"I think we have to be a little bit cautious about ... tossing out that term 'destabilize.' We're getting to think that way too much because of ... Afghanistan and Iraq." -- Sen. Jay Rockefeller, responding to Congressional calls for "regime change" in Iran.
Iraq's New Order Sanctions are gone, and the UN blesses the occupation. So, who's the winner here -- and who's the loser?
Hope in Strange Places There haven't been many reasons for hope recently. Which make the odd few all the more valuable. Iraq's New Order The US occupation of Iraq is now street-legal. As far as the United Nations is concerned, anyway. On Thursday, the US and Britain won approval of resolution 1483, which lifts sanctions and, at least on the surface, hands the UN a wider role in the reconstruction of Iraq. American negotiators offered a host of concessions in order to get pre-war Security Council foes like France, Russia, and Germany on board. The strategy worked, and the international community is back in the postwar picture. But US concessions were miniscule compared to what it got in return: virtually unchallenged control over Iraq and its oil fields. And best of all for Washington, the new dispensation comes with the UN seal of approval.
Writing in Alternet, Ian Williams blasts Washington for its imperial designs. He reserves much of his ire for the White House's erstwhile adversaries, however, and for their willingness to provide the US invasion with a fig leaf of legitimacy.
"It is almost as if a jury returned a verdict of justified homicide for a lynch mob ... Most members of the council decided that fighting for their principles would exact too high a price in blowback from the White House, and well -- how else to put it -- they then collaborated with the resolution.
...
So is there any upside? Well, up to a point. The U.S. was forced to come back to the U.N. because it could not legally sell Iraq's oil without a Security Council resolution and because even alleged coalition countries wanted a U.N. resolution before they would join in the occupation. The U.S. had to admit that it was, in fact, an Occupying power."
"While the concessions -- including a slightly enhanced role for the UN during reconstruction and a pledge to consider at a later date the future of UN weapons inspectors -- did enough to appease detractors, the fundamental goals of Britain and the US were left intact. Both countries are now, in essence, free to run Iraq until an internationally recognised government is in place -- and will control its oil flows."
The editors of London's Guardian view the resolution somewhat favorably. While noting that many details -- such as the timetable for establishing an independent Iraqi government -- remain up in the air, they argue that the resolution is better than almost anyone could have hoped.
"Despite the way it was achieved, the lifting of sanctions on Iraq, the cause of so many years of pointless suffering and fruitless argument, is a matter for celebration. So, too, is this symbolic and to a lesser degree practical reassertion of the UN's primacy in conferring both inter national legality and legitimacy."
For altogether different reasons, neocons like the National Review's John F. Cullinan also see the resolution's passage as a US victory. Finally, he declares, the "weasels" in Old Europe and the UN are getting their comeuppance.
"Resolution 1483 also marks the demise of the so-called Axis of Weasels, that unnatural ménage a trios pulled apart by the centripetal forces of divergent national interests among the French, Germans, and Russians.
...
This is a teachable moment for the U.N. as well. Where vital U.S. national interests are at stake, the U.N.'s remaining relevance and authority depend entirely on that body's willingness to assist or at least acquiesce in U.S. efforts to maintain minimum world public order. This remains to be seen."
Some in the mainstream US press, meanwhile, have declared the rift between Washington and Old Europe on the way to being fixed. The editors of the Boston Globe, for instance, deem the agreement "a welcome revival of council members' will to cooperate," and a sign of the UN's renewed vitality.
"If council members wish to stitch together the torn fabric of international cooperation, this is the way to do it -- by using the UN as a locus for diplomacy that seeks to secure each country's basic interests while preserving the general interest in consensus."
Fine words, and true as far as they go. However, as the Los Angeles Times' editorial board notes soberly, Thursday's agreement merely recognizes the facts on the ground: the US holds all the cards.
"The United Nations Security Council merely acknowledged reality Thursday in voting to lift more than a decade of sanctions on Iraq, thus accepting the role of the United States and Britain as occupying powers."
A coalition of 150 non-governmental agencies was much harsher in its assessment, according to Inter Press Service.
"'The United States was successful in bulldozing its way because it offered too many bribes and held out too many threats,' says Rob Wheeler, a spokesman for the Uniting for Peace Coalition.
The 'threats,' he said, were against developing nations in the 15-member Security Council, and the 'bribes' were the promises made to more powerful nations, which caved in to U.S. pressure.
