About that US Criminal Indictment Alleging Industrial Espionage by China

I have an article up today on Asia Times about an indictment of US and Chinese companies for industrial espionage and theft of DuPont’s trade secrets for the manufacture of titanium dioxide.

This will quite probably turn into a big deal in US-Chinese relations, because it’s a big deal for DuPont and DuPont is a big deal in American industry and politics.  

Titanium dioxide delivers hundreds of millions of dollars each year to DuPont’s bottom line, in large part because of DuPont’s unique know-how in operating a particularly filthy and dangerous piece of chemistry and also, allegedly, because the fact that the technology is very closely held offers opportunities to set up a pricing cartel with the few other Western manufacturers who have mastered the process.

I expect the Chinese will claim that their advances in titanium dioxide technology reflect their own indigenous achievements and any DuPont documentation that came over the transom was peripheral to their own accomplishments.  Maybe so, but maybe US courts, politicians, and public opinion will draw the opposite conclusion, especially in an election year during which Chinese job-poaching perfidy will be at the top of the political agenda.

As an amusing sideline, one of the top Google hits for the piece was on www.allentownstripclubs.com, a site which, as you might expect, promotes strip clubs in Allentown, PA, previous home base for the Bethlehem Iron & Steel behemoth and now a piece of post-industrial fodder for Billy Joel ballads and the sex service industry.

I realized that the good people in Allentown had picked up on the piece because I had substituted “XXX” for the names of people named in the indictment.  It is one of the melancholy privileges of the Internet and social media to be able to look at the personal Christmas pictures of somebody facing decades in jail on a charge of industrial espionage, and imagine his honor, his reputation, and his future evaporating before one’s eyes.  So, I decided, let somebody else strip away his last veneer of privacy.  Maybe my pity was misplaced; we’ll see.  

Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

Jinzhou Titanium Industry Company, in Liaoning Province in Northeast China, is the proud operator of two 15,000 tpy chloride process titanium dioxide lines.

In 2010, it held a seminar for the trade to advertise its achievements:

For more than two decades' persistent and dauntless struggle, Jinzhou Titanium Industry Co, Ltd, has overcome multiple technique difficulties, making the whole process operate smoothly. The company continuously optimized the process and the key equipment, obtaining high level achievement which was never reached before. With excellent application properties, the CR serial titanium dioxide products developed by the company are continuously replacing some imported products in Chinese market ... [1]

Those achievements are now under a cloud. Jinzhou Titanium Industry Co, before it was spun off in 2010, was a subsidiary of Pangang Group, the Chinese corporation named in the criminal indictment for conniving at the theft of DuPont's trade secrets. The indictment lists three contracts involving the misappropriation of DuPont technology: a 1998 $5 million transaction with Chengde Iron & Steel Corporation, a second-tier mill in northern China whose transaction appears to have vanished into the mists of time; a $6 million deal in 2005 involving the 30,000 tons of capacity at Jinzhou; and a $17.8 million contract in 2009 for a 100,000 tpy titanium dioxide project in Chongqing for Pangang Group.

According to the indictment, about $13 million monies under the 2009 contract had been paid out. Pangang Titanium's website showed a picture of the June 8, 2010 groundbreaking and stated:

The technologies are from Jinzhou TiO2 [the chemical symbol for titanium dioxide] Pigment plant, Pangang has the certain share in this plant ... It's planned to commission the plant in the end of 2012. [2]

While embroiled in the civil suit, the principal of USAPTI labored to demonstrate that the services he provided to China had been generated without DuPont knowhow.

However, the indictment paints a picture of a relationship over 13 years between USAPTI and a retired DuPont engineer; proprietary documents - including a 407-page Basic Data document for DuPont's titanium dioxide plant in Kuan Yin, Taiwan - with various DuPont stamps and confidentiality instructions getting passed around; and the retired engineer providing photographs and technical assistance to USAPTI to scale the Kuan Yin documentation up to the capacity envisioned for the Pangang plant.

That “Disgusting” “Travesty” Over Syria at the UN

What went down at the UN:

As a riposte to the Arab League initiated, US/EU backed “Assad must step down” resolution, Russia proposed a resolution calling on both sides to pull back forces and negotiate.

Pretty reasonable proposal.  But reasonableness is not part of the program on Syria.

Instead, a Security Council vote was called on the West's proposal, even though everyone knew it was headed for a veto.

Not just as a gratifying piece of “moral outrage theater” designed to embarrass the Russians and Chinese.

The Gulf and Western powers wanted to advertise, no, make that provoke, a failure at the United Nations.

They got it when Russia and China, as promised, vetoed a resolution they considered one-sided.

Even though the resolution had been advertised as precluding armed intervention, i.e. so toothless as to be meaningless, it was paradoxically trumpeted as “the last chance” for peace.

What it really means is that, with the UN rejected as a suitable venue for great power diplomacy, it’s open season on Syria.

