Sanctions

/10/janoberg.jpg”> Lund, Sweden May 9, 2014 1. Welcome de-escalation Vladimir Putin’s statements that separatists should not hold referendums on May 11, that he welcomes the elections in Ukraine on May 25 and that Russia is withdrawing troops from the border with Ukraine should be welcomed. If he has been ”aggressive” and this is a ”turnabout” as many in the West believe, this turnabout is even more welcome. If he hasn’t been aggressive but merely defensive, it is still helpful in terms of defusing the crisis. 2. Constructive response from the West The only constructive approach so far seems to be OSCE chair Burkhalter’s “roadmap”. But it needs to get more concrete and detailed. We now need some constructive response from the US, NATO and EU. It would be helpful if they announced that they will not try to include Ukraine in NATO or EU for that matter but respect the...

Av Jan Öberg Dr.hc., direktör för TFF 4 maj 2014 Eliten i Sverige är mer lojal mot Nato, USA och EU än mot sitt folk • Under de senaste 25-30 åren har Sveriges militära, säkerhets- och utrikespolitiska elit vridit Sveriges politik 180 grader. • Dessa grundläggande förändringar inleddes av den socialdemokratiska regeringen under Göran Persson och utrikesminister Anna Lindh och har genomförts praktiskt taget utan offentlig debatt. • Omsvängningen till interventionism, militarism och USA/Nato på alla områden har planerats gradvis, i smyg och ohederligt – kort sagt på ett sätt som är ovärdigt en demokrati. • Denna elit är mer lojal mot Bryssel och Washington än mot svenskarna. • Om din bild av Sverige är att det är ett progressivt, förnyande och fredsfrämjande land med global inställning som försvarar folkrätten så är den – tråkigt nog – föråldrad. Hur Sverige har förändrats Sverige är inte längre neutralt och det är...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> April 29th 2014 When it comes to Ukraine the US and the EU are adopting a holier than thou attitude which, unfortunately, leads them not to worship at the alter of truth. Take the issue of the fuss made over alleged soldiers wearing Russian uniforms. They are not dressed in the smart fatigues of the unmarked Russian soldiers in Crimea, about which President Vladimir Putin has acknowledged he misled us. What these soldiers, leading the Russian-speaking revolt, are wearing can be bought in any army surplus store. As for the photos Western intelligence has persuaded much of the media to use as evidence, they are hazy and would not be admissible in a court of law. The Ukranian Security Agency announced that it captured 20 of its Russian counterparts. But then it reduced the number to 10 and then to 3. But the last figure received much less highlighting...

There is no more reliable guardian of entrenched conventional wisdom than The Economist. And so when its cover proclaims ‘the new world order,’ and removes any ambiguity from its intentions, by its portrayal of Putin as a shirtless tank commander with menacing features. No such iconography accompanied the last notable invocation of the phrase ‘new world order’ by George H. W. Bush in mobilizing support for a forcible response to the Iraqi invasion and annexation of Kuwait in 1990, the dirty work of Saddam Hussein.

I have been struck by the unhelpfulness of ideology to my own efforts to think through the complexities of recommended or preferred policy in relation to Syria, and more recently, the Ukraine. There is no obvious posture to be struck by referencing a ‘left’ or ‘right’ identity. A convincing policy proposal depends on sensitivity to context and the particulars of the conflict. To insist that the left/right distinction obscures more than it reveals is not the end of the story. To contend that ideology is unhelpful as a guide for action is not the same as saying that it is irrelevant to the public debate. In the American context, to be on the left generally implies an anti-interventionist stance, while being on the right is usually associated with being pro-interventionist. Yet, these first approximations can be misleading, even ideologically. Liberals, who are deliberately and consigned to the left by the...

/10/janoberg.jpg”> Lund, Sweden March 16, 2014 Of course it is illegal and of course it will be rigged, that referendum in Crimea today. And of course it is a ploy and comes only in the wake of Russia’s (read Putin’s) unprovoked aggression, used as a pretext to build a new Greater Russia. That is, if you browse the mainstream Western media the last week and on this Sunday morning. Referendum means referring an issue back to the people. It is – or should be – an important instrument in democracies. And it’s a much better instrument than war and other violence to settle complex conflicts. Generally, citizens-decided conflict-resolution is likely to last longer and help healing wounds of the past than any type of solution imposed by outside actors. In Switzerland citizens go and vote on all kinds of issues on many a Sunday throughout the year. Sweden has used...

