by Derek Davison

If you’re looking for a one sentence indicator about the state of post-Euromaidan Ukrainian politics, consider this: the man who is expected to win next month’s presidential election (assuming it actually takes place) is a billionaire chocolatier named Petro Poroshenko, who served as foreign minister under [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Derek Davison

If you’re looking for a one sentence indicator about the state of post-Euromaidan Ukrainian politics, consider this: the man who is expected to win next month’s presidential election (assuming it actually takes place) is a billionaire chocolatier named Petro Poroshenko, who served as foreign minister under former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, and then as minister of trade and economic development for a government allied with Yushchenko’s rival and successor, Viktor Yanukovych, before becoming one of the leaders of the protest movement that forced Yanukovych from office in February.

Ukraine’s national politics since Leonid Kuchma’s presidency (1994-2005) have been dominated by the rivalry between two men: Yushckenko, who served as Kuchma’s prime minister from 1998-2001 before going into opposition, and then as Ukraine’s president from 2005-2010, and Yanukovych, who twice served as prime minister (under Kuchma from 2002-05 and then under Yushchenko from 2006-07) before being elected as president in 2010 and serving until Euromaidan removed him. Yushchenko was aligned with a broadly pro-EU, anti-Russia faction, while Yanukovych had closer ties to Moscow.

Both men are now out of Ukrainian politics. Yanukovych has the distinction of having twice been removed from the Ukrainian presidency by popular uprising. He was declared the winner of the 2004 presidential election, but allegations of fraud inspired the Orange Revolution, led by Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko. The uprising forced a re-vote, which Yushchenko won. Yushchenko went on to suffer perhaps the worst electoral defeat for an incumbent president in modern history in 2010; he barely cleared 5% of the vote and was kept out of the run-off, in which Yanukovych defeated Tymoshenko. The third figure in this dysfunctional triumvirate, Tymoshenko, voted in 2009 with Yanukovych’s party to strip her erstwhile ally Yushchenko of his presidential powers, and then joined Yanukovych’s pro-Russian faction. After Yanukovych became president, he tried and convicted Tymoshenko (with the aid of Yushchenko’s testimony) on corruption charges in 2011. Since her release from prison, Tymoshenko seems to have appointed herself as one of the leaders of the anti-Russian (and anti-Yanukovych) movement.

In other words, if it’s consistency you’re after, Ukrainian politics probably aren’t for you. Frequent shifts in personal loyalty and party ideology, the ongoing tug of war between pro-European and pro-Russian factions, and high turnover in government (no fewer than eight different cabinets have been formed since Yanukovych’s first stint as prime minister began in 2002), have kept Ukraine from enjoying any semblance of political stability.

With Yanukovych and his Russian sympathies out of favor, the new divide in Ukrainian politics seems to be between neoliberalism and hard-right nationalism or even neo-fascism. A significant proportion of the Euromaidan movement consists of far-right Ukrainian nationalists led by the Svoboda Party, which has been given important posts in the interim Ukrainian cabinet. More troubling still is the degree to which the protests were escalated by neo-Nazi militias like “Right Sector.” It bears repeating that the first law passed by the Ukrainian parliament after Yanukovych was removed from office was an ultra-nationalistic repeal (which was not signed into law by interim President Oleksandr Turchynov) of a 2012 law giving semi-official status to languages deemed regionally important. For reasons that should be obvious by now, the presence of these far-right elements in the government only serves to divide Ukrainians and ethnic Russians in the east from the government in Kiev.

The rest of the Euromaidan leadership is largely neoliberal. The common thread binding Ukraine’s neoliberals is Kuchma. His administration implemented a number of neoliberal economic “reforms,” including rapid privatization and austerity measures intended to balance Ukraine’s budget. This was done in close cooperation with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in order to secure billions in IMF loans and to prepare Ukraine for membership in the EU. Coming at the height of the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, these “reforms” closely resembled the kind of radical “disaster capitalism” that will be familiar to readers of Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine.

Yushchenko followed much the same set of neoliberal policies when he was elected president, and while his administration did preside over a growing Ukrainian economy, it also left Ukraine especially vulnerable to the 2008 global economic crisis, which wiped out most of the gains that had been made in previous years and led to Yushchenko’s historic defeat in 2010. Yanukovych, struggling to maintain closer ties to Moscow without abandoning the neoliberal IMF/EU agenda, failed to repair the damage, and the pro-EU Euromaidan movement began in response to the continued economic struggles.

