Month: November 2013

Following the 2009 military coup in Honduras, the U.S. expanded aid and security cooperation with the new hard-right government and heaped legitimacy on the regime despite steadily increasing human rights abuses. This week, Honduras had an election that many international observers expected to be of dubious validity, thanks to the corruption of the ruling party and its control over the military and police (an occupational distinction which has been deliberately blurred in recent years).

Ballot counting is not yet finished and both leading candidates, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya (the wife of ousted president Manuel Zelaya), and her conservative rival, Juan Orlando Hernández believe they’ve won. Zelaya is confident of a win and explicitly predicts widespread voter fraud. Meanwhile, Hernández has “declared himself the country’s new president,” according to the Washington Post.

In Foreign Affairs, Dana Frank provides context in terms of U.S. policy:

For its part, the U.S. State Department indicates that it continues to support the post-coup regime and Hernández, who, according to a 2010 cable released by WikiLeaks, “has consistently supported U.S. interests.” The United States has never denounced his overthrow of the Supreme Court, the stacking of the attorney general’s office, or the militarization of policing. It continues to pour tens of millions of dollars into both the police and the military, and, more broadly, legitimates the current government by calling it a partner in addressing the security crisis and fighting the drug war.

In remarks that many took as patronizing, U.S. ambassador Lisa Kubiske recently encouraged Honduran voters to turn out to polls en masse and promised that, thanks in part to U.S.-sponsored oversight, this will be “the cleanest election in Honduran history.” Observers are pouring in from all over the world. But many of the key bodies have been accused of legitimating bogus elections in Honduras before. The U.S.-funded National Democratic Institute, for example, helped certify the 2009 elections, when all other international observers except the International Republican Institute pulled out in because of the repressive conditions under which they were being conducted. The U.S. State Department, which has now set itself as the guarantor of the current elections, recognized Lobo’s election in 2009 before the polls had even closed. It was clear that he was going to win, but the move nevertheless sent a disturbing message about the State Department’s desire to swiftly legitimate the election with or without fraud. In addition, the Organization of American States, which also plans to watch the election, certified the 2012 primaries despite widespread evidence of fraud.

There have been several incidents in the past couple years where commando-style Drug Enforcement Administration agents cooperating with Honduran security forces have raided people’s homes and even killed civilians, all in the name of the drug war. This has contributed to the rising violence and insecurity in Honduras, which has the highest homicide rate in the world, not to mention the weakening of democratic institutions and respect for the rule of law. There are even allegations of U.S. support for death squads run by the Honduran police department.

The Committee of the Families of the Disappeared of Honduras (COFADEH), a human rights organization, said in a statement last year that “a foreign army [i.e., the U.S. army] protected under the new hegemonic concept of the ‘war on drugs,’ legalized with reforms to the 1953 Military Treaty, violates our territorial sovereignty and kills civilians as if it was in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or Syria.”

A group of 40 Honduran scholars and former government officials then sent a letter to President Barak Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, demanding the U.S. stop supporting the Honduran military and police. The letter was publicly supported by 300 academics in 29 countries.

“It’s really troubling,” said American University anthropology professor Adrienne Pine, one of the signers. “It’s absolutely not appropriate for U.S. law enforcement to be killing other people in other countries.”

One of the four emerging myths about the Iran-P5+1 deal has reached a fever pitch. Turn on basically any network news channel and you’ll hear it propagated again and again: Iran got too much sanctions relief!

People are even saying this deal asked too much of the P5+1 and too little of Iran, when really the opposite is true. Here’s Ankit Panda and Zachary Keck in The Diplomat explaining what that $7 billion really means to Iran.

Altogether, the White House estimates that this amounts to between US$6 billion and US$7 billion in sanctions relief for Iran over the six month period, although the higher figure appears to incorporate the humanitarian aid and the spare parts for Iran’s civilian aircraft. Under the current sanctions regime, Iran loses about US$5 billion each month in oil sales alone, with an unknown additional loss from financial and other sanctions. Based on a 30 day month, this means Iran will be receiving at most about 36 days of relief from oil sanctions, despite freezing and in some cases rolling back its nuclear program for a period of 182.5 days.

Thirty-six days of modest financial benefit in exchange for freezing or rolling back the entirety of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.

Read more here and here.

The deal reached between Iran and the P5+1 is top news today and probably much of this week. In one of the few instances of a media buzz word accurately describing a major news event, I do think the agreement, although simply an interim deal, is historic. It wasn’t very long ago that even low-level diplomacy with Iran was totally out of the question.

