The “Rift” That Never Was: How Hyping Obama-Netanyahu Gossip Preserves the Status Quo Against Iran & Palestine

Among the myriad tactics employed by the establishment right in the US, a category which increasingly includes Democrats and Republicans, a favorite is what can be called the repositioning of the political center. Under this logic radical, militarist policies are normalized as legitimate responses to “imminent” threats by “liberals” while “conservatives” lambaste presidential decisions, no matter how egregious, as being too “soft on terror.” One of the more recent applications of this framework could be detected during the US bombing of Iraq and Syria. When President Obama decided to commence an air war against the Islamic State, a clear violation of international law, the dominant theme within elite media was that this was behavior emblematic of a “reluctant warrior.” “The Bible makes it clear that leadership is unpredictable: That the most powerful people often don’t get to choose what they themselves will do,” opined David Brooks in an embarrassingly effusive Op-Ed in the New York Times. “History is full of reluctant leaders, too. President Obama is the most recent.”

Arguments of this kind are extremely convenient in that they foreclose entirely peaceful alternatives while reducing the debate to how hard we should pummel the “enemy”, and not the much more consequential question of what legal or moral right we have to engage in such acts of aggression. Furthermore, this tactic obscures the consensus between both political factions that violence is justified, rendering critical analysis of this area of agreement more difficult. It therefore should come as no great surprise that this tactic has surfaced once again, this time in the context of the ongoing US-Israeli hostility to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Current debate has it that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is undermining President Obama’s Iran policy in his decision to deliver a speech before the US Congress promoting his more aggressive stance against Iran and its nuclear program. “White House officials remain furious with Netanyahu for failing to notify the administration about the address to Congress, a breach of diplomatic protocol,” reported John Hudson of Foreign Policy. New York Times columnist, and noted expert on everything Iranian, Roger Cohen echoed this sentiment, observing that the Israeli Prime Minister’s actions made Obama “furious, with cause,” adding, “He has been a firm supporter of Israel,” and “His patience with its leader is at an end” (my emphasis).

Exaggerations aside, Cohen’s assessment is worth further analysis in one crucial respect, namely his acknowledgement that Obama has been “a firm supporter of Israel”, an understatement when one takes a look at the diplomatic record. Numerous scholars, from Rashid Khalidi and Max Blumenthal to more mainstream commentators like Hillary Mann Leverett and Fawaz Gerges have been unambiguous in their acknowledgement that the Obama administration has been an uncritical advocate for Israeli militarism and diplomatic sabotage. Since November 2008, Israel has carried out three major military assaults against the Gaza Strip: Operation Cast Lead, Operation Pillar of Defense, and Operation Protective Edge. In all three cases Obama vigorously embraced the Israeli line that any display of Israeli terror, regardless of how many civilians it kills, falls under the rubric of “the right to self-defense.” During Operation Protective Edge the Obama administration went as far as blocking a UN inquiry into war crimes carried out in the Gaza Strip.

Obama opposed to forming any UN commission to investigate Israeli war crimes in Gaza (AR) http://t.co/maTADrY0Qe #NoRiftWithNetanyahu

— Ali Abunimah (@AliAbunimah) February 5, 2015

Writing on Obama’s policy with regard to Israel-Palestine, London School of Economics professor Fawaz Gerges stated “US politicians, including Obama, are trapped in a political culture that promotes conformity and groupthink on Israel and strongly discourages dissenting voices. After a promising start, the new president dared not to exert real pressure on Israel to stop the construction of settlements on the West Bank and to negotiate in good faith with the Palestinians.” While Gerges attributed this to a combination of Obama’s “timidity” and his being “trapped” by external forces beyond his control, other critics have been less generous. In his extensive review of US policy in Israel-Palestine Brokers of Deceit Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi was unequivocal in his description of Obama as an unprincipled cheerleader for Israeli brutality:

“Crucially, since Barack Obama first stated his view on this topic, he has always accepted a constant, central element of Israel’s self-presentation: its victim status, to which it has always clung fiercely and aggressively. In his public statements he has always accepted as well a related proposition, dear in particular to the heart of Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli right wing, and its followers in the United States, but widely believed farther afield: that the state of Israel and the Israeli people, indeed the entire Jewish people, are in a state of perpetual existential danger.”

Incidentally, it is precisely this argument—that Israel is facing an existential threat from Iran—that Benjamin Netanyahu aims to invoke in his speech to Congress, a point conceded by Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer in an interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. Moreover, this is also the argument that various media organizations are laboring to portray as antagonistic (and not compatible) to Obama’s policies despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. So the Obama administration’s decision to sale 55 “bunker buster” bombs to Israel in 2011, a move widely interpreted as a preparation to attack Iran’s underground nuclear facilities, does little, if anything, to interfere with the perception that Obama is opposed to Netanyahu’s policies. In fact, in some vital respects Obama’s policy vis-à-vis Iran has gone considerably beyond his “neoconservative” predecessors. As Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett state in their authoritative study of US-Iran relations Going to Tehran “[the Obama administration] did nothing to rein in the anti-Iranian covert programs it inherited from its predecessor; indeed, leaked documents show that such programs (including ties to groups whose actions in Iran, had they been taken in Israel or many other countries, would be condemned as terrorism) intensified after Obama came in.”

More troubling, “the Obama administration used nuclear talks with Iran primarily as a way to set the stage for more coercive measures—tougher sanctions and, at some point, military strikes—and to bring international partners and the American public on board” (my emphasis). Another glaring illustration of just how supportive Obama is of the US-Israeli status quo in the region can be found in his decision to boycott a nuclear non-proliferation conference in Helsinki on the dubious pretext that the “political turmoil in the region and Iran’s defiant stance on non-proliferation,” made US participation impossible. When Israel’s attendance was requested the Obama administration denounced it as an act of “coercion.” Predictably, this blatant disregard for international law (as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty Iran has a legal right to enrich uranium) was misleadingly described in USA Today as indicative of “clashing visions of disarmament and non-proliferation efforts.” Perhaps this description is correct, if consciously escalating the threat of nuclear proliferation by shielding the one state with a nuclear monopoly in the Middle East (Israel) from any form of international scrutiny can be described as a “vision of disarmament and non-proliferation” (disarmament for “enemies” and proliferation for “allies”).

To the limited extent that there does exist any animosity between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Obama it has virtually no impact on the substance of US-Israeli policy. In tactical terms, Obama’s resort to military force may be more calculated than Netanyahu’s but to read this as representative of a split between Obama’s position and the Israeli Prime Minister’s is to ignore these much larger areas of strategic and ideological overlap which, if left unchecked, will only add to the horrors currently enveloping the region. Much more significant, and thus underreported, is the growing divide between the US public and centers of power. Latest public opinion polls reveal a noticeable shift in American attitudes towards Israeli aggression. After Operation Protective Edge Gallup reported that 51% of Americans under 30 said that “Israel’s aggression in Gaza [was] unjustified.” Meanwhile, Pew reported “among 18-29 year olds, 29% blamed Israel for the current wave of violence, while 21% blamed Hamas.” These are the political transformations that would dominate headlines in a genuinely democratic society, not the highly personalized, gossipy squabbles between two war criminals, which may deserve lengthy analysis in the National Enquirer or the Globe but not anywhere where the fate of humanity should be a high priority.

