Iran's Rouhani may meet Obama at UN

First meeting of US and Iranian leaders since 1979 revolution could open way to diplomatic end to Iranian nuclear standoff

Julian Borger, Diplomatic editor             Guardian/UK                 15 September 2013

An exchange of letters between Barack Obama and the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, has set the stage for a possible meeting between the two men at the UN next week in what would be the first face-to-face encounter between a US and Iranian leader since Iran's 1979 revolution. Britain's foreign secretary, William Hague, is also due to meet his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, at the UN general assembly meeting in New York, adding to guarded optimism that the June election of Rouhani, a Glasgow-educated moderate, and his appointment of a largely pragmatic cabinet, has opened the door to a diplomatic solution to the 11-year international standoff. Tehran took the Foreign Office by surprise, tweeting on Rouhani's English-language feed that the president would also be prepared to meet Hague, something the UK had not even requested.

Diplomats said that the tweet reflected the new Iranian government's eagerness to make diplomatic headway on the nuclear issue, which has been at an impasse for several years. A Hague meeting with either Rouhani or Zarif could clear the way to restoring full diplomatic ties, which have not existed since the British embassy in Tehran was ransacked by a mob in November 2011.

On Sunday, Obama made clear that there was a diplomatic opening with Iran, not only over the nuclear question but also over Syria. He confirmed earlier reports that he and Rouhani had "reached out" to each other, exchanging letters. Speaking on ABC's This Week, Obama raised the prospect of Iran getting involved in broader talks on Syria if Tehran recognised "that what's happening there is a train wreck that hurts not just Syrians but is destabilising the entire region". He said the Geneva deal could pave the way for more general talks involving Russia and Iran aimed at "some sort of political settlement that would deal with the underlying terrible conflict".

In the same interview, Obama also urged Iran's leadership not to draw the wrong lessons from his decision to draw back from air strikes on Syria in pursuit of a diplomatic solution to the chemical weapons crisis. He said it showed that it was possible to resolve the standoff over Iran's nuclear aspirations peacefully, but insisted it did not indicate a weakening of US resolve to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.  "I think what the Iranians understand is that the nuclear issue is a far larger issue for us than the chemical weapons issue, that the threat against … Israel that a nuclear Iran poses is much closer to our core interests. That a nuclear arms race in the region is something that would be profoundly destabilising," Obama said in the ABC interview.

After meeting John Kerry, US secretary of state, the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, stressed the same point. "Iran must understand the consequences of its continued defiance of the international community by its pursuit toward nuclear weapons," he added.

However, Obama insisted: "What they should draw from this lesson is that there is the potential of resolving these issues diplomatically. Negotiations with the Iranians are always difficult. I think this new president is not going to suddenly make it easy. My view is that … if you have both a credible threat of force, combined with a rigorous diplomatic effort, that, in fact you can strike a deal."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/15/obama-rouhani-united-nations-meeting         [Abridged]

There is something deeply cynical about this chemical weapons ‘timetable’

Syrians will be left to kill each other as before - only without sarin

Robert  Fisk                    Independent/UK                        15 September 2013

What on earth was going on in Washington and Geneva last week?  The Obama administration is still getting weirder and weirder.  Obama last year was really, terribly, awfully worried that Syria’s chemical weapons would “fall into the wrong hands”. In other words, into the hands of al-Qa’ida or the al-Nusra front. Seemingly they were still, at that moment, in the “right hands” – those of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. But now Obama and the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, have decided that they are in the wrong hands after all, since they are now accusing the “right hands” of firing sarin gas shells at civilians. And that crosses the infamous “red line”.

And then – wait for it – as the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, suggested an international collection of all the rusty old chemical shells in Syria, Pentagon “sources” said it would need up to 75,000 armed troops to protect the chemical inspectors. Seventy-five thousand! If that isn’t boots on the ground, I don’t know what is.

Of course, Putin and Lavrov kept clear of references to the Second World War. Russia suffered too grievously from Hitler for that. I’ve said this before, but I really do suspect that leaders who have no experience of war – I am excepting McCain and the indefatigable UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi here – actually thought they were making a Hollywood movie. Kerry’s preposterous “unbelievably small” strike is obviously a low budget film for recession-hit America. Obama promises wide-screen drama. Think Steven Spielberg. And then the Russians, who can spot a dead cat when they see one, zap the whole project.

None of the above should cheapen the tragedy of Syria. The world, I suspect, is not totally convinced that the regime was responsible for using chemical weapons in Ghouta on 21 August – though I bet the Russians know who did. Now we’ve got rebels chopping off prisoners’ heads, I’m not sure what scruples they’d have about using sarin. But it was interesting to see the Syrian government agreeing to put their chemical weapons in international hands – I couldn’t help noticing that they didn’t demand the same of the insurgents…

Let’s have a closer look at the Kerry-Lavrov timetable. The Syrians have to come up with a list of their nasties within a week. Inspectors are to be on the ground by mid-November. Then every chemical weapon has got to be destroyed (or “secured”) by the middle of next year. And this amid a civil war! Peace in our time.

