The political opposition in Iran held commemorations in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Ahvaz and Rasht for the deaths of protesters at the hands of security forces on June 20, especially for Neda Agha-Soltan, a young woman whose last moments on videotape became a heartbreaking sensation throughout the world. In Shiite Islam, mourning sessions are conducted for the deceased after 40 days as well as at other times. The technique of building larger and larger crowds locally helps the movement expand and avoid losing momentum.
Hundreds also gathered at the Musalla Mosque in downtown Tehran, but were dispersed by security forces with tear gas and life ammunition. Clashes continued into the night.
Even the hard liners have been disturbed by the ferocity of the crackdown on protesters.
Member of Parliament Hosain Ibrahimi announced Thursday that of the 300 protesters he said the regime had in custody, 140 had been released and all but a handful of the rest would be let go in the next few weeks. The regime has said that it will try about 20 of the protesters.
Although Ibrahimi was underestimating the number of prisoners of conscience being held, that such officials feel a need to make conciliatory announcements of this sort suggests that the scale of the arrests is an issue for centrists and even some hard liners, not just for reformers.
Today’s (Friday’s) edition of Jumhuri-yi Islami (Islamic Republic) carried an article criticizing the deaths in prison of some protesters who had been arrested. The article goes [courtesy the USG Open Source Center], “For some time now there has been a series of reports in informal media on the deaths of detainees from recent events (protests following the June presidential elections), which have prompted extensive concerns in society and especially among the families of detained people. Of course relevant officials have generally remained silent in response to these reports and news in some media and official reactions have been restricted to particular cases like the deaths of Mohsen Ruholamini and Sohrab E’rabi. . . At that time when the soldiers of Islam captured a member of the enemy military, though they knew that moments before he had pointed his gun at them, they dealt with their prisoner with kindness and mercy. They gave him food and water and bound his wounds, and these were treated humanely in prisoners’ camps. This humane and Islamic treatment led many prisoners to change in their time of captivity and some later joined Iran’s army (or the Sepah/revolutionary guards), fought on the front and were even martyred. . .If officials were saying until yesterday that rioters armed with weapons presented by America and Israel had killed people, there is no sign of these armed and dependent people in prison now, and the detained are being guarded by agents. One cannot link any threats to their lives to foreign powers. The most logical issue it seems then is that certain agents have either improperly carried out their legal duties in guarding the detained, or have gone to extremes above the law in the way they have treated them, and brought about this situation. In this sense those responsible are undoubtedly liable to prosecution as no law permits this violent treatment or killing of individuals before any charges are proven and a definitive sentence issued.”
The call for the punishment of security men who abused prisoners to death, on the part of a hard line newspaper, is remarkable. The condemnation of extra-judicial punishment is likewise not what you would expect from a Khomeinist organ (but that is what this newspaper is). But note that one of the protesters alleged to have been killed in prison was the son of a prominent campaign activist for the hard line former head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, Mohsen Reza’i, one of the presidential condidates who initially, at least, protested the way the June 12 presidential election was conducted. When you off the children of prominent hard line politicians in jail, it does not go unnoticed.
Three prisoners, including the two mentioned by Jumhuri-yi Islami above, were said to have died in Kahrizak prison. These deaths were loudly condemned by reform leader Mir Hossein Mousavi. As a result, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei closed Kahrizak earlier this week, presumably to deprive the reformists of a symbol of the regime’s murderousness and to remove a blot on the escutcheon of the Islamic Republic.
In a way, these killings of prisoners is functioning like the shooting of Kent State protesters by National Guardsmen in 1970 in the US, which helped turn a lot of fence-sitters against the Vietnam War. In this case, the harshness of the methods deployed by the hard liners is becoming repulsive even to other hard linters. Remember that they view themselves as highly ethical and as acting in accordance with islamic norms, and these deaths challenge their own self-image.
Likewise, the hard line Mashhad journal, Khorasan from Thursday, July 30, 2009, quoted Iran’s national police chief Brig. General Esmail Ahmadi-Moqaddam as saying [courtesy USG OSC], “Some commanders went to excess during some of those events, and while pursuing the rioters they inflicted some losses on the people.” Ahmadi-Moqaddam continued: “My concern is that nobody should act beyond the limits of the law.” He added: “As the result of the orders that have been issued, some steps have been taken to respond to people’s complaints and to win their hearts.”