Time to crank up another extra-UN “coalition of the willing” (Iraq-speak) or “contact group on Syria” (Libya-speak).  In fact, the process has already started.

Basically, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, France, Turkey whoever can now meddle in Syria with cash and arms to their heart’s content.

My personal feeling: the United States is pushing  regime collapse in Syria (I’m not even going to dignify the process with “regime change”) as a consolation prize to the Gulf states for the US not going all out to start a war with Iran.  Assad’s scalp on the GCC’s belt will have to do for now.

A while back, I wrote that the people’s revolution in Syria had failed; and the rebellion would now have to make do with whatever nation the GCC, the US, the EU, and Turkey decide to give them.

I’ve got a feeling that, beyond the full-time insurrectionists and propagandists of the SNC, the people of Syria are not going to be happy with the increasingly militarized, bloody, and divisive rebellion executed in their name, accompanied by the high-minded bleating of the neo-liberal interventionists.

To me, that’s “disgusting” and a “travesty”

Israel Attack on Iran: Same BS Different Day

“Israel to attack Iran” is a hardy if never-blooming perennial.  I rerun this post (originally written on the occasion of Israel’s bombing of an alleged nuclear facility in Syria in 2007) every year as a reminder of the rather daunting technical issues involved in flying from Israel to Iran and blowing things up in a truly convincing fashion, even as the same threats are put forward again and again.

Blowing things up in a truly convincing fashion involves a) flying there b) getting refueled in mid-air c) getting rearmed d) going back and do it again and again against Iran’s dispersed and hardened nuclear facilities.

So it won’t be an orgasmic one-off like the Osiraq reactor strike against Iraq, a nice quasi-surgical demonstration of civilized Israeli warfare.  It would be a grinding, prolonged assault, presumably with plenty of Iranian casualties, and with the unmistakable, sustained assistance of a local ally to keep the planes in the air.

Iran’s nuclear facilities are beyond the combat range of Israel’s fighter bombers.  So Israeli planes would not only need to overfly Iraq or Saudi Arabia and/or Turkey with or without permission; they would have need to get refueled over Iraq or Saudi Arabia as well on the return trip.

It doesn’t look like the US is going to provide refueling facilities, leaving it up to local partners (unlikely/infeasible) or Israel itself.

This year, the presence of a pro-Iranian government in Iraq would make it necessary for Israel to cross Iraqi airspace without permission, and defy the Iraqi government in prolonged fashion by having Israel’s tankers hovering over Iraq for multiple bouts of mid-air refueling.

And I don’t think Turkey’s going to be keen about permitting overflight, since they aren’t even signing on to the proposed bilateral sanctions against Iran.

That leaves the Saudis.  Saudi Arabia is in the midst of an aggressive rollback against Iran in particular and Shi’ites in general, and the London Times quoted an anonymous Saudi source as saying Israeli jets attacking Iran would be waved through Saudi airspace.

Doesn’t quite pass the smell test for me, though.  I don’t think the Saudi government is happy to harass the Iranians, but I don’t think they have the stomach for taking the Israeli side in a full-blown war.

On the record comments in December from Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s top security honcho, will undoubtedly be dismissed as disinformation by Western observers because he’s calling for a nuclear-free Middle East (a slap at Israel!), but I think his statement more closely reflect Saudi reality:

Replying to a question about the possibility of an attack on Iran to force it to roll back its nuclear program and the impact of such an action, Prince Turki reiterated that the impact will be “calamitous … cataclysmic, not just catastrophic.”

He said that Iranian actions have provoked worldwide opposition but at the same time suggests that Iran's nuclear program is being singled out, while Israel is being given a clean chit. Any unilateral decision to launch a military attack aimed at halting the nuclear program of Iran could have huge consequences, he warned.

As to the technical issues of refueling, the IDF has made a big deal of demonstrating that it does not need US refueling services, as this report indicates:

In the last days of May and first week of June, 2008, Israel staged an impressive and well-reported exercise over Crete with the participation of the Greek air force. More than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighter jets, as well as Israeli rescue helicopters and mid-air refueling planes flew a massive number of mock strikes. Israeli planes reportedly never landed but were continuously refueled from airborne platforms. Israel demonstrated that a 1400 km distance could be negotiated with Israeli aircraft remaining aloft and effective. Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment facility is 1400 km from Israel.

Early in 2011, the Jersusalem Post reported Israel took delivery of a 707 for conversion into a tanker for refueling its F15-I fighter bombers coming back for Iran.  How many additional tankers Israel has is “classified”, but an unsourced thread puts the total number of converted 707s to eight.

The JPost article went on to say:

The air force has conducted a major upgrade of its tanker fleet in recent years and now plans to wait for the US Air Force to choose its future tanker before buying additional aircraft.

