Writing for the Washington Post Douglas Farah and Dana Priest report that Osama Bin Laden son Saad bin Laden is one of many al Qaeda members living in and working from Iran.
Like other al Qaeda leaders in Iran, the younger bin Laden, who is believed to be 24 years old, is protected by an elite, radical Iranian security force loyal to the nation's clerics and beyond the control of the central government, according to U.S. and European intelligence officials. The secretive unit, known as the Jerusalem Force, has restricted the al Qaeda group's movements to its bases, mostly along the border with Afghanistan.
Osama Bin Laden has had on-going contacts with Iran spanning years.
Gunaratna said that an analysis of bin Laden's satellite telephone calls from 1996 to 1998 showed that more than 10 percent were placed to Iran, demonstrating the ongoing contacts with Iran during that time.
What is amazing about this story is that Iran's support for terrorists continues even after 9/11 and even after the overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. So far nothing the United States has done has intimidated the mullahs who rule Iran. To them it is business as usual. The United States still is not openly threatening Iran with a military attack and the Iranians think they can get away with what they are doing both in terms of support for terrorists and in terms of nuclear weapons development.
Once the Iranians manage to build functional nuclear weapons the ability of the US to restrain Iran will decline considerably. The United States will then be in the position of having a nuclear-armed enemy that supports terrorists that have carried out attacks on American soil. It seems likely that more terrorist attacks will have to happen before there is sufficient political will to deal with either North Korea or Iran.
China eLobby draws attention to a recent report that the North Korean and Iranian regimes are negotiating a deal for more extensive cooperation on nuclear weapons development.
So many North Koreans are presently in Iran working on nuclear and ballistic missile projects, the story said, that a Caspian Sea resort has been furnished for their use.
Then, just two days ago, a story in the Japanese newspaper Sankei reported that the two countries would likely reach an agreement in mid-October to jointly develop nuclear warheads. Also, under the agreement, North Korea will export Taepodong missile components for assembly in Iran.
It isn't called Axis Of Evil for nothing.
It is interesting to note that there was a period of European history when Kings proclaimed their divine right to rule as representatives of God on Earth. Some intellectuals in Iran would like to bring an end to their era of divine right to rule.
More than 250 university teachers and writers added their voices to students' bold demands for democratic reforms in Iran, telling supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei he must answer to the people and abandon the idea that he is God's unchallenged representative on Earth.
The biggest destabilizing force in Iran has got to be the relative youthfulness of the Iranian population.
But the tumult in Tehran's streets suggests that the country's youth will not be quieted for long. More than 60% of Iran's 70 million people are under the age of 30.
Old folks do not typically engage in street battles. High testosterone young males with feelings of adolescent rage and rebellion are the best hope for the downfall of the Mullahs in Iran. Whether enough young males can be roused to overthrow the regime remains to be seen. One of the biggest factors weighing against that outcome is the sizeable number of Islamist young males who are eager to fight to maintain the theocracy.
The failure of the previous revolution continues to limit enthusiam for another revolution. The Iranian students would be a lot more motivated if they had a clearer shared goal for their protests. (same article also available here)
But there is no collective vision of a viable alternative. "The problem with reforms is that Iranians know what they don't want, but they do not know what they want," said Muhammad, a 24-year-old student. Many students interviewed did not want their full names or schools published, saying they feared subsequent harassment.
I'm still pessimistic about the prospects for a radical change in Iranian politics. The broader Iranian public is too apathetic. In her visit there for The New York Times Magazine Elizabeth Rubin found widespread feelings of apathy and resignation about politics in Iran. The latest street protests are not yet a sign that the broader Iranian populace are in a pre-revolutionary frame of mind. Even if the Iranians have a revolution many secular reformers want to continue Iran's nuclear weapons development program anyway.
Update: For a more optimistic outlook on the protests in Iran we can count on Michael Ledeen:
Fourth, and perhaps most important, the anti-regime demonstrations are not limited to Tehran. On Sunday night, for example, the biggest demonstrations to date — anywhere in the country — reportedly took place in Isfahan (where my informant said virtually the entire city was mobilized against the regime), and other protests were staged in Mashad, Shiraz (where three distinguished scholars were thrown in jail last Thursday, following an extorted "confession" from a 14-year old) and Ahvaz. This is doubly significant, both because it shows the national character of the rebellion, and because Isfahan has historically been the epicenter of revolutionary movements (and indeed some of the harshest critics of the regime are in and from Isfahan).
I hope Ledeen is correct. This sort of thing is incredibly hard to predict. The regime could make some big mistake and make some move that intensely enrages the populace. Video For instance, footage might capture regime thugs killing children in a demonstration or something else similarly enraging and that footage might be broadcast into Iran via satellite. Some spark could set off a big scaling up of the demonstrations.
Update II: There is one big difference between the prospects for a revolution in Iran now and the period that led to the overthrow of the Shah in the late 1970s: Then the secular and religious forces were both pushing for a change in goverment. But now many Islamists are lined up against the secularists. There could be a brutal civil war if the secularists became sufficiently emboldened to try to bring down the government. It is far from clear which side would prevail. In large part it depends on the level of motivation and ruthlessness of the two sides.
Students in Tehran have protested for 3 nights in a row.
ISTANBUL, June 13 (Friday) -- Clashes this week between students and security forces in Tehran appear to be the most significant civic protests inside Iran in almost five years, according to analysts and witnesses who say it remains unclear whether the unrest will spread to the general population.
Hooman Peimani says that protests by only a few thousand do not amount to much. If the protests started pulling in a significant portion of the 1.7 million Iranian students only then would they have the scale needed to offer a serious challenge to the Mullahs currently ruling Iran.
Nevertheless, student protests in themselves are not capable of facilitating the desired change as long as they remain scattered as they can then be easily contained or suppressed. Having said that, the 1.7 million Iranian students attending a large number of higher education institutions, if acting as a united social group, could certainly function as a catalyst of change, encouraging other social groups to join a peaceful movement for the formation of a secular democratic system. If, then, the student protests can continue, they have the potential for growth and consolidation.
Peimani also reports that even as students protest and the United States seeks to isolate Iran to pressure it to halt nuclear weapons development Germany is trying to develop better relations with the current Iranian government.
Visiting German Foreign Ministry official Volker Stanzel's talks in Tehran on Sunday with Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Euro-American Affairs, Ali Ahani indicate that while the American government is seeking Iran's isolation, Berlin is moving in the opposite direction.
The Germans are not being helpful.
The demonstrations began in order to protest against rising student tuition fees.
Minister of Science and Technology unveiled a plan to privatize universities requiring the students to pay tuition fees causing dismay among the students who could not afford to.
The student complaints have become more general and aimed at the regime.
"Tanks, artillery and guns no longer have any power," the protesters chanted. "Khatami, Khatami, resign, resign." Others shouted, "Death to dictators."
The government is using paramilitaries to attack the students and the behavior of the paramilitaries is going to make the government even more unpopular.
Often they would ditch their vehicles and attack private homes, smashing lights and exposed windows and screaming at cowering residents to stay indoors. Sometimes the students would get their revenge. At one point, they separated a sole vigilante, wrestled him off his bike, pummeled him and then set his bike afire.
The approach of the anniversary of the July 1999 student protests which were brutally suppressed has Iranian opposition groups promoting the idea of a big demonstration on July 9.
About a dozen US-based television stations run by Iranian opposition groups have been urging people to demonstrate against the clerical system on July 9.
Michael Ledeen continues to say that Iran is ripe for a revolution.
Over the past two years, millions of Iranians have taken to the streets in open rebellion. For the most part, these demonstrations have been led by "students," but these are not the kids in Paris or Berkeley in the 1960s. Iranian "students" are considerably older (some of the leaders are in their late thirties or early forties), and hardened by years of street fighting, imprisonment and torture.
However, AFP reports on the third night of student protests the number of protesters has declined. Count me as continuing to be skeptical about the prospects for a revolution in Iran that will usher in a secular democracy that forsakes terrorism and nuclear weapons development. The broader Iranian public is too apathetic. Even if they have a revolution many secular reformers want to continue Iran's nuclear weapons development program anyway.
Update: Joe Katzman's Iran Regional Briefing has a nice collection of links on recent events in Iran. He includes a link to Iranian blogger ahuramazda about the accuracy of Michael Ledeen's writings on Iran. Note that he believes Ledeen exaggerates the size of street protests and also believes that apathy is the dominant mood in Iran.
Former CIA agent Reuel Marc Gerecht examines the very important question of whether the Iranian government is tolerating the operation of Al Qaeda cells in Iran.
Nonetheless, when Tehran wants to make a show of force in any region, it can deploy forces fairly quickly. Also, the internal informant network in clerical Iran, though not nearly as effective as in Saddam's Stalinist Iraq, is good. It is just not credible that Arabic-speaking members of al Qaeda could sustain themselves for any length of time in Kurdistan or Baluchistan (where Arabic speakers are few) without Iran's internal security services getting wind of their presence. Why local Iranian Kurds or Baluchis would want to aid a foreign Arab group like al Qaeda is another question. Fleeing members of al Qaeda are probably not cash-rich, their drug-trade utility since the fall of the Taliban must at best be marginal, and the Kurds and the Baluchis would obviously not want to incur Tehran's wrath or closer supervision for foreign holy warriors unrelated by blood. If Tehran didn't mind al Qaeda in Baluchistan or Kurdistan, then the local reaction would, of course, be different.
