Is the New Iranian President a Moderate?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Everyone has seen the “Peanuts” cartoon where Lucy is holding a football that Charlie Brown is about to kick. As he runs towards it, she pulls it away at the last minute. She’s done it many times, yet Charlie Brown never learns.

Iran held its presidential election on June 14, won by an ostensible “moderate,” 64 year old Hasan Rowhani. But we’ve seen this movie before. All I can say is, “Here we go again.”

Western observers have been waiting for signs of moderation in the Islamic Republic run by the 12-member Council of Guardians, now under the control of Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, for more than three decades.

But no such saviour has ever arrived, and the hardliners have gone from strength to strength, supporting Hezbollah and Assad’s Syria in the ongoing civil war in that country, destabilizing Iraq, and, most ominously, working towards acquiring nuclear weapons in order, many believe, to defeat Israel.

Like the other five candidates in the race, the newly-elected Hasan Rowhani, who won 50.7 per cent of the vote, first had to meet with the approval of Iran’s real rulers, the mullahs. Still, Rowhani’s backers, such as Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, president between 1989 and 1997 and another supposed reformer, urged Iranians to cast ballots and abandon plans to boycott the election in protest -- even though the mullahs vetoed Rafsanjani’s own attempt to get on the ballot.

Himself a cleric and long-time acolyte of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the theocratic state in 1979, Rowhani has been a loyal servant of the Islamic Republic from its inception and supports Iran’s nuclear program.

He is no outsider – he has been a lawmaker for 20 years and the country’s lead nuclear negotiator between 2003-2005. In a 2004 speech he stated that even when Iran had suspended uranium enrichment, it was able to make its greatest nuclear advances because, he remarked, the pressure was off.

Rowhani’s conservative opponents, Iran’s Supreme Leader and even the Revolutionary Guard have all issued statements in support of the president-elect, who will take office on August 3.

I don't think they were unhappy that Rowhani won. The mullahs will now resume the good cop-bad cop routine, with this “moderate” and more “pragmatic” president becoming the benign face of Iran, thus allowing U.S. President Barack Obama and others to breathe a sigh of relief and resume negotiations. “We have to enhance mutual trust between Iran and other countries,” said Rowhani after his victory.

Already Iranian intellectuals are touting Rowhani as a leader who is wary of a purely ideological approach to foreign policy. In an article in the June 19 New York Times, on “How to End the Stalemate With Iran,” Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a research scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and Mohammad Ali Shabani, a contributing editor at the Iranian Review of Foreign Affairs, argued that “Rowhani’s victory demonstrates that there is now real momentum toward the initiation of direct talks between Iran and the United States.”

The mullahs need Rowhani to ease tensions with the United States in order to reduce the tough sanctions that have crippled the economy. Suzanne Maloney, a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, has suggested that Khamenei has allowed Rowhani’s victory in order to repair Iran’s frayed relations with the world, one that enables the country to revive oil exports and resume normal trade. It’s the strategy of two steps forward, one step back. Rowhani’s power is limited by Iran’s other institutions, many of which are in conservative hands. Since an Iranian president has little real power, the benefits outweigh the costs.

Is it working? Maybe. Obama has already said that voters in Iran “rebuffed the hardliners and the clerics in the election who were counseling no compromise on anything, anytime, anywhere.”

The Council of Guardians also didn’t want a repeat of 2009, when a fixed election resulted in mass demonstrations against incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In today’s volatile Middle East, that would be too dangerous.

The real winner four years ago, Mir Hossein Mousavi, has been under house arrest since 2011, after he called his supporters onto the streets for a rally in support of the uprisings in the Arab world. Even his daughters were detained this past February.

Ayatollah Khamenei, who retains the final word on Iranian policy, including its nuclear program, issued “necessary guidelines” to Rowhani during their first meeting after the vote.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

Israel's Enemies Are at Loggerheads

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

In the summer of 1939 there was a little known war that took place on the Mongolian-Manchurian border, between the Soviet Red Army and the Imperial Japanese Army. Mongolia was at the time a Soviet satellite, while Manchuria, renamed Manchukuo, was a Japanese puppet state.

