JK Alternative Viewpoint

Western leaders know full well the penalties won’t cause Tehran to abandon its nuclear program. , AP Photo

The robust sanctions against Iran won’t work by themselves. Looking at Iranians from their perspective helps explain why. By Leslie H. Gelb.
The United States, Israel, and Europe are

inching closer to war with Iran because of what they’re doing and what they’re not doing. What they are doing is squeezing Iran with unprecedented economic sanctions (which is good); but Western leaders know full well the penalties won’t cause Tehran to abandon its nuclear program. What the West is doing is drawing “red lines” that are backing its leaders into untenable and dangerous corners, as well as cornering Iran. What they are not doing is leveraging these economic and military pressures with a negotiating proposal that can curtail Iran’s nuclear-bomb-making capabilities without war.
 As Western leaders back Iran into a corner and as they are locking themselves into a war policy they haven’t seriously contemplated and don’t really want, now is the time to offer a deal. The peace package is simple: Iran keeps its uranium facilities but with capabilities to enrich reduced to levels fit only for civilian use. Tehran also agrees to the tightest international verification procedures. The West lifts sanctions gradually as Iran complies with both reconfiguring its nuclear plants and accepts the necessary verification. For sure, President Obama has tried similar proposals before. This time, however, Iran may find that the biting economic pressures make the deal more palatable. For sure, neither I nor anyone else knows whether Iran will accept this time.

But I do know this: if we don’t at least try the negotiating track, a war of untold uncertainties and dangers can come upon us.
To see why economic sanctions alone won’t lead to Tehran’s capitulation, try to look at the situation through Iranian eyes. Here’s what they see: Pakistan, a country that has already given away nuclear secrets to terrorist and renegade states and which itself could be heading toward a Muslim extremist takeover, got the bomb. We did nothing about it. North Korea, one of the nuttiest states around, which has also given nuclear knowledge to Syria and Pakistan (among others), also acquired nukes. We did nothing about that either. Washington accepted India’s nukes and even made special verification arrangements with New Delhi that expressly contradicted the Non-Proliferation Treaty. And of course, Israel has long had a substantial nuclear strike capability, and Washington secretly applauds that, as do I, openly.
Washington and Israel say Iran is a special case. One reason is that Tehran is supposedly more likely to use its nukes. But why? North Korea and Pakistan are even less predictable than Iran. Another reason is that Iran’s nukes will cause its neighbors, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to go nuclear. But just as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have restrained themselves regarding North Korea, so too can Iran’s Arab neighbors. What should calm the waters in the Mideast, as in Asia, is confidence in the U.S. deterrent power. If Pyongyang so much as twitched a nuclear finger, its existence would be a thing of the past. Iran would face the same fate.
 
Western leaders know full well the penalties won’t cause Tehran to abandon its nuclear program. , AP Photo
As Iranians see it, the real reason they are made the only exception to America’s no-nukes wall is this: Israel. The Netanyahu regime is convinced that Iran actually will go to nuclear war against the Jewish state, no matter Tehran’s certainty that it will be utterly destroyed in return. Tel Aviv thinks the mullahs are Hitlers bent on the destruction of Jews, no matter the cost to themselves. Besides, they reckon that Israel’s options to use force against its neighbors will be dangerously limited if Tehran possessed nukes and made nuclear threats.
These Israeli judgments have to be taken seriously. At the same time, it needs be said that many if not most Israeli intelligence officers and key senior military officers have taken nearly the opposite point of view. Of course, they worry about such an Iranian threat. But they believe that Israel’s powerful nuclear deterrent will work, that the Iranian leaders are not crazy Hitlers. And they further argue that war would solve nothing and could have grave consequences. Nothing would be solved, they say, because Iran’s nuclear march would be set back only by a year or two, then go further underground and be even harder to destroy. And they contend that the adverse reaction to an Israeli attack around the world would be devastating politically, to say nothing of the prospect of a wave of anti-Israeli terrorism.
Faced with these circumstances and prospects, Washington has decided to toughen its stance rhetorically. The good old formulation that “all options are on the table” is no longer sufficient. Now, with full White House support, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has gone much further in reducing ambiguity about what the U.S. would do if Iran proceeded with its nuclear development. He didn’t define that “red line,” but the inevitable neoconservatives are doing it for him and

for President Obama. They’re maintaining that almost any further moves by Tehran along the nuclear path should trigger U.S. strikes against all possible nuclear targets. Some U.S. military leaders seem to think red lines make sense; most military leaders decidedly do not.
I’d like to see President Obama show the courage of offering a solid peace proposal instead of just drawing chest-thumping red lines.

International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors arrived in Iran on Sunday for a three-day inspection tour. Most recently, that agency, charged with checking what’s going on within suspect nations, issued a report saying it could not attest that Iran’s program was peaceful, and that it could be headed toward nuclear weapons. The agency didn’t say so in its report at that time, but most analysts now predict that Iran could have usable nukes within one to two years. Such precision belies their intelligence capabilities as well as America’s. But there we are.
And here we Americans are in a presidential election year. At these times, the straps of restraint on tough talk and

tough action are almost always loosened. That’s especially true when Democrats hold the White House—Democrats who are quadrennially scared stupid by the prospect of Republicans accusing them of being lily-livered liberals and selling out the nation’s security. I’d like to see President Obama show the courage of offering a solid peace proposal instead of just drawing chest-thumping red lines. Meantime, he doesn’t have to withdraw any sanctions or any “red lines.” Just cut the usual diplomatic and political baloney, and try. With so much pressure now being applied on Iran, it might work. In the midst of a barrage of economic and military pressures, it is not a sign of weakness or lack of resolve to offer peace. It is classic negotiating from strength.

Leslie H. Gelb, a former New York Times columnist and senior government official, is author of Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy (HarperCollins, 2009), a book that shows how to think about and use power in the 21st century. He is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/30/leslie-h-gelb-on-how-president-obama-should-handle-iran.html

Contemporary culture places a high premium on novelty. Armand D’Angour argues that we should consider the more balanced views about old and new found in classical Greece.

New media, new technology, new politics, new products and services, new fashions and designs, new, new, new. It seems as if the world is devoted to innovation and novelty. What is not new is the interest and excitement – as well as the worry and anxiety – aroused by novelty. A similar ambivalence about newness is evident in another era of intense novelty and creativity, classical Greece from the eighth to the fourth centuries bc, when the Greeks produced a series of innovations that formed the basis for two millennia of western thought and achievement in literature, art, architecture, philosophy, politics, medicine and mathematics.

The Greeks could even lay claim to having discovered innovation, since they are the first known people to have written about the notion (the Greek for ‘innovation’, kainotomia, is first found in a comedy by Aristophanes of 422 bc).

The Greeks innovated in artistic and intellectual spheres, rather than in practical or technological areas, but the principles underlying their innovations parallel those found today. Is there,

then, nothing new under the sun

? (The expression itself, familiar from the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, derives from the ideas of early Greek philosophers such as Pythagoras.) Modern processes of innovation differ in significant respects, but if we look at novelty through the eyes of classical Greeks we can learn some pertinent lessons. So what are these principles? A starting point is suggested by Aristotle (384-322 bc), the most comprehensive thinker of the ancient world, whose surviving writings include works on logic, ethics, literature and biology. Aristotle observed that innovation means different things, depending on the area in which it is applied: political innovation, for instance, is different from technical innovation.

Investigators of novelty need to consider at the outset such questions as: what does the new mean in this context

? What sort of innovation is required here?

Numerous other principles stemming from the Greeks’ experience of innovation can be compiled from the corpus of texts that have come down from the classical age. One important consideration is that innovation is dynamic: that is, it involves an active interchange between individual innovators and the public, tradition and change, old and new. Fifth-century Athenian musicians, for instance, composed new songs that struck contemporary listeners as a radical departure from tradition. Plato, a trenchant critic of the ‘new music’, would have banned it altogether, arguing that innovation should involve no more than a modest variation of familiar structures. (Respect for tradition is in fact an important basis for innovation: for novelty to succeed it must appeal to existing perceptions about what is valuable or effective.)

But the pluralistic environments that foster the pursuit of innovation also generate diverse responses. Although the avant-garde musicians of the ancient world have left no lasting mark on the western musical tradition they were hugely popular with large sections of the Athenian public. They not only achieved fame and financial success in their lifetimes, but the songs of the most radical of them all, Timotheus of Miletus, were ironically enough considered classics by later generations. One could draw an analogy with the Beatles – except that Timotheus’ songs and lyrics were still being performed in Greece 700 years after his death.

