Failing Islamic States - 2011

[larry Strong]

Yup, stuck on the "merry-go-round". They can't say "Yes" to one and "No" to others..............

 

[57Chevy]

                          Shared in accordance with provisions provided in The Copyright Act

Ottawa may help Canadians evacuate Syria
Jordan Press, For Postmedia NewsApril 24, 2011 6:12 PM
http://www.canada.com/news/Ottawa+help+Canadians+evacuate+Syria/4667630/story.html#ixzz1KUUT6IcY

OTTAWA — The federal government wouldn’t say Sunday whether it has an evacuation plan ready for Canadians in Syria, instead urging those in the country to get out while airports and border crossings remained open.

Should the situation in Syria become a crisis that requires evacuation, the government will help Canadians in the country get the nearest safe haven, said spokeswoman Claude Rochon.

“The government of Canada may assist Canadians in leaving a country as a last resort, when all means of commercial or personal transportation have been exhausted,” Rochon said.

“At this time, means of commercial or personal transportation have not been exhausted in Syria. In fact, airports and other transportation systems in Syria are working normally.”

Rochon said there are about 870 Canadians registered with the Embassy in Damascus, but there are estimated to be 5,000 Canadians in Syria.

On Saturday, the Department of Foreign Affairs urged Canadians to avoid travelling to Syria, and urged those already there to leave.

The British government issued a similar warning to its residents, noting in a release that should the situation in Syria deteriorate, “it is highly unlikely that the British Embassy would be able to provide a normal consular service.”

The situation in Syria continued to deteriorate Sunday as government forces loyal to President Bashar al-Asad clashed with pro-democracy protesters.

Over the long weekend, more than 100 people were killed when security forces opened fire on demonstrators, according to reports and human rights groups. However, reports have not been able to independently verify death figures, which range from 100 to more than 300 in the past few weeks.

In its statement, the Foreign Affairs Department said it was “deeply concerned” about reports of violence against demonstrators, and called on the Syrian government to “engage in a genuine dialogue on democratic reforms with all groups in Syria.”

Anyone in Canada looking for information on Canadian citizens in Syria should contact the Emergency Operations Centre by calling 1-800-387-3124 or by sending an email to sos@international.gc.ca.

 

[57Chevy]

                      Shared in accordance with provisions provided in The Copyright Act

Syria sends tanks to crack down on protesters; U.S. may impose sanctions
By Paul Richter and Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles TimesApril 25, 2011 8:58 PM
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Syria+sends+tanks+crack+down+protesters+impose+sanctions/4670057/story.html#ixzz1KaqWOaSV

BEIRUT, Lebanon — With tanks now patrolling the streets of a restive Syrian city, the Obama administration is preparing to take its first concrete steps against President Bashar Assad and his top lieutenants - the imposition of sanctions for an increasingly bloody crackdown on demonstrators.

The regime in Damascus escalated the violence Monday, ordering army tanks and troops into action against protesters in the southern city of Daraa. The move follows a tumultuous weekend in which Syrian security forces gunned down an estimated 120 pro-democracy protesters. More than 200 people have died since the uprising erupted five weeks ago.

Obama administration officials said they are readying orders that would freeze U.S. assets of senior Syrian officials and deny them permission to travel in the United States.

U.S. sanctions are unlikely to produce a dramatic impact because Syrian officials apparently own few U.S. assets. But the move signaled a notable shift by the Obama administration, which has worked hard to build better relations with Damascus, a regime it considers a strategic key for security in the Middle East.

European officials said they also are considering steps against Assad's regime. Syrian officials maintain far larger investments in Europe than in the U.S., so economic sanctions or travel bans there would have a more direct impact.

The Obama administration hopes U.S. sanctions will help build pressure on its European allies, especially France and Britain, to follow suit. Officials in Washington have consulted closely with counterparts in London and Paris on how best to persuade Assad to show restraint.

Moves by British and French officials against Syria could be particularly important. France, the former colonial power, retains strong cultural and economic relations with Damascus. Assad lived a number of years in Britian and may have financial assets stored there.

David Schenker, a former Middle East adviser at the Pentagon, said steps to isolate Syria, especially by European countries, would sting.


More at link...

 

[57Chevy]

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Critics blast UN Rights Council's two-faced stance on Syria
Steven Edwards, Postmedia News April 27, 2011
http://www.canada.com/news/Critics+blast+Rights+Council+faced+stance+Syria/4685267/story.html#ixzz1KmBuiiyL

NEW YORK — The duplicity of the UN's Human Rights Council could be on full display Friday as the Geneva-based body holds an emergency session on human rights abuses in Syria — even as it appears set to welcome the Arab country as a member.

Canada was among 37 co-sponsors of a Wednesday measure that successfully scheduled the emergency session — but human rights monitoring groups noted that Syria's candidacy to join the 47-member council for an upcoming three-year term remained intact.

"Choosing Syria to be a global judge of human rights would be like appointing Bernard Madoff to defend victims of financial fraud," said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch in Geneva, referring to the former Wall Street broker convicted of operating a multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme

article continues at link

 

[sean m]

Here is footage of syrian forces shooting at innocent protestors (caution it is graphic)... Refering to discussions, after analyzing, everyone here who deems that it is important to review the situation in these countries in crisis are of course correct. Many here brought up a good point by stating how we as well as other western nations do not want to cause further problems for ourselves as well as others yet when looking at this footage how much should we take before we decide enough is enough or can it ever come to that point?

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=909_1303928809

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=224_1303590464

 

[sean m]

The BBC has developed a list of the top people providing advice as well as support for Al Assad

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13216195

 

[Journeyman]

"Choosing Syria to be a global judge of human rights would be like appointing Bernard Madoff to defend victims of financial fraud," said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch in Geneva...

It was less than a year ago that Libya was elected to the UN Human Rights Council -- why suddenly wring your hands now about the dumb shit that the UN does
    :

 

[a_majoor]

How the Palestinians operate (another failed stae/culture):

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-mosab-yousef-saga-did-hamas-%E2%80%98defector%E2%80%99-dupe-all-of-us/?singlepage=true

The Mosab Yousef Saga: Did Hamas ‘Defector’ Dupe All of Us?

Posted By Walid Shoebat On May 5, 2011 @ 12:00 am In Uncategorized | 5 Comments

While a prisoner of Israel in 1996, Mosab Hassan Yousef — the son of Sheik Hassan Yousef, a founding member of Hamas — was approached by Shin Bet agents who looked to recruit him to spy within Hamas. He agreed. Mosab’s information soon had Shin Bet calling him “the most reliable source in the Hamas leadership,” and Israeli lives were undoubtedly saved as a result of Mosab’s collaboration.

Despite this success, Yousef has since revealed himself to be more double agent than turncoat.

During the initial contact within Israel’s Maskubia (Jerusalem’s central prison), Mosab agreed to collaborate in exchange for Israel not targeting his father. After years of providing valuable intelligence, in 2007 Mosab declared his conversion to Christianity, moved to California, and went public with his story. His tale was a sensation, drawing attention and praise from U.S. pro-Israel organizations. But his tale has since been revealed to be a “long con,” the evidence coming from when he speaks publicly in Arabic.

Mosab did not convert to what the West would recognize as Christianity, but to a fiery, Palestinian brand of the faith that is vehemently anti-Israel. According to Mosab, his main goal in coming to the U.S. is to infiltrate the main source of international support for Israel: the American church. From an interview with Al-Arabiya:

    During my tours in universities and even churches, [I found] the real support for Israel stems from the church in the West. … We need to understand the difference between “revenge” and “resistance” and once the Palestinians do, we will have our victory against Israel.

Activists like Mosab know very well that Western media rarely translate their doublespeak. He continues:

    Israel is the problem and as an occupation it needs to end. … There are many ways to do this besides the coward explosive operations.

Mosab’s formula? Infiltrate the West with his book:

    This will be the first time in history that a Palestinian book will find success so that the Western reader can see for himself the reality of what goes on over there. People in the West do not know what happens over there.

On the Arabic-language show Daring Question [1] — sponsored by the 700 Club — Mosab wore the symbol of pro-Palestine advocates, the kaffiyeh [2]:

    With a balanced approach I discuss the life of the Palestinian child under the Israeli occupation, of course my life suffered under all the problems of murder and the criminal operations that were carried out by the Israeli occupation against my people, my family, myself, and against humanity.

To Mosab, the Palestinian struggle was lacking: while he praises Hamas leaders as “heroes and glorious defenders,” he instructs them to enlist more educated political defenders like himself:

    With regret, our great leaders and mighty heroes and glorious defenders over there did not realize that instead of spending their wealth and monies on silly issues, they needed to enlist in their ranks writers and educated individuals in order to reverse the image of the Palestinian struggle.

Mosab stated that he is only against Hamas methodology, but not their agenda:

    It appeared at first that my desire was to seek revenge against Hamas. … How could I do such a thing … revenge [against] my own father? He is one of the leaders of Hamas.

Perhaps the most shocking revelation: Mosab asks Arabs not to report terrorist activity. The host of Daring Question asked a caller:

    If you were in Mosab’s position and have two choices: either someone from Hamas will be killed, or school children in a bus will be killed, will you report it?

The Arab Christian caller vacillated, then Mosab spoke:

    If I was in your shoes, you should not report it to Israel.  I do not encourage anyone to give information to Israel or collaborate with Israel. If anyone hears me right now and they are in relation to Israeli security I advise them to work for the interest of their own people — number one — and do not work with the [Israeli] enemy against the interest of our people. They should collaborate with the Palestinian Authority only.

Most in the West do not understand the Arab “Christian” position when it comes to Israel. Witness the Daring Question host Rasheed, a Christian convert from Islam himself, pardoning Mosab from any wrongdoing: the pardon is not for Mosab’s connection to Hamas, but for his collaboration with Israel. To Rasheed, Mosab’s collaboration was during his Muslim life, while he was still unforgiven:

    He [Mosab] did not become Christian then collaborate with Israel. He used to collaborate with Israel, then became Christian. [3]

Mosab’s book Son of Hamas — published in English — does not express Mosab’s views as openly as his Arabic statements do, and the book is additionally littered with factual errors and exaggerations.

For example: Mosab portrays the Jerusalem prison as a center for torture and persecution of Palestinians. The reality is much kinder; each inmate has his own bed and an in-the-cell shower as well.

I know this — I was a prisoner there myself.

