By Amaani Lyle

The current situation in Iraq and Syria clearly indicates that the coalition, and not ISIL, now dictates the pace of operations, a U.S. Central Command spokesman said during a telephonic press conference with Pentagon reporters.

“For the last twelve months of this multi-year effort, our campaign has focused on countering and effectively degrading ISIL’s overall capabilities, while enabling the efforts of the indigenous ground forces in both Iraq and Syria, and empowering the 60-plus nation coalition,” Air Force Col. Pat Ryder said.

ISIL’s Losing Ground

Ryder asserted that rather than ISIL forces “waving black flags and traversing Iraq and Syria in big convoys to capture large swaths of new territory,” the true situation shows a waning insurgency, losing ground steadily on nearly every front.

Currently, anti-ISIL forces now defend two-thirds of Syria’s northern border, and in Iraq, Ryder said he estimates as of this April, ISIL can no longer operate freely in roughly 25 to30 percent of the populated areas in which it could less than a year ago.

“Consistent and effective pressure against ISIL’s leadership has caused the organization to be more centralized and less flexible,” Ryder said. “Over the past year, we have removed several thousand ISIL fighters from the battlefield, as well as dozens of the organization’s senior leaders.”

The colonel also reported that ISIL has had to repeatedly replace leaders in key positions. “Every time they have to return to the bench, you can presume they’re having to put less experienced and less capable individuals into these leadership positions, thereby reducing the organization’s overall effectiveness in decision-making and command and control.”

But Ryder also noted that air power has played a key role in ISIL’s decline, as coalition air forces have conducted more than 6,000 air strikes in Iraq and Syria in support of anti-ISIL forces, destroying thousands of pieces of the enemy’s equipment, command and control nodes, training facilities, supply lines, and other military and economic resources.

“Our airstrikes in Syria against ISIL continue to deny them safe haven,” he said, “and disrupt their ability to project combat power into Iraq — which, in turn, has bought the Iraqi forces much needed time and space to regenerate combat power and go on the offensive.”

And the Syrian Kurds in the northeast portion of the country have performed exceptionally well, according to Ryder.

“They’ve not only retaken significant swaths of territory from ISIL, but in doing so, they have significantly impacted the enemy’s key lines of communication between Syria and Turkey and between Syria and Iraq,” he said. “This means that ISIL will no longer be able to freely move fighters and supplies between the countries.”

Coalition Partners Step Up

Meanwhile, in support of that effort, approximately 1,200 coalition partners from 17 nations have enabled Iraqi forces through the DoD’s “Building Partner Capacity” sites and “Advise and Assist” programs, the colonel explained.

At five training locations in Iraq, Ryder reported the coalition has trained more than 11,000 Iraqi forces personnel, providing a wide range of training designed to aid Iraqi security forces and Peshmerga effectiveness on the battlefield, with similar consulting exchanges resulting in training for approximately 1,100 Sunni tribal fighters engaged in the counter-ISIL fight.

And U.S. military equipment provision includes 250 mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles, nearly 2,000 Hellfire missiles, more than 10,000 M16 rifles, body armor, helmets, and millions of rounds of ammunition, the colonel said. Coalition donations to the anti-ISIL effort, he added, include 22 million rounds of small-arms ammunition and 12,000 mortar rounds to the Iraqi army and Peshmerga.

On the Syrian front, the coalition continues to support and enable the efforts of anti-ISIL forces, to include Syrian Kurdish, Arab, and Turkoman fighters to drive ISIL out of northern Syria border regions, Ryder said.

“These anti-ISIL forces, whose efforts have been supported by more than 2,200 coalition airstrikes, have made significant progress in northern Syria — having regained more than 5,300 square kilometers from ISIL,” the colonel said. “As they continue to progress, they are building regional coalitions, specifically with local Arab forces committed to defeating ISIL and expelling them from their lands.”

Meanwhile, strides are being made in training vetted Syrian opposition force recruits as part of the coalition’s “Syria Train and Equip” program, designed to give training alumna the capabilities they need as New Syrian Forces to defend the Syrian people and go on the offensive against ISIL, the colonel said.

“The second class of recruits is currently in training,” he said, “and we continue to see significant interest in opposition forces volunteering for the program and have hundreds of additional fighters currently undergoing vetting for potential training in the future.”

Ultimately, Ryder said, success does not hinge on one fight or one event, rather in the continuous application of lessons learned.

“With Turkey’s decision to open bases for the deployment of U.S. aircraft conducting counter-ISIL operations, the coalition now has another strategic location from which it can conduct strikes if and when necessary,” the colonel said.

He acknowledged a long road ahead without illusions about the complexities of the fight against a determined adversary.

“Our combined military efforts can and will defeat ISIL,” Ryder said. “However, the effects achieved will be short-lived unless the leadership of the country of Iraq makes the right decisions and does the right things to ensure that all of that nation’s citizens are treated fairly and equally.”

All of Sri Lanka’s voters have a great responsibility to elect only suitable persons to the Parliament in forthcoming General Election, said President Maithripala Sirisena.

Only most suitable candidates who work for the country and safeguard the respect of the Parliament should be elected to the Parliament at the election, Sirisena added. People should do that selection according to their knowledge, intelligence and prior experience of the persons, he further stated.

The President made these remarks at a ceremony to launch two books of Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe, held on Friday at the BMICH in Colombo.

The book “A Sri Lankan Voice in the Global Arena” and its Sinhala copy consist of the speeches made by Minister Samarasinghe at International Human Rights Council and the summits of United Nations as well as at special occasions.

Sirisena also pointed out that the reputation of the politicians being tarnished because they are not fulfilling their responsibilities towards the people properly. He also said that politicians, public servants as well as diplomats should always commit themselves to fulfill the aspirations of the people when they assume duties of their respective posts.

The President commended the former Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe for the services rendered at national and international levels using his knowledge, wisdom and experiences. President Sirisena also offered best wishes to Mr Samarasinghe for his future endeavours.

By Sylvia Mishra*

More than a dozen Republicans and a handful of Democrats have announced that they are running for their parties’ 2016 presidential nomination. On the Republican side, if the competition between the presidential nominees is rife, the competition between the two front runners for Democratic presidential nominees is only gathering steam. Hillary Clinton’s ratings are going down as Bernie Sanders stirs populism.

A Gallup poll shows that Bernie Sanders’ favourable ratings among American public has shot up to 24% in July from 12% in March this year. On the other hand, in the vortex of the email controversy, Hillary Clinton’s ratings have slipped to 43% from 48%. The good news for Hillary Clinton is that her approval ratings are almost doubly ahead of Bernie Sanders. Although, investigations looking into the 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi and on a possible Justice Department inquiry into Mrs Clinton’s controversial ’email-gate’ severely threaten her campaign.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders’ campaign momentum is rapidly picking up. Will Sanders be able to bridge the favourability gap between Clinton and himself by striking a chord amongst the non-white community rallying with his economic message of revolution against inequality? Or will the lack of foreign policy experience circumvent Sanders’ growing popularity among the voters? This article highlights the differences in Clinton’s and Sanders’ positions on economic, social and foreign policy issues and showcases the vulnerabilities of both the candidates.

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 economic plan is focused on increasing middle-class incomes. She stands for giving a boost to the economy by giving tax cuts to the middle class and helping small businesses and enabling women to enter the workforce. Her other economic ideas include raising the minimum wage, making college, health and child care more affordable and support long term economic growth. On the other hand, self-declared ‘democratic socialist’ Sanders has recently launched a fiery campaign in Kenner, Louisiana, denouncing inequality in America as ‘grotesque’ and ‘immoral’. Economic issues have been the basis of his campaign and Sanders has frequently called for paid family leave, mandatory paid vacations and a raise in the minimum wage. Additionally, Sanders has rallied to fix America’s ‘crumbling’ infrastructure and has also blasted against pay inequalities based on gender and racial disparities in unemployment. Broadly, the economic messages of both candidates has converged on rebuilding the American middle class, market-led recovery, higher taxes on the wealthy and both strongly favour ObamaCare. However, in the economic realm what sets Clinton and Sanders apart is their position on international free trade, especially pertaining to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). While Mrs Clinton has endorsed the trade deal as one which will produce jobs, raise wages and increase the prosperity of the American middle class, Sanders has been one of the staunchest critics of the TPP. Sanders has repeatedly argued that if the TPP is in place, multi-national corporations would outsource millions of good paying American jobs to other low-wage countries and would depress wages in the domestic market.

On social issues such as reforming education and gender equality, both the Democratic candidates’ ideas broadly converge. Clinton has advocated for women’s rights and family interests at the top of the domestic agenda along with healthcare reforms. On issues relating the environment, Hillary Clinton has promised to help people save money on their electricity bills by helping to install half a billion new solar panels. She has set a goal of producing 33 percent of the nation’s electricity from renewable sources by 2027 up from 7 percent today – a higher goal than the 20 percent that President Obama has called for by 2030. Ms. Clinton’s strategists see climate change as a winning issue for 2016. They believe it is a cause she can advance to win over deep-pocketed donors and \liberal activists in the nominating campaign. However, her rival Bernie Sanders too has a strong record on issues relating to the environment and climate change. Hence, Clinton’s ambitious climate change agenda would earn her votes vis-à-vis Republican candidates than her immediate rival for the nomination – Bernie Sanders.

On issues relating to immigration, Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders has called for comprehensive immigration and a structured path to citizenship stating that “Our job is not to divide. Our job is to bring people together.” This claim has been in sharp contrast to the mainstream GOP agenda of advocating for tougher border security. One of the challenges for Sanders has been that his voter base is strictly confined to the white community. This is a challenge as Sanders hopes to win the nomination in a party where nearly one-in-five members are black. Though, recently Sanders has touched on many social issues of concern to civil rights groups such as voting rights to police brutality to for profit-prisons, his campaign is yet to take off where he directly reaches to black voters beyond his mostly white base.

The United States’ foreign policy is evolving and has seen a marked change from a sense of American exceptionalism during Bush years to one of cautious restraint during the ongoing Obama presidency. So issues pertaining to foreign policy would loom large in the US Presidential elections of 2016. Being the former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has a clear advantage over Bernie Sanders when it comes to foreign policy. Clinton has been one of the strongest proponents of President Obama’s Pivot to Asia policy. However, over time there has been a shift in rhetoric during the election campaign to prioritize on the war in the Middle East and the immediate threat of the ISIS to the ‘Rebalance to Asia’ policy. On the other hand, Sanders has been criticised for his lack of foreign policy experience. One of the glaring shortcomings of Sanders election campaign is the lack of a foreign policy vision he offers. Sanders has been a critic of large-scale military interventions abroad, labelling them as expensive and counter-productive. He had opposed the Iraq War and had reservations about Obama’s intervention in Libya. It is interesting to note, however, that Sanders is not against military action in all cases and had previously backed Bill Clinton’s airstrikes in Kosovo and the Afghanistan War in 2001.

The Democratic election nomination tussle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders is going through an exciting time as Sanders’ far-left economic agenda is increasingly becoming more appealing to the party’s base. While most thought that the Democratic nomination is going to be a landslide victory for Clinton, in reality the Democratic presidential front-runner is now labouring to find new avenues of leadership in campaign strategy in the backdrop of her sliding favourability ratings. In the long run, what could prove to be advantageous for her is her massive war chest compared to that of Sanders’ and her expertise in matters of foreign policy where Sanders is yet to gather momentum.

*The writer is a Junior Fellow with Observer Research Foundation, Delhi

The Presidential Business Working Group is worried that the end of the so-called mineral commodity super cycle is a major constraint to South Africa’s economic growth, says Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies.

Some analysts have blamed the end of the super cycle on slowing growth in China. Speaking to the media after the Presidential Business Working Group meeting in Pretoria on Friday, Minister Davies said the problem is now compounded by the surplus of steel on world markets, which is also affecting South Africa.

“We cannot anticipate that there will be a return to the commodity super cycle anytime soon, not least, because there are structural factors including the change in the trajectory of growth in China,” he said. He said government will use the nine point plan, announced by President Jacob Zuma earlier this year, to address challenges discussed in the meeting. Government also presented to the meeting plans to grow the economy in areas that include industrialisation, infrastructure, innovation, investment, inclusion and integration.

Minister Davies said the meeting also discussed the state of the mining economy and those who attended welcomed the announcement that there will be Operation Phakisa in the mining sector in the near future.

