Informed Comment

Martin Kramer revealed his true colors at the Herzliya Conference, wherein he blamed political violence in the Muslim world on population growth, called for that growth to be restrained, and praised the illegal and unconscionable Israeli blockade of civilian Gazans for its effect on reducing the number of Gazans.

M. J. Rosenberg argued that Kramer’s speech is equivalent to a call for genocide. It certainly is a call for eugenics.

It is shocking that Kramer, who has made a decade-long career of attacking social science understanding of the Middle East and demonizing anyone who departs even slightly from his rightwing Israeli-nationalist political line, should be given a cushy office at Harvard as a ‘fellow’ while spewing the most vile justifications for war crimes like the collective punishment of Gazan children.

Kramer is after all not nobody. He was an adviser to the Giuliani presidential campaign. He is listed as an associate of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the influential think tank in Washington of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He is associated with Daniel Pipe’s ‘Middle East Forum,’ a neo-McCarthyite organization dedicated to harassing American academics who do not toe the political line of Israel’s ruling Likud Party.

Kramer’s remarks are wrong, offensive and racist by implication. He is driven to them by his nationalist ideology, which cannot recognize the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by Israelis in 1948, cannot see that most Palestinians have been deprived by Israeli policies of citizenship rights (what Warren Burger called ‘the right to have rights’, as Margaret Somers pointed out), and that Palestinians are even at this moment being deprived of basic property and other rights by Israeli occupation. To admit that any of these actions produces a backlash is to acknowledge the Palestinian movements as forms of national liberation activism, and to legitimize Palestinian aspirations. Rightwing Zionism is all about erasing the Palestinians from history. And now Kramer wants to make it about erasing future Palestinian children!

Where have we seen the picture Kramer draws before? It is just a recycled form of Malthusianism, where the population growth rates of “some people” is seen as dangerous to society. Barbara Brown wrote of Apartheid South Africa:

‘ [White] South Africans who express a [concern with Black population growth] perceive a close relationship between population growth rates and political instability. There are two variants of this approach. The first holds that a growing black and unemployed population will mean increased poverty which will in turn lead to a black revolt. . .

In an opening address to a major private sector conference on ‘population dynamics’ in South Africa, the president of the 1820 Foundation argued that ‘Rapid population growth translates into a steadily worsening employment future, massive city growth . . . and an increase in the number of poor and disadvantaged. All are rightly viewed as threats to social stability and orderly change.’

A second, but smaller, group believes the black threat arises simply out of the changing ratio of white to black. This group sees that ‘THE WHITES ARE A DWINDLING MINORITY IN THE COUNTRY’ and argues that this situation will lead to a ‘similar reduction of white political authority’.

Some argue for birth control on even more overtly racist grounds, but few people in leadership positions do so, at least publicly. Debates in the House of Assembly have included remarks to the effect that blacks are unable to make a contribution to South African society and so should be encouraged to limit their numbers. The organiser of a ‘Population Explosion’ conference, a medical doctor who is deputy director of the Verwoerd Hospital, argued that whites must organise a family planning programme for blacks because the latter group is biologically incapable of exercising foresight.’

- Barbara B. Brown, “Facing the ‘Black Peril’: The Politics of Population Control in South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2(Jan., 1987), pp. 256-273, this quote pp. 263-64.

There are other notorious examples of this sort of argument, including eugenics theorist Madison Grant, who warned in the early 20th century that white Americans were being swamped by inferior eastern and southern Europeans such as Poles, Italians, and Jews.

How ironic, that Kramer should now resort to the very kind of arguments Grant used to condemn Martin Kramer’s ancestors being allowed to come to the United States.

As usual, Kramer, a notorious anti-intellectual opposed to the mainstream academic study of the Middle East, is wrong as a matter of social science.

Population growth in and of itself explains nothing, and certainly not terrorism. Between 1800 and 1900, Great Britain’s population tripled, whereas France underwent a demographic transition and grew very slowly. Yet Britain experienced no revolution, no great social upheavals in that period. France, in contrast, lurched from war to war, from empire to monarchy to empire to Republic, and saw the rise of a plethora of radical social movements, including the Paris Commune.

