By Ignacio Ramonet
PARIS, Jul 7 2014 (IPS)

In ‘Hard Choices’, her new book about her experiences as Secretary of State during U.S. President Barack Obama’s first term (2008-2012), Hillary Clinton writes something of prime importance about Cuba – she says that late in her term in office she urged Obama to reconsider the U.S. embargo against Cuba.
“It wasn’t achieving its goals, and it was holding back our broader agenda across Latin America.”

Ignacio Ramonet

For the first time a U.S. presidential hopeful has publicly stated that the blockade imposed by Washington on the Caribbean island – for over fifty years! – is “not achieving its goals”.

In other words, the embargo has not subdued this small country in spite of the amount of unjust suffering it has caused for its population.

The essence of Hillary Clinton’s declaration is two-fold: first, it breaks the taboo on saying out loud what everyone in Washington has known for some time: that the blockade is useless.

And second, and more importantly, her statement comes at the moment when her campaign is being launched for the Democratic Party nomination to the White House; that is, she is not afraid that her affirmation – in opposition to all of Washington policies towards Cuba over the past half century – could be a handicap in the electoral battle she faces up until the elections of November 8, 2016.

If Hillary Clinton takes such an unorthodox position, it is because she is aware that public opinion on this topic in the United States has changed, and that the majority today is in favour of ending the blockade.

Indeed, a nationwide poll in February 2014 by the Atlantic Council research institute, found that 56 percent of U.S. respondents favour changing Washington’s policy towards Cuba.

Contrary to hopes that arose after U.S. President Barack Obama was elected in November 2008, Washington’s relations with Cuba have remained on ice. Just after taking office in April 2009, Obama announced at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago that the United States was seeking a “new beginning” in its relationship with Havana.

“Washington’s attitude towards Cuba is still reactionary, typical of the Cold War era which has been over for a quarter of a century. Its archaic stance is in sharp contrast to the position taken by other governments”
But he made only limited, largely symbolic, gestures, permitting Cuban Americans to visit the island and send small amounts of money to their families. Later, in 2011, he adopted further measures but these were still of limited scope: he allowed religious groups and students to travel to Cuba, authorised U.S. airports to handle charter flights to Cuba, and increased the limit on remittances Cuban Americans could send to their relatives. Not much in comparison with the huge disputes that divide the two countries.

One of their differences – the case of ‘the Cuban Five’ – has caused an international commotion. Five Cuban intelligence agents, engaged in the prevention of anti-Cuban terrorism, were detained in Florida in September 1998. They were convicted in a Cold War style political trial – a real courtroom lynching – and sentenced to long prison terms. The injustice of their treatment is clear from the fact that they had committed no acts of violence, nor spied on U.S. security secrets, but had risked their lives to prevent attacks and save human lives.

Washington is inconsistent when it claims to combat “international terrorism” yet continues to back anti-Cuban terrorist groups on its own soil. For instance, in April 2014 the Cuban authorities arrested another group of four people arriving from Florida with intent to commit attacks.

Washington’s attitude towards Cuba is still reactionary, typical of the Cold War era which has been over for a quarter of a century. Its archaic stance is in sharp contrast to the position taken by other governments.

For example, all Latin American and Caribbean states, whatever their political orientations, have recently improved relations with Cuba and denounced the blockade. This was proved in January at the summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) held in Havana.

Washington was snubbed again in May at the general assembly of the Organisation of American States (OAS) in Cochabamba, Bolivia, when Latin American countries, in a fresh show of solidarity with Havana, threatened to boycott the next Summit of the Americas scheduled for 2015 in Panama if Cuba is not invited.

For its part, the European Union decided in February to abandon its so-called “common position” on relations with Cuba, imposed in 1996 by José María Aznar, the then Spanish prime minister, to “punish” Cuba by rejecting all dialogue with the island’s authorities. But the policy proved fruitless and it failed. Brussels has recognised this and has reinstated negotiations with Havana to reach agreement on political and economic cooperation.

The European Union is Cuba’s biggest foreign investor and its second most important trading partner. Reflecting this new spirit, several European ministers have already visited the island.

In contrast with Washington’s immobility, many European foreign ministries are observing with interest the changes President Raúl Castro is promoting in Cuba in the framework of “updating the economic model” and the line taken at the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) in 2011, which are highly significant transformations of the economy and society. The recent creation of a special development zone around the port of Mariel, and the approval in March of a new foreign investment law, in particular, have excited great international interest.

The Cuban authorities see no contradiction between socialism and private enterprise. According to some estimates, private enterprise, including foreign investment, could expand to take up 40 percent of the country’s economy, while 60 percent would remain in the hands of the state and the public sector.

The goal is for the Cuban economy to be increasingly compatible with those of its major partners in the region (Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador and Bolivia) where public and private sectors, the state and markets coexist.

All these changes highlight by contrast the stubbornness of the U.S. Administration, painted into the corner of an ideological position dating from another era, even if, as we have seen, more voices are raised day by day in Washington to acknowledge the error of this position and the need to abandon international isolation in terms of its Cuban policy. Will President Obama listen to them? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Excerpt:

U.S. President Barack Obama’s weeklong visit to Asia was meant to reassure allies in the region of American support and re-engagement. But it raised Chinese hackles and failed to dispel doubts over his administration’s ‘pivot to Asia’ strategy.

During his visit to Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines Apr. 23-29, Obama repeatedly asserted that the key to prosperity in Asia lay in China playing by the rules, rather than bending them to suit its own interests.Chinese commentators have referred to the Obama visit as an effort to form an Asian version of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

His final stop was in Manila, traditionally a staunch U.S. ally that has an ongoing dispute with China over islands in the South China Sea. The Philippines and the U.S. signed an Agreement on Enhanced Defence Cooperation (AEDC) that will allow the U.S. to redeploy military forces in the islands for the first time in over two decades.

“Our territorial conflicts with China are the reason for this new agreement,” noted Walden Bello, a member of parliament writing in the Philippines Daily Inquirer. “AEDC is the mechanism that will make the Chinese respect our rights to Scarborough Shoal, the nine islands and reefs we claim in the Spratly Islands, our continental shelf and our 200 Mile Exclusive Economic Zone. The truth of the matter, however, is that the deal will do no such thing.”

Bello, a long-term critic of U.S. policy in the region, argues, “What we see is Washington’s ‘exhibitionist syndrome’, that is, the imperative it feels to ‘show the flag’ to its allies and to China, and to do so in an inexpensive way, with no rent to the host country.”

Obama said in a speech at the Philippines Army headquarters in Manila that nations and peoples have the right to live in security and peace and have their sovereignty and territorial integrity respected. “We believe that international law must be upheld, that freedom of navigation must be preserved and commerce must not be impeded,” he said.

Critics say such comments have drawn further scepticism in the region because what Obama is preaching is not practised by his own nation – as the history of American foreign policy in the past two decades clearly shows. China has also latched on to such arguments to claim that it is the U.S. rather than China that is trying to destabilise the region.

“Obama’s rhetoric about peace and international law sounds hollow because it contradicts what Washington and (he) himself have been up to,” said the state-controlled China Daily in an editorial on Apr. 29, adding “it is now clear that Washington is no longer bothering to conceal its attempt to contain China’s influence in the region. It is even less convincing to say the U.S. pivot to the Asia-Pacific is not targeted against China.”

Announced in January 2012, the Obama administration’s ‘pivot to Asia’ strategy is a multi-dimensional one that includes improving bilateral relationships in the region, especially with its traditional allies; deepening working relationships with emerging powers, including China; and promoting trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region.

“Asian allies (such as Singapore and the Philippines) believe a U.S.-centric order is good for the region by and large,” argued Dr Tan See Seng, head of the Centre for Multilateralism Studies at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) here.

“America is one of the major countries that sets the rules and expects others to follow even as it breaks its own rules. China sees that point very clearly and doesn’t accept that,” Tan told IPS.

China Daily says that for a considerably long period, the Chinese have cherished the “naive thought” that Washington will rein in its unruly allies when they go too far. “Obama’s current trip should be a wake-up call that this is just wishful thinking,” it argued. “Ganging up with its troublemaking allies, the U.S. is presenting itself as a security threat to China.”

The troublesome allies China refers to are Japan and the Philippines. The dispute between Japan and China centres around the uninhabited islands that Japan calls Senkaku and China calls Diaoyu. Chinese claims to the islands are based on historical records going back to the Ming Dynasty in the 14th century but, at the end of World War II, Japan officially transferred ownership of the islands to the U.S. and, in 1972, the U.S. transferred it back to Japan, moves seen by China as illegal.

In an interview with Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, Obama has said that the islands fall under the U.S.-Japan Mutual Cooperation and Security Treaty and that Washington opposes any “unilateral attempts to undermine Japan’s administration of the islands.” This comment has ruffled many feathers in Beijing.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang was quoted in China Daily as saying that his country “firmly opposes” actions that place the Diaoyu Islands under the cover of the U.S.-Japan treaty and urged Washington to “speak and act cautiously.” He said, “China’s determination and will to safeguard territorial integrity, sovereignty and maritime interests is unshakeable.”

Chinese commentators have referred to the Obama visit as an effort to form an Asian version of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

But Dr Termsak Chalermpalanupap, lead researcher at the ASEAN Studies Centre of the National University of Singapore, told IPS that such an organisation was not necessary.

“Most countries in Southeast Asia don’t want confrontation with China,” argued Termsak, who worked with the ASEAN Secretariat for over 20 years. “China has become the top trading partner for most of these countries and what they welcome is more trade and economic integration with China.”

Dr Evan Resnick, Coordinator of the U.S. Programme at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore believes the U.S. is concerned about freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. “It’s a major artery for international commerce and the U.S. is interested in freedom of navigation for trade and military purposes,” he told IPS.

Tan argues that the U.S. has been used to the “hegemonic manifestation” of its power in the Asian region. But with an emerging China and nationalistic pride contributing to growing assertiveness in the South China Sea, the U.S. sees itself as a declining power and is troubled by what it believes is China’s challenge to it.

“Obama’s ‘pivot’ is an attempt to continue and maintain its interests,” he noted.

Despite renewed calls in Congress for increasing pressure on Iran, support for a U.S. attack against the Islamic Republic has declined markedly over the past year, according to the latest in an annual series of polls carried out by the American Jewish Committee (AJC).

Asked whether they would support a military strike if current diplomatic efforts and economic sanctions failed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, 52 percent of the AJC’s respondents said they would support a U.S. attack – down from 64 percent in last year’s survey – while 45 percent said they would oppose a strike, up from 34 percent in 2012.

Moreover, 46 percent of respondents said it was either very or somewhat likely that a combination of diplomacy and sanctions “can stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons,” up from a mere 35.5 percent last year. Conversely, 52 percent said the strategy was either somewhat or very unlikely to succeed in that goal, down significantly from 64 percent last year and 71 percent in 2011.

In another finding that should hearten Secretary of State John Kerry, who has made an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord a major goal of his tenure, the survey also found a sharp increase in the percent of U.S. Jews who favour the establishment of a Palestinian state – from 38 percent in 2011 to 50 percent today.

Despite Kerry’s efforts, however, only 12 percent of respondents said they believed the chances of reaching a final settlement have increased over the past year, as opposed to 19 percent who said they had fallen and 68 percent who said the odds have not been affected by the past year’s developments.

This year’s poll, which queried just over 1,000 U.S. Jews across the country, was conducted between Sep. 30 and Oct. 15; that is, immediately after the highly successful visit by Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, to New York for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly.

That visit, capped by a farewell phone call from President Barack Obama to Rouhani in the first conversation between the two heads of state since 1979, put the hawkish government of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who called Rouhani “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”, on the back foot.

Since the trip, and despite talks Sep. 15-16 in Geneva between the so-called P5+1 (United States, Britain, France, Russia and China plus Germany) and Iran that were hailed as potential progress toward an agreement to curb Tehran’s nuclear programme, Netanyahu and his supporters in the Israeli lobby here have repeatedly called for tighter sanctions and a credible threat of U.S. military action against Iran if it does not completely dismantle its programme.

Senior administration officials last week made clear in briefings with lawmakers that increasing sanctions – the Senate has pending legislation to force foreign companies and countries to halt all oil imports from Iran – before the next round of negotiations scheduled for Nov. 7-8 in Geneva could prove counterproductive by strengthening hardliners in Iran who oppose Rouhani’s diplomacy and by fraying the P5+1’s unity.

While the administration is focusing its lobbying efforts on Senate Democrats, Republican lawmakers, especially those closely associated with the Israeli lobby, have been calling for even tougher action.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the only Jewish Republican member of Congress, said Friday a military strike needed to be considered, calling a new report by a controversial think tank that said Iran could produce enough fissile material for a bomb in as little as one month “extremely alarming”. The administration claims that it would take Iran at least a year to be able to produce a nuclear weapon if it decided to do so.

Cantor’s remarks came in the wake of a mini-storm over an interview last week with Sheldon Adelson, a multi-billionaire and major funder of right-wing pro-Israel groups, in which he dismissed negotiations and called for Washington to detonate its own nuclear weapon over a desert in Iran as a warning.

“And then you say, ‘See! The next one is in the middle of Tehran,'” Adelson, who also serves as chairman of the Republican Jewish Committee (RJC) and provided at least five million dollars to a political action committee run by Cantor during the 2012 election cycle, told students at Yeshiva University in New York.

The remarks by Adelson, who is also a major supporter of Netanyahu, came under fire from some Jewish leaders, notably Eric Yoffie, who led the Union for Reform Judaism from 2006 to 2012 and who called them “”obtuse, insensitive, and morally bankrupt.”

Yoffie also urged leaders of major Jewish institutions to “decline invitations to appear at Mr. Adelson’s side,” in spite of his philanthropy, until he apologises.

The AJC’s executive director, David Harris, has himself criticised Netanyahu for his dismissive attitude toward Rouhani and for ordering Israel’s U.N. delegation to boycott the Iranian president’s speech to the U.N.

In Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, he questioned whether the boycott helped or hurt Israel’s case, adding that some “would say that Israel only demonstrated its unwillingness to hear the message, even if Rouhani turns out to be, say, the next Mikhail Gorbachev.”

While the AJC survey showed continued support for Netanyahu’s handling of U.S.-Israeli relations – 19 percent strongly approved, while 52 percent “approved somewhat” – the drop in support for a U.S. attack on Iran suggests that the Israeli leader has become less convincing. Moreover, the survey found 62 percent approved of Obama’s handling of Iran’s nuclear programme. Only 36 percent disapproved.

The survey also found a significant majority of U.S. Jews supported Obama’s handling of Syria, despite strong criticism from many of Washington’s pundits, especially pro-Israel neo-conservatives who have long favoured more aggressive U.S. action to oust President Bashar Al-Assad. Sixty percent of respondents expressed approval for Obama’s performance.

As the U.S. struggles with a weeks-long government shutdown which has threatened the country’s economic recovery and forced President Barack Obama to cancel a series of high-stakes visits to Asia, China has instead taken the centre-stage, boosting ties with Asian neighbours and promising multi-billion trade and investment deals.

Amid rising geopolitical tensions in the Western Pacific, Obama’s scheduled trip to Asia was meant to reassure allies and reiterate Washington’s commitment to regional stability. Moreover, Obama was also expected to make a strong pitch for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement (TPP-FTA), which aims to cover 12 Pacific Rim nations that collectively constitute about 40 percent of the global economy and a third of its total trade.

But facing a domestic political crisis, with the U.S. Congress blocking implementation of the Affordable Healthcare Act, the White House announced Obama’s decision to not only skip state visits to Malaysia and the Philippines, but also trips to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) as well as the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN) summits in Indonesia and Brunei."Obviously we prefer a U.S. government that is working than one that is not, and we prefer a U.S. President who is able to travel and fulfill his international duties to one that is preoccupied with domestic preoccupations.”

In Obama’s absence, Chinese President Xi Jinping took the limelight, becoming the first foreign leader to deliver a speech at the Indonesian Parliament and serving as the keynote speaker at the APEC summit (Oct. 7-8).

To up the ante, Xi offered to set up a 50 billion dollar Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank which is set to rival the U.S.-Japan-led Asian Development Bank (ADB) as the continent’s primary source of development aid.

“China will firmly uphold regional peace and stability and help cement a foundation for a win-win situation in the Asia-Pacific,” declared Xi at the APEC summit. He emphasised China’s role as Southeast Asia’s top economic partner and its emergence as a regional powerhouse. “China cannot develop in isolation of the Asia-Pacific, and the Asia-Pacific cannot prosper without China.”

Throughout the summit, Xi astutely glossed over China’s deepening territorial disputes with neighbouring countries, namely Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines, while emphasising the resilience of the Chinese economy and the depth of its interdependence with Southeast Asian neighbours.

Intent on undermining the TPP, a centerpiece of Washington’s pivot to Asia that ostensibly excludes China, Xi also pushed for the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) free trade agreement (FTA), which aims to consolidate already existing regional FTAs into an overarching trade arrangement, with China very much at its centre.

The ongoing TPP negotiations, which have been criticised for their lack of transparency, have met strong domestic opposition across member countries, especially in Asian countries such as Japan, Malaysia, and Vietnam. The TPP is widely characterised as a corporate-driven FTA, which aims to stringently uphold intellectual property rights, allow foreign companies to override domestic laws and sue member states, curtail consumer access to basic goods and services, and place restrictions on or/and dismantle state-owned enterprises.

“The TPP is designed as a second-best alternative to promote corporate interests via free trade given the stalemate at the World Trade Organisation,” Dr. Walden Bello, a renowned expert on trade-related issues, told IPS. “The benefits of trade accruing to corporations whatever their nationality with what will soon become the world’s biggest economy will undermine the U.S.’s geo-economic objective.”

