Dr. Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, discusses the US Congress’s push for war with Iran on the eve of P5+1 talks in Moscow; the Sudanese migrant laborers and political refugees who risk mass-deportation from Israel; and the self defeating US anti-terrorism policy in Africa.
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I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, first up on tonight's show is Stephen Zunis.
He is a foreign policy and focus columnist and senior analyst, professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.
He's the author, along with Jacob Mundy, of Western Sahara, War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution.
Good to talk to you again, Stephen.
Welcome back to the show.
Good to be back.
All right, so a lot on our plate tonight.
Very important news going on.
First and foremost, the collapse of the so-called sorta-kinda Moscow talks between the UN Security Council and Iran this week.
And as you point out in your recent article at Foreign Policy and Focus, Congress made sure that their loud and nasty voice was heard just on the eve of these talks, and in a pretty rough way.
Do you think that had much to do with the results of the Moscow talks, or were these things new from the start, or what?
It's hard to say.
I mean, certainly the congressional resolution didn't help.
It seemed to make Obama appear as weak, because the resolution explicitly ruled out containment as an option in terms of dealing with Iran and any potential aggression on their part.
But not only that, they lowered the threshold, which Obama's long-standing threshold had been that the U.S. would not consider military action until Iran actually had nuclear weapons, or in the verge of having nuclear weapons.
But now they're saying that just simply having the capability of producing nuclear weapons, not even a nuclear weapons program or anything like that, would be grounds for military action.
And the fact that this resolution passed with only a couple dozen dissenting votes, I mean, it was overwhelming bipartisan support, basically gave the message that Obama was a weak leader, and that no matter what compromises Iran might be willing to make, there would be this strong voice on Capitol Hill pushing for a military confrontation.
Well, you know, I was talking to Reza Marashi from the National Iranian American Council, and he seems hopeful that, I guess, at the mid-level, some State Department weenie and some Iranian equivalent can work something out and make some breakthrough that they'll be able to take back to the bosses.
But it seems pretty obvious, right, that the basis for the agreement is right there.
They just have to agree to accept the so-called additional protocol, expand the amount of inspections, verifying what everybody already knows that they're not making nukes, and we'll lift the sanctions and stop threatening to bomb them.
They just have to keep their civilian nuclear program very, very above board, so that people in Tel Aviv and D.C. don't have to be nervous about it.
And then the rest is just details, right?
Why is it so difficult for them to just work it out?
Well, it seems that something like this could conceivably work.
But there are several things working against them.
One, of course, is the pressure, like I mentioned, from Congress on President Obama, the fact that there are similar hard-line elements on the Iranian side, which find this kind of confrontation with the West advantageous in terms of stirring up national sentiments, the Iranian regime has lost so much legitimacy at home because of their domestic policies.
They have been able to take advantage of the widespread resentment at the double standards and the other pressure from the West regarding their nuclear program.
And the additional protocols that have been pushed on Iran, while legally within the purview of the International Atomic Energy Agency to enforce, do seem to underscore the blatant double standards around the Western tolerance and even support for already existing nuclear weapons programs and nuclear weapons stockpiles by some of Iran's neighbors like Israel, Pakistan, and India, while insisting they can't engage in nuclear reprocessing of any kind.
And I think it's this kind of, I mean, just like in Vietnam, we tend to underestimate the nationalist side of the resistance against the United States and the Saigon regime because we focus only on the communist orientation of its leadership.
In a similar way, I think we're making the same mistake with Iran by focusing exclusively on the Islamist nature of the leadership, but forgetting how they have been able to take advantage of the enormously strong nationalist sentiments of a very proud people who don't like being singled out the way that Iran is being singled out.
Yeah, it's such a ridiculous thing.
I wonder if anybody really means it other than, I don't know, Bill Kristol seems honest when he says he thinks that if we were to start bombing them and try to force a regime change there, that the people would rise up and take our side and seeing it as their chance to overthrow the evil ayatollahs.
But boy, that sure doesn't, I don't think, seem likely to anybody else.
What's striking is that if you look at the leaders of the Green Revolution of 2009, they're siding with the government on the nuclear question.
And on the existence of the ayatollah, right?
They weren't trying to overthrow the entire system of government, they just didn't like Ahmadinejad, they wanted this other guy.
Yeah, and some of them also wanted more substantive changes, but within the context largely of the Islamic Republic, I mean, there's debate about how far can it reform and et cetera, et cetera.
But the fact is that despite the charges of the Iranian leadership and despite the hopes of some American foreign policy makers, the opposition there was not a pro-American, pro-Western movement.
It was a pro-democracy movement within an Iranian and largely Islamist force that does not want to be anybody's puppet.