That quote suggests to me that Iranian law enforcement is perceiving a lot of hostility from the public over the crackdown on protesters, and its high officials are therefore attempting to reduce tensions. A regime only has to worry about winning people’s hearts if it has lost them.
Meanwhile, reformist former president Mohammad Khatami denounced the steps taken by the hard liners with regard to abuse of protesters and of prisoners as insufficient, demanding genuine accountability rather than euphemisms. When Khamenei closed the Kahrizak prison, he said it was because the facilities were inadequate. Khatami replied Thursday, “”it is not enough to say that a sub-standard detention center has been shut down. What does ‘sub-standard’ mean? . . . Does it mean that a ventilation fan was faulty or its washrooms were not clean? Lives have been lost and our dear youth, women and men have been subjected to certain treatments. . . On the issue of detainees… Of course, they must be released, but that is not enough.”
Khatami also called for a parliamentary investigation of the June 12 presidential election.
In short, the reformers are coming as close as you can to a direct public condemnation of Khamenei as you can come in Iran and remain out of jail.
Demanding accountability for crimes already committed and threatening a parliamentary investigation also may forestall further crimes (something that the US Democratic Party does not seem to realize with regard to the crimes of of the W. Bush officials).
The reformist daily Aftab-i Yazd on Thursday carried an impassioned denunciation of the election fraud and the crackdown on protests [courtesy of USG OSC]:
‘It is difficult to remain silent or speak out in the current situation. We cannot remain silent because the future on which Iran’s and Islam’s capital have been spent is in danger. It is also impossible to speak freely because some people are inclined to label every critic as a spy, connected (to enemies), or non-believer. . .
The events that took place after the 22 Khordad (12 June) election were bitter and painful for any Iranian nationalist who is loyal to the God’s law. . . This initial sadness did not prolong for a long time. The country and people witnessed events that resulted in increasing the anxiety of some families and bloodshed of others. . . this situation gave rise to advice and protests from reformist leaders. Some well-known principle-ists also criticized these incidents and their criticisms showed that their views are different with the government faction of principle-ists. They protested about the lack of attention to the demands of protesters. . .
Today, nobody can call the killing of a youth (Mohsen Ruholamini) during the unrest as a scenario created by foreigners and increase the problems of the dead person’s family by their ignorance. This is because the person who was killed in the recent events is a person from their own faction.
Over the past few weeks, they urged the protesters to pursue their protests through legal means. This would be a wise suggestion and would result in maximum achievements in fewer expenses, if the officials were completely loyal to the laws. Are they loyal to the law? If yes, then why do they not allow the protesters to use their rights to protest according to the Article 27 of the constitution? Why do they deal with the protestors in this manner? The well-known principle-ists figures have also protested about their conduct.’
The point made here, that the lawless conduct of the regime undermines its authority, is crucial. That a writer could make it in print in today’s Iran is nothing short of incredible. But it seems to me as though either there will be an even more Draconian press crackdown soon, or the regime will have to seek some sort of compromise.
The some 3000 Iranians in the camp had originally come there in the 1980s to fight Iran and undertake destabilizing operations against it during the Iran-Iraq War, since they opposed the clerical government of Ayatollah Khomeini. Others came later, in the Saddam period, to harass and spy on Iran. For more background, see this this NYT article.
Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that about 1,000 Iraqi security personnel entered the camp on Tuesday, after the MEK authorities had refused to allow any Iraqi police inside the camp. It quotes official Iranian Iraqi government spokesman Ali Dabbagh, who complained that press coverage had spoken of an Iraqi “assault” on the camp. He said that it is nonsense to talk of Iraqi security forces assaulting the camp, since it was on GOI premises. The Iraqi government is complaining that stone-throwing camp residents injured 25 actived-duty policemen in thea action.
Muhsin al-Hakim, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) spokesman in Tehran, said that based on the letters sent to him, there is a substantial number of Mojahedin who want to return to Iran if they can be assured that they will not be prosecuted. Al-Hakim is the son of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of ISCI inside Iraq, and it is quite odd that he has become a spokesman for the MEK’s desires.
