Is the Iran deal about staving off the coming oil shock - By Nafeez Ahmed

The Iran nuclear deal signals a major shift in the geopolitics of the Middle East. Integral to the equation is oil, economics, terror – and US hegemony.

The Bush administration had initiated a long-term covert strategy to undermine Iranian influence in the Middle East and Central Asia, combined with overt pressure through diplomatic initiatives and economic sanctions.

Under Obama, this strategy accelerated, largely in concert with other Gulf powers like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, who have long sought to roll-back Iranian influence.

Yet even as the strategy accelerated, unlike its predecessors which openly declared their warmongering hostility to Iran, the Obama administration had used the pressure to forge an unprecedented deal with the country.

Averting regional war

The reasons for the shift are, of course, pragmatic. For years, US intelligence agencies have told the White House that there is simply no evidence Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb.

And the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has repeatedly certified that uranium is not being enriched to levels necessary for weaponisation, nor is it being diverted to a secret weapons programme.

Meanwhile, senior US military officials have long warned that the sort of US-Iran military confrontation which frothing neoconservatives have been pining for would likely fail and destabilise the entire region.

What about an Israel-Iran confrontation? A classified Pentagon war simulation held in 2012 found that an Israeli attack on Iran would also lead to a wider regional war.

Unlike the neocons, for the military pragmatists in successive US administrations, war with Iran could never be a preferred option.

The added bonus is that Iran might notch down its involvement in Iraq and Syria.

Earlier this year, the US assured its allies at the Camp David summit that under the nuclear deal, Iran’s growing geopolitical influence in the region would be curtailed. Simultaneously, the US gave Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and others the green light to accelerate support to the Islamist militants of their choice in Syria.

George Friedman, founder and CEO of private US intelligence firm Stratfor – which operates closely with the Pentagon and State Department – forecasted the US-Iran détente four years ago.

His prescient assessment of its strategic rationale is worth noting. Friedman explained that by reaching “a temporary understanding with Iran,” the US would give itself room to withdraw while playing off Iran against the Sunni regimes, limiting Iran’s “direct controls” in the region, “while putting the Saudis, among others, at an enormous disadvantage”.

“This strategy would confront the reality of Iranian power and try to shape it,” wrote Friedman.

Ultimately, though, the US is betting on the rise of Turkey – hence the latter’s pivotal role in the new anti-IS rebel training strategy, despite Turkey’s military and financial sponsorship of IS. More

 

©

Image of Gas Attack Against Lone Brazilian Woman Goes Viral

Shocking images of police violence draw much-needed attention to protests and larger issue of police brutality

A captured instance of brazen police brutality against a civilian has, once again, grabbed the attention of the global community. The shocking photograph of a lone woman being pepper sprayed at close range by Brazilian police has gone viral, drawing criticism and attention to the ongoing mass demonstrations in Brazil—at which the attack took place—and the chronic undercurrent of police violence that so often follows peaceful citizen uprisings.

New York Magazine's Daily Intelligencer spoke with the photographer behind the image, Victor Caivano, who said , long after "the protest was over, riots included."that the attack happened at around 11:20 Monday evening

The woman appeared to be a "normal, middle-class university student," he said, adding that she was standing alone on a "deserted corner" after the police had cleared the area.

He continued:

Three riot officers approached the woman and told her to leave. When she objected — the woman either questioned the order or insisted that she wasn't doing anything wrong, Caivano recalls — she was pepper-sprayed. "This policeman just didn't think twice," Caivano says.

The woman stumbled backward, "screaming and cursing." She was detained and taken to a police van. Caivano says local reporters are now trying to track her down.

The photograph has drawn obvious comparison to two similar images of the unbridled use of pepper spray, each encapsulating the fierce police brutality that too often goes hand-in-hand with such demonstrations.

One is of a woman named Ceyda Sungur—the 'woman in the red dress'—who, during arecent protest in Istanbul's Gezi Park, was bombarded by an officer who shot pepper spray directly into her face.

"The jet sent her hair billowing upwards," wrote the Guardian at the time. "As she turned, the masked policeman leapt forward and hosed down her back. The unprovoked attack left her and other activists choking and gasping for breath; afterwards Sungur collapsed on a bench."

The second image is of the infamous incident at the University of California at Davis when a peaceful Occupy protest was met with an overly aggressive show of police force. This culminated in Officer John Pike directly and deliberately spraying burning yellow chemicals into the faces of the protesters.

"To see unarmed, unaggressive bystanders who, by virtue of their location at a time and place where trouble was brewing, were assaulted by authority figures spraying burning, toxic, chemicals, is an unforgettable visual," writes columnist Lorraine Devon Wilke. She continues:

Likely there are many more that occur every day; these particular ones exist as iconic moments that symbolize bigger movements, of countries, of people, even of students. These images are important historical documents of what happened, how, and to whom. Hopefully they will contribute, by sheer virtue of their shock value, to change, progress, and needed solutions; the agony of those attacked has to account for something of value. More

One has to question who our countries actually belong to, for if this is how citizens are treated it certainly does not belong to us. Editor

 

Israel, Armenians and the question of genocide

When Israel remembers the Holocaust, why does it think only of Jews?

History has proven time and again that the Jews are not unique for having suffered genocidal policies. The many debates about preventing such tragedies have so far not helped populationsthat suffered mass killings and expulsions, with intent to destroy them for their national, religiousor ethnic identity – even in recent decades. Therefore the politicization of the Armenian genocidein Israel in the context of Israel-Turkey relations, described with great eloquence by Akiva Eldar in al-Monitor, is not only wrong; it calls into question whether Israel is truly committed to “never again” when it comes to people who are not Jews.

