Iran Deal: A Possible Crossroads to Peace

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

05 April 15

 

The Israeli-Saudi alliance and the American neocons are furious over the framework agreement for a peaceful settlement to the Iran nuclear dispute, but the deal gives hope to people who see the need to end the perpetual wars that have roiled the Middle East and deformed the U.S. Republic, writes Robert Parry.

he April 2 framework agreement with Iran represents more than just a diplomatic deal to prevent nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. It marks a crossroad that offers a possible path for the American Republic to regain its footing and turn away from endless war.

Whether that more peaceful route is followed remains very much in doubt, however, given the adamant opposition from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Sunni Arab allies in Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich sheikdoms. On Thursday, Netanyahu continued his denunciations of the deal — saying it would “threaten the survival of Israel” — and no one should underestimate the Israel Lobby’s power over Congress.

But the choice before the American people is whether they want to join a 1,300-year-old religious war in the Middle East between Sunnis and Shiites – with Israel now having thrown in its lot with the Sunnis despite the fact that Saudi Arabia and its cohorts have been supporting Al-Qaeda and Islamic State terrorists.

Despite blame also falling on Iran and the Shiite side in this sectarian conflict, the Iranians have emerged as the most effective resistance to Al-Qaeda, which carried out the 9/11 attacks killing some 3,000 Americans, and to the Islamic State, which has engaged in – and franchised out to other extremist groups – the practice of chopping off the heads of Americans, Christians, Shiites and other “apostates.”

Though the Saudi royal family and other Sunni princes around the Persian Gulf deny that they support Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, few knowledgeable people believe them, since the jihadists follow Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabist fundamentalist teachings and have consistently served Saudi interests as the frontline fighters in the Sunni-Shiite conflict. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “ The Secret Saudi Ties to Terrorism .”]

Preference for Al-Qaeda

Plus, Saudi Arabia and Israel have made clear that they would prefer the Sunni fighters, even Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, to prevail over governments and other forces linked to Iran. The Saudi-Israeli alliance has provided real military assistance to these Sunni jihadists.

For instance, the current Saudi bombing campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen (who practice a form of Shiite Islam) has served to bolster Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, including aiding in a prison break that released scores of hardened Al-Qaeda militants. A source familiar with the Yemeni conflict told me that the Saudis also are giving Al-Qaeda weapons supplied by Israel.

In the Syrian civil war, senior Israelis have made clear they would prefer Sunni extremists to prevail over President Bashar al-Assad, who is an Alawite, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. Assad’s relatively secular government is seen as the protector of Shiites, Christians and other minorities who fear the vengeful brutality of the Sunni jihadists who now dominate the anti-Assad rebels and have absorbed the U.S.-trained “moderates” into the extremist ranks.

In September 2013, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren told the Jerusalem Post that Israel favored the Sunni extremists over Assad and the Shiites. “The greatest danger to Israel is by the [Shiite] strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc,” Oren said in an interview .

“We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.” He said this was the case even if the “bad guys” were affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

In June 2014, Oren expanded on this Israeli position. Then, speaking as a former ambassador, Oren said Israel would even prefer a victory by the Islamic State. “From Israel’s perspective, if there’s got to be an evil that’s got to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail,” Oren said.

This Israeli preference has extended into a tacit alliance with Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front in Syria, with which the Israelis have what amounts to a non-aggression pact, even caring for Nusra fighters in Israeli hospitals and mounting lethal air attacks against Lebanese and Iranian advisers to the Syrian military fighting Nusra forces.

Netanyahu himself has played down the danger from the Islamic State (or ISIS) when compared to what he claims is the greater Iranian threat. In his March 3 address to a cheering and hooting U.S. Congress, Netanyahu depicted ISIS as a minor annoyance with “butcher knives, captured weapons and YouTube” when compared to Iran, which he accused of “gobbling up the nations” of the Middle East.