Of course, while the inspectors are battering their way through the front lines the Syrians continue to kill each other, the Syrian government goes on trying to break the rebels and the Islamist insurgents go on attacking Christian towns and chopping off the heads of captives. Put bluntly, they can use rifles, shells, knives and swords to slaughter each other – but absolutely no sarin. There is something deeply offensive and deeply cynical about all this. Russia re-enters the Middle East, Obama is off the hook after playing World War 2 – and the Syrians go on dying.

I do hope that we will have a “Geneva 2” conference at last, and that America and Russia will no longer spat over the Syrian bloodbath. But I am not at all sure the rebels will go along with this, because Assad is clearly not leaving power. Not now, anyway. And the Saudis? And the Qataris? And any other Gulf Sunnis who’ve been funding and arming the rebels? The whole timetable seems so hopelessly optimistic.

However, there is another story going on here, and that’s Iran. For now, the leader of Iran appears to be a wise and sane man, Putin can surely resurrect his own ideas on Iranian nuclear material, and the Iranian-Syrian alliance could be hooked up together to end the whole miserable failure of politics and perhaps even the war in Syria. Then Obama can claim a world-shaking political victory (brought about only by his threat to use force, of course) and Kerry can go back to making peace between Palestinians and Israelis.         [Abridged]

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/there-is-something-deeply-cynical-about-this

Obama's Rogue State Tramples Over Every Law It Demands Others Uphold

by George Monbiot                       Guardian/UK                September 10, 2013

You could almost pity these people. For 67 years successive US governments have resisted calls to reform the UN security council. They've defended a system which grants five nations a veto over world affairs, reducing all others to impotent spectators. They have collaborated with the other four permanent members (the UK, Russia, China and France) in a colonial carve-up, at the expense of peace and global justice. Never have Obama or his predecessors attempted a serious reform of this system.

In 1997 the US agreed to decommission the 31,000 tonnes of sarin, VX, mustard gas and other agents it possessed within 10 years. In 2007 it requested the maximum extension permitted– five years. Again it failed to keep its promise, and in 2012 it claimed they would be gone by 2021. Russia yesterday urged Syria to place its chemical weapons under international control. Perhaps it should press the US to do the same.

The US used millions of gallons of chemical weapons in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. It also used them during its destruction of Falluja in 2004, then lied about it. The Reagan government helped Saddam Hussein to wage war with Iran in the 1980s while aware that he was using nerve and mustard gas. (The Bush administration then cited this deployment as an excuse to attack Iraq, 15 years later).

Smallpox has been eliminated from the human population, but two nations – the US and Russia – insist on keeping the pathogen in cold storage. They claim their purpose is to develop defences against possible biological weapons attack, but most experts in the field consider this to be nonsense. While raising concerns about each other's possession of the disease, they have worked together to bludgeon the other members of the World Health Organisation, which have pressed them to destroy their stocks.

In 2001 the New York Times reported that "the Pentagon has built a germ factory that could make enough lethal microbes to wipe out entire cities". The Pentagon claimed the purpose was defensive.  Looming over all this is the cover the US provides for Israel's weapons of mass destruction.  It's also that, as the Washington Post points out: "Syria's chemical weapons stockpile results from a never-acknowledged gentleman's agreement in the Middle East that as long as Israel had nuclear weapons, Syria's pursuit of chemical weapons would not attract much public acknowledgement or criticism." Israel has developed its nuclear arsenal in defiance of the non-proliferation treaty, and the US supports it in defiance of its own law, which forbids the disbursement of aid to a country with unauthorised weapons of mass destruction.

 Looming over all this is the cover the US provides for Israel's weapons of mass destruction.  Israel has developed its nuclear arsenal in defiance of the non-proliferation treaty, and the US supports it in defiance of its own law, which forbids the disbursement of aid to a country with unauthorised weapons of mass destruction.

As for the norms of international law, let's remind ourselves where the US stands. It remains outside the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, after declaring its citizens immune from prosecution. The crime of aggression it committed in Iraq – defined by the Nuremberg tribunal as "the supreme international crime" – goes not just unpunished but also unmentioned by anyone in government.

Obama's failure to be honest about his nation's record of destroying international norms and undermining international law, his myth-making about the role of the US in world affairs, and his one-sided interventions in the Middle East, all render the crisis in Syria even harder to resolve. Until there is some candour about past crimes and current injustices, until there is an effort to address the inequalities over which the US presides, everything it attempts will stoke the cynicism and anger the president says he wants to quench.