This is an article well worth reading in full. The United States faces two big questions on Iran: A) Is Iran trying to develop nuclear weapons? and B) Is the Iranian government providing refuge and an environment which Al Qaeda and or other terrorist groups can use to help them strike at American and other Western targets? The answer to the first question is clearly Yes. Much is known about the nuclear facilities at Natanz and Bushehr. It would be ridiculous to argue that these facilities are not being built to enable nuclear bomb construction.
But the second question is much harder to judge. Certainly the Iranian regime has a track record of state support for terrorism. The regime has even supported attacks against American targets. But is the regime providing sanctuary to Al Qaeda operatives? If it is then the United States can not let Iran get away with it. There is too much at stake in the larger fight against Al Qaeda. Gerecht provides a lot of useful background for anyone who wants to form a judgement on the question.
Hopes that the United States can foment an internal rebellion in Iran do not seem realistic.
"If anybody took a look at Iranian history, the likelihood of fomenting mass popular uprising in the midst of foreign interference is naïve," said the reformer, an academic who spoke on condition he not be identified by name. "Right now it would result in the opposite, emboldening a sense of collective resentment against a superior outside power.
"This is at the popular level," the academic added. "At the elite level it would be even worse. You would have strong resentments and a closing together of various factions, reformers and conservatives."
The Bush Administration does not know what to do about Iran.
Administration officials say there is a split in the administration over how to proceed with Iran, with some advocating tough measures like cutting off diplomatic contacts and possibly supporting antigovernment opposition groups based in American-occupied Iraq.
US intelligence does not appear to have a clear picture of the relationship between Iran and Al Qaeda.
U.S. intelligence sources said last week that al-Qaeda members in Iran included Saif al-Adil, a leader implicated in 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa. U.S. officials said it was not clear, however, whether Adil had any responsibility for the Riyadh attacks. It was not known whether he was among those arrested.
A lot of articles have been written lately about Al Qaeda members in Iran. However, the articles are short on specifics. How many of the Al Qaeda people are in Iranian cities? How many are in border regions near Afghanistan and Pakistan? Are they getting support from the Iranian government? It is certainly possible.
Even the Iranian reformists support Iran's nuclear weapons development program. The Bush Administration would like to find a way to deal with Iran that doesn't require a military intervention yet which prevents Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Well, good luck with that ambition.
Time has an in-depth look at Saddam Hussein's sons Qusay and Uday.
Uday was so jealous of his brother, says a senior broadcaster, that he leaned on editors to keep Qusay's picture out of the media and threw tantrums when he couldn't prevent it. Uday's former business manager Adib Shabaan said the competition extended to women. Uday demanded that beautiful women who had had sex with his brother be brought to him. In several cases, Shabaan said, Uday also had sex with the woman, then had her branded on the buttocks with a horseshoe, producing a scar in the shape of a U, for Uday.
Qusay was civilized compared to Uday. Uday kidnapped women from their wedding parties. Uday used the internet to do web searches to look for information about torture practices in other cultures and periods of history. He put much of what he found to use.
Saddam and his sons have something in common with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il (aside from brutal heartlessness): a love of American movies.
According to Izzi, they were fixated on American-made movies, directing their representative at the United Nations, Tariq Aziz, to bring back dozens of videos each time he left New York. And "Pollyanna" these were not: "Silence of the Lambs," "Casino" and "Rob Roy" for Saddam and "From Dusk Till Dawn," "The Mummy" and "Bride of Chucky" for Uday.
Uday's lions are being sent back to Africa.
The lions are expected to arrive in South Africa as early as next month, while the bear will be sent to a reserve in Greece, she said. The cheetahs -- nearly tame -- will stay in Baghdad.
At least Saddam had the sense to realize that someone as vicious and impulsive as Uday shouldn't rule a country. Saddam realized that even vicious killer dictators should place some restraints on their behavior.
The hospitals would collect a month's worth of dead babies and not allow the parents to have them to bury so that they would be available for parades.
But The Telegraph can reveal that it was all a cynical charade. Iraqi doctors say they were told to collect dead babies who had died prematurely or from natural causes and to store them in cardboard boxes in refrigerated morgues for up to four weeks - until they had sufficient corpses for a parade.
Regime supporters were ordered out to line the streets and act out as the dead baby parades passed by. Iraqi doctors now say that the lack of drugs was due to the government taking the money and spending it on palaces and other things for the corrupt regime. Also, Shiites had to live in neighborhoods with poor sanitation because the government would not build infrastructure in areas whose populaces were considered hostile to the regime. Recall that the US support of UN sanctions was blamed for the high infant mortality rate in Iraq before the war.
Writing in The Washington Post Glenn Kessler reports that US intelligence intercepts between Al Qaeda members in Iran and Saudi Arabia relating to the recent terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia are being used to justify support for a proposal to try to destabilize the Iranian government.
The Bush administration, alarm-ed by intelligence suggesting that al Qaeda operatives in Iran had a role in the May 12 suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia, has suspended once-promising contacts with Iran and appears ready to embrace an aggressive policy of trying to destabilize the Iranian government, administration officials said.
If there are Al Qaeda members in Iran who were involved in the attacks in Saudi Arabia are they living in areas of Iran that are firmly controlled by the Iranian government? Did any part of the Iranian government know what these Al Qaeda people in Iran were up to? It is not at all clear.
Iran has an elected government and then separately various organs run by the Ayatollahs. Keep that in mind when reading this latest report of arrests of Al Qaeda members in Iran.
Iran has informed the US that it has detained suspected members of the al-Qaeda network, but it is not yet known if they are the same activists thought by the Bush administration to have played a direct role in last week's suicide bombings in Riyadh, a US official said yesterday.
Are these the most important Al Qaeda members who were arrested? Were they arrested under orders of the elected leaders or under orders of the Ayatollahs?
The extent of State Department acquiescence or opposition to this proposal is not clear as different news reports provide different accounts of State's position. The Pentagon wants to use MEK fighters in Iraq as part of the plan to bring down the ayatollahs.
The Pentagon plan would involve overt means, such as anti-government broadcasts transmitted to Iran, and covert means, possibly including support for the Iraq-based armed opposition movement Mojahedin Khalq (MEK), even though it is designated a terrorist group by the state department.
The biggest problem I have with this proposal is that I agree with those who think that Iran is not in a pre-revolutionary state. Writer Elizabeth Rubin holds this view as well. I am skeptical about whether the Iranian people are deeply opposed to the regime in large enough numbers to revolt. What happens if the US tries to destabilize Iran and the Ayatollahs respond by jailing all the reformers and viciously opposing street protests? It is quite possible that there will not be enough popular support for an uprising to succeed.
Meanwhile 130 of the 290 members of the Majlis legislature in Iran wrote a letter to Ayatollah Khamenei calling for reform.
Some 130 reformist lawmakers called on Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to accept democratic reforms for the ruling establishment to survive.
This latest letter is signed by fewer people than the 153 who signed another letter calling for reforms a couple of weeks ago. It is not clear to what to make of that.
Update: Coverage in The New York Times reiterates the uncertainties about Iranian government connections to Al Qaeda and also skepticism that a revolution in Iran would stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Among other things, they note that George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, has testified that even the secular "moderates" in Iran favor development of nuclear weapons.
The secular ideology which the North Korean regime uses to govern can be defeated. Secular ideologies are provably wrong using empirical evidence because secular ideologies are not otherworldly. North Korea's people, given enough information about the world, could be convinced that communism is nonsense. But trying to convince Middle Easterners that Islamic political ideology is wrong effectively requires convincing them to abandon beliefs in the supernatural. That is much more difficult to do.
While some commentators in the United States point to secular pro-democratic and pro-reform segments of Iran's population as the great hope for preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power Paul Hughes of Reuters finds Iran's nuclear weapons program popular even among many of those Iranians opposed to clerical rule.
But for many Iranians, even those staunchly opposed to the system of clerical rule in place since the 1979 Islamic revolution, nuclear arms are a legitimate national aspiration which would boost the country's security and bargaining power.
"I hope they are building nukes," said Ali, a U.S.-educated businessman who inherited a thick Californian accent from 18 years living on the U.S. west coast.
Bear in mind that when India and Pakistan first tested nuclear weapons there were celebrations in the streets of each country. The people of Pakistan were thrilled that Pakistan responded to Indian nuclear tests with their own nuclear tests. If Iran's government explodes a nuclear bomb in a test will the Iranian people respond any less enthusiastically?
Democratic reform will not stop Iran's nuclear weapons program. Therefore, only a military option will stop it. Considering the amount of time the Bush Administration spent on diplomatic efforts and in efforts to build up support domestically for the attack on Saddam Hussein's it is hard to see the Bush Administration building the needed level of support in time enough to be able attack Iran before it becomes a nuclear power.
Update: Gary Sick agrees that the reformists in Iran are not opposed to Iran's nuclear weapons program.