Equipped with almost 200 billion dollars in foreign aid budget, China has become the prime economic force in Asia. While cautiously welcoming Beijing’s increased economic footprint, with Xi declaring a one trillion dollarChina-ASEAN trade target by 2020, Southeast leaders are, however, less impressed with Washington.

“Obviously we prefer a U.S. government that is working than one that is not, and we prefer a U.S. President who is able to travel and fulfill his international duties to one that is preoccupied with domestic concerns,” lamented Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, prodding Washington leaders to get their act together.

“And America has to continue to be engaged in this region because it plays a very important role which no other country can replace, not China, not Japan, not any other power.”

Immediately after the APEC summit, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, in turn, took the mantle of leadership at the ASEAN summit (Oct. 9-10) in Brunei. After months of hectic negotiations over establishing a new regional Code of Conduct (CoC) to peacefully resolve territorial disputes in the South China Sea, many were hoping for concrete indications of a diplomatic breakthrough.

With China earlier this year agreeing in principle to re-open negotiations over a CoC, there were expectations of new announcements on the contours of the proposed code, the composition of the technical group in charge of drafting its guidelines, and a detailed timetable for its conclusion.

Among Southeast Asian states such as the Philippines, which are locked in a bitter territorial dispute with China over a variety of features in the South China Sea, there was a great sense of urgency for a major diplomatic development.

Despite incessant efforts by major regional leaders from Japan, Australia and the U.S. (represented by Secretary of State John Kerry), however, there was hardly any sign of China softening its territorial stance, with Premier Li emphasising how China is “unshakable in its resolve to uphold national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

Alarmed by China’s assertive stance, and with little indications of the ASEAN collectively standing up to China on the territorial issue, Philippine President Benigno Aquino and his Vietnamese counterpart Prime Minster Nguyen Tan Dung held a meeting on the sidelines of the summit aiming to coordinate their efforts in preventing a conflict in the South China Sea and peacefully resolving disputes.

As an indication of the depth of bilateral tensions, Aquino’s effort to reach out to his Chinese counterpart was rebuffed, while Filipino and Chinese diplomats reportedly quarrelled over the wording of a paragraph regarding the territorial disputes in the ASEAN-China joint statement.

The Philippines, currently negotiating an expanded U.S. rotational military presence on it soil, was hoping for Obama to back its territorial claims and dissuade China from further territorial assertiveness.

But amid Washington’s shutdown and Obama’s absence, China was busy courting Southeast Asian states and elevating its regional profile by offering massive trade and investment incentives.

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.

Portraits of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Credit: james_gordon_losangeles/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Aug 30 2013 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama indicated Friday he would soon conduct what he called “very limited” military action against Syria to punish its alleged use of chemical weapons which, according to the White House, killed more than 1,400 people in several Damascus suburbs last week.

At a brief press appearance, Obama insisted that he still was consulting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill and foreign leaders and had not yet made a “final decision about various actions that might be taken” to enforce the international norm against the use of chemical weapons. The options he was considering “would be very limited and would not involve a long-term commitment or a major operation,” he said, and would “in no event…involve boots on the ground.”

“But we are looking at the possibility of a limited, narrow act that would help make sure that not only Syria, but others around the world, understands that the international community cares about maintaining this chemical weapons ban and norm,” he said, stressing that U.S. “national security interests” were at stake.

Obama spoke shortly after his secretary of state, John Kerry, read a lengthy statement summarising the unclassified evidence about the alleged attack and the Syrian government’s responsibility for it and stressing the importance of Washington and the world’s reaction.

Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons not only threatens international arms-limitations accords and potentially the security of neighbouring countries, notably Israel, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, according to Kerry, but it also “matters deeply to the credibility and the future interests of the United States of America and our allies.”

“It is directly related to our credibility and whether countries still believe the United States when it says something. They are watching to see if Syria can get away with it because then maybe they too can put the world at greater risk,” he said, explicitly citing Iran, Hezbollah and Iran.

“It is about whether Iran, which itself has been a victim of chemical weapons attacks, will now feel emboldened in the absence of action to obtain nuclear weapons. It is about Hezbollah, and North Korea, and every terrorist group or dictator that might ever again contemplate the use of weapons of mass destruction.”

As Kerry was speaking, the White House issued a four-page briefing paper apparently cleared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) about the alleged Aug. 21 attack. It concluded “with high confidence” – one level short of “confirmation” – that the Syrian government was responsible and that it was “highly unlikely” that opposition forces could have carried it out.

The paper said U.S. intelligence had intercepted communications involving a senior official who confirmed the regime had used chemical weapons and was concerned with the U.N. inspectors in the country at the time finding evidence. It also charged that in subsequent days Syrian artillery greatly intensified its shelling of the affected neighbourhood in an effort to cover up the evidence.

The paper, which was based on “human, signals, and geo-spatial intelligence, as well as a significant body of open source reporting”, including 100 videos, made what it called a “preliminary” assessment of 1,429 people killed in the attack, including at least 426 children.

Friday’s developments followed multiple setbacks to Obama’s efforts to rally support here and overseas for any military action he may undertake and which some observers believe could come as soon as Saturday, when U.N. inspectors are expected to leave Syria and report back to the world body.

While the Arab League earlier this week denounced Syria for the alleged attack, it did not endorse military reprisals, calling instead for the “Syrian regime [to be held] fully responsible.”

And, in a vote Thursday evening that stunned the administration, the British Parliament rejected a watered-down motion by Prime Minister David Cameron calling for consideration of international military action on humanitarian grounds in response to the chemical attack.

According to commentators, the vote – which means that, for the first time in the post-Cold War era, Britain is unlikely to join the U.S. as part of a military “coalition of the willing” – was attributed in large part to the legacy of distrust, especially about Washington’s misuse of intelligence, left by the George W. Bush administration in its drive to war in Iraq ten years ago.

That leaves France and Turkey as the only U.S. allies that have said they are willing to take action along with Washington, although some U.S. officials said Friday they believed more countries would join.

Back home, meanwhile, lawmakers, including some who were briefed by top administration officials in a 90-minute telephone conference call Thursday evening, appeared deeply divided both on the strategic wisdom of the kind of “limited” attack that Obama appears to be planning for and on whether he should be required to seek Congressional authorisation before an attack takes place.

More than 160 members have signed letters calling for Obama to ask Congress for authorisation. Particularly notable were statements issued over the past two days by the far-right senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, opposing any military action due to the “financial crisis in our military”.

Democrats have also voiced concern that even the “very limited” actions Obama is considering – reportedly “stand-off” strikes by ship-based cruise missiles against selected military targets – could create a “slippery slope” toward greater involvement in Syria’s civil war, particularly if Assad or his allies retaliate in some way, either by escalating the war or striking out against possible targets in other countries, notably Lebanon or Iraq both of which have seen an upswing in sectarian violence.

Still, faced with the shocking videos of the aftermath of last week’s alleged attack, an otherwise war-weary public appeared to be moving more in favour of military action, so long as it was indeed limited. Thirty-one percent of respondents in a poll taken earlier this week agreed with the proposition that the U.S. has a responsibility to prevent Syria from using chemical weapons.

In an NBC poll released Friday, 42 percent said the United States should take military actions against Syria’s government if it used chemical weapons against its citizens, while 50 percent said it should not. But when asked if the military action was limited to air strikes by cruise missiles against Syrian military units and infrastructure used for chemical warfare, 50 percent agreed, while 44 percent disagreed. Nearly 80 percent of respondents said Obama should be required to gain Congressional approval before taking military action.

In his remarks, Obama stressed both his understanding for what he called a “certain suspicion of any military action post-Iraq”.

“My preference obviously would have been that the international community already acted forcefully,” he said. “But what we have seen so far at least is an incapacity at this point for the [U.N.] Security Council to move forward in the face of a clear violation of international norms.”

Coal mining in Suesca, Colombia. Credit: Gloria Umaña

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jun 28 2013 (IPS)

The World Bank is set to consider dramatically cutting down its funding for coal-related power projects, according to a draft strategy document leaked this week.

The bank’s continued focus on coal projects, particularly in poor countries, has been a key frustration for environmentalists and some development experts, who have warned that such a stance is at odds with the Washington-based multilateral lender’s attempts to strengthen its focus on climate change mitigation and adaptation.

While the new moves would be applauded if passed, many are now expressing concern about the strategy’s apparent increased focus on natural gas and hydroelectric production.

“The [World Bank Group] is committed to maximising synergies between economic development and climate change mitigation. The WBG will cease providing financial support for greenfield coal power generation projects, except in rare circumstances,” the paper, a copy of which was seen by IPS but which is not available online, states.

“Considerations such as meeting basic energy needs in countries with no feasible alternatives to coal and a lack of financing for coal power would define such rare cases. Even in such cases, only a minimum level of WBG support would be deployed, with recourse to private-sector financing to the extent possible.”

The document, subtitled “Directions for the World Bank Group’s Energy Sector”, is slated to be discussed by the bank’s board on Jul. 19, according to a spokesperson, after which the strategy will be publicly released.

“The World Bank Group’s energy work is aligned with our twin goals of ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity,” Frederick Jones, a World Bank spokesperson, told IPS in a statement.

“The WBG is committed to universal access to electricity and safe household fuels, double the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix, and double the rate of improvement of energy efficiency.”

He noted that the bank approved a record 44 percent of its annual energy lending for renewables last year, valued at some 3.6 billion dollars. In terms of power-generation projects, that figure rose even higher, with renewables comprising 84 percent of financing.

But the bank is also currently considering funding for a 600-megawatt power plant in Kosovo, which would burn a particularly dirty form of coal called lignite. That project has been disparaged by Kosovar and international environmentalists.

Climate bank

“The World Bank is right to say that energy has a crucial role to play in eradicating poverty,” Nicolas Mombrial, head of the Washington office of Oxfam International, a humanitarian agency, told IPS.

“We’re also pleased to see the bank acknowledge that failing to move away from fossils fuels will have enormous environmental costs that ultimately will be born by the poorest and most vulnerable,” Mombrial added.

“Going forward, the bank needs improved environmental and social assessments that are mandatory for all its energy projects, and to make sure that its energy lending benefits the poorest, most vulnerable people,” he said.

With the paper still up for discussion, its content could be altered or voted down entirely. Analysts point out that this has happened with previous attempts to roll back coal-related financing by the bank, actions that have been vociferously opposed by major coal users such as China.

Still, the new coal-related guidelines would constitute a major policy change if they go through and would be in line with a broader new institutional focus on climate change, as pushed by World Bank President Jim Kim.

“[L]eaders around the world must propose even more far-reaching solutions and deliver results … They know there’s no substitute for aggressive national targets to reduce emissions,” Kim wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post published Friday.

“Today, the burden of emissions reductions lies with a few large economies, including the United States, China, India and the European Union. In particular, the moves by the United States and other big emitters to reduce emissions from coal-fired plants are an important step forward.”

The World Bank document was leaked in the immediate aftermath of the first major climate change-focused policy speech given by President Barack Obama on Tuesday in which he laid out a policy vision in part strikingly similar to the World Bank’s new draft proposal.

“Today, I’m calling for an end of public financing for new coal plants overseas,” Obama stated, “unless they deploy carbon-capture technologies or there’s no other viable way for the poorest countries to generate electricity.”

This announcement too would constitute a major policy reversal, as the United States has directly offered billions of dollars in financing for coal-fired power plants in recent years, including in India and South Africa, and is considering a proposed project in Vietnam.

Locked in

The potential moves away from coal-related financing on the part of both the World Bank and the United States are being lauded by environment groups and development agencies.

Yet both of these new approaches would place significant emphasis on natural gas and, in the case of the bank, other contentious forms of electricity production such as hydroelectric dams.

The new World Bank policy noted, “In some cases, natural gas is likely to make an important contribution [to transitioning to sustainable energy] … providing flexible electricity supply where demand and supply fluctuate.”

“It is welcome news that the World Bank is moving away from coal, because we’ve known for some time that bank investments in coal have not helped meet the energy needs of the poorest, but rather have helped some of the richest corporations on the planet,” Daphne Wysham, co-director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network and the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“The bad news is that instead of leading the world towards a truly renewable green-energy future, the bank is once again locking developing countries into carbon-based infrastructure, this time with natural gas.”

While natural gas burns far cleaner than coal, producing natural gas tends to result in significant leakage of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. As a result, scientists say, natural gas can result in similar levels of climate change-causing emissions as coal.

Wysham pointed to a report released this week by the International Energy Agency (IEA), a Paris-based think tank backed by Western countries, that surprised many analysts by forecasting that the price of renewable energy will drop below that of natural gas as early as 2016.

“In our opinion, any significant focus by the bank on natural gas would make no sense,” Wysham said, “from either a climate or economic perspective”.

Increasing U.S.-Iran cultural exchanges could lay the groundwork for better relations between the two countries, believes a prominent think tank here, despite the prevalence of stereotypical memes of the United States as the “Great Satan” and Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil”.

According to an issue brief released today by the Washington-based Atlantic Council, the United States should reach out to Iran’s people through a variety of cultural exchanges, even as the Jun. 14 election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s next president may present an opportunity for the United States and Iran to mend their decades-long cold war.

Experts suggest that cultural exchanges could help improve U.S.-Iranian relations. Above, members of Kiosk, one of Iran’s underground rock bands. Credit: Credit: Shoja Lak/IPS

“Cultural and academic exchanges between the U.S. and Iran are a low-cost, high-yield investment in a future normal relationship between the two countries,” said the brief, authored by the council’s bipartisan Iran Task Force.

Recommendations from the task force, comprised of an array of U.S. national security experts, included creating a non- or quasi-official working group “comprised of bilateral representatives from academia, the arts, athletics, the professions, and science and technology” and an U.S. Interests Section in Tehran.

“When it comes to countries that have no diplomatic channels like the U.S. and Iran, people-to-people diplomacy is the only route available to us,” Reza Aslan, an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told IPS.

Scepticism towards cultural diplomacy

Major roadblocks stand in the way of the kind of diplomacy that led to improved U.S.-Soviet relations during the Cold War.

“Yes, cultural diplomacy is good and has been tried before with decent results during the Khatami presidency,” Farideh Farhi, an independent scholar at the University of Hawaii, told IPS.

“But note that the context was different. The United States had not yet fully embarked on its ferocious sanctions regime which makes cultural exchanges quite difficult and reliant on the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control granting exceptions to literally every exchange,” she said."People-to-people diplomacy is the only route available to us.”
-- Reza Aslan

The council conceded that conducting U.S.-Iran exchange programs between nations without bilateral diplomatic channels is “challenging”.

It also stressed that “selling such programming as a means to drive a wedge between the Iranian government and people makes any successful execution problematic”.

But the “goodwill of the Iranian people is ultimately the biggest U.S. asset in changing the direction of the Islamic Republic” and “maintaining active people-to-people linkages during periods of strained bilateral relations has many benefits for U.S. national security, particularly over the long term”, according to the brief.

Addressing animosity

Even so, decades of mutual mistrust between U.S. and Iranian governments, fuelled by what both consider consistent acts of hostility from the other side, has also filtered into the media of both nations.

“The media in Iran is obviously state media which just espouses the propaganda of regime and that’s not going to change,” Aslan told IPS.

“On the U.S. side, the media is a commercial enterprise…As with any soap opera, the only thing the media cares about is eyeballs, which are attracted by sex, violence, fear and terror, and right now, the biggest boogie man is Iran and nothing change is going to change that,” he said.

“While public diplomacy is absolutely vital and really the only outlet we have, the question of whether it’s going to change the larger media perception in the two countries of each other remains a complex one,” said Aslan.

In his first press conference as Iran’s president-elect, the reformist-backed Rouhani appeared as a stark contrast to Iran’s current controversial president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“Our main policy will be to have constructive interaction with the world,” Rouhani, Iran’s nuclear negotiator during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami, during a televised broadcast on Jun. 17.

“We will not pursue adding to tensions. It would be wise for the two nations and countries to think more of the future. They should find a solution to the past issues and resolve them,” said Rouhani said regarding future U.S.-Iran relations.

Rouhani, who served on Iran’s Supreme National Security Council for 16 years and is known as the “diplomatic sheik”, has elicited much commentary in the United States about his possible impact on Iran’s nuclear negotiating stance.

How his new position will affect Iran’s interactions on the world stage, including its controversial nuclear program and its backing of the Assad regime in Syria, remains to be seen.

On Jul. 1, tough new sanctions to which President Barak Obama has already committed will also take effect. Among other provisions, they will penalise companies that deal in Iran’s currency or with Iran’s automotive sector.

The Republican-led House is expected to pass legislation by the end of next month (on the eve of Rouhani’s inauguration) that would sharply curb or eliminate the president’s authority to waive sanctions on countries and companies doing any business with Iran, thus imposing a virtual trade embargo on Iran.

Other sanctions measures, including an expected effort by Republican Senator Lindsay Graham to get an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) resolution passed by the Senate after the August recess, are lined up.

“Unless there is a change in the overall frame of Washington’s approach to Iran, cultural exchanges will be perceived with suspicion in Tehran and effectively undercut by powerful supporters of the sanctions regime in Washington,” Farhi told IPS.

Twenty-five-year-old Razia is one of 2,500 survivors of the factory collapse in Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jun 27 2013 (IPS)

Citing Bangladesh’s alleged failure to respect international labour rights, U.S. President Barack Obama Thursday suspended trade benefits for the South Asian country’s exports under the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP).

