Showing posts with label NATO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NATO. Show all posts
Sunday, 7 May 2023
Friday, 10 March 2023
Sunday, 5 March 2023
Thursday, 1 December 2022
Wednesday, 10 August 2022
War or peace, truth suffers
Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn
UKRAINE has published a list of some 620 academics, journalists, military veterans and politicians who it says are Russian propagandists. Three such worthies in the list are Indian, and they seem baffled by the accusation.
As ‘agents’ go, there’s probably nobody to beat Pakistan, followed by India in sheer turnover. Someone praising an Indian batsman in Pakistan could fall into the category of an Indian agent as is known to have happened with cricket enthusiasts in India cheering for a Pakistani bowler. An Indian or Pakistani critical of authoritarian rule in their countries could be portrayed as enemy agents.
UKRAINE has published a list of some 620 academics, journalists, military veterans and politicians who it says are Russian propagandists. Three such worthies in the list are Indian, and they seem baffled by the accusation.
As ‘agents’ go, there’s probably nobody to beat Pakistan, followed by India in sheer turnover. Someone praising an Indian batsman in Pakistan could fall into the category of an Indian agent as is known to have happened with cricket enthusiasts in India cheering for a Pakistani bowler. An Indian or Pakistani critical of authoritarian rule in their countries could be portrayed as enemy agents.
Rahul Gandhi has made the grade more frequently than many others. Opponents of nuclear weapons on both sides are easily saddled with the opprobrium of helping the enemy. Occasionally, campaigners for peace between the two become targets of slander. Others run the risk of annoying both sides.
The Pakistani establishment deemed Faiz Ahmed Faiz as too close to India. And now his daughters have run into trouble with the Indian visa regime.
Let’s suppose Russia were to publish a list of Ukrainian ‘agents’ in India. Quite a few, surely, including top-ranking former diplomats, would be running for cover having declared the imminent fall of Vladimir Putin either by assassination or a bloody coup.
The maxim that truth becomes a casualty in war is thus only half true. Peacetime is no longer a safe sanctuary for the ill-fated truth against being exchanged for something more expedient. Countries are creepily spying on their own unlike the old days when foreign agents were planted abroad to pry on each other.
A very determined American lover of democracy exposed the subversion of the constitution in his country whereby ordinary citizens were spied on in a Big Brotherly way. He is now parked in a Moscow hotel, some distance from those seeking to hunt him down as an enemy of the state. Such heroes are not uncommon across the world. Julian Assange and Mordechai Vanunu belong to this club.
Ukraine’s unusual move has an Indian parallel. It reminds one of framed pictures of intellectuals critical of the ultra right-wing government in Uttar Pradesh hung in public squares in Lucknow. The high court ordered the photos removed to protect the life and limb of those framed, as also their privacy.
Ukraine’s countermeasures have a history. During the war with Nazi Germany, Britain, currently advising Kyiv, had a department of propaganda, which was called that. It toggled also as the information department in its other avatars.
The ministries of information in our patch have remained a euphemism for the state’s propaganda overdrive targeting its own people mainly, come peace or war. In Ukraine, the Centre for Countering Disinformation was established in 2021 under Volodymyr Zelensky and headed by former lawyer Polina Lysenko.
According to UnHerd — the journal that carried absorbing responses from some of the alleged Russian propagandists — the disinformation department sits within the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine. Its stated aim is to detect and counter “propaganda” and “destructive disinformation” and to prevent the “manipulation of public opinion”.
The July 14 list on its website names those “promoting Russian propaganda”. Several high-profile Western intellectuals and politicians were listed. Republican Senator Rand Paul, former Democrat Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, military and geopolitical analyst Edward N. Luttwak, political scientist John Mearsheimer and renowned journalist Glenn Greenwald were named. “The list does not explain what the consequences are for anyone mentioned,” the UnHerd story notes.
Next to each name the report lists the “pro-Russian” opinions the individual promotes. For example, “Luttwak’s breach was to suggest that ‘referendums should be held in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions’”; Mearsheimer’s folly was to say that “Nato has been in Ukraine since 2014” and that “Nato provoked Putin”. UnHerd contacted and published the comments by Luttwak, Mearsheimer and Greenwald.
From Feb 24, the very start of the war, said Luttwak, he had “relentlessly argued that not just the US, UK, Norway and others should send weapons to Ukraine, but also the reluctant trio of France, Germany and Italy”.
“What happened is this. I said that there is a victory party and the victory party is not realistic … Their idea is if Russia can be squarely defeated then Putin will fall. But this is also the moment when nuclear escalation becomes a feasibility. It is a fantasy to believe Russia can be squarely defeated. In Kyiv they have interpreted this stance as meaning I am pro-Russia.”
Mearsheimer was equally annoyed at being labelled a Russian plant. “When I was a young boy, my mother taught me that when others can’t beat your arguments with facts and logic, they smear you. That is what is going on here.
“I argue that it is clear from the available evidence that Russia invaded Ukraine because the United States and its European allies were determined to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border, which Moscow saw as an existential threat. Ukrainians of all persuasions reject my argument and instead blame Vladimir Putin, who is said to have been bent on conquering Ukraine and making it part of a greater Russia,” he told UnHerd.
“But there is no evidence in the public record to support that claim, which creates real problems for both Kyiv and the West. So how do they deal with me? The answer of course is to label me a Russian propagandist, which I am not.”
Greenwald saw a clear glimpse of McCarthyism in the Ukrainian list.
“War proponents in the West and other functionaries of Western security state agencies have used the same tactics for decades to demonise anyone questioning the foreign policy of the US and Nato. Chief among them, going back to the start of the Cold War, is accusing every dissident of spreading ‘Russian propaganda’ or otherwise serving the Kremlin. That’s all this is from the Ukrainians: just standard McCarthyite idiocy.”
The Pakistani establishment deemed Faiz Ahmed Faiz as too close to India. And now his daughters have run into trouble with the Indian visa regime.
Let’s suppose Russia were to publish a list of Ukrainian ‘agents’ in India. Quite a few, surely, including top-ranking former diplomats, would be running for cover having declared the imminent fall of Vladimir Putin either by assassination or a bloody coup.
The maxim that truth becomes a casualty in war is thus only half true. Peacetime is no longer a safe sanctuary for the ill-fated truth against being exchanged for something more expedient. Countries are creepily spying on their own unlike the old days when foreign agents were planted abroad to pry on each other.
