The American Bear

› The west and its allies cynically bleed Syria to weaken Iran | Seumas Milne

If anyone had doubts that Syria’s gruesome civil war is already spinning into a wider Middle East conflict, the events of the past few days should have laid them to rest. Most ominous was Israel’s string of aerial attacks on Syrian military installations near Damascus, reportedly killing more than 100.

The bombing raids, unprovoked and illegal, were of course immediately supported by the US and British governments. Since Israel has illegally occupied Syria’s Golan Heights for 46 years, perhaps the legitimacy of a few more air raids hardly merited serious consideration.

But it’s only necessary to consider what the western reaction would have been if Syria, let alone Iran, had launched such an attack on Israel – or one of the Arab regimes currently arming the Syrian rebels – to realise how little these positions have to do with international legality, equity or rights of self-defence.

Israeli officials have let it be known that the attacks, launched from Lebanese airspace, were aimed at stockpiles of Iranian missiles bound for Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia resistance movement and governing party. They were not, it was said, intended as an intervention in Syria’s civil war – but as a warning to Iran and protection against Hezbollah attacks in a future conflict.

That’s not how it seemed to the Syrian rebel fighters on the ground, filmed greeting the attacks with cries of “Allahu akbar”, unaware of who had actually carried them out. By bombing the Syrian army, which has recently made advances in some rebel-held areas, Israel is clearly intervening in the war.

The raids follow the public declaration by Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah last week that his fighters are supporting government forces inside Syria – which are also backed by Iran, Russia and China. It is Syria’s role as the pivot of Iranian influence across the Middle East that has turned the Syrian war into a potential regional conflagration.

Having hedged its bets, Israel has now started to make clear it regards the prospect of Islamist and jihadist groups taking over from the Assad regime as less threatening than the existing “Syria-Iran-Hezbollah axis”, as the Israeli defence ministry official Amos Gilad put it recently.

… [W]hat began in Syria more than two years ago as a brutally repressed popular uprising has long since morphed into a vicious sectarian war, manipulated by outside forces to change the regional balance of power and already dangerously spilling over into neighbouring Lebanon and Iraq.

The consequences for Syria have been multiple massacres, ethnic cleansing, torture, a humanitarian crisis and the risk of the country’s breakup. The longer the war, the greater the danger of a Yugoslavian-style fragmentation into sectarian and ethnic enclaves.

The Assad regime bears responsibility for that, of course. But so do those who have funded and fuelled the war, bleeding Syria and weakening the Arab world in the process. The demand by Cameron and other western politicians to increase the flow of arms is reckless and cynical.

The result will certainly be to ratchet up the death toll and spread the war. If they were genuinely interested in saving lives – instead of neutralising Syria to undermine Iran – western leaders would be using their leverage with the rebels’ regional sponsors to negotiate a political settlement that would allow Syrians to determine their own future.

› Reminder: The U.S. Government Lies About the Use of Chemical Weapons in the Mideast | A Tiny Revolution

Obviously I have no idea whether any chemical weapons have been used in Syria, and if they have who’s responsible. But this is a good time to remember that, even beyond the bogus case for the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. government has a long history of lying about this subject.

This is from last week:

In a letter to key lawmakers, the White House said U.S. intelligence agencies “assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin.”

Now Carla Del Ponte, a member of the UN Commission on Syria, says they have “strong, concrete suspicions” that chemical weapons were used in Syria, but that they were deployed not by the Assad regime but by Syrian rebels. (Del Ponte was the lead prosecutor of Slobodan Milošević‎; earlier she barely escaped assassination when Sicilian organized crime attempted to blow up her house with 1000 pounds of explosives.)

And this is from March 1988, about Saddam Hussein’s notorious gassing of the Iraqi city of Halabja back when Saddam was our ally:

The U.S. State Department said both Iran and Iraq had used poison gas in the fighting around Halabja and called on both nations to desist immediately.

“This incident appears to be a particularly grave violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning chemical weapons. There are indications that Iran may also have used chemical artillery shells in this fighting,” department spokesman Charles Redman said in Washington.

