WhirledView

Bush on the Syrian Incident - Updated 5/1/08

by CKR

Two stories reported as news today aren’t particularly new. President Bush was simply repeating the talking points.

Michael Abramowitz in the Washington Post – Bush: Revealing Reactor Was Meant to Pressure N. Korea

Steven Lee Myers in the New York Times - Bush Says Syria Nuclear Disclosure Intended to Prod North Korea and Iran

Abramowitz:

President Bush said yesterday that his administration's disclosure of secret information last week about suspected North Korean assistance for a Syrian nuclear reactor was designed to pressure Pyongyang to come clean on its nuclear activities.

At a Rose Garden news conference, Bush also said he wanted to send a message to Iran to cooperate with international efforts to limit proliferation, and to Syria to help stabilize Iraq and Lebanon….

Bush said the disclosures last week should make it "abundantly clear" to North Korea that "we may know more about you than you think, and therefore it's essential that you have a complete disclosure on not only your plutonium activities, but proliferation, as well as enrichment activities."

Myers:

President Bush said Tuesday that last week’s disclosure of what senior American officials called evidence of a nearly completed nuclear reactor in Syria was intended to warn North Korea and Iran about the dangers of spreading nuclear weapons….

Making the first remarks in public about the Israeli attack by any American official, Mr. Bush said that his administration maintained a cloak of secrecy to avoid the risk of further military conflict in the region, including possible Syrian retaliation against Israel. He said that risk of conflict “was reduced” now….

“We also wanted to advance certain policy objectives through the disclosures, and one would be to the North Koreans to make it abundantly clear that we, we may know more about you than you think,” Mr. Bush said at a White House news conference….

Mr. Bush said that the disclosure of a covert Syrian reactor, which Syria has denied, should persuade other countries to support United Nations Security Council resolutions intended to keep Iran and other countries from developing nuclear arms.

“We have an interest in sending a message to Iran and the world for that matter about just how destabilizing a nuclear proliferation would be in the Middle East,” he said.

All he’s doing is repeating the talking points from the press briefing the other day.

We were concerned that if knowledge of the existence and then destruction of the reactor became public and was confirmed by sources that the information would spread quickly and Syria would feel great pressure to retaliate…

We are at the point in the Six-Party talks where we believe going public will strengthen our negotiators as they try to get an accurate accounting of North Korea’s nuclear programs. We believe and hope that it will encourage North Korea to acknowledge its proliferation activity, but also to provide a more complete and accurate disclosure of their plutonium activities and their enrichment activities as well.

With respect to Iran, the Syrian episode reminds us of the ability of states to obtain nuclear capability covertly and how destabilizing the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East would be. And obviously everyone is concerned about that with respect to Iran, and we hope that disclosure will underscore that the international community needs to rededicate itself to ending Iran’s nuclear enrichment activities, and needs to take further steps to ensure that Iran does not obtain nuclear weapons. And countries can start by the full implementation of the U.N. Security Council resolutions already dealing with Iranian nuclear activities, which are not being implemented as aggressively and fully as they should.

…Disclosure of Syria’s nuclear activities, we hope, will help us in convincing other nations to join us in pressuring Syria to change its policies.

Not much difference, even in the wording.

I’ll send a link to this post to the two reporters. Seems to me that they might have mentioned somewhere in their accounts that Bush's words were pretty much identical to those in the press briefing.

Update (5/1/08): Michael Abramowitz provides a response of sorts. The second question (Santa Fe, NM) is mine. He seems to be tolerant of the blogosphere, or at least not ready to condemn us out of hand. Also check out his response to the next-to-last question. But he's not asking the hard questions of President Bush and others.

Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think: Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Earlier this month, a friend recommended one “must read” book for inclusion in a short list of books and other materials on the Muslim world for a hand out at a recent symposium the World Affairs Forum held in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The symposium was entitled “Meeting Minds with the Muslim World” and was conducted on a “non-attribution” basis.

The “must-read” book was Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think by John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed. It was published in 2007 by Gallup Publishers and it should be at the top of the reading lists for all three U.S. presidential candidates, their advisors as well as American voters, the vast majority of who desperately need far more accurate information about Muslims and the Islamic world than the US media normally provides.

