Britain, E.U. Plan Iran Sanctions

16 June 2008

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Monday announced plans for new sanctions against Iran and a small increase in troops for Afghanistan, handing President Bush a symbolic boost on the last day of his weeklong farewell trip to Europe.

Brown, appearing with Bush at a 10 Downing Street news conference, said Britain and the European Union are expected to act to freeze the assets of Iran’s largest bank, Bank Melli, in response to Tehran’s refusal to suspend its uranium enrichment program.

[...]

European action against Bank Melli comes on top of restrictions imposed in October 2007 when the U.S. Treasury Department froze bank assets and halted transactions as part of a broader package of sanctions against state-owned Iranian financial institutions. Bank Melli allegedly sent $100 million to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups from 2002 to 2006, according to Treasury officials.

Treasury has also cut off another major Iranian bank, Bank Saderat, from the U.S. financial system.

“This has been a good trip,” President Bush said at the news conference.

Meanwhile, Israeli sabre-rattling ratchets up another notch, as Der Spiegel reports:

‘MISSION DOABLE’: Israeli Ministers Mull Plans for Military Strike against Iran

The Israeli government no longer believes that sanctions can prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons. A broad consensus in favor of a military strike against Tehran’s nuclear facilities — without the Americans, if necessary — is beginning to take shape.

UPDATE from Reuters via Cryptogon:

TEHRAN (Reuters) – Iran has withdrawn around $75 billion from Europe to prevent the assets from being blocked under threatened new sanctions over Tehran’s disputed nuclear ambitions, an Iranian weekly said.

Press TV, 10 June 2008: Israel launches ‘Iran Command’ for war

BBC, 10 June 2008: US and EU issue new Iran warning (more sanctions threatened)

McClatchy, 11 June 2008: Strike on Iran nuclear sites under discussion again

AP, via Newsday, 12 June 2008: Bush, in Germany, hints at military option on Iran

Jim Lobe speculates a bit, asking: “War?”

Chris Hedges points out that Saint Obama won’t end to US designs on Iran in The Iran Trap

Dear Libertarians,

Most of you have staked all of your hopes on Ron Paul. He has been defeated, during the course of the popularity pageant we call the democratic process.

The Libertarian Party has existed for more than thirty years, with no concrete results under its belt except a few local, irrelevant posts. Perhaps you believe it is the only solution. Perhaps you believe that the sole alternative to political evils is a violent revolution, and thus prefer the evils to violence, and call it “necessary” (as if anything evil could be necessary).

Suffrage is… powerless and unreliable. It can be exercised only periodically; and the tyranny must at least be borne until the time for suffrage comes. Besides, when the suffrage is exercised, it gives no guaranty for the repeal of existing laws that are oppressive, and no security against the enactment of new ones that are equally so.

Lysander Spooner

Or perhaps you may now be coming to the same realization that Anarchist writers have written about for centuries:

No political means have ever produced lasting freedom. Political means can engender nothing but the sustenance of political means. Only disengagement and principled resistance can produce lasting freedom.

With very few and very temporary exceptions, no government has ever been made smaller by political means. No successful movement for freedom in history has ever been guided by any other principle but disengagement and principled resistance.

From Étienne de la Boétie, 16th century precursor of the modern Anarchist movements, to Murray Rothbard, founder of the modern Market Anarchist movement, all are in agreement: disengagement is the best way to oppose the ever-growing State.

The surest sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. Libertarians, is what you’ve been doing working, and if not, why do you keep doing it? Has the constant compromise of your principles (culminating in the nomination of Bob Barr for candidate, who is about as libertarian as George Bush) resulted in any success?

Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.

William Lloyd Garrison, on the emancipation movement

You believe in smaller government. We are on your side. But libertarianism cannot be fulfilled by political means, and it cannot be fulfilled by violent revolution. The only way through which libertarianism can be fulfilled is disengagement. This is the method that Market Anarchists have always preached and followed.

How can disengagement succeed where political means and violent revolutions fail? Because the State can only survive when we, the people, believe in its legitimacy and treat State law, State “justice,” war, taxation and democracy as “necessary evils.” If a mere 10% of the people in any society refuse to vote, refuse to pay their taxes, refuse to recognize the legitimacy of State courts and the State police, establish their own voluntary courts and security, and promote a peaceful, voluntary way of life to the majority, then the State will be exposed as the criminal gang that it is.