He declined, however, to say what evidence the United States had to implicate the Iranians.

Seventeen years later, investigative reporter Joost Hiltermann wrote about declassified State Department cables instructing U.S. diplomats to muddy the water by claiming that both Iraq and Iran had used chemical weapons around Halabja and “to dodge the ‘What’s the evidence’ question with the stock ‘Sorry, but that’s classified information’ response…In the final analysis, the only evidence for the convenient claim that Iran used chemical weapons during the war is that the US government said so.”

More recently, a senior U.S. official explained the general principle about this kind of thing: “The countries that cooperate with us get at least a free pass. Whereas other countries that don’t cooperate, we ream them as best we can.”

P.S. Charles Redman, the Reagan State Department spokesman who lied about Iran using chemical weapons in 1988, was later rewarded by Bill Clinton with the Ambassadorship to Germany. He then cashed in by becoming a senior vice presidential at Bechtel. Thanks to Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks you can read here about Redman flying to Tripoli to try to get Bechtel into business with the Qadhafi family.

› The Syria-Iran red line show | Pepe Escobar

This eminently Bushist Obama “red line” business, applied to Syria, Iran or both, is becoming a tad ridiculous.

Take Pentagon head Chuck Hagel’s tour of Israel and the “friendly” GCC (the de facto Gulf Counter-revolution Club) last week. US defense contractors had the Moet flowing as Hagel merrily congregated with that prodigy of democracy - United Arab Emirates (UAE) Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed - to celebrate the sale of 25 F-16 fighter jets.

There’s more on the way; 48 Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD missile interceptors, at a cool US$1 billion. The Pentagon is sending one of its only two of such systems to Guam this month to counter that other threat - missiles from North Korea.

The weaponizing free fest to Israel and the Gulf petro-monarchies - missile defense, fighter jets, mega-bombs - could not but be duly hailed as the proverbial “message” to “counter Iran’s nuclear ambitions”, or “the air and missile threat posed by Iran”, or the general “worry about Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon” or “Washington’s determination to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

There’s no “red line” here; just hardcore weaponizing of Israel and the GCC. Any doubts, blame it on Iran. And this while Saudi-controlled media in the Middle East - roughly everything except al-Jazeera - was breathlessly spinning that Tel Aviv is pursuing a deal to use Turkish soil for an attack on Iran.

Wait; there’s more weaponizing on the way - bound to neighboring latitudes. Kraus-Maffei Wegmann (KMW) from Germany closed another $2.48 billion deal with Qatar - five years in the making - to deliver 62 Leopard 2 tanks and 24 self-propelled howitzers. Qatar is not exactly using them for the 2022 FIFA World Cup; they are bound to “friendly groups in other countries” - as in Syria’s “rebels”, via Turkey.

Now take the Syria chemical weapons charade. The White House now seems to be convinced that the CIA believes, with “varying degrees of confidence”, that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons. Secretary of State John Kerry - an “intervention” cheerleader posing as a dove - was already convinced.

But then Hagel said, “Suspicions are one thing; evidence is another.” Just to flip-flop a little while later, during his visit to Israel, he became convinced Bashar al-Assad was using sarin gas. Of course; after all, Hagel finally had unimpeded access to Israeli - not US - intel.

And now for the beauty of Hagel’s marketing; what about embarking as a traveling salesman to “our bastards” with a sales pitch of ” Look, Iran and Syria are both crazy, you might consider stacking up on this, this and this.”

The Nenets of Siberia - crossing the Ob river to enter the Arctic Circle - could teach a thing or two about real strategy to those limping armchair warriors in US Think Tankland. Even the Nenets would know that the current chemical weapons hysteria is a total fabrication by the CIA, MI6 and Israeli intelligence - corroborated by zero evidence. Still, the prevailing Washington “wisdom” is that a “red line” must be enforced over Syria so a “red line” must be enforced on Iran.

The fact is that the al-Assad government initially accused the “rebels” of using chemical weapons - and asked the United Nations for an official investigation.

