What to do when the Saudi monarchy falls?

Secretary of State John Kerry with King Salman bin Abdulazziz

Photo Credit: The Atlantic.

The United States, back to the times of Henry Kissinger and maybe Franklin Roosevelt, has based its Middle East policy on support for the Saudi Arabian monarchy.

Washington has treated the Saudi monarchy’s enemies (except for Israel, and maybe Israel is not that much of an enemy) as its own enemies—Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, the ayatollahs in Iran, the Assad regime in Syria and even the Shiite community in Yemen.

In return, the Saudi monarchs have kept oil prices under control, charged for oil in dollars and deposited those dollars in U.S. banks, and bought billions of dollars with of weapons from American aerospace and defense contractors.

But Sarah Chayes and Alex de Waal, writing in The Atlantic, warn that the Saudi Arabian monarchy, like the rule of the Shah in Iran, cannot go on forever.   And like the Shah, the Saudi royal family is ripe to be overthrown  by militant, anti-American religious zealots.

The Saudi government has appeased these zealots by encouraging them to go wage jihads in foreign lands.  The best result, from the Saudi perspective, is that they die fighting and never come home.  The next best result is that their identities are known and they can be tracked.

The Iran nuclear deal looks torpedo-proof

Am I the only one who finds it just a little bit odd that the American officials loudly claiming Iran cannot be trusted to fulfill any deal are simultaneously pledging that they will not fulfill any deal?  Is it possible they have such little self-awareness?

via Hullabaloo.

President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry deserve a lot of credit for the nuclear deal with Iran, as do President Hassan Rouhani of Iran and the other diplomats who worked on the negotiations.

I think it is the best deal that can be expected.   The Iranians have nuclear power plants, which they are not willing to give up.  Any nation with nuclear power has the capability to develop nuclear weapons.

What the Iranians have done is to give up equipment and uranium stockpiles that would have enabled them to develop weapons-grade uranium and plutonium overnight, and to submit to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure that they do not do so.

It is crazy for Republican Senators presidential candidates to threaten to torpedo the deal.

What made the economic sanctions effective against Iran in the first place is that they were supported by U.S. allies and the Security Council of the United Nations.  Under the agreement, the other negotiating parties, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China and other countries will resume trade with Iran no matter what the U.S. government does.

The only ones who would be hurt if the U.S. government renounced the deal would be Americans who want to do business in Iran.

The problem of the spread of nuclear weapons is more than just Iran.  Almost all industrial nations—Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa and many more—have the capability to develop nuclear weapons.

Actually, it is a tribute to the world’s good sense that only nine nations are known to have nuclear weapons—the USA, Britain, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.

The only way to stop the spread of nuclear weapons on a long-term basis is for the existing nuclear power to agree to disarm and to turn over control of nuclear materials to an international agency.  Every nuclear-capable nation, not just Iran, should be open to the IAEA.

LINKS

The Iran nuclear deal, translated into plain English, by Max Fisher for Vox news.

The Iran Nuclear Deal, by the Numbers by Graham Allison for The Atlantic.

A good deal: How both sides can sell the Iran agreement back home by Ali Vaez for Reuters.

What if the US & UN sanctioned Israel over its nukes the way they did Iran over enrichment? by Juan Cole for Informed Comment.

Ukraine gas company hires Joe Biden’s son

Burisma Holdings Ltd., the Ukraine’s largest producer of natural gas, announced that Hunter Biden, the son of vice president Joe Biden, is joining its board of directors.   He will be in charge of the firm’s legal department, and work on “transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion and other priorities.”

Joe Biden and Hunter Biden

Burisma also announced the appointment of Devon Archer to its board.   Archer was co-chair of the fund-raising committee for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.  Hunter Biden used to be a lobbyist, but gave that up in September, 2008, before his dad was elected vice president.

Biden and Archer are members of Rosemont Seneca Partners, a finance and policy advisory firm.   Archer is the college roommate of Christopher Heinz, the stepson of John Kerry.  The two of them founded Rosemont Capital, a private equity firm which owns half of Rosemont Seneca Partners.  Archer is a noted fund-raiser and bundler of campaign contributions for the Democratic party.

Burisma was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Cyprus.  It owns gas fields all over Ukraine, including in the Donetsk basin in eastern Ukraine where separatists hold sway.

Crony capitalism?   Hardly anybody in Washington appears to think so.  Biden and Archer have violated no laws, and, as one person put it, Hunter Biden shouldn’t be deprived of a job opportunity just because he is the Vice President’s son.  What do you think?

Arab countries said to offer to pay for invasion

The following is by a blogger for the Washington Post.   I think it deserves more attention than it got.

Secretary of State John Kerry said at Wednesday’s hearing that Arab counties have offered to pay for the entirety of unseating President Bashar al-Assad if the United States took the lead militarily.

“With respect to Arab countries offering to bear costs and to assess, the answer is profoundly yes,” Kerry said. “They have. That offer is on the table.”