A very determined American lover of democracy exposed the subversion of the constitution in his country whereby ordinary citizens were spied on in a Big Brotherly way. He is now parked in a Moscow hotel, some distance from those seeking to hunt him down as an enemy of the state. Such heroes are not uncommon across the world. Julian Assange and Mordechai Vanunu belong to this club.
Ukraine’s unusual move has an Indian parallel. It reminds one of framed pictures of intellectuals critical of the ultra right-wing government in Uttar Pradesh hung in public squares in Lucknow. The high court ordered the photos removed to protect the life and limb of those framed, as also their privacy.
Ukraine’s countermeasures have a history. During the war with Nazi Germany, Britain, currently advising Kyiv, had a department of propaganda, which was called that. It toggled also as the information department in its other avatars.
The ministries of information in our patch have remained a euphemism for the state’s propaganda overdrive targeting its own people mainly, come peace or war. In Ukraine, the Centre for Countering Disinformation was established in 2021 under Volodymyr Zelensky and headed by former lawyer Polina Lysenko.
According to UnHerd — the journal that carried absorbing responses from some of the alleged Russian propagandists — the disinformation department sits within the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine. Its stated aim is to detect and counter “propaganda” and “destructive disinformation” and to prevent the “manipulation of public opinion”.
The July 14 list on its website names those “promoting Russian propaganda”. Several high-profile Western intellectuals and politicians were listed. Republican Senator Rand Paul, former Democrat Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, military and geopolitical analyst Edward N. Luttwak, political scientist John Mearsheimer and renowned journalist Glenn Greenwald were named. “The list does not explain what the consequences are for anyone mentioned,” the UnHerd story notes.
Next to each name the report lists the “pro-Russian” opinions the individual promotes. For example, “Luttwak’s breach was to suggest that ‘referendums should be held in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions’”; Mearsheimer’s folly was to say that “Nato has been in Ukraine since 2014” and that “Nato provoked Putin”. UnHerd contacted and published the comments by Luttwak, Mearsheimer and Greenwald.
From Feb 24, the very start of the war, said Luttwak, he had “relentlessly argued that not just the US, UK, Norway and others should send weapons to Ukraine, but also the reluctant trio of France, Germany and Italy”.
“What happened is this. I said that there is a victory party and the victory party is not realistic … Their idea is if Russia can be squarely defeated then Putin will fall. But this is also the moment when nuclear escalation becomes a feasibility. It is a fantasy to believe Russia can be squarely defeated. In Kyiv they have interpreted this stance as meaning I am pro-Russia.”
Mearsheimer was equally annoyed at being labelled a Russian plant. “When I was a young boy, my mother taught me that when others can’t beat your arguments with facts and logic, they smear you. That is what is going on here.
“I argue that it is clear from the available evidence that Russia invaded Ukraine because the United States and its European allies were determined to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border, which Moscow saw as an existential threat. Ukrainians of all persuasions reject my argument and instead blame Vladimir Putin, who is said to have been bent on conquering Ukraine and making it part of a greater Russia,” he told UnHerd.
“But there is no evidence in the public record to support that claim, which creates real problems for both Kyiv and the West. So how do they deal with me? The answer of course is to label me a Russian propagandist, which I am not.”
Greenwald saw a clear glimpse of McCarthyism in the Ukrainian list.
“War proponents in the West and other functionaries of Western security state agencies have used the same tactics for decades to demonise anyone questioning the foreign policy of the US and Nato. Chief among them, going back to the start of the Cold War, is accusing every dissident of spreading ‘Russian propaganda’ or otherwise serving the Kremlin. That’s all this is from the Ukrainians: just standard McCarthyite idiocy.”
Saturday, 12 March 2022
Tuesday, 8 March 2022
Sunday, 27 February 2022
Saturday, 26 February 2022
Monday, 28 January 2019
The commitment to EU integration must not be underestimated
Wolfgang Munchau in The FT
Aachen is close to the Dutch city of Maastricht, which gave its name to what is probably the most important European treaty of modern times. The treaty of Aachen, signed last week by German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Emmanuel Macron, is of a different category. But you would be wrong to underestimate its significance. This treaty will set an agenda, just as the Franco-German Elysée Treaty did in 1963. And agendas matter in European discourse.
If you want to think of an analogy, consider the Werner Plan. In December 1969, in the twilight days of the Bretton Woods system of semi-fixed exchange rates, EU leaders held a summit in The Hague to set up a working group to study monetary union. It was headed by Pierre Werner, Luxembourg’s prime minister at the time. Economists were right at the time to dismiss the discussion of a future monetary union as pie-in-the-sky, just as defence experts today are right to dismiss talk about a European army. The Werner Report was an unrealistic road map to a single currency. But it nevertheless managed to put this hugely significant policy agenda on the table. It was another 30 years until the introduction of the euro. But without this first, failed step, it would never have happened.
One of the many reasons why the UK is leaving the EU has been a persistent tendency to underestimate such symbolism. Another is the entrenched belief that the golden era of EU integration is behind us. The widespread dismissal in the UK press of the Aachen Treaty is very much in that tradition.
Being in denial about integration does not square with the facts on the ground. I have often criticised the German government’s handling of the eurozone crisis. But I have never had any doubt about Germany’s ultimate commitment to monetary integration. The Aachen treaty provides no concrete solutions, but at the very least it underlines that commitment. Germany and France say, essentially, that they will do whatever it takes. Like Saint Augustine before them, they just do not want to do it yet.
But they may not be able to wait too long. The EU must make some fundamental choices on the future of its dysfunctional monetary union. In the decade since the financial crisis, many of the problems in both the real economy and the financial sector have been left unaddressed. The so-called banking union has failed in its principal objective to break the doom loop between banks and sovereign borrowers. Italy continues to bail out its banks. I expect Germany to do the same very soon.
The latest economic indicators suggest that the downturn is going to be steeper than previously thought. If short-term interest rates do not rise above -0.4 per cent at the top of the economic cycle, you know you have a very sick underlying economy. The European Central Bank’s latest bank lending survey suggests that credit conditions are now beginning to tighten in Italy, while the Netherlands is suffering from a financial bubble. In other words, we are entering a period in which policy reform will soon be on the agenda.
