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FOCUS: Khamenei, in Reply to Trump, Gives Europe 6-Point Ultimatum on Nuclear Deal |
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Thursday, 24 May 2018 11:32 |
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Cole writes: "Iran's clerical Leader, Ali Khamenei, weighed in on Trump's violation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or Iran nuclear accord of 2015."
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. (photo: EPA)
Khamenei, in Reply to Trump, Gives Europe 6-Point Ultimatum on Nuclear Deal
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
24 May 18
 ran’s clerical Leader, Ali Khamenei, weighed in on Trump’s violation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or Iran nuclear accord of 2015, which the US signed off on along with the rest of the UN Security Council and Germany (informally representing the European Union). Speaking frankly to Iran’s European trading partners, the ayatollah laid down six requirements for Iran to remain in the JCPOA itself. These demands appear to be a response to those made by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whom Khamenei has dismissed as a mere “spy.”
Khamenei expressed his disappointment in Europe’s past and present behavior. He noted that some large European firms were already pulling out of Iran (this may be a reference to Total, SA). He said that on several occasions the US has violated its responsibilities under the JCPOA (referring to new economic sanctions slapped on Iran by Congress after it was signed with a promise of sanctions relief). He added that the Europeans had not so much as complained about these US violations. Then he set out his requirements.
1. The US has violated UNSC Resolution 2231 by revoking its signature. The European members of the Security Council (France and Britain), along with non-member Germany must introduce a resolution there condemning the US for this violation.
2. The 3 Western European Powers must stop pressuring Iran about its ballistic missile tests and its presence in the Middle East. Khamenei said that every time there is a meeting with them they bring up these two issues. (Neither was part of the JCPOA). He insists that they cease and desist. He said that Iran’s relationship with Middle Eastern countries is based on Islamic soft power and Iran’s strategic depth, and is key its ability to defend itself. It will not give up this element of its strategy.
3. Every time Trump announces a new boycott on Iran, Europe must explicitly reject it and stand against it.
4. If the US manages to damage Iran’s ability to export its petroleum (it is now exporting 2.5 mn barrels a day), Europe at Iran’s request must make up the shortfall. It may be, Khamenei said, that the Islamic Republic will view a reduction in its oil exports as a positive. If, however, the Iranian government decides it is being harmed by the US ability to strong-arm some of Iran’s customers into ceasing their imports of Iranian oil, Europe must agree to hold Iran harmless.
[The line about the benefits of any reduction in Iranian oil sales may reflect a conviction in some circles that it is never bad for an oil state to keep the oil in the ground, since its value will only increase in the future. This line of thinking does not reckon with the rise of electric vehicles, which may make petroleum worthless in 15 years or so.]
5. European banks must guarantee both governmental and private financial transactions (i.e. they must not yield to US blacklisting of Iranian banks. The US has just slapped sanctions on the Bank Melli, a major government institution, in an attempt to make it harder for Iran to buy and sell on the world market).
6. The Europeans must be prompt in responding to these requests.
If France, Germany and Britain will not undertake these guarantees, Iran reserves the right to start back up its enrichment activities, and would go back to enriching to 19.75%.
(That level of enrichment produces fuel useful in medical reactors and nuclear submarines; but Iran only has one of the former, and none presently of the latter, so enriching to that percentage is simply a form of deterrence, since obviously it is easier to enrich a stockpile of 19.75% to the 95% needed for a bomb than it is to start from scratch. – JC)
Khamenei underlined that since the US plans to make war on Iran via the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assent Control (OFAC), Iran would have to respond with its own economic and financial organs, as well as via the foreign ministry.
Khamenei was firm that Iran reserves the right to start back up its enrichment program if it concludes that the JCPOA is useless to it.
A set of ultimatums of this sort signals that Khamenei wants out of the JCPOA, since he surely knows that Europe is highly unlikely to acquiesce in his demands. He clearly has decided that Europe cannot be depended upon to buck Trump, and that its major corporations will most likely fold and pull up stakes from Iran. He may be underestimating the will of the French in particular to defy Trump, and Paris’s willingness to run interference for smaller French firms that do not have significant US business and who want to invest in Iran.