Short, well organized, timely and an easy read

Who Speaks for Islam? is mercifully short (184 pages). It is well organized and easy to read. Its findings are a distillation of reams of first rate data collected by the Gallup organization between 2001 and 2007 in hour long, face-to-face interviews using open-ended questions with tens of thousands of “residents of more than 35 nations that are predominantly Muslim or have substantial Muslim populations.” As I understand it, the book confirms the results of numerous – but far less comprehensive - opinion surveys conducted by other western survey research organizations over the same period.

These results presented in Who Speaks for Islam? explode virtually every assertion about the Islamic world and Muslim views of the West that the Bush administration has promulgated since 9/11 to justify its controversial policies in the Middle East.

Islam’s Silenced Majority: the “clash of civilizations” is a canard

First, according to Who Speaks for Islam?, there is no “inevitable clash of civilizations.”

Sorry Professor Huntington, I’ve also never agreed with your overly simplistic and often inaccurate divisions of the post Cold War world on questionably-drawn religious/ethnic grounds. This includes your monolithic characterization of the Islamic world. In Who Speaks for Islam?, Esposito and Mogahed demonstrate that a majority of the world’s approximately 1.3 billion Muslims do, in fact, value democracy and human rights. So, Mr. Bush, pray tell, where is the “inevitable clash of civilizations” based on irreconcilable differences of values upon which you have based our foreign policy for the past seven years?

Most Muslims do not hate the West, or the US, because of our values – despite what Mr. Bush and his neoconservative supporters at the American Enterprise Institute and other rightwing think tanks continue to attempt to shove down our throats through various media outlets – the problem is most Muslims object to America’s not living up to those values. This begins with human rights abuses at Abu Graib and Guantanamo, the administration’s covert rendition and discriminatory visa policies and moves on to its ill-considered invasion of Iraq coupled with unconditional support for a greater Israel.

The Gallup data also tell us that there are major differences between how Muslims view the West. Just as we should - but too often do not - recognize that the Islamic “world” is far from monolithic, the majority of Muslims realize that there are major differences between France and Germany, for instance, and the US. France and Germany come out far ahead because of American unilateralism based on the Bush administration’s militaristic approach to the world, in particular the invasion of Iraq and the administration’s one-sided support for a greater Israel’s domination of the Middle East.

War against whom? Against what?

Hormones, again!

By Patricia L. Sharpe

A few days ago I was in Silver City, New Mexico, where a friend was searching for affordable housing. Silver City’s heyday was the late 1800s, when the city was home to mining money. The ore-meisters built cupola-topped red brick mansions on the main drag, but mining, in it’s usual cyclical way, crashed. Then a flood came and washed away much of the center of the city. A surviving old house is now the wildly quaint city museum.

The next memorable era in Silver City was the hippie phase, which the museum does not recognize. Sixties-recalling murals, second hand shops and cafés dominate the historic city center today.

Now a third phase is underway. Real estate values are so depressed and/or reasonable that Silver City is becoming a retirement destination. So my friend decided to check it out.

That she did, for a day and a half, after which, last Wednesday morning, it was time to leave. Since our quaint B&B served the world’s most horrible breakfast, with swill as coffee, we stopped at a place called Java the Hut (Har! Har!) to fill our thermoses.

Java the Hut is also the place to go for a morning gab session. Three guys of the retiree variety were lounging on comfy couches taking about the primary in Pennsylvania. I hadn’t heard the late results, so I asked if any of them knew what the final vote was. The spread, one said, was nearly ten percent, with Clinton leading, which led one of his buddies to observe, “Twenty-five percent of Obama’s supporters would throw their weight to Clinton. Only 19 percent of her supporters would do the same. It’s racism,” he concluded.

I couldn’t resist. “If one is racism, the other is sexism. Why aren’t you denouncing that?”

The three of them laughed (Har! Har!). “A woman in the White House! Can’t risk it. Once a month, you know, women lose it.”

The curse of the curse! A monthly warpath! Was I really hearing this?

I muttered something about the 24/7 effects of testosterone on the current White House resident and his closest advisers, but I was so dumbfounded that didn’t think of the other perfect comeback. By the time any woman is ready to run for the presidency, menstruation is likely to be history.

But maybe my lapse was just as well. Sexist popular culture has nothing good to say for the business of being female during menopause either.

In short, if you’re a woman, young, middle-aged or old, you can’t win. And that’s what these guys were hoping, until Clinton grabbed the lead in Pennsylvania.

But sexist? Not them!

So if anyone’s still wondering why a lot of white men of the normally (covertly) racist variety are going to vote for Barak Obama, this little anecdote may shed a little light on the phenomenon.

