Since the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the United States has developed from a super power into a hyper power, says Subrata Ghoshroy, researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This development has far reaching negative consequences in terms of global security – continual promotion of the international arms race as well as persistent devaluation of diplomacy and international law.

As one of the key speakers at a symposium on ‘Science between War and Peace’ held in Berlin from May 16 to 18 one hundred years after the outbreak of the First World War, Ghoshroy highlighted the militarisation and utilisation of research for war purposes in the United States. The Berlin symposium was organised by ‘Network 1914-2014’, an alliance of peace groups including the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA) and the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW).

Subrata Ghoshroy. Credit: Karina Boeckmann/IPS

In an interview with IPS, Ghoshroy, an engineer of Indian descent, describes how sophisticated weapon systems are being used as dominant instruments of U.S. foreign policy. Ghoshroy himself had worked in the field of high-energy laser before he turned defence analyst and whistleblower against faked ‘Star Wars’ missile defence tests by U.S. government contractors. At MIT, a private research university in the U.S. city of Cambridge, he directs a project to promote nuclear stability in South Asia.

IPS: We are experiencing ongoing militarisation and the use of research for military purposes. Are peace scientists like you an endangered species?

Ghoshroy: Yes, and very much so, unfortunately. The term ‘peace scientist’ really doesn’t exist in the United States. It’s more in a German context that you have these terms such as ‘Friedensforschung’. There are individual scientists who are opposed to war. They express themselves. But there is really no discipline.

So, individuals do things their own way. And of course there are scientists all over the United States with the heritage of the Manhattan Project, the U.S.-led research and development project that produced the first atomic bombs in the 1940s. All these scientists from top universities worked there, they came back and became very much against the bomb. And there is some legacy of them still lingering in U.S. departments, particularly in physics departments where more people have become more anti-war and openly speak if not write about the problems of military research – but very few.“The collapse of one super power, the Soviet Union, marked the beginning of the United States as a hyper power. Blind faith in technology fuelled unilateralism” – Subrata Ghoshroy

IPS: How much of U.S. academic research is sponsored by the Defence Department and how much is being invested annually?

Ghoshroy: In the United States, the Defence Department spends together about three billion dollars annually in universities. In certain disciplines – in physical sciences, in engineering, materials engineering, aerospace, mechanical engineering, physics, chemistry and computer science – the support from the military is absolutely crucial and dominating. So, if you look at numbers in electro-engineering, 72 percent of all research at U.S. universities is funded by the military, and in mechanical engineering maybe 60 percent and in computer science maybe 55 percent.

IPS: There is a long history of using academic research for military purposes. How has it developed since the end of the Cold War and 9/11 (the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States)?

Ghoshroy: The real collaboration between science and the military started with the Manhattan Project (a research and development project that produced the first atomic bombs during the Second World War II. That was the beginning. And then, after the war ended in 1945, this military had already established laboratories in different universities like MIT and other schools. So, they wanted to see how they could continue this relationship after the war and they came up with this plan that the military would invest massively and it would be very easy politically to support spending on science if it was done through the military.

Public support for the military was very strong after the defeat of fascism. The Second World War was a tremendous thing for the Americans. So they wanted to keep doing it and found a way for all science to be done through the military and then they would get support in Congress for this.

As the Cold War developed, the new rationale was science and technology to give the United States the upper hand against the Soviet Union. I believe that this paradigm that started after the end of the Second World War and continued throughout the Cold War has been maintained in all the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But there is no big enemy, no enemy that we need so much money for our military to defeat. Russia spends so little money compared with the United States or China, also although it’s coming up. But regardless, all this spending on weapons is primarily coming from the United States. The universities, the military and its contractors, they all act together to promote science and science for weapons.

IPS: And since the beginning of the so called war against terrorism?

Ghoshroy: After 9/11, the public was completely terrified, so it gave the government tremendous power to do anything and, yes, it gave the military and universities money for everyone who wanted to go into research to support the so-called war on terrorism. I would not say that the money has increased so much for research. Money has increased for other things like homeland security. But it certainly has given them another opportunity to support and boost science to fight this new enemy.

IPS: You have said that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States super power has turned into a hyper power. What have been the consequences?

A: Well, first of all, they are really blinded by this position that they have now. Nobody can do any check and balance on their actions. When I was in Congress, when we discussed foreign policy in meetings of the staff in Congress to advise members, there were no counter arguments against what they were doing. They would say “we will prevail, eventually; there are some people making noises, but that doesn’t matter, we will prevail.”

This is very dangerous. This vision of America – being a force for and doing good in the world – is really believed by the people and policy makers. But in many instances, or actually most instances, they are certainly doing the opposite. They don’t understand different cultures, the peculiarities of different societies and civilisations, so they see everything in this American way. “Our democracy, our form of democracy, is the right one” even though there are other civilisations that have lived for thousands of years.

The collapse of one super power, the Soviet Union, marked the beginning of the United States as a hyper power. Blind faith in technology fuelled unilateralism, variously termed as humanitarian, pre-emptive and regime change interventions. This hyper power is totally defying the United Nations, it is totally against everything. That has led to lawlessness in and out the country. “We don’t like the government in Iraq. So let’s go change it.”  But, I am optimistic that the post-Cold War order may be coming to an end.

IPS: Are we experiencing a devaluation of diplomacy?

Ghoshroy: Definitely. U.S. foreign policy always talks about diplomacy. But American diplomacy means that you speak softly but carry a big stick. This is how they operate. So the big stick is always there.

Diplomacy is about give and take. U.S. policy is not diplomacy in that way. Yes, they have their diplomats who sit down across the table with the people of Iran or wherever. But the moment that their plan is not accepted, diplomacy is over. They will bomb. So they don’t care about diplomacy in the original sense of the term where you negotiate for a peaceful solution of give and take. Either, it’s my way or the highway.

IPS: Is the economic downturn a chance to counter the trend of militarisation and reduce military expenditure?

Ghoshroy: It does offer an opportunity, but it’s a very hard uphill battle. Cutting a military budget is very difficult in the United States because military contractors are very tied to politicians, no matter whether they are Republicans or Democrats. All these people and their election campaigns receive funds from the military contractors like Lockheed and Boeing and the others all have strong lobbyists in Washington. All sides are benefitting.

IPS: What are the chances of winning the war against wars?

Ghoshroy: It’s a slow process. In the United State there is a lack of political consciousness. The country is isolated. And in the media you read what is being propagated by the establishment.

In Viet Nam, the public reacted against the war when thousands of their beloved ones came back in body bags. In wars such as in Iraq and Afghanistan the number of victims is relatively low. Further, journalists were not allowed to photograph the returning dead. And there is another big difference. The people being killed are not middle class people who can influence the system.

Yet, People are turning against these wars, although it is not moral but economic reasons that are the decisive factors.

IPS: European members of NATO rarely criticise the United States for its unilateral warfare. Do you have any advice for them?

Ghoshroy: I have been saying in many meetings that it would be so fantastic if European countries like Germany that suffered and inflicted so much pain on other countries in the world were to be the ones to take the initiative to stand up against the United States in terms of what they want to do with NATO.

First of all, we need its dissolution. It should have been dissolved when the Warsaw Pact was dissolved. It has no mission. And I think stopping warmongering in Europe would be a further important first step for world peace. It’s unfortunate that despite people’s actual strong support for non-intervention, even the so-called parties of the Left in Europe, like the French Socialists or the Greens in Germany, support strengthening NATO. This is not helpful in terms of building peace.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at the United Nations during a four-day diplomatic blitz in September. Credit: U.N. Photo/Rick Bajornas

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 8 2013 (IPS)

A week that began with a blistering denunciation by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of Iranian duplicity ended with diminished prospects for Israel to take direct action to address Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

“The Israelis find themselves in a far worse position now than they have been for several years,” concluded Elliott Abrams, a leading neo-conservative who served as George W. Bush’s main Middle East adviser, in Foreign Affairs.

While Israel could still attack Iran’s nuclear sites on its own, “[i]ts ability to do so is already being narrowed considerably by the diplomatic thaw” between Iran and the United States, Abrams wrote. “It is one thing to bomb Iran when it appears hopelessly recalcitrant and isolated and quite another to bomb it when much of the world – especially the United States – is optimistic about the prospects of talks.”

Abrams’ assessment was widely shared among his ideological comrades who believe Israel will be the big loser if hopes for détente between Washington and Tehran gather steam after next week’s meeting in Geneva between Iran and the P5+1 (the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China plus Germany).

The Weekly Standard, a neo-conservative publication, described Israel’s position as “Standing Alone,” the title of its lead editorial at week’s end, although its authors, editor-in-chief William Kristol and the director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Michael Makovsky, took a far more defiant tone than Abrams. They urged Netanyahu to follow through on his latest threats to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities with or without U.S. approval."The United States will be stronger if it can create a new framework for security in the Middle East that involves Iran..."
-- David Ignatius

“No one likes the truth-telling skunk at the appeasement party,” they wrote, asserting that President Barack Obama’s “soft-headed, even desperate, desire for some sort of [nuclear] deal, any deal” with Iran comprised the kind of Western “failure of nerve and a collapse of will” that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill decried with the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Similarly, the Wall Street Journal‘s chief foreign affairs columnist, Bret Stephens, complained bitterly about the situation confronting Israel in the wake of Rouhani’s U.N. tour de force the previous week.

“Israel is now in the disastrous position of having to hope that Iranian hard-liners sabotage Mr. Rouhani’s efforts to negotiate a deal,” he wrote just before Netanyahu took the podium to denounce Tehran’s perfidy.

The Israeli leader, he complained, had already deferred far too much to Obama’s diplomatic efforts by not attacking Iran last year. Given Washington’s “retreat from the world” – most recently demonstrated by its failure to deliver on threats to attack Syria – the Israelis should “downgrad[e] relations with Washington,” he demanded, and now “must proceed without regard to Mr. Obama’s diplomatic timetable.”

Gary Sick, an Iran expert who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan, told IPS that neoconservatives’ recent outpouring of defiance and despair constituted “the most convincing evidence I have seen to date that the die-hard supporters of sabotaging an agreement between the U.S. and Iran are in full defensive mode.”

Diplomatic milestones

A week before Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif is expected to sit down with his P5+1 interlocutors in Geneva, Netanyahu and supporters in Washington face a diplomatic and political environment distinctly different from that of just five weeks ago.

That environment is defined above all by a pervasive war-weariness among the U.S. electorate, clearly indicated by strong public support for Obama’s choice of diplomacy over missile strikes to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.

