Thursday, May 8, 2014

Ukraine Overreach Hubris Confirms Decline of American Empire

Ukraine Overreach Hubris Confirms Decline of American Empire

"Keynes's collective work amounted to a powerful argument that capitalism was by its very nature unstable and prone to collapse. Far from trending toward some magical state of equilibrium, capitalism would inevitably do the opposite. It would lurch over a cliff," --- Hyman Minsky.

"Capitalism has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells"- Karl Marx

"When there is a general change of conditions, it is as if the entire creation had been changed and the whole world been altered." - Ibn Khaldun

"History is ruled by an inexorable determinism in which the free choice of major historical figures plays a minimal role", Leo Tolstoy

"History is but glorification of murderers, criminals and robbers." - Karl Popper

The collapse of the Soviet Union and its allies in Eurasia in the wake of a tabletop 'Nuclear Confrontation 'when USSR could not match the military expenditure against US led West, was claimed to be a victory of capitalism over scientific socialism, and the silly 'End of history '.After barbaric colonialism, imperialism was invented the charade of Globalisation, used to transfer perhaps a trillion dollars worth of wealth from former communist states to the West.

But by the end of 20^th century the neo-liberal capitalism model started to fray and fail and so it continues .Since then the author has been writing about the end of the US century and the decline of its hegemony . URLs of 10 articles are given below;

1. CAPITALISM IN CRISIS AND FAILURE OF GLOBALISATION 12 July 2000 http://tarafits-archives-usa-eurasia.blogspot.in/2009/11/capitalism-in-crisis-and-failure-of.html

Extracts;

"Globalisation ,much heralded since early 1990s as panacea has turned out to be a glib-lisation of economic and social problems of the people in former socialist countries with the so called shock therapy reducing millions to penury and misery .The middle classes have been decimated with wealth and power becoming concentrated in the hands of a few ,--

But –"Now the very concept of capitalism as panacea for all problems and countries is being questioned, rightly, even in the West, after the collapse of economies in East and South East Asia, followed by crisis in Brazil. They had followed all the rules prescribed by IMF and other Western Institutions. In 1998 during the gravest global economic crisis in a half-century there was furor when Malaysian PM Mahathir defied the conventional wisdom of the inter-national financial community by curbing free flow of hot money which had played such havoc with the economies of SE Asia .He brought in strict short-term capital control measures, made the ringgit non-convertible, set up three agencies - for corporate debt restructuring, for asset management and for refinance etc. Malaysia's recovery was almost as dramatic as it was full-blooded –

In August/Sept 1998 the very bastions of capitalism were reduced to utter panic and incoherence after the collapse of East and South East Asian economies, the decimation of the rouble and impending fall of the Brazilian economy.

On September 8, The Washington Post under the title " Rethink Capitalism "wrote,' What is frightening about the world's current economic troubles is a sense that rules we thought we understood don't seem to apply now. Until a few months ago, we thought we knew what a developing country had to do to join the ranks of the wealthy. We thought we knew how a Communist country could transform itself into a capitalist one. The general understanding was that as the world became more connected, it also would become more prosperous. Now, with Russia and much of Asia having crashed, with Eastern Europe and Latin America imperiled and with much of Africa going backward, the certainties of only a year ago seem far from certain.

—'Some other headlines around the same time were 'Global Capitalism, Once Triumphant, Is in Full Retreat 'by Robert J. Samuelson in Newsweek' ,'In Russia, the Liberal Western Model Has Failed 'by Martin Malia in International Herald Tribune etc. There were similar articles in Foreign Affairs of CFR, Washington and other journals. After chiding Asians for their crony capitalism , in Sep 1998, LTMC a big US Investment firm run by two 1997 Nobel Prize Winners for Economics (derivative trading?) had to be bailed out as its bets around the world amounted to US$ 100 billion .Perhaps in expatiation Amritya Sen was given next years prize for his writings on famines and democracy."

The 9/11false flag operation to bomb Afghanistan and latter invasion of Iraq against international law as confirmed by UN Sec Gen Kofi Annan and protests by tens of millions of people all over the world only confirmed the depravity and villainy of so called leaders like George Bush .Tony Blair, in fact the whole lot of them .they are but puppets in the hands of financiers and bankers.

Almost 1.5 million Iraqis have been killed since then and the state damaged beyond repair. But after the killing fields of Iraq the US army dare not put its boots on invaded and bombed hostile land .The Army is "broken, worn out" and "living hand to mouth," so proclaimed in 2005 late Congressman decorated Marine Col. John Murtha.The story about Afghanistan, then Libya, Syria is no different .Like losing armies of Napoleon and Hitler, West is bringing destruction where ever its eyes fall and more so when in retreat.

My articles and URLs are listed below.

2. The decline of the American Century Sept 11, 2002 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/DI11Ak06.html

3. The US Empire –Beginning of the End Game 24 Nov, 2006 http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15729.htm

4. The Decline and Coming Fall of US Hegemony March 30, 2008 http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m42600&hd=&size=1&l=e

5. Western Military-Capitalist Civilization in Disarray September 25, 2008 http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m47513; http://www.boloji.com/analysis2/0386.htm

6. Corporate Culture and Greed Sink the American Republic 17 May, 2009 http://www.boloji.com/analysis2/0442.htm

7. Confirmation of Pressure on Dollar and US Decline 8 October, 2009 http://www.boloji.com/analysis2/0493.html

8. The Looming Mother of all Economic and Social Crisis 11 May, 2010

http://www.mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/2405-k-gajendra-singh.html, etc

9. Post Sept 2008 Crippled Economy & US Strategic Decline

Smoke and Storm Signals, 4 July.2011

http://www.boloji.com/index.cfm?md=Content&sd=Articles&ArticleID=11174

10. Post Bretton Woods; Emerging Outlines of New International Monetary Order

http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/16527-new-international-monetary.html

Given below is an excellent article,

"The Ukraine Imbroglio and the Decline of the American Empire '

By Prof ARNO J. MAYER of the Princeton university .In spite of almost overwhelming control of military-industry complex and corporate control over education, barren think tank lands and communications , some spirited forces can still tell the truth in USA.

Please take your time in perusing these articles and comments

Amb (Retd) K Gajendra Singh 8 May, 2014, Mayur Vihar, Delhi.

http://tarafits.blogspot.com/2011/08/amb-rtd-k-gajendra-singh-cv-post.html

The main points highlighted by Prof Mayer are as follows;

Prof Mayer refers to Edward Gibbon's insightful perception in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "Why it had subsisted for so long," has a particular relevance today about the decline and coming fall of US empire...

President Obama and his staff, as well as nearly all Democratic and Republican Senators and Representatives, policy wonks and pundits, remain confirmed and unquestioning imperials. Should any of them read Gibbon they would pay no mind to his hunch that "the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness" which by blowback corroded the polity, society, and culture that carried it. Of course today, with no barbarians at the gates, there is no need for legions of ground forces so that the bankrupting "defense" budget is for a military of airplanes, ships, missiles, drones, cyber-weapons, and weapons of mass destruction. Si vis pacem para bellum—against whom and for which objectives?

In 1997, in his The Great Chessboard Brzezinski argued that "the struggle for global primacy [would] continue to be played" on the Eurasian "chessboard," and that as a "new and important space on [this] chessboard . . . Ukraine was a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia." Indeed, "if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its [then] 52 million people and major resources, as well as access to the Black Sea," Russia would "automatically again regain the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia."

American and Israeli hardliners want to contain and roll back a resurgent great-power Russia, as much in Syria and Iran as in its "near abroad" in Europe and Asia.

In sum, the unregenerate U. S. Empire means to actively contain both Russia and China in the true-and-tried modus operandi, starting along and over Russia's European "near abroad" and the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait connecting the South China Sea to the East China Sea.

The U.S.A. accounts for close to 40% of the world's military expenditures, compared to some 10% by China and 5.5% by Russia. The Aerospace and Defense Industry contributes close to 3% of GDP and is the single largest positive contributor to the nation's balance of trade. America's three largest arms companies—Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing—are the world's largest, employing some 400,000 hands, and all but corner the world's market in their "products." Of late defense contracting firms have grown by leaps and bounds in a nation-empire increasingly loathe deploying conventional boots on the ground. These corporate contractors provide an ever greater ratio of contract support field personnel, many of them armed, over regular army personnel. Eventually, in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom private contract and regular military personnel were practically on a par.

There is, of course, a considerable work force, including white-collar employees, that earns its daily bread in the bloated "defense" sector. It does so in an economy whose industrial/manufacturing sectors are shrinking, considerably because of outsourcing, most of it overseas. This twisted or peculiar federal budget and free-market economy not only spawn unemployment and underemployment but breed growing popular doubt about the material and psychic benefits of empire.

Within a matter of days following Putin's monitory move NATO, notably President Obama, countered in kind: a guided-missile destroyer crossed the Bosphoros into the Black Sea for naval exercises with the Romanian and Bulgarian navies; additional F-15 fighter jets were dispatched to reinforce NATO patrol missions being flown over the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; and a squadron of F-16 fighter bombers and a fulsome company of "boots on the ground" was hastened to Poland. Of course, theses deployments and reinforcements ostensibly were ordered at the urging of these NATO allies along Russia's borders, all of whose "regimes" between the wars, and especially during the 1930s, had not exactly been paragons of democracy and because of their Russo-cum-anti-Communist phobia had moved closer to Nazi Germany

In the midst of the Ukraine "crisis" President Obama flew to The Hague for the third meeting of the Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) chartered in 2010 to prevent nuclear terrorism around the world

nuclear material worldwide and tightening security of all nuclear materials and radioactive sources in their respective countries. At The Hague, with a myriad of journalists covering the event, some 20 heads of state and government and some 5,000 delegates took stock of advances made thus far in this arduous mission and swore to press on. But there was a last minute dissonance. Sergey Lavrov, the Foreign Minister of Russia, and Yi Jinping, the President of China, along with 18 other chief delegates, refused to sign a declaration calling on member nations to admit inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to check on their measures to rein in the menace of nuclear terrorism. {IAEA has been used to control and harass regimes not subservient to US imperialists}

The negotiated elimination or radical reduction of nuclear weapons is completely off the agenda. It is dismissed as a quixotic ideal in a world of nine nuclear powers: U. S., Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea—and Israel. It was on Obama's watch that the U. S. and post-Soviet Russia agreed that neither would deploy more than roughly 1,500 warheads, down from many times that number. But now, with Russia's reemergence as a great power and China's prodigious forced-draft renascence, in a multipolar world the U. S. seems bent on keeping a considerable nuclear superiority over both. Whereas most likely Washington and Moscow are in the throes of "modernizing" their nuclear arsenals and delivery capabilities, in this sphere China is only beginning to play catch-up.

The decline of the American Empire, like that of all empires, promises to be at once gradual and relative. As for the causes of this decline, they are inextricably internal / domestic and external / foreign. There is no separating the refractory budgetary deficit and its attendant swelling political and social dissension from the irreducible military budget necessary to face down rival empires. Clearly, to borrow Chalmers Johnson's inspired conceptually informed phrase, the "empire of bases," with a network of well over 600 bases in probably over 100 countries, rather than fall overnight from omnipotence to impotence risks becoming increasingly erratic and intermittently violent in "defense" of the forever hallowed exceptional "nation."

--to the fury of the nuclear bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. It is, of course, commendable that so many nations now seek to prevent "nuclear terrorism" by way of the Nuclear Security Summit. However, there being no fail-safe systems of access control this endeavor is bound to be stillborn without a simultaneously resolute drive to radically reduce or liquidate the world's staggering stock of nuclear weapons and weapons-grade nuclear materials. After all, the greater that stock the greater the opportunity and temptation for a terrorist, criminal, or whistle-blower to pass the Rubicon.

