U.S. troops have left Iraq and are leaving Afghanistan. The “war on terrorism” now seems so last decade. U.S. military spending has leveled off, and the Pentagon is looking at some fairly serious reductions after 2015. Last month, President Obama finally pulled the various threads of his foreign policy approach into a  by John Feffer*

U.S. troops have left Iraq and are leaving Afghanistan. The “war on terrorism” now seems so last decade. U.S. military spending has leveled off, and the Pentagon is looking at some fairly serious reductions after 2015. Last month, President Obama finally pulled the various threads of his foreign policy approach into a “doctrine” that emphasizes incremental diplomacy and leaves military intervention as a last resort.

We are, it would seem, at an epochal moment in U.S. history. The Reagan and Bush Jr. administrations attempted to deepsix the Vietnam syndrome and resurrect the U.S. military as the principle tool of U.S. foreign policy. But after the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan, the syndrome has returned in an industrial-strength version. Finally, it seems as if the United States is willing to take the cop out of cooperation.

But before we stick flowers into the barrels of the Special Forces’ combat assault rifles and celebrate the transformation of the CIA’s drones into Amazon delivery vehicles, let’s evaluate what will likely be a very substantial backlash to the Obama doctrine. Depending on what happens in the mid-terms and more importantly the next presidential elections in 2016, we might be looking at yet another effort to drive a stake through the heart of the Vietnam-Afghanistan-Iraq syndrome and reassert, once again, American military power.

In the last presidential election, we narrowly escaped a return to the foreign policy of the 1980s with Mitt Romney. Next time around, the hawks from both major parties minus the libertarians — the War Party — may well offer something considerably more retrograde: perhaps a return to the 1890s and a celebration of American empire under Teddy Roosevelt.

But it won’t be just one war — Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain! — that the War Party will want the Pentagon to prepare to fight. Nor will it be the two or two-and-a-half wars of the Cold War heyday. Instead, the next generation of U.S. militarists — the Project for the NewNew American Century — will be talking about girding our loins for three wars. Before detailing this three-front global conflict, let me explain how we’ve been at this point already twice in the recent past.

Long before Obama unveiled his doctrine, the last two Democrats in the White House also tried, in their half-hearted ways, to restrain the Pentagon and elevate the State Department. For Jimmy Carter, his first two years in office marked the high point of détente and the military drawdown from the Vietnam years. Even though he turned considerably more hawkish in the second half of his term, Carter became a symbol of everything weak about the Democratic Party and its foreign policy. The events of 1979 — the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution — also conspired against President Malaise. Carter’s opponent in the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan, promised to stand up to the Russians, the Iranians, and anyone else who dared challenge Old Glory.

Bill Clinton, too, presided over a reduction of the U.S. military leviathan in the wake of the end of the Cold War. Clinton was by no means a pacifist. The United States was involved in the wars in former Yugoslavia and several attacks on al-Qaeda and its ilk during the 1990s. But the great sin of the Clinton administration, to its critics on the right, was its commitment to multilateralism. The Clinton administration actually seemed to believe in the United Nations and such associated efforts as the International Criminal Court. Beginning in 1997, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) pushed a program that would eerily resemble the eventual foreign policy of the George W. Bush presidency, including a major uptick in military spending and regime change in Iraq. As in 1979, the events of September 11 helped to propel U.S. foreign policy in a different direction.

PNAC is dead and gone, and the Bush doctrine is buried in the sands of the Middle East. Obama has reached back to the earlier traditions of his Democratic predecessors for inspiration, borrowing a measure of modesty from Carter and a measure of multilateralism from Clinton. And Obama has encountered the same congressional resistance to his de factotempering of American exceptionalism. Behind the Obama doctrine lurks a certain implicit assumption: that a safety net of international norms can both cushion the relative decline of the United States and contain the rise of other powers like China. Of course, Washington would like to game the system as much as possible to prolong the U.S. unipolar moment and ensure a comfortable imperial retirement. If all goes according to plan, the only conflicts that will take place will be over the terms of America’s golden parachute and our 401(k) plan (to be negotiated at trade talks, with Chinese investors, and with European banks).

But nothing ever goes according to plan. And here are three reasons why, drawn entirely from recent headlines.

On May 1, China set up an oilrig in the South China Sea in waters that Vietnam also claims. Vietnam has used YouTube to show China ramming its ships. Both sides have fired water cannons at each other. Chinese fighter jets patrol the sky above the disputed territory. Vietnam and U.S. allies Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines have all pressed Washingtonto check China’s more assertive claims to territory in the East and South China Seas. They want a more vigorous Pacific pivot to Asia.

On May 11, voters in two regions in eastern Ukraine supported greater autonomy in a referendum rejected by the central government in Kiev. Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed to intervene if the interests of ethnic Russians in Ukraine are threatened. Although he has promised to withdraw the 40,000 troops currently near the border, no such troop movements have been detected. Clashes between Ukrainian government forces and separatists in eastern Ukraine threaten to spiral into a civil war. New NATO members in East-Central Europe are wary of Russia’s more assertive claims to territory near their eastern borders. Polish Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak, for instance, has called on the United States to “re-pivot” to Europe.

Then there’s Africa, where the United States created a new Africa Command shortly before Obama took office and where the Pentagon has recently ramped up its operations to more than a mission a day. Boko Haram, a radical Islamist group that seeks to turn Nigeria into an Islamic state, kidnapped more than 200 girls from their school last month. It’s only the latest act of extremism from a group that Washington put on the foreign terrorism list last year. It’s not clear whether the Nigerian radicals have any ties to al-Qaeda. But the war on terrorism has entered a new phase in which smaller U.S. forces partner with governments on the ground in Africa to battle non-state actors. Although some in the United States have called for an “African pivot,” no one in the region has issued such an invitation. They don’t really have to. We’re already there.

So far, the Obama administration has been rather cautious in addressing all three of these challenges. The U.S. Navy maintains more than half of its fleet in the Pacific, the Army still has bases in Europe, and Special Forces are deployed throughout Africa. But the administration has not advised military intervention in any of the three cases (though the use of drones and some “boots on the ground” in Africa certainly go beyond mere non-military strategies).

It’s also not likely that a Republican president would do anything appreciably different, although the party has practically Photoshopped Neville Chamberlain into the Oval Office. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who is likely to throw his hat in the ring for 2016, has called for perhaps the strongest responses to Russia and China. But even he has stopped short of calling for actual U.S. military intervention. After all, Americans are now thoroughly cynical about sending U.S. troops to fight overseas.

But remember: the United States maintained its two-war doctrine more as a yardstick for measuring how much money to allocate to the Pentagon. In the 1980s, hawks were not pushing the United States to start a war with the Soviet Union or Iran. Rather, they wanted to maintain the capabilities to fight both wars simultaneously if need be.

Here’s the nightmare scenario for 2016. The War Party will fight against any cuts in Pentagon spending and argue for upping the allocation in order to fight three wars simultaneously: against Russia, against China, and against non-state actors wherever they threaten U.S. interests. Sound unlikely? The Bush administration was able to transform a ragtag group of crazies — which, admittedly, had directly attacked the United States and killed nearly 3,000 people — into the “heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century.” Imagine what the War Party, if it controlled the White House and Congress, could do with the likes of Russia, China, and the heirs of the heirs of all those murderous ideologies? If we’re lucky, we’ll avoid any outright conflict. But the price will nevertheless be bankruptcy. Forget about that imperial 401(k) plan.

It’s often pointed out that the British Empire finally collapsed because of the debts incurred by England during World War II. Washington extended London a mountain of loans to fight the war, and when the loans came due, the United States effectively replaced England as the hegemon of the “free world.”