Gary Sick, the Iran specialist at Columbia, noted that under the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970 Iran is legally entitled to build facilities for a full nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment plants and plants for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel that could be used to produce weapons-grade uranium or plutonium.
"They are going about this very systematically, and very rapidly," Sick said. "What's worrisome is that there is no serious debate about this in Iran. The reformers aren't up in arms. There is, in fact, quite a bit of unanimity" that Iran, given its geography, needs to go the nuclear-weapons route.
Michael Ledeen, the influential conservative pundit and moderator of the panel, opened the discussion by sharing his assertion that Iran resembles a country that is experiencing the final stage of its ruling government. Gerecht disagreed on this assertion and maintained that the Iranian regime would not fall anytime soon. A revolution would require a series of events and not a mere spontaneous uprising. As an example, Gerecht mentioned that the 1999 students uprisings were “peanuts” compared to the demonstrations of 1979. Moreover, US meddling in Iran is not helpful, according to Gerecht, who pointed out that “everyone in Iran hates the regime, including the regime itself!”
On the issue of weapons of mass destruction, Gerecht pointed out that Iran’s nuclear policy has widespread support in Iranian society and described a nuclear Iran as an inevitability. Although a targeted military strike against Iran could work, it wouldn’t work well since the CIA’s intelligence (Gerecht’s former employer) is not sufficiently reliable, i.e. chances of missing the targets are considerable. Currently, Iran’s program can be best checked through Israel, in Gerecht’s view.
Note that Gerecht does not think that the Iranian regime is anywhere near to falling.
Iran's elected deputies of their Majlis legislature have written a letter calling for reform of the Iranian government.
An open letter, signed by 153 deputies in the 290-seat Majlis and read out in the chamber on Wednesday, said Iran was in "a critical situation" and the ruling establishment risked losing the support of the people, who had overwhelmingly voted for reform.
The US invasion of Iraq has emboldened the elected deputies of Iran's Majlis legislature. These deputies are toothless since any legislation they pass that the ruling Mullahs disagree with can be cancelled by the Mullahs.
The American presence on both borders is emboldening the reformers.
"Following the installation of American forces in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq, the threat has arrived at our borders," it said. "We, the reformist parliamentary deputies, have seen these conditions and are of the opinion that to escape from this situation the solution is to push forward reforms and attract confidence at home and abroad," the MPs wrote.
The Majlis deputies may be motivated as much by fear of being voted out of office in the next election.
"The majority of Iranians are waiting for reforms, but have reached the conclusion that their votes are meaningless," the MPs wrote, citing the low turnout in February's municipal elections that saw backers of embattled moderate President Mohammad Khatami suffer an unprecedented defeat.
If only the Islamists are motivated to get out and vote then the reformists are going to be voted out of office in large numbers. You can therefore read their letter as a desperate attempt to improve their chances in the next election.
From that previous passage and this passage here and it is clear that the deputies are telling the Mullahs that unless they do reforms to get more popular support for the government the people of Iran will be unwilling to defend Iran against an American invasion.
The reference to voter apathy was coupled with an observation of the course of the US-led invasion of Iraq, during which "the Iraqi people stood by without any reaction during the occupation of their country".
This is the most powerful argument they can make. Whether the argument will have enough impact on the Mullahs to loosen up their reigns of control any and to give up some power to democratically elected officials remains to be seen. Count me skeptical.
On a related note Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi says Iran wants to have normalized relations with the United States
"Iran wants to expand its relations with all countries, even with the United States," he said after meeting in Luxembourg Wednesday with Lydie Polfer.
He can say that but there are two problems with this statement: First, the ruling Mullahs have to give permission to the elected government to normalize relations. Second, the US has to have some reason to want to agree. Iran is about to become a nuclear power and is in Bush's Axis Of Evil. Unless the Mullahs want to abandon their nuclear program what would be the point of normalizing relations with them?
Update: Some analysts see the US invasion of Iraq and establishment of a democracy there as having an effect mainly in the longer term as the example of the democracy becomes seen by the people in the region.
Bernard Lewis, an emeritus professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University and a well-known expert on Islam and the Middle East, said that a major fear among the ruling theocratic regimes in the Middle East, such as Iran, is that the American effort to bring democracy to Iraq will be successful and spread liberal ideas to their countries.
"A secular democracy in Iraq will be threat to the governments of Syria, Iran and other countries in the region. It is in Iran that this fear of secular democracy in Iraq is most strongly felt and with a variety of reasons," Lewis said at the conference.
Development of a secular democracy in Iraq will take years. Therefore the full impact it will have on people in neighboring countries still lies years into the future. This does little to help the US today deal with Iran's fairly advanced nuclear weapons development program.
Some neocon hawks argue that the threat of nuclear proliferation from Iran can be dealt with by helping the reformist forces in Iran. Most notably Michael Ledeen has repeatedly made the argument that Iran is ripe for the picking to become a liberal democracy if only we'd help out. See here and here and here and here for examples of his views on the subject. By contrast, in my view the Iranian people are not in a pre-revolutionary frame of mind. Now let us look at some opinion polls that have come out of Iran in the last year or two and see if there are any hopeful signs for Ledeen's rosy anti-Mullah pro-liberal democracy scenario.
First of all, slightly over half of the youthful folks in Iran do not approve of the performance of the Iranian government. These 14 to 29 year olds represent about a third of the total Iranian population.Citing the results of a questionnaire completed by 75,000 14 to 29-year-olds over the past year, the group said "54 percent do not approve of the plans and performance of the government ... although 80 percent approve of Khatami himself".
Does 54 percent seem a lot to you? How often have US Presidents had approval ratings that low or lower? Did the US have a revolution as a result? This hardly seems promising. That Iranians polled had a higher esteem for the Iranian President who effectively serves as a puppet of the Mullahs who have the real power is not encouraging either. Khatami is not going to lead a revolt against the figures who wield the real power.
Most of the Iranian population want better relations with the United States and about half are sufficiently opposed to their own government to approve of US policy toward their country.
In October the judicial authorities closed down the National Institute for Research Studies and Opinion Polls, which found in a poll commissioned by the Parliament that approximately three quarters of the population supported dialogue with the U.S., and close to half approved of U.S. policy towards their country.
Well, you can find Democrats who approved of US policy toward the United States over the Iraq war. Again, this is not earth shattering.
The pollsters who conducted that previous poll were sentenced to jail terms for doing the poll.
A poll conducted last year for a parliamentary committee showed 74 percent of Tehran residents in favor of dialogue with America. An enraged judiciary charged three prominent pollsters with selling classified information to institutes with alleged links to the CIA.
In a bizarre twist, hardliner (see what he says about the Muslim use of nuclear weapons against Israel) former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani favors a referendum to approve normalization of diplomatic relations with the United States.
Hashemi Rafsanjani, former president of Iran, suggested recently that a referendum be held for Iranians to decide if they want to reconcile with the United States. A majority of Iranians favor reconciliation, according to numerous opinion polls.
What is his motive? To placate the portion of the Iranian population that is opposed to the regime? To just cause trouble for other factions among the Mullahs?
Previously mentioned conservative columnist Michael Ledeen, a long time observer of Iran and advocate of US support for opposition forces in Iran, reports on a secret poll that showed very deep dissatisfaction with the Iranian government.
Two recent polls suffice to demonstrate the hatred of the Iranian people for their leaders, whether "hardline" or "reformist." The first, a secret survey carried out by the Interior Ministry for the ruling mullahs, found that only six percent of 16,000 people in Tehran said they were satisfied with the regime; the other 94 percent said they were unhappy with it. Moreover, nearly half of those polled — 45 percent — said it was impossible to reform the system and must be totally changed.
It is hard to know what to make of this. Assume this report is accurate. How deep is the dissatisfaction? Does it translate into anger? What is the motive for the dissatisfaction? Ledeen wants to find signs that the Iranian people are so dissatisfied that, appropriately encouraged, they'd rise up and overthrow their rulers and replace those rulers with a new government which will abandon efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Well, how convenient (hear the Dana Carvey Church Lady's voice when you read that). What if they are more resigned and despondent than angry? What if they want a better economic system but want a strong military and see themselves as having every bit as much of a right to nuclear weapons as the United States?
Ledeen also comments that people may have been less than honest with the pollsters out of fear that the government was conducting the poll and could retaliate. Well, would someone who is that fearful answer the first question honestly and say they were unhappy with the government and yet answer the second question dishonestly and say that the system didn't have to be totally changed? Perhaps. But if the fear was that great I'd expect more than 6% would say out of fear that they really were happy with the government.
Ledeen has one secret poll result supporting his view of deep popular dissatisfaction whose accuracy we can not trust. But even if the level of dissatisfaction is as great as he reports that will still not lead automatically to a revolution. As long as the Mullahs have enough enforcers and a willingess to lock up, kill, and torture opponents the prospects of revolution are low unless a large portion of people get very angry. It takes fury to send people out into the streets to put their lives at risk in sufficient number to bring down the regime. But the Iranians already did that once and were disappoionted with the result.
There are other polls reported from Iran that are coming from sources that make them suspect. The Iranian government's own news agency the Islamic Republic News Agency reports a poll showing deep Iranian popular distrust of the United States.