Asked by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) about how much those countries would contribute, Kerry said they have offered to pay for all of a full invasion.

“In fact, some of them have said that if the United States is prepared to go do the whole thing the way we’ve done it previously in other places, they’ll carry that cost,” Kerry said. “That’s how dedicated they are at this. That’s not in the cards, and nobody’s talking about it, but they’re talking in serious ways about getting this done.”

via Washington Post.

Kerry didn’t say which Arab countries he had in mind, but Saudi Arabia and the Gulf oil mini-states are the only ones who would have the money to finance such an operation.  They reportedly have been financing the Syrian rebels, so this might be cost-effective for them to do.

We Americans should ask ourselves how these Arab countries’ interests are served by overthrowing Bashar al-Assad and whether those interests are the same as our interests.   If our interest is in promoting freedom and democracy, my answer is, probably not.

Syria is in the middle of a struggle involving Saudi Arabia, Iran and other countries for power and influence in the region.  I don’t see how the people of the United States, or the people of Syria, or freedom and democracy, are served by the United States taking sides in this struggle.

Slavery is not a thing of the past

We think of slavery as a thing of the past, but it isn’t.  The International Labor Organization estimates that there are 21 million people around the world in different kinds of forced labor.  And it isn’t just backward countries such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Zimbabwe.

The U.S. State Department issued its annual report on forced labor and human trafficking on Wednesday.  The Guardian reported

China is criticized for perpetuating human trafficking in 320 state-run institutions and the widespread domestic trafficking of girls and women into forced prostitution. In Russia, an estimated 1 million people are exposed to exploitative labor, including forced labor used in the construction of the Winter Olympic park in Sochi, according to the report.

The government of Uzbekistan continues to force older children and adults into slave labor in its cotton industry, the US state department says, and the country “remains one of only a handful of governments around the world that subjects its citizens to forced labor through the implementation of state policy”.

via The Guardian.

Uzbekistan is noteworthy because coerced labor for production of cotton is government policy.  Uzbekistan has been dependent on its cotton industry since the days of the old Soviet Union.  Here is a report from a human rights organization.

Photo by Thomas Grabka

In 2012, the Uzbek government mobilized the forced labor of over a million children and adults. Regional authorities enforced state cotton quotas on farmers, under threat of taking their land.  While there was not the nationwide shut-down of primary schools, authorities mobilized children ages 15 to 17 nationwide and younger children sporadically.

Children forced to pick cotton worked excessive hours, conducted arduous physical work in hazardous conditions and under threat of punishment, including expulsion from school.  Government employees – including teachers, doctors, nurses, and soldiers – and private business employees were forced to pick cotton under threat of dismissal from work, the loss of salary, pensions and welfare benefits.  Authorities extracted fines from those who failed to meet their cotton quotas.

This spring, the Uzbek government is again mobilizing children as young as age 10 and adults to plow and weed cotton fields.  On April 19, the deputy governor of Namangan region beat seven farmers for planting onions instead of cotton.  As is the case each year during the fall cotton harvest, the forced labor of government employees is once again disrupting the delivery of essential public services, including health care and education.

via Cotton Campaign.

Secretary of State John Kerry should be commended for allowing the report to go out, even though it embarrasses powerful countries such as Russia and China and U.S. allies such as Uzbekistan and Saudi Arabia.

Congressional law allows for targeted economic sanctions against countries that practice or tolerate slavery, forced labor and human trafficking.   I don’t think this is likely anytime soon, but to name them and shame them is more than nothing.

What good are Democrats?

During the 2004 election, Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, told an unemployed worker that he had no real answer to the outsourcing of U.S. jobs overseas, but that he unlike President George W. Bush would not make things worse. This was an honest statement, and a true statement, but it also was an inadequate statement.

Does President Barack Obama have any better answer than Senator Kerry did? If not, what good are the Democrats?

Joe Bageant, in Deer Hunting With Jesus, and Thomas Frank, in What’s the Matter With Kansas? wrote about the disconnect between college-educated white liberals and the struggles of working people.  They pointed out that it is not so much that so many working people vote on the so-called cultural issues – abortion, gay rights, school prayer – rather than economic interests, as that there is not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties on economic issues.

I have to admit that I don’t have a complete answer to these problems myself, but then I’m an old retired guy in Rochester, N.Y., not someone who claims to be qualified for the highest office in the land.

I think that a good start for a Democratic administration would be to (1) take advice from labor and consumer organizations more than investment bankers, (2) put people to work repairing our deteriorating bridges, levees, water and sewer systems and other infrastructure, (3) regulate and break up predatory financial institutions that divert savings and wealth away from the real economy, (4) use the power of government contracting to foster “green” and high-tech industry, as was done in an earlier era with semiconductors, the airlines and other industries and (5) yes, as Kerry said,  stop making things worse, such as with tax breaks for industries that close U.S. plants and relocate overseas.