Iran, Space Monkeys and The Pixies

I wanted to try something a little different with this post.  Perhaps it is the result of a few years spent as a DJ, but a lot of times when I see a story in the news, a song will pop into my head, a song that is usually related to the story in some odd way.  That was the case when I read this report about Iran's nascent space program and their successful attempt to launch a monkey into space. The song this conjured up was, of course, The Pixies “Monkey Gone To Heaven”.  So the idea of this post is to talk a little about the story and then a little about the song.

Space, The Final Frontier

With news from and about Iran dominated by that country's nuclear research program, the story of their space launch came as a bit of a surprise.  But Iran has ambitions to become a space-faring nation in their own right.  In 2009, Iran launched their first home-built satellite into orbit.  The Iranian government has stated that their goal is to launch a man into space by 2019, using domestically designed and produced equipment.

By comparison, the mission announced this past Sunday was quite modest – a capsule carrying a single monkey as a passenger was carried aloft by a Pishgam (or “Pilgrim”) missile to an altitude of 75 miles before returning to Earth.  In a good sign for Iran's future astronauts, their monkey passenger apparently survived the flight unharmed.

Though modest in scope – both the US and Soviet Union were doing this sort of thing more than 50 years ago - this mission passed a couple of important milestones for Iran: they crossed the threshold of space (typically defined as any altitude above 62 miles) and managed the G-forces encountered in descent well enough for their primate passenger to survive.  Since man too is a primate, the monkey's survival is indication that Iran has solved some of the basic technological problems associated with returning a manned-capsule safely to Earth.

But there was likely a subtext for Iran's monkey mission.  A rocket that can carry a capsule into space is also capable of carrying a warhead thousands of miles to an enemy's territory.  The United States slipped into a full-blown panic in 1957 after the Soviet Union successfully orbited the Sputnik satellite – not only had US pride been hurt by being beaten into space by the “Reds”, but it was also a clear indication that the Soviet Union now possessed ICBMs capable of reaching the United States.  In this time of high tensions with the US and Israel, a similar message could be drawn from this weekend's Iranian journey into space.

 

Monkey Gone To Heaven

 

From the mid-1980s through the early 1990s, The Pixies would become one of the bands that defined the college radio/alternative sound, at least before the genre was largely consumed by the Grunge scene out of Seattle, though The Pixies would influence that genre as well. They were a band that specialized in the sound that Nirvana's Kurt Cobain would describe as “quiet, then loud”.  The Pixies were aided in this expression by the smooth lead vocals of singer Black Francis (later Frank Black), with backing vocals by guitarist Kim Deal. They layered lyrics that often trended towards the bizarre over music that could range from light and melodic to crashing walls of sound – sometimes within the same song.

“Monkey Gone To Heaven” is an apt expression of this songwriting formula.  From the album Doolittle, the track is an example of The Pixies at their highest point as a band.  The lyrics of “Monkey Gone To Heaven” go off on explorations of environmentalism, religion and man's relationship with the divine - a relationship that Francis seems to believe the divine will get the worst of.  Early on, the song talks about Neptune, Roman god of the seas, being “killed by 10 million pounds of sludge from New York and New Jersey” (and as someone who grew up in NJ, I can totally see that happening).  In this respect, the conceit of the “monkey gone to heaven” is an indication of man's diminishment of the divine through the elevation of a primate - and keep in mind that man too is a primate – to the realm of the gods.

You have to wonder what Iran's ayatollahs would make of that?

Is The US Dashing Israeli Hopes For A Strike Against Iran?

From the file of news that was overshadowed by the dueling Republican and Democratic political conventions is this nugget from Reuters about a US smackdown of Israel over their escalating rhetoric about a war with Iran (Reuters used the more diplomatic term 'chastised', but you get the idea).

Last week, while speaking to reporters in Great Britain, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, said that the United States did not want to be “complicit” in a preemptive  attack on Iran and starkly warned Israel that if they went it alone on the attack that they risked unraveling the international coalition that has levied heavy sanctions on Iran's crude oil industry and banking sector; sanctions that Pres. Ahmadinejad admitted earlier in the week were starting to causing real pain in Iran.

It was a bold statement, and one that has sent Israel scurrying back to square one in their efforts to start a war with Iran. The simple fact is that the Israeli Air Force does not have the ability to launch the type of sustained and targeted campaign of air strikes that would be necessary to knock out Iran's nuclear research program.  Or as one unnamed European diplomat was quoted as saying in the same Reuters article: “all this talk of war is bullshit. If they could do it, then they would have already done it long ago.”

For their part, the Israelis are now pushing for the establishment of a clear “red line”, an action by Iran that would guarantee a military response by the anti-Iran coalition (namely the United States). The Israelis are also ramping up their sabre-rattling against Iran's proxy group Hezbollah, threatening retaliation against Lebanon should Hezbollah launch attacks against Israel on Iran's behalf. For their part, the Obama administration is offering up a vague statement that diplomacy cannot go on “indefinitely” and that “military action” remains a possibility if Iran doesn't live up to their obligations.

