Author Archives: Paul Woodward

Why kill World Cup fans?

Bombings in Uganda that killed 74 football fans watching the World Cup final between Spain and the Netherlands have been attributed to Somalia’s al-Shabab militia. Earlier, the Washington Post described the way the sport and its fans were being targeted inside Somalia:

Al-Shabab, a hard-line Islamic militia that is waging a campaign of terror across Somalia, has banned playing soccer in many areas it controls. The al-Qaeda-linked militia, along with Hezb-i-Islam, a rival extremist group, prohibited broadcasts of the World Cup, describing the sport as “a satanic act” that corrupts Muslims.

The militants have brutally targeted politicians, clerics and peacekeepers — anyone who has challenged their extreme views. But in the past month, they have killed at least five people and arrested scores more for watching the World Cup. They have detained and tortured local soccer club owners on charges of misguiding youth.

So do Sunday’s bombings represent an escalation in a bloody fight against a satanic sport? Probably not.

At The Atlantic, Max Fisher considers possible reasons for the attacks that have no ideological basis.

There are two likely explanations for this act of terrorism, both with dark implications for Somalia and East Africa.

Though militants did not begin using the name al-Shabaab until 2006, they are part of the same Islamist insurgency that has plagued, and at times partially ruled, Somalia since the 1990s. Al-Shabaab is often compared to al-Qaeda, but the two groups have little in common. While both are violently Islamist, only al-Qaeda is ideology-driven, espouses global ambitions, and a has history of terrorism simply for the sake of killing. Al-Shabaab seeks only to rule Somalia and to impose an extreme form of Islamic law. The group has long privileged its fight for control of Somalia over ideology. As many have pointed out, the attack on Uganda makes sense as part of al-Shabaab’s fight against the African Union forces, to which Uganda contributes troops. Only days earlier, the East African block of the African Union voted to increase its peacekeeping force, which seeks to expel al-Shabaab from Somalia’s south, from 6,000 to 8,000 troops.

But Uganda’s participation in the African Union force does not fully explain Al-Shabaab’s attack. After all, several countries contribute to the peacekeeping mission. Uganda does not even border Somalia. If al-Shabaab wanted to expand the borders of its territorial control, it would have pushed into Kenya or Ethiopia. If the militant group was simply seeking revenge against the African Union, it would have targeted Ethiopia, the country most responsible for its removal from power in 2006, when it was known as the Islamic Courts Union. Ideologically, Uganda is also an unusual target. Al-Shabaab’s ideology is primarily concerned with fellow Muslims, on whom the group wishes to impose Taliban-like law, but Uganda is over 80 percent Christian.

The decision to bomb civilian gatherings in Kampala was almost certainly tactical. Al-Shabaab is not like the Taliban of 2000, which had secure control of Afghanistan and thus felt comfortable spreading violence and ideology outside the country’s borders. But al-Shabaab is still struggling in Somalia’s ongoing civil war. There are two likely tactical explanations for the attack. The first is that al-Shabaab is feeling increasingly threatened by the African Union force and is desperate to forestall or prevent the planned addition of 2,000 peacekeepers. In that case, this attack was a defensive act. Insurgents typically turn to terrorism when they are no longer able to challenge their opponents on the battlefield. While this may appear to be good news because it would mean that the group is weaker, a threatened al-Shabaab would become a threat to not just southern Somalia but all of East Africa. As Graeme Wood explained in his chronicling of the Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency in the Central African Republic, “the smaller and more resoundingly defeated the rebels are, the more brutally they fight.” This is how insurgencies, which can be negotiated or even reconciled with, become terrorist groups, which do not accept political compromises and can persist for many years. This attack on civilians outside Somalia would not be the last.

The other possibility is that al-Shabaab is stronger than we think and that this attack is the beginning of a push to expand its reach. Al-Shabaab only operates in Somalia’s south. If it feels confident in its control there, it may be planning to assault north into the contested horn of the country or even into the relatively calm Somaliland region in the north, which has been called an “oasis of stability.” This act of terrorism would be al-Shabaab way of opening a new front in a campaign to expel the peacekeepers from the regions al-Shabaab does not yet control. If the insurgency is indeed growing stronger, this would help explain why the African Union felt the need to increase its force strength by one third. It’s difficult to know how long the peacekeepers could hold back al-Shabaab from taking more of the country.

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Opaque Obama

During the most violent summer of a war soon to enter its tenth year, Andrew Bacevich writes:

Much as Iraq was Bush’s war, Afghanistan has become Obama’s war. Yet the president clearly wants nothing more than to rid himself of his war. Obama has prolonged and escalated a conflict in which he himself manifestly does not believe. When after months of deliberation (or delay) he unveiled his Afghan “surge” in December 2009, the presidential trumpet blew charge and recall simultaneously. Even as Obama ordered more troops into combat, he announced their planned withdrawal “because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”

The Americans who elected Obama president share that view. Yet the expectations of change that vaulted him to the presidency went well beyond the issue of priorities. Obama’s supporters were counting on him to bring to the White House an enlightened moral sensibility: He would govern differently not only because he was smarter than his predecessor but because he responded to a different — and truer — inner compass.

Events have demolished such expectations. Today, when they look at Washington, Americans see a cool, dispassionate, calculating president whose administration lacks a moral core. For prosecution exhibit number one, we need look no further than the meandering course of Obama’s war, its casualties and costs mounting without discernible purpose.

Bacevich concludes by asking:

Who is more deserving of contempt? The commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause, however misguided, in which he sincerely believes? Or the commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause in which he manifestly does not believe and yet refuses to forsake?

Any president who sends young Americans to die for no good reason is undoubtedly deserving great contempt, yet to observe that Obama’s war is a war he doesn’t believe in, begs an even more troubling question: Does Obama believe in anything?

How can a man whose ambitions, character, strengths and weaknesses were all hard to measure before he entered office, be even harder to read now that he has acquired a presidential track record — relatively short as that might be?

While George Bush might have entered office with a transparent sense of entitlement, what propelled Obama? Were his ambitions wrecked by impossibly difficult circumstances, or did they never hold any more substance than the nebulous promises of his campaign?

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As Petraeus takes over in Afghanistan, could success be worse than failure?

While reflecting on the dangers of “success” in Afghanistan, Tom Engelhardt writes:

On the basis of our stated war objective — “[W]e cannot allow Al Qaeda or other transnational extremists to once again establish sanctuaries from which they can launch attacks on our homeland or on our allies,” as General Petraeus put it in his confirmation hearing at the end of June 2010 — success in Afghanistan means increasingly little. For al-Qaeda, Afghanistan was never significant in itself. It was always a place of (relative) convenience. If the U.S. were to bar access to it, there are so many other countries to choose from.

