Left Flank

Continue the interview with Part 2.

I want to believe the trends are good, and Reihan Salam is right.

But Maliki did something unexpected: He fired those who refused to fight and pressed on with the offensive, in Basra and also in Sadr City, where a second front opened up. A tenuous ceasefire took hold in Basra, and ISF forces have cleared the streets of the militias, using tactics drawn from the surge. This was done with a strikingly small number of American and British troops, though coalition assistance proved crucial. And now, as The New York Times reported yesterday, something resembling normal life is taking hold. In particular, the vigilantes who use violence to enforce their allegedly Islamic ethical code have been driven out, and you can once again hear music playing in the streets.

Though these gains may be temporary, there has also been a more lasting change: The Sadrists have been marginalized. Even the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has been reluctant to make political interventions in recent years, pointedly condemned Sadr for refusing to disarm. Leading Sunni faction have also returned to the fold. The Kurds, who have their own problems with Sadr, are also on board. Maliki, suprisingly enough, increasingly looks like the leader of all Iraqis.

So what does this mean for our debate over Iraq? Advocates of withdrawal will insist that Maliki's forces are just as penetrated by the Iranians as the Sadrist militias. But as noted above, this reflects a simple misunderstanding of Iranian influence. The fighting in Basra and Sadr City hasn't simply pitted one set of Iranian-backed militas (one in ISF uniforms) against another, and it's clear that the forces that controlled Basra weren't popular at all: The city really was, as Maliki argued, in the grip of criminal gangs who terrorized the population.

Alternatively, proponents of withdrawal will argue that Maliki's Charge of the Knights would have failed without substantial American assistance, which is true -- but it's also true that the ISF has become an increasingly effective fighting force. Moreover, the successes of the last month demonstrate that Maliki's government isn't the Vichy government the most strident anti-war voices have suggested. Rather, it is a government that actually represents the interests of Iraq's vast majority.

The smartest case for withdrawal would acknowledge this new reality, and claim that it demonstrates that coalition forces are superfluous and can thus be safely withdrawn. It's true that Maliki's government now has momentum, and would have a fighting chance to survive if U.S. forces are rapidly withdrawn. But the government's chances would be far stronger with a continued American presence backing its efforts up. Unfortunately, few Americans understand what Maliki has accomplished, and how much international assistance he needs to beat back foreign elements that aim to undermine Iraq's fragile democracy -- which is, as far as neighboring governments are concerned (particularly those that begin with an "I" and end with an "n"), a profoundly subversive influence.

But, in no way will I accept any Bush administration official telling me this was the plan all along. Getting it right, by doing the right thing, the first time is the only way to go.

After reading O'Sullivan's Shrewd Sanctions: Statecraft and State Sponsors of Terrorism (2003) about a year ago, but this was the first time I've listened to her, particularly about the Iraq War. O'Sullivan disagrees with a Democratic proposal to withdraw precipitously, because withdrawal will cause Iraqi politicians to retreat into their partisan communities and eschew the sort of nationalizing reforms Baghdad needs to enact.

Of course, that's if one argues Iraq should, or can, achieve centralized, as opposed to a federal, government.

With the recent disclosures about DPRK-Syria cooperation at al-Kibar, context is a rare commodity, and The Economist delivers.

Judging by its past behaviour, North Korea would do pretty much anything for cash; there are suspicions that it helped the Khan network supply nuclear material to Libya. That said, providing engineers and designs for Syria's reactor may chiefly have been meant to tweak America's nose, says Michael Green, a former Bush administration official now at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington, DC.

The Bush administration and North Korea fell out badly in 2002 over charges that Kim Jong Il's regime had secretly been trying to enrich uranium (also a potential bomb ingredient) while plutonium production was frozen by a previous agreement. The following year North Korea privately threatened to expand its «deterrent», test it (which it later did) and even sell it. With little to export beyond counterfeit currency, drugs and crises, says Mr Green, North Korea used Syria to up the ante—and the expected compensation for later agreeing to desist.

Now America and Mr Kim are negotiating again as part of a six-party deal (also including South Korea, Japan, China and Russia) to tempt him to give up his bombs. Senior American officials last week acknowledged that they had debated whether to try a combination of diplomacy and threats to end the Syrian project. For Israel, however, the Syrian reactor was an existential threat-in-the-making. There was no green light from the United States, the officials said: «none was asked for, none was given.»

Hoping to avoid retaliation, and to head off the risk of a wider Middle East war, Israel wanted the intelligence that led to the bombing kept secret. Worried that wider disclosure would sink the six-party effort too, America briefed only a score of senior members of Congress at the time.

But now the administration needs Congress's support for a controversial deal that could fall significantly short of the prize that the six-party negotiations were supposed to deliver: that, in return for oodles of energy aid and a lifting of some key sanctions, North Korea would first provide a full and accurate accounting of its nuclear past and later dismantle all its nuclear programmes. Instead it has merely declared a rather modest stockpile of plutonium and dug its heels in. Trying to move talks forward, American diplomats have struck a tentative deal that would allow North Korea to «acknowledge» American «concerns» about uranium and proliferation activities, in return for better verification of Yongbyon's plutonium haul. But the backtracking led Congress to demand the facts on Syria first.

George Bush said this week that by going public, America wanted to press North Korea's (notoriously impervious) Kim Jong Il into fuller disclosure, and send a message to proliferators everywhere. But the Syrian pictures may just as easily lead Congress to demand that America adopt a tougher stance in the six-party talks.

