Month: June 2013
Bahrain: silence is a war crime
Protests in Bahrain have attracted media coverage outside the country, but there has been little international attention paid to its government’s efforts to block media coverage inside Bahrain. On Tuesday, Nada Alwadi, a Bahraini journalist and co-founder of the BPA, presented a 2012 report that tries to elucidate: Bahrain: Silence is a War Crime at the National Endowment for Democracy. Alwadi was joined on a panel by Delphine Hagland from Reporters without Borders and Adel Iskander from Georgetown University. David Lowe, Vice President for Government Relations and Public Affairs at the National Endowment for Democracy, facilitated the discussion.
Nada Alwadi described the status of Bahraini media before the protests. By 2010, the government controlled radio and TV stations as well as most of the major newspapers in the country (Alwasat newspaper was a notable exception). The government also monitored blogs and online news outlets. As a result of this state monopoly, the Bahraini press became largely ineffective. Without government funding, independent news outlets could not always sustain themselves. Alwaqt newspaper closed down in 2010 for lack of funding. Read more
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Is war inevitable?
This brings us to Iran. With the first round of the Iranian presidential election on Friday, the West is once again focused on the Iranian nuclear program, negotiations on which will resume once a new president is in place. To date, international sanctions have sought to punish the Iranian leadership for its defiance of the non-proliferation regime. As Iran gets closer to the production of its own nuclear weapon, sanctions have increasingly targeted Iran’s economy, hoping to change the cost/benefit analysis of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As a result , oil exports have dropped from 2.6 million barrels per day to 1.1 million barrels per day and overall government revenue has seen a 17% drop compared to Iran’s five-year average. Despite these effects, sanctions have been unsuccessful in compelling Iran to suspend its program.
On Monday, members of a newly-established Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs Iran Task Force met to discuss the challenges facing US national security vis-à-vis a nuclear Iran. Chaired by Ambassadors Eric Edelman and Dennis Ross, the task force spans the political spectrum, across which there is a common belief that a nuclear Iran would be detrimental to US strategic interests and dangerous to regional stability. As the experts on the task force made clear, the Iranian nuclear program is now significantly more efficient and operating on a much larger scale than in the past. While the Iranians are careful to avoid so-called international redlines such as breaching 20% uranium enrichment levels, some estimate that they are only a matter of months away from breakout capability – a significant turning point where the only obstacle to weapons production would be their own restraint or military action. Read more
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The real scandal
Edward Snowden, the techie who revealed top secret National Security Agency collection programs, has opened a debate that was overdue: how much privacy are we willing the sacrifice for an uncertain security upgrade? In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it is understandable that we launched a massive effort to improve intelligence collection and enlarge the intelligence apparatus. We had been attacked. We needed to know more about what other threats were out there. The US government grounded all commercial aircraft that day. In retrospect, that was an over-reaction, since no other plotters were found, other than those who seized and crashed four planes. But at the time it was a perfectly reasonable, though costly, precaution.
It is now almost 12 years later. Very few Americans are being killed by terrorists–on the order of a dozen per year, mostly abroad in Kabul. The odds of being killed by lightning are higher. Maybe that’s because what we have done has worked well. Maybe what we did was overkill. But with time comes perspective and maybe wisdom. President Obama has vigorously defended the surveillance programs that Snowden revealed. They had been briefed to Congress and appear to have been legal. Now they should be debated in public. My bet is that most Americans will not regard what the US government is doing as excessive, until it is clearly abused and the abuses made public.
I for one don’t really much care if my emails and text messages are stored in some vast data base under a mountain in Utah. I long ago started assuming that it was all available as soon as I touched the QWERTY keys. I also have been known to go skinny dipping. I’m just not all that self-conscious. But other people are and deserve their say. I have no doubt but that abuses are possible, ranging in import from trivial to gross. One only need read how government misbehavior led to Daniel Ellsberg’s escaping judicial sanction for publishing the Pentagon papers to know that Washington is capable of doing terrible things. Read more
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Peace Picks, June 10-14
1. Drones and the Future of Counterterrorism in Pakistan, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Monday, June 10 / 5:00pm – 6:30pm
Venue: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
1779 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, D.C. 20036
Speakers: Frederic Grare, Samina Ahmed
The future use of drones in Pakistan is uncertain after President Obama’s recent speech on national security. Washington has now satisfied some of the demands of Pakistan’s incoming prime minister, Nawaz Sharif. But while drone strikes were seen in Islamabad as a violation of the country’s sovereignty, they were also arguably an effective counterterrorism mechanism. Samina Ahmed will discuss the future use of drones in Pakistan. Frederic Grare will moderate.
Register for the event here:
http://carnegieendowment.org/2013/06/10/drones-and-future-of-counterterrorism-in-pakistan/g7f0
2. Tyranny of Consensus: A Reception with Author Janne E. Nolan, Century Foundation, Monday, June 10 / 5:00pm – 6:30pm
Venue: Stimson Center, 1111 19th Street Northwest, 12th Floor, Washington D.C., DC 20036
Speakers: Janne E. Nolan
In “Tyranny of Consensus,” Nolan examines three cases-the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the proxy war with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa-to find the limitations of American policy-makers in understanding some of the important developments around the world. Assisted by a working group of senior practitioners and policy experts, Nolan finds that it is often the impulse to protect the already arrived at policy consensus that is to blame for failure. Without access to informed discourse or a functioning “marketplace of ideas,” policy-makers can find themselves unable or unwilling to seriously consider possible correctives even to obviously flawed strategies.
Register for the event here:
http://tcf.org/news_events/detail/tyranny-of-consensus-a-reception-with-author-janne-e.-nolan
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The West needs to explain
Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai, one of the better speakers on the hummus circuit these days, started this evening’s rhetorical stemwinder at the US/Islamic World Forum in Doha pretty much the way all the other non-American speakers did: with the failure of the American efforts to produce an Israel/Palestine peace agreement on the two-state model. He has no objection to Israel he said, but the Palestinians are likewise entitled to a secure and peaceful state.
But he veered quickly to colonial Afghanistan, British rule and the Americans as heirs to it, stopping along the way to note the Soviet invasion. Hold on tight now, because the roller coaster ride is about to start. Read more
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Iran: something interesting
This I missed: Iran’s presidential candidates sweeping the floor with Saeed Jalili, the apparent front runner, for lack of seriousness in pursuing a nuclear agreement with the P5+1. I am grateful to the well-informed (and informing) Laura Rozen for pointing it out to me, along with her publication of the P5+1 proposal for confidence building measures.
Together these betoken some reason for optimism about nuclear talks that have appeared to be going nowhere. Saeed Jalili is clearly the Supreme Leader’s candidate. Would the others have piled on so blatantly about his shortcomings as a negotiator without believing that there is room for debate? That is room the Supreme Leader allows them, as they are all pretty much regime loyalists. It is also room they presumably think might help them in the general public, whose votes will decide the outcome of the Iranian presidential election June 14.
But ultimately whoever is elected president will have little impact on the nuclear issue, which is very much the Supreme Leader’s turf. He has issued a fatwa against the making and use of weapons of mass destruction, as sinful and prohibited by Islam. A religious judgment of this sort can be superseded. Its validity moreover extends only to the death of its author. Western religious leaders’ strictures against nuclear weapons have not prevented their manufacture and even use. We might expect better of a religious judgment in Iran, but would we get it? Read more
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