By Farhang Jahanpour In his State of the Union Address on 28th February, President Barack Obama bluntly pointed out that if the hawks in Congress pushed for a bill to impose new sanctions on Iran he would veto that bill. This brave and almost unprecedented move by President Obama has silenced, at least for the time being, the opposition to the Joint Plan of Action that was agreed by Iran and the P5+1 (the five permanent Security Council members plus Germany) last November. This was a major setback for AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) and other pro-Israeli lobbies that had mobilized all their forces to block the deal. In fact, some of the Democratic Senators that had sponsored the bill to impose additional sanctions on Iran have already distanced themselves from it. Furthermore, at least seventy Members of Congress are organizing a letter to the President supporting U.S.-Iran diplomacy...

By Farhang Jahanpour Despite strong opposition by the White House and the States Department and despite the pleadings of some of the most prominent bipartisan US foreign policy luminaries who have warned that additional sanctions would jeopardize ongoing diplomatic efforts, (1) many US senators are pushing forward with a new resolution that is supported by the same neocons that brought us the Iraq war. (2) It seems that the majority of Congressmen and Senators know very little about Iranian history or what is going on in Iran at present.

This Sunday morning, I stumble upon this article on BBC’s homepage – the French foreign minister is “pessimistic” about the negotiations to be held in January in Montreaux, Switzerland about Syria. This is a slightly expanded version on what I jotted down on TFF Facebook: And then You are surprised and pessimistic that perhaps these negotiations won’t be a success !! Is that because you really always wanted peace so much? Or are you just systematically behaving as conflict illiterates, doing more harm than good?

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Now that Iran and the US have agreed to negotiate over Iran’s nuclear program hopes are rising that a deal can be made that will end the 34 year-long mutual estrangement. But wait a minute. Before we discuss the possibilities of such a deal coming to fruition there is lurking in the wings a would-be putative saboteur – Israel. At the UN last September Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented to journalists a caricature of an Iranian nuclear bomb and with a marker pen drew a red line near the top. He made it clear there was a step in the Iranian nuclear program that would be a step too far. The implication was that Israel would make air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, just as it did against Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981 and Syria’s in 2007. Netanyahu appears convinced that Iran is on the nuclear bomb route and...

While the outcome of the Iranian elections scheduled for June 14 may be hard to predict, it will make little difference as long as power remains firmly in the hands of Ayatollah Khamenei and other hard-line clerics. Indeed, while there are contending factions vying for the country’s relatively weak presidency, the narrow ideological spectrum within which candidates are allowed to run for public office offers little hope for change — at least through the electoral system. Following the 2009 election, in which the incumbent right-wing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner despite his apparent loss to the popular reformist Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the people of Iran rose up in a popular civil insurrection, which was brutally crushed. While it is hard to guess how soon democracy will come to Iran, the government’s theft of the election and subsequent crackdown — shattering the illusion many Iranians still held that they could...

Nobody celebrated the 10th anniversary of the 19-20 March 2003 coalition invasion of Iraq (not only the USA was responsible, the stupidity coalesced). Stephen Zunes [also TFF Associate, edit] summarizes the losses in one of his excellent articles in the Santa Cruz Sentinel[i]: “the death of up to half a million Iraqis, the vast majority of whom are civilians, leaving over 600.000 orphans. More than 1.3 million Iraqis have been internally displaced and nearly twice that many have fled into exile. Almost 4,500 Americans were killed and thousands more have received serious physical and emotional injuries that will plague them the rest of their lives. The war has cost US taxpayers close to $1.3 trillion”. On top of killing 1.3 million in the UN-imposed sanctions. To use expressions like “humanitarian intervention” or “human security” given such predictable insults to basic human needs and rights beats Orwell’s 1984 Newspeak. With nothing...