Monthly Archives: April 2009

An Israeli attack on Iran

Realpolitik for Iran

Here’s one normalization scenario:

Iran ceases military support for Hamas and Hezbollah; adopts a “Malaysian” approach to Israel (nonrecognition and noninterference); agrees to work for stability in Iraq and Afghanistan; accepts intrusive International Atomic Energy Agency verification of a limited nuclear program for peaceful ends only; promises to fight Qaeda terrorism; commits to improving its human rights record.

The United States commits itself to the Islamic Republic’s security and endorses its pivotal regional role; accepts Iran’s right to operate a limited enrichment facility with several hundred centrifuges for research purposes; agrees to Iran’s acquiring a new nuclear power reactor from the French; promises to back Iran’s entry into the World Trade Organization; returns seized Iranian assets; lifts all sanctions; and notes past Iranian statements that it will endorse a two-state solution acceptable to the Palestinians.

Any such deal is a game changer, transformative as Nixon to China (another repressive state with a poor human rights record). It can be derailed any time by an attack from Israel, which has made clear it won’t accept virtual nuclear power status for Iran, despite its own nonvirtual nuclear warheads.

“Israel would be utterly crazy to attack Iran,” ElBaradei said. “I worry about it. If you bomb, you will turn the region into a ball of fire and put Iran on a crash course for nuclear weapons with the support of the whole Muslim world.”

To avoid that nightmare Obama will have to get tougher with Israel than any U.S. president in recent years. It’s time. [continued…]

Don’t flash the yellow light

It should go without saying that an Israeli attack on Iran would have disastrous consequences. No matter what Washington might claim, or how vociferously officials there denounce it, such an attack would be widely understood throughout the Muslim world as a joint U.S.-Israeli operation.

It would, as a start, serve as a powerful recruiting tool for extremist Islamist groups. In addition, an outraged Iran might indeed send commandos into Iraq, aid armed Iraqi groups determined to attack U.S. and government forces, shoot missiles into the Saudi or Kuwaiti oilfields, and attempt to block the Straits of Hormuz though which a significant percentage of global oil passes. Washington would certainly have to write off desperately needed cooperation in the war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Any attack would only strengthen the reign of the mullahs in Iran and reinforce the country’s determination to acquire a nuclear deterrent force that would prevent future attacks. And keep in mind, Iran’s nuclear program has overwhelming public support, even from those opposed to the current regime.

Given the Netanyahu government’s visible determination to attack, an ambiguous signal from Washington, something far less than a green light, could be misread in Tel Aviv. Anything short of a categorical, even vociferous U.S. refusal to countenance an Israeli attack might have horrific consequences. So here’s a message to Obama from an observer in Israel: Don’t flash the yellow light — not even once. [continued…]

Peres makes rare hint at possible strike on Iran

President Shimon Peres had some unusually aggressive words for Iran Sunday, seemingly threatening military action if US President Barack Obama’s overtures to the Islamic republic fail to bear fruit.

In an interview with Kol Hai Radio, Peres also said that the arrest before the weekend of a Hizbullah terror cell in Egypt was a blow to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s power.

“Ahmadinejad recruits forces against us, but there are also forces against him,” Peres said. “What happened in Egypt created a fierce opposition and we must unify all his opponents – the Sunnis and the Europeans, as well as those afraid of nuclear weapons and terror.”

Peres went on to say that he hoped Obama’s call for dialogue with Ahmadinejad would be heeded, but warned that if such talks don’t soften the Iranian president’s approach “we’ll strike him.” [continued…]

Why Israel will bomb Iran

From the standpoint of international relations theory, the scariest thing about recent Israeli rhetoric is that an attack on Iran lines up quite well with Israel’s rational interests as a superpower client.

While Israeli bluster is clearly calculated to push America to take a more aggressive stance toward Iran, that doesn’t mean the Israelis won’t actually attack if President Obama decides on a policy of engagement that leaves the Iranians with a viable nuclear option. In fact, the more you consider the rationality of an Israeli attack on Iran in the context of Israel’s relationship with its superpower patron, the more likely an attack appears. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Whatever you want to say about David Samuels’ argument, he certainly deserves credit for creative reasoning. That said, the idea that Israel bombing Iran could be a precursor to a grand bargain that delivers a Palestinian state is, I would say, a mighty stretch.

What interests me more about his piece is that it represents the common thread that unites all those who present a military solution to “the Iranian threat” as desirable, inevitable and necessary. That is, it presents an attack on Iran as an action that will have an upside (success being measured by how far Iran’s nuclear program is set back) but no significant downside. Warnings such as ElBaradei’s that an attack would “turn the region into a ball of fire” are dismissed. Israel’s missile defense systems are assumed to provide the Jewish state with adequate protection from a retaliatory attack. Hamas and Hezbollah have already been “taught a lesson,” while the international community is expected to be outwardly critical yet quietly grateful. Israel will have successfully demonstrated its regional dominance while Iran and its allies will sullenly resign themselves to accepting the status quo.

The risk assessment being made by attack-Iran proponents places all the risk in Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons and essentially none in the effects of an attack — an extraordinary replay of the arrogance that led to the war in Iraq.

There is however one major difference. The war in Iraq began during a period of global economic buoyancy. An attack on Iran, if it comes, is going to take place during a dire economic crisis. To blithely assume that Iran would not exploit its economic leverage in such a situation is beyond reckless. It suggests that those whose imaginations are shackled by their obsession with the fate of the Jewish state seem to think that Israel can prosper even while the world goes to ruin.

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NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP & EDITOR’S COMMENTS: April 11

Obama team mulls aims of Somali extremists

Senior Obama administration officials are debating how to address a potential terrorist threat to U.S. interests from a Somali extremist group, with some in the military advocating strikes against its training camps. But many officials maintain that uncertainty about the intentions of the al-Shabab organization dictates a more patient, nonmilitary approach.

Al-Shabab, whose fighters have battled Ethiopian occupiers and the tenuous Somali government, poses a dilemma for the administration, according to several senior national security officials who outlined the debate only on the condition of anonymity.

The organization’s rapid expansion, ties between its leaders and al-Qaeda, and the presence of Americans and Europeans in its camps have raised the question of whether a preemptive strike is warranted. Yet the group’s objectives have thus far been domestic, and officials say that U.S. intelligence has no evidence it is planning attacks outside Somalia. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — One of the great soundbites of the Obama election campaign was: “I want to end the mindset that got us into war.”

So far, the Obama administration has paid more attention to linguistic adjustments (“war on terror” is out) without any clear evidence that it is willing to address the deeper issues of political transformation.

Somalia provides the perfect test case of whether the war on terror has truly ended or whether it is simply going to be repackaged.

The threat posed by al Shabab is a direct result of policies shaped by the war-on-terror mindset.

Al Shabab’s precursor, the Islamic Courts Union, brought the first period of peace and order experienced in Somalia for over a decade but this experiment in Islamist rule was cut short by the Bush administration because of it’s name: “Islamist.”

The mindset that all Islamists are cut from the same cloth made it inconceivable that any form of Islamist rule could be deemed tolerable. Moreover, the fact that the neocons deemed Somalia as having been the arena in which American weakness had emboldened al Qaeda in the nineties, meant that American toughness — even if primarily through Ethiopian proxies — would have to put on display.

The direct result of this misconceived policy is that Somalia is now largely under the control of the much more extreme al Shabab splinter group and during the political turmoil resulting from the US-backed Ethiopian invasion, Somali piracy has become the strongest sector in the economy.

As the Obama administration develops it regional policy towards the Horn of Africa, the first thing it needs to acknowledge is that military solutions rarely solve political problems. The second is that the Bush administration made a serious mistake in undermining the Islamic Courts Union. Supporting a movement that enjoys broad indigenous support is more important than determining whether the political complexion of that movement is appealing in the eyes of Americans. Moreover, the American tradition of choosing its allies on the basis of who they oppose rather than whether they have grassroots support has invariably been a miserable failure.