The fact that the disarmament process has so far gone much more smoothly than anyone had anticipated has further discredited neo-conservatives, who were most fervently opposed to the U.S.-Russian deal that made it possible and most enthusiastic about unilaterally attacking Syria and supporting rebel forces who appear increasingly dominated by radical Islamists.

The remarkably positive impression left by Rouhani during his four-day diplomatic blitz in New York in September, capped by an unprecedented phone call with Obama, has created expectations not only for a deal on Iran’s nuclear programme but also for the possibility of a rapprochement between the two nations after 34 years of mutual demonisation.

In his essay, Abrams conceded that Netanyahu’s demand that any nuclear deal require Iran to abandon its entire nuclear programme was no longer realistic and would almost certainly have to be compromised, barring sabotage by hard-liners in Iran.

“Netanyahu is setting forth standards for a nuclear agreement that are far tougher than the Obama administration believes can be negotiated and, as a result, are not even being sought,” he wrote.

The Israeli leader should prepare to accept a limited enrichment programme of up to 3.5 percent and strict limits on the number of centrifuges Iran can run and the stockpile it can hold. Sanctions would be eased in the coming months, he stressed, only to the extent that Iran actually implements the deal.

Meanwhile, Abrams argued, echoing the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Congress, where the Israel lobby exerts its greatest influence, should ensure that sanctions remain in place.

Yet such a compromise is not so far from what much of the foreign policy elite already considers the most viable deal.

As put forward in an op-ed published Sunday, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, its basic elements call for Iran to “cap its level of uranium enrichment (at, say, 5 percent) and its stockpile of enriched material” to levels small enough that Israel and the U.S. would have months of “strategic warning” if Tehran made a “dash for a bomb”.

In exchange, the West would lift sanctions and accept “Iran’s rights, in principle, to enrich,” according to Ignatius, whose views often reflect those of the policy establishment.

According to Ignatius, Washington’s engagement with Russia over Syria and Iran over its nuclear programme presents a “great strategic opportunity” which critics are wrong to see as “signs of American weakness or even capitulation.”

“The United States will be stronger if it can create a new framework for security in the Middle East that involves Iran and defuses the Sunni-Shiite sectarian conflict threatening the region,” and that “accommodates the security needs of Iranians, Saudis, Israelis, Russians and Americans.”

But such accommodation is anathema to Netanyahu and his neo-conservative supporters, who insist on Israeli primacy in the Middle East and depict its competition with Iran as a zero-sum proposition that cannot be compromised.

President Barack Obama talks with Prime Minister Enrico Letta of Italy during the G20 Summit in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Sept. 6, 2013. Credit: White House Photo by Pete Souza

By George Gao
NEW YORK, Sep 19 2013 (IPS)

When U.S. President Barack Obama tried to drum up momentum for airstrikes in Syria to punish and deter the use of chemical weapons, he failed to gain much of a following.

At the G20 summit in St. Petersburg – which featured leaders from 20 of the world’s top economies – the U.S. proposed a statement to condemn Syria’s use of chemical weapons. But over half the other participants – from the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the European Union, Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico and Germany – chose not to sign."The Obama administration recognised its limits and was ready to change course rather than head into a very risky option of war.” -- James Paul

Domestically, a range of public opinion polls reflected U.S. citizens’ growing distaste for military interventions. The New York Times and CBS, for example, asked 1,011 people from Sept. 6-8 whether the U.S. should take the leading role in trying to solve international conflicts, and 62 percent of respondents said no.

“You see characteristics of a more gradual change that’s taking place,” said Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

Since World War II, the U.S. has been a “provider of last resort” in acting alone or with a coalition to address international problems, Kupchan told IPS. But now, the U.S. public is more focused on domestic issues and increasingly wary of intervening abroad.

“The U.S. simply doesn’t have the same sway that it used to,” said Kupchan, who cited a process in which power is slowly diffusing on a global scale. “In some ways, Syria is emblematic of these more long-term trends.”

The recent case over Syria was also interesting at grassroots levels. While Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron pushed for intervention, public representatives in Congress and Parliament held them back.

“Not since the Vietnam War era had we seen such decisive influence from the grassroots over international policy,” said James Paul, former executive director of Global Policy Forum (GPF).

“Washington did not command the beliefs or the respect of world public opinion… Governments wanted to go along, but could not without losing their support. Even Gulf monarchs have to think about how the public will receive their policies,” Paul told IPS.

U.S. leadership?

The idea that the U.S. is “failing” to lead unilaterally is a stigmatised one in U.S. society, whereas the U.S.’s main competitors have recently trumpeted ideas of diplomacy and multilateralism.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, for example, has been touting the phrase “win-win cooperation”, in which countries engage each other as partners, and Russian President Vladimir Putin criticised the notion of “American exceptionalism” in his recent New York Times op-ed.

“There are big countries and small countries… (but) we must not forget that God created us equal,” wrote Putin.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov took the initiative in brokering a diplomatic deal between the U.S. and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – which forces Assad to turn over his chemical weapons arsenal to the international community at the expense of a U.S. military attack. But Obama took criticism at home for backing into such an agreement.

“Today, the U.S. has less leverage, less respect and less flexibility than it once had,” said Paul. “But we must see the Syria outcome not as a U.S. failure, but rather as a kind of success, in that the Obama administration recognised its limits and was ready to change course rather than head into a very risky option of war.”

Nonetheless, many U.S. officials are wary of Russia’s Putin, who granted the U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum in his country. Putin’s recently established anti-gay laws also cast him under a negative light in the West.

“There is a certain predisposition in the United States to look askance at partnerships with non-democracies,” said Kupchan of CFR. “That’s simply part of America’s ideological equipment.”

However, engaging diplomatically with Russia over Syria may improve bilateral relations and give new momentum for the U.S.-Russia “reset”. It may, for example, allow U.S. and Russia to renew negotiations for nuclear disarmament.

“But if this agreement stumbles, and it appears that Russia acted in bad faith, it will do more harm than good,” warned Kupchan.

Paul said that the U.S.-Russia deal finally puts the spotlight back on diplomacy at the U.N., paving a way for U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to have another try in negotiating a political settlement to end Syria’s deadly civil war.

“When the great powers use the U.N., we can breathe a sigh of relief,” argued Paul. “Hopefully, the Syrian people can anticipate peace and political renewal. Western publics, by opposing war, have made this (opportunity) possible. “

The multipolar world

On the heels of the G20 summit in Russia was another meeting in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, which gathered heads of state from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) – an assembly of former Soviet nations and China. SCO leaders have also pioneered new ideas for development and trade across Eastern Europe and Asia. When the U.S. applied for observer status to the SCO in 2006, its application was rejected.

The SCO reflects the increasing role of regional organisations and alliances to deal with international issues in a “multipolar” world. Such organisations include the European Union, the African Union, UNASUR, ASEAN and the Gulf Cooperation Council, among others

Asked if diplomacy or coercion will be the norm in a “multipolar” world, Kupchan said, “I think it could go either way. You could say that in a world in which there are multiple centres of power, those centres of power can address global challenges only through multilateral cooperation. As a consequence, you can expect more of it.

“An alternative view would be: in a world in which there is a diffusion of power, there will be more competition for primacy and status, and as a consequence, you will see less multilateralism and more geopolitical rivalry.

“But I’m enough of a realist to say that the default position will be growing rivalry, and only through really good policy and steady efforts will we tame that rivalry through multilateral cooperation,” argued Kupchan.

While much of the foreign policy elite here sees the tide of public opposition to U.S. air strikes against Syria that swept over Washington during the past two weeks as evidence of a growing isolationism, veteran pollsters and other analysts say other factors were more relevant.

A variety of surveys have shown that the public has become generally more inward-looking in recent years, especially since the 2008 financial crisis and the widespread disillusionment over U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."The key division between the public and the elites is not internationalist versus isolationist; it’s the different kinds of internationalists.” -- Political scientist Jonathan Monten

However, the Barack Obama administration’s failure to muster multilateral support for his plan to punish the Syrian government for its alleged use of chemical weapons played a key role, according to some experts.

In addition, demands by more-hawkish forces in Congress and much of the foreign policy elite that any U.S. military attack aim at weakening the regime on the battlefield – and the administration’s somewhat incoherent efforts to appease them – raised public concerns that Washington would soon find itself in the middle of yet another Middle Eastern civil war.

“The administration’s best chance to get public support was to stick to the normative argument [that it was necessary to uphold the international norm against chemical weapons] and not to get involved in affecting the course of the civil war,” said Stephen Kull, director of worldpublicopinion.org.

“But the normative argument got muddied by more talk about trying to affect the outcome of the war and that – combined with the fact that there was no U.N. Security Council approval – clearly bothered people.”

Moreover, by asking the Congress to authorise military action when most of its members were in their home constituencies for the August recess, rather than in the “Beltway bubble” where the foreign policy elite — Washington officialdom, highly paid lobbyists, the Congressional leadership, and think tank analysts — dominate the debate, Obama effectively exposed them to more grassroots pressure than usual.

The foreign policy elite “is generally more sceptical of multilateralism, more supportive of America playing a dominant role in world affairs, and more wary of constraints on U.S. freedom of action than the public is,” Kull, who also heads the University of Maryland’s Programme on International Policy Attitudes, told IPS.

Surveys of both elite and public attitudes on foreign policy and the U.S. role in the world that have been conducted over decades tend to support that assessment.

“The public is often eager for other countries to take their share – if not take the lead – in dealing with international problems… while the elite or people, who are much more knowledgeable about American power and the role it plays in the world, are more willing to play the role of first among equals in pushing for international action,” said Michael Dimock, director of the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press which conducted the most recent major survey of elite-public opinion in late 2009.

“A lot of people in the international affairs world say, ‘If America doesn’t take the lead, no one will feel they should or have’,” he told IPS.

Indeed, in the 2009 survey, only a third of respondents from the general public said Washington should either act as the “single world leader” or the “most active” among major powers. By contrast, nearly seven of 10 elite respondents – taken from the membership of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) – took that position.

“When it comes to military engagements, the public perception is high risk, low reward, while there are many in the elite who see the balance or risk to reward in a different light,” Dimock told IPS.

Few experts deny that the public has turned more inward in recent years, although they generally avoid the qualifier “isolationist”, a pejorative term which is associated – by neo-conservative hawks, in particular — with (mainly Republican) opposition to Washington’s intervention in World War II before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and Germany declared war on the U.S. in December 1941.

“One of the things that has really jumped out in this debate is that the key division between the public and the elites is not internationalist versus isolationist; it’s the different kinds of internationalists,” said Jonathan Monten, a political scientist at the University of Oklahoma and co-author of a number of academic articles on elite foreign policy views with Joshua Busby of the University of Texas.

