Iran: Edging Nearer the Brink of War

It was one of his campaign promises — to get rid of “one of the worst negotiated deals of any kind that I have ever seen” — not that his base had ever asked for it. Itching to end the deal that put Iran’s nuclear development on hold, after acquiescing to its continuance in two mandated quarterly reviews, President Trump in October 2017 decertified the inspection reports, setting in motion the abrogation of an agreement that had taken almost two years to negotiate.

His national security team had strongly recommended that he keep the U.S. in the accord. In a statement that September, over 80 disarmament experts urged him to honor the U.S. pledge, calling the agreement a “net plus for international nuclear nonproliferation”. That the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which conducts non-proliferation nuclear inspections on site in Iran, had all along reported that Iran was in compliance with the terms of the pact was

of no moment to the president. Neither had he concern for the five nations — Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China — who were allies with the U.S. in the deal and wanted, then and now, to preserve it. U.N. ambassador at the time Nikki Haley said at the United Nations, “This is about U.S. national security. This is not about European security. This is not about anyone else”, which left the five nations that alongside us laboriously worked out the Iran accord stunned.

Shortly after backing out of the deal, Trump reimposed the sanctions that had been dropped as part of the moratorium, and adopted a program of “maximum pressure”. The European allies, already cutting business deals with and selling goods to Iran, had no appetite to jettison the new opportunity that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) had afforded them. As a riposte to Trump, Germany, France, and the U.K. scrambled to keep the accord alive, setting up a framework named Instex to skirt the sanctions with a barter trading scheme that does not use the dollar nor need the international funds transfer system. It just began operations in June with Russia showing interest. All the while, to encourage the Europeans, Iran stayed in compliance, as verified by the IAEA.

In May, Trump withdrew waivers that had allowed those and other nations to continue doing business with Iran without the risk of being sanctioned. So we’ve seen this White House ally with Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates against Iran, and turn its back on former European allies.

lashing out

The Iranian economy has been hard hit by the president’s maximum pressure which the Iranian rulers call “economic warfare”. Since his administration reinstated sanctions last year, Iran’s oil exports of 2.5 million barrels a day before the sanctions have fallen by more than half. The White House objective is to drive oil exports to zero. The Iranian currency, the rial, has lost more than 60% of its value against the dollar in the past year. The Iranian economy contracted by 4% in 2018 and is expected to contract by another 6% this year.

The broken economy has caused Iran to retaliate. Six tankers have been hit, flagged by a number of nations, and a $130 million U.S. Global Hawk drone was brought down by a surface-to-air missile launched from the Iranian coast along the gulf of Oman. A British warship had to scatter three Iranian boats trying to block a U.K.-bound tanker from passing through the strait. The U.S. shot down a small Iranian drone that had come within a thousand yards of the USS Boxer, and now the Iranians have commandeered a British tanker, after having towed off another belonging to the United Arab Emirates.

Iran is pressing the European coalition to move faster on its trade plan, showing what could happen to their oil supplies and the attacks say as well that if Iran’s exports are halted by U.S. sanctions, oil exports of the Saudis and Gulf Arabs can expect the same.

After the downing of the U.S. drone, a counterattack by the U.S. was called off by President Trump with only minutes to spare out of the his concern for loss of life compared to the loss of an unmanned aircraft. “I find it hard to believe it was intentional, if you want to know the truth”, Trump said. “I think that it could have been somebody who was loose and stupid that did it”. He is certainly the wiser by now. He instead struck back with further sanctions in late June, this time against the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself and the lucrative offices he commands.

The president is reported as not wanting war — another Middle Eastern war could doom his re-election — but he has put himself right at its edge by his increasingly aggressive actions aimed at destroying the economy of a country of 80 million.

breaking out

In June, IAEA inspectors warned that Iran was boosting production of nuclear fuel. On July 1 it was reported that their stockpile of raw uranium had exceeded the cap permitted by the deal. A few days later, President Hassan Rouhani, claiming Iran has the right to do so under the agreement if any of the parties breached, said they would enrich uranium beyond the 3.67% allowed and in “any amount that we want”, the first step toward a nuclear bomb.

The JCPOA doesn’t rein in Iran’s missile testing, or centrifuge research, and doesn’t curtail their trouble-making around the Middle East, from Syria to Yemen to Iraq. It is an arms control agreement, its only objective. It may not cover everything, but it stopped Iran when on the verge of making an assumed nuclear weapon in 2015.