Ancient Greek physicians were also radical innovators in their time, the first to take a genuinely rational approach to human health and disease; but these Hippocratic doctors saw themselves as traditionalists who rejected ‘novel’ medical theorisation. Re-theorisation can be, nonetheless, a successful form of innovation: for over 2,000 years before the rise of modern medicine medical practice thrived (often at the expense of its patients) on the novel theory of the humours. This kind of innovation may seem to involve little more than words – a rhetoric of novelty. But rhetoric is a technique of presenting something persuasively and calling something ‘new’ is still often an effective rhetorical tool (think of New Persil, New Labour, New World Order). Just because something is called ‘new’ does not make it an innovation, though we might want to distinguish what is really new from what is simply called ‘new’. But in a world in which novelty attracts a premium, ‘new’ sells. Whether it’s an old product relaunched or an old idea recycled rhetoric can make all the difference, so we ignore it at our peril.

What kinds of individuals, organisations or cultures attract or generate innovation? Freedom, competition and incentive are widely recognised as keys to cultures of innovation. The ancient Greeks were no strangers to these notions: they invented the notions of democracy and freedom under the law, created the first large-scale monetary system in history and were notoriously competitive.

But the new takes the place of the old and since this is sometimes bound to mean the loss of real value we must also learn when not to innovate. To retain their creativity, innovative individuals and societies need to acknowledge what is of lasting value. The ancient Greeks held on to valuable traditions and allowed space for mourning, institutionalising it in religious rituals and in public practices. The modern world has less time for reflection about the destruction that innovation can bring. If today’s ceaseless innovation brings anxiety and disaffection as well as excitement and wonder we might at least learn something and refresh our own perspective on innovation by reviewing the experience of the past.

Armand D’Angour is Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford and the author of The Greeks and the New (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

 
.http://www.historytoday.com/armand-d%E2%80%99angour/innovation-classical-greece

A prophet-provacateur faithful to French traditions of lucidity, sensuality, and alienation, Houellebecq believes we are all doomed. The Map and the Territory continues his great project of exposing the limits of individualism.
About the authorJames Warner is the author of All Her Father’s Guns, a Bay Area novel, published in 2011 by Numina Press. His short stories have appeared in many publications. His personal website is here.

 
Michel Houellebecq condemns the soullessness of our consumer society, yet paradoxically he reserves his worst contempt for those endeavors one might naturally suggest as an antidote or palliative. The possibility of having children is generally treated with derision in his work, and it’s the same with any kind of humanitarian project. Houellebecq is especially scathing about “human rights” – in any of his novels, a character using this term is immediately identified as an idiot.

His novel Atomised (called The Elementary Particles in the U.S. translation) disparages the “sexual revolution” –

“As the lovely word ‘household’ suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in li

beral society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day.”

(In French the word in quotes is “ménage,” a more beautiful word than “household,” with connotations of order and human scale.)

In Atomised, the grandmother of Michel and Bruno is selflessly devoted to her family, while their mother, an apostle of the sexual revolution, is horrendously self-centered. Michel and Bruno themselves both prove incapable of committing to the most important women in their lives, and Michel goes on to pave the way for a future where sexual reproduction is abandoned in favor of cloning. Houellebecq denies that a society can be run according to secular humanist ideals – a passage in Atomised sweepingly blames the notions of “personal freedom,” “human dignity,” and “progress” for the alleged fact that “human history from the fifteenth to the twentieth century was characterized by progressive decline and disintegration.”

Yet he is not a reactionary, he tells Bernard-Henri Lévy in the letter collection Public Enemies, because he believes in the “absolute irreversibility of all processes of decay once they have begun.” All that is left for his characters is the search for sexual gratification, in a society whose decline and fall is irrevocably determined – or, for those more theoretically inclined, the hastening of a post-reproductive future.

Houellebecq apparently regrets not having experienced a more traditional upbringing himself, and the narrator of his novel Platform laments his own lack of a civic sense –

“I suddenly realized to my embarrassment that I considered the society I lived in more or less as a natural environment – like a savannah, or a jungle – whose laws I had to adapt to. The notion that I was in any way in solidarity with this environment had never occurred to me. It was like an atrophy in me, an emptiness. It was far from certain that society could continue to survive for long with individuals like me.”

Although he expresses contempt for radical Islamists, the narrator of Platform occasionally sounds like one –

“For the west, I do not feel hatred. At most I feel a great contempt. I know only that every single one of us reeks of selfishness, masochism, and death. We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live, and what’s more, we continue to export it.”

Houellebecq’s latest novel, The Map and the Territory, opens with a description of an oil painting depicting Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, a work by the fictional character Jed Martin. Imagining Hirst and Koons painted in oils invests them with a Lovecraftian and monstrous aura, obsessive figures fighting intricate battles for domination. Is a novel about contemporary man as incongruous as an oil painting of Koons? What earlier era could have produced a novel in which the hero drifts apart from the heroine largely because of apathy – as Jed loses touch with the novel’s main female character, Michelin PR representative Olga Sheremoyova?

The Map and the Territory shows a France in demographic decline, more dependent on tourism than industry, where most of a priest’s job is to conduct funerals. Houellebecq’s nostalgia for lost glory comes across in his evident shock that as culturally authoritative a French institution as Michelin is now largely owned by foreign institutional investors. A fascination with Michelin maps crops up throughout Houellebecq’s work, and is shared by Jed, whose lifework Houellebecq envisages as “a homage to human labor.”

When Michelin posts Olga back to Russia, Jed stops exhibiting and selling photographs of maps and starts making oil paintings of contemporary professional figures. Unable to finish the painting of Jeff Koons – “it was as difficult as painting a Mormon pornographer” – Jed decides instead to work on Michel Houellebecq – “a loner with strong misanthropic tendencies: it was rare for him even to say a word to his dog.” And Houellebecq is certainly easier to visualize as an oil painting than is Koons, the resulting painting inspiring one of the book’s most Lovecraftian sentences – “The expression in the eyes appeared at the time so strange that it could not, in the critics’ view, be compared to any existing pictorial tradition, but had rather to be compared to certain archival ethnological images taken during voodoo ceremonies.”

In Houellebecq’s version of history, “free-market economics redrew the geography of the world in terms of the expectations of the clientele.” He captures a village in the Loiret with this juxtaposition – “The multipurpose cultural center offered a permanent exhibition on local crafts. For a long time there had probably been only second homes here.” The place strikes a visiting detective as “a fake village recreated from a television series,” with a church that has been “pitilessly restored.” The provinces become what the metropolis wants them to be, as France itself is repackaged for overseas visitors – Houellebecq’s prediction in Public Enemies, that the economic future of France is as “a sort of tourist brothel,” starts to become realized within the timeline of The Map and The Territory (some of which takes place in the 2020s, in a future where the French birth rate has begun to decline again). In another scene, at a party thrown by French television personality Jean-Pierre Pernault – a man nationally famous for his advocacy of regionalism — musicians of Breton and Corsican, Savoyard and Basque origin perform, sometimes simultaneously, in a cacophony of localisms that is absurdly Parisian.

Other French public intellectuals appear as characters, including the novelist Frédéric Beigbeder, who gains sympathy points for being the only character who tries to get Jed and Olga to reunite, in vain – Olga’s primary purpose in the novel seems to be to demonstrate the impossibility of love in our time. In general Houellebecq shows a willingness, romantic in its own way, to extrapolate from any single failed affair the “decline of Western sexuality” – the phrase comes from Platform. Romantic love is like many other traditions for Houellebecq, in that he thinks it’s important yet cannot make himself believe in it. He told the Paris Review that love may no longer exist because of “the materialist idea that we are alone, we live alone and we die alone. That’s not very compatible with love.” Seemingly he would endorse the statement of another provacateur, the Protestant theologian Stanley Hauerwas, that “liberalism is that cluster of theories about society that are based on the presumption that we must finally each die alone.”

Houellebecq fears the work ethic is likewise doomed. Jed’s father, an architect, defends the vision of Charles Fourier – “Fourier had lived under the Ancien Régime, and he was conscious that, well before the appearance of capitalism, scientific research and technical progress had taken place, and that people worked hard, sometimes very hard, without being pushed by the lure of profit but by something, in the eyes of modern man, much vaguer; the love of God, in the case of monks, or more simply the honour of the function.”

(“L’honneur de la fonction” is another phrase that sounds better in French.)

A phrase halfway through the book summarizes Jed’s life – “he had produced a body of work, as they say, without ever encountering, or even contemplating, happiness.” Yet Jed’s solitary old age is encapsulated in the gently apocalyptic vision of him shopping at the local Carrefour on Tuesday mornings when it is least crowded – “He sometimes had the supermarket all to himself – which seemed to him to be quite a good approximation of happiness.” His last works are montages of electronic components superimposed on vegetation, suggestive of the world our species will leave behind. According to Jed, “everyone in Western Europe seemed persuaded that capitalism was doomed, and even doomed in the short term, that it was living through its very last years, without, however, the ultra-left parties managing to attract anyone beyond their usual clientele of spiteful masochists.

