Do Drones Know Miranda Rights?

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During a short press conference before meeting UN envoy Kofi Annan today, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made some emotional remarks about the “moral” accusations levelled at Russia and China by the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Whilst he didn’t mention the madam secretary’s name, Lavrov said it is “incorrect” to put all the blame for the situation in Syria on Russia and China, not to speak about “threats that they [Russia and China] will pay for it”. Lavrov was obviously referring to Mrs Clinton’s recent statement at the so called “Friends of Syria” conference in France. Mrs Clinton said there that Russia and China would “pay a price” for allegedly supporting Assad’s régime.

One shouldn’t shy away from moral dilemmas, but a question immediately confronts one… WHO are the judges? What makes President Obama and Secretary Clinton qualified to pass moral judgements on the, indeed, intricate problem of the moral responsibility of the Russian, or, for that matter, the Syrian government? What enables the Western press take such a high moral ground on “Russia’s responsibility” for the developments in Syria (with the questions on the moral responsibility of the Syrian opposition and its foreign sponsors wisely avoided). The question is made ever more timely by the fact that, in recent months, Mrs Clinton returned to some of the “tough” policies of former-President George W Bush, who based his approach to the Middle East on an unlimited use of warfare (something Mr Obama now euphemistically calls “leaving all options on the table”).

Yelena Suponina, the head of department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the Russian Institute for Strategic Research, noted, “It’s interesting to note that Hillary Clinton, who started her career as Secretary of State emphasising a certain contrast between herself and former-President George W Bush, at the end of her tenure, returned to some of Bush’s approaches. Obviously, there are some patterns in American Middle East policies that can’t be changed for long”. Were they ever changed? If we believe recently-published stories in American media, in fact, some of the morally-questionable qualities of this policy never changed. A series of articles published in the New York Times revealed even a certain hardening of the White House’s approach. For example, in reality, Obama adopted a “take no prisoners policy” towards terrorist suspects in the Middle East. Under Obama, American drones reportedly killed hundreds of suspects, destroying in the process thousands of civilians, with only ONE MORE PERSON being put in the infamous Guantánamo camp, which the “humane” candidate Obama had promised to close during his electoral campaign.

The NYT’s Jo Becker and Scott Shane wrote in their review of Obama’s drone strategy, “Whilst scores of suspects were killed under Mr Obama, only one has been taken into American custody, and the president balked at adding new prisoners to Guantánamo”. Both authors point up that Obama’s “killing lists” got longer and longer despite the fact that Obama’s America did not suffer from large-scale terrorist acts, unlike George W Bush’s America which went through the 9/11 disaster in 2001. The New York Times kindly noted, “What remains unanswered is how much killing will be enough”, adding that Mr Obama’s own system of evaluating civilian casualties “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants” Obviously, the USA is still at war with terrorism, despite having had no hostile action on its territory for the last 10 years.

Now, how would THIS President Obama react to some unknown “militants” (let’s use the Western media’s preferred term) setting off bombs near US government buildings in DC every day, killing children on their way to school in the process? This is what happens in Damascus. How would Obama treat “combatants” who make “targeted liquidations” of US Army officers (“targeted liquidations” is the term used by the French newspaper Le Figaro to describe the drive-by shootings of Syrian General Mohammed Omar al-Derbas and Colonels Abdel Karim al-Raei and Fouad Shaaban, assassinated before the bombardments of Homs and Houla)? How would he react to someone’s taking a whole detachment of American servicemen as hostages (such was the Free Syrian Army’s action that unleashed the battle for Homs)? So, how would Obama react to such actions? The answer would be… drones, at least; nuclear bombs, at most. Somehow, Obama and Clinton deny the same luxury of self-defence to Assad. Is it just because his bombs aren’t as smart as American ones? Yes, American bombs are smarter, but smart weapons put their owners before ever-more terrible moral choices. The New York Times reports that Obama, when deciding to “liquidate” Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, knew that Mehsud’s wife and in-laws were in the same home. However, the American president still preferred “the killing option”. In a way, his moral position in this situation is even more compromised than that of Assad’s artillerists, who at least don’t know for sure which family their shells are going to kill…

