Iran, US, Others Try One More Time To Avoid War

A meeting is set for tomorrow in Baghdad that could determine the future of the US-led sanctions regime and whether or not there will be another war in the Mid-East this summer, this time over Iran's nuclear program.

The rhetoric out of the region seems to have cooled off a bit in recent weeks – unless, of course, you're Benjamin Netanyahu, who continues to beat the wardrums.  The most likely reason, as explained here, is that all of the parties involved realize that they can't afford a war or a disruption in global oil supplies: not Iran, not the United States and certainly not Europe.  But Iran and Europe can't risk seeing the sanctions regime continue either, the United States, which doesn't import Iranian oil, is largely immune from the impact of the sanctions we've slapped on Iran and are expecting the rest of the world to abide by.

Of course the European economies most vulnerable to the lack of Iranian oil are the European economies in the worst trouble; including Greece and Italy.  Both are suppose to halt imports from Iran on July 1 as per the European side of the sanctions regime, but Italy is owed billions of dollars worth of Iranian oil as payment for infrastructure projects completed by Italian companies, while Greece also has favorable deals with Iran to buy oil, if they need to replace this oil, it will likely be at a higher cost from other sources.  And if Greece drops out/is kicked out of the Euro as some are speculating they will be, they will have to negotiate new oil deals in the midst of a full-blown economic crisis.

From the Iranian side, the sanctions are having an effect on their economy, with food and fuel prices soaring, though the bite is reported to be not as bad as Western authorities expected (there was some foolish hope in the West that the pain caused by the sanctions would inspire the Iranians to rise up and overthrow their government. Good luck with that...).  The Iranian government has stepped in and is offering subsidies to perhaps 60% of the population to help defray costs.  Of course this isn't a sustainable policy for the long run, but so far it seems to be working.  Meanwhile two of Iran's biggest oil customers, China and India, are balking at joining in the US-led sanctions regime.  Oil exports from Iran to China actually increased in April, reversing a decline in March.  Technically, both China and India could face punitive action from the US for not joining in on the sanctions party, but let's see if the US has the nerve to slap sanctions on them.

Of course it's also hard to see how the US and Iran back away from the crisis they have created.  Iran may offer some level of inspection of their nuclear sites, but it is unlikely to satisfy the US, which has demanded a full stop to their nuclear program; from the American side, agreeing to anything less than the full compliance we demanded of Iran will be pounced on by President Obama's Republican opponent in November election as a sign of “weakness” (never mind that it may be the most practical/rational thing to do), so that's unlikely to happen.  And then there's Israel, where Benjamin Netanyahu has made a career of stoking fears of an Iranian nuke; it is hard to imagine just what Bibi would accept short of a military raid against Iran, which the US Republicans will expect the Obama regime to fully support...

Navigating out of this quagmire created by political posturing and stubbornness will require some deft political maneuvering and probably more finesse than we can expect from the Baghdad meeting. 

As Iraq Crumbles

Iraq is falling apart at breakneck speed.  With the dust still settling from the US troop convoy out of the country, Iraq is showing every sign of coming apart at the seams. This morning, Baghdad was rocked by a series of coordinated blasts during the morning rush hour that killed at least 50 people and wounded more than 100 others.  But those explosions are masking an even larger problem gripping the Iraqi government.

Earlier in the week, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki issued an arrest warrant for Iraq's Vice President, Tariq al-Hashemi, claiming that al-Hashemi was running his own murderous hit squad.  It's worth noting here that this is Iraq's Shiite Prime Minister trying to arrest Iraq's Sunni Vice President.  In response, al-Hashemi fled to the northern city of Erbil, de facto capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, where he was granted protection by Iraq's Kurdish President Jalal Talabani.

So as of Thursday morning, Iraq's whole political system was in a three-sided stand-off broken down along ethnic/sectarian lines.  Part of the reason that this kind of situation could even happen in the first place is that Iraq's national government has obviously taken a lesson from the US Congress and developed an amazing ability to avoid making tough decisions.  The final status of Kurdistan within the Iraqi federal state has gone unresolved for years. The main sticking point is over oil revenues from the oil rich north, which the Kurds think should stay in their autonomous region and the Sunnis/Shiites think should be distributed to the country at-large.  Some oil companies have signed contracts to develop resources in the north with the Kurdish government in Erbil, which the federal government in Baghdad hasn't decided yet whether to honor or not. And then there's the city of Kirkuk, which sits in the middle of Iraq's northern oil patch, that the Kurds say was historically Kurdish and should thus belong to them, but Iraq's Arabs say was repopulated by Saddam Hussein with Shiites and Sunnis and so should not.

Of course the situation involving Iraq's Vice President has sparked claims from the Republican critics in the United States that the possible pending collapse of Iraq is all President Obama's fault for withdrawing US troops too quickly and too soon.  This line of argument ignores the fact that Pres. Obama's decision was motivated by the government of Iraq's refusal to sign an extension of the Status of Forces Agreement (or SOFA) that exempted US troops from prosecution under Iraqi law for any perceived misdeeds (you can only imagine how Obama's Republican critics would have howled if he had left US troops in Iraq without this protection). A larger question for the critics though is if after eight years Iraq's government was so fragile it would start to crack just days after the US withdrew from the country, when then would it be ready to govern? In another five years? Ten? Would the United States need a massive and permanent presence in Iraq to play referee to the feuding ethnic and sectarian groups, and is this what they're advocating?