According to informed estimates presently there are well over 20,000 nuclear bombs on this planet, with America and Russia between them home to over 90% of them. No less formidable are the vast global stockpiles of enriched uranium and plutonium.

Not only Washington but Moscow knows that in 1945 the ultimate reason for using the absolute weapon was transparently geopolitical rather than purely military.

With the weight of the unregenerate imperials in the White House, Pentagon, Congress, the "third house," and the think tanks there is the risk that this U. S.- masterminded NATO "operation freedom in Russia's European "near abroad" will spin out of control, also because the American Know nothings are bound to have their Russian counterparts.(Indian TV channels are populated mostly by Know nothings)

In this game of chicken on the edge of the nuclear cliff the U. S. cannot claim the moral and legal high ground since it was President Truman and his inner circle of advisors who unleashed the scourge of nuclear warfare, and with time there was neither an official nor a popular gesture of atonement for this wanton and excessive military excess. And this despite FDR and Truman Chief of Staff Admiral William Leahy confessing that "in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages," an observation possibly anticipated by General Eisenhower's plaint to Secretary of War Stimson of his "grave misgivings" and belief that "dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary and… our country should avoid shocking world opinion…"

The Ukraine Imbroglio and the Decline of the American Empire

by ARNO J. MAYER

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/18/the-ukraine-imbroglio-and-the-decline-of-the-american-empire/

When discussing the Ukraine-Crimea "crisis" it might be hygienic for Americans, including their political class, think-tank pundits, and talking heads, to recall two striking moments in "the dawn's early light" of the U. S. Empire: in 1903, in the wake of the Spanish-American War, under President Theodore Roosevelt America seized control of the southern part of Guantanamo Bay by way of a Cuban-American Treaty which recognizes Cuba's ultimate sovereignty over this base; a year after the Bolshevik Revolution, in 1918, President Woodrow Wilson dispatched 5,000 U. S. troops to Arkhangelsk in Northern Russia to participate in the Allied intervention in Russia's Civil War, which raised the curtain on the First Cold War. Incidentally, in 1903 there was no Fidel Castro in Havana and in 1918 no Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin.

It might also be salutary to note that this standoff on Ukraine-Crimea is taking place in the unending afterglow of the Second Cold War and at a time when the sun is beginning to set on the American Empire as a new international system of multiple great powers emerges.

Of course, empires have ways of not only rising and thriving but of declining and expiring. It is one of Edward Gibbon's insightful and challenging questions about the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that is of particular relevance today. Gibbon eventually concluded that while the causes for Rome's decline and ruin were being successfully probed and explicated, there remained the great puzzle as to why "it had subsisted for so long." Indeed, the internal and external causes for this persistence are many and complex. But one aspect deserves special attention: the reliance on violence and war to slow down and delay the inevitable. In modern and contemporary times the European empires kept fighting not only among themselves, but also against the "new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child," once these dared to resist and eventually rise up against their imperial-colonial overlords. After 1945 in India and Kenya; in Indochina and Algeria; in Iran and Suez; in Congo. Needless to say, to this day the still-vigorous

U. S. Empire and the fallen European empires lock arms in efforts to save what can be saved in the ex-colonial lands throughout the Greater Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

There is no denying that America's uniquely informal empire, without settler colonies, expanded headlong across the globe during and following World War Two. It did so thanks to having been spared the enormous and horrid loss of life, material devastation, and economic ruin which befell all the other major belligerents, allied and Axis. To boot, America's mushrooming "military-industrial complex" overnight fired the Pax Americana's momentarily unique martial, economic, and soft power.

By now the peculiar American Empire is past its apogee. Its economic, fiscal, social, civic, and cultural sinews are seriously fraying. At the same time the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and Iran are claiming their place in the concert of world powers in which, for a good while, one and all will play by the rules of a new-model mercantilism in a globalizing soi-disant "free market" capitalist economy.

America's splendid era of overseas "boots on the ground" and "regime change" is beginning to draw to a close. Even in the hegemonic sphere decreed by the Monroe Doctrine there is a world of difference between yesteryear's and today's interventions. In the not so distant good old times the U. S. horned in rather nakedly in Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1962), Dominican Republic (1965), Chile (1973), Nicaragua (1980s), Grenada (1983), Bolivia (1986), Panama (1989), and Haiti (2004), almost invariably without enthroning and empowering more democratic and socially progressive "regimes." Presently Washington may be said to tread with considerably greater caution as it uses panoply of crypto NGO-type agencies and agents in Venezuela. It does so because in every domain, except the military, the empire is not only vastly overextended but also because over the last few years left-leaning governments/"regimes" have emerged in five Latin American nations which most likely will become every less economically and diplomatically dependent on and fearful of the U. S.

Though largely subliminal, the greater the sense and fear of imperial decay and decline, the greater the national hubris and arrogance of power which cuts across party lines. To be sure, the tone and vocabulary in which neo-conservatives and right-of-center conservatives keep trumpeting America's self-styled historically unique exceptionalism, grandeur, and indispensability is shriller than that of left-of-center "liberals" who, in the fray, tend to be afraid of their own shadow. Actually, Winston Churchill's position and rhetoric is emblematic of conservatives and their fellow travelers in the epoch of the West's imperial decline which overlapped with the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and Communism. Churchill was a fiery anti-Soviet and anti-Communist of the very first hour and became a discreet admirer of Mussolini and Franco before, in 1942, proclaiming loud and clear: "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." By then Churchill had also long since become the chief crier of the ideologically fired "appeasement" mantra which was of one piece with his landmark "Iron Curtain" speech of March 1946. Needless to say, never a word about London and Paris, in the run-up to Munich, having willfully ignored or refused Moscow's offer to collaborate on the Czech (Sudeten) issue. Nor did Churchill and his aficionados ever concede that the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact (Nazi-Soviet Pact) of August 1939 was sealed a year after the Munich Pact, and that both were equally infamous ideologically informed geopolitical and military chess moves.

To be sure, Stalin was an unspeakably cruel tyrant. But it was Hitler's Nazi Germany that invaded and laid waste Soviet Russia through the corridor of Central and Eastern Europe, and it was the Red Army, not the armies of the Western allies, which at horrendous cost broke the spinal cord of the Wehrmacht. If the major nations of the European Union today hesitate to impose full-press economic sanctions on Moscow for its defiance on Crimea and Ukraine it is not only because of their likely disproportionate boomerang effect on them. The Western Powers, in particular Germany, have a Continental rather than Transatlantic recollection and narrative of Europe's Second Thirty Years Crisis and War followed by the American-driven and –financed unrelenting Cold War against the "evil empire"—practically to this day.

During the reign of Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev NATO, founded in 1949 and essentially led and financed by the U. S., inexorably pushed right up to or against Russia's borders. This became most barefaced following 1989 to 1991, when Gorbachev freed the "captive nations" and signed on to the reunification of Germany. Between 1999 and 2009 all the liberated Eastern European countries—former Warsaw Pact members—bordering on Russia as well as three former Soviet republics were integrated into NATO, to eventually account for easily one-third of the 28 member nations of this North Atlantic military alliance. Alone Finland opted for a disarmed neutrality within first the Soviet and then post-Soviet Russian sphere. Almost overnight Finland was traduced not only for "appeasing" its neighboring nuclear superpower but also for being a dangerous role model for the rest of Europe and the then so-called Third World. Indeed, during the perpetual Cold War, in most of the "free world" the term and concept "Finlandization" became a cuss word well-nigh on a par with Communism, all the more so because it was embraced by those critics of the Cold War zealots who advocated a "third way" or "non-alignment." All along, NATO, to wit Washington, intensely eyed both Georgia and Ukraine.

By March 2, 2014, the U. S. Department of State released a "statement on the situation in Ukraine by the North Atlantic Council" in which it declared that "Ukraine is a valued partner for NATO and a founding member of the Partnership for Peace . . . [and that] NATO Allies will continue to support Ukrainian sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity, and the right of the Ukrainian people to determine their own future, without outside interference." The State Department also stressed that "in addition to its traditional defense of Allied nations, NATO leads the UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan and has ongoing missions in the Balkans and the Mediterranean; it also conducts extensive training exercises and offers security support to partners around the globe, including the European Union in particular but also the United Nations and the African Union."

To be sure, Secretary of State John Kerry, the Obama administration's chief finger wagger, merely denounced Putin's deployment in and around Ukraine-Crimea as an "act of aggression that is completely trumped up in terms of pretext." For good measure he added, however, that "you just do not invade another country," and he did so at a time there was nothing illegal about Putin's move. But Hillary Clinton, Kerry's predecessor, and most likely repeat candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency, rather than outright demonize Putin as an unreconstructed KGB operative or a mini-Stalin went straight for the kill: "Now if this sounds familiar. . . it is like Hitler did back in the '30s." Presently, as if to defang criticism of her verbal thrust, Clinton averred that "I just want people to have a little historic perspective," so that they should learn from the Nazis' tactics in the run-up to World War II.

As for Republican Senator John McCain, defeated by Barack Obama for the Presidency in 2008, he was on the same wavelength, in that he charged that his erstwhile rival's "feckless" foreign policy practically invited Putin's aggressive move, with the unspoken implication that President Obama was a latter-day Neville Chamberlain, the avatar of appeasement.

But ultimately it was Republican Senator Lindsey Graham who said out loud what was being whispered in so many corridors of the foreign policy establishment and on so many editorial boards of the mainline media. He advocated "creating a democratic noose around Putin's Russia." To this end Graham called for preparing the ground to make Georgia and Moldova members of NATO. Graham also advocated upgrading the military capability of the most "threatened" NATO members along Russia's borders, along with an expansion of radar and missile defense systems. In short, he would "fly the NATO flag as strongly as I could around Putin"—in keeping with NATO's policy since

1990. Assuming different roles, while Senator Graham kept up the hawkish drumbeat on the Hill and in the media Senator McCain hastened to Kiev to affirm the "other" America's resolve, competence, and muscle as over the fecklessness of President Obama and his foreign-policy team. He went to Ukraine's capital a first time in December, and the second time, in mid-March 2014, as head of a bipartisan delegation of eight like-minded Senators.

On Kiev's Maidan Square, or Independence Square, McCain not only mingled with and addressed the crowd of ardent anti-Russian nationalists, not a few of them neo-fascists, but also consorted with Victoria Nuland, U. S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. Too much has been made of her revealing or unfortunate "fuck the EU" expletive in her tapped phone conversation with the local U. S. Ambassador Geoffrey Ryatt and her distribution of sweets on Maidan Square. What really matters is that Nuland is a consummate insider of Washington's imperial foreign policy establishment in that she served in the Clinton and Bush administrations before coming on board the Obama administration, having close relations with Hillary Clinton.

Besides, she is married to Robert Kagan, a wizard of geopolitics who though generally viewed as a sworn neo-conservative is every bit as much at home as his spouse among mainline Republicans and Democrats. He was a foreign-policy advisor to John McCain and Mitt Romney during their presidential runs, respectively in 2008 and 2012, before President Obama let on that he embraced some of the main arguments in The World America Made (2012), Kagan's latest book. In it he spells out ways to preserve the empire by way of controlling with some twelve naval task forces built around unsurpassable nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, its expanding Mare Nostrum in the South China Sea and Indian Ocean.