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, ‘But what shall I do?’ my answer is, ‘If you really wish to do any thing, resign your office.’ When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.

Henry David Thoreau

But most of you do not want Anarchy. This is well understood. However, some Market Anarchies in the past have had a legislative or law enforcement structure (e.g. the well-documented example of Iceland). I would like to submit to you that the establishment of such a structure is far more likely than any Libertarian political victory. Once the State is dissolved, I believe that most people will readily join the principles of freedom that you espouse: “as long as you don’t harm me, I won’t harm you.”

Ron Paul had a lot of good ideas, but he was wrong about one thing. He believed that the “role of government” was to protect and serve us. No government in history has ever done this. The role of government is to cheat, steal, and kill, for the profit of its members. We constantly observe this to be a fact in all its actions.

Hitch your wagon to ours. We have the ideals, the arguments, and the methods to change society forever. With your help, we cannot fail.

Francois Tremblay, in the name of all Market Anarchists
Mike Gogulski, in his name alone

As things look, Israel may well attack Iran soon

By Joschka Fischer

As a result of misguided American policy, the threat of another military confrontation hangs like a dark cloud over the Middle East. The United States’ enemies have been strengthened, and Iran – despite being branded as a member of the so-called “axis of evil” – has been catapulted into regional hegemony. Iran could never have achieved this on its own, certainly not in such a short time.

A hitherto latent rivalry between Iran and Israel thus has been transformed into an open struggle for dominance in the Middle East. The result has been the emergence of some surprising, if not bizarre, alliances: Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas and the American-backed, Shiite-dominated Iraq are facing Israel, Saudi Arabia, and most of the other Sunni Arab states, all of which feel existentially threatened by Iran’s ascendance.

The danger of a major confrontation has been heightened further by a series of factors: persistently high oil prices, which have created new financial and political opportunities for Iran; the possible defeat of the West and its regional allies in proxy wars in Gaza and Lebanon; and the United Nations Security Council’s failure to induce Iran to accept even a temporary freeze of its nuclear program.

Iran’s nuclear program is the decisive factor in this equation, for it threatens irreversibly the region’s strategic balance. That Iran – a country whose president never tires of calling for Israel’s annihilation and that threatens Israel’s northern and southern borders through its massive support of proxy wars waged by Hizbullah and Hamas – might one day have missiles with nuclear warheads is Israel’s worst security nightmare. Politics is not just about facts, but also about perceptions. Whether or not a perception is accurate is beside the point, because it nonetheless leads to decisions.

This applies in particular when the perception concerns what the parties consider to be threats to their very existence. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threats of annihilation are taken seriously in Israel because of the trauma of the Holocaust. And most Arab governments share the fear of a nuclear Iran. Earlier this month, Israel celebrated its 60th birthday, and US President George W. Bush went to Jerusalem to play a leading part in the commemoration. But those who had expected that his visit would mainly be about the stalled negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians were bitterly disappointed. Bush’s central topic, including his speech to Israel’s Knesset, was Iran. Bush had promised to bring the Middle East conflict closer to a resolution before the end of his term this year. But his final visit to Israel seemed to indicate that his objective was different: he seemed to be planning, together with Israel, to end the Iranian nuclear program – and to do so by military, rather than by diplomatic, means.

Anyone following the press in Israel during the anniversary celebrations and listening closely to what was said in Jerusalem did not have to be a prophet to understand that matters are coming to a head. Consider the following:

First, “stop the appeasement!” is a demand raised across the political spectrum in Israel – and what is meant is the nuclear threat emanating from Iran.

Second, while Israel celebrated, Defense Minister Ehud Barak was quoted as saying that a life-and-death military confrontation was a distinct possibility.

Third, the outgoing commander of the Israeli Air Force declared that the air force was capable of any mission, no matter how difficult, to protect the country’s security. The destruction of a Syrian nuclear facility last year, and the lack of any international reaction to it, were viewed as an example for the coming action against Iran.

Fourth, the Israeli wish list for US arms deliveries, discussed with the American president, focused mainly on the improvement of the attack capabilities and precision of the Israeli Air Force.

Fifth, diplomatic initiatives and UN sanctions when it comes to Iran are seen as hopelessly ineffective.

