Are We Supposed to Believe that Ahmadinejad is a CIA Agent?

On Thursday Iran blamed the CIA for the recent protests roiling the country. Yesterday Caitlin Johnstone wrote "Reminder: The Lying, Coup-Staging CIA Recently Escalated Operations In Iran":

The CIA recently escalated its involvement in Iran, and they ain’t there for the baba ghanoush.

Back in June the Wall Street Journal published a report saying that America’s Central Intelligence Agency had set up a new organization whose sole task would be to focus on Iran under the direction of “Ayatollah Mike” D’andrea, an aggressive Iran hawk.

“The Iran Mission Center will bring together analysts, operations personnel and specialists from across the CIA to bring to bear the range of the agency’s capabilities, including covert action,” says the report.

This alone is reason enough to be intensely skeptical of every single thing you hear about Iran. The CIA has been a consistent utilizer and developer of the science of psyops — psychological operations in which large groups of people are deceived and manipulated into thinking and feeling a certain way to advance a prefered agenda during war and during peacetime. Relatedly, the CIA also has an extensive and well-documented history of staging regime change coups to topple rival governments all around the world, including Iran. These are not conspiracy theories. These are conspiracy facts.

I agree with Johnstone. We have to be skeptical. At the same time we can't look at every uprising as a CIA maneuver. The U.S. spook machine will definitely start spinning once protests spread, attempting to maximize mayhem for official enemies. But we should not confuse this with an army of agents on the ground manning the barricades and leading the protests.

The staple for the CIA is a capital-based coup, what has been dubbed a "color revolution." The protests in Iran are the opposite of the CoRev model; they're not centered in a capital but are taking place in the hinterlands where it is hard for Western journalists to report what is actually going on. As Thomas Erdbrink noted on Wednesday (see "As Iran Erupts in Protest, Tehran Is Notably Quiet"):

The protests that broke out a week ago in other parts of Iran — but never gained traction in the capital — have shown some signs of abating, though demonstrators are still taking to the streets after dark in many outlying provinces. Elite forces with the Revolutionary Guards Corps were deployed to three of them on Wednesday — Hamadan, Isfahan and Lorestan — to help quell uprisings there.

Rural Iranian provinces are more conservative than the cosmopolitan urban centers. (The same is true of the United States of course. Trump won because of a tsunami of rural support.) The rural areas have been bedrock for the Islamic Republic of Iran. For the CIA to stage a coup built out of this bedrock would be the same as toppling Viktor Yanukovich in 2014 with Russian-speaking patriots from Donetsk instead of the neo-Nazis from Lviv who showed up in Kiev with guns. In other words, nonsense.

We have to grant agency to ordinary people; to do otherwise would be to subscribe to a type of Gnosticism where various intelligence agencies stand in for the demiurge.

My sense is that the mainstream reporting is generally correct. This is about rural vs. urban inequality, about Ahmadinejad vs. Rouhani, about domestic politics, a perspective bolstered by reports of former president Ahmadinejad's arrest.

Intelligence agencies are good at disinformation, sowing discord and dissension, co-opting already existing movements; creating campaigns from whole cloth . . . well, look at Timber Sycamore, an epic failure that might eventually be blamed for the dissolution of the European Union.

Iran's Occupy

I try to keep my eye on Thomas Erdbrink' s dispatches from Tehran because they're generally free of the "official enemy" deceit that taints New York Times reporting from Russia and Venezuela. Erdbrink's explanation (see "Deadly Iran Protests Prompt Warning of Harsher Response") of the protests roiling Iran makes it sound like Iran is experiencing its own version of the Occupy Wall Street protests that frightened neoliberal leaders in 2011. Activists in the U.S. figured out that Obama was not going to deliver "Change We Can Believe In"; Iranians who voted (twice) for Hassan Rouhani are now coming to the same conclusion. The body count in Iran leads one to conclude that Iranian protesters are more committed than their American counterparts:

The death toll from the clashes was up to at least 21, and in the central province of Esfahan, one police officer was reported killed and three wounded in a gunfight. “An agitator exploited the current situation, and using a hunting rifle, opened fire on police forces,” state television reported.

[snip]

In all, about 450 people have been arrested in Tehran alone since the protests began on Saturday, the semiofficial news agency ILNA reported, citing Ali Asghar Naserbakht, the political security deputy for the Tehran governor’s office. There were also arrests in provincial towns.

Mr. Rouhani has urged demonstrators to avoid violence but defended their right to protest. He did so again on Monday on Twitter.

“People want to talk about economic problems, corruption and lack of transparency in the function of some of the organs and want the atmosphere to be more open,” he wrote. “The requests and demands of the people should be taken note of.”

The protests are not just the largest in Iran since 2009. They also suggest a rejiggering of some traditional divisions.

People who live in rural provinces, long viewed as supporters of the authorities, are now leading most of the demonstrations. And while people in Tehran have also taken to the street, the capital is not the center of the protests, as it was during the so-called Green Movement in 2009. In Tehran, many middle-class Iranians share the discontent but also fear insecurity.

