The New York Times parked a travesty of a story on its Web site today reporting that “the Iranians moved roughly 4,300 pounds of low-enriched uranium out of deep underground storage” to a small, above-ground plant, leaving it vulnerable to attack, sabotage or some other suitable, destructive fate. Interesting, but …

The story has no analysis or commentary tag, so presumably it’s a news story. It carries the byline of David E. Sanger, who has written for The Times for more than a quarter of a century and serves as the paper’s chief Washington, D.C., correspondent. He’s a foreign policy and nuclear deproliferation expert, which I am not. He’s a member of two Pulitzer-winning teams at The Times, an exceptional historian, and a damn good writer. But that doesn’t leave him immune from criticism.

It’s irritating that this piece carries only one — that’s one — named source. He expects his readers to swallow a steady diet of anonymice. Worse, Sanger provides no reason for withholding their names. That’s a disservice to readers, who have no way of assessing those grants of anonymity. And Times reporters do this frustratingly, irritatingly often.
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by Michael Brenner

Operation New Dawn! How disarming it would be were this a sign that a bit of dry wit had penetrated the mental fastness that is the American defense establishment. Alas, the truth is that the Pentagon’s public relations machine is still grinding away. This administration’s dedication to continuing the tradition of dishonest public communication bequeathed it by the Bush bunch is of cardinal importance. For its implications for how we conduct the nation’s affairs are deeper and more enduring than this ridiculous try at casting the mantle of success over our gory, corrupt and inept escapade in Iraq. First a few thoughts on the dimensions of our failure there.

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After the poetic rhetoric in Prague, it was tempting to think that Obama might be headed in the right direction on at least one issue. I’d be willing to forgive just about all of his sins were he to get significant movement in reducing America’s nuclear arsenal. START has been technically defunct since December and negotiations between the US and Russia are ongoing. But the same stupidity that derailed the last great attempt at nuclear disarmament has returned. Gibbs says that Medvedev didn’t mention a problem last time he and Obama talked. An anonymous source involved in the process adds that, “Gibbs also had a friend of Obama’s who’s in the same gym class as Medvedev’s best friend ask about it, and apparently the note that Obama’s friend got later in math class didn’t say anything about it either.” So maybe it’s, like, ok.

But that’s not what Chief of Staff Generals and Deputy Prime Ministers in Russa are saying.

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So now that we have the domestic drama of “Kennedy’s seat” being lost and the Democratic Party proving that it’s brazenly incompetent and disastrously out of touch, the earthquake in Haiti can be moved below the fold. But before one of Bill Clinton’s friends gets a big wad of “aid” money to build new sweatshops in Haiti, there are a few things we should talk about.

Not only were we treated to the historically inaccurate (and frankly bat-shit insane) sweet nothings that Pat Robertson’s Warrior Jesus whispers in his ear. We’ve also had the good, Dr. Wesley Stafford – CEO and President of an organization called Compassion International – agree with Pat’s thesis. Theoretically, Dr. Stafford knows of what he speaks; his organization is very active in Haiti. It pairs tens of thousands of Haitian children with direct sponsors in the U.S. and is active throughout the nation.* On a recent Focus on the Family appearance, Dr. Stafford said, “Haiti … has been a disaster in almost every way long before this ever struck. And it is a nation, between you and me, I guess, that Satan has had absolutely free reign in that nation…”

Count me convinced, and we’ll get to David Brooks a little later on.
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THE DEPROLIFERATOR — “We declare that Iran respects the [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty], despite all the flaws the treaty has,” said Ali-Akbar Salehi, director of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, on Iran’s Press TV. “I believe that some Western countries, which are unfortunately affected by international Zionism, are trying to force Iran to withdraw from the NPT so that they can create an anti-Iran climate in the international arena.”

While invoking the NPT — that talisman of a treaty — on his way to the moral high ground, Salehi stumbled and took a header. Like his president, he just couldn’t keep his thoughts about Zionism to himself. Nor did he help himself or his cause by adding “we hope that the wise part of the West will overcome its irrational part so that it can seize the opportunity offered by Iran to end the current situation.” Full Story »

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — A large part of the lore of crime is the history of those transporting precious goods and the highwaymen who prey on them. Valuables are most vulnerable when in transit. Removed from safe storage and the constancy of inanimate walls, they become susceptible to the capriciousness of the human element. For example, their guard corps may be infiltrated by agents of those who covet them. This is as true of nuclear materials as anything else. Full Story »

There has been a pretty steady drumbeat of news coming out of Latin America recently surrounding the possibility of war between Venezuela and Colombia. In most of this media coverage, the blame here has been placed pretty squarely on Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s president, who is portrayed as a possible warmonger against our valiant ally in the War on Drugs (TM), Colombia. However, recent developments have raised the somewhat alarming prospect of further destabilization in the region, and, not surprisingly, the US seems to be behind it all.