Even the New York Times was forced, grudgingly, to admit the “rebels” acknowledged an attack happened in territory controlled by the government, with 16 Syrian Army dead, plus 10 civilians and over a hundred injured. But then the “rebels” changed the narrative, blaming Damascus of bombing their own soldiers. It was Moscow that introduced a measure of reality, detailing how Washington was stalling the UN investigation.

Our Nenets of Siberia would also know there’s hardly anything secular leading the “rebels” in Syria; it’s a motley crew of varying degrees of fanaticism. Once again, the Nenets would not need to freeze to death reading the New York Times to find out that the CIA is “secretly” funneling a free for all weaponizing to the “rebels” via Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Still the Obama administration peddles the fiction that Washington only supplies “non lethal” aid [*] as Capitol Hill nutters keep insisting that Obama install a “no fly zone” over Syria - as in Libya-style NATO war remix.

US Think Tankland nonetheless is ecstatic that the GCC petro-monarchies now have access to precision-guided munitions to “strike Iranian targets”.

But nothing compares to the cheerleading of Israel’s new access to KC-135 aerial refueling tankers - or Stratotankers. Then there’s the imminent transfer of anti-radiation missiles as well - advanced versions of the AGM-88 HARM missiles. These toys will “reduce the threat to Israel’s follow-on strike package.”

No, this is not exactly about “US circumspection”, or “US resolve in the campaign against Iranian nuclear weapons”; it’s unqualified Dog of War barking.

Meanwhile, that police state run by King Playstation, also known as Jordan, has opened its airspace to Israeli drones now engaged in “monitoring” Syria.

As Asia Times Online has repeatedly warned, Obama in Syria is fast becoming a remix of Reagan in 1980s Afghanistan. We all know what came out of those “freedom fighters” afterwards. In this context, Robert Ford, Obama’s alleged Syria expert, telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that it’s important for Washington to “weigh in” to affect “the internal balance of power in Syria” qualifies as a joke line, not a red line.

› Hagel Says Israel Has Right To Commit Crime Of Aggressive War | Steve Hynd

When a nation launches an attack on another which hasn’t attacked it, that is a war of aggression as defined by Nuremberg, and a clear war crime. Calling such preventative warfare “self-defense” is taking on board the Bush regime’s justification for invading Iraq in 2003.

Welcome to Obama’s second term, and his hard-fought-for pick for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, Although he warned that it would be premature for Israel to attack Iran, he also said that the US recognizes the same threat (which doesn’t as yet exist) from Iran, and recognized Israel’s right to attack whenever it wants to, for whatever reason it wants to.

Hagel stressed repeatedly that Israel has a sovereign right to decide for itself whether it must attack Iran. He made no mention of the possibility that an Israeli attack would draw the U.S. into the conflict and lead to a wider regional war.

“Israel will make the decision that Israel must make to protect itself, to defend itself,” Hagel said as he began a weeklong tour of the Middle East.

I repeat – absent an actual and provable attack on Israel by Iran which would serve as a causus belli for retaliation, any such Israeli attack would be a war crime of the most heinous kind. The Obama administration just rubber stamped its approval for that crime even as it is saying Israel shouldn’t go forward with such an attack.

Yet officials from both Israel and the U.S. have threatened several times over the last decade, perhaps scores of times, to attack Iran with no causus belli other than an admittedly non-existent nuclear weapon. Both have also made it clear they and regional allies are arming for such an attack.

› Clapper: Iran Still Not Building a Nuclear Weapon; Purpose of Sanctions is to Foster Unrest | Nima Shirazi

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee today and reiterated the same assessment regarding Iran as was delivered in March 2013.

The exact same statements - verbatim - were included in Clapper’s unclassified report, including the assessment that “Iran is developing nuclear capabilities to enhance its security, prestige, and regional influence and give it the ability to develop nuclear weapons, should a decision be made to do so. We do not know if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.”

