Russia nudges Syria to move on....

Russia nudges Syria to move on.... It is interesting to watch the refined-Zioconned Russian maneuvering....Still difficult to see how they will succeed in creating the conditions for dialogue....
By M K Bhadrakumar

The United Nations Security Council statement on Syria on Wednesday marks a turning point. The unanimity of opinion over the year-long crisis in Syria is appearing for the first time; why and how this happened needs to be understood.

Russia finds itself in the driving seat in crafting the future of a key Middle East nation. This is unprecedented and it impacts the alchemy of ties between the presidency of Vladimir Putin and the West. Indeed, the Arab Spring won't be the same again.

But first, Wednesday's statement itself. It "declassified" the initial six-point proposal submitted to the Syrian authorities by the joint special envoy for the United Nations and the League of Arab States, Kofi Annan. The endorsement by the permanent five of the UN Security Council - the United States, Russia, France, United Kingdom and China - implies that the Syrian government is expected to work with Annan.

The six-point proposal demands:

The Syrian government designate an "empowered interlocutor" for Annan to work with.

The cessation of all violence, including an immediate end to all troop movements and security operations and a pullback from population centers, with a UN supervision mechanism to oversee a "sustained cessation of armed violence in all its forms by all parties".

The creation of a mechanism for coordinating the rendering of humanitarian relief assistance.

The expedition of the release of political prisoners.

International media coverage of the Syrian situation.

A legal guarantee for peaceful political activities.

In sum, Syria should undertake its political reforms openly and transparently in peaceful conditions with monitoring by the Security Council, which "will consider further steps as appropriate". The statement begins with an affirmation of the Security Council's "strong commitment" to Syria's sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity.

The Syrian situation is the stuff of much polemics today. Unsurprisingly, it is tempting to misinterpret that Russia and China "blinked" after earlier balking at backing resolutions against Damascus. The point is, Moscow has been calibrating its diplomatic position on Syria since the Russian presidential election in early March that will result in Vladimir Putin resuming the presidency on May 7.

Behind the cloud cover of rhetoric, Moscow has been probing how to steer Syria in a direction, broadly speaking, of a Yemen-like transition, while safeguarding its interests.

By March 2, Putin already began tempering Russia's support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In an interview with editors of six leading Western newspapers, Putin said:

We don't have a special relationship with Syria. We only have interests in seeing the conflict being resolved. It is up to the Syrians to decide who should run their country.

In order to solve this problem, you cannot stand on one side of an armed conflict or on the side of one of the warring parties, sorry for the tautology. We need to look at the interests of both, get them to sit down, get them to ceasefire.

Suffice to say, on the eve of the UN Security Council statement, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was willing to be drawn into a media discussion over Assad's political future. He said without diplomatic niceties, "Nobody invited him to Moscow. It's up to Assad to decide. He won't make the decision because someone from Russia asked him to."

But then, Lavrov also pondered why Western and Arab politicians who pressed for Assad's resignation shouldn't first "answer the question of how it all would look and who would streamline the [power transition] process. Taking into account the great discord among the Syrian opposition forces, there is no clear answer to that question yet."

Clearly, Russian diplomacy is taking advantage of a "co-relation of forces". One, Moscow forged a close coordination with Beijing so that it didn't face diplomatic isolation. Two, as time passed, it became clear that the United States was not seeking Western military intervention in Syria.

Three, fissures began appearing among and betwixt the Western powers and their Arab allies. Four, the Arab League once again badly exposed itself as a regional organization, thanks to the obduracy of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Finally, the deadlock in the Security Council put the onus on the West to find a way to work with Russia rather than around Russia. There were anxious moments too, such as when Russia defiantly supplied Assad with weapons, dispatched warships to Syrian port of Tartus or kept up a propaganda war invoking fears of an imminent Libya-like war over Syria.

Meanwhile, ground realities vindicated Russia's policy assumptions. One, the Syrian regime showed its staying power. Two, the Syrian opposition failed to unite or project any cohesive political agenda. Three, the ascendancy of extremists in the ranks of the opposition disheartened the West, frightened Syria's "silent majority" and isolated the Saudis and Qataris who covertly rendered assistance to the radicals.

Four, Syria began edging toward a full-fledged civil war and the prospect worried the international community, especially Turkey. All in all, there are no takers today for the Saudi drive to reset Middle Eastern politics in terms of a Sunni-Shi'ite schism.

The Saudis snubbed Moscow's overtures thrice in recent weeks - King Abdullah slammed President Dmitry Medvedev; Riyadh ignored Moscow's request for consultations; and Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal and Lavrov sat across the Arab League table at Cairo and tutored each other on the lessons of history.

Long rope to hang
But Moscow was unflapped, knowing that the Saudi agenda was not about democracy or reform but stemmed from a motiveless malignity to overthrow Assad at any cost. Besides, through all this, the Saudis ceased to matter, as the US began nudging Russia to take a lead role to bring about a peaceful transition in Syria. In essence, a kind of role reversal of what happened over Yemen.

What is the raison d'etre of this paradigm shift? It has been brilliantly explained in a report by Julien Barnes-Daicey, an experienced "Syria hand" at the European Council on Foreign Relations, titled "Syria: Towards a Political Solution". The report says:

With ... Bashar al-Assad looking unlikely to be pushed from power soon, it is becoming more urgent than ever to find a political solution ... But ... a political resolution is, at minimum, dependent on Russian acquiescence. Without pressure from Moscow, the regime will neither relent ... nor enter into a political process. Thus engaging with Russia may be the only way of halting the bloodshed.

Kofi Annan should therefore begin a political process that gives Russia a lead role and includes direct negotiations with the regime, which are not preconditioned on Assad's immediate demise ... Europe, for its part, must solidly back Annan's efforts.

Thus, Annan is heading for Moscow "in the next few days". And Moscow too is moving toward a new position and putting its weight behind Annan. In a pre-recorded interview broadcast over Kommersant radio on Tuesday, Lavrov was openly critical of the Syrian regime.

All this doesn't mean that Moscow is "dumping" Assad or that the Syrian crisis is moving toward a solution. To be the devil's advocate, Washington is probably giving Moscow a long rope to hang itself. Time will tell.

The fact remains that Moscow is not the only patron saint hovering above the Damascus skyline. Tehran cannot easily abandon the Syrian regime. Baghdad also plays a complicated role and it is about to assume the chairmanship of the Arab League. Then, there are the ubiquitous "non-state actors" of the Middle East tapestry.

Thus, things will have to move at some point in the direction of forming a contact group of stakeholders. While Russia has specific interests in Syria (which may fall within the ambit of its evolving relationship with the West) and is doubtless highly motivated, when it comes to the brass tacks of a political transition in Damascus, much will depend on regional players.

It is difficult to underestimate the tenacity of regional players such as Turkey or Iran to safeguard their interests. Interestingly, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is visiting Tehran on March 27 ahead of the meeting of the "Friends of Syria" in Istanbul on April 1.

A core issue remains, namely, the absence of a sustained diplomatic engagement of Iran so as to bridge the huge gulf of distrust. It means clearing the air that the West's agenda is actually to force regime change in Iran. The West must manifestly show the willingness to engage Iran comprehensively on the range of regional security issues that affect its core interests....

The spin at the times is mind blowing:

"... the United Nations Security Council delivered a diplomatic setback to Bashar Assad of Syria on Wednesday, unanimously embracing efforts by Kofi Annan, the former secretary general, to negotiate a cease-fire in the year-old Syrian conflict, funnel aid to victims and begin a political transition.

In a document known as a presidential statement, the 15-member council expressed its “gravest concern .....”

The statement said Mr. Annan’s plan would “facilitate a Syrian-led political transition...” closely resembles an Arab League proposal (WHAT? Read Young below!) that Mr. Assad has rejected. It calls for all combatants to immediately stop fighting, for the military to withdraw from populated areas, for a United Nations-supervised truce and for the provision of humanitarian assistance, the release of all arbitrarily detained people, freedom of movement for journalists and freedom for peaceful demonstrations. (The Times ignores the statement's call for 'dialogue' (rejected by the opposition & the government!)...'

But, thanks to Lebanon's uber-neocon, the resord is set straight;

"...Last week, Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, made a disconcerting revelation. Kofi Annan, the United Nations-Arab League envoy to Syria, is not discussing the departure of Syrian Bashar Assad from office. "I can assure you that there was no talk about Assad's departure," Mr Lavrov declared in an interview, describing what Mr Annan had told him.

If that's true, then what precisely is Mr Annan's mandate? When the former United Nations secretary general was appointed, we were told that his assignment was to implement the Arab League plan for Syria drafted in January. This calls for Mr Al Assad to hand over power to his first vice president, which would be followed by the formation of national unity government that would seek to end the violence by withdrawing the army from cities and releasing prisoners.

Mr Annan is being buffeted by the bargaining all around him. Recently, Russia and the Arab League, after a tense meeting in Cairo, agreed to several principles for resolving the Syrian crisis. However, behind a facade of concord, the two sides had different priorities.

Mr Lavrov, at a press conference with the Qatari foreign minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem Al Thani, listed the following principles: agreement to end the violence, whatever the source; the establishment of an impartial monitoring mechanism; the rejection of foreign intervention; and the removal of obstacles blocking the distribution of humanitarian aid to Syrians.