“Our economy is facing challenges, growth rate is below what is ought to be, the inclusive growth levels are also where they need to be, but at the same time we have been registering progress even in areas of attracting investment,” he said.

This summer, as the British parliament take its annual break from business, civil servants are hard at work preparing an unprecedented assault on Islamist extremism. The UK’s Counter-Extremism Strategy, to be published in the autumn, will set out a detailed analysis of the threat posed by Islamism to the nation, and what the British government intends to do to combat it. This plan of campaign promises to be the first effort by a world power to tackle domestic Islamism head-on. There is to be no shilly-shallying around the nature of the danger facing Britain – and, by extension, the civilized world – nor the multi-faceted effort that needs to be taken to counter and conquer it.

The groundwork for Britain’s forthcoming Counter-Extremism Strategy was laid in a seminal speech delivered on July 20 by the UK prime minister, David Cameron. Uniquely among world leaders who have spoken on this issue, Cameron addressed his Muslim co-citizens candidly. Without beating about the bush, he asserted that condemning violence was not enough. Too many ordinary decent Muslim citizens, he maintained, while thoroughly disapproving of violence, allowed themselves to be seduced by Islamism to the extent of subscribing to intolerant ideas which actively promote discrimination, sectarianism and segregation, thus fostering the very climate in which extremists can flourish. It was clear from what he said that Cameron places high on his list of “intolerant ideas” the mindless anti-Semitism that is endemic to Islamism.

Also, said Cameron, ideas “based on conspiracy: that Jews exercise malevolent power; or that Western powers, in concert with Israel, are deliberately humiliating Muslims, because they aim to destroy Islam. In this warped worldview, such conclusions are reached – that 9/11 was actually inspired by Mossad to provoke the invasion of Afghanistan; that British security services knew about 7/7, but didn’t do anything about it because they wanted to provoke an anti-Muslim backlash.”

Cameron pointed out that the backgrounds of those convicted of terrorist offences often reveal that they were first influenced by what some would call non-violent extremists.

“It may begin,” he said, “with hearing about the so-called Jewish conspiracy, and then develop into hostility to the West and fundamental liberal values, before finally becoming a cultish attachment to death. Put another way, the extremist world view is the gateway, and violence is the ultimate destination.”

The adherents of this ideology, he claimed, are overpowering other voices within the Muslim debate, especially those trying to challenge it.

To counter this threat Britain intends to confront, head on, the extreme ideology that underpins Islamism – the cultish worldview, the conspiracy theories, and its malevolent appeal to the young and impressionable. The new strategy will involve exposing Islamist extremism for what it is – a belief system that glorifies violence and subjugates its people, not least Muslim people – and will contrast the bigotry, aggression and theocracy of Islamism with the liberal, democratic values that underlie the Western way of life.

A key part of the subsequent action programme will be to tackle both the violent and the non-violent aspects of the creed. Cameron was clear that this would mean confronting groups and organisations that may not advocate violence, but which do promote other parts of the extremist narrative.

“We’ve got to show that if you say ‘violence in London isn’t justified, but suicide bombs in Israel are a different matter’, then you too are part of the problem. Unwittingly or not,” he said, “and in a lot of cases it’s not unwittingly, you are providing succour to those who want to commit, or get others to commit to, violence.”

He insisted that condemning a mass-murdering, child-raping organisation was not enough to prove that a person was challenging the extremists. The new strategy would demand that people also condemn the wild conspiracy theories, the anti-Semitism, and the sectarianism.

Acknowledging the religious aspect of Islamist extremism has proved a stumbling block for many previous attempts to combat the problem. Britain’s Counter-Extremism Strategy will face the issue fairly and squarely. As Cameron pointed out, simply denying any connection between the religion of Islam and the extremists doesn’t work, because these extremists are self-identifying as Muslims.

“They all spout the same twisted narrative, one that claims to be based on a particular faith. It is an exercise in futility to deny that. And more than that, it can be dangerous.”

To deny that Islamism has anything to do with Islam, claimed Cameron, means that the critical reforming voices from within the faith are disempowered – religious heads who can challenge the scriptural basis on which extremists claim to be acting, and respected leaders who can provide an alternative worldview that could stop a teenager’s slide down the spectrum of extremism. The UK’s Counter-Extremism Strategy will empower, support and fund those individuals and organisations from within the Muslim community that are dedicated to countering extreme Islamism and its nihilistic philosophy.

Although an independent Counter-Extremist Project has been running in the US for the past year, and a European counterpart, CEP Europe, was launched in Brussels on June 29, the only government to have grasped the nettle is the UK’s.

Britain alone seems to have taken on board the extent of the threat facing the civilized world, to have analysed the issues coolly and hard-headedly, and to be in the process of devising a comprehensive strategy for countering it. In short, the UK is seizing the initiative in the major struggle of our times – a war to the death between a liberal way of life, rooted in parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, and those intent on destroying those values and substituting their own narrow and extremist version of sharia, not shared by the majority of the world’s Muslims. It is a war the world can, must, and surely will, win.

Gross inputs to U.S. refineries exceeded 17 million barrels per day (b/d) in each of the past four weeks, a level that had not previously been reached or exceeded in any given week since EIA began publishing the data in 1990. The rolling four-week average of U.S. gross refinery inputs has been above the five-year range every week so far this year (Figure 1).

The record high gross inputs reflect both higher refinery capacity and higher utilization rates. Lower crude oil prices and strong demand for petroleum products, primarily gasoline, both in the United States and globally have led to favorable margins that encourage refinery investment and high refinery runs.

Gulf Coast refinery margins are currently supported by high gasoline crack spreads that reached a peak of 66 cents per gallon (gal) on July 8, a level not reached since September 2008 (Figure 2). For the past several years, distillate crack spreads have consistently exceeded those for gasoline, but since May this trend has reversed. From 2011 to 2014, distillate crack spreads (calculated using Gulf Coast spot prices for Light Louisiana Sweet crude oil, conventional gasoline, and ultra-low sulfur distillate) averaged a 24 cents/gal premium over gasoline crack spreads, but that premium has fallen to an average 2 cents/gal so far this year. Since May 20, Gulf Coast gasoline crack spreads have averaged 17 cents/gal higher than distillate crack spreads. Higher demand for gasoline is supporting these margins. Total U.S. motor gasoline product supplied is up 2.9% through the first five months of 2015, and trade press reports indicate that demand is also higher in Europe and India so far this year compared with 2014.

Favorable margins leading to high refinery runs are not limited to the Gulf Coast region. Since early April, U.S. refinery utilization (gross inputs divided by operable calendar day capacity) has consistently been above 90%, driven largely by elevated runs at Gulf Coast and Midwest refineries (Figure 3). During that time, East Coast and Rocky Mountain utilization has also been high, only dipping below 90% in five weeks and two weeks, respectively.

Despite the ongoing unplanned outage at ExxonMobil’s Torrance, California, refinery, utilization on the West Coast exceeded 90% for the past three weeks, marking the second, third, and fourth times that all five regions have recorded refinery utilization rates above 90% for the same week since EIA began publishing weekly utilization data in 2010. These high utilization rates combined with increased U.S. refinery capacity (18.0 million b/d as of January 1, 2015) have led to record high gross inputs. Monthly data on utilization rates go back further, and the last time all regions exceeded 90% in the same month happened in September 2006.

U.S. refinery runs tend to peak in the second and third quarters of the year when demand is greater because of increased driving in the summer. In its July Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), EIA estimates that refinery runs will average 16.7 million b/d from April through September and then dip slightly in the fourth quarter to 16.2 million b/d before falling further to 15.8 million b/d in first-quarter 2016. Following the winter period of lower demand and refinery maintenance, STEO expects U.S. refinery runs will reach new highs next summer, averaging 16.9 million b/d in third-quarter 2016.

U.S. average gasoline and diesel fuel prices decrease

The U.S. average retail price for regular gasoline decreased six cents from last week to $2.69 per gallon as of August 3, 2015, down 83 cents from the same time last year. The West Coast and Midwest prices both decreased seven cents per gallon, to $3.48 per gallon and $2.52 per gallon, respectively. The East Coast and Gulf Coast prices each declined five cents, to $2.58 per gallon and $2.39 per gallon, respectively. The Rocky Mountain price decreased three cents to $2.83 per gallon.

The U.S. average diesel fuel price declined six cents from the prior week to $2.67 per gallon, $1.19 less than the same time last year. The Gulf Coast price decreased eight cents to $2.54 per gallon. The Midwest price declined six cents to $2.56 per gallon. The Rocky Mountain and West Coast prices both fell five cents, to $2.69 per gallon and $2.91 per gallon, respectively. The East Coast price was down four cents to $2.77 per gallon.

Propane inventories gain

U.S. propane stocks increased by 0.9 million barrels last week to 90.4 million barrels as of July 31, 2015, 21.9 million barrels (32.0%) higher than a year ago. Midwest inventories increased by 0.7 million barrels and Gulf Coast inventories increased by 0.2 million barrels. Rocky Mountain/West Coast inventories increased by 0.1 million barrels while East Coast inventories remained unchanged. Propylene non-fuel-use inventories represented 5.3% of total propane inventories.

The oil-rich GCC countries are starting to show signs of financial stress maintaining high defense and social spending while the price of oil remains low.

By Amit Bhandari*

The big news from the oil world in the past fortnight was the ‘deregulation’ of gasoline/petrol and diesel prices in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), resulting in an increase by 24% in the price of petrol to $0.58 per litre, still very low by global standards. This hike comes at a time when global petroleum prices have fallen and reveals the extent to which fuel in the UAE was being subsidized and the pain from low oil price has now forced the UAE government to cut down on subsidies.

Meanwhile, fuel at $0.31 a litre is cheaper in neighboring Oman, giving rise to a new business – the smuggling of petrol. News reports indicate that fuel stations at the UAE-Oman border are doing brisk business, and new stations have sprouted in recent weeks – a concern for Omani authorities. The smuggling is hurting Oman, which has a current fiscal deficit of 14.8% of GDP. Petrol prices of other Gulf Cooperation Council(GCC) members Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar are even cheaper, ranging from $0.16 to 0.28 per litre.

The troubles of Oman and the UAE indicate that the six-member GCC – an oil rich cohort with low populations – is also starting to feel the pinch of low oil prices. These countries need oil to be between $65 and $108 per barrel to keep their budgets balanced. The IMF used $57 per barrel as the base price of oil, to project fiscal deficits for five of the GCC members–the current price of crude oil is less than $50 per barrel. Adding to their gloom is the repeal of sanctions on Iran, which means more oil will be pumped into world markets, keeping prices lower for longer.

The stress on budgets comes at a bad time.

Following Iran’s nuclear deal with the P5+1, the GCC nations are expected to purchase more defense equipment. Just days after the deal was announced, Saudi Arabia placed an order for 600 Patriot missiles, valued at $5.4 billion, from the U.S. Saudi Arabia was the world’s top arms importer in 2014. It is currently leading a war against an Iranian backed faction in Yemen, with the backing of all other GCC members, with the exception of Oman. In fact, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE, the three biggest GCC oil producers, have not lowered defense spending in 2015 despite the dramatic, over 50% fall in oil prices.

Adding to their external concerns are internal ones – unrest within their own populations, simmering since the so-called ‘Arab Spring.’ These countries relied on higher social spending to quieten political unrest. This cannot continue indefinitely, but if let up, can lead to another set of problems for some of the states.

What then, is the economic stress point for India? The GCC accounts for just over 16% of India’s exports, including discretionary items such as gems and jewelry. Weak GCC economies can hurt Indian exporters and spell trouble for Indian banks especially those which lend to the gem and jewelry sector. Already in 2013, Winsome Diamonds, a jewelry exporter, defaulted on its loans of Rs 6,000 crore to a group of banks.

About 3.3 million expatriate Indians also work in the six GCC nations. During the 2008 economic crisis, activities such as construction came to a halt in Dubai, rendering thousands of Indian workers jobless.

The drop in oil prices has so far benefited India, but any political change could destabilize current equations. India can insulate its economy by diversifying energy supply sources, and by buying stakes in global oil and gas fields, to guard against the unforeseen.

About the author:
*Amit Bhandari is Fellow, Energy & Environment Studies, Gateway House.

Source:
This article was written for Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations.

