Category: News

At this point in the international negotiations with Iran, people seem to be reading into it whatever is beneficial for their own arguments. They’re either bound for resolution in the third round in Moscow later this month, or they’re doomed to failure because, hey, you can’t trust those Persians.

As James Rubin, former assistant secretary of state during the Bill Clinton administration, just mentioned in his latest scrawl pining for war in Syria, “the current round of negotiations with the world’s major powers will not fundamentally change Iran’s nuclear program.” On the other hand, Laura Rosen today reported that IAEA chief Yukiya Amano announced another meeting with Iranian negotiators to take place just ten days before the Moscow talks. Iranian officials have reiterated their willingness to make concessions, namely opening up the Parchin military site to inspections and halting 20 percent uranium enrichment.

One thing is for sure, if the U.S. and its western allies aren’t interested in coming to an actual agreement, self-fulfilling prophecy will once again prove an accessible phenomenon.

The fact that Iran has been negotiating separately and in parallel with the IAEA is indicative. Washington’s needless intimidation and aggressiveness quite simply makes the Iranians not want to make concessions when talking with the P5+1. The IAEA is not the one waging economic warfare and threatening to bomb Iran to bits, so Tehran sees the UN watchdog as a more viable and reasonable negotiator.

As Reza Nasri over at PBS Frontline’s Tehran Bureau put it today, “world powers are again poised to ‘solve’ an international crisis through an ‘agreement’ that is essentially predicated on intimidation, illegal threats of military action, unilateral ‘crippling’ sanctions, sabotage, and extrajudicial killings of Iran’s brightest minds.” In other words, ensuring a failure of talks.

Constant threats of military action, paired with harsh economic sanctions, are admittedly meant to coerce Iran into concluding an agreement with the P5+1 on its nuclear program. Covert operations, such as the assassination of top Iranian scientists and the spate of massive cyberattacksthat have targeted the country’s civilian energy sector, also seem to be part of a broader policy whose aim is to diminish Iran’s position at the negotiation table.

Mind you, taking these postures is illegal under international law (not that this matters to Washington):

Indeed, from the lens of modern international law, an agreement that is obtained through coercion is generally considered invalid. Article 52 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties — which codifies some of the most fundamental bedrocks of the laws among nations — is very clear on the subject: It specifically renders “void any treaty which has been procured by the threat or use of force in violation of the principles of international law embodied in the Charter of the United Nations.”

After the failed talks in 2009 and 2010, wherein Obama ended up mysteriously rejecting the very deal he demanded the Iranians accept, as Stephen Walt wrote last week, the Iranian leadership “has good grounds for viewing Obama as inherently untrustworthy.”

Still, the Iranians have all but given in. They just haven’t laid prostrate in the face of Western bullying. Rosen:

For the upcoming P5+1/Iran talks in “Moscow, an agreement on ‘zero stockpile of 20 % enriched uranium would be the best achievement,” Mousavian proposed.

Under such a plan, he explained, the P5+1 and Iran would set up a joint committee to determine how much 20% enriched uranium Iran needs for medical purposes, and the rest of its 20% stockpile would be exported or converted to 3.5%.

He also proposed that the IAEA define the maximum amount of transparency it would like from Iran. “If Iran accepts, to sign the additional protocol and give the IAEA access beyond that demanded in the additional protocol, then the [western powers] should be ready” to defer new European and American sanctions set to go into effect next month targeting transactions with Iran’s Central Bank and oil exports.

There you have it. The agreement is there. No more 20 percent enrichment, just don’t impose further economic sanctions. Whether Washington will accept this peaceful resolution in Moscow remains to be seen. But so far, the Obama administration’s policy has been schizophrenic. And when it comes down to it, the U.S. is primarily concerned with Iran’s nuclear know-how – not out of concerns of nuclear proliferation – but because it closes “avenues for regime change.” That mentality will mean the long-term failure of any resolution. And any peace.

Nikolas Kozloff writing at al Jazeera had recently brought to light the Obama administration’s construction of a new military base in Argentina. Local authorities and official U.S. explanations insist the “Resistencia” base is for civil and humanitarian purposes alone, but many Argentinians reject this. One Argentine legislator even called for an investigation into the “Yankee base in Chaco.”

Well, now Kozloff writes about another new military base in Chile:

The installation, which has cost the US taxpayer nearly a half million dollars to construct, is situated in the port city of Concón in the central Chilean province of Valparaíso. In Chile, the political debate surrounding the Concón base mirrors the previous fight over the Resistencia installation: while local authorities and the US military claim that Concón will be used for training armed forces deployed for peacekeeping operations, the Chilean left believes the base is aimed at controlling and repressing the local civilian population.