As a disciple of Alfred Thayer Mahan, quite naturally Kagan earned his spurs and his entrée to the inner circles of the makers and shakers of foreign and military policy by spending years at the Carnegie Endowment and Brookings Institution. That was before, in 1997, he became a co-founder, with William Kristol, of the neo-conservative Project for the New American Century, committed to the promotion of America's "global leadership" in pursuit of its national security and interests. A few years later, after this think tank expired, Kagan and Kristol began to play a leading role in the Foreign Policy Initiative, its lineal ideological descendant.

But the point is not that Victoria Nuland's demarche in Maidan Square may have been unduly influenced by her husband's writings and political engagements. Indeed, on the Ukrainian question, she is more likely to have been attentive to Zbigniew Brzezinski, another highly visible geopolitical who, however, has been swimming exclusively in Democratic waters ever since 1960, when he advised John F. Kennedy during his presidential campaign and then became national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter. Heavily fixed on Eurasia, Brzezinski is more likely to stand on Clausewitz's rather than Mahan's shoulders. But both Kagan and Brzezinski are red-blooded imperial Americans. In 1997, in his The Great Chessboard Brzezinski argued that "the struggle for global primacy [would] continue to be played" on the Eurasian "chessboard," and that as a "new and important space on [this] chessboard . . . Ukraine was a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia." Indeed, "if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its [then] 52 million people and major resources, as well as access to the Black Sea," Russia would "automatically again regain the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia." The unwritten script of Brzezinski, one of Obama's foreign policy advisors: intensify the West's—America's—efforts, by means fair and foul, to detach Ukraine from the Russian sphere of influence, including especially the Black Sea Peninsula with its access to the Eastern Mediterranean via the Aegean Sea.

Presently rather than focus on the geopolitical springs and objectives of Russia's "aggression" against Ukraine-Crimea Brzezinski turned the spotlight on the nefarious intentions and methods of Putin's move on the Great Chessboard. To permit Putin to have his way in Ukraine-Crimea would be "similar to the two phases of Hitler's seizure of Sudetenland after Munich in 1938 and the final occupation of Prague and Czechoslovakia in early 1938." Incontrovertibly "much depends on how clearly the West conveys to the dictator in the Kremlin—a partially comical imitation of Mussolini and a more menacing reminder of Hitler—that NATO cannot be passive if war erupts in Europe." For should Ukraine be "crushed with the West simply watching the new freedom and security of Romania, Poland, and the three Baltic republics would also be threatened." Having resuscitated the domino theory, Brzezinski urged the West to "promptly recognize the current government of Ukraine legitimate" and assure it "privately . . . that the Ukrainian army can count on immediate and direct Western aid so as to enhance its defense capabilities." At the same time "NATO forces . . . should be put on alert [and] high readiness for some immediate airlift to Europe of U. S. airborne units would be politically and militarily meaningful." And as an afterthought Brzezinski suggested that along with "such efforts to avoid miscalculations that could lead to war" the West should reaffirm its "desire for a peaceful accommodation . . . [and] reassure Russia that it is not seeking to draw Ukraine into NATO or turn it against Russia." Indeed, mirabile dictu, Brzezinski, like Henry Kissinger, his fellow geopolitical with a cold-war imperial mindset, adumbrated a form of Finlandization of Ukraine—but, needless to say, not of the other eastern Border States—without, however, letting on that actually Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister had recently made some such proposal.

Of course, the likes of Kagan, Brzezinski, and Kissinger keep mum about America's inimitable hand in the "regime change" in Kiev which resulted in a government in which the ultra-nationalists and neo-fascists, who had been in the front lines on Maidan Square, are well represented.

Since critics of America's subversive interventions tend to be dismissed as knee-jerk left-liberals wired to exaggerate their dark anti-democratic side it might help to listen to a voice which on this issue can hardly be suspect. Abraham Forman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League and renowned inquisitor of anti-Semitism, concedes that "there is no doubt that Ukraine, like Croatia, was one of those places where local militias played a key role in the murder of thousands of Jews during World War II." And anti-Semitism "having by no means disappeared from Ukraine . . . in recent months there have been a number of anti-Semitic incidents and there are at least two parties in Ukraine, Svoboda and Right Sector, that have within them some extreme nationalists and anti-Semites."

But having said that, Foxman insists that it is "pure demagoguery and an effort to rationalize criminal behavior on the part of Russia to invoke the anti-Semitism ogre into the struggle in Ukraine, . . . for it is fair to say that there was more anti-Semitism manifest in the worldwide Occupy Wall Street movement than we have seen so far in the revolution taking place in Ukraine." To be sure, Putin "plays the anti-Semitism card" much as he plays that of Moscow rushing to "protect ethnic Russians from alleged extremist Ukrainians." Even at that, however, "it is, of course, reprehensible to suggest that Putin's policies in Ukraine are anything akin to Nazi policies during World War II." But then Foxman hastens to stress that it "is not absurd to evoke Hitler's lie" about the plight of the Sudeten Germans as comparable to "exactly" what "Putin is saying and doing in Crimea" and therefore needs to be "condemned . . . as forcefully . . . as the world should have condemned the German move into the Sudetenland."

Abraham Foxman's tortured stance is consonant with that of American and Israeli hardliners who mean to contain and roll back a resurgent great-power Russia, as much in Syria and Iran as in its "near abroad" in Europe and Asia.

As if listening to Brzezinski and McCain, Washington is building up its forces in the Baltic states, especially Poland, with a view to give additional bite to sanctions. But this old-style intervention will cut little ice unless fully concerted, militarily and economically, with NATO's weighty members, which seems unlikely. Of course, America has drones and weapons of mass destruction—but so does Russia.

In any case, for unreconstructed imperials, and for AIPAC, the crux of the matter is not Russia's European "near abroad" but its reemergence in the Greater Middle East, presently in Syria and Iran, and this at a time when, according to Kagan, the Persian Gulf was paling in strategic and economic importance compared to the Asia-Pacific region where China is an awakening sleeping giant that even now is the globe's second largest economy—over half the size of the U. S. economy—and the unreal third largest holder of America's public debt—by far the largest foreign holder of U. S. Treasury bonds.

In sum, the unregenerate U. S. empire means to actively contain both Russia and China in the true-and-tried modus operandi, starting along and over Russia's European "near abroad" and the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait connecting the South China Sea to the East China Sea.

Because of ever growing budgetary constraints Washington has long since complained about its major NATO partners dragging their financial and military feet. This fiscal squeeze will intensify exponentially with the pivoting to the Pacific which demands steeply rising "defense" expenditures unlikely to be shared by a NATO-like Asia-Pacific alliance. Although most likely there will be a cutback in bases in the Atlantic world, Europe, and the Middle East, with the geographic realignment of America's global basing the money thus saved will be spent many times over on the reinforcement and expansion of an unrivaled fleet of a dozen task forces built around nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. After all, the Pacific and Indian oceans combined being easily more than twice the size of the Atlantic and though, according to Kagan, China is not quite yet an "existential threat" it is "developing one or two aircraft carriers, . . . anti-ship ballistic missiles . . . and submarines." Even now there are some flashpoints comparable to Crimea, Baltic, Syria, and Iran: the dustup between Japan and China over control of the sea lanes and the air space over the potentially oil-rich South China Sea; and the Sino-Japanese face-off over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. Whereas it is all but normal for Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea to have tensions, even conflictual relations, with China and North Korea, it is something radically different for the United States to NATOize them in the pursuit of its own imperial interest in the furthest reaches of its now contested Mare Nostrum.

The Pacific-Asian pivot will, of course, further overstretch the empire in a time of spiraling fiscal and budgetary constraints which reflect America's smoldering systemic economic straits and social crisis, generative of growing political dysfunction and dissension. To be sure, rare and powerless are those in political and academic society who question the GLORIA PRO NATIONE: America the greatest, exceptional, necessary, and do-good nation determined to maintain the world's strongest and up-to-date military and cyber power.

And therein lies the rub. The U.S.A. accounts for close to 40% of the world's military expenditures, compared to some 10% by China and 5.5% by Russia. The Aerospace and Defense Industry contributes close to 3% of GDP and is the single largest positive contributor to the nation's balance of trade. America's three largest arms companies—Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing—are the world's largest, employing some 400,000 hands, and all but corner the world's market in their "products." Of late defense contracting firms have grown by leaps and bounds in a nation-empire increasingly loathe to deploy conventional boots on the ground. These corporate contractors provide an ever greater ratio of contract support field personnel, many of them armed, over regular army personnel. Eventually, in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom private contract and regular military personnel were practically on a par.

This hasty evocation of the tip of America's military iceberg is but a reminder of President Dwight Eisenhower's forewarning, in 1961, of an "immense military establishment" in lockstep with "a large arms industry. . . [acquiring] unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought," injurious to democracy. At the time Ike could hardly have imagined the gargantuan growth and political weight of this military-industrial complex or the emergence, within it, of a corporate-contract mercenary army.

The formidable oligarchy of arms makers and merchants at the heart of the military-industrial complex fields a vast army of lobbyists in Washington. In recent years the arms lobby, writ large, spent countless millions during successive election cycles, its contributions being all but equally divided between Democrats and Republicans. And this redoubtable octopus-like "third house" is not about to sign on to substantial cuts in military spending, all the less so since it moves in sync with other hefty defense-related lobbies, such as oil, which is not likely to support the down-sizing of America's navy which, incidentally, is far and away the largest plying, nay patrolling, the world's oceans—trade routes.

In 1967, when Martin Luther King, Jr., broke his silence on the war in Vietnam, he spoke directly to the interpenetration of domestic and foreign policy in that conflict. He considered this war an imperialist intervention in far-distant Southeast Asia at the expense of the "Great Society" which President Johnson, who escalated this war, proposed to foster at home. After lamenting the terrible sacrifice of life on both sides, King predicated that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." He even intimated that "there is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent . . . the richest and most powerful nation in the world . . . from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war."

Almost 50 years later President Obama and his staff, as well as nearly all Democratic and Republican Senators and Representatives, policy wonks and pundits, remain confirmed and unquestioning imperials. Should any of them read Gibbon they would pay no mind to his hunch that "the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness" which by blowback corroded the polity, society, and culture that carried it. Of course today, with no barbarians at the gates, there is no need for legions of ground forces so that the bankrupting "defense" budget is for a military of airplanes, ships, missiles, drones, cyber-weapons, and weapons of mass destruction. Si vis pacem para bellum—against whom and for which objectives?

In the midst of the Ukraine "crisis" President Obama flew to The Hague for the third meeting of the Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) chartered in 2010 to prevent nuclear terrorism around the world. The NSS was Obama's idea and project, spelled out in an official statement issued by the White House Press Secretary on the eve of its founding meeting in April 2010 in Washington. This statement stressed that "over 2,000 tons of plutonium and highly enriched uranium exist in dozens of countries" and that there have been "18 documented cases of theft or loss of highly enriched uranium or plutonium." But above all :"we know that al-Qaeda, and possibly other terrorist or criminal groups, are seeking nuclear weapons—as well as the materials and expertise needed to make them." But the U. S., not being "the only country that would suffer from nuclear terrorism" and unable to "prevent it on its own," the NSS means to "highlight the global threat" and take the urgently necessary preventive measures.

Conceived and established in the aftermath of 9/11, by the latest count the NSS rallies 83 nations bent on collaborating to head off this scourge by reducing the amount of vulnerable nuclear material worldwide and tightening security of all nuclear materials and radioactive sources in their respective countries. At The Hague, with a myriad of journalists covering the event, some 20 heads of state and government and some 5,000 delegates took stock of advances made thus far in this arduous mission and swore to press on. But there was a last minute dissonance. Sergey Lavrov, the Foreign Minister of Russia, and Yi Jinping, the President of China, along with 18 other chief delegates, refused to sign a declaration calling on member nations to admit inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to check on their measures to rein in the menace of nuclear terrorism.