By Elise Harris

On Sunday Pope Francis said the “horrific” atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the icon of man’s destructive misuse of scientific progress, and called for an end to all nuclear arms and weapons of mass destruction.

The “tremendous” atomic bombing of the two Japanese cities, which took place Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, “still arouses horror and repulsion,” the Pope said in his Aug. 9 Sunday Angelus address.

He told pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square that the event “has become the symbol of man’s enormous destructive power when he makes a wrong use of scientific and technical progress.”

These bombings ought to serve as a permanent warning to humanity in order “to repudiate her forever from war and to banish nuclear arms and every weapon of mass destruction,” he said.

Francis then called for prayer and a decisive commitment to work for peace and to spread an “ethic of fraternity” in the world so as to foster a serene coexistence among peoples.

“From every land should arise one voice: no to war and violence and yes to dialogue and peace!”

Seventy years ago, the only wartime use of nuclear weapons took place in the Aug. 6 attack on Hiroshima and the Aug. 9 attack on Nagasaki by the United States.

The Hiroshima attack killed around 80,000 people instantly and may have caused about 130,000 deaths, mostly civilians. The attack on the port city of Nagasaki killed about 40,000 instantly and destroyed a third of the city, the BBC reports. The attacks took a heavy toll on all of Japan’s population.

Pope Francis has spoken against nuclear weapons before, including during a Dec. 7, 2014 message to an international gathering on the weapons.

“Nuclear deterrence and the threat of mutually assured destruction cannot be the basis for an ethics of fraternity and peaceful coexistence among peoples and states,” he said.

“A global ethic is needed if we are to reduce the nuclear threat and work toward nuclear disarmament,” the Pope explained, adding that the many victims of nuclear arms are a warning “not to commit the same irreparable mistakes which have devastated populations and creation.”

In his Angelus address, Francis also offered his thoughts and prayers to the people of El Salvador, where he “follows with concern” the news of increasing hardships due to famine, the economic crisis, acute social conflicts and growing violence.

“I encourage the dear Salvadorian people to persevere united in hope, and I urge all to pray so that in the land of Blessed Oscar Romero, justice and peace will flourish again,” he said.

Archbishop Romero was killed due to hatred of the faith March 24, 1980, in the midst of the birth of a civil war between leftist guerrillas and the dictatorial government of the right. At the beginning of this year Pope Francis approved of his martyrdom and he was beatified May 23, 2015.

Violence in El Salvador skyrocketed after a treaty between local gangs and the government collapsed early last year.

According to the Associated Press, a recent spike in murders – with a reported 600 in May alone – is due to the fact that gangs are seeking to pressure the government into negotiating a new treaty, much like a previous one which resulted in a significant drop in homicides. However, the government has frequently repeated that it will not negotiate with criminals.

In his reflections on the day’s Gospel reading from John, Pope Francis focused on Jesus’ declaration that he is the true bread come down from heaven, and that “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him…He who believes in me has eternal life.”

Jesus’ words, he said, introduce a relationship into the dynamic of faith, which is the relationship between the human person and the person of Jesus. Both the Father and the Holy Spirit naturally play a decisive role in this relationship, he noted.

Pope Francis said that “it’s not enough to encounter Jesus to believe in him, it’s not enough to read the Bible, it’s not enough either to witness a miracle,” even though all of these things are good.

What’s needed, he said, is an open heart, because there are many who have come into close contact with Jesus, but have still not believed and have even despised and condemned him.

“Why? Because their hearts were closed, (and) when the heart is closed faith can’t enter,” he said, explaining that faith is a gift from God.

“Faith…blooms when we allow ourselves to be drawn from the Father to Jesus, and we go to him with an open mind, without prejudice; so we recognize in his face the face of God and in his words the Word of God, because the Holy Spirit allows us to enter into the relationship of life and love there is between Jesus and the Father,” he said.

Pope Francis concluded his address by turning to the example of Mary, who is the first one to both believe in Jesus and welcome his flesh. He prayed that all would learn from her how to receive the gift of faith before leading those present in the traditional Angelus prayer.

By Jeff Conant*

This spring, investigators discovered mass graves of human trafficking victims in Malaysia. How did the U.S. State Department respond? By upgrading its assessment of Malaysia’s human rights efforts. According to Reuters, trafficking experts in the department had given the country a poor rating, but political appointees overruled them.

There’s only one reason why the State Department would change Malaysia’s status: to ease the country’s inclusion in the Trans Pacific Partnership, or TPP — a massive 12-country trade and investment pact currently being negotiated by the Obama administration.

Congress recently granted President Obama fast-track powers to complete negotiations on the TPP without opening it up to scrutiny by Congress or the public. But Congress did one thing right: It included trade restrictions on dealing with countries that have the worst records in combating human trafficking. Malaysia happens to be one of them.

Rather, Malaysia was one of those countries, until late July.

Just last December, the U.S. Department of Labor cited Malaysia’s palm oil industry — which supplies about 40 percent of the world’s total exports of the substance — as a sector marked by forced labor practices. Also last year, the State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report placed Malaysia at the lowest rank for its flagging efforts to stop human trafficking.

The human rights atrocities carried out by the Malaysian palm oil industry don’t appear to be on the wane. But with the TPP negotiations hanging in the balance, and Malaysia’s rapidly growing economy a key player, these rankings simply couldn’t stand in the way of the Obama administration’s plans. And with the TPP, things will only get worse.

Environmental and human rights advocates know that the TPP, like too many trade deals before it, is a bill of rights for corporations that will dramatically lower such “barriers to trade” as environmental safeguards, workers’ rights to collective bargaining, and the public’s right to know. The State Department’s wholly unjustified and unexplained change in Malaysia’s official human rights status is just the latest example of the political machinations at work behind the scenes of the TPP — political machinations that cost human lives.

The same week that the State Department let Malaysia off the hook, the Wall Street Journal reported on human trafficking on a Malaysian palm oil plantation owned by Felda Global Ventures — a supplier to Cargill, the U.S.-owned agricultural trader, and other U.S. importers.

The report tells the story of one Bangladeshi worker who paid about $2,000 to be taken to Malaysia with 200 others on a 40-foot wooden fishing boat. To his shock, the boat was run by armed men who rationed food and water amidst overpowering heat and stench. Dozens died, and their bodies were sliced open and tossed into the sea. This was just the beginning of a nightmare journey that ended — for the lucky ones — with years of forced labor harvesting palm oil fruit for the growing global market.

Another Malaysian palm oil company, KLK, earned an expose in Bloomberg in 2013 for its own abusive practices, which were no less gruesome.

Reports like these have given rise to numerous efforts to clean house. Yet the industry-dominated Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, founded in 2006, has failed to root out the sector’s problems. Both Felda and Cargill are members, and the group’s secretary-general said he was unaware of any abuses faced by Felda’s workers. More recently, many companies, including Cargill, have made voluntary commitments to trade in only responsible palm oil. The Wall Street Journal expose shows about how much those voluntary pledges are worth.

Increasing scrutiny from international bodies, governments, and environmental groups like Friends of the Earth is essential to getting these commitments implemented in practice. But with the Obama administration rolling back the few mandatory protections that do exist — indeed, sending a strong signal that it will turn a blind eye to serial human rights violations — our efforts are being undermined.

If President Obama is willing to overlook the brutal fate of Asian workers tossed into the sea, beaten lifeless, or worked to death on Malaysian palm oil plantations, how can we believe him when he says the TPP will have strong safeguards for people and the environment?

The TPP is simply not worth the human cost.

*Jeff Conant is the Senior International Forests Campaigner with Friends of the Earth.

The evening of Wednesday 12 August into the morning of Thursday 13 August sees the annual maximum of the Perseid meteor shower. This year, a new moon makes prospects for watching this natural firework display particularly good.

Meteors (popularly known as ‘shooting stars’) are the result of small particles, some as small as a grain of sand, entering the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed. The tail of the Comet Swift-Tuttle, which last passed near the Earth in 1992, leaves such debris in the Earth’s path.

On entering the atmosphere, these particles heat the air around them, causing the characteristic streak of light seen from the ground. This shower of meteors appears to originate from a single point, called a ‘radiant’, in the constellation of Perseus, hence the name.

The shower is active each year from around 17 July to 24 August, although for most of that period only a few meteors an hour will be visible. From the UK, the peak of the shower occurs in the late evening on 12 August to the morning of 13 August, when as many as 100 meteors or more may be seen each hour. This year, for the first time since 2007, this peak coincides with a new moon on 14 August, creating ideal dark sky conditions for meteor-spotting.

Professor Mark Bailey, Director of Armagh Observatory, said “The Perseid meteor shower is one of the best and most reliable meteor showers of the year. The French astronomer Jeremie Vaubaillon has also predicted that the Perseids may this year produce an outburst of activity around 7.40pm BST on 12th August. Although it is unfortunately still daylight at that time in the UK and Ireland, it is just possible that enhanced rates may persist for a few hours around this time and so be observable soon after dark.”

Unlike many celestial events meteor showers are straightforward to watch, and for most people the best equipment to use is simply the naked eye. Advice from experienced meteor observers is to wrap up well and set up a reclining chair to allow you to look up at the sky in comfort. If possible it also helps to be in a dark place away from artificial light, and to have an unobstructed view of the sky.

Although the number of visible meteors is hard to predict accurately, at least one every few minutes can be expected. They mostly appear as fleeting streaks of light lasting less than a second, but the brightest ones leave behind trails of vaporised gases and glowing air molecules that may take a few seconds to fade.

By Bhaskar Roy*

From the very first day Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi jumped into foreign policy. By inviting leaders of all SAARC nations, Mr, Modi underscored his desire to promote a “neighbourhood first” foreign policy. This was a notable departure from the past.

It was well known that economic development was high on his agenda and a friendly and cooperative neighbourhood with a shared and mutually supportive action plan would make a win-win situation for all. This strategy is well on the way. The only impediment remains Pakistan – not a surprising fact. With infusion of monetary aid from the US, and large scale investment and defence assistance from China, Pakistan’s military-politico establishment views the situation in its favour and is quite happy disturbing the development infrastructure of SAARC, if only to hurt India. The manner in which events are shaping, Pakistan may eventually be left behind like a non-performing partner of this regional group.

In two recent speeches (July 17 in New Delhi and July 20 in Singapore) Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar gave an overview of Mr. Modi’s initiative and success till date and his future ambitions. This is new approach, as foreign secretaries have generally been reticent on publicly airing the government’s policies and thought process. The Indian public has greatly benefitted with the knowledge. Mr. Jaishankar is a highly experienced diplomat, having been ambassador to China, closely associated with the process of the India-US nuclear deal from the time of the UPA-led Congress government, and also served as ambassador to the US, before being brought back by Mr. Modi as the foreign secretary. He is the prime minister’s trusted man and carrier of his policies.

There are two old but important strategic visions that need to be mentioned here. One is “he who rules Central Asia rules the world”. The other is “he who rules the Indian Ocean rules the world”. Both sayings were apt not only for their times but continue to be relevant today, though total rule over either by any one country today is out of the question. But the quantum of influence matters.

Mr. Modi, who has already visited 25 countries, toured four Central Asian countries which were generally neglected by New Delhi. He also visited the Indian Ocean countries including Sri Lanka with goodwill and support. The Maldives was the only exception because of politically irregular developments in that country. Impending summits of the Pacific Islands and African states will take India’s friendly profile wider in a concrete manner.

Mr. Jaishankar spoke about them as signals of different times, of “greater confidence, more initiative, certainly stronger determination,” as expressions of growth in India’s capabilities,

Apart from the neighbourhood policy, the main opportunities and challenges to India’s foreign policy relates to the US and China with Pakistan in between. Other relationships attach themselves to this ballpark variously, as per circumstances.

Mr. Jaishankar talked about a China policy that triangulates security, economic cooperation and international politics. He referred to the Xian (China) meeting between Mr. Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping as a high point from India’s perspective in bilateral relations, which would have been difficult to envisage a year ago. But what about real issues? The Chinese are masters in propaganda and show up with statements from which they withdraw whenever they wish. If the interlocutor is seen as someone who gets impressed by huge shows, the task of the Chinese is made even easier.

It is difficult to accept that India-China relations have undergone an “orbital jump” or a quantum jump in the last one year. If Mr. Modi and Mr. Xi agreed to describe India and China as, “two major powers in the region and the world”, it should have translated into some action on Beijing’s part.

