Yearly Archives: 2010

Greedy bastards

[Rush Limbaugh] said on his radio show that President Obama may be appealing to anti-Semitism with his recent populist criticism of banks and bankers. “There are a lot of people,” Limbaugh said, “when you say banker, people think Jewish.” He didn’t mention Goldman Sachs. Abe Foxman, longtime head of the B’nai Brith Anti-Defamation League, declared that Limbaugh’s remark was “offensive and inappropriate” and “borderline anti-Semitic.” Limbaugh and his defenders protest that Limbaugh clearly was referring to other people, “people who have–what’s the best way to say–a little prejudice about them,” and not endorsing such views himself. And the transcript bears him out.

By Foxman’s standard, even to mention that many bankers are Jewish is anti-Semitic (even though it’s true), and attributing this view to others (while professing to be worried about it) is no excuse This may be over-the top. We live in a culture of umbrage, in which everybody seems to be taking offense at something somebody else says. Foxman is one of the nation’s foremost umbragists.

However, Limbaugh’s supporters make too much of the fact that, read literally, his remarks took the form of defending Jews against unfair maligning. There can be something creepy about “philo-semitism,” or a professed special fondness for Jews. Even when it is sincere (as it may well be in Limbaugh’s case), it rests on an acute feeling of “otherness” about Jews that makes many Jewish Americans rightly uncomfortable.

Sometimes the stereotype about Jews and money takes a harsher form: Jews are greedy, they lie, cheat and steal for money, they have undue influence with the government, which they cultivate and exploit ruthlessly, and so on. In recent weeks, many have said this sort of thing about Goldman Sachs, but with no reference to Jews. Are they all anti-Semites? No. It ought to be possible to criticize Goldman in the harshest possible terms–if you think that’s warranted–without being tarred as an anti-Semite. (Many of Goldman’s harshest critics, unsurprisingly, are Jewish. Jews can be anti-Semites, too.)

Yesterday, I made the pointed observation that Goldman Sach’s CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, appears to meet the CIA’s requirements for becoming the target of a Predator attack: that such an individual poses “a continuing threat to US persons or interests.”

That observation deserves three points of clarification:

1. No, I am not suggesting that the CIA or anyone else “take out” Blankfein. I neither support extrajudicial killing nor even the death penalty.

2. I freely confess that I harbor a prejudice – but it’s not against Jews; it’s against greedy bastards. I don’t give a fig whether any particular greedy bastard happens to be a Jew or a Gentile.

3. My loathing for greedy bastards does not rest on a simple Marxist belief in a need for the equitable distribution of material wealth. Rather, it springs from seeing the corrosive effect on human culture that derives from attaching excessive value to material things.

Yes, we have been fleeced by men like Blankfein, but much worse we have been led to believe that they are models of success – that they and their values deserve the power to shape the society in which we live and the culture that we create. We have been led to forget that the things of real value are things we can certainly lose, but never buy or own.

Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira’s Jewish supremacism

Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, was detained for questioning by the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) in connection with the burning of a mosque in Yasuf, a village near Nablus, in December. He is head of the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in Yitzhar, and is a disciple of Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsberg. The Jerusalem Post reports:

While religious Zionists are primarily concerned with the issue of evacuating settlements, the students at Od Yosef Chai also see IDF ethics as problematic because they are based on “western” or “Christian” morality that equates Jewish lives with those of non-Jews.

In sharp contrast to the Goldstone Report, which criticizes the IDF for purportedly committing “war crimes” against Palestinians during Operation Cast Lead, Od Yosef Chai’s criticism of the IDF is totally different.

IDF battlefield ethics are seen as immoral not because they allow for the killing of innocent bystanders but because they force Jewish soldiers to needlessly endanger themselves to protect gentiles.

The measures taken by the IDF to protect non-combatants, such as using ground forces to weed out terrorists embedded in highly populated civilian areas so as to minimize collateral damage, are viewed by Shapira as downright evil, because they lead to the needless injury or death of Jewish soldiers.

In his preface to the controversial book Torat Hamelech [The King’s Torah], authored by Shapira and Rabbi Yosef Elitzur, Ginsberg points out the tremendous need to illuminate the fundamental differences between Jew and gentile “at a time when we are obligated to conquer [the land of Israel] from our enemies so that we can act as we need to in the spirit of Torah and so that we can strengthen the spirit of the nation and its soldiers.”

Some of the guidelines mentioned at the back of the book in a section entitled “Conclusions – Chapter Five: The Killing of Gentiles in War,” include the following: “There is a reason to kill babies [on the enemy side] even if they have not transgressed the seven Noahide Laws [to believe in God, not to commit idolatry, murder, theft or adultery, to set up a legal system, and not to tear a limb from a live animal] because of the future danger they may present, since it is assumed that they will grow up to be evil like their parents….”

Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan interviewed on Euronews

Euronews, Ali Ishan Aydin: How do you see the future of Turkey-Israel relations? After all that has happened, do you still think Turkey can mediate between Israel and Syria, and other Arab states?

Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: Israel should give some thought to what it would be like to lose a friend like Turkey in the future. The way they recently treated our ambassador has no place in international politics. We have done our best for Israel-Syria relations. But now we see Benjamin Netanyahu saying ‘I do not trust Erdoğan, but I trust Sarkozy’. Do you have to give a name? This is diplomatic inexperience, too. Because when you say this… How can I trust you if you say you don’t trust me? We have important ongoing agreements between us. How can these agreements be kept going in this climate of mistrust? I think Israel had better take another look at its relations with its neighbours if it believes it is a world power.

Euronews Nial O’Reilly: In recent days the Israeli foreign ministry has accused you of being a cause of the rising tension between your two countries. In fact, it has accused you of anti-semitism. When you review how you handled this incident, do you feel YOU could have handled it more diplomatically?

Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: I am telling the truth…And I will keep telling the truth. Turkey has an age-old history as a state. When you talk to such a state you must be careful. When innocent civilians are ruthlessly killed, struck by phosphorus bombs, infrastructure is demolished in bombing and people are forced to live in an open-air prison… we can not see this as compatible with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, simply human rights, and we can not close our eyes to all this happening. 1-30-10

Which is more dangerous: reckless or clueless?

When Obama took office, many citizens of this nation (including me) let out a sigh of relief, comforted by the thought that a reckless fool had been replaced a calm and sometimes inspiring realist.

How can a year seem like such a long time ago?

Engagement turned out to a piece of campaign pap that fizzled out when the administration discovered that face-to-face contact with Americans does not in the eyes of America’s adversaries have the irresistible appeal it was supposed to have. When you come to the table a smile and a handshake turns out not to be enough.

So what’s Obama’s fallback plan when it comes to confronting Iran?

First we should note that Obama never really challenged the Bush/neocon paradigm in the first place: confrontation with Iran.

Now, since talks went nowhere we’re into the phase escalation: Obama ditched the European missile defense plans (which might have been a smart way of placating the Russians) but now he’s sending in Patriot missiles to be positioned right on Iran’s doorstep. The New York Times reports:

“Our first goal is to deter the Iranians,” said one senior administration official. “A second is to reassure the Arab states, so they don’t feel they have to go nuclear themselves. But there is certainly an element of calming the Israelis as well.”

Adhmadinejad, on the other hand, promises a February 11 “telling blow to global powers.” What kind of blow? I predict it’ll be something symbolic and not quite as dramatic as his language suggests, but who knows.

Meanwhile, Gen James Jones, Obama’s national security adviser, has warned that Iran might lash out at Israel through its surrogates, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Sorry, but this is exactly the kind of regurgitated conventional wisdom we should expect from a man who gives every appearance of functioning on autopilot.

Did Jones happen to hear Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri warn last week that an attack on Hezbollah by Israel would be viewed as an attack on Lebanon? This from the poster-boy of the Cedar Revolution which five years ago was taken by the Bush administration as the herald of democracy spreading across the Middle East.

What’s my point? Hariri, who might view Hezbollah warily nevertheless recognizes that it is not an Iranian surrogate waiting to be unleashed on Israel. The Islamist party’s primary focus is on its own domestic constituency and the wider interests of Lebanon.

If a war with Iran was to erupt, would Hezbollah and Hamas have a role? Quite likely, but that doesn’t mean that these groups are sitting around awaiting their commands from masters in Tehran. They have their own political agendas that are not subordinate to the interests of the Iranians.

And if my comments about Jones sound harsh, just watch his keynote address at the J Street conference in October last year where he said: “Of all the problems the administration faces globally, that if there was one problem that I would recommend to the president that if he could do anything he wanted, he could solve one problem, this [the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] would be it.”

Ah, if only he was in a position to make such a recommendation. If only he had the president’s ear…

If only Obama’s push for Middle East peace hadn’t turned out to epitomize a wasted year in office.

General Jim Jones, President Obama’s National Security Advisor, addresses J Street’s first national conference from Isaac Luria on Vimeo.

Covering up homicide

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama said: “… in the last year, hundreds of al Qaeda’s fighters and affiliates, including many senior leaders, have been captured or killed — far more than in 2008.”

He could have said “we have killed…” just to make it clear that he includes himself as an actor, not an observer, in the killing process. And he could also have said “and we killed a bunch of innocent bystanders as well.” But maybe when it comes to al Qaeda, there is in Obama’s mind no such person as an innocent bystander. Maybe the children, wives and grandparents are “affiliates”.

In Pakistan the concept of an innocent bystander has not been abandoned and what Obama touts as great success is perceived as an ongoing unrelenting massacre.