Inevitably the standoff over Ukraine-Crimea dimmed, even overshadowed, the hoped-for éclat of the Nuclear Security Summit. President Obama's mind was centered on an ad hoc session of the G 8 in the Dutch capital; a visit to NATO Headquarters in Brussels; an audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican, in Rome; and a hastily improvised meeting with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in Riyadh. Except for his visit with the Holy Father, from which he may have hoped to draw a touch of grace and indulgence, in his other meetings the President reasserted and proclaimed that America was and meant to remain what Hubert Védrine, a former French Foreign Minister, called the world's sole "hyperpower." The Ukraine-Crimea imbroglio merely gave this profession and affirmation a greater exigency.

It is ironical that the scheduled Nuclear Security Summit was the curtain-raiser for the President's double-quick imperial round of improvised meetings in the dawn of what Paul Bracken, another embedded and experienced geopolitician, avers to be The Second Nuclear Age (2012), this one in a multipolar rather than bipolar world. Actually Bracken merely masterfully theorized what had long since become the guiding idea and practice throughout the foreign policy-cum-military establishment. Or, as Molière's Monsieur Jourdain would put it, for many years the members of this establishment had been "speaking prose without even knowing it."

Standing tall on America's as yet unsurpassed military and economic might, Obama managed to convince his partners in the G 8, the conspicuous but listless economic forum of the world's leading economies, to suspend, not to say expel, Russia for Putin's transgression in Ukraine-Crimea. Most likely, however, they agreed to make this largely symbolic gesture so as to avoid signing on to ever-stiffer sanctions on Moscow. With this American-orchestrated charade the remaining G 7 only further pointed up the prepossession of their exclusive club from which they cavalierly shut out the BRICS.

As yet there is no significant let-up in the pretension to remain first among would-be equals on the seas, in the air, in cyberspace, and in cyber-surveillance. And the heft of the military muscle for this supererogation is provided by a thriving defense industry in an economy plagued by deep-rooted unemployment and a society racked by a crying income and wealth inequality, growing poverty, creeping socio-cultural anomie, and humongous systemic political corruption. Notwithstanding the ravings of the imperial "Knownothings" these conditions will sap domestic support for an unreconstructed interventionist foreign and military policy. They will also hollow out America's soft power by corroding the aura of the democratic, salvific, and capitalist City on the Hill.

Whereas the Soviet Union and communism were the polymorphic arch-enemy during the First Nuclear Age terrorism and Islamism bid well to take its place during the Second Nuclear Age. It would appear that the threat and use of nuclear weapons will be even less useful though hardly any less demonic today than yesterday. Sub specie aeternitatis the cry of the terrorist attack on New York's World Trade Center and Boston's Marathon was a bagatelle compared to the fury of the nuclear bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. It is, of course, commendable that so many nations now seek to prevent "nuclear terrorism" by way of the Nuclear Security Summit. However, there being no fail-safe systems of access control this endeavor is bound to be stillborn without a simultaneously resolute drive to radically reduce or liquidate the world's staggering stock of nuclear weapons and weapons-grade nuclear materials. After all, the greater that stock the greater the opportunity and temptation for a terrorist, criminal, or whistle-blower to pass the Rubicon.

In September 2009 Obama adjured the U. N. Security Council that "new strategies and new approaches" were needed to face a "proliferation" of an unprecedented "scope and complexity," in that "just one nuclear weapon exploded in a city—be it New York or Moscow, Tokyo or Beijing, London or Paris—could kill hundreds of thousands of people." Hereafter it was not uncommon for Washington insiders to avow that they considered a domestic nuclear strike with an unthinkable dirty bomb a greater and more imminent security risk than a prosaic nuclear attack by Russia. All this while the Nuclear Security Summit was treading water and the Pentagon continues to upgrade America's nuclear arsenal and delivery capabilities—with chemical weapons as a backstop. With the cutback of conventional military capabilities nuclear arms are not about to be mothballed.

Indeed, with this in mind the overreaction to Russia's move in Ukraine-Crimea is disquieting. From the start the Obama administration unconscionably exaggerated and demonized Moscow's—Putin's—objectives and methods while proclaiming Washington's consummate innocence in the unfolding imbroglio. Almost overnight, even before the overblown charge that Moscow was massing troops along Ukraine's borders and more generally in Russia's European "near abroad" NATO—i. e., Washington—began to ostentatiously send advanced military equipment to the Baltic counties and Poland. By April 4, 2014, the foreign ministers of the 28 member nations of NATO met in Brussels with a view to strengthen the military muscle and cooperation not only in the aforementioned countries but also in Moldova, Romania, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. In addition NATO air patrols would be stepped up while anti-missile batteries would be deployed in Poland and Romania. Apparently the emergency NATO summit also considered large-scale joint military exercises and the establishment of NATO military bases close to Russia's borders which, according to Le Figaro, France's conservative daily, would be "a demonstration of force which the Allies had themselves foregone during the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union." Would tactical nuclear weapons and nuclear-capable aircraft—or nuclear-capable drones—be deployed on these bases?

To what end? In preparation of a conventional war of the trenches, Guderian-type armored operations or a total war of Operation Barbarossa variety? Of course, this being post Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there must be a backup or contingency plan for nuclear sword play, with both sides, should reciprocal deterrence fail, confident in their first and second strike capabilities. Not only Washington but Moscow knows that in 1945 the ultimate reason for using the absolute weapon was transparently geopolitical rather than purely military.

With the weight of the unregenerate imperials in the White House, Pentagon, Congress, the "third house," and the think tanks there is the risk that this U. S.- masterminded NATO "operation freedom in Russia's European "near abroad" will spin out of control, also because the American Knownothings are bound to have their Russian counterparts.

This is a time for a national debate and a citizen-initiated referendum on whether or not the U. S. should adopt unilateral nuclear disarmament. It might be a salutary and exemplary exercise in participatory democracy.

Arno J. Mayer is emeritus professor of history at Princeton University. He is the author of The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions and Plowshares Into Swords: From Zionism to Israel (Verso).

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

India’s Nuclear Doctrine

India's Nuclear Doctrine

The survival of Homo sapiens hangs under the Sword of Damocles, at least since World War II on an irrational theology, which forms the basis of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD); watch this space for more.

There have been many instances like during the Cuban crisis when only providence and a Soviet Submarine Commander saved the world from devastating nuclear warfare, whose range and long term evil effects of destruction were demonstrated by US which nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not that it was militarily necessary, but as a pointer and lesson to USSR .There were reports of some rogue US generals taking the law into their hands during the Washington Moscow brinkmanship on Syria last year.

Below is an excellent piece on India's nuclear doctrine by Jayant Prasad. It is very precise and concise and makes for a compelling read. Amb Jayant Prasad definitely batted on difficult pitches in his diplomatic career.

The author has written many articles on the 5 nuclear gangsters, also with veto in UNSC, who terrorise the world .An article ( also posted by the Chatham House , underlining how US led West allowed Pakistan to acquire the nuke and its technology and exchange it for missiles technology with N. Korea.

K.Gajendra Singh 6 May 2014.Mayur Vihar, Delhi .

For a clear nuclear doctrine

JAYANT PRASAD Hindu Oped 6514

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/for-a-clear-nuclear-doctrine/article5979229.ece?homepage=true

For a credible deterrent, constancy of doctrine in its core essentials has definite merit

For India, nuclear deterrence is defensive and a means to secure its sovereignty and security. Its strategy of assured retaliation, combined with "no first use," provides adequate guarantee for this purpose. The strategy was unveiled concurrently with its 1998 nuclear tests, which ended the determined U.S. bid to prevent India from acquiring nuclear deterrent. Ironically, India's nuclear weapons tests, together with the rapid expansion of its economy, transformed its global outlook and relations with the U.S. and the world.

The Chinese nuclear weapons test of 1964, on the heels of the 1962 war, had always rankled in Indian minds. K. Subrahmanyam and K.R. Narayanan, at the time in the early years of their public service, advocated a matching Indian response. This did not then have resonance at the top, as India was facing the twin crises of food and finance.

The P-5 states treated non-proliferation as their default foreign and security policy objective, but this was invariably trumped by national interest. India's restraint and decision not to weaponise its nuclear capacities after the 1974 test were well known. Yet, when Pakistan accelerated its nuclear proliferation, it was not stopped in the wake of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when U.S. President Jimmy Carter designated Pakistan a "frontline" state.

The Chinese transferred nuclear materials and technology to Pakistan, including the weapons design and the means to deliver them — the solid fuel 300-kilometre range M-11 ballistic missiles. In a paper published in 1972, Professor Wayne Wilcox of Colombia University, then working as cultural attaché in the U.S. Embassy in London, perceptively recognised that India's policy concerning China and Pakistan "is to hedge all bets and cover all contingencies." India was compelled to acquire nuclear weapons to deter nuclear blackmail in its contiguity.

Unlike Pakistan or Israel, India could not have a "recessed" deterrent or bomb in the basement, given India's governance practices. Contingent factors delayed India's nuclear weapons tests, such as the persistent external pressure on India, and arguments by internal agnostics who claimed that such testing would betray India's long-held principles, diminish its international standing, and reduce future GDP growth rates by up to two per cent annually. In 1995 came the perpetual extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, without linking it to the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. The conditions attached to the 1996 Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, which could foreclose India's nuclear weapons option, became the final point of conviction. From then on, the question was not whether to test but when.

For India today, the choice is clear, as it was in 1998: so long as nuclear weapons exist, India's nuclear deterrence will have to be maintained. Until there is a global compact for creating a nuclear weapon-free world, India will have to persevere with this policy.

What is credible deterrence?

In delivering the message of credible deterrence, all nuclear weapons states, including those that have embraced no first use, face a conundrum. Nuclear weapons are weapons of the last resort, fundamentally different from conventional weapons. War is a traditional tool of statecraft, but the weapon to end all wars cannot be a standard instrument of an ordinary war — it can only be the final recourse for dissuasion. It cannot be chance, for then it will fail to deter. While embracing a declaratory policy to avoid nuclear war, the state concerned must simultaneously demonstrate that it has nuclear war fighting capacity — the resilience to take the pain of a first strike, and both the ability and resolve to inflict massive and intolerable destruction on the attacker.

For improving its punitive capacity, China is seeking a sea-based nuclear deterrent, deploying mobile solid-fuel missiles, and moving missiles below the surface in elaborate tunnels in mountainous terrain, undetectable from space, called the "Underground Great Wall." The same motivation has led India to similar pursuits. India's missile force, the weak link in its deterrence, is under rapid repair. Its transformation is enabling the shift toward strategic deterrence. In the past half-dozen years, India has invested in improving the command, control, communications, and intelligence systems and its second strike capacity, including the survival of the decision-making structure. The National Command Authority deserves credit for this. Simultaneously, the sea-based leg of the triad of delivery systems is taking shape — even if at a slower pace than the situation warrants. India might also have to do more to communicate effectively that its deterrent carries credibility.

In popular domestic imagination, India's assurance of "credible minimum deterrence" is confused with minimum credible deterrence, as if it connotes an arbitrary limitation. The essential prerequisite for nuclear deterrence is as much the sufficiency of the retaliatory capacity as the surety of response. This hinges on the size and nature of the arsenal and delivery systems, their survivability in the event of a pre-emptive attack, and the realisation by a potential adversary that the costs of attack outweigh the gains.