The frustrations that led to the protests also appear different from the sentiments in 2009.

That year, a wave of demonstrations broke out after the contested election of a hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and then turned into a wider protest movement against Iran’s leaders.

This time, it is the failure of President Rouhani, a moderate, to deliver greater political changes and economic opportunity, despite the lifting of some of the sanctions against Iran as part of the nuclear deal. Young people are especially angry. The average age of those arrested is under 25, one official said.

The poor economy especially affects Iran’s young people — more than 50 percent of the population is under 30, according to official statistics. Officially, youth unemployment is near 20 percent, but experts say it is really closer to 40 percent.

When the protests started last Thursday in the city of Mashhad, demonstrators chanted slogans about the weak economy.

But as the protests spread, they have taken on a far more political cast. Increasingly, they are being directed at Iran’s entire political establishment. Some demonstrators have even called for the death of Mr. Rouhani and of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The strength and volatility of the protests have caught Iranian politicians by surprise. Some have denounced them as “riots,” while others have acknowledged that the widespread frustrations at their root can no longer be ignored.

What we know is that Obama was able to co-opt the protest message of the 99% for his campaign against Mitt Romney. But in the end it was a police crackdown on the main encampment at Zuccotti Park that ended Occupy Wall Street. The same thing will happen in Iran, sooner rather than later.

****

My mantra has been to make it to year-end. That accomplished, my new mantra is make it to February 3. During the holidays there was a brief lull in workplace demands. With the New Year here, it's back to weekend work. So activity on this page is going to continue to be sporadic. Hopefully sometime in February I can return to "Hippies vs. Punks."

Trump's Embrace of al-Saud Proof of a United States in Crisis

Almost nothing remains of candidate Trump after four months in office.

For those voters who thought Trump offered the rational choice with his promise to shelve regime change in Syria in favor of dealing first with Islamic State (which implied continued engagement with Iran), the orgiastic embrace over the weekend of POTUS 45 in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proves that Trump's campaign-trail rationality was merely rhetoric.

Trump completed a rhetorical somersault yesterday with his speech on Islam. He managed to criticize Iran for extremism and a lack of freedom at the very moment that Iranian voters reelected moderate president Hassan Rouhani (something subjects of al-Saud can only dream about).

For the moment mainstream press (see "In Saudi Arabia, Trump Reaches Out to Sunni Nations, at Iran’s Expense" by Ben Hubbard and Thomas Erdbrink) and alternate media (see Bill Van Auken's "Trump’s speech in Riyadh signals US escalation against Iran") are in agreement over Trump's hypocrisy. Of course, the alternate media tends to did a little deeper into why Trump is moving to scrap Obama's Iran nuclear deal legacy achievement. According to Van Auken,

Beyond the drive to militarily confront Iran, a principal regional rival of US imperialism in the Middle East, and the huge profits that Saudi arms purchases reap for the US military industrial complex, there are broader strategic considerations in the US turn toward a closer alliance with Riyadh.

Some of these issues were outlined on the eve of Trump’s trip in a piece published by the influential Washington think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies and authored by Anthony Cordesman, a longtime Pentagon adviser. First among them is, according to Cordesman, “the continued level of US dependence on Saudi help in securing the stable flow of Gulf oil.”

While US imports from the Gulf have fallen sharply over the past quarter-century, Cordesman cites “indirect dependence” in terms of the impact a disruption in oil exports would have on global energy prices and the world capitalist economy. In particular, he points to the dependence of Asian economies on Gulf petroleum exports.

If the United States failed in “providing power projection forces and arms” to the region, he writes, its principal global rival, China, might fill the void. “China may not yet be ready to try to assume the role, but the entire South China Sea crisis would pale to near insignificance if China became the de facto guarantor of Gulf stability.”

Cordesman continues: “The real-world nature of US influence and power in the Pacific would be cut massively, China’s leverage over other major Asian economies like Japan and South Korea would be sharply increased, and the potential rise in tension between China and India--and cut in India’s relative position--would have a massive impact on the balance of power in South Asia and the Indian Ocean.”

In other words, the turn toward closer relations with Saudi Arabia and the related Gulf oil sheikdoms is bound up with US imperialism’s mounting conflict with China, which it has identified as the principal challenge to the drive for American global hegemony. Washington is determined to dominate Asia, including China, by maintaining the military power to choke off the region’s energy imports.

The fact that the sclerotic House of Saud, one of the world’s last absolute monarchies, has become a lynchpin of Washington’s imperialist strategy, not only in the Middle East but globally, is a measure of the crisis of American and world capitalism.

Oil revenues, which account for fully 90 percent of the kingdom’s export earnings, have been cut nearly in half since 2014. Last month, the government was forced to reverse itself on austerity measures that hit the military and public employees over fear that declining living standards and rising unemployment are creating the conditions for social revolt.

