Iran, Israel and US

S P SETH

Having occupied, divided, created apartheid-era Bantustans, and generally ruined Palestine, Israel is now turning its attention to Iran to rally the world, especially the United States, against that country. This has been going on for a number of years because Iran’s nuclear energy program, according to Tel Aviv, is an “existential danger” for Israel as well a threat to global peace. Therefore, it is not just an Israeli issue, but also a global issue requiring a global response.

Israel doesn’t accept Iranian proposition that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. It believes that Tehran is actually working on a nuclear weapons program and indeed is quite within reach of making a bomb, though there is no hard evidence to back it up. It would therefore like the US, its most powerful ally, to stop Iran from heading in that direction by destroying its nuclear facilities. If the US were squeamish about it, Israel would do this on its own with the US standing behind it if things were to go wrong. Short of actually attacking Iranian facilities at this point of time, President Obama has said that the US wouldn’t allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. In other words, the US will keep all its options open including, if necessary, the military option. Which is quite a tight undertaking but not entirely satisfactory to Israel.

Against this backdrop, Israel’s additional worry now is that Iran’s new moderate President Dr Hassan Rowhani might somehow be able to sway the United States and its allies into constructive talks on the nuclear question. Rowhani has called for “serious and substantive talks” to break the deadlock over Iran’s nuclear program. To quote Rowhani, “As the president of the Islamic republic, I am announcing that there is the political will to solve this issue and also take into consideration the concerns of the other sides.” In other words, there is scope for compromise. But he also made it clear that Iran will not give up its nuclear program for peaceful uses as provided under international regulations. According to Rowhani, “Iran’s peaceful nuclear program is a national issue…we will not give up the rights of the Iranian people.” He added, “We will preserve our rights based on the international regulations. In Iran, nobody has said we will give up uranium enrichment, no one and at no time.”

 But Israel, the US and its allies are aiming for Iran to give up its nuclear program. And for that to happen, the US is banking on the harshest sanctions it can impose and force other countries in the world to do likewise to cripple Iran economically. In other words, it is engaged in economic warfare against Iran; there is no other word for it. The logic is that people’s economic hardship will turn them against the clerical regime and replace it with a more responsive (to US pressure) political order. And if that too doesn’t work, there is the ultimate threat of military intervention (bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities).

But Israel wants urgent action to destroy Tehran’s nuclear program. And it considers Rowhani an even bigger danger being a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”, as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described him. Netanyahu warned a group of visiting US congressmen against putting hopes in Rowhani as: “ He knows how to exploit this, and yesterday he called for more talks. Of course, he wants more talks. He wants to talk and talk and talk.” He added, “ And while everybody is busy talking to him, he will be busy enriching uranium. The centrifuges will keep on spinning.”

It is not just Netanyahu who is warning against Rowhani. It would appear that much of the Israeli state machinery has gone on the offensive. For instance, Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s minister for international affairs, reportedly said, “Rowhani is charming, he is cunning, and he will smile all the way to the bomb” And his advice to the US and the world reportedly is that Iran should be told unmistakably that it had only two choices: close its uranium enrichment program or “see it destroyed with brute force” that, in his view, would take only “a few hours of airstrikes, no more.” And he was very dismissive about a possible Iranian counter-attack, which might involve firing “several hundred missiles” with “very little damage because we can intercept many of them.” Therefore, as far as Israel is concerned it is time to go after Iran with all guns blazing to destroy its nuclear facilities. Indeed, according to some press reports, the US response to an Israeli attack on Iran might be softening.

Iran’s new President Rowhani is aware of the dangers. He has said, “Unfortunately, the war-mongering lobby in the US is opposed to constructive [talks] and only protects the interests of the foreign regime [Israel], and often receives orders from that regime…” If such were the state of affairs, the only solution for Iran would be to surrender and junk its nuclear program. Which, most probably, is unlikely to happen.

But surely, there would be some policy makers in the US worrying about stoking another conflict in the Middle East, when the US is trying hard to extricate itself from Afghanistan and its Iraq war project went so terribly wrong, with the country hit by bombs all too often. If a recent article in the New York Review of Books by William Luers, Thomas R. Pickering and Jim Walsh entitled, “For a New Approach to Iran”, is any indication, there apparently is concern at some levels about the dangerous drift in US-Iran relations that have struggled since the 1979 Iranian revolution.

The article broadly favours a diplomatic path to deal with the nuclear issue, complementing it with a broader dialogue on a whole range of issues, involving the region. It rightly evokes Obama’s March 2009 message that said, “My administration is now committed to diplomacy… and to pursuing constructive ties among the United States, Iran, and the international community. …We seek instead engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.” In the same way, Iran’s new President has announced, “… there is political will to solve this [nuclear] issue”, taking into consideration the “concerns of the other sides.”  

The authors of the article have called upon their government to recall what President Kennedy said fifty years ago, in another context, urging his countrymen “not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.” This message is as apposite today in the context of US-Iran relations as it was in the era of Cold War. But to pursue this course, the US will have to rid itself of Israel’s pernicious and self-serving influence on its foreign policy.