And sixth, with the approaching end of the Bush presidency and uncertainty about his successor’s policy, the window of opportunity for Israeli action is seen as potentially closing.

The last two factors carry special weight. While Israeli military intelligence is on record as saying that Iran is expected to cross the red line on the path to nuclear power between 2010 and 2015 at the earliest, the feeling in Israel is that the political window of opportunity to attack is now, during the last months of Bush’s presidency.

Although it is acknowledged in Israel that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would involve grave and hard-to-assess risks, the choice between acceptance of an Iranian bomb and an attempt at its military destruction, with all the attendant consequences, is clear. Israel won’t stand by and wait for matters to take their course.

The Middle East is drifting toward a new great confrontation in 2008. Iran must understand that without a diplomatic solution in the coming months, a dangerous military conflict is very likely to erupt. It is high time for serious negotiations to begin.

The most recent offer by the six powers – the UN Security Council’s five permanent members plus Germany – is on the table, and it goes very far in accommodating Iran’s interests. The decisive question, however, will be whether it will be possible to freeze the Iranian nuclear program for the duration of the negotiations to avoid a military confrontation before these negotiations are completed. Should this newest attempt fail, things will soon get serious. Deadly serious.

From Asia Times Online:

Bush ‘plans Iran air strike by August’

NEW YORK – The George W Bush administration plans to launch an air strike against Iran within the next two months, an informed source tells Asia Times Online, echoing other reports that have surfaced in the media in the United States recently.

Two key US senators briefed on the attack planned to go public with their opposition to the move, according to the source, but their projected New York Times op-ed piece has yet to appear.

The source, a retired US career diplomat and former assistant secretary of state still active in the foreign affairs community, speaking anonymously, said last week that that the US plans an air strike against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The air strike would target the headquarters of the IRGC’s elite Quds force. With an estimated strength of up to 90,000 fighters, the Quds’ stated mission is to spread Iran’s revolution of 1979 throughout the region.

Targets could include IRGC garrisons in southern and southwestern Iran, near the border with Iraq. US officials have repeatedly claimed Iran is aiding Iraqi insurgents. In January 2007, US forces raided the Iranian consulate general in Erbil, Iraq, arresting five staff members, including two Iranian diplomats it held until November. Last September, the US Senate approved a resolution by a vote of 76-22 urging President George W Bush to declare the IRGC a terrorist organization. Following this non-binding “sense of the senate” resolution, the White House declared sanctions against the Quds Force as a terrorist group in October. The Bush administration has also accused Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons program, though most intelligence analysts say the program has been abandoned.

An attack on Iraq would fit the Bush administration’s declared policy on Iraq. Administration officials questioned directly about military action against Iran routinely assert that “all options remain on the table”.

Related:

• CASMII summary of recent anti-Iran sabre-rattling
• Israeli PM Olmert requests US act of war against Iran
• Arch-criminal Kissinger’s “other measures” for Iran
• Hypocritical toward Iran nuclear issue: how shocking!
• Bush’s Iran diplomacy is a sham; admits US Defence Secretary
• US, Israel signal war on Iran
• War with Iran might be closer than you think
• Report: US convenes on Iran war scenario

“Oppose the war; support the troops.”

The idea had a certain strategic logic to it. Our opinion was a minority one, and offending the millions with military members in their families or otherwise close to them didn’t seem like a terribly bright way of getting the peace message across. We also somewhat accepted the logic that the people in the military had signed up to defend America; that they were being sent to a criminal war for profit on the other side of the globe wasn’t really their fault, they’d been hoodwinked.

So, all of those well thought out banner ideas like “US Military: Millions of Murderers in Uniform” were left aside so that we might more effectively get the peace message across and avoid offending anyone’s precious sensibilities. We stuck instead to our peace signs and our rainbows and our doves and our “No blood for oil” lines. We endured the taunts from the counter-protests: “My country, right or wrong!” “America, love it or leave it!” “Traitors!” and so on. And we gingerly protested in our carefully cordoned-off free speech zones or under city permit permission, got ourselves in the papers and all cried together and lit candles as the radio reports started coming in of the missiles and bombs striking Baghdad. And, of course, none of it made a damned bit of difference.

credit: wardolino @ flickr.com

It always bothered me, though, this “support the troops” idea. Sure, it was a smart strategic play, but in stark conflict to the rest of what we thought we were doing. We were here to bring the truth to an ignorant, deluded or sleeping public, and the whole truth, nothing but. That truth must have necessarily included the realization that these amorphous “troops” we were enjoined to support were actually individual, thinking, morally responsible men and women. It must have included the knowledge that each and every “troop” currently engaged in mass murder in our names had volunteered. And we knew, as they should have, that the murderous, destructive, obscene organization they volunteered to serve, hadn’t conducted a legitimate “defense of America” since at least WWII, and maybe as far back as the War of 1812, depending on whose Pearl Harbor narrative you believe.