The story is fairly straightforward–the US and Colombia have signed a new agreement that would expand the ability of the US to station forces on Colombian territory, and the range of what possible military operations might be. Full Story »

The National Security Archives at George Washington University recently published translations of Soviet Politburo meetings on Afghanistan. They are more illuminating than the combined words of America’s punditocracy that litter the nation’s editorial pages. For one, they probably reflect the administration’s deliberations with uncanny accuracy. For two, they are free of the domestic political maneuvering that editorial writers in the US seem incapable of putting aside. Reading them for their content and applying the words to the US situation requires letting go of the American exceptionalism that plagues our thoughts, but it is important to remember that such exceptionalism will be our downfall…so it’s best to dispense with that in any case.

Mikhail Sergeyevich applies the idiomatic phrase “…… vydelyvnet Krendelya” to Karmal. We could use it do describe Karzai, Obama, Clinton, McChrystal, et. al.. It translates literally as “….. is walking like a pretzel.” The figurative meaning is that someone is staggering and weaving like a drunk; that is, not being straight-forward.
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Well now, the paper of what, why didn’t anyone tell us? record has stumbled across information suggesting that Ahmed Wali Karzai is on the CIA’s payroll. Yeah, that Ahmed Karzai who had the Senate’s panties all in a bunch as recently as August for his purported role in the Afghan opium trade.

According to the paper of sure we’ll lie to help you invade Iraq record, Mr. Karzai was paid for “a variety of services” that included raising a paramilitary force. You don’t say…

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Election fiascos and strategy deliberations continue, while Pakistan’s army is laying waste to South Waziristan. The deliberations are of the utmost importance; more important and more pressing than health care reform. This is Obama’s second strategy review in nine months. He cannot, politically or strategically, continue on such a pace. That means that the decisions made can be expected to indicate overall policy for the rest of his term, if not longer in the way that policy develops a momentum of its own.

There’s no question that the election was rigged, but the low voter turnout is more dangerous to government legitimacy than the fraud. Just five years ago Afghanistan held an election that defied expectations: women voted in large numbers, old men cried after voting for the first time in their lives, polls had to stay open late so that all who wanted to vote could, and it was peaceful. In effect, we’ve been moving backwards.

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My latest for Raw Story:

Figure in Bush propaganda operation remains Pentagon spokesman

A months-long review of documents and interviews with Pentagon personnel has revealed that the Bush Administration’s military analyst program — aimed at selling the Iraq war to the American people — operated through a secretive collaboration between the Defense Department’s press and community relations offices.

Raw Story has also uncovered evidence that directly ties the activities undertaken in the military analyst program to an official US military document’s definition of psychological operations — propaganda that is only supposed to be directed toward foreign audiences.

READ THE REST…

It was such a pleasant weekend. Fall is in the air. Football is on TV, and the Angels sent the Boston Red Sox golfing. It even felt wholesome and normal to listen to the soothing sounds of Republicans and Democrats making fun of each other and playing nerf meme dodge ball. I suppose that we owe the Nobel Committee a thank you note. But all good things must come to an end. Or…. Now that we’ve got that peace prize thing out of the way, let’s get back to the business of war.

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After a similar attempt resulted in civil war in Madagascar, the South Korean government bought 1,000 sq km of land in Tanzania for use in agriculture.  Mindful of the politics involved, the South Koreans are setting aside half of that land for local development.

To quote from a recent BBC article:

Lee Ki-Churl, a corporation official, said he expected Tanzanians to benefit from the deal. “Some African countries export fruit and import fruit juice, or export olives and import olive oil, simply because their past colonialists did not teach them how to process food,” he told the AFP news agency. “We plan to set up an education centre for Tanzanian farmers in the food-processing zone in order to transfer agricultural know-how and irrigation expertise to them.”

I think it is both patronising and ignorant to assume that Africans don’t farm the way modern western farms operate because they are uneducated.  This almost seems to imply that Africans are too stupid to help themselves. Full Story »

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — In a previous post, I wrote about how the Obama administration should borrow a page from master framers like George Lakoff and Drew Westen. It should present its disarmament initiatives as honoring the man who’s a latter-day saint to many — Ronald Reagan — by realizing his dream of a world free of nuclear weapons.

And make no mistake, as Paul Boyer writes in an Arms Control Today review of a new book, Reagan’s Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World From Nuclear Disaster, according to authors Martin Anderson and Annelise Anderson. . .