Of course, as Clapper notes, Iran’s ability to potentially manufacture the components is inherent to its advanced nuclear infrastructure and is not an indication of an active nuclear weapons program, which all U.S. intelligence agencies agree Iran does not have.

[…]

During questioning from Senators following his prepared remarks, Clapper admitted - as a number of recent independent reports have shown - that the increasingly harsh sanctions levied upon Iran have had no effect on the decision-making process of the Iranian leadership, yet has produced considerable damage to the Iranian economy and resulted in increased “inflation, unemployment, [and the] unavailability of commodities” for the Iranian people.

This, he said, is entirely the point. Responding to Maine Senator Angus King, who asked about the impact sanctions have on the Iranian government, Clapper explained that the intent of sanctions is to spark dissent and unrest in the Iranian population, effectively stating that Obama administration’s continued collective punishment of the Iranian people is a deliberate (and embarrassingly futile) tactic employed to the foment regime change.

“What they do worry about though is sufficient restiveness in the street that would actually jeopardize the regime. I think they are concerned about that,” Clapper said of the Iranian leadership. It is no wonder, then, why Clapper refers in his own official report to the economic warfare waged against Iran as “regime threatening sanctions.”

Not mentioned in the session, of course, are the decades of repeated affirmations by senior Iranian officials that Iran rejects nuclear weapons on strategic, moral and religious grounds. Within the past six weeks, this position has been reiterated by Iran’s envoy to the IAEA Ali Asghar Soltanieh, President Ahmadinejad, and Ayatollah Khamenei himself.

Just two days ago, for instance, during a three-day diplomatic visit to Africa, Ahmadinejad declared, “The era of the atomic bomb is over. Atomic bombs are no longer useful and have no effect on political equations. Atomic bombs belong to the last century, and anyone who thinks he can rule the world by atomic bombs is a political fool,” according to a report by Iran’s state-run PressTV. He also pushed back the constant conflation in Western discourse of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons. “Nuclear energy is one thing and an atomic bomb is another. This useful energy must belong to all nations,” he stated.

Furthermore, reports that Iran has continued converting its stockpiled 19.75% enriched uranium into fuel plates for its cancer-treating medical research reactor gained absolutely no traction within the Committee or Clapper’s comments. For Congress, Iran is a threat simply by virtue of having independent political considerations, inalienable national rights and refusing to accept American hegemony over its own security interests. [++]

› Iran quake leaves scores dead

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake has struck southeastern Iran near the border with Pakistan, reportedly killing at least 45 people with casualties feared to rise, according multiple news sources.

The US Geological Survey said on Tuesday that the epicentre of the quake was 86km southeast of Khash, Iran.

According to the Iranian FARS news agency, 40 people were killed in the sparsely populated region.

An Iranian government official said on he feared more casualties from the earthquake.

“It was the biggest earthquake in Iran in 40 years and we are expecting hundreds of dead,” the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.

› State the Objective of the Iran Talks | Paul Pillar

[…] Another problem on the P5+1 side is an apparent failure to realize that an impediment to negotiating progress is a lack of confidence among the Iranians that the West wants an agreement, or at least an agreement that would leave the Iranians with anything that could be called a nuclear program. More broadly, the Iranians suspect that the West doesn’t really want to deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran at all.

The West and especially the United States have given the Iranians ample basis to have these suspicions. There is the inflexibility regarding sanctions relief. There is the talk about damage that sanctions inflict on Iran and in which some Westerners take pleasure, for reasons that have nothing to do with negotiating an agreement. And there is all the talk about regime change (an outcome that some in the West openly hope sanctions will hasten).

In short, the West has given the Iranians plenty of reasons to believe that they are being strung along, with negotiations continuing as the sanctions work their effects, both economic and, as some would hope, political. The Iranians fear that this is not only a losing game for them but that the game has no end. As Scott Peterson reports in the Christian Science Monitor, the Iranians are “concerned that P5+1 demands could mount – including a requirement to stop all enrichment – with only marginal sanctions relief.”

