A group of female activists is preparing a ship full of women, called the Mariam, which is scheduled to leave Lebanon for Gaza in the coming days. Or maybe not.
The Israeli government has already warned the United Nations that it will use "all necessary force" to stop the ship. Israel has also linked the ship to Hizballah, but the group denied any connection to the flotilla in a statement released Friday.
The latest United Nations quarterly report on Afghanistan (pdf), released today, is a mix of bleak pronouncements about security and neutral-or-slightly improved news about governance.
The "overall security situation has not improved" since the UN's previous report in March 2010.
My personal take on the new package of Iran sanctions approved this week is that they won't accomplish anything -- anything good, at least.
The Iranian regime has already warned that the sanctions will preclude further negotiations over its nuclear program. Officials have also warned that the sanctions might scrap last month's so-called "Tehran declaration," the tripartite deal negotiated by Turkey and Brazil. (That might be a bluff -- it would sour relations with both countries, and Iran does need at least a few allies.)
The predicted Security Council vote on new sanctions against Iran came Tuesday, with predictable results: Slight additions to previous sanctions, opposition from Brazil and Turkey and an abstention from Lebanon, and an outburst from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Some commentators, including the Leveretts, lack faith that this fourth round of sanctions will have any serious effect on Iran's behavior, but the White House, armed with a list of 14 "new" measures imposed by Tuesday's resolution, argues otherwise.
The United Nations Security Council says it could vote on a new package of Iran sanctions this week.
Claude Heller, Mexico's ambassador to the UN (and the current Security Council president), said the vote could come as early as tomorrow. UN envoys are scheduled to meet on Tuesday morning to discuss the latest sanctions package, which bars Iran from "any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons," and prohibits Iran from buying several types of heavy weapons (these types of sanctions have been quite difficult to enforce).
Philip Alston's report on targeted killings, delivered to the United Nations' Human Rights Council this week, has received a lot of attention for being the first big takedown of the United States' clandestine drone program.
Alston makes a measured and reasoned legal attack on the general use of targeted killings by governments against non-state actors, but he specifically criticizes the American drone campaign in the Middle East, expressing doubt that the U.S. can claim to be in an armed conflict with Al-Qaeda and concluding that, "[o]utside the context of armed conflict, the use of drones for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal."
But Howard Koh, the top Obama administration official to attempt a public legal defense of the use of drones, has invoked America's "armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces" as a justification for taking out individual fighters and leaders. So who's right when everybody's wrong?
I've been doing largely non-stop flotilla coverage at Al-Jazeera for the last three days (including live blogs on Monday and Tuesday), so you'll forgive me for not writing too much about the subject tonight; I need a break. (Issandr El Amrani has a good roundup of flotilla commentary, if you're looking for broad analysis.)
But I do want to quickly comment on the American reaction -- or, rather, the lack thereof -- to the flotilla attack. During the White House press briefing yesterday, press secretary Robert Gibbs was asked (repeatedly) about Obama's refusal to condemn Israel's actions -- something dozens of other world leaders had already done.
The Obama administration agreed to a compromise yesterday to salvage a month-long round of talks aimed at updating the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty -- and then promptly announced that it may not accept one of the conditions of the deal.
All 189 NPT signatories accepted the 28-page review document in a vote last night. It directs the United Nations secretary-general to convene a conference in 2012, aimed at creating a "WMD-free zone" in the Middle East. The final document also urges Israel to join the treaty (along with India and Pakistan, the other two countries to never sign the NPT).
Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, will ask the Obama administration next week to stop the CIA's clandestine drone strike program, according to the New York Times.
Alston... said Thursday that he would deliver a report on June 3 to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva declaring that the "life and death power" of drones should be entrusted to regular armed forces, not intelligence agencies.
The rest of the NYT article lays out the rather convoluted legal justification for running the drone program out of the CIA (it's quite a stretch). The UN makes a compelling case that the CIA officers running the program aren't entitled to the same sort of "battlefield immunity" as uniformed soldiers.
Tuesday's big announcement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- that the United States had reached agreement with the other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to table a new Iran sanctions resolution -- was clearly meant to upstage what had already begun to be perceived as the previous day's diplomatic coup by Iran: a nuclear fuel swap deal brokered by Brazil and Turkey.
Washington's immediate pushback has left international diplomats and American pundits confused and angry. Brazilian and Turkish officials are reportedly "outraged"; Gary Sick called the U.S. announcement a "gratuitous insult"; and Marc Lynch tweeted that "trashing the Turkish deal was a mistake."
But let's take a clear-eyed look at what's really happening.
Update 5/18/10 4:07 p.m.: In opening remarks before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the United States, Russia and China had agreed on a draft United Nations Security Council resolution that would impose sanctions on Iran. Clinton said that the United States and the rest of the P5+1 would "rally the international community on behalf of a strong sanctions resolution that will, in our view, send an unmistakable message about what is expected from Iran."
Original post: In the wake of Monday's announcement that Turkey and Brazil have convinced Iran to ship around half or more of its low-enriched uranium out of the country, the media has been quick to proclaim winners and losers.
A United Nations report released yesterday concluded that Pakistan has the highest number of internally displaced people in the world in 2009. Three million people fled their homes last year, according to the study.
"The military operations of governments and armed non-state actors caused most displacement, and many people were displaced more than once."