In the discussion on common defence, we may only be at the point where we were in 1969 on monetary integration. The external event to prompt a rethink in Berlin and Paris has been repeated threats by President Donald Trump that the US will leave Nato. Even in the unlikely event of this happening, Germany and France would not be in a position to create a joint army. Germany, in particular, is politically not ready; it spends only 1.2 per cent of its gross domestic product on defence, as opposed to France’s 2 per cent. The German constitution mandates that any decision to deploy troops has to be agreed by the Bundestag. Attitudes towards military engagement differ fundamentally between the two.
Aachen will not shift German political views on defence. But I would not rule out that, over time, it could become more acceptable for a German government to raise defence spending targets — so long as this occurs in a European context. After the Werner report came a series of loose currency arrangements followed by the European exchange rate mechanism. The way to a common army is not only paved with good intentions but with many small steps, such as a pooling of defence procurement.
In the preamble to the Aachen treaty France and Germany promise to take their “bilateral relations to a new level”. One day, while you are looking the other way, that will actually happen.
Aachen is close to the Dutch city of Maastricht, which gave its name to what is probably the most important European treaty of modern times. The treaty of Aachen, signed last week by German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Emmanuel Macron, is of a different category. But you would be wrong to underestimate its significance. This treaty will set an agenda, just as the Franco-German Elysée Treaty did in 1963. And agendas matter in European discourse.
If you want to think of an analogy, consider the Werner Plan. In December 1969, in the twilight days of the Bretton Woods system of semi-fixed exchange rates, EU leaders held a summit in The Hague to set up a working group to study monetary union. It was headed by Pierre Werner, Luxembourg’s prime minister at the time. Economists were right at the time to dismiss the discussion of a future monetary union as pie-in-the-sky, just as defence experts today are right to dismiss talk about a European army. The Werner Report was an unrealistic road map to a single currency. But it nevertheless managed to put this hugely significant policy agenda on the table. It was another 30 years until the introduction of the euro. But without this first, failed step, it would never have happened.
One of the many reasons why the UK is leaving the EU has been a persistent tendency to underestimate such symbolism. Another is the entrenched belief that the golden era of EU integration is behind us. The widespread dismissal in the UK press of the Aachen Treaty is very much in that tradition.
Being in denial about integration does not square with the facts on the ground. I have often criticised the German government’s handling of the eurozone crisis. But I have never had any doubt about Germany’s ultimate commitment to monetary integration. The Aachen treaty provides no concrete solutions, but at the very least it underlines that commitment. Germany and France say, essentially, that they will do whatever it takes. Like Saint Augustine before them, they just do not want to do it yet.
But they may not be able to wait too long. The EU must make some fundamental choices on the future of its dysfunctional monetary union. In the decade since the financial crisis, many of the problems in both the real economy and the financial sector have been left unaddressed. The so-called banking union has failed in its principal objective to break the doom loop between banks and sovereign borrowers. Italy continues to bail out its banks. I expect Germany to do the same very soon.
The latest economic indicators suggest that the downturn is going to be steeper than previously thought. If short-term interest rates do not rise above -0.4 per cent at the top of the economic cycle, you know you have a very sick underlying economy. The European Central Bank’s latest bank lending survey suggests that credit conditions are now beginning to tighten in Italy, while the Netherlands is suffering from a financial bubble. In other words, we are entering a period in which policy reform will soon be on the agenda.
In the discussion on common defence, we may only be at the point where we were in 1969 on monetary integration. The external event to prompt a rethink in Berlin and Paris has been repeated threats by President Donald Trump that the US will leave Nato. Even in the unlikely event of this happening, Germany and France would not be in a position to create a joint army. Germany, in particular, is politically not ready; it spends only 1.2 per cent of its gross domestic product on defence, as opposed to France’s 2 per cent. The German constitution mandates that any decision to deploy troops has to be agreed by the Bundestag. Attitudes towards military engagement differ fundamentally between the two.
Aachen will not shift German political views on defence. But I would not rule out that, over time, it could become more acceptable for a German government to raise defence spending targets — so long as this occurs in a European context. After the Werner report came a series of loose currency arrangements followed by the European exchange rate mechanism. The way to a common army is not only paved with good intentions but with many small steps, such as a pooling of defence procurement.
In the preamble to the Aachen treaty France and Germany promise to take their “bilateral relations to a new level”. One day, while you are looking the other way, that will actually happen.
Tuesday, 10 April 2018
The Skripal affair: a counter view
Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn
IF one were to anchor a TV programme with the archival revelation that it was Benazir Bhutto who introduced Theresa May’s husband to the future British prime minister at an Oxford reunion ball in 1976, many of us would perhaps happily spend a lot of our precious time glued to the looped and re-looped discussion.
On the other hand, if one were to ask whether Prime Minister May posed a bigger threat to a stable world order than does President Donald Trump it would likely pass for a precipitous canard. This despite that fact that we are ever so often cautioned about the rear view mirror in the car: the objects one sees may be closer at heel than they appear. The warning can be easily applied to international politics.
What we see, or believe we are seeing, can be different from what is afoot. What seems distant or remote could be the trigger for what passes for domestic turbulence. Astute social scientists call it dialectics, whereby everything in the world can be connected with everything else.
Take the poisoning of the double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury or consider the latest chemical attack near Damascus in the rebel-held region of Douma. There are legitimate ways of seeing a link between the two. But the way the avenues of news and information have been dumbed down, it would be a challenge to engage an average citizen in a discussion on what to them would be a distant blip on their mirror, if not an imagination of a foggy mind.
So let us quickly come to the facts at hand, and we can crosscheck them too. It is a fact, after all, as distinct from false news, that Trump was elected US president in November 2016. Wasn’t he? Then his election was soon declared to be the handiwork of Russian agents. Right?
Indeed, Trump continued to annoy the deep state. He wanted to befriend Vladimir Putin and questioned the purpose of Nato. He went a step further. He began to question intelligence reports passed to him or leaked to the public.
Then came Theresa May to the rescue of the deep state with its roots on both sides of the Atlantic. When Trump in his pre-political avatar was misbehaving with women, May was already her country’s home secretary. She held that position from 2010 until she was elevated to lead her party and country in July 2016.
Her tenure as home secretary saw the destruction of Libya and the savage assault on Syria. Even more importantly, she was in the cockpit when the Crimea crisis erupted. And she had a good view of it even if she may have been privately appalled at the less than robust response that Nato was willing to offer Russia.
When she became the first foreign leader to visit President Trump on Jan 26 last year, Ms May was nursing another headache on the tour. And so her round trip to the White House included an equally vital stopover in Turkey on the way back. Leaders of both countries on her itinerary were allies of Nato and both were veering perilously close to Vladimir Putin. In a jiffy, she saw the centuries-old British policy of garrotting Russia slipping under her feet.
