Redefining legislators’ role

PRIME Minister Shaukat Aziz wants the legislators to help solve the problems of the people. Such problems are bound to be too many and far too diverse in a developing country with one-third of the people living below the poverty line, another one-third just above that line and the top 20 per cent enjoying more than half the national income, according to official figures.And that underscores the need for the collective efforts of all, particularly of the elected leaders, to work together to reduce the intensity of the problems of the people, if not eliminate them. But the members of the national and provincial assemblies and the Senate, who meet often to talk about the plight of the people, may expect the government to solve the collective problems of the people beginning with sustained inflation, pervasive corruption, widespread lawlessness and inefficacious judiciary with excessive corruption at the lower levels. They would want the government to increase allocations for education, public health and clean environment.

But even in each of these areas the legislators can be helpful and come up with major initiatives and enlist the cooperation of the people. They can be helpful at three levels: first, at the policy level by debating such issues in the assemblies and secondly by driving home to the ministers to be effective, clean and fulfil official targets for each year in their constituencies, and thirdly by monitoring the work of implementation and sustaining that in actual practice.

They can also spotlight the hardships of wronged individuals in the villages and prevent police excesses or high handedness of the local feudal or tribal lords. Such vigilance on their part and intervention on behalf of the wronged people can make them truly effective in their areas.

But while they are expected to monitor the functioning of the officials at all levels down to the grass roots, the question is: who will monitor them? Not really the prime ministers, who depend on their support for staying in office and getting the official legislation passed. There is too much give-and-take at the top at public expense or at the cost of real democracy.

The first concern of the legislator after his electoral success is to get the right parliamentary lodge with congenial parliamentary neighbours. Then comes the issue of repaying the loans raised for the election which could have cost a crore of rupees or more and settle outstanding bills.

If a member becomes a minister in the first round, half his financial problems are solved. He can do official favours to his lenders in return for the large loan. Otherwise he might have to mobilise resources to repay the loans or settle bills.

Over the years, contesting an election is becoming more and more costly. Men of modest means with real commitment to the people are knocked out of the electoral race. This tendency has to be checked through rigorous enforcement of election expense rules. But with land and real estate prices soaring sky high even ordinary persons with some property besides his house may be able to contest the elections.

In the House of Commons in Britain access of the voters to his MP is a sacred right and no policeman can stop him however convulsed the environment outside the Parliament building is. That is not the case in Pakistan. Here, neither members nor ministers are too keen to meet their voters in the Parliament House, and nor are the voters too desperate to do that. Similarly, the members of parliament in Britain have to reply to letters received from his voters if he wants to win the next election.

But the best part of the serious parliamentary work or the means to guide, goad or control the government is through the over 30 standing committees of the House and a lower number in the Senate. With the minister for each department attending the meeting, the members including those of the opposition have plenty to ask him and plenty more to tell him to make his ministry perform better. Such committees are free to invite anyone to testify before them and they include special experts on the related subjects. The standing committees have been under-performing for long although they perform better since ministers ceased to be chairman of the committees who seldom called the meetings.

Of all the Parliamentary committees the most important is the Public Accounts Committee, whose sittings when H.U. Beg was the chairman, were accessible to the press despite the strong objections of the bureaucracy and those who fear exposure by the investigations of the committee. The PAC is now to look into the defence spending and CBR’s performance in tax collection and condoning evasion but we may not get to know the details, particularly in respect of defence spending which now stands at Rs. 160 billion officially.

As the governments keep changing often and parliaments dissolved along with that as the military steps in to rule the country, the PAC has lost its importance and failed to keep up with great traditions. The PAC deliberations should now be made public so that the people come to know how the varied taxes they have been paying have been spent or squandered. If the legislators want to have effective control over the government and reduce the waste in public spending or misappropriation, the parliament should meet more often and not only for the fixed minimum number of days each year. They have to meet far more than a couple of hours each day and the evening sessions interrupted by the Maghrib and Isha prayers should last longer.