The USG Open Source Center translates the comments on the Camp Ashraf events by hard line speaker of the Iranian parliament, Ali Larijani:
‘Iran Speaker Praises Iraq For Taking Action Against MKO’s Ashraf Camp Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1 Wednesday, July 29, 2009 Document Type: OSC Translated Excerpt
(Presenter) After (several) years, the army of Iraq has gained control over the camp of the terrorist grouplet Monafeqin [the Iranian regime calls them "hypocrites"/ Munafiqin instead of Holy Warriors/ Mojahedin], which is called Ashraf camp in Diyala province, by entering this military camp of Monafeqin. The American Department of State has implicitly expressed concerns over the Iraqi forces’ entry into the Monafeqin’s camp and has said that Washington will closely watch the situation. . .
(Reporter) The Speaker of the Islamic Majles also described the Iraqi government’s action in taking control over the Monafeqin’s camp as late but praiseworthy.
(Larijani) Now after the Monafeqin worked as mercenaries of Saddam’s regime for years, we were informed yesterday that the government of Iraq had attacked Ashraf camp. You have heard the yells and screams of the leader of the Monafeqin through the media. Although the Iraqi government took this action very late, their decision to clear the land of Iraq from the dirt of the existence of terrorists, deserves appreciation.
(Description of Source: Tehran Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1 in Persian — state-run television)’
Iraqi security forces from the Ministry of the Interior raided Camp Ashraf, the stronghold of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) terrorist cult in eastern Iraq, on Tuesday, killing at least four MEK members, wounding 21, and arresting 28. The terrorist group has been attempting to destabilize Iran through bombings and assassinations for decades and was given a base in Diyala province near Iran by Saddam Hussein for the purpose of spying on and harrying the clerical regime.
Although the State Department declared the group a terrorist organization, the US military continued to support the MEK in Iraq and is alleged to have deployed them for intelligence and perhaps operational purposes, over the objection of the Shiite government in Baghdad.
Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that the Iraqi police had demanded from the 3000 residents of Camp Ashraf that they allow the erection in the camp of Iraqi police checkpoints. The MEK refused. An elite anti-terrorist force from Baghdad then entered the camp and faced resistance from the MEK in the form of attacks with bare fists. (The US military disarmed the group several years ago). The security forces used tear gas to disperse them.
Now that US troops have ceased their independent patrols in Iraqi cities, the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has decided to move against the group. The Ministry of the Interior security forces are alleged to have been deeply infiltrated by the Badr Corps of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a leading party in parliament and ally of al-Maliki that was formed in Iran by Iraqi expatriates under the auspices of Ayatollah Khomeini. Badr in turn was from the 1980s through 2003 essentially a unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Likely the victory of the hard liners and the IRGC in Iran’s struggle over the outcome of the June 12 presidential election has put them in a strong position to ask their Iraqi counterparts and former colleagues to move against the MEK.
The UN has instructed Iraq not to return the MEK members to Iran, where they would face torture and possibly summary execution, and what to do with the camp inmates is as controversial for Iraq as what to do with the Guantanamo prisoners is in the US. Al-Zaman says that the MEK members say they would be willing to return to Iran if they are given full immunity from prosecution, imprisonment and torture. Since this development is unlikely, I suppose they will end up in some other country.
You will note that not a single high Iraqi Shiite official condemned the hard liners’ tactics in Iran during the past month, and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq made pretty clear its support for the hard liners. IRNA reported on June 15, “Head of Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, too, forwarded a message of congratulations to the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on holding fair presidential elections during which Ahmadinejad was re-elected as Iran’s President.” It was because of a similar message to Tehran from Moscow that the reformists in Iran have been chanting “death to Russia.”
You will remember that a little over two years ago, the US military arrested Ammar al-Hakim, now the de facto leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, as he returned from consultations in Iran across the Iraqi border without going through passport control. It was alleged at the time that Ammar’s secret trips to Iran were revealed to the US by MEK spies.
Payback, as they say, is a female dog.
