The government is considering establishing work camps in the south of the country, where illegal migrant workers will receive shelter, food and medical care, Army Radio reported Wednesday. In exchange, illegal migrants would perform manual labor outside the camps, but would not earn a salary.
They would stay at the camp until their asylum claims are decided, which could take months or years.
The proposal, part of the effort to address the problems posed by illegal migrants, would place asylum seekers at jobs in communities in the Negev and Arava. Their salaries would go to the state, in order to fund the camps.
The issue of illegal foreign migrants and refugees has made the headlines due to the efforts by human rights organizations to block the deportation of 1,200 foreign workers’ children. One of the main arguments by deportation advocates, including Interior Minister Eli Yishai (Shas), is that allowing them to stay would bring hundreds of thousands more illegal migrants.
They would bring in “a range of diseases such as hepatitis, measles, tuberculosis and AIDS [as well as] drugs,” said Yishai.
“I fear how far we have fallen,” said MK Dov Khenin (Hadash) in reaction to the work camp proposal, adding that he thinks the plan would encourage many more asylum seekers to try to enter Israel.
“The plan [would] induce refugees to come to Israel. A bed is an incentive compared to where they come from. Israel has the right to close its borders, but when someone comes here, you cannot fight with him. This shows that we haven’t learned a thing, as people living in a country established by refugees for refugees,” Khenin added. [continued…]
Israel started recruiting workers from East Asia 20 years ago, after the first intifadeh ended the flood of day laborers from the West Bank and Gaza. The migrants support entire families back in their home countries. Noa Kaufman of the Israeli Children pressure group, says Israel encourages deporting workers after five years or when they have children. But then those departing workers are simply replaced by new arrivals who go through the same turmoil. “The recruitment companies only get money for new workers. If a worker moves jobs once he’s here, the recruitment company doesn’t get any money,” she says. “It doesn’t make sense that there is no naturalization process for someone who was born here or someone who lived here as a refugee for 10 years. They are people, not machines. You can’t expect them not to fall in love, not to give birth.” [continued…]
A US native from this isolated settlement was arrested by Israeli security services nearly a month ago amid allegations that he killed two Palestinians more than a decade ago and attempted to murder two others more recently. The local media are calling it the latest case of Jewish terrorism.
The accusations against Yaakov Teitel, the son of a US Navy dentist, is fanning concern in Israel that nationalist vigilantes in Israel still have the ability to carry out attacks aimed at sabotaging peace negotiations and expected land concessions.
The case is even more loaded because security services publicized it Sunday – just days before the Nov. 4 anniversary of the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by Jewish extremist Yigal Amir, which derailed the peace process for years. [continued…]
When a murderer like Yaakov Teitel walks around freely for 12 years, carries out attacks, trains, creates an explosives lab, and builds up a weapons depot with no interruption, this means there is no deterrence.
In other words, the Shin Bet security service and police are not there. And when there is no deterrence, there is high likelihood that the next “patriotic” murderer is already walking amongst us.
And what does the next murderer think to himself, the person who dreams – like Yaakov Teitel – of being the nation’s savior and guardian of our race? How simple it is, he must be telling himself. You can murder, plant explosives, and create provocations freely and nobody will snitch on you or capture you.
After all, Yaakov Teitel did not hide in a large city like Tel Aviv. He lived in a very small community, Shvut Rachel. It’s impossible that he raised no suspicions for such a long time. But the fact is, nobody informed authorities. Even when he was held up for questioning, he was released for lack of evidence.
So what does the next murderer conclude about the Shin Bet’s ability to cover and penetrate such small communities? There is nobody to fear. Law enforcement authorities don’t reach these places. [continued…]
The erstwhile rival to President Hamid Karzai in the presidential election’s second round held a news conference on Wednesday in which he denounced Mr. Karzai’s newly anointed administration as illegal and said that the government would be unable to cope with the problems facing Afghanistan, including security and corruption.
“Eight years of golden opportunity we have missed,” said the former presidential candidate, Abdullah Abdullah, referring to the money and lives spent by international forces.
Although his words were sharp, they were delivered in a measured tone with little rancor. At the news conference, held at his home, Mr. Abdullah said that he saw the flawed Aug. 20 election as finished and that he did not plan to continue his efforts to challenge the results. [continued…]
The Afghan National Police have been penetrated by the Taliban “at every level” with officers poorly trained, corrupt and some addicted to drugs, a former Army officer has said.
Capt Doug Beattie, who served two tours in Afghanistan working with the ANP, said many police officers are in the paid of insurgents and were more loyal to their tribes than the Afghan government.
British officers say that among low-ranking Afghan police, and particularly in more rural areas away from central control, there is widespread corruption and disloyalty. [continued…]
In a landmark ruling, an Italian judge on Wednesday convicted a base chief for the Central Intelligence Agency and 22 other Americans, almost all C.I.A. operatives, of kidnapping a Muslim cleric from the streets of Milan in 2003.
The case was a huge symbolic victory for Italian prosecutors, who drew the first convictions involving the American practice of rendition, in which terrorism suspects are captured in one country and taken for questioning in another, often one more open to coercive interrogation techniques.
