//From the latest issue of my e-zine// Reflections on the Middle East

Any Israeli attack against Iran will be beneficial for Iran and its regime. It would give Tehran a position of victim, what it loves to promote. Many Arabs would side with Iran. Moreover, the Saudis would be embarrassed. Of course, they would be an objective ally of Israel in the issue, as they do not want a nuclear Iran and dream to weaken that country. I think they would condemn the attack while trying to take advantage of it. But it would increase tensions in the Gulf and the possibility of a regional war, which Riyadh does not want. For obvious reasons, Saudi Arabia prefers to count on Western countries instead of Israel to wield pressure on Iran.

(Source : collateraldamagemagazine.com)

“US policy, currently, is to strangle Iran through economic warfare…US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Senate Arms Services Committee in February of this year that the sanctions “probably will not jeopardize the regime,” but will certainly, “have greater impacts on Iran.” By “Iran,” Clapper means the seventy-five million Iranians. The US political class is in agreement: “Sanctions,” they say gleefully, “are working.” This is reminiscent of US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s callous statement in 1996; when asked about the half-million dead Iraqi children resulting from the sanctions against the regime, she said, “we think the price is worth it.””

(Source : jadaliyya.com)

Of Stupid Men and Smart Machines

“…emerging narratives of what unfolded in Benghazi Tuesday night hint of a different antecedent. A crowd of largely unarmed demonstrators was soon joined by individuals armed with anti-aircraft weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. The p

(Source : jadaliyya.com)

Iranian Women: Victims of Economic Strain

As those both inside and outside Iran have rightly pointed out, the course restrictions do reflect stereotypes about “male” and “female” abilities and will likely be welcomed by those hostile to women’s involvement in the public sphere. More often than not, however, observers outside the country have overestimated the influence of gender stereotypes and glossed over the impact of structural issues, such as socio-economic disparities, on policies, like the academic course restriction, that affect women inside Iran. As with most things in the country, the reality behind Iran’s new university policy is more complex than suggested by these simplified narratives.

(Source : english.al-akhbar.com)

the fact that everyone is talking about the feasibility of bombing iran instead of the morality, legality and sanity of such a move means that israel and america have already won the battle as far as subduing the public mind is concerned.

- Jahanzeb

Syria and the Invisible Hand of Foreign Intervention

Last week, Reuters reported a classified intelligence “finding” signed by President Obama authorizing aid to the Syrian rebels. This may be the tip of the iceberg that eventually reveals an extensive covert campaign by the United States, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to overthrow the Assad government in Damascus. According to this scenario, these U.S. allies would be using Qatar, assorted freelance jihadists and Lebanese rightists as cat’s-paws to sustain the uprising. Jihadists, both Syrian and foreign, may also play a spearhead role in the fighting.

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Western powers already may be employing destabilization methods in Syria that were perfected in Libya. The DGSE, French foreign intelligence, cobbled together a group of Libyan exiles to form the “National Forces Coalition,” which rallied anti-Qadaffi elements in Benghazi. Britain’s MI6 intelligence had been active there for decades stirring up opponents of the Qadaffi regime.

In Libya, NATO air power intervened on “humanitarian” grounds to halt killing of civilians. News reports showed only lightly armed civilians battling Qadaffi’s regulars. Not shown were French, British and some other Western special forces disguised as Libyans that did much of the fighting and targeted air strikes.

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As a former soldier, I cannot believe that anti-Assad forces in Syria have made such great strides on their own. All armed forces require command and control, specialized training, communications and logistics. How have anti-Assad forces moved so quickly and pushed back Syria’s capable, well-equipped army? Where does all their ammo come from? Who is supplying all those modern assault rifles with optical sights?

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How have so many Syrian T-72 tanks and other armored vehicles been knocked out? Not by amateur street fighters. Powerful antitank weapons—likely French, American or Turkish—have been used extensively. You don’t blow up a modern T-72 tank with light, handheld RPG rockets. Powerful antitank weapons, like the U.S. TOW or French Milan, require professional, trained crews. The use of these weapons suggests that outside forces are involved in the fighting, as they were in Libya.

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Now come reports that the rebels are receiving small numbers of man-portable antiaircraft missiles. If properly used, they would threaten the Assad regime’s armed helicopters. Yet using such missiles requires a good deal of training. I saw in Afghanistan in the 1980s how long it took the mujahidin to learn this skill from CIA instructors—and then how quickly the Red Air Force was denied air superiority.

If Syria’s rebels are being trained, it is probably happening in Turkey (which makes the deadly U.S. Stinger AA missile under license). However, the United States has a major campaign under way to prevent jihadist groups from acquiring such man-portable missiles. If the Taliban received effective antiaircraft missiles, U.S. military operations in Afghanistan would be seriously threatened.

According to Reuters sources, the United States may have worked with Turkish allies to set up a command HQ at Adana, close to its Incirlik airbase in eastern Turkey near the Syrian border. This is where it would make sense for U.S. intelligence to coordinate the flow of arms, communications gear, medical supplies, food and munitions to the Syrian rebels.

