West bad faith shifts P5+1 goalposts

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani

By Finian Cunningham

The Western powers are shifting the goalposts in the P5+1 nuclear talks, thus making a comprehensive deal with Iran elusive.

Since the P5+1 of six world powers signed the interim deal with Iran, the latter has met the demand to limit uranium enrichment.

By pledging a limit of five per cent enrichment of the nuclear fuel, Iran was demonstrating its oft-repeated claim that its nuclear program is for peaceful, civilian applications. At that level of uranium processing, it is nowhere near possible to build a nuclear bomb.

Western powers have been accusing Iran over the past 10 years and more of secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons, which Iran has consistently denied. The US, Britain and France have never provided any proof to support their alleged suspicions, but on the basis of their allegations they have imposed deleterious economic sanctions on the Iranian people.

The ongoing nuclear negotiations - the next round is in four weeks - are supposedly aimed at lifting the sanctions in return for Iranian guarantees about the peaceful nature of its program.

It should be noted that Iran's self-imposed restriction on uranium enrichment at the five per cent level is arbitrary. It is not mandated by any law or international treaty obligation. As a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iran could in principle enrich uranium to any level - 80 per cent or more - if it so wanted. Certainly, Iran has developed the technology to do so despite the inimical Western-led blockade on its national economy.

So, the five per cent enrichment limit agreed to by Iran six months ago is a goodwill gesture that Iran has freely conceded to in order to prove its constant claim that its nuclear program is for peaceful civilian uses, such as energy production, medical isotopes and scientific research.

Since signing the interim deal last November, the IAEA inspectors, who have been given unprecedented access to Iranian nuclear facilities that few other countries would permit, have reported Iran's full compliance. There are no grounds whatsoever for continuing Western claims that Iran is doing or might do anything untoward.

Iran has gained some sanctions relief as a result of the six-month interim so-called handshake. But the bulk of US and European-imposed trade and finance embargoes remain in place, inflicting a harsh toll of human suffering on Iranian civilians, from the shortage of certain life-saving medicines, to the higher cost of food and other daily staples, owing to currency inflation and impediments to conducting normal international commerce.

The latest round of talks in Vienna at the end of last week clearly shows now what is preventing completion of a final nuclear agreement. It is Western shifting of the goalposts for reaching any deal.

The supposed point of any comprehensive accord is for Iran to demonstrate its commitment to peaceful nuclear development. Iran has done so with much forbearance, as even the Western-biased IAEA testifies.

Why a final deal was not reached in Vienna last week is because the US-led Western camp introduced a new variable into the equation - the issue of Iranian ballistic missiles. The West now wants - in addition to a cap on uranium enrichment - restrictions placed on Iran's formidable arsenal of long-range conventional military missiles.

These restrictions are supposedly an assurance sought by the Western powers that if Iran were to "break out" from its self-imposed five per cent limit of uranium enrichment that the country would then not have the delivery means to fire a nuclear warhead. This alleged Western safeguard is directed at ostensibly securing the Israeli regime - even though the latter has illegally stockpiled up to 400 nuclear weapons that remain beyond any international legal oversight.

In an editorial column at the weekend, the Washington Post described "the difficult path to a nuclear deal with Iran". The newspaper - which reflects official US thinking - puts the onus on Iran to make concessions over the latest demand for controls on long-range ballistic missiles.

At this point, we need to stand back and see what's going on. The moving of goalposts by the Western powers is not merely churlish haggling over the interim deal. More sinisterly, the sidetracking shows Western bad faith - bad faith that destroys confidence in the chances of arriving at a mutual comprehensive accord and an end to the decade-long nuclear deadlock.

What this strongly suggests is that Washington and its European allies are not serious or sincere about finding a genuine solution to the nuclear standoff with Iran. In particular, the lifting of the barbaric Western sanctions on Iran, the ongoing impact of which very arguably puts these measures in the category of a crime against humanity.

Against this inveterate Western mentality of aggression, Iran unfortunately may never be able to satisfy Western demands for assurance over its nuclear program. No sooner is one condition met when another condition is introduced, and so on, and so on.

