In the world of diplomacy you often never know what is the truth until historians have a chance to study the actual documents, records etc. Recently I reported Sec. of Defense, Gates, made a speech warning Israel, attacking Iran would not be welcomed. Was this meant to send a signal to Iran prior to Obama's meeting with them or was this truly intended for Israel and was a message from Obama through Gates etc?
Now we have a report suggesting Israel may feel compelled to attack Iran. Is this more propaganda strategy intended to shape the outcome of Iran's upcoming elections, put pressure on Obama as a response to his 'alleged' warning to Israel or is this just "musing" out loud and/or in print?
Is this an attempt by the Administration to cover itself while winking at Israel and then, should Israel attack, Israel again becomes the fall guy for doing the West's bidding but also something the Saudis and other Middle East rulers quietly support as they too fear Iran?
I have repeatedly written, if Obama forces Israel into a corner, Israel will have no choice but to attack and from everything Obama has been doing, including bowing to the Saudi ruler, has he actually caused Israel to feel increasingly abandoned? Obama may have hosted the first Seder at the White House but the real question is does he have "Matzah Balls" or steel ones or does it matter?
Is Obama building a strategy that encompasses Israel's legitimate concerns and will he have the time and the ability to do so before Iran's nuclear baby leaves its pen?(See 1, 1a, and 1b below.)
Keinon offers a thoughtful and sobering analysis of all of this and takes a different tack. (See 2 below.)
And, Glick writes about the Pakistan dilemma. (See 3 below.)
More regarding Iran and Pakistan's 'strange' relationship. (See 4 below.)
I recently attended a lecture by a professor from a small Ohio College who expressed his views on the effect of "The Surge" and what would be the aftermath. He concluded, regardless of Obama's campaign rhetoric, in order to avoid a calamity we would have troops staioned in Iraq for an entire generation and he reminded the audience we have far flung troops stationed in Germany, S Korea and elwhere and they have been deployed for decades. The professor said eventually Obama must tell Americans the truth about this.(See 5 below.)
Obama - right man at wrong time? asks Charles Mooore. (See 6 below.)
Mark Steyn supports my thinking regarding the "Tax" protests. (See 7 below.)
Ralph Peters writes about his concerns. (See 8 below.)
George Jonas, sees Carter's ghost and has second thoughts about relying upon politicians when they speak because he assumed they always lie but then, to his dismay, realizes on occasion they actually tell the truth. (See 9 below.)
David Horowitz tells us what we should already know - free speech is dead because student Leftists buried it a long time ago. Rather than debate they trample. (See 10 below.)
Al Franken may be a clown but he knows how to manipulate Minnesota's Judicial System and steal an election. (See 11 below.)
Have a great weekend.
Dick
1)Obama's charm offensive for radical rulers abandons Israel to Iranian threat
The new US president's dramatic global policy shifts have easily dwarfed the knotty Israeli-Palestinian peace issue handed down from one US president to the next over decades. Barack Obama's outstretched hand to Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Iran's best friend in the Americas, on April 17, at the summit of American leaders in Port of Prince, made the talk surrounding Special Middle East Envoy George Mitchell's mission to Jerusalem and Ramallah this week sound eerily like voices from the past.
After talking to Mitchell, Israel's prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and defense minister Ehud Barak tried the usual bromides: They protested that Jerusalem's ties with Washington and Jerusalem were as strong as ever and they would work together toward an agreed solution for the Palestinian problem.
But those words were lost in the black Iranian cloud hanging over the relations.
Barack Obama has set his sights and heart on friendship with the rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran and their radical allies. The name and policies of the occupant of the prime minister's office in Jerusalem do not matter - any more than Tehran's determination to complete its nuclear weapons program in defiance of the world, or even its first A-bomb test in a year or two, for which intelligence sources report Tehran is already getting set.
Washington may believe it can live with a nuclear-armed Iran – a decision probably taken first under the Bush presidency. But Israel cannot, and may have no option but to part ways with the Obama administration on this point. As a nuclear power, Iran will be able to bend Jerusalem to the will of its enemies: Israel will be forced to unconditionally give Syria the Golan plus extra pieces of territory; tamely accept a Hamas-dominated Palestinian West Bank luring over its heartland and let the Lebanese Hizballah terrorize Galilee in the north at will. All three will make hay under Iran's nuclear shield.
Israel will be stripped of most of its defenses against a radical Islamic Republic anointed by Washington as the reigning regional power and dedicated to its destruction.
Israel is not the only country in peril.
Unlike Israel, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt has stuck his neck out, backed quietly by Saudi Arabia, as the only Middle East ruler to stand up to the threat Iran poses to the region directly and through its surrogate, Hizballah. He is openly critical of Washington's courtship of the revolutionary Islamic republic.
Cairo's Al Ahram Saturday, April 18, accused Iran, Syria, Qatar, Hizballah, Hamas, al Jazeera TV of a conspiracy to overthrow Egyptian government.
The US president is not daunted by the radicalism or enmity of his new friends. At the Summit of All Americas, Obama greeted Hugo Chavez first, 24 hours after the Venezuelan ruler said: "The United States empire is on its way down and it will be finished in the near future, inshallah!"
Using the Muslim blessing to underline the wish for America's downfall was no bar to the smile and handshake, any more than Chavez's close personal and political bond with Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Both have called US leaders devils; the latter has sworn to "wipe Israel off the map."
The Venezuelan ruler recently severed its ties with Israel for no provocation and will host a delegation of Hizballah (internationally branded a terrorist organization) in Caracas.
The only point relevant to President Obama is that Hugo Chavez is co-architect of the joint Russian-Iranian campaign to displace American influence in the southern hemisphere. The US president has opted for winning America's enemies over with smiles and embraces rather than punishing them like George W. Bush.
Syria is another object of Obama's charm offensive for extremists regardless of Bashar Assad's blunt statement Friday, April 17, to the pro-Hizballah Lebanese publication al Akhbar that Damascus will not loosen its strategic ties with Tehran or stop supporting the Lebanese Shiite group [with arms] because Hizballah is dedicated to fighting Israel.
For the first time in years, the administration this week sent a high-ranking delegation to Syria's independence day celebrations at Washington's Mandarin Oriental Hotel, headed by Jeffrey Feltman, former ambassador and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs.
The thaw in relations has gone so far that some Washington wags are calling Assad's capital "Syria on the Potomac."
The American storm besetting the Middle East is leaving Israel's most vital interests way behind, so that the condition Netanyahu put before Mitchell for progress in peacemaking - that Israel be recognized as a Jewish state, instantly rejected by Palestinian Authority leaders – aroused scant attention in Washington or anywhere else. The Israeli government's claim that it needed a few weeks to review its policies was taken as a bid to buy time.
Even if the Israeli prime minister should suddenly turn around and line up with Obama's quest for a Palestinian state alongside Israel and the 2007 Annapolis declaration, and freeze construction in the West Bank and Jerusalem, the US president would not digress from his course.
As Netanyahu will find when he meets Obama in Washington early next month, Israel is no longer a prime factor in US global policy because America's Middle East allegiances and alliances have been fundamentally reshuffled. Even Tzipi Livni at the helm in Jerusalem would not divert Obama from his détente with Ahmadinejad, Assad and Chavez.
To gain points with these new friends, Obama's White House is not above nudging Israel to please them. This week, his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told Jewish leaders whom he met in Washington that if Israel wants America's help for thwarting Iran's nuclear program, it must first start evacuating West Bank settlements.
This was of course cynical claptrap.
Even if every single settlement were to be removed, the Obama administration would not help Israel strike Iran's nuclear facilities because this would interfere with its drive for friends in the anti-American radical camp.
After ceding Tehran's uranium enrichment program (and therefore its drive for nuclear arms), Washington would have to forcefully oppose Israeli military action against Iran for the sake of consistency.
US defense secretary Robert Gates made no bones about the administration's total opposition to any Israeli military action. He went to almost absurd lengths this week to play down the Iranian nuclear threat and Israel's ability to handle it.
So what options are left to Israel at this juncture?
1. To bow under the Obama tempest until it blows over, in keeping with the old proverb which says that the trees bowing in the wind remain standing. The question is will Israel's trees still be standing when the storm has passed and, if so, in what strategic environment?
2. To follow the example set by Likud's first prime minister Menahem Begin in 1981. He stood up to Ronald Reagan's fierce objections and sent the Israeli Air force to smash the Iraqi nuclear reactor before it was operational, which Saddam Hussein never rebuilt. By following in Begin's footsteps before it is too late, Netanyahu would change the rules of the game regionally and globally.
(The London Times reported from Jerusalem Saturday that the Israeli military is preparing itself to launch a massive aerial assault on Iran's nuclear facilities within days of being given the go-ahead by its new government. Two civil defense drills have been scheduled to prepare the population for missiles that could fall on any part of the country without warning.)
3. Israel could go for a more modest target, one of Iran's faithful surrogates – Syria or Hizballah – to warn Washington that a larger operation is in store for their boss. If the Gaza offensive against Hamas last January was meant to send this message, it failed. Hamas is still the dominant Palestinian power and Barack Obama was not diverted from forging ahead with his policies of rapprochement with Iran and other radical world leaders.
1a) 'IDF eyes attack on Iran within hours of green light'
The London Times online edition reported on Saturday that the Israel Defense Force was making preparations to be able to launch a massive aerial assault on Iran's nuclear facilities within days of being given the go-ahead by Israel's government.
"Israel wants to know that if its forces were given the green light they could strike at Iran in a matter of days, even hours. They are making preparations on every level for this eventuality. The message to Iran is that the threat is not just words," one senior Israeli defense official told The Times.
The report comes just as the United States voices willingness to launch a dialogue with Iran, to discuss, among other things, the Islamic Republic's controversial nuclear program.
The London Times report appears to be an Israeli message to Iran conveying its capability and readiness to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons.
The report includes a nation-wide home front drill, scheduled for June, among what it calls Israel's intensive preparations for the possibility of an attack, aiming to prepare Israel's civilians for the possible consequences of an attack on Iran.
"We would not make the threat [against Iran] without the force to back it. There has been a recent move, a number of on-the-ground preparations, that indicate Israel's willingness to act," another official from Israel's intelligence community told the Times.
He added that it was unlikely that Israel would carry out the attack without receiving at least tacit approval from America, which has struck a more reconciliatory tone in dealing with Iran under its new administration.
Last Saturday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that Iran now controls the entire cycle for producing nuclear fuel with the opening of a new facility to produce uranium pellets.
Ahmadinejad has announced several times in the past that Iran has the knowledge necessary to enrich uranium ore into fuel pellets, but with the opening of the new facility, the Islamic republic says it now has the
capability.
Tehran maintains that its nuclear ambitions are limited to peaceful ends, but the international community fears that the Islamic republic aims to build nuclear weapons.
1b) Yossi Melman: I would advise Netanyahu to attack Iran
If I were Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's national security adviser, I
would advise attacking Iran. It doesn't have to happen immediately. Although
Iran has crossed the "technological threshold" and already has most of the
know-how, the equipment and the materials to enable it to create a nuclear
bomb, it will take anther year at least, and maybe even three, to implement
the potential and the capability it has accumulated.