Why Now? (Some of) The Politics of the Al Kibar Revelations

by CKR

Why now? Let’s see what the Senior Administration Official had to say about this (emphasis added):

Our first concern was to prevent conflict and perhaps an even broader confrontation in the Middle East region. We were concerned that if knowledge of the existence and then destruction of the reactor became public and was confirmed by sources that the information would spread quickly and Syria would feel great pressure to retaliate. And, obviously, that would have been a threat to Israel and risked the possibility of a broader regional confrontation which we hoped to avoid. As time has passed, our assessment is that that risk has receded. We have an obligation to keep Congress informed with matters such as this. We had briefed 22 members of Congress in positions of leadership and chairs and ranking members of key committees last September and October. We wanted and Congress wanted us to brief more widely within Congress. We also felt that we could – and we also felt that we could use public disclosure to advance a number of policy objectives. So the calculation was the risks of greater discussion and disclosure had declined and were now acceptable and that, for a number of reasons, timing was good now to advance some policy objectives

We are at the point in the – for example, first let me take North Korea. We are at the point in the Six-Party talks where we believe going public will strengthen our negotiators as they try to get an accurate accounting of North Korea’s nuclear programs. We believe and hope that it will encourage North Korea to acknowledge its proliferation activity, but also to provide a more complete and accurate disclosure of their plutonium activities and their enrichment activities as well.

With respect to Iran, the Syrian episode reminds us of the ability of states to obtain nuclear capability covertly and how destabilizing the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East would be. And obviously everyone is concerned about that with respect to Iran, and we hope that disclosure will underscore that the international community needs to rededicate itself to ending Iran’s nuclear enrichment activities, and needs to take further steps to ensure that Iran does not obtain nuclear weapons. And countries can start by the full implementation of the U.N. Security Council resolutions already dealing with Iranian nuclear activities, which are not being implemented as aggressively and fully as they should.

Finally, with respect to Syria, at the present time there are major initiatives underway to advance the cause of freedom and peace in the Middle East: There are talks between Israelis and Palestinians; there is progress in building a stable and democratic Iraq; there are efforts in Lebanon to consolidate its sovereignty after a long period of foreign occupation. Actions by the Syrian regime threaten progress along each of these tracks. Disclosure of Syria’s nuclear activities, we hope, will help us in convincing other nations to join us in pressuring Syria to change its policies.

That’s all pretty clear. I’d like to focus on the last of the reasons.

Tibet and China

by Elizabeth S. Dahl, Guest Contributor

I completely understand and sympathize with the outrage people feel about the repressive treatment of Tibetans and others in the PRC. However, as someone who teaches Chinese politics, I want to caution those who agree with Jonathan Zimmerman about how to deal with the People's Republic of China (PRC). There is an important question of how to be most effective in addressing these concerns to Chinese leaders and thereby promoting constructive change.

As a good professor of 20th–century American history, Professor Zimmerman is operating from a Western understanding of the politics of protest. The American, French, and British protesters who blocked Olympic torchbearers also probably share this worldview.

Unfortunately, such tactics are not completely understood by Chinese leaders, nor even by many of the mainland Chinese. (Note how some China supporters now are jogging alongside the Olympic torch to prevent future attempts to disrupt the torch relays.) Based on a complex mix of different cultural factors and issues of historical memory, Chinese leaders view such actions as driven by “troublemakers” from former imperial powers who want to keep a rising country from reaching its true potential. This interpretation means that such protesters will not change minds in Beijing. Indeed, some Chinese leaders may be so insulted by such “unseemly” actions that they will crack down all the more on dissidents within their borders.

Fortunately, as so often is the case, there are ways of peaceful protest that may be more effective. In this particular situation, there even is a key figure who demonstrates such an approach: the Dalai Lama. By embodying a quiet, peaceful, reasonable attitude toward Chinese oppression—merely advocating nonviolence, greater autonomy for Tibetans, and even granting the right for the Chinese to hold the Olympic Games—the Dalai Lama is a model of courage along the lines of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. It is no wonder that Chinese leaders find him a particular thorn in their side. It is because he is potentially far more dangerous to them than a protester trying to seize the Olympic torch or Western professors who send them a petition decrying Chinese repression. Those who want to change China would be well served to follow the Dalai Lama’s humble example. When it comes to China, the crucial point is that “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.”

