Security officials say clashes between pro and anti-Syrian groups in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli have killed at least one person and wounded five.
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Security officials and witnesses say several hundred people have ransacked the campaign headquarters of an Egyptian presidential candidate who was ousted President Hosni Mubarak's last prime minister.
An emergency meeting of the UN Security Council called to discuss a massacre in Syria hears that 108 people were killed and 300 injured.
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The meeting of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) with Iran in Baghdad is apparently producing a lot of detailed proposals for resolving the crisis.
Apparently the one place there could be a breakthrough, if not at Baghdad then later this summer, is with regard to Iran’s enrichment of uranium to 19.75% (this is still low-enriched uranium or LEU) for the production of medical isotopes at its medical reactor. A stock of 19.75%- enriched LEU is much closer to the 95% enriched uranium typically needed to construct a nuclear warhead than the 3.5%-enriched uranium used to fuel ordinary electricity-generating reactors. The UNSC and Germany want to find a way to have Iran supplied with the fuel for the medical reactor from the outside, so that they do not have to make their own.
The International Atomic Energy Agency is also seeking enhanced access to sites for inspection. Some of these sites have no uranium enrichment facilities, such as the military base Parchin, but are of interest because Iran is suspected of conducting experiments there with weapons implications, as with the construction of a superhard casing for a warhead.
The problem on the UNSC + Germany side is that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) allows Iran to enrich uranium, including to 19.75%, and does not allow for inspections of military bases (at US and then-Soviet insistence). The P5 + 1 are making demands on Iran for which there is no basis in international law, and which are directly contradictory to the NPT. In essence, the UNSC has high-handedly repealed the NPT for Iran and from 2006 has just insisted that Iran stop enriching uranium altogether, including for peaceful power-generating purposes.
Iran would be under no obligation to pay attention to these extra-legal UNSC demands save that they are accompanied by the imposition of a financial blockade on Iran that aims at preventing it from selling its petroleum via the international banking system and so at paralyzing the Iranian economy. US unilateral sanctions are far more harsh than the UNSC sanctions, but the US is still the world’s largest economy, and it can usually make its financial policies stick.
The European Union extra sanctions beyond those called for by the Security Council may not be legal. According to Iranian officials, a European court recently struck down third-party sanctions on an Iranian firm. This ruling should not be surprising, since the legal case for sanctions on Iran is weak to non-existent.
The sanctions and threatened blockade have brought Iran to the negotiating table. But the Iranian state, as opposed to the Iranian people, is not terribly worried about the Western sanctions, since its petroleum income is sufficient to buffer the government from unrest at anything above $54 a barrel, well below the current price. The state, in short, is still getting rich even with the sanctions, and can evade the blockade by using soft currencies like the Indian rupee and by resorting to barter trades (oil for wheat, e.g.). The Iranian state probably is sufficiently cushioned from the sanctions that state actors will not be harmed by even the stringent US sanctions. Thus, Tehran doesn’t absolutely need to make urgent concessions, though it does want to show some flexibility, in hopes of getting the sanctions dropped or at least softened (especially the UNSC sanctions, since Iran wants to separate out the uber-hawkish US government from its United Nations Security Council colleagues.
The main good thing about the talks is that as long as they continue, they make it hard for anyone to start a war.
 BBC News |
GOP Rep. King says Obama officials disclosed identity of jailed Pakistani doctor
Fox News GOP Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, expressed concern Wednesday about the extent of the Obama administration's efforts to protect the Pakistan doctor who was sent to prison in Pakistan for treason after helping to … Security breach alleged in making of bin Laden raid filmCBC.ca Profile: Shakil AfridiBBC News CIA, Pentagon quizzed onkilling of bin Laden film co-operationThe Australian The Independent -The Guardian -Irish Times all 1,029 news articles » |
Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer write at Tomdispatch:
Recent months have seen a flurry of headlines about cuts (often called “threats”) to the U.S. defense budget. Last week, lawmakers in the House of Representatives even passed a bill that was meant to spare national security spending from future cuts by reducing school-lunch funding and other social programs.
Here, then, is a simple question that, for some curious reason, no one bothers to ask, no less answer: How much are we spending on national security these days? With major wars winding down, has Washington already cut such spending so close to the bone that further reductions would be perilous to our safety?
In fact, with projected cuts added in, the national security budget in fiscal 2013 will be nearly $1 trillion — a staggering enough sum that it’s worth taking a walk through the maze of the national security budget to see just where that money’s lodged.
If you’ve heard a number for how much the U.S. spends on the military, it’s probably in the neighborhood of $530 billion. That’s the Pentagon’s base budget for fiscal 2013, and represents a 2.5% cut from 2012. But that $530 billion is merely the beginning of what the U.S. spends on national security. Let’s dig a little deeper.
The Pentagon’s base budget doesn’t include war funding, which in recent years has been well over $100 billion. With U.S. troops withdrawn from Iraq and troop levels falling in Afghanistan, you might think that war funding would be plummeting as well. In fact, it will drop to a mere $88 billion in fiscal 2013. By way of comparison, the federal government will spend around $64 billion on education that same year.
Add in war funding, and our national security total jumps to $618 billion. And we’re still just getting started.
The U.S. military maintains an arsenal of nuclear weapons. You might assume that we’ve already accounted for nukes in the Pentagon’s $530 billion base budget. But you’d be wrong. Funding for nuclear weapons falls under the Department of Energy (DOE), so it’s a number you rarely hear. In fiscal 2013, we’ll be spending $11.5 billion on weapons and related programs at the DOE. And disposal of nuclear waste is expensive, so add another $6.4 billion for weapons cleanup.
Now, we’re at $636 billion and counting.
How about homeland security? We’ve got to figure that in, too. There’s the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which will run taxpayers $35.5 billion for its national security activities in fiscal 2013. But there’s funding for homeland security squirreled away in just about every other federal agency as well. Think, for example, about programs to secure the food supply, funded through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. So add another $13.5 billion for homeland security at federal agencies other than DHS.
That brings our total to $685 billion.
Then there’s the international affairs budget, another obscure corner of the federal budget that just happens to be jammed with national security funds. For fiscal 2013, $8 billion in additional war funding for Iraq and Afghanistan is hidden away there. There’s also $14 billion for what’s called “international security assistance” — that’s part of the weapons and training Washington offers foreign militaries around the world. Plus there’s $2 billion for “peacekeeping operations,” money U.S. taxpayers send overseas to help fund military operations handled by international organizations and our allies.
That brings our national security total up to $709 billion.
We can’t forget the cost of caring for our nation’s veterans, including those wounded in our recent wars. That’s an important as well as hefty share of national security funding. In 2013, veterans programs will cost the federal government $138 billion.
That brings us to $847 billion — and we’re not done yet.
Taxpayers also fund pensions and other retirement benefits for non-veteran military retirees, which will cost $55 billion next year. And then there are the retirement costs for civilians who worked at the Department of Defense and now draw pensions and benefits. The federal government doesn’t publish a number on this, but based on the share of the federal workforce employed at the Pentagon, we can estimate that its civilian retirees will cost taxpayers around $21 billion in 2013.
By now, we’ve made it to $923 billion — and we’re finally almost done.
Just one more thing to add in, a miscellaneous defense account that’s separate from the defense base budget. It’s called “defense-related activities,” and it’s got $8 billion in it for 2013.
That brings our grand total to an astonishing $931 billion.
And this will turn out to be a conservative figure. We won’t spend less than that, but among other things, it doesn’t include the interest we’re paying on money we borrowed to fund past military operations; nor does it include portions of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that are dedicated to national security. And we don’t know if this number captures the entire intelligence budget or not, because parts of intelligence funding are classified.
For now, however, that whopping $931 billion for fiscal year 2013 will have to do. If our national security budget were its own economy, it would be the 19th largest in the world, roughly the size of Australia’s. Meanwhile, the country with the next largest military budget, China, spends a mere pittance by comparison. The most recent estimate puts China’s military funding at around $136 billion.
Or think of it this way: National security accounts for one quarter of every dollar the federal government is projected to spend in 2013. And if you pull trust funds for programs like Social Security out of the equation, that figure rises to more than one third of every dollar in the projected 2013 federal budget.
Yet the House recently passed legislation to spare the defense budget from cuts, arguing that the automatic spending reductions scheduled for January 2013 would compromise national security. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has said such automatic cuts, which would total around $55 billion in 2013, would be “disastrous” for the defense budget. To avoid them, the House would instead pull money from the National School Lunch Program, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Medicaid, food stamps, and programs like the Social Services Block Grant, which funds Meals on Wheels, among other initiatives.
Yet it wouldn’t be difficult to find savings in that $931 billion. There’s plenty of low-hanging fruit, starting with various costly weapons systems left over from the Cold War, like the Virginia class submarine, the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft, the missile defense program, and the most expensive weapons system on the planet, the F-35 jet fighter. Cutting back or cancelling some of these programs would save billions of dollars annually.
In fact, Congress could find much deeper savings, but it would require fundamentally redefining national security in this country. On this issue, the American public is already several steps ahead of Washington. Americans overwhelmingly think that national security funding should be cut — deeply.
If lawmakers don’t pay closer attention to their constituents, we already know the alternative: pulling school-lunch funding.
Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer are research analysts at the National Priorities Project. They wrote the soon-to-be-published book A People’s Guide to the Federal Budget, and host weekly two-minute Budget Brief videos on YouTube.
[Note: This is the latest National Priorities Project piece on TomDispatch about the true cost of national security. In a piece last year by Chris Hellman, the total cost of national security was calculated in a slightly different manner; it included interest payments on the borrowing that funded past military operations. In the national security numbers described above, such interest payments have been omitted.
For further reading on national security spending see “U.S. Security Spending Since 9/11,” an examination of the nearly $8 trillion the United States has spent on defense since the September 11th attacks. Also see “Debt, Deficits, and Defense: A Way Forward” by the Sustainable Defense Task Force.]
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Copyright 2012 Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer
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Mirrored from Tomdispatch.com
During Bahrain’s current troubles,there has been little talk about the legacy of British rule, and the post-independence role of British security advisers, in the island Kingdom. This post from Adam Curtis at the BBC, complete with lots of old BBC video clips, reminds us of the legacy of Charles Belgrave and more notoriously, Ian Henderson. I’m not the sort to blame colonialism for every single flaw in modern Middle Eastern states, but it’s certainly not entirely innocent. And a note: though Ian Henderson, the British policeman who ran security fot decades in Bahrain after establishing his credentials suppressing the Mau Mau in Kenya, only retired in 1998,the last I heard he is still alive and living in Bahrain.
Though there are a lot of old video clips of historical interest, I’m not going to label this one “nostalgia,” since I doubt if very many are all that nostalgic for this aspect of the past.
My latest column for The National, on Egypt’s presidential race and its political context, is here. I’m on a trip, so there will be very little posting in the next few days.
NEW YORK – The UN Security Council has "condemned in the strongest terms the terrorist attacks" that ripped through the Syrian capital Thursday, killing 55 people and leaving trails of death and destr
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Learn To Read And Write Arabic
Find out all about the revolutionary secret technique for learning to read and write Arabic. Read the article here.
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