Bush administration paralysed over Iran

WASHINGTON: Does the administration of US President George W. Bush still consider Al Qaeda and its associates the main target in its almost three-year-old “war on terrorism”, or has its military victory in Iraq whetted its appetite for bigger game?

That is effectively the question that the powers-that-be in Iran appear to be posing to Washington at a critical moment in the war’s evolution.

The administration appears deadlocked over an answer.

According to a series of leaks by US officials, Iran has offered to hand over, if not directly to Washington then to friendly allies, three senior Al Qaeda leaders and might provide another three top terrorist suspects that Washington believes are being held by Tehran.

But its price — for the US military to permanently shut down the operations of an Iraq-based Iranian rebel group that is on the State Department’s official terrorism list — might be too high for some hardliners, centred in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, who led the charge for war in Iraq.

Members of this group see the rebels, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) as potentially helpful to their ambitions to achieve “regime change” in Iran, charter member of Bush’s “axis of evil” and a nation that is believed to have accelerated its nuclear weapons programme in recent months.

The question of what to do about the reported Iranian offer is one of the issues being discussed this week in successive visits to Bush’s Texas ranch by Secretary of State Colin Powell (who returned from there on Wednesday), Cheney, and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld.

Iran has confirmed that it is holding three Al Qaeda leaders, including Seif al-Adel, considered the network’s number three and chief of military operations who already has a $25 million bounty on his head; its spokesman, Suleiman Abu Gheith; and Saad bin Laden, Osama bin Laden’s third oldest son.

In addition, Washington believes Tehran also has custody of three other much-sought-after targets: Abu Hafs, a senior Al Qaeda operative known as “the Mauritanian”; Abu Musab Zarqawi, who has been depicted by the administration as a key link between Al Qaeda and former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein; and possibly Mohammed al Masri, an Al Qaeda associate active in East Africa, according to a recent report by a special investigative team of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain.

“If Washington could get its hands on even half these guys, it would be the biggest advance since the fall of Afghanistan in the fight against Al Qaeda,” according to one administration official. “If we could get them all, that would be a huge breakthrough.”

The State Department has been pushing the administration to engage Iran more directly in pursuit of the best deal possible and was reportedly authorized to hold one meeting with the Iranians two weeks ago.

Washington and Tehran broke off bilateral relations during the US embassy hostage crisis in 1980, but quiet meetings were held over the past year, until they were broken off in mid-May after administration hardliners charged that a series of terrorist attacks carried out against US and other foreign targets in Saudi Arabia May 12 were organized from Iranian territory, presumably with the approval of elements of its government.

But the same hardliners reportedly oppose a deal with Tehran, which they depict not only as a sponsor of terrorism determined to acquire nuclear weapons, but also an exhausted dictatorship teetering on the verge of collapse that could be easily overthrown in a popular insurrection, with covert US help or even military intervention.

The hawks are backed by the Likud government in Israel, which has been urging Washington to go after Iran since even before the war in Iraq. As soon as Iraq is dealt with, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told the ‘New York Post’ last November, he “will push for Iran to be at the top of the ‘to do’ list”.

Pentagon hardliners, who exert the greatest control over the occupation authority in Iraq, last month authorized the re-birth of the arm of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service — the Mukhabarat — that worked on Iran, according to the Pentagon- backed Iraqi National Congress (INC), which is helping in the effort.

That was the same unit that worked closely with the MEK under Saddam Hussein.

The MEK, which began in the late 1960s as a left-wing religious movement against the Shah but broke violently with the leaders of the Islamic Republic after the 1978-79 revolution, was given its own bases, tanks and other heavy weapons by the Iraqi leader during the Iran-Iraq War, all of which it retained during his regime to use in raids against Iran, but also to help Saddam Hussein put down unrest, particularly after the 1991 Gulf War.

US forces bombed the group’s bases in the initial phases of the Iraq campaign earlier this year, but negotiated a ceasefire and eventually a surrender as Washington expanded its control over Iraq.

Yet the group has been permitted to retain most of its weapons, remain together, and, despite its listing by the State Department as a terrorist group and Tehran’s demands that it be completely dismantled, continue radio broadcasting into Iran.

Although the MEK, which displays many of the characteristics of a cult in its hero-worship of its “first couple”, Maryam and Massoud Rajavi, appears to have intelligence assets inside Iran — the group was the first to alert Washington to the existence of a previously unknown nuclear facility earlier this year — most Iran specialists believe it has no popular following there whatsoever, and is mostly despised due to its alliance with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war.

“It’s hard to see how they could ever be seen as a political asset to the United States in Iran,” one administration official who favours a deal told IPS recently. “The (MEK) is precisely the kind of common enemy against which both the reformists and the conservatives — and even the students — are likely to rally against.”

A deal would also re-confirm to an increasingly sceptical Muslim world that Al Qaeda was indeed the primary target of Bush’s “war on terror” and not simply a pretext for a major intervention in the Middle East and the Gulf to ensure US and Israeli domination of the entire region, say analysts here.

“Our priority should be Al Qaeda, and if we can engage the Iranians tactically to get some high-ranking Al Qaeda operatives, we should”, Flynt Leverett, the top Mideast expert on the National Security Council under both Clinton and Bush until his departure earlier this year, told the ‘New York Times’ on Saturday.

The same analysts argue that disbanding the MEK would help demonstrate that Washington is not applying a double standard to different terrorist groups, depending on their usefulness.

