The deceit of talks with US

By Sepideh Hashemi and Ghazaal Hoseinkhani

Tehran (ISNA) – US officials and President 

Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike 

Pompeo at the 

head of them claim they are ready for talks 

with Iran, repeating the assertions every day 

in their rhetoric. 

But the remarks are accompanied by 

intimidation, military threat and increasing 

political and economic sanctions, which 

make their claims seem false and meaningless.

In his Wednesday statement, Iran’s Supreme Leader started with refusing assertion by US officials to negotiate with Tehran: US’ proposal to hold talks is a deceit. When the enemy couldn’t reach its purpose by pressure, it proposes negotiation presuming Iran’s nation naive.

The leader said the negotiation bid pursues disarmament and elimination of Iranian nation’s strength.

In this regard, other Iranian officials also insisted that US’ negotiation bid is only real when not accompanied by threats, otherwise it’s just bullying.

President Hassan Rouhani said, “Americans has proved that their claim to hold talks with Iran is just groundless, false and vain. While Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe was holding talks in Tehran, US imposed a new sanction, which was the best way to show that he is a liar who is playing game”.

Foreign Ministry spokesman, Seyyed Abbas Mousavi pointed to American officials’ inconsistent statements, saying, “Such paradox in remarks by American officials over Iran shows their political confusion, lack of policy and uncertainty”.

“We don’t consider such rhetoric and the only important thing for Iran is practical measure and a change in US’ political approach towards Iran,” he added, calling US officials’ claims deceptive and unreal which are aimed at attracting public opinion.

Iran ambassador to United Nations, Majid Takht-Ravanchi noted, “How can we negotiate with a government that puts people under pressure? They imposed new sanctions just recently. How can we hold talks with somebody who threatens Iran?”

“The current situation is not prepared for talks. You can't sit on negotiation table under the shadow of threats. That was US that began tensions against Iran,” he added.

Advisor to President Rouhani, Hessamoddin Ashena stressed that US’ readiness for holding talks without precondition is not acceptable, as sanctions and threats continue.

Iran ambassador to UK, Hamid Baeidinejad said, “Washington can’t force Iran for negotiation by putting pressure”.

Spokesman of the Guardian Council, Abbasali Kadkhodaei said, “As the Supreme Leader said, negotiation with US’ untrustworthy administration is a lethal poison”.

Spokesperson of the parliament's commission on national security and foreign policy, Seyed Hossein Naghavi Hosseini said, “US’ new sanctions on Iranian top officials show that Washington’s administration is unreliable and unnegotiable and we can’t hold talks under current situation”.

Iran’s ambassador to Japan, Morteza Rahmani Movahed said, “US left the JCPOA negotiation table and its claim to hold talks with no precondition is a deceit. If US is honest, it should return to the JCPOA and lift sanctions”. 

Former member of Parliament’s national security and foreign policy commission, Abbas Ali Mansouri Arani said, “Under a situation that Trump imposes sanctions on one hand and talks about negotiations on the other hand, undoubtedly, the talks are doomed to failure and we shouldn’t accept the bid”.

Iran newspaper’s political analyst, Abbas Abdi said, “Negotiation under current situation is meaningless. There is no prospect for achieving an agreement. Any negotiation under current situation means accepting bullying and irrational claims of the other side and will have no achievement”.

Representative of Golpayegan and Khvansar district in Iran’s Parliament, Ali Bakhtiar said, “All the Iranian officials believe that we can’t negotiate with Washington under current situation would be to the detriment of the Islamic Republic”.

Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi said, “The first condition of negotiation is mutual trust. You can’t negotiate with Washington which is untrustworthy and doesn’t adhere to the principals and agreements”.

In media's looking glass, US doesn't threaten Iran but merely responds to Iranian threats

Dr. Greg Shupak

The media- especially those dubbed as "Mainstream Media"- are indeed the quislings of the US, fabricated Zionist regime of Israel and a few European and Arab regimes.

They totally change realities to adapt with the policies of the bullies in Washington, Tel Aviv, London and the like. Dr. Greg Shupak is an author and activist who teaches Media Studies at the university of Guelph in Canada. His piece entitled, "In media's looking glass, US doesn’t threaten Iran but merely responds to Iranian threats" has given a few examples of such behavior by these media sell-outs.

US leaders have been threatening Iran for years, but US corporate media persistently and wrongly paint US escalations against Iran as defensive countermeasures.

George W. Bush said in 2008 that “all options are on the table” in terms of the policies the US will consider toward Iran, which was a way of saying that the US might militarily attack Iran—even a nuclear first strike would fit under “all.” (Oddly, when officials talk about “all options,” options that involve killing people seem to be the only kind they have in mind.)

President Barack Obama repeatedly made the same threat, vowing “we will do anything” to stop an Iranian nuclear weapons program that US intelligence agencies have long said Iran doesn’t have. Signing a nuclear accord with Iran did not end his administration’s belligerence, as Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, repeated the threat: “The president, this president or the next president, will have all options on the table, including military ones.”

John Bolton openly urged a military attack on Iran (calling for “a thorough job of destruction”, and President Donald Trump went on to appoint him national security advisor. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that, you guessed it, “all options” are on the table against Iran, including military ones. Recently Trump refused to rule out a war against Iran (“I don’t want to say no, but hopefully that won’t happen”).