Well, and of course, even mistakenly, if the Americans wanted the Greens to do better, the last thing they want to do is to take their side.
They're just handing ammunition to the ayatollahs to say that all of their opposition is really just the CIA and the NED coming in and manipulating their dissidents, and that's the surest way to make them seem illegitimate.
Exactly, and when Congress and the Bush administration pushed through that program that thankfully Obama ended of giving money to opposition groups, virtually all the legitimate opposition groups said, no way, again, this plays right into the regime's hands.
Are you kidding us?
Yeah, I mean, you look at how Ahmadinejad even got elected in the first place.
George Bush in 2005 said, the people of Iran better be warned that you better not vote for the right winger, and so the next day they all did, made sure to vote for exactly who Bush said to not support.
Exactly.
That's a sad thing.
All right, now tell me quickly this terrible news about Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud government, which is the super majority in the Knesset-backed now government of Israel, and this mass deportation of Sudanese refugees.
Yes, I mean, the interesting thing about Israel is that since the first intifada back in the late 1980s, the country which had been relying on Palestinians for cheap labor then shut off the Palestinians and then brought in people from poor countries around the world, including Africa, and you also, of course, had an inflow of political refugees as well as those seeking economic opportunities.
But, you know, the kind of racism that has been growing in Israeli society to rationalize for their occupation and colonization and oppression of Palestinians, not surprisingly is extended to black Africans, and there has been this really ugly, xenophobic, and overtly racist movement centered in a number of parties that are within Netanyahu's coalition government, and apparently they have indeed gotten the votes, the political support, to engage in this mass expulsion, a number of whom, if they do end up back in Sudan, as it looks like they may, would be subjected to some very serious persecution by that country's repressive regime.
So, they got in there because they were allowed in as cheap labor?
Or they were just refugees and somehow, I'm thinking of like the Cuba policy where if a refugee from Cuba gets his foot on a beach in Miami, he's safe kind of thing?
It was a mix.
A lot of them had connections already because of economic migrants and some political migrants joined their families and the like.
But, you know, I guess it is kind of ironic when you think about that that a country that's rich enough to have these hundreds of thousands of poor people from around the world working as these guest laborers, that country with one thousandth of the world's population gets far more foreign aid than all of sub-Saharan Africa combined, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.
But that's another story.
Well, you know, they better be thanking their lucky stars.
We've been ignoring them as much as we have.
As bad as things are down there.
And this is my next question for you here real quick.
If you could tell us a bit about what's going on in Mali.
I saw, I've sort of been out of the loop here, but I saw a couple of headlines anyway about how the United Nations and or America, NATO, whatever, just might have to intervene in Mali because lo and behold, waging a NATO war to topple Muammar Gaddafi in Libya has consequences.
And part of the consequences are the renewed troubles there in Mali, which apparently could at least serve as an excuse for further intervention there.
I guess that's not sub-Saharan Africa, but close enough.
Ironic, isn't it, that the U.S.
-led war led to the tribesmen being able to get all those extra arms, which they gave to their feral tribesmen in Mali, which started this uprising when elements of the Malian army didn't think they were getting adequate support from the civilian government.
A U.S.
-trained officer staged a coup, which then further emboldened the separatists, some of whom were allied with a hardline Islamist, which now the West is thinking of as an excuse perhaps for further intervention.
And indeed, this is part of this broader militarization of Africa we've seen, where we have been training these military officers in supposedly counter-terrorism.
We may start seeing a pattern we saw in Latin America, when we trained these anti-communist military officers who would then stage military coups, which would then provoke the very kind of communist uprisings we were trying to prevent.
It looks like we may be seeing the same pattern in Africa, only with Islamists.
Well, and we just talked with Michael Clare on the other radio show today, about how it's all just a pretext for the strategic control of the oil, just in case of a conflict with China at some point in the future, we can choke them off.
That's all.
And of course, West Africa is becoming the world's biggest supplier of new oil finds, and of course the U.S. wants to get into the action.
And of course, as Michael Clare points out, if you look at the pattern of U.S. military assistance and military presence and training, it very much follows the oil.
And it really is as simple as that, right?
If we just go back to the defense planning guidance from 1991, that leaked after the Gulf War, that this is their plan for America to be the hyper-power, unquestioned ruler of Earth, with no near-peer competitor can ever be allowed to even think about rising.
Full spectrum dominance, they call it.
Well, until America falls apart, which is coming soon enough.
Which this very policy is accelerating.
Right, yes, of course.
Great fun.
Thanks again very much for coming on the show, Stephen.
It's always great to talk to you.
I really appreciate your time.
My pleasure.
All right, Stephen Zunis, everybody, from Foreign Policy in Focus.