This little incident at Camp Ashraf is like a magnitude 4.5 earthquake in California, something that locals would hardly notice but which indicates that a big fault in the earth is on the move. The Iranian Right has strengthened its position in the Middle East, and the US Right has seen its weaken. Thus, the proteges of the Neoconservatives and the Pentagon hawks are now increasingly in an impossible situation in Iraq and clearly will have to leave. They cannot carry out their espionage and sabotage in the face of opposition from the increasingly powerful Shiite government in Baghdad, which is in turn closely allied with Iran’s hard liners.
Gunmen, presumably guerrillas, pulled off a bloody bank heist in the tony Shiite district of Karrada in Baghdad on Tuesday morning, killing 8 guards and making off with $6.5 million. Some observers are wondering if the robbery indicates that the remaining guerrillas opposing the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki are running out of money. (That conclusion would suggest that the private Gulf millionaires who are alleged to have sent contributions to the Sunni cause have lost interest or gone bankrupt, and that the remnants of the Iraqi Sunni Arab elite have either lost most of their wealth or given up spending it on insurgency).
Meanwhile, Iraq’s other big neighbor, Turkey is also pressuring Baghdad to move against a terrorist camp, this time that of the Kurdish Workers Party on the Iraqi border with Turkey, which has been more or less under the protection of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Peshmerga paramilitary. PM al-Maliki is spoiling for a fight with the Peshmerga anyway, since he considers them an expansionist threat to Iraq’s unity. But if Baghdad really did move militarily against the PKK in alliance with Ankara, it could spark major conflict with Iraq’s own Kurds. Here again, the US Right is partially responsible for the terrorist havens on the Iraqi side of the border, since the US military had needed Kurdish support to remain in and to succeed in Iraq and could not afford to acquiesce in Turkish demands that the PKK be expelled. Now that the US troops are increasingly confined to base, Turkey is beginning to throw its weight around with Baghdad. In the end, it is Middle Eastern regional powers that will fill the vacuum that the US and Britain are leaving behind.
Behind the scenes, as Bloomberg implies, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on his surprise visit to Baghdad on Tuesday was no doubt working behind the scenes in an attempt to head off an Arab-Kurdish conflagration. The question is whether the US is still influential enough in Iraq to accomplish that goal. (In some ways, Iran is better placed to urge reconciliation, since it has long been a supporter of important Kurdish factions and is also close to the Shiite government of al-Maliki).
Speaking of leaving behind. The Iraqi Parliament either rejected or just did not get around to granting authorization for 100 British military personnel to remain in Iraq after July 31. As a result, the remaining British troops are relocating to Kuwait for lack of a valid legal framework for them to remain in Iraq. Although the British are saying that the glitch is temporary, I doubt the parliament will have any new sessions until well into September, after Ramadan, and it is not clear whether the MPs were dragging their feet or Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki just did not have the votes to get the authorization. The upshot is that the US military is now in Iraq all by itself, and George W. Bush’s infamous ‘coalition of the willing’ (note, not ‘coalition of the authorized by international law’) has finally evaporated.
‘ Despite being among the poorest people in the world, the inhabitants of the craggy northwest of what is now Pakistan have managed to throw a series of frights into distant Western capitals for more than a century. That’s certainly one for the record books.
And it hasn’t ended yet. Not by a long shot. Not with the headlines in the U.S. papers about the depredations of the Pakistani Taliban, not with the CIA’s drone aircraft striking gatherings in Waziristan and elsewhere near the Afghan border. This spring, for instance, one counter-terrorism analyst stridently (and wholly implausibly) warned that “in one to six months” we could “see the collapse of the Pakistani state,” at the hands of the bloodthirsty Taliban, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the situation in Pakistan a “mortal danger” to global security.
What most observers don’t realize is that the doomsday rhetoric about this region at the top of the world is hardly new. It’s at least 100 years old. . .’
Speaking of which, Reuters reports that on Monday, Pakistani helicopter gunships deployed against Pashtun militants in the Khyber region killed 20 of them. This group, led by Mangal Bagh, is unconnected to the Old Taliban of Mulla Omar but was suspected by the Pakistani military of ‘planning some attacks.’ The US and NATO in Afghanistan depend on the Karachi to Khyber route to get materiel to their troops in landlocked Afghanistan, but militants on the Pakistan side have attacked the convoys and closed off the route, forcing the US to depend on Russia for transshipment of materiel instead. The US has put pressure on the Pakistani government to put down the Pakistani Taliban and reopen the Khyber pass route.