Both the government party members and the opposition should take the non-official days of the assemblies seriously and come up with serious legislation in the social sector. And they should try to prevent more anti-social acts like the Karo-kari murders. The ruling party or the government need not invariably obstruct the legislation brought up by the opposition members if they think of the House as a collective entity.

The National Assembly and the provincial assemblies should not be paralysed by the absence of quorum too often. When the bill to amend the OGRA legislation was introduced there was no quorum last week. The speaker tried hard to mobilise a quorum but he could not. He finally adjourned the house to the embarrassment of the largely absent ruling party and the glee of the opposition who has been urging the government to maintain quorum in the house as it is its duty to do that.

And when there is a quorum the session is marked for too many walkouts and boycotts. The ultimate result is a noisy parliament that is paralysed otherwise.

When it comes to the legislators helping the people directly, single or in groups, there is plenty they can do. To begin with, they can use the legislators’ development fund of five million to the MNAs and Senators and less for provincial assembly members on the projects which are really helpful to the people instead of building the roads which lead to their farms or for other personal benefits. The prime minister says this fund would soon be raised to ten million. The enhanced funds should be used for better purposes that are truly helpful to the people in the form of a public facility.

To solve the widespread problem of unemployment, they can induce industrialists to invest in their areas and, if possible, attract foreign capital, too, to their areas, particularly the capital from Gulf area which is coming in increasingly.

They can associate themselves with the local price committees and persuade the sellers to make less profit. They can also associate themselves with the local NGOs and promote social work even in the face of opposition from vested interests or the elders, who believe in the old customs and false concepts like sanctioning murder of Karo-Kari couple. Local Jirgas or council of elders should not have the power of life and death over others for small offences or infractions of law.

Now if the cities are poisoned by vehicular smoke in excess the rural areas are poisoned by industrial pollution. Many drink polluted water. The legislators of such areas can lead the fight against such pollution and try to arrange for safe drinking water for the people of their areas.

The injustice to women which begins with barring girls from going to schools, particularly mixed schools, should be resisted and the legislators should come to the help of wronged women and protect threatened women. It is of no use to talk of how tolerant is Islam without extending that tolerance to our women.

Above all, at their own level in the rural areas, they can lead the campaign against poverty which of course, has to begin with better employment avenues and higher wages for women. That means each legislator has to spend quite some time in his constituency instead of spending too much time in Islamabad or other cities.

If the elections are regular and fair, and if the parties are truly democratic and choose candidates on merit the legislators will be far more interested in the problems of their voters. But as the political parties, save the religious ones, have more or less similar programmes and identical slogans, the parties are really not interested in good men as their candidates but in the possible winning candidates. As a result many good men get pushed out and most of the feudal lords, their sons or nephews and daughters or nieces pack the assemblies at the cost of the more deserving candidates. So the democratic process suffers as also the poor voters in the villages.

In India where the elections are more regular, last year’s elections saw the dramatic ouster of the rightist BJP government from the centre and the sudden arrival of the Congress Party. Sonia Gandhi, the Congress Chief, refused to be the prime minister in view of her Italian origin and nominated Dr. Manmohan Singh as the prime minister.

Now the basic problems of the people in Pakistan have aggravated following the rise in inflation rate to 9.95 per cent. That is far more vital for the masses than the crossing of the historic 10,000 points in index in the Karachi stock exchange. The same day ugly scenes were witnessed in the Sindh Assembly just a little further away from KSE. The Assembly did not discuss the people’s problems which it was scheduled to but adjourned in chaos. That is not how the legislators can help solve the problems of the poor or strengthen the economy of the country despite its bright indices. Far more sincerity and earnestness are needed.

The Saarc fiasco

It is hardly surprising that the Saarc Conference scheduled to be held in Dhaka had to be called off at India’s insistence at the eleventh hour. But the reasons advanced by the Indians for doing so appear unconvincing. They say that this was a direct consequence of the latest political development in Nepal where the king had arbitrarily dismissed the elected government of Prime Minister Deuba and assumed the position of head of the government in addition to being head of the state. The press note issued by the government of India in Delhi elaborated that it disapproved of the Nepal developments as they were contrary to democratic politics and that, therefore, the Indian prime minister would not be participating in a conference where the Nepalese king was one of the participants. Also, there was an oblique reference to ‘the uncertain security situation’ prevailing in the Bangladesh capital.

