WhirledView

More, But Not Enough, on the Nuclear India Deal

by CKR

I've found some new links on the US-India nuclear deal, but I won't have a lot of time over the next several days to write as much as I'd like to on them. So a quick summary:

US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman is telling Indian critics of the deal that there is no threat to India's autonomy or its national nuclear program. On the contrary, it's a major opportunity. Either Bodman hasn't been reading the criticism or he's been tasked with spreading the administration line. Interesting that so many of President Bush's cabinet have been talking to Indian groups lately.

Bodman evidently hadn't read Siddharth Varadarajan's interview on what Stephen Rademaker, the former US Assistant Secretary for International Security and Non-Proliferation, said at a talk in New Delhi. Rademaker is now at Barbour Griffith and Rogers, a lobbying firm. Varadarajan notes that Barbour Griffith and Rogers has been retained by the Government of India.

If Varadarajan's account of the speech is accurate, there are a number of questions that arise. The most sensational is why Rademaker would state that the United States "coerced" India into voting at the International Atomic Energy Agency against Iran's nuclear activities to this Indian audience. There is no new question about his leaving the government to lobby for another nation's interest after being involved in relevant deliberations; this is common practice in the United States, however one may question the ethics involved.

Varadarajan takes the speech as a warning

that the U.S. would make further demands on India. For example, he openly said the US wanted India to join its unilateral sanctions against Iran in the likely event that Russia and China did not back tough UN sanctions. India should abandon its proposed gas pipeline from Iran, he said. India should do all these things if it wanted to be part of the "First World". There was no doubt that he was holding out a threat, from his vantage point as a former senior official of the Bush administration AND (and this is the irony) as a paid lobbyist of the Indian government.

This is indeed odd, unless the purpose was to increase opposition within India to the agreement. The question is whose interest that serves.

Varadarajan further recounts a proposed debate between himself and Robert Blackwill, former US ambassador to India and now also at Barbour Griffith and Rogers. Blackwill, after Varadarajan recorded many hits on his blog from BG and R, backed out of the debate "with a sore throat."

More about India's lobbying effort here.

All of these links are a month old and older; shows how hard it can be, even with my intensive googling of the subject, to find this information.

Marc Lynch on Sunni Differences in Iraq

by CKR

Marc Lynch has published an important article for understanding what is going on among Sunni factions in Iraq. According to him, it's not at all the way the MSM is reporting it. I find it a bit difficult to understand, partly because I'm not acquainted with the names of the groups in the way he is, an partly, I suspect, because it doesn't go according to most of the narratives we keep hearing.

So, at the risk of oversimplification, let me sketch out what Lynch is saying. Please read the whole article and correct me if I've got it wrong; I'm trying to understand it myself.

Islamic State of Iraq = Al-Qaeda's declared polity in Iraq.

Islamic Army of Iraq = One of the insurgency's stronger factions.

In October 2006, al-Qaeda declared the Islamic State of Iraq and now is aggressively insisting that others line up with its program. The Islamic Army of Iraq and some tribal leaders are voicing objections to al-Qaeda leaders outside Iraq.

The American presence in Iraq is part of al-Qaeda's program: Iraq is at the center of their global jihad, presumably where the Caliphate is to be reconstituted. The Americans provide propaganda and targets. Other Sunni factions see their primary goal as an independent Iraq, with the American gone. They are not interested in exporting jihad.

So one of the threats dragged out by the "stay the course" faction, the establishment of an al-Qaeda base in Iraq, is already established. The American presence feeds it. Other factions are turning against al-Qaeda, but not because of the American surge. They are the ones we hear about on the tv news who are asking for deadlines for withdrawal.

We're not talking about divide and conquer here, or the enemy of my enemy being my friend. None of them like the Americans, but if we weren't there, the focus might be on driving al-Qaeda from the country.

Richard Perle Goes for a Ride

by CKR

Scarecrow at Firedoglake was dismayed at the Richard Perle segment of PBS’s America at a Crossroads series. There’s nothing wrong with that review, but I think that there is more to say about Perle’s pearl than that.

