Iran invasion: The Dutch going ... Dutch

It is definitely not a turning point on the meandering road to an eventual US attack on Iran.
However, the refusal of a small majority in the Parliament of The Netherlands, yesterday, to go blindly along with such an action, is a new warning sign sign on the White House wall of Nebuchadnezzar Bush.

Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen (photo: NRC-Handelsblad, 4.5.07)
In 2003, some months before the total absence of WMD in Iraq was revealed, the Dutch Government decided to participate in the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq. Against parliamentary opposition, who pointed out that there did not exist an UN-approved legitimation for military intervention in Iraq, the PM Balkenende found an escape in declaring the Dutch military mission 'political', not military. But his Government did not protest when Mr. Bush, some days later, included The Netherlands in his Iraq "Coalition of the Willing", together with e.g. Lithuania and Guatemala.

Mr. Balkenende, who also leads the new center-left Dutch government that came in power after elections in November 2006, is still haunted by his 2003 trick and is hiding behind a "for-your-eyes-only" letter from British PM Tony Blair, that he claims to have received in the spring of 2003, but that he balks at releasing. As part of the new government-agreement with the second biggest government party, Dutch Labour (PvdA) he succeeded in imposing upon that party to refrain from further asking about that letter.

The same Agreement, however, states, that new Dutch military engagements need an 'adequate' international juridical basis. Partnership with the US is, as the new vote in parliament states, not to be considered as such.

Knowing, that the most recent Security Council resolution on Iran excludes explicitly military action, Foreign Minister Verhagen, a right-leaning member of PM Balkenendes Christian-Democrat Party, pleaded unsuccessfully for a government mandate to eventually follow the US, without an UNSC resolution. He was defeated by a small majority in congress, government party PvdA voting with the left and centrist opposition.

An eventual US attack against Iran would not result in an Iraq kind of invasion/occupation. The country is too vast and too populated. It would consist of sea- and air-born terror bombings. The 200 Dutch F16s, entirely integrated into US guiding and communication systems (unlike those of other NATO-countries), could have played a sizable role in bombing out the American-chosen targets in Iran. The Dutch Navy was probably assigned to rearguard tasks outside the Strait of Hormuz, but is is conceivable, that Dutch guided missiles ships would also play a more vanguard role in American plans.

The signal is more political than military, however. Even the country of the NATO Secretary-General is backing away from Bush-Cheney adventurism.

Juan Cole about the Valerie Plame Affair

Starting with "An 21st Century Caligula..." on November 2, 2005, on this blog, I followed the deployment of the 2003 Valerie Plame affair closely. In my opinion, the primary target of the White House smearing campaign was not, as commonly thought, Plame's husband Wilson, but the liquidation of the CIA front store in Istanbul, led by Plame.
The CIA-Agency involved, was a branch of a CIA-created American firm. Its Istanbul bureau monitored Middle East nuclear efforts. That includes: Turkey, Israel, Syria and Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. And, maybe, Saudi-Arabia and the Gulf States, as well as Egypt.

It is more than probable, that the Plame-Agency produced embarrassing information about Iraq: No nuclear program there, confirming the El-Baradei assessments. But the main embarrassment came from reports about Turkish-Israeli nuclear collaboration, that Cheney did not want to disturb, while the Iranian efforts to obtain a nuclear capacity should not, at that moment be too much published, for that would undermine the reasoning for an attack on Iraq.

Cheney saw a CIA conspiration against his designs. So, when Plame-spouse Wilson, former US ambassador to Iraq and presented as a hero in 1990, when Saddam Hussein took Western nationals as hostages, went public with a denial of Saddam's supposed deal with the Central African Republic for yellowcake, in June 2003, Cheney reacted as if the CIA were using the same methods as he does: His marginal remarks on the Wilson Op-Ed in the New York Times, revealed at the Libby trial, show a hysteric and revengeful psychopath, cought in his own intrigues.

Meanwhile, the CIA has been more or less dismantled. I have no reason to deplore that. The Agency was during 50 years across my way, in Holland and in Europe. But it's liquidation means also more freedom for the Bush cabal to manipulate information from abroad so as to lure the US into extremely dangerous adventures.

