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By coincidence, this week I’ve been reading Arang Keshavarzian’s Bazaar and State in Iran: The Politics of the Tehran Marketplace, an extremely theory-heavy political science monograph examining the effects on political mobilization of transformations within the Tehran Bazaar since the Iranian Revolution. It usefully examines the bazaar, not as a unity, but as a series of networks created by the space of the bazaar and the ways of doing business, and argues that under the Pahlavi regime, these networks gave rise to a “cooperative hierarchy” which allowed for mass mobilization of the type seen in the revolution, whereas the policies of the Islamic Republic have, largely as unintended side effects, reduced the importance of bazaar space and given rise to new “coercive hierarchies” which are related to patronage ties, tend to be segmented among different sections of the bazaar, and do not have the same social force as the pre-revolutionary bonds. This new situation means that bazaar strikes tend to be of short duration and limited to certain areas.
The current bazaar strikes have had an impressive duration, but how do they fit this pattern? Reading articles closely, one finds:
“A strike that began last week at the gold and textile sections of the bazaar in Tehran as a protest against a government plan to increase the income tax on merchants grew on Tuesday to other sections, according to the Web site Khabar Online.”
“On Sunday, subways heading to the bazaar were relatively empty. Whole swaths of the market were shut down…
“News websites said authorities arrested the head of the union of fabric traders in Tehran’s old bazaar for allegedly speaking to merchants through a loudspeaker to assemble in Sabzeh Maidan Square, the main gate of the old bazaar, against the tax hike.
“Some Iranian youth joined the merchants in protest at Sabzeh Maidan. Eyewitnesses report that when a student attempted to record the scene, police beat him with a baton and arrested him, spiriting him away to an unknown location. Witnesses claim that plainclothes policemen and government security forces then launched tear gas bombs at protesters…
“Some merchants continue to pay the taxes. A man who has been selling scarves in the bazaar for more than 40 years said he will comply with the law…
“In the sections of the bazaar still open, electricity brown-outs kept plunging the shops in darkness, even during daylight, and the merchants could be seen angrily fanning themselves with small hand-held fans, made in China.”
One can see while this is a significant event, there is clearly a segmented element to its organization, and many shops, apparently those in certain areas which almost certainly sell similar products remain open. Organization is difficult even such a significant grievance on the part of the entire merchant class. Some unknown number of students are also involving themselves. Strikingly, Reformist leaders seem invisible, perhaps because they see the new taxes as necessary even if they condemn the policies of the oil boom years that led to the current situation.
Matt Yglesias reacts to news about the Obama administration’s growing concern with the radicalized insurgency in Somalia – the result of a process of radicalization that was the predicted outcome of the Bush administration’s decision to back Ethiopia’s invasion of its longtime rival in the name of “helping” Somalia and, ironically, combatting radicalization:
At the time, we were intervening on behalf of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government against an Islamic Courts Union headed by Sharif Ahmed. The ICU, once crushed, splintered into various faction, the most radical of which, al-Shabaab, is now fighting against a new version of the TFG which is currently headed by none other than Sharif Ahmed himself! Military adventures are frequently counterproductive, but rarely in such direct and clearcut a way as this. Now the best-case scenario is Somalia ruled by the very figure we intervened to boot from power.
This military intervention was, naturally, hailed by conservative foreign policy pundits as a great triumph in counterterrrorism policy – a model to be replicated becauase the Ethiopians showed such a blatant disregard for civilian casualties and human rights concerns. If only we could be more like them, it was argued.
Of course, we haven’t actually captured or killed any high ranking al-Qaeda operatives by and through this operation, but on the upside, a lot of Somalis are dead (and the Ethiopians aren’t concerned in the slightest!), we’ve swelled the ranks of an al-Qaeda affiliated outfit, increased its prestige and fueled anti-American anger due to the destruction we helped sow.
Time to dust of the old “Mission Accomplished” banner. But seriously, war is no way to go about counterterrorism. That is basic, if often disregarded, knowledge.