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au

Egypt facing a civil war

S P SETH

When is a coup a coup? Apparently, when the US says so. And so far (at the time of writing) the US has refused to call the removal from power of President Morsi by the military on July 3 a coup. The chain of events unleashed since then has led to an orgy of killings of Muslim Brotherhood supporters wanting their leader back as the country’s president. Though the US has condemned the recent use of military force, it was not prepared to call the military coup a coup.  Indeed, during his recent Pakistan visit, the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, justified the military coup in Egypt when he said that the Egyptian generals had acted to restore democracy.

Kerry was not entirely wrong to point out that the Morsi administration had indeed incurred the wrath of many Egyptians’, probably a majority, in trying to hijack a broad based revolution to rid the country of the Hosni Mubarak regime. For instance, the youth movement, Tamarrud (the rebellion) had collected 22 million signatures urging Morsi to resign, and had indeed organized the largest demonstrations to support their campaign.

The Muslim Brotherhood and its political wing, Freedom and Justice Party, simply couldn’t wait to use their political power to push their own agenda by riding roughshod over their opponents. Worse still, they even alienated some of their own political partners, like the radical Islamic outfit, the al-Nour Party, which supported Morsi’ removal. With power in their hands, the Brotherhood conveniently forgot what had won them the election; and that was to remain part of an inclusive national movement without seeking domination. They had, for instance, undertaken not to nominate for the country’s presidency. They had also undertaken not to run candidates in all parliamentary constituencies. In both cases, they backtracked.

These assurances were meant to assure the secular and youthful pioneers of the revolution that the Brotherhood would be real partners in the unfolding revolutionary enterprise. But when they won the presidency and a large number of parliamentary seats, they decided to push through a constitution that seemed very much like an Islamist document, ignoring the rights of women, minorities, secular and liberal elements of the country’s new revolutionary political spectrum.

Indeed, even Sheikh Mohamed Abdel Zaher, one of al-Azhar’s leading clerics, was not impressed with Morsi’s attempts to refashion Egyptian society along more rigid Islamic lines. He reportedly felt that, “ He [Morsi] was guilty of bad behaviour.”  He added, “He and his people tried to take all the important positions of Egypt for themselves and the people rejected this.  He became like something of the old regime.”

The problem with the Muslim Brotherhood in government was that they had never been in power before. Ever since its formation in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna with a view to refashion Muslim society, on a global scale hopefully, to follow the Islamic scriptures and precepts, it struggled to make  headway clashing with established political order and system. As a result, they found themselves hounded, persecuted and proscribed, while trying to survive under the most difficult circumstances, whether it was in Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Tunisia and elsewhere.

Indeed, in the early nineties when Islamists were about to win elections in Algeria, the country’s military annulled the vote leading to a bloody civil war costing nearly 200,000 lives. Within Egypt too, the country’s military regime from Nasser down to Mubarak persecuted and tortured them, banning them from any overt political role. But the movement still survived and lived to win an election in revolutionary Egypt when Morsi was elected the country’s President in 2012.

But without any political experience of governing and lacking the art of political consensus and compromise, they took their election win as a holy edict of sorts, quoting ad infinitum from their new political bible of democracy. And they felt terribly wronged when President Morsi was unceremoniously removed from power. In this situation, the only vindication for them of their principled position would be the restoration of Morsi to the country’s presidency. As against this was the army’s position that they were only following the people’s will to remove Morsi and his regime from power. In other words, both the Brotherhood and the army had reached an irreconcilable situation.

 At this point it is important to examine the role of external forces. The first overt sign of US displeasure with the Morsi regime came when President Obama said last year that the US considered Egypt neither an ally nor an enemy. Which, in simple language, meant that the Morsi regime was not reliable. But, at the same time, they didn’t want to cut them off completely. In other words, the US was sending confusing signals to both the military and the Morsi regime. General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the army chief, bolstered up by popular and widespread demonstrations against the Muslim Brotherhood, preferred to read US signals, however confusing and ambivalent, as signs of US support. And when the 48-hour ultimatum for a political resolution of the crisis expired, el-Sisi felt confident, both domestically and internationally, about the popular and political correctness of his decision to depose Morsi as the country’s president, replacing him with an army-appointed interim president and a new government with himself as defense minister and deputy prime minister.

By refusing to call the coup a military coup, the US seemed to be showing some preference for the army’s interim solution. But, at the same time, it was working for some kind of political reconciliation between the warring parties. Which didn’t impress the Brotherhood. While in Pakistan, John Kerry clearly expressed US preference for the military’s removal of President Morsi by calling it an exercise in restoring democracy backed by popular demand.

Still the army was not terribly happy as General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi blasted the US government for its lack of support. And it is even more unhappy now when President Obama has condemned the army’s killing of civilians, and announced the cancellation of a joint military exercise next month; though the $ 1.5 billion annual US aid, much of it for the army, will continue as usual. The fact is that the US can’t afford to cut off the Egyptian army, which is the lynchpin of its strategy of maintaining Israel’s security, an important component of which is the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.

All the efforts of the US, European and Arab envoys to mediate and prevent a bloodbath in Egypt having failed, the military let loose its fire power and went on a killing spree. The way things are in Egypt, the country looks like descending into a civil war, like the one in Algeria when that country’s elections in 1992 were annulled by the military to prevent Islamic Salvation Front gaining power. If that happens, it will have catastrophic effects for the entire region.

 Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth @yahoo.com.au