I mentioned in my Dr. Stuxlove presentation early in 2011, and in later blog posts, it was American policy-makers who were behind the move for Iran to get nuclear capability.

The Washington Post probably said it best in 2005:

Ford’s team endorsed Iranian plans to build a massive nuclear energy industry, but also worked hard to complete a multibillion-dollar deal that would have given Tehran control of large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium — the two pathways to a nuclear bomb.

[…]

After balking initially, President Gerald R. Ford signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran the chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The deal was for a complete “nuclear fuel cycle” — reactors powered by and regenerating fissile materials on a self-sustaining basis.

That is precisely the ability the current administration is trying to prevent Iran from acquiring today.

The story is that Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz came back in the Bush administration and sang a completely different tune compared to their work under Ford. The WashPo offers a possible explanation why.

Gary Sick, who handled nonproliferation issues under presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan, said the entire deal was based on trust. “That’s the bottom line.”

“The shah made a big convincing case that Iran was going to run out of gas and oil and they had a growing population and a rapidly increasing demand for energy,” Sick said. “The mullahs make the same argument today, but we don’t trust them.”

That doesn’t really get to the heart of weapons risk. Never mind the energy issue. There are other energy solutions. Why was Iran trusted in nuclear non-proliferation? Or for that matter, why was Pakistan trusted? As Gorbachev used to often tell President Reagan, trust but verify.

Analysis this month by famous political scientist Kenneth N. Waltz might better explain what President Ford’s crew was thinking. Competition between states, in Waltz’s self-described structural realist view, keeps them in check. He writes in “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb” that proliferation would bring stability.

Most U.S., European, and Israeli commentators and policymakers warn that a nuclear-armed Iran would be the worst possible outcome of the current standoff. In fact, it would probably be the best possible result: the one most likely to restore stability to the Middle East.

Perhaps Rumsfeld et al in the 1970s believed this and also held the view that competition would only ever be between Iran and Iraq — at the very most a limited regional affair. After all, Iran was an ally of Israel, sending oil supplies and collaborating on weapons development until the 1980s.

Ironically, the shah teamed with Israel to develop a short-range system after Washington denied his request for Lance missiles. Known as Project Flower, Iran provided the funds and Israel the technology. The monarchy also pursued nuclear technologies, suggesting an interest in a delivery system for nuclear weapons.

A joint Iran-Israel nuclear ballistic missile collaboration? It seems impossible now. But that’s the issue with nuclear proliferation. A long-term irreversible threat to the region let alone America must have occurred to Rumsfeld, Kissinger and anyone even vaguely familiar with Iranian history. We can say the world changed a lot but to work hard for Iran to get the bomb, and then try hard to stop Iran from getting the bomb…Rumsfeld never explained his reversal on an irreversible issue. It certainly puts Stuxnet in a different light when you look at the historic role America and Israel have had with regard to technology in Iran. Wonder if Waltz thinks malware is also good for stability.

Wired did a blistering expose of the transfer of federal military equipment to local law enforcement. There are many elements of the story that make sense in terms of a military-industrial-congressional complex predicted by President Eisenhower. Apparently the lobbyists figured out that a good way to expand federal government spending on military equipment is to setup domestic distribution channels.

On the one hand we should expect to hear arguments along the lines of “if this saves just one life, it’s justified”. That’s a hard point to argue against if a life will actually be saved but it’s mostly speculation. Speculation aside, a good counter-argument is that the move from civilian to military tactics tends to create an imbalance that will seriously damage relations with citizens. If we agree that the police become less effective as they lose respect then the question should be how military equipment affects respect.

I suspect police will have a harder time maintaining respect (aside from respect that comes through intimidation and fear) when they show a need to rely on military-grade technology to solve problems; it will make them appear tactically weak. After all, they are not funded to have the time and resources to maintain a military training program. Without the federal funding to acquire the equipment it would not be possible, but then comes the real costs of ownership. The simple act of acquiring a tank is very different from the complexity of securely storing, maintaining and training with a tank to use it effectively.

