Nearly One in Four Persons on Globe is Muslim

CNN reports that nearly one in four human beings is Muslim, based on a new extensive survey by the Pew Forum for Religion in Public Life.

The number of Muslims they estimate, about 1.5 billion, is the one I have been using for some time based on my own back of the napkin calculations, but one often sees in the press estimates of one billion or 1.2 billion. The Pew conclusions are higher than the researchers had expected going into the study.

If current demographic trends continue, moreover, the world could level off at about 9 billion persons in 2050, and nearly 1/3 of those could well be Muslim. The really big Muslim populations are not in the Middle East, which is largely arid and wouldn't support such populations. It is in relatively well-watered places such as Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia in Asia where the bulk of Muslims live. Pakistan now has about 170 million people but is likely to rival the current US population of 300 million in the next few decades. (When I first went to Pakistan in 1981 I think its population was, like, 70 million).

I don't think most people in the West realize the implications of the likelihood that one-third of humankind may soon be Muslim. We don't have a real sense of scale in the US. We don't realize that Brazil alone is nearly as big as the US in area, or that the US could be fitted into East Africa. We don't realize how huge Iran is, or what it implies when we call India a subcontinent.

One of the implications is that the US is a little unlikely to thrive as a superpower in the 21st century if its more venal and bloodthirsty politicians go on barking about "Islamo-fascism" (they never said Christo-Fascism even though Gen. Franco in Spain was a good candidate for the label) and denigrating Islam and Muslims and seeking to militarily occupy their countries and siphon off their resources. That kind of behavior may have worked in the 19th century before Muslims were mobilized, but it does not work now.

The Muslim world is the labor pool of the next century, and is also the custodian of much of the world's fuel. New American crusades of the sort favored on the right of the Republican Party may finally induce imperial overstretch and deeply harm the US. Some 5 percent of the population cannot dominate by force 25 percent of the globe and what may eventually be 33% of the globe.

Obama's strategy, of positive engagement, is the only viable way forward.

I underline this need in my recent book, Engaging the Muslim World.


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ECC Will Count Fraudulent Ballots Against Candidates; Obama won't Slash Troop Numbers

Another big explosion has rocked Kabul, killing several persons and wounding more.

I don't know if Peter Galbraith still has a job at the United Nations after he went public with charges that the Electoral Complaints Commission, mainly appointed by the UN, was ignoring large-scale fraud in the August 20 presidential elections, fraud that mainly benefited incumbent Hamid Karzai. But he certainly sacrificed something. And it was not for naught.

On Wednesday, the ECC reversed itself on the way it will recount ballots suspected of being fraudulent. The recount will attempt to determine which candidates benefited most from fraud. If, as is widely suspected, it is Karzai, then his current estimate of 54% of the vote could be reduced below 50%, triggering a runoff election between him and his chief rival, Abdullah Abdullah. The ECC reversal almost certainly comes from the firestorm of criticism over its apparent willingness to ignore ballot fraud by the incumbent, provoked in important part by Galbraith's speaking out.

Russia Today reports that President Obama has ruled out slashing the US troop contingent in Afghanistan. So now the question is whether he will yield to Gen. Stanley McChrystal's request for 40,000 more troops.



Meanwhile, NATO is pressuring Russia to supply more equipment and training to Afghanistan army troops. That is one of those ironic, science-fictional sentences that non-fiction authors seldom get to pen.

The Cato Institute reviews the Afghanistan war and worries that once the original mission, to capture Usamah Bin Laden, failed, it morphed into an open-ended project of nation-building with no end in sight. The documentary argues that a huge Western military footprint in a fiercely independent tribal society will backfire. If the object is to wipe out al-Qaeda, a smaller military force would be more effective. The film also is critical of forcible poppy field eradication as a means of dealing with Afghanistan's drug problems (though to be fair, the US has abandoned that strategy).