In fact, Jews need not look outside their own community to understand the categorical need to universalize the awful lessons of the Holocaust. Eldar points out that one of the greatest advocates of this position was himself a victim:

The man who coined the term genocide and fought for adoption of the treaty [1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide - ds] was the Jewish-Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, whose entire family was annihilated in the Holocaust. He himself managed to flee to the United States. Lemkin referred specifically to the Armenian annihilation as an act of genocide. This position was never adopted by Israeli governments. The official Israeli position was summed up in 2001 in an interview by then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres with the Turkish Daily News: “The Armenians suffered a tragedy,” he said, “but not genocide.”

Tragically, Eldar’s description of the feeling many Knesset members hold towards this question mirrors what I feel in Israeli society:

For them, any attempt to hint that other peoples were also persecuted and massacred for racist reasons is considered “disrespect for the Holocaust” (they themselves, on the other hand, often use the term “Holocaust,” especially to scare the Israeli public with the Iranian threat). They do not define the Armenian genocide as a human-Jewish-ethical issue.

To the argument that recognition of the Armenian experience threatens very immediate political needs related to Turkey, I hope that Turkish leaders and people see it differently. Remembering horrors suffered by others would say more about Israel’s values than it does about Turkey. Anyone can commit terrible crimes against innocents, Jews included. I wish for a country that rises above its own trauma to recall, support and help victims anywhere.

I can scarcely believe this needs to be said, but apparently it bears repeating: we must acknowledge that all human beings are at risk of falling victims to genocidal acts, or of perpetrating such acts themselves. The same people can be in both positions. To deny this seems to me as awful and dangerous as Holocaust denial itself. More

 

Robert Fisk: Khalil Raad Palestinian pictures chart the history - and the tragedy

The Long View: This exhibition of the work of the first Palestinian photographer helps fulfil the Palestinian narrative, but it also shows a country that will never return.

Jerusalem lies there in 1933, the slopes below al-Aqsa empty of roads, the view across the Mount of Olives containing scarcely four houses. During the First World War, a man in a white smock hangs outside the Jaffa gate, Ottoman Turkish troops standing to attention – proud of their judicial murder – the dead man’s head twisted to the right, a large placard on his chest announcing that he tried to help the enemy. The enemy then were the British – or perhaps just the Arab nationalists who opposed the Ottomans – and the British later became the enemy of the Arabs themselves.

Khalil Raad, the first Palestinian photographer, took all the pictures and they hang now in a cool gallery in Beirut’s Clemenceau Street – yes, named after the French President in that same First World War – a majestic series of landscapes and portraits from the Great War to 1948 that shows Palestine as it was. One picture depicts a Palestinian porter carrying a grand piano, another a man lugging a wardrobe on his back. Tough times, tough people. The Institute for Palestine Studies (whose exhibition this is) claims the photos help to fulfil the Palestinian narrative history – a narrative that for many years belonged exclusively to Israel – and I think it may be right. But I also believe that this Palestine, existing in dreamless sleep for many Palestinians, will never return. The Jewish colonies on what is now called the West Bank and the Jewish colonies around Jerusalem are, when you examine these photographs, ghosts of the future.

There are other ghosts, too. A pre-1918 Turkish policeman can be seen searching an Arab man. Then a British soldier is searching an Arab man. Now Israelis search Palestinian men. There are Arab schoolchildren in white (and very Western) shirts and blouses, streets packed with people, most of them Arabs. There are Jews in some of the pictures after 1918, but not many. But then, the Arabs were at that time a majority.

So what happened to those schoolchildren, the men loading Jaffa oranges into their boats to take to the steamship lying off the coast? What happened to the family of the man hauling the wardrobe on his back?

We do not know, and that is part of the tragedy. These people speak to us with their faces or in their peasant clothes, usually without identification. The exhibition ends in their catastrophe – for Palestinian Arabs, not for the new State of Israel – in 1948, with booby-trap explosions across the land of the old British mandate. To be fair, the pictures include scenes of 1948 Arab bombings of Jewish civilians, just as they depict Jewish bombings of Arab civilians. But you cannot deny the authenticity of these scenes. The Jaffa oranges were mostly sent to London. And London, of course, repaid the Palestinian Arabs by supporting the British government’s desire for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

The Israeli narrative, of course, is that Arab armies tried to destroy the nascent Jewish state by invading Palestine – true – while Arab radio stations told the Arabs to flee their homes until “the Jews have been driven into the sea”. Totally untrue. No Arab radio ever said that. There were rapes and murders and ethnic cleansing of Arabs in that part of Palestine that would become Israel. The Israeli historian Illan Pappé has done seminal work on this.

And there is one deeply disturbing picture in this collection. It shows the Hotel Fast in Jerusalem, with the Nazi swastika flag hanging from the first floor, next to a UK flag. What was the Hotel Fast? Were these the rooms of German and British diplomats after 1933 – the date Hitler came to power – for the swastika must certainly have gone by September of 1939? The Institute for Palestine Studies does not know. Do any readers?

Born in Lebanon in 1854, Raad’s family moved to Jerusalem after the death of his father, who had converted from Catholic Maronitism to Protestantism. But in the 1914-18 war, Raad happily became a photographer for the Turkish army. There’s a grim picture of Jemal Pasha, one of the authors of the 1915 genocide of the Armenians, and of Raad himself on horseback in Ottoman uniform. His family donated his pictures. More