from its two greatest local rivals -- Saddam Hussein and the Taliban -- it has expanded its influence into Iraq, Afghanistan and across the Middle East. The supposedly tough sanctions that would dissuade the Iranian government have failed to materialize since the Russians and Chinese have offered little support for the types of economic measures that would inflict genuine pain on the Iranian regime. And there is general agreement that bombing Iran's nuclear facilities would only cause a temporary delay in its uranium-enrichment program, while guaranteeing that the regime would react by moving beyond its current civilian nuclear program and develop a bomb.
Given these bad options, the choice is no longer between engaging in direct diplomacy and trying to pressure Iran through military and economic coercion to give up its nuclear program. We must now decide between allowing Iran to continue to work against American interests, move closer toward becoming a nuclear power and increase its influence across the region, and trying to engage. Engaging in direct talks does not mean giving in to Iranian demands. But through engagement we can make our own positions clear to the Iranians and work with them on common interests. This policy of talking directly in combination with economic inducements and threats may convince the Iranian regime to bring its nuclear program under an international verification regime with the goal of it eventually being eliminated. In essence the choice has become doing nothing or trying something.
Finally, there is the question of leadership, and here Barack Obama deserves much credit for moving the conversation. When Obama first made the statement last year about direct talks with Iran it was seen as a gaffe to be taken advantage of by his Democratic rivals. But his position actually turned into an advantage in the Democratic primary. Now Obama is sticking to his guns against McCain and so far it seems to be working. It's hard to imagine that the 21-point swing on this issue over the past few months is not at least partially due to the fact that the man who may currently have the most powerful bully pulpit in the country is out there aggressively making the case for talks.
Obama's zealous advocacy has undoubtedly had an impact in the beltway as well. Foreign-policy experts factor political will into their recommendations and try not to take positions that are completely unachievable. But Obama's position has blown through the assumption that talking directly to Iran is domestically unworkable. It's also signaled to experts in think tanks around Washington that they need to start thinking carefully about exactly how the United States would conduct diplomacy with Iran because it's clear that an Obama administration will likely ask for advice on this particular question.
In the end, we should be careful not to expect too much too soon from diplomatic overtures toward Iran. Thirty years worth of grievances will not be solved overnight and the Iranian regime is still playing a malign role in Iraq, supporting Hezbollah and Hamas and building a uranium-enrichment capability.
But let's not fool ourselves into thinking that diplomatic engagement with Iran is some kind of controversial fringe progressive idea. In reality, it is the consensus position. It is John McCain's and George Bush's stubborn insistence of continuing a failed policy that is out of touch.
6/25/08
Talking to Iran Is Not So Controversial: Don't look now but there is a broad consensus on what the next administration should do about Iran.
Ilan Goldenberg
If two years ago you were to tell me that the Democratic presidential nominee would make engaging with Iran a central element of his campaign, I would have thought you were joking. After all, talking to a country that has historically enjoyed a favorability rating of a whopping 10 percent in the United States and has a president known for his anti-Western rhetoric probably isn't going to be all that popular. Not to mention the fact that the most substantive interaction Americans have had with Iran over the last 30 years involved watching blindfolded hostages and burning American flags on their television screens.
Yet incredibly, in a feat that defies conventional wisdom, Barack Obama is more than just holding his own against John McCain. When it comes to Iran he has the American public and most foreign-policy experts squarely behind him.
Obama's position is that we should be willing to engage in direct talks with the Iranian regime and offer them a choice: greater economic incentives and regular diplomatic relations in exchange for greater cooperation or economic sanctions and political isolation for their intransigence. John McCain and President Bush both argue that the United States should only talk to Iran if it first agrees to the precondition of suspending its uranium-enrichment program. Essentially, they are demanding that Iran give up its most significant bargaining chip before even sitting down at the table. In the meantime, McCain has called for more robust sanctions and has continued the Bush administration's pattern of saber rattling -- even jokingly singing about "bomb, bomb, bombing" Iran.
Americans support the idea of dealing directly with the Iranian regime. A recent Gallup poll found that despite extremely low opinions of Iran, 59 percent believe it's a good idea for the president to meet with the Iranian leadership. A Public Agenda/Foreign Affairs poll taken this spring found that 47 percent of Americans believed that establishing better relations with Iran through diplomacy was the one best way for the United States to deal with Iran while 40 percent supported economic sanctions, military threats or military action. This represented a 21 point swing from the fall of 2007 when only 35 percent supported diplomatic talks as the best option and 49 percent argued for more aggressive policies.
Meanwhile, experts and former government officials from across the political spectrum are also coming to the conclusion that direct talks must be part of a comprehensive strategy. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group Report that included former Secretaries of State James Baker and Laurence Eagleburger, both Republicans, argued in December 2006 that the United States should engage Iran on the question of Iraq. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Michael Mullen, recently stated that he "would like to have a healthy dialogue with Iran." At a recent conference hosted by the centrist Center for New American Security (CNAS), Jim Dobbins, who worked with the Iranians when he was leading U.S. negotiating efforts after the war in Afghanistan, Dennis Ross, who served as special envoy to the Middle East during the Clinton Administration, and Suzanne Maloney, who was on the State Department's policy planning staff working Iran issues from 2005 to 2007, all agreed that direct talks should be an important component of U.S. strategy.
