Objectionable Red Lines

Face-saving measures

It’s been one of those weeks.

Let’s skip through it.

First up, nuclear proliferation (always start with the cheery stuff). As the Diary was being written, a second round of six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear crisis had kicked off in Beijing. Hopes are muted, but better than you might expect. Last time we were here, the North Korean delegation had a change of heart in the taxi ride to the airport. Once they’d entered the departure lounge they’d reneged on the agreement and promised to detonate a nuclear bomb.

Things can only get better.

This time, the talks (consisting of US, North Korean, South Korean, Japanese, Russian and Chinese delegations who sit around a hexagonal table) may involve a little more compromise (a word you can nevertheless guarantee will never be used in public by either Washington or Pyongyang). The two sides (i.e. North Korea vs. Everybody Else) are caught in a stand-off. The US refuses to be blackmailed and coerced into concessions. North Korea refuses to tell the truth about anything.

Who’d be a diplomat?

Anyway, a day before the talks started, South Korea urged the US to offer concessions to the Stalinist North in an effort to persuade the rogue state to abandon its nukes programme. “We need to give something to make further progress and help each other save face,” said President Roh Moo-hyun.

But, of course, this is the problem. Does the US want to let North Korea “save face”? Firstly, the nation simply cannot be trusted. Secondly, a freeze on nuclear production (hard enough to police as it is) would still leave Dr. Evil (otherwise known as “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il) in power. How does that help the spread of democracy and human rights?

Ah, yes, realism vs. idealism. Where have we seen this before?

The US never formally responded to Roh’s suggestion. On the opening day of talks, South Korea presented the proposal, in order to save American face. The deal would involve economic aid in exchange for a North Korean pledge to dismantle its nuclear facilities. (US and North Korean representatives even indulged in an hour-long bilateral chat after the meeting). In other words, someone has decided to trust the DPRK, or at least to act like they do.

Or, to put it another way and quote a “senior administration official” in the NYT, “If [the South Korean offer] doesn’t cross what might be considered an objectionable red line of ours, then I don’t know that we would object to what another party might want to do.”

Uh-huh.

Or, alternatively, in the words of an “Asian official” (again quoted in the NYT): “The metaphor that everybody is using is that if you are in forward gear, and if your car is moving forward, and you want to make it go backward, you have to stop the car first.”

Somebody get me an aspirin!

Going global

Of course, all this is linked to Pakistan.

How? Well, the much documented recent revelations that Pakistan was selling nuclear technology and secrets to any available dodgy black market bidders has understandably had a profound impact on proliferation watchers. The desire has strengthened to deal with North Korea now, before things get any worse.

This week, in an interview with the Financial Times, former Prime Minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto confessed that she was approached several times by Pakistani military officials and scientists in an effort to gain her permission to export nuclear technology. “It was certainly their belief that they could earn tons of money if they did this,” she said. “If they chose to sell it, only three countries would buy it [Iran, Iraq and Libya], because it wasn’t like McDonald’s hamburgers that would have a huge consumer market.”

Mmm...

Bhutto said she refused permission because the money would not be significant enough to help Pakistan’s economy and the price would be international isolation.

Are these the only reasons?

US government forensic investigators went public this week with findings that indicate a global bomb-making network used by Islamic militants. Bombs in Africa, the Middle East and Asia have used the same designs. “We know that we have the same bomb maker, or different bomb makers are using the same instructions,” a forensic expert told the NYT.

George Tenet, director of the CIA, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that compared with a year ago, the world “is equally, if not more, complicated and fraught with dangers for American interests” – a remark taken to contradict President Bush’s assertion last month in his State of the Union speech that since the fall of Saddam, the world had become “a better and safer place”.

The hatred of America that fuels al Qaida has spread to other Sunni Muslim extremists, Tenet said. The “next wave” of terrorism will endure “for the foreseeable future with or without al Qaida in the picture.”

Oh, spiffing!

Meanwhile, Pakistani officials announced this week that its military forces will launch an offensive against Taliban and al Qaida forces on its border with Afghanistan some time in the next few weeks (when they’ve had time to hide).

Is Pakistan getting serious about fighting the “war on terror”? Maybe so. The idea, apparently, is to drive the Qaida members over the border and into the arms (and weaponry) of the US military – a “hammer and anvil” operation – thereby halting Taliban and Qaida efforts to disrupt the scheduled June elections.

Twenty-five al Qaida suspects were seized along with weapons and ammunition in a six-hour military raid around the town of Wana on Tuesday. Seems like Pakistani and US troops are going after bin Laden with all they’ve got. In the words of Lieutenant Colonel Beevers, spokesman for the US coalition forces in Afghanistan, “”We are going to continue to present the leadership of al Qaida ... with impossible situations that they are not going to be able to get around, through, under or over.”

Even Joyce Rumsfeld, wife of US Defense Secretary Don, joined the effort this week, arriving in Khabul for a conference on women’s rights in post-Taliban Afghanistan.