A veil of ashes seemed to have spread over people’s minds.” Sackcloth suits Houellebecq well — “I feel only a faint sense of solidarity with the human species,” the character Houellebecq tells Jed, the author portraying himself over-playing himself with admirable theatricality.

Adept at balancing the lyrical with the clinical, and the confessional with the socio-analytical, Houellebecq wrestles with many ideas in this novel without letting them overwhelm it. Occasional flashes of prose lifted from Wikipedia foreshadow the eventual victory of the hive mind and “death of the author.” In The Map and The Territory this death is enacted literally, since the character Houellebecq is viciously murdered – an exercise the author Houellebecq must surely have found therapeutic.

Houellebecq’s rejection of all political developments since the fifteenth century and palpable sense of living in a fallen world, together with such claims as that “all the theories of freedom, from Gide to Sartre, are just immoralisms thought up by irresponsible bachelors,” might seem to presage a conversion to a right-wing form of Catholicism.

The character Houellebecq, before being murdered, does in fact mysteriously get himself baptized. Certainly Houellebecq seems temperamentally ripe for some kind of conversion, were his will to believe only stronger.

His anti-heroes, although affable and not unkind, seem incapable of love or even friendship – generally the most intense thing they can feel is sexual infatuation.

These are men who blame societal decadence for their own lack of any self-sacrificial motivation or capacity for true love – perhaps what makes them sympathetic is that it’ s a lack they genuinely regret, if with a certain detachment.

Houellebecq’s big moral insight is that self-obsession individuates us less than self-sacrifice does, that ties to a community restrict us less than the absence of such ties, that consumer freedom may turn us into clones. He is capable of sensing something admirable about community-spiritedness, without to date having been able to work up any actual enthusiasm for it – but perhaps there remains the possibility that, after his symbolic murder in The Map and The Territory, he will be reborn from the ashes with the seeds of a more committed vision.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/james-warner/long-haul-of-solitary-death-michel-houellebecq-and-decline-of-western-sexuality

Thousands of people joined a secular rally in Tunis on Saturday to protest violence by the Salafis. Many in the cosmopolitan city now worry about what the revolution they embraced might unleash.

TUNIS — The insults were furious. “Infidel!” and “Apostate!” the religious protesters shouted at the two men who had come to the courthouse to show their support for a television director on trial on charges of blasphemy. Fists, then a head butt followed.

When the scuffle ended a few minutes later, Tunisia, which much of the Arab world sees as a model for revolution, had witnessed a crucial scene in what some have cast as a gathering contest for its soul.

“We’re surrendering our right to think and speak differently,” said Hamadi Redissi, one of the two men, still bearing a scab on his forehead from the attack last week.

The challenges before Tunisia’s year-old revolution are immense — righting an ailing economy, drafting a new constitution and recovering from decades of dictatorship that cauterized civic life. But in the first months of a coalition government led by the Ennahda Party, seen as one of the most pragmatic of the region’s Islamist movements, the most emotional of struggles has surged to the forefront: a fight over the identity of an Arab and Muslim society that its authoritarian leaders had always cast as adamantly secular.

The popular revolts that began to sweep across the Middle East one year ago have forced societies like Tunisia’s, removed from the grip of authoritarian leaders and celebrating an imagined unity, to confront their own complexity. The aftermath has brought elections in Egypt and Tunisia as well as more decisive Islamist influence in Morocco, Libya and, perhaps, Syria. The upheaval has given competing Islamist movements a chance to exert influence and define themselves locally and on the world stage. It has also given rise to fears, where people in places like Tunis, a seaside metropolis proud of its cosmopolitanism, worry about what a revolution they embraced might unleash.

An opposition newspaper has warned darkly of puritanical Islamists declaring their own fief in some backwater town. Protests convulsed a university in Tunis over its refusal to let female students take examinations while wearing veils that concealed their faces. Then there is the trial Mr. Redissi attended on Jan.

23, of a television director who faces as many as five years in prison for broadcasting the French animated movie “Persepolis,” which contains a brief scene depicting God that many here have deemed blasphemous.

The trial was postponed again, this time until April. But its symbolism, precedence and implications infused a secular rally Saturday that drew thousands to downtown Tunis in one of the biggest demonstrations here in recent months.

“Make a common front against fanaticism,” one banner declared.

Tunisia and Egypt are remarkable for how much freer they have become in the year since their revolts. They may become more conservative, too, as Islamist parties inspire and articulate the mores and attitudes of populations that have always been more traditional than the urban elite. Some here hope the contest may eventually strike a balance between religious sensitivity and freedom of expression, an issue as familiar in the West as it is in Muslim countries. Others worry that debates pressed by the most fervent — over the veil, sunbathing on beaches and racy fare in the media — may polarize societies and embroil nascent governments in debates they seem to prefer to avoid.

“It’s like a war of attrition,” said Said Ferjani, a member of Ennahda’s political bureau, who complained that his party was trapped between two extremes, the most ardently secular and the religious. “They’re trying not to let us focus on the real issues.”

Nearly everyone here seems to agree that “Persepolis” was broadcast Oct. 7 on Nessma TV as a provocation of some sort. Abdelhalim Messaoudi, a journalist at Nessma, said he envisioned the film, about a girl’s childhood in revolutionary Iran, “as a pretext to start a conversation.” But many in Tunisia, both pious and less so, were taken aback by the brief scene in which God was personified — speaking in Tunisian slang no less. A week later, a crowd of Salafis — the term used for the most conservative Islamists — attacked the house of Nabil Karoui, the station’s director, and he was soon charged with libeling religion and broadcasting information that could “harm public order or good morals.”

The trial, which Human Rights Watch called “a disturbing turn for the nascent Tunisian democracy,” was originally scheduled for Nov. 16, then postponed until January.

On Jan. 23, crowds gathered outside the colonnaded courthouse, along a sylvan street in Tunisia’s old town, known as the casbah. Tempers flared and, in a scene captured on YouTube, Mr. Redissi and Zied Krichen, the editor of the newspaper Al Maghreb, tried to leave.

“All I could think was to not look behind me, walk ahead, and not open my mouth,” said Mr. Krichen, who is 54. A man rushed toward him, hitting him from behind.

When Mr. Redissi, 59, turned to defend his colleague, he was head-butted. At first, the police did nothing, then helped escort the two men to a police station down the road.

Mr. Messaoudi, who was sitting at a cafe across the street, was also assaulted.

Two days later, in a statement many secular figures deemed too timid, Samir Dilou, a government spokesman and a member of Ennahda, reiterated the party’s view that the film was “a violation of the sacred.” But he condemned the violence and promised to act. One of the assailants, identified in the video, was later arrested.

For people like Mr. Mess aoudi, though, the incident reflected

a months-long trend of thuggery by Salafis, from an attack on a theater airing a film they deemed objectionable to their brief control last month over a northern Tunisian town called Sanjan. Some secular figures acknowledge that Ennahda is embarrassed by the incidents, loath to be grouped with the Salafis. Others view both as part of a broader Islamist outlook that celebrates Tunisia’s Muslim identity as a way to promote a more conservative society.

“Certain Islamist factions want to turn identity into their Trojan horse,” Mr. Messaoudi said. “They use the pretext of protecting their identity as a way to crush what we have achieved as a Tunisian society. They want to crush the pillars of civil society.”

The debates in Tunisia often echo similar confrontations in Turkey, another country with a long history of secular authoritarian rule now governed by a party inspired by political Islam. In both, secular elites long considered themselves a majority and were treated as such by the state. In both, those elites now recognize themselves as minorities and are often mobilized more by the threat than the reality of religious intolerance.

Mr. Redissi, a columnist and professor, predicted secular Tunisians might soon retreat to enclaves.

“We’ve become the ahl al-dhimma,” he said, offering a term in Islamic law to denote protected minorities in a Muslim state. “It’s like the Middle Ages.”

As in Egypt, the prominence of the Salafis since the revolution has taken many Tunisians by surprise. Their numbers pale before their brethren in Egypt, but like them, they are assertive and determined to make their presence felt, often embarrassing more moderate counterparts like Ennahda and the Muslim Brotherhood. On Friday, they organized a demonstration in front of the Foreign Ministry in support of Syrian protesters. For weeks, they held a sit-in at Manouba University here in Tunis to demand that women in full veils be allowed to take exams, eventually forcing the campus to close for a time.

