24 and Zero Dark Thirty helped sell Americans on torture

A new Pew poll says Americans approve of CIA torture by 51%-29%, so bringing this out again:

Not just politicians, but also the media are responsible for selling Americans on torture. During the Bush years, there was the series 24, whose very premise – Jack Bauer only has 24 hours to stop the terrorists and save America – made the case that torture can be justified in an emergency. Last year, the film Zero Dark Thirty revived the argument by erroneously depicting torture as instrumental to finding (and killing) Osama Bin Laden. The order of events shown implies a connection between the torture of a detainee and what most Americans think is the most significant foreign policy achievement of the last decade. In other words, the plot exploits the jingoism of US audiences to convince them that while the CIA did some ugly things, it was all worth it in the end.

This kind of ideological manipulation is especially worrying in light of the filmmakers’ heavy collaboration with the CIA. The hacks behind Zero Dark Thirty got exclusive access to information about Bin Laden’s murder that was denied to the public. In return, the CIA got Oscar-nominated, chest-thumping propaganda. While some haveclaimed that the interrogation scenes are actually critical of torture, the camerawork and editing are careful to show us everything from the point of view of the CIA officers – not the detainee. For example, when he is stuffed into a box too small for his body, terrified and in pain, we don’t go in there with him. Our perspective stays outside. We’re invited to identify not with the tortured, but the torturers.

…

As Glenn Greenwald pointed out on MSNBC, “Americans know that torture is brutal – That’s why they think it works. They have supported torture because they believe that the people that we’re doing it to are primitive, violent, horrible savages who need to be treated brutally, because that’s the only way we can get information, and that’s the way we stay safe.”

Every Senate Democrat just voted to fund Israel’s genocide in Gaza

I haven’t written since July 14 for two reasons: I can’t write about Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza when others (see: Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss) are doing it so well, but I can’t write about anything else while Palestinians are being slaughtered by a government that receives upwards of $3 billion a year in military aid from our own.

Yesterday President Obama made people mad with comments downplaying CIA torture and blaming Hamas for the astronomical civilian death toll in Gaza. I won’t link to them because I don’t really care what he said. I can’t believe we still have to convince people the Democrats are the worst of the worst.

More important than Obama’s speechifying are the actions of Congress, who (also yesterday) voted overwhelmingly to approve $225 million in additional funding to replenish Israel’s arsenal, depleted by a three-week-long offensive that has killed over 1600 Palestinians, at least 75% of whom are, according to the UN, civilians.

Let me repeat that: After the Obama administration single-handedly torpedoed a UN inquiry into Israeli war crimes, the Senate passed by unanimous consent (and the House voted 395-8) to rearm the Israeli military during an operation that its most tactlessly honest defenders admit is a genocide. This is a massacre that has prompted the governments of Brazil, Ecuador, Chile, Peru, and El Salvador to recall their ambassadors to Israel and the government of Bolivia to declare Israel a “terrorist state”.

What do those countries have in common? They all, to varying extents, have progressive governments willing to stand up to the US – a state sponsor and financier of terror if ever there was one. In taking a stand (however belated) against Israeli aggression, they stand in stark contrast to so-called progressives in the US government.

I’ve written a lot about issues on which Republicans and Democrats agree, but no issue makes a mockery of the “partisan polarization” narrative more than Israel-Palestine.

I recently argued that, should they run, candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders (an “independent” whose independence from the Democrats is pretty tenuous) could pose a serious primary threat to Hillary Clinton, whose deeply conservative record is out of step with the Democratic Party’s “populist” base. On the issue of Israel-Palestine, a recent Gallup poll found that only 31% of self-identified Democrats think Israel’s actions in Gaza are “justified”.

Yet Sanders and Warren – along with every other member of Congress – voted not once but twice for symbolic resolutions endorsing Israel’s assault as “self-defense” and blaming the civilian death toll on Palestinians themselves. Both resolutions passed by unanimous consent: They were backed not just by mean old Republicans, not just by hawkish Democrats like neoliberal poster boy Cory Booker and Chuck “Bomb Iran” Schumer, but also by the party’s so-called left wing.

And now, leading House “progressives” like Barbara Lee and John Conyers joined their Senate counterparts (Ron Wyden and Al Franken, to name a couple others) to reaffirm yet again that, as Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz once put it, there “will never be daylight between the two parties” when it comes to unconditional support for Israeli militarism and apartheid.

The 8 members of Congress – 4 Democrats and 4 Republicans – who voted against the additional funds are, on the Democratic side, Representatives Keith Ellison, Zoe Lofgren, Jim Moran, and Beto O’Rourke, and on the Republican side, Justin Amash, Walter Jones, Thomas Massie, and Mark Sanford.

They took a serious political risk going against the pro-Israel lobby and their respective party leaderships. I’ve linked to the Twitter accounts of each above – if you’re on Twitter, tweet them a “thank you!”, and if you aren’t, their Twitter bios include links to their websites where you can do so.

Here’s the thing, though: That this many members of Congress voted “no” in such a rabidly pro-Israel political climate as Washington is a testament to how undeniably horrific the reports and images from Gaza have been. People on the ground say this attack is beyond anything they’ve seen in their lifetimes.

But Israel’s draconian blockade of Gaza, also a point of bipartisan consensus, had already made it an open-air prison that the UN projected would be “unlivable” by 2020. Israel counts calories to determine how much food can reach its prisoners, blocking everything but the bare minimum needed for survival: Items banned since the siege began in 2007 include shoes, paper, coffee, tea, wood, cement, and iron.

Despite the withdrawal of its Jewish settler population in 2005, Israel continues to control Gaza’s water, electricity, borders, airspace, coastline, and population registry. It has to approve (and often doesn’t) every person, every molecule of food or raw material, that goes in or out. Even during “ceasefires”, the so-called Israeli Defense Forces conduct deadly raids and airstrikes with no accountability.

Gaza is surely unlivable today, after Israel has bombed 4 hospitals, 2 UN shelters, and its only power plant. More than a tenth of Gaza’s 1.8 million people are now housed in the same UN shelters that have become targets for Israeli bombardment, and 1.2 million Gazans lack access to clean water. 

As Americans, we are deeply complicit, and more and more of us are waking up to that reality. The politics of Israel-Palestine in the US are changing, as evidenced by the Gallup poll showing only 25% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 support “Operation Protective Edge”, compared to 55% of those 65 and up.

You can be on the right side of this 21st century struggle against colonialism, or you can sit idly by, congratulating yourself on how reasonable you sound talking about “both sides” and how hatred or religious divisions are the greatest obstacle to “peace”.

