Posts in "Brazil"

By Roy Antoun at 5:56AM

May 18, 2010

Mom, the government's being Paranoid again. Make it stop.

The New York Times recently reported that Iran proposed a new deal with Brazil and Turkey in which the rogue state would “ship half of its nuclear fuel to Turkey.”

What’s the United States’s response? More sanctions. The Times continues to report that “rejecting the new deal, however, could make President Obama appear to be blocking a potential compromise.” And blocking a potential compromise he is indeed. The United States has been prodding a stick at an angry pit bull for half a century and seems to believe that doing so will make the pit bull (Iran) calm down and accept U.S. terms. What President Obama, his predecessors, and current State Department staff refuse to do, however, is put themselves in Iranian shoes.

When President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeatedly states that he is willing to negotiate and talk with the United States, perhaps the United States should be willing to negotiate and talk with the same country it has harassed for fifty years all because of an oil dispute in the 1950s. It’s as if the U.S. is doing whatever it can to prolong conflict and delay peace.

War: Avoided!

There is a breaking new development in the Iran debacle:

In a move that will likely drive a stake into the heart of the near-term prospects for the US-backed “crippling sanctions” against Iran, Turkey and Brazil have managed to come up with a compromise deal that provides everything the Western nations claimed to have wanted from the third-party enrichment deal in the first place.

Whether or not the US and other western allies decides to tone down their rhetoric on another round of sanctions on Iran is still up in the air. Hopefully Turkey will help to put out the warmongering flame with their key "intermediary" position:

Turkey on the other hand is an incredibly inconvenient intermediary for the war party, because they are simultaneously a key US-NATO ally in good standing and have trustworthy relations with Iran. Turkey would be obligated to return Iran’s uranium if the West fails to provide the fuel rods, and could likely be trusted to do so.
As Iran has now accepted the deal, President Obama will struggle to back out of it without doing serious damage both to his international reputation and to US-Turkey relations.

As for now, it looks like war will be avoided. However, there is still the recent shipment of bunker busters to the strategic base on Diego Garcia that has many worried.

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By Roy Antoun at 11:54AM

Feb 1, 2010

Haiti: An American Crutch

It’s naïve to think that the United States government is a generous institution that genuinely looks after the general welfare of its republic and others in need. After a long history of mismanaged occupation and indebtedness, the US feels the obligation to aid Haiti victims in the wake of the earthquake disaster. For those who believe the United States is operating benevolently and unselfishly, they should think again.

Given the mismanaged history of US-Haiti relations, it is safe to say that if the United States had no stake in Western hemisphere politics it wouldn’t be contributing so much to the relief effort. But it does. In the government's conception of the US’s best interest, glorifying American wealth and manpower is nothing short of how a state operates when its global hegemony feels threatened. The constant reminder of the 82^nd Airborne’s presence in Haiti is all too similar to Russia’s May Day parades during the Cold War, US troops parading through Paris in 1944, and Caesar’s military showcase after his conquest of Gaul. And after American conquest in the Middle East, what better way to boast military power in the Western hemisphere than to remind a poor country how powerful and wealthy America can be when it taxes its citizens promptly and without adherence to law?

American Imperialism