Should Iran Trust the Great Satan?

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

10 October 13

he horse trade seemed straightforward from the start. Iran proves to the satisfaction of the U.S. and its European allies that it could not quickly build an atom bomb should Tehran choose to break out of international safeguards. In return, the West turns off the economic sanctions that are crippling Iran's economy. What could be so difficult about that?

The big difficulty is built in. The Americans - long portrayed in Iran as the Great Satan - have set the rules by which the Iranians must play, and these rules differ dramatically from those that govern their regional frenemies and rivals. Pakistan, India, and Israel all have nuclear arsenals, which Washington and its European allies currently accept. India and Israel refuse to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and do not permit regular inspections and continuous monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). No problem for the allies, who have singled out Iran for crippling economic sanctions and have threatened to go to war to stop it from ever getting the capability to build even a single atomic bomb.

As President Barack Obama told the U.N. General Assembly, the U.S. "is prepared to use all elements of our power, including military force ... to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon."

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's spiritual leader and top man, appears to have accepted this neo-imperial reality, at least for now. Khamenei calls this "historic flexibility" and sees no better way to remove sanctions and the threat of a costly war his country would lose. To make it more palatable, his salesmen - president Hassan Rouhani and the razor-sharp foreign minister Javed Zarif - talk about Iran's self-interest in giving the world confidence that it will remain free of nuclear weapons. Khamenei also appears to have decided that breaking out of Iran's diplomatic isolation is more in his country's national interest than having the capability to build a nuclear weapon, whose production, stockpiling, and use he has called forbidden by Islam. He has said this many times, most famously in his fatwa of 2005, which he could no doubt find a way to countermand if he wanted to.

One other thing to remember about Khamenei. He knows Western culture, with an understanding that often appears less Islamic than classically anti-imperialist. This comes through when he lets the world know that he doubts that the Great Satan can change sufficiently to make a nuclear deal possible.

Though I abhor the Ayatollah's theocratic politics, I share his doubts. I also have to wonder how long he and his compatriots will allow themselves to accept the devil's dictates. The answer, I suspect, depends on how quickly Iranians see an end to the sanctions and a material improvement in their standard of living. This is why the negotiators have no time to lose.

For the next few weeks, maybe even months, Iranians will hear only an inconsistent mix of words. In his U.N. speech, President Obama apologized for the coup, announced that he was no longer seeking regime change, referred respectfully to Khamenei's anti-nuclear fatwa, and inched away from saying that "all options are on the table." But caught up in their imperial mindset, Obama and members of his team continue to remind the Iranians who's on top, which is stupid and counter-productive at the start of negotiations that could become a smaller replay of Richard Nixon's opening to China.

On the other side, the Iranians themselves have given the world reason to be suspicious of their nuclear program. The suspicions go back to at least 2002, when the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) - an Iranian opposition group that the U.S. State Department had officially labeled as terrorists - identified two nuclear sites that Tehran had been building in secret. Satellite surveillance confirmed their claims. One site, at Arak, was for a heavy-water reactor that could produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. The other, near Natanz, was an underground plant for enriching uranium. Western intelligence agency then discovered the clandestine construction of another enrichment facility some 70 meters underground in a hardened bunker at Fordo, near the holy city of QOM.

The IAEA accused the Iranians of failing to notify it when they began construction of these facilities. The Iranians insisted - and still do - that under the terms of their safeguards agreement, they did not have to notify the IAEA about any facility until 180 days before it went into production. Legally, the Iranians could well be right. But politically they lost the game, as Europe, the U.S. Congress, the White House, and the U.N. Security Council all imposed economic sanctions.

At the same time, Western spymasters decided that Iran had begun research on how to turn their enriched uranium or plutonium into nuclear weapons. Their findings, right or wrong, directly challenge declarations by both Rouhani and Khamenei that Iran has never pursued nuclear weapons. "If President Rouhani wants the world to believe Iran will not build nuclear weapons in the future," write former weapons inspector David Albright and his colleague Christina Walrond, "the Iranian government should reconsider its blanket denials of ever seeking nuclear weapons in the past."