The greatest obstacle to peace in Israel-Palestine is apartheid, a racist system of segregation, discrimination, and expulsion. The greatest obstacle to peace is Zionism’s archaic project of an ethnically-exclusive state. The greatest obstacle to peace is the unconditional support of our government, including and especially its “progressive” darlings, for Israeli occupation and human rights abuses.

Empire rots from the inside out, and Congress will be the last domino to fall in the US-Israeli “special relationship”. Sooner or later, material support for Israeli terrorism will become a political dealbreaker. Make it sooner rather than later. Let your Congresspeople know: Enablers of mass murder and ethnic cleansing will lose your vote.

Whether or not you’re PEP – Progressive Except on Palestine – isn’t about ideological purity. It’s about whether you’re willing to stand up to evil when it really matters. Don’t call it evil if you don’t want to. Call it fascism, genocide – just don’t be silent. You’ll regret it.

No one’s really Ready for Hillary – except Wall Street and the war machine

To hear some people tell it, you’d think the Democrats had already nominated Hillary Clinton for president in 2016. But it’s 2014. This show has 3 seasons, and we’ve barely made it through the first episode.

The name of Clinton’s Super PAC – “Ready for Hillary” – suggests one of the main rhetorical bludgeons Democrats will use to enforce lockstep marching behind the former Senator: If you don’t want her to be president of the United States, you must not be “ready” to see a woman in the Oval Office.

But there are plenty of legitimate reasons why no one who calls themselves progressive or lefty should throw their support behind Clinton, a deeply conservative Democrat with the record – first as a Senator, then as Secretary of State – to prove it.

For one, she’s shown herself to be even more hawkish than Obama. While she was in Congress, Clinton vocally supported and voted for the US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and even criticized the Bush administration for being too soft on Iran.

In her time in the State Department during Obama’s first term, she personally pushed for the administration’s most aggressive and disastrous foreign policies, from the so-called surge in Afghanistan (which, according to the military, failed on all counts) and extrajudicial killings (which have killed close to a thousand civilians in Pakistan alone) to the bombing campaign against Libya (which ended in regime change and plunged both that country and northern Africa into greater turmoil) and the covert training and arming of militias in Syria (which was supposed to oust Iran’s regional ally Bashar Al-Assad, but succeeded only in triggering a catastrophic civil war).

And of course, throughout, Clinton remained steadfast in her support for Israel, never uttering a word or lifting a finger in defense of the victims of Israeli militarism and apartheid – to which the US government is financially and diplomatically indispensable. As a Senator, she was silent during Israel’s month-long assault on Gaza that killed some 1400 Palestinians (more than 700 of them civilians) in 2008-2009, and four years later declared her “110%” support for a bombing campaign that left 102 Palestinian civilians dead.

In the economic realm, things look just as grim. Despite going back on her support for the wildly unpopular NAFTA – championed by her husband – Clinton supported other “free trade” agreements under Bush and Obama (like those with South Korea and Colombia). As I’ve written before on this blog, “free trade” deals undermine local economies and protections for both workers and consumers while deepening inequality – both in the US and abroad.

She has touted the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the most expansive and radically anti-democratic pact to date, which will severely limit the ability of nations to regulate and hold accountable the multinational corporations that operate in them.

In particular, Wall Street would be delighted to see the presidency of a Senator who, in 2001, voted to make it more difficult to erase personal debts through bankruptcy – a bill mainly backed by banks and credit card companies. And after helping Clinton and her husband make over $100 million since leaving the White House, the financial services industry know they’d have an ally (and probably a few of their own) in the next administration.

And herein lies the problem for the Clinton campaign: How can you pass yourself off to primary voters as a friend of the 99% when, in a single week, you made $400,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs?

Clinton may well stick to her line that she and Bill were “dead broke” after his second term. But the Clintons’ wealth and how they got it are no secret, and any rival, especially in the Democratic primary, is sure to pounce on her Romneyesque attempts at relatability. What is the “populist” Democratic base going to conclude about Clinton’s loyalties?

What, indeed?

It’s true, we live in a country where laughing maniacally about bombing Iran doesn’t put an end to your presidential aspirations. But we also live in a country where young people under 30 (who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats) have a more favorable view of the word “socialism” than “capitalism”.

We live in a country where you can’t deport a record 2 million undocumented immigrants – a policy Clinton says she would escalate even further – without fierce resistance from leaders and activists in your base and a sizable drop-off in support from Latin@ voters.

And we live in a country where Herman Cain once led the polls in the Republican primary.

The story that the Democratic nomination is a foregone conclusion has some holes – and the party knows it. Already, Democrats in the media and blogosphere are urging progressives to give Clinton a political blank check and pooh-poohing the chances of Senator Bernie Sanders (a self-identified socialist) in a Democratic primary with a defensiveness that betrays the true uncertainty of a Clinton cakewalk.

They’re less knee-jerk in their dismissal of an Elizabeth Warren candidacy – a former strategist for Al Gore’s failed presidential bid openly states that Warren could win a primary against Clinton – but I think that openness comes, in part, from a place of perceived security: At this point, it looks like Warren isn’t running.

But that could change. The smart money is clearly still on the Anointed One, but politics isn’t about predictions – it’s about possibilities that, all too often, aren’t obvious until after they’ve been realized.

And lest we forget, running to Clinton’s left has worked before.

The fact is, there are very few concrete policy differences between Warren and Sanders, and the willingness of party insiders to take a hypothetical challenge from Warren seriously suggests to me that the independent Senator from Vermont has a better shot than it may appear.

After all, an all-time-high 42% of US voters identify as “independents”: Whether they’re progressives, libertarians, leftists, or anything else, Americans – and young Americans most of all – have seen unconditional support for leaders in both parties bear the fruit of 14 years of endless war and a neoliberalism whose bubble has burst for good.

Obi-Wan Kenobi said, “Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them.” It may look like the cult of personality around Hillary Clinton would make her an even “more effective evil” than Obama. It may look like 2016 is too close for a reasonably progressive candidate to mount a serious challenge. But we live in interesting times. And below the surface, people and ideas are moving in conflicting directions all the time, movements that are only clear in hindsight.

Probably the most realistic goal is a few left-leaning cabinet appointments and a civil society more willing to hold Democrats’ feet to the fire. There’s no need and no justification for optimism. But if we take our pessimism seriously, and not as an excuse for inaction, maybe we can make things a little bit better.

