The Difference Between Chess And Tic-Tac-Toe

 

Obama Tells Congress to Approve Deal, Khamenei Directs Rouhani to Pick It Apart

by Bridget Johnson
July 16, 2015 – 8:15 am


That’s the Supreme Leader’s letter to President Hassan Rouhani, as released on his Twitter account.
So while President Obama is urging Congress to quickly drop its opposition and approve the deal, Iran’s leader is urging his president and lawmakers to carefully pick it apart.

The White House dismisses tweets from Ayatollah Khamenei as fodder for domestic consumption.
In another slap in the face to the United States, Khamenei pardoned 930 convicts today for Eid al-Fitr. Americans Saeed Abedini, Amir Hekmati and Jason Rezaian were not among them.

Prepare For A Long Chess Match

 

 Pitfalls lie ahead in the Iran nuclear talks

Ali Ansari

Though almost a week has passed since President Obama unveiled the framework understanding with Iran, the casual observer may be confused as to its value. And little wonder. The president has said it could be a game-changer – a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see whether or not we can at least take the nuclear issue off the table”. But the stated parameters of this framework are already fraying at the edges. So where do we stand?

On the face of it, this is a good deal, a very good deal indeed. Supporters on either side have understandably spared no time in heralding it as a “historic breakthrough” achieved against the backdrop of negotiations that appeared agonisingly close to failure. There is nothing like a prolonged period of tension to generate euphoria when the precipice is avoided and success snatched from the jaws of defeat. Much the same happened with the announcement of the interim agreement in 2013 – also hailed as a historic breakthrough. The difference is that this framework “understanding” gives us a much-needed peek at the light at the end of what has seemed like a very long tunnel. After myriad leaks, we have a sense of what the final agreement may look like.

But there is some way to go, and the journey is unlikely to be smooth. That much is clear if one examines the US state department fact sheet issued to complement the announcement made by the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, and the EU high representative for foreign affairs, Federica Mogherini. The formal announcement was somewhat vague, representing a collective attempt to satisfy all parties, but the fact sheet was more precise, containing specific details about the reduction in the number of centrifuges and the nature and pace of sanctions relief as well as the extent of the “unprecedented” inspections regime that Iran would face for up to 25 years. Anyone who feared the United States was giving too much away would have had those fears allayed. Not only would sanctions relief be phased subject to verifiable compliance by Iran of its obligations, but sanctions would “snap back” if at any time Iran was seen to have reneged. Meanwhile, UN security council sanctions – a particularly sore point with the Iranians – would be lifted with the completion by Iran of nuclear-related actions addressing all the key concerns.

The problem is that this fact sheet was not part of any agreement. It has similarities with the appendices that appeared on the Iranian foreign ministry website, but there are also significant differences. Zarif himself was quick to denounce the fact sheet as American “spin”, rejecting any notion of phased relief of sanctions, which Iranian officials have repeatedly stressed must be lifted on the first day of the implementation of the agreement. He said he had protested to the Americans, and that the agreement was effectively an “understanding” with no legal force whatsoever other than to indicate the direction of travel (thus taking care to fall in line with the supreme leader’s injunction that there be no two-stage agreement). From the Iranian point of view, the great achievement was not just that they had achieved official recognition of enrichment on Iranian soil, but that – according to their understanding – not a single nuclear activity would be suspended or closed.

Here there is much scope for disagreement. The Iranian position clearly conflicts with the mooted reduction in centrifuges and has since been softened.

The most obvious symbol of difference is the Arak heavy water reactor, 320km south of Tehran. While the Iranians claim the reactor will be modified and “updated” with international assistance under the management of Iran, the fact sheet states categorically that the current reactor will be redesigned and rebuilt subject to specifications agreed by the P5+1, and the original core “will be destroyed or removed from the country”. The Iranian documentation envisages a 10-year limit on the enrichment of uranium at the Natanz nuclear facility in central Iran, but otherwise there is little detail on time frames envisaged or the proposed inspections regime, and there is no reference to the reduction in the stockpile of enriched uranium.

We may not have the whole picture. There may be private agreements held back by both sides for domestic political purposes. But the public statements suggest a great divergence of opinion beyond the niceties of diplomatic interpretation,that each has endorsed the deal in accordance with how they perceive it. The cautious support by Friday prayer leaders – said to reflect the views of the supreme leader – are unlikely to have been for the American version of what transpired.

There is a path, but there are also pitfalls, and in establishing a narrative to suit the domestic agenda – a narrative enthusiastically reinforced by much of the western media – the Americans may have made life a little harder for their Iranian interlocutors.

Moreover, the irony will not have been lost on congressional critics that Iranian parliamentarians have insisted, and have received assurances, that they will have to ratify any final agreement. Diplomats on both sides have seized on the re-energised mood to stress that the June deadline can be met. But if experience is any guide, there is a good deal of work to be done. It is not at all clear that we will be witnessing a sprint to the finish.

