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Category: US Foreign Policy

  • Insanity reigns: The US, Israel and Iran

    All too often, events occur that make me feel that I am living in ‘Bizarro World’. The recent talk and extensive US corporate media coverage about whether or not the US and/or Israel will soon attack Iran is one of these occasions. The alleged rationale for such an attack is the possibility that Iran might pursue the development of a nuclear weapon. This rationale ignores the religious ruling or fatwa issued by the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei against the acquisition, development and use of nuclear weapons.

    In its reporting on the possibility of the US or Israel attacking Iran, the US corporate-controlled media usually fails to mention that these threats are illegal under international law. Of course, illegality is not an issue for the media when these two countries are involved.

    In addition, also seldom mentioned is the fact that the US is the only nation that has dropped atomic bombs on another country. The US is also a country that many nations claim has not complied with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Moreover, Israel is a country that has not even accepted the NPT and also has nuclear weapons. Also generally ignored is the fact that the US and Israel routinely violate international law with their unprovoked attacks on other nations. These are the two nations threatening Iran over the possibility that it might develop nuclear weapons. Such incredible hypocrisy and the media fails to call it out!

    Note that Iran has gone the extra mile to demonstrate its willingness to reach a diplomatic resolution, but that is not enough for the US under President Trump and Israel under Prime Minister Netanyahu. For example, in 2015 Iran agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, an agreement with China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the US. This deal, also endorsed by the UN Security Council, restricted the development of Iran’s nuclear program. During the next few years, Iran was in full compliance with the agreement.

    Even more bizarre, despite Iranian compliance, in 2018 the US pulled out of the agreement. The US then reimposed sanctions and imposed new sanctions on Iran. In an attempt to destroy the Iranian economy, the US also threatened nations that traded with Iran. These illegal and barbaric US sanctions, still in effect during the covid-19 pandemic, have tremendously harmed the Iranian people and the US image. Despite all of this, Iran continued to honor the agreement for a full year after the US withdrawal.

    Note the US National Intelligence Estimate has repeatedly concluded Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons program. Many former high-ranking Israeli intelligence and military officials agree that Iran is not an existential threat to Israel. Thus, in a sane world, wouldn’t there be international pressure being placed on the US and Israel over their nuclear weapons and over their war crimes? Instead, in this ‘Bizarro World’, because the US and Israel demand it, the focus is on Iran and its attempted development of a nuclear energy option.

    In addition, given this background of no credible evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program nor of an existential threat to Israel, maybe the real motivation for the US and Israel is not about an Iranian nuclear weapon. Perhaps the goal is for a change in leadership in Iran to someone more compliant with US and Israeli plans. The US has used its illegal unilateral sanctions to cause suffering among the Iranian people in a misguided effort to get them to reject the current Iranian leadership. Despite overwhelming evidence that this approach doesn’t work, the US continues to use this barbaric, illegal and flawed tactic.

    Why do the US and Israel continue to play the risky game of needlessly provoking Iran? One possible reason is that Netanyahu would like to see Iran respond in order to draw in the US into a military conflict with Iran. His thinking may be that the US would so weaken Iran, something that Israel cannot do without using its nuclear weapons, that Iran could no longer prevent Israel from achieving hegemony in the Middle East. Perhaps the revenge motive drives Trump and the US neocons. They cannot forgive Iran for overthrowing the Shah and humiliating the US in 1979 as well as for Iran following its own interests.

    The recent provocations may also serve domestic considerations for Trump and Netanyahu even if they don’t lead to a military conflict. For Netanyahu, this focus would distract from his criminal trial for fraud, bribery and breach of trust. For Trump, the provocations would make it more difficult for President-Elect Biden to rejoin the JCPOA. Who knows for sure in ‘Bizarro World’?

    One crucial concern for the US and Israel is the relationship among Iran, Russia and China. How would Russia and China react if the US and Israel were to attack Iran? Might such an attack lead to a much larger conflict that could escalate to a nuclear war? Thus these needless US and Israeli provocations may be more risky than the dangerous duo of Netanyahu and Trump want to admit.

    Ron Forthofer is a retired professor of biostatistics from the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston and was a Green Party candidate for Congress and also for governor of Colorado. Read other articles by Ron.

    This article was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020 at 3:13pm and is filed under Benjamin Netanyahu, China, Donald Trump, International Law, Iran, Israel, Nukes, Russia, Sanctions, United States, US Foreign Policy.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Will the World Community Condemn the Murder of Iran’s Nuclear Scientist?