They weren’t conscripted, they weren’t shanghaied, they weren’t tricked into signing up and donning the uniform and picking up the gun. They sought out the role, they agreed to follow orders, they signed the papers, and nowhere along the way did they somehow become transformed from individual human beings, morally responsible for their individual acts of violence and destruction into those collectively romanticized “troops”. Some small number said, “I didn’t sign up for this,” and did the only moral thing possible, which was to desert. The rest marched freely onto the planes and ships and deployed, the willing agents of empire. Certainly in many, the thought was there afterward: “We didn’t sign up for that,” but still they went, perhaps finding their own moral cover in the notion they’d been tricked. Likely, most found no moral problem with going at all.

Even today, the “support the troops” mentality is embedded in the tactics and rhetoric of the organized anti-war movement, implicitly or explicitly. It’s considered bad form to condemn the American armed services en masse for their self-subjugation to the American empire’s war machine.

another victim of empire

Unlike Gulf War I, though, Gulf War II, freshly turned five years old, is an occupation. It is an obviously immoral war launched on the flimsiest of concocted excuses and conducted with the most sinister of aims. The history of Gulf War I, the suffering inflicted on Iraq by a decade of sanctions, the horror of depleted uranium weapons residues and unexploded landmines and other ordnance from the first attack should have made it obvious to anyone that a crime had been committed there. A massive, inexcusable, inhuman, monstrous, treasonous crime.

And yet, most of the military personnel that have served in the current conflict up to the present weren’t in the military for the first. They signed up, willingly. If they didn’t know the history of what the US military actually did for the prior fifty years, flag-waving nonsense and Cold War turned War on Terror hysteria aside, their foolishness should not excuse them. If they learned nothing from the lessons of Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Lebanon or other places that the empire had been sticking its nose and its guns into, well, we should let neither ignorance nor willful blindness be an excuse. Unjust, illegal wars do not just happen by themselves. They are the sum total of millions of individual decisions by millions of individually responsible people to obey, topped by whatever dark cabal is giving the orders for the week.

Further, probably close to half or more of those still in Iraq today signed up after the war’s justifications had evaporated, after the stories of casual murder, collective punishment and institutionalized torture were already splashed on television screens and across newspaper headlines worldwide. They, especially, should have known better.

So, I will not support the troops. In fact, fuck the troops! Each and every US serviceperson today who is not deserting, refusing to follow orders or turning their weapons on their commanders is, in fact, a criminal, and one for whom we should feel neither sympathy nor pity, let alone the specious solidarity of “support the troops” when it’s those same “troops” who are carrying out slaughter, destruction and torture in our name.

credit: wardolino @ flickr.com

At the same time, fuck all those who support the troops! If history, recent or ancient, hasn’t been sufficient to educate you on the true nature of war and the true nature of the predatory, inhuman power you seem so eager to serve, then damn you for your stupidity, damn you for your ignorance, damn you for your blindness, damn you for your fallacious morality. And this goes not only for every family member or friend of someone serving in the US military today who is NOT insistently urging their child or husband or wife or friend to desert or disobey, it goes also for every federal employee and for every shareholder and employee from janitor to CEO of the military-industrial-terrorism complex and the companies that comprise it: Blackwater, Halliburton, Boeing, General Dynamics, Allied-Signal, Unisys, Westinghouse, DynCorp, Exxon, Hewlett-Packard, EDS, Computer Sciences Corporation, IBM, Hughes, KBR, Kearfott, Lockheed-Martin, McDonnell Douglas, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Shell, AT&T, Sikorsky, United Technologies and all the rest. There is blood on your hands, real human blood — lives taken, families shattered, homes destroyed, crops ruined, populations displaced, tortures committed, atrocities sanctioned, all facilitated by your unthinking, odious, ignorant, unconscionable support.

