One nuclear weapon

The ABC's Washington correspondent Kim Landers reported last Monday, ‘The United States' top military officer [Admiral Mike Mullen] believes Iran has stockpiled enough nuclear fuel to make a bomb’. ‘The International Atomic Energy Agency,’ she continued, ‘reported last month that it believed Iran had built up a stockpile of nuclear fuel which could be enough for one nuclear weapon.’

It may come as a surprise that one US official’s belief about the IAEA’s belief is deemed so newsworthy, particularly when Mullen’s boss, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, claims ‘They're not close to a stockpile.’

Waxing hysterical in response to the same announcement, the American Jewish Committee’s tireless Executive Director David A. Harris opined,

A nuclear Iran presents a grave, perhaps catastrophic, threat to the Middle East and beyond. While we welcome the international consensus that Iran must not be allowed to develop a nuclear arsenal, as reflected in numerous UN Security Council resolutions, the window of opportunity to prevent this from happening is closing fast…We must not wake up one morning and find ourselves in a new era where Iran has the bomb and the means to deliver it…Iranian terrorist proxies, including Hamas and Hezbollah, seek a "dirty bomb"; and Iran's neighbors rush to embark on their own nuclear programs to confront the Iranian threat.

In AJC-speak, it’s self evident that the Lebanese nationalist Hizballah and the Palestinian nationalist Hamas are ‘Iranian terrorist proxies’, but this is the first I’ve heard about those outfits seeking a dirty bomb. A quick search reveals that some crackpot posting under the name Iqbal Latif alleged in a comment on Sara Roy’s review of a book about Hamas that both organisations were hiding dirty bombs in mosques. Doubtless ample evidence for David Harris.

As for Iran’s immediate neighbours, Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, and Turkmenistan, we know for sure that one of them will not be rushing to embark on its own nuclear weapons program, because Pakistan’s program culminated in a successful test 11 years ago. Another nearby country, already endowed with tested nukes, long range missiles, and a world class air force, a country that unconditionally refuses any IAEA inspections whatsoever and hasn’t even signed the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, has been threatening Iran for years. But it’s inconceivable that the UN Security Council’s ‘goal of establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery’ applied to Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which could never instigate a regional arms race.

Anyway, there’s no need for Harris to be so worried. A few weeks ago, Philip Sherwell reported in The Telegraph that Mossad has matters well in hand.

Reva Bhalla, a senior analyst with Stratfor, the US private intelligence company with strong government security connections, said the strategy was to take out key people.

"With co-operation from the United States, Israeli covert operations have focused both on eliminating key human assets involved in the nuclear programme and in sabotaging the Iranian nuclear supply chain," she said.

Mossad was rumoured to be behind the death of Ardeshire Hassanpour, a top nuclear scientist at Iran's Isfahan uranium plant, who died in mysterious circumstances from reported "gas poisoning" in 2007.

Other recent deaths of important figures in the procurement and enrichment process in Iran and Europe have been the result of Israeli "hits", intended to deprive Tehran of key technical skills at the head of the programme, according to Western intelligence analysts.

Israel has also used front companies to infiltrate the Iranian purchasing network…The businesses initially supply Iran with legitimate material, winning Tehran's trust, and then start to deliver faulty or defective items that "poison" the country's atomic activities.

Harris concludes by magically transforming Mullen’s belief, ‘His assessment follows a recent report by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran had understated by one third the amount of uranium it has enriched.’

The source of Mullen’s hyperbole is the most recent IAEA report on their quarterly inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities.

The IAEA report showed a significant increase in Iran's reported stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) since November to 1,010 kg -- enough, some physicists say, for possible conversion into high-enriched uranium for one bomb.

But according to IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming,

The (IAEA) has no reason at all to believe that the estimates of LEU produced in the (Natanz) facility were an intentional error by Iran. They are inherent in the early commissioning phases of such a facility when it is not known in advance how it will perform in practice.

In other words, if Iran were planning to build nuclear weapons, and if they had enough centrifuges to enrich the ‘stockpile’ to the required degree, and if they could do this without the IAEA noticing, and if they had the knowledge and technology to weaponise the uranium, they might at some stage be able to produce a nuclear weapon. At least according to ‘some physicists’.

In reality, not only has Iran denied such an intention, but the US National Intelligence Council’s (NIC) November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate reported, ‘We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.’

The IAEA ‘has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran, including all declared low enriched uranium.’ Fleming asserts that ‘Iran has provided good cooperation on this matter’. Furthermore, ‘No nuclear material could have been removed from the facility without the agency's knowledge since the facility is subject to video surveillance and the nuclear material has been kept under seal.’

Significantly, the NIC also reported,

We judge with moderate confidence Iran probably would be technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon sometime during the 2010-2015 time frame…All agencies recognize the possibility that this capability may not be attained until after 2015.

It’s worth remembering that a country with enough Highly Enriched Uranium to build one bomb is not in a position to threaten anyone with it, as they would have to test it before risking nuclear annihilation for shooting off a dud. It doesn’t even have deterrent value. If I’m not mistaken, no country has ever announced that it was developing a nuclear weapon. There are accusations, of course. But, although North Korea provided six days’ warning of its 2006 test, the successful test is the announcement. And you don’t carry out the test until you’ve built more than one bomb, which you can’t do with just enough LEU to process into enough HEU to build one bomb.

Typically evenhanded, the ABC report concludes, ‘Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful, energy-related purposes.’

But they can’t fool cluey American ‘Likely Voters’, 77% of whom told Rasmussen in a poll conducted on 29 and 30 January that they believed Iran's nuclear program was ‘for weapons development’.