Tehran, April 14, IRNA -- Eighty-three percent of citizens in Tehran distrust US government, a survey carried out by the Iranian Students Opinion Polls Center, has shown.
The polling was carried out on April 10 and 11, using the 'cluster sampling' method, in which 973 people were interviewed, the center said in a statement, a copy of which was faxed to IRNA Monday.
This poll might even be accurate. But I have the sneaking suspicion that the government pretty much went looking for questions to ask that would allow it to portray America in the most negative light. My guess is that the question they were not about to ask (at least if they were going to honestly report their results) is whether the interviewed people trusted their own government. Of course Ledeen's point about fearfulness of the government applies on this poll as well. If the people know that the correct answer is to state that they distrust the government then they'd tend to do so.
But if people in Iran are afraid to answer some poll questions honestly one would expect them to be fearful of anyone who either calls them up or approaches them to ask questions. Therefore one would have to doubt the accuracy of the results of the other polls mentioned above.
Iranian voters are so disillusioned that only 10% of the population of Teheran turned out to vote and conservatives won almost all the contested seats.
Conservatives recovered almost all the local council seats which reformers won in Iran's first ever municipal elections in 1999 , on a tiny turnout amid growing public disillusion with electoral politics.
Can people be unwilling to vote and yet willing to rise up and revolt? Count me skeptical. What I see in Iran is unenthusiastic disillusionment. The grievances are there. But there is no fire-in-the-belly revolutionary fervor. Also, there are religious factions who are fervent who will support the theocracy against the threat of a secular revolution.
Reporters from The Daily Telegraph (free registration required) managed to get inside the headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (presumably the newspaper means the Mukhabarat though they do not say) and found documents that link Saddam's regime with the Ugandan Allied Democratic Forces group.
Saddam Hussein's regime was linked to an African Islamist terrorist group, according to intelligence papers seen by The Telegraph. The documents provide the first hard evidence of ties between Iraq and religious terrorism.
The reporters were able to get into the building thru a hole made by shelling. One has to wonder what files are being carried out of the building by whoever decides to try to do so. The US military really ought to be doing a much better job of protecting sites which have valuable intelligence files.
A US State Department official says the United States government wants Robert Mugabe to hold another election that is free of the coercion and fraud that helped him win the last election.
"The neighbourhood is starting to realise there is a downside to giving aid and protection to Comrade Bob," the official said, using a derogatory nickname for Mugabe.
"There is stuff happening, there is stuff happening behind the scenes," the official added, declining to elaborate.
US Undersecretary of State for African Affairs, Walter Kansteiner may visit South African countries and pressure Mugabe to hold another election.
The US government wants Mugabe to leave office in advance of the next election and let a transitional government rule while the next election is held.
The campaign comes amid growing international pressure - especially from the United States, which on Monday called on Zimbabwe's neighbours to step up pressure on President Robert Mugabe to hand over power to a transitional government in order to pave the way for new elections.
The US wants Mugabe out in advance of the next election so that he can't steal it again.
"What we're telling them is there has to be a transitional government in Zimbabwe that leads to a free and fair, internationally supervised election," the official said. "That is the goal, he stole the last one, we can't let that happen again," the official said, referring to a widely condemned election last March in which Mugabe won re-election.
The US approach to Zimbabwe provides yet another contrast with French foreign policy. The brutal repressive Zimbabwe regime is another government that the French government caters to. Once again the French government pretends that making nice with a vicious dictator can somehow improve the nature of the dictator's regime. If Mugabe was an enlightened benevolent dictator who just happened to be opposed to democracy it might not be worth it to force him to hold elections. But this guy is running Zimbabwe into the ground. If the United States government can find a fairly low effort way to force him from power then the people of Zimbabwe stand to benefit. If the US is going to make this happen it ought to be done sooner rather than later because under Mugabe the economy and the famine will only get worse.
Eason Jordan, chief news executive of CNN, reports on what CNN was afraid to report while Saddam was in power.
I knew that CNN could not report that Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, told me in 1995 that he intended to assassinate two of his brothers-in-law who had defected and also the man giving them asylum, King Hussein of Jordan. If we had gone with the story, I was sure he would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting.
Read the full article.
Contrast that with what House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says even today about the war.
"I have absolutely no regret about my vote on this war," she told reporters at her weekly briefing yesterday, saying the same questions still remain: "The cost in human lives. The cost to our budget, probably $100 billion. We could have probably brought down that statue for a lot less. The cost to our economy. But the most important question at this time, now that we're toward the end of it, is what is the cost to the war on terrorism?"
How could we have brought down Saddam's statues for less? Does she have in mind pinpoint bombing aimed only at the statues? Or did she have in mind to negotiate with Saddam to buy the statues? Perhaps she thinks a secret CIA team could have gone there and planted some corrosive material in the base of the statues? Its hard to take her delusions seriously at this point.
Others are in rather closer touch with reality. A US soldier viewing the contents of an Iraqi military prison in Zubayr Iraq sees electric cables running into a small cell and sums up the whole place rather cogently: "It's just evil in here."
"I'd hate to think of what those clamped onto," said one U.S. soldier, who speculated the far end would be attached to a generator. "It's just evil in here."
The Mullahs in Iran have decided to make life more difficult for American occupation forces in Iraq.
WASHINGTON, April 3 (UPI) -- Iran's senior leadership decided last month to send irregular paramilitary units across their border with Iraq to harass American soldiers once Saddam Hussein's regime fell, according to U.S. intelligence reports.
Iran is playing similar games in Afghanistan. So this shouldn't be too surprising. It will be interesting to see what the Bush Administration does in response. The Mullahs perhaps do not understand that they are increasing the chances that the Bush Administration will decide to either preemptively attack their nuclear facilities or perhaps even try to overthrow the Mullahs one way or another.
Writing for the New York Times Magazine Elizabeth Rubin has written an excellent essay on the democratic opposition to the unelected clerics who rule Iran. She confirms what I've read from other sources: the Iranian populace are not eager to launch a revolution to unseat the Mullahs from power.
As radical and impatient for democracy as the students are, however, most of them do not want to lead Iran into another bloody revolution. I asked Mehdi Aminzadeh, a 25-year-old student leader studying civil engineering, if there was anything brewing in Iran equivalent to Yugoslavia's Otpor, or ''resistance'' -- a grass-roots movement spread by Serbian youth that defeated the dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic. (One of the opposition satellite television channels that are beamed into Iran by the Iranian diaspora in California constantly replays the chronicles of Milosevic's destruction of Yugoslavia and Otpor's destruction of Milosevic, as if trying to suggest a script for the students to follow.) No, he said. For now there is no social movement or political party tough enough and well financed enough to organize such mass demonstrations.
They had a revolution. It turned out disastrously. They are not eager to have another one. They want gradual change. All of this is understandable.
The United States can not count on an internal revolution to overthrow the Mullahs. The people of Iran are just not up for having a revolution. This is a problem for the United States because the Mullahs are well along in their development of their nuclear weapons program. The development of a democracy by either revolution or internal reform most likely will not happen before Iran becomes a nuclear power. The United States can not afford to wait long enough for the democratic forces to some day get into control of Iran and eliminate Iran's nuclear weapons program (if an elected government in Iran would even decide to do so). International Atomic Energy Agency director ElBaradei has recently toured Iranian nuclear facilities and found the Iranians close to launching the operation of a uranium enrichment facility.
Dr ElBaradei became the first international official to be shown the Natanz site just under a month ago. He reported yesterday that a pilot uranium enrichment plant at Natanz "is nearly ready for operation, and a much larger enrichment facility [is] still under construction at the same site".
In a Natanz Iran facility 160 uranium enrichment centrifuges are tested and ready for operation while more uranium enrichment centrifuges are being assembled.
In a nearby building, workers are assembling parts for 1,000 more centrifuges, part of a constellation of 5,000 machines that will be linked together in a vast uranium enrichment plant now under construction. When the project is completed in 2005, Iran will be capable of producing enough enriched uranium for several nuclear bombs each year.
Some members of the Bush Administration see Iran's nuclear program as something that needs to be dealt with fairly promptly.
John Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, joined national security adviser Condoleezza Rice in warning that the White House sees nuclear-weapons programs in Iran and North Korea as imminent threats.
``The estimate we have of how close the Iranians are to production of nuclear weapons grows closer each day,'' said Bolton, a leading hawk within the administration.
Iran, like North Korea, will not have its regime overthrown by internal revolt. If the United States wants to end the Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons development programs it must either launch preemptive strikes against their nuclear facilities or it must use military force to overthrow the Iranian and North Korean regimes itself.
Saddam Hussein's psychopathic son Uday is in charge of Iraqi sports teams.
"I know what they went through," adds Haydar, who escaped from Iraq in 1998 and now lives in London. "I was tortured four times after matches. One time, after a friendly [match] against Jordan in Amman that we lost 2-0, Uday had me and three teammates taken to the prison. When we arrived, they took off our shirts, tied our feet together and pulled our knees over a bar as we lay on our backs. Then they dragged us over pavement and concrete, pulling the skin off our backs. Then they pulled us through a sandpit to get sand in our backs. Finally, they made us climb a ladder and jump into a vat of raw sewage. They wanted to get our wounds infected. The next day, and for every day we were there, they beat our feet. My punishment, because I was a star player, was 20 [lashings] per day. I asked the guard how he could ever forgive himself. He laughed and told me if he didn't do this, Uday would do it to him. Uday made us athletes an example. He believed that if people saw he was not afraid to beat a hero, that they would live in greater fear."