    Protesters burn U.S. and Israeli flags flags in Tehran after the killing of Fakhrizadeh. (Credit: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA, via Shutterstock)

    Israel used all four years of Trump’s presidency to entrench its systems of occupation and apartheid. Now that Joe Biden has won the U.S. election, the assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, likely by Israel with the go-ahead from the US administration, is a desperate attempt to use Trump’s last days in office to sabotage Biden’s chances of successful diplomacy with Iran. Biden, Congress and the world community can’t let that happen.

    On Friday November 27, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was assassinated in the Iranian city of Absard outside of Tehran. First, a truck with explosives blew up near the car carrying Fakhrizadeh. Then, gunmen started firing on Fakhrizadeh’s car. The immediate speculation was that Israel had carried out the attack, perhaps with the support of the Iranian terrorist group the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran (MEK). Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif tweeted that there were “serious indications of [an] Israeli role” in the assassination.

    All indications indeed point to Israel. In 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu identified this scientist, Fakhrizadeh, as a target of his administration during a presentation in which he claimed that Israel had obtained secret Iranian files that alleged the country was not actually abiding by the Iran Nuclear Deal. “Remember that name, Fakhrizadeh. So here’s his directive, right here,” Netanyahu said.

    Fakhrizadeh was far from the first assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist. Between 2010 and 2012, four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated—Masoud Alimohammadi, Majid Shahriari, Darioush Rezaeinejad and Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan. Though Israel never took official credit for the extrajudicial executions, reports were fairly conclusive that Israel, working with the MEK, were behind the killings. The Israeli government never denied the allegations.

    The assassination of Fakhrizadeh also follows reports that the Israeli government recently instructed its senior military officials to prepare for a possible U.S. strike on Iran, likely referring to a narrowly averted plan by President Trump to bomb Iran’s Natanz nuclear site. Furthermore, there was a clandestine meeting between Netanyahu and Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman. Among the topics of conversation were normalization between the two countries and their shared antagonism towards Iran.

    Israel’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear activities are particularly galling given that Israel, not Iran, is the only country in the Middle East in possession of nuclear weapons, and Israel refuses to sign the International Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Iran, on the other hand, doesn’t have nuclear weapons and it has opened itself up to the most intrusive international inspections ever implemented. Adding to this absurd double standard is the intense pressure on Iran from the United States—a nation that has more nuclear weapons than any country on earth.

    Given the close relationship between Netanyahu and Trump, and the seriousness of this attack, it is very likely that this assassination was carried out with the green light from Trump himself. Trump has spent his time in the White House destroying the progress the Obama administration made in easing the conflict with Iran. He withdrew from the nuclear deal and imposed an unending stream of crippling sanctions that have affected everything from the price of food and housing, to Iran’s ability to obtain life-saving medicines during the pandemic. He has blocked Iran from getting an IMF $5 billion emergency loan to deal with the pandemic. In January, Trump brought the US to the brink of war by assassinating Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, and in an early November meeting with his top security advisors, and right before the assassination of Fakhrizadeh, Trump himself reportedly raised the possibility of a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

    After the news broke of the assassination, Trump expressed implicit approval of the attack by retweeting Israeli journalist and expert on the Israeli Mossad intelligence service, Yossi Melman, who described the killing of Fahkrizadeh as a “major psychological and professional blow for Iran.”

    Iran has responded to these intense provocations with extreme patience and reserve. The government was hoping for a change in the White House and Biden’s victory signaled the possibility of both the U.S. and Iran going back into compliance with the nuclear deal. This recent assassination, however, further strengthens the hands of Iranian hardliners who say it was a mistake to negotiate with the United States, and that Iran should just leave the nuclear deal and build a nuclear weapon for its own defense.

    Iranian-American analyst Negar Mortazavi bemoaned the chilling effect the assassination will have on Iran’s political space. “The atmosphere will be even more securitized, civil society and political opposition will be pressured even more, and the anti-West discourse will be strengthened in Iran’s upcoming presidential election,” she tweeted.

    The hardliners already won the majority of seats in the February parliamentary elections and are predicted to win the presidential elections scheduled for June. So the window for negotiations is a narrow one of four months immediately after Biden’s inauguration.  What happens between now and January 20 could derail negotiations before they even start.

    Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, said that US and Israeli efforts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program “have now morphed into Trump & Netanyahu sabotaging the next US President. They are trying to goad Iran into provocations & accelerating nuclear work—exactly what they claim to oppose. Their real fear is US & Iran talking.”