For Chilean civil society, which has longtime experience with US interventionism going way back to the dark days of the Augusto Pinochet military dictatorship, the Concón base raises eyebrows. Human rights groups charge that the actual design of the base – which simulates an urban zone with eight buildings as well as sidewalks and roads – suggests that the Chilean military is interested in repressing protest. According to United Press International, Concón “is growing into a major destination for regional military trainers and defence industry contractors”.

The facility is run by the US Southern Command, headquartered in Miami, Florida. The US, which has in recent years been losing some of its political and economic hegemony in the region, is interested in getting another foothold for its military operations. Indeed, ever since the nationalist/populist regime of Rafael Correa booted Washington out of its base in Manta, Ecuador, the US has been on a quest to find alternative sites in South America.

It doesn’t take a Ph.D in international relations to know that the presence of U.S. military bases around the world serves as a projection of power and control, not for civil and humanitarian purposes as is officially claimed. As was on display in recent weeks in the cases of Japan and Guam, foreign military bases typically engender deep resentment on the part of the local population. But these feelings will be even stronger in a place like Chile, where in 1973 the U.S. ousted a democratically elected leader in a coup and had him replaced with a dictator, Augusto Pinochet, who tortured and murdered his own people. Pinochet’s rule lasted until 1990 – a mere 22 years ago.

Nevertheless, Obama sent his secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, over to meet with the Chilean president – fast becoming a client of Washington’s, as Kozloff explains – to smooth over the new military-to-military relationship. This seems like a good example of the liberal claim to the Obama presidency: imperialism with a softer face.

From the New York Times:

The aspect of the Syria issue that is getting the most attention right now has the least to do with calls for intervention. I wouldn’t for a second belittle the suffering people there have faced; what I’m saying is that those demanding that America do something about that suffering, apparently care very little about it.

I’ve written previously about how strangely open many of these interventionists are about what an intervention in Syria would mean. Before Rick Santorum dropped out of the presidential race, his Syria talking point was the following: “Syria is a puppet state of Iran. They are a threat not just to Israel, but they have been a complete destabilizing force within Lebanon, which is another problem for Israel, and Hezbollah.” And Romney: “The key ally of Iran, Syria, has a leader that’s in real trouble. And we ought to grab a hold of that like it’s the best thing we’ve ever seen.”

Rep. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who is rumored to be one of Romney’s choices for VP, said recently in a video message to his constituents that arming and aiding the Syrian opposition is “in our national security interest” because “Iran,” which he described as “the number one immediate threat facing the world and the United States,” has “no stronger ally in the world than Syria” and “the loss of the Assad regime in Syria is the single, most damaging thing that can happen to Iran’s regime.”

This is nothing new. But the narrative about a humanitarian catastrophe in Syria obligating the U.S. to intervene on behalf of innocent civilians is still the dominant one. In the headlines of the major newspapers and on network news, the suffering of the Syrian people is prompting calls to “do something” to “stop this,” and so on. But the suffering going on in Syria – as horrendous as it is – is only as prominent in our news media and political debate because of the geopolitics.

I was struck by a segment on MSNBC’s Morning Joe wherein former National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski faced off against a chorus of Syria interventionists. Brzezinski was being eminently reasonable in arguing against intervention in Syria and against using the conflict to justify being a belligerent bully on the world stage – particularly towards Russia. Then he said that the conflict “is not as horrible or as dramatic as it is portrayed,” especially when compared to other recent conflicts around the world, like “the horrible war in Sri Lanka, the killings in Rwanda, the deaths in Libya and so forth – you know, let’s have a sense of proportion here.” He added, “Let’s not exaggerate this conflict…Look, I think what we are hearing is a lot of hand-wringing and hysteria…”

It’s an important point. To watch American media and listen to haranguing politicians right now, you’d think Syria was the worst hell-hole in the world. It’s bad (as I said above, I would never belittle it), but something like 800,000 people were murdered in Rwanda in the 1990s and we heard very little about intervention there. The civil war in Sri Lanka lasted for over two decades and led to 100,000 or so violent deaths, ending in a shaky resolution only in 2009. I can’t agree with Brzezinski about Libya, but consider the Sudan. There was something on the order of 400,000 civilians dead in the Darfur conflict, again only petering out in very recent years, while the conflict largely persists. In March 2011, a civil war in the Ivory Coast broke out with incredible massacres of civilians, but I’d bet Rubio couldn’t find it on a map, much less argue for intervention.

People like McCain and Romney and John Kerry and the other powerful people in Congress calling for more direct intervention in Syria like to present themselves as being genuinely concerned with the suffering of their fellow man. But that is evidently not the case. Syria is strategically located in the Middle East, is geographically a close neighbor of Israel and a close ally of Iran. President Bashar al-Assad is a puppet of the Russians who value their last close ally in the region because it affords them geo-political influence and a chance to defy U.S. imperialism. And this is why the conflict in Syria is being portrayed as disproportionately grave. And this is why pundits and politicos are calling for intervention. The conflict is merely a pretext.