How is the triangulation policy with China working? The latest is on terrorism, one of India’s key security interests. China vetoed India’s move in the UN Security Council to designate Mumbai carnage mastermind, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, as an international terrorist. Mr. Modi took up this issue with Xi Jinping at Ufa, Russia, but was rebuffed. The Chinese made this public immediately in a press conference in Beijing.

In international politics, China has declined to support India’s candidature as a permanent member of an expanded UN Security Council. It is not in China’s interest to push through reform of the United Nations and certainly not an expansion of permanent members with veto powers. An expansion could mean membership of Japan and Germany certainly, and perhaps that of South Africa and Brazil. It could also mean a change in veto power. India was supported by the other four members of the P-5, who also supported India’s move on Lakhvi.

China says it supports a greater role for India in the UN but this means absolutely nothing – only a tactic of deception. There can be no reform or restructure of the UN without expansion of the P-5 and a redefining of their powers.

Beijing continues to block India’s entry in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) where the membership issue requires a consensus. It opposed the India-US nuclear deal and NSG clearance till the US intervened at the highest level – US President George W. Bush had to call Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

The India-China border issue will continue to remain unresolved till China finds it strategically convenient to resolve it, as it did with Russia and the former Soviet states.

On Chinese investments in India, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) should pay greater heed to the advice of the intelligence agencies. Strategic areas must remain out of bounds, and the Indian private sector may also be appraised accordingly. Unfortunately, the private sector does not seem to be well versed on security issues.

China has demonstrated repeatedly that Pakistan is their mainstay in the region and the animosity of Islamabad and Rawalpindi toward India will continue to be exploited, short of a full-scale war with India.

The improvement of India-China relations began very slowly with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to Beijing in 1988. The movements were cautious on both sides. The first break through was marked by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s visit to China in 1993, when the Peace and Tranquillity Treaty on the border was signed. Further improvements followed thereafter.

Chinese leader, late Deng Xiaoping saw stability in the country’s periphery as a prerequisite for its drive for reform, opening up and economic development. That policy continues to some extent but not entirely. Deng Xiaoping’s policy of “hide your strength, bide your time” began to be questioned around 2004, but most definitely from 2008. It assumed a new surge from 2012, when Xi Jinping came to power. China is now both confident and assertive, having become the world’s biggest economy with more than $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, and the third most powerful armed force, still growing at a fast pace.

India, of course, has to work with China and deal with China with confidence. It must be remembered that the Chinese respect strength. And India has to act to demand its space in Asia and the world.

The post-cold war India-US relations have changed positively with the shift of global balance of power and interests. Both the US and China pursue bilateral relations of mutual benefit, but also with serious strategic differences. Both are pursuing a “great power relationship” which has elements of a new cold war. The US seeks a relationship with India which can indirectly counter China, and Beijing is ever suspicious of and alert to it. India has handled this complicated challenge astutely.

It must be recognised, however, that a strong contingent of cold warriors still remain in the US foreign policy establishment. They argue for China because Beijing joined the USA in a strategic anti-Soviet axis, which included Pakistan. The same influencers, fathered by Henry Kissinger hold a pro-Pakistan and anti-India position. They were visible during the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war, the Indian nuclear test in 1998, and during the India-US nuclear deal negotiations. Things are changing but not enough.

Although communism is dead in Russia, these forces have helped push Russia into the arms of China. Russia is joining China in countering the US pivot in the Asia-Pacific region, pushing back initial indications of a possible Russia-Japan rapprochement. These are difficult waters to navigate. Mr. Modi’s Russia visit for the BRICs and SCO conference needs to be followed up by more robust engagement.

Pakistan, however, is going nowhere. No doubt India has to engage with Pakistan, but the off again, on again approach is self-defeating and only gives Pakistan an upper hand. Being helpful and co-operative to neighbours is certainly positive but being soft to a semi-rogue neighbour which takes every opportunity to harm India is weak policy.

Serious mistakes have been made in the past regarding Pakistan and terrorism. It is very difficult but not impossible to retrieve the situation. Pakistan is preparing to take India to the UN General Assembly, accusing India of terrorism in Pakistan. This requires a well-researched, calculated and effective response at appropriate fora.

An improvement of relations with Pakistan should not be seen in absolute terms. This is a long term path and should be walked on accordingly, affirmative action being taken when required. With its strategic geographical location, Pakistan has big powers quietly appeasing it. Hence, much wider diplomacy is required to hold Pakistan accountable for terrorism.

Under Mr. Modi, there has been a broadening of diplomacy, with the Indian Ocean countries and the Indo-Pacific receiving greater attention. But the underpinning, that is, the defence sector continues to lag. With a 7,500 km long coastline, strengthening of the navy, backed by long rage air force is paramount.

Unfortunately, the navy’s budget was reduced. In contrast, Pakistan will acquire eight more submarines from China, whose navy is growing rapidly, with nuclear submarines, a modern 40,000 ton landing craft under construction, five aircraft carriers planned, and one nearing completion.

Development must be supported by strong defence, otherwise it will be in jeopardy. India has traditionally paid little importance to military diplomacy, which in today’s global world is unavoidable. China followed the US in indigenous military production, supplying military weapons, aircraft, naval craft and other equipment to smaller countries, it has even reached Peru, supplying missiles! Such supplies buy a lot of influence,

Yoga has been claimed a soft-power success. But a one-off publicity is not enough. There is an urgent requirement of emphatic statements through publicity and propaganda. India’s external publicity is weak, yet publicity is an essential part of foreign policy. A dedicated structure is required, not necessarily under the foreign ministry.

The Indian Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR) exists, but mainly serves as a parking place for Foreign Service officers waiting for their next assignment. Here, out of the box thinking is required and the country has no dearth of talented human resources.

But publicity needs to go beyond culture, and policy and position on issues must be highlighted.

All achievements cannot be rested in the last one year. Most have clear lines of continuity while in some cases dormant policies have been given new life. The image of a divided polity is dangerous and will not serve the country at all.

It is time Mr. Modi enlisted other members of his cabinet to promote foreign policy. It cannot be a one-man army. Time is limited and the prime minister must spend much more time on domestic issues. Follow up and action on promises made and assurances given is a must. Otherwise credibility will be lost.

Optics is very important. Domestic developments impact foreign policy for foreign interlocutors view a country as a whole.

Finally, ministers must learn to speak in one voice. Misplaced bravado and intemperate statements could seriously impact sensitive foreign policy and diplomacy negatively. Some people, therefore, need to be quarantined.

*The writer is New Delhi based strategic analyst. He can be reached at e-mail grouchohart@yahoo.com

By Zachary Cohen*

While the world’s attention has been firmly fixed on Greece’s debt crisis and the “Grexit” threat, there is trouble brewing much closer to home. Staying largely in the Greek shadow, Puerto Rico is on the brink of defaulting on its debts. The parallels with Greece are unavoidable, and not just on account of the timing, so it is worth taking a deeper look into whether Puerto Rico is the United States’ own Greece and if its looming debt default could potentially have similar repercussions.

Background

What has been going on with Puerto Rico? In short, once a prosperous Caribbean nation, in the past decade Puerto Rico has seen its economy shrink considerably. This trend, the growing migration of citizens to the mainland, as well as the island’s labor policy, have all conspired to create the perfect storm for Puerto Rico.

Jumping to present day, Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla recently told the New York Times that the nation’s $72 billion debt was ‘not payable,’ while Reuters quoted Moody’s as warning that the probability of Puerto Rico defaulting on its securities was approaching 100 percent.

Much like Greece, Puerto Rico has been asking its creditors for debt relief, and much like Greece, it relies on a much wealthier economy to the north. The island’s debt, owed to a combination of creditors, is higher per capita than any US state.

Default Repercussions

With Puerto Rico’s default almost certain, one cannot help but wonder about the potential impact on the US economy, especially given the parallels with Greece and the chaos which the Grexit could unleash not only on the Eurozone but on the world.

In addition to disrupting the life of Puerto Rico’s citizens, the repercussions of a default would ripple through the traditionally low-risk bond market, impacting investors such as retirement funds.

Dante Disparte, founder of capital management firm Risk Cooperative, recently told The Huffington Post that a $73-billion write-off had the “potential to bring down many more aspects of the economy than we might let on, because we are trying to treat it like it’s isolated and that it’s an island, but it’s a dollar-denominated economy.”

MarketWatch in turn quoted Daniel Hanson, an analyst at Height Securities, as commenting in a note that “the signal from breaking a seven-decade streak of bond payments may imply more defaults are looming”.

Hedge funds, known as heavy buyers of Puerto Rico bonds, are bound to take a beating too. According to The Wall Street Journal’s analysis of data from Morningstar Inc, OppenheimerFunds Inc and Franklin Advisers Inc for instance together owned about $10.8 billion face value worth of bonds, representing 15 percent of Puerto Rico’s debt as of March 31.

Banks Breathing Freely

And yet, as far as financial turmoil is concerned, the similarities between Puerto Rico and Greece seem to end here. While the Grexit threat has caused serious concerns for European banks, prompting them to reduce their exposure to Greece, US banks have little cause for worry. Wall Street is not exposed to Puerto Rico debt and would not feel the impact of a default to the extent that European lenders would if Greece continues defaulting on its debts.

John Cochrane, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, recently compared the two situations in an article on his blog, “The Grumpy Economist,” commenting that the big lesson from the Greek drama was that sovereign debt must be able to default in a currency union, without shutting down the banks.

“There is no question of PRexit, that people wake up one morning and their dollar bank accounts are suddenly PR Peso bank accounts,” he pointed out.

In addition, despite Puerto Rico being a dollar-denominated economy, there is hardly any risk for a “spillover” to other economies, nor is there a threat to the US dollar as a currency, unlike the euro whose very existence is threatened if one nation leaves the euro zone. A proof is Detroit’s bankruptcy in 2013 which, while considerably smaller, did not trigger financial contagion.

Definitely Not Greece

While Puerto Rico’s default will cause a certain degree of financial turmoil, just like the default of any country, and will be felt to some extent in the north as well, it will not spell the same disaster for the United States and its banks as Greece would to the rest of Europe. Or in other words, it is much closer to home, but is much less dangerous.

About the author:
*Zachary Cohen is the Managing Director of the Finance Institute.

Source:
This article was published at Geopolitical Monitor.com

Yes, I think the election season is a disastrously overlong distraction. If people’s interest in it can be used to get them to ask their heroes to lead on important matters — such as asking Bernie Sanders to rally the Senate for the Iran agreement or against the TPP — then that’s a nice silver lining. If people want to get drunk watching Republicans debate rather than some other poorly conceived tragicomedy on TV, what do I care?

But there’s usually little of moving the beloved leader forward on anything, because supporters take on the role of servants, not masters. Criticism equals endorsement of some other leader. Advice equals endorsement of some other leader. And facts are seen through glasses tinted the shade of one’s preferred public commander.

RootsAction’s petition asking Sanders to talk about the military has nearly 14,000 signatures. It’s produced a number of claims that Bernie in fact does talk about the military, and has a great record on it, etc. Following up on each of these claims thus far has led to virtually nothing new. If you go to Bernie’s website and click on ISSUES and search for foreign policy or war or peace or overall budget priorities (militarism now actually gets 54% now), you’ll be searching forever — unless he adds something. His “issues” page acts as if 199 nations and 54% of the budget just don’t exist.

If Senator Sanders were to add anything about war to his website, judging by his standard response when asked, it would be this:

The military wastes money and its contractors routinely engage in fraud. The Department of Defense should be audited. Some weapons that I won’t name should be eliminated. Some cuts that I won’t even vaguely estimate should be made. All the wars in the Middle East should continue, but Saudi Arabia should lead the way with the U.S. assisting, because Saudi Arabia has plenty of weapons — and if Saudi Arabia has murdered lots of its own citizens and countless little babies in Yemen and has the goal of overthrowing a number of governments and slaughtering people of the wrong sect and dominating the area for the ideology of its fanatical dictatorial regime, who cares, better that than the U.S. funding all the wars, and the idea of actually ending any wars should be effectively brushed aside by changing the subject to how unfair it is for Saudi Arabia not to carry more of the militarized man’s burden. Oh, and veterans, U.S. veterans, are owed the deepest gratitude imaginable for the generous and beneficial service they have performed by killing so many people in the wars I’ve voted against and the ones I’ve voted for alike.

