The helping hand
Ding Ying

IRAN has been sticking to its guns by defying calls for it to stop enriching uranium. It may be easier for the country to continue its plans now that Russia has given tacit approval to its nuclear program, Chinese experts on world affairs said. Russia made its support clear in mid-October when President Vladimir Putin visited Iran, although he did not promise to give the country any practical assistance. Iran has been under increasing international fire over its nuclear program. The country insists on its right to enrich uranium for civilian power generation. In early September, Iran said publicly that it had installed 3,000 centrifuges, the machines that enrich uranium. Although the Security Council has imposed sanctions on Iran, the United States and other major powers have called for tougher ones, believing that Iran intends to produce nuclear weapons. The American media warned that if Iran did not change its stance, the United States would launch a military strike on the country. The recent resignation of Ali Larijani, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, on October 21 has caused more international consternation. His replacement, Saeed Jalili, is considered a loyalist of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Common needs
Putin’s visit was mutually beneficial to both Iran and Russia, said An Huihou, a former Chinese ambassador to Egypt, Lebanon and Algeria, who is now a senior researcher at the Chinese Institute of International Studies (CIIS). For Iran, his trip was a milestone in diplomatic aspects, because no Soviet or Russian leader had traveled to the country since Josef Stalin went there in 1943. During Putin’s Tehran tour, he held talks with Ahmadinejad and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Putin’s visit was a strong signal to Iran and the rest of the world that its stance on Iran’s nuclear program differs from the United States and other major powers. Before Putin traveled to Tehran, he said there was no evidence that Iran intended to produce nuclear weapons. During the visit, Putin also attended the Second Summit of the Caspian Sea Littoral States, a meeting of regional leaders from Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. The countries’ leaders issued a joint statement after the summit with three major points: that they would support Iran’s right to peacefully use nuclear energy; that the oil and natural gas resources around the Caspian Sea should be jointly exploited by the five countries; and that no Caspian Sea country should allow its land to be used to attack a fellow coastal country.
The joint statement provided much comfort to Iran at such a sensitive moment, An said. While Putin’s trip was not just to comfort Iran, it was a good opportunity for Russia to tell the United States that its stance on Iran’s nuclear issue was important, he said. “Recently, Washington has quickened its pace to squeeze Moscow’s strategic space in Central Asia and Eastern Europe,” An said. “Putin’s attitude is a kind of counterpunch to Washington,” because the enlargement of the NATO and the “color revolutions” in former Soviet Union states that formed Russia’s traditional security strip were pushing Russia back to its bottom line.
The United States is pressing ahead with its anti-missile defense system plan in Poland and the Czech Republic, prompting new disputes between the Kremlin and the White House. Russians view this plan almost as a U.S. doormat being placed in front of their door. Putin previously suggested that the United States could share Russia’s radar base in Azerbaijan, but so far the Americans have declined his invitation. “Russia’s stance on the Iranian nuclear issue is a protest to the United States for declaring its independent tune,” An said. It is a signal to the United States that if Washington pushes Russia too hard, Russia can play its “Iran card,” he added.
According to a report in People’s Daily, during his Tehran trip, Putin invited Ahmadinejad to Moscow to share their views on developing their bilateral relationship and on regional and international affairs. Russia has two specific interests in Iran, An said. First, it wants to maintain its heavy arms trade with Iran; second, it wants to resume building Iran’s first nuclear power station in the town of Bushehr. In March 2007, Russia stopped building the station and halted its nuclear fuel supply to Iran, due to unpaid “construction expenses” Iran owed Russia. Although Putin refused to set a date for restarting construction on the nuclear power plant, he pledged that Russia would fulfill its obligation to finish the facility as soon as possible.
Hua Liming, China’s former ambassador to Iran, wrote an article about Putin’s visit on his Web blog, pointing out that Iran is of special strategic importance to Russia. Because the United States keeps squeezing Russia’s strategic space, the Kremlin sees countries on its “south wing” - including Iran - as its only strong point. Russia hopes this area, and especially Iran, remains independent of U.S. influence. The five Caspian Sea countries reaffirmed this strategic goal when they signed the joint statement at the recent summit, so that the United States could not use them as a springboard to strike Iran or Russia, Hua wrote. The Caspian Sea is well known for its ample oil and natural gas reserves, which are almost one third of the world’s total reserves. The Russian media previously reported that the United States intends to build a pipeline that threads Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea and Azerbaijan and connects to pipelines in the Mediterranean Sea area. But the joint statement of the five Caspian Sea countries has thwarted the plan by excluding the United States from the region’s energy reserves.
No easy task
Iran’s nuclear issue is far from over. Although Putin stressed during his visit that the issue should be settled through peaceful diplomatic talks, the United States did not respond. U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech on October 21 that the international community was ready to impose “serious consequences” on Iran, if it did not stop enriching uranium. Recently, there were various reports throughout the world that the U.S. Government was planning to launch military strike on Iran. “No accurate information from official sources can prove that the Bush administration is preparing for military action against Iran,” said An from the CIIS. It will not be easy to solve Iran’s nuclear issue, and there are only three possible ways for Washington to settle the matter, he added.
The first way is through peaceful negotiations between Iran and the United States, which would entail compromises from both sides. “The core of the Iranian nuclear issue is the bilateral relationship between Iran and the United States,” An said. “The diplomatic negotiations can resolve both the nuclear issue and the bilateral tie once and for all.” The second way is for the United States to continue calling for international sanctions against Iran, which would require cooperation from big countries. If it worked, Iran would give in. But Russia and the European Union countries have closer ties with Iran than the United States, and they would be reluctant to join Washington’s sanction plan. China, which always supports settling disputes through diplomacy, would not applaud either choice, An said.
The last way for the United States to deal with Iran would be by military strike. But “now is not the time for Washington to make this decision,” An said. The messy situation in Iraq has left the U.S. army with very limited forces to launch another military attack elsewhere. Both the United States and Europe have been flooded with antiwar appeals. For Bush, it also would not be wise to start another war while his Republican party prepares for the 2008 presidential election. “The United Nations and U.S. Congress would not approve a war plan” against Iran, An said, adding that Iran’s military strength is stronger than that of Iraq under its former ruler, Saddam Hussein.
The most probable direction for the United States to take will be to just hold off for a while, “because neither Iran nor the United States will give up its stance on this issue,” An said. Iran’s nuclear issue will not change much during the remainder of Bush’s term, just like with other matters in the Middle East. These are Bush’s political legacies that will be left to his successor, An said.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review  Articles Exchange Item)