Extrajudicial assassination: An Obama holiday tradition

This weekend, the Obama administration began an operation targeting “suspected Al-Qaeda militants” in Yemen, where three days of drone strikes have left at least 55 people dead. Days earlier, the Al-Qaeda network’s Arabian Peninsula affiliate (AQAP) had released a video of an unprecedented gathering of AQAP fighters, including its leader, Nasir Al-Wuhayshi, who vowed to fight back against Western “crusaders”.

George W. Bush, who launched one drone attack against Yemen (in 2002), once described the War on Terror as a “crusade”. But it’s Barack Obama – still the anti-Bush in the eyes of most Democrats, despite having bombed Yemen more than 80 times – who marked Easter Sunday by killing 30 people without charge or trial in south Yemen’s Abyan province.

Most of mainstream media reporting on the administration’s so-called targeted killing program simply parrots the claims of anonymous administration sources (or in this case, unnamed “high-level Yemeni government officials”). But can we really take their word for it? How do we know the dead were all “suspected Al-Qaeda militants”? And even if they were guilty of some punishable infraction, why couldn’t they be charged with a crime like any other criminal?

This seems like a good time to point out that:

• The administration defines “militants” as “all military-age males in a strike zone”.
• A Human Rights Watch report found roughly 70% of airstrike victims in Yemen were civilians.
• Yemen is the primary theater for the Obama policy of signature strikes, which allow the administration to order an attack without knowing the identities of the targets, based on patterns of “suspicious behavior”.
• According to a legal memo carefully prepared by the Justice Department and “leaked” in Feb. 2013, the administration doesn’t need a shred of evidence that someone is a threat to national security in order to assassinate them for being a threat to national security.

Government officials lie about the extrajudicial killing program all the time, and mainstream news outlets take their word for it – every time. When, on Dec. 12, 2013, a US drone strike hit a wedding convoy, killing at least 12 local tribespeople, US and Yemeni officials “leaked” the demonstrably untrue story that the strike had actually killed 12 militants, including Shawqi Ali Ahmad al-Badani, a mid-level AQAP operative.

The fact is that nothing drives terrorist recruitment like the Obama administration’s campaign of terror in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Libya. As a “counterterrorism” policy, extrajudicial killing – whether by drones, conventional aircraft, or any other weapon – is as counterproductive as it is ethically repugnant. Nothing foments hatred of the United States more, nothing could make outbursts of violence against Americans more inevitable, than our government’s own unrestrained savagery.

Yet polls consistently show that a significant majority of self-identified liberal Democrats support the President’s drone program. Their racism is the subtle racism of indifference to the plight of others – the brown Muslim others whose lives take a backseat to partisan loyalty. 

Every election season, the liberal media and political class position the Democratic Party as a friend: a friend to women, to ethnic minorities, to labor, to queer folks, to the “middle class”. In 2012, the Democratic cheerleading-industrial complex defeated mean old Mitt Romney by demanding lockstep marching behind the President, as if three years of neoliberalism and war were less of a dealbreaker than some missing tax returns or an unfortunate incident with the family dog.

It was later revealed that, during that election, our friend joked to aides that he didn’t know he’d be “really good at killing people”. I don’t think there’s much to say about Obama personally without buying into his formidable cult of personality – only that comments like this betray a callousness we’re told to expect from evil Republicans, not from our friends.

But it was a Democrat who ordered the deaths of four unidentified people in Pakistan on Christmas Day, 2013, and it was a Democrat who massacred 30 people in Yemen on Easter. I think Charles Davis said it best: “If I had a friend like that, I probably wouldn’t be friends with them anymore.”

Why we don’t learn about Malcolm X in school

I don’t remember learning about Malcolm X (a.k.a. El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) in school – not really. Not like I learned about such Great Americans as Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and George Washington Carver, the inventor of peanut butter.

Seems things haven’t changed much: As the New York Daily News recently reported, teachers at a Queens elementary school forbade their (mostly black) students to write about the revolutionary black nationalist leader and thinker. Why? Because he was “violent” and “bad”.

So when Malcolm X is brought up (usually during the month of February), it’s only in opposition to King. In this story, Malcolm plays the part of the hateful (Muslim) radical, the unreasonable foil to King’s conciliatory (Christian) liberal.

Of course, any honest account of King’s thought must acknowledge that he grew to share many of Malcolm’s positions: King’s famous speech against the Vietnam War, “Beyond Vietnam” – given in 1967, shortly before his murder – is almost entirely ignored by the liberals and conservatives who now sing his praises. But the speech’s marked anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism indicate how the influence of principled ideological rivals like Malcolm X (as well as the reality of the civil rights struggle) kept pushing King further to the left, until the untimely end of his days.

King can be celebrated as a national hero by Americans of all political stripes because he’s been Santa Clausified, his radicalism whitewashed, his legacy reduced to something about a dream.

We don’t learn about Malcolm X because there’s nothing in the history of his thought that can be sanitized and rendered unthreatening to the white capitalist power structure. Contrary to a convenient interpretation, Malcolm’s hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) didn’t move him closer to advocating “integration” or reconciliation with whites – it only inspired him to link the struggle of blacks in the US with the struggles of colonized peoples the world over.

By the end of his life, King had come to see things more like Malcolm, but Malcolm had only come to see things more like himself.

49 years ago today, Malcolm X was assassinated, apparently by members of the Nation of Islam. In the half-century since his death, his analysis of white supremacy as a political and economic system – a dynamic system of exploitation and repression that would survive the end of legal apartheid – has been vindicated again and again.

A half-century ago, Malcolm was warning of the “black bourgeoisie” and the danger it posed to any serious agenda of racial justice. Now, the figurehead of the bourgeoisie is himself a black man. While the Great Recession’s biggest losers by far have been black Americans, blacks – historically, the most left-leaning ethnic demographic in the US – have never been more loath to criticize the US government and its role as the handmaiden of capital.

There’s a lot to read and watch if you want to learn more about this great leader of the left in his own eloquent, uncompromising words – but for now, I’ll leave you with this short excerpt, the continued relevance of which I think readers of this blog will appreciate as much as I do:

The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political “football game” that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives.

Politically the American Negro is nothing but a football and the white liberals control this mentally dead ball through tricks of tokenism: false promises of integration and civil rights. In this profitable game of deceiving and exploiting the political politician of the American Negro, those white liberals have the willing cooperation of the Negro civil rights leaders. These “leaders” sell out our people for just a few crumbs of token recognition and token gains. These “leaders” are satisfied with token victories and token progress because they themselves are nothing but token leaders.

A couple of media interviews with me

I was on Iran’s Press TV this past week discussing US public opinion about the War on Terror – you can watch that clip here.