'Iraq has the world's second largest oil reserves. The United States will now decide how those reserves are to be distributed. And nobody wants to be cut out of the pie,' Wheeler told IPS on Thursday."
That certainly seems true in Russia's case. Few ever attributed Russia's antiwar stance to high principle, of course. So it's no surprise that Russia dropped its objections once Colin Powell assured Moscow that most of its Saddam-era contracts and debts would be honored, as Islam Online reports (via Agence France-Presse).
All horse-trading aside, though, the Christian Science Monitor's editors are encouraged. Returning at least some power to the UN, they opine, is an improvement -- as well as a smart long-term move for the Bush administration.
"By now returning to the UN, Bush has helped revive an institution he may well need in the future as the war on terrorism progresses."
Hope in Strange Places Sometimes you read stories and they just don't leave you. Such was the case with Ira Chernus's "Nonviolence is Starting to Matter in the Middle East," which I found posted on Common Dreams over a week ago and finally get around to citing now. Such was the case with George Monbiot's Guardian column from early last week. The subjects dealt with couldn't seem more different. Chernus wants to suggest that nonviolence is beginning to make a difference in Israel; Monbiot is commenting on the bringing of what is, in essence, a "nuisance suit" in Belgium against General Tommy Franks for war crimes in Iraq. What could they possibly have in common?
And yet, I find them joined in my mind, possibly because I'm still thinking about Rebecca Solnit's piece on hope in dark times, also from early last week. Each of these stories seems to me a tiny example of hope embedded in the worst of times, like some sudden flash of color in the darkness.
To begin with Chernus: Have you noticed that violent resistance (and, no, I am not myself in favor of this) to injustice is invariably denounced by the same people who dismiss nonviolent acts as hopeless, utopian, not for our world, not to be taken seriously. What's left, of course, is the norm, which in Iraq, in Israel, and here as well is increasingly a horror in itself. The sense that no serious person could believe any other path open to us, no matter that we can see the cliff ahead and feel our collective foot on the gas peddle, is crippling. It is the essence of hopelessness but passes itself off in our desperate world as the most basic "realism." So I found Chernus, a professor of religion, offering a tiny beacon of hope simply by attending to Charmaine Means, who refused to follow an order from her superiors in the U.S. Army, and to the Rachel Corries of this world and what they are trying to do. (I find myself drawn, as well, to a fine piece by Naomi Klein in the Guardian, comparing Rachel Corrie to Jessica Lynch, and asking, "So who is a hero?")
Monbiot's piece about the war crimes lawsuit against Gen. Franks seemed an exceedingly modest reminder that, despite the best efforts of the Bush administration, the age of human rights is not dead. This suit represents, after all, another path open to us, but these days dealt with dismissively here in the U.S. -- the path of enforcing through multinational action legal responsibility for one's acts and crimes. It appeals to me no less that such an approach is still available in Belgium, a nation with its own hardly confronted dark past (in the Congo) and even possibly a darkening present.
Finally, I find some hope in the eloquent graduation speech (found at the War In Context website) given at Rockford College by Chris Hedges, New York Times reporter and author of the book 'War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning', who has covered many wars for the Times and been remarkably outspoken during our most recent Iraq war. While the speech is remarkable in itself, what stirs me is the willingness of a reporter to speak in this blunt and unpopular fashion, even when essentially booed offstage, even when, as the latest missives of Mediachannel's Danny Schechter seem to indicate, he may be putting his career in jeopardy. The urge to speak, the urge not to be silenced, is always an act of hope.
Additional contributions from Tom Engelhardt can be found throughout the week at TomDispatch.com, a weblog of The Nation Institute. {publish-page-break}
"We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals -- and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship... Bipartisanship is another name for date rape." -- Grover Norquist, a leading Republican strategist and onetime adviser to Newt Gingrich.
Posturing or Policy? The neoconservatives shaping foreign policy in Washington have locked their sights on Iran. But is the belligerent talk for real?
Big Fraud, Big Winner WorldCom-MCI pulled off the nation's biggest accounting scam. Now it's got a contract in Iraq. Posturing or Policy? In the days after the fall of Baghdad, pundits in Washington seemed interested in answering only one question: Who's next? The neocons populating the capital's think-tanks had an easy answer: Iran.