This consensus further reinforces a new CNAS report arguing that the Bush administration's continued emphasis on using military threats as leverage is actually making any diplomatic breakthrough less likely. Richard Haas, who has served in a number of Republican administrations and is currently the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, also supports direct talks and even a neoconservative like Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has argued that talks are a good idea. (Although admittedly he believes that they will likely fail, and that the outcome will be greater international support for harsher measures against the Iranian regime.)
A number of factors account for the growing consensus on Iran. First, the Iraq War has dramatically changed the country's views on the use of force. Polling over the past few years has shown a reduction in the number of Americans who see military force as the most effective tool for keeping America safe and a related increase in support for diplomacy. Before the invasion the public was led to believe that that the war would be quick, easy and cheap. But with more than 4,100 American casualties, approximately 30,000 wounded, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, and direct costs alone topping $500 billion Americans have been reminded that war is hard, expensive, and unpredictable, and that the use of military force should only be seen as a last resort.
In addition to Iraq, the absolute failure of our Iran policy has also caused people to reconsider. The Bush administration has refused to engage with Iran at a senior level until it suspends its uranium-enrichment program. In the meantime, Iran has gone from zero to 3,000 nuclear centrifuges. Freed from its two greatest local rivals -- Saddam Hussein and the Taliban -- it has expanded its influence into Iraq, Afghanistan and across the Middle East. The supposedly tough sanctions that would dissuade the Iranian government have failed to materialize since the Russians and Chinese have offered little support for the types of economic measures that would inflict genuine pain on the Iranian regime. And there is general agreement that bombing Iran's nuclear facilities would only cause a temporary delay in its uranium-enrichment program, while guaranteeing that the regime would react by moving beyond its current civilian nuclear program and develop a bomb.
Given these bad options, the choice is no longer between engaging in direct diplomacy and trying to pressure Iran through military and economic coercion to give up its nuclear program. We must now decide between allowing Iran to continue to work against American interests, move closer toward becoming a nuclear power and increase its influence across the region, and trying to engage. Engaging in direct talks does not mean giving in to Iranian demands. But through engagement we can make our own positions clear to the Iranians and work with them on common interests. This policy of talking directly in combination with economic inducements and threats may convince the Iranian regime to bring its nuclear program under an international verification regime with the goal of it eventually being eliminated. In essence the choice has become doing nothing or trying something.
Finally, there is the question of leadership, and here Barack Obama deserves much credit for moving the conversation. When Obama first made the statement last year about direct talks with Iran it was seen as a gaffe to be taken advantage of by his Democratic rivals. But his position actually turned into an advantage in the Democratic primary. Now Obama is sticking to his guns against McCain and so far it seems to be working. It's hard to imagine that the 21-point swing on this issue over the past few months is not at least partially due to the fact that the man who may currently have the most powerful bully pulpit in the country is out there aggressively making the case for talks.
Obama's zealous advocacy has undoubtedly had an impact in the beltway as well. Foreign-policy experts factor political will into their recommendations and try not to take positions that are completely unachievable. But Obama's position has blown through the assumption that talking directly to Iran is domestically unworkable. It's also signaled to experts in think tanks around Washington that they need to start thinking carefully about exactly how the United States would conduct diplomacy with Iran because it's clear that an Obama administration will likely ask for advice on this particular question.
In the end, we should be careful not to expect too much too soon from diplomatic overtures toward Iran. Thirty years worth of grievances will not be solved overnight and the Iranian regime is still playing a malign role in Iraq, supporting Hezbollah and Hamas and building a uranium-enrichment capability.
But let's not fool ourselves into thinking that diplomatic engagement with Iran is some kind of controversial fringe progressive idea. In reality, it is the consensus position. It is John McCain's and George Bush's stubborn insistence of continuing a failed policy that is out of touch.
Friday, June 27, 2008
IRAN'S ECONOMY, AND MORE FROM CRS
SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2008, Issue No. 63
June 27, 2008
Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/
IRAN'S ECONOMY, AND MORE FROM CRS
Noteworthy new and updated reports from the Congressional Research
Service that have not been made readily available to the public include
the following.
"The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror
Operations Since 9/11," updated June 23, 2008:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf
"Conventional Warheads For Long-Range Ballistic Missiles: Background
and Issues for Congress," updated May 16, 2008:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RL33067.pdf
"Iran's Economy," updated June 12, 2008:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL34525.pdf
"The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: Comparison of the Senate
Amendment to H.R. 3773 and the House Amendment to the Senate Amendment
to H.R. 3773," June 12, 2008:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/RL34533.pdf
"Awards of Attorneys' Fees by Federal Courts and Federal Agencies,"
updated June 20, 2008:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/94-970.pdf
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2008, Issue No. 63
June 27, 2008
Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/
IRAN'S ECONOMY, AND MORE FROM CRS
Noteworthy new and updated reports from the Congressional Research
Service that have not been made readily available to the public include
the following.
