by Daniel Korski | Aug 11, 2008 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
At the risk of turning Global Dashboard into a book club, I have to recommend a book for the autumn reading list. Written by Ronen Bergman, one of Israel’s best investigative journalists, The Secret War with Iran details the three-decade “intelligence struggle” between Iran and the West.
While the book will not be out before September, I recently had dinner with Ronen and he gave me a preview of the book, which includes hitherto unpublished information about:
- The 2007 Israeli “Ghost Raid” against a Syrian nuclear reactor
- Links between Iran an al-Qaeda in Bosnia
- Israeli cooperation with the regime of the late shah
- The assassination of Imad Moughniyeh, one of Hizbullah’s top security officials and high on America’s wanted list
To collect material about Iran’s involvement in terrorist operations around the world, Ronen travelled from Argentina to Bosnia, poured over classified military intelligence reports and interviewed hundreds of spies.
Ronen also says he shows that Israeli intelligence has failed time and again in its wars against both Iran and Hezbollah for the past 30 years, despite its reputation. With the autumn sure to be focused on Tehran’s drive for a weaponized nuclear programme, Ronen’s book is bound to be high on the DC reading list.
by Jules Evans | Aug 11, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia
This is the perspective from my Russian friend, Konstantin, with whom I have had many a foreign policy discussion in the bars of Moscow. He is an educated, well-travelled Russian and I would say his view is in some ways quite typical of the Russian middle class.
My opinion has formed up long ago. There is no international law, there is only power. It was, it is, and it will be until the golden age of enlightenment. For that, I am not outraged or surprised by the US/UK position. It was to be expected. Georgia has no power to get the provinces back – so, Saakashvili should have sat still. It is stupid to pick at Russians now saying that it is de jure Georgian territory… Saakashvili was shelling the capital of South Ossetia for one and a half days, and levelled it to the ground. That’s it.
I strongly respect Americans in this way, and am deeply concerned about the readiness of our troops to wage conventional war. The US military is very effecient – bombs, bombs, bombs on “civilian areas of Belgrade” – and the war is over. and Russians? More than 20 russian soldiers have been killed, a thousand russian citizens murdered – and we are talking about a ceasefire. During the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia, the Nato losses were ZERO.
I would refer you also to the speech of the Russian UN representative, Vitaly Churkin. I think his position is quite reasonable http://www.un.org/webcast/sc.html
There was an amusing moment when Khalilzad [US ambassador to UN] produced a paper with the print-out of a telephone conversation between Condoleeza Rice and [Russian foreign minister] Lavrov where Lavrov said that “Saakashvili must quit”. Khalilzad was pressing this point when Churkin said “I am glad you publicize confidential information of our foreign ministers…” And during the press-conference the reporters were shelling him with this question, if Russians want to overthrow the democratically elected president, and Churkin said “I do not practice overhearing my boss’s converstions”.
Again, I have lost all, I repeat, all respect for the West coalition. It is all clear with the US. But the UK! Miliband looks to me like Tabaqui the jackal following after Shere Khan, the role the Georgian envoy was playing masterfully in the UK. But the UK is not Georgia, it must be shameful for them to follow in every US step. The British establishment generally is as despicable and decadent as the Russian. Reprimanding Russian moguls, while selling them family castles, selling them “Britishness”. Truly, if David Miliband represents the new generation of British diplomats, this is very sad.
“Do not forget that we are a small grey donkey between the bear and eagle” W. Churchill. It is true that the bear is lame, and maybe will never recover, but one must not behave like a donkey.
To sum it all up. I do not care at all what the West says, they lost all credibility, authority and respect. Russians are not angels either. Anyway, why did Serbia let Kosovo go? Because they were not strong enough. Why did Russia manage to suppress Chechnya? It was just bigger and more powerful. Human rights aspect is another issue.
So, it is my sacred dream to manage to free myself from the state’s influence and lead the life I choose, and live with the people I choose and respect. I saw many wonderful and reasonable people in America and Britain. I am sure there are a lot of them. But what the establishment is doing is above my understanding…
by Alex Evans | Aug 11, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia
Daniel may well be right that “The German and French governments need to reflect on how their veto of Georgia’s NATO membership at the Bucharest Summit in April encouraged Mikheil Saakashvili to take unilateral military action, believing nobody else would help him recover territory belonging to Georgia” – but it also leaves open the question, what if Georgia had become a NATO member?
This is undoubtedly the question that Georgians are asking themselves this weekend, as the NYT’s Andrew Kramer is discovering in Gori:
One soldier, his face a mask of exhaustion, cradled a Kalashnikov. “We killed as many of them as we could,” he said. “But where are our friends?” It was the question of the day. As Russian forces massed Sunday on two fronts, Georgians were heading south with whatever they could carry. When they met Western journalists, they all said the same thing: Where is the United States? When is NATO coming?
But if one scenario is that Georgia’s non-membership of NATO encouraged Saakashvili to take unilateral action, an alternative one is that membership itself might also have emboldened Georgia’s leader to go on the attack. As John Lewis Gaddis recounts in The Cold War, the history of the last 60 years is full of instances in which tails wagged dogs as a result of great powers’ alliances. One of the examples he offers is South Korea just prior to the outbreak of the Korean War, where
The South Korean president, Syngman Rhee, repeatedly sought support for his amibitions to liberate the north from officials in Washington as well as from General Douglas MacArthur … but he never got it. One of the reasons the Americans withdrew their troops from South Korea, indeed, was their fear that the unpredictable Rhee might “march north,” and thus drag them into a war they did not want.
Another case, he suggests, is the Chinese-Taiwanese dispute over offshore islands in 1954-55 and 1958, which looked at points as if it could drag the US and Russia towards a nuclear war.
No one in either Washington or Moscow had instigated these events … nor did any American or Soviet leader think the offshore islands were worth a war in which nuclear weapons might be used. They were, however, unable to avoid threatening each other with just such a result, because the lacked the means of controlling their own ‘allies’.
But the example par excellence, he continues, is Vietnam:
By the beginning of the 1960s [Ngo Dinh Diem’s] South Vietnamese government had become an embarrassment to the Americans … Aware that Washington’s credibility was on the line once again, Diem – following the example of Rhee and Chiang – warned that his regime might collapse if the Americans failed to increase their support for it. “We still have to find the technique,” Kennedy adviser Walt Rostow commented in 1961, “for bringing our great bargaining power to bear on leaders of client states to do things they ought to do but don’t want to do”.
In fairness, one can equally well argue that if Georgia were a member of NATO, then this would have caused Russia to reconsider its decision to surge beyond the South Ossetian border and into Georgia proper. It’s an imponderable that will doubtless be discussed for a long time to come – but I suspect that people who opposed NATO membership for Georgia may well feel vindicated by Saakashvili’s subsequent actions.
