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‘Ecuador being punished for befriending Iran’

Press TV –  February 22, 2010

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa says his country was added to a list of states accused of lagging in the campaign against money laundering to punish it for its ties with Iran.

“This decision has nothing to do with the fight against money laundering, or the fight against the funding of terrorism… It has to do with that we have an embassy in Iran,” Correa said in the highland town of Sangolqui outside Quito on Saturday.

“So because we have misbehaved. They are giving us a smack so we don’t misbehave,” he added, describing the move as a “hypocritical punishment.”

“Instead of revising themselves, they condemn us. There is no money laundering here my friends. There is no terrorism, and no funding of terrorism. Imagine if he had money to fund terrorism, I wish I had money to build all the schools that I want to build,” he said.

The Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, or FATF, named Ecuador and Iran on a list of states that it says are failing to comply with international regulations against money laundering and financing terrorism.

However, Correa said that Ecuador’s two dozen banks had perfectly adequate legislation to protect against laundering and terrorism financing and dismissed the report as “a huge lie.”

Under Correa’s administration, Ecuador has strengthened diplomatic and commercial ties with Iran, which has opened an embassy in Quito.

In recent years, Iran has looked to increase its cooperation with Latin American states such as Ecuador, to the chagrin of Washington.

Citing a 2009 agreement between Ecuador’s Central Bank and some Iranian financial institutions, Ecuador’s private bank association said on Friday that it believed the Iran factor was behind the country’s inclusion on the FATF list.

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February 22, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Some Straight Thinking About Iran

By Philip Giraldi | February 18, 2010

The Annual Threat Assessment overview was released by the office of the Director of National Intelligence on February 2nd.  A forty-seven page unclassified version includes a page and a half on Iran’s proliferation threat.  It raises legitimate concerns about Iran’s doubling of its number of operating centrifuges (while conceding that as many as half might not be working) and regarding what it describes as the secret nuclear facility near Qom.  Apart from that, it supports the conclusions of the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) which concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program and had not made the political decision to start it up again.

One would think it would be good news that the Iranian nuclear program has not really advanced since 2007, but something strange is happening.  The Obama Administration has intensified pressure on Iran with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denouncing what she sees as the Iranian government’s increased militarization.  The mainstream media, meanwhile, has not reported the conclusions of the Annual Threat Assessment while there has been instead considerable commentary about how Iran is moving closer to having a nuclear weapon together with calls for harsh sanctions.  The Washington Times and Newsweek are also reporting that the US intelligence community will soon finish a second NIE on Iran that will revise the conclusions of the December 2007 document.  If their information is correct, the forthcoming NIE will emphasize that Iran is moving towards the point where it will have all the technical requirements in place to put together a nuclear weapon if the country’s political leadership decides to proceed.  This is a spin that is somewhat different than the Annual Threat Assessment, which is presumably written by the same analysts using the same information.  Admittedly, as the political go-ahead might never be given, all the intelligence really suggests is that Iran could soon join a large number of other countries that have the technical capability to make a nuclear weapon.  Of those countries there are some – mostly in Europe — that clearly have no interest in nuclear weapons development while others could move rapidly into a weapon program if their circumstances seem to demand it.  Iran is far from unique.  Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia all have the technological resources to develop nuclear weapons on an expedited basis if they found themselves threatened.

So the Annual Threat Assessment and the possibly forthcoming NIE would really only confirm the 2007 NIE’s judgment that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, does not appear to have an in-place weapons program, and is still several years away from having a nuclear device even if the political decision is made to proceed.  If there is a new NIE it will not really change anything, but there is clearly a political agenda playing out that is driving the process.  One might even suggest that the timing is somewhat reminiscent of the infamous 2002 “slam dunk” Iraq NIE that falsely made the case for war by hyping phony evidence of weapons of mass destruction.  In this case, the conclusions are not as important as the report’s appearance at a crucial time when negotiations between Tehran and the West have broken down and Washington is pushing hard to pressure Iran.  The surfacing of a new assessment that is already being spun to heighten the threat will inevitably increase concerns about a possible Iranian weapons program and provide ammunition to those who are seeking a more assertive US policy.  By its very existence, the new NIE will also provide a measure of credibility for the Obama administration, which has relentlessly been making the case that Iran is intent on acquiring a nuclear weapon, a conclusion that is not supported by the available intelligence.

That the drive to punish Iran has been supported in Congress and the media is perhaps no coincidence, suggesting that the effort is being coordinated by those who want war.  At the end of January, by an overwhelming voice vote, the US Senate joined the House of Representatives in passing a resolution demanding sanctions on Iran’s energy imports.  A joint resolution that will go to President Obama is currently being crafted and is expected soon.  The resolution could well give Obama the political cover he needs to advocate even more draconian measures against Iran and its rulers.  From the Iranian viewpoint, it is pretty much a declaration of war.

Why is Iran the target of so much rage even though it has not threatened the United States or any vital American interest?  Influence over Congress and the media from Israel and its friends is surely a large part of the answer.  How else can one explain the different treatment afforded Iran and North Korea given Pyongyang’s open development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles?  Unlike North Korea, Iran continues to be a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its nuclear sites are inspected by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency.  Iran is a developing country with a small economy and tiny defense budget and it has not invaded a neighbor since the eighteenth century.  It does not even have the resources to refine its own oil for home consumption and must import the gasoline it uses.  If the proposed Congressional sanctions are fully implemented the country’s economy will grind to a halt, but the damage does not stop there.  Iran deals with many European and Asian companies in its energy industry, all of which would be sanctioned by the US if they do not break off relations.  They might not like that and might well take commensurate steps against the United States.  Ultimately, the United States Navy might have to enforce the sanctions.  What would happen when a Chinese or Russian ship is stopped on the high seas?  Did the US Congress really think about what it was doing and what the consequences of sanctions might be?