But the process was not so cut and dried. “In July 1950, on the eve of the Korean War,” writes Tony Judt in Postwar, “Britain had a full naval fleet in the Atlantic, another in the Mediterranean and a third in the Indian Ocean, as well as a permanent ‘China station.’ The country maintained 120 Royal Air Force squadrons worldwide and had armies or parts of armies permanently based in Hong Kong, Malaya, the Persian Gulf and North Africa, Trieste and Austria, West Germany and the United Kingdom itself.” Five years after the end of World War II, someone forgot to give the British the news that their term was over.

The United States that Barack Obama inherited in 2008 was similarly a “dead empire walking,” and China now serves as the bankroller that the United States was in the 1940s. A prudent president, Obama has attempted to maintain U.S. position in the world at a lower cost and with less blowback. His critics on the left, myself included, want less empire and more prudence. But we must also acknowledge the deluge that might come après Obama and make the last few years seem like halcyon days.

If the War Party wins in 2016, all bets are off. We will prepare to fight in the Eurasian heartland, the South China Sea, and the resource-rich lands of Africa — because if we don’t fight them there, we’ll have to fight them here. Just when it seemed like we were about to give peace a chance, the United States will suddenly revert to a three-war doctrine. 2016 will be 1979 and 2001 all over again. And, as we all know, bad luck always comes in threes.

*John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF). This article was first published by FPIF and was reprinted here with permission.

You’re no doubt aware by now of a proposal by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for Syria to hand over its (still only accidentally acknowledged) chemical weapons to international control, which his Syrian counterpart Walid al-Moualem said Syria “welcomes”. Syrian ally Russia was jumpstarted into action after [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Jasmin Ramsey

You’re no doubt aware by now of a proposal by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for Syria to hand over its (still only accidentally acknowledged) chemical weapons to international control, which his Syrian counterpart Walid al-Moualem said Syria “welcomes”. Syrian ally Russia was jumpstarted into action after Secretary of State John Kerry apparently went off script in London today by floating the proposal (suggested over a year ago by former Senator Richard G. Lugar) and doubting its feasibility in the same sentence after CBS reporter Margaret Brennan asked if there was any way Syria could avert military action:

Sure, if he could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community, in the next week, turn it over. All of it, without delay and allow a full and total accounting for that, but he isn’t about to do it and it can’t be done, obviously.

Novelist Teju Cole has broken all this down for us in Twitter-speak

Kerry: We won’t attack…if you do this impossible thing. Syria: Oh? We’ll do it. Russia: They’ll do it. UN: They’ll do it. Kerry: Shit!

— Teju Cole (@tejucole) September 9, 2013

While it’s too soon to get excited with the proposal’s details still in the making, Kerry’s words have taken on a life of their own  (though some have suggested this was at least somehow related to a behind-the-scenes diplomatic maneuver). The State Department and White House seem to have forgotten to talk to each other before issuing statements on all this earlier today. State Department Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf called Kerry’s words “hypothetical” and “rhetorical” and said the Russian proposal was considered “highly unlikely”. She also — wait for this — categorically stated that “the Secretary was not making a proposal.” Later the White House said during its daily press briefing that it would take a “hard look” at the Russian proposal, but Press Secretary Jay Carney also repeatedly emphasized that all this would not have occurred without the credible threat of force against President Bashar al-Assad’s alleged actions. He meanwhile urged Congress to vote for an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against Syria, which the administration has been strongly pushing for, and which Kerry’s words may have now endangered.

Speaking at the White House during a Forum to Combat Wildlife Trafficking immediately after Carney’s appearance, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she had just met with President Obama and seemed to have the most updated speech on the issue:

…if the regime immediately surrendered its stockpiles to international control as was suggested by Secretary Kerry and the Russians, that would be an important step. But this cannot be another excuse for delay or obstruction.

While many are labelling Kerry’s words a “gaffe”, Clinton strategically tried to frame it as a purposeful move by Kerry, being forced, of course, to include the Russians. Perhaps the White House is hoping everyone will eventually forget Harf’s opposing description.

In any case, here’s Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting Ben Rhodes with the most recent WH statement:

US will review Russian proposal. We want Syrian CW under intl control. Important that this only proposed bc credible threat of mil action

— Ben Rhodes (@rhodes44) September 9, 2013

It should also be noted that earlier in the day UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had said following the Russian announcement that he was “considering urging the Security Council to demand the immediate transfer of Syria’s chemical weapons and chemical precursor stocks to places inside Syria where they can be safely stored and destroyed” if it was proven that chemical weapons have been used.

It will be interesting to see how Obama tackles all this during his many scheduled interviews today and during his speech to the nation Tuesday night wherein he will urge for military action against Syria, especially considering how a majority of Americans continue to oppose it, even after the release of those horrific videos of the Syrian victims of the Aug. 21 attack.

by Victoria Brittain

via Tom Dispatch

A four-month hunger strike, mass force-feedings, and widespread media coverage have at last brought Guantanamo, the notorious offshore prison set up by the Bush administration early in 2002, back into American consciousness. Prominent voices are [...]]]> How to Pre-Convict and Pre-Punish an American Muslim 

by Victoria Brittain

via Tom Dispatch

A four-month hunger strike, mass force-feedings, and widespread media coverage have at last brought Guantanamo, the notorious offshore prison set up by the Bush administration early in 2002, back into American consciousness. Prominent voices are finally calling on President Obama to close it down and send home scores of prisoners who, years ago, were cleared of wrongdoing.

Still unnoticed and out of the news, however, is a comparable situation in the U.S. itself, involving a pattern of controversial terrorism trials that result in devastating prison sentences involving the harshest forms of solitary confinement.  This growing body of prisoners is made up of Muslim men, including some formerly well-known and respected American citizens.

At the heart of these cases is a statute from the time of the Clinton presidency making it a crime to provide “material support” to any foreign organization the government has designated as “terrorist.”  This material support provision was broadened in the USA PATRIOT Act, passed by Congress just after the 9/11 attacks, and has been upheld by a 2010 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project.  Today, almost any kind of support, including humanitarian aid, training, expert advice, “services” of all sorts, or “political advocacy” undertaken in “coordination” with any group on the State Department’s terrorist list, can lead to such a terror trial. The Court has never defined what “coordination” actually means.

In that Supreme Court ruling, Justice Stephen Breyer was joined in dissent by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Breyer proposed a narrower interpretation of material support: individuals should not be subject to prosecution unless they knowingly provided a service they had reason to believe would be used to further violence. At the time, the position of the dissenting judges was backed by key editorials in major newspapers.  In the three years since, however, more material support cases have resulted in long sentences with very little public notice or critical comment.

Pre-Trial Punishment

In the U.S. these days, the very word “terror,” no less the charge of material support for it, invariably shuts down rather than opens any conversation.  Nonetheless, a decade of researching a number of serious alleged terrorism cases on both side of the Atlantic, working alongside some extraordinary human rights lawyers, and listening to Muslim women in Great Britain and the U.S. whose lives were transformed by the imprisonment of a husband, father, or brother has given me a different perspective on such cases.

Perhaps most illuminating in them is the repeated use of what’s called “special administrative measures” to create a particularly isolating and punitive atmosphere for many of those charged with such crimes, those convicted of them, and even for their relatives.  While these efforts have come fully into their own in the post-9/11 era, they were drawn from a pre-9/11 paradigm.  Between the material support statute and those special administrative measures, it has become possible for the government to pre-convict and in many cases pre-punish a small set of Muslim men.