He claimed “Iran now dominates four Arab capitals, Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sanaa. And if Iran’s aggression is left unchecked, more will surely follow. … We must all stand together to stop Iran’s march of conquest, subjugation and terror.”

But Netanyahu was engaging in hyperbole at best. Of those four capitals cited, Iran took none by force; no invasions had occurred. In the case of Syria and Iraq, Iran has been helping the established governments withstand assaults from the Islamic State and, in Syria, Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front as well.

In Iraq, the only reason there is a Shiite-dominated government is because President George W. Bush invaded in 2003 and deposed the Sunni-dominated government of Saddam Hussein. In Lebanon, Iran is merely allied with one element of the government, Hezbollah.

The Yemeni Civil War

Regarding Yemen, Netanyahu and the Saudis have sought to portray the conflict as a case of Iranian “aggression,” but those claims border on the ludicrous. The Houthi rebels, who have gained control of several large Yemeni cities including the capital Sanaa, follow an offshoot of Shiite Islam known as Zaydism, but it is relatively close to Sunni Islam and has peacefully co-existed with Sunni Islam for centuries.

The Houthis also deny that they are agents for Iran, and Western intelligence services believe that Iranian support has consisted mostly of some funding. Former CIA official Graham E. Fuller has called the notion “that the Houthis represent the cutting edge of Iranian imperialism in Arabia – as trumpeted by the Saudis” a “myth.” He added:

“The Zaydi Shia, including the Houthis, over history have never had a lot to do with Iran. But as internal struggles within Yemen have gone on, some of the Houthis have more recently been happy to take Iranian coin and perhaps some weapons — just as so many others, both Sunni and Shia, are on the Saudi payroll. The Houthis furthermore hate al-Qaeda and hate the Islamic State.”

In other words, the alarmist rhetoric from Netanyahu and the Saudis about the Houthis is hyped. And the Obama administration’s decision to assist the Saudi air strikes inside Yemen, including some attacks that have inflicted heavy civilian casualties, would seem to be undermining the U.S. goal of combating Islamic terrorism by strengthening Al-Qaeda.

Helping the Saudis kill Yemenis also contradicts the high-blown U.S. rhetoric denouncing Russia for intervening in a civil war in Ukraine, on Russia’s border. One can only imagine the fiery U.S. rhetoric if Russia launched air strikes against the neo-Nazi militias and other Ukrainian forces fighting on behalf of the U.S.-backed Kiev regime.

In Ukraine, when elected President Viktor Yanukovych fled to Russia to escape a violent coup on Feb. 22, 2014, the Obama administration cited Yanukovych’s departure as proof that he had vacated his office, thus justifying the appointment of a new president without the bother of following Ukraine’s constitution. Ukrainians who resisted Yanukovych’s ouster were deemed “terrorists” and any subsequent intervention by the Russians to protect the ethnic Russians under assault was decried as “aggression.”

Yet, when ousted Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi fled to Saudi Arabia, the Obama administration took the opposite position: Hadi’s departure was not proof that he had vacated his office but rather justification to bomb the Yemenis who had replaced him even if that helped actual terrorists in Al-Qaeda – another case of what’s good for the goose is not good for the gander.

Hope for the Republic

However, more significant for Americans is that the diplomatic agreement between world powers and Iran to tightly restrict its nuclear program to ensure that it’s for peaceful purposes only is that the deal repudiates the calls for war from Netanyahu and leading American neoconservatives. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “ NYT Publishes Call to Bomb Iran. ”]

Bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities could cause a massive human and environmental catastrophe, unleashing radiation on civilian populations and possibly making large swaths of Iran uninhabitable. That might serve the Saudi-Israeli interests by forcing Iran to focus exclusively on a domestic crisis of the first order.

Thus, Iran might be unable to assist the Iraqis and the Syrians in their desperate struggles against Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Ambassador Oren might get their preference and see Sunni jihadists hoisting the black flag of Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State over Damascus, if not Baghdad.