After all, what’s left of the original al-Qaeda — estimated by U.S. intelligence experts at perhaps 300 leaders and operatives — seems to have established itself in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, a place that the U.S. military could hardly occupy, no matter how many CIA drone attacks were sent against it. Moreover, U.S. intelligence experts increasingly suggest that al-Qaeda is in the process of fusing with local jihadist groups in those borderlands, Yemen, Somalia, North Africa, and elsewhere; that it is increasingly an amorphous “dispersed network,” or even simply an idea or crude ideology, existing as much online as anywhere in particular on the ground.

In this sense — and this is the only reason now offered for the American presence in Afghanistan — a counterinsurgency “success” there would be meaningless unless, based on the same strategic thinking, the U.S. then secured Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and a potential host of other places. In other words, the U.S. military would have to do one thing the Bush years definitively proved it couldn’t do: impose a Pax Americana on planet Earth.

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Dignity — the mark of cultural integrity

It’s possible to catch glimpses of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and see a social reality whose nature is transparent without any need for historical context — a social reality that contrasts dignity and its absence.

The following videos from B’Tselem, an Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, show Palestinian families in Hebron who are being imprisoned in their own homes in order to provide “freedom” for Jewish settlers. The settlers, who are quite explicit about their intent to drive their neighbors out, treat them worse than animals — and yet the Palestinians retain their dignity.

The undiluted contempt and arrogance displayed by both settlers and Israeli soldiers reveals their own lack of self-respect. It exudes an utter indifference to how they will be perceived outside their own small tribe. They have, in short, cut themselves off from humanity. They enjoy the comfort of the pariah who has abandoned any hope for human embrace.

(H/t Mondoweiss)

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A source of emulation

Jimmy Carter meeting Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah in Hezbollah-controlled Dahiyeh, South Beirut, June 9, 2009

Consider this: When Jimmy Carter visited Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah in Beirut just over a year ago, protection for the former US president was provided not only by the Secret Service but also Hezbollah’s own security personnel, both of whom feared that Carter might be assassinated by Israel’s Mossad!

Fourteen years earlier Fadlallah escaped an assassination attempt — that time it was a CIA covert operation in which 83 people died and 283 were injured.

The two incidents highlight the subjective nature of “terrorism” — a term used in the contemporary era to refer almost exclusively to violence carried out by non-government entities, yet a term that could just as reasonably be used to describe actions by the two governments that most loudly trumpet the threat from terrorism: Israel and the United States.

With that in mind, let’s consider once more the life of a man who the US government still designates as a “terrorist”: Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah.

Rami G Khouri (who in confessionally fragmented Lebanon, it should be noted, is a Palestinian Arab Christian) writes:

Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon’s most influential Shiite Muslim leader who died in Beirut this past weekend, was a marja, or a source of emulation for Shiites, during his lifetime — just about the highest achievement a human being can attain in this world.

It would be doing Fadlallah a disservice only or mainly to see him as a gifted Shiite religious figure. His great achievement, I believe, was to provide a living example of the combination of the best qualities that any Arab or Muslim could aspire to in this era of great mediocrity, corruption, materialism, mindless violence and abuse of power throughout much of the Arab world.

Fadlallah was — as Americans are fond of saying of sports figures who are talented, smart, humble, generous and personable — “the complete package.” He stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries in Lebanon and most of the region because he combined several qualities noteworthy each on its own: profound theological and academic learning; an analytical and active mind; extensive social activism to assist the needy; nationalist politics to protect one’s sovereignty and support Arab causes, like Palestine; a commitment to resisting and fighting foreign aggression and occupation; political modernism that appreciated pluralistic and accountable governance; a rejection of one-man rule in favor of collective leadership based on consultation and consensus; a deep commitment to dialogue and solidarity with those of different faiths, ideologies or ethnicities; a progressive sense of the rights of women and youth; humility of spirit that prevented him from assuming public or official positions; and — I suspect from reading some of his writings, as I never met him — a twinkle in his eye and generosity in his heart that accepted the need to enjoy life, without hurting others or blaspheming core religious dictates.

It is no surprise, therefore, that Fadlallah had followers in many parts of the world, far beyond his native Lebanon or Iraq where he grew up. A key reason for his charisma and a source of emulation was his philosophy of the obligation of the weak and oppressed to struggle and if necessary to fight for their humanity, liberation, dignity and rights. By the examples he set in his own life and behavior — education, contemplation, self-assertion, honesty, generosity toward the needy — he showed others how they could aspire to achieve their full potential as human beings, individually and collectively.

His was a very Shiite life story, given that the Shiites of Lebanon in just two generations — from the 1960s to the 2000s — transformed themselves from the abused and subjugated downtrodden of Lebanese society into the single most powerful group in the country. His rise to prominence coincided with and partly inspired this epic transformation, that now sees Hizbullah as the dominant Shiite organization in the political, social and military fields. This change in status is also controversial for many other Lebanese who distrust Hizbullah and see it as an Iranian- and Syrian-manipulated menace to Lebanon’s collective sovereignty, identity and stability.

Fadlallah’s life story is so noteworthy because it transcends the Hizbullah-dominated dimensions of Lebanese Shiism. There was a convergence of sentiments and struggle between the man and the nascent movement and its forerunners, for a while, in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet he went beyond Hizbullah’s focus on resistance, to embrace and develop the totality of human, communal and national dimensions that he believed was the obligation of any Muslim and any human being.

His recipe was simple but effective, for those who could apply it: Read. Study. Discuss. Debate. Question. Learn. Work hard. Be generous. Respect others, especially those who are different from you. Stand up for your rights. Use your power to defend your people and country. And, always, remain humble.

Perhaps his greatest feat — as is the case with others of his ilk who joined God’s world with ours, like Martin Luther King, Jr., Pope John Paul II, or Bishop Desmond Tutu — was his ability to make Islamic religious ethics a springboard for personal and collective human betterment, rather than an isolated obsession or source of autocratic fanaticism.

The learned man moved back and forth from his books to his neighborhood, from lofty divine inspirations to mundane social, economic and political problems that needed resolution — in this lifetime, not the one to come. Faith, in his view and life practice, gave you the power and confidence to fix the flaws and injustices of our world, rather than only to bemoan and endure them. That, in the end, was not just a holy man, but a very modern man — a model Lebanese, Arab and Muslim who was rightly respected and emulated by many in his lifetime, because he showed us what we could become if we put our mind to it.