But the president considers himself an expert: “I’ve studied the issue in great detail. I would say, actually, greater by far than anybody else. Believe me. Oh, believe me”. More, he therefore thinks, than even John Kerry who negotiated the deal over almost two years. “If you look at the deal that Biden and President Obama signed”, Trump averred, Iran “would have access, free access, to nuclear weapons in just a very short period of time”. He has made that statement repeatedly. The accord halted Iran’s nuclear development for 10 to 15 years dating from its 2015 signing. Cancelling the agreement has caused that short time to be right now, as we see Iran resume uranium enrichment, so Trump maintaining that reversion to no agreement at all makes less than no sense.

It is legitimate to think the voiding of so important an agreement shows Trump’s willingness to damage America’s national security only for the purpose of exacting vengeance on Barach Obama for being the nation’s first black president, yet another act by Trump in his mania to destroy every accomplishment of Obama’s presidency.

it didn’t have to come to this

Trita Parsi is president of the Iranian-American Council. He says that after the U.S. overran Iraq in 2003, the Iranians sent the U.S. a letter offering negotiations on almost all issues of contention between the two countries. Iran would agree to stop support of Islamic jihad and Hamas, and offer full transparency of its nuclear program. But in its triumphalist mood, the Bush Administration and its neoconservative coterie would go one better. They aspired to regime change in Iran. That had worked so well in Iraq.

Uranium is enriched in spinning centrifuges. The George W. Bush administration decreed that Iran could not have any enrichment at all — “not one centrifuge spins”, was the edict of the State Department’s top proliferation official. Bush’s administration refused to negotiate unless all Iran’s centrifuges stopped spinning. So the few hundred working in 2003 expanded to thousands by the time Obama took over.

It happened again with Obama. He asked Brazil to see if it could resurrect a deal with Iran that had been proposed in 2008 and 2009. We had offered to take Iran’s lower enriched uranium and transfer it to Russia, which would produce fuel pads for creating Iran’s medical isotopes, the country’s avowed reason for enriching. Brazil succeeded, but at the same time that the U.N. Security Council voted sanctions against Iran. The Obama Administration opted for sanctions instead of the deal. So the centrifuge count swelled to 19,000.

breakout”

“In March of 2012, the United States and five other nations accepted a January offer by Iran to enter into talks, with Iran willing to discuss its uranium enrichment program for the first time. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believed that talks were just “running the clock”, a delaying tactic while Iran worked on a bomb. He argued that Iran should suspend uranium enrichment as a precondition to any talks. The Obama White House said that would end the talks before they began.

With 19,000 centrifuges spinning and an enriched stockpile already in hand, Iran could create enough enriched uranium for a single bomb in a mere 2-3 months — the so-called “breakout time”. The U.S. and negotiating partners were entirely focused on lengthening the breakout time. They set their sights on assuring that if an accord could be hammered out but Iran someday chose to break it, at least a year would be needed before breakout could be reached.

An interim accord was struck by January 2014 that gave Iran modest sanctions relief in exchange for them suspending the most sensitive aspects of their nuclear program. Negotiations went on for a scheduled six months. Talks were extended another four months to late November. That date came and went with little progress and another extension of the status quo was agreed to, this one to the end of June of 2015. After last minute attempts at re-trading by the Ayatollah, the document was signed July 15th 2015.

All of which is to point out that the negotiations were a protracted process, with Iran toughing it out with its “resistance economy”. Yet all Republicans in the Senate, joined by 10 Democrats, pressed for a tougher set of sanctions to bring Iran to heel and end what they considered to be stalling while Iran advanced weapon development in secret locations. A prevalent view was that Obama, too, was stalling so as to avoid military action against Iran’s nuclear advances so as to hand the problem to the next president.

Rather than everyone stalling, the negotiators were in a breakneck hurry. There was worry that the existing sanctions would collapse, ending any Iranian need for the nascent deal. More than the six negotiating nations had adhered to the sanctions, but countries such as Japan, South Korea and India were restive about indefinitely injuring their economies. Another layer of sanctions coming out of Congress risked that Iran, having reached breakout capability, would simply go for the bomb.

a better deal

Netanyahu — “a prime minister who’s never seen a war he didn’t want our country to fight”, said California Rep. Jared Huffman — lobbied hard to undermine Obama. He had even gone behind Obama’s back by inviting himself to speak before a joint session of Congress, which gave him the customary standing ovation in appreciation of campaign funding by the Israel lobby. “I think a better deal is possible”, Netanyahu said to everyone who would listen. Tougher sanctions would force “Iran to choose between lifting the sanctions and rolling back, truly rolling back, their nuclear capability”. The Obama administration, knowing the intransigence of the Iranian negotiators, assumed the opposite, that if more sanctions were added, Iran would build its bomb.

the actual deal

When negotiations began, the hope was to eliminate the centrifuges altogether and ship the enriched uranium out of the country. But the Iranians tested the U.S. and its partners’ eagerness to strike a deal by just saying ‘no’ to one after another demand. “As soon as we got into the real negotiations with them, we understood that any final deal was going to involve some domestic enrichment capability,” a senior U.S. official said. Only 5,060 less efficient first generation machines could stay on line, restricted for 15 years to enriching no higher than 3.67% in U-235 isotope content, a level suitable for power plants and medical isotopes, but nowhere near 20% level needed for a nuclear bomb. Iran decreed that the rest of the 19,000 centrifuges were not to be destroyed, only mothballed, or no deal.