We ate three full meals a day, and drank tea or sweet punch. And Mosab fails to mention that the Maskubia had Jewish inmates as well, who received the same treatment as the Palestinians and ate out of the same menu. Yes, you were beaten by security when lives were at stake: I witnessed first-hand Israeli soldiers in the corridor beating an inmate who attempted to kill his cellmate (I was selected to clean the mess afterward). What was so shocking to me at the time? The attempted murderer was a Jew.

I have never heard of Israelis killing Palestinians in prison. Yet Palestinian prisoners do kill each other, as Mosab himself describes. Palestinian inmates killed my landlord Muneer Abu-Sayb’a from Bethlehem, yet his death was blamed on Israel. My friend Basem Hanuneh was brutally murdered — his privates removed and stuffed in his mouth — which was also blamed on Israel.

Mosab is now touring churches to end Israel’s lifeline. Many Jews and Christians in the West are unable to determine friend from foe in the Mideast; they are not able to read what is said in Arabic. They must seek translations, and must be aware of double agents like Mosab.

Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-mosab-yousef-saga-did-hamas-%e2%80%98defector%e2%80%99-dupe-all-of-us/

URLs in this post:

[1] Daring Question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSndfbSnD3Y&feature=related

[2] kaffiyeh: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKj7oNkshUo

[3] He [Mosab] did not become Christian then collaborate with Israel. He used to collaborate with Israel, then became Christian.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7E9iPx-fyU

 

[a_majoor]

Sadly, Egypt is now feeling the true effects of the Arab Spring. I suspect many of the Arab Spring states will soon be having similar outcomes:

http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/2011/05/09/egypt-situation-deteriorating-badly-and-rapidly/?print=1

Egypt: Situation Deteriorating Badly and Rapidly
Posted By Barry Rubin On May 9, 2011 @ 6:05 am In Uncategorized | 5 Comments

In the wake of bloody Muslim attacks on Egyptian Christians, the New York Times informs us:

“By lifting the heavy hand of the Mubarak police state, the revolution unleashed long-suppressed sectarian animosities that have burst out with increasing ferocity….”

No kidding! Did you think a single Egyptian Christian didn’t know this in February? Why didn’t the media report or the U.S. government understand that this was absolutely inevitable and predictable? But the only mentions of Christians were to claim that they were really enthusiastic about the revolution.

The remaining Christians in most of the Arabic-speaking world may be on the edge of flight or extinction. All of the Christians have left the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip which is, in effect, an Islamist republic. They are leaving the West Bank. Half have departed from an increasingly Islamist-oriented Iraq where they are under terrorist attack. Within a few years they might all be gone.

In Lebanon, while the Christians are holding their own, there is a steady emigration. As for Syria, the community has generally supported the Assad regime fearing a revolutionary Islamist replacement. One dissident recalled that as he was being beaten in a Syrian prison a few years ago, the police yelled at him, “Why are you doing this? You’re a Christian!”

Egypt has more Christians than Israel’s entire population. There have been numerous attacks, with the latest in Cairo leaving 12 dead, 220 wounded, and two churches burned. The Western media generally attributes this to inter-religious battles. Yet Egypt’s Christians, so totally outnumbered and not having any access to the power of the state, have generally kept a low profile.

It is hard to believe that gangs of Christians go out and attack Muslims, especially when the fighting revolves around mobs attacking churches. “How can they say we started it when we are defending our church?” asked one Christian. That makes sense.

The Christians cannot depend on any support from Western churches or governments. Will there be a massive flight of tens or even hundreds of thousands of Christians from Egypt in the next few years?

The U.S. government has just announced that it will forgive about $1 billion of Egyptian debt at a time when the American economy isn’t doing so well. You can just bet that there are no political strings attached: no pressure over Egyptian backing of Hamas, growing anti-Israel policy, cutting off natural gas supplies, the increasingly difficult situation of Christians, opposing Iran’s ambitions and nuclear weapons drive, or anything else.

What will happen if and when an Islamist-dominated regime is in power in Egypt — which could happen as early as September? Will U.S. aid and support continue?

Up until now, the strength of the Muslim Brotherhood has been badly underestimated in the West. But increasingly it is also apparent that the strength of anti-Islamist forces has been overestimated.

I have noted that even Amr Moussa, likely to be Egypt’s next president and a radical nationalist, has predicted an Islamist majority in parliament. That should be a huge story, yet it has been largely ignored.

He is not creating his own party, meaning that a President Moussa will be dependent on the Muslim Brotherhood in parliament. Rather than the radical nationalists battling the Islamists, these two forces might well work together.

And who will they be working against? Just guess.

Article printed from Rubin Reports: http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/2011/05/09/egypt-situation-deteriorating-badly-and-rapidly/

 

[sean m]

Here is a documentary about the powerful, radical Islamic groups have in Indonesia. They supposedly have powerful backers in government and/ or military. Hopefully this situation does not get out of control

http://www.youtube.com/user/journeymanpictures?blend=1&ob=5#p/c/2C32A4BDEAD6466A/0/LF0S4qUQWzU

 

[a_majoor]

A bit of a tangent, but here is a sample of the sort of reporting and veiwpoints that were common in 1968:

http://www.bookwormroom.com/2011/05/20/contemporary-coverage-of-the-six-day-war-clear-signed-and-moral/

Contemporary coverage of the Six Day War — clear-sighted and moral
Bookworm on May 20 2011 at 5:31 pm | Filed under: Israel

Given Obama’s obsession with the 1948 borders, this seemed like an appropriate day to resurrect some contemporary coverage of the Six Day War, culled from a commemorative issue that Life Magazine published back in 1967.  (For those with long memories, I first published these excerpts back in 2006.  It’s a shame Obama wasn’t reading my blog then.)

The commemorative issue opens by describing Nasser’s conduct, which presented such a threat that Israel had no option but to react. It makes for interesting reading, in part because it assumes a legitimacy to Israel’s 1967 preemptive strike. After describing how Pres. Abdel Gamel Nasser, speaking from Cairo, demanded Israel’s extermination, the Life editorial board goes on to say this:

The world had grown accustomed to such shows [of destructive hatred towards Israel] through a decade of Arab-Israeli face-offs that seasonally blew as hot as a desert sirocco. Since 1948, when Israel defeated the Arabs and won the right to exist as a nation, anti-Zionist diatribes had been the Arab world’s only official recognition of Israel. Indeed, in the 19 years since the state was founded, the surrounding Arab states have never wavered from their claim that they were in a state of war with Israel.

But now there was an alarming difference in Nasser’s buildup. He demanded that the U.N. withdraw the 3,400-man truce-keeping force that had camped in Egypt’s Sinai desert and in the Gaza Strip ever since Egypt’s defeat in the Suez campaign of 1956 as a buffer between Egyptians and Israelis. A worried United Nations Secretary-General U Thant agreed to the withdrawal, then winged to Cairo to caution Nasser.

He found him adamant. Plagued by economic difficulties at home and bogged down in the war in Yemen, Nasser had lately been criticized by Syrians for hiding behind the U.N. truce-keeping force. With brinksmanship as his weapon, Nasser had moved to bolster his shaky claim to leadership of the divided Arab world.

In contrast to the fevered, irrational hatred on the Arab side, the Life editors are impressed by the Israelis. Under the bold heading “Israel’s cool readiness,” and accompanied by photographs of smiling Israeli soldiers taking a cooling shower in the desert, listening to their commander, and attending to their tanks, Life has this to say:

With the elan and precision of a practiced drill team, Israel’s largely civilian army — 71,000 regulars and 205,000 reservists — began its swift mobilization to face, if necessary, 14 Arab nations and their 110 million people. As Premier Levi Eshkol was to put it, “The Jewish people has had to fight unceasingly to keep itself alive…. We acted from an instinct to save the soul of a people.

Can you imagine a modern publication pointing out the vast disparity in land mass and population between Israel and the Arabs, or even acknowledging in the opening paragraph of any article that Israel has a right to exist? The text about Israel’s readiness is followed by more photographs of reservists preparing their weapons and of a casually seated Moshe Dayan, drinking a soda, and conferring with his men. Under the last photograph, you get to read this:

The Israelis, Dayan said, threw themselves into their hard tasks with “something that is a combination of love, belief and country.”

After admiringly describing the Israelis’ offensive strike against the Arab air-forces, which gave Israel the decisive advantage in the War, Life addresses Israel’s first incursion into Gaza. I’m sure you’ll appreciate how the Gaza area is depicted:

Minutes after the first air strike, a full division of Israeli armor and mechanized infantry . . . was slashing into the Egyptian-held Gaza Strip. A tiny wasteland, the strip had been given up by Israel in the 1956 settlement and was now a festering splinter — the barren harbor for 315,000 refugees bent on returning to their Palestinian homes and the base for Arab saboteurs.

Wow! Those clueless Life writers actually seem to imply that Egypt, which controlled Gaza for eleven years, had some responsibility for this “festering,” dangerous area.

The Life editors, circa June 23, 1967were both clear-headed and prescient about the refugee problem that remained when war ended (emphasis mine):

The 20th Century’s excellence — and its horrid defects — find some of their most vivid monuments in the hate-filled camps of Arab refugees. The refugees have been supported by the voluntary U.N. contributions of some 75 governments, not to mention the Inner Wheel Club of Hobart, Australia, the Boy Scout Union of Finland, the Women’s Club of Nes, Iceland, the Girls High School of Burton-on-Trend, England, and (for some reason) a number of automobile companies including Chrysler, Ford, G.M. and Volkswagen.

The philanthropy, governmental and private, that has aided these displaced Arabs is genuine — and admirable. The stupidity and political selfishness that have perpetuated the problem are appalling.

Down the ages, there have been thousands of episodes in which whole peoples fled their homes. Most were assimilated in the lands to which they fled. Brutally or beneficently, previous refugee groups were liquidated. Not until our time have there been the money, the philanthropy, the administrative skill, the hygienic know-how and the peculiar kind of nationalism which, in combination, could take a wave of refugees and freeze it into a permanent and festering institution.

In the wake of Israeli victories, the refugee camps received thousands of new recruits, and there may be more if, as seems likely, Israel successfully insists on some enlargement of its boundaries. Thus the refugee problem, one of the main causes of Middle East instability, is about to be magnified.