And the irony is that the United States has a problem with Iran that has largely been manufactured in Washington and in Tel Aviv.  Even though Tehran does not actually threaten the US, Washington has been supporting terrorists and separatists who have killed hundreds of people inside Iran.  Israel, which has its own secret nuclear arsenal, claims to be threatened if Iran develops even the ability to concentrate its uranium referred to as “mastering the enrichment cycle,” a point of view that has also been adopted by Washington.  The White House has made repeated threats that the military option for dealing with Tehran is “on the table” while Israel has been even more explicit in its threats to attack.  Meanwhile, the US mainstream media is united in its desire to come to grips with the Mullahs.

It is no wonder that Iran feels threatened, because it is.  To be sure, Iran is no role model for good governance but a desire to deal with the country fairly and realistically is not an endorsement of the regime in power.  Iran is engaged diplomatically and through surrogates in the entire Persian Gulf region and central Asia, supporting its friends and seeking to undermine its enemies.  But that does not make it different than any of its neighbors and the United States, all of which play the same game.  The bottom line is that the US has been interfering in Iran since 1978 and even before if one goes back to the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq by the CIA in 1953.  The interference has accomplished nothing and has only created a poisonous relationship that Barack Obama has done little to improve.  Indeed, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s harsh rhetoric suggests that when it comes to Iran the Democrats are more hardline than George W. Bush.

Imagine for a moment what might happen if Washington were to adopt a serious foreign policy based on the US national interest.  That would mean strict non-interventionism in troubled regions like the Middle East where the US has everything to lose and little to gain.  It would be the real change promised by Obama if Washington were to admit that it is not threatened by Tehran and were to declare that it will not interfere in Iran’s politics. It could further announce that it no longer has a military option on the table, and that it will not permit Israeli overflight of Iraq to attack Iran.  Iran’s leaders just might decide that they don’t really need their own “option on the table” which has been the threat that they might seek to develop a nuclear weapon.  And an Iran that feels more secure might well be willing to take some risks itself to defuse tension with its neighbors and Washington.  In 2003 Iran offered to negotiate all outstanding differences with the United States, an offer that was turned down by the Bush White House.

So the big question about Iran is not whether or not it has the knowledge and resources to build an atom bomb.  It does or will soon.  The real issue is whether the United States is actually threatened by that knowledge and what should be done in terms of positive policies to discourage an expanded nuclear program.  The United States should first of all recognize that, as the world’s only superpower, it controls the playing field.  It is up to Washington to take the first steps to defuse the crisis that is building by offering Tehran the security guarantees that might undercut the influence of those in its government who seek a nuclear weapon deterrent.  Punishing Iran is no solution.  It will not work, closes the door to diplomacy, and will only make the worst case scenario that much more likely.  Opening the door to a rapprochement by eliminating the threatening language coming out of Washington and creating incentives for cooperation is a far better course of action.

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February 18, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

NYT Sees UN-Syria Conspiracy Theory

By Robert Parry | Consortium News | February 15, 2010

The New York Times simply refuses to deal with “enemy” Muslim states with any sense of objectivity or fairness, reaffirming its deep-seated bias again on Sunday with the publication of a one-sided article about the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on its fifth anniversary.

The article entitled “A U.N. Betrayal in Beirut” by op-ed contributor Michael Young argues that the original United Nations-authorized Hariri investigation, which pointed the finger of guilt at the Syrian government and its Lebanese allies, was correct but was then undercut by U.N. officials for political reasons.

The hero of the Times op-ed is German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, who headed the initial U.N. inquiry and was subsequently replaced by Belgian investigator Serge Brammertz, who is portrayed as an incompetent who squandered Mehlis’s supposedly courageous work. Young wrote:

“Mr. Mehlis had few doubts about Syria’s involvement, and said so in his first report. He asked for President Assad’s testimony (over Syrian protests), interviewed Syrian intelligence officers in Vienna and arrested suspects. When Mr. Mehlis stepped down from his position in December, 2005, he felt he had enough to arrest at least one of the intelligence officers.

“However, the investigation wilted under his successor. … Mr. Brammertz issued uninformative reports and displayed a lack of transparency that discouraged potential witnesses, unsure of whether he had solid evidence in hand, from coming forward; … he failed to follow through on the interviews with the Syrian officers; and though he met with President Assad, he apparently did not formally take down his testimony.”

Young’s narrative fits with the Times’ previous hostility toward the Syrians regarding the Hariri case and other issues, much as the Times regularly tilted its coverage against Iraq prior to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and currently slants its reporting against the government of Iran.

On the Hariri case, the Times would have its readers believe that U.N. leaders lost their nerve and dumped a brilliant prosecutor in favor of an incompetent to sabotage the case.

But what Young and the Times failed to disclose on Sunday was that Mehlis’s initial investigation amounted to a rush to judgment that relied heavily on two witnesses whose testimony was later discredited or retracted. His successor, Brammertz, had no choice but to retrace Mehlis’s steps because there had been so many slip-ups.

The murder mystery began on Feb. 14, 2005, when an explosion destroyed a car carrying Hariri through the streets of Beirut.

Because Syria was then on President George W. Bush’s hit list for “regime change” – and Syria was considered a front-line enemy of Israel – speculative evidence of Syrian guilt was an easy sell to the U.S. news media. When Mehlis’s preliminary report was issued, there was little U.S. media skepticism about its assertions of guilt regarding Syrian leaders and their Lebanese allies.

“There is probable cause to believe that the decision to assassinate former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials and could not have been further organized without the collusion of their counterparts in the Lebanese security services,” declared Mehlis’s report on Oct. 20, 2005.

