Monthly Archives: September 2007

NEWS: Olmert under investigation – again

Israel orders Olmert corruption probe
By Jacques Pinto, AFP, September 24, 2007

Israel ordered a criminal graft probe of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert over a real estate deal on Monday, in the latest scandal to hit the premier who had been steadily regaining popularity.

Attorney General Menahem Mazuz “has decided to order the police to open a criminal probe in the Cremieux Street affair,” a justice ministry statement said.

The Israeli premier is suspected of having received an effective bribe when he and his wife purchased the west Jerusalem home in 2004 for an estimated 300,000 dollars below market price, the statement said. [complete article]

EDITORIAL: Why the nuclear story isn’t nuclear

Why the nuclear story isn’t nuclear
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, September 23, 2007

“Israelis seized nuclear material in Syrian raid,” blares the headline in The Sunday Times. After two weeks of furious speculation about the purpose and significance of Israel’s September 6 attack on a target in eastern Syria, we finally know that this really was something really big that went down: it was nuclear! The Syrians had “nuclear materials” that have been traced to North Korea. Except… “nuclear materials” turns out to be a headline (and first paragraph) paraphrase. “Nuclear materials” turns out to be short for “nuclear-related” material — almost certainly no fissile material, nor even anything radioactive. And no one has forgotten that the most famous example of nuclear-related material turned out to be no such thing. Continue reading →

OPINION: The rise of political Islam

Democracy, not terror, is the engine of political Islam
By William Dalrymple, The Guardian, September 21, 2007

The Bush administration proclaimed in 2004 that the promotion of democracy in the Middle East would be a major foreign policy theme in its second term. It has been widely perceived, not least in Washington, that this policy has failed. Yet in many ways US foreign policy has succeeded in turning Muslim opinion against the corrupt monarchies and decaying nationalist parties who have ruled the region for 50 years. The irony is that rather than turning to liberal secular parties, as the neocons assumed, Muslims have lined up behind parties most clearly seen to stand up against aggressive US intervention.

Religious parties, in other words, have come to power for reasons largely unconnected to religion. As clear and unambiguous opponents of US policy in the Middle East – in a way that, say, Musharraf, Mubarak and Mahmoud Abbas are not – religious parties have benefited from legitimate Muslim anger: anger at the thousands of lives lost in Afghanistan and Iraq; at the blind eye the US turns to Israel’s nuclear arsenal and colonisation of the West Bank; at the horrors of Abu Ghraib and the incarceration of thousands of Muslims without trial in the licensed network of torture centres that the US operates across the globe; and at the Islamophobic rhetoric that still flows from Bush and his circle in Washington.

Moreover, the religious parties tend to be seen by the poor, rightly or wrongly, as representing justice, integrity and equitable distribution of resources. Hence the strong showing, for example, of Hamas against the blatantly corrupt Fatah in the 2006 elections in Palestine. Equally, the dramatic rise of Hizbullah in Lebanon has not been because of a sudden fondness for sharia law, but because of the status of Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah’s leader, as the man who gave the Israelis a bloody nose, and who provides medical and social services for the people of South Lebanon, just as Hamas does in Gaza. [complete article]

NEWS & OPINION: Blackwater’s killing spree

The real story of Baghdad’s Bloody Sunday
By Kim Sengupta, The Independent, September 21, 2007

The eruption of gunfire was sudden and ferocious, round after round mowing down terrified men women and children, slamming into cars as they collided and overturned with drivers frantically trying to escape. Some vehicles were set alight by exploding petrol tanks. A mother and her infant child died in one of them, trapped in the flames.

The shooting on Sunday, by the guards of the American private security company Blackwater, has sparked one of the most bitter and public disputes between the Iraqi government and its American patrons, and brings into sharp focus the often violent conduct of the Western private armies operating in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, immune from scrutiny or prosecution.