The early Zionists, looking toward a binational state, never thought they would, could or should replace the Arabs in Palestine.  When terrorism and fighting mounted in 1947-48, Arab leaders urged Palestinian Arabs to flee, promising that the country would soon be liberated.  Israelis tried to induce the Arabs to stay.  For this reason, the Israelis do not now accept responsibility for the Arab exodus.  Often quoted is the statement of a Palestinian Arab writer that the Arab leaders “told us:  ‘Get out so that we can get in.’  We got out but they did not get in.”

After the Israeli victory, Arab leaders outside of Palestine reversed their policy and demanded that all the refugees be readmitted to Israel. Israel reversed its policy, [and] refused to repatriate large numbers of Arabs on the ground that they would endanger the state. Nasser, for instance, has said, “If Arabs return to Israel, Israel will cease to exist.”

Now 1.3 million Arabs, not counting the recent influx, are listed as refugees. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has an international staff of about a hundred and spends nearly $40 million a year, 60% of it from the U.S. government. UNRWA services are performed by 11,500 Arab employees, most them refugees. Obviously, this group has an interest in not solving the refugee problem.

So have the host governments. Consistently they have refused to go along with any plan or policy for the resettlement or assimilation of the refugees, preferring to use them politically. In 1955 the Arab League scuttled a Jordan Valley development project precisely because it would have reduced, perhaps by 250,000, the number of Arab refugees.

It’s about time this dangerous deadlock ended. The inevitable reshuffle of the Middle East ought to include a plan to phase out the refugee problem in five or 10 years. Israel, to show goodwill, should repatriate a few thousand refugees per year. All of the 1.3 million could be absorbed in underpopulated Iran and Syria, provided their governments would cooperate in internationally supported developments projects. Persuading Arab governments to adopt a policy of resettlement should be central to U.S. policy, and it would be worth putting up quite a lot of A.I.D. money to get the job done.

History has shown the Life editors to be correct when they predicted that UN economic interests and Arab political interests would leave the refugee camps as a permanent blight on the Middle Eastern landscape. They were naive only in believing that anyone had the political will to solve the problem. They also could not have anticipated that, in a very short time, the same situation, with its same causes, would be plunged into a looking-glass world, where the Arab governments and the UN were absolved of their sins, and the blame was placed on Israel for not having engaged in an act of self-immolation by taking in these 1.3 million (and counting, and counting, and counting) hate-filled refugees.

These same editors understood the Cold War aspects of the 1967 War. They editorialized about the Soviet Union’s UN fulminations (an editorial I’m also quoting in its entirety):

As the Arab soldiers and refugees made their sad and painful way from the scenes of their defeat, the Soviet Union threw its heaviest oratorical gun into the United Nations in an effort to salvage some of what it had lost in the Mideast. Premier Aleksei Kosygin arrived at the General Assembly with an arsenal of invective.

Kosygin put all the blame on Israel and its “imperialist” backers (i.e., the U.S. and Britain). As he saw it, Israel’s “atrocities and violence” brought to mind “the heinous crimes perpetrated by the fascists during World War II.” He demanded the Assembly’s approval for a resolution — rejected earlier by the Security Council — that would condemn Israel as sole aggressor in the conflict, and he proposed that Israel not only be made to pull back to her prewar borders but also to pay reparations to the Arabs for their losses.

He was answered by the Israeli foreign minister, Abba Eban [his speech is here], whose detailed documentation and eloquence told how the Arabs had given his country the choice of defending its national existence or forfeiting it for all time. Then he put Kosygin himself in the defendant’s dock. Russia, he charged, was guilty of inflaming passions in a region “already too hot with tension” by feeding the arms race and spreading false propaganda. He called Kosygin’s reference to the Nazis “an obscene comparison . . . a flagrant breach of international morality and human decency.” As for the Russian demand that Israel pull back to her prewar lines, that, he said, was totally unacceptable until durable and just solutions are reached “in free negotiations with each of our neighbors.” The Arab states “have come face to face with us in conflict; let them now come face to face with us in peace.” Israel was determined not be deprived of her victory.

Did you catch that the Soviet speaker used precisely the same rhetoric about Israel that has become normative throughout Europe and in most Leftist publications? He castigated Israel as an imperialist entity and claimed that her tactics were “atrocities” that were identical to those the Nazis used. Unlike today’s MSM, Life’s 1967 editorial team appears appalled by the tenor and falsity of those accusations.

My Mom was quite the packrat.  In addition to the Life magazine that I quoted from above,  which was published at the end of the War, my Mom also saved the June 16, 1967 edition of Life magazine, which was written within days of the War’s abrupt beginning and swift end.  The news reports are pretty much the same as in the commemorative edition (sometimes verbatim), but there’s still something new and surprising, making it an enlightening glimpse at a different era of reporting.  How’s this for unimaginable journalism , which appears in the magazine’s opening editorial?

The tremendous discrepancy between the competence of Israeli and Arab armies is the most obvious fact from which to start [in searching for meaning about the War].  The Israelis are very patriotic, brave and skillful soldiers, brilliantly led.  But that only gives half an explanation of their huge — and mounting — military superiority.  The other half may yield to an impolite but unavoidable question:  what is the matter with the Arab armies?  Was there ever a people so bellicose in politics, so reckless and raucous in hostility — and then so unpugnacious in pitched combat — as Nasser’s Egyptians?

The editors than take on what they perceive as the canard that the U.S. blindly allies itself with Israel.  Au contraire, say the editors.  The fact is that the U.S. allies itself with the moral side, and that side is Israel (can we find some editors to write this way now?):

The error [the belief that the U.S. unthinkingly supports Israel] arises out of the fact that in most disputes the U.S. has been found on Israel’s side.  That’s because it is the Arabs who challenge the existence of Israel, and not vice versa.

I really can’t add anything to that, can I? This is how normal people once viewed the world, before Leftism overtook academia and the media. People had a fundamental understanding of right versus, and they understood that, whether one viewed Israel from a historic, legal, military or moral perspective, Israel had the high ground.

 

[57Chevy]

                                          Shared with provisions of The Copyright Act
Tunisia's former president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and his wife sentenced to 35 years in prison
The Telegraph/20 Jun
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/tunisia/8588000/Tunisias-former-president-Zine-al-Abidine-Ben-Ali-and-his-wife-sentenced-to-35-years-in-prison.html

A Tunisian court on Monday sentenced ousted president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and his wife, in absentia, to 35 years in jail each after finding them guilty of theft and unlawful possession of cash and jewellery.

Reading out the verdict and sentence in the courtroom after just one day of deliberation, the judge also ruled Ben Ali and his wife would have to pay fines totalling 91 million Tunisian dinars (£40.6 million).

The judge said the verdict on other charges, relating to illegal possession of drugs and weapons, would be pronounced on June 30.

Ben Ali, who is in exile in Saudi Arabia, is being tried in absentia at the Tunis criminal court.

The court is hearing two embezzlement, money laundering and drug trafficking cases against the 74-year-old. It follows the discovery of around $27 million in jewels and cash plus drugs and weapons at two palaces outside Tunis after he flew to Saudi Arabia on Jan 14.

Saudi Arabia did not respond to an extradition request, and some Tunisians expressed frustration that he would not be present for his judgment.

article continues at link....

 

[a_majoor]

The ever expanding war. This might also be appropriate here

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/07/american-boots-hit-ground-somalia-after-drone-attacks/39539/

American Boots Hit the Ground in Somalia After Drone Attacks

ADAM CLARK ESTESJUL 02, 20111,414 ViewsComments (5)

Somalia is now the sixth country over which the United States is flying attack drones. Last month, the same Special Operations Command unit currently operating in Yemen carried out an attack on two leaders of the Somali militant group al-Shabab in a June 23 mission. The Washington Post reported the attack on Wednesday, and on Friday, Somalia's defense minister says that American military forces touched down to collect the bodies of the insurgents. Al-Shabab has carried out attacks on the Somali government, and while the government is calling on more American drone missions, they say they were not aware of the first drone attack. "But we are not complaining about that. Absolutely not. We welcome it," Defense Minister Mohamoud Haji Faqi told the Associated Press. "We understand the U.S.'s need to quickly act on its intelligence on the ground."

Some are questioning the apparently hasty mission, however. Joshua Foust, a fellow at the American Security Project and a contributor to The Atlantic, warns that the United States may not accomplish much without a broader strategic framework in Somalia:

There is a very poor understanding of Somalia's politics, which almost by design results in poorly crafted policy. It's why libertarians continue to insist Somalia is some sort of anarchic paradise, rather than  the chaotic, violent hellhole it is: they just don't know how or why the country functions the way it does. […] (Interpolation: not any libertarians I know....)

What we do know, based on past experience both within Somalia and with U.S. foreign policy in a general sense, is that without a strategic framework in place to help guide, inspire, and constrain policy, we really shouldn't expect anything different from the last 20 years of anarchic violence there. Because we won't be working toward anything else.

Eugene Robinson, a columnist at The Washington Post points out that drone warfare in general has not been publicly discussed in the United States. And the particular nature of "these antiseptic missile attacks" is raising concerns around the world. In addition practical and legal questions, the ethical quandary could lead to more animosity against Americans, Robinson says:

Most troubling of all, perhaps, are the moral and philosophical questions. This is a program not of war but of assassination. Clearly, someone like Ayman al-Zawahiri--formerly Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command, now the leader of al-Qaeda--is a legitimate target. But what about others such as the Somali “militants” who may wish to do us harm but have not actually done so? Are we certain that they have the capability of mounting some kind of attack? Absent any overt act, is there a point at which antipathy toward the United States, even hatred, becomes a capital offense?
Of course, the most lasting memory of United States military involvement in Somalia is the botched "Black Hawk Down" mission in 1993, when 18 American soldiers were killed in the Somali capital Mogadishu. That lasting memory will likely turn the spotlight towards Somalia should the U.S. government continue to engage there.

 

[a_majoor]

Monetary and political stresses within OPEC. Add the addition of non OPEC oil production ramping up due to new technologies like Frakking and the Gulf and Mid East could be thrown in even more turmoil as their income stream is disrupted:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/is-opec-headed-for-collapse/?print=1

Is OPEC Headed for Collapse?

Posted By Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi On July 3, 2011 @ 12:00 am In Uncategorized | 15 Comments

In the comments section [1] of one of my previous articles, a reader asked me whether the collapse of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC — responsible for 40% of the world’s petroleum output) is likely in the near future. Fair question, especially in light of the currently dysfunctional state of the Arab League. Are we really about to witness the end of a monopoly on global oil prices?