“Are you the kind of internationalist who favours a very muscular, hawkish forward-leaning foreign policy or one who favours working through multilateral means, using more soft-power elements of foreign policy? What the Syria debate reveals is that there are both types of internationalists on both sides of the aisle,” he told IPS.

Until recently, the major media looked almost exclusively to Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham to act as spokesmen for their party’s foreign policy views. However, the Syria debate witnessed the emergence of non-interventionist figures in the party, with virtually all of the lawmakers considered likely 2016 presidential candidates coming out in opposition to military action.

“Before the debate shifted to Congress, it wasn’t really clear how powerful the anti-interventionist bloc was within the Republican caucus,” according to Monton, who said the breakdown in the elite Republican consensus encouraged opposition.

“Ten years ago, they wouldn’t be caught dead opposing the use of military power in the world once it had been proposed. It was interesting how quickly the cascade happened.”

“The growing split in the Republican Party between neoconservative interventionists like McCain and the anti-intervention ‘isolationist’ [Senator] Rand Paul groups forces rank and file Republicans to have to grapple more with issues and possibly choose,” added Busby in an email exchange.

While Obama’s failure to muster multilateral support for military action played a not insignificant part in the public’s opposition to strikes, Dina Smeltz, the senior fellow on Public Opinion and Foreign Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA), told IPS, “war weariness [was] the major point”.

“Two in three Americans say the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth the cost, and I think those conflicts were probably perceived to be more of a direct [U.S. national] interest than Syria,” she said.

Indeed, a New York Times/CBS News poll taken last weekend found that two-thirds of respondents were particularly concerned that military action in Syria would result in a “long and costly involvement”.

Asked in the same poll whether the U.S. should take “the leading role among all other countries in the world in trying to solve international conflicts,” 62 percent said it should not.

Remarkably, in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq invasion 10 years ago when the U.S. was being compared to the Roman and British Empires in its mastery of world affairs, 43 percent said it should not, compared with a plurality of 48 percent who said it should.

But Kull said the war-weariness factor, like “isolationism”, is overplayed and that both the major media and the foreign policy elite itself tend to underestimate how much the public favours multilateral and cooperative approaches to international affairs.

Indeed, a 2004 CCGA poll of elite and public opinion in which elite respondents were asked to estimate how the public would react to specific issues, found that the opinion leaders significantly underestimated public support for, among other things, U.S. participation in U.N. peace-keeping operations, the International Criminal Court, and the Kyoto agreement to curb greenhouse gas emission, giving the U.N. the power to tax, and accepting collective decisions by the U.N.’s governing bodies.

“The more multilateral cooperation and support we get, the more comfortable people are,” noted Kull. “In this case, that support was not forthcoming – even the British weren’t there – and that definitely undermines support here.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

The United Nations, which has remained deadlocked over Syria, is in danger of being craftily exploited to justify the impending air strike on Damascus.

The threat of double vetoes by Russia and China against an attack on Syria has shifted the focus to the U.N. team of inspectors whose report on the chemical weapons attack may be released either later this week or next week."The claim will be that the U.N. is involved and somehow that means it's a legal attack." -- Michael Ratner of the Centre for Constitutional Rights

But the conclusions of the report are predictable – within the team’s limited mandate, as laid out by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The team is expected to only confirm the use of chemical weapons in Syria and leave unanswered the more important question of who used those weapons.

The Syrian government and rebel forces are blaming each other, with no positive proof on either side.

But the administration of President Barack Obama has repeatedly said the U.N. evaluation is “irrelevant” – and it knows more about the chemical weapons attack than the United Nations does and hopes to.

Still, European governments, and particularly France, have said they would not endorse a military strike until the U.N. report is released. French President Francois Hollande was quoted as saying last week his government would not act militarily before the U.N. inspectors presented their findings on the Aug. 12 attack in Syria.

According to one published report, the U.N. findings “would enable European governments to tell their constituents that there has been U.N. involvement before military action, and it would not appear to tie the Americans’ hands.”

Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, told IPS many of those governments prefer to support the United States and will use the “fig leaf of the U.N. inspections” and its conclusion – assuming it states chemical weapons are used – to give that support.

“The claim will be that the U.N. is involved and somehow that means it’s a legal attack. Nothing could be further from the truth or law,” he said.

Without Security Council approval, an attack violates the U.N. Charter and is utterly lawless.

“Let’s hope for once that governments, including my own, listen to people they purportedly represent. [That] would be a major breakthrough in the struggle for a more democratic world,” said Ratner, who is also president of the Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights.

He said most of Europe, particularly its population, like that of the United States is reluctant or opposed to bombing of Syria.

Meanwhile, reports surfaced Monday that Russia, backing a demand from the United States, was urging Syria to give up its chemical weapons and put them under international control and then destroy them.

Such a move could also possibly prevent a U.S. military attack on Syria.

“We have given our proposal to Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem and are counting on a fast and, I hope, positive response,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters.

Asked for his comments, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters Monday, “I have already been considering certain proposals that I could make to the Security Council when I present the investigation team’s report.

“I am considering urging the Security Council to demand the immediate transfer of Syria’s chemical weapons and chemical precursor stocks to places inside Syria where they can be safely stored and destroyed.

“And I urge again [that] Syria should become party to the OPCW [Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons]”, which bans the production, use and distribution of chemical weapons, he added.

Pressed about a timeline for such a transfer, Ban said if and when Syria agrees to the proposal, “I am sure that the international community will [take] very swift action to make sure these chemical weapons stocks will be stored safely and will be destroyed. I do not have any doubt and worry about that.”

But first and foremost, he noted, Syria must agree positively to this.

Asked about the punishment for the use of chemical weapons, either by the Syrian government or the rebels, Ban said there will be an “accountability process” making sure that nobody commits such horrendous use of chemical weapons and gets away with it.

“So I believe that even with this, accountability should be pursued in accordance with what had happened, in accordance with the investigative team’s report,” Ban said.

Ratner told IPS it’s hard to believe people and governments are accepting anything the U.S. says on this topic.

“Even assuming the U.N. inspectors conclude chemical weapons were used on Aug. 21 – and we do not yet know – where is the proof that Assad ordered them used?” he said. So far, he noted, the U.S. has offered the world no proof – except what it calls “common sense”.

“So the U.S. and European countries should bomb another country and kill people based on common sense. Common sense makes no sense,” Ratner concluded.

With the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, the United States should take a more flexible approach toward Tehran to increase the chances of a successful resolution of the latter’s nuclear programme, according to a new report by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) released Tuesday.

The report, “Great Expectations: Iran’s New President and the Nuclear Talks,” urged the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama to take a series of measures to enhance the prospects for progress in a likely new round of negotiations between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, China and Russia plus Germany) next month.

Specifically, the report called for Washington to engage in direct bilateral talks with Iran alongside the P5+1 and to be more forthcoming in the negotiations – by offering greater sanctions relief in exchange for Iranian concessions and describing an “end-state” that would include de facto recognition of Tehran’s “right” to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.

It should also widen the scope of discussions between the West and Iran to include regional security issues, according to the report, which called on Washington to end its opposition to Tehran’s participation in any future international conference on Syria.

Finally, the report stressed that imposing new economic sanctions against Iran at such a delicate time is likely to prove counter-productive.

“(N)ow is not the time to ramp up sanctions,” the report stated. “That could well backfire, playing into the hands of those in Tehran wishing to prove that Iran’s policies have no impact on the West’s attitude, and thus that a more flexible position is both unwarranted and unwise.”

It also noted that “heightened sanctions”, such as those recently approved by a 400-20 vote in the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives, “could undermine Rouhani’s domestic position even before he has a chance to test his approach.”

The new report comes amidst considerable speculation here whether Rouhani, who was inaugurated just last week after pulling off a surprise first-round victory in the June elections, will prove more flexible in nuclear negotiations and, critically, could persuade Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to back him up in Iran’s highly factionalised political environment.

While most U.S. officials, including Obama himself, have indicated “cautious optimism” that they can do business with Rouhani, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced him as “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” even before his inauguration.

The latter theme has been echoed repeatedly since Rouhani’s election by lawmakers and think tanks closely associated with the Israel lobby and its most prominent flagship, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

The latter has also urged Congress to quickly approve tougher sanctions – as early as next month even before the next P5+1 meeting – to increase pressure on Tehran to suspend, if not abandon its nuclear programme.

“American resolve is critical, especially in the next few months,” wrote Republican Sen. Mark Kirk and Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Tuesday. “By bringing the regime to the verge of economic collapse, the U.S. can …[force] Iran to comply with all international obligations, including suspending all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities.”

The two men, both of whom enjoy especially close relations with AIPAC, urged the Senate to swiftly approve the sanctions bill passed last month by the House.

Among other measures, it would impose sanctions against any foreign country or company that buys Iran’s oil or that conducts business with key sectors of Iran’s economy, such as its auto and petrochemical industries. It would also cut off access to most of Iran’s overseas financial reserves and reduce or eliminate the president’s authority to waive such sanctions.

Whether the Democrat-led Senate will do so remains unclear. The administration has indicated that it opposes new sanctions pending a new round of negotiations, but it is uncertain whether it can keep key Democrats in line in the face of a major AIPAC campaign when Congress returns from its August recess in the first days of September.

Seventy-six of the 100 senators signed an AIPAC-inspired letter to Obama initiated by the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Robert Menendez, which called for enhanced sanctions and “a convincing threat of the use of force that Iran will believe”, although it did not explicitly endorse the House bill, and some key senators who normally go along with AIPAC’s initiatives apparently declined to sign it.

And, in a rare departure from his usual staunchly pro-Israel stance, the number two Democrat in the House, Rep. Steny Hoyer, told officials in Israel this week that Rouhani should be given an opportunity to be heard, according to a report by the Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA) Tuesday.

Hoyer, who is leading a delegation of 36 Democratic lawmakers, was not one of 131 House members, including 18 Republicans, who signed a letter last month calling for enhanced diplomatic engagement with Iran to resolve the nuclear issue.

The ICG report stressed that expectations of significant progress in negotiations on the nuclear file should be restrained and that “Iran’s bottom line demands – recognition of its right to enrich and meaningful sanctions relief – will not budge” due not only to Khamenei’s retention of the “final say” on the issue, but also because of Rouhani’s long-standing involvement and investment in the nuclear programme.

Indeed, his failure in the early 2000s, when he served as Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, to obtain anything in return for an agreement with the EU-3 (Britain, France, and Germany) to suspend enrichment for a year and a half will likely make him “highly reluctant to take any step that is tantamount to suspending enrichment.

“…Instead, he will likely be far more inclined to focus on measures to increase transparency of the nuclear program,” according to the report.