Requiem for the war on terror

This is the way the Global War on Terror (also known, in Bush-era jargon, as GWOT) ends, not with a bang, not with parades and speeches, but with an obscure memo, a few news reports, vague denials, and a seemingly off-handed comment (or was it a carefully calculated declaration?) from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “The administration has stopped using the phrase [“war on terror”] and I think that speaks for itself. Obviously.”

This is often the way presidents and their administrations operate when it comes to national security and foreign policy — not with bold, clear statements but through leaks, trial balloons, small gestures, and innuendo.

In this case, though, are we seeing the cleverly orchestrated plan of a shrewd administration, every move plotted with astonishing cunning? Or are the operators actually a bunch of newbies bumbling along from day to day, as a literal reading of press reports on the end of GWOT might suggest? Unless some historian finds a “smoking gun” document in the archives years from now, we may never know for sure. [continued…]

Obama to appeal detainee ruling

The Obama administration said Friday that it would appeal a district court ruling that granted some military prisoners in Afghanistan the right to file lawsuits seeking their release. The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — One has to ask: where’s the push coming from to maintain extrajudicial power? Most likely, the CIA. CIA murder suspects like Mark Swanner seem no closer to facing charges. Swanner’s role in the homicide of an Abu Ghraib prisoner was supposedly being investigated by the Justice Department. But as Jeff Stein points out:

It’s not likely Swanner, who was not an undercover employee, was ever really under investigation by the Bush administration’s Justice Department, which constantly found loopholes for CIA interrogators to escape Geneva Convention and congressional strictures on torture.

Nor were CIA officers in charge of interrogations at Baghram Air Base in Afghanistan, where another prisoner died of hypothermia, ever held to account. CIA inspectors found that headquarters officials had carefully coached them on what to say in their official report. But the matter, including the names of the CIA’s Baghram base chief and his deputy, remains classified, and no one was punished, much less prosecuted.

Swanner’s name, too, might have remained secret, were it not for Mayer’s story. But it quickly slipped beneath the waves, not to surface again. Nor has the Justice Department announced it has decided not to pursue charges against him.

Swanner’s case has just been left to die quietly, without notice, a former CIA official involved in the matter observed, on condition of anonymity because it remains classified.

CIA to close secret prisons for terror suspects

The Central Intelligence Agency announced on Thursday that it will no longer use contractors to conduct interrogations, and that it is decommissioning the secret overseas sites where for years it held high-level Al Qaeda prisoners.

In a statement to the agency’s work force, the director, Leon E. Panetta, said that the secret detention facilities were no longer in operation, but he suggested that security and maintenance have been continued at the sites at taxpayers’ expense.

“I have directed our agency personnel to take charge of the decommissioning process, and have further directed that the contracts for site security be promptly terminated,” Mr. Panetta said. “It is estimated that our taking over site security will result in savings of up to $4 million.”

The C.I.A. has never revealed the location of its overseas facilities, but intelligence officials, aviation records and news reports have placed them in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Romania and Jordan, among other countries. Agency officials have said that fewer than 100 prisoners were held in them over several years. [continued…]

Netanyahu returns

We’ve learned that the Netanyahu character remains the same as it was during his previous three-year episode in power, in the late 1990s: He is, in principle, a hardliner. That said, the principle he holds most strongly is that he should be prime minister. And the public advocate of unbending diplomatic stances is, in fact, a weak negotiator who hands out contradictory concessions to whomever he meets. Barack Obama, take note: Netanyahu speaks loudly and carries a small stick.

To build a coalition, Netanyahu cut deals with five parties besides his own Likud Party. Left out was the centrist Kadima, led by former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, which actually won more seats in the Knesset than the Likud did in February’s election. Livni’s most public conditions for joining the government were that Netanyahu commit himself to a two-state solution and that he continue the negotiations with the Palestinians begun at the 2007 Annapolis conference. Reportedly, she also demanded a rotation agreement, under which she would serve as premier for part of the four-and-a-half-year term. (The precedent was the 1984-1988 agreement between the Likud’s Yitzhak Shamir and Labor’s Shimon Peres, after an electoral stalemate between the two parties.) Netanyahu was neither willing to share power with Livni in the Israeli government nor to divide the land now under Israeli rule into two states. [continued…]

The gathering storm

Six years to the day since the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Baghdad, the war that has dominated American politics for half a decade and upturned an entire regional order is being not-so-gently forced from centre stage. Iraq specialists at the National Security Council in Washington have hung signs on their office doors declaring that theirs is now “the good war”; the Obama administration is eager to declare victory in Iraq and shift its attention to the long-neglected conflict in Afghanistan.

It is difficult to predict what will occur as the Americans reduce their troop numbers, but few Iraqis feel optimistic, despite the recent reduction in violence: whatever comes next, it is unlikely that Iraq will recover quickly from six years of chaos and bloodshed.

Iraq’s economy remains in tatters. The central government has bought a provisional peace by placing hundreds of thousands of military-age men on its payroll. But the drop in oil prices has forced the state to slash its budget at a time when it is almost the only source of employment.

The oil sector, still Iraq’s most significant industry, is plagued by a rotting infrastructure. Pipelines in Basra are being kept together by “duct tape and spit”, according to one concerned American official. “They can burst at any minute.” Most Iraqis today might say much the same about their country. They are grateful for the temporary respite from extreme violence, but certain it will not take much to reignite the flames. [continued…]

General Ray Odierno: we may miss Iraq deadline to halt al-Qaeda terror

The activities of al-Qaeda in two of Iraq’s most troubled cities could keep US combat troops engaged beyond the June 30 deadline for their withdrawal, the top US commander in the country has warned.

US troop numbers in Mosul and Baqubah, in the north of the country, could rise rather than fall over the next year if necessary, General Ray Odierno told The Times in his first interview with a British newspaper since taking over from General David Petraeus in September.

He said that a joint assessment would be conducted with the Iraqi authorities in the coming weeks before a decision is made. [continued…]

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NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP & EDITOR’S COMMENTS: April 9

Israel cries wolf

“Iran is the center of terrorism, fundamentalism and subversion and is in my view more dangerous than Nazism, because Hitler did not possess a nuclear bomb, whereas the Iranians are trying to perfect a nuclear option.”

Benjamin Netanyahu 2009? Try again. These words were in fact uttered by another Israeli prime minister (and now Israeli president), Shimon Peres, in 1996. Four years earlier, in 1992, he’d predicted that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999.

You can’t accuse the Israelis of not crying wolf. Ehud Barak, now defense minister, said in 1996 that Iran would be producing nuclear weapons by 2004.

Now here comes Netanyahu, in an interview with his faithful stenographer Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, spinning the latest iteration of Israel’s attempt to frame Iran as some Nazi-like incarnation of evil… [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — In the interest of precision it’s worth pointing out that Netanyahu doesn’t merely liken Iran’s leaders to the Nazis — he says the Iranians are more dangerous. What happened in Germany was horrific but what the Iranians might do is even worse.

In the likes-to-be-called “progressive” Huffington Post, Mort Zuckerman offers some more scare-mongering on steroids:

    Fundamentally, a nuclear Iran represents a unique threat. The fear of mutually assured destruction has long restrained other nuclear powers. There is a real risk that Iran is not rational, that driven by its mad hatreds it will act in ways that are irrational, even self-destructive. Anti-Americanism is a cornerstone of the ideology of this Islamic State. The virulence of Iran’s hostility is impervious to reason. “Death to America!” has provoked the Iranian street for over a quarter of a century and is the venom upon which an entire generation of Iranians has been raised.

Thank goodness the cool rational voices of Zuckerman and Netanyahu are speaking out to alert us to the diabolical threat. And let’s add another dispassionate voice: The Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, announced on Tuesday that his office is making every effort to prosecute “perhaps the largest supplier of weapons of mass destruction to the Iranian government.”

Everyone’s been warning about the risk of Iran producing its own nuclear weapons and now we learn from the Manhattan DA that Iran has WMD suppliers — several of them — perhaps. This is terribly alarming — perhaps.