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When honesty gets dangerous, liars succeed

No, Ariel Sharon has not just died. But when he does, will Wolf Blitzer lose his job if he writes a tweet like the one above (a fake of course, created by yours truly)?

Certainly not, because as Glenn Greenwald correctly noted yesterday: “The speech prohibitions and thought crimes on the Middle East all run in one direction: to enforce ‘pro-Israel’ orthodoxies.”

Then again, Blitzer (who was at AIPAC and the Jerusalem Post before moving to CNN) will have no need to let his Zionist colors fly within the confines of a tweet. He’ll be content to report gushing praise for the former Israeli prime minister from President Obama or President Whoever, the day Sharon dies — a day when little if anything with be said in the Washington political/media establishment about Sharon’s personal responsibility in the slaughter of as many as 2,000 Palestinians killed in the Sabra and Shátila massacre in Beirut in 1982.

CNN’s Octavia Nasr, on the other hand, has been found guilty of praising Sayyid Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a man whose stature Sharon could never match — and for that offense, as has now been widely reported, the Lebanese-born journalist lost her job.

As Frances Guy, Britain’s ambassador to Lebanon, wrote in a blog post soon after Fadlallah’s death (a post she later removed “after mature consideration” according to the British Foreign Office):

When you visited him you could be sure of a real debate, a respectful argument and you knew you would leave his presence feeling a better person. That for me is the real effect of a true man of religion; leaving an impact on everyone he meets, no matter what their faith. Sheikh Fadlallah passed away yesterday. Lebanon is a lesser place the day after but his absence will be felt well beyond Lebanon’s shores. I remember well when I was nominated ambassador to Beirut, a muslim acquaintance sought me out to tell me how lucky I was because I would get a chance to meet Sheikh Fadlallah. Truly he was right. If I was sad to hear the news I know other peoples’ lives will be truly blighted. The world needs more men like him willing to reach out across faiths, acknowledging the reality of the modern world and daring to confront old constraints. May he rest in peace.

So why did CNN’s Nasr lose her job for expressing sadness at Fadlallah’s death? After all, his name is not a household word outside the Middle East.

Nasr’s mistake may well not have been that she expressed appreciation for this particular eminent Shia cleric but that she referred to him as one of “Hezbollah’s giants.”

So here’s one of the many ironies in this incident: while the Israel lobby controls the mainstream media with a well-oiled censorship machine that would be the envy of Joseph Goebbels, freedoms that journalists are being terrorized to abandon are nevertheless being exercised inside the US military. At CNN Hezbollah cannot be mentioned without also being demonized, yet at CENTCOM there are those calling for the powerful militia to be brought in from the cold. As Mark Perry revealed last month, a recent Red Team report called for the integration of Hezbollah into the Lebanese Armed Forces.

As for Sayyid Fadlallah himself, Lebanon’s prime minister, Saad Hariri — an Arab leader of the variety much-loved in the West — praised the cleric as “a voice of moderation and an advocate of unity.”

One of the reasons Fadlallah has been condemned by successive US governments is because of his alleged connections to the 1983 bombing in Beirut that killed 241 American servicemen, yet Robert Baer, who was himself a CIA field officer in Beirut, says: “there never has been a shred of evidence that Fadlallah was responsible for the Marine bombing, other than his preaching against foreign occupation.”

Opposing foreign occupation — this indeed was Fadlallah’s principal offense.

In his New York Times obituary, Fadlallah’s “extremism” was supposedly evident when in 2002 he told the Daily Telegraph:

[The Palestinians] have had their land stolen, their families killed, their homes destroyed, and the Israelis are using weapons, such as the F16 aircraft, which are meant only for major wars. There is no other way for the Palestinians to push back those mountains, apart from martyrdom operations.

Which reminds me of a line I came across on Facebook recently: a terrorist is someone with a bomb but no air force.

Fadlallah was also guilty of questioning the Holocaust — a commonplace attitude in the Middle East that must surely perplex many in the West. Even so, that attitude is, I suspect, much more one of sentiment than historical perspective. The Holocaust, as a justification for the dispossession and slaughter of Palestinians, has as much relevance as do the childhood traumas of a murderer when recounted to the murder victim’s family. This is context that does nothing to color the crime. Indeed, Holocaust doubt, thus provoked, can be seen as a direct effect of Holocaust exploitation.

Perhaps Sayyid Fadlallah is best remembered not through a tweet or a State department classification but in his own words:

Throughout my life, I have always supported the human being in his humanism and [I have supported] the oppressed… I think it is the person’s right to live his freedom… and [it is his right] to face the injustice imposed on him by revolting against it, using his practical, realistic and available means to end the oppressor’s injustice toward him, whether it is an individual, a community, a nation, or a state; whether male or female. God created the people free; thus no one has the right to enslave people and no one has the right to enslave himself for others. Imam Ali said “do not be a slave of others, as God created you free.”

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UAE ambassador confirms: Palestine is the core issue

During a stage interview with Yousel al Otaiba, the UAE ambassador to the United States, Jeffrey Goldberg made it clear that even when acting as a representative of The Atlantic and helping facilitate a forum in Aspen, Colorado, he still sees himself first and foremost as an Israeli.

When the ambassador pointed out that Iran’s nuclear program presents a greater risk to the UAE than it does to the US — the US being separated from Iran by two oceans — Goldberg requested clarification. Was he being addressed as an American or as a “representative of the Jewish people”? In Goldberg’s mind, to be Jewish means to have ones heart in Israel irrespective of where one might reside on the planet.

As Goldberg’s blog posts after the interview also made clear, when it comes to Iran, the topic that interests him above all else right now is pumping up support for a military strike against Iran. When the UAE ambassador pointed out that Palestine is the core issue in the region, Goldberg simply glossed over the fact.

This is the key section of the interview — the part Goldberg ignored, as did his friend Eli Lake at the Washington Times, when pumping out this week’s rendition of Israel’s Arabs-united-against-Iran narrative. Here the ambassador makes it clear that the only significant leverage Obama has on the issue of Iran is to push hard for the creation of a Palestinian state.

YOUSEF AL OTAIBA: I think President Obama has inherited two very difficult campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has inherited the worst financial crisis since 1929. He is now dealing with what seems to be an unfixable oil spill, not just environmentally, but economically, from an energy standpoint. So President Obama has his hands full.

Do I think he recognize the threat from Iran? Yes, I do. Do I think he has very limited options and not necessarily a lot of ability to fix it? Yes. I think President Obama is just constrained with the lack of resources and tools at his disposal. And if he’s heard anything from the Arab leaders that he talks to, most of them, and I’m fairly sure that King Abdullah when he was here mentioned the same thing.