Of course, it is very hard to imagine the US launching any kind of military action before the November elections, and if reelected, Obama is likely to feel much less pressure to placate the pro-Likud lobby within the United States, which puts into question the likelihood of military action against Iran in Obama's second term.  This does make you wonder if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might not attempt to interject himself into the US presidential race somehow. Netanyahu is a longtime personal friend of Republican Mitt Romney, so it is plausible to think he might try to play the double whammy of encouraging a US strike against Iran and boosting his friend's presidential chances by trying to make Obama look like he is both weak on Iran and putting Israel at risk by not launching military strikes now to stop the imminent threat of the Iranian nuclear program.

This strategy has some real risks attached though: for one, Netanyahu has been saying that Iran was on the verge of getting a bomb since the mid-90s, so his cries of danger have worn a little thin by now; the bigger issue though is that the American populace, mired in a slow economic recovery and weary from a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, might genuinely oppose calls for launching another military campaign in the Middle East, which would weaken, rather than strengthen, Netanyahu's efforts to get the USAF to knock out Iran's nuclear program for him.

If Netanyahu tries to go this route, it will likely be at the United Nations General Assembly set for later this month.

Are US-Israeli Relations Changing?

Two recent statements by US officials have me wondering if we are seeing a subtle shift in US-Israeli relations. One is that for the first time, acts of violence by Israeli “settlers” against Palestinian residents of the West Bank have been described by the State Department as “terrorist incidents”; the second is a statement made by the US ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro who said that an official Israeli investigation into the death of American activist Rachel Corrie in 2003 was not “thorough, credible and transparent.”

Corrie was only 23 when she was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer as she and others tried to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes in Rafah in the Gaza Strip. The action prompted international outrage and became a rallying point for those protesting the Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli government promised a full investigation into the incident (a “thorough, credible and transparent” investigation, which Amb. Shapiro referenced in his statement).  But last week, Israel closed the formal investigation, concluding it was an accident, but also chiding the now-dead Corrie for inserting herself into a war zone.

Turning back to the terrorist declaration against the Israeli settlers, the State Department took the move after recent attacks by groups of young settlers against Palestinians, including attacks on mosques, beatings and one particularly brutal incident: the firebombing of a Palestinian taxi that left six people injured, including two four-year old twins.  The State Department's Country Reports on Terrorism for 2011 included: “Attacks by extremist Israeli settlers against Palestinian residents, property and places of worship in the West Bank.” According to the United Nations, which monitors conditions in the West Bank and Gaza, attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians have increased by almost 150% between 2009 and the end of 2011.

It is important to note that the State Department isn't going out on much of a limb here. The Israeli media and government have been growing increasingly concerned about the actions of extremist settlers, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the fire-bomb attack of the taxi and other government officials have used the word terrorism when referring to some of the actions taken by a subset of extremist Israeli settlers (though the Israeli government supports the expansion of more “mainstream” Israeli settlements in the West Bank).

But given how reluctant the US typically is to criticize the actions of Israel, it is then quite noteworthy that officials with the US government would, in the space of a week, use the word “terrorism” when referring to the actions of Israeli settlers and would condemn an official report by the Israeli government. Could it be the sign of a subtle shift in US-Israeli relations? Only time will tell.

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. 

Iran, The War, and Everything

Since it is now the Persian New Year (Happy Nowruz), it seemed like a good time to run the infographic below that illustrates how foreign powers nibbled away at the territory of Iran during the 19^th and 20^th centuries, which might just explain why the Iranians are rather particular about being ordered around by the international community.

 Meanwhile, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has come to the same conclusion that I did several months ago – that any attack on Iran's nuclear sites will only drive Iran towards building a nuclear bomb, rather than dissuading them from it.  “I am almost certain that such a decision will surely be taken after (any) strikes on Iran,”  Lavrov said Tuesday on Moscow's Kommersant FM radio, where he also claimed that the CIA and other American officials have admitted to not having any hard evidence of any political decisions on the part of Iran's leadership to actually authorize a nuclear weapons program.  Lavrov also repeated assessments made by military analysts in the West that have concluded airstrikes against Iranian facilities could slow any research program, but would not destroy it as the Israelis did with Iraq's nuclear program, which was effectively ended by an Israeli airstrike in 1981.

But energy industry analysts are becoming more convinced that a conflict with Iran is in fact imminent, based in part on an executive order signed on Friday by President Obama that, among other things, orders executive departments and agencies responsible for plans and programs relating to national defense to “be prepared, in the event of a potential threat to the security of the United States, to take actions necessary to ensure the availability of adequate resources and production capability, including services and critical technology for national defense requirements.”  Get that? Analysts say that the order effectively would, in a time of national emergency, give the President effective control over the country's natural resources.  And the only national emergency the analysts see on the horizon is a potential conflict with Iran.  The White House tried to downplay the impact of the executive order on Monday, saying that it was similar to executive orders signed by several other presidents in the past and should not be taken as a sign of an impending war.

The New York Times meanwhile, is reporting that the Iranian conflict could prove to be quite costly for America.  A leaked war game scenario carried out by the Pentagon earlier in the month projected up to 200 American casualties after a US warship was attacked by Iranian forces in retaliation for Israeli airstrikes against their nuclear research facilities.  This attack then draws the United States into a large-scale conflict with Iran.  Pentagon officials stressed that this was one of a number of possible outcomes, but admitted that an Israeli attack would spark off a series of reactions that were both “unpredictable and uncontrollable”.