Surrounding a country with military forces is also a threat. Major US military bases have encircled Iran. The US has ships, jets, drones and tens of thousands of soldiers on Iran’s doorstep—surely US media would see it as threatening if Iran deployed comparable forces to Canada, Cuba and the Gulf of Mexico. Further, the US has openly talked about drawing up plans to invade Iran.

The US has gone beyond making threats to actually carrying out attacks against the country. Sponsoring Iraq’s 1980 invasion of Iran and helping Iraqi dictator Saddam use sarin and mustard gas in that war, as the US did, is one example. Throttling Iran socio-economically, as the US is currently doing, is another. Nevertheless, US media have persisted in ignoring this long record of US threats and hostile actions against Iran, casting Tehran as the aggressor in its conflict with the US.

The Hill published an article under the headline, “B-52s Conduct First Mission of Counter-Iran Deployment.” The sources for the notion that Iran is doing something that the US needs to “counter” are such impartial observers as a statement released by the US Air Force Central Command (AFCENT) and comments from an AFCENT spokesperson. The article moved on to treat those claims as if they merited no skepticism, branding the US’s intimidation from the sky a “response:”:

The B-52s were deployed to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar last week as part of the US response to what the Trump administration described as “troubling and escalatory indications and warnings” for Iran.

From uncritically repeating the administration’s interpretation of Iranian conduct, The Hill went on to absorb that worldview, describing the US sending offensive weaponry to the Persian Gulf as a “response” to some unspecified Iranian action: “As part of the Iran response, the Trump administration also sent the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group to the region.”

A Foreign Policy headline said “US Sends More Firepower to Counter Iran.” Apart from the unimpeachable word of the Pentagon, the sole proof offered for the claim that Iran is taking actions in need of “countering” is that Tehran issued an explicit threat to the Abraham Lincoln, which transited through the Suez Canal. In the past, a US aircraft carrier would be a threat; now, it is a “target,” said Amirali Hajizadeh, head of the IRGC’s air force.

However, the “explicit threat” can be read very differently from the way Foreign Policy suggests. Here are Hajizadeh’s remarks, quoted in Al-Jazeera, via the hyperlink in the Foreign Policy article:

“An aircraft carrier that has at least 40 to 50 planes on it and 6,000 forces gathered within it was a serious threat for us in the past. But now it is a target and the threats have switched to opportunities,” said Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Revolutionary Guard’s air force. If the Americans make a move, we will hit them in the head,”, according to the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA).

Foreign Policy’s article is written as though the second half of Hajizadeh’s statement—saying that Iran will defend itself if attacked by the large military force assembled on its borders—didn’t exist. It’s extremely misleading to call the statement as a whole an “explicit threat.”

ABC used the headline “1,500 More Troops and Defensive Capabilities Headed to Middle East to Deter Iran.” How the US sending soldiers to the doorstep of a country that has not attacked it is “defensive,” or the evidence of the need to “deter” Iran, goes unexplained, an egregious omission when one considers that there is every reason to doubt US claims that Iran is about to attack the US.

A CNBC headline told readers that the “Pentagon Will Send 1,500 Troops, along with Drones and Fighter Jets, to the region to Counter Iran Threat.” CNBC presents US officials’ justifications for their military maneuvers as though they were facts:

Currently, the USS Arlington, USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group, a Patriot missile battery and a US Air Force bomber task force have been sent to the region in order to deter Iranian and proxy threats.

Rather than being the debatable claims of US officials, these “Iranian and proxy threats” are presented as flat descriptions of reality. The article functions as a sort of information-laundering service, turning state talking points into neutral pieces of data:

The movement of additional US forces to West Asia is the Trump regime’s latest effort to pressure Tehran over its support for weapons proliferation and freedom-seeking groups in the region.

What’s most remarkable about this piece is that its next two paragraphs describe US maneuvers that not only constitute a threat against Iran, but actual aggressive actions the US has taken against the country:

Earlier this month, Trump ordered new sanctions placed on Iranian metals, Tehran’s largest non-petroleum-related source of export revenue. The US also took aim at Iranian oil by effectively ordering countries worldwide to stop buying Tehran’s oil or face sanctions of their own.

Additionally, the US designated Islamic Revolution Guard Corps as a terrorist group. Iran responded with designating American forces in the region as terrorists and threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, where about a third of the world’s oil export vessels pass. The US then announced it was expediting the deployment of a carrier strike group equipped with bomber aircraft to the region.

The article says that the US is “countering” the Iran “threat,” but offers no concrete evidence of such a threat. Meanwhile, specific hostile actions the US has taken against the country, including menacing troop movements and US government attempts to subvert the Iranian economy, are not depicted as a US threat against Iran.

Both the ABC and CNBC articles note that Vice Adm. Michael Gilday, the director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, blamed Iran for attacks on Arabia’s oil infrastructure and for a rocket that landed near the US embassy in Baghdad. Neither piece notes that US officials have said they have no evidence that Iran was behind either drone attacks on the pumping stations or the sabotage of four oil tankers, two of which were Saudi, in the Persian Gulf. Nor did either report inform their readers that the US produced no evidence that Iran was responsible for the rocket in Iraq. (Yemeni Ansarullah combatants, falsely depicted as pawns of Tehran, said they carried out attacks of Saudi oil pumping stations in retaliation for the Saudi/US/UAE/UK/Canadian invasion and immiseration of Yemen.)