Much of the segment consists of Richard Perle sitting and riding or sitting and talking: fine metaphors for his role in government. He sits and talks with Simon Jenkins, forced onto a couch that both look like they’d like to escape; he rides in a car in Dubai, where he later sits and talks with an Iranian dissident; he rides to Pat Buchanan’s house and sits and talks with him, but Buchanan has chosen the more dominant seat as Perle sinks into the upholstery; he rides through the market in Kabul; he sits and watches a newsreel of John Kennedy’s inaugural address. A hand occasionally manipulates a steering wheel, perhaps trying to indicate that Perle is in command of the vehicle, but it lacks credibility. He manages to stand up when confronting demonstrators against the war or chatting with Natan Sharansky near Lefortovo Prison, but it looks like it’s only because no overstuffed armchairs were available.

America the Untrustworthy

By PLS

Bill Fisher among others has already commented on George Packer’s recent New Yorker article describing the betrayal of Iraqis who have worked for America over the past few years. These are people who’ve put their lives bravely and loyally on the line—as translators, for example—only to get dumped, ignored or stiffed , by the US, when they needed help. For one thing, the U.S. hasn’t provided an expeditious route for receiving these risk-taking friends as refugees or putting them onto a fast track to U.S. citizenship, even though Iraqis tainted by association with the American occupation are favored targets for assassination.

As I read Packer’s article I felt shame and anger—and incredulity. How can U.S. policy makers expect the Muslim world (or anyone else) to buy American democracy or the American way of anything when those who actually serve us, either as direct hires or as employees of contractors funded by the U.S. government, are thrown away like garbage?

Words Are Cheap

Unfortunately I can’t even take refuge in the belief that the Iraq situation is exceptional. Too often, as a foreign service officer, I saw our local employees treated callously by the very FSOs who’d swear, in a florid public manner, that they couldn’t accomplish anything without their “wonderful” foreign service nationals, the Germans or Ghanans or Indians or Argentinians “who could run the embassy/consulate/post all on their own.” In really small posts, those with few Americans frequently rotated, such an assertion wasn’t even hyperbole. But when crunch time came, big post or small, the reality was: words and pay packets that didn’t match.

Those very same effusive FSOs would be complicit (if only by silence or passivity) in squeezing the salaries of their “wonderful” local colleagues to save money for the State Department or USIA or USAID. Admittedly, US foreign service agencies were consistently underfunded by Congress during my years of service. In USIA we had to run operations on the cheap (ask our American speakers what they got paid and how they had to travel) and we got very good at it, but there were some corners that shouldn’t have been cut.

In short, while we foreign service officers could still count on our yearly cost of living increases and step increases and a fairly reliable promotion process, our locally hired FSNs lived in dread of the periodic descent of the pay comparability mafia. What was this all about? Simple. Washington-based personnel people would visit each post in rotation to see if the salaries being paid to non Americans employees had got out of whack with prevailing pay practices. Were we paying more than we absolutely had to get or keep our positions filled? Once it came down to this: were we paying more than the Iranian consulate for similar services?

Compared to Whom?

Inflation might have averaged 10% a year for five years with no end in sight for the upward trend, food and other costs might be soaring, but if an employee at the US consulate was being paid more than someone doing supposedly comparable work for the Iranian consulate or any other local employer, that FSN would have his or her pay frozen until those on the comparability scale caught up. As if there could be any comparison between working for just any old employer in some highly stratified, elite dominated country and an agency of the United States at a time when we were (believe it or not) trying to sell the world on the US model for a prosperous middle class society: work hard; live well; end of story. For a USIS officer trying “to tell America’s [then inspiring] story” to a skeptical local audience the periodic pocketbook raiding could be very awkward.

The Job Description Scam

Another ugly way of saving on personnel costs abroad involved rewriting a job description, supposedly from observations “proving” that what an FSN was actually doing involved skills of a lower level than that presupposed by the existing job description and pay level. Once again, the best an FSN could expect from this situation was a pay freeze, but sometimes the result was a fairly immediate pay cut or an open-for-all-to-see demotion. Either way, a conscientious worker was demoralized by a blow to the ego and self-respect as well as the pocketbook.