The move came two months after the collapse of a building, the Rana Plaza, in Dhaka that killed more than 1,200 textile and garment workers.

The disaster, which followed last November’s fire that killed 112 workers at the Tazreen garment factor, drew unprecedented attention to labour conditions in Bangladesh’s fast-growing apparel industry and to the major western retailers that are its chief customers.

“I have determined that it is appropriate to suspend Bangladesh’s designation as a beneficiary developing country under the GSP program because it is not taking steps to afford internationally recognised worker rights to workers in the country,” Obama, who is currently on a tour of Africa, said in a statement issued by the White House.

“The recent tragedies that needlessly took the lives of over 1,200 Bangladeshi garment factory workers have served to highlight some of the serious shortcomings in worker rights and workplace safety standards in Bangladesh,” said U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Michael Froman after the White House announcement.

He noted that Washington would begin “new discussions with the government of Bangladesh regarding steps to improve the worker rights environment in Bangladesh so that GSP benefits can be restored and tragedies like the Rana Plaza building collapse and Tazreen Fashion factory fire can be prevented”.

A broad indirect impact

The direct impact of Thursday’s decision, which followed a multi-year USTR review initiated by U.S. labour unions that have long complained about working conditions in Bangladesh, is likely to be minimal, since the country’s apparel exports – its biggest industry by far – are not covered by Washington’s GSP programme.

“GSP doesn’t cover sensitive products like apparel,” said Dan Anthony of the Coalition for GSP, a lobby group for U.S. companies that benefit from GSP, which provides about 750 million dollars a year in tariff relief for products from developing countries. Last year, importers of Bangladeshi products received about 35 million dollars in GSP benefits.

Of that total, the tobacco sector was the largest beneficiary, accounting for over 11 million dollars in exports. Exports of golf equipment, porcelain and china hotel and restaurant tableware, and plastic bags each received around five million dollars in GSP benefits, according to Anthony.

While the total represented less than one percent of the more than four billion dollars in apparel goods imported to the United States from Bangladesh last year, the indirect effects of the GSP suspension are likely to be much greater, according to labour activists and their supporters.

“The decision to suspend trade benefits sends an important message to our trading partners,” according to a statement released by the Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO, the largest U.S. trade confederation which initiated the government’s review of Bangladesh’s labour conditions more than six years ago.

“Countries that benefit from preferential trade programmes must comply with their terms. Countries that tolerate dangerous and even deadly – working conditions and deny basic workers’ rights, especially the right to freedom of association, will risk losing preferential access to the U.S. market,” he said.

Others stressed that the decision will exert renewed pressure on U.S. apparel companies to adhere to binding agreements regarding their responsibility to improve and oversee working conditions in the garment factories, including the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (Safety Accord) that has been signed by several dozen mainly European retailers, such as H&M, Primark and the Benetton Group, since it was concluded last month.

“While the decision is an important step by the U.S. government, the decision alone may not ensure that action will be taken to end the epidemic of senseless deaths of Bangladesh’s garment workers,” said Liana Foxvog, organising director at the International Labour Rights Forum (ILRF) here.

“As a next step, we ask the U.S. government to call on U.S. companies like Gap and Walmart to make legally binding commitments to invest in the future of Bangladesh garment workers by joining the Safety Accord,” she said.

Most major U.S. companies have so far declined to sign the accord due to concerns that disputes could wind up before U.S. courts that could grant huge damages for non-compliance.

Safety considerations

Bangladesh is currently the world’s second biggest apparel exporter, with an estimated 5,000 textile plants. Since last November, more than 1,500 workers have died in fires and the Rana Plaza collapse.

In documents submitted to the USTR, the Bangladeshi government itself admitted that the rapid expansion of the textile industry “has outstripped the pace of our progress” in ensuring adequate regulation and oversight.

For all of the country’s plants to meet minimum safety standards, improvements will cost on the order of about three billion dollars – or an average of 600,000 dollars per factory, according to labour activists who worked on the Safety Accord. That accord requires signatories to pay for all of the improvements.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that major U.S. retailers, including Wal-Mart and Gap, are expected to reach their own accord next month that would establish a 50-million-dollar, five-year fund to support the needed improvements.

Unlike the Safety Accord, the proposed plan would strictly limit the circumstances under which any disputes could be taken up by U.S. courts and limit the liability they could face there.

Activists consider the U.S. plan, which is being negotiated with the help of the Bipartisan Policy Centre, to be inadequate in almost every respect.

Last week, 113 organisations sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry urging the administration to support the Safety Accord. Public demonstrations against the recalcitrant companies are being organised in front of their stores in 30 U.S. cities as part of the International Day of Action to End Deathtraps.

“No one will want to wear clothing that is ‘Made in Bangladesh’ if it is made on the blood of workers,” said Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Robert Menendez, who held a hearing on labour issues in Bangladesh earlier this month. “It’s time for American industry to show leadership and work with their European counterparts on a global standard for safety.”

Labour activists stress that safety is not the only challenge workers in Bangladesh face. Threats and violence against union organisers are also common.

Last month, the International Labour Organisation and the World Bank rejected Bangladesh’s application to join their “Better Work” programme, which carries out unannounced inspections of textile factories, complaining that the countries labour laws were too weak and repression against union organisers too great to warrant the country’s membership.

The Supreme Court ruled today that a key part of federal legislation banning same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. Credit: Bigstock

By Cydney Hargis
WASHINGTON, Jun 27 2013 (IPS)

Large crowds cheered outside the U.S. Supreme Court here on Wednesday morning as the justices inside announced their majority decision that a key part of two-decade-old federal legislation banning same-sex marriage is unconstitutional.

Cheering supporters held signs reading, “The people united will never be defeated.” When the decision was read, they began chanting, “DOMA is dead,” referring to the so-called Defence of Marriage Act (DOMA), legislation that for 17 years has disallowed federal recognition of same-sex couples, even as state legislatures have begun to recognise such unions.

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court struck down DOMA and simultaneously required the extension of federal benefits to legally married same-sex couples. In a separate decision, the court also dismissed Proposition 8, a state law in California, effectively allowing same-sex marriage in that state.

“Today’s decision not only gives federal recognition and respect to the many married same-sex couples in the U.S.,” Graeme Reid, the director of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Rights Program at Human Rights Watch, an international advocacy group, told IPS. “More fundamentally, it also affirms that LGBT people are deserving of fundamental rights and equal protection in all areas of the law.”

The decision will immediately extend benefits enjoyed by heterosexual couples, including social security, healthcare, pension and tax benefits, to legally recognised same-sex couples. Currently, around a dozen statess allow same-sex couples to marry."[Today's decision] affirms that LGBT people are deserving of fundamental rights and equal protection."
-- Graeme Reid

“Under DOMA, same-sex couples have their lives burdened, by reason of government decree, in visible and public ways,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. “By its great reach, DOMA touches many aspects of married and family life, from the mundane to the profound.”

President Bill Clinton originally signed DOMA into law in 1996, though he has since recanted his support of the legislation. Clinton’s view on the issue mirrors a broader cultural shift throughout the United States, with analysts suggesting that public opinion on same-sex marriage has changed faster than on almost any other issue in memory.

“The laws of our land are catching up to the fundamental truth that millions of Americans hold in our hearts,” President Barack Obama stated in response to Wednesday’s rulings. “When all Americans are treated as equal, no matter who they are or whom they love, we are all more free.”

Obama himself is a good example of the shift in U.S. popular views on the subject, having announced his support for same-sex marriage only last year.

Still, Wednesday’s court decision was narrowly split, with several of the dissenters suggesting that the court didn’t have jurisdiction to hear the case in the first place, similar to the decision on Proposition 8. Justice Antonin Scalia even read his dissenting opinion from the bench, which is done in a small number of cases, typically when the opinion is very strong.

“In the majority’s telling, this story is black-and-white: Hate your neighbor or come along with us.  The truth is more complicated,” Scalia wrote. “It is hard to admit that one’s political opponents are not monsters, especially in a struggle like this one, and the challenge in the end proves more than today’s Court can handle.”  

Path towards equality

While the crowd waited Wednesday morning for the second decision, on California’s Proposition 8, a protestor put up a sign that read “Gay Mormon for Marriage Equality”.

“For those of you who don’t know, 10 years ago today a [judicial] decision came down in Lawrence v. Texas, allowing us to be gay,” he said. “And in 15 minutes, we’ll find out if we are considered equals.”

In a 6-3 ruling in 2003, the Supreme Court struck down the sodomy laws in Texas and invalidated these laws in 13 other states, making same-sex sexual activity legal in every state.

When it was announced, the Proposition 8 decision was also split 5-4, yet essentially the justices decided that they did not have the power to make a full ruling on the case. Proposition 8 banned same-sex marriage in California based on the results of a state-wide referendum in 2008.

In effect, however, the decision is a boon for supporters of same-sex marriage. It allows to stand a 2010 injunction made by a federal district court that sough to prevent the state of California from enforcing Proposition 8, stating that the law violated due process of law and equal protection.

“The Court does not question California’s sovereign right to maintain an initiative process, or the right of initiative proponents to defend their initiatives in California courts,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority on the Proposition 8 case. “But standing in federal court is a question of federal law, not state law.”

Despite the fact that the justices decided not to offer a full ruling on Proposition 8, critics of the law rejoiced.

“This is truly a day for the history books,” Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer who argued the case at the Supreme Court, said following the decision, “one that will be marked by future generations as a giant step forward along our nation’s continuing path towards equality.”

Though noisy opposition was noticeably absent from the rally at the Supreme Court, not everyone was pleased with Wednesday’s decisions.

“Kennedy’s decision is not law,” Maggie Gallagher, a fellow at the American Principle Project, a conservative advocacy group, said in a release. “It is Justice Kennedy’s moral values written into our Constitution, and interfering with our rights as Americans to pass laws that accord with our values on marriage.”

Tim Wildmon, president of the conservative American Family Association, similarly said he was deeply saddened by the decision in a country founded on “biblical principles”. “Our next line of defense is to vigorously protect our religious liberty.”

Meanwhile, others are already looking forward to using Wednesday’s rulings to help new plans to push state-level legislators to bolster support for same-sex marriage legislation.

“Now what needs to happen is [gay] Americans in the other 37 states need to have the same rights that all Americans get: To marry the person they love and have full, equal rights,” Neil Sroka, the communications director for Democracy for America, an advocacy group close to President Obama, told IPS.

“Our supporters and members are ready to hit the ground running.”

Protesters outside the White House in January 2012 demonstrate against torture and indefinite detention on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo Bay. Credit: Charles Davis/IPS

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Jun 26 2013 (IPS)

Groups promoting human rights here are “cautiously optimistic” that U.S. President Barack Obama’s renewed pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay will be fulfilled.

That optimism is due in part to the language of this year’s proposed U.S. National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA), a massive annual appropriations bill that funds much of the U.S. military and is currently being debated in Congress.

“It feels like there is momentum building toward achieving a bipartisan consensus,” Dixon Osburn, director of the law and security program for Human Rights First, a Washington advocacy group, told IPS. “I’m certainly more optimistic on this than I have been for the last several years.”

In its current form, the 2014 NDAA would give the executive branch, through the secretary of defence, greater authority to remove detainees from the prison, either to transfer them to other facilities or to release them altogether. It would also unblock transfers of detainees to the United States.

The NDAA recently passed through the Senate Armed Service Committee with the provisions related to Guantanamo left intact. These provisions, which would help pave the way for an eventual shutdown of the prison, are expected to be the subject of fierce debate when the Senate votes on the full bill sometime in the coming months.

The current push to close the controversial detention centre is being spearheaded by a renewed pledge made by Obama in late April. At that time, the president spoke in no uncertain terms against the continued existence of the facility, which he had originally pledged to close down at the start of his first term, in 2009."It's not sustainable…the notion that we're going to continue to keep over 100 individuals in a no-man's land in perpetuity."
-- U.S. President Barack Obama

“It’s not sustainable…the notion that we’re going to continue to keep over 100 individuals in a no-man’s land in perpetuity,” Obama stated in April, noting that U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been or are being wound down. “The idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried – that is contrary to who we are, it is contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop.”

Since that renewed call, powerful members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, have come out forcefully in favour of supporting Obama’s efforts to close down the prison. Earlier this month, Senators John McCain and Dianne Feinstein (the former a Republican and the latter a Democrat) joined White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough on a trip to Guantanamo, afterward releasing a statement advocating its termination.

“We continue to believe that it is in our national interest to end detention at Guantanamo, with a safe and orderly transition of the detainees to other locations,” the statement noted. “We intend to work, with a plan by Congress and the administration together, to take the steps necessary to make that happen.”

Cleared for release

There are currently 166 detainees being held indefinitely at the detention centre in Guantanamo, 86 already determined eligible for released. Due to concerns over where to send them, however, they remain stuck in the prison.

Fifty-six of the 86 inmates cleared for release (and nearly 100 of the 166) are originally from Yemen, a country believed to contain a heavy presence of al-Qaeda affiliates. Previously, a moratorium had been in place preventing repatriation to the country, but last month Obama announced he would lift that moratorium.

Many of the inmates waiting for release are currently being force-fed, following a mass hunger strike that began in February to protest their continued detainment.

“Those who have been cleared are sitting there waiting for the political stalemate to end,” says Osburn.

In addition to human rights concerns, Osburn notes the “exorbitant” costs of holding individuals at Guantanamo. He cites expenses as totalling 1.6 million dollars per detainee per year, a sum much larger than the average cost of holding prisoners in high-security facilities in the United States, which is around 50,000 dollars per year.

Obama’s original pledge to close the prison actually came before he was elected president, in 2008, when he promised that the detention centre would be shuttered within a year of his taking office. Largely due to opposition from Congress, however, the president has failed to follow through on this promise, disappointing human rights advocates.

“We took the president at his word the last time around,” Andrea Prasow, a senior counterterrorism counsel for Human Rights Watch, an international watchdog group, told IPS. “I want to believe it is different this time, but I won’t until I see action.”

Nevertheless, Prasow, too, was “quite hopeful” that action of some kind would be taken on the renewed pledge. She noted that Obama likely views the issue as an important part of his legacy.

“[Obama] is a young president, who will live a long time in this country and see the impact of his decisions,” she said. “Leaving office without having changed this situation would be a grave mistake.”

Protests at the White House in 2011 against the Keystone XL pipeline. Credit: tarsandaction/CC by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jun 25 2013 (IPS)

Stymied by the U.S. Congress, President Barack Obama on Tuesday unveiled his vision to reset the United States’ incoherent national plan to combat climate change, offering dozens of regulatory tweaks and targets that his administration could now implement without Congressional approval.

Without action from Congress, the president is unable to make a comprehensive effort to combat climate change. Nonetheless, the piecemeal new goals are the most far-reaching attempt yet by a U.S. president to coordinate national planning of mitigation and adaptation efforts on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.

At a major speech here in Washington, the president also directly commented on the contentious Keystone XL pipeline, proposed to bring particularly dirty “tar sands” oil from Canada to refineries in the United States. For the first time, Obama said Keystone-related emissions would affect his decision to approve the project, directly linking the U.S. national interest with climate change.

“This was a milestone speech in two aspects: President Obama made clear he’s not afraid to tackle coal as the primary culprit of climate change, and he made a major pivot in how he framed Keystone,” Daphne Wysham, co-director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“He’s no longer talking about jobs or energy security, but rather linking our national interest to whether the project would have a major impact on the changing climate. This puts the issue into an entirely different court – and one where we believe we can win.”

Obama said the new measures would get the United States back on track to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. The president originally set this goal three years ago, but Congress has since failed to institute policies that that could allow for such a decrease.

The centrepiece of the plan is a crackdown on carbon pollution from power plants, both planned and – in a highly anticipated move – existing. In the United States, power plants are responsible for some 40 percent of carbon emissions.

“We limit the amount of toxic chemicals like mercury and sulphur and arsenic in our air or our water, but power plants can still dump unlimited amounts of carbon pollution into the air for free,” the president stated Tuesday. “That’s not right, that’s not safe, and it needs to stop.”

While Obama’s new assertiveness was lauded by environmental and health groups here, advocates were particularly electrified by the surprise indication of the president’s views on the Keystone XL proposal. While currently in the approvals process, the pipeline will ultimately require Obama to personally certify that the project is in the “national interest”."On the international level, the promises for action, while welcome, are too little too late."
-- Saleemul Huq

“[O]ur national interest will be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution,” the president said. “The net effects of the pipeline’s impact on our climate will be absolutely critical to determining whether this project is allowed to go forward.”

War on coal

Much of the president’s new vision revolves around the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to enforce regulations under a key piece of decades-old legislation known as the Clean Air Act.

While the EPA was supposed to issue new rules for regulating power plant emissions in April, it missed that deadline. That failure almost prompted a lawsuit from environmental groups, which halted their plan only when it became clear in recent days that the president was planning this major address.

Even with the EPA now mandated to develop rules to limit emissions from existing power plants, that process will take at least two years, and experts say implementation could take a decade. Still, industry analysts are suggesting that the knowledge of an official timetable will now lead owners of some coal-fired power plants to decide against repairing plants that could operate only for a few additional years.

On Monday, Daniel Schrag, a White House science advisor, made waves by declaring that the president should use Tuesday’s address to declare a “war on coal”, a phrase that conservatives are now using to batter the president’s new plan. For environmentalists, however, this combative stance towards coal is welcome.

“The president has a lot of power through executive action, and EPA regulations on carbon are going to be essential in the broader transition from coal to clean energy,” Whit Jones, an activist with the Energy Action Coalition, an advocacy umbrella group, told IPS from outside the president’s speech here in Washington.