Reading between the lines, maybe the United States is not particularly keen on delivering tankers and enhancing Israel’s capability to conduct unilateral air operations against Iran.

Accordingto Karl Vick at Time magazine, Israel doesn’t have the tanker capacity or, for that matter the ordnance, to devastate Iran for weeks:

What everyone agrees, however, is that as formidable as the Israeli Air Force is, it simply lacks the capacity to mount the kind of sustained, weeks-long aerial bombardment required to knock down Iran’s nuclear program, with the requisite pauses for damage assessments followed by fresh waves of bombing.  Without forward platforms like air craft carriers, Israel’s air armada must rely on mid-air refueling to reach targets more than 1,000 miles away, and anyone who reads Israel’s order of battle sees it simply doesn’t have but a half dozen or so.  Another drawback noted by analysts is Israel’s inventory of bunker-busting bombs, the sort that penetrate deep into concrete or rock that shield the centrifuge arrays at Natanz and now Fordow, near Qum.  Israel has loads of GBU-28s, which might penetrate Natanz. But only the U.S. Air Force has the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator that could take on Fordow, the mountainside redoubt where critics suspect Iran would enrich uranium to military levels.

So, why do we keep talking about Israel’s threats to attack Iran?

I’ve frequently commented that the main purpose of the attack-Iran threat is to yank America’s chain, and forestall possible rapprochement between the United States and Iran.

The Obama administration knows this, I think, and I find its politically-motivated willingness to continue with the sanctions charade, and the low level but cruel and destabilizing program of assassination, sabotage, and economic warfare against Iran rather shameful.

Friday, October 05, 2007

 

The Mystery of the Dropped Fuel Tanks

An e-mail from a reader concerning the Israeli raid on a purported North-Korea-linked military facility in Syria stated:

FYI, the combat radius of an F-15 in deep strike mode is 1800km
The distance to the Syrian target is ~ 700 km.

No need for drop tanks........

Hmmm. Too interesting to pass up.

The Internet is a treasure trove for armchair commanders and aviation and weapons enthusiasts. Industrious googling yielded the following information:

During the raid, some Israeli aircraft jettisoned two external fuel tanks up by the Turkish border.

The tanks were from an F-15I fighter bomber , called the “Ra’am” or “Thunder”, itself the Israeli variant of the F-15E Strike Eagle.

In agreement with my correspondent, the Observer states the Ra’am is:

...the newest generation of Israeli long-range bomber, which has a combat range of over 2,000km when equipped with the drop tanks.

But I think the Observer (and perhaps *gasp* a loyal reader) got it wrong. Either they confused cruising range with combat range, or confused the current F15I with its previous incarnations (for instance the F15C does have a combat radius of 2000 km).

The F-15E is a completely different animal from previous F-15s, which were sleek interceptors, designed “without a pound for the ground” i.e. no air to ground armament, for those days of air-to-air combat with the parfait knights of the Soviet bloc.

The F-15E is a big, fat hog of a plane, sometimes nicknamed the Flying Tennis Court, or Rodan for its resemblance to the ungainly but murderous superpterodactyl featured in the Godzilla movies.

It’s meant to carry big bombs and missiles to blow up stuff on the ground and the people standing in it or next to it, and fight its way out if necessary.

So it’s got bigger engines and less range than previous F15s.

According to the data I dug up, the F-15E has a combat radius—the distance it can be expected to fly for a mission assuming high speed, fuel-consuming maneuvers--of 790 miles (see here and here ).

To achieve this radius, it needs its internal fuel plus external fuel.

Internal fuel capacity is 5,952 kg.

External fuel consists of two components:

Conforming fuel tanks or CFTs with a total capacity of 4500 kg. They are integral parts of the plane—one report I read said the plane isn’t really designed to fly without them—and can’t be jettisoned.

Then there’s another 5500 kg in conventional external fuel tanks—the kind that were dropped during the mission.

With a fistful of caveats, the combat radius for an F-15I without the external fuel tanks would be around 500+ miles.

Distance from the Hatzerim airbase (home of the F-15I-equipped 69th Squadron) near Beersheba to Dayr az Zawr: 420 miles.

So you might think that the conventional external fuel tanks weren’t needed for this particular mission, and the only reason to carry them was for road-testing prior to some Iran-related hanky-panky.

Maybe yes, maybe no.

If the Israelis really did bomb Dayr az Zawr, it’s unclear why they went barnstorming up to the Turkish border a hundred miles away.

But they certainly did go, and to fly that kind of mission including a flyby of the Turkish border, I think they would need the external fuel tanks.

Maybe the Turkey excursion was to test some fancy new electronic countermeasures equipment mounted on another plane, called “Suter”, to disrupt Russian air defense hardware recently supplied to Syria—and Iran, for Israel’s benefit and our own.

