|
A Temporary Deal With Iran
There is now a temporary deal between the U.S. (and some sideshows) and Iran about some reduction of illegal U.S. sanctions against Iran in exchange for some freeze of legal Iranian industrial nuclear activities. Since March secret negotiations were held between the Obama administration and Iran to achieve this break through. But it is dubious that the deal is a real change of course. The White House "fact sheet" on it is still typically condescending.
Some preliminary thoughts:
– The deal is limited to six month and chances are that no permanent deal will follow. We will likely be back to the usual animosities and renewed calls for war some six month from now. There are many who do not want a more permanent deal and they will do their best to prevent one. When, in six month, the U.S. will stop adhering to the agreement Iran will be blamed of breaking it. This clause in the "Fact Sheet" is the decisive one:
Specifically the P5+1 has committed to:
• Not impose new nuclear-related sanctions for six months, if Iran abides by its commitments under this deal, to the extent permissible within their political systems.
Translated: Congress has ways and means to increase sanctions and thereby break this deal and will likely do so.
– A much better deal, from the U.S. perspective, could have been had in 2003, 2005 and 2007.
– While the White House claims that the deal does not accept Iran's "right to enrich" it factually does. Also recall what Kerry thought about this issue some four years ago:
John Kerry, chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee and the Democrats’ 2004 presidential nominee, told the Financial Times in an interview that Iran had a right to uranium enrichment – a process that can produce both nuclear fuel and weapons grade material.The US and the world’s other big powers have repeatedly demanded that Tehran suspend enrichment …“The Bush administration [argument of] no enrichment was ridiculous . . . because it seemed so unreasonable to people,” said Mr Kerry, citing Iran’s rights as a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. “It was bombastic diplomacy. It was wasted energy. It sort of hardened the lines, if you will,” he added. “They have a right to peaceful nuclear power and to enrichment in that purpose.”…
– The deal and any possible follow on only came through because the U.S. needs to change its foreign policy focus from the Middle East to Asia. For lack of resources and capacity the U.S. can only do so after achieving some balance in the Middle East. All issues the U.S. has with the Middle East are in some form influenced by Iran. It simply can no longer be ignored. The "pivot to Asia" which the U.S. needs to counter China necessitates a "pivot towards Iran".
– If followed up soon there is a chance that this deal will lead to some other deal that solves the situation in Syria.
It ain’t bevin, guest, though I’m in agreement with much of what he, and most other posters here say.
This deal needs to be seen in the light of two important facts.
The first is Israel.
It is true that Israel has long exerted disproportionate influence over US foreign policy. But it is not true that Israel has dictated policy over a long period. The basic fact is not Israel’s weight in US politics, either in terms of numbers or money, but the existence if a vacuum, much to nature’s disgust, in US foreign policy. Apart from the general desire to dominate everything, always-a not uncommon desire among the very young- there isn’t much purpose. Business pursues its own interests and while the iron fist of the Pentagon is nice to have, it really isn’t necessary. All business really needs from Washington is ever lower taxes, a tight lid on wages, and a regulation free environment. It has them all; and democrats and republicans compete to take credit for it.
What Israel, led by single minded fascist fanatics does very well is to give the Pentagon and the State Department something to do. It ensures by keeping them busy chasing ghosts, such as terrorism, Iran’s nuclear threat, another holocaust being planned and other amusements for empty minds (the end times!) that nothing is done about implementing decades worth of promises regarding a Palestinian state, the end of the occupation, the return of Syrian and Lebanese territories, civil rights in Israel. Not to mention ceasing the sponsorship of terrorists and standing on its own feet economically.
Israel, with 200 nuclear weapons and a regional monopoly on WMD, cries wolf and the Military Industrial Complex in the US seconds those cries but there is no future in a policy of eternally escalating hysteria.
And the past isn’t as long as it sometimes looks. One of Obama’s first actions in 2009 was to appoint Mitchell as a peace envoy. It didn’t go anywhere, although George Mitchell did, but it was an indication of a commitment, half hearted but real, to negotiations. Israel’s partisans were horrified and they made sure that the mission was aborted, but it took them a lot, including political credit, to achieve that. The current attitude of letting Israel do as it pleases in settlements and build and annex at will is not only new but linked directly to the “Arab Spring” civil wars raging or impending from Aden to Beirut, the Mahgreb to Sudan. It cannot go on.
The change in US Foreign policy is only partly to do with the “pivot to Asia.” Much more likely than which is a revaluation of the cost effectiveness of the current strategy of building bases and starting fights everywhere. The costs are enormous, the benefits non-existent: US military adventures abroad are a self conducted propaganda campaign against the USA. From Okinawa to Mukhalla the stars and stripes are hated. And, increasingly, not feared. Those who talk of “soft power” and “cultural reach” clearly don’t get out much.
I recollect, in the mid fifties, being in a cinema full of Malayan schoolchildren where a Hollywood movie about Korea was being shown. How it ended I have no idea, because there was a riot which lasted all day. Sixty years later the brand, tainted by decades more of riding roughshod over the world, is tainted beyond repair. W was right: those not with the US are against it. The latter are many, the former are few, cowardly and mercenary. Soft power only applies to a sliver of treacherous intellectuals in every country always ready to trade their country for crumbs in America and comprador businessmen.
