Is the US really bringing stability to Baghdad?
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, February 15, 2008
… any true assessment of the happiness or misery of Iraqis must use a less crude index than the number of dead and injured. It must ask if people have been driven from their houses, and if they can return. It must say whether they have a job and, if they do not, whether they stand a chance of getting one. It has to explain why so few of the 3.2 million people who are refugees in Syria and Jordan, or inside Iraq, are coming back.

In a first, Ahmadinejad to visit Iraq next month
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will travel to Iraq next month in the first such visit by a leader of the Islamic Republic, Iraqi officials said Thursday, adding that Iran had postponed a fourth round of talks with the United States to discuss Iraq’s security.

Invited by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, Ahmadinejad is scheduled to arrive March 2 for a visit of two to three days to discuss bilateral relations, the officials said. He will also meet with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The two neighbors fought an intense eight-year conflict in the 1980s during the rule of Saddam Hussein. But the ascent of a Shiite-dominated government in Iraq after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion ushered in a new era of friendship with overwhelmingly Shiite Iran.

The door to Iraq’s oil opens
By M K Bhadrakumar, Asia Times, February 16, 2008
The cynosure of Western eyes at the meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, commonly known as OPEC, in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, last December 5 was an unexpected personality – Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani.
But that wasn’t a chance occurrence. By the time OPEC gathered in Vienna six weeks later, it was beyond doubt that Shahristani was on the way to becoming a celebrity in the West.

Shahristani is “a rare thing” in politics, to quote Toby Lodge, the well-known scholar on Iraq at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London – “not too religious, not too political, not too secular, not too pro-American Shi’ite who [Grand Ayatollah Ali] Sistani would talk to”.

But for the ease with which Shahristani traversed in his later years the dividing line that separates religiosity and idealism from worldliness and pragmatism, Shahristani would have become a cult figure for human-rights activists, given his extraordinary background as a top nuclear scientist who turned a stubborn dissident, and then a reckless jail breaker from Saddam Hussein’s Abu Ghraib prison where he was tortured and tucked away in solitary confinement for an impossibly long 10 years till 1991.

Hezbollah chief warns Israel of wide war
Hezbollah’s leader threatened Thursday to strike Israel anywhere in the world in retaliation for what he said was its role in assassinating Imad Mughniyah, a Hezbollah commander blamed by the United States and Israel for killing hundreds in bombings, kidnappings and hijackings over a quarter-century.

In a video speech broadcast to thousands of mourners in a spare but sprawling tent in southern Beirut, Hasan Nasrallah said that because Israel had struck beyond what he called the “traditional battlefield” of Lebanon and Israel, it risked a borderless war with the Shiite Muslim group. Israel has denied involvement in the car bombing Tuesday that killed the 45-year-old Mughniyah in a tony neighborhood of Damascus, the Syrian capital.

“You have crossed the borders,” he said in the speech, which was vehement even by Nasrallah’s fiery standards. “Zionists, if you want this type of open war, then let it be, and let the whole world hear: We, like all other people, have a sacred right to defend ourselves, and everything we can do to defend ourselves, we will do.”

Top Pakistan lawyer in vote rigging tape row
Worries about vote rigging in Monday’s general election in Pakistan deepened yesterday when Human Rights Watch released an audio tape in which the government’s top lawyer allegedly predicts the vote will be “massively rigged”.

The recording, which was posted on the internet, features a voice identified as the attorney general, Abdul Malik Qayyum, advising a friend about which party to approach for a nomination in the parliamentary election.

“They will massively rig to get their own people to win. If you can get a ticket from these guys, take it,” he said in apparent reference to President Pervez Musharraf’s ruling party.

Where feudalism lives on
By Dilip Hiro, The Guardian, February 15, 2008
The main contest in the Pakistani general election on February 18 is seemingly between the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), led by late Benazir Bhutto’s husband, Asif Zardari; the pro-Musharraf Pakistan Muslim League-Q (“Q” for “Qaid-e Azam”, the honorific for the state’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah); and the opposition Pakistan Muslim League-N (“N” for Nawaz Sharif, former prime minister).

But no matter which party wins most seats and governs alone or in coalition, and which becomes the opposition, the privileges of feudal lords dominating the overwhelmingly rural society will remain intact.