 

 

Sources:

Leverett, Flynt Lawrence., and Hillary Mann. Leverett. Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

Khalidi, Rashid. Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

Gerges, Fawaz A. Obama and the Middle East: The End of America’s Moment? New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/julian-borger-global-security-blog/2011/sep/27/iran-nuclear-weapons

http://inthesetimes.com/article/14387/nuclear_iran_gravest_threat

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/report-israel-seeking-to-upgrade-its-nuclear-weapons-capabilities-1.392957

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/americas/13203-latest-gallup-poll-shows-young-americans-overwhelmingly-support-palestine

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2012/11/11/mideast-nuke-talks-npt/1697215/

http://fair.org/blog/2013/09/27/nyt-columnist-you-cant-trust-shiites/

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/01/dermer-on-netanyahu-boehner-and-iran/385003/

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/02/04/democrats-huddle-with-israeli-ambassador-to-discuss-delay-of-netanyahu-speech/?wp_login_redirect=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/06/opinion/roger-cohen-israel-needs-a-grown-up.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

https://xavierobrien.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/the-reluctant-imperialist-obama-gets-a-boost-from-the-servants-quarters/

Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic

When marketing state terror it’s always necessary distort the identity of so-called enemies. Oppressive policies are easily portrayed as legitimate if the victims are understood to be ungrateful savages or demons anxiously waiting to destroy “civilization.” Few conflicts validate this principle of imperial power more emphatically than America’s multi-decade assault on the Islamic Republic of Iran, a country that liberated itself from US control in 1979. On the 35th anniversary of the revolution the elite press was uniform in their willingness to caricature Iran as a villainous opponent of the United States intent on achieving nothing less than our total annihilation. Cries of ‘Death to America’ as Iranians Celebrate 35th Anniversary of Revolution read the headline in the New York Times. “Mixing exhortations of death to America with admonishments to children about healthy teeth and gums, Iran celebrated the 35th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution,” read the opening sentence. Joining the chorus was the Los Angeles Times which opened its article on the revolution’s anniversary by describing Iran as “a defiantly anti-Washington government.” This article, authored by Ramin Mostaghim and Alexandra Sandels, concludes with the scene of “a white-turbaned young mullah,” named Mohammad Mobaraki chanting “Death to America!” Any casual observer would look upon these exclamations as indicative of a society gone mad with fanaticism and irrational hatred but an honest investigation into the underlying causes of these statements tells a radically different story. Details of this story can be learned in Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett’s deeply insightful and incisive history of US-Iran relations Going to Tehran. Central to the Leveretts’ study is a vigorous refutation of what they term “a powerful mythology of the Islamic Republic”: “the irrationality myth”, “the illegitimacy myth”, and “the isolation myth.” Quite apart from the cognitive scripts passing for “news” in the American press, the Leveretts explain how Iran promotes rational policies based on safeguarding national independence (esteqlal), freedom (azadi) and the right to self-defense. Since the early 1800s Iran has been forced to deal with European, Russian or US intervention in its internal affairs.

Before Iran became the punching bag of the United States, Britain and Russia “subverted Iran’s 1906 Constitutional Revolution–when Iranians created both their first written constitution and their first elected parliament.” British, Russian and American control of Iran persisted during the Pahlavi monarchy until 1951 when Iranians finally liberated themselves from external control with the election of Mohammad Mossadeq who governed on a platform that “urged the nationalization of Western oil interests and an independent (even if not anti-American) foreign policy.” The CIA and British intelligence responded to these policies in 1953 by orchestrating a coup, overthrowing the democratically elected prime minister and installing to power the Shah, “an autocrat so unpopular that he was ultimately deposed by one of the most broadly based revolutions in modern history.” None of this crucial history merited comment in the Los Angeles Times’ orientalist depiction of a “white-turbaned young mullah” chanting “Death to America!” Also unmentioned in media accounts of Iranian politics and history are the repeated efforts on the part of the Iranian leadership to cooperate with the US government. Notable examples include Iran’s cooperation in freeing American hostages in Lebanon, its cooperation with the Clinton administration to “supply weapons to beleaguered Bosnian Muslims when American law prevented Washington from doing so,” and its decision to work with the Bush administration to combat Al-Qa’ida and the Taliban. In the case of the Clinton administration, President Rafsanjani offered a $600 million contract to ConocoPhillips to “develop two oil and gas fields off Siri Island in the Persian Gulf”, a stunning offer given Iran’s history. Clinton responded to this offer by rejecting it and passing two executive orders, one which “[barred] American companies from participating in the development of Iran’s hydrocarbon resources,” and another that “effectively imposed a comprehensive American economic embargo on the Islamic Republic.” More than anything, this hostile response demonstrated that the Clinton White House did not want to work with Iran based on principles of mutual aid and consultation. Clinton’s model, like his successors, demanded Iran’s obedience and nothing more.

Following closely behind Washington’s hegemonic stance on the diplomatic front is an enduring campaign of international terrorism. This campaign ranged from backing Saddam Hussein’s gassing of Iranians in the Iran-Iraq war to the shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner over the Strait of Hormuz, killing all 290 people on board (including 66 children). 48 hours after the destruction of Iran Air 655 Vice President George H.W. Bush reacted to the mass slaughter by saying “I’ll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don’t care what the facts are.” Contrast the savage response of Bush Sr. after this act of international terrorism with that of President Khatami two months after the September 11th attacks. Visiting New York for a UN General Assembly meeting, Khatami “asked to visit Ground Zero so that he might offer prayers and light a candle in memory of the 9/11 victims.” In accord with the irrationality myth, these expressions of Iranian compassion must be forgotten in favor of leaders who are “bat-shit insane” (as comedian Jon Stewart described Ahmadinejad) or reside in a country that is “a backward, repressive, and misogynistic place where, as Jay Leno jokes, the Flintstones are known as the Jetsons.”

It therefore should come as no surprise that the Iran mythology persists under the Obama administration. Despite the absence of any empirical evidence pointing to a nuclear weapons program, the Obama administration continues to impose harsh economic sanctions on Iran, a clear violation of international law. In a recent speech on the topic, Obama warned foreign companies contemplating business deals with Iran that the US would “come down on them like a ton of bricks,” if they violated the sanctions regime. Few, if any, commentators noted that this statement constituted an act of coercion, plausibly in violation of the UN Charter’s prohibition on the threat of force, a triviality for President Corleone. Incidentally, the “ton of bricks” suspended over the heads of foreign businesses also hovers over Iranian cancer patients, a consequence of economic sanctions that “have blocked access to the best chemotherapy drugs …”

Coupled with this policy of economic warfare are assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and covert operations to destabilize Iranian civil society. In 2011 “the Obama administration opened a ‘virtual embassy’ to Iran, set up to bypass the government and engage the Iranian public directly, for the express purpose of stimulating popular discontent with the existing order”, a flagrant violation of the 1981 Algiers Accord which legally obligates the US “not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.” Obama also “removed the MEK’s terrorist designation,” thus “positioning it to become the vanguard of an explicit regime change strategy.” This effort on the part of the Obama administration to bring about regime change has received ample ideological support from the commissar class.