Juan Cole, the indefatigable Middle East Professor from the University of Michigan, daily blogger about Iraq and the Middle East region, produced Saturday an analysis, concise and clear, about the Plame affair. I left out the paragraphs about the details of the US juridical system. The main message is evident: The affair is not about an error of judgment, but it is about high treason. The US have been unnecessarily endangered by the Cheney intrigue. In my view, it is not by chance, that, in June 2003, Cheney obtained the (hitherto) presidential privilege of being allowed to mention undercover US agents.

Juan Cole:

Giving Aid and Comfort to the Enemy: the Plame Affair

Valerie Plame Wilson, whose career Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney wanted destroyed in a fit of pique, was finally allowed to testify before Congress on Friday.
Some in the blogosphere are arguing that the outing of Plame Wilson was an impeachable offense. Defenders of Rove and Cheney say that if they did not know that Valerie Plame Wilson was an undercover operative, then they did not break the law by trying to out her.
[..]
Moreover, they did know that Plame Wilson was involved in counter-proliferation efforts, including against Iran. By leaking her name with the intent that journalists such as Judy Miller publish it, they were conveying information about a CIA operation to Iran. That is high treason, even if they did not know she was covert. All they had to know is that she was trying to impede Iran's nuclear program, and that the Iranians did not know that that was what she was doing. You can't make her public without also letting the Iranians know.
[..]
It aided and comforted Iran to know that Valerie Plame Wilson and her dummy CIA corporation, Brewster Jennings & Associates, had been engaged in counter-proliferation efforts against it. Bush put Iran in the Axis of Evil, thus declaring it an enemy of the US.
Therefore, Rove and Cheney (and maybe Bush himself) gave aid and comfort to an enemy of these United States by a deliberate act of outing a CIA operative who was not known to Iran and whose cover and activities had not been.
That's treason. That warrants impeachment.

With an internally divided and short Democrat majority in Congress, an impeachment of the Vice-President, and the more so of the President, is not soon to be expected.
As a two-thirds majority in the Senate is necessary, this option is still far away.

The European Union, endangered by the liquidation of the CIA anti-proliferation outpost in Istanbul, should act on its own now. The nuclear configuration of the Middle East, with Israel at it's core, should be monitored daily, for it is on Europe's doorstep. US adventurism, launching Israeli (and Turkish?) nuclear strikes against Iran, would provoke a nuclear response against Europe, the South-East (Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Cyprus, Turkey) in the first place.
Where is our plan?

Een nieuwe lente en een nieuw geluid: ... 19.3.07 [NL]

Ik wil dat dit lied klinkt als het gefluit,

Dat ik vaak hoorde voor een zomernacht

In een oud stadje langs de watergracht . [..]

En menig moe man, die zijn avondmaal

Nam, luisterde, als naar een oud verhaal,

Glimlachend, en een hand die 't venster sloot,

Talmde een pooze wijl de jongen floot. 

(Herman Gorter: MEI, 1889/90) 

Pretentieus, natuurlijk, om een eerste stukje in een nieuwe blog te beginnen met een -overbekend- citaat van een van Nederland's grootste dichters. Maar ik voel me zo, vlak tegen het begin van de lente van het jaar 2007.

Oude kerselaar bloeit in mijn tuin. Eigen foto, St-Gillis Obbrussel.Ik verlangde naar de 'look and feel' van een met liefde grafisch vormgegeven web-omgeving van Squarespace. Bij e-urban, mijn grootste succes van de laatste tijd, is de site te overladen en te druk, bijna onesthetisch geworden. Hier heerst eenvoud en rechtlijnigheid. Ik heb hier mijn halfgelukte blog-pogingen van de afgelopen jaren bij elkaar gebracht. Dat wil zeggen: voorzover ze persoonlijk van aard zijn.

Om redenen die ik later wel eens zal bespreken, heb ik de afgelopen jaren moeten worstelen, om terug mijn plek te vinden in de wereld van beroep, politiek en kunst. De pensioenleeftijd heeft me ingehaald. Wat niet betekent, dat ik mijn inspanningen heb opgegeven. Maar ik kan er eindelijk minder verkrampt tegenover staan. Het is een bevrijding, her te beginnen in een rechte lijn. Niet meer toe tegeven aan de neiging om mezelf op te splitsen in 4 talen, 8 persoonlijkheden en 16 vaardigheden - alle afzonderlijk in de verkoop of wel ter verleiding.

Daarom is deze nieuwe lente voor mij tegelijk die van een nieuw geluid. Voorlopig zit deze blog nog vol met oude stukken. Maar kijk eens hoe ze samen zingen!