It is an open secret that for a very long time now, Nepal has been at the receiving end of India’s dictates. But this abrupt declining by India to attend the Saarc Conference appears more in the nature of a ‘put on act’. Nothing happens in Nepal that does not have the overt or covert nod of India.

Not without good reason is it that the Indian ambassador in Kathmandu is locally known as the Indian viceroy. For the past several decades, ever since 1947, Nepal has never really been free of incessant Indian backstage manoeuvrings. But up until now the Indians had been maintaining a somewhat diplomatic sangfroid of non-involvement in the internal affairs of Nepal. However, this no longer the case.

Only recently — that is a couple of years ago — the circumstances in which the last king and his whole family got violently and physically eliminated made the whole process look extremely suspicious and weird. It in fact made the impossible to happen with the ascending to the throne of King Gyanendra who incredibly made it from well-behind having originally been nowhere in the event of a normal succession. It is evident thus that the progression of Indian policy towards Nepal in recent times has seen the Indian role degenerate into the grotesque of realpolitik that will not stop at anything in order to achieve Indian political and diplomatic ends.

The circumstances in which King Gyanendra ascended to the Nepalese throne are extremely suspect as to India’s role in the internal power struggles within the royal family. Needless to say India’s intelligence and diplomatic services having over the past several decades done their best to try and contain Chinese penetration into Nepal have miserably failed in doing so. King Gyanendra the present monarch is widely reputed among his own people even in the streets of Kathmandu as India’s planted nominee as king. His predecessor king, it is also no secret, had experienced India’s rejection for having tried to do a balancing tightrope act between India and China.

In the process all that the Indians and the likes of King Gyanendra have succeeded in is to have on their hands a seriously aggravated crisis led by the Maoist militants who are not Chinese but Nepalese. The Maoists in Nepal are in fact the downtrodden elements of Nepal’s rural deprived and starved hilly countryside. They have not received enough attention from their own government and have suffered violence at the hands of the state apparatus that has been let loose on them. The Kathmandu elite that wields power in the name of whosoever may be the king of Nepal has for years been living and having a great time on Indian largesse that they received and distributed among the privileged of a rather narrow circle.

It is true that Indian policy in the affairs of Nepal has all along been rather heavily loaded with a pathological fear of Nepal’s proximity to China. When things were relatively calm in Nepal till the end of the 20th century India’s political surrogates in Nepal were the Koiralas and the Deubas and the likes who provided a Brahmin veneer that kept Nepal India-aligned and comfortably distant in terms of its internal social order from China.

But that situation in my view has now drastically changed. With the turn of the century Nepal continued to find itself poverty stricken and backward to a point that despite India’s financial and economic support it continued to be on a backward slide. The Chinese methodology of economic development through mass participations having begun to attract the Nepalese underdog is now causing daily tremors as well as traumas in Nepalese society in the shape of the Maoist movement’s clashes with Nepal’s army and police. This is taking a very heavy toll of human lives and has destroyed the internal peace of Nepal.

But coming back to the circumstances of the Saarc conference fiasco the question naturally occurs as to why the Indians wanted the Saarc conference summarily brushed out of their way at this point of time. The Indians are currently locked in two simultaneous major diplomatic efforts at the international level. The first one is in the negotiations with Pakistan that passes by the description of a composite dialogue of a bilateral nature. And the second one is in the negotiations that are currently going on at the UN headquarters and in the major world capitals regarding the expansion of the UN Security Council with some regional powers becoming new members and for which India is an obvious aspirant.