Iran is a threat to US interests in the sense that Iran is a barrier to full-spectrum US domination of West Asia. But there’s no evidence Iran will attack the US, which is how the word “threat” will generally be interpreted by consumers of news media. The media’s false implication that Iran is a danger to the US population makes US escalations against the country appear necessary and justified, and reduces the likelihood that a sufficient number of US citizens will mobilize to stop the potential and actual harm being inflicted in their name.

Intelligence and Trump’s war against truth

The Trump administration’s tendency to disregard conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community has become, as the Washington Post’s Greg Miller has reported, a habit.

Paul R. Pillar is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University and an Associate Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy. He is a Vietnam War veteran and a retired officer in the U.S. Army Reserve. Pillar has written an article on the issue under the heading of “Intelligence and Trump’s war against truth.”

Initially, Trump’s shoving aside of the intelligence agencies’ assessments was all about his refusal to acknowledge the role that Russia played in his election victory in 2016. During the subsequent two years, the administration’s rejection of those agencies’ analysis has extended to a variety of important topics, from North Korea and Iran to migrant caravans and murder in Istanbul.

Miller quotes comments of an anonymous U.S. intelligence official about how “there is extraordinary frustration” over how the “time, energy, and resources” devoted to providing accurate intelligence to Trump seems to be all “a waste.” What is proper or improper in policy-intelligence relations is more complicated, however, than simply noting how much the current president either heeds or blows off what intelligence officers tell him.

There is no need to feel sorry for intelligence officers more than other public servants, notwithstanding the aforementioned frustration. In some respects, the intelligence agencies are more insulated from Trump’s excesses than are many other federal departments and agencies. The intelligence agencies’ mission involves providing the best possible information and analysis to inform policy decisions; it does not extend to the policy decisions themselves.

The job of intelligence includes leading the policy horse to water and advising whether the water is safe to drink; the job does not include getting the horse to drink it. This principle is not always observed in public perceptions of how well intelligence has done its job, but that’s a problem with the public perceptions, not with the administration of the day.

We should feel sorrier for public servants in those parts of the federal government—such as the Environmental Protection Agency or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—whose core missions the Trump administration is negating and are led by people appointed to impede those missions. In such places the government-wide drop in morale under Trump has understandably been especially steep.

For any of several legitimate reasons, foreign and security policy might not take the direction that an intelligence assessment seems to imply. Important foreign policy issues commonly involve multiple U.S. interests and objectives. An assessment on any one question does not speak to all those interests and objectives. Policy-makers must choose among competing national priorities and consider where to pay costs and to assume risks. Intelligence cannot make those priority-setting decisions. Makers of foreign policy also must consider resource constraints and domestic support, and not only the situation overseas that the intelligence agencies describe.

A policy-maker going against what appears to be the implied direction of intelligence assessments should be honest about the reasons for doing so and should respect the legitimacy of the intelligence agencies’ assessments even if they do not ultimately guide the policy. As Miller observes, Trump doesn’t do that. Instead, he attacks the accuracy of the information those agencies provide. This type of reaction is not unprecedented. It prevailed during the George W. Bush administration’s selling of the invasion of Iraq, when that administration denigrated the intelligence agencies’ (accurate) assessment that the Iraqi regime had nothing to do with the operations of al-Qaeda and promoted an alternative (false) notion of an “alliance” between the regime and the terrorist group.

Another unfortunate tactic much in evidence under Trump is to demand an extreme and probably unattainable level of “proof” before accepting a reality. The administration has used this tactic in refusing to acknowledge the role of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo talk about the absence of a “smoking gun” or “direct evidence” implicating the crown prince. Such a tactic, if applied to foreign policy generally, would be a recipe for paralysis, because most situations to which foreign policy must respond do not offer smoking-gun type evidence but are no less a reality because of that.

Again, there is precedent in the Bush administration’s selling of the Iraq War, when policy-makers disregarded probabilities to promote their preferred notions, although in that case the promoted notions more often were that something did occur rather than that it didn’t. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld preached that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” and Vice President Richard Cheney propounded the “one percent doctrine,” under which we were supposed to treat as a certainty something that was highly unlikely.

Trump’s rejection of reality is nonetheless unprecedented in a couple of respects. One is the sheer scope and magnitude of the lying, with tallies of presidential falsehoods having gone off the charts. Another is Trump’s persistent repetition of lies even after their falsity has been conclusively and publicly demonstrated. Already overworked fact-checkers in the media have had to develop new scoring systems to track this Trumpian habit. The habit resembles nothing in previous American history as much as it resembles the Big Lie technique that totalitarian regimes have perfected. In Trump’s case the idea evidently is that if he repeats a falsehood often enough and long enough, it will replace reality at least in the minds of his cherished political base.
Intelligence agencies are seemingly in the truth business, and so it is natural to think of them when contemplating Trump’s war against truth. But the agencies are not central to what is at stake in most of this war. We don’t need intelligence agencies to know how much of this presidency is based on falsehoods, even in foreign affairs. For example, acknowledging the Saudi crown prince’s role in the Khashoggi murder depends less on some juicy bit of reporting from an intelligence agency than on an understanding of how the current Saudi regime operates.