De reizende stadsvernieuwer ontmoet de historicus van de emancipatie van het werk(loze) volk. De wetenschappelijke onderzoeker beleeft de onverklaarbare magie van de creatieve omzetting tot kunst (beeldend, dramatisch, muzikaal) van oral history, explosieve menging van ongebruikte vaardigheden bij gewone mensen in weggestopte stadswijken. De dolzinnige en permanente uitvinding van verhullende nieuwe woorden voor hetzelfde, komt aan het licht, als je ze in vier talen vergelijkt. De econoom en institutie-man, de beleidsambtenaar van toen, de gekozen stadsbestuurder van eerder, ontdekken de enorme verspilling van institutioneel invechten en van bureaucratie. De uitsluiting van mensen die daarin de weg niet weten. En wat daartegen te doen valt.

Een fusionele opluchting. Een heideggeriaans 'Begin!'. Dank aan wie me daarbij geholpen hebben. Vergetelheid voor wie me dwarsboomden of in de steek lieten. Een open venster op de wereld.

Genoeg gefloten, een wijle te lang getalmd, alvorens dit venster te sluiten en het volgende te openen. Man is moe, maar voldaan. Daar past een poëtische vormgeving bij , die ik u en mezelf tevoren niet gunde.

Iran: US lost in contradictions

Seymour Hersh' revelations about the war preparations against Iran by the White House and the Pentagon, correct as they certainly were, refer to a former stage in the desperate housewives' story of how US foreign and security policy under George W. Bush is being made.

The ousting of Rumsfeld, the marginalization of Cheney and his cabal, gave an opening to the State Department to make a North Korea deal. Cheney pestered against it, but apparently cannot make it undone. He is touring the Middle East at this moment, trying to align Sunni guerrillas against the Iraq (and Iran) Shiites, with Saudi help.

A disastrous policy, inspired by the success of the Taliban against the Russians in Afghanistan, when they were supported by the CIA and the Pakistani ISI. We all know what came out of that: Terrorism, Bin Laden, and an unwinnable civil war in South East Afghanistan, where NATO is engaged at this moment.

This is the background against which a Washington melodrama unfolded this week. An Iraqi Government initiative, to bring together regional and global players in Baghdad (10 March and somewhere in April) in order to discuss stability in the Iraq region, will bring together the US and Iran at one table for the first time since 2003. The State Department, Wednesday, suggested strongly, that bilateral talks were not excluded. A détente? - No! The day after, the White House stated that (Financial Times of London, 1.3.07):

"There will not be bilateral talks between the United States and Iran or the United States and Syria, within the context of these meetings," said Tony Snow, the White House spokesman. The US precondition re-mained unchanged, he said, that Iran first suspend its uranium enrichment programme as called for by the United Nations Security Council.

"We want to make sure those waters don't get muddied," he said.

Engaging Syria and Iran in stabilizing the region, was one of the main conclusions of the Iraq Study Group last November. I guess that Rice has been a little bit too fast in applying her North Korean recipe to the more sensible Iraq imbroglio. Bush needs time to turn his Iraq catastrophe into something less ugly. That is what most observers think (FT):

Some analysts interpreted the mixed signals as evidence that the Bush administration was more interested in using the appearance of diplomacy to appease domestic critics and get its supplemental Iraq war budget through Congress, rather than adopt one of the key findings of the Iraq Study Group, which was to engage Iran and Syria directly. However, other analysts believed that Ms Rice was in fact trying to shift the US position in the direction of engagement with Iran, as has happened in recent weeks with North Korea, culminating with the nuclear freeze agreement reached in Beijing last month.

"It creates confusion, and when the Iranians are confused they are paralysed," commented Ray Takeyh, an analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations think-tank who believes Ms Rice is anxious to engage Iran in talks.

I believe that the new American attempt to become an arbitrator (again) in Iraq by reinforcing the Sunnis, if necessary by having sent in Salafist terrorists, comes too late. The growing internal and international pressure to abandon the damaging US refusal to engage in diplomatic exchanges with key players in a region where they have invested so much (and where they stand to loose so much), will gain the upper hand, before eventually Cheney's terrorists will be able to turn Iraq into an anti-Iranian American stooge like it was in the eighties under Saddam Hussein.

Cheney will soon come to regret the ousting of his old buddy Saddam!