The United States went to war in Iraq for dubious motives to remove the government of Saddam Hussein.  Our plan for the “day after” Saddam’s fall was to install Ahmed Chalabi, a shifty Iraqi ex-pat, as the new leader, a plan the Iraqis balked at.  It is clear that in the eight years following the rejection of Chalabi, the US never was able to come up with a Plan B other than to try to graft a federal system of government onto three groups with long and contentious histories, a plan that now shows signs, not surprisingly, of coming dramatically apart.

A Resource Curse Prescription For Kurdistan?

Is the Iraqi region of Kurdistan about to feel the effects of the Resource Curse?  That's the feeling you get from this piece in Foreign Policy about the development boom currently underway in the Kurdish capital Erbil. 
 
While suddenly finding vast reserves of a highly-valued natural resource should be a blessing for an under-developed country or region, history has often shown the opposite to be true: rather than focusing on development projects that build infrastructure and improve the lives of the public at-large and establishing a scheme so that all the citizens can share in the windfall produced by the resource in question, what tends to happen is that vast sums of money are spent on lavish, but ultimately ineffectual projects, corruption is rampant, and while a few individuals become fabulously wealthy (typically individuals who are members of or friends with the ruling regime), the masses tend to stay in poverty, sometimes their living conditions actually worsen as has happened in the Niger Delta in Nigeria.  That is the resource curse.
 
And early indications are it is starting to take shape in Kurdistan.  Iraq is widely believed to have the last remaining untapped, easy-to-access oil reserves on the planet – an unintended side effect of decades of sanctions levied against Iraq's former ruler, Saddam Hussein.  It just so happens that a large portion of those reserves lie in the northern portion of the country, in the areas now controlled by the Kurds.  The Kurds are eager to exploit these resources and have begun signing contracts with foreign oil companies.  This has led to a massive influx of foreign cash to Erbil.  But how much of that cash is making its way to average Kurds at this point is unclear.  That, as FP notes, Erbil now has three luxury hotels under construction, but no modern hospitals, is not a good sign.
 
To make matters worse, the Kurds and the national government in Baghdad are still negotiating over who actually controls the northern oil fields and how the revenue will be divided, meaning there's no master plan for how the oil revenues will be used, nor apparently is there adequate oversight of the oil projects getting underway, all of which makes it likely that Kurdistan could be the latest victim of the resource curse.

The Real Price Of Oil...

There's an incredibly thought-provoking piece out now from Time.com's military-focused blog Battleland on United States policy in the Persian Gulf. It talks about an analysis put together last year by Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Princeton University, who, after an exhaustive study, calculated the cost of the United States' military presence in the Gulf from 1975-2010 - a cost he puts at a whopping $8 trillion. Yes, that's trillion with a “T”. According to those calculations, the United States now spends as much each year ensuring that the oil from the Persian Gulf keeps flowing as it did in fighting the Cold War. And to make matters worse, Stern argues that it is not money well spent.

US policy towards the Gulf boils down to this: Thanks to the bottleneck created by the Straits of Hormuz, a military force could conceivably block the narrow shipping channels, cutting off the supply of oil and sending the world into an oil-fueled economic shock; therefore we must maintain a robust presence in the region to ensure that this does not happen (the US Navy's Fifth Fleet is currently based in the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain). Stern thinks this is nonsense. While it is conceivably possible that the Straits of Hormuz could be blocked by strategically sinking a few very large ships, the states of the Persian Gulf are too reliant on oil exports to ever do this, and countries outside of the Gulf (like China) are too dependent on oil imports ever to do it either.

History shows that Stern is probably right. Iran and Iraq spent eight years in the 1980s engaged in a brutal war with each other that featured, among other things, ballistic missile strikes on each others cities, the use of chemical weapons and suicide attacks carried out by children on the Iranian side. Yet neither the Iranians or Iraqis ever seriously tried to shut down the Straits of Hormuz, and oil prices were not only largely stable during the period of the war, they were also at near historic lows. If the Straits weren't shut down during that conflict, it is hard to imagine when they ever would be.

Yet much of current US foreign policy is built around just this scenario. Stern argues that this leaves the US overfocused on the Middle East while ignoring strategic threats in other parts of the world – say from China. I absolutely agree with him, especially since this is a point I've been arguing here for some time now. Consider for a moment that by the middle of this decade the United States will likely get as much oil from Africa as from the Persian Gulf, yet our investment/interest in Africa pales in comparison to our focus on the Mid-East. Unfortunately for as compelling as Stern's arguments are, they're not likely to change the minds of many decision-makers in Washington; his report originally came out in April 2010, a full year ago, to little public notice.

Beating The War Drums

A few quick thoughts on Iran. Just a casual look around the blogoshpere turns up an awful lot of pieces dealing with the idea of Iran - either warning of the growing Iranian “nuclear threat”, advocating military action to keep Iran from building a nuclear weapon, or in fewer instances, warning against the consequences of attacking Iran. Perhaps it’s laziness on the part of the punditocracy, since a rehash of the case for/against war with Iran kind of writes itself at this point; but it does seem like there’s a growing expectation that there will be some military action against Iran soon (something I humbly note that I predicted back in June).