My prediction is that if the Israelis launch their oft-threatened airstrike, it will be before our November presidential elections.  The clock keeps ticking...

So Why Can't Iran Have The Bomb?

Let's cut to the chase on the whole mess surrounding Iran.  It is looking like a conflict in the Persian Gulf this spring/summer is becoming more of a possibility; the “crippling sanctions” the United States is trying to impose on Iran are leaky enough not to be “crippling”.  India, China and Turkey are all balking at joining in on the isolation, which means that Iran is unlikely to just give up on their nuclear research program.  That kicks the ball back into the court of the US/Israel, both of whom have insisted that Iran not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon, and leaves US and Israeli leaders with two options: back down or follow through on their threats of military action.

 
The spectre of Iran with a nuclear weapon is driving the march to war, but what does Iran having a nuclear weapon really mean?  So far there are several arguments as to why this is such a terrible idea that war would be necessary to prevent it, but taking a look at each argument shows that they are all fairly weak.  Here they are, in no particular order:

A nuclear Iran is a threat to the United States.  Not really.  Consider that if Iran were to tomorrow announce that they had successfully built a nuclear bomb, the US arsenal would outmatch theirs by a factor of about 3,000-1.  Even if Iran would decide to use this weapon and could deliver it to the United States (a big if), it would be a devastating attack, but not one that would destroy the country, not even close.  Of course it would ensure a retaliatory strike that would destroy Iran.  No country is suicidal, therefore this is not a real threat.

Iran might give the bomb to terrorists!  It is an idea that makes for a great spy thriller, but one that makes no sense in real life.  Do we really think Iran would spend billions of dollars, decades of research and turn themselves into a “rogue state” (at least according to the US) in pursuit of a nuclear bomb, only to give it to a terrorist?  It makes no sense.  Besides, if you want to worry about terrorists getting a bomb, then worry about them stealing one from Pakistan, where nuclear security is particularly weak, or buying one outright from North Korea.

The nuclear dominoes will fall.  Saudi Arabia has said publicly that if Iran gets the bomb, they may be compelled to embark on their own nuclear weapons program.  Of course the Saudis say a lot of things and in the past have threatened to start working on a bomb in response to Israel's nuclear arsenal, but never have.  And even if the Saudis do start work on their own bomb, who will that be a threat to besides Iran?

A nuclear Iran is a threat to Israel.  We're at least getting to the semi-plausible reasons here.  Israel is a much smaller country that the United States, so a much smaller nuclear strike could be devastating to them.  But the Israelis are keenly aware of this and will have prepared a second-strike capability (the ability to retaliate if hit without warning).  Israel's nuclear arsenal is somewhere between 200-400 weapons, meaning that they could likely hurt Iran a lot worse than Iran could hurt them, which makes an Iranian first strike highly unlikely.

That leaves us with something I'll call the Yom Kippur Scenario.  In 1973 Israel fought its last great war when a coalition of Arab states launched a surprise attack during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.  Part of the Arab motivation was revenge for the solid defeat they had suffered in 1967 during the Six-Day War.  The Yom Kippur War started badly for the Israelis, for awhile it seemed as though the Arab forces might be victorious, before Israel rallied and pushed the Arabs back crossing into both Egypt and Syria in the process.

Israel has never forgotten this lesson.  The Israeli nuclear arsenal is to ensure that such a scenario does not again occur.  Basically, if there were to be a repeat of the Yom Kippur War, and if this time Israel were about to be defeated by a coalition of Arab states, they could use their nuclear arsenal to devastate the lands of their attackers, giving the Arabs a true Pyrrhic Victory.  Israel has made this intention clear to their Arab neighbors, and it is an effective deterrent - so long as no one else in the neighborhood has their own nuclear arsenal.  Iranian bombs, and the ability to deliver them, changes this equation, and robs Israel of this deterrent.

Of course a second Yom Kippur War is highly unlikely.  Israel has had calm, if not cordial, relationships with their neighbors for 40 years now.  The Israeli military is by far the most powerful and most capable in the region, since the militaries of most of their neighbors are designed to suppress domestic unrest rather than to campaign beyond their borders.  Yet this is the real motivation for the current standoff with Iran: to prevent a challenge to Israel's military hegemony in the region.

But is this justification for a conflict that will cause upheaval across the region and be a severe blow to an already shaky global economy?  That is the question that we should be discussing. 

Your Next War

In my latest piece over at The Mantle, I take a look at the ever more likely possibility of a conflict between the US and Iran (and maybe some others). Check out Stumbling Towards War: Iran Edition at The Mantle.

More Than Just Bad Apples

By now you've probably seen, or at least heard about, the video showing a team of US Marine snipers urinating on the bodies of several Taliban militants whom they had just killed.  Predictably, the Afghan government is outraged at the incident, so too is the leadership of the Pentagon, which has already identified two of the Marines from the video, and is promising to punish the entire team.  Thursday morning on CNN, their resident military analyst, retired Gen. Spider Marks, tried to chalk the incident up to the actions of a few bad apples; it seems like this will be the official line on the matter.

