Iranian planes and hidden toll of sanctionsIt’s too early to tell the reason for the midday plane crash on 15 July in Janat-Abad near the former capital of the Persian Empire, northwest of Tehran. All 168 people on board were killed in Qazvin province and there is an inquiry underway.
One thing is sure, though. It wasn’t fired on by the U.S .military which, some twenty-one years ago, shot down flight IR655, killing 290 people, including 66 children. It was the same year as Lockerbie but the captain of the USS Vincennes which fired a missile at the plane was awarded the U.S. Legion of Merit and his crew given Combat Action Ribbons. But, even so, the relatives of the 168 that have died today may yet blame the U.S. and Britain for their dead.
The U.S. foreign policy is being felt in Iran’s aircraft hangars, just as it is in the hearts of the millions of Iraqi refugees a few hundred miles from the crash site. They are fleeing the chaos unleashed by what was called Operation Iraqi Liberation, before the State Department realized the resulting acronym spelled “OIL”. Iran may have been the deciding factor when it came to deposing the U.S.-created Taliban from Afghanistan but as British soldiers die in Helmand, Iran is not the ally. Iran is the eternal irritant, refusing to budge in its support for anti-colonial struggle, fighting Anglo-American desires for apartheid in Palestine, fighting for sovereignty over its energy resources.
President Obama has repeatedly cited economic sanctions as the stick with which to beat Iran as the Islamic Republic continues to pursue its uranium-enrichment programme. But, again, showing more skill than his G8 colleagues, Obama backed off from making sanctions a leading issue at the L’Aquila summit.
Britain’s beleaguered leader, Gordon Brown was caught out again. He has form on this. Last year, with President George W. Bush by his side, he announced “We will take action today that will freeze the overseas assets of the biggest bank in Iran, the Bank Melli.” It turned out to be yet another Brown-blunder – the FT quoted diplomats at the time looking askance. Brown had said he wanted more sanctions when standing next to the then Israeli PM, Ehud Olmert, a year earlier. And in L’Aquila, Brown said he sought changes to the Non-Proliferation Treaty so that proof of a nuclear arms programme is no longer required for sanctions to be imposed on a state he didn’t like. The stakes have certainly been raised since the elections which saw Mahmoud Ahmadinejad retain the presidency and which corporate media was quick to characterise as the stolen election that will presage a green revolution to rival the colour revolutions of the former USSR.
Sanctions currently prevent U.S. citizens from doing business with Iran and there is also a total ban on selling U.S. aircraft and repair parts to Iranian aviation companies and that includes U.S.-made components in Russian aircraft such as the Caspian Airlines Tupolev TU-154M.
Some five years ago, the Iranian Transport Minister, Ahmad Khorram, claimed Iran’s aviation sector was at “crisis point.” Back then, more than one hundred perished in a similar plane and three hundred then perished in an air-disaster in 2003.
At the end of 2006, the head of Russian aviation company, Sukhoi, said that deals with Iran were hitting road-blocks as the U.S. Department of State complained about perceived violations of Bill Clinton’s Iran Non-Proliferation Act. That Act bars the re-exporting of U.S. made components to Iran. Sukhoi's civil aircraft chief Viktor Subbotin said that "If the sanctions are switched fully on, everything will stop."
From those who have been most voluble about the recent Iranian elections– but with notable exceptions – we will not hear about the U.S.-nod to the coup in Honduras, let alone Hezbollah’s candidates all winning in Lebanon and the lack of elections in the Palestinian Authority while Hamas enjoys its mandate.
That more nuanced analysis we shall have to leave to Noam Chomsky who details it in his latest piece, “Season of Travesties: Freedom and Democracy in mid-2009.” There will be few “pro-democracy” demonstrators chanting against the sanctions that may have killed another plane-load.
In the 1990s, Bill Clinton’s UN sanctions on Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of children as discovered by its own agency, UNICEF. We now have a man in the White House who trumpets the use of sanctions over the war-war bluster of George W. Bush. President Bush’s continual threats about the use of military force on Iran did nothing but entrench the Iranian people’s support for the theocratic government.