It added that whether greater transparency by itself will satisfy Washington and its allies is “highly questionable” as Tehran draws closer to the capability to build a bomb within a matter of weeks if it chooses to do so, thus becoming a “virtual nuclear weapons state”.

Moreover, “Western doubts about Rouhani’s ability to deliver are matched by Tehran’s scepticism that the U.S. in particular can accept a modus Vivendi with the Islamic Republic or that President Barack Obama has the political muscle to lift sanctions,” the report said.

That said, Rouhani, whose election was made possible by a coalition of moderate and reformist leaders, has made clear that he believes Iran’s recent strategy in dealing with the issue has come at an exorbitant cost to the Iranian economy. Moreover, his unexpected victory “gives him a relatively potent mandate for change”.

To facilitate such a change, Washington and its Western allies should not maintain their “wait-and-see posture” but instead put “more ambitious proposals on the table,” such as offering greater sanctions relief for a period of time in exchange for Iran’s suspension of its 20-percent enrichment of its uranium and conversion of its existing to fuel rods and a freeze on the installation of advanced centrifuges in its bunkered enrichment facility at Fordow.

Launching bilateral talks with Tehran – something Obama has repeatedly proposed – would also enhance the chances for progress, according to the report, which noted that Rouhani has several times since his election indicated his support for such a dialogue despite Khamenei’s frequently voiced scepticism that it would bear fruit.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Vitaly I. Churkin, Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the UN. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 13 2013 (IPS)

When the Cold War peaked in the late 1960s and ’70s, the United States and the then-Soviet Union were armed with one of the most effective non-lethal weapons in their diplomatic arsenal: a veto in the U.N.’s most powerful body, the Security Council.

Both superpowers never hesitated to deploy the veto to further their national interests or protect their allies from condemnation or sanctions – including Israel, Hungary, Algeria, Vietnam and Panama, and in the post-Cold War period, Myanmar (Burma), Zimbabwe and Syria."Big powers with worldwide interests are usually inclined to act more practically at the Security Council than their political rhetoric may sound." -- former U.N. assistant secretary-general Samir Sanbar

“Between the founding of the United Nations in 1945 and the advent of detente in the late 1960s, the Soviet Union used its veto power more than 100 times, almost always as the sole dissenting vote,” Dr. Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, told IPS.

The United States did not use its veto power once, he added.

By contrast, however, between 1969 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Soviets used their veto power less than a dozen times while the United States vetoed 69 resolutions, also usually as the sole dissenting vote, he said.

In the subsequent 22 years, the United States has used its veto power 14 times and Russia 10 times, most of the time as the only negative vote, said Zunes, who has written extensively on the politics of the Security Council.

Syria as a litmus test

As the rift between the United States and Russia has gone public over the granting of temporary asylum in Russia to U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden, the next litmus test would possibly be a new Security Council resolution to sanction the beleaguered government of Syrian President Bashar al Assad.

But in the current environment will such a resolution survive?

The last three Western-inspired resolutions, and a stillborn draft, against Syria were vetoed by Russia, along with China.

The Snowden asylum has not only undermined relations between the two superpowers but also between U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The New York Times last week quoted a Russian political analyst Andrei Piotovsky as saying: “Putin openly despises your president, forgive my bluntness.”

At a press conference last week, Obama couldn’t resist the temptation of implicitly taking a passing shot at Putin.

After confessing he did not have a “bad personal relation with Putin”, Obama told reporters, “I know the press likes to focus on body language, and he’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.

“But the truth is that when we’re in conversations together, oftentimes it’s very productive.”

Besides any sanctions against the Syrian government, the two superpowers also have to deal with several other thorny issues, including missile defences in Europe, nuclear disarmament, Iran’s nuclear programme and an upcoming peace conference on Syria – where Russia is insisting on the participation of Iran, which the U.S. opposes.

More bark than bite?

Samir Sanbar, a former U.N. assistant secretary-general who once headed the department of public information, is confident the U.S.-Russia rift would have fewer negative consequences on the United Nations.

“Big powers with worldwide interests are usually inclined to act more practically at the Security Council than their political rhetoric may sound,” Sanbar told IPS.

He pointed out that even during critical moments in the Cold War era, like the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, “They first tried to pressure through their proxies or communicate through intermediaries, reserving their vetoes as a last resort in the knowledge that holding it as a [trump] card could be more effective than actually using it.”

During the “cold peace period”, he said, the exclusive club of two worked more in tandem than others presumed, for example, on the selection of a secretary general.

On certain crucial issues, they seemed to coordinate fairly closely to the point that some independent insiders wondered whether the two superpowers shared a joint list of operatives, said Sanbar, who served under five different secretaries-general.

On other issues, he said, they seriously disagreed with a real threat of veto, but the then-secretary general who sensed the risk would actively attempt to lighten the atmosphere.

Incidentally, one famous case of an earlier clash was about the 1950-53 Korean War when the Soviet delegation angrily boycotted the Security Council’s deliberations and thus was unable to block a swiftly-passed resolution approving the deployment of troops there.

Now, decades later, Russia voted for a South Korean, Ban Ki-moon, as secretary general, Sanbar said.

“And will he, or could he, make a special effort to ease tension before the high-level debate of the General Assembly next month or would U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov take care of business as usual?” speculated Sanbar.

U.S. “hypocrisy”

Zunes, who also serves as a senior policy analyst for the Foreign Policy in Focus project at the Institute for Policy Studies, told IPS the tough stance taken by the United States over Snowden’s temporary asylum has stirred up nationalist sentiments across the political spectrum.

He said the Russians can point to U.S. hypocrisy in Washington’s refusal to extradite former U.S. spy chief in Italy Robert Seldon Lady back to Italy to face kidnapping charges for abducting an Islamist cleric off a Milan street in 2003 and sending him to Egypt for torture; and the refusal to extradite Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada and Carlos Sanchez Berzan to Bolivia to face charges for ordering the massacre of scores of indigenous peasants.

Additionally, there was also the refusal to extradite Luis Posada Carriles, who is wanted in several Latin American countries for a series of terrorist bombings, including blowing up a Cuban airliner in Barbados which killed 73 people.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, an Asian diplomat told IPS, “I don’t think we are heading back to the days of the Cold War.”

Things have moved on since the “fall” of Communism and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989-1991, he said. And Russia is not the threat that it was perceived to be to the U.S. or to the rest of the non-Communist world.

He said relations between the U.S. and Russia are also not the same – they have more substantive ties at all levels.

“The relationship will get colder in some aspects but I don’t think the two sides will allow it to go cold again,” he said. “And the relationship between the U.S. and Russia will continue more or less in the same vein in Security Council.”

Do you expect a miracle from Rouhani? You are heading down the wrong road. Please take it easy!

This was the initial sentiment among Iranian president-elect Hassan Rouhani’s supporters in social networks, blogs, the media, virtual or actual forum discussions and post-election gatherings days after his victory in Iran’s eleventh presidential election.

Iranians were excited by an unexpected win in the unpredictable elections of Jun. 14.

They also wisely understood that now is the time for balanced expectations as Rouhani takes the first steps into his new government.

Ending the domestic economic crisis and improving rocky international relations are on top of Rouhani’s “to do” list.

Most of his supporters recognise that he faces a long and hard path ahead in rectifying a country with 42 percent inflation, 12.3 percent unemployment and a 143-billion-dollar money supply, according to the latest data coming out of Tehran.

Despite acquiring 539 billion dollars from oil revenue in 2012, Iran’s economic crisis worsened due to mismanagement by the country’s outgoing president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Iran’s domestic political and social situations are similarly chaotic, while the human rights situation is in crisis.

Rouhani campaigned on a platform of freeing Iran’s political prisoners.

He said he would open up breathing space for newspapers and journalists, prepare a “civil rights charter”, repair the economy and restore Iranian relations with the West and other countries through a “government of wisdom and moderation”.

Rouhani won Iran’s presidency through the concerted efforts of a young generation of activists committed to reform.

They maintained that a moderate approach spearheaded by inside actors – while, at the same time, opposing any external intervention from foreign countries – could effectively change Iran.

Rouhani’s campaign activists from inside and outside the country united in calls for the release of all imprisoned youth, students, journalists, human rights lawyers, political figures and activists from the 2009 election, which saw the rise of the Green Movement.

His supporters also established a campaign to demand the release of Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi, the Greens’ two leading figures.

But this demand, made in the first days following his victory, was premature.

Can Rouhani free prisoners without a mandate from the Supreme Leader (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei)?

Can he fulfill his promises to the people and run his government without a “reconciliation” of the two other main branches of the state – the judiciary system and Parliament?

Both are controlled by conservatives – clear opponents of Rouhani’s camp. Article 110 of the Iranian Constitution indicates that the power and authority of the Supreme Leader surpasses the president’s. The complex structure of the Islamic Republic of Iran doesn’t allow the president alone to push through domestic and international reform.

That said, three weeks after the election, Khamenei met judiciary officials and mandated them to assist Rouhani.

This mandate will give the new president a strong boost in fulfilling his campaign promises.

Rouhani’s victory has been described as an alliance between Iran’s moderates and reformists.

The reformists are defined as those political leaders who sought significant change in the political system.

The moderates are defined as those who focused more on the economic strength of the country than on radical political change.

The two political leaders, former moderate president of Iran Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989 – 1997) and former reformist president Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005), heeded the message of the populace in building a coalition of moderation-reform to support Rouhani.

So far, the wisdom of this alliance has been effective in shaping Rouhani’s victory.

He is wisely forming a spectrum made up of both reformists (from Khatami’s cabinet) and moderates (from Rafsanjani’s team) for his administration.

The failure of reformists and moderates in the 2005 election taught both political camps to revise their approach and ponder their weaknesses during the past eight years.

Rouhani learned from the reformists that he must avoid radicalism which might alienate too many constituencies. He also learned how the moderates lost their popularity by forgetting ordinary people and middle-class families.

Maintaining the moderation-reform method in leading his government will enable Rouhani to rectify the domestic and international crises that have engulfed Iran, while also addressing civil and human rights demands as an important second priority.

Washington needs to rethink its approach in this new Iranian era.

Western sanctions have unified Iran’s opposition and its youth behind the state, whether they truly support it or not. Washington has to accept this and revise its policy toward Iran.

It needs to listen to the message and approach of the opposition, whose goal is reforming the country moderately while defending and recognising its national interests.

In a recent letter to President Obama, a group of former U.S. government officials, diplomats, military officers and national security experts referred to Rouhani’s election as a “major potential opportunity”. They urged Obama to engage in bilateral negotiations with Iran and engage it beyond the nuclear issue.

