Tim Sumner

Iraq, Political wind, Turkey

Where is the upside to the current Armenian resolution?

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The Turkish parliament is about to vote to let the Turkish Army cross the Iraqi border and attack the P.K.K.

The Wall Street Journal questions this morning why Senator Tom Lantos offers now an amendment to label the death of a million Armenians during WWI ‘genocide’ when he and Bill Clinton were both against doing so in 2000:

The bill is opposed by eight former U.S. Secretaries of State, including Madeleine Albright. After Tom Lantos’s House Foreign Affairs Committee voted out the resolution last week, Turkey recalled its ambassador from Washington. Turkey serves as a primary transit hub for U.S. equipment going into both Iraq and Afghanistan. After the Kurdish terrorist group PKK killed 13 Turkish conscripts last week near the border with Iraq, Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, asked the parliament to approve a huge deployment of the army along the border, threatening an incursion into Kurdish-controlled Iraq. This of course is the one manifestly successful region of post-Saddam Iraq. In a situation teetering on a knife-edge, President Bush has been asking Mr. Erdogan to show restraint on the Iraq border.
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Pointedly, Jane Harman, the Southern California Democrat who Speaker Pelosi passed over for chair of the intelligence committee, wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times Friday, questioning the “timing” of the resolution and asking why it is necessary to embarrass a “moderate Islamic government in perhaps the most volatile region in the world.”

Why indeed? Perhaps some intrepid reporter could put that question to the three leading Democratic Presidential candidates, who are seeking to inherit hands-on responsibility for U.S. policy in this cauldron. Hillary Clinton has been a co-sponsor of the anti-Turk genocide resolution, but would she choose to vote for it this week?

Back when Bill Clinton was President, Mr. Lantos took a different view. “This legislation at this moment in U.S.-Turkish relations is singularly counterproductive to our national interest,” he said in September 2000, when there was much less at stake in the Middle East. According to Reuters, he added that the resolution would “humiliate and insult” Turkey and that the “unintended results would be devastating.”

Senator Lantos and Speaker Pelosi clearly intended to create a diplomatic impasse and undermine America’s military efforts in Iraq. When people go beyond merely being against a war and act towards their own nation’s defeat in that same war, some people question their patriotism; some people might even say Lantos and Pelosi are aiding and abetting the enemy.

Debra Burlingame, Divest terror, Iran, War on Terror

Either bomb Iran now or divest terror and give peace a chance

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I am for bombing Iran, today. Yet Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter writes that my friend Debra Burlingame offers a tangible alternative that might stop Iran’s support of terrorism, their developing nuclear weapons, and keep us from having to fight a war with Iran. [Most of] Alter’s blathering about neocons aside, consider the rest:

Debra Burlingame says there’s got to be a better way to confront Iran. Her brother Charles F. (Chic) Burlingame was the captain of American Airlines Flight 77, the airliner hijacked and flown into the Pentagon on 9/11. Since then, Ms. Burlingame can’t get over our failure to fight a smarter war on terror, a war that wouldn’t get more people killed. “We should be using all the tools we have—including our enormous wealth—to prevent our enemies from coming after us,” she says. So she, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Sam Brownback, among others at the state and local level, have identified a powerful tool—a grass-roots and bipartisan campaign to “divest” from Iran, just as the international community divested from South Africa’s apartheid regime in the 1970s and ’80s.
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Its first important convert was Missouri State Treasurer Sarah Steelman, a Republican elected in 2004. When Steelman assumed supervision of the state pension funds, she learned that Missouri parked a large chunk of its assets with BNP Paribus, a French bank that floated billions in loans to Iran, and that the Show Me State invested its pension funds in dozens of European and Asian companies that effectively helped prop up murderous regimes. (North Korea, Syria, Sudan and, until recently, Libya are the other governments cited for sponsoring terrorism and targeted for divestment.) The pension funds don’t like to be told what to do, and they claimed divestment would bring heavy losses. Wrong. Steelman’s “terror-free” fund returned 29 percent in the last 12 months, 4 percent higher than the benchmark.
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To date, 12 other states have divestment bills that are either pending or passed. Schwarzenegger has signed one in California that divested as much as $24 billion in massive pension-fund assets, though the bill was limited to energy and defense companies doing business with Iran. The same goes for the Obama-Brownback bill (which is being held up by one, anonymous senator, per the Senate’s idiotic rules). But arguably, other companies in Iran should also be forced to divest. Telephone companies, for instance, provide “dual use” technology that can be used in Iranian defense systems. And even mullahs like their creature comforts. Serious diplomacy will only work when they feel the heat.
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How can Americans help encourage this movement? It isn’t easy. (So far, there’s only one self-described “terror free” mutual fund, the Roosevelt Anti-Terror Multi-Cap Fund). But divestment has the feeling of a movement whose time has come, if for no other reason than the alternative—war—will send oil over $100 a barrel and get a lot of Iranians (and, soon enough, Americans) killed.

Cheney & Co. have 15 months to persuade Bush to attack Iran, presumably because the next president will be too wimpy to do so. To stop them, the debate must shift from “bomb or do nothing” to a series of interim options. Divestment, Burlingame says, can be seen as both “putting the squeeze” on Iran and as a “peace initiative.” That’s why it appeals to both right and left, and fits the pragmatic spirit missing from so much of our reaction to 9/11.