They insisted the enriched uranium be diluted rather than shipped out of the country. Creation of a heavy water reactor meant to extract plutonium was halted. The Ayatollah ruled out inspection of military bases. “It must absolutely not be allowed for them to infiltrate into the country’s defense and security domain”, he said. That left the Parchin base, suspected of conducting research on nuclear weapons, off limits.

Nowhere in the talks were restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missile program considered. The Obama administration agreed not to bring it up despite no country lacking an atomic warhead ever having been interested in developing ICBMs. Rouhani tweeted “In #Geneva agreement world powers surrendered to Iranian nation’s will”.

The defects of the final agreement were real and worrisome, but the notion that a better deal could have been struck took no notice of how long the negotiations had taken with repeated deadline extensions as the parties fought over final terms and language. Detractors wanted return of hostages, renouncement of threats to Israel, prohibition of missile development, promises to make nice in the region. “Does this deal resolve all other threats Iran poses to its neighbors in the world? No”, said Obama. “Does it do more than anyone has done before to make sure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon? Yes. And that was our top priority from the start.”

Those opposed were astonished at a deal that would allow Iran to emerge a decade later with the full capacity to create a nuclear bomb, never mind that without the deal Iran could produce enough material for a bomb right then and there in three months. “They were months away from it in 2013”, said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va) in 2015 when the deal was before Congress. “Could you imagine a point at year 15 or 25 where they might do something bad? Yes, you could …but remember that we were at that point two years ago”, before the interim accord froze Iran’s activities so that talks could proceed. The deal bought time. How to explain alarm for the future greater than alarm for the immediate present?

a tough road ahead

The maximum pressure campaign has served to breed solidarity and embolden the hard-liners in Iran. Our fond notion that the people of Iran long for relations with the West has turned to anger with inflation crossing 50%. The urban public may have moved away from the religious theme of the revolution, but they have now turned to the nationalism of the Revolutionary Guard, angered at classification by the U.S. as a terrorist organization. They see the guard as their best defense against the United States. An Iranian poll, if truthful, says 72% of the people do not think Iran should negotiate with the West because it is untrustworthy.

There is no hint of a willingness by Iran to negotiate a replacement deal, and Trump has never spelled out what he seeks other than the usual “better deal”. He, with Mike Pompeo and John Bolton at his side, really should review the history outlined above of how limited were the concessions that took 20 months for six nations to wrest from Iran before they assume forging a much better deal with Iran will be simple. And yet there was Pompeo at the Heritage Foundation in May of last year laying out 12 demands that Iran must accede to. Among them:

 Ending enrichment of uranium—a ban imposed on no other country. The non-proliferation treaty confers an “inalienable right” to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
 Giving international inspectors “unqualified access” to “all sites throughout” Iran—a license for espionage that no country would accept.
 Halting tests and development of ballistic and cruise missiles.
 Ending support for Syria, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen.
 Disarming its militias in Iraq.
 Ceasing all threats against Israel.

It reads like unconditional surrender for a war not yet fought.

If Hostilities Break Out, Iran Controls the Geography

The many provocations in recent weeks, capped by the downing of a costly drone, are sure to provoke a military response from the U.S. should Iran continue. We’re full of bluster with Trump talking of “obliteration” and “end of Iran”, but, having
Where the drone was brought down in the Gulf of Oman with the Straits of Hormuz to its west.

pulled back after the drone’s loss, there will be pressure to respond militarily if an incident causes any loss of American life.

Trump wants to avoid war, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wants to use threats of military force only to drive Iran to new negotiations, we’re told. But then there’s National Security Adviser John Bolton, the sort who never wore a uniform but has no qualms about sending young Americans to risk their lives, war being his preferred diplomacy. And he wants to go all the way to regime change.

With the focus on a threat in Iraq, have any of them considered Iran’s geography? There have been flare-ups before and we wrote about Iran’s strategic advantage years ago. The geography hasn’t changed, so we reprieve below excerpts from articles back then that should make this administration fearful:

From “Rattling the Sabers at Iran” — January 11, 2012

The geography of the planet has always been a determinant of power and a decisive influence over the outcome of war.