But the Pentagon reportedly remains resistant to stronger action against the group.

“There is no question that we have not disbanded them, and there is an ongoing debate about them between the office of the Secretary of Defence and the State Department,” Vince Cannistraro, a former counter-terrorism director in the Central Intelligence Agency, told ‘USA Today’ this week.

It appears that some officials believe the MEK could yet serve some purpose.— Dawn/The InterPress News Service.

And grace marks for failures!

Absolutely baffling, but above all disappointing. In an age, where competition is tough — getting tougher, where the best is not proving to be good enough, where the frontiers of human and professional excellence are being furthered, even effortlessly, (it seems) here we have something that shocks. The Board of Secondary Education, Karachi, has decided to award two per cent grace marks to students, who failed in the matriculation examinations in the years 1999-2002. Both in the annual and the supplementary exams, and where these students exhausted all their chances to pass that examination.

Said one news report this week that “all such candidates have been directed to obtain the prescribed application forms available at the rate of Rs25 each from the Board’s Enquiry office — and they should submit the same with attested copies of their admit cards and marksheets with an affidavit of Rs50.”

There are other details, which would interest these students whose total number has not been indicated. But they are to be given two per cent grace marks. Why that number asked one student? Why not three?!! (This is the start).

There is indeed much to contemplate at this point. Who are these students, who have failed to the point of having exhausted all their chances of passing the exams? Keep in mind that there are repeated and regular lamentations that the standard of education and examination is declining in the country, and the performance of the educated work force at the point of their entering professional life is dismal, often.

Keeping in mind that this decision will, perhaps, condone failure as a concept, it makes one wonder who are these students, who failed repeatedly? What actually had gone wrong? Who failed them? Did they fail themselves? Or the system, the textbooks, the teachers, the parents, the classroom ambience, the domestic environment, the family input, or the examination system.

I am compelled here to take notice of a reported suggestion that is evidently being considered by the experts and the bureaucrats. Briefly the idea is to scrap the practical exams in Class-IX and Class-X. The feeling, or rather the considered view is that these examinations are neither fair, nor transparent. Now read this, as being symbolic of another kind of a failure, and in the educational system, dear citizen. Mourn? A national Urdu daily has reported that if and when these practical exams are scrapped in Sindh, the Karachi Board of Secondary Education will save three million rupees annually. Look at the thinking being reflected. And the option being proposed instead of the practical exams is to increase the marks allocated for theoretical side of the exams. This will be done by increasing 15 marks, and the remaining 10 marks will be given at the discretion of the school principal. This is being proposed for the 2004 examination. Nobody resents changes or questions them. Why is it so disappointing? The reason here is that it reflects the absence of integrity in the present system. That is to say the least. Integrity in our lives — a constant minus.

Returning to the grace marks to be given, thought goes out to the category of those students, who get marks in the range of 70- 80-90 per cent that at times one cannot even comprehend. That is, in a way, the other extreme. One often meets primary and secondary school boys and girls, who get marks that are amazing. Are they really that good? Are their teachers and textbooks that good? Are those schools that good? Is that the difference, and the gulf between the good and the bad, or the successes and the failures? If the educational system that we have is as hollow as we keep complaining about, how can it produce such brilliant students whose marks are of astonishing dimension and scale. Any incongruity?

One does not seek to speculate whether the private schools are always better than the government schools, in terms of what is good or bad. But look at the peculiar difference that surfaced during this week on the subject of summer vacations. The rains brought life to a standstill or a major dislocation, and the schools’ summer holidays in Sindh were extended upto Aug 18. Private schools in Karachi didn’t like it, generally speaking, and the argument was that they wanted to carry on with their classes, but the officials thought otherwise, as they played safe, just in case it rained again. These extended schools’ vacations have not been well received even by students, and one does wonder whether the closure was an appropriate decision. As it is, we don’t get enough working time in our school system, said a vast section of people.

There is always much to mourn about the way we are carrying on with the school system or the college system or education in general. There is a cynicism, multidimensional and many-tiered about the quality of education being imparted. And for whatever it means, one must take notice of the excessive and growing number of print media ads of local institutes, colleges and universities.

But as against that context, look at these stories that have appeared recently pointing out that “city colleges face shortage of teachers’, and that the “number of private colleges declining”. Read one paragraph which says, “The majority of the government run intermediate colleges, imparting general as well as specialized education, in the city are facing acute shortage of teachers, which is adversely affecting the standard of teaching in these institutions.”

According to a spokesman of the city government, who deals with colleges, there are about 700 college teachers short in over 90 local colleges. One reason for the shortage is the lengthy recruitment process, including that which is followed by the Sindh Public Service Commission. Whither unemployment?

The other story about the decline in the number of colleges says: “Unlike the mushroom growth of schools in the private sector, the number of private colleges is declining, owing to the reluctance shown by students in getting admission at these institutions”. This relates to the poor academic standards in these private colleges, it seems, which reflects more failure in this field.

Are these disturbing signals coming out of education system that we have here? Schools, colleges, universities all? Signals and symptoms that relate to the quality and academic worth of students. Underlined one senior teacher, who disagreed vehemently with the very concept of awarding grace marks.

Another teacher tried to sum up the education scenario as she said, “We have still not been able to decide on what should be our national curriculum after 56 years of independence. Even the basic concepts were a matter of pointless debate, she regretted.