U.S. to join Iran talks over nuclear program

The Obama administration said Wednesday that the United States would start participating regularly with other major powers in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

The decision was a further step toward the direct engagement with Iran that President Obama has promised. It followed an invitation to Iran to join in a new round of talks, which would include Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. And it coincided with an unusual expression of conciliation toward the United States by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Mr. Ahmadinejad said Wednesday in a speech that his government would welcome talks with the Obama administration, provided that the shift in American policy was “honest.” [continued…]

Biden warns Israel off any attack on Iran

Vice President Joe Biden issued a high-level admonishment to Israel’s new government Tuesday that it would be “ill advised” to launch a military strike against Iran.

Biden said in a CNN interview that he does not believe newly installed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would take such a step. Even so, his comment underscored a gap between the conservative new Israeli government and the Obama White House on a series of questions, including the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and Iran. [continued…]

U.S. reiterates 2-state solution after Lieberman remarks

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Tuesday that Western-backed peace efforts with the Palestinians had reached a “dead end” and that Israel intended to present new ideas for diplomacy, prompting a response from the State Department re-emphasizing the American goal of establishing two states.

“There is definitely a regression here and we must understand and admit that we are at a dead end,” Lieberman told members of Yisrael Beiteinu during a party meeting. “We definitely intend to present new ideas.”

The Yisrael Beiteinu chairman also said that he planned to remain foreign minister for at least “four and a half years,” and vowed that his faction would stay a central component of the current government coalition until the next round of elections.

The State Department did not react directly to Lieberman’s statements, preferring instead to reiterate Washington’s commitment to a two-state solution. [continued…]

With ‘Annapolis,’ a warning to Israel

By forcefully rebutting Mr. Lieberman’s repudiation of Annapolis, and in such a public fashion, Mr. Obama is issuing a warning to Mr. Netanyahu that the United States will push for a two-state solution, and will expect him to publicly articulate his own support for such an initiative, many experts said.

“At a minimum, Bibi will need to disown these statements and come out explicitly in support of the two-state solution before his meeting with President Obama,” said Ghaith Al-Omari, a former Palestinian negotiator who now works with the American Task Force on Palestine. “If not,” Mr. Al-Omari said, “the issue will become the focus of the meeting.” [continued…]

Lieberman’s paradoxical strength

In the absence of a peace process – a situation that did not start with Lieberman’s appointment – the Palestinian position is likely to improve, much to the dismay of Lieberman and Benjamin Netanyahu. When Israel becomes entrenched in the world’s eyes as an obstacle to the peace process, thanks to Lieberman’s shoot-from-the-hip statements, what will prevent Europe from easing the pressure on Hamas, funneling cash to Gaza without Israel’s approval, requesting that Egypt open the Rafah crossing, freezing the upgrade in Israel’s relations with the European Union (as the EU has hinted) and opening consulates in the West Bank? All this would be to signal that the Europeans recognize the principle of two states for two peoples.

What will happen if Washington does not automatically veto every resolution condemning Israel in the Security Council? Or worse, what if Washington decides to join the condemnation? After all, it will have a good excuse: Lieberman. Paradoxically, Lieberman is likely to become a part of Obama’s new doctrine of global arrangements: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not end, but Israeli obduracy will enhance, not diminish, the United States’ standing in the Middle East. While Lieberman can continue to bang on his tom-toms every time somebody mentions the phrase “diplomatic process,” he will not be able to direct forces much larger than him or Israel. He will be the perfect excuse for these forces to act. This is his strength, nothing more. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Whatever you might think of Lieberman, it’s hard not to find his bluntness refreshing. A peace process that’s reached a “dead end” is hard to rejuvenate. It really does provide an opportunity to open up debate instead of expending energy on giving CPR to a corpse.

Unfortunately, given that the Obama administration has lately discovered some virtue in the so-called Annapolis “process”, I’m skeptical about how soon we’ll be hearing US officials openly referring to “Israeli obduracy”. Instead, I predict, in the coming months we’re going to hear officials, face cast down, chin withdrawn, saying that such-and-such a statement or development is “unhelpful”. And when it gets really, really bad the Israeli government might even be admonished for being, “frankly, unhelpful”.

The wild card here is whether there will emerge a significant split between the US and Europe. In that event, there may well be European-made fait accomplis to which Washington (with hidden relief) stoically acquiesce.

Obama team readying for confrontation with Netanyahu

In an unprecedented move, the Obama administration is readying for a possible confrontation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by briefing Democratic congressmen on the peace process and the positions of the new government in Israel regarding a two-state solution.

The Obama administration is expecting a clash with Netanyahu over his refusal to support the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

In recent weeks, American officials have briefed senior Democratic congressmen and prepared the ground for the possibility of disagreements with Israel over the peace process, according to information recently received. The administration’s efforts are focused on President Barack Obama’s Democratic Party, which now holds a majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. [continued…]

Obama saying Israel still bound to two-state solution

Dialogue between Jerusalem and Washington over the past week has been done via speech-making. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman swept aside the Annapolis process, and U.S. President Barack Obama swept it right back. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the two-state solution and Obama “clarified” that the United States not only “strongly” supports it, but he himself intends to advance it.

What’s going on here? Clearly the Netanyahu government and the Obama administration have not yet developed discrete communication channels to let them coordinate their policy and avoid statements that would embarrass the other party. The response from Netanyahu’s bureau after Obama’s speech was mainly intended to play for time “to formulate a policy.” [continued…]

Grappling with the ‘Problem of Lieberman’

… therein lies the Problem of Lieberman. It is tempting to characterise him as a radical populist, but his rhetoric clearly mirrors what many Israelis feel, namely that the Palestinian minority in Israel should be treated as a fifth column and that Israel should prioritise its Jewishness over democratic values.

To Palestinian citizens of Israel, the minority has always been viewed and treated that way and Mr Lieberman is only reaping the benefit of spelling out what are already both official and common attitudes. From 1948 to 1966, Palestinians in Israel lived under military rule that allowed them little freedom of movement and no recourse to civil law. Large swathes of land were confiscated to make room for new Jewish immigrants. The situation has improved since then, but Palestinians still complain of discrimination in budget allocations and in the health and education sectors, and the minority is the poorest and least educated sector in Israeli society.

“Lieberman only gives voice to what is already a very racist mentality [in Israel] against Palestinian citizens,” said Johnny Mansur, a Haifa historian. “This mentality exists because Israel has never resolved the question of whether it is possible to define itself as a Jewish state and at the same time offer full rights to non-Jewish citizens.” [continued…]

Rattling the cage: The threat from within

Lieberman talks a lot about “the threat from within” being more dangerous than the threat from without – that the Arabs inside our borders can destroy this country easier than the Arabs outside. He’s right about the threat from within, but it isn’t from Israeli Arabs, it’s from Lieberman himself and what he represents and the power he’s gained. He’s now taken over the Foreign Ministry. He’s gotten the stamp of approval from the leading parties of the right, center and center-left – the Israeli consensus. He’s being laundered and sanitized by virtually the entire American Jewish establishment.

And he’s not through by a long shot. At this point, he seems to have an even brighter future ahead.

Lieberman is more dangerous than Ahmadinejad because we have the military power to deter Iran’s threat to destroy us physically. I don’t know if we have the power to deter Lieberman from destroying us morally – from turning us into the image of what we claim to hate. [continued…]

Losing the ‘war on terror’

By lumping together the disparate forces, movements, armies, ideas and grievances of the greater Muslim world, from Morocco to Malaysia; by placing them in a single category (“enemy”), assigning them a single identity (“terrorist”); and by countering them with a single strategy (war), the Bush administration seemed to be making a blatant statement that the war on terror was, in fact, “a war against Islam.”

That is certainly how the conflict has been viewed by a majority in four major Muslim countries — Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan and Indonesia — in a worldpublicopinion.org poll in 2007. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they believe that the purpose of the war on terror is to “spread Christianity in the region” of the Middle East.

Indeed, if the war on terror was meant to be an ideological battle against groups such as Al Qaeda for the hearts and minds of Muslims, the consensus around the globe seems to be that the battle has been lost. [continued…]

“I am under a lot of pressure to not diagnose PTSD”

“Sgt. X” is built like the Bradley Fighting Vehicle he rode in while in Iraq. He’s as bulky, brawny and seemingly impervious as a tank.