Iran sits at unique location on the Persian Gulf, not only bordering a body of water through which 20% of the world’s oil passes daily, but at a spot where a spine of
land thrusting north from the Emirates squeezes the waterway to form a strait — the strategic Strait of Hormuz, a waterway as little as 21 miles wide with Iran looming over its northern shore like an open hand poised to choke a passerby.

In retaliation, Iran has threatened to block the strait, has told the recently-departed carrier U.S.S. John C. Stennis and its battle escort not to return to the Gulf, and, in a show of intent, has just conducted 10 days of naval maneuvers near the strait with a vow to repeat those exercises soon.

There have been threats in the past to mine the strait or to sink ships to block its channels, and mention by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of our using “minesweepers” suggest we think that’s all Iran has in mind — that, Iran’s naval maneuvers notwithstanding, they would never confront the U.S. Navy.

There were reports in 2006, however, that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard’s Navy had prepared for a massive assault on U.S. naval forces and international shipping in the Persian Gulf to disrupt trade the last time the Hormuz choke point was in the headlines.

But the more serious threat is that ships have become vulnerable in the face of missile technology. The strait is reportedly targeted by Iran with anti-ship missiles. If an American carrier, with its crew of 5,000, were struck, it would mean all out war.

Not even missiles are needed. Four years ago five speedboats taunted three U.S. warships +entering the Gulf in a provocative action that almost drew our fire…More ominous still, a war game conducted by our Navy in 2002 showed that warships are disturbingly susceptible to waterborne guerrilla tactics. In that simulation a Navy convoy lost 16 major ships, including an aircraft carrier, in a matter of minutes to a “swarm” of such speedboats. It is not difficult to imagine that this startling result inspired that speedboat probe as a trial run to test our Navy’s reaction.

From “Should We Risk War Number 4?” — May 1, 2011

The danger is that Iran will turn overtly hostile at our refusal to leave [Iraq], that it will view the diminished U.S. force as easy pickings for an army that is far more powerful than what we encountered in Iraq. The Iraqi army, after years of training by the U.S., is no match for Iran’s.

If Iran attacked and we found ourselves at war with them, the situation could quickly spin out of control. Our ships would need immediately to go on station to keep open the Strait of Hormuz, a choke point only 21 miles wide controlled by Iran through which 20% of the world’s oil passes. Iran has often threatened to mine the strait. Ships are highly vulnerable to land-based missiles, and Iran has conducted exercises with fleets of speedboats. Speedboats may seem to be no match for powerful naval ships until one remembers that an even lesser suicide craft blew a hole in the destroyer USS Cole, when it was docked in Yemen in October, 2000, killing 17 sailors.

Census Blocked, Trump Will Not Be Denied Immigrant Data

Donald Trump had insisted on having his own way, and no Supreme Court of the United States was going to get in that way. In his quest to reduce the American government to a single branch, with the other two just looking on, he rejected the court’s disallowing a question in the 2020 census that would ask every one of us if we are a citizen. The president took to Twitter, and with his peculiar chant at the end he seemed to say that the Supreme Court is not patriotic:

Changes in government practices need good reasons — the Administrative Procedure Act spells that out — and the high court found that Wilbur Ross and his Commerce Department, which runs the census, had effectively lied to the court about the reason for including the citizenship question. The justices ruled 5-to-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts the swing vote against the four to his right, that the stated reason for the question was “contrived” and “pretextual”.

The Justice Department was put to work by Trump to find a way around the court’s prohibition, even to the point of trying to swap in a whole new contingent of lawyers when the first group failed to come up with an end run. Ultimately they surrendered, finally perhaps realizing that any new rationale for their citizenship question would simply be viewed by the court as Contrived # 2.

But Trump needed cover for his retreat; it can never appear that he lost. So he issued an executive order to all agencies that citizenship data be compiled from existing government sources. “Not only didn’t I back down, I backed up because anybody else would have given this up a long time ago”, Trump told reporters. In his inadvertent way, Trump fully admitted that the real reason for the citizenship question was not to identify citizens for enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, the original false pretext presented to the court, but to scare off non-citizens from taking the census, thus undercounting the people in states with large immigrant populations:

“Far left Democrats in our country are determined to conceal the number of illegal aliens in our midst…This is probably part of a broader effort to erode the rights of the American citizen”.