Increasing negative pressure and deepening sanctions, instead of achieving a negotiated agreement on the nuclear issue, will benefit neither the United States nor Iran.

Iran’s people have created a new era of moderation-reform to rebuild their country.

The world must listen to their message.

*Sahar Namazikhah is an Iranian journalist based in Washington, D.C. She was previously editor of several daily newspapers in Tehran. She is currently director of Iran Programmes at George Mason University’s Center for Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution.

Trinidad and Tobago’s Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Dookeran, speaking, with CARICOM Secretary General Irwin La Roque (seated right).

By Peter Richards
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, May 18 2013 (IPS)

Whether by accident or coincidence, recent days have seen a variety of Caribbean leaders and journalists question whether the region is failing to pursue leadership roles within international organisations – and thus losing its voice in global issues like trade, climate change, and peace and security.

“These days, it is difficult to find CARICOM citizens in top positions, except for Dr. Carissa F. Etienne of Dominica who is director general of PAHO [the Pan American Health Organisation]; Albert Ramdin of Suriname, who is assistant secretary general at the OAS [Organisation of American States]; and Judge Patrick Robinson of Jamaica, who is president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia,” the Jamaica Observer said in an editorial this week.

The paper went on to blame “the complete lack of strategic planning by the political leadership and Caricom Secretariat in positioning our regional citizens for top jobs.”

Earlier in the week, the country’s former prime minister P.J. Patterson, speaking at the launch of the book “Multilateral Diplomacy for Small States” by former Guyanese foreign affairs minister Rudy Insanally, also lamented the fact that few from the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) were occupying high-profile positions outside the region itself.

In defence of the 15-member bloc, Trinidad and Tobago’s Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Dookeran, who chairs the CARICOM Council for Foreign and Community Relations (COFCOR), said the issue was among “strategic matters” discussed during the two-day meeting of Caribbean foreign ministers that ended here Wednesday.

“At the level of Caribbean personalities in international organisations we are conscious of it and we had a long discussion on that and we are devising a process by which we are trying to improve that presence,” he told IPS.

Dookeran, who in his own address to the foreign ministers had also questioned whether “diplomacy in the Caribbean has lost its magic”, said that Caribbean countries need to make “the political statement as necessary in the councils of those bodies that we need to have a higher presence”.

CARICOM Secretary General Irwin La Rocque told IPS that Caribbean countries, despite their seemingly low profile, are still viewed as “prized assets” globally, and points to the presence at the meeting here of delegations from as far away as Japan and New Zealand.

“I am not so sure we have lost our charm, I think it is there. A number of political personalities have expressed an interest in coming to the heads of government meeting in Trinidad in July and I think that in itself speaks volumes,” La Roque said.

He added that there have been recent bilateral discussions with the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Chile, arguing “the outside world seems to recognise the ability of the CARICOM countries to punch above its weight.

“I don’t think we have lost the charm, I think what we have to do is to be a little certain in terms of harnessing and leveraging our collective voices in the international forum,” he told IPS.

Caribbean diplomacy is expected to benefit from the decision of the Trinidad and Tobago government to fund a diplomatic academy at the University of the West Indies (UWI) that “would provide current and future diplomats, government officials, non-state actors with training and learning facilities on issues and processes that are relevant to the discharge of our diplomacy and the conduct of our foreign relations”.

Dookeran, who has been calling for a “new frontier for Caribbean convergence”, said the academy, which opens in September with an international conference, “will establish a network of cooperation with similar training and learning institutions to benefit from the benefits and offerings from other countries,” and that interest has been shown by countries in North America, Asia, Europe and Latin America.

“We are realising the limitations of being a one-language country,” he conceded. “It will take time to change that…this is part of our British inheritance.”

The CARICOM foreign ministers have also vowed to pursue reforms in the United Nations Security Council to better take into consideration the positions of developing countries.

“Clearly that’s an issue that is very troubling,” Dookeran said, adding that the membership should be “placed on the agenda squarely and frontally at the next [General] Assembly”.

“We have in fact begun to talk with some major countries in the world in order to make sure we have the necessary political clout to make a start,” he said.

The communiqué issued at the end of the meeting here said Japan’s candidature for a 2016-2017 non-permanent seat and reform of the Security Council had been discussed with Minoru Kiuchi, the parliamentary vice-minister for foreign policy, and “welcomed the commitment expressed by Japan to drastically increase assistance” to the region.

Nonetheless, Dookeran insists that small states “should have a political presence in the Security Council”.

“We are not saying in what ways it should be done at this stage, and we are saying that the continent of Africa should definitely be part of that process,” he said. Such changes would be a reflection “of the return to political and moral legitimacy of the body and therefore there is need to establish that so that its views cannot be ignored.

“There is [also] need to have more diplomatic dialogue with international financial institutions” such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) so as to get them to change their lending policies to small island developing states (SIDS), he said.

In this vein, the Caribbean is working on developing new strategic partnerships with other SIDS “so that we can improve the strength of the voice of the small economies of the world.”

Publication this month of Vali Nasr’s “The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat” is well-timed.

The U.S. and the NATO allies are disengaging from Afghanistan, without clarity about the West’s continuing interests or how to secure them.

The Syrian civil war continues, without apparent U.S. efforts to fit that conflagration within regional developments as a whole. President Barack Obama has visited the Near East, but there is as yet no promise that serious Israeli-Palestinian negotiations will resume.

The standoff with Iran and its nuclear programme continues, without a viable U.S. strategy to resolve it short of war. And there is widespread questioning about future U.S. commitments toward the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

For some observers, including Vali Nasr, all this raises profound questions about U.S. foreign policy and leads him to judge: “retreat.”

The author, now dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, has had a special vantage point. From January 2009 until 2011, he was special advisor to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke (who died in December 2010), the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan – “Afpak.”

Dr. Nasr’s brief but intense experience in the U.S. government at a high level was both disappointing and disillusioning.

His principal conclusions are that the Obama White House failed to take seriously the diplomatic opportunities afforded the U.S.; that it tolerated excessive militarisation of U.S. policies, at the expense of a proper role for diplomatic instruments; that the president himself was long on language but short on action, thus failing to come to grips with a number of regional developments; that the best efforts by the State Department, including by Secretary Hillary Clinton, to intervene in critical policy-making, were often rebuffed or ignored by “the White House;” and that the U.S. thus failed in its essential leadership role.

What Nasr says about the way in which the White House dominated and controlled foreign policy in Obama’s first term and made it subservient to domestic politics is a damning indictment – even if only partly true, and at this point in history, no outsider can judge.

This helps explain why a pre-publication book has gained so much attention, along with the Washington parlor game of welcoming “kiss and tell,” merged with a desire to see the sitting president stub his toe or worse.

Thus “Dispensable Nation” is a compelling read. And while Nasr is not part of the new cottage industry of “declinists”, he does warn that, without radical changes to the making and carrying out of U.S. foreign policy, this nation can do itself and its role in the world serious injury, not least to its reputation and others’ willingness to rely on us.

So far, so good. But some other facets of this book present a somewhat different perspective. One might be called an “old school” approach to government service: that someone who willingly “takes the King’s shilling” assumes a burden not to tell tales out of school, at least not until all the narrative’s senior players have left the stage. Breaking with that unwritten practice makes for a juicier read, but it does make one ponder.

A more serious question is raised by the assumption running throughout the book that if a different approach had been taken to X or Y — in particular a greater reliance on diplomacy and, even more so, diplomatic approaches advanced by the Special Negotiator, Ambassador Holbrooke — very different and positive things would almost surely have come about.

But with regard to the Middle East/Southwest Asia and its long history of complexities and imponderables, one must be chary of drawing straight-line conclusions about the impact of policies different from those pursed.

It is hard to believe that U.S. leadership on its own would have transformed Arab-Israeli peacemaking; that a different U.S. approach to Egypt and other Arab countries would necessarily have produced a better course for the Arab Spring; that earlier intervention (but just what?) would have stopped the slaughter in Syria; that following the negotiating strategy and tactics advocated by Ambassador Holbrooke would have brought the Afghanistan war to a successful conclusion — without taking us all back to Square One, with the Taliban in full control – and with U.S. relations with Pakistan on a better footing and the region stable.

In short, in addition to highly-relevant and well-argued analysis of the Obama administration’s shortcomings, most of the author’s suggestions for alternative approaches are more wishful thinking than the product of a depth of knowledge about the region and seasoned judgment concerning the limits of power.

Perhaps that conclusion is unfair, given that his role in Afpak has so far been the author’s only venture into government, but that argues for being doubly cautious about making sweeping predictions about the putative success of alternative strategies.

It might also have been useful if Vali had drawn upon his experience to discuss whether using special representatives instead of regular diplomacy is good or bad.

In some cases, appointing a U.S. special negotiator has proved to be good — like Arab-Israeli peacemaking, thus relieving a secretary of state from having to deal virtually full time with these demanding partners; or lengthy arms control negotiations, where having experts at the table is essential.

But in general, creating special representatives as substitutes for regular practices of the U.S. government is asking for trouble. This was certainly true regarding the plethora of special representatives appointed during the first Obama administration, such that the expertise and experience needed for effective policies was often missing or sidelined.

Certainly, balancing contending (and legitimate) points of view within the bureaucracy (e.g., state, defence, CIA, NSC staff) was regularly lost, to the detriment of coherent policy.

Add to this the appointment of a special representative for Afpak who had achieved almost superstar status, with personal ambitions to match and a well-deserved sobriquet of “bulldozer,” and it would be surprising if all had gone smoothly — not least because Holbrooke had no experience in the region and no prior knowledge either of the issues or the local political cultures.

Indeed, it did not go smoothly, predictably so given Amb. Holbrooke’s career-long disdain for anyone who got in his way (along with his methods for eliminating competitors for either position or limelight), his lack of capacity for genuine strategic thinking as opposed to short-term tactical fixes, plus his most undiplomatic approach to both friend and foe.

In fact, from the moment of his highly publicised spat with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, Holbrooke’s usefulness ended.

In sum, Nasr has given us not just a good read but also judgments about what happens when a U.S. administration does not place a high enough priority on getting right the U.S. role in the world; does not assess adequately what the nation truly needs to do abroad; that inserts domestic political judgments at the start of the process instead of (as is indeed necessary) after due consideration of foreign policy choices; that permits a continuing imbalance between military and non-military instruments of power and influence; and that fails to “think strategically” about the future, fully two decades after the end of the Cold War made such strategic rethinking imperative.

One conclusion, not in the book but flowing from its argument, is that a second-rate team appointed by the president and secretary of state cannot produce first-rate foreign policy, an outcome that Nasr argues forcefully.