Critics of the Bush administration have long hailed the case as a repudiation of the tactics it used to fight terrorism. And the fact that Italy would actually convict intelligence agents of an allied country was seen as a bold move that could set a precedent in other cases. [continued…]
One of the 23 Americans convicted today by an Italian court says the United States “broke the law” in the CIA kidnapping of a Muslim cleric Abu Omar in Milan in 2003.
“And we are paying for the mistakes right now, whoever authorized and approved this,” said former CIA officer Sabrina deSousa in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson.
DeSousa says the U.S. “abandoned and betrayed” her and the others who were put on trial for the kidnapping. She was sentenced in absentia to five years in prison. [continued…]
Congressman Brian Baird (D-WA) told Al Jazeera: “The resolution [HR867] itself, I don’t think accurately characterizes the Goldstone report itself. It certainly doesn’t accurately characterize, nor does it really attempt to characterize, the reality on the ground and the devastation and death that occured there. And nor does it speak at all to the suffering of the Palestinian people or what needs to happen to try to move this situation forward. And I am concerned not only about that but about the general issue of what we can do proactively to get more relief to the people in Gaza in need immediately and what we can do to try to move the peace process forward, and that includes in my judgment, cessation of settlement expansion and moving towards real progress on the ground — tangible progress.”
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) made the following statement on the House Floor about H. Res 867, which condemns the ‘Goldstone Report’ or the Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict:
“Today we journey from Operation Cast Lead to Operation Cast Doubt. Almost as serious as committing war crimes is covering up war crimes, pretending that war crimes were never committed and did not exist.
“Because behind every such deception is the nullification of humanity, the destruction of human dignity, the annihilation of the human spirit, the triumph of Orwellian thinking, the eternal prison of the dark heart of the totalitarian.
“The resolution before us today, which would reject all attempts of the Goldstone Report to fix responsibility of all parties to war crimes, including both Hamas and Israel, may as well be called the “Down is Up, Night is Day, Wrong is Right” resolution.
“Because if this Congress votes to condemn a report it has not read, concerning events it has totally ignored, about violations of law of which it is unaware, it will have brought shame to this great institution.
“How can we ever expect there to be peace in the Middle East if we tacitly approve of violations of international law and international human rights, if we look the other way, or if we close our eyes to the heartbreak of people on both sides by white-washing a legitimate investigation?
“How can we protect the people of Israel from existential threats if we hold no concern for the protection of the Palestinians, for their physical security, their right to land, their right to their own homes, their right to water, their right to sustenance, their right to freedom of movement, their right to the human security of jobs, education and health care?
“We will have peace only when the plight of both Palestinians and Israelis is brought before this House and given equal consideration in recognition of that principle that all people on this planet have a right to survive and thrive, and it is our responsibility, our duty to see that no individual, no group, no people are barred from this humble human claim.”
Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, director of Military Intelligence, announced Tuesday that Hamas launched a rocket some 60 kilometers into the sea, apparently as an experiment. Such a rocket, if fired from the northernmost point of the Gaza Strip, could strike the southern cities of the Gush Dan area – including Rishon Letzion, Holon and Bat Yam – and possibly reach as far as Tel Aviv itself.
Although Yadlin didn’t specify the type of the weapon used, it appears to be a standard, foreign-made rocket smuggled into Gaza. Yadlin told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Hamas has accumulated an arsenal of rockets slightly larger than the arsenal it possessed before last winter’s Operation Cast Lead.
The experiment hardly caught Israeli intelligence by surprise, as it had assumed Hamas had acquired a similar type of rocket several months ago. However, the importance of Yadlin’s report should not be underestimated as this is the first tangible piece of evidence that Hamas holds a weapon capable of striking Gush Dan. It would seem Hamas has used the lull in fighting with Israel to not only restore, but improve its capabilities. Still, and similar to Hezbollah, restoring the arsenal hardly testifies to restoring motivation to confront Israel militarily. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — How can you tell when an Israeli official is lying? You can see his lips moving.
I know, an old joke, but really: are we supposed to believe this?
Then there’s the dubious concept of missile testing in this context. One would assume that missiles constructed in Iran have undergone very thorough testing in Iran. “Testing” them in Gaza would simply mean depleting the inventory.
Haaretz says: “Israel believes Hamas considers the new rocket a strategic asset, a ‘doomsday weapon’ of sorts, and therefore avoided publicizing the experimental launch, in the hope of using the weapon as a surprise during some later confrontation.”
Wouldn’t a more effective way of maintaining the element of surprise be to skip the “test”?
Before the war on Gaza, Israeli hawks kept on saying that Hamas could not be trusted to maintain a truce and that it was building up its stockpile of longer-range missiles. Then Israel attacked and the long-range missile threat never materialized.
If Hamas really had such an arsenal, why didn’t it use it?
Were they afraid that Israel would abandon its “restraint”? Were they afraid that Israel might use disproportionate force?
The Obama administration is scaling back its ambitions for the Arab-Israeli peace process, focusing on maintaining some degree of low-level dialogue in the face of big divisions between the two sides.
U.S. officials began outlining Washington’s diminished expectations as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton completes a one-week tour of the Middle East on Wednesday. She had tried to kick-start a new round of talks during stops in Israel and Arab capitals, but the divisions proved too wide to bridge.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused U.S. calls for a complete freeze of settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the Palestinians have ruled out resuming negotiations without the freeze.