High population growth can be a problem for development, and can contribute to internal conflict over resources, but it is only one factor. If economic growth outstrips population growth (say the economy grows 7 percent and population grows 3 per year), then on a per capita basis that is the same as 4 percent economic growth per capita per annum, which would be good for most countries. Or if a place is thinly populated and rich in resources, population growth may not be socially disruptive. Most countries in the world have grown enormously in population during the past century, yet they display vastly different rates of social violence.

Although under some circumstances, rapid population growth can contribute to internal social instability, it is irrelevant to international terrorism as a political tactic. The deployment of terror, which the US Federal Code defines as the use of violence against civilians for political purposes by a non-state actor, is always a form of politics. The Zionist terrorists who blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, which killed 91 persons and wounded 46, did not act because Jewish Irgun members had too many brothers and sisters. (And if you think about who exactly might have made an argument of that form in the 1940s, it becomes clear how smelly Kramer’s is.) Irgun blew the hotel up because British Mandate intelligence had offices there, and because these Zionist activists did not care if they killed dozens of civilians.

Studies of groups that deploy violence against civilians for political purposes show that [pdf link] they are characterized by higher than average education and income, which correlate with smaller family size.

Political violence is about grievances, land, resources and politics. Palestinians were no more violent than any other group in the Middle East until they were ethnically cleansed and their property was stolen by Jewish colonists in their homeland, for which they never received compensation. As Robert Pape has shown, suicide bombings cluster in the area in and around Israel, in Iraq and Afghanistan/ Northern Pakistan, places where people feel militarily occupied. But there are none in Mali or Benin, countries with among the highest population growth rates in the world.

Kramer’s argument is implicitly racist because he applies the population-growth calculus mainly to Arabs, whose family size he minds in ways that he does not others. Belize and the Cameroons have higher population growth rates than Libya. Is Kramer afraid of those two countries? Why is it only Arab children he marks as a danger?

If population growth rates were the independent variable in predicting a turn to terrorism, moreover, the fast-growing ultra-Orthodox or Haredi Jewish population of Israel would be a concern. But in fact they refuse to serve in the Israeli army and so are the least violent part of the population (though there have been occasional Haredi attacks on Palestinians.)

Kramer will find, in his new role as the Madison Grant of the twenty-first century, that his arguments are a double-edged sword that even more unsavory persons than he will gleefully wield against groups other than Arabs.

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Operation Enduring Freedom is now responsible for the deaths of 1,000 US troops, the bulk of them in Afghanistan. It has now also gone on longer than the Revolutionary War.

You have to wonder how many of those troops would be alive if the Bush-Cheney administration had not taken its eye off the ball and deprived them of resources, sending the resources instead to Iraq. Efforts to develop and build governmental capacity in 2002 and 2003 might have averted the rise of a neo-Taliban insurgency. Once an insurgency gets going, it is almost impossible to stop it militarily (only 20 percent of insurgencies are defeated on the battleground).

A bicycle bomb detonated remotely killed 7 persons and wounded 14 on Tuesday morning in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province. The bombing is a bad sign, since Lashkar Gah was supposedly the secure base for the US/ Afghan National Army attack on Marjah to the West, but even the capital is not stable.

In Zabul– another southern, Pashtun province– a roadside bomb wounded 5 Romanian troops.

The Afghanistan cabinet issued a strong condemnation of NATO for an airstrike in the province of Dai Kundi, which is alleged to have killed 21 civilians and wounded 14 in 3 vehicles. Aljazeera Arabic noted that the US and its allies have repeatedly mistakenly fired rockets at civilians and repeatedly apologized, and that Afghans are getting tired of it.

Pakistani Cmdr. Khalid Iqbal (ret.) critiques Operation Mushtarik (together) from a military point of view. It is a fine piece of analysis, though he is wrong that the Taliban ‘call the shots’ in most Afghan provinces. They only control 10-15% of the country, though they have “a presence” in some other parts of it; but the presence exactly overlaps with areas of Pashtun settlement (e.g. 1/3 of the northern province of Qunduz is Pashtun, and there are some Taliban among them; but most of the north has few Pashtuns and only tiny numbers of Taliban). He says:

1. American commanders ignored the lessons learned in Swat Valley by the Pakistani military, particularly the need to set up checkpoints to prevent the escape of large numbers of militants.

2. Instead, the US actually closed down some checkpoints along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, virtually guaranteeing that large numbers of insurgents would flee Marjah for safe haven in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan.

