Behind the (most recent) Iran crisis

Tensions appear to be mounting over the issue of Iran's nuclear enrichment, as a reasonably decent analysis piece in today's New York Times illustrates.
But what underlies it? Who are the US's rivals to the East? Who really threatens American global dominance? Iran and the possibility of it producing nuclear power, or of funding the second intifada (which in fact can and does operate independently of any government's support)? Does it really ring true? Or is something else at work. Are Russia and Western Europe where the real danger lies? An article in yesterday's FT seems to give a good hint at why Iran is considered more of a threat to US dominance than a country which actually has nuclear weapons like North Korea:


'US seeks to limit Gazprom hold on Europe'
>By Guy Dinmore in Washington
>Published: April 28 2006 22:00; print issue of April 29 2006.


The Bush administration is seeking to curb Moscow’s influence in the Caucasus and central Asia and weaken Gazprom’s growing hold over gas supplies to Europe with an effort to promote new oil and gas corridors that would bypass Russia and exclude Iran.

US intentions were highlighted on Friday when President George W. Bush welcomed President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan to the White House, stressing the importance of their security and energy relationship.

Next week’s visit to Kazakhstan by Dick Cheney, the vice president, is further evidence that the US wants to shore up ties with key partners in central Asia, having lost access to a major military base in Uzbekistan last year. The vice president will use the visit to press for closer energy ties between Kazakhstan and Europe.

But analysts are concerned that an overall hardening of US policy towards Moscow could drive Russia and Iran, which together hold nearly half the world’s gas reserves, into an energy-based alliance.

A senior financier told the Financial Times that Iran, which is competing with Gazprom to provide gas to the Caucasus, was considering a switch in policy by selling its gas to Russia through central Asia because the US was blocking its access to Europe and India.

Lack of investment by Gazprom, which supplies Europe with about a quarter of its gas, means that Russia will be increasingly reliant on buying gas from central Asia or Iran to help meet its subsidised domestic needs and export commitments. Cliff Kupchan, analyst with the Eurasia Group consultancy, said he had a different understanding: that Russia and Iran would co-ordinate their gas export policies, with Moscow selling to the west and Iran to the east.

The stage is set for a bidding war between Russia, China and western energy companies over central Asian oil and gas.

Deals are proceeding at a bewildering speed. Turkmenistan signed a framework deal in Beijing this month to sell gas to China, while Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan president, visited Moscow for an agreement to double the capacity of a major oil pipeline for exports to Russia.

But the US wants Kazakhstan to look in a different direction, with officials outlining their desire to see a gas pipeline from Kazakhstan’s Kashagan field across the Caspian, linking with Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz field and then heading west to Europe via Georgia rather than north through Russia.

“The market is not working,” said Matt Bryza, US deputy assistant secretary of state, noting that Gazprom buys central Asia gas for $55 per thousand cu m then sells it for double that in the Caucasus and for $265 to Turkey.

However, US officials dismissed suggestions that they were trying to “clip the wings” of Gazprom.

The US has to tread carefully as its oil majors are competing for participation in Gazprom’s Shtokman project under the Barents sea. The US has already started buying LNG provided by Gazprom.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Going by GMT, I have missed this by two minutes. But going by San Fransisco (Blogger) time, I have a few hours to spare.
Today is Holocaut Remembrance Day. (To clear up the confusion, the UK had had a Holocaust Memorial Day held on 27 January since 2001) A time for reflection, no doubt.

Perhaps some reading recommendations. I want to say, read "A Nation on Trial" by Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn. This comprises two (scholarly) devastating critiques of Daniel Goldhagen's "Hitler's willing Executioners"

It would be a valid objection to suggest that engaging with Goldhagen in the first place is a terrible waste of time.

If one is of such an opinion, then two others are recommended. First, Norman Finkelstein's "The Holocaust Industry" and second, Richard J. Evans' "The Coming of the Third Reich"
Both are magnificent pieces of work (in very different ways) which give a fascinating insight into one of the most remarkable events of our history. Both inspire reflection at the level which seems sadly to be missing from social affairs generally in our depressingly unreflective society.

On a quite different note, today I finally got hold of "NHS plc" by UCL Professor Allyson Pollock. So far, it looks like a wonderful account of healthcare as it stands - and its future - in the UK. Tony Blair wants his legacy as PM to be about reforming public services. Gordon Brown is convined the public sector cannot do anything efficiently. In this text lies the future of British politics - indeed, here lies the future of British society. A text far beyond the level of engagement one finds in newspapers, and thus badly needed, the analysis is likely to reveal much about the direction in which public services are heading.