“Meanwhile, industrial workers are increasingly restive. According to the Iran Labor Report, a Web publication of Iranian labour activists, 180 workers at the Alborz china company in the northwestern city of Qazvin staged a demonstration Jul. 6, complaining that they had been paid only twice in the last 12 months. They had previously protested on May 1.
“Kevan Harris, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who frequently travels to Iran, noted that the head of a government-run trade union in the northern city of Tabriz complained recently that workers there have ‘reported not receiving wages on time, receiving below the minimum wage, no payment of overtime, being cut out of government sponsored entitlements such as food vouchers, and moving towards temporary contract labour’…
“A major test is likely to come when the government phases out subsidies of consumer staples and replaces them with cash payments. The subsidy reform, already postponed several times, is now due to be implemented in late September.”
One school of thought felt that the regime was so repressive in 2009 because it knew 2010 would be a year of austerity.
“With shops that sell everything from herbs and spices to carpets and gems now firmly closed, Tehran’s Grand Bazaar is on strike with merchants warning that higher taxes could force them to shut down for good.
“The usually bustling corridors of the centuries old market, known as ‘Iran’s economic pulse’, have been deserted for the past week in a standoff between the hard-line government and merchants. Some shops were draped with black banners in protest.
“Work stoppages are rare in Iran but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s decision to raise the rate of Value Added Tax (VAT) on goods set off a strike that merchants have threatened to extend despite a government offer to suspend the increase…
“Iran’s economy is over 60 percent dependent on oil income and the sharp fall in oil prices threatens its finances. The government had hoped to fill the shortfall by increasing tax.
“The tax forms part of wider economic reforms planned by the government, including a bill that will end subsidies on energy and food.”
It’s not easy being a Republican these days. Ask Mitt Romney. Ask Dick Lugar.
The New START treaty is a particular challenge. It revives and renews the arms control relationship between the United States and Russia, which flourished under Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. But it is a treaty, and Republican common wisdom developed under Jesse Helms George W. Bush was that treaties encroached on American sovereignty and therefore should be eschewed. Further, the Congressional common wisdom under John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Newt Gingrich is that President Obama must be denied any successes.
The Senate must ratify treaties with a two-thirds majority. That means that at least eight Republicans must vote to ratify New START. Party discipline has been strict on most legislation so far, so one might think that New START has no chance if the current Republican party discipline holds.
But, it has been said, politics ends at the water’s edge. And Republicans have supported arms control in the past, most especially when the nuclear arms race was on fast forward. Further, arms control has been a project of both Republican and Democratic administrations, with treaty ratification by both Republican and Democratic Senates.
The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks began in November 1969, under President Richard Nixon, who signed the resulting Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Leonid Brezhnev in 1972. The treaty was ratified in November 1972 by a Senate composed of 54 Democrats, 38 Republicans, 1 Independent, and 1 Conservative. President Gerald Ford continued the talks after ratification. President George W. Bush withdrew from the treaty in December 2001.
The SALT II treaty was negotiated under President Jimmy Carter. It was the first treaty actually to roll back numbers of delivery vehicles and a turning point in the arms race. Carter and Brezhnev signed the treaty in June 1979. Congress (58 Democrats, 31 Democrats, 1 Independent) did not ratify it because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The first strategic arms reduction proposal was presented by President Ronald Reagan in 1982. That was an interesting time; Reagan was beginning a big defense buildup. The war in Afghanistan was going badly, and their defense spending was crowding out consumer needs. A series of aged Communist Party hacks headed the government and quickly died. It wasn’t until Mikhail Gorbachev became First Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985 that Reagan had a partner he could negotiate with. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) was signed in July 1991 by President George H. W. Bush and Secretary Gorbachev.
Then the Soviet Union came apart for once and all in December 1991, and some details had to be ironed out, like those nukes in the new countries of Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine. So it wasn’t until 1994 that the treaty was ratified. That Senate had 52 Republicans and 48 Democrats.