All nuclear weapons states that have robust missile programmes retain their first strike capabilities, since conventional missiles of short and intermediate ranges can be mated equally with nuclear or non-nuclear warheads, and can be used to attack nuclear facilities. At times doubts arise about the "responsible" behaviour of certain states, such as when Chinese President Xi Jinping did not mention China's no first use doctrine in a defence policy speech delivered in December 2012 to the Second Artillery Corps, or when the Chinese Defence White Paper, released in April 2013, did not contain the standard reiteration of this doctrine, thereby creating doubts about a shift in its nuclear policy.

While India remains watchful, most P-5 states appear to be settling into a more stable deterrence, discounting first strike weapons, despite holding a range of nuclear weaponry and delivery mechanisms. Under the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the U.S. and USSR had agreed to eliminate their intermediate and shorter range missiles between 500 and 5,500 kilometres. Pakistan alone is going in the other direction.

Myth of flexible response

The U.S. and Russia did contemplate flexible response and limited use of nuclear weapons in specific theatres in the hope of containing damage to their homelands. A graduating use of nuclear weapons is not possible, except in theory books and planning exercises. Envisaging escalatory nuclear weapons exchanges is even more difficult in India's security context: here, the space and time span between launch and delivery is non-existent. "Controlled" nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia is hard to imagine. Between India and China, or between India and Pakistan, it is impossible.

Admittedly, nuclear weapons can be used for coercion, but up to a point, and with some success only against a non-nuclear state. The experience of Kargil 15 years ago demonstrated how the leaders of the Pakistan Army took the wrong lesson from deterrence. They believed that with the advantage of stealth and shock, they could upset the conventional status-quo, without inviting an effective riposte for fear of a nuclear exchange. This was a serious miscalculation, as they discovered to their cost. Changing India's defensive nuclear doctrine to complicate their calculus will be irresponsible. India can survive a first strike but Pakistan cannot. What incentive would Pakistan have to consider a second strike if it believed India could attack it first? As for the growing non-nuclear threats to security, India can meet them by augmented conventional preparedness, hardened defences, upgraded equipment and a strong indigenous armament industry.

Toward a more secure India

The foremost threat to Indian security today comes not from its nuclear posture or externally, but from social deprivation and anaemic economic growth. Unshackling its entrepreneurship, accelerating infrastructure development and regenerating growth will make India safer. There is a clear vision in India on what has to be done. The new government should focus on how best and quickly to do it.

As Shyam Saran, Chairman of the National Security Advisory Board, has said, it would be best to put to rest any further speculation of a change in India's nuclear weapons policy. For a credible deterrent, constancy of doctrine in its core essentials has definite merit. The Bharatiya Janata Party has embraced the national inheritance on no first use. India's nuclear deterrent can be made more robust, meanwhile, by continuing the work to guarantee the efficacy of its retaliatory strike.

(Jayant Prasad was India's Ambassador to Afghanistan, Algeria, Nepal and the U.N. Conference on Disarmament.)

`Strategic Nuclear Environment: Pakistan, Iran & North Korea`

(Background)

http://tarafits.blogspot.in/2013/12/strategic-nuclear-environment-pakistan.html

The interim agreement between Iran and P5+1 on Tehran's enrichment of uranium for its power plants, medicinal and other uses (up to 20%) except nukes, is allowed to Iran under NPT which Tehran has signed .US led pressure and rabid hostility since 1979 was to subdue Iran to its wishes like pre Khomeini era, a loyal gendarme in the region. Iranians are a very patriotic, nationalistic and proud people.

I won't be surprised if US led western oil companies will start queuing up for stakes in Iran's to be exploited massive oil and gas reserves and to be part of Iran's industrial renaissance.

India's Iran policy has been stupid and shortsighted but then what to expect from IMF pensioners ruling in New Delhi and sold out empty head think tankers full of US planted ideas and gas...Apart from the damaging vote against Iran in Vienna, so called strategic thinkers or heads foreign policy boards made uncalled for statements that we do not want another Muslim nation to have nukes .What can these ignoranti do or for that matter India. They won't even recognize the spit fallen back on their faces .In between otiose statements of civilsational similarities would be repeated. Iran survived Arabs, Tatars, Mongols and Turks and civilsed them beginning with boorish Alexander of Macedonia.

Iran will play a crucial role in post-US Afghanistan and being a Shia beacon, beholden to battered Shias in Pakistan .It can provide more info on Pakistan .US sacrificed Mumbai for its agents in Pakistan .Worse it would have even loved a war between the two nuclear armed neighbors as some have suggested .But still we love George Bush or any American. A Congress spokesman even suggested that Bush be awarded Bharta Ratna. What more?

By end 2003 early 2004 it was clear to a student of history that US had entered into a quagmire in Iraq, a sort of Chakravu (unbreakable military fortress) and will not easily escape undamaged.

www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FA07Ak01.html

Its army was broken and useless wastage of treasure only enriched its bankers, financiers and war mongers bringing ruin to the country and its people. It only strengthened Tehran, with Iran supported and financed Iraqi Shias now in power in Baghdad .Iran with help from Russia, even China has seen ff US led west and its Sunni Gulf dependencies in Syria.

I had stood firm in my view that it would be suicidal for Washington or Tel Aviv to bomb Iran and did not take the threats seriously .Netanyahu has been crying wolf so that he can grab more Palestine land and not reach any solution on the problem .The Jewish lobby has the US Congress and administration by its short hair.

So in spite of threats and planted stories of all options being on the table I had maintained that US /Israel were not that stupid .Specially after US roll back and loss of airbases, facilities and agreements in central Asia and return of some pro Russian rulers in its near abroad .Azerbaijan is too much dependent on the West and for the time being Georgia has also signed a trade cooperation agreement with EU in Vilnius but not Ukraine .Its capital Kiev has been engulfed by heavy strikes , as usual funded and promoted from the west .If Western oriented interest try too much ,eastern Ukraine will rise in protests , an area which was added to Ukraine by Ukrainian born Soviet Union boss Nikita Khrushchev .

Below is an old piece about how US led west allowed Pakistan to have a nuke with Chinese gifts and guidance (India, if it had guts could have helped Vietnam likewise –now Putin is courting Vietnam as a counter to rising China.) Pakistan leveraged its nuke know how for missiles knowhow from North Korea

This first in the series of a few earlier background pieces on nuclear environment and Tehran's success in saving its vital interests which has angered Netanyahu and the aged wonders ruling in Riyadh have gone ballistic.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37031.htm

Watch this space for more.

K.Gajendra Singh 3 December, 2013 .Mayur Vihar, Delhi.

Pl also visit http://tarafits.blogspot.com/

Emerging Strategic Nuclear Environment: Iran & North Korea (first published on 29 May, 2005) Bucharest, Romania

While posted at Dakar in Senegal in West Africa ,I commenced in October 1980 the first leg of my travelathon crisscrossing continents on an Air Algeri flight which after a brief halt at Nouakchott , Mauritania , zigzagged East to Niamey, Niger's throbbing capital (thanks to uranium). Looking down from the plane, the journey across Sahara, crossing river Niger, over Timbuktu and GAO was fascinatingly dull. I wondered if all these little known places and Bamako (Mali), N'djamena (Chad) and Bangui (Central African Republic) might become household words like Kuwait, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, once the reportedly buried uranium wealth underneath were mined to fuel energy needs of last decade of this century and early 2lst century.

But in spite of wake up calls in 1970s of hydrocarbon energy shortage, the corporate interests in oil and gas, which is so profitable, did little to develop nuclear or other means of energy. So Niger has become notorious for its uranium mines for weapons use, and some times for its famines. President George W.Bush used alleged attempts by Saddam Hussein, proved concocted, to get uranium from Niger for weapons, as one of the causes belli to invade Iraq.

How ever, it was the Bhopal ( India) born Pakistan national and German trained metallurgist and nuclear scientist and a globaliser in nuclear weapons technology ,Dr. Abdul Qadir Khan, who last year brought into world focus, Timbuktu ,which even the much traveled Indian journalist Khuswant Singh thought was a only a verbal expression , when I told him about it. For in November 1979 after presenting my letters of credence in Bamako, saying now or never, I undertook a journey by road and by boat on river Niger, to sample some romance of the earlier travelers, to the famous Eldorado, where during medieval centuries a pound of salt fetched an ounce of gold, attracting traders, invaders and scholars making Timbuktu a great centre of Islamic culture and civilisation.

Who would have ever thought in 1979 that Khan would love Timbuktu so much that he would even invest in a hotel there (It appears that Hotel La Colombe (?) has been named for his wife -shades of a minor Shah Jehan).But even Dr Watson would tell Sherlock Holmes why, so that he could travel from Pakistan to Timbuktu and back and supervise transfer of yellow cake to Pakistan and elsewhere. One can easily fly east from Timbuktu to Niger or go by road or river. He went around openly, flying around to Morocco, Mali, Chad, Sudan and every where the maker of the Islamic bomb was a welcome hero.

The media accused Khan last year when the scandal about his proliferation activities exploded, of him even using Pakistan military aircrafts to transport furniture for his Timbuktu hotel project from Pakistan. Pray Dr Watson, what came back in empty Pakistani military aircrafts. Yellow cake, of course. Not even the gullible would believe that such top secret transfers were not known to the all powerful ISI, the Intelligence Services of Pakistan or the western intelligence services. Recently a former Dutch Prime Minister said that he was stopped from moving against Khan by USA's Central Intelligence Agency.

The Muslim world has been oppressed and exploited by the Christian West since centuries and Pakistan's pioneering role is part of the battle to face up to the western challenge, whether as an ally ( against India ) or as an opponent ( sooner or later ). But for its nuclear arsenal, USA after 119 would have come down on Pakistan even more heavily. So Iran has only taken the Pakistan ignited torch to share its nuclear capability for peaceful uses with Muslim and other nations as part of millennia old Jihad versus Crusade. If non-Muslim third world nations too join in this struggle then it would also become a North vs. South struggle and confrontation.

AQ Khan's contribution to Globalization of nuclear weapons technology

Khan ,a Pakistani national ,while employed in early 1970s by Physics Dynamic Research Laboratory ,based in Amsterdam ,a subcontractor to the URENCO consortium specializing in the manufacture of nuclear equipment , was persuaded in 1975 to take over Pakistan's Uranium enrichment plant by Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who after India's 1974 nuclear implosion had vowed that Pakistan would have its Islamic bomb even if " we eat grass" Khan took over in 1976 bringing with him stolen secret URENCO blueprints for uranium centrifuge and the suppliers list .

Convicted in 1983 in abstentia by a court in the Netherlands for stealing the designs, his conviction would be later overturned on a technicality. Then US supported and financed and Pakistan facilitated Jihad against USSR in Afghanistan was in full swing. The purloined material used for enrichment of Uranium was used in Pakistan's first nuclear device on 28 May 1998. There are allegations that the Pakistan's nuclear weapons origins closely mirror Chinese designs from the late 1960's.

In March 2001, when Al Qaeda had shown its hand and attacked US embassies in Africa and the close collaboration with Pakistan's ISI and military with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden was well known ,Khan , by now a national hero ,was quietly retired but remained an adviser to the new President General Pervez Musharraf . Khan's proliferation activities could become mushroom clouds over the west. Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage in an article in Financial Times of 1 June 2001, expressed concern that, "people who were employed by the nuclear agency and have retired" may be assisting North Korea with its nuclear program. Unsaid were fears of Taliban, Al Qaeda and nuclear secrets passed on to Muslim countries like Libya and Iran among others.