Despite the curiously vague wording – “probable cause to believe” the killing “could not have been taken without the approval” and “without the collusion” – Bush immediately termed the findings “very disturbing” and called for the U.N. Security Council to take action against Syria.

The U.S. press joined the stampede in assuming Syrian guilt. On Oct. 25, 2005, a New York Times editorial said the U.N. investigation had been “tough and meticulous” in establishing “some deeply troubling facts” about Hariri’s murderers. The Times demanded punishment of top Syrian officials and their Lebanese allies.

But Mehlis’s investigative report was anything but “meticulous.” Indeed, it read more like a compilation of circumstantial evidence and conspiracy theories than a dispassionate pursuit of the truth.

As a wealthy businessman with close ties to the Saudi monarchy, Hariri had many enemies who might have wanted him dead for his business or political dealings. The Syrians were not alone in having a motive to eliminate Hariri.

Indeed, after the assassination, a videotape was delivered to al-Jazeera television on which a Lebanese youth, Ahmad Abu Adass, claimed to have carried out the suicide bombing on behalf of Islamic militants angered by Hariri’s work for “the agent of the infidels” in Saudi Arabia.

However, Mehlis relied on two witnesses – Zuhair Ibn Muhammad Said Saddik and Hussam Taher Hussam – to dismiss the videotape as part of a disinformation campaign designed to deflect suspicion from Syria.

Mehlis then spun a narrative of a Syrian conspiracy to kill Hariri. Four pro-Syrian Lebanese security officials were jailed on suspicion of involvement in Hariri’s murder. Everything was falling neatly into place.

As a new U.S. press hysteria built over another case of pure evil traced to the doorstep of an American adversary in the Muslim world, holes in the U.N. report were mostly ignored. At Consortiumnews.com, we produced one of the few critical examinations of what had the looks of a rush to judgment. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Dangerously Incomplete Hariri Report.”]

A Case Crumbles

Much like the Bush administration’s Iraqi WMD claims – which the Times also touted uncritically – Mehlis’s Hariri case against the Syrians soon began to crumble.

One witness, Saddik, was identified by the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel as a swindler who boasted about becoming “a millionaire” from his Hariri testimony. The other one, Hussam, recanted his testimony about Syrian involvement, saying he lied to the Mehlis investigation after being kidnapped, tortured and offered $1.3 million by Lebanese officials.

Mehlis soon stepped down, as even the New York Times acknowledged that the conflicting accusations had given the investigation the feel of “a fictional spy thriller.” [NYT, Dec. 7, 2005]

Mehlis’s subsequent replacements backed away from his Syrian accusations. Brammertz began entertaining other investigative leads, examining a variety of possible motives and a number of potential perpetrators.

“Given the many different positions occupied by Mr. Hariri, and his wide range of public and private-sector activities, the [U.N.] commission was investigating a number of different motives, including political motivations, personal vendettas, financial circumstances and extremist ideologies, or any combination of those motivations,” Brammertz’s own interim report said, according to a U.N. statement on June 14, 2006.

In other words, Brammertz had dumped Mehlis’s single-minded theory that had pinned the blame on senior Syrian security officials. Though Syria’s freewheeling intelligence services and their Lebanese cohorts remained on everyone’s suspect list, Brammertz adopted a far less confrontational and accusatory tone toward Syria.

Still, the U.S. news media, which had played the initial Mehlis accusations against Syria as front-page news, barely mentioned the shift in the U.N. probe.
Virtually nothing appeared in the U.S. news media that would alert the American people to the fact that the distinct impression they got in 2005 – that the Syrian government had engineered a terrorist bombing in Beirut – was now a whole lot fuzzier.

Instead, it remained common practice for the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream U.S. news media to continue citing the Mehlis report and referring to “Syrian officials implicated in Mr. Hariri’s killing” without providing more context.

That pattern continued Sunday in Young’s article, with the online version linking to a 2005 story that trumpeted Mehlis’s initial report. Young and the Times cite no articles describing the subsequent collapse of Mehlis’s case.

Last year, the U.N. tribunal examining Hariri’s murder and other terrorist acts in Lebanon acknowledged that it lacked the evidence to indict the four Lebanese security officials who had been held without formal charges since 2005. Finally, Judge Daniel Fransen of a special international tribunal ordered the four imprisoned security officials released.

In a similar situation – say, one that involved a U.S. ally – the release would have been viewed as proof of innocence or at least the absence of significant evidence of guilt.

In this case, however, the New York Times refused to acknowledge the obvious fact that the case against Syrian complicity was weak. Instead, the Times framed the development as underscoring “the legal pitfalls of a divisive international trial.” [NYT, April 30, 2009]

That stubbornly one-sided approach has now extended to the fifth anniversary of the Hariri slaying. Instead of acknowledging the flaws in Mehlis’s initial findings – or recognizing how recklessly premature those accusations were – the Times is now promoting a conspiracy theory that U.N. officials willfully tanked the investigation.

Yet the only conspiracy that Young’s article seems to corroborate is the one in which the Times and its editors relentlessly portray Muslim governments that are out of Washington’s favor as the “bad guys.”

Source

February 16, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Don’t Worry About Dependence on Foreign Oil

By Ivan Eland | September 1, 2008

Politicians regularly turn public fear into votes. President Bush proved a master at this in his 2004 reelection success. Most presidents who don’t win the popular vote the first time don’t get a second term, but fear pushed Bush over the top in 2004.

In the 2008 election, oil prices are high, and the presidential candidates from both parties are trying to get into the White House by fear mongering about U.S. dependence on foreign oil. Barack Obama and John McCain both seem to think such dependence is a bad thing, and the American public wholeheartedly agrees. Because almost everyone concurs (except many economists) on this questionable proposition, the debate on high oil prices and what to do about them degenerates from there.