What the UNSC got from Iran in the JCPOA was pushing the timetable for any Iranian nuclear bomb, once Iran decided to create one, from three months out to a year or more. Khamenei’s response to Trump’s destruction of the JCPOA is to go back to the three-month timetable. It is a realistic and significant threat, which not only Europe but Israel and Saudi Arabia will take seriously. Europe in the end will shrug. Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and their bought man in the White House are more likely to respond with extensive covert action against Iran, in hopes of stirring up its ethnic minorities and restless working class.
The aggressive quartet, however, should be careful, since Iran is not helpless and can make trouble for them through covert operations as well.
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FOCUS: How Much Longer Can Rod Rosenstein Protect Robert Mueller? |
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Thursday, 24 May 2018 10:32 |
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Toobin writes: "In the latest of the complex machinations in the Russia investigation, and in the investigations of the investigation, it's easy to lose the most important thread: that President Donald Trump is still scheming to rid himself of the meddlesome special counsel, Robert Mueller."
Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General - who both hired Robert Mueller as the special counsel and who supervises his investigation - has been a special target of President Trump. (photo: Andrew Harrer/Getty)
How Much Longer Can Rod Rosenstein Protect Robert Mueller?
By Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker
24 May 18
n the latest of the complex machinations in the Russia investigation, and in the investigations of the investigation, it’s easy to lose the most important thread: that President Donald Trump is still scheming to rid himself of the meddlesome special counsel, Robert Mueller.
The latest chapter began when the Times reported, last week, on the origins of the F.B.I.’s investigation of possible connections between members of the Trump campaign and Russians. The Times said that, in the initial stages of the F.B.I. probe, “at least one government informant met several times” with people affiliated with the campaign, to draw them out about their ties, if any, to Russia. This was normal investigative behavior by the Bureau, a low-risk way to obtain information at an early stage. Notwithstanding the obvious propriety of the F.B.I.’s tactics, the disclosure prompted great fury on the part of the President.
“Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president. It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a ‘hot’ Fake News story. If true - all time biggest political scandal!” Trump wrote on Twitter. Two days later, he went on, “I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes - and if any such demands or requests were made by people in the Obama Administration!”
This demand for an investigation of the F.B.I.’s behavior, which was promptly joined by a number of congressional Republicans, is without precedent in modern American history. By custom and by norm, Presidents have allowed the Justice Department, which includes the F.B.I., to conduct its investigations without interference from the White House. This was especially true in cases, such as the Whitewater probe, during the Clinton era, in which those investigations touched on the President and his associates, where the conflicts of interest would be especially acute. Trump’s demand is so obviously improper that it’s possible to see it in a different way—not as a bona-fide attempt to gain information about the investigation but, rather, a dare to Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, to resign in protest. Rosenstein, of course, is the person who both hired Mueller as the special counsel and who supervises his investigation. As such, Rosenstein has been a special target of the President and his allies, and they would like nothing more than to depose him and install someone who could restrict, and ultimately dispatch, Mueller himself.
If Rosenstein were following the modern traditions of independence at the Justice Department, he would have rejected Trump’s request outright—but then he would have risked getting fired, and thereby potentially deprive Mueller of the protection that he has provided for the past year. So Rosenstein devised what was, under the circumstances, an artful finesse. He did not, as Trump seemed to demand, launch a criminal investigation of the F.B.I.; rather, Rosenstein took an intermediate step. He took advantage of the fact that the Justice Department’s inspector general is already conducting an investigation of the conduct of the F.B.I. in connection with its applications for surveillance of a Trump campaign adviser in 2016. Rosenstein just told the inspector general to add the issue of the use of informants in the Russia case to his existing investigation. This probe by the inspector general may well interfere with Mueller’s investigation, by subjecting its witnesses to another round of questioning, but Rosenstein probably figured, with reason, that it was the least bad alternative available to him. For the moment, at least, his offer seemed to mollify Trump, and an immediate crisis has been averted.
But no one should think that Rosenstein—or Mueller—is safe. Trump’s fake outrage about the nonexistent spy in his camp is just the latest assault on the independence of the Justice Department, the F.B.I., and the special counsel. At the same time that Rosenstein was brokering Trump’s demand for an investigation, the President directed his chief of staff to accommodate a request from House Republicans to view certain secret documents from the Russia investigation. Likewise, under modern ethical traditions, the House members should have been immediately refused; but, the White House wants to assist its congressional allies, and allowing them to see documents that they shouldn’t be allowed to see is part of that effort. In a similar vein, earlier this year, the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, with support from the President, released the so-called Nunes memo, which was a tendentious and misleading account of supposed F.B.I. misconduct. Later, the committee members released a report on their own investigation, which found no wrongdoing by the President.