A START II treaty followed on, signed by President George H. W. Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin and ratified by a Republican Senate, but it never came into force, partly because the Gingrich-Helms Republican missile defense uproar of the nineties was beginning.
George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin signed the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) in 2002, Bush under duress because the Russians didn’t believe in his Texas handshake and wanted something in writing. Another Republican Senate ratified it. SORT has no verification provisions and uses the provisions of START I. Which brings us up to New START.
It has largely been Republican presidents and Senates that have developed and approved treaties. The Democrats kept the ball rolling, so reducing the world’s nuclear arsenals has been a bipartisan effort. And I didn’t mention that Reagan and Gorbachev almost agreed to eliminate both countries’ nuclear arsenals by the year 2000.
But that sort of bipartisanship is now anathema to most of the Republican Party.
Senator Richard Lugar has been a senator since 1976, when arms control was getting rolling. He’s worked closely with Joe Biden when Biden was a senator on arms control and, when the Soviet Union came apart, on programs to keep the Soviet legacy nuclear arms under lock and key and the scientists occupied with other things than freelancing for, say, Libya. He is now the ranking Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Enter Mitt Romney, not a senator but presumably interested in the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. It’s looking like Sarah Palin is getting ready to run too. Today’s Republican Party is driven by Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the Tea Partiers, aided and abetted by the congressional caucus that believes that wrecking the country will lead to voter disgust with the party currently in power, making the Republicans electorally victorious. National interest seems to play no part in their calculation, as it did for the Republicans who supported arms control from the 1970s on.
So Romney, seeing the difficulty in being a Republican with the party’s pacifistic history of giving up its mighty nuclear arsenal for the mere historically-backed assurance that the Soviet Union would do the same, decided to go for the Palin-Limbaugh-Beck school of making it up as you go but keeping it aggressive. If you want a line-by-line fisking of Romney’s piece, Fred Kaplan does a good job.
And then Senator Richard Lugar weighed in. He didn’t point out the dumb in Romney’s op-ed the way Kaplan did. He summons the history by listing the Republican elder statesmen who support New START and firmly but diplomatically undercuts some of the same points in Romney’s op-ed that Kaplan does. And he adds a very good point: where Romney criticizes New START for not addressing Russia’s tactical nukes, Lugar points out that if New START is not ratified, there is no way that we can address those tactical nukes.
Now Romney has a real problem. He is being called out by an elder statesman of his own party. He could go the he-man route, standing up for our strong defense and saying whatever he feels he needs to in order to seem as strong as Sarah Palin when Putin is raising up his head to fly over her house. But such a response is likely to diminish him.
But Lugar has his own set of problems. He is one of a rapidly declining breed, the moderate, internationalist Republican. Others have been voted down in favor of Republicans who are more acceptable to the Tea Party. Lugar may see ratification of New START and, perhaps, of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty as the capstones of a long career, so he may be willing to let the chips fall where they may in the election of 2012 and continue his principled and intelligent stand for arms control.
Matt Duss provides some useful background information on Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, whose death over the weekend, and subsequent tweet regarding his passing from 20 year CNN veteran Octavia Nasr, has created something of a controversey:
On Sunday, the influential Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah passed away in Lebanon. A source of religious guidance for thousands of Shiites, including many members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraq’s Da’wa Party (which he helped found), Fadlallah was well known for a number of relatively liberal views, such as his support for women’s rights, and fatwas against the brutal practices of female circumcision and honor killings.
Though he was an early supporter of Hezbollah (often mistakenly identified as “the spiritual guide of Hezbollah“), and justified the use of suicide bombings as legitimate resistance to occupation in Lebanon, Palestine, and elsewhere, he later criticized the group for its close relationship with Iran, and distanced himself from Ayatollah Khomeini’s system of velayet-e faqih (rule of the clerics.) He also strongly condemned the September 11 attacks as acts of terrorism. Though by no means a progressive (at the time of his death Fadlallah remained on the U.S. State Department’s list of designated terrorists), his unorthodox views earned him condemnation from more conservative clerics as a tool of the West to undermine Islam.