The facts are that oil prices are high by historical standards (although at this writing, they have declined somewhat from their peak, and the media has provided less coverage of this downward slide than it did of their upward movement) and the United States imports about two-thirds of the crude oil that it consumes.

In the globalized world, however, the United States is heavily dependent on imports for many important necessities and products – for example, semiconductors. International trade allows U.S. companies and the American public to take advantage of the world market to get better goods at cheaper prices. Thus, when politicians generate fear of U.S. dependence on foreign oil, they are implicitly alleging that oil is somehow special. Oil is heavily used in transportation and the manufacture of such industrial items as petrochemicals and plastics. Yet to use the example of semiconductors mentioned above, imported semiconductors also are key component parts of important items throughout the economy – for example, computers, television sets, other electronic devices, cars, etc. Therefore, the politicians are not only implying that oil is special, but that it is also “strategic.”

Oil is strategic, however, only in the narrow sense that its derivatives help run tanks, aircraft, ships, helicopters, and other vehicles that the U.S. military would use in a war. (Of course, so do semiconductors.) But the United States produces about 1.8 billion barrels of oil annually, almost 13 times what the U.S. military used at the height of its consumption during the latest simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (144 million barrels per year). Thus, there is plenty of domestically produced oil to run the U.S. military in times of war.

With the probability of any worldwide conventional war among great powers escalating into a global thermonuclear holocaust being quite high – in which case nobody would be caring about the vaporized imported oil – such a widespread conventional conflict is very unlikely. Thus, in any regional war, the U.S. economy would be able to get oil from the regions of the world not involved in the conflict. The price might go up because of the war, but industrial economies are actually quite resilient to oil price increases. For example, the U.S. economy has not collapsed in the wake of recent record oil prices, and from late 1998 to late 2000, Germany maintained respectable economic growth rates in the face of a 211 percent price increase in oil.

But what if the war occurred in the volatile Persian Gulf region? The United States only gets 21 percent of its oil from the Persian Gulf. Most of it comes from Canada, Mexico, Nigeria, and Venezuela. Of course, a war anywhere in the world will cause the price of oil to go up. But about 80 percent of U.S. semiconductor imports come from East Asia, yet the media doesn’t constantly run hysterical stories on price spikes in semiconductors or on the horrible U.S. dependence on East Asian semiconductors. And the politicians don’t talk about using the U.S. military to safeguard such supplies from East Asia.

But can’t the world run out of oil, especially with developing nations, such as China and India, using more? Theoretically, the answer is yes because there are only finite deposits in the earth. Yet because exploration and recovery technology is constantly improving, proven oil reserves have tended to increase over time. Also, as oil prices go up, conservation increases and alternative energy sources – natural gas, solar, geothermal, etc. – become more attractive economically. For example, the conventional wisdom was that U.S. natural gas fields were in irreversible decline, but the high price of oil has led to a drilling boom to find more of this substitute. New technology to extract natural gas from shale beds has increased production in the U.S. dramatically and will probably also do so around the world. So who knows, similar technological leaps might also increase the amount of recoverable oil around the world.

But one thing is sure: it’s a myth that being dependent on imported oil is bad. As a way to stump politicians who perpetuate this nonsense, perhaps we should ask them this question: If oil is so critical and will become even more valuable when world supplies allegedly dwindle in the future, shouldn’t we use other countries’ oil now and have the U.S. government require that our limited production be saved to use or sell as the shortages worsen and future prices go even higher? Diametrically opposed to the present time, with the prevalent fears of dependency on foreign oil, this “conservation theory” was all the rage in the late 1930s and 1940s when a slowdown in finding new oil deposits seemed to threaten chronic future shortages (similar to the dire predictions after World War I and in the early 1920s before big oil discoveries were made late in the 1920s).

Of course, this is not the right policy prescription either. We should instead treat oil as any other product and let the market provide ample supplies at the lowest cost to the consumer.

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February 16, 2010 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Tom Friedman’s Peak Confusion

Twisted Energy Politics

By ROBERT BRYCE | February 16, 2010

When it comes to energy issues, Thomas Friedman simply doesn’t care about the facts.

That reality was made apparent, once again, in Friedman’s column in the February 10 issue of the New York Times. In an otherwise mostly sensible article, written from Yemen, where Friedman was talking about the need for proper educational opportunity in the Arabic and Islamic worlds, Friedman concluded that the US will have to maintain a strong military presence in the region in order to counter al-Qaeda. But he continues, we also must “help build schools and fund scholarships to America wherever we can. And please, please, let’s end our addiction to oil, which is what gives the Saudi religious ministry and charities the money to spread anti-modernist thinking across this region.”

Friedman has been bashing the Saudis for so long, it’s hardly worth recounting the many instances where he does so. But the fact that Friedman once again trots out the tired cliché of our “addiction to oil” and that he then immediately ties that issue to the Saudis shows that he simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Rather than stick to the facts, he retreats to a mindless slogan that contributes nothing to the need for a broader discussion of energy policy and the reality of the global marketplace.

The US could quit buying oil tomorrow, all oil, and it won’t put the Saudis out of business. According to the EIA, in 2008, the Saudis exported an average of 8.4 million barrels of oil per day. Of that quantity, the US accounted for about 1.5 million barrels per day.

Thus, even if the US somehow managed to segregate Saudi crude from its other oil imports, and also prevented the Saudis from selling that 1.5 million barrels per day somewhere else, Saudi Arabia would still be selling about 7 million barrels of oil on the global market. Needless to say, that 7 million barrels per day will bring the kingdom a fair bit of revenue.