Aviation Week put out the story courtesy of “U.S. officials”:

A Kuwaiti newspaper wrote that "Russian experts are studying why the two state-of-the art Russian-built radar systems in Syria did not detect the Israeli jets entering Syrian territory. Iran reportedly has asked the same question, since it is buying the same systems and might have paid for the Syrian acquisitions."


We got a certain amount of military chest-thumping about how cool this new gear is, but these planes only jettison their fuel tanks if they’ve been engaged and need extra speed and mobility, which leads one to believe it couldn’t have worked too great.

As to Israeli insistence that they’ll take out Iran if we can’t get off our collective rears, I found this analysis interesting and persuasive.

It argues that the Israeli air force simply doesn’t have the horses to haul the armament needed to make a terminal dent in the hardened and dispersed Iranian facilities on a 1200-mile mission—remember, more fuel means fewer weapons carried--unless the U.S. either assists in the refueling of the Israeli planes or allows them to stage the assault U.S. from bases in Iraq.

And maybe not even then.

Bottom line:

Theoretically, the Israelis could do this, but at great risk of failure. If they decide to attack Natanz, they will have to inflict sufficient damage the first time - they probably will not be able to mount follow-on strikes at other facilities.

When all the analyses are done, there is only one military capable of the sustained widespread air operations required to eliminate Iran's nuclear weapons research program - the United States.

So it looks like the Israelis could start something—but it would be up to Uncle Sam to finish the job.

I take this as support for my thesis that a key data point for Israel from the Syria raid was the nature of the U.S. support it did—or did not—elicit, and what that would mean for Israel if it conducted a dramatic but less than conclusive raid on Natanz with the hope that the U.S. could be dragged into the campaign.

So: War with Iran—it’s up to us. Don’t know whether that’s reassuring or disturbing.

A Modest Proposal

How Niall Ferguson Can Save the World from the Rabble Unfit to Rule

An interesting conservative meme is bubbling to the surface in time for the 2012 presidential election.

Call it “The Rabble Are Unfit to Rule.”

In essence, it’s trying to turn the 99% doctrine on its head, saying “Yes, I am the 1%.  Not just the richest 1%.  I’m the best and smartest 1% too.”

Making this argument on behalf of the 1% also provides the delicious side benefit of celebrating one’s own intellectual endowment.

Niall Ferguson, history professor at Harvard University, set the argument forth in an article for Newsweek that, one year from now, may be remembered as the ultimate resume stain on his CV, or perhaps an opening salvo in the rich’s counterrevolution against the grasping poors.

The article, meant to reassure rich Americans in an unhappy period in which they are publicly identified as deliverers of financial dysfunction, economic inequality, and political gridlock, is titled, Rich America, Poor America.

Ferguson turns to the work of Charles Murray and Murray’s new book, Coming Apart, for inspiration.

Murray is famous for his previous book, The Bell Curve, a tendentious work that explained US racial inequality through the division of America into two separate gene pools.  The inbreeding white gene pool was locked in a virtuous cycle of moral and cognitive perfection, while the black gene pool…well, according to Murray, it’s headed in the opposite direction.

Murray’s book, though vigorously and effectively attacked for its confounding of cause and effect (the key issues: do poor people who do badly in school do badly because they are poor, or because they are dumb; or some combination of the two?  Maybe it’s the schools?  Yada yada yada), was adopted by conservatives of a certain Caucasian persuasion as a talisman, reassuring them that the U.S. racial hierarchy was indeed a meritocracy (and a rapidly diverging one at that), and that any attempts at liberal minded social engineering were just howls in the genetic whirlwind.

Murray recycles the same themes in Coming Apart, while simply substituting the labels “Rich” and “Poor” for “White” and “Black”.

Ferguson elaborates on Murray’s thesis that the world’s problem is that people on the top of the heap (like Ferguson himself) are just too darn smart and are pulling away from an ever more incapable and resentful lumpen class.  However, in a gesture toward inclusiveness, he does expand the elite from 1% to 5%:

Murray sees two nations where there used to be just one: a new upper class or “cognitive elite”—to be precise, the top 5 percent of people in managerial occupations and the professions—and a new “lower class,” which he is too polite to give a name. The upper class has gotten rich mainly because the financial returns on brainpower have risen steeply since the 1960s. At the same time, elite universities like Harvard (where I teach and where Murray studied) have gotten better at attracting the smartest students. The fact that these students are very often the offspring of better-off families reflects the fact that (as Murray puts it) “the parents of the upper-middle class now produce a disproportionate number of the smartest children.” They do this because smart people tend to marry other smart people and produce smart children.

An issue that I wish Ferguson would address is how it turned out that rich people did a lot of stupid things during the boom and bust of the Great Recession.

Could rich, smart people who studied at Harvard under the solicitous care of Niall Ferguson and maximized the financial return on their brainpower do stupid things like totally cock up the world’s economy?  Maybe there was a fifth column of cognitive proles that were dedicated to destroying the system from within?  How could their dim minds grasp the complexities?  Did they have help?  Shouldn’t there be some kind of investigation?