Unfortunately it's not true, the video cannot simply be dismissed as an act of misplaced bravado by a few rogue soldiers.  Rather it is a symptom of the kind of psychosis that comes along with the long-term occupation of a land and its people.  The United States is ten years into its Afghan mission.  We went to Afghanistan to avenge the barbaric acts of 9/11; we were indoctrinated to think that this land hosted individuals with no regard for human life, who would happily kill innocent men, women and children to further their own twisted view of religion.  Al-Qaeda became conflated with the Taliban, who in turn, became conflated with the Afghan people.  We can run all of the feel-good stories we want about American soldiers helping to open medical clinics or schools for girls in Afghanistan, but at home we continue to promote the idea that if we don't continue to fight “them” over there, terrorist acts will return to our shores, just look at some of the rhetoric from the presidential campaign that supports this very idea.  For our soldiers on the ground, they are told of the need to constantly be on guard, that any Afghani they meet could be one of “them”.

The surprise then shouldn't be that a group of US Marines decided to dehumanize a group of enemies they had killed, the surprise should be that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often since it is the natural progression of any long-term occupation – the trend, perhaps the psychological need, to dehumanize those you are occupying, since how could you control every facet of someone else's life, down to their very right to have life at all, if you consider them a human being equal to yourself?  The history of the 20^th century offers ample evidence to support this idea.  Members of the Israeli political left and peace movements decry their nation's occupation of the Palestinian territories for this very reason, adding that Israeli soldiers' dehumanizing of the Palestinians also has a corrosive effect on Israeli society as well; one can also look at the occupations of various European nations during World War II, or Japan's brutal treatment of those in the regions of China they occupied; and, of course, there is also the entirety of Europe's Age of Colonization to consider as well.

Viewing the occupied as something less than human is a natural outgrowth of occupation as the Marine video reminds us.  It should also serve as a powerful example of why it is time for the United States to end its Afghanistan mission once and for all.

Shepherds and Settlements

Humble shepherds in the hills above Bethlehem play an important role in the Christmas story.  But ask one of the remaining Christian shepherds tending their flocks in modern-day Israel the line from the famous Christmas carol about what they see and the reply is likely to be not a star, but a settlement wall.

The BBC reports this holiday season, that the shepherds tending their flocks near Bethlehem are saying their age-old way of life could soon be coming to an end, thanks to the expansion of Israeli settlements on the West Bank.  Israel has been expanding their massive housing developments - illegally built on Palestinian land, the BBC notes - in recent years.  But security walls surrounding the settlements have cut shepherds off from many of their prime grazing lands, while the settlements themselves draw massive amounts of water from already marginal reserves in the arid region, leaving little behind for the shepherd's flocks of sheep.  The result is that many of the current generation of shepherds are likely to be the last – their children don't want to go into an already difficult line of work, work now made nearly impossible thanks to the Israeli settlements.

Consider this – Israeli policies towards the West Bank and Gaza are staunchly supported by Conservative Christians in America, yet those very policies are now working to end a traditional way of life for a group of Christians that dates directly back to the time of Jesus.  As Homer Simpson once said: “think about the irony...”

Iran And The Bomb

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is set to release a report that supposedly will show that Iran is much farther along in their pursuit of an atomic weapon than previously believed. Add to that the noticeable increase in anti-Iranian rhetoric in the op-ed pages, rumors of a mock Israeli attack on a NATO base as part of training for a long-range bombing mission and last month's botched (and highly suspicious) assassination attempt by Iranian agents against the Saudi ambassador in Washington DC and you can see that the war drums are clearly starting to beat for Iran.

For their part, the official Iranian line is that they have no active nuclear weapons program. According to details from the IAEA report, this may be technically true. The “smoking gun” in the IAEA report is a claim that Iran has designed and perhaps tested an explosive (though non-nuclear) triggering device necessary for an atomic weapon to work. It seems then, while not actually trying to build a bomb per se, the Iranians are trying to design and build all the parts so that if at a point in the future they wanted a nuke, they could quickly pull one together.

You have to ask though, why wouldn't Iran try to build their own nuclear bomb? Let's look at some of the major foreign policy actions of the new millennium: the United States assembled a coalition in 2003 to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein, while this year a US/NATO coalition used a proxy force of Libyan rebels to depose (and ultimately murder) Moammar Gadhafi. Meanwhile, Kim Jong-il continues to rule North Korea despite defying numerous sanctions from the United Nations and “international community” and after launching several outright military attacks against his South Korean neighbors; yet no one seriously talks about putting together a coalition to oust the Kim regime. What's the biggest difference between Kim, Hussein and Gadhafi? Kim has nukes, while the other two did not.

It's become clear that the best way to keep the international community out of your business is to set off a test nuclear device or two. Now look at Iran. They are almost completely surrounded by neighbors who host either large numbers of US troops, major American military installations or both: Afghanistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Iraq (though that one, at least, will change by year's end). And the Iranians remember, even if Americans do not, that the United States overthrew their democratically-chosen government in 1953 and reinstalled the Shah, whose brutal regime the US then helped to keep in power for the next 26 years. So, if your country is nearly surrounded by armed forces from the country who once overthrew your leader to install a regime more friendly to their interests – why wouldn't you take every step imaginable to protect yourself, including trying to make, or at least gain the knowledge to make, a nuclear weapon, when that device has proven to be the one thing that will stop this foreign power from meddling in your internal affairs?