Russia Today also asks what would happen if US troops pulled out of Afghanistan and talks with Cato:




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Rethinking Afghanistan

You get your pick of polls on the Afghanistan war this morning. AP-GfK found only 40% of Americans any longer support the war, though they back sending one-off expeditionary forces to fight specific terrorist threats. Quinnipiac found a slight majority still in favor of the war. Widely diverging results such as this one suggest either small samples or poorly worded questions. But it seems to me clear that if Obama makes a big commitment of troops and resources in Afghanistan he will face increasing public disillusionment over time, especially in his own party, now the majority party in the country.

Aljazeera English on assessing al-Qaeda's strength in Afghanistan:



CBS reports on Afghanistan's political future in view of the disputed presidential election (see below).



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Gross: Massive Fraud in Afghanistan Election

Nasrine Gross writes in a guest op-ed for IC

Friends & Colleagues,

I have just returned from Kabul. And I am shocked how little the extent of fraud in the presidential elections is understood outside Afghanistan. In this regard I have some data that I would like to share.

During the summer and up until I left a few days ago I worked as a volunteer for Dr. Abdullah’s campaign. I was impressed with how well the campaign was being conducted with so many experienced, educated and prominent Afghans as well as eager and dedicated young men and women, but I was stunned by how much people were seeking Dr. Abdullah. In Kabul alone, on a daily basis, around 10,000 persons came to the campaign headquarters in Char-rahi Shahid, and when Dr. Abdullah was in the office in Char-rahi Ansari, he met with about 2,000 people. The office was open twenty-four hours and campaign workers and Dr. Abdullah himself saw people and/or attended to other work, very often until after 3 a.m. I was enormously proud of my people, most of whom only have the experience of the last two elections (presidential 2004, and parliamentary 2005) to be so gung-ho on this process of democracy and instinctively doing it right.

I worked in Dr. Abdullah’s office and so the multitudes that I ran into, and I really mean multitudes, gave me a new perspective on my country: From every part of Afghanistan, from every ethnic, religious, linguistic and locality group, from every political persuasion, from men, women, old, young, poor, rich, educated and illiterate, people came in droves. In those hot summer days, especially when electricity would go off and the fan would stop running, sometimes there were more than fifteen people in my office waiting to see their candidate, in a space of no more than 14 feet by 9 feet! They were also in every corner of that house turned office, in the corridors standing, in the lawns sitting and squatting, in the rooms in the outhouses lying on mattresses, on chairs in the waiting rooms inside the building, in the dining area, in the utility room, in the cook’s quarters, there were human bodies, turban’ed, burqa’ed, veiled, suited, in groups, chaperoned, or in single file, but there were people - - as if all of a sudden they had realized they had a real choice and flood gates had burst open, they were rushing to see Dr. Abdullah! I could not hear my own thoughts; such were the din of their presence! I got to learn a lot of Pashto, some Uzbeki, heard a lot of Noorestani, many dialects of Hazaragi, and many other languages. I met so many more people from so many other places and provinces and of course so many women! Ah, it was tiring but also a real treat to be part of this wonderful sea of humanity stumbling over itself to do something right!

And then there was the campaign trail that I did not participate in but heard about from my office mate who was in charge of the foreign press and went to every pit stop with the candidate - - and brought me stories and photos for the website. When we had Jalalabad, we thought ‘oh wow!’ and upon his return, gave our candidate a standing ovation over lunch (at 3:30 pm!) But then Herat happened where it took him more than two hours to go a distance that normally takes twenty minutes and for several subsequent days, the cuts and scratches on his fingertips to his upper arms were witness to the pull of the thousands who had thronged his motorcade and had clasped him in welcoming gestures! Well, we were elated and could not find words for it but knew that this was a turning point in the campaign, that our dreams were going to have more flesh, that the foreign press was really talking about it. And then, the thousands in Paktia, Paktika, Bamiyan, Ghor, Pul-e Khomri, and in Kandahar three thousand men and one thousand women met him in separate rallies, the same city where Mr. Karzai was received by 500 mostly complaining people! By the time Mazar rolled around with over one hundred thousand persons, we had gotten used to it: Dr. Abdullah had transcended all molds of Afghan leaders, candidates and elections, people were rallying around him like their long lost guiding light, embodying all their hopes for change, for the future, for dignity that trust in tomorrow brings. It was giddying and we did not mind the twenty hour days - - I remember one night - - actually morning at 3:30 am, my brain had gone to mush but Dr. Abdullah was still going strong!