Of course, Wednesday’s column isn’t the first time Friedman has shown that he cares more about polemics than facts. In August 2008, he held up Denmark as an energy model that should be copied by the US. In the wake of the 1973 Oil Embargo, Friedman claims that Denmark “responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent.” Friedman went on to lament America’s situation, writing that if “only we could be as energy smart as Denmark!”

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Friedman clearly loves the idea of energy independence, but the data shows that Denmark is not energy independent – it’s not even close. The Danes import all of their coal. I repeat, Denmark imports all of its coal. Furthermore, those coal imports – and coal consumption – show little sign of declining even though Denmark’s wind power production capacity has increased rapidly over the past few years. And Denmark is even more dependent on coal than the US! (1)

Nor did Friedman bother to mention that thanks to the Danish government’s exorbitant taxes, the Danes now have some of the world’s most expensive electricity and most expensive motor fuel.

In 2006, the Energy Information Administration looked at residential electricity rates in 65 countries and found that Denmark’s rates were the highest, by far, at some $0.32 per kilowatt-hour. That was about 25% higher than the electricity costs in the Netherlands, which had the next-highest rates in the survey, at $0.25 per kilowatt-hour. And that’s not a new phenomenon. From 1999 through 2006, Denmark had either the highest – or the next-highest – electricity rates of the countries surveyed by the EIA. (In 1999 and 2000, Japan’s electricity rates were slightly higher than those in Denmark.)  Furthermore, Denmark electricity rates are the highest in Europe – and no other country comes close. (2)

In 2008, electricity rates were even higher, with Danish residential customers were paying $0.38 per kilowatt-hour – or nearly four times as much as US residential customers who were paying about $0.10 per kilowatt-hour. And the Danes were paying more than twice as much as their counterparts in nuclear-heavy France, where residential electricity costs were $0.17 per kilowatt-hour.

While Danish homeowners are getting spanked by expensive electricity, Danish motorists are getting absolutely mugged at the service station. In late 2008, Danish drivers were paying $1.54 per liter for gasoline, while drivers in the U.K. were paying $1.44 and US motorists were paying $0.56. According to GTZ, an agency of the German government, only a handful of countries have more expensive fuel than Denmark, a list that includes Italy, Norway, Turkey and Germany.

Unfortunately, Friedman’s polemics on energy are nothing new. Back in 2006, Friedman published a column in the Times saying that the U.S. should build a wall around itself. “Build a virtual wall. End our oil addiction.” Getting rid of our need for oil will, he wrote, “protect us from the worst in the Arab-Muslim world….These regimes will never reform as long as they enjoy windfall oil profits.” The solution, he declared is for America to build “a wall of energy independence” around itself. Doing so, “will enable us to continue to engage honestly with the most progressive Arabs and Muslims on a reform agenda.”

Remember that this is the same Friedman, who, in his 2005 best-selling book, The World is Flat, declared that the world was increasingly globalized and the implications of that were obvious. In this new “flat” world, money, jobs, and opportunity, Friedman said, will “go to the countries with the best infrastructure, the best education system that produces the most educated work force, the most investor-friendly laws, and the best environment. (3)

Hmmm. So doesn’t that also mean that in our new “flat” world, that energy will be exported by the countries that have the best infrastructure for providing that energy to the world market?

Friedman’s problem is that he wants it both ways: he espouses the merits and potential of the new flat world, while also insisting that the US should withdraw into energy isolationism, and thereby surrender any participation in the world’s single biggest industry, the global energy sector. The irreconcilable contradictions in Friedman’s arguments are easily seen in the penultimate paragraph in The World is Flat where he claims that the “two greatest dangers we Americans face are an excess of protectionism – excessive fears of another 9/11 that prompt us to wall ourselves in, in search of personal security – and excessive fears of competing in a world…that prompt us to wall ourselves off, in search of economic security. Both would be a disaster for us and for the world.”

So, to summarize Friedman’s world view, he wants a “wall of energy independence” around America while simultaneously warning Americans that the two greatest dangers are a) walling “ourselves in” and b) walling “ourselves off.”

Friedman sees a flat world where walls are dangerous because they will isolate the US from other countries. But when it comes to energy, walls are good because they isolate the US from other countries. Oh, and along the way, we need to bankrupt the Saudis, because, well, they might give money to people who don’t think like we do.

Is anyone else here confused?

Robert Bryce’s fourth book, Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future, will be published in April.

Notes.


(1) BP Statistical Review of World Energy. In 2007, Denmark got 26% of its primary energy from coal while the US got 24.3%.

(3) Yale Global Online, “’Wake Up and Face the Flat Earth’ – Thomas L. Friedman,” April 18, 2005. Available: http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=5581

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February 16, 2010 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Behind the Drive to War

By Ismael Hossein-zadeh

A most widely-cited factor behind the Bush administration’s drive to war is said to be oil. “No Blood for Oil” has been a rallying cry for most of the opponents of the war. Yet, such claims cannot be supported by facts. Major oil companies have come (in recent years and decades) to prefer peace, stability, and predictability in global markets to war and instability. It is true that big oil, like the arms industry, has handsomely benefited form the heightened tempo of war and militarism. There is no hard evidence, however, that major oil interests encouraged or embraced the Bush administrations drive to war and militarism. On the contrary, evidence shows that for the last quarter century or so oil interests have not favored war and turbulence in the Middle East, including the current invasion of Iraq. Major oil companies, along with many other non-military transnational corporations, have lobbied both the Clinton and Bush administrations in support of changing the aggressive, militaristic U.S. policy toward countries like Iran, Iraq and Libya in favor of establishing normal, non-confrontational business and diplomatic relations.