Something to think about as the war drums beat.

Perry (and Washington) On US Foreign Policy

Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry was in New York today giving a speech where he accused President Barack Obama of not only single-handedly setting out to destroy the United States, but to destroy Israel as well. The backdrop for Perry's speech was the United Nations General Assembly meeting where the Palestinians are widely expected to petition the UN for full member-nation status. Perry contends that the Palestinians wouldn't be taking such a step if Obama hadn't thrown Israel under the bus.

"Simply put, we would not be here today, at the precipice of such a dangerous
move, if the Obama policy in the Middle East wasn't naive, arrogant, misguided
and dangerous,” Perry said.

As we've seen from last week's special election in Queens, New York to fill the seat of disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner, potentially sabotaging America's relationship with the world's billion-plus Muslims by vetoing Palestine's petition to the UN just isn't enough to make some people believe that Obama isn't anti-Israel. Perry's fellow presidential candidate, businessman Herman Cain, has also said that he would make support for Israel the bedrock of his presidency.

Since candidates, particularly Republican candidates, love to wrap themselves in the words of the Founding Fathers, it’s a good time to print what George Washington himself had to say about “foreign entanglements”:

A passionate attachment of one Nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite Nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest, in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite Nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the Nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained; and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld.

Now none of what I'm saying should be taken as an anti-Israeli position; I think that the only places US presidential candidates should be speaking of defending so passionately are parts of the United States itself. But if we are talking foreign policy, I can easily think of a list of places of far more strategic/economic importance to the United States than Israel that these candidates should be focusing on, for example:

Mexico – the country with which we share thousands of miles of border, which is currently locked in bloody battle with the militias of a group of powerful drug cartels.
China – the nation many feel will soon join America in the Superpower Club.
Canada – the other nation with whom we share thousands of miles of border, who also is our largest trading partner and a major energy supplier; just because the Canadians are quiet doesn't mean we can ignore them.
The European Union – gripped by an economic crisis that could drag our country into a recession, or a depression.
Saudi Arabia – the country that still exports more of the black sticky stuff we're addicted to than anyone else in the world.

Those are just five off the top of my head. You could probably make a case for Russia, Brazil, India, Japan and even Somalia as having more real importance to the United States than Israel. Yet an outsized portion of our foreign policy efforts remain focused on the US-Israel relationship. And at least in the early days of the campaign, it seems like Israel will take center stage in our foreign policy debates as well.

Turtle Bay Train Wreck

So if all goes as threatened tomorrow, the legs could get kicked out from under US diplomatic efforts across the Middle East/Islamic world. That's because Tuesday was the day set by President Mahmood Abbas to petition the United Nations to admit Palestine as a full member-state, a petition the United States has already publicly promised to veto on behalf of Israel.

Last week the Saudis issued a dire warning via the pages of the New York Times that a veto would make the United States “toxic” across the region and could put an end to the decades-long US-Saudi love affair. It was a warning so dire, that you're almost inclined to ignore it, to simply dismiss it as another bit of hyperbole in a region long noted for such verbal excess. But things have changed in the MENA (Mid-East/North Africa) region. The “Arab Spring” has made despots take note that you sometimes actually have to listen to your people. And while the House of Saud has managed to stave off overthrow, they have done so with a mix of security crackdowns and by passing out tens of billions in social aid to the growing Saudi underclass; no wonder they're worried about how “toxic” America might become.

The Arab street is sure to take a veto as yet another put-down of the long oppressed Palestinian people; but I'm viewing a veto as an incredibly hypocritical move on the part of the United States, for two reasons. First, the US has spent much of 2011 cheerleading (in the case of Egypt), threatening (in the case of Syria) or bombing (in the case of Libya) on behalf of some notion of self-determination among the oppressed Arab peoples. Yet in the case of Palestine, we're taking the opposing position – continuation of a status quo that fundamentally denies Palestinians many of the rights that we're saying the Egyptians, Syrians and Libyans deserve; all, apparently, because it doesn't fit into our preconceived notion of how the Palestinians should gain these rights and because Israel opposes it – neither is a terribly convincing argument in favor of a veto.

To make matters worse, a veto of Palestinian membership would go against the precedent that the United States itself set for such situations with Kosovo back in 2008. The Kosovars had been engaged in a multi-year, UN-overseen process of negotiating a settlement of final status with Serbia (Serbia wanted Kosovo to remain part of the country, the Kosovars wanted to split), when the Kosovo side decided that the talks were going nowhere and unilaterally declared their independence from Serbia. The United States, along with Great Britain and France, were quick to recognize the independence of Kosovo, even though it was in explicit violation of the UN-led process and seemingly out of step with the norms of international law – the argument was that the Kosovars' right to self-determination had to be respected more than some UN “process”. Then there's Palestine, which has been involved in two decades of negotiations started in 1993 under the Oslo Accords with Israel as part of the “two-state solution” that would see the creation of a nation of Palestine. From the Palestinian point of view, that day will never come; the negotiations, when they even happen, seem endless, and in the meanwhile Israel continues to expand “settlements” in the West Bank that every year gobble up a little more of the land that would one day become the Palestinian state. And despite American insistence that all parties return to the negotiating table, there is zero reason to expect there to be any substantive movement, let alone a real breakthrough, so President Abbas has decided enough is enough and is using the UN declaration as an end-run around a moribund process.