I also returned to the Progressive Radio Network with a couple of my SJP comrades to talk BDS and Israeli apartheid for a full hour – stream or download here (interview starts at around minute 7:45).

The Red Fury endorses David Green in the Dem primary for IL’s 13th

The candidacy of David Green presents Illinois’s 13th district with a refreshing choice come March 18: We can a) elect a conservative Democrat to face Republican incumbent Rodney Davis in the fall, or b) elect a real alternative to the status quo, a candidate whose professional experience as a policy analyst is matched by his commitment to a pragmatic, unapologetic politics of social justice and human rights. Of the three candidates – Green, Ann Callis, and George Gollin – Green is the most progressive on every issue that matters to you.

Here’s where Green and his opponents stand on just a few of the political priorities I know local readers of this blog will share:

One issue that resonates strongly in our district is mass incarceration and the so-called War on Drugs. It’s long been obvious that the “drug war” is a farce: Behind that facade of concern for health and public safety, the US elite have built up the world’s largest, most racist police state, which imprisons as many people of color as the entire prison population of China, a country of almost 1.4 billion people.

On their campaign websites, neither Callis nor Gollin make any mention of the law enforcement and criminal justice policies responsible for the creation of what some scholars recognize as a new form of apartheid. Green writes,

I support movements toward decarceration and de-criminalization, especially in relation to non-violent behaviors. I support seriously addressing poverty at a social level and addiction at an individual level as means of moving beyond the racially-biased War on Drugs, and towards prevention, treatment, and restorative justice when appropriate.

So Green opposes the current policies of locking up millions of mostly poor, mostly black and brown people for non-violent offenses, and supports treating drug addiction as a health issue, not an issue for the courts. One can only assume that Callis and Gollin either support those policies and don’t want to admit it, or else they think Democratic voters just don’t care about the “New Jim Crow”.

Gollin and Callis are as silent on white supremacy abroad as they are on white supremacy at home. They don’t waste a single word on such trivial issues as permanent global war, the ongoing carnage that is the US legacy in Iraq, US government support for repressive client states, or the Obama administration’s continued use of torture. But as Green writes in an op-ed for Champaign-Urbana’s News-Gazette,

Since 9/11/ 2001, I have publicly and actively opposed the war-making policies of both the Bush and Obama administrations in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in the larger Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. I have opposed the expansion and privatization of the military-industrial complex, drone warfare, our empire of military bases, and military funding for Israel, Egypt and Colombia, based on the those countries’ violations of international law and human rights.

I know this to be true: David Green has been a courageous, often lonely voice of reason throughout my time as an anti-war activist in C-U. His vocal support for Palestinians’ human rights and his sober, unflinching criticism of Israel’s policies towards Palestinians have earned him the ire of many in our community who call themselves liberals. More importantly, they’ve earned him the deep respect of me and others who refuse to place a lower value on the suffering of people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America than we place on the suffering of people in our own community.

Green’s approach flies in the face of the usual Democratic extortion tactics that tell us Democrats need to support right-wing foreign policies in order to achieve a more progressive domestic agenda. Aside from its thinly-veiled racism and totally naked chauvinism, this line is also, for the most part, not supported by reality. Democrats and Republicans are thought to have meaningful differences when it comes to economics, but the fact is that Democrats have been so deeply invested in neoliberal economic policies that Republicans can only outflank them by demanding more and more cuts in taxes and spending.

Whatever promises the eloquent orator in the White House may have made, his administration’s record shows that the rich have paid less in taxes and reaped a much, much higher percentage of income gains than they did under Bush. Everyone but the most craven reactionaries claim to be concerned about widening wealth/income inequality, yet when called upon to articulate an actual solution, all party-line Democrats have to offer is the familiar medley of tax cuts, “innovation”, and investment in education and infrastructure.

Gollin’s website reads, “We must direct our economic policies toward investment in education and research, innovation as a primary driver of job growth and infrastructure repair and improvements.” On the question of job creation, it says,

We must expand credit to help small businesses start and grow, and provide tax incentives and credits to those businesses which really are “job creators.” We must prioritize policies which encourage manufacturing, construction, and production of American goods by American workers in the United States.

So Callis: “[W]e need to do more to support our colleges and universities that can be job incubators and link labor with local business leaders to identify critical skill-set [sic] needed to help re-train workers for the local jobs of the future.” She promises to

work with the district’s numerous manufacturers to see how tax credits and other incentives can help keep this critical part of our state’s economy growing. Rebuilding our local infrastructure and re-training those who are actively looking for work are vital steps toward keeping the middle class secure.

So Gollin and Callis agree that the proper role of government in “job creation” involves tax cuts that incentivize businesses to hire new workers and remolding education to fit the needs of employers. This may sound nice when you’re arguing with Republicans, but it’s not a prescription for what ails the US economy. It’s a prescription for more of the same. As Green points out,

Tax incentives for small businesses are ineffectual if not counter-productive in stimulating the number of jobs and the level of growth that is needed at this time. There is no particular magic about small businesses, and providing tax incentives to them is an ineffective way of creating jobs. Small businesses create more jobs, but also lose more jobs, and the average length of employment in small business is half that of larger businesses.

Green supports a living wage, a higher minimum wage, and the right of every worker to unionize. He’ll push for full employment as a federal government policy, which would entail living wage ($15-20/hour) jobs for every unemployed worker, and cash transfers to redistribute wealth to the bottom. This would be funded, he proposes, by a new regime of progressive taxation (including cracking down on offshore tax havens and eliminating the payroll tax).

Basically, he’s calling for an end to neoliberal deference to the private sector and a return to the sort of social-democratic policies that vastly improved the lot of the poor and working class in the industrialized capitalist economies. If the private sector won’t hire, then the government will step in to make sure that everyone who needs a stable job can find one; that everyone who is sick can get health care without falling prey to our predatory private monopoly; that millions of US children who go to bed hungry can grow up to live healthy lives doing safe, dignified work.

This line of thinking has limitations, as any Marxist worth her salt will tell you. But as Venezuela and Latin America’s “Pink Tide” have shown, in the age of global capitalism’s “race to the bottom”, it’s not only possible but necessary to find creative ways of refocusing politics on far-reaching, progressive reforms.

Gollin and Callis direct all of their appeals towards the shrinking “middle class”, without once acknowledging why it’s such a problem that the middle class is shrinking: Because poverty is built into the system of capitalism, and in capitalism, it really, really sucks to be poor.

Green’s campaign has made it clear that he isn’t afraid of the word “poverty”. While poverty is endemic to capitalism, Green believes – as we all must – that we aren’t powerless to mitigate the system’s most destructive tendencies.