Unaccountably at his side in the Rose Garden was Attorney General William Barr. His Justice Department should be in hiding for having provided the phony “contrived” Voting Rights Act reason for the citizen question. Instead he obsequiously congratulated the president for signing the order. It will “ensure that we finally have an accurate understanding of how many citizens and non-citizens live in our country”, he said, a matter of no concern to Justice. Trump said of his backup plan, “It works out actually better…It will be, we think, far more accurate”. Then why, one might ask him, did you, Ross, and Barr spend a year and a half in the battle over using the census?

full court press

It had been another of several instances of Trump attacking the courts, a justice system he thinks is “a joke”, and “a laughing stock”. He claimed he couldn’t get a fair trial from the “Mexican” judge in San Diego because of his plans for a wall (the judge has a Latin name but is an American born in Indiana). He lashed out against the 9th Circuit when it blocked his first travel ban against seven Muslim countries. And the Supreme Court drew a tongue-lashing. Talking to reporters outside the White House, Trump lamented:

“We’re spending 15 to 20 billion dollars on a census. We’re doing everything. We’re finding out everything about everybody. Think of it: 15 to 20 billion dollars and you’re not allowed to ask them, ‘Are you a citizen?’.”

Job #1

The census is a big deal. Our earlier article on the dispute began,

“It’s Job #1, the first thing the newly adopted Constitution in 1789 instructed the United States to actually do, so important that it’s the document’s 6th sentence.”. It orders that an “actual Enumeration shall be made” of inhabitants every 10 years in order to apportion to the states, based on their “respective numbers”, delegates to the House of Representatives.

It is also used to allot proportionate funding to the states on the order of $900 billion for a broad array of programs.

Because of its importance, the census contingent of the Commerce Department takes pains to get it right. No change is made without sampling focus group reactions and conducting field tests to make certain that a question or a checkbox doesn’t meet with some unexpected reaction or bias to taint the survey’s results. Yet Trump intended to blow past all that and just issue an executive order.

On the Tuesday before the July 4th holiday, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and lawyers from the Justice Department acceded to the Supreme Court ruling, and the printing of the census forms, up against a deadline for the long census-taking process, began without the question. Then came the following tweet:

William Barr’s Justice Department jumped in to reverse the decision of his own department of the day before. That’s what set in motion the attempt at an end run and the ultimate retreat behind an executive order.

coming up short

The “enumeration” is to count every man, woman, and child in the U.S. The Constitutional mandate says nothing about citizens. The Trump administration, with Ross as point man, wanted to use the census question to induce undocumenteds to go into hiding, to not respond to the census at all, fearful that a “no” response will identify them for deportation, or a “yes” would lead to that plus a jail term for fraud. The right wing and the Trump administration would have celebrate the undercount that the question would have produced in states with large migrant populations such as California and New York. Those states would all experience lower funding allocations, but the big payoff could have been that a few states could lose representatives in the House, with the red states taking away those seats for themselves.

The administration didn’t admit to that reason, of course, until we heard Trump just blurt it out. Ross lied to Congress about those actual origins of the citizenship question and faces a contempt citation. He concocted with William Barr’s Justice Department the phony story that the citizen count is needed by Justice for enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, an assertion that might cause one to ask however did they manage without it for 55 years? That fabrication was even refuted by a member of the Justice Department itself, who said in sworn testimony before Congress that citizenship data was never needed by the Act. Internal government documents surfaced in a New York lawsuit that the White House had begun discussing inclusion of the question right after the Trump administration took office, primarily at the instigation of then-chief strategist and immigration opponent Stephen Bannon. If there was any doubt that the citizenship question was meant to tip the census in favor of Republicans, it was dispelled when the estranged daughter of a deceased redistricting strategist released her father’s files containing a seminal 2015 report saying that amending the question “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and would be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic Whites”.

Three federal judges in three states ruled that Wilbur Ross violated the law when he ordered the Census Bureau to add the citizen question, yet four hard right justices on the Supreme Court ruled in Ross’s favor. Before backing down, President Trump wasn’t even bothering with trying to find a legal way. He said he would simply issue an executive order adding the question to the census. Get that: an executive order to circumvent the Supreme Court to deliberately cause a short count of the Constitutionally mandated enumeration of everyone in the country with the motive of strengthening Republican states to the detriment of Democratic states.

Jul 16 2019 | Posted in Law | Read More »

This Will Be Pompeo’s War. Congress Won’t Have a Say

The Trump administration is setting the stage to begin a war with Iran without the bother of obtaining the authorization of Congress, as the Constitution prescribes. Nothing else can explain the outlandish claims in briefings to members of Congress by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the Pentagon that Iran is linked to al Qaeda.

What is that about? Just three days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress authorized the president to use military force “against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks…or harbored such organizations or persons”. That organization was quickly determined to be al Qaeda, and the AUMF, as the Authorization for Use of Military Force is commonly referred to, has been used since as justification for our wars-without-end throughout the Middle East.