Unfortunately for the pro-action crowd, their arguments are pretty weak. Take this recent piece in the Weekly Standard, which makes the case that the US has to take military action against Iran to protect the world’s oil supply, since if there was an outbreak of hostilities, it would negatively impact the world’s supply of oil (feel free to scratch your head over that bit of logic). The pro-action crowd also maintains that Iran’s nuclear capabilities can quickly be eliminated through a series of air strikes that will have no negative reprocussions. And if you believe that, I have some lovely beachfront property along the Straits of Hormuz to sell you.

Sadly, we’ve seen this movie before. Military action in Afghanistan was suppose to quickly decapitate al-Qaeda and eliminate the country as a terrorist safe-haven. Our soldiers in Iraq would, supposedly, be greeted as liberators, met with candies and flowers and Iraq’s oil revenues would pay for the whole invasion to boot. We all know how well those two scenarios played out. But sadly as Arnaud de Borchgrave reports in today’s Washington Times, those lessons of history seem to have been lost on the crop of neoconservatives still rattling around Washington DC; he quotes Reuel Marc Gerecht who says that Iran’s response to military action will be “minimal” and that an attack will “rock the system” in the region - basically shoveling the same stupid line the neocons pushed seven years ago about Iraq.

If we indeed are set on military action against Iran then, let’s hope our leaders do a much better job planning for the day after the attack as they do for when the bombs fall.

So Much For The Sanctions...

Speaking of Iran, the whole sanctions regime endorsed by the United Nations and strengthened by the United States and Western Europe seems to be rapidly falling apart. Iran and Russia have struck a deal to begin the fueling process at their Russian-built nuclear reactor in Bushehr. Russia began work on the reactor back in 1994, but progress has been incredibly slow, and at times has stopped entirely (partially in response to requests to Russia from the United States that they halt work as part of the “isolate Iran” foreign policy plan). But now Russian officials say that they will start loading nuclear fuel into the plant on August 21, with Iranian officials saying the plant will go online by the beginning of September.

Meanwhile Russia's LUKoil has delivered shipments of gasoline to Iran this month as well. While Iran has vast oil reserves, they lack oil refining capacity, meaning that they have to import much of their gasoline (perhaps as much as 40%). The US and Europe passed a secondary round of sanctions that go beyond the most recent United Nations sanctions, which specifically target the nation's gasoline imports – the idea being that a shortage of gasoline would cause public unrest that could bring about the end of the A-jad regime (a bit of wishful thinking there). But LUKoil's recent deliveries show that Russia's not crazy about the idea of isolating Iran, who is one of their major trading partners. China and India have also indicated that they are not planning to go along with the oil and gas boycott of Iran either. And now you can add Turkey to that list as well, last Thursday the Turkish government said they would support Turkish companies if they decided to sell gasoline to Iran; perhaps another clear indication that after nearly two decades of trying to join the European Union club, Turkey is looking to carve out a niche for itself as a region power in the Middle East.

And to quote the old TV pitchman: “but wait, there's more.” Last week Iraq's oil ministry held talks with their Iranian counterparts and were “open” to an Iranian proposal to build a natural gas pipeline across their country so that Iran could start selling their natural gas to Syria. Iran has one of the world's largest reserves of natural gas and have recently been talking with Pakistan as well about a proposal to build a pipeline to their country as well. But the Iraq/Syria pipeline deal is particularly interesting since not too long ago (say the 1980s), Iraq and Iran were mortal enemies. Since the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein though, the two countries have set aside much of their old animosity, with Iran wielding an increasing amount of influence in Iraq.

You can chalk that up as another unintended consequence of the Iraq War II. Something to keep in mind if we decide to take military action against Iran, a decision that might be helped along by the continuing erosion of the sanctions regime against that country.

Tariq Aziz On Iraq

On Friday, the Guardian published a two-part interview with Tariq Aziz, the former Deputy Prime Minister under Saddam Hussein, who, with his bushy moustache and thick, black-framed glasses, was one of the regime’s most recognizable figures. Aziz is currently sitting in jail in Baghdad, halfway through a 15-year sentence for crimes against humanity for his role in the Hussein regime. While the entire two-part interview is well worth reading – Aziz maintains that Iraq was better off under Saddam than the current regime, that Iraqis are all “victims” of the United States and Great Britain, and that the coalition has undone decades of progress made under Hussein – but past his bluster are two fascinating claims.

The first is that Aziz not only states Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (ostensibly the reason for the 2003 invasion), but that Hussein deliberately maintained a policy of “ambiguity” around Iraq’s WMD capabilities as a hedge against their long-time adversary, Iran. If the “ambiguity” strategy sounds familiar, it is also Israel’s stated policy regarding the existence, or not, of their nuclear weapons program. Israel’s belief is that so long as hostile nations in the region think they have nuclear weapons, none will risk an outright war with them. Aziz explained that Saddam pursued the same strategy against Iran – the two countries spent much of the 1980s involved in a bloody war that saw each launch ballistic missile attacks against the other’s major cities and also the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield. Saddam’s belief was that Iran would think twice about starting a second war so long as they thought the Iraqis possessed WMDs.