Here are some of the latest damning numbers – numbers that no doubt many an American journalist will hesitate to report because they haven’t been confirmed by the holiest of sources, the Pentagon:

Afghanistan-based US predators carried out a record number of 12 deadly missile strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan in January 2010, of which 10 went wrong and failed to hit their targets, killing 123 innocent Pakistanis. The remaining two successful drone strikes killed three al-Qaeda leaders, wanted by the Americans.

The rapid increase in the US drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal areas bordering Afghanistan can be gauged from the fact that only two such strikes were carried out in January 2009, which killed 36 people. The highest number of drone attacks carried out in a single month in 2009 was six, which were conducted in December last year. But the dawn of the New Year has already seen a dozen such attacks.

Note that all of these Predator attacks came after the CIA team widely reported as having been responsible for Predator targeting had been killed in the Khost bombing.

Now if it became known that the US government was responsible for sending gunmen into restaurants where mafia-style they left their targets riddled with bullets in front of horrified onlookers, even if there were no innocent bystanders killed, there would be public outrage. The government would be accused of having stooped to using the methods of gangsters.

Instead, we fire missiles, destroy the restaurant and kill everyone in it and even if it turns out the target had already left, somehow it’s OK. It was an innocent mistake. It happened in a distant country. We’ll never hear the names of the dead.

The immutable connection between greed and talent

From Politico:

In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.

In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.

The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.

But sources familiar with the CIA’s moonlighting policy defend it as a vital tool to prevent brain-drain at Langley, which has seen an exodus of highly trained, badly needed intelligence officers to the private sector, where they can easily double or even triple their government salaries. The policy gives agents a chance to earn more while still staying on the government payroll.

OK, I know it’s supposed to be a fundamental law in free-market economics that the only way of finding and holding on to talent is through high “compensation” but whatever else we might have learned from the Wall Street debacle, isn’t it that the bright minds there turned out not to have wisdom commensurate with their pay checks.

Isn’t this the only sure thing that can be said: that those who seek the highest paying jobs are the people who want to make the most money and their talent, such as it is, consists most reliably in this: their ability to enrich themselves.

For the last eight years we’ve been told that the CIA is staffed by heroic patriots who’ve dedicated their careers to protecting America. Mistakes, they’ve made a few, but they did it their way.

Are we now supposed to add the caveat – so long as they can make as money as possible in the process.

Lloyd Blankfein: a continuing threat to U.S. persons or interests?

Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs
From The Times:

Goldman Sachs, the world’s richest investment bank, could be about to pay its chief executive a bumper bonus of up to $100 million in defiance of moves by President Obama to take action against such payouts.

Bankers in Davos for the World Economic Forum (WEF) told The Times yesterday they understood that Lloyd Blankfein and other top Goldman bankers outside Britain were set to receive some of the bank’s biggest-ever payouts. “This is Lloyd thumbing his nose at Obama,” said a banker at one of Goldman’s rivals.

Goldman Sachs is becoming the focus of an increasingly acrimonious political and financial showdown over the payment of multimillion-pound bonuses. Last week the US President described bonuses paid out by some banks as “the height of irresponsibility” and “shameful”.

The LA Times reports that Anwar al Awlaki, an American radical cleric, may be about to have his name added to the CIA’s hit list. In other words, if it is determined on the basis of current intelligence that he poses “a continuing threat to US persons or interests” then the CIA has, under a presidential order, the legal authority to kill him. Al Awaki has been linked to the Ft Hood massacre and the failed Christmas Day airline plot.

So here’s the question: is Anwar al Awlaki capable of doing more harm to America than the CEO of Goldman Sachs?

Let’s face it, Goldman Sachs might have weathered the financial crisis better than any of its competitors but that’s not by virtue of being squeaky clean. And let’s be objective, the harm done to the US economy and to millions of American families as a result of the rapacious business practices of Wall Street’s investment bankers far exceeds the damage done by al Qaeda.

When the economic bomb exploded, America was the point of impact with collateral damage strewn across the planet. Tall buildings might not have suddenly fallen, nor airliners exploded in balls of fire, yet lives have been lost, futures destroyed and security shattered while individuals like Lloyd Blankfein are still able to cast their eyes across the wasteland and conclude: sure, I deserve a $100 million more. It’s mine for the taking.

America’s contract killers

America's contract killers Twelve years ago, after Benjamin Netanyahu personally directed Mossad assassins to try and murder Khalid Meshaal in Amman, Jordan, President Clinton expressed his frustration with the Israeli leader, saying: “I cannot deal with this man. He is impossible.”

In accordance of the diplomatic norms of the era, it was seen as preposterous that Israel would send its agents onto the streets of a neighboring friendly capital to murder one of its enemies and for them to do so while posing as Canadians. Moreover, Israeli agents had been caught in the act and were in custody. The Jordanians had been embarrassed and an antidote to the deadly poison injected into Meshaal would have to be promptly administered if Israel wanted its operatives released. Only under US pressure did Netanyahu yield.