Amnesty International looks somewhat less smart than American bombs when it requires Assad, in the current situation, to hold “fair trials” for terrorists. As if the USA, with its death squads of drones and “signature strikes” against “suspicious compounds”, bothers to have such trials. Gone are the days when former-Vice President Richard Cheney suspected Obama of “giving the terrorists the rights of Americans, letting them lawyer up and reading them their Miranda rights”. Drones know no lawyers, and “smart missiles” don’t recognise Miranda rights.

17 July 2012

Dmitri Babich

Voice of Russia World Service

http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_07_16/Do-drones-know-Miranda-rights/

After SNC Visit to Moscow Western Media Shows Signs of Better Understanding Russia’s Position

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The media circus around the recent visit to Moscow of the Syrian National Council’s delegation revealed some important cracks in the “anti-Russian front” of Western press reports on Russo-Syrian relations. The simplistic picture created by the mainstream US and EU press for months, that Moscow’s “shielding” Bashar al-Assad while denying its people objective information on Syria, simply doesn’t correspond to reality. If Moscow’s “shielding” Assad, then, why does Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov receive his bitterest enemies? If Russia’s unwilling to inform its own people, then, why did it give the leader of the SNC, Mr Abdel Basset Sayda, an opportunity to speak to dozens of reporters from all Russian media during a press conference at the state-owned news agency, RIA-Novosti?

CNN’s website summed up this more convoluted reality, suddenly revealed to Western reporters, in the lead to its recent article, suggestively headlined Russian Views on Syria More Nuanced than They May Appear. The author, Tom Watkins, having followed some of the recent events, came to a conclusion that seems heretical when seen against the background of Mrs Clinton’s recent statement about Russia “having to pay a price for its support of Assad”. He wrote, “The Russian government shares many of the US concerns about the continuing violence in Syria, but Moscow’s reluctant to embrace Washington’s proposals to solve them because it is wary of its motives”, thus, revealing a whole new world to the average reader of the Washington Post or the New York Times. To support his point, Watkins quoted Jack Matlock, the former US ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1985-91, now seen as the most successful American envoy to Russia since 1917, who said, “People at the embassy characterised our positions [i.e. the positions of the Russian and American side on the violence in Syria] as 95 percent the same. They haven’t been giving [Syria] offensive weapons; they’ve cut way back on weapons’ supplies… the point is that their position isn’t primarily motivated by trying to protect Assad in Syria”.

Mr Matlock’s sober assessment of the situation is a stark counterpoint to the reaction of the mainstream media on both sides of North Atlantic, which concentrates on venting the anger and frustration of Syria’s armed opposition about their leaders’ failure to elicit Moscow’s 180 degrees change of course. It is interesting to note that, for example, the French newspaper Le Figaro continues to ascribe only the most unseemly motives to Moscow’s seemingly-risky moves in the Syrian conflict, as it commented, “Being sure that Washington won’t dispatch, at least in the near future, any troops to Syria, the Kremlin’s getting active on the diplomatic front, satisfying its obsession to stay in the middle of the fray”. Since the beginning of the crisis, all kinds of egotistic motives were ascribed to Moscow’s actions… a desire to see a dictator in power, worries about the fate of its naval base in Syria, the wish to be unpleasant to Washington, etc. Now, it’s the “obsession” with diplomatic hype.

Dmitri Simes, president of the US-based Center for the National Interest, offered a somewhat less negativist explanation on CNN earlier this week, “Russia’s halt to arms sales to Damascus may have had nothing to do with international pressure. The Assad régime has no money to pay for Russian weapons… the Russian position, basically, is that if NATO and the USA want to interfere with Syria, Russia isn’t going to stop them, but Russia is not going to support it either”. Simes also called Hillary Clinton’s assessment of Russia’s position as a position of a state that is “standing up for a tyrant” as being “unhelpful”.