“Ultimately we will clearly need to demand Congressional action, but this is still a very exciting first step. Once the president shows strong action on climate change, we will expect him to follow up and continue the transition away from fossil fuels.”

Further, the implications of the president’s coal proposals will extend beyond U.S. borders.

“Today’s speech takes previous actions much farther, to call for an end to almost all U.S. government support for public financing of coal plants overseas,” the Institute for Policy Studies’ Wysham said. “That would rule out, for instance, coal-fired plants in India and South Africa, two of the most recent recipients of World Bank funding for coal projects.”

Coordinated assault

The new plan goes well beyond power plants as well, with the president laying out steps to bolster the development and use of renewable energy, strengthen energy and fuel efficiency, and end energy subsidies for fossil fuel companies.

Some of these proposals will require approval by Congress, however, where conservative lawmakers have moved quickly to disparage most of the new proposals. The top conservative leader in the House of Representatives, John Boehner, dubbed the plan “absolutely crazy”.

President Obama also outlined how the United States would redouble its efforts to reach international consensus on a “coordinated assault” on climate change. Yet many who have been frustrated by the United States’ stance at past international negotiations expressed scepticism at the new vows.

“On the international level, the promises for action, while welcome, are too little too late,” Saleemul Huq, a senior fellow in the Climate Change Group at the International Institute for Environment and Development, a London think tank, said Tuesday.

“While it is good to see a leader of the world’s richest country and biggest cumulative polluter finally promise to take actions, after over a decade of refusal to do so, the problem has become much bigger while the U.S. was ignoring it.”

U.S. President Barack Obama's in Accra, Ghana in 2009. Credit: US Army Africa/CC by 2.0

By Cydney Hargis
WASHINGTON, Jun 24 2013 (IPS)

Advocacy groups here are urging U.S. President Barack Obama to focus on more than just economic development during his upcoming trip to Africa.

They are also hoping that the state visits will be able to turn the tide on years of U.S. engagement with Africa only through the lens of security and counter-terrorism.

Starting Wednesday, Obama will visit Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania on what will be his second trip to the continent as president. His advisors say he hopes to focus on increasing trade, investments and other economic opportunities.

“This shouldn’t be a light-hearted and easy trip,” Adotei Akwei, Africa advocacy director for Amnesty International, told IPS. “It shouldn’t just be about economics and investing, because there are some serious issues that need to be addressed.”

According to aides, Obama will also put significant emphasis on supporting growing democracies in each of the three countries, as well as on the African youth population."If the U.S. wants to be in step with the 21st century and the centuries to come...it needs to pay attention to Africa." -- Emira Woods

“Each of the countries that we’re visiting are strong democracies,” National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said in a White House briefing conference call. “The president has made it a priority to support the consolidation of democratic institutions in Africa so that Africans are focused not just on democratic elections, but institutions like parliaments, independent judiciaries and strengthening of the rule of law.”

In addition to bilateral meetings with political leaders in the three countries, Obama will participate in events with private sector leaders. Development issues will play a role, particularly regarding food security.

“Food security has been one of our key development priorities,” Rhodes said, “in which we’ve brought together the international community as well as the private sector behind approaches that strengthen African capacity in developing agricultural sectors that better feed the populations.”

Obama has been criticised for paying relatively little attention to Africa during his presidency. His first and only trip to the continent lasted less than 24 hours.

“If the U.S. wants to be in step with the 21st century and the centuries to come,” Emira Woods, the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank, told IPS, “it needs to pay attention to Africa.”

Security focus

Further, for many humanitarian advocates, what little focus Obama has paid to Africa has been largely security related.

“I am concerned that in recent years, the degree to which there is a focus in Africa has been aimed at counterterrorism initiatives,” John Hutson, director of communications at the Enough Project, a Washington advocacy group, told IPS. “I hope this trip will create a sense of interest and actions that will help African development and thereby help the United States.”

The Institute for Policy Studies’ Woods concurred, “The U.S. has focused overwhelmingly on the security sector, at the expense of those other building blocks of a healthy society.”

Obama will not be visiting two of the continent’s most unstable countries, Somalia and Mali. Yet according to some observers, the instability in these parts of Africa is due in part to U.S. support of authoritarian regimes.

Independent policy analyst and activist Nii Akkuetteh applauded the Obama administration for not visiting countries that, at a panel discussion here Monday, he called “U.S.-friendly tyrants”.

“The criticism right now is, if you flood a country like Mali with arms and it goes wrong, we don’t think it’s right to turn your back on the problem,” said Akkuetteh. “It is in the U.S.’s best interest to help Mali rebuild since they were partners when Mali slipped into their problematic state.”

Meanwhile, others are pointing to climate change as a more pressing long-term security threat to Africa. On Tuesday, Obama is scheduled to unveil a major new U.S. policy push to combat climate change, but so far Washington has been a significant contributor to the inability of international negotiations to arrive at a comprehensive agreement on the issue.

“Clearly what we are calling for is for the Obama administration to look at the affects of its policies on climate change,” said Woods. According to Dev Kar, chief economist at the research and advocacy organisation Global Financial Integrity, scientists and security analysts are already forecasting a increase in the number of conflicts in Africa and beyond as a result of water shortage.

According to recently released World Bank data, such an uptick will likely be visible within decades.

Meanwhile, the cost of Obama’s trip, reportedly from 60 to 100 million dollars, has led to some furious criticism from within the United States, where austerity measures are continuing to upset long-running government programmes. But Amnesty International’s Akwei suggests this is not only a sideshow, but a problematic indication of the broader U.S. view of Africa.

“This criticism continues a sad trend of the perception of the continent, which is basically that it doesn’t matter and its irrelevant,” he said.

“In fact, it is relevant. It is a major front of the Pentagon and its work on terror, it is a major source of oil to this country, and it is a humanitarian focal point.”

In 2011 in Bahrain, riot police reportedly tried to disperse protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets. Credit: Al Jazeera English/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

Human rights groups here are calling for the United States and the European Union (EU) to exert more pressure on Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, to seriously engage its opposition and end its repression of its majority Shi’a population.

“Bahrain claims to be on a path of political reform, but it is heading altogether in the wrong direction,” according to Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), which issued an 87-page report Thursday on how the kingdom is cracking down harder on independent civil society organisations (CSOs).

“The new draft law on association – just like the continued imprisonment of opposition activists – shows all too clearly how the ruling family is rolling back genuine reform on so many fronts,” he added."Bahrain claims to be on a path of political reform, but it is heading altogether in the wrong direction."
-- Joe Stork

Brian Dooley, a specialist in the Gulf states for Human Rights First (HRF), said that the Obama administration “is realising, if belatedly, that it’s been had” by Bahrain’s promises of reform. “It needs to figure out what to do instead.”

“There’s been a slow, but unmistakable increase in repression. The current situation can’t go on year after year, because there’s a real danger it will explode into something much worse,” he said.

The new HRW report, as well renewed appeals for Washington to take a tougher stance, comes ten days before EU High Commissioner and several EU commissioners are to meet their Gulf Cooperation Council counterparts in Bahrain.

“They should convey beforehand their expectation that key political prisoners will be released in advance of the summit,” said Stork.

The report also comes two weeks after Obama and other senior U.S. officials met in Washington with visiting Crown Prince and First Deputy Prime Minister Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa.

The crown prince has been Washington’s favourite in the ruling al-Khalifa family due to the perception that he favours at least limited democratic reform that would give the Shi’a community, which makes up about 70 percent of the island-state’s population, some share of power. The al-Khalifas, who have ruled Bahrain for more than two centuries, are Sunni Muslims.

In a bid to increase the crown prince’s leverage back home, the administration announced during his previous visit here 13 months ago that it would deliver some weapons from a previously agreed 53-million-dollar arms package. The package was held up by lawmakers in Congress concerned about human rights abuses committed during Bahraini security forces’ fierce, Saudi-backed crackdown on opposition during the 2011 “Arab Spring”.

The crown prince, however, has failed to deliver. Despite the February launch of a much-heralded national dialogue, repression has actually increased, according to human rights monitors and independent analysts, who noted that no new arms announcements were made during this year’s visit, during which Obama nonetheless reiterated his support for “advancing reform” and the dialogue process.

“The national dialogue has essentially frozen,” noted Toby Jones, a Gulf expert at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “It’s accomplished exactly what the royal family had hoped it would; that is, to basically paralyse the political process in Bahrain.”

“Washington had hoped that the crown prince and Al-Wefaq, the mainstream Shiite opposition party, could reach some negotiated compromise, but the crown prince is not as powerful as the U.S. would [like] him to be,” Jones explained.

“His rivals have used this kind of public politics as a way to give the appearance of accomplishing something without really accomplishing anything at all.”

The situation actually appears to have deteriorated, said rights advocates here, several of whom, including Dooley and the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez, were given visas to Bahrain this spring only to have them cancelled at the last minute.

Since February, when HRW researchers visited the country to compile information for its new report, “‘Interfere, Restrict, Control’: Restraints on Freedom of Association in Bahrain”, the group has been denied visas to return.

“New laws and lengthy jail terms for activists have put freedom of association in Bahrain under severe threat,” HRW said Thursday, pointing to a draft bill that would be even more restrictive than current law, which bans CSOs from engaging in politics. “Bahraini authorities have left hardly any space for peaceful political dissent.”

“We’re seeing an uptick in the last month of people being pulled from their houses at night by masked men without warrants, similar to what happened [during the repression of] 2011, though not on the same scale,” Dooley told IPS. He also pointed to more “reports of torture in custody” and “a clampdown on social media”.

“No senior officials have been prosecuted for torture or extra-judicial killing. Judicial harassment of dissidents has continued, as has the excessive use of force by police, plus the problem of increasingly violent protests…with no light at the end of the tunnel,” he continued.

The Obama administration, according to Dooley, is deeply frustrated by the situation and increasingly impatient with the Khalifas to follow through with promises for reform. He noted that recent official U.S. government reports on human rights, religious freedom and labour rights in Bahrain have been noticeably more critical than in the two previous years.

In 2011 and 2012, no one in Washington considered moving the Fifth Fleet out of Bahrain, Dooley said. “But there’s now much more open discussion about it in two ways – that the level of repression may reach such a pitch that’s it’s just too embarrassing to have the fleet there and that the political situation is becoming so unstable and volatile that it’s just too risky for the fleet to remain.”

Jones, however, was more doubtful, particularly given rising regional tensions around Iran’s nuclear programme and strong Saudi pressure to support the monarchy.

“Washington continues to see Bahrain not as a place with complicated politics, but as a strategic asset.…If it had to choose a menu of options, it would choose the Al-Khalifas and a more or less stable Bahrain over a political system in which the opposition has more say,” he told IPS.

“Except for the crown prince, the other major players in the royal family don’t believe American pressure is real, and it’s not as evidenced by the continued sale of military hardware.” Indeed, in its proposed 2014 foreign aid budget, the administration asked for 10 million dollars in military sales credits, the same as in 2012, and 450,000 dollars in security training programmes for the Ministry of the Interior (MOI), which is in charge of the police.

In defending the latter, the State Department said the training would “contribute to counterterrorism and investigative support”.

As explosive devices from opposition protesters grow in sophistication, “the MOI needs training to better counter and prevent terrorist activities,” it said, and all training “will underscore the importance of adherence to international human rights standards while confronting serious threats”.

U.S. President Barack Obama chairing the Security Council Summit on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament in 2009. Credit: Bomoon Lee/IPS

By Cydney Hargis
WASHINGTON, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

Reactions have been mixed to President Barack Obama’s call for greater nuclear arms reductions in the United States and Russia, made during his speech in Berlin on Wednesday.

“We may no longer live in fear of global annihilation, but so long as nuclear weapons exist, we are not truly safe,” Obama stated. “We may strike blows against terrorist networks, but if we ignore the instability and intolerance that fuels extremism, our own freedom will eventually be endangered.”

The president addressed about 6,000 invited guests at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, marking 50 years after U.S. President John F. Kennedy made a similar speech at the height of the Cold War."So long as nuclear weapons exist, we are not truly safe."
-- President Barack Obama

Obama announced he would push to work with Russia to reduce the number of U.S. and Russian tactical weapons in Europe, as well as the total number of strategic nuclear weapons deployed by both countries.

“To me, the speech today was disappointing,” John Burroughs, executive director of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy (LCNP), a New York advocacy group, told IPS. “Obama did not talk about some important multi-lateral opportunities, nor about creating more opportunities.”

Others lauded the president’s call as critical, if belated.

“The Berlin Wall fell more than two decades ago, and these reductions are long overdue,” Lisbeth Gronloud, a senior scientist and co-director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group, said Wednesday.

“The president’s initiative implicitly acknowledges that today nuclear weapons are a liability, not an asset,” Gronloud added.

The New START Treaty of 2010 limited U.S. and Russian stockpiles to 800 missiles, bombers and submarine launchers each, as well as 1,550 deployed strategic warheads.

The Obama administration is now proposing cutting each country’s strategic warheads by a third, which would leave the United States and Russia with slightly over 1,000 nuclear weapons each.

“Bipartisan national security leaders agree that further, deeper nuclear reductions would increase U.S. security, lead to budget savings, and help pressure other nuclear-armed states to join the disarmament enterprise,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based advocacy group Arms Control Association, said Wednesday.

An expensive system

According to the Arms Control Association, the United States spends an estimated 31 billion dollars annually to support its arsenal of deployed strategic nuclear warheads and associated delivery systems.

If the country reduced its deployed strategic warheads to 1,000 or fewer, the group estimates, taxpayers would save some 58 billion dollars over the coming decade.

With terrorist and cyber attacks increasingly prevalent in recent years, analysts have stepped up calls for the U.S. government to re-evaluate whether a massive nuclear arsenal remains the most relevant way of addressing those threats, particularly given the hundreds of billions of dollars in upkeep those arsenals require.

Obama has renewed commitments to the U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which forbids all nuclear test explosions. Ratification of the treaty has already failed once in Congress, however, and the president has set no new deadline for submitting it to the Senate.

Obama has also stated that he plans to hold the fourth meeting of the Nuclear Security Summit, a biennial meeting to prevent nuclear terrorism around the world, in 2016, with the United States hosting the talks.

The administration now hopes to work with NATO allies to come up with concrete proposals for reducing the world’s stockpiles of tactical nuclear weapons, which are not covered by the New START Treaty from 2010.

Russia, which has many more tactical weapons than either the United States or Europe, has been resistant to such reductions in the past.

On Wednesday, Russia’s initial response to Obama’s call for reductions was lukewarm. One senior foreign policy adviser to Russian President Vladmir Putin said Moscow wants to “expand the circle of participants” of countries reducing their nuclear arms.

“How can we take seriously this idea about cuts in strategic nuclear potential while the United States is developing its capabilities to intercept Russia’s nuclear potential?” Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin told reporters in St. Petersburg.

Rehashing statements

In the United States, some civil society voices are suggesting that Obama’s new proposals sound suspiciously repetitive.

“President Obama’s nuclear proposals in Berlin are a tired rehash of U.S. nuclear policy,” said Alice Slater, the director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, a non-profit advocacy group, “designed to maintain America’s global military superiority in a web of alliances entangling other nations in a U.S. sphere of nuclear weapons and missile ‘offenses’ under the ribs of a leaky nuclear umbrella.”

Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, have already made it clear that they will push back against any treaty that proposes cuts deeper than those proposed in the 2010 New START Treaty, suggesting that the proposed reductions would hurt U.S. security.

“I do not believe the American people will support the president’s policy, which will serve only to weaken our nuclear deterrent and our ability to deal with threats to our strategic interest in the years to come,” James Inhofe, a conservative senator and ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Wednesday.

According to LCNP’s Burroughs, if proposed cuts made it into the treaty, it is not certain they would receive the required two-thirds majority in the Senate. However, he said a political understanding between the Obama administration and the Russian government would not actually require congressional approval.

But he also warned of severe objections to proceeding in that direction.

“The steps that Obama was talking about taking with respect to tactical nuclear weapons or the long-range strategic weapons is basically making any U.S. reduction contingent on Russian reciprocity,” Burroughs told IPS.

“I understand the political reasons…but the United States could make reductions on its own and invite Russia to follow – and we’d be perfectly safe.”

Peace talks between the United States and the Taliban are due to begin later this week in Qatar. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

Nearly 12 years after the United States ousted the Taliban from power, the White House announced Tuesday that the United States will begin formal talks with the militant Islamist group in Qatar later this week as part of Afghanistan’s national reconciliation process.

The announcement, which coincided with ceremonies marking the formal transfer of primary security responsibility from U.S.-led NATO forces to their Afghan counterparts, preceded a statement issued shortly afterwards by the Taliban itself in which it implicitly disassociated itself from Al-Qaeda.

The Taliban “would not allow anyone to threaten the security of other countries from the soil of Afghanistan”, Muhammad Naim, a Taliban spokesman, said in a televised broadcast from Doha. In addition, he pledged that the group seeks “a political and peaceful solution” to the conflict.

“These are two statements which we’ve long called for and together, they fulfil the requirements for the Taliban to open…a political office in Doha for the purposes of negotiation with the Afghan government,” said a senior official in a background teleconference for reporters.

“These statements represent an important first step towards reconciliation, a process that, after 30 years of armed conflict in Afghanistan, will certainly promise to be complex, long and messy, but nonetheless, this is an important first step,” said the official, who spoke on condition of not being identified.

He also called on the Taliban and the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai to begin direct negotiations “soon”."There will be a lot of bumps in the road."
-- U.S. President Barack Obama

Speaking at the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland, President Barack Obama also described the opening of the Taliban office an “important first step towards reconciliation” but stressed that “there will be a lot of bumps in the road”.

