Conservatives are pushing for a December showdown over Iran, writes Daniel Luban.

After an uneventful first meeting between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that seemed to produce no real breakthroughs, hawks in the US and Israel are seizing upon what they claim is a significant concession by Obama: his setting a "timetable" for negotiations with Iran.

Although Obama merely promised a "reassessment" of the situation at the end of the year without providing any benchmarks for progress, in the days since Monday’s meeting those pushing for tougher measures against Iran’s nuclear programme have portrayed his remarks as setting a hard-and-fast cutoff point for diplomacy.

By attaching so much importance to the end-of-year assessment, the Iran hawks - many of whom have publicly supported a significantly earlier deadline - may hope to box the president in politically, setting up a December showdown on Iran policy whether Obama likes it or not.

A relatively short Iran timetable would also suit Netanyahu, who has sought to make the Iranian nuclear programme a higher priority than the Israel-Palestinian peace process and who notably offered no real concessions on the Palestinian front in his meeting with Obama.

On Monday, Obama told reporters that "it is important for us, I think, without having set an artificial deadline, to be mindful of the fact that we're not going to have talks forever".

"My expectation would be that if we can begin discussions soon, shortly after the Iranian elections, we should have a fairly good sense by the end of the year as to whether they are moving in the right direction and whether the parties involved are making progress and that there's a good faith effort to resolve differences," Obama continued.

"That doesn't mean every issue would be resolved by that point, but it does mean that we'll probably be able to gauge and do a reassessment by the end of the year of this approach," he said.

Obama did not set any benchmarks that would have to be met for the administration to judge that discussions were "moving in the right direction", nor did he threaten any specific consequences if talks did not result in progress. This was in keeping with his administration’s stated desire to move away from the "carrots and sticks" approach of incentives and threats, which Iranian officials have called insulting.

"[The end-of-year reassessment] all amounts to nothing," wrote M J Rosenberg, policy director of the Israel Policy Forum, at the website TPMCafe. "Of course, he will assess how his diplomacy is working and, of course, he would never (publicly) rule out the use of force. This is what Obama always says and said during the campaign."

Similarly, some prominent Iran hawks were sceptical that Obama’s comments implied any real deadline.

"Obama has provided no metric by which to judge progress," wrote Michael Rubin, a neoconservative Iran analyst at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). "If there is a 1 percent chance that talks might advance, will Obama grant a 90-day extension?"

More frequently, however, Iran hawks sought to promote the idea that Obama had endorsed a fixed timetable for diplomacy, and that - barring a major breakthrough - the administration would turn to punitive measures by the end of the year.

"The timeline that [Obama] set openly was that if by the end of the year there is no indication of significant movement with Iran, it's over, and he will turn to strong sanctions," said influential neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer.

Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal conceded that Obama’s actual statement was far less definite, but argued that "every single media takeaway" took the statement as evidence for a hard deadline, and that Obama sent a message that "they’re going to move to sanctions" at the end of the year.

Indeed, a great deal of mainstream news coverage

‘Official communist’ gambit fails, writes Jim Moody

Apparently even surprising themselves, Sonia Gandhi and the Indian National Congress that she heads have been swept back into power under the umbrella of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in the recently concluded general election in India.

Equally as surprised - not to say shocked - the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) saw its National Democratic Alliance come a poor runner-up, the BJP’s score of MPs dropping from 138 to 116. And, with public attacks already being made by leading members, the knives will now be out at the BJP, which has not fared well under its octogenarian leader, LK Advani.[1]

Congress’s victory is qualified by the fact that it could only achieve it as part of a wider coalition. Even then the UPA was initially 13 votes shy of an overall majority in parliament, though that hurdle has now been overcome after it received unexpected support from the erstwhile dalit (‘untouchable’) Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP). The BSP had been in electoral alliance with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)), while the SP had been the biggest component in a bloc with regional parties.

The UPA coalition now has over 300 seats in the new Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, for which there were 543 contested places, and has thus achieved a clear majority for a new government. It will be a government with an almost identical complexion to the outgoing one. That said, a strengthened Congress-led government may decide to take on more of the regional role that suggestions from Washington have trailed lately. It certainly no longer needs the left as a cover and for additional support.

Just as the USA has its west Asian policeman in Israel, so it needs one for south Asia, especially now that the Obama government lumps Pakistan with Afghanistan as part of its new Af-Pak strategy. India is far and away the best candidate in terms of population, industry and military might; it helps, too, that unlike Pakistan it is completely onside on the question of the US administration’s interpretation of what constitutes terrorism - Indian governments, especially Congress ones, are only too aware that two Indian prime ministers have been assassinated in recent decades.[2]

With Kashmir still a festering sore, India has become an enthusiastic member of the US-led ‘war on terror’ (or, as we might rephrase it, the war of terror). And India’s governments have not been at all averse to using state terrorism, including in Kashmir - where, for example, widespread rape as a weapon has often been carried out by its jawans (troops), undoubtedly with top-brass approval, as part of army offensives aimed at cowing the majority Muslim population.

No party in India expects to govern alone these days, nor has that happened for some decades. But not only has the largest party by popular vote in these elections had to horse-trade in an alliance or front: so too has every other party of note, and not just on the right.

If Congress and the BJP led the first and second fronts respectively, the CPI(M) also joined with other parties, in a so-called Third Front. This was cobbled up almost at the last minute, on March 12 this year, and brought together the CPI(M) with the smaller Communist Party of India (CPI), the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), All India Forward Bloc, Janata Dal (Secular), the BSP and six regionalist parties. In the last parliament, the CPI(M) and its left allies supported the outgoing UPA coalition. For the last few years at least, the CPI(M), CPI, RSP, and All India Forward Bloc have comprised the core of the Left Front (LF) state governments of West Bengal and Tripura and the Left Democratic Front state government in Kerala.

But the ‘official’ communists’ gambit did not come off this time. Why, after all, vote for a party or alliance that had merely been the tail of the governing

As US-backed Ethiopian troops rolled back into Somalia yesterday, after previously pulling out in January, Alex Perry explains the proxy-war background to the ongoing strife.

Just last month, Western donors gathered in Brussels to pledge money to the new Somali government of Sheik Sharif Ahmed, in the hope that he could restore order and put an end to the offshore piracy that has plagued shipping off his country's coastline. But renewed fighting in and around Mogadishu has raised fears that Somalia's 15th government in 18 years is about to fail. Sharif was named President only in January, and it was hoped that as an Islamist committed to restoration of law and order and political dialogue, he might do better than his predecessors at uniting Somalis behind a central administration and bridging the divide between militant Islam and the secular West. That was before the return to Somalia of Sharif's erstwhile Islamist comrade, Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys.

Sheik Aweys had led the Islamist Courts Union (ICU) with Sharif when it briefly ruled Mogadishu in 2006 and had established the Alliance for the Reliberation of Somalia to expel the Ethiopian troops who had invaded and toppled the Islamists in late 2006. But Aweys brands Sharif a traitor for his more moderate stance and his dependence for security on 3,400 foreign African Union peacekeeping troops. Since Aweys' return a little more than a month ago as head of a new group calling itself Hizbul Islam, hard-line Islamist rebels known as al-Shabaab have made steady gains across the country against forces loyal to Sharif. After some fierce street fighting in Mogadishu last week that killed more than 100, al-Shabaab on Sunday took the town of Jowhar, just north of the capital, and on Monday the nearby town of Mahaday. Sources inside Mogadishu report that Sharif now controls little more than a small patch of territory near the center of the city, although, crucially, his forces also still hold the port.

Analysts and observers differ on the extent of peril facing the new government. Mogadishu has not known peace since the demise of the last national government in 1991 — and a period of relative calm during the six months when the ICU controlled the city — and it is plagued by a byzantine maze of miniwars between clan militias that often control as little as a single building. In that context, an eruption of more fighting is often merely a sign that the bloody stalemate continues as usual. A diplomat in Nairobi suggested that while Sharif's forces were short of ammunition, the President was confident he had sufficient forces to survive al-Shabaab's attacks. But others believed there was a real possibility Sharif might be defeated. "He's taking a real beating," said an observer. "We're wondering whether he's going to be pushed into the sea." The BBC reported Tuesday that eyewitnesses in Somalia claimed that Ethiopian troops had reentered Somalia, just months after their departure, but these claims were vigorously denied by the Ethiopian government.

The fate of Sharif's government is closely tied to efforts to suppress piracy in and around the Gulf of Aden, but Somalia has also long served as a battlefield for regional rivalries. Last week the US accused Eritrea of being behind the latest upsurge in violence in Somalia — the UN has previously accused Eritrea of supplying vast amounts of weapons to hard-line Somali Islamists as part of a proxy war against its nemesis Ethiopia, whose intervention in Somalia was backed by the US. The Somali Islamists in 2006 declared a jihad against Ethiopia, while the US says al-Shabaab has links to al-Qaeda and is sheltering the surviving member of a cell that bombed US embassies in East Africa in 1998. Osama bin Laden, for his part, has repeatedly backed al-Shabaab, which the UN says is reinforced by some 280 to 300 foreign jihadist fighters. Those fighters are attracted both by the chance to live under the strict Shari'a law i