Towards a global perspective . . .

Last week a US House of Representatives Committee voted to bring a bill to the floor encouraging President Bush to declare that the slaughter of up to 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turkish Government during World War I was a “Genocide”. This caused a fierce negative reaction from the Turkish Government and President Bush. Despite the flap, Nancy Pelosi has so far stood firmly behind her decision to bring this bill to the floor. She says it is time to stand behind the truth, and points out that it is a compassionate gesture towards older Armenians who will soon pass away. Apparently this is a more important issue than the same number of Iraqis killed in the last 6 years due to the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. But, no one, as far as I can tell, no one at all is talking about that.

The Turks are already quite distressed by the Kurdish situation on their border. The Kurds in Northern Iraq, the only Iraqis truly friendly toward and welcoming of the Americans, have started setting up their own state. They have a constitution, and have made a deal with one of Bush’s close associates to begin selling their oil on the free market. The Iraqi Government rejects their sovereignty, but really doesn’t have the resources to do anything about it at the moment, and… who cares what they think anyway. But the Kurds aren’t satisfied with the prospect of a sovereign state within (or without) Iraq. They won’t be satisfied until all Kurds and Kurdish territories have been liberated. That would include the Kurdish areas in Iran and Turkey. Now that the Kurds don’t have to fight every day for their survival, as they did in Saddam’s time, they have turned their sites on liberating the rest of their tribe.

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The ‘Buzz’ in the US media is all about Iran. Everywhere you look, every newspaper and TV station is talking about Iran. ‘Iran is supplying weapons to Iraqi insurgents’, ‘Iran is sending Military people in to Iraq to fight US soldiers’, ‘Iran is the problem’ in Iraq. The ‘problem’ is spun and discussed in every venue. Al Arabiya, a Saudi satellite station, has even picked up the tone. The ‘problem’ has been in the public domain since Petraus speech, but didn’t really come to the forefront until after Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s visit to the US a couple of weeks ago. What was happening before that? What changed?

For the last few years, the US has been insisting that Iran’s nuclear development program, more specifically, their Uranium enrichment program is illegal, and that they are developing the technology to make an atomic bomb. Throughout this period, IAEA inspectors, under the leadership of IAEA Director General, Mohamed Baradei, have been working with Iran to clarify exactly what is going on with the Iranian Nuclear Program. What they say that they have found is that the program is as described by the Iranian’s and perhaps, a little less. They have found that the program is indeed, as the Iranians report, appropriate for peaceful use in nuclear power plants. In the US, we haven’t heard much about this. When the story finally hit the air, the networks began to buzz with disclaimers accusing Al Baradei, and by extension, the IAEA process, of being untrustworthy for a variety of reasons.

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