Western war on Iran soon?

Rising risk of Western war on Iran

GLOBAL TRENDS BY MARTIN KHOR

The new year is witnessing an escalation of a Western economic blockade against Iran while it has been claimed that Israel is preparing for a military strike. Can a war against Iran be avoided? 



THE risk of the world being engulfed in a new and dangerous war is increasing. In recent weeks, Iran has come under greater pressure over its nuclear programme, and the chances of this leading to military conflict have escalated.

A recent article in New York Times magazine revealed that senior Israeli leaders were preparing for a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2012.

The United States has intensified its initiative on trade and financial sanctions on Iran.

Republican candidates for the Presidency have been using high anti-Iran rhetoric.

And there is the possibility in a Presidential election year that the incumbent President may start a war to gain popularity.



In his State of the Union speech last week, President Barack Obama said he would take no option off the table to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

Europe recently announced an embargo on Iranian oil. The European Union foreign ministers decided there would be no further oil contracts between its member states and Iran, and that existing oil delivery deals would be allowed to run only until July.

These actions are purportedly aimed at preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons. But Iran has insisted its research programme is for developing nuclear power, not weapons.

And there is no evidence that it is in fact developing, or intending to develop, weapons.



There is a danger of dramatic escalation of the present conflict through one of various scenarios, such as an Israeli attack on Iran (with or without United States assistance or approval) or an incident in the Persian Gulf involving Western and Iranian ships.

The US has doubled the number of aircraft carriers near the Persian Gulf, while French and British warships recently accompanied the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln into the Gulf.

These developments are creating the conditions for a slide into a catastrophic war.

On Jan 25, the New York Times carried an article – “Will Israel attack Iran?”– by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, an analyst who interviewed Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak, vice-premier Moshe Ya’alon and others.

“After speaking with many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012,” wrote Bergman.

This determination to strike comes despite many difficulties, listed by Bergman.

Iran has dispersed its nuclear installations throughout its vast territory, and Israel has limited air power and no aircraft carrier.

Even if an attack were successful, Iran would be able to rebuild the damaged or wrecked sites. And Iran had declared that it would strike back if attacked.

There is of course irony and double standards in this situation.

While Israel and the West decry the consequences if Iran obtains nuclear weapons capability, it is well known that Israel itself owns many nuclear weapons.

And while Iran is often accused by the same countries of sponsoring terrorism, Iran itself has been the victim of terrorist attacks and economic and technological sabotage.

Bergman’s article provides many details of many of the covert actions taken by Israel against Iran.

The Israeli secret service Mossad was given “virtually unlimited funds and powers” to stop the Iranian bomb through a five-front strategy that involved “political pressure, covert measures, counter-proliferation, sanctions and re­­gime change”.



The moves against Iran include boycotting of financial institutions, the use of computer viruses to disrupt the operations of the nuclear project, tampering with components and the supply of faulty parts and raw materials, explosions at various facilities, and the assassination of several Iranian nuclear scientists.

The article implies that Israel has been involved in, or approves of, these actions, although it does not explicitly admit to them.

Meanwhile, Iran insists it is not intending to develop nuclear weapons, and there has been no evidence that it is doing so.

Iran’s enemies are fearful it will develop a technical capability for developing weapons as it pursues its nuclear energy programme.

Nuclear physicist Yousaf Butt, a former Fellow in the Committee on International Security and Arms Control at the US National Academy of Sciences, and scientific consultant for the Federation of American Scientists, has said Iran was not doing anything that violated its legal right to develop nuclear technology.

Under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, it is not illegal for a member state to have a nuclear weapons capability or option.



If a nation has a fully developed civilian nuclear sector, it, by default, already has a fairly solid nuclear weapons capability, and several countries that do not have weapons, do have this capability.

Meanwhile, Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service reported that several influential foreign policy figures in the US (who used to be Iraq war hawks) were speaking up against military action on Iran.