In an interview in the high-rise offices of his Denver attorneys, however, symptoms of the damaged brain inside that tough exterior begin to appear. Sgt. X’s eyes go suddenly blank, shifting to refocus oddly on a wall. He pauses mid-sentence, struggling for simple words. His hands occasionally tremble and spasm.

For more than a year he’s been seeking treatment at Fort Carson for a brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, the signature injuries of the Iraq war. Sgt. X is also suffering through the Army’s confusing disability payment system, handled by something called a medical evaluation board. The process of negotiating the system has been made harder by his war-damaged memory. Sgt. X’s wife has to go with him to doctor’s appointments so he’ll remember what the doctor tells him. [continued…]

For America, the problem is Pakistan

We will need to remind ourselves often in the next few years that the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is not the Obama administration’s fault. It inherited from George W. Bush a crisis so deep and so horribly complex that dealing with it would tax the powers of St Peter, let alone a US government with many other things on its mind and on its grossly overstrained budget. Improving the situation is the best that we can hope for. Finding a “solution” to the Afghan war and its repercussions in Pakistan is not even a possibility.

On Afghanistan itself, the administration’s new strategy, set out last week, strikes most of the right notes. In particular, it is correct to emphasise the critical importance of building up the Afghan National Army, without which nothing can be achieved in Afghanistan in the long term; and on the need for the US to work towards an exit strategy rather than engage in empty rhetoric about “staying the course”. Talk of creating a modern, western-style democracy in Afghanistan has been drastically scaled back.

The administration has also done something that should have been obvious from the very beginning and reached out to Afghanistan’s northern and western neighbours. When the US eventually leaves Afghanistan, regional powers – perhaps grouped in the Shanghai Co-operation Council – will have to try to manage Afghanistan’s ongoing conflict. [continued…]

Do U.S. drones kill Pakistani extremists or recruit them?

Even as the Obama administration launches new drone attacks into Pakistan’s remote tribal areas, concerns are growing among U.S. intelligence and military officials that the strikes are bolstering the Islamic insurgency by prompting Islamist radicals to disperse into the country’s heartland.

Al Qaida, Taliban and other militants who’ve been relocating to Pakistan’s overcrowded and impoverished cities may be harder to find and stop from staging terrorist attacks, the officials said.

Moreover, they said, the strikes by the missile-firing drones are a recruiting boon for extremists because of the unintended civilian casualties that have prompted widespread anger against the U.S. [continued…]

US bounty scheme struggles in Pakistan

In Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal territories, where the Taleban and al-Qaeda are resurgent, the US does benefit from a loose network of informants.

But anyone caught betraying a fellow Muslim risks finding their family dishonoured for generations.

Mike Scheuer believes this explains why after all these years Osama Bin Laden is still a free man.

“It’s very unlikely that any Muslim is going to turn him in to the Americans for money,” says the former CIA officer, making reference to al-Qaeda’s attacks on the US in 2001.

“He’s been in Afghanistan since 9/11. It’s the third poorest place on the planet. We have $200m of reward money outstanding, including $50m for Osama and no-one has come forward to take a cent.

“I think we need in the West to grow up a little bit, everything doesn’t pivot on money.”

“In the Islamic world, at least when it comes to Osama Bin Laden, it pivots off of religion,” Mike Scheuer says. [continued…]

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NEWS & VIEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENTS: April 7

Report outlines medical workers’ role in torture

Medical personnel were deeply involved in the abusive interrogation of terrorist suspects held overseas by the Central Intelligence Agency, including torture, and their participation was a “gross breach of medical ethics,” a long-secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded.

Based on statements by 14 prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda and were moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in late 2006, Red Cross investigators concluded that medical professionals working for the C.I.A. monitored prisoners undergoing waterboarding, apparently to make sure they did not drown. Medical workers were also present when guards confined prisoners in small boxes, shackled their arms to the ceiling, kept them in frigid cells and slammed them repeatedly into walls, the report said.

Facilitating such practices, which the Red Cross described as torture, was a violation of medical ethics even if the medical workers’ intentions had been to prevent death or permanent injury, the report said. But it found that the medical professionals’ role was primarily to support the interrogators, not to protect the prisoners, and that the professionals had “condoned and participated in ill treatment.” [continued…]

The Red Cross torture report: what it means

When it comes to torture, it is not what we did but what we are doing. It is not what happened but what is happening and what will happen. In our politics, torture is not about whether or not our polity can “let the past be past”—whether or not we can “get beyond it and look forward.” Torture, for Dick Cheney and for President Bush and a significant portion of the American people, is more than a repugnant series of “procedures” applied to a few hundred prisoners in American custody during the last half-dozen or so years—procedures that are described with chilling and patient particularity in this authoritative report by the International Committee of the Red Cross.[2] Torture is more than the specific techniques—the forced nudity, sleep deprivation, long-term standing, and suffocation by water,” among others—that were applied to those fourteen “high-value detainees” and likely many more at the “black site” prisons secretly maintained by the CIA on three continents.

Torture, as the former vice-president’s words suggest, is a critical issue in the present of our politics—and not only because of ongoing investigations by Senate committees, or because of calls for an independent inquiry by congressional leaders, or for a “truth commission” by a leading Senate Democrat, or because of demands for a criminal investigation by the ACLU and other human rights organizations, and now undertaken in Spain, the United Kingdom, and Poland.[3] For many in the United States, torture still stands as a marker of political commitment—of a willingness to “do anything to protect the American people,” a manly readiness to know when to abstain from “coddling terrorists” and do what needs to be done. Torture’s powerful symbolic role, like many ugly, shameful facts, is left unacknowledged and undiscussed. But that doesn’t make it any less real. On the contrary.

Torture is at the heart of the deadly politics of national security. The former vice-president, as able and ruthless a politician as the country has yet produced, appears convinced of this. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Is Cheney convinced? I’m really not so sure. As a healthy young man, Dick Cheney made it a priority to avoid being sent to Vietnam. As an enfeebled former vice-president, Cheney’s priority these days is avoiding being sent to prison. His fear might not be great because at least so far he has been able to hide behind fairly strong institutional protection. But the emotive bedrock of his defense — and that of his co-conspirators — is that their actions were the expression of their concern for national security. I don’t buy it.

Cheney could always have made an argument in defense of the use of torture. He never has for the simple reason that he knows that the thin legal ice he’s already been walking on would at that point shatter. He has shied away from the T-word strictly for legal — not ethical — reasons. Cheney’s passion to defend America only goes so far — it does not mount to the level of personal risk.

The ticking-bomb scenario that so captured the limited imaginations of Cheney and his cohorts always had an obvious flaw. It’s easy enough to argue that an extreme situation might call for an extreme response but that extreme response could always include an individual’s willingness to ignore the law.

Here’s the way it goes:

    FBI: Mr Vice President. We have the suspect. He knows where the dirty bomb is hidden and he’s already told us it’s going to explode in an hour but he won’t say any more. What can we do to force him to talk?
    Cheney (national hero): Do whatever it takes and if we all end up in court I’m willing to pay that price to defend my country.
    Cheney (the real one): Speak to my lawyer.

What Cheney actually did was to construct a quasi-legal culture within which individuals would not feel personally responsible and legally and ethically accountable for their own actions. By so doing, he populated a counter-terrorism institutional structure with Cheney-clones whose primary concern was to be able to hide themselves behind some mangled construction of the law.

The issue here is not national security; it’s how to save your ass.

Obama rejects the clash of civilizations

In 1993 with the era of the Cold War having ended and amid vociferous debate about how the future world order might take shape, the American political scientist Samuel P Huntington asserted: “The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”

For the neoconservatives who steered US foreign policy after 9/11, Mr Huntington’s views were regarded as prophetic. While the Bush administration insisted that its war on terrorism should not be seen as a war against Islam, for proponents of a the clash-of-civilizations view of history that distinction was often seen as nothing more than a matter of political correctness. As recently as last month, the former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice conceded, “we were never able to make clear that it was not a war against Islam”.