It is thus understandable that at Almaty the Iranian deputy negotiator told journalists that if Iran was to make any concessions or take any steps as confidence-building measures this had to be “part of a larger, more comprehensive plan” with a clear “final outcome.” Part of that outcome has to be acceptance by the P5+1 of a peaceful Iranian nuclear program, including enrichment of uranium.

The deputy’s comments point to a harmless way to help quell the well-founded Iranian suspicions that are impeding negotiating progress. The Iranians consider it important to get some positive statement in principle from the other side that Iran, like any other party to the Nonproliferation Treaty, has a right to a peaceful nuclear program. The P5+1 seem to consider any such statement as a concession to Iran that ought not to be made, if it is made at all, until some real curbs to the Iranian program are implemented. But the P5 +1 need to ask themselves—and to provide a clear answer to this question—whether they really want to reach agreement with Tehran (and as a subsidiary question, whether the real purpose of all those sanctions is the same as their ostensible purpose, which is to provide inducement to reach such an agreement). If the answer is no, then the negotiations are a charade, the Iranians really are just being strung along, and there would be no reason to expect the Iranians to take more risks and make more concessions. [++]

› Navy Releases Cartoon of New Laser Weapon After Non-Productive P5+1 Talks | Jim White

› Deep Sanctions on Iran are Repeating the Deadly Mistakes of Iraq | Coralie Pison Hindawi

… By the Fall 2003, Iran declared having adopted a policy of full disclosure and, following an agreement with France, Germany and the UK, decided to suspend all enrichment and reprocessing activities, as well as to sign the Additional Protocol and start applying it in advance of its ratification. These measures were portrayed by all parties involved as designed to restore confidence, pending the resolution of the outstanding issues related to Iran’s past activities. In the following months, the IAEA acknowledged good progress in its understanding of the Iranian program. By mid 2004, the list of unexplained questions had shortened and there seemed to be two main issues outstanding that the IAEA wanted to clarify: the origin of high and low-enriched uranium contamination found in some nuclear facilities, as well as Iran’s efforts to import, manufacture and use P1 and P2 centrifuges. Reading the IAEA reports at the time, the resolution of these issues was presented as ‘of key importance to the Agency’s ability to provide the international community with the required assurances about Iran’s nuclear activities’. This gave the impression that the resolution of these issues would lead to the closure of the file.

Interestingly, though, and we are gradually approaching the core of the problem, what triggered the IAEA Board of Governors to loose patience in September 2005, declare that Iran was in ‘non-compliance’ with its safeguard agreement (while it was clear by mid-2003 that Iran had breached the agreement, but had worked since with the IAEA to make up for that) and refer the matter to the UN Security Council – thereby letting Iran fall into the Chapter VII trap – was not a new disclosure about concealed actions, but the fact that Iran had restarted its enrichment and reprocessing activities.

There is an irony here, and it is one that had also appeared in the Iraqi case a decade before: it is the fact that, in spite of the cooperation displayed by the Iranians from late 2003 until 2005, the pressure on that state was not decreased, but progressively increased. The fact that several times, increased cooperation actually led to harsher resolutions or, for the post-2005 period, further sanctions. The fact that almost each time one file has been closed by the IAEA, new issues have been raised, based upon new intelligence made available by third states to the agency. While it has now become a cliché, it is difficult not to think of the Iraqi case, in which a very coercive disarmament process went on for twelve years, growing increasingly confrontational and ultimately providing the best justification for the invasion of the country, whereas nobody can now refute that the vast majority of the Iraqi WMD and programs had been destroyed or dismantled at the latest by the mid-1990s.

This major paradox in the case of Iraq can neither be explained by the so-called failure of US intelligence, nor by the various motives of the Bush administration to launch an unnecessary war (since the crisis related to the Iraqi WMDs started and unfolded long before G. W. Bush became president). The thing is simply that the Iraqi disarmament file was never closed in spite of the fact that there were no weapons left because such coercive, Chapter VII-based, WMD arms control processes have the potential never to be closed.