In any case, Israel must wait in order to not disrupt U.S. President Barack
Obama's strategy of talking to Iran, a strategy that is destined to fail.
These are the main considerations that should determine whether or not to
attack:
1. Would nuclear weapons in Iranian hands really constitute a clear and
present danger to the existence of Israel?
2. Does Israel have the intelligence and operational capability to enable it
to strike hard at Iran's nuclear sites?
3. What damage would be caused to Israel by an Iranian response?
4. Would an Israeli attack harm vital U.S. interests?
5. How would the Arab world react to such an attack?
As an adviser, here are my answers.
1. It is not certain that nuclear bombs in Iranian hands would necessarily
constitute an existential threat to Israel. The Gulf states, such as
Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, should be more afraid than Israel, and in
fact they are extremely worried. It is also difficult to imagine that the
ayatollahs would use nuclear weapons. Such a use would not only eradicate
the nation being attacked, it would also destroy the regime of the religious
leaders as well as the lives of millions of people in Iran. But Israel will
still have difficulty trusting in the rationalism of Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Ayatollah Ali Khomanei.
2. Israel has the military ability to cause serious damage to the Iranian
nuclear program, to hit the nerve centers of production: the uranium
enrichment facility in Natanz, the uranium conversion facility in Isfahan
and several additional sites where they are working on assembling the bomb.
Such as attack would delay Iran's nuclear capability by several years, but
would not destroy it entirely.
3. Iran has about 100 missiles that can reach Israel, and would also
activate Hezbollah and its terror networks worldwide. But in spite of its
technological achievements, Iran is a backward country, burdened with the
problems of prostitution, drugs, poverty, ignorance and above all,
corruption. It is doubtful whether a country that is riddled with rot is
capable of maintaining a strong and efficient army. Iran is a paper tiger.
4. An attack that is not coordinated with Washington would cause a deep rift
with the United States and lead to the imposition of harsh sanctions against
Israel.
5. The Arab and Muslim world would condemn Israel.
Ostensibly, the obvious conclusion from these answers is that an attack
against Iran is too great a gamble, one that the Israeli leadership should
not take. That is also the reigning opinion among senior members of the
Obama administration - from Vice President Joe Biden to Defense Secretary
Robert Gates, who recently spoke on the subject - and most U.S. experts.
An exception to this group thinking can be found in words written recently
by editor David Samuels in the online magazine Slate, in an article
entitled, "Why Israel will bomb Iran." The essence of his assumptions, which
favor attack, are as follows: Israel's special status in the United States
stems not only from common cultural values and the Christian belief in the
Holy Land and from the memory of the horrors of the Holocaust, but also, and
primarily, from Israel's image as the lone ranger who fights the bad guys in
the Wild West of the Middle East, in order to defend its existence. Recently
there have been cracks in this image due to what are seen as Israel's
failures in the most recent campaigns against Hezbollah and Hamas. In
Samuels' opinion, Israeli weakness is undermining strategic cooperation with
the United States, while Iran is trying to achieve regional hegemony.
According to Samuels, while an Israeli attack may serve American interests,
it will force the Obama administration to behave as though those interests
have actually been harmed. The angry Arab and Muslim world will always
suspect that Washington was a secret partner and gave Israel the green light
to attack. In order to assuage Arab Muslim anger, the United States will
have to force Israel to withdraw from the territories and enable the
establishment of a Palestinian state.
Therefore, a good adviser must tell Netanyahu: Don't wait until they force
you to do something you don't want to do. Preempt it. An attack on Iran is a
window of opportunity that could not only remove the nuclear threat, but
also restore Israel's status as a regional superpower and its image as crazy
and unpredictable and a state which will stop at nothing.
The truth is that such an attack serves the interests of the United States,
the West and the Arab world, but they would find it difficult to admit it
and would be forced to respond harshly to an Israeli offensive. Therefore,
if I were the national security adviser, I would explain to the prime
minister than an attack alone, even if it succeeds, would not serve Israel's
true national interests.
In order to implement a strategic breakthrough, the Israeli government will
have to orchestrate a formative historic event. It must agree to the
establishment of a Palestinian state and operate at a feverish pace to that
end. In such a case, not only would the United States and the pro-Western
Sunni Arab world accept the attack on their Shi'ite rival, they would even
welcome it, thus making it possible to pave the way to more peace agreements
with Arab nations, security arangements a strategic alliance based on common
interests.
2) Diplomacy: Rounding up the anti-Iranian posse
By Herb Keinon
Former US President George W. Bush was often criticized for acting as the world's sheriff: bringing his form of justice to the range with his pistols a-blazing, and the hell with what anyone else thought.
New US President Barack Obama has made it clear that his is a much different style. Not cut in the lone, solitary sheriff mold, Obama favors the posse method: organize a group of people to go after the prey.
Make no mistake about it, for both Bush and Obama, the prey remains the same: Iran. What has changed dramatically is how to go about capturing it, and it is through this prism that the visit of US special envoy George Mitchell this week must be seen.
While the overall Obama foreign policy game plan is still being formulated, certain trends have definitely emerged. The first is that the new president's number one priority is the economy, and the economy is intricately linked with foreign policy, because US leverage, strength and prestige overseas flow largely from its economy. A strong dollar means more foreign policy clout abroad; a weak dollar, less US influence.
Secondly, the focus of Obama's foreign policy is currently on Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan - and Iran. This, however, does not mean that he has forgotten the Israeli-Arab conflict. Mitchell's visit is testimony that he has not. It's just that our conflict is now a tool to be used in trying to deal with the other - bigger - problems, primarily Iran.
Obama's way of dealing with Iran, as is his way of dealing with the economy, is by building coalitions. The new president is the Great Coalition Builder, or at least he's trying to be. He wants to build a coalition around Iran that will include the US, Europe, Russia, China, the Arab countries and Israel.
That is a lot of variegated parties to put under one net, and in order to get the Arab countries involved, he will be asking Israel to do what it can to get them to join in.
The expectation in Jerusalem is that the new US administration will ask Israel to toe the line. For instance, if the Sunni Arab countries, more petrified right now of Iran than of Israel, make the Arab peace initiative a condition for entering into this grand coalition, then Israel will be asked to look at it favorably.
In other words, what Obama is saying to Israel is, "I am putting together a broad global coalition that wants to make peace in the Middle East and stop the Iranians. What is your contribution?"
AND IT is clear to a certain degree what the administration wants Israel to contribute. It wants the government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to show signs that it will remove settlement outposts and tamp down settlement construction, particularly beyond the security barriers.
It also wants Israel to simply "not rock the boat," to keep a low profile. Although this seems something that should be relatively easy for Netanyahu to do, much easier - for instance - than removing some settlement outposts, it isn't, considering that one of his key coalition partners, and his foreign minister, is Avigdor Lieberman, not exactly a low-profile guy.
Lieberman has already shown, during his maiden address at the Foreign Ministry earlier this month, that he has no plans to be a shrinking violet. The US expectation is for Netanyahu to keep his foreign minister in line.
Indeed, trying to figure out what, and how much, Israel can contribute to cobbling together the US coalition against Iran is part of what the Netanyahu team is working on right now, as it engages in its "policy review."
Government sources said recently that it is likely that Netanyahu, currently going over all elements of Israel's relationship with the Palestinians, including the status of the road map and what was agreed upon in the negotiations between the Olmert government and the PA, will come up with some of his own diplomatic initiatives to take to Washington for his first meeting with Obama sometime in May.
Netanyahu's apparent interest in drawing up an initiative of his own seems influenced by the experience of former prime minister Ariel Sharon, who, to a large extent, came out with the disengagement plan to counter other initiatives that were on the table at the time, including the Saudi peace initiative of 2002 and the Geneva initiative.
"When Sharon saw the Arab peace plan, and the Geneva initiative, he said he had to come up with his own initiative," said Sharon's former spokesman, Ra'anan Gissin. "That was one of the driving forces to the disengagement. He said that sooner or later the US was going to ask what Israel had to propose."
DESPITE THE wishes of some, Mitchell - according to assessments in Jerusalem - did not come to town this week to read Israel the riot act.
Both the new US administration and the new Israeli government are smart enough to realize that it is in neither party's interest to have a face-to-face confrontation. Besides, one source close to Netanyahu asked, what exactly are they going to fight about right now?
Outside of very broad outlines, no one yet knows for sure what the Netanyahu diplomatic program will look like. Sure, Lieberman said in his speech at the Foreign Ministry that the country was not obligated by the Annapolis process, but in the same breath he also said it was committed to the road map that calls for a two-state solution.
Netanyahu, for his part, has been exceedingly careful not to say anything at all publicly about his diplomatic ideas, beyond painting general strokes in his Knesset inaugural address.
That address should be considered carefully.
"My Government," Netanyahu said, "will act vis-à-vis the Palestinian Authority to achieve peace on three parallel tracks: economic, security and political. We strive to assist with the accelerated development of the Palestinian economy and in developing its economic ties with Israel. We will support a Palestinian security mechanism that will fight terror, and we will conduct ongoing peace negotiations with the PA, with the aim of reaching a final status arrangement.
"We have no desire to control another people; we have no wish to rule over the Palestinians. In the final status arrangement, the Palestinians will have all the authority needed to govern themselves, except those which threaten the existence and security of the State of Israel. This track - combining the economic, security and political - is the right way to achieve peace. All previous attempts to make shortcuts have achieved the opposite outcome and resulted in increased terror and greater bloodshed. We choose a realistic path, positive in approach and with a genuine desire to bring an end to the conflict between us and our neighbors."
Where, exactly, in that address are the "fighting words" with the US? What exactly in those comments, again a very broad outline, will tempt the US - as some are suggesting - to reassess its ties with Israel?
Some are dying to see such a reassessment, and would love to see heavy pressure on Israel. For instance, Harvard University's Stephen Walt, co-author of the damning book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, penned for the readers of the Foreign Policy magazine Web site, a "user's guide" for putting pressure on Israel, from "changing the rhetoric," to "supporting a UN resolution condemning the Occupation," to "reducing US purchases of Israeli military equipment."
But just because Walt - and a number of others with a high media profile - wish it, does not necessarily make it US foreign policy.
NETANYAHU UNDERSTANDS the need to work together with the US government, and will look for a way to do so. Ways will be explored to find a formula to bridge the Obama administration's belief in a two-state solution, and the Netanyahu vision that seems to be of a Palestinian state-minus, meaning a state that will be demilitarized, not be able to form treaties with countries like Iran, and not have complete control over its own air-space, water or electromagnetic spectrum.
Will it be easy? Obviously not. But will it mean a reassessment of US ties toward Israel, of the kind that some like Walt seem to be advocating? Also, obviously not.
When then US president Gerald Ford and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger broached a reassessment of ties in 1975, the relationship between the two countries was much, much different. The ties have flourished and become much more intimate, close and intertwined over the last third of a century. Israel and the US are coming off of 16 years of very close ties, through both the Clinton and Bush administrations, and there is a Congress and public opinion that is extremely favorable.
A Gallup Poll taken in April 1975, the year of the Ford-Kissinger threat of a reassessment, asked Americans where their sympathies lay - with Israel or the Arab states? At that time, 37 percent said Israel, and 8% went with the Arab states, a 29-point differential.