3. This influx of militants into Pakistan could well reinvigorate the militant movement in the northwest, which has been devastated by Pakistani military and intelligence moves, by arrests or killings of leaders, and by US drone strikes. Calming down Marjah while stirring up FATA is not a particular advance.

4. The Americans are not taking account of the possibility of a popular Pashtun backlash inside Afghanistan against their ‘surge.’

5. President Hamid Karzai lacks the political standing inside the country to be an effective partner in working for a political settlement. Not all of his foes are necessarily ‘Taliban.’

6. The Afghanistan National Army is not actually ready to provide security in Marjah after the Taliban are quelled. Therefore, either the US troops will get bogged down there trying to keep the Taliban from taking back over, or they will leave affairs in the hands of the ANA, which may well open the door to a Taliban return, given the Afghan Army’s unpreparedness. Either way, the Marjah campaign is either a trap or a Sisyphean task.

In contrast, the Russians are very pleased by the destruction of the heroin labs in Marjah by the US Marines. In an interview with Ekho Moskvy Radio on Monday, February 22, 2010, Dimitri Rogozin– the Russian Federation’s permanent representative to NATO– explained that Russia’s main interest in AFghanistan is not fear of the spread of Muslim extremism into southern Russia but rather the spread of heroin, which has already produced 2.5 million addicts and 30,000 deaths a year. Russian leaders see drug and alcohol use as among the prime reasons for the country’s catastrophic loss of population since the fall of the Soviet Union (the population fell by approximately 10 million, a virtually unheard-of decline given the absence of famine or plague as causes. And they see demographic decline as a security problem).

The USG Open Source Center paraphrases or translates the Rogozin interview, and here is the Afghanistan bit:

‘ Russia’s permanent representative to NATO, Dmitriy Rogozin, has said that Russia will not send its troops to Afghanistan “under any circumstances”. Rogozin was the studio guest of the “Dnevnoy Razvorot” (“U-Turn”) programme on Gazprom-owned, editorially independent Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy on 22 February. Rogozin also said that Russia would only provide support for NATO operations in Afghanistan on the condition that the alliance became engaged in “destroying drugs laboratories and drugs mafia” in that country. In the wide-ranging interview, Rogozin also talked about Georgia, the current state of relations with NATO, US missile defence plans in Europe and Ukraine.

Afghanistan

At the start of the interview, Rogozin was asked to comment on NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s recent statement on the possibility of Russia becoming engaged in NATO’s operation in Afghanistan. To a question whether this is possible, Rogozin said: “No”. He explained: “Because our position of principle is that we are not taking part in the military phase of the operation in Afghanistan. We shall not send our soldiers or officers there under any circumstances.” Rogozin then added that Russia was ready to provide “any other assistance” to NATO in Afghanistan.

Speaking of Russia’s interests in Afghanistan he said that “they are specific. For example, we are not afraid of Taleban, right? They are not threatening us as some kind of a force that will attack Russia. I don’t believe this.” He went on: “But we are afraid of drugs. That is, the heroin aggression is real. It is on such a scale, it has increased approximately 40 times, well, the volumes of production of opiates on Afghan territory have increased 40 times since 2002, that is – you can practically count from the moment of foreign armies, foreign troops appearing there.

And therefore we believe that because our borders are practically porous in the southern direction, deliveries of hard drugs – and heroin is a hard drug, much harder than cocaine, than synthetic substances, than all sorts of grasses – this heroin is killing us. According to our estimates, approximately 30,000 people annually.” Rogozin added that there were at least 2.5 million heroin addicts in Russia.

He also said that the scale of drug trafficking did not depend on whether Taleban would strengthen its position in Afghanistan or not, as Taleban’s attitude to drugs was “cynical”.

Rogozin then mentioned “dogs of war” as a second threat to Russia. “That is not Taleban, but fighters drawn in by war from other countries, who are now bogged down in the war with the Americans and their allies, but if the war ends, they will look for a use for themselves. There are about three to four thousand well-trained militants who are such crazy citizens. Naturally, if the war ends, they will most probably go to somewhere in Central Asia.”