The last principle was by far the most ambiguous and open to contradictory interpretations. As the Russian foreign minister put it, Russia and the Arab League had agreed to strongly support the Annan mission so that it could initiate a dialogue between the Syrian government and the opposition - as Mr Lavrov added, one based on references "accepted" by the United Nations and the Arab League.

Sheikh Hamad repeated the same principles, but used a slightly different formulation on the final point, mentioning the references "adopted" by the United Nations and the Arab League. Since only the Arab League has actually adopted decisions on Syria, while the Security Council has been stalemated, this could have been a subtle way of redefining the accord as Arab governments construe it.

Word games aside, what the Arab League and Russia agreed, like the Security Council statement being prepared to bolster Mr Annan in his task, will mean different things to different governments. Arab countries, particularly Saudi Arabia and Qatar, along with a large majority of the Syrian opposition, still consider his mediation as a lever to get rid of Mr Al Assad. Russia, in contrast, views it as a device allowing the Syrian president to regain legitimacy and remain in power.

...........The core of the problem is that once a dialogue begins, Assad will necessarily represent the Syrian regime. The logic of such negotiations will ensure that the president stays in office, since what kind of national dialogue can take place that sets as a precondition the eventual exclusion of one of the parties? And if Mr Al Assad fails to vacate the presidency, then the Arab League plan is meaningless.

That is what the Russians are wagering on, and Mr Annan's remarks suggest he is closer to Moscow than to the Arab states. No wonder Mr Lavrov is so keen to assist Mr Annan, while advocating humanitarian aid. The Obama administration, as well, favours a political solution, ruling out arming the Syrian opposition. The French agree, while Turkey seems unsure of what to do. Ankara's warning last week that it might set up a safety zone inside Syria should be taken seriously, but without international cover, such a move could backfire.

If Mr Al Assad dominates the Syrian dialogue, and the opposition is made to participate, the president will regain the initiative.....

Mr Annan is close to selling out the Syrian opposition. If he is about to undermine the Arab League plan, then the Arab states should insist on tightening his terms of reference to their satisfaction. Otherwise, they must withdraw their endorsement of the envoy.

Of course, the Arabs won't dare openly do such a thing. Instead, they will arm the opposition, hoping to weaken Mr Al Assad on the ground......."

Japan’s Growing Military Confidence....

Japan’s Growing Military Confidence....

The Japanese Self-Defense Forces performed admirably after last year’s tsunami. Expect a more confident force to play a growing role in disaster response.

By James Hardy

Militaries rarely earn their spurs in peacetime, but the Japan Self-Defense Force’s performance in the aftermath of last year’s tsunami and earthquake in Tohoku could be described as a coming of age for a force that has traditionally had a complex relationship with itself and the Japanese public.

A year on from the disaster in northeastern Japan, officials were justifiably proud of what the SDF achieved. “We deployed over 100,000 troops to the disaster area in under a week,” Defense Ministry official Motoyuki Nakanashi said earlier this month. “But because we achieved a lot in response to the earthquake, in the future people’s expectations will be higher. That will be a challenge.”

Regardless, it’s undeniable that the SDF has cemented its role as the lead humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) agency if and when the “big one” eventually hits Tokyo, which according to a recent University of Tokyo study has a 70 percent chance of happening in the next five years.

That the SDF can do this is thanks to policy changes made in the aftermath of the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake, which exposed the dangers of allowing Japan’s sclerotic and dysfunctional body politic to make life-and-death decisions. After the January 1995 earthquake, the coalition government led by Japan Socialist Party leader Tomiichi Murayama delayed, and then limited, its deployment of SDF troops. Although Murayama repeatedly denied that the failure to mobilize the SDF was due to his understandable (but in the event irrelevant) ideological problems with the SDF's constitutional legality, the ensuing public criticism led to legislation that gives the SDF the autonomy to deploy after a major earthquake without first consulting with local governments. Should Tokyo be hit by a major earthquake, this should at least help mitigate some of the crises the capital’s residents would face, and would allow SDF troops to use their significant resources to act as the first responders they should be allowed to be.

Another key difference between the Hanshin quake and last year’s tsunami was then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s acceptance of U.S. help. In 1995, all the Japanese government would accept from the U.S. military was blankets – a measly little compromise that again suggested hubris or at least indecisiveness on Tokyo’s part. This time around, U.S. Forces Japan acted “almost on autopilot” in moving into a major HADR role, its deputy commander said recently, and commanders quickly placed themselves at the disposal of the Joint Task Force created by the Ground Self-Defense Force’s Northeastern Army: the command post for the SDF’s operations throughout the response.

Although the U.S. contribution was again limited, it was targeted: one of U.S. Forces Japan’s first tasks was to transport SDF troops from Hokkaido to Honshu; it also cleared the deluged Sendai Airport and had military aircraft landing in under a week. It also provided overwatch at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant through U.S. Air Force RQ-4 Global Hawk UAVs and ground monitoring of radiation throughout Fukushima Prefecture – data it fed back to the SDF Joint Task Force and Japanese government.

Continued sensitivity about Tokyo’s inadequate response to the nuclear disaster means that U.S. officials won’t talk about these areas of assistance on the record, but Japanese Defense Ministry officials admit that the shortfall in nuclear monitoring is something they are seeking to compensate for.That means unmanned aerial and ground vehicles, potentially platforms like the Global Hawk, and a general improvement in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) assets: something that was called for by the 2010 Defense Program Guidelines, but which now has extra impetus. As South Korea recently found out, however, building up an unmanned aerial capability doesn’t come cheap.

Equally, Japan has to work out a way to increase its sealift on a budget. That’s nothing new – sea transport in a contingency is a challenge for all militaries. Britain used liners like the QE2 as troop transports in the 1982 Falklands War, while China’s invasion plans for Taiwan are believed to envisage it using civilian roll-on, roll-off ferries and car carriers.

After the tsunami, the U.S. Marine Corps deployed its Austal Westpac Express catamaran from Okinawa to the mainland to help with logistics, giving the SDF a close-up view of possible solutions to this problem. “It isn't realistic to have equipment ready to respond to the greatest imaginable crisis,” then-Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa said in July, adding that “chartering commercial vessels” was the most likely outcome.

Speaking in early March, Japanese Defense Ministry officials reiterated that position, adding that better coordination with U.S. assets was also a possibility. What’s clear is that the Maritime SDF won’t get the amphibious ships that would really help it respond quickly to such a crisis, for reasons that are partly financial and partly political: a beach-landing ship would drag the MSDF close to the “offensive capability” abhorred by the Constitution and so would likely prove incendiary. Japan has amphibious ships in the form of the Oosumi class vessels, but these have limited capabilities for their type. Equally, the 22DDH helicopter destroyers under construction won’t be fitted with the well dock and stern doors necessary for amphibious ops – much to the disappointment of at least one senior U.S. Forces Japan officer, who says this was an opportunity missed.

Japan’s hedging on sealift is matched in the air, where it has made the unprecedented decision to buy second-hand kit in the form of surplus U.S. Marine Corps C-130 Hercules. Reported issues with radios will also need to be remedied – sources say that SDF personnel in Tohoku had to communicate via mobile phone and commercial radios – while the Air Self-Defense Forces will have to decide what to do about the squadron of Mitsubishi F-2s that were lost when Matsushima Air Base was swamped.

Ultimately, the most significant outcome of the 2011 tsunami and earthquake for the Defense Ministry may be that HADR has become the SDF’s primary mission, an outcome that supports recent comments by Singaporean Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen. Ng noted that with the increasing privatization of public transport systems and utilities, the armed forces are becoming the only government agency with the capabilities in reserve to respond to once-in-a-lifetime natural disasters. A major quake in the Tokyo region would certainly serve to further prove his thesis.

As the Defense Ministry’s Motoyuki Nakanishi has noted, the SDF’s response in Tohoku means that next time “people's expectations will be higher.” The corollary is greater expectations within the services too. As one U.S. Forces Japan officer says: “We knew they were competent – but now they are confident too.”

James Hardy is Asia-Pacific editor of Jane's Defence Weekly.

Rothschild/Soros/CIA clan lost huge investment in China's ouster of Bo Xilai...

Huge repercussions predicted after power shakeup in China....

March , 2012 -- Rothschild/Soros/CIA clan lost huge investment in China's ouster of Bo Xilai...

Most Americans have probably never heard the name Paul Desmarais. However, Desmarais is the Canadian tycoon who is said to front for the Rothschild family in running the wealthy and influential Power Corporation of Canada. Desmarais has also reportedly been the power-behind-the-throne for at least five Canadian Prime Ministers: Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien (whose daughter is married to Desmarais's son Andre), Paul Martin, and ZIOCON Stephen Harper....

Desmarais is also a close friend and supporter of French President Nicolas MOSSAD Sarkozy, who scrapped the Gaullist policy of supporting sovereignty for French-speaking Quebec, abandoned the policy. Desmarais is vehemently opposed to independence for Quebec. Desmarais has used his influence and wealth to ensure the loyalty of at least two pro-federal Quebec Premiers, former Premier Daniel Johnson and current Premier Jean Charest.