“We’re doing this terrible thing all over again,” wrote Leslie Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and previously a Iraq-war hawk.

Kenneth Pollack, whose 2002 book on Iraq was cited frequently by hawks before the Iraq invasion, argued not only against any further escalation, but also suggested that the US-EU sanctions were proving counterproductive.

Princeton University professor Anne-Marie Slaughter argued that the West and Iran were playing a “dangerous game of chicken” and that the West’s current course “leaves Iran’s government no alternative between publicly backing down, which it will not do, and escalating its provocations”.

“The more publicly the West threatens Iran, the more easily Iranian leaders can portray America as the Great Satan,” wrote Slaughter, formerly director of policy planning under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

It remains to be seen if cooler heads will indeed prevail so that a new war against Iran is avoided.

Made in China: Country's new supercomputer uses homegrown chips

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China is stepping up its semiconductor manufacturing efforts and using domestic chips for its latest supercomputer. It's going to be interesting to see how fast China can close in on U.S. supercomputer processor makers Intel, AMD, and Nvidia.

The New York Times reported that a supercomputer called Sunway BlueLight MPP, was installed in September at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan, China. The details emerged at a technical meeting. The real catch is that China used 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 chips.

Those semiconductors are homegrown and indicate that China is aiming to be a major chip player. The New York Times story was mostly sourced to Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee, but Chinese sites reported on the technical meeting. Dongarra helps manage the list of Top 500 supercomputers. China's previous supercomputers used Intel and Nvidia chips.



Meanwhile, ZDNet UK highlighted the blog of Hung-Sheng Tsao, founder of HopBit GridComputing, who posted the slides detailing the Sunway BlueLight MPP, which come from IT168.com. IT168.com covered China's supercomputing powwow extensively this week.

ZDNet UK's Jack Clark noted:

According to (Tsao's) slides, which appear to be from a presentation describing the computer's capabilities, the ShenWei Sunway BlueLight MPP has 150TB of main storage and 2PB of external storage. Each ShenWei SW1600 processor is 64-bit, has 16-cores and is RISC-based.

Here's a Google Translate link offering more details via IT168.

The Wall Street Journal noted that the China domestic supercomputing effort is very credible and signals an effort to cut the country's reliance on western companies. It's unclear whether China's chips are completely original blueprints or based on a previous design. One issue for the Sunway chips is power consumption. The Sunway supercomputer apparently doesn't need that much power relative to rivals.

The New York Times added that that ShenWei chip appears to be based "on some of the same design principles that are favored by Intel's most advanced microprocessors."

China's efforts appear to be a few generations behind, but rest assured the country will try to close any gaps quickly.

This story was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines under the headline "China steps up its semiconductor game with homegrown supercomputer effort." 

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is editor in chief of ZDNet and editorial director of CNET's TechRepublic. He has covered the technology and financial-services industries since 1995.

 
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Obama Wants $1.5 Trillion In Tax Hikes, Mostly On Rich, Draws Election Battle Lines

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Janet Novack, Forbes Staff I write from D.C. about tax and retirement policy and planning.

Image via Wikipedia President Barack Obama will call today for an additional $3.2 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade, including $1.5 trillion in tax hikes, mostly on the rich. His plan also includes $1.1 trillion in savings from winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and $580 billion in savings from “mandatory” programs, including $248 billion in Medicare cuts, but significantly, no increase in the age for Medicare eligibility and no Social Security trims.

Contrary to earlier press reports, however, the plan Obama is sending to Congress’ Joint Select Committee On Deficit Reduction—the so-called Super Committee– won’t include a special  new  millionaire’s tax. Instead, Administration officials said in a background briefing with reporters Sunday night, Obama will call for tax reform to be based on five principles and one of those will be the “Buffett rule”—in honor of Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett who has complained for years that he pays taxes at a lower rate than his secretary.  An official put the rule this way: “People making more than $1 million should not pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than middle class people pay.”  The other four principles, he added, are that tax reform should lower rates; reduce the deficit (in other words raise taxes) by $1.5 trillion over 10 years; close “wasteful loopholes and tax breaks”; and “boost job creation and growth.”


Republicans, too, favor tax reform and lower rates, but have ruled out raising any new revenue. On Thursday House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) declared tax increases “off the table”.  In an interview on NBC’s Meet The Press show Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) dismissed any consideration of tax increases as “a bad thing to do in the middle of an economic downturn.”

The August political deal that raised the nation’s debt ceiling and averted a Treasury debt default created the Super Committee and charged it with coming up with a plan by Thanksgiving to trim at least $1.2 trillion from the deficit over 10 years. The Super Committee is  made up of six Democrats and six Republicans and if it deadlocks—or its final product is voted down by Congress or vetoed by Obama–automatic budget cuts would kick in. Republicans insist the $1.2 trillion should come solely from cuts to spending, including to entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

Significantly, the Administration official said Obama is making his embrace of Medicare cuts contingent on tax increases being included in the final deal.  “He’ll say he’ll veto any bill that takes one dime from the Medicare seniors rely on without asking the wealthy and the biggest corporations to pay their share,’’ the official said in a preview of Obama’s remarks. In another move that should similarly please his restive Democratic base, Obama is excluding from his proposal any change  to Social Security, including a reduction in inflation adjustments for Social Security recipients that was part of a bigger deal he tried to strike with Boehner in July. “It’s his vision,  not a legislative compromise,” an Administration official explained. “It’s inherently different form the grand bargain he was working on with the Speaker.”  A higher age for Medicare eligibility was also, reportedly, considered as part of the failed bargain with Boehner but won’t be in Obama’s proposal. (Currently, Americans become eligible at 65 even if they haven’t yet claimed their Social Security benefits.)



In the Sunday night preview, Administration officials cast Obama’s plan as a total of $4.4 trillion in net deficit reduction —including cuts that were made in discretionary spending as part of the August deal and prospective savings on interest costs. (While Republicans are sure to dismiss Obama’s counting of war savings, they have done the same thing in their deficit plans.)  Moreover, an Administration official noted, the $4.4 trillion is net of the cost of Obama $447 billion “jobs” proposal—a package of payroll tax cuts, infrastructure spending, and help for the unemployed designed to attack the nation’s stubbornly high 9.1% unemployment rate. Obama has proposed paying for that too with tax hikes Republicans have rejected, including a limit on mortgage, charitable and other deductions for the well off; elimination of the “carried interest” tax break enjoyed by the managers of hedge funds and other partnerships; and the repeal of various tax preferences enjoyed by oil and gas producers, including Exxon Mobil,  Chevron and BP.

Indeed, most of Obama’s tax proposals will apparently repeat those he has made before. For example, $800 billion would come from letting the Bush tax cuts for families earning more than $250,000 expire at the end of 2012, meaning the top rate on ordinary income such as salary would rise from 35% to 39.6%. Last month, in a New York Times op-ed, Buffett called for two higher tax rates—one on income over $1 million and the other on income over $10 million. Published reports over the weekend variously suggested Obama would endorse a new millionaire’s rate or release some sort of proposal for a minimum tax on millionaires—say to replace the current convoluted alternative minimum tax.  But Sunday night, the Administration official said the Buffett rule was simply a principle for tax reform.

Most people earning more than $1 million are already taxed at a higher effective rate than their secretaries. In 2008, for example, taxpayers with adjusted gross income between $1 million and $10 million paid an average of 24.5% of their adjusted gross in federal income tax, compared with an average of 12.6% for those earning $100,000 to $200,000, and 8.4%  for those earning $50,000 to $100,000. But the 400 highest income taxpayers do pay a lower effective rate  than mere millionaires—an average of just 18.1% in 2008. That’s because the top 400 get the bulk of their income from capital gains, which are taxed at a top rate of 15%, scheduled to rise to 20% when the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of 2012. If tax reform is to insure that billionaires pay a higher effective rate than the upper middle and middle class it would have to reduce or eliminate the break for capital gains—something that was done in Reagan’s 1986 tax reform but that doesn’t sit well with most Republicans today.

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Obama tax plan draws election battle lines

Stephen Collinson 

An impassioned US President Barack Obama has set up an acerbic and personal clash with Republicans, demanding $US1.5 trillion ($A1.47 trillion) in new taxes on the rich in a plan aimed at slashing the deficit.

"This is not class warfare, it is math," Obama declared, arguing that without tax increases on those who could afford it, the budget gap - which is casting a shadow over future generations of Americans - could never be closed.

"All I'm saying is that those who have done well, including me, should pay their fair share in taxes," Obama said in a speech that effectively staked out the ground on which the 2012 presidential election will likely be fought.

But Republicans immediately came out against the move, making it more likely that a fierce partisan row over taxes and spending will rumble on and define the terrain of the 2012 presidential election.

"Pitting one group of Americans against another is not leadership," said Republican House Speaker John Boehner.

A fiery, populist Obama laid out a plan few experts believe has any chance of passing Congress but which will make clear the battle lines between the White House and Republicans on the lumbering economy.

"We can't just cut our way out of this hole," Obama said in the White House Rose Garden, laying out his plans to cut $US3.0 trillion from the deficit with a mixture of spending cuts and tax hikes.

"It is only right we ask everyone to pay their fair share," Obama said, in a direct challenge to House of Representatives speaker John Boehner, who has categorically ruled out any tax increases to trim the budget gap.

"We can't afford these special lower rates for the wealthy. We can't afford them when we are running these big deficits," Obama said, fighting for the end of tax cuts for the rich passed by former president George W Bush.

"Middle class taxpayers shouldn't pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires. That's pretty straightforward. It's hard to argue against that," said Obama, who has seen his approval ratings hammered by the slowed economy.

In a sign of the antipathy between Obama and Republican leaders after months of political confrontations, the president took personal aim at Boehner's refusal to contemplate any tax revenue raises.

"The speaker says we can't have it 'my way or the highway' and then basically says 'my way or the highway'."

"That's not smart. It's not right."

Obama's plan amounted to suggestions to a congressional supercommittee charged with finding up to $US1.5 trillion in deficit cuts by November.

The president threatened to veto any bill produced by Congress that was based on cutting medical benefits for the elderly but did not include increased revenues drawn from higher taxes on the rich and corporations.

Obama's plan effectively forced Republicans to defend continued favourable tax treatment for the wealthiest Americans and corporations while unemployment is at 9.1 per cent and economic frustration stalks the United States.

But Republicans, who say tax hikes would penalise small business and lower growth, reacted with contempt to his speech.

"Veto threats, a massive tax hike, phantom savings, and punting on entitlement reform is not a recipe for economic or job growth-or even meaningful deficit reduction," said Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate.

Mitt Romney, a leading Republican contender to take on Obama in the 2012 election, also rejected his plans as the action of a president who he portrays as out of his depth on the economy.

"President Obama's plan to raise taxes will have a crushing impact on economic growth," Romney said.

"This is yet another indication that President Obama has no clue how to bring our economy back."

Obama's plan includes $US1.2 trillion in cuts in federal discretionary spending already agreed in August as part of a compromise which ended a standoff with Republicans over raising the federal debt ceiling.

It includes $US580 billion in spending cuts across all mandatory spending programs and $US1.1 trillion of savings realised from drawing down US troop numbers in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Tax reform would result in $US1.5 trillion in savings, and a further $US430 billion will be found in additional interest savings elsewhere.

Included in the spending cuts will be $US248 billion in savings from Medicare programs for the elderly and $US72 billion in cuts from the Medicaid service for the poor, officials said.

© 2011 AFP
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Fallout from Sept 11 still being felt!

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MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR

There are efforts by ordinary citizens all over the world to heal the wounds left by the Sept 11 tragedy. Many people have been reaching out to one another with respect, humility and trust.
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

UNLESS you’ve been on Mars this past week, you would have realised that it was the 10th anniversary of Sept 11 a few days ago. There had been so much news and stories about it everywhere.

Nobody doubts that the events of Sept 11 10 years ago were a horrific tragedy, and all sympathy should go to the families who lost loved ones that day. But it should also be remembered that the aftermath of Sept 11 has been equally tragic, and is still ongoing.

According to the costs-of-war project at Brown University, a “very conservative” estimate is that about 137,000 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan and that the wars have created more than 7.8 million refugees in these countries.

The Brown project puts the wars’ ultimate cost, including interest payments and veterans’ care, to the United States at up to US$4tril – equivalent to the country’s cumulative budget deficits for the six years from 2005 to 2010. Think of how many people that money could feed and school.

What have all these gained? Even Americans have been affected by it. Today, they live in an environment so fearful of another attack that they have to suffer the indignity of all manner of surveillance and security inconveniences. One recent op-ed in the New York Times suggested that on balance the infringements on civil liberties that Americans have had to suffer are relatively minor.



It failed to mention that for its American Muslim citizens, these have been major. The blame, the humiliation and the abuses that they have had to endure are not yet over.

But despite all these, and its global impacts, there are efforts by ordinary citizens to heal these wounds. In the United States and several other Western countries, the issues that arose from Sept 11 were not glossed over but discussed and debated as a way to rebuild the broken bridges. Civil society, rather than governments or politicians, have been at the forefront of these.

I was just in Western Australia where I was asked to speak at a conference on Rebuilding Harmony in the post-Sept 11 world. It was heartening to see so many people interested in the subject, and so disappointed by the ongoing violence that has accompanied the event by all sides.

Many Australians had been opposed to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, correctly seeing that this was no way to have peace.

They emphasised that people of different backgrounds, cultures and faiths need to know one another in order to avoid war, and that politicians should be held accountable for their part in the violence.

In the evening after the conference, we attended a special service at the main cathedral in Perth to commemorate the anniversary of Sept 11. It was attended by all the state dignitaries as well as people from all faiths. The entire service was beautiful and solemn as befitted the occasion.

But what moved me most was something I did not expect nor had ever experienced. An imam from a local mosque got up and recited the Al Fatihah and two other verses from the Quran dealing with compassion to humanity.

To hear the first surah of the Quran recited in Arabic in a cathedral while everyone listened so respectfully was a profoundly emotional experience for me. Never had its meaning been more beautiful.

It led me to think about how elsewhere in the world so many people have been reaching out to one another with respect, with humility and trust. When I heard the Al Fatihah in that church, it made me love my religion more.

The translation was in the programme, along with the words of all the other prayers and hymns that day, Christian and Jewish.

And what struck me most was how the sentiments expressed, while coming from different holy books, were in fact similar. My religion is as compassionate and generous as any other, not just to our own people but to all of humanity.

It made me wonder why this does not happen at home, why there is so much mistrust that nobody steps into a house of worship that is not their own.

Surely to be able to know one another is a good thing. After all, God says in surah Al-Hujarat, verse 13: O men! Behold, We have created you all out of a male and a female, and have made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another.

By constantly isolating ourselves from each other, are we not rejecting what our Creator intended?

As Malaysia Day approaches, perhaps we should think about how we can reconcile with one another. Or at the very least, refuse and reject the many deliberate attempts to divide us.

Selamat Hari Malaysia!

The new anarchists - Are Hackers The 21st Century’s First Revolutionary Movement?

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Hackers’ efforts to fight the power may lead to a backlash

By Trevor Butterworth

Peter Steiner’s now famous cartoon for the New Yorker, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” first appeared in 1993 but didn’t, according to the artist, receive much attention until the Internet became more familiar to people. It was a rare instance of a cartoon doing what it’s not supposed to do, gaining relevance over time as people understand just how pithily it captured an essential truth. This, surely, elevates it to one of the most important cartoons in history (Steiner told the New York Times in 2000 that he felt a little like the person who invented the smiley face).

History has shown Steiner’s vision to be much too benign, and the cyber events of the past year — hacking and theft on the scale of 18th-century piracy — demand an update, perhaps along the lines of, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re China.” But even that may have been spoiled after the events of this week, which saw the appearance of an alliance between two groups of clandestine hackers, Anonymous and LulzSec, both of which have been implicated in numerous high profile security breaches.

In a statement announcing “Operation Anti-Security,” LulzSec declared that “the government and white hat security terrorists across the world continue to dominate and control our Internet ocean … we encourage any vessel, large or small, to open fire on any government or agency that crosses their path.”



This was accompanied by “an open letter to citizens of the United States of America” on Anonymous’ news site, which sounded uncannily tea party-ish in its call on Americans to “wake up” and take back their liberties from a corrupt government.

To judge from the reaction of some information security experts, the alliance was on the scale of Germany teaming up with Japan during World War II. Except by the end of the week, LulzSec was apparently calling it quits, alarmed, perhaps, by the arrest of an alleged member in Britain and the attempts by other hackers to expose their identities.

With subterfuge as the name of the info-war game, the virtual equivalent of smoke and mirrors makes it difficult to say what’s true and what might be misdirection, especially with organizations that are leaderless and decentralized. But here’s the upshot of this recent cycle of cyber shenanigans: On the Internet, one person’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist.

Technological prowess has given hackers an extraordinary sense of political entitlement. It’s easy to theorize about how the world should work if your only engagement with it is through a computer and you’re in your teens or 20s. But weaponize your theories through hacking and you’re all but certain to lose the public, who will demand ever more stringent crackdowns and restrictive laws that, in turn, will push some hackers to even more extreme responses.

At the same time, the hacker collectives do possess a technological prowess that is beyond the imagining of most people, and with a deep understanding of how technology works, there is the privilege of insight. The explosive development of the Web raises serious, complex questions about ownership, privacy and freedom. And if these are ignored by politicians, or dominated by commercial interests, or dismissed by a mainstream media averse to complexity, then hacker frustrations will turn to direct action as a way of getting attention.

This is, after all, what non-governmental organizations and other advocacy groups do on a much more limited scale to promote their interests. (Still, it’s one thing to disrupt traffic with a protest march; it’s another to disrupt Internet traffic with a denial-of-service attack.)

The question is what kind of politics is this technology empowering? If you don’t acknowledge genuine concerns or even good faith in the info security community, if government is irredeemably corrupt, then you haven’t just abandoned politics, you’re anti-political; all that’s left is a war of attrition.

Oddly, the most useful insights on hacker culture may come from a re-engagement with the politics of anarchism, as noted in a review of new books on the subject in the summer issue of BookForum by Columbia historian Mark Mazower. While Mazower makes a mistake, in my view, in seeing revolutionary politics as still being mediated through academic leftism rather than through technology, his point — that the anarchist theories of the 19th century are more relevant than Marx to explain the present political conditions — is timely.

“Anarchism’s combination of individual commitment, ethical universalism and deep suspicion of the state as a political actor mark it out as the ideology of our times,” writes Mazower, before ending his piece with the claim that “we are all anarchists now.”

But we’re not. We are disenfranchised because today’s anarchism belongs to the hackers — and they have the means to make much better bombs. Whether the alliance between LulzSec and Anonymous was ever real or not, it defines the new ideological reality of our times: the network as an emerging anarchic state actor. Whether we like it or not, this politics of technology forces us toward libertarianism, to maximal freedom, because the alternatives — anarchy and control — are dancing toward disaster.

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