Quiet please - Turkey and the EU: the slow waltz resumed pianissimo

By PHK

Just four months ago, Turkish accession talks with the European Union were being written off by the media as a train wreck. Forecasting doom, gloom, war and premature death make good headlines and sells newspapers but I’ve never been convinced that such skim-the-surface reports are anything more than superficial recounts of what each side wants the public to hear at the moment and what reporters – all but the few skilled in reading complex negotiating tea leaves - can themselves make out of the puzzle palace that envelopes lengthy and complex negotiations especially those relating to the EU and other multilateral organizations.

Reports from Germany over the weekend suggest that this was indeed the case – and that German Chancellor Angela Merkel –since joining a coalition government with the Social Democrats who supported Turkish full membership under Gerhard Schröder – is now apparently backing away from her earlier opposition to it. Even before Merkel’s public remarks, Turkish membership negotiations on enterprise and industry issues were quietly reopened last month, according to the EU Observer on April 16.

Like it or not, it seems to me that international negotiations often take on many twists and turns of the
bazaar. Negotiations that involve more than two countries move from plane geometry to solid geometry and perhaps calculus. They are far more complex and difficult for outsider or even insider to understand – because of their interrelatedness and multidimensionality. To succeed, negotiators need to figure out what’s happening at and under the table as well as in the corridors, delegation rooms, restaurants, bars, parties, back home and elsewhere people get together to work out deals and find common positions.

On the surface, the EU – Turkish talks ostensibly ran up against a wall in January because of the Turkish refusal to allow Greek Cypriot ships and planes to dock or land at Turkish ports – or at least all but one Turkish port or airport. This issue remains unresolved – but it doesn’t mean that it is necessarily a “deal-breaker” as described by the media in January – but it is a powerful Turkish bargaining chip.

The Greek Cypriots argue that the Turks are reneging on promises made and breaking the EU rules of open trade. The French and the Dutch supported the Greek Cypriots, but for another reason: the Muslim fear card which plays well with portions of their electorates – despite the fact that most Muslims in France come from North Africa not Turkey. Although the Netherlands has more Turkish Muslims than any other single Muslim immigrant group there aren’t that many more Turks than Moroccans and besides the Turks are considered more westernized.

It was, after all, a militant Islamic Moroccan with dual citizenship, not a Turk, who murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh after he made a controversial film in 2004 about a Somali émigré woman forced into an arranged marriage.

Yet this non-deal-breaker “deal-breaker” has, of course, multiple dimensions. It is clear that there are also various political conditions which Turkey still needs to meet particularly with respect to the human rights dimension. The most visible one is the abolition of the controversial Article 301 – or protection of “Turkishness” under which leading writers have been charged and in Hrant Dink’s case convicted (and then murdered by a susceptible youth who had come under the sway of an Islamic fanatic) – as well issues of freedom and property rights for religious groups which hurts the small Christian minorities and has deep Kemalist roots.

There are other reasons besides the Cyprus conundrum as to why Turkish entry will be a long time coming – living standards, corruption, honor killings and the Turkish government’s treatment of the Kurdish and other minorities also stand as impediments. But the government’s abolition of the death penalty and its willingness to allow the Kurds certain cultural freedoms they did not have until recently were implemented to move the country towards compliance with EU human rights standards. These are necessary preconditions for Turkish membership.

But I think it’s worth delving a little deeper into the reasons the Turks have dug in their heels on the ships and planes “deal breaker” – at least right now. Could one reason for Turkish recalcitrance and Greek Cypriot insistence on a Turkish opening of its ports to Cypriot flag ships relate to oil, gas and potential transport revenues?

The port of Ceyhan which is located on Turkey’s south coast east of Antalya is the end point of the recently opened Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline which transports oil from the Azerbaijani oil fields through Georgia across the Black Sea to eastern Turkey and then to the Eastern Mediterranean. There are other pipelines that end – or may end there, too making Ceyhan the oil depot of the northeastern Mediterranean.