Americans certainly should be attuned to misrepresentations of reality that involve misuse of intelligence. Such abuse is most likely to involve cherry-picking, in which a few bits of intelligence reporting are publicly highlighted to make a case while disregarding other information that fully and more accurately portrays reality. Such cherry-picking in the selling of the Iraq War is echoed in much of the Trump administration’s promotion of hostility toward Iran. For example, Pompeo’s most recent statement about Iranian defensive missiles was a highly selective treatment that left unsaid anything about other missile activity in the region, the threats and aggression to which Iran is responding, and who is and is not respecting obligations in multilateral agreements and United Nations Security Council resolutions.

Yes, it would be better if Trump heeded the intelligence agencies’ assessments more than he does. But defending American democracy in the face of Trump’s war against truth and trying to prevent more such damage to that democracy in the future go beyond the role of those agencies. The defense includes somehow instilling in the general population not only the ability but also the duty to distinguish between truth and lies.

Sanctions War

Editor

The US is the only country in the world that uses sanctions as a weapon of war. Islamic Iran has been subjected to a new round of sanctions — completely illegal — to force it to comply with Washington’s ludicrous demands. They went into force on November 5 (meant to coincide with the “hostage crisis” that started on Nov. 4, 1979) with the avowed aim of shutting off Iran’s oil exports. The punitive measures also targeted 700 individuals, banks, aircraft, ships, and companies tied to Iran’s energy and financial industries.

If it is any consolation to the Islamic Republic, it is not alone in being subjected to sanctions. Russia, China, Turkey, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea also face America’s wrath. In the past, Iraq and Pakistan were also sanctioned because the Washington warlords did not like their policies. Between 1991 and 1996, more than 586,000 Iraqi children were killed as a result of US sanctions, a horror described by then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as a price “worth it” to remove Saddam Husayn from power (he was removed from power not through sanctions but by US bombs).

Returning to the latest round of illegal sanctions against Iran, the US no longer has the clout or the power to enforce them as it used to. Even America’s European allies are appalled at the cavalier attitude of Donald Trump. Iran is in strict compliance of the 2015 JCPOA agreement — a fact repeatedly certified by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Even Trump does not dispute that; what he is demanding is that Iran must abandon its defensive missile program and end all policies that advance its strategic interests. In other words, Trump demands Iran’s surrender, something the moron-in-chief is not going to achieve in his lifetime.

While Trump continued with his characteristic bombast through tweets, the climb down was left for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to announce. Ten countries in all were exempted from sanctions, including Turkey, Iraq, India, China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Russia, Italy, and Greece. Three countries — India, China, Japan — account for some 80% of Iran’s oil, so the latest round of sanctions are practically meaningless as far as Iran is concerned.

Some countries had already announced that they would not abide by the illegal US sanctions. These included Turkey, Iraq, China, and Russia. Members of the European Union (EU) said they would establish a separate payment mechanism to bypass trading in US dollars. Russia has created a new payment system that bypasses SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), the Belgium-based mechanism that simply transmits information about transactions.

Russia’s alternative to SWIFT — SPFS — is drawing considerable interest, especially from the Europeans, who are fed up of Trump’s disruptive behavior, as well as China and Turkey. And then there are barter arrangements being worked out whereby countries trade in their own currencies. Turkey, Iran, Russia, and China have all entered into such arrangements. India, too, despite playing both sides of the fence, is looking into it.

Thus, realistically, while Iran may face some difficulties in the near term, it is the US under Trump that has been left largely isolated. He only has himself to blame. Washington’s demands were always illegal but Trump’s latest moves have shown how obnoxious he can be. His behavior has turned off even his closest allies. He is too toxic to touch. Similarly, the two pariah regimes, Zionist Israel and Wahhabi Arabia that have pushed this policy, also stand exposed.

Saudi Savages

Listening to music while chopping up Khashoggi — alive!

By Yusuf Dhia-Allah

The Saudi consulate in Istanbul doubled as slaughterhouse, at least on October 2. The butchers from Riyadh had come with a bone-cutting saw. They had an important mission to accomplish: grab Jamal Khashoggi and cut him into pieces. Audio recordings of the macabre ritual on the study table of the Saudi Consul General leaked to the Turkish media reveal that Khashoggi was chopped up while he was still alive.

The lead chopper — Salah Muhammad al-Tubayqi — was part of the 15-member squad (their names and photos were published in the Turkish daily, Sabah) that had arrived earlier in the day at the consulate. Identified as a 20-year veteran and head of forensic evidence in the Saudi general security department, al-Tubayqi put on earphones and listened to music as he dismembered Khashoggi with a bone saw. He advised other members of the squad to do the same in order to drown out Khashoggi’s screams. Was he listening to Beethoven as he went about his macabre ritual?