For him to really make progress on the Iran issue and to deal with extremism and to deal with terrorism in the region, to deal with radicalized home-grown terrorism in the U.S., you need to address the peace process. That is the one core issue everyone tends to blame, and that’s what the people hang all their problems on.

Well, the Palestinians are, you know, they are — they don’t have a country, they are abused, they are oppressed, and the U.S. always sides with Israel. So the sooner U.S. appears to be objective and impartial and create a Palestinian state, we take that argument away from everyone, and that is in everyone’s best interest.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Why would that stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon?

OTAIBA: It won’t stop. It will get you all the Arab countries more aligned on containing Iran because now they use Palestine as an excuse, and the Palestine issue is a deep political problem. And I’m not saying it’s only the U.S.’ fault, I’m saying it is as much Israel and Palestine’s fault for not making any progress on it themselves. But lack of their kind of commitment, the U.S. needs to step in and say, you need to do this. And you need to do this for your sake, for our sake, and for the region’s sake. [Emphasis mine.]

So, contrary to the claims being made by Jeffrey Goldberg and others in the Israel lobby, the principal call coming from the Arab world is not for the US to strike Iran but rather that it apply its influence on Israel and hasten the creation of a Palestinian state.

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Who’s pushing to strike Iran?

[Update: See this post which confirms that Goldberg twisted the narrative here.]

After an exchange between the UAE ambassador to the US Yousef al-Otaiba and Jeffrey Goldberg on Tuesday we learn that “the UAE would sooner see military action against Iran’s nuclear program than see the program succeed” — at least that’s what Goldberg says.

But the ambassador also said: “There are many countries in the region who, if they lack the assurance the US is willing to confront Iran, they will start running for cover towards Iran.”

In other words, countries like the UAE will ultimately align themselves with whichever ends up being the most durable power in the region. Even so, autocratic rulers who rely on American support would naturally like the defender of their tenuous legitimacy to maintain its regional dominance.

The Washington Times quotes from the same exchange between Goldberg and al-Otaiba in Aspen:

“I think it’s a cost-benefit analysis,” Mr al-Otaiba said. “I think despite the large amount of trade we do with Iran, which is close to $12 billion … there will be consequences, there will be a backlash and there will be problems with people protesting and rioting and very unhappy that there is an outside force attacking a Muslim country; that is going to happen no matter what.”

“If you are asking me, ‘Am I willing to live with that versus living with a nuclear Iran?,’ my answer is still the same: ‘We cannot live with a nuclear Iran.’ I am willing to absorb what takes place at the expense of the security of the UAE.”

And this is how Goldberg interprets the UAE/Arab position:

It is not only Israel that fears the rise of a nuclear Iran; the Arabs, if anything, fear such a development to a greater degree. The Jews and Arabs have been fighting for one hundred years. The Arabs and the Persians have been going at for a thousand. The idea of a group of Persian Shi’ites having possession of a nuclear bomb scares Arab leader like nothing else — it certainly scares them more than the reality of the Jewish bomb.

Goldberg speaks for Netanyahu and the lobby, but the UAE government does not accept his interpretation of their ambassador’s remarks:

The UAE Assistant Foreign Minister for Political Affairs, Tareq al Haidan said today that the statements attributed by the Washington Times to the UAE Ambassador to the United States, Youssef al Otaiba “are not precise”.

“These statements came as part of general discussions held on the sidelines of an unofficial gathering and were taken out of their context in which Mr. Otaiba was speaking,” Mr al Haidanl said.

“Iran is a neighboring country and we maintain historic relations with it.” He stressed that “the UAE respects and believes in the sovereignty of other states and in the principle of non-interference, of all forms, in their internal affairs.”

“Already, the UAE declared, more than one time and in official statements issued by the Foreign Ministry, its position on the Iranian nuclear issue,” Mr al Haidan added.

“The UAE totally rejects the use of force as a solution to the Iranian nuclear issue and rather calls for a solution through political means that are based on the international legitimacy, transparency as well as the need for working, through the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA], on the right of all states to the peaceful use of nuclear energy.

“The UAE, at the same time, believes in the need of keeping the Gulf region free of nuclear weapons,” Mr al Haidan said.

As for whether the Arab world is as vexed about Iran as Goldberg claims, perhaps a clearer indication came from one of Israel’s few allies, Jordan, when King Abdullah spoke to the Wall Street Journal in April:

WSJ: What do you think when you look at Iran and international policy. There’s a lot of talk now about how active Iran is in Iraq as far as trying to push their political clients. Do you see it active in Hezbollah/Lebanon? In the Palestinian territories? Is the engagement track working?

HM KING ABDULLAH: Again, I look at it from a different angle. If there are those that are saying that Iran is playing mischief, then I say it is being allowed to play mischief. The platform they use is the injustice of the Palestinians and Jerusalem. So if you start taking those cards off the table, then Iranian influence on the Mediterranean through Hezbollah and Hamas in Gaza diminishes or becomes non existent. My view is that I am really against any military action in Iran, that is Pandora’s box. But by dealing with the core issue, that’s when you start taking cards away from the Iranian regime.

The core issue is Palestine — not an Iranian bomb — and a strike on Iran, that’s Pandora’s box.

Just because Obama put on a shameless performance yesterday to please the Israelis and the lobby, and just because there is no evidence that he is a man of principle, doesn’t mean he’s stupid. He knows what Pandora’s box looks like and he’s just as reluctant as anyone else to find out what it contains.

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Integrity — now you see it, now you don’t

Anyone who believes a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict hinges on the actions of Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, might as well turn their attention elsewhere — The moral bankruptcy of both men was on full display at the White House yesterday.

If before engaging in their vacuous performance, they had cared to study what meaningful engagement actually looks like, they could have done nothing better than to witness a recent meeting between two very different men: Haim Bajayo, 75-year old Jew and Hebron’s Palestinian Mayor Khalid Al-Useili.

Ma’an reports:

An elderly Jewish man from Hebron has asked the city’s mayor to permit his burial in a Muslim cemetery when he dies, insisting that his body not be placed in one of the sites now controlled by Israeli settlers.

Haim Bajayo, 75, visited Mayor Khalid Al-Useili at his office in the southern West Bank city and described in detail how Jews and Arabs had generally enjoyed amiable relations until the arrival of tens of thousands of foreign immigrants from the 1920s until 1948, the year Israel was established and most of Hebron’s Jews fled to the new state established in their name.