A similar poll taken in February, after Operation Cast Lead, found that 59% of Americans said their sympathies were more with Israel, and 18% said their sympathies were with the Palestinians, a 41-point difference.
That strong pro-Israeli sentiment, a sentiment even more strongly reflected in Congress, is not the type of attitude that gives birth to - as some fear, and others hope for - an administration that will advocate a policy of pushing Israel against the wall. And, by the way, three months into the Obama administration, there is no real indication, outside of noise in the media, that pushing Israel to the wall is where this administration wants to go. Disagreements over some issues should not be confused with a collision course.
3) The Pakistani dilemma
By Caroline B. Glick
In the current era of ideological polarization, throughout the West, the Right and the Left diverge on almost every issue. One of the few convictions that still unifies national security strategists across the ideological spectrum is that it would be a global calamity of the first order if al Qaida gets its hands on nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, due to the rapid demise of nuclear-armed Pakistan as a coherent political unit, this nightmare scenario is looking more possible than ever. Indeed, if events continue to move in their current direction, it is more likely than not that in the near future, the Taliban and al Qaida will take possession of all or parts of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.
This week has been yet another bad week in Pakistan. On Monday Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari officially surrendered the Swat Valley — an immense district in Northwest Pakistan that encompasses seven provinces — to the Taliban when he signed a regulation implementing Islamic Sharia law in the area. Following the government's capitulation in Swat, the Taliban now controls eighteen out of Pakistan's thirty provinces in its northwest and Federally Administered Tribal Areas that border Afghanistan. Only two provinces remain under full government control.
With its new territory, the Taliban now controls the lives of some 6.5 million Pakistanis. For their part, the civilians live in a state of constant terror. Since the Taliban took control of Swat in February, executions, public floggings, bombings of girls' schools, restaurants, video and music stores have become routine occurrences. As a merchant in Swat's main village of Mingora told the Wall Street Journal, "We are frightened by this brutality. No one can dare to challenge them."
And with just sixty miles now separating the Taliban from the capital city of Islamabad, the Taliban are well positioned to continue their march across the country. Indeed, the Taliban appear unstoppable.
The Pakistani government, for its part, seems both unwilling and incapable of taking concerted action to destroy Taliban forces. Again according to the Wall Street Journal, Taliban fighters are flooding the Swat Valley with thousands of veteran fighters from Afghanistan and Kashmir and setting up training camps throughout the areas. Moreover, they are recruiting — both through intimidation and persuasion — still more thousands of locals to join their lines.
A further sign of government capitulation came on Tuesday when Pakistan's Supreme Court released Maulana Abdul Aziz, the leader of the Lal Masjid or Red Mosque in Islamabad from house arrest. In 2007 Aziz used his al Qaida/Taliban affiliated madrassa to incite an Islamist takeover of the Pakistani capital. It took then president Pervez Musharraf three months to forcibly take over the Red Mosque. Arguably, Musharraf's actions against Aziz and his followers were the ultimate cause of his political downfall last year.
According to the online Long War Journal, over the past year, the government has signed capitulation agreements with all of Aziz's Taliban and al Qaida allies and returned control of the mosque/madrassa complex to the jihadists. At the time of Aziz's attempted overthrow of the Musharraf government and since, the Red Mosque became emblematic of the jihadist war to take over the nuclear-armed state. Aziz's release in turn symbolizes the current government's willingness to surrender.
For their part, US strategists appear despondent in their assessments of the situation in Pakistan, and its impact on NATO's capacity to stabilize the security situation in neighboring Afghanistan. US Army General David Petreaus, who is responsible for the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan has called the Taliban an "existential threat" to the Pakistani state. David Kilcullen, who advised Petreaus on his successful counter-insurgency campaign in Iraq and now advises the White House, warned last week that Pakistan could fall within six months. The growing consensus in Washington — particularly given the recent unification of command of Taliban forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan under the so-called Council of United Holy Warriors and their open collaboration with al Qaida — is that Pakistan is a far greater danger than Afghanistan.
The US's assessment of the threats emanating from Pakistan and Afghanistan has been largely the same under both the Bush and Obama administrations. In both cases, the US has identified Taliban/al Qaida acquisition of nuclear weapons as a primary threat to US security that must be prevented. Both have also asserted that the unimpeded operation of al Qaida training camps in Afghanistan/Pakistan is a grave threat to US and global security.
Then too, the US's strategy for contending with these challenges has been similarly focused for much of the past eight years. The US has sought to militarily and politically defeat the Taliban/al Qaida in Afghanistan by fighting them on the battlefield and cultivating democracy. In Pakistan, the US has sought to defeat the Taliban by strengthening the Pakistani government mainly through financial assistance to its civilian and military budgets.
In recent years, the US has also worked to decapitate Taliban/al Qaida leadership through targeted assassinations inside Pakistan carried out by unmanned aircraft. Under the Obama administration the US has declared its intention to maintain these strategies but expand them by increasing the number of soldiers in Afghanistan and by increasing its civilian assistance to the Pakistani government to $1.5 billion per year.
Unfortunately, the US's efforts in Pakistan to date have failed miserably and there is little cause to believe that expanding them will change the situation in any significant way. Both under Musharraf's military dictatorship and under Zardari's civilian government, the Pakistanis have failed to stem the Taliban's advance.
The Pakistani military and Inter-Service Intelligence agency (ISI) have refused to divert their resources away from fighting India and towards fighting the Taliban. They have refused to take any concerted action against terrorist groups, including al Qaida that openly operate on Pakistani soil.
Against the wishes of the US, they have continued to surrender territory to the Taliban in the framework of "peace accords." And still today, the Pakistani government and military openly oppose US military action on Pakistani territory, preferring to allow the Taliban to take over the country to permitting the US to help the Pakistani military defeat them.
What the situation in Pakistan clearly exemplifies is the fact that sometimes there are no good options for contending with international security threats. Once Pakistan became a nuclear power in 1998, the US lost much of its ability to pressure the Pakistani government and military. Washington understood that if it pushed too hard, the Pakistanis could opt to abandon the West and collaborate with the Taliban and al Qaida which by then were not only openly operating from Pakistani territory after having taken over Afghanistan with Pakistani support two years earlier. They were also attacking US targets — including the 1998 attacks against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks demonstrated just how dangerous jihadists in Pakistan/Afghanistan are to global security, it has been clear that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is a primary threat to global security. For eight years, the US's chosen methods for staving off the threats have effectively served as little more than holding actions because Pakistan's governments have been both unable and unwilling to wage successful military or political campaigns against the Taliban and al Qaida.
Musharraf believed that he could play a double game of at once helping the US in Afghanistan and sheltering al Qaida and the Taliban in Pakistan. The Zardari government, which exerts little control over the military and the ISI, has simply expanded and intensified Musharraf's policy of capitulating to the jihadists. Due to the Taliban's current control over the territories bordering Afghanistan, Pakistan is no longer in a position to support NATO operations in Afghanistan. And in the meantime, the advancing Taliban forces in Pakistan itself place Pakistan's nuclear weapons and materials in unprecedented jeopardy.
Given the failure of the US's political strategies of securing Pakistan's nuclear arsenal by supporting Pakistan's government, and fighting the Taliban and al Qaida in Afghanistan, it is becoming apparent that the only sure way to prevent the Taliban/al Qaida from taking control over Pakistan's nuclear weapons is to take those weapons out of commission.
The US has two basic options for accomplishing this goal. It can send in forces to take control of Pakistan's nuclear installations and remove its nuclear arsenal from the country. Or, it can destroy Pakistan's nuclear installations. Both of these options — which are really variations of the same option — are extremely unattractive. It is far from clear that the US military has the capacity to take over Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and it also unclear what the ultimate effect of a military strike against its nuclear arsenal would be in terms of lives lost and areas rendered uninhabitable due to nuclear fallout.
The only other option that is discussed by US strategists today is that India may serve as deux ex machina and destroy Pakistan's nuclear arsenal itself. Reasonably believing that India would be the first target for Pakistan's nuclear weapons — which Pakistan built in order to threaten India — US military strategists do not expect India to sit back and wait for the US to defend it against a Taliban/al Qaida-ruled nuclear-armed Pakistan.
For India however, the calculation is not as clear as one might assume. New Delhi knows it can expect for the US to support the imposition of various political and military sanctions against it if it were to attack Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. Consequently, it is possible that Washington's unwillingness to make a tough but necessary call may mean that no one is willing to make it.
The situation in Pakistan of course is similar to the situation in Iran. There, as Iran moves swiftly towards the nuclear club, the US on the one hand refuses — as it does with Pakistan — to make the hard but essential decision to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. And on the other hand, it warns Israel daily that it opposes any independent Israeli operation to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear-armed state. That is, the Obama administration is forcing Israel to weigh the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran against the threat of an abrogation of its strategic alliance with the US in the event that it prevents Iran from becoming a nuclear power on its own.
In both Pakistan and Iran, the clock is ticking. The US's reluctance to face up to the ugliness of the options at its disposal will not make them any prettier. Indeed, with each passing day the stark choice placed before America and its allies becomes ever more apparent. In both Pakistan and Iran, the choice is and will remain seeing the US and its allies taking swift and decisive action to neutralize nuclear programs that threaten global security, or seeing the world's worst actors successfully arm themselves with the world's most dangerous weapons.
Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.
4) Pakistan and Iran's Dysfunctional Relationship
By Harsh V. Pant
In April 2008, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Pakistan as part of a whistle-stop tour of South Asia. The meeting was cordial but tense. While the two neighbors were once staunch Cold War allies, the Islamic Revolution, Afghanistan's civil war, and Pakistan's nuclear development have transformed the relationship into one of tense rivalry. As Afghanistan's stability has become a U.S. strategic concern, preventing Pakistan-Iran tensions from again transforming Afghanistan into a proxy battlefield should be a U.S. interest. Unfortunately, so long as the Iranian and Pakistani governments remain concerned with the defense of Shi'i and Sunni sectarian interests respectively, U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan may not be able to bring stability but at best may remain referees in a struggle that extends far beyond that country's borders.
A Troubled Triangle
Pakistan and Iran are bound by cultural, tribal, and religious bonds. Pakistan gained its independence in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War. Iran became the first state to recognize the new nation, and the two neighbors soon developed a strong partnership, signing a treaty of friendship in 1950. Some of this was geopolitical. Pakistan was born amidst great bloodshed and a transfer of population with India, a country with which Pakistan has territorial disputes to the present day. Pakistan found a natural partner in Iran after the Indian government chose to support Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser who sought to export a pan-Arab ideology that threatened many Arab monarchies, a number of which were favored by the Iranian shah. Iran was a natural ally and model for Pakistan for other reasons as well. Both had majority Muslim populations but remained secular, centralized, and Western-oriented in practice. Both countries granted the other most-favored nation status for trade purposes; the shah offered Iranian oil and gas to Pakistan on generous terms, and the Iranian and Pakistani armies cooperated to suppress the rebel movement in Baluchistan.[1]
Both countries also became major bulwarks of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Both were firm U.S. allies and members of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact. In 1971, however, the geopolitical situation began to shift. The withdrawal of British forces from the Persian Gulf left the United States to fill the vacuum, making Saudi Arabia far more important in U.S. strategic calculus. Pakistan's defeat in its 1971 war with India—and the loss of half its territory with Bangladesh's independence—led it to court China as a means to balance India. Pakistan also sought closer ties with the Arab states in order to isolate India, and thus weakened its ties to Iran, even though Islamabad-Tehran relations remained cordial.
