Month: December 2013

In Washington, there is a lot of opposition to the ongoing diplomatic negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. For the most part, the reasons for their opposition are unconvincing reiterations of trite political slogans.

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), for example, insists the Iranians are not sincere and are only engaging in talks to distract the world while they expand their nuclear program. The history of diplomacy with Iran “is littered with Iranian feints and the promise of concessions that never occur,” he wrote in Politico. “The United States should think long and hard before taking any Iranian official that speaks for this regime at his word,” Rubio warned.

Sens. McCain and Graham, two of the most hawkish members of Congress, expressed similar doubts. “We remain skeptical of the Iranian regime’s seriousness in negotiations,” they said in a joint statement last month. They then urged the Senate to take up the issue of additional sanctions because, “As the current negotiations proceed, it is essential for the Congress to continue to keep the pressure on Iran’s rulers.”

Nothing demonstrates how trite and clichéd these objections are better than pointing to the exact same objections coming from hardliners in Iran. In an exclusive Time magazine interview with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif, the Iranian skeptics are said to “believe the West and particularly the United States are not sincere, are not interested about reaching an agreement.” The U.S. is determined to “use the mechanism of negotiations in order to derail the process, in order to find new excuses.” Sounds all too familiar.

Q: What opposition are you facing at home to the Geneva deal? And what are you doing about it?

A: The most opposition here emanates from the lack of trust because we do not have a past on which we can build. It’s a psychological barrier to interaction that we need to overcome. The fundamental reason for opposition: they believe the West and particularly the United States are not sincere, are not interested about reaching an agreement. They believe that they will try to use the mechanism of negotiations in order to derail the process, in order to find new excuses. And some of the statements out of Washington give them every reason to be concerned. Now we know that Washington is catering to various constituencies and is trying to address these various constituencies. We read their statements in the light of their domestic constituency process. But not everybody in Iran does that. We believe that the U.S. government should stick to its words, should remain committed to what it stated in Geneva, both on the paper as well as in the discussions leading to the plan of action.

Notably, Time asks Zarif what will happen if these U.S. hardliners win out and succeed in imposing new sanctions on Iran. “The entire deal,” he answered, would be “dead.”

Q: What happens if Congress imposes new sanctions, even if they don’t go into effect for six months?

A: The entire deal is dead. We do not like to negotiate under duress. And if Congress adopts sanctions, it shows lack of seriousness and lack of a desire to achieve a resolution on the part of the United States. I know the domestic complications and various issues inside the United States, but for me that is no justification. I have a parliament. My parliament can also adopt various legislation that can go into effect if negotiations fail. But if we start doing that, I don’t think that we will be getting anywhere.

There are two important lessons from this exchange with Zarif. First, there is nothing particularly enlightened or novel about the hardliner’s reasons to oppose diplomacy. Second, the argument from the hardliners in Washington that new sanctions would facilitate Iranian cooperation and capitulation is just flat out wrong. It would derail the deal (which, I believe, many of them want).

If you want to get an idea of how tight a hold defense corporations have over the government, take a look at this Seattle Times scoop (update: originally reported at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch). It reports on a secret document drawn up by Boeing and sent to 15 state governments. Boeing is dangling the prospect of establishing factories to build its new 777X commercial airliner, with the promise of creating thousands of jobs, but it is also demanding that taxpayers foot the bill for the building of the factory, the real estate, the facilities, and much more.

Here is a list of some of the demands the great welfare queen Boeing issued:

• “Site at no cost, or very low cost, to project.”

• “Facilities at no cost, or significantly reduced cost.”

• “Infrastructure improvements provided by the location.”

• Assistance in recruiting, evaluating and training employees.

• A low tax structure, with “corporate income tax, franchise tax, property tax, sales/use tax, business license/gross receipts tax, and excise taxes to be significantly reduced.”

• “Accelerated permitting for site development, facility construction, and environmental permitting.”

• Low overall cost of doing business, “including local wages, utility rates, logistics costs, real estate occupancy costs, construction costs, applicable tax structure obligations.”

• The quality, cost and productivity of the available workforce.