Bajayo was born in Hebron in 1935 and grew up in its Daboya neighborhood with his family, which owned a home there and held official property documents until 1977. A decade after Israel seized control of the Palestinian city and began permitting its citizens to settle there, Bajayo ceremoniously ceded his home for the benefit of the Palestinian municipality. The mayor at that time was Fahd Al-Qawasmi.

“As long as [the settlers] are in Hebron, there is no chance of reaching an agreement” to end the six-decade conflict, he told the mayor. “I don’t want any of my property or my house back as long as Palestinian homes and lands are not returned. The same day the Palestinians regain what was taken from them in 1948, I’ll come to you and say, ‘I have a house … registered in the real estate department.'”

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The war Israel can’t win

At The Daily Beast, historian Thaddeus Russell writes:

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits the White House Tuesday, President Obama will have the chance to be the first American president since the founding of Israel to ask The Question.

The Question is never addressed by Israel’s supporters and rarely raised by Israel’s detractors. But for those of us who are taxpayers in a nation that has been the state of Israel’s chief benefactor for 42 years — or those of us with Jewish ancestry — it is becoming the only question to ask. It is simple, self-interested, and fundamental: Does the existence of Israel make Americans and Jews safer?

And here is the paradox: Though support for Israel among Americans, and especially Jewish Americans, remains high according to recent Gallup polls, historical evidence says the answer to The Question is “no.”
“There was not a single act of Arab terrorism against Americans before 1968, when the U.S. became the chief supplier of military equipment and economic aid to Israel.”

The history of Israel and its relationship with the U.S. is infinitely complex, but there’s one damning fact that’s ignored as often as The Question: There was not a single act of Arab terrorism against Americans before 1968, when the U.S. became the chief supplier of military equipment and economic aid to Israel. In light of this fact, it’s difficult to credibly sustain the argument that Arab terrorism is spawned by Islam’s alleged promotion of violence and antipathy toward American culture or by a “natural” Arab anti-Semitism. It also suggests that no matter what policies Israel enacts to protect itself — even a withdrawal from the occupied territories or a two-state “solution” — it must be a perpetual wartime state.

Very few Americans today are aware that the question of American and Jewish self-interest was first raised at the time of Israel’s founding by officials in the highest levels of the U.S. government. In 1948, several members of Harry Truman’s Cabinet predicted that the creation of a Jewish state in the Middle East would spur Arab violence against Jews and Americans, advising the president to shun Israel.

These included Secretary of State George Marshall, Defense Secretary James Forrestal, and George Kennan, then the leading policy strategist in the State Department. They argued that if the United States helped to set up an independent Jewish nation it would provoke terrorist attacks on Americans and inaugurate an endless war between Arabs and Jews. “There are 30 million Arabs on one side and about 600,000 Jews on the other,” Forrestal told those in the administration who favored recognizing Israel. “Why don’t you face up to the realities?”

Israel apologists will plead that Thaddeus Russell’s commentary is one more instance among international efforts — rapidly gaining steam — to delegitimize Israel.

Strangely, in response to what is perceived as a campaign of degitimization, there is, as far as I’ve seen, no Israel legitimization campaign. Those mounting a defense, do nothing more than attack their critics — and usually do so with an unbridled viscousness.

For instance, Robin Shepherd, writing in the Jerusalem Post about a decision last week by the Methodist Church of Britain to launch a boycott against goods emanating from settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, says:

Overall, a church that behaves in the manner of the Methodists has buried its credibility under a gigantic dunghill of intransigence, pedantry, lies and distortions.

But let us not allow this matter to rest with a mere recognition of whom and what they have chosen to become.

If the Methodist Church is to launch a boycott of Israel, let Israel respond in kind: Ban their officials from entering; deport their missionaries; block their funds; close down their offices; and tax their churches.

If it’s war, it’s war. The aggressor must pay a price.

While it’s often said that attack is the best form of defense, that principle does not hold in the art of persuasion (and rarely for that matter in national security). The ranks cheering an attack such as Shepherd’s are small and shrinking. Indeed, the more venomous Israel and its supporters become, the less sympathy the Jewish state will evoke and the closer we will move to a critical juncture: where the world has given up on Israel and Israel has given up on the world. At that point, Israel’s isolation becomes the world’s nuclear peril.

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Israel bans parachutes from Gaza

If Hamas had plans to form a paratroopers brigade, these will now need to be put on hold.

Israel’s long-awaited release of its blacklist of items banned from importation into the strip include parachutes. How exactly parachutes might be used in Gaza, if the ban gets lifted, is hard to envisage. What’s the use of a parachute if you can’t fly?

As Israel eases its economic blockade on Gaza, the manner by which it does so exposes the multi-layered deceit with which the siege was imposed and now unravels.

In its new policy, Israel now specifies which items are banned rather than which are allowed entry. But a ban on arms and munitions and items which could be used to develop, produce or enhance the military capabilities of the Gaza militias, begs a rather obvious question: were any such items allowed into Gaza before the siege started four years ago?

Of course not. So the idea that Israel’s goal, now or ever, has simply been to stem the flow of weapons into Gaza, doesn’t add up. Indeed, if that had actually been Israel’s primary concern it would have avoided creating a situation in which the principal conduit for the flow of goods into the strip had been through an unmonitored system of tunnels. Now as always, the easiest way to regulate what comes in and out of the Palestinian enclave is through carefully controlled land crossings.

The siege has always been and still remains a method of subjugation. Its purpose is to crush the will of the population in the hope that this might drain support for the resistance.

Now, in its effort to present a softer face to the world in the wake of its brutal attack on the flotilla, Israel is letting Gazans eat chocolate. What it remains much more reluctant to do is open the economic barriers that would allow Gazans to manufacture or perhaps even export their own chocolate.

Ultimately though, this isn’t about what Palestinians can be allowed to import or export — it’s about the one thing Israel continues to withhold from Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank. It’s about freedom.

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Petraeus: mission will be accomplished

Predicting what will happen in Afghanistan is about as wise as declaring “mission accomplished.” As he arrived to take over command of US forces in what has become America’s longest war, Gen David Petraeus might not have actually predicted the outcome of the war but he certainly narrowed what can be deemed an acceptable conclusion:

In a ceremony on the tree-shaded lawn in front of NATO headquarters in Kabul, Petraeus assumed command from Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who was fired last month after a magazine quoted him and his staff making critical remarks about Obama administration officials.

A general with a sterling reputation for military creativity and political acumen, Petraeus, 57, struck a determined tone in his remarks to fellow officers, foreign diplomats and Afghan officials, insisting “we are in this to win.”