While it’s too soon to speculate what Poroshenko’s economic policy would be, his past as a close Yushchenko ally hints at his neoliberal sympathies. The current interim government is dominated by figures from Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna Party, including Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, a favorite of Victoria Nuland, the US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, who has ties to prominent neoconservatives. Nuland favors the kind of shock capitalism that is practiced by the IMF and that guided the economic policy of the Kuchma and Yushchenko administrations. Yatsenyuk has referred to the cabinet he heads as a “kamikaze” government because of the “extremely unpopular” financial policies it plans to implement, and has promised to follow IMF-dictated austerity measures. Considering the impact of these policies on Greece, it’s remarkable that Yatsenyuk has embraced them so whole-heartedly and unquestioningly.

Ukraine faces immense challenges. The threat of pro-Russian separatism in the east is the most immediate concern, closely followed by the related risk of hostile Russian action, be it military in nature, economic (e.g., shutting off natural gas exports), or both. But the economic crisis that brought down Yushchenko and helped to bring down Yanukovych has not been abated, and it will be impossible to stabilize potential breakaway regions if the Ukrainian economy continues to struggle. Ukraine desperately needs competent, stable governance right now, but based on its recent political history and on the choices it now faces between destructive ultra-nationalism and failed neoliberalism, there’s little reason for optimism on this front.

Photo: Demonstrators march and carry an EU flag during a protest in Kyiv, Ukraine, Nov. 24, 2013.

by Derek Davison

Russia moved to annex Crimea this week, as Ukraine evacuated most of its soldiers from the peninsula. Tensions in eastern Ukraine seem to have reached a tense equilibrium, even as reports of a Russian military build-up along its Ukrainian border raised the possibility of another incursion.

Recent [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Derek Davison

Russia moved to annex Crimea this week, as Ukraine evacuated most of its soldiers from the peninsula. Tensions in eastern Ukraine seem to have reached a tense equilibrium, even as reports of a Russian military build-up along its Ukrainian border raised the possibility of another incursion.

Recent events

Moving quickly on the heels of last week’s referendum on Crimean independence, in which Crimean voters nearly unanimously voted to secede from Ukraine and become part of Russia, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday signed into law a bill to formally annex the peninsula. On Thursday, one day before a temporary truce between Ukrainian and Russian forces in Crimea was set to expire, the Ukrainian defense ministry announced that plans were “well underway” to evacuate and resettle the roughly 25,000 Ukrainian soldiers currently stationed in Crimea to other parts of Ukraine. Pro-Russian forces stormed the Belbek airbase near Sevastopol, wounding one Ukrainian soldier and taking the base commander prisoner. The interim Crimean government issued an order for Crimea’s Tatar population to vacate part of the land on which it is currently settled, but insisted that it will allocate other land for Tatar settlement and that Tatars will be “well represented” in the Crimean government moving forward.

The New York Times characterized the situation in the eastern part of mainland Ukraine as “an uneasy calm” between “entrenched pro-Russian and pro-Western camps that scarcely existed before [the uprisings in Kiev].” Pro-secession fervor there is at a high level, particularly in large cities that tend to have higher proportions of Russians and Russian-speakers than the surrounding countryside. Friday’s announcement that the Ukrainian government had signed an association agreement with the European Union, a deal that will bring the two parties into “closer economic and political cooperation,” raised fears that tensions in the more pro-Russian east could rise still higher.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe announced that it would deploy civilian observers to Ukraine (not including Crimea), after Russia dropped its objections to such a move. However, NATO officials continued to express concern over an alleged Russian troop buildup along its Ukrainian border, suggesting that the units could be used either to invade mainland Ukraine or to cross Ukraine and seize control of the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria, whose leaders requested that Russia annex it earlier this week. The Russian government claimed that any troop movements were part of routine military exercises and that there were no plans to cross the border into Ukraine. Ukraine’s acting foreign minister, Andrii Deshchytsia, told American media that the chance of a Russian-Ukrainian war was “becoming higher.”

The United States and the EU levied further sanctions against top Russian officials and allies of President Putin on Friday. The new list of American targets includes Putin’s chief of staff as well as key figures in Russia’s energy and banking sectors. The EU list includes several figures who had been named in the initial round of US sanctions on Monday. A Kremlin spokesman said that the Russian government was “bewildered” by the new sanctions and promised that it would retaliate, which it then did by placing travel bans on several American political figures, including Senators Harry Reid and John McCain and Speaker of the House John Boehner.

There are two disputed narratives that are fueling the ongoing conflict:

Was the Crimean referendum legitimate?