The latest bad faith display by the West at the P5+1 talks in Vienna confirms what many observers have already noted - namely that the nuclear issue is not really the Western concern. It is but a chimera to conceal the real Western objective, which is to subjugate Iran and inflict misery with sanctions in order to foment regime change. The West could not easily get away with such criminal aggression towards the Iranian people otherwise.

But this realization is not a dead-end for Iran. While the Western powers may try to shift goalposts in their fake P5+1 negotiations, the global economy is shifting away from these has-been powers. This week sees the Russian President Vladimir Putin meeting his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, where they are expected to sign a strategic energy deal. The global economy is moving inexorably away from the bankrupt Western capitalist powers and the spent US dollar as the international reserve currency.

Rather than wasting time and resources on pandering to Western intrigues, Iran might be better off walking away from the P5+1 altogether, and concentrate its interests in developing a new global economic axis. Russia and China should also snub the P5+1 charade. After all, the same subterfuge of US-led regime change is being pursued against Moscow, as should be obvious from the current Ukraine crisis.

The Western powers do not deserve the respect of negotiations. They are arrogant rogue powers, with the innocent blood of millions on their hands. Their bad faith is endemic and incorrigible. That should be clearer more than than ever after the latest setback at the P5+1 talks.

Editorial

MAHAMA’S MOVES

President John Dramani Mahama has been very busy since his election as Chairman of the Economic Community of West African States.

 He has moved from one country to another and invited his colleagues to Accra to find ways of combating terrorism in the Sub-region and beyond.

 So far it appears that President Mahama and his colleagues are focusing attention on raw and hard military action as a way out.

 Over view is that the problem of terrorism can effectively be dealt with by improving West Africa’s intelligence capability rather than military might.

 It is also clear that Western interventions in West Africa can only worsen the situation especially as the West profits from the Boko Haram insurgency.

Before the insurgency, West Africa had said no to the establishment of US Military bases but now the situation has facilitated the presence of the US, Israeli, British and French military in the Sub-region.

 The fight against terrorism in West African is a West African problem which must be dealt with by West Africans.

We commend President Mahama for taking the initiative in finding a solution to the problem but we still have to be careful.

SFG MILITARY INTERVENTIONS IN AFRICA

Kyeretwie Opoku, SFG Convener

The Socialist Forum of Ghana (SFG) is deeply concerned about the recent increase in military intervention in West and central Africa. We are equally concerned that these interventions might be used to perpetuate impunity and the rule of self-serving African elites and their collaborators in the exploitation of African resources. The SFG identifies France as the most blatant imperialist power intervening militarily in Africa. We are alarmed that in some instances France has referred to Agreements it signed with African leaders who were desperate to lead their countries into independence from France more than fifty years ago as providing it legitimacy for her military interventions. We have no doubt that like all neo-colonialist countries France is only interested in Africa for economic reasons which it seeks to maintain through military might and cultural domination.

We recall that France conducted three nuclear bomb tests in Algeria on February 1960, November 1961 and January 1996. This was despite worldwide protests in 1959 led by organisations such as the Sahara Protest Team, the British Direct Action Committee (DAC), and the United States Committee for Non-violent Action (CNVA) and the Ghana Council for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). So when it comes to infringing the sovereignty of Africa with impunity, France has a pompous history that has no equal.

When forced by world events to grant independence to her West African colonies in the early 1960s, France ensured that her economic interests would be secured through facilitating and underwriting a fee-applicable monetary union among her former colonies. Using this ‘economic interest’ and so called ‘historical responsibility’ as pretexts, France stationed troops in several African countries in order to guarantee an ill-defined ‘internal security’ for each country. Since then any nationalist attempt at questioning France’s economic dominance in her former colonies has been suppressed using troops strategically stationed in Africa.