As the weeks passed, as the US reconstruction effort in Iraq showed signs of faltering, as Afghanistan's US-backed government showed signs of crumbling, those neocons stayed on message. Earlier this month, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol made the argument in typically triumphalist fashion, declaring that "the next great battle... will be for Iran." That battle, Kristol notes, need not be a military one. But Kristol's fevered rhetoric was distinctly martial.
"We are already in a death struggle with Iran over the future of Iraq. The theocrats ruling Iran understand that the stakes are now double or nothing. They can stay in power by disrupting efforts to create a pluralist, non-theocratic, Shia-majority state next door--or they can fall, as success in Iraq sounds the death knell for the Iranian revolution.
So we must help our friends and allies in Iraq block Iranian-backed subversion. And we must also take the fight to Iran, with measures ranging from public diplomacy to covert operations. Iran is the tipping point in the war on proliferation, the war on terror, and the effort to reshape the Middle East."
Last week, it seemed that the Bush administration was at least flirting with Kristol's aggressive approach, as leading White House hawks repeatedly took aim at Iran. Then, on Sunday, Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler suggested that the posturing was due to become policy. Kessler wrote that the White House had suspended all contacts with Tehran and appeared "ready to embrace an aggressive policy of trying to destabilize the Iranian government." Senior White House officials were to meet yesterday, Kessler wrote, to discuss the Iran policy. And he reported that Pentagon officials were "pressing hard for public and private actions that they believe could lead to the toppling of the government."
"The State Department, which had encouraged some form of engagement with the Iranians, appears inclined to accept such a policy, especially if Iran does not take any visible steps to deal with the suspected al Qaeda operatives before Tuesday, officials said. But State Department officials are concerned that the level of popular discontent there is much lower than Pentagon officials believe, leading to the possibility that U.S. efforts could ultimately discredit reformers in Iran.
...
'We're headed down the same path of the last 20 years,' one State Department official said. 'An inflexible, unimaginative policy of just say no.'"
Apparently, somebody in the White House did just that -- the meeting was put on hold until tomorrow. But Kessler's report rippled through Washington and the Middle East. Whether mere posturing or real policy, the hawks' belligerence made Iran issue one for many Washington pundits and politicians. Not that the politicos on Capitol Hill were eager to comment. On Sunday's Meet the Press, four influential senators from both parties eagerly sidestepped the question of whether a campaign to 'destabilize' Tehran would be prudent or practical (Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, at least acknowledged that he was ducking the question). Sen. Joe Biden, D-Delaware, would only say that he would like to see the administration finish the existing work in Afghanistan and Iraq before casting about for the next fight -- although he did question the notion that regime change is possible using the kinds of methods the neocons seem to favor.
"We have a multibillion -- I believe several hundred billion-dollar obligation out of our own self-interest in Iraq. I'd like to get one of them nailed down before we start off -- and, by the way, this notion of being able to topple the government from within by covert operation -- I have seen no evidence of that. I've seen no evidence that that is likely. And I think it ranks up there with the assertion that we were going to be greeted by the Shia as great liberators and embraced. I think this is civilians at the Defense Department. I have not seen anything from the (CIA) to suggest this. I've not seen any -- that is, that there's a likelihood of an internal uprising overthrowing this government. I think it's fanciful."
The reaction in Tehran was equally swift, and far less obtuse. Rejecting Pentagon claims that senior Al-Qaeda leaders were being given refuge in Iran, Tehran publicly lashed out at Washington, warning the US against interfering in Iranian affairs. Privately, however, some of Iran's embattled conservative clerics might be expected to welcome Washington belligerence. As Dan de Luce of The Guardian reports, the Bush administration's angry outburst "could not have come at a more awkward time" for reformers in Iran.
"As the political and constitutional battle between reformists and Islamists comes to a head, the US intervention is a distraction and a pretext for muffling dissent.
Reformist MPs, who form a parliamentary majority, are threatening to resign en masse after repeated obstruction by conservatives on the guardian council, an unelected body but possessing a constitutional veto over legislative change.
...
Conservatives portray the threat to resign as naive and dangerous, damaging Iran's national security at a time when the US military encircles Iran. The state prosecutor warned MPs that they might face legal action if their resignations threatened 'national interests'."