Although the Ukrainian government appears to have no intention of contesting Russia’s annexation of Crimea on the ground, it, along with the US and EU, has insisted that last week’s referendum is illegal under both international and Ukrainian law. Russia has argued that the referendum was consistent with international law, specifically Article 1 of the UN Charter (which mentions “respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” as one of the UN’s guiding principles), and Putin has specifically cited Kosovo’s secession from Serbia (which Russia opposed) as having set the precedent for this similar act by Crimea.

International law does not take a firm position on the question of self-determination versus national sovereignty. Without a clear declaration by a body like the UN Security Council there is no “law” that deals conclusively with Crimea’s decision to leave Ukraine and join Russia. Kosovo is a problematic case to use as precedent, given that its secession was the product of a war in which Serbians committed war crimes against Kosovar Albanians (though in fairness the Albanian rebels committed war crimes of their own). There is evidence of some mistreatment of Ukraine’s Russians, but a UN report (which Russia rejects) found no systematic abuses. However, the fact that the first act of the interim Ukrainian government was an aborted attempt to repeal the country’s law governing the use of official minority languages was cause for alarm among Ukrainian Russian-speakers.

Under Ukrainian law there is no question that the referendum is illegal, since Article 73 of the Ukrainian constitution requires that any changes to Ukraine’s territory be approved in an “All-Ukrainian referendum.” Last week’s Crimean vote was regional, and therefore does not meet this requirement. However, given that the Crimean and Russian governments do not recognize the authority of the interim Ukrainian government, they presumably reject its invocation of the constitution as well.

Is the Ukrainian government legitimate?

The Ukrainian government obviously thinks so, and so do the US and EU. But there is no disputing the fact that Viktor Yanukovych was the legally elected president of Ukraine before his ouster, and Russia’s official position has been that it still recognizes him as Ukraine’s rightful president, though it has not pushed for his restoration. Russia has characterized the Euromaidan protest movement that removed Yanukovych from office as an “armed fascist coup,” engineered with considerable American support. Far-right Ukrainian parties did play a large part in the protest movement, as evidenced by the sizable role that they have been given in the interim Ukrainian government. Moreover, a recording of a January phone call between Assistant US Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt shows that American officials were at least discussing ways to assist the protest movement and what a post-Yanukovych government might look like. Russia also accuses the EU of having spurred the protests by forcing the Ukrainian government to choose between Russia and the EU rather than allowing it to have strong ties with both, an accusation that EU officials have denied.

On the other hand, the US supported a February 21^st agreement that would have kept Yanukovych in office but restored Ukraine’s 2004 constitution (which reduced the power of the presidency relative to parliament). That deal collapsed when protesters (including the far-right elements of the movement) rejected it, despite the fact that several protest leaders had already signed off on it. Further, while the Nuland phone call is evidence that the US government supported the protesters, it is not in itself evidence of the level of that support, let alone of the idea that the US was actually behind the movement. The Obama administration contends that Yanukovych forfeited his authority when he fled the country after the February 21 agreement collapsed. Yanukovych, who also recorded a statement resigning his office, which he later retracted, was impeached and removed from office by the Ukrainian parliament. Nevertheless, there are serious questions as to the constitutionality of that impeachment vote and the manner in which Yanukovych’s successor was determined.

Photo: Crowds waving Crimean and Russian flags in Simferopol in Crimea after the referendum. Credit: Alexey Yakushechkin/IPS

by Robert E. Hunter

Accidents happen, even to seasoned US diplomats. In this case, the Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia was caught in a highly sensitive conversation on Ukraine’s future with the US ambassador in Kiev. Not much out of the ordinary in their talk, conducted in diplo-speech, except [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Robert E. Hunter

Accidents happen, even to seasoned US diplomats. In this case, the Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia was caught in a highly sensitive conversation on Ukraine’s future with the US ambassador in Kiev. Not much out of the ordinary in their talk, conducted in diplo-speech, except for one almost inaudible expletive by Victoria Nuland.

The State Department turned it all into a joke, a kind of “boys [and girls] will be boys [and girls]” and blamed the leaking of the conversation on the Russians, a “new low in trade-craft” — more diplo-speech for spying. This barb at Moscow, although thousands of hackers around the globe could have picked up the phone call; and the Russians would naturally patrol the US embassy in Kiev (and everywhere else) listening for unguarded talk, just as (we hope) the US does likewise against them. And, if Moscow had been urging its ambassador in Kiev to try manipulating Ukrainian politics, as the State Department was doing, and if we had picked up one of their phone calls, we would broadcast it to the world, as part of the continuing struggle for Ukraine’s soul now being conducted by the old Cold War superpowers.

There is irony. The recently much-maligned National Security Agency spends huge amounts of money providing US diplomats with easy access and highly secure telephones; and every junior diplomat is trained never, ever to hold a conversation as sensitive as the one revealed except through classified email or on one of those NSA instruments.

With “egg on their faces” and a well-merited rebuke from the Federal German Chancellor, whose own phone calls were hacked by the NSA, what’s not to like in this B movie? Ambassador Nuland ‘fessed up; so let’s all have our laugh and move on.

Yet this accident has revealed issues that merit study. First was the expletive, directed against what the US diplomats — and much of Washington — see to be the European Union’s fecklessness, not just in regard to Ukraine — “a day late and a Euro short” — but also in getting its act together in general.

Not so fast. It’s not as though the United States had been consistently leading for the West in helping Ukraine define its future, a country pinioned by geography between the Russian Federation and Europe Proper, in an effort to provide Jeremy Bentham’s “greatest good for the greatest number.” Nor has the US been paying much attention to the European Union — or to Europe, for that matter. When he spoke at the Brandenburg Gate last year, President Obama made only a passing reference to NATO and referred to the EU only as “your union.” He will stop off for a brief summit meeting with the EU in Brussels next month, but for years these have been pro forma, a couple of hours of shop talk and then back on Air Force One to some place more important. There will be a NATO summit in Wales this September, but as of now it will focus on what should be done about Afghanistan after Dec. 31 when NATO troops in the International Security Assistance Force depart. Charting NATO’s future? So far an empty basket.

The fact is that for years Europe has been the low region on the US’ Northern Hemisphere totem pole. The one saving grace is the administration’s commitment to negotiating the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which has become the touchstone of transatlantic relations, now that NATO is in fast decline. But even TTIP may not make it, unless Congress gives the President so-called Fast Track Negotiating Authority, whereby he can sign a deal without Congress’ picking it apart. Even that is now in doubt, as those who oppose more open trade, mostly in the President’s own Democratic Party, are pushing back.

So, lesson 1. Mr. President and Secretary of State John Kerry: pay more attention to Europe, and if there is something as important as the future of Ukraine, get involved at a more senior level. As skilled as Ambassador Nuland is, negotiating this issue should be happening above her pay grade to show that the US is really serious. And as important as Mr. Kerry’s diplomatic heavy-lifting in the Middle East is to that benighted region, the US has to be able to “walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Lesson 2: stop looking at what is happening in Ukraine as though it is simply a replay of Cold War confrontation. It’s striking how much rhetoric, both in the US government and in the American commentariat, is reveling in the prospect of a return to the Good Old Days when the Russians were the bad guys. At the same time, it’s striking that, with all the efforts to load political issues onto the Sochi Olympics, however important LGBT rights and Syria may be, there has been no use of this moment to get President Vladimir Putin to understand that his Sochi glory also depends on controlling his ambitions in Central Europe, with all its geopolitical importance.

In the 1990s, the remaking of European security — George H.W. Bush’s grand strategy of a “Europe whole and free” and at peace — fell short in integrating the Russian Federation into the future. While it was brought into the Partnership for Peace and into a special relationship with NATO, it was too long kept largely isolated economically, so its people did not see that playing ball with the West pays dividends in their own lives.

Is it too late to try building an overarching political, economic, and security structure throughout Europe, in which the US, Canada, Western Europe, Central Europe, Ukraine, and Russia can all play legitimate parts, minus “spheres of influence because everyone gains something more important in terms of prosperity and, yes, respect? Maybe, maybe not. It is past time for the US, as the West’s leader, to start trying. And without ignoring — and stigmatizing — its indispensable partner, the EU.

The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has updated its Iran Sanctions page to include more individuals and entities, including Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (Ershad), its Press Supervisory Board and several Iranian universities and related institutions. No reasoning is provided in the official US via Lobe Log

The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has updated its Iran Sanctions page to include more individuals and entities, including Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (Ershad), its Press Supervisory Board and several Iranian universities and related institutions. No reasoning is provided in the official US explanation as to why the universities were sanctioned — odd even if the sanctions regime hardly makes sense anyway.

Meanwhile, Columbia University Professor Gary Sick, who served on the National Security Council staff under Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan, argues in CNN that the US’s Iran strategy has become tantamount to a war which may explode into a full-scale military conflict:

Yet today, the sanctions regime in Iran is resembling, more and more, the Iraqi and Cuban cases. We have arrived by a very different route. Instead of controlling all goods going into the country, we have ingeniously found ways of manipulating Iran’s banking system. That, together with regional boycotts, has the prospect of blocking a large proportion of Iran’s oil sales.

In Iran there has been a run on the currency, food prices are soaring, and every single person is beginning to experience some form of economic pain. That has been the source of considerable public satisfaction in Washington and elsewhere. It is also reminiscent of the early stages of the Iraqi experience. Add to that the serial murders of civilian scientists, cybertampering with Iran’s centrifuges, flyovers of U.S. drones, and covert assistance to Iranian separatist groups.

Forget the euphemisms. What would we think if a nation were doing all of this to us? The benign image of sanctions as graduated pressure has been transformed. In reality, it is war with Iran in all but name.

The US and EU are touting Iran’s currency woes as proof that sanctions are working, though it’s not clear to what end. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Western powers “are working on new coordinated measures intended to accelerate the recent plunge of Iran’s currency and drain its foreign-exchange reserves”:

The first [...]]]> via Lobe Log

The US and EU are touting Iran’s currency woes as proof that sanctions are working, though it’s not clear to what end. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Western powers “are working on new coordinated measures intended to accelerate the recent plunge of Iran’s currency and drain its foreign-exchange reserves”:

The first salvos in this stepped-up sanctions campaign are expected at a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Oct. 15, including a ban on Iranian natural-gas exports and tighter restrictions on transactions with Tehran’s central bank, European officials said.

The U.S. and EU are also considering imposing a de facto trade embargo early next year by moving to block all export and import transactions through Iran’s banking system ….

To that end, U.S. lawmakers are drafting legislation that would require the White House to block all international dealings with Iran’s central bank, while also seeking to enforce a ban on all outside insuring of Iranian companies.

David Cohen, who coordinates the US’s Iran sanctions policy from within the Treasury, outlined the US’s stance in a speech before a British think tank. Reuters reports:

[David] Cohen, undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, added in remarks on a visit to Britain’s Chatham House think-tank that Iran had the ability to “relieve the pressure its people are feeling” by resolving concerns over its nuclear work.

“What in particular has sparked the most recent precipitous decline in the rial, I’m not in a position to say on a granular basis,” he said, adding however that over the past year it had fallen substantially.

The Washington Post also reported that EU officials are “even more blunt” over the intentions behind the sanctions:

One senior European official said the goal of the tightened sanctions was to “bring the Iranian economy to its knees,” and to “make it in a way that really hurts the regime more than the population. That is very difficult.”

But US officials are also attempting to downplay the negative effects of the sanctions by blaming the regime. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said yesterday that “[t]he Iranian state has horribly mismanaged all aspects of their internal situation.” Cohen told the Chatham House audience that the unrest in Iran “is undoubtedly in significant part due to the Iranian government’s own mismanagement of its economy and it is in part due to the effect of sanctions. The Iranian leadership has within its capacity the ability to relieve the pressure its people are feeling.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered the following qualifier:

“They have made their own government decisions– having nothing to do with the sanctions– that have had an impact on the economic conditions inside of the country,”" Mrs. Clinton said. “Of course, the sanctions have had an impact as well, but those could be remedied in short order if the Iranian government were willing to work with. . .the international community in a sincere manner.”

via IPS News

In a move certain to ratchet up already-high tensions with Iran, the administration of President Barack Obama will remove a militant anti-regime group from the State Department’s terrorism list, U.S. officials told reporters here Friday.

The decision, which is expected to be formally announced before Oct. [...]]]> By Jim Lobe and Jasmin Ramsey

via IPS News

In a move certain to ratchet up already-high tensions with Iran, the administration of President Barack Obama will remove a militant anti-regime group from the State Department’s terrorism list, U.S. officials told reporters here Friday.

The decision, which is expected to be formally announced before Oct. 1, the deadline set earlier this year by a federal court to make a determination, was in the process of being transmitted in a classified report to Congress, according to the Department’s spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland.

The decision came several days after some 680 members of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), or People’s Mojahedin, were transferred from their long-time home at Camp Ashraf in eastern Iraq close to the Iranian to a former U.S. base in at Baghdad’s airport in compliance with Washington’s demands that the group move. The transfer leaves only 200 militants at Camp Ashraf out of the roughly 3,200 who were there before the transfers began.

Most analysts here predicted that the administration’s decision to remove the MEK from the terrorism list would only worsen already abysmal relations with Iran and possibly make any effort to defuse the gathering crisis over its nuclear programme yet more difficult.

“Delisting will be seen not only by the Iranian regime, but also by most Iranian citizens, as a hostile act by the United States,” Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, told IPS.

“The MEK has almost no popular support within Iran, where it is despised as a group of traitors, especially given its history of joining forces with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War,” Pillar, who now teaches at George Washington University, added.

“Any effect of the delisting on nuclear negotiations will be negative; Tehran will read it as one more indication that the United States is interested only in hostility and pressure toward the Islamic Republic, rather than coming to terms with it.”

The decision followed a high-profile multi-year campaign by the group and its sympathisers that featured almost-daily demonstrations at the State Department, full-page ads in major newspapers, and the participation of former high-level U.S. officials, some of whom were paid tens of thousands of dollars to make public appearances on behalf of the MEK.

Officials included Obama’s first national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, former FBI chief Louis Freeh, and a number of senior officials in the George W. Bush administration, including his White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, attorney general Michael Mukasey, and former U.N. ambassador John Bolton.

Created in the mid-1960s by Islamo-Marxist university students, the MEK played a key role in the 1979 ouster of the Shah only to lose a bloody power struggle with the more-conservative clerical factions close to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The group went into exile; many members fled to Iraq, which they used as a base from which they mounted military and terrorist attacks inside Iran during the eight-year war between the two countries. Its forces were also reportedly used to crush popular rebellions against President Saddam Hussein that followed the 1991 Gulf War.

During a brief period of détente between Washington and Tehran, the administration of President Bill Clinton designated the group as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO) in 1997 based in part on its murder of several U.S. military officials and contractors in the 1970s and its part in the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover, as well as its alliance with Saddam Hussein.

When U.S. forces invaded Iraq in 2001, the MEK declared its neutrality and eventually agreed to disarm in exchange for Washington’s agreement that its members could remain at Camp Ashraf as “protected persons” under the Geneva Convention, an arrangement that expired in 2009.

The government of President Nour Al-Maliki, however, has been hostile to the MEK’s continued presence in Iraq. Two violent clashes since 2009 between Iraqi security forces and camp residents resulted in the deaths of at least 45 MEK members.

Last December, the UN reached a U.S.-mediated accord with the MEK to re-locate the residents to “Camp Liberty” at Baghdad’s airport, which would serve as a “temporary transit station” for residents to resettle in third countries or in Iran, if they so chose, after interviews with the UN High Commission on Refugees.

Until quite recently, however, the group — which Human Rights Watch (HRW) and a significant number of defectors, among others, have described as a cult built around its long-unaccounted-for founder, Massoud Rajavi, and his Paris-based spouse, Maryam — has resisted its wholesale removal from Ashraf. Some observers believe Massoud may be based there.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s increasingly blunt suggestions that the MEK’s failure to co-operate would jeopardise its chances of being removed from the terrorism list, however, appear to have brought it around.

The MEK claims that it halted all military actions in 2001 and has lacked the intent or the capability of carrying out any armed activity since 2003, an assertion reportedly backed up by the State Department.

Earlier this year, however, NBC News quoted one U.S. official as confirming Iran’s charges that Israel has used MEK militants in recent years to carry out sabotage operations, including the assassination of Iranian scientists associated with Tehran’s nuclear programme.

“The Iranian security establishment’s assessment has long believed that foreign intelligence agencies, specifically the CIA, Israeli Mossad, and the UK’s MI6 utilise the MEK for terror attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists, nuclear sabotage and intelligence gathering,” noted Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former senior Iranian diplomat and nuclear negotiator currently at Princeton University.

“Therefore, the delisting of MEK will be seen in Tehran as a reward for the group’s terrorist actions in the country,” he wrote in an email exchange with IPS. “Furthermore, Iran has firmly concluded that the Western demands for broader inspections (of Iran’s nuclear programme), including its military sites, are a smokescreen for mounting increased cyber attacks, sabotage and terror of nuclear scientists.

“Delisting MEK would be considered in Tehran as a U.S.-led effort to increase sabotage and covert actions through MEK leading inevitably to less cooperation by Iran with the IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency).”

He added that government in Tehran will use this as a way of “demonstrating to the public that the U.S. is seeking …to bring a MEK-style group to power” which, in turn, “would strengthen the Iranian nation’s support for the current system as the perceived alternative advanced by Washington would be catastrophic.”

That view was echoed by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which noted that the decision opens the doors to Congressional funding of the MEK and that leaders of the Iran’s Green Movement have long repudiated the group.

“The biggest winner today is the Iranian regime, which has claimed for a long time that the U.S. is out to destroy Iran and is the enemy of the Iranian people,” said NIAC’s policy director, Jamal Abdi.