In October 2003, Richard Armitage reportedly briefed Gen. Musharraf and so did Gen. Abizaid, then head of US Central Command. But the nuclear genii was already out of the bottle. With the international inspections of Iran's nuclear operations and the October 2003 interception of a ship headed for Libya and carrying centrifuge parts, Pakistan's game was out in the open , when United Nation's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), weighed in November 2003. In late January 2004 Pakistani officials concluded that Khan and Mohammed Farooq were doing black market deals, but acting on their won, in sale of sensitive technology to Iran and Libya, perhaps for their own personal gain .Musharraf first denied any government involvement (He is adept at denials as Indian Prime Ministers learn sooner or later). His pledged so called harsh punishment amounted to house arrest. It only meant no one could meet or interview him.

Like Pakistan's TV family melo dramas, popular in India too, Khan admitted selling nuclear technology to Iran, Libya, and North Korea between 1989 and 2000 (to North Korea even beyond) and asked for clemency, which was promptly granted. Any international investigation, not including US and Chinese experts would show the truth of western acquiescence. Is murder of former Prime Minister Hariri of Lebanon more important than wide spread proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The network used to supply these activities has turned out to be global in scope, stretching from Germany to Dubai and from China to South Asia, and involves numerous middlemen and suppliers. Khan Research Laboratories' sales brochure had promoted the sale of components derived from Pakistan's nuclear weapons program and critical to the making of centrifuges.

Khan traveled openly during late 1990s to many countries around Niger, with Pakistani missions in Morocco, Nigeria, Sudan, Kenya, Malaysia etc providing him all help .This information is available in media and books. In Cleric Turaibi's Sudan, where Osama was guest after leaving and returning to Afghanistan, Khan met the Sudanese President and the minister of education. Many times he was accompanied by senior serving scientists of Pakistan's nuclear establishment, responsible for Pakistan's military nuclear development. These included Dr. Fakhrul Hasan Hashmi, Chief Scientific Adviser to Khan, Brig.Tajwar, Director-General Security Khan's Research Laboratory, Dr.Nazir Ahmed, Director-General S&TC Division KRL among others. Khan and his aids visited at least 10 African countries in February, 2000 alone.

An investigation into Khans' activities revealed the transfer of nuclear weapons-related technology, centrifuge parts, and blueprints to Iran and Libya through a Malaysian middleman, Buhary Syed Abu Tahir. The network comprised of European middlemen from Germany, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland which helped Khan in illicit trafficking and proliferation of nuclear technology through countries ranging from the United Arab Emirates, to South Korea, Switzerland, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Times of India, in February and March, 2004, reported that Khan sold Nuke Tech to Syria and Turkey.

North Korea & Pakistan in a Missile for Nukes Tango;

In Pakistan's wide ranging nuclear proliferation, especially with North Korea, almost all Pakistan Prime Ministers and Military Chiefs were reportedly involved. Khan's network reportedly played a key role in North Korea's nuclear program, including both centrifuge designs and a small number of actual complete centrifuges, in addition to a list of components needed to manufacture additional ones, after it had agreed under the 1994 Agreed Framework to freeze its reactors and reprocessing facilities. In return, in 1994 Pakistani Gen. Abdul Waheed sent Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to Pyongyang for North Korean assistance in nuclear-capable long range missiles and to bring back computer disks containing specifications for missiles. It was reportedly claimed that lack of money on Pakistan's part made trading easier. Soon Khan made the first of his about 13 trips to North Korea, as part of a Pakistani delegation to Pyongyang, composed of both scientists and military officers. At that time Gen. Musharraf was Gen Waheed's director general for military operations.

Khan confessed to helping North Korea with the knowledge and approval of senior military commanders, among which two army chiefs and Gen Musharraff, Gen. Karamat (dismissed by Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif thus cooking his own goose later), now Ambassador to USA who secretly travelled to North Korea in December 1997. Khan claimed that Karamat was also aware of the terms of the barter deal between North Korea and Pakistan, as Pakistan test-fired a Ghauri missile in April 1998. Implicitly Musharraf knew too as after becoming army chief of staff in October 1998, he also took over the Ghauri program. In exchange, North Korea got centrifuge components between 1997-1999, with Khan's network providing direct technical assistance between the years 1998-2000.

In 2000, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence conducted a charade raid on an aircraft chartered by the Khan Lab and bound for North Korea because it was claimed that senior military commanders were unaware of Khan's dealings with North Korea. The raid obviously yielded no evidence. As late as July 2002, Pakistani cargo planes were spotted by US Spy satellites in Pyongyang being loaded with missile parts. Now President, Gen Musharraf claimed that these were picking up surface-to-air missiles Pakistan had purchased. In April 2003, a cargo-ship containing aluminum tubing, intended for use as outer casings for G-2(P-2) centrifuges, was intercepted in the Suez Canal following German conclusion that it was headed for North Korea. It was also reported that Khan admitted that during a 1999 visit to an undisclosed location, an hour out of Pyongyang, he witnessed first hand what were described to be three plutonium nuclear devices produced by North Korea.

How ever, only in August 2005, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf for the first time confirmed, during an interview with the Japanese news agency Kyodo, that Khan had transferred centrifuges and centrifuge parts as well as their designs on to North Korea.

September 19, 2005 Agreement with North Korea

After three years of confrontation, choice insults hurled at each other ( US and North Korea ) and off and on negotiations - a statement of principles intended to form a framework for an eventual agreement was signed on 19 September 2005 ,after four rounds of six-party talks in Beijing. Under intense pressure from its neighbors and the United States, North Korea signed up to the document that commits it - in theory - to scrapping its nuclear weapons and weapons programs and readmitting inspectors from IAEA. The North Korea's neighbors and the US, in return, have agreed to supply energy assistance and move towards diplomatic normalization. The US also promised it had no nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula and had no intention to attack the North Korea. How ever it is to be seen how the details are worked out November to implement the agreement and how North Korea's nuclear claims would be verified.

While a fundamental disagreement over the scope of North Korea's nuclear capabilities has also not been addressed, the agreed statement looks like the minimum necessary face saver to keep the diplomatic process alive .It was warmly welcomed in the region - perhaps more out of relief than any expectation of an early settlement. The accord is "an important turning point that will help peace take root," said a statement issued by the South Korean government. If North Korea has lied so has USA broken international laws and treaties, invaded Iraq against UN opposition, so there is little trust in each other.

Pakistan's help to Iran;

Following Iran's disclosure of uranium enrichment research and subsequent inspections last year, the central role of Pakistan in Iran's nuclear program was unearthed. According to media reports, Khan reportedly told Inter Services Intelligence officials that he transferred nuclear weapons technology so that other Muslim countries could use it to enhance their security.

Global Security.Org website says that ,"according to confessions by A.Q. Khan and his aides to Pakistani investigators, he reportedly implicated among others, Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, the commander of Pakistan's army from 1988-1991, and that any nuclear technology shared with Iran had been approved by him. These charges were denied by Beg. But there was evidence that Beg had been informed by Khan of the transfer to Iran in early 1991 of outdated hardware, though it has been claimed that A.Q. Khan had led him to believe that the material would not allow Iran to produce enriched uranium.

"A.Q. Khan has claimed that equipment and drawing shipped to Iran were supplied as a result of pressure from the late Gen. Imtiaz during his tenure as defense advisor to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto from December 1988 to August 1990. Khan also admitted to meeting Iranian scientists in Karachi at the request of Dr. Niazi, a close Bhutto aide. In return for the help, Iran transferred millions of dollars to foreign bank accounts, with some money funnelled through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which collapsed in 1991.

"Some of the centrifuges examined also appeared to have been used outside Iran to enrich uranium, while components of some centrifuges appeared to have come directly from Pakistan. Though some of the machines Iran had bought did not work properly, Iran reportedly still managed to effect significant improvements on Pakistani equipment designs. Despite the design similarities, Iran has nonetheless denied having received them from Pakistan.

"Faced with disclosure, Khan reportedly contacted Iranian officials to not only urge them to destroy some of their facilities but also to pretend that the Pakistanis who had assisted them had died. In early March 2005, Pakistan acknowledged A. Q. Khan had provided centrifuges to Iran, though it denied having had any knowledge of the transactions. "

Iran counters Western opposition;

In his statement at the UN General Assembly, the recently elected President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused the West of "nuclear apartheid" and lambasted them as sponsors of state terrorism around the world. "Those hegemonic powers, who consider scientific and technological progress of independent and free nations as a challenge to their monopoly on these instruments of power ... have misrepresented Iran's healthy and fully safeguarded technological endeavors in the nuclear field as pursuit of nuclear weapons," he said. "This is nothing but a propaganda ploy."

Young, austere and ascetic Ahmadinejad is a product of the 1979 Khomeini revolution and not a Cleric like Khattami or bazzari (trader) like Rafsanjani, his predecessors and stuck to Iran's right to process uranium fuel for its nuclear power reactors as permitted under non-proliferation treaty. He offered partnership to other countries in Iran's uranium enrichment program and sought to broaden the stalled E-3 talks with UK, France and Germany on Tehran's nuclear program. Iran "is prepared to engage in serious partnership with private and public sectors of other countries to implement uranium enrichment program in Iran. This represents the most far-reaching step ... being proposed by Iran." South Africa gave up its nuclear program after its independence after the peaceful collapse of the apartheid regime .Iran's offer was also aimed to attract others with any similar ambitions like Brazil, Argentina, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. The last two which had inherited nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union after its collapse, surrendered them.

Ahmadinejad said Iran would not accept "nuclear apartheid" that permitted some countries to enrich fuel, but not others. "We're not going to cave in to the excessive demands of certain powers," Ahmadinejad said later at a media conference. He correctly insisted the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT, gave every signatory the right to produce nuclear fuel, an interpretation wrongly disputed by the West. He insisted that Iran's program was purely for peaceful civilian energy purposes and said Tehran would cooperate with the IAEA, although he hinted that it would consider withdrawing from the NPT if the matter was sent to the Security Council.

He denied media reports that Iran would share nuclear technology with other Islamic countries, saying that his remarks were quoted out of context. He "thanked South Africa who could potentially be a negotiating partner," Ahmadinejad said, adding that Iran will not limit the cooperation to only some countries. In an interview with CNN, he did not rule out steps for an oil price rise if sanctions were imposed on Iran." Any intelligent, healthy, smart human being should use every resource in order to maintain his or her freedom and independence," he replied when asked about the oil weapon. Iran "has the means to defend and obtain its rights."

U.S. and EU officials were disappointed with a British Foreign Office spokesman saying: "This was an unhelpful speech on which we will now want to consult our partners on the IAEA board of governors." French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said the option of reporting Iran to the U.N. Security Council "remains on the agenda." A senior US State Department official privately briefed the media."It's a very aggressive speech which would seem to cross the EU3 red line, especially in one very important regard with respect to enrichment."

Earlier addressing the UN, Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, demanded that Iran return to the negotiating table with the Europeans. "Questions about Iran's nuclear activities remain unanswered despite repeated efforts by the International Atomic Energy Agency and after agreeing to negotiate with the European Union," she declared. "Iran should return to negotiations with the EU and abandon for ever its plans for a nuclear weapons capability."

The action has now shifted to Vienna, where a critical meeting of the board of the IAEA, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, began on 19 September. While European diplomats in Vienna said the West had the support of at least 20 countries on the 35-member IAEA board, Russia, China, India and Pakistan were reluctant to send the dispute to UNSC.