    That’s why U.S. members of Congress, and President-elect Joe Biden himself, must vigorously condemn this act and affirm their commitment to the US rejoining the nuclear deal. When Israel assassinated other nuclear scientists during the Obama administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced the murders, understanding that such illegal actions made negotiations infinitely more difficult.

    The European Union, as well as some important US figures have already condemned the attack. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy pointed out the risks involved in normalizing assassinations, how the killing will make it harder to restart the Iran Nuclear agreement, and how the assassination of General Soleimani backfired from a security standpoint. Former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes tweeted that it was an “outrageous action aimed at undermining diplomacy,” and former CIA head John Brennan called the assassination “criminal” and “highly reckless,” risking “lethal retaliation and a new round of regional conflict,” but rather than putting the responsibility on the U.S. and Israel to stop the provocations, he called on Iran to “be wise” and “resist the urge to respond.”

    Many on Twitter have raised the question of what the world response would be if the roles were reversed and Iran assassinated an Israeli nuclear scientist. Without a doubt, the U.S. administration, whether Democrat or Republican, would be outraged and supportive of a swift military response. But if we want to avoid escalation, then we must hope that Iran will not retaliate, at least not during Trump’s last days in office.

    The only way to stop this crisis from spiraling out of control is for the world community to condemn the act, and demand a UN investigation and accountability for the perpetrators. The countries that joined Iran and the United States in signing  the 2015 nuclear agreement —Russia, China, Germany, the UK and France—must not only oppose the assassination but publicly recommit to upholding the nuclear deal. President-elect Joe Biden must send a clear message to Israel that under his administration, these illegal acts will have consequences. He must also send a clear message to Iran that he intends to quickly re-enter the nuclear deal, stop blocking Iran’s $5 billion IMF loan request, and begin a new era of diplomacy to dial back the intense conflict he inherited from Trump’s recklessness.

    This article was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2020 at 12:00pm and is filed under Assassinations, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, Iran, Israel, Joe Biden, Mossad, Saudi Arabia, US Congress, US Foreign Policy.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • US Intervenes as Venezuela Prepares for High Stakes Election

    by Roger D. Harris / November 27th, 2020

    The US finally appointed an ambassador to Venezuela after a decade hiatus and in the runup to the Venezuelan National Assembly elections. The new ambassador, James Story, was confirmed by US Senate voice vote on November 18 with Democrats supporting Trump’s nominee.

    Ambassador Story took his post in Bogotá, Colombia. No, this is not another example of Trump’s bungling by sending his man to the wrong capital. The US government does not recognize the democratically elected government in Caracas.

    Impasse of two Venezuelan presidents

    US hostility to Venezuela started when Hugo Chávez became president in 1999 and continues to this day, according to Adán Chávez, the late president’s older brother and vice-president of the PSUV, the ruling socialist party in Venezuela. “For the last 21 years,” he commented, “the empire has been perfecting its attacks” on Venezuela.

    The elder Chávez, spoke at an international online meeting with the US Chapter of the Network of Intellectuals, Artists and Social Movements in Defense of Humanity on November 19. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, he explained, was not initially socialist, although it was against neoliberalism. The traditional parties in Venezuela in 1998 had lost their appeal to the voters. Hugo Chávez ran and won, looking for a “third way” that was neither capitalist nor socialist. What the revolution discovered was that there was no third way: either socialism or barbarism.

    When in 2013, Venezuela elected President Nicolás Maduro and not the US-backed candidate, the US declared that election fraudulent and refused to recognize the winner. In the 2018 when Maduro was reelected, the US – not taking any chances – proclaimed fraud four months in advance of the vote.

    Then in January 2019, US Vice President Pence telephoned the newly installed president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, Juan Guaidó. The following morning Guaidó declared himself president of Venezuela on a Caracas street corner. Almost immediately Donald Trump recognized him as Venezuela’s de facto president.

    Guaidó’s claim to the national presidency was based on being third in constitutional succession, overlooking that neither the Venezuelan president nor vice-president had vacated their offices. At the time, the 35-year-old was unknown to 81% of the Venezuelan people, according to a poll by a firm favorable to the opposition. Guaidó was not even a leader in his own far-right party, Popular Will. He had never run for national office and his previous “exposure” was just that. A photograph of his bare behind made the press when he dropped his pants at a demonstration against the government. The person, whose butt may have been better known than his face, only got to be president of the National Assembly by a scheme which rotated the office among the parties in the legislature.

    But Juan Guaidó had one outstanding qualification to be the US-anointed puppet president of Venezuela – he was a trained US security asset.