Mrs. Clinton subsequently pressed Arab leaders to agree to support talks with just a partial Israeli freeze. But barring that, U.S. officials said all sides might be forced to accept a lower level of engagement in the talks to guard against a new round of violence in the Palestinian territories.
There is a fear that militant groups, such as Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon, could use a political vacuum to spark renewed violence.
More on Mideast Peace Talks
“There’s value in having the process” in itself, said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley on Tuesday. In a sign of the administration’s changing focus, Mr. Crowley added: “If this particular path, we think, can’t get us there, we’ll look for others.” [continued…]
Police suspect that Yaakov (Jack) Teitel, who has confessed to murdering two Palestinians and carrying out a long list of other, less deadly, terror attacks, also murdered two traffic policemen in the Jordan Valley eight months ago – a crime originally attributed to Palestinian terrorists.
Haaretz reported on Tuesday that police suspected Teitel of other murders in addition to those of the two Palestinians, but at the time, a gag order was still in place that prevented specifying which murders.
The policemen, Warrant Officer David Rabinowitz and Senior Warrant Officer Yehezkel Ramzarkar, were shot while sitting in their patrol vehicle near Moshav Massua. The subsequent investigation indicated that the assailant had lain in wait at the turn-off from the main road to Massua and did something to make them stop and roll down their window. He then shot them from point-blank range. No damage was done to the vehicle, and nothing was taken from it.
Teitel denied responsibility for these murders, and it not clear what evidence the police have against him. But a police source said yesterday that Teitel’s modus operandi in the crimes he has admitted to “precisely matches” that of the policemen’s murder.
The police and the Shin Bet security service have long assumed that the policemen’s killer acted alone, and not as part of an organization, making it difficult to get information about the crime. And while the police considered the possibility that the murder was criminal rather than the work of terrorists, three different lines of inquiry had drawn blanks, leaving investigators utterly in the dark. [continued…]
George McGovern has some advice for President Barack Obama: Get U.S. troops out of Afghanistan.
“I’m convinced that war is going to turn sour. I’m convinced we’re not going to prevail there,” McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, said Sunday at a Truthdig event in West Los Angeles.
The former U.S. senator from South Dakota noted that “some of the best reporters over there are telling us that the Taliban are getting stronger and we’re getting weaker in the minds of the people, and that you have a corrupt government involved in drugs, involved in just plain old-fashioned stealing and corruption. It’s a lousy government, and it’s very difficult, even for a great country like [the U.S.], to make them look good. So I think we have every reason to withdraw.” [continued…]
A rogue Afghan policeman shot and killed five British soldiers in southern Helmand Province on Tuesday and escaped, the British military said Wednesday. It was one of the highest British tolls from a single attack since the Afghanistan invasion eight years ago.
About the same time, militants attacked on the other side of the checkpoint, and during subsequent fighting a fire broke out. As residents tried to put out the blaze, warplanes attacked the militants and killed five civilians. It was not clear whether the two attacks had been coordinated.
The British prime minister, Gordon Brown, told the House of Commons that the Taliban had claimed responsibility for the attack on the soldiers, which brought the British death toll in the Afghanistan war this year to 92, the highest single-year loss sustained by British forces since the Falklands conflict in 1982. Mr. Brown said insurgents may have infiltrated the rogue officer’s unit. [continued…]
Human Rights Watch and its rights-watching peers have heard it all. They’re quasi-terrorists with an anti-U.S. ax to grind or perhaps stealth fighters for global capitalists. They’ve been accused of being anti-Semitic, anti-Asian, and anti-African at one time or another. Since the human rights movement began in the early 1970s, the criticism has grown as fast as the stacks of reports, op-eds, and analysis that the organizations’ analysts produce.
Six years ago, we decided it was time to systematically examine the accusations flying from all directions. After subjecting human rights organizations’ work to a barrage of statistical tests, we found that everyone was right. Yes, the watchdogs have biases. But they might make those groups more effective at pushing the human rights cause. Whichever side of the fence you fall on, there’s no denying it: There’s a politics to human rights.
It was bound to happen. Despite the drive for neutrality that watchdogs strive for, they were playing in a political minefield. Just take reporting on Israel, which has been the source of consistent controversy from both sides. The debate turned especially nasty two weeks ago when one of Human Rights Watch’s own — Bob Bernstein, chair of the group’s board from 1978 to 1998 — lambasted his protégé in a New York Times op-ed for dwelling excessively on Israeli abuses. “Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict,” he claimed. [continued…]
Street battles between Iranian security forces and anti-government demonstrators erupted Wednesday after opposition supporters tried to disturb state-sanctioned rallies marking the 30th anniversary of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy, witnesses and state media reported.
Security forces posted on nearly every street corner in the city center heavily outnumbered protesters and broke up crowds using batons, tear gas and warning shots, state media reported. Foreign media representatives were allowed to cover only the government-sanctioned rally, in front of the building that formerly housed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
In Washington, President Obama called on the Iranian government to decide whether it wants to focus on the past or the future. “Iran must choose,” he said in a statement marking the 30th anniversary of what he described as the unjust hostage-taking.