“There are red lines not to be crossed,” said Abdel-Qadir al-Hashemi, a 28-year-old Salafi activist who helped organize the protest at Manouba. “The film ‘Persepolis’ was a provocation, simply a provocation, with the goal of driving us toward violence.”

A few of his colleagues turned out for the secular protest Saturday.

“Go back to your caves and mind your own business!” someone shouted at them.

They heckled back.

“You lost your daddy, Ben Ali!” one of them taunted, referring to the Tunisian dictator, President Zine El-Abdine Ben Ali, who was forced into exile in Saudi Arabia last year.

Even secular figures like Mr. Redissi suggest that Ennahda would rather avoid the debate over “Persepolis.” He predicted the trial would be postponed until after the next elections that follow the drafting of the constitution, in a year or so. Others insisted that Ennahda take a stronger stand against the Salafis before society became even more polarized.

“I don’t see either action or reaction — where is the government?” asked Ahmed Ounaïes, a former diplomat who briefly served as foreign minister after the revolution. “What is Ennahda’s concept of Tunisia of tomorrow? It hasn’t made that clear.”

In Ennahda’s offices, Mr. Ferjani shook his head. He complained that the case had been “blown out of proportion,” that media were recklessly fueling the debate and that the forces of the old government were inciting Salafis to tarnish Ennahda. But he conceded that the line between freedom of expression and religious sensitivity would not be drawn soon.

“The struggle is philosophical,” he said, “and it will go on and on and on.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/world/africa/tunisia-navigates-a-democratic-path-tinged-with-religion.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

The year 2012 is Europe’s moment of truth. If their dithering continues, European politicians will soon lose control of the continent’s economic and financial future. After all the excitement of 2011, it is also a make-or-break year for some Middle Eastern countries in the midst of tricky political transitions. Even the United States is being shaken out of its social slumber as concerns mount about income inequality and, more generally, the fairness of the “system.”

All this speaks to an increasingly bimodal outlook for the world economy in the years ahead. At one end, timely and proactive policy measures can help with the healing and put the globe back on the path toward higher growth, job creation, and better social justice. At the other, political dysfunction and financial deleveraging could lead to economic fragmentation, higher unemployment, trade wars, and social unrest.

In an attempt to shed light on the key issues in play, what follows is an attempt to identify four factors that could wreck the global economy in the next few years, and four factors that could propel it to greater stability and prosperity. Let’s hope our leaders choose wisely.

THE WORST CASE

European economic and financial fragmentation: As of today, the biggest risk for the global economy this year is the disorderly collapse of the eurozone. It would bring economic and financial activity to a standstill across the continent, cause widespread corporate bankruptcies and bank runs, and destroy millions of jobs. Other countries, be they advanced or emerging, would be contaminated by the collapse in global trade, the curtailment of credit, and the spike risk aversion that would lead investors to rush into cash. A complete eurozone collapse would be both chaotic and an unmitigated disaster.

Disruptions in the Middle East: As the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman brilliantly pointed out in a recent column, there are two types of destabilized countries: those that implode when highly stressed, and those that explode, affecting entire regions. Iran and Syria are of the latter type, and both are near boiling point due to internal and external developments.

The greater the instability in these two countries, the higher the risk of regional contamination and, accordingly, worrisome global repercussions. This could include surging oil prices, leading to an ugly global stagflation.

Central bank exhaustion: Unconventional measures by central banks have, up to now, played a critical role in avoiding debt deflation and economic recessions in advanced economies. In the process, the banks have ballooned their balance sheets to previously unthinkable levels (from 20 percent of GDP for Britain and the United States to 30 percent for the European Central Bank). No one knows with any degree of confidence how far these balance sheets can expand safely, nor is there sufficient clarity on the collateral damage and unintended consequences. What is clear is that we are in unchartered waters and, given that they are the only agencies that have stepped up to the policy plate, the world can ill afford a loss of central bank credibility and effectiveness.

Social unrest: Enabled by social media technologies that facilitate broad-based coordination, the world has witnessed an astonishing outburst of grassroots social movements that are pressing for greater social justice — from the Arab Spring to the Indignados in Spain, the Occupy movements in the United States, Israel’s protesters, and anti-austerity riots in Greece and Italy. Having come together on the basis of legitimate grievances, these movements now face the challenge of pivoting from complaints about the past to helping to build a better future. The longer it takes the pivot, the higher the probability of frustration and of the protests turning violent — and governments reacting inappropriately.
THE BEST CASE

“Refounding” Europe: France and Germany have embarked on an effort to strengthen the underpinnings of a restructured and reformed eurozone — what French President Nicolas Sarkozy has labeled a “refounding.” So far, this effort has been half-hearted, trying to meet too many objectives with too few instruments. Both Europe and the world would benefit from a more focused effort to enhance the core of Europe through greater fiscal and political integration and countering the fragility of banks. The likely outcome — namely, a smaller but more robust eurozone focused more on the Germanys and Netherlands of the region as opposed to a Greece or Portugal — would remove a major uncertainty that holds back investments and job creation.

America’s Sputnik moment: The United States remains the global economy’s best locomotive for growth. But its vibrancy is threatened by unprecedented political squabbling that undermines any attempt to lift the impediments to growth. What America needs is reminiscent of what followed the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik in 1957 — the convergence of American society around a common vision and purpose. A 2012 economic Sputnik moment would lift structural obstacles to growth (including in housing, public finance, and credit), unleash the considerable dry financial powder currently on the sideline, and empower the entrepreneurship that is unquestionably in place; and the post-Sputnik efforts would revolve around improving education, infrastructure, innovation, and other enablers of long-term growth.

Political healing and leadership: It is not due to complicated technical difficulties that many of the world’s economic problems persist and deepen.

In most cases, today’s malaise is a reflection of political dysfunction and ineffective leadership, both of which pre-empt any meaningful effort to take the difficult yet necessary decisions. Witness how the U.S. Congress has torpedoed President Barack Obama’s job initiative.

As a result, the credibility of the system itself suffers. Fortunately, several key countries, including the United States, are holding elections this year, giving citizens an opportunity to send a message to their elected representatives. The greater the clarity and urgency of that message, the higher the probability that bickering politicians can overcome real and perceived legacies to unite in doing the right thing for current and future generations of citizens.

Unleashing the emerging consumer: Emerging economies, China in particular, are in a very different place today than Europe and the United States. With a savings rate that has consistently been among the highest in the world, their consumers have the wallet but not the will to spend. Their behavior is a complex reflection both of self-insurance against the uncertain public provision of social services and of government policies that favor production at the cost of consumption. By moving on the latter, for instance accelerating the liberalization of the exchange rate system and tweaking the balance of taxes and subsidies, emerging economies can have a material impact on global growth and trade.

***
 
The world economy faces an unsettling outlook for the next few years. It can either break out of its current malaise and deliver economic prosperity, jobs, and greater social fairness; or, instead, it can slip deeper into unemployment, inequality, financial instability, and trade wars. Neither is preordained at this stage as leaders still have an important ability to influence outcomes to the better. But, as Europe demonstrates, the longer they dither and bicker, the higher the risk that policies will lose both effectiveness and credibility.

Mohamed El-Erian is CEO and co-chief investment officer of investment management firm Pimco and author of When Markets Collide.

A Separation written, produced and directed by Asghar Farhadi
Reviewed by Kaveh L Afrasiabi

PALO ALTO, California – The idea of art imitating life is exquisitely implemented in the highly-acclaimed Iranian movie, A Separation, which has been nominated for two Oscars, Best Foreign Movie and the Best Original Screenplay.

It is Asghar Farhadi’s fifth film, illuminating aspects of life and people in Iran in a clear, precise and subtle form that is bereft of symbolism and full of cinematic realism.

Like Farhadi’s previous film, About Elly, this movie offers a distinctively Iranian buffet of class, cultural, normative and psychological issues, some of which, like the ethics of caring for

elders, are universal and resonate with a global audience.

Both films zoom in on the issue of truthfulness and (in) convenient lies, although A Separation is more restrained by comparison and, as a result, somewhat inferior to About Elly, Farhadi’s finest film yet touching on taboo love, which has grown more resonant with time.

Farhadi’s verite style – of projecting every day reality, with all its complexities and dynamic tensions, straight on the silver screen – is refreshingly divorced from any directorial license notorious in “new Iranian cinema”. This enables him to make subtle judgment on the various themes such as gender relations and the role of religion and secularism – ie, standard ingredients of tales of “tradition versus modernity”.