Take the case of Ahmed Abu Ali, a young Palestinian-American who is now serving life in the Administrative Maximum Facility, a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, and is currently under special administrative measures that restrict his communications with the outside world. A university student in Saudi Arabia, he was arrested in 2003 by the Saudi government and held for 20 months without charges or access to a lawyer. The Washington Postreported that the U.S. government finally asked for his return just as his family filed a lawsuit in Washington.

At the time, it seemed like a victory for the family and the various human rights organizations that had supported them, but on arrival Ahmed was charged with material support for al-Qaeda and plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush. The evidence to convict him came from an anonymous alleged co-conspirator and from taped confessions he made, evidently after being tortured in Saudi Arabia, a common practice there. The evidence of his torture wascontested at his trial.  The case was described by a staff member of Amnesty International USA as “unusual in the annals of U.S. outsourcing of torture.”  An appeal of Ahmed’s 30-year sentence actually resulted in the imposition of an even more severe sentence: life without parole.

In addition, special administrative measures have been applied to him.  These were originally established in 1996 to stop communications from prison inmates who could “pose a substantial risk of death or serious risk of injury.” The targets then were gang leaders.  Each special administrative measure was theoretically to be designed to fit the precise dangers posed by a specific prisoner. Since 9/11, however, numerous virtually identical measures have been applied to Muslim men, often like Ahmed Abu Ali with no history of violence.

A question to Ahmed’s sister about how her brother is doing is answered only with a quick look. She is not allowed to say anything because special measures also prohibit family members from disclosing their communications with prisoners. They similarly prevent defense lawyers from speaking about their clients. It was for a breach of these special measures in relation to her client, the imprisoned blind sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, that lawyer Lynne Stewart was tried and sentenced to 10 years in prison in the Bush years.

Although these measures have been contested in court, few have ever been modified, much less thrown out. Those court challenges and evidence provided to the European Court of Human Rights by American lawyers have, however, provided a window into what one of them described as a regime of “draconian and inhumane treatment.”

Under such special administrative measures at the Metropolitan Correction Center in New York City, a prisoner lives with little natural light, no time in communal areas, no radio or TV, and sometimes no books or newspapers either, while mail and phone calls are permitted only with family, and even then are often suspended for minor infractions. Family visits are always no-contact ones conducted through plexiglass.

“The conditions have quite simply wreaked havoc on Mr X’s physical and mental well-being,” one lawyer wrote for the European Court of Human Rights, describing a seven-month period in which a prisoner at the Metropolitan Correction Center was allowed no family phone calls. Another highlighted his client’s lost concentration, which made it impossible to work on his case effectively. “Their world shrinks dramatically,” was the way Joshua Dratel, a lawyer who has represented several men under these measures,described the situation.

In cases where special administrative measures are in place pre-trial, such as the well-documented ordeal of American post-graduate student Syed Fahad Hashmi, lawyers have often been obliged to prepare cases without actually sitting with their clients, or being able to show them all court materials. After three pre-trial years mainly in solitary confinement under special administrative measures at the Metropolitan Correction Center, Hashmi accepted a government plea bargain of one count of material support for terrorism and was given a 15-year sentence.

His crime? He allowed an acquaintance to stay at his student apartment in London, use his cell phone, and store a duffel bag there. The bag contained ponchos and waterproof socks that were later supposedly delivered to al-Qaeda, while the phone was used by that acquaintance to make calls to co-conspirators in Britain.

Silencing Palestinian-Americans

Just as the Bush administration found the Geneva Conventions “quaint” and ignored them, so the principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” a part of Western civilization since Roman times, has all but disappeared for Muslims who face accusations of “material support” for terrorism.

Such cases have, at times, involved high-profile men and once received significant media attention. Civil rights activist and University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian, accused of being a leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (a State Department-designated terrorist organization), was, for instance, treated like a man already being punished for his crime even before his trial.  Previously, he had been a respected American-Muslim political leader with contacts in the White House and in Congress.  Now, walking to pre-trial meetings with his lawyers, his arms were shackled behind him, so that, humiliatingly, he had to carry his legal papers on his back.

Amnesty International described Al-Arian’s pre-trial detention in Coleman Federal Penitentiary as “gratuitously punitive.” It cited his 23-hour lockdown in his cell, the strip searches, the use of chains and shackles, the lack of access to any religious services, and the insistence on denying him a watch or clock in a windowless cell. He was transferred to 14 different prison facilities in 6 states. He ended up spending three and a half years in solitary confinement without being convicted of anything.  At his trial, the government called 80 witnesses, including 21 from Israel, while his counsel called no defense witnesses, only citing the U.S. Constitution. A Florida jury nonetheless acquitted him on half of the counts, and deadlocked on the other half.  (Ten out of 12 jurors wanted to acquit him on all charges.) He later struck a plea deal on one minor charge.

Today, the Palestinian-American professor is still in legal limbo, under house arrest, awaiting a judge’s ruling on whether he has to testify in a separate case. An articulate U.S. Muslim political leader, who helped bring in the Muslim vote for George W. Bush after the candidate came out publicly against the use of secret evidence in trials, when the Gore campaign did not and so contributed to his Florida victory in the 2000 presidential campaign, has been silenced for his openly expressed pro-Palestinian opinions.

Successful and influential Palestinian-American Ghassan Elashi, a founder and the chairman of what was once America’s largest Muslim charity, the Holy Land Foundation, and Shukri Abu Baker, its president, were similarly silenced along with three other foundation officials.  The two of them received prison sentences of 65 years for giving charity to orphanages and community organizations in Gaza (also supported by the European Union and the U.S. Agency for International Development). The Holy Land leaders were accused of giving “material support” to a foreign terrorist organization: Hamas, the elected government in Gaza.  There were no accusations of inciting or being involved in acts of violence. This case, like Professor Al Arian’s, would never have been possible if Justice Breyer’s views had prevailed at the Supreme Court.

Even then, it took a second trial before a jury returned a guilty verdict against the Holy Land leaders. Nancy Hollander, counsel for one of the men, summed up the situation this way: “The thought that somebody gets sixty-five years for providing charity is really shameful, and I believe this case will go down in history, as have others, as a shameful day.” In 2012, the Supreme Court refused to rehear the case, and four of the five convicted men remain confined to the especially restrictive “communications management unit” at the U.S. penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, where Muslims make up two-thirds of the inmates.

There were also 246 unindicted co-conspirators named in the Holy Land Foundation case, including major Muslim organizations.  The case and the particularly long sentences sent a shot of fear through Muslim communities in the U.S., as was surely intended.

The men’s daughters still speak out on their fathers’ case. Noor Elashi, for example, told me, “His is the poster case for ‘material support.’”  In the meantime, 15-minute weekly prison phone calls, monitored in real time from Washington, are the thinnest of threads to hold family relationships together, as are rare visits to distant prisons. Mariam Abu Ali once described to me her annual visit to her older brother Ahmed Abu Ali.  The expense was difficult to absorb: two flights, a rental car, and a motel for a three-day visit of about four hours a day, for a family already shouldering heavy debts for legal fees.

The real ordeal, though, was emotional, not financial. “They bring him in shackled at the waist and legs,” she told me. “We see them take off the handcuffs as he puts his hands out through a gap in the door. It’s emotionally draining… he’s there but so far away behind the glass. Only one of us can hear him at a time as he speaks though a phone… I’ve tried to lip read when it isn’t my turn, but it really doesn’t work. I feel very exhausted and sometimes I fall asleep during the visit. I cry every time, especially when he leaves…  It’s not like a death.  You don’t grieve and then finish, because this is not in the past.  In fact, it is not even in the back of my mind — it is always there… This is chronic after nine years and it is not going to end.”