This is the dominant attitude in Washington, which adds to doubts that Obama can deliver an end to sanctions even if the Iranians prove they have given up any nuclear weapons capability. Only Congress can kill the toughest sanctions, even as they now consider a new round of even harsher sanctions. This is where the neo-cons, the Israeli American Public Affairs Committee, and other friends of Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu will fight hardest to block any détente with Iran, making war all too likely.

Can Obama win this battle? Strangely enough, he can, but - irony of ironies - he can only do it with a massive outpouring of public protest to Congress even larger than the one that stopped him from sending his Tomahawk missiles into Syria. Hopefully, the doubting Ayatollah Khamenei will stay his present course and we can begin to change the Great Satan for good.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How To Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Deluded Secessionists Have Already Won

By David Sirota, Salon

10 October 13

Conservative secessionists want their own country? Their agenda already rules, even though a majority opposes it.

hanks to a confluence of three events, the S-word - secession - is once again in the air. In Washington, new questions are emerging about whether the United States can function as a unified nation after a partial government shutdown was engineered by a largely regional party - one whose home territory looks eerily similar to the Confederacy. Adding to the questions about the viability of the post-Civil War union is the fact that the shutdown has been orchestrated by a Texas legislator whose state party stalwarts - including its governor - seem to support secession, to the point of taking concrete legislative steps to prepare for independence. On top of all that, in states across the country, incipient secession movements have sprung up only a few months after secession petitions flooded the White House website.

In his seminal book "Better Off Without 'Em," Chuck Thompson marshals data to argue that America would benefit by letting the Republican Party and its strongholds formally secede from the country. Whether or not you end up agreeing with Thompson, the argument he forwards is compelling on the policy merits. It also raises an important but less-explored political question: Why would today's conservatives want to formally secede from a nation that gives them the privilege of governing the whole country, even though they remain in the electoral minority and even though their policy agenda is opposed by a majority of the country?

Partisans on both sides will inevitably deny this reality, because they see the world exclusively through a red-versus-blue prism. The reality-distorting effects of such a prism cast Democratic politicians as uniformly liberal, and therefore creates the illusion that Democratic Party control of the presidency and the U.S. Senate mean those institutions are similarly liberal. But such a partisan view obscures ideological conservatism's undeniable dominance of both parties - and, thus, American politics.

Inside the Beltway, you can see this dominance in (among other things) the transpartisan support for the escalation of wars, the expansion of the surveillance state, the perpetuation of the Drug War and the preservation of corporate welfare. You can also see it in the annual budget fights that interminably shift to the right.

The last few months illustrate that point. Today, draconian sequestration-gutted budgets that were recently considered controversial are the new mainstream center. Indeed, to Democrats, the sequestration levels they once criticized as too harsh are now the new acceptable normal. At the same time, to Republicans, the sequestration levels they once could only dream of are now the overly "Big Government" that allegedly requires a full-on government shutdown to rein in.

Underscoring the rightward shift, that government shutdown is not coincidentally structured to keep funding conservatives priorities (the Military-Industrial Complex, the Surveillance State, etc.) while eviscerating liberal social programs. Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation's healthcare ideas championed by the Republican Party's most recent presidential nominee are now billed as a socialist plot, thus pushing the Overton Window even further to the right and marginalizing anything genuinely liberal like, say, single payer. Oh, and as all this is happening, popular liberal priorities like gun control can't get an up-or-down majority vote even after children are massacred.

It's the same story of conservative domination in many state legislatures, regardless of party control. On economics, the debates in both Republican and Democratic states are typically not about reducing corporate welfare and tax cuts and using the recovered cash to better fund the social safety net. Instead, whether in a red or blue legislature, it usually is a debate about how much more corporate welfare and tax cuts to hand out, and how much more the social safety net must be gutted. At the same time, the serious state-level gun control proposals are stymied despite their strong public support, and legislatures keep passing new restrictions on a woman's right to choose, despite strong public opposition.

What's news here is not that the right has a hammerlock on American politics, but that it has engineered such a hammerlock even as public opinion polls show America is moving to the left on issue after issue after issue, and even as national electoral results show America continuing to overwhelmingly vote against the Republican Party's ultraconservative agenda. This dichotomy between political power and public will represents far more than mere tolerance of a political minority's rights in a republican democracy. It is more than even a tyranny of the conservative minority. It is nothing short of the conservative movement declaring independence from America yet still ruling the America it abandoned with the entitled arrogance of an occupying force.