In the predominantly Shia Eastern Province, the center of the kingdom’s oil production, security forces laid siege to the town of Awamiyah, a center of resistance to the regime, during the week preceding Trump’s visit. Combined with the failure of the Saudi bid to topple the Assad regime in Syria by supporting Al Qaeda-linked militias and the regime’s inability to retake Yemen from the Houthi rebels, the deepening domestic crisis is creating the conditions for revolutionary upheavals against Washington’s principal ally in the Arab world.

Obama's push for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was not because he was a fervent pacifist. It was because segments of the U.S. deep state realize that Iran cannot be conquered militarily. The U.S. cannot win that war. The fact that the U.S. is moving full steam in that direction is certainly proof of a crisis.

Despite Syrian Ceasefire Proposal, U.S. Still Insists "Assad Must Go"

Kerry is in Paris today (Julie Hirschfeld Davis, "Cease-Fire and Political Transition in Syria Crucial to Defeating ISIS, Kerry Says") talking up the ceasefire deal arrived at in Geneva. But the U.S. secretary of state has not ceased chanting the Saudi mantra of "Assad Must Go," and he persists in blaming the Syrian government for the rise of ISIS (some kind of chutzpah):

PARIS — The United States, France and Russia must step up their coordination in striking the Islamic State in Syria after the Paris terrorist attacks, Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday, but he insisted that cooperation cannot begin until there is a cease-fire and a political transition. 

Mr. Kerry expressed optimism that a shift in Syria could come within weeks now that the United States and more than a dozen other nations, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, have agreed to a framework to end the crisis there. 

That will depend, he said, on the ability of Syrian opposition groups to organize and negotiate with the government of President Bashar al-Assad, and cooperation from Russia and Iran to ease the transition. 

“Now, all we need is the beginning of the political process, and the cease-fire goes in place – that’s a gigantic step,” he said in an interview with reporters who were traveling with him. 

Mr. Kerry also met with President François Hollande of France on Tuesday to discuss how to intensify pressure against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL or the Arabic acronym Daesh. 

“If we can get that done, that opens up the aperture for a whole bunch of things,” Mr. Kerry said of a cease-fire in the four-year civil war. “So we’re weeks away, conceivably, from the possibility of a big transition for Syria.” 

The more quickly the political changes occur, he added, “the faster the violence can taper down and we can isolate Daesh and al Nusra, and begin to do what our strategy has always set out to do.” 

Although American and Russian forces are sharing limited information in their military campaigns, they are not fully coordinating their efforts against the Islamic State. France is also hitting Islamic State targets in Syria. 

United States officials fear that any information they shared with Moscow about American-supported opposition groups would be used by the Russians or Mr. Assad to target them.  [U.S. won't share intelligence on the groups it is backing because this would reveal that the West is backing jihadist groups very similar to ISIS; fighters move back and forth between the various Islamist factions based on who is paying top dollar.]

Once the political process is on track, Mr. Kerry said, the United States and Russia could begin to “cooperate on the broader scale, which we can’t do until we have some definition.” 

Mr. Kerry’s diplomatic effort faces long odds in the multisided conflict in Syria, which has become a proxy war, and it was not clear whether his ambitious timetable is feasible.
Although the United States has said Mr. Assad must leave office as part of any solution to the conflict in Syria, he has the support of Russia and Iran, and Iran’s deputy foreign minister reiterated that point on Monday. 

But Kerry said on Tuesday that it would be impossible to defeat the Islamic State without the departure of Mr. Assad. 

“He’s complicit in the rise of Daesh, and therefore, as long as Assad is there, you cannot fully go get rid of this phenomenon,” Mr. Kerry said.

In other words, nothing much has changed. Hope has been expressed that the impromptu Putin-Obama powwow at the G20 conference in Turkey might lead to increased coordination between Russia and the U.S. But as of yet we have no real proof of any rapprochement. There is some evidence that the French and Russians are working more closely. According to Foreign Policy's "Situation Report" this morning, French and Russian planes are both bombing Raqqa. This takes coordination I would imagine:

Amid new reports that Russian cruise missiles and long range bombers hit the Syrian city of Raqqa late Monday night, (there’s video of one of the missiles streaking across the Syrian sky), French warplanes also pounded the Islamic State’s capital for the second straight night, launching 10 fighter jets from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan.

So while the U.S. is parroting the line that ISIS (and therefore the terror attacks on Paris) is Assad's fault, there is some proof that France is beginning to gravitate to the Russian camp.

Yesterday's "Situation Report" contained an interesting synopsis of the spin on Paris:

Forty-nine Syrian rebel groups issued a joint statement on Friday condemning the attacks "that oppose the heavenly laws and the human values," according to a translation published by SITE Intel Group. The rebel groups asked the international community to align against the Assad regime, which it labeled the source of the Islamic State's persistence.

On the other side of the Syrian conflict, both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani decried the Paris attack, with Putin urging France to join with Russia in forming an international coalition in Syria. Hezbollah, which is fighting in Syria alongside Russia and Iran on the side of the Assad regime, also issued a statement, referencing the recent attacks against a Shiite neighborhood in Beirut by the Islamic State.

