Courcy's Intelligence Brief

Turkey may be angling for a 'grand bargain' with Iran

LatinNews 21 March 2012 Hits: 335

As Turkey has been one of the strongest advocates for the overthrow of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, increasing signs of concern emanating from Ankara about the likely effect on regional stability of Assad’s potential downfall need to be taken seriously. In our 7 March report we looked in detail at the difficult choices facing Turkey. In the two weeks since we published that briefing, it would seem that Turkey’s concerns have grown even stronger.

We suggested in our 7 March report that Turkey’s main concerns were that a civil war in Syria could provide an opportunity for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to reactivate militancy in Syria’s Kurdish regions; that the impact of a Syria-in-chaos on Lebanon would be profound, possibly reigniting the civil war that in its previous manifestation raged for 15 years; and that it could encourage the further fragmentation of Iraq, with Iran moving to consolidate its domination of the Shia regions. We also noted fears that Jordan could be a casualty, with some in Ankara going so far as to say that the royal family would struggle to survive.

During the past week, sources in Ankara have been re-emphasizing these concerns, saying that the current view is that the fall of Assad could produce at least as much instability within Syria as did the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, but with even more regional knock-on effects. In Iraq, the fall of the dictator produced civil war between the ousted Sunnis and majority Shias. In Syria, the same will happen between the ruling Alawites and the majority Sunnis. What is really exercising Ankara, however, is the potential response of Iran. In Iraq, Iran was on the winning side and therefore its response to the fall of Saddam Hussein went little further than ensuring the eventual ascendancy of the pro-Iranian Shia majority. With Syria, by contrast, if Assad falls Iran will be on the losing side – and that (Ankara fears) could produce a very different level of response. Iran has the capability to exercise destabilizing influence not just in Syria itself, but (at least) in Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, and the Caucasus (notably in Azerbaijan).

These fears can only have been increased by the evidence of last week’s rocket attacks on Israel launched from the Gaza Strip by the Iranian-allied Islamic Jihad and, more significantly for Turkey, by the escalating anti-Azerbaijan rhetoric emanating from Tehran. Last week, the Azeri authorities arrested 22 Azerbaijan citizens who they said were Iranian spies trained in Iran by Iran's Revolutionary Guard. This, in turn, follows on from Iranian allegations that Azerbaijan has helped Israel in its assassinations of Iranian scientists involved in Iran’s nuclear programme.

The most recent assassination was on 11 January, and on 11 February The Times of London reported that Israel was using Azerbaijan as a base to spy on the Tehran government. It quoted a Mossad agent called Shimon as saying: “This is ground zero for intelligence work…Our presence here is quiet, but substantial. We have increased our presence in the past year, and it gets us very close to Iran. This is a wonderfully porous country.” The next day, Iran's foreign ministry summoned the Azeri ambassador to Tehran, Javanshir Akhundov, to protest against Baku granting asylum to the Mossad-trained assassins. Now, at Friday prayers on 16 March, the Imam of Tabriz, Ayatollah Mojtahed-Shabestari, who is a member of Iran’s Assembly of Experts, has warned: “Azerbaijani leaders know that their outrageous action...will not last long and leaders of Azerbaijan should learn a lesson from the fall of Hosni Mubarak, al-Qadhafi, arrogant powers and regional pharaohs...The country has unfortunately let the USA and Israel to have bases on their land, which is not acceptable at all. We should tell the leaders of this regime that this kind of action will not last long and if they do not remember how tyrants ended in history, they should at least take a look at the fall of regional dictators and learn a lesson.”

Turkey’s concerns for regional stability will have been further raised by the latest news from Iraqi Kurdistan. So far, the Arab Awakening has had little overt impact on the Kurdish question, but from the outset we have indicated that this was only a matter of time. On 20 March, the President of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, Masoud Barzani, launched a strong verbal attack on the Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki hinting at moves towards a more independent Kurdistan – something to which Turkey is viscerally opposed.

In a speech marking the Persian new year holiday, Barzani warned: “It is time to say enough is enough. The current state of affairs is unacceptable to us, and I call on all Iraqi political leaders to urgently try and find a solution otherwise we will return to our people and will decide on whatever course of action that our people deem appropriate.”

Barzani’s complaints include “an attempt to establish a one-million strong army whose loyalty is to a single person [Maliki]”; failure to resolve the territorial dispute over the oil city of Kirkuk, which is outside the Kurdish region but is claimed by the Kurds as part of their historical homeland; the failure of central government to provide promised funds for Kurdish security forces; and central government opposition to Kurdish oil deals in order to prevent the Kurdish region reaching its full economic potential. The central government, for its part, is furious that the Kurdish regional government has failed to hand over Vice-President Tareq al-Hashemi, the senior Sunni Arab politician in the government who fled to the Kurdish region on the eve of the US troops withdrawal in December.

Although the actions of Iraqi Kurdistan are not related to Iran’s responses to the threat to Assad’s rule in Syria, they do represent one more major headache for Turkey – and another reason why, with so much potential for Iranian-inspired regional instability, some influential voices in Ankara are arguing that the best action might be to negotiate a ‘grand bargain’ with Iran that addresses all its concerns and brings it in from the cold.

Undoubtedly there are some in the US administration who share this view, but the idea of a ‘grand bargain’ with Iran would be anathema not just to Israel, but to Saudi Arabia as well - and, for that reason, it is unlikely to gain traction in Washington. However, two further points do follow. The first is that there will be continuing muddle over Syria, with the West pulling its punches for fear of what success might bring. Secondly, this talk of a ‘grand bargain’ with Tehran (even if it leads nowhere) will be used by the Israeli hawks to bolster their case for an early strike against Iran. JdeC.

NOTE: The latest estimates from Jerusalem are that a majority of the 14-strong dilpomatic-security cabinet would support a unilateral Israeli strike if pushed by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, despite the best efforts of many powerful opponents to a strike. The split is said to be 8-6 in favour. The latest reports from the United States, that an Israeli attack on Iran could spark a regional war, have had less impact than might have been thought. There is a near consensus in Israel that the threat from its Arab neighbours is set to become greater over time, as the new Muslim Brotherhood ascendancy establishes itself in Egypt and elsewhere. However, at the moment, the Arabs are weak. Syria, Libya, and Iraq are in turmoil; the Jordanian establishment is fighting for survival; Egypt has not yet made the transition from military rule to popular (anti-Israel) government; Hezbollah in Lebanon might be distancing itself from Iran; and the Gulf States are desperate to maintain stability. It is also pointed out that the Palestinians, even Hamas, would be reluctant to risk all in support of Iran when the medium term offers them such potential through the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood.

So, if there is to be a war with Iran, the Israeli hawks have the better of the argument when they say it would be safer, in strategic terms, to have it now rather than later. This is in addition, of course, to the hawks’ fundamental point that time is the enemy when it comes to Iran’s nuclear developments, and if Israel wants to attack Iran alone, it has a rapidly narrowing window of opportunity in which to do so.

China won't let Russia backslide on Syria

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On 20 March, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov delivered the Kremlin’s sharpest criticism yet of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, saying that Assad was “making lots of mistakes”. Some in the West have taken this as a sign that Russia may be preparing to drop its support for the Syrian regime. It is no doubt true that the Kremlin is engaged in an effort to shore up its reputation in the region, but the latest fulminations from China suggest that Moscow is unlikely to move too far towards the West’s position on Syria.

Russia and China have been strident in their opposition to a policy of regime change or military intervention, and both continue to complain about the way in which Nato stretched UN Security Council Resolution 1973 on Libya from protecting civilians to justify regime change. To mark the first anniversary of the military operation against Libya, codenamed Odyssey Dawn, on 18 March China’s official news agency Xinhua published a critique of the West’s ‘new interventionism’, which it described as an “inerasable dark cloud hanging over international relations”.

Xinhua argued that Libya was the testing ground for the new interventionism, which justified military intervention on humanitarian grounds, and that “disturbing[ly] the West appears to be continuing the momentum of promoting the new interventionism” by making Syria and the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad “their ultimate target”.

China’s problem is twofold. The first is that it objects to morally-based interventionism for the obvious reason that this could in future be justified against China. Secondly, it believes that the justification for the ‘new interventionism’ is in any case hypocritical humbug. As Xinhua put it: “Be it ‘old interventionism’ or ‘new interventionism’, there is no difference in essence per se, that is they are both power politics and hegemony, with the purpose of maintaining the West’s strategic interests, and the only difference between them is that the latter has an even more misleading nature.”

A third objection, expressed by Xinhua, is that the most recent Western interventions have been disastrous. In Libya, for instance, Xinhua argues that “in addition to the 20,000 deaths caused by the war, several tens of thousands of people have been rendered homeless; some 5,000 large and small armed groups are fighting among themselves; the pace of the process of political and economic reconstruction is quite arduous; and separatism is seriously threatening the state’s unity”. It finishes by asking: “Are such results not a supreme irony to those interventionists who staged war under the banner of human rights?” And it concludes by warning of the “need to be on guard against the spread of ‘new interventionism’ at all times”.

This makes clear there is to be no weakening of China’s opposition to an overt policy of regime change in Syria, let alone to a military intervention, which in turn suggests that those in the West who have been reading some weakening into the Russian position from Lavrov’s latest speech on Syria are misreading his signals. A belated Russian attempt to minimize any rift with the rising Muslim Brotherhood ascendancy over Syria is not the same as preparing to compromise over Nato-led interventionism.

Japan's PM warns about Chinese incursions

LatinNews 21 March 2012 Hits: 287

In last week’s issue, we looked at the US’s relations with China, and in particular at seemingly conciliatory remarks made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to mark the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to China. We provided evidence to support the view that not too much should be read into the diplomatic protestations of US support for China’s rise and that the reality continued to be one of concern and rivalry. No such forensic interpretation is required to decipher Japan’s level of concern over China’s rise. It is doing nothing to hide it.

The latest open acknowledgement of Japan’s fears over China’s rise came in a speech on Sunday by Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda to a graduation ceremony of Self-Defence Forces cadets in Yokosuka. Speaking on 18 March, Noda warned about North Korea’s nuclear threat and then added that “moves by...China, which is reinforcing its military capabilities and continuing vigorous activities in surrounding waters, are growing increasingly severe”. He said that he felt “even more keenly” the bond of the Japan-US alliance and he urged cadets “to support from your fields the efforts to deepen and develop this relationship”.

Just two days earlier, on 16 March, China’s foreign ministry had issued a statement describing its naval patrols near the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands (Diaoyu in Chinese) as “lawful”. Spokesman Liu Weimin said: “Our law enforcement vessels patrolled waters close to the Diaoyu Islands to maintain normal order and safeguard China’s maritime rights and interests.” On the same day, China’s State Oceanic Administration (SOA) said that two of its surveillance ships had arrived in the area that morning to conduct an inspection tour.

Japan responded immediately by summoning China’s ambassador to protest against what it called the “extremely serious” incursion into Senkaku waters. The foreign ministry said that the Chinese vessels had entered territorial waters despite “repeated warnings” from the Japanese coastguard in what is the first incursion into Senkaku waters by Chinese state vessels since August last year. In 2010, a clash between a Chinese fishing boat and Japanese coastguard vessel in the area sparked the worst dispute between Beijing and Tokyo in years.

Meanwhile, in the South China Sea, on 19 March a Chinese maritime official said that a China Maritime Surveillance (CMS) patrol team had just finished its third mission “targeted at the illegal exploration of oil and gas”. The CMS said that the patrol had searched for “illegal offshore oil and gas extraction platforms” and that it had discovered 30 in total. On 16 March, China had warned the Philippines against unilateral oil and gas exploration in the disputed Spratly Islands. The Philippines, for its part, has said that oil and gas exploration near the Reed Bank is non-negotiable.

Also on 19 March, South Korea announced that it had deployed additional aircraft to patrol waters around Ieo Island after China claimed the submerged rock was under its control. Ieo is 149km off Korea’s southern coast and considered to be part of its exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

Risk pointers

LatinNews 21 March 2012 Hits: 169

*** Lavrov’s selective logic. On 20 March, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov used a famous quote from Germany’s historic ‘Iron Chancellor’ Otto von Bismarck to justify continued Russian opposition to the US’s missile-defence plans in Europe. Having conceded that Nato has no intention of attacking Russia, he quoted Bismarck as saying: “In military affairs, the most important thing is not intentions but capabilities.” On the very same day, however, he argued against Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities on the grounds that he is “absolutely convinced” that Iran would never use nuclear weapons against Israel. He argued that Iran’s “foreign political rhetoric” is aimed “at achieving domestic aims and aims in the Islamic world” and its threats to destroy Israel should not be taken seriously. Israel is more likely to heed Bismarck’s advice – it’s the capabilities, not the intentions, of a potential adversary that must dictate a nation’s actions.

*** Indonesian coup warning. On 18 March, Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) issued an opaque warning about a possible coup when speaking to activists of the Democratic Party. He said: “There is another weird movement that essentially believes that the SBY government must be brought down before 2014 on the basis of fabricated reasons. It is a group that is unwilling to struggle on the democratic path, for instance, through a political party. There is a group that does not want to make every effort and move in the constitutional corridor; it just wants the presidency and the vice-presidency...Currently I am the target. There are quite many who pray for me, but there are also quite many who threaten my security to overthrow me during my term.”

*** Stark warning from WHO. The director-general of the World Health Organization, Dr Margaret Chan, has issued the starkest warning yet about antimicrobial resistance. Speaking in Denmark on 14 March, she said that for patients infected with some drug-resistant pathogens, mortality has been shown to increase by around 50%. In practical terms, this means that of the 650,000 people who have contracted multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (out of a total of 12m TB cases worldwide), “even with the best of care” only slightly more than 50% will be cured.

Chan added: “If current trends continue unabated, the future is easy to predict. Some experts say we are moving back to the pre-antibiotic era...In terms of new replacement antibiotics, the pipeline is virtually dry...Prospects for turning this situation around look dim...A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could once again kill. Some sophisticated interventions, like hip replacements, organ transplants, cancer chemotherapy, and care of preterm infants, would become far more difficult or even too dangerous to undertake.”

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