None of this is an accident. It is the result of a preconceived strategy that relies on two sets of tools.

The first is the unprecedented use of the U.S. Senate filibuster and the creation of the so-called Hastert Rule. The former gives just 11 percent of the population enough Senate representation to stop anything (like, say, minimal gun control) that the other 89 percent may want. The latter basically does the same thing, only with U.S. House rules that prevent any bill from even being voted on unless it has the support of a majority of the House Republican Conference. This particularly empowers a tiny minority of conservative voters considering that the GOP Conference didn't even win a majority of votes for U.S. House in the last election.

How, you ask, did Republicans win the lower chamber but receive far fewer total votes for the U.S. House than Democrats? They employed the second set of tools: redistricting and the gerrymander.

As Mother Jones magazine documents, Republican legislatures in 2010 used the decennial practice of redrawing district lines to all but guarantee the GOP control of the House, irrespective of whether a majority of American voters actually cast their ballots for that. The result is exactly what President Obama described at his press conference yesterday when he said: "There's no competition and those folks are much more worried about a Tea Party challenger than they are about a general election where they've got to complete against a Democrat or go after independent votes - and in that environment, it's a lot harder for them to compromise."

Why is it harder to compromise? Because a Republican in a gerrymandered district doesn't have to worry about a general election in which he gets painted as an extremist. In such a district where the primary winner is the automatic general election winner, that incumbent is mostly concerned with creating a voting record that appeases ultraconservative Republican primary voters and therefore prevents a primary challenger from calling him a moderate.

While it is true that none of this comprises a formal secession, it is also true that all of this together does indeed represent a genuine unofficial political secession by the right. Through the filibuster, conservatives now use the brinkmanship of threatened government shutdowns and debt defaults to successfully legislate their pro-militarism, anti-social-program agenda over the objections of everyone else. At the same time, through gerrymandering, conservatives have geographically walled themselves off in a way that prevents them from having to electorally answer to anyone but themselves.

They have, in other words, made a deliberate choice to secede into their own separate nation. Call it Conservastan.

This was a choice, of course, that the right didn't have to make. To start winning national elections and electoral mandates again, the conservative movement could have used redistricting to dilute Republican districts, make more Democratic districts potentially competitive, and then defeat Democrats in those competitive elections. That would have required the difficult work of broadening the movement's agenda and expanding its electoral base, but if successful, it would have also led to actual mandate-worthy majorities and genuinely national governance for the long haul.

Instead, the right chose to use redistricting to create a whole separate political country for themselves. Inside this new country, the Fourth Estate check on power isn't an objective news media - it is Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and right-wing media enforcing dogma against the perceived threat of ideological traitors. Inside this country, the Republican Party isn't interested in broadening its agenda; the incentive in Conservastan is for the party to continually narrow its agenda to intensify conservative fervor so that the gerrymandered districts that comprise Conservastan remain impenetrable GOP strongholds.

As a pure power grab, the strategy has been wildly successful. Not only does the conservative movement's less populous breakaway country now control the political destiny of those of us still here in regular old America, it does so while making sure all of us in liberal America financially subsidize Conservastan.

Thus, we return to that first question: Why would any conservative want to formally secede from the union when the conservative movement's undeclared political secession has been so incredibly successful for the right? If, say, you are a conservative living up the road from me in Northern Colorado, why would you want to formally secede when the conservative movement's aggressive abuse of the state constitution and recall process allows your fellow Colorado conservatives to shape large portions of state policy without actually having to win statewide elections anymore? Why, too, would you want to give up such privilege and also give up subsidies that, according to the I-News Network, makes the rest of Colorado give you a net cash transfer of "between about $60 million and $120 million or more a year"?

These are the same kinds of questions you could ask of any of the secession campaigns across the country, and the fact that there are no politically rational answers is probably, in part, why many leaders of the conservative establishment do not openly support actual secession. They know that the filibuster and the gerrymander have already let them politically secede and yet still rule this country. They know they are still ruling because they see government shutdowns structured to protect conservative priorities and they see a Democratic president endorsing conservative healthcare, Social Security and national security ideas. And most important, they know their continuing rule doesn't have to involve any of the downsides of an official secession, even though a secession has already happened.