“When I do this job, I listen to music. You should do [that] too,” al-Tubayqi was recorded as saying, according to the Middle East Eye quoting a Turkish source (October 17). First, Khashoggi’s fingers were chopped. Obviously they had to go first because he used them to type “nasty” reports published in the Washington Post. Next, his arms were sawed off. Turkish media reports say that people downstairs in the consulate could hear Khashoggi’s screams. The consul general Muhammad al-‘Utaybi, perhaps a little faint-hearted, was also told to leave his office!

Barbarism is in Najdi Bedouins’ DNA. It has also been reported that after completing the chopping task that took 11 minutes from which Khashoggi took seven minutes to die, all 15 members went to the consul general’s house for dinner. That they could enjoy dinner after indulging in such a gruesome act speaks volumes about their demonic nature. Perhaps, people would now get a better sense of the Saudi mentality.

Let us get some basic facts straight: Khashoggi was no revolutionary or champion of freedom of speech or even basic freedoms. For decades he served the Saudi royals faithfully acting as advisor to Turki bin Faysal, the Kingdom’s long-time intelligence chief. He also headed many media outlets, acting as apologist for the regime. Khashoggi had also denounced Shaykh Nimr al-Nimr as an “outlaw” and applauded his beheading in January 2016.

Such sycophancy, however, did not guarantee his safety. With thousands of academics and religious scholars imprisoned by the impetuous crown prince Muhammad bin Salman (MbS), Khashoggi fled the country settling in the US.

The Washington Post, which is basically a deep-state/CIA front organization, provided him space for a regular column. He started to express mild criticism of Bin Salman’s policies but this was quite tepid and not meant to rock the Saudi boat. Even this, however, was not acceptable to the crown prince.

There were probably other reasons as well but first let us be clear that Bani Saud deserve no sympathy. Those responsible for the ghastly murder should be held accountable. The Saudi admission on October 19 that Khashoggi was murdered in the consulate after a fistfight broke out is a crude attempt to deflect responsibility from Bin Salman. It was Donald Trump who first floated the theory of “rogue killers” being responsible. Soon thereafter, he dispatched Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Riyadh and Turkey (October 16-17) for private consultations and issue instructions on how to sweep the matter under the rug (damage control).

An artist’s rendering of what a Saudi apology — not to Khashoggi’s family, the field of journalism, or the world, but to the US and Israel — means in real-world terms. The White House’s tepid response to the whole incident suggests that it was a setup for a trillion dollar shakedown in order to bolster the US economy and thereby improve President Trump’s chances for re-election in 2020. Should the clown prince accept culpability, hush money will have to be paid (mostly to Washington); should he deny responsibility and refuse to pay up, then the message has been sent: you are on a fault line that we control, and we will replace you with a more pliable prince who accedes to our security guarantees and any strings that come attached. This scenario seems to concur with the news leaked by the Turkish ambassador to Lebanon about the CIA setting up the assassination and dismemberment of Khashoggi.

The Saudis announced that 18 people had been arrested and were being investigated. Ahmad ‘Asiri, deputy head of intelligence, and Sa‘ud al Qahtani, a senior guard in Bin Salman’s security detail, were dismissed from their posts. Saudi media also reported on October 20 that an investigation had been launched.

Appearing on Fox News (October 21) Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said Khashoggi’s killing was a “terrible mistake” and the people arrested had been involved in a “cover-up,” hence the earlier Saudi denials about the journalist’s death. Much of the world (except the White House) as well as human rights organizations dismissed Saudi explanations as an attempted “whitewash.”

Both Turkey and the US — the latter eagerly protecting the Najdi Bedouins — are exploiting this to further their own interests. This is shocking even by their own low standards. Trump does not want to jeopardize the $110 billion Saudi arms deal; he wants — and will get — billions more from the Saudis for giving MbS, now dubbed “Mr. Bone Saw,” a clean bill of health.

Turkey is demanding billions in Saudi investment and recognition as leader of the Muslim world. Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan’s pledge on October 20 to reveal the “naked truth” about the murder on October 22 turned out to be a rehash of stuff already known. Did he back down from revealing more details under pressure from the US?

There is also speculation that the Saudis may have increased the bribe amount; nonetheless he appears dissatisfied with the reported $5 billion offered so far. He wants many more billions before he would destroy the audio and videotapes to exonerate Bin Salman of Khashoggi’s murder.

On October 21, the Turkish daily Yeni Safak reported that Bin Salman had spoken to Khashoggi minutes before the latter was killed at the consulate. Mahir ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Mutrib’s cell phone was used. Mutrib is a member of Saudi intelligence and is close to Bin Salman. There was also a Skype conversation between Sa‘ud al-Qahtani (another Bin Salman guard) and Khashoggi at which the former told the journalist to return to the Kingdom. When Khashoggi refused, al-Qahtani ordered the team to bring the “head of this dog to Riyadh.” This seems to have been obeyed and Mutrib is believed to have taken Khashoggi’s body parts in his luggage back to Riyadh (he did not go through security screening because he carries a diplomatic passport).

There has, however, been major fallout from the ghastly murder. Saudi stocks plunged 7% losing some $50 billion on October 14. Leading Western investors and executives pulled out of the “Davos in the Desert” conference (October 23–25) in Riyadh. It would have been too much even for the Western bloodsuckers to be shaking hands with MbS while Khashoggi’s blood was still dripping from his hands.