Ferguson’s argument is something of a refinement of the traditional conservative defense of rich people: accusing their critics of the politics of envy and divisive class warfare.

Instead, poor people are just plain stupid, and in their stupidity they will cook the goose that lays the golden eggs instead of waiting gratefully for it to drop out golden eggs out of its butt.

Where this is apparently headed is that what we really need is a Millionaire on Horseback, an omniscient and benevolent figure who will protect the rich, capitalism, the economic system, and even the poor themselves from the poor.

And you thought the rich were screwing things up.  Silly you!

It’s an interesting idea for a democracy, but conflating race and class is a potent American political cocktail.  Murray provides the intellectual underpinnings and Ferguson is pulling for Romney to make the sale:

I say we tackle the inequality issue head on. This is the perfect year to do it, after all. The choice in November will be stark. On one side, the president’s project to make America more like Scandinavia, with higher taxes on the rich and yet more federal programs to spend their money on the poor. And on the other?

As Murray shows, there is a conservative solution to the problem of inequality. Scrap the failing welfare programs of the ’30s and ’60s before they bankrupt America. Ensure that everyone has a basic income. Then simplify the tax code to restore the incentives that used to exist for everyone to work hard. Finally, end the state monopolies in public education to launch a new era of school choice and competition.

A welcome return to Dickensian squalor, however, does not offer a permanent solution to the underlying problem: the unwashed, undeserving, and underbrained majority racing to taxfarm the cognitive elite, the free market, and democracy utterly out of existence before they themselves succumb to terminal genetic decline.

Unfortunately, Ferguson is unwilling to grasp the nettle and propose a thoroughgoing solution to the problem: a massive sperm transfer from the cognitive 5%, the “supers” as it were, to the underclass.

Surely society’s losers would understand, albeit dimly, that superior sperm, freely offered, is their ticket out of the underclass, and the program will be enthusiastically oversubscribed.

Approximately 140 million babies were born last year; the ejaculate of a healthy man contains perhaps 30 million sperm.  It would seem to me that Niall Ferguson could set the world on the shining path to a eugenic future over a pleasant weekend, or even, with more energetic application, in a single day.

Less time, and time better spent, I would hazard, than Ferguson expended writing his article.