The fighting involved over 100,000 troops and  one thousand tanks and aircraft. Some 30,000-50,000 men were killed and wounded.

The famed journalist John Gunther, author of the classic work “Inside Asia,” published in 1939, quipped at the time that “the whole world was hoping that both sides would lose.” (Actually, in the climactic battle, at the end of August, the Japanese were defeated.)

This is probably the way most Israelis feel about both sides in the Syrian civil war. For that reason, among others, the country aims to stay out of Syria’s civil war, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told Israelis, despite some violence eroding security on the Golan Heights border area.

Obviously the Syrian regime itself is no friend of Israel’s. But many of the rebel groups are also opposed to non-Sunni governments in the region – including, of course, a Jewish one.

The Syrian Islamic Liberation Front is similar to the Muslim Brotherhood, while the Syrian Islamic Front (SIF) is an alliance of more hardline Islamist forces. Finally, there is Jabhat al-Nusra, affiliated with al-Qaeda. True, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) is a moderate grouping, but they have been losing strength in relation to the other groups.

So, as far as Israel is concerned, all the combatants inside Syria oppose the Jewish state. And this is true also of Israel’s main non-state enemies outside Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas. But due to the war, both of these militant movements are losing support.

Hezbollah, the well-armed Lebanese Shi’te movement which fought Israel to a standstill in a major conflict in the summer of 2006, is now involved in the Syrian civil war on the side of the Shi’ite regime in Damascus. The group has at least 5,000 fighters in the Syrian battle theater, and has been turning the tide against the rebel opposition. They helped the regime capture the strategic town of Qusair near the Lebanese border recently.

But this comes at a cost. “There is no doubt that Hezbollah is being degraded,” said Shai Feldman, director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA.

The organization, he told the Forward newspaper in New York, is not only losing men and weapons in the Syrian combat; it is also coming under increasing attacks from political rivals in Lebanon and in the broader Arab world. “For the short term,” Feldman said, “this means Israel is safer, because Hezbollah’s focus is in a completely different direction.”

In Gaza, to Israel’s southwest, Hamas, the Sunni organization close to the Muslim Brotherhood, has also suffered because of the Syrian civil war. The group’s constant rocket attacks into Israel led to all-out war in the winter of 2008–2009 and again in 2012.

Now, because of its backing of Sunni opposition groups fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Hamas has lost millions of dollars in funding and weaponry it used to get from Shi’ite Iran, which supports the Syrian regime. A cash-strapped Hamas has lost some of its capabilities and is less able to launch attacks on Israel.

Ghazi Hamad, the Hamas deputy foreign minister, told The London newspaper the Telegraph in late May that relations with Iran were “bad” and said that, “for supporting the Syrian revolution, we lost very much.” He indicated that military aid from Iran had come to a full stop.

Meanwhile, in early June al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri urged Syrians to unite to bring down President Assad and thwart what he said were U.S. plans to set up a client state in Syria to safeguard Israel's security. Al-Qaeda is militantly Sunni.

Zawahri, an Egyptian who became Al-Qaida’s head after Osama bin Laden was killed, also criticized Iran for supporting Assad, saying the conflict in Syria had “revealed the ugly face of Iran.”

The internecine Arab warfare has taken diplomatic pressure off Israel to renew talks with the Palestinians as well. Even so, Israel must tread warily. The Middle East is, after all, a minefield, and no one knows whether the fighting in Syria may yet spread.

Samantha Power, Syria and the Issue of Genocide

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

President Barack Obama has nominated Samantha Power to be the American ambassador to the United Nations. Her appointment, if confirmed by the U.S. Senate, will be quite timely, given the widening war in Syria - especially with the intervention of Hezbollah.

Power is probably best known for her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, published in 2002, following her years covering atrocities in the Balkans as a journalist.