France intervened in the Chadian civil war in 1978, 1983 and 1986 to ensure her continued domination of the internal affairs of that country. France has a permanent base in Niger to protect uranium production exclusively mined by a French owned company. So it is not surprising that the French Army intervened in Niger in 2013, ostensibly, to ‘flush out Al-Qaeda’. Referring to an Agreement signed with Ivory Coast in August 1961, France intervened in that country in 2012 to stop the elected government of President Laurence Gbagbo from supressing a military uprising and installed the leaders of the rebellion who were more amenable to French influence. French involvement was also highly evident in the Burkina Faso coup in 1987 which removed the anti-imperialist government of Captain Thomas Sankara and replaced it with the pro-French regime led by Captain Blaise Compaoré. We must also recall that in the early 1960s France sabotaged attempts by Guinea and Mali to join Ghana in a union aimed at pooling their development efforts and increasing their strength at international trade negotiations. France also sabotaged similar attempts by Maurice

Yameogo, then President of the then Upper Volta to form a political union with Senegal, Benin and Mali in 1961.

The recent French military interventions in Mali and the Central African Republic however have a heightened viciousness and hypocrisy which behoves us to call on all pan Africanists to take note and act to expose this French hypocrisy no matter how it is camouflaged. France as the former colonial power is directly responsible for creating poverty and misery in her former colonies through the unremitting exploitation of their resources without adequate compensation. France is also responsible for not allowing her former colonies the space to develop local solutions to the problems of poverty, youth unemployment and hunger. Having strategically created the conducive conditions for civil war in her former colonies, it is highly hypocritical for France to claim that her military interventions are humanitarian.

French hypocrisy is currently exemplified in the Central African Republic (CAR) and Mali where France claims her military intervention is aimed at preventing genocide. The SFG asserts that the underpinning reason for French interest in CAR and Mali are economic and geopolitical. The interventions have a long tunnelled vision of exploiting African resources well into the future. Africa must wake up and act to stop this relentless exploitation of African resources by former colonial powers. We owe it to future African generations to preserve our natural resources or at the minimum get the best deal for their exploitation.

The challenge is here and now.

First we must ensure that we seek Africa led solutions to all our conflicts. Africa has the capacity and is capable of resolving her own conflicts devoid of foreign meddling. Any assistance from outside Africa should be what Africa asks for and not what the donors claim they can offer.  The SFG contends that military assistance offered by France, the UK and US at best provide solutions which provide short term relief in conflict situations whilst hardening the underlying reasons for the conflicts which were carefully implanted in the colonial era.

Second, we must heed the clarion call made over fifty years ago by Kwame Nkrumah for the formation of an African High Command. In 1958, Nkrumah predicted with frightening accuracy what the consequences for Africa would be if an Africa High Command was not put in place. The foreboded consequences have been with us since 1963 when the coup in Togo overthrew a leader who questioned French imperialism. It is time for African leaders to put aside narrow and short sighted objectives which serve the interests of former colonial masters. We call upon all Africans to see French intervention for what it really is, and to mobilise the African masses to end conflicts, and remove imperialist force from African soil.

The SFG calls on Africa to come together and act now!

Dauda Mohammed Suru

For convener

Nigeria's Giant Military Is No Match For Boko Haram

Nigeria Military officers

By Michael Moran

There was a time not so long ago when a mutiny by Nigerian soldiers invariably led to bloodshed, arrests and a new government in Lagos.

On Wednesday, when army troops launched an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate one of their country's most prominent generals, it sent a shiver down older spines.

 
The attempt was unsuccessful and appears to be no threat to the country's government. But like the current standoff with Boko Haram, a militant group that kidnapped more than 200 girls last month from a remote village school, the botched assassination is shining an unwelcomed spotlight on a flailing military force.
On Friday, President Goodluck Jonathan abruptly canceled his planned visit to the area due to security concerns. 

 
Nigeria's army came by its reputation for brutality honestly. The military ruled Nigeria as a dictatorship for most of the period between independence from Britain in 1960 and 1998, when the last of its venal strongmen, Sani Abacha, died under mysterious circumstances.
The generals, tainted by repression, a brutal civil war in the 1960s and a world-beating reputation for corruption, retreated to the barracks.

 
Protesters march in support of the girls kidnapped by members of Boko Haram in front of the Nigerian Embassy in Washington May 6, 2014.

 
Then they remade themselves as important contributors of troops to United Nations and regional peacekeeping missions.

 
But Boko Haram's violence and kidnappings are putting the military back in the headlines.
The army's inability to counter the group has forced the national government to do something unprecedented: invite the United States, French and British militaries to help them rescue the young hostages.