Desmarais founded the Canada China Business Council and struck up a personal friendship with Bo while he was mayor of Dalien.

Desmarais, through his son Andre, who took over as president of Power Corporation, the tycoon's relationship was maintained with Bo when he became Communist party First Secretary in Chongqing. Chretien and Canada's far right-wing evangelical former Trade and Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day also maintained close contact with Bo through the Desmarais lobbying operation in China.

Harper has also been close to Bo and the demotion of the Chinese Communist regional leader is a blow to Harper's business outreach to China, which has included an offer for Alberta tar sands oil since the moratorium by the Obama administration on the Keystone pipeline project from Canada to Texas.

Chretien served on the board of Power Corporation's Consolidated Bathurst Ltd. and he and his son-in-law, Andre Desmarais, who is married to Chretien's daughter France and owns Manulife Insurance and Cirque du Soleil, were keen to land power plant deals in China, with the assistance of Bo. Chretien's nephew, Raymond Chretien, was named Canada's ambassador to China to help facilitate energy deals between Power Corporation and China.
Desmarais, who has been less-than-candid about his religious affiliation, is a strong influence on the Harper government's strong support for the right-wing government of Israel. In fact, the "Marais" in "Desmarais" is the historically Jewish neighborhood of Paris. And Paul Desmarais is known to associate with the Jewish upper crust in Palm Beach, Florida, where he maintains one of his homes.

Another close associate of Desmarais is Maurice Strong, who once served as President of Power Corporation before he became a UN senior bureaucrat who became the leading proponent of greenhouse gas carbon credits under the Kyoto climate change control protocols. Desmarais, the Rothschilds, and Soros has also feathered the nest of Bo's son, Bo Guagua, who attended elite preparatory schools in the United Kingdom, as well as Oxford, a pre-requisite for what Desmarais and the Rothschilds hoped would be the beginning of a Bilderberg Group/Council on Foreign Relations stranglehold on China. Bo Guagua was also a member of the Oxford Emerging Markets student club, a training ground for Rothschild/Soros implants in targeted nations.

Paul Desmarais and his Rothschild consortium business partners, including Evelyn de Rothschild and vulture capitalist Soros, had a lot of hopes invested in Bo being elected to the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party. However, a series of incidents, culminating in the mysterious visit of Bo's chief of police for Chongqing, Wang Lijun, to the U.S. Consulate General in Chengdu, nixed any chances that Bo would be elevated to the Politburo, one of nine members of China's top leadership, to fulfill the grand plan of Desmarais and the Rothschilds, namely, Bo becoming the Mikhail Gorbachev of China to set about disestablishing the People's Republic in favor of a capitalist contrivance that would return China to the neo-colonial glory days of economic serfdom and Western financial dominance.

WMR has been informed by our sources in China that the anti-crime exploits of Bo and his former police chief Wang were overly hyped and that the criminals they prosecuted and convicted in Chongqing were mostly small-time criminals. The Politburo discovered that Bo's dealings with the Rothschilds, Desmarais, and Soros constituted a major criminal conspiracy against the People's Republic and its economy.

Meanwhile, the Rothschilds and their network, including Soros/CIA, are livid about Bo's ouster. It can be expected that the Soros non-governmental organization (NGO) global network will now try to foment a themed revolution in China, not one based on a "soft power" themed revolution using social networks, but one more prone to violence like the uprisings in Libya and Syria. The Rothschild/Soros clique wants to punish outgoing President Hu Jintao; Prime Minister Wen Jiabao; incoming President Xi Jinping; Bo's chief rival, Guangdong party secretary Wang Yang; and Vice Premier Li Keqiang. After failing to unseat Vladimir Putin in the Russian presidential election, the Rothschilds/Soros financial cartel -- with the Obama CIA administration wall to wall... as their willing accomplices -- will do anything to bring about violent change in Beijing and Moscow....

The Canadian and Mormon links of Bo Xilai and his family extend scandal beyond China....

Heywood not only foreigner "offed" in China...

Neil Heywood, the British businessman who died in Chongqing, China last November, allegedly from "alcohol poisoning" but now thought to have been poisoned by Gu Kailai, the wife of purged Chinese Communist Party official Bo Xilai, is not the only western businessman who has been dispatched under mysterious circumstances in China.

Heywood, who was a consultant for the British intelligence contractor Hakluyt & Company, supposedly died at the Nanshan Lijing Holiday Hotel in Chongqing after he stumbled across a plan by Bo to move large amounts of money abroad. As previously reported by WMR, Bo was secretly backed by Rothschild, George Soros, and U.S. Canadian, Israeli, and British players who hoped that Bo would be named to the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, and, like Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, move to disestablish the People's Republic of China to make way for a new regime in lockstep with globalist goals, including opening up China to the illegal narcotics trade, land acquisition by Western interests, and gambling.

Western involvement in what amounts to organized crime "warlordism" in modern China resulted in "alcohol poisoning" of six Western businessmen in Dongguan, Guangdong in 2002. They included five Americans and one Canadian. It was claimed that all six merely drank two draft beers before they died. The U.S. and Canadian embassies were informed that the six men died from alcohol poisoning but the embassies refused to investigate their deaths. The deaths of the Westerners was reportedly part of a turf war between the Israeli Mossad and People's Liberation Army (PLA) for control of the Ecstasy trade in southern China.

Gu is now under investigation by Chinese authorities for murdering Heywood. Wang Lijun, Bo's former associate and Chongqing's ex-police chief, attempted to seek asylum in the U.S. Consulate General in Chengdu. After briefing consular officials for some 36 hours, Wang was handed over to Chinese authorities who were waiting outside the consulate and he was whisked off by plane to Beijing where he may face treason charges.

The plan by Bo and his wife to take over power in Beijing and circumvent the plans by Xi Jinping to become China's next president, succeeding Hu Jintao was supported by the Rothschilds; Soros; the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a close friend of Bo; and the U.S. "Mormon diplomatic contingent" in China that included former U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman and the U.S. Consul General in Chengdu, Peter Haymond, who ordered Wang handed over to the Beijing authorities.

The murder of Heywood sent all the Western interests that were backing Bo into damage control mode. However, it also appears that some factions of Western intelligence agencies, including Britain's MI-6, with which Heywood had a relationship, were not so keen on the plan to install Bo

While ambassador, Huntsman's daughters, Mary Ann, Liddy, and Abby, reportedly dated Bo's playboy son, Bo Guagua. Bo Guagua attended Harrow and Oxford in the United Kingdom and there are questions about how the son of a relatively moderately-paid Chinese Communist Party officials could afford an expensive education in Britain. Bo Guagua is now under protective U.S. custody after he was escorted from his apartment near Harvard University.

The connections between Bo's family and Huntsman and his family could spell trouble for the one-time U.S. presidential candidate and cousin of presumptive GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Huntsman, who speaks Mandarin Chinese, has been tipped as a potential Secretary of State in a Romney administration. However, there may be no political capital gained by Obama in the Bo and Gu scandal in China, since Obama appointed Huntsman as his ambassador to China. Questions are now being raised about the propriety of Huntsman's tenure in Beijing and his links to the Bo clan. Similarly, Bo's close links to Harper and some of his top ministers in Canada are of little comfort to the Canadian opposition, since Bo also had close links, some of which are through Power Canada's billionaire tycoon Paul Desmarais and his son Andre, who is married to the son of former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien. The Bloc Quebecois's Lucien Bouchard and the New Democratic Party's Thomas Mulcair also have close links to Bo and his associates....

It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home, America....

It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home, America....

http://truthernews.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/the-nuclear-assassination-of-america-exposed/

USA runaway borrowing and entitlements is unsustainable, a return of inflation, Massive trade and capital flow imbalances, criminal and Zioconned imperial strategic overreach, ZOG and US Aipac occupied stupid Congress has degenerated from debating teams into execution squads, and consensus is impossible on how to deal with the American People's pressing problems are the highlights of the problems facing the crumbling US Empire....

"...A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be changed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, "This is not just."

The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love...

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. We are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster. America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. The home that all too many Americans left was solidly structured idealistically; its pillars were solidly grounded in the insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage. All men are made in the image of God. All men are bothers. All men are created equal. Every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Every man has rights that are neither conferred by, nor derived from the State--they are God-given.

Out of one blood, God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. What a marvelous foundation for any home! What a glorious and healthy place to inhabit. But America's strayed away, and this unnatural excursion has brought only confusion and bewilderment. It has left hearts aching with guilt and minds distorted with irrationality.

It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home, America. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on." I call on Washington today. I call on every man and woman of good will all over America today. I call on the young men of America who must make a choice today to take a stand on this issue. Tomorrow may be too late. The book may close.

And don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, "You're too arrogant! And if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I'll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know that I'm God."

Now it isn't easy to stand up for truth and for justice. Sometimes it means being frustrated. When you tell the truth and take a stand, sometimes it means that you will walk the streets with a burdened heart. Sometimes it means losing a job...means being abused and scorned. It may mean having a seven, eight year old child asking a daddy, "Why do you have to go to jail so much?" And I've long since learned that to be a follower of Jesus Christ means taking up the cross.