"The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror
Operations Since 9/11," updated June 23, 2008:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf
"Conventional Warheads For Long-Range Ballistic Missiles: Background
and Issues for Congress," updated May 16, 2008:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RL33067.pdf
"Iran's Economy," updated June 12, 2008:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL34525.pdf
"The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: Comparison of the Senate
Amendment to H.R. 3773 and the House Amendment to the Senate Amendment
to H.R. 3773," June 12, 2008:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/RL34533.pdf
"Awards of Attorneys' Fees by Federal Courts and Federal Agencies,"
updated June 20, 2008:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/94-970.pdf
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Living on the Ice Shelf
From Tom Dispatch http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174949/Tomgram%3A%20%20Mike%20Davis%2C%20Welcome%20to%20the%20Next%20Epoch
Living on the Ice Shelf
Humanity's Meltdown
By Mike Davis
1. Farewell to the Holocene
Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.
This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column.
The London Society is the world's oldest association of Earth scientists, founded in 1807, and its Commission acts as a college of cardinals in the adjudication of the geological time-scale. Stratigraphers slice up Earth's history as preserved in sedimentary strata into hierarchies of eons, eras, periods, and epochs marked by the "golden spikes" of mass extinctions, speciation events, and abrupt changes in atmospheric chemistry.
In geology, as in biology or history, periodization is a complex, controversial art and the most bitter feud in nineteenth-century British science -- still known as the "Great Devonian Controversy" -- was fought over competing interpretations of homely Welsh Graywackes and English Old Red Sandstone. More recently, geologists have feuded over how to stratigraphically demarcate ice age oscillations over the last 2.8 million years. Some have never accepted that the most recent inter-glacial warm interval -- the Holocene -- should be distinguished as an "epoch" in its own right just because it encompasses the history of civilization.
As a result, contemporary stratigraphers have set extraordinarily rigorous standards for the beatification of any new geological divisions. Although the idea of the "Anthropocene" -- an Earth epoch defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force -- has been long debated, stratigraphers have refused to acknowledge compelling evidence for its advent.
At least for the London Society, that position has now been revised.
To the question "Are we now living in the Anthropocene?" the 21 members of the Commission unanimously answer "yes." They adduce robust evidence that the Holocene epoch -- the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization -- has ended and that the Earth has entered "a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years." In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation which "now exceeds [annual] natural sediment production by an order of magnitude," the ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction of biota.
This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that "the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks." Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.
2. Spontaneous Decarbonization?
The Commission's coronation of the Anthropocene coincides with growing scientific controversy over the 4th Assessment Report issued last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is mandated to establish scientific baselines for international efforts to mitigate global warming, but some of the most prominent researchers in the field are now challenging its reference scenarios as overly optimistic, even pie-in-the-sky thinking.
The current scenarios were adopted by the IPCC in 2000 to model future global emissions based on different "storylines" about population growth as well as technological and economic development. Some of the Panel's major scenarios are well known to policymakers and greenhouse activists, but few outside the research community have actually read or understood the fine print, particularly the IPCC's confidence that greater energy efficiency will be an "automatic" byproduct of future economic development. Indeed all the scenarios, even the "business as usual" variants, assume that at least 60% of future carbon reduction will occur independently of greenhouse mitigation measures.
The Panel, in effect, has bet the ranch, or rather the planet, on unplanned, market-driven progress toward a post-carbon world economy, a transition that implicitly requires wealth generated from higher energy prices ultimately finding its way to new technologies and renewable energy. (The International Energy Agency recently estimated that it would cost $45 trillion to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.) Kyoto-type accords and carbon markets are designed -- almost as an analogue to Keynesian "pump-priming" -- to bridge the shortfall between spontaneous decarbonization and the emissions targets required by each scenario. Serendipitously, this reduces the costs of mitigating global warming to levels that align with what seems, at least theoretically, to be politically possible, as expounded in the British Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change of 2006 and other such reports.
Critics argue, however, that this represents a heroic leap of faith that radically understates the economic costs, technological hurdles, and social changes required to tame the growth of greenhouse gases. European carbon emissions, for example, are still rising (dramatically in some sectors) despite the European Union's much praised adoption of a cap-and-trade system in 2005. Likewise there has been little evidence in recent years of the automatic progress in energy efficiency that is the sine qua non of the IPCC scenarios. Although The Economist characteristically begs to differ, most energy researchers believe that, since 2000, energy intensity has actually risen; that is, global carbon dioxide emissions have kept pace with, or even grown marginally faster than, energy use.
Coal production, especially, is undergoing a dramatic renaissance, as the nineteenth century has returned to haunt the twenty-first century. Hundreds of thousands of miners are now working under conditions that would have appalled Charles Dickens, extracting the dirty mineral that allows China to open two new coal-fueled power stations every week. Meanwhile, the total consumption of fossil fuels is predicted to increase at least 55% over the next generation, with international oil exports doubling in volume.
The United Nations Development Program, which has made its own study of sustainable energy goals, warns that it will require "a 50 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2050 against 1990 levels" to keep humanity outside the red zone of runaway warming (usually defined as a greater than two degrees centigrade increase this century). Yet the International Energy Agency predicts that, in all likelihood, such emissions will actually increase in this period by nearly 100% -- enough greenhouse gas to propel us past several critical tipping points.
Even while higher energy prices are pushing SUVs towards extinction and attracting more venture capital to renewable energy, they are also opening the Pandora's box of the crudest of crude oil production from Canadian tar sands and Venezuelan heavy oil. As one British scientist has warned, the very last thing we should wish for (under the false slogan of "energy independence") is new frontiers in hydrocarbon production that advance "humankind's ability to accelerate global warming" and slow the urgent transition to "non-carbon or closed-carbon energy cycles."