The shah's fall in 1979 was a blow to Pakistan. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's anti-American posture worried the Pakistani authorities, as did the prospect of any export to Pakistan of Khomeini's radical views. After all, in 1979, perhaps 20 percent of Pakistan's population was Shi'i and, at the same time, Khomeini's religious rhetoric sparked radicalism across the sectarian divide. Nevertheless, Islamabad offered an olive branch to Tehran. Pakistan was among the first countries to recognize the new Islamic Republic and was among very few countries in the region that refrained from supporting Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war.[2]
The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought the Soviet Union to Pakistan's doorstep, transforming the geostrategic environment further, all the more so given India's close ties to Moscow. For the United States, concerned about Soviet expansionism, Pakistan's importance rose. Ironically, Pakistan, Iran, and the United States all found themselves on the same side with regard to Afghanistan, even as Iran's revolutionary authorities continued to hold U.S. diplomats hostage. Though Iran was preoccupied with domestic turmoil and its war with Iraq in the 1980s, it supported the Afghan resistance and provided limited financial and military assistance to groups who supported the Iranian vision of revolutionary Islam.
Meanwhile, Pakistan emerged as the frontline state in the U.S. struggle to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan. Here, the Pakistani military regime under General Zia ul-Haq did try to coordinate with the Islamic Republic but, in practice, Islamabad cooperated much more fully with Saudi Arabia, which bankrolled Pakistani military programs.[3]
Pakistan became the transit point for weapons and aid to Saudi-funded, U.S.-equipped, and Pakistani-trained mujahideen who fought to drive the Red Army from Afghanistan. Pakistani authorities, however, put a filter on the aid. The loss of Bangladesh—formerly East Pakistan—in 1971 had led the Pakistani leadership to be very wary of ethnic nationalism. Pashtun nationalism in Afghanistan had challenged Pakistani cohesion for as long as Bengali nationalism.[4] The Pakistani government, therefore, only allowed aid to flow to those groups who rallied around a sectarian rather than a nationalist identity.
The Iranian authorities, in contrast, miscalculated. While generous with aid to their allies, they had far fewer resources at their disposal because of the ongoing war of attrition with Iraq. That aid which Iranian officials could provide, they limited largely to Shi'i and ethnic Persian-speaking Tajik groups. This transformed a potential Afghanistan-wide influence into a far more localized interest. Nor, in contrast to the actions of the Pakistani leadership, did Iranian authorities properly cultivate or manage their population of Afghan refugees in order to spread their influence. [5]
Tehran did not want to cede the advantage to Islamabad, though, and continued to fight for influence in Afghanistan, even as the Pakistani- and Saudi-backed Taliban consolidated control over 90 percent of the country. This proxy fight, however, polarized Afghanistan and brewed further Pakistan-Iran mistrust.
In August 1998, after an incident in which the Taliban sacked an Iranian consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif and murdered six Iranian diplomats and some agents, the Iranian military massed some seventy thousand troops on their border with Afghanistan and blamed Pakistan, claiming that Pakistan had assured the safety of their diplomats.[6] Iranian president Mohammad Khatami, however, helped walk Iran back from the brink of war as he sought to thaw relations between Iran and both the United States and the Taliban.
The 9-11 terrorist attacks on the United States changed the foreign policy priorities of both Iran and Pakistan. The George W. Bush administration's tough stance forced president Pervez Musharraf to support Washington's "war on terror," which ended Taliban rule in Kabul.[7] Though Iranian officials welcomed the move, they soon found themselves encircled by U.S. forces in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the Persian Gulf. President Bush's inclusion of the Islamic Republic as part of an "Axis of Evil" also led some Iranian officials to presume that Tehran might be next in line for regime change[8] and ended whatever détente had occurred in U.S.-Iranian ties under Khatami. Bush's emphasis on transformative diplomacy and democratization[9] worried Iranian leaders further.
Tehran and Islamabad sought to improve bilateral relations after the Taliban's 2001 fall. Iran supported the Bonn agreement which, under U.N. auspices, brought prominent Afghans together to plan for the future governance of their war-ravaged nation.[10] In December 2002, Iran signed the Kabul Declaration on Good Neighborly Relations along with Pakistan and other regional states.[11] Khatami visited Islamabad in December 2002, the first visit by an Iranian head of state since 1992. Iran has tried to project itself as a responsible regional actor since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, urging the Afghan Northern Alliance to accept the Bonn agreement for the formation of a new broad-based government in Kabul and offering aid and loans as well as training Afghan soldiers.[12] It is investing in construction projects in the western parts of Afghanistan, building roads, rail links, and border posts.[13] It played a major role in restarting the post-Taliban political process in Afghanistan and has pledged $560 million in aid and loans to Afghanistan.[14] However, other interests are also at play as Iran supports conservative Shi'i religious schools and warlords and is increasing its intelligence activities across Afghanistan.[15] Iran has viewed itself traditionally as the guarantor of the security of Afghanistan's Shi'a.
However, the situation in Afghanistan continued to overshadow the relationship. Tehran moved promptly to establish diplomatic ties with Hamid Karzai's new government.[16] Iranian authorities supported Karzai's attempts to exert authority over the entire territory of Afghanistan, encouraging the Hazara, for example, to support Karzai, despite his Pashtun background. Tehran's links to Ismail Khan, the former Herat governor, were especially strong. However, Iranian officials supported the U.S. and Afghan central government's efforts to subordinate Khan—who acted as Iran's proxy in Afghanistan—to Kabul's authority.[17]
Soft and Hard Power in the Afghanistan Rivalry
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency has long supported the Taliban and has aided its resurgence. The rejuvenation of the Taliban bolsters Pakistan's role as a frontline state in the war on terrorism, securing often lucrative assistance from the United States. The Taliban may be a concern to both Kabul and Washington, but Islamabad is more willing to tolerate jihadist violence so long as it is focused outward on Afghanistan, Kashmir, or other parts of India.
While Karzai's government is nominally supported by both Tehran and Islamabad, neither neighbor has been willing to sacrifice its own interests. With time, tension has increased. Iran retains its special interests in Afghanistan's western Herat region, until 1857 part of Iran, and Pakistan considers the Pashto-speaking southern sections of Afghanistan to be within its sphere of influence. Kabul remains a contested area within that sphere. The deterioration in Afghan security, perhaps sparked by one or both, has also created a dynamic of increasing tension between Iran and Pakistan.[18] Increasingly, as a perception of U.S. weakness spreads, Iran has raised its rhetoric against the presence of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, which Islamabad nominally supports, at least publicly. Tehran continues to blame the U.S. presence in Afghanistan for continuing instability in the region.[19]
Both Iran and Pakistan have adopted strategies of using soft power influence to provide cover for their more traditional hard power approach vis-à-vis Afghanistan. Though Musharraf committed Pakistan to support efforts to stabilize Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban and agreed to strengthen the Karzai administration, doubts remain as to Islamabad's capacity and commitment to crack down on terrorists and militants. Kabul is suspicious of Pakistan, on whom its security largely depends. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency has long supported the Taliban and has aided its resurgence. The rejuvenation of the Taliban bolsters Pakistan's role as a frontline state in the war on terrorism, securing often lucrative assistance from the United States. The ISI and Pakistani military elite also see Pakistan as engaged in a proxy war for influence in Afghanistan.[20] The Taliban may be a concern to both Kabul and Washington, but Islamabad is more willing to tolerate jihadist violence so long as it is focused outward on Afghanistan, Kashmir, or other parts of India. The brazen terror assault on Mumbai in November 2008 that has increased tensions between the two nuclear armed states in the subcontinent is just the latest case of Islamabad continuing to direct Islamist extremism towards its neighbors.
Iran, meanwhile, has taken a multi-pronged approach towards Afghanistan, focusing its economic, social, and educational efforts on the western provinces of Herat, Farah, and Nimruz, perhaps to seek a zone of influence in western Afghanistan and to prevent the West and the Karzai administration from adopting a coherent, countrywide strategy.[21] While Iran has focused its development aid on portions of Afghanistan it considers its near-abroad, Tehran has learned a political lesson from the past and now cooperates with any Afghan group, regardless of sect and language, so long as they oppose the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. The perception that Pakistan and the United States would gain an upper hand in the evolving political environment in Afghanistan has pushed Iran into charting a proactive course towards its eastern neighbor. Iran's strategy toward Afghanistan seems geared toward hastening the withdrawal of U.S. forces, preventing the Taliban from regaining power, and trying to keep Afghanistan under Tehran's sway.
As a result of this policy, some Iranian groups appear to have reached out to the Taliban. U.S. and NATO forces have repeatedly intercepted shipments of Iranian weaponry to the Taliban.[22] The Taliban are already using Iranian-made improvised explosive devices (IEDs) as well as heat seeking missiles and rifles to deadly effect against Western forces.[23] Though the Iranian government has denied any such involvement, sections of the Iranian establishment, in particular the Quds Force, are seen as behind such moves. Several media reports from Afghanistan suggest that Iran has been increasing its operations in Afghanistan in an effort to gain influence with the contending insurgent factions and to hasten the departure of U.S. troops from the country.[24] Growing tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan are also working to Iran's advantage with Kabul increasingly dependent on Tehran for its transit trade routes. The Karzai government cannot pick fights with both its vital neighbors and so tries to keep Iran in good humor. While Washington maintains that Iran is funneling weapons into Afghanistan, the Afghan government continues to say that Iran is a close friend and ally.[25]
Will a Pakistani-Iranian Rivalry Erupt?
There is little common ground between Iran and Pakistan on a solution to the Afghan crisis, and history may repeat itself with both states once again funding proxy wars between Shi'a and Sunnis in each other's countries as well as in Afghanistan, increasing the likelihood of a major sectarian explosion in the region.
Communities of some five million Baluch tribesmen stretch across southwestern Pakistan and southeastern Iran. Baluchis on both sides of the border feel neglected, on sectarian grounds in Iran and on ethnic grounds in Pakistan, and nationalist sentiments have long simmered, sometimes erupting into open insurrection.[26] While the shah helped the Pakistani army crush Baluch insurgencies in the days prior to his ouster, today insurgency has again erupted with both Pakistani and Iranian officials accusing each other of aiding the insurgents. Tehran has also repeatedly accused the U.S. Special Forces of using their bases in Pakistan to pursue undercover operations inside Iran designed to foment Baluch opposition to the Islamic regime.[27] In June 2008, Jundallah terrorists, an insurgent Baluchi group operating from Pakistan, kidnapped sixteen members of Iran's paramilitary Law Enforcement Forces (niru-ye entezami) and, over the course of months, executed all of their hostages.[28] Tehran blames the Pakistani government for sheltering the group even though Pakistan has also declared Jundallah to be a terrorist organization and, on occasion, Pakistani troops have killed Jundallah terrorists.[29]
Sectarian tension has also complicated relations. In the 1980s, several radical groups sponsored by Pakistani intelligence[30] began a systematic assault on Shi'i symbols and mosques in Pakistan. Pakistani Shi'a, with Iranian assistance, responded by forming their own militias. The continued targeting by Sunni terrorists of Pakistani Shi'a remains an Iranian concern.[31] This Shi'i-Sunni strife in Pakistan has provoked Iran to provide clandestine support to its co-religionists there.[32]
However, Pakistan and Iran have worked to improve security cooperation. In 2001, the two states established the Pakistan-Iran Joint Ministerial Commission on Security to enhance cooperation on security issues such as terrorism, drug trafficking, and sectarian violence. Top Iranian political and intelligence officials regularly engage their Pakistani counterparts, but engagement does not necessarily equate to trust.
The nuclear issue also complicates Pakistani-Iranian ties. Pakistani and Western officials sometimes say that Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadir Khan operated outside the law when he provided assistance to Tehran's nuclear weapons program; however, evidence also suggests that the Pakistani military was not only aware of Khan's nuclear transactions with Iran but also tacitly approved of his activities.[33] Nevertheless, there remains a sense of rivalry between Islamabad and Tehran on the nuclear issue, given Pakistan's unique position as the sole Muslim country with the bomb. Interestingly, one of the drivers of Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions is fear of a "Sunni bomb." Rumors of an oil-for-nukes pact between Riyadh and Islamabad have exacerbated such concerns. [34]
An Economic Solution?
Is it possible to ameliorate Iran-Pakistan ties to prevent the development of a dynamic that will undercut Afghan security and, by extension, the safety and security of U.S. and NATO troops present in that country? Here, economics may provide a solution. Trade between Pakistan and Iran remains in the range of $500 million, and both governments hope to double it.[35] Absent much trade, however, political and security tensions will continue to exercise a negative effect on ties.
It is in this context that the impetus comes for the so-called "peace pipeline" that would transport Iranian gas to Pakistan and onward to India. Should the pipeline project come into operation, then trade will become the defining feature of Iran-Pakistan ties. Rising energy demand in both India and Pakistan, at least until the 2008 worldwide recession struck, have led both to consider collaborating on a gas pipeline from Iranian fields through Pakistan to India. Such a pipeline might in theory create mutual economic interests and bring Islamabad perhaps $500 million annually in royalties.[36] However, there has been little progress, largely because of disagreements about pricing and the methods to be used to supply gas to India.[37] India and Iran signed the $22 billion deal in 2005 before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad assumed the presidency and while the crude oil price was low. India considers the pricing deal final while Iranian officials have sought an upward revision in price, arguing that the contract is not valid until the Iranian Supreme Economic Council ratifies it.[38] There are also differences between the national oil companies of Iran and India over the legal interpretation of the contract for the export of five million tons of liquefied natural gas to India.
Both India and Pakistan have contended that Tehran should offer a price for gas in line with global practices for long-term contracts and have rejected Iran's gas pricing formula, whereby the gas price is linked to Brent crude oil with a fixed escalating cost component. The Indian government also argues that it should only pay for gas upon delivery, and opposes Tehran's demand for price revision every three years.[39] The three states decided by consensus to refer the matter to an independent consultant, but Tehran continued to maintain that the consultant's opinion should not be binding, causing tensions among the three parties. As with many pipeline projects, the bickering has led to much recrimination but little construction.[40] Other points of contention include Pakistan's costs for security and transit and U.S. government opposition to any investment in an Iranian project,[41] alongside Iranian worries that tensions between Pakistan and India could disrupt operations and undermine economic viability.[42]
Conclusion
Notwithstanding some tentative recent attempts by Pakistan and Iran to improve their bilateral ties, the two countries' relationship remains strained. Rather than bringing the two states together, the situation in Afghanistan has provided a stage where their rivalry is once again played out. Though the vacuum resulting from the fall of the Taliban government is the main factor behind the rising turmoil in Afghanistan,[43] the problem there also remains a regional one. The more the United States and its NATO allies fail to secure Afghanistan, the more neighboring states will revive their ties to ethnic and ideological proxies, creating a dynamic that will further undermine Afghanistan.
While both Pakistan and Iran seem to have concluded that a stable, independent, and economically strong Afghan state is preferable to a weak and troubled one, they remain very sensitive to their relative gains vis-à-vis each other.
Regardless of who runs Afghanistan, Tehran's and Islamabad's conflicting interests over Afghanistan have played a pivotal role in the formation of their foreign policies toward each other. Afghanistan's predicament is a difficult one. The country may like to enhance its links with its neighboring states, yet, peace and stability will continue to elude it so long as its neighbors view it through the lenses of their regional rivalries and as a chessboard on which to play out the game of their regional power and influence.
In many ways, it is a paradox. The situation in Afghanistan can only improve if Tehran and Islamabad revise their attitudes, but any deterioration in Afghanistan's security situation will instead compound suspicions and force them to prioritize their own security interests in a way which intensifies regional rivalries. Iran will only play a positive role in Afghanistan if it feels its vital interests are not under threat, and a deteriorating security environment in Afghanistan will only make Iran feel more vulnerable, forcing it to take steps to safeguard its interests, letting the conflict spiral further. Pakistan, meanwhile, is reluctant to cede the preeminent position it has enjoyed for the last several decades in determining Afghanistan's political trajectory. And as the security environment in Afghanistan deteriorates further, Islamabad will view this as an opportunity to maintain its presence in its neighbor's territory in order to secure its larger strategic interests.
By no means does this suggest that the United States or its NATO allies should abandon Afghanistan. However, U.S. policymakers should recognize that they are not the only players in the sand box nor that their struggle to stabilize the Karzai regime and battle the Taliban is the only fight going on in the country. Indeed, until there is fundamental change in either Tehran or Islamabad, Afghanistan will remain a crossroad if not for armies, then for their proxies.
Harsh V. Pant is a lecturer in the defense studies department at King's College London and an associate at the King's Center for Science and Security Studies.
[1] Shahram Chubin and Sepehr Zabin, The Foreign Relations of Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 140-69.
[2] Mushahid Hussain, "Pakistan-Iran Relations in the Changing World Scenario: Challenges and Response," in Tarik Jain, et al, eds., Foreign Policy Debate: The Years Ahead (Islamabad: Institute of Policy Studies, 1993), pp. 215-9.
[3] Stephen Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2004), p. 122.
[4] Michael Rubin, "Who's Responsible for the Taliban?" Middle East Review of International Affairs, Mar. 2002.
[5] Ali Mohammadi and Anoushiravan Ehteshami, Iran and Eurasia (Reading, U.K.: Ithaca Press, 2000), pp. 141-5.
[6] Ahmad Rashid, Taliban (London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 203-5; "Pakistan: Haven for Killers," Tehran Times, Feb. 24, 1998.
[7] Gary C. Schroen, First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan (New York: Ballantine, 2005), pp. 43-74; Richard B. Andres, Craig Wills, and Thomas E. Griffith Jr., "Winning with Allies: The Strategic Value of the Afghan Model," International Security, Winter 2005/06, pp. 124-60.
[8] Alef.ir (Tehran), July 14, 2008.
[9] The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: The White House, Sept. 2002); John Lewis Gaddis, "A Grand Strategy of Transformation," Foreign Policy, Nov./Dec. 2002), pp. 50-7.
[10] "Agreement on Provisional Arrangements in Afghanistan Pending the Re-Establishment of Permanent Government Institutions (Bonn Agreement)," United Nations, Bonn, Ger., Dec. 5, 2001.
[11] "Kabul Declaration on Good Neighbourly Relations," Afghanistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dec. 22, 2002.
[12] Marvin G. Weinbaum, "Afghanistan and Its Neighbors," Special Report, United States Institute of Peace, June 2006, pp. 12-4.
[13] Islamic Republic News Agency (Tehran), Oct, 27, 2003.
[14] The New York Times, Dec. 27, 2006.
[15] RFE/RL Iran Report, July 8, 2002; The New York Times, Dec. 27, 2006.
[16] Eurasia.net (New York), Feb. 26, 2002.
[17] Thomas Johnson, "Ismail Khan, Herat, and Iranian Influence," Strategic Insights (U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Center for Contemporary Conflict), July 2004.
[18] Barnett R. Rubin, "Saving Afghanistan," Foreign Affairs, Jan./Feb. 2007, pp. 57-78.
[19] Manouchehr Mottaki, Iranian foreign minister, "Our Activities Are Legal," interview, Newsweek, Oct. 13, 2008.
[20] Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), pp. 238-60.
[21] Frederick Kagan, Kimberly Kagan, Danielle Pletka, Iranian Influence in the Levant, Iraq and Afghanistan (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, Feb. 19, 2008), pp. 37-56.
[22] Robert Gates, U.S. secretary of defense, news briefing, Ramstein Air Force Base, Ger., June 13, 2007; The Washington Post, Sept. 21, 2007.
[23] "… As Afghan Authorities Say 100 Iranian-made IEDs Found," Newsline, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Aug. 15, 2007.
[24] Muhammad Tahir, "Iranian Involvement in Afghanistan," Terrorism Monitor (Jamestown Foundation, Washington, D.C.), Jan. 18, 2007.
[25] The International Herald Tribune (Paris), Aug. 7, 2007.
[26] Selig Harrison, In Afghanistan's Shadow: Baluch Nationalism and Soviet Temptations (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1981).
[27] Selig Harrison, "Pakistan's Baluch Insurgency," Le Monde, Oct. 2006.
[28] BBC Persian Service, June 20, 2008; Alef.ir, July 12, 2008, Dec. 4, 2008.
[29] The Gulf Times (Dubai), Feb. 15, 2007; Asr-e Iran (Tehran), Apr. 6, 2008.
[30] Olivier Roy, Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (London: Hurst, 2002), pp. 35-43.
[31] Vali R. Nasr, "International Politics, Domestic Imperatives, and Identity Mobilization: Sectarianism in Pakistan, 1979-1998," Comparative Politics, Jan. 2000, pp. 175-87.
[32] Zahid Hussain, Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle with Militant Islam (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 89-101.
[33] Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, The Nuclear Jihadist (New York: Twelve, 2007), pp. 176-9.
[34] Thomas Woodrow, "The Sino-Saudi Connection," China Brief, Jamestown Foundation, Oct. 24, 2002.
[35] The Nation (Islamabad), July 25, 2008.
[36] Sohaib Shahid, "Iran-Pak-India Gas Pipeline: Implications and Prospects," Jang (Karachi), Jan. 15, 2007.
[37] Dawn (Karachi), Apr. 12, 2007.
[38] P.R. Kumaraswamy, "Delhi: Between Tehran and Washington," Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2008, pp. 41-7.
[39] The Indian Express (New Delhi), Nov. 1, 2008.
[40] Aftab-e Yazd (Yazd), Nov. 3, 2008.
[41] For greater detail, see Harsh V. Pant, "A Fine Balance: India Walks a Tightrope between Iran and the United States," Orbis, Summer 2007, pp. 495-509.
[42] Alef.ir, Oct. 5, 2008.