Another casualty could be the NPT itself. The IAEA's boss, Mohamed ElBaradei, says inspectors should have been given information about the Syrian reactor sooner by America and Israel. Yet Syria, had it not chosen to deny all, could have claimed that technically it was doing nothing wrong. Building a nuclear reactor is not against NPT rules, unless done with weapons intent—and that is hard, if not impossible, for inspectors to prove, says Henry Sokolski of the Non-proliferation Policy Education Centre in Washington. However, under a 1992 rule accepted by Syria, it should have alerted the IAEA to its reactor plans before construction started. North Korea, Iran and now Syria. The NPT seems there for the breaking.

Firstly, comes NPT reform and a proper way to share intelligence. And then, the US can deal with its armistice with the DPRK. In that order!

Putting the al-Kibar «reactor» disclosures into a geostrategic framework is necessary. Stratfor's George Friedman discusses a possible Israel-Syria agreement:

Iran will not be happy about all this. Tehran has invested a fair amount of resources in bulking up Hezbollah, and will not be pleased to see the militia shift from Syrian management to Syrian control. But in the end, what can Iran do? It cannot support Hezbollah directly, and even if it were to attempt to undermine Damascus, those Syrians most susceptible to Tehran's Shiite-flavored entreaties are the Alawites themselves.

The other player that at the very least would be uneasy about all of this is the United States. The American view of Syria remains extremely negative, still driven by the sense that the Syrians continue to empower militants in Iraq. Certainly that aid — and that negative U.S. feeling — is not as intense as it was two years ago, but the Americans might not feel that this is the right time for such a deal. Thus, the release of the information on the Syrian reactor might well have been an attempt to throw a spoke in the wheel of the Israeli-Syrian negotiations.

This interpretation is further reinforced by independent analyses of those videos from al-Kibar.

Professor William Beeman at the University of Minnesota passed along a note today from «a colleague with a U.S. security clearance» about the mysterious Syrian site targeted in a Sept. 6 Israeli airstrike.

The note raises more questions about the evidence shown last week by U.S. intelligence officials to lawmakers in the House and Senate.

1. Satellite photos of the alleged reactor building show no air defenses or anti-aircraft batteries such as the ones found around the Natanz nuclear site in central Iran.
2. The satellite images do not show any military checkpoints on roads near the building.
3. Where are the power lines? The photos show neither electricity lines or substations.
4. Here is a link to a photo of the North Korean facility that the Syrian site was based on. Look at all the buildings surrounding it. The Syrian site was just one building.

The author of the note pinpoints irregularities about the photographs. Beeman's source alleges that the CIA «enhanced» some of the images.

Gee, I feel so empowered to be a minor dupe in a diplomatic ploy!

Image by peace chicken via Flickr

There has already been much discussion about the remaining mysteries surrounding the Syrian plutonium-generation reactor. My own guess (and it is just a guess) is that the Syrian reactor was the fruit of a three-way partnership composed of Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Iran provided the money, idea, and leadership. Iran ordered Syria to provide the site and some of the labor. North Korea provided the expertise, for which Iran paid (directly or indirectly) in cash.

But where Westhawk is even more helpful is the other half of his post: , the NPT system is broken, so he asks, «What will replace the broken NPT-IAEA system?» I would argue that the system is fundamentally sound, if only nuclear powers with intelligence assets would share information and let the IAEA do its job.

The challenge of proliferation control lies not in the lack of proven techniques but in the absence of moral suasion and sustained diplomacy by the world leaders. The American government subsidized the spread of nuclear knowledge through the Atoms for Peace program to counter Soviet influence, and at virtually every critical juncture since then successive administrations have set aside long-term proliferation goals in favor of short-term strategic priorities. (Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz, The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets, and How We Could Have Stopped Him, p. 1844, Palm e-book)

Collins and Frantz advocate the following proposals to fix the system:

• a moratorium on enriched uranium;
• revision of the NPT, including eliminating the right to opt-out and a UN commitment to sanction violators;
• the reduction of nuclear arsenals and a moratorium on the creation of a new generation of weapons;
• restrictions on sales of nuclear technology;
• monitoring of civilian nuclear industries;
• intelligence-sharing

With the exception of sanctions, which are generally a worse remedy than the problems they seek to cure, this is a sane international nuclear policy

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In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith experiences an epiphany during a war rally when he realizes, that «…the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax…. Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete.»i During the commotion, Smith receives a copy of an illegal, secret tome, «The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism«, written by a member of the Brotherhood, Emmanuel Goldstein. Nestled in an armchair, Smith reads about the geopolitical reality underlying the continuous wars in a chapter entitled, «War is Peace». Three super-states, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia are locked in a cycle of warfare for control of cheap labor in a western Asian and African shatter zone and to mobilize their respective citizens in perpetual mobilization.

Lost In Eurasian Land Lust: A Critique of Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard - Get more documents

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«Why did fate have to throw me into the peaceful lives of honest smugglers Like a stone hurled into the placid surface of a pond I had disturbed their tranquility, and like a stone had nearly gone to the bottom myself!»i Like Mikhail Lermontov's fictional account of Pechorin's encounter with smugglers in «Taman» in A Hero of Our Time, I am not certain if one could legitimately label Robert D. Kaplan in Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, or any number of politicians, border guards, and professors he interviews, a victim. In Lermontov's «Taman», the seducer, Pechorin, unwittingly becomes the pawn and victim of a «supple», singing smuggler, and then a boy thief steals his saber and dagger. Kaplan might lose a little cash obtaining a visa on his running interview from Hungary to Armenia, but his interviewees always steal an opportunity to tell their respective tales. I would like to believe Kaplan orchestrated his interviews as cunningly as he organized his itinerary from one storied city to another, but like Lermontov, whose realistic portrait of the depraved Pechorin is nearly lost among his sordidly colorful characters and the enchanting Caucasus itself, Kaplan reveals a cramped world full of crooks and despots.

Pechorin's Ghost: A Critique of Kaplan's Eastward To Tartary - Get more documents