Outside of government, too, the Republican coalition is mobilizing behind the attempt to discredit Mueller. Last week, Steven Calabresi, a professor at Northwestern Law School and a co-founder of the Federalist Society, the powerful conservative lawyers’ organization, wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing that Mueller’s investigation was unconstitutional and that his cases should be challenged and, perhaps, dismissed. Later this week, the Federalist Society is hosting a conference call for Calabresi to share his message with a broader audience. None of these attacks has succeeded in neutralizing Mueller—yet. That’s why they’re continuing. The final showdown between Trump and Rosenstein—and, thus, Mueller—hasn’t taken place; it’s just been postponed.
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John McCain's Revisionist History Is a Team Effort |
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Thursday, 24 May 2018 08:44 |
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Taibbi writes: "I hope my editors boil in oil in the afterlife for asking me to review John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls."
John McCain and Sarah Palin in 2008. (photo: Larry W. Smith/Shutterstock)
John McCain's Revisionist History Is a Team Effort
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
24 May 18
In HBO's 'John McCain: For Whom The Bell Tolls,' the Arizona Senator is pre-eulogized by ghoulish ex-foes
hope my editors boil in oil in the afterlife for asking me to review John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls, the new HBO doc that premieres Memorial Day and stars David Brooks, Henry Kissinger, George W. Bush and a succession of other wax-museum escapees who line up to evade and prevaricate about things McCain-related and not.
The review copy might as well have been titled, Go Ahead, Say Something Bad About a Terminal Cancer Patient. I felt like a monster 20 seconds in.
Having covered McCain's 2008 run, I had mixed feelings about the man anyway. Just as a person, McCain came across as the kind of insistently obnoxious guy you hear complaining about the slow service in an airport bar – a type I always found oddly sympathetic.
But the political myth-making around McCain has always been tough to take, and this movie is basically two hours of it. The myths aren't just about McCain, either, but also an effort to gloss over about six decades of American history, and how we got to the terrible place we're in today.
The movie is called For Whom the Bell Tolls because McCain calls the Hemingway novel his "lodestar." Mark Salter says its theme, "The harder the cause, even lost, the better the cause," spoke deeply to his personal belief system.
McCain has certainly fought for a lot of lost causes in his life. But most of them were causes he deserved to lose.
For instance, one of the things McCain will be most harshly judged for is his decision to make Sarah Palin his running mate in 2008. Many people (correctly) believe that moment paved the way for the rise of what David Brooks in the movie calls "a disease" of anti-intellectualism in the Republican Party.
But the excuses offered in the film by McCain supplicants like Rick Davis and Salter is that McCain, instead of running against expected establishment opponent Hillary Clinton, had to find a way to run against "change" in Barack Obama.
George W. Bush, the storyline goes, was the most unpopular president ever at the time, with a 25 percent approval rating. Obama, as a result, was kicking McCain's ass on the stump by pointing out that McCain said he shared a "common philosophy" with the hated Bush.
In this situation, the legend continues, McCain had to gamble: "Fight change with change," as daughter Meghan puts it in the film.
So McCain brought in Sarah Palin, who was a hell of a change, all right, with the IQ of a cheese-wheel – she made Dan Quayle sound like Spinoza. McCain's campaign was cooked from that moment, because as the months passed, he couldn't conceal his growing contempt for his own decision, leading to a fracture within the party that has persisted to this day.
This narrative makes it out to be just McCain's bad luck that he had to run against a brilliant marketing phenomenon like Barack Obama at a time when Republicans' national popularity was plummeting along with Bush.
But McCain deserves that millstone around his neck. No other politician – not even, really, Bush himself – was as aggressive in pushing the catastrophic Iraq invasion that ultimately cratered the modern Republican Party.
McCain talked about military action against Iraq long before any other prominent elected official. He did it while the towers were still smoldering, on September 12th, 2001, predicting many of our future Middle East interventions. He pushed action in not "just Afghanistan – we're talking about Syria, Iraq, Iran, perhaps North Korea, Libya and others."
He then went on Letterman in October and, in the middle of tumescent descriptions of how American weaponry was performing in Afghanistan, said, "The second phase is Iraq."
