by David Steven | Sep 21, 2007 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa, North America
The Washington Post has more on the mysterious Israeli raid on Syria that may or may not have been aimed at a nuclear installation that may or may not have been built with North Korean co-operation…
Pre-emptive strike against WMDs or neo-con misinformation? You decide.
Update: The Nelson Report believes a consignment of conventional missiles was blown up:
Our best sources continue to maintain the intel, such as it is, confirms “missiles and/or weapons parts”, most likely from N. Korea, and possibly including a Russian radar installation (which might have been helping guard the site).
Via Arms Control Wonk, who dismisses the ‘silly’ claims of a nuclear angle here…
Update II: National Review editors see the maybe-yes-maybe-no strike as a reason to up pressure on… Iran:
The Syrian connection… especially bears watching in light of the Sept. 6 Israeli air strike on a target in Syria… The target was a suspected nuclear site set up in cooperation with North Korea. Syria is of course a client state of Iran, and the Islamic Republic has a long history of cooperating with North Korea on banned weapon technologies. Iran’s membership in this axis makes it an even greater threat to the United States, and to global security generally, than it would be on its own.
Update III: Joseph Cirincione:
If the United States, Israel or any nation seriously believed there was prohibited or suspicious nuclear activity, they could have called for a special inspection. They still could. Any nuclear material—even after a bombing—would leave traces that IAEA inspectors could detect. This is precisely why we have international agencies—to provide independent, rapid verification of suspect activities. The Washington Post‘s encouragement for states to shoot first invites a more unstable, less secure world for all.
Update IV: The Sunday Times:
Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month, according to informed sources in Washington and Jerusalem…
They confirmed that samples taken from Syria for testing had been identified as North Korean. This raised fears that Syria might have joined North Korea and Iran in seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.
by David Steven | Sep 20, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa, North America
Writing in Salon, Steve Clemons recalls a round table he organised 18 months ago on the prospects for war with Iran. Then an unnamed former official in the Bush administration had this to say:
The President is going to receive a memo — some time in the next 6 to 12 months — that presents a “bleak binary choice”. Either he takes action to preempt Iran from reaching a nuclear threshold and calls for a military strike or he stands down and accepts a future with Iran with nuclear weapons.
Condi’s job is to develop a “third option”. She will dance round and round, waltzing with that third option. She will dance faster and faster with it, spinning and spinning, all around she’ll go — but when she’s done she’ll see that she’s dancing with a corpse.
This President is the kind of president who believes it is his moral responsibility to address serious problems now and not to leave these tough actions to a successor.
Those are the cold, harsh realities that we face — and to me, as I look ahead, I don’t see how we come out of this without military action. Unless Iran abandons its nuclear weapons intentions, which I don’t see happening, there will be a war.
So war with Iran is inevitable, right? Clemons says no – arguing that Cheney’s influence is on the wane, the military is strongly opposed to action, and that the President’s body language suggests air strikes are unlikely:
To date… nothing suggests Bush is really going to do it. If he were, he wouldn’t be playing good cop/bad cop with Iran and proposing engagement. If the bombs were at the ready, Bush would be doing a lot more to prepare the nation and the military for a war far more consequential than the invasion of Iraq. There is also circumstantial evidence that he has decided bombing may be too costly a choice.
All very reassuring. Until you reach the last few paras, that is, when Clemons starts back pedalling:
What we should worry about, however, is the continued effort by the neocons to shore up their sagging influence. They now fear that events and arguments could intervene to keep what once seemed like a “nearly inevitable” attack from happening. They know that they must keep up the pressure on Bush and maintain a drumbeat calling for war.
They are doing exactly this during September and October in a series of meetings organized by the American Enterprise Institute on Iran and Iraq designed to reemphasize the case for hawkish, interventionist deployments in Iraq and a military, regime-change-oriented strike against Iran. And through Op-Eds and the serious political media, the “bomb Iran now” crowd believes they must undermine those in and out of government proposing alternatives to bombing and keep the president and his people saturated with pro-war mantras.
We should also worry about the kind of scenario David Wurmser floated, meaning an engineered provocation. An “accidental war” would escalate quickly and “end run,” as Wurmser put it, the president’s diplomatic, intelligence and military decision-making apparatus. It would most likely be triggered by one or both of the two people who would see their political fortunes rise through a new conflict — Cheney and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
That kind of war is much more probable and very much worth worrying about.
by David Steven | Sep 20, 2007 | North America
The leader of the Western world, yesterday:
Asked what traits people should look for in choosing a President, George Bush responded immediately: “Be comfortable with your family. Work hard to make sure there is love in the White House.”
He went on to talk about how a president needs to have “rock solid” principles and warned that D.C. is a town where they will be constantly challenged. “If your principles ever get eroded, I don’t know how you will look in the mirror.”
