Category: News

As talks between Iran the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) conclude, all parties should be commended for returning to the negotiating table. Obama should be commended for having turned diplomacy into a process rather than the one-off meetings that existed in the past. There is no other way to find a peaceful solution to this crisis. These talks were always going to be challenging, because making progress means tackling the thorniest issues that have divided the two sides for years. To that end, both sides entered negotiations with their maximalist positions, and neither budged. Looking ahead, now the hard work begins.

With that in mind, it is important to be clear about what has happened thus far. The U.S. made it clear that regardless of tangible concessions offered by Iran on 20% enrichment, it would still not offer any sanctions relief at this stage of the negotiations. As a result, the paradigm has shifted: It’s less about the U.S. knowing what Iran is capable of offering and more about one of two scenarios: The U.S. is either driving a hard bargain, or Congress has limited Obama’s maneuverability to the extent he does not have the necessary political space to offer sanctions relief to match Iranian concessions.

If this position is more than a hard bargaining tactic, and it holds in the next round of talks in Moscow in June, then likelihood of a confrontation will increase. This begs an important question: Is Congress willing to risk war for the sake of not lifting any sanctions – even if Iran offers real and tangible concessions?

We remain hopeful that this is a bargaining tactic rather than a negitiation strategy. The U.S. can afford to drive a hard bargain because time still exists to talk – but time is short.

A feasible solution is to match tangible, verifiable Iranian concessions with a delay of the impending European Unions oil embargo. This would add time to the negotiation clock and buy both sides some breathing space.

All too often in the past, negotiations have collapsed not because a deal couldn’t be found, but because domestic political factors prevented either or both sides from taking yes for an answer. Both sides must pursue a strategy centered on breaking the deadlock, rather than on appeasing domestic elements who fear peace more than they fear war.

RT:

Lawmakers in New York State are proposing new legislation that involves the Web, and no, it’s not SOPA-esque or another CISPA-like spy-bill. Politicians in the Empire State want to outlaw anonymous speech on the Internet.

Republican Assemblyman Jim Conte says that the legislation he co-sponsors, Bill no. S06779, would cut down on “mean-spirited and baseless political attacks”…

That’s bound to be constitutional.

A lot of people are puzzling over the Obama Adminstration’s stance on the P5+1 talks going on in Baghdad right now. In particular, the administration has said that even if a deal is reached with Iran at the summit, they aren’t going to remove any sanctions from them in return.

This is, of course, the way sanctions work.

In 1990, the United Nations imposed a massive array of sanctions on Iraq because Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The result was hundreds of thousands of civilians, by even the most conservative estimates, getting killed, and Madeline Albright getting her moment of infamy when she insisted the deaths of children was “worth it.”

In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, conquered the country, and installed a puppet regime. In 2006 the puppet regime captured and executed Saddam Hussein.

Today, portions of those anti-Iraq sanctions are STILL in place, and 5% of Iraq’s annual oil and gas sales to this day (Iraq is now the #2 producer on the planet) go to Kuwait as “reparations” for a war that was over 20+ years ago. With Iraq and Kuwait arguing over the positioning of a key port on the Persian Gulf, it is unlikely Kuwait will ever sign off on them.

So when Iran agrees to something, obviously the sanctions don’t go away. Iran could have a full scale color-coded revolution and install a US viceroy tomorrow, announce that it is giving all of its nuclear material as a gift to Israel (and appointing Iranian-born Israeli Deputy PM Shaul Mofaz as its new Shah), and we’d still be talking about portions of the Iran sanctions being debated for years.

The Treasury Department seems like it slaps extra sanctions on Iran just to spice up a slow news day at this point, but while this sort of thing happens on a whim, it will be a thorn in everyone’s side for a generation.

Under statutory mandates, Congress is required to impose automatic budget cuts if an agreement on “debt reduction” is not reached. It is already clear Congress is ignoring its own self-imposed requirements, which Americans overwhelmingly support. As I recently wrote: “Essentially, Congress mandated action on cutting spending by force of law, and then ignored their own legislative mandates. A more illustrative example of lawlessness is hard to find.” Well, I may have found it:

Military planners are under strict orders not to devise scenarios for meeting the demands of “sequestration,” as the automatic, across-the-board spending reductions are called. Such paperwork, if leaked, would tell Congress there might be a way to deal with such drastic cuts.

…“They said they had all been ordered not to. It would be a violation. It would be a crime,” one participant told The Times.

An Army officer said, according to the participant: “I would be disobeying orders. I would be violating my orders and essentially committing a criminal act if I did any analytics on sequestration at this point.”

Remember, this is not about slashing budgets, but rather about a decision to slow the rate of growth in defense spending.

In an interview today on CNN, Afghan President Hamid Karzai was asked about reports that Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R – CA) is banned from entering Afghanistan. Karzai confirmed the ban, and went on to say that:

“A democratically elected congressman of the United States of America should not be talking of an ethnic divide in Afghanistan, should not be interfering in Afghanistan’s internal affairs, should not be asking the Afghan people to have a federal structure as against what the Afghan constitution has asked for, should not be speaking disrespectfully about the Afghan people or the various ethnic groups in Afghanistan.” He went on to say that the US would never allow anyone critical of its constitution to visit either.

Rohrabacher responded by saying that he would never apologize to Karzai or his “corrupt clique of irresponsible leaders.” He added that it was ridiculous to say a foreigner shouldn’t have a say in the Afghan constitution since a foreigner, former US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, wrote it in the first place.