A brilliant and talented friend of mine named Jonathan Tasini is about to publish a book on Sanders’ platform on numerous issues. I asked to read an early copy because I had a huge hope that perhaps Sanders had addressed what he’s silent on in an interview with Tasini. He’s silent on how much he’d cut the military, even within a range of $100 billion. He’s silent on alternatives to war. He’s usually silent on U.S. subservience to Israel. He’s silent on drone murders. He’s silent on militarism and military spending driving the wars, the civil liberties losses, the militarization of local police, the militarization of the borders, the nasty attitudes toward immigrants and minorities, etc. He’s silent on the public support for two, not one, great sources of revenue: taxing the rich (which he’s all over) and cutting the military (which he avoids). I admit that I also had a secret fear that Tasini’s book would not mention foreign policy at all.

Well, the book turns out not to include new interviews but just to collect past speeches and remarks and interviews and legislative records, carefully selected to paint the most progressive picture. So, wars Sanders opposed are mentioned. Wars he supported are not. Critiques of wasteful spending are included. Support for wasteful spending when it’s in Vermont is not. Etc. I do recommend getting the book as soon as it comes out. No similar book could be produced about any other candidate in the two mega parties. But take it all with a grain of salt. You’ll still have no grasp of Sander’s basic budgetary platform or approach to diplomacy or foreign aid or international law or demilitarization or transition to peaceful industries — assuming he develops any approach to some of those things.

And to those who are already telling me that Sanders has to censor his actually wonderful secret desires to move the world from war to peace (and presumably a 12-dimensional chess move by which Saudi Arabia check mates all the warmongers and fossil fuel consumers) — that he has to keep quiet or he’ll have powerful forces against him or he’ll be assassinated or he’ll lose the election — I’m going to say what I said when people told me this about Obama: IT’S NEVER WORKED THAT WAY IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD! WHAT ARE YOU SMOKING? We’re lucky if candidates keep half the promises they make. Getting them to keep promises they never made but we fantasized has never been done.

I also had hopes for the wonderful and admirable Nicole Sandler’s radio show on Thursday. She’d said that Sanders had no reluctance at all to discuss militarism. But of course I didn’t expect him to refuse to talk. I expected him to just muddle through the same old same old. And so he did. He talked about cost overruns and waste, fraud, a DoD audit. He said he’d eliminate some weapons (but didn’t name a single one). He said he’d make cuts but “I can’t tell you exactly how many.” Can you tell us roughly how many? He said he wanted “Muslim countries” to help with fighting the wars. Sandler prompted him with his Saudi Arabia thing, and he went off on that, and the host agreed with him.

So the Socialist wants to turn foreign affairs over to a royal theocratic dictatorship, won’t say what he’d do to the largest item in the budget even though it’s WAR, and he’s bravely come out against fraud and waste without naming any instances of it.

And now I have a choice of being satisfied or an ungrateful perfectionist secretly supporting Hillary, even though her record on militarism is worse than that of almost any human alive and her website lists Iran, ISIS, Russia, and China as enemies to be stood up strong against. Oh, forget it. What time do the Republicans come on? Pass the whiskey.

By Adam Garfinkle*

Over the past few days the Obama Administration has rolled out the big cannons to sell the Iran deal to a clearly nervous Congress. The main two salesmen-in-chief have been the President and the Secretary of State, the former by dint of a conventional speech, and the latter mainly through an interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. (Secretary Moniz went off to Chicago to bang the gong, but, for better or worse, no one pays much attention to him because he’s not particularly charismatic and his formidable technical knowledge just makes most people’s eyes glaze over.)

In some ways it is a peculiar show. The way the Corker-Carlin (or Corker-Menendez, if you like the original label) law is written—which turns the Senate’s advise-and-consent function upside down and gratuitously sticks the House on for good, but probably unconstitutional, measure—the Administration should objectively have little to worry about. Both houses would have to override a Presidential veto to stop the deal, and given the regnant political geometry, that seems too high a hurdle to get over. But if that’s so, why is the Administration rushing to the ramparts?

Well, several interconnected reasons seem either possible or plausible. The first is that Administration principals know the weaknesses of the deal and reason that if they do nothing while critics score points, they might actually lose the argument and the first vote—or at the least end up needing to use a veto to deliver the deal. That would be embarrassing and politically costly, so it’s worth avoiding if possible.

Second, there is a possibility that Administration principals have an outsized Jewcentric fear that the “Jewish lobby”, working with the Israeli Prime Minister, is actually powerful enough to derail the agreement. They might point privately, within the inner sancta, to the fact that Chuck Schumer, the influential Jewish Senator from New York, and Steven Israel, the most senior-ranking Jewish member of the House—both Democrats—have already come out against passage. So has David Harris and the board of the American Jewish Committee, an organization not generally known for kneejerk hawkish stances. We will return to the “Jewish” element in all this anon. Suffice to say for now that, if they really worry about this, they are delusional.

Third, let it not go unmentioned that the big push is simply expected of them. This is what Administrations do. This is part of the political process, and part of the benign required ritual of a deliberative democracy. All the noise is a natural and healthy aspect of a genuine policy discourse.

I.

Except that there is something a little unhealthy, if not a bit fishy, about the “noise” of the past few days. The tone of the President’s speech, part of it certainly, was unpresidentially shrill. It violated Sidney Hook’s rule that a decent person first meet the arguments of his opponents before disparaging their characters. The President did not first meet and defeat the arguments of the critics. He first labeled the whole lot as, essentially, a bunch of neoconservative warmongers who gave us the disastrous Iraq War. His reference to “tens of millions of dollars in advertising” is especially noxious, as if opponents do not have a right to make their arguments, and as if Democratic politicians know nothing of political advertisements.

He then turned to the critics’ arguments, which are all over the place. In some cases he merely asserted facts that, in my view, are not true. That does not mean he lied, anymore than Bush Administration principals lied about WMD stockpiles in Iraq before March 2003; someone can be both sincere and mistaken about something, after all, with no intent to mislead. In some cases his arguments hit home. Several others fell somewhere in between, which is to be expected when the subject is a complicated, somewhat technical, and hence a somewhat ambiguous can of worms. Let us take these three categories in turn.

So what did the President say that, in my analysis, is not true? He claimed the deal “permanently prohibits Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon”, that it “cuts off all of Iran’s pathways to a bomb”, that “under its terms, Iran is never allowed to build a nuclear weapon”, and that “Iran will never have the right to pursue a peaceful program as a cover to pursue a weapon, and in fact this deal shuts off the type of covert path Iran pursued in the past.” How so?

Because the verification system will work to catch any significant Iranian cheating. The President asserted that, “Inspectors will be allowed daily access to Iran’s key nuclear sites”, that there “will be 24/7 monitoring of Iran’s key nuclear facilities”, and that access is guaranteed, “even if Iran objects”, with “as little as 24 hours notice.” He claimed, too, that, “Under the terms of the deal, inspectors will have the permanent ability to inspect any suspicious sites in Iran.” And finally: “The prohibition on Iran’s having a nuclear weapon is permanent. The ban on weapons related research is permanent. Inspections are permanent.”

With respect to the broader implications of the deal, the President also spoke an untruth or two. One is the President’s remark that the Bush Administration “did not level with the American people about the costs of war, insisting that we could easily impose our will on a part of the world with a profoundly different culture and history.” The second untruth stands out in particular: “And by the way, such a strategy also helps us effectively confront the immediate and lethal threat posed by ISIL.”

Let us now step back and address these claims.

It is difficult for me to square any of the President’s claims that use the words “permanently” and “never” with a deal whose terms expire in ten, or fifteen, or in a few cases 25 years. Maybe I’m slow on the uptake, but I can’t square the logic. Nor can I find the passages in the 159-page document that is the JCPOA deal that confirm these claims. If these statements are true by dint of side agreements between Iran and the IAEA, I would be surprised, but neither I nor the Congress has access to those side agreements—and it’s not entirely clear that the President does either.

The fact is that Iran will be able to run some 6,000 centrifuges under the terms of the deal, it will be able to conduct research and development on various nuclear technologies, and it will be able to advance its human capital resources, as well. Increasingly as time passes, therefore, Iran will burnish its credentials as a nuclear-threshold state, so that by the time the deal expires its nuclear infrastructure, in many respects, will be far more advanced than it is today. The broader political implications of this fact are daunting: Rather than obviate a regional proliferation race, which the President yet again rightly stressed is the real problem here, it is likely to stimulate it. That is in the cards anyhow because the way the Administration approached the negotiations, by delinking them from Iran’s broader regional behavior, stimulated enough anxiety among U.S. allies that they have already begun to vow efforts to achieve parity.

The claims about the foolproof capacities of the verification and inspection regime also strike me as wrong. I cannot find in the agreement any evidence that inspectors will be able to go anywhere they want within 24 hours. Note in this regard that on the same day that the President delivered the speech, the Wall Street Journal reported that the IAEA inspector-general Yukiya Amano expressed frustration that the Iranian government is still stiff-arming the IAEA with regard to access to Iranian scientists. Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported that U.S. intelligence has evidence that the Iranians are now sanitizing, in broad daylight, a suspected nuclear site at Parchin. Why is this important?

The IAEA is now in the process of trying to resolve what is known as the PMD issue. PMD stands for “possible military developments” (not “past military developments”). Secretary Kerry promised in April, when the framework agreement was extracted from Wendy Sherman’s whiteboard, that the PMD issue would be settled before any signatures attached to an agreement. That did not happen. It still isn’t settled. The IAEA is supposed to report out on the PMD issue, by mutual agreement, on December 15, which is, please note, way beyond the period of congressional review. Again, why is this important? Because only if we know what past military activities the Iranians have been involved in can we establish a baseline against which to judge whether the deficiencies in the inspection/verification regime are acceptable on balance or not. So far, anyway, the Iranians show no willingness to settle this issue on acceptable terms, and cleaning up old messes seems designed to hide earlier military-related work from all possible means of intelligence exposure.

Now, it is all well and good that television monitors will be set up at Fordow, Nantanz, and other known facilities. But what will go in does not represent the best technical craft the IAEA possesses, and worse, by definition this monitoring cannot see what is going on at undeclared sites. There has never been a time over the past two decades when Iran has not been violating the NPT with covert work, a fact the President referred to and a fact that is responsible for seven Security Council resolutions censuring Iran. Unless we have powerful national technical means to see inside of Iran, well over and above what the IAEA can do, we won’t know what we won’t know. This is why getting the PMD portfolio settled properly is so important. But, alas, if the IAEA could not do its job before the deal while sanctions have been in place, it strains credulity to think that the Iranians will be more cooperative once the sanctions regime is gone. So the claim that “this deal shuts off the type of covert path Iran pursued in the past” seems to me untrue.

The Bush Administration “did not level” with the American people? This is really below the belt. As already noted, being mistaken is not the same as lying or not leveling. The key Bush Administration principals actually believed these things, although no one said, as far as I can remember, that “we could easily impose our will” on the Arab world. People, notably the President, spoke of “the work of generations.” I agree with President Obama that this was a fool’s errand, and have written as much many times over the past decade. But the insinuation that these errors were knowingly part of a con job of some sort is insufferable.

As to the new strategy helping the effort against ISIS, this is simply nonsense. The reverse is true.

ISIS arose from serial U.S. errors and ambient weakness and chaos in the region. Those errors include invading Iraq and shattering that state with no credible Phase IV and no Plan B in hand if things didn’t go well, and they certainly didn’t; then leaving too soon before social and political normalcy, or what passes for it in a place like Iraq, could be established; and, above all, passivity in the face of the Alawi butchery of some 200,000 Sunnis in Syria. ISIS arose to fight Alawis in Syria and Shi’a in Iraq; it was sucked into that vortex by fawning weakness not just in those states, but in the whole Sunni Arab world.

ISIS therefore is the radical Sunni pole that matches and feeds off of the radical Shi’a pole whose epicenter is Iran. Hence, ISIS has used fear of Iran and of Shi’a encirclement as its prime recruitment tool. Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, ISIS’s chief mouthpiece, has repeatedly warned of a Western plan to hand over the Muslim world to Iran. After the U.S. military seemed to act like the Shi’a air force, even sharing a base with a vicious Iranian-backed Arab-Shi’a militia, the Administration’s deal with Iran will mightily reinforce this narrative. It’s the best thing that’s happened to ISIS and its recruiting effort since the Administration began its feckless, strategy-free air war against it, which managed to confirm the mantra that “the West is at war against Islam” without really hurting the bloody bastards all that badly.