This essay is in part a response to the writings of Arthur Silber, in a piece entitled “The Honor of Being Human: Why Do You Support?“

credit: vredevanutrecht @ flickr

In concluding, he states:

The Bush administration has announced to the world, and to all Americans, that this is what the United States now stands for: a vicious determination to dominate the world, criminal, genocidal wars of aggression, torture, and an increasingly brutal and brutalizing authoritarian state at home. That is what we stand for.

I repeat once more: these horrors are now what the United States stands for. Thus, for every adult American, the question is not, “Why do you obey?” but:

Why do you support?

Or will you refuse to give your support? Will you say, “No”? These are the paramount questions at this moment in history, and in the life of the United States. We all must answer them. Our honor, our humanity, and our souls lie in the balance.

No, Arthur, I will not support.

From The Guardian:

Demolished by the Pakistan army: the frontier village punished for harbouring the Taliban

A fading photo tossed on an empty bed is all that remains of the interrupted lives in Spinkai, a desolate Pakistani village that has endured the wrath of the army’s “collective punishment”.

[...]

An estimated 200,000 villagers have been displaced since the Pakistani army attacked the mountain redoubt of Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban and a suspect in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto four months ago.

[...]

Four months later the villagers are forbidden from returning home. Their wheat is rotting in the fields. But Pakistani commanders insist they have been merciful in their application of “collective punishment” – a practice invented by the British who demarcated the tribal areas over a century ago.

[...]

In March the CIA director, Michael Hayden, warned that the lawless area presented a “clear and present danger” to the west, and was the likely source of any future attack on America. On Sunday the new prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, met President George Bush on the fringes of a conference in Egypt to discuss the situation.

The US is bankrolling the operations in North and South Waziristan, giving at least $5.5bn (about £2.8bn) in military assistance since 2002.

From The Jerusalem Post:

US denies report on plan to attack Iran

The White House on Tuesday flatly denied an Army Radio report that claimed US President George W. Bush intends to attack Iran before the end of his term. It said that while the military option had not been taken off the table, the Administration preferred to resolve concerns about Iran’s push for a nuclear weapon “through peaceful diplomatic means.”

Army Radio had quoted a top official in Jerusalem claiming that a senior member in the entourage of President Bush, who concluded a trip to Israel last week, had said in a closed meeting here that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were of the opinion that military action against Iran was called for.

The official reportedly went on to say that “the hesitancy of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice” was preventing the administration from deciding to launch such an attack on the Islamic Republic for the time being.

From Press TV:

‘Nations will decide on attacking Iran’

Sun, 18 May 2008 22:49:41

The looming visage of Henry Kissinger at the 1992 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting

Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger says the nations of the world will decide on dramatic measures against Iran if necessary.

Pointing to Iran’s nuclear program, Kissinger said the international community had to define ‘nuclear capability’ and once it is defined, they had to set a timetable and impose meaningful sanctions on the country.

“There is no point talking about unacceptability without defining specific proposals and significant sanctions,” Kissinger said in a conference in Jerusalem.

“Then nations decide whether other measures can be taken as a last resort,” the former Nixon Secretary of State suggested.

Kissinger claimed that the prospect of a nuclear Iran would only result in the spread of nuclear weapons to the Middle East.

This is while the George W. Bush administration, in 2007, offered a $20 billion arms sale package, including advanced satellite-guided bombs, to Saudi Arabia and five other Persian Gulf littoral states.

US, Israel signal war on Iran

Fri, 16 May 2008 17:56:59

Israeli premier Ehud Olmert’s spokesman, Mark Regev, said on Friday that the diplomatic efforts to exert pressure on Iran to give up its uranium enrichment have so far been insufficient.

“It is clear that additional steps will have to be taken,” he continued.

“We are on the same page. We both see the threat… And we both understand that tangible action is required to prevent the Iranians from moving forward on a nuclear weapon,” said the Israeli spokesman.

Regev then claimed that ‘leaders of many countries’ have discussed the prospects of using military force against Iran and affirmed that Israel agrees with the ‘options on the table’, hinting at a war against the Middle Eastern country.

“I have said Iran is dangerous, and the NIE estimate doesn’t do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world – quite the contrary,” Bush has said in response to the release of the US National Intelligence Estimate.