And my bible tells me that Good Friday comes before Easter. Before the crown we wear, there is the cross that we must bear. Let us bear it--bear it for truth, bear it for justice, and bear it for peace. Let us go out this morning with that determination. And I have not lost faith. I'm not in despair, because I know that there is a moral order. I haven't lost faith, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

I can still sing "We Shall Overcome" because Carlyle was right: "No lie can live forever." We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant was right: "Truth pressed to earth will rise again." We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell was right: "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne." Yet, that scaffold sways the future.

We shall overcome because the bible is right: "You shall reap what you sow." With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope..."

Martin Luther King, Full Sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, April 30, 1967

US ZOG is wrong on India's Iran Policy....

By Bharat Karnad

India has been criticized for not doing enough to pressure Iran. But Delhi has sound economic and domestic reasons for what it’s doing.

http://the-diplomat.com/2012/03/19/u-s-wrong-on-india%E2%80%99s-iran-policy/?all=true


The signing of the 2006 civilian nuclear deal was supposed to be emblematic of a burgeoning strategic relationship between India and the United States. After some forty or so years of frosty relations, the beginning of the 21st Century saw leaders in Washington and Delhi touting a grand strategic partnership. To realize this, the George W. Bush and Manmohan Singh administrations courted great political risk in taking on the entrenched mindsets opposed to the nuclear agreement.

In Washington, opposition from the non-proliferation community nearly sank the deal during negotiations. In Delhi, the signing of the deal was so controversial it almost brought down the Congress Party’s coalition government in the 2008 vote in parliament. An upside to the tortuous negotiations was supposedly the empathy and understanding Indian and U.S. diplomats developed for the political constraints the other side operates under.

The Indian policy establishment and strategic community were therefore taken aback when Nicholas Burns, former undersecretary of state and the chief American negotiator on the nuclear deal, slammed India for its Iran policy in The Diplomat. Having reaffirmed India’s “immense strategic importance to the United States” in the Boston Globe a mere 10 days prior, Burns now argued that Delhi’s unwillingness to support U.S.-led sanctions amounted to a failure “to meet its obvious potential to lead globally,” thereby equating, in a spurious sort of way, India’s leadership ambitions with toeing the American line. Despite recognizing some of India’s votes against Iran at the U.N., Ambassador Burns went further in accusing India of “actively impeding the construction of the strategic relationship it says it wants with the United States.”

In actuality, it’s Washington’s unbending attitude towards accommodating India’s vital interests in Iran that potentially threatens the Indo-U.S. bilateral relationship. Burns and others U.S. critics of India’s Iran policy are, in effect, forcing Indo-U.S. relations back into a version of the old, inappropriate, and eminently discardable, “If you are not with us, you are against us” policy mold. By framing the issue in dichotomous terms, critics in Washington ignore the economic and domestic context in which India’s Iran policy is made.

In downplaying Delhi’s economic interests in Iran, Burns dismisses the fact that India gets 12 percent of its oil from Iran as a “weak defense” of its policy, because Delhi has had many years to find new suppliers. This ignores the fact that many of India’s government-owned refineries are geared to processing Iranian crude. If India were to switch to other sources, this would require a substantial upfront investment to retrofit its refineries to process other types of crude. Already facing a budget shortfall that is equal to 5.6 percent of GDP, the Singh administration is in no mood to incur these costs.

Moreover, it’s not at all clear that India could procure enough oil from other sources to make up for its loss of Iranian crude. Many suggest Saudi Arabia as both willing and able to make up the gap. But Riyadh’s spare capacity has come under severe strain after a decade of global supply interruptions elsewhere, and the rapid increase in demand caused by rising powers like India and China. Meanwhile, Saudi oil production is already at historically unprecedented levels, and it was unable to supplement the loss of Libya’s rather insignificant oil exports last summer, forcing Western nations to tap into their strategic reserves. Furthermore, both the International Energy Agency and the U.S. Energy Information Administration see Riyadh’s spare capacity continuing to diminish throughout 2012.

In addition, if India stopped buying Iranian oil, there’s little reason to believe China would follow suit. Beijing is yet to pay a price for being, as Bruce Loudon pointed out in The Australian early this month, “the constant contrarian on the global scene.” Washington has demonstrated time and time again that it has no leverage worth the name vis-a-vis Beijing. Although China has recently been cutting back on its purchase of Iranian oil, it continues to be a major customer. Beijing would possibly increase the amount of Iranian crude it uses were Iran to further reduce prices after India announced its exit from the market. Thus, Tehran will only be slightly discomforted by the sanctions. India, meanwhile, would have surrendered much.

Oil isn’t India’s only economic interest in Iran. In the wake of an official Indian delegation’s visit to Tehran, the Associated Chambers of Commerce announced that two-way trade reached $13.7 billion in 2010-2011 and will likely increase to $30 billion by 2015. In response to China’s infrastructure projects in Central Asia progressing at breakneck speed, India has fast-forwarded its plans for a “north-south corridor”linking the Iranian port of Chabahar on the North Arabian Sea with a railway line to Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Russia via Hajigak, a mineral-rich area in Afghanistan where an Indian consortium has secured mining concessions. In parallel, India is helping build a highway connecting Chabahar to Milak and Zaranj, which has a road link to Dilaram in Afghanistan, a 213 kilometer stretch constructed by the Indian Border Roads Organization. The Chabahar port has been enlarged with Indian assistance and is now capable of annually handling 6 million tons of cargo and will serve as the entrepôt for Indian business. This route has a strategic element too; namely, India uses it as a conduit to sustain ties with the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and to firm up goodwill with the Afghan people generally and the Hamid Karzai regime in particular. In the past year, for instance, India has shipped over 100,000 metric tons of food grain to Kabul from Chabahar. More significantly, Chabahar allows India to outflank the Chinese presence in the Pakistani port of Gwadar, 72 kilometers to the east.

There’s an important domestic political rationale to India’s Iran policy, which the self-consciously “secular” Indian government is loath to admit. India’s Shi’a population is the second largest in the world after only Iran itself. In contrast to Sunni Islam in the subcontinent, which has evolved around local seminaries with distinct schools of thought, India’s Shi’a community maintains strong links with their Iranian counterparts. This is especially true among the clergy who closely monitor theological developments and pronouncements emanating from the Iranian religious center in Qom. The Iranian government has carefully cultivated these cultural ties with the Indian Shi’a religious institutions, politicians, and intelligentsia, and translates them into political clout to deter any Indian government from prosecuting unfavorable policies towards it. This is democracy at work, something Washington can surely appreciate.

The Obama administration’s foreign policy pivot to the Asia-Pacific and India is meant to contain China, a goal that is served by India’s strong and growing relations with Iran. As India and the United States discovered in Burma, leaving a vacuum for China to fill is an act of high strategic folly. India is unwilling to repeat that mistake in Iran.

Israel and Iran will thrash out their problems in their own way and it makes no sense to hold the Indo-U.S. partnership hostage to that situation, even less, to Iran’s proliferation status. By creating friction over Indo-Iranian ties, America is in danger of achieving the smaller, regional, objective at the expense of the larger, overarching, strategic goal.

Bharat Karnad is a Professor in National Security Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, and a former member of the Indian government’s National Security Advisory Board, National Security Council. His books include ‘India’s Nuclear Policy’ and the forthcoming ‘India’s Rise: Why India is Not a Great Power.’

Iran nuclear claims test good faith....

Iran nuclear claims test good faith....
By Gareth Porter

VIENNA - The first detailed account of negotiations between the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran last month belies earlier statements by unnamed Western officials portraying Iran as refusing to cooperate with the IAEA in allaying concerns about alleged nuclear weaponization work.

The account given by Iran's permanent representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, shows that the talks in February came close to a final agreement but were hung up primarily over the IAEA insistence on being able to reopen issues even after Iran had answered questions about them to the organizations's satisfaction.

It also indicates that that the IAEA demand to visit Parchin military base during that trip to Tehran reversed a previous agreement that the visit would come later in the process, and that IAEA Director General Yukia Amano ordered his negotiators to break off the talks and return to Vienna rather than accept Iran's invitation to stay for a third day.

Soltanieh took the unprecedented step of revealing the details of the incomplete negotiations with the IAEA in an interview with IPS in Vienna last week and in a presentation to a closed session of the IAEA's Board of Governors on March 8, which the Iranian mission has now made public.

The Iranian envoy went public with his account of the talks after a series of anonymous statements to the press by the IAEA Secretariat and member states had portrayed Iran as being uncooperative on Parchin as well as in the negotiations on an agreement on cooperation with the agency.

Those statements now appear to have been aimed at building a case for a resolution by the Board condemning Iran's intransigence in order to increase diplomatic pressure on Iran in advance of talks between the P5+1 (the United States, Britain, France, Russia, the People's Republic of China and Germany) and Iran.

Soltanieh's account suggests that Amano may have switched signals to the IAEA delegation after consultations with the United States and other powerful member states which wanted to be able to cite the Parchin access issue to condemn Iran for its alleged failure to cooperate with the IAEA.

Parchin had been cited in the November 2011 IAEA report as the location of an alleged explosive containment cylinder, said by one or more IAEA member states to have been used for hydrodynamic testing of nuclear weapons designs.