He also said Washington remained “fully committed to our military efforts to defeat Al-Qaeda and to support the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF)”.

Critics of the U.S. military effort hailed Tuesday’s announcement as signalling a major change in policy in advance of the deadline at the end of 2014 for the withdrawal of virtually all foreign troops from Afghanistan.

Most experts in Washington believe that at most 10,000 U.S. troops – plus about 4,000 more from other NATO countries – are likely to remain beyond that date as trainers for Afghan forces and as counter-terrorist units focused on preventing the return of Al-Qaeda forces.

“The U.S. and Karzai know they have to cut a deal with the Taliban and that the Taliban cannot be defeated militarily,” said William Goodfellow, director of the Centre for International Policy (CIP) here.

“The problem for the last 11 years is that it’s the (U.S.) military that’s been running the show, and to the military, negotiations equals defeat. We’re now shifting away from a policy of wanting to defeat the Taliban militarily to one of finding a political solution,” he said.

Tuesday’s developments – both the transfer of security responsibility to Afghan forces and the announcement of U.S.-Taliban talks – come amidst indications of eagerness by both the White House and Congress to wind down Washington’s commitment to Afghanistan as quickly as possible.

Just last week, a majority of the Republican-led House voted for the first time to approve a bipartisan amendment to the defence authorisation bill in favour of accelerating Washington’s troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The amendment, which was adopted by a 305-121 margin, also deleted a provision of the bill that had supported a continued U.S. military presence after 2014, replacing it with a call for the administration to seek explicit Congressional approval for retaining any U.S. troops there after that date.

About 66,000 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan – down from a high of around 100,000 two years ago following two “surges” sent by Obama as part of an ambitious counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy overseen by General David Petraeus.

The administration is currently engaged in a major internal debate over the pace of withdrawal for the remaining troops before the 2014 deadline and how many troops Washington will retain in Afghanistan after that date.

The latter question presumes that Karzai – or whoever succeeds him after the 2014 presidential election – wants them and provides the necessary guarantees, including the thorny issue of immunity from criminal prosecution, to keep them there.

The Pentagon and its supporters want to keep as many troops there for as long as possible, including next year’s “fighting season”, which lasts from late spring into the fall. They believe that that U.S. forces can still deal major blows to the Taliban – thus weakening its position in any negotiations – and are still badly needed to back up the ANSF.

Though 352,000 strong and more battle-tested than two years ago, the ANSF suffers serious weaknesses in a range of areas, including air support and an annual attrition rate of about 30 percent. The United States and its allies have said they will continue spending more than 4 billion dollars annually to help maintain, supply and expand the ANSF after 2014.

Obama, who had described the Afghanistan conflict as a “war of necessity” during his 2008 presidential campaign, initially deferred to Petraeus but reportedly became increasingly disenchanted with COIN’s effectiveness.

As early as two years ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the administration’s support for direct negotiations with the Taliban.

But despite a series of informal meetings with Taliban representatives hosted by various European countries and Qatar, the State Department proved unable to wrest control of policy from the Pentagon and its supporters in Congress.

Other key actors, including Karzai himself, the Pakistani military, which is believed to exert considerable influence if not outright control over key Taliban leaders, and more hard-line factions within the Taliban, also opposed talks at various times.

U.S. officials who briefed the press said they believed that the Taliban Political Commission in Doha is fully authorised by all factions of the movement and its leader, Mullah Omar, to conduct negotiations.

The officials also stressed that talks between the United States and the Taliban would likely be limited in scope and that negotiations between the Taliban and the Karzai government, as represented initially by the High Peace Council, were far more important. They said they expected the Council to send representatives to meet with the Taliban several days after the U.S.-Taliban talks.

“I think that given the level of distrust among Afghans, it’s going to be a slow process to get that…intra-Afghan dialogue moving,” said one. “The United States will encourage and help facilitate that, but the talks are largely going to be paced by the success or failure in that dialogue, and so I wouldn’t be looking for early results.”

“There is no guarantee that this will happen quickly, if at all,” added another.

In addition, Washington, they said, would only sign a final accord if the Taliban met three conditions: “First, that they break ties with Al-Qaeda; that they end the violence; and that they accept Afghanistan’s constitution, including its protections for women and minorities.”

While the Taliban’s statement about not permitting Afghan territory to be used to threaten the security of other nations moved partway toward meeting the first condition, they said, the Taliban would have to be more explicit to fully satisfy it.

Families For Freedom protesting outside Senator Chuck Schumer's office in New York City calling for an end to deportations. Credit: Lucy Westcott/IPS

By Lucy Westcott
NEW YORK, Jun 16 2013 (IPS)

As the debate on immigration reform continues in the Senate and fractured talks persist about the future of 11 million undocumented migrants, one New York-based group took to the streets to ask their senator a question.

Stationed outside Senator Chuck Schumer’s office in midtown Manhattan Friday, Families For Freedom, an organisation fighting against the detention and deportation of immigrants, particularly parents, asked their leaders, “Obama, Schumer, would you deport your papa?”

The protest, held two days before Father’s Day, was meant to highlight the trauma deportation and detention causes by separating families when parents are held in facilities or sent home.

“We’re demanding that President Obama stop deporting fathers and that the fathers that have been deported are able to come back,” Esther Portillo-Gonzalez, spokesperson for Families for Freedom, told IPS.

“We have families from Africa, from the Caribbean, from Latin America mostly, and those are the continents that are most affected by these deportations,” she added."Everybody in this country, it doesn't matter where they come from - they're immigrants too."
-- Jeanette Martinelli

Nearly 2 million people have been deported under President Obama up to the end of last year, according to data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In 2012, Obama deported 409,849 immigrants, a record high, with 55 percent of them convicted criminals, according to ICE data.

“Many of those [who were deported] are parents and fathers, breadwinners, and a lot of the kids who are here [at the protest] today…will not be with their fathers on Father’s Day,” Portillo-Gonzales said.

The number of “criminal aliens” the United States has removed has increased dramatically over the past decade, mirroring the overall number of deported persons. According to ICE, in 2002, 71,686 criminals were deported; 10 years later, the number swelled to 225,390, an increase of 214 percent.

Marco, 23, was brought to the United States from Mexico when he was nine years old. He has felt the pain of threatened family separation but was lucky enough to see an uncle fight his deportation trial and win, letting him stay in the country instead of returning to Mexico.

“I saw my cousin suffer; she’s a little girl, she was just a newborn, and hearing that they were going to be separated…kind of broke my heart,” Marco told IPS at the protest, adding that Families for Freedom is seeking humane immigration reform.

“Ever since [I arrived], I’ve adapted to American culture. But once I [went] to college, I started realising things, especially that there’s suffering in my people, and I have to help them out,” he said.

Outside Schumer’s office, sons, daughters and a grandchild of the deported spoke through the small red cone of a makeshift megaphone, telling their stories into the shuffling rush hour throng.

One of the speakers, Alyssa, 14, is still feeling the effects of her grandfather’s removal in 2010. He is now in Panama City.

“It makes me upset, depressed, sad,” Alyssa told IPS.

Her grandmother, Jeanette Martinelli, recalled her husband’s seizure by the authorities.

“He was in a store and the cops came and started searching people and just…they picked him up. When he went to court, jurors dismissed the case, but ICE took him and that’s it,” Martinelli told IPS.

All of Martinelli’s children were born in the United States, and she is also an American citizen. The depression and trauma Alyssa has felt since her grandfather’s deportation have had wider repercussions throughout the family, Martinelli said. In addition, Martinelli’s daughter has stopped attending college because her father can no longer finance it.

A report published by Human Impact Partners on the health status of documented and undocumented migrants and their families shed light on the physical and mental tolls that detention and deportation can cause.

Higher proportions of children of undocumented parents felt fear and anxiety than those with documented parents, reporting sleeping, eating and exercising less out of fear of family separation.*

The report also said that 77 percent of undocumented parents felt feelings of racial profiling, and with less access to health insurance and medical services, they will have shorter lives and decreased health.

Around 23 percent of all deportations, or 205,000 people, from Jul. 1, 2010 to Sep. 31, 2012 were of parents with children who are U.S. citizens, according to data obtained by Colorlines.com through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

If she could speak to ICE, Martinelli would ask officials to think not only about their own families but also the history of the United States.

“We are all human beings. They have families too. Everybody in this country, it doesn’t matter where they come from – they’re immigrants too,” she said.

The children at the protest held purple and white balloons, representing parents, including their own, who have been deported from the United States and separated from their families, before releasing them into the sky, much to their delight.

“It’s not fair that they call people illegal,” Martinelli said. “Nobody is illegal.”

*An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the findings of the HIP report and said that children of undocumented parents felt higher levels of fear and anxiety than those with documented parents.

The Obama administration intends to militarily arm Syrian opposition. Credit: FreedomHouse2/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jun 14 2013 (IPS)

Despite Thursday’s announcement that President Barack Obama has decided to provide direct military assistance to Syrian rebels, what precisely the administration has in mind remains unclear.

Analysts here are also questioning whether the decision is part of a deliberate strategy – and, if so, what that strategy is – or whether it is instead another in a series of efforts to relieve growing pressure from its allies in Europe and the Gulf and hawks at home to take stronger military measures designed to shift the 27-month-old civil war decisively in favour of the opposition.

“When Julius Caesar actually crossed the [Rubicon], he proceeded rapidly to mission accomplishment in accordance with a sound strategy,” noted retired Ambassador Frederic Hof, a Syria specialist at the Atlantic Council who has long called for stronger U.S. military intervention.

“Although the administration’s crossing [decision] is significant, welcome, and long overdue, it is far from certain whether this particular legion will move smartly toward an objective or simply mill around the river bank.”

The White House tied the decision to escalate the “scope and scale” of military aid to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the Syrian Military Council (SMC) to the U.S. intelligence community’s determination that the Syrian forces had used chemical weapons – albeit “on a small scale” – against rebel forces in multiple battles over the past year.

It also cited the deepening involvement of Iran and Hezbollah militants from Lebanon in support of the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad, whose departure from office Obama has repeatedly demanded since hostilities first broke out more than two years ago."It is far from certain whether this particular legion will move smartly toward an objective."
-- Frederic Hof

The announcement, however, followed a series of intensive internal meetings over the past two weeks, as it became clear that the regime’s forces had made a series of battlefield advances – most importantly by capturing, with Hezbollah’s help, the strategic western town of Al-Qusayr close to the Lebanese border – that threatened to tip the war decisively in Assad’s favour.

With pro-government forces and Hezbollah fighters reportedly preparing a major assaults on the key city of Aleppo and other “moderate” opposition leaders appealing desperately for weapons, the administration has found itself under pressure from both its allies abroad and hawks here to “do something” that could halt, if not reverse, the regime’s momentum and restore the “strategic stalemate” that Washington considers essential to any prospect for a political settlement.

But what precisely that “something” is or will be remains unclear. In a briefing for reporters Thursday evening, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes repeatedly avoided answering the question, insisting, however, that Washington will increase “the scope and scale” of direct aid to the SMC which so far has received mainly humanitarian and “non-lethal” assistance.

According to various published reports, Obama has indeed decided to provide small arms and ammunition but still pending are decisions on rebel requests for anti-tank weapons and shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. Washington had previously ruled out the latter, in part due to Israel’s concerns that they could be used against its aircraft, particularly if they fall into the hands of radical Islamist factions among the anti-Assad forces.

But hawks here have argued that small arms and even anti-tank weapons are at this point insufficient to redress the rapidly tilting balance of power on the ground.

“The president must rally an international coalition to take military actions to degrade Assad’s ability to use airpower and ballistic missiles and to move and resupply his forces around the battlefield by air,” declared Congress’s most visible interventionists, Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham late Thursday. “We must take more decisive actions now to turn the tide of the conflict in Syria.”

They and others have called for Washington to create “no-fly zones” along Syria’s Turkish and Jordanian borders that would both safe havens for refugees and rebels and permit the latter to be trained, armed and supplied for operations against government forces inside Syria.

Hof has urged that such a zone also be used protect a rebel government that could gain formal recognition from the United States and other allies, request heavier weapons and eventually go to peace talks as diplomatic, as well as military, equals of the Assad government.

While Rhodes told reporters that Obama has “not made any decision to pursue a military operations such as a no-fly zone”, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that a Pentagon proposal still under consideration calls for a limited “no-fighting” zone extending up to 40 kilometres inside Syria that would be enforced by U.S. and allied aircraft operating from Jordanian airspace.

In recent months, Washington has set up Patriot air-defence batteries and sent fighter jets to bases inside Jordan, where it has also been secretly training rebel and Jordanian forces on securing chemical-weapons facilities and weapons in the event the Assad regime collapses, according to some reports.

Some analysts who have opposed escalating U.S. involvement in the civil war agree that directly supplying arms to the rebels would be unlikely to turn the military tide, certainly in the short term, and could carry additional risks.

“Selective arms shipments could [spur] clashes between rival rebel groups. Extremist elements might attack more moderate rebel units receiving better arms, driven by need, resentment or both,” according to Wayne White, the former deputy director of the State Department intelligence unit on the Near East, who noted that this could actually strengthen the regime. Indeed, he added, the “rebel military vanguard” for some time has been the “radical Islamist in character – even Al-Qaeda affiliated”.

He also expressed scepticism about the effectiveness of a no-fly zone, noting that it would risk swift escalation. “The rebels would remain at the mercy of the regime’s other heavy weapons on the ground, thus tempting those establishing any sort of no-fly zone to attack regime ground targets as well.”

“The first step on the slippery slope is always easy, but it’s much harder to actually resolve a conflict or to find a way out of a quagmire,” wrote Marc Lynch, a Middle East expert at George Washington University, on the eve of the White House announcement.

For Lynch, who has long urged Obama to resist calls to escalate Washington’s intervention, the key issue is what U.S. policy ultimately aims to achieve and whether providing military aid or taking more aggressive measures will help achieve them.

“Should Syria be viewed as a front in a broad regional cold war against Iran and its allies or as a humanitarian catastrophe that must be resolved?” he asked, noting that very different strategies should be followed depending on the answer to that question.

At the moment, according to Lynch, “advocates of arming the rebels switch between making the case that it would strike a blow against the Iranians (and Hezbollah) and that it would improve the prospects for a negotiated solution.”

While the White House clearly framed its decision this week in the latter terms, it may nonetheless add momentum to those who tend to view the Syrian conflict more as part of the larger conflict against Tehran the model for which, according to Lynch, “would presumably be the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan – a long-term insurgency coordinated through neighbouring countries, fuelled by Gulf money, and popularised by Islamist and sectarian propaganda”.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s Middle East visit has eased a good deal of friction between Israel and the U.S. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS.

By Pierre Klochendler
JERUSALEM, Mar 23 2013 (IPS)

On his visit to Israel and the Palestinian Territories, U.S. President Barack Obama laid out his vision for a revival of the long-stalled peace talks. Yet, it was clear from his statements that a settlement freeze is no longer an immediate requirement. And, he carefully avoided mentioning the pre-1967 lines as the basis for a two-state solution, to the Israeli Prime Minister’s delight.

Back in May 2011, on the eve of a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, Obama made a speech on the broader Middle East.

He then declared: “The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps so that secure and recognised borders are established for both states.” His call was a first for a sitting U.S. president, and a low-point in Israel-U.S. relations.

This week not a single time – neither in Jerusalem nor in Ramallah – did the U.S. President mention the June 4, 1967 ceasefire lines.

At his meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, he conceded that “the Palestinian people deserve an end to the occupation.” But he outlined his vision of a Palestinian state as “the homeland of the Palestinian people alongside the Jewish State of Israel,” ignoring the Palestinian President’s opposition to such definition of Israel. Some 20 percent of Israeli citizens identify themselves as Palestinians.

And whereas addressing the Muslim world in Cairo during his first trip abroad of his first term he had insisted that “it’s time for these settlements to stop,” on his first trip abroad of his second term he rejected the Palestinian demand that Israel resumes its settlement freeze as precondition to a resumption of peace talks.

“How do we get sovereignty for the Palestinian people, and how do we assure security for the Israeli people? That’s the essence of this negotiation,” said Obama.

“That’s not to say settlements aren’t important. It’s to say that if we solve those two problems, the settlement problem will be solved,” he reasoned, next to a stone-faced Abbas. “So I don’t want to put the cart before the horse.”

“It’s not only our perception that settlements are illegal. Everybody considers settlements… more than a hurdle towards the two-state solution,” Abbas protested.

If that’s so, why such a turnabout in U.S. policy; why such realignment with the Israeli position?

After a ten-month settlement freeze in 2010; after barely three weeks of bilateral negotiations in September of that year; and three-and-a-half years of futile diplomacy nudging the parties to return to the negotiating table, Obama realised he “screwed up somehow” as he candidly said next to Netanyahu.

He now invokes political constraints and recalcitrant constituencies on both sides as impediments to a resumption of peace talks.

On the Palestinian side, the schism between the West Bank and Gaza, between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas that is adamantly opposed to negotiations with Israel – let alone to its recognition – doesn’t bode well for statehood.

“Waiting and longing is the theme of our political agenda – longing for Palestinian unity; waiting for the new Israeli government’s directions,” says Mahdi Abdul Mahdi, founder of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA).

“We’re only left with our narrative. That is why the PA is losing its credibility.”

“It’s the Israeli government’s duty to halt settlement activity,” Abbas told Obama. Yet, he didn’t explicitly demand a settlement freeze as prerequisite to talks.

The small opening in the Palestinian position could provide an opportunity for U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, back on Saturday to Jerusalem and Ramallah, to discuss ways to translate the Obama vision into concrete steps for a resumption of negotiations.