And while ambiguity seemed to work against them when it came to US-led efforts to enforce UN weapons inspections to certify that Iraq was WMD-free, Aziz claims that the United States was determined to launch a war against Iraq under George W. Bush and was merely looking for an excuse. He accuses the United States of forcing Iraq to try to accomplish the impossible task of “proving a negative”. This goes back to an old story of US weapons inspectors demanding that the Iraqis prove they destroyed WMD stocks the Americans assumed they had rather than just the documented physical stockpiles they disclosed. It works like this: say for example an Iraqi lab produced 800 lbs of sarin nerve gas. The Iraqis would provide the weapons inspectors with proof that they had destroyed 800 lbs of sarin. But it wasn’t uncommon for weapons inspectors to say that they thought this lab could have produced 1,000 lbs, and then demand to see the documentation that the other 200 lbs had been destroyed. When the Iraqis claimed that this additional 200 lbs had never been produced in the first place, the American side accused them of obstructing the weapons inspector’s efforts. The excuse, voiced by Dick Cheney and other administration officials, was that we couldn’t “take Iraq’s word” on these things; of course the fact that seven years after the invasion stockpiles of these phantom WMDs have never been found would seem to bear out the idea that the Iraqis were telling the truth all along.

You can read the whole two-part interview at The Guardian.

Are The Saudis Onboard For Israel Air Raid?

An update now to last Saturday’s post: “Israel, Iran and the Summer War”. The Times of London reported on Saturday that Saudi Arabia and Israel have struck a secret deal where the Saudis will basically “stand-down” their national air defense system over the northern part of the country to allow the Israeli Air Force a corridor to fly through on their way to attack nuclear sites in Iran. Rumors of Saudi assistance in an Israeli strike have been circulating for some months now, the Brookings Institution war game scenario of an Israeli raid on Iran even speculated that the Israeli Air Force might set up a secret refueling base in the Saudi desert (the target sites in Iran are at the far edge of the IAF’s operational range).

Since Saddam Hussein’s removal from power, Iran’s influence in the Persian Gulf has grown steadily, thanks in part to now no longer having to worry about getting involved in another war with their long-time adversary, Iraq (the two countries spent most of the 1980s engaged in a bloody, but ultimately fruitless, war). Iran’s growing power has not sat well with the Saudis, who like to see themselves as the big player in the Gulf, which is why they would likely be willing to let Israel use their airspace to launch an attack on Iran. The Times article should be seen as more evidence that an Israeli air strike against Iran this summer is becoming more and more likely.

Israel, Iran and the Summer War

If there is a message to be drawn from Israel’s raid on a Gaza-bound humanitarian aid flotilla it is this: there will be a major war in the Middle East this summer.

The flotilla raid was more than simply a military operation; it was an outward expression of Israel’s ongoing internal political and security debates. Since the modern state’s founding, Israel’s national mythos has been built on the idea that they are an island surrounded on all sides by hostile forces. While this was certainly true during their early history, Israel has enjoyed peaceful relations with two of their next-door neighbors, Egypt and Jordan, for several decades now; Turkey too was one of their closest allies, at least until the flotilla raid. In recent years, though hard-line Israeli governments have expanded this mythos: so now not only do they have enemies on all sides, they also exist in a world that (with the notable exception of the United States) is indifferent to their plight while secretly hoping for their downfall. The generally negative reaction to the flotilla raid around the globe (again save for the US) has only given strength to this idea.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s post-flotilla raid press conference gives valuable insight into the current thought process of Israel’s leadership. Netanyahu was quick to dismiss the flotilla’s stated mission of providing humanitarian aid and instead condemned it as an attempt by Hamas - the ruling force in Gaza that Israel regards as a terrorist organization - to rearm in preparation for a new conflict with Israel. Netanyahu then went a step further, to draw the line from the flotilla through Hamas in Gaza and back to Iran, at one point saying that Iran could not be allowed to “open a port on the Mediterranean [Sea].” It is a sign of how completely Iran is dominating current Israeli strategic thinking. Israel regards their main security challenge today as coming not from the Palestinian Territories, but rather from Iran and their ongoing nuclear program. Israel dismisses Iran’s claims that their nuclear research is meant to establish a domestic nuclear power program; instead saying it is a front for a secret atomic weapons program, which Israel regards as an existential threat to its very existence.

Here, it’s useful to take a look at Amos Oz’s op-ed in the June 1 New York Times. Believing that hostile forces surround them, Israel has responded by building and maintaining a formidable military. The downside to this belief, as Oz explains, is that Israel now acts as though every foreign policy problem has a military solution; Israel’s military campaigns against Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in 2008 though, both of which failed to destroy these groups, would seem to argue against this belief. Yet the Israeli leadership remains undeterred, arguing that only military action (namely air strikes) and not a new round of sanctions will prevent Iran’s nuclear program from going forward. Here Israel is buoyed by their success in 1981, when a raid against the research reactor at Osirak destroyed Iraq’s fledgling nuclear program.

To this point, diplomatic pressure and fear of a widespread backlash seem to have kept Israel from ditching the UN-based sanctions scheme and preemptively launching air strikes against Iran’s nuclear sites. I would argue the flotilla raid then should be viewed as a sign that these forces will no longer restrain Israel. Simply stated the flotilla raid is Israel in effect saying: “we’re surrounded, we’re going to act in our defense and we don’t care what you think about it.”