Gollin talks about supporting “policies which encourage manufacturing, construction, and production of American goods by American workers in the United States”, but only Green makes the connection between “offshoring” and neoliberal “free trade” policies that allow corporations to relocate overseas in order to escape from countries where modest welfare state protections are still in place.

These agreements – the most sweeping of which is being hammered out in secret by the Obama administration and 600 corporate lobbyists – force countries to compete to offer multinational corporations the lowest wages, the flimsiest safety regulations, and so on.

Green promises to continue to oppose neoliberal policies (deregulation, austerity, privatization), not just in East Central Illinois, but in Indonesia and Bangladesh as well. Why? Because he recognizes, unlike his opponents, that in today’s global capitalism, the struggle of workers anywhere is inextricably tied to the struggle of workers everywhere.

In the early years of the Obama administration, I thought that no leftist or progressive should ever vote for a Democrat again – the injunction to vote for the “lesser evil” only to emboldens the party to serve empire and the capitalist class all the more slavishly. This remains true today.

At the time, I concluded that any vote for anyone running as a Democrat had legitimized the party and the system, and that this symbolic defeat outweighed whatever might be gained in practical terms. This is no longer my view. Progressives and the left are, today, laying the groundwork for a mass movement, and one of the ways we organize and mobilize the enormous left-wing consciousness in this country is to present concrete, practical alternatives to neoliberalism at all levels of government.

In doing so, we move this country’s political discourse to the left – and we create opportunities for working-class people to engage with and help shape a program of genuinely revolutionary reform. This will necessarily include third parties, but it also means we have to be ready to launch progressive primary challenges in places where only Democrats’ voices are heard. On the issues I’ve touched on and many, many more, David Green presents just such a challenge.

Supporters of Gollin will charge that those who vote for Green only benefit the allegedly more conservative Callis; supporters of Callis will charge that those who vote for Green only benefit the Republican incumbent.

The truth is that those of us who participate in the struggle for justice win no hearts and minds by abandoning our convictions, and Representative David Green is only as unlikely as we make it.

What is possible? A lot of things that, today, are not yet actual. The current wave of mass demonstrations, uprisings, and revolutions; the Occupy Wall Street protests; the recent electoral success of socialists running at the local level; the polls that show young Americans on average favor “socialism” over “capitalism” – these are fragments from our future, glimmers of the impossible that lies just ahead.

Rosa Luxemburg: An icon to reclaim, if ever there was one

For Uwe-Jürgen Ness: May you always feel at home in the world. 

There is a pathology on the US left today, and it has to do with history. The New Left of the 1960s/70s and what remains of it today are characterized by a pretty remarkable phenomenon: You can hardly have a discussion about anti-capitalist struggle and revolution – not just with liberals and conservatives but even amongst ourselves – that doesn’t feature some obligatory, long-winded caveat disavowing our relationship to what’s called “historical communism”.

The safest way to talk about that relationship is to portray it as a clean break with everything that came before, as if “historical communism” were just a term for the inevitable end of revolution in totalitarian tyranny; as if the diverse range of movements, parties, and states that have called themselves communist, socialist, or revolutionary are just one monolithic thing; as if their successes and failures took place in a vacuum rather than in reaction to a violent status quo that always threatens to return with a vengeance.

But the biggest taboo isn’t against movements, parties, or states – it’s against individual people. Single out a historical figure and claim them as an icon of the left and you’re already halfway to the sort of authoritarian leader worship we associate with the phrase “cult of personality”.

Never mind that the liberals whose approval we so desperately seek have elevated the “democratic” personality cult into an art form, with disastrous results. No, it’s radicals who’ve proven ourselves incapable of venerating an icon without making dogmatic excuses and whitewashing their crimes. After all, the real problem with the left isn’t what our convictions are – we are free, we’re reminded, to think and say what we want – it’s that we stubbornly persist in acting like we have any real convictions at all.

I think I’ve made it clear that I think this is a destructive tendency. But are there really revolutionary figures worth reclaiming, people whose prescient analyses and principled opposition are as crucial today as they ever were? I claim that there are, and one of these is Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary Polish activist and thinker who is, at this moment, arguably the intellectual godmother of the radical left in Germany.

In the span of three decades, Luxemburg became one of the most influential leaders of the European labor and socialist movements – second, perhaps, only to Lenin. She founded, along with Leo Jogiches, the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland, the Marxist political party that fought for Poland’s liberation from the German and Russian Empires of which it was a part.

She then moved to Germany, at that time the home of Europe’s strongest workers’ movement, and quickly earned the respect of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), including its most notable leaders, like August Bebel and Karl Kautsky.

In those early years, the SPD appeared unified: As Bebel said in his toast on New Year’s Eve, 1899, just as the 19th century had been a century of hope, the 20th would be “a century of fulfillment”. Instead, for Germany as for Europe, it would be a century of betrayal. The prospect of World War I split the SPD into left and right factions, revealing the party leadership’s socialist internationalism to be of a fair-weather sort.

They argued for accommodating nationalism and militarism in much the same way that Democrats today lecture progressives and the left about the necessity of Obama’s wars of aggression and support for apartheid: If we take a principled stand for international solidarity and human rights now, we’ll become unelectable in a climate where imperialism is a prerequisite for political “seriousness”.

Luxemburg continued to speak out against the war even after parliamentary Social Democrats voted unanimously to approve war credits in 1914, and for that, she was imprisoned by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Having committed no punishable infraction, she was instead put in “protective custody” (in relatively comfortable quarters) with the explicit purpose of shutting her up.

In her defense at her trial in Frankfurt, she cited numerous resolutions by the First and Second Internationals condemning war between the elites of nation-states as an enemy of working-class solidarity (As Walter Benjamin would later write, “War and war alone can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system.”).

The prosecutor denounced “Red Rosa” as a traitor, accusing her of inciting soldiers to mutiny through her agitation. Luxemburg refused to back down:

Wars can be waged only when and only so long as the mass of working people either participates wholeheartedly, because it considers the war just and necessary, or at least tolerates it. If, on the other hand, the vast majority of working people come to the realization – and to awaken them to this realization, this consciousness, is precisely the task we Social Democrats put to ourselves – …that wars are a phenomenon that is barbaric, deeply immoral, reactionary, and hostile to the interests of the people, then wars will have become impossible.

Luxemburg was imprisoned for the duration of WWI. On November 9, 1918, after two weeks of increasing munity by sailors over the lost war effort, Wilhelm II abdicates the throne. Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert is named Chancellor and declares Germany a parliamentary democracy, kicking off the period commonly referred to as the Weimar Republic. Luxemburg is freed from protective custody, and Karl Liebknecht (along with Luxemburg, the most prominent dissident on the SPD’s left wing) declares Germany a socialist republic.