The claim that attributes the Bush administration’s drive to war to the influence of major oil companies tends to rest more on precedent and perception than reality. Part of the perception is due to the exaggerated notion that both President Bush and Vice President Cheney were “oil men” before coming to the White House. But the fact is that George W.Bush was never more than an unsuccessful petty oil prospector and Dick Cheney headed a company, the notorious Halliburton, that sold (and still sells) services to oil companies and the Pentagon. The larger part of the perception, however, stems from the fact that oil companies do benefit from oil price hikes that result from war and political turbulence in the Middle East. Such benefits are, however, largely incidental. Surely, American oil companies would welcome the spoils of the war (in the form of oil price hikes) in Iraq or anywhere else in the world. From the largely incidental oil price hikes that follow war and political convulsion, some observers automatically conclude that, therefore, big oil must have been behind the war. But there is no evidence that, at least in the case of the current invasion of Iraq, oil companies pushed for or supported the war.

On the contrary, there is strong evidence that, in fact, oil companies did not welcome the war because they prefer stability and predictability to periodic oil spikes that follow war and political convulsion: “Looking back over the last 20 years, there is plenty of evidence showing the industry’s push for stability and cooperation with Middle Eastern countries and leaders, and the U.S. government’s drive for hegemony works against the oil industry.”  As Thierry Desmarest, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of France’s giant oil company, TotalFinaElf, put it, “A few months of cash generation is not a big deal. Stable, not volatile, prices and a $25 price (per barrel) would be convenient for everyone.”

It is true that for a long time, from the beginning of Middle Eastern oil exploration and discovery in the early twentieth century until the mid-1970s, colonial and/or imperial powers controlled oil either directly or through control of oil producing countries—at times, even by military force. But that pattern of imperialist exploitation of global markets and resources has changed now. Most of the current theories of imperialism and hegemony that continue invoking that old pattern of big oil behavior tend to suffer from an ahistorical perspective. Today, even physically occupying and controlling another country’s oil fields will not necessarily be beneficial to oil interests. Not only will military adventures place the operations of current energy projects at jeopardy, but they will also make the future plans precarious and unpredictable. Big oil interests, of course, know this; and that’s why they did not countenance the war on Iraq: “The big oil companies were not enthusiastic about the Iraqi war,” says Fareed Mohamedi of PFC Energy, an energy consultancy firm based in Washington D.C. that advises petroleum firms. “Corporations like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron-Texaco want stability, and this is not what Bush is providing in Iraq and the Gulf region,” adds Mohamedi.

During the past few decades, major oil companies have consistently opposed U.S. policies and military threats against countries like Iran, Iraq, and Libya. They have, indeed, time and again, lobbied U.S. foreign policy makers for the establishment of peaceful relations and diplomatic rapprochement with those countries. The Iran-Libya Sanction Act of 1996 (ILSA) is a strong testament to the fact that oil companies nowadays view wars, economic sanctions, and international political tensions as harmful to their long-term business interests and, accordingly, strive for peace, not war, in international relations.

In May of 1997, for example, major U.S. oil companies such as Conoco, Exxon, Atlantic Richfield, and Occidental Petroleum joined other non-military U.S. transnational corporations to create an anti-sanction coalition. Earlier that same year Conoco’s Chief Executive Archie Dunham publicly took a stance against unilateral U.S. sanctions by stating that “U.S. companies, not rogue regimes, are the ones that suffer when the United States imposes economic sanctions.” Texaco officials have also argued that the U.S. can be more effective in bringing about change in other countries by allowing U.S. companies to do business with those countries instead of imposing economic sanctions that tend to be counterproductive.

The Military-Industrial-Zionist-Alliance

A widely-shared view attributes the Bush administration’s militaristic foreign policy to the influence of neoconservative forces and the power of their ideology: the small but influential cabal of starry-eyed ideologues, bent on spreading the U.S. economic and political system, along with American power and influence, managed to single-handedly drive the country to war through lies and false pretexts. Some of these critics compare the “ideologically-driven” neoconservative militarists to the idealistic Jacobinic forces ofmore than two centuries ago in Europe, the eighteenth century French revolutionaries whose intention to remake Europe in revolutionary France’s image launched the Napoleonic Wars. Proponents of this thesis further argue that the neoconservatives’ domination of the Bush administration’s foreign policy amounted to a political coup d’etat.

While this argument may not be altogether false, it is woefully deficient. By placing an inordinately high emphasis on pure or abstract ideology, and on political personas or the role of individuals, the argument tends to lose sight of the bigger, but largely submerged, picture: the powerful military-industrial-Likud interests—the real architects of war and militarism—that lie behind the façade of neoconservative figures in and around the Bush administration. There is clear evidence that the leading neoconservative figures have been long-time political activists who have worked through think tanks set up to serve either as the armaments lobby or the Likud (militant Zionist partisans) lobby or both—going back to the 1990s, 1980s and, in some cases, 1970s. These corporate-backed militaristic think tanks include the American Enterprise Institute, Project for the New American Century, Center for Security Policy, Middle East Media Research Institute, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Middle East Forum, National Institute for Public Policy, and Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. There is also evidence that the major components of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, including the war on Iraq, were designed long before George W. Bush arrived in the While House—largely at the drawing boards of these think thanks, often in collaboration, directly or indirectly, with the Pentagon and the arms lobby.

Take the Center for Security Policy (CSP), for example. It “boasts that no fewer than 22 former advisory board members are close associates in the Bush administration. . . . A sixth of the Center’s revenue comes directly from defense corporations.” The Center’s alumni in key posts in the Bush administration include its former chair of the board, Douglas Feith, who served as Undersecretary of Defense for policy, Pentagon Comptroller Dov Zakheim, former Defense Policy Board chair Richard Perle, and longtime friend and financial supporter Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In its 1998 annual report, the center “listed virtually every weapons-maker that had supported it fromits founding, from Lockheed, Martin Marietta, Northrop, Grumman, and Boeing, to the later ‘merged’ incarnations of same—Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and so forth.”