Another positive approach is to educate oneself about Chinese history, going farther in the past than 1989’s Tiananmen Square massacre to begin to understand the conditions that made such an event possible. For example, the “hundred years of humiliation”—the period when China was carved up by imperial powers—continues to have an impact on the worldview of Chinese leaders and citizens alike. A greater understanding of Chinese culture and politics will show us better ways to address such issues.

Elizabeth S. Dahl is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. This article appeared in slightly different form as a letter to the editor in The Omaha World-Herald on April 15th, 2008.

Al Kibar: Orienting the Destruction Sequence

by CKR

Reactor Photos
Overhead Photos

Once again, the photos are from Moon of Alabama, and you can enlarge them by clicking on them. [4/27/08: All photos included.]

This gets more, er, interesting, since I don't have Paul's nice software, and I'm hardly an expert on Photoshop.

What I have tried to do here is to orient all the photos of the Box in the same direction. That is the first necessary step before anyone can make any sense of them. I invite readers to try their hand at further interpretation.

I am keying on a few features in particular. We can see two of them in the 6:31 remaining time photo (all times given will be remaining times, as MoA has designated them that way): the bluff just to the east of the box, which I will maintain at the top of the photos. The right-hand corner shows the area of what has been labeled the pipeline from the pumping station on the Euphrates. In this photo, we see only the curved cleared area around the edge of a bluff that leads into the pipeline.

The 4:36 photo appears to be the same one in a slightly different orientation. Note the shapes of the shadows and the small shapes to the right of the Box.

The first photo of the bombed Box (4:34) is presented upside down relative to these first two in the CIA video. It shows the third feature that I am keying on, the bunker-like structure that throws a rectangular shadow in the lower right-hand corner of this photo. It can be identified in the first two photos by a small triangular shadow at its lower left-hand edge.

The next photo of the bombed Box (2:54) is also upside down and skewed. [This needs to be tilted about 45 degrees clockwise to fit the first two.]

Al Kibar: The Reactor Photos

by CKR

Overhead Photos
Orienting the Destruction Sequence

The alleged Syrian nuclear reactor photo is split-screened with the Yongbyon reactor for comparison in the CIA video. (Again, photos courtesy of Moon of Alabama. Also again, click on the photos to enlarge.)

Let's count those fuel element channels. They're easier to see in the full-width photo.

For the alleged Syrian nuclear reactor, counting from the left-hand side, the rows contain 4, 6, 8, possibly 8 (one seems to be obscured by a cloth), a row that might be 3 control rod channels, two more rows of 8, then 6 and 4. For the Yongbyon reactor, counting from the right, the rows contain 5, 7, 9, four rows of eleven, then presumably, although they're out of the photo, 9, 7, 5.

That's a pretty big difference for a reactor. It means that the fuel in the fuel elements will have to be configured differently. And the Yongbyon reactor doesn't have that odd 3-channel row down the middle.

If we're not particular about numbers or configuration of fuel element channels, then lots of reactors look like this from the top. Here's the closest match I found, the ship's reactor from the Russian icebreaker Lepse:

That even has four fuel element channels in the outer row.

This one is fancier, apparently from the British Generation IV Very High Temperature Reactor, so I guess we can't blame the University of Manchester.

And, finally, I guess it's not modeled on the Krasnoyarsk-26 reactor, because we see squares instead of circles. Although it's not clear if those square things are tiles over the top of the reactor or the top of the reactor itself.

Al Kibar: The Overhead Photos

by CKR

Update: Analysis of reactor photos here. Orienting of photos from the destruction sequence here.

I won’t say I’m an expert in interpreting overhead photos, but a decade or so ago, I needed to find some trash burial pits at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The story was that they contained explosive. That was improbable on the face of it, if you knew how explosives engineers think, but that’s another long story…

So how do you find where stuff was buried several decades earlier, and the vegetation has pretty much returned to normal?

I had a bright young man, Paul Pope, working for me. Let’s take all the data, he said, and overlay it. Let’s use infrared photography to detect differences in surface temperature that might come from water pooling in those pits or from large buried metal objects, like bomb casings, that were supposed to be buried there too. Let’s take the historical aerial photos and everything else we can get and overlay them all. Visual photos that seemed to show partial vegetation patterns. Multispectral imaging from helpful friends in Nevada who wanted to try out their planeful of stuff. Satellite photos if we could get them.

To do that, of course, all the photos would have to be at the same scale and taken from the same angle, preferably directly overhead. Some of the historical photos, in particular, had been taken at quite oblique angles of the area we wanted to look at, from low-flying planes.