3. Fin-du-Monde Boom
What confidence should we place in the capacity of markets to reallocate investment from old to new energy or, say, from arms expenditures to sustainable agriculture? We are propagandized incessantly (especially on public television) about how giant companies like Chevron, Pfizer Inc., and Archer Daniels Midland are hard at work saving the planet by plowing profits back into the kinds of research and exploration that will ensure low-carbon fuels, new vaccines, and more drought-resistant crops.
As the current ethanol-from-corn boom, which has diverted 100 million tons of grain from human diets mainly to American car engines, so appallingly demonstrates, "biofuel" may be a euphemism for subsidies to the rich and starvation for the poor. Likewise "clean coal," despite a vigorous endorsement from Senator Barack Obama (who also champions ethanol), is, at present, simply a huge deception: a $40 million advertising and lobbying campaign for a hypothetical technology that BusinessWeek has characterized as "being decades away from commercial viability."
Moreover there are disturbing signs that energy companies and utilities are reneging on their public commitments to the development of carbon-capture and alternative energy technologies. The Bush administration's "marquee demonstration project," FutureGen, was scrapped this year after the coal industry refused to pay its share of the public-private "partnership"; similarly, most U.S. private-sector carbon-sequestration initiatives have recently been cancelled. In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, Shell has just pulled out of the world's largest wind-energy project, the London Array. Despite heroic levels of advertising, energy corporations, like pharmaceutical companies, prefer to overgraze the commons, while letting taxes, not profits, pay for whatever urgent, long-overdue research is actually undertaken.
On the other hand, the spoils from high energy prices continue to gush into real estate, skyscrapers, and financial assets. Whether or not we are actually at the summit of Hubbert's Peak -- that peak oil moment -- whether or not the oil-price bubble finally bursts, what we are probably witnessing is the largest transfer of wealth in modern history.
An eminent Wall Street oracle, McKinsey Global Institute, predicts that if crude oil prices remain above $100 per barrel -- they are, at the moment, approaching $140 a barrel -- the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council alone will "reap a cumulative windfall of almost $9 trillion by 2020." As in the 1970s, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbors, whose total gross domestic product has almost doubled in just three years, are awash in liquidity: $2.4 trillion in banks and investment funds according to a recent estimate by The Economist. Regardless of price trends, the International Energy Agency predicts, "more and more oil will come from fewer and fewer countries, primarily the Middle East members of OPEC [The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries]."
Dubai, which has little oil income of its own, has become the regional financial hub for this vast pool of wealth, with ambitions to eventually compete with Wall Street and the City of London. During the first oil shock in the 1970s, much of OPEC's surplus was recycled through military purchases in the United States and Europe, or parked in foreign banks to become the "subprime" loans that eventually devastated Latin America. In the wake of the attacks of 9/11, the Gulf states became far more cautious about entrusting their wealth to countries, like the United States, governed by religious fanatics. This time around, they are using "sovereign wealth funds" to achieve a more active ownership in foreign financial institutions, while investing fabulous amounts of oil revenue to transform Arabia's sands into hyperbolic cities, shopping paradises, and private islands for British rock stars and Russian gangsters.
Two years ago, when oil prices were less than half of the current level, The Financial Times estimated that planned new construction in Saudi Arabia and the emirates already exceeded $1 trillion dollars. Today, it may be closer to $1.5 trillion, considerably more than the total value of world trade in agricultural products. Most of the Gulf city-states are building hallucinatory skylines -- and, among them, Dubai is the unquestionable superstar. In a little more than a decade, it has erected 500 skyscrapers, and currently leases one-quarter of all the high-rise cranes in the world.
This super-charged Gulf boom, which celebrity architect Rem Koolhaas claims is "reconfiguring the world," has led Dubai developers to proclaim the advent of a "supreme lifestyle" represented by seven-star hotels, private islands, and J-class yachts. Not surprisingly, then, the United Arab Emirates and its neighbors have the biggest per capita ecological footprints on the planet. Meanwhile, the rightful owners of Arab oil wealth, the masses crammed into the angry tenements of Baghdad, Cairo, Amman, and Khartoum, have little more to show for it than a trickle-down of oil-field jobs and Saudi-subsidized madrassas. While guests enjoy the $5,000 per night rooms in Burj Al-Arab, Dubai's celebrated sail-shaped hotel, working-class Cairenes riot in the streets over the unaffordable price of bread.
4. Can Markets Enfranchise the Poor?
Emissions optimists, of course, will smile at all the gloom-and-doom and evoke the coming miracle of carbon trading. What they discount is the real possibility that a sprawling carbon-offset market may emerge, just as predicted, yet produce only minimal improvement in the global carbon balance sheet, as long as there is no mechanism for enforcing real net reductions in fossil fuel use.
In popular discussions of emissions-rights trading systems, it is common to mistake the smokestacks for the trees. For example, the wealthy oil enclave of Abu Dhabi (like Dubai, a partner in the United Arab Emirates) brags that it has planted more than 130 million trees -- each of which does its duty in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, this artificial forest in the desert also consumes huge quantities of irrigation water produced, or recycled, from expensive desalination plants. The trees may allow Sheik Ahmed bin Zayed to wear a halo at international meetings, but the rude fact is that they are an energy-intensive beauty strip, like most of so-called green capitalism.