But such a victory, with its attendant slaughter of innocents and the prospects of new terrorist attacks on the West, would almost surely force whoever is the U.S. president to recommit hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to remove Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State from power. It would be a war of vast expense in money and blood with little prospect of American success.

Beyond the death of many U.S. soldiers, there would be an equally certain death of the American Republic, since the United States would have to become a fully militarized state dedicated to perpetual war. That might please — and profit — the neocons but it would be a tragedy for those Americans who believe in constitutional principles and democratic ideals. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “ A Family Business of Perpetual War. ”]

That is why the framework agreement with Iran offers a hope, albeit perhaps a thin one, that the United States can now separate itself from the endless war demands of Israel and Saudi Arabia – and chart a course home to a more peaceful harbor where our constitutional system might have a chance to repair.

_________

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

On Institutional Stupidity

By Noam Chomsky, Philosophy Now

04 April 15

 

aturally I am very pleased to be granted this honour, and to be able to accept this award also in the name of my colleague Edward Herman, the co-author of Manufacturing Consent, who himself has done a great deal of outstanding work on this crucial topic. Of course, we’re not the first people to have addressed it.

Predictably, one of the earlier ones was George Orwell. He’s written a not very well known essay that is the introduction of his famous book Animal Farm. It’s not known because it wasn’t published – it was found decades later in his unpublished papers, but it is now available. In this essay he points out that Animal Farm is obviously a satire on the totalitarian enemy; but he urges people in free England to not feel too self-righteous about that, because as he puts it, in England, unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force. He goes on to give examples of what he means, and only a few sentences of explanation, but I think they’re to the point.

One reason, he says, is that the press is owned by wealthy men who have every interest in not having certain ideas expressed. His second is a interesting point, that we didn’t go into but should have: a good education. If you go to the best schools you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things it just wouldn’t do to say. That, Orwell claims, is a powerful hook that goes well beyond the influence of the media.

Stupidity comes in many forms. I’d like to say a few words on one particular form that I think may be the most troubling of all. We might call it ‘institutional stupidity’. It’s a kind of stupidity that’s entirely rational within the framework within which it operates: but the framework itself ranges from grotesque to virtual insanity.

Instead of trying to explain it, it may be more helpful to mention a couple of examples to illustrate what I mean. Thirty years ago, in the early eighties – the early Reagan years – I wrote an article called ‘The Rationality of Collective Suicide’. It was concerned with nuclear strategy, and was about how perfectly intelligent people were designing a course of collective suicide in ways that were reasonable within their framework of geostrategic analysis.

I did not know at the time quite how bad the situation was. We have learnt a lot since. For instance, a recent issue of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists presents a study of false alarms from the automatic detection systems the US and others use to detect incoming missile attacks and other threats that could be perceived as nuclear attack. The study ran from 1977 to 1983, and it estimates that during this period there were a minimum of about 50 such false alarms, and a maximum of about 255. These were alarms aborted by human intervention, preventing disaster by a matter of a few minutes.

It’s plausible to assume that nothing substantial has changed since then. But it actually gets much worse – which I also did not understand at the time of writing the book.

In 1983, at about the time I was writing it, there was a major war scare. This was in part due to what George Kennan, the eminent diplomat, at the time called “the unfailing characteristics of the march towards war – that, and nothing else.” It was initiated by programs the Reagan administration undertook as soon as Reagan came into office. They were interested in probing Russian defences, so they simulated air and naval attacks on Russia.

This was a time of great tension. US Pershing missiles had been installed in Western Europe, with a flight time of about five to ten minutes to Moscow. Reagan also announced his ‘Star Wars’ program, understood by strategists on both sides to be a first strike weapon. In 1983, Operation Able Archer included a practice that “took Nato forces through a full-scale simulated release of nuclear weapons.” The KGB, we have learnt from recent archival material, concluded that armed American forces had been placed on alert, and might even have begun the countdown to war.