[43] Seth G. Jones, "The Rise of Afghanistan's Insurgency," International Security, Spring 2008, pp. 7-40.
5) Leaders' mortality may sway Iraq's health
By Michael Rubin
US President Barack Obama's plan to withdraw troops from Iraq is predicated on an assumption that Iraq's stability is durable. On 29 January 2009, General Ray Odierno, commander of the Multi-National Force-Iraq, said: "We are getting close to enduring stability, which enables us really to reduce [US military forces]." Advocates of military withdrawal by the United States are optimistic: the 31 January 2009 provincial elections proceeded without much incident.
According to US government figures, violence is down to 2003 levels. Progress, however, has less to do with the governance system, and more to do with key personalities: President Jalal
Talabani, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, both of whom met Obama in Baghdad on 7 April, as well as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani each conciliate crisis and reconcile disparate interests. Without them, stability and security in Iraq may not be sustainable.
Pivotal president
Iraq's National Assembly elected Talabani, a septuagenarian Kurdish political leader, as president on 6 April 2005, nine weeks after Iraq's first free elections. Talabani is a pivotal official. Fluent in Arabic, Persian, Kurdish and English, he is equally at ease in Baghdad, Washington and Tehran. While Iraq's executive on paper is weak and ceremonial, Talabani has used his relationships cultivated during decades in opposition to cajole Sunnis and Shia, Kurds and Arabs into compromise – first on the constitution and then to walk absolutist politicians back from the brink of civil war.
The Obama administration, like the Bush presidency, sees Talabani as a primary ally in Iraq. Vice President-elect Joseph Biden visited Talabani just eight days before inauguration to discuss Obama's strategy and Obama telephoned Talabani less than two weeks into his presidency to discuss the way ahead. Talabani is not deemed a figure head but a partner.
However, basing policy on Talabani is not without risk. On 12 March 2009, Talabani told an Iranian interviewer that he would not seek re-election when his term ends this year. This is not definitive: Talabani has been known to change his mind and the White House may enlist Talabani to mediate even after his return to his hometown of Sulaymaniyah.
Retirement, however, is not the main concern. At 75, Talabani's health is tenuous. In February 2007, he was flown to Amman for emergency medical care after falling unconscious. He was later transferred to Minnesota's Mayo Clinic, which discreetly treats foreign leaders suffering heart ailments and cancer. Jordanian doctors contradicted Iraqi officials who said Talabani was suffering from exhaustion. Talabani made at least three subsequent visits to the Mayo Clinic, the first in May 2007 for 10 days of tests. In June 2008, the clinic confirmed Talabani's return. His office said he was receiving treatment for a knee problem. Two months later, Talabani returned and, after he missed several events, his office acknowledged he had had emergency heart surgery.
Talabani returned to duty, but his age and poor health make him an unwise pillar upon which to tie Washington's Iraq policy. While Western officials treat the Iraqi president as a permanent fixture, senior cadres in his Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) party openly jockey for position in a post-Talabani Iraq. Talabani's former deputy Noshirwan Mustafa broke from the PUK in November 2006 and will now head a list to challenge the PUK at polls on 19 May. On 7 October
2008, a number of other senior PUK officials broke away to form the Movement for Democratic Change. Still, none of these officials will be able to replace Talabani on the national stage.
Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih is popular in Western capitals, but lacks a powerbase in either the PUK's peshmerga militia or its intelligence services. Equally as important, he is disliked by Talabani's wife, Hero Ibrahim Ahmad, whose opposition dashed Barham's hopes of leading Iraq's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That slot went instead to Hoshyar Zebari, Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) leader Massoud Barzani's uncle. However, tribal politics may preclude Zebari's promotion to the presidency. Not only is he an outcast within the Zebari tribe (which is centred on Mosul) for backing Barzani but like Barham, his popularity among Iraqi peers falls short of that afforded him by Western diplomats. Barzani, increasingly unpopular in Iraqi Kurdistan and long dismissive of Iraqi unity, would not politically be able to replace Talabani. Talabani had served in the Iraqi army and after the fall of Saddam spent as much time in Baghdad as in Kurdistan. Barzani on the other hand antagonised Arabs with his statements and seldom voiced any consideration for Iraq's unity. Accordingly, there is no obvious Kurdish leader able to succeed Talabani on the national stage.
Prime health
Unlike Talabani, 48-year-old Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is in good health. Maliki's May 2006 ascension to the premiership surprised observers. The White House had hoped Vice-President and former minister of finance Adil Mahdi, a moderate within the Islamic Supreme
Council of Iraq (ISCI), would win the top slot. Many US politicians publicly denounced Maliki as too polarising to lead. In August 2007, Maliki became a campaign issue in the US. Hillary Clinton, then front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination and now US secretary of state, declared her "hope that the Iraqi parliament will replace Prime Minister Maliki with a less divisive and more unifying figure". Washington's assessment changed as Maliki both showed willingness to reach across sectarian lines to Sunnis in Anbar province and to take on the excesses of Shia militias. He then proved his mettle to Washington by forcing the Status of Forces Agreement through parliament in November 2008.
For the White House, the adversary became an asset. US officials cheered the success of Maliki's supporters in provincial elections, especially given the US assumption that the ISCI strays too close to Iranian interests. However, Maliki's consolidation of control undercuts the development of potential successors, a dangerous phenomenon in a country where all officials remain vulnerable to assassination. Meanwhile, Maliki's Dawa party is characterised by its factionalism, making the process of succession more intricate.
The ISCI provides no clear alternative. Its leader, Abdul Aziz Hakim, has terminal cancer, and it is uncertain whether his 37-year-old son Ammar can consolidate control. In such a vacuum, no leader can rise above the fray without Iranian financial and logistical support. Western officials are anxious that under such circumstances, Moqtada al-Sadr emerges as the strongest Shia leader.
Wildcard
The greatest wildcard is 78-year-old Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. He is Iraq's leading religious figure and possesses significant implicit political clout. Like many traditional Shia clerics, Sistani sees his role as an indirect guide rather than an active political leader. While he advocates Shia empowerment, he tempers populist anger, discourages Iranian-style clerical political control and eschews violence. When he dies, it is unclear who might fill his role. Najaf is home to other Grand Ayatollahs – Afghan-born Muhammad Ishaq Fayadh and India-born Bashir Najafi – but neither has a large enough following to replace Sistani.
Many senior Shia leaders live in Iran but to prevent even passive challenge to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the most prominent traditional clerics in Iran – Hossein Ali Montazeri and Hossein Kazemeyni Boroujerdi – remain under house arrest or in prison. At best, should Sistani die in the near future, there will be no clear marja at-taqlid (source of emulation), to represent the Shia voice. In such a situation, firebrands such as al-Sadr may find little impediment to religious demagoguery.
Alternatively, 73-year-old Iraqi-born Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah may return from Lebanon. While scholars debate whether or not Fadlallah is a patron for Lebanese Hizbullah, they do not debate either his long association with the group nor his support for their actions. Should Fadlallah return, no cleric is likely to be able to challenge him as the pre-eminent Shia religious authority in Iraq. As much as Sistani has been a voice for calm, his successor could become a force for discord.
As long as Iraqi security is dominated by personalities rather than checks and balances, stability in the country will be a mirage. The situation in Baghdad has improved greatly since 2007, but while success rests upon the longevity of old men and unwillingness to acknowledge the prime minister's mortality, any gains could fast reverse.
Michael Rubin is editor of the Middle East Quarterly and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
6)Obama's house of prosperity may yet be a castle in the air:
He feels like the right man to be President, but has he come at the right time.
By Charles Moore
The best way to arrive in Washington is by rail. You leave the platform and enter the magnificent main hall of Union Station. Then, through the glass doors, you see the Capitol proud on the hill in front of you. When I came that way this week, and saw it all in the blossom-filled spring sunlight, I momentarily felt the slightly insane optimism that grips James Stewart when he first claps eyes on the same view in the classic film Mr Smith Goes to Washington. He is the tall, thin, young senator whose innocence, against all the odds, prevails.
Until January, Barack Obama was a tall, thin, young senator, and one reason he is President of the United States today is because he answered – in modernised form – that American yearning for purity and simplicity. He knows that his appeal is still strong, which explains why, virtually every day, he makes a speech.
On Tuesday, at Georgetown University here in Washington, Mr Obama spoke about the economy. I was told that the White House, hypersensitive to conveying the wrong visual message, insisted that the university's device, which includes the initials IHS, the traditional, particularly Jesuit, abbreviation for Jesus Christ, be obliterated from the backdrop. But the President invoked the Sermon on the Mount all the same.
He reminded his audience of how the well-meaning attempt to spread home-ownership in America had been perverted into forms of debt so ill- or unsecured that they had provoked the world financial crisis. He repeated Jesus's parable of the two houses. One was built on "a pile of sand", and so fell when the rain came. The other was built upon a rock. "We must build our house upon a rock," said the President.
The house that Barack wants to build is architecturally grand. It will have five pillars, he announced. The first is that Wall Street will have new rules to reward "drive and innovation, not reckless risk-taking". The last is that "new savings in the federal budget… will bring down the debt for future generations". Sandwiched between these pillars are the other three. Each of these involves "new investments" – education, renewable energy, and health care. This, said Mr Obama, would be the "new foundation".
How rock-like is that foundation likely to be? Back in Britain, we still await Alistair Darling's Budget, to find out how he proposes to restore financial order to government, but in America, Mr Obama's is already there for all to read. I am grateful to Larry Lindsey, former economic adviser to three Presidents, for drawing my attention to Table S.9. It states that the total "required to be borrowed from the public" (the PSBR, in British-speak) in the fiscal year 2009 is $2.562 trillion. That is 18 per cent of American GDP. Fiscal 2009 ends on September 30. Given what the federal government needs to borrow in the time that remains, the sum works out at between $6 and $10 billion per day. I make that roughly the entire British annual defence budget in one week.
Normally, a country borrowing on that scale faces collapse, and has to call in the IMF. America is not a normal country, of course: it is the axis on which the world turns, with the currency to which people resort for safety. In the past, its huge deficits have never produced the catastrophe predicted for them. Perhaps they will not do so this time, although what the nation faces today is more than twice as big as the largest previous deficits in US history (under Ronald Reagan). But it does make one wonder whether the President's five-pillared house is a castle in the air.
Like New Labour, Mr Obama likes to speak – he used their favourite phrase again in Georgetown – of "tough choices". So when he offers his social reforms to the American people, he argues that they will be financially as well as morally virtuous. He says he is attacking entitlements – what Tony Blair and later David Cameron called "the bills of social failure" – and he rightly castigates the waste and fraud in existing US medical provision. But it is not clear that these choices are actually going to be made. What is clear – it is publicly stated – is that an extra $634 billion has been allocated in the Budget to begin to create his new health-care system. When Aneurin Bevan set up our own dear NHS, one of his beliefs was that better health care, by making people well, would lead to lower health spending. To say that these savings did not materialise is the understatement of the century.