In itself, solitary confinement has devastating effects, as Dr. Atul Gawande has vividly pointed out, and is becoming ever more common in U.S. prisons in breach of internationally recognized norms on the humane treatment of prisoners.  It tends to break the will of inmates, sometimes even robbing them of their sanity.  However, in its most extreme use, combining those special administrative measures with the isolation imposed in prison communication management units, it is mainly applied to American Muslims.

The stories of what happens to Muslim men today in U.S. prisons and of the judicial cases that land them there under the harshest of conditions bear a startling resemblance to the cages at Guantanamo Bay and the charade of a legal system that is still in operation there.

Miscarriages of Justice

In addition to the examples of prominent, formerly successful Palestinian-Americans, there are a series of haunting cases of newer Muslim arrivals in the U.S., each of them an evident miscarriage of justice.  These include the Fort Dix Five, originally from Albania, and that of Imam Yassin Aref, an Iraqi Kurd.  Their entrapment cases, typically based on “sting” operations manufactured by FBI informants, sent men respected in their communities into solitary confinement for long years on what were probably trumped-up charges. In such cases, the only “plot” is often manufactured by the government itself.

This, then, is the state of so many cases of “terrorism” in the U.S. today in which disparate Muslim men have been swept up in a system in which guilt is assumed and people’s lives are quickly turned into waking nightmares in what used to be called the “justice system.”  Some great miscarriages of justice do get overturned. Black Panther Robert King spent 31 years in prison, 29 in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit. His release in 2001 came about by chance when his persistent letter writing attracted the attention of a young lawyer and the founder of The Body Shop, Anita Roddick, who became his champion alongside a grassroots campaign for his release.  Since then, King has himself campaigned at home and abroad for the release of his two colleagues in “the Angola Three,” who still remain in prison, and against the system that could have broken him as it has so many others.

Thanks to the special administrative measures applied in his case, Ahmed Abu Ali cannot do what Robert King did, or what the lawyer and a friend of WikiLeaks informant Private Bradley Manning did to get his prison conditionswidely known, or what Mumia Abu Jamal has done throughout his 30 years in solitary confinement via his books and his talks on prison radio. Ahmed cannot contact the world outside in search of the support he and his family need, nor can his family members.

The painful impact of all this on the families is difficult to imagine. Chilean novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman once wrote that torture “presupposes the… abrogation of our capacity to imagine someone else’s suffering, to dehumanize him or her so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer… but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness.”

Perhaps such a state helps explain why people around the world are far more aware than most Americans of what happens to Muslim men in the post-9/11 “justice system.”  The particular cruelty of the punishments they endure even before their unfair trials, will someday, like the abuses at Guantanamo, gain the attention they deserve.

Victoria Brittain, journalist and former editor at the Guardian, has authored or co-authored two plays and four books, including Enemy Combatant with Moazzam Begg. Her latest book, Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2013), has just been published.  This is her second piece for TomDispatch.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2013 Victoria Brittain

by Robert E. Hunter

Publication this month of Vali Nasr’s The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat, could not have been better timed. The US and the NATO allies are in the process of disengaging from Afghanistan — however they choose to describe the process — without first [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by Robert E. Hunter

Publication this month of Vali Nasr’s The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat, could not have been better timed. The US and the NATO allies are in the process of disengaging from Afghanistan — however they choose to describe the process — without first developing clarity about what comes next and how to understand or secure the West’s continuing interests there or in the region. The Syrian civil war continues, seemingly without end and without success so far in the US government to develop a coherent policy or, apparently, efforts to fit that conflagration within developments in the region as a whole. President Obama has just visited the Near East, but there is as yet no promise that serious negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians will begin anytime soon. The standoff with Iran and its nuclear program continues. And there are widespread doubts about the staying-power of US commitments and policies throughout the Middle East and Southwest Asia. For some observers, including Nasr, all this leads to serious questioning about the overall conduct of American foreign policy, summarized in his judgment: “retreat.”

The author, now Dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, has had a special vantage point. From January 2009 until 2011 Nasr was special advisor to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke (who died in December 2010), who was the President’s (and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s) Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan — shortened to the more digestible “AfPak.” It is not too much to say that Dr. Nasr’s brief but intense experience in the US government at a high level was both disappointing and disillusioning — and he was not alone. His principal conclusion, at least as inferred by this reviewer, is that the Obama White House failed to take seriously the diplomatic opportunities that were afforded the US, not just toward AfPak, but in the region overall; that it continued to tolerate an excessive militarization of US policies begun by earlier administrations at the expense of a more integrated approach where diplomatic instruments could play their proper role; that the president himself was long on language — eloquently so — but short on action and in the process failed to come to grips with a number of regional developments; that the best efforts by the State Department, including by Secretary Clinton, to intervene in critical policy-making were too often either rebuffed or ignored; and that the US has failed in its essential leadership role. Indeed, the title of Nasr’s book, Dispensable Nation, is a play on a term first coined by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to the effect that the US in the post-Cold War world remains the “indispensable nation.”

(Nasr also does valuable service by eviscerating the case made for sanctions and yet more sanctions against Iran in order to get it to do what we want on its nuclear program, as well as on other matters, including the sub-rosa effort undertaken by the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia to eliminate Iran completely as a competitor for influence in the Middle East. However, the author’s insight comes at a price. His need to paint a dark picture of Iranian ambitions for the bomb and for regional hegemony, coupled with his shredding of the case for sanctions, leaves one wondering whether there is any alternative to war.

On China Nasr provides valuable service by alerting us to the fact that it — like often neglected countries such as Russia — also has major ambitions in Southwest Asia and parts of the Middle East. But he over-interprets available evidence, draws too many connections by linking murky data and too readily assumes that there will inevitably be contention, if not open confrontation, between the US and China.)

What Nasr says about the way in which the White House controlled foreign policy in Obama’s first term and made it highly subservient to domestic politics, at times thereby neglecting critical foreign interests, is a damning indictment – even if only partly true, and at this point in history, no outsider can judge. Nasr is not the only one to argue a similar thesis, but it is the first to be made, as far as this reviewer is aware, by someone as intimately involved in at least one major element of US policy implementation. This helps to explain why a book that has not yet hit bookstores has gained so much attention, apart from the usual Washington parlor game of welcoming “kiss and tell,” merged with a desire to see whoever the sitting president is stub his toe or worse. On all of this, Dispensable Nation delivers. It is a compelling read, even though it occasionally gets bogged down in detailed analyses of issues which most people will know little about. And while Nasr cannot be counted as a member of the new cottage industry of “declinists,” he does warn that, without a radical rethinking about the making and carrying out of US foreign policy, this nation can do itself and its role in the world serious injury, not least to its reputation and to the willingness of others to rely on it.

So far, so good. But there are some other facets of this book, which, while not reducing the author’s valuable insights listed above, at least present a somewhat different perspective. One might be a quibble on the part of an “old school” approach to government service: that someone who voluntarily “takes the King’s shilling” implicitly assumes a burden of not telling tales out of school, at least not until all the senior players have left the stage. Of course, breaking with that unwritten practice makes for a juicier read, but also leads one to ponder.