It's hard not to remember that candidate Donald Trump didn't just viciously pick on McCain's POW past; he also successfully ran (as a candidate, anyway) against the Middle East wars McCain, and most all of the other panelists interviewed, supported.
That Trump has cranked up our bombing campaigns and proved to be a total fraud on the "war is a bad deal" front is immaterial. This is an example of how the backslapping gang of Beltway all-stars who gather in this film to lament the loss of civility in politics had a lot to do with bringing about that change. They helped create that anger vote.
McCain adviser Rick Davis in the film talks about how bringing on Palin was an ill-considered attempt to bring "the Maverick" legend back.
The thing is, the Maverick legend, in reality, is based on the humorous fact that McCain has a "cactus" personality and has routinely called other senators names like "shithead" and "fucking jerk" – not for ideological reasons, but just because he has the temper of a normal human being thrust into that horrible job. McCain has always seemed to hate the work part of being a senator, which requires slogging through lots of boring negotiations with self-important blowhards.
That part is easy to understand and even sympathize with, but when he started to shoot for higher office, his handlers spun his persona into a legend that he was a rebel and a change agent, which he really wasn't. McCain is a war hero who married the heiress to a beer distributorship and needed a job.
I'd have been interested in a single cut of McCain talking into the camera for two hours about how much he hated his job and how full of shit he thought everyone in Washington was, but the movie goes another way.
Instead, we get a parade of wraithlike politicians from the past speaking slowly, so as not to bust their obviously recent eye jobs and neck tucks, to offer McCain mild plaudits while soft-pedaling various unrelated atrocities they personally had hands in.
If you want to hear Henry Kissinger croak out that he and Dick Nixon carpet-bombed Vietnamese population centers on Christmas – after years of bombing civilians in Laos and Cambodia in similar fashion, a policy of "anything that flies on anything that moves" – for the sake of peace, in order to rescue POWs like McCain, then this is the film for you.
There's also a ton of forced schlock-roasting by this parade of ex-adversaries. For instance, one of the things the press always liked about McCain is his rep for swearing a lot in off-the-record bull sessions (a rep his people, again, quickly marketed in 2000 with high-ick-factor stunts like the "Straight Talk Express").
In an homage to this trait, and to the latitude offered by the HBO venue, almost everyone in the film forces up an F-bomb or two. So you get to hear Lindsey Graham use the word "asshole" and it's all very humanizing.
I do hope someone makes a repeating-loop GIF of David Brooks saying "fucking asshole" (it's at 55:39 of the movie) because it seriously looks like it's the first time he's ever said it, which is sort of funny but also not.
On the road with McCain in 2008, I was amazed by the degree to which he couldn't let go of Iraq. Since he wasn't really with the party on a lot of other issues – he'd railed against televangelists and waffled on abortion and didn't get off on being a chainsaw-wielding, yee-hawing goon the way Bush did – this left him with nothing to run on.
For days on end he seemed to campaign exclusively in half-filled VFW halls, where he would try to chew up as much time as possible glad-handing and telling jokes, so he wouldn't have to talk policy.
His big theme that year was "the surge is working" and that it was better to fight the terrorists "over there" than here in America. This was a complete non sequitur that McCain surely knew was absurd, but still he kept lugging these and other awful lines – like Obama running for "redistributionist-in-chief"– up the hill.
But rather than bravely face up to a policy error as he had on, say, the Confederate flag issue in South Carolina in 2000 or his 1983 vote against Martin Luther King day, he compounded the mistake by inviting the most vicious and virulent strain of modern conservatism onto his ticket.
This was piling one error on another, and you can draw a straight line from that second gaffe to Trump.
McCain was right to later distance himself from the movement Palin started, and his concession speech to Obama after his defeat that year was far classier than his audience was hoping for ("I can't listen to this shit," one of his supporters yelled at the Arizona Biltmore that night).
As for his occasional "maverick" stands against his own voters: Couldn't he have saved himself the trouble of having to make those agonizing displays by just switching parties? Yes, it takes stones for a Republican to admit Barack Obama is not "an Arab," that slavery is bad, or that the Dixie Chicks shouldn't be burned alive. But most Democrats don't have to call pressers on these issues.
McCain's tragedy as a politician is that he is forever torn between his intense desire to pander to the bomb-humping, deregulating right and the fact that he so obviously thought most Republican voters – particularly the religious ones – were dipshits.