Asked to clarify what Russia’s main interests were, Rogozin said: “Our first interest consists of the Americans – by waging war and resolving their own interests in Afghanistan, which do not contradict our interests – destroying that extremist element which in any other s

ituation will fight against us or our allies in Central Asia. And our second interest consists of the Americans and their allies – having a large grouping in Afghanistan, they are interested in transit and many other things, in logistical, rear support of their grouping, but we are making this support conditional on them having to fight against heroin. That is we are putting in front of them the enemy which we consider as being the main enemy, not a virtual one, such as Taliban, which will not attack Russia – we understand that this is a purely internal Afghan phenomenon – but, let’s say, heroin is already attacking our country.”

Rogozin was then asked about talks that are currently being held with NATO. He said that such talks “are being held constantly. We are saying that we shall not do anything for our NATO colleagues unless they deal with the problem, tackle the problem of destroying heroin supplies. They have now reported to us that last year, the amount of heroin coming from Afghanistan decreased, including the amount of crops which decreased. But we consider this to be useless scrap of paper, I’m sorry to say, because the amount of heroin mainly decreased precisely because it had been overproduced, that is there is such an amount of processed heroin in warehouses, there is such an amount of precursors in warehouses, which had already been brought into Afghanistan, that demand has simply decreased. Therefore our future support for NATO actions in Afghanistan will now be made conditional to the absolute degree upon their intentions and their real actions aimed at destroying drugs laboratories, destroying drugs mafia, cooperating with our structures, including the CSTO, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, which also conducts specialized operations aimed at intercepting drug supplies.”

Rogozin also said that he receives information about NATO’s specific operations in Afghanistan. He added that approximately 30 per cent of his working time in NATO is spent on discussing Afghanistan. ‘

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Facebook keeps promising to lift the 5000-friend limit, but has not done it. So my account over there is more or less full. Just to let readers who are interested know that the Facebook Informed Comment fan page works nearly as well, and that I’ve been trying to spend some time there, making a few extra postings and comments.

Also, remember that there is an Informed Comment iPhone app.

Since social media is so important to what used to be called blogging, and some action has shifted to news upvote sites, I’m always grateful to readers who submit postings to Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, etc.

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Gen. David Petraeus, a straight shooter, admitted on Meet the Press Sunday that the Afghanistan War will take years and incur high casualties.. His implicit defense of President Obama from Dick Cheney on the issues of torture and closing Guantanamo will make bigger headlines, but sooner or later the American public will notice the admission. The country is now evenly divided between those who think the US can and should restore a modicum of stability before getting out, and those who want a quick withdrawal. The Marjah Campaign, the centerpiece of the new counter-insurgency strategy, is over a week old, and some assessment of this new, visible push by the US military in violent Helmand Province is in order.

There was never any doubt that the US and NATO would win militarily, fairly easily occupying Marjah and nearby Nad Ali. Marjah at 85,000 or so is a city smaller than Ann Arbor, Michigan. The campaign is only significant in a larger social and political context. The questions are:

1. Can the stategy of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, of taking, clearing, holding and building be extended deep into the Pashtun regions? Marjah is only a stepping stone to the key southern city of Qandahar, which has a population of a million, more the size of Detroit.

This outcome has yet to be seen. But for rural Pashtuns to come to love foreign occupiers is an unlikely proposition. Even the WSJ admits that in Marjah, the Marines are not exactly feeling the love from the civilians they have supposedly just liberated. Since the Taliban are typically not as corrupt as the warlords, in fact, to any extent that the US and NATO re-install corrupt warlord types in power, they may alienate the locals. And keeping civilian casualties low so as to win hearts and minds is key here. That task will become more difficult as the US inserts itself more deeply into Pashtun territory, since insurgent villages will have to be defeated. The Soviet occupation produced 5 million externally displaced and 2 million internally displaced, along with hundreds of thousands dead. A campaign in Qandahar could easily displace half a million people, and they might mind. Meanwhile, on Monday, the governor of Dai Kundi asserted that a US airstrike killed 27 persons, mostly civilians. There is also the question, raised by Tom Englehardt, of whether the US is capable of good governance in Afghanistan when it is not in Washington, DC.

2. Can the demonstration of vitality and of a sense of progress mollify NATO publics long enough to fight a prolonged war and do intensive training of troops and police over several years?