Taking a leaf out of the push pollsters’ book, what Rasmussen asked was,

Iran says its uranium enrichment program is for peaceful energy purposes. The U.S., Israel and the European Union believe it is intended to develop nuclear weapons. Do you believe Iran's nuclear program is for energy purposes or for weapons development?

Only 6% believed a rogue pariah state like the Islamofascists in Iran, when credible sources like the cuddly US, Israel and the EU contradict them. The US, that is, except for the National Intelligence Council.

In a demented reprise of the old ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ trope, Rasmussen went on to ask,

Before a meeting is allowed between the President of Iran and the President of the United States, should Iran be required to stop developing nuclear weapons capabilities?

While 56% said President Obama should not condescend to meet Ahmedinejad until Iran stops developing nuclear weapons capabilities, 27% said he should, and 17% weren’t sure, 100% of those answering the question at all accepted that Iran was in fact developing nuclear weapons capabilities.

Four stars for philanthropy

Last week, the American Jewish Committee’s Weekly update #279 (not posted on the website yet, but probably will be here soon) boasted,

AJC has moved up significantly on the Chronicle of Philanthropy annual ranking of the top 400 non-profit organizations in the U.S. (out of a total of over 900,000 registered groups). On the just-released 2007 list AJC is 313, up from 355, with a 35.7 percent increase in revenue over the previous year. This achievement, in addition to earning Charity Navigator's highest 4-star rating, continues to underscore AJC's strength and fiscal responsibility.

Well might you wonder how an organisation that devotes its resources to publishing drivel like Israel’s quest for peace (see my critique) can qualify as a charity at all, much less a highly rated one. Among their other recent philanthropic efforts was Alvin H Rosenfeld’s immortal pamphlet, ‘"Progressive" Jewish thought and the new anti-Semitism’ (see this), demanding sanctions against Iran (see here) while excoriating the campaign for a boycott of Israel (‘The Ideological Foundations of the Boycott Campaign Against Israel’, see here), and publishing mendacious full page newspaper advertisements. What better use could any well meaning donor hope to see their money put to than honouring Colombian President Alvaro Uribe with its Light unto the Nations Award?

At least they’ve been extremely generous in providing me with a constant stream of material.

A little help from your friends

Anticipating a US or US-UK attack on Iran, the Guardian’s Seamas Milne observes,

What is becoming clearer is that the likely pretext for aggression against Iran has shifted from the possibility that Tehran might develop nuclear weapons to its role in supporting and allegedly arming the resistance in neighbouring Iraq and Afghanistan. The administration is increasingly convinced that it will be far easier to convince the American public of the case for war on Iran if it's seen as being about the protection of US troops rather than nuclear scaremongering from the people who brought you Saddam Hussein's WMD.

In recent times, the doctors of spin have enjoyed some stunning triumphs, including the remarkable feat of erecting the downright silly straw man that Israel’s critics single Israel out for criticism, and keeping it standing. And now, it would seem, they have another up their sleeve.

Milne is probably right that allegations of Iranian support for the Iraqi resistance will form at least one of the pretexts for any attack on Iran. I hasten to interject that I am not predicting an attack anymore, although I do consider bombing a plausible scenario. But sometimes they just beat the drums of war because they like the way people react to the noise. And people like Kolko, and Milne, have pointed out plenty of good reasons why it would be a bad idea.

Accusations of Iranian interference have formed a part of the propaganda surrounding the US adventure in Iraq all along and came to a head with the advent of Explosively Formed Projectiles. These were obviously Iranian imports, since, the media told us, the Iraqis are too stupid to develop such a fiendishly clever device. That was actually after Iraqi workshops manufacturing EFPs were discovered by US troops, if memory serves. And there was the abduction of several Iranian diplomatic staff in January.

So, what if the Iranians really were supporting Iraqi resistance to US occupation? Is that a casus belli? The standard spin on the occupation these days is that the poor old US going to extraordinary lengths to help the struggling fledgling democratic government of Iraq overcome Iraq’s deepseated millennia of communal strife even though the government seems unwilling to rise to the challenge of running a democracy under American tutelage. As the toddling government is beleaguered by deadenders, Ba’athists, foreign fighters, jihadis, and of course al Qa’ida, the US provides not only munitions, but many tens of thousands of its finest young people. It’s an expression of the generous spirit of the American people that their government has invested so much in supporting its Iraqi friends.

By the same token, if it’s ok for the US to offer military support to its friends in Iraq, what principle would preclude the Iranian people from offering military support to its friends in Iraq? They might think, with some reason, that the Americans invaded and occupied Iraq with a view to gaining control over the world’s second largest proven reserves of oil and establishing a military presence in the heart of the principal oil producing region in pursuit of their stated objective of full spectrum dominance. They could be forgiven for believing that the US has been cavalier in its respect for Iraqi life, slaughtering over a million, displacing a further four million, and thoroughly immiserating the rest. They could even entertain a reasonably well founded apprehension that the US has its eye on their own third largest proven oil reserves and harbours designs on Iranian sovereignty. That would justify supporting the resistance, wouldn’t it?

But if Iran is supplying copper plates for EFPs, that’s a blatant violation of International law – the law that says, ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’.

Urgent poll

Modestly describing itself as ‘one of America's leading online news services’, extreme right wing crackpot site NewsMax.com ‘is conducting an urgent national online poll’.

What, you might ask, could be urgent about an opinion poll? Obviously nobody could entertain the illusion that ‘decisionmakers’ are interested in what their ‘constituents’ think, or there would be no US troops in Iraq and abortion would be legal almost everywhere. The answer is that in this case they don’t want to record opinions at all. They want to create them, or at least reinforce them.

The page is headed, ‘Crisis Time: Should We Bomb Iran?’ Just dig these questions. They start off by asking

1) Do you believe U.S. efforts to contain Iran's nuclear weapons program are working?