• Predictability of utilities pricing and government regulation.

So, Boeing walks into a bar tended by Uncle Sam and says, “Hey Sam, give me billions of dollars worth of free stuff, tax breaks, subsidized cost structures, and any other government assistance you can think of, and put it on the tab of the American people. In exchange, I’ll put some of your constituents to work – albeit at lower wages than usual.”

What a deal! While it’s great for Boeing and it helps ensure the politician’s reelection because they get to point to the uptick in employment numbers, it’s a bad deal for the taxpayer.

Despite the fact that in this case the Boeing factory will be building commercial airliners, this is the kind of raw deal Americans are served with in virtually every military contract. As I wrote about in October, rent-seeking defense corporations that have politicians wrapped around their little finger keep building expensive jets, tanks, warships, and weapons systems that the Pentagon says it doesn’t want or need. But they get built and bought anyways because politicians who understand the whole reciprocal back-scratching proverb insist upon it. It’s not necessary for national defense according even to the top military brass, but Americans get stuck with the bill anyways because the military-industrial complex has the clout to do it.

That’s the kind of safety net Republicans and Democrats don’t like to make an agenda out of.

Foreign Policy reports that Japan is stiffening the state’s ability to classify information and punish whistleblowers and is even rolling back their pacifist constitution to get “in line with U.S. preferences.”

The new law, which passed Japan’s upper house Friday, will give agency heads discretionary power to classify 23 types of information in four categories — defense, diplomacy, counter-terrorism, and counter-intelligence — and stiffens penalties for leaking state secrets, even in cases of journalists exposing wrongdoing. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has insisted that the law is necessary if Japan is to maintain effective diplomatic partnerships with the United States and other allies.

Washington, for its part, has long supported stronger secrecy laws in Japan, if only to make it easier for the two nations to share information.

…The measure is part of a larger effort by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to move away from Japan’s pacifist past and establish a stronger military posture that is congenial to, or in line with U.S. preferences, according to Samuels. Among other initiatives, Abe plans to create Japan’s version of the U.S. National Security Council, the coordinating body of American foreign policy, and is pushing to reinterpret Japan’s constitution to expand its military’s limited self-defense role — giving it the authority to aid the United States and other allies, if they’re attacked.

These developments should be viewed in the context of the Obama administration’s Asia Pivot, which is helping to militarize U.S. allies in Asia so they can assist in containing a rising China.

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Today you can watch much of the world praise the life and mourn the death of former South African President anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela. Scores of U.S. leaders and political pundits with platforms to reach millions of Americans are expressing admiration for Mandela today, but I have barely seen a single acknowledgement of the fact that the U.S. strongly opposed Mandela’s struggle and strongly supported the white supremacist apartheid system in South Africa. There has been almost no mention in the mainstream that Mandela remained on the U.S.’s terrorism watch list until 2008. Mandela spent 27 years in prison, thanks in part to the CIA assisting the apartheid regime’s secret police in his arrest.

This white-washing mostly occurs on television. Cable news is especially vapid. There are a few exceptions in print/digital media. One comes from Peter Beinhart:

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan placed Mandela’s African National Congress on America’s official list of “terrorist” groups. In 1985, then-Congressman Dick Cheney voted againsta resolution urging that he be released from jail. In 2004, after Mandela criticized the Iraq War, an article in National Review said his “vicious anti-Americanism and support for Saddam Hussein should come as no surprise, given his longstanding dedication to communism and praise for terrorists.” As late as 2008, the ANC remained on America’s terrorism watch list, thus requiring the 89-year-old Mandela to receive a special waiver from the secretary of State to visit the U.S.

…In South Africa, for decades, American presidents backed apartheid in the name of anti-communism. Indeed, the language of the Cold War proved so morally corrupting that in 1981, Reagan, without irony, called South Africa’s monstrous regime “essential to the free world.”

Believe it or not, there is an aspect of this hypocritical praise of Mandela that is mentioned even less than the media coverage of his passing. That is the uncomfortable similarity that Israel’s occupation of Palestine now has with the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Continue reading “The Hypocrisy on Mandela is Palpable”