US Campaign to Isolate Iran Backfires
December 24, 2007
An excellent overview of recent developments.
However, it appears that the neocons have not relented entirely. Nemesis creation is a neoconservative specialty, and you can always trust them to come up with the most outlandish warnings. Jim Lobe, one of the world’s finest investigative journalists, reports that the neoconservatives are now claiming Iran poses a direct challenge to the Monroe Donctrine by intervening in the US sphere of influence in the Americas (the latter’s ‘backyard’, as it is often disparagingly called). They warn that ‘Iran’s embassy in Managua could become a base for terrorist operations against the U.S.’
‘Iran is replicating the Soviet Union’s efforts to build global power and confront the United States on multiple fronts,’ Lobe quotes another as saying, who also advises US to ‘to confront and rollback Iran at every turn.’
None of this particularly new; Frank Gaffney has been warning about the Ahmadinejad-Chavez-Ortega axis in apocalyptic terms since before the Sandinista leader reclaimed the Nicaraguan presidency last year. But, nonetheless, the neo-conservative compulsion to see in the visit of an Iranian broadcasting executive to one of the hemisphere’s poorest nations (and made much poorer as a result of Abrams’ efforts 20 years ago) a harbinger of an existential threat on a par with the Soviet Union is truly a sight to behold.
For students of US foreign policy, especially the impulses animating the different factions within the foreign policy elite, the work of Jim Lobe should be indispensable. Jim’s reports frequently contain insights and the depth of understanding missing in the contra-analytical MSM.
Daughter of the West
December 7, 2007
A very interesting round up from Tariq Ali on developments in Pakistan. He also sheds much needed light on the West’s favorite feudal democrat, Benazir Bhutto.
Arranged marriages can be a messy business. Designed principally as a means of accumulating wealth, circumventing undesirable flirtations or transcending clandestine love affairs, they often don’t work. Where both parties are known to loathe each other, only a rash parent, desensitised by the thought of short-term gain, will continue with the process knowing full well that it will end in misery and possibly violence. That this is equally true in political life became clear in the recent attempt by Washington to tie Benazir Bhutto to Pervez Musharraf.
The single, strong parent in this case was a desperate State Department – with John Negroponte as the ghoulish go-between and Gordon Brown as the blushing bridesmaid – fearful that if it did not push this through both parties might soon be too old for recycling. The bride was certainly in a hurry, the groom less so. Brokers from both sides engaged in lengthy negotiations on the size of the dowry. Her broker was and remains Rehman Malik, a former boss of Pakistan’s FIA, who has been investigated for corruption by the National Accountability Bureau and who served nearly a year in prison after Benazir’s fall, then became one of her business partners and is currently under investigation (with her) by a Spanish court looking into a company called Petroline FZC, which made questionable payments to Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Documents, if genuine, show that she chaired the company. She may have been in a hurry but she did not wish to be seen taking the arm of a uniformed president. He was not prepared to forgive her past. The couple’s distaste for each other yielded to a mutual dependence on the United States. Neither party could say ‘no’, though Musharraf hoped the union could be effected inconspicuously. Fat chance.
The Quaint Contradictions of Dubai
November 30, 2007
A friend of mind described Dubai as a Xanadu-meets-Disneyland architectural abomination. But the reality of Dubai is even more surreal. The condition under which immigrant workers in U.A.E work is by now well know, but the veritable police state that this dazzling facade conceals is not. The Guardian recently published an interesting story from a British-American academic who was subjected to a 13 hour investigation by the Secret Police for his research work on expatriates in Dubai. The following part of the story is noteworthy:
Good cop also came to the nub of what I’d got myself into when he told me he liked me, but had doubts about my funding. “What do you mean?” I asked. “I think it is the Jewish,” he said. “Why would ‘the Jewish’ be funding me, a Muslim American, to ask questions of people in Dubai?” “I do not know, but I think it is them … and maybe the CIA.”
In many Middle-Eastern countries distrust of Jews is quite widespread since the representative face of Judaism for them has always been the Israeli occupation soldier brutalizing a fellow Arab. But in Dubai this couldn’t be much of a consideration since in 2006 when Israel launched its brutal assault on Lebanon, UAE joined Saudi, Egypt and Jordan in condemning the Lebanese resistance instead. But more interestingly, YNet is now reporting that Dubai will now be home to the first Israeli store in the region. ‘Ml clothing chain, which specializes in large sizes, to open four stores in prestigious Dubai shopping areas’, it reports.
Only in Saudi Arabia
November 16, 2007
…or Musharraf’s Pakistan does a rape victim get punished along with the rapist (more often the rapists go free). This is the country which is forever seeking legitimacy on the grounds that it is home to two of Islam’s holiest sights, yet it demolishes others to build shopping malls and parking lots. And then there is its idea of justice, which makes the pre-Islamic age of Jahiliyya appear more reasonable by comparison. Here BBC reports: ‘ Saudi gang-rape victim is jailed‘.
An appeal court in Saudi Arabia has doubled the number of lashes and added a jail sentence as punishment for a woman who was gang-raped.
The victim was initially punished for violating laws on segregation of the sexes – she was in an unrelated man’s car at the time of the attack.
When she appealed, the judges said she had been attempting to use the media to influence them.
The attackers’ sentences – originally of up to five years – were doubled.