II.

What did the President get right? To be fair and objective, plenty. In general terms, he did not equivocate about how nasty and dangerous the Iranian regime is or about how justified Israeli concerns with it are. He hit all the right notes on both scales. He stated that “there’s never been disagreement on the danger posed by an Iranian nuclear bomb”, that military options remain to be used if necessary down the road, that “there are times when force is necessary, and if Iran does not abide by this deal, it’s possible we don’t have an alternative.” Maybe the Iranians do not believe him, but that’s now moot. The drama will not play out to that point while Obama remains in office. But I think these are fair statements, and I think that whoever becomes President in January 2017 will retain these judgments and this sense of obligation to use force if it comes down to that.

I therefore think the President is right to characterize the situation as either this deal or an ineluctable path to war. That is what I have been saying for many years now, and the President is absolutely right to say that the “send it back for renegotiation” ploy is just that: a tactical evasion and a non-starter.

He is also right to say that if the Congress votes the deal down the sanctions regime will be dead in the water. But it will disappear if the deal is consummated too. So either way, it’s toast. The President is right to insist that sanctions alone, even were the full wall of constraint to persist, cannot stop an Iranian bomb. He is right, too, to claim that even more hurtful sanctions cannot be erected if this deal goes down, because it was the promise of a negotiated solution, or at least a full faith effort of the U.S. government to try for one, that enabled the sanctions regimes to be built in the first place. I wish he had avoided language like “are not being straight with the American people” and “are selling a fantasy”, but on the merits he is right.

Finally on this score, the President is right to claim that no one has a better alternative right now. This is a point I have also made before: If you don’t like the deal, what’s your alternative? The alternative is indeed a high risk of war, and, as the President said, some are honest enough to say that it’s a risk worth running under the circumstances. But when the President talks like this he undermines the credibility of his own claims to be willing to use force if need be. So this introduces us to the ambiguous.

III.

And what about the ambiguous? Well, first, the President’s claim that taking the diplomatic track is what got Hassan Rouhani elected President of Iran is mere speculation. Lots of things determine the outcome of elections in Iran, not least the absurdly narrow qualification criteria to be able to run. The President’s remark that “the Iranian people elected a new government” seemed to bless Iran as a genuine electoral democracy, no different, really, from our own. This is odd, to say the least.

Second, the claim that the deal is better able to limit the Iranian effort to get a bomb than a military attack is hard to assess from both directions. As I have written before, the Iranians have any number of exit ramps they can take between implementation and 15 years from now. They can, in my view, cheat repeatedly at the margins without much fear of being forced to relent, and in such a way as to accumulate real militarily applicable assets, and then walk out of the deal after copping the financial benefits. Read paragraphs 36 and 37. Now, the President said that sanctions can snap back at U.S. insistence alone: “We won’t need the support of other members of the UN Security Council, America can trigger snap back on our own.” So Iran’s financial benefits will be temporary and modest—that’s the tacit argument here. Well, we can snap back our own sanctions but we cannot unilaterally re-impose everyone else’s, which means the sanctions regime in its stronger form is not something we can bring back to life once it is deconstructed.

As to the other end, how much damage a military strike can do depends on the particulars of the strike. I would not trust this Administration to undertake an effective strike, given what its anti-ISIS campaign looks like, but other Administrations might do a much better job of planning and execution. Of course the President is right that “immaculate conception” strikes are impossible; the Iranians would respond and there are plenty of U.S. targets to hit, military and otherwise. Uncertainties and unanticipated consequences would abound, as always. But the categorical assertion that this deal will retard Iranian ambitions better than any conceivable form of military action strikes me as not proven, at best.

At one point the President claimed that people who criticized the November 2013 interim accord now use it as an excuse not to “support the broader accord.” Maybe he knows someone who fits that description; I don’t.

And finally on the ambiguity scorecard—which will serve as a segue to Secretary Kerry—the President claimed that the Iranians will “have to get rid of 98 percent of its stockpile of enriched uranium, which is currently enough for up to 10 nuclear bombs, for the next 15 years.” Now this is a very slippery remark. It suggests that without the JCPOA the Iranians will be able to build “up to 10 nuclear bombs” essentially anytime they feel like it. Hold that thought while we visit the mind of Secretary John Kerry.

IV.

Secretary Kerry made this same claim not once but three times in his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg: “They didn’t make the bomb when they had enough material for 10 to 12”; “They have mastered the fuel cycle; they have enough fissile material for 10 to 12 bombs”; and “They were really nudging into it. This was a dangerous place we were in. We were at two-months; we were at 10, 11 bombs-worth fissile material.” Kerry characterized the deal not a preventative, but as a rollback. We have, he said, “the mechanism to get rid of nuclear weapons.” And, “What we’ve done, and what no one else has succeeded in doing, is rolling back the program.”

This is a very significant claim. Accepting the risks of JCPOA for buying time or arguably preventing an Iranian nuke is one thing; accepting them for actually achieving rollback of all-but-existing nukes is something else again—a significantly more attractive proposition. (To my surprise, Goldberg failed to pick up on the significance of what he was hearing.) But is any of this true?

I have been closely following this business for a decade or more, and I have never heard any American official—or any other official, for that matter—claim that Iran ever had or now has enough fissile material for 10, or 10-12, bombs. So what are the President and Secretary Kerry talking about?

The best answer I can give goes like this: The Iranians had a lot of LEU (low-enriched uranium)—in the 3 to 20 percent range—by 2011-12. To get 10-12 weapons out of that material would have required something called batch enrichment to hike it to a level of around 90-percent enriched—that’s weapons grade. That is not easy to do. Besides, after Prime Minister Netanyahu did his September 2012 act at the UN General Assembly, displaying his famous Wile E. Coyote cartoon of the bomb with the line at 200 kilograms of 20 percent enriched uranium, the Iranians, according to the IAEA quarterly reports, down blended their 20 percent enriched stockpile to stay under the 200 kg limit. They were doing this, at least in part, before the interim JPOA was signed in November 2013. They may have been afraid of the Israelis at that point, if not of us. This means that they never got close to having what Kerry and the President suggest in their remarks.

So, is this a lie? A matter of technological ignorance? Both? Far be it from me to judge. All I know is that the statement is perhaps true in some sort of vague, general way; but it is not true as intended. The Iranians never had enough 90 percent enriched uranium for 10 bombs. The deal is not a rollback. It is at best a buy-time preventative, and should be judged against that achievement and nothing more.

One final comment about Secretary Kerry’s interview. At one point in the conversation Goldberg asks about whether the Iranians would walk away from a prospect of Congress-forced renegotiation. Kerry answers: “I know they would walk away for several different reasons. It’s not a ‘think’—it’s a ‘know.’ You need to talk to the intel community. You know, we had pretty good insight in the course of this process. Our evaluations out of the intel community informed us where reality was, what the market would bear.”

This is not the first time Obama Administration officials have evoked classified material in public for political purposes. But it is wrong. It is always wrong to politicize intelligence like this, and it is disingenuous for Kerry to pull intel trump to make a public argument when those outside the SCI realm cannot judge for themselves what he’s talking about. Earlier in the interview Kerry expressed a reluctance to come across like an analyst in answer to Goldberg’s questions; he knows, at least, that doing so is not Secretarial. But using classified information in such a manner is far worse.

V.

Now let’s talk about the Jews. A rather inordinate amount of words got spilled by both the President and the Secretary about Israel. Why?

Well, as the President said, Israel’s government is the only one that opposes the deal, and does so ferociously. This is a problem because Israel is a close ally, and it deserves special consideration. One does have to wonder about the specter of Jewcentricity, however. Just how much clout do Administration principals think “the Jews” really have? I cannot answer that question.

The whole business is quite troublesome, however, for lots of reasons. First, there are plenty of experts who think the Iran deal is a bad deal who are not remotely Jewish. Second, the disagreement poses real dilemmas to those American Jews who have deceived themselves into thinking that U.S. and Israeli interests and perceptions are always synonymous. They are not and never have been, but it’s a comforting illusion and it’s not so hard to believe in during normal times. But these are not normal times. This is a wrenching, divisive issue at a politically polarized moment in both Israel and the United States. Both President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu bear responsibility for making a difficult situation much worse. It’s at best a toss-up whether U.S. support for Israel can ever again be a non-partisan issue.

Secretary Kerry and the President both claim that Bibi is wrong, and that they know what’s best for Israel better than he does. They say as much. They also claim not to understand his opposition to the negotiations, which sprang forth with all four paws bared in November 2013. The former claim reminds me of leftwing “progressive” consciousness-raising from the 1960s. The New Left types claimed to know what was in the best interest of laborers better than laborers themselves, even though the vast majority of these kids did not come from proletarian homes. I did, and so naturally they came across to me pretty clearly as a bunch of arrogant and obnoxious jackasses. Even if the President thinks he knows what is best for Israel, more so that its own democratically elected leader, it is not wise to say so publicly.

As to the second claim, well, there’s no secret about the reason for Netanyahu’s judgment as of November 2013, and in this most Israelis are of the same view. The November 2013 deal enshrined Iran’s right to enrichment. That is the crucial concession that changed the purpose of the negotiations from where they started to where they have ended up. Now, the President and the Secretary posture as though it’s the Holocaust that is to blame for all this anxiety and opposition. They profess to “understand” and “sympathize” with this. They therefore raise themselves up to the status of amateur psychoanalysts, with Israel the one lying there on the couch. This is condescending in the extreme, and it is also happens to be misleading sanctimonious bull.

Israelis, and Jews around the world, are worried because they see the unfolding of a regional proliferation nightmare all around them. It is irrational to think that once the Iranians had mastered the fuel cycle any negotiation could have undone that reality. I happen to think so, which is why I have argued over and over again that arms control diplomacy cannot significantly alter strategic realities, only modulate them a bit at the margins. For the Israeli government to have demanded the impossible, and then acted like a petulant child when the U.S. government could not deliver it, has not been pretty to watch. But Israeli (and Jewish) fears are not at base irrational and they are not tied to a Holocaust syndrome. Had there never been a Holocaust the objective situation right now and going forward would not be one iota different.

What Israelis and Jews are looking at is the possibility, just 10 or 15 or 25 years down the road—which is a few seconds in the long skein of Jewish history—that millions of Jews could be killed and the State of Israel rendered non-viable. What this means to thoughtful Jews is that the very continuity of the Jewish people would be called into serious question. What kind of future could the Jewish people have, and what could possibly be its character, after such a calamity? This is what is at stake deep in the hearts of Israelis and Jews, and for the President and the Secretary of State to fob it off as an irritating wisp of mere paranoia or irrationality is deeply unsettling, all the way, I think, to tragic.

VI.

The big sell will continue, as will the naturally partisan big thumbs down campaign, until the Congress votes on the deal next month. The vote tally is unknown at present, but it is unlikely that the Administration will need to exercise a veto to get its way. Even if it must, it is even more unlikely that a veto could be overridden. Thereafter, the gears of implementation will begun to churn, the debates will narrow onto how the IAEA is faring with the Iranians, and a great deal of leather-lunged simplification is bound to populate the campaign season ahead. And then what?

And then nothing very dramatic, for a good while. It will take time for the prognostications, optimistic or dire, to play out. It could take a decade or longer, or a mere few years. But by the time the bell rings for the next significant round, it will be another Administration’s problem, and no one can predict what the ambient political and strategic environment at the time will look and feel like. In a sense then, the Iran deal is a little like a space probe—something launched into not so much space but into time, into the future. Someone once said that the past is a foreign country. The future may as well be another planet.

About the author:
*Adam Garfinkle is Editor of The American Interest magazine and Fox Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Source:
This article was published at FPRI.

Among the items awaiting Congress when it returns from its August break is reconciling competing House and Senate bills reauthorizing No Child Left Behind. These bills passed early this spring. Each bill is being marketed as a huge step toward restoring state and local control over education. However, an examination of both bills shows that both provide local schools with only limited relief from a few federal mandates.

The biggest problem with these so-called reform bills is that they do not significantly reduce federal education spending. Congress and the executive branch use the promise of “free” money — which they have taken from the American taxpayer — to convince state and local governments to allow the federal government to control the classrooms. The only way to protect American schoolchildren from schemes like Common Core is to repeal, not replace, the federal Department of Education.