[Luckily, the Obama administration has been able to perceive the costs of intervention and so have stated opposition to military action. Still, they have provided elements of the opposition with both lethal and non-lethal aid, which is probably helping to prolong the conflict.]

Here is the MSNBC segment:

The International Criminal Court has sentenced Charles G. Taylor, the former president of Liberia “to 50 years in prison over his role in atrocities committed in Sierra Leone during its civil war in the 1990s,” reports the New York Times.

As is common for heads of state, Taylor did not physically carry out these crimes himself. Rather he did by proxy, which is why the court convicted him on charges of “aiding and abetting, as well as planning, some of the most heinous and brutal crimes.” Prosecutors introduced evidence, for example, of communications Taylor had with rebel forces while he was in Liberia and they were in Sierra Leone. Other testimony “focused on arms and munitions shipments to those rebels.”

The court’s mandate “covered only those crimes in Sierra Leone between 1996 and 2002, wherein up to 50,000 people were killed.” Those were some interesting years. It just so happens that America was “aiding and abetting, as well as planning” what would become incredibly heinous and brutal crimes which would in many ways surpass what happened in Sierra Leone. But the leadership in Washington didn’t aid and abet these crimes against humanity sitting in a poor nation in Africa, so their crimes aren’t within the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction.

Throughout the 1990s, the Clinton administration provided the Turkish government with the bulk of its arms. As this was happening, the atrocities committed by Turkey against the Kurdish population in the southeast was at its peak. “In the single year 1997 alone,” writes Noam Chomsky, “U.S. arms flow to Turkey exceeded the combined total for the entire Cold War period up to the onset of the state terror campaign.” Under the pretext of suppressing Kurdish separatist rebels, Turkey unleashed a campaign of ethnic cleansing in the southeast, forcibly displacing more than 400,000 impoverished Kurdish villagers. Torture and extra-judicial killings and disappearances were rampant, and the bombing and attacks by security forces led to the deaths of up to 40,000 people. Such a vast and coordinated campaign would have been very difficult without critical U.S. support.

Indonesia had been committing crimes against the people of East Timor from 1975-1999. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger gave the terrible President Suharto the green light to invade East Timor, an event which led to tens of thousands of deaths and major army atrocities right off the bat. The U.S.-backed state terror – “the United States was then supplying Indonesia’s military with 90 percent of its arms,” writes Reed Brody of the Nation – lasted through to the Clinton administration and by 1999 the dead totaled somewhere around 200,000-250,000 people. “This shows every sign of being planned and coordinated beforehand,” said Sidney Jones of Human Rights Watch in 1999. “The Indonesian army may be trying to teach a lesson not only to the East Timorese but to the people of Aceh and Irian Jaya. The lesson is: if you seek separation from Indonesia, even if support for separation is overwhelming, we will destroy you, and no outside power will come to your aid.”

In 2002, the last year in the ICC’s mandate for conviction of Taylor’s role in aiding and abetting the murder and torture of over 50,000 people, the Bush administration had already begun the sales campaign that would become the lead up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Prior to this, throughout the 1990s, the U.S.-led sanctions regime directly contributed to a dramatic increase in child mortality rates and notoriously resulted in the death of over 500,000 children (that’s ten times more than Taylor has been convicted of helping kill). But very soon after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, the Bush administration began to construct fallacious and distorted justifications for an aggressive, unprovoked war on Iraq. Every initial justification for the invasion has since been conclusively falsified, and the invasion and occupation of the country led to the deaths of well over 600,000 Iraqis. As this was being needlessly carried out, the Bush administration also had set up a worldwide system of torture and indefinite detention without charge or trial, also serious international crimes.

Nobody is saying Taylor isn’t a criminal that deserves to go to jail. But why is America’s leadership sitting comfortably in early retirement after “aiding and abetting” and “planning” crimes that far surpass anything Taylor did? Washington considers itself above the law, which is probably the reason for its refusal to ratify the statute authorizing the ICC, and why it would almost certainly veto any UN Security Council referral to the ICC. When the World Court held in 1984 that the Reagan administration had committed international terrorism – or rather, aided and abetted international terrorism – in Nicaragua through its terrorist proxies in the Contra rebel militias (who committed atrocities from torture to mass murder of tens of thousands of people), Reagan merely dismissed the case and refused to have anything to do with the court. And that’s how to commit massive crimes with impunity (i.e. have the power to ignore the victims). Easy as pie.