"No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence," she wrote. "It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on."

More recently, she served as senior director of the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights at the National Security Council and as chair of Obama's Atrocities Prevention Board. She is also a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Will her appointment usher in a more robust - and interventionist - foreign policy by the Obama administration? Her writings would suggest so. "Outside powers cannot wait for confirmation of genocide before they act," she wrote in "Remember Rwanda, but Take Action in Sudan," an April 6, 2004 article in the New York Times. " In 1994 the Clinton administration spent more time maneuvering to avoid using the term ‘genocide' than it did using its resources to save lives."

In the case of Darfur, she continued, "American officials need not focus on whether the killings meet the definition of genocide set by the 1948 Genocide Convention; they should focus instead on trying to stop them."

Three years after the end of World War II, the United Nations General Assembly passed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Absolute state sovereignty, including the "right" to engage in the mass murder its own or other peoples, would be a thing of the past.

The man most responsible for this was a Jewish lawyer from Poland, Raphael Lemkin, who fled Poland ahead of the Nazis in 1939 and came to the United States. But 49 members of his family were killed in the Holocaust.

In 1944, he published Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, where he coined the term "genocide," defining it as "a co-ordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves."

But Lemkin, who died in 1959, would be saddened by what has transpired since then, in places such as Cambodia, Chechnya, the Congo, Rwanda, and the Sudan. Little was done to stop mass killings in these places.

Like much of what passes for international law, genocide, as one lawyer recently said to me, is now just a concept that you shape to suit your politics. The term has become politicized and contentious: "what you call genocide is my defensive reaction," some might respond.

Many Turks make that claim, for instance, when rationalizing the more than one million Armenians killed by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. They contend that the Armenians were supporting the country's enemies, the Russians, in a time of conflict.

The term has also become terribly vague and malleable. We now even hear of "cultural genocide," referring to oppressed people who are deprived of their languages, religions, or traditions - even if no attempt is made to actually physically murder them.

If the killing of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995, or Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic's actions in Kosovo in 1999, were considered acts of genocide, why doesn't the slaughter of at least 80,000 Syrians, most of them unarmed civilians, also amount to genocide?

Does the fact that this is a civil war, and the Syrian rebels have guns, nullify that definition? But the disparity in weaponry between them and the Assad regime is still immense - as was the case in Kosovo, until NATO stepped in.

And even when the international community does in large part agree that certain mass murders and war crimes have risen to the level of genocide, then what? It's been years since the Darfur atrocities were declared to be genocide, but Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir is still thumbing his nose at Samantha Power - and us.

And by the way, since no one wants to confront Russia, the 160,000 dead in the two Chechen wars have also been ignored.

Power has been credited with convincing Obama in 2011 to push for a UN Security Council resolution to authorize a coalition using military force to protect Libyan civilians during the uprising against Moammar Gadhafi.

But she's also aware of the limitations of multilateralism. In "Full Force," published in the New Republic, March 3, 2003, she admitted that "The UN Security Council is anachronistic, undemocratic, and consists of countries that lack the standing to be considered good-faith arbiters of how to balance stability against democracy, peace against justice, and security against human rights."

So, given the veto power exercised on the Security Council by Russia, Bashar al-Assad's backer, there may not be all that much the U.S. can do, unless it organizes a ‘coalition of the willing', outside United Nations auspices.

The Rise and Decline of Arab Nationalism

Prior to the First World War, most of the Middle East was ruled by the Ottoman Turks. Communal identity under the Ottoman millet system was religious, not ethnic or territorial – Christians, Jews, and Muslims could live side by side in the same town, each under their own hierarchy. Communal and religious loyalty was one and the same thing.

Muslim Arabs played important roles and suffered no real discrimination. Arabic was the language of the Quran and mosque; Arabs were religious and legal figures throughout the empire. There were even Arab generals, governors and prime ministers.

While Muslim Arabs were theoretically on a par with Turks, Christian Arabs    in any case divided into Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Maronite, and Coptic communities    were in law not fully equal citizens of the empire.