No. Over the weekend, the center-left government of the Netherlands fell over whether to keep Dutch troops in Afghanistan. The Afghanistan war is universally unpopular in continental Europe, and governments have troops there mostly in the teeth of popular opposition, because NATO invoked article 5 of its charter, ‘an attack on one is an attack on all’ with regard to the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001, attacks. It may take months after the next elections this spring for the Dutch to form a new government, in part because of the surging popularity of the far-right populist anti-Muslim ‘Freedom Party’ of Islamophobe Geert Wilders– a smelly party the others will probably not want in their coalition. Holland’s 2000 troops are likely to be withdrawn by late summer. Canada’s military is also departing Afghanistan. Are these one-off situations, or are they the beginning of a NATO withdrawal over-all, which will leave Obama in the lurch? Australia is already refusing to take up the Dutch slack, and its government is under public pressure to get out, itself. While it is entirely possible that scandal-plagued rightwing billionaire Silvio Berlusconi will survive the next elections in Italy, it is also possible that he will not, and his successor may well want out of the unpopular Afghanistan quagmire. Moreover, the Pashtun insurgents may smell blood in the water with the Dutch withdrawal from Uruzgan (the home province of Mullah Omar), and target the smaller NATO contingents (the deaths of 6 Italian troops last fall raised public ire against the war).

There are about 45,000 NATO and other allied troops in Afghanistan, and 74,000 American. Obama wanted to increase the European contingent by 10,000, but NATO generally declined that offer, and now the NATO contingent may begin to shrink just when more trainers in particular are desperatedly needed. The Afghanistan National Army is supposedly nearly 100,000 strong, but many critics say the true number is half that, and that even that half is mostly illiterate, poorly trained, and often suffers from uncertain loyalties, drug use, or other debilitating considerations.

3. Can an Afghan army be stood up in short order that has the capacity to patrol independently and keep order after the US and NATO troops withdraw?

Unlikely. The answer to the question about Afghan military preparedness– after nearly a decade of training and an investment of $1 billion that Afghan troops are not ready for prime time. In the Marjah campaign, they showed no initiative, no ability to fight independently. They are poorly served by their junior field officers, and they are 90% illiterate. (The NYT reporter expected to see them with maps out planning approaches!) The ethnic make-up of the particular Afghanistan National Army units sent into Marjah is also not clear. Almost no ANA troops hail from Helmand Province, and Tajiks (native speakers of Dari Persian, often from towns and cities) are vastly over-represented in the army. There is often bad blood between Tajiks and Pashtuns, the group that predominates in Marjah. The same skill set of the ANA most prized by the US Marines during the assault– the ability to sniff out which households are Taliban– may be a liability in the holding and building phase, since it stems from a decade and a half of Tajik Northern Alliance battles against the Taliban.

4. Can the Afghan public, which includes many groups (Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks) deeply harmed by Taliban rule, accept reconciliation, as well?

Unlikely. Former Northern Alliance leader popular among Tajiks, Abdullah Abdullah, warned Karzai against reconciling with the Taliban this weekend. Abdullah dropped out of last fall’s presidential contest in protest against alleged ballot fraud in Karzai’s favor. There is general hostility toward reconciliation with the Taliban among the parties representing northern, non-Pashtun ethnic groups.

5. Can so much pressure be put on the Taliban that at least their middle and lower ranks will accept reconciliation with the Karzai government?

So far, there is no sign that the Taliban leadership still at large is interested in negotiations. A Taliban spokesman replied to Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s call for reconciliation with Kabul over the weekend with a resounding ‘No!’. Qari Muhammad Yusuf Ahmadi told the Afghan Islamic Press in Pashto that the Taliban would cease fighting when there were not further foreign troops in his country. He said, according to the translation in The News:

“The entire world knows that foreign forces have invaded Afghanistan and occupied this country. They have also started the fighting. Taliban will neither lay down weapons nor will hold talks with Karzai administration even in the presence of a single foreign soldier in Afghanistan. . .”

“The ongoing war in Afghanistan is between Afghans and foreigners. The responsibility of the war lies on the foreigners and their slaves. They continue fighting in the populated areas and have sent 15000 troops to small area like Marja; and are killing civilians and trying to impose infidels on Afghans.”

“Karzai himself has no power. The foreigners control everything and the nation is fighting against them.”

Commenting on the deaths of 12 civilians in Marjah, Qari Muhammad said: “Karzai should have said who martyred the people. In fact neither Taliban kill the people and nor destroy their houses. These are foreigners who are bombing the houses and killing civilians everywhere as they have brought miseries to the people of Marja.”