And when did you start eating dog shit? Yeah, it’s that kind of question. It doesn’t matter how you answer, because whatever you say, you are agreeing that Iran has a nuclear weapons program and that the US is making efforts to ‘contain’ it. When they ask

2) Should the U.S. rely solely on the U.N. to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program?

it goes beyond the presupposition. Now there’s a sneaky little insinuation that the UN is not up to the job of stopping the mythical program, not that Newsmax readers would be in any doubt about that.

3) Do you believe Iran poses a greater threat than Saddam Hussein did before the Iraq War?

Now, we need to accept not only that Iran poses a threat, but that Saddam Hussein did, as well. And at this point, we come to the real point of the survey.

4) Do you agree with Joe Lieberman that the U.S. undertake military action against Iran if it does not stop their nuclear weapons program?

The only way I can read this carefully crafted question is that both ‘it’ and ‘their’ refer to Iran, as if the ‘survey designers’ couldn’t make up their ‘mind’ whether Iran was singular or plural. But it could be that ‘it’ refers to the UN and they didn’t bother to fix it when they inserted the Saddam question in between the UN question and this one? Jumpin’ Joe and Newsmax would never propose anything as gruesome as an attack. All they want is for the US to ‘undertake military action’. Wouldn’t harm a fly. And clearly Joe Lieberman is just the guy to take on the challenge of averting the terrible threat of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, possibly even more dangerous than Saddam’s ‘weapons of mass destruction-related program activities’.

5) Who should undertake military action against Iran first?

The US, or Israel?

NewsMax will provide the results of this poll to major media and every member of Congress. Additionally, NewsMax's results will be shared with every major radio talk show host in America.

Good for the gander

…a clear and present danger to international peace and security. Its ambitions to become the dominant power in the region, its heavy-handed interference in the domestic affairs of its neighbors, its lavish support for terrorist groups, and its massive arms build-up all underscore the nature of the threat.

…in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and UN Security Council resolutions.

…economic sanctions have been presented as a possible means to influence the regime and persuade it that there will be a painful price for flouting the will of the international community. With the implementation of sanctions and the threat of further ones…sanctions may have more direct impact than skeptics believed.

Despite…destabilizing influence in the international arena, investors from around the world continue to supply vast sums of money that not only prop up the regime, but also serve to embolden it…

No, of course it’s not Israel that the AJC was writing of in its new pamphlet, The Ca$e for Targeted Sanctions. Needless to say, the cuddly peacelovers at the American Jewish Committee aver, ‘No nation should relish the idea of military confrontation…The object, it should be stressed, is not to target the Iranian people, but its government’s policies.’

That would be the same American Jewish Committee that wasted no time yesterday in issuing a statement that ‘condemns the decision of UNISON, Britain's largest trade union, to advocate for a total boycott of Israel’.

"With the UNISON action, the union representing more than one million workers in public services in the United Kingdom has now joined with the journalists and academics unions in a shameful hate campaign against the Jewish state."

The UNISON resolution makes no mention of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, yet calls for the removal of Israel's security fence, pejoratively referred to as the "Apartheid wall".

…"UNISON has aligned itself with these murderous, anti-democratic and viciously anti-Semitic forces."

Later this week the UNISON conference may consider a further resolution calling for divestment from pension funds "which may have investments in Israel or in key companies trading with Israel."

Both motions are anti-Semitic, attempting to put Israel beyond the pale, just as prior anti-Semitic movements targeted individual Jews and Jewish communities.

Just in case anyone has missed some of the action, ‘Iran’s nuclear weapons program is particularly worrisome’. Israel’s nuclear arsenal threatens nobody. ‘Experts believe that the regime is developing ballistic missiles to deliver nuclear weapons…and could wield its nuclear deterrent as political blackmail throughout the Middle East’. Some ‘experts’ believe that, some Israeli experts for example, but not the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Director General, Mohamed ElBaradei, for example. And it goes without saying that Israel’s actual nuclear arsenal blackmails nobody. ‘In light of these scenarios, the international community has turned to economic penalties to demonstrate to Iran’s policymakers that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable.’ But a nuclear armed Israel is not only acceptable, but desirable.

And economic penalties for ‘a clear and present danger’, ‘ambitions to become the dominant power in the region’, ‘heavy-handed interference’, ‘lavish support for terrorist groups’, ‘massive arms build-up’, ‘violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and UN Security Council resolutions’? Well they’re ok if the target is Iran, whose deadliest, most implacable enemies make those claims about it. But not if the target is Israel, which has demonstrated that it meets every one of the criteria the AJC cites to justify economic sanctions against it’s regional rival. Except one. Israel has not violated the NPT. That’s because Israel isn’t even party to the NPT, for obvious reasons.

Once again, we have an example of Israel’s shrillest defenders, ‘Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.’ In their haste to accuse others of anti-Semitism, they display their own anti-Semitism, in the terms of the very ‘Working definition’ they helped draft. Apparently this proclivity for foot shooting has a long pedigree. On Tuesday, the AJC took umbrage when the UN Human Rights Council designated Israel ‘a permanent and separate agenda item’.

“No words can adequately describe how disappointing has been the performance of the UN Human Rights Council since its inception more than a year ago,” said AJC Executive Director David A. Harris…adding that this development is particularly painful for AJC, whose leaders were directly involved in helping to draft the human rights provisions in the UN Charter more than 60 years ago.

I suppose they should have taken more care to frame human rights provisions explicitly to exclude violations by Israel.

The looming threat

Peter W. Rodman is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and until recently was assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. William Shawcross is the author of “Allies: Why the West Had to Remove Saddam” and many other books.