A more serious question is raised by the apparent assumption running throughout the book that, if a different approach had been taken to X or Y — in particular a greater reliance on diplomacy and giving free rein to diplomatic approaches advanced by the Special Representative, Ambassador Holbrooke (who appears in Dispensable Nation to have been the lead character of an “inside the Beltway” morality play), then very different, positive things would have resulted. This would be a reach in regard to any region of the world. With regard to the Middle East and its long history of complexities and imponderables — more even than what Winston Churchill said of Soviet foreign policy, “a puzzle inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma” — one should be chary of drawing hard-and-fast conclusions about the impact of different policies that might have been pursued. Thus, it is difficult to believe that, without other major factors changing, US leadership would on its own somehow have transformed Arab-Israeli peacemaking; that a different US approach to Egypt and other Arab countries would have produced a better course for the Arab Spring; that earlier intervention (but exactly what?) would have ended the slaughter in Syria; and that the negotiating strategy advocated by Ambassador Holbrooke would have brought the Afghanistan war to a successful conclusion (without taking us all back to Square One with the Taliban again in full control) and with US-Pakistan relations on better footing and the region stabilized.

To summarize, in addition to the highly relevant and well-argued analysis of the Obama administration’s shortcomings, many of the author’s suggestions for alternative approaches are more wishful thinking than the product of deep knowledge about the region and seasoned judgment concerning the very real limits of power, however “powerful” the actor. Perhaps that is an unfair conclusion, given that Nasr’s role in AfPak was the his first venture into government, but that gives greater weight to the admonition about being careful with drawing needlelike conclusions and making sweeping predictions about alternative strategies and their putative outcomes.

It might also have been useful if Dr. Nasr had drawn upon his experience to discuss whether the practice of using special representatives instead of common and garden-variety diplomacy is a good or bad thing. In some cases, appointing a US special negotiator has had positive effects – like in Arab-Israeli peacemaking, where a special negotiator can relieve a Secretary of State from having to deal virtually full-time with demanding and quarrelsome partners; or lengthy arms control negotiations, where having at the table experts from outside the Foreign Service can be essential, as the Obama administration, in this reviewer’s judgment, has ably and effectively done. But other than these exceptional circumstances, substituting a special representative for the regular practices and processes of the US government is just asking for trouble. This was certainly true in regard to the plethora of special representatives appointed during the first Obama administration, thereby short-circuiting the regular workings of government so much so that the expertise and experience needed to formulate and implement effective policies were at times missing or sidelined. Certainly, the balancing of contending (and legitimate) points of view from different elements of the bureaucracy (e.g., state, defense, CIA, NSC staff) risked being lost, to the detriment of coherent policy that could be effectively integrated for the longer-term with other related US concerns abroad beyond the purview of the special representatives.

Add to this the appointment of a special representative for AfPak who had achieved almost superstar status, with personal ambitions to match and a well-deserved sobriquet of “bulldozer,” and it would be surprising if all had gone smoothly within the US government — not least because Amb. Holbrooke, the hero of Dispensable Nation, had no experience in the region and no prior knowledge of the issues or the local political cultures. Indeed, it did not go smoothly, predictably so given Amb. Holbrooke’s career-long disdain for anyone who got in his way (along with his methods for eliminating competitors for either position or limelight), his lack of capacity for genuine strategic thinking as opposed to short-term tactical fixes, and his most undiplomatic approach to friend and foe. In fact, since his highly publicized spat with Afghan President Hamid Karzai who, like it or not, is someone the US has had to deal with, Holbrooke’s role as an interlocutor ceased to be useful to the United States.

In sum, Nasr has not only given us a good read but also a former insider’s judgments about what happens when a US administration does not place a high enough priority on getting right the US role in the world; does not assess adequately what it truly needs to do (instead of issuing slogans like “pivot to Asia” that confuse allies and imply reduced US interest in the Middle East and Southwest Asia at the very time when peril to American interests there is increasing); that inserts domestic political judgments at the start of the process instead of after due consideration of foreign policy choices; that permits a continuing imbalance between military and non-military instruments of power and influence; and that does not yet adequately “think strategically” about the future two decades after the end of the Cold War made such strategic thinking imperative.

Whether Dr. Nasr is right on both his analysis and his prescriptions will now be hotly debated. In any case, Dispensable Nation has emerged as valuable evidence supporting one important point of view.

by Marsha B. Cohen

Taking advantage of the delay in the vote on Chuck Hagel’s nomination to the Senate, the spinmeisters of the anti-Hagel propaganda machine have a new charge to hurl at the former Nebraska Senator. Ben Shapiro of Breitbart.com claims that “Senate sources” have told him that Hagel secretly accepted a campaign [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by Marsha B. Cohen

Taking advantage of the delay in the vote on Chuck Hagel’s nomination to the Senate, the spinmeisters of the anti-Hagel propaganda machine have a new charge to hurl at the former Nebraska Senator. Ben Shapiro of Breitbart.com claims that “Senate sources” have told him that Hagel secretly accepted a campaign contribution from “Friends of Hamas.” The allegation has been picked up and promulgated by numerous right-wing websites and blogs, including Algemeiner and the Sheldon Adelson-owned news daily, Israel HaYom (Israel Today).

Putting aside the common sense realization that no real “friends of Hamas” would be dumb enough to actually form an organization in the US or anywhere else, with a bank account that writes checks to political candidates on behalf of an internationally recognized terrorist organization, we have to ask when and where we have heard that phrase ‘Friends of Hamas’ before”?

The first time was during President Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign in 1996, when it festooned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Steve Emerson headlined Friends of Hamas in the White House.

As Ali Mazrui of the International Policy and Strategy Institute (IPSI) pointed out, while “Clinton’s administration had been more pro-Israel than any other U.S. administration since Lyndon Johnson, this same Clinton administration had domestically made more friendly gestures towards U.S. Muslims than any previous administration.” In 1995, Vice President Al Gore had visited a mosque. The following year, President Clinton sent greetings to Muslims for their Ramadan fast. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton hosted an Eid el Fitr celebration at the White House at the end of Ramadan in 1996, and would do so again in 1998. During the Clinton administration, the first Muslim chaplain in the US Air Force was sworn in. President Clinton discussed a wide range of domestic and international issues with a delegation of Arab Americans at the White House. National Security Adviser Anthony Lake met with a delegation of Muslims to get their views on the Bosnian crisis. Not everyone was pleased by this outreach:

The Clinton gestures towards Muslims were sufficiently high profile that a hostile article in the Wall Street Journal in March 1996 raised the spectre of “Friends of Hamas in the White House” – alleging that some of the President’s Muslim guests were friends of Hamas, and supporters of the Palestinian movement. The critic in the Wall Street Journal (Steve Emerson) had a long record of hostility towards U.S. Muslims. His television programme on PBS entitled Jihad in America (1994) alleged that almost all terrorist activities by Muslims worldwide were partially funded by U.S. Muslims. President Clinton’s friendly gestures to Muslims probably infuriated this self-appointed crusader of Islamophobia.

How exactly did reaching out to Muslims equate “Friends of Hamas” being in the “White House”? Emerson explained:

In response to the terrorist carnage committed by Hamas in Israel, President Clinton has organized an anti-terrorist summit in Egypt to begin today. But other participants at the conference, and the American public as well, might be a bit surprised to learn that both the president and first lady have closely embraced an Islamic fundamentalist group in the U.S. that champions and supports Hamas. This group also openly supports, lobbies for, and defends other Islamic terrorist groups.

The contacts between the White House and the Islamic radicals began on Nov. 9, 1995, when President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore met with Abdulrahman Alamoudi, executive director of the American Muslim Council, as part of a meeting with 23 Muslim and Arab leaders. A month later, on Dec. 8, Mr. Clinton’s national security adviser, Anthony Lake, met with Mr. Alamoudl at the White House along with several AMC board members and other American Islamic leaders. By Feb. 20, Mrs. Clinton was allowing the AMC to draw up the Muslim guest list for the first lady’s historic White House reception marking the end of Ramadan. One person familiar with the situation says that Mrs. Clinton’s syndicated newspaper column of Feb. 8, “Islam in America,” was based on “talking points” provided by the AMC.