Looking at the Iranian nuclear crisis today, the issue has really very little to do with how high the cost inflicted by the sanctions on Iran must be to force the regime to cooperate, and what the red lines are for both Iran and the ‘West’. Arguably, talks as the recent ones in Kazakhstan, offers of limited relief on sanctions, should the Iranians agree on one move or another, don’t have the potential to solve things either. The file is now on the Security Council’s desk, acting under Chapter VII, and the rationale for the Council’s involvement is the need to regain trust in the peaceful intentions of Iran’s nuclear activities. However, even in the unlikely event that the Iranians would agree to ‘cooperate fully’ with the IAEA and to refrain from pursuing some of the nuclear activities they have been involved in, it is impossible to define clearly what level of cooperation will be considered enough to end the process, what new requirements or questions may be raised, month after month, possibly year after year. There are reasons to fear, borrowing the words of former IAEA Director and Nobel Peace prize laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, that ‘… nothing would satisfy, short of Iran coming to the table completely undressed’. I have no doubt the Iranians involved in the process understand well that they are now in the same position as their late Iraqi foe, and that the possibility exists that under its current leadership, Iran may never be considered to have ‘fully complied’ with the Council’s demand.

Once again: “Charlie says again: ‘You can have everything you say you want!’ As on the other occasions, Sam yells: ‘THIS MEANS WAR!!’ Everyone knows Sam means it. And Sam gets ready to murder Charlie and his entire family.”:

Obama and the U.S. Government repeatedly insist that punishing sanctions against Iran are intended to avoid war, that they are meant as an alternative to war. The purpose, we are told, is to compel Iran to cease its attempts to develop nuclear weapons — attempts which Iran denies it has ever made or is making now, and for which no evidence exists — so that Iran may rejoin “the world community.” This is exactly what the U.S. Government said about the sanctions against Iraq. It was a lie then and it’s a lie now. What the U.S. says it wants is not what it actually wants.

› Wide Asleep in America: Cautious Optimism as Negotiations Between Iran and the P5+1 Resume in Almaty | Nima Shirazi

… “[T]he international community” does not appear to have any interest in supporting any more American-led sanctions on Iran. Last summer, the 120 nations represented in the Non-Aligned Movement unanimously backed Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy and the domestic mastery of the fuel cycle, including an enrichment program. Just last week, the world’s five fast-growing economies, known as the BRICS nations – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – concluded their fifth annual conference and issued a declaration expressing concern over unilateral sanctions, opposing military action and recognizing “Iran’s right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy consistent with its international obligations.”

On Wednesday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov stressed that “unconditional recognition” of Iran’s right to a civilian nuclear energy program is the only solution to the current standoff, adding that any long-term solution must be based on the recognition of Iran’s “unconditional right to develop its civilian nuclear program.”

Both Russia and China have previously opposed imposing unilateral sanctions upon Iran and its trading partners.

Furthermore, as veteran journalist Jim Lobe recently reported, even the P5+1 itself “is showing signs of growing disunity, according to the European Union’s former top foreign policy official,” Javier Solana. “I think that the level of consistency and coherence of the P5 (+1) is diminishing,” he said during remarks at Washington’s Brooking Institute this week, adding that “emerging powers” are “unhappy with Western pressure to curb imports of Iranian oil and gas, especially in light of the latest estimates of a possible spike in energy prices next year if Iranian supplies are kept off the market.”

Unsurprisingly, the Israeli Prime Minister has also chimed in. In a statement released Wednesday, Benjamin Netanyahu accused Iran of “talking, but at the same time developing nuclear weapons; threatening and at the same time developing nuclear weapons and threatening the use of nuclear weapons, we cannot allow this to happen in Iran,” despite the fact that Iran is neither developing nuclear weapons nor has it ever threatened to use the nuclear weapons that it’s not developing.

With all of these factors in play, any progress this weekend may very well prove elusive. But what happens in Almaty will surely set the stage for what comes next: either more of the same bellicose threats from Israel and the United States or the beginning of the end of three decades of hostility and propaganda. The latter possibility, however remote, is reason enough to hope for the best.