Oct
6
Democracy In Iran
Filed Under American Politics, Foreign Policy | 4 Comments
Isn’t worth keeping an eye on nowadays.
The Obama administration has withdrawn funding from the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. This isn’t a human rights activist organisation seeking to blatantly promote human rights in Iran, it is simply a watchdog taking on the responsibility of tracking human rights violations in Iran. One would think that would be a fairly important program at this time, following the dishonest election there and the ensuing violent put down of protests and the imprisonment of political enemies.
An indication of the good work this agency does:
The group has published 12 reports in English and Persian about the forced confessions of detained bloggers and journalists, the 1988 massacre of thousands of political prisoners, and the Iranian government’s campaign to assassinate dissidents abroad. Although the State Department has been the group’s main source of funds, the Canadian government granted it money to research human-rights abuses in the wake of the disputed election this year.
Currently, the group is working to develop a list of all those who were arrested following the election and a list of those responsible for alleged abuses in prison.
Not for much longer though:
But without additional funding, the group will shut down in May when its funding runs out, Redman said.
Isn’t it strange that this comes only a week after the talks with Iran? Some quid pro quo? First there was the announcement that for the first time since the early nineties, an American President has refused to meet the Dalai Lama, and now this. If this agency was a neo-conservative action group determined to actively promote democracy in Iran I could understand it. But for the Obama administration to try to prevent the monitoring of abuses in that country, possibly, and seemingly likely, at the request of the Iranian government. Even Alex Massie disapproves:
Because otherwise this looks shabby and, actually, terrible. Realism is fine but realism doesn’t have to be granite-hearted to the point it becomes embarrassed by talk of human rights and the careful documentation of such abuses.
Personally I think it’s shameful.
Oct
2
Are The Iran Talks Going Well?
Filed Under American Politics, Foreign Policy | 1 Comment
The West seem to have got some concessions out of Iran following their talks yesterday:
Iran agreed on Thursday in talks with the United States and other major powers to open its newly revealed uranium enrichment plant near Qum to international inspection in the next two weeks and to send most of its openly declared enriched uranium outside Iran to be turned into fuel for a small reactor that produces medical isotopes, senior American and other Western officials said.
However, as even the American negotiators admit, this may well be a “hollow” promise:
If Iran has secret stockpiles of enriched uranium, however, the accomplishment would be hollow, a senior American official conceded.
I’m no student of the Vietnam war, but I wonder if Iran will play these ongoing talks like the North Vietnamese did the Paris talks. There, they made vague promises as a way of assessing America’s convictions. As America sought compromises and made promises as part of the negotiating process, North Vietnam were able to assess America’s lack of conviction, both politically and domestically, for an all out win. America’s problems in negotiating with Iran are made worse by the international nature of the negotiations. Europe, Russia and China are all going o have to see things in the same way America does, and for Russia and China, any desire for punitive actions against Iran are reluctant at best. So as Iran offer concessions, there is the risk of a wedge being driven in between the long-term negotiating partners.
They got more out of these one-day talks than I thought they might but I think that most parties realise that Iran are playing a game here. They are the most potent Middle-Eastern country right now, they’re not going to give that up easily, and bowing down to international pressure will most surely weaken them in the eyes of fellow Middle-Eastern countries. However, by giving up something, Iran may well have bought themselves some time against Israeli attack; the west will pressure Israel not to attack Iran as Iran are giving up concessions.
One final question. should Iran’s support for terrorist organisations be on the table?
Sep
23
This Is Wrong
Filed Under American Politics, Foreign Policy | 119 Comments
Late Sunday night, the United Nations issued its Monday Journal, which lists the heads of state who are addressing the opening of the 64th U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday.
Tucked in between Colombia and Russia is Honduras — but the legitimate president of Honduras will not be speaking. The U.N., a majority of whose member states are not “fully free” (according to Freedom House), has invited the ousted would-be dictator of Honduras, disgraced former president Manuel Zelaya, to deliver the address.
This is an outrageous decision, but don’t expect President Obama to stand up for justice and the rule of law. As NR’s Jay Nordlinger recently pointed out, Obama has decided to revoke the visa of Honduran president Roberto Micheletti, preventing his entry into the United States. Obama apparently feels more comfortable sharing a cappuccino in the U.N. Delegates Lounge with a deposed Chávez acolyte than with its authentic, constitutionally legitimate president.