Given the precedent we unwillingly set with Kosovo, the United States should be a vocal supporter of Palestinian membership in the UN, but instead, we are promising a veto. And before you say that the difference is terrorism, it is worth noting that the Kosovo Liberation Army, which became the government of Kosovo, was and is considered a terrorist organization by Serbia and as late as the 1990s was also considered a terrorist organization with possible ties to al-Qaeda by other countries, including the United States.

But while the Kosovars were supposedly within their rights to short-circuit continued negotiations they found pointless, the Palestinians are committing a breach of international law by taking the same action. Saudi Arabia's Turki al-Faisal is likely right in saying the veto will fuel anti-American anger in the Arab street, the rest of the world may just take note of the rank hypocrisy of the move.

Arab League Doubles Down

While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice are said to have led the charge within the American government to intervene for humanitarian grounds in Libya, the act that seems to have spurred the global community to action was the Arab League's call for a no-fly zone. Within a few days of the Arab League's announcement, which amounted to their symbolically turning their backs on one of their more famous members, Col. Moammar Gadhafi, aircraft from the United States, Great Britain and France were patrolling the skies over Libya.

Now the Arab League is calling for another no-fly zone, this time over the Gaza Strip. That call is spurred by an increase in fighting between the Gazans and Israel over the past week, which has seen rocket attacks launched from Gaza met by Israeli airstrikes. So far the casualty totals are one wounded in Israel and 19 dead in Gaza. That statistic has the Arab League calling Israel's actions “brutal” and asking that the UN Security Council “consider the Israeli aggression in the Gaza Strip on an urgent basis to stop its siege and impose a no-fly rule on the Israeli military to protect civilians in the Gaza Strip,” according to the League's formal statement. Not surprisingly, the Israelis responded by telling the Arab League that instead of UN resolutions, they should focus on getting the folks in Gaza to stop launching missiles into Israel.

The Arab League's call for a no-fly zone over Gaza won't fly (forgive the pun) if for no other reason than a resolution authorizing it will be vetoed by the United States within the Security Council as are any resolutions that are perceived to interfere with Israel's security stance. But the fact that the Arab League is publicly calling for a no-fly zone in the first place is yet one more bit of tension in an already tense region. Meanwhile, both the Gazans and the Israelis say they are willing to abide by a cease-fire, so long as the other side stops shooting first. As to why there has been a flare up in attacks between Israel and Gaza after a period of relative calm (relative to the region at least), a couple of factors are likely at play: a recent attempt at rapprochement between the Hamas-led government in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank, as well as Palestine's potential unilateral declaration of statehood that could happen later this year, both factor that would drastically change the current Israel-Palestine equation.

You Think This Would Be News: Argentina and Palestine

Second item for the Would Be News file, the government of Argentina announced on Monday that it recognized Palestine as a “free and independent” state within the 1967 borders. Argentina's announcement comes just three days after Brazil made a similar proclamation towards Palestine.

Argentina said it took the step of recognizing Palestine out of frustration on the progress (or lack of progress) in the “two-state” peace negotiations which started back in 1991 and continue to drag on today. This is exactly what Israel feared might happen after talks once again stalled after the Israeli side refused to renew a freeze on the construction of Israeli-only settlements within the borders of what would-be the Palestinian state. As part of a proposed deal for a one-time extension of the settlement freeze, the United States promised to block any unilateral moves by organizations like the United Nations to recognize Palestine as an independent state.

Of course that doesn't stop countries like Argentina from acting unilaterally, and apparently several other countries in Latin America are planning to issue their own statements of recognition according to the Palestinians. Even though Argentina's recognition has little practical effect, the Palestinians are hoping as more countries join in, the idea of a nation of Palestine occupying the 1967 borders will become the default position in the international community, a condition that they hope will lead to actual statehood for Palestine.

Turkey's Rambo Takes Aim At Israel

While we're on the topic of media, Foreign Policy is reporting that relations between Israel and Turkey will likely suffer another blow with the upcoming release of a Turkish spy film. “Valley of the Wolves: Palestine” is the latest adventure for Agent Polet Alemdar, who Foreign Policy describes as a sort of “Rambo for the Islamic world”; Alemdar's target this time is Israel, specifically Israeli agents who intercepted a Turkish aid ship bout for Gaza.

You likely remember the story of the Gaza-bound relief flotilla intercepted by Israeli forces earlier this year; while several of the boardings went off peacefully, the boarding of the Turkish-owned Mavi Marmara went terribly with a battle breaking out on deck between the Gaza activists and Israeli commandos, which left nine of the Mavi Marmara's crew dead. “Valley of the Wolves: Palestine” is the story of Alemdar's quest for revenge against the Israeli agents responsible for the events aboard the Mavi Marmara, a story that actually sounds a lot like the movie Munich, the story of Israeli agents exacting revenge against the Palestinians who planned the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Similarities aside, the Israelis are livid over the release of “Valley of the Wolves: Palestine”, which they say is another example of the “creeping anti-Semitism” in Turkey today. It's worth noting that Israel-Turkey relations hit another low point recently after a Turkish television movie about secret agents painted Israel's Mossad is a very unflattering light. Following the airing of that movie, the Turkish ambassador to Israel was publicly dressed down on Israeli television, an act that outraged the Turks.