If the murder of Mahmoud al Mabhouh in a hotel in Dubai eleven days ago happens to have been performed by another team of Netanyahu’s hit men, what might President Obama’s response have been?

“Are there any useful lessons for the United States here Mr Prime Minister?”

It turns out that contract killing — something that President George W Bush opened the door to but didn’t pursue with vigor — has been embraced with surprising passion by his successor.

Is it for that proverbial reason that dead men don’t talk or equally that dead al Qaeda operatives don’t present the many legal conundrums as do those caught alive? Is it that detention below rather than above ground has simply become a matter of political expedience?

There are now officers in the CIA who supposedly have the legal authority to sign a death warrant on the basis that an individual is “deemed to be a continuing threat to U.S. persons or interests.”

There is a level of accountability. We’re not told who signs these death warrants but we can rest assured that those who sit on Obama’s death panels must sign their names in ink. These are not a death sentences delivered by email or text message.

As the LA Times reports:

Former officials involved in the program said it was handled with sober awareness of the stakes. All memos are circulated on paper, so those granting approval would “have to write their names in ink,” said one former official. “It was a jarring thing, to sign off on people getting killed.”

Jarring perhaps, yet the greatest human frailty is that moral judgment so easily yields to the legitimizing power that flows from normality. And nothing shapes normality more effectively than bureaucracy.

Set up a bureaucratic process and — as the Nazis proved — anything becomes possible. Through faithfulness to a government-endorsed procedure almost anyone will sooner or later become willing to suspend the timid dictates of their own conscience.

The LA Times describes in clinical terms the process that runs from signature to incineration:

The CIA sequence for a Predator strike ends with a missile but begins with a memo. Usually no more than two or three pages long, it bears the name of a suspected terrorist, the latest intelligence on his activities, and a case for why he should be added to a list of people the agency is trying to kill.

The list typically contains about two dozen names, a number that expands each time a new memo is signed by CIA executives on the seventh floor at agency headquarters, and contracts as targets thousands of miles away, in places including Pakistan and Yemen, seem to spontaneously explode.

No U.S. citizen has ever been on the CIA’s target list, which mainly names Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, according to current and former U.S. officials. But that is expected to change as CIA analysts compile a case against a Muslim cleric who was born in New Mexico but now resides in Yemen.

When America’s contract killers target their first US citizen, will his fellow citizens pay much attention? Probably not. He has an Arabic name and dark skin — he’s suitably other. If Anwar al Awlaki is eliminated, the CIA’s hit list will briefly get shorter.

How Israelis learned to brutalize Palestinian children

Women in the Israeli Defense Forces break their silence:

A female soldier in Sachlav Military Police unit, stationed in Hebron, recalled a Palestinian child that would systematically provoke the soldiers by hurling stones at them and other such actions. One time he even managed to scare a soldier who fell from his post and broke his leg.

Retaliation came soon after: “I don’t know who or how, but I know that two of our soldiers put him in a jeep, and that two weeks later the kid was walking around with casts on both arms and legs…they talked about it in the unit quite a lot – about how they sat him down and put his hand on the chair and simply broke it right there on the chair.”

Even small children did not escape arbitrary acts of violence, said a Border Guard female officer serving near the separation fence: “We caught a five-year-old…can’t remember what he did…we were taking him back to the territories or something, and the officers just picked him up, slapped him around and put him in the jeep. The kid was crying and the officer next to me said ‘don’t cry’ and started laughing at him. Finally the kid cracked a smile – and suddenly the officer gave him a punch in the stomach. Why? ‘Don’t laugh in my face’ he said.”

Israel is very pleased with the cage in which it has trapped Obama

Zvi Bar’el in Haaretz:

Speeches, so it turns out, are an excellent substitute for policy. There’s no solution to the problem of radical Islam? Talk about reaching out in friendship to moderate Islam. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is stuck? Talk about the legitimate rights of the Palestinians. The war on Al-Qaida is not progressing? Speak of building a nation in Afghanistan. Iran is being impudent? Issue an elegant warning. Wait a year. Let it be forgotten and then make another speech. Erase all that did not succeed, bypass the major crises and continue on to the next year.

Indeed, President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address reveals that what stirred the world’s imagination during the past year, what led to his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, what caused sandstorms in Middle Eastern and Muslim states and sowed terror in Israel – simply popped like a bubble. Not a single word on the Middle East peace process. Only a restrained “promise” to Iran’s leaders of “growing consequences.” No new outstretched arm to moderate Islam. A word about human rights? Nothing. Just let us make it through the year in peace.