News also comes that the Pakistani government has arrested Pashtun cleric Maulana Sufi Muhammad, a founder of the Pakistani Taliban and leader of the Movement for the Implementation of Muhammad’s Law. Sufi Muhammad was the one who brokered the controversial cease-fire in the Swat Valley between the Pakistani government and the Pakistani Taliban, led by his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah. The ceasefire broke down when the Taliban attacked neighboring areas and sought to expand the territory under their control.
Ironically, at the same time that Western observers lauded the Pakistani president’s decision to arrest Sufi Muhammad and cut off negotiations with the Taliban in Pakistan, they continued to pursue peace talks with the Afghan so-called Taliban.
William R. Polk writes in a guest editorial for IC:
Probably like most of you, I am engaged in a daily attempt to make up my mind about President Obama. I was an early supporter. And as a former Washington “player,” I am aware how difficult is his position. I began to worry when he failed to grasp what I have seen to be the early window of opportunity for a new administration — the first three months — when the government is relatively fluid. As the months have flown by, I have seen that there are many positive things, mainly in his eloquent addresses on world problems, notably his speech at the University of Cairo on world pluralism, but also quite a few negative things. With sadness and alarm I find that my list of the negatives keeps on growing. Among them are the following:
(1) the commitment to the war in “Af-Pak” which (I believe) will cost America upwards of $6 trillion but perhaps only a few hundred casualties since we are relying increasingly on drone bombing. Just the money costs could derail almost everything Obama’s supporters hoped and thought his administration would do. That amount of money is roughly half the total yearly income (the GNP) of America. Of course, it will cost Afghanistan far more. Less dramatic perhaps but more crucial will be the further breakdown Afghan society, leaving behind when we ultimately get out an even more demoralized, fractured society and will probably lead to a coup d’etat in Pakistan, further enhancing the danger of war between the South Asian countries. The nominal leaders of Afghanistan (Hamid Karzai) and Pakistan (Asif Ali Zardari) whom we practically appointed and with whom we have chosen to work are hated by their people and are human monuments to the potential of government corruption. (Drugs, traffic in American arms even to insurgents, shakedowns of citizens, sale of public offices, outright stealing, kidnap for ransom…the list is long and as an old hand, it certainly reminds me of South Vietnam.) We now have a window of opportunity to get out of this looming disaster, but it seems that the President is determined to “stay the course.” Fundamental to my worry is that I do not hear anyone around the President or he himself saying things that indicate that they know anything about Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir or India, much less “Pashtunistan” aka The Northwest Frontier. Ignorance is rarely a very rewarding guide.
(Parenthetically, I have recently read the British “how to do it” manual on “Tribal fighting on the Northwest Frontier” by General Sir Andrew Skeen. Skeen spent his life fighting the Pathans. He warned British soldiers back in the 1920s that the Pathans were “the finest individual fighters in the east, really formidable enemies, to despise whom means sure trouble.” My copy is the only one I could find on the internet. it survived in a British officers’ mess library. I doubt that Messrs Petraeus, McChrystal et al have ever heard of it. It makes more sense than Patraeus’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual.)
(2) the choice of personnel is (to me) baffling:
In the military he has chosen to keep on Bush’s Secretary of Defense (who signed if not wrote the latest version of the neoconservative-inspired US National Defense Doctrine calling for, among other things, the “right” of first striking almost anyone we choose if we don’t like them), General David Petraeus whom I regard as a con man for breathing life into the Vietnam counterinsurgency program (which has never worked anywhere in the world in the last two centuries when tried by the British, the Russians, the French, the Germans or us) and General Stanley McChrystal who makes statements that sound terrifyingly like the SS. His main claim to fame appears to have come out of running the prison system in Afghanistan where, apparently, some of the worst cases of torture happened. Sy Hersh who just met with him came out of the meeting appalled. These men, allegedly, have told Obama that he could win the war in Afghanistan “on the cheap.” So when his then principal military adviser gave a more sober assessment — nearly half a million men — Obama fired him and listened to Petraeus’ siren song. Again, as an old hand, I cannot help remembering Vietnam where we went from 1,700 to half a million soldiers and still lost.