Paul programmed a geometric transformation that would revise those oblique photos. The pixel information was stretched or compressed to represent the areas as they would look from overhead.

All the data together pretty well delineated the disposal pits. They did seem to have some big pieces of metal in them, and places where water may have been pooling. I suspect they haven’t been dug up, so we don’t have ground truth yet. But the overlaid data clarified and reinforced what was vague in each individual photo.

That was twelve years ago. Google has applied something like Paul’s transformations to give a realistic look to their “fly-throughs” on Google Earth. When they introduced that feature, one look at the shadows told me that they were just transforming the overheads. Fun, but no more information than in the overheads.

If Google can do that, then it is hard to believe that NSA and CIA haven’t improved on Paul’s work.

Photos of Al Kibar

Israel Has Nuclear Weapons - Updated 4/24/08

by CKR

That is the sentence that cannot be uttered in international relations. The silence distorts much, perhaps most, of our discussion about the Middle East.

That distortion is in today’s news three times over.

Another Nuclear Spy for Israel
A man in New Jersey has been charged with selling US nuclear secrets to Israel in the 1980s. His handler was the same person who got nuclear information from Jonathan Pollard. At the time of Pollard’s arrest and trial, Israel told the United States that there had been no other spies. In Israel, it is being suggested that the arrest is being used to “to loosen support for Israel as the two countries enter a tenacious period of negotiations.”

Ben-Ami Kadish says he shared the information to “protect Israel.” At the time Kadish provided that “protection,” Israel had a nuclear arsenal.

Update (4/24/08): The Israelis respond. Still no mention of their nukes. Emptywheel speculates on how they found Mr. Kadish and his activities.

Clinton Promises to Nuke Iran
Hillary Clinton this week brandished the US’s nuclear arsenal at Iran for a hypothetical attack on Israel with nuclear weapons.

…what our policy should be is to make it very clear to the Iranians that they would be risking massive retaliation were they to launch a nuclear attack on Israel.…their use of nuclear weapons against Israel would provoke a nuclear response from the United States…

“Massive retaliation” was the description of what the United States would do if Russia attacked with nuclear-tipped missiles. Or vice versa. She made that explicit in her later words. She also proposed that the United States offer a “nuclear umbrella” to other states in the Middle East that might feel intimidated by an Iranian nuclear arsenal.

Radio Free What?

By Patricia H. Kushlis

In her April 22 column in The Washington Post, Anne Applebaum laments the lack of support in Congress and the Bush administration for Radio Free Europe (RFE) which she erroneously claims was the “only source of independent information in Eastern Europe” during the Cold War.

Now I’m not either a proponent or opponent of Radio Free Europe or its Russian language counterpart Radio Liberty. Both were surrogate radio stations operated first by the Central Intelligence Agency then when their covers were blown around 1970 - openly by the U.S. government. Their task was to broadcast information in local languages to Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union not available because of Communist government censorship so that the peoples “behind the Iron Curtain” could hear the unvarnished news of what was happening in their own countries in their own languages.

That few Americans knew – or today know – of RFE’s existence let alone support its continued existence does not surprise me.

Its name, by the way, is RFE/RL, a post-Cold War amalgamation of the once-upon-a-time two separate services.

RFE/RL operates under the restrictions of the little known Smith-Mundt Act which supposedly restricts the US government from propagandizing its own citizens. This means a special Congressional dispensation is required for Americans to have access to US government media products produced by and directed at foreigners. This Act, enacted in 1948 and strengthened in 1972, was, I suppose, fine in its day. But with the Internet, satellite broadcasting and the rise of medium wave stations, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and today’s Europeanization of much of Eastern Europe, Smith-Mundt has now become a 12 inch soft plastic barrier to the American public’s right to know what its government is saying abroad but, as Mountain Runner suggests, it's like the elephant under the table, no one wants to deal with it.

An aside: I was looking at data on Amazon’s Alexa Internet rankings a couple of weeks ago and discovered that the State Department’s newly launched America.gov, an Internet page of indeterminate quality and usefulness aimed at the world outside the US, had a readership that was about 20 percent American. But quiet please, don’t tell anyone in Congress or America.gov’s State Department bosses. America.gov comes under Smith-Mundt and Americans aren’t supposed to know about it or have access to its contents despite the fact our tax dollars fund it along with other entities like RFE/RL.