Add the International Olympic Committee to the list of international organizations that turn a blind eye to the brutality of the most evil regimes in the world. The horrible treatment of Iraqi athletes has been well known for years. Yet Iraq is still allowed to participate in international matches. The IOC, by allowing Iraq to participate, has given Saddam Hussein's regime legitimacy that it does not deserve. Plus, it has conducted contests that inevitably have let to the torture of Iraqi athletes once they get home.
Also see previous posts on the brutality of the Saddam and his sons Uday and Qusay.
UPI Editor Arnaud de Borchgrave reports on an American peace activist who fled Iraq for Jordan
A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality." Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera "told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."
Do the peace activists not bother to take the time to do much reading about Iraq before going to all the trouble to take a trip over there? The use of shredders and other gruesome methods to kill political prisoners have been widely documented. At least this one peace activist could come to his senses. I wonder how many learned the same things and remained unpersuaded of the wrongness of their cause.
British Labour MP Ann Clwyd made her case for taking out Saddam's regime in an Times of London article entitled "See men shredded, then say you don't back war".
There was a machine designed for shredding plastic. Men were dropped into it and we were again made to watch. Sometimes they went in head first and died quickly. Sometimes they went in feet first and died screaming. It was horrible. I saw 30 people die like this. Their remains would be placed in plastic bags and we were told they would be used as fish food . . . on one occasion, I saw Qusay [President Saddam Husseins youngest son] personally supervise these murders.
Update: Writing for the New York Times John Burns find ordinary Iraqis in Baghdad eager for Saddam's overthrow.
Ordinary people here whispered as the week progressed that they were ready for the war, and even welcomed it, as long as it was short, and civilian casualties were limited. Today, as the bombers approached, these whispers became more daring. "What, what, what?" one man said, pointing surreptitiously toward the sky and winking. His meaning, unambiguously, was that he was tired of waiting for Iraq's new era to begin. But these Iraqis, too, continued to be frozen in fear of government retribution.
The standoff, then, is between a US policy of pushing North Korean nuclear disarmament and a Kim policy of developing nuclear weapons for self-preservation. Can or will Kim give up on his goal? That's not a whole lot more likely than Mao giving up on nuclear development in the 1960s. Will the US give up its demand for dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear weapons program? That's equally unlikely, as the very logic of its Iraq policy is WMD (weapons of mass destruction) disarmament to prevent proliferation.
Erikson's argument sounds correct. Its implications are staggering. The North Korean regime can survive even if a substantial portion of its population is in total poverty and hungry. It is not motivated by a sense of economic desperation. The regime wants a nuclear capability most of all to be able to deter an attack. The regime's primary goal is to ensure its own survival. Once it has that nuclear capability it will want to try to milk it for more money by extortion and it may try to use it to unify with South Korea with the North playing the dominating role. It may also elect to sell nuclear materials and even nuclear bombs in order to raise money. But its greatest goal is to have a greater deterrent capability.
Meanwhile in Natanz Iran the Iranian regime is scaling up to become a major nuclear power.
In a nearby building, workers are assembling parts for 1,000 more centrifuges, part of a constellation of 5,000 machines that will be linked together in a vast uranium enrichment plant now under construction. When the project is completed in 2005, Iran will be capable of producing enough enriched uranium for several nuclear bombs each year.
The North Korean and Iranian regimes are both determined to become nuclear powers. They can not be bribed out if their ambitions. They can't be threatened out of them. No diplomatic process will dissuade them. Unless the regimes are overthrown or their nuclear development facilities are destroyed they will both become nuclear powers with substantial nuclear arsenals.
The question the people of the Uinited States need to consider is what are risks to the US and the rest of the world of Iran and North Korea as nuclear powers and what price is the United States willing to pay to prevent each of these regimes from becoming nuclear powers.
The UK Independent reports American and British military and intelligence services are tracking the movement of 3 cargo ships that have been cruising around the Indian Ocean which may be carrying Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
American and British military forces are believed to be reluctant to stop and search the vessels for fear that any intervention might result in them being scuttled. If they were carrying chemical and biological weapons, or fissile nuclear material, and they were to be sunk at sea, the environmental damage could be catastrophic.
Are these ships hiding weapons from the inspectors?
John Eldridge, editor of Jane's Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defence, said Saddam Hussein would have been "extremely sensible" to hide weapons at sea.
This doesn't seem likely. Iraq is a big place. Saddam has plenty of places to hide weapons in Iraq. Maybe the ships are weapons development labs. Or perhaps they are carrying weapons that are to be used to strike the US and its allies if Iraq is attacked.
Some criticise the Bush Administration for preparing to invade Iraq in the face of North Korean moves to develop nuclear weapons. The argument made by many critics is that since North Korea is the greater threat it should be dealt with first. These criticisms are unconvincing for a very basic reason: there is little that would be prudent for the United States to do about North Korea that war preparations and diplomatic efforts against Iraq are preventing.
Lets consider what the US might do to deal with the growing threat from North Korea. Lets start with military options. One could claim that if only the US didn't have so many military assets tied down preparing to invade Iraq that the US could instead be building up military forces near North Korea. In order for a build-up of military force to be credible as a source of pressure to bring against the North Korean regime the US has to really be willing to use it. How many of the critics of the coming attack on Iraq are prepared to instead support an attack against North Korea that would be, compared to the coming Iraq war, much more risky, economically costly, and result in enormously higher casualties? Precious few is my guess.
Another option would be to try to do covert operations to bring down the North Korean regime. Such operations wouldn't necessarily have to be for the short term goal of organizing a coup. Economic and propaganda tools could be used to gradually weaken the regime (and one can only hope that the CIA is running such operations). Surely the CIA is big enough to run operations against Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime while also running operations against North Korea to smuggle in information for propaganda purposes and to bribe well-placed North Koreans for information and to get influence in North Korea. It is hard to see why dealing with Iraq is as big of a problem for the CIA as watching and attacking Al Qaeda. Therefore if the CIA is distracted away from North Korea by anything it is far more likely to be by Al Qaeda than by Iraq. It seems dubious to argue that US intelligence agencies are strained by Iraq and therefore can't deal with North Korea.
If military options against North Korea are not a good idea at this point (and I don't think they are yet) and if intelligence resources aren't being overly strained by the run-up to the Iraq war (again, if they are strained over anything its Al Qaeda) then in what other way might the US be getting distracted by Iraq? One could argue that at the top level of civilian leadership and in the diplomatic corps US officials just don't have enough mental time to think about North Korea properly because they have to spend so much time thinking about Iraq. This argument at least seems possible. Still, it implies a rather low regard for the capacity of diplomats and top national security types to deal with more than one big international issue at a time. My guess is that they can handle multiple big issues at once and that when the National Security Council meets to hash things out in the White House that North Korea gets more attention than the White House gives it in public pronouncements.
An argument that the US is paying too much attention to Iraq and not enough to North Korea ought to be looked at in light of just what exactly the US ought to do to deal with North Korea. Think about whether the Bush Administration tactics toward North Korea make sense. We know that the Bush Administration does not want to get into a direct two-party negotiation with North Korea. Why? First of all, if an agreement could even be reached the North Koreans wouldn't honor any agreement that might come out of such a negotiation. Also, the rest of the world would complain to the US about any outcome from such negotiations (unilateral cowboys that we supposedly are). Negotiating with the North Koreans is a no-win game for the US. We also know that North Korea is trying to escalate the crisis in order to get the US to make concessions. The North Koreans want the direct negotiations for the same reasons that the Bush folks want to avoid them. Democrats in the US who are calling for such negotiations are playing into Kim Jong-il's hands.
Knowing that the US doesn't have enough leverage with the North Koreans, the Bush folks want China to apply pressure to North Korea. China doesn't want to do that and so China is recommending direct talks between the US and North Korea. The most important diplomatic game over North Korea is between the US and China. Bush wants China to accept that it has a responsibility to discipline its client North Korea. China wants North Korea to be free to continue to make problems for the US.
There is one additional card that Bush has set into motion which is the most important reason why North Korea and China are so eager to see the US directly negotiate with North Korea: The US has cut off aid to North Korea and some other countries have done so as well. The North Korean regime is going to feel under increasing economic pressure as a result of this. China may need to step in to help. Given the reduction in foreign aid and current trends North Korea's economic problems are going to get worse.
In public pronouncements Colin Powell, George Bush, Ari Fleischer and other officials say that the US is pursuing the diplomatic route with North Korea. For understandable reasons this is an incomplete and misleading description of what is going on. The US doesn't want to admit that it is probably doing covert operations against the North Korean regime and that the intelligence agencies of some other governments (e.g. Japan, South Korea) are doing likewise. The US doesn't want to dwell on the fact that the aid cut-off is going to help make poor North Koreans even poorer. The US is definitely applying economic pressure (e.g. the cut-off of oil shipments) and trying to convince other countries to apply economic pressure as well.