Clashes were reported in several places in the city center and in Shiraz, a city 420 miles south of the capital. Most demonstrators were unable to convene for long periods, as motorcycle units of the Revolutionary Guard Corps arrived to disperse them. [continued…]
The kill ratio was 100-to-1 in our favor. The destruction ratio was much, much greater than that. To this day, thousands of Gazans are living in tents because we won’t let them import cement to rebuild the homes we destroyed. We turned the Gaza Strip into a disaster area, a humanitarian case, and we’re keeping it that way with our blockade.
Meanwhile, here on the Israeli side of the border, it’s hard to remember when life was so safe and secure.
So let’s decide: Who was the victim of Operation Cast Lead, them or us?
No question – us. We Israelis were the victims and we still are. In fact, our victimhood is getting worse by the day. The Goldstone report was the real war crime. The Goldstone report, the UN debates, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Red Cross, B’Tselem, the traitorous soldiers of Breaking the Silence and the Rabin Academy – those were the true crimes against humanity. This is what’s meant by “war is hell.”
It is we who’ve been going through hell from the war in Gaza. It is we who’ve been suffering.
This imaginary monologue is how we actually see ourselves today. We initiated the war in Gaza, we waged one of the most one-sided military campaigns anyone’s ever seen – and we’re the victims.
We’re fighting off the world with the Holocaust; witness Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu at the UN with his Auschwitz props. “We won’t go like lambs to the slaughter again,” vowed his protégé, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, in a cabinet discussion of the Goldstone report.
Auschwitz, lambs to the slaughter, Operation Cast Lead. To Israelis today, it’s all of a piece, it’s one story, one unbroken legacy of righteous victimhood.
The truth is that the State of Israel has never been a victim, and our likening of ourselves to the 6 million has been embarrassing from the beginning – but now? After what we did in Gaza? With the stranglehold we have on that society, while we over here live free and easy?
Victims? Lambs to the slaughter? Us?
No, this has gone beyond embarrassing; this is out-and-out shameful.
And, despite our excuses, it’s not that we’re “traumatized” by the past into believing that we’re still weak, still the frightened, powerless Jews about to be led to the gas chambers. Many Holocaust survivors still believe this, and to some very limited extent, this vestigial fear still takes up space in the Israeli mind.
But by now, 64 years after the Holocaust, 42 years after seeing in the Six Day War how strong we’d become, we know, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, that we aren’t the victims anymore. We know we aren’t a continuation of the 6 million but rather a deliberate and stark departure from them.
THE REASON we tell ourselves and the world that we are victims is because we know, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, that victimhood is power. Victimhood is freedom. A victim can’t be told to restrain himself. A victim fighting for survival can’t be accused of abusing his power because, after all, his back is to the wall, he’s desperate.
On the facts, it’s very hard to convince ourselves, let alone the world, that Gaza and its Kassams have pushed Fortress Israel’s back to the wall, that we’re desperate, that we’re struggling to survive. So, to convince ourselves and the world that this really is so, we do two things.
One, we refuse to acknowledge any facts that mar this image of ourselves as victims, and instead go over and over and over only the facts that fit the picture.
We talk only about the thousands of Kassams fired at Sderot; we never mention the thousands of Gazans we killed at the same time.
We talk only about Gilad Schalit; we never mention the 8,000 Palestinian prisoners we’re holding.
And we never mention our ongoing blockade of Gaza or the devastation it does to those people.
The second thing we do to convince ourselves and the world that we’re still victims is to never, ever, ever let go of the Holocaust – because that’s when we really were victims. Victims like nobody’s ever known, victims a million times worse than the Gazans.
Auschwitz, lambs to the slaughter. Remember us, the people of the Holocaust? That wasn’t the Middle East’s superpower you saw fighting in Gaza.
That was the 6 million.
So you can’t blame us. We’re immune from your criticism. We’re the biggest victims the world has ever known. We’re desperate, so don’t tell us about kill ratios and disproportionate use of force and collective punishment. We’re fighting for our survival.
This is what we tell ourselves and the world, and, in the face of what we did and are still doing in Gaza, it has become intolerable. We are not the 6 million. The 6 million were powerless Jews three generations ago; we cannot wrap our abuses of power in their tragedy.
Instead, let’s take a good, hard look at what we did and what we’re doing in Gaza. Then let’s take a good, hard look in the mirror. And then let’s admit who’s the true victim here and now, and, more importantly, who isn’t.
Editor’s Comment — Larry Derfner is a columnist for the conservative Jerusalem Post. Presumably the paper’s editors feel moderately comfortable publishing his provocative commentaries because the paper provides “balance” with other pieces by rabid Likudniks like Caroline Glick. Still, at this time I doubt that there is a single newspaper editor in the United States who would have the guts to publish Derfner’s piece.
Even so, the times they are a-changin’.
Americans are losing patience with Israel and the media knows it. It will be a while before we see a New York Times editorial calling for a cooling in US-Israeli relations, but the views of ordinary Americans are now percolating up through newspaper letters pages. This is where editors are testing the water to see how much space they might dare provide for more honesty when the topic is Israel.