So while police departments across the nation may see the military supplies windfall like kids in a candy store, their local citizens undoubtedly will grouse about a much darker or even sinister downside. Wired says some police understand this effect and have warned about it already.

“There’s been an unmistakable trend toward more and more militarization of American law enforcement,” Norm Stamper, former Chief of the Seattle Police Department and author of Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing, told Danger Room. During his tenure in Seattle, he clamped down on the WTO protests in 1999, the infamous “Battle in Seattle.” It’s a response he now calls “disastrous.”

According to Stamper, having small local police departments go around with tanks and military gear has “a chilling effect on any effort to strengthen the relationship” between the community and the cops. And that’s not the only danger. “There’s no justification for them having that kind of equipment, for one obvious reason, and that is if they have it, they will find a way to use it. And if they use it they will misuse it altogether too many times,” said Stamper. What happened a year ago in Arizona, when army veteran Jose Guerena was shot down during a drug raid that found no drugs in his house, could very well be an example of that misuse.

If people want to make the argument that the equipment could save a life, they also must confront the growing number of examples where the equipment has caused unnecessary loss of life and property. Wired points out that the equipment is more often used in vain and causes more damage than good.

Wired also gives a long list of cities that already have been buying large amounts and types of military supplies. In a surprise move the Berkeley campus police just applied to get on the military-industrial-congressional complex program; it can now be added to that list.

The University of California – Berkeley Police Department (UCPD) has acquired a $200,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security to purchase an “Armored Response Counter Attack Truck,” a police department spokesman told Campus Reform on Friday.
The eight-ton vehicle, commonly referred to as a “Bearcat,” is used by U.S. troops on the battlefield and is often equipped with a rotating roof hatch, powered turrets, gun ports, a battering ram, and a weapon system used to remotely engage a target with lethal force.

[…]

Tejada said that although he does know of any incident in the university’s 144-year history in which such a vehicle would have saved a life, the police department would have have liked to deploy it in an incident last year when they mistakenly believed a man had an AK-47 assault rifle.

Clearly the military equipment makes some police feel more prepared to face their worst fears. The issue will soon become whether these police also have calculated how much less safe citizens will feel and what militarization means for an overall objective of keeping the peace. Who really benefits from this trend, aside from the manufacturers? Furthermore, as the police completely change risk calculations have they properly calculated the costs to manage insider threats and to prevent the equipment from being stolen, abused or misused? Consider the recent armored car robbery…it’s a bigger gamble than they might realize and they could soon wish they had never been “given” military tools.

The Bamiyan Buddhas were infamously destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban in Afghanistan. A similar tragedy is unfolding in West Africa as Islamic fundamentalists are now destroying Islamic shrines and cultural heritage in Mali.

Earlier this year a coup in Mali was linked to the destabilization of the northern half. Military leaders hoped to squash rebellion but instead created a greater mess. The emergent political void was filled by militant rebels of the Tuareg, an ethnic group who has sought independence for more than fifty years as I’ve written before:

In brief: the Tuareg (who call themselves Kel Tamsheq) live in the southern Sahara, dispersed across the borders of several countries including Algeria, Mali, Libya, and Niger. Despite this separation they share a common language apparently related to Berber. They are perhaps most known historically for establishing the north African city Timbuktu in the 10th century near the Niger river and fostering trade including scholarship, literature and books.

They were essentially tribes of caravans around the Sahara with agricultural work performed by non-Tuareg serfs. Fast forward several hundred years to their fierce resistance to French colonization in the 1890s — colonial guns against swords of the nomads. The French feared them as raiders, which led to massacres of the nomadic minority. They were thus forced to sign treaties that led to oppression by the state. Their attempt to gain autonomy during the Mali independence movement in the 1960s failed and so they struggled as dislocated minorities through severe African drought in the 1970s and 1980 that devastated their livelihood. With little or no control of government, and rampant corruption, foreign aid rarely was distributed where it was needed most.