‘Many years ago,’ they write in their joint op-ed in today’s NY Times,

the two of us clashed sharply over the wisdom and morality of American policy in Indochina, especially in Cambodia… Decades later, we have not changed our views. But we agreed even then that the outcome in Indochina was indeed disastrous, both in human and geopolitical terms, for the United States and the region. Today we agree equally strongly that the consequences of defeat in Iraq would be even more serious and lasting.

After detailing their view of the unfortunate outcomes of the US defeat in Vietnam, they conclude,

American defeat in Iraq would embolden the extremists in the Muslim world, demoralize and perhaps destabilize many moderate friendly governments, and accelerate the radicalization of every conflict in the Middle East.

It never ceases to amaze me the way these ‘intellectuals’ think that they deploy a ‘friendly’ word like ‘moderate’ and suck in all the regular punters. As if we didn’t know just what kind of moderate governments they prefer remain stable. The ones whose moderation is evidenced by hacking off people’s limbs as a punishment and taking a strong stance against women’s suffrage, or even driving.

The ones they endeavour to demonise as ‘extremists’ include, but may not be limited to, those who espouse such extreme political views as trade union rights for Egyptians, an end to the US occupation of Iraq, or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, or even making ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ a state of all its citizens – ‘or what the rest of us would call a liberal democracy’ as Jonathan Cook puts it.

Our conduct in Iraq is a crucial test of our credibility, especially with regard to the looming threat from revolutionary Iran. Our Arab and Israeli friends view Iraq in that wider context. They worry about our domestic debate, which had such a devastating impact on the outcome of the Vietnam War, and they want reassurance.

That would be the looming threat of Iran developing nuclear power and selling more oil to America’s looming economic rival in China, in Euros. And obviously, ‘we’ mustn’t do anything to worry ‘our Arab and Israeli friends’, the hand choppers and beach shellers.

The United States cannot be strong against Iran — or anywhere — if we accept defeat in Iraq.

Well…good, and not a moment too soon! American credibility has not benefited the people or the planet. The only concern is the release of greenhouse gases as billions issue a collective sigh of relief.

Just call me 'Googly'

According to Fred Burton in yesterday’s Stratfor Terrorism Intelligence Report, former Iranian Deputy Defence Minister Ali Reza Asghari was not abducted after all. He defected to the US while on a putative business trip to Istanbul. Burton claims that although he was thought to have disappeared as early as December, the Iranians didn’t notify the Turks that he was missing until last month.

The significance of Asghari's disappearance stems entirely from his background. Not only did he serve as Iran's deputy defense minister under former President Mohammed Khatami, but he also is a retired general who was a commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in the 1980s and 1990s. Therefore, the Iranians clearly have worried that he might be providing Western intelligence agencies with a wealth of information on the capabilities of the Iranian armed forces, and possibly helping to improve their understanding of the relationship between the IRGC (or "Pasdaran," in Farsi) and Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Iraqi Shiite groups such as the Mehdi Army and the Badr Brigade. Given his background, he also would be in a position to shed light on the Pasdaran's clandestine abilities abroad and perhaps identify other Iranian intelligence officers. In other words, Asghari could prove an important (and timely) catch for U.S. intelligence, especially if he had been working with the United States as an "agent in place" for a long period.

It certainly sounds like we can expect great things. The bogus case for an Iranian nuclear weapons program has already been established, the the IAEA and the CIA’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. All we need now is a new ‘Curveball’ to tell the ‘intelligence’ agencies what they want to hear and hey presto, casus belli!

Wikipedia reckons that ‘Curveball’ was a randomly generated codename, but I reckon we ought to call Asghari ‘Googly’ for the sake of consistency. Maybe the time has come for the NY Times to give Judith Miller her old job back? And for Condi to start warming up the overhead projector.

'Let slip the wolves'

To all appearances, the US is gearing up for the long awaited attack on Iran.

Never before displayed in public, the weapons included squat canisters designed to explode and spit out molten balls of copper that cut through armor. The canisters, called explosively formed penetrators or E.F.P.s, are perhaps the most feared weapon faced by American and Iraqi troops here. (NY Times)

Presumably, Bush spent his childhood so steeped in Christianity that he missed out entirely on the pagans, like Aesop,

A Shepherd-boy, who watched a flock of sheep near a village, brought out the villagers three or four times by crying out, "Wolf! Wolf!" and when his neighbors came to help him, laughed at them for their pains. The Wolf, however, did truly come at last. The Shepherd-boy, now really alarmed, shouted in an agony of terror: "Pray, do come and help me; the Wolf is killing the sheep"; but no one paid any heed to his cries, nor rendered any assistance. The Wolf, having no cause of fear, at his leisure lacerated or destroyed the whole flock.

We can only hope that it’s just him and that the American people remember how Bush and the neocons sucked them into the Iraq adventure just four short years ago. It would be a terrible embarrassment for them to believe this mob of liars again, ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’

In a hopeful development, even the usually gullible NY Times has expressed a degree of healthy scepticism,

In a news briefing held under strict security, the officials spread out on two small tables an E.F.P. and an array of mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades with visible serial numbers that the officials said link the weapons directly to Iranian arms factories. The officials also asserted, without providing direct evidence, that Iranian leaders had authorized smuggling those weapons into Iraq for use against the Americans. The officials said such an assertion was an inference based on general intelligence assessments.

That inference, and the anonymity of the officials who made it, seemed likely to generate skepticism among those suspicious that the Bush administration is trying to find a scapegoat for its problems in Iraq, and perhaps even trying to lay the groundwork for war with Iran.