*Robert E. Hunter, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, was director of Middle East Affairs on the National Security Council Staff in the Carter Administration and in 2011-12 was Director of Transatlantic Security Studies at the National Defense University.

Amb. Bruce Laingen (left) and Amb. John Limbert. Credit: Kate Gould/Friends Committee on National Legislation

By Jasmin Ramsey
WASHINGTON, Feb 26 2013 (IPS)

On the eve of resumed talks between Iran and the P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany) in Almaty, Kazakhstan over its nuclear programme, two former hostages of the U.S. embassy takeover in Tehran argued that the aura of mistrust that has dogged relations for decades must be addressed.

“The ghosts of 1979 will be there and they will do their best to prevent any progress – they will haunt the proceedings, so to speak,” said retired Ambassador John Limbert at a Capitol Hill press conference Monday.

“All concerned should take steps [to address the shared issue of mistrust], particularly the governments of Iran and the United States,” Ambassador Bruce Laingen (retired), the chief of mission held hostage during the 1979 hostage crisis, told IPS.To goad Iran into entering direct talks with the U.S., the Americans must come up with ways to show that they are serious about finding a peaceful solution.

“The two of us intrude on each other’s interests all the time. We’ve got to find a way reasonably to talk about those interests as they conflict or at least be ready to talk,” he said.

A fluent Persian-speaker and author, Limbert also urged broadening diplomatic efforts with Iran despite the constantly referenced grievances on both sides.

“The U.S. ‘two-track’ policy of engagement and pressure has – in reality – only one track: multilateral and unilateral sanctions, that whatever their stated intention and real effects, are allowing the Iranian government to claim credit for defying an international bully,” he said at the packed event, which was co-hosted by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the Friends Committee on National Legislation and the National Iranian American Council.

“To move forward, we must stop holding all questions hostage to agreement on the nuclear issue…The United States and Iran must open up dialogue on areas where there is political space on both sides to break the cycle of mistrust,” he said.

“The Islamic Republic, like it or not, is what it is and we have things to talk about, even if we are not friends,” said Limbert, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy.

The Barack Obama administration maintains that “all options are on the table” to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. “But neither side wants to resort to military action to reach a solution,” said Alireza Nader, a senior policy analyst at the Rand Corporation, during an Arms Control Association briefing Monday.

“A military conflict – you can a make a very good argument – would be against the national interests of all sides,” he said.

Still, what has been assessed by most Western nuclear experts and intelligence agencies as Iran’s slow but steady move towards a nuclear weapon capability has resulted in years of cold and at times tense relations between Iran and the U.S. and Israel, as well as an ongoing “crippling” sanctions regime that led to Iran’s currency losing 40 percent of its value in October 2012, among other economic pain.

Yet Iran continues to insist that its nuclear activities are completely peaceful and has shown no sign that it will submit to P5+1 demands – most recently described as the “stop, shut and ship” demand (Iran should stop enriching uranium to 19.75 percent, shut down its Fordow plant and ship out its stockpile of its 19.75-enriched grade of uranium) – without substantial sanctions relief and acknowledgement of what Iran interprets as its right to enrich uranium according to its interpretation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Hopes for bilateral talks between Iran and the U.S. were also dashed last week after a speech by Iran’s Leader Ali Khamenei was interpreted by the Western press as a rejection of direct talks.

“The U.S. is pointing a gun at Iran and wants us to talk to them. The Iranian nation will not be intimidated by these actions,” said the leader on Feb. 7.

But some analysts contend that bilateral talks, as with progress on the nuclear issue, remains possible.

“…the Leader did not explicitly rule out bilateral talks. He merely voiced deep scepticism as to whether they would lead to a resolution of the nuclear dispute,” wrote Peter Jenkins, the UK’s former ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), on IPS’s foreign policy blog on Feb. 8.

“To goad Iran into entering direct talks with the U.S., the Americans must come up with ways to show that they are serious about finding a peaceful solution,” Mohammad Ali Shabani, an Iranian political analyst based in London, told IPS.

“The Obama administration can do this by either taking on Congress to secure concessions, or pushing the European members of the P5+1 to lift EU sanctions,” he said.

While the P5+1 will reportedly present Iran with an updated proposal that will include “sanctions relief” in return for verifiable moves by the Iranians that their nuclear programme is entirely peaceful, few are expecting substantial progress during this round of talks, particularly because Iran is getting ready for its June presidential election.

The Iranians are unlikely to allow substantial nuclear progress to be made while Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is president, according to Shabani, who edits the Iranian Review of Foreign Affairs website.

“The best that can be achieved in Kazakhstan is for all sides to agree on some kind of road map for how to end the nuclear crisis down the road, and agree on a series of technical-level meetings to pave the way for high-level political talks later this year,” Shabani told IPS.

“Tearing down the wall of mistrust will not be easy,” said Laingen, who first served in Iran in 1953, during the Capitol Hill briefing Monday.

“But brick by brick, every step toward that goal advances the national security interests of the U.S. and Israel and other allies in the region, which are threatened by the spectre of another war in the powder keg of the Middle East,” he said.

By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, Feb 25 2013 (IPS)

“Going to Tehran” arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far.

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett tackle not only U.S. policy toward Iran but the broader context of Middle East policy with a systematic analytical perspective informed by personal experience, as well as very extensive documentation.

More importantly, however, their exposé required a degree of courage that may be unparalleled in the writing of former U.S. national security officials about issues on which they worked. They have chosen not just to criticise U.S. policy toward Iran but to analyse that policy as a problem of U.S. hegemony.

Their national security state credentials are impeccable. They both served at different times as senior coordinators dealing with Iran on the National Security Council Staff, and Hillary Mann Leverett was one of the few U.S. officials who have been authorised to negotiate with Iranian officials.

Both wrote memoranda in 2003 urging the George W. Bush administration to take the Iranian “roadmap” proposal for bilateral negotiations seriously but found policymakers either uninterested or powerless to influence the decision. Hillary Mann Leverett even has a connection with the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), having interned with that lobby group as a youth.

After leaving the U.S. government in disagreement with U.S. policy toward Iran, the Leveretts did not follow the normal pattern of settling into the jobs where they would support the broad outlines of the U.S. role in world politics in return for comfortable incomes and continued access to power.

Instead, they have chosen to take a firm stand in opposition to U.S. policy toward Iran, criticising the policy of the Barack Obama administration as far more aggressive than is generally recognised. They went even farther, however, contesting the consensus view in Washington among policy wonks, news media and Iran human rights activists that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election in June 2009 was fraudulent.

The Leveretts’ uncompromising posture toward the policymaking system and those outside the government who support U.S. policy has made them extremely unpopular in Washington foreign policy elite circles. After talking to some of their antagonists, The New Republic even passed on the rumor that the Leveretts had become shills for oil companies and others who wanted to do business with Iran.

The problem for the establishment, however, is that they turned out to be immune to the blandishments that normally keep former officials either safely supportive or quiet on national security issues that call for heated debate.

In “Going to Tehran”, the Leveretts elaborate on the contrarian analysis they have been making on their blog (formerly “The Race for Iran” and now “Going to Tehran”) They take to task those supporting U.S. systematic pressures on Iran for substituting wishful thinking that most Iranians long for secular democracy, and offer a hard analysis of the history of the Iranian revolution.

In an analysis of the roots of the legitimacy of the Islamic regime, they point to evidence that the single most important factor that swept the Khomeini movement into power in 1979 was “the Shah’s indifference to the religious sensibilities of Iranians”. That point, which conflicts with just about everything that has appeared in the mass media on Iran for decades, certainly has far-reaching analytical significance.

The Leveretts’ 56-page review of the evidence regarding the legitimacy of the 2009 election emphasises polls done by U.S.-based Terror Free Tomorrow and World Public Opinon and Canadian-based Globe Scan and 10 surveys by the University of Tehran. All of the polls were consistent with one another and with official election data on both a wide margin of victory by Ahmadinejad and turnout rates.

The Leveretts also point out that the leading opposition candidate, Hossein Mir Mousavi, did not produce “a single one of his 40,676 observers to claim that the count at his or her station had been incorrect, and none came forward independently”.

“Going to Tehran” has chapters analysing Iran’s “Grand Strategy” and on the role of negotiating with the United States that debunk much of which passes for expert opinion in Washington’s think tank world. They view Iran’s nuclear programme as aimed at achieving the same status as Japan, Canada and other “threshold nuclear states” which have the capability to become nuclear powers but forego that option.

The Leveretts also point out that it is a status that is not forbidden by the nuclear non-proliferation treaty – much to the chagrin of the United States and its anti-Iran allies.

In a later chapter, they allude briefly to what is surely the best-kept secret about the Iranian nuclear programme and Iranian foreign policy: the Iranian leadership’s calculation that the enrichment programme is the only incentive the United States has to reach a strategic accommodation with Tehran. That one fact helps to explain most of the twists and turns in Iran’s nuclear programme and its nuclear diplomacy over the past decade.

One of the propaganda themes most popular inside the Washington beltway is that the Islamic regime in Iran cannot negotiate seriously with the United States because the survival of the regime depends on hostility toward the United States.

The Leveretts debunk that notion by detailing a series of episodes beginning with President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s effort to improve relations in 1991 and again in 1995 and Iran’s offer to cooperate against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and, more generally after 9/11, about which Hillary Mann Leverett had personal experience.

Finally, they provide the most detailed analysis available on the 2003 Iranian proposal for a “roadmap” for negotiations with the United States, which the Bush administration gave the back of its hand.

The central message of “Going to Tehran” is that the United States has been unwilling to let go of the demand for Iran’s subordination to dominant U.S. power in the region. The Leveretts identify the decisive turning point in the U.S. “quest for dominance in the Middle East” as the collapse of the Soviet Union, which they say “liberated the United States from balance of power constraints”.

They cite the recollection of senior advisers to Secretary of State James Baker that the George H. W. Bush administration considered engagement with Iran as part of a post-Gulf War strategy but decided in the aftermath of the Soviet adversary’s disappearance that “it didn’t need to”.

Subsequent U.S. policy in the region, including what former national security adviser Bent Scowcroft called “the nutty idea” of “dual containment” of Iraq and Iran, they argue, has flowed from the new incentive for Washington to maintain and enhance its dominance in the Middle East.

The authors offer a succinct analysis of the Clinton administration’s regional and Iran policies as precursors to Bush’s Iraq War and Iran regime change policy. Their account suggests that the role of Republican neoconservatives in those policies should not be exaggerated, and that more fundamental political-institutional interests were already pushing the U.S. national security state in that direction before 2001.