Other unverified reports from the Mideast suggest that the U.S. mercenary firm formerly known as Blackwater (it recently changed its name to Academi) is training Syrian rebels in Turkey, moving in veteran mercenaries from Iraq, where there were once fifty thousand U.S.-paid private soldiers, and sending combat units into Syria.

Antiregime groups such as the Free Syrian Army probably would be ineffective without some kind of covert Western support. Whether they can grasp power from the jihadis who now dominate the streets remains to be seen. This gambit worked in Libya—at least so far. Syria, in contrast, is a very complex nation whose modern era has been marked by instability and coups.

After overthrowing one Syrian government in the late 1940s, Washington wisely backed off from Syria. Now it may get drawn back into the vortex of one of the Mideast’s most difficult nations.

(Source : nationalinterest.org)

Iran Conference: Setting the Stage for Dialogue in Syria →

One of the most informative articles I’ve read so far on Syria.

Must read. 

Pressure Madness Continues

Here we go with another round of Americans on different parts of the political spectrum trying to outdo each other in pushing for more pressure and punishment on Iran. As usual, all this pushing is almost totally devoid of any attention to exactly how the pressure and punishment are supposed to accomplish anything useful or to why they haven’t accomplished more than they have so far. In coverage of the most recent legislative intensification of the pressure—on which the White House cooperated with Republicans and Democrats in Congress—one searches in vain for any sign of understanding of the basic principle that sanctions can only be one-half of any attempt to influence another government and that as long as Western negotiators fail to couple Iranian concessions with any significant relief from sanctions, the Iranians lack incentive to make concessions no matter how much pressure they feel. And don’t even bother searching for signs of attention to why the contingency that supposedly is driving all this—a still nonexistent Iranian nuclear weapon—should be such an obsession, beyond repeated chants of the mantra that, to use the words of one presidential candidate, it would be “the greatest threat to the world.”

Pressure on Iran has long ago passed the point of becoming a seemingly mindless, endless exercise in pressure for pressure’s sake. In the absence of any attention to the role of Western negotiating rigidity or flexibility, we have the spectacle of people calling for more of something that they themselves acknowledge isn’t working. Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, for example, notes that the goal of the sanctions is to change the political calculus of Iran’s leadership and then observes, “There’s no evidence to date that the sanctions have achieved that objective.” A statement the White House released on Tuesday proudly enumerates at length all the ways the administration has inflicted pain on Iran but—apart from noting how a few of the more focused sanctions have directly impeded nuclear activities—says nothing about what any of this is accomplishing, or could hope to accomplish. There is not a word about the critical role of negotiating positions. It is as if the economic pain is a good in itself, which it isn’t—for Iran, for the United States or for anyone else.

The sanctions story has been pushed so hard for so long that politicians are running out of creative ways to exert more pressure. One of the latest offerings is from Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who, evidently stimulated by reports of military cooperation between Israel and Azerbaijan, suggests stoking ethnic Azeri nationalism in northwest Iran as a way of frightening Iranian leaders with the threat of U.S. aid for “the legitimate aspirations of the Azeri people for independence.” The dumbness of this idea is explained by Farideh Farhi, who asks us to “imagine a member of a parliament from another country sending out a letter to their government asking for support to be given to Hawaiian nationalists or for the return of California to Mexico.” Another consideration is that most Azeri Iranians are far too integrated into the social and political fabric of Iran to think in separatist terms. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is half Azeri, and opposition leader and former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi is wholly so. Perhaps an even better analogy in the U.S. context would be someone promoting the separation from the union of Massachusetts in order to realize the legitimate aspirations of Irish Americans for independence.

When future historians try to make sense of the pressure madness, a nonexistent nuclear weapon is not likely to be much of the explanation, because that simply does not make sufficient sense of the phenomenon. The current role of Israel in American politics clearly provides much of the explanation (and for an especially crisp description of that role, seeThomas Friedman’s latest column). Americans probably also are receptive to the Israeli message because the demonization of Iran helps to fulfill a historically conditioned need for foreign dragons to confront and to slay.

(Source : nationalinterest.org)

King Hussein’s dual legacy

Hussein was often caught in the cross-fire because he was a man in-between, an heir to the dual legacy of Arab nationalism and western imperial patronage. His tragedy and limitations have not been fully understood. He was a victim of two forces - imperialism and nationalism - which throughout this century have interacted in the Arab world in an unequal relationship of antagonistic collaboration. The unresolved equation between these two forces has contributed greatly to the crisis of state and society in the Middle East.

(Source : reocities.com)

Après les « printemps » : quel avenir pour « l’Islamisme » ?

À la différence des monarques saoudiens ou marocains, dont la présence dans l’arène politique n’a toutefois jamais posé de problème aux plus laïques des dirigeants occidentaux, les formations politiques marquées par l’expérience des Frères musulmans, en passe aujourd’hui d’accéder au pouvoir sur la rive sud de la Méditerranée, sont toutes acquises à l’idée que leur légitimité est seulement démocratique et que leur exercice du pouvoir sera strictement civil.

(Source : ifpo.hypotheses.org)