The Antichrist Will Soon End The Chess Game

Inside Iraq’s political stalemate

Al Jazeera – Mon, Sep 29, 2014

It was the Iraqi prime minister himself who set the tone. “Soon we will overcome our challenges,” he said the day after the opening session of parliament dissolved into a messy ‎shouting match in which all sides seemed to blame each other for failures of, well, each other.

A new date, July 8, was set for parliament to convene. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki seemed confident. Then late in the evening of July 7 there was an announcement that July 8 was no longer feasible, it would be postponed another week. Again it was postponed until August. ‎Then another announcement that actually parliament would meet on July 13. This all happened in the space of few hours with state television channel Al-Iraqiya disseminating the news. I watched the to-ing and fro-ing with veteran Iraqi journalist Bassim Muhiy.

He wasn’t impressed. “Akh, these people. These politicians can’t agree on anything, and because they can’t they will argue like this for months and the people will suffer.”

There is a precedent for Bassim’s thinking. After the 2010 election it took nearly six months to form a government. To put this into perspective, the election took place on April 30. You can understand Bassim’s pessimism.

This time the stakes are higher than ever before. Iraq is fighting a war that threatens to split it apart, and the longer the politicians bicker, the more entrenched the Islamic State group and the other Sunni rebels become.

Opposition to al-Maliki

But why is it taking so long? One of the reasons is the intense opposition to Prime Minister al-Maliki, even from the Sunni leaders who want to fight but won’t until they see change, political change in Baghdad.

Speaking to my colleague Zeina Khodr, one of the key Sunni leaders said, “We won’t fight on behalf of the Americans or the Iraqi government.”

Most are in agreement that if you want to win against the Sunni rebels, then the Sunni tribes are key, and at the moment they aren’t in the mood to help a government that they blame for ignoring them, playing sectarian politics and therefore allowing Sunni anger to turn into Sunni revolution.

But the political ‎stalemate isn’t just sectarian. It’s also nationalistic. Even the Shia politicians, natural allies of the Prime Minister, criticise the government and a desire for change. ‎Muqtada al-Sadr, a key Shia cleric has publicly criticized the prime minister and has said that he wanted “new faces” in power. The Sunni rebel groups aren’t looking for a caliphate. They want Iraq, and a new leader in Baghdad.

Diplomatic efforts 

The delay in forming a government has also concerned the international community. Backstage there have been frantic diplomatic efforts to try and push through the stalemate and get Iraqis to begin the political process. Diplomats close to the talks have told me that this has involved meeting with all parties and sending the message that only a political solution will get them out of the crisis.

The UN in Iraq has been particularly vocal, with head of the assistance mission, Nikolay Mladenov, telling me that the politicians need to “undertake all necessary and constitutionally-orientated steps in order to initiate a political process, the only aim should be to restore political and legal order as well as to guarantee security of the Iraqi citizens”.

It would be all too easy to blame the current political stalemate on al-Maliki. The truth is, as it nearly always is, not that simple. The prime minister’s party won the popular vote in the April election. He has support. But Iraqi politics isn’t just about popularity among the electorate, it is also a game of coalition building with other political blocs.

Right now the real reason behind the delay in forming the government isn’t Maliki. It is coalition building and political dealing.

This mix of nationalism, sectarianism, religious rhetoric combined with ‎deal making and self-interest is a powerful force, and not necessarily one that is easy to manage. So while every lawmaker is looking to see what deal can be made, Iraq remains stuck in political first gear with little hope of a quick fix.

Obama: The Novice Against The Chessmaster

Obama’s nuke test
An Iranian bomb threatens the whole world

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Sunday, May 18, 2014, 4:05 AM

The Iranian Chessmaster

 

It is truth and consequences time for President Obama and leaders of five world powers in striking a deal that would definitively end Iran’s march toward nuclear weapons .The President will have to do a whole lot better than he has of late on the international front, most especially in his attempt to talk Syrian dictator Bashar Assad into surrendering his chemical weapons.Obama cut U.S. stature off at the knees last August when he suddenly backed down from missile strikes on Assad’s stockpiles and joined Russia in a tag-team deal with the strongman. While the President has pointed to successes in destroying the Assad arsenal, France and Human Rights Watch now assert that Assad used chlorine gas in attacks against his own people last month. At the same time, there is growing skepticism that Syria will fully surrender its weapons and dismantle its chemical factories.
 

Rather astoundingly, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius expressed regret that Obama failed to unleash the missiles after Assad broke the President’s infamously drawn red line. He said that France had been ready to support such an attack.
 

Here’s hoping that Obama learned tough lessons from his disastrous Syrian misadventure, because the issues at the table in the Iranian negotiations are quite parallel.
 

There, too, against even higher stakes, Obama misguidedly eased off on the weapon at hand — economic sanctions — to bring Iran to talking about reducing (not eliminating) its capacity to rapidly produce weapons-grade uranium along with a missile delivery system.
 