Bypassing the Bosporus: A Los Angeles traffic jam at rush hour

This newly opened pipeline (BTC) is the first to evade the Russian stranglehold on transshipments of
petroleum products from Central Asia to Europe. The Baku-Tbilisi -Ceyhan pipeline also bypasses the overcrowded Bosporus, the spectacular waterway between the Black Sea and the Dardanelles that bisects Istanbul, the dividing line between Europe and Asia. The Bosporus already resembles a Los Angeles traffic jam at rush hour. An oil tanker wreck on it would be catastrophic.

So here’s the argument: the Turks control the port of Ceyhan. Greek Cypriots and other ship-owners who fly the Cypriot flag own tankers and understand the large profits to be made from transshipment of the liquid gold from Ceyhan to Western Europe.

Reflagging privately owned ships is a way around a nation-based blockade, but then, although ship owners may prosper, the country doesn’t. Cyprus “has the sixth largest fleet in the world.” It is itself an "open registry" or “flag of convenience” country with around 2,700 ships on its registry that brings in “some 120-140 million pounds a year and employs 4,000 people, more than half of whom are Cypriots” according to the Cyprus Mail.

Tuesday Sorrow Blogging

by CKR

Lots of words out there today, but not a lot of sense. I've posted a couple of the better articles on "WhirledView Choice," toward the top of the right-hand sidebar. Here's the one I think is the best so far.

Juan Cole and Larry Johnson have noted that what happened yesterday at Virginia Tech happens every day in Iraq. Actually, it's worse, because there are usually more killed in Iraq, and the effect is proportionately larger because Iraq's population is about a tenth of America's.

The photo above was taken between our recent storms, mostly wind, but some sleet/snow/hail/slush/rain as well. When those storms move out into the prairie, they become those devastating tornadoes. One the other day even overturned my plastic birdbath when it was full of water.

But yesterday was bright and quiet enough, the junipers' orgasm ended, for me to check out what's blooming in the yard. I've posted photos of that little plant before and haven't been able to identify it; this photo helps confirm that it's a crucifer, with that broccoli-like head of buds.

The New York Times today celebrates plants. Maybe plants' constancy and persistence is part of why we give flowers to people who have lost loved ones.

But nothing is sure. On my trip around the yard, at least two of my little mammillaria cactuses have disappeared, the cute double one and another nearby. I had put some rocks around the double one, distinctive ones, but they got washed away about the time the cactus disappeared last summer. That encouraged me to put a stick in the ground near the other, but it now looks like the snow smashed the stick.

I suspect that they have been covered over by soil and rocks moved by rain and snow. Maybe, as they swell up with spring growth, they'll push through the overburden. Maybe, in a month or so, I'll be able to see their lavender blooms.

Joan Didion writes that as she called friends on the West Coast to tell them her husband had died, she thought that maybe the time change could somehow bring her husband back. It seems to me that a lot of the commentary we're seeing now is of that sort, which seems to be a natural concomitant to loss: if only the campus had been shut down, if only the word had been spread sooner, if only everyone had guns, if only she hadn't been in the wrong place, if only guns weren't so available, and a thousand more personal if onlies. But nothing can bring back the dead.

So here's my little flower for those who still live.

On behalf of Congressional Travel

By PHK

If you haven’t read Gordon Robison’s “When Congressmen Travel” in Gulf News, don’t bother. Not only is the title sexist and outdated – even my less than illustrious Congressperson Heather Wilson-R who was in Iraq burnishing her foreign policy “credentials” on a Codel over the Christmas holiday recess is female – but also the content of Robison’s article is disappointing and misleading. Rather like my Congressperson who I’ll bet is no longer a David Iglesias favorite either.

I had hoped for a far better and more balanced description of the role of Congress in the U.S. foreign policy making process from an experienced American foreign correspondent than I found in Robison’s glib recount of the handling of Codels by some whiney Foreign Service Officers he presumably encountered in his earlier Middle East reporting days. His less than balanced characterization of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent trip there didn’t sit well with me either.