The mirror on the driver’s side may be telling us to watch out for Donald Trump, who everyone, including most Americans, agrees is speeding ahead rather recklessly on an uncharted trajectory. The mirror on the other side though is showing us a blip, and in a lane where it shouldn’t be. As far as the naked eye can see, the more threatening blip looks like Theresa May. Stated bluntly, Trump may be a decoy.
Double agent Sergei Skripal was swapped by Russia with the US in 2010 and sent for safekeeping to UK. There are some questions about his illness the Russians have asked, including the question: what purpose could it serve to bump off a used- up Russian double agent on the eve of a presidential election, or just ahead of the World Cup that Russia will be hosting? There can be a legitimate suspicion that Skripal and, unwittingly, his daughter fell victim to a strike by someone whose cover Skripal had blown.
But we could also ask, on the other hand, whether it is impossible for another country to replicate the poison that one country has manufactured. The question holds the key when the other side claims to know what that poison is. In other words they have the substance or can produce it to develop an antidote or, why not, to keep it in store for a useful false flag attack. This is not how it happened. This is how some questions come to mind.
A poor scientist died of smallpox in England, after all, when a laboratory accidently released the virus in 1978. The cause of Janet Parker’s infection sent shockwaves through the medical profession. It was reportedly accepted at the time that the virus had travelled through an air duct connecting a smallpox lab with Janet’s office directly above.
To assert that both attacks — in Salisbury and in Douma — can be blamed on Russia, is to state the obvious. A more involved discussion could look at the rise of John Bolton as the new national security adviser to Trump. He has advocated war with Iran, and the alleged Syrian chemical attack may tie up with that objective, as a ruse.
But why has Trump changed his tune on Russia? Has the deep state got the goods on him, in a manner of speaking? If so, Theresa May should have a better grip on the narrative. It was a former British agent in Moscow, after all, whose report is said to have brought the president of the United States to his senses, if that is the word.
IF one were to anchor a TV programme with the archival revelation that it was Benazir Bhutto who introduced Theresa May’s husband to the future British prime minister at an Oxford reunion ball in 1976, many of us would perhaps happily spend a lot of our precious time glued to the looped and re-looped discussion.
On the other hand, if one were to ask whether Prime Minister May posed a bigger threat to a stable world order than does President Donald Trump it would likely pass for a precipitous canard. This despite that fact that we are ever so often cautioned about the rear view mirror in the car: the objects one sees may be closer at heel than they appear. The warning can be easily applied to international politics.
What we see, or believe we are seeing, can be different from what is afoot. What seems distant or remote could be the trigger for what passes for domestic turbulence. Astute social scientists call it dialectics, whereby everything in the world can be connected with everything else.
Take the poisoning of the double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury or consider the latest chemical attack near Damascus in the rebel-held region of Douma. There are legitimate ways of seeing a link between the two. But the way the avenues of news and information have been dumbed down, it would be a challenge to engage an average citizen in a discussion on what to them would be a distant blip on their mirror, if not an imagination of a foggy mind.
So let us quickly come to the facts at hand, and we can crosscheck them too. It is a fact, after all, as distinct from false news, that Trump was elected US president in November 2016. Wasn’t he? Then his election was soon declared to be the handiwork of Russian agents. Right?
Indeed, Trump continued to annoy the deep state. He wanted to befriend Vladimir Putin and questioned the purpose of Nato. He went a step further. He began to question intelligence reports passed to him or leaked to the public.
Then came Theresa May to the rescue of the deep state with its roots on both sides of the Atlantic. When Trump in his pre-political avatar was misbehaving with women, May was already her country’s home secretary. She held that position from 2010 until she was elevated to lead her party and country in July 2016.
Her tenure as home secretary saw the destruction of Libya and the savage assault on Syria. Even more importantly, she was in the cockpit when the Crimea crisis erupted. And she had a good view of it even if she may have been privately appalled at the less than robust response that Nato was willing to offer Russia.
When she became the first foreign leader to visit President Trump on Jan 26 last year, Ms May was nursing another headache on the tour. And so her round trip to the White House included an equally vital stopover in Turkey on the way back. Leaders of both countries on her itinerary were allies of Nato and both were veering perilously close to Vladimir Putin. In a jiffy, she saw the centuries-old British policy of garrotting Russia slipping under her feet.
The mirror on the driver’s side may be telling us to watch out for Donald Trump, who everyone, including most Americans, agrees is speeding ahead rather recklessly on an uncharted trajectory. The mirror on the other side though is showing us a blip, and in a lane where it shouldn’t be. As far as the naked eye can see, the more threatening blip looks like Theresa May. Stated bluntly, Trump may be a decoy.
Double agent Sergei Skripal was swapped by Russia with the US in 2010 and sent for safekeeping to UK. There are some questions about his illness the Russians have asked, including the question: what purpose could it serve to bump off a used- up Russian double agent on the eve of a presidential election, or just ahead of the World Cup that Russia will be hosting? There can be a legitimate suspicion that Skripal and, unwittingly, his daughter fell victim to a strike by someone whose cover Skripal had blown.
But we could also ask, on the other hand, whether it is impossible for another country to replicate the poison that one country has manufactured. The question holds the key when the other side claims to know what that poison is. In other words they have the substance or can produce it to develop an antidote or, why not, to keep it in store for a useful false flag attack. This is not how it happened. This is how some questions come to mind.
A poor scientist died of smallpox in England, after all, when a laboratory accidently released the virus in 1978. The cause of Janet Parker’s infection sent shockwaves through the medical profession. It was reportedly accepted at the time that the virus had travelled through an air duct connecting a smallpox lab with Janet’s office directly above.
To assert that both attacks — in Salisbury and in Douma — can be blamed on Russia, is to state the obvious. A more involved discussion could look at the rise of John Bolton as the new national security adviser to Trump. He has advocated war with Iran, and the alleged Syrian chemical attack may tie up with that objective, as a ruse.
But why has Trump changed his tune on Russia? Has the deep state got the goods on him, in a manner of speaking? If so, Theresa May should have a better grip on the narrative. It was a former British agent in Moscow, after all, whose report is said to have brought the president of the United States to his senses, if that is the word.