What effect would an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities have? Here it’s useful to look at a war game scenario conducted by the Brookings Institution that examined both the Israeli raid and the probable Iranian response. Rather than retaliate directly against Israel militarily, Brookings predicts that Iran will use their Lebanon-based proxies in Hezbollah (which receives a large portion of its funding from Iran) to strike back against Israel. And here is where the air strikes will spark the region-wide war. In April, Israel accused Syria of smuggling Scud missiles across the border to Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. Hezbollah, Lebanon and Syria have all denied the claims, though that has not stopped Israel from pressing them. Because Hezbollah has seats in the Lebanese parliament, Netanyahu has said that Israel will regard any attack against Israel from Hezbollah as being officially sanctioned by the Lebanese government and will respond accordingly, the same goes for Syria for their role as the transshipment route for the weapons. So, if Iran’s Hezbollah proxies strike out at Israel, Israel will respond militarily against the governments of Lebanon and Syria (it’s also hard to imagine that Hamas, which also receives funding from Iran, won’t launch retaliatory strikes against Israel as well). What started as a series of air raids against a select group of targets in Iran will then quickly devolve into a war pitting Israel against Lebanon, Syria and Gaza.

The United States will find itself involved in the Summer War, by both choice and circumstance. During Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the United States provided emergency shipments of precision guided bombs when Israel’s stockpile of these weapons ran low as what they thought would be a series of air strikes and hit-and-run ground incursions turned into a month-long guerilla campaign. It’s logical to believe that the United States will again be called on to provide Israel with war material; US troops based in Iraq (still numbering in the tens of thousands) are likely to become targets of retaliation attacks from Iranian-backed militias within Iraq, or by groups in Iraq sympathetic to the Iranian cause. Since the removal from power of their long-time adversary Saddam Hussein in 2003, Iranian influence in Iraq has steadily grown – Shiites, the dominant Islamic sect in Iran also make up the largest single ethnic group in Iraq as well. If Iran chooses to play the “oil card” by attacking oil tankers and other shipping in the Persian Gulf (a possibility outlined in the Brookings scenario), the United States, with the largest naval presence in the Gulf, will be pressed into the role of securing these vital shipping lanes as well.

Wars have unusual ways of unfolding once the shooting starts. It is impossible really to script exactly how the Summer War would play out – what role Turkey will play, how the populations in Jordan and Egypt will react to the fighting and how the government in Iraq will formally respond all are difficult to predict, as is how long the Summer War will actually last. But even before it starts, we can know the war will be a strategic loss for Israel. Countries go to war with specific goals that define victory – for Israel air strikes against Iran are meant to bring an end to their nuclear program. Israel believes this is an achievable outcome because of their experience with the Iraqi reactor at Osirak. But Iran has studied Osirak as well, and they have learned from the Iraqi experience not to concentrate their nuclear program at one lightly guarded site. Iran has scattered their nuclear sites across the country and some are allegedly buried 75 feet or more underground, protected by anti-aircraft weapons systems. It is extremely unlikely that the Israelis could destroy them with air strikes alone. And the experiences in 2006 and 2008 show that it is also unlikely Israel will be able to destroy Hezbollah and Hamas through military might as well. So long as the Iranian nuclear program, Hezbollah and/or Hamas survive the conflict in some meaningful form, they win/Israel loses.

An Israeli loss will likely (again) spell the end of Netanyahu’s government. Israeli political coalitions are notoriously fragile; fighting another unwinnable war will likely turn Israeli public opinion against Netanyahu and bring down his government. The Summer War will probably spell the end of any meaningful foreign policy efforts on the part of Barack Obama as well. Support for Israel in an unprovoked attack against Iran will undo all of the outreach Obama has conducted with the Islamic world, which started in earnest with his landmark speech in Cairo last summer. It will also drive a wedge between his administration and rising powers, like Brazil and Turkey, who attempted to negotiate a deal that would defuse the Iranian nuclear situation in May – an attempt that was rebuked by the United States; and it will be another irritant in relations with Russia and China, both of whom the United States has worked hard to bring onboard for a new round of sanctions against Iran. Attempting to justify America’s support for Israel’s preemptive strike against Iran and their launching of a wider regional war will dominate Obama’s foreign policy efforts for the rest of his term in office, crowding out other initiatives.

The biggest losers, of course, will be the many, many innocent civilians who will be killed, maimed or displaced by the fighting in an unwinnable war.

Happy International Women’s Day

You may or may not know it, but March 8 is International Women’s Day. The day was first observed in 1909 to advocate for women’s rights and equality, especially in the rapidly industrializing workplace of the time. It has remained a day to promote equal rights and access for women around the world, though in the Soviet Union and its allied nations the day also became a sort of surrogate Valentine’s Day as well (as indicated by this Soviet-era International Women’s Day card below).

To commemorate International Women’s Day this year, lawmakers in India tried to pass an ambitious bill that would have required that one-third of legislative seats in the country be reserved for women. The bill was held up at the last minute by lawmakers from two of India’s regional political parties, but the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is strongly behind the bill and is determined to get it passed into law within the next few weeks. A spokesman for the prime minister chided the opposition politicians for keeping the bill from symbolically being passed on International Women’s Day. Women currently make up less than 10% of the legislature, even though they account for 44% of the voting population in India, the world’s largest democracy.