And, while we're at it, let's just ask: What if the buying and selling of carbon credits and pollution offsets fails to turn down the thermostat? What exactly will motivate governments and global industries then to join hands in a crusade to reduce emissions through regulation and taxation?
Kyoto-type climate diplomacy assumes that all the major actors, once they have accepted the science in the IPCC reports, will recognize an overriding common interest in gaining control over the runaway greenhouse effect. But global warming is not War of the Worlds, where invading Martians are dedicated to annihilating all of humanity without distinction. Climate change, instead, will initially produce dramatically unequal impacts across regions and social classes. It will reinforce, not diminish, geopolitical inequality and conflict.
As the United Nations Development Program emphasized in its report last year, global warming is above all a threat to the poor and the unborn, the "two constituencies with little or no political voice." Coordinated global action on their behalf thus presupposes either their revolutionary empowerment (a scenario not considered by the IPCC) or the transmutation of the self-interest of rich countries and classes into an enlightened "solidarity" without precedent in history. From a rational-actor perspective, the latter outcome only seems realistic if it can be shown that privileged groups possess no preferential "exit" option, that internationalist public opinion drives policymaking in key countries, and that greenhouse gas mitigation could be achieved without major sacrifices in upscale Northern Hemispheric standards of living -- none of which seems highly likely.
And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of galvanizing heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply drive elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity? Global mitigation, in this unexplored but not improbable scenario, would be tacitly abandoned (as, to some extent, it already has been) in favor of accelerated investment in selective adaptation for Earth's first-class passengers. We're talking here of the prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet.
Of course, there will still be treaties, carbon credits, famine relief, humanitarian acrobatics, and perhaps the full-scale conversion of some European cities and small countries to alternative energy. But the shift to low, or zero, emission lifestyles would be almost unimaginably expensive. (In Britain, it currently costs $200,000 more to build a zero-carbon, "level 6" eco-home than a standard unit of the same area.) And this will certainly become even more unimaginable after perhaps 2030, when the convergent impacts of climate change, peak oil, peak water, and an additional 1.5 billion people on the planet may begin to seriously throttle growth.
5. The North's Ecological Debt
The real question is this: Will rich counties ever mobilize the political will and economic resources to actually achieve IPCC targets or, for that matter, to help poorer countries adapt to the inevitable, already "committed" quotient of warming now working its way toward us through the slow circulation of the world ocean?
To be more vivid: Will the electorates of the wealthy nations shed their current bigotry and walled borders to admit refugees from predicted epicenters of drought and desertification like the Maghreb, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Pakistan? Will Americans, the most miserly people when measured by per capita foreign aid, be willing to tax themselves to help relocate the millions likely to be flooded out of densely settled, mega-delta regions like Bangladesh?
Market-oriented optimists, once again, will point to carbon offset programs like the Clean Development Mechanism which, they claim, will allow green capital to flow to the Third World. Most of the Third World, however, probably prefers for the First World to acknowledge the environmental mess it has created and take responsibility for cleaning it up. They rightly rail against the notion that the greatest burden of adjustment to the Anthropocene epoch should fall on those who have contributed least to carbon emissions and drawn the slightest benefits from 200 years of industrialization.
In a sobering study recently published in the Proceedings of the [U.S.] National Academy of Science, a research team has attempted to calculate the environmental costs of economic globalization since 1961 as expressed in deforestation, climate change, over-fishing, ozone depletion, mangrove conversion, and agricultural expansion. After making adjustments for relative cost burdens, they found that the richest countries, by their activities, had generated 42% of environmental degradation across the world, while shouldering only 3% of the resulting costs.
The radicals of the South will rightly point to another debt as well. For 30 years, cities in the developing world have grown at breakneck speed without any equivalent public investment in infrastructure services, housing, or public health. In large part this has been the result of foreign debts contracted by dictators, payments enforced by the International Monetary Fund, and public sectors wrecked by the World Bank's "structural adjustment" agreements.
This planetary deficit of opportunity and social justice is captured in the fact that more than one billion people, according to UN-Habitat, currently live in slums and that their number is expected to double by 2030. An equal number, or more, forage in the so-called informal sector (a first-world euphemism for mass unemployment). Sheer demographic momentum, meanwhile, will increase the world's urban population by 3 billion people over the next 40 years (90% of them in poor cities), and no one -- absolutely no one -- has a clue how a planet of slums, with growing food and energy crises, will accommodate their biological survival, much less their inevitable aspirations to basic happiness and dignity.
If this seems unduly apocalyptic, consider that most climate models project impacts that will uncannily reinforce the present geography of inequality. One of the pioneer analysts of the economics of global warming, Petersen Institute fellow William R. Cline, recently published a country-by-country study of the likely effects of climate change on agriculture by the later decades of this century. Even in the most optimistic simulations, the agricultural systems of Pakistan (a 20% decrease from current farm output predicted) and Northwestern India (a 30% decrease) are likely to be devastated, along with much of the Middle East, the Maghreb, the Sahel belt, Southern Africa, the Caribbean, and Mexico. Twenty-nine developing countries will lose 20% or more of their current farm output to global warming, while agriculture in the already rich north is likely to receive, on average, an 8% boost.