Here is the tweet in question:
Those words created a firestrom in neoconservative media outlets, and CNN reacted quickly to that criticism by sacking Nasr – despite her long tenure with the network and admirable work during that period. Here is her explanation of her tweet:
I used the words “respect” and “sad” because to me as a Middle Eastern woman, Fadlallah took a contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman’s rights. He called for the abolition of the tribal system of “honor killing.” He called the practice primitive and non-productive. He warned Muslim men that abuse of women was against Islam. [...]
Sayyed Fadlallah. Revered across borders yet designated a terrorist. Not the kind of life to be commenting about in a brief tweet. It’s something I deeply regret.
Regardless of her apology, this should not have been a fireable offense. Not by a longshot. Andrew Sullivan detects a pattern:
Froomkin was fired for opposing torture a little too passionately; Weigel was forced out because his private emails revealed he was not acceptable to the partisan right; Frum is cut off from conservative blogads funding; Moulitsas is barred from MSNBC for criticizing Joe Scarborough; and Octavia Nasr is fired for offending the pro-Israel lobby over a tweet expressing sadness at the death of a Hezbollah leader.
What each of these firing offenses have in common is that they angered and offended the neocon Right….Have there ever been any viewpoint-based firings of establishment journalists by The Liberal Media because of comments which offended liberals? None that I can recall.
While some might be tempted to argue that Nasr’s praise for a leader that endorsed the use of terrorism in certain circumstances is a bridge too far for a media personality, there is a glaring double standard. Consider this recent episode:
…[I]n an interview with Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni, the New York Times’ Deborah Solomon demonstrates the flagrant double standard that exists in the American media in regard to pro-Israel versus anti-Israel terrorism:
SOLOMON: Your parents were among the country’s founders.
LIVNI: They were the first couple to marry in Israel, the very first. Both of them were in the Irgun. They were freedom fighters, and they met while boarding a British train. When the British Mandate was here, they robbed a train to get the money in order to buy weapons.
SOLOMON: It was a more romantic era. Is your mom still alive?
What’s amazing here is not only does Solomon neglect to challenge Livni’s characterization of her parents’ membership in a terrorist group as “freedom fight[ing],” Solomon herself volunteers further assistance in the whitewash. Even if this is a clumsy attempt at sarcasm, can you imagine any mainstream American journalist performing this service in regard to Hamas terrorism? I doubt it.
While Livni may prefer to think that the Irgun weren’t terrorists, and Solomon would like to help, it’s worth noting that both the New York Times and the World Zionist Congress saw things very differently at the time. On December 24, 1946, the Times reported “the World Zionist Congress in its final session here strongly condemned by a vote early today terrorist activities in Palestine and “the shedding of innocent blood as a means of political warfare” by the groups Irgun and the Stern Gang.
I very much doubt that the civilians who were murdered by the Irgun at the King David Hotel, nor those massacred and ethnically cleansed at Deir Yassin and Jaffa, nor the hundreds killed in various other Irgun attacks look upon that era as particularly romantic. Their memories deserve far better.
One wonders where the outcry demanding Solomon’s resignation is. Actually, one doesn’t wonder at all.
But in some ways, this farce gets even worse when one puts Fadallah’s life, death and religious influence in context. Back to Matt Duss for that:
The punchline here is that Sayyed Fadlallah was the religious guide, or marja’ al-taqlid, to numerous members of Iraq’s ruling Da’wa Party, including Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. This means that they looked to Fadlallah as a source of religious authority on matters relating to correct Islamic life and practice, and committed to following his edicts on those matters. It also meant that, in October 2008, when Fadlallah (along with several other ayatollahs) condemned the U.S.-Iraq security agreement in its then-current form and decreed that any agreement should call for an unconditional withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, the agreement had to be re-negotiated.