Prominent Iran “experts”, “scholars” and expatriates have been enlisted by the Obama administration to spin a false narrative about Iran. The so-called Green Movement formed a vital part of this propaganda offensive. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defeated Hossein Mousavi in the 2009 elections American journalists immediately blamed the outcome on electoral fraud. Inquiries into these allegations produced zero evidence to substantiate these claims. In one comical illustration of this ideological norm, Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council “excitedly [cited] MSNBC’s proclamation of a Mousavi victory while the actual return showed something else,” namely that Ahmadinejad was “declared the winner … with 62.5 percent of the vote.” Iran “experts” found Ahmadinejad’s victory difficult to accept, understandable for those captured by the illegitimacy myth, the idea that “the Islamic Republic is an illegitimate and deeply unstable political order at serious risk of implosion.” Now that Hassan Rouhani has assumed the presidency in Iran the expected herd of “experts” have interpreted his rise as an opportunity to ram through US demands. A recent CBS News report suggests another possibility. Responding US threats of military force Rouhani condemned the “delusional people [in the US] who say the military option is on the table,” adding that Iran “regards the language of threat as rude and offensive” (he could have added “criminal” as well). Unless the American public interferes with the plans of these “delusional people” in Washington, the Iran mythology will grow, as will the influence of “analysts” and “experts” itching for another terrorist war. Going to Tehran is therefore mandatory reading for those of us opposed to conventional, stereotypical explanations and the potentially devastating human consequences they entail.

Sources:

http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-iran-35th-anniversary-revolution-20140211,0,5900506.story#axzz2t9hg8xU1

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/12/world/middleeast/anniversary-of-islamic-revolution-in-iran.html?_r=0

http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/1.573744

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-leader-hassan-rouhani-blasts-us-for-rude-and-offensive-ongoing-threat-of-military-action/

http://muftah.org/battling-cancer-fronts-disadvantage/#.Uvm1oU3Eslo.facebook

The State of the Union Address: An Exercise in Moral Illiteracy

Presidential statements should always be treated with a great deal of skepticism. The capacity to obscure, fabricate or lie is a skill that comes easily to political elites and the commissars who construct the required narratives to insulate them from public scrutiny. For this reason, anyone with a minimal interest in democratic governance will not passively accept the pronouncements of the powerful. President Obama’s recent State of the Union Address provides us with an opportunity to demonstrate our commitment to this ideal, a commitment that should be treated with a high degree of seriousness and urgency. Generally, press responses to the State of the Union speech conformed to the typical pattern of distortion and deceit. Christi Parsons and Kathleen Hennessey of the Los Angeles Times published an article shortly after Obama’s address titled State of the Union: Obama asks Congress to reverse economic inequality. The most revealing aspect of this article is its willingness to accept presidential statements at face-value. Obama “promised to flex his power to boost wages, protect the environment and channel resources to education …,” Parsons and Hennessey remarked.

More independent minds would be compelled to inspect the accuracy of this statement. How exactly did President Obama vow to “protect the environment”? The president conveyed this by “[reminding] listeners of his power to regulate power-plant emissions, noting that the shift to cleaner energy would require ‘tough choices,'” or to cite one of the more dramatic phrases from Obama’s address: “climate change is a fact.” Without a doubt, climate change is an undeniable fact, not only to the President of the United States but to all serious climate scientists as well, which makes Obama’s other statements nothing short of alarming. Hailing the prospect of “energy independence”, Obama went on to endorse oil production and the highly destructive process of hydraulic fracturing. “The ‘all the above’ energy strategy I announced a few years ago is working,” the president gushed. “And today America is closer to energy independence than we have been in decades … One of the reasons why is natural gas. If extracted safely, it’s the bridge fuel that can power our economy with less of the carbon pollution that causes climate change,” and “it’s not just oil and natural gas production that’s booming; we’re becoming a global leader in solar too.”

In response to Obama’s glorification of the “booming” oil and natural gas industry 350.org founder Bill McKibben published a harsh critique in which he stated “Fracking isn’t a solution,” but “a disaster for communities and the climate.” Characterizing Obama’s address as “lip service”, McKibben went on to note “you can’t say you care about ending cancer and then go buy a carton of cigarettes–and you can’t say you care about the climate and then go dig up more fossil fuels.” Executive Director of Greenpeace Phil Radford responded to Obama’s address by acknowledging while it was “good to hear that President Obama plans to move forward with his plan to address climate change,” (a curious preface) “his administration continues to undermine this plan by encouraging the extraction of coal, oil and gas from our public lands and waters, unlocking huge quantities of carbon pollution.” None of these grim realities are likely to penetrate the president’s entrepreneurial cocoon where the “booming” profits of oil giants override grave issues of collective survival. Incidentally, it’s not difficult to imagine the majority of the international community joining McKibben and Radford in their protests.

Last November the Obama administration demonstrated its willingness to “protect the environment” when they dispatched a team of diplomats to “delay emission cut commitments” at the UN climate conference in Warsaw. Details of this policy was revealed by Nitin Sethi of The Hindu. Sethi cited a leaked memo which instructed US diplomats to resist any effort on the part of the international community to bring the US into a system “where there is a legal compensation mechanism available for small, vulnerable countries, who otherwise don’t have [a] voice …” in global climate policy. In a message to US diplomats prior to the conference Secretary of State John Kerry warned that “A central issue will be whether loss and damage continues to fall within adaptation or whether it becomes a separate, third pillar … which we believe would lead the [UN Framework Convention on Climate Change] to focus increasingly on blame and liability, which in turn would be counterproductive.” Contemplating the consequences of ignoring the risk of environmental catastrophe, President Obama expressed his desire “to be able to say yes we did” when “our children’s children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world …,” but for the children of Bangladesh, the Philippines or the Maldives such desires would be “counterproductive”, an impediment to satisfying the higher needs of Exxon Mobil, Chevron and other beneficiaries of the nation’s flourishing fossil fuel mafia.
Similar tendencies characterized the very limited attention devoted to matters of US foreign policy. Maybe the most glaring omission was the decision not to talk about what Noam Chomsky has accurately described as “the most extreme terrorist campaign going on in the world today”, the drone assassination program. Obama vowed to “[impose] prudent limits” on the drone program, a toothless proposal as it leaves unaddressed the fact that the program is clearly illegal. Drone strikes not only violate Pakistani sovereignty but they also violate the long-standing prohibition against extrajudicial assassinations as articulated in Executive Order 12036 and the Hague Conventions. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, arguably the leading authority on drone strikes, has reported that more than 2,400 people have been murdered in these attacks in the last five years. Bureau analysis also confirmed that following Obama’s high-profile speech on constraining drone strikes “more people were killed in Pakistan and Yemen in the six months after the speech than the six months before. And the casualty rate also rose over the same period.”