They analyse the Bush administration’s flirtation with regime change and the Obama administration’s less-than-half-hearted diplomatic engagement with Iran as both motivated by a refusal to budge from a stance of maintaining the status quo of U.S.-Israeli hegemony.

Consistent with but going beyond the Leveretts’ analysis is the Bush conviction that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq had shaken the Iranians, and that there was no need to make the slightest concession to the regime. The Obama administration has apparently fallen into the same conceptual trap, believing that the United States and its allies have Iran by the throat because of its “crippling sanctions”.

Thanks to the Leveretts, opponents of U.S. policies of domination and intervention in the Middle East have a new and rich source of analysis to argue against those policies more effectively.

*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Excerpt:

Mali, long praised as a stable democracy and success story, was in reality a fragile state that collapsed, says a new report. Burned cars and abandoned tanks are relics of the violent fighting in Diabaly. Credit: Marc-André Boisvert/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Feb 20 2013 (IPS)

Development workers and aid strategists are urging the U.S. government to adopt a comprehensive strategy for addressing root problems in “fragile states”, warning that an outdated focus on military intervention is draining resources and exacerbating security problems.

Noting Washington’s ongoing policy confusion over how to deal with the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprisings, researchers with the Washington office of the Society for International Development (SID), an international network, are suggesting a restructuring of parts of the federal government to allow for longer-term planning and state-building initiatives.

A new high-level State Department position, the SID researchers say, should be mandated to focus on four issues: demographic pressures, inequality, fragmented security structures and state legitimacy.If our counterterrorism relationship with Egypt served as the core of our relationship, what tariff did we pay on other things that … would have been really important?

Importantly, they are also urging a delinking of state-building initiatives from broader military and intelligence activities. Not only do these latter remain focused largely on counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency approaches, but they have tended to lurch from short-term crisis to crisis.

“Mali, for example, long praised as a stable democracy and success story, was in reality a fragile state that collapsed,” notes a new SID report, released here on Tuesday (online copies are not yet available). “Currently, some 40-60 states, representing over one billion people, are fragile political entities and potential arenas of instability.”

Beyond the security concerns, this has serious implications for development aims. According to the World Bank, by 2015 half of those living on less than 1.25 dollars a day will be in fragile countries. Further, the problem is getting worse, with research from the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, reporting that extreme poverty doubled in fragile states from 2005 to 2010.

Yet, the report states, “The U.S. does not have a strategy for addressing the fundamental problem of fragile states.” Just two parts of the U.S. government are said to have a functioning definition on what constitutes a “fragile state” – the army and USAID, the overseas development agency.

“Because of the trends of history after World War II, the Cold War and now the threat of terrorism, an awful lot of our security policy tends towards military solutions,” General (Rtd.) Michael Hayden, a strategist now with George Mason University, said Tuesday at the release of the SID report.

“Fundamentally, the U.S. national security structure comes out of a law passed by Congress in 1947, and it’s a structure well-suited to the problems of the mid-20th century.”

Hayden told IPS that Egypt was one fragile state where the United States’ singular focus on the “war on terror” proved counterproductive.

“If our counterterrorism relationship with Egypt served as the core of our relationship, what tariff did we pay on other things that … would have been really important?” he asked.

“For example, how much did the American embassy [in Cairo] feel free to reach out to the Muslim Brotherhood or establish contacts with the political opposition? And was that harnessed by how much they did or did not want to put the counterterrorism relationship at risk?”

Hayden suggests that such an approach may have made sense for a few years after the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, but says “even I can’t deny that this distorts other things that in the long term might be more important.”

Diplomatic experiment

The United States is far from alone in its failure to commit significant resources to addressing the base causes of instability in fragile states. However, some European countries have recently made moves in this direction.

Over the past two years, the British government has moved to target the bulk of its overseas aid programmes towards countries deemed fragile. The German government, too, has announced that it will be overhauling its official strategy for dealing with fragile states.

To a great extent, this new discussion is being led by the United Nations, which is currently debating how to add the unique concerns of fragile countries to the post-2015 iterations of the Millennium Development Goals. And, in late 2011, 19 countries agreed to become part of a framework known as the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States, under which unstable states agree to a series of self-assessments aimed at strengthening certain indicators.

According to Pauline H. Baker, a co-author of the new SID report, the proposed framework, which she calls a “new diplomatic experiment”, needs to be seen as the United States’ potential offering to this discussion.

“There’s been a growing literature on this whole phenomenon, but very little government thinking about fragile states as a category of threats to security,” she says. “Previous studies have tended to focus on terrorism, political extremism or mass atrocities, but our view is that the United States needs to address the underlying drivers of this fragility, not merely react to the symptoms.”

This mindset has not subsided, she suggests, and instead is currently finding new ground.

“People are talking about Africa being the new frontier for counterterrorism, and all of the news that we’re seeing is all about military approaches,” she says. “But if you really want to fight terrorism, you have to fight the conditions that gave rise to it, and those are not military solutions – those are non-military solutions.”

She continues: “You have to deal with inequality, with demographic pressure, with the security forces in how they behave and how they’re structured.”

Willing partners

This conversation could well be moving forward in development policymaking here. In late January, a U.S. Army major made a high-profile call for USAID to be given a seat on the National Security Council.

Yet it remains unclear how exactly policymakers would decide on which fragile countries to engage with more closely. Baker and others involved in the new report stress that such initiatives would only work if Washington were to engage only with “willing partners”.

“We were very strong in saying that we can’t just barge in and say, ‘You’re a fragile state and this is the way we think you should be running things,’” she told IPS.

Instead, she says, the programme would require an “equal partnership” as well as a willingness to commit to broad-reaching reforms.

“In some cases – Afghanistan being one of them – we didn’t quite assess the commitment side of the story,” she says. “Countries who have regime survival as their primary focus, we won’t work with them – not until we know we’re working with a group of reformers who we feel really want to change their country.”

The United States is applying different standards in its public criticism of the human rights record of authoritarian states of the former Soviet Union (FSU), according to a new report released here Monday by the Open Society Institute (OSI).

The key variable, according to “Human Rights and the Failings of U.S. Public Diplomacy in Eurasia”, appears to be the perceived strategic importance of the specific country.

While the Belarus government is consistently criticised harshly for suppressing dissidents, reproaches to no-less authoritarian regimes in other FSU countries whose cooperation is needed to supply U.S. troops in Afghanistan, for example, are muted, according to the report.

“No one expects U.S. rhetoric with respect to adversaries like Belarus to be identical to its rhetoric about countries with which it has a security partnership,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), after reading the report.

“But the degree to which U.S. diplomats in Central Asia sometimes seem to be apologising for U.S. policies on human rights was surprising to me. It would be a good idea if we hadn’t learned any lessons from the days of supporting dictators before the Arab Spring,” he told IPS.

Indeed, the 11-page report noted that, “U.S. officials publicly laud countries such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan that are vital to the U.S. mission in Afghanistan or other key interests, while saying as little as possible about these countries’ failings in the areas of human rights and democracy,” according to the report.

It said that such double standards not only invite cynicism toward Washington and undermine its credibility on rights-related issues, but could also eventually prove counter-productive.

“The long-term danger this perception creates is amply visible in public opinion surveys of attitudes towards the United States carried out in Egypt after the fall of Hosni Mubarak,” the report noted.

Mubarak, who resigned in the face of a popular revolt two years ago, was rarely criticised by Washington for his human rights record and manipulation of elections during his 29-year reign in major part because of his role in upholding the 1979 Camp David peace accords with Israel.

Washington’s long-time support for Mubarak, despite an 11th-hour call by President Barack Obama for him to resign, is widely blamed for the low regard in which the Egyptian public appears to hold the U.S.

Eighty-five percent of respondents in a University of Maryland survey of Egyptian opinion last May said their overall opinion of the U.S. was negative.

As indicated by the Egypt experience, the problem of double standards in U.S. human rights positions is hardly a new one.

During most of the Cold War, for example, Washington defended or only mildly criticised military dictatorships in Latin America and apartheid in South Africa for fear that harsh criticism could open the way for left-wing governments sympathetic to the Soviet Union.

The Obama administration’s more-recent reaction to the so-called “Arab Spring” has not been much different.

While repression by authoritarian regimes perceived as hostile or marginal to U.S. interests, notably Libya and Syria, were strongly denounced, the Gulf monarchies, including Bahrain where the regime has cracked down hard against the majority Shi’a population, has been handled with kid gloves. The U.S. Fifth fleet is based in Bahrain.

The OSI report recognises that “a completely uniform response to human rights is unrealistic given the many different relationships the United States has around the world.”

But, it argues, “it is imperative that U.S. public diplomacy around these issues be more consistent so that other governments take U.S. pronouncements on human rights more seriously and public opinion abroad is less cynical when the U.S. does speak out.”

In particular, the report contrasts the public treatment of abuses in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan – both of which host key components of the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), the land-based transport network used by the U.S. and its NATO allies to ship supplies to coalition troops their 90,000 troops in Afghanistan – with that of Belarus and Tajikistan whose strategic importance to Washington is far less, but whose governments are no more repressive.

Reviewing public statements by senior administration officials, including Obama himself, and U.S. ambassadors about bilateral relations, the report’s author, Amy McDonough, found a consistent “focus on the positive” for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, as well as an emphasis on the notion that they were “key partners” with which Washington intended to “co-operate closely”.

“While democracy and human rights are sometimes mentioned as part of the bilateral dialogue, they literally take a backseat, coming farther down the list of issues addressed than those that the United States the United States deems more pressing,” the report noted.

On those relatively rare occasions – usually after a violent incident, such as last year’s labour protests in Kazakhstan, in one of the two countries – that the administration has spoken out, it has expressed concern about rights abuses. But in such cases, the emphasis has tended to be Washington’s eagerness to “work with” the countries in addressing these problems.

Similarly, while Washington has publicly stressed its support for democratic reforms and free and fair elections, it has eschewed the stronger language – such as “insisting” that such reforms be implemented as a condition of improved relations – that it has applied to Belarus.

Similarly, it has denounced specific incidents of repression in both Belarus in particularly blunt terms.

The contrast in how Washington reacted to last year’s elections in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan – both found to have been deeply flawed by observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) – showed a similar double standard, according to the report.

The re-election of Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev – with 96 percent of the vote – was greeted warmly by Washington, which noted only in passing “the shortcomings” detailed in the (OSCE) report but “welcome(d) Kazakhstan’s commitment to further liberalise the political environment…”

Not so the election in Tajikistan – the only one of the three Central Asian countries that is not linked to the NSN – where the U.S. embassy published a statement that cited the many irregularities found by the observers in considerable detail.