The so-called November Revolution made the left-right split official: Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and other radicals splintered off from the now-ruling SPD to form the Spartacus League – later to become the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The SPD leadership, quite logically, viewed the Spartacists as a threat to the established order.

The Spartacists, on the other hand, saw the November Revolution as not yet complete, just as the February Revolution of 1917 (which ended the Tsar’s reign and made Russia a bourgeois democracy) had to be completed by the Bolshevik October Revolution later that year. If the SPD would not make good on its onetime promise to be at the forefront of revolutionary struggle, that task now fell to the KPD.

On New Year’s Eve, 1918, Luxemburg presented a declaration of principles for the KPD, in which she argued that a successful communist revolution in Germany would need the support of the majority of the population (It was clear that it did not). Her declaration was voted down twice; the dominant view, shared by Liebknecht, rejected participation in the upcoming elections in favor of mass strikes and demonstrations until the state could no longer function and the communists could take power.

Liebknecht, without consulting Luxemburg, ordered the start of what’s known as the Spartacist Uprising. On January 5, 1919, the rebellion began in earnest. Luxemburg pleaded with Liebknecht to call it off, knowing full well that the uprising was doomed and would lead only to unnecessary bloodshed.

On the 9th, the right-wing paramilitary Freikorps (which would form the core of Hitler’s supporters), acting in cooperation with the Social Democratic government, moved in to Berlin; on the 15th, on Ebert’s orders, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were kidnapped by the Freikorps and murdered. Her body was dumped in the river. Thousands of German leftists were killed in the streets during the uprising, as well as in the executions that followed.

Luxemburg and Liebknecht assumed the civil liberties afforded to citizens of a liberal democracy would protect them too. She thought she could stay in Weimar Germany after the uprising: imprisoned, but alive, and sooner or later to be released – as Hitler would be.

She was wrong; and so she was killed extrajudicially by a proto-fascist militia, in a particularly bloody chapter of the communist revolution that never came to Germany. Instead, the Social Democrats’ alliance with fascism against communism proved as catastrophic for liberal democracy as it had been for the left.

But despite this bit of practical naïveté, Luxemburg had proven herself as rigorous and realistic in her analysis as she was principled in her struggle. She was not a pacifist, and – as her opponents’ willingness to use the most brutal repression makes clear – nor should she have been.

But she is set apart from Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and most other leaders of “historical communism” by an integrity, humility, and empathy that can only be called revolutionary. “A world must be overturned,” she wrote shortly before her death, “but every tear that flows, though it might be wiped away, is an accusation; and the person who rushes to perform a great deed, and treads on a worm out of sheer carelessness, commits a crime.”

She is survived by thousands of her personal letters, collected and published by the German Democratic Republic’s Institute of Marxism-Leninism. These letters – far from simply regurgitating her speeches and political writing – reveal a rich private life no less passionate than her agitation and organizing.

In a letter to Liebknecht’s wife Sonja (written during her “protective custody” in Breslau, her ninth prison), she describes a scene she witnessed while taking a walk on the prison grounds. A cart rolled past, pulled by oxen; a soldier walked alongside them, whipping them mercilessly. When she asks him if he has no compassion for animals, he laughs it off. One of the oxen begins to bleed:

As the cart was unloaded, the animals stood perfectly still, exhausted; and one, the one that bled, stared ahead with an expression on his black face and in his gentle eyes like a tear-stained child.

It was exactly the expression of a child who has been punished severely and doesn’t know why, what for, doesn’t know how to make the torture and the brute force stop.

… I stood before him, and the animal looked at me, tears ran down my face – they were his tears, and one cannot recoil at the pain of one’s most beloved brother more forcefully than I, in my helplessness, recoiled at this silent agony.

… Oh, my ox, my poor, beloved brother, we both stand here so helpless and worn-down, and are only one in pain, in helplessness, in longing….

Luxemburg confronted every bit of real suffering she came across, whether human or non-human, with the so-called utopian ideal of its alleviation. This is part of what the often ambiguous (and often misunderstood) term “dialectics” means to me: Change emerges from contradictions and antagonisms, but it takes time. You cannot make the possible actual through sheer force of will, just as Liebknecht couldn’t order the revolution into being. What you can do is speak, act, and write such that you, in your own way, help create the conditions of possibility for the world you want to live in.

In his “Schema of Mass Culture”, Theodor Adorno writes that,

The neon signs which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death. Yet they do not come from the sky. They are controlled from earth. It depends upon human beings themselves whether they will extinguish these lights and awake from a nightmare which only threatens to become actual as long as men believe in it.

Today, in struggles for liberation and justice around the world, it’s essential to reassert the possibility of a radically different way to organize social and economic life. The threat of what Adorno so poignantly calls “the natural disaster of society, its frozen death” is more real and imminent than ever.

We have, in Rosa Luxemburg, an icon whose deep humanism and democratic vision of socialism have made it to the 21st century untainted by the failure of “Really Existing Socialism” – an icon worth reclaiming, if ever there was one.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014 marks the 95th anniversary of Luxemburg’s death. We honor her and ourselves when we recognize the truly radical lesson of her life: That utopia casts a shadow into the material world, and this shadow is called possibility. That’s dialectics.

Guest Commentary: Iran & America – Is the nuclear deal really about nuclear weapons?

In this week’s guest commentary, author and friend of TRF Navid Zarrinnal reflects on the so-called Iranian nuclear deal and the prospect of detente between Iran and the United States. The “Iranian threat” was never about nukes, he argues, but rather, the country’s independence from the Western powers. Those looking to explain the recent cooling of tensions should instead turn their eyes to the neoliberal leanings of the new Rouhani administration.

– KS

For over a decade now, the American media, government, public intellectuals and the public at large have been anxious over Iran’s nuclear program. Government officials, media outlets and public experts have insisted that once Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it may target Israel, America’s Arab allies, or even the United States itself; this necessitates, they claim, economic sanctions or a preemptive military strike on Iran.

International English-language media, in covering Iran’s nuclear program, has failed to assuage these anxieties. Daily news, including reports on the most recent negotiations between Iran and P5+1, give the impression that the anxiety over Iran’s nuclear program really turns on a potential weapon that would threaten global security. Perhaps this is inevitable, because daily news and reports from the ground are intended to provide descriptive, factual information on current global affairs.