In short, it is too difficult to predict either way. I discussed earlier how the  Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC ) is starting to replace the Arab League as an inter-Arab political body and Sunni axis against Iran, shifting the onus of decision-making to the Gulf region. However, some of OPEC’s most prominent members [2] — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, and Kuwait — are also part of the GCC, and it is notable that neither Syria nor Egypt, both of whose states of political turmoil have been responsible for the Arab League’s decline, is a major exporter of petroleum or member of OPEC. Thus, the growing importance of the GCC as opposed to the diminishing relevance of the Arab League is unlikely to have a major impact on OPEC’s future.

What is more interesting, however, is the conflict within OPEC between a bloc of states led by Saudi Arabia and other OPEC members, led chiefly by Iran and Venezuela, on the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) decision [3] to tap into “strategic” (or “excess”) stockpiles of petroleum in an attempt to boost output, provide relief for high oil prices, and to stabilize the global economy. The IEA hopes to increase production by around 2 million barrels per day. Following a meeting that resulted in a deadlock at OPEC’s headquarters in Vienna on June 8, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait parted ways with other OPEC members and promised to raise production levels by 1.5 million barrels per day. Indeed, over the past month the Saudis have already increased output by approximately 500,000 barrels per day.

Now, ostensibly, Saudi Arabia is complying with the IEA’s initiative, but John Shimkus [4] plausibly argues for another motive behind the Saudis’ behavior: namely, fear of Iran’s nuclear program, which is probably striving to develop nuclear weapons. As pointed out before, Iran has been at the head of an effort to block release of excess oil reserves. Hence, we should not be surprised if Saudi Arabia and its allies in OPEC might wish to flood the market with their own petroleum in the hope of bringing Iran’s government to the point of bankruptcy and thereby halting the Islamic Republic’s goals for its nuclear program.

To achieve such an objective, the Gulf nations led by Saudi Arabia would have to produce an extra 4 million barrels per day, besides having to enforce a naval blockade against Iranian oil tankers. Of course, the latter act is a remote prospect, as it would be perceived by Iran as a casus belli. Therefore, as Shimkus concludes: “What is more likely to occur is a continued increase in supply coming from Saudi Arabia [resulting in a] prolonged cut into Tehran’s oil profits.”

Nonetheless, Saudi Arabia also faces the problem of competition from Russia [5] in the oil market further east, where much Gulf oil is heading to facilitate the expansion of growing economic powers such as India and China. Russia now supplies almost five times more crude oil through its East Siberia-Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline than in 2008, and given ESPO oil’s higher quality, there is much more incentive for refiners in East Asia to buy Russian petroleum over Gulf oil grades, such that Russia now sells around 300,000 barrels per day to China.

To sum up: while the state of the Arab League has little bearing on OPEC’s functioning, there is potential for a major split within the cartel concerning the question of boosting output to dampen high oil prices and stabilize the global economy. Unsurprisingly, the rivalry is once again between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Saudis could try to attain a massive growth in petroleum production, but one wonders whether the Wahhabi kingdom can compete with Russia in the lucrative Asian markets, perhaps leading to a reversal on Saudi Arabia’s plan to go along with the IEA. All we can do is watch how events will unfold.

Yet the more important point is that the United States cannot depend on oil imports for much longer. It is undeniable that demand for petroleum is accelerating at a much quicker pace than possible short-term increases in output. The need for energy independence is becoming ever more urgent.

Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/is-opec-headed-for-collapse/

URLs in this post:

[1] comments section: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/06/the_gulf_cooperation_council_vs_iran.html

[2] most prominent members: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEC

[3] International Energy Agency’s (IEA) decision: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304447804576413860503688364.html

[4] John Shimkus: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Saudi-Arabia-Using-Oil-as-an-Economic-Weapon-Against-Iran.html

[5] competition from Russia: http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/06/29/155373.html

 

[a_majoor]

A discussion about how social media helped/hindered the Arab Spring movement. A particularly interesting comment in the article speaks of how the amorphus and selp organizing nature of the movement made it hard for the regimes to target them or build civil support for countermovements. On a slightly different scale, the same thing is happening with the TEA party movement in the United States; there is no "leader" and the various issues that unite TEA partiers are "universal" in the sense that everyone can identify with the issue and "gets it" on a visceral level:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/guest/27110/?p1=A5

The Middle Ground between Technology and Revolutions

Social media didn't cause the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, but it did achieve unique visibility.

Aaron Bady 08/26/2011

Is there still a debate on whether social media can cause revolutions? If this was ever a serious question, it was mainly an argument between straw men: on the one hand, wild idealists who saw the internet as an all-encompassing force for freedom and on the other, the crusty curmudgeons who fear technology and pooh-pooh the idea that social media is good for anything but posting pictures of cats. NYU professor Jay Rosen characterized the debate as "Wildly overdrawn claims about social media, often made with weaselly question marks (like: 'Tunisia's Twitter revolution?') and the derisive debunking that follows from those claims ('It's not that simple!')" and argued that these "only appear to be opposite perspectives. In fact, they are two modes in which the same weightless discourse is conducted."

I think we can safely put that debate aside. While Malcolm Gladwell made a lot of noise last October by declaring that "the revolution will not be tweeted," reporting like John Pollock's "Streetbook" demolishes the idea that there is some intrinsic and impassable barrier separating "street" activism from the kind of "slacktivist" organizing of which Gladwell is so dismissive. But it's worth noting that even the most visible "cyber-utopians" and "cyber-pessimists" seem to be converging on a point somewhere in the middle. In March, Clay Shirky significantly qualified the kinds of claims he makes for the centrality of social media—arguing that it is access to each other, not access to media, that makes revolutions—while Evgeny Morozov has pointed out that both he and Gladwell have been clear that the internet can be an effective tool for political change, as long as it is "used by grassroots organizations (as opposed to atomized individuals)." If you can see the fundamental divide between these arguments, you see more clearly than I do.

What's different, I suspect, is that we can now ask the question in the past tense, and the answer is that middle ground onto which both sides are converging, a very middling "kind of, but not completely." What happened in Egypt and Tunisia were revolutions, but they were obviously not caused by Facebook or Twitter: as Ramesh Srinivasan pointed out only 15% of Egyptians have Internet access, and only a small percentage use social media sites. But along with reporting like Pollock's, the work done by people like Zeynep Tufekci, Samir Garbaya, and Ramesh Srinivasan allows us to stop talking, hypothetically, about "technology" and "revolutions" in the abstract, and to start looking at what it was about these revolutions and these regimes that gave these social media tools such potency, visibility, and usefulness. Which is all to the good. Talking about the technology risks making Facebook or Twitter the hero of the story, thereby turning our attention away from the courage and commitment of face-to-face organizers and masses in the street.

But while Malcolm Gladwell may still think that "the least interesting thing [about the protests in Egypt] is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media," it still seems undeniable that social media has achieved a unique kind of visibility in the story of the "Arab Spring." You cannot tell the story of Khaled Said, after all, without talking about social media: he was dragged out of a cybercafé and beaten to death for posting a video showing police corruption, whereupon pictures of his battered face became a mobilizing point for the Facebook group "We Are All Khaled Said," moderated by Google executive Wael Ghonim. Ghonim's declaration to Wolf Blitzer on CNN that "This revolution started online...on Facebook" is not really credible, of course; at most, Facebook organizing managed to build on and enhance the Kifaya movement, which started years ago. But if Facebook is not the whole story, it is certainly part of the story. And what are we to make of the story of the Egyptian newborn named "Facebook"? Or of photos like this one?

It seems to me that there are two significantly different perspectives from which to ask the question of what social media technology does. On the one hand, what Pollock documents in the streets of Tunisia is the way social networking can enhance and enable forms of organizing that are utterly precedented: groups organized around Facebook merge seamlessly with groups organized around football. And as I think both Shirky and Morozov would agree, the important thing is the groups themselves, the grass-roots organizing and access-to-each other that could start with something like football, but which could also be maintained and expanded by something like Facebook. In this sense, "social media" is only one medium of revolution among many.

But the medium is also a message. After all, to join a Facebook group like "We are all Khaled Said" is not the same as joining the group for Hosni Mubarak's National Democratic Party. To "like" Hosni Mubarak would be to endorse a leader—the leader, in fact—but the extremely visible leaderlessness of "We are all Khalid Said" seems to be exactly the point. In other words, instead of the personality cult by which Presidents-for-life like Ben Ali and Mubarak have ruled for decades, the masses of nameless Cairenes and Tunisians—assembled on Facebook and in the street—represents a kind of anti-personality cult. When everyone is "Khaled Said" (or "Mohamed Bouazizi" in Tunisia), after all, the story being told is not only about that the nation is united, but that it is united by the common experience of having suffered at the hands of the state. In this sense, instead of "leaderless revolutions," perhaps we might think about how Facebook helped facilitate a "revolution of leaderlessness"?

If we pull back from the level of the street, in other words, and think about the story being told by people like Wael Ghonim about the revolution, "Facebook" doesn't just represent a medium of street-level organizing. It's also a media messaging strategy, a way of branding and identifying the revolution for the millions who were watching. And it's always worth remembering that these revolutions didn't only succeed in the streets: Mubarak and Ben Ali both lost power when their own militaries (and world opinion) turned decisively against them, siding instead with the nation united in opposition. But how did "the nation" come to seem so completely united? What happened to the ethnic, sectarian, political, and regional divisions that supposedly made it necessary for a strong man dictator like Mubarak to hold the state together? Remember, this has been the argument made for years (and by Mubarak, quite explicitly): Egyptians are so fundamentally divided that without a strong leader, the state would come apart at the seams, would explode into chaos. A Facebook group like "We are all Khaled Said" not only makes exactly the opposite argument—that Egypt is a nation united by its victimhood at the hands of the state— but it demonstrates, quite visibly, that this is the case.

What social media debunkers like Malcolm Gladwell have always argued is that platforms like Facebook are poorly suited for producing strong consensus on a program of action; for Gladwell, the Civil Rights movement was a social movement that could not have been tweeted. And this may be true. But if the movements to oust Mubarak and Ben Ali had been led by a single charismatic leader, or by a party with a clear platform, it would have been much easier for Mubarak or Ben Ali to divide the opposition, to make it seem not like a nation united in opposition to its leadership, but as a particular party or demagogue striving to supplant him. If the Muslim Brotherhood had taken a clear leadership role, after all, Mubarak would have received much more support from those leery of Islamist terrorism. But if the movement had taken on an exclusively secularist character, substantial portions of the population would have been alienated from it. In other words, what Gladwell flags as a weakness of social media—the difficulty of producing strong commitment to a single idea or plan—might actually be what makes it uniquely valuable. By uniting around the crimes of Ben Ali and Mubarak, the much more difficult political question of what kind of government was to succeed him could be deferred until later.