But it's not only the Israelis who are angered over their portrayal in another country's pop culture, Chinese officials are also fuming over recent depictions of their officials in the British spy series Spooks (MI-5 here in the states). According to reports in the British press, government officials in China have ordered Chinese television networks not to do business with the BBC in protest over a storyline in the latest season of Spooks, which cast the Chinese as the bad guys planning to, among other things, set off a “dirty bomb” in London if the British interfered with their plans; a pretty strong reaction considering that Spooks doesn’t even air in China. Officially, the Chinese foreign ministry said it would have to “look into the matter” of the alleged BBC boycott.

Hezbollah's Green Gambit

Environmental advocates have a new ally, but they may not want him.

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah – a group considered by the United States and Israel to be one of the most dangerous terrorist organizations in the Middle East – dedicated much of a speech on Saturday to promoting environmental causes in Lebanon.  Nasrallah cited climate change as one of the greatest threats to mankind today and made the case that being pro-Green is also Islamic, citing events from Muslim history, as well as Islamic scripture to bolster his claims.  According to Reuters, Nasrallah argued that reforestation is in Lebanon's national security interests and announced that Hezbollah's development arm, Jihad al-Bina, recently planted their millionth sapling in the country.  It's worth noting that Lebanon was once a heavily-forested land, their flag even features a cedar tree, the national symbol, and that the pharaohs of ancient Egypt imported Lebanese timber for some of their signature construction projects.   But centuries of agricultural mismanagement, years of poorly-planned development and, as Nasrallah made a point of mentioning, Israeli deforestation efforts in the southern part of the country – meant to deny guerillas cover from which to launch attacks – have left large parts of Lebanon barren.

It was an odd message to hear from an organization best known in the United States as Israel as a hardcore terrorist group.  But Nasrallah's comments point to the complexity of the situation in Lebanon, where Hezbollah has taken pains to establish themselves as a legitimate political movement and has provided much of the redevelopment funding and expertise in the southern part of the country, which was devastated by the Hezbollah-Israel conflict in 2006.

Bill Clinton, Russia And The Settlements

The current round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are once again slouching towards failure and much of the blame, at least on the part of the Palestinians, is falling on Israel's failure to maintain a freeze on settlement building within the West Bank. The “settlements”, in case you haven't been keeping up on the details of the negotiations, are Israeli-only housing projects built on the land the Palestinians hope will one day become their homeland; settlement blocks are ringed by security zones and linked by private roads, causing a map of the West Bank to bear a striking resemblance to a piece of Swiss cheese. The Israeli government meanwhile insists the settlements aren't a real issue but merely an excuse used by the Palestinians to sink the latest round of talks.

Now Bill Clinton has weighed in on the issue, laying the blame for the fragile state of the peace talks not only on the settlement issue, but on Israel's Russian-born immigrant population in particular. Clinton describes the Russian Jews who emigrated to Israel in huge numbers following the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 as the hardest of the hardline segments in Israel. Russian Jews moved to the settlement blocks in large numbers and now that they are there, they don't want to leave, providing a major obstacle to a negotiated Israel-Palestine settlement in the process.

It's certainly an interesting theory on Clinton's part, and it points to a demographic reality that isn't discussed much outside of Israel. It is estimated that one in six Israelis today were born in the former Soviet Union; in Israel's fractious political system, there are several parties that cater especially to Russian-speaking Israelis. And if Israel's current Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, originally from the former Soviet Republic of Moldova is any indication, Clinton may be onto something as far as the political attitudes of Russian-born Jews; Lieberman has a long history of supporting aggressive policies towards the Palestinians, including in the past endorsing the idea of mass deportations of Palestinians from the West Bank.

Americans OK With Fading US Influence

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs is out with their survey of American perceptions of the United States' role in the world, Global Views 2010.  The takeaway from they survey is that a majority of Americans think the United States role in global affairs is diminishing, but surprisingly they're ok with that.  Only a quarter of Americans think that the US plays a larger role as the leader of the world than the country did ten years ago; while nine out of ten Americans think it is more important to focus on fixing domestic problems than for America to try to solve problems abroad.  More than two-thirds of Americans also thought the rise of aspiring global powers like Turkey and Brazil was a good thing since essentially it would mean that there would be other countries to help in dealing with global crises.

What's really interesting about these results is that they seem to fly in the face of the dominant thought among American politicians – namely that Americans expect the United States to play the role of the “sole superpower” and the world's policeman - the country that guarantees law and order around the world. As a result, much of our foreign policy today is based around this idea, along with fear on the part of our political leaders of doing anything that would take America away from this role in the eyes of the American public.  For example, at the core of arguments about why the United States must remain engaged in Afghanistan is this belief that if the US were to end the mission there before achieving “victory” (whatever that means) it would mean a loss of global prestige that the American people wouldn't stand for.

Yet the Global Views 2010 survey indicates that Americans would stand for a diminished leadership role for the United States on the world stage, in fact many would seem to prefer it if it then meant that we would be able to concentrate on resolving pressing domestic issues.