Earlier on 18 September, Iran warned the board of IAEA that "Our advice to the agency is to review Iran's case tomorrow logically and realistically to avoid making the case more complicated," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told a weekly news conference. "We haven't started (uranium) enrichment yet but everything depends on the result of tomorrow's meeting," he said.

Western Reaction;

"For Iran, nuclear technology is a source of national pride and a demonstration of its political and technological independence from its former colonial masters," says Daryl Kimball, executive director of Arms Control Association, a non-partisan organization that researches nuclear issues. Kimball adds, "This is much more complicated than a simple economic and energy calculation."

From the Western corporate controlled media, a more independent Christian Science Monitors' headline on 19 September that "Iran bids to redefine nuclear limits- Iran's president challenges the sway of Western powers" perhaps sums up best the battle between nuclear haves and have-nots. It commented "Ahmadinejad declared at the U.N. Saturday that nuclear power was an "inalienable right" for Iran and accused the West of practicing "nuclear apartheid" by depriving it of nuclear know-how. In his address, President Ahmedinejad accused the US of trying to divide the world into "light and dark countries." The US was failing to abide by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) itself, he charged, with a doctrine that includes preemptive strikes and developing a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons.

"It is, of course, an issue of proliferation, but really it is about the nature of the [Iranian] regime, its politics, and its ambitions," says Shahram Chubin, head of research at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. The dispute masks a power play "on both sides," between Iran and the US, says Mr. Chubin, who runs an annual arms control course for diplomats working on the Middle East. "It's a question of who is going to dominate the regional order." Chubin should honestly admit that the developing world supported by Russia, China, India and others is confronting Western nuclear hegemony, inequitable in this sphere as it is every where.

Libya

Once Libya decided to 'come clean' on its weapons of mass destruction programs the implications on A.Q. Khan and, possibly, Pakistan were clear. Started in the early 1990s, Libya's disclosed uranium enrichment program appears based on both Pakistan's centrifuge designs, with some of the centrifuges having been flown there from Pakistan. Khan confessed to meeting with Libyans in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1990. Libya was also told by the Pakistanis how and where to acquire additional components for this program. Components manufactured at a facility in Malaysia were intercepted by the United States aboard a German-registered ship on their way to Libya in October 2003 after having been spotted whilst going through the Suez Canal.

Other Muslim Nations:

According to the minutes of a meeting of Select Committee on Foreign Affairs of the British Parliament, its chairmen described Dr. AQ Khan "history's greatest nuclear proliferator". Dr. Gary Samore from the International Institute for Strategic Studies said , " I think we know from documentary evidence that representatives of AQ Khan approached Iraq in the months leading up to the 1991 war, and that Iraq never followed up on that offer. That is one case. According to public reports, supposedly AQ Khan approached both Syria and Saudi Arabia, both of whom, for whatever reason, decided not to purchase his services. I think we have to assume that AQ Khan knocked on every door. We may very well learn that he had contacts with other governments in the Middle East but whether anybody actually bought anything, at this point in time, I am not aware."

While there has been no report of any nuclear program in Saudi Arabia in such a secretive society but with such wealth it cannot be ruled out. It has very close military relations with Pakistan. It is well-known that Saudi Arabia granted monetary support for Pakistan nuclear program throughout its duration. Saudi Arabia which considered himself as the leader of the Sunnis was happy that Pakistan succeeded in acquiring the Islamic bomb. A home of Wahabbis , an ideology which it exports , even to Muslim countries ,it kept on denying that there are no Al Qaeda groups in the Kingdom .After every Al Qaeda attack it claims that there are no more left .No one know what is boiling inside the cauldron.

Israel's Haaretz on Crisis;

Yossi Melman writing in Haaretz of Israel, the main beneficiary if Iran were stopped in its tracks, said," the delaying tactics that Iran has perfected over the past two and a half years are proving themselves yet again. Despite the fact that the "new" proposals voiced last night by Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad contain nothing new, the international community is able to see them as a ladder to help him down from his high perch.

The Iranian president is proposing the establishment of a new international monitoring body to supervise his country's uranium-enrichment program and ensure that the finished product, which the Iranians say is for peaceful purposes only, is not used to produce nuclear arms. "

In truth the monitoring body IAEA already exists but the Iranian proposal does contain a semblance of compromise, and will presumably allow the board of governors of the IAEA, to again put off making a decision - one that has been put off repeatedly for more than a year now.

"Opposing voices are coming from Washington, too - not surprisingly. A decision to transfer the matter to the UN Security Council will severely shake the international markets, and send oil prices skyrocketing to $70 and maybe even $80 a barrel. A significant rise in oil prices could work against the Republicans - already weakened in the wake of the botched handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster - in the upcoming elections to Congress in November."

In "UN Security Council, there is no chance of the body imposing sanctions on Tehran - both due to the oil crisis that such a decision could spur, and because Russia and China would veto such a move.

"Iran is looking to buy time so that, under the cover of its overt uranium-enrichment program, it can secretly develop infrastructure and fissile materials that will facilitate the production of nuclear arms. But Iran also fears international isolation and - even more so - the possibility of coming under attack. Therefore, Ahmadinejad's speech could serve as a convenient tool for all those involved in the Iranian game to put off the decision that everyone is so afraid of."

Developing nations and India;

As for Iran, it resumed its work at the plant near Isfahan in August, where uranium oxide is converted to uranium hexafluoride gas – but only under the watchful eyes of the IAEA inspectors. This gas is the feedstock for centrifuges that enrich uranium to varying degrees: 4 percent for power plants, 20 percent for research reactors, and 90 percent-plus for weapons.

As the West does not have majority at the IAEA meeting, they settled on asking Iran to suspend its activities related to uranium enrichment, and for the IAEA secretary-general Muhammad El Baradei to report on the issue by September 3. El Baradei's 15-page report was a mixed bag. While insisting that Iran maintain transparency, the report did not invalidate the IAEA's earlier conclusion that it had not found evidence that Iran was engaged in a banned nuclear weapons program.

The only valid basis to take Iran to the UN Security Council for its breach of the global nuclear non-proliferation regime is enshrined in the NPT. Following the IAEA meeting, Russia – which is building a civilian nuclear power plant near Bushehr, said that it saw no evidence that Tehran was violating the non-proliferation regime. Many in IAEA are cool to western bias and belong to the NAM, like Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa. Rajmah Hussein of Malaysia, the current NAM chairman, reiterated NAM's position that all countries have "a basic and inalienable right" to develop atomic energy for peaceful purposes.

Wrote Dilip Hero recently,"NAM members note that while Western nations repeatedly ask why Iran is so insistent on building nuclear power plants when the country has vast reserves of oil and natural gas, they never pose the same question to the Russians, who have built a large number of nuclear power plants despite having the largest natural gas reserves in the world. In any event, according to a recent estimate by British Petroleum, oil consumption in Iran was rising so fast that the country would become a net oil importer by 2024.

"By design or accident, Iran has positioned itself as a champion of the third world, with the courage and conviction to stand up to the Western powers. This has won it quiet admiration from many NAM governors, who fear that the limitations imposed on Iran could eventually extend to them. The experience of the past few months has made it clear that any further pressure on Iran to relinquish its right to uranium enrichment at the forthcoming quarterly meeting of the IAEA Governors will likely cause an open fissure with the developing world. The double standard applied in implementing nonproliferation is coming home to roost."

Indian dilemma;

Nothing seems to be more important than Iran for USA which took up the bulk of George Bush-and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh tête-à-tête. For India it has become a major problem in its rising energy requirement security program .It needs natural gas from Iran and nuclear power technology from USA .It was a major problem for Manmohan Singh in New York for the UNGA session, which was meant to reform it and expand the SC membership in which India deserves to be added.

It has became clear that if at the forthcoming IAEA board meeting if India did not support the US move , the US Congress would not change its domestic laws to facilitate the sale of civil nuclear energy equipment and technology to India. It was a Republican Congressman from California, Tom Lantos , a member of the India-US Caucus who while supporting the move to sell US nuclear power reactors and technology to India, made it conditional on India showing "a degree of reciprocity", specifically on the US effort to isolate Iran.

What is deeply worrying that Lantos' views were echoed by virtually all members of the House International Relations Committee, cutting across party lines, many members of the India Caucus in the House? If this was how India's friends viewed the Indo-US agreement on nuclear cooperation, what about India baiters.

Was Lantos' outburst "a maverick effort or was it orchestrated by the White House to mount pressure on Delhi, without harming the teflon coating of shared values and enduring relations that Bush had worked so diligently to create? If it's the latter, then what could India do beyond what it had already done to reassure the US that it shared its goals with respect to Iran, but disagreed on the means adopted? "India had already supported an IAEA's resolution expressing concern over Iran's decision to resume the enrichment of uranium after disabling the IAEA's monitoring systems. Iran has to fulfill its commitments as a signatory of the NPT and announced India's support for the attempts being made by E-3 to find a way to resolve the differences without resorting to coercion.

USA has been openly demanding that India back out of the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project? Finally, there was the nagging worry that if India gives in, Iran will only be the thin end of the wedge of American demands. While George Bush may assure Manmohan Singh that he stood by their July joint statement of nuclear cooperation and hoped that Congress would give its approval.

Apart from danger of becoming almost a lame duck President, the US has a long record of signing agreements and treaties only to have Congress refuse to ratify them later. "What is most disturbing about the attempt to change the laws governing nuclear sales to India is the way in which the issue had become embroiled in the larger one of constitutional prerogative. When Burns presented the case for a relaxation of existing laws to exempt India, many members of the committee rounded on him for daring to make commitments to India without first consulting the House of Representatives and the Senate. Even if the administration got past the House of Representatives, it still had to face the Senate. "

Indians who look on US strategic relationship with dreamy eyes might look at the state US led West has reduced Pakistan to .India might also look at the fate of USA's decades old Nato ally Turkey, where both needed and still need each other and to what extent to rely on USA .A Turkish Deputy Prime Minister told the author, who spent nearly ten years in two tenures as diplomat in Ankara."Mr Ambassador, you can not trust the Americans, even on what they give you in writing."

Pak Israel make up in Turkey;

The recent meeting between the Foreign Ministers of Pakistan and Israel in Istanbul with encouragement from Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan could perhaps be the beginning of a far reaching developments-post Hyper power USA 's system now exposed at home by Hurricane Katrina while the Iraqi quagmire is deepening. In post US withdrawal scene, in the region there are four middle level major players, Israel, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey, but only Turkey does not have a known nuclear bomb program. USA will have to rely more on Israel, which reportedly has 100 nuclear bombs.

It was a year after the US invasion of Iraq that Israeli Prime Minster Ehud Barak told Vice President Dick Cheney that USA had messed it up in Iraq and had no back up plan either . The fate of the region may not be decided by Turkey, Israel, Iran and Pakistan but they have a major role to bring in peace and stability to the region and safe guard their interests.

In 1995 when Dr AQ Khan visited Ankara, at a reception when I asked the British envoy, if there was a Turkish nuclear program, he retorted what about India's nuclear program. I snapped back," why does UK need one. To use it against North Ireland or Malvinas." British ambassadors always acted as US poodles and he was clearly not happy to be probed. How ever, on the basis of available information, while the Turkish industry is advanced enough to have a Customs Union with Europe Union in 1996, there appear no research centers including its civil research centre at Tubitak, unless the military has a covert program. But Turkey is surrounded by countries having nuclear weapons and wannabe Iran and almost all with missiles .Turkey has no missiles program of it own but is very keen to have one. Turkish Ambassador in Bucharest has no time to answer any queries on this or any other subject!