The roots of feudal dominance lie in history. The Pakistan Muslim League, the parent of its present two versions, is the descendant of the All India Muslim League (AIML). Formed in 1906 to promote loyalty to the British Crown while advancing Muslim interests, the AIML was led by Muslim grandees and feudal lords. It was not until 1940 that it demanded partition of the Indian sub-continent, with Muslim majority areas constituting independent states. Unlike the anti-imperialist Indian National Congress, it lacked an economic programme favouring small and landless peasants, and trade unions for industrial workers.

How ‘inevitable’ got outmaneuvered
By E.J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post, February 15, 2008
What happened to Hillary Clinton?

Last fall, she was the “inevitable” nominee whose “machine” would raise scads of cash and push her to an early victory. She demonstrated poise and knowledge in debates, and party leaders lined up behind her, fearful of missing her fast-moving train.

But this narrative was flawed from the beginning. Her campaign has suffered from profound organizational failures, small mistakes that took on larger import and miscalculations that have put her in a position where to survive, she must defeat Barack Obama in both Texas and Ohio next month.

McCain calls for Obama to use public financing
Hammering Senator Barack Obama for a fourth straight day, Senator John McCain said here on Friday that he expects Senator Obama to abide by his pledge use public financing for his general election if Mr. McCain does so as well.

“It was very clear to me that Senator Obama had agreed to having public financing of the general election campaign if I did the same thing,” he said after a town hall meeting here. “I made the commitment to the American people that if I was the nominee of my party, I would go the route of public financing. I expect Senator Obama to keep his word to the American people as well.”

Asked if he would use public financing even if Mr. Obama did not, he said: “If Senator Obama goes back on his commitment to the American people, then obviously we have to rethink our position. Our whole agreement was we would take public financing if he made that commitment as well. And he signed a piece of paper, I’m told, that made that commitment.”

Barack Obama’s secret weapon plots a new course for election victory
Steve Hildebrand describes himself as a “big fat goof” who is scared of flying. But, as the chief author of Barack Obama’s grassroots strategy, he is helping to rewrite America’s campaign rulebook.

While Hillary Clinton has won most of the key contests that she has made a priority, Mr Obama is leading the race for delegates because he has picked up most of the other states. “We have competed in large and small states — primaries and caucuses — and not let any state go by,” Mr Hildebrand explains in an interview with The Times. “It’s beyond me why the Clinton campaign did not do the same.”

When we torture
By Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, February 14, 2008
The most famous journalist you may never have heard of is Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman who is on a hunger strike to protest abuse during more than six years in a Kafkaesque prison system.

Mr. Hajj’s fortitude has turned him into a household name in the Arab world, and his story is sowing anger at the authorities holding him without trial.

That’s us. Mr. Hajj is one of our forgotten prisoners in Guantánamo Bay.

If the Bush administration appointed an Under Secretary of State for Antagonizing the Islamic World, with advice from a Blue Ribbon Commission for Sullying America’s Image, it couldn’t have done a more systematic job of discrediting our reputation around the globe. Instead of using American political capital to push for peace in the Middle East or Darfur, it is using it to force-feed Mr. Hajj.

US official admits waterboarding presently illegal
A senior official in the Bush justice department said for the first time today that the controversial interrogation tactic is currently illegal.

The waterboarding remarks by Stephen Bradbury, head of the justice department office of legal counsel, caused a stir in America because they go further than more uncertain opinions on the legality of the tactic voiced by the CIA director and attorney general.

London bombs justify ‘torture’, says Bush
President George Bush cited the London July 7 bombings in an interview broadcast last night to justify his support for waterboarding, an interrogation technique widely regarded as torture.

In an interview with the BBC he said information obtained from alleged terrorists helped save lives, and the families of the July 7 victims would understand that. Bush said waterboarding, which simulates drowning, was not torture and is threatening to veto a congressional bill that would ban it.

Duet in Damascus – is it déja vu?
By Amir Mizroch, Jerusalem Post, February 14, 2008
Duet in Beirut by former Mossad operative Mishka Ben-David is a work of fiction, but owes its wealth of detail to the author’s intelligence experience. Published in Hebrew six years ago, it describes a Mossad hit team traveling to Beirut, stalking the head of Hizbullah’s foreign terror department and assassinating him in a car bombing. Perhaps unfortunately for Mughniyeh, it was not translated into Arabic; had he read it, he might have taken greater precautions.