For Abdul Hadi, renewed U.S. efforts at brokering talks reflect a tighter convergence of interests with Israel, a result of the two allies’ shared concerns with regard to the Arab Awakening.

“Obama’s visit here was to clarify the U.S. presence in the region and open a fresh chapter of support and enhancement in the strategic alliance with Israel under the new government,” says Abdul Mahdi.

Conscious that the sustainability of the new Netanyahu government depends largely on the Jewish Home party, Obama spoke over Netanyahu’s head. This party, if not opposed to talking with the Palestinians per se, rejects a two-state solution and advocates the annexation to Israel of 60 percent of the West Bank.

He reached out to Israeli university students; inspired them to reach out to their Palestinian neighbours; touched them on the immorality of the occupation – and received a standing ovation which Netanyahu would envy.

“Political leaders will never take risks if the people don’t push to take some risks. You must create the change that you want to see,” Obama urged.

Obama’s call was a first for a U.S. president, but that didn’t seem to trouble the Israeli leader.

Whether or not Obama is trying to ‘do a Cairo to him’, Netanyahu is counting on the fact that an awakening against the injustice of the occupation by the same young generation of Israelis who demanded social justice in the summer of 2011 is far from guaranteed.

“The speech is no problem for Netanyahu unless Israelis buy into its core premise – that if Israel only pushes harder for reconciliation, regional hostility to Israel will gradually melt. On that, as the elections proved in January, Israelis are thoroughly divided,” cautions David Horovitz, the Times of Israel website’s editor-in-chief.

Though Obama tactfully avoided demanding any tactical concession from Netanyahu, there’s little doubt as to what the fulfilment of the U.S. strategic goal entails – eventually, the settlements must stop; a Palestinian state must be created on the basis of the pre-1967 borders through negotiations.

But that’s not for the immediate future.

Meanwhile, so long as the borders of a future Palestinian state aren’t specified, and settlement expansion is not on the agenda, the Israeli Prime Minister has no reason to worry about the future of his new-born coalition, and can even afford to pledge Israel’s commitment to a two-state solution as he did during the presidential visit.

The rumbling drone of a fleet of U.S. helicopters carrying security and administrative personnel could be heard long before the eight choppers came into view over the Ramallah horizon on their way to the Palestinian Authority  (PA) presidential compound in the West Bank de facto capital Ramallah.

The helicopters circled over the city several times, swooping low over illegal Israeli settlements on hill tops surrounding the Palestinian enclave, and over Palestinian apartments, houses and businesses before finally landing at PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s Muqata (compound).

This was a security dummy run on Monday for U.S. President Barack Obama’s official visit to Ramallah due Thursday this week. The PA’s security apparatus has been working closely with American and Israeli security personnel to ensure the American president’s safety.

Many Palestinians seem hostile to the visit. Posters of Obama have been torched and vandalised. Angry Palestinians threw shoes at a U.S. diplomatic vehicle in Bethlehem during an anti-Obama demonstration. More demonstrations are being planned during the visit.

These developments came as the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) said that Israel’s “creeping annexation” of the West Bank had led to many human rights violations that could possibly be brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The U.S. refused to take part in the debate in Geneva on Israeli settlements and their effects on Palestinians, accusing the UN of being biased against Israel.

The U.S. stance on the UNHRC debate came as no surprise to Palestinians. It only succeeded in angering them further at what they say is the U.S. government’s bias towards Israel complemented by massive economic and military aid.

The debate followed a January report by a panel of UN investigators, and was supported by the European Union (EU). A resolution declared that “settlements are illegal under international law and constitute an obstacle to peace.”

There are over 500,000 Israeli settlers in the Palestinian Territories, including nearly 200,000 in occupied East Jerusalem. The settlers live in more than a hundred settlements and about as many outposts, all illegal under international law.

Israeli rights group B’tselem states that one of the methods used by the Israeli government to expropriate Palestinian land is simply declaring land in the West Bank Israeli state land, even land privately owned by Palestinians.

“A significant percentage of the land that Israel declared as state land is actually privately owned Palestinian property, which was expropriated from its lawful owners through legal manipulations and in violation of local and international law alike,” says B’tselem.

“This runs contrary to the law which stipulates that state land in the West Bank, even if declared as such prior to 1967, is not to be earmarked for the use of the State of Israel, but rather for the use of the local Palestinian population.”

Obama has said the purpose of his trip to the Middle East is to listen, rather than bring any proposals for a political solution. He has ruled out demanding a construction freeze in Israeli settlements on the West Bank.

Obama’s hands-off approach is sure to be interpreted as a green light to Israel’s newly formed government. The coalition comprises three pro-settler parties with all ministerial positions affecting West Bank settlement activity in the hands of settlers or their supporters.

Still-serving Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said Monday that his Yisrael Beiteinu party would seek to prevent any new construction freeze in West Bank settlements. He also said there would be no peace with the Palestinians in the next four years. Lieberman has support from the Interior Ministry from Pinchas Wallerstein, a veteran settler leader who chairs the committee for investigating the boundaries of regional authorities.

Economics and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett is a former chief of the Yesha Council of Settlers. New Housing and Construction Minister Uri Ariel from Habayit Hayehudi (its electoral base comprises settlers) has spent his public career advancing the settlements.

The new finance minister, Yesh Atid chief Yair Lapid, is chairman of the new Ministerial Committee on Housing Issues. Finance Committee chairman Nissan Slomiansky, also of Habayit Hayehudi, is a secretary general of the Gush Emunim settler movement and a member of the Yesha Council.

Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon and Deputy Defence Minister Danny Danon from the ruling Likud party will be responsible for settlements and their security in the West Bank. “The new government will be a national government that will preserve the country’s interests, including the settlements,” Danon said in an interview before his appointment.

“There is a long fight ahead. We will not give up our land. We prefer to die rather than submit to occupation,” Shaker Tamimi from the Palestinian village Nabi Saleh near Ramallah, which has lost a number of villagers to settler attacks and a lot of its land to the Halamish settlement told IPS. Tamimi’s unarmed brother was shot dead by Israeli soldiers last year while protesting against the expropriation. (END)

U.S. President Barack Obama arrives in Israel on Wednesday, his first destination abroad of his second term, to pay a visit to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whose own second consecutive term will have started only 48 hours beforehand. No wonder that the true purpose of the U.S. President’s visit is defined as reaching out to the Israeli people.

“White smoke in Jerusalem,” announced political pundits. There’s finally a government in Israel. One day prior to the deadline allocated to him by law to form a coalition, Netanyahu informed President Shimon Peres on Saturday evening that he has a government.

“We face a decisive year in the fields of security and economy, and efforts to promote peace,” he told Peres.

But before facing a decisive year, Netanyahu must face a decisive week – the Obama week.

Netanyahu’s majority coalition of 68 legislators in the 120-member Knesset parliament depends largely on the two rising stars of Israeli politics – Yair Lapid and his centrist party There’s a Future (19 seats) that appealed to the middle class with its “equal sharing of the social burden”; and Naftali Bennett and the Jewish Home party (12 seats) linked to the settlers’ lobby.

Netanyahu’s confidantes, former defence minister Ehud Barak, and traditional Likud party buddies were ousted from politics; his ultra-orthodox allies, from the coalition.

“Netanyahu is in a weak position vis-à-vis Obama not just because he’s increasingly alone at the helm, but he’s yet to forge a new policy. Obama knows that. So he’ll hear what the President has to say, but won’t have much to say himself,” says Channel 10 correspondent Yonatan Regev.

“We’ve got a clear policy – on Iran, the Arab world, the Palestinian issue,” retorts Yossi Kuperwasser, director-general at the Ministry of Strategic Affairs.

Regev suggests that “Obama and Netanyahu aren’t the best of friends after all.”  Precisely because they’re not ‘best friends’, Obama sent out some ‘feel good’ messages in an exclusive interview to Israel’s Channel 2 last week.

He went out of his way to refer to Netanyahu by his nickname (“Bibi”) at least ten times, declaring, “We’ve got a terrific businesslike relationship. He’s very blunt with me about his views on issues; I’m very blunt with him about my views on issues.”

“We may differ here and there about what exactly constitutes the right move that would promote our joint interest towards peace,” cautions Kuperwasser. “Matters are discussed, but we’re very close. That’s the atmosphere that’ll characterise the visit.”

On Obama’s agenda is the spring-to-summer red line on Iran obtaining capability to develop nuclear weapons drawn by his host, which if crossed would trigger an Israeli strike on its nuclear sites. And, spring’s in the offing.

Meanwhile, Tehran is reportedly diverting some enriched uranium for research, thus slowing down its march towards an atomic bomb, so that no one knows for sure when Netanyahu’s red line will be drawn.

His opposition to a unilateral attack on Iran notwithstanding, Obama has sought to assuage Israeli misgivings. “Iran possessing a nuclear weapon is a red line,” he said on Channel 2, adopting the Netanyahu language. ”When I say all options are on the table, all options are on the table.”

“It’s not, ‘All options are on the table’,” says Kuperwasser. “There’s need for a credible military option to convince the Iranians to stop their programme.”

Also on the agenda is renewal of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) of President Mahmoud Abbas, who Obama will meet on Thursday.

“Israelis are concerned with socio-economic issues – the price of apartments; the draft of ultra-Orthodox students who’re exempted from military service; the budget,” says Regev.

Immersed in domestic politics for the past three months and in the foreseeable future, Netanyahu has had no time to devote to policy-making. So it’s hard to believe he’ll be hard-pressed by Obama to move forward on the only foreign policy issue on which he can call the shots – peace-making with the Palestinians.

Abbas’s successful bid for UN recognition of ‘Palestine’ as a non-member observer state in November has sparked Palestinian protests against the Israeli occupation.

“Obama’s visit to Abbas is a sideshow to contain the Palestinian problem and give life support to the PA so that it doesn’t collapse but carry on its mission in this transitional phase until the Israelis wake up to realise that they must work for a two-state solution before it’s too late,” says Mahdi Abdul Hadi, founder of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA).

In September 2010, Netanyahu refused Obama’s request to extend a ten-month moratorium on settlement construction; as a result, Abbas refused to have peace talks extended.

Kuperwasser dismisses a renewed settlement freeze: “We’ve been there already. The fact is the Palestinians prefer to opt for a unilateral policy and receive UN declarations with no meaning on the ground instead of negotiating with us without pre-condition possibilities to change the situation in both our favour.”

In a sign that a resumption of peace talks isn’t expected during the presidential visit, U.S. officials have said that Obama will resort to listening to his Israeli and Palestinian interlocutors, and reach out to the Israeli people directly.

Hence, the preview of the President’s trip recently posted on YouTube by the White House highlights a speech on Thursday in front of Israeli students.

“This really is the true purpose of the visit – the ability for the President to speak directly to the Israeli people about the future that we want to build together,” says U.S. Deputy National Advisor Ben Rhodes in the video clip.

During his first trip abroad of his first term, Obama addressed the Muslim world from Cairo University, unaware he had become a source of inspiration for the Arab awakening.

Yet if Obama hopes that he’ll touch Israelis the way he touched the Arab world; that Israelis will emulate the motto ‘Yes We Can’ and reach out to the Palestinians, may be in for a big disappointment.

U.S. President Barack Obama campaigning in Virginia on October 25, 2012. Credit: Watermarked Photography/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 31 2012 (IPS)

With less than a week left in the 2012 election campaign and much of the Northeast recovering from Hurricane Sandy, President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger, former governor Mitt Romney, are running neck and neck in the national popular vote, according to the most recent surveys.

Online bettors and seasoned political analysts, however, appear to agree that by virtue of his edge in about nine key battleground, or “swing” states, the president will most likely emerge victorious after the final ballots are cast on November 6.

Instead of a direct popular vote, the presidency is determined by the electoral college, through which each state is allocated a certain number of votes based on their representation in Congress. Almost all states use a winner-take-all formula, so that the candidate that wins a majority receives all of a state’s electoral votes. With most states either solidly “red” (Republican) or “blue” (Democratic), “purple” swing states are critical.

Residents of those states, which include Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada, are being bombarded around the clock with last-minute radio and television campaign ads as well as robocalls and other telephone exhortations on behalf of not just the presidential contenders but candidates for state and local elected positions as well.

In the critical swing state of Ohio, which nearly all analysts consider a top prize, in part because no modern Republican candidate has won the presidency without it, is also leaning toward Obama, although one top political analyst, Charlie Cook of the “National Journal”, still considers it a “toss-up”.

With one of every eight jobs in that state dependent on the auto industry, the Obama campaign has been pounding away for months at Romney’s opposition during the financial crisis four years ago to the federal bailout of an industry which has since rebounded remarkably well.

Romney may have compounded his problems there this week when his campaign began running ads falsely claiming that Chrysler’s Jeep division was outsourcing U.S. jobs to China. The assertion drew harsh denunciations from Chrysler’s CEO and General Motors.

“You have to think the Jeep/China falsehood could be the nail in the coffin there,” noted Chris Nelson, a well connected political and foreign policy analyst, in his daily Nelson Report Tuesday.

Sandy’s aftermath

While the polls have yet to reflect it, Obama may ironically benefit in the closing days of the race from the hurricane itself, primarily because it enabled him to be shown supervising the federal government’s response, effectively pushing Romney down and, in some cases, even off the news agenda.

The praise showered on the president’s handling of the “Frankenstorm” by two Republican governors, notably Chris Christie of New Jersey, was no doubt poorly received at Romney’s campaign headquarters.

His campaign was just hit Monday with a widely circulated video clip of a debate last year in which the Republican candidate suggested that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) – the national coordinator for relief efforts – be eliminated and its responsibilities off-loaded onto cash-strapped state and local authorities or, better yet, the “private sector.”

A country divided

The closeness of the presidential race is indicative of how deeply and evenly split the country is, despite clear divides along different geographic and demographic lines.

The geographic divisions between blue and red states are the most obvious. With key exceptions in each region, the old South and most of the Midwestern and Rocky Mountain states are firmly in the Romney camp. On the other hand, the Northeast and the three West Coast states are solidly Democratic, as are most of the Rust Belt states of the upper mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes region.

While geographic divisions loom large, demographic differences have also emerged as potentially decisive. In a Washington Post/ABC tracking poll, well over 80 percent of non-white voters said they intended to vote for Obama while over 91 percent of Romney’s backers are white.

Ninety-three percent of African-American voters said they would vote for Obama, and only two percent for Romney, with the rest still undecided, according to a Pew poll released Monday. If their turnout is high, their votes could be decisive in North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida, all three of which went for Obama in 2008 and are considered tossups by Cook and others.

Obama was also favoured by 69 percent of Latinos in an impreMedia-Latino Decisions survey released Monday. A high Latino voter turnout, particularly in the battleground states of Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, Virginia and Florida could also swing those states in Obama’s favour column, ensuring his victory even if he loses Ohio.

Despite repeated efforts by Romney and the Republicans to paint Obama as anti-Israel, Jewish voters appear poised to vote by a solid majority for the president. If that prediction holds, it could make a difference in the two biggest electoral prizes – Ohio and Florida.

Age groups also could play an important role, especially if younger voters (ages 18-29), who historically have been the least likely to vote, turn out at higher rates. Obama leads that age group by more than 20 percentage points, according to the Pew poll, while the numbers are nearly reversed for voters 65 and older.

Similarly, most polls show a gap between men and women voters, although it has narrowed significantly in the past month as Romney moved sharply to the political centre after hewing closely to the positions of his party’s far-right populist core during the primary campaign.

The Pew poll found a seven-percent margin for Romney among male voters, and a six-point margin for Obama among women. Until the last few weeks, the gaps for both genders were more than twice their current sizes.

Overall, the Pew poll, conducted last weekend, found a dead heat between the two men in the popular vote. Other polls released this week have found the same results or one or two percentage points in favour of one or the other – all within the margins of error, however.

Still, most analysts believe Obama is likely to win, given his edge in most of the swing states. At the online betting site, Intrade, Obama’s chances of winning are at about 67 percent, up from 55 percent in mid-October. His odds have also risen about five percent since Monday, when Hurricane Sandy hit land.

Nate Silver, the New York Times’ polling and statistics guru, now puts Obama’s odds at 77.4 percent. Silver predicted Obama will win both the popular vote (by about two percent) and the electoral vote with all swing states except North Carolina and Florida.

President Barack Obama reacts after recognising actress Sissy Spacek in Charlottesville, Va., Aug. 29, 2012. The president happened upon Spacek while greeting people following a stop in the town. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 8 2012 (IPS)

With their respective party nomination conventions behind them, both President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney travelled to the tiny northeastern state of New Hampshire Friday, one of at most a dozen “swing” states whose voters are likely to decide the winner in the Nov. 6 election.

Despite persistent high levels of unemployment and some 60 percent of the electorate telling pollsters that the country is headed “in the wrong direction”, most political analysts believe that Obama enters the final 60 days of the race with a leg up over his challenger.

The latest Gallup poll, released just hours after Obama’s acceptance speech Thursday night at the Democratic convention in Charlotte, North Carolina – another key swing state – showed Obama with a 48-45 percent lead over Romney and with a 52-percent overall job approval rating, his highest since June 2011, when he was still basking in the afterglow of the successful U.S. commando raid that killed Al-Qaeda’s chief, Osama bin Laden – an event to which many speakers referred repeatedly during the proceedings.

Gallup suggested in its analysis that Obama appeared likely to benefit from a bigger post-convention “bounce” in the polls than Romney received after the Republican convention in Tampa, Florida, the week before. Indeed, Romney’s “bounce” coming off the convention was virtually non-existent, according to the polls.