Copyright 2013 The Guardian             [Abridged]      

        http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/10-3

Stopping a War Before It Starts

by Robert C. Koehler                   Common  Dreams               September 5, 2013

This is the time, as the next war strains to be born, amid the same old lies as last time, amid the same urgency and pseudo-debate and pretensions of seriousness:

The government of Syria has crossed a “red line.” It has used poison gas, killing hundreds of innocent people and committing a heinous war crime. And suddenly, clear as a bell, we have good vs. evil. Our only course of action, President Obama and his spokespersons tell us, is to “carry out a punitive strike against the Syrian government.”

This is the abstraction of warspeak, which summons a deeply satisfying mythology of righteous vengeance while making the action sound so clear and logical. President Bashar al-Assad committed a “moral obscenity.” It’s up to us to punish him by firing off some Tomahawk missiles. There’s no messiness in this action, no possibility of disastrous consequences, no hint that our intelligence might be compromised, no wink at our hypocrisy or past failures, and certainly no dead civilians — no random innocents lying just as still in the wake of our rain of thousand-pound warheads as those Assad may have killed in his alleged act of moral obscenity.

War, of course, always starts out like this: as bright and hopeful as the sunrise. It’s almost beyond belief to me that we can have such a clean, bloodless national conversation about a new war in the Middle East while the old wars continue to fester and our moral wounds still haunt us. The image of George Bush on the aircraft carrier in his padded flight suit, proclaiming “mission accomplished,” is one the 21st century’s most bitterly ironic icons.

Yet we’re about to bomb Syria — engage, if Obama gets his way, in some “intervention-lite,” as Simon Jenkins of the Guardian put it. This will almost certainly trigger not good behavior but furious retaliation, alienating not just Syria but its allies, including Iran and Russia. How will the U.S. respond when one of our “enemies” strikes back at us? There’s no telling how far it could go.

Almost as blatantly MIA in the media and political discussion about attacking Syria over possible poison gas usage is any acknowledgement of the hypocrisy of our moral outrage. Think Agent Orange and napalm, white phosphorous and depleted uranium, among many other toxic substances we have thoughtlessly unleashed on “the enemy,” innocent civilians and our own troops in the wars of the last two generations. How many red lines have we crossed? How many lies have we told maintaining the harmlessness of these poisons? How many unborn babies have we poisoned over the years? How many square miles of Planet Earth are uninhabitable because of our righteous battles for the good of humankind?

This is the early part of a longer article by Robert Koehler.

The Strange Thing About Cluster Bombs

by Jim Naureckas        Published September 6, 2013 by FAIR        Common  Dreams

The New York Times has an article today (9/5/13) about a Human Rights Watch report charging Syria's government with the use of  cluster bombs, a "widely prohibited weapon."  Cluster bombs are munitions that release hundreds of miniature explosives; as the Times'Rick Gladstone writes, "Each bomblet detonates on impact, spraying shrapnel in all directions and killing, maiming and destroying indiscriminately.  [Photo shows U.S.plane dropping cluster bombs. Caption:"These are not the bad kind of cluster bomb, because they are dropped on and not by official enemies). 

Gladstone quotes a Human Rights Watch spokesperson calling cluster bombs "insidious weapons that remain on the ground, causing death and destruction for decades." The reporter goes on to cite the Cluster Munitions Coalition peace group on the deadly effects of these weapons:

The coalition said that children make up one-third of all casualties caused by cluster munitions. It said 60 percent of the total casualties caused by the weapons are civilians going about normal activities.

There's a Convention on Cluster Munitions signed by 112 countries who have agreed not to use or possess these weapons. Who wouldn't agree to such a thing? Well, aside from Syria, the article does mention:

There are 85 countries that have not signed the convention, including three permanent members of the Security Council–China, Russia and the United States. Most countries in the Middle East have not signed, including Syria, Israel and Jordan.

Huh–so the country that the New York Times is based in, where most of its readers live, is one of the countries that refuses to sign the treaty banning these horrific weapons? Maybe that's worth a mention before the eighth of 11 paragraphs.

In fact, readers might be interested to know that not only does the U.S. not ban cluster bombs, it actually uses them–they've been used by US forces in Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq, with the most recent target being Yemen. As the Human Rights Watch report notes in a portion not quoted by the Times:

The last reported US use of a cluster munition was in Yemen on December 17, 2009, when one or more TLAM-D cruise missiles loaded with BLU-97 bomblets struck the hamlet of al-Majala in southern Abyan province, causing more than 40 civilian casualties.

But that's the strange thing about cluster bombs: When they're used by official enemies, they're weapons of indiscriminate terror (FAIR Blog, 4/16/11, 1/2/13). When they're used by the United States, they're not much worth talking about.

Copyright 2013 FAIR

Jim Naureckas is editor of EXTRA! Magazine at FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting).

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/06-6