The great vision came down to local politics. To fighting against tribes, gangs, or, in the case of Israel, nationalist parties. Whoever thought that Obama would fulfill the message of Arab-Israeli peace can, like Obama, kick himself for nurturing lofty expectations. But if Obama can chalk up his meager achievements in the Middle Eastern marketplace to inexperience – as if every U.S. president has to reinvent the wheel – that doesn’t absolve the Israelis from paying the bill.

Gideon Levy:

Looking at the way the right acts makes one go green with envy and want to learn from them. Four hundred criminal cases opened against opponents of the 2005 Gaza Strip disengagement, people who threw oil, acid, garbage and stones at soldiers and police, were closed last week and their criminal record expunged. Fifty-one MKs voted in favor of the closure, nine against. That is the true map of Israeli politics (and society). Only about seven percent of the lawmakers believed that this was a worthless and dangerous decision. All the rest agreed with it, or did not bother to vote or take an interest.

Neither did anyone think to apply a similar rule to 800 protesters against Operation Cast Lead, who were arrested and charged, perhaps because they are Arabs, nor to the dozens arrested for protesting in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, perhaps because they are leftists. Left-wing demonstrators never acted as violently as the settlers do, but no one thinks about pardoning them. Not even a semblance of equality before the law, not even the appearance of justice for all – that is unnecessary in a place where public shame no longer exists.

Robert Fisk:

Area C doesn’t sound very ominous. A land of stone-sprinkled grey hills and soft green valleys, it’s part of the wreckage of the equally wrecked Oslo Agreement, accounting for 60 per cent of the Israeli-occupied West Bank that was eventually supposed to be handed over to its Palestinian inhabitants.

But look at the statistics and leaf through the pile of demolition orders lying on the table in front of Abed Kasab, head of the village council in Jiftlik, and it all looks like ethnic cleansing via bureaucracy. Perverse might be the word for the paperwork involved. Obscene appear to be the results.

Palestinian houses that cannot be permitted to stand, roofs that must be taken down, wells closed, sewage systems demolished; in one village, I even saw a primitive electricity system in which Palestinians must sink their electrical poles cemented into concrete blocks standing on the surface of the dirt road. To place the poles in the earth would ensure their destruction – no Palestinian can dig a hole more than 40cm below the ground.

Inside Israeli land grabs, Real News Network:

Uri Avnery:

He hops here and he hops there. Hops to Jerusalem and hops to Ramallah, Damascus, Beirut, Amman (but, God forbid, not to Gaza, because somebody may not like it). Hops, hops, but doesn’t take anything out of his pouch, because the pouch is empty.

So why does he do it? After all, he could stay at home, raise roses or play with his grandchildren.

This compulsive traveling reveals a grain of chutzpah. If he has nothing to offer, why waste the time of politicians and media people? Why burn airplane fuel and damage the environment?

Fear of flying

So now we have what surely sounds like the worst imaginable terrorist threat: the bomber whose weapon is concealed inside their body. Are we going to need MRIs before boarding a plane?

Maybe it’s time to make the inevitable psychological shift from prevention to risk management.

Flying has always entailed risks – just as their are risks in driving a car or eating in a restaurant.

How’s this for what could be universally accepted as an acceptable level of risk: that the danger of being a victim in a catastrophic air flight is such that one is more likely to die because of mechanical problems or pilot error than because of a terrorist act.

At the close of the standard demonstration on how to secure your seat-belt, put on an oxygen mask, hold a flotation devise and find the emergency exits, this is all the flight attendant needs to add: “… Airlines wishes you a pleasant flight and we assure you that if we don’t reach our destination it will most likely be by accident.”

The risk of such an accident is one that we have all already learned to live with.

If, however, the greatest risk in flying turns out to be the risk of getting blown up, then we do indeed have an enormous problem.

As things currently stand, bad weather (an avoidable threat) poses a greater danger than terrorism and the risk from human error vastly exceeds both.

Why the Taliban won’t be bought off

Sun Tzu wrote:

It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.

When people talk about buying off the Taliban on the principle that every man has his price, they are making what through the centuries has been recognized as the greatest mistake in warfare: to have inadequate respect for your enemy.

There’s no question that the adversary in Afghanistan fights with the conviction that he has God on his side and that an imbalance in military power has been more than compensated for by divine help. Why would such a fighter trade God for gold? To imagine that he would is to treat his faith as a charade.

Representatives from nearly 70 countries showed up in London on Jan. 28 for a one-day conference on how to save Afghanistan. President Hamid Karzai was there, gamely offering “peace and reconciliation” to all Afghans, “especially” those “who are not a part of Al Qaeda or other terrorist networks.” He didn’t mention why the Taliban would accept such an offer while they believe they’re winning the war. Others at the conference had what they evidently considered more realistic solutions—such as paying Taliban fighters to quit the insurgency. Participants reportedly pledged some $500 million to support that aim. “You don’t make peace with your friends,” said U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. True enough. But what if your enemies don’t want peace?