Because the president is not elected by the popular vote, however, both political experts and the two campaigns are focused much more on the swing states – those that are considered neither solidly Republican (red) nor Democratic (blue) – that will decide outcome.

Instead of a direct popular vote, the president and vice president are actually elected by an “electoral college” in which each state is allocated a certain number of votes based on their representation in the U.S. Congress.

Almost all states use a “winner-take-all” formula in which whatever candidate wins a majority of the state’s vote receives all of that state’s electoral votes. To win, a candidate must receive a total of at least 271 electoral votes in the electoral college.

Thus, the country’s most populous state, California, has 55 electoral votes all of which will, as appears virtually certain given California’s strongly Democratic electorate, be cast in Obama’s favour. The second-most populous state, Texas, has 38 electoral votes all of which, given the state’s strongly Republican cast, will almost certainly go to Romney.

According to most political analysts, including Republicans, Obama enjoys a significant advantage in the electoral contest.

Current polling shows Romney and his running-mate, Wisconsin Rep. Joe Ryan, with a decisive lead in more states, especially in the Midwest and the Southeast, than Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. But the combined electoral votes of those solidly Republican states come to less than those – including California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Washington State – where the Democratic ticket is considered sure to win.

Different analysts disagree on precisely what constitutes a decisive lead. CNN, for example, currently estimates 237 electoral votes are either solidly in or leaning strongly toward Obama’s column, compared to 191 in Romney’s. Estimates by the Congressional Quarterly a week ago yielded a closer result – 201-191.

Analysts likewise disagree on how many toss-up, or swing, states remain. Going into this week’s Democratic convention, CNN named seven states – Florida, Virginia, New Hampshire, Ohio, Iowa, Colorado, and Nevada as true toss-ups. It found four other states – North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri, and Arizona – “leaning” to the Republican ticket, and four more – New Mexico, Wisconsin (despite Ryan’s candidacy), Michigan, and Pennsylvania – “leaning” toward Obama.

If the leaning states fell into their respective columns, Obama would lead Romney by a 247-206 margin and put him within relatively easy striking distance of the magic 271 electoral votes needed to win.

The fact that Obama swept all seven of the remaining toss-up states in 2008 is seen here as making Romney’s task considerably more difficult, particularly given the growing voting strength of Latinos – whose appeals for immigration reform were soundly rebuffed at the Republican convention – in Nevada and Colorado – and concerns among the substantial numbers of retired and elderly voters in Florida about what the Republicans intend to do about the Social Security and Medicare programmes.

In addition, the commitment of former President Bill Clinton – the only living national politician with a 70-percent approval rating whose rousing nomination speech for Obama Thursday fired up the convention in Charlotte and drew rave reviews from all but the most right-wing commentators – to play an active role in the campaign, especially in the industrial swing states, could help shore up support for Obama among white male – especially blue-collar — voters who, of all demographic groups, are seen as most susceptible to Romney’s appeals.

Indeed, those who are actually betting money on the race give Obama much better odder than the polls would suggest. As of Friday, Intrade, the main U.S. on-line betting site, is giving Obama a 59-percent chance of winning, up from a mid-June low of around 54 percent.

The New York Times’ polling guru, Nate Silver, who pays closest attention to state polling, rates Obama’s chances of winning even higher. While Obama will win 51.3 percent of the popular vote Nov 6, Silver estimated Friday, the electoral margin is likely be 313-225 margin. Based on his statistical methods, Silver, the accuracy of whose predictions in the 2008 election persuaded the Times to hire him, is currently estimating Obama’s chances of winning at 77.3 percent.

Of course, all of these predictions could still be upset by a number of intervening factors, such as a sharp rise in unemployment, which is still running at more than eight percent, or a major international crisis, although Obama appears far more eager to inject foreign-policy issues into the campaign than Romney whose failure to praise the U.S. military in his nomination acceptance speech in Tampa was widely criticised, even by fellow-Republicans.

Given the overriding public concern about the direction of the economy and the fate of the middle class four years after the outbreak of the global financial crisis, most other issues, except health care, are likely to be pushed to the margins.

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

The Democratic National Convention erupted in controversy this week over the removal of a clause in the party platform stating that Jerusalem should remain Israel’s undivided capital and only grew worse when the wording was hastily re-inserted.

Though party platforms are routinely ignored by presidents and members of Congress, the politically sensitive issue of Israel, which has been particularly prominent in a U.S. presidential election where foreign policy has been downplayed by both sides, has caused ripples far beyond Washington.

The Democratic Party platform had initially intended to remove the wording from 2008 which had affirmed the party’s stance on Jerusalem in order to bring it in line with long-standing United States policy, upheld by presidents of both parties, which holds that Jerusalem is a final status issue to be decided in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

Both Republicans and Democrats, however, have routinely voiced support for Jerusalem being Israel’s “undivided capital” in their party platforms in order to gather support from wealthy pro-Israel donors and secure votes in swing states where Jewish voters are believed to be decisive.

Barack Obama, in a 2008 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the major pro-Israel lobbying group, said that Jerusalem must remain undivided, but quickly backtracked and has since held to a policy of keeping Jerusalem as a final status issue.

Although the George W. Bush administration repeatedly stated its intent to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, it never acted to do so, the embassy remains in Tel Aviv, and the United States still has not formally recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Numerous media outlets reported that the Democratic platform had been vetted by AIPAC, which had voiced its approval. But after the controversy erupted, and Republican nominee Mitt Romney referred to the omission of the Jerusalem statement as “shameful”, President Obama was reported to have personally intervened to have the language re-inserted.

The amendment needed approval by a two-thirds majority in a voice vote on the conference floor. The controversy deepened when three calls for a vote came back without a clear majority in favour, much less the required two-thirds. But conference chairman, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, declared that he had heard the required majority. Video recordings of the vote cast strong doubts on that assertion.

“The handling of the Jerusalem amendment in the Democratic party platform was ham-fisted to say the least,” Saqib Ali, a former member of the Maryland House of Delegates and a Democratic Party activist, told IPS.

“By ramming through the amendment on a dubious procedural move, Mayor Villagarosa and party leaders insulted those who believe Palestinians deserve equal human rights to everyone else in the world.

“The Democratic Party platform on this issue contradicts the position of the Obama administration. The divergence between the Democratic platform and the Obama administration policy just doesn’t make any sense,” Ali added.

Palestinians noted the controversy as well. Nabil Abu Rdeneh, an aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said that while the entire episode might just be “election propaganda”, a failure to recognise the Palestinian claim to east Jerusalem will “destroy the peace process” and lead to “endless war”.

The Democrats’ official stance also seems to lack support from the party’s rank and file. In a recent poll by the Arab American Institute, while nearly 60 percent of Democrats said they were not sure what they thought the ultimate disposition of Jerusalem should be, those who voiced an opinion favoured dividing the city over it being controlled by Israel alone by a nearly two-to-one margin.

“Pushing through the amendment was in part a reaction to Republican criticisms that the Obama administration – despite providing record amounts of taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel’s rightist government and blocking the United Nations from challenging Israeli violations of international humanitarian law – was somehow not supportive enough of Israel,” Professor Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, wrote in an article for Foreign Policy in Focus.

“It was also a demonstration of just how determined the Democratic Party leadership is to undermine the Middle East peace process and weaken international law, even if it means running roughshod over their members and thereby hurting their chances in November,” Zunes said.

Other observers were much more explicit about the role of the pro-Israel lobby in the incident.

John Mearsheimer, a professor of politics at the University of Chicago and co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”, says that this episode reflected how out of touch U.S. leaders are with public opinion on Israel and the Palestinians.

“I don’t think the flap over Jerusalem will have any effect on the election, since there is no evidence that Obama was responsible for the problem and he fixed it right away,” Mearsheimer told IPS.

“Nevertheless, what happened yesterday was very important because we saw right before our own eyes that the president and his lieutenants were caving into pressure from Israel and the lobby, but at the same time, there was significant opposition to what Obama was doing among the rank and file in the Democratic Party.

“Actually, this is not surprising if you look at public opinion polls on how the American people think about our special relationship with Israel. The evidence is clear that the public is generally pro-Israel, but not so much as to justify the present relationship, where we give Israel more aid than any other country and give it unconditionally.”

Notably, while Obama visibly intervened to change the party platform, he made no mention of Jerusalem in his convention speech, and barely touched upon Israel at all, confining his remarks to a pro forma statement that “Our commitment to Israel’s security must not waver, and neither must our pursuit of peace.”

Obama also was sparing in his remarks on Iran, which has been dominating U.S. foreign policy for the past year. While this may all reflect a general preference of both candidates to speak to ongoing domestic economic issues in this election, some observers thought there might be some small indication of the beginnings of a shift in pro-Israel influence on U.S. foreign policy.

“Like everyone who saw this appalling misprision of democracy by the Democratic National Convention, I was struck by the blatancy of the political manipulation on view,” former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman told IPS.

“Whatever the merits of the issue itself in terms of campaign politics, the Israel Lobby can have done itself no good by exposing its contempt for the opinion of the delegates now gathered in Charlotte in this way.”

Mearsheimer agreed. “What makes the special relationship (between the U.S. and Israel) work is the fact that the lobby is deadly effective at putting pressure on American politicians and policymakers to support Israel no matter what. If the public had a real say in our policy toward Israel, we would have a very different policy than we now have. Wednesday, that point was driven home clearly on our TV screens for all to see. Nothing like that has ever happened before.”

Gen. Martin Dempsey. Credit: DoD photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo

By Jim Lobe and Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, Sep 5 2012 (IPS)

President Barack Obama’s explicit warning that he will not accept a unilateral Israeli attack against Iran may force Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to step back from his ostensible threat of war.

Netanyahu had hoped that the Obama administration could be put under domestic political pressure during the election campaign to shift its policy on Iran to the much more confrontational stance that Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak have been demanding.

But that political pressure has not materialised, and Obama has gone further than ever before in warning Netanyahu not to expect U.S. backing in any war with Iran. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey told reporters in Britain Aug. 30 that an Israeli strike would be ineffective, and then said, “I don’t want to be complicit if they (the Israelis) choose to do it.”

It was the first time that a senior U.S. official had made such an explicit public statement indicating the administration’s unwillingness to be a party to a war provoked by a unilateral Israeli attack.

Dempsey had conveyed such a warning during meetings with Israeli leaders last January, as IPS reported Feb. 1, but a series of moves by the administration over the next several months, including the adoption of Israeli demands during two rounds of negotiations with Iran on the nuclear issue in May and June, appeared to represent a retreat from that private warning.

Dempsey’s warning was followed by an as-yet unconfirmed report by Time magazine that the Pentagon has decided to sharply cut back on its participation in the largest-ever joint military exercise with Israel designed to test the two countries’ missile-defence systems in late October.

Originally scheduled for last spring, the exercise was delayed in January following an earlier round of Israeli sabre-rattling and the apparent Israeli assassination of an Iranian scientist, which had further increased tensions between Netanyahu and President Obama.

Former Israeli national security adviser Giora Eiland suggested in an interview with Reuters Tuesday that the Dempsey statement had changed the political and policy calculus in Jerusalem. “Israeli leaders cannot do anything in the face of a very explicit ‘no’ from the U.S. president,” Eiland said. “So they are exploring what space is left to operate.”

Eiland explained that Netanyahu had previously maintained that the U.S. “might not like (an Israeli attack) but they will accept it the day after. However, such a public, bold statement meant the situation had to be reassessed.”

Netanyahu and Barak have never explicitly threatened to attack Iran but have instead used news leaks and other means to create the impression that they are seriously considering a unilateral air strike.

The Netanyahu campaign, aimed at leveraging a shift in U.S. policy toward confrontation with Iran, appeared to climax during the first two weeks of August amid a torrent of stories in the Israeli press suggesting that Netanyahu and Barak were getting closer to a decision on war.

An unnamed senior official – almost certainly Barak – indicated in an interview that the Israeli leader would reconsider the unilateral military option if Obama were to adopt the Israeli red line – in effect an ultimatum to Iran to end all enrichment or face war.

As Eiland suggests, however, Netanyahu may no longer feel that he is in a position to make such a demand when he meets Obama later this month. Not only has Obama drawn a clear line against unilateral Israeli action, but the Republican Party and its presidential candidate Mitt Romney have failed to signal that Obama’s rejection of Netanyahu’s belligerence on Iran will be a central issue in the presidential campaign.

Although the party platform said the threshold for military action should be Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapons “capability” rather than the construction of an actual weapon, Romney did not embrace the threat to go to war unless Iran agrees to shut down its nuclear programme, as Netanyahu would have hoped.

That omission appeared to reflect the growing influence in his campaign of the “realist” faction of the Republican Party which opposed the radical post-9/11 trajectory of George W. Bush’s first presidential term in office and re-asserted itself in the second term.

The party’s marquee speaker on foreign policy was not a neoconservative but former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, whom the neo-conservatives viewed with disdain, not least because of her effort to begin diplomatic engagement with Iran.

Rice mentioned Iran only in connection with its crackdown against dissidents during her prime-time speech.

Until recently, prominent neo-conservatives, such as Dan Senor, Elliott Abrams, and Eric Edelman, as well as aggressive pro-Israel nationalists such as former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, had appeared dominant among Romney’s foreign policy advisers.

The fact that the billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, a strong supporter of Netanyahu and the Israeli far right, has pledged up to 100 million dollars to support the Republican campaign seemed to assure them of the upper hand on Israel and Iran.

But neo-conservatives may have lost influence to the realists as a result of Romney’s ill-fated trip in July to Britain, Israel and Poland – all neo-conservative favourites – as well as recent polling showing ever-growing war-weariness, if not isolationism, among both Republicans and the all-important independents in the electorate.

On the convention’s eve, Lee Smith, a neo-conservative scribe based at the Standard, published an article in Tablet Magazine entitled “Why Romney Won’t Strike Iran”.

One of Romney’s senior advisers, former CIA chief Gen. Michael Hayden, has even partially echoed Dempsey, telling the Israeli newspaper Haaretz Thursday that an Israeli raid against Iran’s nuclear facilities would likely be counter-productive.

Both Hayden’s and Dempsey’s remarks about the futility or counter-productivity of an Israeli attack on Iran echoed those of a broad range of Israel’s national-security elite, including President Shimon Peres and the former chiefs of Israel’s intelligence agencies and armed forces, who, provoked by Netanyahu’s and Barak’s war talk, have come out more strongly than ever against the idea.

In addition to publicly casting doubt on whether an attack would be effective, many of the national-security critics have warned that a unilateral strike could seriously damage relations with the U.S.

That argument, which resonates strongly in Israeli politics, was given much greater weight by Dempsey’s warning last week.

Further eroding Israeli tolerance of Netanyahu’s talk of war was a blog post on the Atlantic Magazine’s website by Jeffrey Goldberg, an influential advocate of Israeli interests who has helped propagate the notion that Israel would indeed act unilaterally in the past. As the Netanyahu campaign reached its climax last month, Goldberg offered “7 Reasons Why Israel Should Not Attack Iran’s Nuclear facilities”.

Goldberg worried that an Israeli “strike could be a disaster for the U.S.-Israel relationship,” especially if Iran retaliated against U.S. targets. “Americans are tired of the Middle East, and I’m not sure how they would feel if they believed that Israeli action brought harm to Americans,” he wrote.

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

Rights groups denounced the decision not to pursue prosecutions of CIA officers who may have been responsible for the deaths of two prisoners in their custody. Credit: Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 1 2012 (IPS)

U.S. human rights groups have roundly condemned Thursday’s announcement by Attorney General Eric Holder that the Justice Department will not pursue prosecutions of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers who may have been responsible for the deaths of two prisoners in their custody.

The announcement appeared to mark the end of all efforts by the U.S. government to hold CIA interrogators accountable for torture and mistreating prisoners detained during the so-called “Global War on Terror” launched shortly after the Al Qaeda attacks on Sep. 11, 2001.

For rights activists and for supporters of President Barack Obama, it was the latest in a series of disappointing decisions, including the failure to close the detention facility at the U.S. base in Guantanamo, Cuba. They had hoped Obama would not only end the excesses of President George W. Bush’s prosecution of the war, but also conduct a full investigation of those excesses, if not prosecute those responsible.

“This is truly a disastrous development,” said Laura Pitter, counter-terrorism advisor at Human Rights Watch (HRW). “To now have no accountability whatsoever for any of the CIA abuses for which there are now mountains of evidence is just appalling.”

“It completely undermines the U.S.’s ability to have any credibility on any of these issues in other countries, even as it calls for other countries to account for abuses and prosecute cases of torture and mistreatment,” she told IPS.

“Continuing impunity threatens to undermine the universally recognised prohibition on torture and other abusive treatment and sends the dangerous signal to government officials that there will be no consequences for their use of torture and other cruelty,” noted Jameel Jaffar, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“Today’s decision not to file charges against individuals who tortured prisoners to death is yet another entry in what is already a shameful record.”

In his announcement, Holder suggested that crimes were indeed committed in the two cases that were being investigated by Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham but that convictions were unlikely.

“Based on the fully developed factual record concerning the two deaths, the department has declined prosecution because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said.

The two deaths took place at a secret CIA detention facility known as the Salt Pit in Afghanistan in 2002 and at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison the following year. The victims have been identified as Gul Rahman, a suspected Taliban militant, and Manadel Al-Jamadi, an alleged Iraqi insurgent.

The two were the last reviewed by Durham, who had originally been tasked by Bush’s attorney general, Michael Mukasey, in 2008 with conducting a criminal investigation into CIA interrogators’ use of “waterboarding” against detainees and the apparently intentional destruction of interrogation videotapes that recorded those sessions.