And since Iraq just held their parliamentary elections this past weekend, it is worth noting that by law 25% of the members of their new parliament will be women. That threshold was written into the new Iraqi constitution at the insistence of the United States. According to international monitoring groups, the women in Iraq’s parliament have better attendance and voting records than do their male counterparts. And the 25% representation in the Iraqi parliament is better than the rate of women representation in the United States own Congress, where only 17% of the members are women (17 in the Senate, 74 in the House) – an all-time high level for the United States.

Working On The Railroad In Iraq

Iraq’s international railroad network is expanding again.

Earlier in the month, Iran announced plans to link their southern city Khorramshahr and the Iraqi port Basra with about 35 miles of newly built railway. Now according to the BBC, a rail-link between Iraq and Turkey has been opened for the first time since the 1980’s.

The journey between Gazientep, Turkey and Mosul, Iraq takes about 18 hours. German workers originally built the route almost a century ago as part of a plan to link Baghdad and Berlin by rail. Iraq’s war with Iran in the 1980’s damaged the line to the point where it needed to be closed, while Turkish conflicts with Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq kept them from investing in repairs to the route. But in recent years trade between Turkey and Iraq, particularly the Kurdish northern region that abuts Turkey, has turned into a multi-billion dollar business, and has led to a reopening of the railroad.

Turkey now has plans to expand their network of high-speed passenger trains to include the Gazientep-to-Mosul route.

More Unintended Consequences in Iraq

For those who said that the US invasion of Iraq was just a pretext for American firms to seize control of Iraq’s oil fields, there’s more news today that undercuts their claims. Russia’s Lukoil signed a deal with the Iraqi government on Sunday to develop the massive West Qurna-2 oil field. By 2017, Lukoil plans to extract 1.8 million barrels of oil from West Qurna-2 each day, the Iraqi government is hoping that by the end of the decade their fields will be producing 12 million barrels of oil per day. Iraq has the second largest known reserves of oil in the world, though because of decades of neglect of the petroleum industry the fields are only producing a small fraction of their potential.

Lukoil has a 56% share in the West Qurna-2 field along with their partners Norway’s StatoilHydro and Iraq’s North Oil Company. In recent months Iraq has been actively seeking foreign investment in their oil fields. So far Russian and Chinese firms have been the big winners, but firms from a host of other countries including France, the Netherlands, Malaysia, Japan, Korea and even Angola have all been awarded contracts; firms from the United States though have been relatively minor players in the Iraqi oil bonanza, which seems to work against the war-for-oil hypothesis.

Meanwhile in the south, Iraq is building a lasting link with their longtime nemesis (and neighbor), Iran in the form of a railroad. Iran is hoping to build a link between their city of Khorramshahr and the Iraqi port Basra; the two cities are about 50 kilometers (approx. 35 miles) apart. So far Iran has built a 16km section from Khorramshahr and is negotiating with the Iraqi government about constructing a line from Basra to the Iran/Iraq border.

Iraq’s former leader Saddam Hussein was a bitter adversary of the Iranian regime; the two nations fought a bloody war through much of the 1980s. Since the removal of Hussein, relations between the two countries have been steadily growing closer and Iran is said to have a great deal of influence over the current Iraqi government.

RIP Howard Zinn

Sad news tonight that noted author and historian Howard Zinn passed away from a heart attack while traveling in California, he was 87. Zinn is probably best known for his 1980 book "A People's History of the United States". He was also an unabashed left wing activist.

I was lucky enough to see Zinn give a talk at The New School in New York City just before the start of the Second Iraq War in 2003. Rather than just railing against the Bush administration though, much of Zinn's speech was a discourse on how politicians sold another conflict - the Mexican-American War - to a skeptical population a century and a half earlier. It was like a lecture from a that one really cool professor whose class you always looked forward to, and it was easy enough for the audience to draw their own parallels between that conflict and the one we were about to enter. I still regret not bringing my copy of "A People's History..." along for him to sign...

Rest in peace Prof. Zinn.

Update: Democracy now has an audio file of Prof. Zinn's 2003 appearance at the New School.

More Evidence Naomi Klein Was Wrong On Iraq

Author Naomi Klein has long been a vocal critic of the Iraq War, saying that the goal of the conflict wasn't to liberate the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein, but rather from their oil. Last year in an op-ed in The Guardian, she said: "'We' are already heisting Iraq's oil, or at least are on the brink of doing so...". The op-ed was an expansion of the argument she laid out in her book Shock Doctrine, where she expounded on the theory of "disaster capitalism": that the government engineers crises so that private sector companies can then reap huge profits in dealing with the aftermath.

The problem (for Klein) is that the oil contracts auctioned off by the Iraqi government last week really undercut her main argument - that the war was a gimmick for American (and maybe British) oil companies to cheaply snap up Iraqi oil reserves. If there was anything more remarkable than the truly international spread of the companies winning the bids it was how American companies were almost totally absent among the bidders.