The 49 Syrian rebel groups are chock full of Islamic fundamentalists, many of whom agree wholeheartedly with the Islamic State even if they quibble with the immediate tactics of kamikaze Kalashnikov attacks on rock concerts. These are the rebel groups the U.S. is aligned with, the ones it will be difficult for Kerry to airbrush come time for them to participate in a transition government.

The Big Lie: "Extend & Pretend" Debt in Greece & Iranian "Terrorism"

Syriza accomplished its U-turn on austerity last night in Parliament with modest defections. Only 32 of its 149 MPs voted against it. The total vote was 229 out of 300 for austerity. As Yves Smith comments in "Greek Parliament Passes Bailout Legislation":

[Y]ou can see members of Syriza, whose name translates as “Radical Left Coalition,” taking up neoliberal memes. This is a reflection of the success in organizing the economic and political order along neoliberal lines over the past 35 years.

Eventually there will be a price for Tsipras to pay. Defections will mount within his party as last night's protests continue and the government has to actually implement the pension reforms and VAT increases. But for the time being, since Tsipras managed to limit loses within Syriza to the Left Platform, Greece will muddle along and pass the remainder of the Eurogroup austerity diktats next week. Nonetheless, according to Suzanne Daley and James Kanter in "Greece, Its Back to the Wall, Adopts Austerity Steps," a unity government is likely in Greece's future:

Whether Mr. Tsipras will have to fashion a new coalition is unclear. Some party members suggested that with no one calling for a vote of confidence or a new election, he might be able to hang on. 

Other analysts said that he would no doubt eventually have to form a new unity government with other parties.

In the meantime, there is no indication that the European Central Bank is going to raise the liquidity cap on Greek banks, currently at 89 billion euros, until Greece makes bond payments owed the ECB. So says Jack Ewing this morning in "E.C.B. Weighs Whether to Throw Greek Banks a Lifeline":

Most analysts do not expect the central bank to provide more emergency loans to Greek banks, which the lenders need in order to reopen, at least until Monday. The European Central Bank will wait to see if the Greek government makes a payment of 4.25 billion euros, or about $4.7 billion, on bonds held by the central bank. No payment would mean no increase in emergency loans.

Separately, Greece’s eurozone creditors are weighing whether to give the country enough temporary financing to cover the payment to the central bank, as well as another that is due in August. The creditors could agree on a bridge loan on Friday as they continue negotiations on the latest bailout accord for Athens.

Absent liquidity from the ECB, Greek banks will continue to hemorrhage, even with capital controls in place. Yves Smith rails against the ECB maintaining its liquidity cap in "ECB Expected to Continue to Strangle Banks, Not Provide More ELA Funding Today, Despite Greek Parliament Passing Austerity Legislation":

If this comes to pass (the ECB is to make its decision later today), the refusal is utterly insane and horrifically destructive. Even if Greece were to get an ELA increase, it would take time for banks to begin restoring services. The economy will continue to decay at an ever-accelerating rate and the damage will become more and more permanent as businesses fail, which means workers will lose jobs and income.

The apparent rationale is that the ECB is not willing to take any more credit risk and wants its July 20 bond payment in hand first.

*** 

This is the madness the Eurozone has produced. National governments are held responsible for the performance of their economies when they do not control interest rates (and therefore are subject to overheating or unduly low growth via “one rate for all” not necessarily fitting them) and have tight deficit limits, which means they do much in the way of fiscal stimulus. And Greece is in deflation. Its widely-touted spot of growth in 2014 was the result of prices falling even faster than the rate of contraction in nominal GDP! That’s not a sign of improvement, that’s a disaster in progress. 

Yes, the insanity of the Greek debt crisis, now that a third bailout is in the works, is so obvious that the IMF, previously a active collaborator in perpetuating the "extend and pretend" big lie, is calling it out, which makes the politics of passing the new bailout through the various member-state parliaments tricky because hardliner austerian nations led by Germany categorically rule out any debt relief.

So the bottom line here is that with the ECB keeping the spigot shut and a split within the troika over the insanity of a small country like Greece, teetering on the brink of economic collapse, on the hook for what will be, after a third bailout package, nearly 400 billion euros in debt.

The big lie to match the "extend and pretend" big lie in Greece is one tossed about non-stop in Tom Friedman's interview with Obama after the P5+1 agreement on Iran's nuclear program was announced, and that is the one about Iran being a prime sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East. This claim is never substantiated, not a single case is mentioned. Hezbollah is tossed out. But Hezbollah is, among other things, a legitimate political party with representatives in Lebanon's parliament and cabinet. And some incendiary statements of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are sprinkled on top to spice things up. But the Iranian people lost confidence in him and Ahmadinejad's candidate to replace him as president lost to the moderate Hassan Rouhani.