Why is the leader of the free world choosing to “take a stand” against the democratic, pro-American Honduran government? And why doesn’t he have the moral courage to take stands against the world’s most oppressive regimes, such as those in Iran, North Korea, and Burma? Shouldn’t Obama be denying visas to the real enemies of Lady Liberty?
So Ahmedinejad is allowed to speak but Micheletti, the lawful President of Honduras (endorsed by it’s Supreme Court) isn’t? And this isn’t just a U.N. decision either, Obama’s administration has revoked Micheletti’s visa, preventing access to the U.S.
Obama and Hillary Clinton equivocated on getting involved in the internal strife in Iran, but they have no problem getting neck deep in the internal affairs of Honduras. At worst, what happened in Honduras was a peaceful coup and at best a situation endorsed with legal backing. And this is what Obama feels it necessary to draw a line in the sand on? Crushing revolution in Iran draws little more than a tut-tut from Obama.
Sep
20
Get In Their Faces
Filed Under American Politics, Foreign Policy | 26 Comments
That was Barack Obama’s rallying call to his supporters. Now one of his very earliest supporters and a person Obama turned to for foreign policy advice, particularly through the primary and general election campaign, has taken that message to heart.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, has suggested that if Israel tries to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, America should not only intervene by refusing Israel access to Iraq’s airspace, they should actually intervene by confronting Israel’s aircraft physically with aircraft of their own over the skies of Iraq. From an interview in The Daily Beast:
How aggressive can Obama be in insisting to the Israelis that a military strike might be in America’s worst interest?
We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?What if they fly over anyway?
Well, we have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a Liberty in reverse. [Israeli jet fighters and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty in international waters, off the Sinai Peninsula, during the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel later claimed the ship was the object of friendly fire.]
Wow! Obama may want to remove Brzezinski from his speed dial. Brzezinski is not part of the Obama administration, there is no suggestion that Obama still seeks foreign policy guidance from him, and I am in no way suggesting that Obama would do anything this crazy.
But the contemplation of such an act proves, and I am still recovering from this revelation, that there are people to the left of Obama still. And that’s a scary thought.
In a recent survey, Israel ranked third as the country Americans were most willing to support militarily (behind Britain and Canada), and the contemplation of taking military action against Israel would probably not even register in most Americans consciousness.
The repercussions of such a (hopefully) hypothetical confrontation are intriguing though. I don’t think Israel would face down this threat. I suspect that they’d return to Israeli airspace without a shot being fired. But with the hawkish Israeli’s, one just doesn’t know. But what this would do, is end any short or medium term hope of any kind of resolution of the problems in the Middle East. America could no longer serve as a mediator and would lose all credibility with Israelis.
Brzezinski is considered a foreign policy expert. I can not think of a more disastrous foreign policy move for America than this in the current Middle-East centric climate.
Jul
28
Israeli Strike Imminent?
Filed Under American Politics, Foreign Policy | 34 Comments
By Original Tony
This is a very short post but it comes from something that caught my eye.
If I am not mistaken, Obama gave the Iranian administration ‘until the end of the year’ to enter into dialogue with the USA over it’s nuclear programme and other topics of mutual interest.
Now, with Gates in Israel, that deadline has been reduced to the end of September.
Has this reduced timescale been brought about by Obama’s frustration with Dinnermejacket, or a change of heart to help the rebellion going on in Iran or more likely, the German intelligence report that Iran’s purification process for plutonium has been concluded and as a result the Iranians could make a bomb ‘within weeks’.
Or, is the belligerent Netanyahu giving the US administration a middle finger and planning a strike on Iran’s facilities with or without ‘The One’s’ approval?
Should we expect WW3 to start in 9 weeks time?
Jul
6
That Pesky Constitution
Filed Under American Politics | 14 Comments
Article 2, Section II of the constitution states:
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur
With the expiration of the START I arms treaty in December, the pressure is on President Obama to negotiate a new treaty as a replacement.
But as Jake Tapper reports, the White House are already setting expectations that the process will require the subverting of the constitution:
With the clock running out on a new US-Russian arms treaty before the previous Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, expires on December 5, a senior White House official said Sunday said that the difficulty of the task might mean temporarily bypassing the Senate’s constitutional role in ratifying treaties by enforcing certain aspects of a new deal on an executive levels and a “provisional basis” until the Senate ratifies the treaty.