He also said it was important to “soak in the beauty and greatness of America.” And whoever gets to the White House, he says: “Enjoy it as best you possibly can.” Reflectively he said of running for president, “I’m glad I did it.”
by Alex Evans | Sep 19, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa
So let’s catch up with things on Iran since our last couple of posts (mine, David’s). In Europe on Sunday night, French foreign minister (and founder of Medecins sans Frontieres) Bernard Kouchner commented that:
“We have to prepare for the worst … the worst is war.”
That remark elicited a furious response from International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei, who said on Monday that:
“I would not talk about any use of force. There are rules on how to use force, and I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 700,000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons.”
ElBaradei’s comments were buttressed by off the record briefing by UN officials, one of whom told the Guardian that
“There’s a strategic reason for doing these things. He really is alarmed. He sees this thing going out of control. The feeling around here is that this looks like the run-up to the Iraq war.”
So what’s going on here – and is the risk of war real? Here’s a quick rewind of how, as far as I can tell, things got to where they are and how things play out from here.
- During August, ElBaradei (see excellent NY Times profile here) negotiated a secret agreement with Tehran, under which Iran would answer questions about its nuclear program in return for a series of concessions. His approach was essentially supported by China and Russia, but led to an immediate apoplectic reaction from the US, UK, France and Germany, who argued that ElBaradei had undermined the Security Council process and allowed Iran to buy itself more time to pursue its nuclear program – especially since the IAEA’s agreement with Iran included no stipulation that the latter had to suspend uranium enrichment.
- But the EU-3 and the US realised that ElBaradei had won the key political advantage: momentum. According to the New York Times, a senior European official commented that “We told the Americans it would do no good to criticize ElBaradei, that it would only make him look even more like a hero.” Consequently, the Times went on, the US backed down: “Early in September, when the agency’s board gathered in Vienna and discussed the new plan, the American envoy, Gregory L. Schulte, stunned colleagues by praising Dr. ElBaradei. He told the board that the deal was “a potentially important development and a step in the right direction.”
- Then, on Monday this week, Bernard Kouchner tried to regain the momentum by proposing a new gambit: a European sanctions regime. But there are obvious problems with his approach. While his tougher stance is strongly backed by the US and the UK, the sanctions option is hampered by the fact that no-one (least of all the US) really believes that sanctions work – all the more so when the sanctions are European-only. And there’s also a real risk that proposing a European sanctions regime is a tacit, but still clear, admission that the UN Security Council process is no longer the scene of the action.
And that leaves the question of where the Americans fit into all this. People in touch with the US government think they’ve seen a tipping point where the key American concern now has as much to do with the proxy war it thinks Iran is waging in Iraq, as with Iran’s nuclear ambitions. It’s not clear whether or not a decision has been made in Cheney’s office to push for war; publicly, the White House continues to endorse a diplomatic solution. But it feels like a moment of considerable risk. If the US does want war, then a fractured international approach can work strongly to its advantage: it can argue that the UN process has failed, that the French sanctions approach won’t deliver, and that ElBaradei is placing too much trust in Iranian interlocutors who’ve proved time and again to be unreliable.
So unless the European sanctions approach works, and if the US Security Council process becomes seen to have broken down, then the EU-3 may face a stark choice between throwing their lot in with the US, or backing the increasingly Blix-like figure of ElBaradei.
It remains to be seen how ElBaradei’s approach pans out. But one point in his favour: he appears to be the only international player making a concerted effort to see things from the Iranian side. Last year, I sat in on a House of Lords debate on Iran and listened to David Hannay – a former UK Ambassador the the UN, and member of Kofi Annan’s High Level Panel on threats, challenges and change – speak. A year and a half later, his concluding words still seem as relevant as they are ignored:
Finally, I make a plea as someone who began his diplomatic career 45 years ago in Tehran. We must really try to put ourselves in the shoes of the Iranians and to understand their thinking. It would be quite wrong to suppose that this is exclusively conditioned by religious extremism. Some of the things that President Ahmadinejad says could just as well have been said—indeed, they were said—by Prime Minister Mossadeq in the 1950s. Iran’s experience of being pushed around and manipulated by the great powers is a long and bitter one. We need to appeal to the pragmatic instincts, which exist in every Iranian whom I have ever known and to avoid playing to those memories of earlier defeats and humiliations. To coin a phrase, we need to show them respect, even when we disagree with them.
by David Steven | Sep 19, 2007 | Africa, Economics and development
Research into voting patterns in Ghana:
This article explores voting behavior in one of Africa’s new democracies. Recognizing that much of the literature assumes African political behavior to be subsumed in ethnic ties and clientelism, we ask if individual voting behavior in Africa is driven by evaluative rationales based on retrospective or prospective judgments of the performance of parties or representatives, or by non-evaluative rationales characterized by clientelism and proxy voting. Based on a survey of voters in two recent elections in Ghana, one of the most surprising findings is that an overwhelming majority of the respondents do not vote based on clientelism, or due to ethnic or family ties but cast their ballots after evaluation of candidates and parties. Despite the significance of ethnicity among elites in Africa, voters are seemingly not influenced primarily by it.
