Security and defence

By Farhang Jahanpour After four weeks of savage bombing of their impoverished neighbor, Yemen, the Saudis declared “Mission Accomplished”, and promised to halt their aerial bombardment at midnight on 22 April 2015. Yet only three hours later, they resumed their attacks with greater intensity from the sea and the air. Although the conflict in Yemen has been going on for four years, it was the new 79-year old Saudi King Salman and his young son Muhammad bin Salman (believed to be between 27 and 33 years old) who has been appointed defense minister as well as running the royal court and the newly formed Economic and Development Affairs Council, in addition to being a member of the Political and Security Affairs Council, another key decision-making body, who decided to start the aerial bombing of Yemen. The Saudis turning Yemen into another Libya or Syria After having helped the attacks on Libya that...

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By Gareth Porter, TFF Associate* The framework agreement reached on Thursday night clearly gives the P5+1 a combination of constraints on Iran’s nuclear programme that should reassure all but the most bellicose opponents of diplomacy. It also provides the basis for at least a minimum of sanctions relief in the early phase of its implementation that Iran required, but some of the conditions on that relief are likely create new issue between Iran and the Western powers over the process. The agreement’s dependence on decisions by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the penchant of Israeli intelligence for discovering new evidence of illicit Iranian activities will encourage moves to delay or obstruct relief of sanctions. US and European officials had been telling reporters that they would phase out their sanctions on oil and banking in return for Iranian actions to modify its programme only gradually over several years, and...

By Jonathan Power American Middle East interventionists chide President Barack Obama for not doing more. Why is the US running away from Yemen, why didn’t the US go into Syria and depose President Bashar al-Assad, why did Obama pull troops out of Iraq prematurely, why isn’t he putting “boots on the ground” in the fight against the Islamic State (ISIS)? Why, in short, doesn’t the US use its military might to subdue the stormy parts of the Middle East? The first answer must be that he does not have to be George W. Bush’s surrogate. It was Bush who triggered much of the upheavals with his invasion of Iraq – although ex-President Jimmy Carter bears the responsibility for arming the Taliban and thus the establishment of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Why should Obama want to continue to try and mop up after Bush’s dirty work, especially as more intervention is...

Jan Oberg commenting on Iranian President Rouhani: “Tehran abides by commitments, if P5 1 fulfills promises” – YouTube/PressTV http://ow.ly/LbX3d In spite of the deal’s negative sides, Iran has chosen peace to the benefit of the world. In that perspective it is much more than a nuclear deal, it’s – potentially – a road to peace.

By Johan Galtung Hitler was about race, Stalin about class. Their theories were based on one contradiction: Aryans vs non-Aryans for one; workers vs capitalists/landowners for the other. The ills of their countries followed from the contradictions at the top of their verbal pyramids. As Western intellectuals they tried to explain much from one axiom. Thus, to Hitler bolsheviks and plutocrats were both mainly Jewish. Their utopias were contradiction-free, by cleansing; ethnic for Hitler, class for Stalin. Only Aryans; all others killed-expelled-marginalized by the power of the NSDAP, National-Socialist German Labor Party for one; all capitalists/landowners killed-expelled-marginalized by the power of the vanguard of the proletariat CPSU(B), the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik) for the other. So similar that one may ask: did they imitate each other? Like armies becoming similar by fighting, so also the machines for reshaping societies in the European civil war 1917-1945 (plus minus...

Who wrote this? “The Aryan stock is bound to triumph”. “The Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd) – all Jews” “The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews – in Hungary” “The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany–preying” “-the schemes of the international Jews /against/ spiritual hopes” “-this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization” “-it played recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution” “-the mainspring in every subversive movement in the 19th century” Churchill did. Here quoted from Robert Barsocchini in Countercurrents in February 2015. His point was not that Jews were active in many places, the point is that for Churchill they were the cause of all the revolutions, the root of evil, not, for instance, feudalism gone mad. What does Churchill, a top politician, believe in? (same source): “-the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years” “-100,000 degenerate Britons sterilized /to...

/10/janoberg.jpg”>[/caption] Lund, Sweden, March 13, 2015 If the parties continue this way, there will be no peace in Ukraine but probably war in Europe. With a little out-of-the-box thinking, we could move in a safer direction. You’ve heard everybody involved in the Ukraine conflict solemnly declare that there is no military solution. And what do they all do? Right, they militarise the situation further, use bellicose language, speak bad about each other, take provocative steps, use propaganda and flex their military muscles. It’s thoughtprovokingly thoughtless. These men – sorry, but the are all men – who are competent in war and other violence run our world. They are conflict and peace illiterates embedded with MIMACs – Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complexes – which exist in both Russia, EU, NATO and the U.S. It’s not about evil – they are probably all good spouses, nice to their children or grandchildren and enjoy literature, painting...

By Gunnar Westberg A memory: Russia as a candidate for NATO membership Members of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, IPPNW, have for many years regularly visited the NATO Headquarters in Brussels. We also had good contacts with Russian military officers and Foreign Office politicians. In the middle of the nineties members of NATO’s commission on Nuclear Weapons asked if we could arrange a meeting in Moscow, “because we meet the Russians only under very formal circumstances”. Some open discussions over the vodka were hoped for. We arranged the meeting and got a group of leading Russian military brass and politicians on the participant list. But NATO hesitated. We were told they could not afford the trip… Finally only one officer, a Canadian, came from Brussels. So there we were with a group of disappointed Russian officers. The NATO representative in Moscow showed up for a couple of...

/10/janoberg.jpg”>[/caption] Let’s be cautiously optimistic; the meeting did not break down and a ceasefire document was signed. But that is a minimum in this extremely tense situation. One would have hoped for more than what seems to be a revision of the first Minsk agreement. What are the next steps for this ceasefire agreement to lead to a peace plan, the two things being vitally different? First, what no one talks about, it seems: A rather large UN peace-keeping and peace-making force with a unit of some 8.000-10.000 robust military from countries completely neutral to this conflict. The classical three legs: military, civil police and civil affairs, perhaps 20.000 in all. Why the military component? Because the OSCE can monitor and report but it cannot enforce. And because the parties don’t trust each other. And why should this agreement be more durable than the first without it? If on the...

/10/janoberg.jpg”>[/caption] No matter what you may think of Putin and Russia this is simply not the way international politics should be conducted, particularly not at the personal level. If it wasn’t an offence to children, one would aptly characterise it as childish behaviour. Western leaders ignored a brilliant opportunity to meet face-to-face with Vladimir Putin and move forward towards mutual understanding instead of signalling that they want a new Cold War. Western leaders tell us that Russia is a ”threat to the world”. That obviously serves other purposes because you don’t bully someone you genuinely fear. The G20 Brisbane should be remembered for its show of Western leaders’ personal display of weakness and conflict illiteracy. Pummelled Putin punching bag CNN reports that, during the meeting, Putin took ”pummelling” and was treated as a ”punching bag” by Western leaders from he set foot on Australian soil where his Australian host had...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Just before former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev on Saturday made his stunning criticism of the West that, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it had engaged in “triumphalism”, I was in Moscow. Everyone I talked to said the West had set out to humiliate Russia (not to help rebuild it as it did in Germany after the Second World War). Gorbachev has long been the West’s pet political darling, (although the New York Times didn’t report this speech) – for undoing the straitjacket that enveloped Soviet society, for allowing the reunification of Germany and for being the major contributor to ending the Cold War. So the question is will the West listen to him now? Will it listen to his point that the expansion of NATO has made Russia feel threatened? Will it understand that there is a good reason why he and an overwhelming majority of Russians...