If much-mooted September is the date for President Obama’s new sanctions, they look set to kill many more civilians than any threats by his former rival and now secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. Hillary and her husband seem never to have been concerned about the lethal impact of sanctions on developing nations. It was she who was certain of her ability to press a button to use U.S. nuclear weapons to kill all 70 million people in Iran.
Quo vadis, Barack Obama…?Obama is coming home after two difficult summits, Russia and the G-8, to a domestic agenda not likely to yield better results. If our pessimistic selves paint a world which is economically poisoned and environmentally doomed, Air Force One’s landing at Andrews AFB will bring back this president to the epicenter of it all; for both disasters – economic and environmental – had their start right here, in the good old U.S. of A.
This American president is unquestionably not as big a barker as the previous one, but to most Russians – and not just Vladimir Putin – he is probably another smiling, soft tone messenger of the same unrelenting American empire. And the world of détente remains just that; a compromise held by pins of mutually-assured destruction in the hands of self-appointed, loyal guardians of tribes, nations, ideologies and the rest.
Many in America appear totally surprised at the cool – uneventful at least – reception that President Obama received in Moscow. Duh! What did we really expect... an exuberant welcome to our charismatic leader just like those our copycats Euro-cousins give him? Not in a thousand years! Russians have had it with post-cold war America and its berating behavior as if the victor in a hot-war never fought.
Barack Obama took to the Russians the very same message that George W. Bush did; new messenger, same old message from the very powerful “AMIC” (American Military Industrial Complex)… you know, the mythical-yet-real organization President Dwight Eisenhower warned all Americans about half century ago.
While signing a face-saving agreement which reduced the number of missiles aimed at each other – yet not changing in the least how either or both nations might be reduced to smithereens – the Russians also consented, gleefully one suspects, to allow flights over their territory carryings troops and weapons en route to Afghanistan. Obviously, the Russians vividly remember U.S. involvement two decades ago helping the Taliban that cost them so many dead… an indirect way of paying us back for “our contribution” to their decade-long conflict in Afghanistan; a prelude to a possible second Vietnam for the U.S. A Pyrrhic victory for Obama at the Kremlin… and on to Italy for the POTUS!
L’Aquila was a fitting locale, ‘though coincidentally, as the meeting place for the G-8. Abruzzo, a region devastated three months earlier by earthquakes, was now hosting the discussions on the two major issues – both with catastrophic implications – that confront the world: the deep recession affecting the economy of most nations, and the ominous environmental implications facing the entire planet, usually linked to economic growth. But Obama’s opportunity to have a tête-à-tête with China’s Hu Jintao while at L’Aquila did not materialize, as the president of the world’s most populous nation had to abruptly depart to tend to domestic affairs – disturbances of the ethnic variety – at Xinjiang.
Perhaps it was just as well that Jintao and Obama did not meet. One gets the feeling that Mr. Obama is not prepared to answer the two trillion dollar question that the leader of the soon to be second largest economy in the world would have for him. America’s economy and our people’s pseudo standard of living have been subsidized in the past 10 years by the Chinese masses through a government that purposely, and smartly so, kept “forced savings” (non-consumption) in the national coffers while still permitting a noticeable increase in the citizens’ standard of living. Chinese savings that kept the US economy propped up instead of being declared insolvent. Now, after observing the workings of US capitalism, and the resulting debacle which has occurred, the seemingly obsequious Chinese are getting weary, jittery and concerned of what games the U.S. might play in the valuation, or devaluation (!), of its dollar… and whether they might end up partially paying for our economic sins of the past. But a major confrontation remains in the wings, Obama’s visit to China planned for later this year; and with an economy likely to get worse by then, things for Mr. Obama do not bode well. As with Russia, a wide Barack smile won’t substitute as response to legitimate questions these leaders have and which require straightforward answers, not just diplomatically-treated bullshit.
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