Views once only voiced at the political margins of the blogosphere are now moving into the mainstream. Only yesterday, Andrew Sullivan — not known as an anti-Zionist — had this to say:
One question that should always be asked of an ally: what is that ally doing for the US? Since the end of the Cold War, that question has been increasingly hard to answer with respect to Israel.
Strategically, Israel is obviously a huge burden for the US, making relations with Muslim or Arab nations much harder, and undermining any attempt to portray American intervention in, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, as beneficent rather than predatory. It’s a big drain on the Treasury, as Israel consumes a vast amount of military and non-military aid.
Meanwhile, Congress continues to march in lockstep with the Israel lobby — but this can’t go on forever. As the taboos on criticizing Israel and questioning US-Israeli relations break down, members of Congress will come under increasing pressure to explain how they can justify supporting a country that has become a strategic liability at America’s expense. Israel’s most stalwart defenders should send their donations to a pro-Israel lobby of their choice, but they should no longer expect that support to be subsidized by the US taxpayer.
From the great Congressman Brian Baird, the clinical psychologist who represents Rachel Corrie’s district in Washington, and who has been to Gaza, warning his fellows about the vote today on a resolution to condemn the Goldstone report:
Before House Members vote on H.Res. 867, regarding the U.N. Goldstone report on the Gaza conflict, there are a few questions worth asking.
First, why are we bringing this resolution to the floor without ever giving former South African Constitutional Court Justice Richard Goldstone a hearing to explain his findings? Have those who will vote on H.Res. 867 actually read the resolution? Have they read the Goldstone report? Are they aware that Justice Goldstone has issued a paragraph-by-paragraph response, available on my Web site at baird.house.gov, to H.Res. 867 pointing out that many of its assertions are factually inaccurate or deeply misleading?
Since scarcely a dozen House Members have actually been to Gaza , what actual firsthand knowledge do the rest of the Members of Congress possess on which to base their judgment of the merits of H.Res. 867 or the Goldstone report? [continued…]
One-term president? By Gary Wills, New York Review of Books Blog, November 3, 2009
I am told by people I respect that Barack Obama cannot pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan without becoming a one-term president. I think that may be true. The charges from various quarters would be toxic—that he was weak, unpatriotic, sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, betraying our dead, throwing away all former investments in lives and treasure. All that would indeed be brought against him, and he could have little defense in the quarters where such charges would originate.
These are the arguments that have kept us in losing efforts before. They are the ones that made presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon pass on to their successors in the presidency the draining and self-lacerating Vietnam War. They are the arguments that made President George W. Bush pass on two wars to his successor.
One of the strongest arguments for continued firing up of these wars is that none of these presidents wanted to serve only one term (even Lyndon Johnson, who chose not to run for a second full term). But what justification is there for buying a second presidential term with the lives of hundreds or thousands of young American men and women in the military? [continued…]
Hollow victory By John Mearsheimer, Foreign Policy, November 2, 2009
The conventional wisdom among most Republicans is that while the United States had serious difficulty in Vietnam during the early years, by the early 1970s things were turning around, and victory was on the verge. Unfortunately, the craven Democrats in Congress bowed to widespread anti-war sentiment and forced the Ford administration to end almost all support to South Vietnam, allowing the North Vietnamese to win the war in 1975. In the GOP version of the story, this decision was a disastrous mistake.
There has been a lot of talk lately about what the Vietnam War tells us about Afghanistan. According to the Republicans, the United States is once again at the crossroads of losing another critical war because of feckless Democrats, only this time in Afghanistan. They contend that while, yes, the United States has mismanaged the war over the past eight years, Washington has now found a formidable military leader in General Stanley McChrystal. He knows how to defeat the Taliban and keep al Qaeda out of Afghanistan. However, the major obstacle he faces isn’t in Afghanistan, it’s here at home: the American public is war-weary and the Democrats — who control both Congress and the White House — have no enthusiasm for the greater sacrifices that General McChrystal recommends.
This narrative is unconvincing for at least two reasons. First, the United States was not close to victory in Vietnam by the early 1970s, because the South Vietnamese army could not stand on its own. This was manifestly apparent in 1971 when that army invaded Laos and was badly chewed up by North Vietnamese ground forces. To stand any chance of holding off Hanoi’s offensives, the South Vietnamese army needed massive amounts of American airpower, which effectively meant that the U.S. military would have to continue fighting in Vietnam indefinitely just to maintain a stalemate. That hardly qualifies as being on “the brink” of victory.
In Afghanistan, there is little reason to think that the United States can decisively defeat the Taliban, mainly because they can melt into the countryside or go to Pakistan whenever they are outgunned, returning to fight another day (just as they did after the initial U.S. victory in 2001). Furthermore, the Karzai regime, corrupt and incompetent, stands little chance of ever truly being able to rule the country and keep the Taliban at bay, which means that the American military will have to stay there to do the job for many years to come.
But even if success was at hand in Vietnam and the United States could in the near future win quickly in Afghanistan, there is a second and more important flaw in the Republican narrative: Victory is inconsequential. [continued…]
The Obama Administration’s bid to relaunch an Israeli-Palestinian peace process is falling apart faster than you can say settlement freeze — in no small part because President Obama began his effort by saying settlement freeze. On Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton found herself struggling to persuade skeptical Arab foreign ministers to see the silver lining in Israel’s “No, but …” answer to the U.S. demand that Israel halt all construction in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. At least Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was offering to restrain settlement activity, Clinton argued, but Arab leaders, whom Obama had hoped would make reciprocal gestures towards normalization of ties with Israel, were not buying. For Arab League secretary Amr Moussa, Clinton’s message offered a grim outlook for the Administration’s peace efforts: “I still wait until we have our meetings and decide what we are going to do,” Moussa reportedly said Monday in Morocco, where Clinton was meeting with Arab leaders. “But failure is in the atmosphere all over.”
Asking the Arab states to accept Israel’s offer to simply slow down construction in the West Bank and its refusal to stop building and demolishing Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem — after President Obama publicly and repeatedly demanded it — has battered the Administration’s credibility in Arab capitals. And Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reiterated on Monday his refusal to heed Washington’s call to begin negotiating with Netanyahu in the absence of a settlement freeze. Abbas has promised his public and his own Fatah movement, which is deeply skeptical of the prospects for dealing with Israel’s current hawkish government, that he won’t return to the table until Netanyahu has signaled his bona fides by halting all construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. [continued…]
The two-state solution was on life-support when Obama took office, and at first it appeared he might make a serious effort to nurse it back to health and make it a reality. At least, that’s what he said he was going to do. Instead, he and his Secretary of State are in the process of pulling out the plug. But what will they do when “two states for two peoples” isn’t an option and everybody finally admits it, and the Palestinians begin to demand equal rights in “greater Israel?” Will the United States support their claims for equality, democracy, and individual rights, or will it continue to defend and subsidize what will then be an apartheid state? Well, if it’s up to our courageous reps in Congress, you know what the answer will be. [continued…]
Iran’s leadership has once again equivocated after agreeing to a deal that would ease its nuclear standoff with the West. But this time, that may be as much a product of the nation’s smoldering political crisis as it is a negotiating tactic, political analysts and Iran experts said.
Tehran has yet to state publicly why it objects to the deal, in which it would ship its low-enriched uranium out of the country for additional processing and eventual return as fuel rods for a civilian reactor. But Iran experts say the very caustic, and very public, nature of the debate in Iran over the proposed nuclear deal suggests that the deep divisions cemented by the summer’s disputed presidential election have complicated, if not undermined, the ability to resolve such a major issue.
“Since the 1979 revolution it is rare for the political elite to disagree so openly with an issue of this significance,” said Mehrzad Boroujerdi, a political scientist at Syracuse University. [continued…]
In the usually wonky world of non-profit issue-advocacy organizations, a decidedly political campaign has been waged against foreign policy institutions that promote diplomacy over militarism.
Two relatively new organizations — each covering distinctly opposite ends on the spectrum of Middle Eastern affairs — have been the target of withering public relations attacks in recent weeks and months.
The National Iranian American Council (NIAC), an organization that promotes diplomatic engagement between the U.S. and Iran, sprung to prominence recently for its active media presence in the aftermath of Iran’s disputed elections though its influence in the nation’s capital had been felt long before then. But as NIAC’s voice grew louder in foreign policy circles, so too did the vehemence of its critics. [continued…]
A US federal appeals court has ruled that a Canadian man cannot sue the US after he was held at a New York airport and then transferred to Syria, where he alleges he was tortured.
Maher Arar, a Syrian-born software engineer, was detained by US authorities during a stopover in New York while heading home to Canada in 2002, and then sent to Syria because he was suspected of having links to al-Qaeda.
Arar says he was held in a Syrian jail for almost a year and that he was beaten and whipped with electrical cables during his detention.
In a 7-4 vote on Monday, the US court of appeals for the Second Circuit agreed with a lower court that Arar could not sue US officials, saying that he did not have legal standing. [continued…]
(The CNN embedded video above works in IE, Chrome but not Firefox.)
Matthew Hoh: The first place where I really had — where this was codified for me and where I started to understand what we were doing and how we were involved — the Korengal Valley, which I’m sure a lot of your viewers are familiar with. It’s been on the cover of TIME Magazine. The “New York Times” refers to it as the valley of death. Off the top of my head, unfortunately, I can’t remember how many American soldiers we have lost there, but it’s probably 30 or 40.
This is a valley, I don’t know, 15, 20 kilometers long. There’s only 10,000 people in it. They speak their own language. They speak Korengali. In the year 2009 we have a valley with people who speak their own language. Their only trade is the timber trade. And when they move their timber, they don’t even leave their valley. Most of the time, I believe, they just take it to the Mazar Valley, and a middleman picks it up and brings it to Pakistan for them.
We show up. We enter their valley. We occupy the richest man’s timber mill. And then we bring in Afghan army and Afghan police, who aren’t from there.
And then what do we do? Then we have the Afghan police and Afghan army. They say to the Korengalis, they say, “These mountains here that your families have been cutting trees down, sustaining yourselves for hundreds of years, you don’t own them. The central government does. And you have to pay tax on that.”
I’m not sure how many people anywhere else in the world wouldn’t take up arms against something like that.
And so, and for every Korengal we’re in, like I said before, there’s a hundred we’re not. And there’s like — and that would happen in those other valleys, the same thing, too, in the south. [Interview transcript]
Editor’s Comment — The “valleyism” that Hoh describes contains a crucial message for Americans considering the war in Afghanistan: this is a quagmire far more complex than Vietnam since America and its allies have sparked a thousand wars.