This schizophrenic brand of politics has left McCain marooned between two electorates that could never quite embrace him, and have since drifted apart at light speed.
For this, For Whom the Bell Tolls celebrates McCain as a relic of a past when "reaching across the aisle" was still possible. The film's extraordinary lineup of gushing interviewees – Bush, Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, etc. – is an implicit endorsement of this idea.
It's a paean to the pre-Trump age when "the middle" was still sought-after political territory, and the political class to which they all belong was not yet despised enough to make someone like Donald Trump a viable spite vote. If you need 103 minutes or so of their collective denial about this, please tune in.
Can we get another season of The Wire next time?
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All Colin Kaepernick Ever Did Was Ask |
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Thursday, 24 May 2018 08:42 |
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Bruenig writes: "Like all civil peace, American contentment depends on its people believing in a certain story about how this country functions."
San Francisco 49ers Eric Reid and Colin Kaepernick kneel during the national anthem on September 12, 2016. (photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP)
All Colin Kaepernick Ever Did Was Ask
By Elizabeth Bruenig, The Washington Post
24 May 18
 ike all civil peace, American contentment depends on its people believing in a certain story about how this country functions. Elementary school civics lay the groundwork: We live in a democratic republic, wherein the organs of government reflect the will of the people and the legitimacy of every act of governance can be traced back to the collective consent of so many rights-bearing persons. Individual rights are to be protected above all else because individuals matter above all else. Somewhere way downstream of all this comes football.
There’s some patriotic pageantry with all highly televised and profitable sports, but the National Football League has always seemed to approach its displays with a grim determination. Maybe it is because, for a while, at least, they were a business transaction. A 2015 joint oversight report commissioned by Arizona Sens. Jeff Flake and John McCain found that the Pentagon had paid the NFL nearly $7 million for salutes, color guards, anthems and more during games. The Pentagon and the NFL both say they’ve cut it out since.
So I guess it must be love, not money, driving this latest spasm of patriotic fervor. NFL team owners agreed upon a rule Wednesday (without consulting the NFL Players Association, naturally) that would give players the option of staying in the locker room if they would rather not stand during the singing of the national anthem, but would issue fines if those players chose to kneel publicly during the anthem instead.
On one level, it does seem just as cold and calculated as the old days, when the NFL was swapping salutes for cash. If you have to threaten someone into showing respect, whatever they end up showing isn’t respect but a simulation of it for someone else’s consumption. The fact that the rule has already been made public just means that everyone is aware that this is the portion of the game when the NFL forces its players to stand still while they play a song, or else. The meaning of it all washes out; the fines make it entirely situational: It’s a workplace compliance issue, a matter of the NFL making its performers sell its customers what they want to buy. The content is meaningless.
And yet this latest panic over kneeling during the anthem does seem to be more than strictly business. A wiser group of all-business chief executives would have at least considered the bargaining agreement before unilaterally moving on such a contentious matter, especially considering the attention it was bound to receive — which suggests the potential costs, in bad press and lawsuits and arbitration headaches, were all simply worth it, that there was something more important in it for them.
If not money, then what? There is the evident racial component, bolstered by the bizarre involvement of the president, which has everything to do with disciplining black people in public, a long-running American obsession. But I suspect there’s something more, something wider and stranger, at the root of all this fury over a few athletes quietly kneeling during their country’s anthem. For one, there’s the straightforward fact that kneeling isn’t a sign of disrespect, and nobody brought up in a country with the faintest hint of Christian culture actually thinks it is. As Luke Bretherton, a professor of theological ethics at Duke University, wrote last year in The Post: “New Testament stories describe people who kneel before Jesus in supplication or lament. With their kneeling, these biblical figures say: Something is desperately wrong, please hear us and use your power to help us. Their act of submission signals their faith that healing will come and their prayers will be answered.”
Kneeling during the anthem was always a kind of plea — for an America that works the way the civics textbooks say it does. But making the plea raises the fact that America doesn’t, in fact, function according to its founding story; we’re not all individuals whose rights are equally protected, whose wills are collectively represented in the organs of government, whose interests are advanced according to our common say in how we’re governed. Some are protected more than others, and some better than others, and some at the expense of others, and it isn’t clear that our representative bodies are interested in doing anything about it. All Colin Kaepernick and others ever did was ask.
But that’s the one thing the American story is just too weak to survive.
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itcoin’s energy footprint has more than doubled since Grist 