On the other hand, those members of the Taliban shadow government now in Pakistani custody may be less categorical. A third Taliban commander, Maulvi Kabir (the shadow governor of Nangarhar Province) has been captured by the Pakistani military, allegedly based on information provided by Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Baradar, the military chief of staff for the Old Taliban of Mullah Omar, was picked up recently in Karachi in a joint operation of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and US intelligence, which picked up signals from Baradar. Serious inroads are being made by these arrests into the Taliban ‘shadow government’ of officials who plan out roadside bombings and other attacks in specific provinces of Afghanistan while hiding out in Pakistan.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Riza Yusuf Gilani, and the military chief of state, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, appear to believe that capturing these high Afghan Taliban leaders will give Islamabad leverage in a negotiated settlement of the contest between the Karzai government and the Pashtun religious far right, which is in insurgency.

Obama’s Afghanistan escalation among the sullen Pashtuns is a desperate policy, as dangerous as attempting to build a series of sand castles on the beach at low tide.

Ironically, his bigger success has come in Pakistan, where he appears to have convinced the Pakistani elite to intervene decisively against their own, Pakistani Taliban, and also now to begin arresting the Old Taliban shadow government that is hiding out on Pakistani soil. If he can go further and convince Islamabad that its support of the Afghan Taliban was all a long a key strategic error that has blown back on Pakistan proper, he will thereby come closer to victory than he could by any military measures inside Afghanistan itself.

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The LAT reports that the National Dialogue Front, a secular party led by Salih Mutlak, is calling for a boycott of the March 7 parliamentary elections in Iraq. The NDF has 11 seats in parliament, but Mutlak and another prominent party member were among over 500 candidates (out of over 6000) for parliament disqualified as too close to the prohibited Baath Party. Many of those excluded from running had openly criticized the provision in the Iraqi constitution that bans members of the Baath Party from public life. The purge of Mutlak has been widely condemned in Iraq as unfair, since he left the party in the late 1970s.

Mutlak announced that the boycott decision was taken after remarks by American leaders in Iraq that the banning of candidates had been instigated by Iran. Mutlak said that the upcoming polls in Iraq had been hijacked by Iran and were being conducted according to the Iranian rules, wherein the regime predetermines who wins and some candidates are excluded from running.

Some observers worry that there will be a mass Sunni boycott of the elections, as happened with disastrous effects in January of 2005. I don’t think that catastrophe can now be repeated, because at that time the elections were held on a nation-wide basis. The current elections instead have Iraqi provinces as the electoral unit. Thus, the largely Sunni provinces of al-Anbar, Salahuddin and Ninevah will return a lot of Sunni members of parliament even with a boycott (the resulting members of parliament just would not represent that many people).

Liz Sly of the LAT says that there are two main Shiite blocs for the first time in this election (the first two parliamentary elections saw the Shiite religious parties unite into a single coalition). But she says that the two ” have an informal agreement” to come together as a mega-coalition after the elections, which will enable them to form the government. (In the Iraqi constitution, the largest single party or coalition in parliament gets first shot at choosing the prime minister.)

I have argued that the Shiite-dominated Accountability and Justice Committee may have banned Mutlak precisely in hopes that his National Dialogue Front would boycott, thus depriving the Iraqiya list of enough seats to make a bid to form the government.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the National Dialogue Front gave as further reasons for its boycott that it was also concerned about the lack of security for elections, by the government’s arbitrary arrest of its candidates and party workers, and by the lack of a truly independent high electoral commission.

In contrast, the National Iraqi List, headed by former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi– which the National Dialogue Front had joined in a coalition effort– announced that it would begin campaigning in earnest after last week’s one-week hiatus. Allawi kicked off the campaign with a visit to the capital of Saudi Arabia, Riyadh, for consultations with King Abdullah. Saudi Arabia has backed Iraqi Sunnis behind the scenes, and is worried about Iranian influence in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the main Shiite bloc, the National Iraqi Alliance (which includes the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, formed in 1982 in Iran), accused the United States of interfering in Iraqi domestic politics and of plotting to bring the Baath Party back into prominence as the “neo-Baath.”