“We’re engaged in a contest of wills. Our enemies are doing all that they can to undermine the confidence of the Afghan people,” he said.

Before he mentioned the Taliban, Petraeus described those enemies as “al-Qaeda and its network of extremist allies,” harking back to the justification for invasion nine years ago. He said his mission is to demonstrate to Afghanistan and the world that the extremists “will not be allowed to once again establish sanctuaries in Afghanistan from which they can launch attacks on the Afghan people and on freedom-loving nations around the world.”

“We must demonstrate to the people and to the Taliban that Afghan and [U.S. and coalition] forces are here to safeguard the Afghan people, and that we are in this to win,” he said. “That is our clear objective.”

This commitment to safeguard the civilian population has inevitably been called into question each time an operation results in civilian casualties, yet Petraeus is now under great pressure to make it easier for his troops to fight.

A few days before Gen McChrystal got fired, CJ Chivers, a former US marine who now reports for the New York Times, wrote:

It is an axiom of military service that troops gripe; venting is part of barracks and battlefield life. Troops complain about food, equipment, lack of sleep, delays in their transportation and the weather where they work.

Complaints about how they are allowed to fight are another matter and can be read as a sign of deeper disaffection and strains within the military over policy choices. One Army colonel, in a conversation this month, said the discomfort and anger about the rules had reached a high pitch.

“The troops hate it,” he said. “Right now we’re losing the tactical-level fight in the chase for a strategic victory. How long can that be sustained?”

The Los Angeles Times reports today:

At his Senate confirmation hearings last week, Petraeus said he foresaw no major shift in strategy in the Afghanistan war. But he has made it clear that even if the rules of engagement do not change, the nuances of how they are implemented will get a close new look.

Assuming command Sunday, Petraeus told his troops that while civilian safety remains a critical consideration, “as you and our Afghan partners on the ground get into tough situations, we must employ all assets to ensure your safety.”

It was a remark apparently intended to reassure troops that the safeguarding of Afghans was not to come at the expense of military lives.

The problem with this idea that a balance can be struck between reducing the risks faced by Afghan civilians without putting American soldiers at unnecessary risk is that it implicitly overstates the military’s commitment to a humanitarian mission. The Pentagon is assuming a posture as though it treats all lives as being of equal value, yet the truth — transparent to everyone — is that America regards its soldiers’ lives as being of vastly greater value than the those of the citizens in any of the nations the US has decided to “save.”

Embedded in this is what I call the evangelical conceit: I know better than you do, what’s good for you; you will become better than you are, if you become more like me. It is the antithesis of respect, but describes the mindset with which so many Americans venture into the world on their military and religions missions.

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A free republic and its limits

David Bromwich writes:

“Things are in the saddle,/ And ride mankind.” The words were written by Emerson in a poem about the Mexican war — the first crisis that took America out of itself. The second such crisis was the Spanish-American war, and we are now in the middle of the third. The extent of our empire would have shocked the signers of the Declaration of Independence. On July 4, 1776 they sought to establish their right to stay within themselves; to declare the integrity of a republic as something separate from an aggrandizing power that aimed at subjugation.

Things are in the saddle in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Guantanamo.

Montesquieu observed of the elite of Augustan Rome that

virtue seemed to forget itself in order to surpass itself, and it made men admire as divine an action that at first could not be approved because it was atrocious.

Washington had in mind a similar warning against vainglory when he spoke the words of his Farewell Address on the infinite mischief of foreign entanglements. There may, he saw, be a wrong as well as a right love of one’s country. The wrong overpowers by a loyalty that takes us out of ourselves. The right leads back to constitutional integrity and self-sufficiency.

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‘The world has divided into rich and poor as at no time in history’

Speaking ahead of the G20 summit held in Toronto last week, Maude Barlow, head of the Council of Canadian — Canada’s largest public advocacy organization — said:

On the eve of this G-20 gathering, let’s look at a few facts. Fact, the world has divided into rich and poor as at no time in our history. The richest 2% own more than half the household wealth in the world. The richest 10% hold 85% of total global assets and the bottom half of humanity owns less than 1% of the wealth in the world. The three richest men in the world have more money than the poorest 48 countries. Fact, while those responsible for the 2008 global financial crisis were bailed out and even rewarded by the G-20 government’s gathering here, the International Labor Organization tells us that in 2009, 34 million people were added to the global unemployed, swelling those ranks to 239 million, the highest ever recorded. Another 200 million are at risk in precarious jobs and the World Bank tells us that at the end of 2010, another 64 million will have lost their jobs. By 2030, more than half the population of the megacities of the Global South will be slumdwellers with no access to education, health care, water, or sanitation. Fact, global climate change is rapidly advancing, claiming at least 300,000 lives and $125 billion in damages every year. Called the silent crisis, climate change is melting glaciers, eroding soil, causing freak and increasingly wild storms, displacing untold millions from rural communities to live in desperate poverty in peri-urban centers. Almost every victim lives in the Global South in communities not responsible for greenhouse gas emissions and not represented here at the summit.

The atmosphere has already warmed up a full degree in the last several decades and is on course to warm up another two degrees by 2100. Fact, half the tropical forests in the world, the lungs of our ecosystem, are gone. By 2030, at the present rate of extraction or so-called harvest, only 10% will be left standing. 90% of the big fish in the sea are gone, victim to wanton predatory fishing practice. Says a prominent scientist studying their demise, there is no blue frontier left. Half the world’s wetlands, the kidneys of our ecosystem, have been destroyed in the 20th century. Species extinction is taking place at a rate 1,000 times greater than before humans existed. According to a Smithsonian scientist, we are headed toward of biodiversity deficit in which species and ecosystems will be destroyed at a rate faster than nature can replace them with new ones. Fact, we are polluting our lakes, rivers and streams to death. Every day, two million tons of sewage and industrial agricultural waste are discharged into the world’s water. That’s the equivalent of the entire human population of 6.8 billion people. The amount of waste water produced annually is about six times more water than exists in all the rivers of the world. We are mining our ground water faster than we can replenish it, sucking it to grow water guzzling chemical-fed crops in deserts or to water thirsty cities who dump an astounding 700 trillion liters of land-based water into oceans every year as waste.

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It’s obvious, go talk to the Islamists

Rami G Khouri writes:

This nagging issue just will not go away: How do local or foreign governments best deal with leading Islamist groups in the Middle East and South Asia? Do you engage, negotiate with, ignore, or actively fight politically and militarily against Hizbullah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban and other such groups that range widely along the spectrum of cultural and political activism and occasional armed militancy?

Since the rise of this generation of Islamists, native and Western governments alike have adopted two major strategies: politically containing movements like the Muslim Brotherhood by allowing them to have limited representation in toothless parliaments; and opposing or fighting more powerful movements like Hamas, Hizbullah, the Taliban and others that use military force for various reasons.

The results have been inconclusive, indeed largely unsatisfying. The Islamist movements continue to grow in most cases, to assert their power and legitimacy and share power in some countries, or to break away and rule on their own when that is the only option left to them. Only in Turkey have they assumed power nationally through a credible democratic process.

Two intriguing reports from the United States and Afghanistan in the past few days suggest that more realism may be creeping into the toolkit used to address this issue. In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai is reported to have approved a plan designed to reintegrate low-level Taliban foot soldiers and commanders into the government forces, while simultaneously making peace with more senior leaders and their backers in Pakistan. This effort hopes to succeed where previous ones failed, by offering community leaders jobs, education and development programs that might bring an end to local fighting. Karzai sensibly assumes that foreign military power cannot prevail against armed nationals who believe they are fighting to liberate their country from foreign occupation.

The two key elements in the new approach are the acknowledgment that the Taliban are a credible force that must be engaged in negotiations for power-sharing, and that local developmental needs must be seriously addressed. In other words, both the Afghan government and its NATO backers acknowledge the political legitimacy and core grievances of the Taliban and their supporters.

In the United States, according to Mark Perry, blogging at the Foreign Policy website, a team of senior intelligence officers at US Central Command (CENTCOM) has just issued a report titled “Managing Hizbullah and Hamas,” that questions the current US policy of isolating and marginalizing these movements, and instead suggests a variety of approaches that would integrate them into their Lebanese and Palestinian mainstreams.

Perry notes that the most controversial finding is the one stating that “[t]he US role of assistance to an integrated Lebanese defense force that includes Hizbullah; and the continued training of Palestinian security forces in a Palestinian entity that includes Hamas in its government, would be more effective than providing assistance to entities – the government of Lebanon and Fatah – that represent only a part of the Lebanese and Palestinian populace respectively.”

The report says that while Hizbullah and Hamas “embrace staunch anti-Israel rejectionist policies,” the two groups are “pragmatic and opportunistic.” Perry adds that, “there’s little question the report reflects the thinking among a significant number of senior officers at CENTCOM headquarters – and among senior CENTCOM intelligence officers and analysts serving in the Middle East.”

That such ideas are being pondered by analysts and officers who actually know the realities of the Middle East – as opposed to staunchly anti-Islamist Washington politicians and pro-Israel proxies masquerading as American think tank analysts – is an important early signal of possible policy changes. Most Islamist movements indeed are pragmatic and opportunistic, as recent decades of their evolutions have shown; they are also heavily political and nationalist in nature, rather than mainly religious.

Most importantly, Islamist groups of all kinds – from the docile reciters of holy scripture and purveyors of charity to children, to the militant resistance fighters of Hamas and Hizbullah, to the occasional Al-Qaeda-type terrorists – are deeply driven by practical, identifiable grievances. These grievances are anchored in three main spheres: national socio-economic conditions, the autocratic policies of national governments and out-of-control security agencies in the Arab-Asian region, and the policies of foreign governments and armed forces (mainly American and Israeli) in the same region.

Addressing and ultimately relieving those underlying grievances is the key to dealing with these Islamist groups, most of which will transform or wither into other, non-militant organizations in the wake of a redress of grievances. It is heartening that some people in positions of authority and power in Afghanistan, NATO and the United States armed forces are now considering this rational approach to conflict-resolution, which seeks to promote peace and stability by politically addressing basic needs of justice and dignity.

What took them so long to embrace the obvious?

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‘The Gaza flotilla has done more for Gaza than 10,000 rockets’

The power that the emerging tactically adaptive resistance movement is acquiring draws largely from the fact that Israel is incapable of expressing itself in any other way than through the language of force.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Hamas and Hezbollah, groups that have long battled Israel with violent tactics, have begun to embrace civil disobedience, protest marches, lawsuits and boycotts — tactics they once dismissed.

For decades, Palestinian statehood aspirations seemed to lurch between negotiations and armed resistance against Israel. But a small cadre of Palestinian activists has long argued that nonviolence, in the tradition of the American civil rights movement, would be far more effective.

Officials from Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, point to the recent Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla, in which Israeli troops killed nine activists, as evidence there is more to gain by getting Israel to draw international condemnation through its own use of force, rather than by attacking the country.

“When we use violence, we help Israel win international support,” said Aziz Dweik, a leading Hamas lawmaker in the West Bank. “The Gaza flotilla has done more for Gaza than 10,000 rockets.”

Hamas and Hezbollah, the Islamist movement in Lebanon that has been fighting Israel since the early 1980s, haven’t renounced violence and both groups continue to amass arms. Hamas still abides by a charter that calls for Israel’s destruction; Palestinian youths still hurl rocks at Israeli soldiers across the West Bank separation barrier. And the flotilla incident didn’t fall into conventional standards of peaceful protest: While most activists passively resisted Israeli soldiers, some on the boat where protesters were killed attacked commandos as they boarded, according to video footage released by Israel and soldiers’ accounts.

The incident triggered international condemnation and plunged Israel into one of its worst diplomatic crises in years. In response, Israel said it would take some steps to ease its blockade on the Gaza Strip.

After the incident, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah called on supporters to participate in the next flotilla bound for Gaza. Ghaleb Abu Zeinab, a member of the Hezbollah politburo in Beirut, said it was the first time Mr. Nasrallah had forcefully and publicly embraced such tactics against Israel.

“We saw that this kind of resistance has driven the Israelis into a big plight,” he said. Organizers in Lebanon say they have two ships ready to sail, but no departure date has been set.

A senior Israeli foreign ministry official said Israel recognizes “changes in the tactical thinking of Hamas and other resistance movements.” The official said the groups are no less committed to Israel’s destruction, but have simply concluded they are more likely to defeat Israel by encouraging its international isolation instead of through military force.

“People who are provoking violence are using peaceful protest as a cover,” said Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev.

The Palestinian protest movement picked up steam in the past year, spearheaded by activists in the West Bank and a coalition of pro-Palestinian international human-rights groups.

The absence of peace talks for much of the past two years has pushed the Palestinian Authority leadership to embrace the movement as well. Dominated by members of Hamas’s more moderate rival Fatah, they long advocated a negotiated settlement with Israel and dismissed popular protest campaigns.