The most important argument going on at the diplomatic level is surely that between the US and China. The US is trying to convince the Chinese leaders that it is in their interest to prevent North Korea from becoming a serious nuclear power. South Korea and Japan are also surely making the same argument to China. There are compelling arguments that can be made for why it is in China's interest to restrain North Korea. Most notable is that a nuclear North Korea might lead to a nuclear Japan and to Japan joining much more vigorously to help the US develop missile defense systems. Another argument is that if North Korea sells nukes and some cities get vaporized as a result fingers of blame are going to be pointed at China for its failure to control its client. It is by no means certain that the Chinese leaders can be convinced by these arguments. But it is worth it for the US and its local allies to make the argument.
China is in the position of wanting the US, South Korea, and Japan to pay to prop up a regime that is the source of increasing security threats to all of them but China. This has worked for China up until recently. But North Korea's actions and statements combined with a more hawkish US president are making China's expectations of outside help for North Korea increasingly unrealistic. The Bush Administration has to have the patience to wait for China to accept that it has reached crunch time over North Korea. China has to decide whether it wants to step in and spend the money to replace the aid that North Korea used to receive from other countries. China also has to face the anger and possible subtle forms of economic and diplomatic retaliation that a decision to prop up the North Korean regime would provoke from both the US and Japan.
Update: On Fox News on Sunday Colin Powell mentioned some reasons why China holds many cards in dealing with North Korea.
Take China, for example. China has said that it is their policy that the Korean Peninsula not be nuclearized -- in fact, be denuclearized. Well, therefore, China should play an active role in making sure that that is the case. They have considerable influence with North Korea. Half their foreign aid goes to North Korea. Eighty percent of North Korea's wherewithal, with respect to energy and economic activity, comes from China. China has a role to play, and I hope China will play that role.
There is a limit to the amount of economic pressure that the US can bring to bear on North Korea as long as China is funding the continuing existence of the North Korean regime.
Update II: China's San Francisco consulate Deputy Consul-General Qiu Xuejun claims China is trying to get North Korea to abandon nuclear weapons development.
"China has been going through its own channels to convince North Korea to change its (nuclear) stance," said Qiu, admitting it hasn't had much luck.
"North Korea is an independent country. Of course, we can pass along messages to them, but China's influence on North Korea is ... well, they make their own decisions," Qiu said.
It is unlikely that China has reached the point of threatening to cut off aid if North Korea doesn't comply. China's leadership is not yet demonstrating firm conviction that North Korea must be stopped.
Update III: If you want to read more about the problem of North Korea read my Axis of Evil category archive.
Oh, the irony. China and the EU want the United States to pursue a unilateral course with North Korea while the United States wants a diplomatic negotiation process that involves many interested nations sitting down with North Korea at the same time. Jim Hoagland reports that China and the EU want direct US-North Korean talks.
China's foreign ministry on Tuesday publicly endorsed Pyongyang's demand for talks only with the United States. Astonishingly, Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy spokesman and a genuine advocate of strong transatlantic ties, chimed in during the same Beijing news conference to say that "the most important thing at this point is direct dialogue" between Washington and Pyongyang.
Hoagland says that South Korea and China both misread US intentions on North Korea. I'm skeptical on that point. Hoagland doesn't specify what South Korea and China think the US intentions are. A more likely possibility is that both South Korea and China understand US intentions and are opposed to them.
China and the United States have conflicting interests on North Korea. China is not afraid that North Korea might attack China and hence has no fear of North Korea's nuclear weapons and missile development efforts). At the same time China wants North Korea as a buffer between it and South Korea. Plus, the Beijing regime doesn't want a popular revolt in North Korea giving Chinese people any ideas about doing the same.
South Korea and the United States also have conflicting interests on North Korea. South Korea just wants to buy off North Korea so that South Korea won't have to suffer hundreds of thousands of casualties fighting it (which is certainly understandable). South Korea's interests are parochial and encompass just the Korean peninsula. Of course South Korea's leaders might be misjudging the North Korean regime. It may well be that once North Korea has a large number of nuclear weapons and plenty of missile delivery vehicles that at that point it will greatly up its extortion demands or even demand that South Korea disarm and submit itself to the North Korean regime's political will. But the South Korean leaders do not seem to think this is a likely possibility.
By contrast, the national security thinkers in the United States take a much larger view of the threat from North Korea. The US is worried about the specter of Nuclear KMart and the global risks posed by North Korea. North Korea has so far demonstrated a willingness to sell any military technology it can make and to anyone who has the money to pay. The US is also concerned that once North Korea can deliver nuclear weapons via ICBMs to strike the US that the US will face a greater set of extortion demands from North Korea. Plus, there is the fear that North Korean regime, being so isolated and paranoid, could miscalculate and fire off missiles at the United States. Therefore what we have is a conflict of interests between China, the United States, and South Korea over what to do about North Korea.
US concerns are certainly well justified by the rhetoric that comes from North Korea. North Korea's leaders do not speak calm tones and don't shrink from threatening to wreak havoc on other nations. North Korea is not bashful about threatening to attack the United States.
"Wherever they are we can attack them," Foreign Ministry official Ri Kwang Hyok told France's Agence France-Presse news agency in an interview in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.
"There's no limit to our attack ability. The strike force of the Korean People's Army will take on the enemy wherever he is," Ri was quoted as saying.
Out of the three regional neighbors of North Korea the one that most closely shares US concerns is Japan. Japan fears a nuclear armed North Korea could attack Japan.
TOKYO: Japan would launch a military strike against North Korea if Tokyo had firm evidence that the Stalinist state was ready to attack with ballistic missiles, Japanese Defence Minister Shigeru Ishiba said yesterday.
"It is too late if (a missile) flies towards Japan," Ishiba told Reuters in an interview.
In another blow to multilateral world government and the fantasy regime of international law as guarantor of security and peace China doesn't want the UN involved with North Korea.
China has warned the UN Security Council against getting involved in the North Korean nuclear crisis.
"The UN Security Council's involvement at this stage might not necessarily contribute to the settlement of the issue," said China's ambassador to the UN, Zhang Yan.
COIA directory George Tenet suggests North Korea wants it all: US acceptance of its existence, more aid, its own nukes, freedom to be a WMD arms dealer.
"Kim Jong Il's attempts to parlay the North's nuclear program into political leverage suggest he is trying to negotiate a fundamentally different relationship with Washington, one that implicitly tolerates the North's nuclear weapons program," Mr. Tenet told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Update: If you want to read more about the problem of North Korea read my Axis of Evil category archive.
Saddam's goose is just thoroughly cooked. Even the vaunted "Arab street" has abandoned him.
Baka'a and other Palestinian camps, in Jordan and throughout the Middle East, were hotbeds of support for Iraq and its leader during the 1991 Gulf War. People demonstrated, put up posters of their hero and bought watches and pictures with his likeness.
Now, the narrow streets of the camp are clear of posters and nobody demonstrates. It is a measure of the changed popular as well as official attitudes to Saddam Hussein.
The article provides a very interesting analysis of why anti-American attitudes are growing in governments in the region: they are afraid of regime change. Once Iraq's government has been replaced by the United States the other regimes are afraid that the US will decide that regime change is a good idea and that the US will then proceed to overthrow other regimes in the region.
Note that these governments are far more worried about what the United States might do to them than they are about popular opinion in their own countries. They are confident of their ability to control their populaces. Popular uprisings rarely topple repressive regimes and haven't done so in an Arab country for a very long time.
Some objected to George W. Bush's inclusion of North Korea in an Axis of Evil.
Kim has a legendary weakness for women and parties. He's been married four time, coerced many actresses, and funded specially trained females in official "dancing teams," "happiness teams," and "satisfaction teams."
In the 1990s, during a mass starvation that took 2 million lives, Kim continued a costly complex in Pyongyang called the "Longevity Institute," dedicated to research in prolonging his life. He has a set of lavish palaces, including one at the summit of a mountain with an air strip and a system of tunnels that would awe a prairie dog. He enjoys an enormous floating amusement park with two water slides that can be towed to various family coastal resorts.
One couldn't maintain such a sumptuous lifestyle in the face of large scale poverty and suffering without a huge brutal Stalinist prison system to suppress any opposition.
Jan. 15 — In the far north of North Korea, in remote locations not far from the borders with China and Russia, a gulag not unlike the worst labor camps built by Mao and Stalin in the last century holds some 200,000 men, women and children accused of political crimes. A month-long investigation by NBC News, including interviews with former prisoners, guards and U.S. and South Korean officials, revealed the horrifying conditions these people must endure — conditions that shock even those North Koreans accustomed to the near-famine conditions of Kim Jong Il’s realm.
Any attempt to bribe the North Korean regime with aid in exchange for a reduction of its threat to the rest of the world amounts to a willingness to accept a horrible moral price: the bribery payments helps prop up a regime that inflicts suffering and death on a large fraction of its population.
The press is full of reports about the North Korean nuclear weapons development efforts with lots of statements from government leaders and off-the-record comments of diplomats. But lets keep track of the basics: Which country is willing to do what in order to either restrain or bring an end to the North Korean regime? China is not helping.