On Election Day and afterwards I worked specifically on 8 provinces: Paktia, Paktika, Khost, Ghazni, Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul and Urozgan. It is in regard to these 8 provinces that I am enclosing some of my findings.

1) For my base data I used the data provided by the Independent Election Commission (IEC) for each province. Because I had received many calls during the Election Day from these provinces about problems with polling areas and people not participating, I used the IEC province and polling center data and met with our representatives from these provinces. Specifically, I wanted to know whether a polling center was open or closed, and what the problems were in the polling centers regardless of their being open or closed. To make sure that I had good data, I met separately with different people from each province and double checked and triple checked what they reported (I am speechless that these people worked with me in the most professional manner despite the fact that the sense of betrayal, insult, anger, humiliation, shame and disbelief was eating away at their very soul and many of them, grown men and women alike would uncontrollably shed tears when reporting the situation to me echoing what one of them had said ‘I only had my vote and he (Karzai) stole it from me; I feel like my person has been violated!’

The results of these verifications I have compiled in large Excel tables for each of the 8 provinces. I also made a smaller aggregate table. I am sending you this table which shows that in these 8 provinces there were over 1,680 polling centers (each consisting of many polling stations) and 56% of them were closed and 73% had problems. The table also shows the problems in each province, as reported by these witnesses and workers.

2) After the IEC started posting the results of the polls I took one of the IEC partial data (I think it was at 71% of total polling stations) and subtracted the votes reported from closed polling centers. The results were phenomenal. Only a very partial list of polling centers in each province, totaling 120 centers, showed the extent of fraud clearly: a) in terms of total votes for Mr. Karzai, b) the percentage of votes for Mr. Karzai vis-à-vis the total votes cast, and, c) in terms of the total votes reported versus the total estimated voter population in any polling center.

Here, I am sending the partial list of only one province, Kandahar, where you can see that the IEC Pro-Karzai votes are over 45,000 and those reported from closed polling centers amount to over 31,000 of them! You can also see that in several of the polling centers the votes reported are more than 100% of the total estimated voter population of the area. How can that be when there was such a bad security situation in all of Kandahar that day? In several polling centers you can see that the percent of the vote for Mr. Karzai is above 70%. We know that extremely few women, perhaps as little as one hundred women in the whole of the province went to vote. Assuming that not every woman in that center had registered to vote, this is an impossibility to have over 70% of an entire population consisting of males! You can also see that in several places 100% of vote went to Mr. Karzai. Again, how could there be not even one vote against Mr. Karzai in a province that has seen so much conflict and where so much criticism of Mr. Karzai’s family exists? These trends are very evident both across the entire province and in all the other 8 provinces that I dealt with.

3) I also have a copy of a letter the campaign headquarters sent to the Election Complaints Commission (ICC). This letter describes the types of systematic fraud we had uncovered until then including the computer fraud. In this particular type of fraud, through hard core programming of the system, all candidates were beneficiaries, only that Mr. Karzai was by a much larger multiplier than the rest - - so some of the fraud attributed to Dr. Abdullah is actually Mr. Karzai’s people trying to be smart! (I can send you a copy of this letter if you so wish.)

4) Finally, since one day after the election, droves of people from each province of Afghanistan have been coming to Kabul to present evidence of fraud, report their eyewitness and meet with Dr. Abdullah regarding a course of action to redress the wrong that has been done to them. Sometimes they come in tens, but most often they come in hundreds. Usually, they hold press conferences. Dr. Abdullah keeps asking these disgruntled voters to keep calm, to wait for the ICC to complete its work, to have faith.

A few days ago, more than six thousand of these people coming from 33 provinces of Afghanistan (for the 34th province, Kabul, people were already there) met with Dr. Abdullah at Kabul’s Uranus Hotel. Together they passed a resolution. I have translated it and am sending it to you as well. You will see that these people are reasonable, rational and intent on success for Afghanistan and its friends and allies.

I hope that this documentation will shed better light not only on the extent of fraud and the premeditated and planned nature of it but also on the desire of Afghan people to see their voice recognized, and to help the international community make the right choice - - for Afghanistan and for the world at large. My people want that we must not discard the real votes; that we must not sanction fraud; that we must honor the right of the people to choose. This is the sure way to building security, stability and peace!

I know it is my right I am talking about; but make no mistake, it is also the path for peace and success for all our friends around the world, not the least of whom are the men and women of the Armed Forces of the United States and other countries fighting the Taliban, Al Qaida and who knows who else in Afghanistan!

I assure you that no calamity would befall Afghanistan or the world if the right, democratic path is taken: There will be no rejection or revolt by the Pashtun population (Working with Pashtuns from these 8 provinces I know for a fact that a majority of the Pashtuns did not vote for Mr. Karzai; their vote was stolen from them for one candidate). The non-Pashtuns will not feel that their vote was squandered. The enemies of Afghanistan will receive a loud and clear message that the world is on the side of Afghanistan as are the Afghans. And, those countries and organizations aiding the enemies of Afghanistan will realize that their advantage is to approach Afghanistan in a different manner.



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Iran and Nuclear Latency

When you tool around the blogosphere and the news sites, the discourse about Iran's nuclear program is maddeningly contradictory. But I think a single hypothesis can account for all the known facts. These are:

1. Iran is making a drive to close the fuel cycle and to be capable of independently enriching uranium to at least the 5 percent or so needed for energy reactors and also to the 20 percent needed for its medical reactor.

2. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gave a fatwa in 2005 that no Islamic state may possess or use atomic weapons because they willy nilly kill masses of innocent civilians when used, which is contrary to the Islamic law of war (which forbids killing innocent non-combatants).

3. Iranian officials have repeatedly denied that they are working on a nuclear bomb or that they aspire to have one.

4. US intelligence agencies are convinced that Iran has done no weapons-related experiments since 2003, and that it currently has no nuclear weapons program.

5. Israel forcefully maintains that Iran's nuclear program is for weapons and has repeatedly threatened to bomb the Natanz enrichment facilities.

6. Iran recently announced a new nuclear enrichment facility near Qom.

Those who insist that Iran is trying to get a bomb have a difficult time explaining why Khamenei forbids it as un-Islamic and why the president and others all deny it. It is possible that they are lying, but their denials at least have to be noted and analyzed. The skeptics also have to explain away why the 16 US intelligence agencies say after exhaustive espionage and investigation that there is no weapons program now and that there hasn't been one for some time.

Those who agree with the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, as well as with the International Atomic Energy Agency, that there is no evidence for Iran having a nuclear weapons program have to explain Iran's insistence on closing the fuel cycle and being able to enrich uranium itself.

The answer I propose, which explains all the anomalies elegantly and concisely, is that Iran is seeking nuclear latency. Latency is the possession of a nuclear energy program and of reactors, which would allow the production of an atomic bomb on short notice if an extreme danger to national autonomy reared its ugly head. Nuclear latency is sometimes called the 'Japan option,' because given its sophisticated scientific establishment and enormous economy, Japan could clearly produce a nuclear weapon on short notice if its government decided to mount a crash program.

The reason for the construction of the Qom facility, in this reading, would be that the Natanz facility is too easily bombed or struck with missiles. Moreover, the Israelis and some Americans have repeatedly threatened to strike it. A nuclear enrichment program such as that at Natanz, which is subject to being wiped out by a military strike, cannot truly provide nuclear latency. The Qom facility was necessary in the regime's eyes if the latency strategy was to be preserved.

The regime has every reason to maintain latency and no reasons to go further and construct a nuclear device. The latter step would attract severe international sanctions.

I was on an email list where someone expressed suspicion of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's 2005 fatwa against the possession and use of nuclear weapons by an Islamic state.

One suggestion was that Khamenei is not a real Shiite jurisprudent and has eschewed having followers inside Iran. But, no, Khamenei is a mujtahid or independent jurist and has the standing to issue a fatwa or considered ruling on the law.. A mujtahid may always decline to accept muqallidun or followers, which Khamenei appears to have done for Iranian nationals, without that affecting his legitimate right to issue fatwas. The theory of ijtihad or independent jurisprudential reasoning holds that the law inheres in the reasoning processes of the jurisprudent; whether the jurisprudent has followers or not is irrelevant to the discovery of the law in a particular instance. Moreover, as rahbar or supreme leader,, Khamenei's pronouncements on such matters might even be seen as a hukm or standing command. Finally, since he sets policy on such matters, what difference, in any case, would it make what exact jurisprudential standing his fatwas enjoy?

The only real question is whether he is lying and insincere. That would be a dangerous ploy on his part, in a state premised on Islamic jurisprudence, as Fareed Zakaria has pointed out.

As for the general Islamic law of war, it forbids killing innocent non-combatants such as women, children and unarmed men; ipso facto it forbids deploying nuclear weapons. It was suggested that Iran has chemical weapons and that these would as much violate the stricture above as nuclear warheads. I do not agree that Iran has a chemical weapons program, but in any case chemical weapons have for the most part been battlefield weapons used against massed troops or in trenches. Having such a program does not imply intent to kill innocent civilians. Whereas making a bomb does imply such intent and is therefore considered by most Muslim jurisprudents incompatible with Islamic law.

Khamenei seems to me to have decided some time ago on a policy of nuclear latency, for two reasons. Nuclear reactors lend Iran a hope of energy independence. Iran produces 3.8 million barrels per day of petroleum and uses about 2 mn. b/d itself. It is likely that soon Iran will use up all of its daily petroleum production, leaving it without the petroleum income windfall upon which its government depends. At that point, Khamenei fears, Iran would be dragooned back into the neo-liberal, America-centric order that had dominated Iran under the shah. Second, nuclear latency would help fend off aggressive attempts at regime change by the Western powers or Israel.

Nuclear latency has all the advantages of actual possession of a bomb without any of the unpleasant consequences, of the sort North Korea is suffering.

Even if my thesis that Iran seeks nuclear latency were accepted, isn't there a chance that in the future the leaders of the Islamic Republic might seek a weapon?

Scott Sagan noted in one of his essays that one impetus to seek an actual bomb is regime and national pride in the country's modernity. But this motivation does not exist in the case of Iran, since the Islamic Republic is a critic of the alleged horrors of modernity and because it defines nuclear bombs as shameful, rather than something to boast about.

Moreover, latent nuclear states sometimes give up their latency and foreswear even a nuclear option. Brazil and Argentina mothballed their programs in the 1980s, either because they saw each other as insufficiently threatening or because their move to democratic rule lessed the power of the military-industrial complex in each country that had been plumping for nukes (Sagan thinks it is the latter).

The problem for the West is that nuclear latency is not illegal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And conveniently for Khamenei, nuclear latency is not incompatible with Islamic law. That is why the US and its close allies have to pretend that Iran is actually going for a bomb, despite the lack of good evidence for serious weaponization; they are using this pretense as a way to attempt to forestall a Japan option, which is what they really object to, since it is a geostrategic game changer for the region in and of itself. Unfortunately for them, the General Assembly is unconvinced, and China and Russia are reluctant.

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(I apologize to regular readers that blogger.com comment posting is temporarily down.)

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8 US troops Killed in Nuristan; UN Official Says He was Pressured to Wink at Karzai Ballot Fraud; Abdullah Defiant

On Saturday morning, a force of some 300 guerrillas attacked a US outpost and an Afghan police outpost in Nuristan. They killed 8 US troops and two Afghan police, but failed to overwhelm the bastions, and had to withdraw in the face of withering US air power once it arrived. Some of the fighters are reported by Dawn to have been driven from the Swat Valley this summer by the Pakistani army. It is a worry that as the Pakistani military prepares for a major campaign in South Waziristan, it may inadvertently increase violence in Afghanistan, as the fighters move up to Helmand and Uruzgan.