What happens if the USA does interfere in Syria… not covertly, via CIA agents supplying weapons to the rebels, as it’s doing now, according to the New York Times’ recent report… but overtly? Ambassador Matlock offered a pessimistic scenario, saying, “If there’s overt, external intervention, it’s going to just make matters worse. In the final analysis, if a country’s determined to have a civil war and we can’t prevent it, getting in the middle of it and killing more people doesn’t really help things”.

One could not agree more.

12 July 2012

Dmitri Babich

Voice of Russia World Service

http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_07_12/Russia-position-SNC-visit-to-Moscow/

Chávez Slams Clinton for “Threatening Russia”

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On Tuesday, Univisión reported that Venezuelan President Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías criticised US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who, he claimed, “uttered threats’ to Russia and China while speaking at a Friends of Syria conference. On Monday, at a press conference, Chávez said, “We saw [that the state secretary uttered] overt threats to Russia and China. [She said that] they will have to pay a high price if they do not do what other countries demand. Do you understand? Obviously, this is the downright madness of those who consider themselves the rulers of the world”. He urged Clinton to look to the problems of the American people. “There are enough problems in the United States, but they [the U.S. authorities] want to do [in Syria] what they did in Libya”. Foreign military action killed thousands in Libya to kill Gaddafi, Chávez continued, saying, “Now, they want to do the same in Syria and threaten Iran”, adding that Cuban Leader Fidel Castro already warned him, “There’s a serious threat of nuclear war”.

On Friday, Clinton lambasted Russia and China for blocking efforts to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has lost a key general to defection. She said that Russia and China need to understand that there’s a price to be paid for “blockading” the Syrian peace process, saying, “I ask you to reach out to Russia and China and not only ask but demand that they get off the sidelines. I don’t think Russia and China believe they are paying any price at all, nothing at all, for standing with (the) Assad regime”.

10 July 2012

RIA-Novosti

http://en.rian.ru/world/20120710/174517403.html

Russia Calls “Friends of Syria” Group “Immoral”

Here are the insurgents supported by the West… they’re violent Islamists bent on the massacre of Alawis, Christians, and Muslims they don’t like… I guess that’s the real meaning of “humanitarian intervention” à la Hillary Clinton and the American Enterprise Institute…

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Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) spokesman Aleksandr Lukashevich said that meetings organised by the Friends of Syria group are one-sided and immoral, saying, “Russia, China and a number of other countries which have traditionally friendly relations with the Syrian Arab Republic and its people have refuse to join those ‘friends’ because we believe that the format that they have chosen isn’t only politically wrong, but also immoral”. His remarks followed a conference of the Friends of Syria group held in Paris on Friday, in which representatives of some 100 countries took part. Participants in the talks voiced strong criticism of Russia and China for their reluctance to join Western and Arab governments in calling on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down.

In her address to the delegates, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Moscow and Beijing “will pay a price” for “holding up progress” on Syria, urging participating countries to put pressure on Russia and China to withdraw their support for Assad, saying, “I ask you to reach out to Russia and China and to not only urge, but demand that they get off the sidelines and begin to support the legitimate aspirations of the Syrian people. I don’t think Russia and China believe they’re paying any price at all, nothing at all, for standing up on behalf of the Assad régime”.

Lukashevich said in his comments that the USA and its allies’ “friendship” with the Syrian opposition alone could further deepen the bloody 17-month-long conflict between the Syrian government and those fighting it, noting, “This would mean only one thing… the continuation of bloodshed and new human tragedies. We have an impression that some of the participants in the Geneva meeting on 30 July this year don’t take seriously the responsibility that ensues from the provisions of its final communiqué”. Participants in the Geneva talks, including the five permanent UN Security Council members (Britain, China, France, Russia, and the USA), as well as Turkey, Iraq, Qatar, and Kuwait, urged the Syrian government and opposition groups to immediately end fighting and obey to a peace plan proposed by UN and Arab League envoy Kofi Annan. They also called for the creation of a transitional government in Syria involving members of both the current Syrian leadership and opposition groups.