One wonders where the difficulty in ratifying the treaty might come. Start II was ratified by an 89-4 vote, reasonable arms reduction agreements aren’t unpopular. And as we are constantly getting told, the Democrats have 60 votes in the Senate. Finding 15 Republicans shouldn’t be too difficult surely?
Unless of course, Obama is preparing to give away the store, particularly on missile defense. If he is planning to trade that away (presumably to get Russian help on Iran), those 15 votes will be much harder to come by.
So the plan is to ignore the constitutional requirement that all treaties must be ratified by the Senate. They say that this is only a temporary measure, and that may well be the case, but it is a dangerous precedent to set. We know that Obama is not a big fan of the constitution and if he gets away with ignoring it once, what is there to stop him doing it again? The constitution is there for the very reason of preventing Presidents from stretching their authority unreasonably.
And once again, we notice the Obama administration hitting the panic button. There never seems to be any time for these Democrats to do anything in a considered way. The stimulus HAD to be rushed through because of the economic crisis (and yet only 2% has been spent five months later), legislators weren’t allowed to read either the stimulus or the Cap and Trade Bill before they were voted on, and last minute 300 page amendments were being bought to the floor of the house ahead of big votes. With all this sleight of hand, the American public may, rightfully, start to wonder whether the Obama Administration are hiding something at worse, or at the very least are woefully incompetent and can’t get their act together.
Jun
17
That’s what Michael J. Totten at Commentary Magazine is saying:
A refreshing bipartisan consensus is emerging in the liberal and conservative halves of the blogosphere and the media in general. Visceral detestation of the Islamic Republic regime in Iran is all but universal.
Perhaps he hasn’t checked in with Matthew Yglesias, Joe Klein or Andrew Sullivan recently.
Here is Yglesias writing at The American Prospect which ironically has the tagline “liberal intelligence”:
Ahmadinejad is in most ways a classic right-winger, a demagogic nationalist and cultural conservative. In a manner somewhat reminiscent of a Sarah Palin, however, he clothes this right-wing politics in a language of class resentment, painting his more pragmatic and reformist opponents as decadent elites out of touch with ordinary people. Unlike the populists of the American right, however, he merges this rhetoric with something resembling an actual populist economic agenda.
So Ahmedinejad is like Sarah Palin, only better.O.K., let’s move on to Joe Klein at Time who takes on John McCain’s difference of opinion with Obama over how condemnatory the U.S. should be towards the Iranian governments usurpation of the democratic process:
The point is, neoconservatives like McCain and Wehner just can’t seem to quit their dangerous habit of making broad, extreme statements based on ideology rather than detailed knowledge of the situation in Iran and elsewhere.
This after acknowledging that he had been to Iran all of twice. Thankyou for your expertise there Mr Klein. His “knowledge of…Iran” is evident when he says:
Iran, by contrast, is breezy with freedom
So long as you aren’t gay, a woman or a protester I suppose.
And finally onto Andrew Sullivan, who despite his excellent reporting on events in Iran still finds the time to indulge his obsessional prejudices:
Ahmadinejad’s bag of tricks is eerily like that of Karl Rove
And:
the deployment of Potemkin symbolism like Sarah Palin:
And:
Think of this regime as Cheney and Rove in a police state setting
Classless the lot of them!
Jun
15
Bush, Obama and Iran
Filed Under American Politics, Foreign Policy | 58 Comments
At a major foreign policy speech to the AEI (American Enterprise Institute), a leading neo-conservative think-tank, George W. Bush said:
A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region
Isn’t it possible that the latest events are, in part, a vindication of Bush’s policy on Iraq, namely that a democratic Iraq would serve as a beacon encouraging democratic movements across the Middle East. Whilst causality is circumstantial at best, it isn’t too much of a stretch to suppose that presence of a newly democratic nation on its border might be a catalysing factor in the rush to protest the clear democratic failure of the latest election.