However, analysts and public experts who are supposed to dig deeper have failed, with some exceptions, to provide a sufficiently critical voice on the nuclear debate. They too analyze Iran and the “international community” dispute as if it is fundamentally over the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons.

The “Iranian threat” however is not about nuclear weapons; it is about something else entirely: Iran’s independence from the dominant political-economic order sought by the U.S. and its closest allies.

The threat Iranian independence poses is not new, and neither are economic sanctions. The conflict between Iran and the “international community”—a misnomer for the U.S. and allied countries—dates back to the 1950’s. Situated in the broader global movement towards decolonization, Iranians under the leadership of Mohammad Mossadeq attempted to establish a constitutional democracy and reclaim their oil from the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now British Petroleum or BP); British-led economic sanctions and a CIA-assisted coup followed.

Again in 1979, the Iranian revolution became a major event in the history of decolonization and Third World sovereignty, resulting in the establishment of an Islamic government, which stubbornly resisted American political and economic domination even at great cost to its own stability. And with this stubborn resistance came economic sanctions and indirect military intervention via America’s old ally—turned foe—Saddam Hussein. In the 1990’s and 2000’s, the Islamic Republic continued its refusal to be subsumed under a U.S.-dominated world order; the September 11 attacks, though having no connection to the Islamic Republic, coupled with Iran’s nuclear program and the Ahmadinejad government’s foreign policy, intensified the threat of the “military option” and “crippling” economic sanctions.

Economic and political measures were thus employed historically—during Mossadeq’s premiership and the Islamic Republic’s rule—to thwart Iranian independence.

This is not to underestimate the so-called nuclear issue as the primary source of global anxiety, however; with enough attention devoted to the nuclear issue, the real threat—Iranian independence—is substituted by an imaginary threat, Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons.

As an example, we can look at the world of high politics. State officials like Benjamin Netanyahu, who lie irresponsibly to gain public support for their misguided policies on Iran, begin to believe in their own lies. These officials resemble, rather imperfectly, Eric Cartman in the South Park episode “Jewpacabra.” Cartman knowingly lies about the existence of a dangerous creature, Jewpacabra, that attacks Christian children on Easter, and with enough public anxieties generated around his lie, he begins to believe in the made-up creature himself and fears it immensely. Netanyahu and his devotees in the U.S. government too appear to fear an Iranpacabra of their own making.

Netanyahu and his devotees are becoming increasingly isolated on the international stage, however. The Rouhani administration with its astute foreign policy is putting great pressure on the Obama government to pursue constructive negotiations and push the military option off the table.

Additionally, the economic and political problems that face the U.S. government domestically and internationally are of sufficient magnitude to make negotiations with Iran attractive. The “War on Terror” has exhausted the American military, while the U.S. economy is under great distress. Add to that Iran’s growing strength as a regional power that may prove helpful in resolving political crisis in neighboring states like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, though not necessarily to the benefit of local populations.

Economically too, the Rouhani administration seems to have a greater degree of openness to pursuing neoliberal policies; this economic position makes negotiations with world powers, including the United States, even more attractive but not necessarily to the benefit of the Iranian working class.

The closed-door negotiations in Geneva were concluded on November 24, 2013, and a textual agreement was reached. The agreement places restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, but retains their right to uranium enrichment, in exchange for limited sanction relief. However, the nuclear deal is a distraction from more crucial political and economic issues to be negotiated, like the neoliberalization of Iran and limited U.S.-Iranian political cooperation in the Middle East.

Claims to the future state of U.S.-Iran relations remain speculative. But one observation can be made with reasonable certainty: the old animus between Iran and the United States—34 years of combative politics rooted in post-World War II history—has come to a closure.

Guest Commentary: How We Got Here – A History of Missed Opportunities with Iran

In this week’s TRF guest commentary, author Sina Toossi lays out the history and geopolitics of the so-called nuclear dispute between Iran and the US. It’s not just that the sanctions aren’t “working”, he argues: Iran simply doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program, at least not if you ask the IAEA or any of the 17 US intelligence agencies, and the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations have, over and over, turned down Iranian offers of detente and peaceful enrichment.

– KS

Negotiators from Iran and six major world powers convened again in Geneva this week, and although a deal was not reached, prospects for resolving the decade-long impasse over the Iranian nuclear program are better than they have ever been.

Led by newly elected President Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s recent diplomatic overtures to the West have led many analysts to conclude that Washington’s long-standing sanctions policy against Tehran has finally worked. This has led to calls for even more “crippling” sanctions against Iran during this sensitive time of heightened diplomacy, with proponents arguing that this will get the “already down” Iranians to totally capitulate on all outstanding differences with the West.

This might sound reasonable to casual observers. But the sanctions hawks are overlooking more than a little history.

Missed Opportunities

The foremost fact about the Iranian nuclear program—one that might surprise people who constantly hear about that Iranian “nuclear weapons program,” or that the Iranians are forever “six months away from having the bomb”—is that Iran does not even have a nuclear weapons program.

There has never really been any serious doubt about this either, at least as far as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is concerned. The IAEA’s regular reports on Iran’s nuclear enrichment activities, which it has intensively inspected for nearly 10 years, have never provided any evidence of Iran developing nuclear weapons. Western intelligence agencies too have long maintained that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program.

Iran’s nuclear activities first came to international spotlight in 2002, when the Iranians were allegedly caught “red-handed” with an illicit nuclear program. However, while Iran was indeed pursing a nuclear program at this time, it was not, as per the tenets of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), required to disclose any of its nuclear facilities until six months before nuclear material would actually be introduced to any of its facilities, a threshold that was never reached.

Regardless, the Iranians arguably went above and beyond their international obligations to ease international concern during this time and, under the reformist government of President Mohammad Khatami, froze all of their nuclear enrichment activities. Additionally, they signed onto the NPT’s “additional protocol,” which required the country to give advance notice of future facilities to the IAEA and to adhere to more intensive inspections.

In 2003, the Iranians went on to lay the framework for negotiations aimed at a grand compromise with the United States. In a letter sent through the Swiss Embassy to Washington, the Iranians put almost all matters of dispute with the United States on the negotiating table.

The offer, which the Bush administration refused, would have seen Iran agreeing to full cooperation on nuclear safeguards, ending “material support” to Palestinian resistance groups such as Hamas, and accepting the Saudi Arab peace initiative, which effectively recognized Israel by advocating a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In return, the Iranians wanted recognition of Iran’s legitimate security interests in the region, a halt to hostile U.S. behavior, recognition of Iran’s right to enrich uranium on its soil, and the abolishment of all sanctions. In effect, they wanted what they have always wanted since the 1979 Islamic Revolution: for the United States to recognize the Islamic Republic as a legitimate government and to acknowledge its role and interests as a regional power in the Middle East.