Pompeo is now making the case in advance that war against Iran would be yet another extension of the fight against al Qaeda. Iran “harbored such organizations or persons”, Pompeo and his minions at State are made to say. The White House is free to make a move on its own because, while only Congress, in Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, has the power “To declare War”, they have already done so by that clause in the AUMF.

sunni, Shia, same thing, right?

Pompeo’s assertion goes beyond even the Dick Cheney playbook. The former vice president will tell you to this day as justification for the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with al Qaeda, absent evidence. At least both al Qaeda and Hussein were Sunnis.

But Pompeo is claiming that the Shiite nation of Iran — deadly enemies of the Sunni faction of Islam for thirteen centuries since the schism split Islam — and Sunni al Qaeda have suddenly patched up their differences and become allies. Even though Shiite Iran battled Sunni ISIS, an outgrowth of al Qaeda in Iraq, two years ago to retake Mosul in Iraq; even though Shiite Iran did the same in Syria; even though Iran is engaged in a proxy war against Saudi-backed Sunnis in Yemen. To justify beginning another war — this time against a nation of almost 80 million, twice the population of Iraq — Pompeo wants us somehow to think of Iran and al Qaeda as allies.

the taliban too

This is not the first instance of the administration trying to link Iran with all things hostile. In a June 13th news conference, Pompeo said that a suicide car bombing in Kabul that killed four civilians and injured four American troops among a host of bystanders was “one of a series of attacks instigated by the Islamic Republic of Iran”. Except, the Taliban claimed the attack as their own. No matter. The Pentagon recently gave classified briefings to legislative aides anyway, saying that the Taliban is linked to Iran, too, telling them, according to a Pentagon spokesperson, that “these ties are widely and publicly known and referenced in articles and books.”

Juan Cole is a professor at the University of Michigan and a Middle East expert. In this piece he lays out the many tribal factions in Afghanistan, with emphasis on the Sunni Pashtuns, who make up the Taliban, and the Hazaras, who are Shiites. As Cole tells us…

Now here’s the thing. Pushtuns generally have a certain amount of prejudice against Hazara Shiites…The Taliban, as an extremist group with cult-like beliefs, absolutely hate, abhor and despise Shiites.

Cole is stunned by how wrong Pompeo gets it by trying to link Shiite Iran with the Shiite hating Taliban, calling his statement about Iran supporting the Taliban attack in Kabul “so embarrassing as to be cringe-worthy” — “a display of bottomless ignorance” unless it is “a lie in the service of war propaganda”.

How about both?

Pompeo’s basis for the al Qaeda-Iran link? It seems to be that Iran once provided safe haven to a group from al Qaeda seemingly on the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, given that both wished death to America and al Qaeda had made good on that spectacularly. But only three months after 9/11, Kandahar was about to fall to the Americans, and al Qaeda was on the run, fleeing into Pakistan. But they didn’t trust the Pakistanis, finding them “duplicitous”, so the group’s leader went into Iran with “a suitcase full of cash” and made a deal with the Revolutionary Guard for the others to come in.

The quote comes from an April article in The New Yorker about the contacts of a detainee at Guantanamo, that group’s leader being one of them. It goes on to describe what Pompeo is palming off as an Iranian alliance with al Qaeda, but which the article makes clear is very different, showing a wariness by Iranians of Arabs from Sunni North Africa:

“…they would live with their wives and children under a form of house arrest, sometimes in prisons, sometimes in lavish compounds and hotels, always in the company of the Revolutionary Guard. The decision to simultaneously protect and detain Al Qaeda members was apparently made by Iran’s spy chief, Qassem Suleimani. Within a few months, dozens of Al Qaeda members were living in Tehran, undergoing occasional interrogations, aware that their Iranian hosts could betray them at any moment”.

Take note: Pompeo is using an episode from eighteen years ago as a ruse to free President Trump to start a war in 2019 without the consultation of anyone else, much less the querulous Congress and that pesky Constitution. Pompeo won’t admit that the AUMF is the reason for his working up the spurious Iran-al Qaeda linkage. He refuses to answer whether the administration thinks it has the legal authority from the AUMF to decide on war on its own, both in a Senate hearing and when asked three times on CBS News’ “Face the Nation”. He would “just leave that to lawyers”, he said. But as for the connection between al Qaeda and Iran? “There is no doubt there is a connection”, says Pompeo. “Period. Full stop”.