Basically ISIS and Al Qaeda go largely unmentioned in the interview. After watching the 47-minute lecture by Obama one could not be blamed for thinking that Iran might be behind jihadi terrorist groups. Of course, as everyone who follows the mainstream daily news should know by now, it is Saudi Arabia and its fellow despots in the GCC that support the takfiri jihadists.

"WikiLeaks Cables Show a Saudi Obsession With Iran" by Ben Hubbard and Mayy El Sheikh properly places the horse before the cart where it should be. It is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that is the "troublemaker" in the Middle East and beyond through its funding of Wahhabi fundamentalist arch-conservative Islam:

BEIRUT, Lebanon — For decades, Saudi Arabia has poured billions of its oil dollars into sympathetic Islamic organizations around the world, quietly practicing checkbook diplomacy to advance its agenda. 

But a trove of thousands of Saudi documents recently released by WikiLeaks reveals in surprising detail how the government’s goal in recent years was not just to spread its strict version of Sunni Islam — though that was a priority — but also to undermine its primary adversary: Shiite Iran. 

The documents from Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry illustrate a near obsession with Iran, with diplomats in Africa, Asia and Europe monitoring Iranian activities in minute detail and top government agencies plotting moves to limit the spread of Shiite Islam.

The scope of this global oil-funded operation helps explain the kingdom’s alarm at the deal reached on Tuesday between world powers and Iran over its nuclear program. Saudi leaders worry that relief from sanctions will give Iran more money to strengthen its militant proxies. But the documents reveal a depth of competition that is far more comprehensive, with deep roots in the religious ideologies that underpin the two nations.

The documents indicate an extensive apparatus inside the Saudi government dedicated to missionary activity that brings in officials from the Foreign, Interior and Islamic Affairs Ministries; the intelligence service and the office of the king.

Recent initiatives have included putting foreign preachers on the Saudi payroll; building mosques, schools and study centers; and undermining foreign officials and news media deemed threatening to the kingdom’s agenda.

At times, the king got involved, ordering an Iranian television station off the air or granting $1 million to an Islamic association in India.

“We are talking about thousands and thousands of activist organizations and preachers who are in the Saudi sphere of influence because they are directly or indirectly funded by them,” said Usama Hasan, a senior researcher in Islamic studies at the Quilliam Foundation in London. “It has been a huge factor, and the Saudi influence is undeniable.”

While the documents do not show any Saudi support for militant activity, critics argue that the kingdom’s campaign against Shiites — and its promotion of a strict form of Islam — has eroded pluralism in the Muslim world and added to the tensions fueling conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.

Why do the Saudis always get a free pass from American officials? Because the U.S. government is a "pay-to-play" system that the Saudis (along with Israelis) have learned to wire over the decades. As long as the United States covers for the monarchs of the Gulf and blames their bad actions on Iran, there will be war in the region. That is why the deal on Iran's nuclear program is a helpful first step, but it in no way alters the underlying dynamic fueling war and instability in the Middle East.

About-Face by Obama on Senate Foreign Relations Bill Big Win for Iran

Yesterday after seeing the news (Jonathan Weisman and Peter Baker, "Obama Yields, Allowing Congress Say on Iran Nuclear Deal") of Obama's about-face on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Iran sanctions review bill I said to a coworker, the only one in a office of more than a dozen people who I know at least keeps an eye on the headlines, "This guy is even weaker than I thought." 

What other conclusion can we draw? Obama and Kerry had been promising to fight to the last gasp any encroachment by the Senate on the administration's agreement with Iran on its nuclear program only to meekly acquiesce to a Congressional role after a vote count revealed overwhelming Democratic support for Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Corker's draft legislation.

But this morning I think differently -- not that Team Obama is any stronger, but that Team Obama clearly won this round by its tactical retreat. A protracted fight over a veto of a sanctions review bill would have revealed a president without a party and accentuated Obama's lame duckness, at the same time undercutting negotiations on a final agreement in the remaining two months of the P5+1 talks in Switzerland. As Weisman and Baker point out:

White House officials blitzed Congress in the days after the framework of a nuclear deal was announced, making 130 phone calls to lawmakers, but quickly came to the conclusion that the legislation could not be blocked altogether. 

Moreover, officials increasingly worried that an unresolved fight could torpedo the next phase of negotiations with Iran. 

“Having this lingering uncertainty about whether we could deliver on our side of the deal was probably a deal killer,” said a senior administration official, who asked for anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

No, Obama won this one. The sanctions review period was cut in half from 60 days to 30 (though after the time for a presidential veto and Congressional response is added, it comes to 52 days) and the White House does not have to certify every 90 days that Iran is not sponsoring terrorism. In the end, sometime in July, Congress will get to vote on the nuclear deal. A majority will vote against lifting sanctions. Obama will veto, and he will only need 34 Democrats in the Senate to maintain that veto, something I think he will be able to do:

As Congress considers any accord on a very short timetable, it would essentially be able to vote on an eventual end to sanctions, and then later take up the issue depending on whether Iran has met its own obligations. But if it rejected the agreement, Mr. Obama could veto that legislation — and it would take only 34 senators to sustain the veto, meaning that Mr. Obama could lose upward of a dozen Democratic senators and still prevail.