The movie begins and ends with somber scenes at a family court, but strictly speaking is not a “divorce movie” as mistakenly labeled by some movie critics. Its main protagonists, a middle-class husband and wife, experience a separation, motivated by their disagreement on emigrating out of Iran, but throughout the movie the pair show all the traits of a married couple maneuvering with each other in the course of what appears as (most likely) a temporary rupture.

Their (intensely proto-intellectual) 11-year-old daughter is given the choice to pick her guardian, left ambiguous at the movie’s conclusion, yet sufficiently open to the suggestion that she has her own scheme of how to reunite her parents.

For average Western viewers, accustomed to the negative stereotyping of Iranian males as pathologically patriarchal, thanks to the singular contribution of the popular movie, Not Without My Daughter, this movie presents a timely correction.

Offering a more sympathetic portrayal of Iranian men, as well as Iranian women, it steers clear of any hints of male chauvinism and its dirty clutches of power and domination.

A fan of Harold Pinter, the British playwright, Farhadi has infused Pinteresque elements in A Separation. These include the working-class anger and frustration of the other husband in the movie, whose pregnant wife works as caretaker for the main couple and their Alzheimer-stricken elderly father – until she is unceremoniously dismissed for dereliction of duties.

From a crushingly ordinary beginning, the movie evolves into a unique melodrama that combines subtle glances and pauses with a crisp dialogue that avoids any ideological messages or noise; like Pinter’s works, here the pauses or glances are not simply the elements of character portrayal, they are “freezes” of action to indicate that we are witnessing another layer of reality.

In his earnest fondness for political neutrality, Farhadi nonetheless teases us with a passing whisper at Iranian middle class’ political discontent – in the opening scene when the estranged wife, played brilliantly by Leila Hatami, reveals her preference that her child does not grow up under the present “circumstance” in Iran.

Her silence to the magistrate’s question of “what circumstance” is also revelatory of a self-censorship by a modern middle class that in some sense feels culturally squeezed, indeed the only “symbolic” scene in the entire movie.

In the ensuing maelstrom, triggered by the accidental tragedy befalling the female caretaker and her unborn child, both couples discover a system of equal justice treating them fairly and without prejudice, a departure from the Western stereotype of Iranian justice as archaic or rather barbaric.

This, together with the film’s accurate portrayal of the pull of faith influencing the individual’s behavior (eg, the female caretaker consults with a religious dignitary as to whether or not she can clean the sick elderly man and she later sacrifices a substantial sum over a religious principle) reflect a quasi-affirmation of the status quo that is increasingly under Western siege nowadays.

Simultaneously, in his non-combative turn on faith, loyalty, law and social stratification, Farhadi brings to light the contemporary hardships of the Iranian working class, which is bound to be magnified as a result of comprehensive Western onslaught of sanctions against Iran.

The only villains in the movie are the objective circumstances, the fluid contexts of social existence that trigger events, accidents, and complex interactions, yet in terms of the movie’s zeitgeist, the context of foreign-induced hardship forms the implicit background, thus giving it an indirect political urgency. Its Oscar nomination by the American movie industry, hitherto more attuned to Islamphobia and “clash of civilizations” than tolerance of the Muslim “other” and civility, [1] may be rightly viewed as a cultural or artistic ceasefire that, hopefully, can jolt the American decision-makers that their current warmongering approach toward Iran is in dire need of reconsideration.

In a certain sense, A Separation deals with the cross-cultural gaps or separations, interiorized in the context of intra-family interactions between the middle class and working class characters, and raises awareness of the need for better understanding of the layers of meaning that lie beneath the surface realities, not unlike the philosophical discourse of Terrence Malick in his latest movie, The Tree of Life.

But while Malick is characteristically American in his grand ambition of disclosing the mystery of nature, cosmos and humanity, Farhadi micro-focuses on the Heideggerian Dasein of instant existence that is simultaneously both mundane and electrifyingly dynamic, causing the bumps and bruises of shifting perceptions and character developments.

There are profound stylistic differences between Farhadi and Malick, such as Malick’s overusage of soundtrack as an integral part of his cinematic narrative, compared with Farhadi’s minimal reliance on music that reflects an over-confidence in the ability of storyline to carry the movie forward (an ambition that does not work all the time).

Nevertheless, a limited comparison between the two directors is called for simply because of their distinct abilities to focus on family relations and turn the cinematic medium into a rich recipe for thoughtful provocations.

Together, these two movies, made in separate continents, remind the audience of the vital heartbeat of aesthetic humanism that beats in the East and West.

Note
1. See Afrasiabi, Persians and Greeks: Hollywood and Clash of Civilizations.

A Separation written, produced and directed by Asghar Farhadi. Distributed by Film Iran (Iran). Sony Pictures Classics (US) Memento Films (worldwide). Release date(s) February 1, 2011 (Tehran Fajr Film Festival), February 15, 2011 (Berlin Film Festival). Box office: $3,100,000 (Iran), $9,655,000 (worldwide).

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran’s Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry, click here. He is author of Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing , October 23, 2008) and Looking for rights at Harvard. His latest book is UN Management Reform: Selected Articles and Interviews on United Nations CreateSpace (November 12, 2011).

(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NA28Ak03.html

The writer currently teaches physics and political science at LUMS (Lahore). He taught at Quaid-i-Azam University for 36 years and was head of the physics department.
On January 24, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon vented his frustration at Pakistan’s determined opposition to a treaty that would limit fissile material production for use in nuclear weapons. For three years, Pakistan has single-handedly — and successfully — blocked the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva from discussing an effort that would reduce nuclear weapons globally.

Consequently, within diplomatic circles, Pakistan has acquired the reputation of an outlier that opposes all efforts towards this end.

The opposition comes in the backdrop of news that Pakistan has the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal. This claim — which still reverberates around the world — was first published in a Bulletin of Atomic Scientists report entitled “Pakistan’s nuclear forces — 2011”. The authors, Hans M Kristensen and Robert S Norris, say although the numbers of Pakistani warheads and delivery vehicles is a closely-held secret, yet “we estimate that Pakistan has a nuclear weapons stockpile of 90-110 nuclear warheads, an increase from the estimated 70-90 warheads in 2009”. They reckon that if the expansion continues, Pakistan’s stockpile could reach 150-200 in a few years. By this count, Pakistan’s arsenal may have already exceeded India’s, and will soon rival Britain’s.

The Bulletin report has not been denied by Pakistan. Its stockpile of highly enriched uranium is increased daily by thousands of centrifuges whirring away at the Kahuta Laboratory (and possibly elsewhere). This is augmented by plutonium producing reactors at Khushab; two are already at work and a third is undergoing trials. Google Earth photos show that a fourth one is under construction. The plutonium has no commercial purpose. Instead, the goal is to produce lighter but deadlier bombs to be fitted on to missile tips.

Pakistan’s position is that it needs to produce still more bombs — and hence more bomb materials — because of India. It cites the US-India nuclear deal, along with older issues related to verification problems and existing stocks. Indeed, that infamous deal is Pakistan’s strongest argument and a correct criticism: the US has committed itself to nuclear cooperation with a state that is not a signatory to the NPT and one that made nuclear weapons surreptitiously. Now that the sanctions once imposed are long gone, India can import advanced nuclear reactor technology as well as natural uranium ore from diverse sources — Australia included. Although imported ore cannot be used for bomb-making, India could in principle divert more of its scarce domestic ore towards military reactors.

Pakistan also says that “Cold Start” — an operation conceived by the Indian military in response to more Mumbai-type attacks — requires it to prepare tactical nuclear weapons for battlefield use.

But the US-India nuclear deal may actually be a fig leaf. Pakistan’s rush for more bombs has as much to do with its changing relationship with the United States as with Indian military modernisation. This racing reflects a paradigm shift within Pakistan’s military establishment, where feelings against the US have steadily hardened over many years. Post-bin Laden, the change is starkly visible.

In the military’s mind, the Americans are now a threat, equal to or larger than India. They are also considered more of an adversary than even the TTP jihadists who have killed thousands of Pakistani troops and civilians. While the Salala incident was allowed to inflame public opinion, the gory video-taped executions of Pakistani soldiers by the TTP were played down. A further indication is that the LeT/JuD is back in favor (with a mammoth anti-US and anti-India rally scheduled in Karachi next month). Pakistani animosity rises as it sees America tightly embracing India, and standing in the way of a Pakistan-friendly government in Kabul. Once again “strategic defiance” is gaining ground, albeit not through the regional compact suggested by General Mirza Aslam Beg in the early 1990s.

This attitudinal shift has created two strong non-India reasons that favour ramping up bomb production.

First, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are seen to be threatened by America. This perception has been reinforced by the large amount of attention given to the issue in the US mainstream press, and by war-gaming exercises in US military institutes. Thus, redundancy is considered desirable — an American attempt to seize or destroy all warheads would have smaller chances of success if Pakistan had more.