Restoring local control over education would be a good step toward restoring constitutional government. However, simply replacing federal bureaucrats with state, or even local, bureaucrats will not create an education system capable of leaving no child behind.

The key to real education reform is to give parents control over education by giving them control over the education dollar. When parents control the education dollar, schools must be responsive to parental demands that children receive a quality education that meets their unique needs. Therefore, if Congress was serious about improving education, it would defund the warfare-welfare state, which would then allow dramatically reduced taxes. Congress could also end the Federal Reserve, thus freeing middle and working class Americans from the regressive inflation tax.

In order to make parental control meaningful, parents must be able to choose from a variety of education alternatives. Thus, private schools, religious schools, and homeschools must be allowed to compete in a free market without government interference. This would allow parents to choose an appropriate education for their child.

The growing popularity of homeschooling has already created a thriving market in homeschooling curricula. Working with a team of scholars, I have developed my own homeschooling curriculum. My homeschooling curriculum provides students with a rigorous education in history, math, English, foreign languages, and other subjects. The curriculum is designed to benefit both college-bound students and those interested in pursuing other educational or career opportunities.

The curriculum features three tracks: natural science/math, social sciences/humanities, and business. Students may also take courses in personal finance and public speaking. The government and history sections of the curriculum emphasize Austrian economics, libertarian political theory, and the history of liberty. Unlike the curricula in too many government-run schools, my curriculum never sacrifices education quality to ideological indoctrination.

The curriculum is free for students from kindergarten through fifth grade. Families with a student above the fifth grade pay $250 a year, plus $50 per course.

I am offering three special deals to allow parents to see if my curriculum is right for their child. One is an academic boot camp, designed especially for college-bound students. This is a six-week course that should help students raise their grade point average by at least a full point.

The curriculum is also offering special courses in phonics and mathematics for preschoolers. Both courses consist of 40 video-based lessons designed to teach children basic math and reading in two months.

If you are a parent searching for an appropriate homeschool curriculum for your child, please consider enrolling your child in my academic boot camp, my preschool mathematics program, or my preschool phonics program. Go to ronpaulcurriculum.com for more information.

This article was published by the RonPaul Institute.

The Securities and Exchange Commission just ruled that large publicly held corporations must disclose the ratios of the pay of their top CEOs to the pay of their median workers.

About time.

For the last thirty years almost all incentives operating on American corporations have resulted in lower pay for average workers and higher pay for CEOs and other top executives.

Consider that in 1965, CEOs of America’s largest corporations were paid, on average, 20 times the pay of average workers.

Now, the ratio is over 300 to 1.

Not only has CEO pay exploded, so has the pay of top executives just below them.

The share of corporate income devoted to compensating the five highest-paid executives of large corporations ballooned from an average of 5 percent in 1993 to more than 15 percent by 2005 (the latest data available).

Corporations might otherwise have devoted this sizable sum to research and development, additional jobs, higher wages for average workers, or dividends to shareholders – who, not incidentally, are supposed to be the owners of the firm.

Corporate apologists say CEOs and other top executives are worth these amounts because their corporations have performed so well over the last three decades that CEOs are like star baseball players or movie stars.

Baloney. Most CEOs haven’t done anything special. The entire stock market surged over this time.

Even if a company’s CEO simply played online solitaire for thirty years, the company’s stock would have ridden the wave.

Besides, that stock market surge has had less to do with widespread economic gains that with changes in market rules favoring big companies and major banks over average employees, consumers, and taxpayers.

Consider, for example, the stronger and more extensive intellectual-property rights now enjoyed by major corporations, and the far weaker antitrust enforcement against them.

Add in the rash of taxpayer-funded bailouts, taxpayer-funded subsidies, and bankruptcies favoring big banks and corporations over employees and small borrowers.

Not to mention trade agreements making it easier to outsource American jobs, and state legislation (ironically called “right-to-work” laws) dramatically reducing the power of unions to bargain for higher wages.

The result has been higher stock prices but not higher living standards for most Americans.

Which doesn’t justify sky-high CEO pay unless you think some CEOs deserve it for their political prowess in wangling these legal changes through Congress and state legislatures.

It turns out the higher the CEO pay, the worse the firm does.

Professors Michael J. Cooper of the University of Utah, Huseyin Gulen of Purdue University, and P. Raghavendra Rau of the University of Cambridge, recently found that companies with the highest-paid CEOs returned about 10 percent less to their shareholders than do their industry peers.

So why aren’t shareholders hollering about CEO pay? Because corporate law in the United States gives shareholders at most an advisory role.

They can holler all they want, but CEOs don’t have to listen.

Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, received a pay package in 2013 valued at $78.4 million, a sum so stunning that Oracle shareholders rejected it. That made no difference because Ellison controlled the board.

In Australia, by contrast, shareholders have the right to force an entire corporate board to stand for re-election if 25 percent or more of a company’s shareholders vote against a CEO pay plan two years in a row.

Which is why Australian CEOs are paid an average of only 70 times the pay of the typical Australian worker.

The new SEC rule requiring disclosure of pay ratios could help strengthen the hand of American shareholders.

The rule might generate other reforms as well – such as pegging corporate tax rates to those ratios.

Under a bill introduced in the California legislature last year, a company whose CEO earns only 25 times the pay of its typical worker would pay a corporate tax rate of only 7 percent, rather than the 8.8 percent rate now applied to all California firms.

On the other hand, a company whose CEO earns 200 times the pay of its typical employee, would face a 9.5 percent rate. If the CEO earned 400 times, the rate would be 13 percent.

The bill hasn’t made it through the legislature because business groups call it a “job killer.”

The reality is the opposite. CEOs don’t create jobs. Their customers create jobs by buying more of what their companies have to sell.

So pushing companies to put less money into the hands of their CEOs and more into the hands of their average employees will create more jobs.

The SEC’s disclosure rule isn’t perfect. Some corporations could try to game it by contracting out their low-wage jobs. Some industries pay their typical workers higher wages than other industries.

But the rule marks an important start.

In a rather bizarre unravelling of news that could stun any civilized world and more difficult to digest, the Bali-based Sukarno Center announced the award of its annual prize for global statesmanship to Kim Jong-un of North Korea.

Even when the world is well apprized of his antics and constant indulgence in theatrics that continue to destabilise the Northeast Asia’s security, Indonesia’s hailing of Kim Jong-un as a champion in the fight against neo-colonialism and imperialism would have few supporters. This seems to be the most bizarre logic employed by Indonesia’s Sukarno Center in giving Kim the award. Rachmawati Soekarnoputri, daughter of Indonesia’s founding president, after whom the award is named, made the announcement on 30 July 2015 after meeting with Ri Jong Ryul, North Korea’s ambassador to Indonesia.

The previous recipients of the Sukarno Prize have been luminaries such as Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar and India’s Mahatma Gandhi for their contribution to world peace and development and equating Kim Jong-un with such luminaries creates a lot of disbelief. The decision to award has made headlines and triggered ridicule and disbelief. It is well known that Kim Jong-un’s saber-rattling and bellicose policies have exacerbated already strained and frosty ties with South Korea, Japan and the US and Indonesia owes an explanation to the world in which way Kim Jong-un has contributed to world peace or compares even remotely with the above-mentioned democracy icons. Rachmawati is the honorary Asia-Pacific chairwoman of Pyongyang’s Korean unification preparation committee, a body not recognised beyond the borders of the hermit kingdom, and therefore the decision to give the award to Kim Jong-un may be seen as an obligatory return gesture.

It is not that the North Korean leader is short on accolades but most have come internally, more out of fear than respect. Kim Jong-un’s chest is surely to swell with the Indonesian award now. He is likely to travel to Jakarta in September to receive the award. Far from his contribution to peace and justice, the North Korean state is isolated from the world. During the three successive generations of dynastic rule, the North Korean state is more known to the world for its violence, repression and cruelty to its own people. In February 2014, a UN investigation team headed by Justice Michael Kirby accused the country of rampant human rights abuses “without any parallel in the contemporary world”, pointing towards Nazi Germany to find a suitable comparison.

Like the Kirby report, the Human Rights Watch too calls the regime in Pyongyang as one of the “most harshly repressive countries in the world”. Similarly, the Amnesty International has continuously raised concern about North Korea’s prison camps, and food shortages that have been affected “millions of people” in North Korea over the years.

Though the decision by the Sukarno Center to award the annual prize to Kim Jong-un clearly sounds bizarre, Jakarta is guided by history. The Sukarno Education Foundation had previously given the award to Kim’s grandfather, Kim Jong-il, posthumously in 2001. Bilateral ties between North Korea and Indonesia have remained warm since the 1960s during the era of Kim Jong-il. Rachmawati stoutly defended the decision, saying that “the allegations about human rights abuses are untrue”, dismissing reports of atrocities as “Western propaganda”.

She took comfort and justified her decision by drawing parallels with her own father, who led Indonesia’s independence movement and ruled the Southeast Asian archipelago before spending almost 22 years as the country’s leader and until he was overthrown in 1965. She questioned the Western perception of her father being a dictator, while defending her father’s anti-colonial outlook. During his rule, Sukarno was often accused of being an evil dictator who violated human rights but his daughter believes that such accusations were proven otherwise over time. No wonder, she sees Kim Jong-un from the same prism. Since the early 1960s, Jakarta has maintained open relations with Pyongyang and in April 2015 President Joko Widodo hosted a delegation from the reclusive state as part of an international conference.

International peace prizes are often criticised as being awarded for political considerations and Jakarta’s decision cannot escape criticism from that perspective. Even the Nobel Peace Prize, the most well-known peace prize in the world, is not bereft of criticism and the world’s famous advocate of peace and non-violence Mahatma Gandhi was never awarded Nobel Peace Prize. In 2012, the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy, and human rights in Europe”.

This prompted three former peace prize laureates to slam the decision, saying that the EU is “clearly not one of the ‘champions of peace’ Alfred Nobel had in mind” when he created the prize in 1895. It may be recalled that the Nobel Peace Prize to EU in 2012 prompted some anti-nuclear activists in Japan to successfully seek nomination for Article 9 of the country’s Constitution for consideration of the Nobel Peace Prize as it was argued that Article 9 of the Constitution has played a major role in preventing Japan for the past seven decades to opt the nuclear path and thus helped maintain world peace. It is a different matter that the bid of the anti-nuclear lobbyists found no favour of the Nobel committee and was rejected. But the kind of political debate that the nomination aroused and the kind of political storm a decision to award would have created had the award gone for Article 9, is good enough reason to view peace prize award world over with a bit of scepticism and no unanimity could ever be expected.

Even when President Obama received the award in 2009 only months into his first term in office, it caused many to accuse the Nobel Peace Prize Committee of being politically motivated. One also need not forget that former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger won the award in 1973 for involvement in the Vietnam Peace Accords, though at the time, he was overseeing the secret bombing of Laos.

One also needs to remember that the China-based Confucius Peace Prize, launched in 2000, was recently awarded to former Cuban leader Fidel Castro. In a recent report Washington Post observed: “Individuals criticized by the West have at points set up their own peace prizes to rival the Nobel – between 1988 to 2010, Libya had its own  own “Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights.” Winners included Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and the children of Palestine.”

Indonesia’s decision to award the peace prize to Kim Jong-un does not necessarily have the endorsement of Indonesian people. For example, a 2014 poll conducted by the BBC World Service revealed that just 28 per cent of Indonesians viewed North Korea’s influence as mainly positive, compared to 44 per cent who viewed it as mainly negative.

There seems to be some parallel between Kim Jong-un and Rachmawati. Rachmawati is the younger sister of Megawati Sukarnoputri, Indonesia’s fifth president, who remains one of the country’s most powerful political figures. On his part, Kim Jong-un is known for his ruthlessness in dealing with even the most senior officials suspected of disloyalty, following the execution of his uncle and one-time political mentor Jang Song-Thaek in 2013 and then executing the Defence chief in the most brutal manner with anti-aircraft fire for insubordination and dozing off during a formal military rally where Kim Jong-un was too in attendance. Whenever foreigners are detained by the North Korean authorities for whatever reasons, they are required to make public officially-scripted pronouncements of their guilt in order to help secure their eventual release.

Will the Indonesian award play a sobering influence on Kim Jong-un or spur further his ruthlessness as he is likely to see the award as legitimisation of his excesses? Viewed dispassionately, neither could be true. Kim Jong-un would remain undeterred by the kind of praise that Indonesia has heaped on him and one cannot expect that his ruthlessness would be anything less. The primary aim is to defend the kim dynasty and that is unlikely to change.