As I wrote at the time, the power of these ayatollahs to effectively scuttle an agreement of significant import to the security of the United States throws into stark relief what the Bush administration created in Iraq: a government dominated by Shia religious parties who take their guidance – and derive much of their legitimacy – from the opinions and edicts of a small handful of senior Shia clerics.
That aside, here’s the neocon logic, as best I can explain: When a reporter acknowledges the passing of a revered, if controversial figure in a way that doesn’t sufficiently convey what a completely evil terrorist neocons think that figure was – that’s unacceptable. But when the United States spends nearly a trillion dollars, loses over four thousand of its own troops and over a hundred thousand Iraqis to establish a new government largely dominated by that same "terrorist" avowed acolytes – that’s victory.
The fact that neconservatives ever wielded such influence over US foreign policy would be comedic in its era of error if the results were not so heartbreakingly tragic. The fact that they still dictate foreign policy in the GOP is terrifying. That they are able to cow our establishment media into adopting an incoherent and unjust double standard is nothing short of shameful.
But make no mistake, if and when this country elects another Republican President, the neocons will be back at the helm of this nation’s foreign policy. One wonders if we can survive another such bout.
Some good news (in a qaulified sense) for a change from Joel Wing regarding the Obama administration’s fealty to the SOFA-related Iraq timetable, as first agreed to by the Bush administration:
U.S. forces are scheduled to draw down to 50,000 by September 1, 2010 following President Obama’s withdrawal plan. It’s hardly been noticed, but U.S. troops are almost at that level already.
Since 2009 over 60,000 U.S. soldiers have been pulled out of Iraq. In January 2009 when Obama first took office, there were 142,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. After that, several thousand were withdrawn every couple months, going down to 140,000 in February, 137,000 in March, 134,000 in May, 130,000 in June, etc. According to the spokesman for U.S. forces in Iraq, there are currently 77,500 U.S. personnel in Iraq as of July 2010. [...]
Pulling out the troops isn’t the hardest part of the process, it’s moving or transferring all the equipment. 1.1 million items have already been shipped out of Iraq, with 1.7 million in 405 bases still leftover. Anything that’s not considered essential can be turned over to the Iraqis. Each base can donate between $25-$30 billion to the locals. So far 500,000 items have been given to Iraqis as a result. The rest can be sold to Iraqi businessmen, who then sell it to the public. Some Iraqis also claim that the Iraqi military illegally sells off some of the equipment to make money on the side. [...]
By the end of 2011 all U.S. personnel are supposed to withdraw from Iraq. That process is already well underway. After that date, it’s likely that Baghdad will ask for some continued American support however, because it’s unlikely to have a military capable of defending the country from foreign threats. That means U.S. personnel will remain in the country for several more years, past the final drawdown period.
This otherwise positive news is only so in a qualified sense because while we are leaving Iraq and that is for the good of all involved, unfortunately we are leaving behind a country that is still wracked by violence, riddled with corruption, ruled by a regime that pays little mind to human rights and civil liberties and with a traumitized and, in some instances, radicalized population that must embrace a conciliatory mindset in order to broach the stark ethnic and sectarian divisions that threaten to erupt in ever increasing bouts of conflict.
While the invasion set these tragic events in motion, staying past this deadline would not have helped their resolution. In fact, the imminent departure itself was ameliorative. While it is fashionable to deride timetables with respect to Afghanistan, the fact that a reasonable firm schedule was imposed on the US presence in Iraq did much to tamp down the anti-occupation insurgencies, and focus the attention of the Iraqi government on the task of managing the country post-departure. That created positive momentum in more ways than one.
Whether that momentum will be enough to drag Iraq away from the many pitfalls that loom remains to be seen. Nevertheless, even this macabre denouement is probably more than we can hope for in terms of the Obama administration’s present Afghanistan policy. Even with the 2011 start date on the horizon, Afghanistan is far more fractured than Iraq. Of course, their relative starting points determined the present discrepancies as much as any other factor. In each case, disengagement is the best option.
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