My Newsweek colleague Sami Yousafzai laughs at the notion that the Taliban can be bought or bribed. Few journalists, officials, or analysts know the Taliban the way he does. If the leadership, commanders, and subcommanders wanted comfortable lives, he says, they would have made their deals long ago. Instead they stayed committed to their cause even when they were on the run, with barely a hope of survival. Now they’re back in action across much of the south, east, and west, the provinces surrounding Kabul, and chunks of the north. They used to hope they might reach this point in 15 or 20 years. They’ve done it in eight. Many of them see this as proof that God is indeed on their side.

How the US sustains corruption in Afghanistan

How the US sustains corruption in Afghanistan in order combat the insecurity caused by people enraged by the corruption.

The meeting in a muggy tent at Kandahar Airfield was dragging on when a lieutenant colonel with the Army Corps of Engineers broke in with an uncomfortable question.

“I’m not sure how to put this,” he told some 40 American soldiers and civilians gathered here two weeks ago in the heart of Taliban territory. A commander of the Afghan border police had offered to give the U.S. military prime land at a crossing with Pakistan to build a waiting area for supply vehicles needed for President Obama’s troop increase. The same man, U.S. officials believe, earns tens of millions of dollars a year trafficking opium and extorting cargo trucks.

The lieutenant colonel wanted to know: “Does anyone else see this as a problem?”

The silence that followed revealed a basic dilemma the United States now faces in the war in Afghanistan. After eight years of dropping bombs and killing insurgents, the new American military strategy makes explicit the need to fight corruption to build a more legitimate Afghan government. But corruption is a complicated enemy. American officers may want to remove or marginalize shady local officials such as Col. Abdul Razziq, the 33-year-old police commander in the town of Spin Boldak. Yet, when that goal comes up against other imperatives — maintaining short-term security, gathering intelligence on the Taliban or moving supply trucks over the border — fighting corruption often loses out.

Why the defense and oil industries must be in love with Iran and al Qaeda

The Obama administration is quietly working with Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf allies to speed up arms sales and rapidly upgrade defenses for oil terminals and other key infrastructure in a bid to thwart future military attacks by Iran, according to former and current U.S. and Middle Eastern government officials.

The initiatives, including a U.S.-backed plan to triple the size of a 10,000-man protection force in Saudi Arabia, are part of a broader push that includes unprecedented coordination of air defenses and expanded joint exercises between the U.S. and Arab militaries, the officials said. All appear to be aimed at increasing pressure on Tehran.

The efforts build on commitments by the George W. Bush administration to sell warplanes and antimissile systems to friendly Arab states to counter Iran’s growing conventional arsenal. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are leading a regionwide military buildup that has resulted in more than $25 billion in U.S. arms purchases in the past two years alone.

Hamas to Israel: ‘You may kill us… but we’re going to kill your claimed legitimacy.’

Hamas to Israel: ‘You may kill us… but we’re going to kill your claimed legitimacy.’
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, January 30, 2010

T The mother of Mahmoud al Mabhouh holds up a photograph of her murdered son. he murder of Mahmoud al Mabhouh, a leading member of Hamas’ military wing, the Ezzedine al Qassam Brigades, in Dubai ten days ago, is widely assumed to have been carried out by Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency.

Speaking in Damascus, Hamas’ political leader, Khalid Meshaal said: “You may kill us, you may hurt us, but we’re going to kill your claimed legitimacy and we will tear the false image you’ve painted in recent decades.”

In 1997, Meshaal was himself the target of an Israeli assassination attempt in Jordan which had been personally ordered by then-as-now Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.*

At this moment, when one might expect Hamas to be promising revenge (which it has), it is significant that it also makes a powerful political statement which thrusts right at the heart of the issue: Israel can kill individuals such as al Mabhouh, but it can’t kill the Palestinian cause. And while Israel might consistently overstate the military threats it faces, the threat that will not yield to sheer might — a threat that is indeed magnified by Israel’s bellicose posture — is the threat to its own legitimacy.

As The National reported:

Israel has killed dozens of Hamas leaders and military figures, including its leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in a helicopter gunship attack in Gaza in 2004.

In the wake of the 1989 murder of the two Israeli soldiers, Avi Sasportas and Ilan Sadon, the Israeli army arrested al Mabhouh’s family members and demolished his home, the family said.

“They tried to kill him six times,” said al Mabhouh’s mother, Fatima. “They tried to kidnap and poison him in Lebanon and in Syria. As soon as I heard the news of his death, I knew it was the Israelis.”

“They even arrested us,” she said, “but we couldn’t tell them anything about where he was or what he was doing.”

The family said they attempted to travel to Syria for al Mabhouh’s funeral, held yesterday in Damascus, but were turned back at Gaza’s Rafah border with Egypt by Egyptian officials.

“We paid the Egyptian border guards money, and they even took our passports,” Abdel Raouf said. “And then when they saw our names, they said: ‘Are you the family of Mahmoud al Mabhouh?’ and we said: ‘Yes, is it a crime? He is a hero for our country.’”

The family also said they hoped Hamas would carry out a “strong retaliation” for al Mabhouh’s death.

Ynet said:

Senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar said he believes assassins of senior organization member Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai arrived in the region as part of Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau’s entourage.

Landau recently took part in an environmental convention in Abu-Dhabi. In an interview with Al-Jazeera al-Zahar said it was possible the assassins had come with him and entered Dubai under assumed identities, using false passports.

“A week before the assassination Uzi Landau visited the emirates and he may have had people traveling with him under false names and additional citizenships,” he said.

Izzat Rashaq, a top member of Hamas exiled leadership in Damascus, was asked why his organization had waited nine days to issue a formal announcement of al-Mabhouh’s death. He told the Associated Press that Hamas delayed the announcement because it was trying to “reach the Israeli agents who implemented this operation.”

Clayton Swisher at Al Jazeera commented:

… there is little doubt that Netanyahu would be brazen enough to order the al-Mabhouh hit. It would mean little to him that the Emirates recently hosted on its soil an Israeli Minister, Uzi Landau, even in spite of his hard line stance toward Palestinians (Landau famously likened the PLO to Al Qaeda!).

As Netanyahu demonstrated in 1997, he is not afraid to send intelligence operatives into a friendly Arab guests home, break some china, and have them peace out as if nothing ever happened.

Only in this case, the Dubai police do not have the benefit of a captured operative. They’ll have to rely on whatever witness and forensic evidence they can collect. As a law enforcement agency the Dubai Police are known for mercurial investigative standards.

But given the embarrassment al-Mabhouh’s murder is causing, and the fact that other hits have taken place in the Emirates, they’ll likely up their game in this case to try and salvage some prestige.

Meanwhile, The National reported:

As a senior member of Hamas’ military faction, the Ezzedine al Qassam Brigades, al Mabhouh would typically be accompanied by security guards, Mr Nasser said, but had failed to do so on this occasion because no reservations had been made for them with the airline. “Everywhere he goes he takes bodyguards but there was no booking for them on this flight, so he travelled alone,” Mr Nasser explained. “The guards were due to follow him on the next available flight the following day.”

Al Mabhouh, who lived with his family in Damascus, flew to Dubai on January 19. He was murdered in the Al Bustan Rotana on January 20.

According to Hamas, citing information it said it received from Dubai authorities, he was electrocuted while walking in the hotel corridor, dragged into his room, and then strangled.

“We are now very carefully studying our security plans for all senior figures, we are reviewing all our measures to make sure that we are as well protected as possible,” Mr Nasser said.

“We do not have all of the details yet but maybe he [al Mabhouh] made a telephone call about his plans from a mobile that was intercepted.”

Mr Nasser added: “It is also standard for airlines to fax advance notice of their passengers, so that may have given the assassins a chance.”

Dubai’s police chief, Lt Gen Dahu Khalfan Tamim, confirmed that al Mabhouh had entered the country on a passport bearing his real name.

While involvement of Mossad, Israel’s overseas security agency, had not been ruled out as part of the ongoing investigation, Lt Gen Tamim said his officers were “pursuing individual suspects, not an organisation”.

“We know everything about the suspects’ identity due to the strong evidence they left behind, and we will contact several countries which are connected to the suspects to provide us with all the necessary information,” he said.

In a statement issued on Friday, the Dubai authorities said the suspects were mostly European passport holders and members of an “experienced criminal gang” who had been monitoring al Mabhouh’s movements.

* Consider how much the world has changed in the last decade. In 1997, Netanyahu was widely criticized for sending assassins into a neighboring friendly state. Canada recalled its ambassador from Israel in protest at the use of Canadian passports by Mossad operatives. President Clinton was quoted as saying of Netanyahu: “I cannot deal with this man. He is impossible.”

This time around, if it is proved that Israeli assassins are on the loose, will there be even a murmur from the State Department? Will a president who prefers the much blunter tool of a Hellfire missile when ordering an assassination have anything to say about how Israeli hit men conduct their operations?

No, because we now live in an age where politically-sanctioned murder has been legitimized by a press corp that kowtows to political norms however questionable might be their legality or moral legitimacy.

Obama’s secret prisons

Obama’s secret prisons
By Anand Gopal, TomDispatch, January 28, 2010

O Obama's secret prisons ne quiet, wintry night last year in the eastern Afghan town of Khost, a young government employee named Ismatullah simply vanished. He had last been seen in the town’s bazaar with a group of friends. Family members scoured Khost’s dust-doused streets for days. Village elders contacted Taliban commanders in the area who were wont to kidnap government workers, but they had never heard of the young man. Even the governor got involved, ordering his police to round up nettlesome criminal gangs that sometimes preyed on young bazaar-goers for ransom.