The detailed Iranian account shows that the IAEA delegation requested a visit to Parchin in the first round of the negotiations in Tehran January 29-31 and that it asked again at the beginning of the three "intercessional" meetings in Vienna for such a visit to take place at a second negotiating round in Tehran on February 20-21.

Soltanieh recalled, however, that during three "intercessional" meetings in February with IAEA Deputy Director General for Safeguards Herman Nackaerts, and Assistant Director General for Political Affairs Rafael Grossi, the two sides had reached agreement that the IAEA request for access to Parchin would be postponed until after the Board of Governors meeting in March.

But when the IAEA delegation arrived on February 20, it renewed the demand to visit Parchin, according to Soltanieh's account.

"At the beginning of the meeting the first day, they said the director general had instructed them to give a message to us that they wanted to go to Parchin today or tomorrow, despite what we had clearly agreed two weeks earlier," Soltanieh told IPS.

Soltanieh told the Board of Governors that the negotiating text on which the two sides were working at the February 20-21 meeting provided specifically for a visit to Parchin as well as other sites in conjunction with Iran's actions to clear up the issue of "hydrodynamic experiments" - the allegation by an unnamed member government published in the November 2011 IAEA report.

In response to the renewed request for a visit to Parchin, Soltanieh offered to let the delegation visit the Marivan site, where the same November report said the agency had "credible" evidence Iranian engineers worked on high-explosives testing for a nuclear device.

"We offered Marivan because it was the next priority," Soltanieh told IPS, referring to the list of priority issues on which Iran was expected to take actions to be specified by the IAEA under the provision of the negotiating text.

But the IAEA delegation rejected the offer, claiming that it had been given too little time.

Soltanieh's account reveals that the IAEA also turned down a request to stay one additional day to complete the negotiations of the new action plan. "At lunch hour the second day, we wanted them to stay another day," he told IPS, and the delegation told them it might be possible.

But after consulting with Amano, the IAEA delegation said it could not stay.

Amano's change of signals on Parchin and refusal to stay for a third day of negotiations were followed by condemnation of Iran as uncooperative by a "senior Western official" shortly before the IAEA Board of Governors meeting.

The official was quoted by Reuters on March 2 as saying, "We think there needs to be a resolution that makes clear that Iran needs to do more, a lot more, to comply with the agency's requests." The official called Iran's stance during the talks a "gigantic slap in the face of the IAEA".

In the end, no resolution was passed by the Board. Instead, the P5+1 issued a joint statement urging Iran to allow access to Parchin but not blaming Iran for the failure to reach agreement.

The negotiating text as it stood at the end of the February round of talks, which Soltanieh showed IPS, had relatively few handwritten deletions and additions.

A key provision in the draft text, which IPS was allowed to quote, says, "Iran agrees to cooperate with the Agency to facilitate a conclusive technical assessment of all issues of concern to the Agency. This cooperation will include inspections by the Agency, additional meetings, including technical meetings and visits, and access to relevant information, documentation and sites, material and personnel."

The primary issue standing in the way of final agreement, according to Soltanieh, was whether the IAEA could reopen issues once they had been resolved. The text shown to IPS includes a provision that IAEA "may adjust the order" in which issues were to be resolved and "return" to issues even after they had been resolved.

The Iranians accepted the right of the IAEA to adjust the order but did not agree that it could reopen issues once they were completed satisfactorily, Soltanieh recalled, because Iran feared that giving the IAEA that power would lead to "an endless process".

The other major issue, according to Soltanieh, was Iran's demand that the IAEA "deliver" all the intelligence documents alleging that it had carried covert weaponization activities to Iran before asking it for definitive answers to the allegation. The IAEA delegation said they couldn't produce all the documents at once, he told IPS.

Iran then agreed that the agency could provide only those documents relevant to each issue when it comes up, the Iranian diplomat recalled. It is not clear, however, whether the IAEA has agreed to that compromise.

The United States has refused in the past to agree to turn over the "alleged studies" documents to Iran - a policy that Amano's predecessor, Mohamed ElBaradei, had argued made it impossible to demand that Iran be held accountable for explaining those documents.

After Soltanieh's presentation to the Board of Governors, Amano told reporters that some of Soltanieh's statements had been inaccurate but appeared to confirm the main points of his presentation. "In fact, the February talks initially took place in a constructive spirit," he said. "Differences between Iran and the Agency appeared to have narrowed."

On the second day, Amano said, Iran had "sought to re-impose restrictions on our work", which he said "included obliging the Agency to present a definitive list of questions and denying us the right to revisit issues, or to deal with certain issues in parallel, to name just a few."

Amano's spokesperson, Gill Tudor, declined to comment on the accuracy of Soltanieh's account for this story, saying "(W)e would prefer to let the director general's words speak for themselves."

In response to a request for comment on this story, the US State Department deferred to Amano's account on the talks but said, "(D)espite the IAEA's best efforts, Iran was unwilling to reach such an agreement" and had "failed an initial test of its good faith and willingness to cooperate by refusing an IAEA request to visit Parchin."

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.

Unstoppable legacy of the Zioconned 'war on terror'....

Unstoppable legacy of the Zioconned 'war on terror'....
By Karen J Greenberg

By now, you'd think we'd be entering the end of the horrific inside job of the 9/11 era. One war over in the Greater Middle East, another hurtling disastrously to its end, and the threat of al-Qaeda so diminished that it should hardly move the needle on the national worry meter. You might think, in fact, that the moment had arrived to turn the American gaze back to first principles: the constitution and its protections of rights and liberties.

Yet warning signs abound that 2012 will be another year in which, in the name of national security, those rights and liberties are only further Guantanamo-ized and abridged. Most notably, for example, despite the fact that genuinely dangerous enemies continue to exist abroad, there is now a new enemy in our sights: namely, American oppositional types and whistleblowers who are charged as little short of traitors for revealing the workings of our government to journalists and others.

Here and elsewhere, it looks like we can expect the Barack Obama administration to continue to barrel down the path that has already taken us far from the country we used to be. And by next year, if a different president is in the Oval Office, expect him to lead us even further astray. With that in mind, here are five categories in the sphere of national security where 2012 is likely to prove even grimmer than 2011.

1. Ever-more punitive (ever-less fair-minded)
Those who imagine the era of overreach in the name of national security coming to an end any time soon would do well to remember that some spectacular national security trials are on the horizon - and that we may be entering a new age of governmental vindictiveness.

Among the most newsworthy of those trials: the military commissions at Guantanamo that will bring to the docket Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attack, and his co-conspirators, as well as Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged point person in the 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen. These will likely include capital charges and be prosecuted in a spirit of vengeance.

But that spirit won't stop with al-Qaeda ringleaders and operatives. A series of cases not involving attacks on or the killing of Americans will also be argued in the name of national security and in a similar spirit of vengeance. To begin with, there is the upcoming court martial of Bradley Manning, accused of downloading classified US government documents and leaking them to the website WikiLeaks. And then there is the potential prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in federal court - a federal grand jury is now considering his indictment - for his alleged collaboration with Manning.

Both cases have been hailed with a righteous anger that might strike an outsider as akin to frothing at the mouth. Top officials have insisted that the WikiLeaks materials threatened American lives and left "blood" on the hands of both Assange and Manning (though no one has yet pointed to a single individual physically harmed by the release of those documents).

At the more bloodthirsty end of the American political spectrum, former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and Congressman Mike Rogers (Republican-Missouri), among others, have called for Manning's execution. As Rogers explained, "I argue the death penalty clearly should be considered here. [Manning] clearly aided the enemy to what may result in the death of US soldiers or those cooperating. If that is not a capital offense, I don't know what is."

A similar, if less lethal, desire for punishment lies behind the Obama administration's determination to aggressively pursue and crack down on leaks to the media from inside the government, even when they don't involve the actual theft of government documents. Obama entered the Oval Office proclaiming a "sunshine" policy when it came to the workings of the government, only to move beyond George W Bush in attempts to clamp down on whistleblowers.

The pending trials of two former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers exemplify this pattern. Jeffrey Sterling is charged with leaking classified documents to the New York Times' James Risen about plans to release flawed information to Iran in a potentially counter-productive effort to subvert its nuclear program; John Kiriakou just pled not guilty to releasing information to the media about Bush-era torture policies. All told, the administration has gone after six suspected leakers - more than all previous administrations combined - using the draconian Espionage Act.

In the matter of leakers, the message couldn't be clearer or more vengeful. The government's position has been this: expose us and we will turn on you with a fury you can't imagine. As terrorists have been warned that new laws and legal systems can be built to deal with them, those accused of leaks to the press are being told that even the full extent of the law may not be the limit when it comes to punishment.

Witness the treatment of Manning in his first year of punitive captivity before he was charged with any crime: he was kept in a Marine Corps brig in total isolation and forced to sleep naked. Or consider the attempt not just to prosecute but to destroy the life of former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake. He was accused of leaking classified information on what he considered to be a wildly wasteful National Security Agency program. In the end, though charged under the Espionage Act, he pled guilty to the misdemeanor of essentially borrowing a government computer - but not before his life had been turned upside down and his job lost.

2. Ever-more legal limbo (ever-less confidence in the constitution)
By now, it's old hat to acknowledge that the indefinite detention of those once deemed "enemy combatants", now termed "unprivileged enemy belligerents", has become as American as apple pie. Like the Bush administration before it, the Obama administration insists on its commitment to holding nearly 50 Guantanamo detainees in indefinite detention without charge or trial.