Two thoughts occur. The first is to ask what markets will think of this as it sinks in. Suppose, for example, that this burden of debt crowds out the economic recovery that Mr Obama is trying to engineer. Suppose that the small stirrings of life showing just now disappear in the third quarter as nervous Americans continue to save, not spend, and more people lose their jobs. The world contemplating buying US government debt will understand why it might be worth spending big to repair the banks. Would it feel the same about money borrowed for a US-style NHS and lots of windmills? If the world really doubted America's dedication to its own fiscal and financial order, that would topple the dollar, and with it American power.
The second thought occurred to me because I had made my train journey to Washington from Princeton University. There I had been lecturing, 30 years on, about how Margaret Thatcher confronted economic crisis when she first came to power in 1979. The point that strikes one is that it was the crisis which, above all, galvanised her, captured her intellect, harnessed her energy. Like Churchill in relation to the Second World War, she felt that all her life had been a preparation for that hour. Her vision of what was wrong with her country, and how to put it right, was seen entirely through the prism of the crisis.
The same cannot be said of Barack Obama. This is not merely because he has no previous experience of governing. It is because his idea of what he wants to do is really something quite different from what is actually happening to his country. In his inauguration address, he spoke of the need to get on with the business of "remaking America". For him, that economic stuff is not really part of the remaking, but a distraction from it. His vision of a more social-democratic country was conceived almost without reference to the greatest economic catastrophe to hit America for 80 years. He barely had to argue, or even think about it before or during the campaign. It shows. He says that his education, energy and health reforms must happen so that "such a crisis [the financial one] never happens again", but he merely asserts the link: he does not prove it.
Through his astonishing personal qualities, allied with his ethnicity, Mr Obama feels like the right man to be President. But perhaps he has come at the wrong time.
7) Tea Party animals not boiling over: Media portrayals of protesters as right-wing kooks are overheated.
By Mark Steyn
Our lesson today comes from the old British novelty song:
"I like A Nice Cup Of Tea in the morning
Just to start the day, you see
And at half-past-eleven
My idea of heaven
Is A Nice Cup Of Tea …"
In other cultures, tea is a soothing beverage, a respite from the cares of the world. "A Nice Cup Of Tea And A Sit-Down" is a British best-seller offering advice on tea, biscuits (that's "cookies" in American) and comfy chairs by the husband-and-wife team of "Nicey" and "Wifey," which sobriquets suggest that these are not the folks to turn to for societal insurrection.
George Orwell – the George Orwell of "Animal Farm" and "1984" – wrote a famous essay called "A Nice Cup Of Tea," all about the best way to warm the pot, and the defects of shallow cups. Is it some sort of political allegory for impending civil war set in a household torn between those who put the milk in before the tea and those who do so after? No, Orwell liked a good cuppa (as they say in England) and was eager to pass on his advice for extracting maximum satisfaction from the experience.
But in America tea is not a soothing beverage to be served with McVitie's Digestive Biscuits. It's a raging stimulant. It's rabies in an Earl Grey bag. At America's tea parties, there's no McVitie's, just McVeighs – as in Timothy of that ilk, as in angry white men twitching to go nuts. To Paul Krugman of The New York Times, the tea party is a movement of "crazy people" manipulated by sinister "right-wing billionaires." To the briefly famous Susan Roesgen of CNN, the parties are not safe for "family viewing." Which is presumably why the Boston Globe forbore to cover them last week. The original Boston Tea Party was so-called because it took place at Boston Harbor, which I gather is a harbor somewhere in the general vicinity of the Greater Boston area. So there would appear to be what I believe the journalism professors call a "local angle" to Wednesday's re-enactment. Might be useful for a publication losing a million bucks a week and threatened with closure by a parent company that, in one of the worst media acquisitions of all time, paid over $1 billion for a property that barely a decade later is all but worthless.
But I digress. Asked about the tea parties, President Barack Obama responded that he was not aware of them. As Marie Antoinette said, "Let them drink Lapsang Souchong." His Imperial Majesty at Barackingham Palace having declined to acknowledge the tea parties, his courtiers at the Globe and elsewhere fell into line. Talk-show host Michael Graham spoke to one attendee at the 2009 Boston Tea Party who remarked of the press embargo: "If Obama had been the king of England, the Globe wouldn't have covered the American Revolution."
The American media, having run their own business into the ground, are certainly qualified to run everybody else's into the same abyss. Which is why they've decided that hundreds of thousands of citizens protesting taxes and out-of-control spending and government vaporization of Americans' wealth and their children's future is no story. Nothing to see here. As Nancy Pelosi says, it's AstroTurf – fake grass-roots, not the real thing.
Besides, what are these whiners so uptight about? CNN's Susan Roesgen interviewed a guy in the crowd and asked why he was here:
"Because," said the Tea Partier, "I hear a president say that he believed in what Lincoln stood for. Lincoln's primary thing was he believed that people had the right to liberty, and had the right …"
But Roesgen had heard enough: "What does this have to do with your taxes? Do you realize that you're eligible for a $400 credit?"
Had the Tea Party animal been as angry as these Angry White Men are supposed to be, he'd have said, "Oh, push off, you condescending tick. Taxes are a liberty issue. I don't want a $400 'credit' for agreeing to live my life in government-approved ways." Had he been of a more literary bent, he might have adapted Sir Thomas More's line from "A Man For All Seasons": "Why, Susan, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for a $400 tax credit?"
But Roesgen wasn't done with her "You may already have won!" commercial:
"Did you know," she sneered, "that the state of Lincoln gets $50 billion out of this stimulus? That's $50 billion for this state, sir."
Really? Who knew it was that easy? $50 billion! Did those Navy SEALs find it just off the Somali coast in the wreckage of a pirate skiff in a half-submerged treasure chest, all in convertible pieces of eight or Zanzibari doubloons?
Or is it perhaps the case that that $50 billion has to be raised from the same limited pool of 300 million Americans and their as yet unborn descendants? And, if so, is giving it to "the state of Lincoln" – latterly, the state of Blagojevich – likely to be of much benefit to the citizens?
Amid his scattershot pronouncements on everything from global nuclear disarmament to high-speed rail, President Obama said something almost interesting the other day. Decrying a "monstrous tax code that is far too complicated for most Americans to understand," the Tax-Collector-in-Chief pledged: "I want every American to know that we will rewrite the tax code so that it puts your interests over any special interests."
That shouldn't be hard. A tax code that put my interests over any special interests would read: "How much did you earn last year? [Insert number here]thousand dollars? Hey, feel free to keep it. You know your interests better than we do!"
OK, to be less absolutist about it, my interests include finding a road at the end of my drive every morning, and modern equipment for the (volunteer) fire department and a functioning military to deter the many predators out there, and maybe one or two other things. But 95 percent of the rest is not just "special interests" but social engineering – a $400 tax credit for falling into line with Barack Obama and Susan Roesgen. That's why these are Tea Parties – because the heart of the matter is the same question posed two-and-a-third centuries ago: Are Americans subjects or citizens? If the latter, then a benign sovereign should not be determining "your interests" and then announcing that he's giving you a "tax credit" as your pocket money.
Doing the job the Boston Globe won't do, Glenn Reynolds, the Internet's Instapundit, has been posting many photographs of tea parties. For a movement of mean, angry old white men, there seem to be a lot of hot-looking young chicks among them. Perhaps they're just kinky gerontophiliacs. Or perhaps they understand that their generation will be the principal victim of this grotesque government profligacy. Like the original tea party, it is, in the end, about freedom. Live Tea or die.
8) O'S FOREIGN FOLLIES:IGNORING FESTERING THREATS
By Ralph Peters
THE world has rabies and our swooning media deliver headlines about the new Obama family dog. Yeah, the puppy's cute. But must journalists be lapdogs?
The week kicked off with gushing media declarations that President Obama had "passed his first test" in a foreign "crisis." Three pirates held an American hostage far too long. It was an embarrassment, not a crisis.
Our president was reluctant to authorize deadly force. Against pirates, for God's sake. Then, 24 hours after the Obama White House declared "Mission Accomplished," Somali pirates attacked another US-flagged ship.
This time, the pirates used rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns -- serious firepower.
Our response? The White House didn't send our Navy after the pirates. We're content that the attack was unsuccessful, with just some combat damage to our ship. Live and let live, folks.
Then, on Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced her solution to piracy: Send your tax dollars to Somalia in foreign aid.
That's rewarding criminality. It's tribute money. We're not asking for trouble. We're on our knees begging for it.
Since the new administration took office, our enemies have surged to challenge us, from northern Mexico through the Middle East to Asia. They sense weakness. And their instincts may be right.
Oh, we're huffing and puffing on North Korea -- which really isn't an immediate problem for the United States. (If China wants a nutty neighbor with nukes, hey, let's give General Tso's chickens a chance to come home to roost.) But we won't do anything hard.
The grave problems are elsewhere:
Mexico: Our southern border blazes with a narco-insurgency that's made major Mexican cities ungovernable. The response of our refocused Department of Homeland Security? A warning about the terrorist menace from our military veterans (the thanks of a grateful nation . . .). And more talk, in Mexico this time.
Iraq: Obama's crowd still can't accept the fact that Iraq matters deeply, while Afghanistan -- O's campaign darling -- doesn't. Inspired by the weakness our president projects, al Qaeda's local branch -- which had been crushed -- hopes to make a comeback.
Violence levels remain relatively low in Iraq, but a recent spate of bombings signals that al Qaeda, which had pretty much quit, sees a divine light at the end of the tunnel. Our troops on the scene now face crippling restrictions. The terrorists smell blood.
Pakistan: It's over. We can't fix Pakistan. The Pakistanis aren't interested in our interests. Islamabad's intelligence services belong to our enemies and the army's deeply infected with Islamism and anti-Americanism. Every additional weapon we hand over may be used against us.
Pakistan's president, "Mr. Benazir Bhutto," is feckless, corrupt and incompetent. Our response? Hand him billions more to pocket (hey, it kept AIG from attacking us . . . ). If the administration doesn't re-think our approach to Pakistan fast, this may be a generation's strategic train-wreck.
Russia: Vladimir Putin's regime is subverting Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova; undercutting our Afghan effort; blaming us for the shambles Russia is in, and murdering democracy activists. The Obama team sees Putin's gang as "friends."
Oh, and we've offered to drastically cut our nuclear arsenal and retarget our remaining warheads so they won't hurt anybody. Doesn't anyone in this over-educated administration grasp that only de terrence prevented nuclear war?
Venezuela: As oil prices tank, Hugo Chavez rules through mobs and military force. Elected officials from the opposition have been jailed, beaten or forced into hiding. Democracy's in a coma. Chavez makes no secret of his desire to emulate Fidel Castro and become president-for-life. Obama's response? Embrace the Castro brothers.
Somalia: Pirates attack our ships. Obama's advisers suggest rebuilding Somalia, pouring in money our empty Treasury would have to borrow from China. When will we stop rewarding those who harm us? And we tried reforming Somalia once. Didn't work, won't work. It's time for a little therapeutic violence.
Terrorism? See above. Returning vets and American taxpayers who want to control our borders are the threat, not foreign butchers who act in the name of a religion we mustn't mention. Then there were all those tea-party terrorists . . .
The White House puppy's ready for its close-up now.
Ralph Peters' latest book is "Looking For Trouble."