Any speculation that this would lead to Bin Salman’s removal from power is premature. He is too closely tied to Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. The hope is that the hoopla over the Khashoggi murder would soon subside. It should have by now, but for the relentless campaign by the Washington Post and the CIA that want to squeeze a lot more money from the Saudis.

What the Khashoggi saga has resulted in is that Bin Salman has been greatly weakened although it would be unrealistic to expect that he would be forced to resign or that there will be major changes in Saudi policy. No more should be expected than for Bin Salman to maintain a low profile for a while until the issue blows away. Such are the ways of modern diplomacy and politics.

MBS’s rampaging anger will not silence questions about Jamal Khashoggi

Inside his royal palace in Riyadh, Mohammed bin Salman is said to have alternated between dark brooding and rampaging anger in the days after the death of Jamal Khashoggi, as Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, or MBS, as he is widely known, looked for someone to blame for what Turkish officials have said was the journalist’s grisly murder.

One possible scapegoat, according to several sources, may be Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, the deputy chief of Saudi intelligence. Assiri “has made numerous approaches to MBS on taking actions against Khashoggi and others,” said one source who is familiar with Western intelligence reports.

The U.S. government learned last month that Assiri was planning to create a “tiger team” to conduct covert special operations, I’m told, though officials didn’t know the targets. U.S. intelligence also learned, but only after Khashoggi’s disappearance after entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, that the crown prince had told his subordinates this summer that he wanted Khashoggi and other Saudi dissidents brought home.

The swirling reports and recriminations surfaced as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited the kingdom on Tuesday and urged King Salman and his son to conduct a “transparent” investigation of the disappearance of Khashoggi, a Post contributing columnist. But such efforts to seek a tidy solution will face rising skepticism in Congress, epitomized by the blast on Tuesday from Sen.?Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) that “he [MBS] had this guy murdered.”

Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, urged MBS last weekend to organize an investigation that could identify the culprit responsible for Khashoggi’s death, two sources told me. The next day, after speaking with the Saudi king, the president said he thought “rogue killers” within Saudi Arabia’s government may have been responsible, seemingly telegraphing a fall-guy strategy.

The emerging Saudi narrative appears to be that the palace authorized Khashoggi’s arrest and interrogation but not his murder. This version has some obvious holes: If the goal was “rendition” back to Saudi Arabia (as it is politely termed), then why interrogate him in Istanbul? And why did a forensics expert allegedly join the 15-man Saudi team photographed arriving at Istanbul airport? Finally, will such a Saudi account hold up under intense scrutiny by Congress, the media and, perhaps, U.S. courts?

The Khashoggi case isn’t the first time the palace allegedly attempted to kidnap a critic. After one prominent Saudi criticized aspects of the crown prince’s plan to privatize Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company, in a meeting abroad with potential foreign investors, a Saudi plane arrived along with an official who allegedly tried to arrest the man as a terrorist. He escaped and is now living outside the kingdom. But the message was clear: Challenging MBS was risky.

The darkening mood inside MBS’s palace in recent months shows a crown prince facing economic pressure and tightening his circle of advisers.
MBS’s key counselor is said to have been Saud al-Qahtani, the crown prince’s media adviser but also increasingly his consigliere in the kingdom’s battles with foreign adversaries such as Qatar and Iran as well as domestic critics. Like his boss, Qahtani is considered young and headstrong.

Qahtani organized interviews with MBS for visiting foreign journalists. But sources say he was quietly assuming a larger role overseeing strategy in social media, which the Saudis (like the Russians) view as a domain of war. Qahtani’s headquarters was a special “Center for Studies and Media Affairs,” operating inside the royal court without supervision from other ministries. It became, in part, a domestic snooping operation, sources say.

Qahtani is a demon in Saudi Twitter debates, with 1.3 million followers and barbed messages to dissenters. He has created a hashtag with the Arabic term for “Black List,” and he urges Saudis to report enemies of the kingdom. His opponents in Qatar refer to Qahtani’s followers (perhaps including automated bots) as an “Army of Flies.” U.S.?officials believe that, in addition to seeking dominance in social media, Qahtani and other advisers have helped MBS use the latest and most?aggressive hacking techniques against adversaries.

MBS’s tight inner circle has helped him push modernization efforts, such as reducing the power of the religious police, allowing women to drive and opening movie theaters and other public entertainment. But his team of palace advisers has often amplified, rather than challenged, the crown prince’s worst impulses.

This breakdown was evident immediately after Khashoggi’s disappearance, when official Saudi statements were all happy talk. Behind the scenes, says one knowledgeable source, “MBS went into a funk for several days after learning of Khashoggi’s death before re-emerging on a rampage of anger around what happened and trying to figure out a response.”

Adding to MBS’s anxiety in the weeks before Khashoggi’s disappearance was the erosion of his big plans to boost the Saudi economy. In August, the kingdom delayed indefinitely its push to privatize Saudi Aramco, which MBS had hoped would raise more than $100 billion. That same month, plans for a big investment in the automaker Tesla cratered. An investment deal with the Japanese company Softbank also hit a snag.

Surrounded by yes-men who saw suppressing dissent as part of a media war, and rattled by the reversal of his dreams for economic reform, MBS moved toward the fateful moment when Khashoggi entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. When the brave journalist opened the door, he began a catastrophic process that has now put MBS’s own future in question. Putting a lid on a murder investigation won’t be easy, even for the brashly confident crown prince.