In May 2009, in a speech at the National Archives, the president couldn't have been clearer: indefinite detention, he stated, would remain an option in the national security toolbox under his administration. In this way, he guaranteed that an American version of offshore (in)justice and the essential character of Guantanamo, which he once claimed he would shut down, would continue intact.

In 2012, however, there is a worrisome new indefinite detainee category to worry about: US citizens. Previously, Americans were exempt from incarceration at Guantanamo and so from its policy of detention without trial. In 2002, Yaser Hamdi, a Saudi-American citizen, when discovered at Guantanamo Bay, was hurried to a plane in the wee hours of the morning and whisked away, a sign of the rights still accorded American citizens. Similarly, the "American Taliban", John Walker Lindh, apprehended on the Afghanistan battlefield, was brought into the federal court system.

Lately, however, congress has shown less respect for the distinction between rights accorded to citizens and non-citizens. Last month, congress passed the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The debates over its passage reflected a concerted effort to make American citizens as well as foreigners subject to indefinite military detention.

Ultimately, citizens supposedly remain exempt from the new law, but even so, it was a close call and a signal about where we may be headed. As a recent congressional research service report on the NDAA explained, it is "not intended to affect any existing authorities relating to the detention of US citizens or lawful resident aliens, or any other persons captured or arrested in the United States".

Still, there remain many fears and much confusion about what protections are retained by US citizens under the act. Nor did Obama's signing statement, asserting that he would "not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens", assuage those fears and confusions. If American citizens were indeed protected from indefinite detention under the new legislation, why was such a signing statement necessary?

There is yet another place where the law seems to have plunged into legal limbo without in any way abridging US actions: the high seas. Earlier this year, the Obama administration announced that it was detaining 15 pirates captured off the coast of Somalia - and that they were being held without reference to any legal status whatsoever. According to New York Times reporter C J Chivers, "where interdiction ends, an enduring problem begins: what to do with the pirates that foreign ships detain?"

According to the State Department, the pirates will be tried. But where? In the words of Vice Admiral Mark I Fox, "We lack a practical and reliable legal finish." In other words, the US has not yet found a country under whose law it can try them. In the meantime, according to the latest reports, the US Navy continues to confine them. Think of this, conceptually speaking, as a floating Guantanamo intended to hold for-profit enemies.

3. Ever-more secrecy (ever-less transparency)
"Necessary" secrecy has been the fallback explanation for much of the information that has been withheld from public scrutiny since 9/11. The military commissions at Guantanamo will proceed, for instance, in part on the claim that, if the accused, many of whom have already been held for a decade, were to be tried in federal court, too much would be revealed that could somehow compromise the country's security.

To counter civil libertarian claims that secrecy is only an attempt to hide embarrassing or wrongful behavior, the current administration has promised "transparency" in the military commissions scheduled to begin later this year. Efforts at transparency, announced last fall, included a website where documents - filled with redactions (blacked-out sections) - could be accessed by the public, and a closed-circuit viewing, albeit with a 40-second delay, for the media and members of the victims' families.

It has taken next to no time, though, for the government to contradict those vows of transparency, ensuring that, in the polite words of Spencer Ackerman of Wired's Danger Room blog, Guantanamo will remain "not a place of openness". Meanwhile, all mail between the detainees and their military defense counsels is being screened, a practice that understandably has those lawyers in an uproar.

In the category of non-transparency and the growth of secrecy as a first principle of government, there is the administration's elaborate dance of non-disclosure over a memo produced by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It was evidently written to justify the assassination by drone in Yemen last September of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, alleged to have been the "bin Laden of the Internet".

Until recently, the administration has ducked questions about al-Awlaki's killing and that of another American citizen, Samir Khan, the editor of the al-Qaeda magazine Inspire. In January, the government announced that attorney General Eric Holder would soon make public the OLC memo that legalized the killing, but delayed the attorney-general's explanation until early March.

Meanwhile, the New York Times and the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for its release. On March 5, Holder finally gave a detailed explanation of the tortured reasoning behind the targeted killing of al-Awlaki, but still, no memo seems to be forthcoming.

During the past year, the imposition of secrecy on government activities of all sorts has only become more pronounced. To offer just one egregious example among many, consider the government's behavior in the case of former CIA agent Jeffrey Sterling. At its request, a federal judge has now agreed to allow it to invoke the "silent witness rule". In other words, she will let government documents be shown to the jury without being made public, on the grounds, according to prosecutors, of "national security".

After a decade in which the customary practice in matters of "security" has been to sweep all too many government documents of significance into the shadows under that rubric of national security, this should hardly be surprising. Americans now know ever-less about what the government they elected does.

If it were not for the FOIA lawsuits of the ACLU and others, very little of what we do know about torture, warrantless surveillance, and other instances of government malfeasance would ever have seen the light of day. Consider the increasing number of whistleblower prosecutions as one more way to try to shut government activities off from the eyes of the citizenry.

4. Ever-more distrust (ever-less privacy)
For years, the prospect of warrantless wiretapping in the name of national security has had a chilling effect on Americans who have opposed government policies in the war on terror. In 2008, Bush signed a new FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which authorized the government to snoop on citizens with minimal oversight from the already secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts. (They were set up in 1978 to oversee the granting of surveillance warrants against potential foreign intelligence agents.)

The Obama administration has continually opted to uphold this power and the government's freedom to warrantlessly tap electronic communications between people outside the United States and people inside the country in the name of national security.

Meanwhile, the latest revelations in the ever-more-distrust, ever-less-privacy sweepstakes are led by news that the New York City Police Department (NYPD) has implemented surveillance programs that violate the civil liberties of that city's Muslim-American citizens. The NYPD infiltrated mosques and universities, collecting information on individuals suspected of no crimes, in conjunction with a CIA officer (now withdrawn) using methods traditionally reserved for that agency.

This surely represents, however informally, an abrogation of the CIA's mandate to conduct its surveillance only abroad, and it's likely that no one involved will pay a penalty for it. In addition, in a striking combination of security overreach and police profiling, the NYPD has been investigating and surveilling Muslim-American citizens well outside the city limits - from New Haven, Connecticut, to Newark, New Jersey.

To make matters worse, the government just approved the use of surveillance drones as part of a growing law enforcement arsenal for gathering information in the United States. On February 14, Obama signed a bill allowing for the use of such drones in a broad array of arenas, ranging from business activities to law enforcement.

The message is clear enough: this year (next year and the year after) will be the year of more snooping. For law enforcement, your life is apparently an open book.

5. Ever-more killing (ever-less peace)
Scarcely a day goes by without news of the use of Predator and Reaper drones to kill individuals in foreign countries, including in recent years Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and the Philippines. It's as if the CIA and the military have been handed a new toy that they just can't refrain from using, or teaching others to use. According to the Atlantic, "Conservative estimates suggest hundreds of noncombatant civilians have been killed in Pakistan alone."

Meanwhile, the drumbeat for war with Iran continues to build. Faced with the prospect of an Israeli attack on the Islamic Republic, the Obama administration has refused to definitively back away from the prospect of becoming part of that war.

"Iran's leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment," the president said. "I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I have made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests."

In fact, the urge to stop a potentially disastrous confrontation, which could seriously affect the price of oil and the global economy, has sent high military and civilian officials winging from Washington to Israel with warnings against an attack on Iran. Still, war continues to be treated by diplomats and others almost as a fait accompli.

The news then is certainly grim, and moving in one clear direction - the use of the law, or at least the Justice Department's version of the law, to justify whatever acts the government feels are necessary against whomever they deem to be the enemy. Attorney General Holder summed the situation up tellingly in his defense of the al-Awlaki killing.

In significant detail, he explained that the killing of an American citizen (and terror suspect) was lawful, despite the fact that it brought into question the guarantee of due process under the Fifth Amendment, and despite the guarantees offered by the laws of war. "Due process," he declared, "is not judicial process." It was a startlingly honest admission of something new under the American sun: due process is now what the president and his closes advisors decide it is, a constitutional rethinking of the first order to justify the "targeted killing" of an American citizen.

To sum up, the legal gray zone Washington has, over the course of a decade, plunged us into - and everything that goes with it, including punitive measures, attempts to bypass constitutional guarantees, the spread of secrecy and surveillance, a growing distrust of American citizens, and straightforward killing - isn't something we will soon put behind us. The move away from the rights and liberties enshrined in the constitution and the law is very clearly the way of the American future in our new age of enemies.

Karen Greenberg is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School.

India is the exception as a lone ranger in regional security and Afghanistan's ‘My Lai’....

India is the exception as a lone ranger in regional security and Afghanistan's ‘My Lai’....

M K Bhadrakumar

Winding down

The US strategy to establish military bases in Afghanistan is going to be severely contested by the Afghan people....