The Pentagon budget is not only enormous but contains a number of potential scandals. . . Our overseas bases now cost us over $100 billion yearly. Since the DOD sops up over half of the disposable resources of the government, Obama must get control of it. His task will be difficult because the DOD and what President Eisenhower called the “military industrial complex” have cleverly portioned out the work and procurement on the program to virtually every congressional district. Congress will opt for the program even if it bankrupts America. Congress will be Obama’s enemy if he tries any reforms. Even to try, he will need able advisers and staff. He should certainly know better than to appoint the foxes to guard the henhouse.
In the State Department activities, the most attractive person is Senator Mitchell but he does not seem to have any significant power. I hope I am wrong but he reminds me of my dear friend Governor Chester Bowles after JFK fired him and used him only for window dressing. The others have their own agendas. To be generous, one has to say that Hillary has not yet shown enough to judge, but some of her statements would be hard to worsen. I assume that she has begun to run for the presidency in 2012. She reminds me of the wise saying that when a president assembles his cabinet, he has all his enemies in one room. Dick Holbrooke has a bully’s approach to diplomacy in one of the touchiest spots in the world. His browbeating, hectoring, shouting “Balkan” tactics are ill-suited to Central Asia.
In the White House, I think it would be hard to find a worse choice than the new Special Assistant to the President, Dennis Ross. Three examples of his skill: a) in the early negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians, when he was supposedly the honest broker, he took a more disruptive position than even the Israelis, apparently shocking even them; b) in the build-up to the Iranian elections he sponsored and organized a program to “electronically invade” Iran with destabilizing messages trying, more subtly to be sure than the 1953 CIA-MI6 coup, to “regime change” it. Whatever else could be said about the “Iran-Syria Operations Group” , it played right into the hands of Ahmadinejad and the rightwing of the ulama and the military, giving them a proof text for American interference in the elections and thus may have backfired since no issue in Iranian politics is as sensitive as the fear of foreign espionage; (c) just before his appointment to be the chief honcho on all the Middle East, Ross published a book whose message was essentially ‘let’s try a bit of diplomacy for a short time. Of course it won’t work, but it will justify our attacking.’ That is, his approach to peace-seeking is consistent and negative. Since he is now Obama’s point man, we are in for deeper trouble.
The Vice President, as you know, just reversed the final position of the Bush administration, where Bush told the Israelis that America would not approve an attack on Iran: Joe Biden essentially authorized it, saying what they decided to do was their business, not ours. But those of you who have read my occasional essays could tick off the list of potential disasters for America and the Western world such an attack would bring on. It is patently absurd to suggest that an Israeli attack (made with our weapons and implicit approval) is not our business; indeed, regardless of our weapons and our approval, the long-term consequences for our economy, our position in the world, and our exposure to terrorism would be almost impossible to exaggerate.
On the CIA I confess I am not a big admirer. It has taken on 3 tasks: gathering information, evaluating it and performing dirty tricks. It is usually agreed that over 80%, perhaps more like 95%, of the information it accumulates comes from sources that you and I can access if we have the time, energy and interest. Most of the rest comes from technology (intercepts and code breaking which appear to be valuable for counter-terrorism but, at least in my experience, are of near zero value in ‘strategy’; on satellite and overflight imagery much the same can be said.) The second task, evaluation or “appreciation” is very difficult at best, but the record, at least during the Bush administration, is pretty poor. It was far better done then and during the Vietnam war in the tiny Bureau of Intelligence and Research of the State Department. The third task often leads to disasters and violates all that America should stand for. There are scores of examples to back up this statement, but one that has now come back to haunt us is the 1953 coup d’etat that destroyed an elected and popular Iranian government that, had it survived, might have avoided the 1979 Iranian revolution and relieved us of our current worries there. We should get out of the business of espionage, kidnap, torture and murder. Period. The current leadership of the CIA does not seem to have addressed these issues and President Obama has gone out of his way to grant a sort of blanket pardon in advance lest anyone fear that what he did was illegal or, more accurately, knowing that it was illegal might be called to court.