Aaron Bady is a PhD student in African Studies in University of California Berkeley's Department of English, and the author of the blog zunguzungu.com.

 

[Edward Campbell]

the epitome of a "failed state" must be Somalia.

Here is an article, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail, is an article with which I (broadly) agree:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/africa-mideast/somalia/war-and-corruption-are-responsible-for-famines-not-droughts/article2152432/

War and corruption are responsible for famines, not droughts

THOMAS KENEALLY
From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Last updated Sunday, Sep. 04, 2011

The first part of a week-long look at the crisis in the Horn of Africa

I have never quite believed that simplistic formula invoked in so many modern famines: “caused by a severe drought.”

Not that there isn't a severe drought now in southern Somalia, neighbouring Ethiopia and parts of Kenya. There undeniably is. Last October to December, rains did not appear at all in the area. The March-April rains this year were late. My skepticism arises, though, because I come from perhaps the driest continent on Earth, which has suffered recurrent droughts from earliest settler experience, including the El Nino-influenced drought that seemed to run nearly non-stop from the early 1990s to last year. Many of our farmers were forced off land their families had held for generations.

There has always been drought-induced anguish in the Australian bush. But no one starves. Malnutrition, undeniably, and particularly in indigenous communities, but no famine.

How is it the citizens of drought-stricken homelands in Somalia and the “triangle of death” have none of the guarantees my drought-stricken compatriots have? It's because, as the famed aphorism of Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen puts it, “no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.”

Similarly, an Irish friend of mine, a respected historian of famine named Cormac Ó Gráda, writes, “Agency is more important than a food-production shortfall. Mars counts for more than Malthus.” In contrast to Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus, the 19th-century population theorist who blamed overpopulation and land overuse for the Irish famine, Mr. Ó Gráda sees war and other human actions as the engines of famine. His point is evident in the Horn of Africa now.

One of the affected areas of Ethiopia is, for example, the Ogaden, whose people consider themselves kinsman of the Somalis and are similarly Muslim. It is in their territory that conflict between the Ethiopian army and Somali rebels has occurred over recent years, with many savageries and violation.


The central regime in Addis Ababa has never felt kindly or acted tenderly toward the Ogadenians anyhow, nor given them a decent share of roads or clinics or schools. Is it a priority now to feed and care for them?

All famines share common qualities, a similar DNA, that reduce acts of God like drought from real causes to mere tipping or triggering mechanisms. Famines often occur where farming and grazing are suddenly disrupted to fit some ideological plan of the leaders of the country, as in Mao's Great Leap Forward in the 1950s, Ethiopia in the 1980s and North Korea repeatedly since the mid-1990s.

Famines also strike in areas where people live in hunger and malnutrition year after year. Malnutrition is a sensitivity-numbing word – it does not capture the swollen joints, flaking skin, retarded growth, porous and fragile bone, diminished height, lethargy and disabling confusion of soul that characterize it.

As it's been said, a malnourished child can still howl out; a starving one has no strength to.

As many as 60 per cent of North Korean children aged six months to seven years were malnourished in 2010, so they were set up to become the victims of famine over the past year. Once again, ideology and military priorities offer a better explanation than mere food shortage: The regime's re-evaluation of its currency wiped out the spending power of families, all to sustain itself and its army.

Similarly, southern Somalia, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, had the highest level of child malnutrition on Earth in July this year. A few unlucky factors, and malnutrition becomes famine.

People in that rural hinterland already lived off only a few food staples. Among some pastoral people who survive by livestock holdings, death of animals by June this year was reaching 60 per cent. The value of a cow relative to how much grain a family could buy with it had fallen by two-thirds. Grain and lentils are what farmers live off there. As with the Irish and their buttermilk and potatoes long ago, the East African diet is balanced on a two-legged stool. Still, if drought were the cause, we could just help them until the rains returned. But it's the helping that is complicated. Climate isn't the complication; humans are.

REFUSING AID FROM AN IDEOLOGICAL ‘ENEMY'

The Ethiopian army invaded a civil-war-savaged Somalia in 2006 and, after a hard-fisted occupation, installed an unpopular and only partly successful transitional federal government. Assorted militias, such as the oft-mentioned al-Shabab (“the youth”), retained the hinterland, where conflicts, raids and molestation of citizens by both sides have been common ever since.

Al-Shabab has been driven from Mogadishu, but it is the most commonly cited military villain in this famine. Al-Shabab believes that many Western agencies oppose it because of its desire to make Somalia an Islamist state.

Therefore, it restricts the entry of agencies and non-governmental organizations into its area to those it considers neutral – Red Cross and Red Crescent in particular. It rules out the World Food Program and UNICEF and agencies such as CARE. It has created its own Office for the Supervision to Regulate the Affairs of Foreign Agencies.

There is denial that famine actually exists too. “The UN wants Somalia to be in famine,” a spokesman, Ali Mohamud Rage, has said. “They want push pressure on us through such calls. We agree that there is hunger in some areas, but there is no famine in Somalia.”

Agencies and aid bodies are not always without their flaws, but it is al-Shabab, not drought, that stands between the starving and the food.

Al-Shabab not only threatens aid workers but tries to prevent and punish refugees who try to cross into so-called Christian countries such as Ethiopia and Kenya.

It must be terrifying for the men, women and children now trying to get into Kenya to find themselves surrounded by militia men emerging from the thorn trees.

Is the transitional federal government in Mogadishu an improvement or another face of the problem?

It seems that it is either too venal or too powerless to prevent the plunder of aid food.

Joakim Gundul, a Kenyan assessor of aid results, says, “While helping starving people, you are also feeding the power groups who make a business out of the disaster. … You're saving people's lives today so they can die tomorrow.”

HOW THE NEW HONESTY MIGHT BACKFIRE

It seems to me that in earlier famines, this issue of human agency has not been nearly as honestly and openly discussed by journalists and officials. K'naan, the famed multitalented Canadian Somali, is rightly appalled at what he sees as a slow reaction of the world to this crisis, but the question arises whether the greater honesty about human blame is slowing the response.

The vigour and enthusiasm that came into play in the West's reaction to the Ethiopian famines of the early 1980s has not yet appeared.

Aid to Ethiopia lagged in the early phases of that famine too. The West was dubious about then-president Mengistu Haile Mariam's closeness to the Soviets until BBC and CBC footage, combined with the involvement of rock stars and telethons, shamed governments into increasing the flow of aid.

And not only governments: A farmer from Guelph, Ont., Fred Benson, galvanized by the news from Ethiopia, gave his 107-acre farm to a Mennonite aid agency for the sake of people whose faces he had never seen.

Yet it wasn't much discussed at the time that Mr. Mengistu was arming his troops for a so-called Red Star offensive against the Eritrean rebels with expensive Russian armaments bought with the substance of his starving nation.

With my own eyes, at the time, I saw the astonishing quantities of arms and aircraft he had brought to Eritrea, when I was caught unexpectedly for the better part of the week in a besieged town named Nacfa in the Eritrean highlands.

As an Eritrean minder told me, “He's blowing schools and clinics out of the mouth of his cannon.”

At the same time, Mr. Mengistu was putting great emphasis on celebrating the 10th anniversary of his regime, such that Addis Ababa became a Disneyland of Stalinist achievement in the midst of a hungering populace.

Few voices were raised to tell us all this, or to tell us about the forced resettlement of millions into unfamiliar country. If we had known it all, would Fred Benson have been as generous? Would there have been a Bob Geldof?

For us today, unfortunately, this Horn of Africa famine is another in a string of almost expected events. We expect that the world will get some emergency aid there. We feel as if we have heard the whole story before. Yet it is an utterly fresh and terrifying experience for the people of the “triangle.” They have tried every way of survival. They have skimped at meals, have seen what crops they could grow wither and have lost their livestock or tried to sell them in a glutted market. Meanwhile, the grain shortage sends prices up, and even encourages hoarding by merchants, while in their huts farmers face the massive question of whether they should eat next year's seed crop, one of the final acts of familial desperation.

These starving have looked for eyes of undigested grain in cow manure; they have foraged for wild foods, yehub nuts and berries, in competition with their neighbours. Any family jewellery has been sold. Many starving women probably have been forced to make a Sophie's choice, whether to feed a child likely to die or one not already sick.

And as they slide toward starvation, the devastation of their immune systems will attract assaults by opportunist bacteria. There's no sense of banal repetition in their struggles.

Perhaps we must try a new theorem: to try to get the Somalis and the Ethiopians fed precisely because their governments have not yet created societies in which supply and support are taken for granted.

Aid agencies could be given breaks from endless pie charts about administration costs and aid delivery per donor dollar and stop pretending that they will be permitted to go everywhere they like and to do all the good they can. They should simply invite us into the general struggle to deliver aid as energetically, cleverly and well as the malign circumstances on the desolate ground permit them.

As for the regimes, Mr. Sen's statement glimmers like a tinsel promise, an undeniable though not immediately useful tool, out there in what aid workers call “the field.”

But in approaching that dilemma – how to make regimes behave – I have moved far into “wiser-heads-than-mine” territory. And by the time we solved it, there would be millions dead in Africa.

Thomas Keneally, an Australian novelist and writer, is the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler's Ark (which became the film Schindler's List), The Great Shame and, recently, Three Famines: Starvation and Politics.

Now, surely, we, as humans, have a moral obligation to do what we can to solve the starvation crisis. Maybe not ~ maybe we need to suppress our normal human emotions and try to force the Somalis (and others) to help themselves.

Or, perhaps, the best way we, the US led West, can help, really help, not just in the immediate term, is to invade, destroy the existing power structures - in more than one country - and then leave the people to, as some thoughtful Americans put it, "institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

In any event, it is time to lay the blame for starvation where it belongs ... which is not with the climate.

 

[a_majoor]

Egypt's condition deteriorates:

http://pajamasmedia.com/spengler/2011/09/13/endgame-for-egypt/?print=1

Endgame for Egypt

Posted By David P. Goldman On September 13, 2011 @ 3:21 pm In Uncategorized | 120 Comments

Robert Musil’s Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften (“The Man Without Qualities”), one of the great novels of the past century, is a portrait of the Austrian early in 1914. The readers know that their silly world will come to a terrible end a few months later with the outbreak of war, but the protagonists do not. Musil published a first volume and spent the rest of his life trying to write a second, without success, for it is the sort of story that has no end except for the abyss.