Blackwater’s security men are accused of going on an unprovoked killing spree. Hassan Jabar Salman, a lawyer, was shot four times in the back, his car riddled with eight more bullets, as he attempted to get away from their convoy. Yesterday, sitting swathed in bandages at Baghdad’s Yarmukh Hospital, he recalled scenes of horror. “I saw women and children jump out of their cars and start to crawl on the road to escape being shot,” said Mr Salman. “But still the firing kept coming and many of them were killed. I saw a boy of about 10 leaping in fear from a minibus, he was shot in the head. His mother was crying out for him, she jumped out after him, and she was killed. People were afraid.”

At the end of the prolonged hail of bullets Nisoor Square was a scene of carnage with bodies strewn around smouldering wreckage. Ambulances trying to pick up the wounded found their path blocked by crowds fleeing the gunfire.

Yesterday, the death toll from the incident, according to Iraqi authorities, stood at 28. And it could rise higher, say doctors, as some of the injured, hit by high-velocity bullets at close quarter, are unlikely to survive. [complete article]

Iraq’s ‘Dirty Harrys’
By David DeVoss, Los Angeles Times, September 23, 2007

Blackwater. The name says it all, conjuring images of imminent danger, hidden predators and night terror. From the moment Blackwater USA arrived in Iraq to protect L. Paul Bremer III’s Coalition Provisional Authority until last week, when its guards killed 11 Iraqis and wounded 13 more while escorting a diplomatic convoy through Baghdad, the North Carolina-based private security company has been known for its swaggering image and “Dirty Harry” demeanor.

All the U.S. private security armies in Iraq may be cut from the same khaki cloth, but each has its own personality. When I arrived in the country in September 2004 as a senior information officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development, bodyguards with Kroll Inc., whose credo is “in risk there is opportunity,” met me at the airport. They were British and Irish veterans of Belfast’s “Troubles” and viewed terrorists with a world-weary stoicism.

Our convoy had pulled onto the airport highway and was heading for the Green Zone when three black Chevy Suburbans flashed past. The rear door of the trailing vehicle was open, and inside sat a man dressed in black cradling a large-caliber machine gun. Bandoleers crisscrossed his chest, several handguns and a large knife dangled from his weapons harness and an enormous handlebar mustache covered most of his face.

The look was designed to inspire dread, but it was carried to such cartoonish extremes that the man resembled Yosemite Sam more than the Terminator. “That’s Blackwater,” said the Kroll driver disdainfully. “You’ll see a lot of them while you’re here.” [complete article]

OPINION & FEATURE: Middle East refugees

Alterman: Iraq refugees (and my thoughts)
By Marc Lynch, Abu Aardvark, September , 2007

The Iraqi refugee problem isn’t just about American moral obligations – it needs to be understood as a deep strategic problem shaping both internal Iraqi and regional political outcomes. I don’t think there’s been enough thought given to the complex ways in which this issue could reformulate Iraqi and regional politics over the next few decades.

Alterman lays out the destabilizing impact around the region. I’d go further than the immediate effects on regime stability. If the Iraqi refugee problem is not dealt with, it will likely “default” into precisely the conditions which have made the Palestinian issue so potent and so destabilizing over the decades: a large population of permanently de facto stateless persons spread across multiple Arab countries, whose personal and communal traumas resonate deeply with core political narratives (Arabist or Islamist or sectarian). [complete article]

Unsettling the categories of displacement
By Julie Peteet, MERIP, Fall, 2007

The Middle East has long had the dubious distinction of being one of the world’s major producers of refugees. By the beginning of 2007, the Middle East was generating 5,931,000 refugees out of a world total of 13,948,800. [complete article]

NEWS: Big Brother is watching

Collecting of details on travelers documented
By Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post, September 22, 2007

The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials.

The personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15 years, as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the department’s Automated Targeting System, help border officials distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country.

But new details about the information being retained suggest that the government is monitoring the personal habits of travelers more closely than it has previously acknowledged. The details were learned when a group of activists requested copies of official records on their own travel. Those records included a description of a book on marijuana that one of them carried and small flashlights bearing the symbol of a marijuana leaf. [complete article]

EDITORIAL: Deconstructing the neocon nuclear narrative

Deconstructing the neocon nuclear narrative
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, September 21, 2007

Why can the neocons never get their story straight?

Because they’ve figured out the ending but they’re still working on the plot.