“We feel that U.S. policy towards Central Asia should have been more forceful on human rights issues,” T. Kumar, director of international advocacy at Amnesty International USA, told IPS.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Participants of Duan Yuezhong’s Chinese language class conducted in a local park. Credit: Suvendrini Kakuchi/IPS

By Suvendrini Kakuchi
TOKYO, Sep 29 2012 (IPS)

While the 40^th anniversary of the normalisation of Japan-China relations passed under a dark shadow of rising tensions and bitter territorial disputes in East Asia, a strand of citizen-based diplomacy at the grassroots level is emerging in Japan as a path towards regional reconciliation.

Sabre rattling between Japan and its neighbours – namely its primary economic competitors, China and South Korea – reached new heights at the United Nations General Assembly currently underway in New York when Chinese president Hu Jintao dismissed Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiko Noda’s claims to a disputed chain of islands as “illegal and invalid”.

The uninhabited archipelago in the East China Sea, which may shelter large deposits of natural gas, are known as the Senkaku Islands in Japan, Diayou in China and the Tiaoyutai Islands in Taiwan.

The possibly resource-rich cluster that lies below Japan’s southernmost island of Okinawa has long been a major bone of contention between China and Japan, with Taiwan, too, laying claim to the territory.

The Japanese government’s proposal to buy the islands from a private owner sparked a wave of protest across 50 cities in China earlier this month.

The violence, which included the destruction of several Japanese establishments, forced a number of staff members to relocate back to Japan, while hundreds of Japanese tourists cancelled their visits to China.

The Senkaku Islands were not the only source of conflict at the U.N. this week. On Thursday, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak rejected Noda’s vow to protect Japan’s sea and land space – an obvious reference by the latter to the dispute with South Korea over ownership of Takeshima, a pair of rocky islets known in Korean as Dokto.

A street poll conducted by the Tokyo-based Nippon Broadcasting Corporation this month indicated the Japanese public wants the government to take a stronger stance in these territorial disputes, particular where South Korea is concerned.

East Asia political experts here view these tensions as a further threat to the rocky bilateral relations that have existed since diplomatic ties were established with China in 1972 and with South Korea in 1965.

But a growing number of concerned citizens are convinced that grassroots efforts and local diplomacy can help defuse tensions between the agitated neighbours.

These concerned voices are calling for a cooling down of the situation in an attempt to prevent mutual economic losses, trade boycotts or suffocation of the free flow of students, professionals, artists and information between the various countries.

A citizens’ movement for change?

Duan Yuezhong, a Chinese national living in Tokyo, is very dedicated to this movement. Undeterred by political hot-headedness, he is conducting a discussion group for the Japanese public.

“Nothing can stop my efforts in Japan towards a citizen-based approach to nurture closer ties between China and Japan. To withdraw now is to give up on the future,” he told IPS.

Yuezhong, a former journalist in China, has spent almost two decades in Japan. He owns a publishing company that prints books specialising in Japan-China relations and also conducts popular Chinese-language classes at a local park.

Yuezhong has great faith in the fledging citizen’s movement that highlights the need for political restraint and the importance of objective negotiations between countries.

Akiko Ozaki, a Japanese businesswoman who set up a travel agency in China two years ago, echoed these sentiments. She appealed to participants of her annual tour to Dalian, a major port city in the northeast of China, to go ahead with their visit scheduled for next month.

“My tour may survive. For ordinary people like us who have developed close business ties with China it is very difficult to throw away (our) hard work because of political (stubbornness),” she told IPS.

While economic ties have cemented East Asia as a formidable bloc — China has now overtaken the United States to become Japan’s top trading partner — mistrust is deep-rooted due to Japan’s history of colonisation in the region.

“There is a huge perception gap when it comes to understanding Japanese colonisation in all the three countries,” according to professor Masao Okonogi, an expert on Japan-Korea relations at Kyushu University.

“Against the growing international clout of China and South Korea, Japan must seek to put the past behind it,” he explained.

In an effort to do just this, Okonogi participated in several joint study programmes on history that took place on an annual basis between Japan and South Korea until the project was disbanded two years ago.

“Political interference on both sides dealt a severe blow to crucial attempts to foster a deeper sense of mutual understanding of the historical past but we must persevere,” he explained.

Yoichi Tao, scientist and manager of Global Voices – a website that hosts a myriad opinions including those of Chinese and Korean students in Japan – says space for wider debate on differences between Japan and its East Asian neighbours is crucial.

“Pursuing economic development has pushed the vital importance of bridging (misunderstandings) to the back burner. The latest upheaval has (proven) that the economy alone does not bring stability in East Asia,” he told IPS.

Kao Hui Fen, a Taiwanese national in Tokyo, cannot agree more. Fen says after fifteen years in Japan she has become more outspoken about Japanese colonisation of her country, an approach that has not caused her problems.

“I tell my Japanese friends that colonisation is bad. They do not respond angrily and some are even willing to discuss the past objectively,” she said.

Tao believes that sharing honest opinions at the civilian level can weaken conservative and narrow political agendas that have long divided Japan and its closest Asian neighbours.

“People can lead the way forward in East Asia where emotional historical issues have bogged us down for too long,” he said.

(END)

Amid the persistent beating of war drums, an influential international conflict prevention group is insisting that a deal between Western countries and Iran on Tehran’s controversial nuclear programme can still be reached.

In a new report released Thursday, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) said such a deal would include Tehran’s acceptance of full-scope international safeguards to ensure the programme could not be diverted to military use.

It would also entail Iran’s full co-operation in clearing up outstanding questions regarding alleged pre-2003 nuclear weaponisation research and experimentation, and an exchange of its current stockpile of twenty percent enriched uranium for fuel rods from abroad.

In exchange, the so-called P5+1 countries (the U.N. Security Council’s five permanent members – the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China – plus Germany) would freeze implementation of tough new U.S. and European Union (EU) sanctions, recognise Iran’s “right to enrich” uranium up to five percent and lift existing sanctions in stages.

The 45-page report, “In Heavy Waters: Iran’s Nuclear Program, the Risk of War and Lessons from Turkey”, called on the United States and the EU to take their cue from Ankara’s approach of full engagement with Iran, instead of isolation, sanctions, sabotage and threats of war on which they have mainly relied to date.

“(A) world community in desperate need of fresh thinking could do worse than learn from Turkey’s experience and test its assumptions,” the report noted, suggesting that Iran be engaged at all levels and “that those engaging it… include a larger variety of countries, including emerging powers with which it feels greater affinity”.

“Economic pressure is at best futile, at worse counter-productive,” it added, and “Tehran ought to be presented with a realistic proposal.

“If it is either sanctions, whose success is hard to imagine, or military action, whose consequences are terrifying to contemplate, that is not a choice,” it said. “It is an abject failure.”

The report comes amid continuing speculation about a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The administration of President Barack Obama is also under growing pressure by pro-Israel lawmakers in Congress to impose new sanctions against Iran and take concrete steps, including dispatching more naval forces to the Gulf, to enhance the threat of U.S. military action against Tehran if it does not agree to abandon its nuclear programme.

It also comes in the wake of two visits to Tehran by high-level delegations from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) whose requests to visit a facility on a military base suspected of having been used to test triggering devices for nuclear weapons were reportedly rebuffed.

The delegation and its hosts also failed to agree on an agenda for clearing up outstanding questions regarding Tehran’s past research that Western nations believe may have been part of a weaponisation programme.

Reviving negotiations

Despite the IAEA’s apparent lack of progress, Iran’s acceptance last week of a long-standing request from EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton on behalf of the P5+1 to resume negotiations, stalled for over a year, makes it likely that a new round of talks will take place in late March or April, probably in Istanbul, according to analysts here.

Anticipation of those talks, as well as the rapid escalation of tensions over the last two months, particularly between Israel and Iran, has provoked a flurry of proposals to revive the dormant diplomatic track, if only to calm a situation threatening to spin out of control.

Those proposals contain the same or similar recommendations to those included in the ICG report.

Early this month, for example, two former top-ranking U.S. diplomats, ICG Chair Thomas Pickering and William Luers, called in a New York Times op-ed for the IAEA and the U.N. Security Council to accept a Iranian nuclear programme with certain conditions attached.

The programme would include uranium enrichment to no more than five percent “in return for Iran’s agreeing to grant inspectors full access to that programme to assure that Iran did not build a nuclear weapons”.

Such a bargain – part of a broader initiative to build confidence and co-operation between the U.S. and Iran on a range of issues of common interest, including Afghanistan and Iraq – would result in the progressive reduction of U.N. sanctions against Iran once the inspection regime was in place.

That proposal was strongly endorsed by the president emeritus of the influential Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie Gelb.

“For sure, neither I nor anyone else knows whether Iran will accept this time. But I do know this: if we don’t at least try the negotiating track, a war of untold uncertainties and dangers can come upon us,” he wrote in the Daily Beast.

The same basic bargain was also endorsed by Seyed Hossein Mousavian, an Iranian diplomat currently at Princeton University, who served as spokesman for Iran’s nuclear negotiating team, in a column for Bloomberg News in mid-February.

Iran should accept the maximum level of transparency with the IAEA, limit enrichment activities to less than five percent, and clear up its nuclear file with the IAEA, he argued, while the West should recognise Tehran’s right to enrich and ease sections as part of a “step-by-step plan” proposed by Russia last year.

Perhaps the most intriguing contribution was from Dennis Ross, formerly Obama’s chief Iran aide and long considered a hawk on the nuclear issue.

In a Times op-ed, he suggested that the administration was ready to accept a deal that combined intrusive inspections with limits on uranium enrichment and he cited Moscow’s step-by-step approach favourably, although he did not address when and how existing sanctions could be eased.

Turkish lessons

The new ICG report notes that Turkey, which has ruled out military action against Iran, has “useful experience” in dealing with Iran’s nuclear issue, primarily through its efforts with Brazil in 2010 to work out a confidence-building deal – much of which incorporated the basic elements of the Crisis Group proposal – acceptable to both the P5+1 and Iran.

While the deal was summarily rejected by the U.S. and the EU at the time, Ankara has since worked closely with the Obama administration on a range of major issues during the so-called Arab Spring.

Indeed, Obama has come to consider Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan one of his favourite foreign leaders.

Adding to Ankara’s credibility has been its opposition to broad sanctions and its support for dialogue with Iran – positions similar to the views of Russia and China, the report noted.

“This is not to say that Turkey is amenable to a nuclear-armed Iran,” the report said.

“But it is far more sympathetic to the view that the West cannot dictate who can have a nuclear capacity and who cannot; is less alarmist when it comes to the status of Iran’s program; and believes that the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran is both distant and unsure.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.