Arab politics today has a Musil-like quality of unreality, for the conclusion will be the collapse of the Egyptian state. The misnamed “Arab Spring,” really a convulsion of a dying society, began with food shortages. Egypt imports half its caloric consumption, 45% of its people are illiterate, its university graduates are unemployable, its $10 billion a year tourism industry is shuttered for the duration, and its foreign exchange reserves are gradually disappearing. In August, the central bank’s reported reserves fell below what the bank calls the “danger level” of six months’ import coverage, or $25 billion, from $36 billion in February, although I suspect that even this number is bloated by $5 to $10 billion of Algerian and Saudi loans and trade credits. Despite reports in the press that food price inflation in Egypt has slowed, Arab-language Egyptian media report that the prices of some staples, like rice and sugar, have risen by 50% or more since March. The military government is distributing bread and propane (the main cooking fuel).

Egypt turned down a proposed loan from the International Monetary Fund earlier this year because the military government could not accept the conditionality attached to IMF money. The Gulf States and the West may keep Egypt on life support, which would leave a large proportion of Egyptians in a limbo of extreme destitution. The fiscal collapse of Southern Europe (and severe problems elsewhere) makes this an inopportune time to come to the West with a begging bowl. As for the Gulf States: they are not even meeting their commitments to the Palestine Authority, and can’t be expected to carry a $15 to $20 billion annual financing requirement for Egypt.

It does not compute. Western economists can concoct all the economic recovery plans in the world, but a country that can’t teach half its people to read, and can’t produce employable university graduates, and can’t feed itself, is going to go down the drain. Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak kept Egypt under control by keeping most of its people poor, ignorant, and on the farm, and by warehousing its youth in state-run diploma mills. After sixty years of such abuse, Egypt simply can’t get there from here.

The result, I predict, will be a humanitarian catastrophe that makes Somalia look like a picnic. It’s not surprising that the Egyptian mob might attack the Israeli embassy. The Egyptian street has nothing to do but rise up against perceived oppressors, because nothing good awaits them; and the desperation that will follow the collapse of the Arab “Spring” threatens every Middle Eastern regime, such that the rulers have to try to get out in front of the rage. But what will they actually do? The Egyptian military is hanging onto power by its fingernails. If it attacks Israel, it will lose, and generals will be hanged from lamp posts. The Syrian military is too busy killing protesters to attack Israel, or to assist Hezbollah in a confrontation with Israel.

What we are likely to witness during the next two years will be repellent, even horrifying — but not necessarily dangerous.

Article printed from Spengler: http://pajamasmedia.com/spengler

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/spengler/2011/09/13/endgame-for-egypt/

 

[a_majoor]

Comparing Israel to the Netherlands in the 1600's (and a sidebar look at the collapse of Turkey):

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MI13Ak01.html

Israel as the Dutch Republic
in the Thirty Years War
By Spengler

A small country, its land reclaimed from a hostile nature, fights for survival against overwhelming odds for 80 years. Surrounded by enemies dedicated to its destruction, it fields the world's most innovative army and beats them. Despite three generations of war, the arts, sciences and commerce flourish. Its population grows quickly while the conflict empties the failed states that surround it. And it becomes a beacon of hope for the cause of freedom.

I refer not to Israel, but to the Dutch Republic of the 17th century, whose struggle for freedom against Spain set the precedent for the American Revolution. The final three decades of the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) coincided with the terrible Thirty Years War.

In 1600, a million-and-a-half Dutchmen faced an Austrian-Spanish


alliance with more than 10 times their population; by 1648, the people of the Netherlands numbered two million, while the Spanish and Austrians had perhaps a quarter of their people. Holland had become the richest land in the world, with 16,000 merchant vessels supplying a global trading empire, graced by artists like Rembrandt and Vermeer and scientists like Huygens and Leeuwenhoek.

We might speak of the "isolation" of the Dutch at the outset of the Thirty Years War, although England backed them from the outset; that is why Philip II of Spain launched the Great Armada in 1588. Holland faced more formidable enemies than modern Israel; in place of the feckless Third World armies of Egypt and Syria, the Dutch fought Spain, the superpower of the 16th century, with the world's best professional infantry bought with New World loot. The superior Dutch navy disrupted Spanish lines of communication, and a new kind of mobile infantry defeated the static Spanish square with continuous musket fire.

Holland confronted a formidable adversary, determined to extirpate its Protestant religion; Israel faces a group of failed or gradually-failing states whose capacity to make war is eroding. Seven months after the start of the Arab uprisings, Israel's position is a paradox.

The prospects for a formal peace are the worst since 1977, while Israel's military position has improved. The Syrian army is too busy butchering protesters to attack the Jewish state, and the uncertain position of the Bashar al-Assad regime weakens its Lebanese client Hezbollah. Egyptian popular sentiment has turned nastily against Israel, but the last thing the Egyptian army needs at the moment is a war with Israel that it inevitably would lose.

Egypt is a failed state. It has no way out. Chinese pigs will eat before the Egyptian poor, as wealthy Asians outbid impoverished Arabs for grain. Egypt imports half its caloric consumption, and its foreign exchange reserves last week dipped below what its central bank called the "danger" level of $25 billion covering six months of imports, down from $36 billion before Hosni Mubarak was toppled.
The reported reserve numbers probably include Saudi and Algerian emergency loans. With no tourism and much of the economy in shambles, the country is sliding towards destitution; it barely can feed itself at the moment. What will Egypt do when its reverses are gone? Almost half of Egyptian adults can't read, and the 800,000 young people who graduate yearly from the diploma mills are qualified only to stamp each other's identity cards. It is not surprising that football rowdies attacked Israel's embassy in Cairo last week.

The rupture in Israeli-Turkish relations, in turn, reflects Turkish weakness as well as the fanaticism of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey faces a short-term squeeze and a long-term crisis. Erdogan won re-election last June more as an economic manager than as neo-Ottoman imperial leader, but his economic success rested on a 40% rate of bank credit growth, and a consequent current account deficit equal to 11% of gross domestic product, the same level as Greece or Portugal.

As I reported last month (Instant obsolescence of the Turkish model, Asia Times Online, August 10, 2011), Turkey's stock market has fallen by nearly half in dollar terms since late 2010, and its currency has lost 20% of its value. Erdogan's economic Cave of Wonders has dissolved into the Anatolian sand, and Turkey faces a long period of belt-tightening.

Turkey's economic problems are a discomfort; its ethnic problems, by contrast, present an existential threat in the long run. In a quarter of a century, Kurdish will be the cradle-tongue of nearly half of all Turkish children, as Kurds have four to five children per family while Turkish-speakers have just 1.5. At some point, Turkey in its present form will cease to exist. Kurdish nationalism is stronger than ever; as Omar Aspinar [1] of the Brookings Institution wrote on September 11 in Zaman Online:

    Kurdish political aspirations have reached unprecedented levels in the last 10 years ... Kurdish ethnic, cultural and political demands are fueled by a young and increasingly resentful generation of Kurds who are vocal and frustrated not only in Eastern Anatolia but also in Turkey's large Western cities including Istanbul, Izmir, Mersin and Adana. Turkey's nightmare scenario is Turkish-Kurdish ethnic violence in such western urban centers.

The Kurds know that the demographic future belongs to them, and that Erdogan's frantic calls on Turkish women to have more babies will do nothing to change matters. "The Kurdish issue," warns Aspinar," remains Turkey's Achilles' heel."

Rather than isolate Israel diplomatically, Turkey and Egypt have buttressed its diplomatic position. By declaring the United Nations' Palmer Commission report on the May 2010 Gaza flotilla incident "null and void", Turkish President Abdullah Gul put his country in the position of the rogue state. Egypt's failure to prevent an attack on Israel's embassy was a gross violation of international standards. Diplomacy, though, makes little difference, because Israel requires only the support of the United States.

The most likely outcome is a prolonged low-intensity war in which Israel suffers more rocket attacks from Lebanon and Gaza, and occasional terrorist infiltration from Sinai and the West Bank, but no organized military threat from its immediate neighbors. Iran's nuclear program presents an existential threat to Israel, and remains the great unknown in the equation.

As Jonathan Speyer [2] wrote in a September 11 report for the Gloria Center, Iran's attempt to lead an anti-Israel resistance bloc "has fallen victim to the Arab Spring", particularly after Tehran aided the despised Syrian regime. But Speyer warns that this "should because for neither satisfaction nor complacency".

A country that knows it must fight daily for its existence may thrive under interrupted stress. That is unimaginable for the Israeli peace camp, which dwindled into political insignificance after the Intifada of 2000, as well as for America's liberal Jews. But most Israelis seem to have adapted well to a long-term war regime.

The Dutch certainly did. When the Thirty Years War began in 1618 over Bohemia's attempts to cast off Austrian rule, Holland knew that Spain would take the opportunity to settle accounts with its breakaway Protestant province. Expecting a Spanish invasion, the English Separatists living in Holland decided instead to become Pilgrims to the New World. ''The Spaniard,'' their leader William Bradford wrote in 1618, ''might prove as cruel as the savages of America, and the famine and pestilence as sore here as there.''

A year after the Mayflower sailed to Plymouth Rock in 1620, Spain sent an army into Holland, and in 1625 the Spanish took the great Dutch fortress of Breda, just 90 kilometers from Amsterdam; Velasquez's canvas depicting the city's surrender hangs in Madrid's Prado Museum. The Dutch defenders kept the Spanish army away from their coastal cities only by opening the dikes and flooding the countryside. Had the Pilgrims stayed and the Spanish won, the Pilgrims likely would have been burned as heretics.

Spain embargoed Dutch trade and succeeded in damaging its economy, although Dutch attacks on the Spanish fleets bringing treasure from the New World provided some breathing room. One by one, Holland saw its German and Danish Protestant allies beaten by Austro-Spanish alliance, and by 1625 was fighting alone. By the late 1620s, though, Holland was winning a war of attrition against overextended Spain, and could match the Spanish in the field.

The military balance remained precarious; in 1629 the Spanish army within 40 kilometers of Amsterdam. The turning point came in 1632, when the Dutch took the Flemish city of Maastricht, breaking Spain's hold on the Catholic Low Countries. When Spain and France went to war in 1635, the victorious Netherlands dominated European trade and its "Golden Age" reached fruition.

Holland boasted the world's strongest navy and a dominant position in world shipping trade, and its home provinces became impregnable.

The Dutch were smart and tough, but they beat the Spanish empire in large part by being better than their adversaries. The Dutch republic offered Europe's first example of religious toleration. Iberian Jews and French Huguenot found refuge in Holland against religious toleration, and the skilled immigrants made invaluable contributions to the Dutch economic miracle - something like the Russian immigrants to Israel today.

When Dutch armies invaded the Spanish Netherlands (now Belgium) they offered religious freedom to the Catholics they absorbed. Countries that attract talented people have an enormous advantage over countries that drive them out.

Without stretching the analogy too far, the religious conflict that surrounded 17th century Holland have something in common with today's Middle East. Americans know almost nothing of the Thirty Years War; not a single Hollywood film nor one popular novel recounts its major events. It is a tale of unrelenting misery, of battles and marches and countermarches that left nearly half of Central Europe dead.

It degenerated into a duel between two powers who both acted out of the mystical conviction that they were God's chosen people: the France of Cardinal Richelieu and the Spain of the Count-Duke Olivares. It foreshadowed the neo-paganism that nearly conquered Europe in what British statesman Winston Churchill called "the second Thirty Years War" of 1914-1945.

The conflict between Sunni and Shi'ite Islam may cause something like a Thirty Years War in the Middle East, as Arabs, Turks and Persians fight for the mantle of Divine Election. The difference is that Europe descended into the maelstrom from a peak of economic and cultural success; the Muslim nations of the Middle East are goaded by a profound sense of humiliation and failure.

What transpires may be even more horrific than the events of 1618-1648. The methods the American military employed to win a respite in Iraq might set such a conflict in motion, as I argued last year in "General Petraeus' Thirty Years War" [3]. Once again, the nation that embodies religious faith embedded in democratic values will prevail despite the chaos around it.

Notes
1. Time to focus on the Kurdish question Today's Zaman, September 11, 2011. 2. Israel, Iran and the New Middle East Gloria Center, September 11, 2001.
3. General Petraeus' Thirty Years War Asia Times Online, May 4, 2010.

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman, the author of How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam is Dying Too), just published by Regnery. His collection of essays from First Things magazine and Asia Times Online, It's Not the End of the World - It's Just the End of You (Van Praag) appeared this month as well.

 

[a_majoor]

More disconnects between Libya, Syria and Iran WRT foreign policy:

http://pajamasmedia.com/michaelledeen/2011/09/21/the-shuttered-white-house-and-its-fantasies/?print=1

The Shuttered White House and Its Fantasies

Posted By Michael Ledeen On September 21, 2011 @ 3:11 pm In Uncategorized | 27 Comments

I know exactly what is going on inside the Obama White House; the outside world has been banned and only the true believers are welcome.

This has very little to do with the many unique features of this administration. It is typical of any administration under siege, and it is as understandable and inevitable as it is unfortunate and even dangerous.  I know it well, having seen it with my own eyes during the Iran-Contra siege of the Reagan White House 25 years ago, when the president’s men and women concentrated all their energies and all their passions on “saving” the president from what many of them believed was the return of Watergate. I don’t know if the Obama faithful have an historical template for the current crisis, but their behavior, like Obama’s, is altogether familiar. The White House is hermetically sealed to reality and the president simply repeats his mantras and tries to look unconcerned, even confident and feisty.

That there is little room for reality at the highest levels of the administration is all too obvious. The president’s public statements are repeatedly off key, responding to imaginary events rather than real ones, and sometimes totally dissonant, as when he gave a speech about jobs at a company that was closing down, or in his increasingly odd and incoherent efforts in foreign policy. For example, consider these amazing lines from a story by Helene Cooper in the New York Times, concerning administration planning for Syria after the now-anticipated fall of Bashar Assad:

    …the Obama administration has begun to make plans for American policy in the region after he exits.

    In coordination with Turkey, the United States has been exploring how to deal with the possibility of a civil war among Syria’s Alawite, Druse, Christian and Sunni sects, a conflict that could quickly ignite other tensions in an already volatile region.

As Ms. Cooper explains, these explorations are driven by a desire to avoid repetition of the Bush administration’s errors in Iraq, where the United States did not adequately prepare for what came after the successful invasion of the country. A laudable goal, although the description of what happened in Iraq is typically misguided (there was no civil war; Syria and Iran supported a guerrilla war against the allied coalition), and the list of potential fighters in Syria surprisingly omits the Kurds, arguably the most important of all because they are a major factor in Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. But it is the four words “in coordination with Turkey” that demonstrate the extent to which wishful thinking has trumped reality in the Obama White House, for the Turks are hardly ideal allies in the Middle East these days — they are seeking to establish their own hegemony — and as long as he is in that dangerous frame of mind, Erdogan is a totally unsuitable partner.  Listen [1] to our own Barry Rubin sum it up:

    Turkey’s Islamist regime subverted and then opposed sanctions against Iran. That regime also declared Iran and Syria, Hamas and Hizballah to be its friends. It also sponsored a terrorist group (the IHH) to provoke Israel into an international incident that would generate Islamist martyrs and dead Israeli soldiers. Now, rejecting Israeli conciliation attempts (regrets; donations to families of jihadists who got killed trying to kill Israelis), the Turkish regime escalated to the verge of war.

Worse yet, Obama isn’t actively trying to help the victims of the mass murder in Syria, let alone bring down Assad, despite his proclamation that  “Assad must go.”  He is simply reading tea leaves, trying to avoid looking like an imperialist, and hoping to be able to take credit if anything good should happen.

But what if nothing good does happen?  What if Assad wins?  Ms. Cooper knows it’s possible, but the folks talking to her have a strange way of discussing it:

    To be sure, Mr. Assad may yet prove as immovable as his father, Hafez al-Assad, was before him. Many foreign policy analysts say that the longer Mr. Assad remains in power, the more violent the country will become. And that violence, they say, could unintentionally serve Mr. Assad’s interests by allowing him to use it to justify a continuing crackdown.

As if there weren’t already a “continuing crackdown”?  As if Assad weren’t already ordering the slaughter of his citizens — sometimes randomly, as when his artillery lobs shells into cities full of protesters?  His violence is quite intentional, and he doesn’t “use it” to justify the slaughter.  It’s what he does, as his father before him.

Let’s put it in simple English:  Assad is slaughtering the Syrians who are challenging him.  The longer he stays, the more he slaughters.  And he may win.  Then what?  There’s no answer to this obvious question, because the White House is planning its moves after the happy moment when Assad falls and Obama takes credit for it and Erdogan calls the White House to get his orders.

Not so long ago, the White House was telling journalists that there was a new “Obama Doctrine,” driven by the three Valkyries (Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power), according to which the United States is obliged to rally to the side of people protesting for their freedom against regimes killing them because of their courage.  That’s why, we were told, Obama authorized the American Air Force to bomb the Libyan armed forces.

That was clearly a hoax, wasn’t it?  For the Syrian and Iranian regimes have murdered more of their own than Qadaffi ever did, and they kill Americans too.  So if it was right to support Qadaffi’s opposition, it’s even more right to support Assad’s and Khamenei’s.  Forget it.  Instead, our most dangerous enemies — who turn out to be the most bloodthirsty killers in the region — are more often than not treated as if they were potential allies who have temporarily gone astray.  Take the Taliban, for example.

Just as LBJ was forever trying to apply just the right amount of violence in order to get the North Vietnamese to “reason together” at the negotiating table, so we are forever organizing (or, at a minimum, supporting) peace talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan.  The result:  the chief negotiator gets blown up [2] by a terrorist with a bomb in his turban (as in the famous Danish cartoon of Mohammed with a bomb in his own turban that was judged so insulting to the “Muslim world” [another fantasy] that it was used as an excuse for riots in Copenhagen and all over the Middle East).  And it seems, at least from a distance, that Taliban attacks are increasing, not diminishing.

Or take Iran.  Nowhere is the administration’s incoherence more dramatic.  The regime is conducting a widespread war against Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as slaughtering its own.  From time to time the administration, including the president himself,  puts out information confirming it all.  But not only is there no support for the Iranian people — who have long since demonstrated their hatred of the regime and their willingness to risk life and limb to challenge it — the president steadfastly refuses to call for regime change in Tehran.  In his speech to the United Nations today, he warned that if Iran does not clean up its act, it will suffer greater “isolation.”

Meanwhile, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad unleash mass murder against us and the Iranian people, and race towards acquisition of nuclear devices with which they can kill far more of us and our allies.  And what are we planning to do in response to their acts of war? Perhaps more sanctions (which are welcome but will not bring down the regime or force the mullahs to change their policy), and certainly more negotiations, which have been ongoing since Obama’s 2008 campaign.  It’s obvious that the hostage release was negotiated, for example.  One will get you five that the White House arranged the million dollar ransom, and the odds are that there were additional concessions as well.  This sort of incoherence is contagious, and spreads to the minds of people who ought to know better.  It seems that military planners are pondering the creation of a “hot line” to Tehran [3], to avoid “accidental war.”

But war is already under way, and it’s no accident.  This is more fantasyland.  Just listen to what the Wall Street Journal’s reporters have to say and you’ll see a masterpiece of blithering:

    At least initially, defense officials are most enthusiastic about expanding navy-to-navy contacts with Iran to prevent miscalculations. But they remain wary of any direct engagement with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, due to its deep ties to Middle East militant groups the U.S. has designated terrorist organizations, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories.

    At the same time, U.S. officials acknowledge that most of these near-altercations with Iran have involved the IRGC, making its command central to resolving many disputes.

So,  by the administration’s own standards, it’s a non-starter.  And that’s the least of it.  For unless you believe that the Iranians will use the hot line to avoid conflict, its creation offers them a golden opportunity to deceive us, to delay our response to their attacks, and to put even more Americans at risk.

It ought to be obvious.  But then, it should have been obvious a long time ago that Syria and Iran were foes, not friends, that they want our defeat and destruction, and that our only real choice is between defeating them or losing to them.

Hard to win when everyone around the president tells him he’s a genius.