(Source: Washington Post)

Will Next Steps on Iran Point towards a New ‘Big Three’ or World War III?

JAMES GEORGE JATRAS

On July 22 US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a bizarre speech on Iran. Delivered from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, and ostensibly addressed to the Iranian-American community, the speech’s staging clearly sought to evoke the fall of communism, casting the Ayatollahs in the role of Leonid Brezhnev and company.

Iranian “regime change” is not the publicly stated goal of the Trump Administration’s policy. But it is hard to see how US demands on Tehran don’t amount to exactly that, with Pompeo comparing the Iranian “regime” (a term used dozens of times to imply illegitimacy) to a “mafia.” He asserted that Iran’s behavior is “at root in the revolutionary nature of the regime itself.” What can change its “root” or “nature” without ceasing to be itself?

Pompeo demanded not just a total change in policy from Tehran but a different mode of governance amounting to Iran’s ceasing to be an independent regional power. The Reagan venue’s analogy to the collapse of communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe echoed in the Secretary’s heavy emphasis on “a new 24/7 Farsi-language TV channel” spanning “not only television, but radio, digital, and social media format, so that the ordinary Iranians inside of Iran and around the globe can know that America stands with them.”

The US position on Iran is that it is solely a question of removing a layer of malign governance, after which democracy, tolerance, peace, and general niceness will spontaneously break forth, and justice will roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. Just like happened in Iraq after 2003. Just like in Libya.

Never mind that Iran isn’t North America or Europe. Never mind that American and European ideas of social and personal liberty would be anathema to an unknown but significant percentage of Iran’s population. Never mind that the replacement for the Ayatollahs envisioned by many Administration big shots, the cultish People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (Mojahedin-e Khalq, MEK), may not be particularly democratic or popular with Iranians. Don’t bother us with details – the neo-Bolshevik myth of a spontaneous uprising by the oppressed masses (with a little help from outside, like the Kaiser’s generals were kind enough to provide Lenin) is alive and well in Washington.

One is reminded of “true believer” Condoleezza Rice in 2006 denouncing as – you guessed it! – racist any objections to militant democracy promotion in the Middle East, specifically in Iraq:

‘“Well, growing up in the South and having people underestimate you because one of the reasons for segregation, one of the reasons for the separation of the races was supposedly, the inferiority of one race to the other,” she explains. “And so when I look around the world and I hear people say, ‘Well, you know, they're just not ready for democracy,’ it really does resonate. I hear echoes of, well, you know, blacks are kind of childlike. They really can't handle the vote. Or they really can't take care of themselves. It really does roil me. It makes me so angry because I think there are those echoes of what people once thought about black Americans.”’

Pompeo heavily emphasized Iran’s internal problems, such as political repression, corruption, economic distress, many of which are no doubt are quite real. Still, it was hard to listen to the Secretary without mentally comparing how the identical litany of abuses would apply to Washington’s perennial darling of the Islamic world, Saudi Arabia, which in every particular is far, far worse than Iran. But nobody is talking about what amounts to regime change in Riyadh or even any sanctions against them. Accusations of Iranian state support for terrorism would be risible if arming myriad Sunni jihadist groups by the US and our various partners, the Saudis chief among them, were a laughing matter.

Pompeo’s speech triggered a rebuke by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani that “peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, and war with Iran is the mother of all wars” – an unfortunate choice of words given how Saddam Hussein’s “mother of all battles” turned out. Trump immediately shot back with a tweet threatening that Iran could “SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.” Predictably, Trump’s ubiquitous critics focused as much on the all capital letters as on the substance of the exchange.

No one knows where any of this is leading. The memory immediately triggered was that of harsh verbal exchanges between North Korea’s “Little Rocket man” Kim Jong-un and the “mentally deranged US dotard” Trump prior to their love fest in Singapore. Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com was succinct in his optimism: “This means he’ll be scheduling a Rouhani summit in a few months.”

On the other hand, instead of Singapore 2018 we could be seeing a repeat of the lead-up to Iraq 2003. So many of the same people who were beating the drums for the war with Iraq under President George W. Bush are playing the same tune now with respect to Iran. It is significant that whereas with respect to North Korea our foremost regional partner, South Korea, is pushing hardest for a peaceful outcome, Israel and Saudi Arabia, the two foreign states that exercise almost total control over the political class in Washington, are itching for the US to take care of their Iran problem for them. The hare-brained “Arab NATO” idea has been revived.

Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis has denied a report that the US was identifying targets in Iran to be struck as early as next month and disowned regime change. For what it is worth (probably not much) a recent poll shows that Americans are against war with Iran by a better than two-to-one margin. But, as Raimondo observes, “there are plenty of warmongers in Washington who just can’t wait for the shooting to start in the Middle East again, and they have targeted Iran as their next victim. … [S]uch a war would destroy Trump’s presidency precisely because his base would oppose it. And yet, … despite the fact that the President’s advisors are pushing war with Iran, Trump routinely ignores them and does exactly as he pleases: that’s why we had the Singapore summit and the Helsinki meeting with Putin.”