Sunday, 21 September 2014
Friday, 25 May 2012
If there were global justice, Nato would be in the dock over Libya
Liberia's Charles Taylor has been convicted of war crimes, so why not the western leaders who escalated Libya's killing?
Illustration by Belle Mellor
Libya was supposed to be different. The lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan had been learned, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy insisted last year. This would be a real humanitarian intervention. Unlike Iraq, there would be no boots on the ground. Unlike in Afghanistan, Nato air power would be used to support a fight for freedom and prevent a massacre. Unlike the Kosovo campaign, there would be no indiscriminate cluster bombs: only precision weapons would be used. This would be a war to save civilian lives.
Seven months on from Muammar Gaddafi's butchering in the ruins of Sirte, the fruits of liberal intervention in Libya are now cruelly clear, and documented by the UN and human rights groups: 8,000 prisoners held without trial, rampant torture and routine deaths in detention, the ethnic cleansing of Tawerga, a town of 30,000 mainly black Libyans (already in the frame as a crime against humanity) and continuing violent persecution of sub-Saharan Africans across the country.
A year after the western powers tried to make up for lost ground in the Arab uprisings by tipping the balance of the Benghazi-led revolt, Libya is in the lawless grip of rival warlords and armed conflict between militias, as the western-installed National Transitional Council (NTC) passes Gaddafi-style laws clamping down on freedom of speech, gives legal immunity to former rebels and disqualifies election candidates critical of the new order. These are the political forces Nato played the decisive role in bringing to power.
Now the evidence is starting to build up of what Nato's laser-guided bombing campaign actually meant on the ground. The New York-based Human Rights Watch this week released a report into the deaths of at least 72 Libyan civilians, a third of them children, killed in eight separate bombing raids (seven on non-military targets) – and denounced Nato for still refusing to investigate or even acknowledge civilian deaths that were always denied at the time.
Given the tens of thousands of civilians killed by US, British and other Nato forces both from the air and on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen over the last decade, perhaps Nato commanders prefer not to detain themselves with such comparative trifles. And Human Rights Watch believes that, whatever the real number of civilians directly killed by Nato bombing, it was relatively low given the 10,000-odd sorties flown.
But while Nato's UN mandate was to protect civilians, the alliance in practice turned that mission on its head. Throwing its weight behind one side in a civil war to oust Gaddafi's regime, it became the air force for the rebel militias on the ground. So while the death toll was perhaps between 1,000 and 2,000 when Nato intervened in March, by October it was estimated by the NTC to be 30,000 – including thousands of civilians.
We can't of course know what would have happened without Nato's bombing campaign, even if there is no evidence that Gaddafi had either the intention or capability to carry out a massacre in Benghazi. But we do know that Nato provided decisive air cover for the rebels as they matched Gaddafi's forces war crime for war crime, carried out massacres of their own and indiscriminately shelled civilian areas with devastating results – such as reduced much of Sirte to rubble last October.
There were also Nato and Qatari boots on the ground, including British special forces, co-ordinating rebel operations. So Nato certainly shared responsibility for the deaths of many more civilian than its missiles directly incinerated.
That is the kind of indirect culpability that led to the conviction last month of Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, in the UN-backed special court for Sierra Leone in The Hague. Taylor, now awaiting sentence and expected to be jailed in Britain, was found guilty of "aiding and abetting" war crimes and crimes against humanity during Sierra Leone's civil war in the 1990s. But he was cleared of directly ordering atrocities carried out by Sierra Leonean rebels.
Which pretty well describes the role played by Nato in Libya last year. International lawyers say legal culpability would depend on the degree of assistance and knowledge of war crimes for which Nato provided cover, even if the political and moral responsibility could not be clearer.
But there is of course simply no question of Nato leaders being held to legal account for the Libyan carnage, any more than they have been for far more direct crimes carried out in Iraq and Afghanistan. The only Briton convicted of a war crime over the bloodbath of Iraq has been Corporal Donald Payne, for abuse of prisoners in Basra in 2003. While George Bush has boasted of authorising the international crime of torture and faced not so much as a caution.
Which only underlines that what is called international law simply doesn't apply to the big powers or their political leaders. In the 10 years of its existence, the International criminal court has indicted 28 people from seven countries for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Every single one of them is African – even though ICC signatories include war-wracked states such as Colombia and Afghanistan.
That's rather as if the criminal law in Britain only applied to people earning the minimum wage and living in Cornwall. But so long as international law is only used against small or weak states in the developing world, it won't be a system of international justice, but an instrument of power politics and imperial enforcement.
Just as the urgent lesson of Libya – for the rest of the Arab world and beyond – is that however it is dressed up, foreign military intervention isn't a short cut to freedom. And far from saving lives, again and again it has escalated slaughter.
Thursday, 19 April 2012
How Pakistan makes US pay for Afghan war
By Dilip Hiro
The following ingredients should go a long way to produce a political thriller. Mr M, a jihadi in an Asian state, has emerged as the mastermind of a terrorist attack in a neighboring country, which killed six Americans. After sifting through a vast cache of intelligence and obtaining a legal clearance, the State Department announces a $10 million bounty for information leading to his arrest and conviction. Mr M promptly appears at a press conference and says, "I am here. America should give that reward money to me."
A State Department spokesperson explains lamely that the reward is meant for incriminating evidence against Mr M that would stand up in court. The prime minister of M's home state condemns foreign interference in his country's internal affairs. In the midst of this imbroglio, the US decides to release $1.18 billion in aid to the cash-strapped government of the defiant prime minister to persuade him to reopen supply lines for US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces bogged down in the hapless neighboring Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
Alarmingly, this is anything but fiction or a plot for an upcoming international sitcom. It is a brief summary of the latest development in the fraught relations between the US and Pakistan, two countries locked into an uneasy embrace since September 12, 2001.
Mr M is Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, a 62-year-old former academic with a tapering, hennaed beard, and the founder of the Lashkar-e Taiba (the Army of the Pure, or LeT), widely linked to several outrageously audacious terrorist attacks in India.
The LeT was formed in 1987 as the military wing of the Jammat-ud Dawa religious organization (Society of the Islamic Call, or JuD) at the instigation of the Pakistani army's formidable intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The JuD owes its existence to the efforts of Saeed, who founded it in 1985 following his return to his native Lahore after two years of advanced Islamic studies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, under the guidance of that country's grand mufti, Shaikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz.