But in January, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad launched a campaign to boycott products produced in Israeli settlements and to plant trees in areas declared off limits by Israel. In April, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas outlawed settlement products in Palestinian Authority-controlled areas.

Hamas’s turnaround has been more striking, said Mustapha Barghouti, a prominent Palestinian advocate for nonviolent resistance. “When we used to call for protests, and marches, and boycotts and anything called nonviolence, Hamas used these sexist insults against us. They described it as women’s struggle,” Mr. Barghouti said. That changed in 2008, he said, after the first aid ship successfully ran the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

“Hamas has started to appreciate just how effective this can be,” Mr. Barghouti said.

Hamas has started organizing its own peaceful marches into the Israeli-controlled buffer zone along the Gaza border and supported lawsuits against Israeli officials in European courts. Hamas says it has ramped up support for a committee dedicated to sponsoring similar protests in Gaza.

Mr. Dweik, the Hamas lawmaker, recently began turning up at weekly protests against Israel’s West Bank barrier.

Salah Bardawil, a Hamas lawmaker in Gaza City, says Hamas has come to appreciate the importance of international support for its legitimacy as a representative of the Palestinian people and its fight against Israeli occupation, and has adapted its tactics. Hamas hasn’t claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in years and now denounces the tactic as counterproductive. Since an Israeli military incursion into the territory in December 2008-January 2009, it has also halted rocket attacks into Israel.

“Hamas used to believe [international support] was just empty words,” said Mr. Bardawil. “Today it is very interested in international delegations … and in bringing Israeli officials to justice through legal proceedings.”

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Petraeus schemed with neocon columnist to push pro-Israel pap

Philip Weiss reveals:

Last March General David Petraeus, then head of Central Command, sought to undercut his own testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that was critical of Israel by intriguing with a rightwing writer to put out a different story, in emails obtained by Mondoweiss.

The emails show Petraeus encouraging Max Boot of Commentary to write a story — and offering the neoconservative writer choice details about his views on the Holocaust:

Does it help if folks know that I hosted Elie Wiesel and his wife at our quarters last Sun night?! And that I will be the speaker at the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps in mid-Apr at the Capitol Dome…

Petraeus passed the emails along himself through his own carelessness last March. He pasted a Boot column from Commentary‘s blog into in an “FYI” email he sent to an activist who is highly critical of the U.S.’s special relationship with Israel. Some of the general’s emails to Boot were attached to the bottom of the story. The activist, James Morris, shared the emails with me.

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Mainstreaming realism

It was widely assumed that George Bush’s departure from Washington would coincide with a revival of strength for the reality-based community — the people the neocons swept aside for the sake of empire. But though the neocon dream was quick to perish, the reality-based community is still struggling to assert itself — at least inside the nation’s capital.

It turns out that Tampa, Florida, where CENTCOM is headquartered (and where General David Petraeus was in charge before being sent to Kabul), is more amenable to the expression of realism.

Since its publication in Foreign Policy yesterday, a report by Mark Perry has been causing a stir. In “Red Team — CENTCOM thinks outside the box on Hamas and Hezbollah,” Perry writes:

While it is anathema to broach the subject of engaging militant groups like Hizballah and Hamas in official Washington circles (to say nothing of Israel), that is exactly what a team of senior intelligence officers at U.S. Central Command — CENTCOM — has been doing. In a “Red Team” report issued on May 7 and entitled “Managing Hizballah and Hamas,” senior CENTCOM intelligence officers question the current U.S. policy of isolating and marginalizing the two movements. Instead, the Red Team recommends a mix of strategies that would integrate the two organizations into their respective political mainstreams. While a Red Team exercise is deliberately designed to provide senior commanders with briefings and assumptions that challenge accepted strategies, the report is at once provocative, controversial — and at odds with current U.S. policy.

Among its other findings, the five-page report calls for the integration of Hizballah into the Lebanese Armed Forces, and Hamas into the Palestinian security forces led by Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The Red Team’s conclusion, expressed in the final sentence of the executive summary, is perhaps its most controversial finding: “The U.S. role of assistance to an integrated Lebanese defense force that includes Hizballah; and the continued training of Palestinian security forces in a Palestinian entity that includes Hamas in its government, would be more effective than providing assistance to entities — the government of Lebanon and Fatah — that represent only a part of the Lebanese and Palestinian populace respectively” (emphasis in the original). The report goes on to note that while Hizballah and Hamas “embrace staunch anti-Israel rejectionist policies,” the two groups are “pragmatic and opportunistic.”

To call the Red Team report a “deliberately provocative piece” — as Spencer Ackerman describes it — is to misinterpret the intelligence team’s brief in providing what they do call “unorthodox analysis.”

A Red Team’s approach merely attempts to look at an issue from a broader perspective than the one that military culture engenders. The goal, nevertheless, is objectivity. This isn’t simply an exercise in creative thinking.

Consider, for instance, this uncontroversial observation in the report (written before the recent international outcry demanding a swift end to the siege of Gaza):

The hardships in Gaza may be radicalizing more people, especially the young, and increasing the number of potential recruits for HAMAS. This is the opposite effect Israel thought the blockade would have in Gaza, hoping instead that people would see HAMAS as the cause of their suffering and turn against it.

Yet even today while it is clear to rest of the world that Israel’s divide-and-rule strategy in Gaza has failed, Israel’s deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon wrote on Twitter: “Our position is to differentiate between Hamas, the occupiers of Gaza, and the civilian population.”

Gaza under occupation — by Hamas!

Ayalon might imagine he’s cleverly modifying the concept of “occupation” but the twist will persuade no one in Gaza, which — an ease to the restrictions on the flow of goods notwithstanding — remains the world’s largest prison.

Indeed, the seeming intransigence of Hamas has been in response to this very fact: that the reward for the moderation that the Palestinian Authority has already exhibited and in whose footsteps Hamas is being implored to follow is not self determination but an occupation with no end in sight. In this respect, Hamas, far from representing the extreme position it is claimed to hold, exhibits a sober realism, which is to say, it sees little evidence that concessions by Palestinians are matched with concessions by Israel.

CENTCOM’s Red Team may have concerned themselves only with the issue of “mainstreaming” Hamas and Hezbollah yet the possibility of that happening may depend less on the internal workings of each Islamist organization and more on the extent to which realism can be mainstreamed inside Washington.

The Obama administration’s support for the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in favor of a ridiculously broad interpretation of the meaning of “material support” (as applied to so-called Foreign Terrorist Organizations and thus both Hamas and Hezbollah) is not a promising sign.

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