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It appears that, the International Atomic Energy Agency is at least allowing for the possibility that documents allegedly found on a laptop some years ago –but discounted by the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency as of dubious provenance and incompatible with other intelligence gathered in Iran — point to a nuclear weapons program that no one has been able to locate. Some close observers have concluded that the laptop documents are forgeries. A new IAEA report that declines to dismiss the alleged documents will certainly cause the war lobby in the United States to redouble its efforts to get up an attack on Iran.

Forged documents on the supposed purchase of yellowcake uranium by Iraq from Niger were used by George W. Bush to promote a war on Iraq. It was at that time the Intelligence and Research division of the Department of State that attempted to throw cold water on these “documents,” but was ignored by the president. Then head of the IAEA, Mohammed Elbaradei, was able to show them false in one afternoon.

The UN inspectors have a right to be frustrated with Iran, which has allowed inspections of its Natanz nuclear enrichment site, but which has not been completely transparent or adhered to the letter of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But the sum of those frustrations does not point to a nuclear weapons program, unlike the disputed laptop documents. In statements to the press this fall, US intelligence officials have said that they stand behind the conclusions first reached in 2007, that Iran has no nuclear weapons program.

The Obama administration wants stricter sanctions on Iran, and the Sarah Palin/ Daniel Pipes lunatic fringe wants a military attack on Iran.

But Russia’s General of the Army Nikolay Makarov, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, warned that an American attack on Iran now, when the US is bogged down in two wars, might well lead to the collapse of the United States. He said that such an attack would roil the region and have negative consequences for Russia (a neighbor of Iran via the Caspian Sea). And, he said, the Russian military is taking steps to forestall such an American strike on Iran. Makarov made the remarks in Vzglyad on Friday, February 19, 2010, and they were translated or paraphrased by the USG Open Source Center:

‘Makarov also commented on the recent rumors about the possibility of an attack upon Iran by the United States. In his opinion, this would be complete madness on the part of the American military. He said: “Admiral Michael McMullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently said that, in the United States, there is a plan for carrying out strikes against Iran but the United States clearly understands that now, when it is conducting two military campaigns, one in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan, a third campaign against Iran would simply lead to a collapse. It would not be able to withstand the strain.”

Nevertheless, in proportion to the winding down of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, (the plan for) a war with the Islamic Republic of Iran, in the opinion of General Makarov, may again come out to the foreground.

General Makarov, Chief of the General Staff, said: “The consequences of such an attack will be terrible not only for the region but also for us. Iran is our neighbor and we are very carefully following this situation. The leadership of our country is undertaking all measures in order not to allow such a (military) development of events.” ‘

The less potentially catastrophic path, tougher United Nations Security Council sanctions, however, depend on Russia and China going along. Despite Washington’s optimism that Russia is softening toward the idea of stricter sanctions, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov cast the severest doubts on that idea on Friday.

In a radio interview on Friday with Ekho Moskvy Radio, which was translated by the USG Open Source Center, Lavrov was asked, “What is the situation with Iran’s foreign policy today? And is it true that we now have as a whole a united position with the United States on Iran?”

The foreign minister replied, “I don’t think that we have a united position.” He said that both Washington and Moscow agree on the importance of not allowing “a violation of the regime of nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.” He said the two countries have the same position on this issue, “although we do not coincide 100 per cent in methods of implementing it.”

So what Lavrov is saying is that the US and Russia do not actually have a common position or agree on really tough sanctions. They just both have a vague similar position that proliferation is bad.

Lavrov said that Moscow’s independent stance toward Iran is rooted in the two countries’ historical relationship as well as in Russian desire to get Iranian cooperation on such issues as the disposition of resources in the Caspian Sea. (For a quick overview of Russian-Iranian relations, see N.M. Mamedova, who also mentions Iran’s tacit support for Russia against Georgia in the Caucasus.) Lavrov said:

‘ But Iran for us, unlike the US, is a close neighbour, a country with which we have had a very long, historically conditioned relationship, a country with which we cooperate in the economic, humanitarian and military-technology fields alike and, let me note this particularly, a country that is our partner in the Caspian along with three other Caspian littoral states.

Therefore, we are not at all indifferent to what happens in Iran and around it. This applies to our economic interests and our security interests alike. This also applies . . . to the task of early settlement of the legal status of the Caspian Sea, which is not an easy task and in the approaches to which the Iranian position is close enough to ours.