Other interesting results from the survey were a decided lack of support for a military strike by the United States against Iran to try to stop their nuclear research program (only 18% were in favor), along with a widespread belief that an American military strike would result in terrorist attacks against US interests in retaliation.  A majority also believed that if Israel launched an airstrike against Iran the United States should not engage in military action against Iran in support of Israel.

Israel/Palestine - Why Now?

The big foreign policy news from Friday is that apparently the US has brought the Israelis and Palestinians kicking and screaming back to the negotiating table to try to hammer out some sort of lasting peace agreement. The big question is why?

Finding an end to the intractable Israel-Palestine problem has been something of a mania for the past several presidents; sadly it has also proved to be a fool’s errand. There's no reason to think this time will be any different: there has been no substantive change on the ground, if anything the two sides are less suited for talks than they were when the last round of negotiations fell apart under George W. Bush – the Israeli government is even more right-wing and hawkish than it was previously, while Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is even weaker than he once was (not to mention that his term of office actually ended a year and a half ago...). And if the two sides were just waiting for George W. to leave the scene before starting negotiations again, then talks would have started long ago, not more than a year and a half into the presidency of Barack Obama.

Given all that, I can't see why anyone in Washington can believe these talks will be anything more than yet another Mid-East fail. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu is steadfast in their refusal to put a full and binding halt to Israeli settlement construction; the key irritant to the Palestinian side (they raise a good point – how can they be expected to have a country when Israeli settlements are swallowing it up bit by bit?) Meanwhile Israel refuses to negotiate with Hamas, who hold half the cards in Palestine as the ruling party in Gaza.

Both Israel and the United States consider Hamas a terrorist organization, and both maintain that they won't negotiate with terrorists, which is true, except when it's not... The United States does negotiate with terrorists, and does so quite frequently in fact. The success of the much-ballyhooed “surge” in Iraq was based in large part on negotiating with “terrorists”, particularly Sunni tribes, who following the 2003 invasion became allied with al-Qaeda militants in the country. The US negotiated with, and eventually won over, many Sunni militias, rechristening them the “Sons of Iraq” who were not dedicated to rebuilding their country. Now, as we try to replicate the surge strategy in Afghanistan, a key facet is identifying and negotiating with “more moderate” elements of the Taliban – another group the US considers to be terrorists. And it's worth noting that the successful peace process in Northern Ireland came about after the British began negotiating with a group they considered terrorists, the Irish Republican Army.

The simple truth is that peace negotiations mean sitting down with people you hate. Or as the great Israeli statesman Yitzhak Rabin is often quoted as saying: “you don't make peace with your friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies.” Excluding Hamas from the talks alone is a clear indication that no one is serious about this process actually yielding results. After a couple of weeks the talks will likely end after Palestinian militants launch one of their home-made rockets into Israel, or a hawkish member of the Israeli government (looking at you Avigdor Lieberman) makes another ill-timed announcement about the further expansion of Israeli settlements; or both. As other nations around the world make a bid to be big-time players on the world stage, playing moderator for the Israel-Palestine peace process is a role the United States should gladly relinquish.

Tweet Your Way To Unemployment

CNN fired one of their key foreign correspondents on Thursday, after Octavia Nasr used her CNN Twitter account to express her sadness over the news of the death of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. But Fadlallah is often referred to as the spiritual head of the group Hezbollah, and Nasr’s tweet quickly raised the ire of supporters of Israel, since Israel not only views Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, but also as a prime threat to their national security. Nasr replied that her comment about Fadlallah was driven by his “pioneering” work on women’s rights in the Arab world and her admission that the 140-character limit of a tweet probably wasn’t the best place to express a complex idea such as this, but that explanation wasn’t enough for her bosses at CNN, who quickly caved into pressure and fired her.

This has sparked some discussion in the blogosphere about free speech and First Amendment rights in reaction to Nasr’s firing. I think this is a little misguided – the First Amendment gives you the right to express yourself without pre-censorship, it’s not a blanket protection against action after the fact, and Nasr apparently did use her CNN Twitter account to post the message in question, which would give CNN the right to react in whatever way they think is reasonable to a use of their resources they view as unfit. The real question should be whether the tweet in question was a firing offense, and here I think CNN comes out on the short end of the argument.

During her 20-year career with the network, Nasr gave excellent and objective analysis on issues in the Middle East and was something increasingly rare on CNN – an analyst who actually knew something about global affairs (considering CNN made its reputation on its coverage of world events that’s pretty sad). Perhaps her tweet was poorly conceived or expressed an unpopular (to some) idea, but it’s a rather small offense weighed against the body of Nasr’s work on CNN. In their official explanation of Nasr’s firing, CNN said that her tweet “did not meet CNN’s editorial standards.” But the “editorial standards” argument is a pretty weak one to make considering CNN’s recent decision to hire former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, a man who transported a prostitute across statelines for an illicit affair – breaking several laws in the process, to revive CNN’s flagging ratings by hosting an hour-long program at 8pm (that is assuming Campbell Brown, who quit two months ago, ever stops doing her eight o’clock show…).

It seems that CNN is more than willing to overlook the personal failings of their on-air talent, so long as they believe they can deliver the ratings; it’s ok if they break the law, just as long as they don’t upset influential special interest groups; and that once again, foreign affairs coverage is taking a backseat at what use to be the world’s news channel. Sad really.