Diplomats say the United States would like China, which provides Pyongyang with cheap grain and oil, to put more pressure on North Korea to drop its nuclear ambitions and avoid provocative moves such as missile testing.
China, which has taken a relatively balanced approach to the nuclear dilemma, has been pressing the two sides to negotiate. But two days after China invited the two sides to meet in Beijing, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said on Thursday there had been no takers.
What is a "balanced approach"? Reporters ought to be more careful about endorsing the spin that diplomats place on their position. China's idea of balance is to figure out how to block US moves to pressure the North Koreans to stop WMD development and WMD export while also working to keep US markets open to Chinese exports.
China does not want the matter to go to the United Nations.
Administration officials privately complain that regional players, with the possible exception of Japan, have been too wobbly in dealing with the crisis. China has been a roadblock in bringing the matter to the U.N. Security Council, officials said.
Bush has the choice of carrots or sticks. Carrots aren't going to work. Bush Administration doesn't want to try bribing the North Koreans because, as past events have already demonstrated, Kim Jong-il won't stay bought off and permanently stop WMD development. Kim will not accept a bribery deal that includes sufficiently intrusive inspections to allow verification that he's sticking to the deal. The Bush offer of food and fuel should not be seen as a formal attempt at bribery in exchange for a halt to North Korean WMD development. Bush is just trying to buy himself time to deal with Iraq.
This brings us to sticks. China supplies North Korea with a significant portion of its food and fuel. The Chinese leaders have compelling reasons to keep the North Korean regime in power. China doesn't see North Korea's nuclear ambitions as a threat to Chinese interests. At the same time North Korea is a buffer that separates China from a freer and highly affluent South Korea. Plus, much of North Korea's export of weaponry serves China's long-term interests in the Middle East. So the potentially most effective non-military stick that could be used against North Korea is not available. The US could still try to more thoroughly cut off non-Chinese supplies to the North Korean regime but Bush won't seriously consider doing that as long as Iraq is unresolved.
The US certainly is not going to take military action against the North Korean regime while Iraq's fate hangs in the balance. So the military option is off the table. Even once Saddam's regime has been consigned to the dustbin of history Bush still won't want to risk an attack on North Korea because the casualties and damage to the South Korean economy would be enormous.
Without the active support of China the United States will be hard put to force a change in the behavior of the North Korean regime. Therefore expect little action from the United States for now. The only way this crisis could escalate in the short term would be if the North Koreans miscalculated and took some form of military action. The question facing the Bush Administration is just how far is it willing to go to apply pressure to China (e.g. by gradually raising restrictions on exports from China) to make China in turn apply pressure to North Korea. We are not going to find out the answer to that question as long as Saddam Hussein remains in power in Iraq.
Kim Jong-il clearly realises the extent to which he has maneuvering room due to the heavy diplomatic and military involvement of the United States in the Middle East. He's using this opening to use rhetoric to pressure the United States to placate him while he pushes along his WMD development projects as fast as possible. The most immediate consequence of Kim Jong-il's increasingly threatening actions and rhetoric may well be to stiffen Bush's resolve to take out Saddam Hussein's regime sooner rather than later in order to free up US military assets and to get past the need to constantly do diplomatic work on issues relating to Iraq. It can't do that as long as Saddam Hussein is in power. Tony Blair is under considerable domestic pressure to try to delay the attack on Iraq until the inspectors find direct evidence of WMD in Iraq. Under different circumstances Bush might be tempted to try to help Blair by delaying the attack for many months. But the need to move on to dealing with North Korea may convince Bush that he can't let the Iraq situation go on for most of 2003.
There is a lesson here: the inability of the US military to fight and win two regional conflicts at the same time has provided an opening for the North Korean regime to accelerate its WMD development projects and to try to extract diplomatic and financial concessions from the United States and from countries in the region. The US either needs to preempt potential threats at much earlier stages or it needs a bigger military.
Paris-based Iranian writer Amir Taheri interviews Seyf al-Islam Kaddafi, son of Libya's Muammar Kaddafi. Its a rather bizarre interview which mixes some rather sensible statements along such hard to believe assertions as the idea that his father doesn't really rule Libya. After arguing that political decisions are made collectively he goes on to argue that the Libyan people are still too primitive to be ruled by a democracy.
Taheri: In that case why not have a constitution and hold elections?
Kaddafi: That is the logical direction of our political evolution. But don't forget that transforming a basically medieval and tribal society into a modern democratic one in just three decades is no easy task. We cannot achieve in Libya what older democracies have achieved in centuries. Promulgating a constitution is not a difficult exercise. In fact, all despotic regimes in the Arab world do have constitutions, written by those who intend to, and do, violate them systematically. Holding elections has also become a kind of fashion in the Arab world — largely to please the Americans. But everyone knows that these are fake elections in which people have the right to endorse the rulers, often by the notorious 99.9 percent majorities, but not the right to vote them out. These so-called elections are insults to the Arab people. We in Libya will not accept such an insult. We are honest with ourselves. We realize that moving from tribal monarchy to modern democracy needs more time. We need time to evolve our culture, reform our social habits, and reinterpret our traditions in the spirit of pluralism. We also need a solid middle class without which no democracy is possible. And that, in turn, requires the presence of a large number of educated citizens who can generate enquiry and political debate.
Sure enough tribal societies are not capable of supporting functional democracies. Seyf as-Islam could probably teach Washington power-brokers and the American media and academic elite valuable lessons which they are unaware of their need to learn. One senses from this interview that the son may well understand the world fairly well. But his future is tied to the power of his father and its clear that while some of his statements represent how he sees the world he is also spinning for the Libyan regime while paying lip service to the latest enthusiasms of his mercurial father.
Father Muammar Khadafy/Ghaddafi/Qaddafi has lost his interest in the Arab countries probably as a result of his having lost all influence with them (with the possible exception of deals he may be doing for WMD technology exchanges). So he's turned his attention to Africa as a playground with greater possibilities for exercising his influence. His oil money can buy far more influence in the poorest of countries and Africa has such countries in abundance. This involvement is not doing Africa any favors. He's been helping to prop up Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe even as that regime drives that country into increasingly worse straits. As is noted in the Taheri interview he's so excited by his prospects for greater influence in Africa that he's offering Libyans cash incentives for marrying Africans (presumably only from the Sub-Saharan regions and further south)..
After the North Koreans put an end to IAEA monitoring of a nuclear reactor the US government is calling on the North Korean regime to stop its nuclear weapons development programs.
"We urge the DTRK not to restart its frozen nuclear facilities including the five-megawatt reactor," U.S. State Department spokesman Lou Fintor said Saturday, adding that to do so would "fly in the face of international consensus."
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"We call on the DTRK to respond to repeated requests by the IAEA to consult on arrangements for safeguarding the frozen nuclear facilities at Nyongbyong and allow the IAEA to replace or restore the seals and cameras that the North damaged," Fintor said.
The US State Department is just going thru the motions of establishing that it has demanded that North Korea stop and desist. This will have no effect at all on what the North Korea regime does but this sort of rhetoric is necessary for reasons of diplomacy.
Bill Gertz reports on Chinese shipments to North Korea of a chemical used in nuclear weapons production.
U.S. intelligence officials told The Times that North Korea earlier this month received a shipment of 20 tons of a specialty chemical known as tributyl phosphate, or TBP, from China.
The chemical has both commercial and military applications and U.S. intelligence officials believe the TBP will be used to extract material for nuclear bombs from North Korea's stockpile of spent nuclear-reactor fuel.
Bill Gertz reports that China is demonstrating its unwillingness to pressure North Korea to stop its weapons of mass destruction development.
The transfer itself is an indication that China's government, contrary to some public statements, is unwilling to support U.S. efforts to resolve the North Korean nuclear problem, said administration security officials.
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However, senior administration officials said China continues to export nuclear, chemical and biological weapons material and missile goods, despite claims of curbing exports by Chinese companies to rogue states or unstable regions.
China is not only unwilling to join in pressuring North Korea to stop WMD development but is also continuing to help North Korea pursue its ambitions. The US is faced with the choice of either trying to apply pressure to China to get it to change its position or to pursue other ways to make life more difficult for the North Korean regime.
It is possible that the US government will signal to the Chinese government that the US will launch airstrikes against North Korean nuclear facilities unless China agrees to stop selling supplies that North Korea needs for its WMD programs. The Chinese leaders might be swayed by this threat. However, even if China agreed to cut off the supplies it could still cheat. The fact that the Chinese regime does not see an interest in cracking down on North Korean behavior is paramount here. They have clearly demonstrated their intentions and to attempt to pursue a real change in the position of the Chinese regime is not only futile but would waste time.
The US is left with the choice of either tolerating continued North Korean development of WMD and sales of WMD technology or some form of military action against the North Korean regime. One possibility short of the removal the North Korean regime is to launch B-2 airstrikes against North Korean WMD facilities. B-2 bomber crews train for missions against North Korea. The US military has been working on developing the ability to more rapidly plan and execute bomber missions against North Korea.