The negotiations, joined by Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia, have now reached the stage of actually putting facts down on paper. In other words, it’s reality time.
 

Unwisely beating back congressional drives to increase sanctions, Obama has vested faith that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani will subscribe to a narrowly limited nuclear program — one that would get close international scrutiny and could not produce weapons without a long build-up.
 

Purportedly to develop nuclear power, Iran is using some 10,000 centrifuges to enrich uranium, has an additional 9,000 ready to go and wants even more. The U.S. wants to trim the number to an overly generous few thousand.
 

Meantime, Iran has several tons of low-enriched uranium at the ready. Again, the country wants more — oh, say 30 tons. Again, the U.S. and negotiating partners want far less.
 

Then there’s the question of Iran’s fortified nuclear facilities, its refusal to cooperate with international inspectors, the critical need for Rouhani to come clean on his country’s development of warheads and a need for the absolute certainty of full, untrammeled scrutiny.
 

A half-measure will not suffice on any of those fronts — and on many more. Based on the attitude of Iran’s real power, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Obama will be lucky to get even that far. Consider these recent words:
 

“They expect us to limit our missile program while they constantly threaten Iran with military action,” Khamenei said. “So this is a stupid, idiotic expectation. The Revolutionary Guards should definitely carry out their program and not be satisfied with the present level. They should mass produce.”
 

Even Rouhani, too often and too easily described as a “moderate,” had this to say on the eve of the talks:
 

“Iran will not retreat one step in the field of nuclear technology. We have nothing to put on the table and offer to them but transparency. That’s it. Our nuclear technology is not up for negotiation.”
Up against hardliners, Obama is once more negotiating from a position of self-imposed weakness. That’s why Israel, Iran’s sure target, is terrified, along with many of the Arab countries. To be sure, the administration has said that no deal is better than a bad deal. But right now, given the President’s track record, a bad deal seems more likely.

Checkmate … there is only one King! (Revelation 19)

Nothing tactical about nuclear weapons
By Zahir Kazmi
Published: May 17, 2014

Tactical Nukes Is A Misnomer

The writer is a visiting faculty member at the School of Politics & International Relations, Quaid-e-Azam University

The term ‘tactical nuclear weapon’ is a Cold War relic not applicable to the subcontinent. There is nothing tactical about these weapons, as their use would have strategic fallouts. Their ideal purpose should be to deter adversaries from contemplating actions that can lead to crises, conflicts and wars. For nuclear-armed states, the key would then be to exercise self-deterrence and avoid triggering conflicts.

A potential nuclear war between India and Pakistan would be a chain of unfortunate events, possibly triggered by another spectacular terrorist attack in India by Pakistan-based quasi-state extremists. India would trade the ‘Gandhian restraint’ for a dance of destruction to punish Pakistan without activating a nuclear response.

In times of defence, Pakistan’s hand would be forced to defeat advancing Indian forces either by conventional forces or by using low-yield nuclear weapons. India threatens a massive retaliation against limited nuclear use, discounting assured Pakistani quid pro quo. There will be no winners in a nuclear war.

Escalating a crisis on the grave assumption that Pakistan would be involved in a future terrorist attack is a commitment trap. The rational choice of investigating such an event with Pakistani help would be an easy option. Fighting terrorism in all its forms is essential. Having a military-to-military joint intelligence sharing mechanism in times of peace would be another ideal worth considering. Pakistan had made such an offer after the Mumbai incident.

Likewise, relying on a massive nuclear retaliation threat in hopes to deter Pakistani response to limited war strategy is a naive assumption at best.

The two risky extremes seem impervious to the certainty that there is no way both sides would be able to guarantee either to dominate or control a crisis from escalating. Pakistan has endured several ‘Mumbais’ and the disadvantages of sponsoring sub-conventional war outweigh any potential dividends. As a responsible nuclear weapons state, Pakistan exercises restraint in dealing with terrorist attacks on its soil even if evidence of Indian linkages exist. Statements by American and Indian officials show Indian involvement.

Indian strategies of Cold Start — fighting under Pakistani nuclear threshold — and massive retaliation strain deterrence stability. Pakistan took appropriate measures to deter India from presenting it a fait accompli at tactical and conventional level of operations.

Islamabad has developed short-range missiles like Hatf-IX (Nasr) for delivering low-yield warheads against advancing forces seeking limited war. The Indian political leadership has to move beyond disowning the doctrine, taking credible and verifiable measures of reversing the Cold Start doctrine.
Massive retaliation is a Samson option of destroying itself and taking with it a billion-plus people in the region. It negates the rationale for producing credible deterrence capability such as nuclear submarine-based delivery systems.

Nuclear weapons should be a source of restraint and responsibility instead of bluster. A strategic restraint regime of three interlocking elements of nuclear restraint, conventional balance and dispute settlement has been on offer to India for a while. Such a regime could be a starting point for regional stability. The deterrence value of nuclear weapons can help both states get out the tactical weed and concentrate on strategic issues.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 17th, 2014.