But perhaps more important than this military observation is the way the concept of valleyism should transform the value judgments outsiders make about Afghans and the land they inhabit.
What foreign armies and policymakers are up against is an incomparable level of adaptation where the non-transferable governing force is local knowledge — the means through which Afghans have made their homes in a land that others find utterly inhospitable.
In an analysis for the New York Times, David Sanger talks about Hamid Karzai as a flawed vessel in which the West had invested its hopes that Afghanistan could be saved and that Karzai could be re-legitimized through an election:
The question was whether that vote would demonstrate that a desolate nation that has always been at the mercy of larger powers would show it could find its own way.
In this image of a “desolate nation” that has yet to “find its own way,” there isn’t even an inkling that in many ways Afghanistan, as a patchwork of local communities, has found its own way admirably. Its greatest problem is that this is a way that few outsiders appreciate — especially those coming from a nation where human worth is so often measured by the size of someone’s bank balance.
As Rory Stewart says: “In every case, Afghans are more competent, more canny, more capable than we acknowledge, and we are less so.”
With the White House’s reluctant embrace on Sunday of Hamid Karzai as the winner of Afghanistan’s suddenly moot presidential runoff, President Obama now faces a new complication: enabling a badly tarnished partner to regain enough legitimacy to help the United States find the way out of an eight-year-old war.
It will not be easy. As the evidence mounted in late summer that Mr. Karzai’s forces had sought to win re-election through widespread fraud to defeat his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, administration officials made no secret of their disgust. How do you consider sending tens of thousands of additional American troops, they asked in meetings in the White House, to prop up an Afghan government regarded as illegitimate by many of its own people?
The answer was supposed to be a runoff election. Now, administration officials argue that Mr. Karzai will have to regain that legitimacy by changing the way he governs, at a moment when he is politically weaker than at any time since 2001.
“We’re going to know in the next three to six months whether he’s doing anything differently — whether he can seriously address the corruption, whether he can raise an army that ultimately can take over from us and that doesn’t lose troops as fast as we train them,” one of Mr. Obama’s senior aides said. He insisted on anonymity because of the confidentiality surrounding the Obama administration’s own debate on a new strategy, and the request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American military commander in Afghanistan, for upward of 44,000 more troops.
“Needless to say,” the senior aide added, “this is not where we wanted to be after nine months.”
In the worst of times, my father always used to say, “A good gambler cuts his losses.” It’s a formulation imprinted on my brain forever. That no-nonsense piece of advice still seems reasonable to me, but it doesn’t apply to American war policy. Our leaders evidently never saw a war to which the word “more” didn’t apply. Hence the Afghan War, where impending disaster is just an invitation to fuel the flames of an already roaring fire.
Here’s a partial rundown of news from that devolving conflict: In the last week, Nuristan, a province on the Pakistani border, essentially fell to the Taliban after the U.S. withdrew its forces from four key bases. Similarly in Khost, another eastern province bordering Pakistan where U.S. forces once registered much-publicized gains (and which Richard Holbrooke, now President Obama’s special envoy to the region, termed “an American success story”), the Taliban is largely in control. It is, according to Yochi Dreazen and Anand Gopal of the Wall Street Journal, now “one of the most dangerous provinces” in the country. Similarly, the Taliban insurgency, once largely restricted to the Pashtun south, has recently spread fiercely to the west and north. At the same time, neighboring Pakistan is an increasingly destabilized country amid war in its tribal borderlands, a terror campaign spreading throughout the country, escalating American drone attacks, and increasingly testy relations between American officials and the Pakistani government and military. [continued…]
Israel’s offer to restrain settlement expansion is an unprecedented and positive step but still falls short of Washington’s wishes, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Monday.
“The Israelis have responded to the call of the U.S., the Palestinians and the Arab world to stop settlement activity by expressing a willingness to restrain settlement activity,” she told reporters in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh.
“This offer falls far short of what our preference would be but if it is acted upon it will be an unprecedented restriction on settlements and would have a significant and meaningful effect on restraining their growth.” [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Now as always, the substance of US-Israeli relations is a process through which agreements can be found on language.
Israel seeks and promotes the “right” language and it vigorous fights against the “wrong” language.
Meanwhile Israel will do whatever it chooses. It’s only concern with its American friends is that they have the good manners to talk about Israel’s actions in a favorable way. Thousands of housings units will continue to be built on occupied Palestinian territory but even as this is happening, Israel will be lauded for its “restraint.”
Benjamin Netanyahu is no doubt now glowing with satisfaction as his erstwhile harsh teacher, an administration that only a few months ago admonished the Israeli leader for not doing his “homework” on halting settlement growth, has now become an obedient and loving student.
Like Israel’s government, Israel’s public never tires of proclaiming to pollsters its aspiration for peace and its support of a two-state solution. What the polls do not report is that this support depends on Israel defining the terms of that peace, its territorial dimensions, and the constraints to be placed on the sovereignty of a Palestinian state.