In light of such studies, the current ruthless competition between energy and food markets, amplified by international speculation in commodities and agricultural land, is only a modest portent of the chaos that could soon grow exponentially from the convergence of resource depletion, intractable inequality, and climate change. The real danger is that human solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand shards.
Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change.
Living on the Ice Shelf
Humanity's Meltdown
By Mike Davis
1. Farewell to the Holocene
Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.
This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column.
The London Society is the world's oldest association of Earth scientists, founded in 1807, and its Commission acts as a college of cardinals in the adjudication of the geological time-scale. Stratigraphers slice up Earth's history as preserved in sedimentary strata into hierarchies of eons, eras, periods, and epochs marked by the "golden spikes" of mass extinctions, speciation events, and abrupt changes in atmospheric chemistry.
In geology, as in biology or history, periodization is a complex, controversial art and the most bitter feud in nineteenth-century British science -- still known as the "Great Devonian Controversy" -- was fought over competing interpretations of homely Welsh Graywackes and English Old Red Sandstone. More recently, geologists have feuded over how to stratigraphically demarcate ice age oscillations over the last 2.8 million years. Some have never accepted that the most recent inter-glacial warm interval -- the Holocene -- should be distinguished as an "epoch" in its own right just because it encompasses the history of civilization.
As a result, contemporary stratigraphers have set extraordinarily rigorous standards for the beatification of any new geological divisions. Although the idea of the "Anthropocene" -- an Earth epoch defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force -- has been long debated, stratigraphers have refused to acknowledge compelling evidence for its advent.
At least for the London Society, that position has now been revised.
To the question "Are we now living in the Anthropocene?" the 21 members of the Commission unanimously answer "yes." They adduce robust evidence that the Holocene epoch -- the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization -- has ended and that the Earth has entered "a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years." In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation which "now exceeds [annual] natural sediment production by an order of magnitude," the ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction of biota.
This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that "the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks." Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.
2. Spontaneous Decarbonization?
The Commission's coronation of the Anthropocene coincides with growing scientific controversy over the 4th Assessment Report issued last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is mandated to establish scientific baselines for international efforts to mitigate global warming, but some of the most prominent researchers in the field are now challenging its reference scenarios as overly optimistic, even pie-in-the-sky thinking.
The current scenarios were adopted by the IPCC in 2000 to model future global emissions based on different "storylines" about population growth as well as technological and economic development. Some of the Panel's major scenarios are well known to policymakers and greenhouse activists, but few outside the research community have actually read or understood the fine print, particularly the IPCC's confidence that greater energy efficiency will be an "automatic" byproduct of future economic development. Indeed all the scenarios, even the "business as usual" variants, assume that at least 60% of future carbon reduction will occur independently of greenhouse mitigation measures.
The Panel, in effect, has bet the ranch, or rather the planet, on unplanned, market-driven progress toward a post-carbon world economy, a transition that implicitly requires wealth generated from higher energy prices ultimately finding its way to new technologies and renewable energy. (The International Energy Agency recently estimated that it would cost $45 trillion to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.) Kyoto-type accords and carbon markets are designed -- almost as an analogue to Keynesian "pump-priming" -- to bridge the shortfall between spontaneous decarbonization and the emissions targets required by each scenario. Serendipitously, this reduces the costs of mitigating global warming to levels that align with what seems, at least theoretically, to be politically possible, as expounded in the British Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change of 2006 and other such reports.
Critics argue, however, that this represents a heroic leap of faith that radically understates the economic costs, technological hurdles, and social changes required to tame the growth of greenhouse gases. European carbon emissions, for example, are still rising (dramatically in some sectors) despite the European Union's much praised adoption of a cap-and-trade system in 2005. Likewise there has been little evidence in recent years of the automatic progress in energy efficiency that is the sine qua non of the IPCC scenarios. Although The Economist characteristically begs to differ, most energy researchers believe that, since 2000, energy intensity has actually risen; that is, global carbon dioxide emissions have kept pace with, or even grown marginally faster than, energy use.
Coal production, especially, is undergoing a dramatic renaissance, as the nineteenth century has returned to haunt the twenty-first century. Hundreds of thousands of miners are now working under conditions that would have appalled Charles Dickens, extracting the dirty mineral that allows China to open two new coal-fueled power stations every week. Meanwhile, the total consumption of fossil fuels is predicted to increase at least 55% over the next generation, with international oil exports doubling in volume.
The United Nations Development Program, which has made its own study of sustainable energy goals, warns that it will require "a 50 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2050 against 1990 levels" to keep humanity outside the red zone of runaway warming (usually defined as a greater than two degrees centigrade increase this century). Yet the International Energy Agency predicts that, in all likelihood, such emissions will actually increase in this period by nearly 100% -- enough greenhouse gas to propel us past several critical tipping points.
Even while higher energy prices are pushing SUVs towards extinction and attracting more venture capital to renewable energy, they are also opening the Pandora's box of the crudest of crude oil production from Canadian tar sands and Venezuelan heavy oil. As one British scientist has warned, the very last thing we should wish for (under the false slogan of "energy independence") is new frontiers in hydrocarbon production that advance "humankind's ability to accelerate global warming" and slow the urgent transition to "non-carbon or closed-carbon energy cycles."