The world has not quite reached the edge of the nuclear abyss; but during 1983, it had, without realizing it, come frighteningly close – certainly closer than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The Russian leadership believed that the US was preparing a first strike, and might well have launched a preemptive strike. I am actually quoting from a recent US high-level intelligence analysis, which concludes that the war scare was for real. The analysis points out that in the background was the Russians’ enduring memory of Operation Barbarossa, the German code-name for Hitler’s 1941 attack on the Soviet Union, which was the worst military disaster in Russian history, and came very close to destroying the country. The US analysis says that was exactly what the Russians were comparing the situation to.

That’s bad enough, but it gets still worse. About a year ago we learned that right in the midst of these world-threatening developments, Russia’s early-warning system – similar to the West’s, but much more inefficient – detected an incoming missile strike from the US and sent off the highest-level alert. The protocol for the Soviet military was to retaliate with a nuclear strike. But the order has to pass through a human being. The duty officer, a man named Stanislav Petrov, decided to disobey orders and not to report the warning to his superiors. He received an official reprimand. But thanks to his dereliction of duty, we’re now alive to talk about it.

We know of a huge number of false alarms on the US side. The Soviet systems were far worse. Now nuclear systems are being modernised.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have a famous Doomsday Clock, and they recently advanced it two minutes. They explain that the clock “ticks now at three minutes to midnight because international leaders are failing to perform their most important duty, ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilisation.”

Individually, these international leaders are certainly not stupid. However, in their institutional capacity their stupidity is lethal in its implications. Looking over the record since the first – and so far only – atomic attack, it’s a miracle that we’ve escaped.

Nuclear destruction is one of the two major threats to survival, and a very real one. The second, of course, is environmental catastrophe.

There’s a well-known professional services group at PricewaterhouseCoopers who have just released their annual study of the priorities of CEOs. At the top of the list is over-regulation. The report says that climate change did not make it into the top nineteen. Again, the CEOs are doubtless not stupid individuals. Presumably they run their businesses intelligently. But the institutional stupidity is colossal, literally life-threatening for the species.

Individual stupidity can be remedied, but institutional stupidity is much more resistant to change. At this stage of human society, it truly endangers our survival. That’s why I think institutional stupidity should be a prime concern.

Thank you.

Questions From The Audience:

How could we overcome media propaganda and improve the media? Through education?

This is an old debate. In the US it has been debated for over a century within the framework of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which bars government action from preventing publication. Notice that it doesn’t protect freedom of speech, nor block punishment for speech.

There weren’t really many cases dealing with the First Amendment up until the Twentieth Century. The American press were very free previously, and there were a wide variety of all kinds of media: journals, magazines, pamphlets. The Founding Fathers believed in the freedom of information, and there were many efforts to stimulate the widest possible range of independent media. Freedom of speech, however, was not strongly protected.

Decisions on free speech began to be made around the First World War, but not by the courts. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the US established a high level of protection of freedom of speech. Meanwhile in the interwar period there was extensive discussion within the framework of what has been called ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ freedom, after Isaiah Berlin, of what the First Amendment implies about freedom of expression and of the press. There was a view sometimes called ‘corporate libertarianism’, which held that the First Amendment should concern negative freedom: that is the government can’t interfere with the right of media owners to do what they want. The other view was social democratic, and came out of the New Deal after the Depression and the early post-WWII period. That view held that there should also be positive freedom: in other words, that people should have the right to information as the basis for a democratic society. That battle was waged in the 1940s, and corporate libertarianism won. The US is unusual in this respect. There’s nothing like the BBC in the US. Most countries have some kind of national media which are as free as the society is. The US whacks that to the margins. The media were basically handed over to private power to exercise their capacities as they choose. That’s an interpretation of freedom of expression in terms of negative freedom: the state can’t intervene to affect what the private owners decide to do. There are a few restrictions, but not much. The consequences are pretty much a control of ideas as Orwell describes, and Edward Herman and I discuss this in great detail.