Proof that Obama got the best of the deal is the testy Congressional insistence that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee got everything it originally intended, which is clearly not the case:

White House officials insisted they extracted crucial last-minute concessions. Republicans — and many Democrats — said the president simply got overrun.

“We’re involved here. We have to be involved here,” said Senator Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, the committee’s ranking Democrat, who served as a bridge between the White House and Republicans as they negotiated changes in the days before the committee’s vote on Tuesday. “Only Congress can change or permanently modify the sanctions regime.”

***

“We’ve gone from a piece of legislation that the president would veto to a piece of legislation that’s undergone substantial revision such that it’s now in the form of a compromise that the president would be willing to sign,” Mr. Earnest said. “That would certainly be an improvement.”

Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee and the committee’s chairman, had a far different interpretation. As late as 11:30 a.m., in a classified briefing at the Capitol, Mr. Kerry was urging senators to oppose the bill. The “change occurred when they saw how many senators were going to vote for this, and only when that occurred,” Mr. Corker said.

Mr. Cardin said that the “fundamental provisions” of the legislation had not changed.

An important point to weigh here is that Obama would not have made this tactical retreat unless he had vetted it with his Iranian counterparts. The mild response by President Rouhani to the 19-0 Senate Foreign Relations vote shows that the Iranians can live with the bill and that the P5+1 talks will move along to a final agreement.

This does not mean that Obama will be able to deliver a final agreement even if he can maintain a veto of Congressional obstruction. Congress is controlled by the Saudi and Israeli interests. How else to explain the absurd statement by Tom Cotton?

The agreement “puts Iran, the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism, on the path to a nuclear weapon,” said Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, as he emerged from the briefing. “Whether that’s a matter of months or a matter of years, that’s a dangerous outcome not just to United States and allies like Israel but to the entire world.”

But the end game here appears to be isolation of Congress and its Saudi and Israeli paymasters from the rest of the world. As the Gray Lady makes clear in an unsigned editorial today, "A Reckless Act in the Senate on Iran":

Mr. Obama’s acquiescence might be a tactical move. He could veto the congressional vote on the final agreement, which is supposed to be concluded by the June 30 deadline, rather than expending political capital in vetoing this measure if it were to pass both chambers of Congress. But the Senate committee’s action puts him in an weakened position as the only leader involved in the negotiations who may not be permitted to fully honor commitments that were made.

The nuclear deal is the product of a multinational negotiation with Iran conducted by the United States, France, Britain, China, Germany and Russia. In no other country has a legislative body demanded the right to block the agreement. Even if Congress barred Mr. Obama from waiving American sanctions, the European Union and the United Nations Security Council could lift the sanctions they imposed, thus undercutting the American decision.

This is the bottom line: Unless Obama gets cold feet and kills the talks in the next two months, an international agreement on Iran's nuclear program will be concluded; at which time, even if Congress can prevent the U.S. from ratifying the agreement, it will not be able to block the rest of the world from doing business with the Islamic Republic.

That is why I think it is a pretty safe bet that Israel and al-Saud will gin up some sort of attack on Iran.

Why Aren't Turkey, al-Saud and Qatar on the Office of Foreign Assets Control Sanctions List?

One of the interesting juxtapositions raised by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday is how the United States seeks help to combat violent jihadis in Iraq and Syria, a force it helped to create, at the same time it subjects Iran to withering financial and trade sanctions. Somini Sengupta has the story, "Iran’s President Says West’s ‘Blunders’ Aided Rise of Islamic State":

UNITED NATIONS — President Hassan Rouhani of Iran delivered a searing indictment of Western and Arab states on Thursday in his annual speech to the United Nations, blaming them for sowing the seeds of extremism in the Middle East with “strategic blunders” that have given rise to the Islamic State and other violent jihadist groups. 

“Certain intelligence agencies have put blades in the hands of madmen, who now spare no one,” Mr. Rouhani said, adding that “all those who have played a role in founding and supporting these terror groups must acknowledge their errors” and apologize. 

He also used the occasion to denounce the Western-led sanctions imposed on Iran’s nuclear program and reiterated his government’s desire to resolve Iran’s protracted dispute with the United States and other nations over the program. 

He implied that the nuclear negotiations were linked to Iran’s cooperation in combating the Islamic State and its affiliates, saying that no security cooperation was possible until the sanctions were lifted. 

“The people of Iran, who have been subjected to pressures especially in the last three years as a result of continued sanctions, cannot place trust in any security cooperation between their government with those who have imposed sanctions and created obstacles in the way of satisfying even their primary needs, such as food and medicine,” he said.