De Luce writes that President Mohammed Khatami and other reformers are "furious" that the US chose such an inopportune time to ratchet up its rhetoric. For years, Khatami and other reformers have had a single, overwhelming problem in their campaign to build a civil society in Iran: the country's immensely powerful and staunchly conservative religious leadership. But now, as Simon Tisdall writes, also in The Guardian, Khatami and his allies have another problem: The Bush administration.
"Without some new terrorist enormity in the US 'homeland', surely Bush is not so reckless as to start another all-out war as America's election year approaches? Washington's war of words could amount to nothing more than that. Maybe the US foolishly believes it is somehow helping reformist factions in the Majlis (parliament), the media and student bodies. Maybe destabilisation and intimidation is the name of the game and the al-Qaida claims are a pretext, as in Iraq. Perhaps the US does not itself know what it wants to do; a White House strategy meeting is due today. But who knows? Tehran's dilemma is real: Washington's intentions are dangerously uncertain."
Iranian officials, facing such dire uncertainty, might take the fateful decision to build and deploy nuclear weapons "in order to pre-empt America's regime-toppling designs," Tisdall observes. To Iran's reformers and conservatives alike, he writes, "the US now looks very much like the Soviet Union looked to western Europe at the height of the cold war."
"If this is Iran's choice, the US will be much to blame. While identifying WMD proliferation as the main global threat, its bellicose post-9/11 policies have served to increase rather than reduce it. Washington ignores, as ever, its exemplary obligation to disarm under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT). Despite strategic reductions negotiated with Russia, the US retains enormous firepower in every nuclear weapons category. Worse still, the White House is set on developing, not just researching, a new generation of battlefield 'mini-nukes' whose only application is offensive use, not deterrence. Its new $400bn defence budget allocates funding to this work; linked to this is an expected US move to end its nuclear test moratorium in defiance of the comprehensive test ban treaty."
It's worth noting that the very Washington hawks who are so eager to covertly meddle in Iran's affairs are the same people warning Tehran against meddling in Washington's new Middle East sandbox -- Iraq. Echoing a theme he stamped out weeks ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared that any attempts to "remake Iraq in Iran's image will be aggressively put down."
But is that really Iran's design -- even among the hard-line Islamist conservatives apparently strengthened by Washington's belligerence? William O. Beeman, director of Middle East studies at Brown University, doubts it. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Beeman suggests that the Bush administration "cannot seem to wean itself from the idea that states have primacy of power."
"Therefore it continually makes the conceptual error that if the Shiites become strong in Iraq they will be "controlled" by the established government in Iran.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Iranian government is not benefited in any special way if the Iraqi Shiites come to power. In fact, the Iranian clerics are disadvantaged by the rise of clerical influence in Najaf.
Most Shiite ayatollahs disagree profoundly with the philosophy of clerical rule promulgated by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. They all opposed him when he came to power and will have no qualms about continuing their opposition to this philosophy from Iraqi territory.
In fact, the Shiite community will become a threat to the U.S. only if Washington tries to disenfranchise it and deny it the right to elect leaders for Iraq. At that point the Shiites would resist the U.S. fiercely. They have no intrinsic hostility to the United States, only to American interference in their community affairs, which seems to occur with alarming regularity."
"It is impossible to win in Iraq or to block the spread of weapons of mass destruction throughout the terror network without bringing down the mullahs. Iran is not only a participant on the other side; it is the heart of the jihadist structure. If we are really serious about winning the war against terrorism, we must defeat Iran. Thus far, we haven't been serious enough.
...
If we fail to act decisively, we will permit the mullahs to define the near future. The war against terrorism was never limited to a single country, or to a single strategy. We have defeated Saddam, now we must spread freedom to the heartland of the terror masters in Iran."
Beeman and Ledeen; thoughtful reasoning and unthinking faith. The two are as mutually exclusive in their approach as they are in their conclusions, and a thoughtful, informed public should have little difficulty in choosing between the two. But, with a leading GOP strategist brazenly admitting that his party aims to export "bitter nastiness and partisanship" to the state's often-bipartisan and therefore functional state legislatures, War Watch can't shake the horrible sensation that Ledeen's brand of bitter nastiness may win the day in Washington.
Big Fraud, Big Winner Last summer, WorldCom-MCI flamed out in the nation's all-time biggest financial accounting scandal. The company, which isn't even a commercial wireless carrier in the States, has now been rewarded for its glowing track record with a hefty government contract to build a cellular network in Iraq.