Ben-David said Wednesday that he had modeled his terror overlord, “Abu Khaled,” on two men: Hamas political bureau head Khaled Mashaal, and Mughniyeh, long Hizbullah’s chief of foreign terror operations.

While Ben-David is careful to say that Israel may not have been behind Mughniyeh’s killing, he does detail several examples of how the planned killing of the fictional Abu Khaled might mirror the death of Mughniyeh.

Roiled Hezbollah chief throws down the gauntlet
By Zvi Bar’el, Haaretz, February 15, 2008
When Hassan Nasrallah quotes David Ben-Gurion to emphasize to Israel that “if it loses one war, it will collapse,” or the Winograd report to impress his supporters with the fact that Israel lost the fight against several thousand Hezbollah fighters, we can once more be impressed that he and his advisers follow what is going on in Israeli society far more closely than Israel follows developments in Lebanon. But Nasrallah also knows that sharp rhetoric and expert usage of language are no substitute for a plan of action.

He presented his plan Thursday in his speech by setting the rules for war against Israel: “If you want an open-ended war, it will be an open-ended war,” and he also explained what this would entail. Because Hezbollah blames Israel for the assassination of Imad Mughniyah, which it claims occured “outside the natural arena of the war” (in other words Syria and not in Lebanon), the organization considers it legitimate to use the same method and target Israel outside the “natural arena”: not directly on Israeli territory but against Israeli targets abroad. Thus, Nasrallah absolved himself of the rules he followed for years, according to which he was conducting a war of Lebanese liberation against Israeli occupation. Henceforth, he is adopting a war on behalf of the organization, not in the name of Lebanon, against Israel’s existence.

Iraq successes hang in the balance
By William M. Arkin, Washington Post, February 14, 2008
We have heard a lot in the past year about the Sunni Awakening movement in Al Anbar province in western Iraq, the development of a Concerned Local Citizens program (also known as the Sons of Iraq program) in Baghdad, and the unilateral cease-fire called by Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army Shia militias. These three developments have not only been key to American military gains, but they also are central to the possibility of successful civil society and the prospects for transitioning from the military mission. [Deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East affairs, Mark] Kimmitt frankly calls all of these developments in 2007 a “surprise.” They are also factors most outside of U.S. control.

“The success of the surge was not pre-ordained nor has the surge succeeded according to plan,” Kimmitt says. “No one last December had any ideas that we would see a Sunni Awakening movement, nobody knew that the … [Mahdi Army] would declare a ceasefire …”

Bush’s Iraq calculus
By David Ignatius, Washington Post, February 14, 2008
The last thing the Bush White House would want, you might think, would be to make the 2008 presidential election a referendum on the unpopular war in Iraq. The 2006 congressional elections were such a referendum, and the Republicans got hammered.

But President Bush, newly confident that his troop-surge strategy is working, is taking steps that are likely to guarantee another Iraq-driven election. He favors keeping a big U.S. force in Iraq through the November elections, probably close to the pre-surge level of 130,000 troops. That large presence will draw Democratic fire — and it will make the presidential contest all the more a test between a pro-war Republican nominee and an antiwar Democrat.

Iran postpones talks with U.S. on Iraq
American officials ratcheted up the accusations against Iran today as Tehran postponed another round of negotiations with the United States over security in Iraq.

The development came as the Iraqi government announced that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would arrive March 2 for a two-day visit, the first such trip by an Iranian leader since the two countries fought a devastating war in the 1980s that killed or injured an estimated 1 million people.

The United States and Iran, already locked in a dispute over Tehran’s nuclear program, have long traded blame for the bloodshed in Iraq. But U.S. officials softened their tone late last year, backing away from sweeping accusations that Iran is orchestrating the funding, training and equipping of Shiite Muslim militants who have battled U.S. soldiers here.

In a reversal, U.S. agrees to produce data pointing to Iran’s nuclear ambitions
The Bush administration has agreed to turn over to international inspectors intelligence data it has collected that it says proves Iran worked on developing a nuclear weapon until a little more than four years ago, according to American and foreign diplomats.

The decision reverses the United States’ longstanding refusal to share the data, citing the need to protect intelligence sources.

The administration acted as the International Atomic Energy Agency is scheduled to issue a report as early as next week on Iran’s past nuclear activities. Administration officials hope that the nuclear inspectors can now confront Iran with what the Americans believe is the strongest evidence that the Iranians had a nuclear program.