9) A trip down Jimmy Carter's memory lane
By George Jonas
'If politicians lied all the time, you could figure them out. But you can't rely on it," I remember my father saying to me. "Sometimes they blindside you by telling the truth."
I should have listened to him.
Canadians don't vote in American elections; they only suffer the consequences. Still, had I suspected that Barack Obama is telling the truth, I wouldn't have been so nonchalant about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's onetime parishioner becoming the leader of what used to be the free world.
As a candidate, Obama ran on a platform of "change." It didn't worry me because I didn't think he meant it. When he stayed resolutely on message, I wrote that yes, Obama's platform is change: When elected, he'll change from senator to president. Granted, that's no small step for him, but it wouldn't necessarily be a giant step for mankind.
Well, I was wrong. The new White House has been crying havoc and unleashing the dogs of war on free enterprise, using a big bump in the economic road for a casus belli. The changes President Obama is contemplating domestically include a shift from private to public enterprise and from a market to a command economy. Not exactly piffle, but they're dwarfed by changes in foreign policy. Obama is calling for trips down memory lane, not just from George W. Bush to Bill Clinton or from Ronald Reagan to Jimmy Carter, but all the way back to the 1960s.
I did write last year that Obama could turn out to be a remanufactured video of Jimmy Carter, but I should have added "if we're lucky." If we're not, he might prove to be a black-and-white kinescope of Eugene McCarthy, circa 1968.
We haven't been lucky, it appears. We're back to Ban the Bomb.
Well -- and what's wrong with that? The bomb, scary in anyone's hands, is about to fall into evil ones. Why not just do away with it? Some would call it a no-brainer.
Indeed it is, but in the opposite direction. Uninventing (disinventing?) nuclear weapons might be a splendid idea, except it cannot be done. What Obama contemplates is outlawing them, which is a bad idea.
There's a huge difference between eliminating and outlawing things. Eliminate something, and it's gone.
Outlaw something, and it's gone ... underground. This being so, outlawing what you can eliminate is unnecessary, and outlawing what you cannot eliminate is inadvisable. Outlawing things you cannot eliminate usually makes them more dangerous, not less.
If you outlaw something, it doesn't mean that it will vanish from the face of the Earth. Unless you're a sorcerer with a magic wand and a reliable incantation, such as abracadabra, outlawing something means only that in your jurisdiction it will take an outlaw to possess it. Or, to put it the other way around, anyone who possesses it will be an outlaw by definition. If you outlaw, say, automobiles, no one but outlaws will drive. Or, if you prefer, anyone who drives will be an outlaw.
This isn't a new discovery. Opponents of gun control have been saying it for ages. My friend David Frum mentioned it the other day, specifically in the context of nuclear weapons, while kicking off this series. If anything, it's true enough to be trite. Outlawing anything with a capacity to be used for both good and evil, for aggression as well as deterrence, such as firearms, assures that only bad guys will have them. That's why one should outlaw only what one is content to see as a monopoly of evildoers: Robbery, say, murder or having sex with underage children.
Would it have been better for the destructive deity unleashed at Los Alamos 64 years ago never to have been brought to life? Maybe, but since it was inevitable that it would be, it was better for Roosevelt's scientists to have conjured it up than Hitler's -- and better for them to have done so four years earlier than Stalin's. With Obama as president, it would likely have been the other way around. Los Alamos would have been shut down, and the first mushroom cloud would have risen over some German test site in the Baltic sea.
The genie is out of the bottle; good luck to anyone trying to stuff it back. Preventing proliferation has proven impossible. There's sufficient power to stop nuclear development in rogue countries but there isn't sufficient political will. Hope lies in another direction.
A person born on the day the bomb exploded over Nagasaki will be reaching retirement next year without having seen a similar explosion over any city anywhere. Since humanity has become no kinder or wiser in the interim, the probable reason is that nuclear devices act as their own deterrent.
When non-proliferation is no longer an option, the best hope for averting disaster lies in selective proliferation. Don't ban the bomb; spread it. There's more deterrent value in a thermonuclear device aimed at a rival's capital than in a series of test ban treaties signed by BlackBerrywielding sorcerer's apprentices on the shores of Lake Geneva.
10)Campus Leftists Don't Believe in Free Speech: Conservative speakers now have bodyguards when they visit universities.
By DAVID HOROWITZ
I arrived in Austin, Texas, one evening recently to give a speech about academic freedom at the university there. Entering the hall where I was to give my speech, I was greeted -- if that's the word -- by a raucous protest organized by a professor and self-styled Bolshevik, Dana Cloud. Forty protesters hoisted placards high in the air and robotically chanted "Down With Horowitz," "Racist Go Home," and "No More Witch-hunts."
Fortunately, a spokesperson for the administration was present to threaten the disrupters with arrest if they continued on this course. (The threat was administered very carefully, with three formal warnings before any action could be taken.) This quieted the crowd enough that I could begin my talk, which proceeded without further serious incident.
Even so, there were occasional heckles and demonstrative cheers from the group when I mentioned the name of Sami Al-Arian ( whose organization, Palestine Islamic Jihad, is responsible for the deaths of more than 100 innocent victims in the Middle East), Black Panther Huey Newton (convicted of killing an Oakland police officer in 1967, although he was eventually released on a technicality), or when I uttered the word "communist" -- even though I did so to remind the audience that communists killed 120 million people in the last century trying to implement Marx's ideas.
Among the organizations participating in these outbursts were the International Socialist Organization, whose goal is the establishment of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the United States; Iranians for Peace and Justice, supporters of Hezbollah and Hamas; and Campus Progress, the unofficial college arm of the Democratic Party.
One of the local members of Campus Progress had written a column in the campus newspaper attacking me in advance of my talk, and defending Sami Al-Arian as a victim of political persecution. The conservative students who invited me to the University of Texas told me that organizations such as the Muslim Students Association routinely join with College Democrats in protests against the state of Israel.
At the end of the evening, Prof. Cloud stepped up to the microphone to ask a question, which was actually a little speech. Even though the protocol for such occasions restricts audience participants from making their own speeches, I did her the courtesy she tried to deny me by letting her talk.
She presented herself as a devoted teacher and mother who was obviously harmless. Then she accused me of being a McCarthyite menace. Disregarding the facts I had laid out in my talk -- that I have publicly defended the right of University of Colorado's radical professor Ward Churchill to hold reprehensible views and not be fired for them, and that I supported the leftist dean of the law school at UC Irvine when his appointment was withdrawn for political reasons -- she accused me of whipping up a "witch-hunting hysteria" that made her and her faculty comrades feel threatened.
When Ms. Cloud finished, I pointed out that organizing mobs to scream epithets at invited speakers fit the category of "McCarthyite" a lot more snugly than my support for a pluralism of views in university classrooms. I gestured toward the armed officers in the room -- the university had assigned six or seven to keep the peace --and introduced my own bodyguard, who regularly accompanies other conservative speakers when they visit universities. In the past, I felt uncomfortable about taking protection to a college campus until a series of physical attacks at universities persuaded me that such precautions were necessary. (When I spoke at the University of Texas two years ago, Ms. Cloud and her disciples had to be removed by the police in order for the talk to proceed.)
I don't know of a single leftist speaker among the thousands who visit campuses every term who has been obstructed or attacked by conservative students, who are too decent and too tolerant to do that. The entire evening in Texas reminded me of the late Orianna Fallaci's observation that what we are facing in the post-9/11 world is not a "clash of civilizations," but a clash of civilization versus barbarism.
Mr. Horowitz is the author, most recently, of "One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America's Top Colleges Are Indoctrinating Students and Undermining Our Democracy" (Crown Forum, 2009).
11) Minnesota's Missing Votes: Some Senate absentee ballots are more equal than others..
Meanwhile, back in the Minnesota Senate recount, the three-judge panel reviewing the race has declared Democrat Al Franken the winner. Republican Norm Coleman intends to appeal to the state's Supreme Court, while Democrats and the press corps pressure him to surrender. We hope Mr. Coleman keeps fighting, because the outcome so far hangs on the fact that some votes have been counted differently from others.
Even after the recount and panel-findings, the 312-vote margin separating the two men equals about .01% of the 2.9 million votes cast. Even without any irregularities, this is as close to a "tie" as it gets. And there have been plenty of irregularities. By the end of the recount, the state was awash with evidence of duplicate ballot counting, newly discovered ballots, missing ballots, illegal voting, and wildly diverse standards as to which votes were counted. Any one of these issues was enough to throw the outcome into doubt. Combined, they created a taint more worthy of New Jersey than Minnesota.
The Coleman camp pushed for resolution of these problems during the recount, but it was stymied by a state canvassing board that cared more about preserving its "Minnesota nice" reputation than about making tough calls. The state Supreme Court also punted difficult questions. The mess then landed with the three-judge panel overseeing Mr. Coleman's contest trial, a panel that seemed out of its depth.
Case in point: the panel's dismal handling of absentee ballots. Early in the recount, the Franken team howled that some absentee votes had been erroneously rejected by local officials. We warned at the time that this was dangerous territory, designed to pressure election officials into accepting rejected ballots after the fact.
Yet instead of shutting this Franken request down, or early on issuing a clear set of rules as to which absentees were valid, the state Supreme Court and the canvassing board oversaw a haphazard process by which some counties submitted new batches to be included in the tally, while other counties did not. The resulting additional 933 ballots were largely responsible for Mr. Franken's narrow lead.
During the contest trial, the Coleman team presented evidence of a further 6,500 absentees that it felt deserved to be included under the process that had produced the prior 933. The three judges then finally defined what constituted a "legal" absentee ballot. Countable ballots, for instance, had to contain the signature of the voter, complete registration information, and proper witness credentials.
But the panel only applied these standards going forward, severely reducing the universe of additional absentees that the Coleman team could hope to have included. In the end, the three judges allowed only about 350 additional absentees to be counted. The panel also did nothing about the hundreds, possibly thousands, of absentees that have already been legally included, yet are now "illegal" according to the panel's own ex-post definition.
If all this sounds familiar, think Florida 2000. In that Presidential recount, officials couldn't decide what counted as a legal vote, and so different counties used different standards. The Florida Supreme Court made things worse by changing the rules after the fact. In Bush v. Gore, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that this violated Constitutional principles of equal protection and due process, which require that every vote be accorded equal weight.
This will be a basis for Mr. Coleman's appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court. Should that body be reluctant to publicly rebuke their judicial colleagues who sat on the contest panel, Mr. Coleman could also take his appeal to federal court. This could take months.
Another solution is to hold a special Senate election. Minnesota law does not specifically provide for such a runoff. However, the U.S. Constitution's 17th amendment does provide states with a roadmap for filling "vacancies," which might be a legal starting point for a do-over. Even before the shifting standards of the contest trial, the St. Paul Pioneer Press looked at the ballot-counting evidence and called for a revote. It could be that this is where the court case is leading in any event.
Democrats want to portray Mr. Coleman as a sore loser and make the Republican worry that he will ruin his chances for other political office. But Mr. Coleman has a legitimate grievance that not all votes have been treated equally. If the Franken standard of disparate absentee-voter treatment is allowed to stand, every close election will be settled by a legal scramble to change the vote-counting rules after Election Day. Minnesota should take the time to get this one right.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment