As if the ongoing North Korea and Iran debacles aren’t enough, the IAEA and its unfit head Mohamed ElBaradei have provided yet more reason to doubt their legitimacy and incompetent:

Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Mohamed ElBaradei said Sunday that “Israel is number one threat to Middle East” with its nuclear arms, the official IRNA news agency reported. At a joint press conference with Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization chief Ali Akbar Salehi in Tehran, ElBaradei brought Israel under spotlight and said that the Tel Aviv regime has refused to allow inspections into its nuclear installations for 30years, the report said.”Israel is the number one threat to the Middle East given the nuclear arms it possesses,” ElBaradei was quoted as saying.

Firstly, Iran being the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism and having a revolutionary government would be a seemingly obvious choice for biggest threat to the region. Second of all, Israel’s neighbors have had the opportunity to go nuclear for the past several decades. Some considered it, such as Egypt, but ultimately concluded it wasn’t necessary and understood Israel acquired them as a last resort due to its small geographic size and population. It a major reason the Egyptian program was shut down. Iraq attempted it but this author is not aware of any evidence linking Israel to that decision. Rather, given the nature of the Iraqi regime before 2003, its pursuit of a host of WMD and its belief that Iran (post 1979) was Iraq’s biggest threat, it again seems silly to argue tiny Israel is somehow the region’s largest threat.

Never Be Rude to an Arab was a satirical song by Monty Python, which began as an instruction on racial sensitivity before launching into intentionally offensive lyrics. Yet the title of the song is no joke. And it’s worth reminding the many foreigners that enjoy the fast living of Dubai to never be rude to the natives.

Generally speaking, Dubai is a forgiving place. Foreigners can drink alcohol, buy prostitutes, and otherwise engage in human vice, even during Ramadan. This is a big departure from the social norms in most Muslim states, where social values are much more conservative. But if there’s one thing that Arab culture does forgive, it’s an insult.

The following story was relayed to me by a person working in the Japanese consulate in Dubai. A fast-living westerner making his fortune in Dubai was driving his sexy car and was cut off by an Emirati native. His reaction was to flip his middle finger and roll down his window and shout “fuck you!” A week later, he found himself arrested and in detention for ten days. When he was released, he returned home to find his wife and two children deported. Perhaps he picked on the wrong person in a position of power, but it just goes to show that outbursts that could be forgiven in other countries and cultures are taken seriously in the Middle East.

Operating upon the assumption that Iran successfully develops nuclear weapons, how likely do readers think the following are:

1) A quick resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as Arab states move together and ally against Iran.

2) An alliance between Israeli and one or several Arab states. The Saudis and Israelis arguably have the most to fear from a nuclear Iran, and Israel is the only nuclear power in the region. Afterall, the US is around, but we can leave anytime. The Israelis are stuck there.

These ideas came up in a recent discussion. Readers, your thoughts?

Via Konfidi, Saudi Arabia has banned the color red for Valentine’s Day:

Because of the ban on red roses, a black market has flowered ahead of Valentine’s Day. Roses that normally go for five Saudi riyal ($1.30) fetch up to 30 riyal ($8) on February 14, the Saudi Gazette said.

“Sometimes we deliver the bouquets in the middle of the night or early morning, to avoid suspicion,” one florist told the paper.

The reason for the ban? Apparently, “Muslims shouldn’t celebrate a non-Muslim celebration, especially this one that encourages immoral relations between unmarried men and women.”

Priceless.

Since the founding of the Republic, Turkey’s archenemies have been those whose who harbor legitimate claims against their territory: Greeks, Armenians and Kurds. Ankara’s deepest fears always involve some conspiracy consisting of several of the aforementioned groups collaborating against them to dismantle modern Turkey.

Usually these claims are nonsense, if not utterly absurd.The plot of a Turkish bestseller, Metal Storm, dicussed previously at Coming Anarchy, cuts to the heart of Turkey’s paranoid nationalism and its current conflicts with both the Kurds and Armenians. The plot? America invades Turkey and divides the country between the Greeks and Armenians. It may sound far fetched but this populist and reactionary book plays on the country’s ultimate fear: the disintegration of Turkey into various ethnic homelands.

With that in mind, a recent article in Today’s Zaman,a English-language Turkish daily, alleges something along the same lines.

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), faced with increasing pressure to end its activities in northern Iraq, may be seeking to re-establish its camps in the Armenian-controlled Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, intelligence reports indicate.

[...] Confronted with an increasingly hostile environment, the PKK has already begun evacuating its camps in northern Iraq, according to recent intelligence reports from the region. PKK administrators are now having talks with Armenia to relocate their camps to the Armenian-controlled Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, intelligence reports suggest. PKK leaders have also been talking to 12 Kurdish villages in Armenia, located near the border with Turkey.

While not necessarily unlikely, it would seem to be awfully convenient for Turkey given the escalating situation in northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey. However, it would not be the first time Turkey’s enemies collaborated. Greece, Iran, Syria and the USSR have all armed and train the PKK at various points in time and Greece is has continued to even through the 90s and most likely today. It is therefore hardly unthinkable that Armenia would do the same.

cui bono?

With the green light to launch operations in northern Iraq, Turkey has nevertheless dropped off the radar. While the occasional anti-terrorist operations make Turkish news, they almost always are within Turkey itself and few real attacks have been carried out within Iraq as far as we know. However, with the many weeks of warning, the PKK had plenty of time to shut down its bases in the Qandil mountains and scatter or relocate. Equally predictable was that the Turks would expect this which also explains the lack of public fireworks there. Any guerilla group needs the spotlight but as international attention grew and everyone who picked up a paper suddenly knew the locations of PKK bases, the time had come for a change.

Yet, today there are few hospitable places for the PKK to go. While operations naturally continue in Turkey and Iran (by PJAC), both Syria and Iran no longer support the PKK making moving physical bases and training areas very difficult. North Iraq was long a safe haven for all of the Kurds, law-abiding citizens and PKK members alike. As that day comes to an end and Iraqi Kurds are less willing to risk their autonomy and success for their kin across the border, the PKK has two options: melt back into the population until things cool down or move shop.

Karabagh?

In most people’s mind, Armenia usually conjures up the faces of local immigrants or perhaps vague ideas about genocide at the hands of the Turks. However, less known is that mountainous Armenia as well as Azerbaijan are both home to a very small number of Kurds. In fact, maps of Kurdistan usually include a sliver of each. Thus, the PKK could indeed have connections to the Caucasus although these groups are not only small and isolated but may not be as sympathetic to the cause. In addition, the PKK has developed links with radical Armenian organizations such as ASALA giving it a potential second network of support or at least contacts in the region.

The Caucasus is full of ethnic strife, long standing grudges and unfinished conflicts and Nagorno-Karabagh is no exception. Largely isolated from the world, poor and mountainous, it is both mountainous and difficult to travel through, both advantages to the PKK. Armenia, of which it is a de facto part (despite a laughable facade of independence), does indeed seek to settle the conflict between it and Azerbaijan but never plans to relinquish control of the area. Thus, they lose little by allowing the use of the territory by the PKK. However, one major obstacle exists: the location. Nagorno-Karabagh may be safely located a fair distance from Turkey and in a difficult to traverse area, but there is a major downside. Launching attacks into Turkey would be considerably difficult. Border countries like Syria, Iraq and Iran have longer, mountainous borders which are easier to sneak through. The distance from Stepanakert to the nearest border area with Turkey is around 115 miles through some of the highest mountains of Armenia proper.

Conclusion

While a PKK relocation to Karabagh is merely unconfirmed intelligence at the moment, Armenian support would be neither unthinkable nor unlikely. However, were Karabagh to be used by the PKK it would likely be for smaller scale training operations rather than a base from which to launch attacks against Turkey. In addition, it seems all too convenient for Turkey that their Kurdish and Armenian “problems” can now be publicly linked together and used to further the government’s aims both domestically and internationally. Whatever the reality, a skeptical positions remains the best for the moment.

NOTE: “Kansas” is a term used by those traveling and living in Armenia and Azerbaijan to refer to Karabagh. Discussing the situation as a foreigner is not always a good idea. Similarly, Israel is often referred to as “Disneyland” among outsiders while in Arab countries.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Michael B. Oren, a senior fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, says that Kaplan’s The Arabists is one of the “five best” books that “vividly capture the long history of America’s encounters with the Arab world.” In short:

The Arabists
By Robert D. Kaplan
The Free Press, 1993

From 1813, with the appointment of Mordechai Emanuel Noah as U.S. consul for Tunis in north Africa, until World War I, American Jews served as U.S. diplomats in the region. The State Department believed that these Jews, though most of them German-born, formed a natural bridge between Christian America and the Muslim world. But beginning in the 1920s—as Robert D. Kaplan charts in his riveting “The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite”—Jews were gradually pushed out of the State Department, replaced by a generation of diplomats who encouraged Arab nationalism and who were unabashed in their anti-Zionist, indeed anti-Semitic, worldview. Deeply identifying with Arab autocrats, the Arabists served as the architects of the U.S.-Saudi alliance, represented oil interests in Washington and convinced politicians that the Middle East had far more to fear from America than vice versa. Though their monopoly began to dissolve in the 1970s—when another German-born American Jew, Henry Kissinger, assumed control of policy making in the Middle East—the Arabists continued to exert a disproportionate and generally deleterious influence in Washington. Kaplan’s book, published in the aftermath of the first Islamist attack on the World Trade Center, acquired a greater poignancy after the second. Above all, it exposed the danger of the Arabists’ illusions of a romantic, congenial Middle East.