But as the Ottoman Empire decayed in the 19th century, Europeans brought printing presses and western ideas to the region. An Arabic literary revival began, planting the seeds of modern nationalism. Cairo, Damascus and Beirut became intellectual centres, where thinkers introduced the idea of regenerating the Arab people and culture, and creating an Arab, as opposed to simply a Muslim, consciousness.

The Arab nationalists gained further influence after 1908, when the liberal Committee of Union and Progress (the so-called “Young Turks”) took power in the empire. They too were nationalists, disgusted with the cosmopolitan Ottoman elite, and sought to make the empire more Turkish. Turkish replaced Arabic as the language of instruction in schools in the Arab provinces.

The Arab reaction was to emphasize its own ethnicity and language. Encouraged by the British, during the First World War an Arab revolt against Turkish rule broke out. But the Arabs were betrayed by the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, which called for the division of the region between France and Britain after the war.

The heart of Arab nationalist sentiment was in Greater Syria (including Lebanon) and in 1920 a National Congress in Damascus proclaimed the Emir Feisal of the Hashemite dynasty king of Syria. But the movement was crushed, and France, as agreed by the western powers, became the colonial ruler.

The French governed through divide and conquer tactics, separating Christian Lebanon (much enlarged) from Syria, and also creating autonomous units for Alawites, Druze, and Kurds. This assured Paris of some support from minorities.

The British, too, faced uprisings in Egypt and Iraq, while in Palestine, they confronted permanent animosity between the Arab population and the growing Jewish community being developed by the Zionist movement. This burst into flames on numerous occasions, especially in the Arab revolt of 1936 1939.

 After the Second World War the League of Arab States was formed, but none of the newly independent individual states gave up any sovereignty.

The loss in the 1948 war to the newly formed Israel by the Arab armies of Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon came as a shock, demonstrating to Arab nationalists the levels of corruption and inefficiency in their states. It led to nationalist overthrows of old regimes in Egypt, Syria and Iraq, and attempts in Jordan, Lebanon and elsewhere.

Gamel Abdel Nasser, who took power in Egypt, attempted to reconstruct Egyptian society and inspire the rest of the Arab world, by applying a socialist and revolutionary pan Arab ideology that called for a unified Arab state. He appealed to youth across the Arab world.

He had overthrown a corrupt old king, introduced social and economic reforms, and thwarted the western powers at Suez in 1956.

His slogans were republicanism, neutralism, socialism and Arab unity. Other Arab parties    especially the Ba’ath (Arab Socialist Renaissance) in Syria and Iraq    espoused similar ideals.

In 1958 Egypt and Syria formed the United Arab Republic, but it lasted for only three years. There was also an attempted federation between Iraq and Jordan before the 1958 Iraqi revolution, and at various times Libya attempted to federate with Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and even Morocco.

These pan Arab ventures failed to get off the ground. And the defeat suffered by Egypt and Syria in the 1967 war with Israel led to disillusionment with secular nationalism among many in the Arab world. Nasser died in 1970 and his successors abandoned his political ideals.

And even as Saddam Hussein tried to stoke up pan-Arab nationalism during Iraq’s eight-year war with Persian Iran in the 1980s, the Lebanese civil war was pitting Christians against Muslims, Sunnis against Shiites All were Arabs.

By the turn of the century, the Ba’ath regimes in Iraq and Syria had become little more than authoritarian dictatorships. The Iraqi Ba’ath party was destroyed in 2003 and the one in Syria is embroiled in a sectarian civil war – one that is also inciting Sunnis and Shiites in neighbouring Iraq and Lebanon to attack one another. More than 1,000 Iraqis were killed in May.

Sunni-led Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey (as well as militant groups allied with Al-Qaeda) are backing the uprising against the Syrian regime, while Shiite Iran and its ally Hezbollah in Lebanon provide arms and men to Bashar al-Assad.

