Topic: Buenos Aires

Quite a Legacy

Jennifer Rubin 03.02.2010 - 11:53 AM

For those of us accustomed to watching the Obami try very hard to do as little as possible on Iran, this should come as no surprise:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday it could take months for new UN sanctions against Iran, as she prepared for talks in Argentina and Brazil about the perceived Iranian nuclear threat. Speaking on the plane to Buenos Aires, the chief US diplomat appeared to back away from her contention before the US Senate last week that a new resolution could be obtained in the “next 30 to 60 days.”

“We are moving expeditiously and thoroughly in the Security Council. I can’t give you an exact date, but I would assume sometime in the next several months,” she said before landing in the Argentine capital.

The Obami’s “deadlines” and “timelines” come and go with nary a backward glance. There is no resolve, no determination to draw a line, for that would require action and raise the prospect of conflict, something Obama studiously tries to avoid on the foreign-policy front, no doubt so he can pursue his true passions: health care and climate change, which also are going nowhere.

We seem to have no game plan for those crippling sanctions and no intention of using military force. Obama refuses to pursue regime change. So we sit and wait as the mullahs inch closer to obtaining a nuclear-weapons capability. And this, it seems, more than the catastrophic failure of his domestic agenda, will be the Obama legacy: a revolutionary Islamic state with nuclear weapons.

Iran in Latin America

Gordon G. Chang 12.19.2007 - 4:52 PM

On Sunday, Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s President, met with Ezzatollah Zarghami, director of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. Zarghami’s visit is just one of a series from lower-level Iranian officials, who have fanned out across Latin America in search of friends. In recent years, Tehran has worked hard to strengthen contacts in the region—and it has accomplished much while Washington has neglected the countries south of its border. The world is full of threats, and Washington is paradoxically ignoring the ones closest to the American homeland. Says Riordan Roett of Johns Hopkins, “Since there has been no coherent United States policy toward Latin America, there’s a window of opportunity for the Iranians to come fill the vacuum.”

Tehran has missed no opportunities to do so. In addition to building relations with Ortega’s Sandinistas, Iran has nurtured ties with new leftist governments in Bolivia and Ecuador. And of course there is the combination of Iran and Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, what Tehran calls the “axis of unity.” Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is also reaching out to moderate Latin American governments, most notably Brazil’s. “Iran is trying to create a geopolitical balance with the United States,” according to Bill Samii of the Center for Naval Analyses in Virginia.

Yesterday, the San Antonio Express-News reported how the mullahs in Tehran intend to achieve this “balance.” Friendly Latin American governments are giving the Iranians bases of operation in their countries to carry out covert activities. Iran-supported Hizballah, through front organizations, already operates in the region, and the presence of even more Iranians will undoubtedly enhance its capabilities. Americans, unfortunately, can expect Tehran-supported terrorism: Argentina, contending that Iran was behind bombings in Buenos Aires of Israeli and Jewish community targets, last month obtained Interpol approval for arrest warrants against five Iranians.

There is nothing left to the Monroe Doctrine. If the Bush administration is not going to abandon Latin America to Iran and that country’s terrorist allies, then it will have to tie the region to America in some fashion. At this moment, the fastest way to do so is to erect a network of free trade deals. Yet these agreements are controversial in Washington. Although President Bush signed the FTA with Peru on Friday, similar ones with Colombia and Panama are languishing in Congress. There are many problems with Washington’s free trade agreements with less developed economies, but Ortega’s meetings with junior Iranians like Zarghami suggest that this might be the time to consider dropping technical quibbles and to start looking at the bigger picture.

Primo Levi’s Unknown Text

Benjamin Ivry 10.21.2007 - 12:05 PM

Local media outlets have been curiously silent about a story reported by Haaretz involving last month’s discovery in a Yad Vashem archive of a previously unknown 1960 text by Primo Levi (1919–1987), the Turin-born chemist and author of Holocaust memoirs. This article-length deposition of around 850 words, printed in L’espresso in September, apparently was solicited when the Israeli government was gathering testimonies for the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann. Only weeks before Levi’s testimony was taken on June 14, 1960, Israeli security agents nabbed Eichmann in a Buenos Aires suburb.

The Haaretz article points out that “it is known that Primo Levi was not called to the witness stand facing Eichmann’s glass booth,” a fact that stirs the imagination. Marco Belpoliti, who edited a definitive two-volume edition of Levi’s works, calls the newly discovered essay “tranquil, precise and elegant.”