The Iranians resumed enrichment in 2005 after what they said was the failure of European-led negotiations to build confidence and reach a resolution that would allow for peaceful enrichment on Iranian soil—a right Iran claimed under the NPT. The Iranians went their own way, dismissing Western “red lines” and expanding their nuclear enrichment program. This resulted in the first round of UN Security Council sanctions being imposed on Iran in 2006.

Soon after this, an effort was made by then-Secretary General of the IAEA, Mohammad Elbaradei, to resolve the Iranian nuclear standoff. Elbaradei suggested a deal wherein Iran would give up industrial-scale enrichment and limit its enrichment program to a small-scale pilot facility, and agree to import higher enriched nuclear fuel from Russia. Iran actually responded positively to this proposal, but the offer was dismissed by the Bush administration, which vowed not to approve of any deal that allowed enrichment inside Iran.

In 2010, another diplomatic opportunity arose that prominent political scientist Stephen Walt has said could have been “a step towards the solution of the whole Iranian nuclear program.” Brokered by Turkey and Brazil, rising powers that wanted to enter the world stage by helping to solve the Iranian nuclear dispute, the deal would have seen Iran exchanging large amounts of its stockpiles of low-enriched uranium for small amounts of medium-enriched uranium.

Iran has long argued that it needs medium-enriched uranium (which can be converted to weapons-grade uranium much more easily) to operate a medical research reactor in Tehran that creates vitally needed cancer medicine. To the surprise of many, Iran accepted the deal, and the stage was suddenly set for a potential solution to the Iranian nuclear impasse.

However, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton quickly poured cold water on the whole affair and condemned the deal, worrying that it would undermine support for new sanctions the United States was pushing for against Iran. These new sanctions were soon ushered through the UN Security Council by the United States, where Turkey and Brazil (then rotating members of the council) voted against them.

The Changing Landscape

The argument that sanctions have prompted Iran’s more conciliatory stance today ignores these past overtures. At several junctures in the past 10 years—well before current sanctions were in place—Iran put more concessions on the table than most analysts think it would be willing to offer today. In trying to ascertain what the next diplomatic steps with Iran should be, U.S. diplomats and decision-makers should be cognizant of these previous missed opportunities.

Iran’s “new” strategy is more a consequence of the election of Hassan Rouhani than of sanctions. Rouhani ran on a platform stressing international reconciliation and serious diplomacy aimed at resolving concerns over the country’s nuclear program. He has since brought back more or less the same reformist team that was responsible for the concessions Iran offered 10 years ago—the most it has ever been willing to make.

So far, the Supreme Leader seems to have given Rouhani’s effort his blessing. But there is no reason to believe that if the Iranian people had voted for a more hardline candidate back in June—such as Saeed Jalili, who ran on platform of resistance to Western demands—Iran’s nuclear policy would be the same as it is right now under Rouhani.

There are also a few new geo-strategic factors that make a negotiated settlement with Iran more likely today. Perhaps foremost is that regional power dynamics have drastically changed in the Middle East compared to what they were 10 years ago. Iranian influence now stretches from Afghanistan to Lebanon—thanks in no small part to the U.S.-led wars of the past decade and a half.

But the United States and Iran now have more shared interests in the region than differences, particularly in preserving a stable Iraq and Afghanistan, checking the spread of Wahhabi extremism, and ensuring the free flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf, among others.

While there are certainly elements in the Iranian government that would not support any kind of cooperation between the United States and Iran, key Iranian officials and stakeholders have again and again proven their willingness to work with the United States where Washington’s agenda has overlapped with Tehran’s.

Examples abound. They include Iranian support for U.S. efforts in Bosnia in the 1990s (Iran sent arms to the Bosnians at the request of the Clinton administration, and the critical support Iran lent the United States during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (they helped oust both governments and have propped up new governments to replace them).

Iran has also at times offered the United States olive branches that were turned down. In the early 1990s the United States reneged on its part of a deal by refusing to release frozen Iranian assets after Iran mediated the release of American hostages in Lebanon. An offer by pragmatic former President Hashemi Rafsanjani for U.S. oil companies to invest in Iran’s oil fields was also spurned by President Clinton in the mid-1990s. Then of course there are the numerous missed opportunities at nuclear diplomacy since.

The United States has long sought to isolate Iran, but it has failed. The Islamic Republic continues to exist more than 30 years after the revolution that created it, and plays a bigger role in the Middle East today than it ever has before. With the rise of theocratic governments throughout the region, the U.S. policy of not recognizing Islamist governments is simply no longer feasible. And given the potential benefits of rapprochement with Iran, it’s not advisable either.

A “Win-Win” Deal

What the Iranians want is U.S. recognition, both for their government and for their legitimate interests in the Middle East—this is what their 2003 proposal was about, and it’s what their offer for talks now is about. Now that the United States is negotiating a potentially similar offer from Iran—even as Iran’s position in the region is far stronger, and its nuclear program far more developed than it was 10 years ago—Washington simply cannot afford to let this opportunity fall through.

It is critical for policymakers to understand at this point that sanctions—as a tool to coerce other nations to change their policies against their interests—are rarely effective. While sanctions have badly damaged Iran’s economy, the Iranians have adapted accordingly, a process that has been painful but not fatal. Most importantly, sanctions have failed to change Iran’s nuclear calculus, with the Iranians essentially offering the same thing now that they have been offering for the past decade.

Iran’s leaders are prepared to limit Iran’s domestic enrichment to the 5-percent level, sign onto the additional protocol of the NPT, subject their nuclear facilities to more rigorous inspection, and convert their existing stockpiles of 20-percent enriched uranium (which can more easily be converted to weapons-grade 90-percent enriched uranium) to fuel rods. In exchange, the Iranians want what they have always wanted: a recognition of their right to enrich uranium on their own soil (at the 5-percent level), the removal of sanctions, and a clear endgame to the dispute that puts to rest their worry that the United States is really after regime change.

If some sort of agreement with Iran over its nuclear program reached, the stage will be set to engage Iran on other regional issues. A mutually beneficial rapprochement between Iran and the United States could very well serve as the best security guarantee for American interests in the region for years to come.

Sina Toossi holds BA degrees in Economics and Political Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is currently a graduate student in Comparative and Regional Studies at American University’s School of International Service, with a regional concentration in the Middle East. He is currently an intern at the Institute for Policy Studies.

A version of this article originally appeared on Foreign Policy in Focus.