Julie Hirschfeld Davis had a small story, "Treasury Imposes Terrorism Sanctions," in yesterday's paper about the U.S. Depart of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control designating numerous individuals and a few organizations tied to Islamic State and Nusra, as well as Indonesian jihadis, to be added to its sanctions list.

Hirschfeld Davis constructs her brief piece by culling Treasury's press release, but she one-ups USG by dutifully trotting out at the top of her story the canard that Islamic State is difficult to sanction because its revenue stream is all illicit, principally its sale of black-market oil:

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department on Wednesday imposed sanctions on 11 people and one entity it said were sending financial and other support to terrorist groups, including the Islamic State. The sanctions are aimed at the funding streams that have allowed the terrorist organizations to flourish and recruit fighters from the Middle East, Europe and North Africa. 

The impact of the sanctions is unclear, particularly since the Islamic State largely circumvents the international banking system and traditional commerce, deriving much of its wealth from black-market oil sales, extortion and kidnappings for ransom. But the action is also designed to publicly expose key players in the group, with the goal of isolating them and restricting their access to money and freedom of movement.

Prior to Islamic State's attack on the Kurds in August when the the group was racking up victory after substantial victory on the ground in Syria and Iraq and the United States was doing its best to ignore the jihadi blitz, the canard was floated that IS was self-funding based on its control of oilfields in northern Syria and an extensive system of extortion in Mosul and elsewhere. This canard was necessary in order to steer blame away from sponsors among U.S. allies in the Gulf as well as the U.S. covert programs in Jordan and Turkey to unseat the Syrian government.

But as Kemal Okuyan, a member of the central committee of the Communist Party of Turkey, made clear in a post yesterday on the Counterpunch web site ("The Master's Plan: ISIS, the U.S. and Turkey: Are They All Crazy?"), without money and weapons from the Arab monarchies ISIS could not survive:

Let’s us dig in the issue of ISIS a little more. Among the countries who have joined the U.S. led coalition against ISIS, aren’t there some that still finance ISIS? Yes, there are. In case Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan were to stop the flow of money and arms to ISIS, it would not take more than a week for the whole business to be over. However, other than a few symbolic measures, nothing substantial has been done on that front. In other words, the reactionary coalition keeps feeding the organization that they have declared as the “enemy”. Who would believe you after this?

Yesterday the United States, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates bombed refineries in the northeastern Syrian provinces of Deir al-Zour and Hasakah. Helene Cooper and Anne Barnard in "Warplanes Blast Militants’ Refineries in Syria, Targeting a Source of Cash," point out today the Pentagon's wildly inflated estimates of the value of ISIS's oil revenue:

Officials with the United States Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East, said the refineries produced 300 to 500 barrels of oil daily, generating as much as $2 million per day in black-market oil sales for the group’s operations. That estimate is higher than American officials had previously made public, and would put the price around $333 per barrel. Oil sells for about $100 a barrel on the open market.

Why do this? Why inflate the value of crudely refined jihadi black-market oil to three-times the market worth? The obvious answer is the one provided by the Okuyan: So that the reactionary coalition can keep feeding the jihadis that they are bombing, making the problem bigger and the war larger.

Why not add the nations publicly acknowledged to finance and provision Islamic State to the Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctions list? Cuba, Iran and Syria (along with Russia under the heading "Ukraine-related") are on the list -- and these nations do not attack the U.S. Why not Saudi Arabia and Qatar -- and Turkey, for that matter -- the nations behind Islamic State?

Don't Expect Much U.S. Military Action in Iraq

The United States is not an egalitarian country. It plays one on TV. But the reality it is corporate-dominated kleptarchy that is only nominally democratic.

Our nominal democracy and vestiges of constitutional protections give us a leg up on the subjects of Saudi Arabia. But in terms of an ally who has a strong voice in the conduct of American affairs, you would be hard pressed to find one greater than the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Yesterday, when Iranian President Hassan Rouhani proclaimed his country's readiness to intervene in Iraq to protect the Shiite holy sites there, the Saudis responded by issuing a warning against any foreign intervention. Rick Gladstone and Dan Bilefsky report in "Insurgency in Iraq Widens Rivals’ Rift" that

In a televised speech in Iran on Wednesday, Mr. Rouhani expressed full support for the Iraqis who have joined volunteer militias to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the Sunni extremist group that straddles both countries. It has seized large sections of northern and western Iraq over the past few weeks, threatened to march on Baghdad and vowed to obliterate cities and shrines dear to Shiites.

“Regarding the holy Shiite shrines in Karbala, Najaf, Kadhimiya and Samarra, we announce to the killers and terrorists that the big Iranian nation will not hesitate to protect holy shrines,” the president vowed in the speech to a crowd in Lorestan Province in western Iran. “These terrorist groups, and those that fund them, both in the region and in the international arena, are nothing, and hopefully they will be put in their own place.”

Mr. Rouhani also said many Iranian volunteers were prepared to travel to Iraq to defend religious sites. He sought to cast them as the allies of patriotic Iraqis from all backgrounds who see the Sunni insurgents as a scourge — a theme he also emphasized in a posting on his Twitter account.