But such an attack is improbable. It is difficult to imagine any circumstances — except possibly the most extreme — in which the US would risk going to war against another nuclear state. Even if Pakistan had just a handful of weapons, no outside power could accurately know the coordinates of the mobile units on which they are located. It is said that an extensive network of underground tunnels exists within which they can be freely moved. Additionally, overground ones are moved from place to place periodically in unmarked trucks. Mobile dummies and decoys can hugely compound difficulties. Moreover, even if a nuclear location was exactly known, it would surely be heavily guarded. This implies many casualties when intruding troops are engaged, thus making a secret bin-Laden type operation impossible.

The second – and perhaps more important — reason for the accelerated nuclear development is left unstated: nukes act as insurance against things going too far wrong. Like North Korea, Pakistan knows that, no matter what, international financial donors will feel compelled to keep pumping in funds. Else a collapsing system may be unable to prevent some of its hundred-plus Hiroshima-sized nukes from disappearing into the darkness.

This insurance could become increasingly important as Pakistan moves deeper into political isolation and economic difficulties mount. Even today, load-shedding and fuel shortages routinely shut down industries and transport for long stretches, imports far exceed exports, inflation is at the double-digit level, foreign direct investment is negligible because of concerns over physical security, tax collection remains minimal, and corruption remains unchecked. An African country like Somalia or Congo would have sunk under this weight long ago.

To conclude: throwing a spanner in the works at the CD (Geneva) may well be popular as an act of defiance. Indeed, many in Pakistan — like Hamid Gul and Imran Khan — derive delicious satisfaction from spiting the world in such ways.

But this is not wise for a state that perpetually hovers at the edge of bankruptcy, and which derives most of its worker remittances and export earnings from the very countries it delights in mocking.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 30th, 2012.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/328922/pakistans-rush-for-more-bombs–why/

Indian Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna, left, with Iranian Minister for Economic Affairs and Finance Seyed Shamseddin Hosseini, in New Delhi on July 8, 2010If a U.S.-led ban on importing oil from Iran — recently adopted by the European Union — is making officials in Tehran sweat, it’s hard to tell.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed Jan. 26 that the West had more to lose from severing trade ties with his country, currently in the crosshairs of international scrutiny because of its controversial nuclear program. Indeed, some analysts predict Iran’s output may even grow this year, buttressed by discount deals it cuts with energy-hungry importers such as China and India.

The case of India, in particular, is worth bearing in mind for Americans. New Delhi’s ties with Washington have grown especially robust in recent years, a consequence both of India’s rise on the global stage as well as the strategic desire on the part of two of the world’s leading democracies to have a closer relationship — not least as authoritarian China poses geopolitical headaches for both. But while U.S. diplomats pressure countries like South Korea and Japan to join the Iran oil ban, they won’t get much joy from their Indian counterparts.

India’s Oil Minister, S. Jaipal Reddy, confirmed that his country had no intention of halting imports from Iran. India draws some 12% of all its foreign crude from Iran, the second biggest exporter to the oil-thirsty Asian giant after Saudi Arabia. Moreover, as international sanctions tighten around corporations doing business with Iran, it appears the Indians and perhaps the Chinese will explore paying the Iranians with gold, the Japanese yen or even in part with their own national currencies. Call it one more episode of the post-American world: considerable regional powers are now attempting to unhinge bilateral trade ties off the U.S. dollar or the euro.

Indian officials, including Reddy, insist that New Delhi will abide by U.N. sanctions authorized by the Security Council, but not other measures taken unilaterally by the U.S. and other Western countries. “We will scrupulously adhere to the sanctions imposed by the U.N. No less, no more,” said Reddy.

Richard Fontaine, a senior adviser at the Center for a New American Security, fears the “collateral damage” of Washington’s Iran gambit “could be the U.S.-India relationship.” He writes in the Diplomat:

With the issue heating up in Washington and other world capitals, and with the new U.S. sanctions poised to go into effect, there’s the danger of a real impasse. Members of the U.S. Congress will be dismayed if India appears to stand outside a concerted international effort to press Iran at a critical inflection point. Members of the Indian parliament, for their part, will not particularly appreciate being publicly goaded to get tough on Iran.
Dating back to the years of the Cold War and the height of the third-worldist Non-Aligned Movement, India has long championed its foreign policy autonomy. Relations warmed under the George W. Bush Administration, and the two sides penned a landmark nuclear-energy deal, but Indian politicians still bristle at the assumption that their country is being drawn into an American orbit.

Indian cultural bonds with Iran are deep — it could be argued that, just a few centuries ago, the main centers of Persian literature and civilization were indeed in what’s now present-day India. These days, Tehran and New Delhi are solidly united in their mutual hatred of the Pakistani-backed Taliban in Afghanistan.

A decade ago, they both supported the anti-Taliban rebel Northern Alliance, whose members rose to the fore in Kabul following the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Now India has helped developed the Iranian Arabian Sea port of Chabahar and is constructing roads and highways from the Iranian border into central Afghanistan.

It’s a strategic platform that boosts Indian influence in war-torn Afghanistan, something strategists in Washington may want to preserve following the expected U.S. withdrawal in 2014. Indeed, Indian interests in Afghanistan are likely far more in concert with the U.S. than those of Pakistan or China, which has steadily expanded its Afghan footprint as well. The continued escalation of tensions in the Persian Gulf, though, may reset a number of geopolitical calculations, an unwelcome event in a part of the world that has no need for more quagmires.
http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2012/01/26/to-confront-iran-will-the-u-s-risk-relations-with-india/

In post-Gaddafi Libya, the dream of a stable central government is

fading. Militias are filling the gap.
In the hilly desert scrub north of the town of Bani Walid, Libya’s revolutionaries have been fighting again. Militia units who thought the war ended last year with the death of Gaddafi are back in uniform. Their battered pickup trucks mounting anti-aircraft guns are parked again astride the highway north of the town, 90 miles south of Tripoli.

Many of these men participated in the rebel assault on the town, one of Gaddafi’s last redoubts, when it fell in October. Now they are back again, this time as pro-government forces. Sort of. “We are not part of the National Army,” says Hatir Said Suleiman, a bearded fighter from Tobruk, hunched deep into his green combat jacket against the freezing wind that rolls in off the desert. “We are the National Guard.”

The distinction is important: “National Guard” is a rather grand name for what is actually a hodgepodge of volunteers from militias across the country, sporting as many styles of camouflage jackets as home towns. The National Guard is an alliance with no certain leader, an amalgamation of elements from hundreds of militias, held together because they share a common goal: the eradication of the people who terrorized them for forty-two years, then bombed, rocketed, tortured, and raped for another eight months. Think Paris Commune, or Cromwell’s New Model Army.

By contrast, the government-appointed National Army is small. In the eyes of the militiamen, its reputation is tainted by its officers, many of whom served under Gaddafi. In Bani Walid it has been conspicuous by its absence.

Contrary to many of the headlines, the battle in Bani Walid, which the pro-revolutionary forces now seem to have decided in their favor, was not part of a pro-Gaddafi uprising. Green flags did not, as was first reported, sprout from the rooftops.

The issue was the arrest of war crimes suspects. Since the end of last year’s fighting, Bani Walid has become a refuge for the waifs and strays of the former Gaddafi administration who are on the war crimes lists of other cities. A pro-government unit in the town had begun to arrest them when on Monday their base was attacked by a local clan. Four soldiers were killed, the rest fled, and the suspects were set free.

Now the National Guard wants them back. “We want to go home, we all want to go home,” says National Guard fighter Osman El Hadi, himself from Beni Walid. “But first we need to finish this.”

This minor uprising, in short, is less significant in itself than for what it says about the disarray of the post-revolutionary administration in Tripoli. Right now, power on the national level is exercised by the National Transitional Council (NTC). But this latest crisis has revealed once again that the NTC is, at best, a bit player.

The real power in Libya remains dispersed among the country’s bewildering array of grassroots military formations. Most are grouped around town or city military councils; Tripoli is divided into 11 district militias. The last time anyone counted, Misrata had 172, ranging from ten-man outfits to the 500-strong Halbus Brigade, with a wartime strength of 17,000. That figure has since plummeted, with thousands returning to their jobs.

Of these, the strongest groups are from the cities of Zintan and Misrata. Both have dispatched key officials to Tripoli to take part in the new government. The defense minister, Usama al-Juwali, is a career military officer in the former army from Zintan. Fawzi Abdul Aal, a bespectacled Misratan lawyer, is interior minister. It was their militias that did the most to win the war against Gaddafi, and the appointments were recognition of the fact. (On Wednesday, al-Juwali showed up in Bani Walid, where he tried to negotiate an end to the fighting.)