Big Brother-in-Law is watching - a clarification on conspiracy

Well, the internet being what it is, one never knows who might be reading. Perhaps I should get one of those site counters that were so popular back in the late 90s. Detailed comments are so rare that I usually get back to them immediately, but I've been rather busy dissertating so I haven't had a spare moment to respond.

Conspiracy theory is kind of an intereting concept in our language and culture inextricably wound up with urban legends writ large, and for some reason strongly suggestive of some of the stranger elements of middle American subculture, with Roswell, the moon landings and JFK among the most important markers. The history of the phenomenon is much wider, of course - variations on the theme of conspiratorial Jewish leaders being possibly the longest running example, at least in 'Western' culture. The tin-foil hat variety associated with postwar America seems to have been given a considerable boost by what - by most accounts - was a rather sloppy, unprobing US government report on the 9/11 attacks (although it must be said, the conspiracy theories long predate the report, with unsubstantiated rumours that almost no Jews turned up for work at the WTC that day appearing within a week of the events). In any case, conspiracy theories of the Roswell variety are becoming more popular again, with Charlie Sheen absolutely determined that something is definitely up with the US government's story on 9/11, and Spike Lee's forthcoming documentary on hurricane Katrina loaded with allegations from eye-witnesses that some levees in New Orleans were bombed.

The response of most reasonable people to tales like this is that whichever elements within the US government are supposed secretly to have perpetrated it surely do not have the wherewithall or co-ordination to pull off the job so cleanly. If the Pentagon could orchestrate the JFK cover-up in order to clear the way for escalation in Vietnam, why were they unable to save Nixon's neck from the (much less scandellous) Watergate controversy, which knocked the whole thing on the head?
It all just pieces together too nicely, most of the time, and politicians tend to be much more prone to bungling things, and then changing the subject than carrying out anything seriously seditious in secret.

So "conspiracy theory" becomes a nice label to attach to things which look a little too convenient (or just plainly unlikely) in order to discredit them without engaging with them. This isn't always a bad option: I've tried and tried to engage with the "9/11 truth" folks, but there's always more evidence from some "expert" or other whose credibility cannot easily be judged, so that the whole thing ends up seeming like too much of a waste of time for it to be worth getting to the bottom of.

What's important is to recognise the conceptual distinction between a conspiracy theory, and analysis about what we might, for the sake of brevity, describe as 'structure.'
The media provides a useful example, partly because it's been studied pretty well, and partly because it relates closely to the subject under discussion - advertising and branding. One way of studying the media is to examine the institutional structures, ask what one would expect them to produce, and then compare some evidence.
If we note that the primary consumers in the media industry are advertisers (see previous post), we can expect their interests to be paramount. If we note that the media is a concentrated industry, dominated by monopolistic, multi-national corporations, then we can expect that those making editorial decisions will have a world-view which does not seriously conflict with being in the top levels of management of such a company - if they did, how long would they last in their jobs? If we believe at least some of the public relations industry's own hype, we can appreciate how easy it is to set the news agenda by 'planting stories,' a common technique, used most extensively by government, who provide journalists with information about certain topics, and not others, depriving journalists of the required sources to write about other stories - you go with the piece that lets you include quotes from a government minister, not the one you can't substantiate.

This does not constitute a conspiracy theory, because there is no conspiracy at work. It is simply a matter of trying to detatch oneself from the situation for a moment, look at how the whole business is structured, and then come up with some guesses about what one would expect to find. Studies of these matters tend to confirm these expectations pretty well. Adopting an "ideal type" approach, deviations, exceptions, and examples which do not fit may dilute the explanatory power of the model, but do not discredit it, and are to be expected. In a rather more complicated and subjective procedure, "dissenting views" will often be found to fall within particular parameters, with an apparent range of views which in fact very rarely deviate from a rather narrow range gives the impression of a lively, questioning media.
An interesting example is the criticism of the Iraq war. This is hardly uncommon - but what are the bases? A comparison of the number of articles describing the war as misjudged, a failure, too costly, and impossible task versus those describing it as a war crime for which our leaders would be hanged if the prevailing standards of international law (set out at Nuremberg) were applied, hardly need be conducted. Conspiracy? Or rather what we would reasonably, sensibly expect from a media structured the way it is? Making the distinction has the advantage of opening an important debate, hardly reliant on obscure "experts," but which can be conducted on whatever level you like, using easily available resources.



