[Peace-discuss] [Peace] Trump torpedoes Iran nuclear accord

Wed May 9 17:33:06 UTC 2018

Sometimes it matters for strategy. One of the causes might be a weaker link
in the chain than one of the other causes.

Israel is causing Trump's policy and Saudi Arabia is causing Trump's
policy. Israel is way more popular in DC and in the US generally than Saudi
Arabia is, to say the least. I think that's a key reason that Trump and
Bibi are emphasizing "doing this for Israel" vs. "doing this for Saudi
Arabia." Conversely, it's a reason for us to emphasize "doing it for Saudi
Arabia," even though both are true.

In June 2017, we got 47 votes in the Senate against a Saudi arms deal. In
March of this year, we got 44 votes in the Senate against unconstitutional
U.S. participation in the Saudi war in Yemen. We're very far away from
getting votes like that if the vote can be portrayed as "against Israel,"
even though both Israel and Saudi Arabia are backing the policy that we
oppose.

Recently I suggested to some folks, let's try to get a Congressional letter
going calling for U.S. diplomacy with Russia to try to prevent armed
conflict between Israel and Iran in Syria. I got no response, even though
the suggestion tracked an op-ed by the International Crisis Group in the
New York Times. Even though it's basically the same idea as what we're
trying to do in Yemen - push for diplomacy to end the proxy war between
Saudi Arabia and Iran.

So, over-emphasizing the Israeli role could be counter-productive to
opposing it, even though obviously the Israeli role is quite real.

[Moving this to peace-discuss, since it seems like that's what we're doing.
I didn't realize that the peace list was copied when I replied before.]

Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
(202) 448-2898 x1

On Wed, May 9, 2018 at 12:10 PM, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss <
peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:

> I think that’s well put. The source of US war crimes is institutional - a
> patterned way of doing things. 'Collinearity’ may help when we come to
> assess personal responsibility.
>
> How much was Kennedy responsible for Vietnam? A lot? A little? Does it
> matter, beyond his final interview with the Most High (which might have
> been difficult)?
>
> Our task is to recognize the crimes of the institutions we’re responsible
> for - against the propaganda - publicize, and oppose them.
>
>
>
> On May 9, 2018, at 10:28 AM, Robert Naiman <naiman at justforeignpolicy.org>
> wrote:
>
> I think it's a hard distinction to draw. Trump and Netanyahu are close;
> they have similar worldviews, overlapping objectives, we don't get to see
> their whole interaction; each has incentives to play up the degree to which
> they are acting on behalf of each other as opposed to acting on their own
> behalf, or on behalf of other actors, such as Saudi Arabia.
>
> We know that Netanyahu gave a big speech about Iran, recycling and
> spinning old information ahead of Trump's decision; we know that Trump
> cited the speech in announcing his decision. But the time sequence doesn't
> tell us which was the effect and which was the cause; the thing that came
> second could have been the cause of the thing that came first. Bibi was
> delighted, but a lot of the Israeli national security establishment was
> against it. Saudi Arabia was delighted; Israel has a track record of acting
> in Washington as Saudi Arabia's lawyer. If you look at AIPAC's stuff on
> Yemen, it's Saudi talking points.
>
> There was a big debate about the role of AIPAC and Israel in promoting the
> Iraq war. Certainly, Israel was invoked and AIPAC and Israel lobbied for
> it, but there was also a lot of AIPAC and Israel initial skepticism and
> concern and some argued that AIPAC and Israel didn't lobby for it that
> strongly until it was clear that Bush was totally committed anyway, so they
> did it to support Bush as much or more as they did it for their own
> perceived direct interests, figuring that Bush was going to do it anyway.
> That doesn't mean that they didn't have an impact, but it affects the
> sharpness of the causation story. AIPAC lobbied for Obama's proposed 2013
> military action in Syria; the House rejected it anyway.
>
> There's a problem in statistics called "collinearity." If you have
> multiple independent variables influencing a dependent variable which are
> highly correlated with each other, it's hard to pull apart the contribution
> to causation of the individual variables. There's the military, the
> Pentagon-industrial complex, the Israel lobby, Saudi Arabia, the media,
> other domestic political considerations, like changing the channel,
> rallying around the flag, etc. They're all pointing in the same direction,
> as they often do. How to say that one of them is the One True Cause, when
> they overlap so much?
>
>
> Robert Naiman
> Policy Director
> Just Foreign Policy
> www.justforeignpolicy.org
> naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
> (202) 448-2898 x1
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, May 9, 2018 at 9:18 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss <
> peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
>
>> Carl
>>
>> I read this, I posted it, but to state that the Trump Administration is
>> being “manipulated," would we have said that Obama was being manipulated
>> when Libya was destroyed on his watch? No, you would not.
>>
>> “Manipulated” implies innocence, naïveté” being controlled, influenced.
>>
>> The statement: “Apart from Netanyahu, who has long been advocating the
>> collapse of the internationally recognized agreement, Israeli lobbies
>> within the US greatly contributed to Trump’s decision to take a more
>> hawkish stance on Iran in line with Israel’s own, Blumenthal said.” is a
>> more accurate portrayal, along with the last sentence related to the
>> amounts of money paid to USG Representatives.
>>
>> Both Obama, and Trump, are willing partners, when they take that first
>> cheque from lobbyists. Thats not manipulation, thats complicity.
>>
>>
>> On May 9, 2018, at 06:59, Carl G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>
>> wrote:
>>
>> 'Israel lobby calling the shots in Trump's rollback policy on Iran' – Max
>> Blumenthal — RT US News
>>
>> President Donald Trump's withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal is a
>> result of a lobbying effort by American Jewish billionaires and recycled,
>> cooked-up intelligence touted by the Israeli PM, journalist Max Blumenthal
>> told RT.
>>
>> Trump's decision to pull the US out of the deal, which capped Iran's
>> uranium enrichment in return for economic sanctions relief, has drawn
>> widespread criticism from Washington's European allies and Moscow, but it
>> was lauded in Israel, which has long pushed for dismantling of the 2015
>> accord.
>>
>> If this doesn't speak for itself, Blumenthal told RT that the roots of
>> Trump's decision to scrap the deal can be easily traced back to Israel.
>>
>> "Israeli influence is absolutely key here. At least, Trump sided
>> Netanyahu's kind of used car salesman style of presentation in order to
>> justify withdrawing from the Iran deal and his new policy of rollback," the
>> journalist said.
>>
>> Taking aim at the bizarre PowerPoint presentation delivered by Israeli
>> Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu late last month, Blumenthal pointed out
>> the Israeli leader essentially "introduced nothing new in his
>> presentation," adding that "much of the intelligence" appears to
>> be "cooked" and stem from the early 2000s.
>>
>> In 2004, the George W. Bush administration claimed that it had
>> obtained 1,000 pages of technical documentation shedding the light on
>> Iran's intentions to produce a nuclear weapon. According to the US
>> officials who spoke to the media at the time, the documents came from
>> a "stolen Iranian laptop," and not from an anti-government group. However,
>> it was later revealed by German intelligence officials that the source of
>> the documents was Iranian resistance group Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), which
>> is recognized as terrorist by the US State Department.
>>
>> "It's another intelligence scam driving us to war," Blumenthal said,
>> calling the intelligence cited by Netanyahu "arguably fabricated."
>>
>> Apart from Netanyahu, who has long been advocating the collapse of
>> the internationally recognized agreement, Israeli lobbies within the
>> US greatly contributed to Trump's decision to take a more hawkish stance
