Monday, October 01, 2007

Of Democrats and twisted hopes

Oct.1, 2007

Of Democrats and twisted hopes

by pv vivekanand

IT was with great jubiliation and fanfare that many within the US and around the world greeted the Democratic victory in last year's mid-term congressional elections in which the party gained "control" of both houses of the US legislature. They expected the Democrats to move swiftly to put an end to the US military presence in Iraq if only to avoid further loss of American lives and resources in the chaotic country — essentially ending the war.
Today, nearly one year later, we find not only that the Democrats have failed to end the war in Iraq but also that they have set the ground for a new war in the region, this time targeting Iran.
That is what the Democrats led by senators like Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer did when they voted in favour of the "Kyl-Lieberman Iran Amendment" which in effect is the forerunner of a declaration of war against Iran disguised as a congressional move.
The amendment calls on the administration to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps as a "foreign terrorist organisation . . . and place the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists."
The amendment clears the way for placing sanctions on individual Iranian officials, but more significantly, it would gives the president extraordinary leeway in going after the Revolutionary Guards Corps militarily. It implictly authorises him to unilaterally wage war with Iran without seeking any further congressional authorisation. The operative argument here is that the amendment already grants the president the authority to go after "terrorists."
The "authorisation" goes hand-in-hand with the behind-the-scene build-up to war against Iran that seems to have reached an advanced stage.
According to Newsweek, David Wurmser, a former senior adviser to US Vice-President Dick Cheney, had told fellow neo-conservatives that Cheney had considered asking Israel to launch limited missile strikes against the Iranian nuclear site at Natanz. The intention, it was said, would be to provoke a reaction from Tehran that would help justify wider US air strikes, according to Newsweek.
On the diplomatic front, the Sunday Telegraph reported this week that the Bush adminstration has told its diplomats at the UN to begin "searching for things that Iran has done wrong." The order is remniscent of the build-up to the war against Iraq, and one could easily expect intelligence reports to be tailored to suit the purpose of strengthening the call for military action against Iran.
The administration has also shifted gears. Its argument for action against Iran was Tehran's controversial nuclear programme, but the focus is now shifted to alleged Iranian support — training, arming and financing — for insurgents killing US soldiers in Iraq. Obviously, the administration has realised that the American people are not convinced that a nuclear Iran poses a threat to mainland America, and the argument that the US has to take action against any party or country killing American soldiers is a relatively easier sell to the public.
Surely, the Democrats must be aware of what is happening in the military and diplomatic corridors and realise that the US is edging closer to yet another catastrophe in the Middle East.
It might be easier to understand why the Democrats could not really make a difference to the Bush administration's determination to pursue a non-existent military option in Iraq. The Democrats have a simple majority in both houses of congress but that is not enough to counter administration decisions and the presidential veto power.
However, it is strange that the Democrats, having closely watched the way the US got drawn deep into the Iraq quagmire after a war that was launched on deceptive grounds, could allow themselves to be party to authorising another war that promises to be all the more ferocious with unpredictable consequences.
The only explanation is that the reach of the powerful neoconservative camp is not limited to the Republicans. Equally important is the Israeli element in the US-Iran equation. The US Congress, whether Republican- or Democrat-led, has always been an ardent Israel supporter.
All it takes is a quick glance at how emphatically Senator Joseph R. Biden, a Democrat from Delware, stated his commitment to Israel, calling the country "the single greatest strength America has in the Middle East."
"I am a Zionist," he said. "You don't have to be a Jew to be a Zionist."
Conventional wisdom dictates that the US would not want to get involved in yet another military conflict in the Middle East while it grapples with the Iraq crisis and the elusive hunt for Taliban and Al Qaeda militants in Afghanistan. It has 155,000 soldiers in Iraq and 18,000 in Afghanistan, and the bulk of them are vulnerable — if not sitting ducks — for Iranian retaliation for any military strike, whether Israeli or US.
The repurcussions of a military conflict involving Iran would be too serious for the international oil market to handle and the consequences of a record shoot-up of oil prices would be devastating to the American currency and thus the US economy.
There are many other dreadful scenarios pursuant to a US-led military strike against Iran, and no one in the region wants even to think of them.
However, the Bush administration's track record shows that it cannot be expected to apply conventional wisdom, and that means military action against Iran regardless of the consequences.
The Democrats must but be aware of all these considerations and still they went ahead with granting the administration the green signal for military action against Iran.
But then, that line of thought is based on the assumption that the Democrats must be opposed to the Iraq war. The rug is pulled from under that assumption when we note how the three main presidential hopefuls replied to a question during a recent public debate among themselves.
The question put to the Democratic presidential hopefuls — including frontrunners Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama and John Edwards — by moderator Tim Russert was whether they were committed to withdrawing American soldiers from Iraq: "Will you pledge that by January 2013, the end of your first term more than five years from now, there will be no US troops in Iraq?"
Well, none of the three would undertake that pledge. They argued that it was difficult to predict what could happen in the next four or five years.
That much for our assumption that the Democrats are a committed anti-war party, and out through the window goes our hope that a "regime change" in Washington through the 2008 presidential elections would lead to an end to the crisis in Iraq and a major positive shift in the belligerent American posture and approach that we have seen since the day George W Bush Junior entered the White House in 2001.