The deal was finalized in the wee hours of Sunday morning, but already there are a number of myths being propagated throughout the media. Here are a few to watch out for:

1. Iran got too much sanctions relief. Actually, Iran got almost no sanctions relief. The bulk of the goods for Iran is that they got about $7 billion of their own overseas assets, out of approximately $100 billion, unfrozen. Some minor, negligible sanctions were eased on gold and precious medals transactions and to facilitate the delivery of spare parts for Iran’s outmoded airplanes. These will have little positive effect on the Iranian economy, which is a large part of Rouhani’s domestic selling point for diplomacy. The crippling economic sanctions on Iran’s oil and banking sectors – widely considered the most devastating – remain in place.

2. Iran’s enrichment program is left largely intact, leaving room for Iran to cheat. This deal freezes or rolls back the entirety of Iran’s uranium enrichment program. Half of it’s stockpile of 20% enriched uranium, the aspect of the nuclear program most cited by Iran hawks, will be oxidized and the other half will be irreversibly converted into fuel rods for the Tehran Research Reactor. For the whole of the 6 month period over which this agreement reigns, Iran agreed not to enrich any uranium past 5%. Furthermore, no “further advances” will be made at the facilities at Natanz, Fordow, or Arak. And finally, declared facilities will be inspected daily – not weekly – daily to ensure compliance.

Iran has no incentive to cheat. The hawks’ argument that Iran will use this interim deal to breakout and dash for a nuclear weapon are foolish and illogical. The Iranian regime has staked its domestic and international credibility on this diplomatic path. If it falls apart because they defied the very deal they pushed for and agreed to, they’d look ridiculous. Moreover, it’s clearly preferable in the Iranian cost-benefit analysis to willingly roll back their enrichment program in exchange for thorough sanctions relief and greater international prestige arising out of their acknowledged cooperation.

Not to mention the fact that Iran cheating would give the U.S. or Israel a perfect excuse for bombing, which Iran obviously doesn’t want.

Continue reading “Four Emerging Myths About the Iran, P5+1 Deal”

The P5+1 and Iran are in Geneva negotiating the details of a first-phase deal on Tehran’s nuclear program. In the last round of talks, France scuttled the deal all other parties had reportedly agreed upon, citing Iran’s Arak heavy water reactor as a proliferation concern.

Now, as the secretive talks hammer out the details, the Arak reactor keeps popping up as a point of contention, with hardliners demanding Iran halt all construction on the unfinished facility as part of any first-phase deal. This Reuters report is headlined: “Iran’s Arak reactor is growing nuclear concern for West.”

“The fear is that, while Iran says its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful, it might still separate the plutonium from the reactor’s irradiated fuel and use it to assemble bombs,” Reuters reports.

But the Arak reactor is a red herring, the one issue those opposed to U.S.-Iran rapprochement can grab onto and justify their obstructionism. Iran has made major concessions on its nuclear enrichment program in terms of the rate at which they enrich, and to what concentration, and the frequency of international inspections. Arak is the only thing left.

As the Reuters article points out, in order to extract the plutonium from Arak, “Iran would also need to build a reprocessing plant,” which “it has no declared plans to do.” So not only is Arak construction not scheduled to be completed until late 2014, but Iran would have to construct a whole new reprocessing plant if the Arak reactor were to be an actual proliferation threat, something that would take several years.

Additionally, a former senior Obama official said the deal France rejected earlier this month would have imposed “firm restrictions on Iran building fuel assemblies for the Arak fuel reactor.”

“Arak represents a long-term proliferation risk, not a near-term risk,” Daryll Kimball, Executive Director of the Arms Control Association, told AFP. And time is significant here because the deal being hammered out right now is only a first-phase agreement that would halt or reduce Iran’s enrichment capacity for about 6 months, when a final grand bargain is to be agreed upon.

In other words, Arak is irrelevant to these negotiations. As former Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who supports negotiations, said this morning on MSNBC, the arguments against the nuclear deal are “essentially designed to either humiliate [Iran] or to drive them into negativism so that then we are forced to act militarily.”

Put another way, the harping on irrelevant issues like Arak along with demands for Iran to completely capitulate is intended to put us back on the war path with Iran. Hopefully the negotiators have the good sense to resist that.

Israel’s blockade of Gaza has long been known for it’s cruel results in strangling the population. But two recent happenings – namely Egypt’s destruction of Gaza’s smuggling tunnels and Israel’s decision ratchet up the blockade by blocking construction materials – have made Gaza virtually “uninhabitable,” according to the UN.

Gaza is facing a power crisis as a result of a shortage of fuel, with blackouts lasting 12-16 hours a day, according to Oxfam. Raw sewage has flooded streets in some areas of Gaza City following the closure of Gaza’s only power plant on 1 November, which made pump stations inoperative. Factories have been forced to cut production, leading to layoffs, and hospitals are running on emergency reserves.

Oxfam said only 40% of Gaza’s fuel needs were being met and consumer prices for petrol and diesel had doubled. Less than 400,000 litres of fuel a day enter Gaza through official crossings, compared with 1m litres a day that were smuggled through the tunnels.

This sadistic economic strangulation of 1.6 million people is not just cruel, it’s illegal. A UN panel in September 2011 found that Israel’s blockade subjected Gazans to collective punishment in “flagrant contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law.”

As one UN special rapporteur explained, about one third of Gaza’s arable land and 85 percent of its fishing waters are totally or partially inaccessible due to Israeli military measures, while at least two-thirds of Gazan households lack reliable access to food as a result of the blockade.

According to internal documents released by a court order last year, the Israeli military meticulously and callously calculated the number of calories Gaza residents would need to consume in order not to starve, and used those calculations to inform their blockade policies. As Dov Weisglass, an adviser to former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said in 2006, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

“[S]ince Israel continue[s] to exercise control over Gaza’s airspace and sea—and to a very large extent over its land borders—Israel is still responsible for this territory and its inhabitants, according to a widely accepted interpretation of international law,” writes Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar.

Israel has ignored repeated international pleas to lift the blockade. “I urge Israel to lift its harsh restrictions in order to ease the plight of civilians and bring an end to the closure,” United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said last year.

“Keeping a large and dense population in unremitting poverty is in nobody’s interest except that of the most extreme radicals in the region,” he added.

Nevertheless, the siege continues. If international law is in broad agreement that the blockade is illegal, then the role of the United States cannot be trivialized. The Israeli-imposed humanitarian crisis in Gaza persists because the United States continues to support Israel and virtually everything it does. That means American politicians in Washington bear some responsibility for the totally unnecessary suffering of an entire population of civilians.

Here’s an uncomfortable reality: the Obama administration’s decision to recommit to the war in Afghanistan and surge U.S. military forces in his first term was made largely to allow for continued U.S. drone attacks in neighboring Pakistan.

The hundreds of billions of dollars put towards counter-insurgency and nation building were in large part a sideshow for the U.S.’s main objective, to secretly bomb a nearby country with which it was not at war. The Afghans who have suffered and died under brutal U.S. occupation didn’t suffer and die for their own country’s security or foreign-imposed “democratic” institutions, but rather to provide for another, separate, legally questionable war in Pakistan that they had nothing to do with. That’s really saying something.

But now that the Washington is on the cusp of signing an agreement that will govern 10,000 (give or take) U.S. forces in Afghanistan for at least the next decade, the question of what will happen with the drone war in Pakistan is a pertinent one.

U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan have climbed down significantly from their peak in the first years of Obama’s presidency (down by almost 40 percent, by some counts). But this does not mean the drone war in Pakistan is over. Just yesterday, a U.S. strike hit an Islamic school and killed 6 people (as always, “alleged terrorists”).

So what does the proposed status of forces agreement with Afghanistan say about the drone war? It says that the United States “has pledged not to use Afghan territory or facilities as a launching point for attacks against other countries.”

Micah Zenko, of the Council on Foreign Relations, gives his take:

Since 2011, when Islamabad kicked the last remaining CIA personnel and contractors out of Pakistani airbases, all U.S. drone strikes have been flown from airbases across the border in Afghanistan. If the United States keeps its pledge and Afghanistan actually enforces the agreement (both big ifs), there is no other plausible alternative host-nation from which the United States would receive permission to conduct drone strikes into northwest Pakistan. Armed drones flying from U.S. naval platforms are a few years away, but the distance from the Arabian Sea to the FATA is significant, posing greater operational risk to drones themselves, and also potentially further exacerbating anti-U.S. sentiment in Pakistan by overflying populated areas.

I had predicted in March 2012 that this scenario could emerge. It is possible that continued U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan will be tacitly accepted by Karzai’s successor in exchange forbags of CIA cash, and the estimated three billion dollars in overt funding for Afghan security forces. Yet, enforcing sovereign host-nation basing rights, overflight rights, shutter control, and constrained rules of engagement are part of the normal behavior of an independent, sovereign country, which Afghanistan might finally be.

Truthfully, the ‘proximity to a war zone’ justification for U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan was thrown out the window once the U.S. ramped up another drone war in Yemen. But the key point is having a host-nation from which to launch the drones, which the U.S. apparently doesn’t have for Pakistan without Afghanistan.

So what it comes down to is whether the U.S. and Afghanistan keep their word. I don’t know about you, but I’m sufficiently reassured when the world’s most corrupt semi-state and the world’s military hegemon with a history of writing its own rules make a promise.