Both these negotiations are of the highest importance to India. The Indians axiomatically believe that in and around the subcontinent the principle that truly suits them is that of the bilateral mode in which India’s size and growing importance will make it the preponderant with or without negotiations. So they obviously do not propose getting into any Saarc conference which they consider to be a waste of time especially where they may find themselves outnumbered and outvoted having to face a raucous debate in what they consider to be their own backyard. India’s head and heart are therefore pre-fixed on the membership of the UN Security Council and under no circumstances does it want any shifting of their focus from that priority.

Since the only country in the region that the Indians really take seriously for very compelling reasons is Pakistan, they find it necessary to keep negotiations with Pakistan going on indefinitely without giving away anything substantive till they have achieved their coveted prize of world recognition as the regional power for the policing of South Asia in the form of becoming a permanent member of the UN Security Council with the veto power.

What good sense demands

THE Himalayan state of Kashmir is the divided heart of the subcontinent, with ventricles beating in both India and Pakistan. Both sides feel incomplete without the other. Cut in the aftermath of partition, Kashmir continues to bleed, though more slowly than when war between India and Pakistan appeared close. Those dark times may soon return, according to a study by the Mumbai-based Strategic Foresight Group entitled The Final Settlement.This time, whether Kashmir, as a Muslim-majority state, rightfully belongs to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan or validates the secularism of India is not the reason to return to battle. Instead, the study concludes that north-western India and the neighbouring Pakistani region, the breadbaskets of both countries, are drying out — unless the two nations act soon, they will trade blows over water, not land.

The six rivers of the Indus water basin flow through Kashmir’s mountains and valleys from Tibet and water the plains below. In 1960, the World Bank brokered a deal where India would get the three eastern rivers, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, while Pakistan was awarded the three western flows of the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab.

Skirmishes over water are becoming a regular feature in both areas. In India, two lower riparian states, Punjab and Haryana, with nearly 20 million acres of cultivable land, face a crunch over water in the next five to 10 years. Indian Punjab last year unilaterally annulled all water treaties with neighbouring states and has refused to build key canals to share resources. The scene is set for ever-bigger punch-ups.

In Pakistan, the situation is worse. The flow of river water is dropping precipitately, at nearly seven per cent a year. The country’s vast irrigation network is silting up and agricultural output will reach a crisis by 2010, the report says, with two key commodities — food grain and cotton — badly hit. This is bad news for a country where empty hands can be easily filled with guns, and hearts won over by the message of jihad.

Like its Indian counterpart, Pakistani Punjab swallows much of the water that tumbles from Kashmir. Its smaller but industrially vibrant southern neighbour Sindh regularly complains that its share of water is being diverted upstream to feed large farms owned by influential Punjabi families. Tensions between provinces threaten national cohesion.

Building dams and reservoirs in Kashmir could help irrigate Punjab and Sindh in Pakistan. The trouble is that the territory required for such construction lies in Indian-held Kashmir. Both countries have reached the same conclusion: that the meandering route of the Chenab river on the Indian side of Kashmir is becoming a determining factor in any settlement. Although most of the river lies in Pakistan, its headwaters lie in India’s portion of Kashmir.

All Pakistan’s parries and thrusts since 1999 involve, explicitly or implicitly, a new settlement of the Kashmiri issue by carving up the state again — but placing the rushing torrents of upstream Chenab under Pakistani control. India is unlikely to agree to a fresh partition of the state. It, too, has designs on the Chenab. New Delhi has identified nine sites on the river for hydroelectric projects. Earlier this year, India’s proposal to build the 450MW Baglihar dam on the Chenab so incensed Pakistan that it broke off negotiations and took the dispute to the World Bank.

The Indus water treaty, which looked forward to the two sides coming together, is proving an obstacle to warmer relations and has angered the Kashmiri population. First, it says water cannot be tied to resolution of the Kashmiri issue. Second, the treaty awarded the rivers to India and Pakistan, with India’s Jammu and Kashmir the biggest loser.

The result is that in Indian-held Kashmir, only 40 per cent of the cultivatable land can be irrigated and just 10 per cent of the hydroelectric potential harnessed. Put out of bounds is the ability to store, divert and regulate water — a pressing concern in a state overflowing with river resources.