Their suffering resulted in a cultural revival and rebellion. By the start of the 1990s the Tuareg attempted again to gain more autonomy in Niger and Mali through armed resistance. This led many into years of rebel training camps, imprisonment and even exile to Mauritania, Algeria and Burkina Faso. The mid-1990s, finally saw cease-fire agreements and they are apparently doing better under President Konare.

Also interested in control of the territory are fundamentalist groups such as the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), the radical Ansar Dine, and al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM). These different groups initially worked under a common plan to establish control and setup a governing council. Things soon fell apart.

Last month representatives from the neighboring country Algeria brokered a meeting between the various rebels. It was soon clear that the MUJAO were intent on nothing less than forcing the territory into a fundamentalist Islamic state. That put them at odds with the Mouvement National de liberation de l’Azawad (MNLA), who expressed interest in a secular nation.

From a Western view it might be easiest to characterize the differences between secular and fundamentalist Islamic rebels in terms of their view of Westerners. Those with ties to al-Qaeda terrorist factions will try to capture or kill Europeans in Mali. Ansar Dine, for example, is led by a man trained by Pakistanis for jihad who amassed wealth by being involved in the business of kidnappings. Beyond this man’s distaste for secularism he clearly has a hatred of Westerners and is unlikely to form relations with non-Islamic states.

In contrast the MNLA are Tuareg and veterans of the Libyan army who already have strong ties to Western nations. The destabilization of Libya may have been a turning point that exposed Mali to rebellion; the Western-backed offensive in Libya enabled soldiers there to leave and create pressure in north Mali for ethnic sovereignty. These Islamic rebels have a very different profile from the jihadists, as noted in a harrowing tale of escape by two British during the coup.

…they were made an unexpected offer: the French embassy had contacts with secular Tuareg-led MNLA rebels who were offering them safe passage away from al-Qaeda factions searching the streets for Westerners.

That is why it is not surprising to read about a notorious al-Qaeda terrorist leader just reported as a casualty in a fight with the MNLA.

Dans un communiqué rendu public hier, le Conseil transitoire de l’Etat de l’Azawad (CTEA, ex-MNLA) annonce la mort de Mokhtar Belmokhtar, alias «Belaouar», alias «Khaled Abou El Abbès», lors des affrontements armés l’ayant opposé au Mujao, le 27 juin, à Gao, ville du nord du Mali.

Although I have been watching the devolution of the country for years, I was hopeful Tuareg nationalists and secularists could work out a resolution with the religious fundamentalists. The best case would been negotiations to stabilize borders with Algeria and Niger, which in itself is a complicated problem given concern for ethnic nationalists living across them as I’ve written about before. Instead the heritage of the secularists appears to be threatened directly by fundamentalists and Mali is in danger of losing control to trained jihadists, which would expand the fight from from Algeria/Niger all they way into southern Mali…and create links into other jihadist struggles.

The difference between the nationalist-secularists and the fundamentalists is thus significant and a serious test of Tuareg nationalism. When Timbuktu was seized by the rebels in late May, fundamentalists threatened to destroy the historic site of Islamic learning that would obviously be a source of pride to a Tuareg nationalist.

The fundamentalist Salafi branch of Islam objects to the veneration of saints’ tombs, maintaining that it amounts to saint worship.

“Salafis do not want there to be any intermediary between the believer and God. It looks like Ansar Dine is going after shrines just like other groups have done in Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia”…

Some have suggested that attacks on shrines in Timbuktu by Islamic fundamentalists would be met by local resistance but thus far it has not materialized. Instead, yesterday the threats were realized and Islamic shrines in Timbuktu were destroyed.

“The tombs of Sidi Mahmoud, Sidi Moctar and Alpha Moya in Timbuktu were destroyed Saturday by the Islamists… who are heading towards other tombs,” said one witness, whose report was confirmed by the source close to the imam.

In addition to three historic mosques, Timbuktu is home to 16 cemeteries and mausoleums, according to the UNESCO website.