Lukashevich pointed up that instead of pushing the conflicting Syrian sides to work together to achieve peaceful transition, the Friends of Syria group organise “politico-propagandist performances in the spirit of Party Congresses, where they discuss the fate of Syria in the absence of its representatives, and we hear loud calls from oppositionists to launch an uncompromising fight to overthrow the Syrian leadership”. He added that those calls are strengthened by “generous promises of financial and economic support, as well as behind-the-scenes hints at the possibility of using a military scenario” in Syria.

Russia and China twice vetoed United Nations resolutions against Assad, citing a pro-rebel bias. However, both countries backed Annan’s six-point peace plan, which went into force in April, but has failed to stop the bloodshed. On Friday, a diplomatic source said that Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov should hold talks with Syrian opposition groups next week. Also on Friday, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution condemning the Syrian authorities for what it said were violations of human rights during the conflict. The resolution was approved by 41 members of the council, with Russia, China, and Cuba voting against it. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in a report submitted to the UN Security Council on Friday that the United Nations can’t verify the number of people killed in Syria since the beginning of the unrest in March 2011. Ban cited NGOs as saying the death toll was between 13,000 and 17,000.

7 July 2012

RIA-Novosti

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20120707/174443798.html

US Sanctions No Hurdle to Beneficial Ties

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The USA welcomed the EU embargo on Iran that came into effect on 1 July. Two days before, the Americans slapped economic sanctions on banks and companies that engaged in trade with Iran. However, they exempted nearly 20 countries, including China, from them. Beijing said that it does not intend to scale down oil imports from Iran. The USA postponed the imposition of sanctions against China and exempted another 18 countries, including Japan, South Korea, Britain, and a number of EU countries. In explanation, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the countries in question have substantially cut down oil shipments from Iran, thereby demonstrating what breaches of international nuclear commitments could lead to. According to Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Hong Lei, Beijing imports Iranian oil in accordance with the law and is strongly against unilateral restrictions against any other countries.

Andrei Volodin, the head of the Oriental Research Centre of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Academy, said, “Early this year, we saw a slight drop in oil supplies, but Washington had nothing to do with it. China saw a reduction in oil imports from Iran because the two sides were at odds over the price of oil at the beginning of the year. They settled the dispute by spring and Iranian oil shipments to China increased between April and June. If Beijing chooses to cut Iranian oil imports, it will do so because of economic slowdown, but nothing of the sort is observed at the moment”.

Whilst announcing sanctions against Iran’s trade partners, the USA can’t afford any drastic moves against China. Beijing and Washington boast close economic ties. China is the world’s number two economy capable of consistently upholding its interests. A VOR correspondent met with Oriental Studies expert Andrei Ostrovsky, who said, “The USA and China depend on one another. Naturally, the USA opted to extend the time frame for the introduction of sanctions. It has no other levers to resort to. China’s strong enough to take its own decisions and possesses sufficient potential to ignore threats”.

India and South Korea have exemption from the sanctions as well. Analyst Dmitri Abzalov said, “Apparently, Washington is powerless to exert concerted pressure on Tehran. China’s position is strong indeed. China holds the bulk of US debt, and no one wants to spoil relations with the world’s largest producer and creditor. Iran accounts for a considerable part of Chinese imports, and Beijing wishes to expand exports to Iran. This proves that Washington will find it more than challenging to mount overall resistance to Iran, particularly in the east. Looking to China, Iran switched to non-cash payments, and was able to adapt to a ban on transit operations. Without China, Washington’s efforts will be useless. Naturally, the USA opted for a transitional solution to save face”.