But the hunt turned up nothing. Spring and summer came and went with no sign of Ismatullah. Then one day, long after the police and village elders had abandoned their search, a courier delivered a neat, handwritten note on Red Cross stationary to the family. In it, Ismatullah informed them that he was in Bagram, an American prison more than 200 miles away. U.S. forces had picked him up while he was on his way home from the bazaar, the terse letter stated, and he didn’t know when he would be freed.

Sometime in the last few years, Pashtun villagers in Afghanistan’s rugged heartland began to lose faith in the American project. Many of them can point to the precise moment of this transformation, and it usually took place in the dead of the night, when most of the country was fast asleep. In the secretive U.S. detentions process, suspects are usually nabbed in the darkness and then sent to one of a number of detention areas on military bases, often on the slightest suspicion and without the knowledge of their families.

This process has become even more feared and hated in Afghanistan than coalition airstrikes. The night raids and detentions, little known or understood outside of these Pashtun villages, are slowly turning Afghans against the very forces they greeted as liberators just a few years ago. [continued…]

Segregation blues

Segregation blues
By Larry Derfner, Jerusalem Post, January 27, 2010

I spent the day in Nazareth recently, doing a story about Israeli Arabs in hi-tech, and when I got in the car with the (Jewish) photographer to leave, I said to him, “Isn’t it a relief to talk to Arabs as regular people?” He smiled in agreement.

I had the same feeling when I was doing a story on B’Tselem, the anti-occupation NGO in Jerusalem, and found myself making coffee in the kitchen next to an Arab woman who was getting a glass from the cupboard or something. We were together for about a minute, I don’t remember any conversation, any particular notice we took of each other. It was only afterward that I felt this revelation: For a minute, I wasn’t living in a segregated country. For a minute, the sharing of space with an Arab, as equals, was unremarkable.

This is a vision of life in this country as most Jews and Arabs, I think, wish it could be – and it’s so amazingly rare. We cross paths, but usually on opposite sides of a counter or standing next to each other in line. With few exceptions, we live in segregated neighborhoods, our kids go to segregated public schools, they play in segregated parks.

Nearly 25 years ago, not long after I moved to Israel, I rented an apartment in the Kababir neighborhood of Haifa, right on the informal border between the Jewish section and Arab section. The building had two Arab families along with about 10 Jewish families. I’d see one of the Jews talking with one of the Arabs in front of the building, griping about the plumbing, about the noise – the things neighbors talk about. I got to know one of the Arab families, and once they invited me in to their apartment.

It’s only in the decades since then that I’ve realized how rare an experience that was for an Israeli Jew. [continued…]

Holocaust remembrance is a boon for Israeli propaganda
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz, January 28, 2010

Israel’s bigwigs attacked at dawn on a wide front. The president in Germany, the prime minister with a giant entourage in Poland, the foreign minister in Hungary, his deputy in Slovakia, the culture minister in France, the information minister at the United Nations, and even the Likud party’s Druze Knesset member, Ayoob Kara, in Italy. They were all out there to make florid speeches about the Holocaust.

Wednesday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and an Israeli public relations drive like this hasn’t been seen for ages. The timing of the unusual effort – never have so many ministers deployed across the globe – is not coincidental: When the world is talking Goldstone, we talk Holocaust, as if out to blur the impression. When the world talks occupation, we’ll talk Iran as if we wanted them to forget.

It won’t help much. International Holocaust Remembrance Day has passed, the speeches will soon be forgotten, and the depressing everyday reality will remain. Israel will not come out looking good, even after the PR campaign. [continued…]

Haiti’s children adrift in world of chaos

Haiti’s children adrift in world of chaos
By Deborah Sontag, New York Times, January 27, 2010

Haiti’s children, 45 percent of the population, are among the most disoriented and vulnerable of the survivors of the earthquake. By the many tens of thousands, they have lost their parents, their homes, their schools and their bearings. They have sustained head injuries and undergone amputations. They have slept on the street, foraged for food and suffered nightmares.

Two weeks after the earthquake, with the smell of death still fouling the air, children can be seen in every devastated corner resiliently kicking soccer balls, flying handmade kites, singing pop songs and ferreting out textbooks from the rubble of their schools. But as Haitian and international groups begin tending to the neediest among them, many children are clearly traumatized and at risk.

“There are health concerns, malnutrition concerns, psychosocial issues and, of course, we are concerned that unaccompanied children will be exploited by unscrupulous people who may wish to traffic them for adoption, for the sex trade or for domestic servitude,” said Kent Page, a spokesman for Unicef. [continued…]