Not a piece of real estate

Oct.1, 2007


Not a piece of real estate to be split


THEY CAME, they saw, they conquered and now they want to divide it. We don't know it for sure yet whether splitting Iraq into three ethnic entities was part of the Bush administration's ulterior objectives when it ordered the invasion of that country in 2003, but we do know that the move spells catastrophe for the people of Iraq and the entire Middle East region.
Since the first Gulf war in 1991, the region's leaders had repeatedly cautioned the US against invading Iraq because they had foreseen the consequences of such action. However, the US, which was determined to eliminate Iraq as a potential threat to Israel and which always wanted absolute control of a country with enough hydrocarbon resources to ensure American energy security, was in no mood to listen. It went ahead with the invasion and occupied Iraq. As a result, it is now caught in the jaws of a crisis that it would never be able to solve while keeping intact its strategic geopolitical interests in the region.
The pro-Israeli neoconservative hawks in Washington are aware that the US has lost the war in Iraq, but it matters to little to them because their first priority is to serve Israeli interests even it comes at the expense of American national interests. They would never concede in public that the US stands no chance of pacifying and stabilising Iraq while it maintains its military occupation of the country, or, more specifically, that the US presence is at the root of the problem in Iraq.
And now we have US senators successfully pushing through the Senate a resolution calling for Iraq to be divided into federal regions under control of Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis in a power-sharing agreement similar to the one that ended the 1990s war in Bosnia.
No doubt, Senator Joseph R Biden Jr, a Democrat from Delaware who led the initiative, has as much in-depth knowledge of the intricacies of Iraq and the broader Middle East as someone from the North Pole would have about running a space station.
Indeed, there could be hidden influences and powers at play behind the Senate resolution. We could think of at least one group in Iraq which has set its eyes on independent statehood for themselves and that group is hoping to gain control of the bulk of oil reserves in the country. We also know that many American politicians have close ties with the American oil establishment.
Whether influenced by vested interests or otherwise, Biden and likeminded US politicians are trying to find a solution to the American problem at the expense of the people of Iraq. They are overlooking that Iraq did not create the problem for the US but their own political and administrative leadership did. No one invited the US to invade Iraq, but it did so on its own will and landed in boiling waters. Regardless of the intensity of the problems they face in Iraq, the US political establishment has the moral responsibility and is bound by international conventions and charters not to tamper the territorial intergrity and demographic features of the country. They have no right whatsoever to even suggest that the country be divided on whatever basis.
In simpler terms, US politicians badly need to accept and respect the fact that the American military occupation of Iraq does not mean that the country has become part of their ancestral property that could be disposed off as they find fit. They have to produce an exit strategy on their own without pushing Iraq into further chaos and worsening the regional instability. They have to recognise that the US military presence in Iraq is the problem and should be worrying about how to bring home their soldiers rather than setting the ground for the disintegration of the country.