Therefore, speaking of the proliferation threats, yes, we are concerned about Iran’s reaction. ‘

Lavrov is less convinced there is anything sinister about Iran’s civilian nuclear research, though he admits that questions remain:

‘ in the process of work, questions arose both from the IAEA’s inspectors themselves and on the basis of the intelligence which the IAEA obtains from various countries. They were questions that aroused suspicion as to whether there might in reality be some military aspects to Iran’s nuclear programme.

These questions were presented to the Iranians, as required by the procedures applicable in such cases. And, some time ago, Iran answered most of them. In principle, its answers were satisfactory, in a way that was considered by the professionals in Vienna normal. However, some of the questions are still on the table. ‘

So Lavrov thinks Iran’s answers are largely ‘satisfactory,’ though there remain small areas of uncertainty.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was in Moscow earlier this week calling for ‘crippling sanctions on Iran.’ Lavrov’s remarks clearly indicated that Moscow disagreed that that situation was so perilous as to call for such a step.

But just to be sure there was no misunderstanding, Lavrov sent out his own deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, to denounce any such talk.

Ryabkov said, according to Xinhua, “The term ‘crippling sanctions’ on Iran is totally unacceptable to us. The sanctions should aim at strengthening the regime of non- proliferation . . . We certainly cannot talk about sanctions that could be interpreted as punishment on the whole country and its people for some actions or inaction . . . ” He said that Russia sought to settle differences with Iran through dialogue and engagement. He also pledged that Russia would honor its deal to provide Iran S-300 air defense systems. He said, “There is a contract to supply these systems to Iran and we will fulfil it. The delays are linked to technical problems with adjusting these systems . . . “

So on Friday, even as the hawks in Washington watered at the mouth at the prospect of being able to use the new IAEA report as a basis for belligerency against Iran, Russia’s foreign policy establishment was engaged in a whirlwind of activity aimed at challenging the notion that Moscow is was in Washington’s back pocket on Iran sanctions. The chief of staff predicted American collapse in an Iran conflagration, and vowed in any case to try to block any such attack. The foreign minister pronounced himself largely but not completely satisfied with Iran’s answers concerning its nuclear activities, and underlined that Russia needs Iran because of Caspian issues (and he could have added, because of Caucasus and Central Asian ones). And then the deputy foreign minister was enlisted to slap Netanyahu around a little, presumably on the theory that it would sting less coming from someone with ‘deputy’ in his title.

Those who have argued that Russia’s increasing willingness to acquiesce in tougher UNSC sanctions might influence China to go along, too, should rethink. Russia doesn’t seem all that aboard with a brutal sanctions regime. China not only has its own reasons not to want its own deals with Iran to be declared illegal, but its leaders doubt Iran has the capacity to construct a nuclear warhead anytime soon.

Postscript: The head of Iran’s nuclear program, interviewed on Aljazeera, warns the US against pressuring Iran.

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The USG Open Source Center monitored Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s speech at the christening of an Iranian destroyer, Jamaran, on Iranian official radio, in which Khamenei again denied that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons and affirmed that they are illegal in Islamic law because they kill large numbers of innocent non-combatants.

“Khamene’i Denies Iran Seeking Nuclear Weapons
Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1
Friday, February 19, 2010 …
Document Type: OSC Summary …

Tehran Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1 in Persian in its 1030 GMT newscast on 19 February broadcast a report on the acceptance ceremony for the Iranian navy’s new destroyer, Jamaran, which was attended by Supreme Leader Seyyed Ali Khamene’i. The announcer-read report said Khamene’i delivered an address in which he stressed that Iran is not seeking an atomic bomb.

The announcer quoted Khamene’i as saying: “The old and idle talk about Iran making atomic bombs shows that even in terms of propaganda the enemies of the nation have resorted to repeating themselves out of sheer weakness.”

He was also quoted as saying Iran would not become emotional in response to such “nonsense.”

The announcer further quoted him as saying: “We have said repeatedly that our religious beliefs and principles prohibit such weapons as they are the symbol of destruction of generations. And for this reason we do not believe in weapons and atomic bombs and do not seek them.”

According to the announcer, in another part of his speech Khamene’i referred to claims by the US and other Western countries about Iran’s actions against its neighbors, saying: “Our neighbors know that such claims are lies. By creating discord, America and Israel are trying to divert the attention of the Islamic ummah from its main enemies, namely America and Israel.” “

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