Lenin puts it somewhat less diplomatically,

Leaving aside the dirty cheek involved in America decrying another country's involvement in violence in Iraq, everyone knows that there is a huge black market in weapons in Iraq, and that many of them are likely to have been produced in Iran. That's how black markets work. It's extremely likely, by the way, that many of the car bomb attacks use cars produced in America. What does this prove?

The Independent’s Patrick Cockburn also finds plenty of reason to doubt the Pentagon’s claims,

The allegations against Iran are similar in tone and credibility to those made four years ago by the US government about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the invasion of 2003…

The evidence against Iran is even more insubstantial than the faked or mistaken evidence for Iraqi WMDs disseminated by the US and Britain in 2002 and 2003. The allegations appear to be full of exaggerations…It implies the Shias have been at war with the US while in fact they are controlled by parties which make up the Iraqi government.

The officials speaking in Baghdad used aggressive rhetoric suggesting that Washington wants to ratchet up its confrontation with Tehran. It has not ruled out using armed force and has sent a second carrier task force to the Gulf…

The White House may have decided that, in the run up to the 2008 presidential election, it would be much to its political advantage in the US to divert attention from its failure in Iraq by blaming Iran for being the hidden hand supporting its opponents.

Furthermore,

The allegations by senior but unnamed US officials in Baghdad and Washington are bizarre. The US has been fighting a Sunni insurgency in Iraq since 2003 that is deeply hostile to Iran.

The statements from Washington give the impression that the US has been at war with Shia militias for the past three-and-a-half years while almost all the fighting has been with the Sunni insurgents… It is unlikely that the Sunni guerrillas have received significant quantities of military equipment from Tehran…

The US stance on the military capabilities of Iraqis today is the exact opposite of its position in four years ago. Then President Bush and Tony Blair claimed that Iraqis were technically advanced enough to produce long-range missiles and to be close to producing a nuclear device. Washington is now saying that Iraqis are too backward to produce an effective roadside bomb and must seek Iranian help.

Finally, David Swanson, makes a couple of widely overlooked points, enjoining,

But let's keep one thing in mind as we demand a thorough investigation of both sets of lies -- lies made by the same set of people: In neither case, even if every single claim were 100 percent true and accurate, would there have been an established a legal case for war. If a nation's possession of WMDs were grounds for launching a war against it, the United States would be subject to legal invasion immediately.

So, while debunking the fanciful claims of Bush, Cheney, and Gates may be entertaining, we may actually do more good if we brush them aside and point out that it does not matter whether their claims are true or not. Aiding a nation in repelling a foreign occupation is not grounds for war. The U.S. still brags about having done this in France 60 years ago. If Iran were doing it in Iraq now, which no evidence yet suggests, the crime would lie in the foreign invaders' refusal to leave, not in the aide supplied by the Iranians.

Stunts and action

In a post about Benny Morris’s latest rantings last night, Lenin reminded me of the curious fact that the Jewish community in Iran has neglected to respond to the call from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), Israeli officials and American Jewish communal leaders to leave. After all, Ahmedinejad is a notorious anti-Semite and wants to slaughter us all. So why hasn’t he carried out the dire threats everyone accuses him of on the Jews closest to hand? And perhaps more important, why aren’t they afraid he will?

According to the statistics compiled by HIAS, 152 out of 25,000 Jews left Iran between October 2005 and September 2006 — down from 297 during the same period the previous year, and 183 the year before. Sources said that the majority of those who have left in recent years cited economic and family reasons as their main incentive for leaving, rather than political concerns.

According to the 12 January report in the Forward,

“Iranian Jews have a comfortable Jewish life,” said Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-born Middle East analyst now living in Israel.

… the 25,000 Jews of Tehran, Shiraz and Yazd attend packed synagogues, send their children to Jewish schools, buy their meat in kosher butchers and are even exempt from prohibitions on alcohol.

Clearly there must be some ulterior motive. The Forward reports that according to

Amir Cyrus Razzaghi, a Tehran-based commentator who is not Jewish. “There is a genuine interest to keep the Jewish community in Iran to demonstrate to the world that the government is anti-Israel and not anti-Jewish. This is especially important to a government that strives to be not only the leader in the Islamic world, but also a key regional and global player.”

A propaganda stunt. Like Venezuela’s subsidized Citgo heating oil for poor Americans. Except those Americans actually are warmed by the propaganda and the Iranian Jews are apparently content to live as Jews in Iran.

It would be good to see Israel pull a propaganda stunt like that. For example, according to Ynet,

the human development index of the Arab public in Israel ranks in 66th place out of 177 countries, 44 slots below the general ranking of the State of Israel…very similar to Libya. For Israel overall, the HDI is 0.9…

Moreover, in comparison with the rest of the world, Israel is ranked 22 out of 177 countries. However, when looking at only the Arab population, the ranking plummeted to 66.

This was also the case for health. The overall level of health in Israel was calculated at 0.9, while health amongst the Arab population was rated at 0.85, which is lower than countries like Costa Rica and Cuba.

It would be a great propaganda stunt if Former US President Jimmy Carter’s description were actually true, ‘Israel is a wonderful democracy with equal treatment of all citizens whether Arab or Jew’? What if some of the billions the US plows into expanding the settlements every year went into education and services for the Israeli Arabs? What if, instead of just claiming an intention to dismantle some roadbloacks in the West Bank, and pretending to do so, they actually made life easier for the occupied Palestinians? Why they could even let the Palestinians drive on their Aryan only ‘bypass roads’! That would be a terrific propaganda stunt. Cut some of the ground right out from under those antisemites accusing them of apartheid.

When the chair of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial council, Holocaust survivor Yosef Lapid can say,

"I was afraid to go to school, because of the little anti-Semites who used to lay in ambush on the way and beat us up. How is that different from a Palestinian child in Hebron?"