On its formation, the LeT joined the seven-year-old anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, an armed insurgency directed and supervised by the ISI with funds and arms supplied by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Saudis. Once the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the Army of the Pure turned its attention to a recently launched anti-Indian jihad in Indian-administered Kashmir and beyond.
The terrorist attacks attributed to it range from the devastating multiple assaults in Mumbai in November 2008, which resulted in 166 deaths, including those six Americans, to a foiled attack on the Indian parliament in New Delhi in December 2001, and a successful January 2010 attack on the airport in Kashmir's capital Srinagar.
In January 2002, in the wake of Washington's launching of the "war on terror", Pakistan formally banned the LeT, but in reality did little to curb its violent cross-border activities. Saeed remains its final authority. In a confession, offered as part of a plea bargain after his arrest in October 2009 in Chicago, David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American operative of LeT involved in planning the Mumbai carnage, said: "Hafiz Saeed had full knowledge of the Mumbai attacks and they were launched only after his approval."
In December 2008, the United Nations Security Council declared the JuD a front organization for the banned LeT. The provincial Punjab government then placed Saeed under house arrest using the Maintenance of Public Order law. But six months later, the Lahore High Court declared his confinement unconstitutional.
In August 2009, Interpol issued a Red Corner Notice, essentially an international arrest warrant, against Saeed in response to Indian requests for his extradition. Saeed was again put under house arrest but in October the Lahore High Court quashed all charges against him due to lack of evidence.
It is common knowledge that Pakistani judges, fearing for their lives, generally refrain from convicting high-profile jihadis with political connections. When, in the face of compelling evidence, a judge has no option but to order the sentence enjoined by the law, he must either live under guard afterwards or leave the country.
Such was the case with Judge Pervez Ali Shah who tried Mumtaz Qadri, the jihadi bodyguard who murdered Punjab's governor Salman Taseer for backing an amendment to the indiscriminately applied blasphemy law. Soon after sentencing Qadri to capital punishment last October, Shah received several death threats and was forced into self-exile.
Aware of the failures of the Pakistani authorities to convict Saeed, US agencies seemed to have checked and cross-checked the authenticity of the evidence they had collected on him before the State Department announced, on April 2, its reward for his arrest. This was nothing less than an implied declaration of Washington's lack of confidence in the executive and judicial organs of Pakistan.
Little wonder that Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani took umbrage, describing the US bounty as blatant interference in his country's domestic affairs. Actually, this is nothing new. It is an open secret that, in the ongoing tussle between Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and his bete noire, army chief of staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani, the Barack Obama administration has always backed the civilian head of state. That, in turn, has been a significant factor in Gilani's stay in office since March 2008, longer than any other prime minister in Pakistan's history.
How to trump a superpower
Given such strong cards, diplomatic and legal, why then did the Obama administration commit itself to releasing more than $1 billion to a government that has challenged its attempt to bring to justice an alleged mastermind of cross-border terrorism?
The answer lies in what happened at two Pakistani border posts about two kilometers from the Afghan frontier in the early hours of November 26, 2011. NATO fighter aircraft and helicopters based in Afghanistan carried out a two-hour-long raid on these posts, killing 24 soldiers.
Enraged, Pakistan's government shut the two border crossings through which the US and NATO had until then sent a significant portion of their war supplies into Afghanistan. Its officials also forced the US to vacate Shamsi air base, which was being used by the CIA as a staging area for its drone air war in Pakistan's tribal areas along the Afghan border. The drone strikes are exceedingly unpopular - one poll found 97% of respondents viewed them negatively - and they are vehemently condemned by a large section of the Pakistani public and its politicians.
Furthermore, the government ordered a comprehensive review of all programs, activities and cooperation arrangements with the US and NATO. It also instructed the country's two-tier parliament to conduct a thorough review of Islamabad's relations with Washington. Having taken the moral high ground, the Pakistani government pressed its demands on the Obama administration.
An appointed Parliamentary Committee on National Security (PCNS) then deliberately moved at a snail's pace to perform the task on hand, while the Pentagon explored alternative ways of ferrying goods into Afghanistan via other countries to sustain its war there.
By contrast, a vociferous campaign against the reopening of the Pakistani supply lines led by the Difa-e Pakistan Council (Defense of Pakistan), representing 40 religious and political groups, headed by Hafiz Saeed, took off. Its leaders have addressed huge rallies in major Pakistani cities. It was quick to condemn Washington's bounty on Saeed, describing it as "a nefarious attempt" to undermine the council's drive to protect the country's sovereignty.
Meanwhile, the loss of the daily traffic of 500 trucks worth of food, fuel and weapons from the Pakistani port of Karachi through the Torkham and Chaman border crossings into Afghanistan, though little publicized in US media, has undermined the fighting capability of US and NATO forces.
"If we can't negotiate or successfully renegotiate the reopening of ground lines of communication with Pakistan, we have to default and rely on India and the Northern Distribution Network (NDN)," said a worried Lieutenant General Frank Panter to the Readiness Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee of the US House of Representatives on March 30. "Both are expensive propositions and it increases the deployment or redeployment."
The main part of the NDN is a 3,220-mile (5,100 kilometer) rail network for transporting supplies between the Latvian port of Riga and the Uzbek town of Termez (connected by a bridge over the Oxus River to the Afghan settlement of Hairatan). According to the Pentagon, it costs nearly $17,000 per container to go through the NDN compared to $7,000 through the Pakistani border crossings.
Moreover, US and NATO are allowed to transport only "non-lethal goods" through the NDN.
Other military officials have warned that the failure to reopen the Pakistani routes could even delay the schedule for withdrawing American "combat troops" from Afghanistan by 2014. That would be bad news for the Obama White House with the latest Washington Post/NBC News poll showing that, for the first time, even a majority of Republicans believe the Afghan war "has not been worth fighting". A CBS News/New York Times survey indicated that support for the war was at a record low of 23%, with 69% of respondents saying that now was the time to withdraw troops.
In the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, the PCNS finally published a list of preconditions that the US must meet for the reopening of supply lines. These included an unqualified apology for the air strikes last November, an end to drone attacks, no more "hot pursuit" by US or NATO troops inside Pakistan, and the taxing of supplies shipped through Pakistan.
Much to the discomfiture of the Obama administration, a joint session of the National Assembly and the senate called to debate the PCNS report took more than two weeks to reach a conclusion.
On April 12, parliament finally unanimously approved the demands and added that no foreign arms and ammunition should be transported through Pakistan. The Obama administration is spinning this development not as an ultimatum but as a document for launching talks between the two governments.