How Newt Gingrich Sabotaged the Closing of Guantanamo

January 2012 marks the 10th melancholy anniversary of the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay; if polling is correct, it will also mark the end of Newt Gingrich’s presidential ambitions, as the immense, gas-filled Hindenburg of his ego approaches its Lakehurst in South Carolina. The two intersect in remarkable fashion. Gingrich was key to igniting the firestorm of criticism that prevented the public release of 17 Uighur captives from Guantanamo to Germany and the United States in early 2009. Uighurs were considered to be the cutest and cuddliest of detainees, largely because of a rather bizarre finding that, though they might be terrorists, if they were terrorists they would be anti-China terrorists, not anti-US terrorists.   The term of art was “non-enemy combatants”. The Uighur detainees were championed by politicians across the board, from liberal Democrats to conservative Republicans…until clearing out Guantanamo became a signature Obama issue, and releasing the Uighurs was advertised as the first victory of President Obama’s humane post-Bush post-terror policy. Obstruction became the name of the game, Newt Gingrich jumped in, the Democrats stampeded, and the Republicans--including Republican Rep. Dana Rohrbacher, who advertised himself as the champion of the Uighur cause--faded into the woodwork. The high profile Uighur release fell apart. Subsequently, the Obama administration followed the precedent of the Bush administration, and quietly dribbled the detainees out to remote, low profile jurisdictions sufficiently insulated from the wrath of the PRC: four to Bermuda in June 2009 and six to Palau (an atoll off the east coast of the Philippines which relies on US aid for a third of its budget; it was reported they agreed to accept the six Uighurs in return for a $200 million payday).  Two are apparently destined for Switzerland.  The last five have refused resettlement to whatever exotic locale the US has arranged for them, and are fighting in the courts to try to resettle in the US. Meanwhile, Guantanamo remains open and an embarrassing symbol, both of US reliance on extrajudicial detention and harsh interrogation (which will continue on US military bases and in black offshore prison no matter what happens to the flagship enterprise in Guantanamo) and American political gridlock. Here’s a piece I wrote on the issue in May 2009: Uyghurs sold out in the US Republican leaders in the United States appear eager to hand President Barack Obama a political defeat and diminish his prestige and domestic and international clout - at the cost of the continued detention of 17 Uyghur prisoners at Guantanamo in Cuba. By accident or design, the US Republicans were able to forestall the imminent release of the Uyghurs from Guantanamo to the US and Europe - detainees that the US had long ago determined posed no threat to the US and has been attempting to release for years. The Uyghur cause had been a favorite of anti-communist Republicans. Uyghurs are an ethnic group from Central Asia and Xinjiang province in western China. The ones in Guantanamo were captured in Afghanistan in late 2001. The Uyghur's high-profile champion in Congress, California Republican Dana Rohrabacher, wrote Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in June of 2008 requesting that the 17 Uyghur detainees be released from Guantanamo into parole into the US. Rohrabacher also called on the US government to provide an apology and perhaps compensation for any abuse the detainees had endured. The Uyghurs - and the Republicans' principled position on the issue - fell victim to the conviction of top Republicans that it was of vital importance that the Obama administration suffer a conspicuous setback on an issue that the GOP still sees as political gold: terrorism. In a recent newspaper column, Newt Gingrich, a key Republican strategist, burned the Republicans' bridges to the Uyghur cause with an inflammatory and misleading attack on the 17 Uyghur detainees at Guantanamo. Gingrich insisted that the Uyghurs were too dangerous to be released into the Uyghur community in Virginia and accused them of being "trained mass killers instructed by the same terrorists responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001", who "were trained, most likely in the weapons, explosives and ideology of mass killing, by Abdul Haq, a member of al-Qaeda's shura, or top advisory council." Gingrich claimed the Uyghurs also committed perhaps the ultimate sacrilege against American values: At Guantanamo Bay, the Uyghurs are known for picking up television sets on which women with bared arms appear and hurling them across the room. Contrary to Gingrich's accusations, the Uyghurs indignantly riposted that they are not promiscuously flinging television sets around the camp. In fact, only one TV was kicked, not tossed, several years ago and the culprit was considered to be so harmless to the US that he has already been released to Albania. The New York Times, in an excellent report on the plight of the detainees by Tom Golden, had the TV story in June 2008: They described their imprisonment as bewildering and traumatic, punctuated by moments of the absurd. After they were cleared for release, they were able to watch cartoons and Harry Potter movies, until Mr Mamet smashed the television because of what he said was the guards' refusal to take him to a doctor. The set was replaced with one made in China, the men said dismissively; it broke after a week. Even if the canard of Islamicist rage against infidel appliances is debunked, the Uyghurs will find it difficult to deal with the political realities driving the abrupt sea change in Republican attitudes. Republican Lindsey Graham explained how noble causes can be discarded in a heartbeat when the greater good of political advantage dictates: Asked whether any lawmakers were arguing on behalf of releasing the Uyghurs in the US, he said: "The Uyghur caucus is pretty small." The caucus of Republican lawmakers anxious to achieve political traction against Obama at any cost is, on the other hand, rather large.

What That Dead Iranian Scientist Has to do With China

I titled my most recent article for Asia Times “Desperate Days: The Obama Administration Struggles to Disengage from the Middle East and Escape to Asia”.  The crack editors at AT instead opted for Obama Drags Middle East Baggage to Asia, which perhaps doesn’t convey the bloody Great Game element as well.

My point is, the logic of economics, diplomacy, and security theater tells the Obama administration that the US will find its future and, equally importantly, welcoming arms in Asia.  A meticulous, multi-stage campaign has been crafted to sell the “strategic pivot to Asia” to the key stakeholders: policy wonks and insiders, politicos, US moneybags, military brass, and the nations in Asia that are worried about China but also dubious about American staying power.

Part of the shift in resources involves putting the complications, compromises, and expenses of the Middle East in America’s rearview mirror. 

Goodbye Iraq, goodbye Afghanistan, and maybe, just maybe, the United States can work out a modus vivendi with Iran.  Iran, without exaggeration, has been desperate for normalization of relations with the US for probably the last decade.  The only dispute within Iran seems to be on the terms of engagement and who gets to take credit for reintegrating Iran into the global system.

Our 21^st century partners in Asia, it is safe to say, would also love to see the United States shed its Iran incubus, and lose the fear that their energy imports, banking systems, and futures are hostage to whatever mischief we decide to cook up in the Middle East.

However, whenever it looks like the Obama administration is going to translate its carefully-choreographed campaign of international pressure against Iran into negotiations with Iran, something happens.

I imagine President Obama pounding his desk in frustration and bellowing a la Michael Corleone, “Every time I try to get out, they…pull… me…back…in.”

Funny…about…that.

That’s where the murder of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan comes in. 

Jim Lobe, bless him, makes a similar point in a thoughtful piece up at his blog, flagging the murder as an attempt to disrupt the efforts to restart the negotiations between Iran and the P5+1, possibly conducted  by factions inside Iran but more probably by Israel.

Looking at it from the Asian angle, I think it also had something to do with forcing the United States to reaffirm and continue its expensive and destructive engagement with the Middle East.

The US political dynamics also support continued Middle East involvement.  Beyond the undoubtedly sincere Israel-love of the American Right, Republicans are no doubt happy to see President Obama continuing to flounder in the bloody bog of the Middle East instead of capering off to peaceful and prosperous Asia.