    Guaidó’s parallel government has named ambassadors without power and has colluded with the US to loot Venezuelan national assets, some $24 billion. His former attorney is now on the legal team working to take over CITGO, the oil company in the US owned by Venezuela.

    “As time went on,” Mission Verdad reported from Venezuela, “support for Guaidó faded and his childish image became a laughable anecdote of Venezuelan politics.” After several failed coup attempts, corruption, embezzlement, resigning from his own party, and losing the presidency of the National Assembly, Guaidó’s last shred of legitimacy – his National Assembly seat – will be contested on December 6 with elections to the unicameral legislature.

    US interference and sanctions on Venezuela

    The extraordinary level of US interference in Venezuela’s electoral process highlights their importance. The US government has preemptively declared the upcoming National Assembly elections fraudulent.  Guaidó’s political party and others on the far right have dutifully obeyed Trump’s directive to boycott the contest.

    However, other opposition elements have broken with the US strategy of extra-parliamentary regime change and are participating in the elections. They have also distanced themselves from Guaidó’s calls for ever harsher sanctions against his people and even for US military intervention.

    To maintain discipline among the moderate opposition, the US has sanctioned some opposition party leaders for registering to run in the parliamentary elections. Nevertheless, 98 opposition parties and nine Chavista parties (supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution) will be contesting for 277 seats in the National Assembly.

    Following the US’s lead, the European Union rejected the upcoming election and an invitation to send election observers. A long list of international figures including Noble Prize winners and former heads of state petitioned the EU: “This election represents, above all a democratic, legal and peaceful way out of the political and institutional crisis that was triggered in January 2019 by the self-appointment of Juan Guaidó as ‘interim president’ of Venezuela.”

    The Council of Electoral Experts of Latin America (CEELA) and other internationals will be observing the election on December 6. CEELA Chairman Nicanor Moscoso noted: “We, as former magistrates and electoral authorities in Latin America, have organized elections and also participated in over 120 elections…Our aim is to accompany the Venezuelan people.”

    The nine Chavista parties are not running on a unified slate. The new Popular Revolutionary Alternative coalition, which formed to run candidates independently, includes the Venezuelan Communist Party.

    Communists normally would not get favorable ink in The New York Times. But when there are splits on the left, the empire’s newspaper of record exploits them: “They championed Venezuela’s revolution – they are now its latest victims.” The paper reports: “The repression is partly an outcome of Mr. Maduro’s decision to abandon the wealth redistribution policies of his late predecessor, Hugo Chávez, in favor of what amounts to crony capitalism to survive American sanctions [emphasis added].”

    The key to deconstructing the Times’s hit piece is the phrase, “to survive American sanctions.” As Alfred de Zayas, the United Nations Human Rights Rapporteur on Venezuela, had observed even before the pandemic hit, the US sanctions on Venezuela are causing “economic asphyxiation.” Compromises have been necessitated.

    President Maduro has survived a drone assassination attempt, mercenary invasions, and abortive coups. In this context, the ruling party realistically feels under siege.

    Although running independent candidates, Communist Party leader Oscar Figuera states “we see imperialism as the main enemy of the Venezuelan people.” And on that the Chavista forces are united.

    National Assembly elections as a referendum on the Venezuelan project

    Venezuela’s Vice Foreign Minister Carlos Ron characterized the election as a referendum against the “brutal blockade” imposed by the US and its allies and against their effort to undermine Venezuela’s democracy by trying to prevent the election from being conducted. He spoke from Caracas in a webinar produced by the US Peace Council and others on November 18.

    Carlos Ron lamented that the Venezuelan opposition does not play by the rules. In the 24 national elections held since the election of Hugo Chávez, only the two that have been won by the opposition were deemed truly legitimate by them. Yet this is the electoral system that former US President Jimmy Carter proclaimed to be “the best in the world.”

    Margaret Flowers of Popular Resistance spoke in the November 18 webinar calling for the US government to end the illegal coercive economic measures, including unfreezing Venezuela’s assets. Flowers called for reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the legitimate government of Venezuela based on peace and mutual respect.

    Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace spoke at the webinar of the necessity to protect the Venezuelan project as the “gateway to the transformation of the entire region,” which is also why the US sees Venezuela as a threat. He cautioned that Joe Biden has the same regime-change policy as Trump. Our responsibility, Baraka concluded, is to build a clear anti-imperialist movement.

    This article was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2020 at 8:19am and is filed under Crimes against Humanity, Donald Trump, Elections, Joe Biden, Juan Guaidó, Lies, President Nicolas Maduro, Sanctions, United States, US Congress, US Foreign Policy, US Hypocrisy, Venezuela.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.