The Iran nuclear deal means the stage is set for a Gold Rush to Iran to commence. Curiously, this is something on which the media in Iran as well as those outside seem to agree outright. Take the phrase ‘gold rush’ itself. It has been used by Iran’s Press TV as well as that temple of western punditry, The Economist, as well as, ahem, Russia.

So there must be something in it. The question that remains to be answered is when does this Gold Rush kick off.

‘Gold rush’ begins for Iran business,’ headlines Press TV. ‘Awaiting the gold rush: Foreign firms are keen to get back into Iran if sanctions are lifted—but it will not be an easy place to do business,’ cautions The Economist, along with a Claudio Munoz caricature illustrating, piled up atop a Persian carpet in a desert far away (but soon to be near) the logos of Apple, McDonald’s, a few oil majors like Exxon and BP and a bearded, turbaned and brown-robed male figure guarding a spool of what surely isn’t a garden hosepipe.

Several hundreds of billions of petrodollars would have to pour out of Iran before the stereotype, mullah or man in a Tehran street, appears in an Armani suit.

‘Iran Deal is a Gold Rush for Global Business,’ echoes Forbes and The Wall Street Journal too cannot quite think beyond the big business opportunity the ‘opening up’ represents. Some commentators even have taken to refer deferentially to Iran as Persia, as if to exorcise themselves of the ghosts of bombs and burqas (sorry, chador) of Iran they associated for years with the liberally demonised Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of yore.

Playing catch-up and not too soon, Russia’s RT draws us into ‘Persia’s approaching gold rush.’ But Pepe Escobar’s piece for RT is by far the most entertaining of the lot referenced here and above. Away it goes, in part:

‘You may have heard of the N-11. Yes, it’s another clever Goldman Sachs concoction, to the benefit of that prized specimen – the “global investor”. These are the next BRICS, the new emerging powers.

‘The N-11 is made up of: Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, South Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Turkey and Vietnam. Some of these upstarts may even become members of the increasingly
assertive BRICS.

‘The moment the sanctions regime vanishes, arguably sometime in early 2016, Iran will become the hottest N-11 in the world. It’s very hard to beat its roll call of assets: a consumer market of more than 80 million, largely well educated people; a human capital mix that is even more attractive than Turkey; and in the all-important energy front, a combination of as much oil as Saudi Arabia, as much gas as Russia, and arguably more mineral resources than Australia.

‘And soon back with a vengeance in the global market. Talk about an economic game-changer.’

So, you see, the Iran deal is all things to all men (or women). Even Escobar is not averse to having, well, a bit of fun, as he mentions that Iran isn’t just a land awash with ayatollahs and oil but also a major global producer of steel, cement, cars and well positioned in nanotechnology and stem cell research. ‘It is the certified scientific power in Southwest Asia; the 17th largest producer of scientific papers in the world – ahead of Turkey and Israel. Not to mention Saudi Arabia, that global leader of, well, beheadings.’

It’s clear this show will run and run in a theatre near you. Amidst all the lip-smacking, though, there’s one sad group that isn’t quite sure if and when it will be rewarded in this great scene change.

The arms makers (oops, the defence industry). If only Iran could join or launch a few wars here and there it will suddenly be far more interesting. That, alas, may not be at par with the arms shoppers of the lower Gulf, merrily drawing away on their sovereign funds until both the oil and the dollars run out, but to this lot an arms bazaar in the armpit of the Grand Bazaar of Tehran won’t at all go amiss.

This article originally appeared in The Middle East in Europe [TheMiddleEastinEurope.net].

The United States is gearing up for the 2016 general elections. Candidates from both the Democratic and Republican parties have been making some items on their agenda public. Fuelled by the dollars provided by special interest groups and powerful lobbies, these potential victors are in the process of selling out their country.

Hillary Clinton, one of the candidates running for president in the Democratic Party, is hankering after dollars from deep pocketed American Jews and Zionist sympathisers.

Like virtually every current candidate who is looking for donors, Clinton is well aware of the economic muscle of the Israeli lobby and in order to get on their most favoured status, she recently sent a letter to billionaire Haim Saban, a man known to spend lavishly on political figures for favours in return.

Saban is an Israeli-American and a staunch Zionist who had previously gone on record to state that his ‘greatest concern is to protect Israel’. Speaking sometime back at a conference in Israel, Saban explained to the audience how he was going to achieve his objectives. His three ways to influence American politics were to “make donations to political parties, establish think tanks, and control media outlets”.

Hillary asked for his input on how to fight the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement that is gaining ground on US campuses and among those contemplating and doing business with Israel. This is part of a global response against the illegal Israeli occupation and annexation of Palestinian land.

Demanding the right to return

The BDS is also asking for full equality and freedom for Palestinians in Israel who are currently treated as second-class citizens. It also demands the right to return for those who fled Israeli atrocities over the years. One would think that such democratic principles that the US is founded on would ring a bell and find favour with Hillary Clinton, but sadly, she’s too busy trying to sell US foreign policy to those with money.

In the letter to the wealthy Zionist, Hillary asked Saban for his advice “on how leaders and communities across America can work together to counter BDS”. She stresses the need to contest the BDS campaign “with information and advocacy and fight back further attempts to delegitimise Israel”. In her spiel she also adds that “from Congress and state legislature to boardrooms and classrooms, we need to engage all people of good faith in order to explain why the BDS campaign is counterproductive to the pursuit of peace and harmful to Israelis and Palestinians alike”.

But her pandering for Zionist favour and dollars doesn’t simply end there. The two-page letter that was released to the press by Saban’s office demonstrates the level of solicitation the former US secretary of state has reached. She is very alarmed she says by such movements which are anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist. She is concerned about the ‘murderous attacks on French Jews,’ forgetting the thousands of innocent Palestinians killed by Israeli bullets, and she continues with how she first fell in love with Israel when she and her husband visited occupied Jerusalem’s old city more than 30 years ago, which is part of Palestine.

“The Jewish state is a modern day miracle — a vibrant bloom in the middle of the desert. We must nurture and protect it.”

Choosing to take sides

“I am also very concerned by attempts to compare Israel with South African apartheid. Israel is a vibrant democracy in a region dominated by autocracy, and it faces existential threats to its survival. Particularly at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise across the world, especially in Europe, we need to repudiate forceful efforts to malign and undermine Israel and the Jewish people.”

Clinton has definitely chosen to take sides where the bread is being buttered. Forget democratic principle … it is the greenback instead. Clinton pens that “the Palestinians cannot unilaterally declare a state, and no one can impose a solution on Israel”. She boasts of her record as a US senator and secretary of state on Israeli issues, stating that she had opposed dozens of anti-Israel resolutions at the UN. She reminds Haim that she supported Israel after the “biased” Goldstone Report. She concludes that “time after time I have made it clear that America will always stand up for Israel, and that’s what I’ll always do as president”.

This blatant and servile stance by a candidate running for the office of the most powerful position in the world should be indeed alarming to foreign policy analysts and those who believe in justice and equality. Israel continues to imprison and murder Palestinian men, women and specially children, while US politicians continue to hanker after Zionist dollars.

Selling out the principles a great country like the United States was founded on is tantamount to prostitution.

This article appeared at Gulf News.

By Jessica Hatcher*

The growing schism between the Catholic Church and Burundi’s political leadership is a particularly worrisome aspect of the fallout from President Pierre Nkurunziza’s bid for a third term, which has already seen dozens killed in protests and 175,000 people, mostly women and children, flee the country since April.

More recent signs of violent instability a decade after the end of a 13-year civil war include the weekend assassination of Adolphe Nshimirimana, an army general and intelligence chief said to be the second most powerful man in the country, and the serious wounding in a shooting incident of Pierre Claver Mbonimpa, a leading human rights activist.

The Catholic Church has played a key role during years of talks between opposition groups and the government, dialogue designed to shore up peace since the end of the war, which claimed some 300,000 lives.

On 21 July, Nkurunziza won a predicted landslide victory in a presidential election. The Catholic Church had been among the first bodies to speak out against his candidature, which was widely condemned as being in violation of the constitution and the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Accord signed in 2000. Deeming the entire electoral process flawed, the church cancelled its plans to deploy some 6,000 observers during the poll.

Supporters of the president responded by intimidating and threatening a number of bishops and archbishops. Intelligence agents appeared in churches, monitoring sermons.

The East African Community report on the elections concluded that “successive efforts to build consensus through inclusive dialogue among Burundi stakeholders have not been successful,” and called on all stakeholders to re-engage in candid and inclusive dialogue to find a solution to the political impasse.

According to Father Emmanuel, a priest who chose to use a pseudonym because of his own security concerns, that is going to be difficult. “They’re no longer listening to the priests and the bishops. If the church and the state are not on good terms, the consequences will be severe.”

Aside from its key role in political dialogue, the church manages numerous health and educational facilities, with its staff being paid salaries by the state. This support, according to Emmanuel, now looks uncertain.

The Arusha agreement lay at the heart of the church’s condemnation of Nkurunziza’s third term bid. Mike Jobbins, the head of Search for Common Ground, a peace-building NGO, described that deal as “the Magna Carta of independence; a commitment to power sharing, to ethnic balance, to sacrificing individual interests in favour of peace and security in the country.”

The Catholic Church in Burundi, with support from the Vatican, was instrumental in bringing warring parties to the negotiating table and drafting the agreement. While not a legally binding document, its provisions, which include a two-term limit, have Burundi’s post-war dispensation.

“The Arusha agreement is not perfect, but it’s the best we have,” said Gabriel Baregensabe, who has been a priest for 42 years and the secretary general of the Bishops’ Conference of Burundi for the past decade. He said the decision not to back the president was a difficult one for the church.

“The bishops gathered and took their time to ensure that they were doing what was right for the people and that they spoke the truth accordingly, because they knew what they were saying would mean war,” he told IRIN. The bishops had decided that defending the Arusha accords was, on balance, best for the people.

If dialogue continues to falter, the church’s decision could indeed mean war. Opposition leaders and dissident generals who backed a failed coup in May met on 30 July in Addis Ababa to discuss how to form a unified front against Nkurunziza. “We cannot exclude the use of force,” Anicet Niyonkuru, president of the national opposition council and leader of Burundi’s CDP party, told journalists.

The Sunday killing in Bujumbura of spy chief Nshimirimana was carried out using small arms and rockets. The general was widely thought to have orchestrated the crackdown on street protests against Nkurunziza’s third term bid, which began in May.

African Union Commission chief Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma described the killing as a “barbaric act that is likely to further destabilise the country.” She urged the Burundian government, opposition political parties and civil society “to work very closely together to find a lasting solution to the current crisis.”

But the government no longer sees the Catholic Church as an honest broker in such dialogue, as was displayed by a recent broadside from presidential spokesman Willy Nyamitwe that only a few months ago would have been unthinkable.

“People are dying,” Nyamitwe said. “Grenades are launched at dawn on our citizens. Have you seen any bishop condemn this? No. Because they’re implicated.… We can’t say they are people who present a model of morality.”

“That was his way of telling us to shut up,” said Father Emmanuel, who lives in an opposition neighbourhood that has been a flashpoint for violence over the last three months. He said this attitude from the president’s office was only adding to citizens’ disquiet. “They ask themselves: ‘If the political authorities dare to attack our pastors like that, then what will become of us?’”

After three months of arrests, torture, grenade blasts and after-dark shootings, people are deeply afraid, tired and worried, Father Emmanuel said. Some are experiencing a crisis of confidence in the church, one of the few places where they found peace and solace and where political affiliations could be cast aside.

“There’s no longer any hope. The ruling party has announced that it’s going to continue. Others have announced they’re going to start fighting. People are coming to us, left and right, calling for help,” he said.

“People are asking, ‘what should we be doing?’ We can give them God’s word, but people don’t know how to turn that into a concrete reality. It feels like we have no more lessons to give. People are starting to condemn God.”

A Burundian political analyst working for a European diplomatic mission who preferred not to be named said he believed Nkurunziza needed both the international community and the Catholic Church.

“Nkurunziza can change,” the analyst said. “If they [the Catholic Church] fight him, there won’t be peace, won’t be human rights, won’t be democracy. They will do everything they can to keep the channels of negotiation open.”