>> on Iran in line with Israel's own, Blumenthal said.
>>
>> "This triad of likudic billionaires – [ Home Deport co-founder] Bernard
>> Marcus, [casino magnate] Sheldon Adelson and [hedge fund billionaire]
>> Paul Signer – contributed over $40 million to pro-Trump Super PACs, and
>> also contributed enormous amount of money to Trump's UN ambassador
>> Nikki Haley and Tom Cotton, the senator that shaped Trump's Iran policy,"
>> the journalist pointed out.
>>
>> <https://www.rt.com/usa/426213-iran-deal-withdrawal-israeli-lobby/>
>>
>>
>> On May 9, 2018, at 8:43 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss <
>> peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
>>
>> Carl
>>
>> Stop with the “Trump Administration” being manipulated by Israel.” This
>> is where your credibility comes into question.
>>
>>
>> On May 9, 2018, at 06:03, Carl G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Israel is pushing the U.S. to go to war with Iran. We shouldn’t let it
>> happen.
>>
>> Fifteen years ago the U.S. government attacked Iraq and killed a million
>> people - on the basis of lies that Iraq had dangerous “weapons of mass
>> destruction.”
>>
>> During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump talked of his opposition
>> to the attack on Iraq:
>>
>> “Look at the war in Iraq and the mess that we’re in. I would never have
>> handled it that way ... What was the purpose of this whole thing? Hundreds
>> and hundreds of young people killed. And what about the people coming back
>> with no arms and legs? Not to mention the other side. All those Iraqi kids
>> who’ve been blown to pieces. And it turns out that all of the reasons for
>> the war were blatantly wrong. All this for nothing!”
>>
>> A principal instigator of that shameful US war against Iraq was the
>> government of Israel, who wished to remove Iraq as a regional rival in the
>> Middle East.
>>
>> Now Israel is trying to repeat that crime, urging the US to attack and
>> kill Iranians.
>>
>> But the US is part of a deal with Iran and six other countries that
>> guarantees that Iran will not develop even one nuclear weapon. (The US has
>> thousands; Israel has at least two hundred.)
>>
>> The ‘Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,’ known as the Iran nuclear deal,
>> is an international agreement reached in Vienna in 2015 between Iran and
>> the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (China,
>> France, Russia, Britain and the US), plus Germany and the European Union.
>>
>> President Trump has announced he will violate the agreement and
>> ‘withdraw’ from the deal. The Israeli government cheers, because they want
>> the US to attack Iran, for their benefit.
>>
>> (Aaron Maté writes, “Trump cited Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's bogus
>> speech from last week. Without doubt this effort is coordinated. Will any
>> Democrats call for an investigation of this Trump collusion with a foreign
>> power [like ‘Russiagate’]?”)
>>
>> In order to get its war on, Israel has attacked Iranian troops in Syria
>> (who are there legally, unlike US troops) -- including a bombing last week
>> that registered as a 2.6 earthquake on seismographs. An Israeli government
>> advisor has all but admitted that killing Iranians in Syria is designed to
>> provoke an open war with Iran. Meanwhile, Israeli snipers kill peaceful
>> protesters in Gaza, including children and journalists.
>>
>> We should not let the Trump administration be manipulated into war. The
>> president and our Congressional representatives should be urged to remember
>> the lessons of Iraq and not attack Iran - among other things a more
>> populous and better armed country, with powerful allies, notably Russia and
>> China. War with Iran risks a much larger war - even a nuclear war.
>>
>> The largest anti-war demonstrations in history occurred around the world
>> before the US attacked Iraq. As Americans we must do even more to prevent
>> this new criminal war.
>>
>> If the US and Israel attack Iran, there should be general work stoppages
>> - strikes - and street demonstrations across the US.
>>
>> In the meantime, write the president and our Congressional
>> representatives -  Representative Rodney Davis, Senator Tammy Duckworth,
>> and Senator Dick Durbin.
>>
>> —CGE
>>
>> On May 9, 2018, at 7:57 AM, Karen Aram via Peace <
>> peace at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
>>
>> Trump torpedoes Iran nuclear accord
>> 9 May 2018
>> US President Donald Trump announced yesterday that America has withdrawn
>> from the Iran nuclear accord, is reimposing crippling economic sanctions on
>> Iran, and will soon add further unspecified sanctions.
>> In doing so, Trump ignored warnings from Washington’s closest European
>> allies and cosignatories of the nuclear accord—Britain, France and
>> Germany—that such action risks plunging the Middle East into all-out war.
>> Whilst provocative and incendiary, yesterday’s announcement is not in the
>> least surprising.
>> As the World Socialist Web Site warned in a perspective published in
>> April 2015 in response to the announcement that Iran and the great powers
>> had reached the “framework” for a nuclear accord: “In a broader historical
>> sense, the deal is not worth the paper it is written on. If and when it is
>> expedient, the US will shred the agreement, as has happened many times in
>> the past. The Libyan regime of Muammar Gaddafi cut a deal in 2003 to give
>> up its WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction] programs only to find itself the
>> target of a NATO-led war for regime-change in 2011. Amid its own economic
>> decline, US imperialism will stop at nothing in its reckless drive for
>> global domination at the expense of its major rivals.”
>> Changing what needs to be changed, there are striking and instructive
>> parallels between imperialist diplomacy in the 1930s and today. In the
>> run-up to World War II, all sorts of diplomatic agreements were signed,
>> only to be shredded soon after, with the Nazi regime leading the wolf pack.
>> In this, Trump is only more brazen and thuggish than his White House
>> predecessors.
>> His speech was a rant. The wars the US has waged, fomented, and aided and
>> abetted in the greater Middle East over the course of the past
>> quarter-century have blown up complex societies, from Afghanistan and Iraq
>> to Libya, Syria and Yemen. Yet the billionaire, fascist-minded demagogue
>> accused Iran of being “the world’s leading state sponsor of state
>> terrorism,” whose “malign” and “sinister” activities have caused “havoc” in
>> the Middle East.