During the boom times, WorldCom pulled off an $11 billion fraud. Its executives have been fired, and a handful are fighting criminal charges. As for the company, now in bankruptcy, it settled with the SEC on a payment of $500 million, which will go back to investors. Some say that with that fine, the government has done enough. True, it's the largest fine ever imposed by the SEC, and true, the money will go to investors. But it constitutes only a week's worth of WorldCom's earnings and gives stockholders only a tiny fraction of what investors lost. As Jerry Knight points out in the Washington Post, the fine is trivial:
"[T]he payback would be only about 17 cents a share for WorldCom stockholders -- if they were to get all of it. That's not much compensation for somebody who paid $60 a share for the stock four years ago when its value was inflated by phony accounting. ... The $500 million is not only a pittance, it's also a pointless penalty that takes money out of the pockets of some MCI victims and puts it in the pockets of others.
Along with doing next to nothing to compensate investors, it does nothing at all to deter other corporate crooks from the same kind of phony bookkeeping.
The harder you look at the penalty imposed on MCI, as the company now wants to be called, the clearer it becomes that nobody in Washington has figured out the appropriate punishment for colossal corporate fraud."
It's hard to believe that a sweetheart, no-bid government contracts fall into the category of "appropriate punishment." Of course, WorldCom is joining the honorable ranks of Halliburton and Bechtel -- other mammoth companies with questionable track records and big contracts in Iraq. But the $45 million WorldCom contract has WorldCom's competitors crying foul.
"'We don't understand why MCI would be awarded this business, given its status as having committed the largest corporate fraud in history,' AT&T Corp. spokesman Jim McGann said. 'There are many qualified, financially stable companies that could have been awarded that business, including us.'
Said Len Lauer, head of Sprint Corp.'s wireless division: 'I was curious about it, because the last time I looked, MCI's never built out a wireless network.'"
MCI did once dabble reselling other cellular providers' services. But that's all (and it dropped the operation recently).
American competitors aren't the only ones griping. WorldCom's contract seems to confirm Europe's worst suspicions about their prospects of gaining work in a Bush-dominated Iraq, according to a European analyst on the BBC. But while it might seem to some that WorldCom's cozy relationship with U.S. authorities gives WorldCom an unfair edge, a spokeswoman for WorldCom said that the company's "overall deep relationship" with the U.S. military and government was, in fact, one of its qualifications for the job. The AP reports on that depth:
"[A] recent review by Washington Technology, a trade newspaper that follows computing-related sales to the government, found that WorldCom jumped to eighth among all federal technology contractors in 2002, with $772 million in sales.
It was the first time that WorldCom cracked the top 10.
That $772 million figure refers only to deals in which WorldCom is the prime contractor to federal agencies. The company gets much more taxpayer money -- exactly how much is not disclosed -- from state contracts and from federal deals in which it is a subcontractor.
That infuriates WorldCom critics, who say the government has kept the company afloat while the General Services Administration barred Enron and Arthur Andersen from getting contracts after their scandals emerged."
At least one leader in Congress is asking questions. Senator Susan Collins (R-Me.), head of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, has put in a request for the General Service Administration to explain why why the GSA is allowing WorldCom to reap continued government business while the company is still under investigation for the biggest accounting fraud in the nation's history. But Collins is just asking politely for now; she hasn't made any real accusations.
WorldCom itself is trying to sell its experience in Afghanistan (where warlords rule via satellite phone) as justification for its deal in Iraq. But the real question may not even be whether WorldCom should have gotten this contract, but whether this contract should have been assigned at all. Noting that cell phone service is spotty at best in American cities with fully operating electrical grids, Pat Gerber wonders on CommonDreams.org whether a cell phone network is even a reasonable expense for Baghdad:
"The contract is for a small, temporary network. Its price tag is $45 million for 5,000 to 10,000 phones, if there are no cost overruns. That works out to $4,500 to $9,000 per phone. Since many people carry two or three phones, the cost per user is higher. These figures are so grotesque that they make clean government advocates yearn for the good ol' days when the Pentagon confined its spending excesses to $640 ash trays. Had this contract been put out for open bidding, companies that have actually done this type of work before would not only have been interested but would probably have agreed to a more reasonable dollar figure. "
Remember when president Bush said the private sector was going to teach the government about efficiency?
Coalition Watch: 
Occupation Watch: 
Iraq's New Order 
Iraq's New Order 
Policy Watch: 
Weapons Watch: