DiplomatikGundem

Putin: Ukrayna'nın yerini Türkiye alacak

2009-09-14T10:36:00.000+02:00

Rusya Başbakanı Vladimir Putin, önümüzdeki dönemde Rus doğalgazın ihracında transit ülke olan Ukrayna'nın yerini Türkiye'nin alacağını söyledi.

Rusya üzerine araştırmalar yapan uzmanların yer aldığı Valday Grup'la görüşmesinde Putin'in, Türkiye ile enerji ilişkilerine değindiği ve bu konuda Ukrayna'nın yerini gelecekte Türkiye'nin alabileceğini söylediği ortaya çıktı.
Rusya, Avrupa doğalgaz sevkiyatının yüzde 80'inini Ukrayna üzerinden yapıyor. Bu ülke ile siyasi ve ekonomik konularda sorun yaşayan Moskova, enerji ulaşım yollarını çeşitlendirmek için çalışmalarını sürdürüyor. Kuzey Akım doğalgaz boru hattı ile Avrupa'nın kuzeyine ulaşmayı planlayan Moskova, Güney Akım doğalgaz boru hattı ile ilgili de çalışmalarını yoğunlaştırdı.
6 Ağustos'ta Türkiye'ye bir ziyaret gerçekleştiren Rusya Başbakanı Vladimir Putin, Başbakan Recep Tayyip Erdoğan'la Güney Akım anlaşmasını parafe etti.
Valday Düşünce Grubu ile kapalı kapılar ardında görüşen Putin'in açıklamaları kısmi olarak basına yansımaya devam ediyor. Putin'in 2012'de yeniden Kremlin'e dönebileceği sinyallerinin geldiği görüşmede Putin'in Türkiye ile ilgili de açıklamalarda bulunduğu kaydedildi.
The Moscow Times'da yer alan haberde, Alman düşünce kuruluşu uzmanı Aleksander Rahr'ın Rusya'nın doğalgaz ihracı ile ilgili sorusunu yanıtlayan Putin'in batı transit yolu olarak Ukrayna'nın yerini artık Türkiye'nin alacağını söylediği yer aldı.

Kommersant gazetesi de, Putin'in Erdoğan'la yapacağı telefon görüşmesi nedeni ile toplantının 2,5 saatte bitirilmek zorunda kalındığını yazdı. (CİHAN)

Zaman Gazetesi 14.09.2008

“Makbul Başkan” Obama

2009-01-20T09:26:00.001+02:00

NPQ Türkiye dergisinin 2009 yılına ait ilk sayısında, dünyanın ilk 100 entelektüeli arasında gösterilen, Prof. Dr. Tarık Ramazan’a ait “Umudun Adı Obama” adlı yazıyı okumak, benim için gerçeklerle yüzleşmek adına son damla oldu. Ramazan, yazısının son bölümünü şu uyarıyla bitiriyor: “Her türlü değişim memnuniyetle karşılanır; ama bu arada, özellikle Filistin halkının onurunu tanımayı engelleyen, gezegenin her köşesine yoksulluk ve güvensizlik yayarak yıkım getiren, siyasal ya da ekonomik düzenin kutsal dogmalarına karşı eleştirel titizliğimiz gevşememelidir.” Bu sözleri, müstakbel ABD Başkanı Obama’nın geçtiğimiz haftalarda Havai’de “Golf Oynarken” çekilen “keyifli” fotoğrafları ile birleştirince Ramazan’ın sözleri ete kemiğe bürünmektedir. “Ama”larla başlayan ya da biten yazılardan hiçbir zaman haz duymamışımdır. Ancak şimdi anlıyorum ki Obama için kocaman bir “AMA” demek gerekiyormuş. Obama, Kasım 2008’deki Başkanlık seçimleri sonrası yaptığı tüm seçimler ile yavaş yavaş bir hayal kırıklıkları kulesi inşa etmeye başlamıştır. Bu kulenin en hızlı yükseldiği kısım önce ABD’de ve İsrail’de, İsrail devletine lehine kayıtsız onayı/teslimiyetini içeren konuşmaları ve sonrasında ise dış politika ekibini oluştururken yaptığı seçimler olmuştur. Açıktır ki tüm parlatma çabalarına karşın Obama’nın dış politika seçimi ABD’de ana akım (main stream) siyasetin tam merkezinden yapılan ve “değişim” ile herhangi bir ilgisi olmayan, makyaj malzemesidir.

Obama’nın ABD’nin 44. Başkanı olduğunun ilan edildiği seçim sonuçları sonrası kaleme aldığımız bir yazıda, kısaca Obama’nın Michael Jackson’dan ziyade Martin Luther ve Malcolm X ile özdeşleştirerek, ülkemizdeki Jackson’lara dikkat çekmiştim. Ne var ki geçen sürede ironik bir şekilde Michael Jackson’ın Müslüman olduğu iddia edilirken, Obama’nın hızla Jacksonlaşmasını veya mevcut Jackson’lığını vurgulama/onaylatma sürecine girdiğini izlemek aslında ironik bir şekilde beklenen bir şaşkınlıktı. Obama “mucizelerin adamı” olmaktan hızla sıradan bir “Başkan” olmaya doğru ilerlemekteydi. Okumalarımdan edindiklerim de Obama ile ilgili kuşkularımı doğruladı: Obama, rengine rağmen “Ana Akım bir Amerikalı”dır. Eleştirel olmaktan ziyade, dengeci, orta yolcudur. O nedenledir ki Demokrat Parti’nin Chicago’daki belli belirsiz bir üyesiyken, bir anda dünyaya umut olacak, belki de ABD’ye karşı eleştirelliğini sınırlayacak bir “figür” haline getirilmiştir. Bu çerçevede Ramazan yukarıda belirttiğimiz yazısında belki de Obama’nın esas yükseliş sebebini ortaya koymaktadır: “Artık ABD’nin siyah bir Amerikalı’nın seçilmesine hazır olduğu ortaya çıkarken, göstergeler Eylül 2001 sonrasında yeni bir derin Müslüman karşıtı ırkçılığın yükseldiğine işaret ediyor.” Dikkat edilirse Obama’nın Başkanlık seçimleri süresince sürekli reddetmek zorunda kaldığı geçmişe ait kimliği “Müslümanlık” olmuştur ki, ABD’nin Dışişleri eski Bakanı ve Irak Savaşı’nın aklayıcısı Colin Powell’ın bu konudaki açıklaması gayet manidardı: Obama, Müslüman değildi; siyah ve Hıristiyandı. Kendi siyahları ile barışan ABD, yeni siyahlarını ve ötekisini belirlemiştir. Bunun gövdesini de Obama oluşturmaktadır.

Obama’nın ABD Başkanlığına seçimi sonrası küresel kamuoyunun beklentisi aksine, dış politika ile ilgili yapılan yorumlarda Obama’lı Amerika’nın dış politikada iki hedefi olacağı üzerinde duruluyor: Afganistan-Pakistan hattı ve Afrika çizgisi. İlginç bir rastlantı ile Aralık ayı içinde dünya, Hindistan’ın Mumbay kentine yapılan ve Pakistan gizli servisinin desteği ile gerçekleştirildiği iddia edilen kanlı terör saldırısı ile şok olurken, diğer bir gündem maddesi ise Afrika’da ortaya çıkan Somalili “dehşet” saçan korsanlar olmuştur ki, Somali’nin sahip olduğu zengin petrol ve uranyum kaynaklarını bu haberlerin yalnızca bir kısmında ve satır aralarında görebiliyorduk. Kısaca, Obama’ya çok net bir mesaj veriliyordu, esas görev Afrika ve Pakistan, diğerleri ise talidir. İşte Gazze’de yaklaşık bir aydır yaşanan ve insanlık adına utandıran görüntüler, tek taraflı savaş, bu gerçeği açıkça ortaya koymaktadır. Ortadoğu bir kez daha İsrail merkezli bir ABD dış politikasına teslim edilmiştir.

Maalesef Obama ilk iki ayındaki icraatleri ve duruşu ile yine Ramazan’ı dinleyecek olursak, “bir Afgan’ın, bir Iraklı’nın ya da bir Müslüman’ın yaşamının Amerikalınınkinden daha değersiz olmadığını sergileyecek simgesel eylemlerle” işe başlayamamıştır. Obama ve Değişim kelimelerini yan yana getirenlerin kastettikleri bu olmasa gerek. Bu gidişle, siyasal terimler sözlüğümüzde “Obamania”nın yerini “Obamalılaşmak” alacaktır ki, gönlümüz bunu hiç istememektedir. Obama’nın taşıdığı çoklu kimlikte ne yazık ki değişime ve açıklığa “semt” olarak dahi yer olmadığı görülmektedir. Son günlerde yaptığı iki açıklama incir çekirdeğini doldurmayacak şekildedir. Ve maalesef ABD Başkanları 2008 yılına son derece çarpıcı iki fotoğraf ile veda etmek zorunda kalmıştır: Birincisi 43. ABD Başkanı Bush’a Iraklı bir gazetecinin ayakkabısını fırlattığı poz, diğeri ise Gazze yanar ve yıkılırken, 44. ABD Başkanı Barack Obama’nın kendisini “makbul Başkan” sıfatını onaylatmak amacıyla çektirdiği gülümseyen yüzüyle “Golf Oynayan Başkan” pozudur. 20 Ocak 2009 günü edeceği yemin ile görevine resmi olarak başlayacak olan Barack H. Obama dileriz ki “Amerikan Realizminin” değil, dünya gerçeklerinin sözcüsü olur, yoksa gelecek dört sene hiç de dünyanın umduğu gibi geçmeyebilir.

Sernur Yassıkaya
Dış Politika Uzmanı
20.01.2009

TERÖR DALGASI (MI?)

2008-08-21T14:39:00.000+02:00

Türkiye’miz ve bölgemiz kritik bir virajdan geçiyor.

30 temmuz tarihinden bugüne bakıldığında iki önemli tespitte bulunabiliriz.

1) Terör saldırılarındaki artış
2) Türkiye’nin çevre bölgelerinde artan gerilim. Gürcistan bağlamında ABD ve Rusya arasında beklenen çatlağın ortaya çıkmasıdır.

Türkiye’miz Güngören’de 17 vatandaşımızın canına malolan saldırıdan bugüne kadar saldırılar artış göstermektedir.

Öyle ki bu saldırılar İstanbul’un orta yerinde 1. Ordu Komutanlığını hedef alacak ve havan kullanacak kadar gözü kara bir hal almış durumdadır.

Bununla birlikte terör eylemlerinin şehir merkezlerine ve Türkiye’nin, BTC hattı ve Mersin gibi stratejik noktalarını hedef almaya başladığı da gözlerden kaçmamaktadır.

Erzincan ve çevresinde terör saldırılarının yükselmesinin terör örgütünün olağan saldırılarından saymak mümkün değildir.

Bu noktada PKK’nın BTC projesi gündeme geldiğinde, hattın Türkiye güzergahlarında eylemlerini artırmasını hatırlamakta fayda vardır.

Erzincan ve Mersin hattında son günlerde meydan gelen ve belirli bir stratejinin izlendiği şüphesi uyandıran terör saldırıları, Nabucco projesi ile Türkiye’nin güvenilir ve güvenli ülke görünümü bozularak enerji köprüsü olma özelliğine ket vurulmak mı isteniyor sorusunu akla getirmektedir.

Bununla birlikte İstanbul, İzmir, Mersin gibi kentlerde meydana gelen bombalı saldırılar, bu kentlerimizde toplumsal fay hatlarını harekete geçirmeye dönük bilinçli eylemler olarak da görmek gerekmektedir.

AK Parti’nin Güneydoğu bölgesinde yerel seçimler sürecinde önemli başarılar elde edeceğine dönük sinyaller alınmaktadır. AK Parti’nin Güneydoğu özelinde tek seçenek olması kimi çevrelerin ortak hareket etmesi sonucunu doğurmuş olabilir.

AK Parti’nin söz konusu özelliğini hem zayıflatma hem de toplumsal gerilimi yükselterek, “DTP Aleyhine Açılan Kapatma Davasının Sonucuna” göre yerel seçimleri Kürt Sorunu ile ilgili bir “referanduma” dönüştürerek, bölgesel gerilimi artırma çabası olarak da okunabilir.

Bu noktada terör başı Abdullah Öcalan’ın söylediği ileri sürülen “Ergenekon Davasında Kürtler Taraf Olmasın” sözü dikkat çekmektedir.

Nabucco’nun aktif ve tam kapasite olarak çalışması için İran doğalgazının da hatta eklenmesi uzmanlarca zorunlu kabul edilmektedir.

Bununla birlikte Türkiye ile Ermenistan arasındaki yumuşama sinyalleri de Orta Asya enerji kaynaklarının Türkiye üzerinden taşınması için önemli bir olanak meydana getirmektedir.
Türkiye’nin aktif diplomasi girişimleri ile oluşturduğu bu alternatifi güzergahlar, Rusya’nın Avrupa üstündeki “enerji politikası”na önemli bir darbe olabilecektir.

Tabii bunun için Türkiye’nin içeride istikrarlı bir görünüm çizmesi şart gözükmektedir. Türkiye’nin bölgemizde artan etkinliği ile beraber, tükenme noktasına geldiği düşünülen terör örgütünün saldırılarına hem kırsal hem de kentte hız vermesi düşündürücüdür.

Terör saldırılarının hedef gözeterek meydana gelmesi ve bir artış trendi içinde olması, aklımıza en kötü ihtimal olan “terörle yıldırma” taktiğini getirmektedir. Özellikle son terör saldırılarının ikisinin canlı bomba olduğu belirtilen kişilerin araçlarını havaya uçurarak gerçekleştirmeleri, birbirinden kötü olasılıkları (Iraklaşma – Lübnanlaşma) da düşündürmektedir.

Açıktır ki, Mersin’de Erzincan’da, Yüksekova’da, İstanbul’da, İzmir’de hem askeri hem de emniyet kuvvetlerine dönük terör eylemleri ile “Terör Dalgası”nın Türkiye’yi vurması; Türkiye istikrarsızlaştırılmak mı isteniyor sorusuna sebep olmaktadır.

Bu terör dalgasının, Türkiye’yi güvenlik algılamalarının, sivil siyasetin önüne çıktığı 1991-1999 arasındaki döneme geri döndürerek, sivil siyasetin alanının daraltılıcı bir etki yapmasını amaçladığı da düşünülebilir.

Türkiye’deki tüm kesimlerin mutabık olacağına inandığım şekilde hiç kimse Türkiye’nin dünyaya gözlerini kapadığı ve neredeyse demokrasinin sözde kaldığı o dönemlere geri dönmek isteyeceğini düşünüyoruz.

Bu çerçevede AK Parti hükümetine acil olarak mevcut terör dalgasını görerek, gerekli siyasal, sosyal ve tabii ki güvenlik tedbirlerini almaya gerekirse bir acil eylem planı oluşturarak, Türkiye’yi istikrarsızlaştırmayı ve artan etkinliğine son vermeye dönük girişimleri, akamete uğratma yönünde çalışmalara başlamaya çağırıyor ve tedbir alması gereğini vurguluyoruz.

Söz konusu terör eylemleri karşısında sivil siyasetin inisiyatifi elinde tuttuğunu göstermesi gerektiğine inanıyoruz.

30 Temmuz sonrası AK Parti’nin sinir uçlarının ve reflekslerinin daha hassas olması gereken bir dönemden geçiyoruz. AK Parti’nin insan kaynağını en verimli şekilde kullanacağını ummaktayız.

AK Parti en üst kademeden başlayarak bu gelişmelere set çekecek ve Yasin Aktay’ın ifade ettiği gibi “Adalet” olgusunu öne çıkartacak adımlar atmak durumundadır.

Türkiye’yi içe kapatma çabasının bir aracı olduğu görülen terör dalgasına en iyi cevap, AK Parti’nin demokrasi, adalet ve refah üçgeninde atacağı adımlar olacaktır.

Sernur Yassıkaya
Dış Politika Uzmanı
21.08.2008

BATI’NIN KAYBOLAN AHLAKİ ÜSTÜNLÜĞÜ...

2008-08-21T14:36:00.000+02:00

Çoğu Batılı ve özellikle ABD’li uzman keşke Soğuk Savaş hiç bitmeseydi diye içinden geçiriyordur. Zaten Vladimir Putin bu yöndeki dileğini, “Sovyetler Birliği’nin yıkılışı 20. yüzyılın en büyük jeopolitik felaketidir” diyerek ortaya koymuştur. Özellikle Batılı ülkelerin 1990’dan sonra dünyanın çeşitli bölgelerinde gösterdikleri basiretsizlikler ve göz boyamalar, küreselleşme denen heyyula sonucu iyice göz önüne serilmesi, dünya kamuoyunun Batı’nın sahip olduğu değer yargılarını ve ahlakı sorgulamasına sebep olmuştur. Sovyetler Birliği zamanında Hollywood’un da yardımıyla, daha kötü örneğe karşı “ben doğru, dürüst ve iyiyim” mesajı veren ABD önderliğindeki Batı’nın foyası, Demir Perde yıkılınca ortaya çıkmıştır.

Küreselleşme ile birlikte bilgi ve iletişim olanaklarında olağanüstü artış diğer devletlere de imkan verildiği zaman gelişebilecekleri ve zenginleşebilecekleri yolunda umut olmuştur. Bu umudu en iyi şekilde değerlendiren ülkeler Çin ve Hindistan olmuştur. İki ülke de küreselleşmenin beraberinde getirdiği fırsatları, insan kaynağını belirli bir vizyon ve strateji çerçevesinde değerlendirdikleri taktirde avantaj sağlayacaklarını görmüşlerdir. İşin traji-komik yanı, 2050’lerde dünyanın süper güçleri olması beklenen iki ülkenin de bu gelişimlerini, Batılı ülkelerin küremize sunduğu iki olguyla, liberalizm ve kapitalizmi kendi değerleri çerçevesinde yorumlayarak elde etmiş olmalıdır. Kısacası, bugün Batı’ya rakip olan iki ülke ve çevre bölgeleri bir bakıma Batılı liberal-kapitalist aklın çocuklarıdırlar. Batı’da bilgi toplumunun yaşandığı süreçte, sanayi üretiminin de söz konusu ülkelere ve çevrelerine yerleşmesi, önemli bir itici güç oluşturmuştur. Sanırız ki Batı medeniyetinin, diğer medeniyetlere kibirli bakışı ve dünyada ne olacaksa bizim kontrolümüzde olur hesabı, Güneydoğu Asya’da pazardan dönmüştür. Güneydoğu Asya halkları Batı’nın algılayamayacağı bir hızla gelişim göstererek ve öğrenerek sadece taşeron olmayacaklarını göstermiştir. Batı toplumları hızla yaşlanır ve esnekliğini ve sözde dünyaya açıklığını kısmen ABD hariç kaybederken, Güneydoğu Asya ve kürenin diğer merkezlerinde, medeniyetlerin yeniden dirilişine şahit olmaktayız. İslam’ı da bu dirilen medeniyetler arasına yerleştirmekte herhangi bir sakınca görmüyorum.

Bugün, İslam dünyasında ve müslüman toplumlarda, dünya ile barışık, zamanın getirdiklerini benimsemiş genç bir nüfusun varlığı dikkat çekicidir. Bu genç nüfus İslam’ı kendileri için bir engel değil bilakis beraber yükselecekleri bir kimlik olarak görmektedirler. Türkiye’nin bu konuda önemli bir örnek olduğu kanaatindeyim.

İşte küreselleşmeyi yerel değerlere eklemleyerek meydana gelen bu yeni yükseliş, Batı’nın 400 yıldır sürdürdüğü ayrıcalığa karşı ilk önemli direniş hattını oluşturmaktadır. Bir yandan kadim Çin medeniyetinin, doğu ahlakının yükselişi, diğer yandan İslam’ın kendini yenilemesi, Batı’nın ahlaki üstünlüğüne karşı önemli rakipler olarak çıkmaktadır. Batı medeniyetinin pragmatist ve subjektif ahlaki yaklaşımının, Bosna’da, Irak’ta, Filistin’de, Afganistan’da, nükleer silahların yayılmasının engellenmesine dönük çifte standartta ve en son Doha Round’unda görüldüğü üzere şartlar aleyhine döndüğünde çözümsüzlüğü çözüm gören anlayışında iflas ettiğinin görülmesi, insanlığı yeni arayışlara itmektedir. Bu noktada insan hakları, hukukun üstünlüğü ve refah devleti gibi unsurların artık insanlığın ortak değeri olduğunu kaydetmemiz gerekiyor.

Batı artık bu değerlerin tek sahibi değildir. Avrupa’da ve ABD’de yükselen müslüman ve yabancı düşmanlığı, Batı medeniyetinin toleransının da sınırını göstermiştir. Almanya’da Türk kökenli vatandaşların görünürlüğünü artırdıkça mazur kaldıkları ayrımcılık bu sınırın en önemli göstergesidir. Kısacası diğerlerinin yükselişini görürken şimdilik sadece ahlaki açıdan da olsa Batı’nın düşüşüne şahit olmaktayız. Bir yanda piyasacılar, bir yanda askeri sanayi kompleks taraftarları tepişirken, dünyamız yeni bir doğumun eşiğinde. Söz konusu iki taraf bu doğumu engellemenin peşinde mi?

11 Eylül’den sonra dünyamızın çeşitli bölgelerinde artan gerilimler, Afrika’da yaşanan bölüşüm mücadelesi, Batı dünyasının haşarı çocuğu Rusya’nın önlenemez ve başına buyruk! yükselişi, İran ve İsrail’in karşılıklı salvoları. Son olarak Gürcistan üzerinden kopan kızılca kıyametle ortaya çıkan Batı iki yüzlülüğü, benim işgalim iyi benimkisi kötü, karşımızda sanki bir komedyanın oynadığı hissini uyandırıyor. Irak’ta, Filistin’de, Burma’da, Filipinler’de, Doğu Türkistan’da yaşananlar insanın aklına geldikçe Gürcistan paradosi insanın canını acıtıyor. İnsanın aklına ister istemez de takılıyor: sanki bir el dünyayı Rusya üzerinden yeniden ikiye bölerek, iktidarını devam ettirmek istiyor. 400 yıldır dünyayı yönetenler artık paylaşmayı da öğrenmeliler.

Sernur Yassıkaya
Dış Politika Uzmanı
19.08.2008

ADL VE DEĞİŞEN RESİM

2007-08-29T13:54:00.000+02:00

ADL VE DEĞİŞEN RESİM

Washington merkezli Anti-defamation League (ADL)’in “1915 Olayları”nı –Soykırım- olarak kabul ettiğini açıklaması, Türkiye’nin gündemine bomba gibi düştü. Esas ilginç olan nokta ise ADL’in bu açıklamasının Türk işadamı Jak Kamhi’ye “Devlet Üstün Hizmet Madalya”sının verilmesinin ardından gerçekleşmesidir.

Peki ADL’in aldığı bu kararı nasıl açıklayabiliriz? Öncelikle belirtmek gerekir ki İsrail’de ve Yahudi çevrelerinde “1915 Ermeni Olaylarına” dönük bir duygusal yakınlık bulunduğu bilinmektedir. Örneğin doksanlı yıllar içinde Sözde “Ermeni Soykırımı” İsrail’de ders kitaplarına konulmak istenmiş ancak bu girişim, hem Türkiye’deki Yahudi Topluluğu hem de Türkiye ile ilişkilere önem veren İsrail sağının girişimleri tarafından engellenmiştir.

Özellikle doksanlı yıllarda büyük gelişim gösteren ve “Stratejik Ortaklık” tanımı ile değerlendirilen Türkiye-İsrail ilişkileri için belli başlı fay hatları İsrail tarafı için Filistin sorunu iken Türk tarafı için “Kürt Meselesi” ve “1915 Ermeni Olayları” ile ilgili iddialar ola gelmiştir. Bu nedenle her iki tarafta bu sorunlar üzerinde hassasiyet göstermiş, ilişkileri bu sorunlar üzerinden tanımlamaktan dikkatle kaçınmışlardır.

İsrail sağının “Şahin Politikaları”nın doksanlı yıllarda Türkiye ile ilişkilerde kazandığı girişim üstünlüğü, ve Şimon Peres’in temsil ettiği “Arap ülkeleri ile ilişkileri geliştirme” yanlısı ekolün zayıflığı, Türkiye-İsrail ilişkilerinin realist politikalar çerçevesinde yürütülmesini kolaylaştırmıştır. Bu dönemde Türkiye’de de Ortadoğu politikalarına “Şahin” bir bakış açısıyla yaklaşan ve İsrail’in çıkarlarıyla Türkiye’nin çıkarlarını paralel gören askeri ve sivil bürokrasinin de varlığı göz önünde tutulmalıdır. Özellikle bu dönemde Türk siyasilerin Washington’daki Yahudi lobi kuruluşlarına (JINSA, ADL gibi) ziyaretlerini sıklaştırdıkları ve çeşitli ödüller aldıkları da görülmektedir. O nedenle Türkiye İsrail ilişkileri ile Türkiye’nin Washington’daki Yahudi Lobilerine yakınlığını ayrı düşünmek mümkün değildir.[1] Türkiye ne zaman İsrail ile ilişkilerini geliştirmişse, Washington’daki Yahudi Lobileriyle de ilişkilerde gelişme gözlenmektedir. O nedenle İsrail’in ADL’in açıklaması bizi bağlamaz açıklaması temelsizdir. Bu noktada sadece Türkiye’deki Yahudi toplumunun gelişmelerde bir etkisinin bulunmadığını belirtmemizde yarar vardır.

Resim Değişti!

Kimileri ADL’in son kararını, ABD iç siyasetindeki dengeler oyununa ve Ermeni Lobisi’nin baskısına indirgemeye çalışmaktalar. Ancak daha makro bir çerçevede soruna yaklaşmamız gerekmektedir. Bu da 11 Eylül 2001 terör saldırıları sonrası uluslararası sistemde meydana gelen değişiklikler ve bunun Türkiye’nin çevre jeopolitiğine yansımaları ile ilgilidir. ABD’nin 11 Eylül sonrası “hard power”ı öncelikli araç olarak kullanacağını açıklaması ve İsrail’in “sertlik” yanlısı politikalarına destek veren yaklaşımı, Ortadoğu’daki güçler dengesinde önemli kaymalara sebep olmuştur. Irak, Suriye, İran gibi ülkeler ABD’nin öncelikli hedefi haline gelirken Mısır, Ürdün, Suudi Arabistan gibi Sünni Arap ülkeleri de “Olağan Şüpheliler” durumuna düşmüştür. Libya gibi ülkeler ise zoru görüp mevcut rollerinden çark etmekten hiçbir beis görmemişlerdir. Bu resim, İsrail’e Ortadoğu’da önemli bir Stratejik Derinlik kazandırmış ve Türkiye ile mevcut ilişkilerde bir zemin kayması sonucunu doğurmuştur. Türkiye’de ise aynı dönemde, PKK terör örgütüne karşı askeri üstünlük sağlanmış, terör faaliyetleri tükenme noktasına ulaşmıştır. Suriye ile devletin en üst makamının temsiliyle, bir bahar havasına girilmiş, ilişkilerin seyri hızla pozitif bir görünüm almıştır. Irak ve İran ile ticari diplomasi alanında önemli adımlar atılmış, özellikle İran ile enerji alanında yakınlaşma gözlenmiştir. Yunanistan’la ilişkilerde görünüm son dönemlerde olmadığı kadar iyimserleşmiş ve en önemlisi AB ile ilişkilerde tam üyelik müzakerelerinin başlamasına vesile olacak yeni bir diplomatik girişim başlatılmıştır. Kısacası Türkiye’nin çevresiyle ilgili güvenlik endişeleri doksanlı yıllarla kıyaslanmayacak derecede azalmıştır. Tabii özellikle ikibinli yıllar ile Filistin Sorununun tekrar alevlenmesi ve bu soruna dönemin Türkiye hükümetlerinin duygusal yakınlığı da, Türkiye’nin İsrail ile ilişkilere daha mesafeli yaklaşması sonucunu doğurmuştur.[2]

Türkiye’de hem askeri hem de sivil kanadın söz konusu gelişmeler karşısına İsrail’e mesafeli bir yaklaşım geliştirdiklerini söylemek yanlış olmayacaktır. Evet, İsrail ile Güvenilir Denizkızı ya da Anadolu Kartalı adı altında askeri tatbikatlar yapılmaktaydı ancak bu tatbikatlar doksanlı yıllara oranla medyada daha az yer almakta, askeri yetkililer İsrail ile sıcaklaşan ilişkileri normalleşmeye bırakmaktaydılar.[3] Hatta Türkiye, Pakistan örneğinde görülebileceği gibi İsrail’in ilişki kurmak istediği ülkelerle aracı rolüne de soyunmaktadır ama bu ilişkilerin doksanlı yılların özellikle ikinci yarısında ki görünümünün bir yansımasını vermemektedir. Şu an Türkiye-İsrail ilişkileri “balayı havasını” terk etmiş, normalleşme seyrine girmiştir. Bu çerçevede iki ülkenin çıkarlarının ilişkilerin gelecekteki seyrini etkileyeceğini varsayabiliriz. Bu anlamda iki ülkenin güvenlik kaygılarında bir kaymanın yaşandığını söylemek yanlış olmayacaktır. İsrail, çevre bölgesinde yükselen İslami hareketlerden ve bunların HAMAS ile Hizbullah gibi örgütler vasıtasıyla somutlaşmasından rahatsızlık duyarken, Türkiye özellikle Irak merkezli güvenlik tehditlerinden çekinmektedir. İsrail zayıf ve parçalanmış hatta üzerinde bir “Kürt devleti” kurulmuş Irak’ı güvenlik çıkarları için rahatlatıcı bir etken olarak algılamaktayken; Türkiye, Kuzey Irak kaynaklı PKK tehdidini ve Barzani eliyle hayata geçirilmek istenen bir “Kürt Devleti”ni kendi ulusal bütünlüğü açısından öncelikli tehdit olarak algılamakta ve İsrail’in bu bölgeye verdiği destekten rahatsızlık duymaktadır. Bu rahatsızlığı Seymour Hersch dünya kamuoyuna taşıyarak açığa da çıkarmıştır. İsrail ise İran’ın bölgede etkisini artırmasını, nükleer teknoloji de attığı adımları ve HAMAS ve Hizbullah gibi örgütleri desteklemesini ulusal güvenliği açısından kabul edilemez buluyor. İşte burada karşımıza paradoksal bir yapı çıkmaktadır. Zayıf bir Irak, İran’ın bölgede etkinliğini artırmaktadır. Bununla beraber kurulacak yeni Irak’ta da Şii etkinliği gözle görünür bir biçimde artacaktır. İşte buradaki kilit Irak’taki Kürt varlığıdır. Açıktır ki Barzani yönetimindeki Kürtler bu tarihi fırsatı bir ulus-devlet varlığına büründürmek istemekte ancak 20’inci yüzyılı ıskalamanın “talihsizliğini!” yaşamaktadırlar. Bu noktada İsrail için kötülerin arasında en iyi seçeneğin bölgeyi sürekli diken üstünde tutacak bir “Kürt Devleti” olduğunu da gözden kaçırmamak gerekmektedir.

Türkiye ise giderek artan enerji talebini karşılama ve enerji alternatiflerini geliştirme sorunu karşısında öncelikli alternatif olarak İran’ı görmektedir. Bununla birlikte Türkiye, İran’la son 20 yıl içinde ilk kez bir çıkar paralelliğini Kuzey Irak ve enerji politikaları merkezli olarak kurmuştur. Bu nedenle zaten ortada Irak’la ilgili bir gerilim merkezi dururken, Türkiye’nin hem Suriye hem de İran’da yeni gerilim merkezleri oluşmasına sıcak bakması safdillikten öteye bir arayış olmayacaktır. İşte, Türkiye-İsrail hatta Türkiye-ABD ilişkilerinin sıkıştığı üçgen de (İran-K.Irak ve enerji) burasıdır. Türkiye ikibinli yıllar ile beraber, ittifak çıkarları ötesinde ulusal çıkarların maksimize etmeye öncelik verdiği pro-aktif, barış eksenli bir dış politikayı uygulamaya koymuştur. Bu dış politika çerçevesinde kimi zaman çıkarları ABD ile İsrail’den farklılaşabilmekte bu da ilişkilerde yeni gerilim alanları oluşturabilmektedir. Nasıl ki Türkiye’nin iç siyasetinde küreselleşmenin ve bilgi çağının getirdikleri sonucu yeni bir düzenleme oluşuyorsa, dış politikada da bu sistemik değişim etkileri hissediliyor Türkiye üstünde. Bu ayrımı hisseden büyük güçler de Türkiye’nin önüne tarihin yükünü koymaktan çekinmiyorlar. Geçtiğimiz dönemlerde Türkiye’nin çıkarlarını gözettiklerini öne sürenler ama hiçbir zaman “Demokles’in Kılıcı”nı Türkiye’nin üstünden indirtmeyenler, gönüllerinde olanı dillerine aktarmaktadırlar. Bu durum bize Türkiye’nin kendi çıkarlarını savunmayı geçmiş dönemlerde kimlerin eline bıraktığını ve ulusal çıkarların savunulmasından sorumlu tüm kesimlerin nasıl bir atalet içinde kaldığının en önemli göstergesini oluşturmaktadır. Gelinen nokta bize Türkiye’nin çıkarlarını uluslararası arenada savunacak yeni bir “Dil”in ve “Girişimin” oluşturulması gereğini işaret etmektedir.

Kabul etmek gerekir ki Türk dış politikasında yeni bir döneme girilmiştir ve bu yeni dönemde Türkiye için kalıcı dostlukları ya da müttefiklikleri bulunmamaktadır. Rusya’ya enerji alanında % 65 oranında bağlı olan bir Türkiye’den nasıl ki Mavi Akım 2’yi destekleyip “Ukraynalaşması” beklenemezse, aynı şekilde ABD’nin tehditleri nedeniyle, İran’la enerji işbirliğine girmemesi de düşünülemez. Evet, “Filler” ve “Ayılar”la aynı odaya sığmaya çalışıyoruz; ya birlikte yaşayacağız ya da oda başımıza göçecek. Bu nedenle yalnızca Türkiye’nin değil diğer aktörlerinde dikkatli davranmaları gerekmektedir. Camdan evin varsa komşuna taş atmayacaksın! Türkiye gibi yer alacağı tarafın terazide ağır basmasını sağlayacak bir ülkenin elbette tek başına bırakılmayacağı açıktır ama zorlamanın da kırılmasına yol açacağı görülmektedir? İşte ADL son “ince” manevrasıyla –kırmadan- Türkiye’ye mesaj verme gayretine girdi. Açıktır ki ADL’in son girişimi satranç tahtasında “Veziri” Şah’ın önüne sürmekten farksızdır. Vezir’i yersen Şah’ın bir hamle daha imkanı yapma imkanı kalacaktır. ADL’in aldığı bu tarihi karar Türkiye-İsrail-ABD üçgeninde yeni bir dönemin başladığının da habercisidir. ADL de facto olarak “1915 Ermeni Olaylarını” –Soykırım- olarak kabul ettiğini ortaya koymuştur. ADL’in aldığı kararı yumuşatma gösterisi ise en hafif manasıyla göz boyamadır. Şimdi, Nisan 2008’i bekleyeceğiz; ADL’in oluşturduğu Tsunami’nin zararı ondan sonra daha net görülebilecektir.

Sernur Yassıkaya

27/08/2007

[1] Bu konu ile ilgili olarak bakınız: John Mearsheimer-Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby, London Review of Books, Vol. 28 No. 6, 23 Mart 2006

[2] Bu noktada Türk Genelkurmay’ının da İsrail’e karşı göreceli bir mesafe aldığı da görülmektedir.

[3] Örneğin, dönemin Genelkurmay Başkanı Hüseyin Kıvrıkoğlu kendisinden önceki meslektaşının aksine görev süresi boyunca herhangi bir İsrail ziyaretinde bulunmamıştır.

ÇİN SEDDİ ÜZERİNDE TANGO

2007-06-26T08:59:00.000+02:00

ÇİN SEDDİ ÜZERİNDE TANGO[i]

Türkiye, son dönemdeki gelişmeler neticesinde içine kapanık bir ruh haline bürünmüşken, dış dünyaya bakışımız Kuzey Irak ve Sarkozy’nin popülist konuşmaları çerçevesinde şekillenirken, bize çok yakın ama bir o kadar da uzak kesimlerinde dünyadaki bölüşüm mücadelesini etkileyecek, satranç hamleleri yapılıyor. Orta Asya’da enerji kaynakları üzerinden yaşanan güç mücadelesi tüm hızıyla sürüyor. Rusya’nın enerjiyi kullanarak, Avrupa’yı tirtir titrettiği, ABD’ye başkaldırdığı bir ortamda, Çin gün geçtikçe yükselen enerji talebi karşısında Orta Asya’nın/Kazakistan’ın engin enerji kaynaklarına göz dikiyor. Çin Seddi üzerinden dünyaya ritmik adımlarla mesaj gönderiyor. “Büyük Oyun”un içinde ben de varım, diyor. Çin, artan enerji talebi karşısında alternatif enerji kaynakları edinmek istemektedir. Bu arayışta kaynakların stratejik konumu da önem kazanmaktadır. Çin’e Ortadoğu ve Afrika’dan gelecek petrol ve diğer enerji kaynaklarının ABD’nin 7. filosunun kontrolünde bulunan Doğu Asya denizlerinden, Malaka Boğazından ve Hint Okyanusu’ndan geçmesi, Çin’in Rus ve Kazak petrol ve doğalgaz kaynaklarına yönelmesine sebep olmaktadır. Karadan geçecek petrol ve doğalgaz boru hatlarında Rusya ve Orta Asya Çin için birer “Ulusal Güvenlik” seçeneğine dönüşüyor.

Halihazırda Çin, Afrika’ya, Sudan’a (Sudan’da Çin Silahlı Kuvvetlerinin varlığı bilinmektedir ve Darfur krizine bu açıdan da bakılmasında fayda vardır) yaptığı yatırımlar ve alternatif siyasi/ekonomik yaklaşımı, İran’la geliştirdiği ilişkileri ve Suudi Arabistan’la yakınlaşmasıyla Washington’da Kongrenin koridorlarını ve Oval Ofisi derin düşüncelere daldırtıyor. Şimdi Çin bir adım daha atarak, Kazakistanla geliştirmek istediği ayrıcalıklı ve belki de stratejik ilişkiler ile Orta Asya’nın enerji sahnesinin dominant oyuncusu olmak istiyor.

Çin, dünyanın ikinci büyük petrol tüketicisi. Tüketiminin yaklaşık % 50’sini ithal ediyor. 2030 kadar petrol ithalatının 4 katına çıkması bekleniyor!

Çin Kazakistan’a yaptığı olağanüstü yatırımlar ile de öncelikle bu ülkenin sonrasında ise Orta Asya’nın ana oyuncusu olmak istediğini göstermiştir. Çin’in söz konusu bölgede edindiği ve edineceği kaynaklar ile İpek Yoluna “Enerji” katacağı ve kaynaklarını çeşitlendirmede yeni jeopolitik avantajlar sağlayacağı beklenmektedir.

Tabii Çin’in Kazakistan’a yaptığı yatırımlar sadece enerji güvenliği ve talebi ölçütleriyle ele alınmamalıdır: Çin bir taşla aslında pek çok kuşu da vurmak istemektedir:

1) Kazakistan’la ilişkilerin seviyesini stratejik anlamda geliştirerek, sınır güvenliğini sağlamak,
2) Xinjang-Uygur Özerk bölgesinde, ki bu bölge enerji kaynaklarındaki zenginliği ile bilinmektedir, mevcut etnik kargaşayı kontrol altında tutmak,
3) Orta Asya’da büyüyen tüketici pazarına giriş imkanlarını sağlama almak.

Çin enerjiden başlayarak tüm yukarıda saydığımız hedeflerini, kendisini alternatif bir siyasal ve ekonomik model olarak sunarak hayata geçirmek istemektedir. Bu yaklaşımın yukarıda ifade ettiğim gibi özellikle Afrika ülkelerinde önemli taraftar edindiği görülmektedir. Örneğin Çin yatırım yapacağı Afrika ülkelerinde yolsuzluk, insan hakları gibi araçları bir ön şart olarak sunmamakta, adeta “rejime değil işime bakarım” prensibini yürütmektedir. Bu yaklaşım ise kimi görece küçük ülkelere batı karşısında bir denge politikası izlemelerini de yolunu açmaktadır.

İşte Çin’in Kazakistan ile geliştirdiği özellikli ilişkilerde, Kazakistan’ı Rusya’nın pençelerinden kurtulmanın bir yolu olarak görülmektedir. Çin ve Kazakistan 1993 tarihinden bugüne çeşitli alanlarda 11 adet işbirliği anlaşması imzalamıştır. İkili ticaret rakamları 2005 yılında son 14 yıllık periyotta 16 kat artarak 6,8 milyar dolarlık önemli bir hacme ulaşmıştır –Bu rakamın yakın zamanda 10 milyar dolara çıkması hedeflenmektedir-. Çin’in Kazakistan’da enerji alanında özellikle upstream yatırımlara yöneldiği görülmektedir. Tabii Çin’in Kazakistan’a bu denli yoğun ilgisindeki kritik kavşak’ın 2004 yılında Rusya ile Çin arasında yapılması düşünülen Angarsk-Daqing hattının son anda Ruslarca iptal edilmesi olduğu da belirtilmelidir. Söz konusu gelişme sonrasında Kazakistan ile Çin arasında günlük 200 bin varil taşıma kapasiteli bir petrol boru hattının 2005 yılında hayata geçirildiği ve hattın 400 bin varillik bir hacme genişletilmesinin, tüm maliyetinin Çin tarafından karşılanması şartıyla, düşünüldüğü bilinmektedir. Bu yolla hem Çin kendisi için daha güvenli ve ilk elden bir hattı garantiye alırken, Kazakistan’da Rusya karşı, enerji ihracında kendisine bağımlı olmadığını gösterme fırsatı edinmiştir. Çin ile Kazakistan arasında petrol alanında gelişen ilişkilerin doğal gaz alanında da gelişmesi beklenmektedir. Çin merkezi yönetiminin son 11’inci 5 yıllık planında doğal gazın tüm enerji tüketimindeki payının % 2,8’den % 5,3’e çıkması planlanmaktadır. Ancak Çin’in doğalgaza yönelmesindeki en büyük engelin maliyetler olduğu da bir gerçektir. Bilindiği üzere Çin’in büyük şehirlerinde aşırı kömür kullanımından ve hızlı zenginleşmeden doğan yoğun araç trafiği nedenlerden dolayı, hayati riske varacak derecede hava kirliliği görülmektedir ve doğalgaz bu tehdidin çözümlerinden birisi olabilecektir.

Sonuçta Çin, China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), China National Petrochemical Corporation (Sinopec) and CNOOC gibi şirketleriyle, Afrika ve çevresinde başlattığı atağın bir benzerini Orta Asya’da gerçekleştirmek istemektedir. Ayrıca Çin Şangay İşbirliği Örgütü’nü (SCO)/ Şangay Beşlisini de kullanarak Kazakistan’a 1997 yılından bugüne önemli yatırımlarda bulunmuştur. Açıktır ki Çin, Orta Asya’da yapacağı yatırımlar sonucunda önemli bir stratejik kazanımda elde etmiş olacak, Basra Körfezi, Hint Okyanusu ve Çin denizindeki ABD askeri üstünlüğü karşısında, söz konusu bir gerilimde, stratejik olarak bu gerilimden uzak ve güvenilir enerji hatlarına ulaşma imkanına sahip olabilecektir. Bu noktada en önemli sorunun Çin’in enerji gereksinimine duyan bölgeler ülkenin en Doğusunda yer alırken, alternatif olarak gördüğü ülkelerin enerji kaynakları ise en Batı bölgelerde yer alması ve bunun da maliyetler ile zaman yönünden dezavantaj oluşturmasıdır. Diğer önemli bire nokta, Çin’in özellikle Körfez kaynaklarına ulaşmada ve dış dünyaya açılmada İran’ı bir köprü başı olarak görmesi’dir. Çin’den başlayarak, Kazakistan, Türkmenistan yoluyla İran’a uzanacak ve SWAP yapılacak kaynaklar, Çin’in stratejik derinliğini kuvvetlendirecektir. Ancak şurası bir gerçektir ki, Çin’in Orta Asya’da yaptığı her hamle ve Çin-Orta Asya petrol boru hattını SWAP ve diğer yöntemlerle Körfez bölgesine ulaştırmayı planlayan Sino-Arap petrol güzergahı, Türkiye’nin enerji köprüsü olma rolüne darbe indirirken, Nabucco gibi Avrupa için alternatif enerji güzergahlarının da ölü doğması sonucunu verecektir. Çin’in bu alanda geliştirdiği projeler, Rus-Çin veya Çin/ABD balayının da orta vadede sert bir fırtınaya dönüşmesi sonucunu doğurabilecektir. Kısacası, Türk karar alıcılarının Çin’in enerji alanındaki hamlelerini iyi takip etmesi, uluslararası ilişkiler ve enerji güvenliği konusundaki pozisyonlarını bu çerçevede gözden geçirmesi bir zorunluluktur. Çünkü karşımızda ne istediğini bilen, Neo-Makyavelist anlayışa sahip bir ülke bulunmaktadır.

Sernur Yassıkaya

[i] Sayın Mehmet Öğütçü’ye katkılarından dolayı teşekkürlerimi sunarım.

2007-05-18T15:10:00.000+02:00

Putin and the pipelines
Simon Tisdall
May 17, 2007 10:00 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/simon_tisdall/2007/05/putin_and_the_pipelines_moscow.html

European Union efforts to loosen Russia's energy grip by seeking alternative supplies from central Asia via the Caucasus suffered a stunning setback this week. But even before President Putin agreed deals expanding his control of the gas and oil exports of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, Europe's drive to diversify was running on empty.
Russia supplies about 25% of Europe's gas and a rising proportion of its oil. That is increasingly seen as a strategic weakness that could leave the continent vulnerable to politically motivated energy blackmail. This is the fate that allegedly befell Ukraine and Belarus last year. Lithuania is currently under similar pressure after Moscow cut oil deliveries.
Energy security will figure high on the agenda at tomorrow's EU-Russia summit in Samara. A key aim is to induce Moscow to sign up to an energy charter, a set of rules covering trade, investment and transportation of oil and gas. But experts predict the Kremlin will continue to resist the scheme.
Russia is focusing instead on increasing its market dominance from production through to the point of sale by expanding its investments in Europe (while denying European businesses reciprocal access). The state-controlled energy giant Gazprom now has a stake in 16 of the EU's 27 countries. And while the EU remains divided on the question of how to respond, the Russians are busy maximising their advantage.
"Gazprom already has direct access to end consumers in three of the biggest EU gas markets: Italy, Germany and France," said Katinka Barysch in a study published by the Centre for European Reform. "In the UK, it hopes to raise its market share to 10% by the end of the decade. Not content with controlling pipelines, Gazprom is building power plants and gas storage facilities in various EU countries."
Russia's other main tactic is forging bilateral deals that undermine a collective pan-European approach. Its most spectacular success was agreement with Germany on a Baltic pipeline that is to bypass Poland. But Mr Putin has also dangled the prospect of individual supply-and-distribution arrangements with Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and a host of other energy-hungry EU members.
Moscow's aggressive, and increasingly successful, attempts to entrench its dominant position have also undercut political and financial support for alternative European supply projects that would bypass Russia. One is the so-called Nabucco pipeline to bring gas from the Caspian, which may not now go ahead.
Russia's weekend deals with Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have also raised possibly terminal doubts about the viability of US and European-backed ideas for a central Asia pipeline. Russia's energy minister, Viktor Khristenko, dismissed it this week as a "political project" that was unlikely ever to materialise.
"Russia is increasingly setting the agenda for EU-Russia relations while EU policymakers are struggling," Ms Barysch said.
Russia is not having it all its own way. EU foreign ministers agreed a counter-offensive this week to intensify energy and other cooperation with Black Sea countries, including new neighbours Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Acting unilaterally, Poland is leading efforts to build east European links with Caspian Basin energy producers.
All the same, effective EU action to diversify energy supply faces particular difficulties that do not trouble Moscow. These include concerns about good governance and human rights in partner countries.
The political show trial of a former economy minister mounted this week by the democratically-challenged rulers of Azerbaijan, a key producer and transit route for central Asian gas and oil, has highlighted these contradictions. Azerbaijan's 2005 presidential election was blatantly stolen. It has an appalling human rights record and the use of torture is said to be endemic.
But for now at least, all this is largely tolerated in the west -- just as long as Azerbaijan's feudal oligarchs keep on the "right side" in the high-stakes energy war with Russia.

2007-05-18T15:09:00.000+02:00

Valued-based foreign policy
By Anne-Marie Slaughter
Thursday, May 17, 2007

PRINCETON, New Jersey:
American foreign policy has lost its compass. Voters across the United States, increasingly opposed to the war in Iraq and increasingly certain that the country as a whole is going in the wrong direction, are uncertain about the role that America should play in the world.
Some argue not only for pulling out of Iraq but for pulling back more generally, concentrating on America's broken health care and educational systems rather than on building democracy half a world a way.
Others would forsake a values-based foreign policy altogether and return to Kissingerian realism, in which the nature of a particular foreign government is far less important than its power and its ability to help further U.S. national interests. History tells us, however, that neither of these approaches has much staying power with the American public.
Isolationism is a nonstarter in a 21st century world of intense economic and security interdependence. And it is the backlash against Kissingerian realism - against the very idea that U.S. foreign policy would not be guided in some way by American values - that fed the neoconservative movement in the first place.
A more sustainable approach must start with a different question. How do we stand for our values in the world in a way that is consistent with our values?
The first step is to agree on what those values are. If asked to list them, virtually all Americans would talk about the belief in liberty and democracy. Most would talk about equality; many would add justice. These core values have been enshrined in two centuries of civics classes, Fourth of July speeches, inaugural addresses, poems, anthems, pledges and creeds.
I would add three more: tolerance, humility and faith. Tolerance because liberty and democracy are impossible without it. Humility because it is deeply engrained in our founders' vision of the American mission in the world; because it is indispensable to good leadership; and because it is the flip side of our belief in progress. And faith because faith in our ideals and in the very idea of progress is at the core of what many other peoples see as a distinctively American optimism.
These values are not abstract concepts. They have taken on specific meanings through the stories that make up American history, stories of struggle and persistence against tall odds.
Stories of the Puritans, the Quakers, the Catholics, the Presbyterians, the Mennonites, the Moravians, the Lutherans, the Amish, as well as Jews, Muslims and countless other sects seeking relgious freedom.
Stories of a relatively small number of propertied white men seeking to govern themselves in America's early days, and of white men of lesser means, black men, and women of all races and means determined to secure the right to vote in the years that followed.
Stories of tolerance, a necessary tool to weld a great multicultural nation together. Stories of humility, like the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony offering his shining vision of a city on a hill but telling its occupants to "walk humbly with their god." And stories of faith in our values, in our can-do spirit and in our belief that we can be a force for good in the world.
An American foreign policy that is conducted consistently with our values would look to our past not to glory in it, but rather to remind ourselves and the world at large of our imperfections, our mistakes and our struggles to live up to our own standards.
It would see the United States as a leading democracy, but hardly as the only model for new democracies. Instead, it would work with the European Union, Japan, India, South Africa, Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, Brazil, Argentina, South Korea and countless other countries that are trying to achieve liberty, democracy, justice, equality and tolerance on their own terms.
It would remember our founders' creed: Our values are not only American values, but universal values.
Above all, a value-based foreign policy must move beyond rhetoric. It must meet the challenges of the 21st century in a host of very specific ways that themselves demonstrate how much we value liberty, democracy, justice, equality, tolerance, humility and faith.
It will be a long road back to the high ground, but our true values are still the best compass.
Anne-Marie Slaughter is dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the author of "The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World."

2007-05-18T15:04:00.000+02:00

Eastern European woes ruin Merkel's grand plans for EU alliance with Russia

· Poland and Lithuania wanted summit called off · Germany had hoped for a deal on climate changeIan Traynor in Brussels and Luke Harding in MoscowFriday May 18, 2007
GuardianGermany's hopes of striking a new grand bargain between Russia and Europe, locking both into a close embrace for years to come, have been dashed before a crucial EU-Russia summit.
As the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, flew to Samara on the Volga last night for dinner with President Vladimir Putin and to open today's summit, it was clear that the meeting was being hijacked by a long list of disputes focused on eastern Europe and the Balkans.
Currently chairing the EU, Germany has prepared the summit as an opportunity to secure Russian agreements on energy security, human rights and climate change. But Berlin's wooing of Moscow has fallen foul of the worsening estrangement between President Putin and the west in recent months.
Tension between Russia and the west, hostility towards Russia from the new eastern European members of the EU (and their suspicion of Berlin), and President Vladimir Putin's brash assertion of regained Russian power have all compounded the mood of gloom.
Ms Merkel has won widespread plaudits this year for her steering of the EU. But Germany has a huge stake in the Samara summit and it looks like being a failure for Ms Merkel.
The new EU member states of Poland and Lithuania have been arguing this week for the summit to be called off, and criticising the German preparations. For historical reasons, the east Europeans are highly sensitive to any sign of Germany cutting deals with Russia over their heads.
The immediate cause of the impasse is a Polish veto on launching negotiations on what is known as the partnership and cooperation agreement, or PCA, between the EU and Russia - because of a continuing Russian ban on Polish meat imports.
But the roots of the estrangement lie in the transformation of the EU with the entry of 10 central European and Balkan states since 2004 - all of them former Soviet satellites nursing grievances to varying degrees against Russia. Vladimir Chizhov, Russia's ambassador in Brussels, said the relationship was "more complicated" since the accession of Poland, the Baltic states, and other former Soviet dependencies: "Some of these countries continue to treat Russia in a peculiar manner."
Both sides have a huge stake in a successful partnership. Many European countries, especially eastern Europe and Germany, depend on Russian gas and oil supplies, while more than half of Russia's trade is with the EU. But the eastern Europeans are incensed at Russian efforts to play off "old" versus "new" Europe and at the condescending tone they hear from Moscow. On Wednesday the Kremlin's EU envoy, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, said some of the eastern European governments had "complexes". "Our old and trusted EU partners recognise this," he said, while accusing Estonia of barbarism and of trying to rewrite the history of the second world war.
Ms Merkel had made the ambitious new pact with Russia a centrepiece of her EU presidency, a comprehensive deal designed to replace a 10-year agreement that expires this year. Instead, the summit could turn into a showdown.

TÜRKİYE KAYBEDİYOR; FARKINDA MISINIZ?

2007-05-03T13:03:00.000+02:00

TÜRKİYE KAYBEDİYOR; FARKINDA MISINIZ?

Son bir hafta içindeki gelişmeler bizi; ülkemiz gençliğini geleceğe bakışında karamsarlığa sürüklüyor. Biz, Türk gençliği, daha fazla demokrasi, daha fazla özgürlük ve daha fazla maddi refah ve zenginlik istiyoruz. Avrupa Birliğine üyelik çabalarını da bu nedenle önemsiyoruz. Bizler Türkiye’nin laik, sosyal bir hukuk devleti olarak geleceğe güvenle yürümesini; korkulardan, evhamlardan uzaklaşmış olarak büyümesini istiyoruz. Hukukun millet için olduğu, demokrasiyi koruduğu bir Türkiye Cumhuriyeti istiyoruz.

Son haftalardaki gelişmelere bakıldığında, ülkemizi sevmeyenlerin, yaşananlar karşısında güldüklerine ve ellerini ovuşturduklarını görmemek mümkün değil. Son ayların en sıcak konuları, PKK terörizmini, Kuzey Irak’ı ve Kerkük’ün durumunu adeta unuttuk. Türkiye’nin Ortadoğu’daki gelişmelerden dışlanmasını göremedik. Türkiye’mizin önümüzdeki 15 yılda Türk silahlı kuvvetlerinin modernizasyonu ve kendi savunma sanayisini geliştirmesi için 30 milyar dolara yakın bir kaynağa ihtiyacı var. Peki bu kaynak nasıl elde edilebilir? Siyasi ve ekonomik kriz içinde yaşayan, sürekli iç tehdit algılamasını varlık nedeni sayan, küreselleşen dünya ile bütünleşememiş, bir nevi Kuzey Koreleşmiş bir ülkenin 30 milyar doları savunmasına harcama imkanı olabilir mi? Bu 30 milyar dolarlık kaynak nasıl elde edilebilir, kimilerinin hayallerini süsleyen dışa kapalı bir Türkiye’de? Unutmayalım ki daha 5 yıl öncesinde GSMH’miz 180 milyar dolardı! 30 milyar doların 6 katı! Yani sadece modernizasyon için Türkiye toplam gelirinin 6’da birini harcayacak; peki ya gündelik savunma ihtiyaçları? Bir o kadar da onu hesaplarsak, Türkiye’nin yemeden içmeden üretmeden aynı K. Kore misali sadece savunma harcaması yapması gerekecek. Dün bir televizyonda bir gazetemizin Ankara temsilcisinin Genelkurmay Başkanımızın 28 Ağustos 2006 tarihinde yaptığı bir konuşmaya atfettiği sözlerini hayretle izledim. Bu yazarımızın Genelkurmay Başkanımızın sözlerinden cımbızla seçerek aldığı sözlere önem verseniz sanırsanız ki, Türkiye’de bir askeri yönetim var. İç savunmadan, dış savunmadan, ekonomiden, yürütmeden onlar sorumlu! İşte bu yazarımızın ve onunla benzer düşünce sahiplerinin hayal edebildikleri Türkiye budur! Bu yorum ne yazık ki peygamber ocağı ordumuza yönelik yıpratıcı sözlerdir. Bu şekilde bir düşünce tarzı ne yazık ki asırlar öncesinde kalmıştır ve iyi niyetten yoksundur! Açıktır ki sivil ve demokratik bir yönetimden söz edemezsek, 21’inci yüzyılda güvenlikten de bahsedemeyiz! İş bölümünün giderek arttığı küresel dünyada, tümevarım yapmak ancak karanlığa saplanmaktır. Bu vizyona ve dahi misyona sahip kişilerin varlığıyla, kim bilir, her günü bir cehennem gününden farksız olan güneyimizdeki Irak bile petrol ve diğer doğal kaynakları ile giderek zenginleşirken biz gittikçe daha fakirleşeceğiz.

Tabii bu düşünce tarzının dış uzantıları da yok değil! Onlara göre Türkiye, karşıymış gibi yaptıkları ancak içten içe benimsedikleri Baas tipi bir rejimle yönetilmeli, coğrafyası ile bağları kesilmeli hatta yeri gelirse Avrupa Birliği’ne de çok yaklaşmamalı. Ne lazım, Avrupa Birliği Türkiye’deki demokratik sürecin ve sivil yönetimin devam etmesini isteyebilir, hükümetlere destek olur, olmazsa da Türkiye ile köprüleri atabilir. Türkiye’de fakir, diktatoryal, Ortadoğu tipi bir Baas rejimi olur! Açıktır ki geldiğimiz süreçte AB’nin Türkiye’deki son gelişmelere verdiği tepkilerden hoşnut olmayan kişiler vardır. Hem iç hem de dış kamuoyunda mevcut bu kişilere göre AB, Türkiye’deki hassas sistemin farkında değil, gerçi AB dünyadaki mevcut tehditlere karşı da duyarsız. Evet, maalesef bu kişiler katıldıkları uluslararası toplantılarda Türkiye adına konuştuklarını iddia ediyorlar ve yanıltıyorlar. Ancak içimizi rahatlatan gelişen iletişim teknolojisi sayesinde dışarıda, bu kişilerden çok daha iyi şekilde Türkiye’yi analiz eden ve anlayan, “yabancı” olarak nitelediğimiz dostlar var. Kim daha yabancı onları okuyunca daha açıkça görebiliyorsunuz.

Ne yazık dışarıda kimileri iç çatışma senaryoları da yazmaktalar. Türkiye’yi azınlıklara bölerek, bu azınlıklar üstünden yönetilmesi gerektiğini savunan analizciler var. Nasıl ki Ortadoğu’yu Sünni-Şii diye böldüler ve yüzlerce yıllık yaraları kaşımaktan çekinmediler, şimdi de Anadolu topraklarında kimi yaralar oluşturmak ve kaşımak istiyorlar. Binlerce yıldır aynı topraklar üzerinde yaşamış insanlarımızı bölmek istiyor ve birbirleri üstünde tahakküm kurma planları yapıyorlar. Bu planları hazırlayanlar, raporlayanlar, Türk milletinin ortak değerlerini birer birer yoketmek için çaba harcıyorlar. Mensup oldukları kurumların görüşleri doğrultusunda Türkiye için rapor hazırlıyorlar. Ama milletimiz inanıyorum ki bu planları, birlikte yaşama iradesi göstererek boşa çıkartacaktır.

İşte Ak Parti iktidarı süresince kimi aksaklıklar olsa da, ki bu doğaldır çünkü mükemmel bir yönetişim sistemi henüz bulunmadı, söz konusu gelişmelerin önünü tıkayacak, ulusal birliği sağlayacak ve sivilleşmeyi sağlayacak temelleri attılar. Bu temeller sayesindedir ki kimi yazarların orta sınıf olarak nitelediği insanlarımız geçtiğimiz hafta sonu ve öncesinde meydanlarda toplanarak demokratik taleplerini, kimi bürokrasi aşıklarının arzusunun aksi istikametinde sergilediler. 2000 ve 2001 krizleri ile bu orta sınıf neredeyse kaybolmuştu! İşte Ak Parti, Özal’ın orta direğini ayağa kaldıran isim olmuştur. Yani meydanlarda toplanan yüzbinler mevcudiyetlerini özde Ak Partiye borçludurlar. Ak Parti’nin sergilediği siyasal ve ekonomik istikrar tablosudur ki, bizlere demokrasinin nimetlerinden yararlanmamız sonucunu doğurdu. İşte biz Türk gençliği olarak bu nimetlerden daha çok yaralanmak istiyoruz.

Çevremizde ve küresel sistemde 21’inci yüzyılın bölüşüm savaşı verilirken, Türkiye’mizin iç çekişmelerle vakit kaybetmesini istemiyoruz. Azınlığın çoğunluğa, çoğunluğun da azınlığı tahakküm altına alındığı bir Türkiye istemiyoruz. 10 yılda bir tekrarlanan filmleri izlemekten sıkıldık, izlemek istemiyoruz. Biz laik, sosyal ve hukuk devleti çerçevesine sahip, daha demokratik ve daha müreffeh bir Türkiye istiyoruz. İç ve dış güvenliğini siyasal ve ekonomik istikrarla sağlamış bir Türkiye istiyoruz. Çevresine güven ve umut veren bir Türkiye istiyoruz. Evet, Türk gençliği bunu istiyor, inanmak isteseniz de istemeseniz de, o halde sesleniyorum; O halde büyüklerimize seslenmek istiyorum: Türkiye kaybediyor; farkında mısınız?

Sernur Yassıkaya

Rice on The Right Tracks

2007-04-20T16:13:00.001+02:00

Rice on The Right Tracks
By David Ignatius
April 20, 2007

For the past few years, the United States has been in self-imposed diplomatic isolation in the Middle East. But two paths out of that wilderness are becoming visible, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is moving cautiously down each one.
The first path leads toward a regional solution to the nightmare problem of Iraq. Rice will take a crucial step next month when she meets with foreign ministers of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran and Syria. This regional conference, which will take place May 3-4 in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, follows a preliminary meeting last month in Baghdad that ended the U.S. diplomatic quarantine of Iran and Syria.
As she prepares for this "Iraq neighbors" meeting, Rice has been gathering advice from former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, among others. Kissinger advised her to go in "listening mode," rather than with a detailed American proposal for how the neighbors should cooperate. "Just let it happen," Kissinger is said to have urged. "Let it evolve."
Kissinger argued that at the regional gathering, Rice should seek bilateral meetings with her Iranian and Syrian counterparts, and she isn't ruling out such contacts. The agenda would probably focus on three issues that were highlighted at the preliminary meeting: borders, refugees and internal security. Her aim will be to test the proposition that none of Iraq's neighbors has an interest in seeing that nation destroyed by its present internal strife.
Rice also hopes to make a diplomatic effort to defuse growing tensions between Turkey and Iraq's Kurdish region. She appears concerned that recent threats by Turkish and Kurdish officials could create a wider crisis in northern Iraq if the situation isn't checked.
Kissinger sees a broader, three-level process of negotiations emerging on Iraq: The first level is the political dialogue taking place inside Iraq, even as the car bombs continue to explode; the second is the regional process embodied by the meeting in Egypt; the third is gathering a wider group of interested nations -- perhaps including India, Indonesia and Pakistan -- that could help stabilize Iraq as U.S. military forces are gradually withdrawn.
A second diplomatic path for Rice involves the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the long-festering wound that has afflicted the Middle East for 40 years. Here, as with Iraq, she is embracing a strategy of diplomatic engagement that the Bush administration long resisted. Indeed, in her effort to regain an honest-broker role, she has been willing to meet with Palestinian officials despite Israeli objections.
Rice took a small step this week by meeting with Salam Fayyad, the finance minister of the Palestinian "unity government" that is dominated by the militant group Hamas. She appears hopeful that ways can be found to resume U.S. financial aid to the Palestinians through Fayyad, in his role as a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization, despite a formal ban on assistance to the Hamas-led government.
Israel had argued strenuously against such contacts. But Rice decided she would meet with Palestinian ministers if their past statements accepted Israel's right to exist in peace. Rice may expand her contacts to other Palestinian officials who meet that criterion, including Foreign Minister Ziad Abu Amr and Tourism Minister Khulud Dwaibess. This outreach reflects Rice's decision that it's more important for the United States to have influence within the Hamas-led government and the Palestinian community than to avoid any hint of indirect contact with the militant Islamic group.
Meanwhile, Rice continues a dual-track diplomatic negotiation she describes with the somewhat nebulous phrase of "the political horizon." In practice, that has meant pushing Israelis and Palestinians to discuss details for administering the Palestinian state everyone says they want in principle. The first negotiating session last week discussed such practical issues as how Palestinians would get permits to work in Israel, if there were two states; more such technical talks are planned on security, border controls and other issues.
A promising new Arab initiative is broadening this path out of the Israeli-Palestinian wilderness. With Rice's encouragement, Arab countries agreed this week to establish a working group to present details of Saudi King Abdullah's 2002 peace plan to the Israelis. So far, the group includes only Jordan and Egypt, two countries that already have diplomatic relations with Israel. But there's hope the group will expand if negotiations over the Palestinian "horizon" gather momentum. Such an Arab mission could have a powerful effect on Israeli public opinion.
Rice's past diplomatic efforts have been limited by the Bush administration's tendency to moralize foreign policy issues and to refuse the very process of dialogue with adversaries that might resolve problems. Isolation hasn't worked, and Rice is now charting the pathways out.
The writer co-hosts, with Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, PostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues athttp://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal. His e-mail address isdavidignatius@washpost.com.

From radical jihad to the politics of compromise

2007-04-20T16:11:00.000+02:00

From radical jihad to the politics of compromise
By Shlomo Ben-Ami

It's not surprising that the Mecca agreement and the Palestinian unity government that arose in its wake are thorns in Israel's side. For some time now, useless last-ditch battles have been a hallmark of Israeli policy on the Palestinian issue. But erosion of the boycott of the Palestinian unity government, perhaps the most popular government on the Palestinian street since 1993, has become evident in many Western capitals. The idea that it's possible to isolate Hamas, to deprive it of its right to govern, to hold a dialogue solely with the "moderates" and to expect that Hamas will accept all agreements and not use its destructive power to torpedo them is unrealistic. Paradoxically, Israel and Hamas share more common ground than is apparent at first glance. The chance of a final status agreement emerging from a direct dialogue with the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Mahmoud Abbas, is close to nil. When this becomes clear, and Israel starts searching for a way to return to the idea of withdrawal from the West Bank, it probably won't find a worthier partner than Hamas. Hamas, like Israel, is not ready for the compromises entailed by a final status accord. But a long-term interim agreement is possible only with it, and not with the PLO. Hamas' transition to parliamentary politics is part of a process many movements from the mainstream of fundamentalist Islam are undergoing today, as they seek to disassociate themselves from global jihad founded by Al-Qaida, and instead seek to integrate themselves in their country's political fabric. In Egypt, this is the direction being taken by the Muslim Brotherhood, and it is also that of Jordan's Islamic Action Front, of the Renaissance Party in Tunisia and of the Justice and Development Party in Morocco. The United States is winning the war for Arab democracy, but paradoxically, it is declining to reap the rewards because the new image of Islamic political pluralism does not match the illusion of liberal democracy in whose name America sought to change the face of the Middle East. The West, Israel included, and the Arab rulers it has cultivated need to understand that the struggle between political Islam and the conservative regimes needn't be a zero-sum game. The Mecca agreement is not a marginal matter; it is no random, passing event. This was a formative move in the shaping of a new and revolutionary pattern of a division of power between political Islam and the secular regimes in the Arab world. Hamas certainly won't be satisfied with seats in a government under occupation. Its objective is to conquer the PLO from within and to create a different balance between itself and the powers of Palestinian secular nationalism. This could be the approach in other places, too. In Morocco, Mohammed VI made it clear that he intends to forge "a historic compromise" with political Islam, given the possibility that the Justice and Development Party will be victorious in the country's June elections. The model of national unity that was born in Mecca has become the barrier that is preventing a civil war in the Palestinian Authority. In Algeria, by comparison, the February 2006 Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation was formulated as a tool for ending a bloody civil war which was sparked when the Islamist parties were denied the right to realize their victory in the 1991 elections. The attempt to crush political Islam, as President Mubarak is trying to do via the ban he recently imposed on activity by parties with a religious character, will only increase the anger of the masses, and eventually lead the fundamentalist parties back to terror and communal activism. The stability of Arab regimes that do not rely on a democratic consensus is destined to be deceptive and fragile. A dialogue with political Islam, in the form of Hamas, for instance, is an unavoidable necessity. Ostracism and banning is a recipe for disaster, as the example of Algeria shows. Creating a space for legitimate political activity by Islamic parties, including recognition of their right to govern, is the way to encourage moderation. The challenge therefore is not to destroy the only Islamic movements that can claim authentic popular support in the Arab world, but rather to solidify their fragile transition from radical jihad to the politics of compromise.

The victory won't be American

2007-04-20T16:09:00.000+02:00

The victory won't be American

By Ze'ev Schiff

The assumption that there will be no American victory in Iraq is growing stronger. On the other hand, a Shi'ite victory over the Sunnis seems likely. If there is such a victory, it will have a profound effect on the region, Israel included. It is important to understand that there is another war going on in Iraq - a civil war between the Shi'ites and the Sunnis, who have been in power for hundreds of years. Of late, a crushing Shi'ite victory looks imminent. A respected Middle East expert, Fouad Ajami, a Shi'ite of Lebanese origin, described the situation well in his articles in The Wall Street Journal and The New Republic after returning from Iraq. The turning point in the fighting took place over a year ago after the Sunnis attacked the great mosque in Samara, killing hundreds of worshippers. In the wake of the attack, the battle in Iraq increased in scope and brutality, and the Shi'ites mobilized all their forces. Thousands of men came from the marshlands where Saddam massacred Shi'ites in the past, some of them joining Shi'ite militias such as the one headed by Muqtada al-Sadr. The outcome has been a gradual Shi'ite takeover of the capital. The Sunni neighborhoods lie mostly in ruins, and only 15 percent of the Baghdad population is Sunni. Iraqi Sunnis are streaming into Jordan, which has created a problem there. According to estimates, 1.7 million Iraqi refugees have abandoned their property in Baghdad and other cities. Many were driven out of their homes in ethnic cleansing campaigns. Some Sunnis are calling themselves the "Palestinians of Iraq" after losing their country and being abandoned to their fate by the Arab countries, in the same way the Palestinians were cast off. In their despair, the Sunnis have allowed Al-Qaida to operate in Iraq, which has only increased the level of violence. Chlorine bombs are being lobbed at civilian populations, mosques are being blown up, and thousands of innocent citizens are being indiscriminately killed. In Iraq today, civilians are picked up at random and executed for being Shi'ites or Sunnis, depending on who the kidnappers are. In the midst of all this, mass graves from the Saddam era are being discovered. Add to this the assassinations in Lebanon and the killings among the Palestinians, and it is hard to escape the conclusion that if Arabs and Muslims can be so cruel to one another, imagine what they are capable of doing to others. The lesson is not to rely on their promises and to maintain a very wide safety zone for defense purposes. If the Shi'ites strengthen their grip on Iraq, it will be the first time in modern Arab history that a Shi'ite regime rules an Arab country. Victory in Iraq will bring the power that comes with oil resources. As a result, the Sunni Arab world is worried and nervously readying itself for such a scenario. The danger is that they could push the Shi'ites in Iraq into the arms of Iran. Shi'ite leaders in Iraq told Fouad Ajami that they plan to devote most of their energies to rehabilitating Iraq, and will have no taste for adventures outside the country, like Saddam. In contrast to Saddam, they believe they will be good neighbors. Only time will tell. In any case, a Shi'ite victory is certain to affect the political balance in the Arab world. A Shi'ite victory will also affect Israel's security. The growing Iranian influence in a Shi'ite-controlled Iraq could be detrimental to Israel, and the same holds true for a Shi'ite Iraqi pact with Hezbollah. Meanwhile, it seems that an American pullout will not end the hostilities in Iraq because the Sunnis are fighting for their lives. If withdrawal is interpreted by the Arabs as a sign of American defeat, we can look forward to a radical Arab shift that will strengthen all the extremists around us.

Cautious optimism after the fall of an illegitimate Iraqi order

2007-04-20T16:06:00.000+02:00

Cautious optimism after the fall of an illegitimate Iraqi order
By Fouad Ajami
April 20 2007
DailyStar

"For 35 years the sun did not shine here," said a man on the grounds of the great Shiite shrine of Al-Kadhimiyya, on the outskirts of Baghdad. I had come to the shrine at night, in the company of the Shiite politician Ahmed Chalabi. We had driven in an armed convoy, and our presence had drawn a crowd. The place was bathed with light, framed by multiple minarets - a huge rectangular structure, its beauty and dereliction side by side. The tile work was exquisite, there were deep Persian carpets everywhere, the gifts of benefactors, rulers and merchants, drawn from the world of Shiism.
It was a cool spring night, and beguilingly tranquil. (There were the echoes of a firefight across the river, from the Sunni neighborhood of Al-Adhamiyya, but it was background noise and oddly easy to ignore.) A keeper of the shrine had been showing us the place, and he was proud of its doors made of teak from Burma - a kind of wood, he said, that resisted rain, wind and sun. It was to that description that the quiet man on the edge of this gathering had offered the thought that the sun had not risen during the long night of Baathist despotism.
A traveler who moves between Baghdad and Washington is struck by the gloomy despair in Washington and the cautious sense of optimism in Baghdad. Baghdad has not been prettified; its streets remain a sore to the eye, its government still hunkered down in the Green Zone, and violence is never far. But the sense of deliverance and the hopes invested in the new American security plan are palpable. I crisscrossed the city - always with armed protection - making my way to Sunni and Shiite politicians and clerics alike. The Sunni and Shiite versions of political things - of reality itself - remain at odds. But there can be discerned, through the acrimony, the emergence of a fragile consensus.
Some months back, the Bush administration had called into question both the intentions and capabilities of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. But this modest and earnest man, born in 1950, a child of the Shiite mainstream in the Middle Euphrates, has come into his own. He had not been a figure of the American regency in Baghdad. Steeped entirely in the Arabic language and culture, he had a been a stranger to the Americans; fate cast him on the scene when the Americans pushed aside Maliki's colleague in the Daawa Party, Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari.
There had been rumors that the Americans could strike again in their search for a leader who would give the American presence better cover. There had been steady talk that the old CIA standby, former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, could make his way back to power. Allawi himself had fed these speculations, but this is fantasy. Allawi circles Arab capitals and is rarely at home in his country. Maliki meanwhile has settled into his role.
In retrospect, the defining moment for Maliki had been those early hours of last December 30, when Saddam Hussein was sent to the gallows. He had not flinched, the decision was his, and he assumed it. Beyond the sound and fury of the controversy that greeted the execution, Maliki had taken the execution as a warrant for a new accommodation with the Sunni political class. A lifelong opponent of the Baath, he had come to the judgment that the back of the apparatus of the old regime had been broken, and that the time had come for an olive branch to those ready to accept the new political rules.
When I called on Maliki at his residence, a law offering pensions to the former officers of the Iraqi Army had been readied and was soon put into effect. That decision had been supported by the head of the de-Baathification Commission, Ahmed Chalabi. A proposal for a deeper reversal of the de-Baathification process was in the works, and would be announced days later by Maliki and President Jalal Talabani. This was in truth former US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad's doing, his attempt to bury the entire de-Baathification effort as his tenure drew to a close.
This was more than the political traffic in the Shiite community could bear. Few were ready to accept the return of old Baathists to government service. The victims of the old terror were appalled at a piece of this legislation, giving them a period of only three months to bring charges against their former tormentors. This had not been Maliki's choice - for his animus toward the Baath has been the driving force of his political life. It was known that he trusted that the religious hierarchy in Najaf, and the forces within the Shiite alliance, would rein in this drive toward rehabilitating the remnants of the old regime.
Power and experience have clearly changed Maliki as he makes his way between the Shiite coalition that sustains him on the one hand, and the American presence on the other. By all accounts, he is increasingly independent of the diehards in his own coalition - another dividend of the high-profile executions of Saddam Hussein and three of the tyrant's principal lieutenants. He is surrounded by old associates drawn from the Daawa Party, but keeps his own counsel.
There is a built-in tension between a prime minister keen to press for his own prerogatives and an American military presence that underpins the security of this new order. Maliki does not have the access to American military arms he would like; he does not have control over an Iraqi special forces brigade that the Americans had trained and nurtured. His police forces remain poorly equipped. The levers of power are not fully his, and he knows it. Not a student of American ways - he spent his years of exile mostly in Syria - he is fully aware of the American exhaustion with Iraq as leading American politicians have come his way often.
The nightmare of this government is that of a precipitous American withdrawal. Six months ago, the British quit the southern city of Amara, the capital of Maysan Province. It had been, by Iraqi accounts, a precipitous British decision, and the forces of Moqtada al-Sadr had rushed into the void; they had looted the barracks and overpowered the police. Amara haunts the Iraqis in the circle of power - the prospect of Americans leaving this government to fend for itself.
In the long scheme of history, the Shiite Arabs had never governed - and Maliki and the coalition arrayed around him know their isolation in the region. This Iraqi state of which they had become the principal inheritors will have to make its way in a hostile regional landscape. Set aside Turkey's Islamist government, with its avowedly Sunni mindset and its sense of itself as a claimant to an older Ottoman tradition; the Arab order of power is yet to make room for this Iraqi state. Maliki's first trip beyond Iraq's borders had been to Saudi Arabia. He had meant that visit as a message that Iraq's "Arab identity" will trump all other orientations. It had been a message that the Arab world's Shiite stepchildren were ready to come into the fold. But a huge historical contest had erupted in Baghdad, the seat of the Abbasid caliphate had fallen to new Shiite inheritors, and the custodians of Arab power were not yet ready for this new history.
For one, the "Sunni street" - the Islamists, the pan-Arabists who hid their anti-Shiite animus underneath a secular cover, the intellectual class that had been invested in the ideology of the Baath Party - remained unalterably opposed to this new Iraq. The Shiites could offer the Arab rulers the promise that their new state would refrain from regional adventures, but it would not be easy for these rulers to come to this accommodation.
A worldly Shiite cleric, the legislator Humam Hamoudi who had headed the constitutional drafting committee, told me that he had laid out to interlocutors from the House of Saud the case that this new Iraqi state would be a better neighbor than the Sunni-based state of Saddam Hussein had been. "We would not be given to military adventures beyond our borders, what wealth we have at our disposal would have to go to repairing our homeland, for you we would be easier to fend off for we are Shiites and would be cognizant and respectful of the differences between us," Hamoudi had said. "You had a fellow Sunni in Baghdad for more than three decades, and look what terrible harvest, what wreckage, he left behind." This sort of appeal is yet to be heard, for this change in Baghdad is a break with a long millennium of Sunni Arab primacy.
The blunt truth of this new phase in the fight for Iraq is that the Sunnis have lost the battle for Baghdad. The great flight from Baghdad to Jordan, to Syria, to other Arab destinations, has been the flight of Baghdad's Sunni middle class. It is they who had the means of escape, and the savings.
Whole mixed districts in the city - Rasafa, Karkh - have been emptied of their Sunni populations. Even the old Sunni neighborhood of Al-Adhamiyya is embattled and besieged. What remains for the Sunnis are the western outskirts. This was the tragic logic of the campaign of terror waged by the Baathists and the jihadists against the Shiites; this was what played out in the terrible year that followed the attack on the Askariyya shrine of Samarra in February 2006. Possessed of an old notion of their own dominion, and of Shiite passivity and quiescence, the Sunni Arabs waged a war they were destined to lose.
No one knows with any precision the sectarian composition of today's Baghdad, but there are estimates that the Sunnis may now account for 15 percent of the city's population. Behind closed doors, Sunni leaders speak of the great calamity that befell their community. They admit to a great disappointment in the Arab states that fed the flames but could never alter the contest on the ground in Iraq. No Arab cavalry had ridden, or was ever going to ride, to the rescue of the Sunnis of Iraq.
A cultured member of the (Sunni) Association of Muslim Scholars in Baghdad, a younger man of deep moderation, likened the dilemma of his community to that of the Palestinian Arabs since 1948. "They waited for deliverance that never came," he said. "Like them, we placed our hopes in Arab leaders who have their own concerns. We fell for those Arab satellite channels; we believed that Arab brigades would turn up in Anbar and Baghdad. We made room for Al-Qaeda only to have them turn on us in Anbar." There had once been a Sunni maxim in Iraq, "for us ruling and power, for you self-flagellation," that branded the Shiites as a people of sorrow and quietism. Now the ground has shifted, and among the Sunnis there is a widespread sentiment of disinheritance and loss.
The Mehdi Army, more precisely the underclass of Sadr City, had won the fight for Baghdad. This Shiite underclass had been hurled into the city from its ancestral lands in the Marshes and the Middle Euphrates. In a cruel twist of irony, Baathist terror had driven these people into the slums of Baghdad. The Baathist tyranny had cut down the palm trees in the south, burned the reed beds of the Marshes. Then the campaign of terror that Sunni society sheltered and abetted in the aftermath of the despot's fall gave the Mehdi Army its cause and its power.
"The Mehdi Army protected us and our lands, our homes, and our honor," said a tribal Shiite notable in a meeting in Baghdad, acknowledging that it was perhaps time for the boys of Moqtada al-Sadr to step aside in favor of the government forces. He laid bare, as he spoke, the terrible complications of this country; six of his sisters, he said, were married to Sunnis, countless nephews of his were Sunni. Violence had hacked away at this pluralism; no one could be certain when, and if, the place could mend.
In their grief, the Sunni Arabs have fallen back on the most unexpected of hopes; having warred against the Americans, they now see them as redeemers. "This government is an American creation," a powerful Sunni legislator, Saleh al-Mutlaq, said. "It is up to the Americans to replace it, change the Constitution that was imposed on us, replace this incompetent, sectarian government with a government of national unity, a cabinet of technocrats." Shrewd and alert to the ways of the world (he has a Ph.D. in soil science from a university in the United Kingdom), Mutlaq gave voice to a wider Sunni conviction that this order in Baghdad is but an American puppet. America and Iran may be at odds in the region, but the Sunni Arabs see an American-Persian conspiracy that had robbed them of their patrimony.
They had made their own bed, the Sunni Arabs, but old habits of dominion die hard, and save but for a few, there is precious little acknowledgment of the wages of the terror that the Shiites had been subjected to in the years that followed the American invasion. As matters stand, the Sunni Arabs are in desperate need of leaders who can call off the violence, cut a favorable deal for their community, and distance that community form the temptations and the ruin of the insurgency. It is late in the hour, but there is still eagerness in the Maliki government to conciliate the Sunnis, if only to give the country a chance at normalcy.
The Shiites have come into their own, but there still hovers over them their old history of dispossession; there still trails shadows of doubt about their hold on power, about conspiracies hatched against them in neighboring Arab lands.
The Americans have given birth to this new Shiite primacy, but there lingers a fear, in the inner circles of the Shiite coalition, that the Americans have in mind a Sunni-based army, of the Pakistani and Turkish mold, that would upend the democratic, majoritarian bases of power on which Shiite primacy rests. They are keenly aware, these new Shiite men of power in Baghdad, that the Pax Americana in the region is based on an alliance of long standing with the Sunni regimes. They are under no illusions about their own access to Washington when compared with that of leaders in Cairo, Riyadh, Amman and the smaller principalities of the Gulf. This suspicion is in the nature of things; it is the way of once marginal men who had come into an unexpected triumph.
In truth, it is not only the Arab order of power that remains ill at ease with the rise of the Shiites of Iraq. The (Shiite) genie that came out of the bottle was not fully to America's liking. Indeed, the United States' strategy in Iraq had tried to sidestep the history that America itself had given birth to. There had been the disastrous regency of Paul Bremer. It had been followed by the attempt to create a national security state under Iyad Allawi. Then there had come the strategy of the American envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, that aimed to bring the Sunni leadership into the political process and wean them away from the terror and the insurgency.
Khalilzad had become, in his own sense of himself, something of a high commissioner in Iraq, and his strategy had ended in failure; the Sunni leaders never broke with the insurgency. Their sobriety of late has been a function of the defeat their cause has suffered on the ground; all the inducements had not worked.
We are now in a new, and fourth, phase of this American presence. We should not try to "cheat" in the region, conceal what we had done, or apologize for it, by floating an Arab-Israeli peace process to the liking of the "Sunni street."
The Arabs have an unerring feel for the ways of strangers who venture into their lands. Deep down, the Sunni Arabs know what the fight for Baghdad is all about - oil wealth and power, the balance between the Sunni edifice of material and moral power and the claims of the Shiite stepchildren. To this fight, Iran is a newcomer, an outlier. This is an old Arab account, the fight between the order of merchants and rulers and establishment jurists on the one side, and the righteous (Shiite) oppositionists on the other. How apt it is that the struggle that had been fought on the plains of Kerbala in southern Iraq so long ago has now returned, full circle, to Iraq.
For our part, the US can't give full credence to the Sunni representations of things. We can cushion the Sunni defeat but can't reverse it. Our soldiers have not waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq against Sunni extremists to fall for the fear of some imagined "Shiite crescent" peddled by Sunni rulers and preachers. To that atavistic fight between Sunni and Shiite, we ought to remain decent and discerning arbiters. To be sure, in Iraq itself we can't give a blank check to Shiite maximalism. On its own, mainstream Shiism is eager to rein in its own diehards and self-anointed avengers.
There is a growing Shiite unease with the Mehdi Army - and with the venality and incompetence of the Sadrists, represented in the Cabinet until a few days ago - and an increasing faith that the government and its instruments of order are the surer bet. The crackdown on the Mehdi Army that the new American commander, General David Petraeus, has launched has the backing of the ruling Shiite coalition. Iraqi police and army units have taken to the field against elements of the Mehdi Army. Recently, in the southern city of Diwaniyya, American and Iraqi forces together battled the forces of Moqtada al-Sadr. To the extent that the Shiites now see Iraq as their own country, their tolerance for mayhem and chaos has receded. Sadr may damn the American occupiers, but ordinary Shiite men and women know that the liberty that came their way had been a gift of the Americans.
The young men of little education - earnest displaced villagers with the ways of the countryside showing through their features and dialect and shiny suits - who guarded me through Baghdad, spoke of old terrors, and of the joy and dignity of this new order. Children and nephews and younger brothers of men lost to the terror of the Baath, they are done with the old servitude. They behold the Americans keeping the peace of their troubled land with undisguised gratitude. It hasn't been always brilliant, this campaign waged in Iraq. But its mistakes can never smother its honor, and no apology for it is due the Arab autocrats who had averted their gaze from Iraq's long night of terror under the Baath.
One can never reconcile the beneficiaries of illegitimate, abnormal power to the end of their dominion. But this current realignment in Iraq carries with it a gift for the possible redemption of modern Islam among the Arabs. Hitherto Sunni Islam had taken its hegemony for granted and extremist strands within it have shown a refusal to accept "the other." Conversely, Shiite history has been distorted by weakness and exclusion and by a concomitant abdication of responsibility.
A Shiite-led state in Iraq - with a strong Kurdish presence in it and a big niche for the Sunnis - can go a long way toward changing the region's terrible habits and expectations of authority and command. The Sunnis would still be hegemonic in the Arab councils of power beyond Iraq, but their monopoly would yield to the pluralism and complexity of that region.
"Watch your adjectives" is the admonition given American officers by Petraeus. In Baghdad, Americans and Iraqis alike know that this big endeavor has entered its final, decisive phase. Iraq has surprised and disappointed us before, but as both the Iraqis and we watch our adjectives there can be discerned the shape of a new country, a rough balance of forces commensurate with the demography of the place and with the outcome of a war that its erstwhile Sunni rulers had launched and lost. We made this history and should now make our peace with it.

Fouad Ajami, a 2006 recipient of the Bradley Prize, teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Affairs in Washington DC. He is the author of "The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq" (Free Press, 2006). THE DAILY STAR
publishes this commentary, which first appeared in The Wall Street Journal, by permission.

Eye on Iran, Rivals Pursuing Nuclear Power

2007-04-15T13:16:00.000+02:00

Eye on Iran, Rivals Pursuing Nuclear Power

By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER

Two years ago, the leaders of Saudi Arabia told international atomic regulators that they could foresee no need for the kingdom to develop nuclear power. Today, they are scrambling to hire atomic contractors, buy nuclear hardware and build support for a regional system of reactors.

So, too, Turkey is preparing for its first atomic plant. And Egypt has announced plans to build one on its Mediterranean coast. In all, roughly a dozen states in the region have recently turned to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna for help in starting their own nuclear programs. While interest in nuclear energy is rising globally, it is unusually strong in the Middle East.

“The rules have changed,” King Abdullah II of Jordan recently told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “Everybody’s going for nuclear programs.”

The Middle East states say they only want atomic power. Some probably do. But United States government and private analysts say they believe that the rush of activity is also intended to counter the threat of a nuclear Iran.

By nature, the underlying technologies of nuclear power can make electricity or, with more effort, warheads, as nations have demonstrated over the decades by turning ostensibly civilian programs into sources of bomb fuel. Iran’s uneasy neighbors, analysts say, may be positioning themselves to do the same.

“One danger of Iran going nuclear has always been that it might provoke others,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an arms analysis group in London. “So when you see the development of nuclear power elsewhere in the region, it’s a cause for some concern.”

Some analysts ask why Arab states in the Persian Gulf, which hold nearly half the world’s oil reserves, would want to shoulder the high costs and obligations of a temperamental form of energy. They reply that they must invest in the future, for the day when the flow of oil dries up.

But with Shiite Iran increasingly ascendant in the region, Sunni countries have alluded to other motives. Officials from 21 governments in and around the Middle East warned at a meeting of Arab leaders in March that Iran’s drive for atomic technology could result in the beginning of “a grave and destructive nuclear arms race in the region.”

In Washington, officials are seizing on such developments to build their case for stepping up pressure on Iran. President Bush has talked privately to experts on the Middle East about his fears of a “Sunni bomb,” and his concerns that countries in the Middle East may turn to the only nuclear-armed Sunni state, Pakistan, for help.

Even so, that concern is tempered by caution. In an interview on Thursday, a senior administration official said that the recent announcements were “clearly part of an effort to send a signal to Iran that two can play this game.” And, he added, “among the non-Iranian programs I’ve heard about in the region, I have not heard talk of reprocessing or enrichment, which is what would worry us the most.”

The Middle East has seen hints of a regional nuclear-arms race before. After Israel obtained its first weapon four decades ago, several countries took steps down the nuclear road. But many analysts say it is Iran’s atomic intransigence that has now prodded the Sunni powers into getting serious about hedging their bets and, like Iran, financing them with $65-a-barrel oil.

“Now’s the time to worry,” said Geoffrey Kemp, a Middle East expert at the Nixon Center, a Washington policy institute. “The Iranians have to worry, too. The idea that they’ll emerge as the regional hegemon is silly. There will be a very serious counterreaction, certainly in conventional military buildups but also in examining the nuclear option.”

No Arab country now has a power reactor, whose spent fuel can be mined for plutonium, one of the two favored materials — along with uranium — for making the cores of atom bombs. Some Arab states do, however, engage in civilian atomic research.

Analysts caution that a chain reaction of nuclear emulation is not foreordained. States in the Middle East appear to be waiting to see which way Tehran’s nuclear standoff with the United Nations Security Council goes before committing themselves wholeheartedly to costly programs of atomic development.

Even if Middle Eastern nations do obtain nuclear power, political alliances and arms-control agreements could still make individual states hesitate before crossing the line to obtain warheads. Many may eventually decide that the costs and risks outweigh the benefits — as South Korea, Taiwan, South Africa and Libya did after investing heavily in arms programs.

But many diplomats and analysts say that the Sunni Arab governments are so anxious about Iran’s nuclear progress that they would even, grudgingly, support a United States military strike against Iran.

“If push comes to shove, if the choice is between an Iranian nuclear bomb and a U.S. military strike, then the Arab gulf states have no choice but to quietly support the U.S.,” said Christian Koch, director of international studies at the Gulf Research Center, a private group in Dubai.

Decades ago, it was Israel’s drive for nuclear arms that brought about the region’s first atomic jitters. Even some Israeli leaders found themselves “preaching caution because of the reaction,” said Avner Cohen, a senior fellow at the University of Maryland and the author of “Israel and the Bomb.”

Egypt responded first. In 1960, after the disclosure of Israel’s work on a nuclear reactor, Cairo threatened to acquire atomic arms and sought its own reactor. Years of technical and political hurdles ultimately ended that plan.

Iraq came next. But in June 1981, Israeli fighter jets bombed its reactor just days before engineers planned to install the radioactive core. The bombing ignited a global debate over how close Iraq had come to nuclear arms. It also prompted Iran, then fighting a war with Iraq, to embark on a covert response.

Alireza Assar, a nuclear adviser to Iran’s Ministry of Defense who later defected, said he attended a secret meeting in 1987 at which the commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said Iran had to do whatever was necessary to achieve victory. “We need to have all the technical requirements in our possession,” Dr. Assar recalled the commander as saying, even the means to “build a nuclear bomb.”

In all, Iran toiled in secret for 18 years before its nuclear efforts were disclosed in 2003. Intelligence agencies and nuclear experts now estimate that the Iranians are 2 to 10 years away from having the means to make a uranium-based bomb. It says its uranium enrichment work is entirely peaceful and meant only to fuel reactors.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s concerns grew when inspectors found evidence of still-unexplained ties between Iran’s ostensibly peaceful program and its military, including work on high explosives, missiles and warheads. That combination, the inspectors said in early 2006, suggested a “military nuclear dimension.”

Before such disclosures, few if any states in the Middle East attended the atomic agency’s meetings on nuclear power development. Now, roughly a dozen are doing so and drawing up atomic plans.

The newly interested states include Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Yemen and the seven sheikdoms of the United Arab Emirates — Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Al Fujayrah, Ras al Khaymah, Sharjah, and Umm al Qaywayn.

“They generally ask what they need to do for the introduction of power,” said R. Ian Facer, a nuclear power engineer who works for the I.A.E.A. at its headquarters in Vienna. The agency teaches the basics of nuclear energy. In exchange, states must undergo periodic inspections to make sure their civilian programs have no military spinoffs.

Saudi Arabia, since reversing itself on reactors, has become a whirlwind of atomic interest. It recently invited President Vladimir V. Putin to become the first Russian head of state to visit the desert kingdom. He did so in February, offering a range of nuclear aid.

Diplomats and analysts say Saudi Arabia leads the drive for nuclear power within the Gulf Cooperation Council, based in Riyadh. In addition to the Saudis, the council includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — Washington’s closest Arab allies. Its member states hug the western shores of the Persian Gulf and control about 45 percent of the world’s oil reserves.

Late last year, the council announced that it would embark on a nuclear energy program. Its officials have said they want to get it under way by 2009.

“We will develop it openly,” Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, said of the council’s effort. “We want no bombs. All we want is a whole Middle East that is free from weapons of mass destruction,” an Arab reference to both Israel’s and Iran’s nuclear programs.

In February, the council and the I.A.E.A. struck a deal to work together on a nuclear power plan for the Arab gulf states. Abdul Rahman ibn Hamad al-Attiya, the council’s secretary general, told reporters in March that the agency would provide technical expertise and that the council would hire a consulting firm to speed its nuclear deliberations.

Already, Saudi officials are traveling regularly to Vienna, and I.A.E.A. officials to Riyadh, the Saudi capital. “It’s a natural right,” Mohamed ElBaradei, the atomic agency’s director general, said recently of the council’s energy plan, estimating that carrying it out might take up to 15 years.

Every gulf state except Iraq has declared an interest in nuclear power. By comparison, 15 percent of South American nations and 20 percent of African ones have done so.

One factor in that exceptional level of interest is that the Persian Gulf states have the means. Typically, a large commercial reactor costs up to $4 billion. The six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council are estimated to be investing in nonnuclear projects valued at more than $1 trillion.

Another factor is Iran. Its shores at some points are visible across the waters of the gulf — called the Arabian Gulf by Arabs and the Persian Gulf by Iranians.

The council wants “its own regional initiative to counter the possible threat from an aggressive neighbor armed with nuclear weapons,” said Nicole Stracke, an analyst at the Gulf Research Center. Its members, she added, “felt they could no longer lag behind Iran.”

A similar technology push is under way in Turkey, where long-simmering plans for nuclear power have caught fire. Last year, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for three plants. “We want to benefit from nuclear energy as soon as possible,” he said. Turkey plans to put its first reactor near the Black Sea port of Sinop, and to start construction this year.

Egypt, too, is moving forward. Last year, it announced plans for a reactor at El-Dabaa, about 60 miles west of Alexandria. “We do not start from a vacuum,” President Hosni Mubarak told the governing National Democracy Party’s annual conference. His remark was understated given Cairo’s decades of atomic research.

Robert Joseph, a former under secretary of state for arms control and international security who is now Mr. Bush’s envoy on nuclear nonproliferation, visited Egypt earlier this year. According to officials briefed on the conversations, officials from the Ministry of Electricity indicated that if Egypt was confident that it could have a reliable supply of reactor fuel, it would have little desire to invest in the costly process of manufacturing its own nuclear fuel — the enterprise that experts fear could let Iran build a bomb.

Other officials, especially those responsible for Egypt’s security, focused more on the possibility of further proliferation in the region if Iran succeeded in its effort to achieve a nuclear weapons capability.

“I don’t know how much of it is real,” Mr. Joseph said of a potential arms race. “But it is becoming urgent for us to shape the future expansion of nuclear energy in a way that reduces the risks of proliferation, while meeting our energy and environmental goals.”

The power of green

2007-04-15T13:08:00.000+02:00

Thomas L. Friedman: The power of green
Thomas L. Friedman
Sunday, April 15, 2007

One day Iraq, our post-9/11 trauma and the divisiveness of the Bush years will all be behind us — and America will need, and want, to get its groove back. We will need to find a way to reknit America at home, reconnect America abroad and restore America to its natural place in the global order — as the beacon of progress, hope and inspiration. I have an idea how. It's called "green."

In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue. One thing that always struck me about the term "green" was the degree to which, for so many years, it was defined by its opponents — by the people who wanted to disparage it. And they defined it as "liberal," "tree-hugging," "sissy," "girlie-man," "unpatriotic," "vaguely French."

Well, I want to rename "green." I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism.

How do our kids compete in a flatter world? How do they thrive in a warmer world? How do they survive in a more dangerous world? Those are, in a nutshell, the big questions facing America at the dawn of the 21st century. But these problems are so large in scale that they can only be effectively addressed by an America with 50 green states — not an America divided between red and blue states.

Because a new green ideology, properly defined, has the power to mobilize liberals and conservatives, evangelicals and atheists, big business and environmentalists around an agenda that can both pull us together and propel us forward. That's why I say: We don't just need the first black president. We need the first green president. We don't just need the first woman president. We need the first environmental president. We don't just need a president who has been toughened by years as a prisoner of war but a president who is tough enough to level with the American people about the profound economic, geopolitical and climate threats posed by our addiction to oil — and to offer a real plan to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

After World War II, President Eisenhower responded to the threat of Communism and the "red menace" with massive spending on an interstate highway system to tie America together, in large part so that we could better move weapons in the event of a war with the Soviets. That highway system, though, helped to enshrine America's car culture (atrophying our railroads) and to lock in suburban sprawl and low-density housing, which all combined to get America addicted to cheap fossil fuels, particularly oil. Many in the world followed our model.

Today, we are paying the accumulated economic, geopolitical and climate prices for that kind of America. I am not proposing that we radically alter our lifestyles. We are who we are — including a car culture. But if we want to continue to be who we are, enjoy the benefits and be able to pass them on to our children, we do need to fuel our future in a cleaner, greener way. Eisenhower rallied us with the red menace. The next president will have to rally us with a green patriotism. Hence my motto: "Green is the new red, white and blue."

The good news is that after traveling around America this past year, looking at how we use energy and the emerging alternatives, I can report that green really has gone Main Street — thanks to the perfect storm created by 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Internet revolution. The first flattened the twin towers, the second flattened New Orleans and the third flattened the global economic playing field. The convergence of all three has turned many of our previous assumptions about "green" upside down in a very short period of time, making it much more compelling to many more Americans.

But here's the bad news: While green has hit Main Street — more Americans than ever now identify themselves as greens, or what I call "Geo-Greens" to differentiate their more muscular and strategic green ideology — green has not gone very far down Main Street. It certainly has not gone anywhere near the distance required to preserve our lifestyle. The dirty little secret is that we're fooling ourselves. We in America talk like we're already "the greenest generation," as the business writer Dan Pink once called it. But here's the really inconvenient truth: We have not even begun to be serious about the costs, the effort and the scale of change that will be required to shift our country, and eventually the world, to a largely emissions-free energy infrastructure over the next 50 years.

II.

A few weeks after American forces invaded Afghanistan, I visited the Pakistani frontier town of Peshawar, a hotbed of Islamic radicalism. On the way, I stopped at the famous Darul Uloom Haqqania, the biggest madrasa, or Islamic school, in Pakistan, with 2,800 live-in students. The Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar attended this madrasa as a younger man. My Pakistani friend and I were allowed to observe a class of young boys who sat on the floor, practicing their rote learning of the Koran from texts perched on wooden holders. The air in the Koran class was so thick and stale it felt as if you could have cut it into blocks. The teacher asked an 8-year-old boy to chant a Koranic verse for us, which he did with the elegance of an experienced muezzin. I asked another student, an Afghan refugee, Rahim Kunduz, age 12, what his reaction was to the Sept. 11 attacks, and he said: "Most likely the attack came from Americans inside America. I am pleased that America has had to face pain, because the rest of the world has tasted its pain." A framed sign on the wall said this room was "A gift of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia."

Sometime after 9/11 — an unprovoked mass murder perpetrated by 19 men, 15 of whom were Saudis — green went geostrategic, as Americans started to realize we were financing both sides in the war on terrorism. We were financing the U.S. military with our tax dollars; and we were financing a transformation of Islam, in favor of its most intolerant strand, with our gasoline purchases. How stupid is that?

Islam has always been practiced in different forms. Some are more embracing of modernity, reinterpretation of the Koran and tolerance of other faiths, like Sufi Islam or the populist Islam of Egypt, Ottoman Turkey and Indonesia. Some strands, like Salafi Islam — followed by the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia and by Al Qaeda — believe Islam should be returned to an austere form practiced in the time of the Prophet Muhammad, a form hostile to modernity, science, "infidels" and women's rights. By enriching the Saudi and Iranian treasuries via our gasoline purchases, we are financing the export of the Saudi puritanical brand of Sunni Islam and the Iranian fundamentalist brand of Shiite Islam, tilting the Muslim world in a more intolerant direction. At the Muslim fringe, this creates more recruits for the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Sunni suicide bomb squads of Iraq; at the Muslim center, it creates a much bigger constituency of people who applaud suicide bombers as martyrs.

The Saudi Islamic export drive first went into high gear after extreme fundamentalists challenged the Muslim credentials of the Saudi ruling family by taking over the Grand Mosque of Mecca in 1979 — a year that coincided with the Iranian revolution and a huge rise in oil prices. The attack on the Grand Mosque by these Koran-and-rifle-wielding Islamic militants shook the Saudi ruling family to its core. The al-Sauds responded to this challenge to their religious bona fides by becoming outwardly more religious. They gave their official Wahhabi religious establishment even more power to impose Islam on public life. Awash in cash thanks to the spike in oil prices, the Saudi government and charities also spent hundreds of millions of dollars endowing mosques, youth clubs and Muslim schools all over the world, ensuring that Wahhabi imams, teachers and textbooks would preach Saudi-style Islam. Eventually, notes Lawrence Wright in "The Looming Tower," his history of Al Qaeda, "Saudi Arabia, which constitutes only 1 percent of the world Muslim population, would support 90 percent of the expenses of the entire faith, overriding other traditions of Islam."

Saudi mosques and wealthy donors have also funneled cash to the Sunni insurgents in Iraq. The Associated Press reported from Cairo in December: "Several drivers interviewed by the A.P. in Middle East capitals said Saudis have been using religious events, like the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and a smaller pilgrimage, as cover for illicit money transfers. Some money, they said, is carried into Iraq on buses with returning pilgrims. 'They sent boxes full of dollars and asked me to deliver them to certain addresses in Iraq,' said one driver. ... 'I know it is being sent to the resistance, and if I don't take it with me, they will kill me.' "

No wonder more Americans have concluded that conserving oil to put less money in the hands of hostile forces is now a geostrategic imperative. President Bush's refusal to do anything meaningful after 9/11 to reduce our gasoline usage really amounts to a policy of "No Mullah Left Behind." James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director, minces no words: "We are funding the rope for the hanging of ourselves."

No, I don't want to bankrupt Saudi Arabia or trigger an Islamist revolt there. Its leadership is more moderate and pro-Western than its people. But the way the Saudi ruling family has bought off its religious establishment, in order to stay in power, is not healthy. Cutting the price of oil in half would help change that. In the 1990s, dwindling oil income sparked a Saudi debate about less Koran and more science in Saudi schools, even experimentation with local elections. But the recent oil windfall has stilled all talk of reform.

That is because of what I call the First Law of Petropolitics: The price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in states that are highly dependent on oil exports for their income and have weak institutions or outright authoritarian governments. And this is another reason that green has become geostrategic. Soaring oil prices are poisoning the international system by strengthening antidemocratic regimes around the globe.

Look what's happened: We thought the fall of the Berlin Wall was going to unleash an unstoppable tide of free markets and free people, and for about a decade it did just that. But those years coincided with oil in the $10-to-$30-a-barrel range. As the price of oil surged into the $30-to-$70 range in the early 2000s, it triggered a countertide — a tide of petroauthoritarianism — manifested in Russia, Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Egypt, Chad, Angola, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. The elected or self-appointed elites running these states have used their oil windfalls to ensconce themselves in power, buy off opponents and counter the fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall tide. If we continue to finance them with our oil purchases, they will reshape the world in their image, around Putin-like values.

You can illustrate the First Law of Petropolitics with a simple graph. On one line chart the price of oil from 1979 to the present; on another line chart the Freedom House or Fraser Institute freedom indexes for Russia, Nigeria, Iran and Venezuela for the same years. When you put these two lines on the same graph you see something striking: the price of oil and the pace of freedom are inversely correlated. As oil prices went down in the early 1990s, competition, transparency, political participation and accountability of those in office all tended to go up in these countries — as measured by free elections held, newspapers opened, reformers elected, economic reform projects started and companies privatized. That's because their petroauthoritarian regimes had to open themselves to foreign investment and educate and empower their people more in order to earn income. But as oil prices went up around 2000, free speech, free press, fair elections and freedom to form political parties and NGOs all eroded in these countries.

The motto of the American Revolution was "no taxation without representation." The motto of the petroauthoritarians is "no representation without taxation": If I don't have to tax you, because I can get all the money I need from oil wells, I don't have to listen to you.

It is no accident that when oil prices were low in the 1990s, Iran elected a reformist Parliament and a president who called for a "dialogue of civilizations." And when oil prices soared to $70 a barrel, Iran's conservatives pushed out the reformers and ensconced a president who says the Holocaust is a myth. (I promise you, if oil prices drop to $25 a barrel, the Holocaust won't be a myth anymore.) And it is no accident that the first Arab Gulf state to start running out of oil, Bahrain, is also the first Arab Gulf state to have held a free and fair election in which women could run and vote, the first Arab Gulf state to overhaul its labor laws to make more of its own people employable and the first Arab Gulf state to sign a free-trade agreement with America.

People change when they have to — not when we tell them to — and falling oil prices make them have to. That is why if we are looking for a Plan B for Iraq — a way of pressing for political reform in the Middle East without going to war again — there is no better tool than bringing down the price of oil. When it comes to fostering democracy among petroauthoritarians, it doesn't matter whether you're a neocon or a radical lib. If you're not also a Geo-Green, you won't succeed.

The notion that conserving energy is a geostrategic imperative has also moved into the Pentagon, for slightly different reasons. Generals are realizing that the more energy they save in the heat of battle, the more power they can project. The Pentagon has been looking to improve its energy efficiency for several years now to save money. But the Iraq war has given birth to a new movement in the U.S. military: the "Green Hawks."

As Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who has been working with the Pentagon, put it to me: The Iraq war forced the U.S. military to think much more seriously about how to "eat its tail" — to shorten its energy supply lines by becoming more energy efficient. According to Dan Nolan, who oversees energy projects for the U.S. Army's Rapid Equipping Force, it started last year when a Marine major general in Anbar Province told the Pentagon he wanted better-insulated, more energy-efficient tents in the Iraqi desert. Why? His air-conditioners were being run off mobile generators, and the generators ran on diesel, and the diesel had to be trucked in, and the insurgents were blowing up the trucks.

"When we began the analysis of his request, it was really about the fact that his soldiers were being attacked on the roads bringing fuel and water," Nolan said. So eating their tail meant "taking those things that are brought into the unit and trying to generate them on-site." To that end Nolan's team is now experimenting with everything from new kinds of tents that need 40 percent less air-conditioning to new kinds of fuel cells that produce water as a byproduct.

Pay attention: When the U.S. Army desegregated, the country really desegregated; when the Army goes green, the country could really go green.

"Energy independence is a national security issue," Nolan said. "It's the right business for us to be in. ... We are not trying to change the whole Army. Our job is to focus on that battalion out there and give those commanders the technological innovations they need to deal with today's mission. But when they start coming home, they are going to bring those things with them."

III.

The second big reason green has gone Main Street is because global warming has. A decade ago, it was mostly experts who worried that climate change was real, largely brought about by humans and likely to lead to species loss and environmental crises. Now Main Street is starting to worry because people are seeing things they've never seen before in their own front yards and reading things they've never read before in their papers — like the recent draft report by the United Nations's 2,000-expert Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which concluded that "changes in climate are now affecting physical and biological systems on every continent."

I went to Montana in January and Gov. Brian Schweitzer told me: "We don't get as much snow in the high country as we used to, and the runoff starts sooner in the spring. The river I've been fishing over the last 50 years is now warmer in July by five degrees than 50 years ago, and it is hard on our trout population." I went to Moscow in February, and my friends told me they just celebrated the first Moscow Christmas in their memory with no snow. I stopped in London on the way home, and I didn't need an overcoat. In 2006, the average temperature in central England was the highest ever recorded since the Central England Temperature (C.E.T.) series began in 1659.

Yes, no one knows exactly what will happen. But ever fewer people want to do nothing. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California summed up the new climate around climate when he said to me recently: "If 98 doctors say my son is ill and needs medication and two say 'No, he doesn't, he is fine,' I will go with the 98. It's common sense — the same with global warming. We go with the majority, the large majority. ... The key thing now is that since we know this industrial age has created it, let's get our act together and do everything we can to roll it back."

But how? Now we arrive at the first big roadblock to green going down Main Street. Most people have no clue — no clue — how huge an industrial project is required to blunt climate change. Here are two people who do: Robert Socolow, an engineering professor, and Stephen Pacala, an ecology professor, who together lead the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton, a consortium designing scalable solutions for the climate issue.

They first argued in a paper published by the journal Science in August 2004 that human beings can emit only so much carbon into the atmosphere before the buildup of carbon dioxide (CO2) reaches a level unknown in recent geologic history and the earth's climate system starts to go "haywire." The scientific consensus, they note, is that the risk of things going haywire — weather patterns getting violently unstable, glaciers melting, prolonged droughts — grows rapidly as CO2 levels "approach a doubling" of the concentration of CO2 that was in the atmosphere before the Industrial Revolution.

"Think of the climate change issue as a closet, and behind the door are lurking all kinds of monsters — and there's a long list of them," Pacala said. "All of our scientific work says the most damaging monsters start to come out from behind that door when you hit the doubling of CO2 levels." As Bill Collins, who led the development of a model used worldwide for simulating climate change, put it to me: "We're running an uncontrolled experiment on the only home we have."

So here is our challenge, according to Pacala: If we basically do nothing, and global CO2 emissions continue to grow at the pace of the last 30 years for the next 50 years, we will pass the doubling level — an atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide of 560 parts per million — around midcentury. To avoid that — and still leave room for developed countries to grow, using less carbon, and for countries like India and China to grow, emitting double or triple their current carbon levels, until they climb out of poverty and are able to become more energy efficient — will require a huge global industrial energy project.

To convey the scale involved, Socolow and Pacala have created a pie chart with 15 different wedges. Some wedges represent carbon-free or carbon-diminishing power-generating technologies; other wedges represent efficiency programs that could conserve large amounts of energy and prevent CO2 emissions. They argue that the world needs to deploy any 7 of these 15 wedges, or sufficient amounts of all 15, to have enough conservation, and enough carbon-free energy, to increase the world economy and still avoid the doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. Each wedge, when phased in over 50 years, would avoid the release of 25 billion tons of carbon, for a total of 175 billion tons of carbon avoided between now and 2056.

Here are seven wedges we could chose from: "Replace 1,400 large coal-fired plants with gas-fired plants; increase the fuel economy of two billion cars from 30 to 60 miles per gallon; add twice today's nuclear output to displace coal; drive two billion cars on ethanol, using one-sixth of the world's cropland; increase solar power 700-fold to displace coal; cut electricity use in homes, offices and stores by 25 percent; install carbon capture and sequestration capacity at 800 large coal-fired plants." And the other eight aren't any easier. They include halting all cutting and burning of forests, since deforestation causes about 20 percent of the world's annual CO2 emissions.

"There has never been a deliberate industrial project in history as big as this," Pacala said. Through a combination of clean power technology and conservation, "we have to get rid of 175 billion tons of carbon over the next 50 years — and still keep growing. It is possible to accomplish this if we start today. But every year that we delay, the job becomes more difficult — and if we delay a decade or two, avoiding the doubling or more may well become impossible."

IV.

In November, I flew from Shanghai to Beijing on Air China. As we landed in Beijing and taxied to the terminal, the Chinese air hostess came on the P.A. and said: "We've just landed in Beijing. The temperature is 8 degrees Celsius, 46 degrees Fahrenheit and the sky is clear."

I almost burst out laughing. Outside my window the smog was so thick you could not see the end of the terminal building. When I got into Beijing, though, friends told me the air was better than usual. Why? China had been host of a summit meeting of 48 African leaders. Time magazine reported that Beijing officials had "ordered half a million official cars off the roads and said another 400,000 drivers had 'volunteered' to refrain from using their vehicles" in order to clean up the air for their African guests. As soon as they left, the cars returned, and Beijing's air went back to "unhealthy."

Green has also gone Main Street because the end of Communism, the rise of the personal computer and the diffusion of the Internet have opened the global economic playing field to so many more people, all coming with their own versions of the American dream — a house, a car, a toaster, a microwave and a refrigerator. It is a blessing to see so many people growing out of poverty. But when three billion people move from "low-impact" to "high-impact" lifestyles, Jared Diamond wrote in "Collapse," it makes it urgent that we find cleaner ways to fuel their dreams. According to Lester Brown, the founder of the Earth Policy Institute, if China keeps growing at 8 percent a year, by 2031 the per-capita income of 1.45 billion Chinese will be the same as America's in 2004. China currently has only one car for every 100 people, but Brown projects that as it reaches American income levels, if it copies American consumption, it will have three cars for every four people, or 1.1 billion vehicles. The total world fleet today is 800 million vehicles!

That's why McKinsey Global Institute forecasts that developing countries will generate nearly 80 percent of the growth in world energy demand between now and 2020, with China representing 32 percent and the Middle East 10 percent. So if Red China doesn't become Green China there is no chance we will keep the climate monsters behind the door. On some days, says the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, almost 25 percent of the polluting matter in the air above Los Angeles comes from China's coal-fired power plants and factories, as well as fumes from China's cars and dust kicked up by droughts and deforestation around Asia.

The good news is that China knows it has to grow green — or it won't grow at all. On Sept. 8, 2006, a Chinese newspaper reported that China's E.P.A. and its National Bureau of Statistics had re-examined China's 2004 G.D.P. number. They concluded that the health problems, environmental degradation and lost workdays from pollution had actually cost China $64 billion, or 3.05 percent of its total economic output for 2004. Some experts believe the real number is closer to 10 percent.

Thus China has a strong motivation to clean up the worst pollutants in its air. Those are the nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides and mercury that produce acid rain, smog and haze — much of which come from burning coal. But cleaning up is easier said than done. The Communist Party's legitimacy and the stability of the whole country depend heavily on Beijing's ability to provide rising living standards for more and more Chinese.

So, if you're a Chinese mayor and have to choose between growing jobs and cutting pollution, you will invariably choose jobs: coughing workers are much less politically dangerous than unemployed workers. That's a key reason why China's 10th five-year plan, which began in 2000, called for a 10 percent reduction in sulfur dioxide in China's air — and when that plan concluded in 2005, sulfur dioxide pollution in China had increased by 27 percent.

But if China is having a hard time cleaning up its nitrogen and sulfur oxides — which can be done relatively cheaply by adding scrubbers to the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants — imagine what will happen when it comes to asking China to curb its CO2, of which China is now the world's second-largest emitter, after America. To build a coal-fired power plant that captures, separates and safely sequesters the CO2 into the ground before it goes up the smokestack requires either an expensive retrofit or a whole new system. That new system would cost about 40 percent more to build and operate — and would produce 20 percent less electricity, according to a recent M.I.T. study, "The Future of Coal."

China — which is constructing the equivalent of two 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants every week — is not going to pay that now. Remember: CO2 is an invisible, odorless, tasteless gas. Yes, it causes global warming — but it doesn't hurt anyone in China today, and getting rid of it is costly and has no economic payoff. China's strategy right now is to say that CO2 is the West's problem. "It must be pointed out that climate change has been caused by the long-term historic emissions of developed countries and their high per-capita emissions," Jiang Yu, a spokeswoman for China's Foreign Ministry, declared in February. "Developed countries bear an unshirkable responsibility."

So now we come to the nub of the issue: Green will not go down Main Street America unless it also goes down Main Street China, India and Brazil. And for green to go Main Street in these big developing countries, the prices of clean power alternatives — wind, biofuels, nuclear, solar or coal sequestration — have to fall to the "China price." The China price is basically the price China pays for coal-fired electricity today because China is not prepared to pay a premium now, and sacrifice growth and stability, just to get rid of the CO2 that comes from burning coal.

"The 'China price' is the fundamental benchmark that everyone is looking to satisfy," said Curtis Carlson, C.E.O. of SRI International, which is developing alternative energy technologies. "Because if the Chinese have to pay 10 percent more for energy, when they have tens of millions of people living under $1,000 a year, it is not going to happen." Carlson went on to say: "We have an enormous amount of new innovation we must put in place before we can get to a price that China and India will be able to pay. But this is also an opportunity."

V.M

The only way we are going to get innovations that drive energy costs down to the China price — innovations in energy-saving appliances, lights and building materials and in non-CO2-emitting power plants and fuels — is by mobilizing free-market capitalism. The only thing as powerful as Mother Nature is Father Greed. To a degree, the market is already at work on this project — because some venture capitalists and companies understand that clean-tech is going to be the next great global industry. Take Wal-Mart. The world's biggest retailer woke up several years ago, its C.E.O. Lee Scott told me, and realized that with regard to the environment its customers "had higher expectations for us than we had for ourselves." So Scott hired a sustainability expert, Jib Ellison, to tutor the company. The first lesson Ellison preached was that going green was a whole new way for Wal-Mart to cut costs and drive its profits. As Scott recalled it, Ellison said to him, "Lee, the thing you have to think of is all this stuff that people don't want you to put into the environment is waste — and you're paying for it!"

So Scott initiated a program to work with Wal-Mart's suppliers to reduce the sizes and materials used for all its packaging by five percent by 2013. The reductions they have made are already paying off in savings to the company. "We created teams to work across the organization," Scott said. "It was voluntary — then you had the first person who eliminated some packaging, and someone else started showing how we could recycle more plastic, and all of a sudden it's $1 million a quarter." Wal-Mart operates 7,000 huge Class 8 trucks that get about 6 miles per gallon. It has told its truck makers that by 2015, it wants to double the efficiency of the fleet. Wal-Mart is the China of companies, so, explained Scott, "if we place one order we can create a market" for energy innovation.

For instance, Wal-Mart has used its shelves to create a huge, low-cost market for compact fluorescent bulbs, which use about a quarter of the energy of incandescent bulbs to produce the same light and last 10 times as long. "Just by doing what it does best — saving customers money and cutting costs," said Glenn Prickett of Conservation International, a Wal-Mart adviser, "Wal-Mart can have a revolutionary impact on the market for green technologies. If every one of their 100 million customers in the U.S. bought just one energy-saving compact fluorescent lamp, instead of a traditional incandescent bulb, they could cut CO2 emissions by 45 billion pounds and save more than $3 billion."

Those savings highlight something that often gets lost: The quickest way to get to the China price for clean power is by becoming more energy efficient. The cheapest, cleanest, nonemitting power plant in the world is the one you don't build. Helping China adopt some of the breakthrough efficiency programs that California has adopted, for instance — like rewarding electrical utilities for how much energy they get their customers to save rather than to use — could have a huge impact. Some experts estimate that China could cut its need for new power plants in half with aggressive investments in efficiency.

Yet another force driving us to the China price is Chinese entrepreneurs, who understand that while Beijing may not be ready to impose CO2 restraints, developed countries are, so this is going to be a global business — and they want a slice. Let me introduce the man identified last year by Forbes Magazine as the seventh-richest man in China, with a fortune now estimated at $2.2 billion. His name is Shi Zhengrong and he is China's leading manufacturer of silicon solar panels, which convert sunlight into electricity.

"People at all levels in China have become more aware of this environment issue and alternative energy," said Shi, whose company, Suntech Power Holdings, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. "Five years ago, when I started the company, people said: 'Why do we need solar? We have a surplus of coal-powered electricity.' Now it is different; now people realize that solar has a bright future. But it is still too expensive. ... We have to reduce the cost as quickly as possible — our real competitors are coal and nuclear power."

Shi does most of his manufacturing in China, but sells roughly 90 percent of his products outside China, because today they are too expensive for his domestic market. But the more he can get the price down, and start to grow his business inside China, the more he can use that to become a dominant global player. Thanks to Suntech's success, in China "there is a rush of business people entering this sector, even though we still don't have a market here," Shi added. "Many government people now say, 'This is an industry!' " And if it takes off, China could do for solar panels what it did for tennis shoes — bring the price down so far that everyone can afford a pair.

VI.

All that sounds great — but remember those seven wedges? To reach the necessary scale of emissions-free energy will require big clean coal or nuclear power stations, wind farms and solar farms, all connected to a national transmission grid, not to mention clean fuels for our cars and trucks. And the market alone, as presently constructed in the U.S., will not get us those alternatives at the scale we need — at the China price — fast enough.

Prof. Nate Lewis, Caltech's noted chemist and energy expert, explained why with an analogy. "Let's say you invented the first cellphone," he said. "You could charge people $1,000 for each one because lots of people would be ready to pay lots of money to have a phone they could carry in their pocket." With those profits, you, the inventor, could pay back your shareholders and plow more into research, so you keep selling better and cheaper cellphones.

But energy is different, Lewis explained: "If I come to you and say, 'Today your house lights are being powered by dirty coal, but tomorrow, if you pay me $100 more a month, I will power your house lights with solar,' you are most likely to say: 'Sorry, Nate, but I don't really care how my lights go on, I just care that they go on. I won't pay an extra $100 a month for sun power. A new cellphone improves my life. A different way to power my lights does nothing.'

"So building an emissions-free energy infrastructure is not like sending a man to the moon," Lewis went on. "With the moon shot, money was no object — and all we had to do was get there. But today, we already have cheap energy from coal, gas and oil. So getting people to pay more to shift to clean fuels is like trying to get funding for NASA to build a spaceship to the moon — when Southwest Airlines already flies there and gives away free peanuts! I already have a cheap ride to the moon, and a ride is a ride. For most people, electricity is electricity, no matter how it is generated."

If we were running out of coal or oil, the market would steadily push the prices up, which would stimulate innovation in alternatives. Eventually there would be a crossover, and the alternatives would kick in, start to scale and come down in price. But what has happened in energy over the last 35 years is that the oil price goes up, stimulating government subsidies and some investments in alternatives, and then the price goes down, the government loses interest, the subsidies expire and the investors in alternatives get wiped out.

The only way to stimulate the scale of sustained investment in research and development of non-CO2 emitting power at the China price is if the developed countries, who can afford to do so, force their people to pay the full climate, economic and geopolitical costs of using gasoline and dirty coal. Those countries that have signed the Kyoto Protocol are starting to do that. But America is not.

Up to now, said Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, we as a society "have been behaving just like Enron the company at the height of its folly." We rack up stunning profits and G.D.P. numbers every year, and they look great on paper "because we've been hiding some of the costs off the books." If we don't put a price on the CO2 we're building up or on our addiction to oil, we'll never nurture the innovation we need.

Jeffrey Immelt, the chairman of General Electric, has worked for G.E. for 25 years. In that time, he told me, he has seen seven generations of innovation in G.E.'s medical equipment business — in devices like M.R.I.s or CT scans — because health care market incentives drove the innovation. In power, it's just the opposite. "Today, on the power side," he said, "we're still selling the same basic coal-fired power plants we had when I arrived. They're a little cleaner and more efficient now, but basically the same."

The one clean power area where G.E. is now into a third generation is wind turbines, "thanks to the European Union," Immelt said. Countries like Denmark, Spain and Germany imposed standards for wind power on their utilities and offered sustained subsidies, creating a big market for wind-turbine manufacturers in Europe in the 1980s, when America abandoned wind because the price of oil fell. "We grew our wind business in Europe," Immelt said.

As things stand now in America, Immelt said, "the market does not work in energy." The multibillion-dollar scale of investment that a company like G.E. is being asked to make in order to develop new clean-power technologies or that a utility is being asked to make in order to build coal sequestration facilities or nuclear plants is not going to happen at scale — unless they know that coal and oil are going to be priced high enough for long enough that new investments will not be undercut in a few years by falling fossil fuel prices. "Carbon has to have a value," Immelt emphasized. "Today in the U.S. and China it has no value."

I recently visited the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear plant with Christopher Crane, president of Exelon Nuclear, which owns the facility. He said that if Exelon wanted to start a nuclear plant today, the licensing, design, planning and building requirements are so extensive it would not open until 2015 at the earliest. But even if Exelon got all the approvals, it could not start building "because the cost of capital for a nuclear plant today is prohibitive."

That's because the interest rate that any commercial bank would charge on a loan for a nuclear facility would be so high — because of all the risks of lawsuits or cost overruns — that it would be impossible for Exelon to proceed. A standard nuclear plant today costs about $3 billion per unit. The only way to stimulate more nuclear power innovation, Crane said, would be federal loan guarantees that would lower the cost of capital for anyone willing to build a new nuclear plant.

The 2005 energy bill created such loan guarantees, but the details still have not been worked out. "We would need a robust loan guarantee program to jump-start the nuclear industry," Crane said — an industry that has basically been frozen since the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. With cheaper money, added Crane, CO2-free nuclear power could be "very competitive" with CO2-emitting pulverized coal.

Think about the implications. Three Mile Island had two reactors, TMI-2, which shut down because of the 1979 accident, and TMI-1, which is still operating today, providing clean electricity with virtually no CO2 emissions for 800,000 homes. Had the TMI-2 accident not happened, it too would have been providing clean electricity for 800,000 homes for the last 28 years. Instead, that energy came from CO2-emitting coal, which, by the way, still generates 50 percent of America's electricity.

Similar calculations apply to ethanol production. "We have about 100 scientists working on cellulosic ethanol," Chad Holliday, the C.E.O. of DuPont, told me. "My guess is that we could double the number and add another 50 to start working on how to commercialize it. It would probably cost us less than $100 million to scale up. But I am not ready to do that. I can guess what it will cost me to make it and what the price will be, but is the market going to be there? What are the regulations going to be? Is the ethanol subsidy going to be reduced? Will we put a tax on oil to keep ethanol competitive? If I know that, it gives me a price target to go after. Without that, I don't know what the market is and my shareholders don't know how to value what I am doing. ... You need some certainty on the incentives side and on the market side, because we are talking about multiyear investments, billions of dollars, that will take a long time to take off, and we won't hit on everything."

Summing up the problem, Immelt of G.E. said the big energy players are being asked "to take a 15-minute market signal and make a 40-year decision and that just doesn't work. ... The U.S. government should decide: What do we want to have happen? How much clean coal, how much nuclear and what is the most efficient way to incentivize people to get there?"

He's dead right. The market alone won't work. Government's job is to set high standards, let the market reach them and then raise the standards more. That's how you get scale innovation at the China price. Government can do this by imposing steadily rising efficiency standards for buildings and appliances and by stipulating that utilities generate a certain amount of electricity from renewables — like wind or solar. Or it can impose steadily rising mileage standards for cars or a steadily tightening cap-and-trade system for the amount of CO2 any factory or power plant can emit. Or it can offer loan guarantees and fast-track licensing for anyone who wants to build a nuclear plant. Or — my preference and the simplest option — it can impose a carbon tax that will stimulate the market to move away from fuels that emit high levels of CO2 and invest in those that don't. Ideally, it will do all of these things. But whichever options we choose, they will only work if they are transparent, simple and long-term — with zero fudging allowed and with regulatory oversight and stiff financial penalties for violators.

The politician who actually proved just how effective this can be was a guy named George W. Bush, when he was governor of Texas. He pushed for and signed a renewable energy portfolio mandate in 1999. The mandate stipulated that Texas power companies had to produce 2,000 new megawatts of electricity from renewables, mostly wind, by 2009. What happened? A dozen new companies jumped into the Texas market and built wind turbines to meet the mandate, so many that the 2,000-megawatt goal was reached in 2005. So the Texas Legislature has upped the mandate to 5,000 megawatts by 2015, and everyone knows they will beat that too because of how quickly wind in Texas is becoming competitive with coal. Today, thanks to Governor Bush's market intervention, Texas is the biggest wind state in America.

President Bush, though, is no Governor Bush. (The Dick Cheney effect?) President Bush claims he's protecting American companies by not imposing tough mileage, conservation or clean power standards, but he's actually helping them lose the race for the next great global industry. Japan has some of the world's highest gasoline taxes and stringent energy efficiency standards for vehicles — and it has the world's most profitable and innovative car company, Toyota. That's no accident.

The politicians who best understand this are America's governors, some of whom have started to just ignore Washington, set their own energy standards and reap the benefits for their states. As Schwarzenegger told me, "We have seen in California so many companies that have been created that work just on things that have do with clean environment." California's state-imposed efficiency standards have resulted in per-capita energy consumption in California remaining almost flat for the last 30 years, while in the rest of the country it has gone up 50 percent. "There are a lot of industries that are exploding right now because of setting these new standards," he said.

VII.

John Dineen runs G.E. Transportation, which makes locomotives. His factory is in Erie, Pa., and employs 4,500 people. When it comes to the challenges from cheap labor markets, Dineen likes to say, "Our little town has trade surpluses with China and Mexico."

Now how could that be? China makes locomotives that are 30 percent cheaper than G.E.'s, but it turns out that G.E.'s are the most energy efficient in the world, with the lowest emissions and best mileage per ton pulled — "and they don't stop on the tracks," Dineen added. So China is also buying from Erie — and so are Brazil, Mexico and Kazakhstan. What's the secret? The China price.

"We made it very easy for them," said Dineen. "By producing engines with lower emissions in the classic sense (NOx [nitrogen oxides]) and lower emissions in the future sense (CO2) and then coupling it with better fuel efficiency and reliability, we lowered the total life-cycle cost."

The West can't impose its climate or pollution standards on China, Dineen explained, but when a company like G.E. makes an engine that gets great mileage, cuts pollution and, by the way, emits less CO2, China will be a buyer. "If we were just trying to export lower-emission units, and they did not have the fuel benefits, we would lose," Dineen said. "But when green is made green — improved fuel economies coupled with emissions reductions — we see very quick adoption rates."

One reason G.E. Transportation got so efficient was the old U.S. standard it had to meet on NOx pollution, Dineen said. It did that through technological innovation. And as oil prices went up, it leveraged more technology to get better mileage. The result was a cleaner, more efficient, more exportable locomotive. Dineen describes his factory as a "technology campus" because, he explains, "it looks like a 100-year-old industrial site, but inside those 100-year-old buildings are world-class engineers working on the next generation's technologies." He also notes that workers in his factory make nearly twice the average in Erie — by selling to China!

The bottom line is this: Clean-tech plays to America's strength because making things like locomotives lighter and smarter takes a lot of knowledge — not cheap labor. That's why embedding clean-tech into everything we design and manufacture is a way to revive America as a manufacturing power.

"Whatever you are making, if you can add a green dimension to it — making it more efficient, healthier and more sustainable for future generations — you have a product that can't just be made cheaper in India or China," said Andrew Shapiro, founder of GreenOrder, an environmental business-strategy group. "If you just create a green ghetto in your company, you miss it. You have to figure out how to integrate green into the DNA of your whole business."

Ditto for our country, which is why we need a Green New Deal — one in which government's role is not funding projects, as in the original New Deal, but seeding basic research, providing loan guarantees where needed and setting standards, taxes and incentives that will spawn 1,000 G.E. Transportations for all kinds of clean power.

Bush won't lead a Green New Deal, but his successor must if America is going to maintain its leadership and living standard. Unfortunately, today's presidential hopefuls are largely full of hot air on the climate-energy issue. Not one of them is proposing anything hard, like a carbon or gasoline tax, and if you think we can deal with these huge problems without asking the American people to do anything hard, you're a fool or a fraud.

Being serious starts with reframing the whole issue — helping Americans understand, as the Carnegie Fellow David Rothkopf puts it, "that we're not 'post-Cold War' anymore — we're pre-something totally new." I'd say we're in the "pre-climate war era." Unless we create a more carbon-free world, we will not preserve the free world. Intensifying climate change, energy wars and petroauthoritarianism will curtail our life choices and our children's opportunities every bit as much as Communism once did for half the planet.

Equally important, presidential candidates need to help Americans understand that green is not about cutting back. It's about creating a new cornucopia of abundance for the next generation by inventing a whole new industry. It's about getting our best brains out of hedge funds and into innovations that will not only give us the clean-power industrial assets to preserve our American dream but also give us the technologies that billions of others need to realize their own dreams without destroying the planet. It's about making America safer by breaking our addiction to a fuel that is powering regimes deeply hostile to our values. And, finally, it's about making America the global environmental leader, instead of laggard, which as Schwarzenegger argues would "create a very powerful side product." Those who dislike America because of Iraq, he explained, would at least be able to say, "Well, I don't like them for the war, but I do like them because they show such unbelievable leadership — not just with their blue jeans and hamburgers but with the environment. People will love us for that. That's not existing right now."

In sum, as John Hennessy, the president of Stanford, taught me: Confronting this climate-energy issue is the epitome of what John Gardner, the founder of Common Cause, once described as "a series of great opportunities disguised as insoluble problems."

Am I optimistic? I want to be. But I am also old-fashioned. I don't believe the world will effectively address the climate-energy challenge without America, its president, its government, its industry, its markets and its people all leading the parade. Green has to become part of America's DNA. We're getting there. Green has hit Main Street — it's now more than a hobby — but it's still less than a new way of life.

Why? Because big transformations — women's suffrage, for instance — usually happen when a lot of aggrieved people take to the streets, the politicians react and laws get changed. But the climate-energy debate is more muted and slow-moving. Why? Because the people who will be most harmed by the climate-energy crisis haven't been born yet.

"This issue doesn't pit haves versus have-nots," notes the Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum, "but the present versus the future — today's generation versus its kids and unborn grandchildren." Once the Geo-Green interest group comes of age, especially if it is after another 9/11 or Katrina, Mandelbaum said, "it will be the biggest interest group in history — but by then it could be too late."

An unusual situation like this calls for the ethic of stewardship. Stewardship is what parents do for their kids: think about the long term, so they can have a better future. It is much easier to get families to do that than whole societies, but that is our challenge. In many ways, our parents rose to such a challenge in World War II — when an entire generation mobilized to preserve our way of life. That is why they were called the Greatest Generation. Our kids will only call us the Greatest Generation if we rise to our challenge and become the Greenest Generation.

googlebizelogoyapsana

2007-03-29T16:07:00.000+02:00

googlebizelogoyapsana

Bir grup yakışıklı Türk genci, sivil toplumun Türkiye'de yeşerdiğini ve bireylerin herşeyi devletten beklemediğinin bir kanıtı olarak, googlebizelogoyapsana, başlığında, Türkiye'mize Google'ın tıpkı Kore'ye ya da başka dinlere gösterdiği saygıyı göstermesi için çalışıyorlar. Onlara destek verelim. Logo fikirlerimizi paylaşalım. Bence Google'ın, UNESCO'nun da 2007'yi Mevlana Yılı ilan etmesinden yola çıkarak, Mevlana ile ilgili bir logo hazırlaması gerekir. Haydi gençler arkadaşlarımızı yalnız bırakmayalım...
Google, Google, duy sesimizi, işte bu Türklerin ayak sesleri...

Putin urges limit on U.S. presence in Iraq in letter to Arab leaders

2007-03-29T15:26:00.000+02:00

Putin urges limit on U.S. presence in Iraq in letter to Arab leaders

Thursday, March 29, 2007

MOSCOW:Russia's President Vladimir Putin has sent a letter to a summit of Arab leaders, the Kremlin said Thursday, calling for a time limit for U.S. military presence in Iraq and issuing what sounded like a veiled criticism of U.S. foreign policy.

Putin's letter to the summit which opened Wednesday in the Saudi capital reflected efforts by the Kremlin to expand Russia's global clout and take a higher profile in international affairs.

Putin said in the letter that Russia highly values "the Arab world's contribution to building a just multipolar world order and political and diplomatic settlement of crises."

Russia has repeatedly pushed for a multipolar world — a term underlining its opposition to the unipolar world of U.S. domination.

In what sounded like a veiled criticism of the U.S., Putin complained in the letter against a "policy of unilateral use of force and a desire to monopolize conflict settlement." He also criticized those seeking to "provoke a confrontation between civilizations and faiths."

Putin openly assailed what he described as U.S. over-reliance on force and a unilateral approach to global affairs in last month's speech at a security conference in Munich, Germany.

In a foreign policy review released earlier this week, the Russian Foreign Ministry also strongly warned the United States against attacking Iran, warning that it could trigger a "war of civilizations."

Putin said that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been at the root of unrest in the region and reaffirmed Russia's call for an international conference on the Middle East.

Russia is a member of the international Quartet of Mideast peacemakers which also includes the U.N., the U.S. and the EU, and it has sought to take a broader role in peacemaking efforts.

Putin also repeated Russia's call on Washington to set a time limit for its military presence in Iraq, saying it would become an important factor helping national reconciliation.

Russia has opposed the U.S. military action in Iraq and has not contributed any troops to the U.S.-led coalition force. It said it was willing to help peace efforts, but urged Washington to revise its policy in Iraq by giving more say to opposition groups and by inviting nations such as Iran and Syria to take part in peace-building.

Saudi king calls U.S. presence in Iraq 'illegitimate'

2007-03-29T14:48:00.000+02:00

Saudi king calls U.S. presence in Iraq 'illegitimate'

March 28, 2007

RIYADH: King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, opening a summit meeting of Arab leaders here Wednesday, called the U.S military presence in Iraq "illegitimate" and warned that sectarianism could lead to all-out civil war.

"In beloved Iraq, blood flows between brothers in the shadow of illegitimate foreign occupation and hateful sectarianism, threatening a civil war," he said, in unusually strong criticism of the United States from a strong ally.

But Abdullah's focus was mostly on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which Sunni Arab leaders see as a major cause of violent radicalism in their own countries and threat to regional stability.

In a strongly worded speech, he chastised the leaders for infighting and said their divisions had fueled turmoil throughout the Middle East. He painted a bleak picture of the crises and bloodshed in the region - from Lebanon and Sudan to Iraq - and lectured those attending that it was time to act.

The gathering is aimed at restarting a 2002 initiative that offered Israel peace with the Arab world if it withdrew from lands it seized in the 1967 Mideast war, a proposal the United States and Europe hope can build efforts to resume the long-stalled peace process. Abdullah on Wednesday prodded Arab leaders to take united action aimed at reviving the peace offer.

The leaders have refused calls for changes in the plan to win Israeli acceptance, but Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, allies of the United States, want the summit meeting to give them flexibility in promoting the offer to the West and to Israel.

Abdullah called for the lifting of the "oppressive" international financial embargo on the Palestinians "as soon as possible so the peace process will get to move in an atmosphere without oppression."

"The real blame should be directed at us, the leaders of the Arab nation," he said. "Our constant disagreements and rejection of unity have made the Arab nation lose confidence in our sincerity and lose hope."

The two-day summit meeting comes against a tense regional backdrop, with fears high among Arab leaders that a U.S.-led attack on Iran, a non-Arab nation that has refused to comply with UN demands to halt its nuclear program, could further destabilize the region.

Washington's Arab allies are increasingly worried that crises in the Middle East are building up to a point of disaster, with fears of disintegration in Iraq, increasing Iranian power in Iraq and Lebanon, and growing militancy fueled by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Saudi Arabia has taken a leading role in trying to mediate an easing of the tensions, particularly in the peace process. The kingdom brokered the formation of a Palestinian unity government between the moderate Fatah party and the militant group Hamas, hoping it would be able to enter peace talks with Israel and prompt the West to end the financial embargo on the previous Hamas-led government.

Israel, which rejected the Arab peace initiative in 2002, now says it could accept it if it was amended, particularly to water down its provisions calling for a "just solution" to the Palestinian refugees issues.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the UN secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, toured the region ahead of the summit meeting, trying to build momentum for the peace process and the Arab initiative. Ban spoke Wednesday at the summit talks, calling the initiative "one of the pillars of the peace process" and urging Israel to "take a fresh look at it."

The secretary general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, rejected amending the peace offer, saying, "They tell us to amend it, but we tell them to accept it first, then we can sit down at the negotiating table." But he said Arabs must "do more to convince" the Israelis on the offer.

Although the summit meeting is restarting the peace plan as is, it will create "working groups" to promote the offer in talks with the United States, United Nations and Europe - and perhaps Israel. The summit meeting's final resolution calls on Israel to accept the initiative and "seize this opportunity to resume serious, direct negotiations on all tracks."

Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt are hoping that the working groups can work behind the scenes to make the initiative more palatable to Israel and the West. The Jordanian foreign minister, Abdul-Ilah al-Khatib, told the Arab daily Al-Hayat that there was a "potential" that the working groups could hold direct talks with Israel.

But much depends on the makeup of the working groups, which could be a source of dispute at the summit meeting. Some have spoken of restricting the membership to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. But Syria, which opposed changing the initiative, may also seek to join, fearing it could be sidelined by the moderates.

The European Union foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, a guest at the Riyadh summit meeting, said both sides should show flexibility.

"The important thing is to get the negotiations started," he said. "In any negotiations there are changes in positions, because negotiations are like that."

Mete Çubukçu: K. Irak'tan Kerkük'e

2007-03-15T13:31:00.000+02:00

Mete Çubukçu yazdı: K. Irak’tan Kerkük’e

“Ülkenin Sünni ve Şii Arap bölgeleri tam bir çöküş ve iç savaş yaşarken, Iraklı Kürtler sanki başka bir ülkeymişçesine kendi yollunu çiziyor. Ancak bağımsız bir Kürt devletinin sadece kendilerinin inisiyatifinde olmadığını Iraklı Kürtler de biliyor.”

DİĞER HABERLER

Mete Çubukçu

NTV-MSNBC

15 Mart 2007 Perşembe

İSTANBUL - 1991’deki 1. Körfez Savaşı’ndan 2003’e kadar fiili olarak özerk bir yapıda olan Irak Kürt bölgesi -ya da Türkiye’deki yaygın kullanımıyla Kuzey Irak- 2003’teki işgalin ardından 2005 yılında kabul edilen anayasa ile resmi bir yapıya kavuştu. Haberin devamı

Bu yapının ismi Irak Kürdistan bölgesel yönetimi. Anayasa gereği federal bir yapıya sahip olan bölgesel yönetim, merkezi olarak Bağdat’a bağlı ve 275 sandalyeli Irak Ulusal Meclisi’nde KDP, KYB ve Irak Kürdistan İslam Birliği’nden 53 milletvekili ile temsil ediliyorlar. Ayrıca Erbil’deki Kürt Parlamentosu aracılığı ile yerel yasalar yapma ve bölgede politika yapma haklarına sahipler.

Irak Kürt bölgesi, uygulamalarıyla son yıllarda giderek merkezden kopuyor. Bölgenin herhangi bir yerinde Irak bayrağına rastlamanız mümkün değil; çünkü daha önceleri Celal Talabani’nin bölgesinde Irak bayrağı da dalgalanırken, bu bölgesel yönetim lideri Mesud Barzani tarafından yasaklanmış durumda. Her yerde kırmızı- beyaz-yeşil zemin üzerindeki sarı güneşli bayrak dalgalanıyor.

Yıllar öncesinin ‘dağ savaşçıları’ peşmergeler düzenli ordu olma yolunda. Diploma töreni sırasında Kürt bölgesi marşı söyleniyor; askerler öncelikle Irak değil Kürt bölgesini korumakla yükümlü. Kürt bölgesi sınırları içinde petrol arama çalışmaları devam ediyor; çıkarılan petrolün Irak halkının mı yoksa bölge yönetiminin mi olacağı ise hala belli değil.

Ülkenin Sünni ve Şii Arap bölgeleri tam bir çöküş ve iç savaş yaşarken, Iraklı Kürtler sanki başka bir ülkeymişçesine kendi yollunu çiziyor. Erbil ve Süleymaniye büyük bir şantiye gibi. Çoğunluğunu Türk şirketlerinin oluşturduğu şirketler bölgede ihale kovalıyorlar. 300 Türk şirketi ve yaklaşık 15 bin işçi kayıtlı durumda. Tabii ki bunda ABD işgalinin büyük payı var.

Sırtlarını ABD işgaline dayayan Kürtler tarihin bu döneminde yakaladıkları ‘şansı’ iyi değerlendirmek, tarihin kendilerine ‘Amerikan tepsisi’ ile sunduğu bu olanağı değerlendirmek istiyor. Bu görüşü Mesud Barzani dahil olmak üzere bütün Iraklı Kürt yetkililer sürekli ima ediyorlar. Bugünden sonra federal bir Kürt bölgesinden geri dönüş olmadığı biliniyor. Hatta Türkiye’deki asker ve sivil yetkililer de bunu kabullenmiş durumda.

Ancak, asıl ‘kuşku’ Kürt bölgesinin bağımsız bir devlete dönüşmesi konusunda kendini gösteriyor. Bölgenin kaygan zemininde önümüzdeki dönemde neler olacağını bugünden bilmek olanaksız.

Ancak bağımsız bir Kürt devletinin sadece kendilerinin inisiyatifinde olmadığını Iraklı Kürtler de biliyor. Irak’ın geleceğinde, ve özellikle Iraklı Kürtlerin konumunda Türkiye, İran, ve Suriye’nin tavrı belirleyici olacak gibi görünüyor. Iraklı Kürtler, tüm bu belirsizlik içinde, bütün kurumlarıyla geleceğe hazır olmak için var gücüyle çalışıyor.

MECBUREN BAĞDAT
Bütçesinin tamamını Bağdat’tan alan Kürt bölgesi şu an için kendi ayakları üzerinde duramıyor. Yani, Bağdat’tan gelen paralar olmadıkça bütçenin yüzde 68’ini oluşturan memur maaşları bile ödenemiyor. Ya da, Bağdat ödemeleri biraz geciktirdiği zaman kriz başlıyor, halk homurdanıyor.

Buna rağmen 3 milyonluk Kürt bölgesinde hummalı bir yeniden yapılanma çalışması var. Gelirler KDP ve KYB’nin üst düzey yöneticilerinin akrabalık ilişkilerinden oluşan yönetici kastının süzgecinden geçtikten sonra bölüşülüyor. Özellikle KDP ve KYB’nin akrabalık ilişkileri paylaşılan gelirler milyonlarca dolarlık ‘saraycıklara’ dönüşmüş durumda. Bir dönem Saddam Hüseyin’in saraylarını eleştirenler sanki onu ‘örnek’ alıyor.

Irak petrollerini 30 yıl boyunca yabancı şirketlerin hizmetine veren ‘yarı sömürge’ anlaşmasından sonra Kürtler, her yıl bu gelirin % 17’sine sahip olacak. Bu da önemli bir zenginlik kaynağı. Ancak bölgede tek bir fabrika ya da üretime dönük tesis yok. İşte bu nedenle bağımsızlık arzusuna rağmen Iraklı Kürtler şimdilik Bağdat’taki merkezi yönetime göbekten bağlılar. Bu yüzden Kerkük, Iraklı Kürtler için farklı bir anlam taşıyor ve Kürt yönetimi de tüm enerjisini Kasım ayında Kerkük’te yapılması planlanan referandum için harcıyor.

KERKÜK MÜ PETROL MÜ?
Türkmenler tarihi olarak Kerkük’ün bir Türkmen kenti, Kürtler ise Kerkük’ün Kürdistan’ın tarihi sınırları içinde olduğunu iddia ediyorlar. Kerkük bir Türkmen kenti. Ancak, bazı Osmanlı ve İngiliz haritalarına göre, 1700-1800’lü yıllarda Kürdistan sınırları içinde bulunuyor. Tarih tartışmasının Kerkük sorununa bugün için çözüm getirmesi çok zor.

Ancak, Türkmenlere göre Kürtlerin Kerkük konusunda bu kadar ısrarcı olmalarının altında yatan neden, dünyanın zengin yataklarından biri olan petrol. Kerkük petrollerinin denetiminin sadece Kürtlere verilmesi ise çok zor. Bu Irak’taki Şii ve Sünni grupların büyük tepkisini çekeceği gibi ABD’nin çıkarlarına uymuyor.

Ancak, bu noktada devreye ‘tarihin bu dönemecinde yakalanan fırsat’ devreye giriyor. Yani Iraklı Kürtler petrolü kontrol edemeyecek olsalar da referandum sonucu Kerkük’ün kendi sınırları içinde olduğunun tescilini istiyorlar. Çünkü bu tescil edildiği takdirde, Irak ve Birleşmiş Milletler belgelerine gireceğinden, ileride ellerinin güçlü olacağını ve geriye dönüşün olmayacağının bilincindeler.

Hungary chooses Gazprom over EU

2007-03-13T23:01:00.000+02:00

Hungary chooses Gazprom over EU
As the European Union struggles to achieve a common energy security policy, the Socialist-led government of Hungary has broken with the bloc by joining forces with Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, to extend a pipeline from Turkey to Hungary.

The joint project would compete directly with an EU plan to construct its own pipeline to reduce dependence on Russian energy supplies.

Starting in Turkey and crossing Bulgaria and Romania, the extended Gazprom pipeline, called Blue Stream, would follow almost the same route as the EU project, cost just as much and be finished at about the same time.

The immediate advantage to Hungary in joining the Russian project was unclear, because Budapest could end up contributing to the construction of competing pipelines.

The opposition in Hungary claims that Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany, who leads the former Communist Party and has close ties to President Vladimir Putin of Russia, supports Gazprom's strategy to expand its influence in central and southeastern Europe.

The Hungarian Economy Ministry, however, says that the country has ambitions to become a major energy hub in central Europe and that the Blue Stream project, with access to more Russian natural gas, would further this aim.

Gyurcsany said in an interview that because the EU project, known as Nabucco, had experienced significant delays and could face further problems, the Russian plan was more realistic.

When completed, at the earliest in 2011, the €5 billion, or $6.6 billion, Nabucco project would benefit all the bloc's 27 members and carry at least 30 billion cubic meters, or 1 trillion cubic feet, of natural gas a year to the Union. Currently, more than a quarter of the Union's gas, or 150 billion cubic meters, is imported annually from Russia.

"Which of these two pipelines exists?" asked Gyurcsany, whose company joined the Union in 2004. The Blue Stream line already runs under the Black Sea to Turkey.

"The Nabucco has been a long dream and an old plan," he said. "But we don't need dreams. We need projects."

"The single problem with Nabucco is that we cannot see when we will have gas from it," Gyurcsany said. "If someone could say to me definitively, you would have gas by a certain time, fine, but you can only heat the apartments with gas and not with dreams."

Andris Piebalgs, the Union's energy commissioner, said the Nabucco pipeline would transport natural gas across from the Caspian region, mostly from Azerbaijan to Turkey. It would then be sent through Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary and finally to Austria. These transit countries have established a consortium for the Nabucco pipeline.

Gyurcsany said Hungary would support Russian plans to extend the Blue Stream pipeline into central Europe despite its being a member of the Nabucco consortium.

"Blue Stream is backed by a very strong will and a very strong organizational power," Gyurcsany said. "And there is capacity behind it." The cost of extending the Blue Stream pipeline to Hungary would be €5 billion, according to the Hungarian Economy Ministry.

The Blue Stream pipeline is one of the world's deepest undersea pipelines. But because of low compression and other technical problems it pumps less than three billion cubic meters of gas a year, well below the total of regional needs. It was built to supplement Gazprom lines through other countries, including Ukraine and Belarus.

Once the Russian natural gas arrives in Hungary through the Blue Stream line, it is to be either sold to other European countries or stored in facilities that Gazprom recently acquired.

Gyurcsany said he still wanted Hungary to diversify its energy supplies. Hungary depends almost completely on Russia for natural gas.

Fidesz, the main opposition party in Hungary, said Gyurcsany was making the country even more dependent on Russia by teaming up with Gazprom.

"I would be most thankful if we could diversify our supplies," Gyurcsany said. "I can hardly overestimate the risk that Hungary runs. Any prime minister would be a fool if he did not want to diversify or if he bound himself to one supplier. But chasing dreams is also foolish instead of building on realities."

Janos Koko, the Hungarian economy minister, said he saw no inconsistency in the Hungarian position because it would lead to competition. "We also want to diversify our energy supplies," he said. "Over 80 percent of our gas comes from Russia. There are two competing projects. But Nabucco is more imagination than tangible. I would like to see a stronger Nabucco."

The EU agreed to speed up the construction of the 3,000-kilometer, or 1,900-mile Nabucco pipeline after an energy dispute between Russia and Ukraine in January 2006 that led to shortages of natural gas in some EU countries. Piebalgs said the Nabucco pipeline would "concretely contribute to energy security."

The pipeline has been subject to many delays, not least because of uncertainty over whether it would be able to ship natural gas from Iran. Iran is now subject to UN sanctions because it refuses to halt its uranium enrichment program.

There also have been problems with financing the project. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which advocates competition in the energy sector as well as diversification, agreed last year to finance 70 percent of Nabucco's construction costs.

Australia and Japan sign agreement on security

2007-03-13T23:00:00.000+02:00

Australia and Japan sign agreement on security

The Associated Press
Tuesday, March 13, 2007

TOKYO: Japan and Australia signed a security agreement on Tuesday to improve an increasingly close defense relationship, while the leaders of the two countries played down concerns that the pact was directed specifically at China or other countries in the region.

Under the joint declaration signed Tuesday by Prime Minister John Howard of Australia and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, Japanese forces will train alongside Australians for disaster relief and peacekeeping missions.

The pact also calls for cooperation between the two countries in counterterrorism measures and intelligence sharing.

"Prime Minister Howard and I agreed that the joint declaration offers a framework for concretely stepping up security ties between our two countries," Abe told reporters at a press conference held after the signing.

The declaration is a "further mark of the trust and cooperation between us," Howard added.

The two countries' security ties have vastly improved since Australian troops provided security for a Japanese aid mission consisting of about 600 troops in the southern Iraqi city of Samawa. The noncombat mission ended in July.

China has raised concerns that the Australia-Japan security pact was negotiated in secret; it fears the agreement is aimed at containing China's power in the region.

But Howard dismissed those concerns after the signing.

"This declaration lifts the security aspects of our relationship more closely to the level of our economic and commercial ties," Howard told reporters. "Neither China nor any other country in the region should see this declaration as being antagonistic toward them."

Howard, who had dined earlier in the day with Japanese business leaders, and Abe also agreed that negotiations on a free trade pact to begin next month should be undertaken with "sensitivity" toward areas of concern to both sides.

In particular, Howard noted the importance Japan places on its agriculture industry and expressed his "appreciation" that Tokyo was willing to discuss all elements of its concern.

"Japan has been Australia's largest export market," Howard said.

"Given the diversity of our two countries' economies and the interest in a free trade pact," there is much to be gained, Howard said.

The trade agreement would "have major merits in that it will ensure a stable supply to Japan of resources, energy and food," Abe said. "But we both have to be mindful of sensitivities. For Japan, we must attach importance to agriculture."

Japan is already the biggest buyer of Australian exports, and two-way trade in goods and services between the countries was worth about ¥4.07 trillion, or $34.7 billion, during the 2005- 2006 business year.

Australia mainly exports coal, natural gas and beef and buys Japanese motor vehicles and machinery.

The two men, meanwhile, sidestepped a question about whether Japan should apologize anew for wartime atrocities.

"We must of course always have consideration for the past in mind, but at the same time we want to advance the legacy of trust we have built up in the 60 years since the war to contribute to world peace," Abe told reporters.

Howard echoed Abe's sentiments.

"We don't forget the past, but we need also to look to the future and build on a commitment to put the past behind," he said.

Abe triggered outrage across Asia earlier this month by saying there was no proof that women — including some Australians — were coerced into prostitution.

He later said Japan would not apologize again for the military's "comfort stations." A senior Japanese official apologized in 1993 for the government's role, but the apology was not approved by Parliament.

Chinese officials reiterated on Tuesday that Beijing did not pose a military threat to the region and said that more should be done to boost trust throughout Asia.

"We hope what they've said is true," a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, said at a news conference, referring to Japanese and Australian assurances.

"In the meantime, we are not going to invade or pose a threat to anybody," Qin said.

Whose oil is it, anyway?

2007-03-13T22:54:00.000+02:00

Whose oil is it, anyway?
Antonia Juhasz
SAN FRANCISCO:Today more than three-quarters of the world's oil is owned and controlled by governments. It wasn't always this way.

Until about 35 years ago, the world's oil was largely in the hands of seven corporations based in the United States and Europe. Those seven have since merged into four: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP.

They are among the world's largest and most powerful financial empires. But ever since they lost their exclusive control of the oil to the governments, the companies have been trying to get it back.

Iraq's oil reserves — thought to be the second largest in the world — have always been high on the corporate wish list.

A new oil law set to go before the Iraqi Parliament this month would — if passed — go a long way toward helping the oil companies achieve their goal. The law would take the majority of Iraq's oil out of the exclusive hands of the Iraqi government and open it to international oil companies for a generation or more.

In March 2001, the National Energy Policy Development Group (better known as Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force), which included executives of America's largest energy companies, recommended that the United States government support initiatives by Middle Eastern countries "to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment." One invasion and a great deal of political engineering by the Bush administration later, this is exactly what the proposed Iraq oil law would achieve.

It does so to the benefit of the companies, but to the great detriment of Iraq's economy, democracy and sovereignty.

Since the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration has been aggressive in shepherding the oil law toward passage. It is one of the president's benchmarks for the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al- Maliki, a fact that Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, General William Casey, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and other administration officials are publicly emphasizing with increasing urgency.

The administration has highlighted the law's revenue-sharing plan, under which the central Iraqi government would distribute oil revenues throughout the nation on a per capita basis.

But the benefits of this excellent proposal are radically undercut by the law's many other provisions — these allow much (if not most) of Iraq's oil revenues to flow out of the country and into the pockets of international oil companies.

The law would transform Iraq's oil industry from a nationalized model closed to American oil companies except for limited (although highly lucrative) marketing contracts, into a commercial industry, all-but-privatized, that is fully open to all international oil companies.

The Iraq National Oil Company would have exclusive control of just 17 of Iraq's 80 known oil fields, leaving two-thirds of known — and all of its as yet undiscovered — fields open to foreign control.

The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy, partner with Iraqi companies, hire Iraqi workers or share new technologies. They could even ride out Iraq's current "instability" by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.

The vast majority of Iraq's oil would then be left underground for at least two years rather than being used for the country's economic development.

The international oil companies could also be offered some of the most corporate-friendly contracts in the world, including what are called production sharing agreements. These agreements are the oil industry's preferred model, but are roundly rejected by all the top oil producing countries in the Middle East because they grant long-term contracts (20 to 35 years in the case of Iraq's draft law) and greater control, ownership and profits to the companies than other models. In fact, they are used for only approximately 12 percent of the world's oil.

Iraq's neighbors Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia maintain nationalized oil systems and have outlawed foreign control over oil development. They all hire international oil companies as contractors to provide specific services as needed, for a limited duration, and without giving the foreign company any direct interest in the oil produced.

Iraqis may very well choose to use the expertise and experience of international oil companies. They are most likely to do so in a manner that best serves their own needs if they are freed from the tremendous external pressure being exercised by the Bush administration, the oil corporations — and the presence of 140,000 members of the American military.

Iraq's five trade union federations, representing hundreds of thousands of workers, released a statement opposing the law and rejecting "the handing of control over oil to foreign companies, which would undermine the sovereignty of the state and the dignity of the Iraqi people."

They ask for more time, less pressure and a chance at the democracy they have been promised.

The Brotherhood is gathering outside the pharaoh's palace

2007-03-08T15:10:00.000+02:00

The brotherhood is gathering outside the pharaoh's palace
Timothy Garton Ash

The Mubarak regime is heading for a succession crisis. By trying to strangle Egypt's Islamists, it has strengthened them Timothy Garton Ash in AswanThursday March 8, 2007The Guardian
In front of the towering golden sandstone entrance to the temple of Edfu stands an imposing granite statue of a falcon, some 12ft tall, representing Horus, a premier league Egyptian god. Sculpted into his chest is a small figure of one of the Greek rulers of Egypt at the time when the temple was built. To buttress his political legitimacy, the alien neo-pharaoh had not merely wrapped himself in the flag but carved himself into the stone of a powerful god. The rulers of Egypt have been playing this game for thousands of years - and they are at it again today.
More than three millennia before the birth of Christ, when ancient Britons were still wandering the primal forests in skins, behaving like proleptic football thugs, the first dynasty of the pharaohs had already built a unified kingdom down the valley of the Nile, and they were treated as demi-gods. Later they presented themselves as children and intimates of the sun-god Ra, of Isis and Osiris, and of their divine offspring, the falcon-headed god Horus.
Gods were great for keeping you in power, but they were also fungible. Over the centuries, as the politics changed, there were god-mergers and corporate god-takeovers. Luxor luminary Amun and sun-god Ra merged to become Amun-Ra, a strong new brand. The Ptolemaic successors of Alexander the Great promoted Serapis, a deliberate blending of Greek and Egyptian gods. At the Graeco-Roman temple of Philae, you see a mother and child image sculpted on the walls of the sanctuary, but the face of the mother has been chiselled away. In a Christian time, Isis was thus crudely rebranded Mary, turning the falcon-god Horus into Jesus.
Later, there was Allah, of course, and his messenger Muhammad. For the 19th-century Albanian-born Muhammad Ali Pasha, the new divinity was European-style modernity. For Napoleon and Lord Cromer there were the western gods of progress and civilisation, carried by the bayonet and the Gatling gun. For Nasser, the architect of post-colonial Egypt, there was pan-Arabism but also socialism, with added Islam.
Now they're changing gods again at the pharaoh's palace. Twenty-six years into the reign of President Mubarak, amendments are proposed to the constitution. Article 1, instead of reading "the Arab Republic of Egypt is a democratic, socialist state based on an alliance of the working forces of the people", is to say simply "the Arab Republic of Egypt is a democratic state, based on citizenship...". Socialism is being excised like the face of Isis at Philae. References to it are to be removed from nine other articles of the constitution.
Despite the opposition of secular and Coptic Christian politicians, article 2 will continue to describe Sharia as "the principal source" for Egyptian legislation. At the same time, by banning both political parties based on religion and independent candidates in presidential elections, the president's ruling National Democratic party aims to keep its principal enemy, the outlawed but popular Muslim Brotherhood, out of any future competition for legal political power. So it tries to embrace Islam while fighting Islamism.
Politics, seen from this perspective of 5,000 years of Egyptian history, is something very different from what you find in US civics textbooks. It's not about the installation of this or that logically and legally constructed political system, based on this or that ideology. It's about rulers borrowing, bending and merging gods, ideologies and legal systems, adapting to internal and external forces, mixing coercion and patronage, sharing some of the spoils where necessary, but always with the goal of maximising your own power and wealth, and hanging on to it for as long as possible - for yourself, and your children, and your children's children. Those who take the legitimating religion or ideology too seriously - be it Osirisism or socialism - are missing the point. The gods come and go; what endures over the millenia is men's lust for power and wealth, and their vain quest for immortality.
Which brings us back to the regime of President Hosni Mubarak, who is 78 years old. Although he has been re-elected until 2011, a succession crisis - that bane of all authoritarian regimes - is looming. One thing that brought people onto the streets in the Kifaya (Enough!) protest movement, during the run-up to the presidential election in 2005, was the prospect that he might be grooming his son, Gamal Mubarak, to succeed him. "Despite the police, no to extension, no to succession!" chanted the veteran leftwing activist Kamal Khalil. "Oh, Egypt," he continued, "you still have a palace, you still have slums, tell those who live on Orouba [a boulevard in a neighbourhood with many grand houses, including the president's residence] that we live 10 to one room."
For now, President Mubarak has seen off the Kifaya movement and, as I reported last week, he has also seen off the short-lived US pressure for rapid democratisation. The military, police and security service foundations of his rule seem as solid as the mighty pylons of the temple at Karnak. (They also render valuable services to the Pentagon, including extensive overflight facilities and the nasty business of extraordinary rendition.) He has a rather impressive prime minister, Dr Ahmed Nazif, a computer scientist by education, who described to me his government's push to integrate Egypt into the global economy. They are lowering barriers to trade and investment, and achieved growth of more than 5% last year. Gamal Mubarak, who holds an MBA and used to work for the Bank of America, is one of the driving forces behind the government's new free market agenda. But the economic benefits will only trickle down to the poor, if at all, in the longer term, while the costs will be felt sooner - for example, in the reduction of state subsidies for petrol and household fuel.
For many of those who live 10 to one room in the poorer quarters of Cairo, the great myth remains that of the Muslim Brotherhood, with its brilliantly simple slogan "Islam is the solution". So long as it is banned, the Brotherhood does not need to demonstrate how exactly Islam is the solution. It can hardly be expected to produce detailed, specific policies, let alone to deliver on them. In fact, the Mubarak regime is performing the Brotherhood a great service by continuing to persecute it. Trying to strangle Islamism, it feeds its growth. And the secular left-wing and Coptic Christian oppositionists, to whom I have talked, feel themselves caught between the devil and the deep green sea. (Green as in the colour of Islam.) On many cultural issues, including women's rights, they actually regard the Mubarak regime as the lesser evil.
Whatever happens in the transition from Hosni Mubarak over the next decade - whether we get President Mubarak II, or a candidate supported by the military, or someone else - I would bet on one thing: the Islamic component in the legitimating god-mix of Egyptian politics is likely to grow stronger, not weaker. If you find that worrying, I can suggest only one faint consolation: in time, it will pass. The process may take decades, but one day Islamism, too, will join the 5,000-year line of the gods that failed.· www.timothygartonash.com

Generals says Iraq talks critical

2007-03-08T14:59:00.000+02:00

General says Iraq talks critical
Gen Petraeus was confident violence could be reduced General's comments The top US general in Iraq says the military alone cannot provide a solution to the country's conflict.
Gen David Petraeus, in his first news conference since taking the command last month, said it was critical that alienated groups be brought into talks.
He said the new Baghdad security drive had had some "tough days" but he was confident violence could be reduced.
He was speaking after the US defence secretary approved an extra 2,200 military police to aid the crackdown.
Gen Petraeus said: "There is no military solution to a problem like that in Iraq, to the insurgency of Iraq.
"Military action is necessary to help improve security... but it is not sufficient. There needs to be a political aspect."
In recent days Shia pilgrims were killed in a barbaric manner by thugs with no soul, but the pilgrims continue to march Gen David Petraeus
He said some groups "who have felt the new Iraq did not have a place for them" would have to be engaged in talks.
The new Baghdad offensive involves US and Iraqi forces, thousands of whom are already on the ground, sweeping the city for militants and illegally held weapons.
Gen Petraeus said: "It's too early to discern significant trends, but there have been a few encouraging signs."
However he admitted "sensational attacks inevitably will continue".
BBC defence and security correspondent Rob Watson says that despite the scale of the new Baghdad drive, there simply are not enough US troops to prevent the violence shifting to other areas.
Our correspondent says that privately US officials believe it will not be possible to judge whether the surge has worked until all the troops have arrived in the summer and, if it does not, there will be few options remaining.
Gen Petraeus said it was essential to tackle the sectarian violence that has flared between Sunni and Shia Muslims since an attack on a key Shia shrine in Samarra just over a year ago.
He said US and Iraqi forces must "control the demons responsible for the vicious sectarian violence of the past year - demons who have torn at the very fabric of Iraqi society".
The general detailed the measures taken jointly by US and Iraqi forces to secure Baghdad's neighbourhoods.
He said the aim was not just to secure areas of the capital, but to hold them and help to improve the provision of basic services.
The general also denounced as "thugs with no soul" the recent attackers of Shia pilgrims. On Tuesday, more than 100 people died when suicide bombers targeted a crowd of pilgrims in the town of Hilla.
Nerves 'jangling'
On Wednesday US Defence Secretary Robert Gates approved the general's request for an extra 2,200 military police to support the security drive in Baghdad.
Mr Gates said the deployment would be in addition to the nearly 24,000 combat troops and support personnel approved by President George W Bush.
The BBC's James Westhead says the new troop allocation will set nerves jangling in Washington.
Congressional sources on Wednesday said Democrats were planning to propose legislation requiring US troops to return from Iraq by the second half of next year or sooner if Iraq's government failed to meet security goals.
The legislation could be tied to the $100bn ($52bn) funding request by the Bush administration for the Iraq and Afghanistan operations, the sources said.

Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/6429519.stmPublished: 2007/03/08 11:56:00 GMT

AK PARTİ TÜRK DIŞ POLİTİKASI VE BİR AKIL KAYMASI

2007-03-07T18:28:00.000+02:00

AK PARTİ, TÜRK DIŞ POLİTİKASI VE BİR AKIL KAYMASI
Sernur Yassıkaya

Türkiye 2007 yılında iki önemli seçimi yaşıyacak. Mayıs ayındaki Cumhurbaşkanlığı seçimleri ve Kasım 2007’de düzenlenmesi büyük ihtimal olan (ki Eylül 2007’de düzenleneceğine dönük tartışmalara da rastlanmaktadır) Genel Seçimler sadece Türk kamuoyu’nun değil dünya kamuoyunu da meşgul etmektedir. Acaba Türkiye’nin seçimler sonrası iç ve dış politikası ne gibi bir pozisyon alacak? AB-Türkiye ilişkileri nasıl gelişecek? Başbakan Recep Tayyib Erdoğan’ın Cumhurbaşkanı olması durumunda AK Parti’nin Genel Seçimlerdeki pozisyonu ve yeni seçimlerdeki oy oranı nasıl etkilenecek? Tüm bu sorular biraz da ön yargılarla beslenerek dış basında da yer ediniyor. İlginç olan o dur ki bazı gözlemciler, objektif gözlem yetisini kaybederek varolmayan bir durumu varmış gibi dış basında aksettirmeye çalışmasıdır. Bu yazı da yukarıda bahsettiğim konuların paralelinde içeriğe sahip Bitterlemons’da yayınlanan bir söyleşiden bahsedeceğim. Söz konusu söyleşi Neo-Con bir düşünce kuruluşu olan Washington Institute’un Türkiye Direktörü Dr. Soner Çağaptay ile yapılmıştır.

Söyleşi de Çağaptay Cumhurbaşkanlığı seçimleri öncesinde ABD Kongresine sunulan Ermeni tasarısının oylanacağına dikkat çekiyor. Bilindiği üzere bu tasarı şu an Türk-ABD ilişkileri açısından özellikle Türkiye’deki ultra ulusalcı kesim için olmak ya da olmamak meselesi olarak görülmektedir. Söz konusu tasarının bu haliyle Kongreye gelmesi durumunda Çağaptay Türkiye’deki milliyetçi duyguların daha da kabaracağını ve hiçbir adayın bunu görmemezlikten gelemeyeceğini belirtiyor. Ayrıca Bahar aylarında PKK’ya düzenlenecek bir sınır ötesi , nokta hedeflere yönelik düzenlenmesi muhtemel, operasyonunun AK Parti’ye Genel seçimler öncesi önemli puan kazandıracağının altını çiziyor.

Ancak benim Çağaptay’ın söylemleri ile ilgili üstünde durmak istediğim konu, Çağaptay’ın AK Partiyi ABD ile ilişkilerin soğuması ve Türkiye’nin “Batı” yönelimli dış politikasının yön değiştirmesinin asli sorumlusu olarak göstermesidir. Bu problematik ve birçok gerçeği göz ardı eden düşünce tarzını eleştirmemek elde değil. Çağaptay’a göre AK Parti iktidarı ile Türkiye’nin dış politikadaki yönü Batı’dan Ortadoğu’ya dönmüş durumda. Büyük bir safsata ve vizyon körlüğü! Çağaptay’a göre “laik” bir parti iktidarda olsaydı hem ABD ile ilişkiler daha iyi bir durumda olacak hem de Batı’ya yönelim sekteye uğramayacaktır. Türkiye’de Çağaptay’a göre hangi “laik” parti ABD ile ilişkileri geliştirecek ti, CHP mi DYP mi MHP mi yoksa “hayal kur büyük olsun” partisi Genç Parti mi? Hepimiz tüm CHP kademelerinin hatta ona sempati duyan eski bürokratların ABD’ye yönelik söylemlerini izlemekteyiz. Aynı kadroların AB’ye yönelik sert söylemleri de zihnimizin bir köşesinde. 1 Mart tezkeresinin en büyük sorumlusu CHP değil midir? ABD’ye her fırsatta bir müttefikten bahseder şekilde değil de, Türkiye’yi bölmek isteyen bir güçmüş gibi bahseden CHP değil midir? Bugün CHP iktidar olsaydı, Türkiye’de özgürleşmeye, zenginliğe doğru atılan adımların hangisi atılırdı? CHP iktidar olsaydı biz hala AB’ye üyelik adaylığından bahsediyor olacaktık. Türkiye’deki milliyetçi dalgayı her fırsatta sertleştirmeye çalına CHP midir yoksa AK Parti midir? Kimilerine göre AK Parti iktidarının en büyük destekçisi ABD değil midir?

Çağaptay’a göre Türkiye’deki güçlü milli kimliğin altında bir “İslami gurur” yapılanması varmış. Bunun da sebebi AK Parti olabilir mi? Gülme seslerinizi duyuyor gibiyim. Hepimiz bildiği gibi, bu his yeni bir şey değil ki, bu toprakların bin yıllık harcında bu gurur saklıdır. Ve bunu her adımda hissetmek mümkündür. Bugün Fatih Sultan Mehmet’le gurur duymayan Türk olabilir mi? Bunu yeni bir şeymiş gibi sunmak için herhalde Washington’da ikamet etmek gerekmektedir...

ABD’nin Ortadoğu’yu özellikle Irak’ı bir cehennem çukuruna çevirmesi, her şeyi en iyi ben bilirim edasıyla başladıkları dış politika macerasında, Bush Yönetiminin, cam eşya dükkanına girmiş fil misali her hareketiyle bir yeri kırıyorken, bu toprakların imparatorluk bakiyesi duygulara sahip olan Türk kamuoyunun alkışlamasını beklemek iyimserlik olurdu! Bu coğrafyanın insanlarına her gün görülen insanlık dışı muameleyi gördükçe, Babil’in, Harun Reşid’in Bağdat’ının yandığını hissettikçe elbette bu toprakların vicdanı insanımız tepki gösterecektir. Türkiye’yi kamuoyunun baskı altında tutulduğu Ürdün, Mısır gibi ülkelerle karıştırmamak gerekir. Buna rağmen bu ülkelerde ABD’yi onaylama oranları ancak % 12’lerde seyrediyor. Washington’dan bakıp ta görememe hastalığı anlaşılan sayın Çağaptay’a da sirayet etmiş. Soner Çağaptay ve benzeri düşünce sahipleri artık anlamalı ki Washington dahi küresel gelişmelere Batı ekseninde bakmazken, Türkiye gibi ateş çemberinin ortasındaki bir ülkenin dış politikasını sadece Batı’ya endeksleyerek yönetmesi mümkün değildir. Türkiye AK Parti iktidarı ile bugün hiç olmadığı kadar Afrika’yla, Ortadoğu’yla, hatta Asya ile ilgilenmek durumundadır. Dünyamızın küreselleştiğinden bahsederken, dış politikayı tek bir boyuta indirgemek mümkün değildir. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk gerektiğinde Sadabad Paktını kurmuştur. Atatürk bu paktı kurmakla Batı medeniyetlerini geçme, Batılılaşma iddiasından vazgeçmiş midir? Elbette hayır. O halde elmalarla armutları karıştırmamak gerektir.

Türkiye, AK Parti hükümetleri döneminde hiçbir Türkiye Cumhuriyeti hükümetinin atmadığı adımlar atarak AB’ye üye olma sürecine girmiştir. Özgürleşme ve Zenginleşme yolunda hiç umulmadık adımlar atılmıştır. Önemli Türkiye uzmanlarından Philip Robins’in de ifade ettiği gibi Kasım 2007 sonrası ortaya çıkacak yine etkili bir AK Parti çoğunluğu 2008-2010 dönemini Türkiye için yeni bir reformlar yılı haline dönüştürebilir.

ABD’den her gün bir yetkili hatta İsrailliler bir Ortadoğu ülkesini ziyaret ederken, Türkiye’nin yanı başındaki bölgeye ilgi göstermemesi mümkün müdür? Böyle bir düşünce olsa olsa Türkiye’yi Ortadoğu politikalarından soyutlamak ve onu etkisiz bir aktör haline getirmek isteyenlerin işine yarayacaktır. Nasıl bir denklemdir ki Türkiye’nin Ortadoğu politikalarında aktif rol almak istemesi, rejimin laik temellerinin tehdit edilmesi sonucunu doğurmakta, AK Parti’ye İslamcı nitelikler kazandırmaktadır. O halde Çin, Rusya, AB ülkeleri hatta ABD Türkiye’den daha fazla İslamileşme tehlikesiyle karşı karşıyadır. Bush ailesi’nin Suud hanedanıyla yakın ilişkisi onları sakın Vahabi yapmasın!

Sayın Çağaptay’ın artık Washington Institute gözlüğünü çıkararak, Türkiye perspektifli bir bakış açısı geliştirmesinde fayda vardır. Korkarım ki eğer bu söylem tarzını devam ettirirse, Türkiye masası direktörlüğü ona fazla geniş gelecektir. Çünkü Türkiye seksenli hatta doksanlı yılların Türkiye’si değildir tıpkı yaşadığımız dünyanın olmadığı gibi...

Hoşgeldiniz

2007-03-07T13:49:00.000+02:00

Bu blog'da sizinle ilgimi çeken uluslararası gelişmeleri ve Türk dış politikası ile ilgili haberleri ayrıca kendi yorumlarımı paylaşacağım.