 
Wednesday's assassination attempt, in fact, occurred at the headquarters of the very division charged with finding the girls.

 
Nigeria's 7 Division is based in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, amid Boko Haram's stronghold in the northwest of the country and the same region where the schoolgirls were abducted on April 14.

 
Nigerian press reports say that 7 Division soldiers fired on the vehicle of their commander, Maj. Gen. Ahmadu Mohammed, as he addressed troops at the Maimalari Barracks.
Mohammed's division is on the front lines of the fight against Boko Haram, and its troops have suffered heavy casualties - and, according to human rights groups, retaliated against civilians in the region.

 
Military officials in Nigeria's capital have denied the incident, claiming that 7 Division soldiers merely fired in the air to commemorate four comrades who had been killed in a bloody skirmish with Boko Haram.

 
But Nigerian media report soldiers fired on the general's vehicle as the bodies of slain comrades were being brought to the base morgue.

 
Nigeria's military has opened an investigation.

 
Few see the incident in Borno as a threat to Nigerian democracy, but it has highlighted the low morale and poor capabilities of the 60,000-strong army.
Boko Haram Nigeria

 
Nigeria’s military, with a budget of over $6 billion a year, simply is not an effective force. And as the events in Borno state indicate, it lacks the discipline of a professional military, too.
"We’re now looking at a military force that’s, quite frankly, becoming afraid to even engage, Alice Friend, the Pentagon’s principal director for African affairs, said in congressional testimony Thursday.

 
The Nigerian military has the same challenges with corruption that every other institution in Nigeria does. Much of the funding that goes to the Nigerian military is skimmed off the top, if you will.

 
This is not all the government’s fault. While Nigeria�s economy is growing fast, and it overtook South Africa�s to become sub-Saharan Africa�s largest last year, oil revenues have dropped due to flagging global prices and corruption remains a huge problem.
Nigeria is under pressure � like all countries hoping to raise money in international bond markets to control public spending. Its growing population needs jobs, its increasingly vocal middle class demands services, and the government’s inability to fund these changes through oil exports is exacerbating long-standing religious and ethnic tensions.

 
Yet, far from splurging on new military capabilities, the government in 2012 and 2013 actually cut defense spending. That’s one of the few ways to balance a budget without touching popular social programs like food and fuel subsidies.

 
Military expenditures fell in 2013 by over 5 percent, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

 
That said, cutting defense in Nigeria does not have the same effect that it does in the US or Europe, where capabilities are immediately affected. Nigeria�s defense budget is almost entirely consumed by a mixture of payroll, basic supplies and graft.

 
Purchases of new weapons systems are rare, with new equipment often amounting to refurbished platforms that spent their most useful years in Western forces. The former US Coast Guard cutter pensioned off cheaply to the Nigerian Navy in 2012. The ship, the former USCG Gallatin, first sailed in 1967.

 
On paper, Nigeria has almost 95 aircraft and 75 warships, for instance. In reality, fewer than one-third of these aircraft have flown in recent years � most have been cannibalized for spare parts. Its warships include a host of small coastal patrol craft � in effect, motorboats.

 
But the most serious problem may not be equipment but doctrine. Great �kit� isn�t much help fighting a violent guerrilla insurgency, a fact the US military discovered in Iraq and still struggles with in Afghanistan.

 
To the extent that US and European forces can bring lessons learned in those wars to Nigeria�s hinterland, they may be of some help. But even the most adaptable militaries take years to make such adjustments.

 
For the more than 200 schoolgirls in Boko Haram�s clutches, that�s simply too long to wait.

New Epidemic of Sleeplessness

By Clive Cookson

Sleep? We don’t get enough of it. That lament has been heard for many years, but alarm about mass sleep deprivation is being expressed with growing urgency by experts concerned that the distractions and pressures of modern society are exacerbating the problem.

Typical is a warning last month by Richard Wiseman, psychology professor at the University of Hertfordshire, about a “new epidemic of sleeplessness”. It came on the back of an online survey showing that 59 per cent of adults in Britain get seven hours’ sleep or less a night. That is a significantly higher proportion than earlier surveys had suggested.