In August 2009, Holder expanded Durham’s mandate to include 101 cases of alleged mistreatment by CIA interrogators of detainees held abroad to determine whether any of them may be liable to prosecution.

At the time, he also stressed that he would not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the controversial legal guidance given by the Bush administration regarding possible “enhanced interrogation” techniques that could be used against detainees.

Such techniques, which include waterboarding, the use of stress positions and extreme heat and cold, are widely considered torture by human rights groups and international legal experts. As such, they violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture (CAT), as well as the Geneva Conventions and a 1996 U.S. federal law against torture.

Holder’s position was consistent with Obama’s statement, which human rights groups also strongly criticised, shortly after taking office in 2009 that he did not want CIA officials to “suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering” to escape prosecution and that he preferred “to look forward as opposed to…backwards”.

In his first days in office, Obama ordered all secret CIA detention facilities closed and banned the enhanced techniques authorised by his predecessor.

In late 2010, Durham announced that he would not pursue criminal charges related to the destruction of the CIA videotapes. Seven months later, he recommended that, of the 101 cases of alleged CIA abuse referred to him, only two warranted full criminal investigations in which CIA officers had allegedly exceeded the Bush administration’s guidelines for permissible interrogation techniques.

Now that Holder and Durham have concluded that prosecutions of the individuals involved are unlikely to result in convictions, it appears certain that no CIA officer will be prosecuted in a U.S. jurisdiction. Prosecutions of Bush officials responsible for authorising the “enhanced interrogation” techniques have also been ruled out.

In 2006, a private contractor for the CIA was successfully prosecuted and sentenced to six years in prison for beating an Afghan detainee to death three years before.

Some commentators suggested that these decisions, including the dropping of the two remaining cases, have been motivated primarily by political considerations. Indeed, HRW director Kenneth Roth wrote in an op-ed last year that “dredging up the crimes of the previous administration was seen as too distracting and too antagonistic an enterprise when Republican votes were needed”.

In a statement Thursday, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee praised Holder’s decision. Republicans protested Holder’s referral of the 101 cases to Durham in 2009.

But rights activists expressed great frustration. Holder’s announcement “is disappointing because it’s well documented that in the aftermath of 9/11, torture and abuse were widespread and systematic,” said Melina Milazzo of Human Rights First (HRF), which has been one of the most aggressive groups in investigating and publicising torture and abuse by U.S. intelligence and military personnel.

“It’s shocking that the department’s review of hundreds of instances of torture and abuse will fail to hold even one person accountable.”

Similarly, the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR) noted that Holder’s announcement “belies U.S. claims that it can be trusted to hold accountable Americans who have perpetrated torture and other human rights abuses”.

It said the decision “underscores the need for independent investigations elsewhere, such as the investigation in Spain, to continue”. Victims and rights groups including CCR filed criminal complaints against former Bush officials in Spanish courts in 2009, launching two separate investigations by judges there.

The ambitions of a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran, as harboured by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak, have been defeated by internal opposition, a growing number of observers have come to believe in the wake of dramatic opposing statements by prominent Israeli leaders, including President Shimon Peres.

The picture emerging is one of the prime and defence ministers’ isolation in advocating for unilateral Israeli action. It has been known for some time that the chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), Benny Gantz, and Tamir Pardo, the head of the Mossad, or the Israeli intelligence agency, both oppose a strike on Iran.

This knowledge in itself is unusual. While such sentiments can be leaked, both Gantz and Pardo have been clear in media interviews that they do not share Netanyahu and Barak’s assessments regarding the immediacy of the Iranian threat or the utility of a military strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities. It is worth noting that both Gantz and Pardo were appointed by the current government.

Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea, writing in the daily Yediot Ahoronoth on Aug. 10, listed not only Gantz and Pardo among current military leaders opposing an Israeli attack on Iran, but also Air Force chief Amir Eshel, Military Intelligence chief Aviv Kochavi and General Security Services (Shin Bet) director Yoram Cohen, in what amounts to a consensus among Israel’s top defence and intelligence leaders.

Public disagreement

But it was statements by Peres and by the former IDF Director of Military Intelligence General Uri Saguy that exposed the extent of Netanyahu and Barak’s isolation and criticised Israeli’s leaders on points rarely raised in public.

Peres told Israel’s Channel 2: “It is now clear to us that we cannot go it alone. We can forestall (Iran’s nuclear progress); therefore it’s clear to us that we have to work together with…America.”

“Iran is a global threat, to the U.S. and Israel alike,” he said, adding that he was convinced that the U.S. would take action when necessary.

Peres’s statements were widely interpreted as criticism of Netanyahu’s and Barak’s ongoing attempts to pressure President Obama to attack Iran and the perception that Netanyahu was working to unseat Obama in favour of Republican candidate Mitt Romney, who is on much friendlier terms with Netanyahu.

There was also a widespread belief that Peres was warning that the tactics Netanyahu and Barak were employing with the U.S. threaten to harm the “special relationship” between the two countries.

While Israelis value their freedom to act on their own, they also recognise the need for U.S. support, as the United States is the only major power that has consistently supported controversial Israeli policies and actions. The idea that the Israeli government may be directly interfering with U.S. politics is an extremely unpopular one in Israel.

Diminished credibility

For his part, General Saguy cast doubt on the ability of Netanyahu and Barak to lead the country under dire circumstances. A reporter who interviewed Saguy for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz described his views of both.

“Saguy does not trust (Netanyahu) because he has not seen him make…one single important decision. He does not trust Barak because he’s seen the results of many important decisions the minister has made, as chief of staff, prime minister and defence minister,” the reporter wrote.

This view from a highly respected Israeli military leader seriously undermines the credibility of Israel’s two leading decision-makers with regard to military action. Combined with the military and intelligence consensus, the public statements suggest the possibility of an open revolt against the current leadership if Barak and Netanyahu try to move forward with an attack on Iran.

Netanyahu, however, sharply criticised Peres for “overstepping” his role as president, a largely ceremonial office in Israel. That sharp retort, as well as Netanyahu’s continued campaign among important Israeli party leaders, such as Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual head of the Shas party, could indicate that he has not yet given up on finding a way to attack Iran.

It is widely believed that at least part of the Israeli strategy in beating the war drums on Iran is to pressure the Obama administration into acting against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Netanyahu surely fears that if Israel is no longer believed to be seriously considering a unilateral strike, the urgency in Washington, already far less than he would like it to be, will diminish considerably.

Challenges for Obama

Obama’s position on Iran has been remarkably consistent: pursue sanctions and diplomatic engagement in the hope that Iran will agree to the monitoring of its nuclear program to ensure that weapons are not being developed. Obama has also pledged that all options, including a military one, remain open to prevent Iran from obtaining such a weapon.

An Israeli strike could put Obama in a very difficult position: he could either risk staying out of a conflict not of his making, which would surely set Israel’s supporters in the United States ablaze in opposition to him, or he could support, either directly or indirectly, the Israeli war effort, which would make it easy to cast him to blame when oil prices skyrocket as a result.

With the Israeli threat diminished, at least for the moment, Obama can continue to pursue his approach to Iran with a reasonable level of confidence that this will not hurt his chances of re-election in November. That surely does not please Netanyahu, but unless the situation changes in Israel, he will find it very difficult to raise this issue again before the election.

Members of PTI party protest US operation in Abbottabad, near Peshawar Press Club on May 14. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jun 28 2012 (IPS)

Despite President Barack Obama’s stated policy of using foreign aid to improve public perception of the United States in Pakistan, two major new reports suggest that U.S. policies are exacerbating an already soured relationship.

According to the non-profit Pew Research Center, nearly three-quarters of Pakistanis today “consider the U.S. an enemy”. That number has risen repeatedly over the past several years, from 64 percent in 2009 to 69 percent in 2011 to 74 percent in 2012.

Just eight percent of Pakistanis say they view the U.S. as a partner.

Further, the report, released on Wednesday, notes that a full 35 percent of respondents said that improving relations with the United States is unimportant, up 13 points from last year.

These figures stand in stark contrast to the Pew’s findings on how Pakistanis view China. Nearly 90 percent of those polled saw China as a partner, and just two percent as an enemy.

The view of the U.S. is even more critical than that of India, Pakistan’s traditional nemesis. A full 22 percent reported having a favourable view of India, up from just 14 percent last year.

More importantly, even as a majority (59 percent) name India as Pakistan’s greatest threat – well more than the Taliban (23 percent) or Al-Qaeda (4) – nearly two-thirds of Pakistanis say that it is important to improve relations with India. A similar number support greater bilateral trade and continued talks between the two countries.

For many observers, it is hard to see these numbers as anything but a repudiation of President Obama’s policies in Pakistan.

Only 17 percent, for instance, back U.S. drone strikes, a programme that has massively expanded under President Obama.

Despite Obama’s stated – and largely successful – aim of improving the view of the United States around the world, “Pakistan is the only country where ratings for Obama are no better than the ratings President George W. Bush received during his final year in office,” according to another Pew report released in mid-June.

Security focus

Beyond the drone issue, much of Pakistani public perception of the U.S. is driven by U.S. foreign aid to the country, both military and civilian – particularly the breakdown between those two.

In October 2009, months after President Obama took over power, the U.S. Congress voted to triple civilian assistance to Pakistan, amounting to some 7.5 billion dollars through 2014.

This constituted a significant turnaround from the approach of the previous decade – since the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001 – under which U.S. military assistance in Pakistan was double the civilian funding.

According to a new report released on Wednesday by the International Crisis Group (ICG), a watchdog based in Brussels, “Lopsided focus on security aid after the 11 September 2011 attacks has not delivered counter-terrorism dividends, but entrenched the military’s control over state institutions and policy, delaying reforms and aggravating Pakistani public perceptions that the U.S. is only interested in investing in a security client.”

Thus, the 2009 bill’s goal, as supported by President Obama, was to significantly increase U.S. support for civilian institutions.

Yet in fact, ICG’s researchers note, the attempt to diversify away from a security-heavy budget has not lived up to the initial plans. Thus far, the goal of providing 1.5 billion dollars per year has fallen short by around a third, by 414 million dollars in fiscal year 2011 and by an estimated 500 million dollars in FY2012.

In fact, during that time, the United States’ civilian foreign-aid agency, USAID, has reportedly begun to cut back on its Pakistan programmes.

Further, ICG warns that the space in which USAID, as well as international and Pakistani NGOs it funds, has to work has been “shrinking as a result of the Obama administration’s aid policy”.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani military, supported by the civilian bureaucracy, is said to have strengthened its oversight of aid delivery.

Still, while the deteriorating bilateral relationship has led U.S. lawmakers to call for a significant – or complete – reduction in assistance for Pakistan, ICG cautions against retaliatory cutting of development funding.

“Re-orientation of funding from military security purposes to long-term democracy and capacity building support is the best way to guarantee the West’s and Pakistan’s long-term interests in a dangerous region,” the report concludes. “But aid policies must be better targeted, designed and executed.”

Indeed, according to the Pew report, around four in 10 Pakistanis view both U.S. economic and military aid as “mostly negative”.

Turning that around, ICG suggests, will entail looking beyond the inherently short-term view of a security mindset, including giving USAID “a greater say in devising foreign policy development goals and reset(ting) the priorities of civilian assistance to focus on democratic strengthening, capacity building, economic growth and civilian law enforcement.”

Such policy prescriptions are echoed in a new open letter, released last week, sent to the U.S. State Department from Nancy Birdsall, the president of the Center for Global Development, a think tank here in Washington that has been tracking the U.S.-Pakistan relationship in the aftermath of the 2009 legislation.

Birdsall writes that, in formulating aid packages for Pakistan, Washington officials need to adopt “a greater emphasis on elements of the machinery of democracy that are independent of government”.

In a nod to the Pew’s findings, ICG also suggests allowing local organisations to decide how and even whether to publicly trumpet a project’s links to USAID.

A new book shows there are now more U.S. voters who identify as independent than as Democrats or Republicans, despite the fact that the two major parties maintain their virtual stranglehold on U.S. politics and, so far, on the 2012 presidential election process.

In his book the “Apartisan American”, Russell Dalton, a professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine, reviews survey trends like the American National Election Studies (ANES), which show the share of U.S. citizens who consider themselves independent has nearly doubled, from 23 percent in 1952 to 40 percent in 2008.

Most of the shift appears to be among people who considered themselves Democrats to those who now consider themselves independent.

“In the past, Independents used to (attract) people at the margins of politics, less educated, less interested, who wouldn’t vote, people at the periphery,” Dalton told IPS.

“What’s changed from 20 percent to 40 percent is the growth among young, educated, politically engaged people who are turned off by political parties. They are interested in politics, and actually vote. They won’t vote out of loyalty, but out of issues. That’s what injected volatility into the [presidential] campaign,” he said.

“The unpredictability of elections, and the willingness of people to shift parties has increased; that’s the first whammy. The second whammy creates difficulties for candidates. They have their base that wants red meat party rhetoric to get them to vote. If they get their base to vote, they’re still 15 percent short of a majority,” Dalton added.

This trend is not limited to the U.S., but extends to all major Western democracies where long-term polling data is available, even in countries where it is easier for minor political parties to gain representation in the legislative branch.

While it is technically a political party, Dalton points to the rise of the Pirate Party in Germany and Sweden as evidence younger generations of citizens are eschewing uncritical party deference.

There are in fact a multitude of political parties in the U.S. other than the Democratic and Republican parties, although they differ in the level to which they have obtained ballot access in order to run candidates for various offices on the ballots in those states.

The Green Party, for example, is currently in the process of selecting its presidential nominee. Candidates include Roseanne Barr, Kent Mesplay, and Jill Stein.

Barr is a famous populist actress with significant name recognition for her television programme, “Roseanne”, which featured a realistic, as opposed to a picture-perfect, portrayal of a working class family in the 1990s. Yet she entered the race late, does not have an organised campaign, and has not gained ballot access as widely as Mesplay or Stein.

Stein, on the other hand, appears to be the frontrunner for the Green nomination. Her campaign says it has won primary contests in Illinois, Maine, Minnesota and Ohio.

Because the Green Party has not obtained ballot access in every U.S. state, some of its primaries are conducted by other means.

“Illinois had an online Primary. Ohio had a statewide meeting. Maine is having caucuses around the state,” Scott McLarty, national spokesman for the Green Party, told IPS.

The Green Party was actually founded by Petra Kelly in Germany in the 1980s and first became popular in Europe, especially as an outgrowth of the anti-nuclear movement in Scandinavian countries.

The Green Party currently has gained ballot access in about 20 states and recently gained such access in Arkansas and Tennessee, McLarty said.

“Our goal is to get our nominees on at least 46 (out of 50) of the state ballots,” he said.

With the Democratic Party in the U.S. having moved farther and farther toward the centre – even what in many countries would be considered centre-right – the distinctions between the Green and Democratic parties continue to grow.

“The most dramatic thing is the Democratic Party is addicted to corporate money, the donations from corporate PACs (political action committees),” McLarty said.

“The Green Party is against war in general, and we were very much against the invasion of Iraq and the Afghanistan war, and we often criticised the Democrats for helping [former president George W.] Bush get the U.S. into those wars,” he said.

“Democrats have nuclear power… the (Barack) Obama administration has embraced the idea of clean coal and coal mining and is in favour of offshore drilling. The Green Party opposes those things. We are in favour of Medicare (guaranteed health care) for all,” McLarty said.

While progress is quite slow, the Green Party has seen some gains in recent years. Richmond, California recently elected a Green mayor, Gayle McLaughlin; three percent of Maine voters are registered as Green; and in the District of Columbia, the nation’s capital, the Green Party is the second-largest party.

Meanwhile, the idea of independent and minor party candidates has become increasingly prominent in the national discourse surrounding the Nov. 6 presidential election.

For example, media pundits continue to speculate that Republican candidate Ron Paul may decide to run as an independent. While technically a Republican, Paul is basically a Libertarian; he opposes most U.S. military activities overseas and opposes the so-called “war on drugs,” but also wants to end most welfare programmes and even many federal agencies.

Paul has denied any interest in running as an independent – and it is too late to get on ballots in many states as such – but has left the door open.

Yet there is another possibility for him or another candidate this year: a mysterious, well-funded group called Americans Elect is working to gain ballot access in all 50 states and is spending about 10 million dollars to do it.

“It’s a bunch of liberal Republicans who won’t abide with the Republican party,” Richard Winger, publisher of Ballot Access News and one of the nation’s leading experts on ballot access, told IPS.

“I think people are afraid the Republican Party is going to nominate someone who is inadequate. They want someone high-quality, thoughtful, and intelligent in the race, other the president (Obama),” Winger said.

Possible Americans Elect candidates might include Jon Huntsman, former governor of Utah; Buddy Roemer, former governor of Louisiana; and Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, all three of whom once considered themselves moderate Republicans. The group plans to hold an online nominating contest.

The Libertarian Party of the U.S. is likely to gain ballot access in all 50 states and to nominate Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico, Winger said.

The Constitution Party of the U.S. is likely to gain ballot access in about 40 states, and former congressman Virgil Goode is seeking the nomination, Winger said.

There are also numerous national minor parties with little or no chance of gaining sufficient ballot access to run a presidential candidate, including five different socialist parties and the dwindling Prohibition Party, Winger said.

In addition, there are some state and local minor parties, such as the Independent Party, the Labor Party, the Peace and Freedom party, and the Working Families Party, which largely cross-endorses Democrats.

Winger says the quality of candidates seeking minor party nominations is increasing, and that the biggest obstacles to their success are the corporate media which will not let them participate in debates.