As we all know, those pro-Hamas Clintons survived the assault by Emerson and his echo-chamber. Clinton won re-election. The First Lady almost made it to the top slot on the Democratic ticket twelve years later, and then distinguished herself as Secretary of State for four years. No doubt there’s someone, somewhere, already preparing opposition research to use  against the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign if there is one, diligently compiling the former Secretary of State’s meetings with Arab leaders and chronicling all of the nice things she might ever have said about Muslims. All too soon Jennifer Rubin will be regurgitating them in her Washington Post blog, “Right Turn.”

Emerson’s ominous warning in Middle East Quarterly the following year that Americans should “Get Ready for Twenty World Trade Center Bombings” the following year would elevate him to the status of prophet in the media immediately after 9/11, and make him the face and voice of anti-terrorist Islamophobia. More recently, Emerson was faced with questions about donor transparency with regard to his nonprofit and tax-deductible, Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation, which avoids revealing much of the information that charities are routinely required to disclose. Emerson is currently making headlines with an entire dossier of  “soft on Islam” charges against John Brennan, whose nomination as Director of the CIA is also under consideration in the Senate.

Such is the origin and journalistic debut of the phrase “Friends of Hamas” now being used against Chuck Hagel.

A recrudescence of political Hamasteryia occurred in the spring of 2012, when redrawing the boundaries of New Jersey’s 9th congressional district  pitted two Democratic incumbents — Rep. Steve Rothman and Rep. Bill Pascrell — against one another. The heated June primary attracted outside interest, media attention and several endorsements of each candidate by prominent political figures. President Obama remained neutral, but his campaign adviser, David Axelrod, supported Rothman. Bill Clinton favored Pascrell, who had endorsed Hillary Clinton in her run for the White House. Both House members were considered to be pro-Israel. Each had received funding and endorsements in their previous campaigns from NORPAC, a pro-Israel political  action committee headquartered in New Jersey, but NORPAC ultimately threw its support behind Rothman.

The primary deteriorated into an Islamophobic hate fest when certain overzealous Rothman supporters tried to smear Pascrell by claiming he had the support of members of New Jersey’s Muslim community. Conservative “investigative journalist” Joel Mowbray was clearly alluding to Emerson’s attack on Clinton when he wrote an article for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies headlined “The Friends of Bill Pascrell“:

Because of redistricting, Rep. Bill Pascrell (D, NJ) is running for re-election this coming Tuesday against a fellow Democratic incumbent Congressman. Pascrell’s slogan: “100% New Jersey Fighter.”

Given his troubling associations with Muslim figures who have espoused fiery anti-Israel rhetoric and turned a blind eye to Hamas sympathizers, though, it’s hard to tell against whom he’s actually fighting.

Take, for example, one of Pascrell’s closest allies for at least a decade: Mohamed El Filali, who is an executive with a local mosque whose founding imam is in jail on terrorism charges and whose current imam is fighting deportation on terror-related grounds.

El Filali leads what could seem like a strange existence, leading grotesque rallies by day and then cozying up at night with Congressmen — or at least one Congressman in particular, Bill Pascrell…Pascrell appears to be actively targeting the Arab and Muslim community, last week bringing out the first elected Muslim Congressman, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), who has become one of the most vocal critics of Israel in Congress…While Pascrell has voted in favor of foreign aid for Israel, he has also engaged in caustic Israel bashing, such as signing on to the so-called “Gaza 54” letter, the Keith Ellison-led effort which accused the Jewish state of collective punishment against Gaza.

…Of course there is no problem with courting support in the Arab and Muslim community. But there seems to be a troubling pattern with the associations Pascrell has chosen to cultivate in garnering that support. Should a congressman be condoning – by accepting contributions and other support – the most radical elements as part of his outreach?

Nonetheless, Pascrell went on to defeat Rothman, facing Republican challenger Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who was much more subtle in brandishing the pro-Hamas charge against Pascrell. In an op-ed constructed in the form of an “open letter”, Boteach called on Pascrell to repudiate the “Gaza 54 letter”:

Bill, I will not repeat the earlier error made by some members of our community in labeling you an “enemy” of Israel. My religion commands me to speak truth and show gratitude, and you have voted in favor of foreign aid to Israel on numerous occasions. To perpetuate the myth, started in the Democratic primary, that you are a foe of Israel would contravene my value system, which obligates me to thank you for votes in favor of the Jewish state. By assisting in the continuity of American aid to Israel, you have made the Middle East safer, not just for Jews, but for the hundreds of millions of Arabs whose freedom under their own tyrannical regimes is largely predicated on Israel setting an example of a viable democracy in a region which Arab dictators claim can never be democratized.

…I respectfully request of you, Bill, to either explain your signature on the Gaza 54 Letter, or, if it was a mistake to sign it, as I suspect you now believe, to please repudiate it.

Pascrell won the House seat by a landslide, taking 75% of the votes cast.  Even with the financial backing of Sheldon Adelson, Boteach received less than a quarter of the congressional district’s votes, and was livid when NORPAC declined to support him.

Now it’s Chuck Hagel’s turn. Will the Hamas canard prove to be “strike three” for the Islamophobic and “pro-Hamas” smear? Or will a phantom campaign contribution break the neoconservative losing streak — and usher in  a new era of transparency whereby every political candidate is responsible for the views and ties of their campaign donors, both real and imagined?

by Robert E. Hunter

To say that President Barack Obama’s visit this spring to Israel, the West Bank and Jordan is the proverbial gamble is an understatement. He may end up (rightly) congratulating himself on his wisdom and courage in taking this step and doing so at this time — and [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by Robert E. Hunter

To say that President Barack Obama’s visit this spring to Israel, the West Bank and Jordan is the proverbial gamble is an understatement. He may end up (rightly) congratulating himself on his wisdom and courage in taking this step and doing so at this time — and being thus recognized as a truly valid recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize conferred on him 3 years ago. Or, he may deeply regret venturing into such troubled waters and ending up, like so many of his predecessors, with not much to show for his pains in trying to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

In any event, he has now embarked on a course that he must see through to the end or risk making matters worse, possibly for the regional parties and certainly for the reputation of the United States. Yet if he is prepared to do so — with demands that will match anything else in foreign policy that he has done in his presidency — the payoff will be immense, not just in the Levant but throughout the Middle East.

The lack of success in creating a viable Palestinian state, at peace with Israel and with both peoples living in mutual security, is not from a lack of effort from many senior, talented and dedicated people in the 34 years since President Jimmy Carter’s summit at Camp David with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin launched what were then called Autonomy Talks for the Palestinian territories.

Nor is the lack of success in producing what is known as the “two-state solution” a failure of ideas. These have been fussed over for decades, but have come down pretty much to a consensus on a few cardinal points, looking toward “Final Status.” These were best put in a brief statement by President Bill Clinton in December 2000, following the abortive Second Camp David Summit and a scant four weeks before he left office. They can be found here.

In brief, they propose a swap of land between Israel and the West Bank, so that about 80 percent of Jewish settlers on the West Bank would be incorporated into Israel; the state of Palestine would have contiguity (which implies some link to Gaza); Israel could keep troops in the Jordan Valley for a 3-year transitional period, plus long-term warning stations; arrangements would be made for Jerusalem that boil down to there being two capitals in one city with respect for everyone’s religious sites; there could be any one of five Clinton-suggested approaches to dealing with Palestinian refugees, with at least some being admitted into Israel proper; and Palestine would be a “non-militarized state” with an “international force for border security and deterrent purposes.” With a colleague, I later proposed that this “international force” be NATO, and that idea has gained currency.