Likewise, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an influential Washington think tank and a major lobbying force for the military-industrial-Zionist alliance, can boast of being the metaphorical alma mater of a number of powerful members of the Bush administration. For example, Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne Cheney, State Department arms control official John Bolton (now U.S. ambassador to the UN), and former chair of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle all have had long-standing ties with the Institute. The Institute played a key role in promoting Ahmed Chalabi’s group of Iraqi exiles, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), as a major Iraqi opposition force “that would be welcomed by the Iraqi people as an alternative to the regime of Saddam Hussein” once the Untied States overthrew that regime. “From 1998 on, when there was U.S. government money openly available to support the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein due to the AEI-backed Iraqi Liberation Act, Chalabi’s INC grabbed the bulk of the funding.” In return, the INC, working closely with the AEI, played an important role in the justification of the invasion of Iraq. It served, for example, as a major source of (largely fabricated) intelligence for the civilian militarists of the Pentagon whenever they found the intelligence gathered by the CIA and the State Department at odds with their plans of invading Iraq.

Another example of the interlocking network of neoconservative forces in the Bush administration and the militaristic think tanks that are dedicated to the advancement ofthe military-industrial-Zionist agenda is reflected in the affiliation of a number of influential members of the administration with the Jewish Institute for the National Security Affairs (JINSA). JINSA “is on record in its support of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and against the Oslo Accord. . . . In its fervent support for the hard-line, pro-settlement, anti-Palestinian Likud-style policies in Israel, JINSA has essentially recommended that ‘regime change’ in Iraq should be just the beginning of a cascade of toppling dominoes in the Middle East.”

JINSA has influential friends either as liaisons with or members of the Bush administration. For example, Douglas Feith, assistant secretary of defense during the first term of the Bush administration, is a former JINSA advisor. General Jay Garner, the initial head of the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq, is also a former JINSA advisory board member. JINSA advisor Michael Ladeen, who also unofficially advises the Bush administration on Middle Eastern issues, has occasionally talked about the coming era of “total war,” indicating that the Bush administration should expand its policy of “regime change” in Iraq to other countries in the region such as Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. “In keeping with its role as a cheerleader for U.S. intervention in the Middle East, JINSA chose to honor Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz . . . to receive the 2002 edition of its Henry M. ‘Scoop’ Jackson public service award. The corporate sponsor of the affair was Northrop Grumman, a company that Wolfowitz worked for as a paid consultant prior to joining Rumsfeld’s Pentagon.”

The fact that neoconservative militarists of the Bush administration are organically rooted in the military-industrial complex and/or the militant Zionist supporters of “greater Israel” is even more clearly reflected in their incestuous relationship with the jingoistic lobbying think tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Like most of its counterpart institutes within the extensive network of neoconservative think tanks, PNAC was founded by a circle of powerful political figures a number of whom later ascended to key positions in the Bush administration. As William Hartung describes, “In many ways, the founding of PNAC in 1997 marked the opening salvo in the formation of the Bush policy of aggressive unilateralism. The signatories of PNAC’s founding statement of principles are a rogue’s gallery of intransigent hardliners, ranging from Iran-Contra re-treat Eliot Cohen, to ex-Pentagon hawks I. Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld, to neo-con standbys Frank Gaffney, former Reagan drug czar WilliamBennett, and Norman Podhoretz, to the President’s brother and partner in electoral crime, Jeb Bush.” Add the signature of Vice President Dick Cheney to the list of PNAC founders, “and you have the bulwarks of the neo-con network that is currently in the driver’s seat of the Bush administration’s war without end policies all represented in PNAC’s founding document.”

A closer look at the professional records of the neoconservative players in the Bush administration indicates that “32 major administration appointees . . . are former executives with, consultants for, or significant shareholders of top defense contractors.” For example, James Roche, former air force secretary who took over the army, is a former president of Northrop Grumman; his assistant secretary Nelson Gibbs is another Northrop alumni. An under secretary at the air force, Peter Teets, was chief operating officer at Lockheed while Michael Wynne, a Defence Department under secretary, was a former senior vice-president at General Dynamics. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself is an ex-director of a General Dynamics subsidiary, and his deputy during the first term of the Bush administration, Paul Wolfowitz (now the head of the World Bank), acted as a paid consultant to Northrop Grumman. Today, point out Hartung and Ciarrocca, the armaments lobby “is exerting more influence over policy making than at any time since President Dwight D. Eisenhower first warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex over 40 years ago.”