I’d say a propaganda stunt is in order. Amira Hass has itemized a long list of prohibitions:

* Palestinians from the Gaza Strip are forbidden to stay in the West Bank.

* Palestinians are forbidden to enter East Jerusalem.

* West Bank Palestinians are forbidden to enter the Gaza Strip through the Erez crossing.

* Palestinians are forbidden to enter the Jordan Valley.

* Palestinians are forbidden to enter villages, lands, towns and neighborhoods along the "seam line" between the separation fence and the Green Line (some 10 percent of the West Bank).

What if Palestinians were permitted to do those things and the other fourteen she lists? What if they didn’t need all those permits she enumerates? Good press.

Left I found a study reported in the NY Times to the effect that attitudes to the US in 25 countries suggest that the US has a bit of PR to attend to.

In 18 countries polled previously, an average of 29 percent of those surveyed saw the United States as having a mainly positive influence, down from 36 percent last year.

Imagine how it would affect those nasty ratings if the US were to do something nice for a change, like help its own citizens to heat their homes? Or maybe reprieve a few death row prisoners? Or flood Darfur with food and doctors? Or even pull their troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan? They wouldn’t have to actually mean anything by it. Just a propaganda stunt, after all

What's the hurry?

In an extraordinary performance of cognitive flexibility,

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Monday that Iran was “acting in a very negative way” in the Middle East and that the United States was building up its forces to demonstrate its resolve to remain in the Persian Gulf... “We are simply trying to communicate to the region that we are going to be there for a long time.”

Iran, which conventional maps place in the Middle East, is a negative influence in its own region. The US military, shipped in from thousands of kilometres away, not only is not ‘acting in a very negative way’ as it slaughters its way through Iran’s immediate eastern and western neighbours, but can pontificate about its views of the way the locals behave. And the vast military buildup and the Patriot missiles – just a message.

And speaking of messages, it seems US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice doesn’t even have one of those, averring, “I’m not coming with a proposal. I’m not coming with a plan.”

I just thought it would be nice to take a trip. Have a cup of coffee and a yarn with my mate Tzipi. See how things were going around here.

Plan? We have a plan! What plan? The Roadmap, of course! I know it said Israel would immediately halt settlement expansion. But think of it this way. The bigger the settlements and the more ‘outposts’ there are, the more we can dismantle. So it’s actually better for the Palestinians. Israel will be conceding more.

Sure, the refugees have been languishing in camps for the last 60 years. Sure, the Israelis occupied the rest of Palestine 40 years ago. Sure, we started the ‘peace process in 1993. What’s the big hurry? We said in the Roadmap that we’d ‘reach final and comprehensive permanent status agreement that ends the Israel-Palestinian conflict in 2005’. So? That was only two years ago. We’re still following the map. It’s just that all the signs are in Hebrew and we keep taking wrong turns.

“I think there are openings now that are there as a result of this alignment, there as a result of the obvious desire of Prime Minister Olmert and President Abbas to move forward,” she said. “So I think the opening is there, but I can’t really judge until I’ve had a chance to really talk to all the interested parties how we can accelerate the road map, how quickly we can accelerate the road map and how we begin to talk about the political horizon that everybody is interested in.’

Now we’ve decided to hire a driver who can read Hebrew, and we’ll move forward, accelerating right on down that roadmap highway until we reach…the horizon!

A comrade was once giving a talk about Michael Moore’s book, Stupid white men and pointed out that one of Moore’s problems was that he didn’t understand that class was the issue. Sometimes the enemy appears in the form of a smart black woman.

Further to yesterday’s ‘Crosswords’ piece, a reader advises that King Faisal II of Iraq was overthrown not in 1957, as I wrote, but 1958. Sorry about that. I actually meant to double check, and it slipped my mind.

It must be the crossword

In their now famous apology for their reporting in the lead up to and early stages of the war, published 26 May 2004, the NY Times’s Editors confess, ‘we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been’. Not much of an apology really, especially when hedged with ‘we found an enormous amount of journalism that we are proud of. In most cases, what we reported was an accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time’, as if they had never heard of Scott Ritter, or Hans Blix, for that matter. The fact is, the Times one of the world’s most prestigious papers, ‘the newspaper of record’, featured article after article, particularly, but not only, those by Judith Miller, effectively promoting Ahmed Chalabi’s agenda to get the US to invade Iraq. There was probably no single agency putting forward the neocons’ agenda for ‘regime change’ in Iraq more enthusiastically than the NYT. And yet their agenda was no secret. The Project for a New American Century was articulating it quite clearly from its inception in 1997. In the notorious 26 January 1998 letter to Clinton, John Bolton, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and James Woolsey, among others, wrote,

We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.

We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country.

It’s all there – regime change, WMD, ‘preemptive strikes’, ignore the UN… - for the Times to have known about and borne in mind when they were fact checking Miller’s contributions. But it seems they were asleep at the wheel. Either that or they were really on the PNAC bandwagon and didn’t want to exercise the kind of journalistic professionalism that war hysteria calls for.

You’d think they’d be embarrassed about their failure, and about their grudging apology, as if even a sincere apology could compensate for the damage they’ve done. But no.

In yesterday’s editorial, ‘Picking Up the Pieces’, they write,

It was surreal how disconnected President Bush was the other night, both from Iraq’s horrifying reality and America’s anguish over this unnecessary, mismanaged and now unwinnable war.

What’s really surreal is a few paragraphs later where they claim, ‘we opposed Mr. Bush’s invasion’! It’s as if they think readers have already forgotten the shameful role they played. But that’s not all they believe we’ve forgotten. They criticize Bush for

…sending some 20,000 additional troops in an attempt to impose peace on Baghdad’s vengeful streets. He proposes to do that without any enforceable commitments from the Iraqi government that it will take the necessary political steps that are the only hope for tamping down a spiraling civil war.