Even so, it has strengthened Gilani's hand as never before. Furthermore, he has to take into account the popular support the Saeed-led Difa-e Pakistan Council is building for keeping the Pakistani border crossings permanently closed to NATO traffic. Thus, Saeed, a jihadi with a US bounty on his head, has emerged as an important factor in the complex Islamabad-Washington relationship.
Squeezing Washington: The pattern
There is, in fact, nothing new in the way Islamabad has been squeezing Washington lately. It has a long record of getting the better of US officials by identifying areas of American weakness and exploiting them successfully to further its agenda.
When the Soviet bloc posed a serious challenge to the US, the Pakistanis obtained what they wanted from Washington by being even more anti-Soviet than America. Afghanistan in the 1980s is the classic example.
Following the Soviet military intervention there in December 1979, the Pakistani dictator General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq volunteered to join Washington's Cold War against the Kremlin - but strictly on his terms. He wanted sole control over the billions of dollars in cash and arms to be supplied by the US and its ally Saudi Arabia to the Afghan mujahideen (holy warriors) to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan. He got it.
That enabled his commanders to channel a third of the new weapons to their own arsenals for future battle against their archenemy, India. Another third were sold to private arms dealers on profitable terms. When pilfered US weapons began appearing in arms bazaars of the Afghan-Pakistan border towns (as has happened again in recent years), the Pentagon decided to dispatch an audit team to Pakistan.
On the eve of its arrival in April 1988, the Ojhiri arms depot complex, containing 10,000 tons of munitions, mysteriously went up in flames, with rockets, missiles and artillery shells raining down on Islamabad, killing more than 100 people.
By playing on Ronald Reagan's view of the Soviet Union as "the evil empire", Zia also ensured that the American president would turn a blind eye on Pakistan's frantic, clandestine efforts to build an atom bomb. Even when the CIA, the National Security Agency and the State Department determined that a nuclear weapon assembled by Pakistan had been tested at Lop Nor in China in early 1984, Reagan continued to certify to congress that Islamabad was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program in order to abide by a law which prohibited US aid to a country doing so.
Today, there are an estimated 120 nuclear bombs in the arsenal of a nation that has more Islamist jihadis per million people than any other country in the world. From October 2007 to October 2009, there were at least four attacks by extremists on Pakistani army bases known to be storing nuclear weapons.
In the post-9/11 years, Pakistan's ruler General Pervez Musharraf managed to repeat the process in the context of a new Afghan war. He promptly joined president George W Bush in his "war on terror", and then went on to distinguish between "bad terrorists" with a global agenda (al-Qaeda), and "good terrorists" with a pro-Pakistani agenda (the Afghan Taliban).
Musharraf's ISI then proceeded to protect and foster the Afghan Taliban, while periodically handing over al-Qaeda militants to Washington. In this way, Musharraf played on Bush's soft spot - his intense loathing of al-Qaeda - and exploited it to further Pakistan's regional agenda.
Emulating the policies of Zia and Musharraf, the post-Musharraf civilian government has found ways of diverting US funds and equipment meant for fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban to bolster their defenses against India. By inflating the costs of fuel, ammunition and transport used by Pakistan's 100,000 troops posted in the Afghan-Pakistan border region, Islamabad received more money from the Pentagon's Coalition Support Fund (CSF) than it spent. It then used the excess to buy weapons suitable for fighting India.
When the New York Times revealed this in December 2007, the Musharraf government dismissed its report as "nonsense". But after resigning as president and moving to London, Musharraf told Pakistan's Express News television channel in September 2009 that the funds had indeed been spent on weapons for use against India.
Now, the widely expected release of the latest round of funds from the Pentagon's CSF will raise total US military aid to Islamabad since 9/11 to $14.2 billion, two-and-a-half times the Pakistani military's annual budget.
There is a distinct, if little discussed, downside to being a superpower and acting as the self-appointed global policeman with a multitude of targets. An arrogance feeding on a feeling of invincibility and an obsession with winning every battle blind you to your own impact and even to what might be to your long-term benefit. In this situation, as your planet-wide activities become ever more diverse, frenzied, and even contradictory, you expose yourself to exploitation by lesser powers otherwise seemingly tied to your apron strings.
Pakistan, twice during America's 33-year-long involvement in Afghanistan made a frontline state, is a classic example of that. Current policymakers in Washington should take note: it's a strategy for disaster.
Dilip Hiro, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of 33 books, the most recent being the just-published Apocalyptic Realm: Jihadists in South Asia (Yale University Press, New Haven and London).
(Copyright 2012 Dilip Hiro.)
Monday, 16 April 2012
Compelling case for Iraq war crime tribunal
The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times by Mohamed ElBaradei
Reviewed by Kaveh L Afrasiabi
This book, eloquently written by a former director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is a must read, both for the wealth of information it provides on the contentious issues of global nuclear diplomacy as well as for the passionate and compelling case that it presents for a war crime tribunal to
In blunt yet sincere language steeped in international law, ElBaradei writes that in light of the US's complete "disdain for international norms" in its invasion of Iraq, the United Nations should request an opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as to the legality of the Iraq war.
Convinced
that the overwhelming weight of evidence favors a
negative verdict if the ICJ ever braved such an
initiative, ElBaradei then makes a case for the
International Criminal Tribunal to "investigate
whether this constitutes a war crime". (pg 87)
Irrespective, ElBaradei is so morally outraged by the blatant pulverization of a sovereign Middle East country by a Western superpower and its allies that he also advises the Iraqis to demand war reparations - that is sure to amount to tens of billions of dollars.
If for nothing else, this book's value - in putting self-righteous Western powers on the defensive and depicting them as essentially rogue states that have caused a new global anarchy by their willful exercise of power without much regard for the rights of others - is indispensable.
Divided into 12 chapters with a useful conclusion on the future of nuclear diplomacy, the book covers nearly three decades of the author's involvement with various cases, ie, Iraq, North Korea, Libya and Iran, the notorious "nuclear bazaar of Abdul Qadeer Khan" in Pakistan, as well as nuclear asymmetry and the hypocrisy and double standard, not to mention outright deceptions, marking the behavior of US and other Western countries (along the familiar North-South divide).
In the chapters on Iraq, ElBaradei defends the cherished record of his agency in refusing to act as a sounding board for post 9/11 warmongering US policies, which earned him the occasional venom of US media that questioned his integrity. In fact, ElBaradei is equally critical of the compliant Western media that often act as indirect apparatuses of state despite their wild claims of neutrality and objectivity.