By the way, there has been an interesting discussion as to whether Ahmad Roshan’s murder should be termed “terrorism”.  Slapping the “terrorism” tag on Western policy toward Iran is a useful rhetorical point, but to me the term “terrorism” was always a canard, something meant to discredit the asymmetric warfare of opponents who couldn’t advance their objectives with conventional military forces. Best just to call Ahmad Roshan’s death “murder”.  Or, if you prefer, “state-ordered extrajudicial murder”.

To me, Israeli fingerprints are on the operation not because of its precision, but because of the somewhat creepy efforts to avoid collateral casualties with the sophisticated shaped charge (as the media was suspiciously quick to point out).  Israel has no qualms about blowing up streetfulls of people in its operations, so I am not inclined to give them a lot of brownie points for massaging the optics of the murder (and making sure that international outrage will not inhibit further murders in the future).

Here’s the takeaway paragraphs from my Asia Times piece:

The signature event in United States-Chinese relations last week was not the anti-climactic release of the US Defense Strategic Review, which re-emphasized the Barack Obama administration's widely touted ambitions to perform a strategic pirouette from the Middle East to East Asia. It was the murder of another Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran.

The assassination of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan by forces unknown serves as a message that the Obama administration will find it difficult to reinvent itself as the savior of Asian peace and prosperity; instead, the United States will find itself reprising its dreary and detested role in the Middle East soap opera as defender of the pro-Israel/anti-Iranian status quo.

…

Every time Obama tries to position the US as the guarantor of peace and prosperity in Asia, something or somebody yanks his chain back to the Middle East, war, and the prospect of global economic ruin.

The murder of Ahmadi Roshan came on the one-year anniversary of the murder of two other Iranian nuclear scientists by similar methods (motorcyclist + bomb + car). It also came at a time of heightened tensions (anyway, tensions higher than the usual heightened tensions), inviting the inference that somebody, probably somebody in the region, wants to goad the Iranian government into a response that could start the military action ball rolling.

It is a safe bet that Obama, disengaging from two futile, polarizing, and massively expensive land wars, does not want war with Iran. It is also plausible that Saudi Arabia does not relish the opportunity to prove that it really does have the excess capacity to replace Iranian energy shipments to China, Japan, and South Korea.

And it is certain that Obama does not want the corpse of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan to serve as the poster child for US foreign policy, or that he wishes to ingratiate himself to America's East Asian friends and allies by bearing the gift of $200/barrel oil (while Beijing exploits its relationship with Iran to buy energy at a discount).

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But Iran won't go away: Israel, Saudi Arabia, and their US supporters in both parties won't let it.

Because these powerful stakeholders want to make sure that plans to widen the US diplomatic and military footprint in East Asia don't come at the expense of their perceived existential interests in the Middle East.

So Obama has to drag his Middle Eastern baggage to Asia and make the case that Asia-Pacific should help America work through its Iran obsession.

Instead of exporting American solutions to Asia, the US seems to be exporting American problems.

It does not appear that the Obama administration has figured out how to make lemonade from this sackful of citrus.

One can imagine that the Obama message to Asia is "Believe the policy, not the politics", ie, the United States knows where its interests and future lie, and is not going to drive the world off a cliff because election year politics demand appeasement of the anti-Iran cranks.

However, Asia has zero votes in US politics. On the other hand, the people who are caught up in the rhetoric of war with Iran do have the votes, interest, and money to make their influence felt…

Turkey Hoisted on Syrian Cleft Stick of its Own Devise; Arab League Shafted by Anwar Malek

There is an emerging picture of an embarrassing dilemma for Turkey on Syria.

Eager for regional leader cred and anxious to establish itself as an equal partner with the Western powers in the ongoing Middle East make over, Turkey got out in front in supporting the Syrian rebellion.

Maybe too far in front.

Western military intervention appears genuinely off the table, perhaps because of Russia’s unambiguous opposition.

And Bashar Assad doesn’t seem to be going anywhere for now.

If Turkey wants to finish him off, it will have to take the lead in sending in troops—and in cleaning up the gigantic and destabilizing sectarian mess foreign intervention would probably provoke.

That is beyond Turkey’s ability.

So the rebellion staggers on, and Turkey must brace for the possibility that civil war and all hell break loose anyway, and Ankara will find itself confronting a mess very much similar to the one an invasion might bring.

No guarantee that the West is anxious to step in and end the bloody stalemate, anyway.

I would speculate that Bashar Assad is unable to funnel significant aid to Hezbullah now, and has become a cost center instead of a profit center for Iran, which is struggling to prop up the regime and finds itself inhibited in its full enjoyment of its alliance with the Maliki government in Iraq.