As for Egypt, the country is now ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Today, from Morocco to Iraq, radical forms of Islam have become the main inspiration for political change in the Arab world. The fault lines now are religious, rather than ethnic or nationalist.

Why is Russia Backing the Assad Regime in Syria?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Why have the Russians remained such steadfast supporters of the Syrian regime, supplying Damascus with diplomatic and political aid as well as sophisticated military equipment?

Is it a vestigial ideological attachment, dating back to the days when the Soviet Union backed left-wing Arab states like Iraq and Syria against American Middle East allies, including Israel?

Is it President Vladimir Putin’s desire to demonstrate that Russia has returned to the world stage as a major player, after the country’s weakness and humiliation during the Boris Yeltsin years in the 1990s, when the United States and NATO had a free hand in the Balkans and elsewhere, wresting Kosovo from Russia’s Serbian ally?

Or is it that the Russians prefer a weak Shiite regime that is ostensibly secular to the Sunni militants fighting to remove Bashar al-Assad?

It’s probably a combination of all three.

Lest we forget, the Soviet Union for decades had a very close military and political alliance with Syria, which had declared itself a “socialist” country under the Ba’ath Party. The USSR was Syria’s main arms supplier. In turn, the Russians acquired a Mediterranean naval base at Tartus in 1971.

Indeed, it was Moscow’s erroneous intelligence reports warning that Israel was going to attack Syria that led to the Mideast war in 1967 -- a war in which the defeated Syrians lost the Golan Heights.

In 1972, President Hafez al-Assad (father of the current leader) signed a peace and security pact with the Soviet Union as a means to strengthen its defense capability. During that year, Moscow delivered more than $135 million in Soviet arms to Damascus. In 1980 Assad and Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev signed a further twenty-year treaty of friendship and cooperation.

The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1987 assured Assad that the Soviet Union would continue to provide Syria with economic and military aid. These promises were kept when Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father in 2000.

Since the turn of the century, Russia has sold over $1.5 billion worth of weaponry to Syria. And it now appears that Russian MiG-29 fighter jets and S-300 air defence missiles may be headed to Syria. This would make it harder for the U.S. to impose a no-fly zone over Syria. It will also make Israel, which has already bombed Syria recently to stem the flow of Iranian arms to Hezbollah, more vulnerable to Syrian counter-attacks.

Apart from the arms trade, Russia has strong economic ties to Syria. Russian business investment there now stands at nearly $20 billion.

Russia has used its veto on the UN Security Council three times to protect the Assad regime. Moscow has blocked resolutions aimed at condemning Assad or imposing sanctions.

Putin remains disgruntled at the way UN resolutions passed against the Gadhafi regime in 2011 were extended by NATO into bringing about regime change in Libya, and he doesn’t don’t want the same thing to happen with Syria. He wants the west to know that it can’t do an end-run around Moscow.

Putin also worries that Sunni militancy may spread further, into his own country. The Russian Federation includes some 16 million Muslims, and the Russians are already contending with Islamist terrorism in Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia in the Caucasus. There are even militant rumblings in Tatarstan, an important economic and geographic republic on the Volga.

Some of this ideological and religious extremism is being fuelled by Saudi Arabian money – the same country backing the Syrian rebels. So Putin doesn’t want a Sunni takeover of Syria, one that may include elements allied with al-Qaeda. This could inspire renewed violence at home.

As a corollary, Russia is also trying to present itself as the protector of Christians in the Mideast. There are nearly a million in Syria and 52 per cent are Greek Orthodox, as are most ethnic Russians. Syria’s Christians, along with the ruling Alawites, also fear a Sunni takeover of the country and so most support, or are neutral towards, the Assad regime.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will be meeting soon to discuss when and how to get Assad’s government and the rebels to sit down together and talk peace. In the meantime, though, the Russians continue to bolster Assad’s military.

Apart from Russia, Shiite Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon are also providing aid to Damascus. Even Iraq, now governed by a Shiite regime, has some involvement. This war has now entered its third year and no end seems in sight.