Without mentioning Mr Huntington or the expression “clash of civilizations”, Barack Obama went to Turkey, “a place where civilizations meet, and different peoples come together” and declared on Monday: “This is not where East and West divide – this is where they come together.” [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Obama’s speech was well-crafted as an exercise in redefining US relations with the Islamic world and in underlining the strategic importance of US-Turkish relations and in emphasizing the valuable role Turkey can play in Europe.

That said, there is still a serious gap between presidential rhetoric and administration actions. Emblematic of that gap in this instance (as I point out in the piece above) is that while a certified hate-monger like Geert Wilders is free to tour the United States promoting Islamophobia, Obama administration lawyers are in court defending a Bush administration ruling that the highly respected European Islamic scholar, Tariq Ramadan, be denied entry into this country.

Mitchell: Arab peace initiative will be part of Obama policy

The Arab peace initiative will be part of the Obama administration’s policy toward the Middle East, the United States special envoy to the region said.

The 2002 initiative offers to normalize relations between the entire Arab region and Israel, in exchange for a complete Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories including East Jerusalem, the establishment of a Palestinian State and a “just settlement” for Palestinian refugees.

The envoy, George Mitchell, said the U.S. intends to “incorporate” the initiative into its Middle East policy. He made the statement at a meeting with Israeli, Arab American and European senior diplomats and officials in Washington a few weeks ago. [continued…]

Peres: ‘Devious’ Iran imitates Israel by hiding nuke ambitions

President Shimon Peres on Monday said a “sophisticated and devious” Iranian regime has managed to hide the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions from the world.

Speaking to a group of visiting U.S. members of Congress, Peres also said the United States must enlist Europe in its efforts to thwart those ambitions.

“The U.S. has a real partner in the European leadership and it must enlist it in the struggle against the Iranian nuclear [program],” the president said. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — “Nuclear ambiguity” — what a devious concept! Maybe it’s time for Israel to reframe its nuclear policy and start saying that for the sake of “nuclear modesty” it can’t divulge the size of its arsenal.

Israel not taking orders from Obama

Israel does not take orders from [Barack] Obama,” Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan (Likud) said on Monday, responding to an earlier statement by the US president in which he reaffirmed his administration’s commitment to all previous understandings between Israel and the Palestinians, including the process launched at Annapolis, Maryland, in 2007.

Erdan, who is also the liaison between the cabinet and the Knesset, praised Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman (Israel Beiteinu), who only last week said Israel was not bound by the Annapolis talks because it had never been approved by the cabinet or the Knesset. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — You tell ’em Gilad! It’s an Israeli prime minister’s right to dictate how the US votes in the UN Security Council but what kind of American president would be so arrogant as to insist that Israel abide by its own agreements? Really!

Most in poll back outreach to Muslims

Most Americans think President Obama’s pledge to “seek a new way forward” with the Muslim world is an important goal, even as nearly half hold negative views about Islam and a sizable number say that even mainstream adherents to the religion encourage violence against non-Muslims, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

There is still a broad lack of familiarity with the world’s second-largest religion — 55 percent of those polled said they are without a basic understanding of the teachings and beliefs of Islam, and most said they do not know anyone who is Muslim. While awareness has increased in recent years, underlying views have not improved.

About half, 48 percent, said they have an unfavorable view of Islam, the highest in polls since late 2001. Nearly three in 10, or 29 percent, said they see mainstream Islam as advocating violence against non-Muslims; although more, 58 percent, said it is a peaceful religion. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — I’d never be able to work as an opinion pollster. I just wouldn’t be able to resist responding to some of the answers I got by saying, “Are you serious?” “Do you really mean that?” “You’re just kidding. Now give me an honest answer.”

For instance, one of the numbers in this poll intrigues me. The question: Do you feel you do or do not have a good basic understanding of the teachings and beliefs of Islam, the Muslim religion?

45% of those polled answered that they do have a good basic understanding of Islam. This may correspond with the 47% who say they personally know a Muslim. The latter figure seems surprisingly high to me, considering that only one per cent of Americans are Muslims, but who knows? As for the nearly half of Americans who understand Islam, is it the case that they understand Islam, or that they believe they understand Islam, or that they believe that it’s the socially appropriate thing to be able to claim that one understands Islam in order to avoid looking ignorant?

Perhaps a follow up question would have been in order. Can you name the Five Pillars of Islam? No? Do you want to change the answer you gave to the previous question?

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Turkey’s pivotal place

“Turkey’s greatness lies in your ability to be at the center of things. This is not where East and West divide — this is where they come together.” Barack Obama addressing the Turkish parliament, April 6, 2009.

Turkey wants U.S. ‘balance’

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is a man of brisk, borderline brusque, manner and he does not mince his words: “Hamas must be represented at the negotiating table. Only then can you get a solution.”

We were seated in his suite at London’s Dorchester Hotel, where a Turkish flag had been hurriedly brought in as official backdrop. Referring to Mahmoud Abbas, the beleaguered Fatah leader and president of the Palestinian Authority, Erdogan said, “You will get nowhere by talking only to Abbas. This is what I tell our Western friends.”

In an interview on the eve of President Barack Obama’s visit to Turkey, his first to a Muslim country since taking office, Erdogan pressed for what he called “a new balance” in the U.S. approach to the Middle East. “Definitely U.S. policy has to change,” he said, if there is to be “a fair, just and all-encompassing solution.” [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Obama was well-advised in making Turkey one of his first foreign destinations. As a country that most Americans associate with a bird, its significance is not widely appreciated. But just look at a map. If any country can claim to be located at the strategic center of the world it is Turkey. No other country has as pivotal a position between multiple continents. It is no accident that Istanbul (or as it was, Constantinople) has been the capital of four successive empires. If the Turks now want to reclaim some of their former geopolitical power, the basis of that claim does not have to be imperial nostalgia. Turkey matters because this is where continents and cultures all converge.

Obama in Istanbul: Test for the West

“If we can show that a big Muslim nation can modernize itself with the help of friends,” former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer has argued on behalf of Turkey’s admission to the European Union, “it demonstrates that a strong civil society, equal rights for men and women, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, a modern administration and modern economy are not in contradiction to Islam. This would be the most powerful message against the jihadists and terrorists.”

That is certainly President Barack Obama’s hope when he attends the UN “Alliance for Civilizations” gathering in Istanbul this week after a pointed visit in Ankara to the grave of Ataturk, modern Turkey’s secular saint and founder. The meeting is of particular importance because Mohamed Khatami, the reformist former president of Iran is a key member of the group, as is Federico Mayor, the former secretary general of UNESCO who, long before 9/11, extolled the tolerant virtues of “La Convivencia” — the peaceful coexistence of Muslims, Jews and Christians in Andalusian Spain from 711-1492.

Whether Obama’s hope is justified is indeed the great test for the West in relations with the Muslim world. [continued…]

A Mideast play’s uncertain script

The Obama administration is preparing a broad stage for Middle East diplomacy stretching from the Palestinians to Syria to Iran. It’s a supremely ambitious agenda, and before the curtain goes up, Obama should explore his options and risks carefully.

By seeking to engage all the major actors in the Middle East at once, Obama is pursuing a general settlement of tensions in a dangerously unstable region. That’s intriguing and also worrying for countries in the Middle East. It makes Saudis and Israelis — not to mention Iranians and Syrians — nervous.

If you’re looking for a historical analogy for this scale of diplomacy, think of the Congress of Vienna of 1815. That gathering produced a new security architecture for a Europe that had been violently destabilized by revolutionary France — in something like the way the Middle East has been upset by the 1979 Iranian revolution. [continued…]

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Nuclear disarmament: a dream or an imperative?

Obama outlines disarmament plan

Under a hazy spring sky, before a swelling Czech crowd, U.S. President Barack Obama called for an international effort to lock down nuclear weapons materials within four years, one of a host of steps he said would move the globe to nuclear disarmament.

Speaking just hours after North Korea launched a controversial multistage rocket, the U.S. president took to the stage in Castle Square here, testifying “clearly and with conviction” to an audience of at least 20,000 of “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

“We have to insist, ‘Yes, we can,'” he said, reprising a battle theme recognizable to a crowd a continent away from his campaign victory. [continued…]

Many obstacles to Obama nuclear dream

President Obama’s hopes for a world free of nuclear weapons may just be a dream.

Despite his rousing rhetoric in Prague that “we can do it”, huge obstacles are in the way and even he gave himself two escape clauses.

The first was that he did not necessarily expect this to happen in his lifetime. He is 47 years old, so, given that the life expectancy in the US is about 78, that means another thirty years or more in which the goal might not be realised. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — A goal is just a dream unless there’s a deadline. When JFK announced his plan to send a man to the moon, he didn’t add the caveat, “but it might not happen in my lifetime.”

In a single breath, Obama inflated hopes and then let them drift away. To turn a dream into a reality will require a clearly defined strategy, a set of intermediary goals and deadlines, and genuine political commitment. If Obama becomes really serious, this could actually be the easy route for him to make history.

Gone are the days when nuclear disarmament could be dismissed as a lofty goal only entertained by dreamers. The CND marchers from the 50’s led by the likes of Bertrand Russell have been replaced an unlikely band of elder-statesman realists. Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, William Perry, and Sam Nunn made appeals for disarmament in 2007 and 2008 that drew a favorable response by pointing out that the risks in failing to disarm are now far greater than the challenge of taking on this goal.

But how can disarmament be easy? Of course it won’t be — but everything is relative. Placed alongside objectives such as tackling climate change, ending poverty or eradicating terrorism, nuclear disarmament is a much less complex undertaking. Whether Obama is ready to lead the way may come down to whether he has the courage to take on a bold political strategy that ties together nuclear disarmament with Middle East policy.

The effort to press Iran to abandon its uranium enrichment program would acquire a moral legitimacy that has so far been lacking if this particular objective was an integral part of a wider campaign for disarmament. At the same time, if Iran is to be persuaded then pressure must simultaneously be placed on Israel to both sign the non-proliferation treaty and commit to its own disarmament.

Benjamin Netanyahu says that stopping Iran becoming a nuclear power is a global imperative. Fair enough — but what is Israel willing to give up to make that happen?

If Obama wants to take a small but highly symbolic step in the right direction, he could tell the Israeli prime minister during his first trip to Washington, that the United States will no longer afford Israel the privelage of colluding in Israel’s policy of “nuclear ambiguity”. Robert Gates already chipped a crack in the foundations of that policy during his confirmation hearings. Now it’s time to drop the pretense altogether.

Challenging Iran’s nuclear aspirations requires acknowledging Israel’s nuclear realities.

US may cede to Iran’s nuclear ambition

US officials are considering whether to accept Iran’s pursuit of uranium enrichment, which has been outlawed by the United Nations and remains at the heart of fears that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons capability.

As part of a policy review commissioned by President Barack Obama, diplomats are discussing whether the US will eventually have to accept Iran’s insistence on carrying out the process, which can produce both nuclear fuel and weapons- grade material.

“There’s a fundamental impasse between the western demand for no enrichment and the Iranian dem­and to continue enrichment,” says Mark Fitzpat­rick, a former state depart­- ­­ment expert now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “There’s no obvious compromise bet­ween those two positions.” [continued…]

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Criticizing Israel

Statement by incoming Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman at the ministerial inauguration ceremony

The Israeli government never approved Annapolis, neither the Cabinet nor the Knesset, so anyone who wants to amuse himself can continue to do so. I have seen all the proposals made so generously by Ehud Olmert, but I have not seen any results.

So we will therefore act exactly according to the Road Map, including the Tenet document and the Zinni document. I will never agree to our waiving all the clauses – I believe there are 48 of them – and going directly to the last clause, negotiations on a permanent settlement. No. These concessions do not achieve anything. We will adhere to it to the letter, exactly as written. Clauses one, two, three, four – dismantling terrorist organizations, establishing an effective government, making a profound constitutional change in the Palestinian Authority. We will proceed exactly according to the clauses. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Lieberman needs to study the agreement that he just promised Israel will assiduously abide by. Phase One concludes:
— Government of Israel immediately dismantles settlement outposts erected since March 2001.

— Consistent with the Mitchell Report, GOI freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements).

Prominent gentiles must get over their hangups and start criticizing Israel

This post is not aimed at Jews. Note the headline. Many non-Jews have not come into this space–Criticizing Israel– because of fears of being called anti-Semites and written off. Years ago my friend Rob Buchanan said to me, Phil you have to speak out on this ’cause they’ll just smear non-Jews as anti-Semites. And I accepted that responsibility.

But the point of this post is that the passivity of likeminded gentiles has now become a problem. We need more prominent gentiles to step forward. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — I can’t claim to be a prominent gentile but I’m certainly one who has never been terribly worried about being accused of being an anti-Semite. (Everyone has to be able to read their own moral compass and so long as you are confident in doing that, it doesn’t really matter what kinds of slurs get flung in your direction.)

But the challenge now is not one of recruiting gentiles; it is one of transcending tribalism.

Pro-Israel Jews have two weapons that they predictably unleash. They demean and belittle fellow Jews by calling them “self-hating” whereas they vilify non-Jews by implying that they harbor the murderous intent of anti-Semites.

This is a divide-and-rule tactic and maybe the best way of responding to it is by forging solidarity and recognizing that those who draw attention to the ethnicity of Israel’s critics are merely trying to deflect attention from the criticism to the critic.

New town may be death blow to hopes for Israel peace

The sign in big, red Hebrew letters reads “Welcome to Mevasseret Adumim, the Harbinger of the Hills”. A three-lane road with roundabouts leads up the hill to a police station and street lamps line the flyover that links the new town to neighbouring Ma’aleh Adumim, one of the largest Jewish settlements in Israel.

There are no houses, cars or people in Mevasseret Adumim: it is a town laid out, waiting to be built. That is because international pressure has so far prevented construction from going ahead. The area is the last piece of open land linking Arab East Jerusalem to the West Bank and critics said that to develop it would bury the very notion of a two-state solution to the Middle East crisis.

According to reports in the Israeli media, the area has been earmarked for development under a secret accord between Binyamin Netanyahu, the new, conservative Israeli Prime Minister, and his ultra-nationalist Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman. [continued…]

Netanyahu, America and the cow in the house

To understand how Israel’s new Netanyahu government will handle relations with its neighbours, and a US administration with which it is clearly at odds, it is worth recounting an old Hasidic Jewish folktale

A man’s wife nags him relentlessly that their home is too small. A poor man, he can afford nothing larger, so he asks the advice of his rabbi. “Bring your chickens into the house,” the rabbi advises, which the man duly goes home and does. Naturally his wife’s anger escalates, which he reports back to the rabbi the following day. “Now bring in your goat,” the sage advises – a course of action with predictable consequences, but when the man returns the rabbi orders him to bring a cow into the house the next night. The man returns red-eyed and frantic after a sleepless night. “Rabbi, what can I do, my wife is threatening to leave.” To which the rabbi replies: “Now, take out the cow.”

The basic principle is simple: when you have a problem you can’t solve, create a bigger one. Plainly, Benjamin Netanyahu has a problem he can’t solve: Israel is highly dependent on US support, but America now has an administration determined to move quickly to end the conflict that has raged since Israel’s creation in 1948 by creating a viable, independent Palestinian state. And Mr Netanyahu has repeatedly insisted that he cannot accept such an outcome because he deems sovereign independence for the Palestinians to be an intolerable threat to Israel’s security. [continued…]

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NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP & EDITOR’S COMMENT: April 5

The poor must be included in a global economy

In an age characterised by the death of trust we find comfort in being able to blame everyone. It is entirely reasonable that thousands will protest, hopefully peacefully, against bankers who stuck their noses in the trough, regulators who turned away and governments who kept smiling as the tax take grew. The truth is they could just as easily protest against themselves for blindly succumbing to this leveraged society. We must now clear up the mess. Amid all the experts who failed to call this disaster, only one got it right. It was Bob Dylan, who said: “Money doesn’t talk. It swears.”