Do they really think we’re that stupid? Countries do not send troops to impose peace, for crying out loud, their function is to impose war. And the quisling ‘Iraqi government’ is supposed to take some steps, when it is the US occupation that calls every move. Bush, they claim,

would mortgage thousands more American lives and what remains of Washington’s credibility in the region to a destructively sectarian Shiite government that he seems unwilling or unable to influence or restrain.

It goes without saying that American lives are the issue. The economic conscripts that populate the US Armed Forces do not deserve the fate that Bush and the neocons, in league with the Editors of the Times, have sent them to. But death and injury are widely accepted occupational hazards in their job. Granted, the military ought to have more rigorous health and safety standards, but the 655,000 Iraqis by and large just happened to be in the way.

And where did this credibility come from? The US has done nothing but swagger and throw its weight around the Middle East at least since they overthrew Mossadegh in 1953 and installed the bloodthirsty Shah. They’ve supported, well, not every brutal dictator in the region, but apart from Nasser and the Assads, just about. Certainly not excluding Saddam himself. And then there’s the little issue of that Jewish and Democratic State sitting there – the ‘rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism’, as Herzl put it. Whatever anyone thinks about Israel and whatever anyone thinks about Walt and Mearscheimer, there’s no disputing that US support for Israel, no matter what they’ve done to the Palestinians, over the last six decades has not won the US any ‘credibility in the region’.

And here’s that pesky sectarian government again, completely out of control. It’s as if ‘we’ squandered all those American lives for nothing. So ungrateful. I guess the Arabs really aren’t ready for the gift of democracy. Or could it be that ‘we’ are the ones who aren’t ready for them to exercise democracy. Just like we weren’t when the Iraqis chucked out Britain’s pet monarch in 1958. Yeah, everybody’s talking about Bremer’s big mistake, ‘deba’athification’. But nobody’s talking about the original ‘Ba’athification’, when ‘we’ couldn’t handle their democracy, just like ‘we’ couldn’t handle the Iranians’, or the Guatemalans’, or the Nicaraguans’, or the Haitians’... Anyhow, how can the most powerful country on earth expect to keep a bunch of Shi’ites in line with only 150,000 troops?

But even knowing all that, America cannot simply wash its hands of Iraq and go home. The region’s problems, many of them made worse by this war, are unavoidably America’s problems as well. For starters, Iraq is in imminent danger of violently breaking apart, driving millions of refugees across its borders — who will bring with them their ethnic grievances, and in some cases their weapons — and potentially unleashing a chain reaction of regional conflicts that could draw in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran and perhaps others as well.

Imagine, the region’s problems actually exacerbated by war! Who would ever have expected that? After all, every other war has just been jolly. You know, I had an email responding to that piece I wrote about HRW the other day saying, ‘One has to wonder what human institution does have the moral authority to discuss human rights. Seems we need someone from another planet to take on that task!’. Well, it looks like we’ve found a candidate, because these editors sure don’t have any connection with Earth.

It was before the war that a lot of people were talking about a plan to break up Iraq. There was talk of a merger between the predoiminiantly Shi’ite oil rich south of Iraq and the oil rich Shi’ite regions of Saudi Arabia to form an oil rich Arab Shi’ite sheikhdom. Meanwhile, the oil rich Kurdish north would have the independence ‘we’ promised them in 1915 or so and the intransigent Sunnis could join Jordon, or just get nicked. Who cares, anyway – they wouldn’t have any oil? Wasn’t that the plan? Now they’ve gone all nostalgic about Iraqi unity.

Some of us are already concerned about the estimated two million refugees, and the nearly two million more estimated to be displaced within Iraq. We’re thinking about their welfare. Not the Editors. Much too subtle and discerning for that stuff, they’re worried about the guns.

It’s also a little late to start worrying about drawing in Turkey and Iran – I don’t know about Saudi Arabia. Just Friday, didn’t ‘we’ throw diplomatic protocol to the wind, along with the rest of the unlamented ‘quaint’ Geneva conventions, when ‘we’ invaded the Iranian consulate in Erbil? The justification for that was supposed to be precisely that Iran was already drawn in. As the Times itself reported on Saturday,

A recent series of American raids against Iranians in Iraq was authorized under an order that President Bush decided to issue several months ago to undertake a broad military offensive against Iranian operatives in the country, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday.

As for Turkey, also on Friday, Reuters reported,

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan on Friday reaffirmed Turkey's right to send troops into Iraq to crush Kurdish rebels there and chided U.S. officials for questioning it.

"The Turkish Republic will do whatever is necessary to combat the terrorists when the time comes, but it will not announce its plans in advance," Erdogan told a news conference after a meeting of his ruling AK Party.

In any case, as far as I’m aware, Turkish troops have been crossing the border with impunity all along, anyway.

I’m afraid it doesn’t end there.

The expanding power of a revolutionary, Shiite Iran is profoundly unsettling to the conservative Sunni-led governments in most of the Arab Middle East, which have been America’s traditional allies in the region. If the United States is to recoup any of its standing and influence there, it will have to find a way to contain the chaos in Iraq. And it will have to do a lot more to address other concerns of these governments and their people, starting with a genuine and sustained effort to mediate a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

‘America’s traditional allies’, you know, those nice Arabs. The ones with the neatly trimmed goatees and the long white gowns and veil things with the rope around their heads. Kind of like angels. The ones who have those moderate democratic countries, where women don’t have to vote, or even drive, and they chop your hands off if you steal stuff.