I am bothered by Barack Obama’s reluctance to involve himself in the fortunes of the protesters. I take Alex Massie’s point that supporting the protesters allows Ahmedinejad to cast the Mousavi supporters as pro-American and anti-Iranian. But I think there is something fundamentally more important than foreign policy nuance here. If these early sparks of a movement are allowed to peter out without Barack Obama declaring himself for the right side in this matter, he will be the President who failed to act. That will be a dangerous precedent to set in the world of international affairs, even if it is only a perception and not a truth. Moreover, I think there is principle at stake here (and I know my non-neocon friends will recoil from this), that visibly supporting democracy and setting oneself in opposition to despotism is the right thing to do, particularly when such an opportunity as this presents itself. I’m afraid that I’m going to have to agree with Victor Davis Hanson at The Corner when he says:
How did it come to pass that the Left thought cozying up to a brutal thug like Ahmedinejad was proof of statecraft superior to Bush’s tough position that he was a nut and at odds with the aspirations for freedom of the Iranian people?
Jun
14
When asked last week about the upcoming Iranian elections, President Obama declared:
“We are excited to see what appears to be a robust debate taking place in Iran,”
Is this the “robust debate” that so excites Obama:
Ok, I know, a flippant observation. But I see it as a lead in to the question of what this means for America’s and the west’s relationship with Iran.
In the immediate days before the election, I got a real sense from reporting by some in the left leaning media (the BBC and Andrew Sullivan in particular) that they were viewing the potential Mousavi win as an endorsement of Obama’s non-confrontational approach towards Iran in particular, and the Islamic world in general. If that is the case, and you are welcome to take issue with that, is the ensuing result a rejection of Obama’s overtures?
There are three possibilities that explain the landslide vote in favour of Ahmedinejad:
1. He won a legitimate landslide victory. This seems less and less likely.
2. The Mullahocracy fixed the result in favour of Ahmedinejad.
3. Ahmedinejad has effected a coup d’etat and fixed this election for himself with the support of his trusted Revolutionary Guard.
(My knowledge of the minutiae of foreign relations is far from comprehensive, so please see what I’m about to say as a starting point for discussion.)
The three possibilities listed above do appear to be a rejection of Obama’s approach, although the political rather than democratic rejection seems most likely. If the mullahocracy and/or Ahmedinejad have dug their heals into the sand, how should Obama react? Should he view this as a rejection of his approach and change strategies accordingly, or should he see this as a mere waypoint on the tortuous path towards a distant resolution between America and Iran? In other words, is it just a mere negotiating position? Certainly, an absolute rejection would be an early calamitous blow for Obama’s foreign policy in the region. However, if this is just mere process, a testing of Obama’ resolve, it will be interesting to see whether Obama softens his ’soft power’ approach or turns soft into ‘hard power’.
I’m not in a position to take a deterministic neocon position on this yet although my prejudices certainly lead me to believe that this is an absolute rejection of Obama’s policy, and that we need to head up the belligerence scale rather than move in the opposite direction towards appeasement. however, I’m interested to see how this plays out. An interesting test of a nuanced foreign policy and an accommodating approach to belligerent nations.
I would like to read your thoughts on this. Is this as big a deal as I think it is, or just a hiccup?
May
11
Barack Obama and the Middle East. Playing the Long Game.
Filed Under American Politics, Foreign Policy | 5 Comments
Haaretz have details of a new poll which reports that Barack Obama’s popularity in the Middle East outstrips that of America.
Ipsos said its poll, conducted in March, involved 7,000 adults in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan. Of those surveyed, 33 percent had a favorable view of the United States, 43 percent had a negative view, 14 percent were neutral and 10 percent said they did not know, Ipsos said.
In contrast, Obama received favorable ratings averaging 48 percent in the region as a whole. Approval ran as high as 58 percent in Jordan and was lowest among Egyptians, who gave Obama favorable ratings of 35 percent, Ipsos said.
Haaretz suggests that Obama’s higher favourable ratings will in time make America itself more popular. That’s very possible, and certainly seems to be the strategy. His using of personal capital and soft power is certainly a contrast to the previous administration. However, it can only be a strategy for the long term. Changing perceptions does not happen overnight and any long term strategy runs the risk of being impeded by short term bumps in the road. The war in Afghanistan, the Israel-Iran cold war, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and up-coming election and the current conflagration in the Swat Valley will all push and pull on the soft power strategy.
Whether Obama’s relationship with the Middle East will be regarded as appeasement or engagement will be decided in the court of partisan politics but the poll is certainly indicative of the possibilities and is a tentative endorsement of his strategy so far.