In light of the ongoing immigration debate [...]]]>
For those who missed it, last week U.S. President Obama’s new “deferred action” immigration program went into effect, halting the immediate deportation of young undocumented immigrants and allowing them to apply for work permits instead – which they did by the thousands.
In light of the ongoing immigration debate – which is likely to flare up as the presidential race heats up – I was intrigued when I stumbled on these graphs that NPR’s Lam Thuy Vo put together for Planet Money this week, based on the latest U.S. Census data.
Used with permission from the author, Lam Thuy Vo | NPR Planet Money
Aptly called “100 years of Immigration in two graphs” the illustrations highlight that the percentage of foreign-born people residing in the U.S. is actually roughly the same as a century ago – it’s the origin of that foreign-born population, however, that has drastically changed and become more diverse.
Where a century ago 13.4 percent of people living in the U.S. were foreign born and 87.2 percent of those were European, today, about 12.8 percent are foreign born, but only 12.3 percent of that group are European. Instead, Latin America and Asia take the immigration crown, with Mexico being country-of-origin numero uno.
With the public debate in the U.S. often focussing on how the total number of current immigrants breaks historic records, preferably accompanied by dramatic data graphs that start in the immigration-poor 1960s, it’s nice to see NPR’s clear data visualisation providing a larger historical and national context.
On a side note, last month I wrote about Mexican-born Librada Paz receiving the Rober F. Kennedy Award for her struggle for farmworkers’ rights, hers being a life story not unlike that of many undocumented immigrants now benefiting from Obama’s decree.
For more on the unseen effects of the U.S. deportation policies on families, read IPS’ Zoha Ashad’s piece this week.
]]>Reposted by arrangement with Tom Dispatch
By John Feffer
The United States has long styled itself a Pacific power. It established the model of counterinsurgency in the Philippines in 1899 and defeated the Japanese in World War II. It [...]]]>
Reposted by arrangement with Tom Dispatch
By John Feffer
The United States has long styled itself a Pacific power. It established the model of counterinsurgency in the Philippines in 1899 and defeated the Japanese in World War II. It faced down the Chinese and the North Koreans to keep the Korean peninsula divided in 1950, and it armed the Taiwanese to the teeth. Today, America maintains the most powerful military in the Pacific region, supported by a constellation of military bases, bilateral alliances, and about 100,000 service personnel.
It has, however, reached the high-water mark of its Pacific presence and influence. The geopolitical map is about to be redrawn. Northeast Asia, the area of the world with the greatest concentration of economic and military power, is on the verge of a regional transformation. And the United States, still preoccupied with the Middle East and hobbled by a stalled and stagnating economy, will be the odd man out.
Elections will be part of the change. Next year, South Koreans, Russians, and Taiwanese will all go to the polls. In 2012, the Chinese Communist Party will also ratify its choice of a new leader to take over from President Hu Jintao. He will be the man expected to preside over the country’s rise from the number two spot to the pinnacle of the global economy.
But here’s the real surprise in store for Washington. The catalyst of change may turn out to be the country in the region that has so far changed the least: North Korea. In 2012, the North Korean government has trumpeted to its people a promise to create kangsong taeguk, or an economically prosperous and militarily strong country. Pyongyang now has to deliver somehow on that promise — at a time of food shortages, overall economic stagnation, and political uncertainty. This dream of 2012 is propelling the regime in Pyongyang to shift into diplomatic high gear, and that, in turn, is already creating enormous opportunities for key Pacific powers.
WWashington, which has focused for years on North Korea’s small but developing nuclear arsenal, has barely been paying attention to the larger developments in Asia. Nor will Asia’s looming transformation be a hot topic in our own presidential election next year. We’ll be arguing about jobs, health care, and whether the president is a socialist or his Republican challenger a nutcase. Aside from some ritual China-bashing, Asia will merit little mention.
President Obama, anxious about giving ammunition to his opponent, will be loath to fiddle with Asia policy, which is already on autopilot. So while others scramble to remake East Asia, the United States will be suffering from its own peculiar form of continental drift.
Pyongyang Turns on the Charm
On April 15, 1912, in an obscure spot in the Japanese empire, a baby was born to a Christian family proud of its Korean heritage. The 100th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s founder and dynastic leader, is coming up next year. Ordinarily, such an event would be of little importance to anyone other than 24 million North Koreans and a scattering of Koreans elsewhere. But this centennial also marks the date by which the North Korean regime has promised to finally turn things around.
Despite its pretensions to self-reliance, Pyongyang has amply proven that it can only get by with a lot of help from its friends. Until recently, however, North Korea was not exactly playing well with others.
It responded in a particularly hardline fashion, for instance, to the more hawkish policies adopted by new South Korean President Lee Myung Bak, when he took office in February 2008. The shooting of a South Korean tourist at the Mount Kumgang resort that July, the sinking of the South Korean naval ship the Cheonan in March 2010 (Pyongyang still claims it was not the culprit), and the shelling of South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island later that year all accelerated a tailspin in north-south relations. During this period, the North tested a second nuclear device, prompting even its closest ally, China, to react in disgust and support a U.N. declaration of condemnation. Pyongyang also managed to further alienate Washington by revealing in 2010 that it was indeed pursuing a program to produce highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium, something it had long denied.
These actions had painful economic consequences. South Korea cancelled almost all forms of cooperation. The North’s second nuclear test scotched any incipient economic rapprochement with the United States. (The Bush administration had removed North Korea from its terrorism list, and there had been hints that other longstanding sanctions might sooner or later be dropped as part of a warming in relations.)
Only the North’s relationship with China was unaffected, largely because Beijing is gobbling up significant quantities of valuable minerals and securing access to ports in exchange for just enough food and energy to keep the country on life support and the regime afloat. Between 2006 and 2009, an already anemic North Korean economy contracted, and chronic food shortages again became acute.
To these economic travails must be added political ones. The country’s leadership is long past retirement, with 70-year-old leader Kim Jong Il younger than most of the rest of the ruling elite. He has designated his youngest son, Kim Jeong Eun, as his successor, but the only thing that this mystery boy seems to have going for him is his resemblance to his grandfather, Kim Il Sung.
Still, North Korea seems no closer to full-scale collapse today than during previous crises — like the devastating famine of the mid-1990s. A thoroughly repressive state and zero civil society seem to insure that no color revolution or “Pyongyang Spring” is in the offing. Waiting for the North Korean regime to go gently into the night is like waiting for Godot.
But that doesn’t mean change isn’t in the air. To jumpstart its bedraggled economy and provide a political boost for the next leader in the year of kangsong taeguk, North Korea is suddenly in a let’s-make-a-deal mode.
Kim Jong Il’s recent visit to Siberia to meet Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, for instance, raised a few knowledgeable eyebrows. Conferring at a Russian military base near Lake Baikal, for the first time in a long while the North Korean leader even raised the possibility of a moratorium on nuclear weapons production and testing. More substantially, he concluded a preliminary agreement on a natural gas pipeline that could in itself begin to transform the politics of the region. It would transfer gas from the energy-rich Russian Far East through North Korea to economically booming but energy-hungry South Korea. The deal could net Pyongyang as much as $100 million a year.
The North’s new charm offensive wouldn’t have a hope in hell of succeeding if a similar change of heart weren’t also underway in the South.
The Bulldozer’s Miscalculation
On taking office, the conservative South Korean president Lee Myung Bak, known as “the Bulldozer” when he headed up Hyundai’s engineering division, promised to put Korean relations on a new footing. Ten years of “engagement policy” with the North had, according to Lee, produced an asymmetrical relationship. The South, he insisted, was providing all the cash, and the North was doing very little in exchange. Lee promised a relationship based only on quid pro quos.
What he got instead was tit for tat: harsher rhetoric and military action. Ultimately, although the North made no friends below the 38th parallel that way, the new era of hostility didn’t help the Lee administration either. South Koreans generally watched in horror as a relatively peaceful relationship veered dangerously close to military conflict.
Lee’s ruling party suffered a loss in last April’s by-elections, and in August, he replaced his hardline “unification” minister with a more conciliatory fellow. Still insisting on an apology for the Cheonan sinking and the Yeonpyeong shelling, the ruling party is nevertheless looking for ways to restore commercial ties and again provide humanitarian assistance to the North. Since the summer, representatives from North and South have met twice to discuss Pyongyang’s nuclear program. Although the two sides haven’t made substantial progress, the stage is set for the resumption of the Six Party Talks between the two Koreas, Russia, Japan, China, and the United States that broke off in 2007.
Even if the opposition party doesn’t sweep the conservatives out of power in the 2012 elections, South Korea will likely abandon Lee’s tough-guy approach. In September, his likely successor as the ruling party candidate in 2012, Park Geun-Hye, openly criticized Lee’s approach in an article in Foreign Affairs that called instead for “trustpolitik.”
One project Park singled out for mention is an inter-Korean railroad line that would “perhaps transform the Korean Peninsula into a conduit for regional trade.” That’s an understatement. Restoring the line and hooking it up to Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railroad would connect the Korean peninsula to Europe, reduce the shipment time of goods from one end of Eurasia to the other by about two weeks, and save South Korea up to $34 to $50 per ton in shipping costs. Meanwhile, the natural gas pipeline, which South Korea approved at the end of September, could reduce its gas costs by as much as 30%. For the world’s second largest natural gas importer, this would be a major savings.
Serious economic steps toward Korean reunification are not just a dream, in other words, but good business, too. Even in the worst moments of the recent period of disengagement, it’s notable that the two countries managed to preserve the Kaesong industrial complex located just north of the Demilitarized Zone. Run by South Korean managers and employing more than 45,000 North Koreans, the business zone is a boon to both sides. It helps South Korean enterprises facing competition from China, even as it provides hard currency and well-paying jobs to the North. The railroad and the pipeline would offer similar mutual benefits.
According to conventional wisdom, North Korea has a single bargaining chip, its small nuclear arsenal, which it will never give up. But a real estate agent would look at the situation differently. What North Korea really has is “location, location, location,” and it finally seems ready to cash in on its critical position at the heart of the world’s most vital economic region.
The train line would bind the world’s two biggest economic regions into a huge Eurasian market. And the pipeline, coupled with green energy projects in China, South Korea, and Japan, might begin to wean East Asia from its dependency on Middle Eastern oil and thus on the U.S. military to secure access and protect shipping routes.
Thought of another way, these projects and others like them lurking in the Eurasian future are significant not just for what they connect, but what they leave out: the United States.
Out in the Cold
The Bush administration anticipated Lee Myung Bak’s approach to North Korea by chucking the carrot and waving the stick. By 2006, however, Washington had made a U-turn and was beginning to engage Pyongyang seriously. The Obama administration took another tack, eventually adopting a policy of “strategic patience,” a euphemism for ignoring North Korea and hoping it wouldn’t throw a tantrum.
It hasn’t worked. North Korea has plunged full speed ahead with its nuclear program. The U.S./NATO air campaign against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who had given up his nuclear program to secure better relations with the West, only reinforced Pyongyang’s belief that nukes are the ultimate guarantor of its security. The Obama administration continues to insist that the regime show its seriousness about denuclearization as a precondition for resuming talks. Even though Washington recently sent a small amount of flood relief, it refuses to offer any serious food assistance. Indeed, in June, the House of Representatives passed an amendment to the agriculture bill that prohibited all food aid to the country, regardless of need.
Though the administration will likely send envoy Stephen Bosworth to North Korea later this year, no one expects major changes in policy or relations to result. With a presidential election year already looming, the Obama administration isn’t likely to spend political capital on North Korea — not when Republicans would undoubtedly label any new moves as “appeasement” of a “terrorist state.”
Obama came into office with a desire to shift U.S. policy away from its Middle Eastern focus and reassert America’s importance as a Pacific power, particularly in light of China’s growing regional influence. But the president has invested more in drones than in diplomacy, sustaining the war on terror at the expense of the sort of bolder engagement of adversaries that Obama hinted at as a candidate. In the meantime, the administration is prepared to just wait it out until the next elections are history — and by then, it might already be too late to catch up with regional developments.
After all, Washington has watched China become the top trading partner of nearly every Asian country. Similarly, the economic links between China and Taiwan have deepened considerably, a reality to which even that island’s opposition party must bow. The Obama administration’s recent decision not to upset Beijing too much by selling advanced F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan, opting instead for a mere upgrade of the F-16s it bought in the 1990s, is a clear sign of relative U.S. decline in the region, suggests big-picture analyst Robert Kaplan.
Then there’s the sheer cost of the U.S. military presence in the Pacific, which looks like a juicy target to budget cutters in Washington. Key members of Congress like Senators John McCain and Carl Levin have already signaled their anxiety about the high price tag of a planned “strategic realignment” in Asia that involves, among other things, an expansion of the U.S. military base in Guam and an upgrading of facilities in Okinawa. In response to a question about potential military cuts, new Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has confirmed that reducing U.S. troops and bases overseas is “on the table.”
The future of East Asia is hardly a given, nor is an economic boom and regional integration the only possible scenario. Virtually every country in the region has hiked its military spending. Tension points abound, particularly in potentially energy-rich waters that various countries claim as their own. China’s staggering economic growth is not likely to be sustainable in the long term. And North Korea could ultimately decide to make do as an economically destitute but adequately strong military power.
Still, the trend lines for 2012 and after point to greater engagement on the Korean peninsula, across the Taiwan Strait, and between Asia and Europe. Right now, the United States, for all of its military clout, is not really part of this emerging picture. Isn’t it time for America to gracefully acknowledge that its years as the Pacific superpower are over and think creatively about how to be a pacific partner instead?
John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, writes its regular World Beat column, and will be publishing a book on Islamophobia with City Lights Press in 2012. His past essays, including those for TomDispatch.com, can be read at his website. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Feffer discusses the 2012 election season in Asia click here, or download it to your iPod here.
Copyright 2011 John Feffer
]]>The irony is rich. By [...]]]>
The irony is rich. By association, the U.S. is on the wrong side of history in Bahrain and, more importantly, with Riyadh. Note the analysis that Askari posits: Saudi repression of the Shia in Bahrain is more about repression in its own Shia Eastern province (where there’s oil) than about the spectre of Iranian meddling. Indeed, the aggressive Saudi game plan legitimizes Iran’s regional hegemonic aspirations.
Iran has no choice but to stand up for Shia rights if it wants to play a regional role now and in the future. The Saudi misstep affords Iran the perfect invitation to take on such a role more overtly and with much more justification than in the past. What sense of justice could allow Saudi Arabia to enter into Bahrain with force, to kill peaceful Shia protestors and rob them of their basic human rights, but outlaw Iran coming to the defense of oppressed Shia?
This lays bare the depravity of the proposed Israeli-Saudi alliance nonsense – proffered by rightists in Israel and hardline neocons in the U.S. — which is bad for Israel and bad for the region. I understand Israel’s attraction to counter-revolutionary forces, inspired by vestiges of the notion that autocracies are actually stable and viable in the long term. And, of course, Saudi’s hostility toward Iran and indifference about the Palestinians must also be attractive. But it’s a Faustian bargain for a state which we are constantly reminded is the only liberal Western democracy in the region.
It also goes a long way toward showing that, if the people of Iran matter at all, the U.S. shouldn’t be giving a hoot what either the Israelis or the Saudis have to say about the Islamic Republic. Both U.S. allies have been exposed as caring little for democracy in the region. Perhaps, as Askari recommends, at this critical juncture in Middle Eastern history, the U.S. should be putting some pressure on Saudi Arabia itself.
]]>According to the Associated Press, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said yesterday in Europe that his country wouldn’t take part [...]]]>
According to the Associated Press, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said yesterday in Europe that his country wouldn’t take part in more sanctions aimed solely at crippling Iran’s broader economy.
What’s more, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov swore off the “threat of” and the “use of force” as “effective tool(s)” against Iran.
So much for a new coalition of the willing. If the U.S. or Israel decides to go after Iran militarily, it will be like Iraq — a unilateral move largely considered illegal by the international community. Without Russia, you can count UN support unequivocally out of the question.
From the AP report, via MSNBC (my emphasis):
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that “any new proposals … would basically be aimed at suffocating the Iranian economy.”
He said that “was not part of the agreement” when the U.N. Security Council’s five permanent members and Germany started trying to allay doubts over Iran’s nuclear intentions with a combination of incentives and pressure.
Lavrov argued that the Istanbul meeting was “not a total failure.” And Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov also insisted that there is “very limited and fragile progress,” while emphasizing that Russia was against a nuclear-armed Iran.
“There is no alternative to further talks,” Ivanov said at a security conference in Munich. “We believe that neither stronger sanctions nor the threat of or, more than that, the use of force can be considered as an effective tool.”
(Hat tip to Dr. Walter Posch of SWP, a research institute in Berlin.)
]]>Mubarak is clearly backed by the Americans. He took some moves after speaking with Obama and a visit by a former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Frank Wisner (sp.?).
Mubarak, the army, the Americans and the Israelis are clearly on one side. That’s one camp. [...]]]>
Mubarak is clearly backed by the Americans. He took some moves after speaking with Obama and a visit by a former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Frank Wisner (sp.?).
Mubarak, the army, the Americans and the Israelis are clearly on one side. That’s one camp. The people of Egypt (most of them now) are the other.
The Americans want Mubarak to stay on for longer while they look for a suitable successor that would be best for U.S. interests.
Mubarak’s tactic is to make Egyptians choose between “security”, that he supposedly provided over the past thirty years, or insecurity, vandalism, and chaos that he also is also providing now.
Mubarak, with the backing of his secret police force the Amn Dawla, is punishing the society in general for going out against him. Right now, there’s a battle going on by police officers and Mubarak supporters, many of them work for businessmen allied with the regime, and the protesters who are calling for his ouster.
His punishment for the people also includes blocking off roads, essentially making the cost of transportation much higher now. That translates as higher food prices and shortages of literally almost everything.
We had a huge dose of insecurity over the past few days. I had to take my own family out of Cairo after constant gun shots all night long in the city of 6th October which is some 30 kilometers south-east of Cairo.
This will backfire. Some people got scared which means the fear tactic he used over the past 30 years worked again. But many too have turned even further against him. His tactics are clearly so low and some say even “devious”. There will be lots of blood. But the word I hear is that is going to be worth it. Egyptians will be liberated not just from Mubarak but his backers as well.
The U.S. looks set to lose another country in the Middle East for backing Mubarak and trying to buy more time to get another of their men in power.
]]>Slow-building [...]]]>
Slow-building protests started out with diverse crowds, including children
From the morning on, the number of protesters was increasing by the hour. Immediately after Friday morning Prayers at Sixth of October City, a suburb of Cairo, 3,000 people were out in the streets. By afternoon prayers, the number doubled. In the crowd there were many women, some with kids in tow.
The crowd appeared to traverse social lines, from people wearing the garb of door-guards to middle-class and affluent people. Even school girls were out.
I took it as a sign that people really want change when they risk taking their children out. But when things got out of hand, a lot of people pulled their kids out of protests.
Also soon after clashes started, residents began stocking up on food, and in the main area of Cairo, shops were closing their doors. People were unable to get around in cars.
Only the protesters, the police, and the army were left on the streets.
Of course, I got hungry. I stopped at a state-run bread distribution center and I jokingly asked the woman selling bread why she wasn’t protesting. She asked how many people were out, and I said about 4,000 so far. She said she’s waiting for more people. She’s technically a government employee.
In downtown Cairo, people in their homes and apartments looking out from their balconies and windows were throwing food and water to the protesters. Protesters were even allowed to go and make landline calls and go back down to the streets (mobile service is down in many areas and for many different services). This is in downtown Cairo, some of it in affluent areas. People would just open their doors to let people in.
Protesters going after symbols of the government
Before I went to Cairo, I was near the protest from a nearby main mosque. They were marching down and singing songs like ‘down with Mubarak.’ On the way, there was a police station. Some protesters tried to get in, but didn’t initially throw stones.
These are the symbols people are focusing on now: pictures of Mubarak, police stations, and NDP offices.
I don’t think there’s sympathy for the government — though people are worried about what’s next and whether things will get out of control.
The protesters are not looking outward at all and not mentioning Israel or the U.S.
They are concerned about better lives in Egypt. There were no religious slogans except for “alluhah akbar,” which is also a general expression of celebration.
Army presence in streets, perhaps military intelligence
The branch of the Army that came to downtown Cario to protect the (state-run) TV and Radio building were from the Republican guard, which is the presidential guard.
There were reports of tanks around the U.S. and other embassies, protecting those diplomatic installations.
There were cars around the city in strategic areas with tinted windows. It’s illegal for civilians in Egypt to have tinted windows. Usually, these cars are some kind of military intelligence.
There also appeared to be a communications tower being set up downtown (for police to communicate). But this sort of activity is usually conducted by the military.
Government blames the Muslim Brotherhood
Basically, what the government was trying to do was say that it was the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) behind the unrest, but most of the leadership of the MB was arrested ahead of the protest.
Instead of having senior officials from Mubarak’s party come out and say its the Muslim Brotherhood, a parade of low-ranking governemnt officials came out and said the MB did this. They were blaming the Brotherhood for the “riots,” and for fires.
Unsubstantiated rumors flew that the government itself had set fires in order to blame the MB. People noted that it took nearly four hours for firetrucks to come and fight the fires; they guessed that the authorities could have easily called in services.
Communication breakdown
At home, people were watching satellite broadcasts like Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and even Al Hurra, the U.S. government-funded station, which all had good coverage.
Most forms of communicating out are down or suppressed. There is still no Internet service, and mobile phone services are still down. [Mekay was unable to dial the U.S. from his landline.]
People are complaining that landlines are often busy, too. People are phoning into Egypt in terror, trying to call their families.
The authorities cracking down and cutting all communications really infuriated everyone. It was a sign that they might be losing control.
Nervous excitement
When I came back here, there were some intellectuals who were blaming Mubarak for what’s happening.
Everybody’s nervous; you might hear it in my voice. I don’t know if it’s just excitement, but things are boiling. It’s scary in a way, too, because I personally don’t know what’s going to happen next.
There are reports on satellite television of two more protesters dead in Mansour, a city in the northeast Nile River Delta. Al Jazeera just reported that in the main city on the Suez, 11 people died today, on top of the three others that have died in recent days.
The government may react more violently.
]]>Incredibly well connected in Iran, Majd is one of the country’s most astute analysts and a great story [...]]]>
Incredibly well connected in Iran, Majd is one of the country’s most astute analysts and a great story teller.
For the last question of their chat, Aslan asks Majd what he thinks Iran will be like in five years. Majd delivers a nuanced answer, as both the current situation and Aslan’s question demand. His answer contains many lessons for U.S. policy-makers, shedding light on why Majd is an important voice on this issue outside the Washington bubble. Here’s the full video, with the transcript of Majd’s last answer (my emphasis):
I think it can go either way. It depends on what happens outside Iran, almost as much as what happens inside Iran. When I was last in Iran about five months ago, there was a lot of despondency among the youth, and people trying to emigrate and trying to leave. Not because of an imminent threat to them, but just because they feel like they lost. That’s why people say the Green movement is over, because they feel like they’ve lost this battle.
I don’t think the regime in Iran is particularly unhappy about those kinds of people leaving. I think they feel that they have enough support by their case that they can manage the system.
I think if the United States in particular puts the kind of pressure they are putting on Iran right now — including sanctions for human rights and things like that — they kind of tend to unite the country more than divide it. Even people in the Green movement in Iran — the leadership anyway — have been against sanctions like this because it gives the hard-liners every excuse to crackdown on them.
Five years from now, if you saw what’s happening today with relations between the U.S. and Iran — the threat of war, what’s happening with Israel — I don’t think you’ll see much of a change. We’d see the democratic process stalled; I don’t think we’ll see much progress.
[...] It’s all speculation. And I do think we play a big role in this. I think we play a bigger role than we thing in terms of being able to foster this democratic movement.
I’ve always said, Reza, that if we can resolve this nuclear issue with Iran — no matter how much we hate Ahmadinejad, no matter we dislike this regime — if we can solve this, it gives these guys in Iran a little breathing room so that they’re no longer accused of being on the other side. And it would also force Ahmadinejad and his government to face up to the problems that they have in Iran. Every time something happens, (Ahmadinejad) can point to the nuclear issue and say, ‘Well, we have to be united against them. Sanctions against us; they’re threatening war.’ And it’s impossible for these Green guys to get a break, because every time they want to say something, it gets overshadowed by this pressure from Israel and pressure from the United States.
I’m hopeful that the nuclear issue can be solved in five years, and if it can, you’ll see a lot more change in Iran.
Mostly raised in the West, Majd brings a quasi-outsider’s eye to the Islamic Republic (read my review of his latest book here).
While his Western sensibilities allow Majd to explain Iranian complexities so well to a U.S. audience, one of his greatest assets may be that he’s an outsider here, too: the man has little or nothing to do with the narrow, agenda-driven dialogue in Washington. Coming to writing and journalism late in his career, Majd is a quintessential Washington outsider (though don’t expect him anytime soon on a Tea Party ticket). He thinks outside the Washington box, which allows him to spend most of his time in the real world.
As I wrote, check out his book.
]]>For those who lament the utter lack of any compelling television discussion about foreign policy, particularly about U.S.-Iran relations, there was actually a very engaging conversation yesterday on MSNBC.
On the Dylan Ratigan Show, a midday program on the cable news channel MSNBC, neocon Cliff May of the [...]]]>
For those who lament the utter lack of any compelling television discussion about foreign policy, particularly about U.S.-Iran relations, there was actually a very engaging conversation yesterday on MSNBC.
On the Dylan Ratigan Show, a midday program on the cable news channel MSNBC, neocon Cliff May of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies debated Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald. The discussion was heated throughout, but picks up at about five and half minutes in, when May accused Ratigan of being anti-American. Then the discussion really dug into the actual threat posed by Iran to the U.S. — “Uncooperative, for sure, but just how dangerous are they?” asked Ratigan to kick off the discussion.
Check it out here (or here on Greenwald’s site), or watch the clip:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Ratigan asserted that Iran is not a threat and May, for the second time, said that Iranians chant “Death to America.” Greenwald made two great points here: 1) That Iran sees the U.S. and Israel’s bellicose rhetoric against the Islamic Republic, and sees occupying U.S. armies to its East and West; and that 2) one need only glance at newspapers to see that America and Israel have launched numerous wars of aggression in recent decades, whereas to find an unprovoked Iranian attack on another country, one must go back centuries.
May, upon being accused of being a “warmonger,” asks: “How am I war mongering when I support President Obama and the sanctions, which is a way to peacefully…”
Greenwald interrupted: “What if the sanctions fail? Do you think the U.S. should attack Iran to stop its nuclear weapons program?”
May: “I think we have a big problem if the sanctions fail…”
Greenwald cut him off, and they went back and forth. “Why can’t you answer that?”
May responded: “I think we should…”
Then Greenwald came back: “You think we should. Exactly. That’s what makes you a war monger. You want to attack Iran even though they’re not attacking us, just like you wanted to attack Iraq even though they didn’t attack us. That’s what a war monger is: someone who wants to launch aggressive wars.”
May came back again with the Iranian slogan, “Death to America.”
“That’s all you got?” Ratigan asked, exacerbated, saying its “stick and stones.”
“You sound like a six-year-old,” Greenwald piled on.
May again restated the threat of slogans, citing the U.S. and Israel. “That may not concern you, you may think that’s not a problem. But happily most Americans watching Ahmadinejad on TV understand that.”
Actually, “most Americans” don’t. As I wrote last week on the big, new Chicago Council poll on American opinions about foreign policy:
[O]nly 18 percent of respondents think the U.S. should launch a military strike on Iranian nuclear targets now. Even if diplomacy and sanctions fail to stop Iranian advancement toward a bomb, a slim plurality still think the U.S. should not bomb Iran (49 percent oppose it, 47 would support it).
The conversation overall was the sort of frank discussion we don’t see enough of on television: two impassioned figures on each side of a debate — a real progressive and a neoconservative, no less — and a host who takes sides with reason instead of with a misplaced notion of “balance” or “equal time.”
Update: MJ Rosenberg, a long-time insider and observer of Middle East affairs in D.C., gives his take on the Greenwald vs. May debate. In his Friday newsletter, which has been running more than a decade, Rosenberg places May’s hawkish position in the context of an uptick in chatter about bombing Iran. From the Political Corrections website, a project of Media Matters Action Network, where Rosenberg is a senior foreign policy fellow:
]]>Greenwald opposes confrontation with Iran and believes the case for war is utterly phony. May is a war hawk on Iran, as he was on Iraq. (He also supports any and all Israeli military actions.)
May is kicking off the fall campaign to get America to support an Israeli attack on Iran. Of course, an Israeli attack would be viewed by the entire Muslim world as a US attack and would, as our military warns, endanger US forces throughout the region.
The “Bomb Iran” campaign is just beginning. If President Obama does not stand firm, May and his friends may win the day as they did in 2003.