Iraq is the plum site in the oil-producing universe. The country is believed to have the third largest proven oil reserves in the world. Thanks to decades of mismanagement by Saddam Hussein, these oil fields are largely underdeveloped, meaning that Iraq likely has the last stand of large, easily-accessible oil fields left in the world, period. So of course, now that there's some semblance of security across much of Iraq, oil companies are eager to get access to the fields. This prompted the Iraqi Oil Ministry to auction off development contracts for 15 fields this past weekend, the second such auction they've held.

And the biggest winner seems to have been Russia's Lukoil, which (with their Norwegian partner Statoil ASA) won the rights to West Qurna Phase 2, with perhaps more than 12 billion barrels of oil buried under the sands. The other big winner in the auction was China's state-run oil company China NPC, which won a bid (in partnership with Britain's BP) for the Rumaila field, among other deals. Companies from Japan, Korea, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Malaysia, The Netherlands, and even Angola's oil company Sonangol all also won bids or were in consortia that won bids for some of the 13 other fields. The only US company to win even a portion of a bid in this second round was Occidental, who is a quarter-partner in a consortium that won a bid for the Zubair field.

All of that would seem to undermine Klein's argument from The Guardian, that the war was meant so that "we" (I assume she means the United States) could "heist" Iraq's oil. Most of the companies that submitted winning bids were from countries that had no involvement in the Iraq War, some - like Russia - were even vocal critics. The Iraqi Oil Ministry rejected a fair number of bids as being insufficient, and decided to develop five of the fields offered on their own since foreign companies were concerned over the security situation in those parts of Iraq and were unwilling to make the commitment to develop them.

Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh summed up the auction this way to Reuters: "for us in Iraq, it shows the government is fully free from outside influence. Neither Russia nor America could put pressure on anyone in Iraq - it is a pure commercial, transparent competition." He added, "no one, even the United States, can steal the oil, whatever people think."

No word on whether he meant Naomi Klein.

So Much For "Freedom Of The Press" In Iraq

The British newspaper/webportal The Guardian is furious over a fine levied by an Iraqi court against one of their reporters, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad for his April article that quoted intelligence officials who accused the country's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki of becoming "increasingly authoritarian."

The Guardian published a flood of condemnations from around the world against the Iraqi court decision. Honestly, The Guardian laid it on a bit thick, but the underlying message is a good one: how can we consider the new government in Iraq truly democratic if it is so quick to try and muzzle the press over coverage that is unflattering to its leader? Some of the strongest condemnations came from the Arabic-language newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi, which called the Iraqi tribunal a "kangaroo court" and said: "Despite the fact that the Americans spent $800bn to create a democracy and promote freedom of expression, what we have seen in Iraq is an appalling media where the opposition points of view rarely surface. It is sectarian or factional or financed by the Americans."

Much of the criticism continued in that vein, with words like "mockery" and "affront" thrown around a lot. And this isn't the first time charges like this have been leveled at al-Maliki, back in January the Los Angeles Times did a long piece on the growing authoritarianism of his regime, though the Times was never sued.

Mamoun Fandy from the think-tank the International Institute for Strategic Studies though did see some signs of progress in the slander lawsuit. He said, "it is new that a leader or an intelligence agency in that part of the world takes a journalist in their jurisdiction to court instead of jailing him or ordering him being bumped off."

Did Brzezinski Call For The US To Attack Israel?

President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski gave an interview to Gerald Posner of TheDailyBeast.com on President Obama's foreign policy message. Now there's nothing too strange there - an official from a former administration commenting on the current one, but in the interview there was an exchange about a possible Israeli attack on Iran over Iran's nuclear program.

The most direct path from Israel to Iran is over Iraq. Since Iraq doesn't have a functioning air force of its own, that job is being handled by the US Air Force. This led Brzezinski to say if the United States was serious about preventing an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities (which many believe could lead to an all-out regional war), the USAF could "deny" the Israeli use of Iraq's airspace. Brez went on to suggest that a "reverse" of the USS Liberty incident could occur. (In case you don't know, the USS Liberty was a United States Navy ship involved in a 'friendly-fire' incident with the Israeli Air Force in 1967. Israel has always contented it was an unfortunate accident, while the Liberty's crew has never bought the idea that their ship, flying a huge American flag, could be 'mistakenly' attacked for three hours).

Now if it was me doing the interview, my next question to Brzezinski would be: "are you suggesting the USAF shoot down Israeli jets?", in fact I think that would be the follow-up question of most journalism school students. Mr. Posner, listed as The Daily Beast's chief investigative reporter, though apparently didn't think this bombshell was all that important since his next question was on missile defense.

A renowned foreign relations expert suggests the US and Israel get into a shootout and you don't think to follow up on that? Maybe The Daily Beast needs a new chief investigative journalist...

Iraqi Shoe Thrower Claims He Was Tortured

Remember Muntazer al-Zaidi? He was the Iraqi journalist who turned into a regional folk hero after he chucked both his shoes at then-President George W. Bush during a press conference last December. That act earned him a three year sentence in prison for insulting a foreign head of state (to strike someone with a shoe is considered a grave insult in many Arab cultures).

Al-Zaidi got a gift today, an early release from jail, after serving just nine months of his sentence. And being a journalist, it's no surprise that al-Zaidi is talking.