The end is the end of the Islamic State of Iran, but the first draft of the narrative that was supposed to lead there — through Baghdad — took a major detour, providing Iran with the opportunity to become more powerful than ever.

Even so, a few lessons have been learned from the atrociously written Iraq story.

Don’t talk about “WMD,” is one such lesson. The only weapons worth talking about (as frequently as possible) are nuclear. Fortunately (if you’re a neocon) the press continues to be as obliging as ever in repeating whatever you say. Continue reading →

OPINION: Why the Israel lobby isn’t good for Israel

It’s lobbying, but is it really pro-Israel?
By M.J. Rosenberg, Haaretz, September 21, 2007

I spent almost 20 years as a Congressional aide and can testify from repeated personal experience that senators and House members are under constant pressure to support status-quo policies on Israel. It is no accident that members of Congress compete over who can place more conditions on aid to the Palestinians, who will be first to denounce the Saudi peace plan, and who will win the right to be the primary sponsor of the next pointless Palestinian-bashing resolution. Nor is it an accident that there is never a serious Congressional debate about policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. Moreover, every president knows that any serious effort to push for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement based on compromise by both sides will produce loud (sometimes hysterical) opposition from the Hill.

Walt and Mearsheimer mostly limit themselves to exploring whether all this is good for the United States (and to a lesser extent, Israel). The question I ask today, and not for the first time, is whether this type of behavior is good for Israel. Forty years after the Six-Day War, the occupation continues, the resistance to it intensifies, and Israelis in increasing numbers question whether they have a future in the Jewish state.

Has “pro-Israel” advocacy consistently produced “pro-Israel” ends? At several critical moments, it most certainly has not. [complete article]

NEWS: U.S. kidnaps another Iranian

Kurds denounce U.S. detention of Iranian
By Jay Price and Yaseen Taha, McClatchy, September 20, 2007

U.S. troops arrested an Iranian man during an early morning raid on a hotel in this northern Iraqi city Thursday and accused him of helping to smuggle a deadly type of roadside bomb into Iraq.

But the Kurdistan Regional Government in a statement called the arrest “illegitimate,” said the man was a member of a trade delegation that had been invited to Sulaimaniyah by the local government and demanded that he be released.

“Actions like these serve no one,” the statement said.

The United States has detained several Iranians in Iraq in the past year and accused them of training Iraqi insurgents and providing weapons to them. In January it took five Iranians into custody in Irbil, the Kurdish regional capital, and accused them of being members of the Iranian military. They’re still being held. Eight other Iranians who were detained last month in Baghdad were quickly released, however. [complete article]

OPINION: The face of American extremism

Iranophobia hits Ground Zero
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi, Asia Times, September 22, 2007

…the US media have once again fallen victim to an orchestration of “enemy image” that aims to vilify, intimidate, deface and demonize a Middle Eastern leader who, ironically, has been unusually forthcoming in his expressions of warm feelings toward the American people (though not the US government and its policies).

Never mind that Ahmadinejad has released a few Iranian-Americans who were suspected of instigating a “velvet revolution”, or that he has broken the ice of diplomatic non-dialogue with the US by consenting to direct meetings between Iranian and US ambassadors in Iraq, or that he has made the most far-reaching Iranian cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to date.

None of this matters the least to frenzied pundits and politicians who want to cash in on the feverish anti-Iran mood in the US, whose government has done nothing to quell this Iranophobic frenzy and, instead, is fanning the flames by escalating accusations against Tehran. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Televised images of street protests in Pakistan where effigies of George Bush are being burned and the US flag is being trampled on are standard fare when it comes to representations of anti-American Islamic extremism. The New York Daily News presents nothing less than a mirror image — our own xenophobic extremism.

