Yonatan Zunger’s Blog

One third of the Iranian parliament has just resigned. This comes in protest of the Guardian Council’s decision to ban over half the candidates for parliament for standing for office, including a large number of incumbents. The move comes after a three-week sit-in which the current parliament held in protest.

The situation is heating up; whether this will be the thing that triggers a large-scale change remains to be seen. Best of luck to the reformers.

So Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, has signed a detailed confession about how he provided a great deal of nuclear how-to, including lots of details, to Iran, Libya and North Korea. (NY Times story here)

President Musharraf is of course shocked, shocked! to find out that this was going on.

The American and Pakistani statements, of course, put the blame squarely on Khan, and not on any members of the government, since we’ve found ourselves in the unenviable position of needing Musharraf to stay alive and in power since he’s far and away the best of several options for the rulership of Pakistan. (For one, he’s somewhat opposed to the fundamentalists, despite the fact that they control the army and de facto a good fraction of the country.) Unfortunately, quite a few of his countrymen disagree with that last estimation, or at least so it would seem given the number of people who have tried to kill him in the past few months.

So is anyone at all surprised by any of this?

So the founder of Pakistan’s nuclear program, A. Q. Khan, was just fired from his post as a high-ranking adviser and placed under house arrest amidst increasing evidence that he was personally involved in the sale of nuclear technology to a number of fairly dubious states, such as Iran and Libya. (“Increasing evidence” such as “his sales brochure with his picture on the cover”)

As a side note, Khan is revered as a hero in Pakistan for being the person to give his country the bomb (mostly by stealing the techniques from Germany, but that’s neither here nor there), and this is part of Pres. Musharraf’s attempt to bring various radical elements under control, including another directive issued a few days ago to get his generals to use more aggressive means to bring terrorist elements in the Pashtun hinterlands near the Afghan border under control.

I would not sell Musharraf any life insurance right about now.

The more interesting question is, how will things unfold if/when he’s gone?

In Israel, late at night, the government started erecting a 30-foot wall separating Jerusalem from the neighboring town of Abu Dis. (story)

I don’t know why, but this in particular terrifies me, like it’s a sign that something truly horrible is going to happen. Not in the usual politics sense – in some vaguer and more metaphysical sense. This is a bad idea, one that’s going to have consequences for ages to come, and I’m very scared of what may come next.

So this politics post is dedicated to pure hearsay and strange rumors that I’ve been hearing bits of lately. As a latest reference I’ll just point people in the vague direction of debka, a notorious rumor mill if there ever was one, but a lot of this has been showing up in a wide variety of channels – NY Times, IHT, and so on. The point of this is mostly to mull over strange ideas.
That wacky Qaddafi

Of Bam following the earthquake, from the Federation of American Scientists.

Apparently, a few hours ago, Israeli troops fired live ammunition against protesters at the “security fence” between the West Bank and Israel. One Israeli citizen, a recently (honorably) discharged combat veteran who was at the protest, was seriously wounded; one foreign national, a woman with the international solidarity movement, (ISM) was “lightly injured” (I have no idea what that actually means) by a rubber bullet.

Update: I just heard back from my friend, and she’s ok. Whew.

OK, several things about this:

1. A good friend of mine, female and with American citizenship, is over there right now, working on ground-level peace efforts. I support her very much in this. I know she has some connection to ISM and was almost certainly at that protest; I do not yet have any reports from her, so I don’t know if she is okay or not.
2. This is reminding me of something very important: In the past few years, I’ve spent so much time playing devil’s advocate against the Vacuous Left – the people who say “look, peace would be completely simple, if only…” without any real understanding of what’s going on – that I haven’t spent nearly enough time thinking about the actual problems there and what can be done to solve them. This is something of the utmost importance, and actually doing whatever it is is of even more importance; I’m going to be dedicating a great deal more time to this in the future.
3. On a more proximate note, the fact that troops would fire on demonstrators seems to be a sign that things are deteriorating very, very badly. As far as I can tell morale is falling rapidly, as the army separates into people who believe fervently in the unconstrained use of force and people with increasingly severe moral objections to their orders – often mixed in the same unit, and both routinely placed on the front lines in situations where each decision tends to have extremely severe consequences.
   Unfortunately, I can’t convince myself that this was unexpected. I’ve heard too many reports, from too many sources that I trust, of the use of unconscionable levels of force against civilians at checkpoints and other border areas; once a military starts to accept things like this as being basically routine, not exceptions in need of serious investigation and even courts-martial, things are bad, and only going to get rapidly worse. I hope that all of my friends in the military and related organizations around the world take this situation to heart, and remember to keep a very close eye on how the people in their units and under their command are responding to the stresses of engagement. The balance between self-protection and reasonable force is incredibly hard to find, but it’s extraordinarily important that this always be done, especially in prolonged conflicts; the consequences of failing to do so can include rapid escalations of violence, and worse yet, a split and demoralized military performing random acts of violence on an unsuspecting populace. Yes, I’ve seen this happen with a variety of militaries in a variety of situations – and some of them from very good countries, composed of people with the best backgrounds.
   In this particular case, I can only hope that the extremity of the events, and the fact that Israeli and foreign citizens were involved, will prompt a very thorough investigation, and hopefully severe punishment for the person responsible – either the soldier who fired (if it was in defiance of orders) or the officer on the scene, if it was not.
4. Beyond this, I know that the situation in the Middle East has deteriorated extremely far in the past few months; to say that good solutions are going to be hard to find is probably the understatement of the century. I don’t yet know what to say to that. Enough people seem determined to make matters worse that I don’t know what can happen next.
   But one particular action in the past few days sticks out – after the earthquake in Iran, I noticed that Israel’s government did not make an immediate offer to Iran’s government of aid. I believe this is a deep mistake; above all, we are neighbors and cousins, and have been such for much longer than we have been enemies. Furthermore, there is no better time to begin a genuine process of peace in the long term than at such a moment; it would have been a win for all concerned, and maybe even slowed the process of violence in the region. I do believe that people even at the street level would have stopped and been forced to pause and reconsider their position had Israel sent full assistance teams – and even more so if there were photographs of Israeli soldiers in full uniform, helping Iranian civilians.
   It would have been important to the Israeli soldiers, as well – a chance to participate in something like this, even on a purely volunteer basis, would make a big difference in the morale problem.

I realize this post is a bit vague on specifics. I’m going to have to spend quite a bit of time thinking about several issues raised by this, and several other issues I’ve been letting lie fallow for far too long. So more later.

For once, something possibly good on a political front. From an unexpected source.

Apparently, yesterday Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz was on the radio in Iran, taking live questions. (In Farsi) The questions and the answers were… unexpected. Summary here.

I have no idea what to think, or say.

[politics, mostly just shaking head at odd behavior and useless news stories]

An article today in the NY Times informing us that hostile forces in Iraq are acquiring intelligence information about the comings and goings of various people they would like to gak by hanging out on street corners and watching, and similar reasonably straightforward means, and that this isn’t difficult because we’ve got a large footprint for pretty much everything we do there.

No shit?

The only thing that really caught my eye in this was this line:

The American-led alliance’s intelligence system “continues to get better every day in theater, and we receive credible information which assists us in pre-empting potential attacks against our soldiers,” a military officer said.

Sounds like an awfully defensive position whence to be planning one’s intelligence operations. In fact, that sounds a lot like someone thinking in terms of a siege mentality. I sincerely hope that sort of mindset isn’t too widespread among the American forces there, or we’re going to be in for a lot of trouble quickly.