For peace, both sides need to accept that water must never become a weapon of war. Yet New Delhi contemplated turning off the taps after it blamed Pakistani militants for an attack on the Indian parliament in 2001. A looming water war was foreseen by a ‘bright and ambitious’ Pakistani brigadier on a year-long course in 1990 at London’s Royal College of Defence Studies. In his paper, the officer said that the distribution of Indus rivers contained the “germs of a future conflict”. After a decade and a military coup, that soldier became the leader of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf.

The water bomb needs to be defused. No nation should deprive another of a shared resource which, thanks to geographic design, collects in a basin within its borders. The Final Settlement calls for a cross-border body that will oversee the Indus water basin and treat water as a commodity to be shared equitably. Could such trust be built up between bickering rivals? The answer may lie with another resource: gas. India and Pakistan are edging closer to agreeing a deal where hydrocarbons would be transported from Iran via Pakistan to India. New Delhi would pay Islamabad transit fees and Pakistan would guarantee India’s energy security.

From pipe dream to pipeline is years away, but it signals that both sides are prepared to escape from the prison of the past. Whether they continue to do so will determine whether a nuclear war will be fought over water.—Dawn/ Guardian Service

Increments that kill

IT’S been a year since the world woke up to the mass killings in the Darfur region of Sudan, and six months since the Bush administration termed them “genocide.” Revulsion at the death toll, which stands at an estimated 300,000, has produced a humanitarian relief effort and the deployment of 1,900 armed cease-fire monitors by the African Union; both responses have saved lives. But Darfur’s people still live in fear of rape, murder and starvation; perhaps 10,000 of them die monthly. And the worst of it all is the low-tech nature of this butchery. Sudan’s government has armed a primitive militia that goes about on horses and camels; the government has supported the militia with rudimentary airpower, which NATO could cripple easily. So many lives could be saved with relatively little Western effort. But the killing continues.

This is the context in which to judge the latest U.N. resolution on Darfur, the fourth since last summer. To the diplomats inside the U.N. bubble, the new resolution, which circulated in draft form this week, may represent a breakthrough. It may resolve a dispute between the United States and other nations as to which sort of international tribunal should hold Darfur’s war criminals accountable.

It may urge extra support for the underpowered cease-fire monitors. It may lead to a ban on travel by leaders suspected of war crimes and a freeze of any assets that they hold abroad. But though these measures amount to incremental progress, incrementalism is itself the problem. How can the world’s prosperous and powerful nations accept sedate progress when hundreds die each day?

For an example of what a more serious response would look like, consider the option of a no-flight zone. This could be organized from Chad, Sudan’s western neighbour, which already is host to a contingent of the French air force. According to retired Gen. Merrill A. “Tony” McPeak, a former chief of staff of the Air Force, enforcing a no-flight zone in Darfur would take one squadron of 12 to 18 fighter aircraft, backed up by four AWACS planes and other support aircraft.

This would represent a small fraction of NATO’s capability; France alone could provide the necessary fighter aircraft. Sudan’s limited air force and air defence system would offer little resistance. And yet, although the no-flight zone would impede attacks on civilians by helicopter gunships and send a powerful signal to Sudan’s criminal government, it is not on the table.

The same is true of beefing up the cease-fire monitors. It’s been known for months that the African Union force would require Western logistical and financial support to deploy effectively. But the support has been late and tentative, with the result that even the modest promise of a 3,000-strong deployment has yet to materialize. U.N. officials say that a force of 10,000 is needed, and NATO’s secretary general suggested last year that his organization could support the African Union.

But France, which jealously guards its position as the chief military intervener in Africa, objected to the NATO option. The new U.N. resolution does not squarely address the need for an expanded Darfur deployment.

This evasion and caution partially reflects the mood of Western publics. Polling by the Programme on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland suggests that 60 percent of Americans support a U.S. contribution to a U.N. military intervention when they are asked about the subject. But this majority is mostly silent, prompting a group called the Save Darfur Coalition to organize a letter-writing campaign.