Another thing I’m planning to return to, probably in a separate post, is Israel and the Palestinians. Suffice it to say at this point that the Editors must be on something awful powerful if they think the US can pretend that it is some kind of impartial arbiter to ‘mediate’ between those squabbling children. Or maybe not. They got away with it in Angola.

And so long as any American troops remain in Iraq, Mr. Bush must put serious pressure on Mr. Maliki to support the troops’ efforts with a genuine program of national reconciliation. That must include, at a minimum, ridding the police and other security services of killers, torturers and criminals and disarming all sectarian militias.

‘Disarm those militias!’ Now where have I heard that before? Oh, yes, it was Mr Sharon laying down conditions for the ‘government’ of Palestine, that country that only exists in the future.

And check this out – the comrades down at the Times put in a lot of work on this editorial,

The government must also assure that Iraqi oil revenues are fairly shared out among the entire Iraqi population.

I was surprised, too. I had no idea those guys were socialists. Or could it have been a slip of the keyboard? It’s not often they saying anything that makes any sense. But wait a second. That doesn’t make sense either. Didn’t that ‘government’ just pass some kind of decree giving all the oil revenues to foreign oil companies?

Its provisions are a radical departure from the norm for developing countries: under a system known as "production-sharing agreements", or PSAs, oil majors such as BP and Shell in Britain, and Exxon and Chevron in the US, would be able to sign deals of up to 30 years to extract Iraq's oil… Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world's number one and two oil exporters, both tightly control their industries through state-owned companies with no appreciable foreign collaboration, as do most members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Opec.

That’s right, even those nice, moderate, traditional American allies in Saudi Arabia won’t give the oil giants the amount of control the democratic government of Iraq have decided to, entirely of their own free will, even if, according to today’s Independent, ‘the US government has been involved in drawing up the law’.

It’s kind of funny that the Times can write of a sovereign government of Iraq while stipulating a whole range of conditions that the US government must lay down for that government to comply with, or else.

…These benchmarks should be accompanied by fixed timelines. And they must be accompanied with a clear message that the United States is prepared to withdraw its troops if the Iraqis continue to refuse to take responsibility for their own future.

Withdraw the troops! Oh, no! After all the wonderful things they’ve done for the Iraqi people, like the big cull. I’m confident the sectarian Shi’ite government will come to heel when faced with a threat like that.

Sometimes I wonder what keeps people buying the NY Times when they seem so intent on insulting their readers with blatant, transparent bullshit, day after day. I guess it must be the crossword puzzle.

Disenfranchising the minority for a change, etc.

According to yesterday’s Jerusalem Post, there are moves afoot to implement a threshold of 5% - or 6 of 120 seats - for parties to take seats in the Knesset. Although plainly a move to disenfranchise the three sitting Arab parties, or ‘factions’ as the Post is pleased to characterize them, none of which holds more than four seats, it would also eliminate the liberal Meretz party, which currently holds four seats, along with any other small parties, such as the Greens. The article doesn’t specify how the votes from failed parties are to be distributed, but in Turkey, a similar 10% threshold enables the reigning soft Islamist AKP (Justice and Development Party) to govern with a huge 66% majority even though they achieved less than 35% of the popular vote in the 2002 parliamentary elections.

Bloggers sell out!

Yesterday’s NY Times reports on a bunch of high profile bloggers accepting money from politicians. Some of them obviously don’t have very strong principles, because they sold out for a pittance. As for me, would I take money from Clinton? For 20,000 Euros a month, sure, I’d tell her anything she doesn’t want to know.

Jews sans frontiers posted a satirical piece attributed to Gabriel Ash and said to have first appeared on yellowtimes in 2003.

Soldiers should be instructed not to use the Star of David when defacing Palestinian property... the IDF could provide soldiers with defacement kits which include a sticker with the following disclaimer (in colloquial Arabic): "This humiliating act is performed by the State of Israel and has nothing to do with Jewish religion.”

Army Education Officers should be dispatched to all Palestinian villages and neighborhoods. The officers should take advantage of the long curfews which keep the population indoors in order to pass from house to house educating people about the deep historical commitment of the Jewish religion to justice and human rights, the beauty of Jewish holidays, the celebrated self-mocking Jewish humor, and the significant contributions of Jews to world culture. Officers will distribute to Palestinian families …free DVD recordings of "Annie Hall"…

Olmert said Israel will be ready to evacuate occupied lands and settlements in return for "real peace." "You have to stop violence and terror, to recognize our right to live in peace and security by your side and to give up the right of return. That's a right, natural and possible target," he said.

I guess I’m a little slow on the uptake with this one. But then, it’s not really news when an Israeli PM undertakes to ‘evacuate occupied lands and settlements’, note not ‘the occupied lands and settlements’ or ‘all occupied lands and settlements’, in exchange for the Palestinian ‘leadership’ relinquishing a right that is not theirs to negotiate. In other words, once again taking a lesson from Jacob and Esau, or perhaps Tom Sawyer, Israel is making a generous offer to return a small part of what they stole if the Palestinians will give up their birthright.

Courtesy of The Israel Project:

Iran must be stopped before it is too late.

Help us educate the press and the world – and stop Iran before it gets the nuclear bomb.

Now is the time to take action to secure Israel’s future.

Can you imagine the world without Israel? Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah can. That’s why we’re working to stop them – but we need your help.

As you know, Iran has been identified as the world’s leading state sponsor of international terrorism, funding Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas.

…educating the media costs money:

· $250 covers the cost to email fully-vetted background information to 10,000 journalists worldwide

· $600 lets us create and email a “breaking news” press release to journalists

· $1200 pays to have one journalist take a 2½ hour helicopter tour over Israel

And educating the media about the real foremost state sponsors of terrorism, which already have nukes? Priceless.