An American president who addresses the Arab world and promises a fair and evenhanded approach to peacemaking is immediately seen by Israelis as anti-Israel. The head of one of America’s leading Jewish organizations objected to the appointment of Senator Mitchell as President Obama’s peace envoy because, he said, his objectivity and evenhandedness disqualified him for this assignment.
The Israeli reaction to serious peacemaking efforts is nothing less than pathological — the consequence of an inability to adjust to the Jewish people’s reentry into history with a state of their own following 2,000 years of powerlessness and victimhood.
Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, whose assassination by a Jewish right-wing extremist is being remembered this week in Israel, told Israelis at his inauguration in 1992 that their country is militarily powerful, and neither friendless nor at risk. They should therefore stop thinking and acting like victims.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s message that the whole world is against Israel and that Israelis are at risk of another Holocaust — a fear he invoked repeatedly during his address in September at the United Nations General Assembly in order to discredit Judge Richard Goldstone’s Gaza fact-finding report — is unfortunately still a more comforting message for too many Israelis. [continued…]
Palestinian officials on Sunday criticized the United States for what one called “backpedaling” on demands that Israel stop settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, saying the Obama administration’s change of approach on the issue damaged the likelihood of a peace agreement.
“If America cannot get Israel to implement a settlement freeze, what chance do the Palestinians have of reaching agreement” on the even more complex set of issues involved in final peace talks, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said in a written statement.
“We are at a critical moment,” Erekat said. “The way forward, however, is not to drop the demand for Israel to comply with its obligations.” [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — This is how the narrative has been twisted:
Although Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu rebuffed the initial U.S. demand, he also offered alternatives that, while short of what the Palestinians wanted, were still characterized by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton over the weekend as “unprecedented” concessions made in hopes of helping direct talks resume.
Netanyahu has shown flexibility and the Palestinians are being intransigent. No suggestion that the Palestinians’ mistake was simply to believe that President Obama was a man of his word.
Marwan Barghouti instead of Mahmoud Abbas? The associates of the senior Fatah leader jailed in Israel are examining the possibility that he will announce his candidacy for president should elections be held as planned and should the current president surprisingly decide not to run again for the post.
Recently, following the dead end reached in the peace talks, officials close to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas reported that the Abbas is exhausted. However, Abbas has not threatened to resign, though his associates say that the option cannot be ruled out that he will not run in the upcoming presidential elections.
“True the president is exhausted; true he is not satisfied with the situation; and true he prefers not to contend, but, as of now, and I say this with confirmed information, the president will be the Fatah candidate in the elections. The question is whether the elections will be held,” said a senior Fatah source to Ynet. [continued…]
Leaders of Jordan and Egypt on Sunday warned that Israel’s unilateral actions in East Jerusalem and other Arab areas were “derailing” efforts aimed at resuming peace negotiations with the Palestinians, and would thereby have a “catastrophic” effect on the region.
The remarks came in a joint communique issued at the end of a whirlwind visit to Cairo by Jordan’s King Abdullah II where he held talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, according to Jordan’s official Petra news agency.
The two leaders discussed the “catastrophic consequences on the region’s stability and security resulting from the failure to seize the current opportunity for making peace,” the statement said.] [continued…]
As Iran prepares for a major commemorative rally on Wednesday, the leaders of the opposition movement called over the weekend for a renewed challenge to the government, setting the stage for a possible showdown between protesters and the police.
Although the opposition leaders, Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mohammad Khatami, did not openly call for street protests, their remarks were widely seen as a call to arms on a day of considerable symbolic importance.
The occasion is the 30th anniversary of the takeover of the United States Embassy in Tehran by hard-line students on Nov. 4, 1979. The day is marked every year with anti-American rallies. [continued…]
Did Michael Goldfarb, a former John McCain staffer and now an editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, defame Trita Parsi, the founder and president of the National Iranian American Council, by suggesting that Parsi is working for the Iranian government?
Last week, Goldfarb described Parsi as “the Iranian regime’s man in Washington.” Goldfarb didn’t present any evidence to support this. He stated it as fact and moved on. When I emailed Goldfarb asking if he meant to say literally that Parsi is working for the Iranian government, he doubled down, replying, “If it walks like an ayatollah and quacks like an ayatollah…. Maybe you should do your due dilligence [sic] on Trita Parsi.” [continued…]
In an op-ed that reveals far more about him than about Iran’s Green Movement, Jackson Diehl expresses disappointment that Iran’s dissidents apparently aren’t all Western-style democrats. Diehl kicks things off with a bit of the dusty old Orientalism:
The enduring nature of Iran is to frustrate outsiders who work by the usual rules of political logic or who seek unambiguous commitments. The West relearned that truth last week as the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dragged a straightforward plan to swap its enriched uranium for fuel rods into a swamp of double talk and counterproposals.
Those crafty Iranians — they’re so crafty! Unlike we Westerners, who always do things that make perfect rational sense. In point of fact, the P5+1’s uranium swap plan was itself a response to Iran’s original idea “to refuel the Tehran research reactor through purchasing fuel assemblies from international providers, including the United States.” Iran has apparently refused the uranium swap plan, and that’s bad news, but it shouldn’t be too much to expect the Deputy Editorial Page Editor of The Washington Post to be able to analyze this without resorting to tired cultural stereotypes. [continued…]
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