Rummy must mean business.

Death and paradise

Oh, and a quick reminder from the other side.

Ayman al-Zawahari, bin Laden’s deputy, taunted the US in a tape broadcast on Al Jazeera this week. Iraq and Afghanistan are now fundamentalist strongholds, he claimed. Not convinced? Then “from where are we carrying out attacks on your forces and your agents, from where are we sending our messages which defy you and reveal your lies?”

“Bush, fortify your defences and intensify your security measures,” al-Zawahari warned, “because the Muslim nation, which sent brigades to New York and Washington, has decided to send you one brigade after another, carrying death and seeking paradise.”

And that’s not all. France came under attack for its ban on headscarves in public schools which “is new evidence of the extent of the Crusaders’ hatred for Muslims, even if they brag about democracy, freedom and human rights. France, the country of liberty, defends only the liberty of nudity debauchery and decay, while fighting chastity and modesty.”

Back-up to the future

Fed up with all this, Harpreet Devi, a taxi driver from the Indian state of Punjab, has been driving in reverse for two years.

The story appeared on the BBC World Service. It’s quite complex.

Devi has what he calls a “reverse philosophy”, the core principle of which is “that you can improve a situation by going into reverse.”

One day, a couple of years back, Mr. Devi’s car broke down. He was forced to drive home in reverse. “That was the time that I thought, ‘why not think about specialising in reverse?’” he told the BBC.

There’s a logic to this, sort of. Devi wants to improve ties between India and Pakistan. For some reason, he thinks driving backwards will encourage the two nations to return relations “back to what they were before independence”.

The BBC says Devi hits speeds of up to 85kph, and is aiming to break the 100kph barrier. The chief minister of Punjab has granted Devi special permission to drive his streets in reverse. The police can do nothing.

“I do have pains in the neck – frequent pains in the neck – and I have had severe vomiting in past,” Devi said. “I have got a severe backbone problem from driving so fast in reverse, because my whole body gets contorted.” But “to achieve something, you have to do something. So it’s right that I should be experiencing pain.”

Ayatollah rate nothing

Finally, let’s just hear some of the excuses for this week’s sham election in Iran.

With 2,530 reformist candidates banned from the election, turnout was understandably low (somewhere between 40-50%, 33% or lower in Tehran), though not if you believe the ruling Guardian Council (who claimed over 60%).

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hailed the poll as a democratic triumph, insisting the election was “completely credible”, just like his statements.

“Those who lost the elections were America, Zionism and the enemies of the Iranian nation,” he said in the week’s most tediously predictable statement. “The judgement of American imperialists who have been talking nonsense about these elections is absolutely worthless.”

Not a single woman has been elected to the parliament.

In the words of one Northern Iranian man on national TV (as quoted in the International Herald Tribune): “We can gouge out the eyes of the enemy. Each vote is like a slap to American’s face.”

Somebody needs some lessons in democracy.

Even better, how about this from Khamenei: “I think this election is more important than the former ones because the counterrevolutionaries are making efforts to stop people from voting.”

And even better than that, here’s what Ayatollah Ali Meshkini had to say on the subject: “Anyone who fails in the slightest way to fulfil this duty [voting] will be answerable (to God) in this life and the next.”

Two days before the polls opened, the last remaining pro-reform newspapers were shut by the state.

Conservatives and hardliners inevitably won a large victory and now will take full control of parliament. “[T]he enemies of this country … woke up in a cold sweat,” trumpeted the conservative Kayhan newspaper.

One last word from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: these elections were a “national and an Islamic epic in the true meaning.”

On Monday a fist fight broke out in parliament. The EU is pondering sanctions.

Don’t miss

The end / Foul play in Goa / Earth II

Figures of the week

325 & 80,000,000
The number of years in prison and the fine in US dollars faced by former Enron chief Jeffrey Skilling.

21
The number of “high value and moderate value” sites suspected of housing illicit weapons in Iraq that were not reported by the CIA to the UN before the Iraq war, thereby hindering the search by the UN weapons inspectors.

Quotes of the week

“Instead of responding by acquiescing, we see volunteers are still in line to join the police. They’re still in line to join the army. They’re leaning forward. They’re taking losses, and God bless them for it.”
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld saluting the bravery of the Iraqi people.

“I have made it abundantly clear to the Coast Guard that we will turn back any refugee that attempts to reach our shore.”
President George W. Bush on the worsening crisis in Haiti.

“An awful lot of our spies might speak Russian but they are not so much for Arabic.”
British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott lamenting the end of the Cold War.

“I have seen in the last year communities that contain people who came to me and whispered in my ear, saying simply, not, ‘Should we leave?’ but ‘When should we leave?’ My God, what a question!”
Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate, addressing a day long conference on anti-Semitism in Europe at the EU HQ in Brussels.

“It’s going to be the year of the sharp elbow and the quick tongue.”
President George W. Bush on 2004

Contact the Diary: dominic.hilton@openDemocracy.net