Although much of what ElBaradei writes about the US-British deceptions to go to war in Iraq is already well-known, it is instructive to revisit those "grotesque distortions" - as he puts it - from a reputable source who for years was caught in the maelstrom of contesting politics of non-proliferation.
With respect to the British role under premier Tony Blair, whom he accuses of a false alarm on Iraq's chemical weapon capability, ElBaradei actually underestimates the degree to which London influenced Washington on Iraq, characterizing this instead as a "one-way street" with the British "acting as apologists for US". (pg 67).
But, ElBaradei is not a foreign policy expert and his shortcoming, in detecting the American foreign policy elite's vulnerability with respect to British political influence, is forgivable. This is a minor defect in a solid contribution that sheds much light on how the US manipulated the UN atomic agency as "bit players" in its scheme to invade Iraq.
It shows the Pandora's box opened by the IAEA when it agreed to receive foreign intelligence from member states spying on others, thus opening the door to calibrated disinformation often beyond the ability of the agency and its meager resources to authenticate.
As a result, today the IAEA has turned into a de facto ''nuclear detective agency" that constantly receives tips from Western clients targeting specific countries. Sooner or later, either this unhealthy situation is rectified or we must expect more gaping holes in the agency's credibility.
With respect to North Korea, which has exited the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and proliferated nuclear weapons without much international backlash, ElBaradei blames the US's failure to live up to its agreed commitment and the fallacy of "attempts to contain proliferation ambitions through confrontation, sanctions, and isolation". (Pg 109)
He also writes about Libya's voluntary disarmament in 2004, a decision that the late Muammar Gaddafi now regrets in his grave, given the likelihood that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would have thought twice about attacking Libya under the guise of "responsibility to protect", thus making a mockery of the UN, if Tripoli had retained a nuclear shield.
For sure, this issue must loom large on the mind of many developing nations that have clashing interests with the (increasingly bullying) Western powers.
ElBaradei has devoted a whole chapter to the subject of nuclear double standards that discusses, for instance, how South Korea's clear evidence of non-compliance was shoved under the rug by the US in 2004 simply because it is a US allay.
The US and other privileged nuclear-have nations have been derelict in their NPT obligations to move toward nuclear disarmament, some, like France and Britain, modernizing their arsenals, while at the same time having the audacity of taking the moral high ground against countries suspected of clandestine proliferation.
ElBaradei writes that in the Middle East, "The greatest source of frustration and anxiety was the regional asymmetry of military power symbolized by Israel's arsenal." (pg 223) And yet, Israel, which since its bombardment of Iraq's nuclear facility in 1981 has been mandated by the UN Security Council to place its nuclear facilities under the IAEA inspections, has evaded this obligation with impunity.
Regarding Iran, extensively dealt with in four chapters, ElBaradei seeks to present a balanced account that pinpoints the chronology of events, interactions and negotiations that are still ongoing as of this date, thus making the book an indispensable tool for those who follow the developments in the Iran nuclear crisis.
Since his retirement from the IAEA, ElBaradei has repeatedly gone on record to state that during his tenure at the agency he never saw any evidence that Iran was proliferating nuclear weapons.
What is more, he informs readers that after the 2007 US intelligence report that confirmed that Iran's program had been peaceful since 2003, "I received a follow-up briefing by US intelligence. They did not show the supposed evidence that had let them to confirm the existence of a past Iranian nuclear weapon program, other than to refer to the same unverified set of allegations about weaponization studies that had already been discussed with the agency." (pg 269)
He also writes, "The Americans did acknowledge - as in most previous intelligence briefings - that there was no indication that Iran had undeclared nuclear material." (pg 262) Indeed, this is important information, given that in more than a dozen reports on Iran the IAEA has repeatedly confirmed the absence of any evidence of military diversion of "declared nuclear material".
In Chapter 11, on the "squandered opportunities" with Iran, the author writes about Iran-IAEA cooperation through a workplan that resulted in the successful resolution of the "six outstanding" issues that had led to the IAEA's referral of Iran's file to the UN Security Council.
Missing in this book is any mention of that workplan's concluding paragraph that stipulated the agency's treatment of Iran's nuclear file as "routine" once those issues were resolved. That this did not, and as of today has not, happened is solely due to the US-led disinformation campaign that burdened the IAEA with new data coming from a stolen Iranian lap top, even though ElBaradei readily admits that "the problem was, no one knew if any of these was real". (pg 281).
He discretely blames his deputy, Ollie Heinnonen, now turned into a valuable US asset from his recruitment by Harvard University, of buying "into the US accusations" (pg 281), and laments the fact that on a number of occasions the US scuttled meaningful negotiation with Iran by "refusing to take yes for an answer".
Questioning the US's negotiation strategy toward Iran, in a memorable passage that rings relevant to today's context of new multilateral talks with Iran, ElBaradei writes: "It was naive to ask Iran to give up everything before the start of the talks and expect a positive response. But the problem was familiar, nothing would satisfy, short of Iran coming to the table completely undressed." (pg 313)
In a clue to the direct relevance of this book to the Iran nuclear talks this weekend in Istanbul, where the US has put its foot down by demanding Iran's suspension of its 20% uranium enrichment, ElBaradei readily admits that under the NPT, Iran has the right to possess a nuclear fuel cycle, like "roughly a dozen countries" around the world. Moreover, he reminds us of the absence of a legal basis for the US's demand, in light of the fact that "many research reactors worldwide also use 90% enriched uranium fuel for peaceful purposes, such as to produce medial radioisotopes". (pg 14)
As he puts it in the final chapter, on the quest for human security, this cannot be a selective, or rather elitist, process that benefits some while depriving others. In today's increasingly interdependent world, the idea that the threat of nuclear proliferation can be contained while the asymmetrical nuclear-have nations hold onto their prized possessions and even use them to threaten the non-nuclear nations, is simply a chimerical dream that has a decent chance of turning into a nightmare. This is the core message of ElBaradei's timely book that cannot be possibly ignored.
The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times by Mohamed ElBaradei. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2011. ISBN-10: 0805093508. Price US$27, 322 pages with index 340 pages.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry, click here. He is author of Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing , October 23, 2008) and Looking for rights at Harvard. His latest book is UN Management Reform: Selected Articles and Interviews on United Nations CreateSpace (November 12, 2011).
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
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