During his first ever visit to India in 1995, Turkish President Suleyman Demirel, a former engineer himself went around Tata's Fundamental Research centre and the Atomic Energy Research centre in Bombay. On return he wistfully remarked that "look India has hundreds of nuclear engineers and scientists as does Pakistan (which he visited six times). Turkey is economically and militarily a powerful nation and would certainly like to have a nuclear program. It seems to be the only defense currency nowadays .It has seen and suffers from the consequences of USA's unilateral and illegal invasion of Iraq in search of free oil and to control of the region. At this rate Iraq might be reduced to the rubble level of Afghanistan.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan who met with Iran's president on the sidelines of a U.N. summit on 15 September said that Ahmadinejad assured him that Iran wants to be as transparent as possible and was in touch with the IAEA. Erdogan denied that they talked about transfer of nuclear technology and said Turkey wouldn't accept the offer anyway.

The possession of half a dozen nuclear bombs by North Korea have proved that only Nuclear weapons can protect a poor and small nation and guard its sovereignty. Pakistan, one seventh India' size because of its nuclear threat continues to blackmail and bully India, in which it has been encouraged and aided by Anglo-Saxons. It is natural that Iran after mastering the legal Uranium fuel cycle would embark on the Pakistani path and could arrive there sooner or later.

It is therefore time for Turkey to start preparing for the same objective. If Turkey has a nuclear program or is on the way, Israel will feel less singled out. While Israel may not provide any assistance, if Pakistan or anyone else helps, Israel with its control over US Congress and decision-making machinery can ease the situation, now for Pakistan and later for Turkey. Already Pakistan is demanding parity with India on nuclear reactors. It will get F-16s or what ever it else wants.

It has not dawned on India's Hindu hardliners, many of whom believe that all Muslims are against Israel and also against Hindus because of Pakistan's successful propaganda. The Hindu Muslim cleavage was assiduously promoted during the British era and is a colonial legacy. But apart from diplomatic relations with Egypt, Jordan, Mauritania, Israel has relations with Turkey since Israel's creation by western powers .Israel has an Embassy in Baku and relations with other Turkic republics in Central Asia.

Relations can be hostile between Muslim states as can be seen in the Arab world .Nearer India ,let us take majority Sunni Pakistan and Shia Iran .During 1980s there was a papered over joint front against USSR in Afghanistan, but underneath there were tremendous differences and enmity, which led to open brutal warfare after the withdrawal of the Soviet troops in 1989.Since then Iran and Pakistan supported by Saudi Arabia kept up proxy battles supporting different Mujahidin groups in Afghanistan till now , while Saudi Arabia and Iran support to Sunni and Shia extremists in Pakistan.

To whatever extent Pakistan and Turkey remain attached to USA and NATO, it is because of Russia lurking in the background .Iran with this oil wealth is now well-placed economically and could become the avant grade of the East in the progressive confrontation which US led West is mounting, with Russia and China openly backing Iran on the nuclear issue .In the energy sector both China and India need Iran. Nuclear Pakistan's relationship with the Russia would remains undefined, while Russia benefits by strengthening Iran.

Pak Israel relations;

After the Pakistan and Israel Ministers meeting Istanbul, President Musharraf accepted an invitation to address an interfaith conference this month organized by the Council for World Jewry when he comes to New York for the UN General Assembly. "It is learnt that covert contacts between representatives of the Jewish state and Pakistan had been going on for several months through diplomatic and informal channels. However, the decisive factor for the first open political contact between the two countries was the Israeli pullout from Gaza last month, which in Pakistan is viewed as a positive move and has been welcomed by the government," Dawn added. Some lame excuse!

Relations with Pakistan are important for Israel. Pakistan is one of the most populous Muslim countries, and establishing ties could soften enmity towards the Jewish state in other Muslim countries. Israeli officials also believe that relations with Pakistan could set off a chain reaction in the region, with countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh following suit.

Musharraf, a key US ally in the Indian sub-continent, has been gradually moving toward conciliation with Israel, despite strong opposition from powerful Islamic radical parties in Pakistan. But the head of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League said the Arab world would benefit from Pakistan and Israel establishing relations."

Pakistan would also benefit by dampening to some extent the emerging close relationship between India and Israel specially supply of crucial military hardware to India. Ruthless as Israeli's are, which the Indian right-wing does not understand, Tel Aviv would exploit its relationship with Pakistan to bargain with India. There have been reports of Pakistan assistance to US interference in Iran .It appears that any Israeli proposal, reported from time to time, to bomb Pakistan's nuclear facilities is now off the table, at least for the time being.

Yes, Iran is really worried. "The meeting between Pakistan and Israel is a great blow to the policies of the Islamic republic based on an unabated antagonism with Israel and the 'Palestiniation' of its diplomacy which, in the past two decades, were the cause of many crises in Iran's foreign relations and increases in tensions with the United States, resulting in huge damage to our national interests," commented Iran Emrooz, a Persian-language Internet news website based in Germany.

While , there has been no comment from Tehran, a source close to the new government of Ahmadinejad said, "They are shocked to the point of being choked off," referring to the Iranian leaders. "As usual, when Iranian officials are jolted and horrified to the point of being astounded at some news they are not ready for, they keep silent until the oracle comes from the leader, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini," the source added, speaking on condition of not being named.

"As a result of a foolish diplomacy based on the destruction of Israel, Iran has suffered enormous diplomatic humiliations and economic losses," said Dr Shahin Fatemi, a professor of Economy at the American University of Paris. "The biggest danger for the Islamic republic is that the Pakistanis, under growing pressures from Washington, might inform Israel on the extent of cooperation offered by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the so-called father of Pakistan's atomic bomb and the materials he sold to Tehran secretly," said Hasan Shari'atmadari, a member of the Iranian Republican Movement based in Hamburg, Germany. It is silly pro-West assessment.

Throughout history Iran has always existed as a powerful state in the region and would continue to aspire and do so, whatever USA and its brutal Sheriff Israel might want to do in the region. This is not the first time in history that Iranians are controlling Iraq. The Sassanians controlled Mesopotamia and battled with the Romans and Byzantines and later against the Ottoman Turks. The Sunni Ottomans could reach Vienna but were stopped at the present border by Persian Shia Safavids.

Power flows through a nuclear armed Missile;

"The US only takes countries seriously that have reached a certain degree of technological and economic power (hence the cooperation with India)," says Bijan Khajehpour, an analyst and chairman of the Atieh Group of companies in Tehran. "This fact certainly motivates Iran to become ... more powerful."

To dispel fears of Iran's nuclear intentions, Mr. Ahmadinejad spelled out acceptance of broader oversight, suggesting the involvement of third countries such as South Africa, or even private companies working with Iranian scientists. He also appeared to indicate that Iran was constrained by Islam in developing weapons. "[I]n accordance with our religious principles, pursuit of nuclear weapons in prohibited," he said.

Iran bid for more support from nonaligned countries - and sought to counter the US push to isolate the Islamic Republic - when Ahmadinejad promised to share its nuclear knowledge with other Muslim countries. "We believe that atomic energy is a blessing given by God; it is an opportunity given to all nations," the staunchly conservative leader said.

"Ironically, those who have actually used nuclear weapons, continue to produce, stockpile and extensively test such weapons ... [and] are not only refusing to remedy their past deeds, but in clear breach of the NPT, are trying to prevent other countries from acquiring the technology to produce peaceful nuclear energy."

The offer to share nuclear technology has "changed the dynamics," says Mr. Khajehpour, because "some Western players now see more reason to stop Iran's efforts to enrich uranium." But the offer was likely "targeted at Iran's neighbors to give them assurances that Iran is not planning to deprive the region of nuclear technology."

Still, the offer has set off alarm bells in Western capitals. "That's red meat for anyone concerned with nonproliferation and security threats," and may prove to be "another bargaining chip to give away," says Natalie Goldring, at the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University in Washington.

But the inability of the US and EU to muster sufficient votes at the IAEA or Security Council to sanction Iran, for a combination of reasons, points toward a shifting nonproliferation framework.

"The US has very little leverage with potential proliferators," says Ms. Goldring. "When headlines in the US talk of preemptive attacks on countries without nuclear weapons, and that [the US] will improve its tactical nuclear arsenal, our leverage is zero or negative."

"We've given the message to Iran that we will not do a whole lot to stand in their way," says Goldring, noting that India and Pakistan, after detonating secret nuclear devices in 1998, survived sanctions and are now being courted by the US. "If I were in Iran, I would see a US tied down in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Mississippi, so Iran has some freedom of movement now."

In Tehran, says Chubin, "they talk about the rising East, the rising Asia - this is the old multipolarity: 'If we get Iran tied to Russia, China, and India, then the US would not be able to do anything.'" "And the Russians almost say the same thing," adds Chubin, who visited Moscow earlier this month. "They do it politely, but they are constantly complaining about US influence.... The Russians are not going to annoy the Americans by supporting Iran, but they are not going to make it easy for them, either."

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in his opening address at the UN session said that the consensus underlying the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was badly frayed but nations would rather point fingers at each other than work for solutions. "We face growing risks of proliferation and catastrophic terrorism, and the stakes are too high to continue down a dangerous path of diplomatic brinkmanship," he said.

Henry Kissinger gets hillibilies;

The cold warier who called Indira Gandhi and Indians names in a meeting with President Nixon , thinks that if Bush's first term was dominated by the war against terrorism, the second would be preoccupied with the effort to stem the spread of nuclear weapons.

"This challenge is more complex than the first. Do we oppose proliferation because of the rogue quality of the two regimes - Iran and North Korea - furthest advanced on the road towards acquiring nuclear weapons? Or is our opposition generic; does it extend to fully democratic countries?

"During the Cold War, all of the principals who might have to decide on the issue of nuclear war faced the dilemma that such a decision could involve millions of casualties, yet a demonstrated willingness to run this risk was necessary if the world was not to be turned over to totalitarians. "

""All Cold War administrations navigated these shoals. Deterrence worked because there were only two main players in the world. Each made comparable assessments of the perils to them of the use of nuclear weapons.

"But as nuclear weapons spread, the calculus of deterrence grows increasingly ephemeral. It becomes ever more difficult to decide who is deterring whom and by what calculations." Finally, the experience with the proliferation network demonstrates the consequences to the international order of the spread of nuclear weapons even when the proliferating country does not meet the formal criteria of rogue state.

"For these reasons, it is the fact, not the provenance, of further proliferation that needs to be resisted. The loathsomeness of a regime that undertakes proliferation compounds the problem and provides a sense of urgency, but in this analysis it is not the decisive factor. We should oppose nuclear proliferation even to a democratic Iran.

"How do we prevent the diplomatic process from turning into a means to legitimise proliferation rather than avert it? We must never forget that failure will usher in a new set of nuclear perils dwarfing those that we have just surmounted."

Recently the doddering warrior, accused by many as a war criminal, was put on an American Channel .The very idea of Iran having a bomb gave him the hillibillies.

In 1970s when my son in school first learnt what getting hillbilly's means, a good actor, he tried to express it by facial and voice contortions like some cartoon characters. But he was no match for Henry Kissinger's act of fear, which most of the world or any one "who is not with us, is against us" has lived with, since USA dropped two Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

(K Gajendra Singh, served as Indian Ambassador to Turkey and Azerbaijan in1992 -96. Prior to that, he served as ambassador to Jordan (during the1990 - 91Gulf war), Romania and Senegal. He is currently chairman of the Foundation for Indo-Turkic Studies, in Bucharest. The views expressed here are his own.)

TARAFITS