Washington might find it particularly troublesome to bicker with Beijing ahead of the election. By putting off the imposition of sanctions, President Obama has de facto postponed a solution to the issue for the next presidential term. The Republicans were quick to jump on this, accusing the current administration of betraying national interests. Mitt Romney’s supporters will surely exploit this over the next few months. Experts say, however, that even if the Republicans win the vote, they’ll have to take a pragmatic approach, and their vociferous statements will remain nothing more than words.

2 July 2012

Polina Chernitsa

Aleksandra Dibizheva

Voice of Russia World Service

http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_07_02/79986365/

Iran: Myths and Consequences

The real Iran… it’s not mad mullahs and Revolutionary Guards… it’s the people… just like the USA…

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The West is stepping up its efforts to tighten a grip on Iran in connection with its nuclear programme. The USA slapped sanctions on foreign state-run banks that clinched oil deals with Tehran and imposed restrictions on the operations of private financial institutions cooperating with the Islamic Republic. On 1 July, the EU’s launching an oil embargo against Iran. Such an abundance of “economic reprisals” against a major player on the world oil market could have lasting consequences. No more new oil from Iran will be available in Europe after 1 July. Countries will have to rely on the Iranian oil that they purchased under previous contracts. The EU has even banned crisis-struck Greece from importing Iranian oil on preferential terms. Washington’s restrictions on the banks that were “spotted” in partnership with Tehran pursue the same agenda… to slash Iranian oil sales.

The restrictions in question have already had a negative effect on the social and economic situation in Iran, which has seen a rise in food prices and a devaluation of the national currency. However, the embargo on Iranian oil led to an increase in oil prices throughout the EU this spring, to the disappointment of millions of European consumers. Oil prices might spike again after 1 July. The EU accounts for 20 percent of Iranian oil exports, this amounts to about 30 million tons (195 million bbl). Europe expects Saudi Arabia to fill the gap. Nevertheless, Iran has the resources to block the Strait of Hormuz, through which oil from Saudi Arabia and LNG from Qatar reaches world markets.

Yevgeni Satanovsky, of the Institute of the Middle East, said, “As for Iran, it could offset its losses by supplying oil to other countries. This means that the embargo might not prove as effective as planned. Some countries, including South Africa, have sharply increased Iranian oil imports. Consumption of Iranian oil hasn’t dropped in Turkey. South Korea cut Iranian oil supplies, but only slightly. Indian companies reduced the consumption of Iranian oil in the country’s state sector, but it’s increased in the private sector. China, even though it cut Iranian oil supplies, has exerted pressure on Iran to get it to slash oil prices so that Beijing could boost the consumption of Iranian oil for the same prices”.

Because of the embargo, Iran will lose 20 percent of the 100 billion USD (3.25 trillion Roubles. 79 billion Euros. 64 billion UK Pounds) it earns from oil exports annually. The loss is far from disastrous. In addition, sanctions will help to spur Iran’s efforts in other areas. Vitaly Bushuyev, General Director of the Institute of Energy Strategy, observed, “The role of Iran in the formation of world oil prices has been exaggerated. No radical fluctuations on the oil market have been predicted for the near future. Oil prices will range between 85 and 110 USD (2,760-3,570 Roubles. 67-87 Euros. 54-70 UK Pounds). Iran may affect that, but its influence won’t go further than causing one-time price volatility within a maximum variation of 3-5 dollars (97-162 Roubles. 2.50-4 Euros. 2-3.25 UK Pounds)”.

In other words, the western sanctions against Iran won’t trigger any upheavals on the world market or an economic collapse in Iran. Instead, they could hit the wallets of ordinary people in Europe. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that unless Iran takes specific steps to dispel the international community’s concerns regarding its nuclear programme, pressure on it will increase, and it’ll become more and more isolated. As an alternative to economic pressure, Washington might carry out air strikes against Iran’s military facilities. In this respect, attempts to exert pressure on Tehran through economic sanctions aren’t the worst option.

29 June 2012

Ilya Kharlamov

Voice of Russia World Service

http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_06_29/79695943