3. Fin-du-Monde Boom
What confidence should we place in the capacity of markets to reallocate investment from old to new energy or, say, from arms expenditures to sustainable agriculture? We are propagandized incessantly (especially on public television) about how giant companies like Chevron, Pfizer Inc., and Archer Daniels Midland are hard at work saving the planet by plowing profits back into the kinds of research and exploration that will ensure low-carbon fuels, new vaccines, and more drought-resistant crops.
As the current ethanol-from-corn boom, which has diverted 100 million tons of grain from human diets mainly to American car engines, so appallingly demonstrates, "biofuel" may be a euphemism for subsidies to the rich and starvation for the poor. Likewise "clean coal," despite a vigorous endorsement from Senator Barack Obama (who also champions ethanol), is, at present, simply a huge deception: a $40 million advertising and lobbying campaign for a hypothetical technology that BusinessWeek has characterized as "being decades away from commercial viability."
Moreover there are disturbing signs that energy companies and utilities are reneging on their public commitments to the development of carbon-capture and alternative energy technologies. The Bush administration's "marquee demonstration project," FutureGen, was scrapped this year after the coal industry refused to pay its share of the public-private "partnership"; similarly, most U.S. private-sector carbon-sequestration initiatives have recently been cancelled. In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, Shell has just pulled out of the world's largest wind-energy project, the London Array. Despite heroic levels of advertising, energy corporations, like pharmaceutical companies, prefer to overgraze the commons, while letting taxes, not profits, pay for whatever urgent, long-overdue research is actually undertaken.
On the other hand, the spoils from high energy prices continue to gush into real estate, skyscrapers, and financial assets. Whether or not we are actually at the summit of Hubbert's Peak -- that peak oil moment -- whether or not the oil-price bubble finally bursts, what we are probably witnessing is the largest transfer of wealth in modern history.
An eminent Wall Street oracle, McKinsey Global Institute, predicts that if crude oil prices remain above $100 per barrel -- they are, at the moment, approaching $140 a barrel -- the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council alone will "reap a cumulative windfall of almost $9 trillion by 2020." As in the 1970s, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbors, whose total gross domestic product has almost doubled in just three years, are awash in liquidity: $2.4 trillion in banks and investment funds according to a recent estimate by The Economist. Regardless of price trends, the International Energy Agency predicts, "more and more oil will come from fewer and fewer countries, primarily the Middle East members of OPEC [The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries]."
Dubai, which has little oil income of its own, has become the regional financial hub for this vast pool of wealth, with ambitions to eventually compete with Wall Street and the City of London. During the first oil shock in the 1970s, much of OPEC's surplus was recycled through military purchases in the United States and Europe, or parked in foreign banks to become the "subprime" loans that eventually devastated Latin America. In the wake of the attacks of 9/11, the Gulf states became far more cautious about entrusting their wealth to countries, like the United States, governed by religious fanatics. This time around, they are using "sovereign wealth funds" to achieve a more active ownership in foreign financial institutions, while investing fabulous amounts of oil revenue to transform Arabia's sands into hyperbolic cities, shopping paradises, and private islands for British rock stars and Russian gangsters.
Two years ago, when oil prices were less than half of the current level, The Financial Times estimated that planned new construction in Saudi Arabia and the emirates already exceeded $1 trillion dollars. Today, it may be closer to $1.5 trillion, considerably more than the total value of world trade in agricultural products. Most of the Gulf city-states are building hallucinatory skylines -- and, among them, Dubai is the unquestionable superstar. In a little more than a decade, it has erected 500 skyscrapers, and currently leases one-quarter of all the high-rise cranes in the world.
This super-charged Gulf boom, which celebrity architect Rem Koolhaas claims is "reconfiguring the world," has led Dubai developers to proclaim the advent of a "supreme lifestyle" represented by seven-star hotels, private islands, and J-class yachts. Not surprisingly, then, the United Arab Emirates and its neighbors have the biggest per capita ecological footprints on the planet. Meanwhile, the rightful owners of Arab oil wealth, the masses crammed into the angry tenements of Baghdad, Cairo, Amman, and Khartoum, have little more to show for it than a trickle-down of oil-field jobs and Saudi-subsidized madrassas. While guests enjoy the $5,000 per night rooms in Burj Al-Arab, Dubai's celebrated sail-shaped hotel, working-class Cairenes riot in the streets over the unaffordable price of bread.
4. Can Markets Enfranchise the Poor?
Emissions optimists, of course, will smile at all the gloom-and-doom and evoke the coming miracle of carbon trading. What they discount is the real possibility that a sprawling carbon-offset market may emerge, just as predicted, yet produce only minimal improvement in the global carbon balance sheet, as long as there is no mechanism for enforcing real net reductions in fossil fuel use.
In popular discussions of emissions-rights trading systems, it is common to mistake the smokestacks for the trees. For example, the wealthy oil enclave of Abu Dhabi (like Dubai, a partner in the United Arab Emirates) brags that it has planted more than 130 million trees -- each of which does its duty in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, this artificial forest in the desert also consumes huge quantities of irrigation water produced, or recycled, from expensive desalination plants. The trees may allow Sheik Ahmed bin Zayed to wear a halo at international meetings, but the rude fact is that they are an energy-intensive beauty strip, like most of so-called green capitalism.
And, while we're at it, let's just ask: What if the buying and selling of carbon credits and pollution offsets fails to turn down the thermostat? What exactly will motivate governments and global industries then to join hands in a crusade to reduce emissions through regulation and taxation?