How do you overcome it? One way is education; but another way is by returning to the concept of positive freedom, which means recognising that in a democratic society we put a high value on the right of citizens to have access to a wide range of opinions and beliefs. That would, in the US, mean going back to what was in effect the earliest conception of the founders of the Republic, that there should be, not so much government regulation of what is said, but rather government support for a wide variety of opinions, news-gathering and interpretation – which can be stimulated in many ways.

Government means public: in a democratic society, government ought not to be some Leviathan making decisions. There are major grassroots projects that are trying to develop a more democratic media. This is a big battle because of the enormous power of the concentrated capital that of course tries to impede this in every possible way. But it’s a battle that has been going on for a long time, and there are fundamental issues at stake, including the issues of negative and positive freedoms.

Do you have any thoughts about the impact of search algorithms and search bubbles on the individual’s attempts to find information in their attempts to subvert Big Media?

Like all of you, I use search engines all the time. For people who are sufficiently privileged, the internet is very useful; but it’s usefulness is roughly to the extent that you do have privilege. ‘Privileged’ here means education, resources, a background ability to know what to look for.

It’s like a library. Suppose you decide ‘I want to be a biologist’, and so you join the Harvard Biology Library. Everything is in there, so in principle you can become a biologist; but of course it’s useless if you don’t know what to look for, and don’t know how to interpret what you see, and so on. It’s the same with the internet. There’s a huge amount of material out there – some valuable and some not – but it takes understanding, interpretation and background even to know what to look for. That’s quite apart from the fact that the Google system, for instance, is not a neutral system. It reflects advertiser interests in determining what’s prominent and what isn’t, and you have to know how to work your way through this maze. So it’s back to education and organisation enabling you to proceed.

I should stress that as an individual, you’re pretty limited in what you can come to understand, what ideas you can develop, how to think, even. So if you’re isolated, that highly restricts your ability to have and evaluate ideas, either in becoming a creative scientist or a functioning citizen. That’s one reason why the labor movement has always been at the forefront against information suppression, with workers education programs, for example, which were once extremely influential in both the UK and the US. The decline of what sociologists call ‘secondary associations’, where people come together to search and inquire, is one of the processes of atomisation which lead to people being isolated and facing this mass of information alone. So, the net’s a valuable tool, but as with all tools, you have to be in a position to be able to use it, and that’s not so simple. It requires significant social development.

How might it be possible to make institutions less stupid?

Well, it depends on what the institution is. I mentioned two: one is the government in control of a nuclear capacity; the other is the private sector, which is pretty much controlled through rather narrow concentrations of capital. They require different approaches. With regard to the government situation, this requires developing a functioning democratic society, in which an informed citizenry would play a central role in determining policy. The public is not in favour of facing death and destruction from nuclear weapons, and in this case we know in principle how to eliminate the threat. If the public were involved in developing security policy, I think this institutional stupidity could be overcome.

There’s a thesis in international relations theory that the prime concern of states is security. But that leaves open the question: Security for whom? If you look closely, it turns out it’s not security of the population, it’s security for privileged sectors within the society – the sectors who hold state power. There’s overwhelming evidence for this, which unfortunately I don’t have time to review. So one thing to do is to come to an understanding of whose security the state is in fact protecting: it’s not your security. It can be tackled by building a functioning democratic society.

On the issue of the concentration of private power, there’s also basically a problem of democratisation. A corporation is a tyranny. It’s the purest example of a tyranny you can imagine: power resides at the top, orders are sent down stage by stage, and at the very bottom, you have the option of purchasing what it produces. The population, the so-called stakeholders in the community, have almost no role in deciding what this entity does. And these entities have been granted extraordinary powers and rights, way beyond those of the individual. But none of it is graven in stone. None of it lies in economic theory. This situation is the result of, basically, class struggle, carried out by highly class-conscious business classes over a long period, which have now established their effective domination over society in various forms. But it doesn’t have to exist, it can change. Again, that’s a matter of democratising the institutions of social, political, and economic life. Easy to say, hard to do, but I think essential.