Since 1994, the military has continued to improve its adaptive planning capabilities for nuclear forces. Other documents released under FOIA illustrate just how rapid the planners envision nuclear targeting to be in regional scenarios. When the first B-2 bombers replaced the B-1 in the SIOP-98 war plan in October 1997, it took planners “well over” 24 hours to complete the planning and processing of a single SIOP sortie. One year later, in November 1998, Stratcom ordered an update of the B-2 planning documents to reflect shorter timelines for planning new nuclear strike missions, calling for:
• Deliberate planned missions with a timeline of no more than 24 hours, including executable war plans, prepared in advance, for anticipated contingencies. (An example of this is OPLAN 5027, mentioned at the beginning of this article.) • Adaptive planned missions (directed planning options or theater nuclear options) with a timeline of no more than eight hours. Under these guidelines, planning for new limited strikes in smaller regional scenarios involving only one or a few nuclear weapons could be carried out in less time than it takes for a B-2 to fly from home base at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to North Korea. On the way, the crew would be able to reconfigure existing sorties or build entirely new strike options with the bombs in their payload, revolutionizing the flexibility of nuclear-bomber strike planning.
This planning ability could equally well be used for a conventional weapons strike against North Korean nuclear facilities. The biggest question mark over the idea of conducting such a strike is whether the US knows where North Korea stores any existing nuclear weapons it might have in its arsenal and whether the US could destroy those weapons with a conventional strike using highly accurate guided weapons. Its a fair guess that the information needed to answer that question is highly classified.
The United States needs a workable and effective plan for how to deal with the North Korean regime. So far it does not have one and it is hard to imagine just what a workable plan would look like. Of all the regimes on the Axis Of Evil list how to deal with North Korea is surely the most problematic.
Diplomacy will fail. An attack against North Korea is too risky because the North Korean regime could probably attack South Korea with biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. At the same time, the North Korean leadership is so paranoid and isolated that its not inconceivable that Kim Jong-il could launch an attack on his own.
If you match up the dates, North Korea's secret project to produce enriched uranium must have started at the time of Kim Dae-jung's "groundbreaking" visit, while the more accommodating President Clinton was still in the White House.
Aidan Foster-Carter, a North Korea expert at Leeds University, is near despair: "The North Koreans are prisoners of their own world view. They missed their best chance when they had Clinton and Kim Dae-jung in office. And yet it seems they must have begun uranium enrichment around the time Kim Dae-jung was visiting. How is trust possible now?"
The mystery is just what will Bush come up with? Will China play along on economic sanctions? Will the US be willing to create a naval blockade? The North Korean regime could respond by shelling Seoul.
My own modest proposal to try to make a small difference: provide the North Korean people with the means to find out what is going on in the rest of the world. Right now they are incredibly isolated. This widespread ignorance helps to prop up the regime. They need to be able to listen to radios. The US could get together with South Korean electronics firms to build radios that are small and powered by mechanical springs or photovoltaic panels (necessitated by a lack of access to electricity). Put large numbers of them into floating plastic containers and release them near North Korean coastlines. Submarines could release the radios while staying submerged. Some of the radios would be found and destroyed by the military. But even just getting the radios into the hands of regular soldiers could make a difference. Some would hide them and listen to them when alone or pass them along to their families.
Jim Hoagland thinks Iraq's weapons report is so bad that the Bush Administration may be able to get UN approval for military action.
Having to defend that mess of a report should embarrass even the Russians and the French.
The sighs of relief that U.S. officials exhaled when they got a first glance at the report tell me the administration will alter its strategy and pursue a second resolution actively. This would give Colin Powell a major diplomatic triumph that would be denied him should Washington go it alone.
Would the French, Russian, and Chinese leaders vote for a second resolution to authorize force? That still seems unlikely to me. The other factor weighing against a UN Security Council authorization is time. The US military is going to be ready to invade Iraq in January. If the US goes for UNSC approval that approval could take weeks or months to hammer down. That could delay the invasion till the point where weather becomes less than optimal. Plus, the US really shouldn't waste too much time before attacking Iraq precisely because there are other regimes that need to come under pressure next.
In a similar vein, Tom Holsinger believes that after the US has replaced Saddam's regime it may be possible to get UN approval for sanctions and blockade of North Korea.
Assume the U.S. government seeks a UN Security Council resolution requiring North Korea to deliver all its WMD and production equipment to appropriate international agencies for removal from the country, and to permit effective inspections by UN teams to verify compliance. Such a resolution would probably pass in the climate expected after publication of the incriminating archives of American-occupied Iraq.
Enforcing this hypothetical (for now) resolution if North Korea refuses to comply would be a quite different matter. Economic sanctions aka blockade, perhaps backed by limited military force, would be the most we could possibly obtain, but fuel &food sanctions could be very effective given geography.
Are Hoagland and Holsinger being realistic here? Once the US has control of Iraq the revelations about Saddam's WMD programs will sway a lot of people that preemption really was necessary in the case of Iraq. This will certainly help in an attempt to go after North Korea. But will China go along with such a move? If China doesn't go along then the best the US will be able to do is a cut off of all South Korean, Japanese, and US aid. The US might be able to conduct a naval blockade of North Korean ports and to get Russia to close its border with North Korea. But China might step in to try to prop up the North Korean regime precisely because the United States would be trying to make it fall.
Writing in the Washington Times Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett, II say China has played the role of enabling principal for weapons technology swaps between North Korea and Pakistan.
Looking at the origins and development of the North Korean long-range missile program, we can say that without critical help from Chinese Peoples' Liberation Army scientists, there probably would not be such a program today. In 1994, the Wall Street Journal published a discovery by the American Defense Intelligence Agency that one stage of the new North Korean missile was a copy of the Chinese CSS-2 missile. Quoting the DIA, the Journal wrote, "Presumably, the only way they [North Korean engineers] would know how to build something the size of the CSS-2 is either by physical transfer of such a beast, or of engineers familiar with the program."
The regime in China has an interest in making Pakistan a greater military threat to India but China also wants deniability for its role. North Korea serves a useful role since China can just blame Pakistan's increased military capabilities on that rogue North Korean regime.
Jim Hoagland argues that the Saudis have got to stop the practice of paying what is essentially protection money to the most extremist Islamist factions:
America's war on terrorism and the disappearance of abundant petrodollar surpluses bring the Saudi rulers to a traumatic moment of choice. To survive in the 21st century, they must actively help put the extortionists and terrorists out of business rather than fund and shield them.
The biggest change must come at home: The House of Saud must end the Faustian bargain it originally made with the country's extremist Wahhabist sect, which was given significant sway over the kingdom's social, economic and political life in return for supporting the monarchy. Wahhabi clerics have used Islamic charity as a cover to promote terrorism and hatred in the Middle East and Central Asia. The Saudi monarchy must disown and de-legitimize the extremists or remain mired in a disappearing world.
Claude Salhani points to the increasing pressure on the Saudis to cut off the financial flows that are helping terrorists and to spread Wahhabi Islam.
Amid the continuing anti-Saudi frenzy gripping those inside the Washington Beltway, the Princess Haifa affair is certainly blown out of all proportions -- after all, it is quite obvious she would never finance the Sept. 11 hijackers -- this is simply not in her lifestyle. Still, Saudi Arabia must come to grips with reality and conduct a deeper audit of its finances and eradicate certain money trails or face the consequences.
A National Security Council task force is recommending an action plan to the president designed to force Saudi Arabia to crack down on terrorist financiers within 90 days or face unilateral U.S. action.
Jeff Gerth and Judith Miller make the argument that I think explains the Bush Administration's position: Administration can't afford to offend a nation it needs in case of war. Then they go on to report just how much a problem Saudi money is for the US:
Outside experts have been more critical. A report sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations last month said Saudi Arabia was the largest source of financing for al-Qaida, and blamed both the U.S. and Saudi governments for not being tough enough.
Matthew Levitt, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former terrorism analyst for the FBI, said Saudi officials and state-paid religious leaders sat on the boards of charities the American government suspected of supporting terrorism.
Once the US military removes Saddam's regime from power the Bush Administration will be in a much stronger position from which to pressure the Saudis. That is an argument for deposing Saddam sooner rather than later.
Still, people who believe that if we would just pressure the Saudis to stop funding terrorism that the size of the threat would be greatly diminished are not appreciating all the dimensions of the problem. For the US and the West the problem is not just that the Saudi regime is paying money directly to terrorists to buy protection for themselves. If intelligence reports are to be believed there are wealthy private Saudi citizens who are willingly and eagerly supporting terrorists. But even if both sources of support could be cut off the Saudis would still be generating threats for us in part because the Saudis are raising their own children to believe things that make them feel hostility toward us. But that is not the worst of it. They are also financing the spread of their version of Islam and in the process helping to radicalize Muslims all around the world. Our biggest problem is that people are being taught to believe the sorts of ideas that make them want to become terrorists in the first place.
Saudi money funds Islam in America:
Saudi Arabian donations have helped finance more than 1,700 mosques, Islamic centers and schools around the world. The kingdom has fully or partially financed Islamic centers in Los Angeles; San Francisco; Fresno; Chicago; New York; Washington; Tucson; Raleigh, N.C.; and Toledo, Ohio.
Even if all the Saudi money that flows into terrorism and into Islamic evangelism was cut off (and that is very unlikely to happen) we'd still be faced with the continued spread of the more fundamentalist varieties of Islam. Saudi