Above all else, Reagan was a man of peace whose unwavering objective, rooted in his personal history and reinforced by his brush with death in 1981, was a world free of nuclear weapons. Full Story »

Part 3…God’s own medicine

The Obama administration rescinded the Bush administration’s quixotic order to eradicate poppy fields in Afghanistan. Judging by hectare cultivation numbers and harvest yields, the plan was either never fully implemented or failed miserably. At the very least, farmers in Afghanistan are no longer being punished for trying to make a living. Like Bush, the Obama administration wants to reform Afghan agriculture and move it away from poppy cultivation. Unfortunately, these plans are still “being finalized”. To understand the problems inherent in the administration’s plans and possible futures for Afghan agriculture we need to examine Afghanistan’s situation, the opium poppy, and the history of opium cultivation.

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Part  2…hatin’ the player, not the game

The Senate is prepared to discuss the problem of Afghan corruption at length. It must be all the marble and parliamentary silly-talk that makes these men immune to irony, because portions of the report’s section entitled “The Scope of Corruption” sound like a description of American politics if the reader mad-libs a little. The Senate is very worried about the scope of corruption from the drug trade in Afghanistan. It forgets, in its rush to explain how horrid Afghanistan is, that it already admitted to setting the stage for this very situation when the U.S. invaded in 2001. Or maybe the Honorable Senators think that they weren’t there, cheering on “the good war”…that they had no responsibility to oversee the comedy of errors that led us to this point they feel so compelled to decry. In any case, the Senators know evil when they see it. And they’re not afraid to dedicate three paragraphs to giving Ahmed Wali Karzai the Billy Carter treatment.

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So now there’s talk among the higher reaches of the Labour government to put together some sort of commission, or study group, to look into whether the Special Relationship has been damaged by the Libyan prisoner fiasco. Given that the government, and the Labour party, have acted dishonourably throughout this whole affair, this takes more than a little cheek, but it’s what we expect from a government and party led by Gordon Brown, who, if anything, is proving to be a duplicitous and mendacious as his predecessor—but whose sights are set considerably lower. Blair wanted to run the world (and, indeed, still does)—Brown just wants to stop the weekly explosions that have characterized his government since he became Prime Minister two years ago.

But it’s the Special Relationship that’s of interest here. We were, I admit, somewhat surprised to learn, when we arrived on these shores eleven years ago, that this was still a major concern. We thought this was something that Churchill and Roosevelt had during that last good war, but had died a slow death from attrition. Certainly we weren’t giving it a lot of thought when we moved here. But it was surprising, still, to discover that it’s taken very seriously here.
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Part 1…lying sidelong on a divan in the Senate cloakroom

That John Kerry and his Senate Foreign Relations Committee are a regular bunch of cards. Their Aug. 10 report, “Afghanistan’s Narco War: Breaking the Link Between Drug Traffickers and Insurgents”, is funnier than a barrel of drunk monkeys. It opens with the statement: “At the end of March when President Obama fulfilled his pledge to make the war in Afghanistan a higher priority, he cast the U.S. role more narrowly than the previous administration: Defeat Al Quaeda and eliminate its safe havens in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To accomplish these twin tasks, however, the President is making a practical commitment to Afghanistan that is far greater than his predecessor—more troops, more civilians, and more money.”

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THE DEPROLIFERATOR — First, let’s tie up some loose nuclear ends with. . . Nukes in the News.

• Remember the 2007 NIE (National Intelligence Report) which declared that Iran had abandoned any development of nuclear weapons in 2007? Well, at Inter Press Service, investigative reporter and historian Gareth Porter writes:

Western officials leaked stories. . . last week aimed at pressuring the outgoing chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, to include a summary of intelligence alleging that Iran has been actively pursuing work on nuclear weapons in the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] report due out this week. [More when that appears -- RW.] … the stories suggested that ElBaradei has been guilty of a cover-up in refusing to publish information he has had since last September alleging that Iran has continued to pursue research on developing nuclear weapons. [Why? The usual charge: to] “undermine the U.S. sanctions drive.” Full Story »

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — In the eighties it became more and more difficult to kill movie monsters dead. They’d re-surface again and again like your favorite musical artist in live performance with encores upon encores. Neither were monsters, supposedly dead once and for all, immune to resurrection. In one installment of the Friday the 13th series, Jason Voorhees was brought back to life via telekinesis.

But the entire premise of the 1985 film Reanimator was reviving the dead, a subject which has also been on the mind of Joseph Cirincione, who, as the president of the Ploughshares Fund, is as able as he is visible a spokesperson for disarmament. He was recently quoted in a Global Security report (thanks to Armchair Generalist for the heads-up): Full Story »