Back to the President: From my experience with life at the “brink,” during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I think that the President’s initiatives on cutting back nuclear weapons is perhaps the best thing he has done so far. True, it is a very modest step, leaving thousands of “devices” in place on both the Russian and American sides, only urging Israel which has hundreds of bombs to join the NPT, actually encouraging India to forge ahead with its nuclear program and so probably moving inexorably toward at least doubling the number of nuclear-weapon-armed countries rather than (as I have strenuously advocated) moving from Russo-American cutbacks to nuclear free areas and ultimately toward worldwide abolition of nuclear weapons. But, at least it is a step in the right direction.
That’s for foreign affairs.
On domestic affairs, I am really not qualified, but the only senior man to whom I would give high marks is former Federal Reserve Bank chairman Paul Volker. I predict that sooner or later, however, several of the men appointed to handle the financial problems will prove to be major political embarrassments to Obama. The phrase “no banker left behind” may prove a potent slogan.
Healthcare is the really tough but literally vital issue. I doubt that many Americans realize that it takes up about $1 in each $6 in our economy but that still 50 million Americans are uninsured. A June 2009 poll showed that 85% of the American public said the system either must be fundamentally changed or totally rebuilt. I think Obama is right that this is probably the make or break issue of his presidency. But I do not find a strategy to match his rhetoric. For some reason, on this issue as on some others, he does not seem to grasp the potential advocacy — and educational — powers of presidency. Too bad he could not learn from Lyndon Johnson.
On the environment, I see no significant concrete steps. Perhaps on this issue is the real test of a presidency’s fundamental role in a democracy: educating the public so that it can understand and cope with the present and the future. I certainly pretend to no particular wit on the environment, but it doesn’t take much wit to see what is happening. Never-mind what the scientists say, one would have to be blind not to see what the photographs show us of climate change. And where does this lead? I think there can be no other answer than a cutback, either voluntarily or enforced, in our material culture. It is going to come as a great shock to Americans who have grown up with SUVs, cheap gasoline, uninsulated houses, and rampant consumerism. We had better begin to prepare ourselves and for this, the President must be our shepherd. Arguably, it is much too early in his presidency for him even to consider this role, but as we look back it was taking on a comparable role that marked the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt.
There are, of course, for President Obama as for all previous presidents, myriads of issues, but one that I believe will haunt him for his own term and beyond is moral and constitutional: What are we doing — and what will we be seen to be doing — to the vast but unknown number of prisoners — terrorists, freedom fighters, accidents — we are holding indefinitely, without charges, without recourse to the courts or that fundamental right in our heritage from the struggle against tyranny, habeas corpus. What we are doing at Guantanamo, Bagram and an unknown number of other “secret” prisons is, as the courts have rightly, if belatedly and guardedly, held, a violation of our legal system. We don’t need the courts to tell us that it certainly a violation of our moral code. Obama began by urging transparency on this sordid issue, but he backed off . His Justice Department is now appealing a US District Court order that the Supreme Court decision on habeas corpus rights for Guantanamo also applied to a set of prisoners at Bagram who apparently arrived there by rendition or who, at least, are non Afghans. Of course, the most sordid issue is the evidence of sodomy, rape and torture captured in the photograph collection that Obama first wanted to release and then changed his mind. Those who profess to know say that what these pictures show is truly horrible. Some have compared them to the vivid record the Nazis kept of their sadism. Even pragmatically, since they are known — indeed known worldwide — it is questionable to say the least that hiding them will protect our reputation. For what little it is worth, my opinion is that making a clean breast of the evil and making an apology — as we have repeatedly urged other countries to do in comparable cases — would be or could be the beginning of the resurrection of America.
So it is that I read with further dismay . . . [a recent] article in The Washington Post [entitled] . . . “U.S. Rebuffs U.N. Requests for Guantanamo Visits, Data on CIA Prisons. . . “
# # #
I am waiting for the Obama we elected to show up. I hope this drama does not follow Samuel Beckett’s script.
—- William R. Polk was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia from 1961 to 1965 and then professor of history at the University of Chicago where he founded the Middle Eastern Studies Center. He was also president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. His most recent book is Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism & Guerrilla Warfare from the American Revolution to Iraq (New York: HarperCollins, paper edn. 2008).
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