It shouldn’t take letters to make President Bush do the right thing on Darfur. A leader who prides himself on a bold and morally grounded foreign policy should have no patience for the incrementalism that enables mass killing.

—The Washington Post

Mystery of Hariri’s murder

WHOEVER targeted former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri — an icon in his country — aimed to kill many birds with one stone. Even to his detractors, Hariri, the self-made billionaire, was a miracle worker who took in his stride the challenge of rebuilding his devastated country in every sense of the word. He healed his people’s throbbing wounds and set about rebuilding Beirut and its butchered precincts with the zeal of a crusader. What he achieved was an amazing piece of reconstruction. Hariri’s assassins clearly aimed at crippling the fragile sense of security and national cohesion of the Lebanese people. The murder of a popular political figure can prove a devastating blow to any nation, let alone a people barely emerging from the shadows of a 15-year civil war.

So who could have an interest in destabilizing Lebanon and robbing it off its as yet unfinished fusion of ranks? Vested interests — within the region and afar — have pointed a finger at Syria. But how does Syria stand to benefit from a reeling Lebanon? Syria has been an invited or uninvited — depending on which side of the ideological divide one is on - ‘guest’ in Lebanon for nearly three decades. Syria has, perhaps, deeply rooted interest in keeping Lebanon stable and united.

Granted that there was no love lost between Hariri and the regime in Damascus that is still keeping intact the vestiges of Hafez Al Assad’s hard-fisted rule. Hariri was known to have a soft corner for the US and Europe, which wasn’t surprising given his political incubation in Saudi Arabia in his formative years. But he wasn’t a votary of Washington or any other western capital, just as he wasn’t a protege of Riyadh or Damascus.

At the same time, Hariri was too shrewd and pragmatic a politician to open a hostile front with Damascus. He was in favour of Syria pulling out its troops from Lebanon. However, he never made it a debating point with Damascus from a public platform. Instead, he opted for quiet persuasion and closed-door lobbying — in Damascus and elsewhere in various Middle East capitals — to plead for the understanding that the Syrians had overstayed their invitation.

It would be naive of Damascus to murder a Lebanese hero and invite the wrath of its detractors in a climate where the US and Israel have long been brandishing sticks at Syria to discipline the regime of Bashar Assad.

Syria’s vulnerability has increased manifold since the Americans occupied Iraq. Damascus has been accused of all sorts of ‘crimes’ relating to American problems in Iraq. It has been held responsible for providing sanctuaries to remnants of the Saddam clique, sheltering militants allegedly operating from its soil to sow terror in Iraq, and additionally funnelling weapons and money into Iraq.

The neocons in Washington, as well as their friends in Israel, have long believed that Syria is a ‘low hanging fruit’ and easy to pluck as compared to the more challenging Iran. The odds have long been overwhelmingly arrayed against any rash adventurism by Damascus in Lebanon. So, with this backdrop of hostility towards its short and long-term interests, it would be an act of sheer suicide for Damascus to even contemplate trifling with the chessboard they have laboured so hard and so long to arrange in Lebanon.

And yet, one shouldn’t rule out a Syrian hand in Hariri’s murder. Addicted to an unbridled wielding of power and used to having their way in Lebanon without meeting defiance, Assad’s coterie of supporters and advisers may have believed that these odds, and the resultant perception, should give them the benefit of the doubt.

The Syrians were known to be angry with Hariri since he backed last year’s UN Security Council resolution calling upon all foreign troops to leave Lebanon. The hard-liners among them may have decided that their obvious culpability in the eyes of their American and Israeli detractors was their best alibi and political pundits would be forced to rule out Syrian responsibility for Hariri’s murder because they couldn’t think the Syrians would be so naive.

However, there is an equally good and convincing argument to point the finger in the direction of Tel Aviv as the mastermind and perpetrator of Hariri’s murder.

Syria has been under intense psychological, diplomatic and media pressure from Israel and the US to fall in line behind the new geo-political strategy planned for the region by the two countries. The ingredients of this new order include a pliant Syria that would create no hurdles for Israeli domination of the region as Washington’s satrap.