“Iranian nation will protect Iraq’s holy shrines & they aren’t alone. Iraq’s Sunnis, Shias & Kurds all ready to defeat terrorism solidarity,” he wrote.

Mr. Rouhani signaled over the weekend that Iran did not intend to send troops to Iraq. But Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the head of Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards, recently traveled to Iraq to meet with Iraqi leaders, who have mobilized thousands of militia fighters, almost exclusively Shiites. The high-level contact suggested that General Suleimani was helping oversee their training and strategy.

In Saudi Arabia, Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal warned that no outside power should be meddling in Iraq. Coming on the same day that Mr. Rouhani spoke, the clear implication was that the Saudi minister was referring to the Iranians. He said the Iraqis needed to achieve national reconciliation without “foreign interference or outside agendas.”

Prince Faisal's admonition goes for the United States as well. That is why stories that appear in the press regarding Obama's deliberations on the use of force in Iraq always accentuate the limited strategic options he is dealing with. A few drone strikes are usually mentioned. The stories convey no sense of urgency, certainly none of the shrieking that went along with the press's drumbeat for strikes on Damascus last summer. Then it was the entire global order at stake, dependent as it is, or at least thought to be inside the Beltway, on unilateral U.S. belligerence. Here we are only dealing with the realization -- a caliphate rising in northern Iraq erected by a group Osama bin Laden found too extreme -- of the fantasy that Bush-Cheney used to justify their 2003 invasion.

The U.S. and the Kingdom are reading from the same script when it comes to Iraq: the ISIS blitzkrieg is due to the sectarianism of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. This is the talking point that has been reiterated with great discipline since Mosul fell.

Another red flag is that the atrocities and war crimes of ISIS are given short shrift, mentioned only as if in passing. Whereas any Shiite reprisals, such as the 44 Sunni prisoners who ended up shot in an attack on a Baquba prison earlier this week, are labeled "horrific."

Gladstone and Bilefsky mention that

The Saudi kingdom also issued a statement repudiating accusations by Iraq’s Iranian-backed Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, that it was providing moral or financial support to the Sunni insurgents.

“Any suggestion to the contrary is a malicious falsehood,” the Saudi statement said.

But Saudi sponsorship of ISIS was even acknowledged yesterday by the Gray Lady in her lede editorial: "Turkey, for instance, should shut its border to militants and to materiel flowing into Syria and Iraq. And Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other gulf states need to stop financing (directly or indirectly) ISIS, which began as an Al Qaeda affiliate, and other extremist groups."

Warmongers Hemmed In

Next week is shaping up to be a momentous one. The United Nations General Assembly convenes and the United States House of Representatives, currently being led by the Tea Party caucus, will decide whether to shut down the government.

The news today is buzzing with the possibility of a deal between Obama and new Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, over Iran's nuclear program. They will likely meet in New York City where both will be attending the General Assembly.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry is proceeding along the same belligerent path he has trod from the beginning in relation to Syria, ignoring the unmistakable turn of events of the last two weeks since his Monday, September 9, faux pas during a London press conference opened the door for the Russian proposal for Syria to adopt the Convention on Chemical Weapons.

Michael Gordon has a good summary this morning of the effort underway, based on what Kerry says is indisputable proof of Syrian government guilt, to allow the Security Council the use of force if Syria does not comply with the agreement to get rid of its chemical weapons. To this end, Kerry is trying to isolate the Russians by getting the Chinese to join with the U.S., France and Britain in supporting Chapter VII sanctions. It's not going to happen.

The Obama Administration has its hands full: Iran, a Tea Party emboldened by its defeat of Obama's Authorization for the Use of Military Force looking to shut down the government, and, now, finding a plausible way to upend peace talks with Syria. This is from Gordon's story, "Kerry Presses Security Council to Act on Syrian Arsenal":

Mr. Kerry plans to meet next week with Mr. Lavrov and Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy on the Syria crisis, to discuss planning for a possible peace conference. 

No date for a conference has been set, and Russia and the United States are at odds over who should attend. Russia, for example, has insisted that Iran should participate. The United States has opposed including Iran and said the “London 11,” a group of European and Arab nations that support the Syrian opposition, should attend.

Engaged in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program makes it hard to deny them a place at the table in talks on Syria.

The Guardian had a story yesterday on Putin's take on Syria; it included this sensible question from the Russian president:

The Russian president also reiterated suspicions that the 21 August chemical attack near Damascus was carried out by rebels and not by forces loyal to Assad. 

"We talk all the time about the responsibility of Assad regime if it turns out that they did it, but nobody is asking about the responsibility of the rebels if they did it," said Putin. "We have all the reasons to believe it was a clever provocation."

The warmongers, it goes without saying, will do everything in their power to reassert the primacy of force. But with food stamps being axed by House Republicans, who at the same time are hurtling towards a collision in their quixotic effort to repeal Obamacare, the United States Government is in no position to threaten other countries.