“It will certainly not improve U.S.-Iranian relations,” according to Alireza Nader, an Iran specialist at the Rand Corporation, who agreed that the “delisting reinforces Tehran’s longstanding narrative regarding U.S. hostility toward the regime.

“Nevertheless,” he added, “I don’t think it is detrimental to U.S. interests as Tehran suspects U.S. collusion with the MEDK anyhow, whether this perception is correct or not.”

Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the move was unlikely to be “game-changer” in that “the MEK will continue to be perceived inside Iran as an antiquated cult which sided with Saddam Hussein during the (Iran-Iraq) war, and U.S. Iran relations will remain hostile.”

“It doesn’t help (Washington’s) image within Iran, certainly, and some Iranian democracy activists may misperceive this as a U.S. show of support for the MEK, which could have negative ramifications,” he noted.

Another casualty of the decision may be the credibility of the FTO list itself, according to Mila Johns, a researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.

“The entire atmosphere around the MEK’s campaign to be removed from the FTO list – the fact that (former) American government officials were allowed to actively and openly receive financial incentives to speak in support of an organisation that was legally designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, without consequence – created the impression that the list is essentially a meaningless political tool,” she told IPS.

“It is hard to imagine that the FTO designation holds much legitimacy within the international community when it is barely respected by our own government,” she said.

No other group, she noted, has been de-listed in this way, “though now that the precedent has been set, I would expect that other groups will explore this as an option.”

*This week’s must read is “Obama’s Counterproductive New Iran Sanctions: How Washington is Sliding [...]]]> In response to a worrying trend in U.S. politics Lobe Log has launched Iran Hawk Watch. Each Friday we will post on notable militaristic commentary about Iran from a variety of sources including news articles, think tanks and pundits.

*This week’s must read is “Obama’s Counterproductive New Iran Sanctions: How Washington is Sliding Toward Regime Change”. Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution writes:

The Obama administration’s new sanctions signal the demise of the paradigm that had guided U.S. Iran policymaking since the 1979 revolution: the combination of pressure and persuasion. Moreover, the decision to outlaw contact with Iran’s central bank puts the United States’ tactics and its long-standing objective — a negotiated end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions — fundamentally at odds. Indeed, the United States cannot hope to bargain with a country whose economy it is trying to disrupt and destroy. As severe sanctions devastate Iran’s economy, Tehran will surely be encouraged to double down on its quest for the ultimate deterrent. So, the White House’s embrace of open-ended pressure means that it has backed itself into a policy of regime change, something Washington has little ability to influence.

Also check out “Forgetting Iraq, Republicans Thirst For War Against Iran”, by John Tirman.

Mainstream Media and Pundits:

Washington Post: Using the “military option” against Iran and Mitt Romney get a plug from the WaPo’s hawk-in-chief, Jennifer Rubin. Perhaps more zealously than any other prominent media figure, Rubin has been agitating for war with Iran. Even before the most crippling Iran sanctions that have ever been implemented are in full swing, she is recommending that congress prepare for war while the administration educates the public about why it’s necessary. The more Obama gives to the Iran hawks, the more they demand:

The administration and the president specifically also need to begin a period of public education to explain why it is imperative that Iran not get nuclear weapons and why it is both advantageous (because of our military resources) and essential (because of our position as leader of the free world and guarantor of the West’s security) to do the job, if it becomes necessary, rather than let Israel do the heavy lifting. The duty to educate and prepare the American people is critical and in and of itself will enhance the credibility of a military option.

Wall Street Journal: Even while acknowledging that Iran’s threats to close the Strait of Hormuz are desperate “bluster”, the hawkish WSJ editorial board urges the U.S. to act in ways which would likely be interpreted as provocation by the Iranians:

Meantime, the best response to Iran’s threats would be to send an American aircraft carrier back through the Strait of Hormuz as soon as possible, with flags waving and guns at the ready.

Past and Present U.S. Officials:

Victoria Nuland: Yesterday, during the daily press briefing, State Department spokesperson Nuland (the wife of neoconservative Iraq war hawk Robert Kagan) said getting multilateral support for the U.S.’s latest sanctions against Iran “will be an important next step in the global effort to tighten the noose on their regime.” From the beginning the Obama administration has rejected adopting regime change as its official Iran policy, opting for sanctions and some limited diplomacy instead, so was this comment a Freudian slip from Nuland or does it signal something bigger? Nuland’s curious comments bring Maloney’s argument to mind.

Mark Kirk: The AIPAC-favorite senator who coauthored the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act imposing sanctions against Iran’s Central Bank wants the President to implement them no matter what. Obama said he would treat the provisions as “non-binding” if they interfered with his “constitutional authority to conduct foreign relations”, but Kirk said that wasn’t as important as crippling Iran’s economy. The push to sanction Iran’s Central Bank has been ongoing since 2008, but it reached its climax in the summer with heavy lobbying from AIPAC and hawkish members of congress. In October Kirk told a radio show that he had no problem with “taking food out of the mouths” of ordinary Iranians to take down their government, which sounds a lot like collective punishment. Kirk’s pressure on Obama is backed by the likes of prominent neoconservative analyst, Michael Rubin, and Commentary’s editor, Jonathan Tobin, both of whom opined about Obama’s non-binding comment this week.

Mitt Romney: According to former AIPAC-staffer M. J. Rosenberg, Romney’s hawkish stance on Iran (echoed this week at his Iowa Caucus speech) is the result of his many neoconservative advisers:

Fifteen of the 22 worked on foreign policy for the George W. Bush administration and six were members of the original neoconservative group, Project for the New American Century, that famously called on President Clinton in 1998 to begin “implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power.” Its rationale: Saddam was producing weapons of mass destruction.

A detailed examination of another Romney-adviser, Walid Phares, can be found here.

Rick Santorum: The Republican presidential hopeful said this week that if he was elected, he would go to war with Iran over its disputed nuclear program:

And finally, I would be working openly with the state of Israel and I would be saying to the Iranians, you either open up those facilities, you begin to dismantle them and make them available to inspectors or we will degrade those facilities through air strikes – and make it very public that we are doing that.

Today reporter Matthew Lee asked questions beyond the official script during a press session with U.S. State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, following the Obama administration’s announcement that it would be cutting funding for the U.N. cultural agency, UNESCO, after its member countries overwhelmingly approved a Palestinian bid for full membership. Nuland said [...]]]>

Today reporter Matthew Lee asked questions beyond the official script during a press session with U.S. State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, following the Obama administration’s announcement that it would be cutting funding for the U.N. cultural agency, UNESCO, after its member countries overwhelmingly approved a Palestinian bid for full membership. Nuland said UNESCO’s decision was “regrettable, premature and undermines our shared goal to a comprehensive, just and lasting peace” between Israelis and Palestinians, adding that the U.S. would not be making it’s scheduled $60 million payment in November as a result. Over 100 countries voted for the bid or abstained and only 14 voted against it.

Following is an excerpt and here is Lee’s report in the Associated Press.

Victoria Nuland: …This was, as I said, regrettable, premature and undermines the prospect of getting where we want to go and that’s what we’re concerned about.

Matthew Lee: Exactly how does it undermine the process of getting where you want to go?

Victoria Nuland: The concern is that it creates tensions when all of us should be concerting our efforts to get the parties back to the table–

Matthew Lee: The only thing that it does is upset Israel and it triggers this law that you said will require you to stop funding UNESCO. Is there anything else? There’s nothing that changes on the ground, is there?

Victoria Nuland: Our concern is that this could exacerbate the environment which we’re trying to work through so that the parties can get back to the table–

Matthew Lee: How does it exacerbate the environment if it changes nothing on the ground, unlike, say, the construction of settlements. That changes nothing on the ground. It gives Palestine membership in UNESCO which is a body that the U.S. was so unconcerned about for many years that it wasn’t even a member.

Victoria Nuland: Well, I think you know that this administration is committed to UNESCO, rejoined UNESCO, wants to see UNESCO’s work go forward–

Matthew Lee: Well, actually the last administration joined UNESCO, not this one, but I need to have some kind of clarity on how this undermines the peace process other than the fact that it upsets Israel.

Victoria Nuland: Again, we are trying to get both of these parties back to the table, that’s what we’ve been doing all along, that was the basis for the president’s speech in May, basis of the diplomacy that the quartet did through the summer, the basis of the statement that the quartet came out with in September, so in that context we’ve been trying to improve the relationship between these two parties and improve the environment between them and we are concerned that we exacerbate tensions with this, and it makes it harder to get the parties back to the table.

Matthew Lee: Since the talks broke off last September until today, how many times have they met together, with all your effort?

Victoria Nuland: How many times have the parties met? I think you know the answer to that question, that doesn’t change the fact that we all are committed to trying–

Matthew Lee: Correct, so how can things get worse than they already are?

Victoria Nuland: Matt, I think you’re engaged in a polemic here rather than questions, Saeed please?