With the exception of a small minority of countries, global public opinion is overwhelmingly opposed to drone strikes. Pew Research reports “in 31 of 39 countries surveyed last spring, at least half of the public disapproved of the attacks.” This past December the Yemeni the parliament passed a law banning drone strikes citing “the importance of protecting all citizens from any aggression” and “preserving the sovereignty of Yemeni air space.” Pakistan’s High Court in Peshawar raised similar legal objections in their ruling that drone strikes constitute “criminal offenses” carried out in violation of Pakistani sovereignty and present a challenge to Pakistan’s “autonomy and independence.” For President Obama to call for the imposition of more “prudent limits” on a policy the Yemeni parliament and a Pakistani judicial body have accurately condemned as military “aggression” (more bluntly, international terrorism) is about as morally and legally sensible as an al-Shabab fighter or a Taliban warlord suggesting more “prudent limits” on acid attacks and car bombings.  Investigate journalist Jeremy Scahill said it best in a tweet shortly after Obama’s address: ” Translation: I will only bomb *some* wedding parties.”
Where drone terrorism received sparse coverage, other topics were ignored almost entirely. Since his revelations last June, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has fundamentally transformed the national conversation about privacy, security, journalism and the role of state-corporate forces in our lives. So profound has Snowden’s impact been that even the New York Times, the epitome of establishment journalism, published an editorial demanding that President Obama “tell his aides to begin finding a way to end Mr. Snowden’s vilification and give him an incentive to return home.” Norwegian politicians Baard Vegar Solhjell and Snorre Valen have now nominated Snowden for a Nobel Peace Prize citing his “[contribution] to a more stable and peaceful world order.”  Furthermore, public opinion polls have been critical of NSA programs. According to a recent USA Today / Pew Research Center poll “most Americans now disapprove of the NSA’s sweeping collection of phone metadata,” and “they’re inclined to think there aren’t adequate limits in place to what the government can collect.” 70% of Americans “say they shouldn’t have to give up privacy and freedom in order to be safe from terrorism,” and 45% of the American public think Snowden’s exposures have “helped … the public interest” (43% say the disclosures “harm” public interest).To limit discussion of this highly consequential topic to an extremely brief and meaningless comment on “reform” evinces a contempt for democracy that eludes rational explanation. The limited treatment of this topic also exhibits a seething hatred of the “community of nations” victimized by the NSA, a community Obama hypocritically claimed Iranians would be able to “rejoin” if they are able to “convince” the godfather they “not building a nuclear bomb”, a nuclear bomb that only exists in the warped imaginations of western political elites and their loyalists in the commissar class (there is ample evidence of this).

In a recent interview with Edward Snowden broadcast on German television he responded to allegations within elite circles that his act of dissent was treasonous by making the following statement: “If I am a traitor, who did I betray? I gave all of my information to the American public, to American journalists who were reporting on American issues. If they see that as treason I think people really need to consider who do they think they are working for. The public is supposed to be their boss, not their enemy.” It’s this conception–that the public should be the boss of state and corporate power and not its servants–that President Obama, Congress and their associates in corporate America find so threatening and it’s this threat that compels them to force unpleasant facts about American political culture into the margins whether it be about climate change, state-terrorism or mass surveillance. Quite apart from preserving the state of the union by attending to the needs of the public, Washington elites and their corporate backers would much rather enrich themselves at any cost. The gap between official rhetoric and actual policy makes this transparently obvious. In its entirety, this year’s State of the Union address can best be described as an exercise in moral illiteracy, the hallmark of a political and intellectual culture that is either unable or unwilling to examine its own crimes in an honest and constructive fashion. Nothing about the current predicament we find ourselves in is graven in stone. Societies in the past have gone through worse forms of oppression. President Obama demanded that 2014 be a “year of action.” Putting aside the sincerity of this sentiment, it will be up to an informed and morally courageous public to ensure that this “year of action” doesn’t leave behind the wreckage that inevitably follows in societies that avoid serious self-reflection.

 

Sources:

 http://ecowatch.com/2014/01/28/obama-sotu-climate-fracking/

 http://chomsky.info/onchomsky/20131002.htm

http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-state-of-the-union-obama-2014-20140128,0,2195484.story#ixzz2rlJsRgUP

 http://350.org/press-release/sotu/

 http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/us-to-oppose-mechanism-to-fund-climate-change-adaptation-in-poor-nations/article5351162.ece

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/full-text-of-obamas-2014-state-of-the-union-address/2014/01/28/e0c93358-887f-11e3-a5bd-844629433ba3_print.html

 http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2014/01/23/more-than-2400-dead-as-obamas-drone-campaign-marks-five-years/

 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/opinion/edward-snowden-whistle-blower.html

 http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/01/20/poll-nsa-surveillance/4638551/

 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/polls-continue-show-majority-americans-against-nsa-spying

 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/29/edward-snowden-nominated-nobel-peace-prize
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/10/23/report-questions-drone-use-widely-unpopular-globally-but-not-in-the-u-s/
http://www.dawn.com/news/1074289/yemen-parliament-bans-drone-attacks-news-agency
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/pakistani-court-declares-us-drone-strikes-in-the-countrys-tribal-belt-illegal-8609843.html
https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/05/09-8
http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com/2013/12/panic-predictions-propaganda-iran-nuclear.html

Facing the Guns of Infinite Madness: US “Provocations” & North Korea Hysteria

Media depictions of official enemies are expected to be fabricated, exaggerated and, often, blatantly false. This is standard. Yet sometimes this norm develops into something more insidious and threatening, an atmosphere that can only be called hysterical. Such is the case in US coverage of the current events in North Korea. North Korean president Kim Jong-un has issued threats to carry out nuclear strikes against the US and its military bases in Guam and Japan. The US responded to these threats by flying nuclear-capable B52 stealth bombers in South Korean airspace. The press described these flyovers as a response to North Korean “provocations” (as distinct from the non-”provocative” actions of the US). Another reporter described this latest iteration of North Korean power as a sign of Jong-un’s “measured madness” while the White House attributed the statements to his “youth and inexperience”. Conspicuously absent from these reports are explanations of the historical backdrop of the US-DPRK relationship and what it tells us about how North Korea got to the place it is today. The details are instructive. Take for example the verifiable fact that North Korea’s nuclear program would not exist without US complicity in Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation network which provided vital support to the country’s nuclear arsenal. In fact, the US provided indirect support for North Korea’s nuclear arsenal in 2002. In this year intelligence reports appeared detailing North Korean enrichment of uranium to build nuclear weapons. The Bush administration not only ignored these reports but shielded it from the Arms Control Disarmament Agency, the chief government organ of non-proliferation. The rationale for this was that this intelligence would derail the administration in their pursuit of a higher objective, namely waging an aggressive war against Iraq.

Apparently the CIA’s global drug trafficking monopoly is threatened as well.

In addition to these indirect forms of support for North Korean nuclear weapons, there was also direct support. In the same year that the Bush administration received this intelligence report on North Korea’s enrichment program, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice “advised that the [Bush] administration would continue to provide North Korea with shipments of heavy fuel oil and nuclear technology, even though Pyongyang had, by starting uranium enrichment, broken the terms of the Agreed Framework and hence forfeited its right to any US assistance.” This is but one of the innumerable insights featured in Adrien Levy and Katherine-Scott Clark’s authoritative study on nuclear proliferation in the Asia-Pacific Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons. Interestingly, this stunning episode of organized irresponsibility does not enter into circles of “serious” commentary about “unscrupuous”and “militant” regimes that threaten world order in sporadic fits of “measured madness”.