OPINION: The international community can do business with Hamas

Hamas is the key
By Ahmed Yousef, Haaretz, September 21, 2007

While largely unnoticed in American discourse on the topic, much has been said and written to debunk the sanctions regime imposed on Hamas government administrations since its resounding victory in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections of January 2006. These calls and reports show with compelling logic that the sanctions regime is wrong and misguided and, equally important, that it is a reaction to the excessively intense pressure that the U.S. administration has exercised over other nations to induce them to boycott and besiege a government democratically elected by the people and to punish the Palestinians for their democratic choice. The Quartet has been spearheading this campaign of isolation against Hamas, and in the process is advancing a U.S.-Israeli agenda whose goal is to delegitimize Hamas and prevent it from exercising its right to lead the Palestinian people, even though the latter have elected it in a transparent, internationally monitored electoral process. A variety of underhanded methods, both internal and external, have been used to undermine the Hamas-led government, including destabilization from within the fragile Palestinian political system. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — According to the “West Bank first” fable, Israeli and Western support for the “moderate” Abbas regime would pave the way for peace and something vaguely resembling a Palestinian state. But even while Condoleezza Rice endeavors to add delicate strokes to her picture of a political horizon, the Israelis, rather than dismantling roadblocks — one of the specified gestures intended to serve as a sign post pointing to that political horizon — have instead been busy constructing dozens of new roadblocks.

NEWS: Will the dollar collapse?

Fears of dollar collapse as Saudis take fright
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph, September 21, 2007

Saudi Arabia has refused to cut interest rates in lockstep with the US Federal Reserve for the first time, signalling that the oil-rich Gulf kingdom is preparing to break the dollar currency peg in a move that risks setting off a stampede out of the dollar across the Middle East.

“This is a very dangerous situation for the dollar,” said Hans Redeker, currency chief at BNP Paribas.

“Saudi Arabia has $800bn (£400bn) in their future generation fund, and the entire region has $3,500bn under management. They face an inflationary threat and do not want to import an interest rate policy set for the recessionary conditions in the United States,” he said. [complete article]

See also, Has the repudiation of the dollar begun? (Naked Capitalism).

OPINION: Tall tales from the annals of the Bush administration

Glued to our seats in the Theater of War
By Ira Chernus, TomDispatch, September 20, 2007

Every war is bound to turn into a story. Every war is experienced as dramatic spectacle — the more mythic the better. It’s no coincidence that the military refers to a battle zone as a “theater.”

Political “battles” are high drama, too. On the campaign trail, the most gripping plot usually wins. In that context, a debate about the math of minimalist “drawdown” — how many troops should leave and how soon — is hardly the stuff of legend, the sort of thing to fuel public passions. And yet the two major parties have to conjure up the illusion of a profound, emotionally stirring difference between them. So they turn a debate like the present one about troop numbers and time frames into a contest between larger competing narratives. [complete article]

NEWS: Lawless contractors

Where military rules don’t apply
By Steve Fainaru, Washington Post, September 20, 2007

Blackwater USA, the private security company involved in a Baghdad shootout last weekend, operated under State Department authority that exempted the company from U.S. military regulations governing other security firms, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials and industry representatives.

In recent months, the State Department’s oversight of Blackwater became a central issue as Iraqi authorities repeatedly clashed with the company over its aggressive street tactics. Many U.S. and Iraqi officials and industry representatives said they came to see Blackwater as untouchable, protected by State Department officials who defended the company at every turn. Blackwater employees protect the U.S. ambassador and other diplomats in Iraq.

Blackwater “has a client who will support them no matter what they do,” said H.C. Lawrence Smith, deputy director of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq, an advocacy organization in Baghdad that is funded by security firms, including Blackwater. [complete article]

NEWS: Iraq’s refugees

Refugees in their own land: 2m Iraqis forced to flee their homes
By Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian, September 20, 2007

Nearly two million Iraqis have become refugees in their own land in the past year, redrawing the ethnic and sectarian map of Baghdad and other cities, a report by the Iraqi Red Crescent said yesterday.

In Baghdad alone, nearly a million people have fled their homes.

Last month saw the sharpest rise so far in the numbers of Iraqis forced to abandon their homes – 71.1%.

The forced migration raises questions about claims from the Bush administration that the civilian protection plan at the core of its war strategy is making Iraq safer for Iraqis. [complete article]

NEWS: U.S. builds up pressure on Iran; Bolton backs Israeli strike; ElBaradei’s inconvenient deal

U.S. ramps up pressure on Iran
By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy, September 19, 2007

One year after the United States launched an intensified global economic campaign against Iran with the stated aim of halting Tehran’s nuclear work, the Bush administration is counting its successes — and calling for still more pressure.