He claims that he was tortured while in prison and fears that now he's out US intelligence forces will hunt him down, a fear that he's taking so seriously that al-Zaidi won't move into a house his employer, al-Baghdadia television in Baghdad, bought for him until he arranges for his own security detail.

Actually, the claims of torture are nothing new, soon after his arrest the New York Times, among other news sites, reported that al-Zaidi had apparently been beaten while in custody, and had even had a tooth knocked out. Al-Zaidi claimed that a confession/apology he made a few days after the event was due to this torture. In his impromptu press conference outside the prison gates, al-Zaidi said that he was regularly tortured by Iraqi officials, suffering beatings, electric shocks and exposure to extreme cold. Al-Zaidi has promised to name "senior Iraqi officials" he said were involved in his mistreatment.

After the shoe throw, al-Zaidi became a folk hero in many parts of the Mid East. He said that he threw his shoes to protest the American occupation of his country.

Kurds Mixed Message On Iraq's Future

Remember Iraq? You know, that place that use to be on the news ALL the time? They took another step into the future last weekend when folks in the northern Kurdish areas went to the polls to elect their regional government.

Kurdistan has a large degree of autonomy within Iraq and even has its own parliament, which until last weekend was totally dominated by a union between its two largest parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). The two-party union will still be in control when the new Kurdish parliament is seated (they together took 57% of the vote), but a new third party called the Change list made a pretty respectable showing, gathering nearly a quarter of the vote.

This is one of those glass half-full/half-empty situations. The positive view of the election is that Change's surprisingly good showing is an indication of democracy fully taking root in Kurdistan and Iraq; the negative view is that a basically unknown party was able to do so well because the Kurds are fed up with the corruption of the KDP-PUK union. Many Kurds say that unless you are a member of one of the two parties, you can't get a job, others are upset with their regional leaders confrontational relationship with the national government down in Baghdad. And many of the seats in the Kurdish Parliament lost by the KDP-PUK union came from the PUK side, prompting some thought that the KDP could decide they don't need to continue their relationship with the PUK. That could cause real problems for Kurdistan since the two sides nearly fell into a civil war during the 90's over control of the Kurdish region.

Kurdistan holds the key to Iraq's future; if Iraq does fall apart it will probably be because of Kurdistan. The biggest issue in Iraqi politics today is control over the city of Kirkuk. Kirkuk was once a Kurdish city, but during his reign, in an effort to eradicate the Kurds, Saddam Hussein 'encouraged' tens of thousands of Iraqi Arabs to move into Kirkuk, drastically changing the demographics of the place. The Kurds think the city should go back to its historic designation as a Kurdish city, while Iraq’s Arab majority thinks that the city should stay allied with Baghdad and not be part of the Kurdish Autonomous Region.

What makes this not just an academic debate over demographics is oil, and lots of it. The fields around Kirkuk may hold as much as 4% of the world's remaining oil reserves, much of which is currently untapped, meaning there are billions of dollars to be made. Of course the Kurds think those billions should flow to their capital, Arbil, while the Iraqi Arabs think it should go to Baghdad. Iraq's politicians, showing the type of leadership they likely learned from the US Congress, have dealt with the Kirkuk situation by doing their best to ignore it.

That's a fine solution to a problem until the day when you actually do have to deal with it, a day that for Iraq is rapidly approaching.

Saddam Hussein: I Lied About WMDs

According to just-released transcripts of Saddam Hussein's interrogations at the hands of FBI officers, he made up all that stuff about Iraq actually having a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program to keep Iran from attacking his country.

Iraq and Iran spent most of the 1980's locked in a bloody war that killed hundreds of thousands of people on each side. Hussein feared that Iran would attack again if they thought Iraq was weak, so he encouraged the belief that Iraq was actively pursuing WMD technology to keep the Iranians at bay. He told his FBI interrogators that he was much more worried about Iran than he was the United States, thinking that Iraq could absorb a second US-led invasion, if it came to that.

Ironically Hussein and George W. Bush seemed to have a similar world view in a couple of key ways: they both thought that Iran was led by a bunch of religious "fanatics" and Saddam condemned Osama bin Laden as a "zealot" - adding that he never supported the Saudi-born terrorist.

Iraqi shoe thrower prison sentence cut

Muntadar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who became a folk hero after flinging his shoes at President George Bush, should be out of jail by the end of the year.

Al-Zaidi was originally found guilty of assault after a trial in March and was sentenced to three years (out of a possible 15) in jail. But an Iraqi judge has agreed with al-Zaidi's appeal, changing his crime from assault to 'insulting a foreign leader' (a crime under Iraqi law) and reducing his sentence from three years to one. With time already served, it means al-Zaidi should get out of jail in September.

Al-Zaidi became a hero to many in the Middle East after he tossed both of his shoes at Bush during the President's press conference to mark his last visit to Baghdad last December. Throwing or hitting someone with a shoe is considered a grave insult in Arabic cultures. At his trial al-Zaidi said he threw his shoes at Bush because "I had the feeling that the blood of innocent people was dropping on my feet during the time that he was smiling and coming to say bye-bye to Iraq with a dinner."

A recent poll conducted by the BBC found that 62% of Iraqis consider Muntadar al-Zaidi to be a 'hero' for his actions.