The Bush administration’s responsibility in the growth of North Korea’s nuclear program is also conceded by the California-based Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability. In an article titled Tactically Smart, Strategically Stupid: Simulated B52 Nuclear Bombings in Korea Peter Haye’s remarks that the Bush administration’s demand that the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization “suspend heavy fuel oil shipments to North Korea until it took ‘concrete and credible actions to dismantle completely its highly enriched uranium program ‘. . . put pressure on North Korea to fast track its nuclear weapons program rather than to bring it in compliance with its NPT and IAEA safeguards obligations.” He went on to note that this decision “accelerated North Korean proliferation propensity and activity.” As with Rice, Bush’s behavior evades the category of “measured madness” as well. This is to say nothing of the uncontroversial reality that the India-Pakistan conflict is just as, if not more dire, than the North Korea-South Korea conflict due to the fact that in addition to both countries being non-signatories of the NPT, both India and Pakistan have considerably larger nuclear stockpiles. India and Pakistan are also US allies, another fact it “wouldn’t do to say,” to borrow Orwell’s phrase.

In lockstep with these largely ignored misdeeds of the Bush government, the Obama administration has continued down this path of infinite madness. Obama administration National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon recently gave a talk at the New York based Asia Society on the topic of the US “rebalancing” of military, economic, and political forces in the Asia-Pacific, benignly termed the US “pivot” in similar circles. In this speech Donilon adds some substance to why North Korea has chosen to engage in the “provocations” we are now witnessing. Speaking on “What Rebalancing Is, and What It Isn’t” he stated the following:

“… A higher proportion of our military assets will be in the Pacific. Sixty percent of our naval fleet will be based in the Pacific by 2020. Our Air Force is also shifting its weight to the Pacific over the next five years. We are aiding capacity from both the Army and the Marines. The Pentagon is working to prioritize the Pacific Command for our most modern capabilities – including submarines, Fifth-Generation Fighters such as F-22s and F-35s, and reconnaissance platforms. And we are working with our allies to make rapid progress in expanding radar and missile defense systems to protect against the most immediate threat facing our allies and the entire region: the dangerous, destabilizing behavior of North Korea.”

Here we have the world’s largest and most violent military superpower “rebalancing” its military so that 60% of its naval fleet is stationed in the Asia-Pacific along with next generation bomber planes and reconnaissance technology and its called a “pivot”. Meanwhile, North Korea issues verbal threats to bomb the United States and its called a “provocation”. The level of discipline required on the part of the western intellectual classes not to see these North Korean “provocations” as rational responses to much graver provocations by the US and its allies tests the boundaries of anything deserving to be called a “free press”, at least if that “freedom” is supposed to apply to the thoughts of journalists as much as it applies to the organizations they inhabit.

It’s worth noting that this acknowledgement of North Korean threats as a rational response to US provocation is not an excuse for the threats themselves. Doubtless, they are criminal and violate the UN Charter. We should know this more than anyone else as we have become experts in this practice in our regular dealings with Iran. This is perhaps the supreme irony of the US reaction to North Korean threats, namely they are, in essence, milder versions of what we routinely do to Iran with total impunity. Imagine if, in addition to the current threats, Kim Jong-un informed the US that “all options were on the table,” if President Obama continued to approach his “red line” and complimented these threats with surveillance flights over Texas, car bomb assassinations of nuclear scientists working at Sandia Labs, military training facilities for anti-American terrorists in Pyongyang (call them the Anti-American Mujahideen-e-Khalq), and unleashed an arsenal of sophisticated cyberweapons to destroy US nuclear infrastructure. North Korea, as a geographic entity, would be lucky to make it to 2014. Instead of committing themselves to this morally honest task, the US press would much rather publish headlines like Why North Korea Gets Away With It. In the words of the standard paternalistic phrase: North Korea must not “do as we do,” but “do as we say”.

This North Korean obligation to “do as we say,” is not only reflected in the media silence about this recent history but also about the more distant history. Though it may be hard for imperial countries to understand, the Korean Peninsula was the victim of heinous war crimes during Korean War, the large share of which killed civilians. Pulitzer Prize-winning Asia specialist John Dower writes in his lengthy study on US atrocities in the Asia-Pacific Cultures of War “the Korean War probably saw the deaths of more than a million South Koreans, some 85 percent of them civilians, and a like number of North Koreans (over 10 percent of the population of the north) ” (my emphasis ). These atrocities are given a certain degree of clarity in Gabriel Kolko’s Century of War. Kolko recounts the observations of US General William Dean upon witnessing the destruction of the North Korean city of Huichon: “I think no important bridge between Pyongyang and Kanggye had been missed and most of the towns were just rubble or snowy open spaces where buildings had been . . . The little towns, once full of people, were unoccupied shells. The villagers lived in entirely new temporary villages hidden in canyons . .” This included the destruction of “over 90% of North Korea’s power capacity at a time when the war’s ravages had already ruined its social and health infrastructure and both typhus and smallpox were epidemic.” US forces also destroyed the Toksan irrigation dams, a blatant war crime (crimes for which Nazis were hanged). Altogether, these crimes forced Kolko to conclude that the US crimes in the Korean War represented “a fundamental dilemma in military technology that has inexorably moved it increasingly to make war against civilians and suck them into the vortex of destruction.”

This “vortex of destruction” is at risk of being regenerated if the Obama administration continues to escalate the threat of war through massive military drills with South Korea, drills that compelled the American Friends Service Committee to call for “the suspension of war games and military exercises on all sides,” and an end to the Obama administration’s “provocative simulated nuclear attacks which are more likely to reinforce the DPRK’s commitment to its incipient nuclear arsenal, rather than to open a constructive dialogue.” The likelihood that this reasonable request will influence policy is doubtful if the prevailing mindset in Congress is of any importance. Speaking on the difference between bombing Iran and North Korea Democratic Senator Carl Levin remarked “Iran has this patina, at least, of this super-religious extreme folks that might actually not care if they were wiped out in response to one of their attacks. There are some folks in Iran who … might actually care less … than the North Koreans do, because the North Koreans care only about regime-serving.” We might ask what our reaction would be if Kim Jong-un predicted that a “patina” of “super-religious extreme folks,” in America’s Bible Belt would “care less” if they were “wiped out” in a nuclear holocaust. Surely we’d call him mad, but not in the infinite sense. Leave this distinction to the “regime-serving” citizens in Washington who aren’t afraid to remind the world that they dominate in this psychological domain.

Sources:

http://www.nti.org/country-profiles/north-korea/nuclear/

http://www.nti.org/country-profiles/india/nuclear/

http://nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-policy-forum/nautilus-institute-policy-forum-online-tactically-smart-strategically-stupid-the-kedo-decision-to-suspend-heavy-fuel-oil-shipments-to-the-dprk/#sect1

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/04/why-do-we-laugh-at-north-korea-but-fear-iran/274680/

http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/nuclearweapons/nukestatus.html

http://afsc.org/story/statement-response-us-simulated-nuclear-attacks-north-korea-and-cyber-attacks-north-and-south-

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/nkorea-refuses-let-skoreans-enter-joint-factory

Century of War: Politics, Conflicts, and Society Since 1914 by Gabriel Kolko

Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq by John Dower

Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons by Adrien Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark

http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/04/03/north-korea-rattles-sabres-meanwhile-u-s-pretends-to-drop-nuclear-bombs-on-them/

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-us-korea-tension-20130330,0,1370627.story

http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/21/gerard-butler-olympus-has-fallen-makes-north-korea/

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/03/29/1794031/why-you-should-be-more-concerned-about-war-with-north-korea-this-time/?mobile=nc

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137399/jennifer-lind/why-north-korea-gets-away-with-it
http://asiasociety.org/new-york/complete-transcript-thomas-donilon-asia-society-new-york

 

Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons

A recent Gallup poll declared in bold print “In US, 83% say North Korean Nukes are a Critical Threat”. This poll, which was publicized in the Times of Israel, also revealed that “99%” of Americans found the Iranian nuclear program threatening (either an “important” or “critical threat”). 1% saw Iran’s nuclear program as “not an important threat”. Conspicuously absent from this poll was another category, namely Americans who found Iran non-threatening, a ommission that can be attributed to years of corporate propaganda. The historical context in which this propaganda took root and its frightening contours can be traced with stunning clarity in Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark’s exhaustive study of the US-Pakistan nuclear relationship Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons. Remarkably vast in scope and rich with insight Levy and Clark detail how consecutive US administrations, from Carter to Bush Jr., ignored, sheilded, and actively participated in the development of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb and proliferation network.