On Monday morning, Taliban blew up a bomb in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad near the World Food Program offices. Early reports said at least three people were killed. The Taliban have suffered many reversals in Pakistan in the past few months, and this bombing seems likely an expression of frustration and revenge.

AP has video on Saturday's battle in Afghanistan:



The LAT suggests that the attack may have been planned by the Hizb-i Islami or 'Islamic Party' of Gulbadin Hikmatyar (an old-time 1980s anti-Soviet 'freedom fighter' once backed to the hilt by the US and Pakistan), who now considers US and NATO troops foreign occupiers every bit as objectionable as the Soviet Red Army had been. But if Dawn is right that many of these fighters were from Swat, it could have just been a tribal attack.

Just to say that it worries me that the guerrillas were able to fight in a unit as large as 300. I don't think the Iraqi Sunni radical guerrillas ever assembled a force greater than 30 or so except maybe at Fallujah. I suppose in Iraq the US air force would have destroyed such a large troop contingent in the desert, whereas Afghanistan's craggy geography makes that a more difficult proposition.

National Security Adviser Gen. Jim Jones told CNN on Sunday that Afghanistan is not on the verge of falling to the Taliban, that the Taliban are not "coming back," and that there are less than 100 al-Qaeda personnel in the whole country. Well, I guess we aren't spending billions and tying down our army to fight al-Qaeda, then.

CBS reports on a US military effort against the Haqqani Network in Eastern Afghanistan.



I was struck by the confidence of the US military personnel that they could attract the loyalty of the pro-Haqqani tribes this winter when the guerrillas withdraw during the bad weather to Pakistan for more training. I'd want to know how alienated locals were by the searches conducted by the US troops through their villages; and how many of the villagers are cousins to the more committed guerrillas, who might have rather minded the helicopter gunship attack on 14 of the latter from the air, which the video shows. And, if it were possible to attract the loyalty of locals, why hadn't it been done before now and why are so many more Pashtuns gradually going over to the anti-government fundamentalists? And, wouldn't the Kabul government be the one that had the most chance of attracting the loyalty of Afghans? I have a dark suspicion that the US commanders think the locals are only supporting the guerrillas because they are coerced into it (as, to be fair, was often the case in Iraq). In Afghanistan, I don't think there is the same disjuncture between Pashtun tribes and militant guerrillas as there was in Sunni Iraq. Someone like Jalaluddin Haqqani has been fighting as a guerrilla in those areas, first against the Soviets and now against the Americans, for nearly 30 years. Surely he has constituencies that won't just abandon him. Ironically, some of those constituencies were built up back in the day with Reagan's money.

This report in Dari Persian about hundreds of demonstrators in the western city of Herat who came out Sunday to chant "Death to America" is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night. The protest was also a funeral procession, for a 20-year-old Afghan man, who had been traveling on a road outside the city when he was kidnapped. The thugs demanded a $100,000 ransom, which his family did not have. The demonstrators, however, blamed the United States and the Karzai government for the lack of security. That is, as security deteriorates, there is a danger of a snowball effect, whereby the US loses any legitimacy even in the eyes of Persian-speaking Tajiks precisely because it is unable to provide basic needs like security. If the foreigners aren't even useful foreigners, the Afghans are unlikely to want them occupying the country.

CBS also reviews the course of the war in Afghanistan and explores Gen. McChrystal's proposed counter-insurgency strategy, which he contrasts with a smaller, targeted counter-terrorism strategy:



One of the keys to successful counter-insurgency is the establishment of government legitimacy and efficiency. In Afghanistan, things are going in the opposite direction. Peter Galbraith, who formerly served in the UN in Afghanistan, says that the UN collected evidence that one third of the ballots for incumbent Hamid Karzai cast last August 20 in the presidential election were fraudulent. If this is true, it would drop him from the current 54% of the vote he is said to have received to less than 50%, triggering a run-off. Galbraith charges that he was pressured to cover up the fraud in the interests of national peace. He was fired from his post and made to leave the country because of differences with his boss, Kai Eide of Norway. Some UN and US officials worried that a runoff election between Karzai, who is backed by Pashtuns, and his chief rival Abdullah Abdullah, who is backed by Tajiks, could throw the country into ethnic turmoil just as the US military was implementing a policy to pacify the Pashtun provinces.