Encouragingly, neither man is a warlord in the traditional sense: Both are answerable to their city councils, and to parallel military councils. It’s not quite democracy, to be sure. But they still enjoy a legitimacy beyond that of the ruling National Transitional Council, which is self-appointed.

The NTC has been doing little to help itself. Formed in the eastern city of Benghazi in the heat of battle, it has morphed into an organization both secretive and inefficient. It refuses to make public its membership list, or its meetings, or its voting records. Nor will it open the books on what is being done with the country’s swelling oil revenues. On top of everything else, earlier this month it bungled the drafting of legislation for a planned June national election, thus feeding the paranoia of Libyans who believe that many of its members are Gaddafi loyalists trying to manipulate the revolution to their own ends.

It has no press office. Or rather, it does, but as one of its former press officers recently explained to an online journalism forum, a decision was taken that the NTC would have no press officers, so the office is unmanned and the door locked. There is no phone.

Instead, what the Libyan people get are occasional edicts delivered from upon high, such as the bewildering pronouncement, in reaction to anti-NTC protests across the country, that the economy and oil ministries would be moved to Benghazi and the finance ministry to Misrata, a recipe for bureaucratic confusion. “Don’t think that the NTC is a single cohesive body,” said a Libyan who spent years in exile in the UK. “It is chaos. Chaos. It is everybody against everybody else.”

Meanwhile protests continue across the country accusing the NTC of a lack of transparency, and of ineptitude. Earlier this month the NTC’s headquarters in Bengahzi was stormed by demonstrators.

The NTC’s deputy leader, roughed up the day before by a crowd of protesting students, resigned.

The militias, meanwhile, are gaining in strength. And the Zintanis and the Misratans have formed a de facto alliance to bolster their position against the NTC. Their rising power was marked by the recent appoint of a Misratan, Yussef al-Manguish, as army chief of staff.

But it is the two militia leaders who remain the men to watch in Libya. Al-Juwali, the Zintani, is a soft-spoken man whose calm demeanor belies his resolve. It was Zintanis who captured Saif al Islam, Gaddafi’s son, last fall, thus prompting al-Juwaili’s appointment to the NTC. (Saif remains in the custody of the militia to this day). Al-Juwali’s men also control the international airport in Tripoli, an important potential source of funds.

In November, the Zintanis made headlines when they prevented Abdulhakim Belhaj, the former Al Qaeda-sympathizer who now heads the Tripoli Military Council, from entering the airport, accusing him of trying to travel on a fake passport. (He was allowed to travel only after NTC chairman Mustafa Abdul Jalil personally intervened to smooth out the dispute.) The month after that, the Zintanis at the airport became embroiled in a firefight with the bodyguard of yet another leading light of the NTC.

Both Zintan and Misrata have transformed themselves into virtual statelets, with heavy security forces that control all movements in and out. Misrata’s “gate” boasts thirty white poles flying the flags of the world, giving you the feeling of entering another country. The city’s bewildering array of local militias operate on a duty roster that allows their members to keep up with their day jobs when they’re not carrying guns. The city and its operational zone, which includes East Tripoli and stretches as far as the coastal city of Sirte (a distance of about 300 miles), is to all intents and purposes outside NTC control. Abdul Aal, the Misratan now serving in the government, is regarded as urbane and smart, and enjoys the unreserved loyalty of the cityfolk.

Yet there are reasons to doubt the durability of the Zintan-Misrata alliance as a basis for national stability. In both Zintan and Misrata there are problems with rogue units; the flip side of this citizens’ army is that each element is free to do its own thing. A few weeks ago a Misratan unit attacked a Tripoli militia when they refused to hand over a wanted man. Elders in Misrata bemoan the attack, saying that it has fractured relations between the groups involved and that the militia should have awaited some judicial mechanism for the arrest of the individual.

The situation is not hopeless. These militias could potentially serve as useful building blocks for the new Libyan state. The easiest way would be to give each group wide-ranging responsibility for its own turf. But so far that is not happening. The appointment of the two militia leaders to their posts in the NTC were concessions to reality, not part of any wider process of coalition-building.

And there is still considerable sympathy for the idea of a unitary Libyan state — especially among the revolutionaries who hail from the relatively sophisticated towns of the coast.

Hitching a lift back from the Beni Walid front line to Tripoli in a car full of National Guard is instructive. Two of the young men are from Bani Walid itself, the third from Benghazi. None of them takes the NTC particularly seriously. They dismiss current NTC chairman Mustafa Abdul Jalil as neither charismatic nor decisive, though they do regard him as personally trustworthy.

Going down the list of other leaders, they agree that the shedding by the NTC of former Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril and former Finance and Oil Minister Ali Tarhuni, men who did so much to muster international support in the war, was a mistake. Libyans did not much warm to them when in office, but the NTC seems a faceless beast without them.

We pass a National Army road block at Tarhuna, and there are polite hellos to the soldiers in newly pressed beige uniforms from my companions. They tell me that that the National Army specializes in keeping out of the real action, in case their uniforms are spoiled. While the militias don’t like the army or the NTC, they follow orders from Manguish, trusting him because the former army colonel spent most of the war in a Gaddafi jail.

The man they mistrust most of all, however, is Abdel Hakim Belhaj, figurehead of the Islamists.

Contrary to much feverish reporting, jihadism is not really the threat in Libya. Despite backing from Qatar, the intelligent, charismatic Belhaj, often cited for his past sympathies with al Qaeda, remains a minor player. This is not to say that Libya is a bastion of liberal thought. Talk to the many flourishing women’s groups, who are making impressive inroads into politics, and they will tell you how Libya’s male-dominated pro-democracy political outlook contrasts with a deep social conservatism.

“We are Islam,” a young fighter in Misrata once told me. “Why do we need an Islamic Party? It would be like America having an America Party.”

Meanwhile, Washington, its fingers badly burned in Afghanistan and Iraq, is taking a back seat in postwar Libya, leaving the British and, more discreetly, the French and Qataris, as the leading international players.

Many of the American diplomats are veterans of a decade of blunders and misguided theories in Baghdad and Kabul, and are now more chastened. Their challenge, as they try to push and prod the NTC in the right direction, is to figure out what this direction should be.

But the problems, like the one at Bani Walid, are the NTC’s to solve. Thus far, it is too befuddled and besieged to indulge in such forward planning. It will be an achievement if it survives until the promised summer elections. If it delays those elections, or is seen as tweaking the voting process, its days may be numbered. As one Benghazi militiaman told me: “With this government we will wait and see. If it is no good, well, we know how to do revolution.”
Christopher Stephen reported from the Libyan war for The Guardian and is the author of Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic, Atlantic Monthly Press (New York), 2005.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/01/27/the_lesson_of_bani_walid?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full

The Iran-Pakistan border. (snotch / flickr)

Virtually unnoticed, since late 2001, Iran has held some of al Qaeda’s most senior leaders. Several of these operatives, such as Yasin al-Suri, an al Qaeda facilitator, have moved recruits and money from the Middle East to central al Qaeda in Pakistan. Others, such as Saif al-Adel, an Egyptian that served as head of al Qaeda’s security committee, and Abu Muhammad al-Masri, one of the masterminds of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa, have provided strategic and operational assistance to central al Qaeda. The Iranian government has held most of them under house arrest, limited their freedom of movement, and closely monitored their activities. Yet the organization’s presence in Iran means that, contrary to optimistic assessments that have become the norm in Washington, al Qaeda’s demise is not imminent.

Perhaps more disturbing, Iran appears willing to expand its limited relationship with al Qaeda. Just as with its other surrogate, Hezbollah, the country could turn to al Qaeda to mount a retaliation to any U.S. or Israeli attack. To be sure, the organization is no Iranian puppet. And the two have sometimes been antagonistic, as illustrated by al Qaeda in Iraq’s recent attacks against Shias. But both share a hatred of the United States. U.S. policymakers should think twice about provoking a closer relationship between them and should draw greater public attention to Iran’s limited, but still unacceptable, cooperation with al Qaeda.

Evidence of the Iranian-al Qaeda partnership abounds — and much of it is public. This past year, I culled through hundreds of documents from the Harmony database at West Point; perused hundreds more open-source and declassified documents, such as the U.S. Department of Treasury’s sanctions against al Qaeda leaders in Iran; and interviewed government officials from the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia.

Iran is in many ways a safer territory from which al Qaeda can operate.