At the center of Pakistan’s nuclear program was Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan, a man who Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif would come to call “the father of the bomb”. In the early 1960s Khan was a metallurgist working for a European nuclear consortium called URENCO. Here British, Dutch, and German scientists conducted experiments in uranium enrichment and innovative production techniques like “vertical separation”, the use of “centrifugal force to split apart atoms of uranium-235 from uranium 238”. While working here Khan made several attempts to gain employment in Pakistan only to be rejected.

This changed in the mid-1970s when Pakistani prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto agreed to allow Khan to work on the Pakistani nuclear program after receiving a letter from Khan describing his technical expertise in the field. After reading the letter, Bhutto claimed “Khan is the only man who can fulfill my dream of making Pakistan a nuclear power”. In the remaining chapters Levy and Clark depict how Bhutto’s “dream” unfolded in the shape of a nightmare. The nightmare began in 1974. In this year India, which had its own western-backed nuclear program, exploded a nuclear bomb. The US, China, the UK, France, and the Soviet Union all contributed to this nuclear program, a preview  to what would occur in the following decades with Pakistan playing the role of India and the western powers (minus France) replaying their roles as contributors.

US complicity in the development of Pakistani nuclear weapons is the product of Cold War ideologies mobilized and nurtured by a political elite obsessed with short-term gain at the expense of long-term global security. Beginning in 1979 with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, president Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski put in place a policy that spanned across multiple administrations. Brzezinski advised that Carter depart from the norms of nuclear non-proliferation enshrined in the 1968 non-proliferation treaty and provide military support to drug-trafficking death squads later to be known as the mujahideen. Pakistan’s cooperation in the anti-Soviet resistance would be safeguarded by assurances from the US that their burgeoning nuclear weapons program would be kept secret. While Carter’s support could be described as “turning a blind eye”, his successor, Ronald Reagan, offered nothing less than unequivocal support for Pakistan’s nuclear bomb. In the early years of his first term he was even quoted by secretary of state Alexander Haig as saying “he could live with a Pakistani bomb”. This was followed by a stunningly Orwellian attack on all existing organs of the state’s intelligence apparatus, a policy illustrated most graphically in his dismantling of the Arms Control Disarmament Agency, the facilitation of WMD technology sales to Pakistan in violation of export control laws, and the suppression ,and ultimate excommunication, of intelligence analyst Richard Barlow.

Barlow produced reports detailing the deceit and complicity of the Reagan administration only to have a smear campaign launched against him by the State Department. Not only were Barlow’s reports whitewashed but he soon discovered that unknown sources within the State Department sabotaged law enforcement operations aimed at shutting down the proliferation racket by tipping off Pakistani contacts involved in the illicit sale of nuclear materials. This pattern of revelation, deceit, and cover-up continued until the State Department decided to revoke all of Barlow’s security clearances, condemning him to a life of poverty. Barlow’s story was particularly interesting in that it strongly parallels with the story of John Kiriakou, a former CIA analyst who was sentenced to 30 months in jail for allegedly providing an intelligence source without state authorization. Kiriakou’s real crime, and therefore not worth stating, was that he is a vocal critic of what he called the US government’s “policy of torture”. He, like Barlow, had to be taught the lesson that revealing state crimes is not to be tolerated.

Coinciding with Reagan’s witch hunt against Barlow, was an expansion of Pakistan’s nuclear program, now under the auspices of the Khan Research Facility, from a US-backed nuclear state to a major, US-backed nuclear proliferator. Intelligence reports in the following years recorded the shipment of nuclear materials–centrifuge parts, aluminum tubes, maraging steel– to Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and even al Qaeda. This buildup climaxed in 1998 when Pakistan exploded its first nuclear bomb and “the Ras Koh mountains trembled”. Clinton, outside of a few slaps on the wrist, did little to deter Pakistan after this inauguration into the nuclear weapons club. Interestingly, this nuclearization continued well after September 11 when George W. Bush recruited Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf as an ally in his so-called war on terror. Musharraf, a seasoned war criminal, had long been lending decisive material support to Sunni militias carrying out massacres against Shia populations in the region and authorizing Pakistani invasions of Kashmir, one which came shockingly close to nuclear war.

Though Bush’s purported war-aims after 2001 were to combat nuclear proliferation and “terrorism”, he consciously ignored this very visible terrorist network bankrolled in large part by US dollars and the ISI. Instead the “vulcans”–Levy and Clark’s term for the Bush administration–focused their crosshairs on the “axis of evil”–Iraq, Iran, and North Korea–while neglecting to mention the fact that was obvious to any honest intelligence analyst, namely all the perceived threats that this “axis” posed could be traced directly back to Pakistan and, by association, Washington. In an effort to conceal this hypocrisy, the Bush administration repeated the tactics of the Reagan administration–whitewashing intelligence reports, lying to the public, and sacrificing long-term security for short-term gain. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this nuclear saga is how instructive it is in revealing the ideological continuity between Democratic and Republican administrations on the most urgent foreign policy decisions. For example, president Obama’s policy of “leaving all options on the table” can be traced back to one of the leading commissars in the Bush administration by the name of Robert Joseph. Joseph was responsible for the formal shift in US nuclear policy from non-proliferation to what he called “counter-proliferation”. Under the rubric of “counter-proliferation” negotiations and diplomacy is substituted with the use of brute military force in the form of a pre-emptive strike. Empirical evidence of a threat or acknowledgement of international law was deemed unnecessary in this clear policy of international terrorism.

Deception ends as ominously as it begins. Though A.Q. Khan is placed under house arrest in 2004 after a politically motivated manhunt by president Musharraf that demobilized all of the scientists working at the Khan Research Facility, the authors note “Musharraf’s Pakistan remains at the epicenter of terror, a disingenuous regime with its hands on the nuclear tiller”, an observation difficult to comprehend for those who succumb easily to dogmatic fictions created and sustained by state-corporate power. In a recent speech Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khameini denounced not the use, but the very existence, of nuclear weapons as a “crime against humanity”. Irrespective of the sincerity of the speaker, the substance of his statement should be seriously contemplated and, for those less susceptible to deceit, acted upon.

References:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/160541/say-north-korean-nukes-critical-threat.aspx

http://www.juancole.com/2013/02/sanctions-actually-enrichment.html

http://www.timesofisrael.com/99-of-americans-consider-iranian-nukes-a-threat/?utm_source=The+Times+of+Israel+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=8225ea1379-2013_02_20&utm_medium=email

The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal & American Foreign Policy

Last fall during the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, Operation Pillar of Defense, Gilad Sharon, son of former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, exclaimed “We need to flatten entire neighborhoods  in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima  – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.” This call for nuclear slaughter received little, if any, attention in the major press in the United States. President Obama instead condemned Hamas for shooting rockets into Israel, saying “no country would accept missiles raining down on its population.” The scant attention paid to Sharon’s statement, along with president Obama’s hypocritical refusal to condemn the Israeli killing of civilians in Gaza, is consistent with the policies of previous administrations. In fact, Sharon’s wish to “flatten” Gaza like Nagasaki was not a crazed statement made in the heat of the moment. It was a rearticulation of US-Israeli policy that goes back decades.

Seymour Hersh’s masterful analysis of US foreign policy and the Israeli nuclear arsenal, The Samson Option, explores, in great detail, the roots of this policy. Borrowed from the Biblical narrative of Samson who, after being captured and tortured by the Phillistines, “pushed apart the temple pillars,” and “[killed] himself and his enemies”, Hersh describes how the Israeli nuclear bomb was developed as a weapon to kill its “enemies”, mainly its Arab neighbors. Lies and criminality played a dominant role in the development of Israel’s nuclear program. French scientists, working for the French Atomic Energy Committee, were instrumental in constructing the Dimona nuclear facility located in the Negev desert. Cold war motivations drove Israel to steal reconnaisance intelligence gathered by US satellite technology and use this intelligence to target the Soviet Union.

Various illicit means were used improve the production capacity of the Dimona facility. Take for instance the seizure of 20 kilotons of Norwegian “heavy water” in violation of an agreement between the French and Norwegians that such material would not be shared with other countries. Hersh also details how the Isreali government, under the leadership of Manachem Begin, carried out a joint nuclear weapons test with South Africa in 1979. At the time South Africa was a strong ally of Israel that also supplied the country with uranium ore. Throughout this period the US maintained a policy of silence, what an internal state department memo called “stilling the atmosphere”, and recycled Ben Gurion’s line that there was no Israeli bomb or the nuclear program was “for peaceful purposes”, contrary to a voluminous record of US photographic intelligence. This historical fact clarifies maybe the most interesting component of Hersh’s study, namely its usefulness as a source to expose the hypocrisy of the US-Israeli stance toward the prospect of a nuclear Iran. Since its drafting in 1968, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was never considered as a serious policy document by the Israeli government. President Lyndon Johnson attempted to sell Israel 50 F-4 fighter jets in return for their compliance with the treaty. Israel refused.

More revealing, Israeli prime minister David Ben Gurion rejected IAEA inspections of Isreali nuclear facilities on the ground that such an inspection was a “violation of Israel’s sovereignty”. Instead US-led inspections were carried out by Floyd Culler, a nuclear reprocessing expert from Tennessee. Culler was subjected to the most outrageous forms of deception which included the construction of a fake control room to conceal the true contents of the facility. Iran, on the other hand, has long been a signatory of the NPT and allowed IAEA inspectors into their facilities despite unsubstantiated speculations that the facilities are “sanitized”. If Ahmadinejad were to adopt the principle of Ben Gurion, that IAEA inspections constitute a “violation of sovereignty,” there is little chance it will be given the same level of seriousness, if any.

Hersh also provides a extensive review of the trials of Mordecai Vanunu, a nuclear technician who released photographs from inside the Dimona facility to the UK-based Sunday Times. One cannot help but notice how Vanunu’s punishment at the hands of the Israeli government (18 years in a maximum security prison) is instructive in understanding the punishment Bradley Manning faced for allegedly leaking intelligence to Wikileaks. Though the cases differ radically they illustrate the repressive measures states take to keep the public in the dark when it comes to confronting state crimes. In this respect, The Samson Option is a essential read for anyone who wishes to have an informed discussion about US-complicity in nuclear proliferation. Without this crucial history, there is little chance we can understand the deeper meaning of US foreign policy and its portents for future generations. In the epilogue of the book Hersh states “American’s policy toward the Israeli arsenal . . . was not just one of benign neglect: it was conscious policy of ignoring reality”. “Ignoring reality,”  remains a key policy choice on the eve of president Obama’s second term, another prescription for suicide not unlike the fate of Samson.   

Source:

http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/flatten-gaza-hiroshima-and-mow-population-israeli-public-figures-urge

Highly Enriched Iranium: Tehran, Kashmir, & the Red Lines of Silence

Threats of force against Iran have escalated and new sanctions have weakened the Iranian economy much to the pleasure of Washington and its allies. In the recent vice presidential debate Republican candidate Paul Ryan labeled Iran ‘the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism.’ Biden, in accord with this script, hailed the new sanctions that have devastated Iran’s economy. Or as Joe stated ‘[the Iranians] are being crippled by them. And we‘ve made it clear, big nations can‘t bluff.’ Both comments were accepted with casual approval by the educated classes, a norm for privileged society. Yet it would be instructive to measure the credibility of such statements.

Iran has aroused the contempt of the ‘west’ for their alleged refusal to halt the development of nuclear capabilities which some claim will lead to nuclear weapons. President Obama has repeatedly threatened Iran with military force, of course in violation of the UN Charter, and has ‘tightened the vice’ on a sanctions regime that would be seen as a form of collective punishment in less indoctrinated circles. To be precise, the kind of punishment explicitly forbidden under the Geneva Conventions.

In fact, on-the-ground testimonials within Iran attest to the harmful effects of these sanctions and, more sinisterly, Biden’s maxim that “big nations can‘t bluff”. For example, since this new round of economic sanctions were imposed, the value of the Iranian rial has been cut in half, rising costs have made staple foods harder to purchase, and even hemophilia centers have reported resource shortages, a result of the barriers placed on the importation of vital medicines. According to a report released by Arseh Sevom, an Amsterdam based NGO, the head of Iran’s hemophilia center delivered a letter to the director of the Global Hemophilia Association pointing out that ‘blocks [on Iran’ s banking system] have made payments for medications nearly impossible’. Very rarely does any of this enter the establishment press, a moral disgrace for those who take seriously elementary principles of international law. A graphic example of this refusal to examine the content of Biden’s statement can be discerned in the western media’s treatment of the recent meeting of the non-aligned movement in Tehran. The New York Times described the non-aligned movement as “the biggest single voting bloc in the 193-member General Assembly at the United Nations”. Naturally, one would expect the press to cover the deliberations and documents that emerged from this historic meeting. This was not the case.

The main document to come out of this meeting was the Tehran declaration, a unanimously agreed upon document which condemned ‘all acts of terrorism, in all their forms and manifestations’; in particular, the document denounced the murders of ‘civilian researchers and scientists who have fallen victim to [an] inhumane terrorist campaign’. We should not expect anyone in the west to cite this report, its substance tells us too much about ourselves. For example, it deems the murder of civilian scientists acts of terrorism, a fact that should be obvious to anyone with a moderate understanding of international law.