Compared with the reams of negotiating documents and the years of talk, this is a simple formulation. It is also recognized by almost everyone who has actually been engaged in these negotiations — as I have — as probably the best that can be achieved and a balanced approach from which all can gain and that could, finally, bring the conflict to an end.

These Clinton Parameters, the obvious solution, were advanced 12 years ago, yet the conflict continues. The reason is manifold: part has been a general lack of political will to move forward, especially with the complex — if not tortured — politics in both Israeli and Palestinian societies; part is the natural human difficulty of taking a leap in the dark after decades of stasis; and part is what else has been happening. And it is this “what else has been happening” that Obama cannot avoid addressing during his visit and that will still be there when he departs, no doubt after applying his well-honed skills of inspiration, intelligence, and honest application to tough problems. This will be so even though opinion polling has long shown that a majority of Israelis and Palestinians want the conflict to be over and done with.

Obama will no doubt reassure all parties of US commitment to be engaged until the job is done — and if he is not prepared to “walk the walk” as well as “talk the talk”, he should stay home — ; to provide reassurances to Israel about its security and to Palestinians about the importance of what they call justice; and to call on peoples and political leaders to seize this particular moment. This should include a major address to the Knesset and some form of symbolic (as well as substantive) encounter with the Palestinians.

Then to the “what else is happening.” On the Palestinian side, Hamas’ control of Gaza and the on-again, off-again nature of its relations with the Palestinian Authority led by Mohammed Abbas on the West Bank are far from propitious, if not now impossible to resolve. Abbas will also insist, once again, that the US president get the Israelis to stop settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and to ease significantly the isolation of Gaza.

On the Israeli side, current preoccupation is not with Palestine peacemaking, but with a trifecta of Iran, Syria and Egypt, all of which involve real or potential Security with a capital “S.” In Israel, Obama will no doubt be pressed, and pressed again, to confirm that “containment” of an Iranian nuclear capability is unacceptable to the United States and that all options — including the use of military force — are “on the table.” That will certainly not make negotiations any easier with the Iranians, in whatever form and whatever timing they take, and it will be even more difficult for Obama to change the US negotiating position to something that might have a chance of working — e.g., by recognizing that US, Israeli, and Iranian security concerns must all be accounted for. Prime Minister Netanyahu will also underscore Israel’s continuing concerns with attacks coming from Gaza and Iranian support for Hezbollah. And he will want the US strategic commitment to Israel to be further bolstered in concrete military terms.

Israel is also deeply concerned by the civil war in Syria, which, depending on what happens when President Assad departs (assuming that that will happen,) could turn that country into what Lebanon has so often been — a haven for attacks by Hezbollah and maybe others on Israel. President Obama can offer reassuring words, but the US may have little to offer, including in forestalling a larger, slow-burning civil war between the region’s Sunnis and Shi’ites, a byproduct of the misguided US invasion of Iraq a decade ago. And Israel is meanwhile very carefully watching what is happening in Egypt, where the 1979 peace treaty has been the bedrock of Israel’s strategic confidence ever since.

Nothing that President Obama says or does on his trip to the region will change fundamentally any of these factors. And, as usually happens when any positive possibility seems to be emerging in Arab-Israeli relations, a terrorist incident during the president’s trip is highly likely, further stimulating the fears of all those who would like to move forward, and undercutting moderate politics.

All this is the bad news. The good news — or at least potentially hopeful news — is that for the US to become again engaged in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking is an essential ingredient: despite talk over the years that “we Americans can’t want peace more than the parties,” it has been proved repeatedly that only the US can press the parties forward. (That statement includes whatever other members of the so-called Quartet that the US fostered in 2002 — the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia — will try to do but where they have no capacity to be of much consequence.) It is also true that, when the US commits its prestige and that of its president, “things happen.” This effort is also coming at the start of Obama’s second term, whereas Bill Clinton got engaged seriously only when he was about to leave office — and thus was in no position to put US political muscle behind any forward progress.

Experience also confirms that serious negotiations on Final Status can only truly begin when the US plunks down for consideration the draft text of a complete treaty, perhaps for presentation purposes doing it jointly with the other three Quartet members. At the very least, President Obama needs to outline parameters for a settlement during this trip — whether he just calls them “Clinton” or a more proprietary “Obama” Parameters. He will need to paint himself into a corner in terms of his own personal commitment to success, however long and hard the slog may be.

There is some other news regarding Obama’s spring trip, the impact of which has yet to be proved; it raises questions about why he is acting so soon, other than to splash a big rock in the pool and thereby get everyone’s attention that “the US is back.” Happily, he has appointed a Secretary of State, John Kerry, who is deeply committed to success on this issue, calling failure a “catastrophe.” Yet, by the time Obama goes to the region, Kerry will not have had time to even put his State Department Middle East team together and get his key officials confirmed by the Senate. The NSC staff in the White House will have had to be beefed up with top-notch people in this area; and the nominated Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, who will need to offer strong backing — especially to reassure Israel of US strategic and military engagement — is not yet even in office. There is also precious little time before the president leaves for the Near East, for the White House to do the essential prior consultations with the Congress and key US constituencies, especially leadership of the Jewish community, if his trip to Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan is to be – as it must now be – about substance and not just symbols.

For Obama to offer more than his own commitment and symbolism of “being there,” he must be ready to take one further step, if Kerry is to be spared having to spend a massive amount of his time and energy on the Middle East account, which regularly eclipses other priorities. That is to appoint a senior-level negotiator who will do what it takes for as long as it takes. The one person with experience who could also provide the necessary political clout as Obama’s personal emissary is obvious: former President Bill Clinton.

By Charles Davis
Senator John Kerry (D-MA) is rumored to be President Obama’s next pick for secretary of state, but the web history of one White House staffer suggests the president’s team may be concerned about his defense of Iran’s right to enrich uranium.

In June 2009, [...]]]> via Lobe Log

By Charles Davis
Senator John Kerry (D-MA) is rumored to be President Obama’s next pick for secretary of state, but the web history of one White House staffer suggests the president’s team may be concerned about his defense of Iran’s right to enrich uranium.

In June 2009, just a few months after Obama’s inauguration, Kerry told the Financial Times that despite allegations from US politicians (if not their intelligence agencies) that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon, the Islamic Republic has a right to enrich uranium for a civilian energy program. The George W. Bush administration’s stance that Iran had no right to such enrichment “was ridiculous,” he said. Kerry didn’t stop there:

“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.

As far as international law is concerned, Kerry was right; the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty grants each signatory the right to enrich uranium on its soil for peaceful purposes. But his statement wasn’t only at odds with Bush policy, it also clashed with remarks made by the secretary of state he hopes to replace.

During an appearance on the Sunday talk show, “Meet the Press” — just a few weeks after Kerry’s comments were published — Hillary Clinton said that while Iran had a right to “civil nuclear power,” it did “not have the right to have the full enrichment and reprocessing cycle” under its control. Obama, meanwhile, during a debate with challenger Mitt Romney, asserted that he intended to get Iran to “end their nuclear program” altogether.

Which brings us to Google. This afternoon, someone in the Executive Office of the President found a short piece I wrote in 2009 concerning the apparent Kerry-White House rift on enrichment. That’s probably not a sign that they think Kerry would substantively differ from the administration as secretary of state — since his remarks 3 years ago, Kerry has vigorously defended all aspects of Obama’s Iran policy — but an indication that they may be preparing to defend the Massachusetts senator against charges he’s “soft” (read: reasonable) on Iran.