But Galbraith's charges have stiffened Abdullah Abdullah's resolve to contest the results to the end, making him the Mir Hosain Mousavi of Afghanistan. In a news conference on Saturday, Abdullah pointed to Peter Galbraith's letter as proof that the UN is not an impartial watchdog of the elections. Besides, a conviction that Karzai was fraudulently elected would be far more damaging to Tajik-Pashtun relations than would a free and fair runoff.

In a Persian interview, Abdullah pledged to use all legal means to protest the unjust character of the declared election outcome. That sounds like instability to me.

Meanwhile, Aljazeera English says that Pakistan is pushing back against American demands that Washington be allowed to hit Taliban targets in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, via drones firing rockets. The current drone strikes most target the no-man's land of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, which are vaguely akin to US Indian reservations. But to allow a Western, Christian power to bomb a major Pakistani city and provincial capital is a different matter altogether.



As it is, Pakistani public opinion is vehemently against US drone strikes on Pakistani soil.

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On How Iran is a Military Nothing despite What Propagandists Say; and on How Even Israel Dwarfs Iran Militarily in Every Way that Matters

Some random anonymous person got posted over at Daily Dish who critiqued my column on the top things you think about Iran that are not true. This person pretended to refute my column, but as is typical in propaganda, he really only harped on a few minor details and said nothing about the column's larger point.

The source of some of my statistics was Globalfirepower.com. The poster at DD maintains that the estimate for Iran of the annual military budget is out of date and that it should be "a little over $7 bn. per annum" instead of "a little over $6 bn." But my point was comparative, to countries like Norway and Singapore, who also likely increased expenditures over time. Given that the true US expenditure on things military is about $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) a year, I think we may conclude that a difference of a billion isn't fatal to my argument. Besides which, these comparative estimates are always slightly out of date and potentially misleading. Was the poster's estimate of $7.4 bn. calculated in terms of purchasing power parity? What was it in riyals? Given that Iran had 30% inflation last year, anything calculated in riyals would be worth substantially less this year in real terms than last.

The individual argues that military expenditure as a percentage of GDP is more telling than a per capita figure. But actually both ways of figuring have drawbacks. Figuring expenditures per GDP means that poor countries look more militaristic than they really are and rich countries look pacifist when they are anything but. The CIA listing of countries by military expenditure as a percentage of GDP puts powerhouses like Oman, Eritrea, Burundi, and the Maldives at the top of the world list. The US, which spends more on the military than the next 40 countries combined, comes in 27th on this list behind the countries just mentioned. Of what use is that? Doesn't it just tell us that many of the countries at the top of this list are poor and if they buy so much as a rusty artillery piece, it is a big part of their income? And by the way, if we figure it this way, Iran is 67 in the world. While the poster puts that between India and Vietnam, it is also between the Congo and Portugal. My original point, is that a country that spends $6 or $7 bn a year on military affairs doesn't amount to much of a military threat to the US, is not damaged by this rather silly argument.

The poster also points to the sheer size of Iran's army and reserves, which globalfirepower.com puts at 875,000. But it estimates Israel's active military and reserves at about 600,000, and if we wanted to pull a Jonah Golberg and make a bet on which of the two would win if they went to war in 2009 I'd put my whole life savings on Israel's 600,000 versus Iran's mangy 875,000. Iraq was also puffed up by American hawks as having had a "million-man army," but I think we all saw in 1991 and 2003 what that really amounted to.

Demonizing and building up as threats to the US small third world countries like Cuba, Grenada, Libya, Iraq, Venezuela, and Iran has been a cottage industry since the fall of the Soviet Union and the adoption by the Chinese of the Capitalist Road deprived hawks of any credible great-power rivalry with which to scare Americans into allowing themselves to be fleeced by the military-industrial complex. It is natural that I should be attacked for puncturing the illusion of menace that the American Spartans (slogan: live poverty-stricken in barracks but own Big Spears) want to project about Iran.