Newspapers in the US, like the New York Times, do not consider the murder of nuclear scientists acts of terror. In a January article authored by Alan Cowell the word terrorist is placed in scare quotes and Iran is accused of ‘anti-western belligerence’. Contrast this with Cowell’s article after the attacks on the US embassy in Benghazi where he wrote that ‘5 US ambassadors had been killed by terrorists . . . according to the state department’. Journalism of this kind advances an orientalist doctrine that only America’s so-called enemies can engage in terrorism and any deviation from this doctrinal norm is a sign of ‘anti-western belligerence’ (the removal of the MEK from the terrorist list is but the latest development in this practice). This mode of thought was captured most powerfully in an article that appeared in the Diplomat titled Grand Strategy of the Authoritarian Axis: How Will the West Respond? Here Dr. William Martel, an associate professor of international security at the Fletcher School, decries what he calls a ‘dramatic shift in international politics’, namely states that ‘oppose and resist the policies and actions of the US, the UN, and its allies.’
It’s of great significance that Dr. Martel singled out states that resist the policies of the UN because the US is,by far, the chief obstacle to the passage of comprehensive resolutions at the UN. Take for instance the fact that the US has exercised its veto power 42 times since 1970, more than any other nation. Unilateralist policies of this kind are even recognized in conservative publications like Foreign Policy Magazine and the National Journal. Foreign Policy Magazine’s David Rothkopf described Obama’s drone war in Pakistan as a policy built upon the ‘coerced consent’ of Islamabad and the National Journal highlighted the ways in which the Obama administration, quite apart from a repudiation of the foreign policies that characterized the Bush administration, represents the latest affirmation Bush’s policies, the signature of an ‘imperial presidency’.

Add to this the potential human costs that are likely to be endured by ordinary Iranians in the event of a military strike. When the possibilities are contemplated the criminality of the threats issued by President Obama, Biden, and Benjamin Netanyahu are given a frightening degree of depth. Take for example a scientific study authored by Iranian physicist Khosrow Semani titled The Ayatollah’s Nuclear Gamble. In this study a grim picture is painted which details ‘the human and environmental consequences of an Israeli nuclear strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.’ In section six of the report titled Human Casualties Semani writes “The probability of an attack on Natanz is high. With 2,000 total workers onsite, we estimate 1,000 casualties resulting from a strike. In addition, the casualties from toxic plumes in the Natanz rural region could range between 1,700-7000 people.”

Comparable or worse body counts are estimated if the other nuclear facilites are bombed: Isfahan, 5000-70,000 dead; Arak, 500-3,600 dead; Bushehr, 2,400-12,000 dead. Samin concludes by writing “total casualties at all four sites could range from 5,500 to 85,000“. To put it in more straightfoward terms, if an Israeli strike on Iran were to use the maximal amount of firepower the death toll would be equal to that of 30.8 September 11 attacks, a record in the annals of state-terrorism surpassed in savagery only by maybe the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Incidentally, there are some finer points to be touched upon about Martel’s ‘authoritarian axis’; specifically, those states that are consciously omitted from the category of authoritarian. For example, Martel fails to mention the overt authoritarianism of places like Saudi Arabia or, more interestingly, the most militarized and volatile region in South Asia: Kashmir. India’s ongoing atrocities in occupied Kashmir have been extensively documented by researchers like Angana Chatterji and the Citizen’s Council for Justice. In Chatterji’s 2009 preliminary report, Buried Evidence: Unknown, Unmarked, and Mass Graves in Indian Administered Kashmir, she describes an ‘anthropology of violence’ filled with extra judicial killings, custodial deaths, sexual assaults, mass graves, and the wholesale denial of fundamental human rights. This ‘low-intensity war’ against Kashmiris has led to ‘widespread use of torture in detention camps and interrogation centers,’ which has affected more than 60,000 people, clear war crimes. Moreover, ‘incalculable numbers have experienced gendered and sexualized violence, including use of rape as a means of torture.’ These depredations have entered their 62^nd year and have no perceivable end in sight.

All of this falls silently on the ears of the ‘free world’. Upon his 2010 trip to India President Obama, according to an interview with Chatterji on David Barsamian’s Alternative Radio, was sent a letter signed by 30 prominent parliamentarians which detailed these crimes. The response they received was less than compassionate to put it mildly. In fact, he did not respond at all. Instead President Obama met with a cadre of CEOs in Mumbai to announce that “the Boeing company and the Indian Air Force [had] reached [a] preliminary agreement on the purchase of 10 C-17 Globemaster III military transport aircraft” and that the US was “now in the process of finalizing the details of the sale”. Tripti Lahiri of the Wall Street Journal reported that the deal amounted to an estimated $15 billion”. This military affair was consummated, in part, earlier this year when India was upgraded to the rank of regional ‘linchpin’ in the US military’s so-called ‘pivot’ toward the Asia-Pacific. The US also holds the distinction of participating in more joint military exercises with India than any other country.

It would be useful for us to imagine what the reaction would be in the west if Iran mobilized its revolutionary guard to the country’s northern region and slaughtered, displaced, and raped thousands of Bahais, entered into an Iran Strategic Dialogue agreement with Moscow, and used this Russian support to participate in 56 joint military exercises in the Strait of Hormuz. The response would plausibly be more than a yawn. In fact, the press would be agitating for war.

India, a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, is also engaged in ‘possible uranium sales’ with Australia and was even ‘granted a waiver’ by the Nuclear Supplies Group which normally bars membership for non-signatories. Again, we can ask how the newspapers would read if Iran entered into uranium sales with China, another instructive thought experiment made more illuminating by the fact that Iran would be entitled to such an exchange as a signatory of the NPT. All of this provides more than enough facts to understand Biden’s cryptic statement and the power play it conceals. It’s a policy that is ugly but standard for terrorist states, namely to impose a ‘[strategy] of governance that [produces] and circulates death,’ where “‘safety’ is made synonymous with submission to violent governance.”

Fortunately, in the United States such violence is more structural and shields us from the more naked forms of military brutality like that carried out in places like Kashmir, what Chatterji called ‘death as strategy.’ Yet we cannot deny that we have a major hand in the violence that has come to characterize the region. The same can be said for the people of Tehran who continue to languish under the harshest sanctions on earth because ‘big nations can’t bluff’. It is clear that these policies will proceed uninterrupted as long as the American public and the compliant press remain silent on these matters. Perhaps, we have mastered the practice of “death as strategy” to create a new paradigm: death as principle. The godfathers of world history would undoubtedly be impressed.

References:

http://nucleargamble.org/

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/world/middleeast/iran-reports-killing-of-nuclear-scientist.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://www.kashmirprocess.org/reports/graves/toc.html

http://thediplomat.com/2012/07/24/grand-strategy-of-the-authoritarian-axis/

www.arsehsevom.net/?p=1005

http://www.idsa.in/issuebrief/TheIranianNuclearImbroglioandtheNAMSummit_SamuelRajiv_190912

http://www.nationaljournal.com/issues/the-presidency-will-only-grow-more-powerful-no-matter-who-wins–20121011

http://thediplomat.com/indian-decade/2012/10/10/india-australia-to-negotiate-uranium-sales/

http://www.debates.org/index.php?page=october-11-2012-the-biden-romney-vice-presidential-debate

http://www.thekashmirwalla.com/2012/04/interview-angana-chatterji-by-david-barsamian/

https://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2010/11/06/white-house-confirms-india-deals/