In an interview with Qatar’s Al Jazeera network scheduled for release on Friday, Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House and possible GOP contender for the Presidency, calls for the United States to “sabotage” Iran’s oil and gas infrastructure as part of a broad-based effort to bring down the Iranian regime.

In an interview with Al Jazeera’s Avi Lewis for the Fault Lines programme, Republican Newt Gingrich said targeting Iran’s refinery would spark an economic crisis that would destabilise the government in Tehran.

He said the US should “use covert operations … to create a gasoline-led crisis to try and replace the regime”.

“I think we have a vested interest, the world has a vested interest, in a responsible Iranian government, just as we have a vested interest in a responsible North Korean government,” he said.

While Barack Obama, the US president, has attempted diplomatic engagement with Iran following years of icy relations, some of his administration’s critics have been calling for destabilisation instead.

But Gingrich qualified that such a tactic to destabilise would only be “one piece out of many”.

“I think that the Reagan strategy in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s is the right strategy: we use economic, diplomatic, psychological pressures to try to change the regime.”

Despite being oil-rich, Iran is dependent on gasoline imports to meet about 40% of its domestic consumption. Iran lacks sufficient refining capacity to meet its domestic gasoline needs, forcing Tehran to import large volumes of the motor fuel which it then sells at heavily subsidized prices domestically.

Though the United States is not currently sabotaging Iran’s oil and gas industry, late last month the House Appropriations Committee approved by voice vote a measure prohibiting the US Export-Import Bank from helping companies that export gasoline to Iran or support its production inside Iran. The Swiss firm Vitol, the Swiss/Dutch firm Trafigura, France’s Total, the Swiss firm Glencore, and British Petroleum, as well as the Indian firm Reliance are the main suppliers of gasoline to Iran.

The measure was sponsored by GOP Congressman Mark Kirk of Illinois as an amendment attached to the annual spending bill to cover the expenses of the US State Department and other US foreign operations. I suspect what Newt Gingrich means by ’sabotage’ is more than just cutting off trade financing to foreign companies that do business with Iran.

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Asian economies have suffered severe shocks from the global economic downturn, yet are better placed than most for recovery thanks to lessons learned from the Asian financial crisis, significant stimulus packages and the potential to mobilize regional consumption.

Who will lead the recovery in Asia, and which sectors are demonstrating the most promising growth prospects?

Panelists
Dominic Barton
Max Burger-Calderon, Senior Partner and Chairman, Asia, Apax Partners, Hong Kong SAR
Hoang Trung Hai, Deputy Prime Minister of Vietnam
Michael ByungJu Kim, Founding Partner, MBK Partners, Republic of Korea
Kim Jeong, President, Bell Labs, Executive Vice-President, Alcatel-Lucent, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Laboratories, USA
Chaired by Phil Smith, Editor, North Asia, Thomson Reuters, People’s Republic of China

This panel took place on June 19, 2009.

China recognizes 55 separate ethnic groups but the country’s resettlement policy bringing the majority Han population into ethnic minority regions is stoking ethnic tensions most noticeably in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) and in Tibet.

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After the decision of Delhi High Court on Section 377 of Indian Penal Code, a new debate has evolved. Here’s a short overview of the debate over homosexuality now occurring in India.

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Somalia remains one of the most under-reported stories in the world today. Amid the conflict raging in Somalia, a little-reported battle of beliefs is under way in the port city of Kismayo.

Al-Shabaab fighters, who have vowed to topple the Somali government, are working to impose their version of Sharia law on residents. Those who do not comply are being severely punished.

Al Jazeera’s Zeina Awad reports.

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The ousted Honduran president and the interim government that replaced him arrived in Costa Rica for talks on the country’s political crisis.

But Manuel Zelaya, who was forced into exile, tells Al Jazeera’s Ghida Fakhry there is little room for negotiation on certain key issues and adds that the coup leaders are running out of time.

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The issue of climate change has been a contentious one at the G-8 summit. The major industrialized countries have reached an agreement among themselves to cut greenhouse gases, but a group of developing countries — the so-called G-5 nations — have balked.

On Thursday, the G-5 nations agreed on a general guideline to limit an increase in the worlds temperature. Still, they refused to adopt specific targets to reduce their emissions of carbon. The G-5 countries have been demanding western aid and access to new, clean burning technology in return for agreeing to cut those emissions.

Michael Novacek, provost of science at the American Museum of Natural History, joins Martin Savidge to discuss how the G-8 summit will effect climate change policy.

Here’s more background from the New York Times:

The world’s biggest developing nations, led by China and India, refused Wednesday to commit to specific goals for slashing heat-trapping gases by 2050, undercutting the drive to build a global consensus by the end of this year to reverse the threat of climate change.

As President Obama arrived for three days of talks with other leaders of the Group of 8 nations, negotiators for 17 leading polluters abandoned targets in a draft agreement for the meetings here. But negotiators embraced a goal of preventing temperatures from rising more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and developing nations agreed to make “meaningful” if unspecified reductions in emissions.

The mixed results underscored the challenges for Mr. Obama as he tries to use his first summit meeting of the Group of 8 powers to force progress toward a climate treaty. With Europe pressing for more aggressive action and Congress favoring a more restrained approach, Mr. Obama finds himself navigating complicated political currents at home and abroad.

If he cannot ultimately bring along developing countries, no climate deal will be effective.

The debate over warming dominated the opening of the summit meeting, but the Group of 8 nations also tackled the global economic recession, Middle East peace, the war in Afghanistan and development in Africa. Mr. Obama invited his colleagues to a nuclear security conference in Washington in March and prepared to announce a $15 billion program to combat world hunger. And in a statement, the leaders said they “deplore postelectoral violence” in Iran, and they pressed Tehran for a diplomatic solution to the standoff on its nuclear program.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France told reporters late Wednesday that the major powers would give talks with Iran until September to make progress; but “then we will have to take decisions,” he said.

Mr. Obama put climate change front and center by scheduling a meeting on the sidelines of the main talks on Thursday and inviting nine other nations that, along with the Group of 8, pump out 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. American officials called the results a step forward in the arduous process intended to lead to a worldwide climate treaty at a conference in Copenhagen in December.

But the impasse over the 2050 targets demonstrated again the most vexing problem in reaching a consensus on climate change: the longstanding divisions between developed countries like the United States, Europe and Japan on one side, and developing nations like China, India, Brazil and Mexico on the other.

(more…)

Al Jazeera’s People & Power programme looks at the recent protests in Iran that exposed deep fissures in the regime and within its governing elites.

At least 35 Iranian journalists have been arrested since protests against the result of recent elections began.

Some foreign journalists were also detained. Iason Athanasiadis, a Greek-British reporter, was held for three weeks in Tehran’s Evin prison.

He’s now back home in Athens, where Al Jazeera’s Barnaby Phillips asked him to describe what happened after his arrrest.

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