*The basic ideas expressed here are set out (much more articulately) in a good introductory essay by Noam Chomsky, "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream?" A slightly longer version of the same argument was given in a talk called "The Journalist from Mars" and fleshed out with examples in Edward Herman's book "Manufacturing Consent" and Chomsky's even denser 'Necessary Illusions"

Every time a rug is micturated upon in this fair city...

"You've got a conspiracy theory for everything, haven't you?" my brother-in-law asked me yesterday. It might seem that way to those who bear the brunt of my tirades about corporate profits, the interests of concentrated capital and the commodification of culture. But now and again, one finds an example which suggests that one's whole approach thus far has been far too conservative, underestimating the scope of what is involved.
A story in this week's Sunday Times is one such example. The messages underlying such a scheme are extreme versions of what is already pretty widely appreciated: Art is a commodity - that which cannot be marketed carries no value and is mere vanity for the artist. People are commodities, and employment constitutes ownership limited only by time (and perhaps not even by time) so that employers have the right to instruct employees to respond to their employers' whim - to dress as instructed, to eat and drink as instructed, even to conduct their personal hygeiene in such a way that these acts can be marketed. This is allowed to continue because surrounding the realm of culture in a capitalist society is a secret that cannot be mentioned - and could not be taken seriously if it was. The secret is that the "audience" are not the consumers. As with most spheres of life in our society, a product is being sold to a consumer, but the identities of these actors are confused. To clear up the confusion, it is necessary to do the instinctive thing: follow the money. MTV, the New York Times, and Yahoo! do not make (most of) their money from user subscription fees. They make it from advertisers. Advertisers are their major consumers. What, then, is the product being consumed? Our attention. Media outlets engage primarily in selling the "audience's" attention to advertising firms. For this reason, the content they produce is targeted to what advertisers want. And advertisers, who, to use the jargon of economists, distort consumer preferences for a living, want content that will attract their target markets - generally not simply the biggest audience share.

It's a simple enough model, and as it perpetuates itself, it begins to convince audiences that they are commodities, who might make themselves in to "people" if they were to become "famous." Perhaps this is why being famous is being democratised, in the sense that anyone can do it with a bit of good luck. People no longer want to be famous for doing something, but simply for existing. What does this tell us about our society? It suggests that the meaning has been stripped from everyday activities, and only when the mundane is projected on to the arena of celebrity does it become meaningful. Is it not as likely that young women will gossip about the pregnancy of Katie Holmes as they will about those of their friends?
It should come as no surprise that the arena which has been invaded most by these processes is that of the body, sex and love more generally. By appropriating our most private actions, and eroding that privacy, we are made to make the realm of celebrity and branding in to the place where our lives find meaning. If cleaning up menstrual discharge (Tampax etc.), masturbation (Loaded, or any other "men's magazine") and falling in love (the phenomenon of the "heart-throb") are made in to things which can be discussed ONLY within the realm of the brand, then the branding industry has appropriated the only space for the discussion of our most private activities. We are, in this way, forced to surrender the most intimate aspects of our lives to branding. Particularly the first two are matters that one generally does not discuss with others, and certainly not "in polite company," but which are unremarkable subjects to be discu.ssed - perhaps implicitly, but with little real concealment - in advertis and by branding. Objectors are told they are oppressing women if the effectiveness of tampons cannot be weighed in an unconcealed discussion - but who is really oppressing whom when the only place this discussion is allowed to take place is within adverts?

This is why Saatchi and Saatchi making a girl band to do what they want with has implications beyond rubbish music and one too many cola adverts. Branding is not something which interrupts our leisure time, appearing as irritating adverts fragmenting television programmes, or billboards we glance at when we have a spare moment to look around. It is much more invasive - it teaches us how to desire, and what to desire, and it forces us to participate in the process, but at the same time sets controls over the possible outcomes. It is a serious threat to what we understand as "freedom". Our hopes for a better future for humanity rest on understanding how these processes work in order that they might be challenged. A rather presumptuous, self-serving argument, one might suggest, but it seems to me that the role of intellectuals in such a process is starting to diminish considerably, and for this reason, I would rather urge everybody to consider and to engage, to reflect on their own lives and situations, than to send the tired message "we're trying to figure it out - when we have, we'll tell you the answers in words you can understand."