When Andrew Sullivan first linked to my post, he asked what the comparison would be to Israel. First of all, Iran ranks much higher on the Global Peace Index than does Israel. Then, here are some comparative statistics as between Iran and Israel, in answer to the question. But note that the comparisons are misleading. Israel has 1220 aircraft and Iran has 84. But Iran's include a lot of things like old F-4 Phantoms from Nixon in the 1970s whereas Israel's are state of the art. And, while Israel's military budget is now estimated at a little over $13 bn. annually, it should be noted that over $2 bn. of that is extracted from us Americans and handed over directly with no oversight to Tel Aviv every year, so it isn't exactly all Israel's money (and of course these are only the official figures, ignoring a lot of informal tariff and other tax breaks and transfers of resources). Israel's massive nuclear weapons industry is not counted in the $13 bn. Again, the figures for what they are worth are from Globalfirepower.com. You'll have to scroll down because somehow my table formatting is making an unsightly gap between this text and the table, below.

Population	Israel: 7.2 mn.	Iran: 70 mn.
Wars launched on neighbors:	Israel: 1956, 1967, 1982, 2006, 2008-9	Iran: 0
Nuclear Warheads	Israel: ~200	Iran: 0
Military Budgets:	Israel: $13.4 bn.	Iran: $7.4 bn.
Per capita military expenditure:	Israel: $1,805	Iran: $105
Total Aircraft	Israel: 1,220	Iran: 84
Active Military and Reserve Personnel	Israel: ~600,000	Iran: 875,000
Total land-based weapons:	Israel: 14,200	Iran: 5,499

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Ron Paul on Iran; Ahmadinejad has Jewish Heritage

International Atomic Energy Agency official Mohammad Elbaradei arrived in Tehran on Saturday to begin making preparations for the inspection of Iran's new nuclear research facility near Qom.

The NYT reports that an internal IAEA report concludes that Iran now has the data to construct a nuclear weapon. Which means that there is no point in bombing them, since knowledge is unlikely to be destroyed that way. Me, I think they just want a 'Japan option'-- the ability to construct a bomb if they come under threatening attack.

The Telegraph newspaper reveals that president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to have Jewish antecedents, back in the 1940s when the family was still called Sabourjian (makers of Jewish shawls). This discovery was made via a photograph of his identity card, There have been many conversions from Judaism to Islam, many of them voluntary. In the real world people get all mixed up. Iran has the largest Jewish community in the Middle East aside from Israel itself. In the 19th century there were forced conversions of Jews to Shiism in the eastern city of Mashhad. Since converts intermarry with the majority community, this means that many Mashhadis have a Jewish great grandfather and may not know it. It isn't just Iran. One genetic study found that some 20% of the Spanish had Jewish haplotypes and 10% had an Arab ancestry. The revelation in Iran doesn't change anything; Ahmadinejad does not make his critiques of Israel with reference to his own heritage but on the basis of a radical interpretation of Khomeinist ideology. The latter in its full form is only a little over 40 years old, so for everyone in Ahmadinejad's age cohort, it is an adopted ideology for those who adhere to it, not an inherited one.

Rep. Ron Paul (R.-TX) discusses the current hype about Iran and makes the excellent point that the likely beneficiary of increased US-Iranian tension or even war would be China, which has excellent relations with Tehran:



Ron Paul points to the attempts of Neoconservatives such as Elliot Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz to foment war on Iran or at least keep the US from negotiating with it. Stephen Walt discusses the Neocon attack op-eds in the light of Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett's sober advice on how to engage Iran.

Russia Today says that the US is pressuring Russia to supply weapons systems to Saudi Arabia instead of Iran, and Saudi Arabia is sweetening the deal by being willing to pay top dollar.



Pepe Escobar at Tomdispatch discusses the oil and gas dimensions of US policy toward Russia and Iran.

The US regularly accuses Iran of backing terrorism, but the Iranians feel as though they are on the receiving end of it. Aljazeera English reports on PJAK, a revolutionary Iranian-Kurdish group that holes up with impunity inside American-occupied Iraq and which Tehran says hits targets inside Iran.




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