“The results are extremely worrying, because getting less than seven hours sleep a night is below the recommended guidelines and is associated with a range of problems, including an increased risk of weight gain, heart attacks, diabetes and cancer,” Prof Wiseman said.

His survey pointed to one potential cause of sleeplessness: 78 per cent of respondents (and 91 per cent of those aged between 18 and 24) had used a computer, smartphone or tablet in the two hours before going to bed.

“The blue light from these devices suppresses the production of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, so it is important to avoid them before bedtime,” explained Prof Wiseman.

Not everyone is convinced by such arguments. One distinguished dissenter is Professor Jim Horne, sleep neuroscientist at Loughborough University. His guest column in this FT special report points out that concern dates back at least to 1894, when the British Medical Journal blamed the “hurry and excitement of modern life” for increasing insomnia.

Prof Horne believes claims about growing sleeplessness reflect misunderstanding of past sleep surveys and that links between sleep debt and disease are overstated. But his seems to be a minority view, among a fast flow of studies identifying links between disease and sleep problems.

During 2014 researchers in labs around the world have reported among other things that good sleep improves the survival prospects of women with advanced breast cancer; poor sleep doubles the hospitalisation rate in heart failure patients; young children who sleep less eat more and are at greater risk of obesity; poor-sleep quality is linked to an acceleration of cognitive decline in older men; suboptimal sleep activates genes that lead to depression; fragmented sleep accelerates the growth of tumours; and sleep deprivation leads to the loss of brain cells.

Epidemiologists have long noted a U-curve relationship between sleep and disease. People who normally sleep between seven and eight hours a night have the best health. Death rates rise not only as average sleep duration decreases below seven hours but also as it increases beyond eight.

The latest study, carried out at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and published this month in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, assessed 15,200 female nurses and found those who slept five or fewer hours or nine or more hours a night had significantly worse memory in old age – a deterioration equivalent to two additional years of age – than those sleeping seven hours. A big change in sleeping habits between middle and old age was associated with a more rapid decline in memory.

As with many epidemiological observations, it is hard to move beyond the association and prove that sleeping too little – or too much – really causes poor health, rather than being a manifestation of another underlying health problem.

Even so, Elizabeth Devore, associate epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, says: “Our findings suggest getting an average amount of sleep – seven hours a day – may help maintain memory in later life and that clinical interventions based on sleep therapy should be examined for the prevention of cognitive impairment.”

People who sleep too much may be able to force themselves to get up sooner than they would like, with the help of an alarm clock. People who sleep too little may find the going harder.

Few, if any, professionals recommend long-term medication with sleeping pill prescriptions as a solution, because all existing drugs have significant side-effects and none induces brain activity that matches natural drug-free sleep.

So the healthiest bets for better sleep are to avoid the aggravating factors that can lead to insomnia, such as bright artificial light and intensive mental activity before bedtime. Of course, it helps to have a comfortable, quiet bedroom maintained at a moderate temperature (about 19C works well for most people).

And if you find yourself awake in the middle of the night and unable to go straight back to sleep, then instead of panicking about insomnia and how exhausted you will be the next day, indulge in pleasant thoughts or even a little light problem-solving as you lie awake.

Everyone knows caffeine in the evening exacerbates sleeplessness, but a recent study published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine shows that consuming coffee or tea as much as six hours before bedtime can significantly disrupt sleep.

Christopher Drake, study leader at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, says: “Drinking a big cup of coffee on the way home from work can lead to negative effects on sleep, just as if someone were to consume caffeine closer to bedtime. People tend to be less likely to detect the disruptive effects of caffeine on sleep when taken in the afternoon.”

But one of the biggest factors working against good sleep is to have your body clock or circadian rhythm disrupted by intercontinental travel across time zones or working shifts during the night.

Scientists at Oxford university have identified a ‘buffering’ system in the suprachiasmatic nuclei, the brain area that controls the body clock, which slows down its adjustment to time changes.

“It makes sense to have a buffering mechanism in place to provide stability to the clock,” says Stuart Peirson, one of the Oxford university researchers.

“The clock needs to be sure it is receiving a reliable signal, and if the signal occurs at the same time over several days, it probably has biological relevance.”

In nature, nothing crosses several time zones in the course of a day.