OPINION

A costly shortcut

Re: "Land Bridge not viable", (Editorial, April 28) & "Land Bridge plan due for cabinet", (BP, April 26).

Who will benefit if Thailand builds/operates a Ranong-Chumphon land bridge? It would not be our target market -- for if major carriers truly believe the project would significantly improve profits, we should already have seen at least one anchor commitment.

A canal/land bridge in southern Thailand has been debated for 150+ years, with feasibility studies since the 1960s.

Yet no major ocean carrier appears to have publicly made a binding, material commitment that would prove firm commercial backing for such a project. No carrier has invested cash, signed minimum-volume contracts, or allocated vessels.

Talk is cheap, and that's all Thailand has received from potential clients.

The project is fantastically costly, probably over 1 trillion baht (land costs are unclear). Operating fees cannot be very high, as the bridge will save only four days at sea, so traffic volume must be high for the bridge to be profitable.

Today, ships sail through the Strait of Malacca and use world-class hubs such as the Port of Singapore and Port Klang, which offer massive scale, frequent sailings, repair, bunkering, warehousing, and mature customs/logistics systems that we don't have.

Our unavoidable double-handling adds cost and delay; inbound and outbound cargo may be unbalanced, so ships may return partly empty. Why would shippers want to take all these risks to save a few days?

So, who would a land bridge benefit, other than those setting it up, leaving taxpayers with a hugely unprofitable hot potato?

Diplomatic charade

Re: "US 'reviewing' new proposal from Iran", (World, April 29).

To the uninitiated, it appears the US has exhausted every diplomatic avenue to end the conflict with Iran. In reality, Washington is simply executing a playbook drafted in 2009 by the Brookings Institution: "Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy towards Iran".

I suggest enthusiasts access this paper. Just type the name, and the synopsis, as well as a 170-page paper, will pop up.

The paper is remarkably blunt about "diplomacy." It explicitly discusses the utility of making a diplomatic offer that is designed to be rejected. The logic is that the US would first need to exhaust diplomacy -- or at least create the appearance of exhausting it -- to secure international backing and mitigate global blowback.

By presenting terms Iran could never accept, the US could then credibly turn to the international community and say, "We tried everything, but they were unreasonable," thereby manufacturing consent for military escalation.

This marks the third time in less than two years that Washington has deployed this exact charade against Iran. The US, of course, boasts a long, grim history of fabricating pretexts for conflict, stretching back well before the lies surrounding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The sheer bad faith of the current administration is glaring: for negotiations of this global magnitude, the US did not even bother to send credible diplomats. Instead, they dispatched a lawyer and two real estate developers to Islamabad.

Given Washington's increasingly brazen imperialistic behaviour, the global community has seen entirely through the charade. Even traditional US allies have refused to participate in this illegal war. At this stage, one would have to be a fool to believe that America was ever seriously negotiating for a peaceful solution beneficial to the rest of the world.