Most of the displacements were temporary: Two million people returned to their homes, and Pakistan's IDP population at the end of 2009 was "only" 1.2 million.
Still, the numbers are staggering, particularly when you realize that nearly all of Pakistan's IDPs are coming from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (nee NWFP) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Those two regions have a combined population of roughly 25 million -- so one out of every eight residents became an IDP, at least temporarily, in 2009.
The leaders of Iran, Turkey and Brazil announced an agreement this morning for a nuclear fuel swap, reviving a long-stalled plan from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The agreement now heads to the Vienna Group -- the U.S., Russia, France, and the IAEA -- for approval. If those parties sign off, Iran will be obligated to ship 1,200kg of low-enriched uranium (at 3.5 percent enrichment) to Turkey within one month. In return, Iran will receive 120kg of enriched uranium (at 20 percent enrichment) -- to be delivered within one year -- for use in the Tehran Research Reactor.
Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, is in Tehran today (along with a 300-man Brazilian delegation) to meet with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Lula is trying to convince Ahmadinejad to accept a Brazilian plan for a nuclear fuel swap, a plan Ahmadinejad seemed to embrace (in theory) last week. The exact details of the plan haven't been released, but presumably it would involve Iran sending its low-enriched uranium to a third country -- perhaps to Brazil? -- for further enrichment.
This is a guest post from Wladimir van Wilgenburg, an analyst for the Jamestown Foundation. His main expertise is the situation of Kurds in the Middle-East. Wilgenburg is also an editor of the Kurdish newspaper Rudaw, based in Erbil.
It seems increasingly certain that Iyad Allawi's Iraqiyya alliance will be squeezed out of the next Iraqi government. Wilgenburg explains one of the main reasons Iraqiyya is sidelined: tensions between the Kurdish parties and some of Allawi's coalition partners.
The Kurds are often branded as potential kingmakers in Iraq, and have to decide which list they will support: the largely Sunni-supported Iraqi National Movement (Iraqiyya) of former prime minister Iyad Allawi, or the State of Law coalition headed by Shi'ite prime minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Although the Kurds have good relations with Allawi, they have problems with some partners of the Iraqiyya list in Mosul, which contest Kurdish claims to disputed regions. Allawi's list seems to be the biggest challenge to Kurdish territorial claims in Mosul and Kirkuk. Therefore it is more likely that they will support a Shiite alliance.
The former Kurdish PM Nechirvan Barzani outlined the Kurdish position towards Iraqiyya pretty clear. "Unfortunately, the Iraqiyya list involves figures who have made their political mission against Kurdish people, and refuse to acknowledge gained Kurdish achievements."
The Iranian government, no doubt aware of the growing push for economic sanctions in Washington and New York, has embarked on something of a diplomatic charm offensive over the last few days.
Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, held a dinner in New York last night for the members of the United Nations Security Council. Most countries sent their highest-ranking ambassadors, though the United States, United Kingdom, France and Russia all sent lower-level officials.
As the NPT conference opens today in New York City, a number of states and international actors arrive at the table with competing interests. The United States, United Nations and European Union would like to avoid a repeat of the last conference, five years ago, which collapsed over disagreements on disarmament and squabbles regarding Iran and North Korea. The Obama Administration, by signing a mutual arms reduction agreement with Russia last month, hopes it has laid the groundwork for some good will.
Iran, meanwhile, will push back against an apparently growing consensus among the P5+1 to sanction the country for its lack of transparency and alleged violations of the NPT. China and Russia, which tend to give Iran a long leash in Security Council affairs, have -- at least in according to White House spin -- come closer in recent weeks to accepting such sanctions.
Rounding out the agenda are the traditional issues: the meat and potatoes of disarmament, nonproliferation and access to peaceful nuclear energy. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and Yukiya Amano, the new chief of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, would both like more countries to sign up for additional inspections, while the Egyptian-led bloc of non-aligned nations will push again for its 15-year-old plan for a nuke-free Middle East.
52 parliamentary candidates in Iraq, including two who won seats in last month's election, have been retroactively disqualified from the ballot by the judicial panel reviewing de-Ba'athification decisions.
Both of the winning candidates came from the Iraqiyya bloc, which holds a two-seat lead over prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition. The BBC reports that Iraqiyya will replace the disqualified candidates with other people, preserving the balance of power in parliament (though not the will of the voters who elected those candidates).
David Ignatius has a column in today's Washington Post about the Obama administration's slowly-escalating economic sanctions against Iran, particularly against the banking and shipping sectors. It's pretty complimentary of the administration's efforts -- this is Ignatius, after all -- and so he buries the lede in the third-to-last-paragraph:
Yet for all this aggressive pressure, Iran continues to conduct both banking and shipping -- which illustrates the difficulty of using sanctions to force a change in policy. The track record is spotty, from Cuba to Iraq.
I was traveling this weekend so I didn't have a chance to write about the "Gates memo," the alleged warning from defense secretary Robert Gates that the U.S. doesn't have a long-term plan for dealing with Iran's nuclear program.
Representatives of the five permanent U.N. Security Council members and Germany are meeting today in New York City to hammer out a potential resolution regarding a fourth round of sanctions against Iran.
This is the first time that China has joined in such discussions, and while a sanctions resolution likely faces opposition from other countries on the Council, most of the intrigue now concerns how China will act.