We’re Getting Buried in Trash but Americans Are Oblivious

On the first day of 2018, China announced that it would no longer accept “loathsome foreign garbage”. The world’s largest importer of trash had decided to deal instead with its own “towering mountains of waste”. Beginning in the 1990s, as it grew into an industrial behemoth, China would ultimately take in 40% of America’s plastic, glass, metals and waste paper to feed its insatiable demand for raw materials. It was cheap to ship in otherwise empty container
Trash-pickers in Turkey. An industry elsewhere, we don’t want
that here, but waste is going out of control.

ships, returning to China after unloading the products into which the trash had been converted, and low-cost labor made it economical to sort the imperfectly separated shiploads coming from the U.S. into clean stocks. The U.S. and other countries shipped 106 million tons of plastic to China over the past 25 years. But what we were sending to China was so contaminated with so much trash and food that it had become an environmental matter, said the Chinese.

No easy answers

Americans barely knew that China was taking in our trash. Picked up at the curb, its disappearance from daily lives was and is taken for granted. That most now stays behind in the United States serves to make this country face up to a responsibility which global markets have allowed us to pass off to others. For as long as it is left to market forces, the problems will become formidable.

We think that the aluminum cans we toss in the proper bin after downing a soda or a beer are all being recycled. Aluminum lends itself well to melting and reforming into sheets. But aluminum rollers, as they are called, prefer to chase after the profitable market for making auto and aircraft parts. However, car and plane manufacturers don’t want parts made of aluminum recycled from cans. That leaves soft drink producers and brewers without a sufficient domestic supply, forcing them to import tariffed aluminum sheet while America’s discarded and supposedly recycled cans go into landfills.

Plastics are a worse case. Only 9% of all the plastic produced in the last 68 years has been recycled. They come in many different types and it is costly to extract from the waste stream the few types — plastic bottles, for example — that are worth recovering. This country does not have the legions of waste-pickets found in other countries. Americans are unwilling to take the jobs at recycling plants to sort through what is called “mixed waste” to filter out the useful material that China might once again accept. With no labor willing to sort, Western reprocessing companies need cleaner inputs than their Chinese counterparts, with the result that almost all is going into landfills or incinerators. That should be evident enough to those of you who take your trash to a town “dump” where you discard bagged food waste separately, and sort out glass, but pretty much everything else, including those soda and beer cans, goes together into a dumpster marked “single stream”.

Americans do a poor job of sorting at home. To begin with, most of us don’t know what is recyclable, and are likely to throw old clothing in with the rest, reliably jamming the machines where recycling plants are still operating. Paper can be recycled, but not if lined with plastic, such as paper cups, and not if it’s the coated stock of glossy magazines or packaging.

In fairness, few homes have room for the bins needed to properly sort waste — separate bins for food waste, glass, cans, paper, clear plastic, flattened cardboard, other trash — and a Harris poll said that 66% of Americans wouldn’t recycle at all unless it is made “easy”.

The added problem for would-be plastic recyclers is that everyday polymers can be made cheaply from petroleum relative the cost of recovering useful plastic from waste. Added to that, in a free market, plastic recyclers are subject to swings in commodity prices. They can’t get the price they need to extract and convert it to pellets for further use when the cost of natural gas or oil — feedstocks for plastic — drops to make the price for virgin plastic too low for them to compete.

bury it

With no takers, municipalities are left to send waste to landfills or incinerators. Only 20 years remain before America’s existing landfills will reach capacity, and they are being gradually regulated out of existence anyway. To give an idea of how massive that approach can become, the Fresh Kills landfill in New York is five square miles (12 square kilometers). Regulated or not, hazardous material such as mercury, solvents, lead, pesticides winds up in landfills, and organic matter (food waste) can transform into methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide that can catch fire or explode.

burn it

Many cities, towns and counties are now incinerating up to half their plastic and paper waste as well as the glut of cardboard scrap China no longer takes. The question is: how is this trash getting burned? Open to the sky incineration can release the nitrogen and sulfur that contributes to acid rain, soot to cause respiratory problem, and carcinogenic dioxins that can damage nervous and immune systems. Incineration in plants built for that purpose is not all bad because, given that something must be done with waste, incineration can produce power to light our homes. One of the world’s biggest is in Fairfax, Virginia. It takes in a million or so tons of waste a year and generates up to 80 megawatts, enough to power 75,000 homes. Plants on the Fairfax model constantly read the level of toxins as they convey waste through their furnaces while adjusting the temperature to ensure a thorough destruction of pollutants. The volume of the resulting waste ash is a tenth of the original input.

But a big plant can run to $200 million to build. They are not popular — nimby protests are all but guaranteed — and rare is the politician who will promote them as a solution. Proof enough is that none have been built in the United States since 1995.

what can be done

Certainly, creating less waste is at the top of the list. To begin with, there is the staggering fact that some 30% of our food is thrown out. None of that can be recycled, of course; all of it goes into landfills. We salute the “ugly food” movement which tries to make people aware that food that doesn’t grow up pretty is just as nutritious. Humans foolishly reject it, even though it can be had for less money, hopefully at a co-op near you.