The system was always skewed and its rewards asymmetric. We built a global economy that excluded half of the globe. We marginalised the productive capacity of the 3bn people who live on less than $2 a day. By excluding them, we deprived them of the income they need to buy our stuff and consigned them to ill-health, lack of education and conflict. Instability is inherent in asymmetry. It will topple over. The first task of the Group of 20 nations must be to bring the peripheral economies and their people into the centre. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — In the midst of an economic crisis, the spirit “charity begins at home” always prevails. But in America on top of that there is a near universal assumption that the United States leads the world when it comes to foreign aid. That might be true as a raw number, but when it comes to aid as a proportion of GDP the US lags way behind the leading nations.

A key element of the crisis is a deficit of ethics

Financial crises are triggered when — partially due to the decline of correct ethical conduct — those working in the economic sector lose trust in its modes of operating and in its financial systems. Nevertheless, finance, commerce and production systems are contingent human creations which, if they become objects of blind faith, bear within themselves the roots of their own downfall. The only true and solid foundation is faith in the human person. For this reason all the measures proposed to rein in this crisis must seek, ultimately, to offer security to families and stability to workers and, through appropriate regulations and controls, to restore ethics to the financial world. [continued…]

Administration seeks an out on bailout rules for firms

The Obama administration is engineering its new bailout initiatives in a way that it believes will allow firms benefiting from the programs to avoid restrictions imposed by Congress, including limits on lavish executive pay, according to government officials.

Administration officials have concluded that this approach is vital for persuading firms to participate in programs funded by the $700 billion financial rescue package.

The administration believes it can sidestep the rules because, in many cases, it has decided not to provide federal aid directly to financial companies, the sources said. Instead, the government has set up special entities that act as middlemen, channeling the bailout funds to the firms and, via this two-step process, stripping away the requirement that the restrictions be imposed, according to officials. [continued…]

‘Holy hell’ over torture memos

A fierce internal battle within the White House over the disclosure of internal Justice Department interrogation memos is shaping up as a major test of the Obama administration’s commitment to opening up government files about Bush-era counterterrorism policy.

As reported by Newsweek, the White House last month had accepted a recommendation from Attorney General Eric Holder to declassify and publicly release three 2005 memos that graphically describe harsh interrogation techniques approved for the CIA to use against Al Qaeda suspects. But after the story, U.S. intelligence officials, led by senior national-security aide John Brennan, mounted an intense campaign to get the decision reversed, according to a senior administration official familiar with the debate. “Holy hell has broken loose over this,” said the official, who asked not to be identified because of political sensitivities.

Brennan is a former senior CIA official who was once considered by Obama for agency director but withdrew his name late last year after public criticism that he was too close to past officials involved in Bush administration decisions. Brennan, who now oversees intelligence issues at the National Security Council, argued that release of the memos could embarrass foreign intelligence services who cooperated with the CIA, either by participating in overseas “extraordinary renditions” of high-level detainees or housing them in overseas “black site” prisons. [continued…]

Federal judge to Obama DOJ: You’re wrong, Bagram Prisoners do have rights

Barack Obama’s Department of Justice made headlines in late February when it adopted the Bush administration’s notoriously unconstitutional stance on prisoners at Bagram Air Base, claiming that such “detainees” have no right to challenge their detention. As the Independent UK reported at the time, “less than a month after signing an executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, President Barack Obama has quietly agreed to keep denying the right to trial to hundreds more terror suspects held at a makeshift camp in Afghanistan that human rights lawyers have dubbed ‘Obama’s Guantanamo.'”

Four prisoners at Bagram, however, have been challenging this position in court since before Obama took office — and today, three of them won a major victory.

In a momentous, 53-page decision by Judge John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, a U.S. court concluded “for the first time,” according to the International Justice Network, “that detainees held indefinitely without charge in U.S. custody in Afghanistan are entitled to challenge their detentions in U.S. courts.” [continued…]

U.S. attacks ‘Sons of Iraq,’ its former allies

Less than a week after helping disarm and disband a Sunni paramilitary group that had once been on its payroll, the U.S. military has now directly clashed with some of its former allies.

Multi-National Division – Baghdad announced today that a U.S. aircraft targeted “Sons of Iraq” members who were spotted planting a roadside bomb last night north of Taji. According to a coalition news release, one man was killed in the strike; two others were found wounded in a nearby house. At least one of the men was identified has having served in the “Sons of Iraq.” That’s the largely Sunni tribal group, bankrolled by the U.S. to keep order in their neighborhoods — and to stop fighting American forces. Many of the “Sons” were former insurgents, and insurgent allies. If they flip back to being enemies of the government, the Iraq enterprise could be in deep, deep trouble. [continued…]

Outcry in Pakistan after video of a 17-year-old girl’s flogging by the Taliban is shown on TV

The Pakistani government has ordered an inquiry into the flogging of a 17-year-old woman by Taliban militants in the troubled Swat valley, after public outrage triggered by shocking video footage of the punishment.

The images, played yesterday on private television channels, show a burka-clad woman being pinned to the ground by two men while a third whips her backside 34 times. The woman is seen screaming and begging for mercy as a crowd of largely silent men look on. She is accused of having had an illegal sexual relationship, according to local law. Her brother is among those restraining her.

President Asif Ali Zardari led a wave of public condemnation, and ordered the arrest of the perpetrators. Prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani termed it “shocking” and called for an immediate inquiry. At the supreme court, the newly reinstated chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, summoned officials to a hearing scheduled for Monday to investigate the incident. [continued…]

Britain says U.S. doesn’t object to efforts to engage Hezbollah

The Obama administration is “comfortable” with the British government’s attempts to engage Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed group that the U.S. labels a terrorist organization, a senior British diplomat asserts.

Bill Rammell, Britain’s minister of state for foreign and Commonwealth affairs, said in a brief interview late last week in Damascus that despite protests to the contrary, the new U.S. administration does not object to the fledgling contacts with the political wing of the Lebanon-based Shiite Muslim group, which also has a heavily armed militia.

Britain likens the attempt to engage Hezbollah, launched quietly this year, to its outreach to political leaders of the Irish Republican Army — a move that helped quell the Northern Ireland conflict. [continued…]

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EDITORIAL: Intelligence, information, truth and power

Intelligence, information, truth and power

When the Israel lobby launched its frantic campaign to obstruct the appointment of Chas Freeman as chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), it was as though a notorious anti-Zionist was just about to torpedo US-Israeli relations. The idea that Ambassador Freeman could have played an important role in improving America’s national security and its position in the world apparently didn’t enter the minds of those who saw him as a threat.

Now that the furor has died down, Freeman has given an interview with Jim Lobe from the Inter Press Service and he outlines the approach that he had hoped to bring to the handling of intelligence and its role in government. What Freeman touches upon actually reaches far beyond the issue of intelligence and points to fundamental questions about how information is viewed and how its use shapes our lives.

This is how the issues were laid out in the interview:

Jim Lobe: Because much of the talk around Washington after your appointment – before, during and after your withdrawal – has so narrowly focused on a few issues, there was never much public debate about what you hoped to accomplish in the job of NIC chairman.

Chas Freeman: I was, frankly, approaching this with a fairly well thought out but still hypothetical focus on process with some additional questions of substance that I wanted to explore. I say hypothetical, because you never know until you encounter bureaucratic or other realities whether your notion of what needs to be done is in fact realistic or feasible.

But my sense was there have been several problems with the intelligence community and its output in recent years. Obviously, there’s been a problem of quality, illustrated along with the other problem – credibility – very nicely in the run-up to the Iraq War and the credulity with which the intelligence community responded to assertions by exile and special interest groups and others, and its willingness to slice and dice its conclusions to suit the political taste of its principal consumers.

Jim Lobe: What sorts of procedural changes were you thinking about implementing?

Chas Freeman: In general, I would’ve tried very hard to encourage members of the intelligence community to use classified information as a form of corroboration for information that is not classified, or is not terribly sensitive even if it is classified. In other words, I would urge analysts to write down rather than write up terms of levels of classification.

