Category: Geopolitics

Iran Focus-Iran’s Revolutionary Guards take over key policy body –
Tehran, Iran, Sep. 27 – As part of a plan to bring Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) under the complete domination of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), several highly-placed commanders of the elite military organisation are filling the top slots in the key decision-making body on security and defence policies, Iran Focus has learnt.

More analogies here that Iran sounds more like Japan in the 1930’s. Back then Tojo gained power, at the expense of the revered emperor, who was the symbol of the state-religion Shintoism. Now we have the military, in the form of the Revolutionary Guards, gradually replacing the Mullah-class of this Shiite theocracy of the revered Kohmenhi.

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor after the Allies imposed a oil blockade, to punish their military adventurism in China. Iran is Japan with Oil. Their military adventurism is in Lebanon and Palestine. While Iran doesn’t have an industrial power-house like Nazi Germany, they are courting China and Russia to create a new Axis counter-weight to the Free World.

The atomic bomb, which ended the war with Japan, empowers small countries like Korea to be treated with Great Power status, simply because the Bomb does have great power – power to destroy and therefore level-the-playing-field. In the hands of a non-state individual or group, such as Al Quieda, you have the rise of the Super-Empowered Individual – not a comfortable prospect.

Iranians debate parameters for a global role – The Boston Globe
Iran has never been certain who its allies should be. In the 19th century, Britain and Russia vied for influence. In the 20th century , largely Persian and Shi’ite Muslim Iran clashed with Sunni Arab neighbors. The shah allied with Israel to counterbalance the Arabs; the Islamic Republic went to war with Iraq. Now, with a Shi’ite -led government in Iraq and many Muslims across the world taking pride in Hezbollah’s tenacity, Iran has new hopes for its longstanding goal of exporting Islamic rule.

Soaring oil prices are allowing the government to dole out jobs to loyalists and business contracts to Revolutionary Guard officers, analysts say, masking rising unemployment. Still, the government had to rescind a 40-percent minimum wage hike this year, and many conservatives who like Ahmadinejad’s hard-line foreign policy object to his populist economic programs.

Some Iranian leaders are pushing for better ties with countries such as China, which has been less tough on Iran’s nuclear program. But those plans — such as building a pipeline across Afghanistan to India — probably can’t be realized without Western companies and financing, Takeyh said.

Leylaz, the economist, said that deep down, Iran knows it’s not as strong militarily and economically as it would like to be, which is why it won’t renounce nuclear weapons unless it receives security guarantees. He said domestic politics drive Ahmadinejad’s defiance and his anti-Israeli rhetoric to distract from growing economic and social problems and crush reformers.

The Intellectual Activist

This is the argument that Bush & Rumsfiled have been touting in their current prop[oganda push
Observing the events of today—the hesitation and uncertainty, the stubborn clinging to the fantasy that the enemy can be appeased if we just keep talking and find the right diplomatic solution—I now feel that, for the first time, I really understand the leaders of the 1930s. Their illusion that Hitler could be appeased has always seemed, in historical hindsight, to be such a willful evasion of the facts that I have never grasped how it was possible for those men to deceive themselves. But I can now see how they clung to their evasions because they could not imagine anything worse than a return to the mass slaughter of the First World War. They wanted to believe that something, anything could prevent a return to war. What they refused to imagine is that, in trying to avoid the horrors of the previous war, they were allowing Hitler to unleash the much greater horrors of a new war.

But Iran is not Nazi Germany—a large, united, economically and technologically advanced nation that could nearly equal our military capability. Iran is a poor, backward nation with a large, restive dissident movement. Its military bluster is a hollow shell hiding its underlying weakness.

What Next?
Perhaps the most tragic example of the problems created by large refugee flows occurred in the wake of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. After the Hutu-led genocide resulted in the death of 800,000 to 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus, the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front “invaded” the country from neighboring Uganda. The RPF was drawn from the 500,000 or so Tutsis who had already fled Rwanda from past pogroms. As the RPF swept through Rwanda, almost 1 million Hutus fled to neighboring Congo, fearing that the evil they did unto others would be done unto them.

For two years after 1994, Hutu bands continued to conduct raids in Rwanda and began to work with Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. The new RPF government of Rwanda responded by attacking not only the Hutu militia camps, but also its much larger neighbor, bolstering a formerly obscure Congolese opposition leader named Laurent Kabila and installing him in power in Kinshasa. A civil war in Congo ensued, killing perhaps 4 million people.

Afghanistan: 21 mil population, civil war 1989-2001, 76k dead and 6 mil displaced.
Bosnia: 4.4 mil pop, 1991-95, 250k dead and 2.3 mil displaced.
Congo: 60 mil popl, 1991-2006, 4.3 mil dead and 2.7 mil displaced.
Croatia: 4.5 mil popl, 1991-1995, 17k dead, 1 mil displaced.
Kosovo: 1.8 mil pop, 1998-99, 12k dead, 1.3 mil displaced.
Lebannon: 2.7 mil pop, 1975-90, 150k dead and 800k displaced.
Rwanda: 7.7 mil pop, 1994-95, 950k dead and 2 mil displaced.
Somalia: 8.9 mil pop, 1990-2006, 550k dead and 400k displaced.

France about-turns into a bigger military mess – Sunday Times – Times Online
The French believe that what they say is at least as important as what they do. They spin grandiloquent phrases and strike postures. Rhetoric is away of life and if you point out it is divorced from all strategic reality that is thought to be nitpicking.

The British, on the other hand, get engrossed in tedious detail like: “Is this practical? Who is going to supply the troops? What will be their rules of engagement?” With Lebanon the French have discovered phrase-making is not enough. In recent days they have become very practical, bleating that there are no established rules of engagement (governing what the soldiers can do and when they can fire) almost as though they were British.

If any country could have settled such important details in advance it is France. It took the kudos for working up the UN resolution. It acted as spokesman for the Arab world within the permanent five members of the council. It insisted that the resolution should not be made under chapter 7 of the UN charter, which would have given the troops the right to impose their will by force.

When France was invited to provide leadership over Lebanon, it vacillated. Its offer of 2,000 soldiers remains underwhelming. Chirac’s pro-Arab policies have not even bought off Muslim discontent at home, as the urban riots showed.