Punctuated with repeated exclamation points for dramatic emphasis, the text echoes the author’s greatest works, like The Periodic Table, whose pellucid style answers the much-debated question of whether art can exist after Auschwitz. Perhaps even more impressively, Levi’s books testify that rational thought can survive the concentration camp experience. In the newly found testimony, Levi describes how he and his friends were denounced as partisans and arrested in 1943, and later transferred to a fascist militia camp. There, Levi notes, a guard treated them decently “after learning that we were Jews and not ‘true partisans.’” Levi adds: “He was later killed by partisans in 1945.” In 1944 the friends were transferred to another camp, where they worked as kitchen servants: “We also put together a cafeteria, in truth a rather poor one!!” Arriving at Auschwitz after further deportation, such productive labors were exchanged for daily agonies.

Getting to Know Beverly Sills

Benjamin Ivry 07.09.2007 - 10:03 AM

Commemorating a cultural figure like Beverly Sills (1929–2007), who died last week of lung cancer at 78, is not easy. After a much-publicized career as a coloratura soprano, Sills served as general director of the New York City Opera and chairwoman of Lincoln Center, and later of the Metropolitan Opera. On July 3, in a bizarre tribute, the New York Philharmonic gave a conductorless performance, purportedly in her honor, of a work that most certainly requires a conductor—Leonard Bernstein’s Overture to Candide. (The Philharmonic’s press office announced that this silly “tradition began with the death of Bernstein.”)

Wagner Without Tears

Benjamin Ivry 05.21.2007 - 2:29 PM

A commenter asks if I can recommend any performances conducted by the German conductor Hermann Abendroth (1883-1956). Abendroth was the “only conductor who ever made me genuinely love anything by Wagner,” says the commenter, citing a 1943 Parsifal from Bayreuth. Abendroth, who mainly conducted in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and East Germany, also produced dynamic recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony circa 1950, of which two, with the Berlin and Leipzig Radio Symphonies, have been reprinted on CD by Tahra.

Must music-lovers look to conductors like Herbert von Karajan or Karl Böhm, to name just two, as the final Wagnerian authorities? Yes, Wagner was a notorious anti-Semite who probably would have approved of Hitler’s Final Solution. But that doesn’t mean you have to be a fascist to produce great Wagnerian performances.

Try listening to the conductor who was—with good reason—considered the truest Wagnerian at Bayreuth and Salzburg, until his anti-Fascist convictions made him refuse to perform there in the 1930’s: Arturo Toscanini (1867–1957). Volume Seven of RCA’s Immortal Toscanini series is devoted to Toscanini’s fearlessly virtuosic performances of Wagner with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. “Siegfried’s Death and Funeral Music” from Götterdämmerung has its typically intense dramatic emotional imagery—it sounds like a noble person has died and we are mourning him with grandeur—along with high intellectual clarity. (We can actually see Toscanini conduct Wagner on Volumes One and Four of “Toscanini—The Television Concerts 1948-52” on DVD from Testament.)

Striking Iran: Cakewalk or Slam-Dunk?

Gabriel Schoenfeld 05.14.2007 - 1:10 PM

In 1981, Israel hit Iraq’s nuclear facility at Osirak. Eight F-16 fighter-bombers and eight F-15 fighters swooped in to carry out a precision strike that set back Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions by more than a decade.

As the whole world knows, Israel now faces a similar challenge from Iran, which has an ambitious nuclear program of its own, and whose president has threatened to wipe Israel from the map. Unlike Osirak, however, the Iranian program is housed in multiple sites, with the most critical ones hardened against attack from the air, and all of them situated much further away from Israel than Osirak was.

A key question therefore is whether Israel possesses the military means to attack the Iranian facility on its own, or whether it would depend upon the far mightier United States to help it or do the job in its entirety. This question is being analyzed in defense ministries and intelligence agencies around the world. But the central issues have been laid out for the public in great detail by two MIT military analysts, Whitney Raas and Austin Long, in a paper that appears in the spring issue of International Security.

One of the problems entailed in such a raid would be dealing with the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, which Raas and Long call “one of the most difficult and important targets.” It is 23 meters underground and covered by multiple layers of concrete, such that “only a very robust strike could hope to destroy or at least render unusable” the centrifuges that it houses. Read More

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