Netanyahu and his Congressional friends make a big noise but in the end they are going to be arguing that tens of millions of hungry or desperate or unhappy Americans should sacrifice living standards and hope in order to bankroll Mussolini’s last surviving comrades as they pursue Zionist fantasies in Palestine. Once Congress gets something real to do, it will stop obsessing about Israel.
My prediction is that, by next Spring, a populist opposition in the US will be talking about the need for more social security, more secure pensions, cheaper housing, interest free student loans, a reversal of job exportation, tariff protection, a living minimum wage and other practical policies which will require big cuts in Defense expenditure and an end to million dollar a year private soldiers. In such a wash, Israel will shrink rapidly to its proper size.
The Second important fact is Fukushima. Iran’s nuclear programme goes back to the halcyon days of the fifties when nuclear power was touted as a miracle whose power would be too cheap to meter. And the Shah, always looking for cheap electricity for the torture chambers, was daft enough to buy into it.
For a variety of reasons, many to do with Iran’s proper refusal to be denied its sovereign rights, the programme has survived and become a talisman. But the truth is that nuclear power is a disaster in urgent need of dismantling. And economically the power produced would have to be really inexpensive to justify, over a thousand years, what it has already cost.
The next months afford Iranians a perfect opportunity to look into the implications of nuclear power and reconsider the advantages its proponents claim for it. At the same time the situation is one in which pressure ought to be put on Israel and its enablers, (from Germany which is building its nuclear armed submarine fleet, France, the UK and the US) to begin the long process of dismantling its nuclear arsenal.
If, by reaching an agreement with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation to take shelter under its members’ nuclear umbrella, the threat of nuclear attacks on Iran are deterred all the better.
I have no illusions, that I know of, about the perfidy of the Empire but this agreement represents a welcome split in its rulers’ ranks. It also represents a refusal to be intimidated by AIPAC and its clown chorus in Congress.
Unlike b I do not believe that Congress will be able to impose new sanctions on the government. It certainly has no power to impose them on the EU or the rest of the world. I believe that Iranian sanctions are going the way of those against Cuba, and that increasingly counties will work around them. I also believe that sanctions include some benefits by forcing countries into self reliance and breaking global trade patterns.
Sorry to have written at such length- I’m unsure whether I would read a piece this long- but I had no time to compress it.
Posted by: bevin | Nov 24 2013 16:37 utc | 37
@73 “2013 appears to be repeat of the prelude to war played out in 1914, all over again. Israel will be the trigger that starts the firing of atomic weapons and WWIII, unless restrained.”
An old university text (circa 1962) A.W. Palmer’s “A Dictionary of Modern History” gives an interesting background on short, but significant war(s) in the Balkans that flared up, and came to a head, in 1913.
In March 1912 the rival Balkan States, Bulgaria and Serbia, were induced by Russian diplomatists to sign an alliance providing for future partition of Macedonia, then still a Turkish province. Greece and Montenegro duly associated themselves with this alliance and in October 1912 these four states attacked Turkey, gaining swift victories. The Great Powers, meeting in an Ambassadorial Conference in London, tried to end the war and succeeded, in May 1913, in securing a preliminary peace under which the Turks surrendered most of their European territories on the understanding that the Powers would create a new and independent state of Albania–an arrangement distasteful to Serbia and Montenegro who wished to acquire the Albanian coastline.
But it is strange how alliances of convenience can prove fickle; and in turn, the enemies of a fortnight ago will intervene quickly in a war between those who were but lately allied against them. It all seems to happen, once the loot or territory is in play, and the situation in war becomes volatile.
Friction arose between the Serbs and Greeks, on one hand, and the Bulgarians, on the other. The Bulgarians, who had suffered three-quarters of the casualties, rightly anticipated that Serbia and Greece were planning to divide Macedonia between them, giving only formal compensation to Bulgaria. The Bulgarians accordingly attacked the Serbs and Greeks (June 29th, 1913) but found themselves invaded by the Roumanians and the Turks (with whom the Serbs and Greeks were still technically at war!)
Yes, the Scripture comes to mind: “There is nothing new under the sun.” I guess it can’t be claimed with certainty that the little war turned out to be the precursor of the big one, only a year later; but it certainly was a warning that was not sufficiently heeded.
Inevitably, the Bulgarians were rapidly defeated. The Treaty of Bucharest (August 1913) divided most of the territory claimed by Bulgaria in Macedonia and Thrace between Serbia and Greece and also made Bulgaria cede southern Dobrudja to Roumania. The general effect of the Balkan Wars was: (i) to limit Turkey-in-Europe to the area around Adrianople and Constantinople; (ii) to create the ill-defined state of Albania; (iii) to double the size of Serbia and of Montenegro; (iv) to make Greece the most important power in the Aegean, possessing the key port of Salonica: (v) to leave Bulgaria bitterly resentful. This settlement was to determine the behaviour of the Balkan States during the First World War.
The very term balkanization is drawn from this particular history; and it’s obvious that the chopping up of one country, and the annexation of its amputated parts by other countries, under the intrigue and threat of the Great Powers, can have awful consequences. What we presume is the ambition of some of Syria’s neighbors, including Israel, to carve up, and divvy up sections of a balkanized Syria, should give us all pause to reflect, given the chance that history might make a bad turn, and God forbid, repeat itself.
Posted by: Copeland | Nov 25 2013 7:55 utc | 81
|