Ariel Sharon is not ready to yield an inch of territory to Damascus in the Golan Heights — an old precondition of Syria for better relations with Israel. Neither is George W. Bush inclined to persuade Sharon to oblige the Syrians. Blaming Syria for an operation that carries visible signs of the Mossad on it puts Damascus on the defensive, at the very least. Hariri’s elimination from the scene in Lebanon, at this particular time, serves more of Israeli interests than Syrian.

For one, Hariri was a friend of the Hezbollah and resisted all Washington’s attempts to eliminate it or declare it a terrorist outfit as long as he was in power. He came under relentless pressure from Washington, in the wake of 9/11, to do so but held his ground. Hariri’s murder deprives the Hezbollah of a powerful advocate, if not exactly a patron. Hariri was too much of a nationalist to see the Hezbollah from the eyes of Washington or Tel Aviv, or even Tehran.

For another, a destabilized and vulnerable neighbour would be a perfect reason for Israel to repeat its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Sharon was defence minister then. As prime minister, he may relish the idea of finishing the job. Driving out the Syrians and the Hezbollah from Lebanon would be Sharon’s excuse to teach Lebanon another lesson and mould it to his liking.

The timing of Hariri’s murder is of the greatest essence.

It has happened at a time when both Washington and Tel Aviv had been training their guns on Syria and Iran — the two countries prominent on Bush’s list for regime change. Bush has quickly raised the ante for both his quarries. Vice President Dick Cheney has unabashedly hinted at Tel Aviv doing Washington’s dirty work in Iran. The nuclear issue — the main casus belli against Tehran — has been raised. Condoleezza Rice is not ruling out the use of force as an option to bring Iran to heel.

Syria has great geo-political value as a pawn for those wanting to fashion a new chessboard in the region. If Syria is compelled to withdraw from Lebanon it would send a message to Iran. The catalyst of all this — Hariri’s murder — would have justified itself if Syria could be forced out of Lebanon, the Hezbollah disbanded and pulverized, and Iran made to climb down from its high perch on the nuclear issue.

More than any other thing, it would have rationalized the neocon imperialist thrust of acquiring a beach-head in Iraq in order to secure the region for US strategic and corporate interests, besides also making conditions conducive to Israeli hegemony.

Hariri, the bridge-builder, couldn’t have ever known in life that his death would yield such formidable dividends for those he worked to outwit. In the end, they would have had their revenge, not on him alone but on Lebanon, Syria and Iran as well.

Convergence of views

IF there is one lesson to be unearthed from the rubble of the Iraq war it is that it is easier to set the world to rights if America and Europe are on the same side. So it is good news that the US and its biggest EU partners, Britain, France and Germany, have now agreed on a common approach to the vexed issue of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. By accepting that Tehran can be offered economic incentives to come clean about its alleged clandestine weapons programmes, Washington has secured tacit European support for referring the issue to the UN security council, which could impose sanctions, if that does not happen. This is a significant and welcome convergence of views, and far better than US threats, veiled and not so veiled, that unilateral military action and regime change might be considered if Iran remained defiant. It is bad news that no sooner was this joint initiative announced on Friday than Iranian ministers scornfully rejected it.

Europe’s big three were galvanised into action in late 2003 to avoid a divisive replay of the Iraq crisis, eventually winning a suspension of uranium enrichment, which can be used to make atomic weapons. Tehran’s insistence that it wants nuclear technology solely for civilian power generation - available under the terms of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty - is not widely believed, not least because of 18 years of evasion and lies about its activities.

Israel, itself an undeclared nuclear power, has been banging the drum ominously, warning that unless something is done, the mullahs could have a bomb within five years, and that it will act if the US does not. Others, including the CIA, are not so sure, but are still deeply worried.

Under the terms of the new agreement, the US will back Iran’s accelerated entry into the World Trade Organisation and permit spare parts to be sold for the country’s airliners.

—The Guardian, London