The United States has targeted al Qaeda in Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and other countries, but it has limited operational reach in Iran. Through that research, the history of al Qaeda in Iran emerges as follows: over the past several years, al Qaeda has taken a beating in Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, the Horn of Africa, and North Africa. In particular, an ongoing campaign of drone strikes has weakened — although not eliminated — al Qaeda’s leadership cadre in Pakistan. But the group’s outpost in Iran has remained almost untouched for the past decade. In late 2001, as the Taliban regime collapsed, most al Qaeda operatives fled Afghanistan. Many of the leaders, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy and future successor, headed for Pakistan. But some did not, choosing instead to go west. And Iran was apparently more than willing to accept them. Around October 2001, the government dispatched a delegation to Afghanistan to guarantee the safe travel of operatives and their families to Iran. 

Initially, Iran’s Quds Force — the division of the Revolutionary Guard Corps whose mission is to organize, train, equip, and finance foreign Islamic revolutionary movements — took the lead. Between 2001 and 2002, it helped transport several hundred al Qaeda-linked individuals.

By 2002, al Qaeda had established in Iran its “management council,” a body that bin Laden reportedly tasked with providing strategic support to the organization’s leaders in Pakistan. Key members of the council included Adel, Sulayman Abu Ghayth, Abu al-Khayr al-Masri, Abu Muhammad al-Masri, and Abu Hafs al-Mauritani. All five remained influential over the next several years and retained close ties to bin Laden. Among the most active of the council, Adel even helped organize groups of fighters to overthrow Hamid Karzai’s regime in Afghanistan and provided support for the May 2003 terrorist attacks in Riyadh.

According to U.S. government officials involved in discussions with Iran, over time, the growing cadre of al Qaeda leaders on Iranian soil apparently triggered a debate among senior officials in Tehran. Some worried that the United States would eventually use the terrorist group’s presence as a casus belli. Indeed, in late 2002 and early 2003, U.S. government officials held face-to-face discussions with Iranian officials demanding the regime deport al Qaeda leaders to their countries of origin. Iran refused, but around the same time, the country’s Ministry of Intelligence took control of relations with the group. It set to work rounding up al Qaeda members and their families.

By early 2003, Tehran had detained all the members of the management council and their subordinates who remained in the country. It is not entirely clear what conditions were like for al Qaeda detainees. Some apparently suffered through harsh prison confinement, while others enjoyed informal house arrest with freedom to communicate, travel, and fundraise. Over the next several years, bin Laden, Zawahiri, and other leaders apparently sent messages to Tehran threatening to retaliate if al Qaeda personnel and members of bin Laden’s family were not released. Iran did not comply. Bin Laden did not follow through.

After that, the details of al Qaeda’ s relation ship with the Iranian government are hazy. It seems that many of the operatives under house arrest petitioned for release. In 2009 and 2010, Iran did begin to free some detainees and their family members, including members of bin Laden’s family. And the management council remained in Iran, still under limited house arrest. Tehran appears to have drawn several red lines for the council: Refrain from plotting terrorist attacks from Iranian soil, abstain from targeting the Iranian government, and keep a low profile. As long as it did so, the Iranian government would permit al Qaeda operatives some freedom to fundraise, communicate with al Qaeda central in Pakistan and other affiliates, and funnel foreign fighters through Iran.

Today, Iran is still an important al Qaeda hub. Suri, who was born in 1982 in al-Qamishli, Syria, is a key operative. According to U.S. Treasury Department accounts, Tehran has permitted Suri to operate discretely within Iran since at least 2005.

United Kingdom. Iran’s rationale might be compared to that of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who declared, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”

Iran is likely holding al Qaeda leaders on its territory first as an act of defense. So long as Tehran has several leaders under its control, the group will likely refrain from attacking Iran. But the strategy also has an offensive component. If the United States or Israel undertook a bombing campaign against Iran, Tehran could employ al Qaeda in a response. Tehran has long used proxies to pursue its foreign policy interests, especially Hezbollah in Lebanon, and it has a history of reaching out to Sunni groups. In Afghanistan, for example, Iran has provided limited support to the Taliban to keep the United States tied down. Al Qaeda’s proven willingness and ability to strike the United States make it an attractive partner.

Al Qaeda is probably making similar calculations. To be sure, some revile the Ayatollahs. Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, the now-deceased head of al Qaeda in Iraq, actively targeted Shias there. In a 2004 letter, Zarqawi explained that they are “the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion.” Yet, in a sign of Churchill-esque pragmatism, Zawahiri chastised Zarqawi in 2005, writing that the Shias were not the primary enemy — at least not for the moment. It was crucial, Zawahiri explained, to understand that success hinged on support from the Muslim masses. One of Zarqawi’s most significant mistakes, Zawahiri chided him, was targeting Shia communities, because such a strategy would cripple al Qaeda’s support among the broader Muslim community. And most al Qaeda operatives since the debacle in Iraq have cautiously followed Zawahiri’s lead. 

Moreover, Iran is in many ways a safer territory from which al Qaeda can operate. The United States has targeted al Qaeda in Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and other countries, but it has limited operational reach in Iran. In addition, Iran borders the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, making it centrally located for most al Qaeda affiliates. No wonder that Suri has been able to move money and recruits through Iran to various theaters, including al Qaeda central in Pakistan. Although most governments in the region have clamped down on al Qaeda, Iran’s willingness to allow some activity sets it apart.

The United States should think twice about actions that would push Iran and al Qaeda closer together — especially a preemptive attack on the country’s nuclear program. With the management council still under limited house arrest, Iran and al Qaeda remain at arm’s length. But that could change if Washington’s relationship with Tehran does. So far, the conflict between Iran and the West has been limited to diplomatic pressure and economic sanctions. It has also occasionally deteriorated into cyber attacks, sabotage, assassinations, kidnappings, and support to proxy organizations. But much like the struggle between the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War, it has not spilled into overt conflict. Should an increase of those activities cause a broad deterioration in relations, however, or should the United States or Israel decide to attack Iranian nuclear facilities, Iran and al Qaeda could come closer together. 

For one, Iran would likely respond to an attack by targeting the United States and its allies through proxies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries. The regime might increase its logistical support to al Qaeda by providing money, weapons, housing, travel documents, and transit to operatives — some of which it is already doing. In a worse scenario, Tehran might even allow al Qaeda officials in Iran to go to Pakistan to replenish the group’s depleted leadership there, or else open its borders to additional al Qaeda higher-ups. Several of the operatives already in Iran, including Adel and Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, would be especially valuable in this regard, because of their prestige, experience in paramilitary and external operations, and religious credentials. In an even more extreme scenario, Iran could support an al Qaeda attack against the United States or one of its allies, although the regime would surely attempt to hide its role in any plotting.

Based on Iran’s cautious approach over the past decade, Tehran’s most likely strategy would be to gradually increase its support to al Qaeda in response to U.S. actions. That way it could go slowly, and back away at any time, rather than choosing an all-or-nothing approach from the start.

It would be unwise to overestimate the leverage Tehran has over al Qaeda’s leadership. The terrorist organization would almost certainly refuse Iranian direction. But given the group’s current challenges, any support or tentative permission to plot on Iran’s soil would be helpful. It could set about restoring its depleted senior ranks in Pakistan and other countries, or else rebuild within Iran itself. The organization might thus be amenable to working within Iranian constraints, such as seeking permission before planning attacks in the West from Iranian soil, as long as the taps were flowing.

It is true that the United States has limited leverage with Iran, but it still has several options. The first, and perhaps easiest, is to better expose the existence and activities of al Qaeda leaders in Iran. Al Qaeda has killed tens of thousands of Sunnis, Shias, and non-Muslims over the past two decades and has unified virtually all governments in the world against it. Iran, too, has become an international pariah. Its limited aid to al Qaeda is worthy of further public condemnation. But Iran has largely escaped such scrutiny.

The United States could encourage more countries to prohibit citizens and companies from engaging in commercial and financial transactions with al Qaeda leaders and their networks in Iran. The U.S. Treasury and State Departments have taken steps against some al Qaeda operatives and their supporters in Iran, including against Suri and his circle. But those efforts have not been coupled with robust diplomatic efforts to encourage other countries to do the same. Nor have they been successful in eliminating al Qaeda’s sanctuary in Iran.

Finally, the United States should think twice about actions that would push Iran and al Qaeda closer together — especially a preemptive attack on the country’s nuclear program. Thus far, Iran and al Qaeda have mutually limited their relationship. It would be a travesty to push the two closer together at the very moment that central al Qaeda in Pakistan has been severely weakened.

Thankfully, there is still time to deal with the problem. But the stakes are too high for the United States to remain quiet any longer.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137061/seth-g-jones/al-qaeda-in-iran?page=show