Kyoto-type climate diplomacy assumes that all the major actors, once they have accepted the science in the IPCC reports, will recognize an overriding common interest in gaining control over the runaway greenhouse effect. But global warming is not War of the Worlds, where invading Martians are dedicated to annihilating all of humanity without distinction. Climate change, instead, will initially produce dramatically unequal impacts across regions and social classes. It will reinforce, not diminish, geopolitical inequality and conflict.
As the United Nations Development Program emphasized in its report last year, global warming is above all a threat to the poor and the unborn, the "two constituencies with little or no political voice." Coordinated global action on their behalf thus presupposes either their revolutionary empowerment (a scenario not considered by the IPCC) or the transmutation of the self-interest of rich countries and classes into an enlightened "solidarity" without precedent in history. From a rational-actor perspective, the latter outcome only seems realistic if it can be shown that privileged groups possess no preferential "exit" option, that internationalist public opinion drives policymaking in key countries, and that greenhouse gas mitigation could be achieved without major sacrifices in upscale Northern Hemispheric standards of living -- none of which seems highly likely.
And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of galvanizing heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply drive elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity? Global mitigation, in this unexplored but not improbable scenario, would be tacitly abandoned (as, to some extent, it already has been) in favor of accelerated investment in selective adaptation for Earth's first-class passengers. We're talking here of the prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet.
Of course, there will still be treaties, carbon credits, famine relief, humanitarian acrobatics, and perhaps the full-scale conversion of some European cities and small countries to alternative energy. But the shift to low, or zero, emission lifestyles would be almost unimaginably expensive. (In Britain, it currently costs $200,000 more to build a zero-carbon, "level 6" eco-home than a standard unit of the same area.) And this will certainly become even more unimaginable after perhaps 2030, when the convergent impacts of climate change, peak oil, peak water, and an additional 1.5 billion people on the planet may begin to seriously throttle growth.
5. The North's Ecological Debt
The real question is this: Will rich counties ever mobilize the political will and economic resources to actually achieve IPCC targets or, for that matter, to help poorer countries adapt to the inevitable, already "committed" quotient of warming now working its way toward us through the slow circulation of the world ocean?
To be more vivid: Will the electorates of the wealthy nations shed their current bigotry and walled borders to admit refugees from predicted epicenters of drought and desertification like the Maghreb, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Pakistan? Will Americans, the most miserly people when measured by per capita foreign aid, be willing to tax themselves to help relocate the millions likely to be flooded out of densely settled, mega-delta regions like Bangladesh?
Market-oriented optimists, once again, will point to carbon offset programs like the Clean Development Mechanism which, they claim, will allow green capital to flow to the Third World. Most of the Third World, however, probably prefers for the First World to acknowledge the environmental mess it has created and take responsibility for cleaning it up. They rightly rail against the notion that the greatest burden of adjustment to the Anthropocene epoch should fall on those who have contributed least to carbon emissions and drawn the slightest benefits from 200 years of industrialization.
In a sobering study recently published in the Proceedings of the [U.S.] National Academy of Science, a research team has attempted to calculate the environmental costs of economic globalization since 1961 as expressed in deforestation, climate change, over-fishing, ozone depletion, mangrove conversion, and agricultural expansion. After making adjustments for relative cost burdens, they found that the richest countries, by their activities, had generated 42% of environmental degradation across the world, while shouldering only 3% of the resulting costs.
The radicals of the South will rightly point to another debt as well. For 30 years, cities in the developing world have grown at breakneck speed without any equivalent public investment in infrastructure services, housing, or public health. In large part this has been the result of foreign debts contracted by dictators, payments enforced by the International Monetary Fund, and public sectors wrecked by the World Bank's "structural adjustment" agreements.
This planetary deficit of opportunity and social justice is captured in the fact that more than one billion people, according to UN-Habitat, currently live in slums and that their number is expected to double by 2030. An equal number, or more, forage in the so-called informal sector (a first-world euphemism for mass unemployment). Sheer demographic momentum, meanwhile, will increase the world's urban population by 3 billion people over the next 40 years (90% of them in poor cities), and no one -- absolutely no one -- has a clue how a planet of slums, with growing food and energy crises, will accommodate their biological survival, much less their inevitable aspirations to basic happiness and dignity.
If this seems unduly apocalyptic, consider that most climate models project impacts that will uncannily reinforce the present geography of inequality. One of the pioneer analysts of the economics of global warming, Petersen Institute fellow William R. Cline, recently published a country-by-country study of the likely effects of climate change on agriculture by the later decades of this century. Even in the most optimistic simulations, the agricultural systems of Pakistan (a 20% decrease from current farm output predicted) and Northwestern India (a 30% decrease) are likely to be devastated, along with much of the Middle East, the Maghreb, the Sahel belt, Southern Africa, the Caribbean, and Mexico. Twenty-nine developing countries will lose 20% or more of their current farm output to global warming, while agriculture in the already rich north is likely to receive, on average, an 8% boost.
In light of such studies, the current ruthless competition between energy and food markets, amplified by international speculation in commodities and agricultural land, is only a modest portent of the chaos that could soon grow exponentially from the convergence of resource depletion, intractable inequality, and climate change. The real danger is that human solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand shards.
Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change.
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