The answer could be both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to the question: Is it Afghanistan’s My Lai? Indeed, the mass murder in South Vietnam 44 years and 4 days ago was far more gruesome – between 347 and 504 civilians were slaughtered.
But the Panjwayi massacre is also a watershed event in the Afghan war. The rampage by a United States Army sergeant last Sunday in a remote village in Panjwayi district near a NATO base in Kandahar province, killing 16 Afghan villagers, irredeemably seals the fate of the 10-year old war in the Hindu Kush.
The faultlines hold ominous portents. Afghan nationalism is on the rise. The national mood has turned against foreign occupation and it has become a moot point that the western troops are in Afghanistan under a United Nations mandate. Second, the morale of the US troops is breaking down and a cycle of revenge killings involving them and their Afghan ‘allies’ may ensue. Three, Afghans deeply resent the Pentagon’s handling of the Panjwayi massacre – especially that the suspect was spirited away to the US – as a slur on their national honour.
All this, in turn, greatly complicates the US strategy to wind down the war. It is not only a question of the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of western troops and their heavy war equipment out of an increasingly unfriendly environment – which itself could be problematic – but also a matter of what sort of Afghanistan the US is leaving behind. President Barack Obama has emphasised that the ‘transition’ will commence in 2013 and the ‘combat mission’ will end in 2014, no matter what US commanders might say to the contrary. Hamid Karzai has since called for restricting the US troops to major bases.
In reality, what lies ahead is a downhill slope fraught with great dangers. The Soviet withdrawal in 1989 was carefully choreographed. Moscow tenaciously forged secret understanding with the Mujahideen forces operating in the Amu Darya region and could tap into the regional consensus urging troop pullout. Most important, Afghan state structures that the Soviets built were holding. But none of that is in place today as the US begins to withdraw.
Besides, there was transparency about the Soviet intention to withdraw. The US, on the other hand, continues to pursue a ‘hidden agenda’ by almost cynically using the struggle against al-Qaeda as a pretext to advance its geopolitical objective of establishing a permanent military presence in a highly strategic region of immense mineral resources, which also overlooks five nuclear powers.
Looking ahead, though, the US strategy to establish military bases in Afghanistan is going to be severely contested by the Afghan people and the regional powers. The strategy was predicated on a peace agreement with the Taliban but the latter have broken off the contacts with American officials. Conceivably, Taliban sense that ‘victory’ is at hand. But it may prove to be an illusion as the non-Taliban groups would almost certainly resist a Taliban takeover.

Strategic defiance
Equally, Pakistan may harbor a sense of triumphalism that its calibrated ‘strategic defiance’ of the US in the period since the 2-month detention of the CIA agent Raymond Davis in January 2011 has paid off. Washington is knocking at the gates seeking resumption of the partnership. Paradoxically, however, this is also the moment of truth for Pakistan. Pakistan needs to decide what sort of Afghanistan it wants as neighbour. It is way past Pakistan’s capacity to underwrite the Afghan economy. Over and above, Pakistan needs to take a long-term view and ponder over the profound implications of having a Taliban-run regime across the Durand Line.
The statements by prime minister Yousuf Gilani and foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar suggest incipient signs of new thinking. These are early days, but India’s interest lies in encouraging Pakistan to jettison the outmoded notions regarding ‘strategic depth’ and so on and reorient its Afghan policy in a way that serves the interests of regional security and stability.
How can India do this? First, India needs to clear up the cobweb in its own thinking regarding the Taliban. Second, India should encourage Pakistan to work for a broad-based government in Kabul. This needs to be handled at the highest level of leadership. Three, India will be stupid to force the dynamics of its presence at this juncture. It will be just fine if India keeps its diplomacy in a state of animated suspension during this transitional phase. The Afghan people aren’t running away anywhere and trust any Kabul government – even one led by Taliban – to reach out to India.
Actually, the most formidable challenge is the absence of any regional security architecture.
Shanghai Cooperation Organization [SCO] could have provided a framework but Indian diplomacy lacked the vision to accelerate its quest for membership as a top foreign-policy priority in anticipation of the uncertainties in regional security. The ebb and flow of relations with China (and Iran) and the slow pace of normalization with Pakistan work as negative features. And, it needs to be kept in view that almost all countries surrounding Afghanistan have fortified themselves one way or another to meet the exigencies of the post-2014 scenario for regional security. The latest was Beijing’s initiative to create a trilateral framework with Pakistan and Afghanistan – on top of the SCO and the ‘all-weather friendship’ with Islamabad. India is the exception as a lone ranger in regional security....

Swift blows to Iran and nuclear talks; and the limits of US power in Iraq and beyond....

Swift blows to Iran and nuclear talks; and the limits of US power in Iraq and beyond....
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

Fortunately, Failure after failure might stop the barbaric and Zioconned US warmachine. Or at least bankrupt it....


NEW YORK - Swift, the Belgian-based financial clearing house, delivered a major blow to Iran's international trade by announcing on Saturday that it would cut financial services to Iranian banks. For Iran's oil economy, this was shocking in its simplicity: it means that Iran will find it even more difficult to receive money for its major oil transactions.

While it will take a few months to tabulate the net effect of Swift's decision, rationalized by the European sanctions on Iran, it is fairly certain that the timing was critical, coming prior to multilateral nuclear talks between Iran and the so-called "5 +1" nations (ie, the UN Security Council's Permanent Five plus Germany). This and the White House's warning of a shrinking "window of opportunity for diplomacy," are meant to have the sledge-hammer effect of jolting Iran into submission at the negotiation table, although the exact date and venue for talks has yet to be announced.

Although the Turkish Foreign Minister has expressed his country's interest in hosting the nuclear talks, much like the last round in Istanbul in January 2011, there is a hesitation on Iran's part, due principally to Turkey's anti-Syrian government role that is directly at odds with Tehran's pro-Damascus policy. A clue to the depth of Turkish-Iranian division over Syria is that Iran may opt to move the talks somewhere else - and there is talk in Tehran of Moscow, in order to send Ankara a clear signal. On the other hand, in light of Turkey's cooperative behavior on the nuclear issue in the past, and the on-going Iran-Turkey trade despite the Western sanctions, Tehran may not want to ruffle the waters with Turkey too much at this critical hour when the rings around Iran are rapidly tightening.

Irrespective of where the talks are held, the bigger and more important question is, of course, what can be expected and whether they will yield a breakthrough or another round of fruitless discussions?

From the Western camp, the pre-talk strategy of pounding Iran with maximum pressure, including warnings of "last opportunity" before the Israeli bombs dropped, apparently relayed to Russia by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently, holds sway in various Western capitals, although there is no unity of purpose among the "Iran six" nations and China and Russia have gone on record opposing further sanctions on Iran.

Meanwhile, greater cooperation between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is in the offing, per reports from Vienna suggesting that Iran and the IAEA officials are getting close to finalizing "modality" or framework to resolve the outstanding "ambiguities". That should turn down the heat on the crisis. The temperature of relations in Europe, on the other hand, is fixated on the coming presidential elections in France, scheduled for April 22, that can have profound ramifications on the rest of Europe as well as Europe's relations with the Middle East if ardently pro-Israel President Nicolas Sarkozy is defeated by his socialist challenger Francios Hollande, who is presently ahead in the opinion polls.

With national elections in Germany and Italy next year, the French elections could be a good omen for heralding a new, and vibrant, turn to the left in European politics that may translate into a more balanced and less US-dependent external politics by the European Union, whose oil sanctions on Iran go into effect come this July.

"France has not really been a big factor in the nuclear talks and they have taken their cues from the Americans without showing any sign of independence, but this may change and France may become a more proactive player in the nuclear talks if there is a socialist government," says a Tehran University political science professor who spoke to the author on the condition of anonymity. In other words, Iran is vesting some hope in "regime change" in Europe, just as some Western politicians and media pundits are hedging their bets on regime change in Tehran as a result of "crippling sanctions" and other similar punitive efforts, such as supporting the Iranian political opposition.

Russia's 'step-by-step' proposal
At the moment, the Russian "step-by-step" proposal is the only game in town, and no one with any familiarity with the Iran nuclear talks is even minimally hopeful that Iran would ever consent to scrap its expensive uranium enrichment program under external pressure. The so-called "zero enrichment" option is for all practical purposes a passe and, yet, Western officials have stubbornly refused to present a viable alternative.

What is more, United States President Barack Obama's turn to a more hardline posture of "deterrence", that lowers the US threshold of tolerance to Iran's "nuclear capability" rather than "bomb-possessing ability," simply means that the US has pushed itself into a corner where a more rigid and inflexible negotiation strategy can be expected that is not conducive to achieving a mutually-acceptable breakthrough.

Obama's stiffened position is a product of domestic considerations in an election year and has less to do with the nuclear realities on the ground in Iran, and is yet another reminder of how the Iran nuclear standoff is hostage to the domestic politics of various players involved in the crisis. A resolution requires political realism, diplomatic flexibility, and parties' preparedness to compromise. These are increasingly rare ingredients to come by in 2012.

It may make more sense to actually postpone the Iran nuclear talks after the US and Iran presidential elections, or simply use the opportunity of coming talks this spring for "confidence-building". The problem with this alternative option is, however, that the Iran sanctions have biting effects on the Iranian economy, thus leading some Iranian political and military leaders to entertain the option of introducing further costs to their adversaries, such as by playing hardball in Afghanistan, in light of a recent announcement by a revolutionary guard commander calling on the Afghan people to "expel" the Americans and their allies.