Walmart has announced plans to reduce plastics used in 30,000 of its house-branded products. Environmental awareness and recycling have been part of the national ethos for decades now, so one wonders why this improvement is only now occurring to Walmart.

There are ways to improve recycling. Saying that is not to knock the commendable recycling habits the public has adopted. In 2013, before the Environmental Protection Agency became unconcerned for such matters, the EPA calculated that recycling and composting prevented approximately 186 million metric tons of CO2 from release into the atmosphere, the equivalent of taking 39 million cars off the road.

A proliferation of bins filling the household is not needed for improvement. Just a rearrangement. All bottles — glass as well as plastic — and all drink cans could be combined in a single bin, which makes for items easily identified for rapid sorting, relatively clean jobs at municipal collection centers, and highly resalable stocks to recycling companies.

Cardboard and newspaper could be stored in our garages for occasional bundling and pickup. China has such acute need, now that the country refuses our waste in the form we send it, that Chinese companies have bought mills from Wisconsin to Maine to Georgia to obtain scrap newspaper and cardboard to turn into boxboard for shipment to China.

Most towns require that electronics be disposed of separately. They can be sold to U.S. recyclers who extract gold, silver, and other substances from computers, televisions, and smart phones. A Tokyo study calculated that in 2017 some $55 billion of value had been extracted from what is called “e-waste”, a boost to America’s recycling industry which grew to $20 billion in 2016.

More imagining of reuse possibilities could make a significant difference.

As we know, the oils used in the deep fat fryers of fast food chains can be burned as fuel in vehicles, but how much of that is happening, and can it be mandated?

A conscientious brewer realized that grain from beer-making makes for livestock feed.

Two Dutch firms have been pioneering the use of recycled plastics as road surfaces. And why not? Just as asphalt comes from petrochemicals, so does plastic. The modular sections, prefabricated at a factory and trucked to a site, are hollow to allow for utility lines or drainage pipes. Similarly, it’s estimated that plastic used for railroad ties would outlast traditional wood by a factor of six.

Such reuse could dispose of a great deal of plastic while leaving that much petroleum in the ground; it could even be thought of as returning to the ground hydrocarbons that we borrowed.

Policy advocates argue that manufacturers should contribute to the cost of their products’ disposal, a program called “extended producer responsibility”. The logic is irrefutable, but its practicality seems dubious. Questions arise as to how collected monies find their way to municipalities, but the movement hasn%ore the Environmental Protection Agency became unconcerned for such matters, the EPA calculated that recycling and composting prevented approximately 186 million metric tons of CO2 from release into the atmosphere, the equivalent of taking 39 million cars off the road.

A proliferation of bins filling the household is not needed for improvement. Just a rearrangement. All bottles — glass as well as plastic — and all drink cans could be combined in a single bin, which makes for items easily identified for rapid sorting, relatively clean jobs at municipal collection centers, and highly resalable stocks to recycling companies.

Cardboard and newspaper could be stored in our garages for occasional bundling and pickup. China has such acute need, now that the country refuses our waste in the form we send it, that Chinese companies have bought mills from Wisconsin to Maine to Georgia to obtain scrap newspaper and cardboard to turn into boxboard for shipment to China.

Most towns require that electronics be disposed of separately. They can be sold to U.S. recyclers who extract gold, silver, and other substances from computers, televisions, and smart phones. A Tokyo study calculated that in 2017 some $55 billion of value had been extracted from what is called “e-waste”, a boost to America’s recycling industry which grew to $20 billion in 2016.

More imagining of reuse possibilities could make a significant difference.

As we know, the oils used in the deep fat fryers of fast food chains can be burned as fuel in vehicles, but how much of that is happening, and can it be mandated?

A conscientious brewer realized that grain from beer-making makes for livestock feed.

Two Dutch firms have been pioneering the use of recycled plastics as road surfaces. And why not? Just as asphalt comes from petrochemicals, so does plastic. The modular sections, prefabricated at a factory and trucked to a site, are hollow to allow for utility lines or drainage pipes. Similarly, it’s estimated that plastic used for railroad ties would outlast traditional wood by a factor of six.

Such reuse could dispose of a great deal of plastic while leaving that much petroleum in the ground; it could even be thought of as returning to the ground hydrocarbons that we borrowed.

Policy advocates argue that manufacturers should contribute to the cost of their products’ disposal, a program called “extended producer responsibility”. The logic is irrefutable, but it