By Richard Javad Heydarian

A key foreign policy consequence of President Barak Obama’s reelection is the growing possibility of face-to-face talks between the United States. and Iran. Both the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi have expressed, albeit conditionally, their respective governments’ openness [...]]]> via Lobe Log

By Richard Javad Heydarian

A key foreign policy consequence of President Barak Obama’s reelection is the growing possibility of face-to-face talks between the United States. and Iran. Both the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi have expressed, albeit conditionally, their respective governments’ openness to engage in comprehensive bilateral talks — for the first time in almost three decades — to primarily resolve the ongoing nuclear standoff.

Beyond the issue of urgently resolving the Iranian nuclear question, purportedly to prevent an Israeli pre-emptive strike and an Iranian nuclear bomb, the Obama administration’s growing interest in directly engaging Iran may have something to do with timing, opportunity, and leverage.

There is a feeling in Washington that the recent transatlantic sanctions may have created enough pressure  — and damage to Iran’s economy — to potentially extract major unilateral concessions from the Iranian regime. Namely, a “stop-shut-ship scenario”, whereby Iran would curb its enrichment capacity, open up all aspects of its nuclear program, shut down its heavily-fortified nuclear facilities, and ship out its stockpile of above 3-5 percent enriched uranium in exchange for some nominal — yet to be clarified — incentives from the West.

Since the imposition of Western sanctions against Iran, beginning in late-2011 and intensifying by mid-2012, the Iranian economy has begun whimpering on an unprecedented scale. Iran’s oil output is at its lowest in more than two decades, while oil exports have been halved; the inflation rate has surpassed the 25 percent barrier, while the budget-deficit is reaching its highest level in the last decade; and, the Iranian currency (rial) has lost about 80 percent of its value in less than a year. The sanctions against Iran’s ports, shipping industry, financial sectors, and central bank, Bank-e-Markazi, have also made it increasingly difficult to conduct even the most benign kind of international transactions, from the import of medicines, to food, diapers and medical equipments.

However, there are some recent indications that Iran’s economy is not exactly in a desperate shape, or at least not as frail and fragile as the Obama administrations hopes it to be.

According to the Paris-based International Energy Agency’s (IEA) most recent report, Iran’s oil exports have rebounded sharply – by around 30 percent – after seven months of steady decline, thanks to new contracts with giant Asian customers, China and South Korea. With oil exports constituting more than three-quarters of export earnings, Tehran is now in a relatively better position to defend its falling currency. In fact, the rial has indeed experienced some recovery in recent weeks, appreciating from the record-low of 37,000 rials against 1 dollar in early October to around 27,000 rials against 1 dollar today. Of course, the most recent financial and hydrocarbon sanctions by the European Union will further complicate the process by which Iran intends to translate its rising exports into a stronger local currency.

Another surprising development is in the tourism sector, which has also experienced an unexpected spike. “Although most sectors of Iran’s economy are struggling and oil revenue has steeply declined, foreign purchasing power is at an all-time high in Iran due to a plunge in the value of the Iranian currency, the rial,” reported Jason Rezaian of the Washington Post.

The Iranian government has circumvented transatlantic sanctions by an ingenious mixture of manifold countermeasures. It has negotiated sovereign insurance deals with major customers such as China, India, Japan, and South Korea, while considering barter deals (sweetened by heavy discounts and flexible payment arrangements) to woo major customers and continue large-scale oil trade. Iran has also expanded its tanker storage capacity by purchasing/building new oil-transporting vessels, smuggled oil through neighboring countries like Iraq, and stealthily transported oil — with off-the-radar and/or or ‘foreign flagged’ ships — from its ports to major destinations in East Asia. This explains Iran’s ability to increase oil exports by almost 30 percent in November, compared to previous months.

Moreover, the government has instituted some draconian measures to stave-off the impact of sanctions. It has further slashed imports, postponed its subsidy cuts, reduced money supply, raised interest rates, and jailed so-called ‘currency manipulators’. It has also encouraged domestic manufacturing. Aside from the government’s recent ban on imports of around 77 luxury products, atop reductions in 52 other non-essential goods, the fall of the Iranian currency  — especially in the black market – has also eroded the competitiveness of imported capital goods, which have hammered local producers in recent years.

It’s important to note that the Iranian government has considerable foreign exchange reserves, estimated at between $80-100 billion, giving it significant ability to sustain imports for an extended period and defend its currency amid growing international restrictions. With a multi-tiered foreign exchange system, the government has an ability to cushion the most vulnerable sectors — incidentally, the backbone of the regime – against major disruptions in the import of basic commodities. After all, Iran’s structurally high inflation more the product of a loose monetary policy and major subsidy cuts that begun in 2010.

In some ways, it is Iran’s relative resilience  — and ability to avoid a total collapse — that may explain its willingness to explore direct talks with Washington. Tehran feels that it has enough wiggle room to avoid total unilateral concessions and negotiate a more mutually-favorable, face-saving outcome — perhaps, before it’s tool late.

- Richard Javad Heydarian is a Philippine-based foreign affairs analyst, specializing on international security and economics. He can be reached at jrheydarian@gmail.com

Further to Jim’s post on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s explicit statement on Friday that Washington wants bilateral talks with Iran, are similar comments she made on Nov. 30 at the Foreign Policy Group’s “Transformational Trends 2013″ Forum:

QUESTION: Robin Wright.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Hi, Robin.

QUESTION: I want to ask you [...]]]> via Lobe Log

Further to Jim’s post on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s explicit statement on Friday that Washington wants bilateral talks with Iran, are similar comments she made on Nov. 30 at the Foreign Policy Group’s “Transformational Trends 2013″ Forum:

QUESTION: Robin Wright.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Hi, Robin.

QUESTION: I want to ask you about Iran, and to speak with the same kind of candor you did about Syria. This morning, Dennis Ross said that he thought this year was going to be a decisive year. Apparently, one of the U.S. representatives in Vienna today said that we’re talking about a March deadline – if you could explain that a little bit further.

And tell us realistically what prospects you think there is for compromise with Iran, given the past year of efforts by the United States.

And also, if you believe that Israel is fully on board in letting the United States take the lead and not going off on its own path.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, as to the last question, I’m not going to speak to any country’s security decisions other than our own. Obviously, that’s up to Israel to decide. However, I will say that we continue to believe that there is still a window of opportunity to reach some kind of resolution over Iran’s nuclear program. Now, I’m not a wild-eyed optimist about it, but I think it’s imperative that we do everything we can – unilaterally, bilaterally, multilaterally – to test that proposition.

I think what was meant about the March reference was either about the IAEA and its continuing work or the fact that we finished our election and now would be a good time to test the proposition that there can be some good-faith serious negotiations before the Iranians get into their elections, which are going to heat up probably around the March period, heading toward a June election.

I think that it’s a difficult matter to predict, because it really depends upon how serious the Iranians are about making a decision that removes the possibility of their being able to acquire a nuclear weapon or the components of one that can be in effect on a shelf somewhere and still serve as a basis for intimidation.

We get differing reports, as I’m sure you have seen, as to how serious the Supreme Leader is about that, but we want to test the proposition. This President came into office saying he was prepared to engage with Iran, reached out to Iran, without much reciprocity. We put together this unprecedented coalition to impose these very tough sanctions on Iran. We know they’re having an effect internally. But I think that we’ll see in the next few months whether there’s a chance for any kind of a serious negotiation. And right now, I’m not sure that it can happen, but I certainly hope it does.