"If Mr Obama wants to deliver on his promise of US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in two years, then he should know that Iran has the means to frustrate him and make the US suffer in Afghanistan in response to US trying to make life difficult on the Iranians," says the Tehran professor mentioned above.

Not only that, from Tehran's perspective, the recent showering of southern Israel by the Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza has sent a timely signal to Israel, as a dress rehearsal for much bigger attacks, by both Hamas and Hezbollah, in case Israel attacks Iran. The Iran-Israel war may not actually happen, due to Israel's "tyranny of distance" - to quote an Israeli general - from Iran. But the potential for the threat of that war to trigger smaller wars and flare-ups is indisputable.

All this means that there is ample reason for both sides to give the Russian proposal and its call for the staged removal of sanctions in return for Iran's resolution of outstanding IAEA issues, decent consideration, up to the point of adopting the proposal's implicit agenda; that is, recognizing Iran's right to enrich uranium. For now, the US and its Western allies are stepping in the opposite direction, but the question is how long they can sustain their position, that obliterates the chances for a diplomatic solution, without appearing as unreasonably inflexible and even dogmatic?

Iraq and the limits of US power...
By Paul Mutter

"Washington has lost a valuable opportunity to nurture and support a key counterweight to Iranian influence among Shi'ites in the Arab world," lament Danielle Pletka and Gary Schmitt of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute in an op-ed for the Washington Post. They subsequently call on the Barack Obama administration to bulk up its already grossly overloaded staff at the gigantic US embassy in Baghdad. But in these few words, the two writers fleshed out a more fundamental concern for hawkish pundits in the Middle East: the fear of a "Shia Crescent" of Iranian-backed regimes in Bagdad, Beirut, and Damascus linking the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf.

Indeed, with Iran now able to meddle in Iraq in ways it never could have with Saddam Hussein in power, the country will be more able to contest US-Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. The grim irony, notes Ted Galen Carpenter, is that by invading Iraq in 2003, "the United States has paid a terrible cost - some $850 billion and more than 4,400 dead American soldiers - to make Iran the most influential power in Iraq". Few, if any, of the war's architects and boosters will now concede this, even as they raise alarm over Iran's influence in Iraq.

Looking East
But where today's neo-conservatives see an encroaching Iranian Islamist threat in the Middle East, an older guard has reached back to the not-so-distant Cold War past for parallels. Notably, many leading neo-conservative lights hold out hope that Iraq can be turned into an Arabian version of post-war South Korea and Japan.

Prominent neo-conservatives draw heavily on the memory of America's seizure of Japanese hegemony in Asia after 1945. The United States worked steadfastly with post-war Japanese and South Korean governments to build the two countries up as buffers to Soviet and Chinese influence during the Cold War - efforts that were, by Washington's standards at least, quite successful. Despite challenges from a resurgent China, the Pacific Ocean was (and still is) an American lake.

In a 2010 op-ed for the New York Times, leading Iraq war agitator Paul Wolfowitz invoked this history explicitly, treading breezily past US support for authoritarian South Korean regimes. "The United States stuck with South Korea even though the country was then ruled by a dictator and the prospects for its war-devastated economy looked dim," he wrote. Wolfowitz noted that Iraq's struggling democracy and central location were not unlike South Korea's during the Cold War.

However unseemly, there is some truth to Wolfowitz's recollection. It may be impossible to imagine a fifth column of South Korean agitators helping Pyongyang take over Seoul today, but during the Cold War this was a real concern for the United States. So Washington chose to prop up feudalistic landlords and former Japanese collaborators as Seoul's ruling class, stiffening South Korea's sinews against the appeal of the North Korean model with a glut of military and economic support. Today, Japan and South Korea remain firmly within the US fold.

Moreover, these alliances continue despite the brutal wars that spawned them. US-led forces laid waste to the Korean peninsula with saturation bombing in the 1950s, but Washington could always count thereafter on "our men in Seoul". Japan is an even more extreme case. After several years of firebombing and blockading the country, the United States annihilated two of the Japan's cities with nuclear weapons. And yet Japan plays host to US troops even today.

Those who fear that the United States "lost Iraq" because Barack Obama went through with the US withdrawal schedule negotiated by President George W Bush are clearly thinking about longer-term issues of American hegemony (see Mitt Romney's foreign policy white paper and list of advisers for good examples of this kind of thinking). It's simple logic, really: everything with Iraq keeps coming back to the dual-track policy of containment and rollback the United States has pursued against Iran. Iraq is a vital piece of this strategy; Juan Cole's map of American bases around Iran is unimpeachable evidence of this.

American neo-conservatives may hope that a US-buttressed military-political establishment in Iraq could form a bulwark against a potential "Shia Crescent" led by Iran, just as South Korea and Japan helped stem the red tide spreading through East Asia during the Cold War. They may even have some reason to hope that Iraqis will overlook their resentment over the immensely destructive US war on the country.

Wishful thinking
Just as in South Korea and Japan, there are Iraqis who see the United States as a partner - or at least as a cash cow that can be milked by exploiting US jitters about Iran. In contrast to most Iraqi politicians, who have been almost uniformly opposed to an ongoing US military presence in Iraq, there are Iraqi military officers who wanted to maintain ties with the US military because they doubted their own forces could keep the peace.

There are always people within a country's security establishment who can be made into agents of American influence. But in Iraq, the United States is confronting a much less homogeneous society than in South Korea or Japan, and it faces a much better equipped rival for hegemonic influence in Iran. As Washington's influence in Baghdad recedes, Tehran's hidden hands in Iraq are coming to the fore.

It's not that Iran doesn't have its own baggage to contend with in Iraq as it vies with the United States for influence - Iran wasn't winning Iraqi hearts and minds, after all, when the two countries were busy destroying each other in the 1980s. But a key distinction for Iraqis between that war and the US invasion was that the Iran-Iraq War was launched by their own Saddam Hussein, driving thousands of Iraqi Shi'ite refugees into Iran by the end of the 1980s. By all appearances, America's war on Iraq was purely voluntary and imposed on Iraqis from the outside. Moreover, Iran has from at least 1982 on been working to build up its own agents of influence in Iraq's security and religious establishments.

Most importantly, an Iraqi alignment with Iran is the result not only of two decades of Iranian intrigue, but also of two decades of US sanctions, war, and occupation. Especially since the US occupation, Iraqis have viewed Iranian machinations in Iraq - and even Iran's quiet participation in Iraq's horrific sectarian violence - as just another symptom of a plague brought by the US invasion.

A lack of options
Suppose Obama came into office determined to overturn the withdrawal agreement and keep US troops in Iraq. What tools would he have to force Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to reverse himself in the face of an angry Iraqi public and threats by some Shi'ite groups to take up their arms again if the US military presence continued? What could Obama do to "reclaim the partnership with Maliki", as Danielle Pletka and Gary Schmitt ask?

The answer is surprisingly little, mainly because the US-Iraqi relationship was never a partnership to begin with. It was, from the start, an occupation. The US presence in Iraq - where it tried not just to police the country but at times even had Provincial Reconstruction Teams stand in for civil society - meant that Maliki had little agency of his own. Additionally, holdouts like the Sadrists, Sunni tribal militias, and the Badr Brigades had little reason to lay down their arms; it was fight or collaborate, and they chose to fight.

But ever since the United States enabled Maliki to build his own security forces, electoral bloc, and bureaucracy - and thus achieve an understanding with members of the "insurgency" - he has found other people he can depend on to bolster his rule. He doesn't need US forces to intimidate, capture, or kill people for him; his own people are quite capable of doing that.

Far from being run out of the country after detaining hundreds of former Ba'athist officials this winter, Maliki has apparently managed to use such heavy-handed actions to his advantage. As paper by the neo-conservative Institute for the Study of War recently noted, "It is clear that Maliki has come out as the winner . . . He has made it more difficult for his Shi'ite rivals to dissent while simultaneously confining his Sunni opponents in a position suitable for exerting pressure and exploiting divisions within their ranks." For all of the rampant disunity and criminality of the Iraqi government, its leadership has been able to achieve ever-greater independence from its US backers.

Most importantly, Iraq has little reason to sully an important relationship with its Iranian neighbor just to please Washington. Moreover, it's uneasy about having such a long border with a regime change target and has no wish to get involved with the nuclear question that so preoccupies Israel and the United States. "Iraqis," Adil Shamoo notes, "can tell the difference between mutually beneficial programs and those that create the impression that the US is powerful and can do what it wants in Iraq".

Out of cards
Even "our man in Iraq" Ahmed Chalabi - who swept back into the country by way of Langley, Virginia after a decade of agitating for US-led regime change in exile - wanted the United States out of Iraq because he thought it would be political suicide to keep associating with the country that paid his organization $335,000 a month during the first year of the occupation.

If the United States could not secure gratitude from a man who spent over a decade working with the CIA to overthrow Saddam Hussein, then from whom in Iraq can it call in any favors? Short of sectarian violence reaching the level it did in 2005, gratitude is the only thing that would compel Iraqi officials to reverse course, let US troops back in, and focus their foreign policy efforts on a dual-track policy of rollback and containment against Iran.

Unfortunately for neo-conservatives, Iraq is no South Korea or Japan, and "gratitude" seems to be in short supply.....