In recent months, once-reluctant European countries have joined the effort, which some are calling a financial war, with more vigor.

Germany’s largest bank, Deutsche Bank AG, said recently that it would stop doing business in Iran. France has trimmed export credits that encourage business in Iran and advised French firms, including the oil and gas giant Total S.A., not to start new investments there. Even Japan, heavily dependent on Persian Gulf oil, has pulled back from energy projects in Iran. [complete article]

Bolton: US would support preemptive Israeli strike on Iran
By John Byrne, Raw Story, September 18, 2007

President Bush’s former United Nations ambassador John Bolton said the United States would stand behind a pre-emptive strike by Israel against countries developing “WMD facilities.”

In his remark, printed in Tuesday’s edition of the Israeli daily Yediot Achronot, Bolton directly referenced Iran.

“The greatest concern is to prevent Iran and other countries in the region from acquiring nuclear weapons,” Bolton said, according to JTA.org, a Jewish news service. “We’re talking about a clear message to Iran — Israel has the right to self-defense –and that includes offensive operations against WMD facilities that pose a threat to Israel. The United States would justify such attacks.” [complete article]

Iran’s pact threatens to wrongfoot the West
By Roula Khalaf and James Blitz, Financial Times, September 20, 2007

Diplomats from the permanent five members of the United Nations Security Council and from Germany are to discuss Iran tomorrow, amid disagreement over whether to impose a new round of UN sanctions.

Although the US, UK and France are determined to renew pressure on Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment programme, this new drive in Washington for UN sanctions is unlikely to get far, as it will be blocked by Russia and China.

At the heart of the dispute is an accord between Iran and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency – the UN nuclear watchdog. [complete article]

OPINION & NEWS: Syria’s uranium mining capabilities pose little proliferation risk; Israel says can’t ignore regional efforts to acquire WMD

Extracting uranium from phosphates
By Jeffrey Lewis, Arms Control Wonk, September 20, 2007

Phosphate extraction is just another (uneconomical) form of uranium mining and milling. The resulting uranium would still need to be enriched, using a separation method such as gaseous diffusion or strong rotation. Doing so would require a facility such as the centrifuge plant that Iran is constructing near Natanz. That is, and always has been, the bottleneck that we worry about from a proliferation perspective. Otherwise countries like Kazakhstan, Niger, Naminbia and Uzbekistan would be major nuclear proliferation concerns. [complete article]

Israel says can’t ignore regional efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction
By Amir Oren, Haaretz, September 20, 2007

The deputy chairman of the board of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, Gideon Frank, warned delegates at the 51st International Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna Wednesday that Israel would not be able to ignore the efforts by various countries in the Middle East to develop weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them.

Even though Frank did not specify the countries in question, his statements hinted heavily at Iran and Syria.

Responding to the near permanent call by Arab states for Israel to agree to a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, Frank reiterated a series of preconditions for achieving what he described as “a noble goal,” stressing that this “cannot be advanced out of context.” Frank stressed that the manifestation of this “vision,” which is interpreted as a call on Israel to relinquish its nuclear capabilities, can only occur in stages. [complete article]

NEWS: Lebanon car bombing

Car bomb near Beirut kills Christian lawmaker
By Nada Bakri and Hassan M. Fattah, New York Times, September 20, 2007

A powerful car bomb in a Christian neighborhood just east of Beirut killed a Christian lawmaker from the governing coalition and six others Wednesday evening. It was the latest in a deadly string of bombings that have rocked Lebanon’s teetering political order as the country prepares to select a new president.

The bombing appeared to have deep political implications, giving credence to longstanding fears of a plot to eliminate the governing March 14 movement’s razor-thin majority in Parliament.

The bomb, apparently hidden inside a parked car in the Sin el Fil neighborhood, exploded just as the lawmaker, Antoine Ghanem of the Christian Phalange Party, drove past. The explosion ripped through the busy street, crushing cars and damaging buildings nearby, in a scene now eerily familiar in this politically tense city. [complete article]