We can hope that Trump will decide on his next steps with regard to Iran based on much broader international considerations that impact his domestic goals. Taken most optimistically, that could mean a concept that some of us have been suggesting for almost two years: a new “Big Three” understanding among Trump, Putin, and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Indeed, Professor Michael T. Klare, writing in TomDispatch.com, claims this is Trump’s conscious intention:

‘An examination of his campaign speeches and his actions since entering the Oval Office -- including his appearance with Putin -- reflect his adherence to a core strategic concept: the urge to establish a tripolar world order, one that was, curiously enough, first envisioned by Russian and Chinese leaders in 1997 and one that they have relentlessly pursued ever since.

‘Such a tripolar order -- in which Russia, China, and the U.S. would each assume responsibility for maintaining stability within their own respective spheres of influence while cooperating to resolve disputes wherever those spheres overlap -- breaks radically with the end-of-the-Cold-War paradigm. During those heady years, the United States was the dominant world power and lorded it over most of the rest of the planet with the aid of its loyal NATO allies.

‘For Russian and Chinese leaders, such a “unipolar” system was considered anathema. After all, it granted the United States a hegemonic role in world affairs while denying them what they considered their rightful place as America’s equals. Not surprisingly, destroying such a system and replacing it with a tripolar one has been their strategic objective since the late 1990s -- and now an American president has zealously embraced that disruptive project as his own. [ . . . ]

‘The big question in all this, of course, is: Why? Why would an American president seek to demolish a global order in which the United States was the dominant player and enjoyed the support of so many loyal and wealthy allies? Why would he want to replace it with one in which it would be but one of three regional heavyweights? [ . . . ]

‘In the Trumpian mindset, this country had become weak and overextended because of its uncritical adherence to the governing precepts of the liberal international order, which called for the U.S. to assume the task of policing the world while granting its allies economic and trade advantages in return for their loyalty. Such an assessment, whether accurate or not, certainly jibes well with the narrative of victimization that so transfixed his core constituency in rustbelt areas of Middle America. It also suggests that an inherited burden could now be discarded, allowing for the emergence of a less-encumbered, stronger America -- much as a stronger Russia has emerged in this century from the wreckage of the Soviet Union and a stronger China from the wreckage of Maoism. This reinvigorated country would still, of course, have to compete with those other two powers, but from a far stronger position, being able to devote all its resources to economic growth and self-protection without the obligation of defending half of the rest of the world.

‘Listen to Trump’s speeches, read through his interviews, and you’ll find just this proposition lurking behind virtually everything he has to say on foreign policy and national security. “You know... there is going to be a point at which we just can’t do this anymore,” he told Haberman and Sanger in 2016, speaking of America’s commitments to allies. “You know, when we did those deals, we were a rich country... We were a rich country with a very strong military and tremendous capability in so many ways. We’re not anymore.”

‘The only acceptable response, he made clear, was to jettison such overseas commitments and focus instead on “restoring” the country’s self-defense capabilities through a massive buildup of its combat forces. (The fact that the United States already possesses far more capable weaponry than any of its rivals and outspends them by a significant margin when it comes to the acquisition of additional munitions doesn’t seem to have any impact on Trump’s calculations.)’

If such is indeed Trump’s calculation, his likelihood of attacking Iran is very low.

Conversely, the forces benefitting from the status quo Trump would dismantle cannot be expected to accept such a future with equanimity: the Pentagon and NATO military establishments, the intelligence community, the hordes of contractors and think tank denizens, and others. Perhaps even worse, Trump’s domestic critics face the terrifying prospect that he could emerge as the greatest peacemaker in modern history, as well as restorer of America’s economic might.

We can thus expect an added zeal born of desperation from former “CIA director John Brennan, FBI director James Comey, Robert Mueller, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and the Democratic National Committee,” who, Paul Craig Roberts aptly says, are “engaged in high treason against the American people and the President of the United States and are actively engaged in a plot to overthrow the President of the United States.” Just in recent weeks the intensity of this campaign prevented Trump from agreeing to anything of substance with Putin in Helsinki, forced him to tap-dance around what he did or didn’t say at the post-summit press conference, and postpone according to Grand Inquisitor Mueller’s convenience a follow-up US-Russia summit (no doubt to the delight of his own appointees no less than to his enemies’).

We can expect that between now the November 2018 Congressional elections Mueller will come out with several indictments against Trump associates with the hope of tipping the House of Representatives to the Democrats. If that happens, despite an anticipated GOP retention of the Senate, Trump will be removed or forced to resign in 2019, with a substantial percentage of Republicans ready to jump at the prospect of putting Mike Pence into the Oval Office, with current UN Ambassador Nikki Haley a virtual shoo-in as Vice President.

Such a development would prompt an anguished but futile outburst from Trump’s base. But with l’ancien régime back in power, the guardians of the neoliberal, unipolar order the interloper had imperiled will move quickly to repudiate any understandings he might have had with Moscow and Beijing. The slide toward a catastrophe of literally unimaginable proportions, which Trump had sought to arrest, will become for all intents and purposes irreversible.

At that point Iran will be the least of our worries.

JAMES GEORGE JATRAS

Analyst, former U.S. diplomat and foreign policy adviser to the Senate