The theory here is that, whereas many people in the (NIC) have tended to see the value of intelligence as directly proportional to its level of classification, this, in fact, misunderstands the nature of intelligence. Intelligence is simply information that is relevant to statecraft or decision-making. If it’s on the front page of the Financial Times or Inter Press or has been stolen out of the Kremlin safe, the key question is what is its reliability and how much can you rely upon it in understanding the situation you confront and in forming policies to deal with that situation.

I must say much of the criticism of my appointment focused on the apparently horrifying possibility that I might actually produce intelligence that might not conform to political convenience or correctness but reached some other conclusion – intelligence that wouldn’t fit the preconceptions or policy preferences of its consumers. And that would be unacceptable.

The tendency to tie the value of intelligence to its level of classification is the product of a philosophical view of information that has profound implications.

The crucial issue is whether information is viewed as a repository of truth or power.

Is information valued because it illuminates understanding or because it can serve as a means to an end?

Information as a repository of power needs to be guarded and channeled in the most effective way. Its value becomes diluted through loss of ownership.

Information as a repository of truth acquires value if it can be tied to other information through a process of exchange. Its value is enhanced through the relinquishment of ownership.

Democracy rises or falls on its ability to sustain the free flow of information. As a practical necessity that flow needs to be managed yet if this is treated as an exercise in the control of power, democratic governance itself will be undermined.

Those who saw Freeman as a threat were looking through the prism of information-as-power. They thought he would be a gatekeeper who held back information that would serve their agenda while promoting the flow of information whose dissemination would act against their interests. What they failed to see was that Freeman never shared their presuppositions about the nature of information.

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Israel’s threats

Israel expected to hold back on Iran

Robert Gates, US defence secretary, has said Israel is unlikely to attack Iran this year to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Gates said there was still enough time to persuade Iran to abandon what is widely perceived to be a nuclear weapons programme.

Mr Gates said he does not expect Israel – which believes the US estimate for when Iran could develop a nuclear weapon is too sanguine – to take military action this year.

“I guess I would say I would be surprised…if they did act this year,” said Mr Gates. [continued…]

Israel’s awful new government

Israeli leaders and their advocates have already promoted a full-court blitz demanding that the United States “stop” Iran, or Israel will be forced to do so on its own. In part, this is bluster, as few analysts believe Israel is able to attack Iran on its own, and no one believes that Iran wouldn’t retaliate, which would force the United States into the middle of the conflict. However, this emphasis on Iran serves another useful purpose for Netanyahu and Lieberman: Not only does it remove Palestinian independence and potential Israeli peace treaties with the Arab world from U.S. focus, but it sets the agenda for the U.S.-Israeli talks that are to take place this May.

So far, the Obama administration has kept its cards close to the vest — there’s little sign of how it will engage Israel’s new administration on such fundamental differences in policy. But one thing is certain. The longer the United States waits, the harder it will be for the Israeli government to back down from its positions. And it is clear, looking at the challenges facing the United States throughout the Middle East, that placing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank on the back burner is only going to add fuel to the many brush fires the United States is already fighting in the region. Dealing with a hostile and recalcitrant enemy in Afghanistan and Pakistan is hard enough, but the Obama administration may find that dealing with a hostile and recalcitrant ally brings its own set of challenges. [continued…]

Will Netanyahu attack Iran?

European governments are practicing evacuating their citizens from Iran in case a “third party” strikes the nuclear installations. Israel’s veiled threats “that no option should be lifted from the table,” which were meant to push the international community to intensify pressure and sanctions on Iran to prevent war, have had the opposite effect. The international community has become convinced that Israel will act on its own, so it does not need to do a thing. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Irrespective of whether Israel is ultimately a free agent, for Robert Gates to refer to Israeli intentions as though they are something about which Americans can only guess, does not seem to be in American interests. It burnishes Israel’s image of unpredictability and it implies that the US lacks the power to rein in its ally at a critical juncture.

It’s one thing for the Obama administration to want to show that Israeli interests and US interests don’t always coincide, but to suggest that the US has no leash strong enough to hold back the mad dog will merely have the effect of creating the appearance of complicity. If the US truly sees Israel as a maverick state that in the international arena is a law unto itself, then it’s time to question the basis of the US-Israeli alliance.

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EDITORIAL: Who poses a greater threat to Israel? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Benjamin Netanyahu?

Who poses a greater threat to Israel? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Benjamin Netanyahu?

“In an interview conducted shortly before he was sworn in today as prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu laid down a challenge for Barack Obama. The American president, he said, must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons — and quickly — or an imperiled Israel may be forced to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities itself,” writes Jeffrey Goldberg.

In Haaretz, Aluf Benn presents a somber assessment of the likelihood that Israel will start a war with Iran:

“I promise that if I am elected, Iran will not acquire nuclear arms, and this implies everything necessary to carry this out,” Benjamin Netanyahu said before the elections. In other speeches Netanyahu described Iran’s nuclear program as “an existential threat for Israel,” and warned that it risked a second Holocaust. Does his return as prime minister necessarily bring Israel nearer to war with Iran?

In political circles the view is that yes, Netanyahu as prime minister brings Israel closer to war with Iran. Politicians in touch with Netanyahu say he has already made up his mind to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations.

In The National, I reviewed a recent assessment of the feasibility of an Israeli attack and some of its consequences:

In a recent study conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, Abdullah Toukan predicted that an air assault by Israel on Iran’s nuclear facilities would involve 20 per cent of the high-end combat aircraft and all of the tankers from the Israeli air force.

“We can conclude that a military strike by the Israeli air force against Iranian nuclear facilities is possible, however, it would be complex and high risk in the operational level and would lack any assurances of a high mission success rate.”

The study also noted that Iran may have secretly acquired Russian air defence systems in which case an Israeli strike force would face a significantly elevated risk.

“The attrition rates of the Israeli air strike will be high, could go up to 20 to 30 per cent. For a strike mission of some 90 aircraft, the attrition could then be between 20 to 30 aircraft. A loss Israel would hardly accept in paying.”

The study also considered the possibility that Israel might choose instead to use conventionally-armed ballistic missiles to attack Iran.

Whatever the method of attack, the effects of radioactive fallout emitted by the Bushehr nuclear reactor, if it was destroyed, would be severe. “Most definitely Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE will be heavily affected by the radionuclides.

“Any strike on the Bushehr nuclear reactor will cause the immediate death of thousands of people living in or adjacent to the site, and thousands of subsequent cancer deaths or even up to hundreds of thousands depending on the population density along the contamination plume.”

Significantly, Goldberg writes:

Few in Netanyahu’s inner circle believe that Iran has any short-term plans to drop a nuclear weapon on Tel Aviv, should it find a means to deliver it. The first-stage Iranian goal, in the understanding of Netanyahu and his advisers, is to frighten Israel’s most talented citizens into leaving their country. “The idea is to keep attacking the Israelis on a daily basis, to weaken the willingness of the Jewish people to hold on to their homeland,” Moshe Ya’alon said. “The idea is to make a place that is supposed to be a safe haven for Jews unattractive for them. They are waging a war of attrition.”

What seems strikingly obvious is that the choices made by the Israeli government may well have the same effect and lead Jews in increasing numbers to conclude that Zionism has failed.

An attack on Iran when described as potentially successful — from Israel’s point of view — is likely to merely push back Iran’s nuclear program by a few years.

But what about the psychological impact of failure?

Where would Israel stand strategically in the event that it suffered significant losses while only doing limited damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities?

What would the mood be in Tel Aviv as its residents awaited a reprisal through a means and at a time of Iran’s choosing?

Israel’s nuclear reactor at Dimona is within range of missiles fired from Iran or Lebanon. Bennett Ramberg writing in Arms Control Today says:

… a successful strike on an operating Dimona reactor that breached containment and generated an explosion and fire involving the core would present effects similar to a substantial radiological weapon or dirty bomb. Although consequences would represent only a small fraction of the Chernobyl release, for Israel, a country the size of New Jersey with a population of some six million, the relative economic dislocation, population relocation, and immediate and lingering psychological trauma could be significant.

Whether or not Dimona ends up being attacked, Israel is doomed if it clings on to the idea that military invulnerability and security are the same.

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