Sure, not every Codel I encountered in my 27 plus years in the Foreign Service was a piece of cake. Far from it. We had those – particularly in Thailand during the latter days of the Vietnam War – who came to shop for gems, silk and rattan furniture. At the end of their shopping sprees, they expected the Embassy to ship the booty back duty and postage free. A couple of the members of a delegation that I remember far too well also played district politics on the side adding to the ill will this crew had already engendered among the American Embassy staff – Thai and Americans - assigned to help make their visit a success.

Years later, we had a Codel of One who visited Finland in the last days of the Soviet Union. He told anyone and everyone who would listen – including Finnish reporters in an on-the-record press conference he had requested – that the Baltics would be better off remaining a part of the large Soviet market than striking off on their own. Did this Senator have it wrong. He also didn’t get reelected although I doubt the Nordic/Baltic vote in his home state was large enough to change the outcome.

Codels are far easier and often more substantive than Presidents or Secretaries of State.

On the whole, however, I recall numerous positive experiences with Codels and Congressional staff delegations (Staffdels) especially between 1988-92 when I was Press Attache at the US Embassy in Helsinki and then Public Affairs Advisor for the US Delegation to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe Review Conference.

Frankly, these groups were a lot easier to handle than the three-ring media circuses inflicted on Embassy staff that accompanied Secretary of State James Baker and President GHW Bush and where we would have to call for reinforcements from nearby posts that were not inundated with high level visitors themselves. Those over-blown, over-staffed Presidential and Sec State visits too often shuttered the office for days on end even though we and the Finns could almost walk through the routine with our eyes closed. Even the largest most difficult Codel, however, doesn’t twist an Embassy into that kind of pretzel.

I fortunately managed to escape Vice President Dan Quayle’s entire 1992 visit to Finland. This included his planned, “spontaneous” stop at one of those heavy canvas tents near the Helsinki harbor that sell steaming hot coffee and warm sugar donuts in the frigid mornings where he was overheard asking the vendor where in Finland the coffee beans had been grown. Sorry Mr. Quayle, global warming has not reached Lapland even now and those beans probably came from Kenya.

Why Codels are important

Given Robison’s bad rap on Codels, let me highlight a few positives by pointing out that in my experience Congressional visits can be inordinately helpful in the formation and implementation of US foreign policy because members of Congress can and do do things to advance US interests that elude administration figures – particularly when a significant power shift, succession crisis or US policy change looms large on the horizon.

Why? Because the Ambassador, as personal representative of the president, is accredited to whatever government is in power. In democracies this normally presents no problem– but it can be devastating in dictatorships at the time the dictator is on the ropes and clinging to every last vestige of power.

In certain non-democratic countries it can be difficult and sometimes impossible for high level administration officials to meet with those on the outs without causing major problems for everyone involved. In other instances, it can be far more effective to have a member of Congress rather than the president’s chosen representative deliver a message to a leader who doesn’t want to hear it.

Greedy India

by CKR

USA Today, not usually the first in foreign policy news, carried a story last week on the difficulties the US-India nuclear deal is encountering. A nonproliferation expert called India greedy for wanting

•Permission to buy uranium-enrichment and plutonium-reprocessing technology from the United States. Both have military applications, and sales are prohibited in most cases by U.S. law.

•No limits on testing nuclear weapons. The administration has told India that the United States reserves the right to terminate nuclear cooperation if India tests again. Its last test was in 1998.

•U.S. approval to reprocess used nuclear fuel from power plants.

Those of you who have been following WhirledView’s coverage of the US-India nuclear deal (see list at end of post) know that a number of Indian commentators have been quite outspoken that the agreement with the United States should in no way affect India’s ability to develop its nuclear weapons capability. This USA Today article merely documents more of the same. India has not commented.

According to the USA Today article,

Last month, two Indians were arrested in the USA on charges they bought computer chips used for missile guidance and illegally exported them to Indian government companies.

And last week, India successfully tested its Agni III missile. The Agni III can be fitted with a nuclear warhead.

It’s not always obvious from the news stories, but missile development is the flip side of nuclear weapons capability. Nuclear weapons aren’t much use unless you can deliver them to the target. You don’t want to be close to that target when they go off. Missiles are the best way to do this.