Article printed from Faster, Please!: http://pajamasmedia.com/michaelledeen

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/michaelledeen/2011/09/21/the-shuttered-white-house-and-its-fantasies/

URLs in this post:

[1] Listen: http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/2011/09/20/its-a-bird-its-a-plane-its-a-totally-wimpy-foreign-policy/

[2] the chief negotiator gets blown up: http://www.rferl.org/content/rabbani_killed_afghanistan_taliban/24334470.html

[3] creation of a “hot line” to Tehran: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903374004576578990787792046.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

 

[a_majoor]

A view of the Palestinian problem (long article part 1 of 2):

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/09/25/report-from-the-middle-east-part-one/

Report From The Middle East: Part One
Walter Russell Mead

I’ve just come back from a week of teaching, lecturing and conversation in Israel and the West Bank, and nothing I saw there has led me to change my basic view of the situation.  Peace is not at hand in the Middle East because neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians are really willing to accept the only kind of peace they can get.

The only peace now possible is one in which Palestinians become an independent nation on most of the West Bank and Gaza with “swaps” of land (probably in the Negev) to compensate for land annexed to Israel.  Most of historical Jerusalem will go to Israel; Palestinians will get a few scraps of the historical city with some sort of arrangement to cover the Islamic holy places and suburban developments that can more or less plausibly be called Jerusalem.  (This is more or less what the Israelis had until 1967 on the western side of historical Jerusalem, though Jews were banned from visiting their holy places.)  A few family reunifications may be possible and a handful of aged refugees may go back to pre-1967 Israel, but otherwise there will be no literal “right of return”.  There may be some compensation and large amounts of foreign aid will be committed to the new state.

The State of Palestine will be lightly armed for internal security purposes only; there may well be foreign troops of some kind on its soil.  Water rights and other difficult issues will be governed by treaties with Israel, Jordan and, perhaps, Syria; the Palestinian state will not negotiate those treaties from a position of strength.

Some Palestinians will be satisfied by this arrangement and others, though thinking it grossly inadequate and unfair, will choose to accept it as a way of ending the conflict.  Many will accept it grudgingly for now, but would expect Palestine to seize any favorable opportunity to revise the treaty in Palestinian favor, and would want their government to probe for ways of doing that.  Still others will reject it outright, consider those who sign it as traitors to the Palestinian cause, and like the IRA but on a much larger and more dangerous scale continue armed resistance both against Israel and what they will see as an illegitimate quisling government of Palestine.  Given the way the Middle East works, these groups will probably be able to get financial and other support from various governments looking to stir the pot.

If many Palestinians would reject a treaty like this because it offers too little, some Israelis would reject it because it gives away too much.

There are Israelis who don’t want a Palestinian state and who aren’t willing to give up any land Israelis now hold.  Their ideas for the Palestinian future include concepts like “self governing cantons” and a merger with Jordan.  (Jordan was part of the original Palestinian Mandate assigned to the British by the League of Nations; a majority of its residents today are of Palestinian origin and Jordan controlled the West Bank until the 1967 war.)  The most radical believe that Israel has a divine mandate to occupy all the territories assigned in the Bible to the ancient Hebrews which would include land on both sides of the Jordan.  For many religious Zionists, “Judea and Samaria” as they call the West Bank are more important to Jewish identity than the coastal plain, Galilee and the Negev territories that make up pre-1967 Israel.  Ironically, much of modern Israel occupies lands held by the Philistines in Biblical times; the old Jewish heartland and the sites associated with the patriarchs and prophets of Biblical times are mostly inhabited by Palestinians today.

These Israelis are by and large committed to expanding settlements as fast as they can.  Some believe that God will assist them in this process; all see the current settlement process as a simple and completely legitimate continuation of the original Zionist project that built a Jewish state in the teeth of Arab and world opposition in the first half of the twentieth century.  The essence of Zionism, I have heard settlers say in both the West Bank and the Golan, is Jews returning to their ancestral lands and building new homes.  Their love of the land is real; their commitment to the cause is clear.

The settlement lobby does not have a majority in Israel; if it ever does, the political situation would change — and it is likely that US support for the Jewish state would be tested to the limit.  (There is much more support in the US for a secure Israel in a two state solution than there is for Israeli expansionism, especially among American Jews.)

But to say that the settlers do not have a majority is not to say that most Israelis want to stop settlements now.  Some Israelis believe that the growth of settlements is the only thing bringing the Palestinians to the bargaining table at all, and that if Israel freezes settlement growth the Palestinians will lose the incentive to bargain.  Others just don’t want to take on the settler lobby — which opposes a freeze with all its might — until there is an agreement with the Palestinians.  Politically, it is much harder to support a freeze in exchange for negotiations which may lead nowhere than to support a specific peace treaty which requires both a freeze and a dismantling of many settlements.

This is why most American negotiators, correctly in my view, have tried to focus on the shape of the final treaty rather than mandating a settlement freeze as a precondition for talks.  The US does not have the power to force either the Israelis or the Palestinians to do things they fundamentally don’t want to do, and until President Obama’s mistaken intervention in the early months of his term, American negotiators understood that they should not promise what they could not deliver.

If a critical mass of Israelis believes that a proposed treaty is attractive enough, their elected leaders will take the difficult steps required to fulfill it and so, paradoxically, it is easier to get the Israelis to sign a treaty that requires them to dismantle a great many settlements than to get them to stop building a few marginal ones that almost certainly will have to be sacrificed when the treaty takes effect.

In the medium to long term many fear that that could change; pro-settler forces hope that as the number of settlers on the West Bank increases, Israel will reach a tipping point and there will no longer be a “land for peace” majority in the country.  I read it differently; including the largest settlement blocs in post-treaty Israel (as all parties have done for some time) means that settler demographics will not control the politics of this issue.  But there is no doubt that the longer the settlement process goes on, the harder it becomes to reverse course.

The real question is whether Israelis and Palestinians with or without outside help can negotiate a treaty that will cause Israelis to give up settlements and the status quo.  I am not optimistic.  Even many Israelis who in principle support the idea of the two state solution aren’t willing to support a treaty that has fragile support among Palestinians.  They fear that Hamas might win a post independence election and tear up the treaty at the first opportunity: arming, sponsoring or at least not cracking down on terror attacks.  They fear that even a pro-peace government would be politically too weak to crack down on anti-Israel resistance groups.  Israel would have given up land without getting peace.

These Israeli fears cannot be dismissed as fantasies. As it stands, it is clear that the Palestinian Authority now governing the West Bank cannot “deliver” a united Palestine: it cannot sign a treaty that Hamas will pledge to honor.  Hamas won the last Palestinian elections; does Israel have any guarantee whatever that, after the Israelis have dismantled settlements and turned over strategic territory to the Palestinians, the Palestinian government will continue to abide by a treaty that Hamas doesn’t accept?

The answer is no.  Until the answer is yes it is very unlikely that Israel will make large sacrifices for what is likely to be a bogus, temporary peace.

The core problem with the land for peace concept at the basis of both the Oslo Accords and every effort since to revive the moribund peace process is, simply, this: the process doesn’t offer enough land to the Palestinians or enough peace to the Israelis to be satisfactory to either side.

This is not because the two sides do not understand each other, or because there is something wrong with their leaders or their political processes.  There are good and rational reasons why impoverished Palestinians in Gaza don’t want to sign away their right of return, and there are good and rational reasons why Israelis don’t want to make territorial concessions and dismantle settlements for an illusory peace.

Both sides, however, are compelled to fake an eagerness for peace because neither wants to look like the skunk at the global garden party. For the US, the EU and the Arab states, peace between Israelis and Palestinians on almost any terms would be a huge plus.  Failing actual peace, a peace process that contains the political fallout from the dispute and allows the rest of the world to go about its business undisturbed is in the national interest of almost everyone.

The Israelis and Palestinians both know this; therefore both sides try to exact the highest possible price in aid and political concessions and assurances from outside powers before entering negotiations that, again, both Israelis and Palestinians don’t regard with much hope.

On the other hand, neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians want the blame for blocking negotiations or making them fail.  Both sides want to keep the outside world sweet.  The Palestinian Authority would be hard pressed to survive for six months without the cash it gets from Europe, the US and Arab states; Israel also cannot afford to endanger its political support in the US and elsewhere by too-obviously spurning the peace process.  What both sides do is to raise as many procedural and substantive obstacles and preconditions as possible in order to keep the process at bay.

President Obama fell into a trap when he made a settlement freeze a precondition for talks.  Secretly, both Israelis and Palestinian leaders are, I think, delighted that the US is now so tangled up in this demand that it has lost most of its influence over negotiations. The Palestinians are happier than the Israelis; it looks to world opinion as if it is Israeli intransigence on the settlement issue that is the chief obstacle to peace.  But the Israeli government — while angry at Obama for making them look even worse than usual to much of the world — is also relieved that the settlement demand is so unpopular in Israel that Prime Minister Netanyahu pays no domestic political price for rejecting it.

As I asked Palestinians why they were so enthusiastic about Abbas’ bid for statehood at the United Nations (a step many believed he was taking for personal reasons, to create a legacy for his presidency before he steps down), one reason that came up over and over again was frustration: 18 years of negotiations since the Oslo Agreements had failed to create a Palestinian state, while the Israelis had steadily expanded and deepened their network of settlements on the West Bank.  They were convinced that Israel is content with the status quo: gradually nibbling away at Palestinian territory in both Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank.  Israel, they felt, was simply making not very convincing noises about peace while steadily creating “facts on the ground” that make a Palestinian state less possible every day.

I did talk with some Israelis who feel more or less as the Palestinians say they do: they believe it is their right and destiny to re-occupy everything promised to Abraham and they are happy to see a farcical “peace process” drag on year after year while they establish more settlements on the West Bank and strengthen the Jewish presence in what Israel regards as the eastern district of its capital city of Jerusalem.

But most of those I had this discussion with were still willing to exchange land for peace — if they could be confident that the withdrawal from the West Bank and the dismantling of settlements would actually bring peace.  Instead they fear that the Palestinians would see this as the first step toward recovering more and more territory until in the end, Israel disappeared.

This is the reality and it is a bleak one.  Peace is no closer than at any time since 1948 because neither side is yet willing to settle for what it can actually get.  Israelis don’t want a small and insecure state with a Palestinian enemy next door; Palestinians don’t want a weak microstate that fails to solve the refugee problem. There are some people on both sides who are willing to accept peace on those terms — but not enough.

World public opinion wants good news and it wants action, and so diplomats have built the largest diplomatic cottage industry in the world around this intractable dispute.  Fair enough to some extent; we wrap a wound in bandages to prevent infection and allow time for it to heal.  It makes sense to wrap a conflict in processes and negotiations in the hope that conditions may change.