This sample evidence indicates that the view that the neoconservative militarists’ tendency to war and aggression is inspired by an ideological passion to spread American ideals of democracy is clearly unwarranted. Their success in orchestrating the unprovoked war against Iraq stemmed largely from the fact they were working essentially on behalf of two immensely powerful special interests, the military-industrial complex and the influential Zionist lobby in the United States. Neoconservative architects of war and militarism derive their political clout and policy effectiveness largely from the political machine and institutional infrastructure of these two powerful interest groups.

~~~

Bibliography:

William D. Hartung, How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy?

Johnathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler. The Global Political Economy of Israel

Cyrus Bina, “The American Tragedy: The Quagmire of War, Rhetoric of Oil, and the Conundrum of Hegemony,” Journal of Iranian Research and Analysis, vol. 20, no. 2
Conundrum of Hegemony,” Journal of Iranian Research and Analysis, vol. 20, no. 2
http://www.lib.drake.edu:8080/dspace/bitstream/2092/373/1/ChapmanUnivPaper.pdf.

Ismael Hossein-zadeh, author of the recently published The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave-Macmillan 2007), teaches economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.

February 12, 2010 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Israel Violates Economic Sanctions Against Iran

By Grant Smith, February 11, 2010

The Obama administration is escalating economic sanctions against Iran.  Administered by a secretive unit within the US Treasury Department, they will freeze the assets of Revolutionary Guard Gen. Rostam Qasemi as well as four subsidiaries of a construction firm that he leads.  These sanctions build upon existing U.S. unilateral sanctions targeting shippers, financial institutions, and elements of the Guard Corps some believe are promoting Iran’s missile and nuclear programs.

Economic warfare expert R. Thomas Naylor extensively documents that such sanctions create black markets and spread corruption while doing relatively little to deter rogue regimes.  Obvious economic dynamics create vast margins for smugglers and traders willing to bust embargoes.  Unless the economy of a target country is particularly dependent upon the influence or volume of goods from any single international partner, profiteers quickly step into the breach.  Sanctions typically punish legitimate traders while favoring corruption around the world.

That corrupting nature of sanctions reaches far into the US.  One example is Marc Rich, indicted in the United States on federal charges of illegal oil deals with Iran during the Iran hostage crisis.  Rich broke US embargoes by purchasing Iranian crude under special deals with Ayatollah Khomeini.  Rich then sold them at healthy margins to legitimate traders locked out of the market by US sanctions.  Forbes ranked the intrepid Rich as the 242nd richest American in 2006 with a net worth of US $1.5 billion.

Rich stayed outside the U.S. until he arranged for an unprecedented pardon from President Bill Clinton on January 20, 2001. Eric Holder, then acting as deputy attorney general, gave Clinton his “neutral, leaning towards favorable” recommendation to pardon the Switzerland-based fugitive financier after a quiet and intense campaign by the Israeli government’s Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres and the US Israel lobby.

But the temptations of sanctions busting aren’t an “elites only” affair.  Under the highly problematic US-Israel Free Trade Agreement, US growers should have an advantage in supplying the $20 million Israeli pistachio market.  But grower complaints meticulously documented in 2007 to the US Trade Representative reveal that Israel prefers to avoid importing American nuts while violating its own “Trading with the Enemy Act” by purchasing Iranian pistachios through Turkey.  Although US growers supplied scientific test data to the US Trade Representative validating these claims, no punitive measures have been taken by Israel or the USTR (an office of the President).

History suggests that Israelis and their US lobby’s financial backers will be first in line to violate so-called “crippling sanctions” against Iran, a country over which the US has relatively little direct economic leverage.  This adds insult to injury, since a real US economic sanctions regime — likely to have been highly successful in averting conditions underlying any potential Middle East nuclear arms race — has been suppressed since it was signed into law over three decades ago.

The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 as amended by the Symington Amendment of 1976 and the Glenn Amendment of 1977 prohibiting US military assistance to countries that acquire or transfer nuclear reprocessing technology outside of international nonproliferation regimes. Israel, unlike Iran, is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The declassified US Army report titled The Joint Operating Environment 2008 identifies Israel as a nuclear weapons power in “a growing arc of nuclear powers running from Israel in the west through an emerging Iran to Pakistan, India, and on to China, North Korea, and Russia in the east.”  Jimmy Carter became the first former President to confirm in 2008 that Israel had secretly financed, developed, and deployed an undeclared arsenal of nuclear weapons. Israeli Mordecai Vanunu long ago released his damning photos of Israeli nuclear weapons and facilities for which he served 18 years in prison.

If the President wishes to disburse US taxpayer-funded foreign aid to Israel in compliance with US law, he may do so only by issuing a special waiver, available for public review, as is currently the case with US aid for Pakistan.  Yet every president from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama has violated their oath of office — all refused to either withhold aid or sign the short presidential waiver that would make delivering taxpayer funded US foreign aid to Israel legal under Symington and Glenn.

If US presidents had faithfully executed this US law in order to reign in the Israeli nuclear weapons program since the 1970s, there can be little doubt that the Middle East would be a vastly better place.  Israel is fully dependent on access to the US market, diplomatic cover, and vast military aid.  Israel would have been motivated to negotiate in good faith a comprehensive peaceful settlement with its near and distant neighbors, none of which would feel pressure to establish a deterrent to Israel’s nuclear weapons.  But in terms of political coercion, Israel’s arsenal is pointed squarely at the US.  Back in 1960 the CIA estimated [PDF] that “Possession of a nuclear weapon capability, or even the prospect of achieving it, would clearly give Israel a greater sense of security, self-confidence, and assertiveness…Israel would be less inclined than ever to make concessions…”

The presidential history of capitulation to Israeli violators unmasks these new economic sanctions for what they truly are: corrupt “box checking exercises” as Israel’s lobby eagerly drives the US toward yet another needless — but long planned — military conflict which serves no legitimate American interest.

Source

February 11, 2010 Posted by | Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Israel Demands an Act of War

Netanyahu to EU envoys:

“In the last two days the brutal regime in Tehran has made more outrageous statements, including the implicit call for the extermination of my country. Israel expects all responsible governments, including all those represented here, to forcefully condemn these outrageous statements.”

“But I think what is required is a lot more than words, Iran is racing forward to produce nuclear weapons in brazen defiance of the international community. And the international community must decide if it is serious about neutralizing this threat to Israel, the region and the entire word. I believe that what is required right now is tough action from the international community.”

“This means not moderate sanctions or watered down sanctions, this means crippling sanctions, and these sanctions must be applied right now.” – February 9, 2010

February 10, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

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