>> The International Atomic Energy Agency, which has subjected Iran’s
>> nuclear program to the most intrusive inspection regime in history, all the
>> other signatories of the Iran accord, US Defense Secretary James Mattis and
>> other top members of the Trump administration all state categorically that
>> Iran has fulfilled all its obligations under the Iran deal to the letter
>> and has not had any nuclear-weapons program for at least a decade and a
>> half. Yet Trump claimed Iran is on the cusp of threatening the US with
>> nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.
>> As proof for these lies, he pointed to the April 30 show-and-tell
>> presentation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which was panned
>> by the European Union and all but the most right-wing Western media outlets
>> as hype and lies. The New York Times, which is an expert at war propaganda,
>> deception and forgery, felt professionally affronted that Washington was
>> associating itself with so crude a performance, headlining its editorial
>> response “Netanyahu’s Flimflam on Iran.”
>> Near the end of his speech Trump underscored—using language akin to that
>> of a mafia don touting an “offer you can’t refuse”—that Washington has
>> embarked on an escalating campaign of economic, diplomatic and military
>> pressure aimed at reimposing on the Iranian people the type of neocolonial
>> subjugation that prevailed under the savage US-backed dictatorship of the
>> Shah.
>> First he sung a paean to the Shah, claiming that prior to the 1979
>> Revolution Iran “commanded the respect of the world.” Then he declared
>> Iran’s leaders will reject Washington’s demands for a “new” US-dictated
>> “deal,” adding, “I’d probably say the same thing if I was in their
>> position. But the fact is, they are going to want to make a new and lasting
>> deal.”
>> Trump made a brief reference to North Korea in his statement, immediately
>> after boasting that by blowing up the Iran deal he had demonstrated “The
>> United States no longer makes empty threats.”
>> Whatever the immediate outcome of the planned talks between Trump and
>> North Korean leader Kim Jung-un, the US repudiation of the Iran deal makes
>> clear that the Korean Peninsula “peace talks” are a tactical maneuver aimed
>> at facilitating US imperialist violence and banditry. Should a deal be
>> reached, it will only be to free America’s hands for confrontations with
>> its more substantial adversaries. If and when US strategic priorities
>> change, or circumstances allow, Washington will invoke the most flimsy and
>> contrived pretext to jettison a Korean denuclearization agreement.
>> The Democrats and wide sections of the US military-intelligence
>> establishment have, it should be noted, decried Trump’s turn to
>> negotiations with Pyongyang and more or less announced that they would
>> repudiate any deal he signs with the North Korean regime.
>> No doubt the European imperialist powers are angered and shaken by
>> Trump’s indifference to their counsels. French Prime Minister Emanuel
>> Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel both came to Washington in late
>> April to personally plea for Trump not to jettison the Iran deal. On
>> Monday, it was British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s turn, although he
>> only had audiences with Vice-President Pence and Secretary of State Pompeo.
>> Once again US imperialism has brushed aside the concerns of its
>> ostensible European allies in the naked pursuit of its own interests.
>> Whatever is said in public statements, relations between the imperialist
>> powers are ever more venomous as each pursues its own interests under
>> conditions of economic crisis and ever-intensifying geopolitical and
>> commercial rivalry.
>> The history of the last century demonstrated that the imperialist
>> appetites of the British, French and German ruling elites are no less
>> voracious than those of the capitalist rulers of America.
>> If they have sought to dissuade Trump from jettisoning the Iran deal it
>> is only because this would cut across their attempts to exploit Iran
>> economically, and because they fear the destabilizing impact of a war with
>> Iran, including soaring oil prices and a further mass influx of refugees.
>> In their vain attempt to convince Trump to remain in the deal, the
>> Europeans joined with him in making a whole series of fresh demands on
>> Teheran, including for drastic limits to its ballistic-missile program, and
>> pledged their steadfast support for Israel—thus encouraging both Trump and
>> Netanyahu to proceed with their offensive against Iran.
>> This points to another of the chief concerns of the European
>> imperialists, which underscores that their intentions are no less
>> belligerent. Along with the Democratic Party and much of the US
>> military-intelligence apparatus, they have been arguing that the best
>> strategy for bringing Iran to heel, and integrating that campaign with
>> NATO’s military-strategic offensive against Russia, is to concentrate on
>> prosecuting the war for regime change in Syria. As was frankly admitted by
>> political leaders and the capitalist media in the run-up to last month’s
>> US-French-British airstrikes on Syria, this alternate imperialist strategy
>> could rapidly result in direct military clashes between US and Russian
>> forces, with all that entails.
>> Washington’s trashing of the nuclear deal constitutes an immense crisis
>> and devastating exposure of Iran’s bourgeois nationalist regime. Terrified
>> of the growing class contradictions in Iran, the Islamic Republic’s
>> bourgeois-clerical regime placed its hopes in a rapprochement with US
>> imperialism and Barack Obama’s phony promises of a new US Mideast foreign
>> policy. No matter that it was under Obama that the US attacked Libya,
>> launched a similar regime-change operation in Syria and supported the
>> military in restoring its bloody grip over Egypt.
>> Since Trump, an avowed opponent of the Iran deal from its inception, came
>> to office, Teheran has desperately appealed to the Europeans to shield them
>> from America’s wrath. Meanwhile, in line with these efforts to ingratiate
>> itself with the imperialists and woo investment, the Iranian bourgeoisie
>> has pressed forward with its anti-working-class austerity policies.
>> In response to Trump’s announcement, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and
>> the Europeans announced that they intend to stay in the nuclear deal. In
>> doing so, Rouhani is clutching at straws.
>> Keith Jones
>> WSWS.ORG <http://wsws.org/>
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