On Romney, Mormonism and Islam
Ramzy Baroud


REPUBLICAN presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s speech on Dec. 6 — in which he tried to ‘explain’ his Mormon faith — was met with a mostly sympathetic reception at George Bush Library in Texas. The speech has been long anticipated, not so much for its relevance to the pressing debate on the defining role of religion in American politics, and how this undermines the very meaning of secular democracy. It was awaited simply because Romney belongs to the wrong faith. Recent polls indicate that one out of every three Republicans will not vote for Romney because he is a Mormon. The whole affair has done much to reveal the hypocrisy of institutional democracy in the United States.
While every presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat, has unreservedly uttered lip service to democratic ideals, very few have dared push the boundaries by actually explaining their personal views on what separation of church and state means. Given the Republicans’ reservations on Romney and the fact that the religious vote has long been shown to be a formidable factor in determining who claims the throne of the Oval Office, one can easily deduce that religion is hardly a personal matter in the American political milieu. Imagine, for instance, the sort of chances a presidential candidate would have as a dedicated atheist, or worse, as a devout Muslim. It might be a long time — if ever — before the possibility of a Muslim candidate representing a major party is put to the test. But one need not wait that long to appreciate the narrow-mindedness of the media and politicians, and how this influences public opinion.
While the urgency of ‘responding’ to Islamic fundamentalism has been consistently highlighted in the ongoing presidential campaign, very little has been said about Christian, Jewish or other religious fundamentalisms. Rarely has a candidate — with the exception of Democrat Dennis Kucinich — dared to examine the relationship between Christian fundamentalism and the Iraq war, or Jewish fundamentalism and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Religious fanaticism and fundamentalism are rarely discussed as perilous phenomena in their own right; if it’s not ‘Islamic’ it simply doesn’t count. Such short-sightedness has wide-ranging and deeply harmful implications. All that a volunteer for Senator Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign needed to do to temporarily disrupt the recent gains of Barack Obama’s campaign was to distribute an email suggesting that Obama was a Muslim intent on ‘destroying’ the United Sates. As laughable as this may sound, one cannot underestimate the impact that such rumors have on voters filled with fear and disdain for everything Muslim. Of course, Christian fundamentalist President George W. Bush’s wholesale destruction of a Muslim country, Iraq, is not a mere rumor. That this is not considered noteworthy is most telling.
Chances are Obama will do his utmost to distance himself from the rumor — as he has done in the past — which could reinvigorate the old accusation that he spent time studying at a Muslim school. Obama previously responded by vowing to respond severely to Muslim terrorism, going so far as to say he would bomb Pakistan if necessary. Whether he will upgrade further his hostile language to show his worthiness to lead America is yet to be seen. Although Islam and Muslims were hardly relevant to Romney’s speech, Naomi Schaefer Riley of the conservative Wall Street Journal couldn’t prevent herself from shoving Islam into the picture, predictably in an unfavorable light. In her article, ‘What Iowans Should Know About Mormons’ (December 7), Riley cites a recent Pew poll, which shows that “only 53% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Mormons.” She then observes: “That’s roughly the same percentage who feel that way toward Muslims. By contrast, more than three-quarters of Americans have a favorable opinion of Jews and Catholics.” Riley then gets to her main and vindictive point: “Whatever the validity of such judgments, one has to wonder: Why does a faith professed by the 9/11 hijackers rank alongside that of a peaceful, productive, highly educated religious group founded within our own borders?”
Not only did Riley isolate 9/11 from the pre and post 9/11 contexts (again conveniently neglecting the fact that nearly a million Iraqis were killed by those who mostly profess the Christian faith), she also implicitly indicated that Mormonism is everything that Islam is not. The latter religion is thus hostile, unproductive, backward and alien. Riley was hardly satisfied with selectively linking a religion professed by over a billion people of all colors and ethnicities worldwide — including millions of Americans — to a few hijackers. She used the rest of her inadequate ‘analysis’ to inappropriately bring Islam to a discussion from which it should have been entirely spared.—Arab News




Strange bedfellows? Definitely not
Joyce Njeri

AS THE second European Union-Africa Summit came to an end in Lisbon, one of the stickiest issues on the table was, of course, trade. Bringing together leaders from 53 African and 27 EU countries, the summit was also discussing such issues as peace and security, human rights and governance, immigration and environment. However, one key thing that leaders from Europe were keen on was persuading their African counterparts into signing up new trading pacts, once existing agreements expire at the end of this year.
So what went wrong? The European Union and the US have traditionally been Africa’s most important trading partners, but now there’s a major shift to the East, especially China, and this has not gone down well with the former trade partners. A lot has been said and written about the strange trade relationship between China and Africa, that keeps getting tighter and closer every day. China’s booming economy has seen the country becoming a major foreign economic player in the African continent. This Asian country also has the largest number of embassies and consulates in Africa. I like to call this growing relationship a win-win proposition.
Of course, there is a great deal of hysteria about Chinese actions, but it is no worse than Western countries’ relationship with Africa previously. So is it a case of the pot calling the kettle black? For instance, I read some criticism about the trade ties in international media and was amused at the ‘jealousy’ these countries exhibited. One report said, “There is an understandable temptation on the part of African governments towards finding cheap and short-term fixes for economic problems. This is being exploited by the Chinese, who offer governments liquidity without conditions. Visible ‘sweet things’ are often offered, for instance the building of stadiums and roads, as inducements to tie in African governments into long-term trading relationships.”
Actually, the whole charade is about Africa’s vast, untapped resources. Everybody is fighting for a share of these and whichever way you look at it, the trade profile between China and the continent is hugely important for Africa. The continent is so important to China that the Chinese government last year invited 48 African heads of state to participate in the China-Africa Forum where President Hu Jintao promised to offer $5 billion in loans to Africa, and to double the foreign aid by 2009. And just recently, premier Jintao went on a whirlwind tour of Africa. He visited countries like Cameroon, Sudan, South Africa, the Seychelles, Liberia, Zambia and Mozambique. This was his second trip, after initially covering a number of other states.
Africa has become a region of particular concern for China. The continent supplies the Asian country with a third of its crude oil imports and is rising in importance in other natural resources. From South Africa’s manganese mines to Niger’s uranium pits, from Sudan’s oil fields to Congo’s cobalt mines, China’s hunger for resources has been a shot in the arm, increasing revenues and helping in pushing some of the world’s poorest countries further up the ladder of development. Europe, the US and Africa’s other would-be suitors are watching these events with keen interest. They are certainly not keeping aloof from this intensifying competition for the continent’s enormous resources. The US has been a comparatively lesser economic player in the continent despite her global omnipotence, with limited interests in oil imports from Nigeria, Angola and other oil-producing African countries. On the other hand, for Europe, it is China’s commercial inroads into t he continent that have put it on full alert.

—Khaleej Times