If the regime falls to largely Sunni internal forces, good.  If Bashar Assad staggers on, and Syria remains an open, running sore for Iran, well that’s good too.  At least for the West and the Gulf States.  Maybe not for the Syrian people.

Meanwhile, all that’s necessary to keep the pot bubbling and further pre-empt (increasingly unlikely) national reconciliation is continued sanctions, covert military support to the opposition, and ostentatious outrage at continued government atrocities and the futility of the Arab League mission.

Speaking of the Arab League, much media hay has been made of the resignation of Algerian author Anwar Malek from the Arab League observer mission in Syria.

Malek’s statements buttress the suspicions of many sympathizers of the Syrian uprising, who consider Syrian regime’s acceptance of the mission as nothing more than a temporizing ruse.

Malek told Al Jazeera:

“They didn’t withdraw their tanks from the streets, they just hid them and redeployed them after we left,” Anwar Malek told Al Jazeera English television at its headquarters in Qatar, still wearing one of the orange vests used by the monitors.  

“The snipers are everywhere shooting at civilians. People are being kidnapped. Prisoners are being tortured and no one has been released,” the Algerian former observer said. “Those who are supposedly freed and shown on TV are actually people who had been randomly grabbed off the streets.”

Malek’s statements will undoubtedly provide fodder for those advocating escalating confrontation with the Assad regime, but in truth he is something of a grandstander and dingbat.

The vest is a telling detail since, by Malek’s own admission, he quit the mission and ensconced himself in his hotel room for the last four days of the mission, presumably removing the need to wear that fancy orange attire except when dining out at Homs' finer eating establishments.

Al Jazeera’s Anwar Malek liveblog reported on the contretemp:

The head of the Arab League's monitors mission to Syria, Lieutenant-General Mohammed Al Dabi, issued a statement deriding the remarks made by Algerian monitor, Anwar Malek.

Al Dabi said Malek's statement "had nothing to do with reality."

"Since he was assigned to the Homs team, Malek didn't leave his hotel for six days and wasn't been part of the field visits with the team, citing illness," Al Dabi said.

Al Dabi added that Malek had requested leaving to Paris for treatment and had in fact traveled ahead of schedule on his personal expense and without turning in work property first.

Al Dabi said Malek broke the oath that he took and that his remarks are strictly personal.

Al Dabi concluded by urging the media to be accurate and objective.

Malek responded to the remarks in this statement in an interview with Al Jazeera, saying:

"This is all lies and a kind of tactic because in fact I appeared quite a lot in videos that appeared on the internet and were broadcast by satellite channels even Syrian TV aired about 20 packages that had me in them when I was visiting hospitals, prisons, schools and out on the streets talking to people. I am clearly shown meeting and talking to people in these videos.

So these allegations are all baseless. However what they say about me not leaving my rooms for 4 days is true. I only left to eat but it was at the end of my mission when I decided to quit but this was after I’d spent about 15 days on the field but then I decided to stop work so I stayed in my room for 4 days then I left Homs for Damascus.

I did not send any letter to the head of the mission saying I was unwell and was going to stay in my room. If this is true let them produce the letter. In fact I went to see him to talk to him about my reasons to stop work but he refused to listen to me and gave me only 2 minutes to leave without even listening to me."

Malek’s accomplishments in Arabic literature are beyond me.  Listening to him, on the other hand, is demonstrably a chore, as a bizarre and contentious 2009 appearance on Al Jazeera demonstrates.

Youtube has it. 

Highlights of his remarks were translated by MEMRI, the Israel-affiliated open source intelligence outfit, and lovingly cited on a multitude of right wing Jewish and Christian fundamentalist websites.

It’s easy to see why.

The theme of his discourse is, in his own words, “The Arabs are backward and not fit for civilization at all.”

Some of his high-speed rant is, in light of current events, rather ironic:

[Arab rulers] emerged from among the people and share the same beliefs.  If you placed any Arab citizen in power, I challenge any Arab citizen who may become a ruler to do anything beyond what the current Arab leaders are doing.  There is no difference between the Arab rulers and the Arab people.

When the moderator makes the case for contemporary Arab worth as demonstrated by heroic resistance against overwhelming odds, Malek retorts:

What resistance are you talking about? If you are talking about the resistance of Hizbullah, Hizbullah has destroyed Lebanon, in the framework of a Persian conspiracy.  I say this point blank.

The picture emerges of a Rush Limbaugh-style cultural provocateur and Arab chauvinist nostalgic for the glory days of the Arab empires—and a reflexive Iranophobe.

And, perhaps, a self-selected plant eager to discredit the observer mission from within.

Interesting choice for an observer group trying to mediate between an Iran-backed Shi’ite-esque regime and a Sunni/Muslim Brotherhood rebellion.

Of course, the issue of how that observer group—headed by Sudan’s strongman for Darfur—got put together in the first place would make an interesting story.  Too bad Al Jazeera isn’t interested in telling it.